CHAPTER XVIII

BABYLON

_A labyrinth of ruins, Babylon_ _Spreads o’er the blasted plain;_ _The wandering Arab never sets his tent_ _Within her walls; the shepherd eyes afar_ _Her evil towers, and devious drives his flock._ _Alone unchanged, a free and bridgeless tide,_ _Euphrates rolls along,_ _Eternal nature’s work._ SOUTHEY.

Hillah was founded by the Arabs in the eleventh century of our era and is said by some to occupy the southern part of the site of ancient Babylon. Aside from its interesting legends and traditions--many of them connected with the Tower of Babel and the famed capital of Nebuchadnezzar--its chief attraction for us was the number and beauty of its date palms. Some of them were, doubtless, descendants of those noble trees which once graced the gardens and orchards of Babylon in the meridian of her splendor and which supplied her people with an important part of their nutriment. And, if Delitzsch’s theory regarding the site of the Garden of Eden be true, it is reasonable to suppose that some of the stately palms that now adorn the gardens of Hillah are scions of trees that once raised their graceful fronds high above the humbler plants and shrubs of the Terrestrial Paradise.

Nowhere in the world, not even in the valley of the Nile or in the fertile oases of Algeria, will one find such magnificent groves of date palms as one sees along the lower course of the Euphrates. On the west bank of the Shat-el-Arab, in the humid district of Pasra, there are more than sixty varieties of date palms while the number of trees is estimated to run into hundreds of millions. It is, indeed, from this region that are exported most of the dates of commerce.

But these nourishing and delicately flavored fruits are not a modern staple of commerce. Way back in early Babylonian times “dates of Akkad,” as they are called in cuneiform invoices of the period, were exported in exchange for gold, sheep, and oxen. With corn and flocks and herds they were among the principal sources of the country’s wealth. The early Babylonian kings specially encouraged the development of date plantations and it is related of a certain governor that he considered the planting of palms as among the most notable achievements of his administration.

And there was reason for attaching so much importance to the cultivation of the palm, because it is not only “the prince of the vegetable world,” as Humboldt declared, but also the most useful of all known trees. For it not only supplies the oriental with one of his chief articles of diet but also furnishes him with bread and wine, meal and vinegar, sugar and fuel, matting and cordage, cages and baskets, chairs, benches, beds, and other articles of household furniture and material for the construction of the house in which he lives. So manifold, indeed, are the uses of the date palm that Strabo informs us that a Persian poem enumerates no fewer than three hundred and sixty valuable properties of the palm.

We have seen how dependent the oriental is on the horse and the camel, especially the latter. But the date palm is no less essential to his well-being than the camel. What an incomparable blessing it is in his eyes is evinced by an eastern saying: “The palm is the camel and the camel the palm of the desert.” And so highly does he revere it as a gift of God that he would regard the wanton injury of the palm tree as nothing less than a mortal sin.

“Honor the palm,” enjoins Mohammed, “for it is your maternal aunt; on the stony soil of the desert it offers you a fruitful source of sustenance.” And it is to be noted that this noble tree has followed Islam in all its conquests and is now to be found in every clime which is favorable to its growth in which the followers of the Prophet have made their homes. But the high estimation in which this useful tree is universally held in the East is shown by an Arabian legend which declares that it was from the slime that surrounded a date palm that God formed the first man.

It is not, then, surprising that a tree that plays so important a rôle in the life of the oriental should never be long absent from his thoughts, especially when away from the land of his fathers. For, as the Swiss when abroad longs for his native mountains, so does the Arab pine for the stately palms whose feathery and umbrageous crowns are to him synonyms of home and sweet repose.

Abd-er-Rahman I, the founder of the Ommiad Caliphate of Cordova, was unable to endure in Spain the absence of the beautiful tree which had been the delight of his youth. He, accordingly, had a young palm brought from Syria and planted in the garden of his villa at Rusafah. It was to this tree, the lovely reminder of his native land, that the homesick Caliph addressed these pathetic verses:

_Oh, Palm, like me a stranger here,_ _An exile in the alien west,_ _Driven from home and dispossessed--_ _But, ah! thou’rt mute, nor canst thou shed a tear._

_Happy to have no sentient soul!_ _Heart-ache like mine thou canst not know;_ _Could’st thou but feel, thy tears would flow_ _In yearning love and grief, without control._

_Aye, homesick tears for eastern groves_ _That shade Euphrates; but the tree_ _Forgets; and I, compelled to flee_ _By hate, almost forget my former loves._

When one reads these impassioned verses, one recalls the touching lines of the poet Juvenal who, in his exile in Dyene, wrote:

_Mollissima corda_ _Humano generi dare se Natura fatetur_ _Quæ lacrymas dedit; hæc nostri pars optima sensus._[488]

The words of the exiled Roman seem almost a commentary on those of the homesick Arab.

As we were leaving Hillah for the ruins of Babylon, our attention was arrested by a group of happy, laughter-loving children. Having always been specially interested in the children of the Near East,

## particularly in those of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, we stopped to learn

the cause of their mirth. We found them intently engaged in various games which seemed to afford them the keenest delight. But what was our surprise to find that the favorite games of these sunburnt children in the immediate vicinity of the ruins of Babylon were just the same as the games that are so popular among the boys and girls of America. And stranger still, many of them were quite the same as I had frequently seen played by Indian children on the plateau of the Andes and in the wilds of Brazil. The boys played ball and marbles and leap-frog, while the girls were equally preoccupied with tag, cat’s cradle, and hopscotch.

It would be interesting to know if there was any Babylonian blood in these Hillah children--they seemed to be pure Arabs--and if the games which afforded them such exquisite pleasure were in vogue among the young folk of Babylon in the days of Paltasar and Hammurabi. I commend these subjects to those ardent folklorists who love to trace the nursery tales which so delight the child of to-day back to times primeval.[489]

Our first objective, after leaving Hillah, was the mound of Babil which lies in the northern part of the ruins of Babylon. Most of the land between Hillah and the ruins of the ancient world capital is desolate in the extreme. Not a single human habitation is visible. And yet we were traversing what was during thousands of years the richest and most carefully cultivated tract of land in the world and the one, too, that had the densest population. Now it is untilled and as abandoned as the Arabian desert but a few miles to the westward. The only evidence that we were actually on the site of a once great city were the fragments of pottery and inscribed bricks and the heaps of rubbish which cumbered the ground and the innumerable mounds, high and low, which covered a region many square miles in area.

We saw nothing to remind us of the majestic ruins of Pæstum or Girgenti; no magnificent temples, no stately columns, or impressive pediments or friezes or entablatures. In the mounds which have not yet been changed by the pick and spade of the explorer we could note only occasional traces of brick walls but not the slightest vestige of stone or marble. No remains of temples or palaces or buildings of any kind. All the marvelous structures described by Ctesias and Herodotus had long since disappeared beneath the drifting sands of the desert.

As one contemplates these mounds, beneath which lay the ruined palaces and temples and strongholds of the proud Kings of Chaldea, they have, in the words of the illustrious German explorer, Dr. Robert Koldewey, “the appearance of a mountainous country in miniature; heights, summits, ravines and tablelands are all here.”[490] The landscape is, indeed, such as one might fancy to exist on the planetoid Ceres or Vesta.

We asked an Arab who accompanied us how the potsherds and fragments of vitrified bricks which littered the ground were brought here and he promptly replied--“By the Deluge.” “A foolish answer,” one will say, but it is the same answer that was given by learned men only a few generations ago to account for the occurrence of fossils on the summit of the Alps. And it is the same explanation that was given by the distinguished geologist, Buckland, of the remains of early man, which were found in many of the caverns of Europe. They were _reliquæ Diluvianæ_--relics of the Noachian Deluge--and the majority of the scientific men of his day were disposed to accept his conclusion as correct. It is, then, not so long ago that savants gave answers to questions that were quite as naïve as that of the untutored Arab of to-day.

But the Arabs who live in the neighborhood of Babylon tell more fantastic stories. They assure one that the ruins are haunted by evil spirits and by malignant jinn and that it is dangerous to wander among the ruins after nightfall.

They also declare that there is at the foot of one of the mounds here a rocky pit, although quite invisible to mortals, in which the wicked angels Harut and Marut were condemned by the Almighty to be suspended, in punishment for their sins, until the day of judgment.[491]

But more remarkable is their belief in the existence hereabouts of satyrs--creatures which are usually supposed to be creations of the mythologies of Greece and Rome. The natives are said to hunt them with dogs and to eat their lower half, although they decline to partake of the upper part on account of its resemblance to the human species.

As one contemplates the utter ruin and desolation which are here so overpowering and listens to the strange stories of the Arabs, one recalls the words of Isaiah--I quote from the King James version:

And Babylon, the glory of the kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs[492] shall dance there.

Babil is one of the loftiest eminences in southern Babylonia and it is for this reason that we visited it before any of the other parts of the ruined Chaldean capital. From its summit, which towers seventy-one feet above the surrounding plain, one has a magnificent view not only of the ruins as a whole but also of many notable features in their immediate vicinity. To the west and southwest are the palm-fringed Euphrates and a number of Arabian villages and gardens along its banks. Several miles southward is Hillah with its gleaming minaret, while some six miles towards the southwest of it is the famous tower of Borsippa, called by the natives Birs Nimrud, and long supposed by many European travelers to be identical with the tower of Babel “the top whereof was to reach to heaven.”[493]

The prospect that greets the vision of the spectator from Babil is always interesting, but to the student of sacred and profane history the word _interesting_ but feebly expresses one’s emotions. This is particularly true when, at the hour of sunset, the long amethystine shadows cast on the dun-colored plain, bring out into bold relief the rich golden lines of the spell-weaving ruins of that great city which, in her glory, ruled over the kings of the eastern world. Then the prospect is absolutely thrilling. Then one loves to be _in media solitudine_--such a solitude as Babylon is to-day--to watch the magnificent sunset--a burnished-gold splendor shading up starward into delicate rubies and emeralds--to be alone with one’s thoughts while musing on the vanished glories of what was once earth’s proudest and most powerful capital, where for centuries

_The gorgeous East with richest hand_ _Show’red on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold_--

but of which all we can now say is contained in the words of a Greek comic poet, quoted by Strabo,--“the great city is a great desert.”[494]

Babil--from the old Semitic name Bab-ili--which signifies “The Gate of the Gods,” was the ancient name of the city of Babylon. As locally used it now designates the most northerly mound of the great city. It is, doubtless, because of its name that many travelers have mistaken it for the Tower of Babel spoken of in the eleventh chapter of Genesis.

Thus John Eldred, an English merchant-traveler, who, in the sixteenth century, made three journeys from Aleppo to Bagdad--which he calls New Babylon--speaks of seeing not only “at his goode leisure many olde ruines of the mightie citie of Babylon” but also of having “sundry times” visited “the olde tower of Babell.”[495] From his description, however, one would infer that the ruin which he took for the tower of Babel, was not the Babil of which we have been speaking but rather the imposing ruin of Akerkuf which is a few miles to the northwest of Bagdad, and which is locally called Nimrod’s Tower.[496]

The first European to give an elaborate description of Babil was Pietro della Valle.

Its situation and form [he writes] correspond with that pyramid which Strabo calls the Tower of Belus.... The height of this mountain of ruins is not in every part equal, but exceeds the highest palace of Naples. It is a misshapen mass, where there is no appearance of regularity. In some places it rises in sharp points, craggy and inaccessible; in others it is smoother and of easier ascent. There are also traces of torrents, caused by violent rains, from the summit to the base.[497]

The picture of this mound, which he had made by an artist who accompanied him, gives one a very good idea of what has been considered by many to be the Tower of Babel but which, after the noble Roman’s visit to it, was long known as Della Valle’s Ruin.[498]

But the excavations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” under the direction of Dr. Koldewey have completely exploded all the theories that have hitherto obtained regarding the mound of Babil. Far from being the Tower of Babel, or Nimroud or Belus, as has been asserted by many writers and travelers, it is now demonstrated to be the ruin of one of the numerous palaces of Nebuchadnezzar. And it is highly probable that it is the structure to which this monarch refers in one of his inscriptions, in which he declares:

On the brick wall towards the north my heart inspired me to build a palace for the protection of Babylon.... I raised its summit ... with bricks and bitumen. I made it high as a mountain. Mighty cedar trunks I laid on it for roof. Double doors of cedar wood overlaid with copper, threshholds and hinges made of bronze did I set up in its doorways. That building I named “May Nebuchadnezzar live, may he grow old as the restorer of Esagila.”[499]

There were, however, other ruins that have at various times been identified with the Tower of Babel. Among these, as has been stated, was that of Borsippa, commonly called Birs-Nimrud, which lies some six miles southwest of Hillah. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited these parts in the twelfth century, speaks of it as “the tower built by the dispersed generation” and declares that it was struck by a heavenly fire which “split it to the very foundation”[500]--a description that is quite applicable to its present appearance.

The distinguished explorers Carsten Niebuhr, Claudius Rich, and Robert Ker Porter were also of the opinion that in Birs-Nimrud “we see the very tower of Babel, the stupendous artificial mountain erected by Nimrod in the plain of Shinar and on which in after ages Nebuchadnezzar raised the temple of Belus.”[501]

That the tower of Babel and that of Belus [writes Porter, in the work just quoted from] were one and the same, I presume there hardly exists a doubt. And that the first stupendous work was suddenly arrested before completion we learn not only from the Holy Scriptures but from several other ancient authors in direct terms ... and almost every testimony agrees in stating that the primeval tower was not only stopped in its progress but

## partially overturned by the Divine wrath, attended by thunder

and lightning and a mighty wind, and that the rebellious men who were its builders fled in horror and confusion of face before the preternatural storm.... In this ruined and abandoned state most likely the tower remained till Babylon was refounded by Semiramis; who, in harmony with her character, would feel a proud triumph in repeopling the city with a colony from the posterity of those who had fled from it in dismay and, covering the shattered summit of the great pile with some new erection, would there place her observatory and altar to Bel.[502]

But the tradition which identifies the tower of Birs-Nimrud with that of Babel, which is often spoken of as “the oldest building in the world,” rests on no better foundation than does that which would make Babil the tower whose progress was arrested by “the confusion of tongues.” The researches of Assyriologists, which have thrown such a flood of light on many Scriptural subjects, have so far been unable to identify the Tower of Babel, or to indicate where the famous structure was located. Neither the renown of the tower of Babil nor that of Borsippa proves that either of them was the famous tower begun by the ambitious descendants of Noah in the plain of Shinar, for the populace, especially in the East, “is fickle-minded in this as in other matters and holy fanes have the periods when they are in the fashion, just like everything else.”[503]

Incredible as it may seem, as much ignorance long prevailed among the learned of Europe respecting the site of the city of Babylon as about that of the tower which was generally supposed to be located either within its walls or in its immediate neighborhood. Writing about the famed capital of Nebuchadnezzar at the beginning of the last century, a learned English scholar declared, “Well indeed may the glory of this renowned place be said to have departed when even its site cannot with precision be ascertained and when the antiquary and the traveler are alike bewildered amid the perplexity of their researches.”[504] The same author expresses the same opinion in different words when he writes of Babylon, called Babel by the Arabs, that “its vast remains lay for ages in the depths of time as much forgotten by the learned of Europe as if it had been a city of the antediluvians.”[505] Even the Turkish geographer, Djihannuma, was so in the dark about the location of the ruins of Babylon that he placed them at Teluja, nearly eighty miles northwest of their actual site.

How great was the ignorance of Europeans during the Middle Ages regarding the capital of the ancient world may be gathered from a statement of Sir John Mandeville, who tells his readers that “Babylone is in the grete desertes of Arabye, upon the waye as men gon toward the kyndome of Caldee. But it is fulle longe sithe ony man durste neyhe to the toure, for it is alle deserte and full of dragons and grete serpentes and fulle deverse veneymouse bestes alle abouten.”

Even in the second part of the last century the distinguished Orientalist, Oppert, head of the French expedition to Mesopotamia in the years 1851 to 1854,[506] was entirely in error as to the site of Babylon. Influenced, no doubt, by the accounts of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and other classical writers regarding the vast extent of Babylon, he made it to embrace both Babil and Birs-Nimrud, which are full fifteen miles apart from each other, and to include an area that the researches of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” have demonstrated to be preposterously large.[507]

But, in order fully to realize how greatly the size of Babylon was exaggerated by the ancient writers and to understand how this capital of thousands of years was able, throughout the ages, to cast so great a spell upon the peoples of the earth, one must briefly consider some of their statements respecting its vastness and magnificence. Only in this way is it possible to appreciate the glamour that has so long attached to it and to discover the reasons for the countless legends and romances to which it has given rise since the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Semiramis.

Of the ancient writers who have given us the most minute descriptions of Babylon, Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus are the most deserving of notice. As Herodotus spent some time in the city and was an eye-witness of what he describes he is, notwithstanding the charges of credulity and exaggeration which have frequently been made against him in certain of his statements, more trustworthy than are those authors who wrote only from hearsay.

What most impressed the writers of antiquity who have given us the most graphic descriptions of the Babylonian capital was its stupendous walls and the vast area which the city embraced. According to Herodotus, who is followed by Pliny, who evidently accepted the measurements of the Greek historian, the wall which girdled this wonderful metropolis was seventy-five feet in thickness and three hundred feet in height.

On the top, along the edges of this wall were constructed buildings of a single chamber facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to drive round. In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with brazen lintels and side-posts.[508]

Such a prodigious wall seems impossible, but when we remember the Great Wall of China, which has nearly thirty times the length of that which Herodotus says surrounded Babylon, we cannot insist that the historian’s account is inherently improbable. But when we know that the Babylonian wall was composed almost exclusively of sun-dried bricks we feel compelled to doubt the writer’s measurements for the simple reason that it was quite impossible for the material used to support a structure of so great a height. It is true that Nebuchadnezzar, in a notable inscription, describes his wall as “mountains high,” but this is a bit of hyperbole in which the self-glorifying monarch was wont frequently to indulge. His statement is quite as much of an exaggeration as that of Diodorus Siculus,[509] who declares that Semiramis, to whom he attributes this colossal work, employed two million men in building the wall of Babylon and that she built it at the rate of a furlong a day and had it completed in the space of a single year.

The circumference of the immense wall of Babylon, according to Herodotus, measured no less than four hundred and eighty statia--somewhat more than fifty-three miles. Ctesias, however, makes the circuit of the city but a trifle more than forty miles. In either case the area enclosed by the wall was enormous and far greater than that included within the extended walls of Paris or within those of Nanking, which is the largest city site in China.

The city of Babylon [writes Herodotus] is an exact square, but certain recent investigators maintain that it was in the form of a rectangle twelve miles wide and fifteen miles long. But whatever the form of the city, the estimates given of its area by ancient authors have appeared to many modern scholars so staggering that they have contended that it was an inclosed district rather than a regular city, the streets which are said to have led from gate to gate across the area being no more than roads through cultivated land over which buildings were distributed in groups and patches.[510]

Quintus Curtius asserts positively “that the enclosure contained sufficient pasture and arable land to support the whole population during a long siege.”[511]

If such was the case we should be forced to conclude that the population of the city was out of all proportion to its size. The English geographer, Rennell,[512] is disposed to allow to Babylon during its most flourishing period a population of a million and a quarter, but this is but a surmise, and all estimates of the number of inhabitants in the great city are, at best, the merest conjectures.

For nearly twenty-five centuries the accounts of Ctesias, Strabo, Herodotus, and the writers who accompanied Alexander the Great to the East were our sole authorities respecting the size and the magnificence of the great capital on the Euphrates. Since, however, the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” have begun to publish the results of their carefully conducted excavations we find that we must greatly modify many of our views concerning the city about which there has been so much legend and romance, and envisage it in the light of the cold, scientific facts which have been submitted to us, as the results of long research, by Dr. Koldewey and his scholarly associates. While many of the descriptions of Herodotus and other early writers are found to be accurate, it is now clear that many of their measurements require very considerable revision. Thus, in lieu of the fifty-three miles which Herodotus has given as the circuit of the city and the forty miles at which Ctesias has estimated it, Dr. Koldewey finds that these figures must be reduced to eleven miles. The learned investigator noting that the circumference given by Ctesias approximates closely to four times the correct measurement is lead to suspect that the Greek writer “mistook the figures representing the whole circumference for the measure of one side of the square.”[513]

The excavations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” seem, therefore, to prove conclusively that Babylon, far from covering an area so large that both Paris and London could find place within it, side by side, was in reality, as Delitzsch declares, no larger than Munich or Dresden.[514]

But in spite of the great reduction that Koldewey found himself compelled to make in the measurements of the classical writers he does not hesitate to declare “that, in any case, the city, even in circumference, was the greatest of any in the ancient East, Nineveh, which in other respects rivalled Babylon, not excepted.” He also pertinently observes that “it must always be remembered that an ancient city was primarily a fortress of which the inhabited part was surrounded and protected by the encircling girdle of the walls. Our modern cities are of an entirely different character; they are inhabited spaces open on all sides. A reasonable comparison can, therefore, only be made between Babylon and other walled cities and, when compared with them, Babylon takes the first place, as regards the extent of its enclosed and inhabited area, not only for ancient but also for modern times.”[515]

After spending some time on and round about the mound of Babil we proceeded to explore the ruins in the southern part of the city. On our way thither we strolled along the east bank of the Euphrates which, in places, is fringed with stately palms whose feathery crowns are always a delight to the eye. Indeed, the palm is so indispensable a feature of an eastern landscape that no picture of a town or a river seems complete without groves and clumps of this most picturesque of oriental trees. I was glad to find so many of them bordering the Euphrates and the western ruins of Babylon, as I had always imagined that they must here, more than anywhere else, be an essential part of the environment. But, although I was delighted to find so many of these noble trees, it was not for them that I was then specially looking. I was seeking rather a specimen of the weeping willow--the graceful _Salix Babylonica_--which, in my mind, has always been associated with what is the most pathetic threnody ever written in any language. I refer to the plaintive elegy of the Children of Israel during their captivity in Babylon. Seating myself under an umbrageous palm near a cluster of delicate weeping willows, I said to myself: “This is the one place in the world where one can best appreciate the overmastering sadness of the homesick exiles when their captors asked them to sing the songs of their native land.” And, taking my breviary from my pocket, I read again and again what then seemed to me the most affecting lines ever composed. Put yourself, in fancy, gentle reader, on the bank of the Euphrates in sight of the ruined palace of Nebuchadnezzar and read aloud the lamentation of the disconsolate Hebrews, as given in Psalm 137:

Upon the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion:

On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments. For there they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs.

And they that carried us away said: Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion.

How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten.

Let my tongue cleave to my jaws if I do not remember thee:

If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy.

Is it possible to put in words a more soul-subduing “Home Sweet Home” than this affecting _Super flumina Babylonis_ of the heart-broken captives of Israel? But it is only when it is sung in its beautifully rhythmic Hebrew that one can fully appreciate its depth of pathos and exceeding beauty of expression.

Our walk from Babil southward was one of rare delight and interest. It was through gardens and cultivated fields and attractive palm groves which occupied the greater part of the narrow strip of fertile land which separates the Euphrates from the great city of ruins. The methods employed in tilling the soil here are the same as those used in the days of the Jewish Captivity. There is the same primitive plow, the same process of treading out and winnowing grain, the same methods of irrigating the land as obtained when the prophets Daniel and Ezekiel were here the teachers and the consolers of their exiled countrymen.

The width of the Euphrates varies according to the season. As the rainfall in this subtropical land is rarely more than three inches a year, the river is quite shallow, except when its bed is filled by the annual flood from the mountains of Armenia. At Babylon it is rarely more than four hundred feet wide; and during the dry season its surface is considerably below its banks. For this reason the inhabitants from the earliest times have, in order to irrigate their lands, had recourse not only to canals but also to various devices for lifting water from a lower to a higher level. Among these contrivances are the _dolab_ or chain pump, the _na’ura_ or water wheel, and the _djird_, a huge leather bag, which, when filled with water is, by means of a simple machine operated by an ox, lifted the desired height and automatically emptied into the channel by which the field or garden is irrigated. The strident notes of these various water elevators and the accompanying songs of the native attendants are often the only sounds that penetrate the solemn stillness which reigns amid the venerable ruins that cover the ground from the mound of Babil on the north to the village of Djumdjuma in the southern part of Babylon.

Herodotus tells us that in his time the Euphrates divided the city into “two distinct portions.” But the present bed of the shifting river is considerably to the westward of that which existed in his day. As a result of this shifting, the western part of the city has almost completely disappeared, for nothing of it now remains on the right side of the present channel except slight vestiges of its once massive walls. The same writer also tells us that the two halves of the city were connected by a stone bridge which spanned the river near the center of the metropolis. He attributes this feat of engineering to Queen Nitocris, but, as there is no record of this queen, either in Berosus or in the Babylonian inscriptions, it is probable that Herodotus was misinformed about her existence, or that he had in mind Queen Amuita, the Median wife of Nebuchadnezzar, who is said to have suggested to her royal consort the construction of the famous hanging gardens which were long ranked among the seven wonders of the world. Diodorus,[516] however, will have it that the bridge was due to Semiramis, to whom antiquity ascribes many other of Babylon’s most notable works. But in spite of the determination of the ancient historian to give the credit of this remarkable achievement to a woman, and in spite of the denials of many modern writers that such a bridge ever existed, or that its construction was even possible in the age in which it is said to have been built, the “Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft” in 1910 actually discovered incontestable remains of the much disputed bridge and demonstrated that its construction was due not to Nitocris, or Amuita, or Semiramis, but to the renowned Nebuchadnezzar or to his father, Nabopolassar.

At the spot once occupied by the eastern bridgehead of this notable structure we found ourselves on the famous Procession Street which was long one of the most remarkable features of Babylon. This was the street along which passed the great processions of Marduk-Merodach--the tutelar deity of the Chaldean capital, and of Nabu-Nebe--his son. In this respect it served the same purpose as the magnificent _Via Sacra_, which extended from Athens to Eleusis and which was used by the solemn Panathenaic procession which was annually held for the celebration, in the great Elusinian temple, of the impressive mysteries of Demeter, Iacchus, and Persephone. An inscribed brick recently found informs us of the part Nebuchadnezzar had in the construction of the Sacred Way of Babylon and gives us the characteristic prayer that he addressed to his gods, which reads:

Nabu and Marduc, when you traverse these streets in joy, may benefits for me rest upon your lips; life for distant days and well being for the body.... May I attain eternal age.[517]

Passing eastwards along Procession Street we soon find ourselves between the two ruins of the great temple of Merodack and of the famous Tower of Babylon.

In the temple, according to Herodotus, there was a sitting statue of Zeus--the name he gives to the god Merodach--all of gold. “Before the figure stands a large golden table and the throne whereon it sits and the base on which the throne is placed are likewise of gold”--the weight of the gold of these divers objects aggregating eight hundred talents.

Nebuchadnezzar, speaking of this temple, of which he calls himself “the fosterer,” says he adorned it with the wealth of the sea and the mountains and all conceivable valuables,--gold and silver and precious stones. The shrine of Merodach, he declares, “I made to gleam as the sun. The best of my cedars that I brought from Lebanon, the noble forest, I sought out for the roofing of the chamber of his lordship, which cedars I covered with gleaming gold. For the restoration of this temple I make supplication every morning to Merodach, the king of the gods, the lord of lords.” To judge from his inscriptions, it would be difficult to find a pagan king who was more prayerful or who exhibited greater devotion to his gods than did this proud ruler of old Babylonia.

