Persia and its people

Preface

THIS book is the result of two visits to Persia, extending over a period of about three years, during which I had considerable opportunities of travel and of mixing with the inhabitants.

It was written with the idea of giving a popular description of Iran, but at the same time I have striven to be accurate, and where I could not rely on my personal knowledge I gratefully own my obligation to the works of Mr. Benjamin, Professor E. G. Browne, Lord Curzon, Sir C. Markham, Sir W. Muir, Professor W. Jackson, Sir L. Pelly, and Major Sykes among others.

I have been particularly fortunate in having had the benefit of the criticism of Sir Mortimer Durand, formerly H.B.M.'s Minister at Tehran, his advice having been most valuable.

Besides this. Major Sykes, Miss Bird, and two Persian gentlemen have supplied useful information ; Mr. H. R. Sykes has kindly allowed me to avail myself of his large collection of photographs, and other illustrations are by Mr. Bourke and M. Sevraguine, of Tehran.

viii PERSIA AND ITS PEOPLE

I have tried to give a truthful picture of Persia as it is, dwelling chiefly on those aspects which may be of interest to the general reader, and my principal difficulty has been to compress all that I wanted to say within the limits of a single volume.

If the public finds half as much pleasure in reading my book as I have had in writing it I shall be more than rewarded.

ELLA C. SYKES

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. SOME DESCRIPTION OF PERSIA . . I

II. A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF PERSIA 1 3

Chapter I Some Description Of Persia

THE Persians call themselves Irani and their land Iran, the word Persia being derived from the province of Ears or Pars, from which the Zoroastrians of Bombay take their name of Parsis.

The country is also known as the " Land of the Lion and the Sun," and though the king of beasts has almost died out, yet the symbol of the Zoroastrian deity shines glorious as ever, and on the national standard the sun is depicted with the face of a woman peering over the back of a lion.

The area of Persia is estimated at 628,000 square miles, that is to say it is more than three times the size of France, and its people number only about nine and a half millions. Therefore it will cause no surprise to hear that Persia has only fifteen inhabitants to a square mile, and that it is possible to travel for days in the country without coming across a village or even a human being. In fact the entire population of this great kingdom is considerably under the joint populations of London, Paris, and New York.

Persia is bounded on the north by the Caspian Sea and Russia in Asia ; on the west by the Turkish Empire; on the east by Afghanistan and British Baluchistan, the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea washing its southern shores.

Within these boundaries there are enormous differences in the formation of the country and the climate. Cyrus the Great once commented on this fact by remarking that at one end of his kingdom his subjects might be dying of cold, while at the other they were being suffocated by the intense heat.

The centre of Persia is a vast plateau, some 2,000 to 6,000 feet in elevation, separated from the low-lying lands on the Caspian and the Persian Gulf by formidable mountain barriers, in which are many splendid peaks, ranging from 13,000 to 15,000 feet in height.

This table-land is crossed diagonally from north-west to south-east by frequent chains of mountains separating wide plains, and it is possible to drive between these ranges for some hundreds of miles. But if any one wishes to visit the capital Tehran or the holy city Meshed from Europe, he must, soon after leaving the Caspian, cross the Elburz mountains. This mighty chain runs over five hundred miles from west to east, and its highest peak, the extinct volcano Demavend, rises to a height of 20,000 feet.

Moreover, should the traveller wish to penetrate into the country by way of the Persian Gulf, he must negotiate a formidable mountain barrier, and clamber over lofty passes, the kotals between Bushire and Shiraz always being mentioned in terms of wellmerited obloquy.

SOME DESCRIPTION OF PERSIA 3

The late Dr. Blandford ^ pointed out that, as the edges of this huge plateau are all higher than its interior, hardly any of the rivers or streams find their way to the sea, but lose themselves in marshes, and the writer remembers seeing from the summit of a hill how the Zendeh Rud, the famous river on which Isfahan is built, ended abruptly in a broad, shallow lake on the wide plain below.

