Amurath to Amurath

by Bell, Gertrude

  On the east side of the gate stands the little temple of Ishtar, raised on a high platform and commanding the city below. The temple is built of sun-baked brick, probably in accordance with hieratic tradition, which held to the ancient building material used in an age when the architects were unacquainted with the finer and more durable burnt brick. Small courts with side chambers lead into an inner holy of holies, where in a niche stood the symbol or effigy of the goddess. Behind the sanctuary there is a narrow blind passage where the priests could lurk behind the cult image and confound the common folk with mysterious sounds and hidden voices. The Via Sacra pursues from the gate its stately way, skirting along the edge of an immense open court that lay between the palace and the temple of the god Marduk, the patron divinity of Babylon. The mound in which the temple lies has not as yet been completely excavated, but a pit sunk in its centre has laid bare the walls of the entrance court. It will be no easy matter to continue the work here. The mound was thickly inhabited during the Greek and Parthian periods, and its upper levels consist chiefly of refuse-heaps. When the workmen cut down through them to reach the temple gate, the stench of the old rubbish-heaps, combined with the stifling heat of the pit, was so intolerable that their labours had to be interrupted for several days until a breeze arose and made it possible to continue them.

  The excavations are carried on all through the summer heats, but the director, Professor Koldewey, was at the time of my visit paying a penalty for his tireless energy. He had been ill for some months owing to his exertions during the previous summer, and to my permanent loss I was unable to see him. I retain notwithstanding the most delightful memory of the days at Babylon, of the peace and the dignified simplicity of life in the house by the river, of the little garden in the courtyard where Badrî Bey, the delegate from the Constantinople museum, coaxed his roses into flower and his radishes into red and succulent root; of long and pleasant conversations with Mr. Buddensieg and Mr. Wetzel, wherein they poured out for me their knowledge of the forgotten things of the past; of quiet hours with books which they brought for me out of their library—and books were a luxury from which I had been cut off since I left Aleppo. When I rode out of an afternoon one of the zaptiehs of Babylon was detailed to accompany me. He knew the ruin-field well, having been the fortunate occupier of a post at the Expeditionshaus for several years. I would find him waiting in the palm-grove where my horses were stabled, alert, respectful and less ragged than his brothers in arms whose pay does not come to them through the hands of European excavators. One day I asked him to take me to the Greek theatre, wondering a little whether he would understand the request.

  “Effendim,” he said, “you mean the place of Alexander.”

  The great name fell strangely among the palm-trees, and from out of the horde of ghosts that people Babylon strode the Conqueror at the end of his course. So we rode to the place of Alexander, the theatre near the city wall, ruined almost beyond recognition, but preserving in the popular nomenclature the memory of the most brilliant figure in the history of the world.

  And once the clouds gathered as we were riding through the palm-groves by the river. “Praise God!” said the zaptieh, “maybe we shall have rain.” He shouted the good tidings to a peasant who drove the oxen of a water-wheel: “Oh brother, rain, please God!” But it was dust that was heralded by the darkness, and as we hastened to the great mound of Bâbil the wind bore down upon us and the parched earth rose and enveloped us. We left our horses standing with downcast heads under the lee of the mound and picked our way up the sides between the trial trenches of the excavators. In a few moments the dust-storm swept past, and we saw the wide expanse that was Babylon, embraced by gleaming reaches of river and the circuit of mound and ditch which marks the line of the city wall.

  “Effendim,” said the zaptieh, “yonder is Birs Nimrûd,” and he pointed to the south-west, where, in the heart of the desert, rose the huge outline of a temple pyramid, a zigurrat. Legend has given it a notable place in the story of our first forefathers: it was believed to be no other than the impious tower that witnessed the confusion of speech.

  I heard at Babylon some hint of the state of unrest, bordering on revolution, into which the province of ’Iraḳ had fallen. The German excavators had been sucked into the outer edges of the whirlpool. Their workpeople, drawn from different tribes (they had relinquished nomad life, but the tribal system still held good among them), had caught the infection of hatred and turned from the excavation pits to the settling of ancient scores—so effectually that many a score had been settled for ever, and the debtor came back to his place in the trench no more. Most of the survivors had been clapped into gaol by a justly incensed civil authority, and what with death and the serving out of sentences, Professor Koldewey and his colleagues had suffered from a scarcity of labour. This was nothing, as I was to learn at Baghdâd, to the confusion that reigned in other parts of ’Iraḳ, and it was fortunate that I had no intention of going south from Babylon; at that time it would have been impossible.

