The countless ruins of Palestine, of whatever date they may be, tell us at a glance that we must not judge the resources of the ancient land by its present depressed and desolate state.[1] [1856]
This chapter will demonstrate that it was the physical state of the country which first helped preserve many antiquities, and then the increasing mod-ernisation under western influence which helped destroy so many sites in the face of growing prosperity and population.
Agriculture and desertification (a problem for other countries as well1), population levels and movement, public safety and governance, and transport by land and sea, all affected survival then destruction. Where lands were not cultivated, villages and even towns were abandoned and arable land could become desert, the domain of fierce Bedouin who acknowledged only tribal links and terrorised locals and travellers alike, as Brünnow & Domaszewski tabulate for Provincia Arabia.[2] (Brünnow & Domaszewski‘s accounts of many sites were excellent, and met with praise for their extent and documentation,[3] with an impressive amount of photography.2) They had done so for centuries, surely before the time of the Romans. Attacks on pilgrims were one of the rea-sons given for the launching of the First Crusade. Ottoman central government in Constantinople, a long way from Syria, could not regularly maintain public safety, and local and regional chieftains could be as importunate and expen-sive and difficult for travellers as the Bedouin.
Roads were inadequate, and ports few, so that population increase from the later 19th century and the modernisation and improved transport they brought saw a thirst for building materials for houses, roads, railways and ports, most conveniently and cheaply filled by dismantling ancient monuments and some-times whole towns. The social mix changed, and the economy fluctuated over the centuries.3 This chapter surveys all these interrelated elements, which
1 Brandt & Thornes 1996.
2 MacAdam 1986, 277–306 for catalogue of the 961 images taken by the Brünnow &
Domaszewski 1897–8 expedition, not all of which appear in the three volumes of Provincia Arabia.
3 Issawi 1988, 39–92 General and social developments: Syria; Fortin 1999, 131ff: Organisation de l’économie.
© Michael Greenhalgh, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004334601_003
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
were crucial for monuments, because stasis ensured their survival, whereas development and prosperity damaged and destroyed them.
In the Middle Ages, Christianity declined with the Muslim invasions,4 and with population expansions has lost many of her structures in the past two centuries.5 Syria was probably prosperous throughout all her territory, because (according to one theory) “the expansion of Islam into Syria-Palestine in the 630s was accompanied by only minimal disruption to socio-economic life in both towns and the countryside.”6 For another scholar, “Il est significatif de constater que des terres abandonnées à l’époque omeyyade ne seront de nou-veau cultivés qu’au XXe siècle!”7
In the 18th and especially the 19th centuries, while the region was “a ter-rain upon which nineteenth and early twentieth-century British travellers and imperialist administrators constructed at times overlapping and more frequently divergent discourses about the Middle East,”8 well-educated travel-lers from the West frequently reached a consensus, amidst their often patent desires to master the region.9 They observed that the potential of the country
4 Piccirillo 2002, Roman province of Arabia (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine): 80–113 for Sanctuaires et présence monastique en Arabie; 219–253: La fin d’une province et d’un com-munauté. Kennedy 1992 for their effect on rural settlement. Kuhnen 1990 for Graeco-Roman Palestine.
5 Hirschfeld 2002: A dozen monasteries in western Samaria, parts dismantled last century, because 155 in the British mandate photos (1917–1948) “one can trace the various structural elements of the monastery that were still standing then.” Most of the church has gone, but 172 Conder and Kitchener (1882) saw rich decoration that recalled 6thC Syria and Mount Gerizim.
6 Walmsley 2007 48 for quote; 34–46: Condition of towns in the later sixth century; 71–112 Sites and settlement processes. This deals with existing and new towns, and surveys recent archae-ological work. For the older theory, cf. Fortin 1999, 141: Long decline from 6thC, with Persians, pillage, earthquakes and epidemics – then a long decline in agriculture with the introduc-tion of Islam. Piccirillo 2002, 252–253 for various theories of abandonment of the Roman province of Arabia, including Arab invasion, climate, epidemics, bedouinisation. Magness 2012, 349: Palestine continued to flourish under early Islamic rule. See Bartl & Moaz 2008 for up-to-date research and theories from late antiquity to early Islam in Syria; Sivan 2008 for a well-referenced and broad survey; Canivet 1992 for conference proceedings on Byzantium to Islam.
