To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise

by Ely Banister Soane

On the cliff above Tekrit there are ruins, and in the vicinity of the town there are signs of the time when Birtha, as the place was called in ancient times, was a large and important place. During early Christian times it was the residence of an important Christian official, and is said to have contained as many as twelve churches. At any rate, during the time of the khalifas of Bagdad it was important enough to possess a good bridge, no relic of which now remains, and it withstood a siege against Timur Lang.

Here, hoping to enter by the bridge into Mesopotamia and approach Bagdad from the west, Hulagu Khan, the leader of the Mongol horde that blighted all the Middle East, advanced upon Tekrit, but the Khalifa Al Musta’sim b’Illah destroyed it before he reached the place, and a great battle occurred between the two armies around the place. This was in the first half of the 9th century.

Now it is a place of some fifteen hundred houses, whose inhabitants, says a Persian traveller, “are a people friendly to darvishes,” and of the Hanafi branch of the Sunni Musulman.

Here we took as a passenger an old woman going to Bagdad, a relation of one of the kalak-men, who looked after her with great care. She, on her part, took the ancient man under her special protection and provided him from her plentiful store of bread. She pressed such delicacies as sweet thin wheat cakes and dates upon us, and was extremely sympathetic when she found I spoke but little Arabic and was a stranger from a far land. It was she, too, that rigged up a shelter from the sun between two rows of bales, and gave me some of her sticks, with which to do the same, for which I was grateful, for the mid-day sun was now almost past bearing without some shelter.

Next morning we woke to see the spire of Imam Daur, a small town upon the left bank of the river, backed by one of the ancient mounts. This Daur, or Dura as it was anciently called, has a very old history indeed, for we read of it in the Bible:—“Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was threescore cubits and the breadth thereof six cubits: he set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon;” and here the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego was enacted. Here the Roman army, after Julian was dead, attempted the passage of the Tigris, and part actually waded and swam across; and here Jovian, who succeeded Julian, having retreated from Ctesiphon, made a treaty with the Persians which gave them back the northern Mesopotamian provinces. Here at the same ford attempted by the Romans, we saw a caravan of asses being swum across the river, their drivers effecting the transit by wading part of the way and swimming the rest.

IMAM DAUR

The third or fourth day out of Tekrit we saw the golden domes of Samarra—“Surra-man-ra” (“That maketh glad the heart of him who espies it”). It is a big place upon a cliff that juts out into the broad Tigris; tawny, like the desert out of which it rises, its great mosque standing clear above all, with that clean, new appearance that any strong building must possess in this clear, dry atmosphere. No trees adorn its streets, they are as desert as the plain outside. Only upon the opposite side are a few gardens, and the remains of a bridge of boats, which affords sufficient excuse for the Turks to take a toll from all who pass down the stream.

The ancient fame of Samarra is departed, the crowds of Persians that once inhabited it are departed, leaving behind a mixed population, noted for its immorality and rascality.

Persian historians affirm that Samarra was built by Shapur the Sasanian in the middle of the 3rd century A.D., but that after the power of the Sasanians waned and disappeared in the 7th century before the rising might of Muhammad, the town fell to ruins and was neglected till the reign of Al Mu’tasim, khalifa of Bagdad, who made it his capital, and one of the famous cities of the East. This position it held till the time of the Khalifa Mu’tamid, who re-established the Khalifate at Bagdad. The period of the occupation of Samarra by the khalifas was a decadent one. Following immediately the brilliant times of the famous Harun ar Rashid and Al Ma’mun,[70] who died in A.D. 813, Mu’tasim, whose mind was fanatical and his ambitions those of a rapacious plunderer, by his employment of Turkish mercenaries took the first step upon that road that led to the decline of the dynasty, which, however, was never extinguished till the Mongols sacked Bagdad and murdered Al Musta’sim in A.D. 1240.

Here Mu’tasim built a great mosque, and enlarged the city so much that the Persian historians describe it as having “stretched its length and breadth, so that they said it was seven leagues long and a league broad.”[71]