CHAPTER XII FROM THE EUPHRATES TO THE TIGRIS We scrutinize the dates Of long-past human things, We search out dead men's words and works of dead men's hands. MATTHEW ARNOLD, "Empedocles on Etna." After a delightful but an all-too-short sojourn in Aleppo, made doubly delightful by our amiable Franciscan hosts and by their charming and hospitable friends whose number here, as everywhere else in Syria, is legion, we were once more on the road with our faces turned toward the mysterious and spell-weaving Orient. Although every hour that we had spent under the genial Syrian sun had been replete with its peculiar interest or pleasure, we longed to set foot on the land that is bounded by the famed rivers of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Our feeling, indeed, was somewhat akin to that expressed in Kipling's Mandalay, "If you've 'eard the East a-callin', why, you won't 'eed nothin' else." Boarding a train of the Bagdad Railway at the station on, the site of the erstwhile camp of the Crusaders under Baldwin, we were soon on our way towards our first objective, Jerablus on the Euphrates. Our course lay through the heart of a fertile country strewn with ruins and dotted with mud-built villages. The puffing locomotive made its way alternately along fruitful valleys and over rolling uplands whose state of cultivation showed that this region well deserved the name of "granary of northern Syria." And, notwithstanding the advent of the iron horse, the winding caravans which we frequently passed or overtook were proof conclusive that the service of the patient camel is likely to continue for a long time to come. It was but a few hours after leaving Aleppo that we caught the first glimpse of the Euphrates as it flowed through arid wastes and washed barren rocks and hills of sand. Although, like Ulysses, I Much had seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, I have seen few things that thrilled me more than my first view of this famous waterway. For, notwithstanding the fact that I had spent my early boyhood within a few hundred miles of the Mississippi, I was familiar with the name of the Euphrates before I had heard of that of our great "Father of Waters." And when, after nearly three score years of waiting, I at length found myself actually walking along the sandy marge of this stately river-a river that my earliest reading told me had its source in Paradiseand felt personal contact with it, it was in very truth an event in my life. It was, indeed, like meeting again a favorite friend of boyhood days. The emotions which I then experienced and the memories that were evoked have been expressed in part in the beautiful apostrophe of the poet Michel: All hail, Euphrates! stream of hoary time, What thoughts of earth's young morning dost thou bring! The bowers are crushed where Eve in beauty shone, Ages have whelmed, beneath their ruthless tide, But thou, exhaustless river! rollest still, Raising thy lordly voice by vale and hill; Sparkling through palm-groves, washing empires' graves; Mirroring the heavens, that know no change, like thee, A glittering dream, a bright-leaved history! No river in the world has played so prominent a rôle in the annals of our race, and none, not even the Nile, can boast of nobler traditions or a more illustrious history, or is richer in beautiful myths and soul-stirring legends. On its fertile banks, it is believed, was rocked the cradle of mankind and its glistening waters whisper secrets of longforgotten dynasties and murmurs the names of peoples of whom history has no record. It was long the barrier between the contending powers of the East and the West; between the forces of Persia and Greece, of Parthia and Rome. Eastern poets never tired in singing its praises and Arabian geographers loved to dilate on it as one of the great rivers of the earth. In the Bible the name of the Euphrates occurs as early as the second chapter of Genesis. According to scholars of repute the patriarch Abraham on his way to the Promised Land crossed it at Birejik, but a few miles north of where it is now spanned by the great steel bridge of the Bagdad Railway. In the Covenant which God had made with him the dominions of his posterity were to extend "from the river of Egypt1 even to the great river Euphrates." And, obedient to the command of the Lord to ". "go forth from kindred and out of his father's house . . . Abraham took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother's son and all the substance which they had gathered and all the souls which they had gotten in the land of Haran; and they went out to go into the land of Canaan." Crossing, then, the Euphrates near the spot where we crossed it ourselves they must, in order to find the necessary sustenance for their flocks and herds, have traversed the same fertile plain that had so engaged our attention on the way from Aleppo to Djerabis and probably by one of the sinuous caravan tracks that we noted from the car window. 