Читать книгу The Cradle of Mankind; Life in Eastern Kurdistan - Edgar Thomas Ainger Wigram - Страница 4

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THE belated Jinn who emerged out of Suleiman’s Brass Bottle into twentieth-century London found there, amid much that was strange to him, some beings of his own kin. These were the railway locomotives, obviously Jann like himself, but yet more oppressively treated; bound by spells of appalling potency to labours more arduous and wearisome than Suleiman had ever conceived.

And truly his blunder was plausible: for if Jann be extinct nowadays (which one doubts after visiting Asia), then assuredly cylinders and boilers are charged with the might of the Jann. They are set to work regularly now instead of rarely and spasmodically; and though they raise less dust and clamour their net output is considerably more. The slaves of the Lamp and the Ring developed intense explosive energy, but their effective radius was limited. They could rear Aladdin’s palace in a night, or transport him to Africa in a twinkling; but these more domesticated Titans are capable of transmogrifying whole communities, and advancing the clock of progress five hundred years at a span.

And now the modern Magrabis, the busy Western magicians, have let slip these formidable Efrits against the City of Al Raschid himself: and one fine morning his descendants will awake from the slumber of centuries to find themselves environed by a new heaven and a new earth.

The Baghdad railway has started. It has penetrated inland to Aleppo. “That great river, the river Euphrates,” is bitted with its girders and caissons. One more stride will carry it to Mosul across a country so open and even that it needs but the bedding of the sleepers; and a journey which now takes a fortnight will be accomplished in a ten-hour run. What is now a mere stagnant backwater will thus be suddenly scoured out by one of the main channels of the world’s commerce; and who can venture to calculate the changes which will follow? Western reform will not convert the East any more than Alexander’s conquests converted it; but it may evolve unintentionally some new sort of Frankenstein’s Man.

But meanwhile the East waits unconscious. It takes no thought for the morrow. The shadow of coming events is perceived indeed, but not understood. As it was in the days of Noë, so in most things, it still continues: and the traveller of this generation may still find east of Aleppo those manners and customs unaltered, which the next may find clean swept away. Thus it is possible that some interest may attach to a desultory description of life as it is for the moment still enjoyed, or endured, in those regions; and which better ordered communities may perhaps find rather bizarre.

Aleppo, the present railhead, is a large Oriental city, lying pooled in a shallow depression round the great castle which dominates its roofs. It is beginning to show signs of Westernization; and the quarter nearest the railway station is blossoming with boulevards and hotels. But it is the returning, and not the outgoing, traveller who will be most struck by these symptoms. The latter will only be consumed with wonder that such a crude and guileless imitation should be thought to pass muster as the real thing. Outwardly the place is being refurbished, and the new “Frank” houses flaunt themselves as bravely as their compeers around the Soko at Tangier; but within they are full of all Oriental uncleanness and discomfort, for the Turk is quite satisfied as soon as he gets veneered.

The major part of the town consists of narrow crooked and ill-paved streets, overhung on each side by toppling wooden oriels, which almost engage with each other like cogs across the road; and amid this maze of grimy alleys lurk the mosques, the only noteworthy buildings, whose minarets show up prominently from a distance, but afford little guidance near at hand.

The great castle which dominates Aleppo occupies the flat summit of an immense mound, not much smaller than that of Corfe Castle, which is piled conspicuously upon a gentle eminence just within the confines of the city. The core of this mound may be natural, but the bulk of it is artificial; for it was originally one of the great High Places of that Baal worship which flourished pre-eminently in Northern Syria, and which has left us similar monuments of its dominion in the neighbouring mounds at Homs and Baalbek. The base of this mound is encircled by a deep dry moat, and its sloping sides are revetted with masonry; while its crest is crowned by the towers and walls which form the enceinte of the citadel, and access is provided at one end only through a most magnificent gate. The citadel owes its present form to Saladin, who is said to have employed as his workmen the captive Crusaders whom he had taken at the battle of Tiberias. There are some Western features in the building which give colour to this supposition; but the place was a notable stronghold long previous to Saladin’s day.

