This is Kirkuk, a town which contains, in its present name, one of the few memorials of the old Seleucid rulers. It is a contraction of “Karka d’Bait Seluk,” the “Citadel of the house of Seleucus.” As a city, it is far older than the kingdoms of Alexander’s successors, for it stands on one of the largest and most ancient of “tels”; and the traveller may “acquire merit” by visiting the mosque where are the tombs of Shadrach and Abednego. Meshach, the guide will tell you, is there too, but the site of his grave has unfortunately been forgotten.
The mosque of the picture, however, is not that of the tombs, but the tekke, or hermitage where dwelt the most famous character of modern Kirkuk. This was a Kurdish Sheikh of such surpassing sanctity and zeal for Islam, that Abdul Hamid used to correspond with him in a private cipher; and was accustomed to ask by telegraph for his prayers, whenever he was meditating anything exceptionally black.
Normally, the banks of the river are high, or at least appear so in autumn. No doubt the river is often bank full in springtime when the snows are melting, and its pace is then materially faster. Generally the only feature on the shores are the primitive irrigating machines, the “sakkiyehs,” a type that cannot have altered very much since the days of Abraham. They consist of nothing but pits sunk in the high bank down to water-level, and communicating with the stream, so that there is always water in them. A skin bucket is lowered into the pit and dragged up again by a cord passing over a pulley; and an ox walking to and fro on an inclined plane supplies the motive power.
Two or three days below Mosul the river passes by one point of great interest; the mounds of Kala Shargat, once Assur, the sacred city of Assyria. These are now being[{344}] excavated and examined thoroughly by German savants of the Deutsche Orientalische Gesellschaft. As seen from a little distance, the place has no very exciting appearance. It rather resembles a group of exaggerated sandhills, rising at one point into a blunt pyramid, the “Ziggurat.” In spring the plain is covered with flowers, but all these have vanished long before autumn, and the colour of the whole is that of pale brown paper; the only scrap of green being the rather discouraged-looking garden at the side of the house occupied by the excavating staff.
Here hospitable and kindly gentlemen receive the traveller most warmly, and we have the opportunity of seeing German perseverance at work on a most congenial task. Their method is undeniably thorough, and suggests unlimited resources. You have a set of mounds before you, covering perhaps twenty acres or more, and rising to a height of about eighty feet. A light railway is laid down, running well out into the desert; and the whole of those mounds, or something like it, goes through a fine sieve, and is carried off into the wilderness and dumped. When a pavement is reached in this process, that level is cleared absolutely, and everything worth preserving is preserved, with careful plans showing the position in which it was found. Then that pavement is broken up, and progress made to the next level; and so the work is continued till virgin soil is reached.
Assur, it would seem, was a shrine long before “Assyria went out of Babylon and builded Nineveh.” There are unmistakable signs of a Hittite occupation before them. It was news to the writer that this people had ever penetrated so far to the east and south. When the place fell into Assyrian hands it became their great sacred city; so that almost every king of whom there is record seems to have felt bound to leave there some mark of his reign. Even the latest of the line, Sinsariskun, who ruled for a few weeks only before the Medes stormed Nineveh, and who perished in the flames of his palace, has done some building here. Hence there is a series of at least seven temples on the site; though in each case the lines of the original foundation were[{345}] faithfully followed, and are preserved above ground now in the Arabian “kala” which occupies the ground. This “kala,” by the way, cost considerable trouble to the excavators. Occupying the site it did, it had to come down if the most important portion of the work was not to go undone; but it was a terrible business to secure that result. The wretched place figured in formal reports as a complete modern fortress of the highest strategical importance; and permission to dismantle it was only given at last on condition of rebuilding it afterwards, exactly as it was before. As this cost something under £100, an inference may be drawn as to the character of the “fort.”
The temple is of the ordinary “Semitic” type, and so follows the same general plan as Solomon’s at Jerusalem, and the larger one at Baalbek. That is to say, there was an inner shrine, or cella, into which normally none could enter, and a naos before it corresponding to the “holy place” at Jerusalem. Outside the temple was a series of “concentric” courts, of irregular shape, and probably varying degrees of sanctity, each one lower in level than the one within it. One of these contained the great altar for sacrifice, and the tank for ablutions. The altar was approached (again as at Jerusalem) by a sloping ramp and not by steps. “Thou shalt not go up by steps unto Mine altar”—a device probably meant to facilitate the leading up of the sacrificial beasts. The whole is of mud brick; stone, or even burnt brick being only used for ornament; and the tank mentioned was made watertight by a thick lining of asphalt, still in situ. If the temple has not yielded any such sculptures as have been found in the palaces of Nineveh and Khorsabad, many minor antikas have come to light there; and perhaps the most interesting was a fine model of a flash of lightning, in gold, and about a metre in length. This was no doubt the ex voto offering of some great man in old days, but no inscription was found to explain it. Its discovery caused great excitement in Turkish official circles, report having necessarily been sent by the Ottoman commissioner who is supposed to superintend the excavation. Stories circulated of the finding of a[{346}] “great treasure of gold”; which was, of course, exactly what most people believed the Franks to have been digging for all along. Accordingly two regiments were dispatched to the place, one from Mosul and one from Baghdad, to receive the treasure and escort it duly to some Government headquarters. Naturally, no difficulty was made about the surrender; for the Germans were under pledge to put all articles that they found in the Museum at Constantinople, and had not the least intention of breaking their word. One wonders, however, by how much the cost of moving say, 1200 men for ten days’ march, exceeded the intrinsic value of a thin strip of gold, about thirty-eight inches long!
The temple of Assur and the king’s palace there form, as is usual, a sort of royal quarter of the city, and stand together at one edge of the great mound. They look out over the plain to the “summer temple,” whither the images of the gods were solemnly conveyed every year, when the heat became too much for their comfort in their regular residence. This was a great portico or enclosed garden rather than a temple, and was apparently stone built, which is a rarity in this land.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the excavations, after the great temple itself, is what the excavators call “the Oriental Pompeii.” This is the old town, of date similar to the palace; and therefore going back to about 1000 B.C., though it was inhabited long after the fall of the Assyrian Empire. It is interesting to see how, in every detail of the planning of the houses, the arrangements common in Mosul to-day reproduce this early period. Perhaps the streets in the older city are rather better paved and drained than in the modern one, but that is almost the only difference. We will allow, however, that some progress has been made in such a matter as the disposal of the bodies of the dead. Good folk in Mosul are more than a little casual about this as it is; but they do have graveyards. Their ancestors in Assur put the dead under the floors of the living rooms, and often with scarce six inches between the top of the great pot that served as coffin and the level of the room. They may, as suggested, have sealed up that particular room of [{347}]the house; yet even so——!
Bidding farewell to our hospitable hosts we drifted on down stream, shooting in the process a few very mild rapids. The behaviour of a keleg in such places is perhaps a little startling to a nervous person; though as a matter of fact its safety lies in its eccentricity. Being composed of nothing but a multitude of separate skins, tied onto a very flexible frame, it twists and wriggles and “hogs and sags” in a manner most bewildering to the stranger on it, though it always comes out well into smooth water at the end. It is however, somewhat startling to be awakened at night by what seems a most unusually complicated earthquake.