CHAPTER XV

FLOATING DOWN THE TIGRIS ON A KELEK

_When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free_ _In the silken sail of infancy,_ _The tide of time flow’d back with me,_ _The forward-flowing tide of time;_ _And many a sheeny summer-morn,_ _Adown the Tigris I was borne,_ _By Bagdad’s shrines of fretted gold,_ _High-walled gardens green and old._ TENNYSON.--“Recollections of the Arabian Nights.”

The first thing we did on arriving at Mosul--even before we visited any of the places of interest in the city--was to make arrangements for our transportation to Bagdad. Had it not been for the late World War, the Bagdad Railway would have been completed to the famed city of Harun-al-Rashid and we could then have made the journey from Mosul to Bagdad in a luxuriously upholstered car or in the latest type of _wagon-lit_ accompanied by a well-supplied and well-manned _wagon-restaurant_. In the absence of these we might, had we sought for one, have found an aviator who would have taken us to our destination in an aeroplane, for both aviators and aeroplanes were numerous in this vicinity during the war and there was reason to believe that there were still here both flying machines and pilots.

But we were not looking either for luxury or rapidity of transportation. Even if they had been at our disposal we should not have availed ourselves of these twentieth-century comforts and time-saving devices by which our western world sets such store. We had no desire to fly at express-train speed through the historic valley of the Tigris even if we had had at our disposition all the luxuries and conveniences of a railway president’s private car. We wished to study the country and the people and we desired to do so at our leisure.

The usual way to make the journey from Mosul to Bagdad is by land. Some make it on horseback, but the majority elect to perform it on the back of an Arabian or a Bactrian camel. A few, however, prefer to entrust themselves to the capricious waters of the tortuous Tigris. This route requires more time and offers, besides, a little spice of adventure. Both of these facts appealed to us and we decided--without hesitation--that our journey to the city of the _Thousand and One Nights_ should be by the longest and the slowest and, as we were assured, the most venturesome way.

We chose also to go by the Tigris because I had always been specially fond of river travel. It has been my good fortune to navigate from source to mouth or from mouth to source many of the longest rivers of the world, and I was grateful for the opportunity to spend a week or more on one of the largest rivers of western Asia and one of the most famous in history. Another reason for choosing this route was the peculiar age-old craft that was to carry us to the famed capital of the Caliphs.

It was not a boat nor anything that even remotely resembled one. It was a peculiar kind of a raft which has been in use on the Tigris since the time of the early Assyrian kings, and which, notwithstanding all our modern improvements, still holds its own here not only for conveying the traveler to his destination but also for carrying freight as well.

The raft in question is called a kelek. It is composed of a large number of inflated goat or sheep skins which are kept united by reeds. Over these is laid a framework made of saplings or scantlinglike timbers which are held together by twigs or lianas. No nails or screws whatever are used. If the skins be continually kept moist and properly inflated, the framework of the kelek will always remain above water, even when bearing a considerable load.

Thanks to our good Dominican hosts, the work of constructing our kelek was specially expedited after the workmen knew exactly the size and kind of craft we desired. And to our great joy it was ready for us as soon as we were prepared to start on our journey down the river. It was fifteen by twenty feet in dimensions and counted a hundred and seventy-five inflated skins. In the middle of the kelek we had a good-sized tent in which we had two light cots, three light folding chairs, a folding writing table, ten pockets, and other things which occupy little space but which we found by previous experience contributed immensely to the convenience and comfort of the traveler whether on land or water. Most of our luggage, as well as our provisions, was left outside of the tent in care of our good and faithful Simoun, a middle-aged Chaldean who had been specially recommended to us by our Dominican friends and who was guaranteed to give us devoted and intelligent service. He took charge of everything on the kelek and looked after the kelekgis--rowers--cook, and the commissary department as well as our comfort and pleasure. Certain Greeks and Armenians had applied for the position which we gave to Simoun, but our experience with their countrymen had been such that we had resolved to entrust ourselves thenceforth to the much abused and little-understood Chaldean. For honesty, reliability, devotedness, a Christian Chaldean, like an Osmanli Turk from the interior of Anatolia, is, in any fiduciary capacity, absolutely unsurpassed.

When we actually found ourselves on our kelek, ready to depart for Bagdad, we felt as happy as schoolboys starting on a vacation. It meant at least a week of absolute rest--a rest which, after the strenuous lives we had been leading since we left Constantinople, was most welcome.

Besides the good fathers of St. Dominic, whose kindness during our sojourn in Mosul we can never forget, a number of the people of the city whom we had learned to know were at the point of embarkation to bid us Godspeed. We were specially touched by the presence of some school children with whom, from having frequently met them, we were on the friendliest terms. “Children,” said I to my companion, “are the same the world over. Treat them kindly and they will do anything for you.” I was then specially thinking of the little Indian children whom I had often met in the wilds of South America, and who, although they had never come into contact with a white man before, became, after a little act of kindness, my devoted friends and wished to be always near me. The Turkish children of Anatolia, the little Arabs of Syria, and the Chaldeans of Mesopotamia are, when kindly treated, just as loving and as lovable as the youthful redskins of the broad wildernesses of Brazil and Peru.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when we finally got under way. The last words I heard from my friends on the shore were those of a charming Osmanli youth who in a clarion voice bade us an affectionate good-bye in the touching Turkish words _Allaha-ismarladiq_--we have commended you to God. Again how like the fond _adios_ of the good children of the South American hinterland whose parting words _Vaya Usted con Dios!_--may you go with God--so often cheered our souls during our long journeys over the snow-clad summits of the Andes or through the trackless forests of the Amazon and the Orinoco.

