Chapter III: Part 3

Southern Mesopotamia--the Irak of the Arabs and Babylonia of the Greeks--lies desolate like the North, but is a contrast to it in every other respect. Its aspect is towards the Persian Gulf, and Rohrbach grudgingly admits[51] that down the Tigris to Basra, and not upstream to Alexandretta, is the natural channel for its trade. It gets nothing from the Mediterranean, neither trade nor rain, and every drop of water for cultivation must be led out of the rivers; but the rivers in their natural state are worse than the drought. Their discharge is extremely variable--about eight times as great in April as in October; they are always silting up their beds and scooping out others; and when there are no men to interfere they leave half the country a desert and make the other half a swamp. Yet the soil, when justly watered, is one of the richest in the world; for Irak is an immense alluvial delta, more than five hundred miles from end to end, which the Tigris and Euphrates have deposited in what was originally the head of the Persian Gulf. The Arabs call it the _Sawâd_ or Black Land, and it is a striking change from the bare ledges of Arabia and Iran which enclose its flanks, and from the Northern steppe-land which it suddenly replaces--at Samarra, if you are descending the Tigris, and on the Euphrates at Hit. The steppe cannot compare with the _Sawâd_ in fertility, but the _Sawâd_ does not so readily yield up its wealth. To become something better than a wilderness of dust and slime it needs engineering on the grand scale and a mighty population--immense forces working for immense returns. In a strangely different environment it anticipated our modern rhythm of life by four thousand years, and then went back to desolation five centuries before Industrialism (which may repeople it) began.

The _Sawâd_ was first reclaimed by men who had already a mastery of metals, a system of writing, and a mature religion--less civilised men would never have attempted the task. These Sumerians, in the fourth millennium B.C., lived on _tells_ heaped up above flood-level, each _tell_ a city-state with its separate government and gods, for centralisation was the one thing needful to the country which the Sumerians did not achieve. The centralisers were Semites from the Arabian plateau. Sargon of Akkad and Naram Sin ruled the whole _Sawâd_ as early as 2500 B.C.; Hammurabi, in 1900, already ruled it from Babylon; and the capital has never shifted more than sixty miles since then. Babylon on the Euphrates and Bagdad on the Tigris are the alternative points from which the _Sawâd_ can be controlled. Just above them the first irrigation canals branch off from the rivers, and between them the rivers approach within thirty-five miles of each other. It is the point of vantage for government and engineering.

Here far-sighted engineers and stronghanded rulers turned the waters of Babylon into waters of life, and the _Sawâd_ became a great heart of civilisation, breathing in man-power--Sumerians and Amorites and Kassites and Aramaeans and Chaldeans and Persians and Greeks and Arabs--and breathing out the works of man--grain and wool and Babylonish garments, inventions still used in our machine-shops, and emotions still felt in our religion.

"The land," writes Herodotus[52], who saw it in its prime, "has a little rain, and this nourishes the corn at the root; but the crops are matured and brought to harvest by water from the river--not, as in Egypt, by the river flooding over the fields, but by human labour and _shadufs_[53] For Babylonia, like Egypt, is one network of canals, the largest of which is navigable. It is far the best corn-land of all the countries I know. There is no attempt at arboriculture--figs or vines or olives--but it is such superb corn-land that the average yield is two-hundredfold, and three-hundredfold in the best years. The wheat and barley there are a good four inches broad in the blade, and millet and sesame grow as big as trees--but I will not state the dimensions I have ascertained, because I know that, for anyone who has not visited Babylonia and witnessed these facts about the crops for himself, they would be altogether beyond belief."

Harnessed in the irrigation channels, the Tigris and Euphrates had become as mighty forces of production as the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtse and the Hoang-Ho.

"This," Herodotus adds[54], "is the best demonstration I can give of the wealth of the Babylonians: All the lands ruled by the King of Persia are assessed, in addition to their taxes in money, for the maintenance of the King's household and army in kind. Under this assessment the King is maintained for four months out of the twelve by Babylonia, and for the remaining eight by the rest of Asia together, so that in wealth the Assyrian province is equivalent to a third of all Asia."

