8 
LAND & WATER 
March 15, 1017 
from the Black Sea cnunlrus l)\- Uu- liK'i* valley to 
meet there the stream of exchange tlowing westward 
from Asia. . 
The points of junction, therefore, which were the knots 
or " nodal points " of the system— the points where the 
great trade routes, crossed the twin river system- 
were bound to play a very great part politically, and 
strategically as well. Babylon upon the Euphrates in 
classical times ; Bagdad upon the Tigris in the dark and 
early Middle Ages were centres of this kind. Those who 
possessed these centres were the natural lords of an 
influence which extended far beyond the boundaries of 
Mesopotamia itself. ' They cither attracted into their 
orbit, or directly ruled, the" Median Hills and the Persian 
Plateau beyond. Their influence at times extended 
westward to the Mediterranean, and e\-cn into Egypt. 
The origins of consecutive Grecian history are principally 
concerned with the struggle between our race upon the 
iEgean and the Asiatic Monarchy which had reached that 
sea, although its centre was upon the distant Euphrates. 
Upon such a situation, after it had lasted for no one 
knows how many thousands of years, there came an his- 
torical accident "which, by a sort of paradox, enhanced 
the political and strategical value of Bagdad in particular 
while diminishing or obhterating the value of nearly all 
the rest of the district. 
This historical accident was twofold. It consisted 
in the divergence of the eastern trade route from the land 
to the sea, and from a long march across Western Asia 
to the .ocean voyage round the Cape of Good Hope. It is 
partly as a consequence of this material cause, but more 
through the second cause, the moral cause, a change in the 
political method and temper of government following upon 
great and destructive wars in which the irrigation system 
of Mesopotomia fell into ruins, that the whole vast district 
fell out of human use and reverted to the aspect — though 
not the sterility — of a desert. The destruction of the 
last relics in this system of irrigation was comparatively 
modern, and the traveller notes to this day innumerable 
evidences of that system no longer used, but still mani- 
festing its former extent. The greater canals can still 
be traced for days of marching through the deserted land, 
still contain isolated patches of water in places, and are 
still marked, as are the banks of the rivers, by mounds 
covering the ruins of what were once great towns. The 
building material of the district (which was brick) 
hastened the material decay of the abandoned cities. 
These have left above ground, and in evidence, far less 
for the modern traveller to note than he can still sec of 
much smaller western places equally abandoned but origin- 
ally built of stone. Municipal hfe and civilisation in 
general have disappeared. But surviving as the one 
considerable exception in the whole ruin is the city of 
Bagdad, and Bagdad has so survived because it is the 
last remaining nodal point in all these hundreds of miles. 
The one way left and the only way by which 
wheeled traffic can climb on to the Persian Plateau, and 
the chief way which even boasts of burden must follow 
in this eastern traffic, comes from the west to the Tigris 
at Bagdad and from Bagdad proceeds eastward through 
the only easy gate which the Median mountains afford 
up on]to the highland of Persia and so to the further East. 
Bagdad is the cross roads where the river traffic running 
north and south is crossed by the trade traffic running 
east and west. 
The reason that Bagdad stands where it does is that it 
is at once the most convenient point of transhipment 
between the Upper and Lower Tigris, and the point where 
the "Tigris approaches nearest to the Euphrates in their 
middle course. 
Of these twin facts the point of transhipment is the 
chief. Upon every great river you will find a town of 
this sort, nearly at the point of junction between two 
different kinds of water-borne traffic ; and its station is 
decided by the nature of the vessels employed in the 
civilisation which gave it birth. There is always some 
reach where the larger type of vessel communicating with 
the sea or with a port at the mouth of a river (if the river 
is navigable at all) finds that it has fairly reached t he- 
limit of its usefulness and leaves the water conununica- 
tion further up-stream to a smaller type of vessel. In our 
Northern seas this point of transhipment is often in the 
neighbourhood of the limit of the tides. Upon water courses 
which are very rapid, or shallow, it will be nearer the sea : 
uponmorenavigable,rivir> il will in- lurilui ialaud. JluL 
you always find it. It is the mart created by the necessity 
or habit of transhipment. Such is London upon the 
Thames, Rouen upon the Seine, Nantes upon the Loue. 
