Leptis Magna, My City on the Mediterranean

I, Lucius Septimius Severus, the first and only African Emperor of Rome, speak to you from the grave. Although I died in grey Britannia on a cold February day in the year 221 AD while fighting those troublesome northern barbarians, my heart has always been in the south under the strong Libyan sun, where I was born and raised for seventeen years among the more civilized people of Phoenician and Berber blood, as is mine..

 My natal city was Leptis, known far and wide as Leptis Magna, because I, by my command, clad it in marble and made it great and still gleaming, two millennia after my own time. Yet Leptis is now a ghost town, having been unearthed only recently by archaeologists from the sand, where it lay safely shrouded for fifteen hundred years.

 While alive, I saw Leptis at the height of its Roman glory- its great vaulted basilica and the second largest theater in Africa, its hippodrome- the largest outside Italy- and its 16,000 seat amphitheater carved from bedrock, its magnificent Hadrianic baths- with a swimming pool measuring 28m x l5m- and its temples great and small, its mosaic-paved private villas and public forum, whose Aswan granite columns rest on marble quarried from Mt. Pentelicus in Greece, identical to those in the portico of the Pantheon in Rome, its once busy market places and the three triumphal archways of Tiberius, Trajan, and the greatest one of all belonging to Myself!

 Later, from the cold comfort of the tomb, I saw Leptis defeated and depopulated by Saharan tribesmen- the Austuriani from the near desert and the Garamantians from the deep desert- and by Vandal invaders from the European north. Even the bravest Roman soldiers learned to fear the marauding brigands. When the town fathers asked the army to beat their attackers back from the city walls one time in the 4th C, the Roman governor demanded they raise a 4,000 strong camel corps to confront the enemy on their own.

 When Belisarius, the great general under the command of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, retook Leptis from the Vandals in the year 534, he did not bother to rebuild the destroyed walls and ramparts. Instead, he reduced the extent of the protected city by three quarters, making Leptis in effect nothing more than a fortified harbor, and weakly fortified at that. When the Muslims led by their general Amr ibn al-'As marched across Libya one hundred years later, they found Leptis empty of everything but sand.

 And now, slowly over the last one hundred years, I see Leptis being recovered- unearthed and rebuilt- by modem archaeology. Today Leptis is called the greatest intact Roman city on earth, superior even to Pompeii- which, I might add, never gave Rome an Emperor.

 I want you to visit Leptis with me, as my guest. And I ask that you not listen to Edward Gibbon, author of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who wrote that "Septimius promised, only to betray, and flattered, only to ruin", or that "his ambition was never diverted from its steady course by feelings for humanity", or that "posterity justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman Empire." I made Leptis Magna, but I did not unmake Rome. Indeed, my arch, albeit of less grandeur than that in Leptis, still stands in the Roman Forum.

 And it is also not true, as Gibbon wrote, that modem Italians call me the "Punic Revenge". Yes, my father was Phoenician and my mother's family was intermarried with Berbers. My sister Octavilla spoke only Phoenician, and never once did she leave this city, so much did she love Leptis. I myself spoke Latin with a heavy Punic accent­ but it is not true, as some scholars say, that I pronounced my name "Sheptimiush Sheverush".

 Yes, I was denounced in the United States Senate in 1963, at the height of the civil rights debate, by an angry southern segregationist, who called me Rome's worst emperor, because I was a "Negro". Africans, I would have told him, come in all colors. But what can a Roman Emperor teach an ignorant Mississippi senator?

 Gibbon quotes correctly what I once had to say about myself- omnia fui et nihil expedit­ "I was all things, and all was of little value". You see, I learned well the stoic maxims of my mentor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations I read as a boy. Little did Gibbon know, however, that I was not speaking about myself, but rather about Leptis Magna.

 The impudent Greek historian Dio Cassius was less fair to me when he wrote of what I built in Leptis and in Rome, "Severus restored a very large number of ancient buildings and inscribed on them his own name, just as if he had erected them in the first place from his own private funds. He also spent a great deal uselessly in repairing other buildings and in constructing new ones."

 Dio is wrong. Whatever I built, I built anew from the ground up- such as the 366 meter long Colonnaded Way connecting my new harbor to the decumanus maximus, that paved Roman coastal road linking Alexandria to Carthage. I admit that I modeled it after those great long streets in Palmyra and Apamaea in Syria, near to where my wife Julia Domna was born, just as my triumphal quadriform arch at the crossing of the cardo and the decumanus, the first Roman arch adorned with a broken pediment, I also took from Eastern examples.

 For columns, I used the finest Attic white and Euboean green marbles and the strongest Aswan red granite. Before me, Leptis had been built with grey limestone, which weathered over time to a fine yellow patina, but it was not a white city until I made it so. If you do not believe me, look at huge unworked block of Attic marble beside my Arch, fished up from the sea bed just offshore where it had tumbled off the boat before being landed- and see how difficult is was for us to transport across the sea.

 See how difficult the marble was to move even one thousand years later. The French archaeologist Charles LeMaire could not load three columns off the beach, and there still they lie, pounded by the surf. As he wrote helplessly to his sovereign in Paris in 1680, "I have been working over 5 months to free them from the sand, but I cannot ship them because I do not have a barge strong enough."

My fellow citizens called Leptis "the splendid colony", the jewel of Roman the jewel of Roman Tripolitania, far outshining its two other sister colonies Sabratha and even Oea, which, implausibly, has been given the modern name of Tripoli. Should not that honor, which keeps alive the great Roman legacy in Libya, which I above all others had been most diligent to magnify, have gone instead to the city of my birth?.

 It was by mere historical happenstance, a lucky accident according to archaeologists today, that Leptis- unlike Sabratha, which became a much scavenged quarry for later builders, and ancient Oea, of which nothing remains in modern Tripoli except a much-defiled arch of Marcus Aurelius- was abandoned not long after my death and quickly blanketed by sand. The city was thus protected, covered just as a warm quilt protects a child on a cold night, keeping it from the depredations and thieving hands of those- or, at the least, most of those- who came later.

 Just as Pompeii was buried and, paradoxically, thereby saved for posterity- so was Leptis. And just as Pompeii is today a marvelous lesson and example for those who otherwise could know nothing of Roman domestic architecture and city planning- so too is Leptis Magna, which seems every day to give new proof of how well wealthy Romans lived at home.

 Just a few years ago, a sumptuous Roman villa in Leptis- of the kind called a maritime villa because of its seaside location- was cleared of sand and found to contain a perfectly intact 2nd C AD glass and stone floor mosaic, showing an exhausted gladiator resting on the ground and eyeing his vanquished foe with a mixture of sympathy and satisfaction. Because of its fine painterly quality and dramatic effect, it is said to be on par with the Alexander mosaic from Pompeii's House of the Faun, now the masterpiece of the Naples museum.

 Leptis' other maritime villas- Villa Silin, accidentliy discovered by a fisherman sitting on a sand dune when he scraped his foot on a mosaic pavement, or Villa Nile, Villa Dar Buc Ammera, and Villa Orpheus- have all offered up wonderful floor mosaics with such themes as the four seasons, the bounty of the Nile River, the myth of Lycurgus King of the Edonians, and Orpheus playing to the animals.

 True, antiquities scavengers like the Frenchman LeMaire, the Englishman William Henry Smyth, and the Ottoman Turks stole Leptis marbles for their own use. From the green cipolline marble of the grand Colonnaded Way were built the Rouen cathedral's pulpit, the altar in the church of St. Germain-des-Pres in Paris, and the antique folly in Windsor Castle Park- that surrounds, fittingly, the Roman-style equestrian statue of Mad King George. Even the 16th C. mosque of Murad Aga nearby Tajura oasis was made of my columns.

 Yet there is something about these columns taken from their proper place that seem to invite trouble. Joan of Arc was condemned from the Rouen pulpit to burn at the stake in 1431. Tajura has gone down in history as the first place where bombs were dropped from an airplane, during the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911. Windsor Park was later blitzed by the Germans.

 It was the modern Italians, returning to Libya in the early twentieth century- as colonists for the second time- who began the first scientific excavations at Leptis Magna. And they- sad as it is for me, a proud Roman, to say this- also stole from Leptis. Not architectural pieces, for of those there are plenty in Rome- but rather fine statues, which fill the museums there.

 Some they even gave to their Nazi allies in World War II, such as a 2nd C AD Roman copy of the Capitoline Aphrodite, which was finally returned in 1999. Only this year, an Italian court, rejecting false nationalist claims of "protected cultural property", ruled that an exquisite headless nude known as the "Venus of Cyrene", taken by Italian archaeologists in 1913 from the ancient Greek colony in eastern Libya, must be repatriated.

 The Phoenician traders who founded Leptis almost one thousand years before the time of Christ- its name comes from the Phoenician letters LPQY- were the first to plant olive trees and grape vines, for which the colony became rich and famous. The city later grew strong under the protection of Carthage, its Punic mother.  It is for this reason that most of the names found in Leptis' dedicatory inscriptions- Iddbal, Ithymbal, Muthumbal, and Annobal- have a decidedly non-Latin, pagan god Baal-worshipping resonance.

 And then there were the Greeks. Herodotus, who knew first hand the five Greek colonies of the Pentapolis in the east- Cyrene, Apollonia, Berenice, Barca, and Arsinoe- was not wrong when he called this place "the fairest spot in all Libya". In Book 5 of his History he wrote of how a Spartan colony at nearby Cinyps (the modern Wadi Qa'am) was founded in the year 515 BC by Doreius, older brother of Leonides (who was later to die  at the Battle of Thermopylae) and after only 3 years they were chased away by the Phoenicians at Leptis fighting in league with local tribesmen.

 Olive oil and wild beasts- both of insatiable demand in Rome- gave Leptis wide fame and tremendous wealth as an export emporium. It is perhaps a paradox that two so utterly diffferent things- one so soothing on the plate and in the bath, the other so frightening in the arena and in a cage- could make one rich, but such is huinan nature.

 One of my primary efforts was to rebuild the harbor, whose quays and fastening rings are still visible, albeit far inland from the present shoreline. The Leptis river in flood has always carried too much silt, and over the years, even in my own lifetime, it would fill the harbor, now fully choked.

 Archaeologists think that the city's agricultural holdings, spread 4,000 sq.km across the coastal plain, contained up to 1,500 olive presses. The ruins of many presses can be seen today dotting the flats, their two large verticle stones standing like monolithic legs missing a giant torso. The intrepid 19th C German explorer Heinrich Barth, only the second European to reach Timbuktu and return alive to tell the tale, mistook them as Druidic blood sacrifice altars.

 Each press in a good year might produce 100,000 liters of oil, so Leptis could export some 30 million liters a year. When Julius Caesar imposed a punitive tribute on Leptis of three million pounds, for its townspeople having harbored his enemies during his civil war against Pompey in 46 BC, the burden amounted to a mere drop in the amphora.

 I set things right on this matter when I declared a ius italicum in Leptis during my one and only homecoming as Emperor in the year 203, when I forgave taxes and, in the words of my biographer in the Augustan History, "donated to the Roman people in perpetuity a free and lavish daily supply of olive oil." From that day forward, the people of Leptis were called septimiani, no longer lepcitani, and could neither dip their bread, nor light their lamps, nor anoint their bodies without thanking me.

 As for the beasts, when my predecessor Emperor Titus opened the Colosseum, he paid for one hundred days of  blood sports- leopard pitted against elephant, lion against giraffe, rhinoceros against jaguar- in which nine thousand animals died, many if not most captured from my city's hinterland. Trajan celebrated his victory over the Dacians by ordering eleven thousand beasts to kill themselves before enthralled spectators. Animal combats were a Roman addiction, and Leptis was the chief supplier.

