The rock-cut moat of the city could supply but a small part of the material required for all the buildings, and accordingly shoulder after shoulder of the hills to the westward has been pierced with quarries for more stone. When the masons had finished their job these quarries were promptly appropriated by a flourishing colony of hermits,[34] who honeycombed all the exposed faces with hundreds of cells and tombs. The cells are mostly cut into the vertical faces; the standard pattern having a round-arched recess[{55}] for a porch, with a seat on either side of it, and a small square-headed doorway in the middle admitting to a cell about eight feet square. One of the seats in the porch is often hollowed out to form a grave for the occupant of the hermitage or sometimes this niche has been cut out in the floor or wall of his cell. Other graves are above the quarries, sunk vertically into the horizontal surfaces. These have an oblong opening, and widen out below beehive-wise so as to form two or more tombs. The opening was covered in with a gable-shaped sarcophagus lid, and many of these are lying about though none are actually in position. No doubt they have been removed by searchers after buried treasure.
The biggest of all the caves must have served as the anchorites’ church. It has an elaborately carved doorway with bas-relief panels over it representing apparently the Nativity and the Descent into Hades. The interior is irregularly quadrilateral, and must measure about thirty-five feet across. It has a flat ceiling, and is partly surrounded by a gallery, about eight feet wide and eight feet below the ceiling, supported on a range of rock-cut corbelled arches. There is nothing to indicate the position of the altar, and the eastern side is occupied by the doorway; but the altar may have stood in the centre of the floor. The level of the floor itself is also a matter for conjecture, as at present it is deeply covered with débris. The place is now used as a sheep shelter, and is known as the khan or “Inn.” It is lit by a single small window immediately over the door.
There is interest enough at Dara to occupy an archæologist for weeks together—for months if he sees fit to excavate—but we had to resume our journey, and we knew that if we wanted more archæologizing we should have no difficulty whatever in finding opportunity on the road. About three hours eastward of Dara stands another Roman fortalice—a big square castle standing in lonely grandeur amid the desolate plain. The walls are now sadly shattered, excepting the great round bastion which is planted at one of the angles; and within the ruined enclosure is hutted a squalid community of miserable half-naked Kurds. This[{56}] is doubtless the castle between Nisibis and Daras which Justinian ordered to be built in the first year of his reign. It was not auspiciously founded, for Kobad’s army descended upon the builders before the work was completed, and the Romans were crushingly defeated, leaving most of their commanders[35] on the field. The future course of the war was, however, more favourably influenced by the fact that a certain junior general, of the name of Belisarius, escaped.
Another three hours of slow progress, and we find ourselves approaching another township. The first indication of its neighbourhood is the apparition of a cobble-paved causeway, which gradually consolidates itself out of the dust of the desert, and holds its course steadily onward in a straight undeviating line. Probably it too is Roman, and if so the Romans were the last people who troubled to repair it; for it is so appallingly bumpy, and so frequently intersected by irrigation ditches, that the vehicles tactfully ignore it and keep to the unpaved ground. It leads us at length to a village which is somewhat larger than Dara, but which lacks all Dara’s evidences of bygone wealth and grandeur. This place boasts a khan and a market, and is the seat of a local governor. But if it has not fallen so low as its neighbour, it has fallen infinitely farther: for this wretched hamlet is Nisibis, once the impregnable fortress which marked the furthest limit of the power of Imperial Rome.
Nisibis was won for Rome by the conquering arm of Lucullus. It was known then as Antioch in Mygdonia, because its fertile fields and shady groves irresistibly reminded the Graecian colonists of their lovely Antioch of Daphne. What a satire on Plutarch’s explanation are the grim wastes which now environ it, and the barren hummocks of drift sand which have covered its ruins like a shroud! The Romans fortified the city with a triple rampart and a deep moat, and esteemed it (as it often proved itself) the principal bulwark of the east. They maintained a strong garrison in it; and the inhabitants,[{57}] living in a state of constant warfare with the Parthians and Sassanid Persians, made almost as reliable soldiers as the regular legionaries themselves.
