[3] The city is about 34 kilometres (21 mi) north of Shush, on the main road and the rail line between Tehran and Ahvaz.

[2] The name first appears in cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia from the Ur III period (21st to 20th century BCE) in the form "Adamshakh", with a probable meaning "Crocodile (Town)".

Later it was called "Andamaska" or "Andimaska", meaning "plenty of butter"; local villages like Gheel-AB and Lour and two fortresses were added to it.

[6] The city was en route to Ilam and Anshan and subsequently to Lorestan, which made it strategically important until the late Sassanid era.

At the same time, the American General Motors Company established a branch of its military automobile factory in this city.

The Karkheh Dam is designed to irrigate 320,000 hectares of land, produce 520 MW of hydro-electricity and prevent downstream floods.

In 1956, studies began on the Karkheh Dam by the American company Development and Resources Corporation, which was headed by David E. Lilienthal, the former chairman of the TVA.

[10][11] Andimeshk sits close to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains on the main north–south highway from Tehran to Ahvaz, the provincial capital of Khuzestan.