THE SACRED BOOKS

69

Persian Empire, or supplemented again by later Persian writings on Zoroastrian subjects or by traditions which the priests have preserved. Most important among the Pahlavi texts is a work entitled Būndahishn, ‘Original Creation,' a sort of Iranian Genesis founded on one of the original books of the Avesta which has been lost.1

An acquaintance with the ancient Zoroastrian literature and its language, and a familiarity with the history of the people that have preserved it, made me anxious to make the journey around Lake Urumiah, which Zoroaster himself must have made, and I used my own volume on the Prophet's life as a sort of handbook for the journey in laying out my route from Tabriz along the shores of the historic lake.

1 Most of the Pahlavi books have been translated into English or summarized by West, Pahlavi Texts, 5

vols., in the Sacred Books of the East, Oxford, 1880-1897.

CHAPTER VIII

AROUND LAKE URUMIAH

'Wer den Dichter will verstehen

Muss in Dichters Lande gehen.'

- GOETHE, Westöstlicher Divan.

In spite of rumors of deep snow I ventured to undertake the journey around Lake Urumiah from Tabriz to the city of Urumiah by wagon. I was warned in advance by one of my

friends that if I tried to drive, I should be sure to wish I had ridden, and if I started on horseback, I should be certain to regret not having gone by carriage. Events proved the truth of his words. The roads' were in a vile condition, and the journey, which ordinarily occupies three or four days, took me six.

For the first forty-eight hours I had the companionship of two Persians whom we overtook on the road; they were also driving. One of them was a native of the village of Khosrova, near Dilman, northwest of the lake, and was on his way home from Meshad in eastern Persia. The other was connected

with the bank at Teheran. The latter was a particularly fine-looking fellow, with handsome eyes, clear-cut features, and a tall, well-developed frame. He wore on his head a hood, the ends of which formed a scarf to wrap about his face as a protection against the cold. This made him look like a veritable

THE SNOWS OF AZARBAIJAN

71

portrait of Darius Codomannus at the battle of Issus, a reproduction of which has been given above.

The temperature must have registered nearly zero during the first two days of the trip, although I never had the courage to consult the thermometer which was stowed away somewhere in my baggage. In the daytime I was compelled to wear my sleeping-jacket over my head to shield my frost-bitten face from the congealing wind, and as evening fell I muffled a bathrobe over this to add some warmth. I envied any one whose lot it might be to make the journey in midsummer instead of in winter, and I understood why the Avesta regarded winter as 'the work of demons' and said that it was created by Ahriman as a blight to mar the perfection of Airyana Vaejah, the Azarbaijan of to-day, which otherwise would have been a paradise.1 In this land the Vendidad says 'there are ten months of winter and two months of summer.'" A gloss, it is true, changes the text to 'five months of winter and seven months of summer,' but judging from my own discomfort (for March seemed in the Avestan words to be the very heart of winter,' zimahe zaredhaēm), I felt inclined to agree with the original reading. My discomfort was tempered, however, by the thought that the region through which I was travelling had probably once been traversed by Zoroaster, and this added a zest to my observations en route as the trail meandered forward along the northern shore of the lake.

6

Lake Urumiah is the largest body of water in Persia, although not quite so large as our Great Salt Lake in Utah, which is about seventy-five miles long and from thirty to fifty broad, the Persian lake being about eighty miles in length and averaging twenty-four miles in breadth. Both of these bodies of salt water lie about four thousand feet above the level

1 See Vd. 1. 2, zyamča daēvō- trast between summer and winter in dātam. The heat near the northern Azarbaijan' (Wilson, Persian Life, shore of Lake Urumiah is correp. 83). spondingly great in midsummer: 'no place shows better than this the con

2 Vd. 1. 3.

of the sea, and neither has any outlet. The waters of both are intensely saline and vary considerably in volume according to the condition of the mountain streams that feed them; but the average depth in each case is considerably less than twenty feet. Other resemblances might be pointed out, but enough have been indicated to show the parallel between the two.

