Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  The Sumerians and Babylonians, though grateful for the gift of life, were all aware of the black side to the green well-watered land Marduk/Enlil had made. Floods washed down city walls and destroyed crops and cattle. The blessed rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, by grace of which Iraq has survived, could break their banks and bring disaster. Winter rains, sandstorms, summer heat and drought were all regular threats to prosperity, or even to survival. So, for nearly two thousand years, the canny and uneasy priests of Babylon recited Enuma Elish on the fourth day of their New Year Festival – a scrupulous propitiation of the great god Marduk and a reasonable expression of thanks, but equally a sign that the Babylonians were by no means certain that the cosmic contest between Order and Chaos had been decided once and for all.

  *

  So much for the legend of the creation of the Sumerian and Babylonian world – a world restricted to Mesopotamia and the immediately adjacent regions, with Babylon as its capital for the Babylonians and Nippur for the Sumerians. What of the reality?

  Here controversy sets in among the academics. Up to recent years, scholars believed that until the biblical era, the sea – or, more precisely, the Gulf – covered what is now land, all the way up to Ur and to some point between Qurna and the modern town of Amara. Doubts about the bulge of sea up the Qurna-Amara axis arose when engineers putting down wells in that area failed to find any marine shells that the sea would have brought with it and, on receding, have left behind. Questing geologists had discovered such shells in the Ur region and the great city undoubtedly stood near the sea-shore. This theory is supported by a German, Werner Nützel, who has also presented a new and startling picture of the rise and fall of the ancient oceans. At the time of the coldest Ice Age which lasted (roughly) from 14,000 to 13,000 BC, Nützel maintains, the enormous extension of the glacial regions of the earth sucked up enough water from the oceans to cause the world’s sea-levels to fall about a 110 meters below the present. The Gulf is only a 100 meters at its deepest. Thus, he goes on, the Gulf must have been a dry depression during this period, only attaining its present form in the fifth millennium after the melting process has raised the level once more. But Nützel says that in about 3500 BC an extra warm Warm Age temporarily raised the water-level still higher, to about three meters above today’s level. Such swollen waters would have meant a rush of flood-bores north-westwards, breaching or overwhelming walls, irrigation ditches and dykes and outflanking the sea-shore cities of Uruk and Ur. It would have caused major damage to the reed-houses of the peasant and marsh communities, destroying their crops and cattle and even drowning the marshmen themselves: it would have been an unforgettable disaster. It would explain why the Sumerians and Babylonians wrote obsessively of a Great Flood in their ancient texts. The biblical flood story derives from those Sumerian obsessions.

  The grubbiest urchin herding buffaloes in the southern Iraq of those ancient times must have known, loved and feared the thrilling story of the Deluge. It must have been told and re-told in countless reed houses by generations of mothers to generations of sons and daughters – this legend of the sudden explosion of anger in heaven and the sending of great waters to exterminate Mankind. Of course, the story of Man’s hair’s-breadth escape with its built-in and menacing implications – ‘It could happen again!’ – spread throughout the Near East. When the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2110–2010 BC) fell to the onslaughts of eastern invaders, one of the refugees from the city was Abraham, who decamped, lock, stock and barrel, to Palestine. Besides his family, servants, goods and animals, he took with him the brilliant literary traditions and glowing legends of Sumer. And among these was the story of the flood that would be seized on by the authors of the biblical account of it that we all know.

  The Flood story was certainly passed down by word of mouth to generations of Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. It contributed a glowing chapter to the crowning glory of Sumerian literature – a magnificent epic poem in twelve cantos known as The Epic of Gilgamesh. A mixture of adventure, morality and tragedy, The Epic of Gilgamesh has been described as ‘the finest surviving epic poem from any period until Homer’s Iliad.’ It is fifteen hundred years older than Homer, first written down early in the second millennium on clay tablets in cuneiform, the oldest of all scripts, although familiar to Sumerians many centuries before that. (One of the greatest Sumerologists of our day, Dr Samuel Noah Kramer of Pennsylvania, has shown through his collection of translations of Sumerian texts that the accounts of the Flood in it were certainly known as far back as 3000 BC).

