THE RIVERS OF BABYLON

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 30, 4 February 1916, Page 7

THE RIVERS OF BABYLON

A NEW GARDEN OF EDEN.

(By E. G. Harmer, in the "Christian

World.")

■ A few months ago the magnificent barrage which has been constructed by Sir John Jackson at the head of the Hindia branch of the Euphrates, according to a scheme prepared for the Turkish Government by Sir William Willcocks, was formally opened. This great engineerpig work inaugurates a new era in Mesopotamia, and its ultimate effect 1 will be to add an enormous area to the| corn lands of the world. But the event is also of great moment for the Bible student, and the opportunity may be utilised for drawing attention to some of its aspects, because they enable us to view the story of Babylon in a new perepective.

The Jand of Shinar, enclosed between,' the lower Euphrates and the lojverj Tigris, has an area of about 12,000,000 aeree, one-third of it swamp and twothirds of it desert. The desert is due to the scanty rainfall, which hardly exceeds; eight inches in any year, and the swamp| to the untamed forces of the two natural streams, "whose output during the liood is twelve times greater than at lowi water. In the morning of mankind thei Persian Gulf covered the whole of Shinar, and the stone age peoples who dwelled upon the eastern uplands looked; down upon a sweltering chaos of turbu-| lent sea. It is permissible to hold that] it was the folk memory of that dim pa=t| which was enshrined by the earliest. Semites in their legendary poetry, andj led them to personify the struggle of man with nature in stories of conflicts between their racial heroes and the; dragons of the deep.

I Recent research has shown that behind I the old Babylonian cosmogony there lay I a clear recognition of the practical tasks I wherewith man was first confronted in I the marshland of Shinar. To one of itsi I dragons the name of Rahab clung with I such ]>ersistence that it survived in the I later Hebrew literature. Thus it was ! that Job declared: "He hath described a : boundary upon the face of the waters. I ... He stilleth the sea with his I power, and by his understanding he smiteih through Rahab." The tasks, in fact, were those of the water engineer, and one of the greatest of these early heroes, the Merodacb. of Jeremiah, is he 1 I of whom it was sung:— I Mardok laid reeds on the face of the waters; He piled up eartlien banks, and sheltered So, again, in another tablet: Marduk laid a reed on the face of the waters. He made dust and poured It out upon the reed. On the edge of the sea llnrduk placed a dam. A reminiscence of this very poem has been traced in the eighth chapter of the ! Proverbs. It may be of interest to say that, during the present century, when the port engineers of one of tne greatest I of Indian cities desired to curb the wayj ward course of its river, they followed ) this age-long example by dropping reed J mats mile after mile, and then^building lup behind them a rampart of quarried stone. When we reach the beginnings of written history, Babylonian life is seen tfo depend upon the waterworks formed by the labour of man. At least two thousand years before Amra-phel, kin" oi Shinar, irrigation was highly de° veloped, for there was a regular system of land valuation, associated with a network of casals, tanks, and dams. Amraphel himself—;f he be Hammurabi formed two great canals during his amazing reign. So zealous was he in maintaining the waterways that many of the letters which preserve his memory record his personal instructions from the royal water board. In one, "Let men clear the Damanum Canal within the present month"; in another, "Within three days clear out the canal within Erech." One section of his code of laws was laid down that the riparian owner was responsible for his own banks, and if through his negligence a breach caused injury to his neighbour's crops he should make good the damage, even if this meant his being sold into slavery to raise the money. Even poor women had their small holdings, and such was the fertility of .the land under this careful administration that, whereas to-day the Canadian yield of wheat averages no more than twenty bushels to the acre, Hammurabi could point with pardonable pride to a yield of forty-five bushels.

During the next 2,500 years the agricultural prosperity of the land "between the rivers" was more or less vigorously maintained. In the fifth century 8.C., Herodotus shrank from recording what he knew of its fertility, knowing that he would not be believed. The date and the vine, orchard fruits and vegetables grew in indescribable profusion. Three hundred yeare before him, in the time of Jehu, nearly a thousand villages and fortified towns in the Mesopotamian region were captured in a single Assyrian campaign. Let it be noted that few of the jfreat cities of Chaldea were built upon the ■banks of the natural streams. Ur of 4(ho Chaldees, Larsa and Erech, Nippur and Sippara, even great Ba-bylon iteelf —all were erected upon the banks of artificial canals, whose water supply was the object of systematic regulation. The "river of Chebar," the background of Ezckiel's pathetic poesy, was an irrigation canal. Choked up by centuries of Moslem indifference, it lay unused Until our English engineers cleared it out again for a length of fifty miles, and during this winter-tide filled it once more with the life-giving stream. It was Ezekiel who measured the fall of one in a thousand which has been proved to be accurate by Sir William Willcock's surveyors. It was he who wrote: "Her rivers ran round abont her plantations; and she sent out her channels unto all the trees of the field." He, also, who, in a prophetic vein, declared: "But the miry places thereof, aud the marshes thereof, shall not be healed; .they Khali be given up to salt.'' Not a hundredth part of the old irrigation system, founded by Marduk in the world's far-off dawn, has remained to this day. Camel thorn and caper grow stragglingly where once there flourished the palm and the vine; colocynth and wormwood have displaced the rich cornfields of the past. But at length a new era has come, and within the lifetime of this generation the land of Shinar will once more become an Eden, wherein is the tree of life.