A Day at Babylon

THE swift Mesopotamian twilight had passed as we picked our way through the broken arches and sought the places where our names appeared, in fantastic imitation-cuneiform inscriptions upon fragments of tile from the palace wall. Soft-footed Arab servants filed in through a tottering portal and placed the soup before us, the fragrant steam from which, rising incense-like, turned to loops and coils of gold as it wound into the haloes above the shades of bat tered brass which fended from our eyes the flickering rays of the yellow oil flames winking at the lips of the ancient stone lamps.

‘Gentlemen,’ — our host, the distinguished German archæologist, Dr. Koldeway, did us the honor of speaking in English, — ‘we all have good appetites from our long day in the open air; so let us, as you Americans put it, fall to at once.’

Quite by coincidence, the movingpicture man from New York and I had arrived in Babylon at the same time — he from the south by Nejd and Hilla in an arabanah, and I from the north by Kerbela and Hindia on horseback — and the dinner in the recently-excavated Feast Hall of Belshazzar was in honor, as one of our German hosts phrased it, of the ‘ Yankee invasion.' By one of the ruined portals was draped the ‘ Made-in-Turkey ’ Stars and Stripes which had been borrowed from the roof of the picture man’s arabanah, — it is the custom for foreigners traveling in this part of the world during troublous times to keep their country’s flag in evidence as a warning to robbers, — and the centre-piece on the table was a battered stone bird discovered in a crypt beneath the Temple of Ishtar, which, though plainly intended in the first instance for a Babylonian goose couchant, was this evening, after being decorated with a red, white and blue ruff and tipped up at an angle of forty-five degrees, held to represent an American eagle rampant. This was the extent of the motif Yankee, further decorative touches being of Babylonic, Arabic, or Teutonic inspiration.

The soup, though appearing on the menu as ‘Potage Nimroud,’ had come from a can with a French label. It had a distinctly appetizing odor and no second injunction to fall to was necessary.

It had indeed been a day of absorbing interest, for me the crown of a magical sheaf of days which had begun a week before, when I rode out of Bagdad for a spell of ‘nomading’ in the company of a single Arab dragoman, and was to end on the morrow, when we were to journey back to the City of the Kaliphs in the Hilla stage. There had been chill nights when we had shivered in our close-drawn cloaks on the benches of Arab coffee-shops or solitary Turkish khans; warm noons when we had munched dates and Arab bread in the grateful shade of bowers of greenery by canal lip or desert well. There had been a gazelle hunt in which the dogs were borne in the arms of the mounted hunters until the moment of the final coup arrived; a banquet with a nomad sheikh of sinister reputation, who proudly showed us the loot of a Persian caravan which he had sacked within the week; a day of hunger in fanatical Nejd, where the devout Mohammedans had refused to sell as much even as a handful of dates to the servant of the despised Ferenghi; and then, in breathless succession, all within the last thirty-six hours, had come Kerbela, Hindia, and Babylon.

And where but in this one corner of Mesopotamia can there be seen within the radius of a single fifteen-mile circle three such objects of unique and absorbing interest as these: Kerbela, the shrine of Hussein, the Mecca of the great Shiite sect of Mohammedans; Hindia, the site of the initiatory project in the greatest work of reclamation of modern times, — the restoration, through irrigation, of the traditional site of the Garden of Eden; and the half-uncovered ruins of Babylon, once the scat, of one of the richest and most powerful of ancient empires?

‘The work of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft at Babylon is the most thorough and comprehensive piece of excavation ever attempted,’ the German Consul in Bagdad had told me. ‘Heretofore all the excavation that, has been done in Mesopotamia — and in other parts of the world as well has been little more than a search for relics of a character calculated to make the best museum display. At Babylon “ finds ” have been a secondary feature of a work the main idea of which is to uncover and draw to the last brick every standing fragment of the walls of the palaces, temples and other buildings, until sufficient data are obtained to make possible a pictured restoration of that ancient city so exact as to rival the sketches of the architects of Nebuchadnezzar. Dr. Koldeway’s work at Babylon will undoubtedly entitle him to rank as the foremost archæologist of his generation, and you should not miss the chance to make his acquaintance and see him at work.’

