Amrit, or Encounter with the Bedouin

So often in travel (and perhaps in life) you set out to do one thing, and end up discovering something else en route, an experience that ends up overshadowing your original plan. Travel at its best is often this way, when sightseeing plans end up acting as a mere framework for you to have a genuine cultural experience, the kind that cannot be planned on an itinerary.

Finding ourselves on the coastal town of Tartus (former Tortosa, city of the Knights Templar–please refer to other post) with a morning at our disposal, we set out for the ancient Phoenician ruins of Amrit a few kilometers south. The Phoenicians, in the centuries before Christ, dominated the Levant and controlled cities all over the Mediterranean. While their other cities, including Arwad, an island just off the coast of Tartus and the final base of the Crusaders, were subsequently inhabited and redeveloped by other civilizations, Amrit remained a ruin after the Phoenicians’ departure, providing a more time capsule-like view into their culture. I knew that Amrit was more of a religious center than a great city, and that the ruins remaining are few and scattered, but I was curious to see the site from having always seen mention of the Phoenicians in history books and atlases, but not knowing much about them (perhaps because, despite their great seafaring prowess and wide distribution, they, unlike the Romans, the Greeks or the Persians, do not remain as a nation).

We negotiated with a taxi driver to take us to Amrit, and thought that we were on track as we headed south on the coastal road out of Tartus–but much more quickly than I expected we ended up at a dead-end, a roundabout terminating in a military base. The driver stopped the car to inquire directions of the soldiers. Now, I had read in guidebooks that the ruins of Amrit are mixed in with military installations, which makes access to some of the ruins impossible and photography problematic, but I had not thought that we would run into soldiers before we got to any of the ruins. But no problem–the soldiers were friendly and a particularly well-built one, fresh from swimming or diving in a wetsuit that was now half off, instructed us in his hearty voice to proceed on foot through the military area. A local farmer (?) who happened to be nearby set off with us, and we bid our taxi farewell.

After the first few hundred meters, it became clear that the driver had taken the wrong road, but having faith in the soldier who said that the ruins were reachable by foot, we proceeded forward with our non-English speaking impromptu guide. He briefly stopped to point out to us a giant sarcophagus dug out in a trench, and we knew we were on the right track. Soon we came to a dirt road and a sign and within sight of the ruins of the main temple complex. We bid our farmer goodbye (with baksheesh, or tip) and walked toward the temple, which we had read was dedicated to a local god who was something like Hercules. Built from the sixth century BC, and in active use for centuries afterward, it consisted of a small central shrine within a large compound which is said to have been flooded. Nearby was a extremely long and skinny (230x30m) largely rock-cut stadium, presumably used for very narrow games (running?) and according to tourist literature able to seat over 10,000 spectators.

Central shrine, or cella, of temple

Stadium (note person on left for scale)

From there the real adventure began. The next sites to the south were monumental towers erected over burial chambers, but we didn’t know how to get there. There were some unpaved roads running alongside the temple ruins, yes, but it was not entirely clear whether they would lead to the next set of ruins, and whether cutting through the trees might provide quicker, more shaded access for those traveling by foot. Armed with my vague map, we headed due south. In part because they are tall, the towers were pretty easy to find. One had an unusual cylindrical shape, with odd ornamentation, and each had a surprising number of niches for bodies underneath.

Towers (note person on left tower for scale)

There, we met there a tour guide who was taking an elderly Swiss couple around the ruins. He offered us a ride back to town, but we thanked him and told him that we wanted to explore more of Amrit, including a third, shorter hulking tower nearby. The guide warned us that we were venturing too close to active military areas, jokingly saying that as Americans we would have our hands chopped off if we were caught in the wrong place. Of course, we knew no such thing would happen to us, but Syria being something of a police state (related post to come), we were unsure how cautious we should really be. When we told the guide that we would risk it, he more strongly counseled us against.

We wanted to see the third tower, but also didn’t want to risk detention or arrest–and so we decided to sneak up to the third tower via a circuitous path, which also allowed us first to chat with some picnicking Syrian college students (and pose for the obligatory “photos with foreigners” shoot). As we got closer, it was clear that the tower itself acted as part of a barrier to a small compound that was delineated by barbed wire. About fifty meters from the tower were two large artillery guns, and some slowly spinning radars, and I could see one soldier walking about. We got a little closer, but did not risk lingering or taking photographs (though I think the soldier near the gun must have seen us, and didn’t care that we were poking around.)

