ASSYRIA AND AFGHANISTAN—ANCIENT LAND ROUTES—POSSIBLE SEA ROUTES

With the building up of the vast Persian Empire, and the gradual fostering of eastern colonies, and the consequent introduction of the manners and methods of Western Asia into the highlands of Samarkand and Badakshan, other nationalities were concerned besides Persians and Greeks. Captive peoples from Syria had been deported to Assyria seven centuries before Christ. The House of Israel had been broken up (for Samaria had fallen in 721 B.C. before the victorious hosts of Sargon), and some of the Israelitish families had been deported eastwards and northwards to Northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. With the vitality of their indestructible race it is at least possible that a remnant survived as serfs in Assyria, preserving their own customs and institutions—secretly if not openly—intermarrying, trading, and money-making, yet still looking for the final restoration of Israel until the final break-up of the Assyrian Kingdom. They were never absolutely absorbed, and never forgot to recount their historic pedigree to their children.

With the final overthrow of the Assyrian Kingdom we lose sight of the tribes of Israel, who for more than a century had been mingled with the peoples of Northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. At least history holds no record of their further national existence. From time immemorial in Asia it had been customary for the captives taken in war to be transported bodily to another field for purposes of colonization and public labour. When the world was more scantily peopled such methods were natural and effectual; the increase of working power gained thereby being of the utmost importance in days when enormous irrigation canals were excavated, and bricks had to be fashioned for the construction of walled cities.

The extent and magnificence of Assyrian building must have demanded an immense supply of such manual labour for the purpose of brickmaking. All the mighty works of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon were literally "the work of men's hands." In Mesopotamia was captured labour especially necessary. Stone was indeed available at Nineveh, but the barrenness of the soil which stretches flatly from the rugged hills of Kurdistan across Mesopotamia rendered the country unproductive unless enormous works of irrigation were undertaken for the distribution of water. Mesopotamia is a country of immense possibilities, but the wealth of it is only for those who can distribute the waters of its great rivers over the productive soil. The yearly inundations of the Euphrates and Tigris are but sufficient for the needs of a narrow strip of land on either side the rivers, and the crops of the country undeveloped by canals can only support a scattered and scanty population. Towards the south there is another difficulty. The flat soil becomes water-logged and marshy and runs to waste for want of drainage. There is no stone for building purposes near Babylon. Approaching Babylon over the windy wastes of scrub-powdered plain there is nothing to be seen in the shape of a hill. Long, low, flat-topped mounds stretch athwart the horizon and resolve themselves on nearer approach into deeply scarred and weather-worn accretions of debris, or else they are banks of ancient waterways winding through the steppe, the last remnants of a stupendous system of irrigation. Then there breaks into view the solitary erection which stands in the open plain overlooking a wide vista of marsh and swamp to the west, which represents the ruins called Birs Nimrud, the Ziggurat or temple which, in successive tiers devoted to the powers of heaven, supported the shrine of Mercury. It is by far the most conspicuous object in the Babylonian landscape; huge, dilapidated, and unshapely, it mounts guard over a silent, stagnant, swampy plain.

