The Tigris (Old Persian: Tigr, Aramaic Assyrian: Deqlath, Arabic: دجلة, Dijla, Turkish: Dicle; biblical Hiddekel) is the eastern member of the pair of great rivers that define Mesopotamia, along with the Euphrates, which flows from the mountains of Anatolia through Iraq. (Indeed, the name "Mesopotamia" is a Greek translation from the Old Persian Miyanrudan, which means "the Land between the Rivers". Bethnahrin is the Assyrian word for the area.). The name Tigris comes from Old Persian and means "the fast one". Another name for this watercourse, used from the time of the Persian Empire, is Arvand, which has the same meaning. Today, the name Arvand refers to the lower part of the Tigris (ie, Arvand/Shatt al-Arab) in Persian.
The Tigris is approximately 1,800 km (1,150 miles) long, rising in the Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey and flowing in a generally southeasterly direction until it joins the Euphrates near Al Qurna in southern Iraq. The two rivers together form the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which empties into the Persian Gulf. The river is joined by many tributaries, including the Diyala and Zab.
Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, stands on the western bank of the Tigris, while the port city of Basra straddles both the Tigris and the Euphrates. In ancient times, many of the great cities of Mesopotamia stood on or near the river, drawing water from it to irrigate the civilization of the Sumerians. Notable Tigris-side cities included Nineveh, Ctesiphon and Seleucia, while the city of Lagash was irrigated by Tigris water delivered to it via a canal dug around 2400 BC. Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit is also located on the river and derives its name from it.
The Tigris is navigable as far north as Mosul (near ancient Ninevah). In flood season, native rafts on floats, with loads as great as 35 tons, float the 275 miles between Mosul and Baghdad in three or four days. At Baghdad, the wood is sold and the skins for the floats are carried back upriver on the backs of donkeys. There is little traffic going upriver.
At Kut, the Tigris is about 1,300 feet wide and has a depth varying from a normal 4½ feet to 26 feet when flooding. The current at Kut ranges from 1¼ to as high as 4 miles per hour when flooding.
At Amara, the Tigris is only 600 feet wide with a depth ranging from a normal 6½ feet to 13 feet when flooding. Marshlands, starting near Amara, drain off much of the river water so that at Qurna, the depth remains the same but the river narrows to a width of only 200 feet.
Although the upper reaches of the Tigris are higher than the Euphrates, in southern Iraq the bed of the Tigris is lower than that of the Euphrates and the canals between the two rivers have their tailings in the Tigris, causing the water in these canals to flow from west to east..
Sometimes, at low water during midsummer, the lower Tigris has a depth of only 3 feet but, due to its many tributaries, the river is subject to sudden flooding.
The Tigris and Euphrates meet just below Qurna, from which point the Tigris is called the Shatt al Arab and is full of marshy water from the Euphrates and surrounding marshes. The combined waterway is 30 feet deep and more than 1,200 feet wide.Rainfall at Basra is only 6½ inches a years, of which 5½ inches fall between April and October.
Two types of native boats were used on the Tigris River and Shatt al Arab, a round skin boat (skins stretched over a frame of willow branches) known as a coracle (Arabian = Quffa, Akkadian = Quppu) and a rectangular raft type known as a riverboat (Arabian = Kelek, Akkadian = Kalakku). The coracles principally go downriver but riverboats can be poled or towed upstream. With proper rigging, riverboats can also be sailed and rowed.
Like the Euphrates, the course of the lower Tigris has meandered and changed over the years. In ancient days, the Tigris either flowed where the Shatt al Gharraf is today, or the Tigris had a branch that flowed down the Shatt al Gharraf or, possibly, the Shatt al Gharraf started as a manmade canal through the marshes and the Tigris overflowed into it. The sites of the ancient cities of Girsu and Lagash are located on today’s Shatt al Gharraf.
