He declares that if Noah had been a hydraulic engineer he would have done much better by cutting a channel for the escape of the waters through the bed of the river Pison, for he might thus have saved the entire population. The Pison is one of the four rivers of Eden, the Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates being the others. All of them are really branches of the Euphrates and form a delta in which the Garden of Eden is believed to have been situated.
Nearly the entire area of Mesopotamia was once under irrigation, and the first known dams and canals were built by Nimrod of the Bible, who is identified as the Hammurabi of the inscriptions that are frequently found among the ruins. Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great saw Mesopotamia in its greatest prosperity. The decay of the country began with the invasion of Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde and Timour the Tartar, who destroyed the dams and the ditches and plundered the people of all their wealth so that they had no means to restore the irrigation system. Hundreds of miles of the ancient canals can be easily identified, and Sir William testifies to the remarkable degree of genius shown by the engineers who designed and constructed them. In his report to the Turkish government he recommends that the old canals be restored as far as possible, which can be done at half the cost of constructing new ones.
The Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Caliphs added to the number of reservoirs and extended the canals that were built by the patriarchs of the Scriptures. The fabulous wealth of Babylon, Nineveh, Palmyra, Nippur, Kufa, and other great cities of ancient times was largely derived from agriculture, in a territory that is now a desert; from the cultivation of soil which for thousands of years has been celebrated for its extreme fertility. Sir William Willcocks declares that the greater part of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris and of the area between these rivers is as rich as the valley of the Nile. In his report he says:
“Of all the regions of the earth none is more favoured by nature for the production of cereals than the valley of the Tigris. Cotton, sugar-cane, Indian corn, and all the summer cereals, leguminous plants, Egyptian clover, opium, and tobacco will find themselves at home as they do in Egypt.”
There is a passage in Herodotus, written more than 2,000 years previous, about this same country, which sounds very much like the Willcocks report:
“This is of all lands with which we are acquainted, by far the best for the growth of corn. It is so fruitful in the produce of corn that it yields continually two hundred-fold, and when it produces its best it yields even three hundred-fold. The blades of wheat and barley grow there to full four fingers in breadth, and though I well know to what a height millet and sesame grow, I shall not mention it.”
The proposed reclamation, according to the Willcocks report, can be completed for $40,000,000, and bring under irrigation more than 3,000,000 acres, which he estimates would be worth at least $100,000,000, or $30 an acre. The Assouan dam system, which he has recently completed, cost the Egyptian government $25,000,000, and only about half the area was reclaimed.
Sir William proposes, by dams and canals, to store the floods that are brought down from the mountains in the spring, in enormous reservoirs for use during the summer, and has indicated locations for at least five, which will, he believes, answer every purpose. At least two of these locations were used as reservoirs by the Babylonians and probably by previous civilizations, and Sir William will adapt to modern use the same canals that were then used to distribute the water over the plains. Several dry river beds can also be made available and thus economize the cost.
After the 3,000,000 acres that will be first reclaimed have been sold and settled, the area available for agriculture can be doubled by the expenditure of $15,000,000 additional, and ultimately the gain would be 6,000,000 acres capable of producing annually, according to his estimates, 2,000,000 tons of wheat, 4,000,000 hundred-weight of cotton and fabulous quantities of other exportable products, in addition to whatever food will be necessary to support a population of a million people.
In addition to the agricultural products, he promises pasturage for millions of sheep and goats and hundreds of thousands of cattle in the delta, and he would build a railway from Bagdad to Damascus with branches here and there to tap the harvest fields. The total length of this road would be about five hundred and fifty miles and, according to his estimates, it could be constructed for between ten and eleven million dollars.