CHAPTER VI

BAGHDÂD TO MÔṢUL

_April 12--April 28_

We left Baghdâd on the wings of a strong south wind. My kind host

mounted and rode with me for the first half-hour, and we parted in a

dust-storm at the upper bridge. When he was gone, I joined my servants,

who welcomed me with solicitous inquiries as to how I had passed my time

in the city of Baghdâd. I replied that I had passed every moment

enjoyably, and that I trusted that they had been equally well pleased.

Fattûḥ hastened to satisfy me on this head. His friends had vied with

one another in providing entertainments, and he and the muleteers had

been plunged into a vortex of luncheon and dinner parties.

“And last night,” concluded Fattûḥ, “we supped at the Kâẓimein.”

“You had far to go,” said I. “How did you get back in the darkness?”

“Effendim,” began Fattûḥ--but I cannot remember his exact words, for

they were at once absorbed into the recollection of a more famous

utterance; the upshot of his explanation was, that the rule laid down by

Mr. Jorrocks is observed in Baghdâd, with one exception. Where you dines

you sleeps, but you do not have breakfast; you rise at 4 a.m. and hurry

home, since it would be an infringement of the social law to appear to

expect that your host should provide the morning meal.

We were riding by a narrow path along the top of the ṣidd, the steep

embankment of the Tigris, and as we went, the wind grew more and more

violent and the difficulty of preserving a foothold on that knife-edge

of a road greater and greater. The loaded pack animals were ever

struggling away from an imminent brink, towards which the following

wind buffeted them, first on one side and then on the other, according

to the windings of the path. During the course of the day one of the

horses, unwarily presenting a full flank to the blast, was swept off its

feet and rolled into a cornfield, but by good luck this accident

occurred after we had descended from the ṣidd on to level ground. The

dust was so intolerable that we welcomed the heavy raindrops which

presently came driving down upon the storm; but they could not pacify

the unruly earth, and dust and rain together formed an atmospheric mud

ocean, churned by the wind into whirlpools and breakers. Never have I

ridden through such a hurricane. Six hours from the bridge we reached

the khân of Musheidah[103] where we had intended to pitch camp. No tent

ropes would have held for half-an-hour in that wind, if it had been

possible to unfurl the tents, which it was not, and we rode into the

khân to seek a lodging. But the khân provided only for the needs of pack

animals and contained not a single room for their masters. Fattûḥ looked

gloomily down the long vaults of the stables into which the rain was

beginning to penetrate, and still more gloomily he returned to the gate

and eyed the maddened universe. There was one small edifice besides the

khân; the khânjî, being interrogated, informed us that it was the

barracks, whereupon Fattûḥ strode resolutely out into the rain and beat

upon the door. We waited some time for an answer; the howling blast,

which could not keep the soldiers awake, prevented us from rousing them.

At length one stumbled to the door and led us into a muddy courtyard,

unpromising in appearance. The barracks (perhaps it should only be

dignified with the name of guardhouse) consisted of a small stable with

two rooms above it. Without any hesitation, Fattûḥ took possession of

one of these last, piled into a corner the hay with which it was half

filled, swept it out, and garnished it with my camp furniture. Meantime

the soldiers busied themselves with coffee making, and I, being warm and

dry and well fed, mocked at the storm that battered against the mud

walls, and spent the evening with the books which had served as guides

down the Euphrates.

It was not to those red-bound volumes which we are accustomed to

associate with travel that I turned, but to the best of all guide-books

to Mesopotamia, the Anabasis and Ammianus Marcellinus. In a moment I was

back in the ranks of the Ten Thousand and of the Roman Legions, but what

a change had come over them since we parted from them at ’Ânah! Cyrus

had fallen in the disastrous confusion of Cunaxa, which, but for his

fatal wound, might have crowned his campaign with victory. Julian,

misled by omens, had turned away from Ctesiphon, where Sapor awaited him

in terror; he had thrown his army across the Tigris and had met with his

end on the further side, venerating the everlasting God that he should

die with honour fairly earned in the midst of a career of glory. And by

a “blind decision of fortune,” as Ammianus Marcellinus relates, the

timid Jovian had been elected to his place. The Roman army continued its

retreat along the east bank, and I did not fall into the line of its

march until I crossed the Tigris, but Xenophon and the Ten Thousand

passed close to Musheidah and came down to the river at Sitace, where

they found a bridge of boats. There they crossed and marched four days

up the river to Opis.[104] The topography of this country is difficult

to grasp. The Tigris changed its course during the Middle Ages and now

runs considerably to the east of its former channel. Besides the old bed

of the river, there is also the cutting of a great canal, the Dujeil of

the era of the khalifs, which has long been devoid of water except in

its upper reaches.[105] Each of these dry channels is set thickly with

the ruins of towns and villages belonging to Mohammadan as well as to

earlier times. The northern reaches of the Dujeil still bring water from

the Tigris, and here villages and cultivation continue to exist; but the

canal is much smaller than it was originally, and it no longer rejoins

the Tigris at the lower end of its course.

The soldiers of Musheidah, though they were unexceptionable as hosts,

were inefficient as guides. When I announced that I wished to ride by

the old Tigris bed they exclaimed in horror that it was unsafe to leave

the high road. At this Fattûḥ laughed outright, and remarking that we

had travelled over many a worse desert, laid hands upon a peasant who

happened to be listening to the discussion, and engaged him to accompany

me for the day. The peasant (his name was Ḳâsim) was an Arab of the Benî

’Amr, and he was full of the recent history of the land. All this

district had been granted by the Sultan Murâd to the Ma’amreh, the Benî

’Amr, to have and to hold in perpetuity, “and we possess his ’Irâdeh

signed by his hand,” said Ḳâsim. But about twenty years ago, ’Abdu’l

Ḥamîd, seeing it to be valuable property, ousted the Arabs, sold half

the land to a man of Baghdâd and turned the other half into Senîyeh

(royal estates).[106] The Benî ’Amr were thus left destitute, “and by

God who created the heavens and the earth,” declared Ḳâsim, “I have

nothing

[Illustration: FIG. 117.--WÂNEH, IMÂM MUḤAMMAD ’ALÎ.]

but the mercy of God.” When the constitution was granted and it was made

known that the Senîyeh would be handed over to the State, the men of the

Benî ’Amr, like many others who had suffered in a like manner, began to

speculate as to whether their rights would meet with acknowledgment, but

how the matter has been settled I do not know. We rode from Musheidah to

a number of ruined sites lying somewhat to the west of the present

Tigris channel, and I could see, still further to the west, the line of

mounds which mark the lower course of the Dujeil, now waterless; Ḳâsim

gave me their names as Sagr, Tâṣir, Bisheh and Baghût. In an hour and a

half we came to a series of big mounds called Mdawwî, which lie upon the

banks of the old Tigris bed. In time of flood the river overflows the

land as far west as Mdawwî. From here we crossed a plain, all of which

must have been inhabited, for it was scattered with mounds and covered

with fragments of Mohammadan coloured pottery, blue and green, yellow

and purple, and in three-quarters of an hour we reached Tell Bshairah,

where there were quantities of potsherds and bits of burnt brick. The

land round it is watered in flood time by canals from the Tigris, and at

that time sown with summer crops. The mounds of ’Ukbarâ[107] lie an hour

further to the north. A little to the west of these mounds is a small

ruin known as Kahf ’Alî consisting of two chambers of baked brick, one

of which had been covered by a dome set on squinch arches. I suppose

that it was a shrine or tomb of the late Abbâsid period. Thence we rode

up the dry

[Illustration: FIG. 118.--WÂNEH, IMÂM MUḤAMMAD ’ALÎ.]

[Illustration: FIG. 119.--ḲÂDISÎYAH FROM SOUTH-EAST.]

[Illustration: FIG. 120.--SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE FROM SOUTH.]

[Illustration: FIG. 121.--SÂMARRÂ, FROM MALWÎYEH.]

[Illustration: FIG. 122.--SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, INTERIOR OF SOUTH

WALL.]

bed of the old Tigris to the tomb of the Imâm Muḥammad ’Alî lying among

mounds that mark the site of the village of Wâneh (Fig. 117). The tomb

is built of fine burnt bricks measuring 20 × 20 × 6 c., pale in colour,

nearing to yellow, like the bricks I had previously seen scattered over

the mounds. It is a square-domed building, but the dome rests on an

interior octagon and is set at each of the eight angles on a shallow

pointed squinch arch (Fig. 118). Pointed arched niches occupy seven of

the sides; in the eighth is the door. There is a system of niching on

the façade which has been considerably destroyed by the addition of a

rude porch of sun-dried brick. The mazâr is a typical example of the

small Mohammadan memorial shrine, and from the excellence of its

workmanship and the character of the brick I should place it within the

Abbâsid age.[108] From Wâneh we rode in an hour to Sumeikhah, where we

found our tents pitched in a charming palm garden. Sumeikhah is a modern

village lying on the Dujeil at a point where a little water still flows

down the canal from the Tigris, enough to satisfy the inhabitants and

keep their palm gardens in a flourishing condition. Like all Senîyeh

villages it has a prosperous appearance. The peasants are well to do,

having been exempted under the old régime from the greater part of the

ordinary taxes and from military service. With the memory of the

previous night of storm freshly in our minds we felt that we had reached

an agreeable haven. The temperature had fallen by an average of ten

degrees after the rain; the palm garden was a delicious camping-ground,

which we shared in all amity with a family of storks who had built their

nest on the angle of the enclosing wall. And we knew as little as they

of the counter-revolution which had overwhelmed Constantinople that very

day.

