by Gavin Young
*
Of course, Falih’s was only the threshold. It took the best part of the next morning to reach the permanent Marsh. First, Falih and his servants provided the unavoidable Arab ritual of breakfast: eggs and jam and flat bread, with small glasses of sugary tea. Then our canoe-men loaded the canoe, and again I stepped gingerly aboard it, squatting on a vividly coloured rug that Falih had ordered to be spread amidships. A crowd of people waved us goodbye, calling ‘Come back. Come back soon.’
Falih’s heavy figure stood watching us until we turned the next bend in the water-channel and a clump of willows hid him. The monotony of the low, flat land resumed. But we hadn’t travelled far before the canoe-boys broke off their desultory conversation to point and chatter. On the right bank ahead I saw another great reed mudhif (guest-house) and people, as at Falih’s, moving out of its shadowy, arched doorway to watch us approach. There was a difference here for nearly all of them wore dark blue kefiyahs (headcloths) instead of the customary black and white check ones. By that sign we could tell that they were sayyids, like the sallow-faced man at Falih’s. The owner of this guest-house, Sayyid Sarwat, was the most respected of all the sayyids in these parts; a man known and loved through all southern Iraq up to Baghdad, even to Kuwait. His prestige was immense – not only among superstitious Marsh Arabs and the ultra-religious; with the sheikhs and government officials of the area, too, his wisdom and probity were unquestioned.
This much Thesiger had told me. And I could see the Sayyid now looming on the shore – and loom is very much the appropriate word. For Sayyid Sarwat is a very large man indeed; six feet tall, broad, thick, and made even more imposing by his black beard, black robes from chin to ankle, and a cavernous, bass voice that at this moment was filling the wide landscape with genial booms of welcome in our direction. On later occasions I always stopped here; it was a place of loving kindness and boundless hospitality, a place to rest and be at ease in after hard days and nights in the Marshes, a place in which to catch up on local gossip; a place of common sense; a good place. But we needed to hurry on: my first visit here had to be short. I still worked for a company with ships to load down in Basra and in a few days I was expected to be aboard them, arguing with German or Dutch First Officers about the stowage of the barley the company exported. So we exchanged hails with the Sayyid, pulling our canoe alongside to shake his enormous hand, and left the great man, thunderously upbraiding us across the water, his arms raised in mock anger at our refusal to stay to lunch, dinner, the night, three days, a week….
Presently we were very close to the Marshes. Any minute now I would see if I had abandoned too lightly that ambition to take to the great desert with a camel. Our water-course narrowed perceptibly; a tall palisade of reeds suddenly reared up and seemed to bar our way. In a moment our channel faded out completely and messily into a small stretch of water-logged silt. To prevent us sticking, the boys leapt over the side, their clothing tucked up round their waists, and, thigh-deep in mud, began heaving the canoe forward by main force. Not for long. With a gentle rasping sound, the boat slid off the mud-field and into wide, dear water like a swan taking gratefully to its true element. The golden reeds shot up around us, closing up behind us like twenty feet high sound-proof screens, shutting out all other worlds. Their dun-coloured waving plumes contracted the sky into one pure blue swathe immediately overhead. Like Alice in Wonderland we had plunged into another world. However insignificant on a map, the Marsh is a world to get lost in: 6000 square miles, give or take a few. Shifting their paddles from one side to the other, the canoe-men threaded our needle-slim prow through a weaving half-tunnel of reed, rush and tangled sedge. I looked over the side and saw water as clear as glass and deep creepers, and flickering fish. ‘You’re there,’ said Thesiger. ‘This is the Marsh.’ And the canoe-boy kneeling immediately behind me tapped me on the shoulder and excitedly echoed Thesiger, ‘Hadha el Hor’.
This was the Marsh all right. The impressions of the next few days of this visit took hold of me as relentlessly as the marsh creepers that grapple those millions upon millions of reeds. Sometimes we burst out of the reed-forests into dazzling sun-lit lagoons so vast that their blue mirror-surfaces joined the sky uninterrupted by any solid skyline. We saw Marshmen in the prows of their canoes of immemorial design, bending against the curve of a reed punt-pole, or poised with long five-pronged fishing-spears like javelin-throwers on an ancient frieze, bracing strong bodies the colour of butterscotch. Others seemed dressed for the warpath; clutching Lee-Enfield rifles and festooned with cartridge belts, they paddled past strongly and fast in silence with a grim, preoccupied air. I saw men and boys leaping in and out of canoes, even in deep water, with an agility that seemed almost incredible until I remembered that they had four or five thousand years of practice behind them.
