ASSYRIA AND AFGHANISTAN--ANCIENT LAND ROUTES--POSSIBLE SEA ROUTES
With the building up of the vast Persian Empire, and the gradual
fostering of eastern colonies, and the consequent introduction of the
manners and methods of Western Asia into the highlands of Samarkand
and Badakshan, other nationalities were concerned besides Persians and
Greeks. Captive peoples from Syria had been deported to Assyria seven
centuries before Christ. The House of Israel had been broken up (for
Samaria had fallen in 721 B.C. before the victorious hosts of Sargon),
and some of the Israelitish families had been deported eastwards and
northwards to Northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. With the vitality of
their indestructible race it is at least possible that a remnant
survived as serfs in Assyria, preserving their own customs and
institutions--secretly if not openly--intermarrying, trading, and
money-making, yet still looking for the final restoration of Israel
until the final break-up of the Assyrian Kingdom. They were never
absolutely absorbed, and never forgot to recount their historic
pedigree to their children.
With the final overthrow of the Assyrian Kingdom we lose sight of the
tribes of Israel, who for more than a century had been mingled with
the peoples of Northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. At least history
holds no record of their further national existence. From time
immemorial in Asia it had been customary for the captives taken in war
to be transported bodily to another field for purposes of colonization
and public labour. When the world was more scantily peopled such
methods were natural and effectual; the increase of working power
gained thereby being of the utmost importance in days when enormous
irrigation canals were excavated, and bricks had to be fashioned for
the construction of walled cities.
The extent and magnificence of Assyrian building must have demanded an
immense supply of such manual labour for the purpose of brickmaking.
All the mighty works of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon were
literally "the work of men's hands." In Mesopotamia was captured
labour especially necessary. Stone was indeed available at Nineveh,
but the barrenness of the soil which stretches flatly from the rugged
hills of Kurdistan across Mesopotamia rendered the country
unproductive unless enormous works of irrigation were undertaken for
the distribution of water. Mesopotamia is a country of immense
possibilities, but the wealth of it is only for those who can
distribute the waters of its great rivers over the productive soil.
The yearly inundations of the Euphrates and Tigris are but sufficient
for the needs of a narrow strip of land on either side the rivers, and
the crops of the country undeveloped by canals can only support a
scattered and scanty population. Towards the south there is another
difficulty. The flat soil becomes water-logged and marshy and runs to
waste for want of drainage. There is no stone for building purposes
near Babylon. Approaching Babylon over the windy wastes of
scrub-powdered plain there is nothing to be seen in the shape of a
hill. Long, low, flat-topped mounds stretch athwart the horizon and
resolve themselves on nearer approach into deeply scarred and
weather-worn accretions of debris, or else they are banks of ancient
waterways winding through the steppe, the last remnants of a
stupendous system of irrigation. Then there breaks into view the
solitary erection which stands in the open plain overlooking a wide
vista of marsh and swamp to the west, which represents the ruins
called Birs Nimrud, the Ziggurat or temple which, in successive tiers
devoted to the powers of heaven, supported the shrine of Mercury. It
is by far the most conspicuous object in the Babylonian landscape;
huge, dilapidated, and unshapely, it mounts guard over a silent,
stagnant, swampy plain.
Now the remarkable feature in all these gigantic remains of antiquity
is that they are built of brick. In the wide expanse of Mesopotamia
plain around there is not a stone quarry to be found. Of Nineveh, we
learn from the masterly records of Xenophon that as he was leading the
surviving 10,000 Greeks in their retreat from the disastrous field of
Babylon back to the sunny Hellespont, some 200 years after the
destruction of Nineveh, he came upon a vast desert city on the Tigris.
The wall of it was 25 feet wide, 100 feet high, with a 20-foot
basement of stone. This was all that was left of Kalah, one of the
Assyrian capitals. A day's march farther north he came on another
deserted city with similar walls. These were the dry bones of Nineveh,
already forgotten and forsaken. Two centuries had in these early ages
been sufficient to blot out the memory of Assyrian greatness so
completely that Xenophon knew not of it, nor recognized the place
where his foot was treading. Barely seventy years ago was the memory
of them restored to man, and tokens of the richness and magnificence
of the art which embellished them first given to the world. The mounds
representing Nineveh and Babylon are some of them of enormous size.
