The Tigris Expedition Read online

  But this was not a normal vessel in the eyes of a modem sailor. This was a kind of ship once used by the earhest Sumerians, a kind of ship regarded by modem scholars as a mere riverboat. As wave upon wave thundered aboard the uncontrolled vessel while the ocean held the comer of our mainsail in its grip, it seemed for a while that anything could happen. Whatever did happen would give the answer to one of the questions that had led to the experiment: How seaworthy was such a pre-European vessel? It was for a lesson hke this that we had come on board. To know the Sumerian

  hardships and pleasures, and to feel on our own skins their practical problems at sea.

  I thought of the warm, dry ground between the firm date palms in the Garden of Eden. Would I have started this if I had known that a moment hke this was awaiting us? I beheve so. I be-heve we all reahzed that one cannot go to sea in an unfamihar kind of ship without at some point running into hardship and trouble.

  This was my third ocean voyage on board a reed ship, but it was the first in which we did not simply drift with the elements. This time there was no marine conveyor belt to carry us to our destination. Yet our previous experience of the Egyptian-type papyrus ships gave us great advantages, for in ship design the earhest Su-merians and the earliest Egyptians have a conmion heritage. Scholars had even pointed out that the oldest hieroglyphic sign for "ship" in Sumer was the same as the one for "marine" in the earhest hieroglyphic script of Egypt.^ It depicted a sickle-shaped reed boat with crosswise lashings around the vessel and reeds spreading at bow and stem. Could this mean that the earhest scribes in these two countries had inherited the idea of a script from a now lost common source? Or does it mean only that both people had inherited the same kind of reed ship?

  The reed ships of ancient Egypt had been illustrated by the artists of the pharaohs in such detail that I had been able to copy the vessel, including its steering gear and rigging, when I built the reed ships Ra I and Ra II for testing in the open ocean. Such minute details are not shovm in Mesopotamian art, but the rehefs on a slab wall brought to the British Museum from a royal palace in Nineveh depict a reahstic battle between reed vessels of Assyria and Babylonia. The ships are big enough to reveal double rows of Assyrian soldiers on deck as they embark to massacre fleeing men and women, with the victims thrown overboard to the fish and crabs. These large reliefs show in great clarity that the reed ships of the twin-river country were built like those on the Nile.

  No motif is more common in the miniature art of the Mesopotamian cyhnder seals than the reed boats used by the legendary heroes in the period of settlement. In all principles these boats are the same as those shown in greater detail in Nineveh and Egypt. Yet there was one fundamental difference. The Egyptian reed-boat builders had access to papyrus. In former times papyrus grew in abundance aU along the banks of the Nile from its sources to its delta. The Sumerians had no papyrus; instead, the marshes of Meso-

  potamia offered another tall freshwater reed, locally known as berdi.

  After our two experiments with an Egyptian-style vessel in 1969 and 1970 I knew that a correctly built papyrus ship could cross a world ocean. Ra Z, built by central African Budumas, had almost crossed the Atlantic when the lashings broke. In the following year, with Ra II built by South American Aymara Indians, we sailed all the way from Africa to America. But berdi differs markedly from papyrus both in form and in substance. And what is worse, science had decided that berdi is very water-absorbent. There was only one authority on ancient Mesopotamian watercraft in our time, the Finnish scholar Armas Salonen. In his learned and thorough study of all types of vessels used in the twin-river country in former times he has nothing to say about the elep urhati, the reed vessels, except a reference to the general belief that they quickly absorbed water "and unquestionably had to be brought ashore to dry out after use."^

  There was agreement on this point in the very sparse literature touching on this subject. The Sumerian reed ships, accordingly, could have served only as riverboats.

  How could this modem verdict be reconciled with the ancient texts and illustrations? This was the question that had led me to move into the Garden of Eden Rest House. I came back to Sumerian territory to try to disentangle the theoretical controversy by a practical test. I wanted to see how long a berdi ship would float, and to attempt to retrace some of the obscure itineraries recorded in the old tablets with their references to Dilmun, Makan, Meluhha and other disguised and long-forgotten lands.

