“But now that he is gone,” continued Ibrahîm, “we are at rest. And as soon as we heard of his death we blessed the government, and all the men of the Weldeh rode out and seized the flocks that he had captured from us, and more besides. And behold, there they pasture by the river.” And he pointed to some sheep grazing under the care of a couple of small boys.
“Then all the desert is safe now?” said I.
“Praise God!” he answered, “for the ’Anazeh are our friends. We have no foes but the Shammar, and their lands are far from us.”
Before we reached Ḳal’at Ja’bar we galloped up into the low hills to see a rock-cut tomb. Through a hole in the ground we let ourselves down into a chamber 5·10 m. × 7·00 m., with nine arcosolia set round it, each containing from four to six loculi ([Fig. 27]). On one of the long sides there was a small rectangular niche between the arcosolia. Ibrahîm called the place Maḥall es Ṣafṣâf and assured me that it was the only cavern known to him in these hills. From here he took me down to a mound named Tell el Afrai, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the river. On the landward side
it is protected by a dyke forming a loop from the Euphrates. At one time the water must have filled this moat, but the upper end has silted up and the channel is now dry. Out of the mound, which is unusually large, the rains had washed a number of big stones, some of them squared. We were now close to the two towers of Ḳal’at Ja’bar, one being a minaret that rises from the centre of the fortress, while the other, known to the Arabs as Neshabah, stands upon an isolated hill to the north-west[39] ([Fig. 28]). Of the Neshabah tower nothing remains but a rectangular core of masonry (unworked stones set in thick mortar) containing a winding stair which can be approached by a doorway about four metres from the ground. Below the door there is a vaulted niche which looks like the remains of a sepulchral chamber. All the facing stones have fallen away, but the core is ridged in a manner that suggests the former existence of engaged columns, and I believe that Neshabah is a tower tomb older than the castle, rather than the outlying watchtower of an Arab fort.[40] The buildings at Ḳal’at Ja’bar are mainly of brick, though some stone is used in the walls and bastions that surround the hill-top ([Fig. 29]). The entrance is strongly guarded; from the outer gate-house a long narrow passage, hewn out of the rock, leads into the interior of the castle. Among the ruins within the walls are a vaulted hall and parts of a palace composed of a number of small vaulted chambers. The construction of the small vaults struck me as having stronger affinities with Byzantine than with the typical Mesopotamian systems, and I should not assign to them a very early date. The palace had also contained a hall of some size, but only the south wall is standing ([Fig. 31]). It is broken by a deep recess, possibly a miḥrâb, with a doorway on either side, and the upper part is decorated with a row of flat trifoliate niches. In the centre of the castle a round minaret rises from a massive square base ([Fig. 30]). Towards the top of the minaret there is a double band of ornamental brickwork with a brick inscription between. I could not decipher the inscription, owing to its great height, but the characters were not Cufic, and the round shape of the minaret makes it improbable that it should be earlier than the twelfth century. Beyond the minaret is a vaulted cistern. The shelving north-west side of the hill is defended by a double ring of brick towers, but on the south-east side, where the rocks are precipitous, there is little or no fortification. The brick walls of the buildings above the gate-way are decorated with string courses and bands of diamond-shaped motives, the diamonds set point to point or enclosed in hollow squares ([Fig. 32]).
The history of the castle is not easy to disentangle from the accounts left by the Arab geographers. An earlier name for it was Dausar, but even this does not seem to have been applied before the seventh century, though Idrîsî, writing in the twelfth century, ascribes its foundation to Alexander. He is the first author who mentions Dausar and he gives no authority for his statement as to its origin. Opposite Dausar, on the right bank of the Euphrates, stretches the battlefield of Ṣiffîn, where in A.D. 657 the Khalif ’Alî met the forces of the Umayyad Mu’âwiyah. Tradition has it that ’Alî entrusted his ally Nu’mân, a prince of the house of Mundhir, with the defence of these reaches of the Euphrates, and that a servant of the latter, Dausar by name, built the castle which was called after him. It took its present name from an Arab of the Ḳusheir, from whose sons it was wrested (in A.D. 1087)
