Like most great cities of the world, Baghdad begins its story with a river.
In the Middle East, the magnificence of the Tigris and the Euphrates made inevitable the establishment of the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and modern-day Iraq.
Baghdad is a new city. It first appeared as a settlement next to the Tigris in pre-Islamic times, at least by 1800 B.C.
But it was not until 762 B.C. that it became the capital of the Muslim world. All the world soon knew about the circular-walled city in which many of the tales of the 1,001 Arabian Nights were set.
The Baghdad of those stories was ruled by Haroun al-Rashid, the leader of the Islamic empire. He made the city a center of culture. His son, Mamum, set aside one day a week for discussion of religious and intellectual matters and ordered numerous foreign literary works translated into Arabic.
Baghdad reigned for a time as the world's most important city, capital of an empire that stretched from North Africa to the edges of China. Eventually, the empire fell into internal divisions and the center of the Muslim world shifted to Cairo.
Invaders from Turkey seized Baghdad and the Mongols conquered it twice.
Baghdad's final imperial occupiers were the British, who took it from the Ottoman Empire in 1917. British colonial officers invented the state called Iraq and installed a pro-British king, declaring the country independent in 1932.