 We all know of Emperor Hadrian's great attachment to his boy lover Antinous, and how the boy drowned mysteriously in the Nile in the year 130 AD, and afterwards how Hadrian created a votive cult to honor the deified boy at Antinopolis. In Hadrian' s Bath at Leptis, an Antinous-headed statue of the god Apollo was found. But more to my point about animals is the story of their lion hunt, which occurred somewhere in the Libyan desert just a month before Antinous' death, as recounted in the epic by Hadrian' s court poet Pancrates.

 It is only by dumb luck that the poem has survived, even as a fragment. It was found in 1901 on a papyrus leaf, rolled up as a bottle stopper and thrown into an Egyptian midden pile, and tells of the ferocious beast how

Straight he rushed upon them both

Scourging his haunches and sides with his tail

While his eyes, beneath his brows, flashed dreadful fire.

And from his ravening jaws the foam showered to the earth

While his teeth rattled within.

On his mighty head and shaggy neck the hair stood bristling,

On his limbs it was bushy as trees,

And on his back it was like whetted spear points.

Antinous rashly attacked but was wounded and then unable to defend himself against the lion, so Hadrian intervened to kill the beast and thus save his lover' s life. From the dying lion's blood sprouted red lotus flowers.

There is no doubt of the presence of lions and leopards very near Leptis. The city' s Hunting Baths, so called because of the vivid frescoes on their walls that document hunting scenes, show men killing- in Pancrates' words, with "a spear shod with adamant"- three leopards, and even identify the beasts by name- Rapidus, Gabatius, and Fulgentius, from the Latin stem fulgeo, fulgere- to glitter or to gleam.

 Even more than Hadrian and Antinous, Leptis is most proud of another pair of lovers­ namely, John Wayne and Sophia Loren! In the 1957 Hollywood movie Legend of the Lost, they appear as a thick-skinned adventurer and a sexy prostitute crossing the Sahara in search of a city deep in the sands that promises them boundless treasure- "emeralds the size of eggs, rubies the size of my hand!"- and fall madly in love just as they enter the marble gates of Leptis Magna.

 The lovers wander the ruins with the fires of amor burning ever brighter. Miss Loren poses as a sultry siren next to a gorgon head and screams when she trips over a skeleton­ "! feel they are watching us, all the dead people who lived in this city. I don't like it." Meanwhile, Mr. Wayne mutters Texan imprecations- "You're not going to bed in the desert, you' re going to stand up and walk like a woman. A lost city and a batty dame!"­ and sight reads a Latin inscription- which he gets completely wrong!

 In the picture, we clearly see the inscription he reads-

IMP[eratore] CAES[ar] L[ucius] SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS PIUS...

Emperor Caesar Lucius Septimius Severus, Loyal. ..

 which I myself had ordered to be written. But Mr. Wayne mistranslates it as "Emperor Trajan built this city to last forever"- without even a mere mention of my name! Such an error alone is sufficient reason to give the movie "thumbs down!" Yet it was filmed in Technicolor, so my city' s green marble and red granite, against the backdrop of yellow sands and blue skies, have never looked better.

 Visitors to Leptis Magna today are most fascinated by one particular frieze on my archway, the so-called dextrarum iunctio, or sacred handclasp, showing me reaching across the chest of my second son Geta to shake the hand of my first son Caracalla, both of whom I had named co-emperors shortly before my death. People say this frieze sends a secret message, that with this handshake, in which our two fists almost appear to conceal knives, I authorized Caracalla to commit the sin of fratricide.

 Historians write of the "dysfunctional" Severan dynasty and of buckets of imperial blood it spilled- Geta stabbed by Caracalla in their mother's arms not long after the frieze was made, Caracalla stabbed by a usurper while in the toilet, and my grandnephew Alexander stabbed alongside his mother by his own legionnaires. Perhaps Gibbon was right after all that the end of the Roman Empire is written in my family's blood.

If it is true, then perhaps the decline and fall of Rome is most clearly foretold on that archway at Leptis Magna, which, nevertheless, stall stands where I commanded that it be built two thousand years ago- under the Libyan sun, on the breezy shore of the Mediterranean.

Reading Pausanias Among the Ruins

"Cape Sounion is part of the territory of Attica projecting from the mainland of Greece and facing the Aegean and the Cyclades. Sail round the cape and you come to a harbor; on the point of the cape is the Temple of Athene of Sounion. Sailing further on you will arrive at… "

So begins, in media res, the Periegesis Hellados of Pausanias- to use the title of its original Greek or, as his Roman contemporaries would have called it in Latin, Descriptio Graecae, and as we know it today, the Description of Greece.

Pausanias's  book has been called the world's oldest surviving travel guide, yet its practical information and logical organization are still striking to modern tourists­ offering a full description of the classical Greek monuments and sites which were, in his words, worth a visit (a phrase often used in the Michelin guide). "My account," he wrote, "has preferred to pick out those things that are most noteworthy from the multitude of things not worth relating."

Pausanias also offered details on how to get there, which any reader of the Lonely Planet will surely recognize as sometimes the most important part of their guidebook. Indeed, recent scholars have made check lists of the monuments the Periegesis mentions as "worth seeing", charted its routes on modern road maps for the benefit of motorists, and cut out the wordy digressions in order to make for easier stand up reading - all sure proof that the book still deserves being taken. along on sightseeing trips to Greece.

Pausanias sequenced his descriptions from east to west, the same way his Greek readers would have put the most important part of their country- Attica and Athens- first, and the way most foreign tourists first arrive by air. This differs from the approach of Strabo, writing from Rome, who described Greece from west to east, for the benefit of his readers arriving by ship from Italy from across the Ionian Sea. 

Pausanias' method was to travel in a star pattern outward from cities along radiating roads, taking first one and then the next. Arriving from the frontier of the district described in the previous chapter, he made his way straight to the biggest city's market place and, using it as his hub, would work his way outward as along the spokes of a wheel.

 Whenever he reached the end of one road, he would retrace his steps back to the hub and go out again along the next radiating road until the circle was complete. He did the same from a district's secondary cities until finally covering the entire district, at which point  he would cross into the adjacent district and start over. In a land with poor or nonexistent secondary roads, this was the most logical way to cover the entire landscape without having to travel cross country.

It is not surprising that Pausanias' accounts of coast lines, anchorages, and sailing distances were less accurate than his descriptions of interior landmarks. After all, he was a sightseer, not a sailor. The geographer Strabo on the other hand called the sea his "counsellor", and the literary genre closest to Pausanias' groundbreaking book were the periploi, or "coastal voyages", a kind of annotated navigational chart.

 The Periegesis is divided into ten chapters, which would have been written each on a single scroll covering a separate region, from Boiotia in the north to Lakonia in the south, and including the sites Pausanias describes in painstaking detail: Eleia- home of Olympia and its famous games, Phokis- home of the oracle at Delphi, and Attica- home of Athens and the Akropolis.

 At each of these sites, Pausanias described marvelous things that no longer exist- statues carted off by the Romans, temples since fallen into absolute ruin, and altars destroyed in subsequent barbarian invasions. It is as if a visitor to Spain in the year, let us say, 3700 AD- the same number of years after the present that a tourist in Greece today reads the Periegesis after the year of its composition- could only rely on the Guide Bleu's description of the Alhambra, or the Escorial, or the entire city of Toledo, to imagine what the ravages of time had erased.

 A traveler in Pausanias' day could have unrolled and read a scroll at each stop along the itinerary- just as today a modem tourist reads his book in translation by thumbing through a paperback edition chapter by chapter. Indeed, some of these modem translations rearrange the chapters from the original because the sequence of a modem tourist's itinerary through Greece is so different- given the existence today of superhighways and airports- than that of an ancient traveler relying on ships and mules.

 The Periegesis digresses often from pure site description far and wide into their histories and associated biographies, hero legends, myths and religious cults. The astounding amount and level of detail about pilgrimage procedure, sacred ritual, and devotional practice in ancient Greece endeared Pausanias to James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, the classic study of comparative religions, who translated the Periegesis into English in 1898 and wrote a monumental 4 volume commentary on it.

 In Pausanias'  own words, he tried to find the balance between a place's logoi (stories) and its theoremata (sights), all the while acting as an autoptes (eyewitness). Much like Herodotus, considered the father of history, and unlike the less accurate but better known Strabo, considered the father of geography, Pausanias believed first and foremost in autopsia- a Greek word literally meaning "seeing for oneself '.

 Contrary to the other classical writers whose books of personal travel have survived only in fragments or in the citations of others, Pausanias was willing and able to travel long and hard to reach risky places. More than once he wrote such lines as "the route is easier for a man on foot with a well-belted tunic than it is for horses and mules" or "the voyage is stormy and tortuous".

 Climbing with the legs of a mountain goat, he once visited the Temple of Apollo at Bassai (designed by Iktinos, architect also of the Parthenon) atop a steep and dangerous 4,000 foot high summit in Arkadia, a site so remote that it was only rediscovered by accident in 1760 by a French traveler, killed there by bandits for his coat's brass buttons.

 His book has been called by one scholar "a happy survival, a marvelous cornucopia, an ancient Baedeker , and a sturdy resource to mine for names and places, fragments of history, and versions of myth." In fact, the book barely survived the Classical Age at all. Its title was first mentioned by name only three hundred years later in a document found in Constantinople, and its sole surviving manuscript from the Dark Ages, of nearly 900 pages, came to light in Florence in the 15th Century.

 We know little about Pausanias himself other than what can be inferred from the book. He was born early in the 2nd C AD, probably in the Lydian city Magnesia ad Sipylum, modem day Manisa, near the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. In his life he traveled far beyond Greece- and knew firsthand Upper Egypt, Rome, Palestine, Syria, Macedonia and much of Asia Minor. We think that he wrote the book over a thirty year period after repeated trips through the Greek mainland.

 It is clear that he was a proud philhellene , with little respect for Roman art and culture because, writing three hundred years after the Romans had conquered Greece, he mentioned few monuments- except those constructed by Hadrian- built under their authority even when his site descriptions were otherwise complete. He loved the works of classical Greece above all, and lamented how many statues had been carted off by the Romans.

 Pausanias was most careful not to criticize the Romans openly. Only once does he write of the "calamity" caused by their conquest of Greece in 146 BC. Whenever he did mention their looting of antiquities, it was nearly apologetic. Of the theft of a statue of a Winged Athena from her temple at Tegea, following the Emperor Augustus' defeat of Marc Antony and his Greek allies, he wrote, almost as if to excuse him, "Augustus does not appear to have started the looting of dedications and statues of gods from the defeated, but to have employed an ancient and established tradition."

 He called the Tegea temple itself, destroyed by the Goths two centuries after his visit, the most beautiful in all the Peloponnese, so modem readers are lucky to still have his complete description of its columns and pediments. We are even luckier that Pausanias described its looted image of Athena, when he later visited Rome and found it installed in the Augustan Forum alongside other stolen treasures- "complete ivory, by the sculptor Endoios".

 One wonders if Pausanias was inspired to write the Periegesis at least in part by the example set by the Emperor Hadrian, who reigned while our author was a young man. Hadrian was perhaps Rome's greatest philhellene, having been called as a child in Spain graeculus- or "grieguito"- for his love of Greek studies. The emperor visted Greece three times during his rule and saw many if not most of the hundreds of sites described by Pausanias. Would it not have been handy if Hadrian then had been able to consult this very guidebook?

 Pausanias' admirer James Frazer said, "without him, the ruins of Greece would for the most part be a labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without an answer." The great German classicist Ernst Meyer wrote, "One can safely say that no other book from antiquity shows us as much of the reality of ancient Greece." Nevertheless, several influential 19th C. archaeologists had long disputed Pausanias' accuracy, some going as far as to call him  a fraud, liar, and armchair traveler.

 The basis for this unfair accusation, made first by great philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz, has recently come to light as being a laughable mistake. It turns out that Wilamowitz, while leading a group of important patrons on an archeological tour of the Peloponnese, had misunderstood Pausanias' s directions from Olympia to Heraea- reading them "north to south" rather than "south to north", as they were clearly written- and thereby got his travelling party utterly lost, much to his own personal embarrassment. But then, how many map readers today lose themselves because they hold maps upside down?

