The Tigris River

The Sumerian name of the river, Idigna, written with a fixed group of signs and understood by the ancients, and by most moderns, as “the swift river” or “running water,” in contrast to the slower, siltier Euphrates. It is among the oldest river-names on record, current in Sumerian administrative and literary texts from the dawn of writing, when the two rivers between which the cities stood were the defining fact of the Mesopotamian world.

Idigna is the headwater, in every sense, of both families on this page. From it the Akkadians took Idiqlat and the whole Semitic line down to the Arabic Dijla; and from it, too, by a later Persian reshaping, came the Tigrā that the Greeks turned into Tigris. Every name the river has ever borne, in the East and in the West, flows from this one Sumerian word for swiftness, set down at the very beginning of the written record by the people who first built cities on the river’s banks.

The Akkadian name of the river, Idiqlat, the Sumerian Idigna adapted to Akkadian sound, read from the same logogram. It runs through Akkadian royal inscriptions and administrative texts for two thousand years; the Assyrian capitals Ashur, Nimrud, and Nineveh all stood on its banks, and the kings of Assyria boast of crossing and bridging it on campaign. The shift of the Sumerian -gn- to the Akkadian -ql- is the small sound-change on which the whole Semitic branch of the name turns.

Idiqlat is the form that carried the river’s name out of Sumerian into the wider Semitic world. From this Akkadian word, not directly from the Sumerian, the river passed into Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic, so that the Ḥiddeqel of Eden and the Dijla of Baghdad are both descendants of Idiqlat. It is the hinge of the eastern family, the Akkadian remaking of a Sumerian name that every later Semitic tongue would inherit.

The Hebrew name of the river, Ḥiddeqel, the Akkadian Idiqlat in Hebrew dress, with an initial ḥ-. It is one of the four rivers of Eden in Genesis, “the third river is Ḥiddeqel, which flows east of Asshur,” and the great river beside which Daniel stands when he sees his final vision. The Hebrew form preserves the Akkadian -d-q-l- skeleton clearly, a Mesopotamian name carried into the Hebrew Bible.

Ḥiddeqel is the eastern family’s most famous member, because it is the form in scripture. Set among the rivers of paradise, it fixes the Tigris in the geography of Eden, beside the Euphrates, at the source of the world’s waters. It is also the form that the Greek translators of the Septuagint would not keep: rendering this verse, they wrote not Ḥiddeqel but Tígris, reaching across to the other, Western name of the river, and so identifying, in a single word of translation, the Eden river of the Hebrews with the arrow-river of the Greeks.

The Aramaic name of the river, Diglat, the Akkadian Idiqlat taken into Aramaic with the loss of the initial vowel, i-diqlat becoming diglat. As Aramaic spread across the Near East and replaced Akkadian as the common tongue of Mesopotamia, the river’s name passed into it in this trimmed form, which the later Aramaic dialects and the Syriac inherited. It is the working name of the Tigris in the lingua franca of the Persian and post-Persian Near East.

Diglat is the bridge of the eastern family, the step between the cuneiform Idiqlat and the alphabetic Deqlaṯ and Dijla. The dropping of the first syllable, which makes Idiqlat into Diglat, is what gives the Arabic Dijla its shape: the river’s Arabic name preserves not the full Akkadian form but the shortened Aramaic one. The Tigris reached the modern Near East through Aramaic, and wears, in Dijla, the abbreviation that Aramaic gave it.

The Old Persian name of the river, Tigrā, in which the ancient Mesopotamian name has been reshaped to suit Persian ears. The Behistun inscription tells how Darius crossed the Tigrā to crush a rebel, and the form, while ultimately descended from the same Idigna as the Semitic names, has been remade to resemble the Iranian word tigra, “sharp, pointed,” and its relative tigri, “arrow.” The river’s name became, in Persian, a near-pun on swiftness.

Tigrā is the fork where the river’s Western name begins, and it begins in a reinterpretation. The Persians did not invent the name; they inherited the old Mesopotamian word and bent it toward a meaning of their own, hearing in it the arrow that their own language offered. From this Persianized Tigrā the Greeks would take Tígris, and the whole Western tradition would believe, on the strength of a Persian folk-etymology, that the Tigris was named for running as fast as a loosed arrow.

