544 REPORT—1890. 
villages on the plains belong to them, and as they are most of them 
Kalazians, Sheikh Hassan is a man of considerable importance. He 
receives tithes from the people, and lives in one of the best houses on the 
outskirts of the town. He has a reputation for great generosity, as he 
feeds 150 poor at his own expense every Friday. He is one of those 
who, they say, will at once become stars when they die, without going 
through any of those unpleasant transformations which are a common 
fact of their belief. With them metempsychosis partakes strongly 
of the ridiculous: bad men put on ‘low envelopes,’ or Kamees, in 
the next world; Mussulmans become jackals, and Jewish Rabbis apes ; 
a man may be punished by becoming a woman, but a good woman may 
be rewarded in the next life by becoming a man; and many kindred ideas 
of this nature. 
Lastly, I will say a few words about the mystery of initiation into the 
Ansairee faith—E] Kudda, as they call it. Only males are initiated, and 
not till they are sixteen or thereabouts. The admission is only done by 
degrees; only after the lapse of various probationary periods, sometimes 
never at all, the final mysteries are revealed. The cup of wine is present, 
as at all their festivals, and the sandal of the Seid or Sheikh is bound on 
to the head of the novice with a white rag. The novice has to have no 
less than twelve sponsors, who promise to cut him in pieces if he discloses 
anything, and it is commonly reported at Tarsus, with what amount of 
truth I know not, that the tongues of two men who revealed secrets are 
kept in pickle and shown at the initiation as an awful warning to the 
youth. For the twelve sponsors there are to be two other sponsors, who 
are answerable for the good conduct of the twelve, and the oath by the 
mystery of the Ain Min Sin is administered, the novice repeating the same 
500 times. 
The various probationary periods are forty days, and then seven 
months, by which time the novice is supposed to have had time to learn 
the sixteen prayers to Ali, and to be sufficiently prepared to become an 
ordinary member of their body. What leugth of time it takes before the 
youth is admitted into the higher degrees Ido not know. Altogether 
their system of secrecy is very like that of the Freemasons. By a shake 
of the hand an Ansairee will know his co-religionist, whether he dwells 
on the shores of the Caspian or the Mediterranean, and they have kept 
their secret well, quite as well as the masonic bodies of Western Europe. 
Our further investigations into the nomad tribes of this district were 
to the north-east of the Cilician plain, where vast tracts of uncultivated 
country are given up to them and their flocks, a country capable of great 
development if only a settled government could give security to the 
farmer ; as it is, nearly every attempt at farming has failed. Near Adana 
I was told of a farm with house and stock which could be bought for 
150/., but then there had been three years of famine, and the landowners 
were at their wits’ end to pay their taxes and their wages. 
Our first intercourse with the Afshars of the Cilician plain was near 
the rock fortress of Anazarba, where a detachment of them have taken 
up their winter quarters. The Afshars are a very numerously divided 
scattered tribe, chiefly of nomadic tendency. We saw a good deal of them 
in Northern Persia, where they are said to have aspired to the throne, 
and the great Shah Abbas of Persia, to counteract their influence, esta- 
blished the tribe of the Shah Sevan. 
In Persia the Afshars would appear to be of Kourdish origin, from 