We started on our journey down the Tigris under a cloudless sky. During the early morning it had been quite chilly, but, as the sun rose in the heavens, the atmosphere became as balmy as that of a morning in May. All augured a pleasant voyage; and no sooner had the minarets of Mosul and Nebi Yunus vanished from our sight than we proceeded to give the interior of our tent as homelike an appearance as circumstances would permit. Simoun had decked the opening of the tent with some flowers that our kind friends had brought us. On our writing table we placed some of our favorite books. Among these was a small copy in India paper of the Bible which was in constant use during our journey in the Orient. Another was a small pocket edition of the _Divina Commedia_ which, for years, had been my companion to the most distant parts of the world. There were also small editions of the _Soliloquia_ of St. Augustine and of the select works of St. Teresa. I took these last two books with me because they, like Dante’s immortal poem, had been old and cherished friends in other lands and because they seemed peculiarly appropriate for such a journey as the one we were then undertaking. To these were added copies of Xenophon’s _Anabasis_, Arrian’s _Anabasis of Alexander_, and _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. The other books I had brought with me I left in my trunk, as I expected to spend most of my time on our way down the river in contemplation of the many objects of interest with which both banks were everywhere studded.

A great part of the land in the vicinity of Mosul is under cultivation. Wheat and barley are grown in abundance. Hemp is also cultivated but more attention is given to cotton, especially along the banks and on the islands which diversify the river. Melons seem to be as popular along the Tigris as they are among our dusky population south of Mason and Dixon’s line.

Much of the land in this region is very fertile and, if irrigated as it was three thousand years ago, would yield harvests as extraordinary as ever in the past. But the countless vicissitudes, consequent on wars innumerable and on inefficient government, through which this ill-fated region has passed since the fall of Nineveh, have not been conducive to the development of agriculture nor to the economic growth of what was once the wealthiest country of Western Asia.

I have been on many rivers but I have never found so much genuine intellectual pleasure on any of them as on the Tigris. It has not, indeed, the natural beauties of the Hudson or the Columbia, of the Rhine or the Danube; but it has something that appealed to me far more than the attractions for which these famous waterways of America and Europe are so justly celebrated. Charged with the myths and the legends, the traditions and the historical associations of six millennia, it offers to the thoughtful student subjects for consideration that cannot be found elsewhere.

In contemplating the old classic streams of Greece and Italy, the Illisus, the Peneus, the Tibur, the Po--I always experience a kind of admiration bordering on respect. I am impressed not by the volume of water which they carry to the sea but by their picturesqueness, by the atmosphere of romance that hangs over them and by the venerable history in which they all rejoice. But when I gazed on the Tigris and its ruin-fringed banks, a surge of emotion pervaded my entire being and I was thrilled as by few other objects on earth. Under the name Hiddikel it appears as one of the rivers of Eden. To the prophet Daniel, who crossed it in his journeys to and from Susa, it was “The Great River,”[380] and on its banks he had some of his most remarkable visions. It carried on its waters the greatest fleet ever built by an Assyrian potentate. This was when in 694 B. C., Sennacherib inaugurated his campaign of devastation in Babylonia and when, with the aid of seafaring men from Cyprus and Phœnicia, he floated his boats to the lower Tigris and thence transported them to the Euphrates. It was during this ruthless war that he applied the torch to the great city of Babylon and left it with its magnificent temples and palaces and its splendid works of art--the result of long centuries of labor--a vast, smoldering ruin. It was along the Tigris that Xenophon and his heroic Ten Thousand returned homewards after the eventful battle of Cunaxa. This famous retreat revealed to the Greeks the weakness of the vast Persian Empire and led to its overthrow by Alexander the Great and to “the accomplishment of the promises of God, as made in the prophecies of Daniel, and prepared the way for the third of the great empires which were to precede the coming of the Savior of mankind.”[381]

As the evening sun was disappearing behind a gorgeous gold and crimson mountain range of cumulus clouds, we heard, a short distance ahead of us, the roaring of the Zikr ul Aawaze, a noted cataract about twenty miles below Mosul and we then knew that we were near the celebrated ruins of Nimroud. These ruins formerly stood on the left bank of the Tigris, but, owing to a shifting of the river’s channel towards the west, are now about two miles inland.

As we desired to visit the great tell of Nimroud the following day, we here tied up our kelek for the night. Early the next morning we were on our way to the ruins which, in the annals of Assyrian archæology, are almost as famous as those of Kuyunjik and Khorsabad. Here Layard unearthed some of the most prized treasures in the Assyrian department of the British Museum and here, there are reasons to believe, are still buried countless other treasures equally valuable.

The ruins of Nimroud occupy the site of Calah mentioned in Genesis as having been built by Assur, the founder of Nineveh. But the people living near by are convinced that it was built by Nimrod, “the mighty hunter before the Lord,” and that it was his favorite place of residence. Assyriologists, however, declare that it was built by Salmanassar I who made it the capital of Assyria, a dignity which it retained until the time of Sargon who removed his residence to the north of Nineveh where lie the ruins of Khorsabad.

The general aspect of the ruins of Nimroud is not unlike that of Nineveh. The ruins constitute a platform in the form of a parallelogram about five hundred feet in width and a thousand in length. At the northwest corner of this elevation is a conical tower whose height, according to recent measurements, is one hundred and ten feet above the surrounding plain. This is all that now remains of the imposing _zikurat_, or stage tower, that once dominated the great capital of Salmanassar.

In order to get a good view of the ruins, as well as of the surrounding country, we lost no time in reaching the summit of the tower. From its crest we had a view as interesting as it was replete with historic reminiscences. Our vision ranged over a region in which were enacted some of the most memorable events of Mesopotamia and Persia. Down the Tigris passed the famous fleets of Trajan and Sennacherib, and along its bank marched the vast armies of Esarhaddon, Cyaxares, and Nabopolassar. Within gunshot were the emerald waters of the Great Zab rushing to join the tawny current of the Tigris. On its banks the Persian satrap, Tissaphernes, in violation of a solemn compact, treacherously seized Clearchus and several of his generals and sent them to Artaxerxes, who ordered them to be beheaded. It was here that Xenophon assumed command of the memorable expedition of the Ten Thousand--an expedition that the distinguished English geographer, Rennell, has declared was “the most splendid of all the military events that have been recorded in ancient history.” Eastward was the famous battlefield of Arbela, where “the greatest battle in the record of the ancient world had been fought; where the issue of centuries had struck their balance in a day; where the channel of history for a thousand years had been opened with a flying wedge”;[382] where Alexander the Great had completed the work which was begun by his countrymen under Xenophon when they made the discovery of the innate weakness of the Persian colossus and thus prepared the public opinion of Greece for the great campaign against the ancient Persian Empire which once menaced all the nations of the earth with subjection but which “was irrevocably crushed when Alexander had won his crowning victory of Arbela.”[383]