  On the way to Baghdâd I was resolved to visit Ctesiphon, but we were obliged to follow, during the first day’s journey, the Baghdâd road, re-traversing for some hours the line of our march from Museiyib. Ever since we had left Kebeisah the temperature had been exceedingly high, and from Babylon to Baghdâd we travelled through a heat wave very unusual at the beginning of April. The early morning was cool and pleasant, but by about ten o’clock the scorching sun became almost unbearable, even for people so well inured to heat as my servants and I. As long as we were moving, it was tempered by the breath of our progress, but if we stood still it burnt through our clothes like a flame. There was not a leaf or any green thing upon the plain, and the only diversion in a monotonous ride was caused by a peasant who caught us up with lamentations and laid hold of my stirrup.

  “Effendim!” he cried, “you have soldiers with you; bid them do justice on the man who stole my cow.”

  “Where is the man?” said I in bewilderment.

  “He is here,” he answered, weeping more loudly than before, “but a quarter of an hour back upon the road. An Arab he is; and while I was driving my cow to Museiyib, he came out of the waste and took her from me, threatening me with his rifle.”

  “The effendi has nought to do with your cow,” said one of the zaptiehs impatiently—and indeed the sun withered us as we stood. “Go tell the Ḳâḍî at Museiyib.”

  “How shall I get justice from the Ḳâḍî?” wailed the peasant. “I have no money.”

  The rejoinder struck me as correct, and I sent one of the zaptiehs back with the lawful owner of the cow, telling him to catch the thief if he were still upon the road and I would give a reward. The zaptieh re-joined us while we were lunching at the khân of Ḥasua, but he had not seen the cow, nor yet the thief, and perhaps it was unreasonable to expect that the latter should keep to the high road with stolen goods trotting before him. The khân at Ḥasua is large and built on the Persian plan for Persian pilgrims. We ate our lunch in the shadow of its gateway, and when we came out the sun struck us in the face like a sword. There was nothing to be done but to try and forget it; I summoned Fattûḥ and drew him into conversation.

  “Oh Fattûḥ,” said I, “is there any justice in the land of the Ottomans?”

  “Effendim,” replied Fattûḥ cautiously, “there is justice and there is injustice, as in other lands. Have I not told you of Rejef Pasha and the thief who stole from me £T28?”

  “No,” said I, settling myself expectantly in the saddle.

  “It happened one year that I was in Baghdâd,” Fattûḥ began, “for your Excellency knows that I drive the gentry back and forth between Aleppo and Baghdâd in my carriage, and so it is that I am often in Baghdâd.”

  “I know,” said I. “Once you sent me some blue and red belts embroidered with gold that you had bought in the bazaars.”

  “It is true,” said Fattûḥ. “One I gave to Zekîyeh, and the others I sent by the post for you and
for their Excellencies your sisters. Please God they rejoiced to have them?” he inquired anxiously.

  “They rejoiced exceedingly,” I assured him for the fiftieth time; a present that has to be sent by the post is no small thing, and it would be matter for consternation if it did not please. “But what of Rejef Pasha?”

  “Rejef Pasha was Mushîr of Baghdâd,” Fattûḥ picked up his tale. “And God knows he was a just man. Now I had sold my carriage to one who needed it and gave me £T28 for it, which was a good price, for it was old. And as I was walking in the bazaars a thief stole the money from me, and when I put my hand into my pocket, lo, it was empty.”

  “Wah, wah!” commiserated the zaptieh.

  “Eh yes,” said Fattûḥ. “Twenty-eight Ottoman pounds. Now I had heard men speak of Rejef Pasha that he was famed for justice, and I went to him where he sat in the serâyah and said: ‘Effendim, I am a man of Aleppo, a stranger in Baghdâd; and a thief has stolen from me £T28. And there are many here who can speak for me.’ Then Rejef Pasha sent into the bazaars and all the thieves he arrested.”

  “Did he know them all?” I asked.