The "Asia" over which the Achaemenids ruled included Russian Central Asia and Egypt as well as modern Turkey and Persia, and Egypt, under the same assessment, merely maintained the local Persian garrison[55]. Its money contribution was inferior too--700 talents as compared with Assyria's 1,000; and though these figures may not be conclusive, because the Persian "province of Assyria" probably extended over the northern steppes as well as the _Sawâd_, it is certain that under the Arab Caliphate, when Irak and Egypt were provinces of one empire for the second time in history, Irak by itself paid 135 million _dirhems_ (francs) annually into Harun-al-Rashid's treasury and Egypt no more than 65 million, so that a thousand years ago the productiveness of the _Sawâd_ was more than double that of the Nile.

Another measure of the land's capacity is the greatness of its cities. Herodotus gives statistics[56] of Babylon in the fifth century B.C.--walls 300 feet high, 75 feet broad, and 58 miles in circuit; three- and four-storied houses laid out in blocks; broad straight streets intersecting one another at regular intervals, at right angles or parallel to the Euphrates. Any one who reads Herodotus' description of Babylon or Ibn Serapion's of Bagdad, and considers that these vast urban masses were merely centres of collection and distribution for the open country, can infer the density of population and intensity of cultivation over the face of the _Sawâd_. When the Caliph Omar conquered Irak from the Persians in the middle of the seventh century A.D., and took an inventory of what he had acquired, he found that there were 5,000,000 hectares[57] of land under cultivation, and that the poll-tax was paid by 550,000 householders, which implies a total population, in town and country, of more than 5,000,000 souls, where a bare million and a half maintains itself to-day in city alleys and nomads' tents.

And in Omar's time the _Sawâd_ was no longer at its best, for, a few years before the Arab conquest, abnormally high floods had burst the dykes; from below Hilla to above Basra the Euphrates broadened into a swamp, and the Tigris deserted its former (and present) bed for the Shatt-el-Hai, leaving the Amara district a desert. The Persian Government, locked in a suicidal struggle with Rome, was powerless to make good the damage, and the shock of the Arab invasion made it irreparable[58]. Under the Abbasid Caliphs of Bagdad the rest of the country preserved its prosperity, but in the thirteenth century Hulaku the Mongol finished the work of the floods, and under Ottoman dominion the _Sawâd_ has not recovered.

Can it still be reclaimed? Surveys have been taken by Sir William Willcocks, as Adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his final conclusions and proposals are embodied in a report drawn up at Bagdad in 1911[59].

"The Tigris-Euphrates delta," he writes, "may be classed as an arid region of some 5,000,000 hectares.... All this land is capable of easy levelling and reclamation. The presence of 15 per cent. lime in the soil renders reclamation very easy compared with similar work in the dense clays of Egypt. One is never far away from the giant banks of old canals and the ruins of ancient towns."

But he does not expect to make all these 5,000,000 hectares productive simultaneously, as they are said to have been when Omar took his inventory. "It is water, not land, which measures production," and he reckons that the average combined discharge of the rivers would irrigate 3,000,000 hectares in winter, and in summer 400,000 of rice or 1,250,000 of other crops. This is the eventual maximum; for immediate reclamation he takes 1,410,000 hectares in hand. His project is practically to restore, with technical improvements, the ancient system of canals and drains, using the Euphrates water to irrigate everything west of the Tigris (down to Kut) and the Shatt-el-Hai, and the water of the Tigris and its tributaries for districts east of that line. Adding 33 per cent. for contingencies to his estimate for cost of materials and rates of labour, and doubling the total to cover interest on loans and subsequent development, he arrives at £29,105,020 (Turkish)[60] as the cost, from first to last, of irrigation and agricultural works together; and he estimates that the 1,410,000 hectares reclaimed by this outlay will produce crops to the value of £9,070,000 (Turkish) a year. In other words, the annual return on the gross expenditure will be more than 31 per cent., and under the present tithe system £7,256,000 (Turkish) of this will remain with the owners of the soil, while £1,814,000 will pass to the Government. This will give the country itself a net return of 24.9 per cent. on the combined gross cost of irrigation and agricultural works, while the Government, after paying away £443,000 (Turkish) out of its tithes for maintenance charges, will still receive a clear 9 per cent. per annum on the gross cost of irrigation, to which its share in the outlay will be confined.

