I will set up my name in the place where the names of famous men are written, and where no man’s name is written yet, I will raise a monument to the gods.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Leaving Baghdad, we followed the eastern branch of the Euphrates River, arriving at the town of Hilla the next morning at around ten a.m. With its dusty streets and concrete roundabouts and shops selling car tyres, it would have been quite unremarkable, were it not for one thing. This was the site of the most famous city of the ancient world.
Babylon. It’s a name that evokes images of despot kings and hanging gardens, Alexander the Great and riches beyond imagination. This Bronze-Age metropolis’s name literally means the Gate of God, and for centuries it was considered the very heart of civilisation.
I’d been excited to see the place since reading about the exploits of Alexander as a child. Amar didn’t share my enthusiasm.
‘There’s nothing here. It’s just a pile of old bricks,’ he grunted.
I didn’t care. I wanted to see what was left of the city that used to be the biggest in the world. An old man who served as the guard let me in for a small fee. We entered the complex, hidden behind the palms and thorny acacia trees, through an arch that looked new despite its Akkadian heritage.
‘Saddam rebuilt it all,’ said Mohammed the guide.
He led the way up some stairs onto a platform, where we could see the extent of the refurbished walls. They stretched out for a mile towards the river, surrounded by crumbling mounds.
Mohammed pointed down towards the new-looking ramparts. ‘He did this. He built these walls in the 1980s on top of the original ones two and a half thousand years old.’
‘They look quite nice,’ said Amar.
I shook my head at the barbaric philistinism.
Amar laughed. ‘Iraqis don’t give a shit about ruins. They want to see big walls and shiny things. It’s how Arabs think.’
Mohammed led the way down the steps, past reliefs of the animal gods, until we reached an archway. I looked at the bricks closely. You could tell the ones above a certain height weren’t very old, even though they were of the same clay and earth that Nebuchadnezzar II must have used. The original ones had the name of the Babylonian king stamped on them and the construction date, which apparently said 605 BC. The newer ones had some modern Arabic script.
‘What does it say?’ I asked.
‘Well, when Saddam came here and saw the old writing, he suggested the new bricks should have his own name on them.’
In the reign of the victorious Saddam Hussein, the President of the Republic, may God keep him, the guardian of the great Iraq and the renovator of its renaissance and the builder of its great civilisation, the rebuilding of the great city of Babylon was done in 1987.
‘The problem was nobody knew what the original palace looked like, so most of this is guesswork,’ said Mohammed.
‘Like this arch.’ He pointed up at the huge doorway. ‘No one really knows how high they were, or how high the original walls were, for that matter. But because it was Saddam, the builders decided they needed to be really big. It was all done by Sudanese immigrants. All the Iraqis were off fighting Iran at the time, and they had to rush to get it done in time for the 1987 arts festival.’
I thought back to my own school nativity play in 1987, when I was only six, and the three kings from the East, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. I never imagined at the time that I’d be standing on the walls of Babylon in the footsteps of kings and dictators.
We wandered through the deserted palace. The only other living things were pigeons, who had taken roost in the garish columns. I supposed there was at least something to celebrate in the fact that in recreating the palace, for all its vulgarity, perhaps Saddam had preserved the site for future generations. Looters were less likely to come and rob a place with such high walls and security guards. If it were left as a pile of crumbling bricks, then in all likelihood it would have been built on by villagers or trampled by soldiers.
Mohammed led me outside around the walls to a patch of waste ground covered in litter, where a barbed-wire fence marked the perimeter of the archaeological site.
‘That’s where the river used to come.’
He pointed to a small wadi filled with palms. Plastic bags fluttered from their fronds and they were caked in a thick layer of grime from the dust kicked up from a nearby road. I looked across to the far side of the wadi, now dry after centuries of irrigation and redirecting of the river. One of Saddam’s palaces loomed on top of the cliff. It was now empty, apart from a few Iraqi troops who were using it as their headquarters.
Mohammed stood looking sullen. ‘And this,’ he said with a sigh, ‘is where the hanging gardens used to be.’ I looked around at the acacia scrub and the empty bottles and the piles of baked goat shit and wondered if Alexander the Great would have seen this future as dystopian.
‘I can show you where he died, if you like?’ said Mohammed.
