After the Arabian conquest in the 7th century A.D., Irak entered for a time on a new period of prosperity. Several important new cities were founded, among them Kufa, Basra, Wasit on the Shatt-el-Haï, and Bagdad on the site of an old Babylonian city of the same name, which later became under the Abbasid caliphs not only the capital of Irak but for a time the metropolis of the world (see [Caliphate]). With the decay of the Abbasid power the system of irrigation began to fall into disrepair, the ancient sites were gradually deserted, and the country finally returned to a condition of semi-barbarism alternating between inundation and drought, which is its present state.
See Ritter, Die Erdkunde von Asien, 2nd ed., vol. vii., 10th and 11th parts (Berlin, 1843, 1844); W. F. Ainsworth, Researches in Assyria (London, 1838); F. R. Chesney, Expedition for the Survey of the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris (2 vols., London, 1850); W. K. Loftus, Chaldaea and Susiana (1857); F. Delitzsch, Wo lag das Paradies? (Leipzig, 1881); W. F. Ainsworth, The Euphrates Expedition (1888); J. P. Peters, Nippur (1897); E. Sachau, Am Euphrat und Tigris (1900); F. Delitzsch, Im Lande des einstigen Paradieses (1903). Maps: Chesney (1850); Selby, Bewsher and Collingwood (1871); Kiepert, Ruinenfelder (1883).
(A. So.; J. P. Pe.)
IRAK-I-AJAMI (i.e. Persian Irak), the name (now obsolete) of the important Persian province which the Arab geographers called Jebel (the mountainous region). It used to be the country bounded N. by Azerbaijan and Gílán, E. by Samnan and the central Persian desert, S. by Kerman, Fars and Arabistan, W. by Kermanshah and Kurdistan. Its length, N.W.-S.E., was about 600 m. from the Kaflán Kuh on the Kizil Uzain, the frontier of Azerbaijan, to the frontier of Kerman beyond Yezd, and its width, N.E.-S.W., about 300 m.
IRAN, the great plateau between the plain of the Tigris in the west and the valley of the Indus in the east, the Caspian Sea and the Turanian desert in the north, and the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean in the south, surrounded on all sides by high mountain ranges with a great salt desert in the centre. The modern name Iran, in middle-Persian Eran (a form preferred by many German authors) is derived from the ancient Aryāna, “the country of the Aryans,” i.e. that part of the Aryans which we call Iranians. Eratosthenes limited the name of Ariana to the south-eastern part of Iran, and excluded Persia, Media and Bactria, and therein he is followed by Strabo (ii. 78, 130, xv. 720 ff.; Pomp. Mela i. 3; Pliny, Nat. Hist. vi. 113, 116, xii. 33); Pliny (Nat. Hist. vi. 93) confounds it with Arīa, Areia, Pers. Haraiva, i.e. the district of Herat; but Strabo himself says (xv. 724) that some extended the name to the Persians, Medes, Bactrians and Sogdians, as they all spoke the same language with small dialectic variations (cf. 727 and i. 66, xi. 523).
For the ethnography and history of Iran see [Persia].
(Ed. M.)