volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

38 Bombardment of Mosul.
Nadir Shah, and was only saved from capture and pillage
by the breaking out of a rebellion in Persia, which made
it necessary for him to return to his own country. The
wonder is that anything was left of the town after the
bombardment, for it was said that forty thousand cannon
shot were fired into it. The Pasha and the people of the
town all behaved with great bravery, and as fast as the
walls were knocked down they built them up. It is
said that Nadir Shah planted his guns among the ruins
of Kuyunjik, and for several days shelled the northern
end of Mosul, where there were no houses at all. The
general appearance of the town in the latter half of the
eighteenth century is indicated by the plan published by
C. Niebuhr.i Parts of the walls were in ruins, and many
of the flanking towers also. There were seven gates,
not including the Bab al-Amadi, which was walled up
when Nadir Shah was bombarding the town. The
arrangement of the streets, which are all very narrow,
was in 1889 substantially what it was in Niebuhr's time.
Between 1820 and 1835 Mosul suffered from a series
of calamities, caused by famine, plague and flood. The
scarcity of food which afflicted Northern Mesopotamia in
1824 was hardly felt in Mosul that year, but in 1825 a
drought set in which was spoken of with awe and horror
in 1889. The wheat crop failed almost entirely, and all
the vegetable gardens along the Tigris and about the
villages inland produced very little, but a fairly good crop
of olives came from the mountain villages in the north,
which helped to mitigate the general scarcity of food.
In 1826 the heavens became like brass and the earth like
burnt brick, and all vegetable life disappeared. The
flocks and herds were killed to save them from perishing
by hunger, and after their emaciated carcases were eaten
the people starved, and famished folk died in the streets
and by the way-side, and lay unburied. In 1827 the sufferings
of the people of Mosul became more acute still, and
but for the forethought of some of the Christian priests the
town would have become depopulated. In the year 1824,
* Reisebeschreibung, tome ii, p. 360 (pi. 46).