A study of history, Volume 7 - Universal Churches

A STUDY OF HISTORY The Royal an Institute of International Affairs is unofficial and non-political body, founded ...

Author: Arnold Joseph Toynbee | Edward DeLos Myers | Royal Institute of International Affairs

63 downloads 1075 Views 37MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

A STUDY OF

HISTORY

The Royal an

Institute of International Affairs is

unofficial

and non-political body, founded in and facilitate the scientific

i()20 to encourage

study of international questions.

The Institute^ as sucJi, is precluded by its rules from expressing an opinion on any aspects of international affairs, opinions expressed in this

book are, therefore, purely individual.

A STUDY OF

H STORY I

BY

ARNOLD

J.

TOYNBEE

Director of Studies in the Royal Institute of International Affairs Research Professor of International History in the Universitv of JCondon (both on the Sir Daniel Stevenson Foundation)

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near. ANDREW MARVELL TTOtciv TL Set

as YOVV Âtopo^.

THEOCRITUS yrjpciarKOj 8' cuet

I

KVVLCTKO,S "Spats,

I.

70

vroAAa SiSaaxro/zevos".

SOLON

My

times are in

Thy hand.

Ps. xxxi. 15, in the

But Thou

art the same, and years shall have no end.

Ps.

cii.

Thy

27, in the

VOLUME

A.V.

A.V.

VII

Issued under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs

Royal

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON NEWYORK TORONTO 1954

Oxford University Press Amen House, London E.G. 4 ,

GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI CAPE TOWN IBADAN

Geoffrey Cumberlege, Publisher to the University

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

THE PLAN OF THE BOOK Volume I.

II.

INTRODUCTION

I

THE GENESES OF CIVILIZATIONS

.land n

.

III.

THE GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATIONS

IV.

THE BREAKDOWNS OF CIVILIZATIONS

V.

THE DISINTEGRATIONS OF

.

nr

.

iv

.

CIVILIZA-

TIONS VI. VII. VIII.

IX.

UNIVERSAL STATES

XI. XII.

vn

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

....

CONTACTS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS IN (Encounters between Contemporaries)

.

vm

CONTACTS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS IN TIME (Renaissances)

ix

LAW AND FREEDOM

ix

.....

IN HISTORY

.

THE PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN

.

CIVI-

LIZATION XIII.

vn

vm

HEROIC AGES

SPACE X.

\andvi

ix

THE INSPIRATIONS OF HISTORIANS

.

A NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS MAPS AND GAZETTEER

x x

.

....

x xi

PREFACE four volumes contain Parts VI-XIII of the thirteen parts set out in the plan of the book on p. v above, and their publication brings the book to a close. I was not able to begin writing these concluding eight parts till I had been released from work as a temporary civil servant during the Second World War. By the summer of A.D. 1946, when I found myself free to return to my normal occupations, more than seven years had passed since the publication of volumes iv-vi in the summer of A.D. 1939, forty-one days before Great Britain had gone to war with Germany, and more than seventeen years had now passed since the latest of the notes for the book, which had all been written between June 1927 and June

which are THESE

1929, had been put on paper. If these notes had not still been in existence as they were, thanks to their safe-keeping during the war in the hands of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York I might have found it beyond my power to take up my work again after a seven years' interruption

during been a break in my personal life as well as in the life of the society into which I had been born. On the other hand, I should assuredly have failed at this stage to carry the work to completion if,

which there

hacl

having set my thoughts moving again by reacquainting myself with my notes in their original form, I had not thrown them into the meltingafter

pot and recast them.

The world around me and within me had, indeed, met with a number of challenging and transforming experiences in the course of the nineteen years and more that, by the summer of A.D. 1946, had already passed since the first of the original notes for the book had been written. The focus and perspective in which the earlier millennia of the Age of the Civilizations presented themselves to the eyes of our generation had been appreciably modified in the meantime by further discoveries in the field of Archaeology. The prospects of a contemporary Western Civilization, and of an Oikoumenc which this civilization had enveloped in

its

world-encompassing

National Socialist

and

net, had become clearer and graver since the in Germany had given to Western

movement

Man

non-Western contemporaries likewise a horrifying practical demonstration of the moral depths to which the heirs of a Christian civilization were capable of dragging themselves down. A new dimension of the Spiritual Universe had been brought to light by the psychologists, and a new dimension of the Material Universe by the atomic physicists. An Einstein and a Rutherford, a Freud and a Jung, and a Marshall and a Woolley, as well as a Gandhi, a Stalin, a Hitler, a Churchill, and a Roosevelt, had been changing the face of the Macrocosm; and at the same time my inner world had been undergoing changes which, on the miniature scale of an individual life, were, for me, to his

of proportionate magnitude. The cumulative effect of these divers changes in my universe had been so far-reaching that, when in A.D. 1946 I was once more free to think of resuming and finishing my work,

PREFACE

viii

I found that the reawakening of my original thoughts was only the beginning of my next task. In order to carry out my purpose, I should have to think again in the light of the revolutionary experience which the nineteen intervening years had been thrusting upon me and my con-

temporaries.

The

performing this act of mental rejuvenation capacity if I had been left to attempt it in point I was effectively helped on my way by the

effort required for

might have been beyond solitude; but at this

my

timely receipt of a series of invitations to give public lectures on the topics that were the agenda for the still unexecuted parts of the plan of the book. In a set of Edward Cadbury Lectures delivered at the University of Birmingham, England, in the autumn of 1946 I dealt with the subjects of Parts VI-VIII in a set of Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1947 I dealt with the subject of Part IX; in a set of Bampton Lectures delivered at ;

Columbia University, New York, in April 1948 I dealt with the subject of Part XII, and, later in the same month, with the subject of Part XIII in a set of Rushton Lectures delivered at Southern College, Birmingham, Alabama. The subject of Part XI was my theme in a set of Chichele Lectures delivered in the autumn of 1948 in the University of Oxford on an invitation from All Souls College. The was broached in a couple of lectures delivered in subject of Part April 1949 in the University of Chicago on an invitation from the

X

Committee on Social Thought. I was fortunate in being given these opportunities of feeling my way back into a study of History for the immediate practical purpose of sharing my thoughts and feelings with responsive audiences. The congenial necessity of writing notes for these lectures gave me the stimulus that I needed in order to recast my original notes for the book in a new form answering to the new experiences, public and personal, that I had encountered since the summer of 1927. In the outcome, the original plan of the book still stood and the execution of Parts VI, VIII, X, and XIII was carried out more or less on the lines of the original notes. The subjects of Parts VII, IX, XI, and XII, on the other hand, came, in the event, to be treated very differently from the original design and the subject of Part XI, in particular, so differently that the title of this Part had to be changed from 'Rhythms in the Histories of Civilizations' to 'Law and Freedom in 1

When

History

.

these invitations to lecture had thus given me the impetus required for finishing the book in the light of my experience since 1927, I should have found myself overwhelmed by the accumulation of seven years' arrears of work on the Chatham House Survey of International Affairs work which was the first call on time

and energy my but for the imagination, considerateness, and generosity of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Rockefeller Foundation of New York, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. in co-operating with one another to release the major part of my time, for a period of five years beginning on the ist July, 1947, for writing the rest of A btudy of History, partly in England and partly in America,

PREFACE under

ix

My

debt to the Rockefeller Foundation, and to the authorities at Bryn Mawr College who were the Foundation's consultants when it was considering this project, is a greater one than I can put ideal conditions.

into words.

My

acknowledgements and thanks for the help of many kinds, from quarters, which I have received in the writing of the book as a whole are set out at the end (in volume x, on pp. 213-42), since they run to too great a length to allow of their being included in a preface but

many

;

cannot bring myself to postpone my expression of gratitude for certain essential pieces of help in the production of this last batch of four volumes. The index to the volumes now published, like the two indexes to the I

preceding six volumes, has been made by my wife and colleague and co-author of the Survey of International Affairs. If the reader ever loses the thread of my thought, he will find it again here as I know from having often found it, myself, in the indexes to the two previous batches of volumes. My gratitude is not lessened by the happy knowledge that this skilful and exacting task has been a labour of love.

Miss Bridget Reddin has completed the enormous tasks begun in the winter of 1930-'! of typing from a manuscript that has always been complicated, and of deciphering a handwriting that has not improved in the course of putting on paper some millions of words. Both the printer and I would have been at a loss if Miss Reddin had not returned to give us this help after having served during the Second World War, with my wife and me, in the same department of the Government of the United Kingdom. The book that I am finishing in the act of writing this preface has had a long history on the Time-scale of an individual human life. Now that I have finished it, I can see in retrospect that, without knowing it, I was already at work on it in rather early days. For instance, the Annex to Part VI C (ii) (c) 3 first found its way on to paper, in the form of a child's coloured illustrations to the text of Herodotus, Book VII, chaps. 61-99, in a drawing-book, dated August 1903, which is on my table at my elbow at this moment. Upon it lies the manuscript running to sixty-four pages of sermon paper and ending with a quotation from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel xxxvii. i-io of an essay on 'the Philosophy of History' read at Oxford to an undergraduate society at some date in the academic year 1910-11. In the summer of 1920, after the philosophic contemporaneity of the Western and Hellenic civilizations had been borne in on me by the experience of the First World War, I for the first time consciously tried and, at this first attempt, signally failed to write the present work in the form (dictated by a Late Medieval Italian education in the Greek and Latin Classics) of a commentary on the second chorus (11. 332-75) of Sophocles* Antigone. I did not succeed in finding my way into my subject till more than a year later. On Saturday, 17 September, 1921, I was travelling with my schoolfellow and life-long friend Theodore Wade-Gery in the Orient Express en route from Constantinople to England. Before dawn we had been awakened by the rumbling of our train as it crossed the bridge over the

B

2609 vii

a 2

PREFACE

x

Maritsa, below Adrianople, and, for the rest of that day, we were travelon westward up the valley of a river that had once been famous as the Hebrus. As I stood, hour after hour, at the corridor window, watching the stream glide by, with an endless fringe of willows and poplars marking out, as they slid past, the curves of the gently flowing waters* course, my mind began to dream of historical and legendary events of which an Hellenic Thrace and an Ottoman Rumili had been the theatre the legendary violent death of the Prophet Orpheus; the historic violent deaths of the Emperors Valens and Nicephorus; the entrenchment of the Ottoman Power on the European side of the Straits in the reign of Sultan Murad I. When a group of inquisitive Bulgarian peasants clustered round the door of our coach as the train lingered in a wâyside station, my eye was caught by the fox-skin cap that one of these Thracian contemporaries of mine was wearing; for this was the ling

:

(in Book VII, chap. 75) had paraded the contingent of Xerxes' expeditionary force, and a picture of a Thracian fighting-man in just such a cap, which I had copied into my drawing-book eighteen years ago, had left its imprint on my memory. These stimulating sights and reminiscences must have released some psychic well-spring at a subconscious level. That evening I was still standing at the window, overwhelmed by the beauty of the Bela Palanka Gorge in the light of a full moon, as our tram bore down upon Nish. If I had been cross-examined on my activities during that day, I should have sworn that my attention had been \vholly absorbed outby the entrancing scenes that were passing continually before

headgear in which Herodotus

Asiatic Thracian

my

ward

eye. Yet, before I down on half a sheet of

and in

went

to sleep that night, I found that I had put notepaper a list of topics which, in its contents

was substantially identical with the plan of this book printed in volumes i, iv, and vn. The path that had thus unexpectedly and, as it might seem, casually opened at last before my feet was to carry me farther than I then foresaw on a journey that was to take nearly thirty years to complete; but, once open, the path went on unfolding itself before me till today I find myself at this long journey's end. as

it

their order,

now stands

ARNOLD

J.

TOYNBEE

LONDON 1

6 August 1951

SINCE writing this preface, I have begun to be able to see ahead to the next stage of this Study beyond the moment when I shall have delivered the last proofs of volumes vii-x to the

While these four volumes have been

printer. in the press, I have

been coD. Myers, of Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, and with my former colleague Mrs. Gomme, who was the head of the cartographical section of the operating with

my

friend Professor E.

foreign Office Research Department during the Second World War, in producing the maps, and compiling the gazetteer of place-names that

PREFACE are either i-x,

shown on

which are

these

maps

xi

or are mentioned in the text of volumes

to be published together in a forthcoming

volume

xi.

mostly Professor Myers' and Mrs. Gomme's work, will, I believe, be welcomed by readers of volumes i-x. On the 26th February, 1953, the Rockefeller Foundation once again came to my aid in a most imaginative and effective way by giving my

This eleventh volume, which

is

me a grant to cover the costs of travel with a view eventually to revising this book. Our first use of this kind grant was to pay a visit to Mexico, from the I4th April to the i6th May, 1953, for the threefold purpose of seeing at first hand some of the monuments of the

wife and

Middle American

Civilization

and of the Spanish Empire of the Indies

New

in the former Viceroyalty of Spain and some of the aspects, in the Mexican field, of the current encounter between the World and the

Modern West. Thanks

to the hospitality and help of the Federal Ministry of Public Instruction and the Autonomous National University of Mexico, we were able to use our precious time in Mexico to good advantage. We look forward to following up this reconnaissance in Middle America by visiting Japan and Peru in 1956 on a journey to and from Australia which is to take us round the World. When, after that, we settle down to the task of revision, our plan is, first, to produce a

volume of

'reconsiderations* (retractationes in Saint Augustine's usage of the Latin word). Since the first publication of the first batch of volumes in 1934, there have been additions to our historical knowledge, particularly through the wonderful work of the archaeologists, which have changed the appearance of some tracts of the historical landscape. There have also been comments and criticisms, both general and particular, on the ideas presented in the book and on some of the

by which these ideas have been illustrated and supporhave already profited greatly by many of these criticisms in writing the later volumes, I shall not have drawn the full benefit from them till I have taken a synoptic view of them and this will be the second topic the volume of retractationes that my wife and I are citations of facts

ted.

