United States or Sint Maarten ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"He says the Kurds are coming! He says two regiments of Kurdish cavalry have been turned loose by the Turks with orders to 'rescue' Armenians. They are on their way, riding by night for a wonder. They cut both his hands off, but he got away by shamming dead. He says they are cutting off the feet of people and bidding them walk to Tarsus. They are taking the women and girls for sale.
And one evening Clyde dined alone, reading between the courses a long letter from Vanessa, justifying her action in flitting to more civilised lands with a more congenial companion. It was distinctly evil luck for Vanessa, who really was thoroughly respectable at heart, that she and her lover should run into the hands of Kurdish brigands on the first day of their flight.
Dependent on Stambul, it served to turn thither the eyes and prayers of the provincials. The naturally submissive and peaceful population of Asia Minor quickly accustomed itself to look beyond the dismantled strongholds of its fallen beys. As for the rest contumacious and bellicose beys and sheikhs of Kurdish hills and Syrian steppes their hour of surrender was yet to come.
As the darkness deepened, they shone more and more brightly across the amphitheater of the encampment. The tent in which we were now sitting was oblong in shape, covered with a mixture of goats’ and sheep’s wool, carded, spun, and woven by the Kurdish women. This tenting was all of a dark brown or black color.
"English lady and her husband, of foreign nationality, held by Kurdish brigands who demand ransom" had been the report of the nearest Consul.
Agathias tells us that Chosroes was at the time enjoying his summer villeggiatura in the Kurdish hills, and saw from his residence the smoke of the hamlets which the Roman troops had fired. He hastily fled from the danger, and shut himself up within the walls of Ctesiphon, where he was soon afterwards seized with the illness which brought his life to a close.
All in the camp who were not Turks were Syrians, and these Syrians had been dragged away from their homes scores of leagues away and made to labor without remuneration. This Abraham was a gifted man, who had been in America, and knew English, as well as several dialects of Kurdish, and Turkish and Arabic and German.
The illusion of immense achievement, which it was intended thus to create, has often imposed itself on modern critics, and Tiglath Pileser and Sargon are credited with having marched to the neighbourhood of the Caspian, conquering or holding to ransom great provinces, when their forces were probably doing no more than climbing from valley to valley about the headwaters of the Tigris affluents, and raiding chiefs of no greater territorial affluence than the Kurdish beys of Hakkiari.
We had expected, on our arrival in Bayazid, to find in waiting for us a Mr. Richardson, an American missionary from Erzerum. Two years later, on our arrival home, we received a letter explaining that on his way from Van he had been captured by Kurdish brigands, and held a prisoner until released through the intervention of the British consul at Erzerum.
In the strict sense, the term Mesopotamia should be limited to the territory lying between the Euphrates and the Tigris above their junction, in the neighborhood of Baghdad, and extending northwards to the confines of the Taurus range; while the district to the south of Baghdad, and reaching to the Persian Gulf, may more properly be spoken of as the Euphrates Valley; and a third division is represented by the territory to the east of the Tigris, from Baghdad, and up to the Kurdish Mountains; but while this distinction is one that may be justly maintained, in view of the different character that the southern valley presents from the northern plain, it has become so customary, in popular parlance, to think of the entire territory along and between the Euphrates and Tigris as one country, that the term Mesopotamia in this broad sense may be retained, with the division suggested by George Rawlinson, into Upper and Lower Mesopotamia.
Word Of The Day