This page contains an early draft of the actual text of chapter 2 of my book. This draft was written with the intention of maximising the usefulness of the footnotes and "Main Guide", so it includes a fair amount that's not all that relevant to my book; the version that will actually be published (I hope) is much shorter and better worded. That said, while this draft was meant to make "Half of Asia, for a Thousand Years" more useful, it's on the Web mainly to make the footnotes more readable. So unless your specific concern is with belles lettres you probably shouldn't start by reading from the top of this document; please see the start page for guidance.
The number for each footnote links to that footnote in the footnotes document. In that document, each footnote number links back to the appropriate place in this document, so if your browser's back button doesn't hold your place as you read, try using those links instead.
They loaded him with iron and bound him. They cast him into prison for twenty-six days. But he set his affairs in order, prayed and comforted his flock (2). And then just as a king takes off his armour to wear glittering clothes, the Messenger of Light shed the warlike garment of his body, and entered the Ship of Light, receiving the divine garment (3)...
Eh? What's that? You don't believe in the Messenger of Light any more? Well, OK, I can change with the times; maybe this is more familiar:
Corbicius—who called himself Maniac—they imprisoned, loaded with a mass of chains. While in prison he busied himself lying about the Christian scriptures and yelling at his craven followers; but once sentenced to death, he bribed his guards and fled to a castle. He continued to stir up trouble round about, but finally the king apprehended him and flayed him alive (4)...
Still unfamiliar? Whatever are they teaching nowadays? Oh, it's the hatred you don't like? Fine, then. Here's my final offer:
Chained in prison, Mani could still receive visitors, and so his followers came to him for comfort and guidance (5). He himself found comfort in his mission, and in the knowledge that it would outlive him. For unlike Zoroaster, Jesus or the Buddha before him, Mani had written his own scriptures, confounding the corruption of memory (6); and his seven books (7) would live...
He was right. Mani is one of the best-preserved authors of the region and time this chapter deals with: we have literally dozens of pages he wrote, hundreds or thousands of words (8).
In principle, this chapter covers sixteen countries in Asia (one of which includes a sliver of Europe), plus parts of two more countries: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, in the Arabian peninsula, Bahrein and Kuwait near it; Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, at this time the core lands of great empires; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the Xinjiang-Uigur region of China, in the heart of Asia; Kazakhstan (where the sliver of Europe is (9)), Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, and Russia in Asia, or Siberia, in the north. By land area, this is half of Asia (10). And in principle, this chapter covers the period from 475 BC to AD 525: one thousand years.
But half of Asia, for a thousand years, was not enough to produce a single long and interesting work of fantasy that survived to be read today—even though the speakers of Iranian languages who then occupied or ruled most of this land are crucial to fantasy's history. So this chapter is really about how literature lives and how it dies, a subject Mani understood rather better than most of his contemporaries.
I have already ignored the oldest living Iranian-language book, that part of the Zoroastrian scriptures generally agreed to be Zoroaster's own poetry. Hardly any two scholars agree about when Zoroaster lived, or about how to understand the "Gathas" he left behind. But in the four translations (11) I've consulted, it's nevertheless quite clear that whatever they are, the Gathas are not stories, let alone fantasy stories. So even if any of them had been written between 475 BC and AD 525, which I doubt (12), they would have no place of their own here.
But if those who claim much greater age for the Gathas (13) are correct, these Zoroastrian scriptures actually gave the world an idea around which much fantasy has revolved to this day: the idea of dualism, of the world as a battleground between good and evil (14). There are hints of this idea in the (probably) older literature of Iraq—in the Epic of Creation for example—all those Sumerian and Akkadian stories telling how some god the writer worshipped (ergo good) defeated some terrifying monster in one blow (14a). But Zoroaster, by insisting that the great battle would instead come at the end of time and in the meantime evil would keep going and even sometimes win (15), made a different kind of plot possible—a plot with, well, two or three blows? And he converted evil unequivocally from a matter of whose side you're on to one of right and wrong. These ideas would bear considerable fruit in the West, in apocalyptic writings from Israel and hymns from Italy, and eventually fantasies from England (15a). It would also bear interesting fruit in its homeland, but the epics and encyclopædiæ that survive to tell us the Zoroastrians' stories are several chapters away; hardly any is older than the year 800 in its present form (16). The point in bringing them up now is to remind you, as you read in the intervening chapters about fantasies from Greeks and Chinese, that between and behind these fantasies lay a world lost to us, of Iranian ideas and Iranian translators.