It was in one of the sanctuaries of this temple, apparently in that of the god Ea, lord of wisdom and life and healer of the sick--whom the Greeks identified with Serapis--that the generals of Alexander the Great “asked the god whether it would be better and more desirable for Alexander,” who was then lying critically ill in a palace but a bowshot away, “to be carried into his temple in order as a suppliant to be cured by him. A voice issued from the god saying that he was not to be carried into the temple but that it would be better form to remain where he was. This answer was reported by the Companions and soon after Alexander died as if, forsooth, this were now the better thing.”[518]

Alexander had planned to make Babylon the capital of his world empire, but, shortly after taking possession of the city, his meteoric career in the prime of youthful manhood, was cut short by death, the only invincible foe he had ever encountered. His death was the downfall of the city whence he purposed to rule both Asia and Europe. One of his generals, Seleucus Nicator, succeeded him as ruler of Babylonia and soon thereafter transferred his capital from the banks of the sluggish Euphrates[519] to a new city, Seleucia, named after himself, which he had founded on the banks of the swift-flowing Tigris. And it was not long after this that the great metropolis of Babylonia, which for nearly two thousand years had been the leading capital of the ancient world and which had so long been “the glory of the kingdoms and the beauty of the Chaldees excellency” had literally, in the words of Isaiah, become the habitation of the wild beasts of the desert and was reduced to such a state of decay that, according to St. Jerome,[520] its walls, once the marvel of the world, served only to enclose a hunting park for the diversion of the Parthian Kings.

A furlong to the north of the temple of Merodach is the ruin of the famous tower of Babylon, which by many has been considered identical with the Tower of Babil. So colossal was it that the Babylonians called it “the foundation stone of heaven and earth,” and Nebuchadnezzar, who contributed materially towards its restoration and enlargement, declared in an inscription that he had raised the top of the tower “to rival heaven,” but this was a form of oriental exaggeration in which this monarch frequently indulged. Herodotus tells us that it was a stadium--six hundred feet “in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower and on that a third, and so on up to the eighth, above which there is a great temple.”[521] According to Strabo,[522] this quadrangular pyramid was “five hundred feet high”--nineteen feet higher than the great pyramid of Gizeh. As, however, the existing ruin of the tower of Babylon has not yet been excavated it is impossible, by actual measurements, to control the statements of ancient writers regarding its magnitude. But, from an old inscribed tablet which has been translated by the noted Orientalist, G. Smith, and more recently by Father Scheil, the distinguished French Dominican, we gather that the estimates of the Greek writers were probably excessive, for, according to the tablet in question, the summit of the tower was only three hundred feet above the surrounding plain.

Diodorus[523] informs us that this tower was used by the Chaldeans as an astronomical observatory. In the thick, dust-laden atmosphere of Babylonia, where sand storms are so frequent, such a lofty structure would be quite a necessity for the successful observations of the priest astronomers of Babylonia. “The greatly renowned clearness of the Babylonian sky,” as Koldewey truly observes, “is largely a fiction of European travelers who are rarely accustomed to observe the night sky of Europe without the intervention of city lights.”[524] Cicero, therefore, was quite as mistaken as modern travelers when he thought that the broad plains of Chaldea, where the sky was visible on all sides,[525] were specially favorable to star-gazing and the cultivation of astronomy. Equally misled was the poet who sang of Chaldean shepherds who

_Watched from the centre of their sleeping flocks_ _Those radiant Mercuries that seemed to move,_ _Carrying through ether, in perpetual round,_ _Decrees and resolutions of the gods;_ _And, by their aspects, signifying works_ _Of dim futurity to man revealed._

No, it was not those shepherds “in boundless solitude” who “made report of stars,” but the Babylonian priests who, from the summits of their zikurrats, or temple-towers, laid the foundations, broad and deep, of the sublime science of astronomy centuries before Hipparchus and Ptolemy began those admirable investigations which have rendered them immortal.

All the ruins of Babylon which we had hitherto inspected had greatly impressed us, but we did not yet have a concrete idea of the greatness and splendor of the capital of the Babylonian Kings until we visited that part which the Arabs still call the _Kasr_, or castle. It was the great palace which was begun by Nabopolassar and completed by his illustrious son, Nebuchadnezzar. By the Roman historians it was called the Arx, by the Greeks the Acropolis. It served not only as a citadel but also as the favored residence of the king and as the approach to the great temple of Merodach, already referred to, which was the most famous sanctuary in Babylonia.

Not until we saw the wonderful ruins of the Kasr, which have in great measure been excavated, were we able to appreciate the enormous amount of work which Dr. Koldewey and his associates have here accomplished and the splendid contributions which they have made to the science of Assyriology and to our knowledge respecting the greatest capital of the ancient world.

The massiveness of the walls of the citadel--some of them more than fifty feet in thickness--and the vastness of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace with its countless chambers were amazing. But even more noteworthy were the remnants of the Sacred Way, which were once adorned with scores of life-size figures of lions made of brilliantly enameled bricks, and the great Ishtar Gate which spanned Babylon’s _Via Sacra_, where it entered the older city. The hundreds of bulls and dragons, in brick relief, which cover the walls, and the delicate modeling of the figures prove conclusively that the glyptic art of the Neo-Babylonian period must have attained a very high degree of perfection.

Before the discovery of these wonderful works of art, Koldewey was disposed to be quite skeptical about the traditional splendor of Babylon, but, when he unearthed the marvels of the Sacred Way and the Ishtar Gate, which is “the largest and most striking ruin of Babylon,” he was compelled to admit that the fabled splendor of the city was not without foundation.

Adjoining Ishtar Gate are what are supposed to be the remains of the famous Hanging Gardens which antiquity classed among the Seven Wonders of the World. But a view of the semicircular arches which are said to have supported these gardens makes it difficult to understand why they were called hanging--_pensiles hortus_--as described by Quintus Curtius[526] and other ancient writers. So far as one can judge by an inspection of the ruins now visible, this wonder of antiquity was nothing more than an elevated garden court and far less of a _miraculum_, as the Roman historian calls it, than is an ordinary roof garden on one of our modern “sky-scrapers.”

In the same palace, of which the Hanging Gardens formed so conspicuous an ornament, is shown the large throne room of the Babylonian Kings. Speaking of this Dr. Koldewey does not hesitate to say that “it is so clearly marked out for this purpose that no reasonable doubt can be felt as to its having been used as their--the Kings’--principal audience chamber.” And he furthermore adds: “If anyone should desire to localize the scene of Belshazzar’s eventful banquet, he can surely place it with complete accuracy in this immense room.”[527]

Among the other objects of interest among the marvelous complexus of ruins are a huge lion of basalt, the remains of Persian and Parthian buildings and the débris of a Greek theater which, one may believe, was founded by Alexander the Great for the benefit of his countrymen who, in this remote capital of the East, would have been quite loath to forego those intellectual amusements to which they had been so devoted in the land of their birth.

So much has our knowledge of Babylon been increased by the excavation of one-half of the city that we hope that Dr. Koldewey and his scholarly associates will be able to uncover the other half. Should anything interfere with their completion of the great undertaking in which they had already achieved such splendid results, both science and history would suffer a loss that cannot easily be estimated.

From an examination of the ruins of Babylon, that which most impresses one is the immense size of the city, of its walls and palaces and temples, and that tower of Belus which “the Jews of the Old Testament regarded as the essence of human presumption.” Compared with these colossal ruins the remains of such celebrated cities as Delphi and Sparta and Olympia fade almost into insignificance.

From the descriptions of the Babylonian capital left us by the writers of antiquity, the dominant impression made on us is that of the wealth and splendor and magnificence of this famous metropolis. This impression is emphasized by the inscriptions of its kings, who tell us how lavishly their palaces and temples were embellished by the rarest woods of the East and by vast quantities of ivory and silver and gold. Thus Asurbanipal proudly declares, “I filled Esagilla with silver and gold and precious stones and made Ekua to shine as the constellations in the sky.” And Nebuchadnezzar rejoices in the treasures of art and learning which he had accumulated in his palace for “the amazement of mankind.”

But how are these grandiloquent statements of monarchs and historians substantiated by the investigations of the “Deutsche Orient-Gessellschaft”? That Babylon

_Far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind_;

that, as a trade center, its activities extended from

_Indus to the Nile Or Caspian wave or Oman’s rocky shore_,

there is no room for doubt. But from the glowing descriptions of the Greek and Latin writers, we are also led to infer that the buildings of the city--especially its temples and palaces--rivaled in beauty and grandeur the imposing structures of Athens under Pericles and the sumptuous edifices of Rome under Augustus. The discoveries, however, of the German excavators compel us greatly to revise many of our notions regarding the famed palm-embosomed capital on the Euphrates.

One of their most startling revelations is that, so far as their investigations enable them to determine, hewn stone was employed “in bulk for building,” only in the construction of the northern wall of the Kasr, the Sacred Way, the bridge over the Euphrates and in the arches that supported the Hanging Gardens. In this respect Babylon was far behind Nineveh, its great Assyrian rival, where stone was a common building material. Nearly all of its buildings, even its most lauded temples, were composed chiefly of sun-dried bricks. Only in certain parts of the larger temples were kiln-dried bricks employed. What a contrast between such mud structures and the superb marble temples of Baalbec and Palmyra, or the highly polished granite fanes of Thebes and Abydos on the banks of the Nile! What a contrast, even, between the mud temple of Marduk--the greatest in Babylonia--and the immense stone Temple of the Sun erected by the Incas of Peru in their capital of Cuzco!

The dwelling houses of Babylon, according to Herodotus, were mostly three or four stories high. So far, however, the evidence based on excavations goes to prove that private houses were of but a single story. They were probably, like most of the one-story houses in Babylonia to-day--with flat mud roofs which served as dormitories during the intense heat of summer. Such dwellings were almost exactly like the modern one-story adobe houses everywhere visible in New and Old Mexico. The Mexican houses, however, have windows, while those in Babylon had none--at least on the side facing the street. In this respect, however, they were not unlike so many dwelling houses seen in the Near East to-day.

As I contemplated the large mud buildings of ancient Babylon, I could not but compare them with those of the Great Chimu, whose ruins are now among the most remarkable remains of pre-Hispanic Peru. To look at them one would imagine that some jinnee had picked up a section of the Babylonian city and transported it to the far-distant shore of the South Pacific.[528]

With the exception of the Sacred Way and a few other streets, the thoroughfares of Babylon were unpaved. But none of them, not even the great _Via Sacra_, although polished by long and continuous use, exhibits any trace, as do the pavements of Pompeii, of having ever been used for wheeled traffic. This would seem to indicate that such traffic, even in the Neo-Babylonian period, was rare or nonexistent.

Still more surprising is the fact that the excavations, outside of some of the larger buildings, show but few traces of a drainage system. How so large and flourishing a city could have endured so long without one is a mystery that remains to be solved.

In the light, then, of the German excavations, it is apparent that Babylon, on whose splendor and magnificence the old classical writers so loved to dilate, and concerning whose beauty and grandeur legend and tradition have long spun such wonderful fairy tales, was a city that was remarkable rather for the vastness of its public buildings than for their elegance of design or beauty of execution. Even the temples and palaces were low, squat structures with flat mud roofs and were, from an architectural point of view, quite inferior to many caravanseries that one may now find in various parts of the East. Such ornaments as they possessed were evidences of barbaric richness and prodigality and showed none of the purity of taste that so characterized the matchless creations of Phidias and Ictinus.

But, although Babylon was, in its architectural features, a much overrated city, it has, nevertheless, deserved well of the world and has contributed to the advance of civilization as did few other cities before the rise of Athens and Rome. For, as has been observed, Babylon is “the oldest seat of earthly empire.” And “when the West was shrouded in a darkness that neither history nor tradition can penetrate, ... while wild beasts or naked savages roamed over the future sites of Athens and Rome and Florence and London,”[529] Babylon was laying the foundations of art and science, of law and literature and of that civilization which was subsequently developed and elaborated by the great nations of the West.

Trade and commerce and agriculture [asserts Delitzsch] were at their prime and the sciences--geometry, mathematics, and, above all, astronomy, had reached a degree of development which again and again moves even the astronomers of to-day to admiration and astonishment. Not Paris, at the outside Rome, can compete with Babylon in respect to the influence which it exercised upon the world throughout two thousand years.[530]

It has been the custom, time out of mind, to speak of Egypt as the cradle of civilization. And there was reason for this. For her venerable monuments--her pyramids and temples and obelisks and colossal rock--sculptures--which seemed to be coeval with the dawn of history, appear to justify the theory that our race here took its first steps forward in its great career of material and intellectual development. But recent investigations among the ruins along the Euphrates prove that Babylonia is entitled to the honor which has so long been so freely accorded to the valley of the Nile.

The proofs of this thesis are as numerous as interesting; and, so far as inductive evidence goes, are practically conclusive. But most of them are of so recondite a character that they can be properly discussed only in special works bearing on the archæology and prehistory of the two countries in question. One may, however, be permitted to indicate a few of the more obvious reasons which have led Orientalists to conclude that the civilization in the land of the Pharaohs had its origin in Babylonia.

Thus, recent discoveries in Upper Egypt seem to prove beyond doubt that there was intercourse between the two countries in prehistoric times and that, as a result of this early communication, wheat was first introduced from the valley of the Euphrates to that of the Nile. Another consequence of the intercourse between the two lands was that the Egyptians became acquainted with the Babylonian system of irrigation--a system which had rendered the soil of Babylonia the most productive in the then known world. Babylonian engineers, there is reason to believe, introduced into Egypt the shadoff and the sakieh or water wheel, both of which were Babylonian inventions, as is clearly attested by early Assyrian bas-reliefs and by still earlier Sumerian inscriptions.

Yet more exhaustive researches regarding the early script used in the two countries and the relations of the language of Babylonia, which was a Semetic tongue, to that of Egypt lead to the same conclusion as do investigations respecting the introduction of wheat from the land of the Euphrates, where it still grows wild, into that of the Nile, and the identity of the irrigation machines which have been in continuous use in both lands for thousands of years.

It may, indeed, be admitted that no one of these facts is, of itself, sufficient to demonstrate that the culture and the engineering science of Egypt were Babylonian in origin; but, when they are all found to point in the same direction, the argument based on them has a cumulative force that is quite unassailable. Dr. Sayce gives judgment in a single sentence when he declares “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Semitic-speaking people who brought the science of irrigation and the art of writing to the banks of the Nile came, like the wheat they cultivated, from the Babylonian plain.”[531]

Those, however, who are interested in this fascinating theory, which ascribes to Babylonia not only Egyptian civilization but also the ancestors of the historical Egyptians, should read the remarkable work on the subject by Professor Hommel--a work[532] of profound scholarship and one which has convinced many of the most eminent Orientalists that there can no longer be any doubt that the civilization and culture of Egypt came originally from Babylonia.

But interesting as are the discoveries respecting the cultural relations between the two countries in question, no notice of Babylonia would be complete without some reference to her contributions to the science of astronomy. Here we have more positive information than has hitherto been available regarding the primeval intercourse between the peoples of the Euphrates and the Nile. As one might expect, however, in dealing with subjects carrying us back into the mists of antiquity, we find that the question of Babylonian astronomy is one that is deeply involved in myth and legend, but such myths and legends as help to corroborate the findings of historians and archæologists concerning the labors of the astronomers of old Chaldea.

Even in the question regarding the origin of astronomy, as in that concerning the beginnings of civil engineering in Egypt, we note the same old debate among the learned as to who were the more ancient astronomers, the Egyptians or the Babylonians. The people of the Nileland boasted that Hermes or Osiris was the founder of their astronomical system, while the Chaldeans, that is the Babylonians, claimed that the first astronomer was Belus,[533] the son of Nimrod, who was the grandson of Noah and the reputed builder of the Tower of Babel. This tower, often confused with the tower of Bel described by Herodotus, was, according to Chaldean legend, the first astronomical observatory.

It was not, however, thousands of years before the Christian era, as certain writers would have us believe, that Chaldean astronomy became an exact science. This was not possible and for a very simple reason--the absence of a strict chronology to which the Chaldean observers of the heavens did not attain until 747 B. C., when they adopted what is known as the era of Nabonnassar. Previously there could be no certainty regarding the calculation of time. Not, indeed, until the first recorded eclipse, March 21, 721 B. C., was astronomy raised to the dignity of an exact science.

In fact, during the first twenty or thirty centuries of Mesopotamian history [writes the distinguished Belgian savant, Franz Cumont] nothing is found but empirical observations, intended chiefly to indicate omens, and the rudimentary knowledge which these observations display is hardly in advance of that of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Aztecs.[534]

It is only during the last quarter of a century that we have been able to determine the advances made by astronomy at different periods of Babylonian history and we owe this knowledge almost entirely to the persistent labors of three Jesuits, Fathers Epping, Kugler, and Straszmaier.[535] By a long and careful study of the cuneiform inscriptions bearing on astronomy, many of which they have deciphered, interpreted, and published, they have, for the first time, put the history of Babylonian astronomy on a firm, scientific basis. And they have at the same time completely dissipated the poetical fancy of “Chaldean shepherds discovering the causes of eclipses while watching their flocks” and the oft repeated fable that it was Babylonian astronomers who discovered the precession of the equinoxes--an achievement that was due to the genius of Hipparchus of Nicæa.

Thanks, however, to the researches of the three savants named, it must now be conceded that certain discoveries which have hitherto been attributed to Hipparchus should be credited to the astronomers of Babylonia. Among these were discoveries regarding the inequalities of the lengths of the seasons, the methods of determining in advance the phenomena of the five known planets, the duration of their synodic revolutions, and the dates of the phases and eclipses of the moon. In a remarkable cuneiform inscription, dated as early as 523 B. C., is given what is practically a monthly ephemeris not only of the sun and moon and eclipses but also the more notable phenomena of the planets. With reason does Father Kugler consider this “the oldest known document of the scientific astronomy of the Chaldeans.” And so greatly is he impressed by the marvelous astronomical tables which were constructed by the priest astronomers of Babylonia that he declares:

One does not know which to admire the more, the extraordinary accuracy of the periods which is implied by the drawing up of each of the columns of figures or the ingenuity with which these old masters contrived to combine all the factors to be considered.[536]

Recent research has also shown that some of the very accurate calculations of lunar periods which, from the time of Ptolemy, have been attributed to Hipparchus, should in reality be ascribed to the astronomers of Babylonia.[537] That these ancient observers, who had none of the instruments of precision which are now available in our observatories, should have been able to make so exact calculations is marvelous in the extreme.

Equally noteworthy were the discoveries of the hellenized Chaldean, Seleucus, who proved that the movement of the tides is due to the

## action of the moon and who, contrary to the view which then generally

prevailed, taught the helio-centric theory of the solar system--nearly two thousand years before the epochal achievements of Copernicus and Galileo.

The foregoing paragraphs clearly evince that it was the Babylonians who laid the foundations of astronomy, and not, as Buckle, Draper, and others would have us believe, the Arabians under the Caliphate. “The place of honor in science, therefore,”--a place which for ages was conceded to the Babylonians and which, through Father Epping’s studies, has been won for them anew--“will henceforth remain to them uncontested and incontestable.”[538]

In order, however, to have a correct idea of the far-reaching influence of Babylonian civilization, one must know more about it than its contribution to science, art, and literature. One must know something about the social condition of the people and of their manners and customs as described in their history and reflected in their laws. For this a few words will suffice and these will be based on the wonderful code of Hammurabi, the king who ruled over Babylonia more than two thousand years before our era and who was the real founder of her greatness.[539]

It is true that the great legal code which bears his name was, like all other ancient codes, based to a great extent on precedent and on earlier collections of laws, some of which, there is reason to believe, antedated Hammurabi’s great compilation by more than a thousand years. But it is because it is chiefly a codification of preëxisting laws that the great code of the Babylonian King is so valuable and instructive. We find that, unlike the warlike Assyrians, the Babylonians were not only a peaceable and intelligent but also a very humane and deeply religious people. In the words of one who has made a special study of the history and laws of the people over whom Hammurabi bore rule for forty-three years:

It is startling to find how much that we have thought distinctly our own has really come down to us from that great people who ruled the Land of the Two Streams. We need not be ashamed of anything we can trace back so far. It is from no savage ancestors that it descends to us. It bears the “hall mark” not only of extreme antiquity but of sterling worth.... A right-thinking citizen of a modern city would probably feel more at home in ancient Babylon than in mediæval Europe.[540]

Among the laws of the great Babylonian legislator that are especially remarkable are those which safeguard the rights and privileges of married women. That such laws should have been enacted and enforced more than four thousand years ago shows better than anything else the high plane of social progress to which the Babylonians had thus early attained. To quote from the distinguished Orientalist, L. W. King, they “throw an interesting light on the position of the married woman in the Babylonian community, which was not only unexampled in antiquity but compares favorably in point of freedom and independence with her status in many countries in modern Europe.”[541]

One of the many results of the discovery of Hammurabi’s Code was, curiously enough, completely to demolish a favorite argument of certain Biblical critics respecting the laws of Moses. So elaborate a legislative code as that attributed to the Jewish lawgiver was, they contended, quite improbable at the early date assigned to it, and it must, therefore, have had its origin at a subsequent period when society was more highly organized. It must, then, the critics maintained, have been the work of the Jewish priesthood in the later days of Israel, who, in order to give it the necessary sanction, falsely attributed it to Moses. What then must have been their surprise and confusion, on the appearance of Father Scheil’s translation of Hammurabi’s Code, to find that it was more than five hundred years older than that of Moses, and that with its two hundred and eighty-two enactments it revealed a more elaborate social organization than that described in the violently attacked Book of Exodus? But this is only one of many similar surprises which the Higher Critics have found in the monuments of Babylonia. And in proportion as the cuneiform inscriptions continue to disclose their long-withheld secrets, so also, we may feel sure, will they, in all essential matters, be found to verify and corroborate the declarations of the Sacred Text.

Our last bird’s-eye view of the abomination of desolation that was Babylon was from the highest accessible point of the great royal palace on the Kasr. It was at the hour when the noonday sun was pouring his irradiating beams on the scattered and crumbling ruins of temples and palaces and citadels, which seemed to have been blasted by the lightnings of a wrathful heaven and to be lying under a major anathema maranatha of an offended Deity. In this accursed haunt of serpents and scorpions,--and the Arabs add--dragons and satyrs--the earth was absolutely verdureless. No four-footed thing trod the earth; no winged creature circled through the air; not a tree or a shrub adorned the brown, sun-baked mound. Where once stood the Hanging Gardens that were the glory of an arrogant potentate and the wonder of a marveling world; where once were gorgeous halls, with throne of ivory and gold; where kings and nobles feasted in bejeweled robes; where loud choruses swelled to the joyous notes of harp and cymbal and psaltery; where brazen bacchanals drank to Bel from golden goblets looted from Salem’s desecrated temple, there now was the silence and the vacuity and the oblivion of the tomb. Desolation was everywhere made desolate. Of a truth has Babylon the great, “the mother of the abominations of the earth,” “been thrown down and shall be found no more at all.”[542]

We stood on a spot which must have been near that occupied by Nebuchadnezzar when, in the pride of his heart, he exultantly exclaimed:

Is not this the great Babylon which I have built to be the seat of the kingdom, by the strength of my power and in the glory of my excellence?

And while the word was yet in the King’s mouth a voice came down from heaven: To thee, O King Nebuchadnezzar, it is said: Thy kingdom is taken from thee.[543]

But before this word was uttered the Prophet Jeremias, speaking with all the detail of an eye-witness, had foretold what would be the fate of the proud and wicked city on the Euphrates. How literally true are his predictions, let the reader judge from the following verses:

Thus saith the Lord of hosts: That broad wall of Babylon shall be utterly broken down, and her high gates shall be burnt with fire, and the labors of the people shall come to nothing, and of the nations shall go to the fire and shall perish.[544]

And Babylon shall be reduced to heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment and a hissing, because there is no inhabitant.[545]

Thou shalt say: O Lord, thou has spoken against this place to destroy it; so that there shall be neither man nor beast to dwell therein, and that it should be desolate forever.[546]

Reading these graphic words of the inspired prophet in the presence of the ruins of Babylon as they appear to-day, one can but exclaim with the Royal Psalmist:

“Forever, O Lord, thy word standeth firm in heaven.”[547]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

## PARTIAL LIST OF THE MORE IMPORTANT WORKS

CITED IN THIS VOLUME

ABD-EL-KADER, _Rappel à l’Intelligent, Avis à l’Indifférent_ (Paris, 1858).

AINSWORTH, W. F., _Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Chaldea and Armenia_ (London, 1842); _Travels in the Track of the Ten Thousand_ (London, 1844).

ANDRÆ, W., _Die Festungswerke von Assur_ (Leipsic, 1913).

ARNOLD, T. W., _The Preaching of Islam, a History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith_ (London, 1913).

ASSEMANI, J. S., _Biblotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana_ (Rome, 1719–1725).

AUBLÉ, ÉMILE, _Bagdad, Son Chemin de Fer, Son Importance, Son Avenir_ (Paris, 1917).

BAICOIANU, C. I., _Le Danube, Aperçu historique, Économique et Politique_ (Paris, 1917).

BARKER, W. B., _Lares et Penates, or Cilicia and its Governors_ (London, 1853).

BATUTA, IBN, _The Travels of_, translated by S. Lee (London, 1829).

BEATTIE, W., _The Danube_ (London, 1843).

BELL, GERTRUDE, L., _From Amurath to Amurath_ (London, 1911).

BEVAN, E. R., _The House of Seleucus_ (London, 1902).

BONOMI, J., _Nineveh and Its Palaces, The Discoveries of Botta and Layard Applied to the Elucidation of Holy Writ_ (London, 1852).

BOOTH, A. J., _The Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions_ (London, 1902).

BRÉHIER, L., _Le Schisme Oriental du XI Siècle_ (Paris, 1899).

BUDGE, E. A. WALLIS, _By Nile and Tigris_ (London, 1920).

BUNBURY, E. H., _A History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and Romans from Earliest Ages to the Fall of the Roman Empire_ (London, 1883).

BURCKHARDT, J. L., _Travels in Syria and the Holy Land_ (London, 1822).

BURTON, ISABEL, _Inner Life of Syria_ (London, 1884).

BURTON, RICHARD, _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah_ (Boston, 1858).

CAETANI, LEONE, _Annali dell’Islam_ (Milan, 1905–1912).

CANALE, M. G., _Nuova Istoria della Repubblica di Genova, del Suo Commercio e della Sua Letteratura dalle Origini all’Anno 1797_ (Florence, 1858).

CANDOLLE, ALPHONSE DE, _Géographie Botanique Raisonnée_ (Paris, 1885).

CASTRIES, HENRY DE, _L’Islam, Impressions et Études_ (Paris, 1912).

CHAPOT, V., _La Frontière de l’Euphrate de Pompée a la Conquête Arabe_ (Paris, 1907).

CHATEAUBRIAND, F. DE, _Voyage en Orient_ (Brussels, 1835).

CHÉRADAME, ANDRÉ, _Le Chemin de Fer de Bagdad_ (Paris, 1915).

