Mesopotamia is well known as one of the areas where intensive irrigated agriculture provided the food for early cities to develop. As people diverted river water to the land to grow food crops, populations became denser, and politics, arts, and culture thrived. Less well known perhaps is the fact that in the downstream region of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, what is today southern Iraq, an extensive wetland provided the resources for the development of a large community near or in the marshes. This region received unfortunate attention in the early 1990s, when in an attempt to defeat opposition to his rule, Sadam Hussein ordered the marshes to be drained. Currently, a large-scale restoration project by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) called “Support for Environmental Management of the Iraqi Marshland” is attempting to restore the wetlands and develop the necessary management procedures.

From the 1990s to the present, political discourse on Iraq has linked Hussein’s Iraqi government to weapons of mass destruction. In the booklet Wetlands of mass destruction: Ancient presage for contemporary ecocide in southern Iraq, Robert Lawrence France draws upon this same language to address the marshes. The product of a 2004 workshop at Harvard University on the marshes, the booklet includes several papers describing the recent struggles of the marshland peoples and possible ways in which to support them now and in future.

While preparing for the workshop, France delved into existing historical literature on the region and was “struck by the seemingly prophetic nature of much of the historic material” (p3). Although he acknowledges that one cannot simply use the texts of many years ago as a direct link to recent events, he includes them alongside the workshop papers. The result is rather fascinating. Texts of different times and genres, from ancient inscriptions to modern speeches, can be read in tandem. While there may not be direct links between the recent events and the ancient texts, what is clear from both is that the river and marshes are of vital importance for human survival. It is not surprising then that the water system became a source of power and a tool of power. Draining the marshes or diverting canals—either to flood cities or stop their water supply—was and is a very strong weapon indeed.

I must confess that I find the booklet a little confusing—even vague—at times, with all these different parts. At the same time, by positioning the different sources next to each other, one is forced—encouraged—to think about how these ancient sources on water as power reflect (or not) the struggles of the 1990s. As such, although the booklet was published in 2007, it still stimulates us to rethink how we should understand our historical sources. The present may indeed provide us with interesting questions in our study of the past.