From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Reunion of the Eastern Churches with the Holy See

During my wanderings in the Near East, as during previous travels in Greece and Russia, a question of ever-absorbing interest to me was that of the long-desired and often-attempted reunion of the Eastern Churches with the Church of Rome. When I contemplated the majestic temples of Petrograd with their surging multitudes of pious worshipers and examined the stately convents and monasteries of Moscow with their vast number of devoted, God-fearing inmates; when I marveled at the shiploads of Russian pilgrims who at great expense and with great discomfort annually visited the Holy Land and noted the sumptuous hospices and shrines that their government has there erected for them; when I beheld the desecrated temples of Hellas and Anatolia and recalled how the Greeks, during long centuries of oppression and degradation—when they had everything to gain by apostasy—preserved intact the faith of the Orthodox Church and augmented that vast army of martyrs who sealed their belief in Christ with their blood—when I saw and recollected all this, there was the ever-recurrent question, “Will the fateful schism of a thousand years ever be healed?”

As we have already seen, the last reconciliation of the Orthodox Church with the Holy See took place at the Council of Florence in 1439. On this occasion, also, the Coptic, Abyssinian, Jacobite, Maronite, and Armenian Churches were wholly or partially united with the great Mother Church, from which they had so long been separated. It was then that the Uniate Churches already referred to had their origin. But as the reunion of the Orthodox Church had been based on political rather than ecclesiastical grounds it was of short duration, for it was formally repudiated by the Byzantines in 1472, nineteen years after the occupation of Constantinople by the Ottoman army under Mohammed the Conqueror.

But, although the reunions effected at the Councils of Lyons and Florence were so short-lived, the hope of an eventual and enduring reunion has always been cherished not only by the Latins but by an influential body of the Orthodox Church as well. It will suffice here to refer to two recent efforts to secure reunion—one of which was made by the Œcumenical Patriarch, Joachim III, a little less than two decades ago, and one made by Pope Leo XIII a few years earlier.

In a noted encyclical addressed to the divers Orthodox Churches, the Œcumenical Patriarch requested them to consider the question of reunion of Christendom. His courteous and charitable references in this letter to the Latin Church and his expressed hope that it and the Orthodox may again be reunited evince a man of a deeply religious spirit, whose sole object was the cause of Christ, which, as he conceived it, would be immensely advanced by the restoration of Church unity. But the replies which he received from the sister Church—those in communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople—soon convinced him that his efforts in the direction of the proposed reunion were doomed to failure.

In his famous encyclical Præclara—aptly called the “Testament of Leo XIII.”—which was addressed on June 20, 1894, to “Princes and Peoples,” His Holiness speaks to his wayward and error-bound children in words of surpassing tenderness and deepest paternal solicitude. There is not a word of reproach, not a single expression to wound even the most sensitive.[344] He refers lovingly to the East, “whence salvation spread over the whole world”; to the resplendent history of their venerable sees; to the Greeks who had occupied the Chair of Peter and had edified the Church by their learning and virtue. In his plea for reunion he declares: “No great gulf separates us; except for a few smaller points we agree so entirely with you that it is from your teaching, your customs and rites that we often take proofs for Catholic dogma.”[345] And referring to certain unfounded charges that had often been made against the Holy See, he declares in the most positive terms that no Pope has the slightest desire to diminish the dignity and rights of any of the great Patriarchates of the East. And as for their venerable customs “we shall,” he assures them, “provide in a broad and generous spirit.”

Had the occupant of the Patriarchal See of Constantinople been imbued with the spirit of his illustrious countryman, Cardinal Bessarion, who labored so strenuously for Church reunion at the Council of Florence, and had he been actuated by a tithe of the zeal and charity and love of peace that so distinguished the great St. Athanasius of Alexandria, there is reason to believe that the Sovereign Pontiff’s gentle and noble letter would have met a very different reception and that measures would have been taken ere this to terminate a schism which during ten long centuries has been so prolific of evil to untold millions of souls redeemed at an infinite price.

But, unfortunately for the Eastern Churches, as well as for the Church of Rome, Anthimos VII was then Œcumenical Patriarch. His offensive and abusive reply to the gracious and generous appeal of the renowned successor of the Fisherman shows that in character and zeal for souls and ardent love of the Church of Christ he was the very opposite of the great Pontiff whose overtures he so disdainfully and so ignominiously rejected.

Although the efforts to restore union which were made by Joachim III and Leo XIII were, apparently, completely ineffectual, there can be no doubt that they set people—both clergy and laity—to thinking, and that Church unity is now nearer realization than it has been for centuries. Thanks to more frequent communication between the East and the West, as well as to the all-powerful agency of the press, the people of the Eastern Churches are beginning to realize as never before the extent and magnitude of the frightful evils that have been engendered by the Erastianism and the Philetism which so dominate the Churches of Russia and the Balkans. They have learned that most of the hatred, dissensions, and race antagonisms which have so grieved and afflicted them may be traced to their lack of a central ecclesiastical authority and to the fact that their clergy have been forced to become mere tools of the government. Comparing their condition before the Great Schism with what it is now, they find to their sorrow that they are suffering from arrested development; that their boasted conservatism is but an euphemism for fossilization; that they have long ceased to be a living, active force, and that their only hope of regaining their erstwhile power and prestige is to become reunited with the Apostolic See.

Those who were familiar with the history of the past will recall the days when the eminent saints and scholars Athanasius, Clement, and Cyril of Alexandria reflected such honor on the Church in Egypt; when St. John Damascene and St. Ephrem were the glory of Syria and Mesopotamia; when St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Gregory Nazianzen were the great intellectual luminaries of Asia Minor and the revered doctors of the entire Church of Christ. And pondering these facts it may occur to them that had Photius been less ambitious and more religious he might now be numbered not among sowers of scandal and schism—

Seminator di scandalo e di scisma[346]

but among the great Fathers who were ever-zealous promoters of the good name and the sacred union of the Church Universal.

They will also recall the disillusioning and disconcerting fact that since the very beginning of schism, the Eastern Church, to quote the words of Dean Stanley, “has produced hardly any permanent works of practical Christian benevolence. With very few exceptions, its celebrated names are invested with no stirring associations. It seems to open a field of interest to travelers and antiquarians, not to philosophers or historians.... As a rule there has arisen in the East no society like the Benedictines, held in honor wherever literature or civilization has spread; no charitable orders like the Sisters of Mercy, which carry light and peace into the darkest haunts of suffering humanity.”[347]

So far as intellectual life is concerned they will find that the above words apply with equal truth even to the great monastic republic of Mount Athos, which, during the Middle Ages, was so noted a center of Greek learning. For, sad to relate, one finds even there the same intellectual apathy and decay as elsewhere, and its seven and more thousand monks are to-day as dead set against scholarship as when they indignantly razed the school which Eugenius Bulgaris, the greatest Greek scholar of the eighteenth century, had there established in their own behoof.

It is the recollection of all these things—“the remembering in misery the happy time”—combined with the kind and generous invitation of Leo XIII to return to the Church of their fathers, that has swelled the ranks of that long-existent party in the Orthodox Church known as the λατεινόφοροντες—Latin-favorers—who have always deplored schism and who would use all their influence to bring it to an early termination. This party, which has long groaned under the Erastianism of the Czar and the absolutism of the Sublime Porte, is only biding its time to seize an opportunity to return to its allegiance to the Pope. Professor Harnack, whose competency to express an opinion in this matter no one will question, declared in a notable pronouncement on the encyclical Præcala of Leo XIII that:

People who understand Russia know that there is a patriotic Russian party—or rather tendency—in the heart of the country, in Moscow and among the most educated people, that hopes for a movement of their Church in the direction of the Western Church—that is of the Roman, not the Evangelical Communion—who work for this and who see in it the only hope of Russia. This party manifests its ideas in writing, so far as circumstances in Russia allow, and has already shown that it possesses men of unusual talent, warm love of their country and undoubted devotion to the Greek Church. They have also considered how they shall reconcile Russia’s traditions and world-power with a change in her Church affairs that shall harmonize with the views of Rome and they believe in its possibility.[348]

If the Latin-favorers could now find a leader of commanding personality there is good reason to believe that the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches would not be far distant. Had Russia a pious and forceful monarch like her saintly Apostle, King Vladimir, or had Constantinople a Patriarch of the zeal and influence of St. Theodore of Studium, the great majority of the Orthodox Church, who know nothing about the origin of the existing schism, would follow such a leader without hesitation. And so slight would be the change in faith, in consequence of reunion, that the great mass of the faithful would scarcely be conscious of it. Their faith would remain exactly the same as it was before the schism.

And this holds true not only of the Orthodox Church but of all the other schismatic churches as well. They would, all of them, retain their peculiar rites and customs; they would hear the same language in the liturgy that has been consecrated by long centuries of use. The Copts would retain the presanctified liturgy of St. Mark and continue to use the venerable Alexandrine rite in the Coptic language. The Jacobites would celebrate the sacred mysteries in Syriac according to the age-old ritual of St. James. The adherents of the Orthodox Church would still hear their strange chant echoing “backwards and forwards through the gleaming inconostasis, while the deacon waves his ripidion over the holy gifts and the clouds of incense are borne through the royal doors. Still the people would crowd up for the antidoron and the kolybas, dive for the cross at the holy lights, kiss each other on Easter Day and dance for the Forerunner’s birth, while the psalms from the Holy Mountain would still sound across the Ægean Sea.”[349]

It is because the venerable eastern rituals and liturgies, in their several ancient languages, represent some of the most sacred traditions of the Church that Pope Leo XIII in his noted encyclical Orientalium Dignitas Ecclesiarum praises them so highly and applies to the bride of Christ the words of the Psalmist: “The queen”—the Church—“stood on Thy right hand in gilded clothing; surrounded with variety.”[350]

As I observed, during my travels in the Near East, the frightful ravages that schism has everywhere caused, and noted the growing tendency of many to return to “the unity of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God,”[351] I repeated with ever renewed fervor the supplication in St. Basil’s liturgy: Πãνσον τα σχίσματα των ἐκκλησιῶν—“Grant that Church schisms may cease.” And never did I in fancy more frequently hear reëchoed the touching words of Our Saviour before his passion: “I pray ... that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, in Me, and I in Thee; that they also may be one in Us.”[352]

CHAPTER XIV
NINEVEH AND ITS WONDERS

Here thou behold’st

Assyria, and her empire’s ancient bounds,

Araxes and the Caspian Lake; thence on

As far as Indus east, Euphrates west,

And oft beyond; to south the Persian bay

And, inaccessible, the Arabian drouth;

Here, Nineveh, of length within her wall

Several days’ journey, built by Ninus old,

Of that first golden monarchy the seat,

And seat of Salmanassar, whose success

Israel in long captivity still mourns.

Milton, “Paradise Regained.”

Wrapt in the crispy air of a bright October morning, we found ourselves on the shaky and crowded pontoon bridge that connects Mosul with the long-buried city of Nineveh. Horses and camels jostled heaving, shouting, unwashed Turks and Kurds and Arabs, who seemed to be constantly in imminent danger of being shoved into the swift-flowing Tigris. The variety of garb and multiplicity of tongues of the motley and vociferous throng on the swaying and creaking bridge strikingly recalled the clamorous and varicolored multitude that always crams the outer bridge between Galata and Stamboul.

How often, during our delightful sojourn in Mosul, had we gazed on the mysterious mounds on the eastern bank of the Tigris which were insistently beckoning us to visit them! And how eager were we to respond to the silent invitation and to explore the site of the once proud capital of Assyria! But we resisted the persistent temptation to interrupt our work in Mosul. We had there, with the assistance of the scholarly sons of St. Dominic, a rare opportunity of getting first-hand information regarding the social and economical condition of the people of this part of Asia and of completing our investigations, begun almost at the inception of our journey, respecting the various schismatic churches of the East. Not, then, until we had completed our observations in Mosul and coördinated our impressions, could we be induced to suspend our self-imposed task. We wished to have it completely off our hands in order that, once on the historic soil of Nineveh, we might indulge in reverie without let or hindrance.

When, finally, we were ready to visit the ruins of Nineveh, ours was the good fortune to have with us a learned Dominican of Mosul, who was as familiar with the early history of the famous old Assyrian metropolis as he was with the excavations which during the last two generations have revealed artistic and literary treasures that have been the marvel and the delight of the world. We could not have had a more intelligent or a more enthusiastic guide among the devious ways which led to the sites of ancient temples and palaces, whose existence was absolutely unknown until uncovered by the pick and spade of the archæologist but a few decades ago.

How strange it seemed to me, as we threaded our way through the maze of passages that led to the locations of once famous palaces and temples, that it was also a Dominican—a brother in religion of our guide—who first awakened my interest in Nineveh! That was more than three score years ago. And yet, so vivid was the impression then made on my youthful mind that it seems but yesterday when I first came under the spell of the famed lands of Assyria and Babylonia.

It came about in a very simple way. The Dominican in question—a dear, venerable man—had visited the Holy Land shortly before I met him, and took great pleasure in telling me his experiences in the East. Seeing that I was greatly interested in his narrative he gave me a large history of the Bible. It was not such a book, I have often since thought, as the average boy would have cared to read. But the good priest could not have selected a work that would have given me more pleasure—certainly not one that would have benefited me more deeply or influenced more profoundly all my subsequent reading and study. It was, too, I must add, the first book I ever had in my hands outside of my elementary school readers. But how I prized that book! And how I read it again and again, and always with ever-increasing interest and delight! I do not know how often I read it carefully from cover to cover, but I do know that there is only one other volume that I have read more frequently, and that, after the Bible, is my favorite of all books—The Divina Commedia.

How often I have had reason to be grateful to the good old Dominican who unconsciously directed my studies in such wise as to afford me life-long pleasure and profit! As a consequence of the repeated reading of the book which he placed in my hands I became familiar with the history of the cradle of our race long before I had entered my teens, and I felt quite well acquainted with Nineveh and Babylon when Athens and Rome were yet to me but little more than mere names without significance. And, although as I grew older, I became interested in many other subjects, I never lost my early love of sacred history or of the history and geography of the Near East. For no matter how occupied I might be, I always contrived to find time to continue the studies which had such a fascination for me in my early boyhood.

To the student of Assyrian or Babylonian history, nothing is more impressive than the first view of one of those stupendous mounds which are so frequent along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates and in the vast plain between Bagdad and Abu Sharein. But the impression is greatly intensified when the place visited is associated with the happiest days of one’s youth and when one may again dream the dreams that once afforded such exquisite pleasure and such delightful visions of long-departed glory and magnificence. This was my experience when I first set foot on the soil that covers the superb structures which, in my early boyhood, I had so frequently pictured in fancy that it almost seemed that I had really wandered through their sculpture-adorned halls and had been an actual spectator of the gorgeous processions which they had so frequently witnessed when Nineveh was at the zenith of her power and greatness.

I had been deeply impressed when I first ascended the hill on which stood Homer’s Troy, but my emotion was not so great as when I found myself on the crumbling ruins of “Nineveh, that great city in which there were more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons that knew not how to distinguish between their right hand and their left.”[353]

But this is easily explained. I was much younger when I became acquainted with the enchanting story of Nineveh than when I first conned the spell-weaving pages of the Iliad. My earlier impressions were more vivid and, because of the intimate relation of Assyria to the Holy Land, as exhibited in the Sacred Text, my interest was correspondingly greater.

As I contemplated the remains of the great city which had in tender years been so frequently the subject of my dreams and in mature age had been the subject of so much study and reflection, I found a thousand thoughts presenting themselves to my mind regarding the great capital which for so long a period played so important a rôle during the dawn of civilization.

The days of old return;—I breathe the air

Of the young world;—I see her giant sons

Like a gorgeous pageant in the sky

Of summer’s evening, cloud on fiery cloud

Thronging upheaved,—before me rise the walls

Of the Titanic city—brazen gates,—

Imperial Nineveh, the earthly queen!

In all her golden pomp I see her now.

No region in the world has a more venerable historic past than that vast territory enclosed by the Euphrates and the Tigris, and no city in this region, with the possible exception of Babylon, was for centuries the center of greater power and influence than Nineveh. According to the book of Genesis,[354] it was built by Asur, who came from the land of Sennaar. How long ago this was is a matter of mere conjecture. Its first certain mention occurs in the code of Hammurabi, who ruled over Babylonia in the twenty-third century before our era, but it was doubtless in existence many centuries before the time of this great Babylonian lawgiver. It is, however, certain that from the time of its foundation, it gradually increased in size and importance until it became the celebrated capital of the Assyrian Empire—an empire which at one time embraced the whole of the civilized world. But when it was at the zenith of its greatness, when it was feared and hated from the Nile to the Persian Gulf and from the scorching deserts of Arabia to the Hittite lands to the north of the Taurus, it suddenly, in 707 B. C., collapsed under the combined attacks of the Medes and the Babylonians led by Cyaxares and Nabopolassar, who left it a smoking ruin, where, according to the victors, “the words of men, the tread of cattle and sheep and the sound of happy music” were heard no more.

How execrated was the name of Assyria throughout the length and the breadth of western Asia, and how the peoples whom she had so long plundered and enslaved rejoiced when they heard of the downfall of her capital is made clear by the prophet Nahum when he declares:

All who have heard of the fame of thee [thy destruction] have clapped their hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually.[355]

But the Prophet Zephaniah, who was a contemporary of the stupendous event, gives an even more graphic account of the utter desolation which followed the overthrow of the far-famed metropolis:

And the Lord of hosts ... will stretch out His hands upon the north and will destroy Assyria and He will make the beautiful city [Nineveh] a wilderness and as a place not passable and as a desert.

And flocks shall lie down in the midst thereof, all the beasts of the nations; and the bittern and the urchin shall lodge in the threshold thereof; the voice of the singing bird in the window, the raven on the upper post, for I will consume her strength.

This is the glorious city that dwelt in security; that said in her heart: I am, and there is none beside me; how is she become a desert, a place for beasts to lie down in? Everyone that passeth by her shall hiss and wag his hand.[356]

How completely these dire words of the Hebrew prophet were verified is evidenced by the fact that when Xenophon and his Ten Thousand Greeks two centuries later passed by the mounds which covered the remains of Nineveh’s one-time magnificence, they were quite unaware of being in the immediate vicinity of the sumptuous palaces and temples of the erstwhile Queen City of the Tigris.[357]

Lucian, the Greek Voltaire, who was born at Samosata on the Euphrates in the second century after Christ, tells us in one of his satirical dialogues that all trace of Nineveh had disappeared. Representing Charon as on a leave of absence from the infernal regions, where he officiated as ferryman of the dead, and as starting with Hermes, the swift-footed messenger of the gods, who acts as his guide, on a short tour of this upper world, he gives us these two characteristic paragraphs:

Charon.—Show me the famous cities of which we hear so much down below: The Nineveh of Sardanapalus and Babylon and Mycenæ and Cleonæ and especially Troy. I remember to have ferried over the Styx so many times from this last place that I could not haul my boat upon the bank, or have it thoroughly dried for ten whole years.

Hermes.—Nineveh, O Ferryman, perished long ago and there is no trace of her remaining; nor would you be able to tell where she stood. Babylon is yonder city with the fair towers and the immense circuit of wall, but will soon have to be sought for like Nineveh.[358]

But, although Assyria’s capital was so thoroughly demolished, its name and fame still persisted. In the course of time a new Nineveh arose on the site of the ancient metropolis and, although quite unimportant as compared with its famous predecessor, it served at a later date to aid in the identification of the ancient site and to pave the way to some of the most extraordinary archæological discoveries of the last century.

The great Assyrian Empire came to an end after enduring more than a thousand years, and being, a great part of this period, one of the greatest powers of western Asia. Its downfall, after its long centuries of glory and preëminence, occurred while Rome was yet in its infancy and little more than a rendezvous of robbers and refugees from justice. From that date, 707 B. C., nearly twenty-five centuries passed over the grass and shrub-covered mounds on the site of ancient Nineveh before any serious effort was made to determine whether they concealed any remains of the long-buried metropolis of Mesopotamia.

Until the middle of the last century our knowledge of the history of Assyria and Babylonia was based entirely on the historical books of the Old Testament and on the accounts given by certain Greek and Latin writers. The books of Scripture which are of special importance in their relation to Assyrian and Babylonian history are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Nahum, and the Fourth Book of Kings.

Chief among the classical writers is Herodotus. He was not only, as Cicero calls him, the “Father of History,” but he was also the greatest traveler of his time. Not only did he traverse a great part of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, but there is a strong probability that he extended his peregrinations to the Euphrates and proceeded on its waters to Babylon. Making all due allowance for numerous inaccuracies which exist in his picturesque work and for not a few travelers’ tales,[359] the history of the brilliant Greek writer will always possess value not only for its matchless style but also for the facts which it contains and its descriptions, which are evidently from the pen of an eye witness. I refer especially to that part of his charming work which treats of Babylon and the culture of its inhabitants.

Of more importance was the great history of Babylonia written by Berosus, a contemporary of Alexander the Great and a priest of Bel in Babylon. Unfortunately we have only the fragments of this work which have been preserved by Eusebius, Josephus, and other ancient writers.

But the works mentioned, as well as those of Ctesias, Dinon of Colophon, and others, threw but little light on the civilization and achievements of Assyria and Babylonia during their long and eventful history. Detailed information respecting the development and decline of these two mighty empires was to come only from native annals of which not even the existence was suspected until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Nor was there before the beginning of the last century any certitude regarding the sites of the great Assyrian and Babylonian cities which had made such a profound impression upon the peoples of the ancient world. Although history and tradition still spoke of the grandiose palaces and temples of Nineveh and of the towers and hanging gardens of Babylon, the general ignorance which almost from the time of the Arab conquest had prevailed regarding the actual sites of Babylon and Nineveh was not removed until the illustrious Danish scholar, Carsten Niebuhr, proved that the site of Babylon was in the vicinity of the modern village of Hillah, and the noted English investigator, Claudius James Rich, demonstrated in 1821 that the mounds on the left bank of the Tigris, just opposite Mosul, covered all that remained of the famed city of Nineveh.[360]

But even after the sites of Nineveh and Babylon had been identified, it was yet to be proved that amid the ruins of these famous cities there were records and monuments which would shed light on the civilization of which they were once such noted centers. The potsherds and fragments of cylinders which travelers had found in and about the mounds of Babylon and Nineveh led scholars to believe that discoveries of greater value awaited the explorer. This conclusion was confirmed by the finding in various places of bricks, tablets, and monuments covered with strange inscriptions which were written in characters which are now designated as cuneiform.

It was not, however, until 1842 when the French Government—to which the world of science has long been indebted for intelligent encouragement and generous assistance in every branch of research—sent Paul Emil Botta to Mosul that decisive results were obtained. He was ostensibly appointed to fill there the newly-created position of vice-consul, but, as French commerce did not require the service of such an official at that point, he was really designated to act as the head of an archæological mission to Nineveh and its environs. His appointment, as subsequent events proved, was a red-letter day in the annals of Assyrian research. For, not long after his arrival in Mosul, the world was thrilled by the news of his marvelous discoveries in the long-buried city of Nineveh and the report that he was “sending home the spoils of superb ancient edifices to increase the treasures of the Louvre.... A city buried for more than twenty centuries offered its remains for comparison with the aspects of modern London and Paris; and the sculptured monuments of a bygone race rose up to offer a contrast with the works of modern art.”[361]

Three years after Botta’s arrival in Mosul, Austen Henry Layard began his memorable excavations at Nimroud, a short distance to the south of Nineveh. So successful was he in his work here and subsequently at Kuyunjik—Citadel of Nineveh—that he was soon able to send a larger and a more valuable collection of antiquities to the British Museum than that with which Botta had enriched the Louvre. Great, indeed, was the excitement in France and England when the treasures of the long-buried palaces of Nineveh were placed on exhibition and when people had before their eyes tangible evidence of that famed Assyrian capital which for more than twenty centuries had left no other trace of its existence than a name which was a synonym of fabulous wealth and magnificence.

In a work published shortly after Botta and Layard had electrified the world by their startling discoveries, a well-known English scholar, speaking of the unearthing of Nineveh, wrote:

More than two thousand years had it thus lain in its unknown grave, when a French savant and a wandering English scholar, urged by a noble inspiration, sought the seat of the once powerful empire, and, searching till they found the dead city, threw off its shroud of sand and ruin and revealed once more to an astonished and curious world the temples, the palaces, the idols; the representations of war and the triumphs of peaceful art of the ancient Assyrians. The Nineveh of Scripture, the Nineveh of the oldest historians; the Nineveh—twin-sister of Babylon—glorying in a civilization of pomp and power, all traces of which were believed to be gone; the Nineveh, in which the captive tribes of Israel had labored and wept, was, after a sleep of twenty centuries, again brought to light. The proofs of ancient splendor were again beheld by living eyes, and, by the skill of the draftsman and the pen of antiquarian travelers, made known to the world.[362]

Notices like this which frequently appeared in books and periodical literature had the effect of exciting widespread enthusiasm for the advancement of Assyrian research. Societies were organized for promoting excavations on a larger scale than was feasible for the first explorers, who were greatly hampered by the lack of adequate funds, and for giving due publicity to the work of the archæologists in the field. The results were most gratifying, for it was not long before explorers were investigating the mounds of Babylonia as well as those of Assyria.

Meantime, under the direction of George Smith and Ormuzd Rassam, the mounds which covered the site of Nineveh were made to yield further treasures which were quite as extraordinary as any which had been brought to light by Botta and Layard. A discovery by Smith of a tablet relating, it was supposed, to the Noachian deluge, convinced many that Assyrian archæology was destined to render incalculable aid in the study of Sacred Scripture. Although its apologetic value subsequently proved to be greatly overestimated by some of the more enthusiastic students of Assyrian antiquities, it soon became manifest that the new science was destined to throw a flood of light not only on the Old Testament but also on the history of the greatest nations of the ancient world.

We experienced special pleasure in exploring the mounds which covered the remains of imperial Nineveh. There was not, truth to tell, much to see which was either of interest or value, for everything of importance, that could be transported, had been forwarded to the museums of Europe as soon as they had been disinterred.

On the mound of Nebi Yunus—Prophet Jonas—we visited the mosque which the Moslems declare contains the remains of the prophet who preached repentance to the sinful Ninevites.

This mosque [said our Dominican companion] was originally a Christian monastery that was built in the fourth century by a disciple of St. Anthony of Egypt. He named it in honor of the Prophet Jonas, but when the building, long afterwards, came into the possession of the Mussulmans, it was converted into a mosque. It, however, retained its original name—Prophet Jonas—which it bears to this day.

The inhabitants here exhibit a flat stone which they guard as a treasure beyond price. “It was upon this stone,” they aver, “that the great fish deposited Jonas when it returned him to terra firma.” Since that time the stone is reputed to have the power of curing rheumatism by simply being brought into contact with the afflicted part. So highly do the natives prize this remedial agent that nothing could induce them to part with it. When we told them of the curative powers attributed to the Hittite stone at Aleppo they gravely assured us that the stone of Nebi Yunus possessed incomparably greater efficacy and that it afforded certain relief to all cases of rheumatism however malignant.

Although we were always interested in listening to the folklore of the Mussulmans of the Near East, we preferred on this occasion to stroll over the mounds beneath which were buried the remains of one of antiquity’s most celebrated cities and to inspect the localities where Botta and Layard and Ormuzd Rassam had made those famous finds which contributed so greatly to our knowledge of Assyria and Babylonia. Most of the excavations whence they drew such priceless treasures had been refilled with earth, but this did not matter. We had in various museums seen the valuable monuments that had been taken from them and were, therefore, freer to indulge in day-dreams than we had been when we visited Homer’s Troy.

Aided by the drawings of Place and Fergusson we found it easy to reconstruct in fancy the superb palaces of Sargon and Eserhaddon and Tiglath-pileser, whose names and achievements had so impressed us in our youth. In imagination we contemplated the colossal statues of winged lions with human heads, which stood at the portals of the palace of Sennacherib, and fixed our gaze on the marvelous bas-relief and sculptures—reminders of the frieze of the Parthenon—which adorned the vast halls and exhibited the monarch’s exploits in the chase and in wars innumerable.[363] We could observe Sennacherib himself standing on an elevated outlook of his palace and watching “the marching forth of the hosts of Assur and the smoke of their holocausts spreading over all the lands,” or pensively pacing a lofty tiled terrace which overlooked the swift-flowing waters of the Tigris and the broad expanse of the western desert illumined by the crimson glow of the setting sun.

But a more fascinating scene engages our attention. It recalls one described in the book of Esther,[364] in which King Assuerus is represented as having his annalists and wise men read for him “the histories and chronicles of former times.” Before us is Asurbanipal—the Grand Monarch of Assyria—surrounded by his scribes and sages and intent on the examination of a recent addition to the royal library. For, after many years spent in military campaigns in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Susiana, and elsewhere, he resolved to devote the remainder of his life to the arts and avocations of peace. Numerous temples and palaces in many parts of Assyria and Babylonia bear witness to his activity as a builder and to the magnificence of the structures erected to his own glory and to that of his gods.

But it was in his gorgeous palace at Nineveh that he had the joy of his life—that which was to perpetuate his name to the end of time. This was his library—the largest and most valuable collection of documents that the world had yet seen. Composed of myriads of inscribed tablets, they were fortunately made of a material—baked and unbaked clay—which, for more than two millennia, successfully withstood all the ravages of war and the elements. They treated of mathematics, astronomy, history, poetry, grammar, lexicography, law, religion—in a word, of the entire circle of the sciences of the ancient world.

Asurbanipal—an Assyrian Mæcenas—was not only the patron of scholars, whom he encouraged to produce new books on every branch of science and literature, but was also, as a collector, the worthy forerunner and rival of the bibliophilous rulers of Pergamum and Alexandria. He had his scribes visit all the libraries of Babylonia—the earliest home of science and letters—and had them make copies of all works of value which did not exist in his own library. So indefatigable, indeed, was the King as a collector that it is probably true—as has been stated—that he had in his extensive library a copy of all the books that existed in the numerous libraries of Assyria and Babylonia.

The discovery of Asurbanipal’s library surpassed in importance any that had ever been made in either the valley of the Tigris or of the Euphrates. But every tablet in this immense collection was absolutely a sealed book, for there was not anyone living then who was able to decipher a single sentence of those mysterious documents which had thus so unexpectedly been brought to day. When Layard, in the course of his exploration of the vast palace of Asurbanipal, first beheld the priceless contents of the royal halls of records, his emotions must have been like those of Shelley’s Alastor in the temples of Egypt, for

Among the ruined temples there,

Stupendous columns and wild images

Of more than man, where marble demons watch

The zodiac’s brazen mystery, and dead men

Have their mute thoughts on the mute walls around.

He lingered, pouring on memorials

Of the world’s youth; nor when the moon

Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades

Suspended he that task, but ever gazed

And gazed

on precious monuments before him which he knew full well contained

The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.[365]

The identification of the site of Nineveh and the unearthing of its long-concealed monuments marked the beginning of a new era in Oriental research. But nothing gave so great a stimulus to the study of all things Assyrian and Babylonian as the discovery of the precious library of Asurbanipal. For this wonderful collection of documents was destined to disclose much of the history, science, literature, and politics of the famous land bounded by the Tigris and the Euphrates, and to show—what would not otherwise have been possible—the relation of this land to the other great nations of the Near East.

