CHAPTER THREEI go to Babylon and see the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's city. I make a journey to Ur of the Chaldees and walk the streets of the city in which Abraham was born. I cross the desert again and pass south through Syria and Palestine into Egypt.
§ I
ALONG the most incongruous acts of my life is the journey I made in a taxi-cab to Babylon. The Baghdad driver is unaware of any conflict in association between his cab and Babylon, and he often pulls up at the kerb and suggests that you might like to take a taxi there at a specially cut price.
The ruins are sixty miles south of Baghdad, and the journey takes three to four hours. The road begins well enough, but soon becomes rough and uneven. I knew we were drawing near when we crossed a single railway track running over the sand, and I saw a notice-board bearing, in English and Arabic, the words: " Babylon Halt."
I have read books which have described the humiliations visited by Time upon what was once the mightiest city in the world, but this notice-board translated them into the idiom of our own civilisation. That " the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldee's excellency " should be known as a " halt," a place which even local trains pass with a derisive whistle, seemed to me as bitter as anything prophesied by Isaiah.
As we went on, I saw on every side sandy mounds lying in the sunlight of mid-day: some were large enough to be called hills, others were low ridges, and still more were only uneasy risings and fallings of the earth. But for miles around, wherever this astonishing ruin lay, the earth was blasted and unhappy with the memory of Babylon. So this was the city whose Hanging Gardens were among the Seven Wonders of the World, four-horse chariots could pass on its walls; on one altar alone a thousand talents' worth of incense was burned every year. I looked at it in astonishment, remembering the words of a man who had tried to dissuade me from going to Babylon: " There is nothing to see," he had told me. " You will be sorry if you go."
But even before I left the car, I thought I had never seen anything more impressive and more terrible. As for there being " nothing to see," I doubt whether there is any place in the world in which the imagination can see more.
I climbed a sandy hill in which are embedded the impressive remains discovered by German archaeologists from 1899 to 1917. At first it is difficult to understand them, for you see acre upon acre of brown mud brick walls, broken vaulting, and the lower storeys and cellars of buildings lying in such confusion that only a trained architect could sort them out with any certainty. Palace and hovel, wall and roadway, are equally humbled in this post mortem. But one section of the ruins still stands in unmistakable splendour: the great Ishtar Gate of Babylon built by Nebuchadnezzar. Its towers rise to a height of forty feet, and its mud bricks bear the impression in high relief of a hundred and fifty-two animals, almost life size, alternate rows of bulls and dragons, once brilliantly enamelled, but now bared to the mud from which they were moulded.
What a fortunate discovery this was! Nothing looks drearier than mud bricks all the same shape, dull in colour, crumbling and already returning to the dust whence they came. Even uncarved stone has a quality and a beauty which are absent from mud. And as I looked at these acres covered with Babylonian bricks, I wondered if the buildings in this land were really as beautiful as we have been told they were. But the survival of the bulls and the dragons on the Ishtar Gate leave no doubt. The bulls stride forward with the grace and spirit of young horses, clipped like French poodles. Their hair from head to tail along the back, round the jaw, under the belly, down the chest, and curving round the haunches, was arranged in fringes of tight little curls, in which jewels or beads may have been tied. What superb animals they are; not massive and heavy like the Egyptian Apis, nor fantastic and half-human like the Assyrian bull, but proud, vigorous, young creatures, striding forward into the morning and capable of taking a five-barred gate. I think the bulls of the Ishtar Gate are the finest surviving examples of Babylonian art.
Their companions, the dragons or " sirrush," are equally well done, but they are not so appealing because they represent no known animal. They may have been put there to frighten Medes and Persians. The " sirrush " is really a compromise between a serpent, a lynx, and an eagle: the head, body, and tail are those of a scaly snake, the forelegs are those of a lynx, and the hind legs, which end in talons, might be those of any large bird of prey.
The " sirrush " is pictured on many other Babylonian works of art. Professor Koldewey, who discovered the Ishtar Gate, thinks it possible that the priests kept some strange reptilian creature in the darkness of a temple and exhibited it as a living " sirrush." If this is so, it lends colour to the story of Daniel and the Dragon, which appears in many forms but is not printed in the Book of Daniel. The story is that Daniel refused to worship a dragon in Babylon and offered .to slay the creature single-handed. He was therefore placed in the animal's den, presumably in the belief that he would never emerge from it; but he took with him a potent pill, composed chiefly of hair and bitumen, which he persuaded the dragon to swallow. The poor " sirrush" then died; some accounts say that it blew up.
From the top of the mound you look down over the basements and the brick vaulting of Nebuchadnezzar's Palace. And how hard it is to realise that those incoherent masses of building material nearby are all that remain of the Hanging Gardens, or that the mark like the shadow of a broad road losing itself round Babylon is the line of the mighty walls which once astonished all who saw them.
The flat country stretches to the sky, featureless, bare, and arid, except to the west, where the Euphrates flows in a narrow belt of palm trees. You see no river, but you see this line of foliage running for miles, like a green snake on the sand. Even the " waters of Babylon " have deserted the city, for in ancient times the river ran along the west side of the Kasr, bringing with it the happy sound of water and trees and flowers. As if obeying a command that no touch of life should remain anywhere near Babylon, the Euphrates has carved a new channel for itself and has departed, taking all life with it.
While I stood on the summit of the ruins, an Arab approached and told me that he had worked there with Professor Koldewey. His name was Umran Hamed, " the guide of Babylon." He was a good fellow, and he had absorbed a quantity of accurate information from the German archaeologists, which he was tireless in imparting. We walked about the ruins and he pointed out many things which I should have missed without him.
He showed me the vestiges of three wells in the foundations of the Hanging Gardens and a chamber which he said was a " refrigerator." As he had just confused the word partridge with cartridge, I wondered whether he had got this right.
" Yes; where food was kept cold in snow," he said earnestly.
" Have you ever seen a refrigerator ? "
" No, sir," he replied, " but I have heard the Germans talking."So if Umran overheard correctly, perhaps the lower stages of the Hanging Gardens were stored with cold foods, iced sherberts, and other cool things for the Median princess for whose pleasure Nebuchadnezzar made these gardens. It is believed that in this flat land she became homesick for her native mountains, just as the Jews must have done, and to please her the King ordered the construction of an artificial mountain terraced with gardens. The word " hanging " is not a good description of these gardens. The Greek word is kremastos, which was used in ancient Greek for a man hanged and is used in modern Greek for a suspension bridge.
It is certain that the Hanging Gardens were as solidly anchored to the earth as a pyramid. Like everything else in Babylonia, they were built of mud brick and constructed like a pyramid, or ziggurat, rather like the Mappin Terraces at the Zoo. Water was pumped up from the wells in the foundations to irrigate the gardens. Each series of terraces was planted with trees and flowers, and artificial water-courses may have run musically here and there. In this lovely botanical garden the princess wandered—longing, perhaps, for a piece of real rock. One hopes that Nebuchadnezzar's manly attempt to compensate a lady for a change of scenery was a success. No man, certainly, could have done more; but history, and even the lives of humble men, suggest that such gigantic gestures are not always the most acceptable. Perhaps beneath the troubled bones of Babylon there lies a tablet which records how the maid of the mountains received this proof of the King's affection, when, after many months of labour and laborious rock-gardening, Nebuchadnezzar led her forth.
" Do you call that a garden? Why, it isn't even a hill! "
I asked Umran what he thought the Hanging Gardens were like. He smiled rapturously and replied:
" Like the gardens of Paradise."He led me to a convulsion in the earth such as you see behind a scaffolding in the City of London when a large building has been pulled down. It was the site of the great ziggurat of Babylon, the temple tower called E-temen-an-ki, which archaeologists say was the traditional Tower of Babel. It was evidently a ziggurat of typical Baby Ionian form, rising by a series of stages sufficiently high above the dusty plain to give astronomers an uninterrupted view of the sky. On the topmost stage was a temple, containing only a table and a couch which was occupied at night, said Herodotus, by a single woman chosen by the deity out of all the women in the land. It has been proved by inscriptions that this temple and its high tower go back to the first age of Babylon, and that it was reconstructed from time to time by various kings.
We came to a series of broken arches which once supported the banqueting-hall of Nebuchadnezzar. This was the hall where, according to the Book of Daniel, Belshazzar saw the writing on the wall.
And as we wandered over the lonely mounds, silent except for the hum of the wild bee and the hornet, I thought how literally Isaiah's prophecy of the fall of Babylon has been fulfilled. It is, indeed, overthrown as 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; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But 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. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces..."
