History

The Mesopotamian Marshes occupy the lower delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the same alluvial plain where the earliest agricultural communities in the ancient Near East took root around 6000–5000 BCE. The ecological productivity of the marshes — fish, waterfowl, reeds for construction, water buffalo for milk and meat — made permanent settlement not merely possible but highly attractive. By 3500–3000 BCE the settlements at the marsh edge had grown into the world first true cities: Uruk (Warka), where the first writing (cuneiform) was developed; Eridu, considered in Sumerian tradition to be the first city ever built; Ur, the city of the moon god Nanna and of Abraham in Mesopotamian religious tradition; and Lagash, a major city-state that produced some of the earliest legal texts.

The Sumerian civilisation that emerged from these settlements invented writing, monumental architecture (the ziggurat), codified law, the 60-minute hour, the wheel, and urban planning. The marshes themselves were the ecological base that fed and sustained these innovations for 3,000 years of continuous civilisation.

The Marsh Arabs (Ma dan) are the descendants of the people who remained in and around the marshes across all subsequent historical periods — Babylonian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Sassanid, Arab, Ottoman, British. Their traditional material culture — building homes, villages, and meeting halls entirely from giant reeds (Phragmites australis and Typha) without nails, metal, or mortar; navigating in low wooden canoes (mashoof); and keeping water buffalo on artificial reed islands (known as the same root that gave “floating islands” their name) — has no precise parallel anywhere else in the world and represents a living link to the Sumerian marsh-dwellers of 5,000 years ago.

In 1991, following the failed Shia uprising after the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein ordered the systematic draining of the southern marshes as a punitive measure against the Marsh Arab population who had sheltered the insurgents. A network of drainage canals, dikes, and diversions reduced the marshes from approximately 20,000 km² to less than 2,000 km² within a decade — one of the largest deliberate ecological destructions in recorded history. The Ma dan population fled or was expelled.

Following the fall of the regime in 2003, Marsh Arab communities began returning and manually breaching the drainage structures. The marshes began re-flooding almost immediately, and by 2010 approximately 50–70% of the original wetland extent had recovered. Recovery has been uneven, and the long-term hydrological balance remains fragile due to upstream dam construction in Turkey and Syria reducing the flow of both rivers.