Sumerians called the Tigris the swift river, unlike the lazy Euphrates
The Tigris got its Sumerian name, probably meaning the swift river, by contrast with its slower neighbour, whose sluggish water dropped more silt and raised its bed higher. Running 1,750 km from Turkey's Taurus Mountains past Mosul and Baghdad, it watered Assyria and countless Mesopotamian cities.
The Tigris is the eastern of Mesopotamia's two great rivers. It rises in eastern Turkey about 25 km southeast of Elazığ, runs 400 km through the southeast of the country, then traces the Syria–Turkey border for 44 km, its only stretch in Syria. Tributaries include the Batman, Garzan and the Great and Little Zab. Near its meeting with the Euphrates it splits: the man-made Shatt al-Hayy heads for Nasiriyah, other branches feed the Central and Hawizeh marshes, and the combined flow becomes the Shatt al-Arab, straddled by the port of Basra.
The name passed from Sumerian Idigna to Akkadian Idiglat, Old Persian Tigrā and Greek Tigris, and Kurdish speakers call it Ava Mezin, the Great Water. Nineveh, Ctesiphon and Seleucia stood on its banks, Lagash drew its water through a canal dug around 2900 BC, and the river sustained the Assyrian Empire. In Sumerian myth the god Enki filled it with flowing water, the Hurrians worshipped it as the god Aranzah, Genesis lists it among the four rivers leaving Eden, and Daniel had a vision beside it. Mandaeans still baptise in it, and Baháʼu'lláh wrote The Hidden Words around 1858 while walking its banks in Baghdad. It appeared on Iraq's coat of arms from 1932 to 1959.
In a mostly desert country, the river has long carried traffic: shallow-draft boats reach Baghdad, while downstream trips from Mosul traditionally needed rafts. April snowmelt in the Turkish mountains once brought notorious floods, and heavy damming in Turkey and Iraq now supplies irrigation and flood control. Mosul Dam is Iraq's largest, and in February 2016 American and Iraqi officials warned it could fail, putting between 500,000 and 1.5 million people at risk of drowning.
Turkish dams have stirred controversy over their local environmental effects and the reduced flow reaching Iraq, and water from both rivers has been used as leverage in conflicts. In 2014 representatives from Iraq and Turkey reached the Geneva Consensus on sharing flow data, and archaeologists and activists continue working to protect the river from dams, mismanagement and climate change.
Source: Tigris
