This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning
Hey, everybody, welcome to unsupervised learning. Today I am going to be talking with Michael Bonner, about Iran, Persia. And he is the author of two books. First the Last Empire of Iran, which we're going to be talking about a fair amount, and then a new book that will be coming out with a quite provocative title. And when I asked him about that, ‘In Defense of Civilization’ which I assume is a response in ‘what's so bad about barbarism?’
Yeah, actually, it is.
All right. So let's, let's talk, let's talk about Iran first, because The Last Empire of Iran, most of the listeners here know, what Iran is, it's actually in the news constantly, the nation of Iran, the nation state of Iran, because of nuclear weapons, oh, they're giving drones to Russia, etc, etc. There's a hostage crisis for those of us that are a little older. You know, it just it doesn't end. On the other hand, this is also an ethnicity, a nation, a civilization that is quite old. There's actually not that many, arguably, there's not that many nations that are this old that are still around, you could talk about maybe the Jews, China, the Armenians, the Greeks, not that many 2500 years, maybe 3000 years, depending on you want to calculate it. But your book is about a particular -about a particular phase. And just for the listener out there, can you talk about what is the difference between the different Iranian empire, so I think most listeners will have some vague understanding of the Achaemenid Empire period under Darrius, Xerxes, and you know, the Empire that was conquered by Alexander the Great, I think they're gonna know it mostly, probably, honestly, from films like The film 300, and maybe a reference here and there, in Herodotus some of the Greek histories, then, of course, there's a Parthians, who succeeded them later, after the Seleucid interlude. So this is the Hellenistic era. This is, you know, like, let's say 2000 years ago, plus or minus 200 years. And we don't know that much about the Parthians, we actually don't know that much about the Parthians, from what I know, but also, the regular person on the street, probably doesn't know what that means. And then you have the Sassanids. Again, I think the regular person on the street does not know what that means. But if you live in Iran, or you're Iranian person, probably this particular empire, this particular culture looms really, really large, because it was the last pre Islamic, Iranian polity. You know, it was a Zoroastrian empire. And it was the great rival of Rome during late antiquity. But um, you know, most people don't know about it, how would you characterize these different dynasties to the average person on the street just to like, understand their relevance for modern history for modern Iranians? And you know, just what happened in the past as well?
That's an excellent question. So, to jump right into it, I would say that the Achaemenid state should be understood as the culmination of all the entire evolution of Near Eastern civilization, that it's sort of, you know, from from the days of Sumer, and Akkad, you have this sort of, you know, sort of constant cycle of growth and collapse and regrowth and expansion, outward. And then, after the Bronze Age, collapse, Persia inherits this Near Eastern tradition of of empire, and a great deal of the culture also, you find that the founder of this state's Cyrus is he's portraying himself as the guy who restored and you know, the the indigenous, the indigenous Gods back to their temples, he’s reconstructed, a political order that has sort of fallen into ruin. And he's inherited, essentially, the realms of, you know, everybody who's ruled over the Near East, up until that point, and by the time Egypt is added to the Achaemenid state, under Cambyses his successor, you have this Uh, you have a single body, that's - a single political order, that's a ruling over the two sort of cradles of civilization uniting the great sort of river civilizations into into one political body. And this cast such a long shadow over I think, basically all of all of human history up to the modern period that everybody has sought one way or another. I say everybody's exaggeration, but you know, it has been a sort of constant model for, for imitation. When Alexander the Great comes along, and essentially replaces the Achaemenid political order with, as you say, the the this so called Seleucid. monarchy, you still have this effort to sort of carry on the tradition of, of the Iranian and Near Eastern kingship. And, you know, Alexander and his men are marrying up with Iranian brides and so forth. The Parthian state, though, is essentially, it could be thought of as a reassertion of something akin to indigenous rule, you know, Iranian peoples ruling over the old border, all the domains of the first Iranian empire, they were of nomadic origin. And the term the term Parthian comes from the province, the several provence Parthia, where the the nomads sort of came from and with which they were closely associated. And you have this effort, then to sort of cobbled together as much of the old domains of the Iranian empire and sort of swallow up what's left of the Greco Macedonian territories, and it ends up being a significantly more decentralized and sort of loose rule than then then either the successors to Alexander or the old, Achaemenid state. And once once the Parthian state comes up against Rome, as Rome is expanding westward, and Parthia, is expanding. Well, I shouldn't say necessarily expanding but doing his best to sort of hold the territories to its east, then you have, you know, you have sort of intermittent warfare, conflict and so forth. And this weakens the Parthian state to the point where a local ruler from the province of Parsis or Persia proper, eventually overthrows the the raining house in the early third century. And he, his name is Ardakhshir, Ardashir he purports to have some sort of distant ancestor called Sasan And he establishes what is known to us now as the Sasanisn dynasty. And this is the this is the Iranian state that purports to recreate the Achaemenid monarchy in a more in a more centralized and, and, you know, bureaucratically centralized and sort of dynastically potent manner. And this is the state that the Romans are forced to acknowledge, as an equal, they're constantly going to war beating each other up, I believe this Sasanians tended to have the advantage. But no, neither state can really sort of get one over totally on the other. And they're sort of in a, you know, sort of in a pattern alternating between competition and cooperation until the until the Arab conquests in - that start in the seventh century. So that's sort of, I think I've given you a sort of summary, something more than - well, more than 1000 years of history, but that's how I would picture it.
