SYRIA: THE LAND LINK OF HISTORY'S CHAIN 



457 



of the coast has been traversed for many 

 centuries by the peoples and armies of 

 many nations. 



A few miles north of Beirut, at the 

 point where Dog River enters the sea, the 

 foothills of the Lebanon come down to 

 the very shore of the Mediterranean, and 

 since soldiers and armies have always 

 sought to travel on the level, whether they 

 have fought that way or not, the passage 

 of this point where sea and mountain 

 meet was always a difficult feat. 



One army after another cut its path 

 along the towering cliffs, and when the 

 passage of this narrow defile was thus 

 insured, the commanders left the record 

 of their passing. Who the first men were 

 no one knows, for the troops of Napoleon 

 III, in passing this point, were too lazy 

 to turn over a new leaf; they simply in- 

 scribed their record on a limestone page 

 from which the record of some ancient 

 Egyptian had been erased by the hand of 

 time. 



But the first record that still stands was 

 left by the armies of the most famous of 

 the Pharaohs, Rameses the Great, when 

 they were on their way northward to 

 wage war against the Kheta or Hittites. 



The great Assyrian, Ashurnasirpal, left 

 his record here and his successors, Shal- 

 maneser and Adadnirari, did the same. 

 Then there was a lapse of more than a 

 century, from 812 to 705 B. C, when 

 Sennacherib and his son Esarhaddon had 

 their names chiseled in this stone book 

 of history. 



WHERE AN ALIEN PRINCE OE MECCA 

 LEARNED TO HANDLE MEN 



Although the Egyptian records testify 

 to the glory of the Hittites, it was not 

 until a year before the outbreak of the 

 World War that any orderly evidence 

 about this people came to light. One of 

 the two archeologists who found the key 

 to the Hittite mysteries was T. E. Law- 

 rence, now colonel in the English army, 

 major-general of the Arab forces, cham- 

 pion of Arabian rights in Syria and 

 |alien Prince of Mecca. 



The story of how a tow-headed, anemic 



|youth, once forced by invalidism to leave 



:he halls of Magdalen College, Oxford, 



tnd seek health in tramping tli rough 



>yria, later won over the Arabs to the 



Allied cause and enabled General Allenby 

 to win a decisive victory in Palestine, is 

 replete with romance. 



This brilliant and modest young scholar 

 first won fame as an archeologist at Car- 

 chemish, where the Bagdad Railway 

 bridges the Euphrates, and, in view of 

 the success he has since attained in deal- 

 ing with Orientals, it may be permissible 

 to quote from my article about him and 

 his colleague, Mr. C. Leonard Woolley, 

 which was published in 191 3. 



"Both Woolley and Lawrence are dis- 

 appointing archeologists. I expected to 

 find gray-haired old men with spectacles 

 and a scholarly stoop. Lawrence is ap- 

 parently in his early twenties, a clean-cut 

 blond with peaches-and-cream complex- 

 ion which the dry heat of the Euphrates 

 Valley seems powerless to spoil. 



"He wore a wide-brimmed Panama, a 

 soft white shirt open at the throat, an 

 Oxford blazer bearing the Magdalen Col- 

 lege emblem on the pocket, short white 

 flannel 'knickers/ partly obscured by a 

 Scotch decoration hanging from the belt, 

 which did not, however, obscure his bare 

 knees, below which he wore heavy gray 

 hose and red Arab slippers. 



"Woolley is also hopeless as an arche- 

 ologist. He is young and friendly and as 

 companionable as a college chum. Surely 

 not the stuff of which archeologists are 

 made. 



"But I fancy these two young men are 

 competent to hold down the Carchemish 

 'digs' for a while at least ; for better than 

 their years of excavating and their skill 

 in using French, German, ancient and 

 modern Greek, Turkish and Arabic, is 

 their remarkable knowledge of men. 



"I cannot give a correct estimate of 

 their worth as archeologists, but I do say 

 that they know more about handling Ori- 

 entals than any man I have met during 

 my two years in Syria. " 



ancient ruins at a cross-roads oe 

 future; empire 



Yet in the year that passed before I 

 was again their guest, these two youths 

 firmly established their claim to the title 

 of archeologists of the first rank, and 

 Lawrence's power to handle men has 

 since proved the deciding factor in swing- 

 ing the Arabs from loyalty to Turkey, as 