While

I

;

m

planning to produce. We also have other books on the stocks, and we should be happy if there could be said of us what Clarendon has said of himself in his

autobiography 'In

:

all this

retirement he was very seldom vacant

.

.

.

from reading

excellent books or writing some animadversions and exercitations of his own. ... He left so many papers of several kinds, and cut out so

many to

be

pieces of work, that a idle.'

man may

conclude that he never intended

1

ARNOLD

J.

TOYNBEE

LONDON 1

8 February 1954

1 The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon* written by himself, ad fin. (Oxford 1817, Clarendon Press), vol. 11, p. 567, quoted in the present Study, III. 111. 321.

SCRIPTORIS VITA NOVA O

silvae, silvae, raptae mini,

O non

mea,

Silvani

filia,

musa

non revidendae, dryas,

dolet: hoc Paeto

dictum immortale profata Arria procudit mi quoque robur et aes mi quoque non solus tamen exsulo nonne priores :

;

clara creaverunt tristi opera cxsilio ? Exsul et immeritus divom, Florentia, carmen edidit, alma intra moenia tale tua nil orsus, vates. Non iuste expulsus Athenis,

advena Threiciis, postnatis in perpetuom relegendam

Pangaei scripsit

clivis

vir, bello infelix dux prius, historiam. His ego par fato par sim virtute. Fovetur acrius aerumnis magnanimum ingenium. Me patriae excidium stimulat nova quaerere regna. Troia, vale! Latium per maria atra peto. :

musa dryas, praesens Silvane, penates, *non* mini clamanti 'non' reboate 'dolet'.

Silvae,

quaerens quaerenti tanta ministrat, omnia suppeditat quae constanter amat non tali robore amata^ quae quae dare et hoc totis viribus ardet opem nonne haec digna suo Heronice nomine sancto ? Quod patet ante oculos, improbe nonne vides ?

Quae

sibi nil

nil accipiens

y

y

y

Cui

tarn cara comes,

patria

Caece

qua

diu^

non

exsulat exsul

praesens coniugis adsit

tandem

vidisti clarius.

ubique amor. :

Audi:

Perdita mortali gaudia flere nefas non datur humanis in perpetuom esse beatos : mox marcent vitae praemia : scgnities :

Elysii pretiumst : hcbctat dulcedo : doloris sopitam recreant volncra viva animam.

Haec non

quaesitae tibi ianua aperta salutis: tufatofelix: te nova vita vocat.

xiv

SCRIPTORIS VITA NOVA Gavisus iuvenis vitae describere metas, ausus eram fatum prospicere ipse meum. Prospexi triplicem fauste ducentis Amoris, Musarum comitum, coniugis harmoniam, amens, qui, vasti peragrans vagus aequora ponti, non cavi fulmen, saeva procella, tuorn. Non iterum de me dictabo oracular nosti, qui me servasti, Tu mea fata, Deus.

CONTENTS OF VOLUMES VOLUME VII VI.

B. I.

UNIVERSAL STATES

....

ENDS OR MEANS?

A.

i

... ...

UNIVERSAL STATES AS ENDS THE MIRAGE OF IMMORTALITY

A

VII-X

.

7

.7

Paradoxical Misapprehension of the Roman Empire and the Arab Caliphate of the Manchu, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires

The Aftermaths The Aftermaths

Ghosts of Defunct Universal States

.

.

7

.

7 16

.

.

19

.

.

The Haunting of Cairo and Istanbul by the Ghost of the Caliphate 21 'The Holy Roman Empire' .27 The Haunting of the 'Osmanhs and the Mongols by 'Ghosts of Ghosts' 28 'The Great Idea' of the Modern Greeks .29 .

.

.

.

.

.... .

'Moscow

the Third

Rome'

The Riddle of the Prestige of The Grounds of the Illusion II. THE DOOM OF TITHONUS C.

.

.

.

31

the Imperial Office in Japan .

.

53

.

...

(b)

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEACE

(c)

THE SERVICEABILITY OF IMPERIAL IVSTALLA IONS

56

.

69

I

An

'All

80

.

Analysis of Imperial Institutions

The Spider's Web The Grand Canal Roads Lead

to

.

Rome'

80

.

.... .

56

.

THE CONDUCTIVITY OF UNIVERSAL STATES

Communications

53

.

.

(a)

1.

.41 -47

.

.

UNIVERSAL STATES AS MEANS

THE PRICE OF EUTHANASIA II. SERVICES AND BENEFICIARIES

I.

40

.

So

.

.80 .87

.

91

.

The Roman Roads' Service to the Christian Church The Beneficiaries of Means of Communication created by Other .

Universal States

An

Islamic Pilgrims'

The Mahayana's The Challenge

97

.

Way

.

.

Transcontinental Royal Road to

Christianity 'Annihilation of Distance'

2.

Garrisons and Colonies

in

a

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

of Motives in the Minds of Imperial Authorities Examples of Divers Types of Resettlement

Penal Deportations Garrisons along the Frontiers

.

.

Garrisons in the Interior .

.103 .108 .

.

108 1

14

115

.

Civilian Settlements

.100 .102

Western Technology's

The Mixture Incaic

95

.

.

.

.

.

117

.122 .132

CONTENTS

xvi

'The Melting-pot'

Who

.

?

.

.

-

.

.

.

.

are the Beneficiaries

The Triumph of Equality and Despotism in the Arab Caliphate. The Triumph of Equality and Despotism in the Roman Empire The Utilization of Imperial Garrisons and Colonies by Higher Religions Provinces

3.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

139

.144

.

.

147 152

.158 .163

.

The Mixture of Motives in the Minds of Imperial Authorities 163 . Administrative Policy in the Smic Universal State .169 'the Middle Empire' and in 'the New Administrative Policy .

m

Empire' of Egypt

.

.

.174

.

.

.

Administrative Policy in the Napoleonic Empire Administrative Policy in the Achaememan Empire Administrative Policy in the Arab Caliphate Financial Functions of Provinces Judicial Functions of Provinces

.

.

.179 .181

.

.

.

.

.

182

.

.182

Military Functions of Provinces The Utilization of Provincial Organizations by Alien Civilizations The Utilization of Provincial Organizations by Churches .

.

4.

176 178

.

....

.

185 188

Capital Cities 193 'Laws' governing the Migration of Capital Cities .193 Migrations of the Capital Cities of Alien Empire-builders 194 Migrations of the Capital Cities of Barbarian Empire-builders 203 210 Migrations of the Capital Cities of Marchmen Empire-builders. Migrations of the Capital Cities of Metropolitan Empire-builders 224 .

.

.

Who The The


?

.

Pillage of Capital Cities

by Barbarians

.

.

.

.

.

.

228 229

Exploitation of the Prestige of Capital Cities by Empirebuilders .

.

The Use

tion of Cultures

The Use (d)

.

.

.

.

.

.

.235

.

.

of Capital Cities as Seminaries for Higher Religions

THE SERVICEABILITY OF IMPERIAL CURRENCIES 1. Official Languages and Scripts

.

... .

.

.

.

.

.

Alternatrve Possibilities

A A

.230

.

of Capital Cities as Transmittmg-stations for the Radia-

.

.

237 239 239 239 240 243

for Some Single Language or Script Partnership between Several Different Languages or Scripts Empire-builders who have refrained from giving Official Currency to their own Mother Tongue .251

Monopoly

.

.

Who 2.

.

Law

are the Beneficiaries? .

The Three

.

.

Provinces of

Law

Instances of Failure and

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

..... .... ..... .

.

.

The Expedient of Codification The Historical Background of Empire of

the Indies

.

.

.

2^5

.255

Success in Attempts to impose a

Uniform Imperial Law The Attempt to stabilize the Law Regime .

253

in

256

Japan under the Tokugawa .

.

Codification

.

in

the

.261 262

Spanish

264 Background of Codification in the Roman Empire 265 Historical Background of Codification in the Napoleonic Empire .268

The The

Historical

.

.

.

.

.

.

..... .....

CONTENTS

xvii

The Price of Codification The Exceptional Service rendered by the Code Napoleon to a . Late Modern Western Society The Normal Failure of Codification to arrest Decay .

.

.271

.

.

of the Roman Law in the Roman Empire's Teutonic Barbarian Successor-States The Failure of the Spanish Empire of the Indies to profit by the Law of the Incaic and Aztec Empires The Infusion of a Decadent Roman Law into the Customary Law of the Roman Empire's Teutonic Barbarian Conquerors The Infusion of a Decadent Roman Law into the Islamic Shari'ah

The Decay

.

.

.

.

The Mosaic Law's Debt by Hammurabi

to the Codification of the

3.

...... ..... .....

Governmental Methods of Keeping Count of Time

.

mental Propaganda

The

Demand

User's

Coin Types

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

as a

Medium

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

-

311

3*3

.

Reproduction of .

-

.

.

3*5 .

.

.

a

Mobile Standing

.318

in the post-Diocletianic .

.

.

.320

Esprit de Corps The Problem of Controlling Alien or Barbarian Troops The Consequences of the Enlistment of Barbarians in the post.

Diocletiamc Roman Army The Roman Army's Legacy to

.

2.

Civil Services

.

.

.

the Christian

Church

.

.

Conqueror Experiments in Recruiting a Civil Service from an Existing .

.

.

.

in Recruiting a Civil Service

from Novi Homines

Experiments The Metamorphosis of an Hereditary Aristocracy into a Professional Civil Service

Experiments

Who


3. Citizenships

The

in Providing

Initial

an Education for

?

.

New

.

Gulf between Subjects and Rulers

Recruits

.

.

.

323 327

-333 -338

The Difficulty of Creating a Professional Civil Service The Taking Over of an Existing Civil Service by a Barbarian Aristocracy

318

.318

...... ....... ....... ...... .......

The Creation of a Mobile Standing Army Roman Empire

299 303 305 307 309

Govern-

for

.

THE SERVICEABILITY OF IMPERIAL CORPORATIONS 1. Standing Armies The Difficulty of Creating and Maintaining

Army

.

.

for Conservatism in the .

284 288

294 296

.

.

Inability of New Eras to establish themselves without Religious Sanctions The Conservation of Pagan Calendars by Churches The Defeat of a Duodecimal by a Decimal System of Reckoning

The Invention of Coinage The Diffusion of the Use of Coinage The Invention of Paper Money The Utihtv of a Monetary Currency

283

293 293

.

.

.

The

280

.291

Calendars; Weights and Measures; Money The Concern of Governments with Standard Measures

Calendncal Cycles

278

Sumenc Law

.

.

.

270

.

344 344 345 34& 351

354 359 3^7 372 372

CONTENTS

xviii

The

..

Obliteration of the Gulf

Pang

of Han Liu by the Statesmanship

-373

Enfranchisement Inefficacy of a merely Juridical Allegiances Ecclesiastical and Imperial Citizenships

375

.

.

The

VII.

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

A ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF THE RELATION OF UNIVERSAL CHURCHES TO CIVILIZATIONS CHURCHES

I.

.......

AS CANCERS

CHURCHES AS CHRYSALISES

II.

(a) (b)

III.

THE GROUNDS FOR THE CHRYSALIS CONCEPT THE INADEQUACY OF THE CHRYSALIS CONCEPT

.

.

.

.

A HIGHER SPECIES OF SOCIETY A REVISION OF OUR CLASSIFICATION OF SPECIES OF SOCIETY

CHURCHES AS

(a)

A

.

.

-

.

.

.

.420

.

.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN HEART AND HEAD Essence and Accidents

.

The

Origin of the Conflict

444

.

449 465 465

.

The Fundamental Unity (d)

-

.

Outcomes

A Demarcation of Spheres A Common Endeavour of

.

.

.

.

Truth

.

.

3.

4. 5.

The The The The

Promise Promise Promise Promise

of Overcoming Discord of Revealing a Spiritual

.

Meaning

.

.

.

.

in History

Conduct Mimesis

of Inspiring an Effective Ideal of of Exorcizing the Penlousness of

.

IN

CIVILIZATIONS AS REGRESSIONS

II.

514 523

THE LIVES OF .526

......

CAUSES OF REGRESSION

I.

II.

THE BOW IN THE CLOUD

(a)

Auguries of Spiritual Recovery

(b)

Possibilities of Spiritual

Growth

526

-533

.

THE CHALLENGE OF MILITANCY ON EARTH

C.

6

.

CIVILIZATIONS AS OVERTURES

I.

5

506 507 512

.

.... .....

THE ROLE OF CIVILIZATIONS CHURCHES

B.

47

4?6 483 494

.500

.

THE PROMISE OF THE CHURCHES' FUTURE 1. Man's Fellowship with the One True God 2.

423 425 433 442

.

.

Possible Alternative

42O

42O

.

.

(r)

l

392

.

.

.

3

.

The Higher Religions' Consensus and Dissension The Causes of the Dissension and the Prospects of Transcending it The Value of Diversity The Role of the Civilizations THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHURCHES* PAST

381

-392 .410

....

Reversal of Roles Revelation through Tribulation

(b)

375

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

545 545 551

551 .