The " broad walls " of Babylon have been " utterly broken," as Jeremiah prophesied; her gates have been " burned with fire "; the city has indeed become " an astonishment " and " an hissing without an inhabitant." The words of Jeremiah have become literally true; the city is in " heaps." What word better describes this awful desolation: " And Babylon shall become heaps."
Isaiah prophesied that among the haunters of the ruins would be the kipp6d, a Hebrew word which has puzzled translators of the Bible. In the Authorised Version it is translated as " bittern "; in the Revised Version it has been altered to " porcupine." I drew an admirable porcupine in my note-book and asked Umran if he had seen anything like it in the ruins.
His face lit up with recognition at once.
" Ah, yes," he said, " it is the kunfudh. It is shy and comes in the night."I saw no porcupines, jackals, serpents, owls, or any of the prophet's fauna, but I saw a creature that was not mentioned —a hare. He was the only living creature we disturbed all the time we were walking about the ruins. We put him up not far from Nebuchadnezzar's banqueting-hall.
" Look," cried Umran, " 'Arnabeh! "And a big hare sprang up and went off across the centre of the city.
When we returned to the Ishtar Gate, Umran pointed out the site of the " den " in which Daniel is said to have survived his ordeal with the lions. It is probable that lions were kept in the moat round the Ishtar Gate, and when Professor Koldewey began his excavations, he discovered thousands of coloured tiles at this place. When put together, these tiles formed lions, some with white bodies and yellow manes, and others with yellow bodies and red manes. He thought that about a hundred and twenty lions must have guarded the main gate of Babylon.
Among the most interesting things to be seen in Babylon are bricks still stuck together with asphalt instead of mortar, exactly as Herodotus described them. He was in Babylon about a century after its fall, when it was still the greatest city in the world, although some of the buildings had been torn down. Possibly the punishment it had received from Xerxes gave the builders plenty to do, so that Herodotus may often have watched the asphalt gangs at work with their trolleys of boiling pitch.
The method of building was to lay a thin film of hot asphalt between each row of bricks; and bricks cemented in this way are so firm that they have to be broken apart with a pick-axe. Every now and then a layer of reeds would be inserted, and you can see their clear impression in the asphalt, in places where the reeds have rotted away. Supplies of asphalt were available, says Herodotus, at Hit, about seventy miles west-north-west of Baghdad, a town which even today smells horribly of sulphurated hydrogen, and has two asphalt wells, one hot and the other cold, within thirty feet of one another. Asphalt is, of course, found all over the Persian oilfields, and also round about Mosul.
In ancient times writers from the West were invariably surprised and interested by the bricks and asphalt, which they regarded as a Babylonian characteristic, as indeed it was. The Tower of Babel was constructed of mud brick and asphalt, a word translated in the Bible as " slime." What better account of a Babylonian building operation could we have than the verse in Genesis which describes the building of the ziggurat of Babel:
" And they said, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar."The Ark received a coat of asphalt outside and inside; and this is still given by the natives of Irak to the boats and barges which sail the Tigris and the Euphrates today.
§ 2
It is interesting to the Bible student that the excavated ruins in Babylon are nearly all of the time of the Jewish Captivity.
If you see an inscribed brick still in position in the walls of Babylon—and there are still many such—you may be almost sure that it bears the name of Nebuchadnezzar.I suppose everyone who has visited Babylon says to himself the opening words of that exquisite psalm:
By the rivers of Babylon,No misfortune in history has produced a greater literature than the Exile, and never has the emotion of home-sickness been so surely and beautifully expressed. I had brought a Bible with me, and I turned here and there to the pages of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and that hero of the captivity, Ezekiel, who between them have preserved, as nowhere else is preserved, the atmosphere of a doomed city of the early world. What burning, living words they are! The story is bitter with the salt of tears and burning with a fire of anger and contempt. As long as the words of these men live, the dust of the Egyptian chariot-wheels is suspended in the air, the Assyrian archers stand with bent bows, and Babylonian rams are lifted against the walls. They do not write calmly, like Greek historians, but wildly, like men shouting from a street corner, and there is a rise and fall of their voices which at times drops to tears and at others lifts itself into a scream. There are many beautiful and heart-rending incidents in ancient literature, but never, I think, have men handed to another age such an impression of frenzied emotion, such hope, and such blistering hatred.
There we sat down, yea, we wept,
When we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps
Upon the willows in the midst thereof.The modern world had already been born when the prophets were hailing the downfall of the great oriental empires—Nahum shouting the death of Assyria, Isaiah prematurely killing Egypt, and Jeremiah prophesying the death of Babylon. Greek ships and Greek soldiers were serving with the Egyptian army as it marched into Syria under the Pharaoh Necho. The poet Alcaeus had a brother named Antimenidas, who took service under Nebuchadnezzar; he was present at the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., and probably saw the second batch of Jewish exiles carried off to Babylon. When Babylon fell in 539 B.C., and the Exile was over, there were men alive who were destined to fight at the battle of Marathon.
The Jews were not taken into Babylon all at ®nce, but in three groups, over a period of sixteen years, and the longest term of captivity was about sixty years. Therefore it is possible that Daniel may have entered Babylon as a young boy, have lived there throughout the Exile, and, as an old man, have seen his people receive permission to return to Jerusalem. The Jews were not the only people taken into captivity in this age, for it was the custom at that time to deport whole populations and give the land to other settlers; but they are the only exiles who retained their racial and religious identity.
There was good reason why Nebuchadnezzar should have deported them. Long before his time it had been the policy of the Egyptians to interpose a barrier of rebellious and unfriendly states between themselves and Assyria, and, when Assyria fell, against its successor Babylon.
Before he became king, Nebuchadnezzar was obliged to march an army south to purge Syria of Egyptian influence, and had his father not died as he was nearing Egypt, it is probable that he would have marched on into the Delta. As it was, Nebuchadnezzar hastily concluded an armistice with Egypt by which he retained sovereignty of the Syrian states, and, taking with him a squadron of light cavalry, returned swiftly to Babylon to make sure of his inheritance.
Hardly was his back turned than Egyptian agents continued their propaganda among the tribute people of Syria, who were ready, like all debtors, to think the worst of the creditor. Judah, a small state torn by faction and rebellion, was all too willing to intrigue. The Jews were divided into two parties: the nationalist pro-Egyptian, anti-priest party, which talked of casting off the Babylonian yoke, and the priestly party, which viewed the impending disasters as the just vengeance of God for the sins of His chosen people. God had made Assyria the scourge of His wrath when the Ten Tribes of Israel had been taken away into Assyria a hundred and thirty years previously. He would again place the whip in the hands of Babylon and chastise Judah in the same way. That was the message of the prophets.
As we read the prophets, we must admit that the list of Jewish sins is a hair-raising catalogue of transgression. The Jews had lapsed into all manner of vice and paganism. Incense was burned to Baal every morning on the house-tops, and Jehovah's Temple was the scene of secret rites which may have been borrowed from Egypt. The priests of Moloch lit their fires in the Vale of Hinnom, and false gods were set up everywhere. Through the chaos of the times the prophets strode, proclaiming the coming vengeance; and in the palace the King, his Court officials, and his officers whispered with Egyptian envoys.
Nebuchadnezzar's intelligence department was well chosen, for the great King seems to have lieard of plots in good time to take action. There is ample evidence that he was a man of a kindly, patient nature: Judah would never have received the same consideration from the fierce Assyrians. Nevertheless Nebuchadnezzar's warnings had no effect on the factions in Jerusalem, and in 597 B.C. he set out with an army to call Judah to order. It was the approach of this army, with its Chaldean and Babylonian infantry, its notoriously fierce Scythian and Median cavalry, and its strangely armoured Greek mercenaries, that inspired the prophet Habakkuk to one of those utterances which, though splendid as prose, must have been distinctly nerve-wracking to an already ever-wrought population:
" They are terrible and dreadful," he cried, " their judgment and their dignity shall proceed from themselves. Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from afar: they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat. They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand."