such originally was ,Rome upon the Tiber, and such is 
Bagdad upon the Tigris. To this day the main traffic 
upon the Tigris above Bagdad comes down to the city 
in the light skin rafts and boats characteristic of the 
river. Below Bagdad, in spite of the difficulty of 
navigation and the rapidly varying height of the stream, 
modern steamers and large sail-rigged vessels, of 
immemorial date, can ply. 
Now Bagdad thus established at a nodal point and 
combining the use of the Tigris witli the use of the 
main caravan road perpendicular to that stream, happens, 
as we have said, to be also the only considerable sur- 
vival of all that vast and once densely populated country. 
Hence the paradox defined above that Bagdad ha 
acquired a political and a strategic importance all thf 
greater through the ruin of Mesopotamia. The possessioi 
of this one great city is a necessity to the control of the 
Persian frontiers and to any full communication with tlu 
Persian Plateau beyond. And to this one great city 
there is to-day no alternative. It is a necessity to the 
control of the Tigris ; it commands the control of the 
Euphrates which passes at its nearest pomt at only one long 
cavalry day from the city. That is why Bagdad was the 
appointed terminus of the j*reat Near Eastern railway 
which was the chief design of the German Imperialists ; that 
is why in a country half barbarous you will find no less than 
six telegraph and telephone lines converging upon it as a 
centre, six of the main great tracks or roads ; that is why 
there is here established the only seat of Government 
worthy of such a name for many hundreds of miles. It is 
the half-way house upon the only direct route from the 
west over-land to the Persian cities and thence to India ; 
it is the necessary economic base of any great scheme for 
the resurrection of Mesopotamia such as various 
European Powers (of late years in particular the (jer- 
mans) in turn have dreamed. And all this is the reason 
that Bagdad has been, ever since the first months of the 
war, one of the main objectives of the Entente as a whole 
and of Great Britain in particular ; because Great Britain 
is, of all the Powers of the Entente, that one most directly 
concerned with the East of which Bagdad is already in 
part (and must be still more in future) the main entry. 
The Great Persian Road 
I have said that the Persian-Turkish front in particular 
was dependent upon Bagdad, and that the victory of Sir 
Stanley Maude at Kut, with the very rapid operations 
succeeding it, would necessarily re-act at once upon 
the enemy's forces operating above the Persian Plateau. 
The political importance, both to the Russians and 
to the English, of this plateau are obvious and need not 
be discussed. Its strategical aspect, and the movements 
over it consequent upon the operations of the last year 
and a half, more directly concern us. They will be 
appreciated if we study in some detail the great road 
which leads up from Bagdad on to this Persian plateau, 
and which we have seen to be the only feasible avenue of 
communication upon which the Tuikish armies operating 
there could depend. The road of all tht armies, of 
Darius — whose sculptures ornament the rock abo\^e 
Bisitun — of Alexander, of Harun-al-Raschid. 
The Persian highlands come to a sort of western edge 
beyond which the ground falls very rapidly and steeply 
down on to the Mesopotamian plain. And this edge is 
known in history as the Median mountain district. 
The formation would be a simple one, and easily 
grasped, did the watershed correspond to the great 
frontier range. But it does not so correspond. The long 
process of the Median mountains running from north to 
south (and reaching heights of 12,000 feet) is not a 
boundary between two water systems. On the contrary, 
innmnerable streams which ultimately reach the Mesopo- 
tamian plain and the Tigris rise far to the east of the 
frontier ridge or escarpment of the Persian plateau ; 
and this escarpment is cut in a hundred places by the 
torrents descending upon the plain, which have their 
sources from a hundred to 130 miles beyond upon the 
ulateau itself. The Median mountains themselves are not 
