In a Syrian Saddle

by A. Goodrich-Freer

"Titanic forces taking birth

In divers seasons, divers climes.

For we are Ancients of the earth

And in the morning of the times."

Tristram, after his second visit in the year 1872, returned to England, declaring that the whole question continued to be an insoluble mystery. Even the name gave no clue, and such meaning as it may even have had as Um shita, "mother of winter," presumably so called as affording winter shelter for the flocks, is now subtracted, for although the spelling of Mashita or Meshita has been employed up to the present, even by the precise Baedeker in his English edition of 1900, the derivation is now declared fanciful, and Mshatta the more accurate rendering of the name.

That the problem is a difficult one is the more obvious from the very fact that it has none of the complications which beset the archæologist elsewhere. There have been no subtractions, no accretions, no changes. Hardly a ruin remains in Syria where Moslem zeal has not destroyed its sculptured imagery. Here all is perfect as when the artist laid down his chisel. Not a detail is defaced; the few stones which may have been removed have in no degree marred its completeness; its position has been its protection; far alike from the ignorant zeal of the fellahin Moslem, from the misdirected industry of the town Christian, it has inherited none of the blessings of civilisation. It is still the "unravished bride of quietness." As Tristram has well said: "Too proud to cultivate, happily too careless to destroy, the incurious Bedawin has roamed over its rich pasture lands: never tempted to loosen a stone, for he needs no building materials, and content if the old cisterns and arches afford a shelter in winter for his flocks."

In the wonderful façade upwards of fifty animals, exquisitely sculptured, in every variety of attitude, still quench their thirst in pairs, bending opposite each other, over a graceful vase; their outline, their very motion perfectly rendered; lions, lynxes, panthers, gazelle, buffaloes; here is a man with a dog, there a man carries a basket of fruit; birds hover; peacocks, storks, partridges, parrots, vaunt their beauty, with the grace of the models from which they were drawn, in days when we were living in wattled huts. The more conventional outlines—the cornices and mouldings, the continuous vandyke, with a great rose boss at every angle—although strikingly unfamiliar, are eminently satisfying to the eye, and the wonderful realism of the flowers, grapes, and vine-leaves, which fill up every remaining inch of the façade, is like a dream of Grinling Gibbon carved out in massive stone.

Where, unless in the Alhambra, or (as we learn from Fergusson, De Vogüe, Dieulafoy, and other authorities on Persian art) in remote parts of Persia, can we find anything in the least comparable to the bewildering richness of the designs which have blossomed for us here in the wilderness?—far, not only from mankind, but from such gifts of nature as would make possible the presence of mankind; where, for lack of water, even the rich soil of the great tableland cannot be cultivated, and the district must for ever remain, as it has ever been, a desert! The Arabs have no traditions of this place, as they have of so many other ruins, and they do not even ascribe its foundation to Saladdin or the Khalifs, to whom all that is great is almost invariably assigned. Can a building covered with human and animal designs owe its origin to the Moslem, to whom all such representations were forbidden? Although Thompson, the author of "The Land and the Book," proposed to consider the ruins as those of a church and convent, there is, apart from all other difficulties as to size, plan, and position, no single indication of Christian workmanship or symbol. Were the Romans likely to build a sumptuous Oriental palace in a lonely desert, far from any military road? If the Bedawy, the wandering Ishmaelite, sole denizen of deserts such as this, were for once to depart from his normal style of architecture—two or three poles and a piece of cloth—is it likely that his descendants would have preserved no tradition of so extraordinary a deviation?

One solution offered is, nevertheless, that it was the work of Byzantine architects, employed by the desert tribes, notably the Beni Sakr, in the days when they were rich with the subsidies paid to them by the Romans for protection of their colonies and forts and roads from the encroachments of other enemies of the desert; that it was never intended as a place of residence but merely for the reception of ambassadors, who were to be over-awed, partly by the miracle of this rose of the wilderness, partly by the skill shown in the triumph over niggard Nature; or, in the event of this being insufficient, were to be separated from their steeds, and presented with free house room until hunger, thirst, and loneliness should make them amenable. Whether the work remained incomplete from paucity of money or of ambassadors, is not revealed.

Another solution, of which Fergusson is the originator, is that it was the work of the Persian king, Chosroes II., who, between the years 611 and 614, overran the whole of Northern Syria and Asia Minor. Gibbon's enumeration, gathered from contemporary authors (Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," Chap. x. 701), of his 20,000 camels and 3000 concubines, his 960 elephants and 6000 horses, suggests, at least, that he had the money for the building of artistic palaces, and the fact that he spent the years of his youth at Hierapolis, where he had ample opportunity for studying the art and culture of Asia Minor, may suggest, further, that he possibly had the taste. These kings of the Sassanian dynasty were, indeed, noted for their love of architecture, and the Court favourite of Chosroes II., Ferhad, was an architect. A drawing of an ancient bas-relief at Shiraz, to be seen at the Institute of British Architects, presents Chosroes as slaying a lion, while his fair favourite, Shireen, watches Ferhad sculpturing birds and foliage upon a rock. Some forty or fifty Sassanian bas-reliefs, sculptured pictures such as those at Mshatta, still remain in various places. Moreover, we learn that Chosroes II. had thousands of Greek and Syrian slaves, whom he employed in the construction of sumptuous buildings. The site of Mshatta might well lie in his route between Damascus and the Nile. (See Chap. iii. p. 53.)