Euphrates Valley

“ At one point, however, 26 m. above Deir, where lie the ruins of Halebiya, the river breaks through a basaltic dike, el-Ḥamme, some 300 to 500 ft. high. On either side of the river valley a steppe-like desert, covered in the spring with verdure, the rest of the year barren and brown, stretches away as far as the eye can see. Anciently the country on both sides of the Euphrates was habitable as far as the river Khabur ”

“ On the west, approaching generally within twenty or thirty miles of the present course of the Euphrates, is the Arabian Desert, consisting in this place of tertiary sand and gravels, having a general elevation of a few feet above the Mesopotamian plain, and occasionally rising into ridges of no great height, whose direction is parallel to the course of the great stream. Such are the Hazem and the Qassaim, in the country between the Bahr-i-Nedjif and the Persian Gulf, low pebbly ridges which skirt the valley from the Bahr to below Suk-es-Sheioukh. ”

“ To the patient efforts of the men who persisted in their difficult and often disheartening task of unearthing ruins, and to the scholars who toiled year after year to read the forgotten language these ruins brought to light, we owe most that is now known regarding the early inhabitants of the Euphrates valley. These nations, so long destroyed, their cities, so long abandoned, we shall try to bring before us as they have been reconstructed by historians in more pretentious volumes. ”

“ In antiquity, so long as the canalisation of the country was properly carried out, the fertility of the alluvial plain enabled great and prosperous nations to have their home in the Euphrates valley. Its abundant clay furnished the materials for the masses of sun-dried and burnt bricks, the remains of which, in the shape of huge artificial mounds, still testify to both the magnitude and the industry of the population, thousands of years ago. ”

“ Basin of the Tigris and Euphrates.—The northern part of the Tigris and Euphrates valley, the portion that comprised ancient Assyria, consists of undulating plains, broken in places by considerable mountain ridges.
But all the southern portion of the basin, the part known as Chaldæa, or Babylonia, having been formed by the gradual encroachment of the deposits of the Tigris and Euphrates upon the waters of the Persian Gulf, is as level as the sea. During a large part of the year, rains are infrequent; hence agriculture is dependent mainly upon artificial irrigation. ”

“ Private farms were worked by slaves privately owned. [Pg 318]
Free labor was available, but as a consequence of slavery, wages were low. The grazers were generally free men; they received large herds of cattle and flocks of sheep from several owners, and these they pastured for months together on the west slope of the Euphrates. Because the herds required constant protection from nomadic tribes of the desert, the grazers had to be men of responsibility.
The oldest occupation of the Euphrates valley was agriculture. The soil yielded heavily and early won tribes away from their roving state. ”

“ As a matter of fact, we are not warranted in going beyond the statement that all evidence points in favor of a population of mixed races in the Euphrates Valley from the earliest period known to us. No positive proof is forthcoming that Sumer and Akkad were ever employed or understood in any other sense than as geographical terms. ”

“ The Andite peoples of the Euphrates valley migrated north to Europe to mingle with the blue men and west into the Mediterranean regions to mix with the remnants of the commingled Saharans and the southern blue men. And these two branches of the white race were, and now are, widely separated by the broad-headed mountain survivors of the earlier Andonite tribes which had long inhabited these central regions. ”

“ The contracted area of the Arabian peninsula, the inability of the land to support a large population, coupled with their restless spirit and the constant feuds between the tribes, made emigration a necessity at a very early period. The exact history and order of these migrations it is now impossible to trace, but it would seem that the first great movement was eastward, whither they were drawn by the culture and wealth of the Sumerian civilisation in the Euphrates valley. ”

“ Twenty-six miles farther down lies the town of Deir (q.v.) , where the river divides into two channels and the river valley opens out into quite extensive plains. Here the roads from Damascus, by way of Palmyra, and from Mosul, by way of the Khabur, reach the Euphrates, and here there must always have been a town of considerable commercial and strategic importance. The region is to-day covered with ruins and ruin mounds. ”

“ Be the movement from east to west or from north to south, the main current is sure to eddy along the outskirts of this territory, either pursuing the broad avenue of the valley of the Western Euphrates, or turning aside from the plateau region and flooding across the peripheral mountains into the lowlands of Mesopotamia. ”

“ On the eastern slope the water-courses are soon lost in the sand, but on the upper levels the valleys are protected and fertile. Such were the Nejran, the Minaean Jauf, and the valley of the Sabaeans, which last was made rich by the great dam that stored its waters for irrigation; and these three valleys, the centers of caravan-trade bound north toward the Nile and Euphrates, owed their prosperity mainly to their position above the greatest of all the east-flowing courses, the Valley of Hadramaut. ”

“ The Euphrates line is strategically of advantage to Turkey, mainly as a check on the Bedouin tribes.
This line has the advantage of passing through no absolutely desert district. It would be well watered throughout, and in the Tigris Valley would have a supply of fuel. It would, as far as Mosul, serve four large towns with an aggregate population of two hundred thousand inhabitants, besides numerous villages, and a nearly continuous p. 282agricultural population. ”

“ Toward noon, the highest elevation of the pass is reached, and I commence the descent toward the Erzingan Valley, following for a number of miles the course of a tributary of the western fork of the Euphrates, known among the natives in a general sense as the "Frat;" this particular branch is locally termed the Kara Su, or black water. The stream and my road lead down a rocky defile between towering hills of rock and slaty formation, whose precipitous slopes vegetable nature seems to shun, and everything looks black and desolate, as though some blighting curse had fallen upon the place. ”

“ Of course both China and Sumeria arose on the basis of the almost world-wide early Neolithic culture, but the Tarim valley and the lower Euphrates are separated by such vast obstacles of mountain and desert as to forbid the idea of any migration or interchange of peoples who had once settled down. ”