 In fact, Pausanias' value to modem archaeology was proven just a few years later, in 1878, when the amateur treasure hunter Heinrich Schliemann located the long-sought shaft graves at Mycenae, containing the gold "Mask of Agamemnon" and other precious artifacts today displayed in Athens, simply by correctly reading a key text by Pausanias, who had written that they were to be found " inside the wall"- literally within the wall- not on its inner side, as those words had previously been understood to mean.

 That Schliemann, nearly 1,700 years after the time of Pausanias, was able to use his classical text to find tombs dating an equal number of years before that text was even written, is as much a tribute to the latter' s accurate writing as it is to the former's accurate reading.

 Indeed, much of the nomenclature used today for the most famous Greek sites is thanks to Pausanias first having named them- for instance, the Erechtheion temple atop the Akropolis in Athens and the seven-columned ruins of the Temple of Apollo in Corinth, which has no evidence identifying it as being dedicated to that god other than what he himself wrote.

 Some of the places he noted briefly were later forgotten, only to be located by modem archaeologists with additional evidence that even Pausanias had not mentioned. Oftentimes, Pausanias identified a temple or an altar' s donor or dedicatee. Found ruined in modem times, many such sites have been reidentified only when a lost inscription came to light. Sometimes, he himself had quoted exactly that very same inscription. As one scholar has written, "the odds when there is a contradiction are not that Pausanias is wrong, but that modem scholars are."

No tourist can visit Olympia these days without being shown the remains of the workshop of the sculptor Phidias- creator of the celebrated but long-lost statue of Athena inside the Parthenon, as well as the colossal seated statue of Zeus made there­ whose location was confirmed just fifty years ago when a shard of a drinking cup bearing the inscription "I belong to Phidias" was unearthed. Pausanias, who stood inside the ruined workshop six hundred years -after Phidias' death, had described its exact location.

 Another tantalizing hint about the lost art of Greece's Golden Age was his account of the heavily populated fresco by the painter Polygnotos, teacher of Phidias, which adorned the four inner walls of the now mostly disappeared Cnidian lesche, or meeting house, at Delphi. The two subjects of the great fresco were, to the right, the Greeks at Troy and, to the left, Odysseus's descent to Hades. Pausanias gave sufficient detail- which person was depicted, where they stood or sat, how they looked, and what they wore- that modem scholars have been able to recreate it figure for figure.

 In his description, Pausanias failed to mention only the fresco's colors, except for a brief remark about the pigment used for the skin of the underworld scene's eurynomos, or flesh-eating demon spirit- "between blue and black," he said, "like the flies that settle on meat." All that is left of the fresco today is a smudge of original blue pigment.  Might this have been the devil?

 Pausanias often referred to the acknowledged masters of Greek literature and history who preceded him- Homer, Herodotus, and Hesiod- to claim greater authority for an argument he wanted to make. "Like every attentive reader of Homer, I am persuaded that... ," he would write about some small fact or another lost, in his time as in ours, in the fog of ancient history.

 Yet he was quite honest when he did not know or could not clarify something. "I could learn nothing from the guides", he wrote about the story about Aethra, Princess of Troezen, made pregnant by sleeping with both Aegeus, King of Athens, and the god Poseidon on the same night, and who later gave birth to the hero Theseus. But then, what modem tourist has never been frustrated at least once by the ignorance of thieir guides, even those paid handsomely for their supposed expertise.

 Pausanias accurately described another dilemma regarding guides at popular tourist sites. "The Argive guides," he wrote, "themselves are aware that not all the stories they tell are true, yet they stick with them, for it is not easy to persuade the public to change their opinions"- thus astutely recognizing that tourists themselves often want to be lied to, as long as the embroidery of "fiction" is more entertaining than the dryness of "fact".

 In Olympia, Pausanias paid tribute to a guide named Aristarchos who won the prize for telling the tallest tale- "it would be wrong for me to pass over his story", he wrote in admiration of his guide's straight-faced exaggeration. Aristarchos told Pausanias of having found a perfectly preserved corpse of a Elian soldier lodged in the roof joints of the Temple of Hera, who had died many years earlier while defending it from attackers. "I am bound to record the Greek traditions, but I am not bound to believe them all," he said with a wink and a nod.

 While Pausanias was most attentive to architecture, painting, and sculpture, he was not blind to landscape and agriculture. Much like a modem guidebook's analysis of local gastronomy, he too often singled oul regional delicacies- Messenian oranges and grapes, honey from Hymettus, and olives from Cynuria- for special attention.

 Of a particular locale just over Mt. Parnassos from Delphi, he wrote, "the oil from the olives of Tithorea is inferior in quantity to the oil from Attica and Sikyon, but for the color and taste they give better oil even than Spain or the island oflstria. They use it for distilling all sorts of scented ointments, they take this oil to the emperor."

 How did Pausanias decide which regions of Greece to include in his guide? Where, from his point of view, did Greek territory begin and where did it end? He wrote that his intention was to describe "all Greek matters", so it was understandable that he left out Macedonia and Thrace, considered semi-barbarian hinterlands in the mind of this proud philhellene- but why does he not write of Thessaly, the Aegean islands, and the great Greek cities of Sicily and Italy?

 It seems that, under Roman domination, Pausanias wanted his fellow Greeks to focus more on the well springs of their spirit than on the physical spread of their civilization. He worried that Greeks, now spread out all over the known world, were beginning to forget from whence they came. The Perigeisis was to remind them, and for this reason Pausanias wrote as much about Arkadia, poor in physical monuments yet rich in myth and legend, as he did about Athens.

 Was Pausanias also motivated to write because of his religion? Was he perhaps as much a religious pilgrim as a cultural sightseer? He clearly was more interested in spiritual sites and buildings- temples and sacred springs, altars and holy caves- than he was in, for instance, a town's bouleuterion (council room), odeion (music hall), or metroon (archive).

 Just as guides today tell mosque visitors to remove shoes before entering or tell female church visitors to cover their heads- so Pausanias instructed readers how to approach the shrine of a particular god or goddess. At Olympia, he wrote, "let us go round all the altars. I shall take them in the same order that sacred practice dictates that sacrifice should be offered to them. They sacrifice first to the Hearth goddess, then to the Olympian Zeus, thirdly... " and so on and so on.

 Some guides go still farther, saying, for example, how to light candles before a Catholic saint or how to pay a Hindu priest for performing puja. Just so, Pausanias specified the details of devotional procedure. At the shrine of the goddess Demeter at Phigalia, he wrote, "according to traditional local observance, I slaughtered nothing... the sacred law for her sacrifice dictates that fruit of cultivated trees, honeycomb, and greasy unspun wool be laid on the altar, with oil poured over them."

However, certain practices were for the initiated only and could never be explained. Of secret rituals at the temple of the Kabeiroi in Boiotia, he wrote "the curious will have to forgive me if I remain silent." At the sacred Alkyonian lake where Dionysos descended to Hades to rescue his mortal mother Semele, he wrote, "it would be sacrilegious if I publically reported the night celebration that takes place every year."

 But Pausanias was at heart a religious skeptic, as he makes clear when he visited a place called Actaeon's Bed on Mount Kithairon, where many Greek myths had unfolded. It was said here that Actaeon had spied upon Artemis, goddess of the hunt, while she bathed unclothed, after which, in a rage, she turned him into a stag so that his own hounds tore him to bloody pieces.

 Pausanias retells the story, but adds an alternative explanation- a simple matter of the dogs having rabies, and of Actaeon being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "I am sure that it had nothing to do with any god," he wrote of Actaeon's death. "It  was simply a contagious madness which seized on his hounds. They went mad and would have tom apart anyone they came across without distinction."

 To understand what Pausanias set out to do by writing this book, one should ask, What did the idea of "travel" really mean to the Greeks? For this farflung people, living across mountains and seas from their cities and and holy places, travel was a quotidian activity, almost like cooking or fishing, a means to an end, one of life's necessary tasks- merely a matter of "getting from here to there". It certainly was not the best way to show one' s greatness- battling the Hydra or cleaning the Augean stables was for that, just ask Hercules.

 In only two previous works was the act of travelling the author's central theme. In the Odyssey, travel was the occasion to write about a Greek hero. In Xenophon' s Anabasis, travel was the occasion to write about himself. Herodotus travelled the world in order to write history, while Strabo traveled in order to write geography.

 Yet the Perigeisis was different- a book first and foremost about travel as an end in itself. One might say that until the time of Pausanias, Greeks traveled in order to live. After Pausanias, and especially for those inveterate tourists whom all of us know today, it has now become common to live in order to travel.

Cavafy's Greek Wall

"The essential difference between the historian and the poet is that one tells us what did happen and  the other what ought to happen”

--The Poetics of Aristotle

The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt where he died on his seventieth birthday, preferred to leave his hometown only in his mind. And when he did travel, it was to lands nearby but of the distant past- to write poems about people both real and imaginary ("of historical possibility", as Cavafy called them) in ancient Sparta, Sidon, Antioch, Magnesia, and other Greek colonies-Cyrene, Sinope, and Commagene- even closer to the edge where classical civilization met the barbarians- places all stamped with the fading mark of Hellenism. Yet it was his own town, Alexandria, the long tarnished jewel of the Mediterranean, that inspired some of his greatest poems- those about himself.

Marguerite Yourcenar, the French author of the historically accurate fiction Memoirs of Hadrian, and herself no stranger to entering the mind of real people from antiquity, wrote that Cavafy was "one of the greatest poets, certainly the subtlest, perhaps the most modem, though sustained more than any other by the inexhaustible substance of the past." His poems, she said, created "a labyrinth in which silence and avowal, text and commentary, emotion and irony, voice and echo inextricably mingle, and in which disguise becomes an aspect of nakedness."

 Cavafy called himself a poietes historikos, a Greek neologism borrowed from Aristotle that means "a poet with the mind of an historian". Yet as he referred to himself, using the adjective rather than the substantive, he was Greek, not a Greek, feeling his culture was an attribute, not an essence. He was a Hellene, a man of Greek language and shared history, but not a native son of Greece. His family name came from a Turkish word for shoemaker, and his family's most distant roots may have sprung from the Persian-Anatolian frontier.

As the poem Going Back Home from Greece, about an ancient Greek glad to be leaving mainland Greece behind for what he considered the more vibrant colonies of Asia and Africa, where cultures and peoples freely mixed, puts it, "It’s time we accepted the truth:/We are Greeks also-what else are we?-/but with Asiatic affectations and feelings/sometimes alien from Hellenism…/..We must not be ashamed/of the Syrian and Egyptian blood in our veins;/we should really honor it, take pride in it."

In Egypt, he was self-consciously Greek, yet among Alexandria's prosperous Greek community of traders and industrialists, he was self-consciously an outsider, just as one critic has called him "a connoisseur of history's outcasts." His father's cotton business had gone bankrupt, so requiring him to work as a clerk and translator in the Ministry of Irrigation's district office known as the Third Circle, which brings to mind more Dante's infernal place for gluttons than it does the waterworks headquarters for the western Nile Delta.

 Located, appropriately, over the Gran Trianon, Alexandria's finest and still thriving pastry shop, Cavafy walked to his work at the Third Circle every day for thirty years. His boss there called him "a trifle over-deliberate", because of his fussy corrections of the punctuation of incoming English correspondence- a description which might apply equally well to his poetry and to his person itself.

The English writer E. M. Forster, who befriended Cavafy while stationed in Alexandria in  WW I, called him "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe...who may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence- an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed up and of reservations that really do reserve...which one feels stands also at a slight angle to the universe."

That "slight angle to the universe" also might have involved Cavafy's speaking voice, which carried a faint British accent acquired from a childhood in Liverpool when his father's business was thriving, as well as his sexual orientation, about which he was quite open. As the literary critic Peter Bien wrote of Cavafy, "he merely wrote as he spoke- the mixed city argot of one who indulged in palimpsests by day and pederasts by night."