Just at dusk, a week later, I cantered into Babylon from the desert , followed my servant past the guard of zaptiehs at the gate and down a dim arcade, at the farther end of which a squatting white-clad figure appeared to be in the act of feeding an illimitable mob of yowling gray cats.

‘Take and carry to the Master,’ ordered the dragoman brusquely, thrusting my letter into the hand of the squatting menial, and failing to accompany the action with the customary shove only on account of the intervening wall of cats. An instant later the figure straightened up and I found myself shaking hands with the distinguished Dr. Koldeway himself. ‘We have been expecting you,’ he said genially, ‘and I am pleased to say that a compatriot of yours has also arrived to keep us company. Pajamas are dinner clothes at Babylon at this time of year, and dinner will be ready by the time you have bathed and shifted into yours.’

Cool and comfortable, we dined in our pajamas, — Dr. Koldeway, his three assistants, the picture man and myself,—and the talk was of Europe and America and China, of the war in Tripoli and the little things of local life, of everything, in fact, except ancient Babylon and the work in hand. Dr. Koldeway told of his new motorcycle and the grief to which it had brought him when he endeavored to use it in a cross-country chase after gazelles. Dr. Reuter told of their troubles with the rascally sheikh of the near-by native village, who only the day before had shot a Persian pilgrim in pure wantonness and then thrown him with the two embalmed bodies he was bearing to Kerbela for burial, into the well from which the scientists drew their water. Dr. Reuter concluded his recital with, ‘“And by the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept,” and to-night we can only offer you German beer to drink.’ The picture man told of a recent fight with Arab robbers, in which a zaptieh and a couple of horses were killed before the marauders were finally driven off; and I expatiated on my twentyfour-hour search for food in the streets of fanatical Kerbela.

Our distinguished hosts evidently avoided shop entirely out of working hours, and it was not until the following morning, when Dr. Wetzel took me in hand for a tour of the ruins, that I felt free to ask questions.

Then I learned that the mission, which owed its conception largely to the efforts of Emperor William, had come out to Mesopotamia in 1899, Dr. Koldeway having been in charge from the first. Work had been started on a large but only slightly explored series of mounds on the old channel of the Euphrates, above Hilla, from which the brick to build the latter town had been quarried, and from which, also, much of the material fora comparatively useless barrage at Hindia had been taken by the Turks. At the time, nothing definite had been known as to what the mounds really were, but the fact that all of the quarried bricks bore the name of Nebuchadnezzar stamped on them in archaic cuneiform characters had led to the belief that the heart of the richest of the ancient civilizations might have beat at that point. Work had been prosecuted, as was explained to me at Bagdad, with the idea of revealing all that was hidden; and before many years had gone by not only had the identity of the ruins been established beyond question, but a series of tablets had been discovered, the translation of which cleared away the mists of doubt which have always obscured many of the most striking events told of in the Old Testament, — notably the Deluge. Other tablets turned out to be the ' books ’ of a great Babylonian banking institution, others told of remarkable social and economic conditions hitherto unguessed, while others proved to be architectural records of such accuracy as to be of the greatest help in prosecuting further exploration. Now, after a dozen years of uninterrupted work (it had hitherto been the custom for archæological missions in this part of the world to push operations only in the cool winter months), nearly all the salient objects of the Biblical and Grecian descriptions of Babylon stood revealed beyond a doubt; and as Dr, Wetzel led me here and there through the uncovered ruins he spoke of this and that feature of interest with the easy assurance of a Cook’s guide in Rome or Paris.

’We know these must have been the Hanging Gardens because of the great size of the supporting pillars. These foundations would take a New York sky-scraper, and in Nebuchadnezzar’s time there could have been no reason to build thus except to support some such weight as the replica of a Persian mountain scene which that monarch is said to have had fashioned at the whim of a homesick favorite whom he had brought from Iran. The Tower of Babel, which has always been popularly identified with the great mound called Birs Nimroud, some miles to the north, we were able definitely to locate through data obtained from tablets. Such of its upper walls as existed within the mound were torn down for the bricks by the Arabs many years ago, but we have laid bare its foundations, as you see, and from the angle of its stairway have estimated its height at about two hundred feet. So, while it was several times as high as the loftiest of the palaces, it must have had more the form of a modern steel-frame fifteen-story office building than that of a tower as we ordinarily understand the latter.

