From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

But irrigation is needed near the foothills of the surrounding mountains and adequate drainage is required near the mouths of the four chief rivers that bring fertility to the plain. For, as it is now, a great part of the land bordering the Mediterranean is covered with swamps like that described by Ovid in his beautiful story of Philemon and Baucis:

Haud procul hinc stagnum, tellus habitabilis olim,

Nunc celebres mergis fulicisque palustribus undæ.[222]

During the past few decades a great change has been made for the better, as is attested by the large number of American agricultural implements which are now found throughout the plain and the hundreds of ginning machines, looms, and thousands of spindles—mostly from England—which are seen in the cotton factories of Tarsus and Adana. But, although a great advance has been made over the condition which obtained a third of a century ago, there is yet vast room for improvement. When the Ottoman Government shall awaken to the necessity of conserving its natural resources, when it shall systematically reforest the territory whose once precious woodlands have been so sadly despoiled, and shall duly drain the vast swamps which have been formed by the neglect of its treasure-giving rivers, Cilicia Campestris will again be worthy of the name which legend tells us it once bore—Garden of Eden.

As it is now, the whole extent of Cilicia from the Taurus to the Amanus and from the mouth of the Cydnus to the headwaters of the Pyramus is chiefly remarkable for ruins of cities and the sites of towns whose very names are forgotten. Everywhere on the plain and on the girdling foothills, one will see crumbling fortresses built by Genoese and Venetians; moss-covered strongholds of Saracens and Crusaders; Corinthian columns and marble colonnades, arches, and vaulted roofs of Christian churches; reminders of mediæval warfare and of days when this historic land was swept by inundations of barbarian hordes, who destroyed by fire and sword the arts and labors which were once the pride of western Asia. Everywhere one observes fragmentary remains of Roman bridges and arches, of aqueducts and causeways, of Greek altars attributed to Alexander to commemorate his victory over the Persians; dilapidated walls and towers and sepulchral grottoes with an occasional Greek or Arabic inscription to mark the sites of Corycus, Pompeiopolis, and Anazarba—those cities of renown, where their inhabitants could quietly rest under their vines and fig trees free from the incursions of predatory Cliteans and Tibareni and barbarians of Hun and Scithian savagery, who spread terror and devastation wherever they could gratify their lust of cruelty or plunder. It was the boast of the Mongols that so complete was their work of “extirpation and erasure” of certain cities, where they had wreaked their full fury of rapine and murder, “that horses might run without stumbling over the ground where they had once stood.”[223] Judging by the calamities that have been inflicted on the once populous cities of Cilicia one would say that they were, in the expressive words of St. Prosper of Aquitaine, depredatione vastatœ—ravaged by depredations as ruthless as those that ever characterized the frightful irruptions of Timur or Jenghiz Khan.

This indiscriminate destruction of centers of culture and marts of commerce is often attributed to the Turks. But, as we have already seen, the Turks—I refer especially to the Osmanlis—who have been the rulers of the Ottoman Empire for more than five hundred years, were not like the Mongols and Tartars, a nation of raiders, but a nation of colonizers and empire builders. Their object, therefore, was not to destroy but to construct and develop. Those who make this charge, which is in great measure gratuitous, forget the wholesale destruction of the hordes of Timur and Jenghiz Khan, not to speak of other raiders, and lose sight of the fact that some of the most famous cities of the East were reduced to ashes by the armies of Greece and Rome more than a thousand years before the appearance of the armies of the Ottoman conquerors in Syria, Greece, and Ionia. Thus, to mention only a few instances, it was Alexander the Great who destroyed Halicarnasus, the birthplace of the historians Herodotus and Dionysius. Here stood the magnificent tomb of Mausolus, classed by the ancients among the seven wonders of the world, the ruins of which were in 1402 used by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem as a quarry for building their castles. It was the Roman general Mummius who brought ruin to the famous city of Corinth. This was, in truth, rebuilt by Julius Cæsar, but only to be destroyed again, at a much later period, by the Greeks themselves. It was the Emperor Aurelian who doomed to destruction Palmyra, the magnificent capital of Zenobia, almost during the heyday of its architectural splendor and commercial prosperity. It was the Goths who demolished the temple of Diana at Ephesus, another of the world’s wonders, while the city itself was in ruins even before the advent of the devastating Timur. But it was Timur who razed Sardis, the capital of Crœsus, whose name has ever been a synonym of untold wealth. It was Malik al-Ashraf, ruler of Egypt and Syria, who destroyed the famed city of Tyre after its long and eventful history which antedated the reigns of Hiram and Solomon.

Moreover, for thousands of years before the advent of the Osmanlis in western Asia there was at work an agency of destruction that is usually quite disregarded by those who are so propense to impute to the “Unspeakable Turk” the heaps of ruins which overspread a large part of the great Ottoman Empire—an agency whose power of annihilation is incomparably greater than ever was that of Hun or Mongol. This is the earthquake. From the dawn of history this irresistible power has been in action in nearly all the countries bordering the Mediterranean, and has, times without number, exhibited its relentless fury from Cilicia to Sicily and from Egypt to Dalmatia. In Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor,[224] and Greece whole cities were subverted. In the reign of Valens and Valentinian the greater part of the Roman world was shaken by seismic disturbances of the most appalling violence. Time and again the massive walls of Constantinople, its palaces, churches, and monasteries crumbled under the earth’s paroxysmal movements, and the extent of the disaster inflicted was beyond computation. At Cyzicus a temple which its builders fondly hoped would be as stable and as durable as the pyramids was, in an instant, leveled with the ground by one of those periodical earth shocks that have visited Asia Minor from time immemorial.

In the destructive earthquake of 365 A. D., no fewer than fifty thousand persons lost their lives in Alexandria. But probably no city in the world has suffered more from seismic vibrations than Antioch, which is near the southern border of Cilicia. Here in the terrific earthquake of 526 A. D., the loss of life totaled a full quarter of a million people. During the celebration of a public festival in Greece, at which a vast multitude had assembled, “the whole population was swallowed up in the midst of the ceremonies.” It was during this period of widespread catastrophe in Greece that “the ravages of earthquakes began to figure in history as an important cause of the impoverished and declining condition of the country.”[225]

The same causes that led to the economic and social decline of Greece operated with equally dire results in Asia Minor and Syria and Palestine. When, therefore, we contemplate the countless ruins of once famous cities, that are so conspicuous in a great part of Greece and Turkey in Asia, let us assign them to their real causes—not “the ravaging Turks,” but the devastating Huns and Goths, Tartars and Mongols, Persians and Saracens, and the blind and convulsive forces of nature.

It is far from my purpose to excuse the Osmanlis from any of the crimes they have perpetrated against civilization. But the foregoing paragraphs evince that their part in the destruction of the proud cities and monuments—magnificent centers of culture and commerce—of the ancient world has been greatly exaggerated. Their great sin against humanity, at least for generations past, has been one of omission rather than commission.[226] It has consisted—I speak of the ruling classes—in their inefficient government, which has given little or no encouragement to trade or industry; which has neglected roads and bridges, making interior communication difficult and often impossible; which has failed to develop the vast resources of a country to which a beneficent nature has been rarely prodigal; which has oppressed and trodden down a laborious and long-suffering peasantry, than which there is no better in the world; which has failed to provide for the education of the masses, ever eager for knowledge and improvement; which has permitted systematic bribery in high places and allowed crying malfeasance in office to go unpunished; which, by its unexampled apathy, has been responsible for one of the richest countries in the world degenerating into one of the most desolate, and for a great mass of its people—although innocent—becoming the most execrated.