Accidents of an antiquary's life E-Book

D. G. Hogarth

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

I found the representative of a great British journal in a difficulty. It was his hard task to gather news of several Balkan states, which one and all seemed determined to set about making history at the same moment. Crete was already ablaze; a Macedonian war was promised by Greece, and Bulgaria moved restlessly behind her frontier. Who knew what the others would hazard on flank and rear? I could speak fair Greek. Would I help him by undertaking Crete? It need not be for long. The Powers would soon make its peace, and deport the Greek soldiers who had just landed under the very guns of our ships. His actual correspondent, a Greek, was colouring his despatches to London white and blue. Would I replace him awhile? My temptation was brief. I had never been in Crete, and a scholar may rarely watch war.
I had not long to wait for it. As we drew to our anchorage inside the warships off Canea there were houses to be seen afire two miles inshore and rifles spitting up and down the slopes behind the town. The Turks had thought to revictual their threatened lines in peace during the hour of the Sunday office; but priests and people came out of church to fight. It was a small and desultory affair, from which less than a score of killed and wounded men were borne back at evening to the gates—patient Anatolian peasants for the most part, who had long served out their due time and fought without heat or reasoning why. Along with them came the corpses of two or three bashibazuk Cretans, Greek in feature and Greek in speech, Moslems by chance and all but ignorant of the faith which they had died to uphold. They were the first men slain in anger that I had seen.

Leseprobe

ACCIDENTS OF AN ANTIQUARY’S LIFE

FRENCH CORPORAL DRILLING CRETAN VILLAGE GUARDS (1898).

Frontispiece.

ACCIDENTSOF AN ANTIQUARY’S LIFE

BYD. G. HOGARTHAUTHOR OF ‘A WANDERING SCHOLAR,’ ETC.

WITH FORTY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR AND HIS COMPANIONS

1910

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385741389

PREFACE

Among many companions in these accidents who are not named in the text, lest the book should become a string of names, I have to thank five especially because they have allowed me to use photographs taken when we were together. These are Mr. Alison V. Armour, owner of the “Utowana,” Mr. Richard Norton, a comrade during the cruise of that yacht and at Siut and in Syria, Messrs. A. W. Van Buren and C. D. Curtis, members of the yachting party, and Mr. J. A. R. Munro, who endured many things with me in Asia Minor in 1891. Four others, Dr. A. C. Headlam, who was the third of Sir W. M. Ramsay’s party in 1890, Mr. B. Christian, my companion in Thessaly before the Graeco-Turkish war broke out, Mr. J. G. C. Anderson, who cruised with me to Lycia in 1897, and Mr. A. E. Henderson, who did loyal service at Ephesus, I cannot forbear to name. I have also to express thanks to the proprietors and editors of three magazines, the Monthly, Cornhill, and Macmillan’s, for their kind consent to my using, in five chapters of this book, the second to the sixth, parts of articles which appeared in their issues prior to 1905. Finally, my friend and critic, Charles Robert Leslie Fletcher, who read this book in proof, knows how greatly I am beholden to him.

D. G. H.

Oxford, 1909.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PAGE

Introductory

Apology of an Apprentice

1

I.

An Interlude

21

II.

Lycia

43

III.

Crete

66

IV.

Nile Fens

91

V.

The Satalian Gulf

108

VI.

Cyrene

123

VII.

Digging

142

VIII.

The Sajur

160

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

FRENCH CORPORAL DRILLING CRETAN VILLAGE GUARDS (1898)