Now the remarkable feature in all these gigantic remains of antiquity is that they are built of brick. In the wide expanse of Mesopotamia plain around there is not a stone quarry to be found. Of Nineveh, we learn from the masterly records of Xenophon that as he was leading the surviving 10,000 Greeks in their retreat from the disastrous field of Babylon back to the sunny Hellespont, some 200 years after the destruction of Nineveh, he came upon a vast desert city on the Tigris. The wall of it was 25 feet wide, 100 feet high, with a 20-foot basement of stone. This was all that was left of Kalah, one of the Assyrian capitals. A day's march farther north he came on another deserted city with similar walls. These were the dry bones of Nineveh, already forgotten and forsaken. Two centuries had in these early ages been sufficient to blot out the memory of Assyrian greatness so completely that Xenophon knew not of it, nor recognized the place where his foot was treading. Barely seventy years ago was the memory of them restored to man, and tokens of the richness and magnificence of the art which embellished them first given to the world. The mounds representing Nineveh and Babylon are some of them of enormous size. The mound of Mugheir (the ancient Ur) is the ancient platform of an Assyrian palace, which is faced with a wall 10 feet thick of red kiln-dried bricks cemented with bitumen. Some of these platforms were raised from 50 to 60 feet above the plain and protected by massive stone masonry carried to a height exceeding that of the platform. But the Babylonian mound of Birs Nimrud, which rises from the plain level to the blue glazed masonry of the upper tier of the Ziggurat, is altogether a brick construction. The debris of the many-coloured bricks now forms a smooth slope for many feet from its base; but above, where the square blocks of brickwork still hold together in scattered disarray, you may still dig out a foot-square brick with the title and designations of Nebuchadnezzar imprinted on its face. These artificial mounds could only have been built at an enormous cost of labour. The great mound of Koyunjik (the palace of Nineveh) covers an area of 100 acres and reaches up 95 feet at its highest point. It has been calculated that to heap up such a pile would "require the united efforts of 10,000 men for twelve years, or 20,000 men for six years" (Rawlinson, Five Monarchies), and then only the base of the palace is reached; and there are many such mounds, for "it seems to have been a point of honour with the Assyrian Kings that each should build a new palace for himself" (Ragozin, Chaldaea).

Only conquering monarchs with whole nations as prisoners could have compassed such results. This, indeed, was one of the great objectives of war in these early times. It was the amassing of a great population for manual labour and the creation of new centres of civilization and trade. Thus it was that the peoples of Western Asia—Egyptians, Israelites, Jews, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and even Greeks—were transported over vast distances by land, and a movement given to the human race in that part of the world which has infinitely complicated the science of ethnology. The peopling of Canada by the French, of North America by the English, of Brazil by the Portuguese, of Argentina and Chile by Spaniards and Italians, is perhaps a more comprehensive process in the distribution of humanity and more permanent in its character. But ancient compulsory movement, if not as extensive as modern voluntary emigration, was at least wholesale, and it led to the distribution of people in districts which would not naturally have invited them. The first process in the consolidation of a district, or satrapy, was the settlement of inhabitants, sometimes in supercession of a displaced or annihilated people, sometimes as an ethnic variety to the possessors of the soil. Tiglath Pileser was the first Assyrian monarch to consolidate the Empire by its division into satrapies. Henceforward the outlying provinces of the dominions were convenient dumping places for such bodies of captives as were not required for public works at home.

Nothing would be more natural than that Sargon should deport a portion of the Israelitish nation to colonize his eastern possessions towards India, just as Darius Hystaspes later employed the same process to the same ends when he deported Greeks from the Lybian Barke to Baktria. There is nothing more astonishing in the fact that we should find a powerful people claiming descent from Israel in Northern Afghanistan than that we should find another people claiming a Greek origin in the Hindu Kush.

Nor was the importance of peopling waste lands and raising up new nations out of well-planted colonies overlooked ten centuries before Christ any more than it is now. Then it was a matter of transporting them overland and on foot to the farthest eastern limits of these great Asiatic empires. Always east or south they tramped, for nothing was known of the geography of the North and West. Eastwards lay the land of the sun, whence came the Indians who fought in the armies of Darius, and where gold and ivory, apes and peacocks were found to fill Phoenician ships. To-day it is different. The peopling of the world with whites is chiefly a Western process. Emigrants go out in ships, not as captives, but almost equally in compact bodies—the best of our working men to Canada, and many of the best of our much-wanted domestic servants to South Africa. It is a perpetual process in the world's economy, and perhaps the chief factor in the world's history; but in the old, old centuries before the Christian era it was necessarily a land process, and the geographical distribution of the land features determined the direction of the human tide. Some twenty years before the fall of Samaria and the deportation of the ten tribes of Israel, Tiglath Pileser had effected conquests in Asia which carried him so far east that he probably touched the Indus. Why he went no farther, or why Alexander subsequently left the greater part of the Indian peninsula unexplored, is fully explicable on natural grounds, even if other explanations were wanting.

