Iquitos
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a town in the Peruvian department of Loreto, on the left bank of the Marañon, about 75 miles above the mouth of the Rio Napo. It has an active trade; the imports are exchanged mostly for india-rubber. Pop. of District (1917) 120,000. IRAK AJEMI (ē-räk' äj'e-mē) (Persian Irak), a central province of Persia, nearly coincident with ancient Media; area, 138,190 square miles; pop. (estimated) over 1,000,000. A great portion of the surface consists of elevated table lands, but there are also numerous fertile valleys only partly cultivated. The E. parts are occupied by the extensive salt desert of Dasht-i-Kavir. The industries are cloth and carpets, and the making of glass and porcelain. The province contains the principal towns of the kingdom, including Teheran, the capital, and Ispahan. IRAN. See PERSIA. IRANIAN (i-rā'ni-an) LANGUAGES, a family of languages belonging to the Indo-European stock, closely allied to the Indian group, and called by some philologists Persian, from the best-known member of the family. The two oldest known the cuneiform inscriptions and the Old Bactrian or Zend, the latter the language in which the Zend Avesta or sacred writings of the Parsees is composed. The Middle Iranian languages are the Pehlevi, and still later the Parsee, which are preserved in the commentaries to the Zend Avesta. The latter approaches pretty closely to the modern Persian. The most important of the New Iranian languages is the modern Persian, in which has been produced a very rich and celebrated literature. The Afghan or Pushtu, and the dialects of the Kurds, form separate branches of the Iranian family.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921, Iquitos was a river port whose imports were "exchanged mostly for india-rubber" — but the wild-rubber boom that built its tiled mansions and iron house had already collapsed after about 1912, when cheaper plantation rubber from British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies took the market, and after Roger Casement's 1911 investigation exposed the enslavement and killing of Indigenous workers on the Putumayo. The town recovered on timber, oil (a petroleum refinery arrived in the 1980s) and tourism rather than rubber, and now holds roughly half a million people, making it one of the largest cities on earth with no road connection to the outside world: access is still only by river or air. The Marañón name Collier's used has also shifted in usage — the stretch at Iquitos is now generally called the Amazon proper, below the Marañón–Ucayali junction.
Written for this edition, 2026.