Next morning I left my caravan to follow the straight road and turned

again to the east. In an hour we reached Tell Hir, where there had been

a considerable town on the old Tigris; thirty-five minutes further there

was a similar mound, Tell Ghazab, and in thirty-five minutes more we

came to Tell Manjûr. From Tell Manjûr to Tell edh Dhahab, three-quarters

of an hour to the north, a large area, stretching down to the Tigris, is

completely covered with mounds and strewn with pottery. The pottery is

not coloured or glazed, but ornamented with roughly scratched patterns

and narrow raised bands, a Mohammadan ware with which I was to become

very familiar at Sâmarrâ. The whole site must therefore have been

inhabited in the Mohammadan period, but in all probability it was

occupied by a city of earlier fame. On the east bank of the Tigris,

above the point where it is joined by the river ’Aḍêm, and therefore

exactly opposite the mounds which I saw on the west bank, Ross

discovered a great stretch of ruins and believed them to be the ruins of

Opis.[109] The Tigris, when it changed its course, must have cut through

the area of Opis, so that one half of its mounds now lie to the east of

the river and one half to the west. Opis is mentioned by Xenophon[110]

and by Herodotus.[111] It was the most important city of Babylonia after

Babylon. Alexander’s ships touched there on their voyage up the Tigris,

and Strabo observes that the river was navigable up to that point.[112]

But in Strabo’s time it was no more than a village, and Pliny does not

mention it, unless his Apamea is a later name for Opis.[113] The mounds

and pottery continued uninterruptedly almost up to the Mazâr of Sayyid

Muḥammad, which we reached in an hour from Tell edh Dhahab. The mazâr is

a mosque with a fine great dome decorated with coloured tiles; and near

the mosque is a large khân. I do not know whether there was an older

shrine here; the present mosque is dated by an inscription: A.H. 1310,

_i.e._ A.D. 1893. An hour from the mazâr we came to Balad, a large

village on the Dujeil. It existed in the thirteenth century for it is

mentioned by Yâḳût, but it can scarcely have been more flourishing then

than it is now, with its walled gardens filled with fruit-trees, its

well-laid roads and well-bridged irrigation canals. There was no need to

ask who was landlord here, so clearly did the place bear the stamp of

the Senîyeh estates, nor is it necessary to point out that if the

irrigation system were restored to its old perfection, the country from

Baghdâd to Balad might again be as thickly populated as it was in the

Abbâsid age.[114]

We rode down to the Tigris ferry in two and a half hours, and the way

was beguiled by the conversation of an Arab of the Mujamma’, who

happened to be going in our direction. He gave us the news of the

desert, telling us of Kurdish raids on the east bank of the river

(commonly called the Khawîjeh) and of jealousies between the ’Anazeh and

the Shammar on the west bank, the Jezîreh. We breathed a familiar air,

even though the Kurds were a new element in desert politics. The Arab

did not hold these episodes to be of great account, in spite of the fact

that the Kurds had completely blocked the post-road from Baghdâd to

Kerkûk; “Ghazû mazû!” he said, using an expressive Turkish locution,

“raids maids.”[115] We found the caravan in the act of crossing at the

ferry. I sat down upon the bank to wait for the return of the ferry-boat

and fell into talk with the owner of a pair of performing monkeys.

“Where are you going?” I asked, after I had fed the monkeys.

“Ila’l wilâyah,” he replied vaguely, “to the capital,” and I gathered

that he was making his way to Môṣul. But he thought better of it when he

got to the other side of the river, and for that night he interrupted

his journey that he might enjoy our company. He was wise, since he and

the monkeys were invited to share our supper, but I fear it was not the

man who moved me to hospitality. As we crossed the Tigris the ferrymen

composed and sang a piece at my intent. It was of a purely utilitarian

character and ran thus--

Jenâh es Serkâr: Ḥôsh, ḥôsh!

Fi khidmat: Ḥôsh, ḥôsh!

Bakhshîsh: Ḥôsh, ḥôsh!

Her Excellency the Governor: draw together!

In her service: draw together:

A gratuity: draw together!

There were many more verses, but the gist of all was the same. From our

camp by the water’s edge we could see the famous spiral minaret of

Sâmarrâ, the Malwîyeh, and watch the keleks going down from Diyârbekr to

Baghdâd. Now a kelek is a raft made of logs or brushwood laid over

inflated skins, and it carries all the merchandise of the Tigris.

We were lying within the dry cutting of a canal dug by Hârûn er Rashîd,

and now called the Nahr el Ḳâim. It is connected with the Tigris by

several cross-cuttings, over one of which we passed a quarter of an

hour from the camping-ground, and found upon the further side the ruins

of Ḳâdisîyah[116] (Fig. 119). They are nothing but a crumbling wall of

sun-dried brick enclosing an octagonal area, but whether this space was

ever covered with buildings it is difficult to determine[117]; I

noticed, however, that the surface of the ground was piled into low

mounds such as are left by the decay of sun-dried bricks. The octagon is

far from regular. I paced the eight sides of the enclosing walls and

found them to vary considerably from interior angle to interior angle,

the smallest side being 565 paces, the largest 725 paces. Each angle is

provided with an exterior round bastion, and at intervals of from

twenty-eight to twenty-nine paces smaller round bastions project from

the face of the wall. Six of the sides are broken by three gates apiece,

one by four gates and one by two. The double-gated wall is the northern

side of the octagon, and in the middle part of its length, between the

two gates, there is a series of ten small vaulted chambers (3.55 m. wide

by 3.65 m. deep) set against the interior face of the wall. The barrel

vault of some of these chambers is still fairly well preserved. It is

built of sun-dried brick laid in slices against the head wall on the

Mesopotamian system, by which centering was avoided. Round the interior

of the octagon, at a distance of thirteen paces from the wall, runs a

shallow ditch, ten metres wide, having on its inner side a low mound

which occupies a space about seventeen metres wide. The mound is no

doubt the remains of a wall. Opposite each of the doorways in the outer

wall, a causeway has been laid across the ditch. A wall and ditch upon

the inner side of a strong fortification such as the enclosing wall of

Ḳâdisîyah are singular features. They can scarcely have been intended

for defence, indeed I am not certain that they extend round the whole

enclosure. The ditch may have been a canal bringing water to the palace

or fortress.

We rode out of one of the western gates of Ḳâdisîyah and in a little

over an hour reached the enigmatic tower of Ḳâim. It stands in the angle

formed by the Tigris and the channel of the Nahr el Ḳâim, which has

silted up so that no water runs down it from the river. The tower is a

truncated cone composed of pebbles and concrete; there is no chamber

inside it and no means of climbing to the top of it. It looks as if it

had received some sort of facing, and in that case the existing cone is

only the core of the tower, but whether it was intended merely to mark

the opening of the canal, or whether it is, as Ross supposed, a relic of

remoter antiquity, it would be impossible to determine, though I incline

to the view that it is ancient. Having crossed the Nahr el Ḳâim, we

found ourselves almost immediately among vestiges of the immense city of

Sâmarrâ, of which the bazaars and palaces stretched uninterruptedly

along the east bank of the Tigris for a distance of twenty-one miles.

This city, which was during the brief time of its magnificence the

capital of the Abbâsid empire, sprang into existence at the bidding of

the Khalif Mu’taṣim and was inhabited by seven of his successors, who

added market to market, palace to palace and pleasure-ground to

pleasure-ground. After a period of forty years (836-876 A.D.) the Khalif

Mu’tamid removed the seat of his government back to Baghdâd; with his

departure the walls of Sâmarrâ crumbled back into the desert from which

they had arisen, and like the rose-scented clay of Sa’dî’s apologue when

the fragrance had vanished, became once more the dust they had been. A

glory so dazzling, so abrupt a decline, can scarcely be paralleled on

any other page of history. Encompassed by a league-long expanse where

the surface of the waste is tumbled into confused masses of mounds or

marked off by the vast rectangular enclosures of palace and garden,

stands the modern town of Sâmarrâ, no better than a walled village,

except that above its mean roofs hang the incomparable domes of the

Shî’ah sanctuary, one a-glitter with gold, the other jewelled with

precious tiles. And behind the town the huge Malwîyeh, the spiral tower

of Mutawakkil’s mosque, lifts its head high over the wilderness.[118]

Mu’taṣim’s choice of Sâmarrâ as the site of his new capital when Baghdâd

had become distasteful to him was, according to the Arab historians,

determined by the purest hazard. Ya’ḳûbî, writing at the close of the

ninth century when Sâmarrâ had recently been abandoned, relates that

Mu’taṣim fixed first upon Ḳâṭûl, a point lower down the river, but that

the site did not prove satisfactory.[119] And upon a certain day he rode

out to the chase; “and he continued upon his way until he came to a

place called Surra man raa” (who sees it rejoices), “which is a desert

of the Tîrhân district; there were no buildings in it, and no

inhabitants, except a Christian monastery. And he stopped at the

monastery and spoke with those who were in it, and said: ‘What is the

name of this place?’ And one of the monks said: ‘We find in our ancient

books that this place is called Surra man raa, and that it was a city of

Shem son of Noah.’” Mu’taṣim accepted the good omen, together with other

prophetic matter related by the monks, and chose the place for his

capital. The etymology was, however, as fortuitous as was the khalif’s

selection; the name Sâmarrâ has in reality nothing to do with the Arabic

phrase. A town had existed on the Tigris bank long before Arabic was

spoken there; it was called in Aramaean Sâmarrâ, and Ammianus

Marcellinus alludes to it as Sumere.[120]

Half-way between Ḳâim and the modern Sâmarrâ we came to the first of the

palace enclosures, a large oblong space surrounded by a ruined wall of

sun-dried bricks set with round bastions. The remains of a gateway

decorated with niches led into another enclosure similar to the first,

and both stretched down to the river-bank. From this point the surface

of the ground is seamed with ruin mounds, and just before we reached

Sâmarrâ (about an hour from Ḳâim) we passed another clearly-marked

enclosure by the river. My camp had gone on while I was examining

Ḳadsîyeh, and Fattûḥ had pitched the tents on the brink of the high bank

that overhangs the Tigris. When I saw it I rejoiced, like Mu’taṣim, for

the position could not have been bettered; and moreover the modern town

of Sâmarrâ stands somewhat back from the river, so that we did not

molest its Shî’ah inhabitants, neither did they disturb us.