  I had ended up beside Adam's tree by mere accident. I had searched for a safe and suitable place to build a reed ship in the marshlands and along the riverbanks. Down by the gulf, modern cities and expanding industry had occupied all convenient terrain, and upstream quagmire, mudflats, date plantations or steep escarpments made boatbuilding and launching difiBcult. Then the representatives of Iraq's Ministry of Information showed me the empty garden plot by the side of Adam's tree, and generously offered me the Garden of Eden Rest House as assembly site for the expedition. The endless reed marshes began a few minutes from the door, and from the terrace we could sail down the river straight to the open sea.

  The leaders of the pan-Arab Baath party had won the most re-

  cent revolution and closed the borders of Iraq to tourists, though they welcomed constructive projects in science and industry. All seemed eager to bring the fruits of modem civilization back to the scorched soil where the first seeds had once germinated. The oil pipehnes were the veins of modem Iraq, just as the irrigation trenches had been in Siunerian times. There was a boom in the industrialized areas, and naturally the future was far more important than the past. But a sohd core of scientists at the National Museum in Baghdad were well aware of the fact that the more we know of the past the better we can plan the future. Man cannot know where he is going unless he can see his tracks and know the direction from which he has come.

  Dr. Fuad Safar called together his colleagues and collaborators at the National Museimi, with its well-stocked Hbrary, and together we discussed the project I had in mind. Did the Sumerians cover their reed ships with bitumen to make them waterproof and buoyant? They certainly had access to natural asphalt that came to the surface in open springs near Ur and in several other locaHties higher up the river, and they used it to waterproof receptacles and roofs. On the museum shelves there were reed-boat models five thousand years old, thickly covered with asphalt.

  Or, since asphalt was heavy, did they coat the bigger ships with shark oil, as was still the custom among many of the fishermen in the gulf, who used it on the planks of their wooden vessels? There was even a very early tablet that spoke of a famous hero who mixed six measures of pitch with three of asphalt and three of oil when building a huge reed ship. Was this mixture intended for impregnating the water-absorbent berdi reeds?

  Where was the ancestral Dihnun so often visited by Sumerian merchant mariners? Most scholars now believe it was the island of Bahrain, where recent archaeological work has uncovered extensive towns, tombs and temples which in part even antedate Sumerian time. But Bahrain was far out in the gulf, so perhaps Dilmun was the smaller island of Failaka, which lay just off the Sumerian coast.

  I felt I had derived great benefit from the museum meeting, but I was also very uncertain and bewildered. What should I use to impregnate my reed ship? Anything at all? After weeks among the Baghdad Museum artifacts and translations of the tablet texts I had notebooks fuU of facts and theories. But one thing was clear: the early Sumerians were shipbuilders and mariners. Their civihzation

  was based on the import of copper, timber and other raw materials jfrom foreign lands, and their growth into a dominant power at the mouth of the rivers was due to cities like Ur and Uruk being major ports and centers of very extensive trade. They had no access to copper and little chance of profitable trade in the immediate vicinity, so it seemed obvious that their sailors must have gone very far. Only a practical hfehke test could give the answer. I decided to carry out my project, and the museum staflF convinced their minis
try that to reconstruct a prehistoric vessel such as I had planned was a sensible thing to do. I was then granted permission to harvest reeds in the marshes, to import equipment free of customs, to assemble the expedition's crew in Iraq irrespective of nationahty, and we would aU be the guests of the country until we sailed away.

  I lost no time in returning to the marshes. An interpreter from the museum was sent with me. From our rooms at the Garden of Eden Rest House we could walk through the town of Quma, where the main asphalt road from Baghdad passed full of thundering traflBc. No camels on this road. Not even bicycles. Huge transporters, articulated tankers and army trucks roUed by to the gulf ports. Immediately on the other side of the highway the marshes began, and for mile after mile they led ever deeper into a world of their ov^oi, unlike anything I had imagined. These marshes are about six thousand square miles in extent.