In such a country both the temperature and the rainfall vary greatly, and the feverish, moist heat of the regions round the Caspian and Persian Gulf is the exact opposite of the usually fine climate of the Plateau, where the exhilarating air is of such marvellous dryness and purity that objects can be seen at an almost incredible distance. The extremes of heat and cold, however, are very great on these uplands ; there are always heavy falls of snow during the winter in the northern provinces, and though the sun may be powerful during the day, yet the thermometer falls to 15° or 20° at night.

In the summer the heat is often intense, and all who can do so migrate to the hills to escape it, the hot, dry winds being very trying. Sun apoplexy is not uncommon at this season, a " touch of the sun " giving fever to European and native alike, and it is dangerous to indulge in alcohol during the heat of the day.

Violent sandstorms are frequent in the spring in the " desert " provinces, and hailstorms in which the stones are large as marbles and deal destruction to fruit-trees and crops occur at the same season in the north. To give an idea of the changes of temperature, a traveller in the course of one day's march may leave ' " Zoology of Eastern Persia."

a frost-bound country and descend into a region of feathery palms, where he will find the atmosphere almost stifling. As to the rainfall, it has been computed that fifty inches fall annually at Resht on the Caspian, in contrast to the five or six inches in central and south-east Persia. The great bulk of the country is scantily watered, the rivers being few and small, and the lakes all salt ; therefore most of the cultivation has to be carried on by means of irrigation, the mountain-streams being conveyed to the towns in subterranean aqueducts. Some of these are twenty miles in length, and occasionally are tunnelled at a great depth below the surface, needing constant care to prevent the endless passages getting choked up with earth.

A Frenchman once said that Persia was nothing but a desert, which was sometimes composed of sand and at others of salt, and the traveller will own that the description is not far wrong when he notices the sterility of the kingdom of the Shah. In passing through the country he will get an impression of great barren plains sprinkled with the debris from the equally bare, but often brilliantly coloured mountain ranges that divide them. Not a tree, a shrub, or a blade of grass is to be seen, and only camel-thorn and veitch are sparsely dotted about on the arid ground. The monotony is broken at intervals in the spring by the green of the young crops round a town or village, but the sunken fields on which the wheat and barley are sown have no hedges, only low mud banks for the purposes of irrigation. Were it not for the crops, the scenery would be coloured in tones of ochre, burnt sienna, and neutral tint, and it is indescribably dreary and monotonous on

SOME DESCRIPTION OF PERSIA 5

the rare days when the sun is hidden. But when the heaven of intense turquoise blue vibrates with sunlight, everything is beautified, and most travellers succumb to the weird fascination of the landscape.

From what has gone before, the reader will understand that there must be great differences in the climate and vegetation of the thirty-three provinces into which the kingdom is divided.

Those round the Caspian grow rice, and have great forests, an exuberant vegetation, and numberless streams fed by the constant rain.

To the north-west and west in Azerbaijan, Luristan and the Bakhtiari country, is a region of mountains which may be called the Highlands of Persia, and which is visited by winters of great severity, and to the south of the latter district is Arabistan, a province where the dry heat in summer reaches over 120° indoors, and where enormous quantities of wheat could be grown with the necessary irrigation.

Along the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea the low-lying country has an almost intolerable damp heat during the greater part of the year, but is arid in the extreme, not being visited by the heavy rainfall of the Caspian provinces. Here dates are the staple food and chief product of the country, and Laristan, Makran, and Baluchistan are peopled by Arab tribes on the coast and by Baluchis inland.

North of this region is the small eastern province of Sistan, interesting to Persians as being the home of their great hero Rustum, and to geographers from its physical conformation. As Lord Curzon writes : ^ ". . . not only do the lakes alternately swell, recede ' " Persia."

and disappear — the idea of displacement covering an extent, according to Rawlinson, of one hundred miles in length by fifty miles in width — but the rivers also are constantly shifting their beds, sometimes taking a sudden fancy for what has hitherto been an artificial channel, but which they soon succeed in converting into a very good imitation of a natural channel, in order to perplex some geographer of the future. It is not surprising, therefore, that while the country owes to the abundant alluvium thus promiscuously showered upon it its store of wealth and fertility, it also contains more ruined cities and habitations than are perhaps to be found within a similar space of ground anywhere in the world."

