The New England magazine . resthave been swept away by the current of thechanging river, or plundered by the Arabsfor their bricks, or buried beneath the mod-ern city. Whoever would search for traces of thecitys glory should visit the remains of theuniversity, where, long before Columbusdiscovered America, the greatest scholars ofthe world taught that the earth is round,and, reviving the forgotten learning of theChinese, added to it, and passed it onthrough the Spanish Moors to the westernnations. The world may thank the Arabsfor paper, for gunpowder, for the water-wheel, and for the knowledge
The New England magazine . resthave been swept away by the current of thechanging river, or plundered by the Arabsfor their bricks, or buried beneath the mod-ern city. Whoever would search for traces of thecitys glory should visit the remains of theuniversity, where, long before Columbusdiscovered America, the greatest scholars ofthe world taught that the earth is round,and, reviving the forgotten learning of theChinese, added to it, and passed it onthrough the Spanish Moors to the westernnations. The world may thank the Arabsfor paper, for gunpowder, for the water-wheel, and for the knowledge of graftingfruit-trees; many of our most commonwords — sugar, cotton, alcohol, alchemy,and a host of others — are Arabic. Nowthe university is a han, and the petty tra-ders who pass beneath the proud inscriptionof the archway have forgotten that theirstorerooms were once the lecture-halls oflearned professors. In the centre of the modern city is a sculp-tured and inscribed minaret towering far i8o NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE. Sitt Zobeide, the tomb of the favorite wife of Haroun-al-Raschid above the flat roofs of the houses. Themosque which it once adorned has disap-peared; from its gallery the muezzin nolonger calls the Faithful to prayer, andthousands of blue doves, the sacred bird inwhich the soul of the prophet Mohammedis expected to return to earth, are its occu-pants. From its summit one may see, be-yond the flat roofs of the city, the golden minaret of Kazamieh rising above the surrounding date-palms, and the Tigris winding like a huge snake through the deseruntil it disappears on the horizon. In ever]direction, as far as the eye can reach, is th<once fertile plain of two of the most civilizecnations of the world,— the Babylonian:and the Arabs; now it is deserted save fo:an occasional group of black tents. BAGDAD, HOME OF SINDBAD 181 The modern city is a network of windinglanes, too narrow in places for horsemen,and sometimes when pedestrians meet theymust squeeze aga
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