On this plain, when the waters of the Deluge had passed away, did the children of Noe, as yet of the same tongue, assemble together, and, forgetful of the power of God, say to each other: “Let us make a city and a tower, the top of which may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered
abroad into all lands” (Gen. xi. 4). From this centre, when the Lord had confounded their speech and humbled their pride, did they go forth to people the whole earth.
Here walked Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord, ruling his fellow-men. Here he built Babylon, afterwards so renowned in history. On this plain, too, across the Tigris, were founded Resen and Calah and Ninive, cities of power in the earlier days of history.
For more than fifteen centuries this plain was the most favored spot of the ancient world. As the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Mede, the Persian, and the Greek succeeded each other on the throne, the tributes and the spoils of surrounding nations were brought hither, and were here lavishly squandered in every mode that could display the magnificence or perpetuate the memory of mighty sovereigns. Each monarch seemed, with the land, to inherit the ambitious desires of the builders of Babel. Each strove to found cities, to erect towers, to build walls, and to raise structures which neither man nor time nor the hand of Heaven should destroy. All through those centuries the work was carried on, each age striving to excel in grandeur and strength of work all that had gone before. Neither time nor wealth nor skill was spared; nothing that man could do was left undone.
How vain and futile is man’s mightiest effort! The decree went forth that Ninive should be laid waste, and that Babylon should be
as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha.
This fertile plain, once filled with gorgeous cities and countless villages, checkered with fruitful groves and cultivated fields, has become a wild, deserted, treeless waste, over which the wandering Arab drives his flock in search of a precarious pasturage, and from which even he is forced to flee as the grass withers under the burning heats of summer. The towers and temples and palaces, rich with statuary and painting, and whose sides, glistening with gold and shining brass, reflected the dazzling rays of the sun for leagues around, have all disappeared. In their stead a few mud-walled and thatch-roofed cottages, pervious to wind and rain, may be seen clustering around some ancient Christian shrine, or are falling to fragments since the last raid of the pasha or the rapacity of the Arabs drove the miserable tenants from even such humble abodes. It is only at Mosul and Bagdad, seats of Turkish civil rule—such as it is—and at a few other points, that anything to be called a town can be found. And even there little more is to be seen than an accumulation of many such huts around a few rude stone dwellings and churches. For ages the inhabitants have been ground to the dust by Turkish misrule. Long since stripped of everything, they are the poorest of the poor. He holds life and property by a frail tenure indeed whom the greedy pasha suspects of possessing aught that can be seized. So thoroughly have the glories of old and the outward traces of ancient grandeur passed away that for a long time antiquarians disputed where on this plain Ninive, and where Babylon, stood.
It is a vast, treeless, uncultivated,
arid blank on the surface of the earth. Stern, shapeless mounds rise like low, flat-topped hills from the parched plains—rude, unsightly heaps, whose sides, here and there stripped of earth by the rains of winter, disclose within masses of brickwork and fragments of pottery. Desolation meets desolation on every side. The traveller sees no graceful column still standing erect in solitary beauty, no classic capital or richly-carved frieze fallen to the earth, and half-appearing, half-hidden amid the luxuriant growth of the soil; nothing that charms in its present picturesque beauty, nothing that he can rebuild in imagination. He travels on, day after day, over the parched plain, amid these sombre mounds, and feels that in truth this is a cemetery of nations accursed for their sins. The ever-recurring sameness of the dreary prospect around him, before him, behind him, impresses even more deeply on his mind the grand truth that, do what man may, God reigns and rules and conquers. Every step shows him how completely are fulfilled the threats made of old, in the days of their luxury and pride, against the sensual and sinful peoples who dwelt here. The words of the messengers of God have indeed come true.
For the last third of a century a fresh interest has drawn the minds of men to this plain. The silence of twenty-five centuries has been broken, and these old mounds are lifting up their voices, as it were, and telling us of the glories of ancient times, and how men then lived and battled, what arts they practised and what knowledge they possessed, in what gods they believed and how they worshipped. The tale is a wondrous one.