The phrase "the Oxford of Anatolia," so often used for Amasya, is set out explicitly in the travel book of a young French Hellenist who spent about three weeks in the city in the winter of 1861. In the Amasya chapter of his Souvenirs d'un voyage en Asie Mineure (Memories of a Journey in Asia Minor), Georges Perrot writes that some two thousand softas (madrasa students) studied in eighteen madrasas in a city of twenty-five thousand people, and says that with its colleges living on pious endowments the city resembled an English university town. The chapter is still read as one of the most detailed testimonies in Western languages on nineteenth-century Amasya.

What brought Perrot to Amasya was a scientific mission granted by the French government. On the same journey, in Ankara, he uncovered from behind house walls and copied the Greek translation of Augustus's Res Gestae inscription, making his name known in European scholarly circles before he was thirty. Over the next fifty years he became one of the most influential figures in French archaeology: he directed the École Normale Supérieure, rose to be permanent secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and wrote, with Charles Chipiez, the ten-volume Histoire de l'art dans l'Antiquité.

Youth and the Greek Years

Georges Perrot was born on 12 November 1832 in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, south-east of Paris, then in the department of Seine-et-Oise. According to the biographical page the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres devotes to its members, he entered the École Normale Supérieure first in his year in 1852. The same source's career summary places his agrégation in letters in 1855, while its biographical text gives 1859; the source does not reconcile the two dates.

He spent 1855-1858 as a member of the French School at Athens (École française d'Athènes). During this time he explored the island of Thasos systematically, then went on to Crete, from where he sent to the Louvre the first fragment of the Gortyn law code to reach the museum. On returning from Greece he taught for a while in provincial lycées: in 1858-1859 he was a teacher at the lycée of Angoulême, and in 1859 at Orléans and in 1860 at Versailles he served as substitute teacher of rhetoric. In the preface to the Souvenirs, Perrot writes that before setting out for Asia Minor he had lived three years in the Levant, and that this experience allowed him to make the most of the journey.

The 1861 Mission to Asia Minor

The French government sent Perrot to Asia Minor with one of the special grants for archaeological research made under Napoleon III. In Perrot's own account, he left France at the end of March 1861 with a scientific mission from the Ministry of State. His companions were Guillaume, an architect and holder of a scholarship at the French Academy in Rome, and Dr Jules Delbet of the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Before departing, Guillaume was trying to finish his restoration drawings of the theatre at Verona; Delbet, once the mission had been decided, had taken up photography and within three weeks had made himself a rival of the famous photographers of the day. Since travelling on horseback in the mountains would only be possible in May, Perrot first made his way slowly to Istanbul by way of Italy.

The mission's longest and most productive halt was Ankara. Every morning before seven, Perrot and Guillaume went to the Temple of Augustus and Rome in the precinct of the Hacı Bayram Mosque. On the inner walls of the temple's pronaos was the Latin text known since the sixteenth century as the "Monument of Ankara" (Monumentum Ancyranum), in which Augustus, at the age of seventy-six, summarized his own deeds. Only hasty and faulty copies of this text existed; the most recent was Tournefort's, made around 1700. Pococke and Hamilton had seen fragments of the Greek translation on the outer face of the east wall of the cella and published a few lines, but Turkish houses built against the temple hid almost all of it. Perrot had the partition walls of these houses and the brick screen covering the marble pulled down, and in the first month he copied the Greek text line by line in the dark. The Latin text, too, had to be copied anew and with great care, since no reliable copy existed. The mission stayed in Ankara for about three months.

From Ankara the route led through Galatia and Cappadocia to Pontus. They spent eight days each at Boğazköy and Alacahöyük. Perrot writes that the mission set out from Çorum for Amasya on 25 November 1861.

The Days in Amasya

Most of the two-day journey from Çorum to Amasya passed through monotonous heath covered with juniper. The landscape changed, in Perrot's words, only towards the evening of the second day, when the road came down into the Yeşilırmak valley: mulberry plantations, hundreds of silkworm houses, willows, alders, and red-tiled houses rising above the fruit trees. An hour from the city they crossed the river by a stone bridge, and at a bend in the road Amasya suddenly appeared before them. Perrot calls it the most picturesque town they had yet seen in Asia Minor. His description of the city, with the castle and its five rings of walls, the royal tombs, the Hellenistic walls on the site of the Pontic palace, the tree-planted square before the Bayezid Mosque, houses on piles that reminded him of the Tiber embankments in Rome, the mills and the water wheels, is among the pages later writers have quoted most.

