CHAPTER XI

ALONG THE TRADE ROUTES OF THE NEAR EAST

_Beautiful old stories,_ _Tales of angels, fairy legends,_ _Stilly histories of martyrs,_ _Festal songs and words of wisdom;_ _Hyperboles, most quaint it may be,_ _Yet replete with strength, and fire,_ _And faith--how they gleam,_ _And glow and glitter!_ HEINE.

Apart from its imposing monuments of the storied past, few things in the Near East are of greater interest or suggest more subjects for reflection to the serious traveler than do its trade routes which, for the most part, follow the same course as they did when Abraham fared forth from Ur of the Chaldees into the land of Canaan and when the messengers of the Great King sped along the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis.

Now as then the roadways follow the lines of least resistance. But, owing to the peculiar topographical conditions of many parts of the Near East, the traveler’s choice of direction is necessarily limited. In the broad and inhospitable desert his course will necessarily depend on the location of the few existing springs and wells and wadis, while in the mountainous regions it will, in great measure, be governed by a few and widely-separated passes. In many cases, too, where broad and deep rivers are to be crossed, the direction taken, especially during the season of rains and floods, will vary with the condition of often-changing and frequently treacherous fords.

The celebrated Royal Road, of which Herodotus gives so graphic an account, is a case in point. The student of ancient history is surprised when he first observes its circuitous course between the one-time capital of Persia and the famous emporium of Crœsus, but the reason of it becomes evident when he learns something of the character of the country through which it passed. He then discovers that the prehistoric travelers--long centuries before the days of Cyrus and Darius and Xerxes--who first selected this long and roundabout route between the plains of Mesopotamia and the shore of the Ægean--a route which took them over high mountains and pitiless deserts and dangerous morasses--did simply what a modern railroad engineer would do under similar circumstances--chose for their venturesome journey the line of least resistance.[263]

It must, however, here be observed that the word “road,” as used in the Orient, rarely has the same meaning which we attach to the term. There a road is rarely anything more than the line of route marked by the footprints of travelers or beasts of burden. Even the Royal Highway between Susa and Sardis was nothing more than this. It was only when the Romans--the great road builders of antiquity--became masters of western Asia that its leading cities were connected by roads in our conception of the word. Now, however, only traces of these splendid highways constructed by the Cæsars exist, and roads available for wheeled vehicles are still almost as rare in most parts of the Near East as they were in the time of Tigranes or Tiglath-Pileser.

But, although the great majority of eastern roads have never felt a spade or pick-ax, and are nothing more than evanescent footprints in spongy swamp or shifting sand, nevertheless there hangs over most of them an air of legend and romance and historic association which stimulates the mind of the traveler in a preëminent degree and affords as much food for thought as he can find in any of the great highways of the more civilized regions of the modern world.

We had wished to go from Tarsus to Antakia, formerly the capital of Syria, which in the days of its greatest splendor was known as “Antioch the Beautiful,” “The Crown of the East,” “The Metropolis and Eye of Christendom.” Here the followers of Christ were first called Christians and here for a long time was one of the most influential seats of the Christian Church. For generations it ranked next to Rome and Alexandria as the most important emporium in the great empire of the Cæsars. During a long period it was also the western terminus of the great trade route over which was borne

_The wealth of Ormus and of Ind_

for distribution among the marts of Greece and Rome. But lack of time prevented us from visiting the scattered remains of this once famous city and we perforce boarded a train on the Bagdad Railway and started for Aleppo, whose history is in some respects scarcely less eventful than that of the erstwhile capital of the Seleucids.

We left the Cilician Plain by way of the Bagdad Railroad, which took us over several well-constructed steel bridges and through a number of tunnels in the Amanus Range. One of these tunnels, said to be the longest in Turkey, is more than three miles in length. The roadbed, bridges, tunnels, stations, and rolling stock of this noted line compare favorably with those of the best railways in Europe and show, better than words, what great trade development in the Near East its projectors had in contemplation when they put their millions in the Bagdad Railroad. Will they ever receive any return for their stupendous investment? And, if so, when? Echo asks “When”?

