The Tigris Expedition Read online

  PLATES

  Between pages

  1 In a Marsh Arab reed house 20 and 21

  2 In the marshes of southern Iraq

  3 The riverbanks and floating reed islands of the marshes

  4 Old and new cultures meet in the marshes; berdi reeds for our reed ship

  5 Three stages in the building of Tigris

  6-7 Shipbuilding as in the days of the pyramid builders

  8 The reed ship Tigris on the Shatt-al-Arab

  9 The Garden of Eden; the river at the building site, where the

  two rivers meet °4 and 85

  10 Pollution on the river Tigris

  11 Entering the gulf at the river's mouth; adrift among ships of all nations; steering toward Kuwait

  12 A view from the topmast

  13 In the shallows of FaUaka: the dhows; the Russian lifeboat gives a tow

  14 Towed by Slavsk, the Russian merchantman

  15 Farewell to Captain Usakovsky, and to Slavsk

  16 The hole ripped in Tigris' bow

  17 Geoffrey Bibby shows a sm-vival from antiquity; the bow of

  Tigris is repaired with palm stalks 116 and 117

  18 Burial mounds at Bahrain

  19 Bahrain: a long-lost port city with walled harbor basin

  20 Imported stone at Bahrain—heavy monumental pedestals, cut blocks of a temple and walls of a sacred well

  21 Prehistoric quarries on Jidda Island

  22 Oil platforms and supertankers in the gulf

  23 Carlo preparing ropes; the cliffs of the Arabian peninstda

  24 Timiing into shelter outside the Hormuz Strait; southward from the Strait

  25 The people of Oman 148 ^^^ ^49

  26 A Sumerian mini-ziggurat in Oman?

  27 The lost copper mines of legendary Makan

  28 Paolo Costa at the prehistoric slag heaps; bundle boats in north Oman

  29 Sightseeing in a land closed to tourists

  30 Rowing a reed ship away from land

  31 Thor I again

  Between pages

  33 The island of Astola; the limestone cliffs of the Makran coast 180 and 181

  34 Ashore beside the Ormara peninsula: women hurrying away; houses of mats

  35 Yoimg and old in Ormara bay

  36 Mohenjo-Daro, the lost metropolis of the Indus Valley

  37 Mohenjo-Daro: two-storied houses, brick-covered sewers, and a swimming basin

  38 A reed ship incised on a seal; berdi reeds beside the Indus

  39 Past and present in the Indus Valley

  40 Norman and Yuri prepare for departure; map studies at the dining table

  41 Tigris in the Indian Ocean 244 and 245 42-43 Far from land

  44 The topmast broken after a storm

  45 Pollution; a red belt in midocean 46-47 Tigris still floating high

  48 At home in the ocean

  49 Inside the main cabin; around the deck table 276 and 277 50-51 The international crew of Tigris

  52 No lack of seafood

  53 Norman on the yardarm; adjusting the sail

  54 Rowing at sea; remora fish under the bottom

  55 A dangerous calm

  56 Waiting for wind; radioing for a landing permit

  57 Forbidden waters: nearing Socotra; within shooting range 308 and 309

  58 A birthday photo as the wind fills the sails again

  59 Into the African war zone—military airplanes, helicopters and warships off Djibouti

  60 Into the final port, Djibouti; a welcome from French warships

  61 Abandoning ship in Africa: Tigris is prepared for a proud end 62-63 Farewell to Tigris

  64 The end of Tigris

  Plates 1 and 6-7 by David Graham. All other photographs by Carlo Mauri and the expedition crew.

  THE TIGRIS EXPEDITION

  Chapter 1

  IN SEARCH OF THE BEGINNINGS

  T

  X HE begmning. The real beginning.

  This was the place.

  This was where written history began. This was where mythology began. This was the source of three of the mightiest rehgions in human history. Two billion Christians, Jews and Moslems all over the world are taught by their sacred books that this was the spot chosen by God to give life to mankind.

  Here two large rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, drift slowly together, and their meeting place is shown on every world map. Yet it is not a spectacular scene. Silent as the rivers when they meet are the narrow rows of date palms lining the banks, while sun and moon, passing over the barren desert, are reflected day and night on the cahn waters. A rare canoe ghdes by, vdth men casting nets.