7 Fortin 1999, 141: Islam goes for cotton and linen for export; ibid., 163–5 La période islamique et le commerce de longue distance.
8 Nash 2005, 201.
9 Karsh & Karsh 1999.
The State of Syria in Recent Centuries 15 was not being realised because of failures of administration and development.10 In those centuries the Muslim invasions were also believed to have curtailed prosperity, the Duc de Luynes writing that
Ce ne put être que l’invasion formidable et inattendue de l’islamisme, désorganisateur et destructeur fanatique, qui culbuta ainsi, là comme dans le Hauran, un état de choses où l’ordre et la sécurité obtenaient des garanties. Tout en faisant la part aux immenses et irrémédiables catastro-phes des tremblements de terre dont la trace est partout sur le sol comme dans l’histoire, celle qui renversa l’œuvre d’une si antique civilisation fut bien plus destructive encore.[4]
It must be remembered that western countries were then developing an inter-related infrastructure combining trade, industry and agriculture predicated on improved transport and other communications, and supported by more-or-less stable governments adequately policing a population who, rich or poor, lived sedentary lives in one fixed place in town or countryside, and without too much religious intolerance. In Syria they found a country very different from back home: a population sharply divided between sedentary and nomadic, infrastructure and agriculture often neglected, a distant and often ineffectual central government exacerbated by various local tyrants, and inadequate com-munications plagued by robbers and tribal warfare. The majority who “read”
Syria against their knowledge of the Bible considered that it “contrasts pain-fully with the glory that invested it in the days of David and Solomon . . . the moral degradation of the people, sunk in the darkest errors of the Greek and Romish heresies, which contrasts yet more sorrowfully with that divine light once enjoyed by its favored inhabitants.”[5]
This state of affairs often meant that marshes remained undrained, har-bours blocked, roads undeveloped – all features which graced many ancient sites, and thereby tended to preserve their antiquities, even as admiring travel-lers suffered from diseases such as malaria. Trade was one of the reasons for Europeans to be in Syria, backed up by consuls who knew where antiquities were to be found, and could not only arrange early versions of package tours, but send details home of interesting sites and actual finds. Consuls could also be involved in trade, as was Harborne in Constantinople from 1583, on whose
10 Quataert 2005, 111–141: The Ottoman economy: population, transportation, trade, agricul-ture, and manufacturing.
initiative the Levant Company operated in Syria.11 During the 19th century the population of some areas increased at the expense of others, and deserted areas such as the Hauran (until re-population efforts in the late 19th century) preserved many ancient monuments intact, including thousands of houses.
There were several aspects of the country with which Westerners would have been unfamiliar. One was the sharp population divide between the sedentary and the nomadic, continuing well into the 20th century. Nomadic bedouin made some towns and villages uninhabitable, roads dangerous, and turned good agricultural land into desert – all problems which we shall find travellers describing in detail in the following chapters. Campbell in 1758 noted that “they never inure themselves to any labour; their constant employment is riding, feeding their flocks, and robbing on the highway.”[6] Nor was there just a division between settled and nomadic, for “all [the tribes and sects of Syria] seem to vie in perpetuating the respective virulence and antipathies of their ancestral schisms, and each class lives in distinct and recognized hab-its of separation from all others.”[7] Travelling could end in death, which dis-couraged others.[8]
Prejudice against Islam informs some judgments helped by the contri-bution of Christian art.12 Reid believed it was the Christians who kept the country going, building bridges etc “while the Turks sat and smoked their pipes.”[9] Wortabet had a vision of “when the Cross will be elevated above images and superstitions . . . when ports are whitened with the sails of com-merce, and plunder, confiscation fills the land with plenty; when justice sub-stitutes despotic will, and order arises from a heap of confusion.”[10] From the mid-19th century, what is more, Christian monasteries and missions prolifer-ated in Syria, naturally spreading western ideas, one of which was the Holy Land where “the Jews shall again possess the land of their fathers,” but with the problem of clearing out the present inhabitants by purchase, emigration or force.[11] The difficulties did not stop Oliphant, author of The Land of Gilead (1881), for attempting to help the Jews in the 1880s.[12]
11 Hachicho 1964, 22: “Richard Forster was appointed as the first English consul in Syria on the 3oth of June, 1583, with Tripoli as his residence. The jurisdiction of the first consul extended to Aleppo, Damascus, Tripoli, Jerusalem, Amman and all other parts of Syria and Palestine.”
