Fig. 2.10 T.E. Lawrence (left) and Leonard Woolley (right) in 1913, standing next to one of the carved stone orthostats from the Long Wall of Sculpture, at Carchemish.
The most valuable aspect of Bell's report is that when she visited the tower tombs in 1909, both were preserved to a significantly higher level than in 1992, when Gogräfe visited the site. Of the north tomb, the entire upper part of the second storey had fallen by his time (Fig. 2.11),163 while in the case of the south tomb, nothing remained but a pile of fallen stone blocks.164 Because of this, in his report Gogräfe relied heavily on Bell's photographs for the reconstruction of the northern tomb (along with the images made by Oppenheim and Pognon). He had to depend exclusively on Bell's photographs of the southern tomb, since they constituted the only record of that edifice.
Although Bell was writing almost a century earlier, her description of the tower tombs’ features essentially resembles Gogräfe's. Of the two tombs on the ridge behind Serrin, the more northerly one was better preserved, consisting of a square tower of cut stone blocks, divided into two storeys. The top of the first storey was defined by a slightly projecting cornice, under which, on the east and west sides, were a pair of animal protomes.165 On the west side was also a Syriac inscription, dated to 73 CE, which reported that the tomb was built by Ma'nu and was intended for him and his sons; this inscription survives.166
The entrance to the grave chamber, on the ground floor, was located on the eastern side through a small opening to the north side of the central axis.167 The body or bodies of the deceased would have been accommodated in this chamber, as well as the one above it. The lower chamber would formerly have been blocked by a sliding rectangular basalt stone, which by the time of this author's visit in 2009 was lying on the ground in front of the entrance. The interior was simply defined by a barrel-vaulted chamber with benches on all four sides and a small slit of light piercing the back wall. The second storey also had a chamber, entered on the east side like below. In this case, its basalt blocking stone was still in place.168
Each side of the second storey of the tower tomb was decorated with fluted engaged columns, one in each of the corners. The tops of the columns featured Ionic capitals carrying an entablature comprising a three-fasciae architrave, dentils and a projecting cornice above.169 The roof no longer existed in Bell's time, although she conjectured that it originally had been pyramidal.170 Significantly, Gogräfe spotted a fallen stone block nearby that had a sloped side with a boss, and he concluded that it was one of the blocks of a pyramid-shaped roof.171
The second tower tomb behind Serrin, about 2 km south of the first one, was less well preserved. Only the south wall remained in Bell's time, and of this she noted that the lower storey was decorated with a shallow engaged pier in each corner and had an entrance opening. The upper storey was characterized by engaged columns, but they were not fluted. In place of a chamber opening was an arched niche, possibly for a statue.172
While she walked on the hillside near the north tower tomb, Bell noticed several rock-cut tombs, now filled with stones and earth, and conjectured that the hill had been the cemetery of the ancient settlement that had existed near the riverside below.173 Gogräfe observed in 1992 numerous graves dug into the rock in the vicinity of the southern tower tomb.174 This writer noted in 2009 the presence of what looked to be the top of a vertical dromos of a rock-cut tomb immediately to the south of the north tower tomb, as well as others nearby that had been recently robbed. Finally, it is interesting that in Bell's photographs of the north tower tomb, one can clearly see a mound of cut stone blocks to the south-west.175 This could well be the remains of yet another tower tomb, a conjecture given further credence by Gogräfe's observations of what appeared to be the foundation stones of such a structure in that area.176 In 2009, the bare remains of those foundations were also noted by this writer, while virtually all of the remaining stones of that structure had completely vanished. In summary, there was almost certainly a necropolis on the hill upon which the tower tombs were built, as Bell suspected, but sadly much of this ancient cemetery has been disturbed, particularly over the past 100 years.
