252 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This land is no other than the famous and once beautiful 

 valley of Mesopotamia, through which the great Euphrates and 

 arrow-swift Tigris flow to empty themselves into the Persian 

 Gulf. Almost lost sight of for a while, interest in it was reawak- 

 ened some seventy years ago by the investigations commenced by 

 Mr. Rich, and followed up with such wonderful results by Botta, 

 Place, Layard, George Smith, and others. Their discoveries have 

 revealed to us in unexpected fullness the details of a complex and 

 advanced civilization almost if not quite as ancient as the Egyp- 

 tian, and far more profoundly interesting, for the ancient nations 

 of Mesopotamia are the intellectual forefathers of the modern 

 world. The learning of the Chaldees was the heritage of the 

 Jews and Greeks ; from these the torch was handed on to the 

 Romans, and Jew and Greek and Roman inspired, and still in- 

 spire, for good and evil, the civilization of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. There is much more of the Chaldean in every one of us 

 than we are given to imagine. 



The people whom we find in possession at the dawn of history 

 were Semites, the parent stock from which the Jews subsequently 

 branched off ; and one has but to glance at their faces and forms, 

 as portrayed in their statues and pictures, to recognize the strong 

 family likeness, while the emphasis with which muscular develop- 

 ment is expressed in parts of the human figure suggests that the 

 remarkable assertion, " The pride of a young man is in his legs," 

 was a Semitic opinion long before the time of Solomon. 



Just as Egypt is the gift of the Nile, so is Mesopotamia equally 

 the gift of the Tigris and Euphrates, for it is built up of the mud 

 brought down from the mountains by these two streams into the 

 Persian Gulf, which is thus in process of obliteration. So long as 

 the two great rivers were not regulated, they produced terrible 

 floods in the wet season ; and one of the earliest works of the 

 Chaldeans was to control their flow by great dams, and by divert- 

 ing a part of their water into canals. These canals covered the 

 country like a network, and served not merely to ease the rivers, 

 but also to irrigate the land, which, thus richly supplied by water, 

 became, under the hot sun, so fat and fruitful that corn is said to 

 have borne three hundred fold. Groves of palms, orchards, with 

 grapes and many other luscious fruits, were cultivated, while the 

 pastures supported abundant flocks and herds. It was a true gar- 

 den of Eden, and differed chiefly from the biblical paradise, which 

 Delitsch thinks was actually situated within this garden, in the 

 fact that even here man had still to earn his bread in the sweat of 

 his brow. This the Turks, who now possess the country, have no 

 inclination to do, and consequently it is rapidly returning to its 

 primitive desolation. Were England as enterprising as she was 

 in the time of Elizabeth, we should rent this land from the Porte, 