There is only one way of appreciating the extent of the Abbâsid city,

and that way lies up the spiral path of the Malwîyeh tower (Fig. 121).

It is seldom that the desert offers so wide an expanse to the eye, since

nowhere else is the gazer mounted upon a lofty steeple in its very

midst. Below the minaret lies the enclosure of the great mosque, a

massive brick wall with round bastions; but the colonnades that

protected the worshippers from sun and rain have all vanished and are

indicated only by even trenches, marking the place from which the

columns or piers have been removed. In the central court, surrounded by

the colonnades, lies the shadowy outline of a fountain, and beyond the

walls a long low mound shows that the precincts must have been bounded

by an outer enclosure.[121] South of the mosque, in open hummocky

ground, the little town of Sâmarrâ with its glittering domes is set down

like a child’s toy upon the waste--a toy half broken and thrown away.

All round it the uneasy desert has rolled in over the city of the

khalifs, covering but not obliterating the streets and courts, of which

the walls are dimly apparent, as though they struggled through a veil of

silted sand. To the north are the shattered walls and bastions of a

great rectangular enclosure, Madaḳḳ eṭ Ṭabl the Arabs call it (the Place

of the Beating of Drums), and about it the parallel streets of the city

are drawn upon the surface of the earth, ruled out by the pencil of a

giant artist. Still further north the three halls of the palace of the

khalifs stand amid an immense area of shapeless mounds, and far away a

second spiral tower, the minaret of Abu Dulâf, lifts its head out of the

plain. The waters of the Tigris bring no colour to the vast landscape;

the dead and silent world is like a battlefield, wherein men fought out

the secular contest with the wilderness, and lost, and left it empty of

all but ruins.

I came down from the tower and set to work upon the mosque.

To measure a wall would not seem to be a complicated business, yet I do

not care to remember how many hours I spent upon the mosque. Its great

size is no advantage when seen over the edge of a metre tape, and the

action of the wind upon its masonry has been fatal to accuracy. The face

of the brick is destroyed higher than a man can reach by the constant

scrub and wear of the heavier sorts of desert dust, which makes the

exact noting of angles exceedingly difficult. The buildings on the west

bank of the river, among which I spent the two succeeding days, were

even more disfigured, and the palace of the khalifs, except for its

three vaulted halls, a crowning confusion of mounds and rock-cut

subterranean chambers. It was not until I had made acquaintance with all

these that I found time to visit the modern town. I had been spending a

few final hours in the great mosque and was beginning to wonder whether

a metre tape and a camera are advantageous additions to the equipment of

travel, a doubt which was shared by the zaptieh and Jûsef, whose duty

it was to stretch the one and carry the other over weary acres of

crumbling ruin. When at last we turned our horses’ heads to the little

town lying out upon the plain, we felt that there was a great deal to be

said for prejudices which forbid the measuring and photographing of

mosques that cover the bones of saints. The town walls have recently

been rebuilt, for the acquisition of merit, by a pious Persian; he

neglected, however, to turn his attention to that which they enclose,

and the first few hundred yards of sacred Sâmarrâ is a vacant

desolation, the home of dust and dirt. Having crossed this area we

plunged into mean and narrow streets. All the windows facing outwards

had been blocked up, and within or without there was no living soul to

be seen as we rode down the silent ways. But when we drew near the

mosque we became aware that Sâmarrâ was not quite uninhabited. Grave

Persians and ragged Arabs sat at the tea-shops before the gateway; they

gave me the salute as I passed, and I was careful not to gaze too

curiously through the arch where the big chain hangs across the entrance

of the shrine. Inside, under a dome of priceless tiles, are the tombs of

the tenth and eleventh Shî’ah Imâms, while the smaller dome of gold

covers the cleft into which vanished the Mahdî, who will appear again

when the time is ripe. Therefore when you see black ensigns, black

ensigns coming out of the east, then go forth and join them; for the

Imâm of God will be with those standards, and he will fill the world

with equity and justice.

We left Sâmarrâ early in the morning and rode through almost continuous

ruin-heaps to Shnâs, which we reached in an hour and forty minutes. It

is nothing but a great enclosure, the walls and towers built of

sun-dried brick, and consequently much ruined. The towers are placed

astride the wall instead of upon one side of it only.[122] A few minutes

further north lies an oblong enclosure nearly a third of a mile across,

with a walled triangle to the north of it, in

[Illustration: FIG. 123.--ABU DULÂF, FROM EAST.]

[Illustration: FIG. 124.--ABU DULÂF, INTERIOR, LOOKING NORTH.]

[Illustration: FIG. 125.--NAHRAWÂN CANAL.]

[Illustration: FIG. 126.--IMÂM DÛR.]

which is a small square enclosure near the river, with foundations of

burnt brick. Still further north are some ruin-heaps which are said to

represent the tomb of a holy man. This group of ruins is known as Eskî

Baghdâd, but the name is applied loosely to the whole area round Abu

Dulâf. We crossed a dry watercourse and rode on over mounds for another

hour and a half, when we came to the mosque of Abu Dulâf (Fig. 123). Now

Abu Dulâf is brother and complement to the mosque at Sâmarrâ, for

whereas at Sâmarrâ the arcades have fallen and the outer wall stands, at

Abu Dulâf the arcades stand and the outer wall is ruined. I looked in

vain for traces of a water-basin in the centre of the court, but being

no true antiquarian, I was well consoled for its absence by finding a

tall borage plant where the fountain should have been. It lifted its

blue flowers gaily out of the dust, and every time I crossed the court I

made a circuit that I might look into its clear eye. It was the first

flower that we had seen upon the face of the desert for many weeks, and

it heralded the end of the region wherein the drought had wrought such

havoc. Late in the afternoon I got down to my camp by the Tigris. Fattûḥ

had sought a lodging for the night inside the enclosing walls of a

palace, and whatever prince it was who housed us, he gave us a lavish

hospitality as regards sunset and rising stars and gleaming curves of

river.

Half-an-hour’s ride brought us on the following morning to the northern

limit of Sâmarrâ. In the angle between the Tigris and the Nahrawân canal

lie the remains of Mutawakkil’s tragic palace, built in a year,

inhabited for nine months, destroyed and deserted, together with all the

quarter round it, when Muhammad el Muntaṣir caused the khalif his father

to be murdered within its walls. Immediately beyond it we crossed the

dry channel of the Nahrawân, which was cut by the Sassanian kings in

order to bring water to the fertile regions below Sâmarrâ (Fig. 125). At

the point where our path crossed it are the brick foundations of a

bridge, below a large artificial mound.[123] The dry bed of the canal,

hewn for scores of miles, straight as a Roman road, through the solid

rock, is as impressive as the most magnificent of ruins; for the king

who could bid rivers to flow and crops to spring in the barren

wilderness was indeed lord of the earth.

As we reached the village of Dûr, an hour further to the north, we met a

number of the inhabitants coming out along the road, and all were armed

with rifles. We stopped and asked them whither they were bound, and they

in turn inquired of us whether we had seen anything of a caravan of

merchandise from Sâmarrâ. It was due to arrive at Dûr that morning and

they felt some anxiety as to its safety, since the desert was much

disturbed. There are no soldiers posted on the left bank of the Tigris,

and every man must protect his own property. But we, having come only

from Abu Dulâf, could not reassure them. On the outskirts of Dûr the

plain is once more tossed into ruin-mounds, probably of the Mohammadan

period. The village stands upon an old site; Dûr is mentioned by

Ammianus Marcellinus in his account of Jovian’s retreat. It is

remarkable only for the shrine of the Imâm Dûr (Fig. 126), Muḥammad ibn

Mûsa ibn Ja’far ibn ’Alî ibn Ḥussein--his genealogy goes back to a

respectable Shî’ah ancestry, and I read it on an inscription cut upon a

marble slab by the door. Moreover, while we waited for the mullah to

appear with the key, one of the villagers busied himself with scraping

away the whitewash which covered the lower part of the inscription, and

we deciphered the date, 871 of the Hijrah, which is 1466 A.D.[124] While

we were thus engaged the

[Illustration: FIG. 127.--IMÂM DÛR.]

mullah joined us, a rubicund old man in a spotless turban. The

reluctance which he displayed on being invited to unlock the door was

terminated by the zaptieh, who took him aside and explained that I was

employed by the government as a surveyor; upon which the mullah, with

perhaps a silent reflection on the laxity of the age in the matter of

official appointments, threw open the door and bade me enter (Fig. 127).

The shrine is a high square tower of fine brickwork, laid at the top so

as to form patterns, and, on the north side, inscriptions. Above this

tower rises a conical roof constructed, like the roof of the Sitt

Zobeideh at Baghdâd, by means of a series of alveolate niches or

squinches. In the interior this pointed dome is covered with plasterwork

of a character totally different from the stucco decorations of Raḳḳah

and Sâmarrâ, to which it stands in the same relation as baroque to

cinque cento work. It cannot belong to the same period as the brick

walls of the chamber, for it blocks the windows, and my impression is

that the whole roof is considerably later than the lower part of the

shrine. The mullah, in full assurance of my distinguished position, and

sustained by lively hopes of a sufficient reward, looked on with

benignant interest while Jûsef and I measured the shrine; but his hopes

were to prove as ill-founded as his assurance, for when I opened my

purse, prior to departure, it contained nothing but three piastres. I

had emptied it the night before on behalf of an obliging person who had

accompanied us to Abu Dulâf, and had forgotten to replenish it. To crown

all, the money-bags were with the caravan, and the caravan was a full

two hours ahead on the road to Tekrît. I do not know who was the more

disconcerted by this unlucky accident, but the mullah bore it with the

greater dignity. After I had confounded myself in explanation and

apology, he nodded his head, folded his hands into his sleeves and

dismissed me smilingly.

“Naṣîb!” he said, “a misfortune. Go in peace.”