We stayed in island-built Marsh villages, where you need a canoe to go from one shaggy reed house to another and the houses sit on the water, as Gavin Maxwell described them so accurately, ‘like a fleet of lit boats at anchor in a calm sea’. Through the open doorways of these humble replicas of Falih’s magnificent guest-house I saw men or women sitting round fires that illuminated their faces orange-red, like figures in a seventeenth-century painting. I longed to touch them and talk to them and in some way share their lives. There and then I forgot about camels and deserts.
The natural beauty of the place was hypnotic. Black and white pied kingfishers dived for their prey all around us, clusters of storks arced high above, snow-white flotillas of stately pelicans fished the lagoons; there was always at least one eagle in the sky. The reeds we passed through trembled or crashed with hidden wildlife: otters, herons, coot, warblers, gaudy purple gallinule, pygmy cormorants, huge and dangerous wild pigs. And often, out of some apparently deserted reed-jungle, a full-throated human voice soared into the silence – a young Marsh Arab singing a love-song as he harvested the rushes. The canoe-boys might stop paddling to listen and they grunted appreciatively if the voice was good. They were moist-eyed and soulful only when they themselves were singing. I found the sound of those unselfconscious singers invariably moving. The young voice throbbed and choked with sadness, real or feigned. In that great solitude, where the men of Ur once poled their canoes and where ‘in the beginning’, according to Sumerian legend, Marduk, the great God, built a reed platform on the surface of the waters and thus created the world, the effect is one of unquenchable and universal yearning.
2 In the Beginning
‘Reed-house, reed-house! Wall, O Wall, harken reed-house … O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubaru-Tutu; tear down your home and build a boat….’
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Story of the Flood (from 3000 BC)
Before Men came, Mesopotamia was a lifeless swirl of air, water and mist. At least, that is what legend says, and we do not know any better. Up to the third millennium bc, the history of Ancient Iraq is elusive. Did civilized Man appear there six thousand years ago, or seven thousand? That far back in time, even the experts allow themselves a few centuries of doubt this way or that. The Marsh Arabs, for their part, know next to nothing about their remote ancestors, and so are no help.
One day I asked an elderly Marsh Arab how far back he could trace his antecedents as marsh-dwellers, and he replied, ‘Really, I don’t know how long we have been here. I think perhaps ten generations ago my tribe moved here from the dry land round about. I am not an educated man who would know such things, but I don’t think there was anything here before that except the birds and the beasts.’ Yet, as he spoke, we sat in the heart of a region in which human life had existed since 3500 BC and very probably many centuries earlier than that. An aura of infinity hangs over these sometimes exhilaratingly beautiful Marshes, these sometimes gloomy and disturbing 6000 square miles of water and reed. And why should it surprise, that intimation of infinity? Is it a little matter that five thousand years ago the kings of Ur of the Chaldees gazed at the curved reed houses that we can gaze at and visit today?
That we can travel today in the royal gondolas of Sumer and Babylonia?
A mass of texts excavated from numerous Sumerian sites during the last hundred years shows just how early in history human beings worked and frolicked in Mesopotamia. The Sumerians were the first literate inhabitants of southern Iraq. They invented writing and beyond argument must be counted among the most gifted people the world has ever seen. According to some scholars, the Sumerians arrived from the north and east of Iraq sometime before 3000 BC. Others maintain that they were a mixture of new arrivals from outside Iraq and already settled indigenous peoples of the south with their own civilization in embryo already burgeoning there. The second lot of scholars seem to be in the ascendant. But wherever they did or did not come from, the Sumerians created in Mesopotamia a civilization of a grandeur unsurpassed by Egypt. The Nile Valley and the plains of Greece left no treasures more dazzling than those the archaeologists have dug up in Mesopotamian cities like Ur, Uruk, Nippur, Assur and Babylon.