-555

CONTENTS

xix

ANNEXES VI A, Annex: Table

B

of Types of Endings of Universal States

Annex: The Role of the Byzantine Element

(i),

Heritage

C (u

.

.

.

The Extant Sources

Muscovy's

.

-577

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

of Information

.

.

Administrative Geography and Political History The Ambiguity of Homonyms .

Notes on Names and their Locations

ground (n)

A

VII

A

(i)

(c) 4,

and

(in) (a),

Annex Churches

Annex

I.

.

.

.....

(in) (a),

Annex

II

(in) (a),

Annex

III

(in)

A

(c),

701

Note by Martin Wight

.

711

.

716

.

(n) (a),

The Crux

for an Historian

brought up

...

Annex' Immortality and Karma

Annex The

Table I

Prehistoric

Background Higher Religions

TABLES .

in the

Wight

.

.

.

737

.

749

.

756

to the History of the .

.

.

... .... ...

Universal States

.

Table II Philosophies

.

Higher Religions and Psychological Types

Annex. Holy Writ

(in) (d) 3,

C

692

Achievement and Material Achievement Are they Antithetical or Interdependent ?

Christian Tradition, by Martin

A

690

Spiritual .

A A

684

their Historical

....

Ghosts

as

585

597 614 620

Back-

Historical

.

Annex- Moscow's Changes of Fortune and Causes

(n),

.

...

The Achaememan Empire's

C

569

.

Annex. The Administrative Geography of the Achaememan Empire .580 The Spirit and Policy of the Achaememan Re"gime .580

(c ) 3,

)

.

.

in

.

.

Table III: Higher Religions

.

.

.

.

.

759

769

770

.771

Table IV. Primitive Societies, Civilizations, Higher Religions, in Serial Order facing page 772 .

.

Table V: A Tentative Concordance of the Herodotean Gazetteer and the Official Lists of Countries and Peoples of the Achaememan Empire facing page 772

Table VI: A Tentative Reconstruction of Danus's Original Dissection of the Achaememan Empire into Twenty Taxation Districts facing page 772

..... .....

Table VII' Correspondences between Higher Religions and Psychological Types facing page 772 Table

VIII'

A

Diagram

to

Religions and Psychological

Illustrate

Types

the Relation

between Higher 772

CONTENTS

xx

VOLUME VIII.

VIII

HEROIC AGES

A.

THE GENESIS OF A LIMES

B.

A SOCIAL BARRAGE

.

'The Wreckful Siege of Battering Days'

The The The The

.

.

.

.19 25

.

31

The

.

39

.

.

Self-Defeat of a Policy of Setting a Thief to Catch a Thief

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES A

Reversal of Roles

.

.

.

.

.

.

States

.

.

.

.

.

.

The Restraining Influences of Aidos, Nemesis, and I him The Outbreak of an Invincible Criminality The De"bcle of an Ephemeral Barbarian Ascendancy .

DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT

E.

PHANTASY OF HEROISM A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE

A

IX.

.

.

.

53

-59

.

.

...

64

73

.

.

73

.

8l

IN

(ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES)

AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY

THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS II. IN MEETINGPL ACES

I.

CIVILIZATIONS

.

CLASSIFICATION CIVILIZATIONS

III.

.

CONTACTS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS

SPACE A.

45

.

.45 .46 Successor.50 .

The Demoralization of the Barbarian Conquerors The Bankruptcy of a Fallen Civilized Empire's Barbarian

A

.

.

OF .

.

TYPES .

.

.

.

.

.

CONTACT

OF .

.

.

88

.88 OF

.QO

BETWEEN .

-97

A SURVEY OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATIONS .106

B.

...... .

I.

16

Weapons .

12

.12 .13

Besieged Civilization's Inability to Redress the Balance by Recourse to Organization and Technique The Barbarians' Military Elusiveness and Economic Parasitism

D.

II.

.

.

Impracticability of a Policy of Non- Intercourse Barbarians' Exploitation of their Civilized Neighbours' Barbarians' Exploitation of their Native Terrain .

I.

i

.3

.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE

C.

.

A

PLAN OF OPERATIONS

.

.

106

....

CONTENTS II.

OPERATIONS ACCORDING TO PLAN

(a)

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MODERN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 1. The Modern West and Russia Russia's 'Western Question*

.

.126 .126 .126 .128

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

xxi 126

Channels of Western Cultural Radiation into Russia Alternative Russian Responses to the Challenge of Western .130 Technology The Race between the West's Technological Advance and Russia's .

.

.

.

.

.

Technological Westernization Soviet Union's Encounter with the United States .

.

The 2.

.

.136

.

.

141

The Modern West and the Main Body of Orthodox Christendom 150 Difference between the Ottoman Orthodox Christian and the Muscovite Reaction to the West .150 The Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian Phobia of the West 151 .

The

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The The The

Defeat of Cyril Loukaris

.

.152 .160

Frustration of Evye'nios Voulghans Revolution in the Ottoman Orthodox Christians' Attitude .161 . towards the West .

.

The

.

.

Revolution

in

the

Christianity

West's

.

.

Attitude .

.

.

towards .

Orthodox

.165

.

Channels of Western Cultural Penetration into an Ottoman .168 Orthodox Christendom The Reception of a Modern Western Culture by the Ottoman .182 Orthodox Christians and its Political Consequences The Ottoman Millet System of Communal Autonomy .184 The Fiasco of the Phananots' 'Great Idea' .187 The Disruption of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom by a Modern Western Nationalism .189 Russia's Competition with the West for the Ex-Ottoman Orthodox .

.

.

.

.

.

Christians' Allegiance 3.

The Modern West and

the

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Hindu World

.

Likenesses and Differences in the Situations of a

.192 .198

.

Hindu

Society

...... ......

under British Rule and an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom of a Modern Western Culture and its Political Consequences The Gulf between a Hindu and a Post-Christian Western Weltanschauung The Aloofness of a Reformed British Civil Service in India The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population .

The Reception

.

4.

The Modern West and

The Encirclement Tibet

the Islamic

of the Islamic

.

.

World

World by

.

.

.

.

the West, Russia, -

.

198

200 205 207 213

.216 and

.216

The Postponement of the Crisis .219 The Muslim Peoples' Military Approach to the Western Question 232 The Salvaging of an Ottoman Society by Selim III, Mehmed .

'AH, and

Mahmud

II

The

.

.

.... ..... .

.

.

.239

Collapse in Turkey and Egypt at the Beginning of the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century

The of

Failure of the Arabs to

Western Aggression

Respond

249

to a Continuing Challenge

257

CONTENTS

xxii

The

Failure of a Turkish Committee of Maintain the Ottoman Empire

Union and Progress

to

...... ....... ..... ..... ..... .

.261

.

.

m

The

Success of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Creating a Turkish National State Russia's Competition with the West for an Ascendancy over the Islamic World .

.

5.

The Modern West and

the

Jews

.

.

The Peculiarities of the Western Province of a Jewish Domain The Persecution of the Peninsular Jews under a Catholic Christian

The

.

272

Visigothic

Regime

of the Western Christians' Ill-treatment of the Jews the Jewish Tragedy in a Western Christendom

A

Mirage of Enfranchisement The Fate of the European Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, 1933-48 Causes of the Failure of Enfranchisement .

.

.

.

277

.

.

.

295

.

.

.

298

W orld War on the Destiny of Palestine T

.

.

Civilisations

.

the

.

.

.

.

Fate and Future of the Indigenous American Civilisations Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of an Early Modern

...... .

301 303

306 309

Far Eastern and Indigenous American

.

Perils of Ignorance

West

292

.

Great Britain's Responsibility for the Catastrophe in Palestine Germany's and the United States' Responsibility for the Catastrophe in Palestine The Retrospect and the Outlook

The Modern West and

285 286

.288

Inherent Consequences of the Captivation of the Jews by a Modern Western Gentile Nationalism Inherent Consequences of Zionism's Departure from a Traditional Jewish Practice of Political Quietism Effects of the First

280 281

A.D.

.

.

.

The The

272

Diaspora's

Ottoman Muslim Regimes

6.

268

Respite for the Peninsular Jews under Andalusian and

The Causes The Plot of

The

263

.

.

.

.

313 313 315

.316

.

Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of a Late Modern

West

324 330

The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population A Communist Russia's Chinese Fifth Column .

7.

Characteristics of the Encounters between the

Contemporaries up (b)

to

Date

.

.

-334

.

Modern West and

it\

-337

.

ENCOUNTERS WITH MEDIEVAL WESTERN CHRIS IENDOM 1. The Flow and Ebb of the Crusades 2. The Medieval W est and the Synac World 3. The Medieval West and Greek Orthodox Christendom 4. The Medieval West and Kievan Russia .

T

.

.398

.

(c)

ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS OF THE FIRST TWO GENERAL IONS I.

346 346 363 375

403 Encounters with the Post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization 403 Likenesses and Differences between the Post-Alexandrine Hellenic and the Modern Western Eruption 403 The Flow and Ebb of Post-Alexandrine Hellenism 407 The Epiphany of Higher Religions .416 .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

CONTENTS 2.

3.

4.

5.

C.

xxiii

Encounters with the Pre-Alexandnne Hellenic Civilization The Hellenic Society's Offensive in the Mediterranean Basin The Synac Society's Political Consolidation for Self-Defence The Achaemenian Empire's Counter- Offensive The Aftermath on the Political Plane The Aftermath on the Cultural Plane

.

.

.

.

.

-

.

.

.

.

.

.

-437 -439

.......

Encounters with the Syriac Civilization

.

.

Encounters with the Egyptiac Civilization in the Age of Empire' Tares and Wheat

.

.

.

'the

.

418 418 423 430 435

New 447

.451

.

THE DRAMA OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES (STRUCTURE, CHARACTERS, AND

.... ...... ....

PLOT)

CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS II. ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS I.

(a) (b) (r)

AGENTS AND REAGENTS ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE REACTIONS ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE DENOUEMENTS

.

.

.

.

.

........ .....

THE PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION

D.

THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE II. THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE I.

....

.

.

454 454 464 464 466 476

481 481

495

Culture-Patterns and their Instability 495 The Conduciveness of Cultural Disintegration to Cultural Intercourse .501 .

.

.

.

.

.

Decomposition through Diffraction Inverse Selection through Transmission

.

.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENCOUNTERS TWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

E.

.

BE-

.

AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

I.

(d)

EFFECTS

(b)

EFFECTS

II.

(a)

.

1.

2.

.

.

.

RESPONSES OF THE SOUL

1.

Dehumamzation

2.

Zealotism and Herodiamsm

A A A

.

-529 .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

580

.580 .584 .610 .621

.......

Meeting of Extremes

.

.

.

Ineffectiveness of the Zealot-Herodian Response

Evangelism

.

529 530 530 542

-5^4 .564

.

.

.

Pair of Polar Standpoints Survey of Zealot and Herodian Reactions

The 3.

.

522 527 529

.

.

.

(6)

522 522

.

ON THE BODY SOCIAL Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assailant Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assaulted Party (a) 'One Man's Meat is Another Man's Poison' ()3) 'One Thing Leads to Another' EFFECTS

.

.

ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAULTED PARTY ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAILANT

AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

508

.514

.

.

.

623

CONTENTS

xxiv

ANNEXES VIII C, Annex: The Temporary Halt of the Western Civilization's Frontier in North America at the Edge of the Great Plains 630 D, Annex: 'The Monstrous Regiment of Women' .651 E (i), Annex: Optical Illusions in Hesiod's Vista of History 664 .

.

.

IX

B

......

Annex: The Relativity of the Unit of of Study

(i),

B

(n) (a)

i,

Annex

I-

B

(n) (a)

i,

Annex

II:

B B

(n) (a) 2,

Annex Annex

I

Classification to the Object

of Technological Competition in the Westernization of Russia

.... .

The

Byzantine

The Conflict of Cultures in II: The Morea on the Eve of :

1821

B

(n) (a) 3,

B

(n) (a) 3,

B (n) B (n) ^ 00

Annex

.

.

.

the Soul of Solom6s

.

....

The Ineffectiveness of Panislamism II: The Exploitation of Egypt by Mehmed 'AH

.

684

.

690 692 696

(a) 4,

fa) 5

Annex: Jewish History and the Millet Idea, by James

I:

...

Parkes

(n),

.681

.

Annex Annex

(a) 4,

Annex: The Mercenary Soldier's Role

TABLE Barbarian War-Bands

676 679

The

Peasant Majority of Mankind and the Agrarian Policy of the Soviet Union Annex II: Some Historical Clues to the Riddle of Pakistan's Future I:

674

the Uprising of A.D.

B (n) (a) 7, Annex: The Weltanschauung of Alexander B (n) (c) 2, Annex: Sicilian Light on Roman Origins C (i), Annex: 'Asia' and 'Europe'- Facts and Fantasies

D

.

Russian

of the

Inspiration

Political fithos

(n) (a) 2,

667

The Role

.

.

Herzen

as a Cultural

699 701

.

.

704

.

.

708

Spearhead

.......

730

734-5

VOLUME IX CONTACTS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS IN TIME (RENAISSANCES)

X.

'THE RENAISSANCE*

A.

II.

.

PLAN OF OPERATIONS OPERATIONS ACCORDING TO PLAN

A

(a)

.

...... ...

A SURVEY OF RENAISSANCES

B. I.

.

.

.

.

