Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/147

 spot.^ The chief mosque, in the heart of the city, is of great antiquity, for it owes its foundation, with seven others, to the Arab Maslama, the champion of Islam, whose expedition to Derbent in 733 a.d. resulted in the conversion of the greater part of its inhabitants to the religion of the Prophet. ^

In an instant I was reminded of all that the city had passed through in its long history. Perhaps the invalided soldiers of Alexander, when quartered in the lower portion of the town, had found their way occasionally up to the very place where we were driving. Here of old was the real Persian section when Derbent was the last outpost of the great Sasanian Empire and was a factor in the various treaties with Rome. How often, too, the hostile hordes of Turanians from the north had stormed its gates! The Arabs, as we have just seen, had swept across it, sword in hand, only to be checked by the descendants of the same Turanians, the matchless horsemen of the Tatars or Turk- omans from the north.^ Then Turkish khans had swayed its fortunes, alternating with Persian lords, until Peter the Great found the city a willing victim in 1722. Nevertheless it was again seized by the khans six years later, only to be cruelly ravaged later by Nadir Shah (about 1743) and to remain for a by the Gulistan Treaty.

We had meantime driven through the native quarter, which is not large, and were now riding through a breach in the southern wall (Alexander's wall ?) out to an ancient well not a mile be-

1 Olearius, p. 378 (= tr. Davies, ^ xhe expedition is described in the

p. 404) ; Hanway, 1. 372 ; Kazem- Derbend Ndmeh (Ft. 5), tr. Kazem-

Beg, pp. 42, 48, rem. 11, 152-154, 231- Beg, pp. 88-89, 93 ; the mosque is

232 ; see also the long description of described in detail by Kazem-Beg, op.

the graveyard and its inscriptions by cit. p. 99; cf. also some brief memo-

Eichwald, Heise in den Caucasus, 1. randa by Hanway (Cooke), op. cit.

111-121, A picture of the cemetery in 1. 371. 1860-1861 may be seen in Dorn, Atlas, ^ Kazem-Beg, pp. 3-118.

pi. 3 b.

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