The Greek name of the river, Tígris, taken from the Old Persian Tigrā in the Achaemenid period, when the Greeks came to know Mesopotamia through Persian intermediaries. The Greeks inherited along with the form the Persian fancy that it meant “arrow,” and the word Tígris in Greek also names the tiger, the swift striped beast of the East, so that river and animal share a name suggesting speed. Herodotus and the later geographers use it for the eastern river of Mesopotamia throughout.

Tígris is the form that conquered the West. From the Greek came Latin Tigris and, through Latin, the English and European Tigris, so that the river is known to the modern Western world not by its true and ancient Mesopotamian name but by a Persian reinterpretation of it filtered through Greek. The Septuagint sealed the substitution: translating the river Ḥiddeqel of Eden, the Greek scriptures wrote Tígris, and so even in the Bible the West reads the swift Mesopotamian river under its arrow-name.

The Latin name of the river, Tigris, taken unchanged from the Greek. Pliny repeats the etymology in earnest, explaining that the river is called Tigris from its swiftness, after the Median word for an arrow, and noting how it races through the gorges of the mountains; the same word served Latin for the tiger. Through Roman geography and the Latin Bible the form passed into the languages of Europe.

Tigris is the western terminus of the river’s reinterpreted name, the form English uses. It completes a long irony: the Mesopotamian river called “the swift one” in Sumerian reaches the modern West under a name that means “the swift one” again, but only by accident, through a Persian pun on “arrow” that the Greeks and Romans took for the truth. The sense came round to where it started, swiftness, but by a road that passed through a mistake, and the river’s oldest and most faithful name, Dijla, stayed behind in the East.

The Syriac name of the river, Deqlaṯ, the Aramaic Diglat continued in the dialect of the Syriac churches, whose Mesopotamian heartland the Tigris ran through. The Peshitta uses it for the Eden river of Genesis and the river of Daniel’s vision, and Syriac writers, living along its course, knew it as a familiar local water. The form keeps the d-q-l of the Akkadian, shorn of its first syllable as the Aramaic had shorn it.

Deqlaṯ is the eastern name at home, in a language of the river’s own country. Where the Greek-speaking church to its west read Tígris in the same biblical verses, the Syriac church, standing on the river’s banks, kept the old Mesopotamian Deqlaṯ, the name the land itself had always used. The split between the river’s two names runs, here again, along the line between the Greek and the Aramaic worlds, the same river read two ways in two Bibles.

The Geʿez name of the river, Ṭigros, carried into Ethiopic from the Greek of the Septuagint. Where the Hebrew of Genesis names the third river of Eden Ḥiddeqel, the Greek scriptures wrote Tígris, and the Ethiopic, translated from the Greek, followed suit with Ṭigros; the river appears under this name in the Ethiopic account of paradise, “the third river is Ṭigros, which flows east of Assyria.”

Ṭigros shows the Western name reaching even Ethiopia, and shows once more how the river divided the Bibles. Geʿez is a Semitic language and a cousin of the very tongues that kept the river’s old Semitic name; had it received the name directly from Mesopotamia, it might have said something like Deqlaṯ. Instead it took the river from the Greek, and so an Ethiopian reader knows the swift river of Eden by its Persian-Greek arrow-name, Ṭigros, while the Syriac Christians a little to its north, on the river itself, called the same water Deqlaṯ.

The Arabic name of the river, Dijla, the Aramaic Diglat continued in Arabic, with the g become the Arabic j. Baghdad, founded on its banks in the eighth century as the capital of the Abbasid caliphate, made Dijla one of the great rivers of the Islamic world, and the geographers describe it flowing through the heart of Iraq. It is the name the river bears today in the language now spoken along it.

Dijla is the eastern family come to the present, the living end of a chain that began with Sumerian Idigna five thousand years ago. Of the river’s two names it is the Semitic, Mesopotamian one, faithful to the old d-q-l, that still names the water on the ground in Iraq; Tigris belongs to the maps and books of the West. The swift river of the Sumerians is, to those who live beside it, still recognizably the river the Sumerians named, its most ancient name worn smooth but unbroken across fifty centuries.