IRAQ’S MARSH ARABS IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
IRAQ’S MARSH ARABS IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Edward L. Ochsenschlager
 |
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY |
Copyright © 2004
by
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
3260 South Street • Philadelphia, PA 19104–6324
All rights reserved.
First Edtion.
SUPPORT PROVIDED BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ochsenschlager, Edward L.
Iraq's Marsh Arabs in the Garden of Eden / Edward L. Ochsenschlager.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-931707-74-X (alk. paper)
1. Ethnology--Tigris-Euphrates Delta (Iraq and Iran) 2. Material culture--Tigris-Euphrates Delta (Iraq and Iran) 3. Marshes--Iraq. 4. Baòsrah (Iraq : Province)--Antiquities. I. Title.
DS70.8.A1O29 2004
935--dc22
2004019710
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
4 MUD HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS AND STORAGE CONTAINERS
5 MUD MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, TOYS, JEWELRY, AND AMMUNITION
6 MUD ARCHITECTURE AND ANCILLARY STRUCTURES
8 MATS, BASKETS, AND OTHER OBJECTS MADE OF REEDS AND RUSHES
14 THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF JOHN HENRY HAYNES
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Until the end of the 20th century a vast marsh existed in the south of what is now the modern nation of Iraq. For thousands of years people had lived on the edge of these marshes. The archaeological record shows that already by the middle of the 4th millennium BC a people of unknown origin, known to us as the Sumerians, occupied this land and built there perhaps the world’s oldest cities. By the end of the 3rd millennium BC the land had become absorbed into the first-known empire of history, that of the Akkadians. Over the next two thousand years, the area was controlled by the successive empires of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Parthians.
Over time, perhaps due to an overworking of the land and an abuse due to arrogance or ignorance of the ecological realities, the populations dwindled and the cities deteriorated and were eventually abandoned. What we today refer to as the cradle of civilization had become a wasteland. Over some indeterminate length of time, among the mounds that were all that was left of the great ancient cities by the marshes, people began to eke out a subsistence from this exhausted land. Among them are those known today as the Beni Hasan, the Mi’dan (often referred to as the Marsh Arabs), and the Bedouin. Although they used the land differently, there evolved among them a mutual interdependence. Their way of life was documented by an outsider, an American, John Henry Haynes, at the end of the 19th century during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. By the third quarter of the 20th century their isolation along with their traditions of self-reliance had been broken. The inevitability of change in human affairs now became their reality. By the end of the 1980s their way of life, by now precarious, was given the coup de grâce by Saddam Hussein.
I now consider the great privilege of my life that all three of these peoples allowed me to observe their way of life and actively encouraged my work when I first began in 1968 to try to understand the purpose of a shaped ancient lump of mud and later when I wanted to learn as much about their material culture as possible. I hoped that understanding their way of life would help us better comprehend the information we were gathering about the ancient Sumerians who lived at the nearby ancient city mound we were excavating called al-Hiba.
Change was a part of these peoples’ lives just as it is of ours. In 1968 parents were pressuring their children to stop making their own toys out of mud, professional male potters in the market town with their wheel-thrown pots were winning their battle against the traditional women potters of the villages, and the weaving of reed mats on upright looms was almost a thing of the past. But none of this was of such catastrophic nature as the political solutions of Saddam Hussein that would later force the Mi’dan to leave their homes forever and the Bedouin to vanish from the neighborhood.
This book looks at the material culture of peoples living near the excavations at al-Hiba from 1968 to 1990 and focuses on the ethnoarchaeological question of what can the present tell us about the past. The findings recorded here were extremely helpful in interpreting the context of ancient material remains and gave us some insights into everyday life in antiquity. Careful observation of these people’s ways of life also served to muddy the waters of archaeological interpretation. It brought home the complexity and impact of behavioral and cultural choices in ways that would be almost impossible to decipher from the study of material remains alone.
These studies give us some clues to the nature of change in human society. Because research took place over a period of 22 years we saw a great many changes, both minor and major, and because of our long-term involvement we were better able to document their causes and effects.
Our research demonstrated the problems of understanding