About the shores of Lake Urumiah there are level plains, sometimes covering an area of many square miles, such as the great Plain of Urmi on the western border, and there are high mountains lying beyond them on all sides of the lake. These sometimes thrust their spurs down to the very edge of the water, as does the ridge of the Karabagh mountain on the northwest (six thousand feet high), and the offshoots of the great mountain of Sahand on the east (over eleven thousand feet). A few small islands dot the surface of the lake toward the south-central part, and from the middle of the eastern shore the mountain peninsula of Shahi, or Shah Kuh, juts out. This tongue of land was once an island twenty-five miles in circumference, but it has become a part of the mainland, because the lake has lowered somewhat.1 Of recent years,

however, the volume of water has tended again to increase, so that considerable fluctuations in the outline of the shores are still taking place. To-day there is no navigation on Lake Urumiah except what is carried on by means of clumsy scows propelled by primitive oars and sails.

We can trace the history of Lake Urumiah far back into antiquity, even to Zoroaster's time and still earlier. The region was familiar to the Assyrian kings as the scene of some of their active campaigns, and the lake appears in their inscrip

1 Yakut, who passed by Lake Urumiah twice (A.H. 612, 617 = A.D. 1215, 1220), speaks of the mountain island in the midst of the lake (see Barbier de Meynard, Dict. géog. p. 86), and Sir J. Macdonald Kinneir reports it as an

island in his day (1810-1830); cf. Curzon, Persia, 1. 532. Similarly, Perkins (1843) calls it an island,

which is much of the year a peninsula' (Eight Years in Persia, p. 170).

DESCRIPTION OF THE LAKE

73

tions as the lake of the land Nairi.'1 It was known in the Avesta by the name of Chaechasta, which the Arab geographers corrupted through Chiz into Shiz.2 The Avesta calls it 'deep' (jafra), which may be an appropriate epithet according to the ideas of the ancient Persians, who were unacquainted with our great lakes; but its average depth hardly exceeds fifteen feet. The characteristic Avestan attribute, however, which is applied likewise to the Caspian, is urvāpa, uruyāpa, 'whose water is salt.'3 Lake Urumiah is so briny that fish are not found in its waters, and the only occupant appears to be a small crustacean. The Pahlavi treatise Bundahishn, which several times mentions Lake Chechast, expressly states that 'there is nothing whatever living in it.'4 Ibn Haukal, in the tenth century, makes a similar statement.5 As for the modern

1 So Schrader, Die Namen der Meere in den assyrischen Inschriften, in Abh. d. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Berlin, 1877, pp. 184-193. For the relations between Lake Urumiah and Lake Van, see Streck, Armenien, Kurdistan und Westpersien, in Zt. f. Assyriologie, 13. 11. The fact that the region of the lake and city of Urumiah is alluded to in the Assyrian inscriptions is accepted by Ward, Notes on Oriental Antiquities in American Journal of Archæology, 6. 286, and by others. We might be tempted to seek the name of Urumiah, or Urmi, in the Assyrian Urume, but see Streck, op. cit. pp. 23–24.

2 See p. 131. The actual Avestan form is Vairi Čaēčasta (or Čaēčista), Yt. 5. 49; Ny. 5. 5; Sir. 2. 9. On the name Siz (Ciz) see my Zoroaster, pp. 195, 197, 201-202, 204.

8 Such seems to be the force of Av. urvāpa, uruyāpa, as first pointed out by Darmesteter, Etudes Iraniennes, 2. 179. See also Geldner, Vedische Studien, 2. 270, Stuttgart, 1897, despite Bartholomae, Altiranisches Wör

terbuch, p. 404, Strassburg, 1905. The Pahlavi tradition sees in this epithet warm water,' garmāb, garmīā. Shall we venture to compare Avestan Uru-āpa, Uruy-āpa, 'having salt (or warm) water,' with the modern name Ur-mi, Ur-mia(h), 'Urumiah,' which the natives commonly understood as 'place of water' (the last element being the Semitic word for water)? On Pahlavi Čečast see also Rosenberg, Livre de Zoroastre, pp. xxviii, 74.

4 Bd. 22. 2; cf. 17. 7; 23. 8; and Bahman Yasht, 3. 10.

5 Ibn Haukal, tr. Ouseley, p. 162: 'There is a lake in Azarbaijan called the Lake of Armiah (Urumiah); the water is salt or bitter and contains not any living creature. All round this lake are villages and buildings; from the lake to Maraghah is a distance of three farsang; to Armi (Urmi, Urumiah), two farsang. The length of this lake is five days' journey by land; and by water, with a fair wind, a person may traverse it in the space of one night.'