History of the Conflict Between Religion and ScienceDraper, John William
Religion
History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science
Draper, John William
Religion and science -- History
EVENTS OF THE CAMPAIGNS. The modern military student cannot look
upon these wonderful campaigns without admiration. The passage of the
Hellespont; the forcing of the Granicus; the winter spent in a political
organization of conquered Asia Minor; the march of the right wing and
centre of the army along the Syrian Mediterranean coast; the engineering
difficulties overcome at the siege of Tyre; the storming of Gaza; the
isolation of Persia from Greece; the absolute exclusion of her navy from
the Mediterranean; the check on all her attempts at intriguing with
or bribing Athenians or Spartans, heretofore so often resorted to with
success; the submission of Egypt; another winter spent in the political
organization of that venerable country; the convergence of the whole
army from the Black and Red Seas toward the nitre-covered plains of
Mesopotamia in the ensuing spring; the passage of the Euphrates fringed
with its weeping-willows at the broken bridge of Thapsacus; the crossing
of the Tigris; the nocturnal reconnaissance before the great and
memorable battle of Arbela; the oblique movement on the field; the
piercing of the enemy's centre--a manoeuvre destined to be repeated
many centuries subsequently at Austerlitz; the energetic pursuit of
the Persian monarch; these are exploits not surpassed by any soldier of
later times.
A prodigious stimulus was thus given to Greek intellectual activity.
There were men who had marched with the Macedonian army from the Danube
to the Nile, from the Nile to the Ganges. They had felt the hyperborean
blasts of the countries beyond the Black Sea, the simooms and
sand-tempests of the Egyptian deserts. They had seen the Pyramids which
had already stood for twenty centuries, the hieroglyph-covered obelisks
of Luxor, avenues of silent and mysterious sphinxes, colossi of monarchs
who reigned in the morning of the world. In the halls of Esar-haddon
they had stood before the thrones of grim old Assyrian kings, guarded by
winged bulls. In Babylon there still remained its walls, once more than
sixty miles in compass, and, after the ravages of three centuries and
three conquerors, still more than eighty feet in height; there were
still the ruins of the temple of cloud encompassed Bel, on its top was
planted the observatory wherein the weird Chaldean astronomers had held
nocturnal communion with the stars; still there were vestiges of the two
palaces with their hanging gardens in which were great trees growing in
mid-air, and the wreck of the hydraulic machinery that had supplied
them with water from the river. Into the artificial lake with its vast
apparatus of aqueducts and sluices the melted snows of the Armenian
mountains found their way, and were confined in their course through
the city by the embankments of the Euphrates. Most wonderful of all,
perhaps, was the tunnel under the river-bed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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