If prizes had been awarded in the ancient world for Outstanding Contribution To Humanity, the Sumerians would have been strong contenders. The people whose civilisation one flourished in Mesopotamia, modern-day southern Iraq, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, have been credited with so many firsts they are too numerous to list.
It’s still safe to say that any award presenter would have highlighted cuneiform as the first system of writing. The Sumerian development of branches of mathematics, from arithmetic to geometry, would definitely have got a mention. The invention of the wheel possibly, codes of law, the first city states, as well as farming tools, chariots, sandals, harpoons and… it’s a long list.
Though long, it would have been incomplete without a recognition of the Sumerians as the world’s first irrigation engineers. Maybe as far back as 6,000 BCE the Sumerians were draining the marsh lands of Mesopotamia, re-directing the water that flowed into the natural basin of their land from the mountains of Anatolia. They dug canals, created a network of water storage ditches, thus safeguarding homes, diverting water to the fields for growing crops, fundamentally making it possible for people to live in balance and harmony with the land and nature.
Not quite so long ago in the 1950s, inspired to follow in the footsteps of his Sumerian ancestors Jawad Alwash resolved to become an irrigation engineer. Such was Jawad’s skill and dedication he became one of the country’s leading irrigation experts and one of the first to re-enter the marshlands of southern Iraq, a privilege he shared with his five-year-old son, Azzam, in the early 1960s.
Azzam still talks about those all too rare days spent alone with his father, gliding through this magical water world, navigating the water buffalo, spotting sacred ibis, flamingos and pelicans, the reeds towering above them. Together they would lose themselves for hours in the marshes, the wetlands often called the Garden of Eden. To some, this Mesopotamian paradise, the largest ecosystem in the Middle East, an area more than twice the size of the Everglades in Florida, was the birthplace of civilisation.
Azzam treasured the memory of these days through the decades that followed; through his studies and engineering career in America; and through the news and reports of the torment inflicted on his country by Saddam Hussein. In the early 1990s Saddam took his revenge on rebellious Shi-ite Arabs who took refuge in the marshes. To flush them out, Saddam burned, drained and poisoned huge swathes of the marshlands that covered more than 7,000 square miles.
After Saddam’s removal, Azzam Alwash returned to Iraq in 2003, for a visit to his beloved homeland, nothing more. He knew about Saddam’s destruction of the marshlands, that they had been reduced in size from 7,000 to fewer than 300 square miles. What had been a home for the Marsh Arabs, a haven for an estimated two thirds of migratory birds in the Middle East, a vital resource for the people of Iraq, the site of the Sumerian civilisation, was at risk of becoming barren desert.
What Azzam had planned as a visit became a life mission of philanthropy. Before, his Californian dreaming had taken him back to the marsh wetlands of Iraq. Now he had seen the reality, Azzam made a tough, difficult choice for him, his family and friends, his career, his whole way of life. He stayed in Iraq.
To start, he completed a survey of the marshlands, putting his knowledge of hydraulic engineering to good use. He constructed his own plan for restoring the marshes and lobbied government officials in the environment and water resource ministries. Restore the marshes, he told them, but other experts were saying it was already too late.
In 2004 Azzam founded Nature Iraq, a conservation NGO “to protect, restore and preserve Iraq’s natural environment”. In ten years, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Azzam and his colleagues, almost half of the original marshes were flooded once more.
In July 2013 the Iraqi government voted to establish the marshes as the country’s first national park. UNESCO went further three years later, granting the marshlands the status of World Heritage Site, but their future was by no means secured. Ten years on and a combination of severe drought, climate changes and the construction of new dams outside of Iraq, shrunk the marshlands once more. Al Jazeera reported at the end of 2023 that the marshlands covered little more than 1,500 square miles.
What binds all Iraqis, whether they are Shia, Sunni or Turkmen, Azzam asserts, are mountains and water. If people want to know what a weapon of mass destruction is, he says, it is the elimination of water. Given a chance, nature is resilient. What humanity has to do is simply get out of the way and let the water flow. Iraq is already listed as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world to climate change. To lose the marshlands would be a catastrophe.
If the marshlands of southern Iraq do endure it will not so much be a belated global recognition of what the Sumerians did for humanity, but more because an Iraqi philanthropist and not a man of great wealth, refused to accept that the water world of his childhood, of the Marsh Arabs, of Sumerian civilisation, would be lost forever. It’s a refusal worthy of an award for outstanding contribution to nature and humanity.