and follows a course gradually converging upon that of its sister stream. Finally, near the sea, the two unite and issue as one river into the Persian Gulf.

The land traversed by these two rivers has, like the sister river-land of Egypt, been from time immemorial one of the great historic centers of human development. It divides into two portions of fairly equal length. For the first 400 miles the country gradually descends in a gentle slope from the mountains, forming an irregular triangle between the two rivers, within which the land becomes less and less hilly, as it sinks southward, till, as it nears the Euphrates, it becomes a broad steppe, which, beyond the river, rolls off into the desert. This portion is strictly the land called by the Greeks "Mesopotamia."

THE GREAT ALLUVIAL PLAIN

The second division is totally different in character. It is simply a great delta, like that of the Nile-a flat, alluvial plain, which has been entirely formed of the silt brought down from the mountains by the two great rivers.

The process of land-making is still going on, and the waters of the Persian Gulf are being pushed back at the rate of about 72 feet per annum. What this slow process may achieve in many centuries is evidenced by the fact that we know that the ancient town of Eridu was still, at about 3000 B. C.. an important seaport on the Persian Gulf. It is now 125 miles from the sea.

Both lands were entirely dependent for their habitability and fertility on the rivers which traversed them. In Mesopotamia the Tigris and the Euphrates have for long stretches channeled deep into the soil and flow below the level of the land. In the lower district-Babylonia-the ordinary level of the rivers is frequently above that of the surrounding plain; so that inundations are of frequent occurrence, and large tracts of the country are now unhealthy marshland.

In both cases, therefore, though for opposite reasons, the hand of man was needed to make the rivers helpful. In Mesopotamia the water was controlled by dikes and dams, which held it up until it was raised to the level of the land, over

which it was then distributed by canals. In Babylonia the surplus water was drawn off directly by a great canal sys tem, the banks of whose ancient arteries still stretch in formidable ridges across the plain.

FLOWING WITH MILK AND HONEY

Under the system of irrigation both lands were astonishingly fertile. Even today it can be seen that only well-directed work is needed to bring back the ancient fertility. After the spring rains the Mesopotamian slopes are clothed with rich verdure and are gay with flowers. But of old these lands were the wonder of the world for their richness.

Of Babylonia the Greek historian Herodotus wrote 2,350 years ago: "This territory is of all that we know the best by far for producing grain; as to trees, it does not even attempt to bear them, either fig or vine or olive; but for producing grain it is so good that it returns as much as two hundred fold for the average, and when it bears at its best, it produces three hundred fold.”

You had, then, a land which, in constant human occupation and with constant and organized attention to the details of irrigation, was capable of almost anything; but at the same time it was a land which, left to itself, went back quickly to wilderness. The parching heat of summer withered everything on the Mesopotamian uplands; the low levels of Babylonia very speedily became marsh if the waters were not regulated.

So, the hand of man being withdrawn or checked, both Mesopotamia and Babylonia went back to the state in which they were originally and in which we see them now. They became great barren wastes, the Mesopotamian slopes clad in spring with a brief beauty, then parched and desolate for the rest of the season; the Babylonian plains covered with swamp and jungle, where fever and malaria. breed continually.

DESOLATION SUCCEEDS LUXURIANCE

The desolation is only accentuated by the melancholy remains of human activity-canals choked and silted up till they have become fever beds instead of arteries; huge mounds of rubbish which once

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 inheritance 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 temple and tower, and said: "Is not this great Babylon, which I have built?" These things are part of our earliest and unforgettable 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 Nineveh, 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 memory of man that 400 years before Christ, when Xenophon 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 wonderful palaces and hanging gardens of Babylon. But where these cities stood and what had become of their glories, these were things utterly forgotten for close on 2,000 years.

"Babylon," said Isaiah, long before (Isaiah xiii: 19-22), "the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldee's excellency, 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 excited 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 fragments 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 remains, unlike the Roman and the Greek, have left no visible traces of their civilization or their arts; their influence has long since passed away. The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is con

templating; desolation meets desolation; a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder; for there is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead to hope, or to tell of what has gone by. These huge mounds of Assyria made a deeper impression upon me, gave rise to more serious thoughts and more earnest reflection than the temples of Baalbec, and the theaters of Ionia."

DARKNESS OF CENTURIES BROKEN

The darkness of centuries has since been broken, and broken mainly, in the first instance, by the man who wrote these sentences. Let us therefore seek to outline what we have gradually come to know of the earliest story of the human race in these lands, which seems, as far as can be judged, to be possibly the earliest story of the human race in the world that is to say, as civilized and organized beings.

Scripture, of course, places the first beginnings of human story in this land. The Garden of Eden is described in a way that leaves the actual situation which the writer was aiming to indicate very vague; but certainly it is in the neighborhood of the Euphrates, which is definitely named as one of the rivers which water it; and the word “Eden" itself is the ordinary term for a plain in the Sumerian speech, the oldest language existing in this region.

THE GARDEN OF THE PLAIN

So the Garden of Eden simply meant the Garden of the Plain, and the first forefathers of our race were believed to have had their home in this most fertile spot. The story of the Deluge moves in the same region, and the Babylonian records preserve a tradition which corresponds almost detail for detail with that of Noah and the Ark.

In Genesis xi we have the Hebrew tradition of the beginnings of organized civilization, with the rise of the first city, and the origin of the strifes and jealousies which have separated the various nations from one another. It is, of course, poetically described, but the place where these beginnings occurred and the methods adopted by these earliest organizers of the race are stated with perfect clear

ness, and they correspond exactly with the conditions existing in Babylonia.

"It came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, 'Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, 'Go to, let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'"

Here we have the terse and vivid statement of what must necessarily have happened when men first began to realize their powers and to organize themselves in such a land. The writer of Genesis puts in two sentences, as if it were a single act, what no doubt, in actual fact, took hundreds or perhaps thousands of years to attain.

But there and in that fashion there is no doubt that cities took their rise and civilization began to develop. The fertile plain invited habitation. Men felt the need of gathering for mutual protection against their human enemies or the wild beasts which abounded; and when they cast about as to how to build they found themselves faced by the fact that Babylonia produces no building stone.

Their buildings had to be reared of the mud of which their land was composed; and, from the dawn of history to its close, buildings in Babylonia were of brick, huge masses of crude sun-dried mud, cased on the outside only with the harder kiln-burned bricks.

A CITY FOR PROTECTION AND A TOWER FOR

WORSHIP

"A city and a tower," says the writer, and again he is true to the facts. The city for protection and the tower for worship. For the characteristic feature of Babylonian temple architecture, distinguishing it sharply from the Egyptian temples, with their succession of chambers on the ground level, is the "Ziggurat," or temple tower, rising in successive stages, each stage a little less in area than the one beneath it, until the shrine on the summit is reached.