After exploring the ruins of Nimroud, we returned to our kelek which, with much creaking and quivering, was soon wrestling with the boiling waters of the Zikr ul Aawaze. This is a dam or dyke built across the river and during low water rises a foot or more above the surface. It produces quite a cataract but our kelekgi conducted our frail craft over its seething waters without any difficulty. Like other remarkable works in this neighborhood this dam--some say it was a bridge--is attributed by the inhabitants to Nimrod. The noted French traveler, Tavernier, tells us that when he passed down the Tigris, the Zikr ul Aawaze formed a waterfall twenty-six feet high. He assures us, however, that his kelek went over this waterfall without mishap.[384] One may be permitted to suspect that in this statement he was striving, in recounting travelers’ tales, to emulate his mythical predecessor, Sir John Mandeville.

About fifty miles to the south of Nimroud, on the right bank of the Tigris, is the great mound of Kalah Sherghat over which, until a few years ago, hung as deep a mystery as that which so long enveloped the imposing tells of Nimroud and Khorsabad. To the Turks, in their ignorance, it was but a fort made of clay--_Toprak Kale_. Even so late as 1900 a distinguished German traveler was unaware that the wonderful tell of Kalah Sherghat, which so excited his admiration, covered the remains of one of the most noted cities of Assyria.[385]

It was indeed only after Dr. Robert Koldewey and Dr. Walter Andræ, the eminent explorers of the German Orient Society, had, in 1903, begun their exhaustive excavations at Kalah Sherghat that it was demonstrated that its imposing ruins were none other than those of Assur, the first capital of ancient Assyria. It was here that Asur, the national god of Assyria, had his favorite sanctuary--a god that was not only supreme over all the gods of the Babylonian pantheon but was also their lord and master, “the King above all gods.”[386] King Sennacherib addresses him as

King of the totality of the gods, his own creation, father of the gods.

Whose power is unfolded in the deep, king of heaven and earth, lord of all gods.[387]

As the national deity of the greatest military power of the ancient world, Asur was preëminently a martial god. For, as is evinced by cuneiform inscriptions, it is “by the might of Asur” that the nation’s enemies are vanquished, that towns and cities are razed, that other lands are brought under the dominion of the invincible Kings of Assyria.

Although I had read with exceeding interest, shortly after their publication, Andræ’s superbly illustrated reports of his careful and methodical excavations at Kalah Sherghat, I was not fully prepared for the wonderful ruins which greeted my vision when I first surveyed them from one of the imposing zigurats of the great temple of Anu and Adad, which was rebuilt by Salmanassar III, nearly nine centuries before our era.[388] As reconstructed by Andræ this temple was, in its day, one of the architectural wonders of western Asia. But the city of Assur was more than a thousand years old when Salmanassar placed in the great temple enclosure a record of his work on it and an account of its completion. For fully twenty centuries, B. C., Assyria, from Assur as a center, had begun to extend her dominions northwards and to lay the foundations of that mighty empire which was for so many generations the admiration and the dread of the ancient world.

Besides uncovering the temples and palaces of Assur, Dr. Andræ and his colleagues unearthed a part of its residential quarter. In so doing they made discoveries of the greatest interest regarding the domestic life of its inhabitants and their care for the sanitary condition of their homes. Every house, however small, had suitable sewer connections, while all the larger homes had rooms for domestics and dependents.

But to many students of Assyriology the most notable discovery made here by the German expedition took place not in the temples and palaces of the venerable city but in the space between its interior and exterior walls. This consisted in unearthing a large number of tombs and nearly a hundred and fifty stelae, some of which were made of sandstone and limestone, while others were fashioned out of basalt and alabaster. From the inscriptions on these stelae it was evident that no fewer than thirty-five of them were erected to the memory of rulers of Assyria.

Among the royal tombs were those of Ashbelkala, Ashurnasirpal III, and Shamsi-Adad V. The massive sarcophagus of the first-named king was found to be in almost perfect condition.

Commenting on this remarkable find Dr. Rogers writes:

This discovery of these royal tombs appeals most strongly to the imagination. Before this, Assyriology had seemed so poor in comparison with Egyptology which has from the beginning been able to point to its long series of royal tombs, nay, even to the mummied remains of the greatest of Egyptian Kings. There is no probability that Assyrian discoveries will ever be able to match these, but the reproach that neither Assyria nor Babylonia had even one royal tomb has been taken away.[389]

More interesting far than any of the royal tombs referred to is one of the stelæ that were uncovered in the same place. According to the inscription on it the discovery of this monument was really startling in its import and marked a most notable event in the romance of archæology. The legend which this stone pillar bears tells us that it is:

The stela of Sammuramat

The woman of the palace (that is, the consort of Shamsi-Adad,)

The King of the world, King of Assyria,

The mother of Adadnirari

The King of the world, King of Assyria,

The daughter-in-law of Salmanassar

The king of the four quarters of the earth.[390]

But who was Sammuramat? Surprising as it may seem, she was, as scholars now concede, none other than Semiramis, the famous legendary queen of Assyria.

What a marvelous discovery! What a vindication of long suppressed truth! What an unexpected substitution of reality for fiction, of fact for fancy, of authentic history for myth and legend!

To no other woman of antiquity have there been attributed so many brilliant achievements as to Semiramis. Nor has any one of her sex during the last two thousand years and more, occupied a more conspicuous position in myth and legend, song and story.

