INTERESTING PLACES

In Iraq, all roads lead to the capital Baghdad, the City of the Caliphs and birthplace of Sinbad, the famous sailor and prosperous merchant. A city with a glorious past and a magnificent present.

Baghdad indeed, reflects the most unusual country that frames it. Iraq, after all, is the old, old Mesopotamia of Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, of the glorious sun-burst of the Abbasid Empire of Harun Al-Rashid, of Persian intrusions, and the affliction of 4 hundred dead years of Ottoman rule. In other words, Baghdad is the still-beating heart of a former cradle of civilization, a country as historically dramatic as the Nile Valley or Ancient Greece.

An ancient monument city, some 30 km to the north west of Baghdad built on a Sumero-Babylonian plan in the 15th century BC by King Kurigalzo (thus anciently named "Dur Kurigalzo" which means: the city of King Kurigalzo), on an elongated tongue of natural limestone, and lasted as the capital of the Kassite Dynasty in Mesopotamia up to the end of the 11th century BC. Water came to Agargoaf from a large river branched out of the Euphrates called by the Babylonian "Bitty Inlil" - the canal of the god Inlil, one of the greatest in the ancient Mesopotamian pantheon.