Page 18 - The Tigris Expedition

In Search of the Beginnings

coming in by sea. This is no real beginning. This is the continuation
of something lost somewhere in the mist. Is it still hidden under
desert sand, as was Sumerian civilisation itself, remaining unknown
to science until discovered and excavated in southern Iraq in the last
century? Was it buried by volcanic eruption, as was the great
Mediterranean civilisation on the island of Santorini, unknown
until discovered in our own time under fifty feet of ashes? Or could
it possibly be submerged in the ocean that covers two-thirds of our
restless planet, as suggested by the hard-dying legend of Atlantis?
If we arc to believe the Sumerians, who ought to know, their
merchant mariners returned to Dilmun many times. In their own
days, at least, their ancestral land was neither sunk in the sea nor
buried by volcanic ash. It was within reach of Sumerian ships from
Sumerian ports. One little piece missing from the big puzzle is that
nobody knows the range of a Sumerian ship. Their seagoing
qualities were forgotten with the men who built them and sailed
them, their range lost with their wakes.
Practical research into ancient types of watercraft leads one upon
many untrodden trails. It led me to remote islands in Polynesia,
lakes in the Andes and central Africa, and rivers and coasts of all the
continents. Lastly it brought me to what was formerly Sumer,
today the home of the Marsh Arabs. There began my quest for
human history beyond the zero hour. There began also a voyage
that brought me and my companions into adventures far from
those of the astronauts, back to the remote days and nights when
our planet was still big. So big it was in those times that unknown
and unforeseen worlds, alien to the voyager, beckoned beyond
every horizon. Worlds with plants and animals never imagined.
Peoples, buildings, and living manners so distinct from those at
home, as if pertaining to another planet under a different sun. Such
worlds once existed side by side, separated by barriers of wilderness
and united by the open sea.
The sea roads between them were in use before the Sumerians
came to settle in Sumer. Their tablets speak of navigating kings and
merchant mariners coming from or going to lands overseas, and
they give long lists of cargo imported from or exported to foreign
ports. A few even speak of shipwrecks and maritime disasters. Such
records reflect the hazards always involved in a marine enterprise
even when the vessel is built with the experience of a whole nation
and manned by a crew at home with the craft. In reading the tablets
such dramas come to life. You can almost hear the cry: ‘All hands on
deck!’

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