The Indus valley would offer to the military explorers from the West the first taste of the quality of the climate of the India of the plains which they would encounter. The Indus valley in the hot weather would possess little climatic attraction for the Western highlander. Alexander's troops mutinied when they got far beyond the Indus. Any other troops would mutiny under such conditions as governed their outfit and their march. It is more than possible that the great Assyrian conqueror before him encountered much the same difficulty. It is clear, however, historically, that the Assyrian knew and trod the way to Northern Afghanistan (or Baktria), and if we examine the map of Asia with any care we shall see that there is no formidable barrier to the passing of large bodies of people from Nineveh to Herat (Aria), or from Herat to the Indus valley, until we reach the very gates of India on the north-west frontier. Four centuries later than Tiglath Pileser the battle of Arbela was fought to a finish between Alexander and Darius (who possessed both Greek and Indian troops in his army) on a field which is not so very far to the east of Nineveh, and which is probably represented more or less accurately by the modern Persian town of Erbil. The modern town may not be on the exact site of the action, and we know that the ancient town was some sixty miles away from the battlefield. However that may be, we learn that in the general retreat of the Persians which followed the battle, Darius made his way to Ecbatana, the ancient capital of the Medes. There he remained for about a year, but hearing of Alexander's advance from Persepolis in the spring of 330 B.C. he fled to the north-east, with a view to taking refuge with his kinsman Bessos, who was then satrap of Baktria. This gives us the clue to the general line of communication between Northern Mesopotamia and Baktria (or Afghanistan) in ancient days; and the twenty-five centuries which have rolled by since that early period have done little to modify that line.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century A.D. from the earliest times with which we can come into contact through any human record, this high-road (not the only one, but the chief one) must have been trodden by the feet of thousands of weary pilgrims, captives, emigrants, merchants, or fighting men—an intermittent tide of humanity exceeding in volume any host known to modern days—bringing East into touch with the West to an extent which we can hardly appreciate. It may be said that the straightest road to Baktria did not lie through Ecbatana. It did not; but independently of the fact that Ecbatana was a city of great defensive capacity, and of reasons both political and military which would have impelled Darius to take that route, we shall find if we examine the latest Survey of India map of Western Persia that the geographical distribution of hill and valley make it the easiest, if not the shortest, route. The configuration of Western Persia, like that of Makran and Southern Baluchistan extending to our own north-west frontier, mainly consists of long lines of narrow ridges curving in lines parallel to the coast, rocky and mostly impassable to travellers crossing their difficult ridge and furrow formation transversely, but presenting curiously easy and open roads along the narrow lateral valleys. Ecbatana once stood where the modern Hamadan now stands. The road from Arbil (or Erbil) that carries most traffic follows this trough formation to Kermanshah and then bends north-eastward to Hamadan. From Hamadan to Rhagai and the Caspian gates, which was the route followed by Darius in his flight from Ecbatana, the road was clearly coincident with the present telegraph line to Tehran from Hamadan, which strikes into the great post route eastward to Mashad and Herat, one of the straightest and most uniformly level roads in all Asia. It must always have been so. Remarkable physical changes have occurred in Asia during these twenty-five centuries, but nothing to alter the relative disposition of mountain and plain in this part of Persia, or to change the general character of its ancient highway. All this part of Persia was under the dominion of the Assyrian king when the tribes of Israel left Syria for Armenia. He had but recently traversed the road to India, and he knew the richness of Baktria (of Afghan Turkistan and Badakshan) and could estimate what a colony might become in these eastern fields.

What more natural than that he should draft some of his captives eastward to the land of promise? There is not an important tribe of people in all that hinterland of India that has not been drafted in from somewhere. There is not a people left in India, for that matter, that can safely call themselves indigenous. From Persia and Media, from Aria and Skythia, from Greece and Arabia, from Syria and Mesopotamia they have come, and their coming can generally be traced historically, and their traditions of origin proved to be true. But there is one important people (of whom there is much more to be said) who call themselves Ben-i-Israel, who claim a descent from Kish, who have adopted a strange mixture of Mosaic law and Hindu ordinance in their moral code, who (some sections at least) keep a feast which strangely accords with the Passover, who hate the Yahudi (Jew) with a traditional hatred, and for whom no one has yet been able to suggest any other origin than the one they claim, and claim with determined force; and these people rule Afghanistan. It may be that they have justification for their traditions, even as others have; they may yet be proved to stand in the same relationship to the scattered remnants of Israel as some of the Kafir inhabitants of Northern Afghanistan can be shown to hold to the Greeks of pre-Alexandrian days. It is difficult to account for the name Afghan: it has been said that it is but the Armenian word Aghvan (Mountaineer). If this is so, it at once indicates a connection between the modern Afghan and the Syrian captives of Armenia.

