Cradle of Creation

Clip 2: An ancient civilisation

Taken from the documentary Cradle of Creation (1944)

Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be G

Curator’s clip description

On board a paddle steamer, the camera travels up the Euphrates river passing villages in the swamp and marshland region of the country – a lush landscape strewn with long reeds and covered in date palms. As the crew comes ashore at one of the villages, villagers welcome them with a traditional dance. They then board a gondola and travel further upstream.

Curator’s notes

Where the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet, the ancient site of the biblical Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge is located. Hurley relates to the landscape of the Middle East through biblical references from the Old Testament and historical references to ancient civilisations. The landscape shown in this clip is in modern-day Iraq – what used to be ancient Mesopotamia, the wellspring of civilisation, or ‘cradle of creation’. His travels through other parts of the region – including Iran (see clip one), Jordan, and Jerusalem in Palestine (now Israel, see clip three) – are similarly described in these terms.

By providing a reference point for these exotic landscapes familiar to a European or Western audience, Hurley was attempting to capture part of the world in a way that didn’t show the typical images of war. Hurley was appointed official war photographer for the Department of Information during both the First and Second World Wars and this footage was filmed during his second extended trip to the region. Its focus on the region’s people and its landscape is refreshing, if not a little romanticised.

Lauren Williams, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This black-and-white clip shows part of a travelogue of the Middle East made by Frank Hurley as he travelled up the Euphrates River on a paddle-steamer and observed at close quarters the life of the Ma’dan people of southern Iraq. It opens with a shot of his colleagues sipping tea in the shade before boarding the paddle-steamer. Local people, their villages and river craft are viewed from the boat. Music accompanies the clip including singing from a large group of dancing men. Hurley takes a small gondola to view the waterways more closely.

Educational value points

This clip shows part of what is possibly the earliest film of the Ma’dan, one of the most ancient human communities on Earth. Their traditional way of life, based around fishing, raising water buffalo and building boats and houses from the reeds, extends back 5,000 years. In the 1940s when the film was made about 400,000 Ma’dan people lived in the marshlands where the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers forms an immense delta region.

In the clip Frank Hurley (1885–1962) celebrates the life of the Ma’dan, also known as Marsh Arabs, describing them as ‘a carefree, happy and kindly people’. Included is a dance of welcome performed by men and footage of women watching the dance from a parapet. The Ma’dan people’s skill in adapting technology to suit their environment is illustrated in the mashuf, a reed canoe with an elevated prow that can push through the marsh reeds.

Hurley uses biblical references to help his audience connect with this part of the travelogue and to add exotic appeal to the location. The area of Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet has long been reputed to be the biblical site of the Garden of Eden. By referring to an ancient trunk as a remnant of the Tree of Knowledge and describing a scene from the boat as the Garden of Eden, Hurley establishes the area’s antiquity and gives it poetic appeal.

The music accompanying the clip combines authentic music of the region with Western music designed to suggest music of the Middle East. Orchestral music with ‘exotic’ rhythms and swirling strings and woodwind provides background sound for Hurley’s voice-over narrative. Men singing, percussive sounds and ululating voices are heard during shots of a large mass of men dancing. The sound of a man singing in Arabic accompanies the final footage.

Hardly any indication of the fact that the clip was filmed while Britain was occupying Iraq during the Second World War is seen in the clip. National flags hang from the deck rails of the paddle-steamer, which may also have been used for military surveillance. Britain was involved in armed conflict in Iraq in 1941, which gave it use of transportation and communication facilities. Hurley was in the Middle East as a war photographer.

Ninety per cent of the marshlands shown in the clip, calculated at more than 8,000 square km, were destroyed between 1970 and 2000 as a result of damming and drainage. The huge Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates River in Turkey, Syria’s water projects and Saddam Hussein’s program of drainage have reduced much of the region to desert and forced more than 200,000 Ma’dan people to leave the area.