The mission stayed in the house of a wealthy Swiss merchant and industrialist who lived on high ground south-east of the city and had been settled in Amasya for nearly twenty years. Perrot gives his host's name only as "M. K...". He describes sleeping between sheets for the first time in five months, a piano in the house, and the host's young wife, brought back from Germany, who had died six months earlier. The next day Perrot called on the governor, Salih Pasha. This reception, with gendarmes lined up in two rows from the door of the konak to the top of the stairs, was the most brilliant welcome they had received on the whole journey. Perrot's showering of compliments on the governor made him the target of his host's teasing; he writes that even those in the city who disliked the governor admitted that he laid no hand on anyone's property.

A large part of the Amasya chapter revolves around the flour mill, the bolting works and the silk-reeling mill that the Swiss merchant had set up on European lines. According to Perrot, these works bought the farmers' wheat at a good price, gave employment to the muleteers and camel drivers who carried flour and silk to Samsun, and allowed the women and children of poor families to earn wages in the silk mill. The new methods, however, had met with resistance. When the practice of stifling the chrysalises inside the cocoons with steam instead of killing them in the sun was introduced, there was a great outcry in the city, and the imams and mollas signed a petition declaring it contrary to religion and sent it to Istanbul. Perrot records that the disease that had been killing the silkworms for the past four years was seen by the people as a punishment for these innovations.

It is in this context that the phrase "the Oxford of Anatolia" occurs. Perrot writes that Christians made up only a quarter of the population of Amasya and that the city had remained a madrasa town since the Seljuks, and he makes this comparison: in Amasya, with about twenty-five thousand inhabitants, two thousand softas study in eighteen madrasas; like the colleges of the English universities, each madrasa owns farms in the province, houses in the town and shops in the bazaar; the students lodge in small rooms and receive a weekly allowance of bread, rice and oil, and some madrasas also give a small sum of money. Perrot adds that since the reign of Mahmud II these revenues had been collected by officials of the Ministry of Pious Foundations (Evkaf Nezareti) in Istanbul. His dismissal of the learning taught in the madrasas as "dead scholasticism" reflects how European observers of the period regarded the Ottoman learned tradition.

The mission's stay in Amasya was broken by a five-day excursion to Zile. Perrot and Guillaume wanted to identify on the ground, following Hirtius's account, the site of the battle in which Caesar defeated Pharnaces II of Pontus and announced his victory in three words. On the same occasion they saw the famous Zile fair, attended by merchants from Diyarbakır, Baghdad, Aleppo and the Black Sea coast. During the first three days of the fair, cirit (the javelin game on horseback) was played on a wide field outside the town; the old men complained that it was a pale imitation of the hard game of their youth, played by some fifty horsemen. Perrot gave the scholarly counterpart of this observation years later, presenting a paper to the Académie in 1871 on Caesar's campaign against Pharnaces.

While Perrot and Guillaume were at Zile, Dr Delbet stayed in Amasya, treating Christian and Muslim patients free of charge and, through the connections this created, gathering information on family life and the economic condition of the town. According to Perrot, in a city of twenty-five thousand there was only one physician in the proper sense: a young Italian, recently settled, who had not yet gained much standing. The pasha's doctor was a farrier who had never left the city, and the council paid him a salary to visit free of charge anyone who called him. The section also contains anecdotes such as imams who cured fever with water in which papers bearing prayers and Qur'anic verses had been soaked, and a Karaite Jewish merchant from Crimea, come to buy silk, who could no longer go out into the street because of a rumour that a hair from his beard cured fever.

In the first days of December winter set in suddenly; snow fell for four days and covered the mountains and the valley. They had to reach Samsun before the snow closed the roads. The mission left Amasya on 14 December 1861, crossed the snow-covered road at times on foot, leading their horses, and on Friday 20 December boarded the steamer from Samsun to Istanbul. In Perrot's account, Amasya was, after Ankara, the city where they had stayed longest on the whole journey.