But whilst "men in nations" were thus traversing the highlands of Persia from Mesopotamia to Northern Afghanistan by highways so ancient that they may be regarded almost as geographical fixtures as everlasting as the hills, we do not find much evidence of traffic with the Central Asian States north of the Oxus.

Early military excursions into the land of the Skyths were more for the purpose of dealing with the predatory habits of these warlike tribes, who afterwards peopled half of Europe as well as India, than of promoting either trade or geographical inquiry; and it was the route which led to Northern Afghanistan and Baktria through Northern Persia which was most attractive from its general accessibility and promise of profit. It was this way that Northern Kashmir and the gold-fields of Tibet were touched. The Indian gold which formed so large a part of the Persian revenues in the time of Darius undoubtedly came from Northern India and Tibet. Old as are the workings of the Wynaad gold-fields in the west, and Kolar in the east, of the peninsula, it is unlikely that either of these sources was known to Persia.

The more direct routes to India from Ecbatana, passing through Central Persia via Kashan, Yezd, and Kirman, terminated on the Helmund or in Makran, and there is no evidence that the mountain system which faces the Indus was ever crossed by invading Persian hosts. There was, indeed, a tradition in Alexander's time that an attempt had been made to traverse Makran and that it had failed. This, says Arrian, was one of the reasons why Alexander obstinately chose that route on his retirement from India. In spite, however, of the geographical difficulties which render it improbable that the hosts of Tiglath Pileser (who could have dealt with the Skythians of the north readily enough) ever broke across the north-western gateways of India's mountain borderland, there was undoubtedly a close connection between Assyria and India of which the evidence is still with us.

Throughout the golden age of the Second Empire of Assyria, after the subjugation of Babylon and the consolidation of the Empire by Tiglath Pileser, during the reigns of Sargon and Senacherib (who fought the first Assyrian naval fight), Esar Haddon (who destroyed Sidon and removed the inhabitants) and Assur-bani-pal (Sardanapalus), to the final overthrow of Assyria by Babylon in 625 B.C., when the star of Nebuchadnezzar arose on the southern horizon, Assyria held the supreme command of Eastern commerce, and Nineveh dictated the cannons of art to the world. No event more profoundly affected the commerce of Asia than the destruction of Sidon and the bodily transfer of its commercial inhabitants to Assyria. This was the age of Assyrian art, of literature, and of architecture; Assyrian culture realized its culminating point in the reign of Assur-bani-pal, when the library at Nineveh far surpassed any library that the world had ever seen. It was then that intercourse between Assyria and India became unbroken and intimate. Then public works of the largest dimensions were undertaken, and colonies formed for the purpose of developing the riches of the newly acquired lands in the East. Assyrian art found its way to India, and the affinity between Assyrian and Indian art is directly traceable still in spite of the impress subsequently effected by Greece and Rome.

The carpets that are spread on the floors of every Anglo-Indian home and which, as Turkish, Persian, Central Asian, or Indian, are to be found in every carpet shop in London, usually possess in the intricacies of their pattern some trace of ancient Assyrian art. As Sir George Birdwood has long ago pointed out, general similarities between Assyrian and Indian design in carpet patterns may possibly be due to a common Turanian origin, pre-Semitic and pre-Aryan; but there are details of architectural plan in the Southern Indian temples which, quite as much as the reproduction of the ancient Assyrian "knop and flower" in its infinite variety of form (all expressing more or less conventionally the cone and the lotus of the original idea), testify to an infinitely old art affinity, and at the same time witness to the wonderful vitality of intelligent design.

