Land behind Baghdad

by Robert McCormick Adams

Once inhabited only by nomads, the Diyala plains in Iraq became the setting for a people who sought to found an economy based on irrigation agriculture. Professor Adams has made a uniquely comprehensive study of the area over six thousand years, from prehistoric through Assyriological, Classical, and Islamic periods to the threshold of the modern era. Less a conventional history than a natural history, this work identifies the converging environmental and human forces which shaped the region's successive phases of prosperity and decline. For the first time the full sequence of broadly changing patterns of irrigation agriculture and urban settlement is traced and analyzed within the framework of a small but historically crucial region of the Near East. -- Jacket flap.