There are, I believe, no remains in Membich of the temple of Atergatis which Crassus spoiled, and even at Karkhemish there is nothing but a mound unopened and kept closed by the Turks, to show where a great goddess, probably the greatest goddess of ancient times, was worshipped.
In reading the histories of Chaldea, Syria, Canaan, the Hittites, Israelites, Phœnicians, and Greeks, there appears as the chief goddess in their mythology always a goddess of victory, or love, and it is interesting to trace the course of this deity through the religions of the ancient East. The Chaldean race, which inhabited the lowlands, at the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris, from ages far beyond our knowledge, had, from earliest times set up a goddess, “Belit,” the lady, and it is from her that the later goddesses of other nations, or rather the later names and worship, sprang.
It is now known that the Hittites (for whose history the world is indebted to the wonderful research of Professor Sayce) were an extraordinarily powerful nation, that held the lands of Syria from about 3700 B.C.4 to 700 B.C., when the Assyrians overcame them. During this period they came into contact with the civilisation of Babylon, and, long before the appearance of the Syrians as a nation, probably adopted the worship of Belit or Ishtar (the same deity), whose name they altered to Atergatis. The worship of Atergatis was general among the peoples of Canaan (Syria), under the name of Ashtoreth, or Ashtaroth as we find it in the Bible.
The Canaanitic mythology also supplied a fundamental idea of male and female essence in Baal and Ashtaroth, with whom we are familiarised by the Bible stories; and this idea of the origin of fecundity and power, Baal, the God of all the living principles, according to the Canaanitic peoples, was the deity after whom the Israelites so often strayed; and Ashtaroth, the goddess of motherhood, love, and sensuality, necessarily was coupled with him.
Baal or Bel, or Moloch, the Sun-god, or Dagon, are all names of the same god, according to different tribes and peoples, who adopted this, probably the earliest conception of any worship of the supernatural arising from reverence of the sun and moon as the emblems of day and night, fire and moisture, heat and cold, light and dark, life and death, as twin gods of these antithetic phenomena—in short, the symbols of existence at all.
So we find the goddess Ishtar worshipped by the Phœnicians as Ashtoreth, by the Hittites as Atergatis, by the Philistines and Canaanites as Derketo, the fish-goddess (whose emblem and likeness was that of a half-woman, half-fish, as that of Dagon, the god, was that of a fish-man).
It was of course to these that the high places whereon they erected “Asherah,” or places of adoration, were dedicated, and against them that the prophets of Israel were sent.
Thus we find Elijah sent against the priests of Baal (the Syrian version, the fire-god), who called upon their god, since he had in their mythology retained the first principle of fire, to send down that element.
However, Ishtar, or whatever one of her names we may call her, played a more important part in the history of Western Asia than the Sun-god himself. To her, temples were erected by all the nations worshipping, and she retained through all, the suzerainty over the planet Venus, her particular sign and emblem.
Yet even among the Assyrians, who probably exalted her name more than any other nation, she bore a dual character, for we read that she had a temple at Nineveh and another at Arbela—a place dedicated originally to four gods. Now the Ishtar of Nineveh was essentially a goddess of love and luxury, who ruled the planet Venus; but she of Arbela gave victory in battle and strengthened the arm of the warrior.
It was at any rate a powerful and compelling religion this, that lasted through four thousand years of battles, of races that appeared, rose to importance and vanished, of peoples as little in sympathy with natural feeling as the Phœnicians and Assyrians, as the Hittites or Chaldeans. The worship of this goddess went on claiming homage from the mighty kings of the Hittites, the Chaldeans, and the Assyrians, keeping subject the host of nations, great and small, from Persia to the Mediterranean coast.
And now we are told that the Hittite kingdom extended to Ionia, and temples were erected to the goddess at Ephesus and Smyrna. Here came the Greeks as colonists, and, adopting the hosts of female attendants and priestesses as a basis, founded the legend of the Amazons. Not only that, but they adopted and adapted the worship of Atergatis, giving her a Greek name, under which she achieved a greater fame and commanded a greater reverence than any goddess of the pure Greek mythology.
And here, in this hamlet of Membich that was called Hierapolis during Greek supremacy, was one of the chief Syrian temples in the last day of her worship (54 B.C.). When this occurred, the Hittites had been gone into the oblivion of the past some 650 years, but the goddess, and perhaps her temple, an offshoot of the greater temple of Karkhemish, still stood.
For what we know of the Hittites we are indebted, as above mentioned, to Professor E. G. Sayce, who first announced to an astonished world of Orientalists and students, a great Hittite nation, the existence of which had been to that day—not two decades ago—absolutely unknown.
We now know that the Hittite empire lasted for the enormous period of about 3000 years.
The Chaldean chronicles mention them as a nation, in the date 3500 B.C. (circa). The seat of the nation appears to have been at Karkhemish, but before that they had been domiciled in the Taurus Mountains and the hills of Armenia, whence they descended, a hardy mountain race, to the lowlands of Canaan.