  “Without doubt,” replied Fattûḥ. “He was Mushîr. And some he questioned and let them go, and others he caused to be beaten upon the soles of their feet with rods, and them too he released, until only three men remained, and then only one. And Rejef Pasha said: ‘This is the thief.’ Then they cast him upon the ground and beat him many times, and every time when they had beaten him till he could bear no more, he cried out: ‘Cease the beating, and I will give back the money.’ But when they ceased he said he had not so much as a mejîdeh. Then one of the soldiers caught him by the leg to throw him to the ground, and the man’s garment tore in his hand, and out of it fell £T26 and rolled upon the floor. But two pounds he had eaten,” explained Fattûḥ. “And Rejef Pasha cast him into prison. And when I was next in Baghdâd he was still in prison, and I visited him and lent him £T1, for he was very poor. And we ate together.”

  “Did you see him again?” said I, deeply interested in this simple history.

  “Eh, wallah!” replied Fattûḥ. “I met him in Deir, and there I feasted him in the bazaar. And now he lives in Deir, and I go to his house whenever I pass through the town, for we are like brothers. But he has not returned me the pound I lent him while he was in prison,” added Fattûḥ regretfully.

  “Mâshallah!” said the zaptieh. “Rejef Pasha was a good man.”

  “But I will tell you another tale of Rejef Pasha, better than the last,” pursued Fattûḥ, drawing, with the perfect art of the narrator, upon yet choicer stores of his memory—or was it of his imagination? “Effendim, I had a friend, and he hired from me one of my carriages that he might drive a certain daftardâr from Aleppo to Baghdâd. Now at Ramâdî the daftardâr spent two nights in the house of the son of his uncle, and when they reached Baghdâd the daftardâr searched in his box for the gold ornaments of his wife, and, look you, they were missing. And they cost £T60. Then the daftardâr said that the carriage driver had stolen them, and he caused him to be imprisoned for a period of three years. And soon after, I came to Baghdâd and inquired concerning my carriage; and a man in the bazaar told me that which had befallen, but I did not believe that my friend had stolen the gold ornaments of the daftardâr’s wife. And the man in the bazaar said: ‘You are his friend, and moreover you are a walad melîḥ, a good lad, and he has a wife and two little children in Aleppo. You will not let him starve in prison.’ And when I heard him call me a walad melîḥ and thought upon the children in Aleppo, I went away and sold my two carriages for £T60, and set my friend free. And then,” Fattûḥ continued his gratifying reminiscences, “I went to a scribe in the bazaar and gave him half a mejîdeh. And your Excellency knows that a scribe charges one piastre. And I said: ‘Take this half mejîdeh and write a letter to Rejef Pasha that shall be worthy to be sent to the Sultan and explain to him the whole matter.’ So the scribe wrote the letter, and I took it to the serâyah. Then Rejef Pasha called me before him, for he had not forgotten me, nor the £T28 that were stolen by the thief. And he said: ‘My son, do not fear. I will get back your money if I have to pay from the treasury of our Lord the Sultan.’ And he sent for the daftardâr and rebuked him for committing a man to prison without evidence, for he said that without doubt the gold ornaments had been stolen at Ramâdî. And the daftardâr paid me back £T60. Never was there a pasha like Rejef Pasha,” concluded Fattûḥ. “He feared none but God. God give him peace—he died a year ago.”

  Late in the afternoon we came to Maḥmûdîyeh. The baggage got in half-an-hour afterwards, and found me established in the upper room of a khân which Jûsef had noted down as he passed through on his way to Kerbelâ as “the very place for our effendi.” The room was cooler than a tent, and to sit in the shade and drink tea seemed to me to be the consummation of earthly happiness. My lodging opened on to a flat roof on which I dined, and realized that the more intolerably blasting the day, the more perfect was the soft and delicate night. The khânjî, when he heard that we were bound for Ctesiphon, declared that the Tigris was in flood and the road under water. We stood aghast, seeing a second enemy flow into the field just as we had circumvented the first, but a Kurdish zaptieh (his name was ’Abdu’l Ḳâdir) stepped up with a smart salute and bade us take courage, for he would lead us to Ctesiphon. He was as good as his word; there was, in fact, no water on the road. We reached the mounds of Seleucia in three hours, and in another half-hour camped by the Tigris under the ruined wall of the Greek city. The Tigris, where we came to it, was a mighty stream and a well-conducted. It flowed solemnly between its low banks, which it did not attempt to overstep, in spite of the fact that the snows were beginning to melt in the Kurdish hills and the river was in flood. A belt of cultivation ran like a narrow green ribbon beside it, intersected by a network of irrigation canals which were fed by a regiment of jirds along the bank. The whole area of Seleucia was covered with corn, but half-a-mile inland the relentless desert resumed its rule, for the crops that had been sown beyond the irrigation streams, in expectation of the usual sprinkling of winter rain, had never sprouted. Out of the cornfields rose the mounds of Seleucia, the capital of the Seleucid empire, which for two hundred years after the death of Alexander embraced Mesopotamia, North Syria and a varying part of Asia Minor. Of all cities in Turkey, Seleucia is perhaps the one which would yield most to the spade of the excavator. The Greek civilization of the Diadochi has given up few of its secrets in any of the regions where the generals of Alexander cut their empires out of the fruits of his victories, but in Mesopotamia we are completely ignorant of what the Greek conquest may have meant in the history of architecture and the lesser arts. We know only that at the end of the period of Greek rule the arts emerged profoundly modified, and thus modified governed the late antique and the early Christian world.

