Publisher's Synopsis
THE traveler starting overland from the port of Alexandretta, in northern Syria, beholds beyond the high pass of Beilan thewidely extended plain of Antioch, a view surprising in novelty and charm. As far as the eye can reach the plain is strewn with mounds of varying height, often grass-covered, their artificial origin easily discernible. These mysterious elevations, called by the Arabs Tell, by the Turks Tepe, accompany the traveler to Aleppo and even farther to the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, and they constantly increase in height, extent, and number, from Mosul down the stream and through Babylonia, crossing into the Elamite plain and to Susa. They are the marks of the civilisation of pre-Christian millenniums. The large and small cities of the oldest empires of western Asia, of the Hittite states of northern Syria, of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Elamite empires, with their palaces and temples, walls and gates, terraces and towers, lie buried beneath them.From these mounds of ruins of the Euphrates and Tigris region, weather beaten, grave, and silent, rising from the lonely and lifeless desert, French, English, and American explorers have plucked unfading laurels. They have awakened to new life, after the sleep of thousands of years, the buried glory of millenniums gone, and from innumerable monuments of sculpture and writing living knowledge reaches us of Babylon, Nineveh, and of those earlier peoples whose civilisation continues, in no small measure, to be preserved in our own.
