I'm particularly interested in the area around southern Iraq between Ur and Kish. The area was called the fertile crescent and I've heard there was a lot of marshland, but I have no idea how to picture it in my head.
Was it mostly desert with areas of greenery and some marshy bits within a short radius of the Tigris and Euphrates? Was the entire area more covered in large trees that had strong roots hold the soil even when the rivers would flood or was it mostly fast-growing shrubbery that would get washed away with each flood but then grow again after?
And really, what did the floods look like every year? How far did the water reach and with what kind of force?
I don't expect all of these questions to be answered, but anything you guys can tell me about the general landscape would be awesome! Thanks a lot!
So first of all the Perisan Gulf reached far further inland in 3000BCE. Ur would have been on the gulf and was one of if the largest port in the region.
Mesopotamia is largely a vast alluvial plane bordered to the west by the sands of the Syrian Desert and in the east by the Zagros mountains and their strip of woodlands. In the south it was marshland like today or at least until the modern draining programs got to them. Think tall grass, reeds, a myriad of waterways and a generally rich environment.
The alluvial plane proper was and is fairly dry getting getting around 200 milliliters per year of rain. So imagine dry scrub land, brown loamy earth from the flooding and lots of date palms. Every few years Mesopotamia gets enough water for rain fed agriculture but it isn't predictable and often comes at the wrong time. Due to the lack and unpredictability of rain, irrigation was the only sure method for supporting water intensive agriculture and so the alluvial plane was dense with irrigation canals and where irrigated was rich with gardens and fields of barley, wheat, leeks, lettuce and palm groves.
Flooding occurs once every spring as the snow melts in the mountains of south eastern Turkey. Generally was not enough to top the river banks. Every 3 or 4 years though the water did break the banks and covered a huge amount of the region. During this time it deposited the sediment that made Mesopotamia so productive. Unlike in Egypt though this flooding happened just before the harvest season so it could be highly damaging to the agriculture of the region.
I'm afraid I don't really have time to go deeper into to it but I hope I gave you some idea. I'll leave you with a passage from William Kennet Loftus from 1857 which I think captures something of what it might have been like.
"In the former days the vast plains of Babylonia we nourished by the complicated system of canals and watercourses, which spread over the surface of the country like net-work. The wants of a teeming population were supplies by a rich soil, not less bountiful than that on the banks of the Egyptian Nile. Like islands, rising from a golden sea of wavering corn, stood frequent groves of palms and pleasant gardens, affording to the idler or the traveler their grateful and highly-valued shade. Crowds of passengers hurried along the dusty roads to and from the busy city. The land was rich in corn and vine."