Iraq: From Babylon to Qurna 1979

            Some 85 kilometres south of Baghdad lay the ruins of ancient Babylon, the once great city of Nebuchadnezzar and the place of Jewish exile dating from 597BC. At the time of our visit there was archaeological work in progress, and there had been some restoration work carried out on the great Ishtar Gate where some of the original moulded mud-brick dragons and bulls had been placed in situ.  However most of the ruins appeared untouched and there was speculation as to where the famous ‘Hanging Gardens’ of Nebuchadnezzar, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, were located. Years later Saddam Hussein decided to reconstruct the city to his own egotistical blueprint, desecrating the ancient ruins with inscriptions reading “This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq.” After the American invasion, parts of the archaeological site were levelled to provide a landing site for helicopters and a parking area for military vehicles. In retrospect, we were probably one of the last tour groups to see Babylon before its desecration by both Saddam Hussein and the Americans. 

A dragon on the mud-bricks of the Ishtar Gate, Babylon

             A couple of hundred kilometres to the south is the great Ziggurat of Ur, dating from the 21st century BC, and believed to have been dedicated to Nanna, the Sumerian Moon-goddess by King Ur-Nammu. This interesting edifice had been reconstructed from the original materials by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1930s. Merv parked the coach at the foot of the great stairway and we all climbed to the top. As we were looking across the obscure ruins of Ur, city of Abraham, we heard a distant voice yelling at us, telling us that we shouldn’t be up there and must come down. On our descent, we were confronted by the local guardian of the site who looked us over, then said we could go back up – we were supposed to check with him first, even though he was not then at the site, but he was friendly enough and there was no problem.  On leaving Ur we were stopped by soldiers of the Iraqi military who insisted we would have to surrender our camera films as this was a military site. Of course, we argued as we could see nothing military about the ruins of Ur. The soldiers were young and to be fair, one did phone his superior and sought advice but no, he was told that we had to surrender our films. I had just started a new film, so I opened the back of my camera and a couple of the group surrendered unexposed film. This seemed to satisfy the soldier, who then said that we could go back and retake the photos. My reply is censored! At the time I thought this military presence near an archaeological site rather strange, in fact we had not even seen the military encampment until they stopped us, but just over a year later Iraq invaded Iran, beginning what is now known as the First Gulf War. So this was quite possibly the beginning of the Iraqi military build up for that war.

The Overland coach at the ziggurat at Ur

            We drove south to the town of Nasiriya which I noted was a ‘grubby town’. The directions I had from a previous trip, was to drive south, into the desert and at a crossroad where the arm of a sign was broken, to turn left. We found this without a problem and after crossing a rather dodgy pontoon bridge over a tributary of the Euphrates, we spent the night sleeping in the semi-desert near a brickworks not far from the small town of Fuhud.

The next morning we entered the realm of the Marsh Arabs. These fascinating people occupied, as they had for centuries, the swampy marshland of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers which converge at nearby Qurna. From the road we could see many of the reed houses, for which this area was famous, set amid tall rushs and surrounded by the marshy waters of the swamps. Mashoofs, the local gondola-like canoes, were being poled along channels in the marshes, carrying reeds for thatching and the weaving of mats. Piles of woven mats were stacked neatly along the road, presumably awaiting collection. While we attempted to talk with a group of children, a man walked past carrying a number of fish strung together. These were the Central Marshes and life carried on the way it had for centuries. After the 1991 Shiite Revolt in southern Iraq that followed the Second Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, in an act of revenge – the Marsh Arabs were Shiites – drained the Marshes forcing most of these interesting people into refugee camps, mainly in Iran, ostensibly turning the area into desert. These Central Marshes were some of the worst affected. After the American invasion and Saddam Hussein’s downfall, the marshes have been re-flooded and are showing a rapid recovery, but few of the over 500,000 Marsh Arabs have yet returned. This was another glimpse into an age-old culture that I feel privileged to have seen, albeit it ever so briefly, before it disappeared, possibly forever.

Dwellings of the Marsh Arabs in the swamps of the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers

We stopped at Qurna where the Tigris and Euphrates meet and where, at least in some traditional beliefs, the Garden of Eden was said to have been situated. A tree, known as Adam’s tree, was said to mark the spot where Abraham prayed in 2000BC and symbolises the Garden of Eden.  This tree is supposedly a descendant of ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’, from which Eve, at the encouragement of the serpent, ‘saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’. [Genesis 3:6-7].

Recently I came upon an article, dated May 28, 2003, by Anthony Browne of the Times UK. It is entitled ‘War Takes Its Toll on The Garden of Eden’ and begins: “PARADISE is not what it used to be. Dozens of dead fish float by in a river that reeks of sewage. Dirty sheep chew at the few tufts of grass that survive in the baking earth. Litter swirls around in the dust. The graffiti screams in Arabic: “Down with America! Down with Israel!” Welcome to the Garden of Eden. Or, as the locals call it, Janat Adan. In its centre, the showpiece: the Adam tree, no longer bearing apples, now just a dead, gnarled trunk that rises out of cracked concrete. There is no serpent hanging from its branches, but children, who use it as a climbing frame.” While I do not think anyone believed this was actually the site of the Garden of Eden, or that this was “Adam’s Tree’, it is very sad to see it described like this a little over 20 years after our visit. 

© Neil Rawlins  text & photography 

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