The temperature was nearly forty degrees Celsius when I left the Iraqi capital of Baghdad at dawn on 20 June 2018. I was riding in a bus with a group of local environmental activists, who pointed out the monuments of their beloved, but war-torn, city.
As soon as Baghdad was left behind, large stretches of palm trees appeared over the horizon, and the landscape changed. The grey, concrete T-shaped walls, designed to protect from explosions, gradually gave way to small shrubs and high, green-leafed reeds. In the distance, small huts began to appear, made with ancient building methods, using mud, straw and reeds.
We drove through the city of Nasiriyah, famous for its dates, and for being the scene of a bloody battle, in 2003, that ousted the former dictator Saddam Hussein. We passed the great ziggurat of Mesopotamia. We finally reached our destination—Ur, one of the oldest cities in the world.
We were welcomed in Ur by Ali Khadim Ghanin, the director of the archaeological site, who personally meets the few tourists who visit. He pointed at the decrepit arch of the Edublalmah temple. “It’s the oldest unrestored arch we have from the antiquity of man,” he said.
Having survived centuries of war, Iraq’s historic sites risk being destroyed by the depredations of climate change. Ghanin called for an urgent conservation project to protect the site from environmental damage. “If we don’t act quickly, the ancient city of Ur could disappear due to wind erosion and increasingly harsh environmental conditions,” he told us.
Mentioned in the Bible as the hometown of Abraham, Ur emerged as a settlement over six thousand years ago and grew to prominence during the early Bronze Age. Located on the left bank of the Euphrates river, at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar, it became one of the most prosperous city-states in ancient Mesopotamia. Here, Sumerians developed a complex urban society, established the first monarchies and bureaucracies, and invented the writing system, first using pictograms and then cuneiform.
From the beginning, Ur was an important centre of trade, owing to its location at a pivotal point where the Tigris and Euphrates run into the Persian Gulf. Its heyday came around 2000 BCE, when the city dominated southern Mesopotamia after the fall of the Akkadian empire. It then became the capital of a wealthy kingdom—which the Sumerians called Meluhha—that drew traders from the Mediterranean and from the Indus civilisation.
Ur was once a bustling port city, laced with canals and filled with merchant ships, warehouses and weaving factories. Franco D’Agostino, a professor of Assyriology at the Sapienza University in Rome, told me that there was “a very precise historical reason” that cities such as Ur, Eridu and Uruk were once the cradle of civilisation—the Mesopotamian marshes. “If there were no marshes, there would be no Sumerians,” he said. “Without rivers, we would not have this civilisation.”
D’Agostino, who leads an Italian–Iraqi archaeological mission at the ancient site of Abu Tbeirah, near Nasiriyah, recently unearthed and identified a buried port dating back to the third millennium BCE. It is the oldest port found in Iraq, and proved that the Sumerians were skilled sailors who traded with distant lands. Thanks to the canal network, D’Agostino told me, ships at the harbour would have had direct access to the sea, as well as to Ur, and more distant lands.
It was difficult to imagine this port city, and a landscape in which the Garden of Eden was said to be located, with flourishing marshland and a network of natural and artificial canals. Today, Ur sits in the midst of an arid plain, with the surviving Mesopotamian marshes about a hundred kilometres away.
When archaeologists excavated the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, they were surprised not just by what they found, but where they found it—in the middle of an unpopulated desert. In Ur of the Chaldees, Leonard Woolley, who excavated the city’s ruins, in 1922, asked: “Why, if Ur was an empire’s capital, if Sumer was once a vast granary, has the population dwindled to nothing, the very soil lost its virtue?”
Ur collapsed amid foreign invasions, internal dissension and, possibly, extreme drought, although there is no data linking a prolonged period of drought with the decline of Ur. However, D’Agostino told me that “a dramatic climate change would have affected a town deeply connected with the environment and the marshlands.”
Today, Iraq is again enduring a time of crisis. Climate change is threatening the country’s fragile stability, and it could finish off what remains of the Sumerian culture and marshes. The groundwater level remains very low, and a catastrophic drought is threatening Iraq. The construction of large dams, such as the Ilisu dam in Turkey and the Daryan dam in Iran, will have a devastating impact on water flows to Iraq. The Ma’dan community—also known as the Marsh Arabs—is also at risk. With their destruction, rich ecosystems and a unique Sumerian-influenced culture would be lost. “Drought and the lack of water policies are affecting the local people,” Salman Khairalla, the coordinator of the civil-society advocacy group Save the Tigris and the Iraqi Marshes, told me. “We are at risk of losing our intangible culture.”
A network of Iraqi and international activists, brought together by the Iraqi Civil Society Solidarity Initiative, campaigned for four years to have the archaeological sites of Ur, Uruk and Eridu inscribed in the list of world-heritage sites maintained by the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organisation. World-heritage status was achieved in 2016, but it has done little to alleviate the situation.
Rashad Salim, a bearded man in his fifties, is an artist and designer with a particular interest in Sumerian history and the culture of the marshes. He is one of the last builders of the ancient boats of the Mesopotamian tradition. His Safina Project aims to protect Mesopotamian cultural heritage, including its crafts, materials, techniques and traditional embroidery.
“For me, the environment and rivers are as important as agriculture, when it comes to making the Sumerian civilisation,” Salim told me. “Without the Tigris and the Euphrates, we would not have had the canals, and without the canals, we would not have had the boats and the culture that came with it, not because of the water, but because of the way of transporting things. So you have the connection between people. That’s what makes the unity of the place.”