From the time of Ctesias, the physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, until the latter part of the last century, there was no question about the main facts of her marvelous career. During all this time she was regarded as one of the most notable rulers of antiquity--as a queen of consummate military ability and exceptional statesmanship; as a ruler of vaulting ambition and as a conqueror whose dominions embraced the most flourishing regions of Asia and Africa. So great indeed was her reputed activity and genius that Strabo tells us tradition attributed to her all the most stupendous works along the Tigris and the Euphrates and even those in distant Iran.[391] Alexander the Great, it is said, found an inscription of hers on the frontier of Scythia, which was then considered the boundary of the inhabited world. In this inscription the famous queen declares:

Nature has given me the body of a woman but my achievements have made me the equal of the most valiant of men. I have ruled the empire of Ninus which on the east extends to the river Hinamanes, on the south to the country of incense and myrrh, and on the north as far as the Sacæ and the land of Sogdiana. Before me no Assyrian had seen any of the seas; I have seen four of them which were so distant that no one had ever reached them. I have forced rivers to flow where I wished them to, and I have wished them to flow only where they would be useful. I have rendered the sterile earth fecund by irrigating them with these rivers. I have erected impregnable fortresses. With iron I have made roads through impassable rocks. I have constructed for my chariots highways through places which the wild beasts themselves had never traversed. And in the midst of these occupations I have found time for my amusements and my pleasures.[392]

Zenobia and Cleopatra were distinguished for their beauty, their genius, and the brilliancy of their achievements, but, according to the testimony of Ctesias, Diodorus Siculus, and other ancient historians, they were completely eclipsed by the wonder-working queen of Assyria. So great, tradition had it, were her abilities as a sovereign that two thousand years after her time the most eminent female rulers of their age were named after this extraordinary woman who had so impressed her personality on the West as well as on the East. Thus it is that Catherine II of Russia, who was almost the rival of Peter the Great, is known as the Semiramis of the North, while the same epithet is given to that remarkable sovereign, Queen Margaret de Valdemar of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

But when, in the second half of the last century, Orientalists began to decipher the cuneiform inscriptions of Western Asia, the majority of them soon showed a marked skepticism regarding the historical character of the renowned Assyrian queen. It was contended that there was no mention of her name in the Babylonian records during the period in which she was supposed to have lived and that the silence of these records respecting a ruler who, according to ancient writers, played so important a rôle in antiquity was conclusive proof that she never existed. It was furthermore asseverated that the work of Ctesias, which for so many centuries had been accepted as sober history, was no more than a romantic narrative which the progress of Assyrian research had completely discredited. And Semiramis, it was further averred, was not a woman of flesh and blood at all but an entirely mythical character,--merely a creation of Ctesias and having no existence outside of his elaborate romance which for more than two thousand years passed as serious history.

But scholars, while denying that Semiramis was the human personage she was so long believed to be, were unwilling to concede that she was nothing more than a mere arbitrary creation of the fertile imagination of a Greek romancer posing as a historian. The assumption that she was nothing more than a creature of fancy would, in view of her conspicuous position in the ancient world, be more difficult of acceptance than the age-old belief that she was really, as so long considered, the great queen and conqueror of Western Asia.

If, then, she was neither a human being nor a mere figment of the imagination, what was she? Scholars, and especially Orientalists, felt the necessity of finding a plausible, if not a satisfactory, answer to this question which became daily more and more insistent. To obtain such an answer they ransacked, as never before, oriental history, mythology, and archæology and with results which, at least to themselves, seemed beyond question.

Semiramis [declares an eminent Orientalist] is not a human personage, but a divinity whom legend, as so often happens in similar cases, transports into the domain of human affairs. Diodorus says formally that she was adored as a goddess and declares that her cult had two principal seats, Assyria and the city of Ascalon in Philistia.... That she was, of a truth, a goddess is evinced by her being the daughter of Derceto as well as by the traditions respecting her birth and by her final metamorphosis, which have all a distinctly mythological color.[393]

Another distinguished Orientalist is positive that “Semiramis was the name not of a human queen but of the goddess Istar whose legend was nationalized by the Persian historians and their Greek followers.”[394] “The name of Semiramis,” he will have it, “belongs not to Babylonian history but to Greek Romance.”[395] He accentuates this statement when he asserts that Ctesias, the creator of Semiramis, who is only the Greek Aphrodite, based his history in great measure on Persian annals which “like those of Firdusi or of later Arabian writers consisted for the most part of mere legendary tales and rationalized myths,” in which we have to seek “not the history but the mythology of the Babylonians.”[396]

Another noted scholar writes a learned paper to prove that “Semiramis is not an historical queen whose legend was enriched in later times with elements borrowed from a religious myth,” but that “she is primarily a goddess, and becomes a quasi-historical queen only by virtues of that euhemerism which in the East is so much older than Euhemerus.”[397]

For several decades these and other distinguished scholars endeavored to account for the origin and exploits of Semiramis in a way that would relieve them from the necessity of conceding that she was either an arbitrary creation of Ctesias or, as historians so long taught, an actual Assyrian queen. Insisting that the character of Semiramis is unmistakably that of the Semitic Ishtar or Astarte, some accounted for her historical character by assuming that she was but an eastern myth translated into “the semblance of a history that would be creditable to the Greeks.” Others maintained that she was the daughter of the fish-goddess Derceto, while still others quite as vigorously contended that “the legend of Semiramis originated in Lydia,” whence it found its way to Persia where Persian imagination transformed the daughter of a fish-goddess into a Babylonian queen. Then again it was asserted that the Semiramis legend arose from the commingling of exaggerated accounts of a royal Assyrian lady named Sammurat and certain myths regarding the Assyro-Babylonian Ishtar and the Canaanite Astoreth. To this Semiramis, as to the great Sesostris of Egypt, the Greeks in course of time assigned most of the stupendous works in Asia Minor which were of Hittite or Assyrian origin. Smith, as the result of an exhaustive investigation, comes to the conclusion that “Semiramis is a name and form of Astarte and the story of her conquests in Upper Asia is a translation into the language of political history of the diffusion and victories of her worship in that region.”[398]

