Tigris
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
next to the Euphrates, the greatest river of former Asiatic Turkey; rises on the S. slope of the Armenian Taurus range in Kurdistan to the S. of Lake Goljik. It has sinuous a course in a S. E. direction, almost parallel to that of the Euphrates, which river it joins at Kurna, after a course of 1,060 miles. The joint stream, called the Shat-el -Arab, after a further course of 90 miles, enters the head of the Persian Gulf. In its upper course the Tigris flows through fine pasture land, frequented by nomad Kurds and Arabs, and from Diarbekir, where it becomes navigable for small craft, to Mosul, a distance of 200 miles , its banks are highly cultivated in some places. Below this point, again , as far as Bagdad (250 miles), it traverses unpeopled wastes, while from Bagdad to its mouth the steep banks are overgrown with high reeds and brushwood, and are haunted by lions and other beast of prey. Its affluents, the Bitlis, Great and Little Zab, the Dyala, all flow from the highlands to the N., the country separating it from the Euphrates being a streamless waste. The chief places on the Tigris are Diarbekir, Nineveh, Selucia, Ctesiphon, and Opis. Mosul, and Bagdad, and the ruins of Like the Euphrates , the Tigris rises in spring with the melting of the snow on the Armenian Mountains; and during the latter half of May, when the flood is at its height, the whole country between and beyond these rivers, for over 100 miles between Bagdad converted into a lake. The arrowy stream either loses less water by irrigation or receives more from its affluents than the Euphrates, for it is the larger of the two at the point of confluence. the World War the Tigris was the scene of heavy fighting between the Turkish and Anglo-Indian armies in 1915, 1916 and 1917. dad and Bussorah, is In of Ardeide, with four species from tropi-
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 the Tigris was still "the greatest river of former Asiatic Turkey"; today it is divided between Turkey, a short stretch of the Syrian border, and Iraq, and its flow is controlled by dams the 1921 writer could not have imagined — Iraq's Mosul Dam (completed 1986) and, on the Turkish headwaters, the Ilısu Dam, which by 2020 had flooded the ancient town of Hasankeyf. The lions that Collier's says "haunted" the reed banks below Baghdad are gone: the Mesopotamian lion was hunted to extinction in Iraq in the early twentieth century, and the annual May flood that turned the land between Baghdad and Basra into a lake has been largely tamed by upstream storage. The marshes at the Tigris–Euphrates confluence near Qurna, then a vast wetland, were deliberately drained in the 1990s and only partly re-flooded after 2003, and the ruins of Nineveh named here were bulldozed and dynamited in part by Islamic State fighters holding Mosul in 2014–15.
Written for this edition, 2026.