The mound of Mugheir (the ancient Ur) is the ancient platform of an
Assyrian palace, which is faced with a wall 10 feet thick of red
kiln-dried bricks cemented with bitumen. Some of these platforms were
raised from 50 to 60 feet above the plain and protected by massive
stone masonry carried to a height exceeding that of the platform. But
the Babylonian mound of Birs Nimrud, which rises from the plain level
to the blue glazed masonry of the upper tier of the Ziggurat, is
altogether a brick construction. The debris of the many-coloured
bricks now forms a smooth slope for many feet from its base; but
above, where the square blocks of brickwork still hold together in
scattered disarray, you may still dig out a foot-square brick with the
title and designations of Nebuchadnezzar imprinted on its face. These
artificial mounds could only have been built at an enormous cost of
labour. The great mound of Koyunjik (the palace of Nineveh) covers an
area of 100 acres and reaches up 95 feet at its highest point. It has
been calculated that to heap up such a pile would "require the united
efforts of 10,000 men for twelve years, or 20,000 men for six years"
(Rawlinson, _Five Monarchies_), and then only the base of the palace
is reached; and there are many such mounds, for "it seems to have been
a point of honour with the Assyrian Kings that each should build a new
palace for himself" (Ragozin, _Chaldaea_).
Only conquering monarchs with whole nations as prisoners could have
compassed such results. This, indeed, was one of the great objectives
of war in these early times. It was the amassing of a great population
for manual labour and the creation of new centres of civilization and
trade. Thus it was that the peoples of Western Asia--Egyptians,
Israelites, Jews, Ph[oe]nicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and even
Greeks--were transported over vast distances by land, and a movement
given to the human race in that part of the world which has infinitely
complicated the science of ethnology. The peopling of Canada by the
French, of North America by the English, of Brazil by the Portuguese,
of Argentina and Chile by Spaniards and Italians, is perhaps a more
comprehensive process in the distribution of humanity and more
permanent in its character. But ancient compulsory movement, if not as
extensive as modern voluntary emigration, was at least wholesale, and
it led to the distribution of people in districts which would not
naturally have invited them. The first process in the consolidation of
a district, or satrapy, was the settlement of inhabitants, sometimes
in supercession of a displaced or annihilated people, sometimes as an
ethnic variety to the possessors of the soil. Tiglath Pileser was the
first Assyrian monarch to consolidate the Empire by its division into
satrapies. Henceforward the outlying provinces of the dominions were
convenient dumping places for such bodies of captives as were not
required for public works at home.
Nothing would be more natural than that Sargon should deport a portion
of the Israelitish nation to colonize his eastern possessions towards
India, just as Darius Hystaspes later employed the same process to
the same ends when he deported Greeks from the Lybian Barke to
Baktria. There is nothing more astonishing in the fact that we should
find a powerful people claiming descent from Israel in Northern
Afghanistan than that we should find another people claiming a Greek
origin in the Hindu Kush.
Nor was the importance of peopling waste lands and raising up new
nations out of well-planted colonies overlooked ten centuries before
Christ any more than it is now. Then it was a matter of transporting
them overland and on foot to the farthest eastern limits of these
great Asiatic empires. Always east or south they tramped, for nothing
was known of the geography of the North and West. Eastwards lay the
land of the sun, whence came the Indians who fought in the armies of
Darius, and where gold and ivory, apes and peacocks were found to fill
Ph[oe]nician ships. To-day it is different. The peopling of the world
with whites is chiefly a Western process. Emigrants go out in ships,
not as captives, but almost equally in compact bodies--the best of our
working men to Canada, and many of the best of our much-wanted
domestic servants to South Africa. It is a perpetual process in the
world's economy, and perhaps the chief factor in the world's history;
but in the old, old centuries before the Christian era it was
necessarily a land process, and the geographical distribution of the
land features determined the direction of the human tide. Some twenty
years before the fall of Samaria and the deportation of the ten tribes
of Israel, Tiglath Pileser had effected conquests in Asia which
carried him so far east that he probably touched the Indus. Why he
went no farther, or why Alexander subsequently left the greater part
of the Indian peninsula unexplored, is fully explicable on natural
grounds, even if other explanations were wanting.
The Indus valley would offer to the military explorers from the West
the first taste of the quality of the climate of the India of the
plains which they would encounter. The Indus valley in the hot weather
would possess little climatic attraction for the Western highlander.
