Niebuhr’s map of the Persian Gulf
In his diary Niebuhr regrets that his health does not permit him to make a closer investigation, and he expresses the hope, as he puts it, that he “can leave this to my successors.” As in fact he did.
With this account of the islands, the first stage of the voyage through the Gulf ends. In the evening of 4th February, 1765, Niebuhr arrived at Bushire, the port for Shiraz. Here he learnt that they were about to equip a mule caravan which was to make its way up through the limestone hills to Shiraz; and as it was only a couple of days’ journey from there to the famous ruins of Persepolis, Niebuhr decided to take advantage of the opportunity and join it. Before he set off, he dismissed his Danish servant, who had proved completely unsatisfactory and would never stand up to the tough job ahead. In his place he engaged a Muslim from Bushire.
It was a ragged little group that left the port to travel inland. The caravan consisted exclusively of small merchants and Armenian refugees, who were seeking refuge from the civil war. There was only one camel in the whole line, which otherwise consisted of donkeys and mules, and Niebuhr was the only one riding a horse. For convenience he pretended to be an Englishman. Since his stay in Bombay he continued to wear European dress, but now he regretted it: the tightfitting trousers were a nuisance when riding, and the strange attire attracted the attention of other travellers. Any little thing he did became the subject of long discussions. When one evening they reached a village, he sent his servant off to find fodder for the horse and in the meanwhile set about preparing his evening meal: “I killed a chicken and, quite by chance, I had my face turned towards the west during the operation. Immediately an Armenian came over to remind me that a Christian should always face east when killing a chicken, as well as when he said his prayers. But others believed that I had turned to face Mecca in order that my servant, who was a Muslim, might also eat the chicken. When I thus discovered that my religious convictions were being judged from how I went about chopping the head off a chicken, I decided in future not to do this job any more.”
After travelling for two days, the motley caravan reached the mountains, where the road was worse than any Niebuhr had had to contend with in the Yemen. In spite of being sworn at and whipped, the donkeys would only go very slowly; in some places the path between the rocks was so narrow that the animals had to be unloaded before they could get through; they often came across skeletons of donkeys which had collapsed under this organised torture. One of their own donkeys also dropped dead. Niebuhr noted how the owner immediately set about skinning the animal so that he could sell the hide to his companions, who made shoes there and then out of the pieces by piercing holes near the edges and slotting strings through them. In this way a few more miles were squeezed out of the poor beast.
Up in the mountains the weather had become colder, and they now had rain daily. Unfortunately, Niebuhr had left his tent in Bushire: “I knew that most of the travellers were poor, and I had no wish to appear a rich man.” Besides, he had reckoned on being able to put up for the night in coffee houses en route, as in the Yemen. But in the thinly populated mountains there were no houses; night after night they had to sleep in the open, although they were already dripping wet after the day’s journey and could expect more rain in the night.
After eight days he succeeded one evening in finding a house, which he immediately rented in order to be able at last to have a dry and peaceful night. It was not a success, however, and Niebuhr needed his sense of humour that night more than ever: “In the village of Romchun, which lies up in the high mountains not far from the caravan’s destination, I rented a house to spend the rest of the day and the following night in shelter from the terrible weather. I had some firewood collected and invited some of the Armenians to share the comfort with me. Soon afterwards, a horde of women and children came running up. In the beginning they were happy when I gave them permission to find a place for themselves inside the door. But when at one point I left the house, the women and men changed places and when I got back I found a whole harem encamped round the fire. During the journey from Bushire the women had carefully hidden their faces and kept apart from all strangers. It would therefore have been very impolite if I had now sat amongst them; and it would have been just as awkward to drive them away from the fire. So I tried to light a fire in another corner of the house, but it smoked so much it was unbearable. And so I tried to find another house for myself, but this was impossible. I just had to wait patiently outside while my female travelling companions got their clothes dry by my fire. During the night I virtually had to give over the whole house to the women and children. There was a dreadful storm, with snow and hail and rain. There was no glass in the windows, and the roof was so leaky that the water trickled through everywhere. In short, all through the night I had to drag my mattress from one place to the other without being able to find a place where I could lie without getting wet. In the middle of it all a terrible crash was heard that completely drowned the noise of the storm outside. The house stood on a steep slope, and I was, without realising it, on its second floor. In the stable alongside the room where I lay was my horse. This it was that had gone through the floorboards and fallen down beside the owner of the house, who lay sleeping snugly in his bedroom below.”
