_Whiter than pearls and brighter than_ _the cups at a Sultan’s feast,_ _And these I have brought for love-tokens,_ _from the Lords of Truth, in my East._ FOREWORD The following pages are the result of observations made and impressions received during a recent journey between one of the greatest capitals of Europe and the crumbling remains of what was in the long-ago the greatest capital of Asia. The route I followed was that which has been rendered famous by the migrations of the nations from the East to the West and by the march of armies from the days of Asurbanipal, Darius and Alexander to those of Harun-al-Rashid, Godefroy de Bouillon and Kolmar von der Goltz. The journey in question I made not as a tourist but as a student--as one interested not only in the present condition--social, economic, religious and intellectual--of the peoples of the countries through which I passed, and as one who had had an intense and life-long interest in the history and civilization of the lands which intervene between the headwaters of the Danube and the lower reaches of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The ordinary tourist on pleasure bent would regard most of my journey as having been made through what is usually spoken of as “the unchangeable East.” But to the student who is conversant with the long and eventful past of the Near East the storied belt which connects the Bosphorus with the Persian Gulf has been the theater of more and greater changes in humanity’s development than any other portion of the earth’s surface. It is the _fons et origo_ of the oldest civilization--a civilization whose traditions carry us back to the Garden of Eden. It has witnessed the successive civilizations of the Babylonians and the Assyrians, of the Greeks and the Romans and of the Saracens under the caliphs. And each of these consecutive civilizations has left its monuments of imperial splendor--its temples and palaces and colonnades and its priceless gems of plastic art. Some of these magnificent vestiges of a glorious past, like those of Palmyra, are still standing in the heart of the desert and have long since been abandoned to the roving Bedouin or the rapacious jackal. Others, like those of Ephesus and Pergamum and Nineveh, were long buried under sand and clay and have only recently been unearthed by the pick and the spade of the explorer and the archæologist. But wherever found, whether on the lonely plains and hillsides of Anatolia, or in the solitudes of the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, they possess for the studious traveler an attraction that is not offered in the same degree by any other section of the wide world.