A Traveller's Point of View

The Souvenirs is not merely an archaeologist's notebook; in the preface Perrot introduces it as "a book of good faith" and says he will relate everything he saw in the East "without system or preconception." The Amasya chapter is nonetheless full of generalizations common among European travellers of the period. Perrot explains Turkish resistance to industry and innovation by a religious "fatalism," relates with approval how an English consular agent in Samsun pulled a mufti to his feet by the beard, and argues that Europeans must first act harshly in order to be respected in the East. On the same pages, however, he also criticizes his own society, writing that the "notorious dishonesty" of European merchants too often justified Turkish suspicion, likening the mentality that opposed steam-stifling of cocoons to the one that had once stood against Roger Bacon, Galileo and Copernicus in Europe, and noting that there were people in his own country who thought in exactly the same way. The book's observations on Amasya are therefore a valuable source for figures and events, but a text whose judgments must be read with caution.

His Books and Academic Life

The scholarly results of the journey were published in two large volumes: Exploration archéologique de la Galatie et de la Bithynie (1862) and Exploration archéologique de la Mysie, de la Phrygie, de la Cappadoce et du Pont (1872). The Souvenirs d'un voyage en Asie Mineure, the account of the journey for a wider readership, was published in 1863 and reached a second edition in 1867; the Michel Lévy Frères printing available in digital form bears the date 1864. In this printing the Amasya chapter begins on page 439.

From 1864 to 1871 Perrot taught at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. In 1867 he took his doctorate with a principal thesis on the private and public law of the Athenian republic and a complementary Latin thesis on the Roman province of Galatia; the trace of the journey to Asia Minor is visible in the second. In the same years he published his memories of travel in Crete, a study of Thasos, and translations of Max Müller's books on the science of language.

He entered higher education as substitute for Gaston Boissier in Latin language and literature at the École Normale Supérieure (the Académie's career summary gives 1868, its biographical text 1869); in 1875 he became lecturer in Greek language and literature there. In 1874-1876 he directed studies in Greek antiquities at the École pratique des Hautes Études, and in 1879-1883 he was professor of archaeology at the Sorbonne. On 18 December 1874, aged only forty-two, he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, to the seat left vacant by François Guizot. From 1883 to 1904 he was director of the École Normale Supérieure; the Dictionary of Art Historians gives this office as 1888-1902, but the Académie's own record shows 1883-1904. In 1903 he served as president of the Institut de France, and on 9 December 1904 he became permanent secretary of the Académie. According to the record of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, he had been elected a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences on 17 July 1884.

Perrot's true monument is the Histoire de l'art dans l'Antiquité, which he began with the architect Charles Chipiez as he approached the age of fifty. Starting from Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, Anatolia and the Persian world and reaching Greek art, the work appeared between 1882 and 1914 in ten volumes of about nine hundred pages each and was also translated into English. From 1883 to 1913 Perrot shared the direction of the Revue archéologique; in 1905 he published a book on Praxiteles. As the Académie writes, he worked without interruption into his eighty-second year, and death found him "pen in hand." He died in Paris on 30 June 1914. He held the rank of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.

His Place in the History of Amasya

The three weeks Perrot spent in Amasya are a small part of his long scholarly life, but the text he left on the city matters. His information on the population estimate of 1861, the proportion of Christians, the numbers of madrasas and students, the administration of endowment revenues, the founding of industrial works on European lines and the reaction they met, the silkworm disease, medicine and popular beliefs is an outside testimony that complements the Ottoman sources on Amasya in the Tanzimat period. The comparison "the Oxford of Anatolia," counted among Amasya's historical epithets, is also set out explicitly in this book, by likening the city's madrasas to the English colleges.

Chronology

12 November 1832: Born in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges.

1852: Entered the École Normale Supérieure, first in his year.

1855-1858: Member of the French School at Athens; research on Thasos and Crete.

March 1861: Left France for the scientific mission in Asia Minor.

1861: In Ankara, uncovered and copied the Greek translation of the Res Gestae.

25 November 1861: Set out from Çorum for Amasya.

14 December 1861: Left Amasya for Samsun; on 20 December boarded the steamer at Samsun.

1862: Exploration archéologique de la Galatie et de la Bithynie published.

1863: Souvenirs d'un voyage en Asie Mineure published (second edition 1867).

1867: Doctorate; complementary thesis on the Roman province of Galatia.

1871: Presented a paper to the Académie on Caesar's campaign against Pharnaces.

1872: Second volume of the Exploration archéologique (Mysia, Phrygia, Cappadocia and Pontus) published.

18 December 1874: Elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

1882: First volume of the Histoire de l'art dans l'Antiquité with Chipiez.

1883-1904: Director of the École Normale Supérieure (according to the Académie's record).

9 December 1904: Became permanent secretary of the Académie.

30 June 1914: Died in Paris.

Bibliography

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Online sources