This was Iraq
Writing. The wheel. The city. The law. The stars. The story.
It all started here, between two rivers.
And the story is not finished.
Start the journey again ↑5,000 years - two rivers
A journey of 5,000 years, between two rivers.
Babylon · 575 BC
Behind this door, 5,000 years are waiting.
Take a breath. Then scroll.
The Ishtar Gate
The city has been waiting for you.
Kings, priests and gods walked here before you.
Assyria · 700 BC
They have been on duty for 2,700 years.
For centuries, they guarded the doors of Assyrian palaces.
Mesopotamia · 3500 BC → today
The world you live in has an address, and this is it.
Time, writing and the first cities were all born here, between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
01 · c. 3500 BC · Sumer
5,500 years later, it is still turning.
One circle changed how the world moves.
02 · c. 3200 BC · Uruk
The first written words were pressed into mud.
History begins here, because now it could be written down.
03 · c. 2000 BC · Babylon
Every minute you live is measured the Babylonian way.
Their students solved equations and worked out square roots on clay, 4,000 years before calculators.
04 · The Fertile Crescent
Two rivers. One idea: bring the water to the land.
For the first time, people had more food than they needed.
Iraq once had more than 30 million date palms.
05 · c. 3100 BC · Uruk
The country may still carry this city's name.
As the sun sets, lamps light up behind huge walls.
06 · c. 1754 BC · Babylon
The king's word, carved where no one could change it.
Hammurabi said he wrote the laws so the strong would not oppress the weak.
07 · Babylon · the night sky
They looked up, and found order in the stars.
They split the sky into twelve parts: the zodiac.
08 · Nineveh · Library of Ashurbanipal
The oldest great story on Earth asks a very human question: can we live forever?
He searched the world for a way to never die, and came home with a different answer: what you build and the people you love outlive you.
09 · Baghdad · the round city
Thousands of years later, the story kept going.
In Baghdad, scholars gathered books from Greece, Persia and India, and translated them into Arabic.
Writing. The wheel. The city. The law. The stars. The story.
It all started here, between two rivers.
And the story is not finished.
Start the journey again ↑