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INDEX

“Aaron the Just,” 418

Abbasside Caliphate, the, 172

Abd-el-Kader, Algerian ruler, 249

Abd-er-Rahman I, 473

Abdul Hamid I, Sultan, 110, 159

Abdul Hamid II, Sultan, 50, 110, 268

Abgar, King, 285, 296

Abraham, Patriarch, 253, 275, 294

Abydas, Strait of, 77

Abyssinia, 312

Achilles, Ashes of, 36

Adadinari IV, 386

Adana, commercial center, 197

Aegean Sea, 90

Afium-Kara-Hissar, 122

Agamemnon, “King of Men,” 87

Agostino, Padre, 263

Aimée Dubuc de Rivery, 110

Albertus Magnus, 6

Alcæus, 105

Aleppo, 255, 263

Alexander I, of Russia, 78

Alexander the Great, 27, 46, 78, 83, 194, 217, 400

Alexandria, 289

Alfold, great central plain of Hungary, 19

Ali, first legitimate Caliph, 445

Al-Khader, 260

Allah, 237

Al-Mamun, Caliph, 420

Al-Mansur, founder of Bagdad, 409

Ameghino, Dr., 453

America, does not know or care about the truth about Turkey, 211

Ammianus Marcellinus, 297

Amru, 316

Amuita, Queen, 488

Anadoli Kavak, 45

Anathema Maran-atha, 327

Anatolia, 183 life of the Osmanlis, 121 ruins of, 106

Anatolian Railway, 99, 121, 157

Anazarbas, 199

Andrae, Dr. Walter, 379

Angel de Villarubbia, Fra, 292

Anglo-French press, hostile to Bagdad railway, 166

Antakia, 255

Anthimos VII, Œcumenical Patriarch, 336

“Antioch the Beautiful,” 218, 255, 289

Antipater, 201

“Apostle and Proto-Martyr among Women,” 172

“Apostle of the Gentiles,” St. Paul, 202

Arabian horses, 441

Arabians, life of the, 442

Arab robbers, protection against, 266

Aracca, the Erech of Scripture, 461

Aramaic language, 272

Aratus, 201

Archimedes, 201

Argonauts, 42

_Argos_, 44

Arianism, 232

Aristarchus of Samothrace, 106

Aristotle, 83

Armenian question, 208

Armenians, business ability of, 271 massacre of 1909, 205 responsible in great part for massacres, 207

Arrians, 101, 305

Artemidorus, 201

Ashbelkala, 380

Ashurnasirpal III, 380

Asia Minor, 183 great trouble of, 149 rich in natural resources, 184

Aspasia, wife of Pericles, 104

Asshur, city of, 294

“Association Laws,” 292

Assuerus, King, 353

Asur, builder of Nineveh, 345, 379

Assyrian Empire, 347

Astronomy, foundations and practice of, by Babylonians, 501

Asurbanipal, the Grand Monarch of Assyria, 353

“A Thousand Nights and a Night,” 261

Attica, 104

Attila, 23

Augustine of Hippo, 369

Augustus, Emperor, 11

Aurelian, Emperor, 217

Babil, mound of, 475, 477

Babylon, 471–508 bird’s-eye view of desolation of, 506 descriptions of, by ancient writers, 483 great wall of, 483 hanging gardens of, 282, 494 present day, 486 tower of, 491

Bagdad, 41, 260, 402–436 ancient glories of, 412 bazaars of, 432 Carmelite priests of, 403 etymological names of, 410 fall of, 425 founding of, 409 modern, 427 periodically visited by the plague, 431 population one-fourth Jewish, 432 the future of, 435 the women of, 432

Bagdad railway, 151 aim and purpose of, 168 completion of, held up by World War, 370 Germany gets concession for, 158 meeting of Czar and Kaiser in 1910 in regard to, 164 source of far-reaching political cataclysm, 169 splendidly built, 167 tunnels of the, 255

Balkan peninsula, 22 peoples of, hated one another, more than the Turks, 22

Barbarossa, Frederick, 78, 121

Barmecides, Slaughter of the, 419

Barnabas, 171

Basra, 264

Bayazid I, Sultan, 46

Bazaars of Bagdad, 432

Beaconsfield, Earl of, 63

Beames, William, 265

Bedouins, 268 life of, 442

Beirut, 310

_Beith Allah_, house of God, 235

Belgrade, 19

Belus, first astronomer, 501

Benjamin of Tudela, 414, 480

Berosus, priest of Bel, 348

Berlin, 1

Bessarion, Cardinal, 335

Bethsabee, 275

Bianca Capello, 110

Bilejik, 122

Bir, 281

Birs-Nimrud, 477

Black Forest, 5

Black Obelisk of Salmanasar II, 200

Black Sea, 30

Black Stone, worshiped by Mohammedans, 235

“Blue Mosque,” 175

Bohadin, 417

Borsippa, 480

Bosphorus, 161 plan for tunnel under, 166 proposed bridge over, 166

Bossuet of Meaux, 369

Botta, Paul Emil, 349

Bourse, the, 163

Bozanti Khan, 188

Bralia, 31

Bréau, Quaterfages de, 456

Bronze Horses of Lysippus, 58

Bruin, Cornelius de, 358

Brusa, 94

Budapest, 18

Bukcovitz, Stephen, 114

Bukharest, city of, 29

Bulgar Dagh, the, 189

Burckhardt, discovers black basaltic block, 275

Burnouf, Eugène, 362

Byron, Lord, 43

Byzantine liturgy, 313

Byzantines, 305

Byzas, son of Neptune, 67

Cæsaropapism, 326

Caetani, Prince, 466

Caliphs, triumphs of the, 281

Callicolone, 87

Calmet, Dam, the Benedictine, 459

Calycadnus, the, 191

Camels, trains of, 185

Canals, Danube-Elbe, 34 Danube-Oder, 34 Danube-Salonica, 34 Ludwig, 33 Suez, 153

Canon law of Mohammedanism, 244

Cantacuzenos, introduces the Osmanlis into Europe, 113

Capistrau, St. John, 20

Capuchins, the, 291

Caravans, 186 kept in communication with friends by homing pigeons, 267 protection against Arab robbers, 266 trade, 264

Carchemish, the, 276, 282

Carmelite priests, of Bagdad, 403

Cassandra, 91

Castle of Simeon, 256

Catherine de Medici, 110

Catherine II, of Russia, 61, 383

Caulaincourt, French Ambassador, 79

Cerularius, Michael, 325

Chalcedon, 97

Chaldean church, 307

Champollion, Jean François, 356

Chansans de Geste, untruths in, concerning Mohammedanism, 222

Chardin, Jean, 358

Charlemagne, 10, 324

Chateaubriand, 52

Chesney, Colonel, 152

Chilat, 298

Chosroes I, 194, 281, 287

Christianity, in relation to Mohammedanism, 247 need of change of attitude of the West toward the East, 251

Chrysopolis, the golden city, 96

Chrysostom, St. John, 71

Churches of the East, 303–340

Church of Holy Wisdom, 56

Cicero, 171

Cilician Plain, or _Cilicea Campestris_, 189 population of, 198 the Garden of Eden, 214 three decisive battles of the world fought on, 194

Citadel, at Aleppo, 273

“City of Delight,” the, 29

“City of the Blind,” the, 97

“City of the Saints,” Bagdad, 260

Cleopatra, 204

Code of Hammurabi, 345, 364, 504

Coffee, great beverage of the Moslems, 179

Coffeehouse, Oriental, 181

Columbus, 452

Comnena, Princess Anna, 72

Conquest of Constantinople, 328

Constantine IX, Emperor, 325

Constantine Paleologus, 68

Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 414

Constantine the Great, 68, 321

Constantinople, 51 people of, 65

Constanza, 37

Consul Lirius, 84

Coptic church, 312

Copts, of Egypt, 312

Corinth, 217

Cos, 105

Council of Florence, 327

Crassus, 297

Creation, one of the oldest accounts of, discovered, 462

Crescent and the Cross, 27

Crimean War, 99

Crœsus, King of Lydia, 184

Cross and the Crescent, 27

Crusaders, castles built by, 257 in Phrygia and Lycaonia, 187 in the footsteps of the, 171 route of the, 257

Crusade, Fourth, 327 time has come for a new but different, 252

Cunaxa, battle of, 375

Cyaxares, 345

Cydnus, 203

Cydnus, the, 190

Cyrus, Bishop, 297

Cyrus the Great, 433 army of, 171

Cyrus the Younger, 281

Dacia, 26

Dacians, the, 30

Damascus, 289, 313

Damoclean sword, 331

Dandolo, Henricus, 68

Dante Alighieri, 247, 295

Danube, 4, 31

Darius, 194, 281

Darius Hystaspes, 31

“Dates of Akkad,” 472

Dati, Leonardo, 457

David, King, 275

Dawson, J. W., 463

Debora, nurse of Rebecca, 298

Deggendorf, 8

De Lesseps, and the Suez Canal, 165

Delitzsch, Friedrich, 363, 369, 448

Delta of the Nile, 317

Dervishes, dancing or whirling, 173 howling, 96

_Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft_, 387

Devil’s Wall, 9

Diana, Temple of, 217

Diering, Professor, on the Germans, 168

Diocletian, 100

Diodorus Siculus, 201, 483

Dionysides, 201

Dioscur, Patriarch of Alexandria, 315

Disraeli, and the Suez Canal, 153

Djerabis, 282

“Doctrine of Addai,” 286

Dominican Sisters of the Presentation of Tours, 308

Dominicans of Mosul, 307

_Drang nach osten_, Trend toward the East, 155

Duke Leopold, of Austria, 10

Dunkelboden, 7

Earthquakes, 218

Eastern Churches, 303–340 reunion with the Mother Church, 334

Edessa, 284 legend connected with, 284 school of, 297

Egyptian monophysites, 312

Eldred, John, 265, 478

El Farruch, Earth-Divider, 74

Elgin, Lord, 57

Endocia, Empress, 257

Enoch, the Hermes Trismegistes of the Orientals, 284

_Entente Cordiale_, 165

Ephesus, 103

Epicureans, 201

_Ermeni Millet_, 318

Eski Bagdad, old Bagdad, 398

Eski-Shehr, 122

Etchimiadzin, monastery of, 311

Eudocea, Empress, 71

Euphrates, the, 278, 488

Eusebius of Cæsarea, 285

Eutyches, 309

Eutychianism, 309

Euxine Sea, 5, 35

Father Damien, 247

“Father of Medicine,” 105

Fatihah, first chapter of the Koran, 96

Feringees, 319

Figueroa, Don Garcia de Sylva y, 357

Fourth Crusade, 327

Fra Diavolo, 195, 196

Fragistan-Europe, 319

France, as a protector of Turkey, 160 fate of the French railway in Near East, 160 has always encouraged scientific research, 349 not willing to give recommendations to Bagdad railway project, 163 on friendly terms with Ottoman Government, 155

Franciscan friars, 262

Francis I, of France, 155

Frankish States, 328

Fra Oderic of Pordenone, 39

Galambocz, 24

Galata, 65

Galatz, 31

Garden of Eden, 214 location of, 447 motoring in the, 437 one of the oldest accounts of creation discovered, 462

Gargar, valley of, 298

Genghis Kahn, 113

Germans, determined to build Bagdad railway unaided, 166

Germany, dream of world power in the East, 155 gets concession for Bagdad railway, 158

Ghazzali, 417

Girgenti, ruins of, 475

Gisdhubar, 281

Giurgero, 29

Gladstone, William, 64

Glaser, E, 465

Glorietta of Schönbrunn, 12

Godefroy de Bouillon, 121

Golden Fleece, 44

Golden Horn, 47

Gordianus III, 297

Goths, the, 217

Gourea, Antonio de, 357

“Granary of Northern Syria,” 278

Grand Opera House, of Paris, 55

“Great Assassin,” Abdul Hamid, 159

Great Britain and the Gold Coast, 250 attitude toward Bagdad railway, 160 attitude toward Turks, 159 does not wish to know the truth about Turkey, 211 fear of protectorate over Turkey by Teutonic powers, 162 not willing to give recommendation to Bagdad railway project, 163

Great Cemetery, 96

Great Chimu, 497

“Great Idea,” 332

“Great Schism,” 325

Great Sweet Water, 48

Great Wall of China, 483

Greece, people of, in ancient days, 274

Greeks, business ability of, 271

Gregorians, 310

Gregory of Nyssa, 369

Grotefend, Georg Friederich, 360

Hadj, annual pilgrimage to Mecca, 244

Haidar Pasha, military hospital, 98

Hainburg, 14

Halicarnasus, 217

Halil Halid, the Anatolian, 210

Hamme, Frère Lieven de, 263

Hammurabi, Code of, 345

Hanging gardens of Babylon, 282, 494

Hannibal, 94

Haran, city of, 293

Harem, explanation of, and meaning, 126–129

_Haremlik_, 126

Harnack, Professor, 338

Harpies, 44

Harum-al-Rashid, 46, 417

Hazret, Mevlana, 175

Hebron, 275

Hedja railroad, 267

Hellespont, the Thacian, 77

Heraclius, 194, 281

Herbert, Thomas, 358

Hergenroether, Cardinal, 229

Herodotus, 281, 347, 488

Hieron, city of, 46

Higden, Ralph, the Benedictine, 449

Hillah, village of, 349, 471

Hincks, Edward, 362

Hipparchus of Nicæa, 105, 502

Hippocrates, 105

Hippodrome, in Constantinople, 58

Hissarlik, hill of, 86

Hittites, language of undecipherable as yet, 276 third great empire with Egypt and Babylonia, 275

Hogarth, David G., on the Armenian question, 208

Holy City of Jerusalem, 187

Holy Directing Synod, 331

Homer, 36, 81

Hommel, F., 465

Howling Dervishes, 96

Hudibras, 450

Huet, Pierre Daniel, 460

Hugo, Victor, on the Danube, 5

Hulagu Khan, 426

Hunyady Janos, 20

Ibrahim, 117

Iconium, now Konia, 122, 151

Iconoclasts, doctrine of, 102

Ida, 87

_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, 81

Illock, 20

Imam, the, 236

Iman Dura, town of, 397

Imperial Museum of Constantinople, 273

Independent Church of the Monastery of Mount Sinai, 331

Indicopleustes, 450

International Commission, for regulation of traffic, 33

Io, priestess of Hera at Argos, 45

Ionia, 104

Irene, Empress, 102

Iron gate, 26

Irrigation, of Babylon, 499

Isaac, 295

Ishtar gate, 494

Islam, creed of, 227 liberal policy of, 116 not opposed to influence of foreign science, law or theology, 243 past and present, 220 “the lay religion par excellence,” 233

Island of Achilles, 36

Ismid, 100

Italy, recent campaigns in Tripoli, 250

Jacobites, 309

Jacob, Patriarch, 284

Janissaries, corps of, 114

Jappa, Gate of Jerusalem, 262

Jason, 44

Jebel Hamrin, 389

Jebel Makhul, 389

Jebel Sinjar, 300

Jelal-ed-din-Rumi, tomb of, 172

Jenghiz Khan, 216

Jerablus, 278

Jerusalem, 263

Jinn, land of the, 261

Joachim III, Œcumenical Patriarch, 334

Joan of Arc, 247

Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 61

Joseph of Burgos, Fra, 292

Judas Iscariot, 295

Julian, the Apostate, 10

Julius Cæsar, 84

Justinian, 321

Kaaba at Mecca, the, 235

Kadi Keni, town of, 97

Kaempfer, Engelrecht, 358

Kaffa, city of, 41

Kaif, favorite pastime of the Moslems, 138

Kalah Sherghat, mound of, 378

Kalat el Gebbar, 389

Kalat Makhul, 389

Kapist, Count, 154

Katholicos, head of the Nestorian church, 306

Kelek, a trip down the Tigris on a, 370–401

Kerbela, sacred shrine of, 444

“Key of the Danube,” the, 24

Khabur, valley of, 298

Khanikin, 154

Khatti, the, 275

Kheta, the, 275

Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, 217

Kohl, J. G., 17

Koldewey, Dr. Robert, 379, 475

Konia, 151 ancient Iconium, 122 inhabitants of, 176 situation and climate of, 174

Koran, 96, 116 contains many beautiful things, 248

Kublai Khan, 40

Kufah, 466

Kurdish race, 208

Kurdistan, 306

Kutchuk Ali Uglu, 194

Kuyunjik, 365

Lane-Poole, Stanley, 243

Language of Babylonia, 500

Latin Empire in Constantinople, establishment of, 327

Latin, language of Hungary for many years, 16

_Latin Millet_, 318

Layard, Austen Henry, 350

Leah, 294

Lebanon, 313

Lebanon Range, 294

“Legend of Abgar,” 285

Lemnos, 87

Lenormant, François, 456

Leo, the Mathematician, 423

Leo XIII, Pope, 334, 338

Lesbos, 105

_Liberator of Bulgaria_, 29

Library of Asurbanipal, 354

Linschoten, John Huyghen Van, 265

Little Sister of the Poor, 248

Little Sweet Water, 48

Lloyd George, David, 64

Lombard, Peter, 449

Loti, Pierre, on the Turks, 140, 144

Louis VII, of France, 121

Lucian, the Greek Voltaire, 346

Lucullus, 297

Ludwig I, of Bavaria, 6

Ludwig Kanal, 33

Lully, Raymond, 252

Mahmud II, Sultan, 110, 156

Malabar, 310

Malik al-Ashraf, 217

Mandeville, Sir John, 378, 451, 482

Manzoni, 8

Marco Polo, 39, 304, 412

Marcus Aurelius, 14

Mardin, city of, 304

_Mare Magnum_ or _Majus_, 39

Margaret de Valdemar, Queen of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, 383

Maria Theresa, Queen, 15

Marie-Joseph, Father, 405

Mark Anthony, 204

Marmora, Sea of, 77

Maronites, 313

Marquise de Pompadour, 110

Marracci, Padre Lodovico, 221, 226

Mar Shimum, Lord Simon, 306

Mar Yohannan, 308

Mausolus, King of Caria, tomb of, 184

Mayo, M., 453

McGahan, Januarius A, 27, 28

Mecca, hadj, or annual pilgrimage to, 224

_Medak_, or story-teller, 177

Medes, the, 345

Mehemet Ali, 189

Melchites, 310

Merodach, temple of, 490

Mesopotamia, 283

Metz, Gautier de, 449

Mevlana, tomb of, 172

Meyer, Professor Wilhelm, 361

Michael Cerularius, 325

Michael Prellos, 326

Midas, King of Phrygia, 184

Moawiah, Saracen, 61

Mohammed, accomplishments of, 230 and his followers, 224 creed of, 227 erroneous notions concerning, 224 preaches monotheism, 230 reformation of his countrymen by, 229

Mohammedanism, campaign of vilification against, 225 changeless in doctrine, 242 Christianity in relation to, 247 has a reverence for our Saviour, 249 much to respect and admire in, 270 not on the wane, 240 “the lay religion par excellence,” 233 theologians comment on, 238

Mohammed II, Sultan, 57, 68, 108, 311, 321

Mohammed V, Sultan, 125

Monogamy, 125

Monophysitism, 309

Monotheism, preached by Mohammed, 230

Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, on the Turkish women, 181

Mopsuestia, city of, 197, 199

Moslems, by law not allowed to erect tombstones, 259 characteristics of, 134 creed of the, 227 forbidden tobacco, 178 great use of coffee, 179 of a deeply religious nature, 221 orthodox, do not like the dervishes, 173 piety and devotion of, 124 prayers, 237 regard paintings and statues as impious, 175 women, their place in things, 129

Mosques, the, 234

Mosul, 298, 299, 303

Mount Athos, community of, 331

Mummius, 217

Murad II, Sultan, 108

Muslin, derivation of the word, 298

Mustansiriyah College, 417

Nabonnassar, era of, 501

Nabopolassar, 345

Nahr Belikh, 293

Napoleon, 78

Nazienzus, St. Gregory, 71

Near East question, modified by the Bagdad railway, 151

Nebuchadnezzar II, 281, 397, 490

Nehi Yunus, 365

Nejef, sacred shrine of, 444

Nestor, 201

Nestorianism, 297, 305

Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, 305

Nibelungenlied, 11

Nicæa, 101

Nicene Creed, 102

Nicomedia, 101

Niebuhr, Carsten, 349, 358, 480

Nightingale, Florence, 98

Nimrod, 284

Nimrod’s tower, 478

Nimroud, general aspect of, 376 ruins of, 376

Nineveh, 341–369 built by Asur, 345 early history of, 345

“Niobe of nations,” 310

Nippur, ruins of, 364

Nisibis, 289, 296

Nitocris, Queen, 488

Nizamiyah College, 417

Noachian deluge, 351

Nod, land of, 462

Novatians, 305

Norris, Edwin, 362

“Oak of Weeping,” 298

Obbanes, 281

Œcumenical councils, 102

Œcumenical Patriarchs, 330

Olympus, 90

Omar Khayyám, 417

Opis, 400

Oppert, head of French expedition to Mesopotamia, 482

_Orientalium Dignitas Ecclesiarum_ of Pope Leo XIII, 340

Orkhan, second ruler of the Osmanlis, 95 son of Osman, 107

Orthodox churches, 320

Osman, founder of the Osmanli dynasty, 107

Osmanlis, characteristics of, 133 great sin, one of omission rather than commission, 219 plea for more tolerance to, 150

Oshœne, kingdom of, 284

Ottoman women, 49

Pæstum, ruins of, 475

Pagans, 304

Palace of the Star, 49

Paleologus, Theodore, 114

Palgrave, on Mohammedanism, 241

Palmyra, 217

Pan-Islamism, a force which Christianity must reckon with, 243 greater missionary force than ever, 244 the strengthening of, 268

Parthenon, 57

Parthian Kings, 491

Parthians, 297

Passau, 7

Patriarch of Alexandria, head of the Copts, 312

_Patriarchus Antiochenus Maronitarum_, 314

Paulinists, 305

Paul-Simon, Father, 403

Perez, Father, 403

Pergamus, kingdom of, 185

Peripatetics, 201

Persepolis, 356

Persian Gulf, 466

Persian Kings of the Achæmenian dynasty, 356

Persian satraps, 310

Persian shiites, 445

Persians, school of the, 290

Pescennius Niger, 194

Peter the Great, 331

“Peuteringian Table,” 298

Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, 232, 252

Petervarad, 20

Phanar, the Vatican of the Orthodox church, 330

Philetism, love of one’s race, 330

Photius, 71, 323

Phrygian language, 171

Pietro della Valle, 263

Pillars of Hercules, 325

Pinches, T. F., 462

Plague, in Bagdad, 431

Platonists, 201

“Plato the Divine,” 172

Pliny the Younger, 94

Polygamy, 125

_Pontus Axenus_, 39

Pool of Abraham, 291

Porter, Robert Ker, 480

Potsdam, meeting at, in 1910 of Czar and Kaiser, 164

Poverello of Assisi, 142

Pozsony, 18

_Præclara_, 335

Prayer, of the Moslems, 237

Priam, city of, 88

Primate of the Melchites, 313

Princes Islands, 99

Prophet Daniel, 375

Prophet Jonas, mound of, 352

Prophet Zephaniah, 345

Psametik, King of Egypt, 171

_Pylæ Ciliciæ_, or Cilician Gates, 188

_Pylæ-Tauri_, gate of Taurus, 189

“Queen of the East,” 194

Rachel, 294

Railway, construction of, across Mesopotamia, 152

Rameses II, the greatest of the Pharaohs, 274

Ramsay, Lady, 129

Ramsay, Sir W. M., 129

Raphael’s Madonna of San Sisto, 3

Rashid ud Din, 413

Rassam, Ormuzd, 351

Ratisbon, city of, 3

Rawlinson, Sir Henry, 361, 411

Rebecca, 294

Reign of Terror in France, 212

Rhazes, Mussulman physician, 416

_Rhenus Superbus_, 8

Rhine, river, 11

Richard Cœur de Lion, 10

Rich, Claudius James, 349, 480

Ricouard, Marie, 404

Rio de Janiero, 66

“Rite of Malabar,” 314

Robinson, Reverend Paschal, 141

Romans, road builders of antiquity, 254

Roumania, 26

Roxalana, the Muscovite, 109

Royal Art Gallery of Dresden, 3

“Royal Road,” 121, 253

_Rum Millet_, 318

Russia, attitude toward the Bagdad railway, 160 campaigns in the Transcaucasia, 250 waives all share in Bagdad railway, 164

Russian Nihilist, Armenian revolutionists inspired by, 206

Russians, 28

Safia, the Venetian, 110

St. Athanasius of Alexandria, 335

St. Augustine, 228

St. Basil’s liturgy, 340

St. Bernard, 299

St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, 315

St. Dominic, Sons of, 341

St. Ephrem, 290

St. Francis, Sons of, 142

St. George and the dragon, 24

St. Gregory Mazienzen, 333

St. Gregory the Illuminator, 310

St. Jerome, 232, 299

St. John of Chrysostom, 333

St. John of Damascus, 231

St. John of Jerusalem, Knights of, 217

St. Mary of Kanobin, 314

St. Paul, 171, 189 life and career of, 202–205

St. Peter of Alcantara, 406

St. Prosper of Aquitaine, 216

St. Simeon Stylites, 257

St. Stephen, cathedral of, 12

St. Thecla, 172

St. Theodore of Studium, 339

St. Theresa, 247

St. Thomas, church of, in Malabar, 314

St. Vincent de Paul, 247

Sainte-Thérèse, Father Bernard de, 404

Saladin, Sultan, 223 birthplace of, 393

Salmanassar I, 376

Salmanassar II, black obelisk of, 200

Salmanassar III, 386

Sammuramat, or Semiramis, 381

Samothrace, 87

San Marco, Cathedral of, 58

San Stephano, treaty of, 63

Santa Sophia, church of, 53

Sapor I, 297

Sappho, 105

Saracens, 317

Sardanapalus, 203

Sargan II, 386

Sarzec, M. Ernest de, 363

Satyrs, 476

Saulcy, M. de, 362

Schneider, Siegmund, German engineer, 166

Scholarios, George, 328

School of Edessa, 297

“School of the Persians,” 290

Schrader, Eberhard, 363

Second Council of Lyons in 1274, 327

See of Constantinople, 325

_Selamlik_, 127

Seleucia, city of, 491

Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 305

Seleucids, the, 316

Seleucus Nicator, 491

Seleucus, the Chaldean astronomer, 503

Selim I, Sultan, 108, 117

Seljuk Sultans of Rum, 172

Semiramis, 381 family and connections of, 386

“Semiramis of the North,” the, 61

Sennacherib, 375

Septimus Severus, 14, 194, 297

Serbians, against the Turks, 148

Serpent Column from Delphi, 59

Seven Sleepers, legend of the, 197

Shamsi-Adad V, 380

Simeon, castle of, 256

“Siren of the Nile,” 205

Sister of Charity, 247

Sisters of St. Francis from Lons, 292

Skobeleff, General, 28

Smith, George, 351

Sobieski, John, 13

Solyman the Magnificent, 108

Solyman Pasha, 78

Sons of St. Dominic, 303

Sons of St. Francis, 142

Sanusiyahs, the, 246

Stamboul, 48

Stanley, Dean, 337

Stoics, 201

Stone of Nebi Yunus, 352

Strabo, 201

Suez Canal, 153

Sunnites, the, 445

Syrians, the, 272

Syrian Uniates, 310

Tabriz, city of, 41

Tallyrand, 34

Tarsus, 190, 202 once the center of Greek thought and knowledge, 201

Tartars, 306

Taurus Mountains, 183

Tekrit, 392

Telloh, city of, 364

Temple of Fame, 6

Tenedos, 87

Ten Thousand Greeks, the, 171

Terrestrial Paradise, dispute as to, 447

“Testament of Leo XII,” 335

Teufelsmauer, Devil’s Wall, 9

Teutonic Powers, 162

Thaddée, Father, 403

Thapsacus, 281

Thare, 294

“The Great River” of the Jews, 282

Theodora, daughter of Cautacuzenos, 114

Theodora, Empress, 102

Theodosius II, Emperor, 257

“The Round City,” 411

“The Terrible Turk,” 148

Thévenot, Jean de, 391

“Thirty pieces of silver,” 295

Thracian Hellespont, 77

Tiglath-Pileser I, King of Assyria, 293, 386

Tigris, the, 278

Timok River, 27

Timur, 113, 216

Tobacco, use of, forbidden by Moslems, 178

Tomi, 37

Tonietti, Sig. A., 154

Tower of Babel, mound of Babil not the, 479

Trade routes of the Near East, 253

Trajan, Emperor, 298

Trampe, Herr, 168

Treaty of San Stephano, 63

Trojan War, 319

Troubadours, the, 222

Troy, glory of, immortal, 93 plain of, 88

“Turk,” applied by Osmanlis when referring to a brutal man, 112

Turks, propaganda against, 123 treatment of the women, 131

Turkey, Great Powers cannot, without trouble, treat, as pariah nation, 213

Tyre, city of, 217

Uniate Copts, 313

Uniates, 308

Urban VIII, Pope, 404

Urfa, 284

“Uriah the Hittite,” 275

Ur of the Chaldees, 294

Vale of Bozanti, 188

Valle, Pietro della, 357, 478

Vasco da Gama, 73, 264

Venice, 58

_Via Sacra_, of Babylon, 497

Vienna, 13

Villamil, Emeterio, 453

Violet, M. H., 399

Vladimir, King of Russia, 339

Volga River, 32

Voltaire, 269 on the Koran, 225

von Bieberstein, Baron Marschall, 158

von Hammer-Purgstall, 304

von Moltke, 156

von Pressel, Wilhelm, German engineer, 166

von Siemens, Dr. George, 156

Wahabis, the, 179

Wallachians, 114

Whirling dervishes, 173

“White City” of Serbia, 21

Whitman, Sidney, on the Turks, 147

Wiseman of Westminster, 369

_Wo Lag das Paradies_, 466

Wolf of the Capitol in Rome, bronze, 59

Worship, freedom of, allowed by the Turks, 145

Xenocrates, 97

Xenophon, 46, 189, 281

Xerxes, 59, 77, 83

Yashmak, veil worn by Moslem women, 128

Zab, the, 388

Zenobia, “Queen of the East,” 194

Zeno, Emperor, 201, 297

Zeus, 45, 91

Zikr ul Aawaze, 376

Zobeide, tomb of, 440

Zoroaster, religion of, 256

FOOTNOTES:

[1] When in meditation during the solitary night, I contemplate the waves, there arises in the bright moonlight the pretty water nymph from the Danube, from the beautiful blue Danube.