Cavafy was unmarried and lived with his widowed mother until he was 36 years old, and at her death moved to a flat on Rue Lepsius, just above a ground-floor brothel with a balcony view of St. Saba Greek Church and hospital. "Where could I live better?" he asked a friend. "Below, the prostitutes cater for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die."

The Trianon still has a private bar, shielded from the general public and adorned with a mural of undressed nymphs. As Cavafy put in the mouth of a fellow Alexandrian Greek 1700 years before his own time, in the poem From the School of the Famous Philosopher, "He began to haunt/the corrupt houses of Alexandria,/every secret den of debauchery."

 Alexandria had always a reputation for a no-questions-asked, live-and-let live urbanity. Plutarch wrote of how Anthony followed Cleopatra there "to spend his days like a boy, in play and diversion, fooling around and squandering away time...the Alexandrians liked it all well enough, and joined in good­ nature in his frolic and play, saying they were much obliged to Anthony for acting his tragic parts in Rome and keeping his comedy for them." The novelist Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, four novels that examine all possible romantic entanglements there, called Alexandria a city with "five races, five languages..and more than five sexes."

The city was metaphorically failing and falling, as well as sinking literally into the sea- as it has been for centuries. Cavafy found many equivalencies to this physical decrepitude in both his own life and in history- as read in the decline of his own morals, the decline of his family's fortune, the decline of the city's Greek population, the decline of Hellenism vis-a-vis Rome, the decline of Byzantium vis-a­ vis Islam, the decline of proto-Egyptian nationalism vis-a-vis British occupation, and indeed in the apparent decline of Western Civilization during the awful battles of World War I.

The first lines of Cavafy’s unpublished poem Exiles, set in the 9th Century AD when Alexandria had already seen two centuries of Arab occupation and was on its way to becoming nothing more than a neglected fishing village, speaks to this decay that was already lying heavily upon its past grandeur. "It goes on being Alexandria still. Just walk a bit/along the straight road that ends at the Hippodrome/and you will see palaces and monuments that will amaze you./Whatever war damage it has suffered/however much smaller it has become/it is still a wonderful city."

As Forster wrote with some humor of what was left to modem Alexandria, its "material prosperity based on cotton, onions, and eggs seems assured, but little progress can be discerned in other directions, and neither the Pharos of Sostratus nor the Idylls of Theocratus nor the Enneads of Plotinus are likely to have future rivals."

When Forster further noted that kings, emperors, and patriarchs had once trod the ground between Cavafy’s office and his flat, he did not have to add that such grandeur would never return. As the Alexandria-born Sephardic Jew Andre Aciman, author of the memoir Out of Egypt, wrote when he returned there more recently, "To those who asked, I said I went back to touch and breathe the past again, to walk in shoes I hadn't worn in years. This, after all, was what everyone said when they returned from Alexandria- the walk down Memory Lane, the visit to the old house, the knocking on doors that history had sealed off but might pry open again."

 Cavafy felt himself more Alexandrian than Greek, yet fiercely proud of his mother tongue. As a friend said of him, "to be understood in Alexandria and tolerated in Athens was the extent of his ambition." Indeed, it was in Athens where, on a visit near the end of his life, he underwent a tracheotomy for his throat cancer which ended his ability to speak. He was a snob about the Greek tongue rather than about Greek soil and water. A translator of Shakespeare, he nevertheless pitied the great playwright for having to "live outside the walls of Greek speech."

 The "walls of Greek speech" were intimidating to outsiders even at the height of Hellenism. As he wrote in the poem A Prince of Western Libya, about a Hellenized pretender from some barbaric tribe west of Alexandria who had come to the city to seek its honors, "and all the time he was terrified he would spoil/his reasonably good image/by coming out with barbaric howlers in Greek/and the Alexandrians in their usual way,/would make fun of him, vile people that they are."

In his poem Theater of Sidon (400 B.C.), he wrote, "I sometimes compose highly audacious verses in Greek/and these I circulate- surreptitiously of course./O gods, may these puritans who prattle on about morals/never see those verses about an exceptional kind of sexual pleasure." Cavafy circulated his verses just the same, privately printed and given as gifts in small editions to friends. He never wanted his unsold books to be gathering dust in a bookstore, or to be picked over by those who did not wish him well. The poems were published commercially only after his death.

Forster's comment that "the civilization Cavafy respected was a bastardy in which the Greek strain prevailed...if the strain died out- never mind: it had done its work" is perfectly echoed in his poem The City. "You said: I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,/find another city better than this one.../Don’t hope for things elsewhere/there is no ship for you, there is no road./As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,/you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.”

Marguerite Yourcenar astutely said, "Cavafy may have been well served by the luck which granted him a city bereft of glamour and the melancholy of ruins. For him, the past lives new..." As his biographer Liddell wrote, in a comment that captured perfectly his yearning to escape into time past, "Cavafy regarded the present with the same indifference and the same cynical disbelief as the past, but with much less interest, for it lacked coins, inscriptions, and historians." And as Cavafy himself wrote, "when we say "time", we mean ourselves. Most abstractions are merely pseudonyms for ourselves."

Yet he was a true son of Alexandria, who saw that city as the cultural mixing pot, with Greek culture as its powerful stir rod, that it once and always had been, and still in his day was, before Nasser's socialist revolution made its Italians, Jews, Armenians,. and his fellow Greeks feel so unwelcome that they were forced to give up their own history there and leave forever.

As he wrote in the poem The Glories of the Ptolemies, speaking in the voice of a Lagid, or descendant of Lagus, father of Ptolemy I, "I’m Lagides, king, absolute master/(through my power and wealth) of sensual pleasure/There’s no Macedonian, no barbarian, equal to me/or even approaching me. The son of Selefkos/is really a joke with his cheap lechery/but if you are looking for other things, note this too:/my city’s the greatest preceptor, queen of the Greek world,/genius of all knowledge, of all art.”

Cavafy’s library contained Edward Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a work that aimed to put his own country's present day firmly in the perspective of the classical past- something that Cavafy also aimed for, as well as an edition of The Greek Anthology, a collection of some 8,000 epigrams from classical and Byzantine times. The anthology's choicest poems, all short, use erotic conventions and a conversational tone to make casual observations about life and love.

By far the anthology's best known poet was Callimachus  (300-240 BC)  a scribe in Alexandria's library, who broke with the Greek epic tradition- "big book big bore" he once said- to write with brutal honesty about his love life ("sleep cold at someone's door, as shivering, I lie tonight at yours" and "peripatetic sex partners tum me off. I do not drink from public fountains, can't stand anything out in the open").

Cavafy and Callimachus make a matching pair of self-castigating lovers, one at the end of Alexandria’s Greek history, as is evident in his poem He Swears, "He swears every now and then to begin a better life/But when night comes with its own counsel,/its own compromises and prospects-/when night comes with its own power/of a body that needs and demands,/he goes back, lost, to the same fatal pleasure.”

 A friend said, "History provided him with a museum of safe and useful masks- Cavafy made his perversion travel through history, although  sometimes  he forgot it in favor of history itself."  Many of his most touching poems were indeed masked by history, as in Tomb of Iasis, an epigraph on an imaginary Greek youth's tomb from classical times- "But from being considered so often a Narcissus and Hermes/excess wore me out, killed me. Traveller,/if you’re an Alexandrian, you won’t blame me./You know the pace of our life- its fever, its unsurpassable sensuality.

It was not uncommon for Cavafy, the casual observer of everyday life, to meet that other Cavafy, the erudite student of classical history in one and the same poem. In his poem In Alexandria, in 31 BC, just as in a painting by Pieter Brueghel in which a common man witnesses history as it unfolds without recognizing its significance, the subject is how the  false news of Anthony's victory at the Battle of Actium planted by a palace propagandist, proceeds to race through Alexandria's uneducated populace.

 "From his village near the outskirts of town,/still dust covered from his journey in/the peddler arrives. And “Incense”! “Gum”!/”The best olive oil”! “Perfume for your hair”!/he hawks through the streets. But with all the hubbub,/the music, the parades, who can hear him?/The crowd shoves him, drags him along, knocks him around./And when he asks, now totally confused, “What’s going on here”?/someone tosses him too the huge palace lie/that Anthony is winning in Greece.”.

Actium of course marked the beginning  of  the  end  for Ptolemaic  Egypt,  just  before  the  battle's  victor Octavius Caesar  approached  Alexandria  and  Cleopatra,  the  city's last Greek sovereign,  took  her own life.   But just  before  Cleopatra's fatal last act, another one played out, a perhaps imagined scene first recorded by Plutarch one hundred years after the fact, in which Anthony thought he heard a band of Dionysian musicians leaving Alexandria, which to him symbolized his own death.

 In the poem The God Abandons Anthony, Cavafy imagines how Anthony, just as any man, might finally come face to face with earthly failure- "your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive"- and yet accept his fate with courage , even that worst fate of all, of having to give up the city he loves most.

"As one long prepared, and graced with courage,/ as is right for you who were given this kind of city/say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving/go firmly to the window/ and listen with great emotion, but not/with the whining, the pleas of a coward/listen-your final delectation-to the voices,/to the exquisite music of that strange procession,/and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.”

Yet Cavafy the ironist is not content to leave off his subject with its honor intact. A second poem, In a Township of Asia Minor, tells of how the fawning townspeople of some small town in the wilds of Asia Minor are quick to rewrite a triumphal inscription to commemorate Actium's victor. When the news arrives that it is Octavius and not Anthony- it is not important either way to them, for either name fits in the space they have allowed. Greek, Cavafy seems to say, is indeed the language of empty praise and shallow Hellenism, as the final inscription shows- "To the most glorious victor, matchless in his military ventures,/prodigious in his political operations…/in the Greek language, in both verse and prose/in the Greek language, the vehicle of fame./et cetera, et cetera, it all fits brilliantly.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, author of the novel Zorba the Greek, said that such cynicism about the use of language, along his absolute mastery over it, would have qualified Cavafis as "a 15th Century Florentine, a cardinal, a secret advisor to the Pope, negotiating the most diabolic, intricate and scandalous affairs."

 Indeed, the city life of Alexandria, through all its ups and downs, must be understood both through the lens of history and through the lens of language. The poem Alexandrian Kings contains a perfectly apt verse about this. "And the Alexandrians thronged to the festival/full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations/in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,/charmed by the lovely spectacle-/though they knew of course what all this was worth,/what empty words they really were, these kingships.”

 "The situation of Alexandria is most curious. To understand it, we must go back many thousand years," wrote Forster. And Cavafy himself echoed this long view of history, with an additional twist of irony, when he wrote, "To me, the immediate impression is never a starting point for work. The impression has got to age, has got to falsify itself with time, without my having to falsify it myself."

 The poem that Cavafy is most known for today, partly because it was read at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is Ithaka, and offers a kind of philosophy to Odysseus and all others like him, people in quest of home or a similar goal- either at the end of the road or the end of their life. In simple terms, this philosophy might be- "it is the journey and not the destination that matters".

Cavafy said it like this, "As you set out for Ithaka/hope the voyage is a long one,/full of adventure, full of discovery./May there be many a summer morning when,/with what pleasure, what joy,/you come into harbors seen for the first time:../and may you visit many Egyptian cities/to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars./Keep Ithaka always in your mind./Arriving there is what you are destined for./But do not hurry the journey at all./Better if it lasts for years,/so you are old by the time you reach the island,/wealthy with all you have gained on the way,/not expecting Ithaka to make you rich./Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey./Without her you would not have set out./She has nothing left to give you now'“.
 

Spanish Toponyms of Arabic Origin

A is for Abdalajís, Z is for Zuqueca

The atlas of Spain is laden with place names of Arabic origin, owing much to the nearly eight hundred year period of Arab rule there. It seems as if every other village, river, or mountain in Andalusia has an Arabic etymology. The term Andalusia itself owes something to the Arabs, its origin coming from Al-Andalus, as the Arabs called this region, which itself comes from the Latin term Vandalusia, or Land of the Vandals, the Germanic tribe that invaded and settled there in the 5th C.