Sumer was about the size of Belgium (about 10,000 square miles), a long, rather narrow stretch of irrigated land between Baghdad and the Marshes at the head of the Gulf, which was known to Sumerians as ‘the Lower Sea’ or ‘Sea of the Rising Sun’. The numerous Sumerian city-states straggled up to the general area of present-day Baghdad from the city-state of Eridu just south of Ur, which is a short drive from modern Nasiriya. They were large and sophisticated settlements consisting of suburbs, satellite towns, gardens and orchards; one may have encompassed a population of 30,000 to 35,000. These city-states, with their temples and defensive walls and dykes, were tightly organized by large civil services under the eagle eyes of high priests. Each city-state was ruled by a king or governor, but he was simply the representative, or vicar, of the gods on earth – and chosen by them – for each state was not only protected but actually owned by a particular god. Ziggurats of the kind still visible at Ur were, like the Tower of Babel (Babylon), attempts to bridge the gap between mortals and the gods above. In the cities on the fringe of the giant reed-beds, writing was born (about 3000 BC) and developed, at first in the form of pictograms, simple drawings scratched on clay with reed stalks, and later as cuneiform impressed on clay tablets baked as hard as stone; hundreds of thousands of these have survived. Most were found relatively recently. The ‘heroic age’ of archaeology in Mesopotamia began in the nineteenth century with the early diggings of Claudius Rich of the East India Company, and continued gloriously with Sir Henry Layard’s successes at Nineveh and the work of Sir Henry Rawlinson, the army officer-philologist who cracked the secret ‘code’ of the cuneiform texts. The twentieth century has contributed the triumphs of Sir Leonard Woolley, Dr Parrot of France, Sir Max Mallowan and Dr Fuad Safar of the Directorate-General of Antiquities in Baghdad, and of Dr Samuel Noah Kramer of Pennsylvania who re-discovered Sumerian literature (to list only a few illustrious names). At least a quarter of a million tablets have been unearthed – more ancient texts than any other country has disclosed – and the work of discovery still goes on, turning up more and more. There is still much to find. What ruins lie under the waters of the Marshes, for example, or under the silt?
This great civilization took shape in uncomfortable surroundings: on the edge of – and even within – the Marshes, in a flat plain made habitable by the twin rivers Euphrates and Tigris, where summer temperatures soared to 120° and coupled with intense humidity to make breathing, leave alone hard physical effort, a trial. From the wealth of carvings on cylinder-seals and impressions on tablets, from relief carvings on stone vases and bowls, and from breath-taking sculpture, we can have a very good idea of what they looked like, these indefatigable temple-builders, artists, law-givers, cultivators – and the men of the Marshes who stalked wild-fowl in the reed-beds and speared or netted fish. The Sumerians were often potato-faced, stocky with thick necks, big protuberant noses and large, unusually round eyes – no great beauties, one would say, although their faces show an exuberant strength of character and much humour. After the Sumerians, who were not Semitic whatever else they were, people came from further north who had short, straight noses and heads finer and less round – the Semitic look introduced by the incursions of Akkadian princes from central Iraq. You can see both types of feature (among others) round evening firesides in Marsh houses today. But their owners will not be chattering away in old Sumerian.
The Sumerian language is an unclassified tongue; it has no connection with any other language such as Akkadian (or Assyro-Babylonian), which is a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic. It died out about 2000 BC as a spoken tongue for day-to-day communication. It survived for centuries (such was the strength of Sumerian culture and such the deep respect for it of succeeding ‘foreign’ conquerors of Southern Mesopotamia like the Babylonians and Assyrians) as the written, academic language of priests and scholars, much as Latin survived in Europe through the Middle Ages. There is no linguistic link therefore with the tongue of the Marsh people of today, who speak Arabic in the Iraqi dialect.
Language apart, I think a Sumerian’s shock of recognition would overcome his shock of surprise if, by some magical time-mechanism, I could snatch him from 3000 BC, or even long before that, and plonk him down in a high-prowed Marsh Arab’s canoe built, say, in 1976, and moored at the threshold of a reed house completed last week. Relics of mashhufs from that distant ‘golden age’ of Sumer are accurately reflected by the Marshmen’s boats today. Sir Leonard Woolley found a two-foot long silver model of a mashhuf in the remains of the royal city of Ur, which is only forty miles from the centre of today’s permanent marsh. The model is now on show in the exceptionally fine Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Two larger models from Ur, made of bitumen, are displayed in the British Museum in London. Bitumen models crop up throughout the Sumerian period, some only a foot and a half in length, others as much as six feet. These models of the mashhufs of the ancient fens seem to have had a religious significance, since they were found inside Sumerian graves and had clearly been made there. They bore miniature cargoes of copper pots and jars containing offerings of food and drink intended either for the hungry dead, or to lure evil spirits aboard the boats which would then shuttle them away to oblivion.
