The New York Times, October 12, 1879, p.4:
THE BAGDAD OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.
Bagdad, in the reign of Er Reshid, seems to have been pre-eminently a city of pleasure. Thither flocked from all parts of the Oriental world the most noted and capable poets, musicians, and artificers of the time; and the first thought of the Arabian or Persian craftsman who had completed a specially curious or attractive specimen of art was to repair to the capital of the Moslem world, to submit it to the Commander of the Faithful, from whom he rarely failed to receive a rich reward for his labors.
Surrounded by pleasure-gardens and groves of orange, tamarisk, and myrtle, refreshed by an unfailing luxuriance of running streams, supplied either by art or nature, the great city on the Tigris is the theme of many an admiring ode or laudatory ghazel; and the poets of the time all agree in describing it as being, under the rule of the great Caliph, a sort of terrestrial paradise of "idlesse" and luxury, where, to use their own expressions, the ground was irrigated with rose-water and the dust of the roads was musk, were flowers and verdure overhung the ways, and the air was perpetually sweet with the many-voiced song of birds, and where the chirp of lutes, the dulcet warble of flutes, and the silver sound of singing houris rose and fell in harmonious cadence from every corner of the street of palaces that stood in vast succession in the midst of their gardens and orchards, gifted with perpetual verdure by the silver abundance of the Tigris, as it sped in its arrowy flight through the thrice-blest town.
Bagdad, indeed, was in many respects emphatically a città cortigiana, a sort of Vienna or Bucharest of the olden time, carried to the higher evolution correspondent with the more sensuous influences of the luxuriant East; and the state of public morality there was naturally of the laxest. Especially was this the case among the higher classes. Drunkenness and debauchery of the most uncompromising kind prevailed among them despite the precepts of the Koran; and men and women seemed to vie with each other in refinements of luxury and dissipation.
As was the case in a period that offers no small analogy to that of which I speak, the epoch of the Roman decadence, the women of the upper classes, to whom was apparently allowed an amount of liberty, or rather license, curiously at variance with our Western ideas of Eastern domestic polity, appear to have been especially corrupt; and many are the tales of their licentious habits and adventures that are to be found in The Thousand and One Nights, reminding us of the Memoirs of Casanova, although almost always redeemed by touches of pathos, poetry, or romance, which do not exist in the latter's somewhat dry and unattractive records of ordinary galanterie.
The story of The Porter and the Three Ladies of Bagdad, that of The Barber's Brother Bacbarah, and several others contained in the old version, give some idea of the license of the time, and examples are still more abundant and circumstantial in the tales that compose the comparatively unknown portion of the collection.
The New Quarterly Magazine.
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The New York Times, October 11, 1885, p.11:
BAGDAD.
A city of over one hundred thousand inhabitants, with no place of public resort, where ever house resembles a fortress or a prison, the ponderous doors opening upon narrow, gloomy lanes winding between grim, bare walls, and creaking heavily on their hinges, to reveal the low, dark, vaulted entrance that leads to the courtyard inside, sometimes picturesque enough with pillared verandas and arabesqe lattices, but always rambling, uncomfortable, inconvenient, uncared for, to English ideas of what a man's home should be--a city where the luxury of a wheeled conveyance is unknown; for who could drive anything that goes on wheels in lanes six feet wide that twist round every house corner, and where the mud lies ankle-deep in Winter and dust darkens the air in Summer?
A city through the midst of which flows a mighty river, on which the traffic is carried against wind and steam by men harnessed like beasts, on which the only native boats for pleasure or profit are on the same model and no better in construction than the coracle of the ancient Briton, on which foreign enterprise has placed steamers which have to contend against every device and delay known to the crafty Ottoman.
A city unrivaled for position and fertility of soil, environed by desert which might be made to blossom as the rose, the centre of trade for a whole continent, yet sunk in decay and poverty; where 30,000 Jews contend in the struggle for existence, or, more properly, for a bare subsistence, with twice as many other Orientals not less supple, wily, patient, and persevering than themselves, in a city where poverty and opression have sharpened every man's wits.
A city that might sit enthroned as a queen upon the waters, heir and daughter of mighty Babylon and the later splendors of Madain, Seleucia, and Ctseiphon, now groveling in the dust amid the ruins of a long forgotten former glory.
Such is Bagdad of to-day, the city of Haroun-al-Rashid, the familiar home of Sinbad the sailor and the other worthies of the Arabian Nights.
The Saturday Review.
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The New York Times, December 7, 1890, p. 3:
BRICKMAKING IN BAGDAD
From the London Times.
The British Consul General at Bagdad in his latest report has some interesting observations on brickmaking in that town. All Bagdad, with a population of about one hundred and sixteen thousand souls, may be said to be built of kiln-dried bricks. Stone is little used there, as it is in Mosul, in house building, and, although the tenacious clay of Irâk gives good material, its use is confined chiefly to huts and agricultural squattings along the Tigris banks.
There is thus an enormous demand for bricks. These are all hand-made and kiln-dried. There are about twenty-five large and small kilns at work, in the hands chiefly of Jews and Christians, but the turn-out is far behind the demand. Half-built houses sometimes remain so for long periods over want of bricks. The kilns are dotted over the desert outside the city. Often in Spring, when the Tigris or Euphrates lays acres of ground under water, these stand like islands in the inundation, and brick making is suspended.
The usual prices of bricks at the kiln side is £1 16s. per 1,000 of twelve inches square, and 18s. per 1,000 of seven inches square.
The bricks are carried from the kiln on small donkeys, each taking not more than ten large or twenty-five small bricks. In the course of transit they get much broken, as the best, though good to look at and of a chrome yellow color, are very brittle.