Alexander's troops mutinied when they got far beyond the Indus. Any
other troops would mutiny under such conditions as governed their
outfit and their march. It is more than possible that the great
Assyrian conqueror before him encountered much the same difficulty. It
is clear, however, historically, that the Assyrian knew and trod the
way to Northern Afghanistan (or Baktria), and if we examine the map of
Asia with any care we shall see that there is no formidable barrier to
the passing of large bodies of people from Nineveh to Herat (Aria), or
from Herat to the Indus valley, until we reach the very gates of India
on the north-west frontier. Four centuries later than Tiglath Pileser
the battle of Arbela was fought to a finish between Alexander and
Darius (who possessed both Greek and Indian troops in his army) on a
field which is not so very far to the east of Nineveh, and which is
probably represented more or less accurately by the modern Persian
town of Erbil. The modern town may not be on the exact site of the
action, and we know that the ancient town was some sixty miles away
from the battlefield. However that may be, we learn that in the
general retreat of the Persians which followed the battle, Darius made
his way to Ecbatana, the ancient capital of the Medes. There he
remained for about a year, but hearing of Alexander's advance from
Persepolis in the spring of 330 B.C. he fled to the north-east, with a
view to taking refuge with his kinsman Bessos, who was then satrap of
Baktria. This gives us the clue to the general line of communication
between Northern Mesopotamia and Baktria (or Afghanistan) in ancient
days; and the twenty-five centuries which have rolled by since that
early period have done little to modify that line.
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century A.D. from the earliest
times with which we can come into contact through any human record,
this high-road (not the only one, but the chief one) must have been
trodden by the feet of thousands of weary pilgrims, captives,
emigrants, merchants, or fighting men--an intermittent tide of
humanity exceeding in volume any host known to modern days--bringing
East into touch with the West to an extent which we can hardly
appreciate. It may be said that the straightest road to Baktria did
not lie through Ecbatana. It did not; but independently of the fact
that Ecbatana was a city of great defensive capacity, and of reasons
both political and military which would have impelled Darius to take
that route, we shall find if we examine the latest Survey of India map
of Western Persia that the geographical distribution of hill and
valley make it the easiest, if not the shortest, route. The
configuration of Western Persia, like that of Makran and Southern
Baluchistan extending to our own north-west frontier, mainly consists
of long lines of narrow ridges curving in lines parallel to the coast,
rocky and mostly impassable to travellers crossing their difficult
ridge and furrow formation transversely, but presenting curiously easy
and open roads along the narrow lateral valleys. Ecbatana once stood
where the modern Hamadan now stands. The road from Arbil (or Erbil)
that carries most traffic follows this trough formation to Kermanshah
and then bends north-eastward to Hamadan. From Hamadan to Rhagai and
the Caspian gates, which was the route followed by Darius in his
flight from Ecbatana, the road was clearly coincident with the present
telegraph line to Tehran from Hamadan, which strikes into the great
post route eastward to Mashad and Herat, one of the straightest and
most uniformly level roads in all Asia. It must always have been so.
Remarkable physical changes have occurred in Asia during these
twenty-five centuries, but nothing to alter the relative disposition
of mountain and plain in this part of Persia, or to change the general
character of its ancient highway. All this part of Persia was under
the dominion of the Assyrian king when the tribes of Israel left Syria
for Armenia. He had but recently traversed the road to India, and he
knew the richness of Baktria (of Afghan Turkistan and Badakshan) and
could estimate what a colony might become in these eastern fields.
What more natural than that he should draft some of his captives
eastward to the land of promise? There is not an important tribe of
people in all that hinterland of India that has not been drafted in
from somewhere. There is not a people left in India, for that matter,
that can safely call themselves indigenous. From Persia and Media,
from Aria and Skythia, from Greece and Arabia, from Syria and
Mesopotamia they have come, and their coming can generally be traced
historically, and their traditions of origin proved to be true. But
there is one important people (of whom there is much more to be said)
who call themselves Ben-i-Israel, who claim a descent from Kish, who
have adopted a strange mixture of Mosaic law and Hindu ordinance in
their moral code, who (some sections at least) keep a feast which
strangely accords with the Passover, who hate the Yahudi (Jew) with a
traditional hatred, and for whom no one has yet been able to suggest
any other origin than the one they claim, and claim with determined
force; and these people rule Afghanistan. It may be that they have
justification for their traditions, even as others have; they may yet
be proved to stand in the same relationship to the scattered remnants
of Israel as some of the Kafir inhabitants of Northern Afghanistan can
be shown to hold to the Greeks of pre-Alexandrian days. It is
difficult to account for the name Afghan: it has been said that it is
but the Armenian word Aghvan (Mountaineer). If this is so, it at once
indicates a connection between the modern Afghan and the Syrian
captives of Armenia.
