The men led us back by the corner of the hamlet, and stopped near the river bank at a heavy block, on whose upturned face were carved two winged horses supporting the sacred palm-tree. We did what we could with camera and pencil, and then followed the guides inland across the ancient site towards a conspicuous gap in the northern wall-mounds. Through this, we were told, passed the waggon-track to Urfa, and a group of tumbled stones half seen beyond the gate raised our hopes. Nor were they to be disappointed. There lay two great winged lions of heavy Assyrian style, each inscribed with a long cuneiform text on his inner flank. The one was complete in all his parts but broken in two, the other was in one piece, but without his head: when erect, each had stood nearly ten feet high from claw to crest, looking up the road towards Nineveh. Their inscriptions are of Shalmaneser the Second, the Great King of the ninth century B.C. who crossed Euphrates from Til-Barsip to Carchemish and Pitru.
FALLEN LION OF SHALMANESER II. AT TELL AHMAR.
Yet another monument was shown to us that evening—a broken stela, representing a king or god, some nine feet high, accepting the homage of a puny adorer; and three more, beside a score of little objects, cylinders and seals, both Hittite and Assyrian, we were to see on the morrow.
We tramped a mile up stream, and were poled across Euphrates again under the sunset, prize-winners in the lottery of antiquarian discovery. For we had lighted on no mean city, forgotten by Euphrates. Though passed seventy years ago by the British navigators of the river, it had been visited by no western scholar till our lucky star led us down the Sajur. What city it was and how named, its own cuneiform inscriptions do not say. Was it that Til Barsip, chief stronghold of “Ahuni, son of Adini,” which Shalmaneser renamed Kar-Shalman-asharid, and made a royal residence for himself? Or, if this be placed rightly by scholars at Birejik, was one of Ahuni’s lesser cities built at Tell Ahmar? This much is sure—that in Shalmaneser’s day there was a city of Mesopotamia, facing the Sajur mouth, larger in area than Carchemish, where both the Hittite and the cuneiform characters were known and used; and that diggers will search there some day for the bilingual text which shall unlock the last secrets of the Hittite script.
Dark fell starlit and still by the river. The curious loungers of the daytime withdrew presently to their caves and huts on the western hills, and left us to solitary vigil. Even our muleteers, fearful for their beasts, returned at nightfall to the doubtful shelter of Avshariyeh, and the heavy silence about us was broken by nothing but the thunderous splashes, which told of Euphrates at his age-long Sisyphean task, taking from that bank to add to this. I lay uneasy with a slight fever caught yesternight, and the strong murmur of the river troubled my dreams. I seemed to drift helpless by shores that came no nearer, in a strange company of mitred men with square, curled beards, and stunt, long-nosed folk with tiptilted shoes. Then, without landing, I would find myself ashore between winged lions scanning elusive shifting symbols; but ever, before I read them, I was spirited back to the stream, and struggling among trousered bowmen to reach a bank piled with battlements and high, square towers. Suddenly the waters shrank below the boat, and the archer host rushed past me; and through a confused noise of battle and stamping hoofs, there rang in my ears a cry, “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up that the way of the Kings of the East might be prepared.” Whereupon I woke to find our mules trampling about the tents in the dawn, while their drivers bandied loud words with a knot of Turcomans, who were claiming the grass by the river bank; and the sun rose on the mean mud walls of Tell Ahmar out of an empty stream.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.