Aleppo was one of the few fortresses that made a respectable defence against the Moslems at the time of their first irruption. None of the great frontier towns to the eastward,—Edessa, Amida and Dara—so much as stood a real siege. Such was the bitterness of party strife, both civil and religious, within the Byzantine Empire at that period, that the Arab invaders were welcomed rather than resisted in these lands.

The citadel of Aleppo, however, was defended by a certain Youkinna, till even the redoubtable Caled, “the Sword of Allah,” began to despair of success. Only the direct command of the Khalif Omar had induced him to persevere with the leaguer when a valiant slave named Dames volunteered to attempt a coup de main. Caled approved his design; and to favour its execution withdrew his forces to a distance. Thus Youkinna, rather too readily, assumed that the siege was raised. The sentinels relaxed their vigilance, and the garrison had taken to carousing, when Dames with thirty companions crept up in the darkness to the walls. With the stalwart slave as their base they built up a human ladder, each man in succession clambering on to the shoulders of those below. The man on the seventh tier gripped the battlements, and scrambled over them, and then, letting down his turban, hauled up his associates one by one. Cutting down the few guards they encountered the Moslems then made for the gateway, and succeeded in gaining possession of it ere the garrison was fully aroused. Here they maintained themselves till daybreak when Caled arrived to relieve them, and Youkinna thereupon surrendered, seeing that further resistance was vain.

Aleppo accepted its fate and has since remained Mohammedan. The Byzantines did indeed temporarily recover it little more than three hundred years later, when the waning power of the Abbasside Khalifs enabled Nicephorus and Zimisces to push their armies almost to Baghdad. But this was a transitory conquest; a plundering raid rather than an occupation. The Greeks and Romans had always been alien intruders, and now their Asiatic provinces had reverted to Asia for good.

Another equally transitory raid left a more enduring impression—not indeed upon Aleppo in particular, but upon Mesopotamia at large. For in the year 1400 the country was visited by that most destructive of all conquerors, the terrible Timour the Tartar. He signalized his capture of Aleppo, as usual, by the erection of a gigantic pyramid of human heads; and (as was not unusual) he solaced himself while the pile was being reared by discussing theological problems with the learned doctors of the town. Poor wretches! they must have felt rather like a regiment of philosophers paraded for an interview with the Theban Sphinx; especially when their dangerous questioner opened proceedings with the bland inquiry, “Which are the true martyrs,—those who die fighting for me, or for my foes?” But fortunately they had an Oedipus among them who parried the thrust by quoting the words of the Prophet, “All who die fighting for conscience’ sake are martyrs, no matter under what ensign they fall.”

The conquests of Timour may be regarded as closing the history of Mesopotamia; that first and most striking chapter in the history of the civilization of the world. Here mankind had first emerged from barbarism, and constructed the city of Babylon. Here had arisen the successive great empires that had their seats at Carchemish, at Nineveh, at Persepolis, at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and at Antioch; and here after aeons of conquest and re-conquest there could yet arise the splendours of Baghdad. Invincibly fertile and populous the land still seemed able to revive after each successive devastation; but at last its power of recuperation was exhausted; and after Timour’s day there is no more left to tell. Other conquerors had destroyed and rebuilt; but the Tartars were only destroyers. They razed the cities to the dust; they massacred every living creature; they demolished even the irrigation works that gave fertility to the fields. And the desert which spreads to this day over all the plains to the eastward is, far more truly than his mausoleum at Samarcand, the monument of Timour the Lame.

