Washington is changing some of its most reliable military partnerships in the Middle East because it believes states, markets, and diplomacy can deliver what American troops and Kurdish proxies increasingly cannot. The End of the Post-ISIS* Bargain The juxtaposition could hardly be more striking. On August 24, the United States removed Syria from its list […]

More than two thousand years before modern engineers bored tunnels beneath rivers and seas, ancient writers told of an astonishing passage hidden beneath the waters of the Euphrates. According to these accounts, a brick-lined tunnel ran beneath the river at Babylon, linking the city's two halves and allowing people to cross unseen below the current. If the story is true, the Euphrates Tunnel may have been the world's first underwater tunnel—a feat of engineering centuries ahead of its time. However, no trace of the structure has ever been found, leaving historians to wonder whether it was a genuine marvel of ancient engineering or another one of history's enduring legends.

The Euphrates River. Credit: Wikimedia Commons