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

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The Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Caliphs added to the number of reservoirs and extended the canals that were built by the patriarchs of the Scriptures. The fabulous wealth of Babylon, Nineveh, Palmyra, Nippur, Kufa, and other great cities of ancient times was largely derived from agriculture, in a territory that is now a desert; from the cultivation of soil which for thousands of years has been celebrated for its extreme fertility. Sir William Willcocks declares that the greater part of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris and of the area between these rivers is as rich as the valley of the Nile. In his report he says:

“Of all the regions of the earth none is more favoured by nature for the production of cereals than the valley of the Tigris. Cotton, sugar-cane, Indian corn, and all the summer cereals, leguminous plants, Egyptian clover, opium, and tobacco will find themselves at home as they do in Egypt.”

There is a passage in Herodotus, written more than 2,000 years previous, about this same country, which sounds very much like the Willcocks report: