From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

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.