But who was to decipher the cuneiform tablets which were thus so unexpectedly brought to the light of day? That was the question that was on the lips of everyone. Until this could be accomplished the countless books of the royal library would be of little more value than so many useless curiosities.

That the work of decipherment would eventually be achieved, scholars had no doubt. That the languages in which the mysterious inscriptions were written would one day be read with ease and certainty, all investigators were convinced. The achievements of Champollion in deciphering the hieroglyphics of Egypt and of De Sacy in reading Pehlevi gave an assurance that eventually the mysterious Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions would also be elucidated and that the long-forgotten documents of Asurbanipal’s library would then become the chief sources of our knowledge of the most ancient and most powerful empires of western Asia.

Nothing in the entire history of intellectual advancement is more interesting and romantic than the story of the gradual decipherment of those strange cuneiform inscriptions whose interpretation long baffled the powers of the greatest linguistic geniuses of Europe.

The discovery of the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions was practically the work of one man—the immortal Jean François Champollion. The decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions was the joint achievement of many men, laboring during many generations, in many and widely separated parts of Asia and Europe. It was effected by daring travelers and explorers, by philologists, philosophers, and historians, most of them laboring independently of one another, but all working, although nearly always unconsciously, toward the same goal.

And an even more singular fact was that the first clue towards the unraveling of the great enigma was found far away from both Assyria and Babylonia and in a place where an explorer bent on searching for it would certainly not look for it. This place was Persepolis, where are the remains of the splendid edifices constructed by Darius I, Xerxes I, and Artaxerxes I, the celebrated Persian Kings of the Achæmenian dynasty.

So far as known the first European to visit these remarkable ruins was the noted Franciscan friar, Fra Oderico, on his way to Cathay in the first quarter of the fourteenth century.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century Persepolis was visited by an Augustinian monk, Antonio de Gouvea, whom Philip III, King of Spain and Portugal, had sent as an ambassador to Shah Abbas the Great, King of Persia. Among the many things which attracted his attention in the old Persian city were the inscriptions which he saw on the monuments, which, “although they are in many parts very distinct, there is nevertheless no one who can read them, for they are not written in Persian, or Arabic or Armenian or Hebrew, which are the languages spoken in this land.”[366]

Some thirty years later Gouvea was followed, as ambassador to Shah Abbas from Philip III, by Don Garcia de Sylva y Figueroa, who wrote a letter on the monuments of Persepolis which attracted deep interest when published in Europe in 1620. In this communication he speaks of “one notable inscription cut in a Jasper-table, with characters still so fresh and faire that one would wonder how it could escape so many ages without touch of the least blemish. The Letters themselves are neither Chaldæan nor Hebrew, nor Greeke, nor Arabike, nor of any other Nation which was ever found of old, or at this day, to be extant. They are all three-cornered, but somewhat long, of the forms of a pyramide, or such a little Obliske as I have set in the margine: (△) so that in nothing do they differ one from one another, but in their placing and situation, yet so conformed that they are wondrous plaine, distinct and perspicuous.”[367]

But the first one to make known these peculiar characters to the scholars of Europe was the learned traveler, Pietro della Valle, of whom we have already spoken. And it was thus that this eminent Roman patrician had the honor of being the first of that long line of investigators whose labors have resulted in building up that comprehensive branch of science now known as Assyriology.[368]

From the time of Pietro della Valle the number of travelers who visited the ruins of Persepolis and wrote of the inscriptions which they saw on the ruins of this old Persian capital rapidly increased. But, although their published observations failed to arouse any special interest at the time, some of them deserve at least a passing notice for the quaint language in which the views of the authors found expression. Thus Thomas Herbert, referring to the inscriptions of Persepolis, writes:

Wee noted above a dozen lynes of strange characters, very faire and apparent to the eye, but so mysticall, so oddly framed, as no Hierogliphick, no other deep conceit can be more difficultly fancied, more adverse to the intellect.... And, though it have small concordance with the Hebrew, Greek, or Latine letter, yet questionlesse to the Inventer it was well knowne; and peradventure may conceale some excellent matter, though to this day wrapt up in the dim leafes of envious obscuritie.[369]

The Italian, Spanish, and English writers on Persepolis were followed by travelers and writers of other nationalities. Among these were Jean Chardin of France, Cornelis de Bruin of Holland, Engelrecht Kaempfer of Germany, and Carsten Niebuhr, a German, long in the service of Denmark. Each of these men made a contribution—small though it was—towards the decipherment of the Persepolitan inscriptions.

Chardin was the first to reproduce in his superbly illustrated work[370] an entire inscription from one of the monuments of Persepolis. This, to scholars, was incomparably more valuable than any of the fragments that had hitherto come to Europe. De Bruin, who visited Persepolis in 1704, and subsequently published a book with magnificent views of the ruins of the old Achæmenia capital, together with numerous inscriptions from its monuments, put more material in the hands of scholars than had any of his predecessors. Kaempfer advanced a step further when he published in 1712 a long inscription in Assyro-Babylonian.

But of the four travelers mentioned the one who performed the most important work was Niebuhr, an experienced traveler, an accurate observer and a man of broad scholarship. Besides making careful drawings and measurements of the monuments of Persepolis—monuments which in many respects were the most important in the East—he made copies of numerous cuneiform texts which had not appeared in any preceding work. His studies of the inscriptions also led him to conclude that there were three classes of them and that they were, as some of his predecessors had surmised, to be read from left to right. He had thus not only supplied scholars with new and valuable material but, by his comparative study, blazed the way which led to their final decipherment.

Among the first to attempt decipherment of these inscriptions were such distinguished philologists as Professor Tychsen, of the University of Rostock, and Friedrich Munter, of Copenhagen, and such eminent Orientalists as Eugène Burnouf, Anquetil-Duperron, and Silvestre de Sacy, who was the most eminent Arabist of his age. They did not succeed in solving the problem which had so long baffled the keenest minds of Europe, but they had accumulated the material that was necessary for its solution.

Several years before Botta and Layard sent their vast stores of tablets from Nineveh and Nimroud to the Louvre and the British Museum, it was evident from the few specimens of cuneiform inscriptions which had reached Europe from Mesopotamia that the script on the Babylonian tablets was the same as one of the varieties occurring in the trilingual inscriptions of Persepolis. It was then only a step to the conclusion that these two scripts were identical and represented identical languages. Thanks to the researches of De Sacy, Burnouf, Anquetil-Duperron, and others, it was now possible to make the old Persian script—the first class—of the trilingual inscriptions of Persepolis serve as a key to the third class, or what is now designated as the Assyro-Babylonian script. The process was exactly similar to that which enabled Champollion to use the Greek on the Rosetta stone as a key to the mysterious hieroglyphics of the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

But, although the method to be adopted seemed simple enough, the labor involved was incomparably greater than that which was required of the illustrious French savant. For the Greek on the Rosetta stone was a well-known language, whereas Old Persian, which was to serve as the key for deciphering the Babylonian script, was itself quite as unknown as the writing to be deciphered. It was only after a knowledge of Old Persian had been acquired by comparing it with Avestan, Pahlavi, and Sanscrit, that it could serve as the long-sought key to Assyro-Babylonian.

The first one to read an Old Persian word was Georg Friederich Grotefend. This was in 1802, when he was only twenty-seven years of age and without any knowledge of oriental languages. Nevertheless, he was, wonderful to relate, able “to solve the riddle practically in a few days, that had puzzled much older men and scholars apparently much better qualified than himself. Under the magical touch of his hand the mystic and complicated characters of ancient Persia suddenly gained new life. But when he was far enough advanced to announce to the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen the epoch-making discovery which established his reputation for ever, that learned body, though comprising men of eminent mental training and intelligence, strange to say, declined to publish the Latin memoirs of this little-known college teacher, who did not belong to the University circle proper nor was even an Orientalist by profession. It was not until ninety years later—1893—that his original papers were rediscovered and published by Prof. Wilhelm Meyer, of Göttingen, in the Academy’s transactions—a truly unique case of post mortem examination in science.”[371]

Notwithstanding, however, the attitude of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, scholars like De Sacy, Heeren, and others were not slow to recognize the importance of Grotefend’s far-reaching discoveries. The number of investigators in the studies of Europe and in the ruin-dotted plains of Persia and Mesopotamia gradually increased. The careful researches of Niebuhr were followed in the first half of the nineteenth century by the painstaking observations of Rich, Ker Porter, and Colonel Chesney. But while those noted explorers were winning laurels in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, Sir Henry Rawlinson “forced the inaccessible rock of Behistun to surrender the great trilingual inscription of Darius, which, in the quietude of his study on the Tigris, became the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of Assyriology and in his master hand the key to the understanding of the Assyrian documents.”[372]

While Rawlinson was conducting his celebrated investigations relating to the trilingual inscription of Behistun, and Layard and Rassam were unearthing the priceless documents of Asurbanipal’s library, Edward Hincks in Ireland, Edwin Norris in England, Eugène Burnouf and M. de Saulcy in France, Westergaard, a Dane, and Lassen, a Norwegian, both living in Germany, were astonishing the learned world by their wonderful contributions towards the decipherment of the inscriptions of Persepolis and Behistun and of tablets and seals and cylinders taken from the temples and palaces of Assyria and Babylonia.

Thanks to the investigators named and to a rapidly increasing number of others, the decipherment of Assyrian inscription was gradually assuming the dignity of an exact science. But there were still scholars of acknowledged eminence who questioned the validity of the system employed and who openly expressed grave doubts about the translations of the cuneiform inscriptions which had been published by divers scholars of Great Britain and the Continent.

Finally, in 1857, it was suggested to make a test which should silence all objectors and demonstrate that the method of the decipherers reposed on a scientific basis. An Assyrian text was translated independently by Hincks, Talbot, Oppert, and Rawlinson, and sent sealed to the Royal Asiatic Society. When these versions were compared by a committee of distinguished scholars they were found to show such a remarkable correspondence that there could no longer be any reasonable doubt as to the system of decipherment or the substantial accuracy of the four translations which had been offered to the distinguished committee of the Royal Asiatic Society.

But, notwithstanding this remarkable confirmation of the correctness of the method of decipherment employed by Assyriologists, there still remained a certain number of skeptics even among the most noted scholars of the age—men like Gutschmid in Germany and Renan and Gobineau in France—who refused to admit the conclusiveness of the demonstration which had silenced most other objectors. Even after the French Institute on July 15, 1863, had awarded to Oppert the coveted quinquennial prize of twenty thousand francs for “that work or discovery which is best calculated to honor or serve the country,” skepticism still persisted among certain Orientalists.[373] Indeed, it was not until the appearance in 1872 of the masterly Die Assyrisch—Babylonischen-Keilinschriften of Eberhard Schrader that general confidence in the prevailing system of cuneiform decipherment was firmly established and that all opposition to its methods was finally abandoned.

Seventy years had elapsed from the reading by Grotefend of his epochal paper before the Göttingen Academy to the publication of Schrader’s great work on the cuneiform writing and language. From the time of Schrader, who has been called the father of early Assyriology, to the splendid achievements of his illustrious countryman, Friedrich Delitzsch, who is known as the father of contemporary Assyriology, progress in the new science has been as rapid as the activity of its countless votaries has been enthusiastic. This is evidenced by the large number of cuneiform monuments which are now found in the museums of Europe and America and by the ever-increasing number of scholars who are devoting all their time to the study of Assyrian science, religion, and literature.

It is estimated that there are now, in the divers museums of the world, more than a half million inscribed tablets. Besides the immense number of tablets found in the great library of Asurbanipal, Rassam discovered in Abu-Habba, formerly Hillah, no fewer than seventy thousand. In 1894 M. Ernest de Sarzec took from a single chamber in the ruined city of Telloh, in the alluvial plain of Babylonia, fully thirty thousand tablets, while a few years later Haynes and Hilprecht to the north of Telloh, in the ruins of Nippur, discovered more than forty thousand tablets, which have proved to be of inestimable value to the student of the history, religion, and social conditions of the inhabitants of ancient Sumer and Akkad. Still other stores of tablets were unearthed by Banks at Bismya and De Morgan at Susa. Among the precious monuments brought to light by the distinguished French explorer of Susa was the important code of Hammurabi—the oldest compilation of laws in the world—the code by which Babylonia was governed at a period which antedated the Christian era by fully two thousand years.

But the inscribed clay tablets—some baked, others unbaked—are not the only monuments of value as sources of history which have been uncovered by the pick and spade of the excavator in the tells of Assyria and Babylonia. There are also seals, statues, cylinders, and bas-reliefs innumerable which bear cuneiform inscriptions of the utmost value to the historian and the man of science. There are even numberless uninscribed monuments which are also of immense historical importance. Such are the sculptured alabaster slabs which once adorned the palace of Sennacherib in Nineveh. These marvelous bas-reliefs exhibit scenes of domestic life, the peculiar garbs of men and women, of masters and slaves, of natives and foreigners with almost photographic exactness. They likewise show spirited representations of battles and sieges, which portray in the most lifelike manner the types of the combatants, their divers instruments of warfare, the punishments inflicted by the victor on helpless captives, and long processions of the vanquished bringing tribute to the triumphant monarch of Assyria.

Without the knowledge of a single cuneiform character [declares Professor Hilprecht] we learned the principal events of Sennacherib’s government, and, from a mere study of those sculptured walls, we got familiar with customs and habits of the ancient Assyrians, at the same time obtaining a first clear glance of the whole civilization of Western Asia.[374]

The foregoing pages show the extraordinary progress that has been made in Assyriology since Botta and Layard began their famous excavations in the ruins of Nineveh in the middle of the last century. But, although much, very much, has been achieved, far more remains to be accomplished. For there are, we are assured, hundreds of ruin-mounds and earth-covered cities in Western Asia awaiting the spade and the pick of the excavator to disclose treasures that will equal, if not surpass in value any that have yet rewarded the labors of the explorer. Even such important ruins as those of Babylon and Nineveh, where such splendid results have been obtained, have so far yielded, there is reason to believe, but a part, possibly but a small part, of their precious stores. For it has been computed that to excavate Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus—the two principal mounds of Nineveh—would require the labor of a thousand men working continually for a hundred and seventy-four years. “The recent excavations and tunnelings at Kuyunjik”—the Citadel of Nineveh—“fruitful as they have been in results, have made little impression on the vast mass of ruin, and only prove how much might be gained by complete clearance.”[375]

But as the work of excavation is still almost in its infancy, so is also that of decipherment and coördination of the myriads of inscriptions now in the museums of the world. For, notwithstanding the wonderful achievements of Assyriologists during the last three-quarters of a century, many generations must yet elapse before the vast amount of material which has been already collected and to which additions are being constantly made, can be properly interpreted and made available for students who are not professional Orientalists. As yet there is in Assyrian neither a complete grammar nor a complete dictionary, and, on account of the immense number of ideograms yet undeciphered and the astonishing number of polyphonous signs in the Assyrian language—signs which have each several distinct syllabic values—it is certain that many decades will elapse before the countless difficulties can be overcome.

Considering, however, the complexity of the problem which confronted Orientalists at the beginnings of their researches, it is, indeed, a wonder that their achievements during the last two generations have been so fruitful and of so far-reaching importance. For in a few decades they have changed completely our conception of the ancient peoples of Assyria and Babylonia and shown that their civilization “stands before us in all its ramifications as one of the great forces in the ancient history of mankind, the direct or indirect influence of which is to be seen in many a phase of our modern culture.”[376] They have proved that the Assyrian language was not only the speech of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia but that it was also long used as the language of diplomacy by the Hittites and the Egyptians and by the peoples of Syria and Palestine. More than this, it was a kind of lingua franca from the Euxine to the valley of the Nile and from Cyprus to the plateau of Susiana. This fact is most strikingly proved by the priceless collections of cuneiform inscriptions which, only a few years ago, were found in Tel-el-Armana, Egypt, and in Boghaz-Keui, Asia Minor. These finds are indications that there are other, probably many other, similar discoveries to reward the patient and well-directed excavations of the explorer in the ruin-spread lands of the Near East.

How often, while wandering among the ruins of Kuyunjik, Nebi Yunus, and Khorsabad, have I not had brought home to me the far-reaching changes in our knowledge of the Near East, which have been effected by the startling discoveries that were made three-quarters of a century ago in the palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib and Asurbanipal! But nothing impressed me more than the first question which Scriptural students always make regarding these discoveries, “How do they bear on the Bible”? It is the same question which has so often been asked about the revelations of geology in their bearings on the Sacred Text. Something is discovered which at the first blush is regarded as militating against the accuracy of the Sacred Scriptures. After further investigation, this same discovery is viewed as being strongly confirmatory of the Bible, while still more careful examination shows that the teachings of the new science not only do not but, by their very nature, cannot question, much less impeach the veracity of the Book of Books.

It is true that one’s view of the Bible may be enlarged with one’s advancing years; that one’s understanding of it may be improved by more profound study, and by the progress of research; but science, whether it appear in the guise of geology, or Assyriology, or of what has falsely been called the science of evolution, can never invalidate a single one of the fundamental teachings either of Scripture or of the Church of Christ.

This thought was borne in upon me with unwonted force as I stood one day above the ruins of Asurbanipal’s library. Gazing at a cluster of keleks—skin rafts—bearing their light traffic down the historic Tigris, as they did when Assyria ruled the East, and recalling the pictures I had formed of “Nineveh the great city” when as a boy I read my first history of the Bible—a book that was to exert so paramount an influence on the studies and thoughts of my after life—I asked myself, “In what respect does my faith to-day differ from that which I held three score years ago”? I had then, as Pasteur once said of himself when at the zenith of his fame and mental vigor, the faith of a Breton peasant.[377] Since that far-off time when I delighted to picture the glories of Nineveh and Babylon and dwell on the famous campaigns and victories, the superb palaces and entertainments of Sennacherib and Assuerus and Nebuchadnezzar, I have striven to keep abreast with the intellectual movement of my time and, in so doing, I have never found anything in any of the new sciences that could by any legitimate interpretation be construed as being at variance with the teachings of the religion of my boyhood. We now know incomparably more about the history, the social and economic condition of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians than we did before the explorer brought to light the literary treasures of Nippur, Telloh, Abu-Habba, and Nineveh; but we have discovered nothing which is competent to discredit any of the eternal verities on which our faith is founded. The higher criticism may, indeed, cause us to modify some of our views regarding literary or textual problems, but as to the basal truths of Scripture, they stand absolutely in all their divine immutability untouched and absolutely unassailable. It was, indeed, with a feeling of joy and gratitude that I could, sixty years after my first acquaintance with Nineveh, feel, while contemplating the ruins of the famous city, that there was still in my soul nothing changed of that faith of a Breton peasant—a faith which, as it was my most precious inheritance in early youth, has ever continued to be my greatest consolation from then to beyond the Scriptural age of three score years and ten.

That the discoveries at Nineveh or elsewhere should ever prove to be in conflict with revealed truth, has to me never seemed possible. How could they be? Science and religion belong to entirely different spheres of thought. They are as far separated from each other as are the theories of electricity, of the constitution of matter, of the origin of species, and of universal gravitation from the doctrines of creation, redemption, Providence, sanctification. For this reason I can now repeat as unreservedly as I did a quarter of a century ago that “I am as firmly convinced as I can be of anything, that God is the Lord of science, that science is the handmaid of religion, that the two, speaking of the same Author, must voice the same testimony, and that this testimony must be not only unequivocally true but also unequivocally one.”[378]

When, therefore, the eminent Assyriologist, Friedrich Delitzsch, tells us that “the conviction is becoming more general that it is the results of the excavations in Babylonia and Assyria in particular, that are destined to inaugurate a new epoch as regards both the way in which we must understand the Old Testament and the estimate we must form of it,”[379] we must tell him that our viewpoint will be unchanged in all essential matters and that, whatever may be the future discoveries of Assyriologists, all of them will eventually be harmonized with the Bible and with the fundamental doctrines of the Church just as science and religion have always been reconciled with each other from the days of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo to those of Bossuet of Meaux and Wiseman of Westminster.

CHAPTER XV
FLOATING DOWN THE TIGRIS ON A KELEK

When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free

In the silken sail of infancy,

The tide of time flow’d back with me,

The forward-flowing tide of time;

And many a sheeny summer-morn,

Adown the Tigris I was borne,

By Bagdad’s shrines of fretted gold,

High-walled gardens green and old.

Tennyson.—“Recollections of the Arabian Nights.”

The first thing we did on arriving at Mosul—even before we visited any of the places of interest in the city—was to make arrangements for our transportation to Bagdad. Had it not been for the late World War, the Bagdad Railway would have been completed to the famed city of Harun-al-Rashid and we could then have made the journey from Mosul to Bagdad in a luxuriously upholstered car or in the latest type of wagon-lit accompanied by a well-supplied and well-manned wagon-restaurant. In the absence of these we might, had we sought for one, have found an aviator who would have taken us to our destination in an aeroplane, for both aviators and aeroplanes were numerous in this vicinity during the war and there was reason to believe that there were still here both flying machines and pilots.

But we were not looking either for luxury or rapidity of transportation. Even if they had been at our disposal we should not have availed ourselves of these twentieth-century comforts and time-saving devices by which our western world sets such store. We had no desire to fly at express-train speed through the historic valley of the Tigris even if we had had at our disposition all the luxuries and conveniences of a railway president’s private car. We wished to study the country and the people and we desired to do so at our leisure.

The usual way to make the journey from Mosul to Bagdad is by land. Some make it on horseback, but the majority elect to perform it on the back of an Arabian or a Bactrian camel. A few, however, prefer to entrust themselves to the capricious waters of the tortuous Tigris. This route requires more time and offers, besides, a little spice of adventure. Both of these facts appealed to us and we decided—without hesitation—that our journey to the city of the Thousand and One Nights should be by the longest and the slowest and, as we were assured, the most venturesome way.

We chose also to go by the Tigris because I had always been specially fond of river travel. It has been my good fortune to navigate from source to mouth or from mouth to source many of the longest rivers of the world, and I was grateful for the opportunity to spend a week or more on one of the largest rivers of western Asia and one of the most famous in history. Another reason for choosing this route was the peculiar age-old craft that was to carry us to the famed capital of the Caliphs.

It was not a boat nor anything that even remotely resembled one. It was a peculiar kind of a raft which has been in use on the Tigris since the time of the early Assyrian kings, and which, notwithstanding all our modern improvements, still holds its own here not only for conveying the traveler to his destination but also for carrying freight as well.

The raft in question is called a kelek. It is composed of a large number of inflated goat or sheep skins which are kept united by reeds. Over these is laid a framework made of saplings or scantlinglike timbers which are held together by twigs or lianas. No nails or screws whatever are used. If the skins be continually kept moist and properly inflated, the framework of the kelek will always remain above water, even when bearing a considerable load.

Thanks to our good Dominican hosts, the work of constructing our kelek was specially expedited after the workmen knew exactly the size and kind of craft we desired. And to our great joy it was ready for us as soon as we were prepared to start on our journey down the river. It was fifteen by twenty feet in dimensions and counted a hundred and seventy-five inflated skins. In the middle of the kelek we had a good-sized tent in which we had two light cots, three light folding chairs, a folding writing table, ten pockets, and other things which occupy little space but which we found by previous experience contributed immensely to the convenience and comfort of the traveler whether on land or water. Most of our luggage, as well as our provisions, was left outside of the tent in care of our good and faithful Simoun, a middle-aged Chaldean who had been specially recommended to us by our Dominican friends and who was guaranteed to give us devoted and intelligent service. He took charge of everything on the kelek and looked after the kelekgis—rowers—cook, and the commissary department as well as our comfort and pleasure. Certain Greeks and Armenians had applied for the position which we gave to Simoun, but our experience with their countrymen had been such that we had resolved to entrust ourselves thenceforth to the much abused and little-understood Chaldean. For honesty, reliability, devotedness, a Christian Chaldean, like an Osmanli Turk from the interior of Anatolia, is, in any fiduciary capacity, absolutely unsurpassed.

When we actually found ourselves on our kelek, ready to depart for Bagdad, we felt as happy as schoolboys starting on a vacation. It meant at least a week of absolute rest—a rest which, after the strenuous lives we had been leading since we left Constantinople, was most welcome.

Besides the good fathers of St. Dominic, whose kindness during our sojourn in Mosul we can never forget, a number of the people of the city whom we had learned to know were at the point of embarkation to bid us Godspeed. We were specially touched by the presence of some school children with whom, from having frequently met them, we were on the friendliest terms. “Children,” said I to my companion, “are the same the world over. Treat them kindly and they will do anything for you.” I was then specially thinking of the little Indian children whom I had often met in the wilds of South America, and who, although they had never come into contact with a white man before, became, after a little act of kindness, my devoted friends and wished to be always near me. The Turkish children of Anatolia, the little Arabs of Syria, and the Chaldeans of Mesopotamia are, when kindly treated, just as loving and as lovable as the youthful redskins of the broad wildernesses of Brazil and Peru.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when we finally got under way. The last words I heard from my friends on the shore were those of a charming Osmanli youth who in a clarion voice bade us an affectionate good-bye in the touching Turkish words Allaha-ismarladiq—we have commended you to God. Again how like the fond adios of the good children of the South American hinterland whose parting words Vaya Usted con Dios!—may you go with God—so often cheered our souls during our long journeys over the snow-clad summits of the Andes or through the trackless forests of the Amazon and the Orinoco.

We started on our journey down the Tigris under a cloudless sky. During the early morning it had been quite chilly, but, as the sun rose in the heavens, the atmosphere became as balmy as that of a morning in May. All augured a pleasant voyage; and no sooner had the minarets of Mosul and Nebi Yunus vanished from our sight than we proceeded to give the interior of our tent as homelike an appearance as circumstances would permit. Simoun had decked the opening of the tent with some flowers that our kind friends had brought us. On our writing table we placed some of our favorite books. Among these was a small copy in India paper of the Bible which was in constant use during our journey in the Orient. Another was a small pocket edition of the Divina Commedia which, for years, had been my companion to the most distant parts of the world. There were also small editions of the Soliloquia of St. Augustine and of the select works of St. Teresa. I took these last two books with me because they, like Dante’s immortal poem, had been old and cherished friends in other lands and because they seemed peculiarly appropriate for such a journey as the one we were then undertaking. To these were added copies of Xenophon’s Anabasis, Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander, and The Oxford Book of English Verse. The other books I had brought with me I left in my trunk, as I expected to spend most of my time on our way down the river in contemplation of the many objects of interest with which both banks were everywhere studded.

A great part of the land in the vicinity of Mosul is under cultivation. Wheat and barley are grown in abundance. Hemp is also cultivated but more attention is given to cotton, especially along the banks and on the islands which diversify the river. Melons seem to be as popular along the Tigris as they are among our dusky population south of Mason and Dixon’s line.

Much of the land in this region is very fertile and, if irrigated as it was three thousand years ago, would yield harvests as extraordinary as ever in the past. But the countless vicissitudes, consequent on wars innumerable and on inefficient government, through which this ill-fated region has passed since the fall of Nineveh, have not been conducive to the development of agriculture nor to the economic growth of what was once the wealthiest country of Western Asia.

I have been on many rivers but I have never found so much genuine intellectual pleasure on any of them as on the Tigris. It has not, indeed, the natural beauties of the Hudson or the Columbia, of the Rhine or the Danube; but it has something that appealed to me far more than the attractions for which these famous waterways of America and Europe are so justly celebrated. Charged with the myths and the legends, the traditions and the historical associations of six millennia, it offers to the thoughtful student subjects for consideration that cannot be found elsewhere.

In contemplating the old classic streams of Greece and Italy, the Illisus, the Peneus, the Tibur, the Po—I always experience a kind of admiration bordering on respect. I am impressed not by the volume of water which they carry to the sea but by their picturesqueness, by the atmosphere of romance that hangs over them and by the venerable history in which they all rejoice. But when I gazed on the Tigris and its ruin-fringed banks, a surge of emotion pervaded my entire being and I was thrilled as by few other objects on earth. Under the name Hiddikel it appears as one of the rivers of Eden. To the prophet Daniel, who crossed it in his journeys to and from Susa, it was “The Great River,”[380] and on its banks he had some of his most remarkable visions. It carried on its waters the greatest fleet ever built by an Assyrian potentate. This was when in 694 B. C., Sennacherib inaugurated his campaign of devastation in Babylonia and when, with the aid of seafaring men from Cyprus and Phœnicia, he floated his boats to the lower Tigris and thence transported them to the Euphrates. It was during this ruthless war that he applied the torch to the great city of Babylon and left it with its magnificent temples and palaces and its splendid works of art—the result of long centuries of labor—a vast, smoldering ruin. It was along the Tigris that Xenophon and his heroic Ten Thousand returned homewards after the eventful battle of Cunaxa. This famous retreat revealed to the Greeks the weakness of the vast Persian Empire and led to its overthrow by Alexander the Great and to “the accomplishment of the promises of God, as made in the prophecies of Daniel, and prepared the way for the third of the great empires which were to precede the coming of the Savior of mankind.”[381]

As the evening sun was disappearing behind a gorgeous gold and crimson mountain range of cumulus clouds, we heard, a short distance ahead of us, the roaring of the Zikr ul Aawaze, a noted cataract about twenty miles below Mosul and we then knew that we were near the celebrated ruins of Nimroud. These ruins formerly stood on the left bank of the Tigris, but, owing to a shifting of the river’s channel towards the west, are now about two miles inland.

As we desired to visit the great tell of Nimroud the following day, we here tied up our kelek for the night. Early the next morning we were on our way to the ruins which, in the annals of Assyrian archæology, are almost as famous as those of Kuyunjik and Khorsabad. Here Layard unearthed some of the most prized treasures in the Assyrian department of the British Museum and here, there are reasons to believe, are still buried countless other treasures equally valuable.

The ruins of Nimroud occupy the site of Calah mentioned in Genesis as having been built by Assur, the founder of Nineveh. But the people living near by are convinced that it was built by Nimrod, “the mighty hunter before the Lord,” and that it was his favorite place of residence. Assyriologists, however, declare that it was built by Salmanassar I who made it the capital of Assyria, a dignity which it retained until the time of Sargon who removed his residence to the north of Nineveh where lie the ruins of Khorsabad.

The general aspect of the ruins of Nimroud is not unlike that of Nineveh. The ruins constitute a platform in the form of a parallelogram about five hundred feet in width and a thousand in length. At the northwest corner of this elevation is a conical tower whose height, according to recent measurements, is one hundred and ten feet above the surrounding plain. This is all that now remains of the imposing zikurat, or stage tower, that once dominated the great capital of Salmanassar.