  Gilgamesh was a real king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk (north-west of Ur and now known as Warka) and lived about 2700 BC. In life a great and just judge and a builder of temples, in death he became a legend, two parts god and one part man. The Gilgamesh Epic, in part, describes his restless quest for the secret of eternal life; a quest which takes him, after many adventures and dangers, to the presence of Uta-napishtim, the builder of the ‘ark’ and survivor of the Flood, to whom the gods have given immortality as compensation for his tribulations during the Deluge. Uta-napishtim now lives ‘at the mouth of the rivers’ in the idyllic land of Dilmun, where, the early Sumerians thought, ‘when the world was young … the croak of the raven was not heard, the bird of death did not utter the cry of death, the lion did not devour, the wolf did not rend the lamb, the dove did not mourn, there was no widow, no sickness, no old age, no lamentation’. Uta-napishtim tells Gilgamesh the secret of a unique plant that can give him immortality. Gilgamesh eventually finds it at the bottom of the sea but, bearing it home, he stops to bathe in a stream and a serpent steals out of the water and carries the plant away. At last and in despair, Gilgamesh accepts his mortal fate.

  Earlier, however, during their conversation old Uta-napishtim has related to Gilgamesh his eye-witness story of the flood.

  Enlil, ‘father of the gods’, was responsible for it. He had worked the miracle of Creation by making a reed island on the surface of the water and placing Man on it. Later, he convinced the other gods that they should send a flood to obliterate all animal life. It was an astounding thing to do. Nothing resembling a reasonable justification for such a terrible act is to be found in the ancient texts – nothing, that is, except a Babylonian suggestion that ‘the population of the earth became so numerous and noisy that Enlil was upset by their uproar’. At any rate, only the god Enki, god of wisdom and peace, disagreed with the majority decision – ‘Why deprive ourselves,’ he argued, ‘of our human servants and worshippers?’ What possible sense could there be, in fact, in the decision of a histrionic company of gods to kill off once and for all a unique and respectful human audience – one which could easily have been punished adequately by famine, say, or a plague of lions?

  The assembly’s decision, however, was unchallengeable. Enki could do nothing to prevent the flood taking place. All he could do was to warn one man that a flood was coming so as to give him time to build a boat; this would at least ensure the survival of man- and animal-kind. Because the code of the gods precluded him from divulging celestial secrets directly to a mortal’s ear, Enki whispered his warning to the wall of Uta-napishtim’s reed hut: ‘Reed-house, reed-house! Wall, O wall, harken reed-house, wall reflect; O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubara-Tutu; tear down your house and build a boat, abandon possessions and look for life … take up into the boat the seed of all living creatures.’ So Uta-napishtim of the city of Shuruppak (it was found by archaeologists about forty miles north-west of Ur) built his ‘ark’ and embarked his family, and ‘the beasts of the field both wild and tame, and all the craftsmen’. Soon, according to the early Sumerian account: ‘The mighty storm-winds, all of them together, they rushed…. And the storm-winds tossed the huge boat on the great waters.’

  Mankind was decimated. Eventually, but too late for the wretched men and animals already drowned, the gods were appalled by what they had done and they caused the flood to abate. The great boat came to rest on Mount Nisir, now thought to be Pir Omar Gudrun, east
of the Tigris in the Lesser Zab river basin. Here, Uta-napishtim hopefully released a dove which flew around, found no land to alight on and returned to the boat. The same thing happened when Uta-napishtim released a swallow. Then, however, a raven left the boat with its complement of animals and anxious humans, and was never seen again; it had found land. The waters rapidly receded; and Uta-napishtim promptly sacrified to the gods who had done their best to annihilate him.

  Enlil, at first unrepentant, was furious that any mortal had escaped, but even he was soon convinced that the Deluge had been a serious error of judgement. As old Uta-napishtim told Gilgamesh much later, ‘Enlil went up into the boat, he took me by the hand and my wife and made us enter the boat and kneel down on either side, he standing between us. He touched our foreheads to bless us saying, “In time past Uta-napishtim was a mortal man; henceforth he and his wife shall be equal like to us gods; in the distance afar at the mouth of the rivers.”’