Yet Aleppo itself was near enough to the sea to recover even from this disaster; and within 150 years of Timour’s conquest it was once more one of the chief marts of the East. Hither came the London Turkey merchants, among them the “Master of the Tiger.” Hither, with the Venetians, came Othello, to have his memorable encounter with the “heathen Turk.” John Verney was trading here in the middle of the seventeenth century, and describes it as “the most famous city in all the Grand Seignior’s dominions for the confluence of merchants of all nations.” Among the commodities dealt with he enumerates the “oak galls for dyers” which are still a valuable harvest in the Kurdistan mountains; but he makes no mention of the liquorice, which is now the most important of all.

Aleppo owes its prosperity chiefly to the Arabs; for though, under the name of Berea, it was well known both to the Greeks and Romans, it never appears in their days to have been a particularly important place. No doubt it profited by the decline of Antioch, which had been the second city in the Byzantine Empire. The new direct railway line to Iskanderun harbour will henceforth augment its importance; and when the completion of the Baghdad railway links it up with Constantinople and India it may even attain the position once held by Antioch itself.

Our own business at Aleppo was confined to the hire of a carriage to convey us and our baggage and our fortunes across the desert to Mosul. This was a subject which involved us in some three days’ delicate diplomacy; and eventually we closed with a contractor who offered to take us through at the price of nine pounds for a nominal fortnight’s journey,[1] with two mejidies (about seven shillings) extra for every day that we chose to call a halt.

The carriage in which we proposed to achieve our hegira consisted of a sort of four-wheeled coster’s barrow, endowed with flea-like agility by a perfect cat’s-cradle of springs. It had a seat in front for the driver, and a shelf behind on which our baggage could be corded; but there were no seats for the passengers, and accordingly we spread our sleeping bags upon a thick litter of straw. Most of the springs and many of the spokes had been broken and the fractures had been swathed in string. This required great quantities of string. Finally the tarpaulin tilt which enclosed the body of the vehicle (and which was ostensibly designed for shelter) proved useful for fielding the cargo whenever it got skied by the jolts. Such a carriage is known as “an araba,” or alternatively as an yaili—a name which is probably onomatopœic, for it is about the “slithiest” thing that runs on wheels.[2]

This equipage was drawn by four scraggy ponies; not that it weighed anything worth mentioning, but because the roads were bad. Two of the beasts were harnessed to the pole, and two tacked on by traces outside, like the team of a Homeric chariot. They could seldom be induced to trot, and generally our rate of progress fell even below the minimum that is ordinarily expected of “hollow jades of Asia”; for we cannot have averaged more than twenty miles a day. Our driver was a lank, dank, hook-nosed creature who reminded us irresistibly of Ikey Moses in the old Ally Sloper cartoons, and who looked as if he had been shipwrecked on a desert island a great many times and always in the same suit. He grumbled much at the amount of our baggage, and a great deal more because we insisted that he should carry a good supply of fodder; but we think that he—or at all events his horses—must eventually have felt grateful to us for not having given way.

The road, as it issues from Aleppo, rises gradually on to a heathy upland somewhat similar to Salisbury Plain. Here it soon becomes a mere wheel track—a good enough path to lead to a moorland farmstead, but a poor sort of thing to confide in for a journey of 200 miles. At every two or three leagues its stages are marked off by villages; generally forlorn little groups of one-storied flat-roofed stone hovels, but sometimes a more pretentious affair where the houses rise to two stories and which (on the strength of such superiority) feels justified in calling itself a town. Often even the meanest of these were formerly towns indeed, and instead of being called El Bab or Membij, were known by such high-sounding names as Bambyce and Hierapolis.[3] The hummocks and hollows which mark the foundations of their ancient edifices form a wide margin all around the outskirts, and the surface is strewn for acre on acre with dislocated fragments of columns and great squared blocks of stone. At one point where we made a short halt, we were able to decipher a few tags of Latin inscriptions;—cos, divi, cæsar and a few other similar words. They were deeply, but rudely incised, as though cut in sheer idleness by some unoccupied soldier. A householder who saw us examining them led us to the door of his hut where he showed us another inscription. In this case the lettering was Arabic, and we could read no more than the name of Allah:—a fact which caused great consternation to our householder, for he had been using it as a threshold.