The subsequent events of the day must have been intended as a judgment

upon me. By the time we came down to the river bank opposite Tekrît,

three hours from Imâm Dûr, a strong wind had arisen, and we found the

caravan standing dejectedly at the water’s edge while Fattûḥ called upon

God to hasten the movements of the ferrymen. His prayers were far from

efficacious (moreover, he had forgotten to put up a supplication for a

water-tight boat), and the crossing was longer and more tiresome than

any we had experienced (Fig. 128). It was near sunset before we got into

camp on the high ground behind Tekrît, and the last of the muleteers did

not come in with the riding horses until after dark.

No sooner were the tents pitched than a messenger waited upon me to ask

whether I would receive Ḥmeidî Beg ibn Farḥân. I returned an answer

couched in respectfully cordial terms, since no one who has travelled in

the desert is ignorant of the name of Farḥân, who was the Sheikh of

Sheikhs of all the northern Shammar. Since the death of Ibrahîm Pasha,

the Shammar and the ’Anazeh share, without amity, the lordship of

Mesopotamia, as they did before the Kurd rose into power. The road from

Tekrît to Môṣul is in Shammar territory, so far as it can be said to be

in the territory of any one. Not a caravan passes up and down but it

pays tribute to Mejwal ibn Farḥân, a beshlik (three piastres) on every

mule, and half a beshlik for a donkey, unless the travellers happen to

be escorted by a zaptieh as I was. Muleteers cannot afford zaptiehs, and

when they see two spearmen of the tribe upon the road, they pay and

lodge no complaint in deaf ears. Sheikh Mejwal, who is the strongest of

Farḥân’s fourteen sons, levies a tax from all the Jebbûr, the tribe that

camps along the river, and I was told that whereas the Jebbûr

[Illustration: FIG. 128.--TEKRÎT FERRY.]

[Illustration: FIG. 129.--COFFEE-MAKING, SHEIKH ’ASKAR.]

[Illustration: FIG. 130.--TEKRÎT, THE ARBAÎN.]

[Illustration: FIG. 131.--KHÂN KHERNÎNA, MIḤRÂB.]

had once been breeders of horses, now they breed none, finding it an

unprofitable labour with the Shammar sheikhs alert to seize every likely

mare. Ḥmeidî is said to be the mildest of Farḥân’s brood. He is a

handsome man of middle age, with deepset eyes and a gentle, rather

indolent expression. He had come to Tekrît on some business connected

with sheep stealing, and hearing of my arrival he hastened to bid me

welcome to these deserts and to make me free of the Shammar tents. I

asked him news of his cousins in Nejd, where the Shammar princes of the

Benî Rashîd hold with much bloodshed a hazardous authority, and when he

had spoken of these matters he gave me a piece of news which he thought,

and rightly, might be of no less interest. It was rumoured that the

Sultan had dismissed the deputies, but how or why no one knew, though

the counter-revolution was now more than a week old.

Tekrît is the birthplace of Saladin. It is seen to the best advantage

from the other side of the Tigris, where the bold bluffs and steeply

falling banks to which its houses cling are imposing to the eye. The

distant promise is not fulfilled; the modern town is devoid of interest

and little remains of the mediæval town but ruin-heaps, the line of a

wall and part of the lower gateway of the citadel. Tekrît was the seat

of a bishopric; Ibn Ḥauḳal, writing in the tenth century, states that

most of the inhabitants were Christians, and Rich speaks of the remains

of ten churches.[125] Beyond the ruins of the old town, which extend far

to the west of modern Tekrît, there lies the Moslem shrine of the

Arba’în, the Forty, much dilapidated, though two small chambers covered

with domes are still intact. These chambers, and the ruined precincts

adjoining them, are decorated with stucco of the same character, and I

should say of the same date, as the ornaments of Imâm Dûr (Fig. 130).

We set out from Tekrît with a large and unusually nondescript company,

or perhaps it would be truer to say that they set, out with us, a

European and a couple of zaptiehs being valuable assets on the Môṣul

road. Half-a-dozen Kurds from above Mardîn and as many Nestorians from

the mountains south of Lake Vân marched with my pack-animals, and

presently we fell in with the Father of Monkeys, as Fattûḥ called him,

who had not made much haste on his way to the capital. There was also a

young sayyid, white-turbaned and somewhat forbidding of aspect; with him

too I made friends after I had conquered the distaste born of his

over-godly looks. “I love thieves and pigs,” murmured one of the

muleteers, “Yezîd and Druze, but I do not love sayyids or mullahs.” This

particular descendant of the Prophet addressed me systematically as

Queen, and I experienced a not unnatural gratification at being raised

to royal rank, though whether it is higher than that of consul I cannot

be sure. With the Nestorians I was immediately on terms of intimacy.

They were sturdy, bearded mountaineers of a type which it is impossible

not to appreciate, even at first sight, and they marched cheerfully

through dust and heat with no possessions but a water-flask and a crust

of bread. Their pointed felt caps and close-fitting cotton trousers

formed a costume which was new to me, and as they walked beside my mare

I asked them who they were and whence they came.

“We are the people of Mâr Shim’ûn,” said one, naming the hereditary

patriarch of their faith. “Effendim, we have no friends but the

English--Islâm, Armenians, all are our foes.”

A struggling sect is the ancient community of Mâr Shim’ûn, harassed by

the Kurds in their mountain fastnesses, but if they may be judged by

their brave and independent looks, they do not turn the other cheek to

the striker.

We rode for three hours through monotonous country, a barren and stony

wilderness raised high above the river. When we dropped down to the

water’s edge we found the land to be partly cultivated by the men of

Tekrît, but the Tigris is eating away the right bank and in places field

and

[Illustration: FIG. 132.--KHÂN KHERNÎNA, DETAIL OF FLAT VAULT.]

[Illustration: FIG. 133.--KHÂN KHERNÎNA, VAULT, SHOWING TUBE.]

[Illustration: FIG. 134.--KHÂN KHERNÎNA, SETTING OF DOME.]

[Illustration: FIG. 135.--TELL NIMRÛD.]

path have been destroyed by the depredations of the stream.[126] We

camped that night six and a half hours from Tekrît, near a ḳishlâ which

has recently been built at the expense of a very beautiful khân. The

ḳishlâ represents a spasmodic attempt on the part of the government to

control the tribes; it holds from forty to fifty foot soldiers, who,

since they are unmounted, cannot pursue or punish the marauding Arabs.

The walls of Khân Khernîna, a magnificent Mohammadan building of the

finest period, have therefore been laid low to no purpose, and the

soldiers lead a miserable and useless existence in the ḳishlâ, which has

been erected out of its bricks. The khân is now so much ruined that I

did not attempt to plan it. It is a rectangular enclosure with round

bastions in the walls, and fine gateways covered with pointed arches.

Along the south side stretches a vaulted corridor, interrupted towards

the middle of its length by a chamber which has served as a mosque. This

chamber contains a miḥrâb decorated with exquisite arabesques in stucco;

of the inscription which was placed beneath the pointed arch only a few

letters remain (Fig. 131). The barrel vaults of the corridor, corbelled

slightly forward from the wall and built without centering, are splendid

examples of Mesopotamian brick construction. The roof of a small chamber

at the south-east angle, and the four-sided dome of the mosque, show the

singular arrangement which I had noticed at Baghdâd of a flat piece of

masonry laid over the summit of the vault (Fig. 132). A square chamber

near the mosque had been covered with a dome, and in one corner a

squinch arch, decorated with a tiny ornamental arcade, is still standing

(Fig. 134). On the flanks of the barrel vaults I observed the same

system of tubes which exists at Ukheiḍir (Fig. 133). The masonry and the

plan of the building are closely akin to thirteenth-century work in

Baghdâd, and to that period I should assign it.[127]

There is another guard-house thirty minutes further up the Tigris,

Sheramîyeh is its name. Here we stopped on the following morning to

water our horses, for our road now led us far from the river. A low line

of rocky hills, the Jebel Ḥamrîn, borders the west bank for several

hours’ journey. It runs crosswise over the desert and the river cuts

through it by the Fetḥah gorge. The hills drop sheer into the stream,

leaving no space for a path, and caravans are obliged to skirt the

western slopes, where there is little water and no settled population,

though we saw a few encampments of the Deleim far out in the desert. The

cups and hollows of the plain were filled with a scanty growth of grass.

We rejoiced over the unwonted sight as if each blade were a separate

benediction, and Fattûḥ began to calculate the sums we might save on

provender when the horses could be pastured every evening on fresh

herbage.

“God is great,” said the zaptieh, “but it has been a year of ruin for

poor men. We have not known where to look for food for our horses, and

more than that, I have received no pay for six months.”

“Please God the new government will give you your pay,” said I.

“Please God,” he answered. “But when it comes the ḍâbiṭs” (officers)

“eat it. Effendim, once I travelled with a ḍâbiṭ who received £T18 a

month, wallah! And my pay was 100 piastres a month. Yet whenever he

drank coffee he left me to defray the expense. Where is eighteen pounds

and where a hundred piastres!”

“God exists,” said the sayyid. “Oh Queen, He exists.”

“Wallah, He exists,” said the zaptieh hopefully.

We camped that night six hours from Sheramîyeh in a sheltered place

among the hills beside a spring of which the waters were bitter with

sulphur and not unmixed with pitch; our companions drank of it, but my

servants and I quaffed royally from the flasks which Jûsef had filled

at the Tigris. While the tents were being pitched I walked to the top of

the hills, and on the banks of watercourses that had but recently run

dry I found flowers, blue larkspurs and purple gentians and a wide

selection of the thistle family. A bowl of larkspurs was set upon my

dinner-table, and Jûsef was very loath to throw them away when we struck

camp, so rare and delicate a possession did they seem to us. But I

assured him that the German professors at Ḳal’at Shergât would have

flowers fairer than these. A more wonderful sight was in store for us on

the next day’s march. We had travelled barely two hours when we splashed

into a pool of rain-water, and then into another; there was grass round

them, green, abundant grass: “More than we have seen all the way from

Aleppo!” exclaimed Jûsef. The region of the drought was over, and when

our path led us to the top of the Jebel Ḥamrîn, here sunk to a low hog’s

back, I was scarcely surprised to see the slopes down to the Tigris red

with poppies. But even the poppies could not withhold the eye from the

great mound of Ḳal’at Shergât by the river’s edge, the mound of Asshur,

crowned with the crumbling mass of a huge zigurrat, the temple pyramid

of the tutelary god of the Assyrians. With the general aspect of the

first capital of Assyria I was already familiar, thanks to the excellent

photographs published by the German Orient-Gesellschaft, but I was not

prepared for so magnificent a prospect. The Tigris in high flood washed

the foot of the temple mound; far away to the north ran the snow-clad

barrier of mountains whence its waters flow--a barrier which Nature

planted in vain against the valour of the Assyrian armies; and across

the river the fertile plain stretched away in long undulations to where

Arbela lies behind low hills. Bountiful gods had showered their gifts

upon the land.

