Syria, the Desert & the Sown

by Gertrude Lowthian Bell

At Lebweh are the ruins of a temple built in the massive masonry of Ba'albek. A podium of four great courses of stones crowned by a simple moulding, a mere splay face, is all that is left of it. The village belongs to a man called Asad Beg, a rich Metāwileh and brother to a certain Dr. Haida, who is a ubiquitous person well known in north Syria. I never go to Damascus without meeting him and never meet him without satisfaction, for he is well read in Arabic literature and exceptionally intelligent. He has recently been engaged in some job on the Mecca railway, and he is, so far as I know, the only example in his sect of a man who has received a good education and risen to a certain distinction.

We pitched camp at Rās Ba'albek, where there is an excellent spring in a gorge of the barren eastern hills an hour and a half from Lebweh. The frost had ceased to pinch us of a morning, praise be to God! but it was still cold. When we rose at dawn the sleet was beating against the tents and we rode all day in the devil's own wind. This was March 8; Spring travels slowly into Northern Syria. I sent my camp by the direct path and rode with Derwīsh to a monument that stands on some rising ground in the middle of the Orontes valley and which in that desolate expanse is seen for a day's journey on either side. It is a tall tower of massive stonework capped by a pyramid and decorated with pilasters and a rough frieze carved in low relief with hunting scenes and trophies of arms. The Syrians call it Ḳāmu'a Hurmul, the Tower of Hurmul after the village close by, and the learned are of opinion that it commemorates some great battle of the Roman conquest, but there is no inscription to prove them right or wrong. It lies two hours to the west of Rās Ba'albek. Buffeted by the furious wind we rode on another hour and a half to a line of little mounds protecting the air-holes of an underground water channel—a Ḳanāt it would be called in Persian, and I believe is so called in Arabic. Another two and a half hours brought us to Ḳṣeir, the mules came up a quarter of an hour later, and we camped hard by the cemetery outside the ugly mud-built town. The wind dropped after sunset, and peace, moral and physical, settled down upon the camp. Even Mikhāil's good humour had been somewhat disturbed by the elements, but Ḥabīb had come in as smiling as ever, and I am glad to remember that I, feeling my temper slipping from me down the gale, had preserved the silence of the philosopher. Muḥammad the Druze was no longer with us, for he had been left behind in Damascus. Whether through his own fault or by reason of a conspiracy against him among the others, difficulties and quarrels were always arising, and it was better to sacrifice one member of the staff and preserve the equanimity of the caravan. My contract with him ceased at Damascus; we parted on the best of terms, and his place was taken by a succession of hirelings, indistinguishable, as far as I was concerned, the one from the other.

TEMPLE OF JUPITER, BA'ALBEK

The valley of the Orontes was formerly an Arab camping ground and is still frequented in dry seasons by a few skeikhs of the Ḥaseneh and of the 'Anazeh, particularly by the Ruwalla branch of the latter tribe, but the bulk of the Bedouin have been driven out by cultivation. The Ḳāmu'a Hurmul bears the record of them in the shape of ancient tribe marks. It was more curious to reflect that we were in the southern headquarters of the Hittites, whoever they may have been; the famous examples of their as yet undecyphered script which were found at Ḥamāh are now lodged in the museum at Constantinople, where they have baffled all the efforts of the learned. The present population of Ḳṣeir is composed partly of Christians and partly of the members of a sect called the Noṣairiyyeh. They are not recognised by Islām as orthodox, though, like all the smaller sects, they do their best to smooth, away the outward differences between themselves and the dominant creed. They keep the tenets of their faith secret as far as possible, but Dussaud has pried into the heart of them and found them full of the traces of Phœnician tradition. Living apart in mountain fastnesses that have remained almost inviolate, the Noṣairiyyeh have held on to the practices of ancient Semitic cults, and they occupy an honourable position in the eyes of Syriologists as the direct descendants of paganism, while remaining themselves profoundly ignorant of their ancestry. Native report speaks ill of their religion, following the invariable custom by which people whisper scandal of what they are not allowed to understand, and I was told that the visible signs of it as expressed by the conduct of the sect left everything to be desired. Dussaud has, however, washed away the stain that lay upon their faith, and my experience of their dealings with strangers leads me to adopt an attitude of benevolent neutrality. I spent five days in the mountains west of Ḥomṣ and a week near Antioch, in which districts they are chiefly to be found, and had no reason to raise a complaint. Kurt was not so well pleased with the company in which he found himself at Ḳṣeir. He kept up a continual barking all night; I could almost have wished him back in the courtyard of the Metawīleh.

