The town of Hît stands upon an ancient mound washed by the Euphrates (Fig. 54). Among the palm-trees at the river’s edge rise columns of inky smoke from the primitive furnaces of the asphalt burners, for the place is surrounded by wells of bitumen, famous ever since the days when Babylon was a great city. Heaps of rubbish and cinders strew the sulphur marshes to the north of the town, and a blinding dust-storm was stirring up the whole devil’s cauldron when we arrived. It was impossible to camp and we took refuge in the khân, where we were so fortunate as to meet with an English traveller on his way back from India, the first European whom I had seen since we left Aleppo. The dust-storm rose yet higher towards evening, and though we closed the shutters of the khân—there was no glass in the windows—the sand blew in merrily through the chinks, and we ate a gritty supper in a temperature of ninety-three degrees.
Hît was the last possible starting-point for the Syrian desert, and no sooner had we arrived than I summoned Fattûḥ and presented him with an ultimatum. We had failed to get any but the most contradictory reports of wells upon the road to Kheiḍir and I would not expose the caravan to such uncertain chances, but if we went alone we could carry enough water for our needs. It only remained to dispatch the muleteers along the highway and to find a guide for ourselves.
“Upon my head!” said Fattûḥ blandly. “Three guides wish to accompany your Excellency.”
“Praise be to God,” said I. “Bid them enter.”
“It would be well to see each separately,” observed Fattûḥ, “for they do not love one another.”
We interviewed them one by one, with an elaborate show of secrecy, and each in turn spent his time in warning us against the other two. Upon these negative credentials I had to come to a decision, and I made my choice feeling that I might as logically have tossed up a piastre. It fell upon a man of the Deleim, a tribe to whom we were not well disposed, but since the country through which we were to pass was mainly occupied by their tents, it seemed wiser to take a guide who claimed cousinship with their sheikhs. He was to find an escort of five armed horsemen and to bring us to Kheiḍir in return for a handsome reward, but we undertook to engage our own baggage camels. One of the drawbacks to this arrangement was that no camels were to be got at Hît, and I felt the more persuaded that we had struck a bad bargain when Nâif came back and said:
“How do I know that you will keep your word? Perhaps to-morrow you will choose another guide.”
“The English have but one word,” said I; it is a principle that should never be abandoned in the East. We struck hands upon it and Nâif left us “in the peace of God.”
Fattûḥ needed a day to complete his preparations, and I to see the pitch wells of Hît which lie some distance from the town. I did not see them all, but from the accounts I heard they would appear to be five in number. The largest is called the Marj (the Meadow); it is an hour and a quarter north-east of Hît and is said to be inexhaustible. The pitch is better in quality here than elsewhere, and the peasants can, when they choose, get 2,000 donkey-loads from it daily. The next in importance is at Ma’mûreh, but it is not worked. The pitch flows out over the desert and dries into an asphalt pavement about half-a-mile square. Further south is a small spring, Lteif, from which they get twenty loads a day, and near the town there is a fourth well which yields fifty loads a day (Fig. 53). The fifth well is on the other side of the Euphrates, at ’Atâ’ut; the average yield from it is twenty loads a day.
Near the asphalt beds of Ma’mûreh, about an hour south-west of Hît, lie the ruins of a village clustered round a minaret (Fig. 57). All the buildings were constructed of small unsquared stones set in mortar; the minaret was plastered on the outside and seemed to have been built of large blocks of stone and mortar, firmly welded together before they had been placed in position. The round tower, narrowing upwards and decorated at the top with a zigzag ornament, was placed upon a low octagonal structure which in turn rested upon a square base (Fig. 58). I climbed the winding stair that I might survey the country through which Nâif was to take us. It was incredibly desolate, empty of tent or village save where to the west the palm-groves of Kebeisah made a black splash upon the glaring earth. The heavy smoke of the pitch fires hung round Hît, and the sulphur marshes shone leprous under the sun—a malignant landscape that could not be redeemed by the little shrines which were scattered like propitiatory invocations among the gleaming salts.
