This text is for those wishing to develop an understanding of a cultural legacy and lifestyle that survives today only as a fragmented cultural inheritance. The book illustrates how the economy and lives of the Ma'dan (Marsh Arabs) that spans over 5000 years remained similar to the ancient practices of their Sumerian forebears.

Ethnoarchaeological fieldwork near a mound called al-Hiba, in the marshes of southern Iraq.

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 Ancient Sumerians. On his return to the Marshes some years later Gavin Young found that the twentieth-century had rudely intruded on this lifestyle and that war was threatening to make the Marsh Arabs existence extinct. Return to the Marshes, first published in 1977, is at once a moving tribute to a unique way of life as well as a love story to a place and its people. 'A superbly written essay which combines warmth of personal tone, a good deal of easy historical scholarship and a talent for vivid description rarely found outside good fiction.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times

The Mesopotamian marshes are important for economic, social, and biodiversity values and have been home to indigenous human communities for millennia. They are regarded as a legendary site. This multi-authored book contains chapters written by world-renowned experts in their field. Both basic and applied information are made available, making the book a must-have for a wide spectrum of users. For example, an understanding of the natural and the social aspects of the marshes, as described here, is an obvious prerequisite for a pest management plan in this area. Scholars interested in wetlands can use this book as a guide to compare different wetlands areas in Asia. The bibliography section contains valuable references to the marsh areas and research in the field. This book serves as an up-to-date comprehensive source of information on different aspects of the southern marshes of Iraq and is aimed at academic scholars, environmentalists, and decision makers.

An adventurous diplomat’s “engrossing and often darkly humorous” memoir of working with Iraqis after the fall of Saddam Hussein(Publishers Weekly). In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat who had recently completed an epic walk from Turkey to Bangladesh, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war. The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart’s year. As a participant he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, it amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.

Rare and visually stunning images of a lost world. This remarkable collection of photographs, captured by internationally acclaimed photojournalist Tor Eigeland in 1967, offers unprecedented insight into the daily life of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. These photographs illustrate the beauty of this unique environment—the marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—and show a culture that existed practically unchanged for over 2,000 years. Some have even speculated that this place was the site of the original Garden of Eden. Under Saddam Hussein’s rule, vast areas of the marshlands were dammed and drained, causing catastrophic environmental damage and brutally forcing the marshes’ inhabitants to abandon their way of life. Now Tor Eigeland’s photographic journey stands as a monument, a rare record of a lost world and an ancient civilization. These precious photographs celebrate the people and culture of the marshlands and bring us back to a time and place where people lived in harmony with their environment. In the course of his long and distinguished career, Tor Eigeland has been published in such publications as Time-Life Books, Fortune, Newsweek, and Saudi Aramco World, to name but a few. He has collaborated on ten books for the National Geographic Society, and his assignments have taken him to some of the most remote corners of the globe. He now resides in the south of France.

This is a collection of Wilfred Thesiger's greatest journeys - in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the marshes of Iraq, the mountains of the Hindu Kush and Kurdistan, and the Yemen - illustrated with Thesiger's own photographs.

“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, he won acceptance by dispensing medicines and treating the sick. In this account of his time there, he pays tribute to the hospitality, loyalty, courage and endurance of the people, describes their impressive reed houses, the waterways and lakes teeming with wildlife, the herding of buffalo and hunting of wild boar, moments of tragedy and moments of pure comedy, all in vivid, engaging detail. Untouched by the modern world until recently, these independent people, their way of life and their surroundings suffered widespread destruction under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Wilfred Thesiger's magnificent account of his time spent among them is a moving testament to their now threatened culture and the landscape they inhabit.

A novel written in reverse relates the story of an aging prisoner who is released only to be rescued from an assault by a curator, who works at a museum exhibiting "the marshes, " a conflict-torn wilderness where the former prisoner committed his crime.