12 De Francovich 1984, 1–60 L’arte siriaca e il suo influsso sulla pittura medioevale nell’Oriente e nell’Occidente; ibid. 190–201 La problematica dell’arte siriaca – because of its complicated sources, where often we have a result (Vienna Genesis) but no source.
Fansa & Bollmann 2008 for 4th–7thC Christian art in Syria.
The State of Syria in Recent Centuries 17 Governance
The universal desire expressed by all classes of people in this country, that a European Christian power should be induced to come and take posses-sion of it. Four thousand British troops . . . with the indubitable assistance of the native inhabitants,” would easily take possession of all Syria . . . Acre and El Arish secured, Palestine could oppose little resistance.[13] [1830]
If the above quotation was unduly optimistic after Napoleon’s failure both in Egypt and before the walls of Acre, yet in the same year it was written the French landed in Algeria and colonised it, an early stage in the development of their empire.13 Well before 1900, as we shall see, travellers observed in Syria a country which they considered to be in difficulties, and certainly not fulfill-ing its potential. If they tried to enter by sea, their experience of ports and harbours immediately set alarm bells ringing, as we shall see in Chapter Four (The Seabord, Harbours, Ports). They attributed the country’s failings to what they saw as a lackadaisical government lacking in vigorous action to repair earthquake damage or to tackle the causes of disease, little interested in pur-suing the development of agriculture or trade, with a declining population sometimes at each others’ throats, an uncertain rule of law, the whole bottled up at the western shore by degraded and useless harbours, and at the eastern margins by desertification. The “reckless profligacy and licentiousness which it sanctions and encourages must ever be productive of both moral and physical degeneracy.”[14] As Olivier opined in 1803, the locals were “d’indolens et stu-pides Musulmans . . . des Arabes indomptés . . . ce sont des plaines fertiles, des vallons arrosés, des coteaux verdoyans.”[15] Or as Addison remarked in 1838,
the land presented one scene of robbery, plunder, confiscation, and massacre . . . no settled laws or fixed principles of justice . . . the annual production from employed capital gradually diminished; the wealth of the country gradually decreased, and the population with the means of subsistence.[16]
Nor were the Turkish military to be trusted, a British expedition in 1840 conclud-ing that “how utterly useless and unavailconclud-ing was any attempt at co-operation with a set of ignorant and prejudiced barbarians.”[17] Brocchi even developed a theory that the fertile lands around Baalbek were left uncultivated because central government was afraid the Pasha of Damascus would seize them.[18]
13 Aldrich 1996.
Some travellers, however, were “cautious of charging to the character of a people what the nature of their government seems to require,”[19] and it was equally true that the prosperity of Syria depended at least in part on that of its European trading partners.14 It was not only travellers who observed Syria, of course, since there were plentiful data on the country gathered during Western occupation from the Crusades onward through settlement, trade and diplomacy.[20]
Also very noticeable was what Farren called “the total want of public spirit in the Government,” which simply did not work, so that taxes were not well collected, “national works and public establishments fell into decay, and the country was left to its own local administrations.”[21] For Reid in 1840, it was the Turks who were to blame who, “after they conquered a rich and fertile coun-try, abandoned in a great measure their predatory habits; preferring ease and idleness in the enjoyment of their conquests . . . and with sloth, consequently, the Turks increased in apathy and indolence every generation.”[22] Because of the dearth of planning and oversight, even fertile regions such as the Bekaa were inadequately worked: “This arises from the indolence of the Mussulmans, who are sedentary Arabs; the oppression to the Christians; the enormous rents levied by the holders of the property which, belonging principally to the Sultan, is farmed out to inhabitants of Damascus.”[23] But as Lindsay remarked, while casual visitors were obliged to record what they saw, “the springs of evil, the sources from which the tides of misery flow, are remote and inaccessible to him without the assistance of a guide.”[24] For many travellers, then, the Ottoman government was the cause of a general malaise. Buckingham visited a village near Bosra in 1825, largely inhabited by Druze:
The industry of these people was apparent, in the superior order and neatness every where conspicuous, as well as in the more cultivated state of the land. In this instance, as in a thousand others I had witnessed, it was easy to be perceived how much the whole country might be ben-efited by a change of government. Wherever the despotism of the Turk extends, every motive to improvement is taken away, and every exertion paralysed.[25]
14 Issawi 1988, 56–59: Problems of Development of Syria, 1878. See 56: “The decay since 1865 . . . civil government . . . occasional bad harvests, low prices in Europe . . . stagnation and want of confidence engendered by war at home and abroad.” See Pamuk 1987 for the consequences of European economic penetration on agriculture and manufacturing.
