War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

162 Richard SchofieldPersian territory. 33 Even the pettiest charges and countercharges now becamequickly magnified since, as Kashani-Sabet attests “By then, Perso-Ottomanrivalry had only intensified.” 34 Meanwhile, back in St Petersburg, considerabledifferences had come to light between the maps of the borderlandsbeing produced by the British and Russian delegations on the Turco-PersianBoundary Delimitation Commission. Produced independently of one another,the two versions were reviewed by the British and Russian Ambassadorsin Constantinople, who noted literally thousands of contradictions anddiscrepancies and the painting of such a divergent picture that any questionof jointly presenting them to the Ottoman government was a non-starter.As Lyons, the British Ambassador in Constantinople, would comment on10 January 1867:It appears ...that the two maps differ so widely that they cannot beused indifferently for the purpose for which they were designed – in factthat a line of frontier might be drawn which would be admissibleaccording to the one and inadmissable according to the other. 35Not only that, but the orthography of place names within the mappedborderland zone was causing real problems and that was just LieutenantGlascott trying to match up the British and Russian translations on themapping. 36 This all pointed to a wider shortcoming of the 1850–1852 exercise,of course. Many languages were spoken within the borderlands and the mediatingcommissioners would not have been that familiar with them. Nor canit have been that likely that those individuals on the home delegations duringthe delimitation survey would have been familiar with Armenian, Kurdishand Chaldean. Maybe this partially explained Ottoman diffidence to someof the rulings of the mediating commissioners – for they simply cannot havebeen that well acquainted with the human geography of the borderlands. 37Suffice it here to say that the separate British and Russian maps remainedunsigned and the two powers agreed to produce instead a joint Identic Mapfor presentation to the Ottoman and Persian governments.In August 1869 Glascott announced the completion of the Identic Mapor Carte Identique. Produced at great expense, this extraordinary documentmeasured some 60-feet long and was executed on a scale of one inch to amile, covering the entire length of the borderlands between the 30th and 40thdegrees of latitude from the Persian Gulf in the south and the high drainagedivides of the Caucasus mountains in the north (see map three for a reproducedsection of the Carte Identique). The frontier zone encapsulated onthe map ranged variously between 20 and 50 miles. Having given the mappingthe go-ahead this time around, the British and Russian Ambassadorspresented it to the Ottomans in October 1869, with their counterparts inTehran handing over the same document to the Persian government somefour months later in February 1870. The representatives of the mediatingpowers then expressed the expectation that the Perso-Ottoman boundary would