  This, most of mankind believes, was the cradle of Homo sapiens, paradise lost.

  A narrow point of green land is drawn out between the two rivers as they meet and greet each other with slow whirls, forming a single river, the Shatt-al-Arab, which quickly hides from view be-

  hind a palm-lined bend. Between the rivers, at the very point of the land, a httle rest house was once built and subsequently half abandoned. With its three guest rooms, large hall and still bigger terrace facing the sunrise over the river Tigris, the modest building bears an impressive name in big letters above the door: the garden

  OF EDEN REST HOUSE.

  This boastful name is justified if we are to take a nearby bulletin board hterally. Hardly a stone's throw from the rest house, and separated from it by a greensward large enough for building a boat, are a couple of inconspicuous green trees leaning over the Tigris. Between them hes a thick, short stump. This was part of a fallen tree of undefined species, but venerated by modest candles and solenmly fenced in as a very simple sanctuary. Old men from the nearby town of Qurna sometimes come here to sit and meditate. A placard with text in Arabic and Enghsh tells the rare passerby that this was the abode of Adam and Eve. Abraham, it says, had come here to pray. Indeed, according to the scriptures, Abraham was born at Ur, a few hours away.

  The long-lost branches of this aged tree certainly had never carried apples. And Abraham had probably never venerated that pleasant riverside spot, since the ground level has risen an estimated twenty feet in the last few millennia and must have altered the original water course. Nevertheless, the meeting place of the two rivers, the whole locahty, merits the hmnble meditation of the passerby, for something began in these siu-roundings. Something of importance to you and me and most of mankind.

  As I moved with my luggage into the rest house and leaned over the terrace fence to watch the silent rings made by fish as they broke the surface, the sun shpped away behind me and drew a red curtain over the sky, causing the black silhouettes of date palms on the other side to be reflected for a while in a river that seemed as if turned to blood.

  There was adventure in the air. How could it be otherwise? Here was the homeland of the Thousand and One Nights, of Aladdin's lamp, the Flying Carpet and Sindbad the Sailor. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves belonged to these riverbanks. Downstream, the waters drifted past Sindbad Island, named after the great yam-spinning sailor of Arab folktales. Upstream it had its source near the foot of the soaring cone of Mount Ararat, where Hebrew records have it that Noah grounded his ark. Near the banks, modest road

  signs still point to time-honored ghost cities like Babylon and Nineveh, whose bibhcal brick walls still seem to shake off nibble and dust in their attempt to reach the sky. Jetliners roar into timeless Baghdad, where modem cranes and concrete buildings crowd between golden domes and minarets.

  Located, as it were, to the east of the West and to the west of the East, people of all types and buildings of all epochs blend naturally in this Arab repubhc known today as Iraq. Mesopotamia, the "Land Between the Rivers," was the descriptive name the conquering Greeks on
ce gave to this same territory which men of antiquity had regarded with awe, wonder and admiration and knew under many different names. Best known and first among them was Sumer; subsequent were Babylonia and Assyria. Since the generation of Mohammed the Prophet this has been the Arab's eastern frontier.

  Today oil flows through pipelines across the sterile deserts which were once productive pastures and irrigated fields. In the withered landscape temple-pyramids, minarets and oil driUs stand side by side as symbols of the changing civilizations. Near the former banks of the Euphrates, south of Baghdad and halfway to the distant Garden of Eden, the road passes a huge, shapeless pile of crumbled bricks. A signpost in the rubble brings to mind the classic tale of man's first attempt to build higher than what he himself could control. The sign reads: the tower of babel.

  The road continues in the direction of the midday sun. It runs through endless desert plains, with Arab towns so colorful and picturesque that Sindbad and Ali Baba seem to sit on the doorsteps or move in the throngs in the marketplaces; and one passes from the former domain of Babylon into the coastal area where everything began—southern Iraq, formerly known as Sumer.