The State of Syria in Recent Centuries 19 Because of his ability to exert authority and improve civility, matters improved but only temporarily under Ibrahim Pasha (1759–1848), the ruler of Syria 1831–40, and son of Muhammad Ali (1769–1849) pasha and then viceroy of Egypt,[26] of whom even desert-dwellers as far as Palmyra stood in awe.[27] As Caraman wrote in 1841, his son’s achievement included “l’établissement d’un pouvoir unique, dont la conséquence immédiate a été une sureté complète sur les routes, tant pour les transports du commerce que pour les voyageurs.”[28] But safety did not last: in 1843 Millard flagged the change, with the Christians claiming they needed to be governed:
The Arabs in the Holy Land go armed with pistol and sabre, while rob-beries and bloodshed are frequent. Frank travellers not only need to go armed themselves, but to hire armed escorts for their personal protec-tion, in passing certain dangerous sections.[29]
Nobody should have been surprised, for the Egyptian troops had been badly beaten in 1838 by the Arabs in the Hauran. Tischendorff, writing in 1847, sug-gested most unrealistically that the European powers should have “obtained from the Porte the requisite guarantees, or at least a constant military escort for travellers in that country, who are always under their combined protection.”[30] The plain fact was that Constantinople was too far away to offer reliable help.
In 1878 Farley wrote a chapter on The future of the Ottoman Empire, detail-ing administrative corruption, with “no interest in government except so far as they can make it minister to their cupidity and lust.” He stated (against plentifully available evidence to the contrary) that “Turkish rulers do not want reform, and they would not introduce anything worthy of the name even if they could.”[31] Such judgments by travellers are harsh, but can be part- forgiven because, as already noted, they contrasted Syria with what they same back home – namely increasing prosperity stemming from agricultural and town development, and improved communications, with development under-taken by both private individuals and government. If seeing Syria as a land unchanged since biblical times was something of a topos, as we shall see, the frequent comparisons made by travellers underline how ripe was Syria for development in the western manner, for she was easily defensible, and could be very productive.[32] Yet by the 1830s
it is poorer, less peopled, less cultivated, and possesses fewer nat-ural resources than at any period in its history since the time of Solomon . . . plains, possessing a fine cultivable soil are now desolate and
neglected . . . the country generally is deprived of inhabitants . . . the small population at present existing, is collected in thinly scattered villages and towns.[33]
Bar-Yosef reasonably suspects that one motive for Europeans was that “travel-lers based their claim that the land, once flowing with milk and honey, had deteriorated under Muslim rule.”15
The government of the country attracted consistent criticism. Not only were considerable parts dangerous, but “the whole is exposed to equal inconve-nience and wretchedness by the tyranny and despotism of the Pashahs.” Each local official
appropriates to himself whatever he can lay hands on, and oppresses those below him; while, for the sake of securing his ill-gotten plunder, he propitiates his superiors by bribery and adulation . . . The country has thus been robbed of its wealth, and a tax imposed on industry.[34]
What is more it was unenterprising, for “cultivation is carried on no farther than necessity compels the inhabitants to attend to it.”[35] If local rulers were a problem, so was central government, which conscripted soldiers, hence “the fields had been left uncultivated, and famine was added to the calamities from which his unhappy subjects had to suffer.”[36] Land tenure was a further problem, and badly managed.[37] Nor did government solve the antagonism between settled populations and nomadic or semi-nomadic bedouin,[38] who robbed them (as well as travellers, as we shall see), and were a brake on any farming development beyond immediate needs.16 In other words, the fields were capable of producing large crops and heightening farmers’ prosperity, but defending them against marauders meant that any such extended plant-ing was pointless.
Fear and distrust of the Bedouin was long-standing, Ibn Khaldun under-lining in the later 14th century that where they held sway, towns were
Fear and distrust of the Bedouin was long-standing, Ibn Khaldun under-lining in the later 14th century that where they held sway, towns were