Unquestionably, therefore, the enterprise is exceedingly profitable to all parties concerned. Looking further ahead, Sir William proposes to supersede the navigation of the Tigris[61] by railways, and so set free the whole discharge of the two rivers for irrigation. He contemplates handling annually 375,000 tons of cereals and 1,250,000 cwt. of cotton, and estimates the future by the effects of the Chenab Canal in Northern India--

"a canal traversing lands similar to those of Mesopotamia in their climate and in the condition in which they found themselves before the canal works were carried out.... In such a land, so like a great part of Mesopotamia, canals have introduced in a few years nearly a million of inhabitants, and the resurrection of the country has been so rapid that its very success was jeopardised by a railway not being able to be made quickly enough to transport the enormous produce."

"A million of inhabitants"--that is the crux of the problem. Labour is as necessary as water for the raising of crops; Sir William's barrages and canals without hands to turn them to account would be a dead loss instead of a profitable investment; but from what reservoir of population is this man-power to be introduced? The German economists are baffled by the difficulty.

"It is useless," as Rohrbach puts it, "to sink from 150 to 600 million marks in restoring the canal system, and then let the land lie idle, with all its new dams and channels, for lack of cultivators. Yet Turkey can never raise enough settlers for Irak by internal colonisation[62]."

She cannot raise them even for the minor enterprises at Konia and Adapa[63], and evidently the _Sawâd_ must draw its future cultivators from somewhere beyond the bounds of Western Asia. From Germany, many Germans have suggested; but German experts curtly dismiss the idea. The first point Rohrbach makes in his book on the Bagdad Railway is that German colonisation in Anatolia is impossible for political reasons. "No worse service," he declares, "can be done to the German cause in the East than the propagation of this idea," and the rise of Turkish Nationalism has proved him right[64]. There remain the Arab lands;

"But even," he continues, "if the Turks thought of foreign colonisation in Syria and Mesopotamia, to hold the Arabs in check" (the political factor again), "that would be little help to us Germans, for only very limited portions of those countries have a climate in which Germans can work on the land or perform any kind of heavy manual labour."

And Germany herself is hard up for men.

"For all prospective developments in Turkey," writes Dr. Trietsch, "not merely scientific knowledge, capital, and organisation are wanted, but men, and Germany has no resources in men worth speaking of for opening up the Islamic world."

It is one of his arguments for bringing in the Jews, but the colonisation of Palestine will leave no Jews over for Irak. Rohrbach[65] disposes of the Mouhadjirs--they are a drop in the bucket, and are no more adapted to the climate than the Germans themselves. "There is really nothing for it," he bursts out in despair, "but the introduction of Mohammedans from other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail."

That narrows the field to India and Egypt, and drives Turco-German policy upon the horns of a dilemma:

"The colonists must either remain subjects of a foreign Power, a solution which could not be considered for an instant by any Turkish Government, or else they must become Turkish subjects--"

a condition which, to Indians and Egyptians, as well as Germans, would be prohibitive. No one who has known good government would exchange it for Ottoman government without the Capitulations as a guarantee.

The Ottoman Government has its own characteristic view. In a memorandum on railways and reclamation, published by the Ministry of Public Works in 1909, a _résumé_ is given of the Willcocks scheme.

"In due time," the memorandum proceeds, "a comprehensive scheme for the whole of Mesopotamia must be carried out, but, apart from the question of expense, it is clear that the public works involved will not be justified until Turkey is in a position to colonise these extensive districts, and this question cannot be considered till we have succeeded in getting rid of the Capitulations."

This is the Ottoman pretension. Egypt, rid of the Osmanli, and India, where he never ruled, have kept their ancient wealth of harvests and population, and have man-power to spare for the reclamation of the _Sawâd_. All the means are at hand for bringing the land to life--the water, the engineer, the capital, the labour; only the Ottoman pretension stands in the way, and condemns the _Sawâd_ to lie dead and unharvested so long as it endures.

