Shafaq News

Between the Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia gave the world its first cities, its first legal codes, and its first written records. For millennia, this land shaped human development. Today, Iraq is fighting to preserve that legacy as the environmental and cultural foundations of Mesopotamia come under unprecedented pressure.

The First Civilization at Risk

More than 5,000 years ago, Mesopotamia transformed from scattered settlements into organized urban life. Uruk, by around 3100 BCE, likely hosted about 40,000 people within its walls and twice that number in surrounding areas—making it the largest city on earth at the time.

Inside its six-square-kilometer enclosure, temples, administrative buildings, canals, and markets formed the earliest model of complex city life. Here, cuneiform writing emerged, allowing the Sumerians to record laws, trade, literature, and state administration. It was the birth of history itself.

That heritage continued through the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires, which built monumental capitals such as Nineveh, Babylon, Hatra, and Nimrud. Their palaces, statues, tablets, and ziggurats laid the foundations for science, astronomy, governance, and art.

But the remnants of these civilizations—some of humanity’s earliest—now face erosion, neglect, and destruction.

A Cradle of Civilization Running Dry

Mesopotamia thrived because of water. Its wetlands and rivers supported agriculture, livestock, fisheries, and trade routes that sustained early urban societies.

Yet the ecological base of Mesopotamia is collapsing.

The southern marshes—the Ahwar—once spanned 15,000 to 20,000 square kilometers, forming one of the largest wetland systems in the world. Their environment preserved livelihoods that echoed ancient Sumerian and Babylonian life.

By 2000, however, the Central and Al-Hammar marshes had lost up to 97% and 94% of their area due to upstream damming, drought, and drainage. Although partial restoration after 2003 revived parts of the ecosystem, renewed drought has undone those gains.

The Tigris and Euphrates now carry about 40% less water than in previous decades, and in 2023 alone, an estimated 68,000 people were forced to leave the marsh regions.

This environmental collapse threatens not just modern communities but the natural landscape that enabled Mesopotamian civilization to exist.

Read more: A story in Hawizeh marsh: From water to dust life

Cultural Monuments Damaged and Erased

While water scarcity erodes one part of Mesopotamia’s legacy, conflict has devastated another.

After the 2003 war, looters emptied parts of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. Thousands of artifacts representing thousands of years of Mesopotamian history were stolen, damaged, or trafficked abroad.

The rise of ISIS brought far deeper destruction. Between 2014 and 2017, the group targeted the physical symbols of Mesopotamian civilization, demolishing or looting sites to finance its operations and impose ideological control.

In 2015, ISIS militants razed Nimrud—capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire—using explosives, bulldozers, and sledgehammers to destroy 3,000-year-old bas-reliefs and statues.

The Lamassu figures of Nineveh—massive winged guardians carved in the 9th century BCE—were shattered.

Hatra, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for blending Greek, Roman, and eastern architectural styles, was severely damaged.

These acts erased irreplaceable layers of the world’s earliest civilizations, breaking a historical chain connecting modern Iraq to its ancient identity.

A National Effort to Restore Mesopotamia’s Narrative

Despite the scale of loss, Iraq is taking steps to rebuild the cultural infrastructure needed to safeguard what remains of Mesopotamia’s heritage.

At the Inclusivity of Contemporary Tourist Destinations conference in Baghdad, Minister of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities Ahmed al-Badri described archaeological heritage as “the foundation of national identity.” He said a new national museum is being planned to showcase artifacts from Mesopotamia’s many eras, and that a site has already been selected.

Large numbers of looted artifacts have been recovered in recent years, al-Badri noted, though many remain in storage due to limited display capacity.

Read more: A race against time: Restoring Iraq's lost history

From shrinking wetlands to shattered archaeological sites, the pressures facing Mesopotamia today threaten the material memory of humanity’s earliest civilization. Iraq’s struggle to protect its rivers, marshes, monuments, and museums is now central to preserving the legacy of the land where history first began.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.