Iraq's Marsh Arabs in the Garden of Eden. Edward L. Ochsenschlager
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There is a commendable effort under way to restore the marshes. Although such an undertaking would be difficult, expensive, and probably limited to an area much smaller than the marshes of the past, I think it would be tremendously rewarding. I do not believe, however, that there is any way anyone could restore the integrated society of peoples and tribes that flourished here through the late 1960s and early 1970s. Relations between people brought to antipathy by governmental propaganda and pressure are not easily restored. New opportunities and aspirations make subsistence existence completely unattractive to those with better prospects. Technology has moved on, making the old-fashioned way of doing things painfully burdensome and unrewarding.
* For additional information on the site itself see Robert D. Biggs, “Pre-Sargonic Riddles from Lagash,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 32, 1/2 (1973): 26–33; Elizabeth Carter, “A Surface Survey of Lagash, al-Hiba, 1984,” Sumer (1990) 46: 60–63; Vaughn Crawford, “Lagash,” Iraq (1974) 36: 29–35; Donald P. Hansen, “Al-Hiba, 1968–1969, A Preliminary Report,” Artibus Asiae 32 (1970): 243–50; Donald P. Hansen, “Al-Hiba, 1970–1971, A Preliminary Report,” Artibus Asiae 35 1, 2 (1973):62–78; Donald P. Hansen, “Royal Building Activity at Sumerian Lagash in the Early Dynastic Period,” Biblical Archaeologist 55, 4 (1992):206–11.
* See Dora Jane Hamblin, “Has the Garden of Eden Been Located at Last?” Smithsonian Magazine 18, 2 (1987).
* Jennifer R. Pournelle, “Marshland of Cities: Deltaic Landscapes and the Evolution of Early Mesopotamian Civilization,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2003. For specific details of the al-Hiba regions see 206–10.
* Pournelle, “Marshland of Cities,” 257.
† R. Ascher, “Analogy in Archaeological Interpretation,” Southwestern Journal of Anthro-pology 17(1961):317–25.
‡ E. L. Ochsenschlager, “Ethnographic Evidence for Wood, Boats, Bitumen and Reeds in the Southern Iraq: Ethnoarchaeology at al-Hiba,” Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 6 (1992):47–78.
§ E. L. Ochsenschlager, “Sheep: Ethnoarchaeology at al-Hiba,” Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 7 (1993):33–42; E. L. Ochsenschlager, “Village Weavers: Ethnoarchaeology at al-Hiba,” Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 7 (1993):43–62; E. L. Ochsenschlager, “Carpets of the Beni-Hassan Village: Weavers in Southern Iraq,” Oriental Rug Review 15, 5 (1995):12–20.
* See Margaret Catlin Brandt “Nippur: Building an Environmental Model” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 49 (1990):67–73, for information on the alternating marshy and desert environment around Nippur.
* See Margaret Catlin Brandt, “Nippur: Building an Environmental Model,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 49 (1990):67–73, for information on the alternating marshy and desert environment around Nippur.
2
THE PEOPLE OF AL-HIBA
The people of al-Hiba lived far removed from the outside world. The trip to Shatra, the nearest town, was at its shortest when there was sufficient water in the main canal to float the large motorized boats which carried passengers, animals, and produce from the outlying areas to market. It still required a 2.5 hour trip aboard a motorized boat to a mud bank docking place and from there a taxi ride of 15 to 20 minutes. From January through March, during the rainy season, it took much longer since it was necessary to walk through deep mud from the dock to the nearest place approachable by taxi, a process that could take 1–2 hours. During the dry season, in late fall and early winter, the trip was longer still, 4 hours or more, since the villagers first had to walk to the place where the local canal joined the main Shatra canal (Abu Simech) from where they could hire a tarada (bitumen-covered boat poled through the water with long bamboo or reed poles) that would take them to the point where they could be picked up by the motorized boat. The motorized boat would then take them to the Shatra docking place.
Thus, people in the villages surrounding al-Hiba were relatively immobile. A trip to Shatra was a major event reserved for those occasions when they wanted to sell something—carpets, reed mats, wool, produce, an animal for butchering—that could not be sold or traded in the village, when they wanted to buy a major item such as a plow, a knife, or a gun, or when they needed to visit the doctor at the hospital. In most families the doctor or hospital visit was a desperate last attempt when other kinds of local treatment had failed. Villagers believed that sick people who went to the hospital inevitably died. They often delayed so long in taking a sick person for treatment that their beliefs became self-fulfilling prophesies.
The early years of our excavation, in the late 1960s, were times of unbelievable poverty for the people of al-Hiba. The sheikhs, who were politically active and prospered under the monarchy, were treated with great suspicion by the Baathists who used every opportunity to eradicate them and their influence, leaving a void in the management of farmlands. The irrigation system in the area, which had previously been one of the sheikhs’ major responsibilities, was now often in disrepair and inadequately regulated. Money was beginning to replace barter for some commodities, and people in the villages, who had little opportunity to acquire cash, were at a great disadvantage. In those days one could often see women gathering grass and sedge from the edges of the marsh and the canals, not for fodder for their animals, but to be boiled and served as the main dish for their families’ dinners.
The villagers in the area around al-Hiba fell into three different groups. First, the Bedouin pitched their tents on the seasonal marshland from late August to the beginning of the rains in late December. Second, the Beni Hasan dwelled in seven villages of 200 to 250 people each within walking or boating distance of the site. Third, five small villages of the Mi’dan, or Marsh Arabs, dotted the southern part of the mound. In addition three Mi’dan households, each isolated from the others, were perched on a narrow spit of land in the extreme southeast. Other villages of the Beni Hasan were located on the margins of the marshes, and some Mi’dan villages were found in the marshes where they had created patches of dried land by alternating layers of mud quarried from the marsh bottom with reed mats. All these settlements could be reached by boat.
The Mi’dan, or Marsh Arabs, have in particular attracted considerable attention. Fulanain (Hedgecock and Hedgecock) captured much of the atmosphere and social interaction in the marsh Arab world in a highly personalized account of a marsh dweller in The Marsh Arab Haji Rikkan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1927).* Gertrude Bell, who had encouraged the book, was unable to write a promised foreword because of her untimely death. The Marsh Arabs (New York: Dutton, 1964), by Wilfred Thesiger, and People of the Reeds (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957),† by Gavin Maxwell, provided very personal