Next morning before daybreak we were up and on the way, and the sun rising showed us the same yellow undulating plain with now a range of distant hills to the north of us. We were not taking the usual track across the desert, which goes as a rule more northwards towards Birejiq, a town whose chief feature is a castle built during the wars of the Crusade.
Our way lay towards Membich, a city with almost the most ancient history of the Syrian desert—Karkhemish always excepted. We were traversing the lands which have seen the cultivation of the great Hittite nation that is said to have had its capital at Karkhemish but a few miles from here, about 3500 B.C., an age only excelled by Babylonia herself. From that time till the conquest of these lands by the Assyrians, some 700 years B.C., the king of the Hittites ruled over what was then doubtless a fertile country. It is about the Euphrates banks that some of the greatest battles of the world have raged. Hittite, Assyrian, Greek, Parthian, have all fought for Syria, and won and lost it; and Membich, that had a temple to the goddess Atergatis (of whom more hereafter), existed as a wealthy city, and stood for all these centuries, to be despoiled at the hand of a Roman plebeian, a place-buyer, whose ambition and greed eventually brought him to well-deserved ruin. This was Marcus Lucius Crassus, who in 54 B.C., in a campaign against the Parthians, “entered the shrine, carefully weighed all the offerings in the precious metals, and then ruthlessly carried them off.”[3]
The town was not, however, destroyed, for it was ceded by Anthony, some twenty years later, to a deserter from Parthia, who, after holding it for a few months, once more returned to Parthia, leaving it in Roman hands.
To a field of ruined walls, piles of enormous carven stones, mounds betokening ancient buildings, we came that evening. Upon the highest mound is now a little mosque, and the place is peopled by a number of Circassian immigrants, who in their Cossack dress looked singularly out of place among the Arabs around them. On all sides are the remains of ancient buildings, stones too great to carry away. Their principal use to-day appears to be to wall in the fields of grain, and when not too large for transport, to form new buildings in the dirty, squalid village, whose accommodation—three filthy rooms, all that remains of a caravanserai—is in keeping with the tone of the place.
MEMBICH
Here we blessed the foresight that had made us bring some eatables from Bāb, for the surly inhabitants refused to supply anything but eggs, which were at the price of six for the equivalent of a penny. The water was bad, our supply being from a shallow well (just outside a particularly odorous cesspool), from which half the village came to draw water.
Since there was no bazaar to go to, nothing to do, nothing to buy and eat, I spent the time sitting on my door-step, for there were too many flies to share the room with, and nightfall and sleep came very welcome.
FOOTNOTE TO CHAPTER II:
[3] Rawlinson, Parthia, p. 152.