Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/78

633] from Aleppo to Babylon runs the Euphrates, while the far east is bounded by the Tigris flowing under the mountain range that separates ʿIrāḳ ʿArabi from Persia. Between the two rivers lies Mesopotamia, full of patriarchal memories. Over this great plain there roamed (as still there roam) Bedawi tribes with flocks and herds. The greater part had long professed the Christian religion. Those on the Syrian side, as the Ghassān of Boṣra, owed allegiance to the Roman Empire; those on the east were dependent upon Persia. But nomad life tends to fickle loyalty and laxity of faith; and so, not infrequently, these northern Arabs were now led by affinity with their brethren of Arabia, as well as by the lust of plunder, to desert their ancient allies and ancestral faith, and cast in their lot with the invading columns.

The lower Euphrates, ʿIrāḳ al-ʿArabi, is in striking contrast with the region just described. The two great rivers, while yet far from the sea approach each other; but, instead of joining, still keep apart and, for some two hundred and fifty miles running parallel, inclose the memorable plain of Dura. The country is covered with long hillocks and mounds marking the ancient channels of irrigation, and strewed with fragments of brick and pottery, remnants of a dim antiquity. The face of the land was not then, as now, a barren waste, but richly cultivated and watered by canals. On the Tigris, a little below where the two rivers first approach each other was Al-Medāin, "the double city" (so called from Seleucia on the western bank and Ctesiphon on the eastern), then the capital of Persia. Fifty miles farther south, a mass of shapeless mounds, looking down upon the Euphrates from its eastern shore, marks the site of Babylon, and from their summit may be descried the Birs Nimrud, or "Tower of Babel," rearing its weird head on the horizon of the verdant plain. Thirty miles yet farther south lay Al-Ḥīra, capital of the surrounding Arab tribes. It stood (like its successor Al-Kūfa) on a branch which issues from the Euphrates by a channel in the live rock, cut by the hand of man but of unknown antiquity. Sweeping along the