The inspiring story of Marsh Arabs and their amazing sustainable floating homes, This town of floating houses, aka the Garden of Eden, the Mesopotamian Venice, or the Ma’dan, was a wetland area in southern Iraq. The name of these floating houses was mudhif, and their construction usually took place in less than three days. It is also important that they were built without using any nail, glass, or wood. Even the islands on which a house stand were made of mud and rushes. The Ma’dan, or Marsh Arabs, inhabit the marshy area at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. They are a semi-nomadic tribal people with their own distinct culture whose way of life has changed very little in the past couple thousand years. Their whole way of life revolves around the marshes — most notably, they traditionally build floating houses made entirely of reeds harvested from the open water and Qasab, a kind of giant grass that looks like bamboo.