The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  When the fighting came to an end, it is small cause for surprise that the surviving Armenians wished a plague upon all of their tormentors and joined the Soviet Union. They were allowed to form the republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia, between the Caspian and the Black Sea at the foot of the Caucasian Mountains, which Russia had added to its territory during (he first half of the nineteenth century.

  Then, turning from the traditional victims of Turkish wrath to the Turks themselves, we wander a little farther westward and enter the plateau of Asia Minor.

  Asia Minor, once merely a province of the empire of the old Sultan, is to-day all that remains of the Turks’ dream of world conquest. On the north it is bounded by the Black Sea, on the west by the Sea of Marmora, the Bosporus, and the Dardanelles, which cut it off from Europe, and in the south by the Mediterranean, from which the interior is separated by the Taurus mountains. Across this territory, which is considerably lower than Iran, Persia, or Armenia, runs a famous railway, the so-called Bagdad railway, which has played such an important part in the history of the last thirty years. For both England and Germany wanted to have the concessions for the line that was to connect Constantinople with Bagdad on the Euphrates and Smyrna, the great harbour of the Asiatic west coast, with Damascus in Syria and with Medina, the holy city of the Arabs.

  No sooner had these two nations reached a compromise than French capital insisted upon a share in the future revenue. The French were thereupon given the northern part of Asia Minor, where Trebizond, the export harbour for Armenia and Persia, was still waiting for suitable communications with the west. Foreign engineers then began to survey their roads through these ancient lands where the Greek philosophers of the Athenian colonies had first speculated upon the true nature of man and the universe, where solemn Church councils had given the world the iron-bound faith by which the people of Europe had lived for over a thousand years, where Paul of Tarsus was born and where he had preached, where Turk and Christian had fought for the supremacy of the Mediterranean world, and where in some forsaken desert hamlet an Arab camel-driver had dreamed his first dreams of being Allah’s one and only prophet.

  This railway as planned was to keep well away from the coastline, skirting those legend-haunted seaports of ancient and medieval history—Adana and Alexandretta and Antioch and Tripoli and Beirut and Tyre and Sidon and Jaffa, the only harbour of the rocky land of Palestine—and devoting itself chiefly to the mountains.

  When the war broke out, the railway played exactly that part which the Germans had expected. The railway, with its excellent German equipment, together with the presence of two big German battleships in Constantinople, were two highly practical ‘considerations’ which played a most important part in deciding the Turks to join the Central Powers rather than the Allies. And how well that line had been planned from a strategical point of view was shown during the next four years. For the world learned to its surprise that the Turk made as good a soldier in 1918 as he had done in 1288 when the Seljuk Turks conquered the whole of Asia and cast their first longing glances across the Bosporus at the then impregnable walls of imperial Constantinople.

  Up to then that mountainous plateau had been quite well-to-do. For Asia Minor, although part of the land bridge between Asia and Europe, had never quite suffered the fate of Armenia and the Persian plateau of Iran. This had been due to the fact that Asia Minor was not only part of a commercial high road but also the terminal station for all the routes leading from India and China to Greece and Rome. For when the world was still young, the most active intellectual and commercial life of the Mediterranean was not to be found in Hellas itself. It flourished among the cities of western Asia which the Greek cities of the mainland had converted into Greek colonies. Where the ancient blood of Asia had mingled with the new race until it produced a mixture that for sheer intelligence and sharpness of wit had rarely found its equal. Even in the modern Levantines, of highly unsavoury reputation in regard to business integrity and general honesty, we can detect traits of the old stock which for half a thousand years had been able to hold its own against its many enemies.

  The final disintegration under the rule of the Seljuks was inevitable. As a degenerative force the Turks have always been without a single rival. But to-day this small peninsula is practically all that remains of the ancient glories of the Ottoman Empire. The Sultans themselves are gone. Their ancestors, after residing for almost a century in Adrianople, the only other Turkish city left in Europe outside of Constantinople, bad moved to the latter city in 1453, and from there had ruled a territory which included the whole of the Balkans, all of Hungary, and the greater part of southern Russia.