We rode down into the ruin-field and found one of Dr. Andrae’s

colleagues at work in the trial trenches. He directed us to the house

set round with flowers, as I had predicted, wherein the excavators are

lodged. There Dr. Andrae and Mr. Jordan made me so warmly welcome that I

felt like one returning after absence into a circle of life-long

friends. They had grave news to give me, news which was all the more

disquieting because it was as yet nothing but a rumour. Constitutional

government had foundered suddenly, and it might be for ever. The members

of the Committee had fled from Constantinople, the Liberals were

fugitive upon their heels, and once more ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd had set his foot

upon the neck of Turkey. So we interpreted the report that had reached

Asshur, but since there was no means of allaying or of confirming our

anxieties we turned our minds to more profitable fields, and went out to

see the ruins.

A site better favoured than Ḳal’at Shergât for excavations such as those

undertaken by Dr. Andrae and his colleagues could scarcely have been

selected. It has not given them the storied slabs and huge stone

guardians of the gates of kings with which Layard enriched the British

Museum; they have disappeared during the many periods of reconstruction

which the town has witnessed; but those very reconstructions add to the

historic interest of the excavations. Asshur was in existence in the

oldest Assyrian period, and down to the latest days of the empire it was

an honoured shrine of the gods; there are traces of Persian occupation;

in Parthian times the city was re-built, walls and gates were set up

anew, and the whole area within the ancient fortifications was

re-inhabited. Valuable as are the contributions which Dr. Andrae has

been able to make to the history of Assyria, the fact that he is

bringing into the region of critical study a culture so shadowy as that

of the Parthians has remained to us, in spite of its four hundred years

of domination, adds greatly to the magnitude of his achievement. His

researches in this direction have been pursued not only at Asshur, but

at the Parthian city of Hatra, a long day’s journey to the west of the

Tigris, where the famous palace is at last receiving the attention it

merits.

The temple of the god Asshur, of which the zigurrat is the most notable

feature of Ḳal’at Shergât, goes back to the earliest Assyrian times, but

the greater part of it is occupied by a Turkish guard-house, and has not

yet been excavated (Fig. 136).

[Illustration: FIG. 136.--ḲAL’ÂT SHERGÂT, THE ZIGURRAT AND RUINS OF

NORTH WALL.]

[Illustration: FIG. 138.--SÂMARRÂ, INTERIOR OF SOUTH GATE, RUINED

MOSQUE.]

[Illustration: FIG. 140.--SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, SMALL DOOR IN WEST

WALL.]

The court between temple and zigurrat lies open; in a later age the

Parthians adorned it with a splendid colonnade, and it is here that Dr.

Andrae has succeeded in piecing together large fragments of Parthian

architectural decoration which throw a new light both upon the arts of

Parthia and upon the succeeding era of the Sassanians. Fortunately there

exist upon the mound other temples of the Assyrian period which he has

been better able to study. Chief of these is the double shrine of the

gods Anu and Adad, lords of heaven and of the thunderstorm, the

excavation of which cost him many months of difficult work. The temple

was finished by Tiglathpileser at the end of the twelfth century before

Christ, but in the course of some three hundred years it fell into

complete decay; Shalmaneser II, he who received the homage of Jehu, as

is recorded on the Black Obelisk in the British Museum, filled in the

ruins of the earlier shrine and set a new edifice upon them, preserving

almost exactly the plan of the old. No Assyrian temple has hitherto been

studied accurately, save one of Sargon’s at Khorsabâd, later by more

than a century than the second temple of Anu and Adad; it was therefore

necessary to get an exact record of both the periods at Asshur, and in

order to leave Shalmaneser’s work undisturbed, Dr. Andrae was compelled

to trace that of Tiglathpileser by means of a system of underground

tunnels. “I have never,” he observed, as he surveyed his handiwork,

“done anything so mad.” But the results have more than justified the

labour. The scheme of the Assyrian temple has now been established by

examples ranging over a period of four hundred years, and it is

conclusively proved that it differed in a remarkable degree from the

Babylonian temple plan, and was related to the plan adopted by Solomon.

In Babylonia the chambers are all laid broadways in respect of the

entrance; that is to say, the door is placed in the centre of one of the

long sides, so that he who enters has only a narrow area in front of

him, and must look to right and left if he would appreciate the size of

the hall. At Jerusalem and in Assyria the main sanctuary ran lengthways,

an immense artistic advance, inasmuch as the broadways-lying hall was at

best a clumsy contrivance which could never have given the sense of

space and dignity conveyed by the other. To the genius of what builders

are we to attribute this masterly comprehension of spatial effect? The

question cannot as yet be answered, but Dr. Andrae is inclined to seek

outside Syria and Mesopotamia for the prototypes of Asshur and

Jerusalem. In the palaces, be it noted, the lengthways hall was never

adopted, but palace architecture is not well illustrated at Asshur,

those buildings having been the first to suffer at the hands of the

spoiler.

The walls to the north of the temples are perhaps the most impressive

part of the excavations. The mound on which the city is built reaches

here its greatest elevation, and the gigantic masses of the

fortifications rear themselves up from its very base. Time after time

the kings of Assyria renewed these bulwarks, setting them forward

further and further against the river, which once washed their

foundations--its bed runs now a little more to the east, where the

stream still flows under the eastern quays of Asshur. The upper parts of

the walls are of unburnt brick, but the lower, as Xenophon observed at

Nimrûd, are cased in massive stone. The stonework was not in reality as

durable as the brick, for the Assyrians had no binding mortar, and the

stones, being set together with mud, could not resist a pressure from

behind, such as that which was offered by the mound itself. A mortar of

asphalt is sometimes used in sun-dried brick, but binding mortar seems

to have been a discovery of the age of Nebuchadnezzar, since it is first

found in constructions of his time at Babylon. The fortifications sweep

round southwards to the Gurgurri Gate, well known in inscriptions, and

identified by epigraphic evidence. Between the gate and the temple and

palace area, a great part of the ground is covered with a network of

streets and houses belonging to a late Assyrian period. The larger

houses consist of an outer court with rooms for servants and dependents,

roughly floored with big cobblestones and traversed by a pathway of

smaller cobbles whereon the masters could cross to the inner paved court

round which their chambers lay. Every house, however small, is provided

with a bath-room. The whole complex has the appearance of another

Pompeii, though it is more ancient than the Italian Pompeii by six or

seven hundred years. Down in the plain, outside the city walls, stood a

magnificent building which has been christened by the excavators the

Festhaus. It is a fine open court, surrounded on two sides by a

colonnade, while on the side opposite to the gate there is a raised

platform of solid masonry. The court must have had the aspect of a

formal garden, for at regular intervals there are holes in the hard

conglomerate of the floor which the excavators conjecture to have been

filled with earth and planted with shrubs. In this colonnaded garden was

celebrated the spring sacrifice, the annual festival in honour of the

fruitful earth. The plan of the building is not Assyrian--the column

itself is a non-Mesopotamian feature--but whence it was derived it would

be impossible as yet to say.

Throughout the area of the city a series of deep trial trenches have

been dug, cutting through the Parthian period, through the late

Assyrian, and down to the earliest times. These trenches afford

materials for the most fascinating studies. One of the earliest cities

that stood upon the mound of Asshur is, curiously enough, the easiest to

trace. The houses are in an unusually perfect state; their walls,

preserved not infrequently to a height of several feet, enclose little

cobbled courtyards with narrow cobbled streets between. These worn and

ancient ways, emerging from under the steep sides of the trench and

disappearing again into the earth at its furthest limit, give the

observer a sense as of visualized history, as though the millenniums had

dropped away that separate him from the busy life of the antique world.

It is probable that the city to which they belong was destroyed by some

overwhelming catastrophe, laid desolate, perhaps by an onslaught of the

Mitanni kings of northern Mesopotamia or of the Babylonians from the

south, and so left in age-long ruin until a later generation completed

the filling up of court and street which had been begun by time,

levelled the whole and built their dwellings upon foundations of the

past. The Assyrians were content to leave their story inscribed on clay

cylinder or on stone; they did not, like the Egyptians, rear for their

dead enduring monuments, but each man in turn was thrust into a clay

sarcophagus or sepulchral jar lying immediately below the floor of his

own dwelling--we counted as many as fifteen burials in one of the

smaller houses--or placed, with a slightly greater regard for the

comfort of the living, in an adjoining subterranean chamber vaulted with

brick.

As Dr. Andrae led me about the city, drawing forth its long story with

infinite skill from wall and trench and cuneiform inscription, the

lavish cruel past rushed in upon us. The myriad soldiers of the Great

King, transported from the reliefs in the British Museum, marched

through the gates of Asshur; the captives, roped and bound, crowded the

streets; defeated princes bowed themselves before the victor and subject

races piled up their tribute in his courts. We saw the monarch go out to

the chase, and heard the roaring of the lion, half paralyzed by the dart

in its spine, which animates the stone with its wild anguish. Human

victims cried out under nameless tortures; the tide of battle raged

against the walls, and, red with carnage, rose into the palaces.

Splendour and misery, triumph and despair, lifted their head out of the

dust.

