The Tigris Expedition Page 3

  Our caftan-covered host stirred up the embers of a small fire on a mud patch in the middle of the floor. Then from an elegant teapot small silver-framed glasses were filled and we were offered drink, the perfumed steam strong in our nostrils. More marshmen, covered but for their ruddy faces in caftans and flowing gowns, came silently in, saluted in the name of Allah and sat down in the shade by the reed colunms.

  "The berdi has to be cut in August."

  The old man broke the silence by repeating the sentence I had now heard everywhere in the marshes.

  "Why?" I asked, repeating a question I had asked a hundred times. By now I knew the answer all too well: if cut in any other month the reeds would absorb water and lose buoyancy. Only if cut in August would berdi float for a long time. Some said for a year. Some said two, three or even four years. Some said they did not know why they cut in August; it was the custom.

  "In August there is something inside the stalk that keeps water away," said the old man. "We have to harvest our reeds then and let them dry for two or three weeks before we use them."

  The first time I had heard this statement was on the banks of Shatt-al-Arab at the village of Gurmat Ali, between the marshes and the gulf. It was my first visit to Iraq after my two experiments with Egyptian-type papyrus ships, and I had been quite astonished at seeing half a dozen huge reed rafts moored hke floating wharfs along the riverbank. I had measured one that was 112 feet long,

  16.5 feet wide and about 10 feet deep. One third of the depth was below the river surface. I jumped on board this raft and had tea with a marshman who hved on it in a tiny makeshift shelter, also made of reeds. A patch of mud on the reed floor prevented the huge raft from catching fire, as all he burned to heat his pot were short bits of the same dry reeds. I asked how long Matug had Hved on his big reed raft. Matug had hved on his gdre for only two months so far. He had spent one of them floating it down from Sueb in the marshes. And how far had it sunk into the water in that time? Nothing, he said. Matug had cut his reeds in August. He had come here to sell the reeds of his gare to a small factory that made them into cardboard for modern building insulation.

  Two months I After one month on our papyrus ships our reeds were already completely waterlogged and for the rest of the voyage we had floated with our deck at surface level and the waves breaking over all cargo not kept high above the reed bundles. Matug even told me that in the previous year he had to sit for nine months on his gdre before he could sell it, as the factory was full.

  The seemingly unsinkable gdre gave me no rest. We had harvested the reeds for both Ra I and Ra II in December to have the ships ready built for departure in the spring. Why had my experienced Buduma reed-boat builders from Lake Chad not told me that we had cut the reeds in the wrong season? And why had the Ethiopian monks at Lake Tana, who harvested the reeds for me, said in reply to my express inquiry that any month was equally good for cutting reeds for boatbuilding? The answer was simple. The African reed boats on Lake Chad and Lake Tana were only used for a day or two at a time, after which they were either beached or carried ashore, and had no chance to become waterlogged. The Madans of Iraq, however, spent their lives on top of their reeds.

  At once it became clear to me that the Marsh Arabs could still teach me lessons not taught in any faculty, nor found in any scholarly books. A police car gave me a lift to Quma, where the rivers met, and from there the sheriff drove me on a narrow dirt road to the ferry point across from Madina, a major town on solid sand built up by the Euphrates some fifteen miles inside the marshes. I was housed by the sheikh and served a breakfast I shall never forget: coffee, tea, fresh milk, yogurt, eggs, lamb, chicken, fish, figs, dates, Arab bread, white bread, pastries, compotes. I could hardly stagger

  down to the banks and press myself into the straight mashhuf the sheikh had waiting to take me to Om-el-Shuekh, farther inside the marshes.

  My proud hosts in Madina had shown me their willingness to share everything they had, but they could not give me what I had come for: information about reed boats. They had all seen gdre, such as I had myself seen down the river, but these were just loose crosspiles of berdi temporarily stacked on top of each other to facilitate their transport to the paper mill. The only real boats they knew inside the marshes were the various types of wooden mashhuf: tarada, mataur and zaima, all coated with asphalt, and the broader balam used for the transport of mats and canes. Reed boats belonged to the past. I had to talk to some really old men to learn about them.