Translators? Yes. There is no route by land from the West to India or China that doesn't pass through this region, and although there was sea trade via the Indian Ocean it seems clear that this resulted in relatively little literary contact (17). While both land and sea routes between India and China exist that avoid Xinjiang, Xinjiang was in fact the standard road in this era (18). So while Zoroastrian Iranians in Iraq were giving their own ideas about heaven and hell to the Jews and Christians, Buddhist Iranians in the east were giving India's Buddhist stories to China (18a). We have evidence also of Indian stories coming west, but only from later eras (19). Since my one-sentence history of fantasy is that the Greeks gave us the idea, but India gave us the stories, I can now explain the chapter's title. Not only is this half of Asia, for this millennium, a lost world in its own right, but because it's lost, so is the Old World in general—without the interconnections among the bigger civilisations to east, south and west, we have not an Old World but a set of half-worlds to discuss in the following chapters.
A first hint of what we're missing comes from a writer whose works don't survive, and who probably didn't write in this region anyway. In 475 BC, writing was known across the southern half of the region—from Uzbekistan or so to Yemen—if only because the Achæmenid dynasty, which ruled much of that area, used several written languages for administration (20). Yemen, Iraq and Iran did have old written traditions, but only Iraq's seems to have included written literature (21), and the surviving fantasy-like texts from cities like Babylon are mostly copies of older works I mentioned in the last chapter (22). No area in this region seems to have picked up the idea of writing down stories in the Achæmenid years (23). But the Achæmenids ruled some Greek-speakers too, on the west coast of Turkey among other places (24), and just recently the Greeks had begun to make written stories a habit (25). So it's a Greek from Turkey whose lost works give us the first hint of how the Iranian lands connected India with the West.
Ctesias of Cnidos was apparently taken prisoner by the Achæmenid army sometime around 410 BC, and eventually became a doctor to the imperial family (26). He wrote the first kiss-and-tell book (27), probably after he got home again (28), but since it was the first, and he wasn't original enough to go the whole way, he tried to pass it off as a history book instead. The resulting book included a great deal of falsehood and some truth along with the author's self-promotion (29), but although it was famously untrusted even in ancient times (30), it really wasn't fantasy by our terms today, just hype. The reason Ctesias deserves mention here is that he also wrote a much shorter book, in which he pretended to be an authority on India as well, because, at the emperor's court, he'd seen some tribute sent from Pakistan (31). And although this book, like all Ctesias's books, no longer survives, we have enough knowledge of what he said in it to know that it was probably the Greeks' first source of, um, information about manticores and unicorns (32).
And that's as close as we get to fantasy for the next six hundred years. Why?
Well, in 331 BC, the Achæmenid empire fell to Alexander the Great, who meant to rule from Babylon but died there instead. There followed twenty years of warfare over Iraq, at the end of which the Seleucid dynasty, half-Greek and half-Iranian, controlled not only Iraq but also Iran, much of Afghanistan, and parts of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. But the Seleucids didn't rule from Babylon, rather from new cities, Seleucia in Iraq and, more importantly, Antioch in Syria (33).
Political instability isn't really helpful to literature. This is only partly because books can be burned when cities are burnt, something we aren't even sure happened to any of the books of this region and time. (In contrast, we do know that books have been lost outright during modern wars (34).) It's certainly not because war is expensive and literature is too—while both these propositions are true, societies at war can still write a lot (35). But political instability can mean, among other things, that the royal court relocates, and with it the opportunities for royal support to writers, or royal preservation of their works. We don't have a lot of records of writers working in Antioch, but we have even fewer records of writers working in Seleucia, and fewer still of writers working in Seleucid Iran (36).
(One writer did try to explain Babylonian history and culture to the second Seleucid king, around 290 BC, a Babylonian priest whose Greek name was Berossos (37). What survives of this book, also lost, manages to be even more tedious than the Akkadian epics it summarised, and evidently the Greeks thought so too: for all that they distrusted Ctesias, and for all that Berossos was usually right (38), the standard Greek history of Iraq remained Ctesias's version (39)!)
The Seleucids began losing the far east of their empire around 250 BC, partly to the Arsacid dynasty which took power in Parthia, and around 140 BC the Arsacids finally pushed them out of Iraq (40). The Arsacids' new capital, Ctesiphon, lay near Seleucia, so their takeover should have been relatively harmless to Iraq's literature; it should even have helped, with a king ruling locally again. Yet the Arsacid centuries are just about the worst documented in Iraq's entire history (41). What happened? There's no being sure—these are, after all, badly documented times—but a number of explanations do offer themselves.
