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The Historians' History of the World 01 [Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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This plain, famous for its uncommon fertility as well as for its historic importance, the “Shinar” Land of the Semites, and the Babylonia of the Greeks, is as rainless as Egypt, and would have dried up into a sandy desert, had not nature and human artifice contrived means of irrigation.
For in the spring, when the snow melts on the Armenian mountains, both rivers overflow their banks and water the thirsty land. This overflowing of the gently moving Euphrates is as regular as that of the Nile; the wide tract of water is unopposed in its inundation of the plain and, like the Nile, it deposits a rich mud soil, and man’s resources are called into play to aid nature by the artificial conduct of water and by means of dams to give the neighbouring district a share in the fertilising irrigation.
But the bed of the Tigris growing decidedly more narrow as it nears the sea, receives the devastating stream from the eastern and northern mountains, and the force of the waters transports the fertile soil from the fields and transforms the plains into a wide swampy land, covered with reeds and rushes.
The inhabitants, therefore, had the double task of stemming the force of the stream to prevent destructive inundations, and of securing a course for the fertilising waters by canals and lakes. So the Babylonian plains were sown with such a number of small and great canals, dams and ditches, that the waterworks and means of irrigation were a source of wonder and astonishment to the whole of antiquity. These canals, cut in every direction and decreasing in size until they were almost rivulets, were furnished with countless machines and pump-works. Many of these canals, which should have been kept free by continuous clearing from the stoppage of mud, were lost in the sand; others, emptying into the Tigris, increased its size, the nearer it approached the sea, while the waters of the Euphrates were decreased through the drain of the canals.b
The Tigris and the Euphrates have both flood seasons and carry their waters over a wide extent of country, exactly as the Nile. This fact is so perfectly clear that there can be no doubt concerning it, though Herodotus directly asserts the contrary, saying, “The river does not, as in Egypt, overflow the corn lands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the help of engines.” The rise is indeed not so prolonged as the rise of the Nile, but its influence is, nevertheless, distinctly to be seen. Furthermore, the water was retained in sufficient quantity to supply an irrigation system far back from the river for the grain harvest, after the fall of the river. This entire system is now a vast ruin. The river rises and falls as it wills, and sweeping far over the western bank, turns the country into a morass. The harm of this is both negative and positive. It makes impossible any such great ingathering of grain as existed when this great valley was the world’s granary, and it fills the land with a dangerous miasma, which produces fevers and leaves the inhabitants weak and sickly. There are few instances in the world of a sadder waste of a beautiful and fertile country.e
Old writers give the most brilliant descriptions of the wonders of the district. Xenophon praises the quality and quantity of the dates, of the groves of palms which line the banks of the lower course of the two rivers and break the uniformity of the landscape, and are still very productive where the cruel Turkish rule has not changed the garden into a desert.
Herodotus lays particular stress upon the natural fertility of the country, for he writes: “Babylon is, as we know, famed for the best tillage of all lands, producing always two hundredfold of fruit and, in very good years, three hundredfold. The leaves of the wheat and barley are all four fingers wide, and I very well know, but I would rather not say, to what size the millet and seed grow; for I am certain that those who have not been in Babylon, will not believe it. There are few trees, no fig trees, no vine, no olive. They have no oil but what they make from sesame. But palm trees grow all over the country, and the fruit is eaten and honey and wine made from it.”
This country is now almost a desert, without buildings and vegetation, a world of tower-like ruins, which vary the monotony of the vast plains.
“From these heights,” says Ritter in his Geography, “one sees in the solemn stillness of this ruined world the far-reaching wide mirror of the Euphrates, winding majestically through that solitude like a royal pilgrim among the silent ruins of his departed kingdom. The palaces and temples, and the magnificent buildings, have all dropped into dust and ruin; hanging gardens and blooming paradises have fallen into gray, rush-grown, swampy marshes; and even there, where once the captive Israelites hung up their harps in the royal capital, and sang their songs of mourning over fallen Jerusalem, only a few imperishable willows remain, and the silence is unbroken by a voice of joy or mourning.”
Assyria, a mountainous district between the Tigris and the mountainous western boundary of Iran, is not so fertile as Babylonia, but its high position gives it a bracing climate.
Like the southern plains, it has little rain, but it is partially watered by the numerous rivers which flow eastward and westward to the Tigris, and partially by the canals and water conduits, and is rendered tolerably fertile by careful cultivation.
In the south only a few palm trees and cypresses break the monotony of the wide tilled fields, as in the Babylonian plain, but in the centre of the country are Aturia and Arbelitis (Adiabene) where the Upper Zab, the Zabatus or Lycus of classical writers, pours its blue waters into the Tigris, and there are fruitful hills, with protected valleys, full of corn, wine, sesame, figs, olives, and oranges; naphtha streams give forth their precious oil, and farther northward on the borders of Armenia and Media there are mountainous districts, the heights of which are crowned with woods of oak and pine. The eastern district at the foot of the Zagros (Chalonitis) is particularly prized for its wealth of palms, fruit trees, and olives, and the country of Arpakha (Arrapachitis) in the Chaldean mountains is considered the home of Abraham. From hence he descended into the river district of the centre and settled in the land around Kharran.
Northward lies the pasture land of Mesopotamia, whose wide plains became the scenes of bloody battles, and where races and royal families sought to eternalise their transitory power by the foundation of cities, which have mostly vanished, leaving no trace behind them. Like the Assyrian hill country, it gradually declines into grass-grown steppes until, in the south, it becomes a desert whose waterless wastes are trodden only by wandering Arabs.b
So far back as we have yet been able to penetrate, we find in the southern part of Mesopotamia a number of petty independent kingdoms, governed from their capital cities. Our present knowledge of this land and its inhabitants may be briefly summed up.
After the river Euphrates, with countless windings and sharp falls, has cleft the Syrio-Mesopotamian plain where it fertilises the districts contiguous on its banks, it approaches to within a few miles of the Tigris, and both streams water a completely flat plain, intersected by numerous rivers and canals, and, for the most part, flooded by the Euphrates in the summer.
The numerous districts on both sides of the lower Tigris and west of the Euphrates which are out of reach of the irrigation have a desert character, as rain is as rare here as in Egypt. But the irrigated land was proportionately fertile; at least it was so in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The district at the mouth of the streams was of a marshy character with numerous swamps and lakes. In olden times the confluence of both rivers, at latitude about 31° N., formed a long narrow bay which has now been filled up by their deposits. The Arabian Desert lies at the west of the Euphrates, or rather on its western arm, the Pallakopas. The country on the east of the Tigris rises gradually to the wild mountainous boundary of the Iranian highlands, which descends in terrace form to the Tigris, to which it sends numerous rivers, which in earlier times flowed direct into the sea.