  Thus the sheikh sent me to Om-el-Shuekh, where hved the oldest man they knew. He was said to be a hundred years old.

  I did not expect much memory from a man of that age, and was no more optimistic when the reed screens opened and we silently shd forward to his bank. Both ashore and reflected in the water I saw old chief Hagi Suelem in his white gown and with a long white beard sitting in the opening of his own reed hangar and looking Hke an image of Methuselah. But when old Hagi rose to meet me and wish me peace I looked into a pair of friendly and alert eyes that made the whole man become big and powerful. He was obviously looked upon with great respect by the men who gradually assembled around us and sat down with us in two rows, facing each other across the hall. Like myself, they all Hstened to old Hagi's wisdom and hiunor with interest and approbation. The tea tray was soon there beside the flickering fire, and some big, broad fish, spHt open hke giant butterflies, were balanced on edge close to the flames without a pan. Crisply toasted, but white and juicy inside, rolled up in oven-warm Arab bread baked broad and thin Hke pancakes, the fish was so dehcious that I ate as if the sheikh of Madina had forgotten to give me breakfast. The old man watched me attentively and saw to it that the man at my side dug out the best pieces of the fish with expert fingers and fed me like a royal baby. True to custom, before and after the meal, soap and towel were passed around by a man who went from person to person pouring hot water as we rubbed our hands in the jet over his swiU pail.

  Hagi apologized for the simple meal, as if he had not seen my appetite, and assured me a real treat if I promised to come back. This I promised. I had to come back. I had hved with so-caUed primitive peoples in Polynesia, America and Africa, but these marshmen were not primitive in any sense of the word. They were civihzed, but differently from us. They lacked the push-button services and took the direct shortcut to food and joy provided at the source. Their culture had been proved viable and sound by persisting while the Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Roman civihzations progressed, culminated and collapsed. In this stabihty through untold ages is reflected something the rest of us lack: respect for their progenitors and confidence in the future.

  "We are not poor," said old Hagi, as if he had read my mind. "Our pride is our wealth and no marshman is hungry." He had once been to Baghdad, but could hardly wait to get back to the peace and secmrity of Allah's marshes. The city in his opinion breeds greed, competition, jealousy and theft. Here in the marshes nobody stole. They all had what they needed and nobody had anything to lose, praise be to God. There was plenty of fodder for the buffaloes, there was plenty of fish to spear, there were fowls, and there were boatloads of watermelon and braided-reed mats to trade for flour and tea in Madina. Moreover, and here the old sage raised his hand, there were beautiful women. He himself had four wives. All along the walls there was approving laughter at his virihty.

  The marshwomen are indeed beautiful. That is probably why they were never permitted to eat with us or even to serve the tea. They were wrapped in black from head to bare feet, and as black shadows they ghded by between the reed screens, feeding their chickens or baking flat bread clapped vertically onto the inner walls of cyhndrical clay ovens open at the top. Their profiles were sharp and fine Hke their men's. Their sparkHng eyes and white teeth shone like stars if one got a glimpse of them before they shyly turned their heads or pulled the black cloth over their noses. Like the men, they were fabulous paddlers and punters. I saw women alone, punting huge balams loaded with mats while herding a flock of swimming bu
ffaloes. But only when they were tiny httle girls or old crones could they stand with boys and grown men and laugh and wave at us as we shd by their abodes in our canoe.

  A surprising number of the people were red-haired. Especially among the bareheaded httle girls red hair seemed almost as com-

  mon as black. Among the Madans in the ancient boatbuilding village of Huwair I had seen more red-haired people than in any town in Europe, so many that it could not be due to foreign intermixture, especially since the death penalty for unchaste behavior or adultery is still the unwritten law among the marshmen. Hagi could confirm that during the British administration few foreign soldiers had ventured into the marshes and none to visit Arab women.