RENAISSANCES OF POLITICAL IDEAS, IDEALS, AND INSTITUTIONS

.

i

6 6

7 7

CONTENTS (b)

RENAISSANCES OF SYSTEMS OF

LAW

RENAISSANCES OF PHILOSOPHIES

(c)

(d)

.

xxv .

.

.

.

.

.

.

RENAISSANCES OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES A Revenante Literature's Psychological Appeal

The

Resuscitation of a Classical Thesaurus, or Encyclopaedia

Literature

.

.21

.

.

.

40

.48 48

.

an Anthology,

in

.51

.

.

The The

Counterfeiting of a Resuscitated Classical Literature Discomfiture of an Hellenic Ghost by a Western Vernacular Literature

59

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The

.62 -73

Discomfiture of an Orthodox Christian Greek Vernacular Literature by an Hellenic Ghost The Sinic Classical Incubus on a Chinese Vernacular Literature The Entente between the Vernacular Languages of the Hindu World and a Perennial Sanskrit .

.

.

75

.

RENAISSANCES OF VISUAL ARTS

(e)

(/) RENAISSANCES III.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS

THE DRAMA OF RENAISSANCES

C.

.

THE ROLE OF PILGRIMAGES IN RENAISSANCES .

THE STAGE OF THE DRAMA OF RENAISSANCES II. THE OCCASION OF THE DRAMA OF RENAISSANCES III. THE PLOT OF THE DRAMA OF RENAISSANCES I.

.

.

THE PROCESS OF EVOCATION

D.

.

.

.

.115

.

.

.

.

Il8

.

I2O

.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF NECROMANCY

THE TRANSFUSION OF PSYCHIC ENERGY THE CHALLENGE ROM THE RFVENANT AND II. ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE RLSPONSES. I.

.

I

A

.

(a) (h)

III.

IV.

T] IE ANTAEAN REBOUND AND THE ATLANTEAN STANCE A MR\EY OF ANTAEAN AND ATLAN IE \N REACTIONS .

.

.124 .

124

.

130

.

.

138

.

.

138

PAIR .

OF .

-

.

14 1

.

THE BLESSEDNESS OF IMMUNITY, MERCIFULNESS MORTALITY, AND UNTOWARDNESS OF PRECOCITY THE STERILITY OF THE BLACK ART .

115

.

I.

E.

96

.

.

THE INVERSION OF AN ORIGINAL HISTORICAL ORDER II. THE ECLECTICISM OF WA HL VLR WA NDTSCHA FTEN

78

.82 .86

4

.148 OF .

l6l

-

1

65

XL LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY THE PROBLEM

A. I.

..... ...... .

.

.

.

.

.167

THE STATE OF THE QUESTION DEFINITIONS OF TERMS

II.

III.

THE

AN'I

INOMIANISM

TORIANS. (fl)

MODERN

WESTERN

l68

HIS-

.

J

73

J

73

I

82

THE REPUDIATION OF THE BELIEF IN A 'LAW OF GOD' BY LATE MODERN

WESIERN MINDS (fc)

LATE

OF

.

l6j

I

.

.

.

HE CONTEST HE WEEN SCIENCE AND ANTINOMIANISM FOR THE POSSESSION OF AN INTELLECTUALLY DERELICT REALM OF HUMAN AFFAIRS. 1

CONTENTS

xxvi

(d)

THE GROUNDS OF THE LATE MODERN WESTERN HISTORIANS* AGNOSTICISM

THE OPENNESS OF THE QUESTION

IV.

.

.

.

.

.

2O2 2 17

THE AMENABILITY OF HUMAN AFFAIRS TO

B.

...... ....

'LAWS OF NATURE' SURVEY OF INSTANCES

A

I.

.194

(c)

THE UNCONSCIOUS CREDULITY OF PROFESSED AGNOSTICS

(a)

(b)

.

'LAWS OF NATURE' IN THE ORDINARY AFFAIRS OF PRIVATE PEOPLE IN AN INDUSTRIAL WESTERN SOCIETY

22O 22O

'LAWS OF NATURE' IN THE ECONOMIC AFFAIRS OF AN INDUSTRIAL WESTERN SOCIETY .223 .

(c)

.220

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

'LAWS OF NATURE* IN THE HISTORIES OF CIVILIZATIONS i.

.

The War-and-Peace History

.

.......

Struggles for Existence between Parochial States

The War-and-Peace The War-and-Peace

Cycle in

.

.

234 234

Modern and post-Modern Western

Cycle in post- Alexandrine Hellenic History Cycle in post- Confucian Sinic History .

234 260 271

A Synoptic View of the Currency of the War-and-Peace Cycle in the Histories of the Western, Hellenic, and 2.

Smic

The

Civilizations

Disintegrations and Growths of Societies 'Laws of Nature' in the Disintegrations of Civilizations 'Laws of Nature' in the Growths of Civilizations .

.291

.

(d) 'THERE is

NO ARMOUR AGAINST

FATE'

...... .

.

.

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS OF THE CURRENCY OF 'LAWS OF NATURE' IN HISTORY

II.

The Emancipation

281

287 287

.

of Man's Work from the Day-and-Night Cycle and from the Annual Cycle of the Seasons by Civilization

295

306 306

The Emancipation

of a Psychological Business Cycle from a Physical Crop Cycle by the Industrial Revolution

.310

.

The Human

Spirit's Educational

Use of

a Physical Generation Cycle as a Psychological Regulator of Social Change .

The

Subjection of Broken-down Civilizations to conscious Human Nature .

.

319

of Sub-

.326

.

...... ..... .....

ARE 'LAWS OF NATURE' CURRENT IN HISTORY INEXORABLE OR CONTROLLABLE?

in.

338

THE RECALCITRANCE OF HUMAN AFFAIRS TO

C.

'LAWS OF NATURE' I.

.

Laws

A

SURVEY OF INSTANCES

(a)

.

.

.348

.

THE VARIABILITY OF THE RATE OF CULTURAL CHANGE 1. The Hypothesis of Invariability and the Evidence against 2.

Instances of Acceleration

3.

Instances of Retardation

.

.

an Alternating Rate of Change

.

.

.

.

348

-348

.

4. Instances of (b)

.

it

.

348 355

.362 .364

THE DIVERSITY OF CORRESPONDING EPISODES IN THE HISTORIES OF DIFFERENT CIVILIZATIONS

.

.

.

.

-374

CONTENTS 1

.

2.

xxvii

A Diversity in the Duration of the Growth-Phases of Civilizations A Diversity in the Relations of Religion to the Rises and Falls of Civilizations in Different Generations

.

.

I

.

THE FREEDOM OF HUMAN SOULS THAT

D.

LAW OF GOD

.

.

.

THE NEED FOR THIS INQUIRY THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF ANSWERS

A. B.

.

IS

-395

.

.

.

.

THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF STATISTICS

.406 PRIORI .419 .

.

A

.

.

.

.

.

.

419

.

421

II.

THE INCONCLUSIVENESS OF FEELINGS

C.

THE TESTIMONY OF THE HISTORIES OF THE CIVILIZATIONS

I.

II.

.441

.

.

.

UNPRECEDENTED WESTERN EXPERIENCES

.

.

TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT

D. I.

.

.

.

WESTERN EXPERIENCES WITH NON-WESTERN PRECEDENTS

II.

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

.

.

441

.

465

.

.

.

.

.

.

....... ....... ........

A TRANSMIGRATION OF THE MARTIAL SPIRIT

The Crescendo and Diminuendo

.

.

.

of Militarism

Europe

The Significance of Hitler's Bid for \Vorld-Dommion The Temper generated by Militarization in the Non-Western .

Peasantry

States

III.

IV.

POSSIBLE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF A FUTURE

ORDER

E.

PROBABLE FUNCTIONS OF

TECHNOLOGY,

PLOYMENT

I.

II.

A

FUTURE WORLD ORDER

.

.

.

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

.

490 500 503 516

.

524

WORLD

.

AND

CLASS-CONFLICT,

490

.518

.

ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER

V.

479

Western

in

The Temper in the Soviet Union and in the United The Psychological Consequences of Atomic Warfare

473 473

.

.

473 473

.

.

THE SITUATION AF'IER THE SECOND WORLD WAR PROGRESSIVE CONCENTRATION OF POWER (b) A METAMORPHOSIS OF THE OIKOUMLNE (d) A

(f)

377

THE

THE PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

XII.

I.

376

.

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS OF THE INOPERAT VENESS OF 'LAWS OF NATURE' IN SOME PHASES OF HUMAN AFFAIRS

II.

374

.

536

556

EM.561

.

.

.

.

.

5&I

.

.

5^3

THE SITUATION AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

CONTENTS

xxviii

POSSIBLE COSTS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

IV. V.

....

ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO SOCIAL HARMONY

III.

.

.....

PROBABLE EMPLOYMENTS IN A FUTURE OECUMENICAL SOCIETY (a) *A COMMONWEALTH OF SWINE* (b)

'THE ARGONAUTS OF THE WESTERN PACIFIC*

.

.

(c)

THE SPIRITUAL ODYSSEY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

.

.

(d)

THE 'LAW' OF PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPENSATION

.

.

592

604

604

.614 6l8

-637

THE STRAITS AHEAD

F.

577

642

ANNEXES XB

(n)

(a),

Annex

I.

The

Conflicting Theories of Survival and Revival Emergence of

as Alternative Explanations of the the Medieval Italian City-States

B

(n)

(a),

Annex

(n)

B

(n) (a),

.

.....

(), Annex III: The Role of 'the Old Kingdom' in Egyptiac History

Annex IV: The Relation,

.

.

(n) (d),

Annex

I:

B

....

(n) (d),

Annex

II: 'Classical'

(n) (d),

Annex

III: R. G. Collmgwood's View of the Historian's lation to the Objects that he Studies

Languages and Literatures

.

.

B

(n) (/),

B

(n)

Annex:

A

.

Mmoan

697 705

Re-

.718

....

Annex- Was there a Renaissance of Hellenic History?

XII

693

Are the Relations of the Fine Arts and the Mathematical and Natural Sciences to the Social Milieu Diverse or Similar?

B

649 682

in Renaissances of Universal States,

between Effectiveness of Evocation and Degree of Geographical Displacement

B

645

Likeness and Difference between the Renaissances of the Smic and Hellenic Universal

II: Points of

States

B

.

Religion in

Critique of Gibbon's General Observations on the Roman Empire in the West

Fall of the

.

738

741

TABLES Table I- Successive Occurrences of the War-and-Peace Cycle in and post-Modern Western History

.... .

.

.

.

Modern

.255

Table II: Successive Occurrences of the War-and-Peace Cycle in postAlexandrine Hellenic History 268-9 Table III: Successive Occurrences of the War-and-Peace Cycle in post-

...... ........

Confucian Smic History

Table IV: A Synoptic Table of the Dates marking Turning-points from Bouts of War to Spells of Peace and vice versa in the Modern and postModern Western, the post-Alexandrine Hellenic, and the post-Confucian Smic Series of War-and-Peace Cycles .

Table V: tions

The Time-spans

.

.

273

285

of the Growth-phases of the Affiliated Civiliza-

758

CONTENTS

xxix

VOLUME X THE INSPIRATIONS OF HISTORIANS

XIII.

THE HISTORIAN'S ANGLE OF VISION THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF THE FACTS OF HISTORY

A.

.

B.

....... .......

RECEPTIVITY

I.

CURIOSITY

II.

THE WILL-O'-THE-WISP OF OMNISCIENCE

in.

.

.

.

i

3 3

7

.24

THE IMPULSE TO INVESTIGATE THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE FACTS OF HISTORY .42

C.

... ...

CRITICAL REACTIONS

I.

CREATIVE RESPONSES

II.

(a) (b)

MINUSCULA PAULLO MAIORA .

1.

Inspirations

.

.

42

..50

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

..... .....

from Social Milieux

.

.

.

Clarendon, Procopius, Josephus, Thucydides, Rhodes Polybius . Josephus and Ibn al-Tiqtaqa .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Saint Augustine

.

.

.

.

Twentieth-century Western Student of History

... ....

Inspirations from Personal Experiences

Gibbon Volney

Peregrinus Wiccamicus

Yosoburo Takekoshi

.

.

.

82

.

.

.

.84 -87 .91 .98 98

107

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.107

.in

THE FEELING FORTHE POETRY IN THE FACTS OF HISTORY .113 THE QUEST FOR A MEANING BEHIND THE FACTS OF HISTORY .126 .

E.

.

.

A

D.

.

Hamadam

.

Turgot Ibn Khaldun

2.

.

.

'Ala-ad-Dm Juwaym and Rashid-ad-Dln Herodotus

-50 -59 -59 59 -63 .66 69 .80

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

ANNEX XIII

B

(ni),

Annex:

A

Business School of Intellectual Action

.

.145

.

.167

A NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY I. 1 1.

The Problem The Case for

.

the

.

.

.

.

Correlation of the Chronology with Years of the Christian Era

Goodman-Martinez-Thompson

Yucatec and Mayan

169

CONTENTS ill.

The Current Controversy

over the Dating of the First Dynasty of Babylon in terms of Years B.C. The Overthrow of Eduard Meyer's Reconstruction of the Chronology of South-West Asian History The Stratigraphical Evidence from Sites in North Syria The Evidence of the Mari Archives The Evidence of the Khorsabad List of Kings of Assyria .

.

.

.

i? 1

.

.

i? 1

.

.

.

i?3

.

.

.

1

.

.......

