Four Centuries of Modern Iraq
Stephen Hemsley Longrigg
Oxford at the Clarendon Press
Few lands of ancient renown have faded before the eyes of the later world to more obscurity than that spread over the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in the early sixteenth century. Successive inundations from the further East, with the rise and fall of a score of dynasties, had swept the old glories of the land into legend. The new things of the Renaissance, the new world of Columbus, the policies of brilliant monarchs in Europe wielding new powers of concentrated nations, left to the ‘Iraq but a feeble claim on the interest of the West. Few thought of Babylon, Nineveh, and Baghdad as sites in a living land; fewer had heard of the rare exchanges of diplomacy between the viceroys of ‘Iraq and the courts of Europe. The tales of travellers were scanty and unreal. Only the seafaring states of southern Europe cared for countries east of the Levant as the source, or routes to the source, of the silks ... | 