Frontispiece

THE WHITE CLIFFS OF HIERAPOLIS

6

THE VALLEY OF THE PONTIC LYCUS AT SUNRISE

18

A WRECKED MOSLEM VILLAGE OF CRETE

25

LYCIAN TOMBS

48

THE THEATRE OF MYRA

49

THE REPUTED TOMB OF ST. NICHOLAS AT MYRA

52

THE SAND-CHOKED THEATRE OF PATARA

54

THE DESPOILED HARPY TOMB

62

BLACKENED STUMPS AND PITS

67

SPONGE BOATS IN ZAKRO BAY

79

A BRIDAL BOWER AT GAIF

92

AN OLD FEN VILLAGE

99

THE LONE CONVENT OF GEMIANA

100

A FEN FISHERMAN

102

THE NORTHERNMOST HAMLET

105

CAMELS LOADING AT BALTIM

106

HALF BURIED PALM-FOREST, BALTIM

107

THE UTOWANA AT CNIDUS

108

PHASELIS AND TAKHTALY

113

THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS

118

IN THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS

119

TURKS IN THE CORRIDOR AT ASPENDUS

120

THE THEATRE OF SIDÉ

121

THE ROCK ROAD FROM APOLLONIA TO CYRENE

126

TOMBS OF CYRENE

127

THE MUDIR OF CYRENE

129

THE APOLLO FOUNTAIN

133

BEDAWIS OF THE BENI HAASA

135

APOLLONIA IN STORM

138

RIGGING THE GREAT PUMP AT EPHESUS

150

THE TREASURE SPOT AND PUMPS

151

A SEALED GRAVE-DOOR

155

MODELS OF SERVANTS AT THEIR WORK BESIDE A COFFIN

158

EUPHRATES FROM THE MOUND OF CARCHEMISH

160

THE SAJUR VALLEY AT SUNSET FROM TELL BASHAR

164

TELL AHMAR ACROSS EUPHRATES

171

A EUPHRATEAN FERRY

173

HITTITE INSCRIPTION AT TELL AHMAR

174

FALLEN LION OF SHALMANESER II. AT TELL AHMAR

175

INTRODUCTORY.

APOLOGY OF AN APPRENTICE.

And ta’en the—Antiquarian trade

I think they call it.

Burns.

I will not take the name of Antiquary without apology, and hereby, liberandi animam meam causa, make it in an Introductory, to be passed over if the reader pleases. Your true Antiquary is born, not made. Sometimes an infirmity or awkwardness of body, which has disposed a boy to shun the pursuits of his fellows, may help to detach the man for the study of forgotten far off things; but it is essential that there be inborn in him the type of mind which is more curious of the past than the present, loves detail for its own sake, and cares less for ends than means.

Nevertheless, accident may make an Antiquary, as good as another, out of anybody whose boyish education has given him, willy nilly, some knowledge of the elder world. Let him be thrown, for example, in early manhood, much into lands whose ancient monuments conspicuously exalt the past at the expense of the present. The necessary curiosity can grow within him, disposing his mind to study antiquarian detail as a duty, and, in time, a pleasure; and through apprenticeship he may learn and love the trade to which he was not born.

I claim to be no better than this Antiquary made, and made none too soon. Nothing disposed me to the trade in early years. If I was taken as a child to minsters and abbeys, I endured their chill aisles in lively hope of a pastrycook to come, and at our oldest Public School had no feeling for the grey Gothic austerities among which live the Foundationers, of whose number I was not. Nor was it until half my Oxford course had been run that I discovered curiosity about any ancient thing, and that curiosity was far from antiquarian. Scholar of my College though I was, I had been better known as a freshman for a gamester in a small way than for anything else; but some study was forced upon me, and in the course of it I happened on Mommsen’s panegyric of Caesar. The charm of guessing ancient motives from the records of ancient deeds fascinated me—there is much in the pursuit to appeal to a gambler—and I resolved to attempt a speculative biography of some great man. Looking about me for another imperial figure, I fixed, greatly daring, on Alexander the Great, foreswore cards and the course, and stepped out of the strict lists of the schools into the field of Macedonian history. The spacious world over which Alexander moved fired my imagination and stirred a lust for discovery. As a child my keenest joy was to announce the finding of an untrodden way in the outskirts of a Lincolnshire townlet, and my best remembered grief was to learn that it was already known and named.

