Around the Black Sea / Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania

by William Eleroy Curtis

Daghestan has been known to history for three thousand years. Josephus tells us of a race called the Alans, who dwelt upon the coast of the Caspian Sea and along the northern slopes of the Caucasus, whence, passing through “Iron Gates,” they fell upon the Medes and nearly exterminated them. They invaded Armenia, eight hundred or nine hundred years before Christ, and laid everything waste behind them. They crossed over into Persia and made themselves at home in that country until they were driven out by Cyrus the Great. The “Iron Gates,” so called, were a part of a great wall, like that of the Chinese, which, in prehistoric times, extended from the present city of Derbent on the shore of the Caspian Sea, to the mountain of Koushan-Dagh near the western limits of Daghestan. This wall is believed by several authorities to have been built a thousand years before the Christian era during the reign of a monarch called Nashrevan the Just, for the protection of his people, who lived north of the Caucasus, against the wild tribes of Asia. It was eighteen or twenty feet high and so thick that a squadron of cavalry could gallop along its top. Remnants are still preserved and the ruins of forty-three castles along its foundation have been counted between the mountains and the sea. There was only one passage, through the “Iron Gates” which remained in perfect preservation until the Middle Ages.

Arabian writers in the early part of the Christian era refer to it frequently as a gigantic work, and describe fortifications that were filled with soldiers, and impregnable to attack. The total length of the wall was two hundred and sixty-six miles so that the castles must have been about six miles apart. You will remember that the Romans built a similar wall across the north of England between Carlisle and Newcastle to keep the Highlanders out of Briton, and other defences of the kind have been known elsewhere. Oriental writers say that the hour of prayer used to be communicated along this wall by the sentinels five times a day.

Other writers attribute the construction of the wall and the gate to Iskander, or Alexander the Great, who conquered this country and took possession of it. It was a very important part of his empire, and from the mountains of Daghestan he drew the bravest and most efficient horsemen in his armies. He called the people Khozars, and they were pagans.

Professor A. V. Williams Jackson, of the chair of archæology of Columbia University, New York, has been engaged for several years in the fascinating and important task of locating the trail traversed by Alexander the Great in his conquest of the world between 334 and 323 B.C. He has been able to identify with reasonable certainty nearly all of the stages made by the great Macedonian in his pursuit of Darius III, the last of the Achæmenian kings, the places at which he stopped during his march, and the battle-fields upon which he fought. He is especially gratified that he has been able to fix with certainty the location of the famous “Caspian Gates” beyond the city of Rai, which is ancient Rappa, where the mother of Zoroaster, the founder of the fire worshippers, was born, between five hundred and four hundred years before Christ.

Philip of Macedonia, as you will remember, fell by the hand of an assassin in the midst of his preparations for an invasion of the Persian empire in the year 336 B.C., and was succeeded by his son, Alexander, then a mere boy, twenty years old. He had not been on the throne a year, notwithstanding his youth, before he was recognized as a greater warrior and a more powerful sovereign than his father and commanded the universal awe and admiration of the Greeks. At the head of an army of forty thousand cavalry, infantry, and archers, he started eastward, on his world-conquering campaign, and fought his first great battle, B.C. 334, in Asia Minor. He crossed the Taurus Mountains and subdued Mesopotamia. Thence he marched southward and captured Damascus; besieged Tyre successfully, passed through Jerusalem, paused to overthrow the fortress at Gaza, conquered Egypt, founded the city of Alexandria, which he called by his own name, and there made his first claim to divinity. Having added all this territory to his empire, he returned to Mesopotamia and occupied, one after the other, the capitals of Assyria, Persia, and Media, which were full of wealth and splendour. The actual amount of gold and silver seized by him in these capitals is estimated at one hundred and fifty million dollars and the loot made every soldier in his army rich.

Darius the Great fled before him, and Alexander’s pursuit from Ecbatana, the capital of Media, through the Parthian passes, is considered one of the most remarkable of all military campaigns. He overtook the flying Persian as the latter was dying of wounds dealt him by a traitor, Bessus, his satrap in Bacoria, in what is now called Turkestan. Bessus placed the wounded monarch in a covered chariot and set out to meet Alexander. But Darius refused to follow a band of traitors, whereupon the conspirators, roused to fury, transfixed him with their javelins and left him weltering in his blood. Alexander, who came up only a few moments after Darius had expired, ordered the body to be embalmed and buried with the honours of an emperor. He captured and executed Bessus, the regicide, and married the daughter of Darius, who had no other heir. Thus he assumed, so far as possible, the character of Darius’s legitimate successor and proclaimed himself emperor of the East.

He then returned westward to subdue the Caucasus, and marched northward along the western shore of the Caspian Sea to what was then considered the limits of the world.

Professor Jackson believes that he then built the wall from the shores of the Caspian to the crags of the Caucasus Mountains, like the great wall of China, to hold back the wild tribes of Asia that roamed upon the northern steppes, and the iron gates near the present city of Derbent.

After reducing the Caucasus, Alexander invaded the Trans-Caspian country and marched east and south through Afghanistan, where he founded a city said to be the modern Kandahar. Then he turned northward across the Hindu-Kush Mountains and founded another colony, at what is now Kabul. Then he kept on northward to Bokhara and Samarkand, where he spent a year or more and built a splendid city which he called Marakanda.

From there he set out to conquer India and conquered the desert on the way. In the spring of the year 323 B.C. he returned to Babylon, where he was met by embassies from all the rulers of the civilized world. Fresh troops had arrived from Greece for the campaign against India and the expedition was on the point of starting when Alexander was seized with fever and died in June, 323 B.C., at the age of thirty-two years.