From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Raising thy lordly voice by vale and hill;

Sparkling through palm-groves, washing empires’ graves;

And gladdening thirsty deserts with thy waves;

Mirroring the heavens, that know no change, like thee,

A glittering dream, a bright-leaved history!

No river in the world has played so prominent a rôle in the annals of our race, and none, not even the Nile, can boast of nobler traditions or a more illustrious history, or is richer in beautiful myths and soul-stirring legends. On its fertile banks, it is believed, was rocked the cradle of mankind and its glistening waters whisper secrets of long-forgotten dynasties and murmurs the names of peoples of whom history has no record. It was long the barrier between the contending powers of the East and the West; between the forces of Persia and Greece, of Parthia and Rome. Eastern poets never tired in singing its praises and Arabian geographers loved to dilate on it as one of the great rivers of the earth.

In the Bible the name of the Euphrates occurs as early as the second chapter of Genesis. According to scholars of repute the patriarch Abraham on his way to the Promised Land crossed it at Birejik, but a few miles north of where it is now spanned by the great steel bridge of the Bagdad Railway. In the Covenant which God had made with him the dominions of his posterity were to extend “from the river of Egypt[294] even to the great river Euphrates.” And, obedient to the command of the Lord to “go forth from kindred and out of his father’s house ... Abraham took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son and all the substance which they had gathered and all the souls which they had gotten in the land of Haran; and they went out to go into the land of Canaan.”[295] Crossing, then, the Euphrates near the spot where we crossed it ourselves they must, in order to find the necessary sustenance for their flocks and herds, have traversed the same fertile plain that had so engaged our attention on the way from Aleppo to Djerabis and probably by one of the sinuous caravan tracks that we noted from the car window.

But “The River,” “The Great River,” as the Jews called the Euphrates, was more celebrated in profane than in sacred history. This is particularly true of that stretch of the stream between the modern towns of Bir and Rakka. It was at Carchemish, which adjoins Djerabis, where the Hittites had the great capital and the powerful fortress which enabled them so long to control the commerce between Assyria and Babylonia on the east, and Phœnicia and Egypt on the west. It was at the same famous stronghold that Nebuchadnezzar II won a signal victory over Pharaoh-Necho and his Greek and Asiatic allies. It was here also that Chosroes I crossed the river by building a bridge of boats at the time of his third campaign against the Byzantines as he had crossed it at Obbanes in his first expedition against Justinian. It was at Bir, formerly known as Zeugma—the Bridge—that Crassus and Seleucus Nicator passed into Mesopotamia, where the Roman general met such a tragic fate. It was at Thapsacus that Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger crossed the great waterway in the campaign that terminated so disastrously for the Persian Monarch at Cunaxa. It was here also, nearly a hundred years later, that Darius crossed “fleeing headlong eastwards with his broken army after the battle of Issus, with Alexander headlong at his heels.” It was in the waters of the same famed river that Trajan and Julian the Apostate slaked their horses’ thirst. It was the same waters that witnessed the brilliant campaigns of Heraclius, the splendid triumphs of the Caliphs, and the devastating hordes of Timur and Jenghiz Khan.

Tradition informs us that it was down these tawny waters that a frail craft carried Herodotus in his memorable visit to Babylon. And long before this date it was up the Euphrates, that Gisdhubar, the mythical hero of the great Babylonian epic, proceeded on his homeward voyage after having “by a suitable sacrifice,” secured the good will of heaven for his undertaking.[296] But, what has already been said is more than enough to show that the rolling waters of the Euphrates are, in truth, “charged with the history of the ancient world.” And, judging by the railroads and steamer lines that are planned or in operation, and the great irrigation works that are under construction for restoring to the vast Babylonian plain its old-time fertility, the day is not far distant when “The Great River” of the Jews will witness achievements which shall rival the glories of Babylon and its hanging gardens in the days of the city’s greatest splendor and power.

We had anticipated spending several days in Djerabis in order that we might have an opportunity to examine the remains of Carchemish that have recently been uncovered by the spade of the archæologist. The great number of sculptures, both in relief and in the round, which have been unearthed here are destined to throw a flood of light on the cultural and political histories of the great Hittite empire, and, when they shall have been thoroughly investigated, they will no doubt cause us greatly to modify, if not essentially alter, many of the views we have long entertained respecting one of the most powerful but least known peoples of the ancient world. Excavators here are fondly hoping that they may have the good fortune to turn up among these venerable ruins the long desired bilingual inscription that shall enable them to decipher the strange Hittite script that has so long baffled scholars. Such an inscription would supply them with a key to the history of a nation that was so long a rival of Egypt and Babylonia, and its discovery would truly mark a red-letter day in the annals of oriental research and scholarship.[297]