THE MOST HISTORIC LANDS ON EARTH 



No OTHER people possess lands 

 of such wonderful historic inter- 

 est as the Turks. Occupying a 

 region only a third as great in area as 

 the United States, they have yet a terri- 

 tory within whose boundaries the great- 

 est, the most influential events in human 

 history have occurred. 



The Bible, with little exception, is an 

 account of the doings of people who 

 never got beyond what have hitherto 

 been the confines of Turkey. From a 

 single corner of the Ottoman Empire 

 arose the Babylon that in its day all but 

 ruled the world. From that same region 

 envy and famine conspired to send the 

 children of Abraham into Egypt, which 

 until recently was embraced in the Em- 

 pire of the Ottomans. Thence, as they 

 marched back from Africa to Asia, 

 through the Wilderness of Sin to the 

 Promised Land, they never once set foot 

 off of what came to be Turkish soil. 

 And when the Star of Bethlehem arose 

 it stood over a manger, on land that is 

 now Turkish soil. 



In Asia Minor once dwelt Croesus, 

 whose name to this day expresses the last 

 degree of wealth. Here was Pergamus, 

 whose library in its period was the finest 

 in the world, making such demands for 

 papyrus that Ptolemy was led to prohibit 

 the exportation of that commodity from 

 Egypt. Under the reign of the Csesars, 

 Asia Minor alone contained 500 popu- 

 lous cities, enriched with all the gifts of 

 nature and adorned with all the refine- 

 ments of art. 



The civilization of the Hittites, whose 

 lands finally were occupied by the hosts 

 of Israel ; the civilization of Tyre and 

 Sidon, the greatest colonizers of ancient 

 times ; the civilization of Egypt, rival of 

 Persia and Chaldea in the value of the 

 heritage it bequeathed to the future ; the 

 civilization of Constantinople and the 

 Byzantine Empire, in its day more gor- 

 geous than any that had gone before — 

 all found their home within the bound- 

 aries of what afterward came to be the 



land of the Turk. Mohammed, and the 

 religion which bears his name, and now 

 claims several hundred million adherents, 

 were also born in the Ottoman Empire. 



The greatest of these ancient empires 

 was the Babylonian. The Babylonians 

 built their civilization upon an irrigation 

 ditch and made Babylonia a land teeming 

 with people, the seat of magnificent cities, 

 and the home of a world-conquering em- 

 pire. Babylonia rivaled the Valley of the 

 Nile in production. Every Greek traveler 

 who wandered that way marveled at the 

 luxuriousness of the crops of Mesopota- 

 mia. Even Herodotus hesitated to tell the 

 story in its fulness lest the people for 

 whom he wrote history might regard him 

 as a nature faker. The hanging gardens 

 of Babylon stirred the admiration of the 

 travelers out of the west, so that they 

 wrote them down as one of the seven 

 wonders of the world. Nebuchadnezzar 

 built them for his wife, Amytis, the 

 beautiful Mede, to rescue her from her 

 homesickness for her native Median 

 hills. 



King Sargon, though he lived at the 

 dawn of history, reviewed his reign much 

 as a President of the United States or 

 a great European sovereign might review 

 his official career. He tells us that he 

 restored ancient ruined cities and colon- 

 ized them ; that he made barren tracts of 

 land fertile ; that he gave his nation a 

 splendid system of reservoirs, dams, and 

 canals ; that he protected the needy from 

 want, the weak from oppression, filled 

 the nation's granaries with corn, brought 

 down the high cost of living, and found 

 new markets for the nation's products. 



Babylon's fortifications are said to have 

 had a circumference of 55 miles, the 

 outer wall of which was 350 feet high 

 and 85 feet thick. The palace of Sargon 

 II covered about 25 acres, and its front 

 was twice as long as that of the United 

 States Capitol. Forty-eight great winged 

 bulls guarded its entrances, and upon its 

 walls were more than two miles of sculp- 

 tured slabs telling the story of the king's 

 reign. 



615 