Another great promoter of the demand for bricks is the absorption of water every Winter, bricks suffering equally with the mortar in which they are laid, owing to their porousness. Thus there is hardly a house or wall or brick pathway in Bagdad which does not constantly call for patching or rebuilding with new bricks.
The old city walls, thrown down about 1870 by Midhat Pasha when Governor General, remain still, in spite of years of burrowing and abstraction, a mine of broken bricks. Under a late régime it was said that the right of taking these away and selling them was conferred as a substitute for pay on the soldiery; but at present all classes seem to help themselves to them.
These remarks serve to show what a good opening there is in Bagdad for brickmaking after some simple but scienfific method.
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The New York Times, July 27, 1924, p.SM11:
TWENTIETH CENTURY BAGDADBy Rail From Basrah to the City of the Caliphs as the English Have Made It
By RAYMOND SCUDDER
Bagdad boasts one street. It is an infinitely bad street, and futher depressed in via-ology by bearing a horrible name. The British are great colonizers and are reputed to have a proclivity for civilizing, or more explicitly, westernizing, backward countries and retaining at the same time to the most expedient degree whatever natural charm and beauty the countries possess. But in the case of Iraq, of Bagdad and "New Street, " as they have unfeelingly and unromantically dubbed this thoroughfare, they seem to have made a signal failure in both these provinces.
When the British took over the mandate or occupancy of Iraq after the war, and burrowed New Street, they created at the same time a railway running down the west bank of the Euphrates to Basrah. It is a splendid railway, unequaled perhaps even by the Lackawanna, and covers the distance of 500 miles in admirably good time...
It happened something like this: We left Hillah, the nearest station to Babylon, at 3 in the afternoon, expecting in all good faith to arrive in Bagdad in three or so hours, for the distance is not much over forty miles. But when seven of the clock had dragged its weary limbs across the face of our watch, we could bear the strain no longer, and, deciding that Bagdad was only a mythical place after all, curled up in resigned indolence and went fast asleep, utterly at ease on the hard benches of that third-class compartment among the Arabs and Persians sitting strangely hunched up on the benches beside us...
The next thing we knew was that someone was shouting vile things at us in Arabic... by this time I was more or less conscious and became gradually aware of a great hubbub outside the carriage... And then I realized that this was Bagdad... The bearded and bedraped character was merely trying to book himself as a luggage carrier.
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Iraq News
The Republic of Iraq, is bordered on the north by Turkey, on the east by Iran, on the south by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf, and on the west by Jordan and Syria. The capital is Baghdad. The area of Iraq is 169,235 square miles (437,072 square kilometers). The estimated population of Iraq for July, 2008 is 28,221,180. The official languages are Arabic and Kurdish, Assyrian and Armenian are also spoken there.
Formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq was occupied by Britain during the course of World War I; in 1920, it was declared a League of Nations mandate under UK administration. In stages over the next dozen years, Iraq attained its independence as a kingdom in 1932.
A "republic" was proclaimed in 1958, but in actuality a series of military strongmen ruled the country until 2003, the last was SADDAM Husayn. Territorial disputes with Iran led to an inconclusive and costly eight-year war (1980-88).
In August 1990, Iraq seized Kuwait, but was expelled by US-led, UN coalition forces during the Gulf War of January-February 1991. Following Kuwait's liberation, the UN Security Council (UNSC) required Iraq to scrap all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles and to allow UN verification inspections.
Continued Iraqi noncompliance with UNSC resolutions over a period of 12 years led to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the ouster of the SADDAM Husayn regime. Coalition forces remain in Iraq under a UNSC mandate, helping to provide security and to support the freely elected government. The Coalition Provisional Authority, which temporarily administered Iraq after the invasion, transferred full governmental authority on 28 June 2004 to the Iraqi Interim Government, which governed under the Transitional Administrative Law for Iraq (TAL).
In October 2005, Iraqis approved a constitution in a national referendum and, pursuant to this document, elected a 275-member Council of Representatives (COR) in December 2005. The COR approved most cabinet ministers in May 2006, marking the transition to Iraq's first constitutional government in nearly a half century. Iraq's constitution also established the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), a semi-autonomous region that administers the governorates of Erbil, Dahuk, and As Sulaymaniyah. Iraq has held four national legislative elections since 2006, most recently in October 2021 when 329 legislators were elected to the COR. Following these elections and Iraq's longest government formation process in the post-SADDAM era, the COR approved Muhammad Shia' al-SUDANI as prime minister in October 2022. Iraq has repeatedly postponed separate elections for provincial councils - last held in 2013 - and since 2019 the prime minister has had the authority to appoint governors rather than provincial councils. In early 2023, the COR voted to hold provincial elections by the end of the year.
Between 2014 and 2017, Iraq fought a military campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) to recapture territory the group seized in 2014. In December 2017, then-Prime Minister Haydar al-ABADI publicly declared victory against ISIS, although military operations against the group continue in rural areas. Also in late 2017, Baghdad forcefully seized disputed territories across central and northern Iraq from the KRG, following a non-binding Kurdish independence referendum.
The CIA World Factbook: Iraq
BAGHDAD WEATHER
Free Books on Iraq (.pdfs)
By Desert Ways to Baghdad Wilkins 1908
A Dweller in Mesopotamia Maxwell 1921
Early Adventures in... Babylonia Layard 1887
Nippur... on the Euphrates Peters 1897
Mesopotamia, Persia Under the Mongols Strange 1903
The War in the Cradle of the World Egan 1918
Discoveries at Nineveh Layard 1875
Travels in Koordistan, Mesopotamia, &c. Fraser 1840
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