2 But "The River," "The Great River," as the Jews called 1 According to recent investigations this was probably what is now known as the Wady el 'Arish and not the Nile, as usually supposed. 2 Genesis xii: 5. the Euphrates, was more celebrated in profane than in sacred history. This is particularly true of that stretch of the stream between the modern towns of Bir and Rakka. It was at Carchemish, which adjoins Djerabis, where the Hittites had the great capital and the powerful fortress which enabled them so long to control the commerce between Assyria and Babylonia on the east, and Phoenicia and Egypt on the west. It was at the same famous stronghold that Nebuchadnezzar II won a signal victory over PharaohNecho and his Greek and Asiatic allies. It was here also that Chosroes I crossed the river by building a bridge of boats at the time of his third campaign against the Byzantines as he had crossed it at Obbanes in his first expedition against Justinian. It was at Bir, formerly known as Zeugma-the Bridge-that Crassus and Seleucus Nicator passed into Mesopotamia, where the Roman general met such a tragic fate. It was at Thapsacus that Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger crossed the great waterway in the campaign that terminated so disastrously for the Persian Monarch at Cunaxa. It was here also, nearly a hundred years later, that Darius crossed "fleeing headlong eastwards with his broken army after the battle of Issus, with Alexander headlong at his heels." It was in the waters of the same famed river that Trajan and Julian the Apostate Islaked their horses' thirst. It was the same waters that witnessed the brilliant campaigns of Heraclius, the splendid triumphs of the Caliphs, and the devastating hordes of Timur and Jenghiz Khan. Tradition informs us that it was down these tawny waters that a frail craft carried Herodotus in his memorable visit to Babylon. And long before this date it was up the Euphrates, that Gisdhubar, the mythical hero of the great Babylonian epic, proceeded on his homeward voyage after having "by a suitable sacrifice," secured the good will of heaven for his undertaking. But, what has already been 3 3 Sayce's Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, p. 410 (London, 1898). Lucius said is more than enough to show that the rolling waters of the Euphrates are, in truth, "charged with the history of the ancient world." And, judging by the railroads and steamer lines that are planned or in operation, and the great irrigation works that are under construction for restoring to the vast Babylonian plain its old-time fertility, the day is not far distant when "The Great River" of the Jews will witness achievements which shall rival the glories of Babylon and its hanging gardens in the days of the city's greatest splendor and power. We had anticipated spending several days in Djerabis in order that we might have an opportunity to examine the remains of Carchemish that have recently been uncovered by the spade of the archæologist. The great number of sculptures, both in relief and in the round, which have been unearthed here are destined to throw a flood of light on the cultural and political histories of the great Hittite empire, and, when they shall have been thoroughly investigated, they will no doubt cause us greatly to modify, if not essentially alter, many of the views we have long entertained respecting one of the most powerful but least known peoples of the ancient world. Excavators here are fondly hoping that they may have the good fortune to turn up among these venerable ruins the long desired bilingual inscription that shall enable them to decipher the strange Hittite script that has so long baffled scholars. Such an inscription would supply them with a key to the history of a nation that was so long a rival of Egypt and Babylonia, and its discovery would truly mark a red-letter day in the annals of oriental research and scholarship.* Ampelius writing in his Liber Memorialis, Cap. II, of the origin of the constellations, refers to a more extraordinary legend in connection with the Euphrates. "Pisces ideo pisces quia bello Gigantum Venus perturbata in piscem se transfiguravit. Nam dicitur et in Euphrate fluvio ovum piscis in ora flumimis columba adsedisse dies plurimos et exclusisse deam benignam et misericordem hominibus ad bonam vitam. Utrique memoria causa pisces inter sidera locati." For an interesting report on the excavations made at Djerabis on behalf of the British Museum, see the beautifully illustrated monograph Carchemish (by D. G. Hogarth, London, 1915). |