Ancient Mesopotamia Map
A free printable map of ancient Mesopotamia drawn on real terrain, with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the cities of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria. It comes labeled and blank.
Choose your version
Labeled or blank.
Both are free PDFs sized for US Letter paper.
Labeled
Cities, regions, rivers and seas named.
downloadLabeled PDF
Blank
The same terrain and markers with no names, for labeling practice.
downloadBlank PDFThe geography of Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia means the land between the rivers. The Tigris and the Euphrates rise in the mountains of what is now Turkey and flow southeast to the Persian Gulf. The plain between them gets little rain, but the rivers flooded each year and left fertile soil, and farmers dug canals to water their fields. The world’s first cities grew up in Sumer, in the south, more than 5,000 years ago. Akkad and later Babylonia were in the middle of the plain, and Assyria was in the hillier north. The region is part of the Fertile Crescent, an arc of farmland that curves from the Persian Gulf up through Mesopotamia and down the Mediterranean coast.
On the map
- Ur and Uruk: early Sumerian cities
- Babylon: capital of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar
- Nineveh and Ashur: capitals of Assyria
- Mari: trading city on the Euphrates
- Susa: capital of neighboring Elam
Find it on the map
- The two rivers running side by side
- The Zagros Mountains to the east
- The desert to the west
Coastlines and rivers are shown as they are today. In ancient times the Persian Gulf reached farther inland, so cities like Ur were closer to the sea, and the lakes shown in central Iraq are modern.