First, we know that the major faiths of the Arsacid empire—Zoroastrianism (42), Judaism (43), Buddhism (44)—all distrusted the written word for handing on their sacred works, preferring memorisation. Although all were in the process of succumbing to the necessity of writing, none seems to have been very eager (42), (43), (44). Since religious leaders are often the main scribes or sponsors for scribes, this can't have helped literature over all. (It was in Arsacid times that the last priests in Babylon and Uruk gave up on cuneiform, too (45), a major reason why the Arsacids are worse documented than the Seleucids.) Similarly, although we know that there were minstrels at the Arsacid courts, they don't seem to have written their songs down (46). The easiest way to lose a literature is never to write it down in the first place (47).
Second, the Arsacids were followed by two successive regimes which had no interest in remembering them. We know that the next dynasty out of Iran actively tried to erase the Arsacids from history (48), but it's more than that. Books are not permanent things, and need to be recopied every few centuries (49); and writing can be even less permanent, like the leather the Arsacids' official language, Aramaic, may have been written on (50), or the modern acidic-paper paperback. So even passive neglect tends to destroy literatures. And across this entire half of Asia, the dominant religion of modern times was not present by AD 525, be it Islam, the Christianity we call Orthodox, or Tibetan Buddhism (51). The new religions brought new literary interests, to the detriment of the old (52).
Third, the Arsacids themselves were of nomadic ancestry (53), many of their nobles had ties to nomadic tribes (54), and writing thrives much better in agricultural settlements. We have no ancient writing from hunter-gatherers (55). From pastoral nomads, we do have some old writings—say, AD 600 (56)—and we do have even older hints of writing (57). But stacked against the immense volume of ancient writing from settled peoples, it's clear which way of life makes for better chances of literary survival; and that way of life was not the Arsacid elites' only heritage. Furthermore, agriculture feeds more people (some of whom can then write), and this region, in Peter Christensen's words, had always been "a demographic lightweight".
This helps to explain what happened in Mani's century, then. For across this region, agriculture burgeoned in the first centuries of our era (58), and in its wake, starting in the century after Mani's birth in 216 (59) and the foundation of the new Sasanid empire in 224 (60), the flow of surviving texts increased greatly—from a dribble to a trickle.
That trickle is composed almost entirely of works affiliated with particular organised religions, whether established ones like Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Buddhism or new ones like Christianity, Manichæism and Mandaism (a more obscure gnostic sect, resident in Iraq since an uncertain date probably before AD 525) (61). There isn't a single work that I would unhesitatingly call fantasy, but there are a few worth telling you about.
Ironically, although Mani's books offered an impressively complex myth of cosmic history, there isn't much to talk about here. The Manichæans insisted on their myth's literal truth (62), and anyway it survives only in fragments, usually too short to provide connected narrative (63), so that it has had to be pieced together largely by modern scholars (64). The Manichæans also loved parables, but those that survive rarely have anything fantastic to them, and always have clearly stated morals (65). At best I can point you to a small collection of brief stories or story-fragments in Sogdian, an Iranian language of Central Asia; these stories are probably actually later than AD 525 (since most Sogdian writing is) and several have morals, but some are wonderfully told, and one haunts me with its hints at the opening of "Beauty and the Beast" (66).
Mandaism and Judaism are similarly unhelpful. Most Mandaic texts are much later, but a few probably derive from this period (67). Of these, the only real stories are a tale of a god's descent into the world of darkness, which echoes the old Akkadian myths of such descents (but here is just an introduction to a book about the ritual to cleanse oneself of evil) (68), and perhaps a few hymns about the fate of the soul, a sort of Mandaic Book of the Dead (among many hymns that have less story in them) (69).
The Jewish writings introduce the last reason I want to mention for the dearth of literature known to come from this time and region, a fabrication of modern scholarship which has no name, but I call it "gravity"—just as suns attract planets, authors attract writings. In older times, this meant mainly that people would attribute any anonymous writing (or even ones whose authors were known) to someone famous. Scholars now are more sophisticated, but still do something similar. There is no obvious way to say whether a given work, preserved for us in mediæval Middle Persian, was originally written in southwestern Iran in the first century or in Afghanistan in the fifth; we know too little about the kinds of things writers in either milieu might have mentioned. But if that work was written at the high point of Sasanid literature, the century after AD 531, then it's very likely to mention people or places that—as far as we know—belong to that century and that empire. And so we build up a picture, from both credited and anonymous sources, of what Sasanid literature looks like; after which we soon want to place other anonymous Middle Persian works into the same framework. I should emphasise that I haven't actually caught any scholars in the act of doing this with Middle Persian works, though I strongly suspect they have; but I've done it myself with a Christian work (70), and it's prominent in the study of Jewish writings of this period (71).