  The naked deserts, flat as a farmer's field, continue to the open gulf. Only in the flooded area where the twin rivers slowly converge are vast stretches of green marshes full of birds and fishes. Here a truly unique culture has survived since biblical times, hidden in a world of canes and reeds that grow tall and dense as a jungle. More Sumerian blood probably runs in the veins of these marsh dwellers than in any other Arab tribe. The rivers from Noah's distant mountain seem to ignore the scorched landscape of former Mesopotamia throughout its length to overflow in joy at encountering the timeless Marsh Arabs. They alone of Noah's descendants seem to have been

  blessed with eternal life, while all the great city-states and kingdoms around them have followed one another in collapse.

  The desert, encroaching upon the spring-green marshes from all sides, has swallowed up the former Sumerian homeland and all that it contained. Bright dunes of arid sand have rolled over colossal temple-pyramids erected to forgotten gods, and covered abandoned cities ruled by kings themselves reduced to dust. The landscape which once throbbed with hfe is today as silent and lifeless as the North Pole. Like the snow-fiUed crevasses of the polar ice, endless irrigation systems and former shipping canals run from horizon to horizon, though not a drop of water enters them and not a green leaf grows.

  This is the cemetery of an entire civilization, the oldest ancestor to our own. No one who wants to know his or her own begiimings can ignore what archaeological detectives have extracted from the local sand. For in this dead and buried world hinnan words Hve on like ghosts, ready to speak again whenever recovered from the grip of the soil. Among the excavated palaces and dwellings scientists have imcovered real "hbraries," with tens of thousands of baked clay tablets incised with the earhest script known. The original Sumerian script was composed of hieroglyphic symbols, but these were soon replaced by cuneiform characters easier to cut into clay.

  In tombs and temples the archaeologists have also come across incredible art treasures of gold and silver, witnessing to a standard of taste and a level of civilization so outstanding that simpler minds of our own day have been led to suspect that these long-vanished people must have come from outer space. The learned pubhcations of the archaeologists rarely reach the common reader and the market has been free for stories about extraterrestrial visitors landing to build pyramids and bring civilization to the barbarians on our planet. Such entertaining books and films have spread like wildfire all over the world in recent decades while men from earth have set foot on the moon. Intellectuals smile and shrug their shoulders, but miUions believe in them. They satisfy modem man's growing desire for an immediate answer to a question science has only slowly and meticulously begun to disentangle: How did it all begin?

  What could the first Sumerians have told us if they had returned to life? They were supposedly there to receive the civilized spacemen, if they did not directly descend from them.

  The Sumerians do not have to come back to witness to their or-

  igins. Their words are still with us. They left their written testimony. Their tablets record how they came and from where. It was not by spacecraft. They came by ship. They came saihng in through the gulf, and in their earliest works of art they illustrated the kind of watercraft that brought them. They came as mariners to the coast of the twin-river valley where they founded the civilization which during the ensuing millennia was to affect in one way or another every comer of our world.

  Their written testimony seems at first to open the door to another mystery. Where is the eastern land of "Dilmun" from which the seafaring Sumerians said they came?

  It was to get acquainted with these original testimonies and to obtain practical lessons from people still hving in the marshes that I returned to Iraq time and again in my search for a tiny piece missing from a great puzzle. The real puzzle was that human history has no known beginning. As it stands it begins with civilized mariners coming in by sea. This is no real beginning. This is the continuation of something lost somewhere in the mist. Is it still hidden under desert sand, as was Sumerian civilization itself, remaining unknown to science until discovered and excavated in southern Iraq in the last century? Was it buried by volcanic eruption, as was the great Mediterranean civihzation on the island of Santorini, unknown until discovered in our own time under fifty feet of ashes? Or could it possibly be submerged in the ocean that covers two thirds of our restless planet, as suggested by the hard-dying legend of Atlantis?

  If we are to believe the Sumerians, who ought to know, their merchant mariners retimied to Dihnun many times. In their own days, at least, their ancestral land was neither sunk in the sea nor buried by volcanic ash. It was within reach of Sumerian ships from Sumerian ports. One little piece missing from the big puzzle is that nobody knows the range of a Sumerian ship. Their seagoing qualities were forgotten with the men who built them and sailed them, their range lost with their wakes.

