Iraq

Fly into Erbil, the easiest entry point to the country and a modern airport with direct services from across Europe and the Gulf. The afternoon starts at the top of the citadel, a thirty-metre mound raised by six thousand years of its own rubble and claimed as the longest continuously inhabited site on Earth, with the Ottoman quarter and the textile museum on the summit. Down into the Qaysari bazaar, past the Mudhafaria minaret, and out onto Shar Park at the hour the whole city comes for tea. A briefing over dinner on how the next twelve days actually work.

West and north into the Yazidi heartland. Lalish first, entered barefoot as everyone must: the fluted conical spires, the sacred spring, the tomb of Sheikh Adi and the guardians who will explain a faith that most visitors arrive knowing nothing about. Then on through Duhok and up the Sapna valley to Amedi, a town of two thousand people sitting on top of a flat-topped mesa with a single road up, occupied since Assyrian times and looking exactly as improbable as that sounds. Night in Duhok.

The morning goes to Alqosh and the monastery of Rabban Hormizd, cut into the cliff above the plain in 640 AD and held by the Chaldean church ever since. Then down onto the Nineveh plain and into Mosul, which is the most affecting day of the expedition: the Old City on the west bank, still part rubble and part rebuilding; the Al-Nouri mosque and its leaning minaret under reconstruction; the churches being restored beside them; and, across the river, the walls and Mashki Gate of Nineveh, the greatest city of the Assyrian empire. Back to Erbil for the night.

East across the plain and over the Zagros foothills to Sulaymaniyah, the Kurdish cultural capital and a noticeably different city: more books, more music, more argument. The afternoon is Amna Suraka, the Red Security, the Ba'athist intelligence headquarters left exactly as it was taken in 1991, bullet holes and all, now a museum to the Anfal campaign with a hall of 182,000 mirror shards. Then the Sulaymaniyah Museum, second only to Baghdad's, for the Sumerian and Assyrian collections. Night in Suli.

A morning in the mountains toward the Iranian border: the Halabja memorial, where five thousand people were killed by chemical weapons in a single day in March 1988, and which the town itself insists visitors should see. Then Ahmed Awa or the Dukan lake for the country the Kurds mean when they talk about home. In the afternoon we fly Sulaymaniyah to Baghdad, an hour that saves a long day on the road, and arrive in the capital in the evening for dinner on Abu Nuwas Street, masgouf carp split and grilled by the river.

A full day in the capital. The Iraq Museum in the morning, whose Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian galleries are among the most important collections anywhere and whose looting in 2003 is part of the story the curators now tell. Then the Abbasid Mustansiriya madrasa on the Tigris, founded in 1233; the Baghdadi Museum; and Al-Mutanabbi Street, the booksellers' road rebuilt after the 2007 bombing, which on a Friday fills with readers and poets and ends at the Shabandar café, serving tea since 1917. Evening in Karrada.

North first to Samarra, where the Malwiya rises 52 metres as a spiral you climb on the outside, built in 852 for a mosque that was then the largest in the world, and the golden dome of Al-Askari, rebuilt after the 2006 bombing that nearly tipped the country into full civil war. Then south of Baghdad to Ctesiphon, capital of the Parthians and Sasanians, where Taq Kasra still stands: a brick arch thirty-seven metres high and twenty-six across, the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brick ever built, seventeen centuries old and unsupported.

Down the Euphrates to Babylon, a name that carries more weight than any other in the ancient world: the processional way, the reconstructed Ishtar gate, the basalt Lion of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar's walls, and Saddam's palace on the ridge above, which is its own comment on the place. In the late afternoon into Karbala, and to the shrines of Imam Hussein and Al-Abbas at the hour they are at their most extraordinary: gold domes lit, mirror-work blazing, and a crowd that will want to know where you are from and buy you tea.

An hour south to Najaf, the seat of Shia scholarship and the site of the shrine of Imam Ali, whose golden dome is the centre of the old city and one of the most beautiful interiors in the Islamic world. Beside it lies Wadi Al-Salam, the Valley of Peace, the largest cemetery on the planet: over a thousand years of burials across six square kilometres, and still filling. In the afternoon, Kufa, where Ali was killed, and its great mosque. Night in Najaf or Karbala.

South-east to Ur, the Sumerian city that was already ancient when Babylon was founded. The ziggurat of Ur-Nammu, built around 2100 BC and restored enough to climb, stands over the excavated royal cemetery where Leonard Woolley found the death pits and the treasures now in London and Philadelphia, and beside the mud-brick house traditionally identified as Abraham's. It is flat, silent, enormous desert, and the scale of what was here takes a while to land. Night in Nasiriyah.

Out to the marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, UNESCO-listed since 2016 and unlike anywhere else in the Middle East. You go out in a mashoof, the long shallow canoe, through channels cut in reed beds five metres high, past water buffalo standing chest-deep and villages built on floating reed islands. Tea in a mudhif, the arched reed guest-house whose design has not changed in five thousand years. Saddam drained all of this in the 1990s; the reflooding since 2003 is one of the great restoration stories nobody talks about. Drive on to Basra for the night.

The last morning in Basra, where the Tigris and Euphrates join and run to the Gulf: the corniche on the Shatt al-Arab, the crumbling Ottoman shanasheel houses of the old Ashar quarter with their carved wooden balconies, the canals that once made this the Venice of the East, and the fish market. Then the transfer to Basra International for onward flights via Dubai, Doha or Istanbul. Those who would rather fly home from the north can be routed back to Baghdad or Erbil instead.