One hot night I sat with my hosts upon the roof of their house. The

Tigris, in unprecedented flood, swirled against the mound, a waste of

angry waters. Above us rose the zigurrat of the god Asshur. It had

witnessed for four thousand years the melting of the Kurdish snows,

flood-time and the harvest that follows; gigantic, ugly, intolerably

mysterious, it dominated us, children of an hour.

“What did they watch from its summit?” I asked, stung into a sharp

consciousness of the unknown by a scene almost as old as recorded life.

“They watched the moon,” said Dr. Andrae, “as we do. Who knows? they

watched for the god.”

I have left few places so unwillingly as I left Ḳal’at Shergât.

We rode northwards for eight hours and camped at Tell Gayârah, near to

which there are some small pitch springs. The land of Assyria grew ever

more fertile as we journeyed up into it, and that night the horses were

picketed knee-deep in grass, to the boundless satisfaction of the

muleteers. I was anxious on the following day to visit Nimrûd, the

Assyrian city mentioned in Genesis as Calah, but in order to do so it

was necessary to find a ferry across the Tigris, which was a doubtful

undertaking. Even if it were found, the flood might make ferry-boats

unprofitable vessels, therefore I detached Fattûḥ from the caravan and

bade him ride with the zaptieh and me, Fattûḥ being master of a thousand

wiles with which to baffle difficulty, and possessor foreby of a

remarkably strong right arm. We rode in two hours to Mangûb, where there

are a few ruined huts. On the opposite bank of the Tigris a number of

mounds mark the site of ancient villages. The grass grew thick by the

river, and on the higher ground it had also sprouted abundantly, though

it was now withered. Presently we spied upon the path in front of us an

effendi on horseback, who carried a big umbrella to protect himself from

the sun. His state was further enhanced by the presence of a few

zaptiehs.

“He is coming to Gayârah,” said my soldier. “They have sent him from

Môṣul to judge a dispute about the crops. Four men were murdered last

week at Gayârah, and ten are lying fatally wounded.”

This was news to me. I had been peacefully unconscious of the dead and

dying as I watched my horses knee-deep in the grass. The effendi, when

he came up to us, addressed me as follows:

“Bonjour, Madame. Comment aimez vous le désert?”

“Mais beaucoup,” said I, somewhat astonished to hear the French tongue

spoken in it. And then I added quickly: “What tidings have you from

Constantinople?”

The effendi drew his brows together.

“We hear that troops from Salonica have entered the town and captured

two barracks.”

“Did they take them without difficulty?” I asked.

“We do not know,” he returned.

“Please God!” said I.

“Adieu,” he replied hurriedly, and rode upon his way. In those days of

uncertainty it was not wise to be drawn into a definite expression of

opinion.

Our road took us up a ridge, and when we came to its crest I drew

bridle, for the history of Asia was spread out before my eyes. Below us

the Great Zâb flowed into the Tigris; here Tissaphernes murdered the

Greek generals, here Xenophon took over the command, and having crossed

the Zâb at a higher point, turned and drove back the archers of

Mithridates. To the north the mound of Nimrûd, where the Greeks saw the

ruins of Calah, stood out among the cornfields; eastward lay the plain

of Arbela, where Alexander overthrew Darius. The whole world shone like

a jewel, green corn, blue waters, and the gleaming snows that bound

Mesopotamia to the north; but to my ears the smiling landscape cried out

a warning: the people of the West can conquer but they can never hold

Asia, no, not when they go out under the banners of Alexander himself.

We rode up the bank of the Tigris, and when we came opposite to Tell

Nimrûd there, by good fortune, was a ferry-boat, plying across the river

with the men and flocks of the Jebbûr. The cause of their migration to

the left bank was hopping about our feet--locusts, newly issued from the

rocky ground and swarming over every blade of grass and corn.

“In two days there will be no pasture, and our flocks will die,”

explained an aged shepherd. “Let the consul cross!” he shouted, as the

ferry-boat drew up beside the bank and half the tribe clambered into it.

We ejected two calves, a mare and a few goats and installed ourselves in

their place. The ferry-boat was as tightly packed as the ark and the

passengers nearly as varied; they all talked, whinnied, baa-ed and

bleated at once as we pushed out into the swift stream. I climbed on to

the back of my mare, which seemed the cleanest and the roomiest spot,

and we busied ourselves in catching locusts and throwing them into the

water, for, alas! they had embarked with us by the hundred.

The mound of Nimrûd, when I saw it, lay in a waving sea of corn. The

holes and pits of Layard’s diggings were filled to the brim with grass

and flowers, and the zigurrat of the war god Ninib reared its bare head

out of a field of poppies. But except for the flowers, Nimrûd, whence we

obtained many of the treasures of our museum in London, is a pitiful

sight for English eyes. Its neglected state stands in sharp contrast

with the pious care which the German excavators are expending upon the

ruins of Asshur. Carved and inscribed blocks have been left exposed to

the malicious attacks of Arab boys,[128] who hold it a meritorious act

to deface an idol, and to the even slenderer mercy of the winter rains

and frosts. In one place a stone statue projects head and shoulders out

of the ground, the face of the king or god which it represents being

already terribly battered (Fig. 135). The number of Assyrian statues

known to us is exceedingly small--not more than seven or eight have been

brought to light--yet this splendid example is allowed to fall into

decay for want of a handful of earth wherewith to cover it. The city of

Calah is associated with some of Layard’s most memorable triumphs; for

the sake of our own honour it would be well that we should take steps to

preserve the works of art that remain in it, and that, if we cannot find

money to transport them to the museum at Constantinople, we should at

least employ a few men to re-bury them until more enthusiastic

archæologists turn their attention to Nimrûd.

Sheikh ’Askar of the Jebbûr, who had accompanied me from his tents by

the river, listened sympathetically while I lamented over the statue,

and volunteered to bury it under the earth as soon as his men should

have brought over their flocks from the west bank. I applauded the

suggestion and encouraged it with bakhshîsh, but unless I am much

mistaken, the sheikh’s resolve has not yet reached the point of

execution. We sat in his tent while we waited for the ferry-boat, and

with eager hospitality he set before us coffee, bread, and a mess of

apricots--it was the last Arab coffee fire that was to be lighted in our

honour (Fig. 129). So we ferried back, climbed a bluff alive with

locusts, and cantered through sweet-smelling crops to the sulphur

springs of Ḥammâm ’Alî. A few minutes beyond the village our tents were

pitched in deep luxuriant grass.

We struck camp next morning with an agreeable sense of excitement. Môṣul

was only four hours away, and the advantages of city life--consulates,

rest from travel, news of the outer world--shone very brightly before

us. The rising sun, the dewy cornfields, the flowering grass, lent their

enchantment to our breakfast, and gaily we stepped out upon the road.

Before us lay a little ridge that separated us from Môṣul; we had

journeyed towards it for half-an-hour when there fell upon our ears a

sound that made our hearts stand still. It was the boom of cannon.

Said Fattûḥ: “What is that?” But none of us could answer.

We went on through the smiling sunny landscape and the green corn, where

the peasants stood by the irrigation trenches, their work suspended,

their faces turned towards that ominous sound, and presently we met an

old man. He too listened.

“Why are they firing cannon in Môṣul?” I asked.

“God knows!” he answered, and wrung his hands together. “Perhaps it is

news from Stambûl. One man says one thing and one another, and God knows

what is true.”

A little further a ragged pair came down the road toward us.

“When did you set out from Môṣul?” said Fattûḥ.

“At the first dawn,” they answered, and fear was in their eyes.

“What was happening there?” asked Fattûḥ.

“Nothing,” they replied. “When we set out, wallah! there was nothing.”

We left them standing in the road with anxious faces turned towards the

town. And still the cannon boomed over the hill.

“Môṣul is an evil city,” said Fattûḥ to the zaptieh.

“It is evil,” he answered. “Blood flows there like the water of the

Tigris.”

After a few minutes two Arabs galloped up behind us on their mares, and

one carried a great lance.

“Whither going?” cried Fattûḥ.

“To Môṣul,” they shouted.

“What is your business?” he called out.

“We heard the cannon,” they replied, and galloped up the hill. The

zaptieh went with them.

“He will be little use if Môṣul is up,” observed Fattûḥ.

At this moment the cannon ceased, and we saw a party of four or five

soldiers riding over the brow. The Arabs and my zaptieh stopped to speak

to them, and then turned back with them, coming slowly towards us down

the ridge.

“These know,” said Fattûḥ.

They stopped when they reached us, and the moment was big with Fate.

“Peace be upon you,” they said.

“And upon you peace,” I returned. “What is the news?”

And one answered: “Reshâd is Sultan.”

“God prolong his existence!” said I.

Upon this we parted, and they went down the hill, and we in silence to

the top of the ridge. The silver Tigris and the green plain lay before

us, and in the midst the city of Môṣul, which had published the

accession of another lord.

“Praise God!” said I, looking down upon that fair land.

“To Him the praise!” echoed Fattûḥ.

And then the zaptieh gave voice to his thought.

“All the days of ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd,” he said, “we never drew our pay.”

THE RUINS OF SÂMARRÂ[129]

The ruined mosque at Sâmarrâ has an interior measurement of 240 × 157·60

m., the greater length being from

[Illustration: FIG. 137.--SÂMARRÂ, MOSQUE.]

[Illustration: FIG. 141.--SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, SOUTH-WEST ANGLE

TOWER.]

[Illustration: FIG. 142.--SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, WINDOW IN SOUTH

WALL.]

[Illustration: FIG. 143.--SÂMARRÂ, RUINED MOSQUE, BIG DOOR IN NORTH

WALL.]

[Illustration: FIG. 144.--SÂMARRÂ, EL ’ASHIḲ, WEST END OF NORTH

FAÇADE.]

[Illustration: FIG 139.--SÂMARRÂ, MOSQUE. DETAIL OF PIER, SOUTH DOOR.]

north to south (Fig. 135). The four angle towers are larger in diameter

than those which are set along the walls. The intermediate bastions are

perfectly regular in size and shape except the two on either side of the

southern gate, from which a segment is cut off by the door openings, and

the bastion immediately to the west of the same gate which has a small

addition to the western part of its curve, an addition which I do not

believe to be later in date though the brickwork is of a slightly

different character. The southern gate is a triple opening in the middle

of the wall where it would be natural to look for the miḥrâb (Fig. 138).