So I want to I want to ask you, just a quick question just to highlight this highlight this. So you know, we've talked about Iranian, Iranian is inclusive of obviously, you know, Persian, but also there's languages like Pashto and Kurdish and in antiquity and up until the medieval period, there are many different Iranian languages in Central Asia that were quite distinct from Persian. So you mentioned Ardashir here, he's from the southwest, I believe it's from Fars, like you know, Persia proper right? And that is also the area from which the I think Cyrus was originally from that area, from The South, the southwest of modern day Iran is what we would call it those highland areas like ancient Elam and Anshan, I think,
Yeah, you’re right.
… Elam - Yeah. And so the Parthians are not part of that. They are from, you know, kind of modern day Turkmenistan area, maybe parts of Khorasan. What do you think about… I don’t know, What do you think the relevance is this going back to Fars which is where the Achaemenid dynasty is from, and the influence that it had on Iranian and Persian culture? Because, you know, today, people in Central Asia like Tajiks, an Iranian people, are they speak they speak Dari which is kind of related. I think it's a form of Persian really. But you know, their ancestors did not. When did this spread of Persian culture occur? Persian language? Didit? Was it starting very early on? Or did it happen after the Muslim conquest? I'm just curious if you know,
well, that's, that's a very good question. So I would say that the spread of the specifically Persian dialect is a later phenomenon. It's a post post Islamic one that is associated with the prestige of, of the Sassanian state itself, the memory of the of the Sassanian state. And part of proof of that is the - the early Sassanian Kings put up inscriptions, and they were in the, as a rule, they were in three languages, they were in middle Persian, which eventually evolved into modern day Persian, but also Parthian and Greek. And, you know, the bureaucrats that they had working for them would probably have been talking to one another, especially those in in Mesopotamia, they would have probably been talking to another in some form of Aramaic or or another. So, there's no there's no, there's no particular evidence that what evolves into new Persian is particularly accentuated or prestigious, or whatever, from from, from the early days of the, of the Sassanian state. I think that comes significantly later. But the, the significance of southwestern Iran is, is exactly as you say that that's where Cyrus is from. That's where the Achaemenid tombs were, that's where the, the monumental inscription of Darius, at the base tomb highway is, and long after, you know, long after the fall of of the Achaemenids those relics are still there. And the governor of that region was therefore I argue, you know, significantly more prestigious than any other. Any other figure within the within the Parthian state with the possible exception of the Parthian King himself, but the local, the local Governor there would have been able to command the, you know, the potent memory of that sedentary state in a way that would have mattered, I think, a great deal at a point when the, when the Parthian state is either in some kind of like dynastic feud with itself, or the sort of multiple, multiple claimants to the throne. And when, you know, when the Romans have sort of humiliated them a little bit too much, but then there's also the idea that the Parthians themselves are of nomadic origin, that they come from the steppe. And even though they are Iranians themselves, there's an argument to be made, I think, that the, the restoration of local Persian rule is a reassertion of a, you know, a, an indigenous of an indigenous political order, which I don't think, you know, I'm kind of skeptical of the idea, it's sort of older idea that the Sasanian rule represents a kind of like ethnic, or, you know, like a racial idea that like reasserting this sort of, you know, hereditary claim on on, on the patrimony of Cyrus and so forth. But, you know, there's something to be said I think for the idea of, of of local local prestige and being so closely associated with the with the with the older state at a time when the Parthian kings are not looking so good on the on the world stage.