They were the descendants of Heth, son of Canaan (Genesis x. 15), and once settled in Karkhemish, where the chief temple to Atergatis was built (modern Jerabulus), extended their kingdom from the Bosphorus to the confines of Egypt, with whose Pharaohs they fought long and sanguinary battles.
Like all peoples in the East, even in the present day, they would appear to have been tribal in constitution, but their chief king was he of Karkhemish, with a lieutenant king at Kadesh in the south.
However, their might, long-lived as it was, fell before the onrush of the Assyrians, then but a young race, comparatively newly separated from the Chaldeans and Babylonians, and in 700 B.C. the last of the Hittite kings, who had been for some time tributary to Sargon, rebelled against his stronger neighbours, was defeated, and the last remnant of the Hittite empire, which had grown weak and dismembered, was destroyed and forgotten.
At Karkhemish, the capital through so many centuries of the Hittite empire, and chief city of the worship of Atergatis, there remains now but the great mound. War has again raged over the remains of greater combatants, for the Turks were defeated by the Egyptians there half a century ago.
Its interest to-day lies in the fact that the Bagdad railway is planned to cross the river just by the mound of Karkhemish, so we may look for bulky volumes in German some day, which will give us fuller particulars of this ancient city than we possess at present.
We left Membich very early next morning, and en route discovered that several other carriages had put up in the place during the night; for both behind and before were rumbling, swaying vehicles, two or three full of luggage, and the rest carrying passengers. From Membich the country—as barren as ever—began to get a little hilly, and in the far northern distance we could see the Kurdish mountains in the province of Mamurat ul Aziz, at this time of the year well capped with snow.
For a few hours we got along at a good pace among the low hills, till we received a sudden check from a very steep place going down, and as we turned the elbow of a hillock, the Euphrates appeared below us, an angry, rushing river of very considerable width. By devious and dangerous ways we arrived at a broad foreshore, to find half a dozen carriages already arrived, and by the time the contingent from Membich had been drawn up there were twelve all in a line, the horses unsaddled, waiting to be ferried across by a craft rather like a high-prowed longship cut in half at the waist. Upon the high stern a man wielded an enormously long steering-oar and two or three others with poles and oars supplied a propelling power. But it was not merely a question of rowing across; there were but two landing-places, one on either side, and the current was of such a force as to render it absolutely necessary to tow the craft about a mile above the proposed landing-place on the opposite bank. Then, shoving off, everybody exerted their utmost strength to get the clumsy craft across the river, and if they were sufficiently quick and strong, they would perhaps hit the spot where the waiting carriages stood. If they came to shore lower down, there was of course nothing to do but tow back again. Necessarily the transit of a couple of carriages and their horses (the utmost capacity of the ferry), counting from the time another party had landed on the opposite bank, took two or three hours.
Our large party of passengers, seeing that delay would inevitably occur, were disposed to come to an amicable arrangement regarding precedence. Unfortunately we discovered that half the vehicles were hired by the Chief of Police of Urfa to transport himself, his goods and womenfolk, and though he had—from what his fellow-travellers said—evinced no desire for speed so far, he now turned upon every one of us who talked of arranging an order of crossing, brandished his sword, and upbraided the company in general for proposing any such arrangement in his presence, which should be sufficient to give us the clue to all matters of precedence.
He would go first with all his goods and women, and whoever paid him would follow him in the order of the magnitude of their contribution. The Turkish and Armenian drivers seemed so effectually cowed by his disagreeable appearance and offensive manners, that most of them—ignoring his offer of precedence by payment—retired some distance and began to lunch, content to let him get clear away. Two cartloads of Christians of Urfa, however, intimidated by his continued attempts to extort money, paid and got away during the afternoon.
The remainder of us arranged who should go first, and, making the best of the hours we had to wait, composed ourselves to that which fills up so much of the idle time of the East—sleep.
It was nearly sunset before we finally got across, and found ourselves on the broad plain of the Euphrates valley. With all despatch we harnessed up and set out. Arriving at the caravanserai, we found it full of the effendi and his chattels, and the travellers who had followed him; so, making the best of a bad job, we went on, trusting to luck to find a place to sleep.
We had traversed the plain and were gradually ascending a pleasant hilly country by moonlight, when the driver descried a cluster of sugar-loaf roofs just off the road, and we stopped to interview the inhabitants.
A couple of finely built men came out, apparently Arabs, but they had not spoken half a dozen words to one another before we saw that they were Kurds. This resolved both the driver and myself to stay, for the Kurds, with all their bad reputation, are better hosts than Armenian, Turk, or Arab. Eventually, when a number of children and sheep had been dragged out from what appeared to be a cellar, they told me that the best room in the place was at my disposal. Descending three steps, and passing along a dark narrow corridor, I found myself in a circular chamber whose high sugar-loaf roof was invisible in the gloom undispersed by a tuft of burning brushwood.
