Amurath to Amurath

by Bell, Gertrude

  “Eh yes,” said the Arab, “but the government takes much.”

  “The sheikhs take much,” returned Maḥmûd. “Oh Ma’lûl, is it not true that they levy a tax for themselves on every tent?”

  “Eh wallah!” said the Arab.

  “But if the men of the tents make complaint, the sheikh attacks them and slays them.”

  “Allah, Allah! he knows the truth,” cried Ma’lûl in vociferous approval.

  “And they have no protection,” concluded Maḥmûd.

  “Eh wah!” responded the Arab, “who is there to protect us?”

  So the ancient tyrannies bear sway even in the open wilderness.

  Three-quarters of an hour from Khmeiḍah we passed another mound strewn with potsherds, and thirty-five minutes further down we came upon the ruins of Abu ’Atîḳ. They lie upon high rocky ground that drops steeply into an old bed of the Euphrates from which the river has retreated into a new bed a few hundred yards away. The whole area is covered with stone and brick foundations, some of them built of great blocks of hewn basalt, and the site must represent a city of no small importance. Below it the river is forced into a narrow defile where it flows between steep hills. A little valley, Wâdî Mâliḥ, joins the main stream half-an-hour from the ancient town, and it was here that we were overtaken by a breathless zaptieh from Raḳḳah who was the bearer of the answer to my telegram to the Vâlî of Aleppo. It was a refusal, politely worded, to my request that I should be permitted to travel down the left bank of the Euphrates, and with it came a covering letter from the Mudîr of Raḳḳah saying that if I did not return he would be obliged to recall the zaptiehs he had sent with me. I fear that even those who cannot properly be numbered among the criminal classes catch an infection from the lawless air of the desert, but whatever may be the true explanation of our conduct, we never contemplated for a moment the alternative of obedience, and bidding a regretful farewell to friend Maḥmûd, we went on down the defile. Maḥmûd came galloping back to give us a final word of advice. “Ride,” said he, “to Umm Rejeibah, where you will find a ḳishlâ (a guardhouse), but do not camp to-night in a solitary place, for this is the country of the Baggârah, and they are all rogues and thieves.”

  The Euphrates, gathered into a single channel, flows very grandly through the narrow gorge. At first the hills slope down almost to the water’s edge, but afterwards they draw back and leave room for a tract of level ground by the stream. An hour and a half from Wâdî Mâliḥ the valley widens still more, and on the opposite bank the great castle of Ḥalebîyeh lifts its walls from the river almost to the summit of the hill, a towered triangle of which the apex is the citadel that dominates all the defile (Fig. 46). Twenty minutes lower down, the Mesopotamian bank is crowned by the sister fortress of Zelebîyeh. It is a much less important building. The walls, set with rectangular towers, enclose three sides of an oblong court; the fourth side—that towards the river—must also have been walled, and it is probable that the castle approached more nearly to a square than at present appears, for the current has undermined the precipitous bank and the western part of the fortifications has fallen away. The masonry is of large blocks of stone, faced on the interior and on the exterior of the walls, while the core is mainly of rubble and mortar. There are six towers, including the corner bastions, in the length of the east wall, and between the two central towers is an arched gate. On the north and south sides there is now but one tower beyond the corner. Each tower contains a small rectangular chamber approached by an arched doorway. The court is covered with ruins, and on either side of the gate there is a deep arched recess. Under the north side of the castle hill there are foundations of buildings in hewn stone, but the area of these ruins is not large.

  The name Zelebîyeh carries with it the memory of an older title; in the heyday of Palmyrene prosperity a fortress called after Zenobia guarded the trade route from her capital into Persia, and all authorities are agreed that the fortress of Zenobia described by Procopius is identical with Ḥalebîyeh. Procopius states further that Justinian, who rebuilt Zenobia and Circesium, refortified the next castle to Circesium, which he calls Annouca. The Arab geographers make mention of a small town, Khânûḥah, midway between Ḳarḳîsîyâ (Circesium) and Raḳḳah, and the probable identity of Annouca and Khânûḳah has already been observed by Moritz. But I think it likely that the flourishing mediæval Arab town was situated not in the confined valley below Zelebîyeh but at Abu ’Atîḳ, where the ruin field is much larger. It may be that there was a yet older settlement at Abu ’Atîḳ, and that the stone foundations there belonged to the town of Annouca which stood at the head of the defile, while the castle of the same name guarded the lower end.