We walked through another arch and back into the adobe maze, following a narrow corridor, and then into the open courtyard at the centre of the complex.
‘Right here,’ he said, pointing at the floor. ‘They say he was poisoned.’
Standing in the middle of Saddam’s folly of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, in the spot that Alexander the Great perished after conquering the known world, was a surreal feeling. After seeing such devastation myself, it was a stark reminder that this land had always been a magnet for conquerors, despots and invaders. The latest strife was merely yet another iteration of an age-old struggle between East and West. And Iraq, now as then, lies on that geographical fault-line.
The casus belli may have changed since the days of the ancient kings, but the geography remains more or less the same. Nebuchadnezzar was a local Assyrian who wanted to expand an empire westwards to the Mediterranean, but he was conquered by Cyrus, a Persian from the East, whose empire was in turn defeated by Alexander from the West. These conquerors came from both sides, drawn to the allure of the fertile crescent and the riches it contained, as well as its strategic importance in both overland trade along the Silk Road and its position on the Gulf.
More recently, of course, it’s the allure of oil that brings in the armies from abroad, and religion provides a decent enough excuse. Ostensibly, the latest sectarian fighting can be boiled down to the divide between the Sunni majority and the Shi’a minority. Nationalism has increasingly played second fiddle to religious loyalty, as dictators are toppled and identity is called into question.
It took around three hours to drive to the outskirts of Nasiriya and it was already late afternoon. Amar wanted to get to the town and find a hotel. Fair enough, but I wondered if he was using the pretence of needing to report in with the police to justify his own idleness. We’d fallen into a routine of a constant psychological battle, and I felt I was having to fight the man’s ego on a daily basis. There was no use in arguing or stamping feet, because he would use his trump card of ‘security’.
So I had to explain my motives for wanting to see this or that, and try to convince him how much it would benefit Iraq and him personally to be seen to be helping me. If that didn’t work, I’d end up bargaining with him. ‘Let me see the Sumerian ruins and you can have half an hour extra in bed,’ and that sort of thing. It was like dealing with a toddler at times, and with each passing day I was less inclined to spend time with him, and yet I knew my life was ultimately in his hands.
Anyway, eventually I persuaded Amar to take a short detour to visit Eridu. I’d already stayed in Erbil and seen Babylon, and both can lay claim to being among the first ever cities. Further on in my journey, I hoped to visit Jericho and Damascus, too, arguably the oldest continually inhabited settlements in the world. But Eridu was a place apart.
The city was founded sometime in the fifty-fourth century BC and was the southernmost of a cluster of Sumerian towns based around mud-brick temples. It was here that the first kings were said to have lived.
A German archaeologist in the early twentieth century discovered a clay tablet written in cuneiform, the first recorded written language, in what was then southern Mesopotamia. On it is the first piece of history ever written.
After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu.
It was said that there were eight kings who ruled before the great flood. While historians debate the reality of the deluge, there are remarkable similarities between the statements made in the ‘Sumerian Kings list’ and the book of Genesis. Although a word of warning, some of the dates are a little improbable. The tablet continues by listing the lengths of the reigns of these early kings.
In Eridu, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28,800 years, which even by biblical standards is a rather long time.
The list goes on and on to recount the name and epithet of each successive ruler, and after the flood, the life span of these ancient demi-gods seems to get progressively shorter. Etana, ‘The Shepherd-King’, lived for a mere 1,500 years; and Aga of Kish, ‘Son of En-me-barage-si’, had a pitiful 325-year sovereignty. By the time Sargon of Akkad came along in 2270 BC, kingships had reduced to a more palatable forty years, presumably as people got to grips with basic mathematics.
But in spite of the artistic licence when it came to data recording on behalf of the royal line, these stone tablets were useful in dating these early civilisations and we now know that Eridu, and its nearby sister city of Ur, do indeed date back at least five and a half thousand years to the very limit of history. It was here on the edge of the swampland between the two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, that the earliest organized societies were founded after the first agricultural revolution. It was on this spot that prehistory suddenly (in the grand scheme of things) got written down. And, as they say … the rest is history.
We parked the car at the end of the dust track, where an Iraqi soldier pointed to the hill. Nearby in the gravel mounds were the remains of an old firing range and a burnt-out tank that dated to the Gulf War. The hill was the only remains of the oldest city in the world and because it was the only hill for miles round, it had been used by soldiers as a look-out point for centuries.
