Euphrates

• 1. The River That Named A World

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  The Euphrates runs about 2780 km from the mountains of Turkey to the Persian Gulf, making it the longest river in West Asia and the fifteenth-longest in all of Asia. Its drainage area of 440000 km2 spreads across six countries. The earliest people who wrote its name pressed it into clay. In cuneiform texts found at Shuruppak and pre-Sargonic Nippur in southern Iraq, dated to the mid-3rd millennium BCE, scribes wrote the river as Buranuna. Sometimes they added a small mark, the prefix d, to signal that the river itself was a divinity. Why would a river earn so many names across so many tongues, and a place among the rivers of Paradise? Why do empires rise and fall along its banks, and why might it one day run dry? The answers begin where copper once floated downstream on rafts.

• 2. A Name Carried Across Tongues

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  Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov traced the river's name to a proto-Sumerian word for copper, *burudu. Their reasoning is striking. They argue the Euphrates was the river by which copper ore was carried on rafts, since Mesopotamia stood at the center of copper metallurgy in that period. The Greek Euphrátēs gives English its modern form, but that Greek word was itself adapted from older Elamite and Sumerian writing. The Akkadian Purattu survived in Semitic languages, appearing as al-Furāt in Arabic and as Pǝrāṯ in Hebrew. Each neighboring people reshaped the sound to fit its own mouth. The river is Yeprat in Armenian, Perat in modern Hebrew, Fırat in Turkish, and Firat in Kurdish. In Mandaean scriptures such as the Ginza Rabba, the river appears as Praš Ziwa, the earthly form of a heavenly flowing river. The scribes who first wrote Buranuna also tied it to a city. In Sumerian, the name of the city of Sippar in modern-day Iraq was written the same way as the river, UD.KIB.NUN, marking a bond between the two.

• 3. From Snowmelt To Marsh

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  Two rivers meet 10 km upstream from the town of Keban in southeastern Turkey, and there the Euphrates is born. The Kara Su, or Western Euphrates, runs 450 km. The Murat Su, or Eastern Euphrates, runs 650 km. Both rise northwest of Lake Van, at elevations of 3290 m and 3520 m above sea level. By the Keban Dam the combined river has already dropped to 693 m. From Keban to the Syrian-Turkish border it falls another 368 m in less than 600 km, then slows sharply across the Upper Mesopotamian plains. Within Syria the river drops 163 m, and over the final stretch from Hīt to the Shatt al-Arab it falls only 55 m. Most of the water arrives as rainfall and melting snow, so the river peaks in April and May. Those two months alone carry 36 percent of the annual flow, and by one estimate as much as 60-70 percent. The river is also wildly unpredictable. At Birecik, just north of the border, yearly discharge ranged from 15.3 km3 in 1961 to 42.7 km3 in 1963. By the time the Euphrates joins the Tigris in the Shatt al-Arab, that channel carries both rivers a final 145-195 km to the sea.

• 4. Forests, Fish, And Lions

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  Oaks, pistachio trees, and members of the rose family grow in the moister upper reaches, where the Euphrates passes through the mountains of Southeast Turkey. In these xeric woodlands grow the wild ancestors of cereals, including einkorn wheat, emmer, oat, and rye. Between Raqqa and the Syro-Iraqi border the river crosses a steppe marked by white wormwood, a landscape long overgrazed by sheep and goats. Southeast of the Syria-Iraq border lies true desert, supporting almost no plant life at all. The valley itself once held a riverine forest of Oriental plane, Euphrates poplar, tamarisk, and ash, though human interference has erased it. Among the fish of the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the Cyprinidae family dominates, with 34 of the 52 known species. One of them, the mangar, fights so well on a line that the British nicknamed it the Tigris salmon. The Euphrates softshell turtle, an endangered species, lives nowhere else but this river system. European travellers between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries described gazelle, onager, and the now-extinct Arabian ostrich in the steppe, with wild boar in the valley and wolves, leopards, and lions nearby. Bones of the Eurasian beaver were found at the prehistoric site of Tell Abu Hureyra in Syria, though no one has ever sighted a beaver here in historical times.