  As we reached the first water channel, two tall marshmen in flowing Arab gowns were waiting for us, each with a long punt pole of cane. One held back a long black canoe with his big bare foot as they welcomed us and signed to us to step on board. This was their usual mashhuf, the slender, flat-bottomed longboat built to standard hnes by all Marsh Arabs today. While formerly built of their own reeds, they are now pegged together from imported wood and covered, hke their reed prototypes, with a smooth coating of black asphalt. Prow and stem soar in a high curve like the Viking ships, following the five-thousand-year-old lines of their Sumerian forerunners.

  I stepped on board the unsteady vessel and sat down on a pillow on the bottom, the two slim marshmen standing erect at either end, punting with expert strokes, long and slow, against the shallow bottom. The water was crystal-clear; plants grew on the bottom; I

  saw fishes and there were long garlands of water crowfoot floating on the surface. We shd silently away from the green turf and shpped in between two high walls of canes and bulrushes. As these tall water plants closed in about us and shut the green door behind us we left the bustling, rumbHng modern world and felt as if transported with the speed of spacecraft into the past. With each calm punt stroke by the two silent marshmen I sensed that I was traveling back through time, not into savagery and insecurity, but into a culture as remote from barbarism as ours and yet incredibly simple and uncomphcated. My interpreter from the Ministry of Information had not been with me on my earher visit, and as we reached the first floating villages he was as fascinated as I was.

  On that first visit five years earlier I had the feehng that the authorities in Baghdad had been a bit reluctant to let me into the marshes. Not that the people living there were dangerous. They were just not yet in step with modem Iraq. The surrounding desert Arabs in a shghtly humihating way referred to them as Madans, the keepers of buffaloes instead of camels. Or, rather, instead of cars, for even camels are now out of fashion.

  The water in the marshes is too deep for wheeled traffic and too shallow for normal boats. With its boggy bottom it has always kept horsemen and camel riders away. A pedestrian would be totally lost if wading among the tall reeds. Only the Madans knew the hidden labyrinths of narrow and shallow canoe passages through their bulrush jungle, and for this reason have been left to lead their own hves. But the enthusiasm of the British explorers Wilfrid Thes-iger, Gavin Young and the few others including myself who had been inside the marshes and emerged fuU of admiration had begun to affect the attitudes of Baghdad. This time I was even encouraged to use a film camera and to bring as many Madans as I needed out of the marshes to my shipbuilding site near the rest house.

  Only a few columns of smoke far apart revealed to us that people were living in the marshes. We did not see a single trace of human waste. Not a roof disclosed the whereabouts of the villages until we came within a spear's throw of a building. No elevation, not a stone to step on is found to permit a view above the canes and bulrushes that stand compact and much taller than a man's eyes on boggy ground that yields to the foot like a mattress. Geese and ducks and other waterfowl of all colors and sizes abound, as if guns had not been invented. An occasional eagle sails in from the surrounding shores, and kingfishers, and an endless variety of httle

  birds, some of brilliant color, sit and sway everywhere in the reeds, especially in the migratory season. Tall white herons and red-beaked storks stand like sentinels between the stalks, and stout peh-cans scoop up fish with their big bucketlike beaks.

  With luck one may catch a glimpse of a shaggy black boar as it plows its way in heavy bounces between swinging reeds. Only when approaching the hidden habitations do we see huge water buffalo wading lazily in our way or chmbing up into the reeds, their broad black bodies shining like wet sealskin in the sun. They stop to watch us with their friendly bovine eyes as we pass, flapping their broad ears and flicking their slim tails patiently to shake off flies as they imperturbably continue to chew the last of the green sedge that hangs down from their jaws.