In order to get a good view of the ruins, as well as of the surrounding country, we lost no time in reaching the summit of the tower. From its crest we had a view as interesting as it was replete with historic reminiscences. Our vision ranged over a region in which were enacted some of the most memorable events of Mesopotamia and Persia. Down the Tigris passed the famous fleets of Trajan and Sennacherib, and along its bank marched the vast armies of Esarhaddon, Cyaxares, and Nabopolassar. Within gunshot were the emerald waters of the Great Zab rushing to join the tawny current of the Tigris. On its banks the Persian satrap, Tissaphernes, in violation of a solemn compact, treacherously seized Clearchus and several of his generals and sent them to Artaxerxes, who ordered them to be beheaded. It was here that Xenophon assumed command of the memorable expedition of the Ten Thousand—an expedition that the distinguished English geographer, Rennell, has declared was “the most splendid of all the military events that have been recorded in ancient history.” Eastward was the famous battlefield of Arbela, where “the greatest battle in the record of the ancient world had been fought; where the issue of centuries had struck their balance in a day; where the channel of history for a thousand years had been opened with a flying wedge”;[382] where Alexander the Great had completed the work which was begun by his countrymen under Xenophon when they made the discovery of the innate weakness of the Persian colossus and thus prepared the public opinion of Greece for the great campaign against the ancient Persian Empire which once menaced all the nations of the earth with subjection but which “was irrevocably crushed when Alexander had won his crowning victory of Arbela.”[383]

After exploring the ruins of Nimroud, we returned to our kelek which, with much creaking and quivering, was soon wrestling with the boiling waters of the Zikr ul Aawaze. This is a dam or dyke built across the river and during low water rises a foot or more above the surface. It produces quite a cataract but our kelekgi conducted our frail craft over its seething waters without any difficulty. Like other remarkable works in this neighborhood this dam—some say it was a bridge—is attributed by the inhabitants to Nimrod. The noted French traveler, Tavernier, tells us that when he passed down the Tigris, the Zikr ul Aawaze formed a waterfall twenty-six feet high. He assures us, however, that his kelek went over this waterfall without mishap.[384] One may be permitted to suspect that in this statement he was striving, in recounting travelers’ tales, to emulate his mythical predecessor, Sir John Mandeville.

About fifty miles to the south of Nimroud, on the right bank of the Tigris, is the great mound of Kalah Sherghat over which, until a few years ago, hung as deep a mystery as that which so long enveloped the imposing tells of Nimroud and Khorsabad. To the Turks, in their ignorance, it was but a fort made of clay—Toprak Kale. Even so late as 1900 a distinguished German traveler was unaware that the wonderful tell of Kalah Sherghat, which so excited his admiration, covered the remains of one of the most noted cities of Assyria.[385]

It was indeed only after Dr. Robert Koldewey and Dr. Walter Andræ, the eminent explorers of the German Orient Society, had, in 1903, begun their exhaustive excavations at Kalah Sherghat that it was demonstrated that its imposing ruins were none other than those of Assur, the first capital of ancient Assyria. It was here that Asur, the national god of Assyria, had his favorite sanctuary—a god that was not only supreme over all the gods of the Babylonian pantheon but was also their lord and master, “the King above all gods.”[386] King Sennacherib addresses him as

King of the totality of the gods, his own creation, father of the gods.

Whose power is unfolded in the deep, king of heaven and earth, lord of all gods.[387]

As the national deity of the greatest military power of the ancient world, Asur was preëminently a martial god. For, as is evinced by cuneiform inscriptions, it is “by the might of Asur” that the nation’s enemies are vanquished, that towns and cities are razed, that other lands are brought under the dominion of the invincible Kings of Assyria.

Although I had read with exceeding interest, shortly after their publication, Andræ’s superbly illustrated reports of his careful and methodical excavations at Kalah Sherghat, I was not fully prepared for the wonderful ruins which greeted my vision when I first surveyed them from one of the imposing zigurats of the great temple of Anu and Adad, which was rebuilt by Salmanassar III, nearly nine centuries before our era.[388] As reconstructed by Andræ this temple was, in its day, one of the architectural wonders of western Asia. But the city of Assur was more than a thousand years old when Salmanassar placed in the great temple enclosure a record of his work on it and an account of its completion. For fully twenty centuries, B. C., Assyria, from Assur as a center, had begun to extend her dominions northwards and to lay the foundations of that mighty empire which was for so many generations the admiration and the dread of the ancient world.

Besides uncovering the temples and palaces of Assur, Dr. Andræ and his colleagues unearthed a part of its residential quarter. In so doing they made discoveries of the greatest interest regarding the domestic life of its inhabitants and their care for the sanitary condition of their homes. Every house, however small, had suitable sewer connections, while all the larger homes had rooms for domestics and dependents.

But to many students of Assyriology the most notable discovery made here by the German expedition took place not in the temples and palaces of the venerable city but in the space between its interior and exterior walls. This consisted in unearthing a large number of tombs and nearly a hundred and fifty stelae, some of which were made of sandstone and limestone, while others were fashioned out of basalt and alabaster. From the inscriptions on these stelae it was evident that no fewer than thirty-five of them were erected to the memory of rulers of Assyria.

Among the royal tombs were those of Ashbelkala, Ashurnasirpal III, and Shamsi-Adad V. The massive sarcophagus of the first-named king was found to be in almost perfect condition.

Commenting on this remarkable find Dr. Rogers writes:

This discovery of these royal tombs appeals most strongly to the imagination. Before this, Assyriology had seemed so poor in comparison with Egyptology which has from the beginning been able to point to its long series of royal tombs, nay, even to the mummied remains of the greatest of Egyptian Kings. There is no probability that Assyrian discoveries will ever be able to match these, but the reproach that neither Assyria nor Babylonia had even one royal tomb has been taken away.[389]

More interesting far than any of the royal tombs referred to is one of the stelæ that were uncovered in the same place. According to the inscription on it the discovery of this monument was really startling in its import and marked a most notable event in the romance of archæology. The legend which this stone pillar bears tells us that it is:

The stela of Sammuramat

The woman of the palace (that is, the consort of Shamsi-Adad,)

The King of the world, King of Assyria,

The mother of Adadnirari

The King of the world, King of Assyria,

The daughter-in-law of Salmanassar

The king of the four quarters of the earth.[390]

But who was Sammuramat? Surprising as it may seem, she was, as scholars now concede, none other than Semiramis, the famous legendary queen of Assyria.

What a marvelous discovery! What a vindication of long suppressed truth! What an unexpected substitution of reality for fiction, of fact for fancy, of authentic history for myth and legend!

To no other woman of antiquity have there been attributed so many brilliant achievements as to Semiramis. Nor has any one of her sex during the last two thousand years and more, occupied a more conspicuous position in myth and legend, song and story.

From the time of Ctesias, the physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, until the latter part of the last century, there was no question about the main facts of her marvelous career. During all this time she was regarded as one of the most notable rulers of antiquity—as a queen of consummate military ability and exceptional statesmanship; as a ruler of vaulting ambition and as a conqueror whose dominions embraced the most flourishing regions of Asia and Africa. So great indeed was her reputed activity and genius that Strabo tells us tradition attributed to her all the most stupendous works along the Tigris and the Euphrates and even those in distant Iran.[391] Alexander the Great, it is said, found an inscription of hers on the frontier of Scythia, which was then considered the boundary of the inhabited world. In this inscription the famous queen declares:

Nature has given me the body of a woman but my achievements have made me the equal of the most valiant of men. I have ruled the empire of Ninus which on the east extends to the river Hinamanes, on the south to the country of incense and myrrh, and on the north as far as the Sacæ and the land of Sogdiana. Before me no Assyrian had seen any of the seas; I have seen four of them which were so distant that no one had ever reached them. I have forced rivers to flow where I wished them to, and I have wished them to flow only where they would be useful. I have rendered the sterile earth fecund by irrigating them with these rivers. I have erected impregnable fortresses. With iron I have made roads through impassable rocks. I have constructed for my chariots highways through places which the wild beasts themselves had never traversed. And in the midst of these occupations I have found time for my amusements and my pleasures.[392]

Zenobia and Cleopatra were distinguished for their beauty, their genius, and the brilliancy of their achievements, but, according to the testimony of Ctesias, Diodorus Siculus, and other ancient historians, they were completely eclipsed by the wonder-working queen of Assyria. So great, tradition had it, were her abilities as a sovereign that two thousand years after her time the most eminent female rulers of their age were named after this extraordinary woman who had so impressed her personality on the West as well as on the East. Thus it is that Catherine II of Russia, who was almost the rival of Peter the Great, is known as the Semiramis of the North, while the same epithet is given to that remarkable sovereign, Queen Margaret de Valdemar of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

But when, in the second half of the last century, Orientalists began to decipher the cuneiform inscriptions of Western Asia, the majority of them soon showed a marked skepticism regarding the historical character of the renowned Assyrian queen. It was contended that there was no mention of her name in the Babylonian records during the period in which she was supposed to have lived and that the silence of these records respecting a ruler who, according to ancient writers, played so important a rôle in antiquity was conclusive proof that she never existed. It was furthermore asseverated that the work of Ctesias, which for so many centuries had been accepted as sober history, was no more than a romantic narrative which the progress of Assyrian research had completely discredited. And Semiramis, it was further averred, was not a woman of flesh and blood at all but an entirely mythical character,—merely a creation of Ctesias and having no existence outside of his elaborate romance which for more than two thousand years passed as serious history.

But scholars, while denying that Semiramis was the human personage she was so long believed to be, were unwilling to concede that she was nothing more than a mere arbitrary creation of the fertile imagination of a Greek romancer posing as a historian. The assumption that she was nothing more than a creature of fancy would, in view of her conspicuous position in the ancient world, be more difficult of acceptance than the age-old belief that she was really, as so long considered, the great queen and conqueror of Western Asia.

If, then, she was neither a human being nor a mere figment of the imagination, what was she? Scholars, and especially Orientalists, felt the necessity of finding a plausible, if not a satisfactory, answer to this question which became daily more and more insistent. To obtain such an answer they ransacked, as never before, oriental history, mythology, and archæology and with results which, at least to themselves, seemed beyond question.

Semiramis [declares an eminent Orientalist] is not a human personage, but a divinity whom legend, as so often happens in similar cases, transports into the domain of human affairs. Diodorus says formally that she was adored as a goddess and declares that her cult had two principal seats, Assyria and the city of Ascalon in Philistia.... That she was, of a truth, a goddess is evinced by her being the daughter of Derceto as well as by the traditions respecting her birth and by her final metamorphosis, which have all a distinctly mythological color.[393]

Another distinguished Orientalist is positive that “Semiramis was the name not of a human queen but of the goddess Istar whose legend was nationalized by the Persian historians and their Greek followers.”[394] “The name of Semiramis,” he will have it, “belongs not to Babylonian history but to Greek Romance.”[395] He accentuates this statement when he asserts that Ctesias, the creator of Semiramis, who is only the Greek Aphrodite, based his history in great measure on Persian annals which “like those of Firdusi or of later Arabian writers consisted for the most part of mere legendary tales and rationalized myths,” in which we have to seek “not the history but the mythology of the Babylonians.”[396]

Another noted scholar writes a learned paper to prove that “Semiramis is not an historical queen whose legend was enriched in later times with elements borrowed from a religious myth,” but that “she is primarily a goddess, and becomes a quasi-historical queen only by virtues of that euhemerism which in the East is so much older than Euhemerus.”[397]

For several decades these and other distinguished scholars endeavored to account for the origin and exploits of Semiramis in a way that would relieve them from the necessity of conceding that she was either an arbitrary creation of Ctesias or, as historians so long taught, an actual Assyrian queen. Insisting that the character of Semiramis is unmistakably that of the Semitic Ishtar or Astarte, some accounted for her historical character by assuming that she was but an eastern myth translated into “the semblance of a history that would be creditable to the Greeks.” Others maintained that she was the daughter of the fish-goddess Derceto, while still others quite as vigorously contended that “the legend of Semiramis originated in Lydia,” whence it found its way to Persia where Persian imagination transformed the daughter of a fish-goddess into a Babylonian queen. Then again it was asserted that the Semiramis legend arose from the commingling of exaggerated accounts of a royal Assyrian lady named Sammurat and certain myths regarding the Assyro-Babylonian Ishtar and the Canaanite Astoreth. To this Semiramis, as to the great Sesostris of Egypt, the Greeks in course of time assigned most of the stupendous works in Asia Minor which were of Hittite or Assyrian origin. Smith, as the result of an exhaustive investigation, comes to the conclusion that “Semiramis is a name and form of Astarte and the story of her conquests in Upper Asia is a translation into the language of political history of the diffusion and victories of her worship in that region.”[398]

But while Orientalists were cudgeling their brains in the vain endeavor to solve the problem on which they had wasted so much midnight oil, Dr. Andræ and his associates of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft unexpectedly made their astounding discovery among the ruins of Assur. By a single stroke of the pick they nullified the carefully constructed theories of nearly a half century and proved beyond peradventure that the romantic and mysterious Semiramis was neither an Aramæan goddess, nor the arbitrary creation of a Persian poet, nor the figment of a Greek romancer, but an actual personality who was closely related to some of the best known sovereigns of Assyria. As the wife of Shamsi-Adad V and the mother of Adadinari IV and the daughter-in-law of Salmanassar III, who reigned over Assyria from B.C. 860 to 826, the place of Semiramis in history is henceforth as certain and as fixed as is that of Sargon II or Tiglath-pileser IV, two of the most brilliant monarchs who ever presided over the destinies of the vast empire of Assyria when in the apogee of her power and splendor.

That romance has so long been busy with the name of Semiramis as to leave small space for history; that the myths about Derceto and Astarte and Ashtaroth were in the course of ages attached to the Assyrian palace lady who made so great an impression on her contemporaries is not an exceptional occurrence. Similar myths and romances have clustered about the names of Alexander the Great, about Charlemagne, about Harun-al-Rashid, about Frederick Barbarossa, about Dietrich von Bern, and other notabilities of ancient and mediæval times.[399]

But the veils of myth and legend and romance, which have so long enveloped the commanding personality of Semiramis, are finally torn away and reveal a woman, like her namesake of Russia, of rare ability and forcefulness, and that at a time when and in a land where participation in public affairs on the part of women was absolutely taboo.[400]

I have dwelt somewhat at length on the fascinating romance of Semiramis because it is so interesting an illustration of the extraordinary progress which the new science of Assyriology has made during the last few decades; because it illustrates how difficult it is in the annals of the nations of western Asia to separate myth and legend from authentic history; because it shows how gradually we are acquiring a more thorough and exact knowledge of the great empires of Assyria and Babylonia than was possible for a Berosus or a Herodotus to obtain; and, lastly, because it exhibits in bold relief the importance of the work which the Germans, especially the members of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft, have for years been quietly accomplishing in the valley of the Tigris from the source of this storied river in the highlands of Kurdistan to the alluvial plains of ruin-besprent Babylonia.

The first two days after leaving Assur we found but little along the river to attract us from our smoothly-gliding kelek. We encountered, it is true, occasional eddies, or reaches in the river where the current was more rapid than usual, or where small islands were so numerous that navigation was somewhat intricate, but we rather enjoyed this as it roused our crew from their habitual lethargy and from their chronic disposition to spend all their time in kaif. We also met with quite a number of breakers which extended across the river, but none of them were so violent as that of the Zikr ul Aawaze. Many have maintained that the largest of these rapids are due to the ruins of bridges that spanned the Tigris in ancient times, but it seems more probable that they were caused by the ruins of dams which were constructed by the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia “to insure a constant supply of water to the innumerable canals which spread like a network over the surrounding country.” This seems clear from what Strabo says of them, although he himself seems to think that they were built to prevent hostile fleets from ascending the rivers of Mesopotamia and Susiana.

The Persians [he writes], through fear of incursions from without and for the purpose of preventing vessels from ascending these rivers, constructed artificial cataracts. Alexander on arriving there destroyed as many of them as he could, those particularly on the Tigris from the sea to Opis.[401] [He declared that] such devices were unbecoming to men who are victorious in battle and, therefore, he considered this means of safety unsuitable for him and, by easily demolishing the laborious work of the Persians, he proved in fact that what they thought a protection was unworthy of the name.[402]

A short distance below Assur we passed the embouchure of the little Zab whose clear mountain waters were in strong contrast with the flood of the turbid Tigris. Near the confluence of these two rivers were located the Median villages of Parysatis, the wife of Darius and mother of Cyrus the Younger. These villages had, according to a Persian custom, been bestowed upon the queen by the king for her girdle—that is for the purchase of personal apparel and ornaments. How generous the Persian monarchs were in supplying their wives with pin money!

The scenery below the Little Zab differed but little from that round about Assur—an arid plain on the left and a low range of yellow hills on the right. The Arabs call them mountains—Jebel Hamrin and Jebel Makhul—but they scarcely deserve such an exalted appellation. In a recess of Jebel Makhul are the remains of a stronghold that reminds one of similar ruins along the Danube. It is called Kalat Makhul—the Castle of the Maiden. According to an Arabian legend, this was the citadel of the warlike daughter of a giant, who was the terror of all who sailed down the river. Near by was the citadel—Kalat el Gebbar—of her giant father. The legend apparently recalls the time when these strongholds were occupied by bandits who, like the old robber barons of the Rhine and the Danube, formerly levied tribute on all the passing keleks or who despoiled their owners of all they possessed. These brigands are said to have infested certain reaches of the Tigris as late as a third of a century ago, but, although the traveler is still warned against them, they seem to have changed their scene of operations to fields where they would not be so much harassed by government soldiery.

A few miles below the Giant’s Castle, the river becomes much narrower and swifter, for it here cuts through the sandstone chain of hills called Jebel Hamrin which, on the left bank of the Tigris, continues in a southeasterly direction until it unites with the one of the rugged spurs which juts out from the mountains of Luristan. This narrow section of the river through the range of Jebel Hamrin, which is locally known as El Fatha—the aperture—is interesting because it is on the boundary between the vilayets of Mosul and Bagdad, and because it once marked a point on the natural frontier between Assyria and Babylonia.

Outside of Nimroud and Assur, there is little during the first half of the journey to Bagdad to claim one’s attention except the numerous Kurd villages, composed of squalid stone and mud houses and frequent groups of black tents occupied by various tribes of Arabs. Around the Arabian encampments one sees occasionally quite large flocks of sheep and, in the vicinity of the stone and mud villages of the Kurds, one will note the feeble attempts which its inhabitants make to cultivate the land. Considering the primitive methods of irrigation that exist here, one is not surprised to find that the poor husbandman’s return for his labor is very small. In marked contrast, however, to the unpromising grain fields on the arid plains were the luxurious fields of Indian corn in the small islands which dotted the Tigris.

During the entire journey between Mosul and Bagdad one is never long out of sight of ruins of some kind or other—ruins of old strongholds, ruins of monuments to Moslem saints, ruins of mosques and minarets, ruins of towns and cities long since deserted or destroyed by the ruthless invader. They certainly give the country a most desolate appearance, but they, at the same time, tell in the most eloquent fashion how great must have been the wealth and prosperity of this ill-fated country in the palmiest days of the great Caliphs and during the reigns of the wise and beneficent monarchs of the Sassanidæ and the Achæmenidæ.

However rich the flora and fauna may formerly have been along the Tigris, there is now visible but little of either. Older travelers speak of the long stretches of woodland along the river. Now one sees little more than small clumps of Acacia and Glycyrrhiza here and there and even these seem to be rapidly disappearing.

Wild fowl are said to be abundant, but during the first half of our journey on the Tigris we saw only a few shy francolins, pelicans, and cormorants. Farther down the river, however, the number of fowl appreciably augmented. Among them were some snipe and a beautiful species of duck with snowy-white plumage. Singing birds were exceedingly rare.

According to early travelers, large game formerly abounded the whole way from Nineveh to Bagdad. Thus Jean de Thévenot in his entertaining work on the Levant assures us that in the vicinity of El Fatha, lions were as numerous as sheep elsewhere—des lions—que l’on y voit en aussi grande quantité que des moutons ailleurs.[403] He tells us particularly of an extraordinarily large and powerful lion which took a man from every caravan—except his own—that ventured to pass by that terrible place. That his caravan escaped the payment of the tribute exacted by the ferocious brute from all others, was, he opined, something glorious—ce qui devoit être bien glorieux pour la noire qui ne lui paia point ce tribut.

Judging by the precautions which, he informs us, he was continually obliged to take against these feral terrors of the desert, Thévenot was as much obsessed by them as he was by the hot and poisonous wind which, he avers, was such a deadly menace in the valley of the Tigris. This consuming wind is, he declares, the same as the ventus urens—burning wind—mentioned in the twenty-seventh chapter of the book of Job and prevails during the summer all the way from Mosul to Surat in distant India and is so fatal that if one inhales it one instantly drops dead, and his corpse immediately becomes as black as ink, and, if one touches it, the flesh falls from the bones.[404]

But these are only samples of travelers’ tales that have been current regarding the East and its scorching atmosphere since the days of Strabo.[405] It is, therefore, quite evident that Thévenot did not purpose to allow his predecessors, including his countryman Tavernier, not to mention others, to enjoy a complete monopoly in the recounting of wonders and adventures.

In addition to stories about the poison wind—the Samum of the Arabs—most travelers in the desert have something to say about the huge, yellow sand pillars that are sometimes seen scudding over the plain on the wings of the whirlwind. They are at times a positive menace to travelers and to the natives are objects of terror. According to Arab superstition they are “Jinnis of the Waste which cannot be caught, a notion arising,” Burton tells, “from the fitful movements of the electrical wind-eddy that raises them.”[406]

The first place at which we stopped after entering the vilayet of Bagdad, which embraces the northern part of old Babylonia, was Tekrit. Although modern Tekrit is little more than a wretched village, the Tekrit of mediæval times, as is evinced by the vast area covered by rubbish and ruins, was a large and flourishing city. Writing of the modern town, Rich says its atmosphere “seems to be favorable to prosers, as the saying, ‘To talk like Tekreetli,’ which is common in these parts, apparently indicates.” To this statement he adds, “If the women exceed the men in this gift, in the due proportion of the sex, he is to be pitied who marries a Tekreetli wife.”[407]

The German traveler, Baron von Thielmann, in the account of his journey down the Tigris, gives his impression of the town in a single sentence: “As for ourselves we saw nothing worth noticing in this miserable abode save two solitary palm-trees, the first which we had met with.”[408] Incidentally, he quotes as a statement of Karl Ritter, the celebrated geographer, “the striking remark that the furthest palm-tree in the East always denotes the limit of Arab sway and Arab life.”

But, if modern Tekrit possesses little of interest for the traveler, the ancient city, long in ruins, still breathes proud memories of the distant past. Once known as “Tekrit the Blest,” it was the seat of the Monophysite metropolitan and a center whence missionaries of the Monophysite church radiated in all directions. It was also the birthplace of Saladin, one of the most celebrated of oriental sovereigns, the famous adversary of Richard Cœur de Lion, the Moslem warrior whose chivalry and generosity were the admiration of the Crusaders and whose memory has lived in history and romance from the appearance of the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi and the masterly Historia Hierosolymitana of William of Tyre to the days when Lessing in his Nathan der Weise and Scott in his Talisman gave those matchless portraits of the chivalrous sultan, which made the name of Saladin a household word throughout the whole of Christendom. The valley of the Tigris can point to many illustrious sons, but to none whose achievements were more brilliant than those of the immortal Kurd who, by reason of his gentleness, courtesy, and nobility of character, his justice, truthfulness, and generosity has been signalized in The Tales of a Minstrel of Rheims as “the best prince that ever was in pagandom,” and who, on account of his kingly liberality, is given a place by Dante[409] in company with such illustrious men as Alexander the Great, the good King of Castile, the good Marchese of Monferrato, the good Count of Toulouse, Bertran of Born, and Galasso of Montefeltro.” And, although the poet condemns Mohammed to the frightful punishment meted out to schismatics in the ninth bolgia of hell, he honors Saladin by placing him in the noble castle of Limbo where—senza martiri—without torments—he associates with Cæsar and Brutus, Lucretia and Cornelia and other illustrious heroes and heroines of antiquity.[410]

Although Tekrit is in ruins and has been since it was visited by the fell destroyer Timur, it will still continue to occupy a place in the annals of our race because it was here that the baby eyes of Saladin first opened on the bright, blue sky which canopied the broad lands of which he was in manhood’s prime to become the humane conqueror and the wise and beloved sovereign.

Below Tekrit the Tigris gradually widens and deepens, while the velocity of the river’s current becomes markedly less. Obstructions to navigation rapidly diminish in number and we are able to sail on an even keel—if one can say this of a craft that is keelless.

Our progress down the Tigris, as we foresaw before embarking at Mosul, was exceedingly slow. It rarely exceeded three miles an hour while it was often less than one. As the fall of the river between Mosul and Bagdad, a distance of three hundred and sixty miles, is less than seven hundred feet, there is an average fall of less than two feet to the mile. The Tigris is said to have been named on account of the swiftness of its current, from the Persian word for arrow. The Hebrew name of the river—Hiddekel—also means arrow. Judging, however, from the actual velocity of the river, this name, if not originally given because of some of its northern rapids, is a very apparent misnomer.

Although we had four kelekgis—two for the day and two for the night—their chief occupation was not to propel our kelek, but rather, by means of their long wooden sweeps, to keep it away from rocks and sand bars and steer it clear of dangerous currents and whirlpools. We did not, therefore, row or sail down the river; we simply floated. Sometimes, when we faced a head wind, we came to an actual standstill. But no one complained. We were prepared for this and our crew was so accustomed to it that they would have been surprised if we had not encountered occasional delays of this kind. It gave us an opportunity to enjoy dolce far niente, as never before, and afforded our crew the always coveted leisure to make kaif, to smoke and dream at their sweet pleasure. With the Lotos-Eaters their

Inner spirit sings

“There is no joy but calm!”

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

And how natural is it for us to appreciate the point of view of our calm-loving, rest-seeking boatmen! For hours at a time they sit at their posts without uttering a word and as immovable as statues. Whether they arrive at their destination in a week or a month is apparently immaterial to them. So long as they are allowed to enjoy their kaif they are supremely happy.

As we gaze on our men at their “dreamful ease,” I recall the verses of Tennyson’s “Song of the Lotos-Eaters”:

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream

With half-shut eyes ever to seem

Falling asleep in a half dream!

*****

How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing slowly)

With half-dropt eyelid still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly

His waters from the purple hill—

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave thro’ the thick twined vine—

To watch the emerald-color’d water falling

Thro’ many a wov’n acanthus wreath divine!

Noiselessly and, at times, almost imperceptibly, we glided down the majestic Tigris which through the broad desert waste floats

Changeless to the changeless sea.

With ever renewed interest we gazed on the silent ruins whose history was ended before that of Ancient Rome began. The Forum, the Palatine, the Colosseum, the Mole of Hadrian belong in their splendor to an age when the more imposing ruins along the Tigris were hoary with the dust of centuries or long buried under the shifting sands of the desert.

But it is at the hour of sunset that one most completely falls under the spell of the Tigris and the historic land through which it flows. For the sunsets of the desert lands of the East exhibit a gorgeousness of color unknown in our land of fogs and mists. This is probably owing to the haze produced by impalpable dust in an exceptionally dry atmosphere. As the sun nears the horizon, the western sky glows with all the delicate hues of ruby and topaz, emerald and amethyst and, after it has set, the zodiacal light, rising from where the sun disappeared, ascends to the zenith with a display of all the delicate tints of rose and gold and lilac of the aurora borealis.

The glories of a sunset in Mesopotamia are indeed entrancing, but it is when night comes with her dewy freshness and

Her starry shade

Of dim and solitary loveliness;

when the moon silvers the river’s wavelets and its ruin-crested banks, that one loves to linger in this land of a great historic past and contemplate at leisure

Those ruined shrines and towers that seem

The relics of a splendid dream;

Amid whose fairy loneliness

Naught but the lapwing’s cry is heard.[411]

How we reveled in those glorious moonlit nights spent on our tranquilly floating kelek on the enchanting Tigris! “They say that Carl Niebuhr, the traveler, when old and blind, used to lie and dream over the old Eastern landscapes and night-skies in his darkened life,—a perpetual world of enchantment to console him.”[412] How could it have been otherwise? For how often since our return from the East where we, like Niebuhr, have spent some of the most delightful days of our life, have we not also found ourselves dreaming of the eventful days and the fascinating nights which it was our privilege to spend under the pale azure skies of the inspiring and enthralling home of our race?

But while, in silent rapture, we were thus enjoying the magnificent displays of the setting sun and were reveling in the beauties of the stars,—“the flowers of the sky,” “the poetry of heaven,” “the forget-me-nots of the angels,”—our crew was totally indifferent to all these sublime manifestations of nature and completely buried in their kaif. They were indeed living pictures of what Robert Louis Stevenson somewhere most aptly calls “the apotheosis of stupidity.” As we noted in their placid features their rapturous expression of contentment and happiness we realized as never before the full force of the poet’s words,

The heaven of each is but what each desires.

Never once, during our journey from Mosul to Tekrit were we ever out of sight of some place or monument of historic or legendary lore. But the number of these reminders of the hoary past rapidly increased in our sail between Tekrit and Bagdad. About five miles below Saladin’s birthplace we came to the little town of Iman Dura. According to tradition, it was here that King Nebuchadnezzar set up his colossal golden statue which the Hebrews, Sidrach, Misach, and Abednago, in defiance of the King’s orders, refused to adore.[413] It was near Dura that the Roman army under Jovian pitched their tents after the death of Julian the Apostate and it was here that the Roman Emperor was forced to conclude an ignominious peace—necessariam quidem sed ignobilem, writes Eutropius—with the Persian King, Sapor the Great. A short distance below Dura is a small stream which the natives say was a canal dug by King Solomon. Near it, on the left bank of the Tigris, begins the ruins of Eski Bagdad—Old Bagdad—“a mighty field of ruins,” writes Thielmann, “extending some twenty-five miles along the Tigris.”[414] Situated in this long field of ruins is the little town of Samara, as celebrated for its romantic history as for its remarkable monuments which, however, have only in the last decade or two received the attention on the part of scholars which they so richly deserve.