The tree of life so largely interwoven into Eastern fabrics was the "Asherah" or "grove" sacred to Asshur the supreme god of the Assyrians, the Lord and Giver of life; and it appears to have been the development of the "Hom" or lotus, which, although it is a Kashmir valley plant, is always admirably rendered in Assyrian sculpture. Eventually the date palm took the place of the Hom in the Euphrates valley, just as the vine replaced it in Asia Minor and Greece. In Central Asian rugs we find the cone replaced by the pomegranate, and the tree of life becomes a pomegranate tree. There is too much intricacy in such similarity of ornamental detail between Assyrian and Indian art for the result to have been merely developments from a common pre-historic stock along separate lines. They are clearly imitations one of the other, and the similarity is but another link in the chain of evidence which proves that the highways of Asia connecting Assyria with India through Persia were well-trodden ways seven centuries at least before Christ, even if the sea route from the Red Sea and Euphrates had not then reached the Indus and western coast of India.

Whilst all historical evidence points to the Tehran-Mashad route as the great highway which linked Mesopotamia with Baktria in past ages, there are certain curious little indications that the southern road through Persia, viz. Yezd and Kirman, was also well known, for it is a remarkable fact (which may be taken for what it is worth) that it is in the villages and bazaars of Sind that the potters may be found whose conservative souls delight in the reproduction of a class of ornamental decoration which most clearly indicates an Assyrian origin. The direct route to Sind from Mesopotamia is not by way of Herat. It is (as will be subsequently explained) via Kirman and Makran, but there is absolutely no historical evidence to support the suggestion that this was a route utilized by the Assyrians; and there is, on the other hand, Arrian's statement that roads through Makran were unknown or but legendary.

It is impossible, however, to ignore the fact that the sea route to North-western India was utilized in very ancient times; and although its connection with the northern landward gates of India may appear to be rather obscure, that connection is a matter which actually concerns us rather nearly in the present day. For it is by this ancient sea route that Persia and Baluchistan, Seistan and Afghanistan derive those supplies of small arms and ammunition which are abundant in those countries, but which never pass through India. Muskat is the chief depot for distribution, and the Persian ports of Bandar Abbas, Jask, or Pasni on the Makran coast are utilized as ports for the interior, leading by routes which are quite sufficiently good for caravan traffic towards the point where Afghan territory meets that of Persia and Baluchistan just south of Seistan. Once in Seistan they are well behind the passes which split our nearer line of defence in the trans-Indus hills. Even our command of the sea fails to suppress this traffic, which has led to such a general distribution of arms of precision (chiefly of German manufacture), that these countries may fairly claim to be able to arm their whole population. No recent researches in the Persian Gulf or on the Persian coast have added much to the sum of our knowledge respecting the early navigation of these Eastern seas, but there can be no question as to its immense antiquity. The Phoenician settler in Syria and Mesopotamia has been traced back to his primeval home in the Bahrein Islands, which, if Herodotus is correct in his estimated date for the founding of Tyre (2756 years B.C.), takes us back to very early times indeed for the coast navigation of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Seas. Hiram, King of Tyre, could look back through long ages to the days when his Phoenician forefathers started their well-packed vessels (the Phoenicians were famous for their skill in stowing cargo) to crawl along the coasts of Makran and Western India for the purpose of acquiring those stores of spices and gold which first made commerce profitable, or else to make their way westward, guided by the headlands and shore outlines of Southern Arabia, to gather the riches from African fields. Makran is full of strange relics of immense age for which none can account. Since Egyptology has become a recognized science, who will lay the foundations of such a science for Southern Arabia and Makran? When will some one arise with the wisdom and the leisure to write of the power of ancient Arabia, and to trace the impressions left on the whole world of commerce, of art, of architecture, and literature by the ancient races who hailed from the South?

We cannot tell when the first sea-borne trade passed to and fro between India and the Erythrean Sea, a creeping, slow-moving trade making the best shift possible of wind and tide, and knowing no guide but the pole star of that period, and the rocky headlands and islands of the Makran coast. Many of the ancient islands exist no more, but the coast is a peculiarly well-marked one for the mariner still. Probably the coast trade was earlier than the overland caravan traffic; but the latter was certainly co-existent with the Assyrian monarchy when Persia and Central Asia lay at the feet of the conqueror Tiglath Pileser.