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I guess, you know, the the main distinction here is then like you have the Sassanians who are stylized, like, kind of like, you know, they are Persian-qua-Persian . And the Parthians are kind of, they're stewards of Persian culture. But you know, they're also originally, you know, from the steppe, they're from, you know, Turan, not Iran proper. And, you know, they also interact with, you know, Greeks, Romans, you know, the Aramaic speakers, as you said, in Mesopotamia. So you have this multi ethnic empire, where maybe Persians are dominant in some ways, but you know, the, the Parthians, the Arsacid ruling dynasty is not technically ethnically Persian, right. So we have this transition. I want to, I want to situate the Sasanian Empire for the listener, though, because so it's capital Ctesiphon is in modern day Iraq. It's not that far from Babylon and Baghdad correct. It's like, same general area. Yeah. Okay, so you have this Iranian empire, that's in modern day Iraq, presumably, from what I know, Iraq is a predominantly Semitic speaking area, Aramaic speaking, which is related to Arabic. Not quite, but there's still a few Aramaic villages in Syria, I don't think in Iraq anymore. But in any case, the Assyrians, Syrian Christians, their ancestors spoke a dialect of this - it is still like the liturgical language, in may be the church of the East. So this is a predominantly Christian area by the time of Islam, mostly church to the east, some Jacobite Syrians, probably not too many Melkite Roman, you know, Eastern Orthodox Christians for political reasons. There's a fair number of Jews, we know that for a fact. And, you know, this is we're going to talk mostly about Iran and Persian here. But you know, let me know for the listener, the Babylonian Talmud is, you know, composed in the Iranian Empire, and it's the first versions that are complete, are in the sixth century in the five hundreds and they are in the Sassanidp
empire. So the influence of these Jews in Babylon, the Babylonian Jewry actually persisted for, like 1000 years. So even though we tend to think of Israel, Palestine, that area, the Levant, the Babylonian Jewry was actually the most influential, arguably the most powerful up until the, you know, centuries of Islam. So you have the situation on the west with those people. And then in the center in the highland areas, you have the Persian speakers, presumably, you have other Iranian speakers. So today in western Iran, there's political unrest, partly having to do with ethnic Kurds. It's a different Iranian language, it's a Northwest Iranian language. And I've just been reading some stuff. Actually, it seems like the genetic signatures associated with the Kurds did not really appear until about the Parthian times. So there's some arguments that they might have some connection to the Parthians. I don't know if you want to speak on that, Michael, but I don't know much about this topic. Okay. And then you go further east and north, and you have different Iranian peoples into Afghanistan, and the Parthians actually did extend or the both the Parthians actually, the Parthians, the Achaemenid and the Sassanians, also extended into India into modern day Pakistan, to various degrees. So you have this vast, vast, multi ethnic empire. My question here is, okay, so it's a Persian Empire by language, by identity. And the Parthians… - the Sassanians themselves are Zoroastrian. You know, today, we have a particular kind of idea of nations and official religions and clash of civilizations and all this stuff. So my question to you and you know, this is a list of questions I want to ask is, how Zoroastrian are the are the Sassanids? I think, Philip Jenkins, a historian of Christianity, like he's made the argument that in his book about Eastern Christianity, that the Sassanids themselves might have eventually converted to, you know, what we in the West called Nestorian. Christianity, the church in the East has a different term for them. But in any case, the Persian form of Christianity, what do you what do you say to all that?
Well, that's, I mean, I'll take it in reverse order. First of all, I agree with that hypothesis, or at least I think that that idea is highly plausible because first of all, the the the Babylonian Jewry in exile, they were represented to the government of the day by the exilarch. The I think the term is like Reish Galuta I can't remember in Hebrew. In any case, that rule of exilarch I think provided a model for later Christian communities to and bishops and so forth to to relate to the to the Iranian state and that you can see in the sources that have come down to us that there is as as the life of the dynasty moves on what began with a kind of uncomfortable, awkward relationship that occasionally sort of resulted in prosecution eventually, there's this kind of settlement, couple of attempts at a settlement. But then finally, that, you know, there's there's one in about the, toward the end of the fifth century that that sort of works. And you've gradually find that high officials within the the court are now Christian. And not maybe not exclusively, but they're conspicuously Christian. And the, the high ranking Armenian nobles who are connected with the society in court are notably, you know, very, very visibly. Christian also. So there's not just toleration, but there's also a clearly growth in, in, in the community, and they have, you know, the, the growth of Christianity has clearly not been an impediment to to high, high service. And in the reign of in sort of late sixth century, early seventh reign of Khosrow II, you find that these stories from the ancient lore of Iran sort of stuff that crops up in the Shahnameh and so forth, that is being sort of integrated into biblical biblical history and Christian, Christian legends. So for example, you find that certain of the ancient Iranian heroes are construed to have been, you know, certain biblical heroes, sorry, biblical, biblical figures like patriarchs and kings, and so forth. So, for example, the there's an anecdote about the tomb of, I think it's, I'm not gonna remember his name, but it's a tomb of one of the Iranian heroes, who is also believed to be the also believed to contain the body of David, for example, if I’m not - I’m sorry, Daniel, is Daniel who was an exile also, and the two figures are sort of United so that, you know, the the, the idea that a devote a devout Christian or, or, you know, a practicing Zoroastrian that they can both be loyal to, you know, a single political order without having to compromise. Having having to compromise their principles in any way. So, the argument, the the the argument that Iran is becoming increasingly Christian, and that Christians are, you know, increasingly influential at court. You know, it's, it's one of the reasons why people have why some have argued that Islam is then able to take hold, you know, as it did in, in, in later history. But of course, the other question you asked, how Zoroastrian were they? Well, the reason why that's an important question is that, you know, the way we tend to think of now, like modern people think of religion as like a set of beliefs. It's not It's honest, those Zoroastrianism didn't require