To emphasize his importance, Fath Ali Shah, the second ruler of the Qajar dynasty, kept the officers of the detachment waiting a few weeks before receiving them, and Rawlinson’s own observations of the occasion indicate his opinion of the absurd pomp and rigid etiquette. In order to impress the Persians, Rawlinson and the other officers formed a glittering and gaudy spectacle as they set out on their horses from the residence of the British Envoy in the south of the city. ‘A party of two-and-twenty Europeans thus brilliantly attired,’ Rawlinson noted, ‘is a spectacle to which the eyes of the Teheranees are but little accustomed.’14 Riding through the narrow streets and bazaars, they reached the Golestan Palace, dismounted and were led through courtyards and gloomy passages to the splendid Golestan Garden. The Shah was in an adjoining audience room, ‘but, it being utterly inconsistent with etiquette that we should proceed thither by the direct route, we were paraded half round the enclosure before being permitted to approach the throne’.15 Seated on a throne in one corner of the room overlooking the garden, the Shah was surrounded by sword and shield bearers and miscellaneous princes, who were attired in expensive robes and equipped with jewel-encrusted weapons. The throne, Rawlinson observed, ‘was shaped much like a large high-backed old-fashioned easy chair, and, though made of gold, and studded throughout with emeralds and rubies, appeared a most strange ungainly piece of furniture’.16
This display of wealth contrasted with the simplicity of the room and with the appearance of the elderly Shah (then sixty-four years of age). Although portrayed in numerous flattering paintings gorgeously attired and with a beard down to his waist, Rawlinson thought him a person of ‘a plain and almost mean appearance. The old man’s beard is still of prodigious length, but its claim to supremacy in this respect may, I think, be fairly questioned. His face is dark and wrinkled; his teeth have all fallen out from age; and he retains not a trace of that manly beauty which is said to have distinguished him in former days, and which characterizes even now the pictures which are daily taken of him.’17 In a polite conversation lasting just fifteen minutes, the Shah expressed the value he placed on the detachment, and they were then dismissed with the greatest honour.
As his son Crown Prince Abbas Mirza had died the year before after a long illness, Fath Ali now appointed as his successor his twenty-six-year-old grandson Muhammed Mirza (‘Mirza’ being a Persian title meaning ‘born of a prince’, given to those of good birth), who was one of the twenty-six sons of Abbas Mirza. This announcement dashed the hopes of Fath Ali’s other sons and grandsons, who, according to Rawlinson, numbered nearly three thousand, ‘and every Persian in consequence felt a pride in being the subject of such a king. The greatest misfortune, indeed, that can befall a man in Persia is to be childless. When a chief’s “hearthstone,” as it was said, “was dark,” he lost all respect.’18 Summoned from his military campaigns beyond the north-eastern border of Persia, Muhammed Mirza lifted his siege of the Afghan city of Herat and entered Tehran in a grand procession on 14 June. He was proclaimed Crown Prince straightaway, and the British detachment was transferred to him as a bodyguard, accompanying him at his investiture a few days later.
Because the city of Tabriz, capital of the province of Azerbaijan, was also the official residence of the heir-apparent, Muhammed Mirza was sent there as governor by the Shah. Situated in the far north-west of Persia, this was strategically important territory as it bordered Russia and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Tabriz had been captured by Russia as recently as 1827, after provocation by Persia, although it was restored the following year. The city was located in a valley at the foot of the mountains, and had over the centuries been battered by invading armies, epidemics and devastating, frequent earthquakes, as well as bitterly cold winters with heavy snowfall and hot, dry summers. Accompanied by Colonel Pasmore’s British detachment, Muhammed and the Persian army from his Herat campaign set off from Tehran on 4 July after delays finding sufficient transport animals for the journey of over 300 miles.
Most of the British officers suffered from illness on the march, including Rawlinson who had to be carried for much of the way in a palanquin (a covered litter). ‘Prostrated by fever and ague’,19 he was most likely suffering from malaria, although it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the cause of the illness was found to be a microscopic parasite transmitted through mosquito bites. The symptoms of malaria include violent shivering, followed by a fever with very high temperature, then profuse sweating, as well as headaches and vomiting, culminating in a period of fatigue. Such symptoms caused Rawlinson to spend several days in bed when they reached their destination towards the end of July.
Throughout August and September 1834 the British officers relentlessly trained the Persian troops, stationed on the disputed frontier region. In mid-October Rawlinson and two colleagues obtained a few days’ leave and headed across the border towards Bayazit, a town of about three thousand Armenian inhabitants, 20 miles south-west of Mount Ararat, where a Turkish force was encamped. In the nearby village of Ahura, on the south-eastern slope of Mount Ararat, a legend persisted that a shepherd had once seen a great wooden ship on their mountain, which was believed to be none other than Noah’s Ark of the Old Testament book of Genesis. Today three main controversies still surround Noah’s Ark. Where did it land? Could it have survived to the present day? And did it ever exist? As related in Genesis, God decided to destroy everything living on earth with a catastrophic flood because wickedness among people was so great, but Noah, a righteous man, was told to build an ark (a box-like boat) to protect himself, his family and a pair of every bird and animal. Of enormous size (300 cubits long, equivalent to 450 feet), the ark was equipped with three decks and took over one hundred years to build. The flood, caused by relentless rainfall for forty days and forty nights, did not begin to subside until after a hundred and fifty days, and the tops of mountains only began to be visible after a further two months.
Genesis, originally written in Hebrew, does not say that the ark came to rest on a specific peak, but on the ‘mountains of Ararat’, and for believers in the literal story of the ark, the imposing Mount Ararat has been favoured as the resting place since medieval times. The mountain actually has two peaks 7 miles apart, the highest being Great Ararat, which rises to 16,945 feet and has a permanent ice cap and glaciers. It was not originally known as Ararat, but as Masis to the Armenians and Agri Dag in Turkish. The reference in Genesis is probably to Urartu, a very powerful state in the Lake Van area in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, extending into what is now Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The name Urartu is found in the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria, its great rival to the south, although the people of Urartu actually called their own land Bianili.
From the mid-nineteenth century there have been over forty claims of spotting the ark on Mount Ararat, at times seen embedded in ice or submerged in a lake, since when about 140 expeditions have attempted to find the ark. Ancient wood can survive for thousands of years in very dry or in waterlogged conditions, but Mount Ararat is a large and inhospitable dormant volcano, although no known eruptions have occurred in historical times. There is no evidence of marine deposits from a flood, and the volcano has probably erupted within the last 10,000 years, since any Biblical flood. The ice cap, hundreds of feet thick, is thought to be the most likely hiding place for the ark, and yet the movement of the glaciers would pulverize a wooden vessel.
The summit of Mount Ararat was reached for the first time, on his third attempt, in October 1829 by a German professor of natural philosophy, Friedrich Parrot, only five years before Rawlinson’s visit. Rawlinson was unaware of Parrot’s