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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



were great historic cities, towering up 

 above the plain, shapeless and unsightly. 



Before man came the land was waste. 

 When he had learned to bridle its rivers 

 and to develop its capabilities, it became 

 "as the garden of the Lord." Now that 

 he has lost the grip of his first inherit- 

 ance it has gone back to waste again. 



Yet there can be no doubt that here is 

 a country of almost infinite possibilities, 

 and that in the future, possibly not a very 

 distant future, the first home of the race 

 will again be one of the most fertile and 

 perhaps one of the busiest spots in the 

 world. 



BIBLE WRITERS AS EYE-WITNESSES 



There are few things more remarkable 

 than the way in which this land which 

 had once been supreme in the history of 

 the world, and which for centuries was 

 one of the great molding forces of human 

 story, passed almost entirely out of the 

 thought and memory of civilized man. 



We know it, of course, from our Bibles. 

 The name of Nineveh, "that great city," 

 and the story of Nebuchadnezzar's pride, 

 as he looked round upon palace and tem- 

 ple and tower, and said : "Is not this great 

 Babylon, which I have built?" These 

 things are part of our earliest and unfor- 

 gettable impressions of history. 



The men who wrote the history and the 

 prophecy of the Old Testament did so 

 when these lands were living and at the 

 height of their glory. They witnessed 

 Assyria trampling down the nations and 

 gathering their treasure "as one gathereth 

 eggs that are forsaken," and they saw her 

 fall, exulting over the overthrow of Nin- 

 eveh, whose cruelty had passed upon all 

 nations. They saw the second rise of 

 Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, and 

 lived in the midst of its splendors and 

 beheld them all pass away. 



"then came midnight" 



Then came down midnight. So utterly 

 had the local habitation and the name of 

 these great cities vanished from the mem- 

 ory of man that 400 years before Christ, 

 when Nenophon and the Ten Thousand 

 marched through the land after the battle 

 of Cunaxa, they passed the ruins of 

 Nineveh and never knew of them, and 

 encamped beside the ruins of Kalah. an- 



other of the mighty cities of Assyria, 

 and spoke of them as "an ancient city 

 named Larissa." 



Wonderful stories and legends, of 

 course, still found their place in the 

 minds of men about these ancient cities 

 and monarchies — legends of Nimrod, of 

 Ninus and Semiramis, and of the won- 

 derful palaces and hanging gardens of 

 Babylon. But where these cities stood 

 and what had become of their glories, 



1 * 



these were things utterly forgotten for 

 close on 2,000 years. 



"Babylon," said Isaiah, long before 

 (Isaiah xiii : 19-22), "the glory of king- 

 doms, the beauty of the Chaldee's excel- 

 lency, 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. . . . 

 But the wild beasts of the desert shall lie 

 there, and their houses shall be full of 

 doleful creatures ; and owls shall dwell 

 there, and satyrs shall dance there." 



the words of a prophet 



And Zephaniah (ii: 14) writes thus of 

 the sister city, whose fall was earlier : 

 "He will make Nineveh a desolation, and 

 dry like the wilderness. The cormorant 

 and the bittern shall lodge in the upper 

 lintels of it. . . . This is the rejoicing 

 city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her 

 heart, I am, and there is none beside me : 

 how is she become a desolation, a place 

 for beasts to lie down in ; every one that 

 passeth by her shall hiss and wag his 

 hand." 



Layard thus describes the emotions ex- 

 cited by the first contemplation of the 

 desolate heaps which now represent the 

 cities of Mesopotamia. After speaking 

 of "the stern shapeless mound rising like 

 a hill from the scorched plain, the frag- 

 ments of pottery, and the stupendous 

 mass of brickwork occasionally laid bare 

 by the winter rains." he goes on : 



"He is now at a loss to give any form 

 to the rude heaps on which he is gazing. 

 Those of whose works they are the re- 

 mains, unlike the Roman and the Greek, 

 have left no visible traces of their civili- 

 zation or their arts ; their influence has 

 long since passed away. The scene 

 around is worthv of the ruin he is con- 