[2] He loved to wander over unknown places and to see unknown rivers, his curiosity lessening the fatigue.

[3] _Le Rhin_, Letter XIV.

[4] Ovid, _Metamorphoses_, IV, 294, 295.

[5] 01., III, 13–15.

[6] _The Danube_, p. 71 (by W. Beattie, London, 1843).

[7] _Cf._ _A History of the Life of Richard, Coeur de Lion, King of England_, Vol. II, p. 419 (by G. P. James, London, 1854).

[8] Adventure XXII.

[9] _History of the House of Austria from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second_, Vol. IV, pp. 440, 441 (by W. Cox, London, 1820).

[10] _Cf._ Voltaire’s _Précis du Siècle de Louis_ XV, Chap. VI (Paris, 1828). The application to Maria Theresa of the title _Rex_--King--instead of _Regina_--Queen--was in accordance with a peculiar custom in Hungary which required that her signature on all public documents should be Maria Theresa Rex.

[11] Fraser’s _Magazine_, Vol. XXII, p. 692. Another Englishman declares: “The Latin is so common in Hungary that during my travels I frequently heard the servants and the postillions converse and dispute with great fluency in that language.” Cox, _op. cit._, Vol. V, p. 440.

[12] _Tour of Austria_, p. 372 (London, 1844).

[13] Another saying frequently accompanies this, to wit: _Nullum vinum, nisi Hungaricum_--Hungarian is the only wine.

[14] Nevill Forbes, in _The Balkans, A History of Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Roumania, Turkey_, p. 48 (Oxford, 1915).

[15] _The Balkans_, p. 6 (Oxford, 1915).

[16] It is curious to remember that Attila’s first attack upon the Roman Empire “was delivered at the very spot upon the Danube where the Germanic powers in August, 1914, began their offensive. Attila directed his armies upon the frontiers of modern Servia at the point where the Save joins the Danube, where the city of Singidunum rose then and where to-day Belgrade stands.” _Cf._ _Attila and the Huns_, p. 37 (by Edward Hutton, New York, 1915).

[17] See the _Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti_, pp. 411–419 (by C. W. Russell, London, 1858).

[18] _Cf._ _Historical Geography of Europe_, p. 70 (London, 1881).

[19] Ibid., p. 71.

[20] While I knew the honesty and truthfulness of McGahan too well ever to question his statements regarding the cruelties of the Turks which he so vividly described, I have never had any doubt that most of the atrocities that so shocked the world at the time were provoked by the people of the Balkans themselves. Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks had organized a systematic propaganda for the dismemberment of Macedonia and “when those methods flagged a bomb would be thrown at, let us say, a Turkish official by an _agent provocateur_ of one of the three players, inevitably resulting in the necessary massacre of innocent Turks, and an outcry in the European press.” _Cf._ Nevill Forbes, _op. cit._ p. 66.

“The Bulgarian Atrocities,” according to another well-informed writer, “were a clever and unscrupulous piece of diplomacy on the part of the Russian Foreign Office and of the Pan-Slavist Committees. In May, 1876, the Bulgarian Committees at Bukharest and Odessa organized an insurrection which broke out simultaneously in many of the large towns of Bulgaria, accompanied by abominable atrocities on Moslems, ‘designedly committed by the insurgents as being the means best calculated to bring on a general revolution in Bulgaria, by rendering the position of the Christians, however peaceably inclined, so intolerable under the indiscriminate retaliation which the governing race were sure to attempt, as to force them in self-defence to rise.’” W. E. D. Allen in _The Turks in Europe_, p. 166 (London, 1919).

[21] “Of all the men,” writes Forbes, “who have gained reputation as war correspondents I regard McGahan as the most brilliant.” “He used to be called ‘The Cossack correspondent’ because of the swiftness of his movements. Frank Millet names him ‘Will-o’-the-wisp of war writers.’ George Augustus Sala pronounced him one of the most cosmopolitan men he had ever met--‘a scholar, a linguist, a shrewd observer, a politician wholly free from party prejudice, a traveler as indefatigable as Schyler, as dashing as Barnaby, as dauntless as Stanley.’” “No man of his age in recent years,” avers his friend, Lieutenant Greene, “has done more to bring honor on the name of America throughout the length and breadth of Europe and far into Asia.--I suppose that he and Skobeleff stood at the head of their respective professions.

“Year after year the praises of this bold adventurer and vivid writer are chanted in rude verse by the peasants of the Balkans, and every year the anniversary of his premature death is commemorated by the singing of a requiem mass in the cathedral at Tirnovo, the ancient capital of Bulgaria. When he was riding among the Bulgarian villages in war time the peasants used to crowd about and kiss his hands, hailing him as their liberator, and there were many of the Bulgars who agitated for the choice of this wandering writer as the head of the principality whose creation his dispatches had done so much to establish.” _Cf._ _Famous War Correspondents_, Chap. IV (by F. L. Bullad, Boston, 1914).

[22] After Trajan had conquered the Dacians he established in the newly acquired territory a large body of Roman colonists. But they were by no means all of Latin blood, for they were drawn, according to Eutropius, from all parts of the Roman Empire--_ex toto orbe romano_. Numerous votive inscriptions found in the country show that among the colonists besides those from Italy, were representatives from Gaul, Germany, Dalmatia, Phrygia, Galatia, Africa, Egypt, and far-off Palmyra, But, notwithstanding this complexity of ethnical stock, it was always those of Latin blood and Latin speech that dominated.

[23] For an illuminating account, with a map, of this much discussed campaign of Darius against the Scythians, see _The Geographical System of Herodotus_, Vol. I, sec. 7, 8 (by J. Rennell, London, 1830). _Cf_. also _The Five Great Monarchies_, Vol. III, pp. 434, 435 (by G. Rawlinson, New York, 1881); _The History of Herodotus_, Melpomene, 87–143; E. H. Bunbury’s _A History of Ancient Geography Among the Greeks and Romans from the earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire_, Vol. I., pp. 202–206, 217 (London, 1883).

[24] _Cf._ _Le Danube, Aperçu historique, économique et politique_, Chap. II (by C. I. Baicoianu, Paris, 1917).

[25] See _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (11th ed.).

[26] _Cf._ _The Orient Question_, Appendix C (by Prince Lazarovich-Hebelianovich, New York, 1913).

[27] _Cf._ Baicoianu, _op. cit._, p. 14. See also for an illuminating discussion of this same subject _La Question du Danube, Histoire Politique du Bassin du Danube; Études des divers régimes applicables à la navigation du Danube_ (by G. Demorgny, Paris, 1911).

[28] A venerable legend has it that Achilles met here the shade of Helen of Troy whom he had loved in life, by hearsay, although he had never seen her.

[29] These alleged appearances of Achilles and the Dioscuri, referred to by Arrian, were evidently the lambent electrical discharges known as St. Elmo’s Fires. They are also called corposant, Helena, and, when in pairs, the Dioscuri--namely, Castor and Pollux.

[30] _Tristia_, Lib. III, _Elegia_, III.

[31] _Tristia_, Lib. II, _Elegia_, IX.

[32] For the various names of the Euxine or Black Sea, _cf._ _The Book of Ser Marco Polo_, Vol. I, p. 3 (trans, by H. Yule, London, 1903); _Cathay and The Way Thither_, Vol. II, p. 98 (printed for the Hakluyt Society, London, 1913).

[33] So paramount from the twelfth to the fifteenth century was the commerce of Genoa and Venice that an Italian writer does not hesitate to declare that, “during four centuries, the Genoese and Venetians were the arbiters of the destinies of Europe; that they alone thronged the trade-routes of Asia and Africa; that they alone controlled the commerce of these continents; that they alone civilized their barbarous inhabitants and dispelled the darkness of the Middle Ages.” _Nuova Istoria della Repubblica di Genova, del Suo Commercio e della Sua Letteratura dalle Origini all’ Anno 1797_, Vol. I, p. 7 (by Michel-Giuseppe Canale, Florence, 1858).

In marked contrast to this division of the commerce of the world between Genoa and Venice, the Venetian author, Fabio Mutinelli, would claim a mercantile monopoly for his countrymen. “To them alone,” he writes, “are earth and sea equally open; they alone are the channel of all the riches and the furnishers of all the world which poured into their hands all the money which it possessed.” _Del Commercio dei Veneziani_, p. 126 (Venice, 1835).

For interesting accounts of the Euxine trade routes during the period in question the reader may consult with profit _Histoire du Commerce de la Mer Noire_ (by Elie de la Primaudaie); _Le Danube_, Chap. II (by C. I. Baicoianu, Paris, 1917); _Intercourse Between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome_ (by H. G. Rawlinson, Cambridge, England, 1916); _Travels of Marco Polo_, Vol. I, Bk. I, Chap. IX (by Henry Yule, London, 1903). This masterly work is specially valuable for its numerous maps indicating the routes of Marco Polo, as well as those of the elder Polos through Asia. See also _Geschichte des Levantehandels im Mittelalter_, Vol. II, pp. 76, 78, 158 ff. (by Wilhelm Heyd, Stuttgart, 1879).

[34] Canto V, strophe v. Compare Byron’s graphic description of a storm on the Euxine with that given by Ovid in which he vividly portrays the struggling winds as they furiously rush against one another from all points of the compass.

[35] The Sweet Waters of Asia and the Sweet Waters of Europe on the Upper reaches of the Golden Horn are so called in contradistinction to the salt waters of the Bosphorus.

[36] _Constantinople_, Vol. I, p. 136 (by E. A. Grosvenor, Boston, 1895).

[37] Among the Ottomans and other eastern peoples the capital of Turkey is usually known as Stamboul, or Istamboul, a corruption of Constantinople. It is also called Constantineh. Frequently it is referred to as _Roma Nova_--New Rome. In the official documents of the Greek Patriarch this name is still retained. The Slavs love to speak of it as Tsargrad--the Castle of Cæsar. To Mohammedan poets, who are prodigal in the epithets which they apply to it, it is the City of Islam, the Portal of Felicity, the Gate of Happiness, the Mother of the World.

The municipal government of Constantinople embraces all the cities and villages fringing the Bosphorus from the Euxine to the Sea of Marmora, including the Princes Islands. But, although the superficial extent of the municipality--counting the water expanse of the Strait, the Golden Horn and the northern part of the Marmora--is quite large, its actual land area is comparatively restricted.

[38] _Voyage en Orient_, Tom. III, p. 190 (Brussels, 1835).

[39] _Through South America’s Southland_, Chap. IV (New York, 1916).

[40] For an elaborate account of Justinian’s marvelous temple see _The Church of Sancta Sophia Constantinople_, Chaps. III, IV, XI (by Lethaby and Swainson, London, 1894).

[41] _Annalium_, Pars V, p. 498 (by M. Glycas, Bonn).

[42] _History of Architecture_, Vol. II, p. 321 (London, 1867).

[43] Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto II, Stanza 77.

[44] The name given by the Italians to the official residence of the Grand Signor in Constantinople. The Turks use the word _Serai_, which is derived from the Persian serai, signifying palace--a word which is applied to any residence of Sultan. In English seraglio is frequently, but erroneously, confused with harem.

[45] _The Eastern Question_, p. 139 _et seq._ (by J. A. R. Marriot, Oxford, 1917). Whatever may be said regarding the genuineness of the famous “Political Testament” of Peter the Great “there can be no question that it accurately represented the trend and tradition of Russian policy in the eighteenth century. Constantinople was clearly indicated as the goal of Russian ambition. The Turks were to be driven out of Europe by the help of Austria; a good understanding was to be maintained with England and every effort was to be made to accelerate the dissolution of Persia and to secure the Indian trade. Whether inherited or not these were the principles which for nearly forty years inspired the policy of Peter the Great’s most brilliant successor on the Russian throne, Catherine II.” Marriot, _op. cit._, p. 138.

[46] _Cf._ _Napoleon et Alexandre Ier_, Vol. I, p. 268 (by Albert Vadal, Paris, 1869). The famous Field Marshal von Moltke expressed a similar opinion when he wrote, in 1846, “Rom wurde eine Weltstadt durch seine Männer, Konstantinople durch seine Weltstellung”--Rome was a world-city because of her men, Constantinople because of her world location. _Gesammelte Schriften und Denkwürdigkeiten des General-Feldmarschalls_, Tom. I, p. 165 (by Grafen Helmuth von Moltke, Berlin, 1892). Mr. D. G. Hogarth, in his valuable work, _The Nearer East_, declares: “No other site in the world enjoys equal advantages, nor perhaps ever will enjoy them. For the Isthmus of Suez is beset by deserts, and that of Panama has a climate not to be compared. Constantinople not only has an open and most fertile environment and easy access to the interior of both Europe and Asia, but its position between two seas and exposure on the side of Russia gives it an almost northern climate. Add to this a dry, sloping site, a superb harbor, an admirable outer roadstead, easy local communication by way of the Bosphorus and an inexhaustible water supply, and it is easy to agree that those who founded Chalcedon but left Byzantium to others, were indeed blind.” Pp. 240, 241 (New York, 1902).

[47] Beaconsfield boasted on his return from Berlin to England that he had secured “peace with honor.” McGahan, the brilliant war correspondent, declared as soon as he read the treaty, that “it was not worth the paper on which it was written.” An English writer, forty years later, stigmatized it as a treaty that “was concluded in a spirit of shameless bargain, with a sublime disregard of elementary ethics and in open contempt of the right of civilized peoples to determine their own future. It was essentially a temporary arrangement concluded between rival imperialist states. And it sowed the seeds of the crop of ‘Nationalist’ wars in which the Balkan peoples were to be embroiled for the next half century.” _The Turks in Europe_, p. 179 (by W. E. D. Allen, London, 1919).

[48] _Cent Projects de Partage de la Turquie_, 1281–1913 (by T. J. Djuvara, Paris, 1913).

[49] The distinguished Russian scholar, Prince Eugène Nicolayevich Trubetskoy, expresses in a single sentence the dominant idea of his countrymen when he declares: “The possession of the Straits”--the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles--“may become indispensable for Russia in order to secure her daily bread; the possession of Tsargrad as the condition of her power and importance as a State.” See his lecture _Saint Sophia, Russians’ Hope and Calling_, p. 8 (London, 1916).

[50] “The eternal Eastern Question,” writes the historian Freeman, “will never be settled till the Greek nation once more has its own. We claim for that nation that whole extent of land in Europe and Asia where the Greek race and speech is the race and speech of the Christian population; and with that we claim for them their own ancient capital, the city of the Constantines, the Leos, and the Basils. We claim all this on the score of simple justice, on the score of that general philanthropy which, when Greeks are concerned, is not ashamed of the name of philhellenism.”

Again, he declares: “The fact that Constantinople has been and is and ever must be the head of South-eastern Europe is a practical fact which stares us in the face. And while this fact may, with those who look below the surface, awaken some fears which do not lie on the surface, allay some fears which do. Constantinople can never be the head of a province; it must be the head of an empire. But it does not follow that it can now be the head of an universal empire. Its annexation by a distant power would, in all moral certainty lead to the dismemberment of the power that annexed it.” _Historical Essays, Third Series_, pp. 376, 277 (London, 1879).

[51] _Syria, the Desert and the Sown_, p. X (by G. L. Bell, London, 1908).

[52] _Constantinople_, Vol. I, p. 403 (by E. A. Grosvenor, Boston, 1895).

[53] This tragic event is vividly pictured by the poet Shelley when in his lyrical drama, Hellas, he sings:

_A chasm_ _As of two mountains, in the wall of Stamboul;_ _And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,_ _Like giants on the ruins of a world,_ _Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust_ _Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one_ _Of regal part has cast himself beneath_ _The stream of war. Another proudly clad_ _In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb_ _Into the gap, and with his iron mace_ _Directs the torrent of that tide of men._ _And seems--he is--Mohamet._

[54] According to the eminent Austrian historian, Von Hammer-Purgstall, the city sustained, from the time of its foundation until its capture by Mohammed II, no fewer than twenty-nine sieges. _Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman_, Tom. II, pp. 428, 521–523 (Paris, 1835).

[55] _Op. cit._ p. 251.

According to Augier de Busbecq, the scholarly Flemish diplomat, who, in the middle of the sixteenth century, spent eight years at the Ottoman Court, Constantinople “is a city which nature herself has designed to be the mistress of the world. It stands in Europe, looks upon Asia, and is within reach by sea of Egypt and the Levant on the south and the Black Sea and its European and Asiatic shores on the north.” _Letters_, Vol. I, p. 123 (trans. by D. Forster, Paris, 1881).

[56] Frederic Harrison, _The Fortnightly Review_, June, 1919, pp. 840, 841.

[57] Became a Greek by ceding to the Pastor. Paradiso, XX, 57.

[58] Frederic Harrison, _The Fortnightly Review_, April, 1894, pp. 439, 440.

[59] _Cf._ the author’s _Great Inspirers_, p. 16 (New York, 1917).

[60] _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, Vol. V, Chap. LIII.

[61] _Op. cit._, Vol. VI, Chap. LXVI. “Indeed,” declares a recent writer, “when we consider that this state--the Byzantine Empire--was for a thousand years the defence of Europe against Asiatic invaders, which beat back the Arabs and Seljouks, and checked for a century the advance of the Ottomans, when at the height of their power; that during this period it represented civilization in the midst of barbarism, and maintained a wide commerce by land and sea; that by its missionaries both the Russians and the South Slavonic peoples were evangelized, and the Cyrillic alphabet invented; that to its care in preserving and multiplying manuscripts the existence of a great part of our classical literature is due; and finally, that it was the birthplace of Italian painting, and that its architecture has exercised a greater power than any other style, reaching in its effects from Spain to India; we can hardly overestimate its influence on the world’s history.” _History of Greece From Its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864_, Vol. I, p. vii (by George Finlay, Oxford, 1877).

[62] Among the more distinguished Hellenists besides Lascaris and Chrysoloras, whose labors in Italy contributed enormously towards initiating and developing the work of the Renaissance, and who reflected undying honor on the Greek name, must be mentioned Theodore Gaza, Gemistus Plethon, John Argyropoulos, George of Trebizond, Demitrius Chalcondyles, and Cardinal Bessarion--who were all, as Hody, the noted Hellenist of Oxford, declared, “_viri nullo ævo perituri_.”

[63] Marriott, _op. cit._, Chap. II.

[64] _Napoleon et Alexander I, L’Alliance Russe sous Le Premier Empire_, Tom. I, p. 306 _et seq._ (by Albert Vandal, Paris, 1896).

[65] Note to “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto III, strophe XCI.

[66] How different is now the condition of the Trojan plain from what it was in ancient times! Then according to Schliemann it contained “eleven flourishing cities, all of which were probably autonomous and of which five coined their own money. If we consider further that the eleven cities, besides two villages, existed here simultaneously in classical antiquity and that one of these--the city of Ilium itself--had at least seventy thousand inhabitants, we are astounded and amazed how such large masses of people could have found the means of subsistence here, whilst the inhabitants of the present seven poor villages of the plain have the greatest difficulty in providing for their miserable existence. And not only had these ancient cities an abundance of food but they were also so populous and so rich that they could carry on wars and, as their ruins prove, they could erect temples and many other public buildings of white marble; Ilium especially must have been ornamented with a vast number of such sumptuous edifices.” _Troja, Results of the Latest Researches and Discoveries on the Site of Homer’s Troy_, pp. 345, 346 (New York, 1884).

[67] “The main contention was that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were a collection of songs composed at different times and of very unequal values and that, like the _Niebelungen Lied_, they could be resolved into shorter lays, each celebrating the deeds of individual heroes. The more famous of these heroes, Achilles for example, like Siegfried, had, it was maintained, their ultimate origin in mythological personages, once worshiped as divine.” _Schliemann’s Excavations, an Archæological and Historical Study_, p. 17 (by C. Schuchhardt, London, 1891).

[68]

_Troy--O horror!--the common grave of Europe and Asia,_ _Troy--the untimely tomb of all heroes and heroic deeds._ LXVIIIA.

[69] Herodotus. Book VII, 43.

[70] Troy, or Ilium, as the excavations of Schliemann and Dörpfeld have shown, was destroyed and rebuilt no fewer than seven times. During the Roman period it was known as _Ilium Novum_ and was honored as the city of Æneas and consequently, as the parent of Rome. It was because of this fabulous origin of the Romans that Constantine first planned to establish the seat of empire on the plain of Troy instead of locating it on the site occupied by Byzantium between the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. Fortunately he gave his preference to the spot where has since stood the noble city which still bears his name.

_Ilium Novum_ was for a long time the seat of a bishopric, but, since it was plundered by the Turks, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, it has lain in ruins.

For illuminating accounts of Schliemann’s epoch-making investigations see, besides the _Troja_ above mentioned, his _Troy and its Remains_ (New York, 1876); _Ilios, the City and Country of the Trojans_ (New York, 1881); and Schuchhardt’s work already quoted.

Dr. Schliemann has justly been acclaimed the creator of prehistoric Greek archæology. “He has introduced,” writes Oxford’s distinguished Orientalist, “a new era into the study of classical antiquity, has revolutionized our conceptions of the past, has given the impulse to that ‘research of the spade’ which is producing such marvelous results throughout the Orient and nowhere more than in Greece itself. The light has broken over the peaks of Ida and the long-forgotten ages of prehistoric Hellas and Asia Minor are lying bathed in it before us. We now begin to know how Greece came to have the strength and will for that mission of culture to which we of this modern world are still indebted. We can penetrate into a past of which Greek tradition had forgotten the very existence. By the side of one of the jade axes which Dr. Schliemann has uncovered at Hissarlik, the _Iliad_ itself is but a thing of yesterday. We are carried back to a time when the empires of the Assyrians and the Hittites did not as yet exist, when the Aryan forefathers of the Greeks had not as yet, perhaps, reached their new home in the south, but when the rude tribes of the neolithic age had already begun to traffic and barter, and travelling caravans conveyed the precious stone of the Kuen-lun from one extremity of Asia to another. Prehistoric archæology in general owes as much to Dr. Schliemann’s discoveries as the study of Greek history and Greek art.” Professor A. H. Sayce, in the introduction to Dr. Schliemann’s _Troja_, pp. viii, ix.

[71] According to Suetonius and Horace both Julius Cæsar and Augustus, like Constantine the Great, contemplated making Ilium--Troy--the capital of the Roman Empire.

Lucan not only makes Julius visit the Ilium of his day and “each story’d place survey”--

_Circuit exustæ nomen memorabile Trojae_--

but also has him register a solemn vow to restore Priam’s city to its ancient state and honors--

_Restituam populos, grata vice mœnia reddent_ _Ausomidæ Phrygibus, Romanaque Pergama surgent._

So proud, indeed, were the Romans of Ilium and of their descent from Æneas that their countrymen, under the command of Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus, on getting their first view of the home of their forefathers from the Trojan shore, were so moved, Virgil informs us, that they exultingly exclaimed:

_O patria, O divom domus Ilium et incluta bello_ _Mœnia Dardanidum!_

“The dignity and power of Ilium being thus prodigiously enhanced we must find it but natural,” observes Grote, “that the Ileans assumed to themselves exaggerated importance as the recognized parents of all conquering Rome.” _History of Greece_, Vol. I, p. 328.

[72] Purgatorio, XXII, 102.

[73] _Troy, Its Legend, History and Literature_, p. 122 (by S. G. Benjamin, New York, 1916).

[74] _Highlands of Turkey_, Vol. I, p. 22 (by H. F. Tozer, London, 1869). (2) Odyssey, Vi, 51 _et seq._

[75] So impressed was Kinglake, after visiting the Trojan plain, with the accuracy of the poet’s description of the most salient features of the landscape that he declared: “Now I know that Homer had _passed along here_.” _Eothen_, Chap. IV.

[76] “He who would understand the poet must visit the poet’s country.” Regarding Homer’s birthplace an anonymous poet long ago wrote:

_Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenæ,_ _Orbis de patria oertat, Homere, tua._

But in whichever of these place the immortal bard was born, if in any of them, it is quite evident to even the casual visitor to Troy that the poet was thoroughly familiar with its environment which he describes with such marvelous precision.

[77] _Iliad_, XI, 89, 90.

[78] Thus the distinguished geographer, Elisée Reclus, in speaking of the Mysian Olympus, says positively: “West of the Galatian Olympus, this is the first that has received the name of Olympus, and amongst the fifteen or twenty other peaks so named, this has been chosen by popular tradition as the chief abode of the gods.” _The Earth and Its Inhabitants_. _Asia_, Vol. IV, p. 261 (New York, 1885). “This,” declares another writer, “is ‘the Olympus crowned with snow’ up ‘whose lofty crags the everliving gods mounted, Jove first in ascension.’” _The Sultan and his subjects_, Vol. II, p. 226 (by R. Davey, New York, 1897). _Cf._ also _Constantinople_, Vol. I, p. 30 (by R. W. Walsh, London, 1836). Lady Mary Wortley Montague calls the Mysian Olympus:

_The Parliament seat of heavenly powers._

[79] Ibid., XIV, 251–257.

[80] Ibid., XIV, 317.

[81] Mr. Gladstone, that enthusiastic student of Homer and of

“_Immortal Greece, dear land of glorious lays_,”

in his preface to Dr. Schliemann’s notable work on Mycenæ does not hesitate to declare: “There is no preliminary bar to our entertaining the capital question whether the tombs now unearthed and the remains exposed to view are the tombs and remains of the great Agamemnon or his compeers who have enjoyed through the agency of Homer such a protracted longevity of renown.... The conjecture is that these may very well be the tombs of Agamemnon and his company.”

Dr. Schliemann, writing on the same subject, tells us: “I have never doubted that a King of Mycenæ, by name Agamemnon, his charioteer Eurymedon, a princess Cassandra and their followers were treacherously murdered either by Ægisthus at a banquet, ‘like an ox at the manger,’ as Homer says, or in the bath by Clytemnestra, as the later tragic poets represent; and I firmly believed that the murdered persons had been interred in the Acropolis” of Mycenæ.... “My firm faith in the traditions made me undertake my late excavations in the Acropolis and led to the discovery of the five tombs with their immense treasures.” _Mycenæ; a Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenæ and Tyryns_, pp. 334, 335 (London, 1878).