In turn, the Spanish overseas empire spread these place names to other parts of the world, so it is not unusual to overhear hints of the Arabic language in towns, cities, and islands in the southwestern United States, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, the Philippines, and the Solomons, and also in places no Spanish conquistador or explorer ever set foot.

Indeed, one could travel from the town of Jarque- from sharq, for East- near Zaragosa, to the town of Algarbe- from gharb, for West- near Seville, and all the way to the hamlet of Chaufí- from jauf, for North- near Almería, and not exhaust all the points on the compass where Arabic still echoes in Spain, even when looking down from Spain's highest mountain, Mulhacén (3,478 meters), which derives its name from the penultimate Arab ruler of Granada, Mulay Abu al-Hassan Ali.

The Spanish Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios (1871-1944) compiled the gazetteer Contribución a la toponimia árabe de España of 1,200 Spanish place names with known roots and 250 places with unknown roots. This provides a good starting point to recognize the most common Arabic-to-Spanish etymologies, and also to search for some of the more obscure. He based his study on a close reading of the Arab geographers Yaqut, Idrisi, and Al-Qazwini, as well as more esoteric sources like Al-Qalqashandi's fourteen volume encyclopedia of curiosities Subh al-A'shaa, or The Dawn of the Night Blind One.

But caution is required when seeking roots borrowed from other languages, because national pride and even ideology can come into play. Some Spaniards are averse to thinking, even when the evidence is obvious, that their mother tongue, and especially the names of beloved hometowns, owe anything to outsiders. Conversely, others are quick to find so-called Arabismos where none exist, hearing traces of indigenous paleohispanic languages such as Iberian or Tartessian, or even introduced tongues like Phoenician, a Semitic language, and Latin and Greek, which all preceded Arabic to the Iberian Peninsula.

Asín Palacios himself is frequently inconsistent, and much of his work is questioned by modern scholarship. Luis Molina, a researcher at the Escuela de Estudios Arabes in Granada, notes that his fellow philologist often based his findings on what his ear told him, not on where the documents led him. “Kindly put, he engaged in pre-scientific methods,” says Molina. As examples of more rigorous research, he cites the work of the late Elías Terés on the names of rivers and Joaquín Vallvé's still incomplete geographical dictionary of Al-Andalus.

Despite the difficulties and pitfalls, tracing even hypothetical Arabic etymologies on the Spanish map can have its rewards. What is needed is a bit of guesswork, a keen radar for words in many languages, and the willingness to be proven wrong.

The most certain place names begin with clear markers of Arabic origin, often combined with the Spanish plural or other lexicographical variants. Such are...

“Al-” (from the Arabic definite article al-), with the examples Alberca in Alicante, from al-birka, the pond, Alboreca in Guadalajara, from al-buraika, for the little pond, Albires, from al-b'ir, or the well, and Alborache, from al-buraij, the little tower, and also including such redundancies as El Algarabejo, La Alcaidía, and Las Aljabaras;

“Guad-” (from the Arabic word wadi, or river valley), with the examples Guadalquivir, from wadi al-kabir, or big river, Guadalcázar, from wadi al-qasar, or river of the palace, Guadalcotón, from wadi al-qoton, or river of cotton, and Guadalajara, from wadi al-hijara, or river of stones;

“Gibr-” (from jabal, or mountain), with the example Gibralfaro, from jabal al-farouq, or Mountain of Al-Farouq (an epithet for Omar, the second caliph), and also Jabalcol in Granada, from jabal al-kohl, or mountain of kohl, Jabalí, mountainous, and the Río Jabalón, big mountain, in the Spanish augmentative form;

and “Medina-” (city), with the examples Medinas, Medinaceli and Medinilla, in the Spanish diminutive form.

Two close but separate etymologies- the Arabic ibn (bani, pl.) for son and binaa for building- between them account for some 125 entries, everywhere from Benacazón in Seville, for House of Qasum, and Binixidi in Mallorca, for the Sons of Sayyidi, to Belmuza in Málaga, for Son of Moses, and also in such “V” towns as Vinaixa, for Son of 'Aisha, in Lérida and Vinatea, for Son of 'Atiyya, in Albacete.

It is not unusual to see different places names from the same Arabic root spelled exactly alike, only with and without the definite article, such as Alfar in Barcelona, from al-fakhar, or the pottery and Far in Lérida, just as one can find the same proper name, with and without the nisba, or patronymic, as in Ferez in Albacete and Benifarés in Alicante, both named after a man named Faris.

The prefix abu, for father, often elided and then followed either by a proper name or a title, also adds to a long list- Abofageg in Navarra, for Father of Hajjaj; Albocabe in Soria, for Father of the Ka'b, or High Ranking One; Beceite in Teruel, for Father of Zayd; Belcayde in Castellón, for Father of the Qa'id, or leader; Bonnabe in Mallorca, for Father of Nabih; Boquiñeni in Zaragosa, for Father of Kinani; Bufali in Valencia, for Father of Khalid; and Bullaque in Ciudad Real, for Father of Hakam.

The Spanish prefix Cala-, from qala'a, or castle, generates Calatañazor, from qala'at al-nusour, or castle of the eagles, and Calatayud, from qala'at Ayyub, or castle of Ayyub (Jacob), just as the prefix Car-, from qarya, or village, gives Cariatiz in Almeria, from qaryat 'Izz, or village of Izz, and Cartágima in Málaga, from qaryat al-jami', or village of the mosque.

Similarly, the prefixes Azn- and Izn-, from hisn, or fort, lead to Aznaitín, from hisn al-tin, or fort of the fig, and Iznájar, from hisn 'ashir, or lively fort. Not to be overlooked are the simple place names Alcalá in Seville, Alisne in Córdoba, and Alcaria in Cádiz.

Some places are formed from compounds of two equally well recognized Arabic words, such as Guadalmedina, or river of the city, and Guadalcanal, or river of the canal, from the Andalusian Arabic word al-qanal, whether in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or the Iberian Peninsula. Three Spanish toponyms familiar to almost everyone are from Arabic- La Mancha (as in Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote), from manjah, or upland; Gibraltar, from jabal Tarik, or Mountain of Tarik (ibn Ziyad), the Muslim general who led the Arab conquest of Spain in 711, a place name that has spread to towns in Michigan and Canada, a lake in Alaska, a national park in Australia, and a stretch of England's North Sea coastline; and Trafalgar, from tarf al-agharr, or headland of bedazzlement, which lends its name to a small landlocked town in Indiana and to the most famous square in London.

Some Arabic nouns begin with so called “sun letters” (such as “s”, “z”, “n”, “r”, and “t”) which, when spoken, assimilate the “l” of the preceding definite article “al-”, so that they are written in Spanish as they sound, without an “l”, as in the place names Adobes, from al-toub, the mud; Acera, from al-sirat, the way; Añover, from al-nawaayil, the gifts; Arrayán, from al-raihan, the myrtle; and Azafor, from al-sukhour, the boulders.

Asín Palacios is not always internally consistent with some etymologies, as he gives Guadalupe, from wadi lupus, or river of the wolf, a mixed Arabic-Latin compound, yet he derives Gibraleón from jabal al-'uyun, for mountain of the springs, assuming a purely Arabic origin, although it could plausibly and just as easily be derived from the mixed compound jabal leo, for mountain of the lion. Similarly, he finds the origin of Valladolid to be balad walid, or town of Walid- for which he cites Al-Qalqashandi's authority, yet sees Villabrágima, in the same province, as another mix of Latin and Arabic, villa and ibrahim, or Abraham.

He does not venture a guess at the origin of the town of Bobadilla, but it is possibly a Spanish diminutive of Boabdil, the name the Spaniards gave to Abu Abdallah Muhammad xii, the last Nasrid ruler of Granada. The town, aptly, is along the rail line to the seaside town of Málaga, facing Boabdil's Moroccan land of exile. Neither does he venture that Málaga itself might originate from the Arabic malaha, or salt mine, although the town of La Malahá and its outlying hamlet Malá are not far.

Some of the more curious etymologies are the towns of Bete, in Albacete, from bayt, house; Gorafe, from ghurfa, room; Berita, from barida, cold; Jauca, from shawka, thorn; and Olías, from 'uliyya, height. The towns of Gor in Granada, Algar in Alicante, and Moguer in Huelva derive from ghour, declivity, and its cognates ghar and mughar, both meaning cave.

Arabic is a highly generative language, meaning that the basic roots of its vocabulary can create many other words. In a parallel fashion, a single Arabic word might generate many Spanish place names. The word al-buhaira, the lake (a diminutive form of al-bahr, the sea) gives us the towns Albuhera in Cáceres, and the variants Albufera in Alicante, Albojaira and Albuferas in Almería, and Albuera in Badajoz, as well as Albufereta, in the Spanish diminutive form, which makes it something of a double diminutive. And this does not even include Seville's more properly spelled La Buhaira district.

Following is an alphabetic list of Spanish toponyms that owes much to the pioneering work of Miguel Asín Palacios, even where he goes wrong.

A is for Alhambra, California and Illinois, from al-hamraa, The Red One

B is for Benavídez, Argentina, and Benavides, Texas, from Ibn Abidis. Son of Abidis

C is for Calatrava, the Phillipines, and Santiago de Calatrava, Jaén, from qala'at Rabah, Castle of Rabah, named for Ali bin Rabah al-Lahmi

D is for Daramazán, Toledo, from dar al-mahsan, House of the Stronghold, from the same root as Alisne, Iznatoraf, Aznalfarache, etc.

E is for El Burgo, Málaga, from al burj, the Tower

F is for Farfán, Panama, and Faraján, Malaga, from farhan, Happy

G is for Ganame, Zamora, from ghanam, Sheep

H is for Huete, Cuenca, a less common Spanish derivation from wadi

I is for Isnalloz, Granada, from hisn al-loz, Fort of the Almond

J is for Jaraiz, Cáceres, from haraa'ith, Plowmen

L is for Lentegí, Granada, from al-intishaat, Liveliness

M is for Mezquitilla, Málaga, from masjid, Mosque, in the Spanish diminutive form, not to be confused with Mezquital, Mexico, from the Nahuatl word mizquitl, Mesquite tree

N is for La Nora, Asturias, from na'oura, Persian wheel

O is for Olocau, Valencia, from al-'uqaab, Eagle

P is for Purchil, Granada, from burj hilal, Tower of the Crescent Moon

Q is for Quentár, Granada- presumably from qintar, Hundred Weight, or possibly from qantara, Bridge or Arch

R is for Russafa, Valencia, and also Resafa, Syria, not from al-rasafa, the Paved or Smoothed Place, but rather Arabized from a similar sounding ancient Akkadian language root with a different meaning. Yaqut mentions nine garden-like places with this name in the Middle East, including districts of Baghdad, Damascus, and Basra

S is for Senija, Alicante, from Sanhaja, Arabic name for a major North African tribe, known in Berber language as the Iznagen, from aznig, meaning oasis

T is for Talará, Peru and Granada, hara'at al-arab, District of the Arabs

U is for Ulea, Murcia- no known etymology according to Asín Palacios, presumably from the Arabic root 'alaa, To Be Lofty

V is for Las Vegas, Nevada and Argentina, from buq'a, Plain, in the Spanish plural form

Z is for Calle Zacatín, a street in Granada, from saqaatiin, Scrap Sellers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Film Screening in the Cairo Camel Market

CVA  REVIEW

Revue de la Commission d' anthropologie  visuelle

published by /  publie par Commission on Visual Anthropology Commission d'anthropologie visuellc Departement d'anthropologie Universite de Montreal

Note on the Screening of the Documentary Film Voice of the Whip at the Imbaba Camel Market, Cairo

Louis Werner; Producer and co-director

Voice of the Whip documents an 800 mile camel drive made from Kordofan Province in the west central Sudan to markets in Egypt, following the desert route used since pharaonic times (as noted in the tomb hieroglyphic of Harkouf, court official and expedition leader during the reign of Pepi II) and now known in Arabic as the way of the forty (Darb al-Arba 'een), named for the journey's average number of days.

