But, if my hands were empty of honey,
and pearls and gold,

There were treasures far sweeter than

honey, and marvellous things to be told.

Whiter than pearls and brighter than
the cups at a Sultan's feast,

And these I have brought for love-tokens,
from the Lords of Truth, in my East.

FOREWORD

The following pages are the result of observations made and impressions received during a recent journey between one of the greatest capitals of Europe and the crumbling remains of what was in the long-ago the greatest capital of Asia. The route I followed was that which has been rendered famous by the migrations of the nations from the East to the West and by the march of armies from the days of Asurbanipal, Darius and Alexander to those of Harunal-Rashid, Godefroy de Bouillon and Kolmar von der Goltz.

The journey in question I made not as a tourist but as a student-as one interested not only in the present condition -social, economic, religious and intellectual-of the peoples of the countries through which I passed, and as one who had had an intense and lifelong interest in the history and civilization of the lands which intervene between the headwaters of the Danube and the lower reaches of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The ordinary tourist on pleasure bent would regard most of my journey as having been made through what is usually spoken of as "the unchangeable East." But to the student who is conversant with the long and eventful past of the Near East the storied belt which connects the Bosphorus with the Persian Gulf has been the theater of more and greater changes in humanity's development than any other portion of the earth's surface. It is the fons et origo of the oldest civilization-a civilization whose traditions carry us back to the Garden of Eden. It has witnessed the successive civilizations of the Babylonians and the Assyrians, of the Greeks and the Romans and of the Saracens under the caliphs. And each of these consecutive civilizations has left its monuments of imperial splendor-its temples and palaces and colonnades and its priceless gems of

plastic art. Some of these magnificent vestiges of a glorious past, like those of Palmyra, are still standing in the heart of the desert and have long since been abandoned to the roving Bedouin or the rapacious jackal. Others, like those of Ephesus and Pergamum and Nineveh, were long buried under sand and clay and have only recently been unearthed by the pick and the spade of the explorer and the archæologist. But wherever found, whether on the lonely plains and hillsides of Anatolia, or in the solitudes of the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, they possess for the studious traveler an attraction that is not offered in the same degree by any other section of the wide world.

Unlike the mysterious ruins in the steaming jungles of Yucatan or on the chilly plateau of Bolivia, which speak of an enigmatic race quite alien to our own, the remains of antiquity everywhere found in the lands between Stamboul and Babylon are of forms and designs with which we have been familiar from our youth and which belong to the same civilization from which our own is derived-the civilization that had its origin in the city-states of ancient Greece and that was subsequently introduced into western Asia by the soldiers of Alexander and Seleucus and firmly maintained there for centuries by the legionaries of imperial Rome.

To the student traveling through the Near East-especially along the route which I selected-the experience is, in many respects, like that of one passing through a vast museum. At every turn he meets something of rare and enthralling fascination. Now it is a remnant of a marble capital or architrave in a nomad's hut; then it is a forlorn granite column near a squalid Turkish village-all that remains of some stately temple or sumptuous theater of Greek or Roman greatness. Again it is the fragment of a tomb which was erected to the memory of one who played an important rôle in his day, but whose name and achievements have long since been forgotten. And hovering over these crumbling monuments of a misty past are legends innumerable, but all of entrancing human interest-an