[82] Plinii _Epistulae_ No. 97. “_Nequi enim dubitabam, qualecumque esset quod faterentur, pertinaciam certe et inflexibilem obstinationem debere puniri._”

[83] _The Koran: Commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed_, p. I (Philadelphia, 1870).

[84] The reason why the Ottoman whose home is on the West of the Bosphorus desires to be buried in the cemetery of Scutaria is that “he considers himself a stranger and a sojourner in Europe and the Moslem of Constantinople turns his last lingering look to this Asiatic cemetery where his remains will not be disturbed when the Giaour regains possession of this European city, an event which he is firmly convinced will sometime come to pass. Thus the dying Turk feels a yearning for his native soil; like Joseph in the land of Egypt he exacts a promise from his people that ‘they would carry his bones hence’ and like Jacob, says ‘bury me in my grave which I have in the land of Canaan.’” _Constantinople_, p. 13 (by R. Walsh, London, 1836).

[85] Mohammed enjoined his followers to visit graveyards frequently. “Visit graves,” he says, for “of a verity they shall make you think of futurity.” Again, he declares: “Whoso visiteth the graves of his two parents every Friday, or one of the two, he shall be written a pious child, even though he might have been in the world, before that, disobedient to them.”

[86] The world has long admired the noble qualities of heart and mind of Florence Nightingale but admiration for her has been greatly enhanced by the recent publication of certain letters of hers, previously unknown, which she wrote to one of her associates in the care of the sick and wounded soldiers of the Crimean War. I reproduce a part of one of which she addressed to the Mother Superior of a band of Catholic sisters who were her collaborators in the great work of mercy to which she devoted herself with such sublime self-abnegation:

“Your going,” she writes, “is the greatest blow I have yet had. But God’s blessing and my love and gratitude go with you, as you well know. You know well, too, that I shall do everything I can for the Sisters whom you have left me. But it will not be like you. Your wishes will be our law. And I shall try to remain in the Crimea for their sakes as long as any of us are here. I do not presume to express praise or gratitude to you, Reverend Mother, because it would look as if I thought you had done the work not unto God but unto me. You were far above me in fitness for the General Superintendency, both in wordly talent of administration, and far more in the spiritual qualifications which God values in a superior. The being placed over you in our unenviable reign in the East was my misfortune and not my fault. Dearest Reverend Mother what you have done for the work no one can ever say. But God rewards you for it with Himself. If I thought that your valuable health would be restored by a return home, I should not regret it. My love and gratitude will be yours wherever you go. I do not presume to give you any tribute but my tears.” The letter concludes with the words, “The gratitude of the Army is yours.” Dublin _Review_, October, 1917.

[87] Anatolia is from the Greek word 'Ανατολπ which, like the Latin _Oriens_, signifies the eastern land, the land of sunrise. It is the modern name of Asia Minor which the Ottomans call _Anadoli_.

[88] For an interesting account of the two œcumenical councils of Nicæa see Hefele’s scholarly _Histoire des Conciles_, Tom. I, Livre II and Tom. III, Livre XVIII (trans. by Dom H. Leclercq, Paris, 1910).

[89] _Cf._ _The Historical Geography of Asia Minor_, p. 93 (by W. M. Ramsay, London, 1890).

[90] “The fate of these cities,” observes a recent traveler in Anatolia, “is that of numerous others whose names are a part of classic history. Everywhere throughout Asia Minor decaying ruins mark the sites where art and culture were united with barbaric power. Everywhere are evidences of past refinement, splendor and greatness. And over all the prostrate columns and broken entablatures, the domed mosques and black-green cypresses, the fertile valleys and the great desert, the dark-visaged men and the silent, veiled women lingers the spell, undefinable but wondrously fascinating, of Asia; the cradle of the human race, the land of luxurious magnificence, the abode of mighty empires that rose and crumbled long before the western world had emerged from darkness; the birthlace, too, of subtle mysticism and of every religion that has soothed the soul in anguish and comforted it with hope.” _Asia Minor_, p. 317 (by W. A. Hawly, London, 1918).

[91] See the author’s _Woman in Science_, p. 12 _et seq._ (New York, 1913).

[92] _Ionia and the East_, pp. 8, 9 (by D. G. Hogarth. Oxford, 1907). Another eminent Orientalist, H. R. Hall, expresses substantially the same view when he tells us that “It was in Ionia that the new Greek civilization arose; Ionia, in whom the old Ægean blood and spirit most survived, taught the new Greece, gave her coined money and letters, art and poesy, and her shipmen, forcing the Phœnicians from before them, carried her new culture to what were then deemed the ends of the earth.” _The Ancient History of the Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis_, p. 79 (London, 1916).

[93] _The Story of Turkey_, p. 78 (by Stanley Lane-Poole, New York, 1888).

[94] The historian Hammer-Purgstall tells us that the ablest generals and statesmen under the reigns of Selim and Solyman the Magnificent--those who raised the Ottoman Empire to its acme of prosperity--were renegades. During this period no fewer than eight out of ten of the grand viziers were likewise apostates. “Si donc la puissance ottomane foula aux pieds tant de nations, ce resultat ne doit pas être attribué au caractère indolent et grossier des Ottomans, mais à l’esprit de ruse et de finesse qui distingue les peuples grecs et slaves, a la témérité et a la perfidie des Allanais et des Dalmates, à la persévérance et à l’opiniâtreté des Bosnien et des Croates, enfin à la valeur et aux talents des renégats des pays conquis.” _Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman_, Tom. VI, p. 452–454 (Paris, 1835).

[95] _The Story of the Barbary Corsairs_, p. 66 (by Poole and Kelly, New York, 1893).

[96] _Op. cit._, Tom. I, p. 18.

[97] _Op. cit._, p. 346 _et seq._

[98] _Tableau Général de l’Empire Ottoman_, Tom. II, p. 217 (Paris, 1790).

[99] _The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire_, p. 117 (by H. A. Gibbons, New York, 1916).

[100] Freeman writes to the same effect when he declares “between renegades, Janissaries and the mothers of all nations, the blood of many a Turk must be physically anything rather than Turkish.” _Op. cit._, p. 187.

[101] _A History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time_, Vol. III, p. 475 (Oxford, 1877). Among these causes Finlay indicates three which deserve special attention. “_First_, the superiority of the Ottoman tribe over all contemporary nations in religious convictions and in moral and military conduct. _Second_, the number of different races which composed the population of the country between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, the Danube and the Ægean. _Third_, the depopulation of the Greek Empire, the degraded state of its judicial and civil administration and the demoralization of the Hellenic race.”

[102] Gibbons, _op. cit._, p. 173.

[103] No one is more familiar with the Ottoman people or their history than Professor William Ramsay who does not hesitate to declare: “It has almost always been by the strength and skill of Christian allies that the Turks have vanquished the Christians:

_But Turkish force and Latin fraud_ _Would break their shield, however broad._”

_Impressions of Turkey During Twelve Years Wandering_, p. 271 _et seq._ (London, 1897).

“The Christians were crushed by the arts and arms of their own brethren; Constantinople fell, not before the Saracen or the Turk but before warriors of Greek and Slavonic blood.” _Op. cit._, p. 272.

[104] Gibbons, _op. cit._, p. 302.

[105] Ibid., p. 123.

[106] H. A. Gibbons, _op. cit._, p. 81.

[107] Sura II, 257.

[108] Sura X, 99, 100.

[109] The erudite Assemani, Librarian of the Vatican Library, writing of certain persecutions of the Christians by Mohammedans, declares: “Non raro persecutionis procellam excitarunt mutuæ Christianorum ipsorum simultates, sacerdotum licencia, præsulum fastus, tyrannica magnatum potestas, et medicorum præesertim scribarumque de supremo in gentem suam imperio altercationes.” _Biblotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana_, Tom. III, Pars, II (Rome, 1719–1728).

[110] _The Preaching of Islam, a History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith_, pp. 422, 423 (by T. W. Arnold, London, 1913).

[111] Ibid., pp. 79, 80.

Of all who have made a careful study of the character and religion of the Mohammedans of Asia, no one probably, is better qualified to express an opinion on the subject under consideration than M. A. de Gobiñeau. As the result of thorough investigation during several years residence among them, he does not hesitate to declare that if one separates religious doctrines from political necessity which has often spoken and acted in its name, there is no religion that is more tolerant, one might almost say more indifferent regarding mens’ faith than Islam. “Cette disposition organique est si forte qu’en dehors des cas ou la raison d’État mise en jeu a porté les gouvernments mussulmans à se faire arme de tout pour tendre à unité de foi, la tolerance la plus complète a été la regle fournie par le dogme.... Qu’on ne s’arrête pas aux violences, aux cruautés commises dans une occasion ou dans une autre. Si on regarde de prés, on ne tardera pas à y découvrir des causes toutes politiques ou toutes de passion humaine et de tempérament chez le souverain ou dans la population. Le fait religieux n’y est invoqué que comme pretexte et, en réalité, il reste en dehors.” _Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l’Asie Central_, pp. 24, 25 (Paris, 1865).

What has been said of the tolerance of the Osmanlis or of the peoples of Central Asia the distinguished Orientalist, Prince Caetani, claims for the Arabian followers of the Prophet. “Gli Arabi,” he writes in his monumental work _Annali dell’ Islam_, Vol. V, p. 4 (Milan, 1912), “nei primi anni non perseguitarono invece alcuno per ragioni di fede, no si diedero pena alcuna per convertire chicchessia, sicche sotto l’Islam, dopo le prime conquiste, i Christiani Semiti goderono d’una tolleranza religiosa quale non si era mai vista da varie generazioni.”

[112] _L’España Sagrada, Teatro Geografico de la Iglesia de España_, Tom. XXXVII, p. 312. Cardinal Hergenröther hold the same view when he declares that Islam was a _Strafe_--punishment--for the degenerate Christians of the Orient whose moral corruption, religious schism, and desecration of sacred things through arbitrary state-power had paved the way for it. _Handbuch der Allgemeinen Kirchengeschichte_, Tom. I, p. 748 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1884).

The distinguished historian, F. X. Funk, expresses a similar opinion when he writes: “The Carthaginians were safely gathered under the standard of the Prophet and the conquerors were free to continue their victorious march on the Barbary States and the West of Africa, the many divisions and enmities to which Christological disputes had given rise among the Eastern Christians greatly facilitating their task.” _A Manual of Church History_, Vol. I, p. 132 (London, 1909).

[113] “Estimates of population,” observes Marriott, “are notoriously untrustworthy, but it seems probable that at a time when Henry VIII ruled over about four million people the subjects of Sultan Suleiman numbered fifty million.” _The Eastern Question_, p. 89 (Oxford, 1917).

“After the conquest of Constantinople,” writes Finlay, “the Ottomans became the most dangerous conquerors who have acted a part in European history since the fall of the western Roman Empire. Their Dominion, at the period of its greatest extension, stretched from Buda on the Danube to Bussora on the Euphrates. On the north, their frontiers were guarded against the Poles by the fortress of Kamenietz, and against the Russians by the walls of Azof; while to the south the rock of Aden secured their authority over the southern coast of Arabia, invested them with power in the Indian Ocean, and gave them the complete command of the Red Sea. To the east, the Sultan ruled the shores of the Caspian, from the Kour to the Tenek; and his dominion stretched westward along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, where the farthest limits of the regency of Algiers, beyond Oran, meet the frontiers of the empire of Morocco. By rapid steps the Ottomans completed the conquest of the Seljouk sultans in Asia Minor, of the Mamlouk sultans in Syria and Egypt, of the fierce corsairs of northern Africa, expelled the Venetians from Cyprus, Crete, and the Archipelago, and drove the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem from the Levant, to find a shelter at Malta. It was no vain boast of the Ottoman sultan that he was the master of many kingdoms, the ruler of three continents, and the lord of two seas.” _History of Greece_, Vol. V, p. 6 (Oxford, 1877).

[114] _The Historical Geography of Asia Minor_, p. 23 (by W. M. Ramsay, London, 1890).

[115] _L’Islamisme et la Science_, p. 19 (Paris, 1883).

[116] Count Henry de Castries, in _L’Islam, Impressions et Études_, p. 121 (Paris, 1912).

[117] “It is an amusing fact,” writes an English woman who had an intimate knowledge of Turkey, “that an idea of impropriety is attached by Europeans who have never visited the East, to the very name of harem, while it is not less laughable they can never give a reason for their prejudice. How little foundation exists for so unaccountable a fancy must be evident at once when it is stated that harem, or woman’s apartment, is held so sacred by the Turks themselves, that they remain inviolate even in cases of popular disturbance, or individual delinquency; the mob never suffering their violence to betray them into an intrusion on the wives of their victims; and the search after a fugitive ceasing the moment that the door of the harem separates him from his pursuers.” Julia Pardoe, in _The Bosphorus and the Danube_, p. 126 (London, 1839).

Another English woman, Grace Ellison, who is familiar with the life of the harem and who has given public lectures in London on Turkish life, was seriously told by the secretary of a certain society: “You must not put the word ‘harem’ on the title of your lecture. Many who might come to hear you would stay away for fear of hearing improper revelations, and others would come hoping to hear those revelations and go away disappointed!” _Cf._ _A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions_, p. 16 (by Zeyneb Hanoum, Philadelphia, 1913).

[118] For an illuminating account of an Assyrian harem in the time of Sargon, more than seven centuries B. C., see _Histoire de l’Art dans Antiquité_, Tom. II, p. 435, _et. seq._ (by G. Perrot and Chipiez, Paris 1884). See also the account of the prehistoric palace of the Kings of Tiryns, as given in Schliemann’s _Tiryns_, p. 239, _et. seq._ (New York, 1885). According to Dr. Dörpfeld and other eminent archæologists this palace, the oldest in Greece, is distinctly oriental in plan and its smaller megaron was obviously a harem. _Cf._ also Schuchardt’s _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 31. For interesting descriptions of visits to harems in Turkey and Syria, consult the _Bosphorus and the Danube_, p. 125, _et seq._ (by Julia Pardoe, London, 1839), and the _Inner Life of Syria_, Chap. XI (by Lady Isabel Burton, London, 1884). Both of these women during their sojourn in the East, had exceptional opportunities for studying the real life of the harem where they were always cordially welcomed by its inmates.

The custom of wearing the veil, it may here be remarked, dates back almost as far, if not fully as far, as the harem. _Cf._ Genesis, xxii:65, and Isaiah, iii:23. Nor is the wearing of the veil in the Orient to-day confined entirely to Moslem women. Christian and other non-Moslem women wear it and have worn it from time immemorial. How erroneous, therefore, is the statement, so often made, that it was Mohammed that imposed the veil on the women of the Orient and inhumanly incarcerated them in the harem!

[119] _Observations on the Mussulmans of India_, p. 168 (London, 1917).

[120] _Everyday Life in Turkey_, p. 108 (London, 1897).

The Princess Christina Belgiojoso who spent three years in making a careful study of the people of Asia Minor writes: “The household of the Turkish peasant resembles that of the Christian peasant and, I am sorry to add, the former would often serve as a model for the latter. With equal fidelity, the advantage is in favor of the Turk, for his fidelity is neither imposed on him by civil or religious law, nor by public opinion, nor by local manners, customs and usages; he is led to it simply through the goodness of his nature to which any idea of causing grief to his associate would be repugnant.

* * * * *

“The Turkish peasant cherishes his companion as parent and as lover; never does he knowingly or willingly oppose her; there is no provocation to which he will not cheerfully submit through love for her.... I have seen women old, decrepit, infirm and hideous, led, comforted and adored by fine old men with long, flowing, silvery beards, strong, serene eye and as erect as mountain firs.” _Oriental Harems and Scenery_, p. 108–110 (New York, 1862).

[121] A well-known English journalist, Sidney Whitman, who was long on terms of intimacy with some of the most distinguished men of the Ottoman Empire, tells us that “The stranger, whatever his opportunities, only comes into contact with one-half of the Mohammedan population; the other is barred from his observation, from his very sight. In the course of all my visits to Turkey I never had an opportunity of approaching a Turkish woman within speaking distance.” _Turkish Memories_, p. 267 (London, 1914).

Writing from Constantinople, where she made a special study of the Turks, their manners and customs, the gifted and brilliant Lady Mary Wortley Montague, tells her correspondent in England, “It is a particular pleasure to me here to read the voyages of the Levant which are generally so far removed from the truth and so full of absurdities. I am very well diverted with them. They never fail giving you an account of the women whom it is certain they never saw and talking wisely of men, into whose company they are never admitted, and very often describe mosques which they dared not even peep into.” _Letters_, Vol. II, p. 5 (London, 1793).

As wife of the British ambassador to the Porte, Lady Mary had the _entrée_ of the homes of the Turks, rich and poor, where she was always cordially received and hospitably entertained. Besides this, she was familiar with the language of her hostesses of the harems which she visited and was thus able to become far more intimately acquainted with the people than those who must needs depend on unreliable interpreters. For these reasons her sprightly pictures of the life of the Turkish women have always had special value and one can easily understand her admiration for them and for many of their customs which are so different from those of her own country--England. She would have fully endorsed what her distinguished countrywoman, Lady Isabel Burton wrote many years afterwards: “As a rule I met with nothing but courtesy in the harems and much hospitality, cordiality and refinement.” _The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton: The Story of Her Life Told in Part by Herself and in Part by W. H. Wilkins_, Vol. II, p. 452 (New York, 1897).

[122] _Turkey and the Turks_, p. 84, _et seq._ (by Z. D. Ferriman, New York, 1911).

“There has been,” writes an American woman who has had exceptional opportunities for studying the condition of women in Turkey, “a vast amount of pity wasted upon the Moslem woman. It may surprise even the woman suffragist to learn that the laws of Mohammed confer upon women a greater degree of legal protection than any code of laws since the middle Roman law. The more recent liberties and protection granted to married women by the laws of divorce and the exclusive property rights now in the United States alone can be properly compared to those in force in, Turkey.” _In the Palaces of the Sultan_, pp. 448, 449 (by Anna Bowman Dodd, New York, 1903).

[123] Ibid.

[124] _The Evil of the East, or Truths about Turkey_, p. 42 (London, 1888).

[125] See the _North American Review_.

[126] Lieutenant Wood in his “Journey to the Source of the Oxus,” p. 194 (London, 1872), writes: “Nowhere is the difference between European and Mohammedan society more strongly marked than in the lower walks of life. The broad line that separates the rich and poor in civilized society is as yet but faintly drawn in Central Asia. Here unreserved intercourse between their superiors has polished the manners of the lower classes and, instead of this familiarity breeding contempt, it begets self-respect in the dependent.... Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate self-respect and a natural gravity of deportment which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown.” These characteristics of the people of Central Asia, which so impressed the gallant explorer of the Oxus, are much more striking in the inhabitants of Anatolia.

Another author writes: “The fine manners of all classes of Mohammedans in Constantinople were a constant source of admiration to me. It was as if the grace and dignity of past times--of Courts of the eighteenth century--had taken refuge in Stamboul. Your Caiquejee, your Cafeje and the very boot-blacks, if they are Mohammedans, know how to be unobtrusively polite and well-bred towards each other, and even towards the Giaour himself, if he treats them civilly. The older fashioned, the more prejudiced, the Turkish gentleman, the finer are his manners, the more gracious and delightful his welcome.” _The Sultan and His Subjects_, Vol. I, pp. 280, 281 (by Richard Davy, New York, 1897).

[127] “The houses of the great Turkish ladies,” declares that keen observer, Lady Montague, “are kept clean with as much nicety as those in Holland.” _Letters_, Vol. II, p. 24 (London, 1793).

[128] _Destruction of the Greek Empire_, p. 524 (London, 1903).

[129] _Diary of a Turk_, p. 64 (London, 1903).

Writing to the poet, Pope, Lady Montague declares: “I can assure you that the Princesses and great ladies pass their time at their looms embroidering veils and robes, surrounded by their maids, which are always very numerous, in the same manner as we find Andromache and Helen described.” _Op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 110.

[130] _Op. cit._, pp. 54, 55, 98, 99.

[131] _Letters_, Vol. I, p. 104.

[132] The noted traveler and Orientalist, Sir Richard Burton, graphically defines the meaning of the word Kaif, so frequently heard in the Near East as “The savoring of animal existence; the passive enjoyment of mere sense; the pleasant languor, the dreamy tranquillity, the airy castle-building which in Asia stands in lieu of the vigorous, intensive, passionate life of Europe. It is the result of a lively, impressible, excitable nature and exquisite sensibility of nerve--a facility for voluptuousness unknown to northern regions where happiness is placed in the exertion of mental and physical powers; where niggard earth commands ceaseless sweat of brow; and damp, dull air demands perpetual excitement, exercise or change, or adventure, or dissipation for want of something better. In the East man requires but rest and shade; upon the banks of a bubbling stream or under the cool shelter of a perfumed tree he is perfectly happy smoking a pipe, or sipping a cup of coffee, or drinking a glass of sherbert, but, above all things, deranging his body and mind as little as possible; the trouble of conversations, the displeasures of memory and the vanity of thought being the most unpleasant interruptions to his _Kaif_. No wonder that _Kaif_ is a word untranslatable in our mother-tongue.” _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah_, pp. 23, 24 (Boston, 1859).

[133] _Ferriman_, _op. cit._, p. 334. Professor W. M. Ramsay, than whom no one has a more intimate knowledge of the Osmanlis, writes: “Whenever any work has to be done for which absolute honesty is required, there is always a Turk employed; they are human watchdogs whom everybody employs and trusts.” _Impressions of Turkey During Twelve Tears Wanderings_, p. 43 (London, 1897).

Dr. Schliemann bears the same testimony to their honesty and trustworthiness in his _Troja_, pp. 10, 11.

[134] _Turquie Agonisante_, p. 49 (Paris, 1913).

[135] _Les Massacres d’Arménie_, pp. 19, 20 (Paris, 1918).

[136] _Ansayrii_, Vol. II, p. 144 (London, 1851). _Cf._ Schliemann’s _Troja_, p. 338.

[137] _The Odyssey_, XIV, 57, 58.

[138] _Don Quixote_, Part I, Chap. XL.

[139] _Cf._ Pierre Loti in _Turquie Agonisante_, p. 49 (Paris, 1913).

[140] _A History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time_, Vol. V, p. 161 (Oxford, 1877). Finlay gives the following quotation from the _Turco-Græcia_, p. 487, of Crusius who writes as vigorously in favor of the Osmanlis as Knolles or Pierre Loti.

“Et mirum est inter barbaros in tanta tantæ urbi colluvie nullas cædes audiri, vim iniustam non ferri, ius cuivis dici. Ideo Constantinopolin Sultanus refugium totius orbis scribit: quod omnes miseri ibi tutissime lateant: quodque omnibus, tam infimis quam summis, tam Christianis quam infidelibus iustitia administretur.” Could the verdict of history be more explicit than in the remarkable statements here quoted?

[141] See also his informing brochure, _Les Massacres D’Arménie_ (Paris, 1918).

[142] In Persia, according to the eminent traveler and Orientalist, Arminius Vambery, “Inferior officials cheat the people, and the latter again avail themselves of every opportunity to cheat the officials. Every one in that country lies, cheats and swindles. Nor is such behavior looked upon as anything immoral or improper; on the contrary, the man, who is straightforward and honest in his dealings is sure to be spoken of contemptuously as a fool or madman.” _The Life and Adventures of Arminius Vambery, written by Himself_, p. 284 (London, 1914).

How the Persians have degenerated since the days of Cyrus and Darius! Then, according to Herodotus, their sons were carefully instructed from their fifth to their twentieth year in three things alone--to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth--“παιδεύονσι δε τους πᾶιδας, απ πενταετέος αρξάμενοι μέχρι εικοσαέτεος, τρία μουνα, ἱππεύειν καὶ τοξεύειν καὶ άληθίξεσθαι.” I, 136.

[143] It is interesting to note here that in the Treaty of Amity and Commerce which was concluded in 1535 between France and the Sublime Porte one of the articles reads: “It is forbidden to molest the French in matters of their religion which they have full liberty to practice.” This guarantee of religious freedom included the Christians of all other nations--a guarantee with which the Ottoman government has always faithfully complied. _Cf._ _Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman_, Tom. I, p. 171, 173 (by the Vicomte de la Jonquière, Paris, 1914).

[144] Quoted from _Turkey and the Ottomans_, p. 142, _et. seq._ (by Lucy M. Garnett, New York, 1911).

[145] _Cf._ _Turkish Memories_, p. 128, _et passim_ (by Sidney Whitman). See _Through Armenia on Horseback_, Chap. VIII (by G. H. Hepworth, New York, 1918), and _In the Palaces of the Sultan_, pp. 426, 427 (by Anna Bowman Dodd).

[146] _Op. cit._, p. 108.

[147] Ibid., p. 116.

[148] _Op. cit._, p. 231.

[149] November 29, 1912.

[150] _Le Chemin de Fer de Bagdad_, p. 226 (Paris, 1915).

[151] _Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition carried on by Order of the British Government during the years 1835, 1836 and 1837_, p. 360 (London, 1868).

[152] Ibid., p. viii.

[153] Lord Palmerston, it is interesting to observe in this connection, did not hesitate to declare in Parliament that the construction of the Suez Canal, as planned by De Lesseps, was physically impracticable and that the project was but a trap set for gullible capitalists.

[154] “Ismaili to Koweit Ry.,” _National Review_, p. 464, May, 1902.

[155] _Nineteenth Century_, p. 1084, June, 1909.

[156] Ibid., p. 1085.

[157] _Nineteenth Century_, p. 966 _et seq._, May, 1914.

[158] June, 1901, p. 629.

[159] June, 1901, p. 629.

[160] _Nineteenth Century_, p. 961, May, 1914.

[161] Chéradame, _op. cit._, p. V.

[162] “Le tres distingué M. Eugène Gallos de la Société de Géographie de Paris qui, avec M. Le Général Dolot, ont parconru en 1914 la Syrie et la Mesopotamie peuvent affirmer qu il y avait la-has une seconde France, aimant inlassablement celle qui est en train d’ écrire sa plus belle page dans l’histoire des nations.” _Bagdad, Son Chemin de Fer, Son Importance, Son Avenir_, p. 25 (by Émile Aublé, Paris, 1917).

[163] _The Geographical Journal_, p. 33 _et seq._, July, 1917.

[164] _The Fortnightly Review_, p. 777, May, 1911.

[165] Speaking in the British Parliament April 8, 1903, Lord E. Fitzmaurice went still further when he declared: “Bound up with the future of this (Bagdad) Railway there is probably the future political control of large regions in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf.”

[166] _The Fortnightly Review_, p. 216, February, 1914.

[167] “Les Gouvernment français et anglais refuserent formellment leur approbation et leur appui et conseillerent a leur nationaux de s’en abstenir.” E. Aublé, _op. cit._, p. 15.

[168] _The Nineteenth Century_, p. 1090 _et seq._, June, 1909.

It is gratifying to know that this anti-German feeling was not shared by Sir Clinton and his associates and by clear-visioned men like Sir Edwin Pears who did not hesitate to declare: “The Germans, in inviting British coöperation from the first, have acted fairly and loyally.” _The Contemporary Review_, p. 589, November, 1908.

[169] M. Aublé, _op. cit._, p. 16, referring to this matter, writes: “Si en elle--même l’enterprise du Chemin de Fer de Bagdad est resté telle qu’elle s’est presentée au début, une œuvre allemande, c’est parce qu’on n’a pas voulu profiter des offres allemandes pour lui donner un caractère international.”

[170] _The Nineteenth Century_, p. 1312, June, 1914.