you to believe certain things, but it's, it was less about belief, as I understand it, and more about practice, which is, which is what was at the root of the state's efforts to persecute non Zoroastrians, it was not that they were trying to make them believe anything in particular, they were trying to make them act in a particular way by offering sacrifices by you know, participating in sort of public you know, public rituals for the, you know, for the health of the king or for the you know, for the various various divine figures associated with the sun and the moon or what have you. And obviously, Christians were not and Jews for that matter, we're not interested in doing that, which resulted in you know, a great deal of tension at certain points in, in sustaining history. But, the state had to find other ways to integrate these, these, these minorities, if you will, into you into the state because there were simply too many of them. But what's interesting, I think about Zoroastrian ism at this particular time in history is that, as you say, as Judaism is being codified in the form of the Talmud. And meanwhile, in Rome, you have these church councils that are not in the city of Rome, but in the Roman Empire, you have these church councils that are trying to determine, you know, exactly what Christian doctrine is supposed to be. You don't have that in Zoroastrianism, there's no attempt to sort of hammer out exactly what Orthodoxy is, it's, it is entirely entirely about practice, and about, you know, sacrifices and public, you know, public public worship and that sort of thing. And, and yet, there was also a effort, you know, roundabout, because remember, at random at the same time, you also have the codification of Roman law, under Justinian, which I think is part of the same kind of same kind of trend. Zoroastrian- there's also an attempt, I think we have some evidence of it that, you know, Sassanian law codes are also being kind of hammered out. And so but but it's not a question of, of belief, or like doctrine, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, just to clarify and extend what you're saying, you know, I think we need to make a distinction between orthopraxic religions and orthodox religions. And to some extent, all religions are a mix of the two. But there's, there's different points along it. So for example, in Islam, you have Sharia law and Orthodox Judaism, traditionally, you have Halacha law, Christianity doesn't really have that legalistic aspect to private life, there's canon law, there's church law, and then there's certain things that are, you know, banned in Christian thought practice, but, you know, there is no Christian law, it's quite ad hoc Christianity is more focused on, you know, these belief aspects, these, you know, but there's liturgy. And so, you know, you have, you know, Christian sects, Christian denominations that emphasize more of the ritual and the sacrament. And then, of course, here in the United States, you know, I'm recording here in the United States, we have basically a normative form of an understanding of a religion of religion. That's pretty much radical Protestantism, where people make choices quite often as adults, about 50% of Americans switch their religion. This is just understood, that you choose and you confess your belief in the whatever doctrine you want to whether it's Christian, non Christian, I mean, it's just always like that, or it has been like that for decades in the United States. And I think sometimes Americans misunderstand that. Not only with past civilizations and past cultures, but with other cultures, right.
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the, the persecution element, I think, is very critical here, because it's only persecution or from the perspective of the Christian communities who highlight this, from the Sassanian perspective, what they're doing is trying to enforce loyalty to the state and that like that would obviously not in any way, downplay, like, whatever sort of horrible things they did. But they, you know, they would not have been thinking of trying to enforce either conformity with a particular belief system or trying necessarily to, you know, like, you know, harm or like harm or destroy a big part of their tax base. A lot of a lot of, you know, all these people are living in what is by far the richest, like most fertile land that they have in Mesopotamia. The last thing that we want to do is sort of wipe them out. But of course, that is what some of the more exaggerated. Martyrology is, and so forth, claim about this sort of thing. And, of course, we can't also, you know, we should also remember that, when it's when the Roman Empire was sort of starts to begin to turn Christian, that a lot of this stuff heats up. So, you know, until until you have, you know, until the conversion of Constantine and his successors, you know, this wouldn't particularly mattered that there were Christians living in Iran or in Armenia, for that matter, because I mean, yet the Armenian, Armenian monarchy and many of the noble houses converted before Constantine did, but once the once the Roman state starts endorsing Christian doctrine, then the sustaining state has a problem with that, because you know, it'd be easy to, you know, it'd be easy to form the impression that these Christians or something like a fifth column, in, in, in a predominantly Zoroastrian state. So one of the reactions to that is persecution. The other is that in the fifth century, the king, Yazdgard the first summons his own church council, just like Constantine. And he creates, or he sets in motion, the, the creation of an indigenous Iranian church that was, you know, ostensibly independent from the, from the Roman one, and it's the - this is the body, as you say, that eventually comes to be known as Nestoria. They wouldn't, you know, they admire Nestorius, they wouldn't, they wouldn't have called themselves that, but it's, you know, that's when you start to get, you know, a distinction of doctrine. And the, two sort of the, you know, the, the Iranian Church and the Roman church are sort of beginning to go their their separate ways. And just add one more point to this, which I think is noteworthy, the, you know, at the, if you have these two monarchs, one of whom happens to be as well a Zoroastrian but both of whom are claiming to have like their own sort of their own sort of domestic church underneath them, that opens the door to the question as to sort of like who is the actual, you know, legitimate Christian monarch. And I believe that the Sassanian kings were the, you know, they were perfectly willing to claim that it was themselves and that the Roman, the Roman emperor, might have not been a legitimate Christian leader, or at least a legitimate protector of Christians in the same way that the that the Sassanian Monarch was. And one of the manifestations of this is that you have evidence that later Sassanian kings are patronizing the Christian religion, they're making offerings at important local shrines, and they're taking Christian wives also. And the rumors begin to develop, some of which come down to us in in later Chronicles, the rumors start to develop that the Persian kings themselves have secretly become Christian.