After travelling eighteen days at this pace, which was more than three times as slow as that of the expedition’s journey through the Yemen, the caravan at last reached the legendary town of Shiraz on 4th March.
Here Niebuhr met no difficulties. He stayed with the only European in the town—an English merchant with a wide knowledge of history—and he was received with the greatest courtesy by the governor of the town, who even assured him that if anyone annoyed him the offender would immediately be beheaded. Niebuhr did not doubt his word. On the same day that this audience took place the governor had had a butcher seized for selling rotten meat. The punishment was summary: the poor devil had to stand one whole day in the market-place with his ears pinned to a stake.
Niebuhr was not the first European to explore the ruins of the royal palace at Persepolis, which Alexander burned down after his victory over the Persians. The German doctor Engelbert Kämpfer, the Italian explorer Pietro della Valle and the French historian Jean Charden had already been there before him, but compared with Niebuhr’s studies their accounts can only be regarded as casual jottings. They show other roads to the ruins, but beyond this their investigations have no great influence on the subsequent explorations of the place, which, as we shall soon see, holds the very key to Persia’s history, and indeed to the whole of present-day Assyriology—the key it was Niebuhr’s destiny to unearth. Since Alexander’s attempt to annihilate its splendours Niebuhr was the first person to try imaginatively to reconstruct them.
For Carsten Niebuhr the ruins were without exception the greatest experience of the tour; they outshone even the pyramids of Egypt, and according to his son, constitute “the jewel of his journey.” He had ploughed through his predecessors’ accounts and now approached the place itself full of expectation. The night prior to the last day’s journey he did not close his eyes; up already before sunrise, he saddled his donkey and set off on the last few miles that separated him from Persepolis. It was 13th March, 1765. He had left Shiraz the day before and was travelling alone with only a servant and a guide, who now led them through desolate and uninhabited mountains: “Most of the road is steep and rocky, the fertile fields stand uncultivated, the very trees seem to bemoan all those tribal wars that have ravaged these parts, now that the irrigation system which once brought water to their roots is in a state of total decay.”
After riding for a few hours, they left the main road to Isfahan and made more towards the east, straight in the direction of the royal palace. The guide protested that they must first find lodgings for the night, but Niebuhr would countenance no further postponement: “Even though I knew perfectly well that there was no village in the vicinity of the ruins where I could seek for quarter
s, I had formed such an impression of these ruins of Persepolis from what I had heard and read that I was unable to restrain myself from going to see them immediately, and only afterwards look for lodgings.”
A few hours, and they were there. Niebuhr halted. Below him lay Persepolis, as though the mountain held the ruins in the hollow of its hand, offering them to him. There was not a soul to be seen among the ruins of the palaces of Xerxes and Darius, but the sun setting in the west cast a. rosy glow over the innumerable slender pillars, which looked as though they were still standing among the embers of Alexander’s fire. As darkness fell, Niebuhr made his first tour of the ruins. Overwhelmed with enthusiasm, he inspected the pillars with their bases and capitals, the almost intact reliefs, and the walls covered with signs like the marks of sandpipers on a sandy beach. What it all added up to he was not yet able to say; but one thing was clear, there was enough work here for many weeks. Only when it became too dark to see did he return to his donkey, tethered beside one of the portals of the Persian king; and waking his servant and guide, they rode on to the village of Merdast, which lay an hour’s journey south of the ruins. In spite of the lateness of the hour, he managed to find some friendly people who gave him a room in a small house where travellers usually lodged. There were no sheets on the bed, but this did not matter. That night he slept like a log.