But when the Babylonian armies came before Jerusalem the Jewish King, Jehoiakim, lay dead within the walls, and his eighteen year old son reigned instead. Realising the futility of opposing Nebuchadnezzar, the young King and his mother, accompanied by the high officials and officers of state, the ministers and the eunuchs, came out and prostrated themselves before the King, who dealt with them not at all in the manner of an oriental despot. Men had been blinded, made dumb, and crucified for lesser crimes than the Jewish sedition. But Nebuchadnezzar contented himself by sending the royal family, the Court officials, the leading army officers, and all the best artisans into exile in Babylon. Among this first group of exiles was the prophet Ezekiel. After appointing the twenty-one year old Zedekiah to be king— Judah's last king—Nebuchadnezzar marched his armies home.
Jerusalem was not destroyed and the bulk of her population was undisturbed; and so it might have remained had the Jews not stubbornly resumed their intrigues with Egypt. Young Zedekiah, a weak, amiable noble, who in less dangerous times might have made an ideal monarch, lacked the firmness necessary to stand out against the violently nationalist court faction. Jeremiah could see the futility of further revolt, and did everything in his power to save his countrymen from rushing on disaster.
" Serve the king of Babylon and live," he cried, " wherefore should this city be laid waste ? "
Hissed, shunned, and imprisoned as a pacifist and pro-Babylonian, he still continued his warnings. There were some who said that the Exile would be a short affair and that the exiles would soon be home again. In order to stamp out this belief and to prepare Judah for her ordeal, Jeremiah wrote to the exiles, telling them to settle down in Babylon:
" Build ye houses and dwell in them; and plant gardens and eat the fruit of them; take ye wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands. . . . And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives..."
He turned to his own people in Jerusalem and prophesied the new woes that would fall upon them for their sins. His words were unheeded, and Nebuchadnezzar, seeing that the Jews despised his former clemency, determined no longer to deal gently with them.
It was 586 B.C., eleven years after the first captives had been taken to Babylon. Zedekiah had allowed Jerusalem to become a centre for the plotting of the discontented neighbouring states, Tyre and Sidon, Moab and Ammon. A revolt was planned, probably under the general direction of Egypt, from which at the last moment Edom, Moab, and the Philistines retired. But Judah, Tyre, and Ammon held firm.
When Nebuchadnezzar came south, he was faced by three enemies, with, of course, the shadow of the real enemy, Egypt, always in the background. Ezekiel, who was in Babylon and had heard the story from the Babylonian side, gives us a glimpse of the great King halting by the Orontes and wondering which of his enemies to attack first. He used divination by arrows, and sought an augury by gazing into the liver of an animal. Then remaining behind with a reserve force, he launched two armies, one against Tyre and the other against Jerusalem. Rock inscriptions cut by the army sent against Tyre are still to be seen below the gorge at Nahr-el-Kalb, near Beyrout.
After a siege of eighteen months, the Babylonian battering-rams made a breach in the mighty wall of Jerusalem, and the city, which had been defended with gallantry, though with frenzied discord, was entered by the armies. This time Nebuchadnezzar was merciless. He levelled the town walls, destroyed the Temple, laid waste the city, put out the eyes of Zedekiah, slew his sons, and sent the King with all the nobles in chains to Babylon. This was the second group of exiles.
A population still remained under a Governor, Gedaliah, and among them was the prophet Jeremiah, who had been singled out by Nebuchadnezzar for special treatment. Had the King heard, one wonders, those impassioned pleadings, so well known to us, in which Jeremiah begged his countrymen to respect the power of their masters? Surely we can have no doubt about it. And, having read them, Nebuchadnezzar recognised in the prophet one who, from entirely unworldly motives, was an unexpected ally. Therefore the King himself gave orders that Jeremiah was to be offered the choice of going to Babylon or of remaining in the ruined city.
"All the land is before thee, whither it seemeth good and convenient for thee to go, thither go," he was told. And Jeremiah elected to stay in Judah. He saw with despair how even the Jews left behind continued to plot and rebel until, having murdered the Governor and allied themselves with the Moabites, the Babylonians again descended on them and made a third deportation. From far off in Babylon a warning cry came from Ezekiel condemning the rebels pitilessly, for the full time of retribution was not yet. But the rebels answered that they would fight on and continue to bum incense to the Queen of Heaven. In the last moments of the expiring state, Jeremiah was carried off into Egypt.
But what happened to the Jews during their exile in Babylon? How did they employ themselves? Were they all weeping on the river banks, or was there another side to the picture? That a brighter side existed is proved by the reluctance shown by the Jews to return and rebuild Zion when the captivity was over. They were not poor slaves as their ancestors had been in Egypt. No one compelled them to make bricks, although they were in the greatest brick-making country on earth. We can be sure that had they been oppressed, we should have been told about it by the prophets. That there was hardship, and that the various groups of exiles received varying treatment, some good and some bad, goes without saying. The prophet known as the Second Isaiah, who detested Babylon, mentions that the Babylonians showed no mercy and that upon the aged the yoke was heavy, which suggests that perhaps some were forced, regardless of age, to labour on the canals and dykes, or to engage in the hard work that is always going on in an artificially irrigated country. On the other hand, there is no hint of oppression in Ezekiel's description of the land of exile as " a land of traffick," " a city of merchants," " a fruitful field " into which a colony was transplanted like a willow beside many waters. And Jeremiah, who was a realist, would not have written from Jerusalem to tell the exiles to settle down, plant gardens, and eat the fruit thereof unless this comfortable life had been possible.
The immense city of Babylon, with its fertile country, its hordes of officials, its bankers, its markets, its quays, and its countless industries, offered the quick-witted Jews thousands of opportunities for getting on in the world. It was no doubt in Babylon that the Jew first went into business.
Was the wealthy and old-established firm of Egibi, which for generations handled the financial business of the Babylonian court, a Hebrew firm, one wonders? Hundreds of clay tablets recording their banking and mercantile transactions have been found in the ruins of Babylon, and are now in the British Museum. It has been pointed out that Egibi is Babylonian for Jacob, and it has been suggested that the founder of the firm may have been a member of one of the lost Ten Tribes who, having found his way to Babylon from Assyria, set up in business and prospered. Many of the tablets record the lending of money at 20 per cent. interest, so that Egibi and Company had obviously cast over any old-fashioned Hebrew> prejudice against usury. It is interesting, too, that although the name of the firm remained Egibi (Jacob and Company), all the members of the family had taken Babylonian names such as Itti-Marduk-balatu and Marduk-nasir-aplu, which incorporate the name of the local diety in an encouraging and disarming manner, much in the same way, perhaps, as many a Jew has been known to consider Mackintosh a better trade name than Cohen.
The house of Egibi was evidently an organisation that managed estates, sold land and house-property, dealt in slaves and palm-groves, and was ready to lend anything from onions to shekels of silver. Even if the firm observed a chilling attitude to their brethren from Judah, which as members of Israel they may well have done, there can be little doubt that their success must have fired the exiles with ambition and have opened up new and glorious horizons.
But for the presence of a small group of religious men whose splendid vision and high faith in the future shone bright in exile, the Jews might have been lost among their conquerors. First among the teachers was Ezekiel, whose house at Tel-Abib, " the Cornhill," was the meeting-place of those who were building a new Judah. Ezekiel, while he welcomed the Exile as his nation's second chance, lived in the future, with a complete programme for the new state in his mind: a theocratic state with the Temple of the Lord, and not the King's palace, as its centre and core. Ezekiel is interesting also because, as he went from house to house preaching, prophesying, and laying down the rough draft of the New Jerusalem, he not only for the first time developed the conception of the Good Shepherd who tenderly cares for his fold, but for the first time in the history of religion exhibited a care of souls which almost reminds one of St. Paul.
" As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day. ... I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord God."
With these words of Ezekiel, written in Babylon, we seem to have entered the New Testament. Another great prophet, perhaps the greatest of all, was the unknown writer of chapters xi-iv of Isaiah-—a prophet called the Second Isaiah—whose whole heart was set upon a return to Jerusalem.
In the literary atmosphere of the great city, where scribes were numerous and accounts of even the most casual daily transactions were committed to clay tablets, stored, and docketed in vast libraries, it is natural that those who believed in the future of Judaism should have written and edited the history of their nation. Many of the books of the Old Testament, as we have them in the Bible to-day, date from this period. Thus the literary work of the Exile kept alive the religious and national spirit, and helped the God-fearing among the captives to possess their souls in humility and patience and to bring up their children in righteousness. In this way was Judaism born, preserved, and eventually sent forth into the world. The history of the Children of Israel had ended: the history of the Jews had begun.