I could write a good deal about Macedonians when I went into the Schools, but barely enough on other matters to win salvation; and if I was made presently a tutor and fellow of my College, it was less for my actual scholarship than for hope of its future. I found academic life not greatly to my liking at that age, and when an endowment for scholarly travel abroad was set for competition, I entered in forlorn hope of escape. To the equal surprise of others, I was chosen among better scholars, and found myself in a quandary. If I was to research abroad as a classical scholar, I wished to explore Alexander’s steps; but to go up alone into Asia was beyond my means. A friend, who knew my difficulty, told me that William Martin Ramsay, the well-known traveller in Asia Minor, needed an apprentice. Asia Minor was not Persia, but it was Asia, and fair field for a pioneer. I offered myself, and was accepted, but on the sole condition, that I made some preliminary study at the newly-founded Archaeological School in Athens. I knew nothing of Greek archaeology, having never during six years entered the Museum of my own Oxford; and thus, at an age when most archaeologists are past masters of some branch of their trade, I had to begin apprenticeship. Perhaps it may interest some to hear by what accidents an antiquary of a sort was made out of a wandering scholar.

* * * * *

I went to Athens early in 1887, as raw a neophyte as ever entered Academe. The British School, then in its first youth, was not yet assured of its place in the local republic of science, and held little converse with other Schools. The famous Antiquary who directed it could have guided better, though not more gladly, a student of Attic architecture than a would-be explorer of Asia, and the library held few books, though, heaven knows, enough that I had not read. My one fellow-student helped me much, and would have helped me more, had I been in the temper to learn. But I had come to Athens as a man should not, if he is to love her—come without trained taste for the ancient art, which is her only wealth, and without instinctive reverence for her soil. I gaped at her monuments like any other tourist, though with less than the common understanding, fled from German lectures on her topography, and took refuge in studying her inscriptions as students of history will who are brought unworthy into the presence of her art. For pastime, beside visiting a few neighbouring spots of which I knew not enough to find them interesting, I roamed mean streets and dusty suburbs, regretting the world I had left, and longing for another in the east, with a prospect of Asiatic travel for my sole comfort.

Two months passed drearily, and I escaped to Macedonia. The rickety vessel broke down for the third time at the second sunrise, and, wakened by the stoppage, I climbed sleepily on deck to find myself in a world of fog. A sudden gleam pierced the mist: I turned to see a patch of heaven, and in it, immeasurably high, one hard rose-red cloud. “Olympe!” said a deck hand. The peak stood revealed a moment only; but I had seen the seat of the Gods.

Salonica, sale unique, as the skipper punned, received me for ten days, and, with its camel-trains and Jews, black-bearded and cruel-eyed as men that kill prophets offered a foretaste of the East. It was in days before the railway had come down the Vardar valley and before the Great Fire, and the town, packed more close than now into its frame of white wall, was more odorous, less Italianized, less passable. Under the aegis of a Turk-loving Consul I hunted inscriptions in alleys and courts and stone-cutters’ yards and the purlieus of an unreformed konak, and, beginning to feel the explorer’s itch, would go up to Vodhena to find what might be left of Aegae; but Consul and Pasha forbade lest another Briton be captured by the bands that had taken Synge and Souttar. I was too innocent then to discount official fears, still believing, indeed, that one should walk, revolver on hip, even in Salonica streets; and in the end I proposed no more than to drive to the site of Pella. I went off with a young consular assistant and a guard, rumbling along, gensdarmes to right and gensdarmes to left, as I should never journey again in Turkey. There were soldiers at the coffee-halts, soldiers at the khans, soldiers guarding the bridge which crossed the slow-turning eddies of the Vardar, and soldiers holding Yenije, where astute bugs, who found saucers of water barring their usual access, painfully climbed the leprous walls and dropped from ceiling to pillow. The Yenije gravestones are mostly blocks brought from Pella, and on the site of the ancient city itself lie others, with two fragments of fluted Doric shafts, near a fountain still called Pel. For the rest, Pella has vanished as though it had never been. Out of dusty undulating fields; out of half a dozen barrows; out of a low marshy plain to west and south; out of a glorious horseshoe of hills with the snowy saddle of Olympus at one horn—out of these you must conjure your vision of Philip’s home.

