The Tribes Of The Marsh Arabs of Iraq

The Arab tribes of Iraq differ widely in custom but remain in all essentials of thought and conduct a distinctive and unique group. Their land embraces wide deserts, fertile fields and boundless swamps; its unique features shape the lives of its people. Taking the figure of Haji Rikkan as a

“Five thousand years of history were here and the pattern was still unchanged.” During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Travelling from village to village by canoe,

What can the present tell us about the past? From 1968 to 1990, Edward Ochsenschlager conducted ethnoarchaeological fieldwork near a mound called al-Hiba, in the marshes of southern Iraq. In examining the material culture of three tribes—their use of mud, reed, wood, and bitumen, and their husbandry of cattle, water

It was the legendary traveller Wilfred Thesiger who first introduced Gavin Young to the Marshes of Iraq. Since then Young has been entranced by both the beauty of the Marshes and by the Marsh Arabs who inhabit them, a people whose lifestyle is almost unchanged from that of their predecessors,

The Arab tribes of Iraq differ widely in custom but remain in all essentials of thought and conduct a distinctive and unique group. Their land embraces wide deserts, fertile fields and boundless swamps; its unique features shape the lives of its people. Taking the figure of Haji Rikkan as a