“ From the Euphrates, Abraham, not without divine guidance, wanders towards the west. The desert opposes no invincible barrier to his march. He attains the Jordan, passes over its waters, and spreads himself over the fair southern regions of Palestine. This land was already occupied, and tolerably well inhabited. Mountains, not extremely high, but rocky and barren, were severed by many watered vales favorable to cultivation. Towns, villages, and solitary settlements lay scattered over the plain, and on the slopes of the great valley, the waters of which are collected in Jordan. ”

“ After two hours’ riding we entered a long stretch of sand heaped up into little hills which were held together by tamarisk thickets; it is apt to be submerged when the river is high, and we saw more than one overflow channel filled with pools of stagnant water. On the Syrian side the Euphrates is hemmed in here by hills whereon stands the castle of Ṣâliḥîyeh. In this wilderness we came upon some Arabs who were ploughing up a desolate spot in search of locusts’ eggs. ”

“ Between the embouchures of the Khabur and the Balîkh, the Euphrates winds across a vast table-land, ridged with marly hills; the left bank is dry and sterile, shaded at rare intervals by sparse woods of poplars or groups of palms. The right bank, on the contrary, is seamed with fertile valleys, sufficiently well watered to permit the growth of cereals and the raising of cattle. The river-bed is almost everywhere wide, but strewn with dangerous rocks and sandbanks which render navigation perilous. ”

“ They knew of no ruins in the desert beyond, and my impression is that there has never been any settled population in this region, away from the Euphrates. We struck back to the river in a south-easterly direction, and in three hours came to our camp, pitched by some Afaḍleh tents on a mound of which I have not recorded the name. It is the boundary between the kazas of Raḳḳah and of Deir, and lies about an hour’s march below a site called by Kiepert the Khân. ”

“ The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of the Nile, by the magnificence of their ruins, which are witnesses, even after centuries of neglect, to the activity of a powerful and industrious people: on the contrary, they are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be distinguished—mounds of stiff and greyish clay, cracked by the sun, washed into deep crevasses by the rain, and bearing no apparent traces of the handiwork of man. ”

“ The River Euphrates was the great source of fertility for the whole region through which it flowed. The country watered by this river was very densely populated, and the inhabitants were industrious and peaceable, cultivating their land, and living quietly and happily on its fruits. ”

“ There were marshes, too, for the River Euphrates in particular, which traverses a flat country, has changed its course through the ages on numerous occasions. Some particular course may remain open for a considerable period, and have the appearance of being the main channel, yet always there are overflows, and often enough such a main channel is silted up with the dirt and debris coming from higher parts of the desert ”

“ From the point, on which we stood, to the base of the Mujelibé, large masses of ancient foundations spread on our right, more resembling natural hills in appearance, than mounds covering the remains of former great and splendid edifices. The whole view was particularly solemn. The majestic stream of the Euphrates wandering in solitude, like a pilgrim monarch through the silent ruins of his devastated kingdom, still appeared a noble river, even under all the disadvantages of its desert-tracked course. ”

“ So the ancient tyrannies bear sway even in the open wilderness.
Three-quarters of an hour from Khmeiḍah we passed another mound strewn with potsherds, and thirty-five minutes further down we came upon the ruins of Abu ’Atîḳ. They lie upon high rocky ground that drops steeply into an old bed of the Euphrates from which the river has retreated into a new bed a few hundred yards away. ”

“ For there, the Arabs had told him, "a bow shot off," "two stones' throw," "the length a man might ride [Pg 3] while he said his 'La ilaha ill Allah!'"—ran the great river. Waking some two hours before from the profound sleep of boyhood, he had not been able to close his eyes again for the longing that came over him to look upon it. For this was "that ancient river," last of the mystic Four that watered the flowers of Eden, witness of ruined civilizations, survivor of dead empires, the old historic Euphrates. Not that all this was present to the mind of young John Grayson ”

“ For the land through which it flows is more elevated than its water, and it is not drawn off into canals or into another river, but rather receives them into itself. It is nowhere possible to irrigate the land from it. But the Euphrates flows in an elevated channel, and is everywhere on a level with the land through which it passes. ”

“ Below this point the back country on the Syrian side has always been a complete desert. On the Mesopotamian side there would seem, from the accounts of Xenophon and Ptolemy, to have been an affluent which joined the Euphrates between Deir and ʽAna, called Araxes by the former, Saocoras by the latter; but no trace of such a stream has been found by modern explorers and the country in general has always been uninhabited. Below Salahiya the river-bed narrows and becomes more rocky. ”

“ From what has been said, it will be clear that the Euphrates is, par excellence, the river of Southern Mesopotamia or Babylonia, while the Tigris may be regarded as the river of Assyria. It was the Euphrates that made possible the high degree of culture, that was reached in the south. Through the very intense heat of the dry season, the soil developed a fertility that reduced human labor to a minimum. ”

“ It is traversed in places by rocky ridges of a low elevation, and intercepted by occasional wadys, but otherwise it is a continuous gravelly or sandy plain, incapable of sustaining a settled population. Between the desert and the river intervenes commonly a narrow strip of fertile territory, which in Assyrian times was held by the Tsukhi or Shuhites, and the Aramaeans or Syrians. North of the 36th parallel, the general elevation of the country west of the Euphrates rises. There is an alternation of bare undulating hills and dry plains, producing wormwood and other aromatic plants. ”

“ The Euphrates and its branches do not at all times succeed in reaching the sea: they are lost for the most part in vast lagoons to which the tide comes up, and in its ebb bears their waters away with it. ”