I walked out across the sand towards the monument. There was no one around, no fences or signs, only millions of ancient crumbling bricks of mud. I climbed up to the top of the mound. All around were shards of ancient pottery dating back at least four thousand years, but some of it may have been earlier, perhaps seven thousand years old. It was quite mind-boggling. But it wasn’t just pottery that lay abandoned. Many of the bricks and lumps of clay, on closer inspection, were covered in cuneiform symbols – the earliest writing. The place had, of course, been excavated over the last hundred years by archaeologists, but only three or four times, their work usually interrupted by Iraq’s seemingly insolvable problem – war.
Now Eridu was merely another lump of dust in the desert, unprotected and unloved. I hope that one day it might be guarded; after all, this was where it all began.
Amar shrugged. ‘There’s a war on, we’ve got bigger fish to fry,’ he said. ‘Speaking of which, I’m hungry, yalla. Let’s get to Nasiriya.’
The desert appeared to change into a thousand colours as we drove east. There were reds and oranges and purples. Long shadows were cast by invisible ridges and I spotted an eagle soaring overhead scouting for rats. Near to the ruins of an old shepherd’s hut, I saw some camels. They were the first I’d seen on the journey and I felt a shiver of excitement. They represented the natural form of the desert, and against a backdrop of melancholy, for some reason they embodied hope. As the sun set over the sand flats, we reached the edge of the town in time for the call to prayer, which echoed across the streets.
We ate binni, a type of barbell fish, on the banks of the Euphrates, at a little roadside restaurant. It’s a bottom feeder and tasted earthy, but I was glad to be given something different. It was the first dish we’d had that wasn’t meat and rice and it came as a welcome change. I looked across as fishermen in little motorboats sped out into the darkness to lay their nets for the evening.
‘They’re Marsh Arabs,’ said Amar, pulling a bone from his teeth.
I’d read about these people in Thesiger’s famous book, The Marsh Arabs, but I’d assumed that their culture had long vanished.
‘Didn’t Saddam Hussein wipe them out? I thought he drained the marshes,’ I said to Amar.
‘I think there’s still a few left. The marshes are coming back,’ he replied.
I suggested we travelled east to see if we could meet some and found Amar surprisingly willing.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sleeping outside with the mosquitoes.’
We compromised and agreed that we’d go towards Chibayish in the central marshes, south of Amara, and find a place to stay for the night before it got too late.
Jassim was a jolly man, with a kind smile and passionate positivity that shone through his sparkling eyes, that were only magnified by his little reading glasses.
‘Of course, you can stay here.’ He grabbed Amar by the arm and slapped him across the back in friendly encouragement, motioning for us to follow him into his house on the banks of a canal.
We’d asked around for a hotel and been uniformly told not to bother, instead to search for the man who knew the marshes like no other. Chibayish was a small town nestled on a strip of dry land between two great lakes, but it was dark and we could see nothing of the swamps at this time. Only the green light of the mosque reflected off the water and a few lanterns twinkling in the distance, a reminder of the fishermen who spend their nights out looking for a catch.
Jassim worked for an Iraqi environmental agency and his job was to protect and restore the marshes.
‘I’ve been here all my life. I was here in 1991 when that monster Saddam drained the marshes. He wanted to flush out all opposition and the people here hated him, so he punished them by killing off their home. Ninety per cent of the marshes were gone. People have lived here since the beginning of time, and then one man could do so much damage,’ he said mournfully.
‘So what exactly is left?’ I asked, eager to see for myself what remained of this unique environment.
‘Get some rest,’ he said, smiling. He showed us to his spare rooms and began puffing the pillows. I looked around the house; it was like a museum, full of wooden oars and reeds and traditional clothes pinned to the walls. ‘I can take you out in the morning at first light, and you’ll see the real beauty of the marshes and a side of Iraq you could never imagine.’
We woke at four a.m. to walk down to the canal in the dark. The streets were quiet, apart from a few scavenging feral dogs, which were rummaging around among the piles of rubbish. The canal was filled with litter and a layer of scum floated on its surface, reflecting the moonlight in glinting flashes of foam.