The ruins of which I have here given a brief account [writes a well-known archæologist, after a visit to Samara] are of the first importance for the elucidation of the early history of the arts of Islam. They can all be dated within a period of forty years falling in the ninth century, and are, therefore, among the earliest existing examples of Mohammedan architecture. They bear witness to the Mesopotamian influences under which it arose. The spiral towers of Samara and Abu Dulaf are an adaptation of the temple pyramids and Assyria and Babylonia, which had a spiral path leading to the summit; the technique of arch and vault was invented by the ancient East and transmitted through Sassannian builders to the Arab invaders; the decoration is Persian or Mesopotamian and almost untouched by the genius of the West. In the palaces and the mosques of Samara we can see the conquerors themselves conquered by a culture which had been developing during thousands of years on Mesopotamian soil, a culture which had received indeed new elements into its composition, which had learnt from the Greek and from the Persian, but had maintained in spite of all modifications its distinctive character.[415]

The complex of ruined mosques and palaces which here excites the admiration of the student dates from the time—A. D. 836 to 892—when Samara was the capital of the Abbassid Caliphate. Mutasim, a son of Harun-al-Rashid, was the first caliph who made his residence here. So numerous and magnificent were the edifices which he called into existence, as by an enchanter’s wand, that the glories of Samara soon rivaled those of Bagdad in the days of her greatest power and prosperity. The magnificence of the enlarged and embellished city was expressed in the official name which was then given it, for, in lieu of Samara, it was called Surra-man-raa—Who sees it, rejoices. Judging from the ground plan of the palaces of Samara as given by M. H. Violet, the distinguished French Academician who, during a visit to Samara, made a careful study of its imposing ruins, this group of buildings was not inferior to the royal edifices of Versailles.[416]

According to local tradition Samara, like Sestos and Abydos, had also its Hero and Leander. As they lived in palaces on opposite sides of the river, the Samara Leander could see his immorata, who was the daughter of a sultan, only by breasting the swift-flowing waters of the romantic Tigris. The lovers were, however, more fortunate than were their Greek prototypes, for their lives did not end in the tragedy which overtook the Romeo and Juliet of the Dardanelles but, so the story runs, terminated in a happy marriage like that of Feramoz and Lalla Rookh. And the memory of the devoted pair is still kept green by the names which the Arabs have given to the ruins of their former homes—El Aschik—the lover—and El Maschuka—the beloved.[417]

Below Samara the number of ruins and places of historic and legendary interest seemed to increase in proportion as we sailed southwards. Particularly interesting were the ruins of Opis which was once, next to Babylon, the most important city in Babylonia. It was to this point that were floated from the upper Tigris the boats that Sennacherib, seven centuries B. C., had constructed for use in his celebrated campaign against the Chaldeans and Elamites. From Opis the boats were transported by camels overland to the Euphrates, down which they sailed to the Persian Gulf. How forcibly this achievement of the great Assyrian monarch reminds one of a similar exploit nearly twenty-two centuries later, when Mohammed the Conqueror had a part of his fleet conveyed over the elevated section of land between the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn preparatory to his capture of Constantinople, May 29, 1453!

Opis is also celebrated as having been visited by Alexander the Great in his memorable voyage up the Tigris from the Persian Gulf. “In his voyage up,” as Arrian informs us, “he destroyed the weirs which existed in the river and thus made the stream quite level.”[418] More than twenty-one centuries afterwards, in 1839, the English steamer “Euphrates”—the first steamer ever seen in this region—ascended the Tigris on its voyage of reconnaissance when it went up the river to the tomb of Sultan Abdullah near the mouth of the Greater Zab.[419] But since that date the navigation of the Tigris—at least for commercial purposes—has terminated at Bagdad. If the country bordering the Tigris were under a stable and enterprising government, there is no reason why light-draught and light-tonnage boats should not ply regularly not only between Bagdad and Opis but between Bagdad and Mosul as well. High explosives properly applied under the direction of competent engineers, and possibly a dam or two with suitable locks would solve the problem and would contribute immensely towards restoring to its former flourishing condition a country which, as we have seen, is now little more than a desert overspread with ruins “where kings have paced” and where

The gray fox litters safe

Under the broken thrones.

When the Tigris shall have been cleared for steam navigation from Bagdad to Mosul and the Bagdad Railway shall be completed and in successful operation through its entire length, we may hope to see the fertile lands, through which the famous river flows once more the home of teeming millions as they were when they constituted the richest and the most flourishing region of Western Asia.

Below Opis we noted a marked change in the aspect of the country. We were now passing through a rich alluvial plain where not a pebble was to be seen. There were on both sides of the river broad, verdant fields enameled with wild flowers and carefully irrigated by the primitive shadoofs and norias which are still in use here as they are along the Nile and in all parts of the Levant. Much of this land is under cultivation or utilized for grazing, as is evinced by the flocks and herds with which the country is everywhere dotted. As we slowly glided down the river we observed an ever-increasing number of villages surrounded by gardens and fruit trees and clumps of date palms. All these grateful changes in the landscape, especially the beautiful palm groves which hourly became more numerous and more attractive, and the little fleets of guffahs filled with commodities and passengers, told us that we were near our destination. These indications did not mislead; for a few hours later the domes and minarets of Bagdad hove in sight and our week’s happy floating on a kelek was at an end. We were at last within the gates of the world-renowned metropolis of the Abbasside Caliphs.

CHAPTER XVI
BAGDAD

Romantic Bagdad! name to childhood dear,

Awaking terror’s thrill and pity’s tear;

For there the sorcerer gloomed, the genii dwelt,

And Love and Worth to good Al Rashid knelt;

Prince of the Thousand Tales! whose glorious reign

So brightly shines in fancy’s fair domain!

Whose noble deeds still Arab minstrels sing,

Who rivaled all but Gallia’s Knightly King.

Nicolas Michel.

We entered Bagdad in the full glory of a Mesopotamian sunset. Her mosques glowed with amber and light primrose; her minarets with the most delicate rose and gold. The noble crowns of stately palm trees cast masses of shade over gardens and fountains and, trembling under a gentle breeze from Oman’s Sea, played almost mystically in the quivering and departing sunlight. Throngs of Turks and Arabs, Kurds and Persians pressed feverishly through the narrow streets. The color notes of the red and green, blue and white robes of the men and women struck a pleasant harmony with the drab of the walls and the maroon and olive green of the fretted bay windows which projected over the gradually darkening thoroughfares of the picturesque city of Harun-al-Rashid.

We felt ourselves at once in the thrall of the quiet and subtle spell which the famed home of the Caliphs had cast over us, but, notwithstanding this, we lost no time in repairing to the home of the Carmelite Fathers, who had been advised of our arrival and who gave us a welcome such as is accorded only by the generous and warm-hearted missionaries of the Orient. Once under their hospitable roof we felt that we were a member of their religious family. So fully was our every want foreseen and our every desire anticipated that we saw at a glance that our sojourn among these devoted fathers would be fully as pleasant and as profitable as had been our stay among the whole-souled Capuchins of Urfa and the zealous and scholarly Dominicans of Mosul. Nor were we mistaken, for every hour we spent with the good Carmelite priests of Bagdad was replete with pleasure, instruction, and edification.

The story of the going of the Carmelites to Bagdad and the record of their labors since their arrival there is as interesting as it is inspiring. Their formal taking possession of the Mission of Bagdad, the Carmelites tell us, took place in the first decade of the seventeenth century, under the most dramatic circumstances. The zealous Father Paul-Simon, superior of their mission in Persia, who had been sent by the Shah as an envoy to the Sovereign Pontiff, arrived at Bagdad so exhausted by the fatigues of a long and trying journey and the inroads of disease that, when he reached the gate of the city, he prostrated himself on the ground and gave up the ghost.

A little more than a quarter of a century after this tragic occurrence, was created the Latin bishopric of Bagdad, usually known as the See of Babylon. This was due to the progress which the Church had made in Persia—a progress that was the result of the fruitful missionary labors in that land of Carmelites, Jesuits, and Dominicans and to the protection and liberty which had been accorded them by the wise and enlightened Shah, Abbas the Great. Recognizing the necessity of a bishop as head of the Persian mission, Abbas, in 1830, sent Father Thaddée, a Carmelite, to Rome, to request the Holy Father to create a Latin bishopric in Ispahan, his capital, with a permanent coadjutorship which should guarantee the new episcopate from too long vacancies. As a result of the Persian monarch’s interest in the Church, Father Thaddée was promoted to the new See of Ispahan. He received as coadjutor Father Perez, likewise a Carmelite, who was given the specially created title of Bishop of Babylonia, which at that time was a part of the Persian Empire.

In the meantime, a pious lady of Meaux, France—Marie Ricouard—put at the disposition of the Holy See six thousand Spanish doubloons for the creation and endowment of a bishopric in partibus infidelibus, on the double condition that to the donor should be reserved the presentation of the first titular and that the following bishops should always be of French nationality.

Pope Urban VIII by his bull, Super Universas, decreed in June 1838, that the sum named should be appropriated to the See of “Babylon or Bagdad,” with the formal stipulation that all future incumbents of this bishopric should be obliged to reside there personally under pain of forfeiting all right to the fruits of the Ricouard foundation. At the same time the Sovereign Pontiff named as the first bishop of the new see Father Bernard de Sainte-Thérèse, of Paris, who had been proposed by the donor of the fund mentioned, and ordained that thenceforth no one should be promoted to this see unless he had been born in France. This wish of the Pope and of the pious donor has thus far never been transgressed, and there is no reason to doubt that it will continue to assure to France the honor of seeing one of her sons occupy the See of Bagdad.[420]

In the year 1677 a special act, signed at Constantinople by the Ambassador of Louis XIV, named the superior of the Carmelites in Basra consul of France, in perpetuum. At a later date the French King gave the title and prerogatives of consul to the Bishop of Bagdad. This was an immense help to the bishop in his ministry for it gave him increased power with the civil government and enhanced immensely his prestige among the Mohammedans. From the time of Francis I, when a treaty of peace and amnity and commerce was signed by the French Government and the Sublime Porte, the French had enjoyed full religious liberty throughout the Ottoman Empire and France continued for centuries to be with the Moslem the favored nation of Europe.[421]

But, although the consular positions which were held by the Carmelite superior of Basra and the bishop of Bagdad and, still more, the treaty of amnity which had been established between the French and Ottoman governments—especially after the Ottoman Turks gained possession of Mesopotamia in A. D. 1534—had given the French missionaries in the Near East increased power and prestige, they still had to confront difficulties innumerable and sacrifices that were calculated to appall all but the noblest heroes.

Their difficulties, however, did not proceed from the followers of Mohammed so much as from lack of material resources and from the paucity of subjects for the ever-expanding work of the mission. So many calls were made on their charity by the poor that they were at times forced to live on only a single piece of dry bread a day, with nothing to flavor it but a small clove of garlic. Then both priests and bishops were decimated by the plague while ministering at the bedside of the stricken members of their flock. On one occasion the Carmelite superior of Bagdad saw himself without any assistants whatever. Age and disease had taken them all from him one after another. In this extremity he wrote letter after letter to his superior general in Rome, conjuring him to send him men. “I have none, was the general’s answer; if you want them, come and seek them.”

The superior, Father Marie-Joseph, took the general at his word. Poor as Job, he borrowed money enough to hire a camel and alone, with a single Arab and a sack of dates and a leather bottle of water, he started for Aleppo on the long journey—nearly eight hundred miles—through the inhospitable Arabian and Syrian deserts. Twice his alertness and eloquence saved him from bands of marauding Bedouins. But, finally, after untold difficulties and sufferings he reached Aleppo and Rome. His superior general in the Eternal City was so impressed by the magnificent audacity of the zealous missionary that he found a means of procuring for him the assistants he so much needed and sent him back to his flock rejoicing. Among these assistants was Father Damien, formerly a practicing physician, who soon proved to be a godsend to the suffering poor of Bagdad, whom he gladly treated and supplied with medicine without any compensation whatever.[422]

As in the missions of Edessa and Mosul, the missionaries of Bagdad are nobly assisted in their moral and civilizing work by devoted nuns from France. But the life of these devoted sisters is one of the greatest self-sacrifice. They may not, as did the Carmelite priests, have attempted to imitate St. Peter of Alcantara, who took but one repast and that of the most frugal kind, only once every three days; but the privations which they for years had to endure would daunt all but the most courageous souls. Even before they reached the scene of their missionary activities they had to pass through an experience that, for delicately reared women as they were, was truly disheartening for any but those engaged in the service of the Master. This was their long journey on horseback—in great part—through a wild and forbidding desert from Beirut to Bagdad. They were twenty-four days in the saddle. The nights they had to spend in the filthy, noisy, dilapidated caravansaries which were scarcely fit shelter for the beasts that carried them. And yet these heroic religieuses always maintained the same cheerfulness during this long and trying journey as ever characterizes them in the performance of their arduous labors in the schoolroom and at the bedside of the sick and suffering.[423]

But the labors of these ardent souls is not without compensation, even in this world. Notwithstanding all the drawbacks that confront them they have the comfort of knowing that their sacrifices are not in vain. The number of their pupils, Mohammedans and Jews, as well as Christians of all the numerous rites in Mesopotamia, is so rapidly augmenting, that it is difficult for the good nuns to house them and secure enough teachers to take care of them. For, in addition to the ordinary branches of an elementary education, they teach their young charges various kinds of needlework and the simpler principles of domestic economy.

“The children of Bagdad are very bright and very eager to learn,” said one of the sisters to me in answer to a question I had asked, “and nowhere will you find pupils who are more studious or more grateful for the opportunities they have of improving their minds. Our great grief is that our school-buildings are not larger and that we have not more sisters to meet the constantly increasing demands that are made on us in our class-rooms. But,” she said, in sweet resignation, “the Bon Dieu will provide in His own good time.”

Never before did I so much regret that I was not a millionaire as I did when I visited the schools of these perfervid and laborious religieuses and saw what splendid results they were achieving with the very limited resources at their disposal and learned how much more they could accomplish if they had the necessary means. If the good and generous people of America could only realize the noble work which the good Sisters of the Presentation are achieving in Bagdad and how very worthy they are of assistance, I am sure that many would open wide their purses for the benefit of both teachers and pupils. I know of few places where money could be spent to better purpose. When one remembers that these ardent souls are condemned to perpetual exile by the atrocious Association Laws of their mother country and that they frequently lack the ordinary necessities of life because they are unable to reach a public that would gladly succor them in their needs and coöperate with them in their admirable work, one cannot help sympathizing with them and feel that it is one’s duty to help them in every way possible.

The school for boys under the direction of the Carmelite Fathers is recognized as the best in Bagdad. It, with the church and monastery of the Fathers, occupies a capital position in the center of the city and is pronounced by foreigners to be “a French oasis in the midst of the desert.”

It will interest the reader to know that the study of French is obligatory from the lowest to the highest classes of the school. The result is that many of the pupils speak the language with wonderful facility and correctness. At the commencement exercises at the end of the year they exhibit their proficiency before a large audience made up of the élite of the city by giving a play from Racine. It is in consequence of their thorough knowledge of the language of Molière and Bossuet that after leaving school they are given high positions in the leading houses of commerce and in all the administrative offices of the government. The traveler is often surprised at the extent to which French is spoken in the Near East; but when one remembers that the schools and colleges in the Ottoman Empire, which are under the direction of French priests, sisters, and laymen are numbered by the thousand, the wonder ceases. It is for this reason that the empire is, in the words of Pierre Loti—presque un pays de langue française—almost a country of the French language.[424]

The missionaries in Bagdad—from the Archbishop down to the humblest nun—are greatly attached to the city in which Divine Providence has called them to labor and—to suffer. Not the least reason for this attachment is the glorious position which Bagdad so long occupied in the history of the world. Until the late war the average reader knew little about it except that it was in some way associated with the “Arabian Nights.” And this association was so vague in his mind that he was not sure whether Bagdad ever had an actual existence or whether it, like the famous characters in Thousand and One Nights, belonged only to fable land.

For this reason it seems this chapter would be incomplete without some account of the famous city which, during five hundred years, was the capital of the Abbasside Caliphs; which, there is reason to believe, was for a considerable period the largest city in the world; which, during many centuries bore rule from the Oxus to the Nile and from the Caucasus to the Gulf of Oman; and which, during a half millennium, was to Islam what Rome is to Christendom.

Bagdad was founded A. D. 762, by Al-Mansur, the second of the Abbasside Caliphs. Before deciding on a site for his capital Al-Mansur made many journeys and carefully examined all the available locations along the Tigris from Jarjaraya to Mosul. Moslem historians inform us that the Caliph was finally induced to select the spot on which Bagdad now stands by the advice of those who had lived there both in winter and in summer and who assured him that “among all the Tigris lands this district especially was celebrated for its freedom from the plague of mosquitoes and that the nights, even in the height of summer, were cool and pleasant.” “We are, furthermore, of the opinion,” they continued, “that thou shouldst found the city here because thou shalt thereby live amongst palms and near water, so that if one district fail thee in its crops, or be late in its harvest, in another will the remedy be found. Also thy city being on the Sarat Canal, provisions will be brought thither by the boats of the Euphrates and by the caravans through the plains, even from Egypt and Syria. Hither, up from the sea will come the wares of China, while down the Tigris from Mosul will be brought goods from the Byzantine lands. Thus shall thy city be safe standing between all these streams, and thine enemy shall not reach thee, except it be by a boat or by a bridge, and across the Tigris or the Euphrates.”

“The practical foresight shown by the Caliph,” in the selection of the site of his capital, “has been amply confirmed by the subsequent history of Bagdad. The city called into existence as by an enchanter’s wand was, during the Middle Ages, second in size only to Constantinople, and throughout Western Asia was long unrivalled for splendor. It at once became and remained for all subsequent centuries the capital of Mesopotamia. Wars, sieges, the removal for a time by the Caliphs of the seat of government to Samara, higher up the Tigris, even the almost entire destruction of the city by the Mongols in A. D. 1258, none of these have permanently affected the supremacy of Bagdad as the capital of the Tigris and the Euphrates country, and now, after the lapse of over twelve centuries, the new Arabic King of Mesopotamia still resides in the city founded by the Caliph Al-Mansur.”[425]

Many etymologies, most of them fanciful, have been given of the name Bagdad. It is said that when Al-Mansur finally selected the site for his capital he found it occupied by several monasteries, most of them Nestorian, and that the capital derived its appellation from the Arabic word bagh—garden,—and Dad—the name of a certain monk who had a garden there. Others aver that the name is derived from two Persian words, Bagh—God,—and Dadh—founded—signifying a city founded by God. The official name, however, given, we are told by the Caliph Al-Mansur himself, was Medina-as-Salam, which signifies the “City of Peace.” But among the Saracens it was more generally known as Dar-as-Salam, which also signifies City or Home of Peace. The Greeks gave it a name—Eirenopolis—which is a literal translation of the Arabic Dar-as-Salam. But it is by the older and more common name—Bagdad—which is variously spelt—that the city of Al-Mansur has generally been known from its foundation to the present day.

It was long thought that the capital of the Caliphs had been founded on ground which had not previously been occupied by a dense population. But a discovery made in 1848 by Sir Henry Rawlinson, when the waters of the Tigris were exceptionally low, disclosed the surprising fact that Al-Mansur had founded his capital on the site of a city that antedated the Christian era by at least seven centuries. An extensive facing of brickwork, which still exists, was then found to line the western bank of the river, and each brick of this facing bore the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar. No less remarkable, in this connection, is a later discovery in the Assyrian geographical catalogues, belonging to the reign of Asurbanipal, of a name very similar to Bagdad “which probably refers to the town then standing on the site afterwards occupied by the capital of the Caliphs.”

Al-Mansur founded his capital, known from its peculiar form as “The Round City,” on the right bank of the Tigris, but it was not long until the palaces of the Caliphs and the government offices were transferred to the eastern side of the river, where the capital has since remained, while the part of the city on the western bank, especially the quarter called Karkh, was given over to markets and merchants, where “every merchant and each merchandise had an appointed street: and there were rows of shops, and of booths and of courts in each of the streets; but men of one business were not mixed up with those of another, nor one merchandise with merchandise of another sort. Goods of a kind were only sold with their kind, and men of one trade were not to be found except with their fellows of the same craft. Thus each market was kept single and the merchants were divided according to their merchandise, each craftsman being separated from others not of his own class.”[426]

What greatly contributed towards the rapid development of Bagdad and towards making it the great emporium of the East, was the admirable system of canals which intersected the rich alluvial plains of lower Babylonia and which enabled the inhabitants of this region to utilize the surplus waters of the Euphrates for irrigating the fertile lands which lay between this river and the Tigris. Contrary to what is so often thought, the Arabs, under the Caliphs, gave as much attention to the canalization of Mesopotamia as had their predecessors, the Persians and the Babylonians.

But these canals, besides being used for purposes of irrigation, likewise served for the transportation of merchandise from distant regions. Thus, to give a single instance of their use for this purpose, we are informed that “great boats and barges were loaded at Rakkah, ‘the port,’ as it was called, of the Syrian desert on the Upper Euphrates, there taking over from the land-caravans the corn of Egypt and the merchandise from Damascus; and these boats, coming down the great river, and then along the Isa Canal, discharged their cargoes at the wharves on the Tigris banks at the lower harbor in Karkh.”[427]

To give some idea of the fertility of the irrigated region of Mesopotamia during the reign of the Caliphs it suffices to quote the words of an Arabic writer regarding certain cornlands in the vicinity of Bagdad, where, we are told, “the crops never failed, neither in winter nor in summer,” and of the report given of a certain mill in which there were no fewer than a hundred millstones which produced the extraordinary annual rental of a hundred million dirhams, a sum that was equivalent to several million dollars of our money.

Marco Polo, that king of mediæval travelers, who, by the vast compass of his journeys, was better qualified than any man of his time to express an opinion on the relative importance of the cities of Asia, declares that Bagdad—which he calls Baudas—is “the noblest and greatest city of these regions” and that it “used to be the seat of the Caliph of all the Saracens in the world, just as Rome is the seat of the Pope of all the Christians.”[428] But the illustrious Venetian voyager did not visit Bagdad until several decades after the destruction of the city by the Mongol hordes under Hulagu Khan.

The question now arises, if Bagdad was so great a metropolis only a half century after it was ravaged by the Mongols, what must it have been when at the zenith of its power and magnificence? Some authors estimate that the city counted no fewer than two million souls. D’Herbelot, the celebrated Orientalist, says that one can conjecture the number of the inhabitants of Bagdad from a statement made by Arab historians, who declare that the funeral of Eben Hanbal, a famous Moslem doctor who died with a great reputation for sanctity, was attended by eight hundred thousand men and sixty thousand women.[429] Then again, Marco Polo tells us that the number of Christians in Bagdad, shortly before it was sacked by Hulagu, was more than a hundred thousand.[430] This would indicate that the population of this Saracen city, of which a very great majority was Mohammedan, must then, in the days of its decline, have exceeded a million. This seems clear from what historians tell us about the “horrible butchery of men, women and children,” which lasted forty days, when the city was sacked by the Mongols under Hulagu.

Nearly all the inhabitants, to the number, according to Rashid ud Din, of eight hundred thousand—Makrizi says two million—perished, and thus passed away one of the noblest cities that had ever graced the East—the cynosure of the Mohammedan world, where the luxury, wealth and culture of five centuries had concentrated.[431]

About the greatness and splendor of Bagdad before it was laid in ashes by the Mongol invader, there can be no question. The concurrent testimony of contemporary historians puts this beyond doubt. The walls which surrounded the city in its infancy were such as to rival those of ancient Babylon and Nineveh, as described by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. According to the noted Jewish traveler, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Bagdad in the second half of the twelfth century, “the palace of the Caliph of Bagdad is three miles in extent.”

An idea of the magnificence of the Caliph’s palaces may be gained from an account that has come down to us of the brilliant reception accorded the Greek ambassadors who were sent to Bagdad, A. D. 917, by Constantine Porphyrogenitus.[432] Before being introduced to the Commander of the Faithful, the envoys were conducted in state through the various buildings within the palace precincts. Each of these buildings, of which there were twenty-three in number, was a separate palace.

One of these was the riding academy, adorned with porticoes of marble columns.

On the right side of this house stood five hundred mares caparisoned each with a saddle of gold or silver, while on the left stood five hundred mares with brocade saddle-cloths and long head-covers; also every mare was held in hand by a groom magnificently dressed.[433]

After all this, and leading to the very presence of the Caliph, came the officers of state and the pages of the privy council, all in gorgeous raiment, with their swords and girdles glittering with gold and gems. Near them were “the eunuchs and the chamberlains and the black pages.”

The number of the eunuchs was seven thousand in all, four thousand of them white and three thousand black; the number of the chamberlains was also seven thousand, and the number of the black pages, other than the eunuchs, was four thousand.... On the Tigris there were skiffs and wherries, barques and barges and other boats, all magnificently ornamented, duly arranged and disposed.... The number of the hangings in the palaces of the Caliph was thirty-eight thousand. These were curtains of gold—of brocade embroidered with gold—all magnificently figured with representations of drinking vessels and with elephants and horses, camels, lions and birds.... The number of the carpets and the mats was twenty-two thousand pieces; these were laid in the corridors and courts....[434]

A hundred lions were brought out, every lion being held in by the hand of its keeper. Among other spectacles of rare and stupendous luxury was a tree of gold and silver. The tree had eighteen branches, every branch having numerous twigs, on which sat all kinds of gold and silver birds, both large and small. Most of the branches of this tree were of silver, but some were of gold, and they spread into the air carrying leaves of divers colors. The leaves of the tree moved as the wind blew, while the birds, under the action of mechanical appliances, piped and sang. Through this scene of magnificence the Greek ambassadors were led to the foot of the Caliph’s throne.

The impression made on the ambassador and his suite at the sight of such a display of wealth and luxury was, we may well believe, not unlike that produced on the Spanish Conquistadores at the sight of the vast treasures of Cuzco and Cajamarca, or on the astonished ambassadors of foreign powers when they were admitted to the presence of Abd-al-Rahman III in his gorgeous audience chamber in the famed palace of Medina-al-Zahra.[435]

But Bagdad has more compelling claims to undying fame than those based on gorgeous palaces, superb mosques, boundless luxury, and ostentatious displays of fabulous wealth. This splendid capital of the Caliphs will always live in history’s page as the seat of numerous and splendid institutions of charity and education and as the home of Caliphs who were the most munificent patrons of science and letters of the Middle Ages.

Among the hospitals of Bagdad was a palatial structure with many rooms and wards, which were furnished in elaborate style. Here the patients were gratuitously provided with food and medicine and regularly visited by the physicians of the city. It was here that Rhazes, the most celebrated Mussulman physician of his time, gave his lectures and founded the great medical school which drew students from all parts of Western Asia. Rhazes is famous not only for his eminence as a physician but also as a voluminous writer on medicine and for having described smallpox nearly nine hundred years before Jenner began his noted investigations on this dread disease.

It was, however, the colleges, of which there were more than thirty—“each more magnificent than a palace”—that gave Bagdad its greatest fame in the mediæval world. One of these, called the Nizamiyah, founded by an eminent vizier who was the friend of the poet Omar Khayyám, was, on account of its architectural splendor, and the celebrity of its professional staff, known as the “Mother of the colleges of Bagdad.” Among its most illustrious lecturers were Ghazzali, celebrated as a philosopher and a theologian, and Bohadin, who achieved eminence as a historian, as a statesman, and as the biographer of the Sultan Saladin. The endowment of the Nizamiyah was so princely that it sufficed not only to pay the salaries of the professors but also to pay for the board and tuition of indigent students.

Completely eclipsing the Nizamiyah College in its architectural grandeur, sumptuous equipment, and wealth of endowment was the College of the Mustansiriyah—the ruins of which still exist—which was founded by the Caliph Mustansir, the father of Mustasim, who was put to death by Hulago after the destruction of Bagdad. So great was the splendor of this college that it is said to have surpassed any similar institution in Islam. It was not only the most notable seat of learning in Bagdad, but was also its most beautiful and imposing edifice. When one recalls the many gorgeous palaces of the city—many of them costing fabulous sums—one can realize what munificent patrons were Bagdad’s Caliph and men of wealth and how well this fairy capital deserved its reputation as the Orient’s most famous center of science and letters. It had only one rival and that was the famous Ommaied metropolis in Spain, so celebrated for its riches and attractions, its schools and libraries and scholars—a city which Hroswitha, the gifted nun of Gandersheim, has so beautifully described in a single distich:

Corduba famosa, locuples de nomine dicta,

Inclyta deliciis, rebus quoque splendida cunctis.

But no description of Bagdad is complete without some account of its more eminent Caliphs, especially of its immortal Harun-Al-Rashid, who is “inseparably associated with the most charming collection of stories ever invented for the solace and delight of mankind.” This brilliant Saracen ruler has long been ranked among the illustrious men of all time. For, notwithstanding the fact that from time immemorial legends have gathered around his name in greater number than about those of King Arthur, or Charlemagne, or Frederick Barbarossa, authentic history tells us enough of his character and achievements to make the romantic life of “Aaron the Just”—to Anglicize his name—one of supreme fascination and abiding interest.

The Arabians [Sismondi writes] are indebted to him for the rapid progress which they made in science and literature, for Harun never built a mosque without attaching to it a school. His successors followed his example, and in a short period the sciences which were cultivated in the capital spread themselves to the very extremities of the empire of the Caliphs. Whenever the faithful assembled to adore the Divinity, they found in this temple an opportunity of rendering Him the noblest homage which His creatures can pay—by the cultivation of those faculties with which their Creator has endowed them. Harun-Al-Rashid, besides, was sufficiently superior to the fanaticism which had previously animated his sect not to despise the knowledge which the professors of another faith possessed. The head of his schools and the first director of studies in his empire was a Nestorian Christian of Damascus, of the name of John Ebn Mesua.[436]

Christians were the translators of the works of Plato and Aristotle; of Galen, Hippocrates, and Dioscorides; of Ptolemy, Euclid, and Apollonius Pergæus.

No Caliph ever gathered round him so great a number of learned men:—poets, jurists, grammarians, cadis and scribes,—to say nothing of the wits and musicians who enjoyed his patronage. Personally, too, he had every quality that could recommend him to the literary men of his time. Harun himself was an accomplished scholar and an excellent poet; he was well versed in history, tradition and poetry which he could always quote on appropriate occasions. He possessed exquisite literary taste and unerring discernment and his dignified demeanor made him an object of profound respect to high and low.[437]

He was, indeed, as described by his biographers, “the most accomplished, eloquent and generous of the Caliphs,” and the stories that are told of his lavish generosity towards scholars who frequented his court proved that he was probably the most munificent patron of men of science and letters that ever lived.

And yet, sad to relate, there is a dark spot in the career of Harun-al-Rashid. This is due to his inhuman treatment of the Barmecides, whose tragic fate at the hands of the Caliph is one of the most shocking occurrences in oriental annals. One of this ill-fated family, Yaya ibin Barmek, was Harun’s vizier, who, by his consummate ability, had contributed more than any other man towards the success of the Caliph’s reign. It was he, and not the Commander of the Faithful, who directed the course of events that rendered the reign of Harun-al-Rashid the culminating point of Islamic history. His son Jaafer was the most cherished friend of the Caliph and his constant companion in his nightly incognito wanderings through the city of Bagdad. “Harun’s attachment to Jaafer was of so extravagant a character that he could never bear him to be absent from his side, and he went to the absurd length of having a cloak made with two collars, so that he and Jaafer could wear it at one and the same time.”[438]

But to wipe out a fancied indignity he did not hesitate foully to murder his friend and companion, “by far the most lovable and attractive character of the many that live for us in the Thousand and One Nights.[439] He cast his old and loyal vizier, the father of Jaafer, into prison. Not content with this barbarous treatment of men to whom he owed so much, he vented his fury on their family and did not abate his anger until he had slain more than a thousand of the Barmecides. So great an impression did Harun’s atrocious treatment of his best friends make on his contemporaries that it became “the proverbial example in oriental history of the change of fortune and the mutability of royal favor.” It is because of this barbarous cruelty and his revolting treachery that the Harun of history is so unlike the Harun of legend, in which he is always painted as a merry monarch—the patron of scholars and the boon companion of congenial friends. And it is because of this that we must refuse him his long-accorded title of “The Just” and “The Good,” although, in view of his achievements as a ruler and his unfailing and generous patronage of men of science and letters, we cannot deny him the epithet of “The Great.” Were it not for the stain on his escutcheon, due to his infamous treatment of the Barmecides, we could, with some semblance of truth, say of this illustrious Caliph of Bagdad, in the words of Tennyson:

Sole star of all that place and time,

I saw him in his golden prime,

The Good Harun-al-Rashid.

