Balad

Balad belongs to the fertile country around Mosul, where the Tigris cuts through northern Iraq. Mosul itself lies 396 kilometres northwest of Baghdad and occupies both banks of the river. Its position helped it become a provincial capital and an enduring centre for exchange between the river valley and the surrounding plains.

For centuries Mosul was known for two distinctive products: fine muslin cloth and marble. Its urban life also contained a substantial Assyrian Christian community, which survived the Islamic conquest of 637 and remained part of the city’s religious landscape. The city’s earlier history reached back to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. Later it passed under Persian, Macedonian, Seleucid and Sasanian rule before the Arab conquest, and the Mongols destroyed it in the thirteenth century before the Ilkhanate rebuilt it. Balad’s association with this wider Mosul country therefore joins a river crossing, skilled manufacturing, regional government and a long coexistence of communities. In Ottoman times Mosul served as the seat of northern Iraq.