The dry heat during the summer reaches 121°, and the insect pests that breed in the great Hamun, or Lagoon, into which the river Helmand empties itself, make life a burden. Fortunately, however, Sistan is visited late in May or early in June by the beneficent bad-i-sud-i-bist ruz (wind of a hundred and twenty days), that tempers the heat and drives away the mosquitoes and sand-flies. It has been registered to blow at the rate of seventy-two miles an hour, making the climate bearable and not unhealthy, though the natives suffer a good deal from malaria.

A glance at the map will show an enormous space marked Lut, or Desert, supposed to have been formerly a dried-up inland sea, occupying the centre of the country, and severing the north from the south and the east from the west of Persia, thus doing much to interrupt free communication. Half the large province of Khorasan in the north-east is Sahara, and such big towns as Kum and Kashan lie on the edge of the

SOME DESCRIPTION OF PERSIA 7

glittering Kavir, or salt desert, through which runs a river of brine ; at Yezd, the sandy hummocks of the waterless Lut are almost up to the walls of the city, reminding the traveller of the prophecy that the town is to be overwhelmed by the sand at some future date, and Kerman, two hundred miles further south-east, is only separated by a small cultivated area from this dreary waste that has to be skirted when proceeding southwards into Baluchistan. It may easily be grasped what a tremendous obstacle to intercourse is this great desert, and it is partly owing to its presence that the large towns are more or less isolated, and that the inhabitants centre their interests in their particular cities and not in the country as a whole. In fact, so bad are the communications and so costly is the transport, that if there happen to be a famine in one district, the population must starve, though in other parts of the country there might be bumper crops.

Perhaps what chiefly strikes the European is the poverty everywhere apparent. He will have read accounts of the splendour in which the Achsemenian and Sasanian monarchs lived, and traditions of the Golden Age of Shah Abbas are still extant, and he will wonder whether Persia could possibly have looked so hopelessly "out at elbows" as it does to-day. It could never have been a rich kingdom, and its monarchs drew a great part of their revenue from far more fertile provinces that owned their sway ; but still, wherever the traveller may go, he will find ruins of villages long deserted, towns surrounded by quarters once inhabited and now falling into decay ; even in the Lut there are remains of cultivation showing that the oases were far more frequent than they are at present, and in barren Baluchistan he will observe how the hills are terraced in many parts, the uncivilised inhabitants, who make no use of these long-ago labours, putting them down to the work of " infidels." Many writers consider that the terrible Mongol invasion was a blow from which Persia has never recovered ; but good government could still do much for a country in which the desert literally "blossoms like the rose" if it be irrigated.

Under the system of the Shahs, in which every one in power " squeezes " to his utmost every one below him, there is no protection for property and no encouragement given to enterprise. Thus the country grows steadily poorer as the years pass by, though the prices of food are always on the increase, as the following table will show : —

Cost of Living at Tehr

AN IN 1880 AND l>

900.^

Bread per man (6^ lbs.)

... 3|

9|

Mutton „ ,

029!

Cheese „ „

2 4|

Milk „

Eggs per hundred

The writer who remembered that eggs were ten a penny at Kerman a dozen years ago, found that only three to four were to be purchased for the same sum at Meshed in 1909, and the old days when meat and bread were under a penny a pound and a chicken could be obtained for twopence and a diminutive lamb for fourpence halfpenny, were gone for good.

' " Statesman's Year-Book, 1909."

SOME DESCRIPTION OF PERSIA 9

So barren is Persia at the present day that the uncultivated land surrounding any city looks like a desert, and the ruthless cutting down of the forests through the centuries has done much to decrease the naturally scanty rainfall. Coal being only found near the capital, wood is used everywhere for burning in the form of charcoal, and if no new plantations are laid out Persia's most thickly wooded districts will, in time, become as denuded of trees as is the central Plateau, In fact so expensive is wood in many parts, that much of the heating and cooking are done by means of the boussa, or camel-thorn, donkeys bringing it daily into the towns.