The Chronological Significance of Ammi-saduga's Venus Observations The Relative Certainty of the Dating of the Egyptiac 'Middle Empire'

74

i?5

.

1

80

182

The Picture presented by the Mari Archives and by Babylonian Documents dating from the Reign of Hammurabi .184 The Nemesis of Hammurabi's Imperialism .186 .

.

.

.

An

Egyptiac Chronological Framework for the 210 years of SouthWest Asian History running from the Earliest of the Letters in the Diplomatic Correspondence of King Sams'i-Adad I of Assyria down to the Hittite War- Lord MurSilis Ps Raid on Babylon .187 .

The Twelfth Dynasty's Ascendancy over Syria and the Dating of Sami-Adad Fs Diplomatic Correspondence .188 The Eighteenth Dynasty's Ascendancy over Syria and the Dating of Murih Fs Raid on Babylon .192 The Contemporaneity of Ikhnaton's Reign with Suppiluliuma's and the Dating of Murih I 's Raid on Babylon 1 95 The Hyksos Conquest of Egypt and the Dating of the Reign of Hammurabi .197 The Kassite Conquest of Babylonia and the Dating of the Reign of Hammurabi 208 Some Provisional Conclusions from the Evidence as it stood in A.D. .

.

.

.

.

.

....... ........ .

1952

.

.

.

The Chronology adopted

.

in

.

.

Volumes

vii-x of this

.

Study

210

.212

.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS To Marcus, for teaching me to return Thanks to my Benefactors 213 To my Mother, for making me an Historian .213 in. To Edward Gibbon, for showing me, by Example, what an Historian I.

II.

.

could do IV.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

People, Institutions, Landscapes, Monuments, Pictures, Languages, and Books, for exciting my Curiosity .

v.

.

.213

To People and Books, for teaching me Methods of Intellectual Work .226 To People and Books, for teaching me Methods of Literary Presenta-

........

.

VI.

.213

To

tion

Vii.

To

viii.

To

.

.

.

.

.

.

229

People, Monuments, Apparatus, Pictures, Books, and Events, for giving me Intuitions and Ideas .

.

.

People and Institutions, for showing Kindness to

INDEX TO VOLUMES

VII-X, by

v.

M.

me

.

.231

.

.

TOYNBEE

.

236

243

A KEY TO THE CROSS-REFERENCES IN THE

FOOTNOTES TO VOLS. VII-X

final text of this book, like the original notes for it, has been written (except for some of the annexes) in the order in which the chapters appear in the Table of Contents. At each step in both making

the notes and writing the text, the writer has always tried to see the in its particular passage on which he has been working at the moment relation to the plan of the whole book; and he has printed in his footnotes to the text the resulting network of cross-references because he

believes that a method of continually taking his bearings, which has been an indispensable guide and discipline for the course of his own thought, is likely

also to

be of some help to his readers.

Since, in the nature of the case, the quantity of these notes of crossreferences has increased as one Part of the book after another has been full, the writer has sought, in the printing of this conof four volumes, to spare the readers eye batch and, in the cluding act, to lighten the printer's labours by reducing the bulk of his cross-

written out in

references to a

minimum. Accordingly, each

down

to three entries

small

Roman numeral

reference has been cut

Roman numeral

indicating the Part, a the and an Arabic numeral volume, indicating stand for 'footnote* when the reference n. to an the with page, giving is to one of these. For example, a reference which in volumes i-vi :

a large

would have appeared in a footnote in the form 'See IV. C (iii) (c) 2 (y), Annex, vol. iv, p. 637, above*, would appear in the four present volumes iv. 637*. Neither the printer nor the reader, the writer believes, to regret this compression.

as 'See IV. is likely

VI

UNIVERSAL STATES A.

ENDS OR MEANS?

starting-point of this book was a search for fields of historical study which would be intelligible in themselves within their own limits in Space and Time, without reference to extraneous historical events. An empirical pursuit of this inquiry led us to find the selfcontained units for which we were seeking in societies of the species called civilizations, 1 and so far we have been working on the assumption that a comparative study of the geneses, growths, breakdowns, and disintegrations of the twenty-one civilizations that we have succeeded in identifying would comprehend everything of any significance in the history of Mankind since the time when the first civilizations emerged among the primitive societies which had previously been the only existing form of human social organization. Up to the present stage of our investigation this .assumption has perhaps on the whole been justified by results yet from time to time we have stumbled upon indications that our first master-key might not serve to unlock all the doors through which we have to pass in order to reach our mental journey's end. Near the outset, in the act of identifying as many representatives as possible of the species of society that we had set ourselves to study, we found that certain civilizations were related to one another by a tie that was closer than the mere common characteristic of being representatives of the same species. We described this more intimate relation as one of 2 3 'apparentation-and-affiliation'; and we found, on analysis, that the evidences of apparentation-and-affiliation were certain characteristic social products of a Dominant Minority, an Internal Proletariat, and an External Proletariat into which the 'apparented' society split up in the course of its disintegration. It appeared that dominant minorities pro-

THE

;

duced philosophies which sometimes gave inspirations to universal produced higher religions which sought to embody themselves in universal churches, and that external proletariats produced heroic ages which were the tragedies of barbarian warstates, that internal proletariats

bands. In the aggregate, these experiences and institutions manifestly constitute a link between an 'apparented' and an 'affiliated' civilization that cannot be ignored. And this link in the Time-dimension between two non-contemporary civilizations is not the only kind of relation between civilizations that a comparative study of universal states, universal churches, and heroic ages brings to light. Though civilizations may be intelligible fields of historical study and self-contained units of social life on the whole at any rate by comparison with the relatively parochial

and ephemeral

political

articulate themselves in their 1

B

See

I.

2669.VH

i.

17-50.

communities into which they are apt to the fractions, in the shape

growth stage *

See

I.

B

i.

44.

3

See

I. i.

52-62.

UNIVERSAL STATES

2

of social classes, into which they disintegrate after breaking down acquire a liberty to enter into social and cultural combinations with alien elements derived from other contemporary civilizations. 1 This receptivity of theirs is revealed in the institutions that are their products. Some universal states have been the handiwork of alien empire-builders some higher 2 and some barbarian religions have been animated by alien inspirations war-bands have imbibed a tincture of alien culture. 3 Universal states, universal churches, and heroic ages thus link together ;

;

contemporary, as well as non-contemporary, civilizations in relations that are closer and more individual than an affinity consisting in the bare fact their being representatives of the same species of society; and this observation raises the question whether we have been justified in treating these historical phenomena as mere by-products, in each case,

of

of the disintegration of

some

single civilization

and in assuming

that the

civilizations themselves are the sole objects of historical study which we need to take into account. that we have found that universal states,

Now

universal churches, and heroic ages cannot, for their part, be studied intelligibly within the framework that the history of a single civilization provides, ought we not to study them on their own respective merits, with a view to testing the validity, or at any rate the sufficiency, of the assumption on which we have been proceeding hitherto ? Until we have examined the respective claims of institutions of each of these three kinds to be intelligible fields of study in themselves, and have also considered the alternative possibility that they might be parts of some larger whole embracing them and the civilizations alike, we cannot be sure that we have brought within our purview the whole of human history, above the primitive level, in all its aspects. This further inquiry was the task that we set ourselves at the end of

V of this Study. We shall now try to acquit ourselves of it in Parts VI, VII, and VIII; and happily in this case we are in a position to proceed straight from the formulation of our question to an attempt to answer it, without having to go through the laborious process of seek-

Part

4

and comparing those historical facts that are indispensable raw materials for the empirical method of investigation that we are following in this Study. An incidental survey of philosophies and universal states, higher religions and universal churches, heroic ages and war-bands has already been taken in our review of the dominant minorities and the internal and external proletariats of civilizations in disintegration, 5 and the results have been summarized in four ing, sifting, assembling,

tables printed in

volume

vi 6

and reprinted

here. 7

Accordingly, without further preliminaries, we can now investigate the claims of universal states, and may begin by asking whether they are ends in themselves or means towards something beyond them. Our best approach to this question may be to remind ourselves of certain salient features of universal states that we have already ascertained. 2 See I. i. See V. v. 33 8 -40. 40-41 and 57; II. ii. 213-16; and V. v. 360-1. See V. v. 351-9. 4 See V. vi. 325-6. s See V. v. 6 vi. 35-337327-31. 7 Tables I-III, pp. 769-71 of the present volume, below, and Table I, vol. viii PP- 734-5. 3

m

ENDS OR MEANS? In the

first place,

3

universal states arise after, and not before, the break-

downs of the civilizations to whose bodies social they bring political They are not summers but Indian Summers', masking autumn *

unity.

and presaging winter. In the second place, they are the products of dominant minorities: that is, of once creative minorities that have lost their creative power. 2 The negativeness which is the hall-mark of their authorship and also the essential condition of their establishment and maintenance is brought out in the following passages from the works of a nineteenth- century French philosopher and a twentieth -century 1

English

'The

satirist.

Roman

conquest was the destruction of all the citythen known world, just as the result of all the partial conquests that merged in the Roman conquest had been already to reduce their numbers. Thereafter one city-state alone, the archaggressor, remained standing; but on the very morrow of the establishment of the Empire we see Rome herself promptly divesting herself of her original character, gradually losing her power of aggression and withdrawing into herself. Her dominant aim at this stage is no longer conquest but conservation; the Roman city-state, in short, disappears in order to make way for the Roman Empire. 'But what order, what state of society, did this empire stand for ? Was the aim of conservation, which we have just attributed to the Roman Empire, expressed in a new dogma, in a corresponding social hierarchy, as the Roman conquest had been expressed and organised by the religious dogmas and the social institutions of the Roman city-state ? Unquestionably, no: in casting our eyes over this immense empire, we do not find anywhere, in all its vast extent, any sentiments, ideas or habits that do not go back to the preceding institution that of the city-state. And these sentiments, ideas and habits are deprived of energy, are no longer able to receive any [practical] social application, and therefore no longer provide result of the

states in the greater part of the

positive links between individuals. In short, the Roman Empire in no sense constitutes a society; for, in its capacity as an empire, it has no religion, no goal, and no general practical aim whatsoever; it represents merely a vast aggregation of human beings, a shapeless congeries of the debris of societies. The imperial administration in spite of being so farflung, so complicated, so meticulous, and of giving so great an appearance of symmetry at first glance does not constitute a political order or a social hierarchy at all this administration is in strict truth nothing but a vast office for administering Rome's conquests. These are the characteristics and the causes of the demoralisation of Rome that has made so lively an impression on the mind of Posterity. ;

.

.

.

*

This demoralisation had almost reached full measure before the Empire had completed the first century of its existence. Thereafter, this huge body appears to maintain itself merely by a kind of mechanical equilibrium and, if it does not actually dissolve, that is not so much because there is any positive reason for it to maintain itself as because there is no 3 positive reason, either, for it to undergo any change.' ;

The

point thus illustrated by Bazard from 'real

life'

in the instance of

See IV. iv. 56-119, especially 59-60. See V. v. 35-58. Bazard, A: 'Exposition de la Doctrine Samt-Simonienne', m CEuvres Computes de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin, vol. xlii (Pans 1877, Leroux), pp. 181-5. 1

2

3

UNIVERSAL STATES

4 the

Roman Empire is brought out more wittily by Huxley in his imagin-

ary Anti-Utopia:

"The Nine Years' War, the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and. ' "It's curious ... to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seem to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What 's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. ..." "Art, science you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage. "Anything else?" "Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller: "There used to be ." '* something called God before the Nine Years' War. '

.

.

;

*

.

.

.

*

.

.

not the whole picture for, besides being accompaniThis, however, ments of social breakdown and products of dominant minorities, universal states display a third salient feature they are expressions of a rally and a particularly notable one in a process of disintegration that works 2 itself out in successive pulsations of lapse-and-rally followed by relapse; and it is this last feature that strikes the imagination and evokes the gratitude of the generation that lives to see the successful establishment of a universal state set a term at last to a Time of Troubles that had is

;

:

previously been gathering momentum from successive failures of re3 peated attempts to stem it. Taken together, these features present a picture of universal states that, at first sight, looks ambiguous. Universal states are symptoms of social disintegration, yet at the same time they are attempts to check

and to defy it. with which universal states do cling to life, when once tenacity established, is revealed by a survey of their endings. The divers types into which these endings can be analysed form an illuminating series when arranged in an ascending order of the obstinacy with which a this disintegration

The

universal state rebels against being condemned to death.

To comprehend,

Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World (London 1932, Chatto & Windus), pp. 56 and 269-70 and 271. 2 This rhythm has been analysed and illustrated in V. vi. 278-321. 3 See V. vi. 181-2 and 191. 1

.

ENDS OR MEANS?

5

and compare with one another, these divers typical endings of universal states, we must view each of them in the setting of its own particular version of the common plot of the tragedy of decline and fall and an attempt at a survey on these lines will be found in an annex to the present ;

1 chapter at a later point in this volume. The analysis of the divers types of endings of universal states, which this survey of their histories yields, may be summarized here as follows: When the establishment of a universal state by indigenous empirebuilders has been forestalled by the intrusion of an alien society, the impulse, in the body social of the disintegrating society, to pass through the universal state phase before going into dissolution is powerful enough sometimes to be able to constrain the triumphant alien aggressor to provide his victims with the institution which his very triumph has made it impossible for indigenous hands to set up. The Central Ameri-

can, Chibcha Andean, main Orthodox Christian, and Hindu civilizations all succeeded in exacting this social service from alien intruders;

the Hindu Civilization actually succeeded in exacting it from two intruders in succession: first from Mughal representatives of the Iranic Muslim Civilization and then from British representatives of the Western Civilization.

