Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Pe ...

The inaccessibility of the country was also noted by those who had an opportunity to visit it or became acquainted with its conditions. The American missionaries were the earliest westerners to enter the Tiyari and Hakkari and gave details about its inaccessible nature. According to one,‘[S]ome of the districts…are so rough that no beast of burden can travel over them and even men find it difficult to climb about from cliff to cliff’.³² To move around, people had to wear special mountain shoes called rashichi or, in winter, snowshoes made from thick leaves.³³ People of different villages were able to call to one another across the deep streams, but to reach each other required a journey of many hours.³⁴ These difficulties were compounded during the winter, ‘the road thither being impassable to mules or horses on account of the snows’.³⁵ While heading to Asheetha, Layard noticed that wild goats might use the path, but certainly not horses and mules; if they got through, it was surely a miracle.³⁶ The passes were so difficult that in many places footholds were cut into the rock to fit a man’s foot to the cliffs on both sides.³⁷ Travellers had to use their hands to keep their balance and cross by narrow tracks on the edges of steep cliffs.³⁸ This might explain why crossing the district of Jelu and Baz required two days’ journey. To ascend the narrow gorge leading to Tekhoma, one had to take a most difficult and inaccessible path, along which were located four villages of this district. The houses, however, were nicely distributed through the valley for miles alongside the streams. Except in the northwestern stretches, they were built on the mountain slopes one above another, so that the flat roof of the lower house served as the forecourt of the upper one.³⁹ Unlike Tiyari, this district included no good farmland; the people had to carry soil from distant places to fill the man-made terraces⁴⁰ on the slopes of the mountains—an achievement that astonished the visitor Ainsworth. These conditions hampered communications between various provinces and settlements—for instance, to reach the district of Tekhoma from Baz entailed crossing the high mountains and deep gorges, which took a long time.⁴¹

Dr. Browne, who spent twenty-five years in the country, became intimately acquainted with its conditions, carried on intensive studies of the land and the people, and travelled widely. He noticed that crossingbridges were sometimes as narrow as one foot and only one foot above the water level. These crossingbridges were mostly used for driving sheep and were made of tree trunks.