Читать книгу Iraq's Marsh Arabs in the Garden of Eden - Edward L. Ochsenschlager - Страница 7

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 the reasons for change and the difficulty of evaluating the magnitude of its cultural effect. We discovered that it was not always easy to understand reasons for modern change initiated within the community unless one was present and privy to conversations concerning it immediately before and during the process of the change itself. Shortly after change occurred the previous justifications given sometimes disappeared to be replaced by a new set of justifications more culturally acceptable. In a way, then, the enduring reasons for change became part of a new mythology. These studies also remind us that our knowledge of the past sometimes relies on shaky interpretations and cavalier assumptions, and shows us that it is altogether too easy to misunderstand the significance of physical evidence. Change in personal attitude, in the availability of trained craftspeople or raw materials or in circumstances of life can alter traditions overnight, make cheap things expensive and expensive things cheap, make something either more or less desirable, and modify or change the roles of men, women, or children in society. Sometimes highly visible change is of little cultural significance, while major cultural change can be accompanied by little or no change in the material record.

These studies have an unintended benefit in that they preserve an account of aspects of the interrelated daily lives of the Mi’dan and the Beni Hasan who lived here year-round and the Bedouin who pitched their tents on the dried-up seasonal marshland during the fall of each year. The way of life embodied in these studies, and especially the interplay between the three different peoples, has ceased to exist.

These study gave me an opportunity to come to know a large number of remarkable, industrious, and steadfast people from whom I learned much more than the secrets of their crafts.

After briefly discussing the people living in the area and the way I collected the information, I divided the book into a series of chapters based on the nature of the material resource we investigated. Resources such as mud and reeds were used for so many purposes that they are the subjects of more than one chapter. In addition to discussing how individual artifacts functioned I try to give a detailed account of how they were manufactured. I then deal with what changed and what persisted in both techniques of manufacture and function over the 22 years of the project. Finally I try to give some idea of the impact this information can have on the study of the past.

I would like to thank Vaughn Crawford of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Donald P. Hansen of the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, who put the facilities of the al-Hiba expedition at my disposal and encouraged me in every way. I am deeply indebted to Robert Ehrich, who helped me refine successful applications for funding to the City University of New York and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Claireve Grandjouan for the deep wisdom embedded in her highly entertaining lecture on the Archaeology of the Modern City of New York, and the interest of Edith Poroda, Ralph and Rose Solecki, and Richard Ellis, who helped fuel the expansion of my inquiries. I am deeply indebted to Bonnie Gustav for allowing me to use the material we previously worked on and published. Special thanks are also due to Ann Farkas, Qais Al-Awgati, Mary Strong, Selma al-Radi, and James Pidala, who read parts of the manuscript and helped me improve them immeasurably, and to Richard Zettler, who insisted that I pull this information together and helped me at every turn. Above all I am deeply appreciative of the significant contributions to this project of Marjorie Venit and Sidney Babcock who examined the text and made many valuable suggestions. Others to whom I owe a debt of gratitude include Tony Frantz, Anna Grifiths, Abdullah Khalil, Annie Searight, Alex Pezzati, and of course Muhammad el-Dukkhan, my guide, informant, and friend, without whose generosity and sensitive help the project would have been doomed. I am most grateful to my editor Walda Metcalf and Matthew Manieri for their encouragement and cogent scrutiny of every aspect of the text in putting this study into a publishable form.