Treasure on the Tigris

Life on a traveling circus can bring you to some really out-of-the-way destinations.  At two separate points in my carnie career I found myself working in Iraq, both times wondering what exactly I was supposed to be accomplishing there.  But the strange part is, having spent just about 31 months of my adult life in that country, I never really did get the chance to see much of the cradle of civilization.  From the side window of the circus train, during those long, dusty rides across the desert, I spotted at least a million or so date trees, but that’s about it.  At one point we’d actually pitched our tent about ten short miles away from the ancient city of Babylon…  but of course, the ringmaster kept making up excuses why I couldn’t pop out for an afternoon and go see it.

No, even though I did have the privilege to witness some impressive traffic jams in Baghdad, my time there was mostly restricted to a few areas.  Boredom sets in quickly for a writer, particularly in circumstances like that, so when I wasn’t honing my craft I took to pacing about inside the concrete blast walls, daydreaming of stumbling across one of Saddam Hussein’s caches of gold bars.  And while I never actually did discover any of the dictator’s mythical underground bunkers, while reading every book I could find about my host country, it was shocking to learn just how much cultural treasure Iraq really did have to offer.  

One neat place I never made it to was the city of Basrah.  Iraq’s largest port is just a short plane trip from the capital, and its strategic location has made the city a critical transport hub ever since it was founded in 636 AD.  The legendary Sinbad the Sailor was said to have launched his ships here, and during the Middle Ages, the city’s reputation as a center of culture and education earned it the nickname “Venice of the East.”  Over the centuries, all manner of commercial shipping has passed through the narrow waterways of the Shatt-al-Arab, headed out into the Persian Gulf, and the world beyond.  The area’s shifting, silty soil is world-renowned for its ability to cause shipwrecks.

With such a heavy volume of traffic, it’s no surprise that there are dozens of known shipwrecks in the area, and probably hundreds more which were never recorded.  Basrah is something like a mythical Garden of Eden for treasure hunters, but the problem with ancient shipwrecks is, they’re just so hard to find.  Commercial records are easily lost to history, if they ever existed in the first place, and modern-day seekers are left to chase ghosts from the past.  And that’s why I was so excited to stumble across this article, the story of a British warship thought to have gone down in the area.

Just in case you’re not the type of person who clicks on random Internet links, the story goes like this.  A team of construction workers in Basrah was excavating ground in order to build a new suspension bridge, when out of nowhere, they came across this large metal cannon.  The artifact was quickly determined to be of British origin, so of course, the project superintendent did his best to conceal the remarkable discovery.  (After all, if word got out then the ensuing archaeological investigations would certainly delay his work.)  Thankfully, Iraqis love nothing more than sharing a good piece of gossip over a cup of hot chai, and the word quickly spread.  Eventually Qahtan al-Obeid, the director of Basra’s Museum of Antiquities, caught wind of the find as well.  

Thanks to records from the British Consulate, al-Obeid was able to learn that the cannon came from one of two warships which had sunk in the area, victims of Ottoman gunfire in 1915.  These ships were noted to have been carrying mail, military supplies, and of course, a full load of Iraqi antiquities!  The cultural treasures were supposedly being removed from Iraq for “safekeeping” during the war, as was the practice at the time, destined for the British Museum or some other such institution.  Among the hoard were several massive stone sculptures of Iraq’s legendary winged bulls, each of them weighing several tons.  No recovery attempt was made on the two ships, and to this day, it’s entirely possible that they’re still lying there, undisturbed, down at the bottom of the Tigris River.

In my mind, at least, the coolest thing about this treasure trove is that while both ships are still technically lost, we basically know where they are.  The story has been validated by subject matter experts, as well the governments of both England and Iraq, so now it’s just a matter of going out there and finding them.

Simple enough, right?

And who knows?  Given the amount of time that’s passed, the flow of the river could have shifted so that these sunken ships might actually be hidden beneath solid ground today.  If that’s the case, then you wouldn’t even have to hire a dive team to go looking for them!  All you’d really need is a few hundred grand to hire a geological survey team, a couple dozen laborers, and a dude with a bulldozer.

So what about it?  Any readers out there know how to set up a GoFundMe page?  If so, get at me please, and we can get this expedition started.  Whenever peace and stability finally return to the Middle East, I want to be ready…