The scenery along the railroad in the Amanus Range and in the plain on the way to Aleppo is much like that of the Taurus Mountains and of Cilicia Campestris, where one can truly say with the poet Bryant

_There is a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower,_ _And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea._

Everywhere one comes upon places that are famous in history, both sacred and profane. Everywhere one passes through lands that during thousands of years, witnessed the devastations of Assyrians and Hittites, Persians and Greeks, Romans and Parthians, Mongols and Saracens and Turks. And everywhere are ruins of Christian temples and monasteries which recall the glories of the early Church, the triumphs of her martyrs, and which serve as silent reminders of the days when Roman governors persecuted the followers of the Crucified because they were regarded as dangerous to the Empire and when Sassanian satraps demanded their blood on the ground that they were the foes of the religion of Zoroaster. Of many of these houses of worship but little now remains except a few crumbling arches or disintegrating pillars and doorways. Of others all that is left is buried under a brush-covered tell where a half-famished goat is seeking a little sustenance or whence a Turkoman shepherd is watching his nearby flock.

Notwithstanding, however, the fact that most of the churches and monasteries have long ceased to be more than heaps of dusty rubbish, there are still a few edifices of the long ago in a comparatively good state of preservation. Among these one of the most notable is that of Kal’at Sim’an to the northwest of Aleppo and but a short distance from the railway. Kal’at Sim’an--which is the Arabic for the Castle of Simon--is a monastery church which dates from the fifth century and is unquestionably the most admirable group of ruins in northern Syria. According to tradition this magnificent _mandra_, or monastery, was erected about the pillar on which the noted St. Simeon Stylites spent thirty-six years of his life and where, by his extraordinary austerities and superior holiness of life, he was the edification of countless thousands from far and near. Among these were the Emperor Theodosius II and his consort, the Empress Eudocia, as well as other distinguished personages of the Byzantine capital.

It may here be remarked that the Simeon Stylites here referred to was not--as is often thought--unique in his strange mode of life. He was but the first of the long line of stylitæ, or pillar saints, whose peculiar asceticism and undoubted sanctity made so deep an impression on their pleasure-loving contemporaries not only in Asia but in Europe as well.

But more extraordinary than the ruins of churches and monasteries which greet the traveler in every part of the Levant, are the imposing monuments which are due to the Crusaders and which are found in surprising numbers from southern Palestine to northern Mesopotamia. Crowning precipice-encircled heights and protecting strategic passes, they are marvels of architectural beauty and massive grandeur. Those,

## particularly, which belonged to the great Military Orders vie in

vastness and solidity with the great strongholds which are the glory of the Rhine and the Danube. They were not only highly fortified strongholds with bastions, barbicans, and donjons which served as places of refuge to the surrounding population in times of stress and danger, but were also lordly palaces with spacious halls and noble chapels and chapter houses worthy of the great castles of France and England.

No less remarkable than the massiveness and grandeur of these venerable ruins are the charming locations which they occupy. And then the picturesque names which were given them by their Frankish builders! Among them were such appellations as Blanchegarde, Chateau Pelerin, La Pierre du Desert, and Castle Belvoir, to the last of which the Arabs gave even a more poetical name when they called it Kokab el-Hawa--Star of the Air. Built on the commanding flanks of snow-capped Hermon and cedar-famed Lebanon these lordly strongholds of the Crusaders and of the Knightly Orders of the mediæval times have about them all the glamour and chivalry and romance which envelope the most noted castles of the Tyrolean Alps or the Tuscan Apennines. As I contemplated these fascinating ruins and the superb sites which they so adorn and recalled the stirring scenes which they witnessed and that too, in one of the most romantic epochs of the world, I often wondered that they had not more frequently supplied themes for the poet and the novelist. Tasso in his _Jerusalem Delivered_ gives us some idea of the marvelous richness of material here awaiting the writer of fiction no less than the literary artist in the domain of sober history and archæology. Where, indeed, could a true romanticist find better locations for the plots of his stories than in the wonderful old castles of Kal’at el-Hosn, Kal’at-es-Subebeh, or Burj Safita--grandiose yet fairylike in their lofty aeries--which have been the houses of the bravest Knights who have ever couched a lance and which, despite their present dilapidated condition, for centuries have been the admiration of travelers from all parts of the world. And what land more readily lends itself to tales of romance than that in which are found such famous places as Antioch and Carmel, Tyre and Ascalon and Jerusalem--places which witnessed the most brilliant exploits of the Crusaders and whose names have so long been identified with the most glorious names of Christian chivalry?