We continued on, to see a large cubic mausoleum mentioned in my guide. Although we were not quite sure whether the next fence we encountered meant we were inside or outside of a restricted area, we saw a large road nearby and so figured that we were either out of the military base or at least out of the areas closed to the public. The bigger problem was that I didn’t know how to get to the site, which I knew was about a kilometer away. Trees blocked our sight and the trails that there were were curvy and indirect. We walked about, through fields and roads, asking directions when we could but not getting much useful information (I tried in Arabic the name of the site, the word for tower and the word for cube, and a number of hand gestures to indicate what we were looking for–all to no avail).

Just when we had come upon a man who spoke some English and seemingly confidently pointed us in the right direction, we came upon the bedouins.

Now, bedouins are all over the Arab world. We have met bedouins in the deserts of Oman, and been invited to sit with them and drink cardamon-flavored coffee (they are, of course, famous for their hospitality, even among the general Arab population). But seeing Bedouins on the green Syrian coast felt strange because we were not in the wilderness, not in the desert which intuitively seems the bedouins’ natural domain. Also, this experience was new because the group that we ran into was doing something that we knew bedouins to do, but something we had not seen them doing: moving. It being the twenty-first century, the family was using a large flatbed truck, not camels or other pack animals, but their belongings were much the same as they would have been thousands of years ago–wooden poles for their tent home, canvas for the tent itself, large numbers of quilts and mats, kitchen implements and so forth. The younger men and women were unloading the truck, while children played about and the leader of the group, an elderly man in traditional dress with well-weathered skin, directed.

We lingered to see this ritual, and tried to communicate with the old man, who was quite friendly. There were so many questions
we wanted to ask, though of course we had no language in common: How often do you move each year? Do you go to the same places? How many of you live together? Doesn’t this land belong to somebody? We didn’t get the answers to these questions, but got some descriptions of the family relationships among the people present, and the (obvious) answer to perhaps my biggest question: Why still nomadic? The answer was in the form of hundreds of bleating sheep, lambs, goats and kids. Herded by mule and teenage boys, they crowded the field nearby, walking and grazing packed tight together, some looking wise and old, others mere nursing infants. The bedouin were moving for the same reason they always have–to find pasture for their flock.

It’s strange to see such historical continuity. We often think of the nomadic life as something of the past, a stage that humans went through on the way to life on farms and in cities. It becomes somewhat comprehensible in some extreme places, like the deserts of Arabia or the mountains of Central Asia, where cultivation, or year-round habitation, for climatic reasons, is not feasible. But it seems like a pattern that should not hold out, that whenever possible should give way to sedentary life. But here the bedouin were, mere hours by car from the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities. The bedouins’ ancestors, for hundreds and thousands of years, had rubbed shoulders and traded, shared much the same space, as urbanized people.

In theory, to my biased mind, it seems unlikely–but it is a historical fact, and one of the things that make this part of world so unique. With the fertile coast and river valleys lying so close to desert and emptiness, it is a boundary between two worlds. In the case of the bedouin, it’s the boundary between the urban Mediterranean world and the Arabian desert, where nomads in tents and rich merchants in opulent homes have coexisted. [An old map I saw in an exhibit in Aleppo showed a bedouin encampment outside of the eastern gate–that is of course the direction they would arrive from, the direction of the desert. We found that near that gate still sell good for bedouins, like tent poles stakes.] In other contexts, and at other times, Syria has lain between Egyptian and Hittite, Greco-Roman and Persian, Christian and Muslim, Mongol and Mamluk, and so on.

A family portrait

The lady of the house, tattooed (like in so many other “tribal” cultures)

After talking with the older man and taking pictures of his family (they were very patient with Derek), we walked over to the field to observe the animals. There, we were invited for tea with a man and two younger boys, boiled over a open fire.

One of these boys joined us in our quest for the final mausoleum. We had thought that a young boy would certainly have explored the area and know instantly what we wanted–but no such luck (perhaps asking a nomad for local monuments isn’t the best idea). We wandered with the children (for at times others joined us) for almost an hour, finding some other minor ruins but not the mausoleum, even scouting fruitlessly from the roof of an inhabited house. Eventually, we bid the children goodbye and searched alone. When we had almost given up, we ran into another rather muscular half-naked man on a motorcycle, this time tattooed and for some reason mostly covered with sand, who knew where the structure was and told us to get on his bike. We stopped a few minutes later, and he indicated that we should go through a break in the fence of an orchard on the side of the dirt road. (Coincidentally, this was the same orchard that Derek had “borrowed” a couple of oranges from about twenty minutes earlier, but did not go far enough to see the mausoleum.)

The men tending the orchard didn’t seem to mind our visit, and helped us pick fruit from the best of the many trees, before walking us toward the tall tower.

Mausoleum (note person for scale on right)