There are remains of mouldings round the inner face of the central

opening (Fig. 139). The upper part of the south wall is pierced by

twenty-four windows, two of them being placed over the smaller openings

of the central gateway (Fig. 122). These windows, together with the

trenches in the interior of the mosque which mark the line of the

columns, determine the number of the colonnades; there must have been

twenty-four, each one ending against the wall between the windows. The

central aisle which terminated at the main gate and was wider than the

rest, was not provided with a window. The space between the colonnades

was undoubtedly roofed with beams; the holes into which the large

cross-beams were fitted can still be seen on the inner side of the south

wall. The windows, placed with regard to the aisles, bear no relation to

the position of the round bastions on the exterior of the wall. They

break into them at haphazard, frequently impinging upon their sides,

while in one instance a window is cut straight through a tower (Fig.

120). On the inner face the windows are covered by a cusped arch (Fig.

142). The east and west walls are broken by numerous doors. Beginning

from the southern end there is first a small entrance, 1·25 m. wide,

close to the angle bastion (Fig. 141). A wall about a metre in length

projects from the main wall to the south of the door opening and has

been connected with the top of the main wall by a section of vaulting.

Immediately beyond this postern there is a large gateway 4·55 m. wide,

and then another which is still larger, being 4·75 m. wide. The next

door is 3·85 m.; the fifth, which is only 2·62 m., is found in the west

wall alone. Then follows another of the larger doors, about 4 metres

wide, beyond which there is, in the west wall only, a door 2·62 m. wide;

then on both sides a large door 4·05 m. wide and a small door 1·50 m.

wide. The north wall is broken by five gates, the two at the outer ends

averaging 1·50 m. and the other three 4 metres in width. All the smaller

doors exhibit an exceedingly curious piece of construction (Fig. 140).

The brickwork of the wall runs uninterruptedly over the door opening

without the intermission of arch or lintel. It is as if the door had

been cut out of the wall with a knife, and the bricks above it, so far

as they keep their place, do so only by reason of the excellence of the

mortar. The wall above the larger doors has in every case fallen away,

but there is evidence of the former existence of some kind of lintel or

arch strengthened by wooden beams, the round holes for the beams being

visible in the existing masonry (Fig. 143). I incline to the theory of a

lintel; the faced wall above the holes leaves no room for an arch. Above

this lintel there would seem to have been a row of small arched windows

two or three in number (_cf._ the two side openings of the south gate

where there is a single window above the arch). Along the top of the

east, west, and north walls runs a brickwork decoration consisting of a

series of recessed squares, each of which contains the recessed segment

of a sphere. The walls are seamed from top to bottom with narrow

runnels, which were no doubt connected with the drainage system of the

roof. There is no unanimity of opinion among those who have planned the

mosque concerning the number of the colonnades in the interior. As I

have already said, it seems to me evident that there were twenty-four

rows of columns or piers, from east to west, at the northern and

southern ends of the mosque. I made out the colonnades to be ten deep

upon the south side and three deep upon the north, while upon the east

and west sides I counted four rows of columns.[130] The supports of the

arcades must have been either columns or small piers. From the absence

of any structural remains, such as might have been expected if the

supports had taken the form of brick piers, I incline, with Herzfeld, to

the view that the roof must have been carried on columns. Their total

disappearance may possibly be accounted for by the fact that they were

of wood,[131] though Muḳaddasî, writing at the end of the tenth century,

relates that the mosque of Sâmarrâ was built upon marble columns and his

evidence cannot be wholly dismissed. In the centre of the open court was

placed, in all probability, the famous stone basin called the Kâs i

Fir’aun (Pharaoh’s Cup), which is described by Mustaufî.[132] The

minaret, with its singular spiral path, stands to the north of the

mosque. The summit, though somewhat ruined, still retains a decoration

of niches. There can be little doubt that the mosque is that which was

erected by Mutawakkil (A.D. 847-861) to replace Mu’tamid’s Friday

mosque, but Yâḳût asserts that the minaret is a relic of Mu’tamid’s

foundation. Yâḳût, however, wrote in 1225 when Sâmarrâ had long been in

ruins.

Next in importance to the mosque is the castle or palace on the opposite

bank of the Tigris, known as the ’Ashiḳ (Fig. 145).[133] The first time

I visited it we crossed in a guffah from a point a little below the town

where there is usually a bridge of boats. The bridge had been swept away

by the floods and the guffah landing was very bad. It was a full hour’s

[Illustration: FIG. 145.--EL ’ASHIḲ.]

ride up the river to El ’Ashiḳ, but I was rewarded for my trouble by

finding indubitable traces of a masonry bridge in the low ground almost

exactly opposite a curious little building called Ṣlebîyeh. My attention

was called to the bridge by seeing men digging out the brick piers and

arches for building material. The peasants told me that when the river

is low, piers can be seen in the bed of the stream and that the bridge

ran in the direction of the Beit el Khalîfah. I give this information

for what it is worth. Ya’ḳûbî mentions a bridge of boats (ed. de Goeje,

p. 263); it is not impossible that pontoons may have been thrown across

the deepest and swiftest part of the river and connected with the high

ground on the west bank, which is at some distance from the stream, by a

series of masonry arches of which I saw the remains. The piers and

arches would therefore have stood on ground which was under water in

time of high flood. This is exactly the arrangement of the modern bridge

at Môṣul. The castle of the ’Ashiḳ consists of a great enclosure, 123

metres from north to south and 85 metres from east to west, surrounded

by a wall with round bastions which are set upon a rectangular base

(Fig. 146). All the buildings that may have stood within the wall have

vanished, but adjoining the north wall there are remains of a gatehouse

consisting of five parallel chambers opening on to a corridor or

platform. The chambers and the corridor are built upon a substructure of

vaults. Under the corridor the vaults run from east to west, except in

the central part where the vault running from north to south is a

continuation of the vault under the central chamber. Under the five

chambers all the vaults run from north to south.[134] The vaults are

built of flat tiles laid in slices against the head-wall without

centering. They have the usual small set forward from the wall, but in

one case, perhaps in more than one, there is a slight divergence from

the customary arrangement. From the spring of the vault the tiles are

laid horizontally for the first sixteen or seventeen courses, projecting

forward so as to form a shallow curve;

[Illustration: FIG. 148.--EL ’ASHIḲ, DETAIL OF NICHING ON NORTH FAÇADE.]

above these horizontal courses the tiles are laid upright and in slices;

they form an ovoid curve more abrupt than the curve of the lower part of

the vault. The fourth of the upper chambers, reckoning from east to

west, is the best preserved. It shows the remains of a doorway, 1·85 m.

wide, covered on the same principle as the small doors of the mosques,

_i.e._ without lintel or arch. A moat or trench runs all round the

castle and passes to the north of the gatehouse. A bridge, of which

small trace remains, connected the gatehouse with a rectangular outpost.

To the north and east of this outpost there are fragments of a wall and

towers which encompassed a rectangular area.[135] The most interesting

feature in the ruins is the niche decoration between the bastions of the

north wall (Fig. 148). The niches have been in part filled up--no doubt

they were found to be too dangerous a weakness to the wall--but their

scheme is clearly apparent (Fig. 144). Each niche consisted of a high

cusped arch above a rectangular recessed panel which enclosed in turn a

smaller arched niche. High up on the wall, near the western angle tower,

there are traces of an upper order of niches. There is some indication

that the niches were continued in the first north bay of the west wall,

but the remainder of this wall, together with the whole of the east

wall, is completely ruined. The disadvantage of these deep niches is

evident in the south wall where the niche has been broken through at its

weakest point and has now the appearance of a door. In the two central

towers on this side there seemed to have been small flat-roofed chambers

(Fig. 147). The building materials used in the castle are burnt and

sun-dried brick. The foundations of the

[Illustration: FIG. 146.--SÂMARRÂ, EL ’ASHIḲ FROM NORTH.]

[Illustration: FIG. 147.--SÂMARRÂ, EL ’ASHIḲ FROM SOUTH.]

[Illustration: FIG. 150.--SÂMARRÂ, ṢLEBÎYEH.]

[Illustration: FIG. 151.--SÂMARRÂ, ṢLEBÎYEH, SETTING OF DOME.]

walls and towers, the vaulted substructures, the niched face of the

north wall and its towers, together with what remains of the south wall

and towers are of burnt brick, but all the rest of the structure,

including the partition walls of the gatehouse, are of sun-dried brick,

and the same material is used to fill up the niches in the north wall.

[Illustration: FIG. 149.--ṢLEBÎYEH.]

I rode northwards from the ’Ashiḳ for exactly an hour to the ruins of

Ḥuweiṣilât where there are traces of a wall set with towers. One tower

alone stood to any height; it appeared to mark the north-west corner of

a rectangular enclosure, in the centre of which was a mound covered with

fragments of tiles, but the east side of the enclosing wall was so

completely destroyed that I could not make out the line of it. One

important point is to be noted: the wall and towers were not built of

brick, but of pebbles set in concrete, exactly similar to the masonry of

the Ḳâim tower, and I think it possible that both Ḳâim and Ḥuweiṣilât

may belong to an age prior to the Abbâsid period. It must, however, be

added that the gateway of the castle at Tekrît, which is undoubtedly

Mohammadan, is built of the same materials. South of the ’Ashiḳ is the

ruin known as Ḳubbet es Ṣlebîyeh (Fig. 149). It consists of a small

square central chamber, octagonal upon the exterior, encompassed by an

octagonal corridor (Fig. 150). The central chamber had been covered by a

dome which was set on a simple bracket over the angles of the

substructure (Fig. 151); the corridor had been barrel vaulted. Fragments

of the transverse arches that helped to carry the vault are still in

place. Ṣlebîyeh was built of sun-dried brick covered with plaster.

