Ancient Persia in Western History

Hellenism and the Representation of the Achaemenid Empire

Sasan Samiei

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857736062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Ancient Persia in Western History is a measured rejoinder to the dominant narrative that considers the Graeco-Persian Wars to be merely the first round of an oft-repeated battle between the despotic 'East' and the broadly enlightened 'West'. Sasan Samiei analyses the historiography which has skewed our understanding of this crucial era - contrasting the work of Edward Gibbon and Goethe, which venerated Classicism and Hellenistic history, with later writers such as John Linton Myres. Finally, Samiei explores the cross-cultural encounters which constituted the Achaemenid period itself, and repositions it as essential to the history of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

When dealing either directly or indirectly with the ancient Iranian civilizations, European classicism, both in its incipiency and contemporary manifestation, has displayed a remarkable constancy in ideological perspective, historiographical methodology and textual tonality. If you were to pick a classical text on (say) the Persian Wars or the conquest of Alexander from the eighteenth, nineteenth, most of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, you would confront a number of literary and methodological topoi, all situated well within the boundaries of Orientalism, Hellenocentrism and now Islamism.

Johann G. Herder pondered the following question in 1775: ‘Did any Persian ravager of the world found such kingdoms, cities, and edifices, as he destroyed?’¹ In The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World (1862), George Rawlinson queries the mental prowess of the Persians, especially when compared to the Greeks, and asserts that ‘we cannot ascribe to them any high degree of intellectual excellence’,² thus implying that the threat they had posed to Greece, had it been realized, could have been catastrophic for the intellectual history of the world. Indeed, it is this theme that G. W. Cox took forward some 15 years later:

[T]he conquest of Europe was no longer a vision which could cheat the fancy of the lord of Asia. The will and energy of Athens, aided by the rugged discipline of Sparta, had foiled the great enterprise through which the barbarian despot sought to repress in the deadly bonds of Persian thraldom the intellect and freedom of the world.³

In more recent writings, the oriental credentials of the Persians are signposted with greater stylistic subtlety. For instance, in Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (2006) – a title that brings to mind Henri Bergson’s apt phrase, ‘the illusion of retrospective determinism’⁴ (in this case, the question must be: what was this ‘West’ that they were battling for?) – the author opines that:

the political model established by the ancient monarchy of Persia was one that would persist in the Middle East until 1922, and the deposition of the last ruling caliph, the Turkish Sultan. It is the stated goal of Osama bin Laden, of course, to see the Caliphate resurrected to its prerogative of global rule.⁵

Implicit in Holland’s words here is the belief, held by many contemporary thinkers, that there exists an unbroken arc of statecraft that inexorably links the kingship of Cyrus the Great to the Islamic ‘Wahabbism’ of Osama bin Laden.

With regard to Alexander, his historical portrayal was always a question of benevolent leadership and a mission to civilize. ‘[T]he Macedonian king, the commander-in-chief of the Greek confederates,’ wrote J. B. Bury in 1909, ‘had set forth as a champion of Greeks against mere barbarians, as a leader of Europeans against effeminate Asiatics, as the representative of a higher folk against beings lower in the human scale.’⁶ Although in recent years the use of such terms has become obsolete, the overarching idea that the consequences of Alexander’s conquest were mostly benign still holds. According to a 2005 article in the FT Magazine, entitled ‘Alexander, the First Neo-Con’, ‘[t]he Hellenistic civilisation that flourished for two centuries in Alexander’s wake from Egypt to India is one of the glories of mankind. It truly did bring east and west together, putting Hellenic inquiry and individuality at the core of a vast oriental culture.’⁷