  JERUSALEM

  Four centuries of inexpressible mismanagement sufficed to ruin this empire and make it what it is to-day. Constantinople (Istanbul), the oldest and most important example of a commercial monopoly which for thousands of years held the key to the grain trade of southern Russia, that same Constantinople so favoured by Nature that its harbour came to be known as the Golden Horn, the Horn of Plenty, so filled with fish that no one ever need go hungry, was reduced to the rank of a third-rate provincial city. For the masters of the New Turkey, who had salvaged what was left when Peace was declared, wisely concluded that the degenerate background of Constantinople, a hodge-podge of Greeks and Armenians and Levantines and Slavs and the accumulated riff-raff of all the Crusades, was not the place from which to try the well-nigh, impossible task of rejuvenating the Turkish people and turning them into a modern nation. They therefore chose themselves a new capital, the city of Angora, in the heart of the Anatolian Mountains, more than two hundred miles east of Constantinople.

  Angora was old, very old. Four hundred years before our era a tribe of Gauls had lived here, the same sort of Gauls who afterwards took possession of the plains of France. It had passed through all the vicissitudes of all the cities situated on this main road of trade. The Crusaders had captured the city. The Tartars had done likewise. Even as late as 1832 an Egyptian army had destroyed that whole neighbourhood. But it was there that Kemal Pasha founded the capital city of his new fatherland. He purged it of all the elements that could not be assimilated. He swapped his Greeks and Armenians for Turks who lived in these other countries. He built up his army and his credit with equal brilliance. And he made the New Turkey a going concern, though Heaven knows the mountains of Anatolia, after fifteen centuries of warfare and neglect, yield little enough that is considered of any value to a Western banker who is looking round for possible prospects in the loan market.

  All the same, Asia Minor is generally recognized as being of the utmost importance for the future trade between Asia and Europe. Smyrna is regaining the position it already held when the Amazons, the female warriors of the ancient world, ruled this part of Asia and founded their curious State in which all male children were put to death, and in which no man was allowed to set foot except once a year and then exclusively for the purpose of continuing the race.

  Ephesus, where Paul still found the natives worshipping the image of the Chaste Diana, the ideal goddess, by the way, for a race of Amazons, has disappeared from the face of the earth, but the adjacent region may become one of the most lucrative fig gardens of the world.

  Farther towards the north, past the ruins of Pergamum (the great literary centre of the ancient world, which gave us our word parchment), the railway skirts the plain of Troy to connect with Panderma on the Sea of Marmora. Panderma is only a day’s trip by boat from Scutari, where the famous Orient Express (London—Calais—Paris—Vienna—Belgrade—Sofia—Constantinople) has connexions with the trains that run to Angora and Medina and those which via Aleppo—Damascus—Nazareth—Ludd (change cars for Jerusalem and Jaffa)—Gaza—Ismailia—Kantara connect with Suez, and thence up the Nile as far as the Sudan.

  If it had not been for the Great War, that road could have been made profitable by transporting goods and passengers for India and China and Japan from western Europe by rail as far as Suez, and t
hen sending them the rest of the way by ship. But by the time the damage of the four years’ fighting has been repaired the aeroplane will probably be in general use for passenger traffic.

  The eastern part of Asia Minor is inhabited by the Kurds, the ancient enemies of the Armenians. The Kurds, like the Scots and most mountain peoples, are divided into clans and have too much individual pride to take kindly to a commercial or an industrial civilization. They are a terribly old race, already mentioned in the cuneiform inscriptions of the Babylonians and by Xenophon in his Anabasis (what a dull book!). They belong to the same original stock as we do, but they have been converted to Mohammedanism. As such they have never trusted their Christian neighbours, but this holds good of all the other Moslem States that were founded in consequence of the Great War, and not without cause, as all of us who lived during those days, when ‘official misstatements’ were part of national strategy, have every reason to remember.