In this large country, treble the area of France, there are only six miles of railway. Of roads, in the European sense of the word, there are only four, their total length, when added together, being about 780 miles ; and these owe their existence to European enterprise. Practically everything is carried on the backs of camels and mules along the rough and often dangerous tracks made by the caravans during many centuries. There is only one navigable river, the Karun, which flows into the head of the Persian Gulf, and on this latter sea the ports are open roadsteads at which it is impossible to land cargo during stormy weather, only the port of Enzeli on the Caspian being important.

Persia has merely single-wire telegraph lines, the rickety poplar poles of which are often seen lying on the ground, in which case the Persian official at the nearest station will calmly remark that the line "does not speak to-day." In great contrast to this is the British three-wire line, supported on iron posts, which runs from the Persian frontier on the north-west down lo PERSIA AND ITS PEOPLE

to Bushire on the Persian Gulf, from which point messages to India are carried by cable to Bombay, and this line now has a branch from Kashan to Karachi via British Baluchistan in order to ensure a direct overland connection with our Indian Empire.

Owing to the lack of communications very little is done to tap the resources of the country. For example, Persia possesses many minerals, but as she has no railways, roads, or navigable rivers to carry them to the ports or to markets, this source of wealth is almost untouched. The famous turquoise mines near Nishapur, which have been known from very early times, produce the only precious stones which have been found in the kingdom, and are most inadequately worked, and the valuable Caspian fisheries are leased to a Russian company, most of the sturgeon or salmon caught in abundance finding their way to Russia.

For many years the imports of Persia have exceeded the exports, and this is partly owing to the slow and expensive methods of carriage, and still more to a short-sighted Government that puts obstacles in the way of enterprise and is suspicious of any man who becomes rich and does not conceal the fact. There is never any question of the Shah subsidising any private undertaking, and merchants and traders consider the " powers that be " as real benefactors if they will only leave their subjects to pursue their avocations without let or hindrance.

Sterile as Iran appears to be, yet an able ruler might do great things for his country, and the Englishman cannot but long for a man of the type of Lord Cromer to be allowed a free hand in remodelling the administration of the kingdom.

SOME DESCRIPTION OF PERSIA ii

Like ourselves the Persians are of Aryan stock, and have the same words for father, mother, brother, and daughter {J)idar, madar^ bradar, and diikhtar^ ; moreover, the construction of their language is like English. A mass of Arabic words is, however, incorporated in it, for when Islam was forced upon Persia, at the point of the sword, the converts had to recite their prayers three times daily in Arabic, and read the Koran in that language, no Persian translation of the sacred book being permitted until of late years, when the innovation met with strenuous opposition from the priesthood.

In appearance the true Irani is a handsome, well-built man with regular features and fine, dark eyes, his complexion resembling that of an Italian or Spaniard. P)Ut it must not be forgotten that Persia has been invaded again and again by the Central Asian tribes, and therefore the inhabitant of Shiraz, gay and extravagant, nervous and excitable, a lover of poetry and horses, and who claims to be of pure Persian stock, is very different to the semi-Turkish population of the north-west or to the natives of Khorasan. These latter show traces of Mongol and Usbeg blood in their broad, flat faces, high cheek-bones, and in manners that are brusque and boorish in comparison with the refinement and polish of a Shirazi.

Again the Persian Gulf is bordered by Arab tribes, and throughout the whole country roam a shifting nomad population, the Iliats, who drive their flocks and herds up into the hills during the spring and summer months, and who probably enjoy a pleasanter existence than any one else in Iran. Certainly they have to pay taxes on their flocks and herds, but they are in nowise

" ground down " as are the villagers in many parts, and their sturdy women are usually adorned with plenty of jewellery and look the picture of health, in pleasant contrast to the often sickly townswomen.