This overland camel trade is controlled by urban Sudanese merchants whose purchasing agents in Kordofani market towns assemble trail herds and hire trail bosses and camel drivers, many from the Kababeesh (sing. Kabbaash) tribal federation . The area's traditional pastoralist economy has been disrupted by drought, resettlement, and adjacent civil wars (many marauding camel  thieves are now armed with automatic weapons), which increasingly has forced subsis­tence farmers and herdsmen into refugee camps outside Umdurman or into the wage labor market as camel drivers for the export trade.

In February 1988, the three-person crew accompanied a group of three camel herds led by three trail bosses: Bilal, an old and grey 45 year veteran of the trail; KhairAllah, an experienced and widely respected camel man in his prime; and Yousif, an inexperienced 25 year old who was accompanying the other two for the first time as a trail boss. Each boss had three drivers under his command, so there were some I5 of us altogether on the trail.

I had accompanied KhairAllah on a similar drive in 1984 and had seen him once in the intervening years at the Cairo Market, when I had given him copies of a magazine article I had written about the journey featuring photos of him and our other companions. This previous experience enhanced the entire crew's credibil­ity and eased our entry into the drivers' work routine. II also helped that the crew rode camels alongside the drivers, ate millet porridge ('asseeda) from the com­mon bowl, and helped with the camp chores when possible.

Both trips were arranged by my friend of ten years, the Sudanese camel trader Bashir Abu Jaib, whose word and reputation in both desert and urban circles has more clout than even government documents. On one occasion, a rural police ­rejected the official permits and threatened  to jail me but suddenly smiled broadly after reading Abu Jaib's letter of introduction. My social ties with the driven' employer naturally affected bow they viewed and treated me.

Without a specific shooting plan in mind beforehand, we decided to focus on what appeared to be key interpersonal relationships between the master trail boss Bilal, the teacher KhairAllah, and the young apprentice Yousif. At the midway point, however, Yousif need ahead with his herd in order to arrive at the market before the others, and the films emerging student-teacher theme was left without the student (i.e., Yousif) available to the camera.

The film then was refocused to the subtle discord and ill will that Yousif had caused among the others by his selfish behavior. It is a generally accepted social code to end a desert journey with whomever one had first set out, especially after having benefited from the collective protection of companions when  crossing thief country. Parallel interviews on camera with KhairAllah and Yousif at the Egyptian market underline the issues at stake in the films conclusion.

Besides the interpersonal focus, the film provides a visual  inventory of camel driving and trail chores such as grazing,  hobbling,  watering, vetting, and camp making. Folkloric elements include Bilal reciting campfire-side poetry, KhairAllah telling a humorous camel thief  story,  and  various  drivers  singing  improvised camel driving songs (classic Arabic, hudaa; Kabbaashi dialect, du' bayt). The film ends at the railway station In the market t town of Drau north of Aswan, as the camels are loaded for onward shipment to the Cairo market.

I had the opportunity to screen Voice of  the Whip at the Imbaba Camel  Market in Cairo on December 11, 1990, some thirty months after it was shot and eighteen months after it was edited. The lmbaba market was (it has since been moved to the city’s far outskirts) Cairo's gathering point for Sudanese camel drivers and functions as a social space analogous to that of the summer wells in Dar al-Kababeesh, when far-flung tribesmen gather in central locations to exchange news and commentary.

When I visited the market on Friday before the planned screening, I was surprised to learn that KhairAllah had just arrived from a drive. He and I had not seen each other since the last trip and had only been in touch indirectly through Aba Jaib's son Mahdi, who manages the family's business in Cairo. Also by coincidence, the trail boss Bilal and the young driver Hamid, the latter unnamed in the film but featured in one extended camel singing scene, had also just arrived with separate herds.

From a Kabbaashi point of view, unforeseen and unplanned encounters are not unusual in the desert, at wells, or at the market. In fact, it was by such a coincidence that KhairAllah became part of the film. Even though I had asked the camel trader Abu Jaib to send him as trail boss on the camel drive we planned to film, KhairAllah was still delayed in Khartoum on the day of our departure from the Kordofani town of al-Nahud. Another trail boss would be sent in his stead. An hour before setting out, however, KhairAllah arrived by overnight lorry and calmly took charge of the herd. I was greatly relieved to be accompanied by a person I knew would be of great help on a difficult film shoot.

Similarly, it was by chance that Bilal was chosen for our drive. Abu Jaib's purchasing agent in al-Nahud had been uncertain about sending Bilal or RahmatAllah as the third trail boss. Both were experienced but also quite infirm, Bilal from arthritis and RahmatAllah from near blinding trachoma. To settle the question, the agent wrote their names on two scraps of paper, crumpled them, and placed them on the sand before me to choose. Just then the wind moved one of the scraps a few inches, which I picked up, saying, "this one wants to travel." On it was written Bilal's name.

I was overjoyed to see KhairAllah, Bilal, and Hamid unexpectedly in Cairo and thrilled that they would be present for the film screening. It was fitting that the same element of chance which had first brought us together, and made the film possible, had reconvened us again two and a half years later and made it possible for them to see the finished product.

Khalrllah too seemed pleased, slightly giggly in a bemused sort of way, and eager lo talk in private . We went into his dark quarters at the edge of a camel paddock, a smokey room where a tea fire burned, and  shared a Camel cigarette from a carton I brought him and viewed my snapshots of the 1988 trip.

I was glad that Bilal was present, for he and KhairAllah were old trail companions and in the film were both allies against and victims of Yousif's selfish conduct of running ahead of the others. After greeting me warily he became silent again, a trait that had prevented us from focusing on him and developing his film character in any significant way.

During the shoot, Hamid had been another story. As one of the youngest drivers, he was assigned the camp making chores which we  often assisted him with and helped to draw us close . He was gregarious and worldly, having worked in Iraq for a time, and was proud lo think that we shared the common experience of travelling abroad by airplane. He was also patient in explaining things about camels, and helping with our film gear.

At the market, Hamid was dressed in western clothes and kept to a circle of friends, all camel drivers similarly attired. I barely recognized him, but we were quick to catch up on news about our respective colleagues. He seemed quite ill at ease, however, speaking nervously and under his breath, and he was reluctant to sit in the same circle as KhairAllah and Bilal,  who  barely acknowledged him. For whatever reason, my hope that .II the film subjects  in  the  market  would gather together to reminisce about the trip and accept public  plaudits  was not to be.

Yousif's absence was almost as strongly fell as his presence would have been, it seemed to me. although this may have been due to my insistent questioning of KhairAllah about their relations subsequent to the trail incldent. There had been no lasting fallout between them, he assured me, and the matter seemed to have been forgotten. ln retrospect, I began to wonder myself If perhaps I had overplayed' this incident in my follow up interviews as a way of creating some sense of film tension and drama in what otherwise had been, speaking honestly, a rather monotonous forty days.

It turned out that Yousif was still working as a trail boss, contrary to his intentions stated in the film, when he said he hoped to find employment overseas.and in fact was on the trail with a herd at that very moment. KhairAllah noted with satisfac­tion (lightly, not meanly) that this time he had arrived before Yousif, who therefore would miss seeing the film.

The American Cultural Center provided a 16mm projector, remote speakers, and a large screen which we erected in one of the empty paddocks. I arrived in late afternoon to pass the word and just after sunset prayer , with some 200 Sudanese drivers and a few Egyptian marketeers standing and sitting in  wide rows (fairly orderly given that they arranged themselves), I screened the film.

This audience's response during the screening was much more animated than I had seen it for American, British, or Egyptian audiences. The Sudanese interjected and exhorted during KhairAllah's thief story and Bilal's poetry recitation, praised the meat eating scene, laughed during the camel foot pad patching sequence when the animal growled loudly, shouted out whenever they recognized people momentarily on screen. and whispered comments among themselves during the interview that examined the Yousif incident

Their behavior was somewhat contrary to what I had anticipated. I did not necessarily expect the same hushed, full attention and silent respect of a typical western film audience, but perhaps I did expect seeing some wide-eyed awe and amazement of an audience unaccustomed to watching film, certainly not in a camel market paddock and certainly not in their dialect, about individuals who most knew personally.

Instead the Sudanese reacted to the film as if it were not a film at all but rather a series of live events they  were witnessing from the perimeter. They came alive to the  screen, speaking to and interacting with the screen subjects as if they were flesh and blood. During Bilal 's poetry recitation and KhairAllah's camel thief story, for instance, they behaved as if they had been sitting beside them, reacting and interjecting just as the llsteners had on screen. KhairAllah was in fact so well known to most in attendance that responding to him on screen was perhaps like cheering for a local hero

During the screening, I walked back and forth between KhairAllah and Bilal, who stood together near the center, and Hamid, who was silently in the rear. These three were the most solemn of everyone in the audience. I wondered if they were perhaps nervous about how they would be made to “look" by the filmmakers before their fellows, or rather if they were simply curious about how the screen would make them really look. Either way, I suspect the high seriousness and slight apprehension are near universal reactions for subjects of a documentary film watching for the first time.

After the film, KhairAllah, Bilal, and Hamid were surrounded and questioned in a lively manner. To my surprise following a random questioning of the audience, Yousif's, conduct was not found to be a controversial issue for them. All agreed that he should not have done what he did, but all also  agreed with his explanation in his final film interview. A camel driver's job is terrible, he said, and one wants to be done with it, (i.e., reach the end of the trail) as soon as one can.

l had feared that the film might tarnish Yousif's reputation, hurt his future employment prospects as a trail  boss, or cause  further  unpleasantness  between him and KhaiirAllah. But there was none of that . The audience saw the sound logic of his decision, what might be called his new style  thinking , at the same time they saw his violation of accepted trail conduct, an example of old style thinking. The audience in fact did not even recognize what I thought had been posed as a rather neat dichotomy. So much for a film director’s precooked organizing principles.

The next day, the Economic Councillor at the Sudanese Embassy in Cairo, the man responsible for the camel trade protocol who had attended another screen­ing, came lo the market and engaged KhairAllah in a long private conversation. From a distance I saw that they were smiling, and afterwards the Councillor wanted their picture taken together.

Early in the film, KhairAllah says, "Everyone in Umdurman knows me as a famous trail boss. I've traveled to El Fasher, Nyala, Mileet." While the film's lasting impact on KhairAllah and his tribal status is uncertain, I assume that his reputa­tion at least has now reached even higher and wider circles than before.

Waiting for Ma'toul

"Fancy me at it again."  How many times did I think that  as the Sudanese sun slowly ticked across the white hot sky.    Less than halfway through a forty day journey, and already I'd come down with saddle sores- camel saddle sores, the deep, hide-in-the-dark kind that never seem to heal.

I suppose I should have considered myself lucky.    I had been given a white camel to ride, a sign of authority and dignity I was oft told- the breed that the Prophet Muhammad rode, but I was going out of my mind with open oozings on my tendermost.

All for a good cause. But I was not reassured. Shooting a documentary film about the camel trade from Kordofan to Cairo can't really be done from the back of a jeep, especially when everyone else- including my soundman- was in the saddle.

I had made this 800 mile trip along the darb al-arba'in, or the Way of the Forty (named for the route's average number of days) once before, as a younger man with a tougher tail. The trail boss on the second trip was the same as the first- KhairAllah, a respected elder of the Kababish tribe.    But all he could recommend at the moment was another smear of vaseline from the fast failing pot I'd bought in our trail head village.

"Nothing doing," I shouted to him in my broken Arabic over the ceaseless north wind.     "I'll wait for Ma'toul and there, if God wills, we'll take our rest."

