This indiscriminate destruction of centers of culture and marts of commerce is often attributed to the Turks. But, as we have already seen, the Turks--I refer especially to the Osmanlis--who have been the rulers of the Ottoman Empire for more than five hundred years, were not like the Mongols and Tartars, a nation of raiders, but a nation of colonizers and empire builders. Their object, therefore, was not to destroy but to construct and develop. Those who make this charge, which is in great measure gratuitous, forget the wholesale destruction of the hordes of Timur and Jenghiz Khan, not to speak of other raiders, and lose sight of the fact that some of the most famous cities of the East were reduced to ashes by the armies of Greece and Rome more than a thousand years before the appearance of the armies of the Ottoman conquerors in Syria, Greece, and Ionia. Thus, to mention only a few instances, it was Alexander the Great who destroyed Halicarnasus, the birthplace of the historians Herodotus and Dionysius. Here stood the magnificent tomb of Mausolus, classed by the ancients among the seven wonders of the world, the ruins of which were in 1402 used by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem as a quarry for building their castles. It was the Roman general Mummius who brought ruin to the famous city of Corinth. This was, in truth, rebuilt by Julius Cæsar, but only to be destroyed again, at a much later period, by the Greeks themselves. It was the Emperor Aurelian who doomed to destruction Palmyra, the magnificent capital of Zenobia, almost during the heyday of its architectural splendor and commercial prosperity. It was the Goths who demolished the temple of Diana at Ephesus, another of the world’s wonders, while the city itself was in ruins even before the advent of the devastating Timur. But it was Timur who razed Sardis, the capital of Crœsus, whose name has ever been a synonym of untold wealth. It was Malik al-Ashraf, ruler of Egypt and Syria, who destroyed the famed city of Tyre after its long and eventful history which antedated the reigns of Hiram and Solomon.