Page 37 - The Tigris Expedition
P. 37

The Tigris Expedition
                     constantly seeing.’ It was strikingly similar to the reed-boats I had
                     seen on Easter Island and on Lake Titicaca in South America, except
                     for the Arab on board.
                       But for the information provided by Hagi’s memory I had come
                     to the former Sumerian territory half a century too late; Hagi was
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                     there as a bridge to the past. Looking at him I caught myself
                     thinking of Abraham. In fact, he could very well be a direct
                     descendant. All Arabs, like all Jews, begin their pedigree with
                     Abraham, and after all, Hagi lived close beside Ur, where Abraham
                     was born. In these Biblical surroundings even Abraham could not
                     be overlooked by one who wanted to trace the beginnings, for he
                     not only began both Moslem and Hebrew history but through him
                     we have one of the earliest recorded descriptions of how the
                     Mesopotamians of antiquity built their boats.
                        Abraham is recognised today as an historical personage who
                     lived in Mesopotamia about 1800 bc. According to the Old Testa­
                     ment he was born in Ur where he left his kinsmen and followed his
                     father’s tribe and their livestock on their migration from the fringe
                     of the marshes northwards to Harran in Assyrian territory, then
                     across to Mediterranean lands. Although born in Ur, he went even
                     as far as Egypt before he turned and decided to settle for good in his
                     chosen land, leaving us an example of recorded overland contact
                     between Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley in early antiquity.
                     Although today we think that to man of antiquity Mesopotamia
                     and Egypt must have been two worlds apart, they were not so
                     remote from each other but that Abraham might claim that his
                     descendants had been promised all the land ‘from the River of
                     Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates . . .’3
                       Today the river Euphrates and the green marshes have with­
                     drawn half a dozen miles from the buried ruins of Ur, but the
                     gigantic Sumerian temple-pyramid still rises out of the dust against
                     the blue desert sky as a breath-taking monument to human enter­
                     prise and impermanence. This lofty stepped pyramid has been
                     rebuilt time and again by successive cultures, but was already
                     age-old when Abraham played around its base and bathed in the
                     nearby river that for centuries had made Ur a port of paramount
                     importance. In Ur’s bustling harbour Abraham had come face to
                     face with merchant mariners from foreign lands, and in the shade of
                     the pyramid temple scribes and elders had shared with succeeding
                     generations their knowledge of the past and their recipe for a happy
                     after-life. From them he must have received the long history of his
                     ancestors, which in turn he passed on to his own descendants until it

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