MESOPOTAMIA: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.* 
[With 4 plates and 1 map.] 
3y Sir WILLIAM WILLcocKs, K. C. M. G. 
“ Out of Eden camea river which watered a garden, and from thence 
it was parted and became four heads.” Plans and levels in hand, 
starting from the spot where Jewish tradition placed “the gates of 
Paradise,” I have followed the traces of the four rivers of the early 
chapters of Genesis. Appointed by the new Turkish Government to 
engage engineers and survey and level the rivers and canals of the 
Tigris-Euphrates delta, and devise projects for the rehabilitation 
of the country, I first set myself the task of mastering the ancient 
systems of irrigation, improving on them when I could, and adopting 
them when I could find no better substitute. I started with the 
Garden of Eden. 
The Euphrates enters its delta a few miles below Hit, at the gates 
of Babylonia, where Cyrus the Younger’s army, accompanied by the 
ten thousand, left the deserts and entered the alluvial plains which 
terminate at the Persian Gulf. What the gates of Babylonia were 
to one descending the Euphrates, the gates of Paradise were to the 
early livers in the Babylonian plains. 
Upstream of Hit, past Anah, the river is to-day a series of very 
indifferent cataracts, where the current turns giant water wheels 
which lift water and irrigate the narrow valley to the edge of the 
desert. Garden succeeds garden, orchards and date groves he be- 
tween fields of cotton, and life and prosperity are before us wherever 
the water can reach. I do not think it possible to imagine anything 
more like a practical paradise than the country near Anah. Every 
tree and crop must have been familiar to Adam except the cotton 
crop. Though to-day, owing to the degradation of the cataracts, 
a degradation whose steady progress was noticed by the writers of 
the Augustan age, water wheels are necessary to irrigate the gardens; 
it is easy, indeed, to imagine the condition of the river when the 
“Read at the Royal Geographical Society, November 15, 1909. Reprinted by 
permission from The Geographical Journal, London, vol. 35, No. 1, January, 
1910. 
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