[_Authorities and Sources_:--“Tent Work.” Major Conder. “The Recovery of Jerusalem.” Colonels Warren and Wilson. “Sinai and Palestine.” Dean Stanley. “Walks about Jerusalem.” W. H. Bartlett. “Quarterly Statements of Palestine Exploration Fund.”]
MESOPOTAMIA--“the Land between the Rivers”--is a tract of country nearly 700 miles long, and from 20 to 250 miles broad, enclosed between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and extending from the mountains of Armenia to near the Persian Gulf. It is for the most part a vast plain, but is crossed near its centre by a range of hills running almost east and west-from Hit on the Euphrates, famous for its bitumen pits, to Samarah on the Tigris. North of this line the country, though dry and bare, is undulating, and rises occasionally into mountains, while south of it the region is flat and consists of rich, moist, alluvial land, formed by the rivers themselves. This land of alluvium was Babylonia, and its capital Babylon; the country north of it was Assyria, with its capital Nineveh. But the extent of both countries varied from time to time, according to the power of various monarchs and their successes in war.
The beginnings of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires are lost in obscurity, and no records exist among the people themselves accounting for their origin. Yet the account given in the Bible agrees so well with what is known from the records that there can be no reasonable doubt that in it there is a true history of the rise of these two nations, which were in after time to wield the power of the then known world. This Biblical account, borne out and amplified as it is by the late discoveries, forms one of the most interesting and instructive links in the history of the human race and its progress in civilisation.
“Taking, then, the account as it stands in the Bible,”[49] says Mr Budge, “it appears that the descendants of Ham, the third son of Noah, were Cush, Mizraim, Phut, and Canaan. The lands of Cush and Mizraim have hitherto been identified with Ethiopia and Egypt respectively; Phut was regarded as doubtful, and Canaan was the country with which we are so well acquainted from the frequent occurrence of the name in the Bible. The identification of the first-named and most important of these districts, the land of Cush, has been regarded by many as unsatisfactory: for Nimrod, judging from the names of towns said to have been founded by him, could hardly have been an Ethiopian, though, according to the Bible story, he was a descendant of Cush.”