We halted each night at some village khan, the Turkish synonym for the better known Persian word caravanserai, which forms the common house of entertainment both for man and beast. A typical khan consists of a great square courtyard full of foul dust in dry weather and of fouler mud in wet. Often have we felt inclined to bless the hard frost at night in winter time, which has enabled us next morning to walk to our carriage on the top of the mud instead of wading through. The courtyard is enclosed by a range of miserable hovels—the sort of shanties which might perhaps pass muster as tool sheds in allotment gardens, those “lodges in gardens of cucumbers,” which Isaiah considered the nadir of dilapidation. Some of these take rank as stables and others as guest chambers. In point of comfort and cleanliness there is little to choose between them; but occasionally the guest chambers are on an upper story, and then the humans are somewhat better off than the brutes. Let us assume, not to be too sanguine, that our room will be on the ground floor; and, not to be too despondent, that we shall get a room to ourselves.

Such a room will be about 9 feet square, and will boast a ramshackle door and (perhaps) a shuttered window. Its floor will be about six inches below the level of the yard—we mean the mud. It will be furnished, like the Prophet’s chamber, with “a bed, a stool, and a candlestick;” videlicet—with a rush mat or a rough plank bedstead, a small table (this only occasionally), and a paraffin lamp upon the wall. For a small additional fee the Khanji[4] will bring us a charcoal brazier; but (not wishing to be asphyxiated) we must leave this to burn outside until the blue flames subside. Here we are at liberty to make our own beds, and to cook and eat such provisions as we may have brought with us. The room is never swept, and prudent travellers will often take the precaution of bringing their own carpet with them. The regular charge for such an apartment is five piastres (10d.) a night.

Our fellow guests are mostly Kurds or Arabs, with Syrians and Armenians rather more sparsely intermixed. They may be told apart by their languages, or less certainly by their dress; for the Arabs are the only folk hereabouts who adhere very scrupulously to their own distinctive costume. This consists of a gown, generally of some striped or plain soft-coloured material, reaching almost to the feet, and girt about the waist with a bright coloured sash. A V-shaped opening from neck to waist shows an embroidered shirt-front under, and over all is worn an abba or Arab cloak. The abba is generally of woollen fabric, either dark brown, or boldly striped with black and white or brown and white in broad and narrow stripes arranged alternately. For winter wear it is often made of sheepskin, worn woolly side out during wet weather, and woolly side in during dry. On their heads they wear a bright coloured head cloth, either of silk or cotton, which is kept in position by a double coil of soft black rope forming a sort of wreath. They usually wear their hair long.

The Kurds also in the plain villages often wear an Arab type of costume; but the muleteers and other travellers are clad in a nondescript garb which seems based upon a Turkish original. The typical Turkish trousers are made from a piece of stuff whose width is equal to the length of the leg from waist to ankle. This is folded to form a square, sewn up the sides, and furnished with a cord run round the top to gird in at the waist. A couple of holes for the feet are cut at the two bottom corners, and the garment is then complete. This of course leaves an immense amount of slack between the legs, and superior tailors get rid of this to some extent by a certain amount of shaping; but a very sufficient surplus is always allowed to remain. Above this is worn a waistcoat, with a coloured sash and a kind of zouave jacket. The waistcoat, the lappets of the jacket, and the pockets of the trousers are often adorned with braiding; and the rough frieze of which the dress is composed is generally blue, black or brown. Sheepskin jackets are often worn in winter time.

On their heads they wear sometimes an Arab head cloth, sometimes a Turkish fez, sometimes the conical felt cap of the Kurds and Syrians, either with or without a turban. In cold weather they swathe the ends of their turbans about their faces, muffling themselves up to the eyes and making themselves look even more complete ruffians than they did before.

The officials and well-to-do classes wear what they consider to be European costume, but always top it off with a fez.

