Description

2 ADJOINING MAPS – IRAQ – BASRA REGION / WORLD WAR I MESPOTAMIAN CAMPAIGN / CALCUTTA IMPRINT:

 

1.

GENERAL STAFF, INDIAN ARMY. / SURVEY OF INDIA. / Sidney BURRARD (1860 – 1943).

Turkey in Asia and Persia. / Parts of ’Irāq and Kuwait. (Rough Provisional Issue) (Third Edition) / No. 3.N. [Basra – Zubair Region].

Calcutta: Survey of India, April 1915.

Heliozincograph in colour, with contemporary annotations in indigo pencil (Very Good, creasing and minor stains in wide blank margins), 59 x 47 cm (23 x 18 inches).

[and]

 

2.

GENERAL STAFF, INDIAN ARMY. / SURVEY OF INDIA. / Sidney BURRARD (1860 – 1943).

Turkey in Asia and Persia. / Busra. (Rough Provisional Issue) 2^nd. Edition. No. 3.J.

Calcutta: Survey of India, August 1915.

Heliozincograph in colour, with contemporary annotations in indigo pencil (Very Good, creasing and minor stains in wide blank margins), 59.5 x 47 cm (23.5 x 18 inches).

This is a pair of exceedingly rare, adjoining maps of the vicinity of Basra, the great river port that was for centuries Iraq’s window to the world.  One of the earliest broadly accurate maps of the area, it is predicated upon the most recent surveys and reconnaissance conducted by the Indian Army and navy; mapping done by the Ottoman authorities, as well as various private trading companies.  It was commissioned by the General Staff of the Indian Army early in World War I, when British Indian forces seized Basra, making it their base for their invasion of Ottoman Iraq, called the Mesopotamian Campaign.  The maps were published by the Survey of India in Calcutta, as part of its ground-breaking ‘Degree Sheet’ mapping system of Persia and Iraq.

Referring to #1, which makes up the right-hand side of the pair, there appears the city of ‘Basrah’ (Basra), in the centre-right of the map, on the banks of the ‘Shatt al-’Arab’, the great, navigable estuarine channel that runs from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at Qurna (located just off the top-centre of the map), while the city state of Zubair is located in the desert to the southwest.  The map reaches up to take in the lower part of the main branch of the Euphrates and the swelled ‘New Channel’ of the same, which runs to the south.  The map extends south to cover the northern extremities of Kuwait (since 1914 an autonomous emirate, and a protectorate of Britain; Kuwait City is labelled as being 64 km below the map) and the port of Umm Qasr, with its ‘Landing place’, today Iraq’s only deep-sea port for oil mega-tankers.  The Shatt al-Arab is shown lined with its famous date plantations and the numerous villages.

The main city of ‘Basrah’ is located a ways inland from the Shatt, connected to its port district by the ‘Nahr-al-Ashar’ canal, which was lined with shops and warehouses, long being one of the great marts of the Middle East.  By the wharf is the ‘British Consulate’ and the ‘Quarantine Station’; across the water is the ‘Turkish Govt. Hospital’; while a ways up the Shatt are ‘workshops’.  The main Iraqi telegraph line is shown running up the Shatt towards Baghdad.

Extending southwest from Basra is a main road, accompanied by a ‘Telephone Line’ leading to Zubair, long an autonomous emirate under Ottoman sovereignty, being an ancient city surrounded by old forts, a ‘Ruined Mosque’, ‘tombs’, and ‘wells’.  Beyond the immediate Basra-Zubair area, the desert is punctuated by swamps and old, disused canals, while numerous notes describe the terrain, such as a ‘Salt Plain (bad wet going)’.  In contrast to the well surveyed lands near the cities and the Shatt, the desert hinterland is not well known, as many of the caravan routes are marked with ‘question marks’.

Map #2 continues the coverage westwards up the Euphrates, with its swelled channels forming lakes, before continuing up in the direction of Nasiriya, while a vast expanse of desert extends to the south, pierced by only a single caravan route.  The map labels various villages, date groves and ancient archaeological sites. 

