The Tigris and the Euphrates have both flood seasons and carry their waters over a wide extent of country, exactly as the Nile. This fact is so perfectly clear that there can be no doubt concerning it, though Herodotus directly asserts the contrary, saying, “The river does not, as in Egypt, overflow the corn lands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the help of engines.” The rise is indeed not so prolonged as the rise of the Nile, but its influence is, nevertheless, distinctly to be seen. Furthermore, the water was retained in sufficient quantity to supply an irrigation system far back from the river for the grain harvest, after the fall of the river. This entire system is now a vast ruin. The river rises and falls as it wills, and sweeping far over the western bank, turns the country into a morass. The harm of this is both negative and positive. It makes impossible any such great ingathering of grain as existed when this great valley was the world’s granary, and it fills the land with a dangerous miasma, which produces fevers and leaves the inhabitants weak and sickly. There are few instances in the world of a sadder waste of a beautiful and fertile country.[e]
Old writers give the most brilliant descriptions of the wonders of the district. Xenophon praises the quality and quantity of the dates, of the groves of palms which line the banks of the lower course of the two rivers and break the uniformity of the landscape, and are still very productive where the cruel Turkish rule has not changed the garden into a desert.
Herodotus lays particular stress upon the natural fertility of the country, for he writes: “Babylon is, as we know, famed for the best tillage of all lands, producing always two hundredfold of fruit and, in very good years, three hundredfold. The leaves of the wheat and barley are all four fingers wide, and I very well know, but I would rather not say, to what size the millet and seed grow; for I am certain that those who have not been in Babylon, will not believe it. There are few trees, no fig trees, no vine, no olive. They have no oil but what they make from sesame. But palm trees grow all over the country, and the fruit is eaten and honey and wine made from it.”
This country is now almost a desert, without buildings and vegetation, a world of tower-like ruins, which vary the monotony of the vast plains.
“From these heights,” says Ritter in his Geography, “one sees in the solemn stillness of this ruined world the far-reaching wide mirror of the Euphrates, winding majestically through that solitude like a royal pilgrim among the silent ruins of his departed kingdom. The palaces and temples, and the magnificent buildings, have all dropped into dust and ruin; hanging gardens and blooming paradises have fallen into gray, rush-grown, swampy marshes; and even there, where once the captive Israelites hung up their harps in the royal capital, and sang their songs of mourning over fallen Jerusalem, only a few imperishable willows remain, and the silence is unbroken by a voice of joy or mourning.”
Assyria, a mountainous district between the Tigris and the mountainous western boundary of Iran, is not so fertile as Babylonia, but its high position gives it a bracing climate.
Like the southern plains, it has little rain, but it is partially watered by the numerous rivers which flow eastward and westward to the Tigris, and partially by the canals and water conduits, and is rendered tolerably fertile by careful cultivation.
In the south only a few palm trees and cypresses break the monotony of the wide tilled fields, as in the Babylonian plain, but in the centre of the country are Aturia and Arbelitis (Adiabene) where the Upper Zab, the Zabatus or Lycus of classical writers, pours its blue waters into the Tigris, and there are fruitful hills, with protected valleys, full of corn, wine, sesame, figs, olives, and oranges; naphtha streams give forth their precious oil, and farther northward on the borders of Armenia and Media there are mountainous districts, the heights of which are crowned with woods of oak and pine. The eastern district at the foot of the Zagros (Chalonitis) is particularly prized for its wealth of palms, fruit trees, and olives, and the country of Arpakha (Arrapachitis) in the Chaldean mountains is considered the home of Abraham. From hence he descended into the river district of the centre and settled in the land around Kharran.
Northward lies the pasture land of Mesopotamia, whose wide plains became the scenes of bloody battles, and where races and royal families sought to eternalise their transitory power by the foundation of cities, which have mostly vanished, leaving no trace behind them. Like the Assyrian hill country, it gradually declines into grass-grown steppes until, in the south, it becomes a desert whose waterless wastes are trodden only by wandering Arabs.[b]