In the soil thrown up beneath one’s feet are found gold, silver, bronze, and copper coins, with dates varying from six hundred years before our Christian era to the coin of the present ruler of the realm.
The ancient city of the Trojans, for ten years defended by Priam against the finally successful assaults of Agamemnon and his Greeks, was upon what is now Turkish soil. Many of the scenes pictured in the Iliad and the Odyssey have their staging in what is modern Turkey. Assyria and Babylon and Nineveh there arose into prominence, wielded their power, and passed into ruin. Darius and Xerxes crossed and recrossed this country; and Cyrus met his great defeat and Xenophon made his immortal retreat and all within Turkey. Alexander the Great, born in Macedonia, conducted many of his brilliant campaigns, fought with Darius and defeated him, occupied Sidon and annexed Babylon and Nineveh to the throne of Greece, and died in Babylon while planning the conquest of Arabia; all in territory now subject to Sultan Hamid II.
At the time of Christ much of Asia Minor was a Roman province. Ruins of Roman roads and Roman bridges, in many parts of the country, extend to the northern borders of Mesopotamia, while Roman coins and Latin inscriptions are too common to attract special attention. It is safe to say that there is no other part of the world which presents so much of permanent interest to the student of classic literature and life as the territory now covered by the Turkish empire.
The same is true in no less striking measure of the literature and life recorded in the Bible. Probably all Old Testament history, except that part which was enacted in Egypt, belongs to the geography of Turkey; and Egypt, until recent years, was a part of that empire. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers rise and flow throughout their length upon Turkish soil. Chaldea, Haran, Mt. Moriah, Sinai, the Wilderness, Nineveh, and the Promised Land are a part of the present Moslem empire. Turkey includes the land of the prophets and kings of Israel, and from what is to-day her domain the Hebrew poets sang; there, too, the temples were built, the chosen race was scattered, enslaved, and restored.
Except for one brief sojourn of our Lord in Egypt, his entire life was passed on what is now Turkish territory. With few exceptions the apostles lived and labored and wrote and died in regions now ruled over by the sultan of Turkey. The great foreign missionary, Paul, spent but little time outside this country, while the site of the seven churches of the Apocalypse is in Turkish territory. The most of our Christian Scriptures were written in the same country, passing from there to the west.
The land of Turkey may well be called the cradle of classic and Biblical literature of the Jewish and Christian religions as well as that of Islam. All this, however, be it not forgotten, refers only to the territory covered to-day by the Turkish empire and not at all to the empire itself.