British-Indian forces captured Basra from the Ottomans in November 1914 and consolidated their hold over the greater region the following month.  It remained the main British base in Iraq until the fall of Baghdad in March 1917. 

Importantly, the present two maps were contemporarily used together, and feature annotations in indigo pencil, a medium that was then commonly used by military engineers, and which continues from Map #1 to Map #2.  The additions mark an itinerary dating from April 28 to May 9 (year unspecified, perhaps 1916), starting from the shores of the Shatt al-Arab, just above Basra, down through Zubair and then west and then northwestwards up the Euphrates, in the direction of Nasiriya, giving daily mileages.

 

The Survey of India’s ‘Degree Sheet’ Series: Modernizing the Mapping of Iraq and Persia

It should, at this point, be noted that Britain’s interests in the Persian Gulf came under the auspices of the British Raj (the Government of India), although Whitehall retained the right to directly intervene whenever it so chose.  For decades, the Indian Navy and Army played key roles in surveying the Gulf region, with the resulting maps being edited and published by the Survey of India.

The Indian Government and the Survey of India’s interests in the Gulf intensified in the early 20^th Century, due to oil exploration and the rise of Ottoman-German cooperation which threatened British hegemony.  The Survey of India thus sought to develop a series of maps of the Gulf, Iraq and Persia, executed to high scientific standards and uniform scales sufficient to aid both strategic commercial and military use.

Colonel Sidney Burrard, who served as the Surveyor General of India from 1908 to 1919, was one of the most driven and visionary modern holders of the office.  He decided to expand the highly regarded ‘Degree Sheet’ surveys of the Indian Subcontinent to include Persia and Iraq.  As the name suggests, these surveys were comprised of adjoining map sheets (as the present pair exemplifies) that each covered a rectangle of exactly one degree of latitude by one degree of longitude (for instance, Map #1 depicts the area between 30° and 31° N and 47° and 48° W).  While such parameters for survey sheets were not novel, they proved highly popular in South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), and the Survey of India started producing degree sheets covering India beginning in 1905.

In 1912, Burrard, with the sponsorship of the General Staff of the Indian Army, initiated the publication of the ‘Degree Sheet’ surveys of Iraq and Persia under the title Turkey in Asia and Persia, with the sheets done to a scale of 1:253,400 (1 inch to 4 miles).  This scale was ideal for both military and civilian strategic planning, clearly depicting all key details of a given district, producing maps sheets of a size as to be conveniently portable for use in the field.  The sheets were accordingly updated and reissued as new mapping and intelligence arrived, either at the Survey’s headquarters in Calcutta (as here) or at the main field office in Dehra Dun.  While the sheets of the Turkey in Asia and Persia series were made to be able to be joined to form ever-larger maps, the sheets were issue separately and were considered to be standalone publications in and of themselves.

Importantly, the maps of the series were, as noted on the present map, classified ‘For official use only’, as they featured militarily and commercial sensitive information.  The map sheets were intended for high-ranking military officers, senior government officials, and the principals of major British commercial entities and they were never to be sold of otherwise publicly distributed.  Unless you were pre-authorized to receive the sheets, you would have had to apply to the Chief of the General Staff of the Indian Army in Simla to gain permission to receive examples.

 

A Note on Editions and Rarity

All the map sheets of the Turkey in Asia and Persia series were classified and published in only small print runs exclusively for high level official use, while the survival rate of the sheets, which tended to be heavily used in the field, would have been very low.  Not surprisingly, all issues of all the sheets are today extremely rare.

Referring to Map #1, the present issue of the map is marked as a ‘Rough Provisional Issue / ‘Third Edition’, with the imprint date of April 1915.  As a ‘provisional’ issue, created only months after the British took Basra, it would have been rushed out with whatever updates which had recently arrived by express courier at the Survey of India’s headquarters in Calcutta.  We have no record of the supposed first and second editions (which may have appeared as early as 1912), but we are aware of a Fourth Edition (1916) and another issue printed sometime in the 1920s.

