We're proud of our Iraqi roots, and we love sharing with our guests and partners worldwide a glimpse of the land between two rivers — where the first city, the first writing, and the first law in human history began.
Mesopotamia was the cradle of humanity's first agricultural settlements, as people settled along the Tigris and Euphrates as early as the 7th millennium BCE. The Ubaid culture developed pottery and irrigated agriculture, laying the foundation for what would become the greatest civilizations of the ancient world.
The Sumerians founded the world's first cities — Ur, Uruk, and Lagash — and invented cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, alongside the wheel, organized agriculture, and written law. The Ziggurat of Ur still stands as stone testimony to the genius of this civilization that laid the foundations of human civilization itself.
Around 2334 BCE, King Sargon of Akkad founded the first unified empire in history, uniting the lands of Sumer and Akkad under one banner. The bronze head discovered in Nineveh embodies the spirit of this era, which unified Mesopotamia and extended its influence from the Gulf to the Mediterranean.
Babylon reached its peak under King Hammurabi, author of history's first comprehensive written code of law, and later under Nebuchadnezzar II, who built the stunning Ishtar Gate and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
The Assyrians built a great military and administrative empire centered on Nineveh, leaving behind an enduring artistic legacy in the winged-bull "Lamassu" statues that guarded their palaces, and the Library of Ashurbanipal, which held thousands of clay tablets and remains one of the world's oldest libraries.
Under the Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdad became the capital of the Islamic world and a global center of learning through the "House of Wisdom," while the spiral Malwiya Minaret in Samarra embodied the genius of Islamic architecture. Iraq remains home to a civilizational legacy stretching from the dawn of history to Islam's golden age.