  The Biblical Flood stories end reassuringly with the appearance of the rainbow. The Sumerian and Babylonian accounts contain no such divine guarantees against another Deluge. It is true that Uta-napishtim’s account, in The Epic of Gilgamesh, of the god’s profound remorse contains some comfort for man. Yet the Epic ends somberly. For even Gilgamesh – for generations the legendary king-hero of southern Iraq – was doomed to see immortality snatched from him by a serpent. Even he was obliged to recognize that the lot of man is Death.

  3 From Sumer to Islam

  Apart from the Great Deluge, ancient peoples of Iraq had to put up with an endless succession of smaller floods with as much stoicism as they put up with disease. Dr Fuad Safar, a distinguished Iraqi Sumerologist, says that in the old, old days the waters of the Tigris regularly and very disruptively flooded the areas north, north-east, south-east and south of the present-day city of Amara. Sumer proper and most of its population occupied what is now called Muntafiq – that is, the area that runs from modern Nasiriya, Suq-esh-Shiukh and Shatra up to Babylon. No two experts agree completely on the exact form the Marshes took then. Even the former courses of the two great rivers on which all streams, irrigation canals and marshes in the south depend, are uncertain. Now, of course, rising high in Armenia, they meet at Qurna and flow together down the Shatt al Arab waterway to the sea; on the map they look like an enormous tuning fork. But it is perfectly possible that once upon a time the Euphrates flowed south from Samawa, and ran separately to the sea.

  Through an eagle’s eyes the lands of Sumer resemble a bad case of chicken-pox. Literally thousands of hillocks (tels) and strange mounds (ishans) dot the landscape, marking the sites of as many hamlets, villages and towns. They sit there, mysterious and inscrutable today; so far unnamed and unidentified, awaiting the arrival of the excavators. Many of these antique mounds straggle through the Marshes. One of them, at Abu Shadhr in the central Marshes, I often visit. It is about 300 feet long, 200 feet wide and some 10 feet above water when it is at an average height. Today, Abu Shadhr is inhabited by the Beit Nasrullah tribe of Marsh Arabs, their buffaloes and some cattle. There is something creepy about it.

  The only time I have seen buffaloes behave in anything but a peaceful way was at Abu Shadhr a year ago. One of the canoe-men had a friend among the Beit Nasrullah and we drew the tarada up on the shore of the island, shook hands with our hosts and went for a stroll across this strange, large excrescence of earth. There was not much to see. A considerable number of water-buffaloes were chewing fodder in the centre of Abu Shadhr but that was nothing out of the ordinary.

  Then all of a sudden, an amazing thing happened. The buffaloes scrambled to their feet with extraordinary agility, groaning wildly, and lowered their horns at us. Like fighting bulls, they began to paw up the dust with their hooves, looking not simply alarmed but distinctly aggressive as well. They were clearly about to charge.

  ‘Look out!’ yelled Jabbar, the youngest and liveliest of my companions. He instantly snatched up a large stone and a short length of wood lying by. The others did likewise and darted foward hurling the stones and shouting frantically. Furiously snorting, the buffaloes turned away from this unexpectedly brisk attack and cantered to the other end of the island where they stood blowing nervously through their nostrils and looking aggrieved. But it was curious.

  ‘What made them do that?’ I asked. No one could tell.

  ‘If that had happened years ago,’ Farhan, another canoe-boy, laughed, ‘we would have said it was the tantals, the sprites and spirits that our grandfathers and fathers believed lived in these islands.’

