In your youth, do not let conceit shut your mind to the acquisition of wisdom. Do not think that the world was in darkness until you were born. Old age will shatter hope and you will lose confidence in your generation and become an ancestor worshiper, because you are birth-marked mentally and physically by your ancestors; because old age loves youth, and the present the past, and contrasts the joys and sports of childhood with the toil and pain and poverty of old age; because the evil days have come, the clouds return after the rain, the house you live in trembles, your grinders cease because they are few, [pg 342] your windows are darkened; and having eaten, you know you are naked and are ashamed and afraid.
Solomon the Wise, philosopher and preacher, says: “All is vanity * * * one generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. * * * Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”
The Story.
More than five thousand years before the birth of our prophet Muhammed, The Praised One; even before Ur was; the ancestors of King Surgulla, who belonged to a Turanian tribe, came down from the Heights of Elam on the east, into the plain country and finally settled near Nun-ki, that is, the place of the first water, on the left bank of the Euphrates.
Here was the temple of Hea, the water god; here the palm trees grew in a great garden watered by crystal springs; which place the Jews, a modern people, call the Garden of Eden. Here sat the fathers in judgment under a great palm tree and the chief mufti read from the tablets:
“When the upper region was not yet called heaven,
And the lower region was not yet called earth,
And the abyss of Hades had not yet opened its arms,
Then the chaos of waters gave birth to all of them
And the waters were gathered together into one place.”
The first settlement of tents grew into a city and was called the City of The Good God, Urugudda, which in time was shortened to Eridu. Eridu enjoying several centuries of peace and prosperity, became the capital of [pg 343] a great nation; a seat of learning, philosophy and religion and architecturally beautiful. Its many white public buildings, palaces and temples of fretted marble and porphyry with their red and green tiled roofs and cupolas and gold crescent-crowned minarets, resplendent under a tropic sun, excited the cupidity of every bold robber, who, riding from the desert, viewed its greatness from the distant sand hills.
The people of Girsu were nomads; and worshiped the sun, the moon and water. Their chief had a half grown son, born to sit in the light of the sun, Chalginna. His sole possessions were a light, keen spear, a swift white camel, a water bottle made from a goat skin and a mat on which to sleep. In the stillness of the night as he rested on his mat of camel cloth, though he slept too soundly to hear the roar of the camels or the bleating of the goats or the barking of the jackal, he saw the city and dreamed of its conquest and pillage. Each morning fearful that during the night something might have happened to it, he rode the miles across the desert to the highest of the sand hills, from which with eyes keen as an eagle’s, he looked, the while whetting his wolf-like appetite to feed upon it.
In the city there was a boy his own age, the son of the king, and nearly as strong and brave as he, who day after day was drilled to take his father’s place; and who had dreams of empire more extensive than his father’s. When he was grown, he journeyed with a considerable retinue eastward into Persia, where he was to marry the daughter of a great prince. It was well his caravan guard was strong; because Chalginna, who had gathered about him near a hundred kindred spirits ruled by his fiercer spirit hovered upon its flanks, as a band of hungry [pg 344] wolves from the shelter of the thicket eye the lambs while the shepherd is about and lick their chops in anticipation of mutton at the first lapse of vigilance.
The band reasoning that the wedding party, returning, would be richer by the princess and her dowry, deferred their attack; but reckoned not that part of that dowry would be a dozen elephants, the first brought into the valley of the Euphrates.