When Sapor II made war on Constantius it was Nisibis that checked his invasions. Between the years 338 and 350 it sustained no fewer than three sieges, and on each of those three occasions it repulsed the invader from its walls. The last siege was also the greatest. Sapor advanced to the attack at the head of an enormous army drawn from all parts of Persia and India, and pressed his assaults most vehemently for a period of over three months. The garrison was ably commanded by Count Lucilianus, but the soul of the defence was the celebrated bishop St. James of Nisibis; and Sapor, finding that he could make no impression by ordinary methods, conceived the idea of raising an enormous dam to obstruct the Jag-jag river (the ancient Mygdonius) and so flooding the place out. As the city lies in a slight depression this Gargantuan scheme was just feasible; and Sapor did actually contrive to create such an inundation that he could launch a fleet upon it and assail the defenders of the walls on level terms. The combined effect of the flood and the floating batteries opened a breach 150 feet wide, and the Great King ordered an immediate assault: but the attacking columns were bogged in the deep mud, and environed by invisible pot-holes; and to cap all, the elephants stampeded and trampled them underfoot by scores. At nightfall the Persians drew off, and the breach was repaired before morning. Sapor had lost 20,000 soldiers and broke up the siege in despair. Legend asserts that his retreat was much expedited by a prodigious plague of flies which descended on the Persian camp in response to the sainted bishop’s orisons: but a sceptic might argue that when you have an Oriental army, with its usual disregard of every possible sanitary precaution, encamping in a marsh for three months during the height of a Mesopotamian summer, it needs no miraculous interference to account for something phenomenal in the way of flies!
Alas! all these efforts were wasted. Thirteen years[{58}] later the Emperor Julian was killed in his famous expedition against Ctesiphon. Jovian, in order to extricate the army, was compelled to sign an ignominious treaty; and one of the chief conditions that Sapor insisted upon was that Nisibis should be ceded into his hands. The inhabitants implored the emperor’s pity. Let him but give them leave to defend themselves, they would ask for no external aid. But Jovian was cowed by defeat, and afraid of offending the conqueror: and the townsfolk, well aware that they could expect no mercy from a potentate whom they had thrice discomfited, withdrew with all their possessions and left an empty city in the Persians’ hands.
Nisibis under its new masters proved as impregnable a fortress as ever; but it won a new title to fame while under Sassanian rule. In the year 489 the Monophysite Emperor Zeno suppressed the great College of Edessa on the ground that it was tainted with Nestorianism. The Christian bishop of Nisibis was at that time a certain Bar Soma; a prelate of the type which asserted itself more prominently in the Middle Ages, in such men as Henry Despenser the martial bishop of Norwich, or Carillo the turbulent primate of Toledo. Bar Soma was a personage of some consequence at the Persian Court, and in fact seems to have held a position somewhat akin to Warden of the Marches. He had himself been a scholar at Edessa, and had remained on intimate terms with most of the professors; and he conceived the idea of re-establishing the college in his own cathedral town.
The college thus refounded prospered exceedingly, and remained for many generations the most important educational centre in the East. It boasted about 1000 students (for Oriental students pack close), and though its course was primarily theological, yet it did much to keep alive profane knowledge as well. Thus it forms a not unimportant link between ancient and modern learning. The wisdom of the Greeks, which it received from Edessa, it handed on in its turn to Baghdad and Cordova and Salamanca; and perhaps even Oxford and Cambridge and Paris and Padua may owe to the college of Nisibis more than they are quite aware.[{59}]
There may well be good booty at Nisibin for an archæologist with a turn for excavation, for the mounds and hillocks which encircle it are manifestly piled on ancient walls. But there is little enough above ground—a bridge which is so badly battered that the carts prefer fording the river; a fragment or two of old walling; and a group of five monolithic columns, about two-fifths buried in débris, which are known as the columns of weighing, and which probably formed part of the peristyle of the forum. There remains, however, one special monument of even more interest to the ecclesiologist than to the antiquarian—the Church of St. James of Nisibis, one of the oldest Christian edifices in the world.