At the end of their sixty-years' nominal captivity, the Jews were to witness an event which is often misinterpreted and is always known misleadingly as the " Fall of Babylon." After Nebuchadnezzar's death the crown passed swiftly from head to head, coming at last to Nabonid or Nabunahid, who was literally a devout antiquary. He spent his time digging up ruined temples and inquiring into ancient cults. There is something pathetic in the thought of this monarch attempting to bring the past of his country to light, while all the time the future was rising to overwhelm him. He made the fatal mistake of introducing into Babylon another band of exiles, the gods of Babylonia. He gathered them from all parts and centralised worship in Babylon. They were expensive guests, and funds had to be diverted from the normal ecclesiastical endowments for their upkeep. Thus the priests of Babylon were angry, and the people from whom the exiled gods had been wrenched considered themselves unrepresented in heaven. So the reign of Nabonid holds a warning to all antiquaries and archaeologists who may feel inclined to introduce their harmless passions into public life. This King eventually locked himself up with his studies in a palace at Teima, and may even have abdicated in favour of his son, Belshazzar, whose hands, it seems, held the government of Babylon.
The great power now rising in the world, Persia, was hailed by Babylonians and Jews alike as their deliverer from archaeological monarchy. Cyrus the king was only too ready to act the part, and he marched on Babylon. It will probably never be known how Babylon fell. The Book of Daniel, which describes the last night in Babylon and the writing on the wall, is now generally admitted to have been written two centuries after to encourage the Maccabees against the Selucids, and to have had more religious significance than historical accuracy. It is not counted among the prophetical books in the Hebrew scriptures, neither do its facts agree with those in the genuine literature of the Exile.
What is clear from history is that when Babylon fell, all the horrible details of its fall, as prophesied by the Second Isaiah and Jeremiah, were unrealised. The capture of Babylon by Cyrus was as calm as Mussolini's march on Rome. Thus the " Fall of Babylon," which sometimes creates in the mind a vision of burning houses, falling ramparts, and dead bodies, was merely a peaceful change of dynasty.
The prophets had sung of children dashed to pieces before their parents' eyes, of houses sacked, of men cut down like animals in a shambles, of fountains dried up in the heat of the conflagration. Even the most lovely of the exilic psalms, which begins " By the rivers of Babylon," concludes with the horrible words:
" Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."But the sack of Babylon, so eagerly anticipated by the Jewish prophets, never took place. Instead, the Persian armies entered the city in the year 539 B.C. without striking a blow and with orders to respect property and to do nothing likely to offend the populace. " Babylon is fallen and destroyed, howl for her! " Jeremiah had shrieked before the event, but there was nothing to howl about, because Babylon seemed delighted with her fall. The nations were indeed astonished, as the prophets had said, but not by the fall of Babylon, but because Babylon, with the finest defences and the greatest city walls in the world, had fallen without striking a blow.
Entering the city a fortnight after his army, Cyrus presented that sight rare in history, the conqueror turned philanthropist. Instead of knocking down the walls, he rebuilt them, and made necessary improvements and restorations to temples and public buildings. He sent the exiled gods back to their empty shrines and told the Jews, to their surprise and consternation, that they were free to go home. A close reading of the Second Isaiah, and of the books of Haggai and Nefiemiah, combined with the irrefutable evidence of the great strength of Babylonian Jewry in Hellenistic and later times, proves that only a small number of exiles were willing to uproot themselves from Babylon in order to rebuild the National Home.
" Now that they were free to go, they discovered that they were well off in Babylon," wrote Maspero in The Passing of the Empires. " They would have to give up their houses, their fields, their business, their habits of indifference to politics, and brave the dangers of a caravan journey of three or four months' duration, finally encamping in the midst of ruins in an impoverished country, surrounded by hostile and jealous neighbours—such a prospect was not likely to find favour with many, and indeed it was only the priests, the Levites, and the more ardent of the lower classes, who welcomed the idea of a return with a touching fervour."
It was therefore a pathetically small contingent that set out with Sheshbazzar two years after the end of the Exile, and something like twenty years was to pass before the Temple was again built on Zion. Meanwhile the Babylonian Jews increased in numbers, in power, and in wealth. Though they had declined to go home, they yet regarded the Temple in Jerusalem as their spiritual home, and never failed to contribute to its upkeep. At the head of the Jewish community in Babylon there lived a shadowy king of the Jews, a prince of the house of David, whose title was " Prince of the Captivity "—the Resch-Glutha. This potentate kept his own bodyguard, his ministers, his court officials, and appeared in public clothed in gold tissue and accompanied by the officers of his guard. He was famous for his hospitality and the splendour of his entertainments. When Babylon died, Seleucia inherited her fame, and from Seleucia it passed to Baghdad. Here in the time of the Caliphs the Prince of the Captivity still held his court, and he, in whom we see the last reflection of Solomon's glory, was still reigning over Babylonian Jewry in the twelfth century A.D.
I left Babylon, its lonely, silent mounds, its cavernous ruins, and its dusty, chocolate bricks, with the thought that though the prophets may not have seen the expected desolation of this city, still their words came true; for time is always on the side of prophets.
At Hillah, in a feathery gloom of palm-gardens on the banks of the Euphrates, I saw life passing on its leisurely way as it has done in the Land of the Two Rivers since the beginning of history. It was pleasant and cool in those green groves. The hot, white world outside was held at bay by a stockade of hairy palm-trunks, the fan-like branches met and mingled overhead, and, through the quietness and the shadows below, the Euphrates flowed south towards the Persian Gulf.
Men and women moved lazily in the shadows, always down to the life-giving river, always taking up water in great pots and petrol tins. That is the story of this country: men taking up water from the river and putting it on the land. Not far away a sound like muted bagpipes told me that a djird was working. Beneath a vast mulberry tree an ox was slowly moving, lifting from a canal a dripping leather bag of water that tipped itself wastefully into the irrigation channel and then descended, by means of machinery as effective yet as clumsy as a loom, to continue this slow, laborious work. I am sure the djird has not changed since the days of Nebuchadnezzar. It has the look of an old and wheezy inhabitant on whom progress and the march of events have had no effect whatsoever. Indeed, you might imagine that the djirds, answering one another in different tones from grove to grove all along the Euphrates, are the voices of this ancient land.
Here, too, I saw a strange coracle called a gufa, which I believe Noah would have rejected as primitive and old-fashioned. It is a round basket capable of holding about twenty people—some gufas are big enough to carry sheep and horses—and made water-tight with a coat of bitumen. I promised myself that I would go to the British Museum and look for gufas in the Assyrian and Babylonian rooms, for I am sure that these boats must have existed on the Euphrates since prehistoric times. The gufachi paddles his black bowl with skill along the banks, prodding his way with an oar; and he is always jumping out to tow it, then leaping in again to resume his voyage.
While I watched the gufa, three women in black came softly through the green shadows with jars on their shoulders. Before they filled them, they lifted their veils, thinking that no man was near, and stood talking for a moment " by the rivers of Babylon." When I hear that psalm, I shall always remember the little group standing on the edge of the Euphrates, three women in deep black, the blue sky, the palm fronds, and the running water.
I should like to have remained longer at Hillah, for in his book, By Nile and Tigris, the late Sir Ernest Wallis Budge says that " the Jews of Hillah are undoubtedly the descendants of those who migrated thither from that part of Babylon which was inhabited till the tenth century of our era, and for many generations past they have occupied themselves with the trade in antiquities." There is a savage irony, which would, I am sure, have recommended itself to Jeremiah, in the thought of buying a bit of Babylon from a descendant of the Exile
§3
At 8.30 every morning King Ghazi, the late King Feisal's son, drives to his office from his modest palace on the west bank of the Tigris. He goes across the Maude Bridge and along Al-Rashid Street. The traffic is stopped. Cars, carriages, country carts, horses, and an occasional camel draw in to the side of the road and wait for the King to go past.
He comes preceded by two policemen on motor-bicyles, and, if you are quick, you can see, as his car passes, a slight figure sitting back dressed in khaki and wearing sun-glasses. It is a modest enough procession, and in an Eastern city a good object lesson in punctuality; and as I watched the King go by, my mind turned back to Feisal, wondering what he would have said could he have foreseen this in the days when he and Lawrence talked revolt in the desert among the palm-trees of Wadi Safra.
One morning, as soon as the King had passed, I took another taxi to Babylon. I walked over the mounds and explored the ruins of the Temple of Marduk, the ziggurat of Babylon.
