Iraq’s name may echo Uruk, humanity’s early megacity
Officially the Republic of Iraq, the country sits on the Tigris–Euphrates plains once called Mesopotamia. From the sixth millennium BCE those rivers nursed Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon—and one etymology still ties “Iraq” to the Sumerian city of Uruk.
Besides the Uruk theory, the name may come from Middle Persian erāq, lowlands, while the Arabic word ʿirāq means hem, shore, or edge, which folk etymology read as the escarpment bounding the Jazira plateau. The sixth-century poet Adi ibn Zayd, at the Lakhmid court of al-Ḥīrah, already wrote of the people of Iraq. Medieval geographers distinguished Arabian Iraq in Mesopotamia from Persian Iraq in what is now western Iran.
Sumer arose here between 6000 and 5000 BC in the Ubaid period and is regarded as the earliest civilisation, with cities, writing, monumental building, and canals. The same land was the heartland of the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Neo-Assyrian empires. After Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE he styled himself King of Babylon and of Sumer and Akkad, and after Alexander’s campaign of 331 BCE the city surrendered without a fight, though the Seleucids later moved its people to their new capital, Seleucia.
Under the Parthians and Sasanians, Ctesiphon merged with Seleucia into the metropolis later called al-Madāʾin, and Persian rulers depended on the rich farmland of the Sawad for revenue. Losing Ctesiphon to the Arab conquests ended Sasanian rule. Caliph Ali then moved his seat from Medina to Kufa, and after the Battle of Karbala in 680 the region became the centre of Alid opposition, a legacy the Abbasids exploited.
Britain installed the Hashemite Faisal I as king on 23 August 1921, and the official English name changed from Mesopotamia to Iraq. Independence followed in 1932, after the Ottoman defeat in the First World War. Since January 1992 the formal name has been the Republic of Iraq, confirmed by the 2005 constitution of a federal parliamentary state with a Muslim majority and Christian, Yazidi, and other minorities.
Source: Iraq