About a mile from Ma’mûreh there is a still more remarkable ruin known as Madlûbeh. It is a large, irregularly shaped area marked off from the desert by heaps of stones half buried in sand. Standing among these heaps, and no doubt in their original position, there are a number of large monolithic slabs placed as if they were intended to form a wall (Fig. 59). Many of these must have fallen and been covered with the sand if the enclosure were at any time continuous, and perhaps the heaps are composed partly of buried slabs. Two stand in line with a narrow space between like a door (one of them was 5 m. long × 1·3 m. thick, and it stood 2 m. out of the ground); in another there was a small rectangular cutting that suggested a window-hole on the upper edge (it was 10 m. long × 1·3 m. thick, and stood about 3 m. out of the ground). The stones were carefully dressed on all sides. They may have formed the lower part of a wall of which the upper part was of sun-dried brick or rubble, but at what age they were placed in those wilds a cursory survey would not reveal.
When I returned to the khân, Fattûḥ greeted me with the intelligence that the Deleimî had broken his engagement. Nâif admitted that for ordinary risks the money we had offered would have been sufficient, but Kheiḍir lay in the land of his blood enemies, the Benî Ḥassan, and he would not go. Perhaps he hoped to force us to a more liberal proposal, but in this he was disappointed. A bargain is a bargain, and we fell back upon my boast that the English have but one word. In this dilemma Fattûḥ suggested that he should see what could be done with the Mudîr, and having a lively confidence in Fattûḥ’s diplomacy, I entrusted him with my passports and papers, of which I kept a varied store, and gave him plenipotentiary powers. He returned triumphant.
“Effendim,” said he, “that Mudîr is a man.” This is ever the highest praise that Fattûḥ can bestow, and my experience does not lead me to cavil at it. “When he had read your buyuruldehs he laid them upon his forehead and said, ‘It is my duty to do all that the effendi wishes.’ I told him,” interpolated Fattûḥ, “that you were a consul in your own country. He will give you a zaptieh to take you to Kebeisah, and if you command, the zaptieh shall go with you to Ḳal’at Khubbâz, returning afterwards to Hît. And it cannot be that we shall fail to find a guide and camels at Kebeisah, which is a palm-grove in the desert; for all the dwellers in it know the way to Kheiḍir. As for the caravan, another zaptieh will take it to Baghdâd.”
“Aferîn!” said I. “There is none like you, oh Fattûḥ.”
“God forbid!” replied Fattûḥ modestly. “And now,” he proceeded, “let me bring your Excellency an omelet, for I am sure that you must be hungry.” But I understood this exaggerated solicitude to be no more than a covert slur upon the culinary powers of Mr. X.’s servant, who had provided us with an abundant lunch during Fattûḥ’s absence, and not even so voracious a consul as I could face a second meal. Fattûḥ retired in some displeasure to inform the muleteers that they would journey to Baghdâd and Kerbelâ and there rejoin us, please God.
We explored the village of Hît before nightfall, and a more malodorous little dirty spot I hope I may never see. “Why,” says the poet, concerning some unknown wayfarer, “did he not halt that night at Hît?” and it is strange that Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, who quotes the question, should have been at a loss for the answer. Possibly he had no personal knowledge of Hît. On the top of the hill there is a round minaret, similar in construction to the minaret of Ma’mûreh, but I saw no other feature of interest. The sun was setting as we came down to the palm-groves by the river. The fires under the troughs of molten bitumen sent up their black s
moke columns between the trees (Fig. 60); half-naked Arabs fed the flames with the same bitumen, and the Euphrates bore along the product of their labours as it had done for the Babylonians before them. So it must have looked, this strange factory under the palm-trees, for the last 5,000 years, and all the generations of Hît have not altered by a shade the processes taught them by their first forefathers.