One cannot speak of the services rendered to science and literature by Harun-al-Rashid without referring to his distinguished son and successor, the Caliph Al-Mamun. Although the power and the greatness of the empire had suffered a notable diminution after the death of Al-Rashid, the glory of Bagdad as a center of learning still retained all its former luster. Some, indeed, will have it that its prestige was enhanced and that Al-Mamun and not Harun was the father of letters and the Augustus of the Abbasside Caliphate. For the first thing he did on ascending the throne was to invite the Muses from their favorite seats in the Byzantine Empire to the capital of the Caliphs on the Tigris.

Study, books and men of letters almost entirely engrossed his attention. The learned were his favorites and his ministers were occupied alone in forwarding the progress of literature. It might be said that the throne of the Caliphs seemed to have been raised for the Muses. He invited to his court from all parts of the world all the learned with whose existence he was acquainted, and he retained them by rewards, honors and distinctions of every kind. He collected from the subject provinces of Syria, Armenia and Egypt the most important books which could be discovered, and which, in his eyes, were the most precious tribute he could demand. The governors of provinces and the officers of administration were directed to amass in preference to everything else the literary relics of the conquered countries and to carry them to the foot of the throne. Hundreds of camels might be seen entering Bagdad loaded with nothing but manuscripts and papers and those which were thought to be adapted for the purpose of public instruction were translated into Arabic that they might be universally intelligible. Masters, instructors, translators, and commentators formed the court of Al-Mamun, which appeared to be rather a learned academy than the centre of government in a warlike empire. When the Caliph dictated the terms of peace to the Greek Emperor, Michael the Stammerer, the tribute which he demanded from him was a collection of Greek authors.[440]

History was but repeating itself, for, as in the days of ancient Rome, so also in the most brilliant period of Bagdad

Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes

Intulit agresti Latio.[441]

So great during this brilliant literary period was the love of learning that there were in Bagdad more than a hundred booksellers. How many of our modern cities could count so great a number? And so large were even private libraries that we are told of a doctor of Bagdad who “refused the invitation of the Sultan of Bokhara, because the carriage of his books would have required four hundred camels.”[442]

Nor was it in Bagdad alone that the zeal of Harun and Mamun for the progress of knowledge had stimulated enthusiasm for science and letters. Under these two illustrious patrons of learning, homes of science that almost equaled that of Bagdad were established in all parts of the Caliphate—in Cufa and Basra; in Fez and Morocco; in Cairo and Alexandria and Damascus; in Balk, Ispahan, and Samarcand—many of which, in the splendor of their buildings and in the equipment of their libraries, rivaled the famous Arabian schools of Granada, Seville, and Cordoba, which were in their heyday “when all that was polite or elegant in literature was classed among the Studia Arabum.” And it is to be observed that these institutions, created and fostered by the benign influence of the Caliphs, had reached the acme of their glory when the greater part of western and northern Europe was in a condition of comparative darkness.

But in paying this tribute to the Caliphs of Bagdad—especially Harun-Al-Rashid and his son Al-Mamun—I do not wish to appear as overrating their achievements in science and letters. One may, indeed, concede that they always held literary excellence in the highest honor; one may admit that never, not even in the days of Mæcenas and Lorenzo the Magnificent, did men of letters receive greater encouragement and rewards; one may acknowledge that for centuries the Saracens were far in advance of many of the western nations of Christendom in many branches of science and philosophy, but, granting all this, the indisputable fact still remains that they were borrowers and not originators.

All their achievements in philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics were due to their Greek masters—to Plato and Aristotle; to Galen and Dioscorides; to Hipparchus and Ptolemy; to Euclid, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes. And it must not be forgotten that the Saracens owed their knowledge of Greek science to Christians, for it was Christians who translated for them the works which they were unable to read in the original. Thus it was the Christian scholar Honein, who was the physician to the Khalif Motowakkel, that translated into Arabic the “Elements” of Euclid and the “Almagest” of Ptolemy; and it was his pupils who made the Arabic versions of the greater number of the works of Galen and Hippocrates.[443] And it was to the celebrated Christian family, the Boktishos, and to the Nestorian school of Gondisapor, from which issued so many scholars of distinction, that the Saracens were indebted for versions of countless other works of Greek science and philosophy.

Among the many learned men whom the Caliph Al-Mamun invited to his court and “who contributed far more than his own subjects to the reputation that sovereign has deservedly gained in the history of science,” was Leo the Mathematician, who subsequently became the Archbishop of Thessalonica. The Caliph desired to have made an accurate measurement of the earth’s orbit and he called this distinguished Greek to his court to take charge of this important work because “he was universally recognized to be the superior to all the scientific men of Bagdad in mathematical and mechanical knowledge.”[444]

But while the Arabs were good borrowers from Greek writers on medicine, astronomy, and mathematics, they almost completely ignored the great poets, orators, and historians of ancient Hellas. Never cultivating any language but their own, they were unable to read the masterpieces of Greek literature except in a translation, but as there was no demand by the Saracens for translations of these works into Arabic, none were ever made. For this reason the matchless poems of Homer and the Greek dramatists; the orations of Lysias and Demosthenes; the histories of Herodotus and Trucidides, were for the Saracens as so many closed books. The noted Syriac author, Bar-Herbræus, does, indeed, mention a version of the Iliad and Odyssey by a Christian Maronite of Mount Lebanon, but his translation was into Syriac and not Arabic.

These facts show how much the great reputation of the Saracens for learning was due to their immortal Greek masters and to the literary activity of their Christian subjects, especially the Greeks of the Lower Empire. It is true, as Freeman observes, that “the Arabs studied Aristotle and taught him to the men of western Europe; but it was surely from the men of eastern Europe that they obtained him in the first instance. He was read in translations at Samarcand and at Lisbon, when no one knew his name at Oxford or Edinburgh; but all the while he continued to be read in his own tongue at Constantinople and Thessalonica.”[445]

The impulse that Harun-al-Rashid and his son Al-Mamun gave to educational progress by encouraging the translation of the works of Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, and others of the great Greek masters will always give their reigns a conspicuous place in the annals of science and civilization. But the successors of these two illustrious monarchs did not follow in their footsteps. Although the power of the Caliphate seemed still unimpaired and its splendor was apparently undimmed, the seeds of decay, which led to ultimate destruction, were already at work. The vices of sloth and luxury and cruelty which prevailed at the court and in many of the most important departments of the government of the Caliphate, slowly but surely entailed their fatal consequences. Besides these, there were other causes of decay and extinction. Chief among them were internecine strife and the separation of the remoter provinces from the central power. Added to these disintegrating factors the Caliphate had become top-heavy, and under a weak and degenerate ruler like Al-Mostassem, the last of the Abbassides, its downfall was inevitable.

In contemplating the fall of the power which was for five centuries the glory of the Moslem world, one is led to compare the close of the reign of the last of the Caliphs with that of the last of the Byzantine Emperors:

The last and weakest of the Caliphs without an effort of arms or policy to stay his fall, sinks from senseless pride to craven terror and expires amidst the tortures of a faithless victor. The last and noblest of the Cæsars, after doing all that mortal man could do for the deliverance of his city, himself dies in the breach, the foremost among its defenders. Not Darius in the hands of the traitor, not Augustulus resigning his useless purple, not the Ætheling Edgar spared by the contempt of the Norman Conqueror ever showed fallen greatness so dishonored and unpitied as did Al-Mostassem Billah al Wahid, the last Commander of the Faithful;[446] not Leonidas in the pass of Thermopylæ, not Decius in the battle below Vesuvius, not our own Harold upon the hill of Senlac, died a more glorious death than Constantine Palæologus, the last Emperor of the Romans.[447]

Among the names given to Bagdad, as has been said in a preceding page, was that of Dar-as-Salam, or Medina-as-Salam—City of Peace. In view of the numerous vicissitudes through which the erstwhile capital of the Caliphs has passed, the protracted sieges it has sustained, the frightful destruction it has time and again undergone, the appalling massacres of its inhabitants at the hands of bloodthirsty invaders, it would be difficult to conceive a more preposterous misnomer.

We have seen what was the fate of the city when it was given over to the savage and rapacious hordes of Hulagu Khan. But this reign of terror was but a prelude to the horrors that befell the ill-fated city when, less than a century and a half later, the brutal Mongols again captured and sacked the city; when its streets streamed with the blood of its defenders and reëchoed with the frenzied shrieks of women and children, and when, as a climax of all this unutterable carnage,[448] the Mongol leader, Timur, celebrated his bloody victory by erecting on the ruins of Bagdad a gruesome pyramid of ninety thousand heads of its slaughtered inhabitants.[449]

No wonder that the people of the East were wont to declare that “conquest by Turks or Saracens was a blessing compared with falling into the jaws of the implacable Mongols.” When word reached the Court of Byzantium that the Mongols, under Timur, were approaching the city, so great was the terror which they inspired that “popular rumor painted the invaders as having dogs’ heads and eating human flesh.”[450]

When, in addition to all these atrocities, one recalls the deeds of violence and savagery which afterwards followed the successive storming and occupation of the unfortunate city by Turkomans, Persians, and Turks, one must conclude that the proper epithet for Bagdad would have been not Dar-as-Salam—City of Peace—but Dar-al-Harb—City of War.

“But what,” the reader inquires, “of modern Bagdad, of the Bagdad of to-day”? Since the Muses left the fair capital of the Caliphs, long centuries ago, little more of interest remains in it than may be found in any other city of the Moslem East.

My first hurried view of Bagdad was in the parting splendor of sunset,

When her shrines through the foliage were gleaming half shown,

And each hallow’d the hour by some rites of its own.

My eyes were then open only to what was beautiful, romantic, picturesque.

My second view was on the following morning, from the terrace of the Carmelite monastery. It was at the hour when the sun, in the words of Omar Khayyám, was scattering

Into flight

The Stars before him from the Field of Night.

A filmy veil of pearl-gray mist hung over the slumbering city and the witchery of the scene was even more enthralling than that which so captivated me the preceding evening. Presently

The magic of daylight awakes

A new wonder each minute, as it slowly breaks;

Hills, cupolas, fountains, called forth every one

Out of darkness, as if just born of the Sun.

Yes, I was in Bagdad, the fairy city of boyhood’s dreams, the glittering home of pomp and pleasure, where the fair Zobeide dwelt in a palace with spangled floors and marble stairs with golden balustrades; where there was a riot of broidered sofas, damask curtains, silk tapestry, purple robes from the most famous looms of the East; where a joyous group of bejeweled dancing girls were wont, to the sound of harp and lute and dulcimer, to carol away, with voices as melodious as that of Israfel, the cares and ennui of their pleasure-sated mistress.

Willingly I yielded myself to the hypnotic influence of the spiritus loci. In fancy I saw Aladdin with his wonderful lamp; the one-eyed calenders as they told their fascinating tales; the fishermen as they deluded the heavy-witted jinn; Harun-al-Rashid and Jaffer as they wandered under their double-collared cloak through the somber streets of the capital; the radiant homes of wealth and luxury, which gleamed with the subdued light of a myriad of golden lamps and reëchoed with the heart-easing strains of sweet music and the gladsome voices of midnight revelry.

But the illusion was of short duration. The mauve-shot veil of tenuous mist lifted under the ardent rays of the morning sun and the magic city of Harun and his favorite Zobeide vanished to give place to the squalid houses, narrow, crooked streets, and crumbling walls of a time-stricken, war-battered city which is now but a shadow of what it was in the days of its pristine glory.

As a compliment to our hosts we did not even express a wish to explore the city, which we had come so far to see, until we had visited their schools and those conducted by their heroic coworkers, the Sisters of the Visitation of Tours. After having spent several most delightful hours with teachers and pupils we sent for a trio of those white donkeys for which Bagdad is so celebrated. Gentle as they are strong and hardy, they willingly keep up an easy, ambling gait for hours at a time without exhibiting the slightest evidence of fatigue. I learned to value them a third of a century ago when traveling in Egypt and I was glad to have an opportunity of again availing myself of their service in the old capital on the Tigris. Here they take the place of cabs which would not be at all available in the majority of the very narrow streets of the city.

As the Carmelite monastery is in the heart of the city, we soon found ourselves in the midst of a colorful scene that could not be surpassed by anything similar either in Damascus or Stamboul. Such a seething cauldron of races, such an utter confusion of tongues, such a motley carnival of costumes from plain white and black to the gay fabrics of Madras and the tawdry prints of Manchester! Here we meet men of countless types and creeds and nationalities—Turks, Afghans, Persians, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans; Jews, Hindus, Christians, Parsees, Shiites, Sunnites, and Mohammedans of all the seventy-three sects into which the Prophet of Mecca predicted Islam would eventually be divided. The languages and dialects number more than a score, for which reason the traveler in Bagdad would imagine that he hears fully as many different tongues as were spoken by the builders of the Tower of Babel. Indeed, not the least of the many difficulties which the British forces encountered in their recent operations against the Turkish army was, we are told, “the same which confronted the contractors for the old tower so many thousands of years ago.”

The appearance of Bagdad, as we wandered through the maze of narrow, filthy, noisome streets, was quite different from what it seemed when we first saw it from our lazily moving kelek on the palm-fringed Tigris, or when we gazed upon it enveloped in the delicate mist of early morning. Then little was visible except domes and minarets covered with bright-colored tiles and scintillating mosaics which appeared to float in the opalescent atmosphere.

As in the case of all other eastern cities, Bagdad is more enchanting at a distance than when viewed from her somber unsanitary and intricate thoroughfares. And as we threaded our way through these dingy streets and byways, flanked on either side by low, dun-colored, windowless mud houses, we found it difficult to see in them, even in fancy, the sumptuous homes that adorned the city in the time of Caliphs and more difficult still to repeople them with the glamouring figures of Thousand and One Nights.

But when one passes from these narrow and gloomy streets, that will scarcely admit a camel, into the spacious courtyards with which even the most unpretentious dwellings are provided, one is often surprised at the magic transformation of the scene. Here one finds a profusion of beautiful trees and shrubs and plants loaded with flowers of every size and hue. Among the most conspicuous are the palm, the orange, and the pomegranate whose bright green foliage is in striking contrast with the flaming blooms of the hibiscus in which the Bagdadi takes as much pleasure as do her dusky Hawaiian sisters in far-off Honolulu, with whom these brilliant flowers are universal favorites.

A peculiarity of the habitations of the well-to-do of Bagdad is the serdab, an underground chamber which is usually eight or nine feet in height. It is here that the family lives during the terrifically hot weather that prevails during summer and a part of the spring and autumn. But, although the temperature is here ten degrees lower than in the upper part of the house, the intense heat of mid-summer, which often reaches 120° Fahrenheit in the shade, is almost unbearable. As so great a part of the people spend much of their time in the serdab, the city seems to be almost lifeless during a greater part of the day. Towards sunset, however, it begins to revive. The women then repair to the terraces of their dwellings where they pass the night in talking, smoking, drinking sherbets, and trying, when the mosquitoes permit, to get a little sleep. As to the men, especially the Moslem portion of the population, they endeavor to find some surcease of misery in the Lethean fumes of their chibouks and hubble-bubbles. Most of them congregate in the countless coffeehouses which, during the everlasting dog days of Bagdad, are thronged day and night with all sorts and conditions of sweltering and par-baked humanity.

Passing so much time in a state of semi-torpor, it is not surprising that even the strongest constitutions soon succumb to the enervating climate. Because of the intolerable heat, Europeans endeavor every few years to find relief in a change of climate. But when this is not possible, the majority of the foreign sufferers are short-lived. Thus I was informed that the average life of the Carmelite missionaries in southern Mesopotamia is only about nine years. But their premature deaths do not deter them from continuing the work of charity to which they are so devoted. As soon as one drops out of the ranks his place is immediately taken by a zealous confrère who is only too willing to serve in the cause of the Master where the trials are most severe and where the dangers are greatest and most imminent.

What with the grilling climate, defective drainage, ignorance and neglect of the first principles of hygiene, one is not surprised to learn that the population of Bagdad is periodically decimated by the plague. Cholera is frequent. It was this dread visitant that carried off General Maude, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces during the recent campaign in Mesopotamia against the Turks.

We visited all the places of interest in the city but those in which we found most local color were the bazaars. As we neared the principal one of them we found the street crowded with Kurdish hamals bearing incredible burdens, and quick-stepping white donkeys disputing the way with awkwardly racking camels which snappishly sputtered or proudly held aloft their supercilious noses while disdainfully sniffing the air above the heads of shouting drivers. And round about us was a vociferating throng that were roughly jostling one another in their mad rush to force themselves into the alluring bazaars, which were already filled with all kinds of curious idlers or prospective purchasers.

Although the bazaars of Bagdad are much smaller than those of Damascus and Constantinople they are more interesting. This is not because of the attractive wares, but rather on account of the strange and motley crowd. And what a variety of garbs and what a medley of colors! There are every type and shade of oriental face; every style of headdress; every variety of costume one can conceive. Fezes, tarbooshes, keffiehs, turbans, the brimless hat of the Baktiari, the long felt hats of the Lurs and the Kurds; the black astrakan caps of the Russians and the Persians. As to costumes, there is everything imaginable from the primitive dhotee of the Hindu to the graceful full-flowing aba of the Arabian mollah and the elaborately embroidered apparel of an Indian rajah or the closely fitting frock coat of some prodigal nabob from Europe in quest of strange curios or rare old rugs and tapestries from Khorassan and Candahar.

The vesture of the women is even more variegated and costly and resplendent than that of the men. Some are garbed in rich silks of all the tints of the autumn leaf. Some are veiled, others unveiled, according as they come from the Moslem, Jewish, or Christian quarter of the city—but all are gathered around all the booths in which there is a special display of feminine finery. There is no law in Islam to prevent women from visiting the bazaars and whenever they desire to escape the monotony of the harem they start out on a shopping tour in which they take as much delight as do their sisters in the West. Frequently they have no more intention of making purchases than have the habituées of the great department stores of Fifth Avenue or the splendid jewelry shops of La Rue de la Paix.

My attention was directed to the large number of Jews who had shops in the city and stalls in the bazaars. Many of them were specially conspicuous on account of their cheap misfit garments from English and German manufactories, which contrasted sharply with the costly and elegant robes of some of their customers. For headdress most of them wore black skull caps or flaming red fezes made in Vienna. But they all had the same dark, prominent eyes, the same hot and shining looks, like fanned flames, which so characterize the people of their races in other parts of Mesopotamia and the Near East.

When I expressed surprise at the number of the descendants of Abraham that we saw not only in the bazaars but in all parts of the city, one of my companions informed me that they constituted fully one-fourth of the population. The exact number of the inhabitants of Bagdad is not definitely known, but it is variously estimated to be from one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand. There are, indeed, few, if any, other large cities in the Near East in which the children of Abraham have so great a representation in proportion to that of the adherents of other religious beliefs.

The majority of the Jews in Bagdad are descendants of those who were deported from Judæa to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar six centuries before the Christian era. Others, doubtless, are descended from Hebrew captives that were a century and a quarter earlier carried to Assyria by Sargon and Tiglath-pileser III. Still others trace their descent from those who voluntarily sought refuge in Mesopotamia after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and after the Holy City, many centuries later, fell under the sway of Islam.

The favorable conditions under which the Jews of the Captivity lived during the reign of the Babylonian monarchs, and even during the time of the Abbasside Caliphs, induced many of their brethren to join them in the fertile plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates. So satisfactory, indeed, were the relations of the Jews with their Babylonian rulers, that when, after they had been seventy years in captivity, Cyrus the Great gave them permission to return to their native land, but few of them, comparatively, availed themselves of the proffered opportunity. The unsettled conditions of Palestine and the sad experiences of those of their fellow countrymen who had returned to Jerusalem decided the majority of the Jews to remain in Babylonia where, although nominally captives, they enjoyed more peace, prosperity, and even more freedom than it was possible to find in the ravaged and desolate land of their fathers.

Once fairly settled in Babylonia, where they seem from the first to have enjoyed a great measure of freedom, the mode of life and fortunes of the Jews underwent a complete change. In their fatherland their chief pursuits were pastoral and agricultural. In Mesopotamia also they followed for a time the avocations of their forefathers. Thanks, however, to the greater productivity of the soil in the fertile Babylonian plain, which far surpassed that of the richest fields of Judæa and to their native thrift and industry and keen eye to business opportunities, which permitted no chance to escape them, it was not long before the children of the exiles were living in ease and comfort, while many of them soon found themselves in a position which, as compared with that which they occupied in Palestine afforded them, in Johnsonese phrase, “the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

From that time most of the Jews of Mesopotamia began to devote themselves to commercial pursuits, which, more than anything else, influenced the subsequent fortunes of their countrymen throughout the world.

But not only did the descendants of the Jews of the Captivity achieve distinction in the commercial world; they also became celebrated for their attainments in science and letters. Under the Caliph Ali, in the middle of the seventh century of our era the Jews of Irak—Southern Babylonia—were able to organize what was almost an independent state. Here flourished the great Talmudic schools of Sara and Pumbeditha and here, in the country of their father Abraham, the Jews loved to fancy the survival of a prince of the Captivity who had recovered the scepter of David.[451] This was a period of notable prosperity for Irak, a period when Bagdad was at the height of its glory; when it was not only preëminent in science, art, and literature but was the religious capital of Jewry as well as Islam.[452]

In conclusion, I may here answer a question which I have been often asked, namely, “What of the future of Bagdad?” “Is there any hope of its return to its former greatness and splendor?”

This is a difficult question to answer. When one remembers that two other great capitals—Seleucia and Ctesiphon—once flourished only a few leagues to the south of the city of the Caliphs and that now but a vestige of them remains; when one remembers that Babylon, a short distance to the southwest, was, for nearly two thousand years, the most magnificent city of the ancient world, but that, under the demolishing action of man and nature, it so completely disappeared that its very site was long a matter of controversy, one will hesitate to make any predictions about anything in a land in which the vicissitudes of fortune have been so extraordinary and in which the conflicts of international interests have been so relentless and so destructive. And yet, when one travels over the matchless alluvial plains on which stood the famous capitals that once controlled the destinies of Western Asia, one cannot but feel that there is a brilliant future in this celebrated region of the two rivers, but only when a stable and enterprising government shall have been established—a government whose purpose will be not to exploit the land and the populace for its own selfish purposes, but a government that shall be willing to guarantee to the people the blessings of peace and at the same time honestly strive to secure for them their position in the family of nations, to which their long and wonderful history gives them so just a title.[453] Then and then only shall we again see the broad desert of Mesopotamia blossoming as of old, and witness once more in the Land of the Two Rivers a metropolis that shall recall the greatness and the splendor of Babylon and Seleucia and Ctesiphon and of Bagdad too,—Medinah-al-Salam—as it was in the golden prime of Al Mamun and Harun-al-Rashid the Great.

CHAPTER XVII
MOTORING IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden eastward; wherein he placed man whom he had formed.

And the Lord God brought forth of the ground all manner of trees, fair to behold, and pleasant to eat of: the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

And a river went out of Eden to water paradise, which from thence is divided into four heads.

The name of the one is Phison: that is it which compasseth all the land of Hevilath, where gold groweth.

And the gold of that land is very good: there is found bdellium, and the onyx stone.

And the name of the second river is Gehon: the same is it that compasseth all the land of Ethiopia.

And the name of the third river is Tigris: the same passeth along by the Assyrians. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

And the Lord God took man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

Genesis, ii: 5–15.

“Effendi, your terumbil is ready.” Thus did a young Arab inform me that the automobile which was to take us to Babylon was at the door of the Carmelite monastery.

Barely have a few words so thrilled me as did these then pronounced by the bronze-visaged son of the desert. They meant so much to me—far more than the simple words would seem to imply. They meant that we were at last near the final objective of our long and eventful journey; that, in a few hours, we should be contemplating the world-famed ruins of Babylon; that in, the short journey from the romantic capital of Harun-al-Rashid to the historic city of Nebuchadnezzar we should traverse a land which has long been celebrated in story and legend as the cradle of our race.

When we attempted to cross the swaying pontoon bridge which separates Bagdad proper from its old suburb on the right bank of the Tigris, we found our passage blocked for a while by the heterogeneous crowd of men and women and the long train of burdened donkeys and camels that were headed for the shops and the bazaars of the old capital of the Caliphs. But we welcomed this delay as it gave us an opportunity to study a scene which, during our wanderings along the river front of the city, had always possessed for us a special fascination.

Here were assembled the strange and varied craft for which the Tigris is so noted. Among them was the steam side-wheeler which brings freight and passengers from the port of Basra on the Shat-al-Arab. There were also tugs and barges and lighters of other varieties of modern craft familiar to people of the West. Scattered among these were numerous mahailas, those primitive and picturesque boats so much used by the Arabs in the navigable parts of the Tigris and Euphrates. With their pointed prows, high masts, and lateen sails, they are not unlike the dahabiyehs of the Nile or simplified forms of the fast-sailing felucca and xebec once so much used by the pirates of Barbary. Alongside of them were countless specimens of that long, canoe-shaped boat called by the Arabs the bellum—which in the narrow canals in and around Basra serves the same purpose as the gondola in Venice. The bellum, to judge from certain bas-reliefs found among the ruins of Nimroud, is but a slight modification of the type of boat which Sennacherib employed in his fleet during his celebrated campaign against the Elamits. But a far more singular craft than any of those mentioned is the kufa. Its frame is woven of willows or the split branches of the date palm and, like the Ark of Noah, is “pitched within and without with pitch” which is procured from the hot, bitumen springs of Hit, on the Euphrates. It is circular in form and looks like a large cauldron with its brim turned inwards. Their great number at Bagdad and the way which they are made to rotate among the other boats are always sure to attract attention. They are used as ferryboats in crossing the river and for carrying freight and passengers to and from the city and the adjoining country. Herodotus tells us that, after the city itself, these curious craft surprised him more than anything that he saw in Babylon. In form and size they are similar to the coracle in which St. Brendan is said to have made his famous voyage from Ireland to America, long centuries before Columbus “to Castile and Leon gave a New World.”

But few keleks are seen among the numberless boats that dot the Tigris at Bagdad. The reason is simple. As soon as they arrive from Mosul and Diarbeker their wooden frameworks are sold for fuel, for which they fetch a good price, while the deflated skins are returned to the places whence they came to be again used in the construction of other keleks.

Nowhere in the world can one see so great a variety of river crafts as at Bagdad, or styles of vessels which have remained unchanged for so many thousands of years. For here one finds everything from the raftlike slow-floating kelek to the swift, surface-skimming glisseur which, with a powerful engine, is capable of making a speed of more than forty miles an hour. The kelek and the kufa represent the high-water mark of the shipwright’s achievements two thousand years before our era, while the glisseur is but one of the many triumphs of the marine engineers of the twentieth century of the era in which we live. Forty centuries separate the two creations and yet they are both seen here side by side—one typifying the changeless East and the other the ever-progressive West.

After the congested traffic on the bridge had diminished sufficiently to allow us to pass, we took the stage road that leads to Hillah and Babylon. There was nothing to detain us in West Bagdad for of the old Round City of Mansur not a vestige is now visible. Many travelers make a detour to get a near view of the noted Kazimayn mosque but, as the fanatical Shiahs do not allow a Christian to enter this sacred shrine, I was satisfied with the view I had had of it through my field glass from the summit of the lofty old minaret of Souk-El-Ghazl.

Neither did we go to see that other lion on the western bank of the Tigris—the much lauded tomb of Zobeide, who occupies so conspicuous a place in Thousand and One Nights and in many Arabian chronicles. With the renowned Arabian queens Zenobia and the Queen of Sheba, Zobeide will always live in story and legend as one of the most prominent figures of the East. According to an Eastern tradition, she shares with the mythical Sultana Scheherazade the honor of having composed those fascinating tales known as “The Arabian Nights.” We did not visit the crumbling monument which is said to contain her tomb, for the simple reason that it has been proved beyond doubt that this was never the last resting place of Harun-al-Rashid’s favorite wife and was never considered to be so until nearly nine hundred years after her death.

A few short hours after leaving the city of the Caliphs we were in the heart of the broad alluvial plain of Babylonia. But there was little to attract our attention except the countless mounds that dotted the broad expanse of level land and covered all that remained of once flourishing towns and cities. With the exception of a few palms here and there along some old irrigating canal this extensive region was almost as treeless as the desert sections of northern Mesopotamia. Outside of an occasional reed hut or black tent—the humble homes of Bedouin Arabs—we saw but few human habitations in a land that during thousands of years was as thickly populated and as carefully cultivated as Holland or the valley of the Rhine.

Once we met a small caravan of pilgrims coming from far-distant Mecca and Medina. Although travel worn by their long journey through the burning sands of Arabia they seemed, nevertheless, to be a very joyous company. They were happy in the thought of having complied with the precept of the Koran which requires that every one of the Faithful shall, if at all possible, make a pilgrimage, at least once in his lifetime, to the venerated shrines which enclose the Kaaba and the tomb of the Prophet. Even

The camels, tufted o’er with Yemen’s shells,

Shaking in every breeze their light-toned bells,

seemed to enter into the spirit of their cheerful and godly riders.

Among the green-turbaned hadjis I observed two whose means enabled them to indulge in the luxury of genuine Arabian steeds. After the delightful experience I had had with a pure-blooded Arabian horse when traveling in the East many years ago, I have never been able to pass one of these noble animals without scrutinizing it as closely as I would a masterpiece of Raphael or Murillo. I do not know whether or not these two horses had made the long journey to Mecca and return—a distance of nearly fifteen hundred miles—but if they did, they failed to show it, for they seemed as lively and as vigorous as if they had been on the road but a few days. But this is one of the characteristics of the true Arabian horse—its remarkable powers of endurance, even when forced to travel long distances without food or water.[454] Judging from their delicate forms, their well-fashioned heads, their large beautiful eyes, their agile and supple movements, the two steeds in question must have been bred from one or two of the five pure-blooded races of horses for which, from time immemorial, Arabia has been so celebrated.[455]

According to an Arabian legend, when God wished to create the horse He called the South Wind to Him and said, “I wish to take from thy bosom a new being. Condense thyself by depriving thyself of thy fluidity.” The wind obeyed. The Lord then took a handful of that element, now become malleable, breathed upon it and the horse was born. “You will be for man,” the Lord then said, “a source of happiness and riches and he will render himself illustrious by riding you.”