When the Germans were digging, they discovered two puzzling underground rooms behind the sanctuary. Professor Koldewey believed them to be the dormitories in which those seeking the Oracle, or hoping for a dream-cure, spent the night. It was there, he said, that Alexander's generals kept an all night vigil while their leader lay dying of fever.
Of all the events that have happened in Babylon, there is not one, I think, which touches the imagination more than the death of young Alexander, a man not yet thirty-three, who had created a new world in twelve years. Contemporary records of his career were written by his generals, his admiral, his doctor, his road surveyors, and the pilot of his fleet, but these have all perished; and though the later histories on which we rely paint him merely as a soldier, something outside literature has preserved the rare splendour of his spirit. Any Arab in the desert can tell you a story of Iskander Dhu'l Qarnain, Alexander " the two-horned ": in the mountains of Persia, in India, and in his own Macedonia, the peasants still speak of him, and, though their tales may have grown more marvellous with the years, they perpetuate the memory of one who became a legend even in his own short life-time.
There is something pitiful and beautiful about Alexander which no writer can ever explain. The secret lies, perhaps, in what he called his pothos, a longing, a yearning, for absent things, a state of mind which one of his latest commentators has described as " this human and heart-felt longing, this meek and submissive yielding and yearning tenderness," that " grew to become the motive force of the conqueror of the world." Every history of Christianity should begin three centuries before the birth of Christ, with the story of the young man who, having levelled the barriers between East and West, loosed upon the world the flood of Greek speech and culture which launched the Hellenistic Age. Those who see the hand of God in all things may find no accident in this. It seems as if the world that grew out of Alexander's conquests was being prepared for Christianity with slow care and thoroughness, as a garden is prepared for seed. St. Paul, a product of this Greek world, travelled to Europe speaking the Word of God in Hellenistic cities. When the Gospels came, they were written in the koine, the ordinary everyday Greek language which became the Esperanto of the Hellenistic world after Alexander's time. The story of Jesus was told to the people of the First Century in the language of the Hellenistic market-place. No Christian can therefore visit Babylon without the feeling that one who was the unconscious forerunner of Christianity met his untimely death there among the mounds of black dust and yellow sand.
The bare facts of Alexander's death are well known, but there is much that we should like to know. " In the spring of 323 before Christ the whole order of things from the Adriatic to the Punjab rested upon a single will, a single brain nurtured in Hellenic thought," wrote E. R. Bevan in The House of Seleucus. " Then the hand of God, as if trying some fantastic experiment, plucked this man away."
It was the beginning of June, and Babylon was full of Alexander's armies waiting the order to march. He had built a naval harbour big enough to float a thousand men-of-war, many of which had been built on the spot; others had been carried overland from Tyre and put together at Thapsacus, on the Euphrates. The oldest ships were those which had made the historic voyage down the Indus, across the Indian Ocean, and up the Persian Gulf. Mariners and shell-fishers of the Phoenician coast had made the fleet ready for sea.
On the eve of departure the Emperor developed fever, probably caught in the swamps south of Babylon, which he had visited in order to plan a new irrigation scheme. Though his fever was severe, he insisted on performing the daily sacrifices, but had to be carried to the altar on a couch. He spent the second day of his illness in bed discussing with his admiral the forthcoming fleet operation, which he ordered to take place in four days' time. In the evening he was rowed across the Euphrates to a pleasant house among gardens, where the air was cooler than in the city. For six days he lay there in a fever, performing the daily sacrifices and reluctantly postponing the fleet's departure from day to day.
As his temperature rose, he became more impatient of delay, and would not rest until he had been carried back to the palace in the city, where he could be near general headquarters. Now it became obvious to those around him that he might die. The generals who waited in the hushed ante-rooms, and the officers who thronged the outer halls and courtyards, found when they were admitted to the sick room that Alexander could no longer speak to them. The rumour spread among the armies, as it had done once before when he had leapt alone into a fort in India, that he was dead; and his Macedonian soldiers came clamouring to the palace in such numbers that the bodyguard fell back and was forced to let them in.
Then one of the most touching scenes in history was enacted round the couch of the dying Emperor. The rough old warriors of his campaigns, the Macedonian spearmen and the old cavalry veterans who had conquered Asia, filed in their last parade past his couch. Gallantly, Alexander tried to speak to them, but was unable to do so. He greeted each one by slightly moving his head and signing with his eyes.
That night seven of his marshals kept vigil in the temple at Babylon, seeking a message from the Oracle. Should they bring the Emperor to the temple to be cured by the god? And in the night they were told to let things be. On the evening of the next day, the eleventh day of his illness, Alexander died; and it is said that a silence fell upon Babylon for four days and nights.
It is easy to understand how those who had lived in the shadow of his genius, and even those who were conscious only of his success, felt at the time that the world could not possibly continue without him. He had gathered all earthly power into his hands in such an incredibly short time, and if his pretensions to divinity may have been a joke to those who knew him well, even these cannot have doubted that he was the greatest man in the world. One might say that he died just as the curtain had lifted on the second act of his life, and at this distance one feels more than the usual sadness for a life cut short before its time: one feels also the disappointment of an audience denied a great spectacle. Reading his short life, we are like people in a theatre turned away in the middle of a play because of some grave calamity, to go home saddened, but wondering all the time what the last act would have been like. The conquered Orient lay behind him;
Carthage and the West before him. Rome? Who can say? " Had Alexander lived" is one of the most fascinating Speculations in history.It was not long before men began to whisper that Alexander had been poisoned, but this has never been proved. Arrian mentions a story that poison, " a drug" he calls it, was taken TO Babylon in a mule's hoof. Plutarch says that the poison was the icy water of Nonacris, which could be held only in the hoof of an ass. This was the water of the Styx, a thread of melted snow-water which pours down from the head of Mount Chelmos, in Arcadia, a water so cold and poisonous, declared the ancients, that it would rot any vessel but an animal's hoof: and some even specified the type of animal, such as a Scythian female ass! That Alexander was poisoned by the Styx is unlikely, and the story was no doubt the usual poison rumour that so frequently attaches itself to a royal death-bed in the east. When Leake discovered the Styx a century ago, he found the water wholesome to drink, but, though no one in the neighbourhood had ever heard of the Styx, there was an inherited belief that the water could not be held in any ordinary vessel.
There is a strange mystery about Alexander's funeral and the quarrel for the possession of his body, all the stranger because out of that quarrel the new world shaped itself. We can see a reflection of his power and authority in the violent ambitions that clashed now he was dead; for the men who fought to share the world he had conquered, like gamblers dividing a spoil, were once his obedient servants. The sovereignty which he wore with such grace and ease, even finding it insufficient for his ambition, was almost too much for the crowd of lesser men who struggled for a share, their only claim the fact that they had been good enough to work for him.
It is probable that Alexander's body was mummified like that of an Egyptian pharaoh, though no writer has left an account of this. Diodorus merely says that the coffin was filled with aromatic herbs which gave out a pleasant scent. Strangely enough, evidence of mummification comes, not from classical, but from Eastern, sources. Historians like Mas'udi, though writing long after the event, had ancient authorities at their disposal, and although a great deal of their narratives are inaccurate, there is in parts a solid basis of fact. It is interesting that Mas'udi should say that, at the order of Alexander's mother, the body was first dipped in tar and then taken out of a gold coffin and put in one of marble less likely to rouse the cupidity of tomb robbers. There is confusion of facts here, for the change of coffins belongs to a later episode, but the reference to the tar may well be a memory of the mummification of Alexander. An Ethiopic manuscript says that, after having been washed with aloes, the body of Alexander had " honey of bees" poured over it. This again looks like a reference to mummification.
But whether the body was embalmed or not, it is certain that a long time elapsed, nearly two years, before it set out towards its resting-place. Artists, jewellers, goldsmiths, and engineers were engaged to make a splendid funeral car, and the result of their labours must have been a remarkable construction. It was a huge golden temple on wheels, whose roof was upheld by rows of Ionic columns. From the roof hung bells which gave out a solemn tolling with the motion of the car. The shrine inside, which held the huge golden coffin, was decorated with four paintings: one of Alexander with a baton in his hand, surrounded by his marshals; a second of elephants advancing in battle order; a third of cavalry manoeuvring; and the fourth, a seascape of warships going into action. The car was crowned with a golden wreath of immense size, which produced rays of dazzling brilliance when seen in sunlight from a distance. The weight of the carriage was so enormous that in order to fit it for the rough desert roads, shock-absorbers were devised. Four poles were attached to the car, and to each pole were attached four yokes, and to each yoke four mules, making a train of sixty-four mules. The animals wore golden crowns, little gold bells hung from their head-harness, and their collars were encrusted with precious stones.
