Tigris
The swifter river of Mesopotamia, past Baghdad and Mosul
The Tigris is the eastern and faster of Mesopotamia's two great rivers, running roughly parallel to the Euphrates down the plain that nurtured the world's earliest civilizations. Shorter but steeper and more powerful than its sister, it rises in the mountains of eastern Turkey and flows through Iraq, past Mosul and Baghdad, before joining the Euphrates to drain into the Persian Gulf. Its name is bound up with the very idea of the ancient Near East.
The Tigris runs about 1,750 kilometers from its source in the Taurus Mountains near Lake Hazar. Fed by snowmelt and by tributaries draining the Zagros, it carries a swifter, more flood-prone current than the Euphrates, and historically its sudden rises threatened the cities along its banks. It crosses the Iraqi plain in a series of great loops, supporting intensive irrigation, before meeting the Euphrates at al-Qurnah to form the Shatt al-Arab that flows on to the Gulf.
On its banks stood Nineveh, the great capital of Assyria, opposite modern Mosul, and later Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate and a medieval center of learning whose libraries the river is said to have run black with ink when they were destroyed. Today the Tigris is squeezed by upstream dams in Turkey and by drought, and Iraq has watched its flow dwindle. The marshlands where the two rivers meet, drained and partly restored, depend on what the Tigris still delivers.