It is a long step from the superb monuments of the Crusades to the highly revered tekkehs or mezars which abound in all Moslem countries. In the Near East they are seen everywhere--along the public highway, in the most crowded quarters of large cities and in almost deserted sections of the country. These tekkehs, which frequently serve the purpose of both tombs and shrines, are interesting for two reasons, both of which show how certain religious practices of modern Islam are totally at variance with the teachings of the Koran and with the traditional doctrines of the Prophet.

According to strict Moslem law, the erection of tombs and monuments over the graves of the followers of Islam is strictly forbidden. The orders of the Prophet, as given in the “Traditions,” are “to destroy all pictures and images and not to leave a single lofty tomb without lowering it to within a span from the ground.”[264] And yet, notwithstanding this ordinance which the reforming Wahabis have strenuously endeavored to enforce, the Mohammedans are noted for the magnificent monuments which they have erected to the memory of their distinguished dead. Many of their mosque tombs are the most gorgeous mortuary monuments in existence.

But building tombs over the graves of the dead, contrary as it is to the spirit of Islam, is far less reprehensible than making them shrines or places of pilgrimage. “May Allah’s wrath,” said Mohammed, “fall heavy upon the people who make the tombs of their prophets places of prayer.” This malediction seems, however, to have fallen upon deaf ears for, as Hurgronje declares:

Almost every Moslem village has its patron saint; every country has its national saints; every province of human life has its own human rulers who are intermediate between the Creator and common mortals. In no other particular has Islam more fully accommodated itself to the religions it supplanted. The popular practice was, to a great extent, favored by the theory of the intercession of the pious dead, of whose friendly assistance people might assure themselves by doing good deeds in their names and to their eternal advantage.[265]

In Bagdad, the “City of the Saints,” the number of shrines is

## particularly large. They are frequented by pilgrims from all parts,

who prostrate themselves before the tombs of the saints to whose shrines they often make liberal offerings and where the more devout pray and chant hymns for hours at a time. “The Moslem,” as Kuenen tells us, “seeks what his faith withholds from him and seeks it where the authority which he himself recognized forbids him to look for it.”[266]

According to a widespread opinion the bodies of the departed Moslem saints are not supposed to undergo corruption. For it is a common belief, confirmed by countless traditions, that when the tombs of saints and martyrs are accidentally opened their remains have the appearance of being freshly buried: “their faces are blooming, their eyes are bright and blood would issue from their bodies, if wounded.”[267]

Not only is the Moslem saint not dead, in our acceptation of the term, but his tomb is his house in which he continues to live and in which he receives the petitions of those who have recourse to him in their difficulties. And yet more. According to the implicit belief of his devotees he can leave his tomb, go on long journeys and return again. Firmly believing in a great invisible organization of saints and in the picturesque al-Khader, who is reputed to wander continuously through the lands of Islam performing everywhere the will of Allah, and in the countless deceased but still very active and ubiquitous saints, the life of the pious Mussulman is indeed, as has truly been observed “hedged around everywhere by the Unseen.”

Our journey from Tarsus to Aleppo was a rarely enjoyable one. At every turn of the road we saw something of unique historic or legendary interest. Everything--mountain crags, swirling rivers, foaming torrents, moss-covered castles, crumbling churches, that would have enraptured a Hobbema or a Ruysdael--held so much of glamour and romance that we seemed all the while to be traveling in a veritable fairyland. High above the dark gray crest of Amanus were motionless masses of bright, cumulus clouds which, under some magic influence seemingly, had grouped themselves into the forms of Norman donjons and Saracen strongholds. And hovering near these fantastic shapes, fashioned from the mountain vapor, was the figure of the giant rock of eastern fable. “Verily,” I said to my companion, “we are in the land of the jinn and they are here giving us an exhibition of their power over inanimate nature.” Having the authority of Mohammed for their belief in these supernatural beings of smokeless fire, is it surprising to find the untutored Mussulman ascribing to their agency what he cannot conceive as being done by human means? It is the jinn “riding in the whirlwind,” that cause, he firmly believes, the gyrating pillars of sand to sweep over the desert and the portentous waterspouts to rise from the troubled sea, as it is the jinn that transform clouds into countless forms of animate and inanimate nature, which oriental fancy so readily discerns in a cloud-dappled sky. Should one then be surprised at the exquisite pleasure which the wonder-loving followers of the Prophet find in the recital of the famous stories of “A Thousand Nights and a Night”--stories in which the marvelous is so conspicuous and in which the jinn play so important a rôle?