Ah, Ma'toul, what a sweet sounding place.    Nothing- I knew from my last trip-­ but a desert well serving a brackish beverage, hidden in a nearly shade-less stand of stunted siyaal trees.    But still, rest and refreshment.

"How far did you say it was to Ma'toul?"

"Four days, three days or four," answered KhairAllah with a merry flick of his whip hand.

A few things I had yet to learn about desert travel.  You don't measure distance by miles or days or dots on a map come and gone. You scan the front horizon for a landmark, a barely visible mountain, say, and then you wait you wait you wait and you wait to pass beside it, and then you wait you wait you wait and you wait for it to disappear behind you. You know thus how you stand in comparison to what you can see, but you have no idea where things are that you cannot.

Something else about the Sahara- saddle sores get worse before they get better. Shifting my seat only made them worse, widening the separate wounds until they linked up into one big raw spot. Pus made it tacky. The dry heat made it scab over. As Van Morrison might have sung, "When you got a stomach ache, a little rubbin' will see you through.   When you got a buttock ache, there ain't nothin' you can do."

Next day, KhairAllah proved himself a man of false promise.   I'd kept my tongue out of sight til late afternoon, singing only an occasional chorus of "My bonnie lies over the ocean", when I again popped the question.   "How long to Ma'toul?"     "One more day, one more day if God wills."  Thank you KhairAllah, thank you.

I was not the first green horn to run the risk of saddle galls on the darb al­ arba'in and I have not been the last. The ancient Egyptian Harkouf rode this way during the Old Kingdom in the service of his boy Pharoah Pepi II, returning from a reconnaissance of tropical Africa with ostriches, gold, and, much to the delight of his master, a dancing pygmy.

The Englishman William G. Browne rode round trip on camel back along this route at the end of the 18th C. His stiff upper lip account- with nary a word of backside emollients!- makes an engaging read in this age of manned flight.   If only dromedaries had wings... and first class seating.

In the meantime, a couple of masochistic honeymooners and a pair of perilous Paulines have humped up the trail- each leaving behind their own versions ( Impossible Journey: Two Against the Sahara, by Michael Asher and Mariantonietta Peru, and Shadows in the Sand by Lorraine Chittock) of fighting blisters, sand storms, and fifteen hour stirrup-less days astride.

"O KhairAllah, I do not yet see Ma'toul."  Today we came upon and passed mountain landmarks whose names I had learned before- Abu Fas, Father of the Axe, and Bint Um Bahr, Mother of the Daughter of the Sea.    From dawn the sun had spun its color wheel from yellow to white to yellow to gold to finally... burnt umber. Dark falls and Ma'toul must be near, but still no sign.    What is that, two more days? Cutting it close to the bone, say I.

Nights on the drive were every drover's pleasure.    Even if only a few hours sleep were its end, camp making was always a joyfully anticipated task.     Half reclining, lying back, rolling over- a saddle could accommodate none of this. Spread a camel blanket upon the ground and I will show you a royal's bed. The bedouin have a saying I'll never tire of- Al-na'im huwa al-sultan, He who sleeps is king.

At daybreak I thought I sniffed Ma'toul.    Camels coming in off a drive can smell Nile water from miles out, so why not I? God knows they were no thirstier. The north star was right- on my left cheek. The wind was right- in my face. The sun was right- rising in my eyes.    Even KhairAllah's gait seemed right- urging his mount with more spur than his norm.     He too yearned for a fresh drink.

Breaking a camel camp requires more effort than it deserves. Clint Eastwood simply stands up from his slumber, rearranges his poncho, and sets to. For the bedouin, each camel had to be unhobbled, checked for lameness, and gathered for the morning count.  It never ceased to amaze how three illiterate drovers always agreed on the same total.  One hundred and eighty head are a lot to sum on fingers alone.

The following day our ride was tough.  Water was so low that at the noontime stop only one teapot made the rounds. The drovers grumbled among themselves about the trail boss and the couched\camels extended their necks like exhausted hounds. Our sunshade made from a strung tarp was too flimsy to give us the spell we needed.   When and if we did make Ma'toul, we all knew it would be by the skin of our teeth.

"Morning of Cream, 0 Professor!" was KhairAllah's idea of a jibe in my direction at the breakfast bowl. Professors, as far as he knew, did not ride camels.  "Morning of Milk, O Son of a Bookkeeper!”, came back my answer, noting his unfailing accuracy with the head count.  ”Today we reach Ma'toul ?”   "In three days, God willing."   “Smile when you say that," I spit through gritted teeth, reading another page from Clint Eastwood's book.

The Arabic for trail boss is khabir,  literally meaning expert,   a rank not given lightly by the export traders who employ the men to whom they entrust a movable Fort Knox.  A trail herd is worth upwards of $400,000 US, and during the forty day desert crossing they seem to move quite literally off the face of the earth.  No one alive can track a hijacked herd through the eastern Sahara.

KhairAllah had made the Cairo run as a drover some twenty five times before earning his khabir's stripe.   He could navigate the wastes by night as well as by day. He knew when to push his herd and when to lay off.    He kept the peace among his fractious men and knew when to tell a bawdy joke.  And he hated to lose a camel either to the vultures (I loved their name, Abu Jumjuma , Father of the Skull) or a thief.

But more he hated to lose a herd as he did that day.     Blame it on the flaming grimace. When a male camel entered his rut, he let us know by prolapsing a bright pink throat sac out his mouth and inflating it to the size of a child's birthday balloon. The play became infectious and, boys being boys, soon the camels were scattered for miles about, fighting and dueling across open sands.

It took a long while to pick up the strays, recount, and again get underway, and with such delay I was not surprised by the revised estimate of reaching our watering hole.   Four days to Ma'toul.   KhairAllah, are we going nowhere?   Time moves forward and we go back.  How can this be?

The head does strange things when the bottom gives out.  It begins to mime every downstairs jolt and jar.  I took personally the indignities of being rubbed the wrong way by a dumb animal. I could not exactly fight fire with fire but I did want my mount to know where it hurt.   But humps are not rumps, and he took no notice of my misery.  We rode on late in the night, no one but I knowing the depth of my pain.

What I thought to be our final campfire before Ma'toul was a miserable affair. I had stanched the bleeding but I continued to lose fluids.    Our water ration was a cup apiece. I fell asleep with a new appreciation for the taste of trail dust-blackened saliva.  Tomorrow I would wash it down with clear well water.

"0 Son of a Bookkeeper, Morning of Jasmine.  Today by God we will settle our accounts.  Ma'toul before lunch?”  My smile was not returned and my heart began to sink. "Ma'toul you ask? By God, you are as poor at riding a camel as you are at seeing what lies before your eyes. Did you not see Ma'toul pass on our right hand as we rode. It is five hours behind us and we'll have no turning.”

I left it like that. Ma'toul no longer mattered. concern, and licking yesterday's wounds was not a way to seek solace in a raw world. If I wanted to take a stool at the Lucky Strike, my favorite watering hole back home, I should have stayed at home. Rest now was of no cure for what ailed me most. The desert held no drink for me that day, where tomorrow never comes.

The Luck of Edenhall

The Luck of Edenhall
A Mamluk Syrian glass beaker and “Masterpiece” of the V&A

This polychrome enameled and gilded drinking glass, among the earliest and most fragile objects of the Arab decorative arts to arrive in Northern Europe from the Middle East, got its name from a legend descended from its first known owner, the baronial Musgrave family of Cumberland in far northwest England, which received its Coat of Arms from King Edward III roughly at the same time that the glass was made sometime in the middle of the 14th Century.

Glyn Davies, curator of glass at the Victoria & Albert Museum, has called it “one of the most famous medieval objects in England” and “a testament to the fascination that can be exerted by skillful craftsmanship and technical mastery…its perfect state of preservation is almost miraculous”.

The Musgrave legend described the beaker’s story of origin, that during a banquet the family butler was sent to draw water from the well of St. Cuthberts Church near their castle in the village of Edenhall, and there he came upon a group of fairies who in their haste to run away left the glass behind. When the butler refused to return it to the fairies, they set upon it a hex later recorded in the poem “Luck of Edenhall”, written in German in 1834 by Johan Ludwig Uhland but known better in a translation by the popular American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow- “…If this glass doth fall/Then farewell, O Luck of Edenhall.”

A darker interpretation of the legend might be that the family had in fact stolen the glass from the church where it was in use as a chalice, and then they covered up the theft with a back-dated, whimsical tale of how it had fallen into their hands through providence, but with the added twist of a punishment foretold- the fall of the family fortune- as a veiled admission of their guilt.

The fact that fine Mamluk glassware of similar age, often set on rounded feet of chased gold, was used in Christian ritual is known from similar pieces in France, one called the Goblet of Charlemagne that was transferred during the French Revolution from a church in the town of Châteaudun to the Chartres museum, and another bequeathed by its original owner Margaret Mallet in 1329 to the cathedral in the town of Douai.

The Luck of Edenhall probably was made either in the Mamluk cities of Cairo, Damascus or most likely Aleppo. As the 13th C. geographer Al Qazwini reported about Aleppo’s glass industry, “Among the most notable things of this city is the glass bazaar. He who enters will be reluctant to leave, on account of the astonishing multitude of notable and exquisite objects which he sees there and which are exported to every other country.” Although it is possible that the glass may have been carried to Europe by a returning Crusader, the Egyptian historian Al Maqrizi (1364-1442) wrote of many Italian merchants in Mamluk lands engaged in the luxury trade connecting Egypt and Syria to Europe.

We know that the glass arrived in Europe no more than one hundred years after its creation because it still has a custom-fitted leather case of French manufacture dated to the 15th Century. When precisely it entered the Musgrave household is unknown, but it was first mentioned in the 1677 will of Sir Philip Musgrave and later in a 1729 ballad attributed to a family relative which begins, “God prosper long from being broke/The Luck of Edenhall”.

An article in a 1791 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine first recorded its origin legend from the fairies, and an 1844 diary entry of a guest at a Musgrave family party described a shattered glass-defying game once played with the cup, of throwing it into the air and making the butler catch it before it fell to the floor. The glass was lent to the V&A in 1926 and donated outright in 1959, when it was named a museum “Masterpiece”, a rare designation only given to the collection’s most valuable objects like the Ardabil carpet from Iran and statues by Renaissance sculptors Bernini and Donatello.

So-called fairy cups were common in the inventories of English country homes to elaborate on the old aristocratic families’ mythologies, but none has a story as well established as the Edenhall’s. As for the family’s fate after the loss of their cup- as Longfellow put it, “Then farewell, O Luck…”- their mansion was demolished not long after due to “insufficient wealth”, according to an historical accounting of lost baronial mansions, which stated further that several deaths in the family in short succession meant that heavy estate taxes had financially crippled them. The Hall was sold and the family moved to London. Nothing more is known for certain about the house until its demolition in 1934.

Another variation on the theme of the cup’s curse can be read in an 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual”, when Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of the disappearance of the Musgrave family butler by answering a riddle written in the form of a poem, which leads him to both a dead body and a bag of broken bits of colored glass…which, sorry to disappoint anyone looking for a neat plot ending, are not the shards of the Luck of Edenhall at all, but rather something else entirely.

Salep, Turkey's Winter Drink

When the snow flies in Istanbul, which is not infrequent in the month of February, you can be sure that the busy coffee houses of Fatih and Kadiköy on either side of the Bosporus are serving more than kahve and çay, for those in-the-know Turks who really want a winter warm up will order salep.  This sweet, thick, and white hot beverage is made from milk, sugar, and the dried, powdered bulbs of terrestrial- as opposed to tropical- orchids, often topped with copious amounts of cinnamon. 

Children of all ages, and here are included grandparents who remember how delicious it tasted long ago in their own childhood, beam when the waiter brings them a cup. Contemporary Turkish-Armenian poet Karin Karakasli has written an ode to salep that conjures these memories…

But then a voice
with a burnt tongue,
a cinnamon-perfumed voice
from a far-off fog
asks, is anyone drinking salep.
And, even if you're not,
you too will be warmed -
hot salep
milky salep.