  When Peace was finally declared nobody was satisfied, and many new feuds and quarrels were added to the old ones, all the more as several European powers now installed themselves as ‘mandatory rulers’ over parts of the old Turkish Empire, and proved to be but little less cruel in their dealings with native races than the Turks had been.

  The French, who had invested a great deal of money in Syria, took hold of Syria, and a French High Commission, amply supplied with money and troops, undertook to rule the three million-odd Syrians who most certainly had not asked to be turned into a European ‘mandate,’ which meant a colony but with a slightly less offensive name. Soon different elements that had been part of the old Syria were beginning to forget their dislike for each other in one common hatred for the French. The Kurds made peace with their hereditary enemies, the Roman Catholic Maronites of Lebanon (the old home of the Phoenicians), and the Christians ceased to maltreat the Jews, and the Jews ceased to despise both Christians and Mohammedans, and the French were obliged to erect a great many gallows in order to maintain themselves. But order apparently has been re-established, and Syria is rapidly becoming another Algeria. That does not mean that the people like their mandatory rulers any better than before, but merely that the leaders have been hanged and the others lack the courage to go on fighting.

  As for the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, it was elevated to the rank of a monarchy, and the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh are now part of the Kingdom of Iraq. But the new potentates hardly enjoy the freedom of action of Hammurabi or Assur-Bani-Pal. Iraq has now become a member of the League of Nations.

  As for Palestine (the land of the Philistines), which is also part of this region, it is so strange a country that I shall have to be very short about it for fear of filling the rest of this book with a description of a little State no larger than some ninth-rate European principality like Schleswig-Holstein, but which somehow or other has played a greater part in human history than many a first-class empire.

  The original ancestors of the Jews, after leaving their miserable villages in eastern Mesopotamia, and after wandering through the northern part of the Arabian desert, and crossing the plains between Mount Sinai and the Mediterranean, and spending a few centuries in Egypt, finally retraced their steps. They stopped when they had reached the narrow strip of fertile land between the mountain ridge of Judea and the Mediterranean and engaged in bitter warfare with the original natives, whom they finally deprived of a sufficient number of villages and cities to found an independent Jewish State of their own.

  Their lives cannot have been very comfortable. In the west the Philistines, non-Semitic settlers from the island of Crete, were in full possession of the coastal region. In some respects this was an advantage, for this plain was a great route between the empires of the Near East. Secure amid the hills, the Jews were able to develop their nationality and their religion. When they began to play a part in the politics of rival empires, they lost first their unity and then their liberty, and once more became exiles in a strange land. In the east, one of the strangest natural phenomena of which we have any record, an enormous rift in the rocks running a straight course from north to south and going as deep as 1300 feet below sea-level, separated their country from the rest of Asia. This sink, which is very much to-day as it was when John the Baptist chose it as his place of residence, begins in the north between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, and follows the valley of the Jordan, the Lake of Tiberias or Sea of Galilee, which is 680 feet below sea-level, the Dead Sea, which is 1292 feet below sea-level, and from there (for the River Jordan stops dead in the Dead Sea, which contains 25% salt on account of the constant evaporation) through the ancient land of Edom (where the Moabites lived) to the Gulf of Akaba, a branch of the Red Sea.

  The southern part of this sink is one of the hottest and most desolate regions of the world, full of asphalt and sulphur and phosphates and other diabolical ingredients which modern chemistry has made highly profitable (just before the Great War the Germans founded a formidable Dead Sea Asphalt Company), but which must have inspired the people of long ago with horror and fear, and which made them attribute the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by an ordinary earthquake to an act of divine vengeance.