One of the first impressions which besets a traveller in these parts is the reality of the curse of Babel. For a curse it is most emphatically, though some of our home-bred cranks would appear to regard it as a blessing; and it is devoutly to be wished that all those crack-brained politicians who are seeking to promote the revival of Erse and Gælic and Cymric might be awarded some practical experience of the realization of their dreams. The Swiss boasted that he had three native languages; but the inhabitants of Asiatic Turkey are provided with at least six. Arabic is dominant on the plains; Syriac and Kurdish in the mountains; Armenian on the plateaus to the northward; and Greek in western Asia Minor. Turkish, except in Anatolia, is only the official language; but we suppose it deserves recognition along with the other five. Naturally each of these main stems branches off into dialects by the score; and if these are to be reckoned separately the Turkish Empire is still as polyglot as that of Nebuchadnezzar himself.

No one of course speaks all the languages; but no one can get on at all comfortably without speaking a minimum of two. That number will probably enable him at least to find an interpreter in most of the villages which favour the four remaining tongues.

The nationalities are as diverse as the languages, and are interwoven together in the most bewildering entanglement; not by separate districts dovetailed into one another like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, but by tiny fragmentary communities dispersed like different grains shaken up vigorously in a bag. The village is the largest unit; and where one village is Syrian, the next may be Kurdish, the next Armenian, the next Yezidi; all out of sympathy with each other and all resolutely refusing to mix. Here and there in the medley one may find occasionally a specimen which has no affinity whatever with any neighbouring nationality. Membij, for example, is a village of Circassians, fugitives from the Russian occupation who were given an asylum here by the Sultan Abdul Hamid. We have sometimes wondered whether this extraordinary mixture may not be the fruit of the policy adopted by the ancient Assyrians, who were wont to disperse their captive nations through all the length and breadth of their domain; but the same thing is seen in the European provinces of Turkey where Assyrians and Persians never penetrated, and where Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks and Roumanians form an equally tangled skein.

English critics talk glibly enough of Turkey being an Asiatic Power, and being capable of regenerating herself by concentrating her energies in Asia. They seem to be under the delusion that Turkey in Asia is mainly inhabited by Turks! As a matter of fact (except as aforesaid, in Anatolia) one may live for years in Asiatic Turkey without so much as meeting a single Turk. Even the official classes are largely Circassians and Arnauts; and the bulk of the population are Arabs and Armenians and Syrians and Greeks and Kurds, all of whom are profoundly disaffected and only acquiesce in Turkish rule because they will on no account support each other in usurping its place.

The problem of Asiatic Turkey, like the problem of Thrace and Macedonia, is simply that none of the component races can be trusted to govern the rest, and that all are so inextricably intermingled that it is impossible to parcel them out into distinct homogeneous States. We must own some sympathy with the Turks, the old conquering race, who once fully vindicated their hegemony. But their day is now past: their natural force abated. And though they still hold the tiller (thanks to the dissensions among their crew) they have no longer the strength to keep the ship under control. Their empire is too great for their shrunken numbers to govern, and they find themselves choked by the subject races with whom they have failed to assimilate.

On the third day after leaving Aleppo we reached the banks of the Euphrates; here a broad and rapid river, divided into three or four channels by a string of flat sandy islets. The right bank, from which we descended, is formed by a range of chalky hills breaking off into cliffs here and there; but the left bank is lower and flatter with an edging of conglomerate rock; and under each bank is a wide foreshore of greyish sand, which is of course all covered whenever the river is high. Its waters must have been singularly shrunken when Xenophon forded it at Thapsacus, a hundred miles lower down, and found it no more than breast deep; for here it is quite unfordable and can only be crossed by ferries.

The ferry boats are big spoon-shaped craft with low square bows and high pointed sterns. They are built of very rough planking, which looks as if it could not possibly be watertight, and some very vigorous caulking must have been employed to attain that end. They are steered by a huge flimsy paddle, formed of two or three poles roughly lashed together and pivoted upon the stern post; and what motive power is required is supplied by an iron-shod punt-pole. A crew of two men, one to steer and one to punt, work these unwieldy arks from a small half-deck at the stern.