‘Temples of Baal and of Ishtar — the latter was the Babylonian prototype of Venus — we have uncovered at a number of places, the largest being those connected with the great palaces. They are always identical in form,— large outer chambers opening successively to smaller inner ones until the “Holy” and the “Holy of Holies” are reached, — as you may see by tracing the lines of the foundations. That narrow passageway, walled off from all the chambers to which the worshipers had access, but penetrating to a recess behind the “ Holy of Holies,” is an invariable feature and we have not yet been able to account for it. The most likely theory seems to be that it was used by the priests to reach the hidden recess, from which strange sounds to mystify the worshipers were made to emanate. Possibly, even, definite oracular functions of question and reply were carried on. Tablets t browing light, on t he question may be uncovered any day.’

We passed along the elevated, bitumen-paved ‘Street of Daniel,’— so called because it was the only passage giving access to the palace dungeons where the prophet was believed to have been confined, and therefore must have been the one in which he walked to take the air,—and found the picture man trying to put the members of one of the exca vating gangs through t heir paces. Fresh from the soaring pillars and ornate portals of Palmyra and Balbec, he had found in the crumbling sun-dried brick foundations of Babylon few of the outstanding features so imperative to the moving picture that is to figure in popular exhibitions, — a deficiency he was endeavoring to remedy by introducing ‘human interest..’ Now, one of the men was supposed to be detected in the act of tucking away in his loin-cloth a jewel which he had unearthed among the ruins, and, after a struggle, was led off by two hovering zaptiehs to condign punishment; now, two of the workmen became embroiled in a quarrel and put up a very good imitation rough-andtumble fight at the foot of the statue of the man-eating lion; and now, crowning touch of all, the dignified and sedate Dr. Koldeway was made to execute a pas seul of triumph in front of the clicking machine, in celebration of the supposed discovery of a priceless tablet. The indefatigable operator even had a scenario roughly sketched in which I — the villain, impersonating a rival scientist disguised as a hunter — was to purloin some carefully guarded tablets which contained unguessed secrets of the past, to be betrayed by an Arab dancing-girl, and pursued and captured, after a long chase across the desert, by the hero, a trusted servant of Dr. Koldeway’s. Inasmuch as the finale involved, for the villain, a limp tumble from the back of a camel flying before the pursuit of the Doctor’s motorcycle, I was not entirely sorry that lack of time if not of talent prevented the rehearsal of this playlet.

One of the most interesting things incident to a tour of the ruins is the noting of the evidences of occupation by the long series of conquerors who followed the downfall of the Babylonian empire. This portion of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar was restored by the Medes and Persians; this open-air theatre was the work of Alexander; that line of foundations marked a Parthian temple, that was a Hittite causeway, and that restoration of the Temple of Ishtar bore Homan ear-marks. From later Roman times the ruins must have looked much as they do now, for there is nothing to show that the Arabs had a city at this point even in the times of the Kaliphate of Bagdad.

But among all the evidences of this or that despoiler or restorer, there is one structure which has not been, and probably never will be, traced to its true origin. For the great city of Babylon —fourteen miles square within the walls which have been definitely mapped —was itself built upon the ruins of a city scarcely less extensive, and so ancient that even the records of the Babylonians themselves have so fatfailed to reveal its name or builders. Traces of this prehistoric capital have been found wherever excavations have gone beyond a certain depth, a level, unfortunately, at which the swift-flowing seep of the old Euphrates is also encountered. As this water level is shortly to be raised by the completion of a clam at Hindia, which will divert a good part of the flow of the main Euphrates into its old channel, there is scant likelihood that this problem, one of the most alluring ever offered to archæologists for solution, can be worked out.

Something of the fascination which this riddle has held for the scientists of the German mission, I realized when I stood with Dr. Wetzel at the riverfront face of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, where the rounded brick pillars of a still more ancient structure might be dimly guessed through the dark water that filled the excavation and stopped the work, and heard him tell of the countless nights when, unable to sleep from thinking of it, he had paced up and down those banks and pondered upon the mystery beneath.

