Another equally transitory raid left a more enduring impression--not indeed upon Aleppo in particular, but upon Mesopotamia at large. For in the year 1400 the country was visited by that most destructive of all conquerors, the terrible Timour the Tartar. He signalized his capture of Aleppo, as usual, by the erection of a gigantic pyramid of human heads; and (as was not unusual) he solaced himself while the pile was being reared by discussing theological problems with the learned doctors of the town. Poor wretches! they must have felt rather like a regiment of philosophers paraded for an interview with the Theban Sphinx; especially when their dangerous questioner opened proceedings with the bland inquiry, "Which are the true martyrs,--those who die fighting for me, or for my foes?" But fortunately they had an Oedipus among them who parried the thrust by quoting the words of the Prophet, "All who die fighting for conscience' sake are martyrs, no matter under what ensign they fall." The conquests of Timour may be regarded as closing the history of Mesopotamia; that first and most striking chapter in the history of the civilization of the world. Here mankind had first emerged from barbarism, and constructed the city of Babylon. Here had arisen the successive great empires that had their seats at Carchemish, at Nineveh, at Persepolis, at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and at Antioch; and here after aeons of conquest and re-conquest there could yet arise the splendours of Baghdad. Invincibly fertile and populous the land still seemed able to revive after each successive devastation; but at last its power of recuperation was exhausted; and after Timour's day there is no more left to tell. Other conquerors had destroyed and rebuilt; but the Tartars were only destroyers. They razed the cities to the dust; they massacred every living creature; they demolished even the irrigation works that gave fertility to the fields. And the desert which spreads to this day over all the plains to the eastward is, far more truly than his mausoleum at Samarcand, the monument of Timour the Lame. Yet Aleppo itself was near enough to the sea to recover even from this disaster; and within 150 years of Timour's conquest it was once more one of the chief marts of the East. Hither came the London Turkey merchants, among them the "Master of the Tiger." Hither, with the Venetians, came Othello, to have his memorable encounter with the "heathen Turk." John Verney was trading here in the middle of the seventeenth century, and describes it as "the most famous city in all the Grand Seignior's dominions for the confluence of merchants of all nations." Among the commodities dealt with he enumerates the "oak galls for dyers" which are still a valuable harvest in the Kurdistan mountains; but he makes no mention of the liquorice, which is now the most important of all.