THE PARTHIAN STATIONS OF ISIDORUS OF CHARAX
The only modern record of the road along the left bank of the Euphrates from Raḳḳah to Deir is the rather meagre account given by Sachau; Moritz travelled down the left bank from Deir to Buseirah, but I know of no published description of the road from Buseirah to ’nah. It has not therefore been possible hitherto to attempt to place in any continuous sequence the sites given by ancient authorities. Of these the fullest list is that of the Parthian stations furnished by Isidorus of Charax (Geographi Græci Minores, ed. by Müller, Vol. I. p. 244). It begins with the fixed point of Nicephorium (Raḳḳah) and ends with another fixed point, that of Anatho (’nah). Between these two lies Nabagath on the Aburas. The Aburas may safely be assumed to indicate the Khâbûr, and Nabagath is therefore Circesium-Buseirah. The following comparative table shows my suggestions for the remaining stations, combined with those which have already been made by Ritter and others. The times given are the rate of travel of my caravan; between Raḳḳah and Deir I had the advantage of comparing them with Sachau’s time-table. No two caravans travel over any given distance at exactly the same pace, but the general average works out without any grave discrepancy. I have often tried to reckon the speed at which my caravan travels and have come to the conclusion that it is very little under three miles an hour, say about two and seven-eighths miles an hour. Isidorus computes his distances by the schœnus. According to Moritz 1 schœnus = 5·5 kilometres. From Buseirah to ’nah I travelled over Isidorus’s road at the rate of 1 schœnus in 1 hr. 7 min., which would bring the schœnus down to 5·166 kilometres. The section from Raḳḳah to Buseirah is not so easy to calculate because Isidorus has in two places omitted to give the exact distance between the stations, but my rate of travel was not far different here from that noted in the other sections. So much for the average. The individual distances do not tally so exactly, and in attempting to determine the sites, the evidence that can be gathered from the country itself seems to me to weigh heavier in the scale than the measurements given by Isidorus, especially as his inexactitude is proved by the fact that the sum of the distances he allows from station to station do not coincide with the total distances, from the Zeugma (Birejik) to Seleucia, and from Phaliga to Seleucia, as he states them. In both cases the sum of the small distances comes to a larger figure than that which he allows for the totals—
Zeugma to Seleucia171 sch.
total of distances between stations 174 sch., without the two omitted by him.
Phaliga to Seleucia100 sch.
total of distances between stations 120 sch. without one omitted by him.
As regards the second section, Kiepert believed that a copyist’s error of 10 sch. too much had been made in Isidorus’s table between Izannesopolis and Aeipolis (the modern Hît), but even this correction will not bring the totals together (Ritter, Vol. XI. p. 738). The road from the Zeugma to Nicephorium does not follow the river, and I am therefore unable to control the statements of Isidorus above Raḳḳah; nor do I know the section between Hît and Seleucia. I need scarcely say that my table is of the most tentative character; it begins with the ninth station of Isidorus, Nicephorium.
The first remarkable site which I saw on the river below Raḳḳah was the large area surrounded by a ditch, half-an-hour above my camping-ground. Isidorus’s tenth station from Zeugma is Galabatha. Ritter (Vol. XI. p. 687) observes that it must be above Abu Sa’îd, and the area enclosed by the ditch fulfils that condition. The eleventh station is Khubana which I put at Abu Sa’îd, where there are fragments of columns and other evidences of antiquity. The twelfth station is Thillada Mirrhada; I have placed it at Khmeiḍah (squared stones, brick walls, a broken sarcophagus), but the claims of Abu ’Atîḳ are considerable, the extent of the ruin field at the latter place being much larger than at Khmeiḍah. But Abu ’Atîḳ is 7 hrs. 5 min. from Abu Sa’îd, and the caravan time between Khmeiḍah and Abu Sa’îd (6 hrs. 5 min.) is already rather long for the 4 sch. allowed by Isidorus. The thirteenth station is Basilia with Semiramidis Fossa. Ritter long ago pointed to the probability of its having been situated at Zelebîyeh (Vol. XI. p. 687).
Semiramidis Fossa was no doubt a canal; Chesney saw traces of an ancient canal below Zelebîyeh. The distance from Thillada to Basilia is not given by Isidorus. Ritter would allow 5 sch. and Herzfeld 7 sch. (Memnon, 1907, p. 92); according to my reckoning both these distances are too long. I marched from Khmeiḍah to Zelebîyeh in 3 hrs. 40 min., which implies a distance of not more than 3 sch. For the fourteenth station, Allan, Umm Rejeibah is the only possible site I saw. It is true that I reached it in 3 hrs. from Zelebîyeh, whereas Isidorus puts it 4 sch. from Basilia, but I cut straight across the hills, and if I had followed the river (i. e. from the mouth of the canal, Semiramidis Fossa) the time needed would have been considerably longer. The fifteenth station, Biunan, was conjectured by Ritter to lie opposite