We cannot trace the location of any other examples of the present ‘Rough Provisional Issue / Third Edition’ of the map in any institutional holdings; although was can cite 2 examples of the ‘Fourth Edition’ of the map, dated 1916, held by the India Office Records (British Library) and the Huntington Library (San Marino, California).

Of Map #2, which is likewise marked as a ‘Rough Provisional Issue’ (in this case a Second Edition, with an imprint date of August 1915); we cannot trace any examples of the map in any of its editions.

However, the Bodleian Library (Oxford University) and the University of California at Berkeley hold collections of Iraq Degree Sheets dating from 1921 to 1936 that may contain later editions of the one, or both of the present maps.

 

Britain Captures Basra, Iraq’s Window to the World

Basra was founded as a military outpost in 638 CE, near the beginning of the Islamic era in Iraq.   At the head of the navigation of the Persian Gulf, is soon became Iraq’s dominant port, its window to the world.  By the 11th century, it was a wealthy and sophisticated cultural centre with a grand mosque, and by the 13^th century it became a base for Genoese traders, indicative of its global status.  In the 14^th century, the legendary traveller Ibn Battuta noted that Basra was “renowned throughout the whole world, spacious in area and elegant in its courts, remarkable for its numerous fruit-gardens and its choice fruits, since it is the meeting place of the two seas, the salt and the fresh”.

The Ottoman armies of Suleiman the Magnificent conquered Basra in 1536, although Turkish control over the city and its region would ever only be light at best.  Shortly thereafter, Basra came under Portuguese influence, before becoming a largely autonomous region under the technical sovereignty of the Sublime Porte.

In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain aimed to expand its empire in India and to gain total dominance over the Indian Ocean.  The Persian Gulf was viewed by Whitehall as vital to its strategic interests and, beginning in 1820, Britain began signing protectorate treaties with the Arab Gulf States, hitherto known as the ‘Trucial States’, which progressively allowed the Royal Navy to make the Gulf into a ‘British lake’.

Britain’s political and military affairs in the Gulf were largely under the auspices of the Indian Raj, and the authorities in Calcutta saw Basra as crucial, guarding an envisaged overland travel route between India and Europe.  The British established major commercial interests in Basra, and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of British merchandise were stored in it warehouses at any one time.

Britain assumed political oversight over southern Persia in 1907.  The discovery of oil just across the Persian border from Basra in 1908, and the fouding of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), the precursor of today’s British Petroleum, heightened Britain’s interests in the Shatt al-Arab region, giving it paramount geopolitical importance.

Enter Germany, which likewise possessed extensive interests in Iraq.  Since the late 1880s, it had worked to gradually displace Britain and France as the major foreign financial and military players at the Sublime Porte.  Deutsche Bank, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s preferred financial vehicle, assumed control of the Orient Express (the famed rail route that connected Constantinople to the heart to Europe) and the Anatolian Railway, the uncompleted line that was to run across Turkey.  In 1903, the Germans agreed to expand the Anatolian route through to Baghdad (and perhaps even to Basra), creating the Baghdad Railway (German: Bagdadbahn), the envisaged Berlin-Baghdad Express.  This line, if ever completed, would pose a terrifying threat to British interests in the Persian Gulf, especially the petroleum industry.

To shore up British influence in the region, in 1914, Kuwait was made a British protectorate, like the Trucial States.  Basra was now virtually sandwiched between two British-dominated realms, while the Ottomans were heading towards a conflict with Britain.

In the summer of 1914, Britain, fearing for its interests in the Persian Gulf, formed the Indian Expeditionary Force (IEF), a special unit of the Indian Army, and deployed it to the region.

