From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  When the service had drawn to a close, the congregation -pious ladies with rigid perms and lacy white veils, old men in light tropical suits - poured outside. On the steps Malfono Namek introduced me to Gianmaria Malacrida. Malfono explained that I had recently been in Urfa, and I said I was interested in the Italian's theory that the Urfalees had managed to preserve the chants of late antique Edessa.

  'It's a very difficult subject,' said Gianmaria, offering me a cigarette and lighting up himself. 'I've been working on the music of Urfa for seven years now, and it may take that long again before I manage to prove anything conclusively.'

  The three of us walked round the corner to Gianmaria's flat.

  It was bare and almost empty of furniture, but its shelves groaned with weighty reference books, stacks of notebooks and lines of neatly catalogued cassette tapes.

  "What I don't understand,' I said, 'is how you can ever know that what we heard tonight is unchanged since the Byzantine period.'

  "We don't know for sure,' replied Gianmaria. 'Up to now there have been no specialised studies of the Urfalees' music, and before my coming here the music was never written down. But it does appear to be a very early and very conservative tradition. There is no hard evidence, but it is difficult to believe that the form of this music has been substantially changed over the ages: sacred traditions change very, very slowly, if at all, over the centuries. Yesterday I was listening to the tapes I made seven years ago when I first started working on this. Although nothing is written down, since then there has not been one change - not one note has been added or omitted.'

  'And if there have been no changes made to this music, what does that mean?'

  'In manuscripts of the hymns of St Ephrem of Edessa - some of the very first Christian hymns ever composed - Ephrem writes in about 370 a.d. that he took his melodies and rhythms from Gnostic songs composed by the Edessan heretic Bardaisan. He says that their 'sweet rhythms still beguiled the hearts of men' -in other words that they were still popular and everyone in Edessa knew the tunes. Ephrem merely added new words - and orthodox sentiments - of his own. So if there has been no change to those melodies over the centuries, they should, in principle, be those composed by Bardaisan.'

  'In the third century a.d.?'

  'Bardaisan died in 220, so they could be earlier still, late second century.'

  'And how does this compare with the oldest texts of Western music?'

  'There is no agreement on which is the oldest Western text. There are four contenders, all of them very early forms of Gregorian chant. The most likely is Ambrosian, the chant of Milan; but there's also Romano Antiquo, the chant of Rome; Mozarabic, that of Spain; and Gallican, early French plainchant. They all represent very ancient forms of music, almost certainly dating back to the fifth century in the case of Ambrosian, but we have no musical notation written down for any of them before the tenth century

  a.d.'

  'But their melodies could be as old as those of Urfa?' 'In principle,' said Gianmaria. 'But in practice that is extremely unlikely.' 'Why?'

  'Because the earliest forms of Western plainchant all have markedly Eastern characteristics.'

  'In other words they look like imports?'

  'Exactly. And there is firm documentary evidence, in the church of Milan at least, that this new Western chant was deliberately modelled on older Syrian practice: St Ambrose's biographer writes that the hymns and psalms of the church of Milan "should be sung in the Syrian manner" because it was so popular.'

  All this fitted in very well with what I knew from my own reading. Certainly there was no doubt that Syrian music was regarded with reverence throughout the Byzantine world. There are references in the sources to bands of Syrian monks bursting into song in Haghia Sophia, astounding the Sunday congregation with their strange litanies to the crucified Christ. Moreover the greatest of all Byzantine composers, St Romanos the Melodist, was a Syrian from Emesa (modern Horns), just to the south of Aleppo. His hymns and antiphons took Justinian's Constantinople by storm, but they have been shown to be heavily indebted to those of St Ephrem of Edessa. Furthermore, St Hilary of Poitiers, who first introduced the hymn to Europe - and likewise drew heavily on St Ephrem's Edessan hymns for his models - seems to have first heard the new form when he was exiled from Gaul to Asia Minor by the Emperor Constantius.

  'So is it possible that what we heard tonight may be the most ancient form of Christian music still being sung anywhere in the world?'

