An-Nīl

An-Nil lies on the flat alluvial plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a little east of Baghdad, in the heart of lower Mesopotamia. The land is a level expanse of silt that depends on irrigation: date palms, barley and wheat grow along the canals, while summers are extremely hot and dry and winters are mild. The name An-Nil, the Arabic name of the Nile, was given in medieval Iraq to a canal linking the Euphrates with the Tigris and to the town on its banks.

Southern Mesopotamia also contained some of the world's earliest literate urban societies, whose growth depended on riverine agriculture. Baghdad, founded by the caliph al-Mansur in 762, drew its food from the canal-watered plain around it, and the network of canals between the two rivers fed its markets for centuries. After the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258 many canals silted up, and the country fell back on narrower strips of cultivation and on nomadic herders. Ottoman rule began in 1534, and the region was later governed from Baghdad by Mamluk governors. The settlements of the plain have always depended on the balance between flood, silt and the labour of keeping the canals open.