Which modern country contains ancient Mesopotamia?

Iraq, mostly - the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, with edges reaching into Syria, Turkey and Iran. It is where writing, the wheel, the city, the law code, the sexagesimal system behind our minutes and degrees, and beer all have their earliest evidence.

That is an extraordinary concentration and it happened for an ordinary reason: irrigated agriculture on a flat river plain produced grain surpluses, surpluses required storage and accounting, accounting produced writing, and writing made everything else recordable. The earliest tablets from Uruk are receipts.

The heritage has taken enormous damage in living memory. The National Museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003 with thousands of objects taken while the building was unguarded; sites were dug over illegally on an industrial scale; a military base was built across Babylon; and Islamic State bulldozed Nimrud and Hatra and filmed themselves destroying museum pieces. Some objects have been recovered, including tablets bought by an American craft retailer and eventually seized and returned - but a substantial part of the earliest written record of the species has gone through the antiquities market and into private hands.