Our carriage was backed into one of the boats over the bows, to the accompaniment of an infinity of yelling, and sundry mules and camels were disposed as packing round the sides. Then away we drifted, broadside on, down the rapid stream; wriggled into a back eddy under the lee of one of the islands; and eventually stranded safely about half a mile down upon the further shore. The boats had to be towed up stream a mile or more before they were able to recross; and we were lucky to have found them on the right bank, for the process of getting them over might well have meant an hour’s delay.

The point where we crossed the river is unmarked by any village, but a considerable town named Birijik lies about thirty miles up stream.

A lordlier city once dominated these solitary reaches; for fifteen miles nearer lies the little village of Jerablus, and all around Jerablus lie the mighty mounds which cover the ruins of Carchemish, and among which the gangs of workmen employed by the British Museum are now engaged in recovering the long hidden secrets of the ancient Hittite kings. Carchemish was the capital of the Hittites, that most ancient and most mysterious of all the great nations which once held dominion over northern Syria. Their history is still a sealed book to us; for though we have recovered many of their inscriptions, we have as yet found no key to their decipherment. All that we know of them at present has been gleaned from the records of Egypt and Assyria. We are still awaiting the day when another Rosetta Stone shall unlock for us the secrets of a people, whose capital was already a dead city when Nebuchadnezzar defeated Pharaoh Necho under its walls 600 years before Christ.

But though the Hittites have vanished utterly for so many thousand years, we may still trace their influence in the handiwork of the natives to this day. The villages which border the Euphrates—and a few others nearer Aleppo—are entirely distinct in character from all those in the districts around. The houses are not square and flat-roofed like those in ordinary villages; but circular conical buildings, of a shape between a beehive and a sugar-loaf, built of sun-dried mud, and packed tightly together within a walled enclosure, looking exactly like the haycocks in a crowded rick-yard in England. Houses of precisely this shape are represented on the Egyptian bas-reliefs recording the conquest of the Khati by the Pharaoh Rameses II; and there can be little doubt that the type has persisted continuously down to the present time. It may even perhaps be argued with a certain amount of plausibility that the men who build such villages are remotely of Hittite blood!

The villages in Asiatic Turkey are ordinarily the property of some landowner; and the system of tenure is worth mentioning, for it must date from Patriarchal times. The Government claims as revenue an eighth of all the produce;[5] and the remaining seven-eighths is divided equally between the village owner and the cultivators. The villagers have also to pay to the Government an eighth of the value of the fodder computed to have been consumed by their flocks and herds; and have further to deliver the Government eighth free of charge at the tax-farmers’ storehouses. By law this obligation is restricted to one hour’s journey—i.e. there is supposed to be a storehouse in every village—but in practice they have often to carry it three or four times as far. They have also to pay a land tax of about 5 per cent. They keep all the straw as their perquisite; and it is the landlord’s duty to provide them with the seed grain.

This sounds as if the landlord got the lion’s share of the profits. And if he be miserly he does; but most of them interpret their signoral duties in a more liberal spirit. The landlord is expected to keep a guest house in his village, and a man in charge of it. Here anyone, be he villager or traveller, can get a free meal and free lodging. One big man in this district is reputed to expend food to the value of £1000 annually in such hospitality, including corn to the value of £400 in bread alone. Moreover, the landlord acts as a sort of savings bank to his villagers. If any of them is in distress and applies to him, he will relieve him. He will never think of sparing as long as his barns hold anything. He lives simply, as they do; and he holds that “Allah will provide.”