The finely-shaped canoes the Madan use almost as much today as ever before closely resemble those ancient models. All of them, particularly the taradas or war-canoes of the sheikhs, are things of a rare, almost animal, grace. The war-canoe Falih bin Majid had built for Wilfred Thesiger in 1951 measured thirty-six feet long, though it was only three and a half feet across at its widest. Its sleek prow swept up to a point five feet above the surface of the water, smooth and black with bitumen. Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians built their boats as they do today. Mashhufs and taradas dirt carvel-built out of a mixture of Iraqi mulberry wood and wood imported from Malaysia and Indonesia, with the simplest of tools: a saw, an adze, a drill. When the curving Java-wood ribs have been attached to the lighter slats of the bottom, that are laid out on the ground like a skeleton, a cross-beam is nailed in to buttress the sides. Detachable floor-boards are slipped in, and a small part of the bows and stern are decked to provide space for two punters or paddlers fore and aft.
The Sumerians used the same method of water-proofing that you can watch Marsh Arab craftsmen applying today, smearing the delicate wooden hulls with a skin of the pitch that bubbled out of the ground – and bubbles still – at Hit and Ramadi. (The Sumerians also used the bitumen for water-proofing drains, and as mortar in brickwork.) Every year the bitumen skin is scraped off and a fresh coat put on with a sort of rolling-pin.
*
Given the identical nature of the landscape then and now, why should one wonder that Sumerian legends were largely fixed into settings resembling southern Iraq today: rivers, reeds, marshes, date-palms? The Sumerian and Babylonian tradition of the Creation fits perfectly into the grey-green flatness at the head of the Gulf. ‘If we stand on a misty morning near the present Iraqi sea-shore, at the mouth of the Shatt al Arab,’ wr
ote a recent historian of early Iraq who obviously knows what it looks like, ‘what do we see? Low banks of clouds hang over the horizon; large pools of sweet water seeping from underground or left over from the river floods mingle freely with the salty waters of the Gulf; of the low mud-flats which normally form the landscape no more than a few feet are visible; all around us sea, sky and earth are mixed in a nebulous, watery chaos.’ This, he points out, is how the peoples of this ancient region must have envisaged the beginning of the world. In fact, we know that they did so from an early masterpiece of literature. An epic poem composed by the Babylonians and transcribed onto seven tablets about 2000 BC sets out a detailed account of the Creation legend, an account probably handed down from the even earlier Sumerian times. The creation of the world, these tablets proclaim, was the outcome of a desperate struggle between various combinations of turbulent gods; a titanic confrontation between Good and Evil, Order and Chaos.
Entitled Enuma Elish from its opening sentence, ‘When on high (the heaven had not been named…)’, the poem describes the time when nothing at all had been created – ‘no reed-hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared….’ Only Apsu (the sweet waters), Tiamat (the salt waters) and Mimmu (the clouds) ‘co-mingled their waters as a single body’. Confusion, watery and melancholy, prevailed. A divine miracle was required, and presently it came. The Babylonians credit their patron-god, Marduk – Enlil to the Sumerians – with the creation of Order, the world and human beings. Mounting his storm-chariot and armed with flood-storm and lightning, Marduk/Enlil smote and routed the forces of Chaos, a motley army of dragons and monstrous serpents. He proceeded to create a new sky and to fix the sun, moon and stars in proper courses. Then he went on to make the world. ‘He built a reed platform on the surface of the waters, then created dust and poured it around the platform’ – and this, briefly stated, is how today’s Madan create the artificial islands on which they site their reed houses. Finally, Marduk/Enlil made sure there would be someone about to give credit where it was due. He said: ‘I will establish a savage, “man” shall be his name. Verily, savage-man I will create. He shall be charged with the service of the gods, That they might be at ease!’ And so Man came into the world.