When an indigenous universal state has been overthrown by the intrusion of an alien civilization before the exhaustion of the social rally which the foundation of the universal state has inaugurated, the impulse in the body social of the invaded disintegrating society to complete the universal state phase before going into dissolution is powerful enough sometimes to be able to constrain the triumphant aggressor to provide an alien substitute for the indigenous institution which he himself has destroyed, and sometimes to enable the invaded society to bide its time for many centuries if need be until at last it finds its opportunity to expel the intruder, re-establish the long ago overthrown indigenous universal state, and, this time, carry it through to the completion of its natural course. The Andean and the Babylonic Society succeeded in exacting from their alien conquerors the social service that they required the Andean Society from Spanish representatives of the Western

from two intruders in succession: from Achaemenid representatives of the Syriac Civilization and then from Seleucid representatives of the Hellenic. The Syriac and the Indie Society succeeded in biding their time and eventually re-establishing their overthrown indigenous universal states. Civilization, the Babylonic actually

first

When an indigenous universal state has collapsed after the exhaustion of the social rally which its foundation has inaugurated, the impulse in the body social of the disintegrating society to complete the universal state phase, before going into dissolution, is powerful enough to be able to achieve the restoration of the prostrate indigenous universal state, sometimes as the Hellenic, Sinic, and Sumeric civilizations achieved this by self-help alone, and sometimes as the Orthodox Christian Civilization in Russia achieved it by self-help reinforced by the reception of an alien civilization. 1

On

pp. 569-76, below.

ENDS OR MEANS?

6

After an indigenous universal state has reached the term of its natural expectation of life and has duly given place to the social interregnum in which the dissolution of a moribund civilization is normally consummated, the impulse in the body social of the moribund society to retrieve as is witnessed its life from the jaws of death may be powerful enough by the Egyptiac Civilization's achievement of this tour de force to be able to restore the defunct universal state and thereafter to maintain it in existence by one means or another until the moribund society, preserved within this institutional mummy-case in an uncanny state of 1 life-in-death, has succeeded, like King Menkaure in the folk-tale, in it by the Gods. to of life allotted the span doubling Indeed, after a universal state has reached the term of its natural expectation of life, the determination of the body social of the moribund as is witnessed by society not to taste of death may be obstinate enough the history of the Far Eastern Civilization in China to be able to maintain the senile universal state in existence, without a break, for an additional term by inducing a vigorous and victorious barbarian invader to shoulder the burden of preserving an institution which he might have

been expected to destroy. These divers endings of universal states bear concordant witness to the craving for life by which these institutions are animated. So strong is this craving of theirs that they refuse to forgo their claims to be brought into existence and to be allowed to live out their normal terms, and sometimes even refuse to pass out of existence after having duly realized their natural expectation of life. In other words, universal states show a strong tendency to behave as though they were ends in themselves, whereas in truth they represent a phase in a process of social disintegration and, if they have any significance beyond that, can only have it in virtue of being a means to some end that is outside and beyond them.

The judgement of History on their idolization of themselves nounced in one of the masterpieces of a Modern Western poet

is :

not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make Man better be, standing long an oak, three hundred year, fall a log at last, dry, bald and sere A lily of a day It is

Or

To

:

Is fairer far in

May,

Although it fall and die that night It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions

And 1

See IV.

iv.

in short

we

just beauties see, may perfect be. 2

measures Life

409 and V.

v. 2.

2

Ben Jonson.

pro-

UNIVERSAL STATES AS ENDS

B. (I)

THE MIRAGE OF IMMORTALITY

A Paradoxical Misapprehension AS we have seen in the last chapter,

the endings of universal states ./"îndicate that these institutions are possessed by an almost demonic craving for life and, if we now look at them, no longer through the eyes of alien observers, but through those of their own citizens, we shall find that these are apt not only to desire with their whole hearts that this 1 to believe earthly commonwealth of theirs may live for ever, but actually and this somethat the immortality of this human institution is assured times in the teeth of contemporary events which, to an observer posted at a different standpoint in Time or Space, declare beyond question that ;

this particular universal state is at this very moment in its last agonies. To observers who happen to have been born into the history of their own

societies at a time when these

have not been passing through the universal manifest that universal states, as a class of polity, are byand are stamped by their products of a process of social disintegration 2 certificates of origin as being uncreative and ephemeral. Why is it, such observers may well ask, that, in defiance of apparently plain facts, the citizens of a universal state are prone to regard it, not as a night's shelter in the wilderness, but as the Promised Land, the goal of human en-

state phase,

deavours ?

it is

How is it possible for them to mistake this mundane institution

Dei itself? This misapprehension is so extreme in its degree that its very occurrence might perhaps be called in question, were this not attested by the

for the Civitas

incontrovertible evidence of a cloud of witnesses who convict themselves, own mouths, of being victims of this strange hallucination.

out of their

The Aftermaths of

Roman Empire* and the Arab Caliphate* the Roman Empire, which was the universal

the

In the history of

state

This desire appears to be the characteristic sentiment of citizens of universal states that have been established and maintained by indigenous empire-builders, in contrast to the aversion commonly felt for universal states of alien origin (see V. y. 341-51). An inThe love and digenous origin is, of course, the rule, and an alien origin the exception. hatred inspired by these two different kinds of universal state both show a tendency to grow stronger with the passage of time. 1

characteristic of imperfection that is transparent in universal states is, of course, of all kinds in all circumstances, as is pointed out by a Modern Western Christian the following passage: philosopher 'What men call peace is never anything but a space between two wars: a precarious lasts as long as mutual fear prevents dissension from declaring itself. that equilibrium This parody of true peace, this armed fear, which there is no need to denounce to our can it bring Mankind contemporaries, may very well support a kind of order, but never the spontaneous expression of an interior tranquillity. Not until the social order becomes minds in accord with peace in men's hearts shall we have tranquillity; were all men's then they would know themselves, all wills interiorly unified by love of the supreme good, the absence of internal dissension, unity, order from within, a peace, finally, made of the ordints. But, if each will were in tranquillity born of this order: pax est tranquillitas accord with itself, all wills would be in mutual accord, each would find peace in willing love of what the others will. Then also we should have a true society, based on union one and the same end' (Gilson, E.: The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, English transla2

An

all states

m

m

tion 3

(London 1936, Sheed See

xi,

map

29.

&

Ward),

p. 399).

4

See

xi,

map

37.

UNIVERSAL STATES AS ENDS

8

of the Hellenic World, we find the generation that had witnessed the establishment of the Pax Augusta asserting, in evidently sincere good faith, that the Empire and the City that has built it have been endowed with a common immortality. 1 Tibullus (vivebat circa 54-18 B.C.) sings of the 'aeternae urbis moenia', 2 while Virgil (vivebat 70-19 B.C.) makes his luppiter, speaking of the future Roman scions of Aeneas' race, proclaim: 'His ego nee metas

rerum nee tempora pono:/imperium sine fine dedi.' 3 A soldier-historian may show somewhat greater caution than a philosopher-poet by expressing the same expectation in the form, not of a divine communique, but of a human hope. In recording the adoption of Tiberius by Augustus, Velleius (vivebat circa 19 B.C.-A.D. 31) speaks of a 'spem conceptam 4 perpetuae securitatis aeternitatisque Romani imperil'. An historianafford to be less can and perhaps circumspect, Livy (vivebat propagandist 59 B.C.-A.D. 17) writes with the assurance of Tibullus: 'in aeternum diis auctoribus in aeternum conditam'. 6 But urbe condita'; 5 'urbem Horace, who was both a poet and a sceptic, was doubly audacious in claiming immortality for his own verse and in taking, as his concrete measure of eternity, the repetition, in saecula saeculorum, of the annual round of the religious ritual of the Roman city-state: .

.

Exegi

.

monumentum

acre perennius

Pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens regalique situ

possit diruere aut innumerabilis

annorum series et fuga temporum. non omnis moriar usque ego postera .

.

crescam laude recens scandet

cum

.

:

dum

Capitolium

tacita virgine pontifex. 7

These lines ring ironically in the ears of a Modern Western student of history as he reflects on the unsuccessful rearguard action that was fought by an outgoing Roman Paganism, only four centuries after Horace's day, to induce a Christian Roman Government to reinstate in the Senate House the statue and altar of Victory that had been placed there by Caesar the God' in Horace's lifetime. 8 If some good-natured deity had forewarned Horace, in time, of this not far distant demise of Rome's native religious institutions, we may guess that the poet would '

have heartily thanked his informant and hastily changed his measure of duration. Whether Horace's poetry was, as its author believed it to be, immortal, Time, in A.D. 1952, had still to show; but this etherial creation of an individual genius had already lasted, volitans viva per ora virum, four or five times longer than the rites that are the second term of the poet's unlucky comparison. As a sceptic, the Roman poet Horace finds 'The little rivulet of disbelief which runs counter to the mam stream of popular and which takes the form of a belief in an "allotted span" for the Roman state', is traced from the last century B.C. to the fifth century of the Christian Era by D. A. Malcolm in 'Urbs Aeterna', in The University of Birmingham Historical Journal, vol. in, No. i (1951), PP- 1-152 3 Carmina, Book II, Elegy 5, 11. 24-25. Aeneid, Book I, 11. 278-9. * Velleius Paterculus, C.: Histona Romana, Book II, chap. 103. 1

faith,

s

7

Book IV, chap. Carmina, Book

4,

4-

III,

Ode

xxx,

11.

1-9.

6

Book XXVIII, chap.

8

See V.

vi. 89,

with n.

28, 3.

n.

THE MIRAGE OF IMMORTALITY

9

match in the English historian Gibbon; yet Gibbon, who was in'the triumph of Barspired on the 1 5th October, A.D. 1764, to record barism and Religion* over the Roman Empire by hearing friars singing Vespers in the Temple of luppiter as he sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol nearly 1,772 years after the date of Horace 's death on the of Horace 's i7th November, 8 B.C., no doubt believed in the immortality verse as confidently as the justifiably conceited poet had believed in it his

1

himself.

The same ludicrously inadequate ritual 'yard-stick' that had been taken by Horace as a measure for the duration of his personal literary work was taken by Livy as a measure for the duration of his historical theme the Roman Empire: 'Vestae aedem petitam et aeternos ignes et

in penetrali fatale pignus imperil Romani.' The 'guarantee* of the Roman Empire's survival is the Palladium. 3 In thus read(pignus) archaic religious rite, Livy modern his political symbolism into an ing was perhaps taking a cue from his Imperial patron, and Augustus a cue from his Imperial predecessors on the throne of an earlier universal state which had failed after all to discover the elixir of life. According to an eminent authority, 4 the interpretation of Vesta's undying flame as a 2

conditum

symbol of the eternity of an oecumenical ruler was a Roman adaptation of an Achaemenian idea 5 that was adopted by Augustus when, in 12 B.C., he became Pontifex Maximus and consecrated a new temple of Vesta in his house on the Palatine. Augustus's successors, from the Antonines onwards, gave publicity to this idea by making it their practice to have Vesta's

6 carried in procession in front of them. the century and a quarter that elapsed between the death of in A.D. 14 and the accession of Pius in A.D. 138, the concept of

fire

During Augustus

the eternity of Rome and the Roman Empire had been cherished by two bad emperors who both had met their deserts by coming to untimely aeternitate imperii personal ends. Nero had instituted games 'quos pro 7 The Ada Fratrum Arvalium voluit'. maximos susceptos appellari [ludos]

8 record *aeterni[tati imperi vaccam]' among the proceedings of A.D. 66, and vota si custodieris aeternitatem imperii quod [suscijpiendo ampliavit 9 and 90. (Domitianus)' under the years A.D. 86, 87, In the Age of the Antonines we find a Greek man of letters expressing the Augustan belief in the more delicate form of a prayer, without a Summer* and was praying that suspicion that he was living in an 'Indian '

1

2

See IV iv. 59-60 and XIII. x. 103 and 104. Book XXVI, chap. 27, 14- Cp. Book V, chap.

42,

7-

See Cicero: Pro Scauro, chap, xxin, 48: 'Palladium illud quod quasi pignus nostrae salutis atque imperi custodns Vestae contmetur' Philippicae, Speech xi, ch. x, de caelo delapsum quo salvo salvi sumus futun', quoted by 24signum Malcolm, D. A.: 'Urbs Aeterna', in The University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 3

;

*

.

No. i Cumont,

vol. in, above See p. 171, n. 2, above. i vol. (Berlin and Leipzig 1930, See Franke, O. Geschichte des Chtnesischen Retches,

On

,

7

,

:

:

c,,. vo,. c,t

,

p. ,58.

