The city of Mosul is the northern gateway to the Mesopotamian valley, the “Land of the Two Rivers.” In medieval times it was a center of caravan routes between Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia, and once was famed for its textile manufactures, which produced a cloth named after the city, “muslin.” It is located on the site of a suburb of the ancient city of Nineveh and guards a high pass leading through the mountains into Armenia. In 1903 it had a population of 61,000 and bade fair, after the completion of the Bagdad Railway, to regain some of its lost lustre. South and southeast of Mosul flows the Tigris River all the way to the Persian Gulf. Along the valley of this river was to run the new railway, through the towns of Tekrit, Samarra, and Sadijeh, to Bagdad.[37] In 1903 the splendor of the ancient city of Bagdad was very much dimmed. Although it still was the center of an important caravan trade with Persia, Arabia, and Syria, its prosperity was but a name compared with the riches which the city had enjoyed before the commercial revolution of the sixteenth century. The population of 145,000—in part nomad—was to a large extent dependent upon the important export trade in dates and cereals, amounting, in 1902, to almost £1,000,000. All told, the trade of Bagdad was valued at about £2,500,000 annually. Whether the shadow of the former great Bagdad could be transformed into a living thing was an open question.[38] Five hundred miles south of Bagdad is the Persian Gulf,[39] the proposed terminus of the Bagdad Railway. About sixty miles north of the Gulf, located on the Shatt-el-Arab—the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—is the port of Basra, the outlet for the trade of Bagdad. Communication between these two Mesopotamian cities was carried on, in 1903, by means of a weekly steamer service operated by the English firm of Lynch Brothers, under the name “The Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company, Ltd.” The Lynch Brothers—typical British imperial pathfinders—had established themselves at Basra during the decade 1840–1850 and had succeeded during the following half-century in securing a practical monopoly of the river trade from Bagdad to the Persian Gulf. The absence of effective competition and the hesitancy of the Turkish Government to grant permission for the operation of additional steamers were responsible for a totally inadequate service. It was not uncommon for freight to stand on the wharves at Bagdad and Basra for three months or more awaiting transportation. Under these circumstances it was to be expected that freight charges would be exorbitant; it cost more to transfer cargoes from Bagdad to Basra than from Basra to London. The advent of the Bagdad Railway promised great things for the trade of lower Mesopotamia and Persia.[40]