While traveling this once densely populated region, we recalled a saying of the Arabs that in the triangle comprised between Hama, Antioch, and Aleppo are found the remains of no fewer than three hundred and sixty-five cities. This statement is, doubtless, an exaggeration but we were willing to accept the estimate of Reclus that there are within this area “over a hundred Christian towns dating from the fourth to the seventh century and still almost intact.”[268]

Then there are the countless dome-covered tekkehs which stud the landscape--each with a Kiblah and frequently with a tomb and lighted lamp. Around many of them we note small groups of women who have, presumably, come to make offerings of oil and fruit and coin to the guardian and to implore the aid, if not the intercession, of the local saint.

Besides these ever-interesting objects there are humble homes of the country folk, every one of which rejoices in its fig, plaintain, or mulberry tree. Frequently the scene is sprinkled with nomad tents and enlivened by flocks and herds which dot the green expanse, and by long lines of swaying camels which slowly bear their heavy burdens along the long-neglected highway, still continuing their service of thousands of years, notwithstanding the arrival of their great competitor--the iron horse. The increasing demands of trade and the need of rapid communication make the construction of railways in Asia as necessary as in other parts of the world, but the lover of the picturesque will hope that the time will never come when the locomotive will entirely displace the camel, which seems to be an essential feature in every eastern landscape. This thought comes to me with special insistence as the shriek of the railway whistle announces our arrival at Aleppo, where a train of cars--in place of a caravan of camels--appears to be as incongruous as at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem.

While in Aleppo we were the fortunate guests of the Franciscan friars, the best and most gentle of hosts. They received us with the same cordial hospitality which they had so graciously extended to me in Egypt and the Holy Land a third of a century before. Thanks to their long residence in Aleppo and their thorough knowledge of the manners and customs of its people, they enabled me to see more of the Aleppines during my short sojourn among them than would otherwise have been possible. I shall never forget the extreme kindness of the courteous and learned Padre Agostino, whose knowledge of everything in and about Aleppo continually reminded me of his learned confrère, Frère Lieven de Hamme, who was my constant guide and friend during the happy weeks I spent many years before in the holy city of Jerusalem and its environs.

There is, however, a great difference between the two cities. Jerusalem is a city of sacred monuments and holy memories while Aleppo is noted as Syria’s busiest interior mart. At present its population is about one hundred and thirty thousand but in the heyday of its prosperity it counted no fewer than three hundred thousand souls. It was then the great _entrepôt_ of trade between the Orient and the Occident. Then great caravans brought silks from China, carpets and tapestry from Persia, spices, drugs, pearls, and precious stones from India and the Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago. It was then headquarters for a large colony of Venetian, Dutch, French, and English merchants who here exchanged the products of the West for the prized merchandise of the East.

Pietro della Valle, the distinguished Roman traveler who visited Aleppo in 616, was immensely impressed by the magnitude of its commercial transactions. So great was the amount of money involved that, he says, it was never counted but always weighed in boxes. And no one, he assures us, ever spoke of sales or purchases that did not amount to sums which ranged, at the lowest, from forty to a hundred thousand scudi.[269]

For a long time Aleppo was one of the chief trade centers in the East of the Levant and East India companies. During the period of their greatest prosperity the amount of business transacted here was enormous. For, in addition to these two great organizations, the British Factory here counted no fewer than eighty firms, besides which all the leading countries of Europe had here their factories or organizations of factors or agents for the purpose of securing their share of the great trade of the Orient.

At that time a great part of the commerce of the Far East came to Aleppo by way of Basra and Bagdad. Then the population of Basra exceeded two hundred thousand whereas it does not now count more than one-fourth of that number. The number of Bagdad’s inhabitants has diminished in proportion. The great decrease in the commercial importance of these two cities was partly due to war and pestilence. But the great discovery by Vasco da Gama of an all-sea route between the West and the East and the opening of the Suez Canal reduced the overland traffic between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf to a small fraction of what it was in the palmy days of the great European factories of Aleppo, Basra, and Bagdad. According to the plans of its projectors, the Bagdad Railway is to restore this overland trade to its former magnitude and even greatly add to its amount and value.

It is difficult for the modern traveler as he passes along the present overland routes between Aleppo and Basra to form any true conception of the stupendous scale on which the old caravan trade between the two emporia was formerly conducted. Although the distance between the two places is nearly eight hundred miles and most of the road passes through the inhospitable Syrian and Arabian deserts and the difficulties to be encountered, at the time of which we are speaking, were as grave as they were manifold, the number of merchants and capitalists who ventured fortune and life in this forbidding and dangerous part of the world seems almost incredible. And the magnitude of the caravans and the value of the merchandise they transported in a single journey was yet more astonishing.

