Mesopotamia

Alexander the Great conquered Asia Minor in 331 bc. After his death in 323 bc, his empire disintegrated. Seleucus I entered Babylon in 312 bc, assuming possession of Mesopotamia and Persia. A dozen cities were founded—Seleucia on the Tigris being the largest—bringing Hellenistic culture, trade, and renewed prosperity to the region. A major new canal system, the Nahrawan, was also built. About 250 bc the Arsacid rulers of Parthia took Mesopotamia from the Seleucids. The Parthians organized their empire so that several autonomous vassal states developed, in which Greek and Persian ideas mingled. After weathering three major Roman invasions, the Parthians fell in ad 226 to the Sasanians of Persia, whose domain extended from the Euphrates to modern Afghanistan. They established an effective government with a hierarchy of officials and improved the system of irrigation canals and drainage. Intermittent conflict in the north-west with the Roman province of Syria—later part of the Byzantine empire (after 395)—and with Arabs in the desert border areas led to the destruction of the Sasanian empire in 635 by the Arabs who brought with them the new religion of Islam.

Between 635 and 750 Mesopotamia was ruled by the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus. During that time many peoples settled in the land, and the Arabic language displaced Greek and Persian. Conflicts between the Muslims culminated in the construction of Baghdad as the new capital of a Muslim empire under the Abbasid caliphs. The caliphs imported Turkish slave troops, who gradually took control, establishing dynasties of their own in the area. After the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, administrative decay and further attacks by Bedouin and Mongols (1401) led to the deterioration of the canal system, which in turn affected agriculture.

The Ottoman Turks and Safavid Persian rulers vied for control of Mesopotamia from the 16th to the 18th century, when family dynasties controlled Baghdad and other Mesopotamian cities. The Turks eventually prevailed. During World War I British troops took the area after much hard fighting. The League of Nations then mandated Iraq to Great Britain and Syria to France. Iraq became independent in 1932, Syria in 1945.