It is said that “the happiest events in the life of a Bedouin are the births of a she-camel, of a son, and of a she-foal.” And so highly does the Arab value his young colts, as well as his young camels, that he cares for them as children and “the nearer on the social ladder he stands to the real Bedouin” the higher rises his love for his horse. Indeed, to judge by his actions at times, one would think that he prefers his horse to his son. For when the camels are milked in the evening the colts receive their regular supply of the lacteal fluid before the children of the family. Not only this, but the true Arab puts the care of his horse before his own ease. In the desert there is a saying that “work which does not belittle a man is for his horse, for his brother and for his guest.” Another saying among the Bedouins is that “Allah has three great gifts for man—a good horse, a good wife and a good blade.” Similar to this is the adage that “the greatest blessings are a wise wife and a fruitful mare.”

How well the Bedouin is rewarded for his affectionate care of his horse is a common theme of the stories and songs of the desert. For the prized animal which occasionally exhibits almost human intelligence fully reciprocates his master’s affection and serves him in danger and out of danger with a loyalty that is proverbial and with an unswerving devotion that never falters as long as strength and life endure.

But one cannot speak of the Arab’s horse without also saying something of his intimate associate—the camel. So indispensable is the camel to the Bedouin that, without it, it would be almost impossible for him to continue his nomad life. For the hair of the animal supplies him with clothing and tents while its milk is his principal article of food. Hence, the significant proverb “God created the camel for the Arab and the Arab for the camel.” Hence, also, the peculiar custom of speaking of the camel as a “person.” Thus an Arab when enumerating his flocks and herds will speak of so many “head” of sheep or cattle, but when counting his camels will speak of them as so many “persons.”

According to a Bedouin legend, the camel and the date were fashioned by Allah from the same clay from which Adam was formed. The same legend declares that they were found with our first parents in the Garden of Eden and that they will accompany man to the world beyond the tomb. When young, the camel, like the colt, is regarded as a member of the family. Like its companion, the colt, it is fondled as a child and always treated with the most unremitting care. And so important a position does it occupy in the life of the family and the clan in Arabia, that the poets of the desert have from time immemorial vied with one another in seeking suitable epithets for their inseparable servant and associate. The number of these epithets, describing and glorifying the camel, is no less than six hundred, while the distinguished French traveler Chardin assures us that it is fully a thousand.

And well may the Arab sing the praises of the animal to which he owes so much, for it is to the patient, frugal, and laborious camel that he, in great measure, owes his proud, uninterrupted independence during the long ages of his country’s history. For, “without the camel, he must have long since bowed his neck to a foreign yoke, sharing the fate of those despised felahin who guide or draw the plow on the banks of the Nile and the Orontes.”[456]

But while the much-praised camel is to the Arab fully as useful as the horse—in many respects far more indispensable—he has, contrary to general opinion, neither the docility nor the intelligence of the horse and, notwithstanding all the care his master may have lavished upon him, shows no interest in him whatever. Besides this, he is vindictive to a degree, and that sooner or later he will seek revenge for some real or fancied injury is so well known that the camel driver is always on his guard against its malice and fury.

Palgrave, the adventurous explorer of central and eastern Arabia, who had a rare opportunity of studying “the ship of the desert” in his desert home, writes:

If docile means stupid, well and good; in such a case the camel is the very model of docility. But if the epithet is intended to designate an animal that takes an interest in its rider so far as a beast can, that in some way understands his intentions or shares them in a subordinate fashion, that obeys from a sort of submissive or half fellow-feeling with his master, like the horse and elephant, then I say that the camel is by no means docile, very much the contrary; he takes no heed of his rider; pays no attention whether he be on his back or not; walks straight on when once set agoing, merely because he is too stupid to turn aside; and then, should some tempting thorn or green branch allure him out of the path, continues to walk on in this new direction simply because he is too dull to turn back into the right road.... In a word, he is from first to last an undomesticated and savage animal, rendered serviceable by stupidity alone, without much skill on his master’s part or any coöperation on his own except that of an extreme passiveness. Neither attachment nor even habit impresses him; never tame, though not wide-awake enough to be exactly wild.[457]

Shortly after meeting the caravan from Mecca and Medina, we overtook one going in the opposite direction. This was composed of pilgrims on their way to the sacred shrines of Nejef and Kerbela—the holy cities of the Shiites. A sorrier and more mournful crowd could not easily be imagined. It was composed of Persian Shiites who were convoying their dead to Kerbela and Nejef for burial. Among the departed were some but recently deceased, while others had been dead for years and their moldering remains had been exhumed for final interment in the sacred ground in and around Kerbela and Nejef. There were no sumptuous funeral cars for transporting this gruesome freight. Only jades and donkeys and mules, all worn out by their long journey through the sandy desert. Nor were there any costly caskets to enclose the remains of the dead. Far from it. Some were wrapped in reeds and rugs while others were packed in bags and baskets. In this condition they were slung from the backs of the jaded pack animals which were conducted by friends or servants of the deceased.

In Nejef are preserved the ashes of Ali, the husband of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet of Mecca, while in the mosque of Kerbela is the last resting place of his son, Husein. By his followers Ali was considered the first legitimate Caliph and his sons Hasan and Husein have ever since their tragic death been venerated as martyrs. It was the dispute about the first lawful Caliph that occasioned the great schism which divides the Moslem world into two sects: the Shiites, who reject the first three Caliphs—Abu-Bekr, Omar, and Othman—as usurpers; and the Sunnites, who recognize Ali as well as the three Caliphs named, while they regard the Shiites as “forsakers of the truth.” The Shiites include the Persians, besides whom they have a large representation among the Mohammedans of India.

It is the ardent desire of every devout Shiite to be buried either in Nejef or Kerbela, for the sacred soil of these places, so he firmly believes, assures him of paradise. There is a cherished tradition among the Shiites that Ali will be the first to rise on the day of the general resurrection and that all who are interred in Nejef will rise with him to a life of immortality and happiness.

This accounts for the countless thousands that are every year interred in Nejef and Kerbela. The cost of the burial permits at these two places is said to amount to nearly a million dollars a year, while the number of pilgrims from Persia alone, who annually visit the shrines of Ali and Husein is estimated at no less than sixty thousand souls. In a preceding chapter we have seen that the pilgrims—nearly all of whom are Sunnites—that yearly visit Medina and Mecca number fully two hundred thousand. Considering, however, the relative populations of Shiite and Sunnite countries, more pilgrims are found at the shrines of Ali and Husein than at those of the Prophet and the Kaaba.

But, although both the great Moslem sects recognize Mohammed as their prophet and have the greatest veneration for him, the most profound hatred separates one from the other. The Shiites regard the Sunnites as impure and detest them because of their association with Christians and Jews, something which the followers of Ali consider intolerable.

Unlike the Sunnites, the Shiites, especially those in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, lead a retired life and studiously avoid relations with all except their coreligionists. Those of the well-to-do class are, when at home, continually engaged in religious ceremonies and conferences. On these occasions accounts are read of the tragic deaths of Ali and his sons. So moved are all present that they express their grief by sobs and lamentations. These reunions, which usually last two hours, take place for the men in apartments specially reserved for them and in the harem for the women. But the women are much more demonstrative in their sorrow than the men, for so moved are they by the recital of the cruel deaths of Ali and his sons that they utter piercing shrieks, strike their breasts, and, when carried away by their delirium, disfigure their faces with their finger nails.

But what is passing strange is that these ceremonies of mourning take place on such occasions of rejoicing as a wedding or the birth of a child. In a word, the Shiites are born, live, and die in the midst of tears and moans and lamentations. The wailing of the Jews in Jerusalem at the wall of the temple of their forefathers occurs but once a week, while the dolorous reunions of the Shiites are far more frequent. During the first ten days of the month of Moharrem and every day during the pilgrimage to Nejef and Kerbela they are obligatory.[458]

But it is not my purpose in this chapter to give more than a cursory glance at the present condition of Babylonia and its people. For, during my wanderings in this historic land, my thoughts were rather occupied with its myths and legends and, above all, with that interesting and persistent tradition which, from time immemorial, has here located the Garden of Eden—what the “Vulgate” calls the Paradise of Pleasure and what is frequently known as the Terrestrial Paradise.

Of the many interesting subjects treated of in the book of Genesis, few have received more attention from scholars and interpreters than that which relates to the Terrestrial Paradise. Even in the early days of Christianity men began to dispute about it. Some, among them Origen[459] and St. Ambrose, not to mention others, inclined to the opinion that the Genesiac account of the cradle of our race was to be interpreted allegorically. Others, however, like St. Jerome and St. Augustine,[460] maintained that the Scriptural narrative regarding the Garden of Eden was to be interpreted literally. Even at the present time Biblical students exhibit the same difference of opinion respecting the words of the Sacred Text which relate to the Garden of Paradise as was displayed by the writers and Fathers of the primitive Church. Some favor an allegorical interpretation of the much discussed narrative while others contend that we must adopt a literal interpretation. “So concrete,” they hold with St. Augustine, “is the description of the Terrestrial Paradise that one cannot allegorize it without doing violence to the text.”

The eminent Assyriologist, Frederick Delitzsch, in an elaborate study of this long vexed question, insists that “the Biblical record of the Garden of Eden contains no indication of being fabulous or extravagant, or enveloped in semi-obscurity. Neither need one hesitate as to the sense, nor is one, for lack of clearness, obliged to read between the lines. For the narrator the Garden of Eden, with its four rivers, the Phison, the Gehon, the Tigris and the Euphrates, is a manifest and well-known reality. He is in nowise obscure respecting the meaning of the names of the Phison and the Gehon. Not only does he know exactly their signification—as exactly as that of the Tigris and the Euphrates—but he wishes to instruct his readers concerning the subject. It is for this reason that he gives explanations and elucidations which his readers can control.”[461]

But, notwithstanding the explicitness of the author of the second chapter of Genesis, the localization of the Garden of Eden bristles with many and grave difficulties. Ever since the days of Philo Judæus, scholars have been seeking a solution of the problem, and, although they have written countless books on the subject, the actual site of the Terrestrial Paradise still remains a matter of uncertainty.

How diverse have been the views of learned men respecting the site of Paradise is evinced by the fact that they have located it almost everywhere on the earth, above the earth, and under the earth. Some, following the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, have contended that the home of the first parents was in the third heaven; others that it was in the fourth; others still that it was in the heaven of the moon, or in the middle region of the air, or in some hidden place far removed from the knowledge of mortals. Others again with a great display of erudition have attempted to prove that it was situated in Syria, or Palestine, or Arabia, or Persia, or Armenia, or Assyria, or India, or China, or Tartary. Still others, who were a little more specific in their speculations, placed the Garden of Eden on the banks of the Ganges, in the Canaries, or in Ceylon, or on the Mountains of the Moon, where the Nile was supposed to have its source. Hebron, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Babylon have each been considered as being on the identical spot where our first parents were created and where they fell from their high estate.

The Benedictine, Ralph Higden, who follows the opinion of some of the Fathers of the Church, tells us in his Polychronicon that the Terrestrial Paradise is in an inaccessible region in Eastern Asia. Gautier de Metz, in his Image du Monde, is in essential agreement with the learned Benedictine as to the location of the Garden of Eden. It is, he avers, surrounded by flames, and access to it through its single gate is precluded by an armed angel who is always on guard. Lambertus Floridus describes the primeval home of our race as an island in the Eastern ocean—Paradisus insula in oceano in oriente. But, like Gautier de Metz, he declares it to be inaccessible because it is surrounded by a wall of fire.

Peter Lombard, the famous Master of the Sentences, who is followed by other mediæval writers, teaches that Paradise is located on a very high mountain in Eastern Asia—so high that the waters of the Deluge, which rose above the summit of Ararat, submerged only its base.[462] Another author informs us that “Paradise is neither in heaven nor on earth.... It is forty fathoms higher than Noah’s flood was and it hangeth between heaven and earth wonderfully, as the Ruler of all things made it.... There is there neither hollow nor hill; nor is there frost nor snow, hail or rain, but there is fons vitæ, that is, the well of life.... There is there neither heat nor hunger, nor is there ever night, but always day. The sun there shines seven times brighter than on this earth. Therein dwell innumerable angels of God with the holy souls till doomsday.”[463]

Of similar import is the description of Paradise contained in an Anglo-Saxon poem—a translation of the “De Phœnice” of the Pseudo-Lactantius—in which the poet declares:

I have heard tell

That there is far hence

In eastern parts

A land most noble

Amongst men renowned.

That tract of earth is not

Over mid earth

Fellow to many

Peopled lands;

But it is withdrawn

Through the Creator’s might

From wicked doers.

Beauteous is all the plain,

With delight blessed,

With the sweetest

Of earth’s odors.

From the time of Indicopleustes, who flourished in the sixth century, to our own, travelers and explorers have sought for the Garden of Eden, and geographers have indicated on their maps the places they imagined it should occupy. Some were satisfied with a conjectural location, but others, basing their speculations on the data given in the second chapter of Genesis, were minded that the problem was so simple that it could be answered off-hand. They were quite like Hudibras who

Knew the seat of Paradise,

Could tell in what degree it lies,

And as he was disposed could prove it

Above the moon or below it.

In a letter purporting to have been written to the Emperor Manual Comnenus, the mythical king Prester John declares that Paradise is situated within three days’ journey of his own empire, but whether this empire is in Asia or Africa is not made clear.

The river Indus which issues out of Paradise [he writes] flows among the plains through a certain province and it expands, embracing the whole province with its various windings. There are found emeralds, sapphires, topazes, chrysolites, onyx, beryl, sardius and many other precious stones. At the base of Mount Olympus, located in the dominions of Prester John, there is [the king continues] a marvelous fountain and from hour to hour and day to day the taste of this fountain varies and its source is hardly three days’ journey from Paradise from which Adam was expelled. If any man drinks thrice of this fountain he will from that day feel no infirmity and he will, as long as he lives, appear of the age of thirty.

Sir John Mandeville, the reputed author of a celebrated travel book, which, he assures us, was “proved for true” by the Pope’s councils, places Paradise “beyond the lands and isles and deserts of Prester John’s lordship.”...

Of Paradise [he tells us] I cannot speak properly, for I was not there.... I repent not going there, but I was not worthy. But [he continues] Terrestrial Paradise, as wise men say, is the highest place of the earth; and is so high that it nearly touches the circle of the moon there as the moon makes her turn.

You shall understand [he writes] that no mortal may approach to that Paradise; for by land no man may go, for wild beasts that are in the deserts and for the high mountains and great, huge rocks that no man may pass by for the dark places that are there; and by the rivers may no man go, for the water runs so roughly and so sharply, because it comes down so outrageously from the high places above, that it runs in so great waves that no ship may row or sail against it; and the water roars so and makes so huge a noise, and so great a tempest, that no man may hear another in the ship, though he cried with all the might he could. Many great lords have essayed with great will many times to pass by those rivers towards Paradise with full great companies, but they might not speed on their voyage; and many died for weariness of rowing against the strong waves; and many of them became blind and many deaf from the noise of the water; and some perished and were lost in the waves, so that no mortal man may approach to that place without the special grace of God.[464]

Columbus, as we learn from his letters, thought he had found the site of the Garden of Eden in the northern part of South America. True, he was not aware that he had discovered a new continent. He was under the impression that he was on the east coast of Asia, the ocean-laved shores of far-off Cathay. He accepted as true one of the traditional beliefs which located Paradise in farther India, or yet more to the eastward and was fully persuaded that he had, in the Orinoco, discovered one of the rivers that watered Eden.

Writing to his Royal patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella, of the region at the headwaters of the Orinoco, he says:

I have no doubt that, if I could pass below the equinoctial line, after reaching the highest point of which I have spoken, I should find a much milder temperature and a variation in the stars and in the water; not that I suppose that elevated point to be navigable, nor indeed that there is any water there; indeed I believe it impossible to ascend thither, because I am convinced that it is the spot of the Earthly Paradise whither no one can go but by God’s permission.

[Continuing, he adds] There are great indications of this being the Terrestrial Paradise, for its site coincides with the opinions of the holy and wise theologians whom I have mentioned; and moreover the other evidences agree with the supposition, for I have never either read or heard of fresh water coming in so large a quantity in close conjunction with the water of the sea; the idea is also corroborated by the blandness of the temperature; and, if the water of which I speak does not proceed from the Earthly Paradise, it appears to be more marvelous, for I do not believe that there is any river in the world so large and so deep.

The more I reason on the subject [he concludes] the more satisfied I become that the Terrestrial Paradise is situated on the spot I have described; and I ground my opinion upon the arguments and authorities already quoted. May it please the Lord to grant your Highnesses a long life and health and peace to follow out so noble an investigation in which I think our Lord will receive great service, Spain considerable increase of its greatness and all Christians much consolation and pleasure, because by this means the name of the Lord will be published abroad.[465]

But Columbus was not the only one to locate the original home of our race in South America. Only a few years ago a patriotic Bolivian scholar, Emeterio Villamil, maintained that the site of the Garden of Eden was on the eastern slope of the mighty Sorata, while the Argentine geologist, Dr. Ameghino, contended that the mother region of mankind was within the shadow of Monte Hermoso, in southern Argentina. There could be no doubt about it. For did he not here discover the skeleton of the first man? And did he not testify to the faith that was in him by giving to the Argentine Adam the imposing name of Tetraprothomo Argentinus?

According to M. Mayo, however, all those who would place humanity’s first hearthstone in Asia, or in Europe, or in America were entirely mistaken. In an ingenious study on “Les Secrets de Pyramides de Memphis”[466] he argues that the desert of Sahara embraces what was once the Garden of Eden. True, it is now a bleak and arid desert, but he believes it was once a land of marvelous beauty and fertility. There was a time, he avers, when it was watered by large rivers and meandering streams; when it was covered with rich verdure and luxurious vegetation; when it was densely populated and the happy home of a peaceful and prosperous people. A new reading of Genesis, in the light of certain hieroglyphical inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty regarding the pyramid of Cheops will, he assures us, solve the mystery that has so long enshrouded the famed monument of Gizeh and reveal the reason why all attempts hitherto made to localize the Paradise of Scripture have proved futile. The Nile, he will have it, formerly flowed through the Sahara where it divided into four branches, constituting the quadrifurcate river of Genesis. At this time the people of Egypt, who even then were a powerful and highly civilized nation, suffered from lack of water and cast about to increase their supply of this all-important element. They obtained it by deflecting the course of the Nile and directing it through their own country. By making a large cut or ditch through an elevation near Khartoum they appropriated to themselves the waters of the great reservoirs of equatorial Africa and shut off from their neighbors in the Sahara the only source of irrigation on which their country could depend. It was thus, according to this quixotic Frenchman, not God but man who closed Paradise and made entrance into it impossible by taking from it the water that gave it fecundity and life.

“Fudge,” vociferates Ignatius Donnelly. “Amen,” ejaculates Unger. Paradise according to these worthies was not situated in any of the existing continents, for its seat, as can be proved, was in the lost Atlantis. Accepting Plato’s account of the Atlantis, as given in the Timæus, as veritable history, the paradoxical Donnelly attempts to show that Atlantis was not only the Garden of Eden but also the only possible center of distribution for the various races which now people the Old and the New World. And more than this. Not only, he asseverates, “was it the original home of mankind but it was likewise the focus whence have eradiated all our cereals and most useful plants and fruits and all our domestic animals.”[467] Here, too, he claims, many of the most valuable inventions which ever blessed our race had their origin. In a word, if we are to believe this plausible author, Atlantis was the home of art, science, and literature and the people who inhabited it not only enjoyed all the peace and happiness of which the ancient poets speak as being the lot of the privileged mortals of the Golden Age but they were the prototypes of the gods, demi-gods, and heroes of a later and less fortunate period.

“Nonsense,” exclaim Dr. Warren, Count Saporta, and the German astronomer, Herr Kohl. Basing their opinions on certain forced interpretations of various ancient legends and traditions and on the results of scientific explorations of the regions within the Arctic Circle, these gentlemen reach the startling conclusion that the first home of our race was in the circumpolar North.

The investigations of botanists, they remind us, declare the singular, but as yet inexplicable fact, that “all the floral types and forms revealed in the oldest fossils in the earth, originated in the region of the North Pole and thence spread first over the northern and then over the southern hemisphere, proceeding from north to south.” The same may also be said of numerous and important representatives of the world’s fauna. Why then, they inquire, are we not justified in placing humanity’s birthplace where the animals and plants which serve man and on which he subsists and which have accompanied him on his migrations over the earth’s surface are known to have originated? “Only from the circumpolar regions of the North,” affirms Count Saporta, “could primitive humanity have radiated as from a center to spread into the several continents at once and to give rise to successive emigrations toward the south. This theory best agrees with the presumed march of the human races.”[468]

At the North Pole of the earth, therefore, “the sacred quarter of the world,” “the navel of the earth,” “the mesomphalos,” “the umbilicus orbis terrarum,” are we to look for the long lost Eden, for the cradle of mankind. There where the aurora borealis is seen in all its splendor, under a canopy formed by palpitating and wafting draperies, quivering curtains and shining streamers of primatic hues of varying intensity and matchless brilliancy our first parents spent the first happy days of their existence and there, amid a frozen desolation lie buried the “hearthstone of Humanity’s earliest and loveliest home.”[469]

But the views of those who have located Paradise in “the fairie North” have been no more satisfactory than the contentions of those who have placed it on the elevated plateau of the Andes, or on the top of a cloud-piercing mountain of farther India or beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara or in the fabled Atlantis or in some mythical Hyperborean land which has been ice bound for a million years or more. Far from it. So fascinating, however, is the subject that men of science still continue the quest of humanity’s original dwelling place and still elaborate theories respecting its location that are quite as fantastic as were those of the speculators and paradox mongers of the past. Thus, according to Hasse, it was in Prussia on the shores of the Baltic; Herder imagined it to have been in Cashmere; Livingstone sought it in equatorial Africa and hoped to find it at the headwaters of the Nile, if he could be fortunate enough to discover them. Daumer maintained that it was in Australia whence man emigrated to America and thence, by way of Behring’s Straits, to Asia and Europe.

The eminent anthropologist, Quaterfages de Bréau, is disposed to consider the lofty plateau of Pamir as the original hearthstone of mankind.[470] This is also the view of the distinguished Orientalist, François Lenormant, whose investigations have led him to believe that the four rivers—the Phison, the Gehon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates—which watered Gan-Eden, or Paradise, were what are now known as the Indus, the Oxus, the Tarin, and the Jaxartes.[471]

Here, too, curiously enough, on this “Roof of the world”; on this “central Boss of Asia,” is the spot where the puranas locate the holy Mount Meru, the primeval Aryan Paradise; the center, according to the traditions of the Parsees, whence radiated the first Aryan migrations, and one of the regions of the earth which even Mohammedan teaching has assigned as the cradle-land of our species.[472]

From the foregoing opinions entertained by divers authors the reader can infer how prominent a part wild conjecture, unbridled fancy, and love of learned paradox have played in the numerous investigations which at various times have been made with a view of determining the geographical seat of Paradise. And, be it remembered, allusion has been made to only a few of the opinions that have in times past been promulgated respecting humanity’s pristine home. Nearly a hundred different theories regarding the birthplace of our race have been advocated at one time or another, practically all of which are now discarded as highly fanciful or supremely ridiculous.

Must we, then, as many have done, look upon the Garden of Eden as a religious or a philosophic myth? Has modern research—especially research in the domain of the new science of Assyriology—done nothing toward clearing up the mystery which has so long enveloped the site of the Biblical Paradise, or are we forever to renounce all hope of even an approximate solution of the great enigma? Not at all. We can still say with the Florentine Poet, Leonardo Dati:

Asia è la prima parte dove l’unomo,

Sendo innocente stava in Paradiso.

And leaving out of consideration the vagaries of certain transformists and polygenists and the lucubrations of certain noted paradoxers like those just referred to, it may be asserted of a truth that the general consensus of the highest and most trustworthy authorities is agreed in locating the cradle of humanity somewhere in that part of Asia which is embraced by the Tigris and the Euphrates.

There would, probably, never have been much doubt about this matter, at least on the part of Scriptural scholars, had it not been for the imperfect geographical knowledge of early Christian writers and for the errors that had been given currency by The Seventy in their version of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek. They made no mistake about the Tigris and the Euphrates, which were well known to them, but when it came to the Phison and the Gehon they went completely astray and gave to these two rivers an interpretation which was accepted without question by even the most learned Biblical exegetes for more than a thousand years. For, in their identification of the Phison with the Ganges and the Gehon with the Nile, they so confused all researches respecting the actual site of the Terrestrial Paradise that it was not until long centuries afterwards that students of the Genesiac narrative bethought themselves of making a more serious study of the Sacred Text.

Reading carefully the second chapter of Genesis they discovered that many had been misled by a misunderstanding of the eighth verse. There, according to the Vulgate, it is stated that “the Lord God planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning.” But a careful examination of the Hebrew word, mid-quedem, which is here made to signify the beginning, should, they found, indicate space rather than time. The real sense of the words above quoted should, therefore, be: “The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden.” And they furthermore discovered that the word mid-quedem meant eastward from Palestine and not, as some had imagined, eastward from Babylonia.[473]

The site of Eden, it now seemed clear, should be sought for eastward of Palestine where the writer of the Genesiac narrative lived and somewhere between the well-known rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This greatly reduced the area in which the Terrestrial Paradise was presumed to have been located. For, if the Biblical account of Eden was to be interpreted literally, it necessarily followed that it must have been placed somewhere in that peninsular tract of land which is included between the Tigris and the Euphrates and which extends from their sources—very near each other—in the highlands of Armenia to their confluence in the lowlands of Babylonia near the Persian Gulf.

Guided by these indications of the narrative of Genesis, the learned Benedictine, Dom Calmet, fancied that the seat of Paradise was in the rich plateau of Armenia where even to-day are found some of the most fertile valleys in the world. This opinion, it is avouched by the followers of the distinguished Benedictine, is corroborated by a popular tradition in Armenia which locates the Garden of Eden in the oasis of Ordubad, on the right bank of the Aras.[474]

The four rivers, according to Dom Calmet’s theory, which watered Paradise, are the Tigris and the Euphrates—whose sources are only an hour’s journey from each other—and the Phasis and Araxes mentioned by Pliny and Strabo. It is interesting to note that the sources of all four of these rivers are very near one another, but it is still more interesting to observe that the land which is watered by the Phasis and which is supposed, according to Calmet’s theory, to be the Hevilath of Genesis, “where gold groweth,” corresponds with the Colchis whither the Argonauts sailed in quest of the Golden Fleece.

An objection to this theory is that it does not harmonize with the words of Genesis which declare that the river which went out of Paradise “is divided into four heads,” that is, into four branches. The natural meaning of these words is that the four rivers mentioned in the Edenic narrative had one and the same source. But each river, as has been said, has its own distinct source. The only answer that the defenders of the theory have been able to give is one that is warranted by no known fact—namely that past revolutions of the earth’s surface have materially changed the topography of the original site of the Garden of Eden.[475]

There were many other objections to the theory which located the Paradise of Delights at the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Not the least of these was the rigorous climate of the Armenian uplands. For this reason, and for others that need not here be specified, scholars began to consider more favorably the hypothesis which placed the Garden of Eden somewhere in southern Babylonia. Among the first of these was John Calvin. He identifies the Gehon and the Phison with the Tigris and the Euphrates, in as much as he gives the names Gehon and Phison to the two lower reaches of these rivers, which connect the Shat-el-Arab with the Persian Gulf.[476] But Calvin’s theory regarding the location of Paradise is at variance with the words of the Sacred Text while his assumption of the antiquity of the two channels which connect the Shat-el-Arab with the Persian Gulf is completely negatived by the teachings of science respecting the recent formation of these watercourses.

The first one who ventured to state precisely in what part of Babylonia Eden was located was Pierre Daniel Huet, the learned bishop of Avranches. This he did in his celebrated Tractatus de Situ Paradisi, a book which had so great a vogue that it passed through many editions and was translated into several languages. So clear to him were the indications of the Genesiac narrative respecting the site of Paradise that he declares “I have often marveled that interpreters have shut their eyes to them and have worried with many and so various conjectures which were so little in keeping with the plain words of the Sacred Text.” As for himself he had no doubt about the site of the Garden of Eden. He was sure he could indicate the exact spot where the first pair lived before the fall. It was, he opined, in a bend of the river now known as the Shat-el-Arab and at a point which, according to Ptolemy’s map, is located in latitude 32° 39´ and in longitude 80° 10´. This, as the map drawn to illustrate his view shows, was near Aracca—the Erech of Scripture.

Huet’s view as to the location of Paradise was essentially the same as that of Calvin whose theory was closely followed not only by the theologians of Louvain but also by Joseph Scaliger—the father of modern chronology—and by other scholars innumerable. But, although the good bishop thought he had determined the exact spot where the first human pair first saw the light of day and, although very many of his contemporaries seemed to share his views, it was not long until other hypotheses were promulgated regarding the much disputed site of humanity’s original home. Not counting, however, the fanciful and ingenious speculations of certain authors already mentioned, the general consensus of scholars, since the time of Dom Calmet, seems to have favored southern Babylonia as the land in which “the Lord God planted” the ever-mysterious, the ever-elusive Garden of Eden.

This is particularly true since investigators have had the powerful aid of the new and all-important sciences of geology and Assyriology. They have eliminated many fantastic notions that so long marred the works of the most serious men of science and have shown that certain assumptions formerly made by exegetes must now be regarded as quite impossible. And the general trend of these two sciences has been to illumine and corroborate the much debated statements of the second chapter of Genesis in the most unexpected manner.

Thus, one of the oldest accounts of Creation, as given in a cuneiform inscription discovered some decades ago by the noted Orientalist, T. F. Pinches, “carries us directly to Babylonia. In this the creation of the earth is but a preparation for that of the Garden which stood eastward in Eden, in the center, it would seem of the world. The garden was watered by a river which after fulfilling its work was parted into ‘four heads’ and flowed in four different streams. Of these two were the great rivers of the Babylonian plain, the Tigris and the Euphrates; the others bear names which have not yet been identified with certainty.

“The scenery, however, is entirely Babylonian. The Eden itself, in which the garden was planted, was the plain of Babylonia. This we know from the evidence of the cuneiform texts. It was called by its inhabitants Edinu, a word borrowed by the Semites from the Accado-Sumerian edin, ‘the (fertile) plain.’ To the East of it lay the land of the ‘nomads,’ termed Nod in Genesis and Manda in the inscriptions. The river which watered the Garden was the Persian Gulf, known to the Babylonians as ‘the river,’ or more fully ‘the bitter’ or ‘salt river.’ It was regarded as the source of the four other rivers whose ‘heads’ were the spots where they flowed into the source which at once received and fed them.”[477]

Regarding the rivers which are mentioned in the Edenic narrative, Mr. Sayce, the distinguished Orientalist, seems to have no doubt. Chief among them are the Tigris and the Euphrates whose names date back to early Accadian times. “Though it is questionable,” he writes, “whether the names of the Pison and the Gihon have hitherto been detected on the cuneiform monuments, it is not difficult to determine the rivers with which they must be identified.“[478] These rivers, he endeavors to show, must have been the Kerkhah, the Choaspes of the classical writers, and a stream which is now represented by the Pallakopas Canal. In the first of these two rivers he sees the Gehon of Genesis which ”compasseth the whole land of Cush,” while in the second he recognizes the Phison which “compasseth the whole land of Havilah.”