The Kurds, with continual joking and merriment, tripping one another up, as they brought in the baggage, eventually deposited all my belongings in the room, and then installed themselves. The hamlet had a population of some fifteen men and women, and within five minutes these were all gathered around my strip of carpet. One of them knew Turkish, and tried it on me, taking me for a Turk; but when I replied in Kurdish, telling them I did not understand Turkish, they evinced considerable satisfaction, and hailed me as a brother Kurd, albeit of some other tribe (these were of the Milli), but nevertheless a fellow-countryman, and to be treated as a guest. And right well did these simple people act up to the fine old Kurdish law of hospitality. They possessed little enough of the world’s goods, but their best fowl was sacrificed to the occasion, eggs in numbers sufficient for ten men were produced. Every one of them except the headman, who sat by as host, busied himself about something. One made a fire in the centre of the room, making gloomier the gloom with pungent smoke; another fetched water for washing—they would not let me go outside in the keen wind, to the spring. One heated water for tea, while his companions killed and plucked and commenced cooking the fowl. Surplus eggs they hard-boiled and put up for my journey next day. I felt ashamed to be imposing thus upon these simple and genuine people, only I knew that utter incredulity would have met any attempt I might have made to undeceive them. What could they think of a man whose only means of communication not only with them, but with the whole world of Syria, was Kurdish? I found, however, that the appreciation they evinced for tea and good cigarettes, luxuries unknown to them except by name, quite outbalanced my qualms. The unfortunate driver, who was subject to fits of surliness, finding his protégé in such a state of independence, gave way to a period of disagreeableness which the jibes of the Kurds did nothing to dispel, and finally retired to sleep among his horses’ legs. As a race, Kurds are a witty and facetious people, great lovers of practical jokes; but I think these excelled any I ever met in this particular feature. The stance was one continual roar of laughter; despite their inquisitiveness, their personal remarks, their habit of fingering everything, the whole tone of their behaviour was too obviously ingenuous and well meant, possibly to offend any but Turks, whom they cursed and reviled, and made the subject of many unmentionable pleasantries. About ten o’clock the headman, a handsome fellow, doubly important in the possession of the village rifle, told everyone to clear out and let me sleep, and they retired, driven by the butt of the ancient fire-arm.
I was composing myself to sleep when a young woman came in, and began quietly to sweep the room with a bunch of twigs. Not unnaturally I sat up and regarded her with some astonishment, not lessened when she produced from a recess some bedding, which she put down beside mine. I was hardly in a position to make a remark upon her obvious intention to share the room, but the situation was saved by the appearance of one of my friends of the earlier evening. He saw me sitting up, and asked why I did not sleep, as if the proceedings which had just taken place were too ordinary for remark, and I learned in reply to half-formed questions that he was the house-owner, his wife the sweeper, and that owing to the size of the village, which possessed but two rooms fit to sleep in, they were going to spend the night beside me. This method of procedure was propounded by him in such a matter-of-fact way, and was so apparently quite the thing to do, that I could not, nor did I wish, to make any remark upon what was a purely patriarchal custom. What I learned was, that had I been a Turk or Arab, they would have told me to sleep in the carriage; but being a Kurd, and a guest, I must excuse their presumption in occupying the room, which was my exclusive property. The poor man even seemed somewhat ashamed at having possibly broken some unwritten rule of hospitality, but I did my best to put him and his wife at ease, and we literally lay down together.
I was awakened by the wife early in the morning; her man yet slumbered. She herself carried out the small luggage to the carriage, and then two or three villagers turned out and loaded up the heavy things. Last of all the headman appeared, and, as we drove away, the sound of his rough hearty farewells rang in my ears. These were the first Kurds I met, the outposts of a great race, that covers 125,000 square miles of mountain in Turkey and Persia, and who, despite the fact that their outlying tribes are but fourteen days distant from London, are the least known of any Middle Eastern race; albeit they are one of the bravest, most independent, and intelligent of all, cursed only by the black mark of the blood-feud, and a terrible propensity to brigandage.
The way to our next station was across an undulating plain peopled by Armenians, and sedentary Kurds of the Milli tribes. For miles and miles we rolled along between ploughed lands, where the grain was just beginning to send its green spikes above earth. From the north a keen wind came at a temperature obviously lowered by the snow on the hills, about whose shoulders rags of cloud were beginning to collect, to drench the land and the travellers therein but a few days later. In fact, rain had already fallen by the afternoon—when we found ourselves upon a dreary and immense plain of mud, sticky, clayey soil, into which the wheels and the horses sank. Our station, Charmelik, was visible in the far distance, a distance we seemed never to be able to reduce, for the sticky prospect spread out on all sides, and our speed was about half a mile an hour. Sudden showers began to fly round the country. One could count them as they descended from the hills, and progressing swiftly—columns of dark rain descending from dense black cloud-centres—did the round of the soaked plains, and apparently returned to the mountains and the solid mass of cloud that hung about them.
