Untitled

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3250, 9 April 1943, Page 3

the Middle East. It lies on the cross-

roads leading from Europe to Persia and India, and from Russia through the Caucasus toward Egypt and Arabia. Although itself possessing only a few miles of sea front, on the Persian Gulf, Irak is linked by ancient routes with four other seas —.the eastern Mediterranean and the Red, Black and Caspian Seas. Its great twin rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, collect the waters of many thousands of square miles before they unite to become the Shatt-al-Arab —the River of the Arab —to empty them into the Persian Gulf.

These two great rivers enclose a strip of land which, more than ,any other spot in the world, can be regarded as the cradle of mankind. According to several sources, the Garden of Eden must have been somewhere near Basra; Abraham lived at Ur of the Chaldees, and it is said that Noah’s Ark floated over a flood caused by the the two rivers, although Mount Ararat is about 400 miles further north on the frontiers of Turkey and Persia.

Quite apart from Biblical associations, what is now Irak is certain to have been even in prehistoric times a centre of culture from which racial and religious customs penetrated fai into other lands, as witnessed by the inscriptions' of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. It includes the sites of the two great early civilisations of Assyria and Babylonia, amply substantiated by the ruins and excavations jn the Mosul and Bagdad regions respectively. It saw the conquest of the Medes, the Persians, of Alexander the Great, of the Romans; it was in turn part of the empires of the Caliphs of Arabia, of the Monguls and, finally, for full four centuries, of the Turks. Of the buried cities of Assyria and Babylonia very little remains, at least as far as the layman is concerned, although archaeologists have found the ruins invaluable. The greatest among the ruins, both in extent' and in significance, is the city of Babylon itself, some 40 miles south of Bagdad. Here, according to some historians, stood the tower of Babel, and here reigned King Hammurabi, founder of the Babylonian empire, and originator of the code which bears his name, -and which is Well remembered by every student of law and commerce as the foundation upon which later political and financial codes were built.

Babylon is the best preserved of the buried cities, but its ruins date bach not more than 4000 years or so. Ur. which is about half way between Bagdad and Basra, has yielded many treasures, most of which are preserved in the British Museum.