Yeah, I mean, I think that some of the listeners of Iranian background will know the story of Khusro the second and Shirin Christian wife, so I mean, this is not a it's not a uncommon phenomenon in antiquity. So I guess, like, you know, you know, we've been talking about religion a fair amount, but really, you know, there's the Sassanians were a whole culture. I do wonder about what we know about them. A lot of it is obviously through Islamic sources, Islamic period sources. And, of course, the Shahnameh, the Persian national epic, you know, they had a library, I think it was at Nisibis. If I'm, if I'm correct, or maybe somewhere else up, so they had libraries that they funded. Do we not know as much as we would about the Sassanians partly just because those institutions were not preserved? Or the texts were not copied? I just want to get some clarity on that. Because seems like there's very few literary sources on this period.
Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. This is one of the most vexing problems in all of late antique historiography. Specifically, it just this this empire coming at the end of 1000s, of years of near of the Near Eastern literacy and bureaucratic tradition, they could not possibly have failed to, to keep records. They certainly did. And they and they had a highly competent bureaucracy, one that the, you know, one that was so good at its job that that the Arabs when they conquered it, they simply took it over. And that became in time, you know, the Abbasid bureaucracy. Part of the problem though, is that, you know, it's just been simply so long ago that, you know, a book or a piece of parchment or whatever, just or Papyrus, in the case of Egypt, you know, like they just, it's just too long for a lot of it to have survived, but also the buildings themselves where these things would have been stored record houses or libraries. You know, they would not have been made of stone, they would have been made of mud bricks, so they wouldn't have, they wouldn't have lasted particularly long. And the, you know, things like monumental inscriptions which we do have, we just don't have enough of them. So there's really nothing in the way of any, you know, anything like a Sassanian archive or, you know, bureaucratic document or anything, we don't have anything of that sort at all. Well, we do have our, the Greco Roman writers like Procopius, or any Ennius Mosulinus classicizing historians who were, you know, they were interested in the doings of the, the Emperor's and Roman army and so forth. And they don't make much of an effort to to tell us about like, Iranian politics or sociology or anything like that. It's all about warfare. The they pay a great deal of attention to Persia, whenever there's a there's a big war or an invasion or something like that, which obviously, you know, that that will tell us a good deal from certainly from the Roman perspective as to what they thought was going on. But, you know, it's, it's obviously biased fighting and tends to be hostile, then you have sort of fragments of later stories who who seem to have been closer to, you know, Iranian affairs. But as I say, the only surviving fragments, things like the History of Menander the Guardsman or Priscus, for instance. So, you have that stuff, then you have two and only two possible correctives. To this for any sense of like, an indigenous Iranian perspective. You have Syriac church Chronicles, Syriac, being a dialect of Aramaic, and again, written, as far as we know, entirely by churchmen. And often these are very good. These These, these are extremely useful also for things like the rise of the rise of Islam. You know, like the earliest mention of the name Mohamed is in one of these Chronicles. And again, they're written by Iranian or Mesopotamian Christians who have some window or other into the life of the courts and high politics, but they're still not you know, they're it's not coming from the Royal circle itself, it's still outside. Then you have Armenian historians also tend to be clergyman, they are even closer to the to the court circle, and they pay, you know, they pay close attention to Iranian politics, and to, you know, what the king and his advisors are doing, but only when it pertains, or impinges directly on Armenia. So that, you know, again, that introduces a kind of bias. There are though Arabic Chronicles, that's the second potential corrective, and these are very late, they come long after the fall of the Sassanian state, they're in Arabic. But they purport to recycle some kind of indigenous historiography or Chronicle, so called Book of Kings tradition, and, you know, exactly what that was, is still kind of mysterious. And there's even some question as to whether it was actually a real thing or like a unitary genre, or whether there were sort of multiple King books, you know, the word Shahnameh, King book, you know, where did this idea come from, you know, who's writing it down? Who requested it, you know, who is the audience, none of this stuff can really be known. It's all highly influential, but in my own approach to to Iranian history, when I find a congruence between this later Arabic tradition and a Greco Roman source, you know, I'm pretty sure that that's the truth. There are others you know, there are other