Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/160

 78 OFF TO DERBENT

comes in most opportunely in connection with a find I have since made in Armenian literature about an inscription on the walls of this very citadel. Quite incidentally I came across the passage, quoted by Marquart, who could hardly have divined at the moment the pertinency which his quotation would have in this particular direction. The citation is from the Armenian historian Levond, and it tells how the Arab soldiers twelve centuries ago, after vanquishing the Huns, had found in the fortification of Derbent a stone with an inscription which showed that the Roman emperor Marcianus (450-457) had built a particular tower from money out of his own treasury, and that it was afterwards destroyed but rebuilt again. ^ The passage reads as follows : —

'111 the second year of his reign as prince (716 a.d.), Sulaiman, son of Abd al-Malik, gathered numerous troops and placed them under Mslim (i.e. Maslama b. Abd Malik) and sent them to the Caspian Gates.^ When they arrived and contended with the troops of the Huns in the city of Darband, they overcame them and pursued them, and, breaching the wall, they destroyed the fortifications of the stronghold. And while they were leveling the walls of the fortification, they discovered a great stone in its foundations, which showed the following inscription engraved upon it: "Marcianus, the monarchical emperor, built the town and this tower at the cost of many talents of his treasure. And in later times the Sonsoflsmael {i.e. the Muhammadans] will destroy it and build it anew out of their treasures." ' ^

The stone appears no longer to exist, yet who can tell but that some day an antiquarian may be drawn to Derbent by sugges- tions from the present chapter, and may discover this or kindred treasures that await the archaeologist's enthusiasm and time ?

1 This might possibly be supposed (tr. Paris, 1866) ; see Marquart, Erdn- to allude to the gate called Kaisar in sahr, p. 105, Berlin, 1901. The refer- the city wall (cf. Kazem-Beg, pp. 90, encetothe 'sons of Ismael' looks like 100), though I hardly think it is a later addition to the passage, a retro- likely, spective prophecy of the Muhammadan

2 That is, the ' Caspian Gates ' in victory. As the Armenian original the Caucasus, not the other gates, east text is not accessible to me, I translate of Raghae, through which Alexander the section from Marquart's German

rendering ; but the whole sense of the 8 tevond, ed. Shahnazarean, p. 64 passage is easy and clear.

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