When Jewish works are subject to this sort of "gravity", the norm is to consider writings early (and thus, before AD 525), but also to take them as coming from Israel or Palestine if they're still accepted by Jews, Egypt otherwise, but not from, say, Turkey, Syria, or (what matters here) Iraq (72). There are, for example, two major translations of the Hebrew scriptures into Aramaic that are called "Babylonian", but are normally seen as having actually been done in Israel (73). The connection between the Babylonian Talmud and Iraq, meanwhile, is far too clear to ignore, but a large percentage of the Babylonian Talmud is rather later than AD 525 (74). So there isn't much left to talk about. What there is, is the "Visions of Ezekiel", a short mystical work on the structure of Heaven (75), and perhaps the Tanna Debe Eliyyahu, a long book of preaching full of parables and often well written (76). Both edge on the borders of things fantasy is interested in, but no more than the Mandaic or (probably) the Manichæan works are they themselves fantasy.
There is a good deal more Buddhist writing from the other end of the region, from monasteries at least in Xinjiang and perhaps also in Afghanistan and points in between. Much of this writing consists of sutras of the Mahayana (the "greater vehicle"), sutras which have been revered for over a thousand years in China (77). These are in a narrative form, mixing preaching into a frame story, and are full of references to the wondrous powers of various holy beings. But they're so full of such references that if one reads them hoping for fantasy they fall flat: it's hard to get excited about the mystical light that shines from a Buddha if one knows that in the next sutra there'll be another such mystical light, and on the next page several other (not, in this context) "extraordinary" things. And anyway, there's no reason to think they were ever understood as fantasy.
More promising are real stories. We know that a whole intriguing genre of popular fictions in Chinese were written by Buddhists, and apparently on the basis of models from Central Asia (78). So one would hope that stories by Buddhists of central Asia would also be interesting. Alas, one would be wrong. We have a book known as the Sutralamkara of Asvaghosa in its Chinese translation, but fragments of the Sanskrit original found in Xinjiang show that it is in fact the Kalpanamanditika of Kumaralata (79). And Kumaralata appears to have worked in Xinjiang himself, although he came from Pakistan (80). So this really is a central Asian book of Buddhist stories. Alas, they are all edifying vignettes, in which Buddhist monks or laymen preach to enlighten each other or confound the heretical unbelievers. They haven't anything like the miracle quotient of the sutras. It took me over a year to sort out the information I had found and locate the book in the French translation (81); I don't recommend you go to the same trouble.
The stories left in Syriac by the Christians of Iraq, most of which are stories of martyrdoms, are, on the whole, better written, although they too mostly aren't available in English (82). Many of them are full of well-turned figures of rhetoric, neatly balancing Greek models with the old Semitic parallelism, and they sometimes let the persecuting Persians have some good lines. And most of them are sorely lacking in elements anyone could see as fantastic. But there are four exceptions. The first is the story of the life and martyrdom of Miles of Susa (83). Miles goes from healing to cursing to miracle to miracle, in nine short and vivid pages showing that the idea that Elisha gave rise to centuries earlier still lived in fourth or fifth century Iraq. The sheer contrast between his story and the rest would convince me that his was something exotic, and perhaps even fantasy, were it not for the miracles ascribed to contemporaries of Miles in the second exception, the chronicle of the martyrs of Kirkuk (84), a chronicle historians seriously argue about the reliability of, quite possibly written at the same time, and nothing anybody would accuse of being a fantasy. As things are, I think it's more likely that later generations simply preserved martyrs' trial scenes more effectively than they did wonderworkers' miracle scenes, but that they believed in both.
The third exception is the Book of the Cave of Treasures (85). This is the first thing scholars mentioned to me when I said I was interested in Christian fantasies from Iraq. And indeed its author made a great deal up in retelling the sacred history; he, for example, knows the names and dates of many people the Bible omits. But his book is full of his prejudices (yes, "his"—one of those prejudices is a sharp misogyny) and particular beliefs (that, for example, musical instruments are evil); he also claims to have sources for what he makes up, which is not what fantasists say; and he has no concern to tell a good story. The Cave of Treasures is indeed pseudo-history, but in the sense used in this book, it's hardly fantasy.
