Nothing Is More Difficult Than To Compute Exactly The Population Of
Eastern Towns, Where Registers Are Never Kept, And Where Even The Number
Of Houses Can Scarcely Be Ascertained.
To judge from appearances, and by
comparison with European towns, in which the amount of population is
well known, may be very fallacious.
The private habitations in the East
are generally (though the Hedjaz forms an exception to this rule) of one
story only, and therefore contain fewer inmates in proportion than
European dwellings. On the other hand, Eastern towns have very narrow
streets, are without public squares or large market-places, and their
miserable suburbs are in general more nurously peopled than their
principal and best streets. Travellers, however, in passing rapidly
through towns, may be easily deceived, for they see only the bazars and
certain streets, in which the greater part of the male population is
usually assembled during the day. Thus it happens that recent and
respectable authorities have stated two hundred thousand souls as the
population of Aleppo; four hundred thousand as that of Damascus; and
three hundred thousand as that of Cairo. My estimate of the population
of the three great Syrian towns is as follows: - Damascus two hundred and
fifty thousand; Hamah (of which, however, I must speak with less
confidence) from sixty to one hundred thousand; and Aleppo, daily
dwindling into decay, between eighty and ninety thousand. To Cairo I
would allow at most two hundred thousand. As to Mekka, which I have seen
both before and after the Hadj, and know, perhaps, more thoroughly than
any other town of the East, the result of my inquiries gives between
twenty-five and thirty thousand stationary inhabitants, for the
population of the city and suburbs; besides from three to four thousand
Abyssinian and
[p.133] black slaves: its habitations are capable of containing three
times this number. In the time of Sultan Selym I. (according to
Kotobeddyn, in A.H. 923) a census was taken of the inhabitants of Mekka,
previous to a gratuitous distribution of corn among them, and the number
was found to be twelve thousand, men, women, and children. The same
author shows that, in earlier times, the population was much more
considerable; for when Abou Dhaher, the chief of the Carmatis, (a
heretic sect of Moslims) sacked Mekka, in A.H. 314, thirty thousand of
the inhabitants were killed by his ferocious soldiers.
[p.134] DESCRIPTION OF THE BEITULLAH, OR GREAT
MOSQUE, AT MECCAH.
WHERE the valley is wider than in other interior parts of the town,
stands the mosque, called Beitullah, or El Haram, a building remarkable
only on account of the Kaaba, which it encloses; for there are several
mosques in other places of the East nearly equal to this in size, and
much superior to it in beauty.
The Kaaba stands in an oblong square, two hundred and fifty paces long,
and two hundred broad, none of the sides of which run quite in a
straight line, though at first sight the whole appears to be of a
regular shape.
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