sources that contribute a little bit here and there. There's some Chinese sources that can be useful for the history of the steppe and Inner Asia and that kind of thing. But piecing all this stuff together is is a bit of a struggle, that we don't have the sort of thing. You know, there's no, there's no Iranian Procopius, there's no Iranian Thucydides or Herodotus or anything like that, right? So it's, it's really quite challenging to to get this all to make sense. And to try to tell the story from the Iranian perspective, even with the corrective of things, like, their own inscriptions. And their coins and what have you. And of course, there's, there's very little archaeology that that has has been has been done. I wouldn't say that, like, you know, it's far from none, but it's nothing like the the classical world or even like the old the old Soviet archaeological expeditions into Inner Asia. like there's there's very little of that for, Iran
Is that just is that due to politics, geopolitics with the Iranian Revolutionary regimes isolation?
I think so. But it's also that, like, people are just still living there. You know, it's like the, if you are going, people still live on a lot of these sites. So it's not like you're in a home or whatever, but, but also in Mesopotamia, if you were, if you were looking for, you know, like an old building or whatever, like, you wouldn't really find maybe some archaeologists is going to like correct me. But look, it's everything's made of mud brick, right. So you're not going to really - not going to find anything, particularly like earth shattering or exciting. It's not like, you know, it's not like uncovering some, like, beautiful mosaic in Turkey or something, it's not gonna be like that, just less far less glamorous.
Okay, I mean, so basically, what you're saying is, you know, this is my understanding that this, the Sassanian history, to a great extent, is the view from the outside. And so you need to take as many multiple views from the outside as possible to try to establish what's going on. And obviously, you know, we don't have a Thucydides you know, we don't have the Roman historian, Livy, Tacitus, this sort of thing. We don't have their equivalent for the Persians. I mean, probably there were some analysts, you know, for whatever reason, you know, you pointed some possible reasons, I mean, their annals were not preserved. But, um, you know, - the person state was a big deal, let's say, let's say, 600 ad, like, let's, let's, let's jump to the exciting, you know, the World War of late antiquity. Can you tell us what happened and tell us why that's important for the listener? I think some of them will have some vague idea of this. But I mean, the details are just really incredible.
Yeah, for sure. So the, the war that you're referring to, is the near total conquest and extinction of the Roman Empire by Persia, and Persia has spent centuries up until that point, fortifying its eastern frontier with the steppe. And it has finally assured itself that the nomadic world is calm, that they're not going to, you know, face any kind of trouble in their rear. And right at this point, a kind of struggle for power, a civil war breaks out in in Rome. And this is the moment at which the Persian king decides that he can, he can take a side, in this contest, avenge the last king, who had done him favors in the past by defending his throne when he was a boy and basically snuff out the Roman Empire. Now, this conquest, invasion, it was hard going at first because of the Roman system of fortification in the East. And I think that the original plan, I think, I think that the Iranian plan evolved, as they went on in the early seventh century, I think that the idea was to to place the late - the son of the late King, sorry, the son of the late Roman emperor, on the Roman throne to kick out the Usurper and have sort of a client King. That was the original plan. At some point, the decision was made not to do that probably in around, you know, 615 or so because things were looking up. The Roman state was far too preoccupied to put up much of a fight. And the resources were there to take an old territory. So the the Iranian forces dissenced with the idea of putting a client King in there - a client emperor and pushed on as far eventually as far as Egypt and right to the, to the right to the Anatolian side of Constantinople. In the midst of all this, one of the most how shall I put it, one of one of like, one of the most pivotal events in Christian and Roman history took place, which was the Persian conquest of Jerusalem. And this happened by accident. There was, you know, good effort made to sort of keep the local population happy and avoid provoking an uprising or avoid irritating the locals. But then some trouble arose between Christians and Jews. There was a effectively a pogrom, and the Iranian general station nearby, was asked to intervene. And the result was just a horrific massacre, the way the sources described it. And the array, the ensuing Iranian occupation was pretty brutal at first, because they had they had sacked the city. They had plundered the the monasteries, supposedly, and carried off the relic of the True Cross out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And sent it off back to Ctesiphon as a