Niebuhr lived in this room for about a month. Each day he rose at sunrise, saddled his donkey, rode out to the ruins, and worked from eight in the morning till five in the evening, when the light began to fade. He surveyed the ground plan, copied reliefs, transcribed the inscriptions, made studies of various details. The place lay very high and a chilly highland climate prevailed; towards the west the mountain tops were still covered with snow which shone against the deep Persian sky, and each morning when he arrived at the ruins, the pools of water on the marble floors of the palace were frozen and slowly thawed as the sun rose in the sky. The greater part of the time he was up there alone. Only occasionally did some nomadic Kurd family come with their herds of goats to find grazing for their animals. When they caught sight of the strange man wandering about the ruins in European clothes, they came across to him to have a closer look. Although he was utterly alone, he never heard a threat or an unfriendly word. The Kurds took the opportunity to have a chat, glanced politely at his drawings, marvelled that anybody could be so filled with curiosity as to travel far across the world just to sit and draw and write. Eventually they sold him a little milk and a few goat cheeses. And with that the conversation was over. The peasants trudged back to their animals, and Niebuhr bent himself once more over King Xerxes’ inscriptions.
The ruins of Persepolis drawn by Niebuhr
Down in the village it was much the same. There were no other travellers at the lodging-house. When there was the rare knock on the door by a stranger, it was usually some “poor odd-job men who with their primitive tools travelled from village to village looking for work.” When he came home after his day’s work, Niebuhr bought vegetables, rice, butter and perhaps a chicken, and made himself some pilau. The peasants were soon on excellent terms with the lonely European. When on religious feast days he sat in his room making finished drawings, they came from Merdast and the surrounding villages to visit him. He showed them his work. When they were going to celebrate their Naurus Feast, he gave them the exact date of the equinox. It apparently fell two days before the time traditionally set for the feast, but they corrected it according to the stranger’s information and celebrated their feast on the day he told them. Naturally, he was invited too; and he accepted with pleasure.
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In Persepolis, Carsten Niebuhr again met the young girls who periodically made their appearance during his long journey, as if accompanying him unseen from place to place and only occasionally making their presence known. This time it was a group of young peasant girls from districts round Merdast. The new moon had risen again, Ramadan was over, and the great Feast of Bairam was to be celebrated. Niebuhr spent the feast days working among the ruins, and one afternoon to his amazement he saw a number of women and young girls coming towards him: “They came from the surrounding villages, some on donkeys and some on foot. Only a very few of them had veiled their faces. Perhaps they only wanted to wander round the ruins a little, perhaps they wanted to see the strange foreigner who had come to their district.”
It was soon apparent that neither explanation was the whole story. The girls had heard that this European was a clever scribe, and now they could tell quite clearly from the papers scattered all around him on the blocks of marble that rumour was correct. They had come from the surrounding villages, some on foot and some on donkey, to ask Niebuhr to write certain texts on little bits of paper, which they could then put in their amulets as a protection against sickness and childlessness. Niebuhr was happy to oblige. He put aside his work of copying inscriptions and with his quill he sat down to write out texts in Arabic. We can visualise the scene: Niebuhr sitting hunched over the work; the women watching every moment of the quill.
“Among these modest people I lived every bit as safely as in any European village,” Niebuhr says in his diary. The good conditions and the excellent results of his work among the ruins had given him fresh enthusiasm for the journey, and on 27th March, 1765, he sat down in his room in Merdast and wrote a letter in his incredible French to von Gähler in Constantinople, sending it via Shiraz. This letter, which is still in Danish State Archives, reveals something of the state of affairs during his long journey home—a journey interrupted for the moment in Persepolis. First and foremost he must have money; in return he can promise the Danish King a rich return for his expenditure. He writes to von Gähler:
“J’espère que ce voyage vaudra plus que coutera tout celui de Bombay jusqu’à la Mediterranée. Jamais je n’ai été plus pauvre qu’à présent, parce que j’ai été necessité d’en emprunter. Toute ma confiance dans ce long et pénible voyage est en vous et en Monseigneur le Baron de Bernstorff et je suis sûr que vous ne m’abandonnez pas après avoir tant souffert. Si notre grand Roi me commande encore d’aller à Tadmor, Baalbeck, toute le Terre Sainte, même dans la haute Egypte, et si on n’est pas content du premier voyage à ce fameux Djebel el-Mokateb, je suis toujours pret à suivre les commandements de Sa Majesté.”