Next day the weather was gloriously fine. With Mikhāil I made a long circuit that I might visit Tell Nebi Mendu, which is the site of Kadesh on the Orontes, the southern capital of the Hittites. Kadesh in its day must have been a fair city. The mound on which it was built rises out of a great corn-growing plain; to the south the wide valley of the Orontes runs up between the twin chains of Lebanon, to the west the Jebel Noṣairiyyeh protect it from the sea, and between the ranges of Lebanon and the Noṣairiyyeh mountains there is a smiling lowland by which merchants and merchandise might pass down to the coast. Northwards to the horizon stretch the plains of Coelo Syria; the steppes of the Palmyrene desert bound the view to the east. The foot of the tell is washed by the young and eager Orontes (the Rebellious is the meaning of its Arabic name), and in the immediate foreground lies the lake of Ḥomṣ, six miles long. The mound of Kadesh is approached by grassy swards, and among willow trees a mill wheel turns merrily in the rushing stream. The site must have been inhabited almost continuously from Hittite times, for history tells of a Seleucid city, Laodocia ad Orontem, and there are traces of a Christian town. Each succeeding generation has built upon the dust of those that went before, and the mound has grown higher and higher, and doubtless richer and richer in the traces of them that lived on it. But it cannot be excavated thoroughly owing to the miserable mud hovels that have inherited the glories of Laodocia and Kadesh, and to the little graveyard at the northern end of the village which, according to the Moslem prejudice, must remain undisturbed till Gabriel's trump rouses the sleepers in it. I noticed fragments of columns and of very rough capitals lying about among the houses, but my interest, while I stood upon the mound, was chiefly engaged in picturing the battle fought at Kadesh by the Hittite king against the Pharaoh of his time, which is recorded in a famous series of hieroglyphs in Egypt. A quarter of an hour's ride to the north of Tell Nebi Mendu there is a singular earthwork which is explained by the Arabs as being the Sefinet Nuh (Noah's Ark) and by archæologists as an Assyrian fortification, and the one account of its origin has as much to support it as the other. It is a heap of earth, four-square, its sides exactly oriented to the points of the compass, standing some forty to fifty feet above the level of the plain and surrounded by a ditch, the angles of which are still sharp. We rode to the top of it, and found it to be an immense platform of solid earth, about an eighth of a mile square, the four corners raised a little as if there had been towers upon them, and tower and rampart and platform were alike covered with springing corn. Whoever raised it, Patriarch or Assyrian, must have found it mighty tiresome to construct, but until a few trenches have been cut across it the object that directed his labours will rest undetermined. We rode down to the lake and lunched by the lapping water on a beach of clean shells. There are two mounds close to the shores, another a mile or two out of Ḥomṣ, while the castle of Ḥomṣ itself was built upon a fourth. They have all the appearance of being artificial, and probably contain the relics of towns that were sisters to Kadesh. The fertile plain east of the Orontes must always have been able to support a large population, larger perhaps in Hittite days than in our own. The day's ride had lasted from 9.30 to 2 o'clock, with three-quarters of an hour at Tell Nebi Mendu and half an hour by the lake.

CAPITALS IN THE TEMPLE OF JUPITER, BA'ALBEK