From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

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.