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Updated: May 27, 2025
We most of us have read the Arabian Nights at an early age, and think of the abode of the caliphs as a dream city, steeped in what we have been brought up to think of as the luxury, romance, and glamour of the East. Now glamour is a delicate substance. In the all-searching glare of the Mesopotamian sun it is apt to appear merely tawdry.
In the bright sunlight of the Mesopotamian plains, and probably also on account of their prominence at a distance over the flat land, some of these mud buildings look quite imposing. I remember once approaching a city with ramparts, towers, and formidable walls which, on close inspection, turned out to be a small mud enclosure of the most decrepit kind.
Capable of maintaining with ease a dense population, it was likely, in the early times, to be a powerful rival to the Mesopotamian kingdom, over which we shall find that in fact it sometimes exercised supremacy. On the south Chaldaea had no neighbor.
We are tempted too to link it with that process of astronomical and astrological prognosis practised in the Mesopotamian civilizations from which Ionia imitated and derived so much.
"The Iranians were the dominant race throughout the entire tract lying between the Suliman mountains and the Pamir steppe on the one hand, and the great Mesopotamian valley on the other." It was a region of great extremes of temperature, the summers being hot, and the winters piercingly cold.
We hope, though we hardly expect to see our hope realized, that some day a Mesopotamian temple may be found in good preservation. Until then we cannot give to our restorations of such buildings anything approaching the accuracy or completeness so easily attained when the great religious edifices of Greece or Egypt are in question.
Indeed, wherever Mesopotamian influence has left unmistakable traces upon Greek soil, as in Cyprus and Ionia or at Corinth and Sparta, it is often either certain or probable that the carrying agency was not Phoenician.
The great cities of the Mesopotamian plains show faint traces of town-planning datable to the eighth and following centuries, of which the Greeks seem to have heard and which they may have copied. Our knowledge of these cities is, of course, still very fragmentary, and though it has been much widened by the latest German excavations, it does not yet carry us to definite conclusions.
It has been asserted that Osrhoene was placed likewise upon the same footing; but the numismatic evidence adduced in favor of this view is weak; and upon the whole it appears most probable that, like the other Mesopotamian countries, Osrhoene again fell under the dominion of the Arsacidae.
Again, whereas the Zagros mountains present their gradual slope to the Mesopotamian lowland, and rise in higher and higher ridges as they recede from the mountains of Armenia ascend at once to their full heignt from the level of the Tigris, and the ridges then gradually decline towards the Euxine.
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