But while Orientalists were cudgeling their brains in the vain endeavor to solve the problem on which they had wasted so much midnight oil, Dr. Andræ and his associates of the _Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft_ unexpectedly made their astounding discovery among the ruins of Assur. By a single stroke of the pick they nullified the carefully constructed theories of nearly a half century and proved beyond peradventure that the romantic and mysterious Semiramis was neither an Aramæan goddess, nor the arbitrary creation of a Persian poet, nor the figment of a Greek romancer, but an actual personality who was closely related to some of the best known sovereigns of Assyria. As the wife of Shamsi-Adad V and the mother of Adadinari IV and the daughter-in-law of Salmanassar III, who reigned over Assyria from B.C. 860 to 826, the place of Semiramis in history is henceforth as certain and as fixed as is that of Sargon II or Tiglath-pileser IV, two of the most brilliant monarchs who ever presided over the destinies of the vast empire of Assyria when in the apogee of her power and splendor.

That romance has so long been busy with the name of Semiramis as to leave small space for history; that the myths about Derceto and Astarte and Ashtaroth were in the course of ages attached to the Assyrian palace lady who made so great an impression on her contemporaries is not an exceptional occurrence. Similar myths and romances have clustered about the names of Alexander the Great, about Charlemagne, about Harun-al-Rashid, about Frederick Barbarossa, about Dietrich von Bern, and other notabilities of ancient and mediæval times.[399]

But the veils of myth and legend and romance, which have so long enveloped the commanding personality of Semiramis, are finally torn away and reveal a woman, like her namesake of Russia, of rare ability and forcefulness, and that at a time when and in a land where

## participation in public affairs on the part of women was absolutely

taboo.[400]

I have dwelt somewhat at length on the fascinating romance of Semiramis because it is so interesting an illustration of the extraordinary progress which the new science of Assyriology has made during the last few decades; because it illustrates how difficult it is in the annals of the nations of western Asia to separate myth and legend from authentic history; because it shows how gradually we are acquiring a more thorough and exact knowledge of the great empires of Assyria and Babylonia than was possible for a Berosus or a Herodotus to obtain; and, lastly, because it exhibits in bold relief the importance of the work which the Germans, especially the members of the _Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft_, have for years been quietly accomplishing in the valley of the Tigris from the source of this storied river in the highlands of Kurdistan to the alluvial plains of ruin-besprent Babylonia.

The first two days after leaving Assur we found but little along the river to attract us from our smoothly-gliding kelek. We encountered, it is true, occasional eddies, or reaches in the river where the current was more rapid than usual, or where small islands were so numerous that navigation was somewhat intricate, but we rather enjoyed this as it roused our crew from their habitual lethargy and from their chronic disposition to spend all their time in kaif. We also met with quite a number of breakers which extended across the river, but none of them were so violent as that of the Zikr ul Aawaze. Many have maintained that the largest of these rapids are due to the ruins of bridges that spanned the Tigris in ancient times, but it seems more probable that they were caused by the ruins of dams which were constructed by the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia “to insure a constant supply of water to the innumerable canals which spread like a network over the surrounding country.” This seems clear from what Strabo says of them, although he himself seems to think that they were built to prevent hostile fleets from ascending the rivers of Mesopotamia and Susiana.

The Persians [he writes], through fear of incursions from without and for the purpose of preventing vessels from ascending these rivers, constructed artificial cataracts. Alexander on arriving there destroyed as many of them as he could, those

## particularly on the Tigris from the sea to Opis.[401] [He

declared that] such devices were unbecoming to men who are victorious in battle and, therefore, he considered this means of safety unsuitable for him and, by easily demolishing the laborious work of the Persians, he proved in fact that what they thought a protection was unworthy of the name.[402]

A short distance below Assur we passed the embouchure of the little Zab whose clear mountain waters were in strong contrast with the flood of the turbid Tigris. Near the confluence of these two rivers were located the Median villages of Parysatis, the wife of Darius and mother of Cyrus the Younger. These villages had, according to a Persian custom, been bestowed upon the queen by the king for her girdle--that is for the purchase of personal apparel and ornaments. How generous the Persian monarchs were in supplying their wives with pin money!

The scenery below the Little Zab differed but little from that round about Assur--an arid plain on the left and a low range of yellow hills on the right. The Arabs call them mountains--Jebel Hamrin and Jebel Makhul--but they scarcely deserve such an exalted appellation. In a recess of Jebel Makhul are the remains of a stronghold that reminds one of similar ruins along the Danube. It is called Kalat Makhul--the Castle of the Maiden. According to an Arabian legend, this was the citadel of the warlike daughter of a giant, who was the terror of all who sailed down the river. Near by was the citadel--Kalat el Gebbar--of her giant father. The legend apparently recalls the time when these strongholds were occupied by bandits who, like the old robber barons of the Rhine and the Danube, formerly levied tribute on all the passing keleks or who despoiled their owners of all they possessed. These brigands are said to have infested certain reaches of the Tigris as late as a third of a century ago, but, although the traveler is still warned against them, they seem to have changed their scene of operations to fields where they would not be so much harassed by government soldiery.

A few miles below the Giant’s Castle, the river becomes much narrower and swifter, for it here cuts through the sandstone chain of hills called Jebel Hamrin which, on the left bank of the Tigris, continues in a southeasterly direction until it unites with the one of the rugged spurs which juts out from the mountains of Luristan. This narrow section of the river through the range of Jebel Hamrin, which is locally known as El Fatha--the aperture--is interesting because it is on the boundary between the vilayets of Mosul and Bagdad, and because it once marked a point on the natural frontier between Assyria and Babylonia.

