Move the slider to any year: every polity recorded for that year is drawn. The states ruling the land of today's Iraq in the current chapter are gold, in three shades when more than one shares it (the Republic of Iraq, the Kurdistan Region and the Islamic State in 2015); other states that ruled Iraq at some other time are green; everything else is grey. They are not all the same country. 47 chapters carry the story. Borders change only where the dataset records a change, and they fade rather than morph between dated polygons. The slider is stretched so that the dense modern decades get more room than the long ancient centuries. Hover a territory for its name and dates; click it to open its Wikipedia article. City names are modern; ancient sites are in italics.

Boundaries are approximate, with uncertainty, disputed claims and differing degrees of control; ancient borders in particular are schematic, and there are no polygons before 3000 BCE. The dataset does not map every state separately: the Third Dynasty of Ur and the Isin–Larsa kingdoms are drawn as the Sumerian city-states, and the 1920s layer shows Iraq as part of the British Empire. The Kurdistan Region (Duhok, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah governorates) and the extent of the Islamic State (approximated by the Nineveh, Anbar and Saladin governorates) are reconstructions from modern governorate boundaries. The dashed line shows today's Iraq for orientation.