G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection/Wikimedia commons. Some rights reserved.
In 1905 in a quiet Istanbul coffee house, 26-year-old Mark Sykes met with an employee of a German engineering company that was surveying northern Iraq for the planned Berlin to Baghdad Railway. The engineer passed a small notebook to the young British Embassy employee, who, in exchange, handed over some money.
The notebook contained details about possible oil deposits near Mosul, and Sykes passed it on to his superiors who filed it away without giving it much thought. A decade later the Great Powers would be scrambling for access to the Middle East’s oil reserves and Britain would take over Iraq in what would turn out to be its first occupation of Mesopotamia.