Outside of Nimroud and Assur, there is little during the first half of the journey to Bagdad to claim one’s attention except the numerous Kurd villages, composed of squalid stone and mud houses and frequent groups of black tents occupied by various tribes of Arabs. Around the Arabian encampments one sees occasionally quite large flocks of sheep and, in the vicinity of the stone and mud villages of the Kurds, one will note the feeble attempts which its inhabitants make to cultivate the land. Considering the primitive methods of irrigation that exist here, one is not surprised to find that the poor husbandman’s return for his labor is very small. In marked contrast, however, to the unpromising grain fields on the arid plains were the luxurious fields of Indian corn in the small islands which dotted the Tigris.

During the entire journey between Mosul and Bagdad one is never long out of sight of ruins of some kind or other--ruins of old strongholds, ruins of monuments to Moslem saints, ruins of mosques and minarets, ruins of towns and cities long since deserted or destroyed by the ruthless invader. They certainly give the country a most desolate appearance, but they, at the same time, tell in the most eloquent fashion how great must have been the wealth and prosperity of this ill-fated country in the palmiest days of the great Caliphs and during the reigns of the wise and beneficent monarchs of the Sassanidæ and the Achæmenidæ.

However rich the flora and fauna may formerly have been along the Tigris, there is now visible but little of either. Older travelers speak of the long stretches of woodland along the river. Now one sees little more than small clumps of Acacia and Glycyrrhiza here and there and even these seem to be rapidly disappearing.

Wild fowl are said to be abundant, but during the first half of our journey on the Tigris we saw only a few shy francolins, pelicans, and cormorants. Farther down the river, however, the number of fowl appreciably augmented. Among them were some snipe and a beautiful species of duck with snowy-white plumage. Singing birds were exceedingly rare.

According to early travelers, large game formerly abounded the whole way from Nineveh to Bagdad. Thus Jean de Thévenot in his entertaining work on the Levant assures us that in the vicinity of El Fatha, lions were as numerous as sheep elsewhere--_des lions--que l’on y voit en aussi grande quantité que des moutons ailleurs_.[403] He tells us particularly of an extraordinarily large and powerful lion which took a man from every caravan--except his own--that ventured to pass by that terrible place. That his caravan escaped the payment of the tribute exacted by the ferocious brute from all others, was, he opined, something glorious--_ce qui devoit être bien glorieux pour la noire qui ne lui paia point ce tribut_.

Judging by the precautions which, he informs us, he was continually obliged to take against these feral terrors of the desert, Thévenot was as much obsessed by them as he was by the hot and poisonous wind which, he avers, was such a deadly menace in the valley of the Tigris. This consuming wind is, he declares, the same as the _ventus urens_--burning wind--mentioned in the twenty-seventh chapter of the book of Job and prevails during the summer all the way from Mosul to Surat in distant India and is so fatal that if one inhales it one instantly drops dead, and his corpse immediately becomes as black as ink, and, if one touches it, the flesh falls from the bones.[404]

But these are only samples of travelers’ tales that have been current regarding the East and its scorching atmosphere since the days of Strabo.[405] It is, therefore, quite evident that Thévenot did not purpose to allow his predecessors, including his countryman Tavernier, not to mention others, to enjoy a complete monopoly in the recounting of wonders and adventures.

In addition to stories about the poison wind--the Samum of the Arabs--most travelers in the desert have something to say about the huge, yellow sand pillars that are sometimes seen scudding over the plain on the wings of the whirlwind. They are at times a positive menace to travelers and to the natives are objects of terror. According to Arab superstition they are “Jinnis of the Waste which cannot be caught, a notion arising,” Burton tells, “from the fitful movements of the electrical wind-eddy that raises them.”[406]

The first place at which we stopped after entering the vilayet of Bagdad, which embraces the northern part of old Babylonia, was Tekrit. Although modern Tekrit is little more than a wretched village, the Tekrit of mediæval times, as is evinced by the vast area covered by rubbish and ruins, was a large and flourishing city. Writing of the modern town, Rich says its atmosphere “seems to be favorable to prosers, as the saying, ‘To talk like Tekreetli,’ which is common in these parts, apparently indicates.” To this statement he adds, “If the women exceed the men in this gift, in the due proportion of the sex, he is to be pitied who marries a Tekreetli wife.”[407]

The German traveler, Baron von Thielmann, in the account of his journey down the Tigris, gives his impression of the town in a single sentence: “As for ourselves we saw nothing worth noticing in this miserable abode save two solitary palm-trees, the first which we had met with.”[408] Incidentally, he quotes as a statement of Karl Ritter, the celebrated geographer, “the striking remark that the furthest palm-tree in the East always denotes the limit of Arab sway and Arab life.”

But, if modern Tekrit possesses little of interest for the traveler, the ancient city, long in ruins, still breathes proud memories of the distant past. Once known as “Tekrit the Blest,” it was the seat of the Monophysite metropolitan and a center whence missionaries of the Monophysite church radiated in all directions. It was also the birthplace of Saladin, one of the most celebrated of oriental sovereigns, the famous adversary of Richard Cœur de Lion, the Moslem warrior whose chivalry and generosity were the admiration of the Crusaders and whose memory has lived in history and romance from the appearance of the _Itinerarium Regis Ricardi_ and the masterly _Historia Hierosolymitana_ of William of Tyre to the days when Lessing in his _Nathan der Weise_ and Scott in his _Talisman_ gave those matchless portraits of the chivalrous sultan, which made the name of Saladin a household word throughout the whole of Christendom. The valley of the Tigris can point to many illustrious sons, but to none whose achievements were more brilliant than those of the immortal Kurd who, by reason of his gentleness, courtesy, and nobility of character, his justice, truthfulness, and generosity has been signalized in _The Tales of a Minstrel of Rheims_ as “the best prince that ever was in pagandom,” and who, on account of his kingly liberality, is given a place by Dante[409] in company with such illustrious men as Alexander the Great, the good King of Castile, the good Marchese of Monferrato, the good Count of Toulouse, Bertran of Born, and Galasso of Montefeltro.” And, although the poet condemns Mohammed to the frightful punishment meted out to schismatics in the ninth bolgia of hell, he honors Saladin by placing him in the noble castle of Limbo where--_senza martiri_--without torments--he associates with Cæsar and Brutus, Lucretia and Cornelia and other illustrious heroes and heroines of antiquity.[410]

Although Tekrit is in ruins and has been since it was visited by the fell destroyer Timur, it will still continue to occupy a place in the annals of our race because it was here that the baby eyes of Saladin first opened on the bright, blue sky which canopied the broad lands of which he was in manhood’s prime to become the humane conqueror and the wise and beloved sovereign.

