All the nations that passed over the lands have fought for and owned it. Assyria knew it not by name, though if it existed then, it was an outpost of the empire. Armenians, Persians, Parthians, and Romans fought over it, but the chronicles tell us little. In Christian times the Persian leader Kawad (Sasanian) practically destroyed it; in A.D. 507 and in A.D. 1124 seven hundred persons of the Assassin or Ismailia sect were massacred. It fell into Turkish hands in A.D. 1056, when Tughril Bey of the early Seljuq dynasty captured it.
It was not on the main road from Syria to Babylon, nor Europe to Persia; the hosts of invaders and defeated passed too far to the south, and left Amid in her corner, where she trembled at the noise of the battle that sometimes ruined her. Tigran, one of the greater Parthic-Armenian kings, took the place when he subdued Gordyene, upon whose southern borders it still stands, and he built a capital a little north of it, ignoring its claims to importance.
The present city has, as already described, four gates in its massive walls, but the Turks have knocked out a wicket gate in the north wall, and called the Yengi Qapu, “The New Gate.” Also, a Turkish governor, offended at the sight of so substantial a monument of a race greater than his—and pagan—attempted to destroy the architecture neither he nor all his kind could ever emulate, and succeeded in defacing a portion of the north wall. Demolition of such a monument, however, proved too great a task for this mean vandal, and he desisted, and has gone his insignificant way. A few of the old churches still exist, which, in my character of Muhammadan, I was prevented from viewing.
The modern population, apart from the Kurds and Mosul Arabs, is composed of Christians, of whom there are more varieties than in other towns of Asiatic Turkey. The Armenians are in the majority, and form the whole of the large section engaged in the manufacture of copper vessels, for which Diarbekr is famous. There are Greeks, relics of the rule of Byzantium, divided into three or four sects, Syrians, or Christian Arabs as they prefer to call themselves, some belonging to the Syrian Church and others Catholics. There are Chaldeans, who glory in the assertion (never disproved) that they are lineal descendants of Nebuchadnezzar and the later Assyrians, speaking an ancient dialect which is nearer to the inscription-language than any other.
The Roman Catholics have been busy among all the sects, notably among Armenian and Chaldean here, and many of both own allegiance to the Pope. Every sect—and none can tell how many there are—is as certain of its own particular salvation as of the perdition of all the others, and a hatred reigns over this Christian “centre” among the various kinds of Christians that puts in the shade any length of the detestation for Islam.
It is unfortunate that the Asiatic Christian is, as a rule, a very undesirable creature, more bigoted than the most fanatical Muhammadan, of a craft and infidelity seldom witnessed in other lands, and of an attitude towards his co-religionists of different tenets that can be only described as traitorous. It may be reckoned a heretical statement to put forward, but the dweller in the East is bound to confess that among the greater part of the peoples of Western Asia, Islam produces a better man than Christianity. The temperament of the middle Eastern Semitic is ultra-utilitarian. The ideals that Christianity puts before him have too slender a hold upon a nature that craves for the substance, and the latitude allowed in daily life by the Western faith accords ill with the temperament that seeks set rule and law, that may govern the manner of his rising and sitting, of his eating and sleeping, and by the observance of which he may accumulate the merit that may secure to him the acquisition of ideals almost mundane. The high soul and spirit required by Christianity is too far above these material minds, and the hazy and ill-understood ideal cannot hold their endeavours as do the needs of life and the almost unconquerable cupidity of the Semitic nature. So we see the spiritual and intangible, the higher head and sign of their religion lost sight of, in the struggles that rage about leadership of their minor saints, and points of doctrine and dogma that tear asunder the Christian community. Islam is material, her ideals are powerful and simple, there is through all that unification of leader and led that all can appreciate. One God, one Prophet, one Book, each in its own rational relation to the other, a simple doctrine, powerful in its direct appeal to the unity, a leader, a prophet who lays down with the despotism understood of the ancient Semitic spirit, law and letter for all things; that is a creed that the Arab mind sees as tangible, if such an expression be permissible; a law for all and a reward attainable by the observance of its well-defined canons, demanding not too much of the man in his daily life, yet holding him—as all who know the East must know—with a mysterious and invincible power that calls upon his life when it wills, and finds it ever ready for the sacrifice.
THE NATIVE CHRISTIAN
Persecution has doubtless made the Christian crafty and distrustful, and is often quoted as an excuse for the many undesirable qualities he possesses which the Musulman does not share. Alone among these Christian sects stand the Chaldeans of the north, whose pride of race and tongue has done something to keep them above the Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks they despise, and to preserve alive in their breasts the sentiment of the ruling race from whom they profess to spring, and which saves them from many a littleness which is an integral part of the nature of the other Christians.
The persecution of the Christians—of which Diarbekr has too often been the theatre—excites the sympathy of all nations, and rightly too; for whatever be their quibbles, they hold fast to Christianity through all the massacres and terror that Turkish vindictiveness has incited and paid for. I say paid for, because it is, among the underworld of western Kurdistan and northern Mesopotamia, a common subject of talk in the cafés how much the Sultan and the Government paid the ruffians of the towns to do their dirty work, and how much the Kurdish Aghas presented to the authorities to be allowed to finish unhindered the blood-feuds that existed between themselves and Armenians sheltering in Diarbekr and the towns of Armenia. A very reign of terror overshadows the apparently peaceful and prosperous town.
None ever know when the Turks will permit the looser part of the Musulman population to slaughter, or call down from the hills those terrible Kurds that hold Christian and Musulman alike in fear.