Mudhif: reed-bundle arch building of the marshes
Mudhif: arcos de haces de caña de las marismas
- Date
- c. 3000 BCE · confidence low
- Place
- Mesopotamian Marshes (Chibayish), Dhi Qar, Iraq
- Credited to
- Peoples of the southern Mesopotamian marshes (Ahwar)
- Field
- Tools
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A vaulted building made of great bundles of common reed (Phragmites) planted in the ground, bent and tied into parallel arches and roofed with mats. It is built without nails, fixed centring or dry ground.
Sumerian reliefs and vessels (Uruk, al-Ubaid temple) show vaulted reed buildings, but direct continuity with today's mudhif is an ethnoarchaeological inference; surviving examples are recent and many were destroyed when the marshes were drained in the 1990s.
What it led to
- reed architecture of tied arches recognisable in Sumerian reliefs and seals
- housing and meeting hall for wetland societies
- a model of light, repairable plant-based building