  'That's what I am investigating. Coptic and Eastern Chaldean

  chants are also very old. They may have affinities with certain types of very ancient Jewish synagogue chants, particularly those preserved by the Jews of the Yemen. If so, elements in their tradition may predate the Urfalees' music. But from what we know of the sources, the chants of ancient Edessa should be the oldest original chants in the Christian tradition. What we heard tonight shows every sign of being the unadulterated music of late antique Edessa. If that is so - and it's a big if - then you could certainly argue that it may well be the most ancient Christian chant still in existence, yes.'

  'And so the ultimate origin of the Western Gregorian tradition, and everything else that followed - the root from which Palestrina, Allegri and Victoria all grew ... ?'

  Gianmaria stubbed out his cigarette. 'That's speculation,' he said. Then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled. 'Wait until my research is published.'

  The Convent of Seidnaya, 11 September

  A series of lifts - a truck, a pick-up and finally a tractor - brought me to the ruined Byzantine town of Serjilla in time for lunch. I sat at the brow of the hill munching the sandwiches they had packed for me at the Baron, looking down over the extraordinary expanse of late antique buildings spread out across the valley below.

  It was the sort of classical townscape that you normally see only in Roman and Byzantine mosaics. There were houses, a church, an inn, a set of baths, a couple of villas facing onto their own courtyards, and a scattering of farm buildings, with the pitched rboflines of still more pedimented and colonnaded buildings visible over the brow of the hill. Elsewhere such late classical towns are represented only by bald archaeological sites: tidied lines of bleached pillars, crumbling metopes and fallen architraves. But here, through a strange accident of fate, more intact domestic

  Byzantine buildings lay clustered at my feet in this obscure valley than survive today in all three of the greatest Byzantine metropolises - Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria - put together.

  The perfection of preservation here is extraordinary. Outside some of the houses you can still see olive presses - round basins with a stone funnel leading into a lower tub for the pressed oil -standing as if ready for this year's olive harvest. The colonnade of the inn still provides shade from the sun; the town meeting house, with its pedimented roof and tabernacled windows, still exudes an air of pompous provincial pride, as if the Byzantine gentlemen farmers who lived here were only out in the fields, overseeing their labourers, and would be back in the evening to discuss some weighty matter of village politics.

  The view before me was almost exactly as it would have been when John Moschos passed through these hills on his way to Antioch at the end of the sixth century. Looking inside one villa, peering under the superbly carved entablature of a doorway, I could see in the darkness that the first-floor ceiling was still totally intact: in two thousand years, the earthquakes and upheavals that had levelled Antioch had left not one crack in this structure. Only the total absence of furniture and wooden fittings hinted at what had happened to this fine late antique townhouse; and after the perfection of the view from the top of the hill, I was almost disappointed not to find tables and chairs in the kitchens, nor plates of fruit waiting on the dressers, as they do in the mosaics at Antakya.

  On the lower slope of the hillside, behind the town baths, lay an empty Byzantine sarcophagus. Its heavy granite cover was half broken off and there seemed to be no one about, so I hid my heavy rucksack inside it
, out of sight under the remaining half of the covering slab, and set off across the low hills towards the neighbouring town of al-Barra.

  It was a cool, bright autumn afternoon and thick clouds were racing overhead, casting quick-moving shadows over the massif. The hills were rolling and stony, and on the summits square Byzantine watchtowers rose vertically from the scree. Descending into al-Barra I found myself facing a small, square fifth-century church. It had a triple-arched portal, with each doorway surmounted by a finely carved tympanum. The doorways led into a tiny interior, only three bays long. The capitals were covered with vine-scroll interlace, each leaf raised by drilling away the stone behind it, as with an engraving; between the fronds small equal-armed Greek crosses nested like birds among the grapes and the vine tendrils.