As far as the Persian Wars are concerned, counter-factual and teleological forms of conveying history are usually the preferred modes of exposition. ‘Had things gone the other way’, asserts Peter Green in The Years of Salamis (1970), ‘mosques and minarets would dominate Europe.’⁸ In 1999, Victor Davis-Hanson ponders ‘what if the Persians had won the battle of Salamis?’ He confidently opines that ‘[w]e would live under a much different tradition today – writers under death sentences, women secluded and veiled,⁹ universities mere centres of religious zealotry, thought police in our living rooms and bedrooms – had Themistocles and his sailors failed’.¹⁰ In The Classical World (2005), Robin Lane Fox makes a similar argument:

If the Persians had won in Greece, Greek freedom would have been curbed and with it, the political, artistic, dramatic and philosophical progress which has been a beacon to Western civilization. Satraps would have ruled Greece and dispensed personal justice […]. Persians might have dined on sofas and encouraged and watched the Greeks’ athletic games, although their kings would never have risked competing in them for fear of losing.

Moreover, he is adamant that in ‘480 brave Greeks and their families died for freedom not slavery’.¹¹

Despite this, there was a period, roughly from 1850s to 1930s, when the Persians were characterized quite differently. In some intellectual quarters, they were no longer ‘othered’ in such an uncompromising and binary fashion. These novel forms of depicting the ancients not only refrained from othering the Persians, but had gone out of their way to consider them, along with the Greeks, as the kith and kin of the peoples of Europe. For Gobineau, the Iranians were the ‘cousins’ of the ‘Germans and Scandinavians’.¹² And for Ernest Renan, who believed that ‘progress for Indo-European peoples will consist in distancing themselves more and more form the Semitic spirit’,¹³ the Persians were ‘Exhibit A’ in demonstrating that this ‘distancing’ is entirely within reach: ‘Persia here is the only exception. It managed to retain its own genius, and it did so because it was successful in safeguarding its own legacy from Islam.’¹⁴ In addition, the nineteenth-century anthropologist, R. W. Jackson, in a paper entitled ‘Turan and Iran’, defines ‘Iran’ (which literally means the ‘land of the Aryans’) as an entity that possesses ‘the essential character and quality of the hereditarily gubernational classes, from Persia to Ireland’.¹⁵ He also tabulates the rivalry between the ‘Aryans’ and ‘Semites’ by citing as examples Cyrus’ triumph over the Babylonians, the conquest of Egypt by Cambyses and the victories of the Frankish knights during the Crusades. It is worth noting here that in this scheme, Cyrus’ compadre in history was not Saladin, but Richard the Lionheart. In other words, when looked at from Jackson’s perspective, the idea that Achaemenid kingship could have provided the blueprints for a governance which stretches from the first Islamic Caliphate right through to Osama bin Laden is rendered a fanciful proposition.

In 1911, the Oxford ancient historian, Sir John Linton Myres, described in The Dawn of History the arrival of the Iranians and the Greeks upon the historical scene:

The newcomers of the North marshalled the whole eastern world, from the Adriatic to the Caspian and the Persian Gulf, into final camps, Eastern and Western in name, but held and directed on both sides by long-last brothers and true kinsman. In the west, they were the men who had ‘come from the north,’ and changed the Aegean from Minoan to Greek. And if the others came from the east, they were yet the same clear-eyed, chivalrous horse-tamers; the Persian ‘companion’ of the King of Kings.¹⁶

This was echoed some five years later by Henry Breasted in Ancient Times. ‘The history of the ancient world’, according to the author

was largely made up of the struggle between [the] southern Semitic line, which issued from the southern grasslands, and the northern Indo-European line […] two great races facing each other across the Mediterranean like two vast armies stretching from Western Asia westward to the Atlantic. The later wars between Rome and Carthage represent some of the operations of the Semitic left wing, while the triumph of Persia over Chaldea is a similar outcome on the Semitic right wing.¹⁷

In dealing exclusively with the attributes of an Achaemenid monarch, one of Myres’ former students, Gordon Childe, invites the readers of The Aryans (1926) ‘to compare the dignified narrative carved by the Aryan Darius on the rock of Behistun with the bombastic and blatant self-glorification of the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal or Nebuchadnezzar’.¹⁸

