It depends on how you define Mespotamia. It could be said that I had already been in Mesopotamia for a little while. Most definitions I have seen say that, as the name suggests, it means the land between the rivers, namely the Tigris and the Euphrates.
A wider definition of Mesopotamia is the land that that lies between the Zagros and Anti-Taurus Mountains in the northern end, and the Arabian plateau and Persian Gulf to the south, corresponding to modern Iraq, eastern Syria and southeastern Turkey.
Writings from Mesopotamia (Uruk, modern Warka) are among the earliest known in the world, giving Mesopotamia a reputation of being the Cradle of Civilization, therefore it is regarded by some as the oldest known civilization. It is said that Mesopotamia was the place of the legendary Garden of Eden. On the spot where the Tigris meets the Euphrates Rivers the holy tree of Adam emerged symbolizing the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden.
There are thousands of pages on the web to access if you want to know more about Mespotamia. I don't have time to attempt to summarise it all here. There are many learned articles. I googlewhacked the word and in 4 hundredths of a second got the first 10 of 5,250,000 results. So there's plenty to read about if you want to.
Strangely the following was not in the first 10 nor in the first 50 results, I didn't look any further:
Turn your watch
Turn your watch back
About a hundred thousand years
A hundred thousand years
I'll meet you by the third pyramid
I'll meet you by the third pyramid
Ah come on, that's right, I want
For me in Mesopotamia
We're going down to meet it
I ain't no student
Feel those vibrations
Of ancient culture
I know a neat excavation
Before I talk I should read a book
But there's one thing That I do know
There's a lot of ruins In Mesopotamia
Six or eight thousand years ago
They laid down the law
They laid down the law
aa aa aa aa aa aaa
Six or eight thousand years ago
They laid down the law
aa aa aa aa aa aaa
I'll meet you by the third pyramid
I'll meet you by the third pyramid
Ah come on, that's right, I want
For me in Mesopotamia
We're going down to meet it
Now I ain't no student
Hear those vibrations
Of ancient culture
I know a neat excavation
Before I talk I should read a book
Mesopotamia that's where I wanna go
But there's one thing that I do know
Mesopotamia that's where I wanna go
There's a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia
Six or eight thousand years ago
They laid down the law
They laid down the law
aa aa aa aa aa aaa
Six or eight thousand years ago
They laid down the law
aa aa aa aa aa aaa
In Mesopotamia
aa aa aa aa aa aaa
They laid down the law
aa aa aa aa aa aaa
In Mesopotamia
aa aa aa aa aa aaa
Fred Schneider really says it all. "Before I talk I should read a book". How very true that is. "There's a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia". That's very true too.
Frankly I get a little angry when I think about how many more ruins there are in Mespotamia now than there were before 1997. I was in the area in 1990. The first Gulf War was just starting. The Air Offensive over northern Kuwait and Southern Iraq. I couldn't have known then how things might develop into the tragic situation we see today.
Perhaps in 100 years (if the planet lasts that long) there will be some information resource where an interested or curious soul will read about the history of the area and George W Bush will simply be added to the list of tyrants who have laid waste to the area.
I can understand (or think I can understand) how in ages of widespread ignorance there could have been conquests by the various empires mentioned previously in this blog about my tour. I think I can comprehend how those things happened. I mentioned Tamburlaine in an earlier post. I'll concede that it is difficult to understand the scale of the killing in his case. All the same I would submit that people knew no better.
What I can't understand is how in this day and age, when vast amounts of information can be accessed at the touch of a button at lightning speed, anyone could justify a military campaign such as is going on in Iraq.
The tragedy of Mesopotamia I suppose is that as part of the fertile crescent in ancient times it was well worth fighting over because of the ability through irrigation techniques to grow a surplus of food. If you controlled the area you were rich.
The modern day tragedy is that it is sitting on top of a lake of oil. That's the only credible reason there can be for the US's desire to control the region. They don't care about democracy. All they care about is the wasteful American Way of Life. They talk about Saddam Hussein having been an evil dictator and sat in judgment on him for the attrocities he undoubtedly carried out. They pale into insignificance compared to Tamburlaine of course but the Americans have done more than their fair share of ethnic cleansing and in the not too distant past either.