  We struck across the barren hills and so came down in an hour and half to Ḳubrâ, a ziyârah lying about a quarter of a mile from the river. There were no tents to be seen, whether of the Baggârah or of any other tribe, and no man from whom we could ask the way; by misfortune we happened to be that day without an Arab guide, and mindful of Maḥmûd’s parting injunctions, we began to look eagerly ahead for the ḳishlâ. Some way lower down, the Euphrates swept close under a low ridge which we were obliged to climb, and once on the top we espied Ḳishlâ el Munga’rah nestling under the further side of the slope. It had taken us two and a half hours to reach it from Zelebîyeh. The ḳishlâ, which was built ten years ago and is already falling into ruin, was garrisoned by eight soldiers. They gave us an enthusiastic welcome and helped us to pitch our tents under the mud walls of the guardhouse; visitors are scarce, and the monotony of existence is broken only by episodes connected with the lawless habits of the Baggârah. I never came into contact with the tribe, but I was told that, alone among the river Arabs, they had been the allies of Ibrahîm Pasha and were consequently gôm (foes) of the ’Anazeh and their group. Enmities of this kind are usually accompanied by overt acts, and the Baggârah had their hand against every man.

  It would be difficult to exaggerate the isolation of the guardhouses which are scattered through remote parts of the Turkish empire. The garrisons receive but a scanty allowance of their pay, and a still scantier of clothing; frequently they are left unchanged for years in the midst of an ungrateful desert where the task assigned to them is too heavy for them to perform—eight men, as the soldiers at Munga’rah observed, cannot keep a whole tribe in check—and where there is no alternative occupation. Often enough I have contemplated with amazement, in some lonely ḳishlâ or ḳarâghôl, the patient Oriental acceptance of whatever fate may be allotted by the immediate or the ultimate authority; and many an hour has passed, far from unprofitably for the understanding of the East, while a marooned garrison has shown me, with a pitiful and childlike eagerness, its poor little efforts to while away the weary days—here a patch of garden snatched from the wilderness, where only a hand-to-hand struggle with the drifting sand can keep the rows of wizened onions from total extinction; there a desultory excavation in a neighbouring mound, in which if you dig far enough a glittering treasure must surely lie; a captive quail for snaring, warmly pressed upon me for my evening meal, or the small achievements in what may, for want of an exacter term, be called carpentry, with which the living-room is adorned. If you will reckon up the volume of unquestioning, if uninstructed, obedience upon which floats the ship of the Turkish State, you will wonder that it should ever run aground.

  The relaxation of the men of Munga’rah was taken among the ruins that covered the top of the hill. Umm Rejeibah is a large area enclosed in a wall, clearly marked by mounds, with a ditch beyond it. On the north side an old channel of the river sweeps under the hill, and before the water left this course, it had carried away a part of the ground on which the city stood. The walls break off abruptly where the hill has fallen away, and it is therefore difficult to determine the exact shape of the enclosure. It appears to have been an irregular octagon. Towards its northern extremity the hill-top is seamed by the deep bed of a torrent draining down to the present channel of t
he Euphrates; it cuts through the ruins and reveals in section what is elsewhere hidden by an accumulation of soil. On the slope of its bank the soldiers had observed traces of masonry, and by digging a little way into the hill had disclosed a small circular chamber with brick walls and a white tesselated pavement. Just above the ḳishlâ, in an Arab graveyard, there are fragments of columns and basalt flour mills.