As to the location of Eden it was, according to Accado-Sumerian inscriptions, near the sacred city of Eridu which, some six thousand years ago, was “the great seaport of Babylonia,” but of which nothing now remains but “the rubbish heaps of Abu-Shahrein.” “When Eridu still stood on the seacoast,” continues Sayce, “not only the Tigris but other rivers also flowed into the Persian Gulf. The great salt ‘river,’ as it was termed, received the waters of four in all at no great distance from the walls of Eridu.”[479]

As seen from the foregoing paragraphs, Sayce like Calvin, Huet, and many other scholars, also places the Garden of Eden in southern Babylonia and only about twenty miles from the spot so confidently indicated by the scholarly bishop of Avranches as the site of the Terrestrial Paradise.

No less interesting than Sayce’s view, which is based entirely on the teachings of Assyriology, is the conclusion arrived at by the noted Canadian investigator, J. W. Dawson, from data supplied by the science of geology of which he was a recognized master. With Sayce he agrees that the Kerkhah is the Gehon of Genesis but contends that the river Karun, instead of the Pallakopas Canal, as his English confrère maintains, is the Phison.

We thus find, that if we place our ancient geographer [the author of the second chapter of Genesis] where he places himself, and suppose he refers to the Euphrates and the three principal rivers confluent with it near its entrance into the Persian Gulf, we obtain a clear idea of his meaning and find that, whatever the sources of his information respecting the antediluvian Eden, he had correct ideas of the Idinu of his own time and of its surrounding inhabitants. According to him, the primitive seat of man was in the south of the Babylonian plain, in an irrigated district of great fertility and having in its vicinity mountain tracts abounding in such mineral products as were of use to primeval man.[480]

Curiously enough, it is near the locality designated by Huet and Sayce and Dawson as the site of the Garden of Eden that an age-old tradition of the Babylonian Arabs has located the Terrestrial Paradise. For it is at Kurna at the present confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris, a spot noted for its beautiful and stately date palms—trees so characteristic of southern Babylonia where its fruit has always formed the staple food of its inhabitants—that this tradition places the pristine home of Adam and Eve. Aside from any legends that might have been associated with it, its lovely palm grove must have made so strong an impression on the swarthy sons of the desert that they naturally concluded that it could have been naught else but a beautiful vestige of the original Garden of Eden where the first human pair enjoyed supreme happiness during their short life of original innocence.

The great difficulty in localizing the site of the Terrestrial Paradise has hitherto arisen from the impossibility of identifying with any degree of certainty the rivers Gehon and Phison. Assyriologists, however, are optimistic enough to believe that some document will eventually be discovered among the cuneiform inscriptions still buried beneath the ruins of ancient Babylonia that shall settle this long controverted question to the satisfaction of the most critical investigator.

But, in the absence of the tablet or monument which is to supply us with the eagerly sought information respecting these two puzzling rivers, exegetes and historians, geologists and archæologists, Assyriologists and anthropologists still continue their quest of some clue that may enable them to solve the riddle which has hitherto so completely baffled every attempt at its solution.

Among the most distinguished of recent scholars who have essayed to clear up the mystery are the German savants, E. Glaser and F. Hommel. The former, as the result of a careful study of the geographical indications given in the cuneiform inscriptions, arrives at a conclusion which, so far as it respects two of the rivers named in the Biblical account of Eden, is toto cœlo different from that of any of his predecessors in this fascinating field of inquiry. For he insists, surprising as it may seem, that the Gehon is the Wadi al-Rummah and the Phison the Wadi Dawasir which, in early post-glacial times were two great rivers that, after flowing eastward through central Arabia, became confluent with the Tigris and the Euphrates at a point near the Persian Gulf. This was, we are told, when Arabia, now a sun-parched desert, was a land of magnificent forests and luxuriant vegetation; of extensive and fertile prairies watered by frequent rains; of a temperate and equable climate—an ideal home for a people who were yet ignorant of the arts of civilized life and whose only shelter was abodes of the most primitive type. Glaser, however, agrees with those of his predecessors who locate the Garden of Eden in southern Babylonia.[481]

Professor Hommel, of Munich, goes still farther for, not content with identifying the Gehon and the Phison with the two wadis demanded by his learned compatriot’s novel theory, he contends that the Hiddikel of Genesis—usually called the Tigris—was none other than the Wady Sirhan which traverses northern Arabia and anciently emptied its waters into the Euphrates near Kufah.[482] According to this theory, the three Arabic rivers mentioned formerly discharged their waters into a shallow estuary at points not far distant from one another. This estuary has long since been replaced by the alluvial land of southern Babylonia and through it the lower bed of the Euphrates now passes on its way to the Persian Gulf. Like Huet, Sayce, Dawson, and Glaser, Hommel also teaches that the Garden of Eden must be sought in the Babylonian lowland and somewhere near the confluence of the three Arabian rivers just mentioned with the lower Euphrates.

All these eminent exegetes and men of science—and countless others might be named—are at one with Prince Caetani—justly esteemed for his contributions to our knowledge of the Near East—when he declares that the description of the Terrestrial Paradise, as given in the Sacred Text, in no wise “alludes to an imaginary place, but, on the contrary delineates with great precision a real and determinate locality in western Asia. This it does not only by naming the four rivers which arise in it but also by specifying the countries watered by them and by giving a list of their principal products.

“It is clear that the author of the Genesiac narrative had in view a place that was well known and that he took pains to describe it so minutely that there could be no doubt whatever regarding the country which he wished to indicate.”[483]

But of all the recent works which locate the site of Eden in Babylonia none has attracted more attention or produced a profounder impression than Professor Delitzsch’s masterly Wo Lag das Paradies. The fact that its author is recognized as the most eminent of contemporary Assyriologists and as one who has in lower Mesopotamia made a careful and special topographical study of the region which he designates as Gan-Eden and in which he places the Terrestrial Paradise, gives to his interpretation of the Genesiac record respecting the Garden of Eden an importance that no one can ignore. In his opinion the four rivers mentioned in the second chapter of Genesis are the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the two watercourses now known as the Shatt en-Nil, which he maintains corresponds with the Gehon, and the Pallakopas Canal which he identifies with the Phison. I refer the reader to the author’s work for his reasons for arriving at these conclusions. The interesting fact is that he agrees with the other eminent scholars above-mentioned in placing Gan-Eden—the Hebrew name for the Garden of Eden—in Southern Babylonia, although slightly farther northward than do some of the other noted workers in the same field of research. According to the interesting map, at the end of the volume, with which the learned professor has illustrated his book, Gan-Eden occupied the tract of land between Bagdad and Babylon. This is where the Tigris and the Euphrates most nearly approach each other before their final confluence much farther towards the south.[484]

Were we, then, really traversing the Garden of Eden on our way from the city of the Caliphs to the capital of Nebuchadnezzar? Tradition and legend, history, geology and Assyriology, as interpreted by the most eminent scholars of our time answer in the affirmative. Needless to say, I loved to think so. Indeed, during our entire journey through this mysterious land which has filled so large a page in the annals of our race, I thought of little else. Fancy was active. I needed only to close my eyes to surrounding realities to feel that I was literally wandering through the fragrant and mystic groves of Paradise. I was as a music lover under the spell of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or as one entranced by the sublime harmonies of Wagner’s Parsifal. Oblivious of my actual environment and indifferent, for the time being, to the theories and hypotheses of men of science respecting the site of the Terrestrial Paradise, I thought only of the simple narrative of Genesis and the pictures, based upon it, which, in my early youth, my imagination was wont to portray of the home of our first parents. I recalled Dante’s description of the beauties of the Paradise where he met his beloved Beatrice, from whom he had been so long separated and where he was made

Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars.[485]

Yes, youthful impressions and poetic fancies embalmed in immortal verse meant more to me than did the latest teachings of geologists and Assyriologists with all their display of learning and cocksureness. This was particularly true when we first caught sight of the palm-fringed Euphrates and the sand-mantled ruins of Babylon. The Euphrates is the one river which the great majority of serious students have always held was, without doubt, one of the four rivers of Eden. And Babylon, I hardly know why, I have always looked upon as being as intimately associated with the cradle of our race as is the Euphrates. Both of them were then to me tangible landmarks on the site of the Terrestrial Paradise and when I read Wo Lag das Paradies I could not but hope that future researches would prove that the scholarly Berlin Professor had at last succeeded in locating the site of humanity’s birthplace and, in so doing, had definitively solved one of the greatest riddles of the ages.

And as we came near to Hillah—which is supposed to have formed a part of Babylon in the days of its greatness—and caught our first view of its magnificent groves of date palms, I loved to fancy that they were, as the Talmud teaches, the actual scions of those which flourished in the “Garden of God” and which supplied food and shelter to the father and mother of mankind.

But a more charming sight was awaiting us. It was a beautiful garden adjoining the home where a kindly and well-to-do Arab gave us hospitality while we visited Babylon and its vicinity. In this garden were stately date palms, waving lazily in the soft and scented breeze, orange and other trees laden with golden fruits, and the plantain named the Musa Paradisaica[486] and countless flowers of most gorgeous colors and most grateful fragrance. How vividly this garden recalled the one by God “in the East of Eden planted,” of which Milton sings:

In this pleasant soil

His far more pleasant Garden God ordain’d;

Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow

All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste.

And how a favored nook, distinguished by a riot of flowers, caused this fair garden to remind us still more vividly of the blissful bower where our first parents found their happiest and most blissful home! Watered by “many a rill” of the Edenic river which flowed gently by it,

It was a place

Chosen by the sov’reign planter, when he framed

All things to man’s delightful use; the roof

Of thickest covert was inwoven shade,

Laurel and myrtle, and what higher grew

Of firm and fragrant leaf; on either side

Acanthus and each odorous, bushy shrub,

Fenced up the verdant wall, each beauteous flower,

Iris all hues, roses and jessamin

Rear’d high their flourish’d heads between and wrought

Mosaic; under foot the violet,

Crocus and hyacinth with rich inlay

Broider’d the ground, more color’d than with stone

Of costliest emblem.[487]

Yes, as I contemplated the stately trees and ravishing shrubs and blooms of this lovely garden on the sweetly murmuring Euphrates, I wished to believe that the tradition which located Paradise at or near this spot was well founded and that I was actually gazing on some of the floral and arboreal descendants of those which here sheltered

Adam, the goodliest man of men since born

His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.

I wished also to believe that we here saw a remnant of that spot which was a prototype of the Garden of the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields, the Isles of the Blessed and what was a type and figure of the Celestial Paradise and of the home of Our Father in Heaven.

CHAPTER XVIII
BABYLON

A labyrinth of ruins, Babylon

Spreads o’er the blasted plain;

The wandering Arab never sets his tent

Within her walls; the shepherd eyes afar

Her evil towers, and devious drives his flock.

Alone unchanged, a free and bridgeless tide,

Euphrates rolls along,

Eternal nature’s work.

Southey.

Hillah was founded by the Arabs in the eleventh century of our era and is said by some to occupy the southern part of the site of ancient Babylon. Aside from its interesting legends and traditions—many of them connected with the Tower of Babel and the famed capital of Nebuchadnezzar—its chief attraction for us was the number and beauty of its date palms. Some of them were, doubtless, descendants of those noble trees which once graced the gardens and orchards of Babylon in the meridian of her splendor and which supplied her people with an important part of their nutriment. And, if Delitzsch’s theory regarding the site of the Garden of Eden be true, it is reasonable to suppose that some of the stately palms that now adorn the gardens of Hillah are scions of trees that once raised their graceful fronds high above the humbler plants and shrubs of the Terrestrial Paradise.

Nowhere in the world, not even in the valley of the Nile or in the fertile oases of Algeria, will one find such magnificent groves of date palms as one sees along the lower course of the Euphrates. On the west bank of the Shat-el-Arab, in the humid district of Pasra, there are more than sixty varieties of date palms while the number of trees is estimated to run into hundreds of millions. It is, indeed, from this region that are exported most of the dates of commerce.

But these nourishing and delicately flavored fruits are not a modern staple of commerce. Way back in early Babylonian times “dates of Akkad,” as they are called in cuneiform invoices of the period, were exported in exchange for gold, sheep, and oxen. With corn and flocks and herds they were among the principal sources of the country’s wealth. The early Babylonian kings specially encouraged the development of date plantations and it is related of a certain governor that he considered the planting of palms as among the most notable achievements of his administration.

And there was reason for attaching so much importance to the cultivation of the palm, because it is not only “the prince of the vegetable world,” as Humboldt declared, but also the most useful of all known trees. For it not only supplies the oriental with one of his chief articles of diet but also furnishes him with bread and wine, meal and vinegar, sugar and fuel, matting and cordage, cages and baskets, chairs, benches, beds, and other articles of household furniture and material for the construction of the house in which he lives. So manifold, indeed, are the uses of the date palm that Strabo informs us that a Persian poem enumerates no fewer than three hundred and sixty valuable properties of the palm.

We have seen how dependent the oriental is on the horse and the camel, especially the latter. But the date palm is no less essential to his well-being than the camel. What an incomparable blessing it is in his eyes is evinced by an eastern saying: “The palm is the camel and the camel the palm of the desert.” And so highly does he revere it as a gift of God that he would regard the wanton injury of the palm tree as nothing less than a mortal sin.

“Honor the palm,” enjoins Mohammed, “for it is your maternal aunt; on the stony soil of the desert it offers you a fruitful source of sustenance.” And it is to be noted that this noble tree has followed Islam in all its conquests and is now to be found in every clime which is favorable to its growth in which the followers of the Prophet have made their homes. But the high estimation in which this useful tree is universally held in the East is shown by an Arabian legend which declares that it was from the slime that surrounded a date palm that God formed the first man.

It is not, then, surprising that a tree that plays so important a rôle in the life of the oriental should never be long absent from his thoughts, especially when away from the land of his fathers. For, as the Swiss when abroad longs for his native mountains, so does the Arab pine for the stately palms whose feathery and umbrageous crowns are to him synonyms of home and sweet repose.

Abd-er-Rahman I, the founder of the Ommiad Caliphate of Cordova, was unable to endure in Spain the absence of the beautiful tree which had been the delight of his youth. He, accordingly, had a young palm brought from Syria and planted in the garden of his villa at Rusafah. It was to this tree, the lovely reminder of his native land, that the homesick Caliph addressed these pathetic verses:

Oh, Palm, like me a stranger here,

An exile in the alien west,

Driven from home and dispossessed—

But, ah! thou’rt mute, nor canst thou shed a tear.

Happy to have no sentient soul!

Heart-ache like mine thou canst not know;

Could’st thou but feel, thy tears would flow

In yearning love and grief, without control.

Aye, homesick tears for eastern groves

That shade Euphrates; but the tree

Forgets; and I, compelled to flee

By hate, almost forget my former loves.

When one reads these impassioned verses, one recalls the touching lines of the poet Juvenal who, in his exile in Dyene, wrote:

Mollissima corda

Humano generi dare se Natura fatetur

Quæ lacrymas dedit; hæc nostri pars optima sensus.[488]

The words of the exiled Roman seem almost a commentary on those of the homesick Arab.

As we were leaving Hillah for the ruins of Babylon, our attention was arrested by a group of happy, laughter-loving children. Having always been specially interested in the children of the Near East, particularly in those of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, we stopped to learn the cause of their mirth. We found them intently engaged in various games which seemed to afford them the keenest delight. But what was our surprise to find that the favorite games of these sunburnt children in the immediate vicinity of the ruins of Babylon were just the same as the games that are so popular among the boys and girls of America. And stranger still, many of them were quite the same as I had frequently seen played by Indian children on the plateau of the Andes and in the wilds of Brazil. The boys played ball and marbles and leap-frog, while the girls were equally preoccupied with tag, cat’s cradle, and hopscotch.

It would be interesting to know if there was any Babylonian blood in these Hillah children—they seemed to be pure Arabs—and if the games which afforded them such exquisite pleasure were in vogue among the young folk of Babylon in the days of Paltasar and Hammurabi. I commend these subjects to those ardent folklorists who love to trace the nursery tales which so delight the child of to-day back to times primeval.[489]

Our first objective, after leaving Hillah, was the mound of Babil which lies in the northern part of the ruins of Babylon. Most of the land between Hillah and the ruins of the ancient world capital is desolate in the extreme. Not a single human habitation is visible. And yet we were traversing what was during thousands of years the richest and most carefully cultivated tract of land in the world and the one, too, that had the densest population. Now it is untilled and as abandoned as the Arabian desert but a few miles to the westward. The only evidence that we were actually on the site of a once great city were the fragments of pottery and inscribed bricks and the heaps of rubbish which cumbered the ground and the innumerable mounds, high and low, which covered a region many square miles in area.

We saw nothing to remind us of the majestic ruins of Pæstum or Girgenti; no magnificent temples, no stately columns, or impressive pediments or friezes or entablatures. In the mounds which have not yet been changed by the pick and spade of the explorer we could note only occasional traces of brick walls but not the slightest vestige of stone or marble. No remains of temples or palaces or buildings of any kind. All the marvelous structures described by Ctesias and Herodotus had long since disappeared beneath the drifting sands of the desert.

As one contemplates these mounds, beneath which lay the ruined palaces and temples and strongholds of the proud Kings of Chaldea, they have, in the words of the illustrious German explorer, Dr. Robert Koldewey, “the appearance of a mountainous country in miniature; heights, summits, ravines and tablelands are all here.”[490] The landscape is, indeed, such as one might fancy to exist on the planetoid Ceres or Vesta.

We asked an Arab who accompanied us how the potsherds and fragments of vitrified bricks which littered the ground were brought here and he promptly replied—“By the Deluge.” “A foolish answer,” one will say, but it is the same answer that was given by learned men only a few generations ago to account for the occurrence of fossils on the summit of the Alps. And it is the same explanation that was given by the distinguished geologist, Buckland, of the remains of early man, which were found in many of the caverns of Europe. They were reliquæ Diluvianæ—relics of the Noachian Deluge—and the majority of the scientific men of his day were disposed to accept his conclusion as correct. It is, then, not so long ago that savants gave answers to questions that were quite as naïve as that of the untutored Arab of to-day.

But the Arabs who live in the neighborhood of Babylon tell more fantastic stories. They assure one that the ruins are haunted by evil spirits and by malignant jinn and that it is dangerous to wander among the ruins after nightfall.

They also declare that there is at the foot of one of the mounds here a rocky pit, although quite invisible to mortals, in which the wicked angels Harut and Marut were condemned by the Almighty to be suspended, in punishment for their sins, until the day of judgment.[491]

But more remarkable is their belief in the existence hereabouts of satyrs—creatures which are usually supposed to be creations of the mythologies of Greece and Rome. The natives are said to hunt them with dogs and to eat their lower half, although they decline to partake of the upper part on account of its resemblance to the human species.

As one contemplates the utter ruin and desolation which are here so overpowering and listens to the strange stories of the Arabs, one recalls the words of Isaiah—I quote from the King James version:

And Babylon, the glory of the kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs[492] shall dance there.

Babil is one of the loftiest eminences in southern Babylonia and it is for this reason that we visited it before any of the other parts of the ruined Chaldean capital. From its summit, which towers seventy-one feet above the surrounding plain, one has a magnificent view not only of the ruins as a whole but also of many notable features in their immediate vicinity. To the west and southwest are the palm-fringed Euphrates and a number of Arabian villages and gardens along its banks. Several miles southward is Hillah with its gleaming minaret, while some six miles towards the southwest of it is the famous tower of Borsippa, called by the natives Birs Nimrud, and long supposed by many European travelers to be identical with the tower of Babel “the top whereof was to reach to heaven.”[493]

The prospect that greets the vision of the spectator from Babil is always interesting, but to the student of sacred and profane history the word interesting but feebly expresses one’s emotions. This is particularly true when, at the hour of sunset, the long amethystine shadows cast on the dun-colored plain, bring out into bold relief the rich golden lines of the spell-weaving ruins of that great city which, in her glory, ruled over the kings of the eastern world. Then the prospect is absolutely thrilling. Then one loves to be in media solitudine—such a solitude as Babylon is to-day—to watch the magnificent sunset—a burnished-gold splendor shading up starward into delicate rubies and emeralds—to be alone with one’s thoughts while musing on the vanished glories of what was once earth’s proudest and most powerful capital, where for centuries

The gorgeous East with richest hand

Show’red on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold—

but of which all we can now say is contained in the words of a Greek comic poet, quoted by Strabo,—“the great city is a great desert.”[494]

Babil—from the old Semitic name Bab-ili—which signifies “The Gate of the Gods,” was the ancient name of the city of Babylon. As locally used it now designates the most northerly mound of the great city. It is, doubtless, because of its name that many travelers have mistaken it for the Tower of Babel spoken of in the eleventh chapter of Genesis.

Thus John Eldred, an English merchant-traveler, who, in the sixteenth century, made three journeys from Aleppo to Bagdad—which he calls New Babylon—speaks of seeing not only “at his goode leisure many olde ruines of the mightie citie of Babylon” but also of having “sundry times” visited “the olde tower of Babell.”[495] From his description, however, one would infer that the ruin which he took for the tower of Babel, was not the Babil of which we have been speaking but rather the imposing ruin of Akerkuf which is a few miles to the northwest of Bagdad, and which is locally called Nimrod’s Tower.[496]

The first European to give an elaborate description of Babil was Pietro della Valle.

Its situation and form [he writes] correspond with that pyramid which Strabo calls the Tower of Belus.... The height of this mountain of ruins is not in every part equal, but exceeds the highest palace of Naples. It is a misshapen mass, where there is no appearance of regularity. In some places it rises in sharp points, craggy and inaccessible; in others it is smoother and of easier ascent. There are also traces of torrents, caused by violent rains, from the summit to the base.[497]

The picture of this mound, which he had made by an artist who accompanied him, gives one a very good idea of what has been considered by many to be the Tower of Babel but which, after the noble Roman’s visit to it, was long known as Della Valle’s Ruin.[498]

But the excavations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” under the direction of Dr. Koldewey have completely exploded all the theories that have hitherto obtained regarding the mound of Babil. Far from being the Tower of Babel, or Nimroud or Belus, as has been asserted by many writers and travelers, it is now demonstrated to be the ruin of one of the numerous palaces of Nebuchadnezzar. And it is highly probable that it is the structure to which this monarch refers in one of his inscriptions, in which he declares:

On the brick wall towards the north my heart inspired me to build a palace for the protection of Babylon.... I raised its summit ... with bricks and bitumen. I made it high as a mountain. Mighty cedar trunks I laid on it for roof. Double doors of cedar wood overlaid with copper, threshholds and hinges made of bronze did I set up in its doorways. That building I named “May Nebuchadnezzar live, may he grow old as the restorer of Esagila.”[499]

There were, however, other ruins that have at various times been identified with the Tower of Babel. Among these, as has been stated, was that of Borsippa, commonly called Birs-Nimrud, which lies some six miles southwest of Hillah. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited these parts in the twelfth century, speaks of it as “the tower built by the dispersed generation” and declares that it was struck by a heavenly fire which “split it to the very foundation”[500]—a description that is quite applicable to its present appearance.

The distinguished explorers Carsten Niebuhr, Claudius Rich, and Robert Ker Porter were also of the opinion that in Birs-Nimrud “we see the very tower of Babel, the stupendous artificial mountain erected by Nimrod in the plain of Shinar and on which in after ages Nebuchadnezzar raised the temple of Belus.”[501]

That the tower of Babel and that of Belus [writes Porter, in the work just quoted from] were one and the same, I presume there hardly exists a doubt. And that the first stupendous work was suddenly arrested before completion we learn not only from the Holy Scriptures but from several other ancient authors in direct terms ... and almost every testimony agrees in stating that the primeval tower was not only stopped in its progress but partially overturned by the Divine wrath, attended by thunder and lightning and a mighty wind, and that the rebellious men who were its builders fled in horror and confusion of face before the preternatural storm.... In this ruined and abandoned state most likely the tower remained till Babylon was refounded by Semiramis; who, in harmony with her character, would feel a proud triumph in repeopling the city with a colony from the posterity of those who had fled from it in dismay and, covering the shattered summit of the great pile with some new erection, would there place her observatory and altar to Bel.[502]

But the tradition which identifies the tower of Birs-Nimrud with that of Babel, which is often spoken of as “the oldest building in the world,” rests on no better foundation than does that which would make Babil the tower whose progress was arrested by “the confusion of tongues.” The researches of Assyriologists, which have thrown such a flood of light on many Scriptural subjects, have so far been unable to identify the Tower of Babel, or to indicate where the famous structure was located. Neither the renown of the tower of Babil nor that of Borsippa proves that either of them was the famous tower begun by the ambitious descendants of Noah in the plain of Shinar, for the populace, especially in the East, “is fickle-minded in this as in other matters and holy fanes have the periods when they are in the fashion, just like everything else.”[503]

Incredible as it may seem, as much ignorance long prevailed among the learned of Europe respecting the site of the city of Babylon as about that of the tower which was generally supposed to be located either within its walls or in its immediate neighborhood. Writing about the famed capital of Nebuchadnezzar at the beginning of the last century, a learned English scholar declared, “Well indeed may the glory of this renowned place be said to have departed when even its site cannot with precision be ascertained and when the antiquary and the traveler are alike bewildered amid the perplexity of their researches.”[504] The same author expresses the same opinion in different words when he writes of Babylon, called Babel by the Arabs, that “its vast remains lay for ages in the depths of time as much forgotten by the learned of Europe as if it had been a city of the antediluvians.”[505] Even the Turkish geographer, Djihannuma, was so in the dark about the location of the ruins of Babylon that he placed them at Teluja, nearly eighty miles northwest of their actual site.

How great was the ignorance of Europeans during the Middle Ages regarding the capital of the ancient world may be gathered from a statement of Sir John Mandeville, who tells his readers that “Babylone is in the grete desertes of Arabye, upon the waye as men gon toward the kyndome of Caldee. But it is fulle longe sithe ony man durste neyhe to the toure, for it is alle deserte and full of dragons and grete serpentes and fulle deverse veneymouse bestes alle abouten.”

Even in the second part of the last century the distinguished Orientalist, Oppert, head of the French expedition to Mesopotamia in the years 1851 to 1854,[506] was entirely in error as to the site of Babylon. Influenced, no doubt, by the accounts of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and other classical writers regarding the vast extent of Babylon, he made it to embrace both Babil and Birs-Nimrud, which are full fifteen miles apart from each other, and to include an area that the researches of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” have demonstrated to be preposterously large.[507]

But, in order fully to realize how greatly the size of Babylon was exaggerated by the ancient writers and to understand how this capital of thousands of years was able, throughout the ages, to cast so great a spell upon the peoples of the earth, one must briefly consider some of their statements respecting its vastness and magnificence. Only in this way is it possible to appreciate the glamour that has so long attached to it and to discover the reasons for the countless legends and romances to which it has given rise since the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Semiramis.

Of the ancient writers who have given us the most minute descriptions of Babylon, Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus are the most deserving of notice. As Herodotus spent some time in the city and was an eye-witness of what he describes he is, notwithstanding the charges of credulity and exaggeration which have frequently been made against him in certain of his statements, more trustworthy than are those authors who wrote only from hearsay.

What most impressed the writers of antiquity who have given us the most graphic descriptions of the Babylonian capital was its stupendous walls and the vast area which the city embraced. According to Herodotus, who is followed by Pliny, who evidently accepted the measurements of the Greek historian, the wall which girdled this wonderful metropolis was seventy-five feet in thickness and three hundred feet in height.

On the top, along the edges of this wall were constructed buildings of a single chamber facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to drive round. In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with brazen lintels and side-posts.[508]

Such a prodigious wall seems impossible, but when we remember the Great Wall of China, which has nearly thirty times the length of that which Herodotus says surrounded Babylon, we cannot insist that the historian’s account is inherently improbable. But when we know that the Babylonian wall was composed almost exclusively of sun-dried bricks we feel compelled to doubt the writer’s measurements for the simple reason that it was quite impossible for the material used to support a structure of so great a height. It is true that Nebuchadnezzar, in a notable inscription, describes his wall as “mountains high,” but this is a bit of hyperbole in which the self-glorifying monarch was wont frequently to indulge. His statement is quite as much of an exaggeration as that of Diodorus Siculus,[509] who declares that Semiramis, to whom he attributes this colossal work, employed two million men in building the wall of Babylon and that she built it at the rate of a furlong a day and had it completed in the space of a single year.

The circumference of the immense wall of Babylon, according to Herodotus, measured no less than four hundred and eighty statia—somewhat more than fifty-three miles. Ctesias, however, makes the circuit of the city but a trifle more than forty miles. In either case the area enclosed by the wall was enormous and far greater than that included within the extended walls of Paris or within those of Nanking, which is the largest city site in China.

The city of Babylon [writes Herodotus] is an exact square, but certain recent investigators maintain that it was in the form of a rectangle twelve miles wide and fifteen miles long. But whatever the form of the city, the estimates given of its area by ancient authors have appeared to many modern scholars so staggering that they have contended that it was an inclosed district rather than a regular city, the streets which are said to have led from gate to gate across the area being no more than roads through cultivated land over which buildings were distributed in groups and patches.[510]

Quintus Curtius asserts positively “that the enclosure contained sufficient pasture and arable land to support the whole population during a long siege.”[511]

If such was the case we should be forced to conclude that the population of the city was out of all proportion to its size. The English geographer, Rennell,[512] is disposed to allow to Babylon during its most flourishing period a population of a million and a quarter, but this is but a surmise, and all estimates of the number of inhabitants in the great city are, at best, the merest conjectures.