"The last voyage I made before coming to this country," wrote Sir William Willcocks at Bagdad in 1911, "was up the Nile, from Khartûm to the great equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and forbidden region I was filled with pride to think that I belonged to a race whose sons, even in this inhospitable waste of waters, were struggling in the face of a thousand discouragements to introduce new forest trees and new agricultural products and ameliorate in some degree the conditions of life of the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should I have felt if, in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the richest and most famous tract of the world, I had thought that I was a scion of a race in whose hands God had placed, for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine months in the year, and desolating everything in their way for the remaining three? No effort that Turkey can make"--she was then still mistress of the _Sawâd_--"can be too great to roll away the reproach of these parched and weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven."

Turkey, which claims the present in Western Asia, is nothing but an overthrow of the past and an obstruction of the future.

[Footnote 1: Tekin Alp: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal" (Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1915). The percentage is of course an exaggeration.]

[Footnote 2: In the sense of having preceded Arabic in this region, for in itself, and in its original area, Arabic is as old a language an any other variety of Semitic.]

[Footnote 3: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp.]

[Footnote 4: "The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal," by Tekin Alp.]

[Footnote 5: _The Near East_, 30th March, 1917, p. 507; see also Tekin Alp.]

[Footnote 6: The legendary ancestor of the Turkish race.]

[Footnote 7: _The Near East_, loc. cit.]

[Footnote 8: Which (for obvious reasons) was printed for private circulation only.]

[Footnote 9: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916).]

[Footnote 10: Memorial of the German authority cited above.]

[Footnote 11: Quoted by the German authority cited above.]

[Footnote 12: The Vilayets of Basra and Bagdad.]

[Footnote 13: See the journal _Al-Mokattam_ of Cairo, 30th March, 31st March, 1st April, 1916 (English translation in the form of a pamphlet: "Syria during March, 1916," printed by Sir Joseph Causton and Sons Ltd., 1916).]

[Footnote 14: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 253.]

[Footnote 15: _Thoughts on the Nature and Plan of a Greater Turkey._]

[Footnote 16: Emir Hechmat, their chief, subsequently went to Hamadan in Persia and organised guerilla bands there.]

[Footnote 17: _i.e._, the Turkish-speaking population in the Russian Caucasus.]

[Footnote 18: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 80.]

[Footnote 19: And, like other Young Turks, a Jew ("Tekin Alp" being a _nom de plume_).]

[Footnote 20: Moslem _religieux_.]

[Footnote 21: Ein Wort an die Berufenen Vertreter des Deutschen Volkes: Eindrucke eines deutschen Oberlehrers aus der Türkei, von Dr. Martin Niepage, Oberlehrer an der deutschen Realschule zu Aleppo, z.Zt. Wernigerode. (Printed in the second pamphlet issued by the Swiss Committee for Armenian Relief at Basel; English translation, "The Horrors of Aleppo." London, 1917: Hodder and Stoughton.)]

[Footnote 22: The writer includes Armenia under this term.]

[Footnote 23: Dated 3rd Aug., 1915: See Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 548.]

[Footnote 24: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 413.]

[Footnote 25: "Die deutsch-türkeschen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen," by Dr. Kurt Wiedenfeld, Professor of the Political Sciences at the University of Halle. (Duncker and Humblot, 1915).]

[Footnote 26: "Die Bagdadbahn," by Dr. Paul Rohrbach (Berlin, 1911), pp. 43, 44.]

[Footnote 27: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 49, 50.]

[Footnote 28: The author rubs in his point in his concluding section: "All economic measures we may take in Turkey are only a means to an end, not an end in themselves" (p. 77).]

[Footnote 29: Wiedenfeld's monograph is a _sonderabdruck_ from the two volumes of studies on the "Wirtschaftliche Annaherung zwischen dem deutschen Reich u. seinen Verbundeten," edited by Heinrich Herkner and published by the _Verein fur Sozialpolitik_, which preaches Naumann's creed.]

[Footnote 30: Just as, by a more gradual process, the Magyar Oligarchy, rather than the Hapsburg Dynasty, has become the instrument of German control over Austria-Hungary.]

[Footnote 31: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 29, 33.]

[Footnote 32: Page 23.]

[Footnote 33: Except by a branch line from Adana to Alexandretta, Rohrbach (pp. 27, 36, 37) laments the economic drawbacks of this strategic necessity.]

[Footnote 34: "Bagdadbahn," p.60.]

