From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

The ordinary tourist on pleasure bent would regard most of my journey as having been made through what is usually spoken of as “the unchangeable East.” But to the student who is conversant with the long and eventful past of the Near East the storied belt which connects the Bosphorus with the Persian Gulf has been the theater of more and greater changes in humanity’s development than any other portion of the earth’s surface. It is the fons et origo of the oldest civilization--a civilization whose traditions carry us back to the Garden of Eden. It has witnessed the successive civilizations of the Babylonians and the Assyrians, of the Greeks and the Romans and of the Saracens under the caliphs. And each of these consecutive civilizations has left its monuments of imperial splendor--its temples and palaces and colonnades and its priceless gems of plastic art. Some of these magnificent vestiges of a glorious past, like those of Palmyra, are still standing in the heart of the desert and have long since been abandoned to the roving Bedouin or the rapacious jackal. Others, like those of Ephesus and Pergamum and Nineveh, were long buried under sand and clay and have only recently been unearthed by the pick and the spade of the explorer and the archæologist. But wherever found, whether on the lonely plains and hillsides of Anatolia, or in the solitudes of the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, they possess for the studious traveler an attraction that is not offered in the same degree by any other section of the wide world.

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

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

And then there are the people--especially those of Asia Minor--with whom the author always loved to mingle and of whose kindness and hospitality he will ever retain the fondest memories. No people that I know has been less understood and more misrepresented than the gentle, industrious, home-loving Osmanlis of Anatolia. But of these I shall speak at length when relating my experiences in Asia Minor.

Traveling as a student, I have also written as a student and for students. But I have at the same time endeavored to record my observations and impressions so as to make them of interest to the general reader as well. And while I have given prominence to subjects that specially appealed to myself, these will, I trust, not be devoid of value to others who may wish to have in popular form an account of some of the most famous cities and peoples of the Near East when civilization was in its infancy, or when it was in full bloom under the beneficent influence of Helenism and Christianity.

As many parts of this volume are controversial in character, I have not confined myself to giving simply the results of my own observations and impressions, but I have taken pains to corroborate them by the conclusions of eminent scholars and investigators who have devoted to all the more important subjects long and careful study, and whose opinions, therefore, are entitled to special weight. And that the reader, if so minded, may be able to control my statements and deductions I have invariably given references to my authorities.

In the matter of the orthography of Turkish and Arabic proper names I have had the same experience as Howorth refers to when he writes in his History of the Mongols: “There are hardly two authors whom I have consulted who spell the names in the same way, and very often their spelling is so different that it is nearly impossible to recognize the name under its various aspects.” This arises from the fact that there is as yet no generally accepted system among English scholars for the transliteration of Turkish and Arabic names. Scientific accuracy, therefore, is in this respect difficult, if not impossible. My sole aim, consequently, has been to make myself intelligible. I have, accordingly, followed the orthography adopted by our standard English dictionaries and encyclopedias. In doing this I have, I am aware, exposed myself to the criticism of Oriental philologists, but I shall, I trust, have compensation in the satisfaction of being “understanded of the people.”

IMMERGRÜN, LORRETO, PA.