It was the middle of May when I was free of Athens, and, passing over to Smyrna, found Ramsay about to start. A third member of the party arrived two days later, an adventurous fellow who had spent part of his youth in Albania and Montenegro, and, knowing little of ancient things, cared less, so he had a good horse to ride and an unknown track to follow. The apparatus of travel, which we gathered at Smyrna, was of the simplest,—a single tent and a few pots and pans, but no canned stores; and two simple villagers were hired to serve us. The qualifications of the one chosen to cook became manifest on the second night in camp. We had left railhead at Seraikeuy, and ridden up the Lycus valley to the foot of the white cliffs of Hierapolis. Mehmet bought a turkey of the peasants of Pambuk Kalessi, and was bidden to have it ready for the next night’s supper. Early on the morrow we went up to the site, and all that day, under a broiling sun and among some of the best preserved Roman tombs in Asia Minor, I entered on an arduous apprenticeship to the best epigraphist in Europe. Sharpset at nightfall we hurried down expectant of our turkey. Mehmet sat placid, the bird at his feet. It was a corpse, indeed, but no more, not even a plucked one. “What am I to do with this?” said Mehmet.

He learned better as time went on; but throughout that journey we had little except sodden messes to eat, faring worse than any traveller need fare. It was partly because our leader cared little what he ate, but more because, like his followers, he journeyed on a slender purse. Ramsay had made to himself a European reputation as an explorer of Asia Minor at a cost which another man would think scarcely sufficient for the tour of Germany; and it had become his principle, as, for similar reasons it has become Petrie’s, to suffer none but the barest means to his end. If both have pushed their practice to exceeding discomfort, both have taught several young Britons how little is necessity and how much superfluity: and it is not the least of my many debts to Ramsay that I gained in my first tour of exploration the will and the capacity to go farther at less cost than perhaps anyone but my master.

THE WHITE CLIFFS OF HIERAPOLIS.

This part of my education had begun at once: for while we were still in Smyrna, Ramsay, wanting information about two sites lying north of the Aidin railway, had suggested that I should visit them alone, all raw as I was, and rejoin him at railhead. Feeling like a boy packed off to his first school, I agreed, and took the train to Nazli. I knew very little Greek, and less Turkish, but the Nazli stationmaster, christened Achilles, was reported to speak my tongue. He so far justified his fame as to greet me, stranded forlorn on the tracks, with “How you do, my boy?” When my Oxford manner had readjusted itself, we conversed sufficiently in French; and he found me a dancing stallion and sent me off astride a deep and angular military saddle with my knees level with my hips, the centre of a curvetting escort of the youth of Nazli. My first site proved to be a large hillock once surrounded by walls, and still bearing ruins of Roman baths, towards which an aqueduct straggled across the valley. It certainly looked like the ancient Mastaura which I had come out to see; and all doubt was soon settled by an inscription of that town which, on my return, I found built into a church wall at Nazli, and copied as best I might. After a sleepless night, stiff, sore, and with less skin than had left Smyrna, I went to the second site, and thence, proud but thankful, took train to railhead.

When our modest caravan had left Hierapolis, it wandered awhile on either bank of the upper Maeander, sometimes dropping a thousand feet to the stream, but for the most part keeping the high ground. The land flowed with milk and honey if not much else, and I learned the grave courtesy of the Anatolian peasant. Twice we were called to shelter from the noonday sun in the portico of a mosque, and whatever the ayan, patron of strangers in that ordered village society, could procure of the best, was set before us. Our main purpose was to find inscriptions, and I was taught by precept and example how a villager may be induced to guide an inquisitive giaur into the recesses of his haremlik, or grub up the headstone of his forefather, or even saw away the floor of his mosque. But it was not always plain sailing; and how we used the wisdom of the serpent, and what reward was ours at one Maeander village, Badinlar, I have told already in another book.

