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The Cradle of Civilization. The first cities in human civilization were built 5,000 years ago on the banks of the Euphrates River: the glorious cultures of Ur, Nineveh, and Babylon. Full documentary.
King Jehu of Israel bows before Shalmaneser III of Assyria, 825 BC
Present day Iraq, known in classical antiquity
as Mesopotamia, was home to the oldest civilizations in the world, with a
cultural history of over 10,000 years, hence its common epithet, the
Cradle of Civilization. Mesopotamia, as part of the larger Fertile Crescent,
was a significant part of the Ancient Near East throughout the Bronze Age and
the Iron Age.
Arabs have been the majority of Iraq's
population since Sassanid times.[6] Iraq was ruled by the indigenous empires,
Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian and also by foreign empires; Median,
Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian and Sassanian empires during the Iron Age and
Classical Antiquity, before Iraq was conquered by the Muslim Rashidun Caliphate
in the 7th century, and became a center of the Islamic Golden Age during the
medieval Abbasid Caliphate. After a series of invasions and conquest by the
Mongols and Turks, Iraq fell under Ottoman rule in the 16th century,
intermittently falling under Iranian Safavid and Mamluk control.