But why did such a phenomenon manifest itself in this period, and cease to do so thereafter? The response to the first part of this question can easily be ascertained from the above examples: the growth of comparative philology – and therefore Indo-European philology and mythology – within the very broad and inclusive context of anthropology permitted the opening up of new academic horizons for those interested in new ways of analysing the ancient world. Why this kind of Persian-positive pan-Aryanism dominated the discourse only briefly and does so no longer is a harder question to answer. But, putting it as concisely as possible, the tragic consequences of World War II had rendered unpalatable the kind of framework that classifies the world into certain type of groups and/or cultures. It appears that when it came to the questions of ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ (which, in modern parlance, have become erroneously and unhelpfully synonymous), the contemporary intellectual or academic is determined to sidestep the moral complexities that had bedevilled many of his or her pre-war predecessors. One of the ironies of this new and universal mindset has been the swift jettisoning of the Indo-European framework that had depicted the Iranian world more benignly. Two crucial caveats should be appended here: first, this more ‘benign’ framework was constructed mostly within the contours of the highly dubious foundation of ‘Aryanism’ and the accompanying pseudoscientific discourse of the day. Second, and as a result of this, its benignity was an unintended by-product of classifying, as a matter of conceptual necessity, the ancient Persians along with most of the modern Europeans as belonging to one specific Ur-culture. Nevertheless, the analytical probing of this framework should not be considered, in my tentative judgement, as a morally repugnant act. After all, the reason for carrying it out is to discover and rehabilitate only those aspects which can be shown to be useful and enlightening. Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that it is not being suggested here that this intellectual sprucing-up should be carried out in a cavalier fashion and without due reference to strict ethical codes and intellectual guidelines. This, to be sure, is a treacherous area: I am perfectly aware that some, come what may, would consider many aspects of Indo-European studies (apart from pure linguistics) as nothing but a tawdry exercise in resurrecting the ‘Aryan myth’ and indulging in ‘neo-racist’ fantasies – and, some of the time, rightly so. As a consequence, I am determined – doggedly determined – to approach this subject with a great deal of sober deliberation.

The present-day Galton Institute at the University College London, which was known as the Eugenic Society until 1989, has committed itself to ‘environmental and genetic studies’ and is no longer interested in the ‘out-dated views of the eugenic movement’.¹⁹ In the ‘Introduction’ to Twelve Galton Lectures: A Centenary Selection with Commentaries (2007), one of the editors states that ‘it is readily evident how great was the change and how alien some of the attitudes prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s appear in the twenty-first century – indeed, they had no place in the Society and Institute of the second half of the twentieth century’.²⁰ Moreover, the author finds the contrast between the pre-1945 lectures with the more recent ones striking: ‘One can see how from the 1960s onwards the Society became focused on advances in the life sciences, particularly reproductive health and technology, and on contemporary concerns about population, the environment and genetic disease.’²¹ This intellectual and institutional transformation is indeed a far cry from the kinds of research that had preoccupied the minds of Francis Galton and his contemporaries.²² It is my contention that the way in which modern genetics has successfully negotiated its way out of its less than flattering eugenic past can provide this discourse with the necessary ethical framework in its dealing with the relevant aspects of Indo-European studies.