gift for the for شیرین - for the, - for the Persian kings wife. And this was construe this was such an outrage, as far as Roman public opinion was concerned. That, you know, it was it provoked a lot of sort of soul searching and everybody, you know, thought that the end of the world was coming. And this was just an absolute disaster, total humiliation. And I believe, and I argue, in my book that this is the impetus for Muhammad's Surah Ar-Rahman the Roman surah. In the Quran, he talks about Rome's recent humiliation, I can't think of what else it could possibly be referring to the timing fits perfectly. And, you know, I think he must be thinking of something more than just simply, you know, a reverse in battle. I think that this is the sort of calamity he he he had in mind. So, this eventually provokes, you know, the efforts to sort of fight back even as the Persian armies are advancing into Egypt, and they're ruling it they're holding it. From North Africa comes a revolt, the the the future emperor Heraclius comes in. oust the usurping emperor, his name was Phokas and begins plans to basically kick - kick the Persians out. There's a very memorable siege of of Constantinople where the Persians are bringing the nomadic Avars into to assault the city from the land. The Persians have blockaded the Bosphorus and, you know, they're, they've got their Slavic allies with their canoes in the Golden Horn and the whole, you know, the whole city of Constantinople is trembling with these hordes around it, and the walls hold they survive. And of course the Avars have brought these these impressive like Chinese made with Chinese style trebuchet like lever artillery ans so forth - and the defense's hold. Heraclius then goes off he forms an alliance with the Nomadic Turks, the Western Turks, they launch a massive invasion down through the Caucasus, they sack Tbilisi and then push down into Mesopotamia, right to the borders of, or right to the sort of outskirts of Ctesiphon There's a there's a little skirmish somewhere around Nineveh, the ruins of Nineveh, and by this point, the Persian nobles, they say they've had enough of this, the king has King Khosrow II has pushed this too far. They asked him, put his son on the throne, he sues for peace. All the territory is ceded back. And that's, you know, it's sort of extreme downhill after that.
Yeah. And you know, what's downhill is like, you know, within a generation, I mean, actually less than a generation, within a decade, you're starting to see the expansion of Muslims of Arabs, let's call them Arabs, because I don't want to get into argument whether they were Muslims yet. Right. But Arabs are expanding, they take Syria, they take Iraq, they start, you know, so I think in your in your book, the was it ´the last empire of Iran’ Yeah, that one. I want to talk about your second one soon. Or your other one soon. You suggest, and other people suggested this, the reason that the Sassanids fell, whereas the Romans who later became the Byzantines maintained, some semblance of, they were able to resist and reconstitute themselves all be it as a it as a rump Roman Empire, losing Egypt and Syria. But maintaining Anatolia is because Ctesiphon was captured by the Arabs, whereas Constantinople was not captured by the Arab despite two major sieges, I think it was 680s. Or like, and then also in 720, under Leo the Isaurian, Leo the third. So, you know, the difference here is location - Ctesiphon is exposed on the margin, close to where the Arabs, you know, are in terms of strategic depth, whereas Constantinople, you need to either go through, you know, the middle of Anatolia, or more likely provision through the Aegean and through the sea. would you what would you say to that?
Well, I mean, yeah, that that is effectively my view. Like, I would just, I mean, one of the weaknesses of this view that I have to admit, is that the Romans themselves had captured or at least sacked Ctesiphon more than once in the past, they had done that, but they were never able to hold it, or they didn't want to hold it, for whatever reason, they just didn't they always left and one of so like, that is a potential weakness for that for that theory. But the Romans may simply have not, you know, wanted to, you know, they may have simply not - you know, thought it wasn't worth it. Right. And of course, you also have this. What, like this, this idea that I believe the Iranian strategy was habitually, to allow Roman forces to get as close to the capitol as they could, and then have them surrounded and cut off. And this is what ended up happening to the Emperor of Julian. It may have been that the Iranian state tried to do the same thing with the Arabs. And that, you know, that would explain why they were able to get as far as they did virtually unopposed. And you know, in the event, it just didn't work. The the capital ended up getting surrounded, and the king Yazdgird the third, you know, made a run for it. And, you know, who knows, maybe if he hadn't, you know, might have been different, but in, in the end, whatever defensive tactic they tried, didn't work, and the occupation was permanent. And that was, it, there was no, you know, attempts were made to fight back or to retake you know, retake the Capitol, but it never, it never really, really worked.