When I went to the ’Ashiḳ for the second time I sent a guffah up the

river to above Lekweir and dropped down-stream to the ruins of the

castle, whence we floated down to the camp. On this most pleasant

expedition I took occasion to examine Lekweir. It lies about an hour’s

ride above Sâmarrâ, and unlike all the other ruins, it is in the low

ground by the water’s edge. Its complete destruction is perhaps due to

its having been at the mercy of the flooded river. Great blocks of

fallen brickwork lie upon the bank and in the stream, while a massive

brick wall forms a sort of quay. A large building must have adjoined

this quay, for the ground is tossed into mounds for a considerable

distance and the mounds are strewn with broken brick and with fragments

of thin marble slabs, pink, green and greyish-white in colour.

[Illustration: FIG. 152.--SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH.]

The only other edifice which has escaped complete destruction is the

Beit el Khalîfah (the House of the Khalif) (Fig. 152).[136] It is a

triple-vaulted hall standing above the Tigris (Fig. 153.)[137] The

central hall was no doubt the audience chamber of the palace; it

corresponds to the great hall at Ctesiphon. The two wings are divided

into a small ante-chamber, covered with a semi-dome set on squinches

(Fig. 154), and a larger room roofed with a barrel vault. The vaults are

all slightly pointed and all are built on the

[Illustration: FIG. 153.--SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH.]

[Illustration: FIG. 154.--SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, DETAIL OF VAULT OF

SIDE CHAMBER.]

[Illustration: FIG. 156.--SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, STUCCO DECORATION.]

[Illustration: FIG. 157.--SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, FRAGMENT OF

RINCEAUX WORKED IN MARBLE.]

[Illustration: FIG. 158.--SÂMARRÂ, BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, STUCCO

DECORATION.]

[Illustration: FIG. 155.--BEIT EL KHALÎFAH, FRAGMENT OF STUCCO

DECORATION ON ARCH.]

Mesopotamian system, without centering and with a small corbelling

forward from the wall. Under this outset there are a series of square

holes as if for beams, though it is scarcely conceivable that beams can

have been laid across the halls at this point. Round wooden poles were

certainly used in the body of the walls; the wood has perished leaving

the round hole which it occupied. The windows (or doors?) of the

chambers on either side of the triple hall were covered without lintel

or arch in the manner already described. The decoration of the palace

must have been mainly of stucco, worked in relief or frescoed. Lying

upon the ground were small fragments of plaster bearing a frescoed

pattern of a simple kind, a row of circles outlined in red and yellow; a

small piece of moulded stucco is still attached to the inside of the

arch over the opening of the central chamber (Fig. 155) and I picked up

other pieces (Fig. 158). While I was at work a peasant came to me and

inquired whether I would like to see a picture which he had just

unearthed. I went with him to a trench close at hand, where he had been

digging for bricks, and found a beautiful piece of plaster work adhering

to a wall (Fig. 156). It was doomed to instant destruction that the

bricks behind it might be removed. I inquired whether such decorations

were frequently discovered, and promised a reward for any piece that was

brought to me, with the result that before I left I had been provided

with four other examples. Three showed variants of a continuous pattern

(Figs. 159 and 160), while the third was worked with a fret motive (Fig.

161). To the east of the triple hall there are some underground chambers

hollowed out of the rock. They have been explained in various manners

and fully described by Viollet. Here as elsewhere in Sâmarrâ the rock

begins immediately below the surface of the ground. It is a conglomerate

of pebbles in a bed of lime, exceedingly hard to work and covered with

so thin a layer of earth that no cultivation is possible. The

cornfields and vineyards of the Abbâsid Sâmarrâ lay on the opposite bank

of the Tigris in the low alluvial soil beneath the ridge on which stand

Ḥuweiṣilât, the ’Ashiḳ and Ṣlebîyeh. Near the underground chambers of

the Beit el Khalîfah there are considerable mounds, and in some places

fragments of building which appertained to the palace. The walls are of

sun-dried brick and the rooms have been covered with domes and

semi-domes resting on squinch arches.

[Illustration: FIG. 159.--STUCCO DECORATIONS, SÂMARRÂ.]

Almost due east of the Beit el Khalîfah there rises out of the middle of

the plain a large artificial mound, Tell ’Alîj.[138] It is surrounded by

a moat, and beyond the moat there are traces of a circular wall. A

little to the east of north a raised causeway leads down from the top of

the tell, crosses the moat by what must once have been a bridge and runs

straight as an arrow over the space between moat and wall

[Illustration: FIG. 160.--SÂMARRÂ, STUCCO DECORATION.]

[Illustration: FIG. 161.--SÂMARRÂ, STUCCO DECORATION.]

[Illustration: FIG. 162.--SÂMARRÂ, FRAGMENT OF POTTERY.]

[Illustration: FIG. 163.--SÂMARRÂ, FRAGMENT OF POTTERY.]

[Illustration: FIG. 165.--ABU DULÂF, ARCADE.]

[Illustration: FIG. 166.--ABU DULÂF, NICHED PIER OF NORTHERN ARCADE.]

(Ross made it 110 paces) and across the plain for about half-a-mile. It

ends at a low mound where Ross found remains of brickwork. On either

side of the point where the causeway reaches the outer edge of the

ditch, a low mound, fanning out from the causeway, stretches from ditch

to rampart. These mounds are the remains of walls that protected the

causeway. Local tradition says that the moat was fed with water by a

canal from the Tigris; Ross adds that the ḳanât, or cut as he calls it,

brought water from a channel (he uses the word tunnel, by which he

probably means ḳanât, underground conduit) which ran from the Jebel

Ḥamrîn to Sâmarrâ. What this singular fortified mound can be I do not

know, but I should be surprised if it did not belong to a period earlier

than the days of the Abbâsids.

All the area of the city is strewn with Mohammadan potsherds, but the

pottery is markedly different in character from that of Raḳḳah. Coloured

ware, though it is not entirely absent, is rare; by far the greater

number of pieces are unglazed and ornamented only with incised patterns

which are frequently divided into zones by raised notched bands. I saw,

too, a few fragments of a better class of pottery with beautiful

patterns or inscriptions in relief, worked with the utmost care. When

the peasants discovered that the patterned clay excited my interest they

brought basket loads of broken pots to my tents and I drew and

photographed innumerable examples, two of which I here reproduce (Figs.

162 and 163).

In the mosque of Abu Dulâf (Fig. 164)[139] the arcades are carried on

massive brick piers and the effect of the long, half-ruined aisles is

very imposing (Fig. 165). The area embraced by the outer wall of

sun-dried brick is slightly smaller than at Sâmarrâ (213·20 × 136·50 m.)

and the arcades are more widely spaced, but the type of plan is the

same, even to the spiral minaret to the north. Although the enclosing

wall is no better than a crumbling mound, it is possible to make out

the

[Illustration: FIG. 164.--ABU DULÂF.]

gateways, inasmuch as the jambs, which were built of burnt brick, stand

more or less intact. The arcades and their returns against the wall are

also of burnt brick, and so are the remains of the three bastions which

are all that can be seen in the south wall. In the centre of this wall

there is another fragment of burnt brick which might be the curve of a

miḥrâb but is more probably a door leading into a small building or

vestibule,[140] of which the shapeless mounds can be distinguished

immediately to the south of the wall. There is a space of 10·40 m.

between the outer wall and the southernmost row of piers, and the ruins

give no indication of its having been roofed over. But if this transept

were open to the sky it is unlikely that the miḥrâb should have been

placed in it, and I should therefore place a door in the centre of the

south wall as at Sâmarrâ. The space between the arcades at the northern

and southern ends of the mosque averages 6·20 m., but the alley which

conducts to the central door at either end measures 7·33 m. in width.

Similarly the alley conducting to the central doors leading into the

court from east and west is 4·90 m. wide, whereas the average width of

the intercolumniation of the east and west arcades is 4·15 m. The plan

exhibits everywhere noticeable irregularities; the arcades vary in

width, sometimes by as much as ten centimetres. The small piers in the

ḥaram average 2·10 × 1·73 m., the greater length being from north to

south. The piers of the arcades to east and west of the ṣaḥn average

4·03 × 1·57 m.; the small piers of the northern arcades 2·18 × 1·52 m.

All the piers bordering the central court are adorned upon the face

which is turned towards the court with a brick niche covered with a

cusped arch and placed high up on the pier (Fig. 166). There is also a

decoration of small niches upon the north side of the base of the

minaret; the other sides are too much ruined to have retained the trace

of it. The north wall of the mosque is the best preserved, and shows in

places the same drainage runnels that were described at Sâmarrâ.

The ruins of which I have here given a brief account are of the first

importance for the elucidation of the early history of the arts of

Islâm. They can all be dated within a period of forty years falling in

the middle of the ninth century, and are therefore among the earliest

existing examples of Mohammadan architecture. They bear witness to the

Mesopotamian influences under which it arose. The spiral towers of

Sâmarrâ and Abu Dulâf[141] are an adaptation of the temple pyramids of

Assyria and Babylonia which had a spiral path leading to the summit; the

technique of arch and vault was invented by the ancient East and

transmitted through Sassanian builders to the Arab invaders; the

decoration is Persian or Mesopotamian and almost untouched by the genius

of the West.[142] In the palaces and mosques of Sâmarrâ, we can see the

conquerors themselves conquered by a culture which had been developing

during thousands of years on Mesopotamian soil, a culture which had

received indeed new elements into its composition, which had learnt from

the Greek and from the Persian, but had maintained in spite of all

modifications its distinctive character. Side by side with Sâmarrâ stand

the ruins at Raḳḳah, where the mosque repaired by Nûr ed Dîn probably

preserves a plan which can be dated even earlier than the two mosques on

the Tigris; and finally the scheme and decoration of the Mesopotamian

mosque is reproduced with certain variations in the latter half of the

ninth century by Ibn Ṭûlûn, and the last descendant of the Babylonian

zigurrat is the minaret of his mosque at Cairo.[143]