Recent research on Near Eastern tower tombs shows that the Serrin tower tombs belong to a different category than the more simply adorned funerary towers popularly and abundantly used at Palmyra in central Syria, and which spread across the desert to Halebiye, Dura Europos and Baghouz further down the Euphrates (Bell visited the latter in February 1909).177 Rather, the Serrin tower tombs seem to be more akin to tombs known to the north and north-east, many of which belonged to the kingdom of Edessa and incorporated stronger Greco-Roman elements than those from Palmyra.178 The territory of Serrin itself may have been part of that Edessan kingdom.179 While Bell did not have available to her the mass of evidence we do today, she appears to have been on the right track when she noted a distinction between the tower tombs at Serrin and those at Palmyra: the ‘well-known tower tombs of Palmyra and the Hauran are not capped by a pyramid, nor is the face of their walls broken at any point by engaged columns’ (like the tower tombs at Serrin).180
Euphrates Sites
Bell's writings convey the exhilaration she felt as she travelled below Tell Ahmar and then Serrin, working her way down along the course of the Euphrates and entering into the sparsely inhabited lands of inner Syria. Part of her excitement was due to the fact that she was now entering a region very infrequently travelled by Europeans. Neither Hogarth nor Oppenheim had ventured this far to the south, and other earlier travellers, like Colonel Chesney and his companion Ainsworth (1835), had merely seen the eastern bank from a boat on the river. Only further downstream, at Raqqa, would Bell's route pick up where others, such as Eduard Sachau, Friedrich Sarre and Ernst Herzfeld, had ventured before her.
Bell was also captivated by the landscape. The open, rolling hills stretching away from the river banks were empty save for the occasional tents of a group of pastoral nomads. The landscape conveyed a sense of unencumbered freedom and simplicity, of which she wrote:
The thin blue smoke of the morning camp fires rose out of the hollows and my heart rose with it, for here was the life of the desert, in open spaces under the open sky, and when once you have known it, the eternal savage in your breast rejoices at the return to it.181
With only one village reported between Mas'udiyeh and Raqqa on the east bank of the Euphrates, Bell observed that the land was largely devoid of sedentary occupation and farming activities. Rather, it was the home of tribes of the Beni-Said, the ‘Anazeh and the Weldeh, pastoral nomadic groups who moved with their flocks according to the availability of grazing lands and water sources during the different seasons.182 Nevertheless, observing its potential for productivity and the abundance of ruined tell sites near the river, she guessed that this region had not always been lightly populated:
The majestic presence of the river in the midst of uncultivated lands, which, with the help of its waters, would need so little labour to make them productive, takes a singular hold on the imagination. I do not believe that the east bank has always been so thinly peopled, and though the present condition may date from very early times, it is probable that there was once a continuous belt of villages by the stream, their sites being still marked by mounds.183
As Bell conjectured, this zone of inner Syria through which she was travelling had experienced considerable fluctuations in human settlement throughout its long history. During some periods, the eastern bank of the Euphrates had been thickly settled with sedentary farming villages and towns, while at other times, including the early twentieth century when she passed through, the region had been given over to the grazing lands of only a few scattered pastoral nomadic groups. Recent landscape studies have carefully tracked these settlement oscillations, taking into consideration historical reports as well as observations by Bell and other early travellers about local conditions, and accounting for changes brought about by socio-economic circumstances.184 Between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries
CE, the sparse inhabitation of the Middle Euphrates can largely be explained by the Ottoman government's absence of security and administrative control in this region.185 The marginal character of the region, induced by a suboptimal climate, has also been frequently summoned to explain fluctuations in subsistence strategies. Much of this Middle Euphrates region, particularly that part covered today by Lake Assad of the Tabqa Dam, is located in the so-called ‘zone of uncertainty’ of the Near East, where rainfall isohyets of between 200 and 300 mm per annum indicate a high risk of crop failure, and agricultural pursuits are not always successful.186 Under particularly harsh climatic conditions, the local populations may adopt a pastoral nomadic form of economy with dependence upon sheep and goat husbandry instead of crop production. In all, the Middle Euphrates valley has had a varied history of growth and decline, and of prosperity and poverty, and Bell was among the first to note these striking contrasts through time.
Fig. 2.11a + b Bell’s photo of the north tower tomb at Serrin (top), and the author’s photograph of the same tower tomb in 2009 (bottom). The upper part of the second storey of the tomb, adorned with capitals carrying an entablature of archivolt and cornice, has completely disappeared over the past century, as has the stone masonry of a second tower tomb, seen in Bell’s photograph on the left. A robber’s trench into a possible third tomb is visible directly in front of the tower tomb.