[171] Ibid., p. 1313. After all negotiations looking towards internationalization of the Bagdad Railway had failed, M. Geraud, who is evidently a monarchist, wrote: “We cannot help regretting that the two powers who held the protectorate of the Orient--France her old religious protectorate, and England the protectorate of Anatolia sanctioned by the Cyprus Convention--should, in the space of one generation, have laid down such beneficent weapons.... In order that so much destruction could be consummated, all that was responsible in England and France was the rule of democracy.”

[172] _Cf._ his interesting brochure, _Les Chemins de Fer in Turquie d’Asie_ (Zurich, 1902).

[173] _Revue de Géographie_, p. 398, May, 1902.

[174] According to Herodotus it was a three months’ journey from Ephesus to Susa--a somewhat greater distance than from Constantinople to Bagdad.

[175] _Süddeutsche Monatshefte_, September, 1915. _Cf._ _The Quarterly Review_, p. 149, January, 1917.

[176] _Der Kampf um die Dardanellen_ (Stuttgart, 1916).

[177] _The Quarterly Review_, p. 528, October, 1917.

[178] For an interesting article on this subject, see “Plato in the Folk-lore of the Konia Plain,” by F. W. Hasluck, in the _Annual of the British School of Athens_, No. XVIII.

[179] Called Rum--Rome--because it was, before its conquest by the Seljuks, a portion of the Roman-Byzantine Empire.

[180] See _Turkey in Europe_, p. 185 (by C. Eliot, London, 1908).

[181] In the Koran, Sura V., it is written, “O believers! surely wine and games of chance and statues, and divining arrows are an abomination of Satan’s work! Avoid them that ye may prosper.”

[182] _Cf._ _Mishcat-Ul-Masabih, or a Collection of the Most Authentic Traditions Regarding the Actions and Sayings of Mohammed_, Vol. II, pp. 368–370 (trans. from the Original Arabic by Capt. A. N. Mathews, Calcutta, 1809). “The Angel Gabriel did not visit Mohammed as he promised to do one night because of the presence of a puppy, saying to Mohammed ‘we angels do not go into a house in which are pictures or dogs.’” Vol. II, p. 368.

[183] Sismondi, writing of the Eastern story-tellers, among whom are women as well as men, informs us they sometimes “excite terror or pity, but they more frequently picture to their audience those brilliant and fantastic visions which are the patrimony of the eastern imagination.... The physicians frequently recommend them to their patients in order to soothe pain, to calm agitation or to produce sleep after long watchfulness; and these story-tellers, accustomed to sickness, modulate their voices, soften their tones and gently suspend them as sleep steals over the sufferers.” _Historical View of the Literature of Southern Europe_, Vol. I, p. 62 (Bohn Edition).

[184] The Sheik-ul-Islam issued a vigorous fetwa against it in which he declared that its use “was contrary to the Koran” and that “smoking was a hideous and abominable practice of the Giaours, which no true Believer should adopt.”

[185] “The Eastern nations are generally so addicted to both that they say ‘a dish of coffee and a pipe of tobacco are a complete entertainment’; and the Persians have a proverb that coffee without tobacco is meat without salt.” Sale, _The Koran_, p. 88, “Preliminary Discourse.”

[186] “Most people who have travelled in the Levant are enthusiastic in their praises of the Turkish coffee which they drank out there. There is no reason why coffee prepared in the Turkish style should not become popular here. There is no difficulty about making it. That the coffee may have the delicious flavor it has in the Levant, the beans must be freshly roasted and ground very fine. The water must be boiled in a tin or copper coffee-pot. To supply, say four or five persons with coffee in tiny cups, two or three teaspoonfuls of the powder should be put into the pot while the water is actually boiling therein. Some people do not like sugar in their coffee, but if sugar is required, it should be put into the boiling water and allowed to melt before the coffee is added. Great sweetness is not appreciated by connoisseurs in coffee drinking. When the ground coffee is added to the boiling water, the pot should be taken off the fire and the coffee stirred up in the water with a teaspoon. Then it should be put on the fire again until the froth rises up. It is then poured into the cups. It is better to pour out the coffee slowly, placing the pot on the fire at short intervals, and thus getting more froth for pouring out into the cups, as the taste of the coffee is supposed to be better with the yellowish froth on the surface. It is on account of this idea that greedy people in Turkey choose those cups that have the most froth when coffee is handed round on a tray, leaving those with less to the others who are waiting their turn to be served.” Halil Halid’s _Diary of a Turk_, p. 244 (London, 1903).

[187] In marked contrast to this wildly lyrical praise of the fragrant and delicious beverage made from the Arabian berry, is the denunciation which was hurled against it by the orthodox followers of Islam who declared it to be a menace to public morals and one of the four ministers of the Devil--the other three being wine, opium, and tobacco. “During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries coffee-drinkers were persecuted more rigorously in Constantinople than wine-bibbers have ever been in England or America. Their most unrelenting enemy was the bloody Murad IV--himself a drunkard--who forbade the use of coffee under pain of death. He and his nephew, Mehmed IV, after him used to patrol the city in disguise, à la Harun-al-Rashid, in order to detect and punish for themselves any violation of the law.... A personage no more straitlaced than Charles II caused a court to hand down the following decision: ‘The Retayling of Coffe may be an innocente Trayde; but as it is used to nourisshe Sedition, spredde Lyes, and scandalyse Greate Mene, it may also be a common Nuissaunce.’” _Constantinople Old and New_, p. 24 (by H. G. Dwight, New York, 1915).

[188] _The Beauties of the Bosphorus_, p. 127 (London, 1839).

[189] _Cf._ his _Origin of Cultivated Plants_, p. 439 _et seq._ (New York; _Géographie Botanique Raisonnée_ (Paris, 1885).

[190] _Historical Sketches_, Vol. I, p. 116, 117 (by Cardinal Newman, London, 1901).

[191] _Cf._ _Discovery in Greek Lands_, p. 57 _et seq._ (by F. H. Marshall, Cambridge, 1920). See also _A Century of Archæological Discoveries_, p. 166 ff. (by A. Michaelis, New York, 1908).

Nothing impressed us more during our journey through Anatolia than the utter destruction of those superb cities of which a Roman author once wrote,

_Magnificas Asiæ perreximus urbes._

Of many of these even the sites were unknown until they were recently discovered by the archæologists of Europe. The site of the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus was not identified until 1869, although this celebrated structure was once classed as one of the seven wonders of the world. Nowhere in Asia Minor does one find anything to compare with the stately temples of Pæstum, Girgenti, and Segesta which, with the exception of the wonderful monuments in Athens, are the most remarkable and best preserved groups of ancient Greek architecture in existence.

[192] The region through which they marched was described in the graphic language of an old chronicler as _Terram horroris et salsuginis, terram siccam, sterilem, inamœnam_.

[193] _The History of the Crusades_, Vol. 1. p. 126 (New York, n. d.).

[194] Ibid., p. 257.

[195] Ibid., p. 258.

[196] Called by Cicero _Tauri-Pylæ_.

[197] As legend has it, Charlemagne sleeps in Odenberg, in Hesse, where crowned and armed and girt with his trusty sword, _La Joyeuse_, he awaits the advent of Anti-Christ when he will awake and deliver Christendom.

Bonaparte, it is supposed in certain parts of France, will again return to restore the country to its pristine glory. When Louis Napoleon submitted the plebiscite to the countrymen, many gave their vote under the impression that it was in support of his famous uncle.

[198] _Lares et Penates_ or _Cilicia and Its Governors_, p. 79 (by W. B. Barker, London, 1853).

[199] Barker, _op. cit._, p. 82.

[200] The legend about people sleeping preternatural lengths of time has an honored place in the folklore of many nations in both the East and the West. We have already noted the traditions concerning the long sleeps of Barbarossa, Charlemagne, Napoleon, and other distinguished characters. But many other instances might be enumerated showing the prevalence of similar tales in many lands from the sleepers of Sardis, mentioned by Aristotle, to Rip Van Winkle, immortalized by Washington Irving.

[201] _Cf._ Strabo, XIV, 5; and Arrian’s _Anabasis of Alexander_, II, 5. For an account of Asurbanipal, in the light of recent Assyrian discoveries, see _Graven in the Rock_, Chap. XIV (by S. Kinns, London, 1891).

[202]

_Talk of our souls and realms beyond the grave,_ _The very boys will laugh and say you rave._

[203] _History of Greece_, Vol. X, p. 311 (by W. Mitford, London, 1810).

[204] The Greek word for pinion is _tarsos_.

[205] _Cf._ Josephus, _Antiquities of the Jews_, I. 6; VIII. 7. 2. The Jewish historian was probably misled by the similarity of sounds of the two words and ventured to solve what has always been a riddle to historians and Scripture commentators.

[206] “Oppidum autem Britanni vocant,” says Cæsar, referring to the capital of Cassivellaunus, now London, “cum sylvas impeditas vallo atque fossa munierunt, quo incursiones hostium vitandæ causa convenire consuerunt.” _De Bello Gallico_, Lib. V, Cap. 21.

[207] Strabo, _Geography_, XIV, 51.

[208] J. B. Lightfoot in _Philippians_, Appendix on St. Paul and Seneca, p. 271.

[209] _The Cities of St. Paul, Their Influence on His Life and Thought_, pp. 88, 89 (London, 1907).

[210] _The Heathen World and St. Paul_, p. 20 (by E. H. Plumptre, London, n.d.).

[211] _Acts of the Apostles_, xvii; 6.

[212] In one of his beautiful homilies on the _Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans_, St. John Chrysostom, the greatest of pulpit orators, declares: “I honor Rome for this reason; for, though I could celebrate her praises on many other accounts;--for her greatness, for her beauty, for her power, for her wealth, for her warlike exploits, yet, passing over all these things, I glorify her for this reason, that St. Paul in his lifetime wrote to the Romans, and loved them, and was present among them and conversed with them, and ended his life among them. Wherefore the city is on this account renowned more than all others; on this account I admire her, not on account of her gold, her columns or her other splendid decorations.” _Oeuvres Complètes de Saint Jean Chrysostome_, Tom XVI, p. 308 (Paris, 1871).

[213] _Across Asia Minor on Foot_, pp. 35, 351 (by W. J. Childs, New York, 1917).

[214] The massacre in Constantinople which so horrified the civilized world was, like that in Adana, provoked by the revolutionary activities of the Armenians. After having boldly announced their intention of applying the torch to the city and “reducing it,” as their posted placards phrased it, “to a desert of ashes,” a party of audacious young conspirators proceeded to blow up the Ottoman Imperial Bank, while others of their associates made the Psammatia quarter flow in the blood of helpless inhabitants. During eighteen hours of terror the carnage which the Armenians caused by their use of dynamite and by throwing bombs from the windows upon the Turkish soldiers, who were detailed to suppress the outbreak, rivaled anything recorded in the worst days of the Paris Commune of 1871. _Cf._ _Turquie Agonisante_, p. 174 (by Pierre Loti).

Without pretending to absolve the exasperated Turks for their part in this appalling massacre, I may ask “what would the people of New York do if a foreign mob from the East Side with the red flag at their head were to attempt to blow up the Subtreasury Building and to make the same use of high explosives in their wanton destruction of life and property as did the Armenians in their ghastly work in Constantinople?” The answer will be sufficient attenuation for the conduct of the infuriated Turks on this frightful occasion. And yet, according to the reports flashed through the world at the time, this massacre, like that at Adana and at numberless other places, was laid to the charge of the “unspeakable Turk.” It was the old, old story; the Turk is always guilty, the Armenian never.

[215] _A Wandering Scholar in the Levant_, pp. 147–150 (London, 1896).

[216] Pierre Loti tells of a French consul in Asia Minor who barely escaped assassination at the hands of an Armenian agitator who, when questioned regarding his attempt on the life of the functionary, coolly replied: “I did this in order that the Turks might be accused of it and in the hope that the French would rise up against them after the murder of their consul.” _Les Massacres d’Arménie_, p. 50 (Paris, 1918).

[217] _The Diary of a Turk_, p. 130.

[218] D. G. Hogarth, _op. cit._, p. 77.

[219] Ibid., 65.

[220] Halil Halid’s _Diary of a Turk_, p. 129 (London, 1903). “Alors,” declares Pierre Loti, “comme des lions exaspérés ils se dechaînent contre ceux que, depuis des siècles, on leur a denoncés comme les plus dangereux responsables de tous les malheurs de la patrie.... Hélas! oui, les Turcs ont massacré! Je pretends toutefois que le recit de leur tueries a toujours été follement exagéré et les details enlaidis à plaisir; je pretends aussi--et personne là-bas n’osera me contredire--que la beaucoup plus lourde part des crimes commis revient aux Kurdes dont je n’ai jamais pris la defense.” _Op. cit._, p. 22–24.

[221] Commenting on this subject Professor, now Sir William Ramsay, writes, “Lord Salisbury protests in the strongest terms that Britain has never entertained any schemes of acquisition in Asia Minor. There is, however, probably no Russian or German or Frenchman who believes him.... The protestations that Britain entertains no designs in Asia Minor merely make people abroad all the more sure that a British statesman’s word can never be trusted.” And, referring to her creation of a new consular department to aid her in compassing her designs, he observes “as a piece of statesmanship, crafty and unscrupulous, but able, it was a master-stroke; though I think no one among us will ever look back to it without blushing for the jockeying by which it was effected.” _Impressions of Turkey During Twelve Years Wanderings_, pp. 142–144 (London, 1897).

In the light of recent events how significant--almost prophetic--are these words of Sir William on British policy and diplomacy regarding Turkey!

[222]

_Where men once dwelt, a dreary lake is seen,_ _And coots and bitterns haunt the waters green._ _Metamorphoses_, VIII, 24, 25.

[223] Count Marcellinus, one of the first ministers of Justinian, vividly describes, in a single sentence, the frightful depredations of Attila when this dreadful “Scourge of God” _Pene totam Europam, invasis excisique civitatibus atque castellis, conrasit_. This sentence perfectly describes the depredations of Timur and Jenghiz Khan during their terror-inspiring careers in Western Asia. Of Jenghiz Khan the Arabian traveler, Ibn Batuta, writes that he “came into the countries of Islamism and destroyed them.” The same authority says that after destroying such great cities as Bokhara and Samarcand “he killed the inhabitants, taking prisoners the youth only and leaving the country quite desolate. He then passed over the Gihon and took possession of all Khorasan and Irak, destroying the cities and slaughtering the inhabitants.” His son, Hulaku, laid Bagdad in ruins, whence he proceeded with his followers to Syria, continuing his depredations “until divine Providence put an end to his career.” _The Travels of Ibn Batuta_, pp. 87, 88, 89 (trans. by S. Lee, London, 1829).

The English historian, Marshman, writing of the elder Mongol conqueror, declares: “From the Caspian to the Indus, more than one thousand miles in extent, the whole country was laid waste with fire and sword by the ruthless barbarians who followed Jenghiz Khan. It was the greatest calamity which had befallen the human race since the Deluge and five centuries have been barely sufficient to repair that desolation.” _History of India from Remote Antiquity to the Accession of the Mogul Dynasty_, Vol. I, p. 49 (London, 1842).

“Well might the Mussulman and Christian world shrink down upon its knees in the presence of such a terrible visitation. ‘We pray God,’ writes Ibin al Athir, ‘that He will send to Islam and to the Mussulmans someone who can protect them, for they are the victims of the most terrible calamity, the men killed, their goods pillaged, their children carried off, their wives reduced to slavery or put to death, the country in fact, laid waste.’ Juveni says that in the country traversed by the Mongols, only a thousandth part of the population remained and where there were previously one hundred thousand inhabitants there remained but a hundred. ‘If nothing interferes with the growth of the population in Khorasan and Irak Ajem from now to the day of resurrection,’ he adds, ‘it will not be the tenths of what it was before the conquest.’” _History of the Mongols_, Part III, p. i (by H. Howorth, London, 1888).

Jenghiz Khan and “his followers tramped over the fairest portions of the earth with the faggot and the sword in their hands, forestalling the day of doom and crumbling into ruin many old civilizations. His creed was to sweep away all cities as the haunts of slaves and of luxury, that his herds might freely feed upon grass whose green was free from dusty feet. It does make one hide one’s face in terror to read that from 1211 to 1223 eighteen million four hundred and seventy thousand human beings perished in China and Tangut alone at the hands of Jenghiz and his followers; a fearful hecatomb which haunts the memory until one forgets the other features of the story.” Howorth, _op. cit._, Part I, p. 113.

[224] Pliny in his _Historia Naturalis_, II, 86, writes: _Maximus terræ memoria mortalium extitit motus, Tiberii Cæsaria principatu_; XII _urbibus Asiæ una nocte prostatis_.

[225] _History of Greece From Its Conquests by the Romans to the Present Time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864_, Vol. I, p. 224 (by George Finlay, Oxford, 1877).

[226] I do not ignore the atrocities which the Turks, especially during the last few decades, are alleged to have committed in Armenia and elsewhere. But until reliable testimony as to the Ottoman side of the question is forthcoming it is only fair to the accused for one to suspend judgment.

[227] _Mahomet et le Coran_, p. vii (Paris, 1865).

[228] “Neque in hoc me falli opinor cum hodieque non paucos ex nostris, alioquin non indoctos, Mahumeticarum rerum tam rudes videam, ut Mahumetanos Idolatras, Lunæque ac Mahumeti adoratores existiment, aliasque de Agarenica secta ejusque Auctore neptias effutiant.” _Alcorani Textus Universus_, Tom. I, p. 6 (Patavii, 1698).

Padre Lodovico Marracci, who was a religious of the order of the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God, was the confessor of Pope Innocent XII. It was in obedience to the command of this Pontiff that he published his great work on the Koran on which he spent forty of the best years in his life. It embraces three folio volumes with the text of the Koran in Arabic, accompanied by a Latin translation and copious notes, and is notable as being the most successful of the earlier attempts to make the Koran and Mohammedanism known to the Christian world.

[229] _Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammed_, Vol. II, p. 181 (Berlin, 1862).

[230]

_A mil Franceis fait bien oerchier la vile,_ _Les sinagoges et les mahumeries:_ _A mailz de fer, à ouignèes qu ’il tindrent,_ _Fruissent Mahum e trestutes les ydles._ Lai CCXCVI.

[231]

_A. I. josdi s’ala d’ un fort vin enivrer;_ _De la taverne issi; quant il s’en volt aler,_ _En une place vit. I. fumier reverser;_ _Mahomes si colcha, ne s’en volt trestorner:_ _Là l’estranglèrent porc, si com j’oï conter;_ _Por ce ne volt juis de char de porc goster._ Vv. 5547 _et seq._ (Paris, 1860).

[232] Porcorum verum esum, justa prorsus ratione, contemnunt qui morsibus eorum dominum consumserunt. _Recueil des Historiens des Croisades_, Tom. IV, p. 130 (Paris, 1879).

[233] “As a sample of the controversial works of the theologians of the Reformed Church on this subject,” Mr. R. B. Smith in his interesting work on _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, p. 79 (London, 1876), calls attention to “the following modest title-page of a ponderous work written in 1666: Anti-Christus Mahometes: ubi non solum per Sanctam Scripturam, ac Reformatorum testimonia, verum etiam per omnes alios probandi modos et genera, plene, fuse, imvicte solideque demonstratur Mahometem esse unum illum verum, magnum de quo in Sacris fit mentio, Antichristum.”

[234] _Mohammedanism_, p. 12 (New York, 1916).

[235] _Historia Orientalis_, _Dedicatio_, p. 5 (by J. H. Hottinger, Zurich, 1660).

[236] “Quod vero dissimulandum non est, licet quidam docte, satis solideque scripserint, nonnulli ex rerum Sarracenicarum ignorantia, vera plerumque omittentes, ficta ac fabulosa in medium protulerunt, quæ Mahumetanis risus excitarent eosque in errore suo obstinatiores efficerent.” _Alcorani Textus Universus_, Tom. I, p. 1 (Patavii, 1698).

[237] Referring to the widespread errors concerning Mohammed and his teachings the eminent Orientalist, Adrian Reland, wrote more than two centuries ago: “Quotidie magis magisque experior mundum decipi velle et præconceptis opinionibus regi”--I daily become more and more convinced that the world wishes to be deceived and is governed by preconceived opinions. _De Religione Mohammedica_, p. xxii (Utrecht, 1705). Is there not still room for improvement in this respect?

[238] “Mohammed litt an einer Krankheit, welche in jener ausgepragten Form, wie bei ihm, in unseren Gegenden bisweilen bei Frauen, aber selten bei Mannern vorkommt, Mann hat ihr verschiedene Namen gegeben; Schönlein heisst sie _hysteria muscularis_.” _Op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 207.

[239] “Nulla porro falsa doctrina eat quæ non aliqua vera intermisceat.” _Quæst_, Evang. II. 40.

[240] _Handbuch der allgemeinen Kirchengeschicte_, Vol. I, p. 748 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1884).

“It can be readily understood how the sight of the Muslim trader at prayer, his frequent prostrations, his absorbed and silent worship of the Unseen, would impress the heathen African, endowed with that strong sense of the mysterious such as generally accompanies a low stage of civilization. Curiosity would naturally prompt inquiry and the knowledge of Islam thus imparted might sometimes win over a convert who might have turned aside had it been offered unsought, as a free gift.” _The Preaching of Islam_, p. 418 (by T. W. Arnold, London, 1913).

This view was emphasized by good old Father Marracci more than two centuries ago when he wrote: “Si ethnicus humani intellectus captum excedentia, vel naturali conditioni et imbecilitati dificillima, si non impossibilia, ... cum Alcoranica doctrina comparaverit, statim ab his refugiet et ad illa obviis ulnis accurret.” _Op. cit._, Tom. II, p. 9.

[241] _Cf._ J. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, _op. cit._, p. x.

[242] _De Heresibus Liber, Patrologia Græca_, Vol. XVIV, Col. 763 _et seq._ (Migne Edition).

[243] “Summa vero hujus hæresis intentio est ut Christus Dominus ut neque Deus neque Dei Filius esse credatur; sed licet magnus Deoque dilectus homo tamen purus et vir quidem sapiens et propheta maximus. Quæ quidem olim diaboli machinatione concepta primo per Arium seminata deinde per istum Satanam, scilicet Machumet, provecta, per Antichristum vero ex toto secundum diabolicam intentionem complebitur.” _Petri Venerabilis Opera Omnia_, col. 655, _Patrologia Latina_, Vol. Tom. CLXXXIX (Migne Edition).

[244] “Seminator di scandalo e di scisma.” Inferno, XXVIII, 35.

[245] C. Snouck Hurgronje, _Mohammedanism_, p. 129, _et seq._ (New York, 1916).

[246] The duty of the imam “is to stand in front of the congregation, facing the Kibleh or Mecca-pointing niche, at the appointed hours of devotion, that is ordinarily, as every one knows, five times a day, when he recites aloud the public prayers, marks time for the various devotional postures, and, in a word, acts as fugleman to the worshipers ranged behind him, from whom, however, he is distinguished by no special dress, caste or character! _Primus inter pares_; but nothing more. The Khatib, or preacher, usually reads out of an old, well-thumbed manuscript sermon book, or, though much more rarely, delivers _extempore_ the Friday discourse, a short performance, seldom exceeding ten minutes in duration.... Once outside the mosque, the imam, the khatib, or whoever else may have officiated during the prayers, is a house-mason, a green-grocer, or pipe-maker, or anything else, as before.” _Essays on Eastern Questions_, p. 91, _et seq._ (by W. G. Palgrave, London, 1872).

[247] _Op. cit._, p. 82.

[248] The word “mosque” is derived from the Arabic _masjid_ which signifies a place of worship.

[249] For a full description of Beith Allah--house of God--and the holy Kaaba, “Navel of the World,” as the Arabian geographer, Ibn Haukal, calls it, see Sir Richard Burton’s _A Pilgrimage to El Medina and Mecca_, Chaps. XXIV, XXV.

[250] _Cf._ _Aspects of Islam_, p. 199 _et seq._ (by D. B. MacDonald, New York, 1911).

[251] _Bibliothèque Orientale_, Tom. II, p. 81 (by Barthèlemy d’Herbelot, The Hague, 1777).

[252] D’Herbelot, _op. cit._, Tom. II, p. 106.

[253] D’Herbelot, _op. cit._, Tom. II, p. 351.

[254] _Op. cit._, p. 122, _et seq._

[255] _Mohammed and Islam_, p. 45 (by Ignaz Goldziher, trans, by K. C. Seelye, New Haven, 1917).

[256] _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, p. 334. _et seq._ (by R. B. Smith. London, 1876).

[257] _Studies in a Mosque_, p. 169 (London, 1893).

[258] “The spiritual energy of Islam is not, as has been so often maintained, commensurate with its political power. On the contrary, the loss of political power and worldly prosperity has served to bring to the front the finer spiritual qualities which are the truest incentives to missionary work. Islam has learned the uses of adversity and so far from a decline in worldly prosperity being a presage of the decay of this faith, it is significant that those very Muslim countries that have been longest under Christian rule show themselves most active in the work of proselyting. The Indian and Malay Mohammedans display a zeal and enthusiasm for the spread of the faith, which one looks for in vain in Turkey and Morocco.” T. W. Arnold, _op. cit._, p. 426, 427.

[259] According to Dr. Hubert Jansen’s painstaking _Verbreitung des Islams_, the number of Mohammedans in the world in 1897 was 259,680,672.

[260] “Si les Mussulmans et les Chrétiens me prâtaient l’oreille, je ferais cesser leur divergence, et ils diviendraient frères à l’extérieur et à l’intérieur.” _Rappel à l’Intelligent, Avis à Indifferent_, p. 105 (Paris, 1858).

[261] An American writer, referring to the Italian campaign in Tripoli, asks: “Is there rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash away the stain on Italy’s fair name made deep and black by ruthless massacre?” G. F. Herrick in _Christian and Mohammedan_, p. 236 (New York, 1912).

And an English author writing of the British war on the Gold Coast declares: “Our ‘prestige’ serves as an excuse for committing what we should condemn as crimes in any other nation. It is an entity that has juggled us into the belief that to destroy what we cannot retain is the prerogative not of barbarism, but of civilization and Christianity.... Truly this war will be a _damnosa hereditas_ to posterity, alike whether we accept or disclaim the fearful responsibilities in which it has involved us.” R. B. Smith, _op. cit._, p. 258.

[262] “Aggredior vos non, ut nostri sæpe faciunt, armis sed verbis; non vi, sed ratione; non odio, sed amore.” Peter the Venerable, _op. cit._, col. 673. “I attack you, not as our people often do with arms, but with words; not by force but by reason; not in hate but in love.” These are the words with which Peter the Venerable opens his first book against Mussulmans and shows what should be the attitude of the missionary that would have a hearing with a people who are as proud and sensitive as are the followers of Mohammed.

[263] For a helpful map, indicating the course of the Royal Road, the reader is referred to the third volume of Rawlinson’s _Five Great Monarchies_ (New York, 1881). Much light is also thrown on this interesting subject by Rennell’s valuable work, _The Geographical System of Herodotus_, Vol. I, Sec. 13 (London, 1830).

It is well, in reference to this subject, to recollect that the ordinary policy of the Asiatic monarchies was not that of holding immense continuous areas of territory, but the comparatively simpler one of safeguarding the great highways of communication. “It is important to remember this in connection with rapid conquest like that of Alexander. To conquer the Achæmenian empire did not mean the effective occupation of all the area within its extreme frontiers--that would have been a task exceeding one man’s lifetime--but the conquest of its cultivated districts and the holding of the roads which connected them.” _Cf._ _The House of Seleucus_, Vol. I, p. 22 (by E. R. Bevan, London, 1902).

[264] _Mishkab_ V, 6. Hughes’ _Dictionary of Islam_, p. 635 (London, 1885).

[265] _Mohammedanism_, p. 85 (New York, 1916).

[266] _Missionary Review_, 1889, p. 302.