Such was the fantastic shrine in which the scarred body— for Alexander's body was covered with battle wounds—was carried across the desert from the Euphrates to the Nile; and we can imagine with what superstitious awe the rude tribes saw the conqueror's body pass on its way to a sound of bells, with a fence of spears round it and men marching. The story of the intrigues that led to this departure will never be known. Which six feet of earth should receive the man who had owned most of the civilised world? It was a political problem. Obviously he should have been buried with the Macedonian kings at Aegae; but once, at the beginning of his Eastern triumphs, urged perhaps by that " longing for absent things," he had made a long, romantic journey across the Libyan sands to consult the famous Oracle of Ammon at Siwa. The god greeted him as a divine pharaoh, and the young King seized eagerly on such proof that he was more than man, and on future occasions appeared crowned with the ram's horns of Ammon, the symbol of his divine " father." Then to Siwa, some said, he should go at last, to lie in the sanctity of his " father's " dwelling-place. Ptolemy, who had seized Egypt as his share of the spoil, urged it passionately, for he wanted Alexander's body in Egypt, a talisman of great strength and power. Seeking a convenient time, Ptolemy arranged for the body to leave Babylon, presumably for Macedonia, but with a powerful escort he met it in Syria and took it, not to Siwa, but to the ancient capital of Egypt, Memphis. It was moved, either by him or by his son, to Alexandria, where it remained in a crystal coffin until the beginning of the Christian era.
I asked one of the local Arabs if stories were still told about Alexander in his village. He replied that there were many, and pointing to a high ridge of reddish earth about half a mile east of the ruins, said that there was the place where King Alexander's body was burned on a great fire.
I walked over to this mound, and on the way met another Arab who told me the same story, adding that the whole mound was full of signs of burning. As I approached it, I saw that it was about fifty feet high; its sides were steep in parts and it had the appearance of a huge earthwork, or fortification. Grubbing about in the piles of soft earth and mud brick, I found that the whole mound is blackened as if with fire.
I wondered if this were the remains of the colossal funeral pyre which Alexander erected for his friend Hephaestion. It sometimes happens that while the memory of an event is preserved by word of mouth from generation to generation, famous names are substituted for the right ones. Months afterwards, when reading Professor Koldewey's book on the excavations, I came across this passage:
" Indications of a great conflagration are to be found in blocks of mud brick smelted together by a fierce fire, and bearing clear imprints of palm and other wood. In many places the prints show the sharp edges of good carpenter's work. All this is remarkable, and we should like to find the explanation of it.
" This may perhaps be found in the report given by Diodorus (XVII. 115) of the funeral pyre Alexander the Great caused to be erected to solemnise the funeral ceremonies of Hephaestion. . . . The magnificent pyre, which is said to have cost 12,000 talents, when seen from the Acropolis must have stood out in a most impressive manner against the eastern horizon."
§4
Ur of the Chaldees, the town of Abraham, lies two hundred and thirty miles south of Baghdad, and a hundred and twenty miles from Basra, on the Persian Gulf. To most people the name suggests a place lost in the silence of a dead land, remote and difficult to visit, and I was surprised to find that the modern traveller is able to journey to Abraham's town in a sleeping-car!
One of the results of European influence in Biblical lands is that such places as Ur, Gath, and Ascalon, previously found only in the pages of the Old Testament, now have a place in the railway time-table. With the same sense of incongruity which came to me when I took a taxi to Babylon, I bought a ticket to Ur of the Chaldees. The train leaves Baghdad at night and arrives at Ur in the early hours of the morning.
Baghdad station offered the odd spectacle of Biblical-looking sheiks, their families and attendants, packing into third-class carriages with supplies of food, while people from another age and another world gazed curiously at them from first-class windows. And I observed how the grave and fatalistic Orientals, their composure gone, rushed and shouted excitedly up and down the platform, bidding one another passionate and affecting farewells, even though they might be going only a few miles down the line. There is something about departure by train which destroys the last shred of self-possession in the Eastern peasant: perhaps it is the horrible thought that the train will depart at the advertised time.
The sleeping compartment was comfortable and adequate, and the wash-basin stated that it was a pattern used on the Indian railways. During the day the carriage was an ordinary first-class compartment, but. in the evening it was invaded by one of the polite officials of the Iraqi Railways, armed with sheets, pillows, and blankets. How can officials be trained to such a pitch of politeness? I can only say that the care and attention bestowed by these men on their charges may, perhaps, be equalled, but certainly not exceeded, by those remarkable women whose duty it is to nurse royal infants. Every time the train stopped, my khaki nurse came running along the lines either to lock the carriage door or to stand outside and guard me from the terrors of the Babylonian night. At first I thought he was making sure that no one would kidnap me; but as the stations at which we stopped began to show a uniform desolation, I concluded that he was only making sure that I did not escape. Like so many H others in Iraq, he credited me with an insatiable hunger for |! tea and biscuits, which he promised to bring at some H unearthly hour in the morning.
So I lay trying to sleep, watching the night sky powdered from horizon to horizon with stars. In such flat country the pattern of the sky at night is a compensation for the featureless landscape by day. It is easy to understand why the Chaldeans were among the world's first astronomers. The sky is a superb spectacle every night, and the absence of mountains, or even hills, means that the mind of the star-gazer is never drawn back to earth, but is encouraged to wander in terrifying speculation among the constellations. In ancient times the summit of every ziggurat must have held its little group of men looking up into the violet immensity of the sky, alone with the mystery of the Universe like sailors on the sea.
That the Wise Men from the East were Chaldean astronomers is more than a pleasing fancy. Kepler discovered that the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces, normally seen once only in eight hundred years, occurred no fewer than three times just before the birth of Christ. In no place would it have been more eagerly noted than in the ancient home of astronomy. " We have seen His Star in the East," said the Magi, " and have come to worship Him." How many artists have pictured them setting out from these level plains on the way to Bethlehem, with the Star burning above them?
As the train pounded to the south, I lay reading Sir Leonard Woolley's book, Ur of the Chaldees. This book describes what p will probably go down to history as one of the most valuable 1: and interesting archaeological discoveries of our time. The I excavators found evidence of the Flood. They found the • tombs of highly civilised people who lived centuries before the Pyramids were built. Then, advancing in time, Sir Leonard uncovered the city in which Abraham may have lived. He entered the ruins of houses which Abraham may have known. Seven years' work with a spade at Ur has undone half a century's destructive criticism with the pen.
With the earth rolled back from this ancient city, we now think of Abraham as the citizen of a cultured, highly civilised community; he left it to become a sheep farmer and to wander about the world, as deliberately as a man to-day might leave London for Australia or New Zealand.
" Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee: and I will make of thee a great nation. ..."
Thus Abraham left the busy quay-sides and markets of this earlier, smaller Babylon, and set out across the world, not by birth a nomad, but a townsman in search of his destiny: the first colonist in history.
The train stopped just before sunrise at Ur Junction. This is merely a buffet for locomotives which, having drunk there, go onward to the Persian Gulf.
No sooner had I stepped down on the track than I became aware of something familiar. I had often seen the Junction before. It was the lonely station of the silent films, where the hero arrived in circumstances which never varied First, a towering locomotive with its chain of shining Pullman coaches would charge the spectator at full speed, swerving at the moment of impact to draw gently to a halt. Then the hero would descend, casting glances of dismay at a landscape on whose complete desolation the tracks converged towards the horizon. As if to accentuate his abandonment, full attention was given to the train's departure. There were pictures of the passengers, of helpful negro attendants, of wheels gathering speed, and eventually the hero would be left alone, standing in a dazed condition on the permanent way.
Every detail of this scene was reproduced at Ur in the half-light of that morning. There was nothing but the station and the railway lines drawn north and south. The air was piercing and cold, and the silence was intense. The very fact that I had arrived in comfort in a train now seemed to make Ur more desolate and remote than I could have imagined.
Unlike my predecessors in this situation, I was not met by a girl swinging a sun-bonnet or by an ancient man driving a buggy, or even by the crowd of rusticated persons who always came to the rescue of the man in a film. There was nothing at Ur but dawn breaking over the flat land. As the light grew stronger, it served only to reveal a wider wilderness. But when the sun rose, it shone on a remarkable feature of the landscape. About two miles away a mound of reddish earth rose like a pyramid with a crushed apex. It was an enormous structure, and it was unmistakably the famous Ziggurat of Ur. I had seen many a photograph of it and had read about it in many a book; and there it was in the lonely early morning, only a short walk away across the desert.
