The Hundred Dead Cities
Still farther to the north in Syria, We came upon a region where erosion had done its
worst in an area of more than a million acres of rolling limestone country between
Hama, Alleppo, and Antioch. French archaeologists, Father Mattern, and others found in this
man-made desert more than l00 dead cities. Butler of Princeton rediscovered this region
a generation ago. These were not cities as we know them, but villages and market towns.
The ruins of these towns were not buried. They were left as stark skeletons in beautifully
cut stone, standing high on bare rock (fig. 4). Here, erosion had done its worst. If the
soils had remained, even though the cities were destroyed and the populations dispersed,
the area might be repeopled again and the cities rebuilt. But now that the soils are gone,
all is gone.
FIGURE 4. Ruins of one of the Hundred Dead Cities
of Syria. From 3 to 6 feet of soil has been washed off most of the hillsides. This city
will remain dead because the land around it can no longer support a city.
We are told that in A. D. 610-612 a Persian army invaded this thriving region. Less
than a generation later, in 633-638, the nomads out of the Arabian Desert completed the
destruction of the villages and dispersal of the population. Thus, all the measures for
conserving soil and water that had been built through centuries were allowed to far, into
disuse and ruin. Then erosion was unleashed to do its deadly work in making this area a
man-made desert.
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