Fortunately, while the last Christian item I want to mention is uncertain as to both date and intent, and is really hard to find, it's an excellent story. This is a narrative that tells of the martyrdoms of a number of people in the mid-fifth century; it's usually called the Pethion cycle (86). What distinguishes it is that the people in question are really hard to kill, because God protects them almost past the point of their own wishes. This sounds goofy, but in the part that's most fully translated, the martyrdom of Anahid, the concluding miracle has a kind of majesty that overpowers any impulse towards laughter. I have a very hard time understanding this story as either a contemporary work telling real martyrdoms—in other such works, God takes no such trouble to prolong the martyrs' agony—or a contemporary fantasy—one would think a fantasist would pick a less sensitive and sacred subject. There are hints that it is, instead, a legend of the distant past, and so too late for this chapter (87). But I do recommend that anyone who takes the trouble to seek out the tedious works I've been talking about, also take the trouble to seek this one out, and find something more worth reading.
Speaking of things that are hard to find but worth reading, there actually is some secular literature from Iraq at this time, as also from Saudi Arabia and other nearby lands, because in the half-century or so before AD 525, the oldest surviving Arabic poems were composed (88). Alas, it's the same story in their secular world as in the Syriac Christian one: while much of the work is good, hardly any is fantastic. In what I've been able to find translations of, there are only two exceptions, both by the same author, Ta'abbata Sharran (89). He may or may not have lived in this period, and he may or may not have meant them as fantasy, but in two short poems he writes about meetings with ghouls, meetings that don't go as you might expect. Check them out.
Manichæans, Mandæans, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, Arabs... But what about the Zoroastrians this chapter started with? Well, scholars disagree all over the map, but it does seem probable that their most sacred book, the Avesta, was finally written down in full, in maybe the fifth century (90). There are a number of story-like sections in the Avesta, myths or, as often, simply references to myths, that have remained prominent in Zoroastrian thought, but they're very short and they don't have much plot (91). And, again, there's little reason to think of them in relation to fantasy.
But there was a secular Middle Persian literature as well. Doesn't it have anything to offer? Well, no. I've tracked down information about pretty much every story surviving in Middle Persian, and all but one of them is explicitly dated by scholars—whether on good grounds or simply by the operation of "gravity"—no earlier than the great Sasanid century from 531 to 62891a. That one, meanwhile, is preaching disguised as a story: a wicked magician kills anyone who fails a riddle contest, so a hero comes to riddle with him, but of course what they riddle about is questions of Zoroastrian theology, ritual, and so forth (92). We know that now, as in earlier centuries, the legends of the Iranians were circulating, but we don't really have anything to read of them.
So I'll mention some ringers instead. There's a Sogdian fragment that gives just enough of the story of Rustum (as in Sohrab and Rustum) fighting some demons to make me wish we had the rest (93). Again, being Sogdian, it's probably too late for this chapter, but as a reminder of the stories that would finally burst forth from this lost world centuries later, it will serve.
Gillian Bradshaw made her reputation writing fantasies about the legends of King Arthur while still a student, and then, classics degree in hand, turned to historical novels of the ancient world. She is the best—um, perhaps the only—writer now writing in English about ancient people who aren't famous. Several of her books are set around the Mediterranean, where the ancient action after all was, but two, my favourites, deal instead with meetings between Iranian speakers and Westerners at the edges of the ancient world: Horses of Heaven (94) is about a love triangle involving Greeks and Sakas in Uzbekistan, around 140 BC, while Island of Ghosts (95) involves Sarmatians, far from home in Britain, taking sides in a Celtic revolt against the Romans, around AD 175. In both of these superb novels, there are elements that we would take as fantastic, but that the Iranian-speaking narrators would not take so. And so both symbolise the difficulties in finding fantasy in the scanty remains I've been discussing; both also give us the sorts of stories I, at least, wish had survived for us to read. But they really are both modern books, not fragments of the lost worlds.
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URL: <http://turing.postilion.org/these-survive/fishtory/chapter2/uchapter.html>.
Copyright Joe Bernstein <joe@sfbooks.com>, 2001. Electronic transfer permitted.
Written January, 2001. Webbed from essentially the same text between August 8 and 31, 2001. Please do not expect updates; see the start page for more information about why not.