However, we did arrive at Charmelik at sunset, and put up in a little room. The village is a Kurdish one, and talk among the inhabitants was mostly of Ibrahim Pasha, the famous robber chief who held this country in terror for so long.
So bad a character was he, this outlaw (who adopted his trade in revenge for the Turkish treachery that brought his father to a miserable end), that Kurd and Arab alike disclaimed him; Kurd asserting that he was Arab, and Arab calling him Kurd.
The body of ruffians and thieves that joined him were of every class—Turk, Armenian, Kurd, and Arab. All served under his standard, and by his disregard for the property of any tribe or people he drew upon himself the enmity of his own kinsmen, the Milli Kurds.
But like every astute robber and scoundrel in the Turkish dominions, he bought the Sultan’s favour, and could and did ridicule all the efforts of local government to catch him. For the most part he frequented the hills that border on the Mesopotamian plain to the north, but he was also a power in Viran Shahr and Harran to the south, where he kept everyone in a lively fear of him. Not until the Turks arranged themselves into a Constitution was this powerful brigand, by a ruse, caught and killed, and the heterogeneous collection of rascals dispersed.
The villagers of Charmelik related how his men would follow travellers into the village, instal themselves in the best room, order a meal, and having rested and smoked a pipe or two, stroll out, calmly load the traveller’s effects upon his own cart and take them away to their nearest camp. So much were their reprisals feared—for revenge upon a village was burning and extermination—that not a single person dared protest. Even Turkish officers and officials had to submit to this treatment, and, so the reminiscent throng round the fire assured me, suffer a good beating in the bargain for being of the detested race.
Altogether, Ibrahim Pasha’s was one of the most successful and best organised of the Kurdish raiding parties, and numerically the most powerful. The only other combination, formed solely for the purpose of brigandage and revenge, was that of the Hamavand, whose acquaintance I made later, in southern Kurdistan.
We left this village next morning in a freezing cold, and the sun coming up, found us gradually ascending through gullies and defiles into a considerable range of hills. In that much-abused country, Persia, I have travelled many hundreds of miles by carriage, but I must in justice say, that the worst tracks in that maligned and unhappy country are paved boulevards compared to the carriage-ways of Turkey. Here, within easy distance of the sea and of the influence of Constantinople, the track passes untouched by any of the French-speaking, liquor-loving effindis appointed to look after such things; whereas in Persia there are excellent roads built by the foreign enterprise that she sometimes welcomes and Turkey discourages; and where the European engineer has not made smooth the way, the Persian himself, with no other notion than to ease the pains of travellers, has done his best, by clearing stones and putting down causeways.
For hours we ascended ravines, and slid, banging, down hill-sides, boxes and chattels of all descriptions almost taking charge despite their substantial lashings. Do what one might, inconsequent paraphernalia, eatables, small articles, would leap out and roll away, and one had the greatest difficulty in exercising sufficient restraint upon the overwhelming inclination to follow head first. For miles both myself and the driver walked, helping the wheels over rocks, piloting the carriage round corners of rocky zigzags, or helping the horses in desperate efforts to haul up slopes.
Here and there was a little patch of cultivation among the stones, and a spring made green narrow places in almost every valley. As we neared Urfa, our next stopping-place, ancient cave-dwellings, now unoccupied, began to occur, and bits of carved stone here and there lay about. In one flat plain, some two miles across, were the remains of a large square building, of the style one associates with pre-Muhammadan times, when mud did not enjoy its present popularity with masons.
However, our troubles ceased suddenly, for turning a particularly bad corner we found ourselves upon a very well-made road that continued all the way into Urfa. This is, I believe, the only made road in Syria, and was the outcome of a project to construct a military and commercial route as far as Diarbekr. The effort expired a few miles north-east of Urfa. Once upon this, we saw what would have been our fate without it, and I quite believed the driver’s statement that, previous to its construction, the passes were not negotiable by wheeled vehicles.
On the way we met with a proof of the curious devotion that leads the Musulman from the remotest corners of Asia to Mecca. An old man, in garments that reminded me of Khorasan of Eastern Persia, overtook us, his stride taking him at a greater pace up the hill than our slow walk. I asked him, as a venture, in Persian where he came from, and learned that he was a pilgrim returning on foot from Mecca to Bokhara. His journey he estimated would have taken him nearly a year, from the time he started from his native town to the time he saw it again. He had the appearance of fifty or more years, but none of the feebleness that might be expected, and marched along—having that day done some twenty miles of mountain—as if he were just set out.
Beside the road, as we neared Urfa, there were, in bad repair, remains of an ancient causeway, the original road to the west from Edessa, as Urfa was known in pre-Christian days. Along the paved way of square blocks of stone the armies of the Roman and the Parthian had passed in the days when men worshipped Venus and Astarte.