  Suddenly the village is before us. What a revelationl What perfect harmony with nature! The vaulted reed houses are as much at one with the environment as are the birds' nests that hang among the canes. Some are small and scarcely more than shelters to creep under, but most are big and roomy. They are hidden simply because we ourselves travel behind high and unbroken screens of greenery. The tallest houses are big enough almost to resemble hangars, with walls and roof arching in perfect symmetry from side to side, usually with one end open. Some have both ends open, like a railway tunnel. No wood, no metal, goes into these big structures. A skeleton of thick, arching bundles of cane is covered with reed mats lashed on with bulrush fibers.

  In its elegant perfection, the architecture is as impressive as the result is astonishingly beautiful, each dwelling recalling a httle temple with its golden-gray vault outlined majestically against a perpetually cloudless sky extending from the surrounding desert. Some are mirrored in the water together with the blue sky.

  This was pure Sumerian architecture. The industrious people who first handed the art of writing down to our ancestors had lived in such houses. In their regular cities they had built walls from en-dinring bricks, but in the marshes they had constructed their houses entirely from reeds. They are realistically illustrated in Simierian art five thousand years old, carved in stone and incised on seals, just as their present boats are identical in hne to the small models in silver or asphalt-covered reeds, found as Sumerian temple offerings. Both have proved themselves perfectly adapted to the environment and to local needs.

  As we jumped "ashore" the ground under our feet swayed like

  a hammock and my friend, unprepared for this, tottered and grabbed for an arm. We were walking on a floating mattress of reeds. The few steps from the water's edge to the tunnel-hke entrance to the big house brought us on to a thicker, more sohd foundation. A middle-aged man welcomed me with both hands and then touched his chest close to his heart: "Salam alaikum, peace be with you I"

  I was back among friends. This was where I had been five years earher when I had met an old man I could never forget. This was his son.

  "Friend, how are you? How is your family?"

  "Praise be to God. And you? Your children? And your old father?"

  "He is ahve, praise be to God. But he is in the hospital in Basra. He is more than a hundred years old now."

  I was sorry, for in a way it was this old man who had brought me back to the marshes. Another old man with a long white beard appeared in the cool shade of the reed tunnel and for a while we all continued in Arab fashion, asking each other how we felt and how each member of the family felt, praising Allah for his generosity to our households. We slipped off our shoes and sat down in pohte, traditional silence on the clean oriental mats on the floor, our hosts with their legs folded under the long gowns once they had stuffed piles of colorful cushions behind their two guests, who were expected to lean comfortably against the soft reed wall.

  I looked around me and recognized with pleasure this big airy building, the guesthouse of the old man now in the hospital. I could not have
reached the ceiling even with a fishing rod. Seven stout cane bundles thicker than a human body arched like parallel ribs holding up the tight skin of braided reed mats. It gave me the feeling of sharing the biblical adventure of Jonah in the stomach of the whale. But this whale had its mouth wide open at both ends, leaving a double view of a perfectly blue sky, blue water, green reeds and a couple of fringe-leafed date palms.

  Only a few of the Madan villages can muster date palms. Most of them are built on entirely artificial islands formed by untold generations of rotting reeds and buffalo dung. Quite often these islands are actually afloat and rest on the bottom only in the dry season. New top layers of reeds have to be added annually as the bottom layers disintegrate. To prevent the edges from being washed away

  by the slowly moving water, they are fenced in with tight paUisades of canes stuck into the bog bottom below. While the islands with the reed houses rise and sink within their paUisades according to season, the canals between them permit the passage of the slender canoes and make up a village complex in the pattern of Venice.

  A Marsh Arab can rarely walk more than a couple of steps before he has to enter his canoe. Some of the floating islands are so small that with the traditionally big house or buffalo stable on top they look like houseboats or some sort of Noah's ark with barely enough foothold to walk around the walls. In the lake areas deep inside the marshes, the floating Madan famihes bob up and down on swaying reed carpets with their ducks, hens, water buffaloes and canoes, and the big buffaloes have to dive in with the ducks and swim for the reed fields every morning when their owners unfasten the mat barriers of their vaulted reed stable.