  The oldest, raggedest and most one-eyed of the garrison accompanied us to Deir: I had not the heart to refuse his proffered escort, since it would enable him to spend a night in the local metropolis. The road was entirely without interest. About an hour from Deir cultivation began on the river bank in patches of cornland irrigated by rude water-wheels; jird is the Arabic word for them. We reached the ferry in six hours. The road from Aleppo to Môṣul crosses the Euphrates at Deir, and some ten years ago it was proposed to replace the ferry by a bridge. The work was actually put in hand and has advanced at the rate of one pier a year, according to my calculations; but it can scarcely be expected that this rate of progress will be maintained, since the point has been reached where the piers must be built in the bed of the stream, and construction will necessarily be slower than it was when the masons were still upon dry ground. We pitched our camp upon the left bank and there spent thirty-six hours, resting the horses and laying in provisions. The bazaars are well supplied, but Deir is not in other respects remarkable. It is first mentioned by Abu’l Fidâ, in A.D. 1331, and contains, so far as I know, no vestiges of older habitation. It is built partly upon an island; the gardens of this quarter, exactly opposite my camp, were rosy with flowering fruit-trees. None but the richer sort, and such as have flocks to bring over, cross the river in the ferry boats; more modest persons are content with an inflated goat-skin. I had not seen this entertaining process, except on the Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum, and I watched it with unabated zest during the greater part of an afternoon. You blow out your goat-skin by the river’s edge, roll up your cloak and place it upon your head, tuck your shirt into your waistcloth and so embark, with your arms resting upon the skin and your legs swimming in the water. The current carries you down, and you make what progress you can athwart it. On the further side you have only to wring out your shirt, don your cloak and deflate your goat-skin, and all is done.

  The Mutesarrif of Deir had recently been removed and the new man had not yet arrived, but I paid my respects to his vicegerent, the Ḳâḍî, a white-bearded old Turk, who did not regard my visit as an honour, though he promised me all I wanted in the matter of zaptiehs. The interview took place while he was sitting in the seat of judgment and was presently interrupted by a case. It was a dispute concerning a debt between a merchant and an Arab Sheikh. The sheikh came in dressed in the full panoply of the desert, black-and-gold cloak, black kerchief and white under-robe; his skin was darkened by the sun, his beard coal-black. The merchant was a shaven, white-faced townsman in a European coat. The pair were, to my fancy, symbolic of the East and the advancing West, and I backed the West, if only because the merchant had the advantage of speaking Turkish, and the Ḳâḍî was anything but proficient in Arabic. After a few moments of angry recrimination they were both dismissed to gather further evidence; but the Ḳâḍî called the sheikh back and shook his finger at him. “Open your eyes, oh sheikh,” said he. Asia, open your eyes!

  I have some friends in Deir, Mohammadan gentlemen of good birth and education; to them I went for information as to passing events, no news from the outer world having reached me for a fortnight. They told me that the Grand Vizir, Kiamil Pasha, had fallen, which was true; and that the Mejlis had quarrelled with the Sultan and were about to depose him, which was only prophetic. They made me realize how different an aspect the new-born hopes of Turkey wore on the Bosphorus, or even on the Mediterranean, from that which they presented to the dwellers on the Euphrates: I had already passed beyond the zone that had been quickened by the enthusiasm of European Turkey into some real belief in the advent of a just rule. One of my friends had received an invitation to join the local committee, but he had refused to do so. “I am lord over much business,” said he, “but they are the fathers of idle talk.” All thinking men in Deir were persuaded that a universal anarchy lay before them; the old rule was dead, the new was powerless, and the forces of disorder were lifting their heads. “Yes,” said another, “revolution means the shedding of blood—and the land of the Ottomans will not escape. Then perhaps the nations of Europe will come to our aid and we shall all have peace.” I replied that the only substantial peace would be one of their own making, and that good government takes long to establish. “What benefit have I,” he protested, “if my children’s children see it?” I asked whether they had heard any rumours of an Arab movement, and they answered that there was much wild writing in the newspapers of a separate Arab assembly, and that words like these might stir up trouble and revolt. “But where is unity? Aleppo hates Deir, and Deir hates Damascus, and we have no Arab nation.” The financial position, both public and private, they pronounced to be hopeless. “I know a man,” said one, “who has land on the Euphrates that might be worth £15,000 and is worth as many piastres. He dares not put money into irrigation because he could not get protection against the tribes and his capital would bring him no return. But indeed there is not enough capital in all Deir to develop the land.” He complained that the best land was chiflik, the private property of the Sultan, and this I mention because it is a grievance that has already been remedied—may it be of good omen! The conversation left me profoundly discouraged, there was so much truth in all that I had heard, together with so complete an absence of political initiative. Thus it is through all the Asiatic provinces, and the further I went the more convinced did I become that European Turkey is the head and brains of the empire, and that if the difficult task of reform is to be carried out in Asia it can only be done from western Turkey. I believe that this has been recognized in Constantinople, for the provincial governors appointed under the new régime have been almost invariably well chosen.