Urfa, at the foot of this considerable range, stands upon some hillocks, and once the hideous dwelling of the Governor—built in imitation French style—is passed, the ancient nature of the town becomes evident. The peculiar blackness of the massive walls, whose ruins stand everywhere, the style of the bridges that span the ravine amid the city, the citadel mounds, topped with ruins of buildings all of that blackened stone, tell something of the history of Edessa. And in the hills above the light yellow cliffs that look down, are the innumerable cave-dwellings of the ancients, now occupied by nondescript families of sedentary Kurds.
We drew up at a large caravanserai at the edge of the ravine above mentioned, and I took one of a row of rooms upon its spacious roof, that afforded a promenade from which one could look up at the honeycombed hills, or view the clustered houses upon the hummock forming the Armenian quarter. Contrary to custom, the room, which opened upon the roof, and faced the courtyard, possessed glassless windows, looking down upon the street and a coffee-house. This is not enclosed, but is an extension of the actual coffee-room, the other side of the caravanserai. Along the moat edge, benches are arranged, and trees and matting shelters keep the sun off. Along the strip of road running between this café and the caravanserai walls the town auctioneers paraded every morning, selling every conceivable article, from a handful of cartridges to a horse.
Bids were made by the guests in the café as he passed and repassed singing out the last offer. In many cases his price not being reached, he would hand the horse, or whatever it might be, back to the owner and go on with something else, producing the under-priced animal next morning.
As in nearly all the towns of this empire, half the population of the streets and nine-tenths of all the café and corner loafers were effendis in uniform, who never by any chance appeared to have any kind of duties. In fact, Urfa, I was told, possessed a larger proportion than any other town of these undesirable fowl. Fortunately, they did not worry me: I was to learn their skill in annoyance later. Here the attractions of coffee and pipes apparently outweighed those of the possible piastre of the traveller. The population, apart from these signs of Turkish might, is composed of Kurds and Arabs, and an enormous number of Armenians. The Kurds come from the north, mostly out of the hills of Mamuret ul Aziz; the Arabs are from the plains of Mesopotamia, and probably have the claim to be considered the original inhabitants. The language is Kurdish and Arabic. Kurdish is understood by all, for it has forced itself upon the partially alien population as it does everywhere, displacing older established languages with its extraordinary virility and vitality.
The town is not a large one, but its bazaar is very busy, and its Government House always thronged with people. There is a square with a few trees, and the place is sprinkled with bits of old buildings, some adapted to modern use, and others built into new walls. Under the hills one is shown the Pool of Abraham, who is supposed to have performed various feats here. The water-supply is plentiful, the scenery around beautiful in its ruggedness and the fantastic nature of its hills, and I was told that there are very pretty gardens in the immediate vicinity. It is one of those places one sees so often in Asiatic Turkey, where life could be peaceful among beautiful surroundings and prosperity assured, were it not for the Turks and their misrule.
Urfa, or Edessa as the Romans called it, stood in Assyrian times upon the borders of Greater Assyria, and “the lands of Nairi,” the highlands immediately to the north, which are now known as the western end of Kurdistan, and its name does not appear as a city till the time of the Roman invasion, when we hear of it as the capital of the country of Osrhœne, whose kings were always called Abgarus, according to the Roman mutilation of the Semitic name. The people were Arabs; and Edessa, while capital, marked the most northerly point of the kingdom.
At the same time the kingdom was on the northern marches of Mesopotamia, and always being in a position of a frontier state between Roman and Parthian, Arab and mountaineer—either Armenian or Kurd, though it is not known if the Kurds had spread so far west—was subjected to the fury of all its neighbours in wars, and played traitor to each on many occasions.
After the break-up of the Empire of Alexander, about the third century B.C., Mesopotamia fell into the hands of the Seleucid princes, and as they weakened, the northern portion of their kingdom fell before the advancing Romans. It was with Pompey (65 B.C.) that the king of Edessa, Abgarus, king of the people of Osrhœne, made a treaty, and accepted actual if not formal vassalage.
Ten years later, Crassus, as already mentioned, made his expedition against the rising power of Parthia, and was deceived and deserted by Abgarus after being lured into a position of danger. Thereupon Edessa became allied to Parthia, and incidentally saved itself from the destruction consequent upon conquest.
A century later, and we see the Parthian Empire torn over a question of succession: Meherdates, a Parthian prince, at the suggestion of Rome, proceeds to win his kingdom by the sword from Godarz. En route he passes by Edessa, and now the Abgarus, with a ready facility for duplicity, after feasting him, sets him upon a road he knows will end in disaster. His theory was fully borne out by the defeat of the pretender at Erbil.
After the death of this versatile monarch, little is heard of Edessa till A.D. 115, when the Emperor Trajan established himself there, in preparation for an invasion of Parthia. Edessa was a convenient spot for such a step, being within easy reach of the Mediterranean via Aleppo, and commanding the road from Syria to the East.