In the caravan with which Della Valle traveled there were, he informs us,[270] fifteen hundred persons and forty or more large tents. That of the celebrated French traveler, Tavernier, counted six hundred camels and four hundred men. When in 1745 the Englishman, William Beawes, crossed the desert there were two thousand camels! But this was far less than the number that was in the caravan of his countryman, John Eldred, when a century and a half earlier he made the journey from Bagdad to Aleppo with four thousand camels “laden with spices and other rich merchandise.” But the largest of these caravans was much smaller than the one which in 1750 went from Bagdad to Aleppo and which was composed of five thousand camels and eleven hundred men. When trade between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean was most brisk, caravans of from two to five thousand camels crossed the desert twice a year between Aleppo and Bagdad. The Dutch traveler, John Huyghen Van Linschoten, attributes the great prosperity of Ormuz to the fact that it was located on the great trade route to India.[271]

The value of the merchandise carried by these caravans was often very great. Thus we are told of the caravan of an English trader, one Carmichael, which consisted of thirty mules, fifty horses, and twelve hundred camels, “six hundred of which were laden with merchandise valuing nearly 300,000 pounds. The caravans that carried on the trade between Aleppo and Mocha were,” in the words of a writer of the time, “esteemed indifferently rich if they carry less than two million dollars or one hundred thousand ducats of gold either Hungarian, Venetian, or Moorish.”

The foregoing statements are illuminating in the information supplied respecting the size of the caravans and the amount of merchandise they transported, but they give us no idea of the great fatigues and dangers that were incurred in the long journeys through the cheerless deserts which were inhabited for the most part by hostile and plunder-seeking Bedouins. The Venetian traveler, Cæsar Frederick, throws some light on the character of the country which the caravans had to traverse. Returning in 1581 from his long wanderings of eighteen years in India and beyond he tells us that:

From Babilon to Aleppo is forty days’ journey, in which they make thirty-six days over the Wilderness, in which thirty-six days they neither see houses, trees nor people that inhabit it, but only a plaine and no signe of any way in the world.... I say in thirty-six dayes we passe over the wildernesse. For when we depart from Babilon two dayes wee passe by villages inhabited until we have passed the river Euphrates. And then within two dayes of Aleppo we have villages inhabited.[272]

As a precaution against attacks by Arab robbers, Pietro della Valle informs us that it was always necessary to post at night a strong guard around the caravan. “During the entire night this guard runs around the camp shouting--as is their custom--to their friends to be on the alert and their enemies to keep away.”[273] How conducive to sleep was all this to the anxious and way-worn members of the caravan!

But

_While beasts and men together o’er the plain_ _Moved on--a mighty caravan of pain_,

they were not entirely cut off from the rest of the world. Although it was long generations before the invention of the telegraph and the telephone, they were able to keep up communication with their friends by means of homing pigeons of which the caravan bashis released one every other day of the journey through the desert. By means of these pigeons, which had been used in the East since the days of the Crusades, the leaders of caravans, Linschoten records, were able to keep up regular communication not only with Bagdad, Basra, and Aleppo but also with far distant Constantinople.

Although the great camel trains which were formerly so indispensable to the merchant of the Levant have long given place to the lines of steamships that now connect the East and the West by way of the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope, the Syrian and Arabian deserts still witness as large caravans as were ever known in the most flourishing period of overland traffic between Aleppo and Bagdad. Such caravans are now, however, but little used for the purpose of commerce but rather for transporting the countless thousands of pious pilgrims who annually visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Doughty in his _Travels in Arabia Deserta_ gives us a most picturesque description of a pilgrim caravan which he was allowed to accompany over what he calls “the old gold and frankincense caravan path to Arabia the Happy.” This, he declares, “is the most considerable desert caravan in the Eastern World.” The caravan with which he journeyed was, he tells us, composed of “a slow-footed multitude” of six thousand persons, ten thousand camels, mules, hackneys, asses, and dromedaries, nearly two miles long with a breadth in the desert of about one hundred yards.[274]