  Practical research into ancient types of watercraft leads one upon many untrodden trails. It led me to remote islands in Polynesia, lakes in the Andes and central Africa, and rivers and coasts of aU the continents. Lastly it brought me to what was formerly Sumer, today the home of the Marsh Arabs. There began my quest for human history beyond the zero hour. There began also a voyage that brought me and my companions into adventures far from those

  of the astronauts, back to the remote days and nights when our planet was still big. So big it was in those times that unknown and imforeseen worlds, alien to the voyager, beckoned beyond every horizon. Worlds with plants and animals never imagined. Peoples, buildings and hving manners so distinct from those at home, as if pertaining to another planet under a di£Ferent sim. Such worlds once existed side by side, separated by barriers of wilderness and united by the open sea.

  The sea roads between them were in use before the Sumerians came to settle in Sumer. Their tablets speak of navigating kings and merchant mariners coming from or going to lands overseas, and they give long lists of cargo imported from or exported to foreign ports. A few even speak of shipwrecks and maritime disasters. Such records reflect the hazards always involved in a marine enterprise even when the vessel is built with the experience of a whole nation and manned by a crew at home with the craft. In reading the tablets such dramas come to life. You can almost hear the cry: "All hands on deckl"

  How often such shouts of warning and despair must have been drowned by the thunder of surf against reefs or by a roaring ocean which in fury tried to devour a tiny vessel fighting to resist an unexpected gale.

  "All hands on deck!"

  This time the warning was for me. For me and my sleeping companions inside the tiny bamboo cabin. It was Norman's voice. A roaring noise filled the darkness. This was reahty. In my sleep my body had bounced about so violently that I had dreamed I was riding in a car with one wheel off the road. Instead I found
myself clinging to a bamboo post to stay put in a strange bedstead where water trickled down my face.

  We were in trouble. Out.

  "Outl" I shouted, and kicked the sleeping bag away.

  Others were aheady crawling over my legs, flashhghts in their hands, heading through the tiny door opening.

  No time to dress. Just to tie the safety ropes around our waists. We were all needed on deck. This was the real thing, no bad dream. A gale had suddenly overtaken us during the night. Hard to stand upright for the wind and roUing. Spray and rain whipped the skin. Seeing nothing, we fumbled from stay to stay or clung to the bamboo wall trying to locate the threatened sail and rigging with oui flashhghts.

  "Tie yoiirselves onl" I shouted. A wild sea sent our ship bouncing like an antelope. Sea and air were in uproar, the noise of waves and screaming woodwork was terrifying. The storm howled and whistled in ropes and bamboo. The kerosene lamps had all blown out except for one swinging Hke a maddened firefly high in the mast top, shedding no light on deck.

  "Get Norman to reef the saill" It was Yuri at the rudder oar, yelling to Carlo on the cabin roof. Suggestions, orders, questions, violent exclamations in many languages, were swallowed by the din before they reached the ears they were intended for, though the voice of Norman, our sailing master, cut through from somewhere with overtones of despair. We all knew that our rigging was in danger.

  The mast, rather than the sail, was our Achilles' heel. The sail might spht, but it could be repaired. The feet of the straddle mast were set in wooden shoes lashed to the reed-bundle ship with rope. We feared that the reeds or the ropes might rip away and all our rigging with sail and masts would disappear in the wind. While we all hung upon stays and halyard to press the mast legs down and to lower the maddened mainsail, we heard a sharp report overhead, followed by a terrible crash. The vessel leaned over; everything to chng to leaned over, as I looked up and tried with my feeble flashhght to discern what had happened up there.

  In fact, the sohd topmast had broken into splinters. The main piece dangled upside down in front of the mainsail with the sharp clawhke end of the fracture threatening to rip the canvas which fluttered and battered like a huge kite above our heads, pulhng the vessel ever farther over on to its starboard side. A chasing wave caught at the edge of the sail and refused to let go. Everybody with a free hand gathered to try to drag the drowning canvas back to the ship. We feared the worst. Any normal vessel would have been in the utmost peril of capsizing or springing a leak.