  I clambered up onto a wall and from that height saw what was invisible from the ground: that littered throughout the olive groves was another complete Byzantine ghost town, the stone skeletons of towers, vaults, and half-collapsed townhouses rising everywhere from the soft loam. At the edge of the trees, to the east, some of the largest and airiest of the villas were still inhabited. From my vantage point I could see a Syrian woman in a patterned headscarf peeping out of a late Roman window in one of the largest houses. A washing line ran from the final pillar on her colonnade to the handle of a massive Roman sarcophagus to one side; on it, children's clothes were hanging out to dry in the afternoon sun. Nearby, hens were perching on another fallen pillar which had been hollowed out to make a drinking trough. But the villagers clearly disdained to live in the slightly less grand villas that lay on the lower ground, a little deeper into the groves; after all, these houses had only four or five main rooms, which did not leave enough space for the stabling of horses, asses, goats and sheep; nor, as I discovered when I made a closer inspection, did they have any baths with hypocaust systems, so useful for keeping bantams in.

  Carrying on through the trees, I began to climb over a small drystone wall that separated the land of two farmers; only when I was halfway over did I notice that the wall was made up of a pile of discarded doorjambs, carved tympana and inscribed lintels, an almost ridiculous richness of fine Byzantine sculpture piled up between the trees. Only in Syria, I thought, could a currency of this richness be so debased in value by the embarrassment of its profusion that it could be used for so humble a purpose as walling.

  A little beyond this wall, across the ruins of the town's old marketplace, lay a pyramid. It rested on a squat cube of warm honey-coloured limestone. At the corners of the cube four stumpy pilasters rose to a quadrant of richly curlicued Corinthian capitals. Bands of deeply cut acanthus ran along all four sides of the cube, the swirling leaf-patterns broken by a series of medallions. These turned out to contain the chi-rho monogram that Constantine turned into the symbol of his new Christian Empire. The apparently pagan pyramid was in fact a very unusual early-fifth-century Christian monument.

  Inside the half-light of the tomb chamber lay five great sarcophagi. Unusually, the lids still sealed the caskets shut; the sleepers slept on undisturbed. In the centre, flanked on either side by two smaller caskets, lay the great sarcophagus of what was clearly the family patriarch: a ton of polished porphyry, unorna-mented but for a massive chi-rho monogram contained within a laurel wreath. The sheer baroque bulk of the sarcophagus somehow suggested a portly landowner, a big-bellied, bucolic figure, dangling grapes into his open mouth as he reclined on his couch.

  The pyramid lay in front of the ruins of a magnificent villa, three storeys high. The way the pyramid was located in relation to the house implied that it must have been the dynastic mausoleum of the family who had lived there, not dissimilar to the arrangement - centuries later, in a very different world - at Castle Howard.

  Now the villa was deserted except for a single tethered donkey belonging to one of the olive harvesters. But as I wandered around its collapsing and deserted rooms I wondered about the family that had lived here. Who had built this small palace? The provincial governor? A local landowner? A prominent senator, returning to his home town for burial after a life of politicking in the capital? The house and its adjacent tomb indicated the existence of an entire world - that of the provincial Byzantine aristocracy - which is passed over in the written sources. In the tenth century there are the writings of the misanthropist Cecaumenus, a grumpy provincial squire who advised his readers to avoid the court, lock up their daughters and keep their wives far from any visitors; but from the early Byzantine period there is relatively little to illuminate the life of the landowning class in the eastern provinces, except when such a figure forms the background for a saint's miracle story or emerges briefly from obscurity to lead a rebellion or champion some obscure heresy.

  The sheer magnificent solidity of the family sarcophagi, the confidence and certainty of the workmanship and the conservative nature of the design seemed to hint at a world far removed from the nervy credulity of Theodoret's monks suspended in their cages and raised on their pillars. They also emphasised the degree of continuity between the late classical and the early Byzantine world, a continuity that is easily forgotten when reading the chroniclers' narratives of interminable palace coups, mutinous Gothic generals and collapsing frontiers.