But whilst "men in nations" were thus traversing the highlands of
Persia from Mesopotamia to Northern Afghanistan by highways so ancient
that they may be regarded almost as geographical fixtures as
everlasting as the hills, we do not find much evidence of traffic with
the Central Asian States north of the Oxus.
Early military excursions into the land of the Skyths were more for
the purpose of dealing with the predatory habits of these warlike
tribes, who afterwards peopled half of Europe as well as India, than
of promoting either trade or geographical inquiry; and it was the
route which led to Northern Afghanistan and Baktria through Northern
Persia which was most attractive from its general accessibility and
promise of profit. It was this way that Northern Kashmir and the
gold-fields of Tibet were touched. The Indian gold which formed so
large a part of the Persian revenues in the time of Darius undoubtedly
came from Northern India and Tibet. Old as are the workings of the
Wynaad gold-fields in the west, and Kolar in the east, of the
peninsula, it is unlikely that either of these sources was known to
Persia.
The more direct routes to India from Ecbatana, passing through Central
Persia _via_ Kashan, Yezd, and Kirman, terminated on the Helmund or in
Makran, and there is no evidence that the mountain system which faces
the Indus was ever crossed by invading Persian hosts. There was,
indeed, a tradition in Alexander's time that an attempt had been made
to traverse Makran and that it had failed. This, says Arrian, was one
of the reasons why Alexander obstinately chose that route on his
retirement from India. In spite, however, of the geographical
difficulties which render it improbable that the hosts of Tiglath
Pileser (who could have dealt with the Skythians of the north readily
enough) ever broke across the north-western gateways of India's
mountain borderland, there was undoubtedly a close connection between
Assyria and India of which the evidence is still with us.
Throughout the golden age of the Second Empire of Assyria, after the
subjugation of Babylon and the consolidation of the Empire by Tiglath
Pileser, during the reigns of Sargon and Senacherib (who fought the
first Assyrian naval fight), Esar Haddon (who destroyed Sidon and
removed the inhabitants) and Assur-bani-pal (Sardanapalus), to the
final overthrow of Assyria by Babylon in 625 B.C., when the star of
Nebuchadnezzar arose on the southern horizon, Assyria held the supreme
command of Eastern commerce, and Nineveh dictated the cannons of art
to the world. No event more profoundly affected the commerce of Asia
than the destruction of Sidon and the bodily transfer of its
commercial inhabitants to Assyria. This was the age of Assyrian art,
of literature, and of architecture; Assyrian culture realized its
culminating point in the reign of Assur-bani-pal, when the library at
Nineveh far surpassed any library that the world had ever seen. It was
then that intercourse between Assyria and India became unbroken and
intimate. Then public works of the largest dimensions were undertaken,
and colonies formed for the purpose of developing the riches of the
newly acquired lands in the East. Assyrian art found its way to India,
and the affinity between Assyrian and Indian art is directly traceable
still in spite of the impress subsequently effected by Greece and
Rome.
The carpets that are spread on the floors of every Anglo-Indian home
and which, as Turkish, Persian, Central Asian, or Indian, are to be
found in every carpet shop in London, usually possess in the
intricacies of their pattern some trace of ancient Assyrian art. As
Sir George Birdwood has long ago pointed out, general similarities
between Assyrian and Indian design in carpet patterns may possibly be
due to a common Turanian origin, pre-Semitic and pre-Aryan; but there
are details of architectural plan in the Southern Indian temples
which, quite as much as the reproduction of the ancient Assyrian "knop
and flower" in its infinite variety of form (all expressing more or
less conventionally the cone and the lotus of the original idea),
testify to an infinitely old art affinity, and at the same time
witness to the wonderful vitality of intelligent design.
The tree of life so largely interwoven into Eastern fabrics was the
"Asherah" or "grove" sacred to Asshur the supreme god of the
Assyrians, the Lord and Giver of life; and it appears to have been the
development of the "Hom" or lotus, which, although it is a Kashmir
valley plant, is always admirably rendered in Assyrian sculpture.