[267] _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah_, p. 299 (by Richard F. Burton, Boston, 1858).

[268] “But for the earthquakes which have here and there rent the walls and caused the roofs to fall in nothing would be missing except the woodwork carried off by the builders of more recent cities. The removal of the basalts and other hard materials drawn from the quarries of the district would have been too troublesome and expensive.” _The Earth and Its Inhabitants_, Vol. IV, p. 285 (New York, 1885).

[269] “Nel far le mercanzie, non si contano, ma si pesano casse intere di denari; e non si fa mai compra o vendita dove non corran quaranta, cinquanta, ottanta o centomila que piu a minuto non si parla e sarebbe vergogna.” _Viaggi di Pietro della Valle_, Vol. I, p. 331 (Brighton, 1843).

When one remembers the purchasing power of money in the time of the illustrious patrician compared with what it is now, the sums mentioned were indeed considerable.

[270] _Op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 353.

[271] _The Voyage of John Huyghen Van Linschoten to the East Indies_, Vol. I, p. 48 (pub. by the Hakluyt Society, London, 1885). “Merchants come thither”--Ormuz--“from India with ships loaded with spicery and precious stones, pearls, cloths of silk and gold, elephants’ teeth and many other wares, which they sell to the merchants of Hormos”--Ormuz--“and which these in turn carry all over the world to dispose of again. In fact ’tis a city of immense trade.” _The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East_, Vol. I, p. 107 (trans. by H. Yule, London, 1903).

[272] _Hakluyt’s Voyages_, Vol. V, p. 446 (Glasgow, 1904).

[273] “Mettendo attorno al campo della carovana ... molte sentinelle che tutta la notte scorrevano intorno e gridavano, (secondo la lors usanza) agli amici que stessero all ’erta ed ai nemici che non si accostassero.” _Op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 353.

[274] _See_ Vol. I, p. 7.

[275] “Vivendi licentia, inquies, illos allicit. Ita puto: sed aliquid aliud est quod illos sub boni verique specie decipiat. Habet nimirum hæc superstitio quidquid plausibile ac probabile in Christiana Religione reperitur et quæ naturæ legi ac lumini consèntanea videntur. Mysteria illa fidei nostræ quæ primo aspectu inchedibilia et impossibiblia apparent, et præcipue quæ nimis ardua humanæ naturæ consentur, penitus excludit.” _Op. cit._ Tom. I, p. 4.

[276] _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, s. v. “Mahometanisme.”

[277] _Mankind and the Church_, p. 289 (by G. A. Lefroy, London, 1907).

[278] “A certain solidarity characterizes not only family relations but all Moslem society. There are no paupers; almsgiving is not a mere theoretical obligation but an essential religious duty really discharged. It may be replied that there are many beggars. There are and the spectacle is very unpleasant; but from the beggars’ point of view, could they, given their misfortunes, have a better life? If one has twisted limbs or any incurable malady, including laziness, is it not more healthy, interesting and lucrative to sit begging at street-corners than to be the inmate of a charitable institution? One thing is certain--Moslem beggars never starve.” _Turkey in Europe_, p. 176 (by Sir Charles Eliot, London, 1908).

[279] Lieutenant Wood, the gallant explorer of the Oxus, referring to this subject, writes: “Often ... have I observed that the Mohammedans, both old and young, however worn out by fatigue or suffering from hunger and thirst, have postponed all thought of self-indulgence to their duty to their God.

It is not with them the mere force of habit; it is the strong impression on their minds that the duty of prayer is so important that no circumstance can excuse its omission.” _Journey to the Source of the Oxus_, p. 93 (London, 1872).

[280] These good reports about Mohammedans are not of recent date. Read what Ricoldus de Monte Crucis, a Dominican missionary among them in the thirteenth century, has to say of them: “Quis enim non obstupescat si diligenter consideret quanta ... devotio in oratione, misericordia ad pauperes, reverencia ad nomen Dei et prophetas et loca sancta, gravitas in moribus, affabilitas ad extraneos, concordia et amor ad suos.” _Peregrinatores Medii Ævi Quatuor_, p. 131 (by J. C. M. Laurent, Leipsic, 1864).

[281] Regarding the Armenian’s capacity for business, Mr. Curzon has wittily remarked, that, while “it takes four Turks to cheat one Frank, two Franks to cheat one Greek and two Greeks to cheat one Jew, it takes six Jews to cheat one Armenian.” _Researches in the Highlands of Turkey_, Vol. I, p. 8 (by H. F. Tozer, London, 1869).

According to Dr. Schliemann, however, the palm for business ability must be awarded to the Greeks from the island of Lesbos. “The Lesbian Greeks,” he tells us, “have the reputation of being the shrewdest merchants in the world; as a proof it is alleged that in cities the commerce of which is in the hands of Lesbians not a Jew is to be found.” _Troja_, p. 324.

[282] The learned Benedictine, Father Parisot, has recently collected the vocabulary of this interesting dialect which is threatened with early extinction.

[283] This peculiarity is explained by the fact that when the Jews and Moors were expelled from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century tens of thousands of Jews migrated to Salonica and Constantinople where Spanish is still spoken by large numbers of their descendants.

[284] A like superstition attaches to nearly all similar remains of antiquity not only in Syria but in Egypt as well. Some are reputed to have special virtues for those suffering from tic-douloureux or from rheumatism for which affections they are said by Orientals to possess even greater curative properties than their famous panacea--the bezoar stone.

[285] Ibn Butlan, a noted Arabian physician, and a Christian, of Bagdad, who visited Aleppo in the middle of the eleventh century thus refers to this curious tradition: “In the lower part of the castle is a cave where he”--Abraham--“concealed his flocks. When he milked these, the people used to come for their milk crying ‘_Halaba ya la_’?--Milked yet or not?--asking thus one of the other, and hence the city came to be called Halab--Milked.” _Cf._ G. le Strange’s _Palestine Under the Moslems_, p. 363 (London, 1890).

[286] _The Hittites_, p. 12 (London, 1903).

[287] Genesis xxiii.

[288] Ezekiel xvi: 3.

[289] Kings ii: 12.

[290] St. Jerome in the beginning of his commentary on the gospel of St. Matthew, pertinently observes in this connection: “Notandum est ... nullam sanctarum assumi mulierum sed eas quas Scriptura reprehendit: ut que propter peccatores venerat, de peccatoribus nascens, omnium peccata deleret. Unde et in consequentibus Ruth Moabitis ponitur et Bethsabee uxor Uriæ.”

[291] _Travels in Syria and the Holy Land_, p. 147 (London, 1822).

[292] _Cf._ _The Language of the Hittites_ in _The Times Literary Supplement_, p. 180 (London, April 3, 1919).

[293] When the speech of the Hittites ceased to be a living tongue cannot even be surmised. St. Paul heard it in Lystra of Lycaonia, but how much later it may have continued to be spoken in certain other parts of Asia Minor cannot now be determined. As a people they doubtless long survived and, although they were gradually absorbed by neighboring races, “it is believed that some of them still exist, with their early distinctive characteristics, among the hills of the anti-Taurus range.”

We are likewise in ignorance as to when the languages of Egypt and Babylonia gave place to those of their conquerors. According to Sayce “the Egyptian hieroglyphics were still written and read in the time of Decius, the cuneiform characters of Babylon were employed in the age of Domitian.” _The Ancient Empires of the East_, p. ix (New York, 1886).

[294] According to recent investigations this was probably what is now known as the Wady el ’Arish and not the Nile, as usually supposed.

[295] Genesis xii: 5.

[296] Sayce’s _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, p. 410 (London, 1898). Lucius Ampelius writing in his _Liber Memorialis_, Cap. II, of the origin of the constellations, refers to a more extraordinary legend in connection with the Euphrates. “_Pisces ideo pisces quia bello Gigantum Venus perturbata in piscem se transfiguravit. Nam dicitur et in Euphrate fluvio ovum piscis in ora flumimis columba adsedisse dies plurimos et exclusisse deam benignam et misericordem hominibus ad bonam vitam. Utrique memoriæ causa pisces inter sidera locati._”

[297] For an interesting report on the excavations made at Djerabis on behalf of the British Museum, see the beautifully illustrated monograph _Carchemish_ (by D. G. Hogarth, London, 1915).

[298] It is to this legend that is due the Mussulman name--Nimroud Dagh--the Mountain of Nimrod--of the elevation on which stands the citadel of Urfa.

[299] In the “Testament of St. Ephrem,” as given by Assemani, occurs the words “Benedicta civitas, ... Edessa sapientum mater, quæ ex vivo Filii ore benedictionem per ejus discipulum accepit. Illa igitur benedictio in ea maneat donec Sanctus apparuerit.” _Bibliotheca Orientalis_, Tom. I, p. 141 (Rome, 1719).

[300] _Cf._ _Histoire Politique, Religieuse et Littéraire d’ Edesse jusque à la Première Croisade_, p. 81 (by R. Duval, Paris, 1892).

[301] _Ecclesiastical History_, Bk. I, Chap. XIII.

[302] An ancient manuscript in the British Museum contains a service book of Saxon times, in which the letter of Our Lord to Abgar follows the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed. At the end of the letter, which is in the Latin version of Rufinus, occurs the words: “Sive in domu tua, sive in civitate tua, sive in omni loco nemo inimicorum tuorum dominabit. Et insidias diaboli ne timeas et carmina inimicorum tuorum destruuntur (sic), et omnes inimici tui expellentur a te: sive a grandine, sive a tonitrua (sic) non noceberis, et ab omni periculo liberaberis: sive in mare, sive in terra, sive in die, sive in nocte, sive in locis obscuris. Si quis hanc epistolam secum habuerit, securus ambulet in pace.” _Cf._ _Ancient Syriac Documents Relative to the Earliest Establishment of Christianity in Edessa and the Neighboring Countries, from the Year after Our Lord’s Ascension to the Beginning of the Fourth Century, Discovered, Edited, Translated and Annotated by the late W. Cureton_, p. 154 (London, 1864). See also _The Book of Cerne_, p. 205, _et seq._ (by the erudite Benedictine, Dom. A. B. Kuypers, Cambridge, England, 1902).

[303] For a critical discussion of the “Legend of Abgar” see _Les Origines de l’Eglise d’Edesse et La Légende d’ Abgar_ (by the learned Sulpician, L. J. Tixeront, Paris, 1888).

“The practice of keeping this letter as a philactery prevailed in England till the last century.... ‘The common people’ there have had it in their houses in many places in a frame with a picture before it and they generally with much honesty and devotion regard it as the word of God and the genuine epistle of Christ.’... I have a recollection of having seen the same thing in cottages in Shropshire.” Cureton, _op. cit._, p. 155.

[304] In the province of Osrhoene, about a day’s journey from Edessa, was a celebrated mart called Batne, where the Indians and the Seres came to trade with the Edessenes and rich merchants from other cities at an annual fair which was held in this place in the month of September. Here, Ammianus Marcellinus informs us “magna promiscuæ fortunæ convenit multitudo ad commercanda quæ Indi et Seres aliaque plurima vehi terra marique consueta.” _Rerum Gestarum_, Lib. XIV, Cap. III, 3.

For an illuminating map showing the importance of Edessa as a trade center during Roman times, see V. Chapot’s _La Frontière de L’Euphrate de Pompée à la Conquête Arabe_, facing p. 402 (Paris, 1907).

[305] L. J. Tixeront, _op. cit._, p. 7, _et seq._

[306] _Cf._ _The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Record and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia_, p. 200 (by T. G. Pinches, London, 1908).

[307] Genesis xi: 31.

[308] Ibid., 17.

[309] Purgatorio, XXVII, 94–108. Dante but follows the teaching of the Angelic Doctor who, writing on the active and the contemplative life, declares: “Istæ duæ vitæ significantur per duas uxores Jacob: activa quidem per Liam, contemplativa vero per Rachelem; et per duas mulieres quæ Dominum hospitio receperunt: contemplativa quidem per Mariam,

## activa vero per Martham.” _Summ. Theol._ Pars II, 2dæ, Q CLXXIX,

Art. i.

[310] _Cf._ _The Book of the Bee_, p. 95–97, from the Syriac of _Mar Solomon, Bishop of Basra_ (trans. by E. A. W. Budge, Oxford, 1886).

[311] Students of history will remember that the Emperor Carcacalla was assassinated at Haran by one of his soldiers while on a visit to the temple of the Moon. The Roman general Crassus suffered a crushing defeat at the same place and was treacherously slain in the vicinity while in a conference with a Persian satrap.

[312] “Quæ jam a Mithradati regni temporibus, ne Oriens a Persis occuparetur, viribus restitit maximis.” Lib. XXV, Cap. IX.

[313] _Cf._ Assemani, _op. cit._, Tom. III, Part II, p. 927, _et seq._

Nisibis, “la grand metropole nestorienne, vit naïtre dans ses murs la première Université théologique, les premiers cours publics de théologie. Ce phenomene qui excitait l’admiration et étonnement du _quæstor sacri palatii_ de Justinien ne peut que nous donner une idée avantageuse de la culture du clerge nestorien a cette époque de son histoire.” _Le Christianisme dan l’Empire Perse sous la Dynastie Sassanide, (224–632)_, p. 301 (by J. Labourt, Paris, 1904).

[314] Dion Cassius, _History of Rome_, Bk. I, XVIII, 26.

[315] Genesis xxxv: 8.

[316] “In such circumstances,” writes one who knew the desert well, “the mind is influenced through the body. Though your mouth glows and your skin is parched with heat, yet you feel no languor, the effect of humid heat; your lungs are lightened, your sight brightens, your memory recovers its tone and your spirits become exuberant; your fancy and imagination are powerfully aroused and the wildness and sublimity of the scenes around you stir up all the energies of your soul--whether for exertion, danger or strife. Your _morale_ improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded: the hypocritical politeness and the slavery of civilization are left behind you in the city.... All feel their hearts dilate and their pulses beat strong as they look down from their dromedaries upon the glorious desert. Where do we hear of a traveler being disappointed by it? It is another illustration of the ancient truth that Nature returns to man, however unworthily he has treated her. And believe me, when once your tastes have conformed to the tranquillity of such travel, you will suffer real pain in returning to the turmoil of civilization. You will anticipate the bustle and confusion of artificial life, its luxury and its false pleasures with repugnance. Depressed in spirits you will for a time after your return feel incapable of bodily or mental exertion. The air of cities will suffocate you and the care-worn and cadaverous countenances of citizens will haunt you like a vision of judgment.” _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah_, Vol. I, pp. 150, 151 (by Richard F. Burton, London, 1893).

[317] _A celeritate Tigris incipit vocari. Ita appellant Medi sagittam._ Pliny, _Naturalis Historia_, VI, XXVII.

[318] We have seen in a previous chapter how unfounded is this statement.

[319] _The Book of Ser Marco Polo_, Vol. I, p. 60 (trans. by H. Yule, London, 1903).

[320] _Geschichte der Ilchaner_, Vol. I, p. 191 (Darmstadt, 1842).

[321] Acts of the Apostles, ii: 9, 11.

[322] See map III of Heussi and Mulert’s _Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte_ for the extensive territory occupied by the Nestorian Church during its greatest development.

[323] The dwelling of the Patriarch, as described by a noted traveler of the last century, “is solidly built of hewn-stone and stands on the very edge of a precipice overhanging a ravine through which winds a branch of the Zab. A dark vaulted passage led us into a room scarcely better lighted by a small window closed by a greased sheet of coarse paper. The tattered remains of a felt carpet, spread in a corner, was the whole of its furniture. The garments of the Patriarch were hardly less worn and ragged. Even the miserable allowance of 300 piastres, about £2 10s., which the Porte had promised to pay him monthly on his return to the mountains was long in arrears, and he was supported entirely by the contributions of his faithful but poverty-stricken flock. Kochanes was, moreover, still a heap of ruins.” _Discoveries among the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, with Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan and the Desert_, p. 363 (by A. H. Layard, New York, 1856).

[324] “La progression des Chrétians a été la suivante; en 1750, zéro; en 1856, de 30,000 a 40,000; en 1900, 66,000. Tout donne à espérer que le retour définitif des Nestoriens à la foi portera bientot et définitivement ce nombre, si ce n’est deja un fait accomplit, a 140,000.” _Les Missions Catholiques Francaises au XIXe Siècle_, p. 271 (Paris, 1900).

[325] For the dogmatic definitions of the Church at the General Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon against the heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches see Denzinger’s _Enchiridion_, pp. 52, 65.

[326] The word Copt is apparently derived from the middle part of the Greek word _Aigyptos_ which means Egyptian. It is, however, always used to indicate a member of the Egyptian Monophysite Church.

[327] Melchite is a Græco-Syriac word which signifies imperial. It was given at the outbreak of the Monophysite schism to those Christians in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt who accepted the decrees of Chalcedon and remained loyal to the Emperor in Constantinople and to the Catholic Church. The name is now applied to the Uniates of these lands.

[328] _Cf._ _Verfassung und gegenwärtiger Bestand Sämtilicler Kirchen des Orients_, p. 384 (by I. Silbernagl, Regensburg, 1904).

[329] _The Orthodox Eastern Church_, p. 19 (by A. Fortescue, London, 1908).

[330] Fortescue, _op. cit._, p. 15.

[331] Not having a hierarchy, the Protestants in Turkey do not constitute a _Millet_. The Porte has consequently organized them, consisting chiefly of a small number of converted Armenians, and Syrians, into a special group under the Minister of Police.

[332] Among Orientals a common designation of Franks, which, since the time of the Crusades, has been applied to all the inhabitants of Western Europe.

[333] _Paradiso_, VI, I, 2.

[334] Addressing once a company of bishops Constantine declared: “You are bishops whose jurisdiction is within the Church; I also am a bishop ordained by God to overlook whatever is external to the Church.” Eusebius, _The Life of Constantine_, IV, 24.

[335] Fortescue, _op. cit._, p. 28.

[336] _The Churches Separated from Rome_, p. 151 (by L. Duchesne, New York, 1907).

“For three centuries after the foundation of New Rome,” writes Freeman, “Latin remained the tongue of government, law and warfare; and down to the last days of the Empire survivals of its use in that character still lingered on.... But Greek was from the beginning the tongue of literature and religion; and, even under Justinian himself, it began to creep into use as an alternative language of the law of Rome.--Gradually the Greek tongue displaced Latin for all purposes, but not till it had received a large infusion of Latin technical terms.... Save this technical Latin infusion the tongue of Constantinople was thoroughly Greek. The strange spectacle was there to be seen of an Emperor of the Romans, a Patriarch of New Rome, a Roman Senate and People glorying in the Roman name, and deriving their whole political existence from a Roman source, but in whose eyes the speech of Ennius and Tacitus and Claudian was simply the despised idiom of Western heretics and barbarians.” _Historical Essays_, Third Series, pp. 248, 249 (London, 1879).

[337] How great was their exasperation at the Pope’s action is evinced by the language they addressed to Luitprand, Archbishop of Cremona, when, in 968, he went on an embassy to Constantinople. “But,” they indignantly declare, “the mad and silly Pope does not know that St. Constantine transferred the imperial scepter, all the senate and the whole Roman army hither, and that at Rome he left only vile creatures such as fishermen, pastrycooks, bird-catchers, bastards, plebeians and slaves.” _Cf._ Fortescue, _op. cit._, p. 94.

[338] _Cf._ _Le Schisme Oriental du XI Siècle_, p. 275 (by L. Brehier, Paris, 1899).

[339] Now that the crash had come “one asks oneself what else the Legates could have done. They had waited long enough, and, if ever a man clearly showed that he wanted schism, it was Cerularius. He had already excommunicated the Pope by taking his name off the diptychs. We should note that this is the only sentence that the Roman Church pronounced against the Eastern Communion. She has never excommunicated it as such nor the other patriarchs. If they lost her communion it was because they too, following Cerularius’ example, struck the Pope’s name from their diptychs.” Fortescue, _op. cit._, p. 185.

[340] Although Innocent III, preacher of the Crusade, promptly excommunicated the Crusaders for their perfidy and treachery, the Greeks, nevertheless, persisted in declaring that His Holiness was the real cause of their misfortunes.

[341] According to the custom that subsequently prevailed it was the Grand Vizier who, in the Sultan’s name, gave the _berat_ to the newly appointed Patriarch. As to bishops-elect it was obligatory that they should receive their _berat_ from the government before their consecration.

[342] Thus, during the seventy-five years between 1625 and 1700, there were no fewer than 50 patriarchs whose average tenure of office was a year and a half. Compare this with the long reign--seventy-two years--of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, and Leo XIII whose average tenure of office was twenty-four years--just thirty-six times as long as that of the unfortunate Patriarchs in question.

[343] _Hom. II in Ephesios._

[344] “The Holy Father,” as Mgr. Duchesne beautifully declares, “has put all his heart into it; I might almost say, he had put only his heart into it.” _Op. cit._, p. 41.

[345] “Eo vel magis quod non ingenti discrimine seiunguntur: imo, si pauca excipias, sic cetera consentimus, ut in ipsis catholici nominis vindiciis non raro ex doctrina, ex more, ex ritibus, quibus orientales utuntur, testimonia atque argumenta promanus.”

[346] Inferno XXVIII, 35.

[347] _Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church_, pp. 2, 30 (London, 1861).

The testimony of Professor H. Gelzer, likewise a Protestant, is almost the same as that of Dean Stanley. Writing of the monastic establishments of the Orthodox Church he pertinently inquires: “While the Catholic Orders as teaching and nursing bodies have become an important element in the civilization of the nineteenth century, what have Athos, Sinai, Patmos or Megaspilion been doing? The Greeks often bitterly complain of the mighty progress of Catholic propaganda, but they must themselves admit that the best schools and hospitals in Turkey belong to the Catholic Orders.” _Von Heiligen Berge und aus Makendonien_, p. 2 (Leipsig, 1904).

[348] _Das Testament Leos_ XIII, in _Reden und Aufsätze_, Vol. II, p. 279 (Geissen, 1904).

[349] Fortescue, _op. cit._, p. 432, 433.

[350] Psalms, xliv: 10, “Neque aliud fortasse mirabilius est,” declares the Sovereign Pontiff, “ad catholicitatis notam in Ecclesia Dei illustrandam, quam singulare quod ei præbent obsequium dispares cæremoniarum formæ nobilesque vestustatis linguæ, ex ipsa Apostolorum et Patrum consuetudine nobiliares; fere ad imitationem obsequii lectissimi quod Christi divino Ecclesiæ auctori, exhibitum est nascenti, quum Magi ex varii Orientis plagis devecti venerunt ... adorare eum.”

[351] St. Paul to the Ephesians, iv: 13.

[352] St. John’s Gospel, xvii: 20, 21.

[353] Jonah, iv: 11. Those “that knew not how to distinguish between their right hand and their left,” is supposed to refer to young children.

[354] Genesis x: 11.

[355] iii: 19.

[356] ii: 13–15.

[357] _Anabasis_, Bk. III, Chap. 4. _Cf._ also _Travels in the Track of the Ten Thousand_, p. 139 _et seq._ (by W. F. Ainsworth, London, 1844).

[358] _Charon_, 23.

[359] Even Cicero, declares: “Et apud Herodotum, patrem historiæ ... sunt innumerabiles fabulæ.” _De Legisbus_ Lib. I, Cap. I.

[360] Arabian writers, it is true, had agreed “during nine hundred years, in identifying the mounds on the east bank of the Tigris opposite Mosul with the ruins of Nineveh” but their views were so far from meeting with general acceptance that so late as 1843 the great French explorer, Botta, was convinced when he uncovered the wonderful palace of Sargon II, King of Assyria, B. C. 721–705, that the site of Nineveh was occupied by the ruins of Khorsabad. But the noted English investigator, Layard, “contrary to the teachings of Arabian and Syrian historians and local tradition,” was equally positive that “the ruins of Nineveh were buried under the mound of Nimroud,” which is twenty miles to the south of the actual site of the famous Assyrian capital which was so long the rival and eventually the conqueror of Babylon. _Cf._ _By Nile and Tigris_, Vol. II, p. 8 _et seq._, 15, 16 (by E. A. Wallis Budge, London, 1920).

[361] _The Buried City of the East: Nineveh_, Preface (London, 1851).

[362] _Nineveh and Its Palaces. The Discoveries of Botta and Layard Applied to the Elucidation of Holy Writ_, p. 1 _et seq._ (by J. Bonomi, London, 1852).

[363] “At the end of the seventeenth century, B.C., Asurbanipal’s sculptors at Nineveh were representing horses which the frieze of the Parthenon can hardly equal, and lions which no sculptor has ever surpassed in careful observations and truthful delineation.” _The Ancient History of the Near East_, p. 536 (by H. R. Hall, London, 1913).

[364] vi: 1.

[365] See his _Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, pp. 342–345 (London, 1853); _cf._ also _Hormuzd Rassam’s Asshur and the Land of the Nimrod_, p. 31 (New York, 1897), which gives an account of the discovery of more tablets, among which were the famed Deluge tablets.

[366] Relaçam em que se tratam as guerras e grandes victorias que alcançou o grãde rey da Persia Xa Abbas do grão Turco Mahometto and seu Filho Amethe, pello Padre F. Antonio de Gouvea (Lisboa, 1611).

[367] _Purchas His Pilgrimes_, Part II, pp. 1533, 1534 (London, 1625).

[368] As to the signification of the strange, wedge-shaped character described by the noted Italian traveler, Pietro della Valle admits that he knows nothing. In the fifteenth chapter of his _Viaggi_ he frankly declares: “E queste iscritzioni in que lingua e lettera siano non si sa perchè è caratere oggi ignoto.”

[369] _Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia and Afrique_, p. 145 _et seq._ (London, 1638).

[370] Chardin became an English citizen and achieved such fame as a traveler that a tablet was dedicated to his memory in Westminster Abbey bearing the legend “Sir John Chardin--_nomen sibi fecit eundo_.”

[371] _Explorations in Bible Lands during the 19th Century_, pp. 23, 24 (by H. V. Hilprecht, Philadelphia, 1903).

How Grotefend achieved such marvelous success when others, apparently more competent than he, had failed has been explained by the fact that “he early displayed a remarkable aptitude for the solution of riddles: a peculiar talent which he shared in common with Dr. Hincks, who also acquired great distinction as a cuneiform scholar.” _The Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions_, p. 169 (by A. J. Booth, London, 1902).

Dr. R. W. Rogers, in his instructive work, _A History of Babylonia and Assyria_, Vol. I, p. 61 (New York, 1915), referring to the same subjects, writes:

“It were difficult, if not impossible, to define the qualities of mind which must inhere in the decipherer of a forgotten language. He is not necessarily a great scholar, though great scholars have been successful decipherers. He may know but little of the languages that are cognate with the one whose secrets he is trying to unravel. He may, indeed, know nothing of them, as has several times been the case. But the patience, the persistence, the power of combination, the divine gift of insight, the historical sense, the feeling for archæological indications, these must be present, and all of these were present in the extraordinary man, Grotefend, who now attacked the problem that had baffled so many.”

[372] Hilprecht, _op. cit._, p. 71; _cf._ _A Memoir of Major General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson_, pp. 143–148, 153–157 (by his brother, Canon George Rawlinson, London, 1898); Booth, _op. cit._, pp. 106–114.

[373] Although it was supposed that this prize, awarded by so learned a body as the French Institute, would be tantamount to _une sanction qui devrait dissiper toutes les susceptibilités_, many remained as skeptical as ever and continued “to decry a language in which one can never know if a syllable is ideographic or phonetic, and, when phonetic, which of two or three different values it may have in that place.” _Cf._ A. J. Booth, _op. cit._, p. 416.

[374] _Op. cit._, pp. 118, 119.

[375] _New Light on the Bible and the Holy Land_, p. 10 (by B. T. Evetts, New York).

[376] _The Civilization of Babylonia and Assyria_, p. 110 (by M. Jastrow, Philadelphia, 1915).

[377] A few years before his death, when presiding at the commencement exercises of the College of Dole, in the Department of the Jura in which he was born and brought up, Pasteur told his youthful audience: “When one has studied much, one comes back to the faith of a Breton peasant; as to myself, had I studied more I should have the faith of a Breton peasant-woman.” _The Ave Maria_, February 14, 1920.

[378] _Bible, Science and Faith_, p. 314, 315 (Baltimore, 1895). _Cf._ also _Evolution and Dogma_, Chap. VIII (by J. A. Zahm, Chicago, 1896).

[379] _Babel und Bibel_, p. 4 (Leipzig, 1903).

[380] A name which, as we have seen, is also applied to the Euphrates.

[381] _Cf._ R. I. Wilberforce in _The Five Empires_, Chaps. XV, XVIII (London, 1852).

[382] _Alexander the Great_, p. 368 (by B. I. Wheeler, New York, 1900).

[383] Creasy’s _Decisive Battles of the World_, p. 79 (New York, 1899).

It was at Arbela, where was to be settled once for all the question of world supremacy, that Alexander, when counseled by his generals to make a night attack on Darius, gave the famous answer οὐ κλέπτο τἠν νίκην--I steal no victory--words that were his motto during his eventful and brilliant career.

[384] _Voyages en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes_, Vol I, p. 185 (Paris, 1677).

[385] Die Bedeutung des heutigen Namen’s Kal. ‘at Schergat ist bis jetzt unaufgeklärt geblieben und durfte vielleicht eine Altassyrische Reminiscenz bergen. _Vom Mittelmer zum Persischen_ Golf. Vol. II, p. 210 (by M. von Oppenheim, Berlin, 1900). His countryman, Baron Thielmann, writing of the same ruins a quarter of a century earlier, declares: “This great field of ruin with its pyramid looks truly venerable, but science has as yet made no discoveries here which could help us solve the mystery of this remnant of an ancient era.” _Journey in the Caucasus, Persia and Turkey in Asia_, Vol. II, p. 136 (London, 1875).

[386] _Cf._ Sayce _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, p. 122 (London, 1898).

[387] See Jastrow, _op. cit._, p. 229.

[388] See W. Andræ’s _Der Anu-Adad-Tempel in Assur_ (Leipsic, 1909); and his _Die Festungswerke von Assur_ (Leipsic, 1913).

[389] _Op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 328.

[390] See _Die Stelenreien in Assur_, p. ii (by Walter Andræ, Leipsic, 1913).

[391] “Many other works of Semiramis,” writes Strabo, “besides those of Babylon, are extant in almost every part of this continent, as, for example, earth-works which are called mounds of Semiramis, walls and fortresses, aqueducts and cisterns for water, stair-like roads over mountains, canals communicating with rivers and lakes; roads and bridges.” _Geography_, Bk. XVI, Chap. II.

[392] Polyænus _Strategemeta_, VIII, 26.

[393] _Cf._ _La Légende de Semiramis_, pp. 22, 23 (by François Lenormant), in _Mémoires de l’Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux Arts de Belgique_, Tom. XL (1873).

[394] A. H. Sayce in _Herodotos, with Notes, Introductions and Appendices_, p. 105 (London, 1883).

[395] Ibid., p. 303.

[396] Ibid., p. 362.

[397] Mr. Robertson Smith in _The English Historical Review_, Vol. II, p. 305, April, 1887.

[398] _Op. cit._, p. 317.

[399] As many fantastic stories are related about Dietrich von Bern--Theodoric the Great, King of the East Goths--as there are about Semiramis. As the Assyrian queen was said to have been nursed by doves in her infancy and to have been transformed into a dove after her death so, the German legends have it, Dietrich von Bern was descended from a spirit and made his exit from the world on a black horse. In Lusatia the mythical _Wild Huntsman_ who, during violent storms, rides furiously across the heavens is called Dietrich von Bern. Living so long after Semiramis it is more surprising that his life should be made the theme of Middle High German poems and Old Norse sagas than that the Assyrian queen should have been made the subject of oriental myth and Greek legend.

[400] Lehmann-Haupt in his interesting and illuminating lecture on _Die historische Semiramis und ihre Zeit_, which was delivered before the _Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft_ in Berlin, February 6, 1910, declares: “Von der sagenhaften Ümhüllung befreit, sehen wir Semiramis vor uns als eine Herrschergestalt, die zu einer Zeit, da sonst der Frau eine Beteiligung am öffentlichen Leben versagt war, die Geschichte zweier, vornehmlich durch ihre Klugheit und Umsicht verbundener Reiche in Krieg und Frieden entscheidendend und durchgreifend geleitet hat.” P. 68 (Tübingen, 1910).

How different is this conclusion of the learned German, which is based on the brilliant discoveries of Andræ and his colleagues, from that of the distinguished Orientalist, F. Lenormant, who, as the result of an exhaustive study of Semiramis, makes the _ex cathedra_ statement “_ce personage divin ... doit être definitivement rayé de l’histoire_--this divine personage ought to be definitely expunged from history.” _Op. cit._, p. 68.

[401] _Geography_, Bk. XVI, Chap. I, IX.

[402] Arrian’s _Anabasis of Alexander_, Bk. VII, Chap. VII.

[403] _Voyage au Levant_, Tom. III, p. 200 (Amsterdam, 1727).

[404] Ibid., III, p. 183.

[405] So hot is it in Susa, the Greek geographer writes, that “lizards and serpents at midday in the summer ... cannot cross the streets quick enough to prevent their being burnt to death midway by the heat.” _Op. cit._, Bk. XV, Chap. III.

[406] “There are few sights more appalling than a sandstorm in the desert, the ‘Zauba’ah,’ as the Arabs call it. Devils or pillars of sand, vertical and inclined, measuring a thousand feet high, rush over the plain lashing the sand at their base like a sea surging under a furious whirlwind; shearing the grass clean away from the roots, tearing up trees which are whirled like leaves and sticks in the air, and sweeping away tents and houses as if they were bits of paper. At last the columns join at the top and form, perhaps three thousand feet above the earth, a gigantic cloud of yellow sand which obliterates not only the horizon but even the midday sun. These sand-spouts are the terror of travelers.” _Thousand and One Nights_, Vol. I, p. 114 (by Richard F. Burton, Benares, 1885).

[407] _Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan and on the Site of Ancient Nineveh with a Journal of a Voyage down the Tigris to Bagdad_, Vol. II, p. 148 (London, 1836).

[408] _Journey in the Caucasus, Persia and Turkey in Asia_, Vol. II, p. 138 (London, 1875).

[409] _Convito_, IV., 2.

[410] _Divina Commedia_, IV, v. 121, _et seq._

[411] Moore’s _Lalla Rookh_, p. 181 (New York, 1890).

[412] _Life and Letters of E. B. Cowell_, p. 318 (by G. Cowell, London, 1904).

[413] Daniel, iii.

[414] _Op. cit._, II, 139.

[415] Gertrude L. Bell, in _Amurath to Amurath_, p. 246 (London, 1911).

[416] “Le Khalife, alors tout-puissant, vivait là au milieu de ses milices et de tous les grands scheiks de son royaume, plus entouré de courtisans que Louis XIV à Versailles. Il réservait d’ailleurs toutes ses faveurs à ceux qui venaient embellir Samara en coustruisant quelques belles residences dans le voisinage du palais.” _Description du Palais de Al-Moutasim Fils d’Haroun-al-Raschid à Samara et de Quelques Monuments Arabs connus de la Mesopotamia_, p. 23 and plate XIV (par M. H. Violet, Paris, 1909). _Cf._ Sarre und Herzfeld’s illuminating monograph on Samara.

[417] _Cf._ Von Oppenheim, _op. cit._, II, p. 221.

[418] _Op. cit._, p. 381.

[419] _Cf._ _Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Chaldea and Armenia_, Vol. II, p. 152 (by W. F. Ainsworth, London, 1842).

[420] _Les Missions Catholiques Françaises au XIXe Siècle_, Tom. I, p. 223, _et seq._ (Paris, 1900).

[421] _Cf._ _Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman_, Tom. I, p. 172 _et seq._ (by the Vicomte De la Jonquière, Paris, 1914).

[422] _Du Caucasus au Golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la Mesopotamie_, p. 458 _et seq._ (by P. Müller-Simonis and H. Hyvernat, Washington, 1892).

[423] See the interesting work of Mme. Dieulafoy on _La Perse, la Chaldée et la Susiane_, p. 576 _et seq._ (Paris, 1887).

[424] _Turquie Agonisante_, p. 137 (Paris, 1913).

[425] _Baghdad during the Abbassid Caliphate from Contemporary Arabic and Persian Sources_, pp. 12–14 (by G. Le Strange, Oxford, 1900).

[426] Le Strange, _op. cit._, p. 64 _et seq._

[427] Le Strange, _op. cit._, p. 71.

[428] _The Book of Ser Marco Polo_, Vol. I, p. 63 (translated and edited by H. Yule, London, 1903).

[429] _Bibliothèque Orientale_, Tom. I, p. 326 (The Hague, 1777).

[430] _Op. cit._, I, 72.

[431] _History of the Mongols from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century_, Part III, p. 127 (by H. H. Howorth, London, 1888).

[432] See _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, on a _Greek Embassy to Bagdad 917, A. D._ (January, 1897).

[433] _Cf._ Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, Chap. LII.

[434] At this period, Sir Richard Burton tells us, London and Paris were in a state of quasi-savagery and “their palatial halls were spread with rushes.”

[435] Bagdad, at the zenith of its grandeur under Harun-al-Rashid, was the worthy successor of Babylon and Nineveh. It “had outrivalled Damascus, ‘the Smile of the Prophet,’” and “was essentially a city of pleasure, a Paris of the ninth century.” “Thither flocked from all parts of the oriental world the most noted and capable poets, musicians and artificers of the time; and the first thought of the Arabian or Persian craftsman who had completed some specially curious or attractive specimen of his art was to repair to the capital of the Muslim world, to submit it to the Commander of the Faithful from whom he rarely failed to receive a rich reward for his labors. Surrounded by pleasure-gardens and groves of orange, tamarisk, and myrtle, refreshed by an unfailing luxuriance of running streams, supplied either by art or nature, the great city on the Tigris is the theme of many an admiring ode or laudatory ghazel; and the poets of the time all agree in describing it as being, under the rule of the great Caliph, a sort of terrestrial paradise of idlesse and luxury, where, to use their own expressions, the ground was irrigated with rose-water and the dust of the roads was musk, where flowers and verdure overhung the ways and the air was perpetually sweet with the many-voiced song of birds, and where the chirp of lutes, the dulcet warble of flutes and the silver sound of singing houris rose and fell in harmonious cadence from every corner of the streets of palaces that stood in vast succession in the midst of their gardens and orchards, gifted with perpetual verdure by the silver abundance of the Tigris, as it sped its arrowy flight through the thrice-blest town.” _Thousand and One Nights_, Vol. IX, pp. 333, 334 (translated by John Payne, London, 1884).

[436] _Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe_, Vol. I, p. 30 (New York, 1827).

[437] _Haroun-Al-Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad_, p. 53 (by E. H. Palmer, London, 1881).

[438] Palmer, _op. cit._, p. 83.

[439] This crime, declares Sir Richard Burton, “stands out in ghastly prominence as one of the most terrible tragedies recorded in history and its horrible details make men write passionately on the subject to this our day.” _Thousand and One Nights_, Vol. X, p. 142 (Benares, 1885).

[440] Sismondi, _op. cit._, I, 30.

[441]

_Tamed Greece to tame her victress now began,_ _And with her arts fair Latium over-ran._

HORACE, _Epistles_, Book II, 1.

[442] Gibbon, _op. cit._, Chap. LII.

[443] See D’Herbelot’s _Bibliothèque Orientale_, s. v. “Honain.”

[444] _Cf._ _A History of Greece_, Vol. II, p. 224 (by G. Finlay, Oxford, 1877).

[445] _The History and Conquests of the Saracens_, p. 157 (London, 1877).

[446] Longfellow has chosen the grim episode said to have been connected with the tragic death of Al-Mostassem at the hands of Hulagu Khan for one of his well-known poems in which he makes his victor and executioner address the avaricious Caliph in the following words:

_I said to the Caliph, “Thou art old,_ _Thou hast no need of so much gold;_ _Thou shouldst not have heaped and hidden it here,_ _Till the breath of battle was hot and near,_ _But have sown through the land these useless hoards,_ _To spring into shining blades and swords,_ _And keep thine honor sweet and clear.”_

* * * * *

_Then into his dungeon I locked the drone,_ _And left him there to feed all alone,_ _In the honey cells of his golden hive;_ _Never a prayer, nor a cry, nor a groan,_ _Was heard from those massive walls of stone,_ _Nor again was the Caliph seen alive._

[447] Freeman, _op. cit._, p. 132.

[448] “Tamerlan fit passer au fil de l’epée tous sea Habitants, n’ epargnant ni age, ni sexe, ni condition et fit raser rez pied, rez terre tous ses principaux bätimens.” D’Herbelot, _op. cit._, s. v. “Timour.”

[449] _Cf._ Gibbon, _op. cit._, Chap. LXV. “The ground which had been occupied by flourishing cities was often marked by his”--Timour’s--“abominable trophies--by columns or pyramids of human heads.” Ibid., Chap. LXV. “The people of Ispahan supplied seventy thousand human skulls for the structure of several lofty towers.” Ibid., Chap. XXXIV.

[450] Howorth, _op. cit._, Part III, p. 1.

[451] _Cf._ Benjamin of Tudela, _op. cit._, p. 98 _et seq._ According to the Babylonian Talmud which “became the main factor in the history and development of Judaism,” the Jews of Babylon passed for a purer race than those of Palestine.

[452] “_Tous les pays_,” it is said in the French translation of the Babylonian Talmud, “_sont comme de la pâte relativement à la Palestine, mais ce pays l’est relativement à la Babylonie._” _Cf._ _Géographie du Talmud_, p. 320 (by A. Neubauer, Paris, 1868).

[453] The clever Ottoman author, Halil Halid, pertinently writes in reference to this subject: “In the language of diplomacy the French term ‘_action civilisatrice_’ may still have an impressive sound, but owing to the free use made of it by every politician and journalist, the sense of the term has been much contaminated with vulgarity. The dignified charm of the English political literature dealing with the affairs of the East has also begun to degenerate into something like a commonplace. The notion intended by the term is this, that when one of the mighty Powers of Christendom finds it incumbent upon itself to take under its patronizing ægis the internal affairs of a Muslim nation, which is incapable of holding its own, freedom, justice and the spread of civilization will either immediately or gradually follow the introduction of its good rule and signs of the public well-being will spring up here, there and everywhere.

“There is no necessity to cite here any examples of the astounding work which the civilizing Powers are doing in Eastern countries, as any one who studies the political settlement of these countries can find ample instances for himself. It should only be remarked that all the pains taken in this direction are at the expense of the sovereign rights and national independence of the people which submit to the civilizing tutelage.” _The Crescent versus the Cross_, pp. 184, 185 (London, 1907).

[454] “Neejdee horses are especially esteemed for great speed and endurance of fatigue; indeed in this latter quality none can come up to them. To pass twenty-four hours on the road without drink and without flagging is certainly something; but to keep up the same abstinence and labor conjoined under the burning Arabian sky for forty-eight hours at a stretch is, I believe, peculiar to animals of the breed.” _Personal Narrative of a Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia_, p. 310 (by W. G. Palgrave, London, 1869).

[455] The most prized horses in Arabia belong, it is said, to the _Khamsa_, namely, to one of the _Kehilan_ breeds, which, according to tradition, are descended from Mohammed’s five favorite mares.

[456] _Cf._ E. Reclus, _Asia_, Vol. IV, p. 466 (New York, 1855).

[457] _Op. cit._, pp. 25, 26.

[458] See _La Province de Bagdad_, p. 108 (by Habib K. Chicha, Cairo, 1908).

[459] “Who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise, in Eden towards the East, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life?” _De Principiis_, Bk. IV, Chap. I.

[460] _De Genesi ad Litteram_, Lib. VIII, Cap. I.

[461] _Wo lag das Paradies_, p. 44 (Leipsic, 1881).

[462] Lib. II, dist. 17, c. 5, “Unde volunt in orientali parte esse paradisum, longo interjacente spatio vel maris vel terræ a regionibus quas incolant hominea secretum, et in alto situm, usque ad lunarem circulum pertingentem, unde nec aquæ diluvii illuc pervenerunt.”

[463] _Cf._ _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_, p. 255 _et seq._ (by S. Baring Gould, London, 1892).

[464] _The Voyage and Travaile of Sir John Mandeville_, Chap. XXX.

[465] See _Select Letters of Christopher Columbus_, pp. 141–147 (translated by R. H. Major and printed for the Hakluyt Society, London, 1870).

[466] _La Nouvelle Revue_, April 15, 1893.

[467] _Atlantis, The Antediluvian World_, p. 455 (New York, 1884).

[468] _Popular Science Monthly_, p. 678, September, 1883.

[469] _Paradise Found_, p. 433 (by W. F. Warren, Boston, 1885).

[470] _The Human Species_, p. 175–177 (New York, 1890).

[471] _Histoire Ancienne de l’Orient_, Tom. I, p. 96 _et seq._ (Paris, 1881).

[472] See chapter on The Site of the Garden of Eden, in _Science and the Church_ (by J. A. Zahm, Chicago, 1896), from which I have extensively drawn for the present treatment of the subject.

[473] _Cf._ _Dictionnaire de la Bible_, Tom. IV, Col. 2121 (pub. by F. Vigoroux, Paris, 1908).

[474] See _Reise der K. preussichen Gesellschaft nach Persia_, Tom. I, p. 146 (by H. Brugsch, Leipsic, 1862).

[475] _Cf._ Dom Calmet, _Commentaire littéral sur la Genèse_, p. 61 (Paris, 1715).

[476] Duo sunt amnes qui in unum coeunt deinde abeunt in diversas partes. Ita flumen unum est in confluente; duo autem inferioribus alveis sunt capita, et duo versus mare postquam rursus longius dividi incipiunt. See his _Commentarius in Genesin_. The map of Babylonia, which accompanies the text renders the author’s view quite clear, although it does not specify the site of the Garden of Eden.

[477] See _The Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_, pp. 95, 96 (by A. H. Sayce, London, 1894). _Cf._ _The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia_, Chaps. I, II (by T. G. Pinches, London, 1908); _The Chaldean Account of Genesis_, p. 305 (by George Smith, London, 1876).

[478] Ibid., p. 97.

[479] _Op. cit._, pp. 97, 98.

[480] _Modern Science and Bible Lands_, pp. 197, 198 (New York, 1889).

[481] _Skizze der Geschichte und Geographie Arabiens von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum Propheten Muhammed_, Vol. II, p. 317, _et seq._ (Berlin, 1890).

[482] _Aufsätze und Abhandlungen_, p. 273 _et seq._ (Munich, 1901).

[483] “E chiaro che il narratore nel detto brano della Genesi ha avuto, dinazi agli occhi un luogo ben noto, e si e data la pena di discriverlo mimutamente, affinche non potessero surgere dubbi sul paese che egli voleva indicare.” _Studi di Storia Orientale_, Vol. I, p. 121 (Milan, 1911).

[484] Referring to the discovery of the word Eden--Edina--in cuneiform inscriptions the distinguished Assyriologist, T. G. Pinches, _op. cit._, p. 72, writes: “That we shall ultimately find other instances of Eden as a geographical name, occurring by itself and not in composition with another word, as in the expression _Sipar Edina_, and even a reference to _gannat Edinni_, ‘the Garden of Eden,’ is to be expected.”

[485] Purgatorio, XXXIII, 145.

[486] So called because of an Eastern tradition that it was the plantain and not the apple which was the forbidden fruit in Paradise. It is also known as Adam’s fig.

[487] _Paradise Lost_, Bk. IV.

[488] Nature herself confesses to have given the tenderest hearts to the human race, as she gave them tears; this is the best part of our faculties. _Satire XV_, vv. 131–133.

[489] According to Dr. Fries, an eminent German scholar, all games of ball are traceable back to an old light myth which was presumably Babylonian in origin: “_Alles Ballspiel_,” he writes, “_ja bis herab zum Lawn-Tenis auf denselben Gedanken-den Lichtkampf-zurückgeht._” _Studien zur Odyssee_, Vol. I, p. 324 (Leipsic, 1910).

[490] _The Excavations at Babylon_, p. 15 (London, 1914).

[491] “But the devils believed not, they taught men sorcery and that which was sent down to the two angels at Babel, Harut and Marut.” _The Koran_, Sura II, 96.

[492] Chap. XIII, vv. 19–21. In lieu of the word “satyrs” the _Vulgate_ has _pilosi_--the hairy ones--which is more in keeping with the original Hebrew text.

[493] Genesis xi: 4.

[494] Ερημία μεγάλη ἐστιν ἡ μεγάλη πόλις, Bk. XVI, I, 5.

[495] _The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation_, Vol. X, Part I, p. 63 (collected by Richard Hakluyt, Edinburgh, 1889).

[496] “The inhabitants of these parts are as fond of attributing every vestige of antiquity to Nimrod as those of Egypt are to Pharaoh.” Rich, _Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon_ (London, 1818).

[497] _Op. cit._, Tom. I, p. 382 _et seq._

[498] That Della Valle had no doubt that the mound of Babil was really the ruin of the Tower of Babel is quite evident from the positive statement which he makes to this effect: “che sia quella Babel antica è la torre di Nembrotto, non c’è dubbio, secondo me, perche oltre che il sito lo dimostra, da’ paesani ancora oggidi è conisciuta per tale, ed in Arabico è chiamata volgarmente Babel.” _Op. cit._, p. 384.

[499] Koldewey, _op. cit._, p. 11, _et seq._

[500] _Op. cit._, p. 101.

[501] _Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia_, Vol. II, p. 365 (by Robert Ker Porter, London, 1822).

[502] _Op. cit._, p. 317. The Jews of Babylonia call the tower of Birs-Nimrud “Nebuchadnezzar’s prison,” for what reason is not clear.

[503] _The Old Testament in the Light of Historical Records and Legends of Assyria and Babylonia_, p. 138 (by T. G. Prinches, London, 1908).

[504] _Observations Connected with the Astronomy and Ancient History, Sacred and Profane, on the Ruins of Babylon_, p. 2 (by T. Maurice, London, 1816).

[505] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 336.

[506] _Cf._ _Expedition de Mesopotamie_, Vol. I, Lib. I (Paris, 1863).

[507] See also _Die Tempel von Babylon and Borsippa_, p. 59 (by Dr. Koldewey, Leipsic, 1911), that speaks of Oppert’s _verkehrter Stadtplan von Babylon_ and who declares that Borsippa, as an independent city, bore the same relation to Babylon as does Charlottenburg to Berlin.

[508] _The History of Herodotus_, Bk. I, 178, 179.

[509] _Library_, Lib. II, Chap. VII.

[510] Rich, _op. cit._, p. 43.

[511] _De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni_, Lib. V, Cap. I.

[512] _The Geographical System of Herodotus Examined and Explained_, p. 347.

[513] _Op. cit._, p. 2.

[514] _Im Lande des Einstigen Paradieses_, p. 30 (Stuttgart, 1903). According to Oppert the great wall of Babylon embraces an area fifteen times as great as that of Paris in 1850 and as extended as that of the entire department of the Seine. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 234.

[515] _Op. cit._, p. 5.

[516] _Op. cit._, II, 8.

[517] Koldewey, _op. cit._, p. 54.

[518] Arrian’s _Anabasis of Alexander_, Bk. VII, Chap. XXVI.

[519] According to the measurements of Rich, the current of the Euphrates runs at a medium rate of about two knots an hour while that of the Tigris has a maximum velocity of full seven knots.

[520] _Commentary on Isaias_, Bk. V, Chap. XIII, _Patrologiæ Latinæ_, Vol. XXIV (Migne, Paris, 1865).

[521] _Op. cit._, Bk. I, Chap. 181.

[522] _Geography_, Bk. XVI, Chap. I, Sec. 5.

[523] _Op. cit._, p. 196.

[524] Ibid., p. 196.

[525] “Principio Assyrii”--the Chaldeans--“propter planitiem magnitudinemque regionum quos incolebant, cum cœlum ex omni parte patens et apertum intuerentur, trajectiones motusque stellarum observaverunt.” _De Divinatione_, Lib. I.

[526] _Op. cit._, Lib. V, Cap. I.

[527] _Op. cit._, p, 103.

[528] For a description of the ruins of Cuzco and the Great Chimu, as compared with those of Babylon, see _Along the Andes and Down the Amazon_, Chaps. XIII, XV (by J. A. Zahm, New York, 1911).

[529] _The History and Conquests of the Saracens_, p. 2 _et seq._ (by E. A. Freeman, London, 1877).

[530] _Babel and Bibel_, p. 36, 37 (London, 1903).

[531] _The Archæology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions_, p. 111 (London, 1908).

[532] Entitled _Der babylonische Ursprung der ägyptischen Kultur_ (1892).

[533] Pliny, speaking of Belus, says: “Inventor hic fuit sideralis scientiæ, Naturalis Historiæ,” Lib. VI. Cap. 30.

[534] _Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans_, p. 8 (New York, 1912).

[535] See especially _Astronomisches aus Babylon, oder das Wissen der Chaldäer uber den gestirnten Himmel_ (by J. Epping, in collaboration with J. Straszmaier, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1889); _Die Babylonische Mondrechnung_ (by F. Kugler, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1900).

[536] _Cf._ Dumont _op. cit._, p. 60.

[537] A comparison of the lunar periods as given by Babylonian and by modern astronomers will show how exact were the calculations of the observers of ancient Chaldea.

Periods as calculated by Babylonian astronomers:

Mean sidereal month 27 days, 7 hours, 43’ 14″ Mean synodic month 29 days, 12 hours, 44’ 31.3″ Mean draconitic month 27 days, 5 hours, 5’ 35.8″ Mean anomalistic month 27 days, 13 hours, 18’ 34.9″

Periods as calculated by modern astronomers:

Mean sidereal month 27 days, 7 hours, 43’ 11.5″ Mean synodic month 29 days, 12 hours, 44’ 2.9″ Mean draconitic month 27 days, 5 hours, 5’ 36″ Mean anomalistic month 27 days, 13 hours, 18’ 39.3″

From the foregoing figures it is seen that the maximum difference of time, as given by ancient and modern observers, is less than a half minute; the minimum one-fifth of a second! See Kugler’s _Die Babylonische Mondrechnung_, pp. 24, 40, 46.

[538] Kugler _op. cit._, p. 206.

[539] Hammurabi’s code which is carefully engraved on a large stele of black diorite was found by M. de Morgan and the distinguished Dominican archæologist, Father Scheil, among the ruins of Susa--the Susan of the Bible--whither it had been carried from Babylon as loot by the Elamites. When found in December, 1901, and January, 1902, it was in fragments but the parts were easily rejoined. In October, 1902, there appeared an admirable translation of it by Father Scheil which everywhere excited the greatest interest among scholars both of the Old and the New World. In many respects, it is the most interesting and valuable inscribed monument of old Babylonia which has yet been brought to light.

[540] _Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters_, pp. vii, viii (by C. H. W. Johns, New York, 1904).

[541] _Op. cit._, p. 186.

[542] _Apocalypse_, xvii: 5; xviii: 21.

[543] _Daniel_ iv: 27, 28.

[544] Chap. li: 58.

[545] Chap. li: 37.

[546] Chap. li: 62.

[547] _Psalm_ cxviii: 89.

Transcriber’s Notes:

1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected silently.

2. Where hyphenation is in doubt, it has been retained as in the original.

3. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have been retained as in the original.

4. Italics are shown as _xxx_.