volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

40
Famine, Floods and Plague
when the wheat crop was superabundant, and one hundredweight
of corn could be bought for about a shiUing, these
shrewd men had stored very large earthenware pots
filled with grain in the chambers under their houses,
and then bricked up the entrances to the chambers.
When it seemed likely that everyone would perish these
men, who, of course, knew something of the history of
all former famines in their country, opened their corn
chambers, and doled out the grain, I was told,^ literally
by the handful. During the winter of 1827-28 the lions
from the thickets west of the Sinjar hills, the wolves and
jackals from all the deserts near Mosul, and even large
birds of prey came to the town in a famished state, and
found food in the shape of human corpses. Early in 1828
snow and rain fell, and men's hopes began to revive, but
with the spring came the plague, brought, it was said,
by a caravan from Aleppo, and of the remnant of the
population left by the three years' famine, 20,000 persons
died. Hundreds of deaths were due to excess in eating,
and the melons, beetroots, egg-plants, and other succulent
fruits and vegetables, which the earth brought forth in
abundance, produced many fatal diseases in those who
over-ate of them. The plague passed on to Baghdad, and
men began to breathe once more, and tried to take up
their old life again. But early in 1831 came the heaviest
fall of snow that any man remembered, and for weeks
Mosul was isolated. In the mountains the fall was exceptionally
heavy, and the stepped paths which led from the
plain up to the Monasteries of Mir Mattai and Rabban
H6rmizd were blocked so completely by the snow that
access to them was impossible. In the middle of February
came a sudden thaw, as the result of a week's rain, and
all the district about Mosul and the town itself was
flooded. Then the river rose several feet in one night,
and swept away the bridge of boats, and destroyed many
rafts laden with merchandise. The mound on which Nabi
Yunis is built and the mound of Kuyunjik became
' My authority for these facts was Mr. Jeremiah Shamir, a native
of M6sul.