A quick dip into the net produces this written by By Leah Trabich, Cold Spring Harbor High School, New York, USA in 1997 on a website put up by the Holocaust/Genocide Project called An End to Intolerance. The article is entitled "Native American Genocide Still Haunts United States".
There are some astonishing facts about the scale of mass killing on the Continent after the arrival of Columbus. Leah Trabich says: "By conservative estimates, the population of the United States prior to European contact was greater than 12 million. Four centuries later, the count was reduced by 95% to 237 thousand."
She goes on:"The discovery of gold in California, early in 1848, prompted American migration and expansion into the west. The greed of Americans for money and land was rejuvenated with the Homestead Act of 1862. In California and Texas there was blatant genocide of Indians by non-Indians during certain historic periods. In California, the decrease from about a quarter of a million to less than 20,000 is primarily due to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated by the miners and early settlers. Indian education began with forts erected by Jesuits, in which indigenous youths were incarcerated, indoctrinated with non-indigenous Christian values, and forced into manual labor. These children were forcibly removed from their parents by soldiers and many times never saw their families until later in their adulthood. This was after their value systems and knowledge had been supplanted with colonial thinking. One of the foundations of the U.S. imperialist strategy was to replace traditional leadership of the various indigenous nations with indoctrinated "graduates" of white "schools," in order to expedite compliance with U.S. goals and expansion.
Probably one of the most ruinous acts to the Indians was the disappearance of the buffalo. For the Indians who lived on the Plains, life depended on the buffalo. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were an estimated forty million buffalo, but between 1830 and 1888 there was a rapid, systematic extermination culminating in the sudden slaughter of the only two remaining Plain herds. By around 1895, the formerly vast buffalo populations were practically extinct. The slaughter occurred because of the economic value of buffalo hides to Americans and because the animals were in the way of the rapidly westward expanding population. The end result was widescale starvation and the social and cultural disintegration of many Plains tribes."
So a little less than 120 years ago the U S Government was exterminating Native Americans.
Time is a funny thing. My trip started over 17 years ago. That seems a long time ago but it isn't really. In solicitors' firms the Partners measure their own performance and the performance of more junior fee earners month to month. I sometimes muse that I have only months left to live. It is true. I am 47 years old. I try to keep fit (but not as hard as I should). I try to eat healthy food (but I don't always). I really don't drink very much. I guess that I only drink to excess once a year. I do smoke and pretty unhealthy roll-ups at that. My dad is 75 next birthday. Suppose I live another 40 years for argument's sake? That is only 480 months. It doesn't seem to be a very big number does it? It was only 3 times as many months ago that the Native Americans were being wiped out.
I seem to have strayed some distance from Mesopotamia but when I arrived in Diyarbakir I was definitely there. Diyarbakir is on the banks of the Tigris.
Diyarbakir is also considered by some to be the "capital" of "Kurdistan". This is another difficult problem. Kurdistan does not officially exist. It is not an administrative area. It is a region which includes south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, north western Iran and small parts of Armenia and northern Syria.
In all honesty I am no scholar but it seems to be an area that has very little prospect of ever being allowed to declare itself a State in its own right. All of the States within which it "exists" at present have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. The only officially recognised Kurdish autonomous area is in Northern Iraq and the very fact is beginning to cause problems today. It seems that Turkey suspects that Kurdish terrorists (or freedom fighters, as you will - it depends who wins after all) are using the new autonomous area as a base from which to launch attacks in Turkey. Turkey has threatened to make incursions into northern Iraq in pursuit of them.
As a result of having to retrace our steps from Hakkari to Van and then change the plan and go to Diyarbakir instead we arrived there late and booked into the Pinar Hotel. As I recall the hotel was extremely dingy. We were assured the rooms were clean and the bedsheets likewise. When we inspected the sheets they were stained and we had to insist on fresh linen.
We checked out the next morning and after breakfast relocated to the Kaleli Hotel. I located the Turkish Airlines Office and swapped my last internal flight ticket for one from Adana to Istanbul. Rudiger and I didn't do very much. we sat around drinking tea and playing backgammon or "tavla" as I think it is called in Turkey. We also played the less serious version called Tric-Trac that I had learned when I was young.