I – Methodology, Contexts and Terminology

In 1869, only a few short years after the publication of George Grote’s History of Greece in 12 massive and comprehensive volumes, George Rawlinson could only gather together four ‘modern’ titles that had any direct relevance to the Iranian world, one of which, a 1590 publication, was a borderline incunabulum. It is precisely because of the existence of such a bibliographical dearth that a book such as this can justifiably be described as an intellectual corrective. But what are its main research aims? First, the primary theme of the entirety of this work is the analysis of the paradoxical and confused way in which the classicists of the period (1860s–1930s) discussed the Graeco-Persian world within the constraints of comparative philology. Second, since the resultant ‘cognitive dissonance’ or ‘doublethink’ (Persia being both ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Aryan’ simultaneously) was itself underpinned by a number of spatial (Europe v. Asia) and political (democracy v. despotism) dichotomies, detailed and systematic discussions of those dichotomies, within our stipulated parameters, can scarcely be avoided. And finally, with these interconnected aims being largely ensconced within a number of intellectual and academic settings – such as Hellenism/s, prehistory, questions relating to race and culture, anthropology, linguistics and Romanticism – it is essential to scrutinize these settings as thoroughly as possible.

My methodology, broadly speaking, consists of three interrelated components. First, the nature of this work demands close inspections of a large and varied body of documents. Consequently, detailed textual, and at times, semantic deconstruction defines much of the analytical aspects of this work. This approach, however, is complex and multi-layered – and it needs to be. There are, after all, many different types of texts or terms, each requiring their own bespoke exegesis. As far as the second component is concerned, it is necessary to reconstruct a number of specific historical, intellectual and institution-building trends of the period. The analytical reconstructions of how the fields of anthropology, philology, prehistoric archaeology, as well as Romanticism and Hellenism developed and evolved are needed, because it helps to contextualize the first component of my methodology, namely, the deconstruction of texts and terms. The final component is included as a contingency, but has come into play in a very substantial way. At the outset of this research, it was not clear that the tools of philosophical enquiry were a requirement for what I had in mind. As my thoughts matured, however, I realized that at certain points of this discourse, the application of philosophical analysis would become an unavoidable necessity. And as a consequence, I familiarized myself with a variety of relevant schools of philosophical thoughts, such as history, science, and aesthetics.

There are two contexts within which the overwhelming body of this work dwells. First and most importantly, there is the narrow or the explicit context. The manner in which comparative philology in general, and Indo-European philology in particular, had impacted and, arguably, manipulated questions relating to ‘race’, ‘culture’, ancient history, and prehistory during the 80 years from the 1850s to 1930s (concentrating on the last four decades of this period) defines this narrow context. This context is also where the core of this thesis lies. The broad or the implicit context, in contrast, exists in the margins of this discourse. It is to be found in the preface, endnotes and in the introductory passage of this chapter. Although this broad context deals with the same issues as the narrow one, it does so outside the boundaries of the narrowly defined period under investigation. In other words, it positions the detailed analysis of the first 40 or so years of the twentieth century within a context that includes, inter alia, contemporary classics, new Achaemenid historiography and populist works, such as journalism, fiction and cinema. It is my belief that in order to assess how this particular intellectual enquiry can best be furthered, it is necessary to acquaint oneself with the present state of the relevant debates in a critical manner – be they in the academic environment or beyond.

What do we mean when we speak of ‘Iran’ or of ‘Persia’? The peculiar way in which these two terms and their cognates have been used requires clarification. In everyday discourse, these two terms are often used synonymously. Among the post-1979 émigrés, however, it has become customary to use ‘Persia’ and its cognates to denote a ‘better’ place, a grander, a less confrontational and a more sophisticated set of cultural co-ordinates than those being offered by the hierocratic diktat of the Islamic Republic. Until quite recently, I followed a very simple formula: ‘Persia’ for the pre-Islamic period;...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Detecation
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Setting the Scene: Anthropology, Linguistics and Romantic Hellenism in Victorian Britain
• 3. The ‘Race–Culture’ Debate: 1900s–1930s
• 4. The ‘Diffusionism vs. Evolutionism’ Theoretical Debate, Gordon Childe and the Prehistory of Europe
• 5. Hellenisms Reassessed (1890s–1940s): Part I
• 6. Hellenisms Reassessed (1890s–1940s): Part II
• 7. Hellenisms and the Historiography of Ancient Persia
• 8. Concluding Remarks
• Postscript
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover