DISCOVERIES IN MESOPOTAMIA. 



B}^ Dr. Friedkich Delitzsch. 



The traveler starting overland from the port of Alexandretta, in 

 northern Syria, beholds beyond the high pass of Beilan the widel}^ 

 extended plain of Antioch, a view surprising in novelty and charm. 

 As far as the eye can reach the plain is strewn with mounds of vary- 

 ing height, often grass covered, their artificial origin easily discern- 

 ible. These mysterious elevations, called by the Arabs "Tell," by the 

 Turks "Tepe," accompany the traveler to Aleppo and even farther to 

 the l)anks of the Euphrates and Tigris, and they constantly increase in 

 height, extent, and number, from Mosul down the stream and through 

 Babylonia, crossing into the Elamite plain and to Susa. Thej^ are the 

 marks of the civilization of pre-Christian millenniums. The large and 

 small cities of the oldest empires of western Asia, of the Hittite states 

 of northern Syria, of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Elamite empires, 

 with their palaces and temples, walls and gates, terraces and towers, lie 

 buried beneath them. From these mounds of ruins of the Euphrates 

 and Tigris region, weather beaten, grave, and silent, rising from the 

 lonely and lifeless desert, French, English, and American explorers 

 have plucked unfading laurels. They have awakened to new life, 

 after the sleep of thousands of years, the buried glor}^ of millenniums 

 gone, and from innumerable monuments of sculpture and writing liv- 

 ing knowledge reaches us of Babylon, Nineveh, and of those earlier 

 peoples whose civilization continues, in not a small measure, to be pre- 

 served in our own. The mounds of ruins in the fairyland of "The 

 Thousand and One Nights" have become for France, England, and 

 America mounds of treasure-trove, from whose darkness they bring 

 to light treasures of human art and science that are the greatest orna- 

 ment and pride and the never-resting ambition of the great national 

 museums. 



^Translation of Ex Oriente Lux. Ein Wort zur Forderung der Deutscheu Orient- 

 Gesellschaft von Dr. Friedrich Delitzsch, ord. Professor an der Universitiit zu Bres- 

 lau. Leipzig: F. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1898. pp. 16, 8vo. Dr. Delitzsch 

 has also contributed other articles in this series of publications. 



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