Abu Haider was waiting on a boat. It was a small wooden thing, big enough for only three or four people. He was at the back next to an outboard motor, but held a large punting stick across his lap. He stood to shake hands as Amar and I climbed aboard with Jassim. Abu Haider was a Marsh Arab.
‘He is our boat man. His family have lived in these swamps for thousands of years,’ said Jassim. ‘We call them the Ma‘dān.’
Abu Haider, in his long black shirt and black-and-white keffiyeh, looked like a wise old man. The wrinkles around his eyes and creases on his face testified to a lifetime of laughter and he looked incredibly happy for a man who had been awake at four to come and get us.
‘Yalla,’ he said, with a wink. ‘Let’s go.’
He stood and began to punt with the eight-foot-long pole, pushing us along the canal until it opened up to the lake. As we glided out onto the placid water, I felt an immediate sense of peace and calm. The first glow of light was beginning to appear on the flat horizon, as the sun pushed up above the reeds. It wasn’t long before we had gone far enough out to be in the deeper waters, and Abu Haider pulled the rip-cord on the outboard motor, which spluttered into life, disturbing the otherwise serene silence.
We sped across the lake and soon found ourselves zipping in among narrow channels between the high reeds, some of which reached three or four metres high. As the sunlight filtered through, the scale of the swampland became apparent. In gaps between the papyrus, I could see for miles around the utter flatness of the bogs. Only distant plumes of smoke interrupted the pure morning atmosphere, indicating the faraway villages. A kingfisher buzzed in front of our boat, as if to remind us that nature reigned here and we were but visitors.
‘All of this was completely dry fifteen years ago,’ said Jassim. ‘After Saddam drained it, all the local people had to leave. The reeds turned to dust and it was just desert. You wouldn’t believe what it looked like.’
He was right, I couldn’t imagine it any other way.
‘When the British and Americans came in 2003 and got rid of him, we started to try to bring the water back.’
‘How did you do that?’ I asked.
‘We had to dig canals from the Euphrates and redirect the water. Now it’s being rejuvenated. We’ve got them back to just over half of their original levels.’
Suddenly there was a rustling to our left and two metres away I saw the startled figure of a warthog snorting on the bank, before it scuttled off into the bushes.
‘Luckily the wildlife is returning slowly, too,’ said Jassim.
We sped through the channels before coming to an abrupt stop, as the boat lurched forward. Abu Haider pointed ahead. I could see why he’d hit the brakes. Just in front, I could see the dark black mounds of something moving in the water. There were dozens of them, like vast boulders, but they were alive.
‘Buffalo,’ said Amar. Jassim smiled.
There was a grunt, but apart from that they ignored us as they swam from one side of the bank to the other, and then one by one they clambered out of the water and lolled themselves into the reeds, munching away on the verdant leaves.
‘They belong to the Ma‘dān,’ said Jassim.
Once the buffalo had passed, we carried on for another forty-five minutes, deeper into the swamp, as the sun burst above the horizon and the whole world seemed to glow a perfect deep orange. Abu Haider began to chant. It was rhythmic and hypnotic.
‘It’s their song,’ said Jassim.
It was beautiful, I thought. Jassim joined in and added his own lyrics in Arabic.
‘What’s it about?’ I asked.
Jassim smiled. ‘It’s a poem, about the same things all poems are about. Love and sadness. I used to come into these marshes when I was a boy, even though my family were land dwellers. I used to like coming in here on the boats. It’s where I met my first woman.’ He laughed with a roar. ‘I used to come here in the evenings and make love to her in the reeds.’
The marsh opened out before us and the reeds gave way to what appeared to be flat islands, spreading as far as the eye could see. In the shallow waters were dozens of buffalo wallowing in the mud and yet more grazing on the banks. Ahead I could make out the silhouette of a settlement. A few little shacks made entirely of reeds, bundled together like thatch. It appeared that the inhabitants were already awake and a man waved from the entrance to the house.
‘We call the houses mudhif,’ said Jassim, excited to show me the village.
I could smell the burning of dung well before we disembarked. Abu Haider brought the canoe to a halt, punting us in the final few metres to a grassy bank, where we all jumped out. It was like entering another world, or at least being transported back in time to the Middle Ages.