  The sudden change of climate and scenery when they had crossed the mountain ridge of Judea, which runs parallel with this great rift, must have made a tremendous impression upon the earliest invaders from the east, and probably inspired that jubilant cry of a land “flowing with milk and honey.” For the modern visitor to Palestine will find very little milk and the bees apparently have long since died. That, however, is not due to a change in the climate, as one hears so often said, for the climate to-day seems little different from the climate in the days when the disciples of Jesus wandered from Dan to Beersheba without bothering much about the problem of their daily bread and butter, since there were enough dates and there was enough native wine for the simple needs of all travellers. But the Turks and the Crusaders between them played the rôle of climate. The Crusaders began by destroying whatever remained of the old irrigation works which had been built during the days of independence and during the centuries of Roman domination. The Turks had, as usual, done the rest. A soil which only needed water to bring forth rich harvests was systematically neglected until nine-tenths of the farmer populace had either died or moved away. Jerusalem became a sort of Bedouin village where a dozen Christian sects and their Mohammedan neighbours were for ever engaged in far from edifying quarrels. For to the Mohammedans Jerusalem is also a very holy city. The Arabs consider themselves the direct descendants of that unfortunate Ishmael who, together with his mother Hagar, was driven into the wilderness by Abraham at the request of the latter’s wedded wife, the redoubtable Sarah.

  But Ishmael and Hagar had not perished of thirst, as seems to have been Sarah’s little plan. Ishmael had married an Egyptian girl and had become the founder of the whole of the Arabian nation. To-day therefore he and his mother lie buried just outside the Kaaba, the centre of the most holy of all places of worship in Mecca, which all Mohammedans must visit at least once during their lifetime no matter how difficult the voyage or how far the distance that separates them from that hallowed spot.

  As soon as the Arabs had conquered Jerusalem they erected a mosque over the rock upon which, according to tradition, their distant cousin Solomon, another direct descendant of Abraham, had built his famous temple. That happened Heaven only knows how many centuries ago. But the fight for the ownership of that rock and the walls around it, part of which is the traditional “wailing wall” of the orthodox Jews, is responsible for the continual quarrels between the two races that now make up the population of the Palestinian mandate.

  And what can one hope for the future? When the English captured Jerusalem they found the people of Palestine to consist of 70% Moslems (Syrians and Arabs) and 30% Jews and Gentile Christians. The English, as the rulers of the largest Mohammedan empire of the modern world, could not afford to hurt the feelings of so many of their loyal subjects, and dared not surrender
half a million Palestinian Moslems to the mercies of two hundred thousand Jews and others who had many entirely justifiable axes to grind.

  The result was the usual post-Versailles compromise which satisfied nobody. Palestine to-day is a British mandate, and British troops maintain order between the different nationalities. The High Commissioner is British, but the country does not enjoy that complete political independence of which Lord Balfour had spoken so eloquently, but also so vaguely, when at the beginning of the Palestine campaign he referred to those regions as the future home of the Jewish race.

  Matters would become a great deal simpler if the Jews themselves knew what they wanted to do with the old mother country. The orthodox Jews of eastern Europe, and especially those of Russia, want to keep it as it is now, a vast theological seminary with a little museum of Hebrew antiquities. The younger generation, remembering the wise words of the Prophet “to let the dead bury their dead,” and feeling that too much weeping about the past joys and glories of bygone days is apt to interfere quite seriously with the glories and the joys of to-morrow, hope to make Palestine into a normal, modern state, something like Switzerland or Denmark, a going concern of men and women who have rid themselves of the memories of the Ghetto, and who are more interested in good roads and good irrigation canals than in squabbling with their Arab neighbours about a few old stones which may or may not have been the well from which Rebecca drew the water, but which are now merely a hindrance to progress.

  Since most of Palestine consists of roiling territory with a decided slope from east to west, it is indeed possible to reclaim the neglected and exhausted soil for purposes of agriculture. The sea winds which blow the greater part of each, day spread their heavy dew across the entire landscape and make it ideally fit for the cultivation of olives, and Jericho, the only city of any importance ever built in the terrible Dead Sea region, may once more become a centre for the trade in dates.