[Footnote 35: The German memorialised.]

[Footnote 36: "Bagdadbahn," pp. 39, 40.]

[Footnote 37: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 530. Major Count Wolf von Wolfskahl, who served as adjutant to Fakhri Pasha in the Turkish "punitive expedition" against Urfa, is mentioned as particularly guilty by a trustworthy neutral resident in Syria.]

[Footnote 38: On which Wiedenfeld lays stress, pp. 19, 22.]

[Footnote 39: "Leavening the Levant," by Rev. J. Greene, D.D. (Beston, 1916: The Pilgrim Press), p. 99.]

[Footnote 40: Excluding, of course, the hospital and educational endowments, and the salaries of the missionaries themselves.]

[Footnote 41: _Hilal_, 4th April, 1916, quoted in Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), pp. 654-6.]

[Footnote 42: Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916), p. 309.]

[Footnote 43: Though the work of the American Presbyterian Mission at Beirût must not be forgotten.]

[Footnote 44: See "Zionism and the Jewish Future" (London, 1916: John Murray), pp. 138-170; for the agricultural machinery on the Jewish National Fund's Model Farm at Ben-Shamen, see the Report of the German Vice-Consul at Jaffa for the year 1912.]

[Footnote 45: "Die Jüden der Türkei" (Leipzig, 1915: Veit u. Comp.). Pamphlet No. 8 of the _Deutsches Vorderasienscomitee's_ series: "Länder u. Völker der Türkei."]

[Footnote 46: The Spanish-speaking Jews in Turkey are descended from refugees to whom the Ottoman Government gave shelter in the sixteenth century; the Arabic-speaking Jews have been introduced into Palestine from the Yemen, by the Zionists, since 1908.]

[Footnote 47: Dr. Trietsch admits that Jewish colonisation in Palestine was retarded because "the leading French and British Jews remained under the impression of the Armenian massacres" (of 1895-7) "as presented by the anti-Turkish, French and British Press.... In reality, the butcheries of Armenians in Constantinople were a convincing proof that the Jews in the Ottoman Empire were safe, for ... not a hair on a Jewish head was touched." One wonders how he will exorcise the "impression" of 1915.]

[Footnote 48: As early as 1912 the German Vice-Consul at Jaffa betrayed his annoyance at the progress which Zionism was making. He admits indeed that "the falling off in trade last year would have been greater still than it was, if the economic penetration of Palestine were not reinforced by an idealistic factor in the shape of Zionism;" but he is piqued at the "Jewish national vanity" which makes it advisable for German firms to display their advertisements in Palestine in the Hebrew language and character.]

[Footnote 49: Edessa from Thracian [Greek: _bedu_] = Slavonic _voda._]

[Footnote 50: _Muslin_ is named after Mosul, and cotton itself (in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Turkish) _bombyx_ or _bambuk_, after Bambyke (Mumbij).]

[Footnote 51: "Bagdadbahn," p. 38.]

[Footnote 52: Book I., ch. 193.]

[Footnote 53: Cp. Sir William Willcocks. "The Irrigation of Mesopotamia," p. 5 (London, 1911: Spon).]

[Footnote 54: Book I., ch. 192.]

[Footnote 55: Herodotus Book III., ch. 91.]

[Footnote 56: Book I., chs. 178-183.]

[Footnote 57: A hectare is approximately equal to two and a half acres.]

[Footnote 58: "The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate," by Guy le Strange (Cambridge, 1905: at the University Press), pp. 25-9.]

[Footnote 59: "The Irrigation of Mesopotamia," by Sir William Willcocks, K.C.M.G., F.R.G.S. (London, 1911: Spon). The report is dated Bagdad, March 26th, 1911.]

[Footnote 60: £1.00 Turkish = approximately £0.90 sterling.]

[Footnote 61: In his immediate project he intends to keep the Tigris navigable, and allots £48,350 (Turkish) for its improvement.]

[Footnote 62: Cp. Wiedenfeld, pp. 62-4.]

[Footnote 63: "Die Bagdadbahn," pp. 57, 61.]

[Footnote 64: Cp. Wiedenfeld, p. 64.]

[Footnote 65: "Bagdadbahn," p. 83; cp. Trietsch, p. 11.]