  Hagi was well aware of the fact that we in the cities would not survive without a culture that was dependent upon automobiles and electricity. But he was not at all sure that his people would be made happier by projects to bring electricity cables into the marshes and bricks for building houses. When people are happy they smile, he said. Nobody had smiled at him in the streets of Baghdad.

  "There are too many people in a city," I explained. "One cannot smile at everybody there."

  But Hagi had also walked in streets where there were few people and had seen no difference there. I could not protest. It could not be mere coincidence that the marsh people came out of their houses waving to us with broad smiles as we paddled by, their children racing to the water's edge with happy shouts and laughter. A faint smile from us and the whole assembly laughed happily back. Not so, I had to admit, when we walked in the poorer sections of a city. Old Hagi was right: the marshmen were not poor people.

  The dignity of Hagi was not that of a poor man. With his manners and appearance he could have been a powerful oil sheikh, a former statesman, a retired scholar. But in his attire he looked more like a wise prophet or patriarch out of the Bible, timeless as the Sumerian reed house above us.

  Hagi did remember reed boats. There were three types when he was young. Two were hollow like canoes or receptacles, asphalt-coated inside and out. These were the beautiful jillabie and gujfa I had personally seen still in use higher up the Euphrates, above Babylon. The jillabie was hke a slender canoe or mashhuf; the guffa was perfectly circular and looked precisely like a giant rubber tire, but with a bottom so steady that it did not tilt when I sat on the edge. I had never seen plant stalks worked with greater perfection in symmetry and detail, except in the reed boats on Lake Titicaca, and now in the huge arches of cane that held the lofty ceihng above us. They too represented perfection. All equally spaced and identical to a fraction of an inch, beginning as columns thicker than a

  Captions for the following four pages

  1. In a Marsh Arab reed house. The author second from the left, Detlef and Rashad first and second from the right.

  2. Floating reed islands and riverbanks of southern Iraq.

  3. The boat is still to the Marsh Arabs what the camel once was to their neighbors.

  4. Old and new cultures meet at the edges of the marshes. Women bring berdi reeds for our reed ship.

  >^h^^

  1*.^

  ^

  w<^ ^ ■''

  h^

  •'«#^.

  /

  «^tv».

  k./^-

  K, ^iA!0:^Ki:.

  V . J

  ^

  /^

  ^^

  ^f-

  Captions for the preceding four pages

  5. A wooden jig was built to give correct shape to the ship and to hold the reed mat made by South American Indians to envelop the forty-four bundles prepared by the Marsh Arabs.

  S-y. Shipbuilding on the banks of the river Tigris as in the days of the pyramid builders.

  8. The reed ship Tigris sails down the Shatt-al-Arab on its way to the sea.

  man at base on either side and gradually narrowing toward the apex of the roof, all of one piece from base to base. Hagi pointed to these stout and strong arches. The third kind of reed vessel he had seen was built like these, except that the bundles got narrower toward either end instead of thicker. In that way many bundles lashed together would create a compact watercraft raised and pointed at either end. Berdi had to be used for the bundles, kassab only for the shelter on top. Berdi was a reed with a spongy pulp inside, but kassab was a hollow cane that would crack and fill with water. He had a boy fetch a stalk of each kind and showed me how the tender lower part of the berdi could be eaten, just as I had seen with the same part of the young papyrus. It was crisp and tasty.

  To make the berdi boat float for a long time, Hagi added, each bundle should be pressed as tight as two men could pull the rope ring around it; it should be as hard as a log. I felt once more the arches of his house. I could not press a finger in; it felt Hke touching a tree. In reply to my direct question, Hagi answered that he had never known of asphalt or other impregnation used on this kind of bundle boat.

  I had seen a single photograph of the kind of reed boat Hagi now described to me. It had been published in the Daily Sketch of March 3, 1916, during the First World War, and the faded caption read: "This is the kind of boat our men in Mesopotamia are constantly seeing." It was strikingly similar to the reed boats I had seen on Easter Island and on Lake Titicaca in South America, except for the Arab on board.

  But for the information provided by Hagi's memory I had come to the former Sumerian territory half a century too late; Hagi was there as a bridge to the past. Looking at him I caught myself thinking of Abraham. In fact, he could very well be a direct descendant. All Arabs, like all Jews, begin their pedigree with Abraham, and after all, Hagi lived close beside Ur, where Abraham was bom. In these biblical surroundings even Abraham could not be overlooked by one who wanted to trace the beginnings, for he not only began both Moslem and Hebrew history but through him we have one of the earliest recorded descriptions of how the Mesopo-tamians of antiquity built their boats.

  Abraham is recognized today as an historical personage who lived in Mesopotamia about 1800 b.c. According to the Old Testament he was born in Ur, where he left his kinsmen and followed his

  father's tribe and their livestock on their migration from the fringe of the marshes northward to Harran in Assyrian territory, then across to Mediterranean lands. Although bom in Ur, he went even as far as Egypt before he turned and decided to settle for good in his chosen land, leaving us an example of recorded overland contact between Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley in early antiquity. Although today we think that to man of antiquity Mesopotamia and Egypt must have been two worlds apart, they were not so remote from each other but that Abraham might claim that his descendants had been promised all the land "from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates. . . "^

  Today the river Euphrates and the green marshes have withdrawn half a dozen miles from the buried ruins of Ur, but the gigantic Sumerian temple-pyramid still rises out of the dust against the blue desert sky as a breathtaking monument to human enterprise and impermanence. This lofty stepped pyramid has been rebuilt time and again by successive cultures, but was already age-old when Abraham played around its base and bathed in the nearby river that for centuries had made Ur a port of paramount importance. In Ur's bustling harbor Abraham had come face to face with merchant mariners from foreign lands, and in the shade of the pyramid temple scribes and elders had shared with succeeding generations their knowledge of the past and their recipe for a happy afterlife. From them he must have received the long history of his ancestors, which in turn he passed on to his own descendants imtil it was recorded in the Old Testament. He probably saw the boat models, some of silver and some of asphalt-covered reeds, which the priests buried as temple offerings from prudent sailors, and he must have been familiar with the kind of ships that docked along the local wharfs and riverbanks.

  As Hagi sat there on the floor of his reed house and described the building principle of the jillabie, its ribs clad with reeds waterproofed with bitumen, it sounded like a miniature of a famous v
essel described in the Old Testament. Mention Noah's ark and people will smile with happy childhood memories of the naive story of a bulky houseboat and a gangway packed with pairs of elephants, camels, giraffes, monkeys, lions, tigers and other beasts and birds of all kinds, herded by a friendly old man with a long beard. As a boy, when I played with wooden animals parading into a wooden ark, I never dreamed there was anything to learn from the

  old tale, still less that I should come to the homeland of the legend or study learned volumes which attempted to trace its origin.

  The Hebrew version of the Noah myth dates back to a remote period in human history, antedating the spread of civilization from the Middle East into Europe. The ark described was not a European ship but a Mesopotamian watercraft. The story is one of joint Judaic and Moslem belief and allegedly came with Abraham, who grew up in Ur. The migrating tribe of Abraham could not have avoided passing through the Assyrian kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and there is even reason to beheve that they spent some time there.

  By then the Assyrians, too, were well famihar with the story of the flood that had destroyed the majority of mankind. The vast library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal, which consisted of tens of thousands of inscribed tablets, was found in 1872 to include a detailed version of the Universal Deluge. It is so similar to the younger Hebrew version that both must clearly have had a common origin. Since the Assyrians acquired their writing system as well as their mythology from the Sumerians, and since the Hebrews claim to have come from the former Sumerian capital, Ur, it would be reasonable to suspect that Sumer would be the common source of the Assyrian and Hebrew Deluge stories.*