Having prepared his army, he set out southwards; but while he subdued southern Mesopotamia, the reigning Abgarus, taking an advantage of Trajan’s absence, promptly rebelled, and ejected the Roman garrison installed in the citadel, whose ramparts and walls still stand on the southern side of the city.
Vengeance overtook this effort at independence, for during the next year (A.D. 116), Lucius Quietus, a Roman general, captured the place and burnt it.
Yet once more we hear of Edessa before it sinks into the temporary obscurity that followed the fall of the Roman power in Mesopotamia. In one of the last attempts of Rome finally to crush the Parthians (A.D. 197), Severus, who came from France to try and recover the territories (Edessa among them) recently conquered by Vologases V. of Parthia, found Edessa on his way to the East, and the reigning Abgarus, always ready to turn a complacent face to the man in power, submitted without a murmur, and handed over his sons to the Romans as hostages.
It was not perhaps remarkable that Edessa, after these centuries of strife between the great empires, that saw the ebbing and flowing tide of Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Parthian, Roman and Arab, sweep by and over it, possessed a population of which the Roman and Greek element, particularly the latter, was an important section. When Christianity began to spread, the proximity of Edessa to Antioch made it easy for the bishops of those early days to travel there, and so we find as a result of the efforts of converts a college springing up in very early times.
Though there were doubtless many of the Greeks in this college, we are told that it was the Chaldeans who founded it, and made it famous for its erudition, and particularly its knowledge of the medical science. Doubtless Chaldean, Greek, and Arabic were all spoken there; the last certainly, for Arab pupils of the college, natives of the land towards Mecca and Medina, were relations of the early Muhammadan saints, notably Abu Bekr.
This famous school was dissolved by Zeno the Isaurian,5 and the Chaldeans, with no loss of zeal, transferred it to Susa, in Khuzistan of south-west Persia, whence the now famous missionaries of the Chaldeans to China were despatched.
In 1124 A.D. it had become one of the western strongholds of the followers of Hasan Sabbah, the Ismailis or Assassins of Crusading fame, and when they were finally stamped out, a large number were slain in Edessa, or as it was then called, Urfa; and since then it has taken an ordinary place in the scheme of the general history of Mesopotamia, acquiring evil notoriety recently (1895) for the terrible massacres of Armenians under Turkish instigation.
At Urfa I made the acquaintance of three characters, samples of the curious results of the shattering of races and medley of their remnants which has taken place over western Asia. I had noticed two or three times on my way from Aleppo another carriage with three occupants, and at Urfa found them occupying the room next to mine. Their appearance was remarkable. The eldest and leader of the party was a sinister-looking man, with a big hooked nose, and a huge mouth which opened at one corner to display the only two teeth he possessed. Upon his head he wore a turban, and an old overcoat and Turkish trousers, extremely baggy in the leg and tight at the ankles, completed his visible attire.
The next in importance was a Kurdish-looking fellow, dark, but with a humorous twinkle in his little eyes. The headgear was Kurdish too, the style affected by the northern races. A felt basin cap wound round with a blue cloth is the head-dress of these people. He had adopted the peculiar form of head handkerchief usual among the mountain Chaldeans; that is, instead of making a regular turban, he rolled his cloth till it made a thick rope, and then twisted it round his felt cap three or four times. He wore also the hairy Kurdish zouave jacket and wide trousers. In fact, to the experienced eye he appeared a Kurd of the Erzeroum district. The third of this trinity was all that the others were not—absurdly fat, his hairless face formed a grinning moon under his tiny fez. As coat he wore a garment reaching a little below his waist, made of shot blue silk, and the bagginess of the upper end of his trousers exaggerated his already ample breadth to the point of ludicrousness.
These queer creatures, when in their carriage, spent a great part of their time chanting in Gregorian tones in a language neither I nor the coachman could make out. Now and then they would sing a Kurdish song or a little doggerel in Turkish. Their conversation was carried on in Arabic and Kurdish, which two of them spoke equally well; only the middle man, who appeared so Kurdish, confined himself to that language. At night, now, in the caravanserai, I had a chance of listening to the crew, and heard them talk in the Kurdish called Kermanji, in Arabic, in Turkish, and then in this dialect of theirs which contained a good many Kurdish words. This was distinctly tantalising, and next morning I made the acquaintance of the one I set down as pure Kurd. He was very hearty; we spoke in Kurdish, and I found that they had already ascertained from my driver that I was a southern Kurdish Haji. I now learned that they, too, were returning from Mecca, and were natives of Sert, a small town south of Lake Van. No sooner had I heard this than the secret of their dialect was out. I remembered tales the Chaldeans of Urumia and Dilman in Persia tell of the mysterious “Gavarnai,” who come from inaccessible passes among the Kurdish mountains, Gavarnai calling themselves Christian, but often fleeing from Gavarnai who were Musulman. The solution of the Gavarnai question is as follows:—
The district of Sert and the Gavar (or rock) district of Kurdistan is one of the most inaccessible of the many sealed corners of this mountain country, and it was here that the descendants of the Chaldeans and Assyrians fled before the hordes of the Tatars in the early fifteenth century, finding an asylum among the Kurdish tribes.