During the last few years, however, the Hedjaz Railroad has in great measure taken the place of the large pilgrim caravans that formerly went from Syria to the two sacred cities of Arabia. The northern terminus of this road is at Aleppo. Although it is planned to extend it to Mecca, it has so far been completed only to Medina. Its construction is chiefly due to the late Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, who saw in it a power-means of furthering the projects of Pan-Islamism. The Shah of Persia, the Khedive of Egypt, and the Sherif and Ulema of Mecca cordially joined in this great enterprise. Contribution from rich and poor towards the work came in from all parts of the Moslem world. Lucknow contributed $140,000; Madras and Rangoon, $300,000; while an Indian Prince spent no less than $200,000 on the Medina station alone. No fewer than seven thousand soldiers were engaged in the construction of this railway which was to combine the two most holy cities of the Mohammedan world more closely to the Osmanli Caliphate than ever before and which was to further the cause of Pan-Islamism more effectively than could anything else whatever.

One feature of the Hedjaz Railway trains, which strongly appeals to the devout pilgrims, is its prayer car. For them it is virtually a mosque on wheels. But the majority of the pilgrims appreciate the road still more because it enables them to reach the sacred cities of their heart’s desire without incurring the many fatigues and dangers that are incident to the slow-moving caravans. For what with the plague, the cholera, the treacherous Bedouins, and the exposure to the withering desert sun the mortality of the pilgrims to Mecca is enormous.

To the observant traveler in the East few things are more interesting than to contemplate the pilgrim caravan as it

_Winds slowly in one line interminable_ _Of camel after camel_,

or is more suggestive of serious thoughts regarding Moslem belief and practice.

Many there are who account for the wide spread of Islam, which now numbers two hundred and fifty million adherents, by declaring that it is an easy and sensual religion. But even good Padre Marracci, who was one of the first to make an exhaustive study of the religion of Mohammed, saw that this explanation was not satisfactory.[275] The obligation incumbent on every Mussulman to give liberal alms--which is imposed both by the Koran and by tradition; to observe the strict and very trying fast of Ramadan,--abstaining during the day from water and tobacco even though engaged in the severest kinds of manual labor, and to make at least once during his lifetime the arduous and perilous pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, would seem rather to act as an effective deterrent to the acceptance of the religion of the Prophet.

To those who account for the success of Islam on the theory that “it attracts by pandering to the self-indulgence of men,” Voltaire addresses the pertinent question:

Were there imposed upon you a law that you should neither eat nor drink from four in the morning until ten at night through the whole month of July; ... that you should abstain from wine and gaming under penalty of damnation; that you should make a pilgrimage across burning deserts; that you should bestow at least two and a half _per cent_ of your revenue on the poor; and that having been accustomed to eighteen wives, you should suddenly be limited to four--would you call this a sensual religion?[276]

Those who lay such stress on self-indulgence as a factor in the success of Mohammedanism forget that “a motive of sensuality could never, of itself, make the fortune of a religion.” They forget what a strong appeal the very simplicity of the Moslem creed makes to a man naturally religious. For, reduced to its simplest expression, Mohammedanism embraces but two fundamental dogmas--belief in God and belief in a future life. “A creed so precise, so stripped of all theological complexities and consequently so accessible to the ordinary understanding, might be expected to possess and does indeed possess a marvelous power of winning its way into the consciences of men.” They forget that proselytism is to every Mussulman in a certain measure innate; that every follower of Mohammed is by nature a missionary; that in the pursuit of this avocation he spares neither labor nor expense; that so intense is his conviction that one is forced to “notice and admire the kind of chivalrous pride which the average Mohammedan takes in his faith.”[277]

Nor is this all that will impress the candid observer. Leaving out of consideration the lives of the more unworthy followers of Mohammed, he will find much in Islam that he is forced to respect and admire. Whatever he may think of Moslem teaching, he cannot help admire the devotion, the zeal, the earnestness, the spirit of sacrifice which characterize so large a number of Mussulmans. There are, for instance, no poorhouses among them, for the indigent are abundantly provided for otherwise.[278]

But more remarkable still is the importance which they attach to prayer and the fidelity with which they, five times a day, recite the orisons prescribed by their religion. Mohammed is said to have called prayer the key to Paradise and to have declared it to be of more value in the eyes of Allah than fasting, almsgiving, or a pilgrimage to Mecca. When we see his followers regularly saying their daily prayers wherever they may be, even before satisfying their cravings for much needed food and drink, we must conclude that they take the reputed saying of their Prophet very much to heart and have no doubt of its supreme moment and efficacy.[279]

It is because of their profound religious earnestness, their abiding charity towards the poor and suffering and their many natural virtues that those who know them best have such good reports to give of the Mohammedans,[280] and would fain see them better known among our western people, and will welcome the day when the prejudices and animosities of ages shall disappear and when every soul-loving Christian shall constitute himself a missionary to assist the followers of Islam towards becoming members of the One Fold and finding peace and happiness under the One Shepherd.