Besides containing observations of the modern tribal groups she encountered, Bell's documentation of ancient sites and scattered artefacts becomes particularly detailed at this point in her written reports. She frequently recorded the names of mounded sites, traces of ancient remains spotted on them and their distance from one another. Through these reports, it is often possible to track her precise passage over long stretches down the river, and to compare what she observed with what is currently known about these places.
A great deal of our current knowledge about this Euphrates region's ancient past has been facilitated by the fairly intense archaeological survey and excavation work that has taken place here, especially since the late 1960s. Much of this work was conducted in anticipation of the construction of hydroelectric dams along the Euphrates River, and the fact that the lakes created behind these dams would fill large parts of the valley and permanently submerge the ancient settlements. The first dam, built at the site of Tabqa, 40 km above the town of Raqqa, was completed in 1975 and created a 35 km-long lake directly above the dam. A second dam, constructed at Tishreen to the north, was completed in 1999 and filled another large section of the river valley up as far as the site of Tell Ahmar, its acropolis mound being all that remains above water of this once extensively occupied site. The surveys and archaeological excavations of the river valley preserve a vital record of this ancient landscape, many of the ancient settlements now being located under scores of metres of water. Gertrude Bell's photographic panoramas of various stretches of the river valley in this region from over a century ago also provide valuable glimpses of what is now a completely transformed or vanished ancient landscape.
Some of the ancient sites that Bell passed by, such as Dja'de el Mughara (her ‘Ja'deh’)187 and Mureybet (her ‘Murraibet’),188 were places of prehistoric occupation.189 Mureybet's Neolithic remains, dated between 10,000 and 8700 BCE, reveal traces of round or oval semi-subterranean huts where the inhabitants lived for extended periods. People at both sites were experimenting with cultivating food plants and keeping flocks of sheep and goats, making them among the earliest farming communities in the world.190
Still other ancient sites – namely, the mound of Sheikh Hassan, which Bell passed just below Munbaqa, and the high promontory of Jebel Aruda, on the other side of the river (her ‘Sheikh ‘Arûd’) – have yielded occupation evidence from as early as 3600 BCE.191 Judging by their architecture, pottery and administrative objects (numerical tablets and cylinder seals), their populations consisted of colonists from southern Mesopotamia who were living in Syria, possibly to conduct trade along the Euphrates River.192
Of particular interest are sites reported by Bell that we now know marked places of occupation in the Early Bronze Age of the third millennium BCE. These include Qara Quzaq (her ‘amp;#x1E32;ara Kazâk’), Tell el Banât, Shems ed-Dîn,193 Tell eamp;#x1E93; amp;#x1E92;âher,194 Jerniyeh195 and Halawa (her ‘amp;#x1E24;aliâweh’).196 Archaeological investigations of these sites and the territories around them have revealed a thickly inhabited riverine region consisting of farming villages and towns, and pasturelands extending out into the steppe lands beyond. Some of these settlements possessed urban-like features such as carefully planned and well-constructed city walls, bastions and fortified gates, spacious houses, large temple complexes and funerary monuments.197 Evidence for long-distance exchanges – often found in the site's cemeteries and taking the form of copper and bronze weapons, fine imported pots, and jewellery made of gold, silver and semi-precious stones – also testifies to the prosperous, cosmopolitan character of the Euphrates River Valley during this period in antiquity.198
Of all the sites in the region, Bell seems to have been most drawn to Munbayah, with its grand size and the impressive ruins she noted on its surface. Bell considered Munbayah, along with the ruins at Jerniyeh, to be the two ‘most interesting sites’ she had seen between Tell Ahmar and Qal‘at Jabbar, and she reports having been tempted to ‘clear away the earth and see what lies beneath’.199 Her interest in Munbayah is also attested by the numerous photographs she took of the site and the plan of its ruins she drew up in her field notebook.200 She conjectured that the grassy ridges and lines of stones she had followed were the remnants of the settlement's city walls, while the spaces in between were the city gates, one of which she aptly named the ‘water gate’, given its location facing high above the Euphrates (Fig. 2.12).201