As I drew near to it across a dry, salty marsh, I could see in the sharp sunlight that it was not a mound of earth, neither was it shapeless: it was a great structure of mud brick, and the ramps which led to its summit were clearly defined, even from this distance.
I had not realised that the Ziggurat of Ur would be so impressive, or that so much of it remained. All these temple towers of Babylonia and Chaldea were of the same design: a series of vast, almost square platforms rising one above the other, each platform smaller than the one below. Every nursery makes ziggurats with those bricks that fit one inside another! The shrine of the god was on the topmost platform, and huge inclined ramps led up to it from the ground level.
It may seem odd to say that my first feeling, as I looked at the Ziggurat of Ur, was one of genuine pleasure. I am never at home in perfectly flat country, and I appreciated at once the intention of the long-dead architects of Ur, which was to break the monotony of the plain by building an artificial mountain. The theory is that the ancient conquerors of these plains in remote ages were mountaineers who, either from homesickness or from religious conservatism, or perhaps both, wished to worship their gods on the high places, as they always had done. In Chaldea they had to make the high places with their own hands, and the account of the building of the Tower of Babel is the record of such an event.
Impressive as the Ziggurat of Ur is, even in decay, it must have been an amazing sight when the platforms rose above the plain in bands of vivid colour, the lower stages in black, the upper in red, and the shrine in blue with a roof of gilded metal. And when the priests in coloured robes ascended and descended the ramps, or escorted the statue of the deity down to some great festival, well may the scene have inspired, as Sir Leonard Woolley suggests it may have done, the dream of Jacob's Ladder, with its train of angels going up and down.
I climbed the Ziggurat by the very ramp, uncovered during the excavations, which the worshippers used twenty-three centuries before Christ. It was a strange feeling to explore a structure that was old when Abraham lived; a temple whose vast ground space had last seen the light of day centuries before the Pyramids were built. I noticed the regular rows of slits, like loop-holes in a fortress wall, which puzzled the excavators until they realised their object. These slits go straight through the outer casing of burnt brick and bitumen into the solid, unbaked mud core of the structure. They were put there to drain moisture from the building and were accepted by the archaeologists until it occurred to them that there would be nothing to drain! The bricks and the mud core would have lost all moisture soon after the erection of the building, and provision had been made to lead off the occasional torrential rains. What then was the object of this elaborate drainage system? The answer was provided by an inscription made by the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, whose antiquarian exploits I have already mentioned. He found the Ziggurat of Ur in ruins and restored it, taking care to mention in his inscription that he had cleared it of " fallen branches." Then at once it became clear that the platforms had been planted with trees, and the drainage holes carried off the water which irrigated the terraces.
When I reached the top of the Ziggurat, which is about fifty feet above the plain, I looked round at a view I shall never forget. Immediately below, clustered at the foot of the ruined temple, lay Ur, one of the earliest cities known to us. There were thousands of small, roofless houses of mud brick, intersected everywhere by streets and lanes. The morning sun, slanting across the dead city, threw buildings and streets into relief in sharp lines of white and black. I could follow the main streets through a network of intersecting lanes until they ended in huge mounds of sand, which marked the limits of the excavation. And this was the city, built on the ruins of still older cities, in which Abraham lived twenty centuries before Christ.
As far as the eye could see, a brown plain stretched to the skyline. In one place only was it relieved from complete desolation by a thin band like a green tape curving across the landscape. This was the Euphrates, flowing towards the Persian Gulf beneath its tunnel of date palms.
As I looked from the Ziggurat of Ur I found it easy to imagine what this country was like thousands of years ago. The sea was much nearer, for the silt brought down by the Two Rivers has been piling up and forming the alluvial plain century by century, and the sea is now a hundred and twenty miles away Babylonia is merely a deposit of river silt gently tilted towards the south. Baghdad, two hundred and thirty miles to the north, is a hundred and five feet above sea level, Ur of the Chaldees is only fifteen, and Basra, a hundred and twenty miles to the south, is eight feet above the sea. In Abraham's time sea-going ships sailed to the docks of Ur, and in addition to the sea, the Euphrates, or an important tributary stream, washed the western walls. Instead of this brown desert, the surroundings of Ur must have been a mass of luxuriant vegetation. Palm-groves and fields of growing corn stretched for many a mile round the city, intersected by fresh-water canals running here and there, reflecting the blue of the sky. Instead of scorching desert winds, there would have been a fresh breeze from the sea; instead of the enveloping stillness, there would have been the sound of a busy city and the movement everywhere of ships sailing down the river to the sea, or gliding softly on the blue canals. And from the centre of the one storey houses lying crowded within the walls rose the Ziggurat of Ur in coloured bands, visible for miles over the flat land, the sun striking on the golden roof of its shrine, sending a heliograph to the cornfields of the north and the blue sea lying to the south. In this brilliant and cultivated city lived Terah, the father of Abraham, and from this city Abraham set forth on his wanderings.
I climbed down from the Ziggurat and entered the town of Abraham. If a square mile of Baghdad streets were stripped of roofs and left for a year or two, it would look much like Ur, except that numbers of Abraham's friends probably lived in better houses than many I could point out in Baghdad. The lanes are narrow, some of them barely wide enough to allow a laden donkey to pass, but some of the houses had fourteen rooms, built round a central courtyard. One might picture life in ancient Ur as almost perfect but for a revolting custom. Attached to many houses are what Sir Leonard Woolley calls " private chapels," in which members of the family were buried in huge clay coffins rather like old-fashioned hip baths. In more humble abodes the dead were buried beneath the floor. " It was the custom," says Sir Leonard, " that the dead man continued to inhabit the house in which he had lived and his heirs dwelt on in the rooms above his grave: the custom, barbarous as it may seem at first sight, accords with that feeling of family continuity which is so strong, for example, in the ancient Hebrews." That may be so, but it is difficult to understand why Ur was not wiped out by plague, and in spite of the lagoons, the canals, the river, and all the other pleasant features of Ur, I think that Abraham was fortunate to get away into the desert.
While I was sitting in a house where Abraham and Sarah may have sat, I heard an eerie sound. It was a human whisper. Ur is not, perhaps, the place in which one would choose to hear someone whispering on the other side of a wall. Tiptoeing to the door, I glanced into the lane, where I saw two men standing with rifles slung across their backs. They were the guardians of the ruins.
I often wonder what these men really talk about among themselves, for superstition runs in their blood and, in spite of their rifles and bandoliers, I think they must often feel unprotected as they prowl the ruins. I asked them to show me the place where Sir Leonard Woolley had discovered signs of the Flood, and I am glad that I did so, for I should never have found it by myself. They led the way out of the lanes of the dead city to a series of low mounds nearby, where they pointed into an enormous pit. They warned me to go gently because the sides are not too safe, and I descended into a cavity whose walls record the passage of over five thousand years.
It was interesting to look up at these walls and see the history of the men who have lived on that spot lying in strata like layers in a rich cake. Potsherds protruded from the layers in great numbers; so did bones and other less identifiable odds and ends. The sides of this excavation are in parts an almost solid jumble of jug handles, necks of jars and pots, ind rims of plates and basins; and all of them beautifully preserved. Then with dramatic suddenness all such light-hearted evidence of human carelessness and muddle stops, and there succeed eight feet of solid, unstratified water-laid clay. Those eight feet were deposited by the Flood about six thousand years ago. Below them the evidence of Man begins again—the men who lived before the Flood. Sir Leonard Woolley's description of this discovery is interesting:
" The shafts went deeper," he says, " and suddenly the character of the soil changed. Instead of the stratified pottery and rubbish we were in perfectly clean clay, uniform throughout, the texture of which showed that it had been laid there by water. The workmen declared that we had come to the bottom of everything, to the river silt of which the original delta was formed, and at first, looking at the sides of the shaft, I was disposed to agree with them, but then I saw that we were too high up. It was difficult to believe that the island on which the first settlement was built stood up so much above what must have been the level of the marsh, and after working out the measurements I sent the men back to work to deepen the hole. The clean clay continued without change—tlie sole object found in it was a fragment of fossilised bone which must have been brought down with the clay from the upper reaches of the river—until it had attained a thickness of a little over eight feet. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, and we were once more in layers of rubbish full of stone implements, flint cores from which the implements had been flaked off, and pottery."