Not unlike vanilla-flavored Ovaltine or a thinned version of cream-of-wheat, salep has been served in far-flung former Ottoman lands since the earliest times.  It was first mentioned in the Turkish language in Tabib İbn-i Şerif’s Yadigar, an early 15th C medical book.  The 9th C. Persian polymath Abu Bakr Mohamed al-Razi, known in the West as Rhazes, included it in his 23 volumes as a treatment for gout- even though its high calorie count is more likely to cause than cure it.   Its popularity in Arab al-Andalus, as attested by the 11th C. physician Ibn Wafid and his 13th C.  counter-part Ahmad al Ghafiqi, may explain why and from where it first spread into Western Europe.

In the 17th C London, it was more popular, being much less expensive, than tea and coffee, when the hawker’s cry “Saloop, Saloop! A halfpenny a dish! Hot Saloop!” would lead customers to the Salopian Coffee House at 41 Charing Cross. The 1810 edition of the Encyclopedia Londinensis, a book about all things London, wrote that “the people of the east are extremely fond of salep; they look upon it as one of the greatest restoratives and provocatives to venery in the vegetable world”. 

In the Balkans, Egypt, and Greece, where its street peddlars are called saleptsides, there are still plenty of ready customers in cold weather.   The Greek rembetika song “To Salepi” recorded by Theodhoros Mytilineos in 1926 at the time of much upheaval between the Turkish and Greek communities, contains this double entendre about salep’s supposed restorative and provocative properties.

The best of salepaki [diminutive form of salep]for two francs I sell/ For two francs I sell salepaki best./I came once, I came twice, we talked, poh-poh, just a dream, forgotten all./

And salep is again set to retake the world, just as it had in Ottoman days, with the 170 year old MADO Company of Kahraman Maraş (a southeastern Turkish town known for both wild orchids and dondurma, Turkish ice cream) ready to expand its café chain of 300 franchises in 20 countries- from Europe to Australia- into North America.

The New World however is no stranger to orchid-based food products.  The so-called vanilla “bean” (in botanical terms, not a bean at all but rather a seed capsule), from the New World orchid Vanilla planifolia, is perhaps only the orchid flower’s second most essential ice cream ingredient. It first came to Europe in the Columbian Exchange not as a flavoring but as a perfume.  Alfeñique, the Mexican sugar candy, was originally made with the paste of the Bletia campanulata orchid, and its word origin not surprisingly comes from the Persian panid, via the Arabic al-fanid, meaning the same as it does in Spanish.

For those who want to buy salep powder in Istanbul at retail, a good place to start is at Ayfer Kaur’s stall #7 in the Egyptian Bazaar, doing spice business since 1920.  Salesclerk Aziz offers pure salep from an apothecary jar for 750TL/kg and a string of dried bulbs from Kastamonou in north-central Anatolia for 800TL/ea, so its purity is not in doubt.  Aziz inhales agreeably at its scent, but wrinkles his nose when reading the listed ingredients of the pre-packaged variety- corn starch, guar gum, sugar (20% by weight!), and nary a mention of salep. 

At the Valide coffeehouse just outside the bazaar beside the Golden Horn, Ahmet Tuğ and his wife Vefa have come for their twice-a-week cup.  Vefa is from Kazakhstan, and after her first taste two years ago she fell in love. Says Ahmet, “no, we don’t grow fat from it, because the cinnamon we sprinkle on top absorbs the calories,” - a folk belief that might permit guilty weightwatchers a second cup.  If only she were familiar with other Ottoman medicinal references to salep as a fattener for the women of the harem.

Ahmet first drank salep from the Eyüp district’s street vendors at the age of ten, and thinks they still have the best, for they use unpasteurized cow’s milk or sometimes goat milk. Vefa is not used to drinking milk at all, so she mixes it with water when at home, and finds the taste still perfectly rich. She says, “I had to search the internet before I could believe that such a strong taste could come from a dainty flower.” 

The ginger shaker that sits next to the cinnamon goes untouched by the Tuğs- they consider it a modern affectation by Istanbul’s newly-fashionable health food crowd. But this is also untrue, for Edward Lane’s valuable urban anthropological book Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians from 1836 described salep as “a thin jelly…with a little cinnamon or ginger sprinkled upon it.”

Salep‘s curative properties figure back in history as far as ancient Mesopotamia, whose medical lore prescribed “fox testicle” (unclear if it referred to the real thing or the orchid bulb) to increase lactation. Orchids were used as love charms in Nigeria, for divination ritual in ancient India, and for nightmare prevention in Zululand.  

European witches employed both of the paired tubers of the Orchis mascula orchid- the plumper of the two to promote true love, the smaller to end misdirected love. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has Queen Gertrude speak of that same erect purple orchid species, and hint at its use as a love potion, in reference to the crazed Ophelia’s crown of flowers that she wove before killing herself…

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

Turkish salep is made mostly from Orchis mascula, while Persian salep comes mostly from Orchis latifolia and the subcontinent’s Padshah salep from an orchid with a disagreeable taste- which should not surprise, because salep in Pakistan is used as a glue and sizing material in the silk industry.  World traveler Ibn Batuta was nonetheless impressed when in the year 1333 the Sultan of Delhi gave him as a hospitality gift “I cannot say how many pounds” of sugar, ghee, and salep.

Some so-called “salep” comes not from orchids at all.  In Afghanistan it is made from wild onions, and in Tahiti and the West Indies from arrowroot.  But leave it to French chefs to find the je ne sais quois in true Turkish salep.  The 1961 edition of Larousse Gastronomique, their nation’s master culinary compendium, includes detailed recipes for salep potage and jelly, known in English as soup and jelled consumé.  One might ignore the more extravagant claims of its nutritional value- that one ounce can sustain a working man for a day, for now it is known to be no more nourishing than potato flour- for the sake of its subtle flavor alone.

Do not expect to get any company secrets from Muhsin Kadem, along with his brother Cemal the owner of Istanbul’s foremost wholesaler, Kadem Salepçilik, founded in 1960 by their father Hacı Mehmet Ali.  Muhsin repeats the official statistic of annual salep bulb production at 60,000kg/yr but will not say how much his company contributes to that number, which seems astounding when one considers that a typical orchid bulb weighs but ½ gram and loses up to 90% of that when dried.

Four overflowing sacks of samples represent just a fraction of the thirty different quality grades he sells.   “The best salep,” says Muhsin, “leaves a taste in your mouth that you want again just two hours later. Once you have the real, you will not stand for the artificial. Bulbs from eastern Anatolia are best, but you can find orchids even in Istanbul’s Belgrade Forest just up the Bosporus.”  His office’s location in the crumbling Balkapan Han, once the center for Istanbul’s honey trade, evokes the traditional concoction of honey and salep to cure bronchitis, tight bowels, and menstrual cramps.

The Turkish word salep is derived from the Arabic tha’lab, fox, a shortened version of the orchid root’s folkloric name khusyat al-tha’lab, testicle of the fox, for the fact that the bulb grows in a pair, one large and young, the other one small and old, as was said it grew in the animal. The English translator of the famed 17th C. Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi’s book the Seyahatname, in the passage describing Istanbul's two hundred ambulatory salep vendors whose sales cry was, "Take salep, rest for the soul, health for the body", delicately called it “fox’s cully”.

Ibn al-Baytar, chief herbalist of a 13th C. Ayyubid sultan in Damascus, called the salep orchid qatal akhihi, “killed his brother”, thinking that the younger bulb had killed its older sibling.  Western botanists sometimes call these twin bulbs the “mother” and the “daughter”, perhaps imagining matricide.

Nineteenth C. salep vendors have been depicted in both photographs and paintings.  James Robertson, employed as an engraver by the Ottoman mint and brother-in-law to the photographer Felice Beato, added a street seller to his 1850s series of Istanbul’s traditional professions.  Austrian orientalist Ludwig Deutsch, on the first of his three visits to Cairo in 1886, painted a salep seller ladling from a basin above a burning brazier surrounded by Nubian and Egyptian children and women with cups at their lips.  More recently, the second line of novelist Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book contains the narrator’s remembrance of the salep seller rattling his copper kettles on winter mornings.

There are some 200,000 species of orchids worldwide, and salep orchids come primarily from three Linnaean taxonomic genera, Orchis, meaning testicle in ancient Greek, Satyrion, and Serapias- each genus’ Greek-derived name hinting at the root’s aphrodisiacal properties.  The Ancients may have been on to something, for Jordanian scientists Mohammed Allouh and Nabil Khouri et al. recently wrote a scientific paper titled “Orchis anatolica Root Ingestion Improves Sexual Motivation and Performance in Male Rats”.

Across the straits in Kadiköy, one step closer to the best Anatolian orchid hunting grounds, is the Fazil Bey coffee house, soon to celebrate its 100th anniversary.  Waiter Murad Çelik has been there for almost half that time, but is soon to retire after selling how many cups of salep he cannot remember. “It’s good for a cough”, he says, suggesting that his older customers perhaps suffering from a cold might add a touch of powdered ginger for their health.

Salep is the secret ingredient in the best ice cream because of its chemical property- being high in glucomannan, a dietary emulsifier and thickener like starch and cellulose, whose molecules absorb water.  And the best place to test salep’s taffy-like properties is the Ali Usta ice cream shop- Meşhur Dondurmacı , Famous Ice Cream Maker, as its sign says, since 1968- in the nearby Moda neighborhood. In mid-winter, ice cream customers are off by ninety percent, and the servers look bored.  No long lines wrapped around the block outside as they do in summer.  But inside the hot drink is even more popular as they run through thirty samovars of it in a day.

Ali Usta is near the office of Ekrem Sezik, emeritus professor of pharmacology at Ankara’s Gazi University whose 1967 doctoral dissertation was the first to analyze salep, and now consults to industry and government on its medicinal properties, and has recently helped the Germans test their locally-sold salep to determine if it illegally contains orchid varieties protected under EU treaties. 

Dr. Sezik has accompanied traditional orchid pickers in Muğla province on their rounds in the mountains, and knows that because of severe overharvesting it might now take a picker two days to find just one kg of bulbs, while in years past it was many times that.  Some orchids like pine forests, he says, while others prefer the shade of oaks.  He estimates that 120 million orchids are harvested each year, an extraordinarily high number reached by working backward from his estimate of national annual salep sales. And they must work fast, for orchids bloom only during a three week season. In other times they look like weeds.

“Do not be fooled by packaged mix”, he says.  “Some say ‘salep aroma’, but it is taste, not smell, that makes salep a special drink.  I know that from focus group testing, and from my own tongue.” It is not just the glucomannan content, which in some orchids reach 50% by weight, and which can be more cheaply replaced by the bulbs of the konjac plant (also less appetizingly called voodoo lily, snake palm, and devil’s tongue) from East Asia.  “Those who love salep want most to taste an orchid,” says Dr. Sezik.

In Berlin’s winter market at Mauerpark, located where the Wall used to slice off the East from the West, a stall owned by a native Istanbulite who preferred not to give his name nonetheless does his best to bridge that sometimes still stubborn divide.  He has been selling salep there for more than 20 yrs, he says.   His German-born, ethnic Turkish helper Derya explains that her countrymen back when the stall first opened were curious yet a bit reluctant to try a taste.  But on the coldest days, with steam rising from the kettles, they finally began to plunk down their Deutschmarks and found it very much to their liking. 

“Everyone is happy to hold a hot drink in their hands on a freezing day,” says Derya, whose name means “ocean” in Turkish- which come to think of it is a perfect metaphor for how salep has spread around the world, “even though now the price has risen to 3 euros”.  And the stall’s big yellow sign says what all want to hear in any language- “Das gesündeste Winter Heiẞgetränke”- The Healthiest Hot Winter Drink.  

Ludwig Deutsch, The Sahlep Vender, Cairo

Salep Seller, Istanbul, overpainted photograph, James Robertson, circa 1854, Omer M. Koc Collection