The Mesopotamian Marshes, the Ahwar, are the wetlands of southern Iraq where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet, in Dhi Qar and the neighbouring provinces, drained on purpose in the 1990s and brought back by the people who live on them, and they are poled through in reed canoes past floating islands, reed halls and herds of water buffalo, in a landscape that the Sumerians knew. The marshes did not dry out through neglect: Saddam Hussein built canals to empty them after the uprising of 1991, and the Ma'dan, the Marsh Arabs, were driven out; after 2003 they broke the dykes themselves and the water came back over much of the old area, though the dams upstream in Turkey and Iran now decide how much of the spring flood arrives. The mashoof is the long, shallow canoe that a boatman drives with a pole, the only way into the narrow channels between the reedbeds, and the islands in the water are made, not found, layers of reed and silt piled into rafts strong enough to carry a hut, a family and several buffalo, rebuilt as the bottom rots.
The reed halls, the mudhif, are built of bundled reed columns tied and never nailed, with tufted tops, the same form that appears on Sumerian carvings of the third millennium BC, and guests are received in them with tea. Water buffalo are the currency of the marshes, swimming between the islands in herds driven by boys in canoes, and the fishing is done standing, one man poling while his partner spins a circular net out over the shallows in one motion. This is one of the great bird places of the Middle East, heard before it is seen: the marshes hold roughly half the world's marbled ducks in winter, and the Basra reed warbler nests in the cattail beds and almost nowhere else. The visit is made from Chibayish with a local guide. The Ahwar are a wetland that was killed and revived, and the canoe is still the way through it.