At some stage we ended up in a carpet shop drinking tea there. I was cajoled into buying a very small piece of Kelim carpet. It didn't cost very much, about £11, I think. The very earnest salesman told me it was very old and that a percentage of the cost would be donated to the struggle of the Kurdish people. I hope it wasn't, not because I didn't have any sympathy for their cause (to be honest I didn't really know enough to have a sensible view about it, and probably still don't) but because I don't really want to think that I might have financed armed struggle/terrorism directly or indirectly.
Rudiger was much better at avoiding buying anything. He had done a bit of traveling in his time and knowing that after Turkey my next stop was India told me that based on my inability to withstand the sales techniques of Turkish rug sellers, I was likely to be parted with most of my money in no time when I got to India.
My Filofax notes say that we ate good food in a restaurant called Azure and I remember we had a drink in a posh Hotel that looked like a Kervansaray (Caravanserai). It's called the Deliller Hani. I've looked it up since and it's mentioned on A Silk Road Hotels website which gives the history of the place. I set out below exactly what it says (the English used is not mine):
"The Deliller Han was built by the second governer of Diyarbakir Hüsrev Pasha, to the front of Bezergan Han to serve to the merchants who were travelling go the countries on holy Hicaz and Silkroad , as Syria, Iran and India. The Han was built with mosque and medresse and whole building was consider as KULLIYE, it was constructed in 1521 and finished already in 1527. The Han consist of 72 rooms, 17 shops and a stall which has 800 camel capacity. The Han construction materials mainly were Local materials and mainly were black and white stones. Stones From Urfa. Black stones were brought from Kurtbogazi stonemine and white.
THE DELILLER HAN WHICH TEND TO BE DESTROYED HOW WAS IT CHANGED TO THE GRAND HISTORICAL KERVANSARAY HOTEL
The portion of the Han was occupied by vakiflar ad ministration in 1988 and given a contrat to the Hotel Grand Kervansaray for 49 years. This historical place previously had been used as bazar."
A touristic leaflet about Diyarbakir I picked up is a little more lucid (if shorter) in its description saying that it was built of black basalt and white limestone by Husrev Pasa, the second governor of the city to house the official guides who lead pilgrims from this point to Mecca.
So it looked like a Kervansaray because that's what it was. It's advertised as being a 5 star hotel and the rates at present seem reasonable (although they would have been completely beyond my budget when I was there).
The last word in my notes for Wednesday 10 October 1990 is "Watermelon". I can't remember exactly but I am sure that it was a good watermelon because Wikipedia says that Diyarbakir is famed for its culture, folklore and watermelons. The touristic leaflet I picked up says that watermelons (karpuz) deserve a special mention as the province produces the finest in all Turkey and they have come to be accepted as the symbol of the city. The finest specimens weigh in at 40 to 60kg! Big Melons!
The following day we went back to the Deliller Hani to take a picture. It had looked much more romantic in the dark with the arches softly lit. All the same I think it was worth a snap. If I ever went back to Diyabakir I think I'd stay there.
Walking around Diyarbakir felt a bit strange. In the previous week or so I hadn't spent much time in built up areas and the city was a bit edgy. As I walked around I flicked my Erzurum prayer beads constantly and this seemed to have a magical effect on the local children. In most other places the children would pester you for money or whatever but when they saw me flicking the beads they left me alone.
To tell the truth Diyarbakir did not set me on fire. We did a bit of wandering around but if there was anything really interesting to see I missed it. Below is a not very good picture of the courtyard of the Ulu Cami one of the oldest mosques in Anatolia being converted from a church in 639 after the Muslim armies took Diyarbakir. It suffered damage in an earthquake in 1115 and collapsed. Just under 50 years later it was rebuilt. After the Seljuk period the mosque was further repaired by Uzun Hasan a White Sheep Turkman (Akkoyunlu). In 1839 (after substantial repairs in 1824) the minaret was struck and knocked down by lightning and rebuilt.