In Bombay, Niebuhr had at last received Bernstorff’s angry letter about von Haven’s fiasco on the Sinai peninsula; he now volunteered to do the disastrous trip again. He would even go to Palestine, explore up the Nile, if need be. After more than four years’ “long and arduous travelling” his craving for adventure was as insatiable as ever. But just as in Bombay, when he had planned to sail to China, so this time too he overestimated his own strength. His stay in Merdast, near Persepolis, was no mere idyll. Many of the cuneiform inscriptions he was copying in the ruins were placed so high on the walls that he could see them clearly only when the sun shone sideways on them. But in 1765 there was nothing in the way of sun-glasses. The marble on which the texts were carved was very smooth and gave a bright reflection which hurt his eyes. When Niebuhr insisted on continuing his work in spite of the pain, he had serious trouble. One morning he woke in his room and discovered that he could not see. He had to spend the rest of the day lying “snowblind” on his bed. The next morning when his sight returned, he once more went to the ruins. The sun blazed down upon the walls and upon the white paper. Niebuhr sat down and continued his work where he left off.
Then followed warning number two. His servant, who had been ailing for some time, could not stand the difficult mountain climate any longer. One evening at the beginning of April he died in Merdast. Niebuhr, who had gradually become accustomed to seeing death strike all around him, did not devote many lines to the episode in his diary; but it appears that the servant’s death forced him to reconsider his own position: “If my servant had stayed fit and well, I would gladly have stayed longer at the ruins; but my eyes had suffered so much and my health was on the whole so weak that there w
as no room for taking excessive risks. I allowed my servant’s death to serve as a warning to me, and on 7th April I travelled back to Shiraz.”
Niebuhr’s attempt to reconstruct the cuneiform alphabet
Despite the fact that Niebuhr had to leave earlier than planned, he did not leave much work unfinished at Persepolis. In his journal he presents his results. During the twenty-four days he spent altogether at the ruins, he had compiled a full report covering 43 pages. He gave a detailed account of the siting of the buildings; he outlined theories about their various purposes, giving his evidence; he described statues and reliefs and tried to interpret what they represented. Added to this were no less than 39 plates of plans, prospects, drawings of reliefs and statues, profiles of pillars, bases and capitals and a comprehensive set of copies of inscriptions.
As this present book does not pretend to be a scholarly historical account, this is not the place for a detailed survey of Niebuhr’s achievements at Persepolis, but there is one point on which it is impossible not to go into detail: Niebuhr’s copies of the cuneiform inscriptions. None of the other work he managed to accomplish on his long journey cost him more than these white sheets of paper, on which he had carefully printed hundreds upon hundreds of incomprehensible signs. But the price was worth it. Thanks to the existence of these papers, this first Danish expedition acquires a significance that persists even to-day.
Neither Kämpfer’s, Charden’s nor Pietro della Valle’s copies of the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis had been sufficiently accurate for contemporary philologists to use in their attempts at decipherment. Niebuhr was the first to succeed in keeping the individual letters separate from one another; he was even able to establish the existence of a cuneiform alphabet of forty-two different letters. Finally he noticed that nearly everywhere in the ruins there were three parallel columns of cuneiform writing, and that the two last always consisted of many more symbols than the first. He collected and arranged them carefully on his plates, but neither he nor anybody else at that time could read them.
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