‘Never was anything so near and yet so completely beyond reach,’ he said plaintively. ‘And the most aggravating part of the whole thing is that some of the bricks of the lower palace are stamped with a name or legend, just as are those of Nebuchadnezzar, but in a character just different enough to baffle translation without the discovery of a “key.” There are gray hairs in the head of every member of the mission which trace to nothing else but fruitless speculation along this one line, and especially as to the meaning of the writing on the bricks.'

I suggested.

‘That’s probably as near as any one will ever come to it,’he said with a sigh as we turned to go. ‘And if the word “ archaeologist” could besubstituted for “builder,” I don’t know any epitaph I would prefer to have on my tombstone, especially if it was to be decreed that I was to rest out here near the scene of our labors.’

Almost if not quite as great a disappointment to the members of the Babylonian mission as that occasioned by the impossibility of delving after the secrets of the buried city, came four or five years ago, with the victory of the Young Turks, when it was decreed that no antiquities of any kind, no matter by whom found, should be permitted to leave Turkey. Except for a single small shipment, the priceless accumulations of the first seven or eight years of the mission’s work were stored in the compound at Babylon at this time, and these, so far as the Orient Gesellsehqft was concerned, were as completely lost as if, like some of the Layard antiquities from Nineveh many years before, they had been upset in the river. That the work was never allowed to lapse for a day, in spite of the fact that every foot of earth moved, so far as the discovery of antiquities was concerned, was for the benefit of the Turkish Government Museum at Constantinople, speaks volumes for the devotion of the society and its patron, Emperor William, to their unselfish purpose.

Few of the fruits of the dozen years’ work of the mission have as yet been removed to Constantinople, and these, stowed away in packing cases, large and small, are taxing the capacity of the long lines of the compound’s sheds. Scant reference, save in the most casual way, was made to any of the stored antiquities, nor yet was I encouraged to linger and examine any of the ‘ finds’ of the last few days’ work — strange implements, utensils, ornaments and the like — which had been washed and laid out on long tables to dry. This, Dr. Wetzel explained half-apologetically, was because only the reports on the first few years’ work of the mission had been made public. ‘But,’ he added, ‘Dr. Koldeway, at our little dinner-party to-night in Belshazzar’s Feast Hall, will do us the honor of making his first public statement on one of the most, puzzling questions upon which we have worked, “A Scientific Accounting for the Appearance of the Writing on the Wall.” I trust it will compensate in a degree for your having to wait upon the opening of the Babylonian wing of the Constantinople museum in order to see the tangible fruits of our work here.’

We ended the day with a swim in a still, cool pool of the old Euphrates, and twilight found us refreshed and expectant, feasting within the very room where, it. is recorded, occurred an episode so spectacular and dramatic that — fact or fiction, history or myth — it has become a by-word of the ages. ‘Poisson Babel’ had followed ‘Potage Nimroud,’ and ‘Pheasant Nabopollassar ’ had given way to ‘ Prawns de Euphrates a la Ishtar,’ when our distinguished host arose and, holding aloft his goblet of ‘Vin Baal,’ proposed a toast to the memory of His Royal Highness, Belshazzar, King of Babylonia.

The moon had risen as the dinner had progressed, and now its level beams, striking through a broken archway, fell full upon the trim, erect figure at the table’s head. The howl of a jackal answered our chorused, ‘His Royal Highness, Belshazzar,’ and I felt the flick of a bat’s wing on my fingers as I lifted my glass to drink the toast. A moment later and we had resumed our seats, and the Doctor was speaking from a crumbling dais at the end of the moon-shaft. I can, of course, give but a fragmentary outline of the drift of his discourse.

After tracing the manner in which he had established, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the fact that this particular structure had been the palace of Belshazzar, and that the room in which we were seated was the festal hall of that palace, Dr. Kokleway launched at once into the heart of his subject: —

The statement that writing appeared on the wall of this room on the occasion of a great feast which preceded the downfall of Babylonia by but a few days, has come down to us from so many different sources that we have come to accept it as a fact. It is as definitely substantiated as any other specific happening of so remote a time. Now, the all-important questions to be answered are: How did this writing come to appear where it did? and, Did it really have the meaning which Daniel gave it?