Chapter II A Bird's-eye View Of The History Of Persia

THE beginnings of Persian history are wrapped in legend, but probably about B.C. 700 the Medes, an Iranian race dwelling in what is now North- West Persia, threw off the yoke of Assyria. They left no record of their achievements, but we know from other sources that one of their kings was such a mighty warrior that he led his armies into Europe. Side by side with the Medes lived the Persians, also an Iranian race, and in B.C. 550 Cyrus, the Persian of the Achasmenian line, conquered Astyages, the Median king, and the empire passed from the West Iranian Medes to South Iranian Persians, the two countries being united under the name of Persia. During the rule of the Medes, Zoroaster, a native of Media, started the creed of the Fire Worshippers, his first success being the conversion of the King of Bactria to the new doctrines which spread rapidly, and though probably receiving a check at the time of the Persian conquest, yet they speedily became the established religion of the country under the Achasmenian dynasty.

Cyrus, when he had strengthened his position at home, led his armies into Asia Minor, conquering and taking captive Crcesus, King of Lydia, a man famous in classic story for his wealth and misfortunes, and annexing all the Greek colonies lying in those regions. But his greatest exploit was the capture of Babylon, a city deemed to be impregnable, of immense wealth, and boasting a civilisation far higher than that possessed by the Persians. With the downfall of this capital, Cyrus became master of Assyria, and his conquest contributed to raise Persia to the chief position in Asia. It is interesting that this monarch is mentioned in Isaiah by the words, "He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure." ^ According to a legend, Cyrus retired to a fountain in Azerbaijan, where he disappeared for ever from the sight of men, but in reality he died in battle against the Turanians or Tartars, and Cambyses (B.C. 529-522) succeeded him on the throne of Iran.

Although the new monarch increased the Persian Empire by the conquest of Egypt, yet he was without his father's ability and was cruel to boot, causing his brother Smerdis to be put to death secretly on suspicion of conspiring against him, and when he himself died by an accident there was no heir to the imperial crown. However, one of the Magi, or priests, strikingly Hke the murdered Smerdis, impersonated him, and ruled for a whole year before his imposture was discovered, when he was overthrown by the chief nobles of Persia, one of whom, under the title of Darius I., was raised to the vacant throne.

And now again Persia had a monarch worthy to stand in the place of Cyrus, for Darius (B.C. 521-485) was a leader of men, a great general and a skilful ruler. He ' Isaiah xliv. 28.

enlarged the borders of Persia eastward as far as the Indus ; tried to force his way northwards into Russia — but here the elements obliged him to retreat — and then he turned his attention westwards, meeting at the hands of the Greeks the great reverse of his reign. The Persian army, mustering some fifty thousand men, all accustomed to war, and having hardly ever tasted defeat, was utterly routed on the plains of Marathon by the patriotism and enthusiasm of the Greeks, who could only produce a force one-fifth of the size of the Persian host, which was compelled to return ignominiously to iVsia.

If one of the greatest monarchs that ever ruled Persia were powerless against the Greeks, it may hardly be expected that Xerxes (B.C. 485-465), who succeeded Darius, and was a man of ordinary ability, should do better than his father. However, he determined to undertake the adventure which has made his name notorious, and collected the largest army that had ever been known, to conquer the little people to whose genius the world owes so much. Every schoolboy knows what followed — the heroic defence of the pass of Thermopylae by Leonidas and his immortal Three Hundred ; the naval battles off Artemisium ; the abandonment of Athens to be burnt by the invaders, and the last stand of the Greeks at Salamis, hazarding their all upon a single battle which resulted in a crushing defeat for the Persians, and which, when followed by the Greek victory of Plataea, settled for centuries the question as to whether Asia should conquer Europe.

On the death of Xerxes the kingdom fell into the hands of incompetent rulers ; Egypt was lost after being held by Persia for over a century, and disorder and anarchy were rife. Artaxerxes III. found a hard task on his accession, but being a man of exceptional ability he almost succeeded in restoring Iran to her former greatness, and would probably have done so had he not been murdered in the full tide of his activities.

