Читать книгу Around the Black Sea. Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania онлайн

93 страница из 123

He declares that if Noah had been a hydraulic engineer he would have done much better by cutting a channel for the escape of the waters through the bed of the river Pison, for he might thus have saved the entire population. The Pison is one of the four rivers of Eden, the Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates being the others. All of them are really branches of the Euphrates and form a delta in which the Garden of Eden is believed to have been situated.

Nearly the entire area of Mesopotamia was once under irrigation, and the first known dams and canals were built by Nimrod of the Bible, who is identified as the Hammurabi of the inscriptions that are frequently found among the ruins. Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great saw Mesopotamia in its greatest prosperity. The decay of the country began with the invasion of Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde and Timour the Tartar, who destroyed the dams and the ditches and plundered the people of all their wealth so that they had no means to restore the irrigation system. Hundreds of miles of the ancient canals can be easily identified, and Sir William testifies to the remarkable degree of genius shown by the engineers who designed and constructed them. In his report to the Turkish government he recommends that the old canals be restored as far as possible, which can be done at half the cost of constructing new ones.