  On March 6 we took the road again, still following the left bank of the Euphrates. The country down these reaches of the river is, as Xenophon says, exceptionally dull: “the ground was a plain as level as the sea.” Below Deir the Euphrates has left its original channel and now runs further to the west, and there was generally a stretch of low ground, an older bed, between our road and the stream. This alluvial land is thinly populated and partly irrigated by water-wheels. Along the higher ground, which had once been the bank but is now touched only by the extreme points of the river loops, there were occasional mounds representing the villages of an earlier age. The baggage animals travelled in six and three-quarter hours to Buseirah, which lies in the angle formed by the Khâbûr and the Euphrates. The site is very ancient. Xenophon when he arrived at the Araxes (the Khâbûr) found there a number of villages stored with corn and wine, and the army rested for three days collecting provisions. Diocletian made Circesium the frontier station of the Roman empire. He fortified it with a wall, says Procopius, terminating at either end on the Euphrates in a tower, but he did not protect the side of the town along the Euphrates. The stream sapped one of the towers, the walls were allowed to fall into decay, and Chosroes in his first expedition had no difficulty in taking possession of the fortress. Justinian repaired the ruined tower with large blocks of stone, built a wall along the Euphrates, and added an outer wall to that which already existed, besides improving the baths in the town. Under the name of Karḳîsîyâ, Circesium continued to be a place of some importance during the Middle Ages. Iṣṭakhrî (tenth century) praises its gardens and fruit-trees, but the later geographers describe it as being smaller than its neighbour Raḥbah, on the opposite side of the Euphrates, and with this it fades out of history.

  Extensive though not very scientific excavations were being carried on when I was at Buseirah. The peasants were engaged in digging out bricks from the old walls, ostensibly to provide materials for a bridge over the
Khâbûr. I was therefore able to see more of the ruins than was revealed to former travellers, and my conviction is that I saw nothing that was older than the time of Justinian, while most of the work belonged to the Arab period. The excavations were so unsystematic that it was never possible to make out a ground plan, but in one place the peasants had dug down at least 5 m. below the upper level of the ruin heaps, and had cleared some small chambers near the northern fortification wall. The materials used in these buildings were square tiles in two sizes (42 × 45 × 3 cm. and 21 × 21 × 3 cm.) laid in mortar as wide as the tiles themselves, and small roughly-squared stones also laid in thick mortar. The lower parts of the chambers were of large tiles, the upper parts of stone. From the traces left upon the walls, the rooms would seem to have been roofed over with barrel vaults, and there were some remains of brick arched niches below the stonework. Above these rooms, which were possibly only a vaulted substructure, there were foundations of upper rooms constructed of the smaller tiles. The face of the tile walls had been covered with plaster. There were simple patterns moulded in the broad sides of tiles: At the south-east angle of the enclosing wall stands a tower, round and domed and built entirely of the smaller tiles. The dome is slightly flattened and I believe the structure to be Mohammadan work. The Euphrates flows at a distance of about a mile from the city enclosure, but in all probability its course was once immediately under the wall, and the bed has made the same change here as it has done immediately above Circesium. The modern Buseirah must be the site of the ancient city, and I conclude that in Diocletian’s time the Euphrates flowed under the mound and that this was the side which was not fortified until Justinian’s day.

  In the Arab village, which has sprung up near the south-west corner of the ruins, there are portions of a large building which the natives call the church. It is surrounded on three sides by a very thick wall, roughly built of brick and rubble, with round towers at the angles. Within the wall there are remains of a niched structure which, so far as I could judge, consisted of two domed octagonal chambers. The masonry is of brick and rubble, plastered over, and both this ruin and the outer wall seem to have been built out of older materials pillaged from other parts of the town and mixed indiscriminately together. Finally there is a substructure of brick, octagonal in plan and covered by a much flattened brick dome. The flattened dome is typically Mohammadan: I do not remember any instance where it can be assigned with certainty to an earlier period, and I am therefore led to the conclusion that the whole building cannot be older than the time of the khalifs. The area of the city is strewn with potsherds, by far the greater proportion being unmistakably Arab and closely related to the coarser sorts of Raḳḳah ware. Almost all the coins that were brought to me were Arab.