Up to now the Persian arms had been carried into Europe, but with Darius III. (B.C. 336-329) enthroned at Persepolis things were reversed, and Alexander the Macedonian, one of the greatest generals the world has ever seen, led his soldiers into Asia. The Persian troops, splendid fighters if well led, being now under a monarch both cowardly and incompetent, were beaten at Issus and routed at Arbela. After this battle the Persian Empire fell into the hands of the conqueror, and with. the assassination of the fugitive Darius in B.C. 329, the Achsemenian dynasty, established over two centuries before by Cyrus the Great, came to an end.

And now Alexander had before him the task of pacifying the empire that he had subdued, this being the more necessary as his ardent spirit longed to proceed to the conquest of India, though his knowledge of war taught him the danger of leaving a country at enmity with him in his rear.

He set about his work in two ways — first by mixing Persian soldiers with his own regiments, and secondly by commanding his legionaries to marry the women of the country, he himself wedding Roxana, the daughter of a Bactrian prince, and later on, Statira, grand-daughter of Artaxerxes III. When this was done he marched into India, but to his bitter disappointment he was forced by his war-worn veterans to turn back before the Ganges was reached. The great conqueror then retraced his steps to Babylon, which he made his capital, and busied himself with getting his empire into order before his early death, leaving the satrapies, or governments into which Cyrus had divided the realm, much as they were.

In B.C. 323 Alexander died, and immediately there arose fierce strife among his generals for the possession of the empire, the emperor's son being but a child, and from the Indus to the Nile there was civil war with its accompaniments of misery and anarchy. The less civilised Macedonians sought to lord it over the cultured Greeks, who had formed no small part of Alexander's conquering armies, and one result of this struggle for the mastery was the terrible episode of twenty-three thousand Greeks, being surprised and slain by the Macedonians as they were marching back to their native land. Out of all this discord the General Seleucus, seizing upon Babylon and its province, founded the dynasty of the Seleucidse, and the Greeks in Bactria revolted and formed a state in the heart of Asia, this kingdom lasting for a century, and even carrying its arms into India.

And now we must enter upon a new period of Persian history. About this time certain nomad tribes inhabiting the steppes north of the river Atrek left their native country and settled in Parthia, or what is now known as Khorasan, a large province of northern Persia, and these intruders founded the Parthian dynasty.

They were great fighters and wonderful horsemen, the expression " Parthian shot " being derived from their custom of pretending to fly before an enemy in confusion, and then turning in their saddles and shooting arrows at their pursuers, often defeating them by this ruse. In B.C. 250 these nomads had acquired so much territory that their chief ascended the throne of Parthia with the title of Arsaces I., and for more than four centuries he and his descendants ruled in Persia, and again and again put to rout the armies of Imperial Rome, the mistress of the western world.

The Parthians, far inferior in civilisation to the Persians, kept few records, the historian of these times depending upon the coins they struck and the accounts furnished by Greek and Roman writers.

Chief among their monarchs was Mithridates the Great (B.C. 1 71-138) who broke the power of the Seleucid dynasty, keeping its king a captive for the rest of his days, conquered the kingdom of Armenia and extended his realms from the Indus to the Euphrates. A significant fact, showing the position to which the Parthians had now attained, was the treaty of peace which they entered into with Rome, the first of many meetings between these two great Powers.

In B.C. 54 Orodes being King of Parthia, Crassus, who was triumvir in conjunction with Caesar and Pompey, thought that the time was favourable for an attack on the Parthians, whom he imagined would prove an easy conquest. The Roman legions met their foes at Carrhae on the Euphrates, and the Parthians displayed their usual tactics, on this occasion concealing the main body of their army. Their cavalry then charged, made a feint of fleeing, and was hotly pursued by the Romans into the very jaws of the hidden troops that suddenly surrounded and cut them up. Then the Parthians attacked the infantry, forced the main body of the army to surrender, and slew Crassus, thus inflicting the greatest defeat that the Romans had suffered since the time of Hannibal.