The names of these cities call up, like an incantation, the memory of
the civilisations which grew in them to greatness and sank in them to
decay: Mesopotamia, a great heart of civilisation which is cold to-day,
but which beat so strongly for five thousand years that its pulses were
felt from Siberia to the Pillars of Hercules and influenced the taste
and technique of the Scandinavian bronze age; the Assyrians, who
extended the political marches of Mesopotamia towards the north, and
turned them into a military monarchy that devastated the motherland and
all other lands and peoples from the Tigris to the sea; the Hebrews,
discovering a world-religion in their hill-country overlooking the
coast; the Sabaeans, whose queen made the first pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
coming from Yemen across the Hedjaz when Mekka and Medina were still of
no account; the Philistines and Phoenicians of the Syrian sea-board, who
were discovering the Atlantic and were too busy to listen to the Hebrew
prophets in their hinterland; the Ionians, who opened up the Black Sea
and created a poetry, philosophy, science, and architecture which are
still the life-blood of ours, before they were overwhelmed, like the
Phoenicians before them, by a continental military power; the Hittites,
who first transmitted the fruitful influences of Mesopotamia to the
Ionian coasts--a people as mysterious to their contemporaries as to
ourselves, maturing unknown in the fastnesses of Anatolia, raising up a
sudden empire that raided Mesopotamia and colonised the Syrian valleys,
and then succumbing to waves of northern invasion. All these people rose
and fell within the boundaries of Turkey, held the stage of the world
for a time, and left their mark on its history. There is a romance about
their names, a wonderful variety and intensity in their vanished life;
yet they are not more diverse than their modern successors, in whose
veins flows their blood and whose possibilities are only dwarfed by
their achievements.