Below Tekrit the Tigris gradually widens and deepens, while the velocity of the river’s current becomes markedly less. Obstructions to navigation rapidly diminish in number and we are able to sail on an even keel--if one can say this of a craft that is keelless.

Our progress down the Tigris, as we foresaw before embarking at Mosul, was exceedingly slow. It rarely exceeded three miles an hour while it was often less than one. As the fall of the river between Mosul and Bagdad, a distance of three hundred and sixty miles, is less than seven hundred feet, there is an average fall of less than two feet to the mile. The Tigris is said to have been named on account of the swiftness of its current, from the Persian word for arrow. The Hebrew name of the river--Hiddekel--also means arrow. Judging, however, from the actual velocity of the river, this name, if not originally given because of some of its northern rapids, is a very apparent misnomer.

Although we had four kelekgis--two for the day and two for the night--their chief occupation was not to propel our kelek, but rather, by means of their long wooden sweeps, to keep it away from rocks and sand bars and steer it clear of dangerous currents and whirlpools. We did not, therefore, row or sail down the river; we simply floated. Sometimes, when we faced a head wind, we came to an actual standstill. But no one complained. We were prepared for this and our crew was so accustomed to it that they would have been surprised if we had not encountered occasional delays of this kind. It gave us an opportunity to enjoy _dolce far niente_, as never before, and afforded our crew the always coveted leisure to make kaif, to smoke and dream at their sweet pleasure. With the Lotos-Eaters their

_Inner spirit sings_ _“There is no joy but calm!”_ _Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?_

And how natural is it for us to appreciate the point of view of our calm-loving, rest-seeking boatmen! For hours at a time they sit at their posts without uttering a word and as immovable as statues. Whether they arrive at their destination in a week or a month is apparently immaterial to them. So long as they are allowed to enjoy their kaif they are supremely happy.

As we gaze on our men at their “dreamful ease,” I recall the verses of Tennyson’s “Song of the Lotos-Eaters”:

_How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream_ _With half-shut eyes ever to seem_ _Falling asleep in a half dream!_

* * * * *

_How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing slowly)_ _With half-dropt eyelid still,_ _Beneath a heaven dark and holy,_ _To watch the long bright river drawing slowly_ _His waters from the purple hill--_ _To hear the dewy echoes calling_ _From cave to cave thro’ the thick twined vine--_ _To watch the emerald-color’d water falling_ _Thro’ many a wov’n acanthus wreath divine!_

Noiselessly and, at times, almost imperceptibly, we glided down the majestic Tigris which through the broad desert waste floats

_Changeless to the changeless sea_.

With ever renewed interest we gazed on the silent ruins whose history was ended before that of Ancient Rome began. The Forum, the Palatine, the Colosseum, the Mole of Hadrian belong in their splendor to an age when the more imposing ruins along the Tigris were hoary with the dust of centuries or long buried under the shifting sands of the desert.

But it is at the hour of sunset that one most completely falls under the spell of the Tigris and the historic land through which it flows. For the sunsets of the desert lands of the East exhibit a gorgeousness of color unknown in our land of fogs and mists. This is probably owing to the haze produced by impalpable dust in an exceptionally dry atmosphere. As the sun nears the horizon, the western sky glows with all the delicate hues of ruby and topaz, emerald and amethyst and, after it has set, the zodiacal light, rising from where the sun disappeared, ascends to the zenith with a display of all the delicate tints of rose and gold and lilac of the aurora borealis.

The glories of a sunset in Mesopotamia are indeed entrancing, but it is when night comes with her dewy freshness and

_Her starry shade_ _Of dim and solitary loveliness_;

when the moon silvers the river’s wavelets and its ruin-crested banks, that one loves to linger in this land of a great historic past and contemplate at leisure

_Those ruined shrines and towers that seem_ _The relics of a splendid dream;_ _Amid whose fairy loneliness_ _Naught but the lapwing’s cry is heard._[411]

How we reveled in those glorious moonlit nights spent on our tranquilly floating kelek on the enchanting Tigris! “They say that Carl Niebuhr, the traveler, when old and blind, used to lie and dream over the old Eastern landscapes and night-skies in his darkened life,--a perpetual world of enchantment to console him.”[412] How could it have been otherwise? For how often since our return from the East where we, like Niebuhr, have spent some of the most delightful days of our life, have we not also found ourselves dreaming of the eventful days and the fascinating nights which it was our privilege to spend under the pale azure skies of the inspiring and enthralling home of our race?

But while, in silent rapture, we were thus enjoying the magnificent displays of the setting sun and were reveling in the beauties of the stars,--“the flowers of the sky,” “the poetry of heaven,” “the forget-me-nots of the angels,”--our crew was totally indifferent to all these sublime manifestations of nature and completely buried in their kaif. They were indeed living pictures of what Robert Louis Stevenson somewhere most aptly calls “the apotheosis of stupidity.” As we noted in their placid features their rapturous expression of contentment and happiness we realized as never before the full force of the poet’s words,

_The heaven of each is but what each desires_.

Never once, during our journey from Mosul to Tekrit were we ever out of sight of some place or monument of historic or legendary lore. But the number of these reminders of the hoary past rapidly increased in our sail between Tekrit and Bagdad. About five miles below Saladin’s birthplace we came to the little town of Iman Dura. According to tradition, it was here that King Nebuchadnezzar set up his colossal golden statue which the Hebrews, Sidrach, Misach, and Abednago, in defiance of the King’s orders, refused to adore.[413] It was near Dura that the Roman army under Jovian pitched their tents after the death of Julian the Apostate and it was here that the Roman Emperor was forced to conclude an ignominious peace--_necessariam quidem sed ignobilem_, writes Eutropius--with the Persian King, Sapor the Great. A short distance below Dura is a small stream which the natives say was a canal dug by King Solomon. Near it, on the left bank of the Tigris, begins the ruins of Eski Bagdad--Old Bagdad--“a mighty field of ruins,” writes Thielmann, “extending some twenty-five miles along the Tigris.”[414] Situated in this long field of ruins is the little town of Samara, as celebrated for its romantic history as for its remarkable monuments which, however, have only in the last decade or two received the attention on the part of scholars which they so richly deserve.

The ruins of which I have here given a brief account [writes a well-known archæologist, after a visit to Samara] are of the first importance for the elucidation of the early history of the arts of Islam. They can all be dated within a period of forty years falling in the ninth century, and are, therefore, among the earliest existing examples of Mohammedan architecture. They bear witness to the Mesopotamian influences under which it arose. The spiral towers of Samara and Abu Dulaf are an adaptation of the temple pyramids and Assyria and Babylonia, which had a spiral path leading to the summit; the technique of arch and vault was invented by the ancient East and transmitted through Sassannian builders to the Arab invaders; the decoration is Persian or Mesopotamian and almost untouched by the genius of the West. In the palaces and the mosques of Samara we can see the conquerors themselves conquered by a culture which had been developing during thousands of years on Mesopotamian soil, a culture which had received indeed new elements into its composition, which had learnt from the Greek and from the Persian, but had maintained in spite of all modifications its distinctive character.[415]

The complex of ruined mosques and palaces which here excites the admiration of the student dates from the time--A. D. 836 to 892--when Samara was the capital of the Abbassid Caliphate. Mutasim, a son of Harun-al-Rashid, was the first caliph who made his residence here. So numerous and magnificent were the edifices which he called into existence, as by an enchanter’s wand, that the glories of Samara soon rivaled those of Bagdad in the days of her greatest power and prosperity. The magnificence of the enlarged and embellished city was expressed in the official name which was then given it, for, in lieu of Samara, it was called Surra-man-raa--Who sees it, rejoices. Judging from the ground plan of the palaces of Samara as given by M. H. Violet, the distinguished French Academician who, during a visit to Samara, made a careful study of its imposing ruins, this group of buildings was not inferior to the royal edifices of Versailles.[416]

According to local tradition Samara, like Sestos and Abydos, had also its Hero and Leander. As they lived in palaces on opposite sides of the river, the Samara Leander could see his immorata, who was the daughter of a sultan, only by breasting the swift-flowing waters of the romantic Tigris. The lovers were, however, more fortunate than were their Greek prototypes, for their lives did not end in the tragedy which overtook the Romeo and Juliet of the Dardanelles but, so the story runs, terminated in a happy marriage like that of Feramoz and Lalla Rookh. And the memory of the devoted pair is still kept green by the names which the Arabs have given to the ruins of their former homes--El Aschik--the lover--and El Maschuka--the beloved.[417]

Below Samara the number of ruins and places of historic and legendary interest seemed to increase in proportion as we sailed southwards.

## Particularly interesting were the ruins of Opis which was once, next

to Babylon, the most important city in Babylonia. It was to this point that were floated from the upper Tigris the boats that Sennacherib, seven centuries B. C., had constructed for use in his celebrated campaign against the Chaldeans and Elamites. From Opis the boats were transported by camels overland to the Euphrates, down which they sailed to the Persian Gulf. How forcibly this achievement of the great Assyrian monarch reminds one of a similar exploit nearly twenty-two centuries later, when Mohammed the Conqueror had a part of his fleet conveyed over the elevated section of land between the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn preparatory to his capture of Constantinople, May 29, 1453!

Opis is also celebrated as having been visited by Alexander the Great in his memorable voyage up the Tigris from the Persian Gulf. “In his voyage up,” as Arrian informs us, “he destroyed the weirs which existed in the river and thus made the stream quite level.”[418] More than twenty-one centuries afterwards, in 1839, the English steamer “Euphrates”--the first steamer ever seen in this region--ascended the Tigris on its voyage of reconnaissance when it went up the river to the tomb of Sultan Abdullah near the mouth of the Greater Zab.[419] But since that date the navigation of the Tigris--at least for commercial purposes--has terminated at Bagdad. If the country bordering the Tigris were under a stable and enterprising government, there is no reason why light-draught and light-tonnage boats should not ply regularly not only between Bagdad and Opis but between Bagdad and Mosul as well. High explosives properly applied under the direction of competent engineers, and possibly a dam or two with suitable locks would solve the problem and would contribute immensely towards restoring to its former flourishing condition a country which, as we have seen, is now little more than a desert overspread with ruins “where kings have paced” and where

_The gray fox litters safe_ _Under the broken thrones_.

When the Tigris shall have been cleared for steam navigation from Bagdad to Mosul and the Bagdad Railway shall be completed and in successful operation through its entire length, we may hope to see the fertile lands, through which the famous river flows once more the home of teeming millions as they were when they constituted the richest and the most flourishing region of Western Asia.

Below Opis we noted a marked change in the aspect of the country. We were now passing through a rich alluvial plain where not a pebble was to be seen. There were on both sides of the river broad, verdant fields enameled with wild flowers and carefully irrigated by the primitive shadoofs and norias which are still in use here as they are along the Nile and in all parts of the Levant. Much of this land is under cultivation or utilized for grazing, as is evinced by the flocks and herds with which the country is everywhere dotted. As we slowly glided down the river we observed an ever-increasing number of villages surrounded by gardens and fruit trees and clumps of date palms. All these grateful changes in the landscape, especially the beautiful palm groves which hourly became more numerous and more attractive, and the little fleets of guffahs filled with commodities and passengers, told us that we were near our destination. These indications did not mislead; for a few hours later the domes and minarets of Bagdad hove in sight and our week’s happy floating on a kelek was at an end. We were at last within the gates of the world-renowned metropolis of the Abbasside Caliphs.

##