Eventually the date palm took the place of the Hom in the Euphrates
valley, just as the vine replaced it in Asia Minor and Greece. In
Central Asian rugs we find the cone replaced by the pomegranate, and
the tree of life becomes a pomegranate tree. There is too much
intricacy in such similarity of ornamental detail between Assyrian and
Indian art for the result to have been merely developments from a
common pre-historic stock along separate lines. They are clearly
imitations one of the other, and the similarity is but another link in
the chain of evidence which proves that the highways of Asia
connecting Assyria with India through Persia were well-trodden ways
seven centuries at least before Christ, even if the sea route from the
Red Sea and Euphrates had not then reached the Indus and western coast
of India.
Whilst all historical evidence points to the Tehran-Mashad route as
the great highway which linked Mesopotamia with Baktria in past ages,
there are certain curious little indications that the southern road
through Persia, viz. Yezd and Kirman, was also well known, for it is a
remarkable fact (which may be taken for what it is worth) that it is
in the villages and bazaars of Sind that the potters may be found
whose conservative souls delight in the reproduction of a class of
ornamental decoration which most clearly indicates an Assyrian origin.
The direct route to Sind from Mesopotamia is not by way of Herat. It
is (as will be subsequently explained) _via_ Kirman and Makran, but
there is absolutely no historical evidence to support the suggestion
that this was a route utilized by the Assyrians; and there is, on the
other hand, Arrian's statement that roads through Makran were unknown
or but legendary.
It is impossible, however, to ignore the fact that the sea route to
North-western India was utilized in very ancient times; and although
its connection with the northern landward gates of India may appear to
be rather obscure, that connection is a matter which actually concerns
us rather nearly in the present day. For it is by this ancient sea
route that Persia and Baluchistan, Seistan and Afghanistan derive
those supplies of small arms and ammunition which are abundant in
those countries, but which never pass through India. Muskat is the
chief depot for distribution, and the Persian ports of Bandar Abbas,
Jask, or Pasni on the Makran coast are utilized as ports for the
interior, leading by routes which are quite sufficiently good for
caravan traffic towards the point where Afghan territory meets that of
Persia and Baluchistan just south of Seistan. Once in Seistan they are
well behind the passes which split our nearer line of defence in the
trans-Indus hills. Even our command of the sea fails to suppress this
traffic, which has led to such a general distribution of arms of
precision (chiefly of German manufacture), that these countries may
fairly claim to be able to arm their whole population. No recent
researches in the Persian Gulf or on the Persian coast have added much
to the sum of our knowledge respecting the early navigation of these
Eastern seas, but there can be no question as to its immense
antiquity. The Ph[oe]nician settler in Syria and Mesopotamia has been
traced back to his primeval home in the Bahrein Islands, which, if
Herodotus is correct in his estimated date for the founding of Tyre
(2756 years B.C.), takes us back to very early times indeed for the
coast navigation of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Seas. Hiram, King
of Tyre, could look back through long ages to the days when his
Ph[oe]nician forefathers started their well-packed vessels (the
Ph[oe]nicians were famous for their skill in stowing cargo) to crawl
along the coasts of Makran and Western India for the purpose of
acquiring those stores of spices and gold which first made commerce
profitable, or else to make their way westward, guided by the
headlands and shore outlines of Southern Arabia, to gather the riches
from African fields. Makran is full of strange relics of immense age
for which none can account. Since Egyptology has become a recognized
science, who will lay the foundations of such a science for Southern
Arabia and Makran? When will some one arise with the wisdom and the
leisure to write of the power of ancient Arabia, and to trace the
impressions left on the whole world of commerce, of art, of
architecture, and literature by the ancient races who hailed from the
South?
We cannot tell when the first sea-borne trade passed to and fro
between India and the Erythrean Sea, a creeping, slow-moving trade
making the best shift possible of wind and tide, and knowing no guide
but the pole star of that period, and the rocky headlands and islands
of the Makran coast. Many of the ancient islands exist no more, but
the coast is a peculiarly well-marked one for the mariner still.
Probably the coast trade was earlier than the overland caravan
traffic; but the latter was certainly co-existent with the Assyrian
monarchy when Persia and Central Asia lay at the feet of the conqueror
Tiglath Pileser.