'DIARY OF A TOUR IN THE PERSIAN GULF AND IN TURKISH ARABIA, DECEMBER, 1906 (WITH MAP)' [‎17r] (33/106)

27
Babylon.
The excavations.
--i *
± !
At one in the afternoon we arrived on the
banks of the Euphrates, where we put up
with the German savants who are employed
on the excavations of Babylon. They
have been working away here for eight
years, and the professor in charge says
that there is enough work for another
thirty years. They have accordingly built
themselves a very comfortable house, which
looks like a small fortress—to guard against
predatory Arabs—and have settled down
here for what is practically their life’s
work. Later on we had an opportunity
of seeing what that work was, as we were
conducted all over the excavations. What
has been done at present is the uncover
ing of the palace and temples of Nebuchad
nezzar and of an older palace built by that
monarch’s father. The remains, after being
covered up for some 2,500 years, are really
in a wonderful state of preservation, but
on the whole I was somewhat disappointed.
One reads such marvellous accounts of
the greatness and size of the Babylonian
buildings that it comes as a surprise to find
that they were somewhat mean in appear
ance and restricted in area. Most of the
information regarding them comes to the
multitude from the Bible, and that perhaps
explains why the Jews thought so much
of buildings which to us appear almost
insignificant. When we remember that
the greatest building of the Chosen People,
the Temple of Solomon, was little larger
than the dissenting chapel to be seen in
an ordinary English village, one can realize
how the considerably larger edifices of
Nebuchadnezzar must have struck them,
thereby giving rise to an exaggeration
which is somewhat misleading. It is evi
dent, too, in the opinion of the savants,
that the account given by Herodotus
of the greatness of Babylon is much
exaggerated. Visiting the place a hundred
years after its destruction by Cyrus the
Great, he must necessarily have depended
largely on hearsay. If his accounts were
true, Babylon, with its walls 380 feet high
and its other marvellous features, must not
only have contained engineering feats im
possible to our ideas but have been ac
tually larger as regards population than
the combined cities of London and Paris
as we know them to-day. Our German
iconoclasts have swept away many pre
vious myths and fictions. What is certain
is that a highly civilised community exist
ed in this region from an extremely early
period. Not in Babylon itself, but some
way to the south, there are remains which
testify to a civilization dating back to at
least 3,800 B.C., if not earlier. It is known
that there has been from the earliest times