Here in the beautiful valleys of Sert they settled, and many became Musulman among the Kurds. Others fled from Sert before the blood-feuds of their own kinsmen, who gradually learned from the Kurds a hardy recklessness and bravery unknown of their ancestors of the towns and plains, and pushed farther into the mountains.
In quite recent times the village of Khusrava, now a considerable town, was founded by a Chaldean fugitive or explorer from the Sert valleys, named Nicolai, about 1780.
This statement I put here upon the authority of a native of Khusrava, and leave it as it stands, not without remark, however, that the neighbouring town of Salmas was in pre-Muhammadan days a Chaldean bishopric, where there were undoubtedly a large number of Chaldeans among—but not intermarried—with the Armenians of that region.
The language of these Assyrians, sometimes called Neo-Syriac, or Aramaic, has remained and is spoken, though now known as a language of the Christians, by a great part of the sedentary Musulman population of the Sert plain, who, though calling themselves Kurds, are of Chaldean descent.
Such were two of my new acquaintances, the eldest and youngest. My particular friend, though he knew the dialect, came from a hill village, and besides proving his Kurdish origin also carried further proof in his appearance and manners. We became very good friends, and made many excursions about the bazaars of Urfa together, his tongue, always ready for badinage in any of four languages, assuring him a welcome everywhere.
At Urfa I renewed acquaintance with the Kurdish cigarette, which I suppose must be a unique pattern. The form has been evolved doubtless by necessity, for the tobacco produced in Kurdistan could never be rolled into an ordinary cigarette. Instead of pressing, keeping damp, and eventually cutting the leaf, the Kurds dry it, and pound it to a coarse powder, which to the uninitiated but intending smoker provided with cigarette papers would present an insurmountable difficulty. Consequently a special form of paper, affording employment in its manufacture to hundreds of women in Diarbekr and Mosul, has been invented.
The paper is thicker and coarser than an ordinary cigarette paper, and at least twice as long, and in the packets one buys they are already stuck together, forming slightly tapering tubes. A long slip of thick paper 1 inch broad is taken, and rolled into a plug which is inserted in the narrow end, its natural spring retaining it in place. Tobacco is then poured in from the top, and after sufficient coaxing and shaking down, the edges of the paper are turned in to retain the contents. The greatest disadvantage of this style of cigarette is that the tobacco being absolutely dry, and in tiny chips, does not hold together when smoked, the glowing head continually falling off.
Here in Urfa little else was smoked, and as I knew that eventually I must get used to them, I resolved to procure decent cigarettes as long as possible. So I hunted high and low for Turkish Regie productions, and at last found a dozen boxes, the purchase of which impressed my Kurdish friend immensely, for these are the one thing in Turkey of which the price is fixed and about which it is useless to haggle; also, compared to native cigarettes, they are terribly dear. These that I bought were twenty for threepence—still double and treble the price of Kurdish cigarettes. The purchase of these luxuries gained me the honorary title of effendi from my acquaintances, a title that never left me till I got buried in the frontier mountains of Persia.
We stayed two days at Urfa, and my new acquaintances of Sert were detained still longer. So, in departing, I bade them farewell till Diarbekr, where we should meet again.
From Urfa the road to Diarbekr keeps a mean way between ranges of mountains, the Karaja in the south-east and the high Kurdistan ranges to the north-west, called in ancient times Masius and Niphates respectively by the Romans. In many places the track brings one near the Euphrates, and traverses a number of ravines carrying down tributary streams. The general aspect of the country all the way is great rolling uplands, across which wind and rain come with express velocity and piercing cold. I believe the road from Severik to Diarbekr is impassable from December to February. Certainly when we passed in early April, snow was lying in patches not far away. The prospect is always immense, always dreary, for, though there is water to be got in any one of the innumerable gullies of these immense plains, and though the soil is fertile enough, the Turkish blight is upon the land. In the distance, more particularly to the north, are the sullen, frowning masses of the Kurdistan mountains, at this time of the year half hidden in black clouds, and before and behind apparently limitless plains rising gradually to the east, till at the highest point one looks down over the undulating desert with a curious feeling of being left out in the desolation of utter abandonment, unsheltered from wind, rain, and snow, and lost in the immensity of a silent death-like solitude of infinitely sinister aspect.
And these plains and mountains have from immemorial time been the boundaries, natural and political, of the south and north lands. The high dark range over north—Niphates we must call it, since to-day it has lost its general name—gives birth to the Tigris, the “Arrow.”6 It was also the northern boundary of Assyria under the first great Assyrian monarch, Tiglath-Pileser I. (1100 B.C.). Behind its frowning walls lay the mysterious lands of the Nairi, whom the Assyrian monarchs, greater than any of their descendants, succeeded in subduing, or found necessary to keep chastised periodically. The proudest boast of the Assyrian monarchs was ever that they had penetrated the lands of Nairi and subdued their petty kings. And afterwards, the lands of Nairi were called “Gordyene,” which is “Kurdian” or Kurds, no more and no less, a fact which supports the Kurdish claim to possession of the land ever since the first Aryan in the birth of time came forth from central Asia to people the West.