‘You can see why we consider the Ma‘dān to be the descendants of the Sumerians.’ My guide patted Abu Haider on the back. He led us along a buffalo track towards one of the mudhif, where a woman was squatting next to a buffalo, milking it in the entrance. Her husband walked forward and embraced Jassim and Abu Haider, hugging and kissing them on both cheeks.
I looked up and noticed that on the top of every house was a flag or two. There were lots of green and yellow ones and some had images of the Imam Ali. Jassim must have seen me looking at the flags.
‘We’re all Shi’a Muslims here, the people are very proud,’ he said. ‘But even though they can be warriors when they need to be, like when they rose up against Saddam, they are really a peaceful people. All they want to do is be left alone, and to farm and fish and look after the buffaloes.’
The man invited us into the hut, which was semi-circular and reminded me of a grassy barracks. Inside it was decorated with rugs and carpets and pictures hung from the walls.
‘Would you like to try the milk?’ asked Jassim.
‘Sure,’ I said, without thinking.
Naturally, the woman outside brought in a pottery urn full of the steaming fresh milk, straight from the buffalo’s udder, and placed it down in front of me.
‘Drink up,’ he said.
I gulped down the frothy warm liquid, trying to ignore the bits of floating matter and thick strands of hair that had fallen into the pot.
‘Delicious, isn’t it?’ said Jassim in earnest. Amar snorted and asked for tea instead.
‘You know, the Ma‘dān believe in magic,’ said Jassim, peering over his glasses.
‘I bet they need to, living in this place,’ said Amar.
Jassim ignored him, and carried on. ‘They call the spirits Djinns. Like in English you call them Genies. They can take the form of humans or animals,’ he whispered, as more tea was passed around.
‘They believe in these giant snakes. Sometimes covered in hair, and others are like dragons with big legs and claws. They eat buffaloes and children. Of course, they are stories meant to keep the kids from wandering off into the swamps and getting lost.’
We spent the day exploring the marshes. Going in the boat, watching as the men and women alike would set about with scythes and knives to cut reeds down for fodder for the buffalo and thatch for the roofs. It was a life unchanged in millennia. In the afternoon, we took the boat to Abu Haider’s house. He lived on a floating island of compressed reeds right in the middle of the marsh. The reeds themselves acted as camouflage and I asked Abu Haider about his life, as Jassim translated.
‘My wife and I have lived here our whole lives, until Saddam came and set fire to our island. We were forced to go and live in the city. My sons worked as labourers in Baghdad, but what could I do? I’m an old man and all I can do is fish and look after the buffalo. My wife makes nice baskets, but nobody in the city wants them.’
His wife, Salwa, came and sat down next to us. She wore a black abaya, a full-length robe, and a headscarf, but her face was unveiled. She must have been in her late forties, a good decade or two younger than Abu Haider. Her face was fun and her eyes glistened. She put a soft hand on her husband’s shoulder and they sat next to each other, like a teenage couple very much in love. It was heart-warming to see such affection against a backdrop of what would be considered extreme poverty anywhere in the world.
In the marshes there are no schools, no hospitals, no roads or cars, and the only food is what people catch or make themselves. Such isolation and lack of comfort would strike horror into most people, but for them it was a raison d’être. Their way of life depended entirely on their remoteness.
‘Now we have come back, we want to stay. We’ve been here for the last ten years and now we just want to be left alone,’ said Abu Haider.
My time in Iraq was almost at an end, and the next day I said goodbye to Jassim back at the canal, after Abu Haider dropped us on dry land. Amar and I continued east, following the road through the lakes until we reached al-Qurnah at the confluence of the two great rivers. It is here that the Tigris meets the Euphrates, the place that the Garden of Eden was supposed to have been located – now marked by a few picnic tables and a gaudy concrete pavilion. We stayed for lunch and I swam in the brown waters of the river, much to the disapproval of Amar. By now I’d grown so tired of his irritability that I didn’t even bother talking to him.
We reached Basra that afternoon and spent the night in a dismal grey hotel. I felt as though I’d seen the very best and the very worst of Iraq. I’d seen some truly awful things, and dealing with the petulance of Amar had certainly added to the challenge of traversing a war zone, and yet, for all his flaws, he’d done his job and got me out the other side.
Tomorrow I’d leave Iraq behind and enter the Gulf to cross into Kuwait, where I knew a very different world would await.