  For this ostensibly Christian monument is only barely converted from paganism, and the thinnest veneer of Christianity rests uneasily on what is unashamedly a pagan classical pyramid. Looking at the great porphyry caskets, I wondered whether the calm certainty of the mausoleum was a sham - a brave attempt to maintain classical values in a world where the surface of ancient life was being betrayed at every turn: in the new-fangled clothes that were being worn, in the beliefs that were held, in the strange chants of the Syrian monks and the prophecies of the stylites. Or did it in fact represent the reality? Did the people in these sarcophagi still lead a version of the old life of the late classical landowner: their youth spent in the law school at Beirut or the School of Libanius at Antioch; a period as a provincial official posted to Hippo or Harran; or perhaps a spell in the army on the Rhine frontier, peering over the cold battlements of Cologne or Trier to catch a glimpse of a Gothic raider padding across the ice into Roman territory; then the return to the home estate and the comforts of the richest and most civilised part of the Empire, with winters of hunting and feasting, the occasional marriage party of a neighbouring landowner or a trip to the theatre at Apamea; of afternoons wallowing in the baths at Serjilla and evenings spent reading Homer by the light of an oil lamp. Wandering through the Byzantine villa, through a succession of cool, high-ceilinged rooms, the stone still fitted perfectly, joint by joint, a classical pediment on every window frame, I felt sure that more of the ancient world had survived for longer in the Byzantine East than any of the surviving sources - including John Moschos - now indicate.

  Lost in my Byzantine thoughts, I hadn't noticed that it had turned chilly. A faint yellow-gilt pallor now hung over the olive groves, and the oblique late-afternoon light threw long shadows among the trees. Worried that I had already spent too long in al-Barra, I set off at a brisk pace on the road back to Serjilla to pick up my rucksack before darkness fell. As I walked I wondered what had happened to these strange, deserted Byzantine towns. They certainly had not been burned and destroyed by raiding parties of Persians or Arabs; their marvellous preservation showed that. So what did happen?

  No one is sure, but the results of a number of recent digs appear to have convinced archaeologists that the entire Levantine coast underwent some form of major economic and demographic crisis towards the end of the sixth century, a full half century before the Arab conquest. Plagues, political upheavals, the Persian wars and the raids of desert nomads were responsible for the gradual erosion of urban life and its replacement by a landscape of small villages and monasteries. Some of the larger secular estates and their estate villages might have survived for a while (including that, perhaps, of the entombed aristocrat of al-Barra), but in most places the ancient Levantine trading towns - place
s like Palmyra, Bosra and Jerash - disappeared forever, forgotten by the world until the Scottish painter David Roberts popularised their ruins, turning them into neat idylls, perfectly tailored to the tastes of nineteenth-century European romantics. While the ancient classical trading towns were falling into decay, in the countryside the ever-growing cohorts of monks and hermits were gradually settling in and taking over the abandoned forts, forums and pagan temples.

  Certainly in the pages of John Moschos the three great metropolises - Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople - still appear to be thriving: there are, for example, stories about labourers rebuilding public edifices in Antioch. But elsewhere in the eastern provinces there are only very occasional glimpses of the old classical civic life, with its theatres, schools, brothels, markets and circuses. We hear, for example, about an actor from Tarsus who cohabits with two concubines and 'performs deeds truly worthy of the demons who urged him on', implying that the Tarsus theatre was still functioning healthily. At the same time we know that the ancient trading city of Apamea still had a functioning hippodrome, for Moschos tells us how a former champion charioteer from the town went on to become a monk in Egypt, where he was later captured and enslaved by desert nomads.

  Moreover, The Spiritual Meadow contains occasional references to merchants and trade, which implies that international commerce - the prerequisite for true urban life - had not yet completely died. At Ascalon Moschos hears about a merchant whose ship has sunk and so is thrown into prison, while his wife is forced to prostitute herself in order to pay his debts. On another occasion he tells of a gem engraver travelling by sea; he hears from his cabin boy that the crew is about to murder him for his boxes of precious gems, so he throws the entire hoard overboard.