  These tantals, of which many stories are told round the night fires, were also said to guard mysterious treasure buried on an island which they hid with magic from the eyes of men. Local tribesmen used to say that gold was buried here, but no gold has actually been dug up, as far as I know. On the other hand, someone showed Thesiger an old seal and a piece of lead sheeting with what he was told were Phoenician characters scratched on it. John George Taylor, who was British Vice-Consul at Basra in 1853, had explored bits of ‘the Chaldean Lake’ (as he called the Marshes) and he too found rolls of sheet lead in sepulchral jars with prayers and invocations scratched on them with stilt. The experts now say all these scratchings are from the sixth century AD and in the Mandean language of the Sabaeans, an ancient sect which still inhabits the region. If they were there thirteen hundred years ago, these island-mounds – though not the seals – were very likely there in pre-Islamic times, even in the time of Sumer. Some of them are solid, of the solidity of earth, not rock, and very high. Thesiger wrote about seeing a bare, black mound standing 30 feet above the reeds. To the Marsh people it is Ishan Waqif or Standing Island, and they take it for the site of a long-forgotten city. Later Thesiger saw a mound they call Azizah which he estimated as 50 feet high. Both of these colossal mounds are in Suaid country, towards the Persian border east of Amara. You find bits of pottery there, too, some unglazed, some sky-blue. Now and again a Marsh Arab picks up a square, flat brick with what looks like cuneiform symbols on it, and sometimes crumbling masonry, glazed dark green. Some of these things may be relatively modern, perhaps Islamic. But other things, and things still buried and unseen, could easily be very old indeed.

  *

  Life was good there in those remote times. The green, well-watered gardens, orchards and seemingly endless date-forests of Sumer; the gloriously intricate cobweb of canals and dykes that made Mesopotamia the granary of the Near East; prosperous farmers with their thousands upon thousands of sheep and cattle; singing boatmen in the giant reeds fishing and hunting undisturbed: such was the golden prospect when southern Iraq was as young. A paradise – to be lost later through conflict and neglect.

  The Sumerians, it is thought, brought the ancestors of the Iraqi water-buffalo from India sometime before 3000 BC. Today, as then, you see their black hulk-bodies huddled on the small rounded platforms on every island house of the Madan, and often beside the houses of land-based cultivators, too. Of course they are as tame as the Marshmen’s cows, but their vast bulk and the heavy swing of the gnarled bosses of their thick, wide horns make you wonder at first sight how they are going to take to you. Especially as you jump from a canoe onto the narrow threshold of a Marsh house where they will often be standing or lying close-packed enough to make you bump them as you pass. There is no need to worry. Despite their grotesque appearance, the great pampered creatures seem to have hardly enough energy to chew the fodder in their ruminant mouths after the centuries of selfless attention lavished on them by generation after generation of Marsh Arabs. The Madan seldom slaughter them for meat; they are prized only for their milk and dung. Dried into thin pats like small rounds of unleavened bread, the manure is the best fuel for the Marsh people’s long-burning household fires and also the hard-sealing cement-like substance most easily and cheaply available.

  Buffalo milk is drunk in its pure state from the metal milking-bowls, or made into a delicious rich yoghurt that can be seen regularly at meals all through the
region. As the men (never the women) of the Arab desert tribes are responsible for milking their camels, so it is the duty of the Marsh Arab men to milk the family’s water-buffaloes. The men also look after the sick buffaloes. They light the small fires that somehow never flame but only smoulder, from which thick spirals of smoke billow round the flanks and eyes of the buffaloes tormented by clouds of summer insects.

  The Marsh houses were built then, as they are now, on small islands; one house to an island. Few, if any, of these islands were natural, although after years of human habitation they look very natural indeed. You make one just as Marduk made the world. You decide how big you want your house to be. You gather a small mountain of rushes and heap them in the water inside a reed fence that rises above the surface. When the well-trampled mass of green also appears above the surface, you fold the fencing in on top of it; and continue piling and stamping reeds until you are satisfied with the size and compactness of the new island you have just created. To build a more lasting island, you can alternate the layers of reeds and rushes with layers of mud; this solidifies the whole mass of earth and vegetation into a virtually indestructible mound. Abandoned mounds, of varying size, are to be found scattered here and there through the Marshes. People have been building them, in the way I have just described, for five or six thousand years.