For nearly twenty-five centuries the accounts of Ctesias, Strabo, Herodotus, and the writers who accompanied Alexander the Great to the East were our sole authorities respecting the size and the magnificence of the great capital on the Euphrates. Since, however, the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” have begun to publish the results of their carefully conducted excavations we find that we must greatly modify many of our views concerning the city about which there has been so much legend and romance, and envisage it in the light of the cold, scientific facts which have been submitted to us, as the results of long research, by Dr. Koldewey and his scholarly associates. While many of the descriptions of Herodotus and other early writers are found to be accurate, it is now clear that many of their measurements require very considerable revision. Thus, in lieu of the fifty-three miles which Herodotus has given as the circuit of the city and the forty miles at which Ctesias has estimated it, Dr. Koldewey finds that these figures must be reduced to eleven miles. The learned investigator noting that the circumference given by Ctesias approximates closely to four times the correct measurement is lead to suspect that the Greek writer “mistook the figures representing the whole circumference for the measure of one side of the square.”[513]

The excavations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” seem, therefore, to prove conclusively that Babylon, far from covering an area so large that both Paris and London could find place within it, side by side, was in reality, as Delitzsch declares, no larger than Munich or Dresden.[514]

But in spite of the great reduction that Koldewey found himself compelled to make in the measurements of the classical writers he does not hesitate to declare “that, in any case, the city, even in circumference, was the greatest of any in the ancient East, Nineveh, which in other respects rivalled Babylon, not excepted.” He also pertinently observes that “it must always be remembered that an ancient city was primarily a fortress of which the inhabited part was surrounded and protected by the encircling girdle of the walls. Our modern cities are of an entirely different character; they are inhabited spaces open on all sides. A reasonable comparison can, therefore, only be made between Babylon and other walled cities and, when compared with them, Babylon takes the first place, as regards the extent of its enclosed and inhabited area, not only for ancient but also for modern times.”[515]

After spending some time on and round about the mound of Babil we proceeded to explore the ruins in the southern part of the city. On our way thither we strolled along the east bank of the Euphrates which, in places, is fringed with stately palms whose feathery crowns are always a delight to the eye. Indeed, the palm is so indispensable a feature of an eastern landscape that no picture of a town or a river seems complete without groves and clumps of this most picturesque of oriental trees. I was glad to find so many of them bordering the Euphrates and the western ruins of Babylon, as I had always imagined that they must here, more than anywhere else, be an essential part of the environment. But, although I was delighted to find so many of these noble trees, it was not for them that I was then specially looking. I was seeking rather a specimen of the weeping willow—the graceful Salix Babylonica—which, in my mind, has always been associated with what is the most pathetic threnody ever written in any language. I refer to the plaintive elegy of the Children of Israel during their captivity in Babylon. Seating myself under an umbrageous palm near a cluster of delicate weeping willows, I said to myself: “This is the one place in the world where one can best appreciate the overmastering sadness of the homesick exiles when their captors asked them to sing the songs of their native land.” And, taking my breviary from my pocket, I read again and again what then seemed to me the most affecting lines ever composed. Put yourself, in fancy, gentle reader, on the bank of the Euphrates in sight of the ruined palace of Nebuchadnezzar and read aloud the lamentation of the disconsolate Hebrews, as given in Psalm 137:

Upon the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion:

On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments. For there they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs.

And they that carried us away said: Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion.

How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten.

Let my tongue cleave to my jaws if I do not remember thee:

If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy.

Is it possible to put in words a more soul-subduing “Home Sweet Home” than this affecting Super flumina Babylonis of the heart-broken captives of Israel? But it is only when it is sung in its beautifully rhythmic Hebrew that one can fully appreciate its depth of pathos and exceeding beauty of expression.

Our walk from Babil southward was one of rare delight and interest. It was through gardens and cultivated fields and attractive palm groves which occupied the greater part of the narrow strip of fertile land which separates the Euphrates from the great city of ruins. The methods employed in tilling the soil here are the same as those used in the days of the Jewish Captivity. There is the same primitive plow, the same process of treading out and winnowing grain, the same methods of irrigating the land as obtained when the prophets Daniel and Ezekiel were here the teachers and the consolers of their exiled countrymen.

The width of the Euphrates varies according to the season. As the rainfall in this subtropical land is rarely more than three inches a year, the river is quite shallow, except when its bed is filled by the annual flood from the mountains of Armenia. At Babylon it is rarely more than four hundred feet wide; and during the dry season its surface is considerably below its banks. For this reason the inhabitants from the earliest times have, in order to irrigate their lands, had recourse not only to canals but also to various devices for lifting water from a lower to a higher level. Among these contrivances are the dolab or chain pump, the na’ura or water wheel, and the djird, a huge leather bag, which, when filled with water is, by means of a simple machine operated by an ox, lifted the desired height and automatically emptied into the channel by which the field or garden is irrigated. The strident notes of these various water elevators and the accompanying songs of the native attendants are often the only sounds that penetrate the solemn stillness which reigns amid the venerable ruins that cover the ground from the mound of Babil on the north to the village of Djumdjuma in the southern part of Babylon.

Herodotus tells us that in his time the Euphrates divided the city into “two distinct portions.” But the present bed of the shifting river is considerably to the westward of that which existed in his day. As a result of this shifting, the western part of the city has almost completely disappeared, for nothing of it now remains on the right side of the present channel except slight vestiges of its once massive walls. The same writer also tells us that the two halves of the city were connected by a stone bridge which spanned the river near the center of the metropolis. He attributes this feat of engineering to Queen Nitocris, but, as there is no record of this queen, either in Berosus or in the Babylonian inscriptions, it is probable that Herodotus was misinformed about her existence, or that he had in mind Queen Amuita, the Median wife of Nebuchadnezzar, who is said to have suggested to her royal consort the construction of the famous hanging gardens which were long ranked among the seven wonders of the world. Diodorus,[516] however, will have it that the bridge was due to Semiramis, to whom antiquity ascribes many other of Babylon’s most notable works. But in spite of the determination of the ancient historian to give the credit of this remarkable achievement to a woman, and in spite of the denials of many modern writers that such a bridge ever existed, or that its construction was even possible in the age in which it is said to have been built, the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” in 1910 actually discovered incontestable remains of the much disputed bridge and demonstrated that its construction was due not to Nitocris, or Amuita, or Semiramis, but to the renowned Nebuchadnezzar or to his father, Nabopolassar.

At the spot once occupied by the eastern bridgehead of this notable structure we found ourselves on the famous Procession Street which was long one of the most remarkable features of Babylon. This was the street along which passed the great processions of Marduk-Merodach—the tutelar deity of the Chaldean capital, and of Nabu-Nebe—his son. In this respect it served the same purpose as the magnificent Via Sacra, which extended from Athens to Eleusis and which was used by the solemn Panathenaic procession which was annually held for the celebration, in the great Elusinian temple, of the impressive mysteries of Demeter, Iacchus, and Persephone. An inscribed brick recently found informs us of the part Nebuchadnezzar had in the construction of the Sacred Way of Babylon and gives us the characteristic prayer that he addressed to his gods, which reads:

Nabu and Marduc, when you traverse these streets in joy, may benefits for me rest upon your lips; life for distant days and well being for the body.... May I attain eternal age.[517]

Passing eastwards along Procession Street we soon find ourselves between the two ruins of the great temple of Merodack and of the famous Tower of Babylon.

In the temple, according to Herodotus, there was a sitting statue of Zeus—the name he gives to the god Merodach—all of gold. “Before the figure stands a large golden table and the throne whereon it sits and the base on which the throne is placed are likewise of gold”—the weight of the gold of these divers objects aggregating eight hundred talents.

Nebuchadnezzar, speaking of this temple, of which he calls himself “the fosterer,” says he adorned it with the wealth of the sea and the mountains and all conceivable valuables,—gold and silver and precious stones. The shrine of Merodach, he declares, “I made to gleam as the sun. The best of my cedars that I brought from Lebanon, the noble forest, I sought out for the roofing of the chamber of his lordship, which cedars I covered with gleaming gold. For the restoration of this temple I make supplication every morning to Merodach, the king of the gods, the lord of lords.” To judge from his inscriptions, it would be difficult to find a pagan king who was more prayerful or who exhibited greater devotion to his gods than did this proud ruler of old Babylonia.

It was in one of the sanctuaries of this temple, apparently in that of the god Ea, lord of wisdom and life and healer of the sick—whom the Greeks identified with Serapis—that the generals of Alexander the Great “asked the god whether it would be better and more desirable for Alexander,” who was then lying critically ill in a palace but a bowshot away, “to be carried into his temple in order as a suppliant to be cured by him. A voice issued from the god saying that he was not to be carried into the temple but that it would be better form to remain where he was. This answer was reported by the Companions and soon after Alexander died as if, forsooth, this were now the better thing.”[518]

Alexander had planned to make Babylon the capital of his world empire, but, shortly after taking possession of the city, his meteoric career in the prime of youthful manhood, was cut short by death, the only invincible foe he had ever encountered. His death was the downfall of the city whence he purposed to rule both Asia and Europe. One of his generals, Seleucus Nicator, succeeded him as ruler of Babylonia and soon thereafter transferred his capital from the banks of the sluggish Euphrates[519] to a new city, Seleucia, named after himself, which he had founded on the banks of the swift-flowing Tigris. And it was not long after this that the great metropolis of Babylonia, which for nearly two thousand years had been the leading capital of the ancient world and which had so long been “the glory of the kingdoms and the beauty of the Chaldees excellency” had literally, in the words of Isaiah, become the habitation of the wild beasts of the desert and was reduced to such a state of decay that, according to St. Jerome,[520] its walls, once the marvel of the world, served only to enclose a hunting park for the diversion of the Parthian Kings.

A furlong to the north of the temple of Merodach is the ruin of the famous tower of Babylon, which by many has been considered identical with the Tower of Babil. So colossal was it that the Babylonians called it “the foundation stone of heaven and earth,” and Nebuchadnezzar, who contributed materially towards its restoration and enlargement, declared in an inscription that he had raised the top of the tower “to rival heaven,” but this was a form of oriental exaggeration in which this monarch frequently indulged. Herodotus tells us that it was a stadium—six hundred feet “in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower and on that a third, and so on up to the eighth, above which there is a great temple.”[521] According to Strabo,[522] this quadrangular pyramid was “five hundred feet high”—nineteen feet higher than the great pyramid of Gizeh. As, however, the existing ruin of the tower of Babylon has not yet been excavated it is impossible, by actual measurements, to control the statements of ancient writers regarding its magnitude. But, from an old inscribed tablet which has been translated by the noted Orientalist, G. Smith, and more recently by Father Scheil, the distinguished French Dominican, we gather that the estimates of the Greek writers were probably excessive, for, according to the tablet in question, the summit of the tower was only three hundred feet above the surrounding plain.

Diodorus[523] informs us that this tower was used by the Chaldeans as an astronomical observatory. In the thick, dust-laden atmosphere of Babylonia, where sand storms are so frequent, such a lofty structure would be quite a necessity for the successful observations of the priest astronomers of Babylonia. “The greatly renowned clearness of the Babylonian sky,” as Koldewey truly observes, “is largely a fiction of European travelers who are rarely accustomed to observe the night sky of Europe without the intervention of city lights.”[524] Cicero, therefore, was quite as mistaken as modern travelers when he thought that the broad plains of Chaldea, where the sky was visible on all sides,[525] were specially favorable to star-gazing and the cultivation of astronomy. Equally misled was the poet who sang of Chaldean shepherds who

Watched from the centre of their sleeping flocks

Those radiant Mercuries that seemed to move,

Carrying through ether, in perpetual round,

Decrees and resolutions of the gods;

And, by their aspects, signifying works

Of dim futurity to man revealed.

No, it was not those shepherds “in boundless solitude” who “made report of stars,” but the Babylonian priests who, from the summits of their zikurrats, or temple-towers, laid the foundations, broad and deep, of the sublime science of astronomy centuries before Hipparchus and Ptolemy began those admirable investigations which have rendered them immortal.

All the ruins of Babylon which we had hitherto inspected had greatly impressed us, but we did not yet have a concrete idea of the greatness and splendor of the capital of the Babylonian Kings until we visited that part which the Arabs still call the Kasr, or castle. It was the great palace which was begun by Nabopolassar and completed by his illustrious son, Nebuchadnezzar. By the Roman historians it was called the Arx, by the Greeks the Acropolis. It served not only as a citadel but also as the favored residence of the king and as the approach to the great temple of Merodach, already referred to, which was the most famous sanctuary in Babylonia.

Not until we saw the wonderful ruins of the Kasr, which have in great measure been excavated, were we able to appreciate the enormous amount of work which Dr. Koldewey and his associates have here accomplished and the splendid contributions which they have made to the science of Assyriology and to our knowledge respecting the greatest capital of the ancient world.

The massiveness of the walls of the citadel—some of them more than fifty feet in thickness—and the vastness of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace with its countless chambers were amazing. But even more noteworthy were the remnants of the Sacred Way, which were once adorned with scores of life-size figures of lions made of brilliantly enameled bricks, and the great Ishtar Gate which spanned Babylon’s Via Sacra, where it entered the older city. The hundreds of bulls and dragons, in brick relief, which cover the walls, and the delicate modeling of the figures prove conclusively that the glyptic art of the Neo-Babylonian period must have attained a very high degree of perfection.

Before the discovery of these wonderful works of art, Koldewey was disposed to be quite skeptical about the traditional splendor of Babylon, but, when he unearthed the marvels of the Sacred Way and the Ishtar Gate, which is “the largest and most striking ruin of Babylon,” he was compelled to admit that the fabled splendor of the city was not without foundation.

Adjoining Ishtar Gate are what are supposed to be the remains of the famous Hanging Gardens which antiquity classed among the Seven Wonders of the World. But a view of the semicircular arches which are said to have supported these gardens makes it difficult to understand why they were called hanging—pensiles hortus—as described by Quintus Curtius[526] and other ancient writers. So far as one can judge by an inspection of the ruins now visible, this wonder of antiquity was nothing more than an elevated garden court and far less of a miraculum, as the Roman historian calls it, than is an ordinary roof garden on one of our modern “sky-scrapers.”

In the same palace, of which the Hanging Gardens formed so conspicuous an ornament, is shown the large throne room of the Babylonian Kings. Speaking of this Dr. Koldewey does not hesitate to say that “it is so clearly marked out for this purpose that no reasonable doubt can be felt as to its having been used as their—the Kings’—principal audience chamber.” And he furthermore adds: “If anyone should desire to localize the scene of Belshazzar’s eventful banquet, he can surely place it with complete accuracy in this immense room.”[527]

Among the other objects of interest among the marvelous complexus of ruins are a huge lion of basalt, the remains of Persian and Parthian buildings and the débris of a Greek theater which, one may believe, was founded by Alexander the Great for the benefit of his countrymen who, in this remote capital of the East, would have been quite loath to forego those intellectual amusements to which they had been so devoted in the land of their birth.

So much has our knowledge of Babylon been increased by the excavation of one-half of the city that we hope that Dr. Koldewey and his scholarly associates will be able to uncover the other half. Should anything interfere with their completion of the great undertaking in which they had already achieved such splendid results, both science and history would suffer a loss that cannot easily be estimated.

From an examination of the ruins of Babylon, that which most impresses one is the immense size of the city, of its walls and palaces and temples, and that tower of Belus which “the Jews of the Old Testament regarded as the essence of human presumption.” Compared with these colossal ruins the remains of such celebrated cities as Delphi and Sparta and Olympia fade almost into insignificance.

From the descriptions of the Babylonian capital left us by the writers of antiquity, the dominant impression made on us is that of the wealth and splendor and magnificence of this famous metropolis. This impression is emphasized by the inscriptions of its kings, who tell us how lavishly their palaces and temples were embellished by the rarest woods of the East and by vast quantities of ivory and silver and gold. Thus Asurbanipal proudly declares, “I filled Esagilla with silver and gold and precious stones and made Ekua to shine as the constellations in the sky.” And Nebuchadnezzar rejoices in the treasures of art and learning which he had accumulated in his palace for “the amazement of mankind.”

But how are these grandiloquent statements of monarchs and historians substantiated by the investigations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gessellschaft”? That Babylon

Far

Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind;

that, as a trade center, its activities extended from

Indus to the Nile

Or Caspian wave or Oman’s rocky shore,

there is no room for doubt. But from the glowing descriptions of the Greek and Latin writers, we are also led to infer that the buildings of the city—especially its temples and palaces—rivaled in beauty and grandeur the imposing structures of Athens under Pericles and the sumptuous edifices of Rome under Augustus. The discoveries, however, of the German excavators compel us greatly to revise many of our notions regarding the famed palm-embosomed capital on the Euphrates.

One of their most startling revelations is that, so far as their investigations enable them to determine, hewn stone was employed “in bulk for building,” only in the construction of the northern wall of the Kasr, the Sacred Way, the bridge over the Euphrates and in the arches that supported the Hanging Gardens. In this respect Babylon was far behind Nineveh, its great Assyrian rival, where stone was a common building material. Nearly all of its buildings, even its most lauded temples, were composed chiefly of sun-dried bricks. Only in certain parts of the larger temples were kiln-dried bricks employed. What a contrast between such mud structures and the superb marble temples of Baalbec and Palmyra, or the highly polished granite fanes of Thebes and Abydos on the banks of the Nile! What a contrast, even, between the mud temple of Marduk—the greatest in Babylonia—and the immense stone Temple of the Sun erected by the Incas of Peru in their capital of Cuzco!

The dwelling houses of Babylon, according to Herodotus, were mostly three or four stories high. So far, however, the evidence based on excavations goes to prove that private houses were of but a single story. They were probably, like most of the one-story houses in Babylonia to-day—with flat mud roofs which served as dormitories during the intense heat of summer. Such dwellings were almost exactly like the modern one-story adobe houses everywhere visible in New and Old Mexico. The Mexican houses, however, have windows, while those in Babylon had none—at least on the side facing the street. In this respect, however, they were not unlike so many dwelling houses seen in the Near East to-day.

As I contemplated the large mud buildings of ancient Babylon, I could not but compare them with those of the Great Chimu, whose ruins are now among the most remarkable remains of pre-Hispanic Peru. To look at them one would imagine that some jinnee had picked up a section of the Babylonian city and transported it to the far-distant shore of the South Pacific.[528]

With the exception of the Sacred Way and a few other streets, the thoroughfares of Babylon were unpaved. But none of them, not even the great Via Sacra, although polished by long and continuous use, exhibits any trace, as do the pavements of Pompeii, of having ever been used for wheeled traffic. This would seem to indicate that such traffic, even in the Neo-Babylonian period, was rare or nonexistent.

Still more surprising is the fact that the excavations, outside of some of the larger buildings, show but few traces of a drainage system. How so large and flourishing a city could have endured so long without one is a mystery that remains to be solved.

In the light, then, of the German excavations, it is apparent that Babylon, on whose splendor and magnificence the old classical writers so loved to dilate, and concerning whose beauty and grandeur legend and tradition have long spun such wonderful fairy tales, was a city that was remarkable rather for the vastness of its public buildings than for their elegance of design or beauty of execution. Even the temples and palaces were low, squat structures with flat mud roofs and were, from an architectural point of view, quite inferior to many caravanseries that one may now find in various parts of the East. Such ornaments as they possessed were evidences of barbaric richness and prodigality and showed none of the purity of taste that so characterized the matchless creations of Phidias and Ictinus.

But, although Babylon was, in its architectural features, a much overrated city, it has, nevertheless, deserved well of the world and has contributed to the advance of civilization as did few other cities before the rise of Athens and Rome. For, as has been observed, Babylon is “the oldest seat of earthly empire.” And “when the West was shrouded in a darkness that neither history nor tradition can penetrate, ... while wild beasts or naked savages roamed over the future sites of Athens and Rome and Florence and London,”[529] Babylon was laying the foundations of art and science, of law and literature and of that civilization which was subsequently developed and elaborated by the great nations of the West.

Trade and commerce and agriculture [asserts Delitzsch] were at their prime and the sciences—geometry, mathematics, and, above all, astronomy, had reached a degree of development which again and again moves even the astronomers of to-day to admiration and astonishment. Not Paris, at the outside Rome, can compete with Babylon in respect to the influence which it exercised upon the world throughout two thousand years.[530]

It has been the custom, time out of mind, to speak of Egypt as the cradle of civilization. And there was reason for this. For her venerable monuments—her pyramids and temples and obelisks and colossal rock—sculptures—which seemed to be coeval with the dawn of history, appear to justify the theory that our race here took its first steps forward in its great career of material and intellectual development. But recent investigations among the ruins along the Euphrates prove that Babylonia is entitled to the honor which has so long been so freely accorded to the valley of the Nile.

The proofs of this thesis are as numerous as interesting; and, so far as inductive evidence goes, are practically conclusive. But most of them are of so recondite a character that they can be properly discussed only in special works bearing on the archæology and prehistory of the two countries in question. One may, however, be permitted to indicate a few of the more obvious reasons which have led Orientalists to conclude that the civilization in the land of the Pharaohs had its origin in Babylonia.

Thus, recent discoveries in Upper Egypt seem to prove beyond doubt that there was intercourse between the two countries in prehistoric times and that, as a result of this early communication, wheat was first introduced from the valley of the Euphrates to that of the Nile. Another consequence of the intercourse between the two lands was that the Egyptians became acquainted with the Babylonian system of irrigation—a system which had rendered the soil of Babylonia the most productive in the then known world. Babylonian engineers, there is reason to believe, introduced into Egypt the shadoff and the sakieh or water wheel, both of which were Babylonian inventions, as is clearly attested by early Assyrian bas-reliefs and by still earlier Sumerian inscriptions.

Yet more exhaustive researches regarding the early script used in the two countries and the relations of the language of Babylonia, which was a Semetic tongue, to that of Egypt lead to the same conclusion as do investigations respecting the introduction of wheat from the land of the Euphrates, where it still grows wild, into that of the Nile, and the identity of the irrigation machines which have been in continuous use in both lands for thousands of years.

It may, indeed, be admitted that no one of these facts is, of itself, sufficient to demonstrate that the culture and the engineering science of Egypt were Babylonian in origin; but, when they are all found to point in the same direction, the argument based on them has a cumulative force that is quite unassailable. Dr. Sayce gives judgment in a single sentence when he declares “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Semitic-speaking people who brought the science of irrigation and the art of writing to the banks of the Nile came, like the wheat they cultivated, from the Babylonian plain.”[531]

Those, however, who are interested in this fascinating theory, which ascribes to Babylonia not only Egyptian civilization but also the ancestors of the historical Egyptians, should read the remarkable work on the subject by Professor Hommel—a work[532] of profound scholarship and one which has convinced many of the most eminent Orientalists that there can no longer be any doubt that the civilization and culture of Egypt came originally from Babylonia.

But interesting as are the discoveries respecting the cultural relations between the two countries in question, no notice of Babylonia would be complete without some reference to her contributions to the science of astronomy. Here we have more positive information than has hitherto been available regarding the primeval intercourse between the peoples of the Euphrates and the Nile. As one might expect, however, in dealing with subjects carrying us back into the mists of antiquity, we find that the question of Babylonian astronomy is one that is deeply involved in myth and legend, but such myths and legends as help to corroborate the findings of historians and archæologists concerning the labors of the astronomers of old Chaldea.

Even in the question regarding the origin of astronomy, as in that concerning the beginnings of civil engineering in Egypt, we note the same old debate among the learned as to who were the more ancient astronomers, the Egyptians or the Babylonians. The people of the Nileland boasted that Hermes or Osiris was the founder of their astronomical system, while the Chaldeans, that is the Babylonians, claimed that the first astronomer was Belus,[533] the son of Nimrod, who was the grandson of Noah and the reputed builder of the Tower of Babel. This tower, often confused with the tower of Bel described by Herodotus, was, according to Chaldean legend, the first astronomical observatory.

It was not, however, thousands of years before the Christian era, as certain writers would have us believe, that Chaldean astronomy became an exact science. This was not possible and for a very simple reason—the absence of a strict chronology to which the Chaldean observers of the heavens did not attain until 747 B. C., when they adopted what is known as the era of Nabonnassar. Previously there could be no certainty regarding the calculation of time. Not, indeed, until the first recorded eclipse, March 21, 721 B. C., was astronomy raised to the dignity of an exact science.

In fact, during the first twenty or thirty centuries of Mesopotamian history [writes the distinguished Belgian savant, Franz Cumont] nothing is found but empirical observations, intended chiefly to indicate omens, and the rudimentary knowledge which these observations display is hardly in advance of that of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Aztecs.[534]

It is only during the last quarter of a century that we have been able to determine the advances made by astronomy at different periods of Babylonian history and we owe this knowledge almost entirely to the persistent labors of three Jesuits, Fathers Epping, Kugler, and Straszmaier.[535] By a long and careful study of the cuneiform inscriptions bearing on astronomy, many of which they have deciphered, interpreted, and published, they have, for the first time, put the history of Babylonian astronomy on a firm, scientific basis. And they have at the same time completely dissipated the poetical fancy of “Chaldean shepherds discovering the causes of eclipses while watching their flocks” and the oft repeated fable that it was Babylonian astronomers who discovered the precession of the equinoxes—an achievement that was due to the genius of Hipparchus of Nicæa.

Thanks, however, to the researches of the three savants named, it must now be conceded that certain discoveries which have hitherto been attributed to Hipparchus should be credited to the astronomers of Babylonia. Among these were discoveries regarding the inequalities of the lengths of the seasons, the methods of determining in advance the phenomena of the five known planets, the duration of their synodic revolutions, and the dates of the phases and eclipses of the moon. In a remarkable cuneiform inscription, dated as early as 523 B. C., is given what is practically a monthly ephemeris not only of the sun and moon and eclipses but also the more notable phenomena of the planets. With reason does Father Kugler consider this “the oldest known document of the scientific astronomy of the Chaldeans.” And so greatly is he impressed by the marvelous astronomical tables which were constructed by the priest astronomers of Babylonia that he declares:

One does not know which to admire the more, the extraordinary accuracy of the periods which is implied by the drawing up of each of the columns of figures or the ingenuity with which these old masters contrived to combine all the factors to be considered.[536]

Recent research has also shown that some of the very accurate calculations of lunar periods which, from the time of Ptolemy, have been attributed to Hipparchus, should in reality be ascribed to the astronomers of Babylonia.[537] That these ancient observers, who had none of the instruments of precision which are now available in our observatories, should have been able to make so exact calculations is marvelous in the extreme.

Equally noteworthy were the discoveries of the hellenized Chaldean, Seleucus, who proved that the movement of the tides is due to the action of the moon and who, contrary to the view which then generally prevailed, taught the helio-centric theory of the solar system—nearly two thousand years before the epochal achievements of Copernicus and Galileo.

The foregoing paragraphs clearly evince that it was the Babylonians who laid the foundations of astronomy, and not, as Buckle, Draper, and others would have us believe, the Arabians under the Caliphate. “The place of honor in science, therefore,”—a place which for ages was conceded to the Babylonians and which, through Father Epping’s studies, has been won for them anew—“will henceforth remain to them uncontested and incontestable.”[538]

In order, however, to have a correct idea of the far-reaching influence of Babylonian civilization, one must know more about it than its contribution to science, art, and literature. One must know something about the social condition of the people and of their manners and customs as described in their history and reflected in their laws. For this a few words will suffice and these will be based on the wonderful code of Hammurabi, the king who ruled over Babylonia more than two thousand years before our era and who was the real founder of her greatness.[539]

It is true that the great legal code which bears his name was, like all other ancient codes, based to a great extent on precedent and on earlier collections of laws, some of which, there is reason to believe, antedated Hammurabi’s great compilation by more than a thousand years. But it is because it is chiefly a codification of preëxisting laws that the great code of the Babylonian King is so valuable and instructive. We find that, unlike the warlike Assyrians, the Babylonians were not only a peaceable and intelligent but also a very humane and deeply religious people. In the words of one who has made a special study of the history and laws of the people over whom Hammurabi bore rule for forty-three years:

It is startling to find how much that we have thought distinctly our own has really come down to us from that great people who ruled the Land of the Two Streams. We need not be ashamed of anything we can trace back so far. It is from no savage ancestors that it descends to us. It bears the “hall mark” not only of extreme antiquity but of sterling worth.... A right-thinking citizen of a modern city would probably feel more at home in ancient Babylon than in mediæval Europe.[540]

Among the laws of the great Babylonian legislator that are especially remarkable are those which safeguard the rights and privileges of married women. That such laws should have been enacted and enforced more than four thousand years ago shows better than anything else the high plane of social progress to which the Babylonians had thus early attained. To quote from the distinguished Orientalist, L. W. King, they “throw an interesting light on the position of the married woman in the Babylonian community, which was not only unexampled in antiquity but compares favorably in point of freedom and independence with her status in many countries in modern Europe.”[541]

One of the many results of the discovery of Hammurabi’s Code was, curiously enough, completely to demolish a favorite argument of certain Biblical critics respecting the laws of Moses. So elaborate a legislative code as that attributed to the Jewish lawgiver was, they contended, quite improbable at the early date assigned to it, and it must, therefore, have had its origin at a subsequent period when society was more highly organized. It must, then, the critics maintained, have been the work of the Jewish priesthood in the later days of Israel, who, in order to give it the necessary sanction, falsely attributed it to Moses. What then must have been their surprise and confusion, on the appearance of Father Scheil’s translation of Hammurabi’s Code, to find that it was more than five hundred years older than that of Moses, and that with its two hundred and eighty-two enactments it revealed a more elaborate social organization than that described in the violently attacked Book of Exodus? But this is only one of many similar surprises which the Higher Critics have found in the monuments of Babylonia. And in proportion as the cuneiform inscriptions continue to disclose their long-withheld secrets, so also, we may feel sure, will they, in all essential matters, be found to verify and corroborate the declarations of the Sacred Text.

Our last bird’s-eye view of the abomination of desolation that was Babylon was from the highest accessible point of the great royal palace on the Kasr. It was at the hour when the noonday sun was pouring his irradiating beams on the scattered and crumbling ruins of temples and palaces and citadels, which seemed to have been blasted by the lightnings of a wrathful heaven and to be lying under a major anathema maranatha of an offended Deity. In this accursed haunt of serpents and scorpions,—and the Arabs add—dragons and satyrs—the earth was absolutely verdureless. No four-footed thing trod the earth; no winged creature circled through the air; not a tree or a shrub adorned the brown, sun-baked mound. Where once stood the Hanging Gardens that were the glory of an arrogant potentate and the wonder of a marveling world; where once were gorgeous halls, with throne of ivory and gold; where kings and nobles feasted in bejeweled robes; where loud choruses swelled to the joyous notes of harp and cymbal and psaltery; where brazen bacchanals drank to Bel from golden goblets looted from Salem’s desecrated temple, there now was the silence and the vacuity and the oblivion of the tomb. Desolation was everywhere made desolate. Of a truth has Babylon the great, “the mother of the abominations of the earth,” “been thrown down and shall be found no more at all.”[542]

We stood on a spot which must have been near that occupied by Nebuchadnezzar when, in the pride of his heart, he exultantly exclaimed:

Is not this the great Babylon which I have built to be the seat of the kingdom, by the strength of my power and in the glory of my excellence?

And while the word was yet in the King’s mouth a voice came down from heaven: To thee, O King Nebuchadnezzar, it is said: Thy kingdom is taken from thee.[543]

But before this word was uttered the Prophet Jeremias, speaking with all the detail of an eye-witness, had foretold what would be the fate of the proud and wicked city on the Euphrates. How literally true are his predictions, let the reader judge from the following verses:

Thus saith the Lord of hosts: That broad wall of Babylon shall be utterly broken down, and her high gates shall be burnt with fire, and the labors of the people shall come to nothing, and of the nations shall go to the fire and shall perish.[544]

And Babylon shall be reduced to heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment and a hissing, because there is no inhabitant.[545]

Thou shalt say: O Lord, thou has spoken against this place to destroy it; so that there shall be neither man nor beast to dwell therein, and that it should be desolate forever.[546]

Reading these graphic words of the inspired prophet in the presence of the ruins of Babylon as they appear to-day, one can but exclaim with the Royal Psalmist:

“Forever, O Lord, thy word standeth firm in heaven.”[547]