All payments should be considered as being made in kind, not in money; for coin is scarce in Turkey, and not very generally used.[6] Even if it were more plentiful it is but a fluctuating security; for the coins in common use are the silver ones, and these are never current at their face value.[7] The gold £1 Turkish, nominally worth 100 piastres, fetched at the time of our visit from 102 piastres at Mosul to 114 at Aleppo; and the value of Mejidies (nominally 20 piastres), and of 5 piastre-pieces, varied also in different degrees. This is not all the fault of the Government; for while home trade and industry must be sorely hampered by such eccentricities, the Constantinople banks (which are run by European syndicates) are not altogether displeased. They can make a profit on the deal, for they hold most of the bullion: and when any particular coin has much appreciated anywhere, they can unload their stock of it at that particular place.

Eastward from the Euphrates our track leads over rather lower country, an open undulating heathland which melts gradually into alluvial plain. Here and there, dispersed about the surface, are wide patches of stony ground; and where the track chances to skirt them it is usually found that many of the stones have been piled up into little pillars, five or six one upon the other making a column about two feet high. Each patch will contain twenty or thirty of these little pillars. They are set up by casual wayfarers as a sort of votive memorial, just as the Patriarch Jacob set up his pillar at Bethel.

A similar habit prevails in the mountain districts; but there it is more customary to insert the votive stone in the forked branch of a tree. Cairns also are frequently seen at the sides of the paths in the mountains; but these are generally erected to mark the site of some murder, and it is usual for each passer-by to add his stone to the pile. If you were a friend of the victim you deposit your offering gently; if you were his enemy you hurl it on vindictively. Thus the pile grows apace any way, and it is to be presumed that his manes are appeased.

Near the village of Seruj we reach the outskirts of the great plain of Mesopotamia. Its levels stretch away southward as far as the eye can see. But our track edges still to the left and presently enters the hill country, the first and lowest undulations of the great mountain range towards the north.

It must have been on some of these spurs that the wrecks of Crassus’ army found refuge after their great defeat by the Parthians in the year 53 B.C. Carrhae, which gave its name to the battle, lay in the midst of the plains some twenty-five miles to the southward, and the actual scene of the fighting was some distance further south still: but the beaten troops made for the mountains, their only asylum from their pursuers; and here the last cohorts were surrounded and forced to lay down their arms.

Carrhae was a place of ill-omen for the Romans, for only 300 years later another similar disaster befell them upon the same ground. Here in the year 260 the Emperor Valerian was defeated and captured by Sapor I, the King of the Sassanid Persians, who had by this time inherited the Arascid Parthians’ domains. Roman accounts assert that the hapless Emperor was flayed alive; but the Persians more credibly relate that he was kept a prisoner, and employed in building the great bridge across the Karun river at Shushter.[8] Both accounts agree that after his death his skin was stuffed, and preserved as a grim trophy in the Palace at Seleucia Ctesiphon.

A short distance within the hills our track struck the great metalled road that runs from Birijik to Urfa. It is a road which, as far as it goes, might be called good in any country: but only the Urfa half of it is completed; it comes to an untimely end not far from the point where we struck at, which was somewhere about a third of the way to Birijik. The remaining section, however, served us admirably, and we trundled along it in fine style for the last three hours of our day’s journey, threading a winding rocky valley which debouched at the back of the town.

Oriental cities as a rule are rather a disappointment to sightseers. Picturesque they are indeed, but in such a squalid fashion that much of their charm is blighted. They are a mere agglomeration of hovels, with a few fine features here and there. We have even heard it said of Constantinople itself that, having seen the approach to the Golden Horn, the traveller had better take his departure; for that every nearer inspection brings a fresh disillusionment in its train. Urfa, however, may rank as one of the exceptions. It is beyond question the most picturesque city in Mesopotamia. And, being built chiefly of stone, it has some dignity in its dilapidation, and wears its tattered finery with an aristocratic air.