Outside of her people, I can truthfully say with Della Valle that I found very little in Aleppo that was specially _riguardevole_--noteworthy. But the people, especially those I was able to visit in their homes, were most charming. And of never-failing interest were the representatives of many lands whom I met in the streets and mosques and bazaars. In the last named places were Asiatics and Africans of every race and sect and costume, “with their expressive hands, with henna-tinted nails, with narrow cunning wrists”--wild Bedouins, lordly Turks, grim-visaged Kurds and Turkomans, handsome and athletic Persians and Circassians, artful Greeks, astute Armenians,[281] crafty Jews--“all with eyes glittering with the yellow fires of greed” and all, as in the days of the city’s former commercial prosperity, bent on trade but in transactions far more limited.

I found an additional interest here in the reflection that Aleppo is on the linguistic frontier--extending from Alexandretta to Biredjik on the Euphrates--which separate the peoples of the flowery Arabic speech from those of the more laconic but no less vigorous Turkish. South of this line Turkish ceases to be heard except in the offices of the civil and military administrations of the Ottoman government.

The Syrians, like the Arabs, are Semites, but of their ancient tongue, the Aramaic, little now remains except a sort of dialect which is now confined to only a few villages on the eastern declivities of the Anti-Libanus.[282] Syriac, it is true, is still the liturgical tongue of the Maronites and Jacobites as it was for centuries that of other oriental Christians of Semitic origin. But, if a small number of priests still understand Syriac, no one any longer speaks it. For Syrians as well as for Arabs the language of conversation has for a long time been the vulgar Arabic. The Christians, however, speak a less pure form than the Moslems, for the adherents of Mohammed, by their constant reading of the Koran, become familiar with the more literary forms of classical Arabic.

During the Seleucid and Byzantine domination, the predominant language of educated people in Syria and Asia Minor was Greek. But in these, as well as in other regions formerly belonging to the Ottoman Empire, we now find the most extraordinary anomalies of linguistic distribution. Thus there are in Anatolia villages whose sole inhabitants are Greeks who belong to the Orthodox Church and where the Greek language is so little understood that the priests, in order to be understood by their people, are obliged to preach and read the services of the church in Turkish. In Cyprus, on the contrary, there are Turkish villages whose inhabitants speak only Greek. But this is no more singular than to find--a frequent occurrence--Turkish newspapers printed in Greek or Armenian characters. These literary curiosities are, however, eclipsed by a Jewish newspaper in Constantinople which is printed in Hebrew characters although the language is Spanish.[283]

I have said that outside of her people I found very little in Aleppo to attract attention. I, of course, visited the great mediæval castle--called the Citadel--that dominates the city and from the summit of which one has a magnificent view of the surrounding country. But this impressed me far less than a small block of basalt which I saw in the south wall of a mosque near the Citadel and which bears a curious inscription like those which have, during the last few decades, been brought to light in ever-increasing numbers throughout the greater part of both Syria and Anatolia. By the superstitious natives it is held in great veneration, for it is supposed to offer a sovereign remedy for all ophthalmic affections. We were assured that the smoothness of the stone’s surface was due to the frequent practice of the afflicted of rubbing their eyes upon it.[284]

The character of this inscription was not new to me for I had seen many similar ones in the Imperial Museum of Constantinople and elsewhere, but its location in this commercial capital of the Near East transported me in fancy back to a period antedating the time when the Patriarch Abraham, according to tradition, was wont to milk his flocks in a cave of the citadel and distribute the milk in alms among the poor.[285] Then Aleppo was in the possession of a power that ranked with Egypt and Assyria; a power which, nearly two thousand years B. C., overthrew the first Babylonian dynasty and made an alliance, on equal terms, with Rameses II, the greatest of the Pharaohs; a power which, in its palmy days, bore rule over the greater part of Syria and Asia Minor.

