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.
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