Deir. I saw no traces of ruins upon the left bank, though Sachau speaks of the remains of two bridges (Reise, p. 262), and I should be more inclined to look for Biunan at a nameless site mentioned by Moritz (op. cit., p. 36). The difference is not in any case of importance, for the site seen by Moritz is immediately below Deir. He would have it to be Phaliga, which is doubtless Pliny’s Phaliscum, but that suggestion is difficult to reconcile with Isidorus’s 14 sch. from Basilia to Phaliga, which brings Phaliga much nearer to Circesium. Moreover, Isidorus states that Nabagath is near Phaliga—so near that he does not trouble to give any other indication of the distance between the two stations—and as Nabagath on the Aburas cannot be other than Buseirah, Phaliga too must be close to the Khâbûr mouth. I did not see the site mentioned by Moritz because I neglected to follow the river closely immediately below Deir; if it be, as I suppose, Biunan, I cannot attempt to identify the site of Phaliga. The seventeenth station, Nabagath, is, as has been said, Circesium-Ḳarḳîsîyâ-Buseirah. The eighteenth, Asikha, I would identify with the Zeitha of Ptolemy and Ammianus Marcellinus, and with the mounds I saw at Jemmah. For the nineteenth station, Dura, I know no other site than the very striking tell of Abu’l Ḥassan, the biggest mound upon this part of the river. Müller has suggested that the mound may represent Ptolemy’s Thelda (in his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 1003). Ammianus Marcellinus also mentions “a deserted town on the river” called Dura. The army of Julian reached it in two days’ march from Zeitha, at which place the emperor had made an oration to his soldiers after sacrificing at Gordian’s tomb. Now two days’ march from Zeitha-Jemmah would bring the army to Werdî-Irzî, which is no doubt the place called by Xenophon Corsote and described by him as “a large deserted city.” It is perhaps worthy of observation that, in spite of its being deserted, Cyrus provisioned his army at Corsote and that Julian’s army found at Dura, though it too was deserted, “quantities of wild deer, so that the soldiers and sailors had plenty of food.” My own impression on the spot was that Ammianus Marcellinus’s Dura must be Irzî. The tower tombs were certainly erected before the middle of the fourth century, therefore they were in existence when Julian passed; moreover, they were far more numerous and conspicuous than they are at present, since almost all of them have now fallen into ruin. It is difficult to see how Irzî could have failed to attract the attention of Ammianus Marcellinus, and Dura is the one place mentioned by him between Zeitha and ’nah. But the Dura of Isidorus, the nineteenth station, has to be placed at Abu’l Ḥassan, not at Irzî, since his twentieth station, Merrhan, necessarily falls at Irzî, and I can only conjecture that, as in Julian’s time both places were ruined and deserted, Ammianus Marcellinus made a confusion between them, or was wrongly informed,
and transferred the name of Dura (Abu’l Ḥassan) to Merrhan (Irzî). For the twenty-first station, Giddan, I can offer no suggestion. Jabarîyeh will scarcely fit, as it is but 13 hrs. 15 min. from ’nah, and Giddan was 17 sch. from Anatho, but it must be admitted that all the distances between the stations from Merrhan to ’nah seem to be too long according to my caravan time. The twenty-second station, Belesibiblada, was placed by Chesney at Ḳal’at Bulâḳ, and I saw no better site for it, though I took only 9 hrs. and 25 min. to reach it from Irzî, and the distance given by Isidorus is 12 sch. Ritter would place at Ḳal’at Bulâḳ Ptolemy’s Bonakhe. I do not see any way of identifying with certainty the island station, the twenty-third, which was 4 sch. from ’nah. There are many islands in the stream above ’nah. One of them, Ḳarâbileh, is reported to have ruins upon it; it was about four hours’ journey from ancient ’nah, and may therefore be identical with the twenty-third station, which is placed at a distance of 4 sch. from Anatho. Anatho, the twenty-fourth station, Isidorus expressly states to be on an island; it was therefore the successor to the Assyrian fortress which I believe to have existed on the island of Lubbâd. Xenophon does not mention it; nor does Ptolemy, unless his Bethanua may be taken for ’nah as Ritter believed (Vol. XI. p. 716). Rawâ may possibly be the Phathusa of Zosimos, but I would rather place Phathusa on the left bank, opposite and below the island of Lubbâd, where there are many mounds and ruins. I did not follow the river below ’nah very closely, but the ruins I saw near Ḥadîthah help to justify the presumption that Olabus was situated there. Chesney wished to identify Izannesopolis with the ruins of a castle between Baghdâdî and Hît. I did not go to the spot, and my caravan time between Ḥadîthah and Hît is therefore rather misleading, for if I had followed the river so as to visit the ḳaṣr, the journey would have taken more than the seventeen and a half hours which I have recorded. Isidorus’s 16 sch. from Izannesopolis to Aeipolis can scarcely be correct, and Kiepert’s emendation (6 instead of 16) may well be accepted.
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