Urfa lies just at the foot of the hills, half enclosed by two bold limestone promontories. The upper part of the town is pooled in the bay between them, and the lower and larger portion is split out into the plain. It is almost surrounded by its ancient walls, which are largely of Roman workmanship; and its mosques and minarets and all its prominent buildings are constructed almost entirely of a rich golden-brown stone. The streets are of course mere alleys, narrow and tortuous; but retain here and there many traces of architectural ornamentation; and among and around the houses grow cypresses and other trees. The principal mosque, once a Christian cathedral, is an old Byzantine basilica, and above it rises conspicuously a noble octagonal tower. The present Armenian church is also of great antiquity, though hardly of the First Century, which is what the Armenians claim.[9]

The promontory to the west of the town is crowned by the ancient citadel; now a mere shell, but imposing from its situation, and surmounted by two lofty Roman columns formerly a portion of a temple portico.[10] Towards the town the hill is precipitous, but on the further side the slope is gradual; and accordingly the whole of this face, together with the two return ends, is defended by one of the most magnificent dry moats that exists anywhere in the world. It is hewn out of solid rock, with sides that are absolutely vertical; and may measure even now about thirty feet deep and not less than thirty feet wide. Formerly it could be crossed at two or three places by narrow wooden drawbridges; and the posterns to which they gave access can still be seen in the walls. At what epoch this moat was constructed we did not feel competent to determine. The walls are partly Saracenic, partly Roman, and partly Sassanian; they are now extremely ruinous and of no very formidable height.[11]

Urfa in classical days was known by the name of Edessa, and was the capital city of that king Abgarus of Osroëne, whose Epistle to our Lord is included among the Apocryphal Gospels. This tale is something more than a legend, for it dates from the beginning of the fourth century; and is related by the historians Eusebius and Moses of Khorene, who both profess to have derived their authority from contemporary documents which they had themselves inspected among the royal archives at Edessa. They tell us how the king was afflicted with leprosy, and how he sought in vain to be cured by the physicians and sorcerers of his own land. How at length he heard report of the miracles that were being wrought in Judaea by Jesus the Prophet of Galilee; and how he dispatched ambassadors to Him, entreating Him to come and heal his disease and to instruct his people, offering Him at the same time a secure asylum from the hatred of the unbelieving Jews. These ambassadors were the “certain Greeks”[12] who are mentioned in St. John’s Gospel as having been introduced to our Lord by Philip on the day of His triumphant entry into Jerusalem; and they brought back to Abgarus a verbal message (or some say an actual letter dictated by our Lord to Thomas) promising that one of His Apostles should be sent to Edessa in due time.

Accordingly soon after the Ascension the Apostle Thaddeus was sent by Thomas to preach the Word in Osroëne. He came and healed Abgarus of his leprosy; and the king and all his people thereupon embraced the Faith.[13] Thaddeus himself passed onwards to Armenia and Eastern Mesopotamia, where he founded the Parthian or Assyrian, now called the “Nestorian,” Church.

We may at least say of this legend that it is nearly as well authenticated as that which attributes the foundation of the Church of Rome to Peter; and far better than those which claim Spain for James the Great, or Britain for Joseph of Arimathea. The stories have this much in their favour—that at all events they are not mutually contradictory. Peter and James are conceded to the West; while Eastern tradition contents itself with Thomas and Thaddeus and Bartholomew. One would expect only the illustrious names in any mere fabricated tales.

At least it is historically certain that the Gospel was brought to Edessa almost within the Apostolic ages; and that Edessa formed the main distributing centre for the preachers who evangelized the East.

Osroëne in Abgarus’ days formed a sort of buffer state between the Parthian and Roman Empires; and a little later it experienced the usual fate of buffer states, and was absorbed by the Empire of Rome. Under its new suzerains Edessa took rank as an important frontier fortress, and stood many a siege in the long-drawn wars between the kings of the Sassanid Persians and the Emperors of Byzantine Rome. Moreover it was a great educational centre, the seat of a famous university, which was eventually suppressed by the Byzantine Emperor Zeno in the year 489 on the ground that it was tainted by the heresy of Nestorianism.