• 5. Empires On The Banks

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  Acheulean stone tools and the remains of Homo erectus, dated to 450,000 years old, were found at the El Kowm oasis in the central Syrian steppe. From the eleventh millennium BCE, permanent villages such as Abu Hureyra, Jerf el Ahmar, Mureybet, and Nevalı Çori took root in the upper valley, home first to hunter-gatherers and later to some of the earliest farmers. Without irrigation, these communities clung to land where rainfall alone could feed crops. Occupation of lower Mesopotamia began in the 6th millennium BCE, tied to the arrival of irrigation, with early evidence at Tell es-Sawwan. The Uruk period of the 4th millennium BCE brought true cities. Tell Brak and Uruk each grew past 100 ha and raised monumental architecture. Large stretches of the basin were first united under one ruler during the Akkadian Empire, dated 2335-2154 BCE. Power then passed through Babylonia under Hammurabi, the Middle Assyrian Empire of 1365-1020 BCE, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 935-605 BCE. Later came the Achaemenid Empire, overrun by Alexander the Great, who defeated the last king Darius III and died in Babylon in 323 BCE. The river itself served as a border between Greater Armenia and Lesser Armenia. Near its banks, in 680 CE, came the Battle of Karbala.

• 6. Walls Of Concrete And Water

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  The Hindiya Barrage, built on plans by British civil engineer William Willcocks and finished in 1913, was the first modern water diversion structure in the Tigris-Euphrates system. Syria and Turkey built their first dams in the 1970s. The Tabqa Dam in Syria was completed in 1973, and Turkey finished the Keban Dam in 1974. That dam opened the way to the Southeastern Anatolia Project, known by its Turkish initials GAP. The project covers 75000 km2 and touches roughly 7 million people, about a tenth of Turkey's land and population. When complete, GAP will hold 22 dams and 19 power plants, watering 1700000 ha of farmland. Its largest is the Atatürk Dam, about 55 km northwest of Şanlıurfa, completed in 1992. Its reservoir, the third-largest lake in Turkey, holds a maximum of 48.7 km3, enough to store the river's entire annual flow. Iraq, meanwhile, dug an intricate network of canals. The largest, the Main Outfall Drain or Third River, runs 565 km and was built between 1953 and 1992 to drain salt-threatened land south of Baghdad. Completion of GAP, once scheduled for 2010, slipped after the World Bank withheld funding for the lack of a water-sharing agreement among the riparian states.

• 7. Drowned Cities And Dry Riverbeds

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  The dams of GAP, across both the Euphrates and the Tigris, have affected 382 villages and resettled almost 200,000 people. The Atatürk Dam alone displaced 55,300, and a survey found most unhappy with their new homes and the compensation they received. The flooding behind Syria's Euphrates Dam forced about 4,000 families from their land. The reservoirs brought quieter losses too. Evaporation from them is estimated at 2 km3 a year in Turkey, 1 km3 in Syria, and 5 km3 in Iraq, water that simply vanishes into the air. Irrigation runoff carrying dissolved fertilizer flows back into the river, and salinity in the Iraqi Euphrates has climbed until the water is less fit to drink. Rising waters also swallowed history. The drowning of Zeugma, with its unique Roman mosaics, beneath the Birecik Dam reservoir stirred controversy in the Turkish and international press. When the Tabqa Dam rose, UNESCO coordinated a rescue campaign, and archaeologists dismantled two minarets and rebuilt them outside the flood zone. The Tishrin Dam submerged the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site of Jerf el Ahmar. In 2021, Iraq's Ministry of Water Resources warned that the Euphrates could dry out entirely by 2040.

• 8. Prophecy And The Modern River

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  A hadith of Muhammad holds that the Last Hour will not come until the Euphrates uncovers a mountain of gold, over which people will fight, with ninety-nine of every hundred fighters perishing. The drying of the river appears in the Christian Bible too, in Revelation 16:12, as a sign foretelling the Second Coming. The river Phrath of Genesis 2:14, named among the rivers of Paradise, is identified as the Euphrates as well. These ancient warnings now echo against modern crises over the river's flow. When Turkey and Syria filled the Keban and Tabqa reservoirs in 1975, drought struck, and flow into Iraq dropped from 15.3 km3 in 1973 to 9.4 km3 in 1975. Iraq threatened to bomb the Tabqa Dam, and only intervention by Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union calmed the crisis. In 1987 Turkey signed a treaty promising at least 500 m3 per second into Syria, yet on the 16th of May 2014 it cut the flow off completely, stranding the river at the Turkish-Syrian border. Today, Syria's Euphrates Lake remains the most important source of drinking water for Aleppo, 75 km west of the valley, a reminder that the mountain of gold need not appear for people to fight over what the river carries.