IS I

'i


212

but in locating his seat of government at the western end of the little plain of the Lower Wei. Ch'ang Ngan, where Han Liu Pang laid out his new capital, lay near the right bank of the Wei just opposite the devastated site of Hsien Yang on the farther side of the river. This avatar of the capital of Ts'in remained the capital of the Han Empire for the duration of the Prior Han Dynasty (imperabant 202 B.C.A.D. 9). When, however, after the interregnum arising from the usurpation of Wang Mang (dominabatur A.D. 9-23), l the Empire was reinstated

by the Posterior Han Dynasty (imperabant A.D. 25-221), the seat of government was transferred by them from Ch'ang Ngan in the Lower Wei Valley, just 'within the passes', to Loyang, just outside the passes, on the western verge of the Great Eastern Plain, in the lower valley of the River Lo, which was the next right-bank tributary of the Yellow River below the Wei. 2 This site, just within the plain that was the heart of the Sinic World, was already historic ground by the time when the Posterior Han decided to plant their capital there. the Han regime that was

The transfer of the seat of government made in A.D. 25 had been anticipated

of in

when the Chou Dynasty had evacuated their previous capital within the passes' at Tsung Chou (a few miles to the south-west of the subsequent site of Ch'ang Ngan) after it had been sacked in 771 B.C. by barbarian raiders from the west, and had taken refuge at Loyang, which had previously been no more than a secondary seat of theirs. 4 Moreover, before the Chou had established this at first subsidiary 770

3

B.C.,

*

i

3

2 See II. 11. See V. vi. 295. 119. See Hirth, F. The Ancient History of China (New York 1908, Columbia University .

Press), p. 176. 4

The

political sequels of these two coincident government of the Smic World were not the same

shifts in the location of the seat of made in A.D. 25, the transfer

When

of the capital gave the Han regime a new lease of life; when made in 770 B c., it resulted in the Chou Dynasty's becoming row faineants* who lingered on, in a miniature imperial domain and with merely ceremonial functions, till they were snuffed out by Ts'in She Hwang-ti's grandfather Kung Chao Hsiang of Ts'in in 256-249 B.C. The histories of the Chou and Ts'in dynasties had, however, run almost exactly parallel in an earlier chapter, and, even in the last chapter, the two denouements resembled one another in being, both of them, ironic. Either dynasty had started its career as a western outpost of the Smic World in the moved their seat of upper reaches of the Wei Basin. Both of them had subsequently T ei (Chou perhaps in 1150 B.C., government down into the little plain of the Lo\\er Ts'in after 770 B.C.). Both had then broken out of their western march-state 'within the T orld on the Great Eastern Plain passes' and had conquered the heart of the Smic Ts'in She Hwang-ti's overthrow of Ts'm's six eastern rivals in 230-221 B.C. had its Ch6u overthrow of the precedent Wang's Shang (alias Yin) Power on the Great Eastern Plain at some date, not precisely determmable, between 1122 B.C. (the traditional dating) and about 1050 B c In the next chapter the two histories diverged The Chou Dynasty attempted to organize the government of its eastern conquests by devolution on feudal lines, and thereby reduced itself, by stages, to impotence the first shock was suffered by the Chou Power in 841 B.C the second in 771-7708.0 and the end came in 249 B c. Warned (we may guess) by the miscarriage of the Chou Dynasty's policy, Ts'in She Hwang-ti sought to confirm his hold on his eastern conquests by a policy of extreme Gleichschaltung and centralization, and thereby defeated his own personal and dynastic ends by provoking a violent reaction which extinguished the Ts'in Power for ever within three vears of the First Ts'in Emperor's death. Thanks, however, to the genius of Han Liu Pang and to the hardly less notable statesmanship of the founder of the Posterior Han Dynasty, Kwang Wuti, Ts'in She Hwang-ti's empire and system of government lasted, in a modified and on that account more practically effective form, for nearly four hundred years from Ts'in She Hwang-ti's death in 210 B.C to the decay of the Posterior Han Power towards the close of the second century of the Christian Era (see II. 11. 118-19).

W

W

m

.

Wu

.

,

,

CAPITAL CITIES

213

western seat of theirs at Loyang, the neighbourhood had already been a focus of political power. A site a few miles farther down the course of the Lo River, not far from its junction with the Yellow River, had been one of the successive capitals of the Shang (alias Yin) Dynasty, which had ruled in the Great Eastern Plain before the Chou had descended from 'the Country within the Passes' and had brought this 1 Shang regime to an end. In the history of the main body of the Far Eastern Society that was episode of the transfer of a seat of government from the little western plain in the Wei Basin to the Great Eastern Plain repeated itself after the evocation of a ghost of the Sinic universal state by the Sui Dynasty. 2 The Sui, and the T'ang after them, located the capital of a politically united China at Si Ngan (the latter3 day Sian-fu), on a site adjoining that of Ch'ang Ngan; and the capital affiliated to the Sinic Civilization, this

of this resuscitation of the Ts'in and Han Empire remained at this spot as long as the Sui and T'ang dynasties endured (imperabant A.D. 589907). But, after an interregnum following the decay of the T'ang Power that had set in before the close of the ninth century of the Christian Era, the reunion of all but a fraction of the former dominions of the T'ang 4 by the Sung Dynasty in A.D. 960 was accompanied by an eastward shift in the seat of government 5 along the historic west-east axis. This time, Loyang was not the beneficiary; under the Sung regime she did not re-emerge from the secondary position that she had occupied under the 6 T'ang. The Sung laid out their capital more than a hundred miles farther to the east, at Kaifcng, in the middle of the Great Eastern Plain,

and not on

The

its

western verge.

course of empire in the Yellow River Basin had had a parallel in

of writing, archaeological discoveries had confirmed the Sinic literary by producing independent evidence for the existence of the Shang culture authenti(see xi, map 25) on the Great Eastern Plain m the second millennium B.C. (The of the Shang, still recity of the Hsia Dynasty, which was the traditional precursor mained to he proved ) The capital of the Shang Po\\er was traditionally recorded to have lam in the Lower Lo Valley from 1386 to 1198 B.C. During the last phase of the Shang to have regime, traditionally dated 1 198-1 122 B.C., the seat of government was recorded lam farther to the north-east, at Mo (see xi, map 25), on the mam northern arm of the Low er Yellow River itself After the overthrow of the^Shang Empire, the dynasty survived as hereditary princes of the parochial state of Sung (see xi, map 25) to the east of Loyang in the upper basin of the Huai River During the Sinic Time of Troubles that resulted from the decay of the Chou Power, Sung was one of those little states in the centre of the Sinic World which were the stakes in the contest for hegemony between the great states on the fringes. 2 For this achievement of the Sui Dynasty, and its prolongation by their successors the T'ang, see II. 11. 120, pp. 19-21, above; and X. ix. 16. 3 See II. 11. 120. * Though inconsiderable in area compared with the total extent of the mam body of to the Far Eastern World, this fragment of former T'ang territory which the Sung failed and historically important The remcorporate into the reunited empire was strategically and Wall Great the within n. II. 121) lay just sixteen districts of which it consisted (see 1

By the time

tradition

of the included the site of the future imperial city of Peking at the northern extremity Great Eastern Plain. The Khitan Nomad barbarians, to whom this fragment of territory for this site chose had been ceded, circa A.D. 927-3?, during the post-T'ang interregnum, the capital of their their southern residence and thus prepared the way for it to become of their dominions southsuccessors the Km, after these had shifted the centre of gravity the Yellow River Basin from the Sung in A.D. 1124-42 (see V. vi. ward bv3 conquering M s See II. n. loc. cit. ^ 6 At the time of writing, Loyang was serving, under the name of Honan-fu, as the of Northern China. local centre of administration of the central province


214

the Nile Valley below the First Cataract. 1 In Egyptiac as in Sinic and Far Eastern history, political unity was conferred or imposed on the society no less than three times over by a march-state starting from a base of operations up-river; 2 and in Egyptiac history likewise the aggrandisement of a march into a universal state was followed on each occasion by a shift in the location of the seat of government from the former parochial capital of the empire-building marchmen to a new site nearer to the heart of the domain of the politically unified society. The foundation, circa 3100 B.C., of a united kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt was achieved by empire-builders from the extreme south of the Egyptiac World of the day, in the neighbourhood of the modern Al-Kab, 3 between Thebes and the First Cataract. The political union, from this base of operations, of the whole of the Lower Nile Basin between the First Cataract and the Mediterranean was immediately followed by a northward shift of the seat of power. The Hieraconpolite empire-builders established their imperial residence at Thinis, and their necropolis at Abydos on the opposite bank of the Nile, down-stream from their ancestral canton; and the de facto centre of imperial administration

seems soon

to

have moved on

still

farther

down-stream

to

Memphis.

4

Thereafter, this ideally convenient site, at the point of junction between the mouth of the Nile Valley and the head of the Delta, remained the seat of government of 'the Old Kingdom* to the end. The de facto capital of its spring-time became the de jure capital of its summer, when the Thinites were followed by the pyramid-builders of the Third and Fourth 5 Dynasties; and, when summer passed over into autumn, Memphis was the place from which the demonic pyramid-builders' pious Heliopolitan successors attempted to exert their gradually diminishing

still

6

authority.

After the Time of Troubles following 'the Old Kingdom's' collapse, the establishment, circa 2052 B.C., of an Egyptiac universal state by a prince of the southern march-state of Thebes was similarly followed, in the reign of the Emperor Amenemhat I (imperabat circa 19911962 B.C.), by a transfer of the capital of 'the Middle Empire' from Thebes to a site, only a few miles up-stream from Memphis, which its founder named 'the Conqueror of the Two Lands' (Egyptiace 'Iz7 Taui'). Though Thebes was slightly less remote than Al-Kab had been This parallel has been pointed out, in another connexion, in II. 11. 118. See I. i. 140, n. 2, and II n 112-13. nucleus of the 'nome* (canton) which was the original domain of these Horusworshippmg empire-builders consisted of a pair of cities facing one another across the Nile: Necheb (Graced 'Eileithuia') on the site of the modern Al-Kab on the east bank of the Nile, and Nechen (Graect 'Hierac6npohs', in allusion to the hawk ('hierax') which was both the heraldic emblem of the city and the symbol of its god Horus) on the west bank). (See Hall, H. R.: The Ancient History of the Near East (London 1911, Methuen), 93-94; Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i, Part II, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and gPerlm 1913, Cotta), pp. 80 and in). * See Hall, op. cit., pp. 108-9; Meyer, op. cit., vol. cit., ed. cit., p. 134. s See Meyer, ibid., p. 169. 6 It is significant that, whereas the Thinites were buried at Abydos, far up the Nile Valley though not so far as Al-Kab, the Hehopohtans as well as the pyramid-builders chose the neighbourhood of Memphis for the site of their sepulchres (see ibid. pp. 132 and 202-3). 7 See ibid., p. 267. 1

2 3

The

CAPITAL CITIES

215

from the heart of the Egyptiac World, the gravitational pull of the body social which Theban prowess had reunited proved once again so strong that Thebes on this occasion, like Al-Kab before her, had to pay for her political achievement by ceasing to be the seat of government of the oecumenical polity which she had called into existence. When, however, after an abortive interregnum, the Egyptiac universal state was restored circa 1570 B.C. by another prince of Thebes, as a result of his triumph in a holy war of liberation against the hated alien Hyksos conquerors of Lower Egypt, the power and prestige of Thebes stood so high that this time she was able to resist successfully, for more than two hundred 2 years, the gravitational pull which made itself felt again now that the Egyptiac World was for the third time politically united. 1

'[The] structure of "the New Empire" presents a very peculiar picture the seat of government lies far away from the geographical centre in the southernmost part of the [Egyptiac] Civilization's domain, 700 kilometres above Memphis and only 200 kilometres below the frontier at the First Cataract, as the Nile flows [and not as the crow flies]. This makes the impression of a defiance of the conditions set by Nature. ... In terms of the Kingdom of Prussia, 3 it is as though the seat of government had lain at The distortion is not appreciably Konigsberg [instead of at Berlin]. abated by the fact that Nubia has now once again been incorporated into the permanent domain of the empire. This unnaturalness of "the New Empire's" structure bears striking testimony to the truth that the [Eighteenth] Dynasty's hereditary dominions were, and continued to be, the source of the dynasty's strength.' 4 :

.

.

.

In this instance, Nature proved unable to reassert herself till a man came to her aid. Applying his revolutionary philosophy consistently, as he did, to every side of life, the Emperor Ikhnaton (imperabat circa 1380-1362 B.C.) 5 not only deposed the god Amon-Re of Thebes from his established primacy in the Egyptiac pantheon in favour of an etherialized sun-disk; he also transferred his capital from Thebes to Tall-al-'Amarnah, about half-way, as the Nile flows, from Thebes to Memphis. Ikhnaton, like Ts'in She Hwang-ti and Akbar, defeated his own ends by going to extremes that provoked an overwhelming reaction. 6 What can a solitary philosopher-king achieve against the cumulative momentum of a cultural tradition ? Ikhnaton's Tell-el-Amarna suffered the fate of Akbar's Fatihpur Sikri. Yet Ikhnaton's discomfiture did not enable Thebes to recapture her geographically unnatural prerogative of for a united Egyptiac World. serving as the seat of imperial government de facto circa 1349-1319 B.C.) a still united Under Horemheb of genius

(imperabat

from Egyptiac World was ruled once again

its

geographical centre at

that this was about the length of time for * See p. 176, above. It is worth noticing 'within which, in a Smic World politically united under the Han regime, Ch'ang Ngan the passes' succeeded in resisting the gravitational pull on the seat of government which Eastern Great the of on the verge eventually caused the capital to travel to Loyang, 3

19

Presumably the writer

is

1866thinking of Prussia within the frontiers of A.D.

Berlin 4 Meyer* E Geschichte des Altertums, vol. ii, Part I, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart and 5 Or, on another reckoning, circa 1370-1352 B.C. 1928, Cotta), p. 60. 6 See I. 1/145-6 and V. v. 695-6.


