Publisher's Synopsis
From the introductory...
MESOPOTAMIA and its adjacent plains have been associated with the most important turning-points of history. Geographically situated at the heart of the Eastern Hemisphere, these lands have frequently played a leading part in the world's activities. They have contained for millenniums the capital cities of great world-empires. They have been closely connected with the most thrilling epochs of history, and, once again, by reason of the Bagdad railway schemes, Mesopotamia controls the main currents of this unprecedented commotion and holds the key to the whole world's future.
Many kindly friends have often, in jest, called me "the Rural Dean of the Garden of Eden," in order to remind me that man's earthly paradise was situated somewhere in my Mesopotamian parish; but I protest that I have never seen it, for, under the Turkish regime, that primitive paradise was unfortunately nowhere to be found.
I met, however, in Bagdad a clever impostor, a wily tobacconist, who closed up his shop and travelled extensively through Europe and America, collecting large sums of money from gullible Westerners by posing as the famous "Discoverer of Noah's Ark and the Golden Mountains of the Moon." These also I have never seen; but, apart from all spurious claims and fantastic titles, it is nevertheless true that Mesopotamia cradled the human race, nurtured it for centuries, until a new era was introduced by the Flood incidents, which are recorded not only in the Hebrew Scriptures, but also in interesting cuneiform inscriptions that have been unearthed by archaeologists in Mesopotamia.
This is essentially a land of origins. The oldest sea route in the world, utilised by the first navigators of the high seas, was the Persian Gulf; and the numerous mounds at Bahrain remind us of the world's debt to the Phoenicians, who gave us the alphabet and the earliest system of weights and measures, and who originally migrated to Syria from the shores of the Persian Gulf and the ports of Mesopotamia. From this land also the Hebrew race took its rise when Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees and settled in Canaan.....