ABSTRACT
On a sweltering day in June 1842 two riders arrived at the gates of Mosul, a provincial town in the Ottoman empire. They came from Baghdad in the south and had taken the customary road that led them through the fertile country east of the Tigris; they reached Mosul itself by crossing a rickety bridge of boats which connected the town on the western bank with the villages across the Tigris. One of the men was a Turkish post-rider, a ‘tatar’, who was on his way to Constantinople more than 2,000 km away with official imperial mail. The other was a young man dressed as a Bakhtiyari, a tribe that lived in Khuzistan, the mountainous south-western corner of Iran. A more observant eye would soon decide that he was a European, however, and indeed, after having parted from his travel companion, who entered the local Pasha's palace on the river, he went straight to the British Vice-Consulate where he was received as an old friend. He was the twenty-five-year-old British adventurer Austen Henry Layard.