Here Roman, Parthian, and Greek invader have turned back and set their faces once more to the merciless plains and downs. Those gloomy hill-sides have looked down upon the broken armies of all the greatest Eastern nations, Assyria only excepted, and watched them as they crawled away, to the south and west, relinquishing all hope of penetrating the dread country of the fierce Gordyene, forbear of the not less fierce Kurd of to-day. Strange it is that this sturdy nation, whose name has stood for rebellion, bravery, and untamable spirit, should never have taken rank among the more transitory peoples who never subdued it. Except that they were the Medes—or we imagine them to be—they have no claim to the historian’s enthusiasm—at any rate, these western Kurds have not. They remain as ever, indomitable, invincible, proud, unsubdued, broken only by their own quarrels, hating the Powers that nominally rule them. Secure in their defiles and mountains, and in their archaic language, they cede no jot of their exclusiveness, let the West press never so hard.
This digression from narrative is permitted, I hope, by the lack of detail worth recording about the road from Urfa to Diarbekr. Except that for the first half, for two days, the fiendish genius of some Turkish engineer has induced him to scatter boulders and call it a road, and then lay down 3 feet of clay on marshy ground, and call that a road too, the track calls for no remark. There is but one station of any interest, Suverek.
Referring to notes, I find that two objects struck me as remarkable when approaching this squalid town upon the plain. One is a square white building, with rows of glass windows all round, a porched doorway in front, a Turkish flag on top. This is the Governor’s house, an example of mean European architecture, isolated, from the small surroundings that give it a spurious importance, looking cold, miserable, hollow, and infinitely shoddy, in that vast landscape of plain and distant hill. The other feature is the mound, like that of Aleppo, upon which are the remains of the Governor’s house that the rulers of twenty centuries ago put there, for whose might and whose right, and whose strong hand the country may sigh as it looks there upon the work of a mighty past, and here upon those of a little present.
Modern Suverek is a mean town of one-storeyed houses of black stone, inhabited by sedentary Kurds and Armenians, who are, I believe, permanently on bad terms, as these two races always are. There are no streets as we know them; the hovels are clustered together, leaving alleys of a particular filthiness between. The traveller perforce puts up in a ruinous caravanserai which is situated fortunately on the edge of the town, and looks out through its broken doorway to the desert. The people are peculiarly surly and ill-mannered, and despite the size of the place nothing seems to be purchasable. When we arrived it was quite within the nature of things to find all my sugar finished, and so, leaving my room in charge of an aged Arab woman I found cupping herself outside in the courtyard, I set out to explore. My first question to the Armenian who acted as doorkeeper, elicited the fact that there was a shop round the corner. So round the corner I waded through pestilential mire, and found the shop. It was an open booth—the shop of the East—and the stock-in-trade just required three glances to sum it up. There was a small boy playing with a greyhound. Behind, upon a sloping shelf, a bag of stones, called cheese in these parts, where last year’s cheese is a delicacy, and the fresh article scorned. Two bunches of onions and a few boxes of matches completed the emporium. So I took my trousers up one more turn, and set forth among the alleys, displacing Armenian infants from mud-baths, disputing the right of way with armed Kurds, and finally finding myself in a mosque courtyard, where I was promptly accosted by a priest, who asked my religion, and receiving the answer “Islam,” still doubtful, called upon me to repeat the creed, which done to his satisfaction I made use of him as a guide, and with his assistance found a shop similar to the first, where the owner was more enterprising and kept not only sugar—and sold at a fanciful price—but tea and cigarettes.
Bread, too, I found, but solely by the priest’s goodwill, for, taking compassion upon this strange Haji, he took me to someone’s house where bread was being cooked in an earth-oven, and procured for me ten flaps for twopence.
Fortunately good water was abundant in the courtyard of the serai, where a nozzle poured out a plentiful supply, filling a broken cistern and half the yard. Hither came all the Kurdish women to get their supplies, and I spent an hour sitting on my door-step watching for an ugly girl—and saw none. We had great difficulty in getting away next morning, for the Armenian keeper of the place demanded a mejidie (3s. 4d.) for horse provender from the coachman, and 1s. for my room, which had leaked upon me all night. An hour was wasted in the doorway disputing. Half a dozen Armenian loafers hung upon the horses’ heads while we endeavoured to quell the screams and expostulations of the keeper of the place. We were forced to pay in the end, or stay where we were, the only satisfaction being that we passed off a bad five-piastre piece upon them, and gave the trouble of changing a lira. And so we drove away, cursing Christians and pagans in general and Armenians in particular.