  I had no sooner appointed a camping-ground than I embarked on the broad waters of the Tigris in a basket. The craft that navigate that river are known in Arabic as guffahs, but I have applied to them the correct English word (Fig. 110). They are round with an incurving lip, like any other basket, made of plaited withes and pitched without and within to keep them water-tight. Their size and the pitch alone differentiate them from their fellows in the European market, and I readily admit that when first you are invited to cross a deep and rapid stream in a guffah you feel a shadow of reluctance. But for all their unpromising appearance they are stout and trustworthy vessels, and when you have crossed once, you and your zaptieh and your mares all in the same guffah, and accustomed yourself to its peculiar mode of progression, you come to feel a justifiable confidence in it. The guffah cannot make headway against stream; it must be pulled up the river to a distance considerably above the point you design to touch on the opposite bank—the two guffahjîs push off, the basket spins upon its axis, and so spinning advances, on the principle of the moon’s advance across space, or, for that matter, of the earth’s; the guffahjîs paddle wit
h a genteel nonchalance, first on one side and then on the other, and at the end of all you reach your goal.

  My goal was Ctesiphon (Fig. 107). The huge fragment of the palace, which is all that remains of the Sassanian capital, successor and heir to Seleucia, lies about half-a-mile from the river on the edge of a reed-grown marsh. No more of it is standing than the central vaulted hall (and here half the vault has fallen) and the east wall of one of the wings (Fig. 108). The second wing has disappeared, and nothing is left of the rooms on either side of the hall (Fig. 109). Even in this condition Ctesiphon is the most remarkable of all known Sassanian buildings and one of the most imposing ruins in the world. The great curtain of wall, the face of the right wing, rises stark and gaunt out of the desert, bearing upon its surface a shallow decoration of niches and engaged columns which is the final word in the Asiatic treatment of wall spaces, the end of the long history of artistic endeavour which began with the Babylonians and was quickened into fresh vigour by the Greeks. Tradition has it that the whole wall was covered with precious metals. The gigantic vault, built over empty space without the use of centering beams, is one of the most stupendous creations of any age. It spans 25·80 metres: the barrel vaults of the basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum span 23·50 metres; the barrel vault that covered the aula of Domitian’s palace on the Palatine spanned 30·40 metres, but it has fallen. The Roman vaults were built over centering beams, not over space on the Mesopotamian system, and the latter, what with the appeal which it makes to the imagination and the high ovoid curve which it involves, gives a result incomparably more impressive. In this hall Chosroes held his court. It must have lain open to the rising sun, or perhaps the entrance was sheltered by a curtain which hung from the top of the vault down to the floor. The Arab historian, Ṭabarî, gives an account of a carpet seventy cubits long and sixty cubits broad which formed part of the booty when the Mohammadans sacked the city. It was woven into the likeness of a garden; the ground was worked in gold and the paths in silver; the meadows were of emeralds and the streams of pearls; the trees, flowers and fruits of diamonds and other precious stones. Such a texture as this may have been drawn aside to reveal the Great King seated in state in his hall of audience, with the light of a thousand lamps, suspended from the roof, catching his jewelled tiara, his sword and girdle, illuminating the hangings on the walls and the robes and trappings of the army of courtiers who stood round the throne.