Until lately it was believed by scholars that there were only two great civilizations in the ancient East--Egypt and Babylonia. But recent discoveries in Sinjerli, Boghaz-Keui, and many other places have proved conclusively that there was a third civilization which was synchronous with those of the Nile and the Tigris and which, in the days of its splendor, prevailed from Nineveh to Smyrna and Ephesus and from the headwaters of the Orontes to the lower reaches of the Halys. Far back in the Mycenean period, when the Cyclops, according to legend, were building the massive acropolis of Tiryns, and when, as far as “the first pale glimmer of Greek tradition” will enable us to judge, the people of Greece “were awakening to intellectual life,” this third civilization--until a half century ago entirely unsuspected--was erecting monuments which are to-day the amazement of the learned world and which have prepared it for revelations as startling as any of those that followed the decipherment of the Rosetta stone by Champollion or the unlocking of the secrets of the cuneiform inscriptions of Mesopotamia by Grotefend and Rawlinson.

In this extended region lived an extraordinary people whose cultural development may probably, according to Messerchmid,[286] “be dated about the third millennium” before our era, and who were known by the ancient Egyptians as the Kheta and by the Assyrians as the Khatti. They were the same people who are spoken of in the Old Testament as Hittites and who are supposed to have, at an early date, extended their migrations as far south as northern Arabia. It was, in the opinion of many investigators, from a Hittite--Ephron--that Abraham bought “the double cave looking towards Mambre” near Hebron, as a family burial place.[287] Referring, apparently to the foundation of Jerusalem the prophet Ezekiel declares that her “father was an Armorite and her mother a Hittite.”[288] There is also reason to believe that the ill-fated “Uriah the Hittite,” the husband of Bethsabee, the mother of Solomon, belonged to the same race.[289] And it was because she bore a son to King David that Bethsabee, the wife of a Hittite, became an ancestress of the Savior of the world.[290]

But these and other obscure references in Scripture to the Hittites threw practically no light on the wonderful people who, during the past half century have been engaging the attention of many of the ablest archæologists and orientalists of Europe and America. In 1812 the famous Swiss traveler, Burckhardt, discovered in Hamath, Syria, a black basaltic block on which were strange hieroglyphic signs.[291] But it was not until sixty years later, when other similar monuments were found in the same place, that scholars began to realize their importance. Systematic investigations were then instituted by individuals and learned societies and it was not long until their labors were rewarded by the most extraordinary finds. Not only hieroglyphic inscriptions, like those on the blocks found at Hamath, were brought to light but also remains of cities with large palaces and fortresses adorned with sculptures of the most surprising character.

Further research by such eminent orientalists as Halevy, in France; Hrozny of Austria; Jensen and Winckler, in Germany; Sayce and Hogarth, in England, showed that the builders of these forgotten cities and the authors of the strange script which was written in boustrephedon fashion were no other than the people of whom the Bible speaks of as the Hettites or Hittites.[292] All our knowledge of this mysterious people, outside of the brief references to them in the Sacred Text, is what has been gained since the publication in this country of the first Hittite inscriptions in 1872. We now know that as a power “The Land of the Hittites” became a memory of the past when the Assyrians took possession of Carchemish and when, following their capture of this celebrated stronghold, they entered Asia Minor in 718 B. C.--but a few years after the foundation of Rome. Thenceforward the region so long inhabited by the Hittites was ruled in succession by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Ottoman Turks.

Notwithstanding, however, the fact that scholars now have at their disposition many and valuable Hittite monuments they have, nevertheless, thus far sought in vain for a bilingual inscription that will serve as a key to the Hittite language and which will force the Hittite sphinx to reveal her long-guarded secret. This much desired key may any day be uncovered by the spade of the archæologist. What the results of such a discovery will be can only be conjectured. Many who are competent to judge think they will compare in importance with those that followed the decipherment of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia--that they will disclose an intimate relation between the culture of the Hittites and the earliest civilizations of Cyprus and Crete, Greece and Italy, and that they will contribute immensely to our knowledge of the earliest connection of the peoples of Western Asia with those of southeastern Europe and of their influences on one another in the divers domains of religion, art, literature, and politics.[293]

As I gazed on the mysterious block of basalt at Aleppo with its soon--one hopes--to-be-deciphered inscription and thought of the wonderful Hittite records that have been unearthed during the last few years and the promise which they hold of priceless contributions to the history of our race, I recalled what the distinguished French savant, the late Vicomte E. M. de Voguë, once said of the East, “_L’Orient, qui ne sait plus faire d’histoire, a le noble privilège de conserver intacte celle d’autrefois_,” the Orient which no longer makes history has the noble privilege of preserving intact that of former times.

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