The Scriptures tell us that, ‘There came forth the fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall . . . and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.’

Regarding the moving hand, we must consider that the only evidence in support of that phenomenon was the testimony of the revelers themselves (Daniel was not present at the time the writing appeared), and it is probable that most of them were in a condition in which moving hands would have been among the least startling of the things they were seeing. As for the words themselves,—Mens, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, — the only equivalents which the most, exhaustive of searches has enabled us to find for them have been the names of certain tools and measures which were employed by Persian builders. We know that Persians were employed in the construction of the Hanging Gardens, and it is reasonable to suppose that they — or others of the same nationality — worked upon the palace of Belshazzar. Since it is necessary to account for the presence of the writing in some way, and since the unsupported evidence of the feasters is not enough to incline one to the acceptance of its miraculous appearance at the tip of a moving finger, I am advancing the theory that the words in question were written in an idle moment by one of the Persian decorators and that they remained unnoticed until the night of Belshazzar’s historic feast. Have you not seen an intoxicated person suddenly give frenzied attention to some ordinary object, such as the silver cap on his umbrella handle, which he may have looked upon a hundred times, unheeding, when sober? Thus it was, I am convinced, that the drink-shaken monarch saw the fateful writing on the wall and demanded an instant interpretation, a task which, it is not surprising to learn, none of his fellow-revelers was equal to. When Daniel was called, what could be more natural than that he, the staunch moralist, knowing — as all must have known — of the imminent approach of the Medes and the Persians, should take the occasion to read t lie profligate ruler a stern lecture, tell him that he had been weighed and found wanting, and that his arrogant and wicked city was about to fall into the hands of the invaders? It cannot have been long after this that the armies of Cyrus, King of the Persians, took the city. Belshazzar was killed in the fighting, but Daniel, as you know, survived to attain to still greater honors under the new rulers. — No, we have not thought it necessary to attempt a ‘scientific accounting ' of the Lion’s Den episode. We have animal tamers in our own day.

On the eve of a visitor’s departure from Babylon it is the custom to bring the guest-book of the current year to his room, set pen, ink, and a bottle of German beer before him, and leave him for the night with the warning that if a page of the book is not covered with an appropriate poem or drawing by morning he will not be allowed to go his way. Thus I found myself ‘imprisoned’ on the night of our Belshazzar Feast, my captors, however, having granted me permission, as a special favor, to seek inspiration by conning over the versical ‘ransoms’ of all the years since the mission began its work.

It was midnight when the books, each containing a year’s contributions, were brought and stacked upon my table, and the ‘Phantom of False Morning’ had flickered and gone down again in the east before I had read through them all and bought my freedom by filling the designated page with a string of wretched jingles.

But what a register of famous names was that little pile of roughly bound parchment volumes! Lord Curzon, Sir William Willcocks, Baron Oppenheim and Percival Landonall appeared within a score of pages; but it is sad to record that it seemed the invariable rule that the more famous the writer the worse was the verse. Only two or t hrec of the contributions were of real merit, and the lines of one of these were running in my head as I stepped out on the balcony for a breath of fresh air before going to bed.

Across the courtyard the white-clad figure of a man was pacing slowly up and down the opposite balcony, pausing at one end of his beat to gaze out vacantly across the moon-silvered pools of the half-emptied river channel, and at the other to regard fixedly the shadow-mottled ruins of the imminent palace of Nebuchadnezzar. How long he had been there I could only guess, — possibly for hours, — but presently, after one last look at the crumbling ruin, wearily, dejectedly, he turned and went in to his room. I did not try to see which of my hosts it was; but I knew as well as if he had shouted it to the unpitying stars that he was thinking of the coming of the water in the ancient Euphrates and of the secrets of the city buried beneath old Babylon, never to be read.

‘He is weary with the task Time set,’ I muttered to myself as I, too, turned and sought my room, and the phrase repeated itself several times in my thoughts before I recalled that it was from one of the poems I had just been reading in the guest-books. I turned to it and read it again — and then again. Unlike the other efforts, it was unsigned and undated, but I know that it was written by one who had felt the brooding spell at the end of the desert night and had himself wept by the waters of Babylon. Here it is: —