We had anticipated spending several days in Djerabis in order that we might have an opportunity to examine the remains of Carchemish that have recently been uncovered by the spade of the archæologist. The great number of sculptures, both in relief and in the round, which have been unearthed here are destined to throw a flood of light on the cultural and political histories of the great Hittite empire, and, when they shall have been thoroughly investigated, they will no doubt cause us greatly to modify, if not essentially alter, many of the views we have long entertained respecting one of the most powerful but least known peoples of the ancient world. Excavators here are fondly hoping that they may have the good fortune to turn up among these venerable ruins the long desired bilingual inscription that shall enable them to decipher the strange Hittite script that has so long baffled scholars. Such an inscription would supply them with a key to the history of a nation that was so long a rival of Egypt and Babylonia, and its discovery would truly mark a red-letter day in the annals of oriental research and scholarship.[297] When I first set foot upon Mesopotamia my emotion was almost as great as when I caught my first view of “The River,” “The Great River,” “The River of the East,” “The River of Asia,” as the Euphrates is variously designated in the Sacred Text. I was at last in the Aram-Naharaim of the Jews--“The Syria of the Two Rivers,” known to the Arabs as Al-Jezireh--The Island--because it is compassed by the Tigris and the Euphrates. I was now actually treading the soil of the first country I had ever read about, and surveying the land which first enchained my youthful fancy. But it was not the Mesopotamia of my boyhood dreams that I now beheld; a land of teeming millions of happy shepherds and contented husbandmen; of smiling fields of grain and attractive gardens of luscious fruits; of splendid cities with imposing temples and magnificent palaces. Far from being, as I once pictured it, the most attractive and flourishing region of the world, it was, as far as the eye could reach, a land entirely bare of trees and almost devoid of even the most humble village--a land of utter desolation which exhibited on every side almost a complete cessation of that exuberant life which was here once so dominant.