The IEF arrived off of the Shatt al-Arab on October 29, the same day that the Ottomans effectively entered the war, upon attacking Russian positions in the Black Sea.  Britain declared war on the Sublime Porte on November 5, commencing the Mesopotamian Campaign.  Her forces promptly took out the Ottoman positions on Iraq’s Al Faw Peninsula, before securing the APOC Oil Refinery at Abadan.  On November 17, they battled the Ottomans at Sahil, opposite Abadan, evicting them from their positions.  The way to Basra was now open.

On November 19, 1914, two brigades of British and Indian troops began their march towards Basra, amidst heavy rains.  With difficultly they managed to position their artillery near the city’s outskirts, scoring a few well-placed salvos into the Ottoman trenches.  Realizing that they were hopelessly outgunned, on November 21, the Ottomans sent a delegation under a white flag to parley.  They proposed to be allowed to evacuate the city and be given safe passage out of the vicinity, an offer that the British accepted.  British forces raised the Union Jack above Basra on November 23.  The British secured their control (or so they thought!) of the greater region, upon capturing Qurna on December 3.  While many Basrans did not trust the British, they were pleased to be rid of the Ottoman ‘Young Turk’ regime which had taken on an antagonistic attitude towards Arabs.  They were also eager to resume trade with the British-dominated Gulf.

As the British base for the ongoing Mesopotamian Campaign, Basra flourished, as supplies and money flowed in from India; the city’s traders made a fortune supplying the occupation regime.

However, in what was to become a reoccurring theme of the campaign, the British, having so easily taken Basra, became complacent.  In April 1915, the very month that the present map was published, the Ottomans mounted a reprise that came close to rolling back all the British gains.  The British had sent the majority of its forces up the Tigris, leaving Basra to be defended by a skeletal force.  The Ottoman Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman Askeri Bey formed a force of 18,000 men (both regulars and tribesmen) and set about attacking Basra from its soft underbelly, the interior.

At the Battle of Shaiba (April 12-14, 1915, near where ‘Shaiba Fort’ is marked on the map, just to the northwest of Zubair), Askeri’s army was confronted by a British force of only 6,200 men under Major-General Sir Charles John Melliss.  After two days of very heavy and bloody combat, the British mounted a daring bayonet charge that so startled the tribesmen allied to the Ottomans, that Askeri’s force retreated en masse into the desert.  The British hold on Basra would not be threatened for the duration of the war.

As for the ongoing Mesopotamian Campaign, the relative peace enjoyed at Basra in the wake of the Battle of Shaiba was very much at odds with the scene further up the Euphrates-Tigris basin, where both sides became bogged down in a horrendously bloody contest that see-sawed back and forth, before Britain finally gained the upper hand in 1917, taking Baghdad on December 11, 1917.  From that point, the British continued their conquest northwards, albeit slowly.  While World War I in the Middle East ended upon the Armistice of Mudros (October 30, 1918), in contravention of that agreement, British forces took Mosul on November 14, 1918.

The Treaty of Versailles (1919) led to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and made Iraq into British-controlled mandate (essentially a protectorate).  The Turkish Petroleum Company ramped up its exploration ventures, discovering the massive Kirkuk fields in 1927.  Renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1929, the firm went on to discover many new oil fields, including in the Basra region.  While Iraq technically became independent in 1932, Britain continued to dominate its politics and oil production until the July 14 Revolution of 1958, which brought in a nationalist republican regime opposed to Western hegemony.

 

References: Map #1: N / A – No examples of the present edition traced.  Cf. [Re: 4^th Edition of 1916:] Huntington Library (San Marino, California): 626715; India Office Records, British Library: IOR/L/PS/12/3737, f. 15.; OCLC: 818355389; Map #2: No examples of any of the editions traced.  Cf. [Re: Collections of Iraq Degree sheets from 1921 to 1936 that may include later edition of one, or both, of the present maps:] Oxford University – Bodleian Library: Maps N12487410; University of California – Berkeley: G7610.s253 .S8 / OCLC: 743383533; [Re: Historical Background:] Eugene ROGAN, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 79-87; 124-7.