So, you know, I want to you know, we've been talking mostly about the last Empire of Iran you know, the book, you know, that you got on my radar for Michael. You have a book coming up called in defense of civilization, which - I mean, the title makes us seem very different, so the last empire of Iran just for the listeners, you know, it's kind of a narrative history, diplomatic military history, it is about mostly the Sassanids although there's a little bit before and a little commentary about what's after. So I mean, this is an academic, I don't wanna say monograph but it's an academic book ‘in defense of civilization’ that title I mean, is this an academic book? That seems a much broader purview
No, it's not academic. I mean, it's I use like, academic, you know, texts and references. But it's, and it's not meant to be like that. you know, what I would, what I would say, to sort of set the stage for this book is that I think we've all been through, you know, since I don't know, but 2015. Up until now, I think we've been through a lot of what could safely be called decline in many parts of the world, like, outright upheaval, and that, you know, growing up, growing up as I did in the 90s, like, this is just not what people thought about, you talked about decline, or, you know, deterioration, or that the future would just not be as good as the present, I people, people scoff at that idea, at least I've found, and I think, I think now we're getting used, you know, more and more used to the idea that, like we're going to have, we're going to have a harder time, a great deal of the world is not going to, it's not going to turn out as well as the present, or in some cases, as the past. And I wanted to sort of, you know, put my thoughts down on on this subject. And that, you know, civilization can be contrasted with, as we said earlier with barbarism, it can be contrasted with, you know, just sort of like, this sort of, like collapse of empires, like the, the collapse of the Roman state or of the Sassanian one. And that, you know, we, you know, I wanted to think about that within our own, within our own context, try to determine what some of the sort of, you know, looming problems are, and, you know, not so much necessarily to try to solve them. But to just show that this kind of thing has happened before, and that what we call civilization has always been preferable to anarchy, barbarism, dissolution of political order. And that we've always managed to sort of claw our way back. And if we have to, we can do so again. Additionally, you know, I'm very skeptical of like, these like systems of thought that, like, tell you how history works, like, like Spengler or Marx or whatever- But I wanted to point out that, in the past, these revivals, of what we call civilization have usually come about because of imitating past examples, I talked earlier about the Achaemenid state being the combination of, you know, the long tradition of Near Eastern civilization and monarchy. And that is a pattern almost everywhere. It's only I think, are particularly I think, in the West, where we think of the importance of something like, you know, vacation or, you know, starting over, you know, revolutionary change where that idea seems, you know, weird, I guess, but as a rule, I will say that these revivals have always come about because of imitating past examples and continuity. So a good example, apart from the Achaemenid state would be, you know, an obvious one would be Charlemagne and Alcuin, trying to codify the, the texts of the Latin authors that had come down to them trying to, you know, trying to recreate something of the authority and, and dignity of the Roman state under Charlemagne, you know, that was not ultimately successful, but it -it set a standard that was not really ever abandoned. And then it culminates in what we call, you know, the Renaissance where the, you know, ransacking monasteries and so forth for texts and searching out the deep meanings of you know, Cicero's words and trying to You know, write exactly the way Livy did and stuff like that, that becomes, you know, fodder for, you know, an extraordinary revival and flourish of, of art and, and literature and it's the the age of exploration and so on and so on. So, there's that. And then another component to the book is I look at you know, I want to sort of debunk a lot of the so called like trad ideas, I don't think that you know, art, I don't think that modern art is bad, because it's ugly, I want to get into you know, why why at one point, you know, a tradition of art that you know, flourished for so long in the West became abandoned in favor of, you know, greater abstraction or you know, less less interested in realism or depictions and I look at things like the, you know, say the influence of physics on art that the or the, the, the theories of, you know, Niels Bohr and the, the Bohr Rutherford model of, of the of the atom was an extraordinarily influential on early 20th century artists, and they were trying to depict what they thought of as, like, a random and chaotic world and, you know, simply simply commanding people to draw like a renaissance artist is not going to work if you don't view the world as a, as an orderly and coherent whole, for instance, so basically, where we went wrong in the past? Where we went, right. What kind of, you know, difficulties we may face in the future, and some examples we can look at in the past to sort of point the way to keeping civilization alive.
All right. I mean, that's a that's a good goal. You know, keeping civilization alive. I think everyone can agree with the goal. So definitely, people should check out the book when it comes out. In defense of civilization, when is that what does that coming out? What's What's the available?
It should be available for preorder any minute now. And we'll be in we'll be out early next year.
All right. So in defense of civilization, by Michael Bonner, Dr. Michael Bonner, actually, the last empire of Iran, which is what we were talking about, you know, I really appreciate you coming on to discuss this topic. I think it's important you know, both the civilization part and the Iran part and I think more people should know about it and you know, I hope people enjoy this conversation. And you have a good day Michael
It’s an honor to be here and thanks for inviting me.
Is this podcast for kids? This is my favorit podcast.
