this again the wild tangle of mountains stretching up to the Caucasus was more likely to shelter savagery than to encourage culture.
Cut off on its southern side by Taurus and Anti-Taurus from the Mediter- ranean Sea and from easy access to Syria, Anatolia might seem an isolated country with little prospect of advance. But there was alluvial gold in the western rivers, and the eastern mountains were astonish- ingly rich in metallic ores -- silver, copper and iron, all essential to man's progress; the value of these was bound to outweigh the difficul- ties of transport across the mountain ranges. The narrow straits at either end of the Sea of Marmora brought the peninsula into touch with eastern Europe, and the coastal track along the eastern end of the Black Sea afforded a link with southern Russia; Anatolia indeed was to play the part of a land-bridge for commercial traffic and, at times, of a highway for invading armies.
Syria was the continuation of that land-bridge, whose southern abut- ment was Egypt. But here too there is great diversity. The Amanus and Lebanon ranges (in antiquity densely afforested) sometimes fall abruptly into the sea, sometimes leave along its marge a narrow strip of very fertile ground. Behind the mountains the Aleppo steppe and the long valley of the Orontes, including the Beka'a, is pre-eminently an agricultural land; but behind this stretches the Syrian desert with only the garden oasis of Damascus to relieve its vast expanse of barren gravel, where settlement was impossible and alone the Beduin nomads passed in springtime seeking a scanty pasturage for their herds. To the south the hill country of Judaea enclosed a few fertile valleys such as that of Megiddo and the coastal plain that was to be Philistia, but the Jordan rift was for the most part unfit for cultivation and the open country round Beersheba allowed only of chance crops; to the east, beyond the mountains of Moab, lay the desert. In this long narrow land the manner of men's lives differed perforce. In the north a dense population could exist by tillage and on the sea coast a few cities could prosper; in the economy of the greater part of the country sheep and goats counted for more than agriculture and small towns served as centres for the semi-settled farming clans. Here there was no chance of unity, no common interest could bind together these disparate elements; even the sporadic raids of the desert peoples could not do that, because they were on a small scale and mere raids; either they could be met and driven off by the local levy or, if successful, they were over and the raiders had vanished before help could arrive from any distance; and against organised invasion from Egypt no
Syria
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Publication Information: Book Title: The Art of the Middle East Including Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine. Contributors: Leonard Woolley - author. Publisher: Crown Publishers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1961. Page Number: 16.
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