They had worked right through the time of the Flood to the men who had lived before it.
" So much for the facts," writes Sir Leonard. " What then is to be built up on them? The discovery that there was a real deluge to which the Sumerian and the Hebrew stories of the Flood alike go back does not of course prove any single detail in either of those stories. This deluge was not universal but a local disaster confined to the lower valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, affecting an area perhaps 400 miles long and 100 miles across; but for the occupants of the valley that was the whole world! "
It would be impressive to see, as the excavators did, the line of luman habitation before the Flood, but the drift sand and the always crumbling top and sides of the deep pit have now concealed it from view. Nothing, however, could be plainer than the Flood deposit. It is like a great silence suddenly followed by a shout of human voices, the resumption of life again after " the waters had dried up from Off the earth."
I saw the site of the royal cemetery at Ur in which the excavators found the tombs of King A-bar-gi and Queen Shub-ad, and the skeletons of eighty attendants, mostly women of the court. These tombs were made, and the bodies buried in them, a thousand years before Abraham was born, and it is from this cemetery that most of the exquisite jewellery was found which is now in the Baghdad Museum.
Sir Leonard Woolley's description of these tombs is a brilliant piece of reconstruction. The bones and the objects found with them, the remains of waggons and oxen, were discovered crushed so flat that a solid wooden wheel was merely a grey-white circle of decay in the' soil, yet he has managed to build up a vivid picture of the tomb as it was five thousand years ago, when the royal persons were buried there: the soldiers dead at the gate with their copper spears, the harpist dead beside his harp, the grooms dead at the head of the oxen, the drivers dead in the waggons, the circle of court ladies dead in their gala dresses, and the Queen Shub-ad herself, dead on a wooden bier, in a fantastic head-dress of golden rings and beech leaves, her body covered with amulets and beads and a gold cup near her hand
None of the bodies showed any signs of violence and neither had they died in agony. In fact, one piece of evidence suggests that all these people ran, perhaps willingly, to their fate as to a court ceremony. It was noticed by the excavators that all the women save one had worn a circlet round the head, either of gold or of silver. As the body without a head-band was removed, an object was found at waist-level which turned out to be the missing circlet. The lady had evidently arrived late, perhaps carrying the head-band in the pocket of her gown or in a bag at her waist, meaning to put it on in the tomb; but this she forgot to do. So she lay for five thousand years until her forgetfulness was discovered.
It has been suggested by Sir Leonard Woolley that these people may have been drugged before death came to them. It would seem that they went of their own free will to a ceremony which they believed would be a rapid transition from one world to another.
§5
On the way back to the Ziggurat I fell in with a group of people, several men, three or four women, and some children, all modern Iraqis. The leader of the party introduced himself as the post-master of Ur, and told me that he was entertaining some friends, railway officials, their wives and families. They were going to have a picnic in the ruins and would I care to join them ? I replied I would gladly do so, and we mounted a sand-hill near the temple of the Moon Goddess and sat on the ground.
It was going to be a feast of bunni. I did not know what bunni was, but asked no questions, knowing that the bunni would soon reveal itself. Two young Arabs came up the hill carrying a wooden box in which lay six monstrous fish, very thick in the body and covered with large iridescent scales the size of a finger nail. They had come out of the Euphrates, from a village called Nasariya, about ten miles away. Any one of these fish would have been a meal for us, but all six were split open with a knife and prepared for cooking.
While this was going on the Arabs lit a fire and added to it pieces of hard, dark wood which they had brought with them, for in this treeless country no wood can ever be picked up. I asked what kind of wood this was, and they told me that it came from India, and was part of an old railway sleeper.
The split bunni were pegged upright in a circle on the sand with their scales away from the flames, and allowed to grill. Now and then a bunni fell into the ashes, to be swiftly rescued by a lean, dark hand. Soon the first fish was ready. The post-master produced a lemon, a bag of curry powder, a packet of salt, and a bottle of Lea and Perrins Sauce. These were dashed with rough artistry on the bunni, which was then placed on the ground in the centre of the circle, and we were soon detaching portions of it with our fingers.
If you can imagine an oily cod-fish tasting of smoke and wood ashes, you have a rough idea of roast bunni. It is white, flaky, and extremely rich. The greediest cat on earth would slink away defeated from a fraction of a full grown bunni. But at our feast bunni succeeded bunni with oriental lavishness. Into some we just dipped our fingers as if in a finger bowl and let the Arab lads take it away to devour over the embers.
When I made a remark about the size of the fish, my friends smiled and said that another fish found in the Euphrates, called a bizz, was often seven feet long and weighed as much as a hundred pounds.
I spent the remainder of the day with these kindly folk. We made an excursion to Nasariya, where I saw the Euphrates, broad and strong, flowing through a white town among palm trees. The river was covered with primitive boats, and on its banks walked veiled women with water-pots, and small, black-haired, milk-chocolate babies. Through the streets of the town roamed sombre Shias, enjoying their mournful festival.
It was odd to think that my friends, the railway officials, were of the same race, or even of the same century, as the unchanged peasants in this town. In their blue-serge suits they were almost as foreign as I was. In all these countries which have been administered by European mandates, a clerkly administrative class with European ideas has been created, and I sometimes wonder whether this class will succeed in educating its peasantry, or whether someday the intelligentsia will go under and the people relapse into their natural chaos.
The night train came in, and, saying farewell to my friends of Ur, I was soon on my way back to Baghdad.
§6
Early one morning I took the Nairn coach across the desert to Damascus. I slept nearly all the way, awakening at intervals to see the desert lying in long, peaceful brown distances. In such moments I thought that this journey was one which no traveller of the last century would have believed possible. I was going overland to Egypt, with every hope of being there in three days, and would therefore have journeyed from the Euphrates to the Nile in a little over sixty hours.
Before the war there was no way of crossing this desert except by camel, and the railway between Palestine and ' Egypt had not been built. I cannot imagine how many weeks this now simple and comfortable journey would have taken even twenty years ago.
We stopped at Rutba as the sun was setting. George Bryant was presiding over his incredible fragment of England. I drank tea, ate biscuits, and had another wonderful English dinner: then off again into the night, roaring on in the white track of the head-lights. As a lovely day was breaking, we stopped in the hills east of Damascus and made a little fire of twigs. We were soon drinking strong black tea. The desert car, covered with brown dust, stood there on its gigantic balloon tyres, every bit as romantic as the Deadwood Coach. All motorists will agree that this conquest of the desert by two enterprising New Zealanders is a remarkable and romantic achievement, and my admiration goes out to them and to the drivers who steer their swift juggernauts by day and night across what a British Tommy once eloquently described as " miles and miles and miles of damn-all."
To drive from Damascus into Palestine is a wonderful experience. The road descends gradually towards the Lake of Galilee, and there comes a moment when you see its blue water far beneath, through a dip in the hills to the left of the road. The sun and the air become warmer as you dip down to the lake-side, and if the day is fine, as this one was, you may encounter the heat of June in January.
The Lake lay in calm sunlight. Fishermen from Tiberias were at work with their nets round the Jordan inlet to the north of the Lake, and in the little wood of eucalyptus trees at Tabgha the black and white kingfishers were flashing and diving over the water. The only thing that had changed since I was there last is the preservation of the Fourth Century mosaics in the " Church of the Loaves and Fishes." An Arab no longer sweeps away the sand from these beautiful relics of one of the earliest basilicas in Palestine. They have been roofed over, thanks to the energy of a Scotsman, Major A. A. Gordon of the Bridge of Allan.
It was hard to leave the lake-side and take the road to Haifa, which leads upward into the hills through Nazareth to the coast. At Haifa I heard much of the hatred of Arab for Jew and of the Jew's determination to make Palestine his own land. A Jew came to see me and cried vehemently:
" What has my race done to deserve the world's hate? Where can we go, if not to our own land ? "
A Christian Arab came to see me and he said:
" Do you English people think that God intended atheists to come back to the Promised Land? I could take you to Jewish colonies round about in which men openly scoff at God. Why should we sit down and see our country bought up by Jewish communists ? "To all of which I had nothing to reply. I was heartily glad to get away from the blistering hatred of a country which should be the Holy Land. There had been an explosion on the line and I was advised to take a boat that was on the point of leaving for Alexandria. Although this made my journey a little longer, what did it matter ? We steamed southward past the low green Plain of Sharon, past Jaffa, past Gaza, and were soon in the open sea.
I stepped ashore at Alexandria.