Wilfred Thesiger: 'The Marsh Arabs', London, Longmans, 1964,...

Hammer

£85

Wilfred Thesiger: 'The Marsh Arabs', London, Longmans, 1964, 1st edition, 3 maps + 110 b/w photographic illustrations as called for, original cloth gilt, dust wrapper (36/- price intact). Thesiger's classic account of life among the Marsh Arabs, or Ma'dan, of Southern Iraq, near where the Tigris and Euphrates River join - the traditional recognized site of the Garden of Eden. A remarkably in depth description of a unique culture and landscape that has grown in significance with the dramatic reduction of the marshlands by draining in the late 1980s and 1990s. Today only around 40,000 Marsh Arabs remain, having been forced from their homes; their economy and their environment devastated by the regime of Saddam Hussein