More than a century later, we are exceptionally knowledgeable about the site of Munbayah – today commonly referred to as Munbaqa – on account of the extensive excavations carried out there by a German archaeological team between 1969 and 1994.202 Although Munbaqa was occupied as early as the third millennium BCE and has a Roman-Byzantine cemetery on its summit, its main period of habitation was during the Late Bronze Age of the second half of the second millennium BCE. During this period, the site, whose ancient name was Ekalte, was a thriving settlement of about 15 hectares, with extensive contacts all over the Near East. It housed several monumental temples, craft production facilities and neighbourhoods of large, well-appointed domestic houses.203 The walls Bell endeavoured to plan proved to be those of the Late Bronze Age city, comprising the walls that enclosed the Aussenstadt (outer city), Innenstadt (inner city) and Kuppe (the top of the tell).204 Bell correctly identified the places of the north and south gates leading into the Innenstadt. Although she believed she had identified the ‘water gate’ as the space between two high stone walls, in reality what she saw were the walls of two of the site's monumental temples in antis (Steinbau 1 and Steinbau 2), these positioned on the highest points of the Kuppe, overlooking the river below.205 Altogether, investigations have confirmed the impressive nature of Munbaqa's settlement in antiquity, rightly justifying Bell's desire to ‘clear away the earth’ and ‘see what lies beneath’.206
Qal‘at Jabbar
Described in a letter to her mother as the ‘most splendid castle of all Arab time’, Qal‘at Jabbar was one of the more spectacular Islamic period sites that Bell encountered as she moved down the east bank of the river valley. It stood over the river, guarding an important trade corridor up and down the Euphrates as well as a river crossing on a route that provided a vital link between Aleppo to the west and Mosul to the east.207 As one approached from afar, its defences, towers and prominent central minaret could be seen rising up on high ground above the valley, as Bell's photographs testify (Fig. 2.13). Today, it is no less impressive, although the surrounding landscape has been completely transformed. The waters of the Tabqa Dam's artificial Lake Assad now surround it to its base, the castle standing as an
island amid the blue, with only a narrow causeway linking it to the shore.208
Although established as early as the seventh century, Qal‘at Jabbar reached its greatest importance as a formidable river fortress between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, when it was controlled by a succession of Seljuks, Zengids, Ayyubids and Mamluks. It also experienced a brief Frankish occupation in the early twelfth century, when the crusaders of the principality of Edessa (modern-day Urfa) captured it. Under Nur al-Din (1146–74), the castle experienced significant rebuilding, and much of what is seen today, including its impregnable fortifications and interior minaret and mosque, are attributed to this ruler. The Mamluks ordered some restoration work at Qal‘at Jabbar in the fourteenth century after the castle's devastation by the Mongols in the previous century, but it never regained its former glory or importance and seems to have been abandoned only shortly after.209
Bell actually knew little about Qal‘at Jabbar when she visited in 1909; her diary notes and letters provide the briefest descriptions, and to be sure, few earlier European travellers or scholars had visited the castle or written about it to any extent. By the time of writing Amurath to Amurath, however, she was able to provide a short historical outline based on information she had derived from medieval historian-geographers such as Abu'l Fida, Yaqut and Benjamin of Tudela.210 Her photographs of Qal‘at Jabbar capture architectural details no longer preserved. Her long-distance views of the castle standing high above the river valley, now replaced by Lake Assad, are noteworthy. Also worthwhile is her photograph of the brick wall of a large, vaulted building located immediately above the fortified entrance gate at the south-west. The stepped diamond brick-pattern decoration on the exterior wall, known as hazarbaf, is particularly striking (Fig. 2.14).211 By the latter part of the twentieth century, part of this wall had suffered a collapse such that today it is just over half the width that Bell saw a century earlier. Her photograph of the square-based cylindrical minaret next to the mosque in the centre of the castle, which can be ascribed to the reign of Nur al-Din (1170 CE) on the basis of its nakshi inscription near the top, captures its original state before it underwent restoration at the time of the French Mandate, its eroded brick construction now replaced by modern baked bricks and concrete.212
Britain and the Arab Middle East Page 9