I soon became interested in the simple arts of antiquarian travel, the seeking, the copying, the noting, the measuring, and the mapping, but it was some time before I could practise them in any comfort. The food or the climate, or both, caused at the first severe saddle-boils, for whose easing there were no long halts. To a rider in such plight it means much if his horse trip on stony tracks, lash out at his fellow, plunge and burst his girths in a bog, incontinently roll on a chance sandpatch, or calmly sit down in a ford to cool his haunches. A sorry steed, bought in my innocence at eight pounds English, and dear at two, introduced me to each and all of these packhorse tricks. But the spacious landscapes, the dry warm airs, the novelty of man, beast, bird and flower, kept me going; and was I not in the land where I would be?

A chance visit to Sandukli brought me into my earliest collision with Ottoman authority. It was in the hungry month of Ramazan, and two of us had ridden in from camp to buy what supplies we might in the early hours of morning. As we were about remounting, the police accosted us, and roughly bade us wait on the governor. Led to the konak, we were told his beyship was abed, and we must stay till he had eaten at sundown. To spend a whole day in dusty Sandukli was bad, but worse to spend it waiting on a Bey’s pleasure. We sent word that we gave him half an hour to appear, and, admired by all the loafers of the bazar, stalked up and down, watch in hand, in all the insolence of Britain abroad. The governor came not, but on the call of time sent a deputy, nervously offering excuse, and begging us go in peace. Ours is not a gracious race, but it usually gets what it wants.

Passing north-eastward through Afium Kara Hissar in mid June, we went up to our goal in the Phrygian Monument country, and for all the rest of the month were busied in exploring its pleasant shaggy valleys and carven cliffs. I have seen since no region so thickly set with strange memorials of the past, and none to which I would more joyfully return. Some day when diggers uncover the relics of that Midaean monarchy which seemed to the early Greeks of Asia the eldest and most god-like of powers, may I be there to see! The haunted valley of Ayazin, where we grubbed mole-like under the face of a fallen tomb, and, prone in the shallow pit we had made, sketched the most curious of Phrygian reliefs: the sheer acropolis of Kumbet, where we planned a mysterious rock-house which may be of any antiquity; the gorges of Bakshish and Yapuldak, whose sculptured tombs, fashioned like houses of the living, are seen suddenly through the pines: that stupendous curtain of carved and written stone hung before the gate of death by which Midas the King passed to the Great Mother; all his desolate, impregnable city above it, with inscribed altars and rock-reliefs—of these is woven my “féerie du premier voyage.” I was the photographer of the expedition, equipped with a camera which I had borrowed of an amateur in Smyrna and manipulated for the space of one afternoon under his patient eye—so unready was I for my trade; and I was an assistant surveyor, who having plotted painfully and with many lapses my half of the fortifications of the Midas City, was well enough satisfied with my botched work to question my master’s survey of the other half. He has long forgiven me.

A strenuous and somewhat nervous week we spent there under the Midaean crags. Unwarned of modern tenants, we found a new settlement of Circassians, who in those days had a bad name all over Asia Minor for a certain lawless truculence, born of pride of race, and fostered by the official perfidy with which they were often treated. But Mehmet Bey, the chief, received us cordially with samovar and smooth words. On the morrow he followed our operations among the monuments with very lively interest, and at evening came down to the camp and roundly proposed to share profits. We told him once and again there was no gold in our hopes; but we talked to deaf ears, and at last, to be rid of him, said we would halve such treasure as we might find. This, we well knew, was to sow trouble for early reaping, in a land where all believe that the Frank spirits bullion out of earth and rocks, though one see it ever so little; and we were not comforted by our muleteers’ tales of a recent killing, for which the Ottoman government was holding Mehmet Bey to account. But the local police, who had kept track of us, summoned the Bey to Karahissar on the third day, and thus nothing worse befell than a cooling of cordiality between camp and village as the days went by without our doing anything but draw lines on paper and squint through sights.