Page 37 - The Tigris Expedition

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
I
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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