Unlike the mysterious ruins in the steaming jungles of Yucatan or on the chilly plateau of Bolivia, which speak of an enigmatic race quite alien to our own, the remains of antiquity everywhere found in the lands between Stamboul and Babylon are of forms and designs with which we have been familiar from our youth and which belong to the same civilization from which our own is derived--the civilization that had its origin in the city-states of ancient Greece and that was subsequently introduced into western Asia by the soldiers of Alexander and Seleucus and firmly maintained there for centuries by the legionaries of imperial Rome. To the student traveling through the Near East--especially along the route which I selected--the experience is, in many respects, like that of one passing through a vast museum. At every turn he meets something of rare and enthralling fascination. Now it is a remnant of a marble capital or architrave in a nomad’s hut; then it is a forlorn granite column near a squalid Turkish village--all that remains of some stately temple or sumptuous theater of Greek or Roman greatness. Again it is the fragment of a tomb which was erected to the memory of one who played an important rôle in his day, but whose name and achievements have long since been forgotten. And hovering over these crumbling monuments of a misty past are legends innumerable, but all of entrancing human interest--an interest that is accentuated by the discovery of a Greek or Latin inscription carved in a slab of granite or marble or by the finding of a terra cotta tablet covered with cuneiform characters that carry one back to the stirring reigns of Esarhaddon or Sennacherib. And then there are the people--especially those of Asia Minor--with whom the author always loved to mingle and of whose kindness and hospitality he will ever retain the fondest memories. No people that I know has been less understood and more misrepresented than the gentle, industrious, home-loving Osmanlis of Anatolia. But of these I shall speak at length when relating my experiences in Asia Minor. Traveling as a student, I have also written as a student and for students. But I have at the same time endeavored to record my observations and impressions so as to make them of interest to the general reader as well. And while I have given prominence to subjects that specially appealed to myself, these will, I trust, not be devoid of value to others who may wish to have in popular form an account of some of the most famous cities and peoples of the Near East when civilization was in its infancy, or when it was in full bloom under the beneficent influence of Helenism and Christianity.