216

the victory of the interior over the marches was had been long-delayed. In the next chapter of Egyptiac history the seat of imperial government was prised out, split, and polarized by pressures of unequal magnitude from beyond the frontiers. Two major pressures from the north-east and the north-west drew the principal capital away into the Delta, while a secondary capital arose at Napata, near the foot of the Fourth Cataract, which, under 'the New Empire', had superseded Thebes and Al-Kab as the southern bulwark of an Egyptiac World that had now expanded southward to take

Memphis but this time ;

as short-lived as

it

in Nubia. 1

In Hellenic history the fortunes of Rome are reminiscent of those of Egyptiac Thebes. Rome had won her spurs by taking over from the Etruscans the wardenship of the Italian marches of the Hellenic World over against the Gauls, 2 as Thebes had won hers by taking over from Al-Kab the wardenship of the First Cataract of the Nile over against the barbarians of Nubia. Like Thebes, again, Rome had afterwards turned her arms inwards and imposed political unity on the society of which she was a member. At the same time the geographical location of Rome in the empire which she eventually gathered round her was so much more central than that of Thebes in either 'the Middle Empire* or 'the New Empire* that Rome might have been expected to

Roman imperial government as long as the Roman The Roman Empire was, in geographical terms, a PanMediterranean 'thalassocracy', and Rome's own situation at the midremain the

Empire

seat of the

lasted.

point of the west coast of Italy, on the banks of a river which was navigable up to Rome by the sea-going vessels of the day, was not far from being the geographically ideal site for the capital of an empire embracing all the shores of the Mediterranean and holding this ring of continental provinces together by a network of maritime communications. 3 As a Greek man of letters, writing in the age of the Antonines, expressed it in an invocation to Rome and the Romans,

'The sea stretches in a belt across the middle of the Inhabited World and across the middle of your empire and round the sea the continents extend "grand and grandly" continually supplying your needs with consignments of their products.' 4 ;

Nevertheless,

Rome,

like

Thebes, did eventually lose her imperial pre-

2 See II. n. 161. See II. 11. 113-15. In a Pan-Mediterranean 'thalassocracy' the ideal seat of imperial government, corresponding to Memphis in the fluvial Egyptiac World, would be one or other of two sites in Sicily Messina and Marsala which command respectively the narrower and the wider of the two straits through which the south-eastern and the north-western basins of the Mediterranean communicate with one another. The despots who imposed an imperfect and precarious political unity on the Greek city-states in Sicily and the toe of Italy in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (see III. in. 357, n. i) had never possessed a sufficient surplus of power to enable them to unite the whole Hellenic World, not to speak of the whole circumference of the Mediterranean, round a Sicilian political centre. Syracuse was the capital of a Mediterranean thalassocracy for the first and last time during the residence there of the Roman Emperor Constans II in the years A.D. 663/4-8 (see IV. iv. 330-1 and 589-91). * Aristeides, P. Aehus: In Romam, 10-11 (Aeht Aristidis Quae Supersunt Omnia, edidit B. Keil (Berlin 1898, Weidmann, 2 vols.), vol. n, p. 94), quoted on p. 81, n. 2, above. i

3

CAPITAL CITIES

217

rogative of serving as the seat of government for an empire which she herself had created. While Rome lay not far from the centre of the Mediterranean Basin, she was by no means so centrally situated from the standpoint of an Hellenic World of which she was ostensibly the mistress but in the last resort the servant. The Hellenic Civilization had grown up round the shores, not of the Mediterranean, but of the Aegean, which was a northeastern bay of the larger sea that, for the Romans, was mare nostrum and, though, by the time when the Roman Empire was established, ;

Continental European Greece had lost its former military, political, and economic pre-eminence, the Hellenic and Hellenized provinces of the Empire in Anatolia and Syria were gaining steadily in population and wealth, while Italy, which had conquered the Mediterranean Basin largely in virtue of her then abundant man-power, began, under the Pax Augusta, to fall into the same decline as Greece. Accordingly, under the Roman Empire, though Greek influence continued to radiate into Italy, and Rome herself became for a time a predominantly Greek-speaking 2 city, the centre of gravity of the Hellenic World travelled away from 1

the Aegean Basin, not north-westward towards Rome, but south-eastward towards Antioch and Alexandria. At the same time the centre of gravity of the Empire which was a hollow ring of land encircling the Mediterranean was travelling northwards owing to the doubling of the thickness of this ring on its northern side through the annexation of Britain, Gallia Comata, the Danubian provinces, and Cappadocia between the years 58 B.C. and A.D. 84. These two gradual but persistent displacements of the Empire's economic and social centre of gravity were already exerting a gravitational pull upon the imperial seat of government when, in the third

century of the Christian Era, their effect was suddenly and violently accentuated by pressures from beyond the frontiers: a pressure on the Euphrates from the aggressive Sasanian Power that had replaced the Danube from semilethargic Arsacidae; a pressure on the Lower nomadicized North European barbarian intruders on the Great Western 3 Bay of the Eurasian Steppe and a pressure on the Rhine and on the ;

Rhine-Danube limes from local sedentary barbarians who had made themselves more formidable neighbours by learning something of the Roman arts of war and of state-building. Through the play of these divers social forces the seat of government of the Roman Empire, like 'New Empire', was prised up, split, and polarized.

that of the Egyptiac

1 This decay of Italy can be traced back to the social effects of the devastation of the Appennines, produced by the Hannibahc War (see I. i. 40), and, in Italy south these effects had already become alarming by the generation of Tiberius Gracchus

of Peninsular Italy was, however, (tnbunatumplebis gercbat 131 B.C.). The depopulation counterbalanced at that stage by the colonization of the Po Basin, and, largely on this

~~ ^ iî un ijunauiu 11. A A I*, v^v4i *wwt>, vv _ / ir of a truth which is attested, tor quoted already in V. v. 67) is merely an exaggeration Rome Father Hippolytus, who lived example, by the extant works of the Christian and wrote in Greek in the third century of the Christian Era. 3 See III. in. 399 and 426-8. .

.

m


218

In this case the principal capital was drawn away eastward from the banks of the Tiber to the shores of the Bosphorus. Diocletian was governing the Empire from Nicomedia, at the point where the road from the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus leaves the sea behind and plunges into the interior of Anatolia, when he gave the signal, in A.D. 303, for the launching of an oecumenical campaign to extirpate the Christian Church. Constantine laid out his New Rome on the European shore of the Bosphorus, on the site of the Greek city of Byzantium, 1 in A.D. 324. Simultaneously a secondary capital likewise detached itself from Rome and then travelled, not eastward, but north-westward lingering at Milan and coming to a halt at Trier. 2

Of all the sites open for consideration by any ruler of the Roman Empire who had once shaken himself free from a traditional inhibition against moving the capital from Rome herself, a site on or near the Bosphorus offered the greatest combination of political advantages in the social and strategic circumstances of Diocletian's and Constantine 's day. In a city with a harbour opening on to the narrow seas through which the Black Sea communicated with the Aegean, the imperial

government would find itself within easier reach of the original heart of a maritime Hellenic World. At the same time it would find itself posted midway between the two frontiers the Lower Danube and the Middle Euphrates which in that age headed the list of its military anxieties, while at its doors, in Thrace and Illyricum, would lie the main reservoir of military man-power from which the Empire was now recruiting its armies. The cumulative weight of these considerations was decisive, and a secondary capital in the basin of the Po or the Moselle was necessary merely for looking after those economically backward ex-barbarian provinces in the far west, from Britain to Morocco inclusive, which could not be directly controlled by way of either the searoutes or the land-routes that radiated out from Constantinople. At the turn of the third and fourth centuries of the Christian Era the transfer of the principal capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople or to some maritime city in that neighbourhood was, in fact, inevitable. But it is remarkable to find evidence that, more than three hundred years earlier, when Rome was towering at the zenith of her power under the auspices of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the Romans were already anxiously foreboding a shift in the seat of the imperial government, and were expecting that the Roman dictator with whom the decision of Rome's destinies now lay would choose his new site in that very region on or near the shores of the waterway between the Aegean and the Black Sea which did in fact eventually attract the choice of Diocletian and Constantine. One of the causes of the unpopularity that gave Julius Caesar's enemies at Rome their opportunity for compassing his death was said to have been a rumour that he was proposing 'to migrate to Alexandria [Troas] or Ilium and at the same time to transfer thither the empire's 1 The navigational advantages which had previously made Byzantium a key-point in the Hellenic system of maritime communications have been examined in II. it. 41-48. *

2

See

II.

^

ii.

164.

CAPITAL CITIES

219

resources after exhausting Italy by levies of man-power and leaving friends of his own as his agents for administering the city of Rome'. 1 This anecdote might have been discounted as an echo of a malicious propaganda campaign were it not for a revelation of the same anxiety 2 in a celebrated passage in one of Horace 's odes. The Augustan poet must have written these lines not many years after the Battle of Actium had disposed of the Egyptian Alexandria's attempt to challenge, with Roman arms, Rome's title to be the imperial capital of a politically unified Hellenic World. At that moment 3 Rome stood in solitary omnipotence without any rival to dispute her primacy and Augustus, who had at last succeeded in winning the support of a consensus Italiae by defeating Mark Antony's attempt to transfer the seat of government of the Mediterranean World to the Levant, could not readily be suspected, without substantial evidence, of planning to make on his own initiative a move which had proved a fatal false step for his rival and a damaging insinuation against his predecessor. One of the fundamental principles of Augustus's policy was to steer clear of his adoptive father's fate by ;

eschewing provocatively revolutionary acts and pursuing Caesarean aims by Fabian tactics. Yet it is plain that Horace, writing when and as he did, believed a transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to some site on the Asiatic shore of the Hellespont to be both a serious a possibility and a dangerous subject. Horace tactfully misrepresents cold-blooded 'geopolitical calculation as a pious tribute to the legendary derivation of Rome from Troy, and, after cautiously expressing his disapproval in the form of a mythological conceit, he precipitately breaks off with an apology for trespassing on high matters of state in a mere 1

poet's jeu 3 the .

secured one 1

See X.

2

On

ix.

may

.

.

undertake to change

customs.

27-34.

p. 265, above.

Hanng, C. H. The Spanish Empire in America (New York Press), p. no. 3

:

1947, Oxford University


284

But the indigenous customs that were incorporated into Spanish colonial law on the strength of such considerations as those set forth by Matienzo 'had to do, naturally enough, with the life of the lower orders of society: the regulation of labour, the succession and the privileges of native chiefs, Indian village organisation, agricultural practices, etc. Basically people in the Indies, especially in the domain of private law, lived accord1 ing to the same judicial criteria as in Spain.' .

.

.

.

.

.

Law into the Customary Law of the Empire's Teutonic Barbarian Conquerors In the more usual situation in which the aggressors who have snatched the sceptre out of the hands of the rulers of a universal state are not the representatives of some alien civilization, but are barbarians, we should expect a priori to see the governments of the barbarian successor-states take over much more of the juristic heritage of a former oecumenical Power which has eventually succumbed to force of barbarian arms without having lost its cultural prestige in barbarian eyes. We have, indeed, noticed already 2 that in the Teutonic barbarian successor-states of the Roman Empire the new masters were ready to allow their Roman subjects to continue to live under Roman Civil Law. On the other hand the barbarians' impulse to maintain a distinctive communal culture of their own in the alien social environment in which they have placed themselves through their conquests is apt to declare itself in the field of law, as well as in the fields of religion and poetry in which we have studied it in another context. 3 The extant collections of the laws of divers Teutonic war-bands on ex-Roman ground gave a latter-day student the impression that these barbarians wanted to accommodate themselves to their new social enThe Infusion of a Decadent Roman

Roman

vironment with

as little

change in their own traditional

life

as local

circumstances might allow. The most archaic of these collections was the Prankish Lex Salica 4 but the same imperviousness to Roman influence was displayed in the rather more sophisticated provisions of the other law-books which had been put into their final form at a later date for instance, the laws of the Ripuarian Franks, the Alamanni, the Bavarians, the Frisians, the Lombard conquerors of Italy, and the English conquerors of Britain. The backbone of these laws consisted of such utterly un- Roman institutions as ordeal by battle and the atonement for crimes of violence by the payment of compensation to the injured party or his ;

:

heirs. 5 This contrast in character between the sophisticated Roman Law of a moribund Hellenic World and the archaic barbarian law of the Teutonic war-bands who had settled on the Roman Empire's derelict provinces had its counterpart in a corresponding contrast between the Sumerian Law, as mirrored in Hammurabi's Code, and the law of the 2 On Haring, op. cit., loc. cit. pp. 280-1, above. See V. v. 194-337, passim. * See the aperfu of it in Dill, Sir Samuel Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), pp. 43-62. s An illuminating survey and analysis of the history of this institution among the Teutonic barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire and their successors is given by Phillpotts, B. S. Kindred and Clan (Cambridge 1913, University Press). 1

3

:

:

LAW Hittite barbarians

who had settled on The difference in the

285

moribund Sumeric World's spirit of the law was here twoa

Anatolian fringes. fold. From one point of view the Hittite Law gave the impression of being more advanced than the Sumerian; for, whereas in Hammurabi's Code the punishments prescribed were savage and, in particular, the lex talionis was worked out to forbiddingly pedantic extremes, 1 the Hittite law substituted fines for Hammurabi's sentences of death or mutilation as the penalty for a number of offences. 2 From another point of view, however, the Hittite Law represented a regression; for, in dealing with crimes against persons, it substituted a tariff of wergeld for the punishments, to be imposed and exacted by the state, that had been 3 prescribed for the same crimes by Hammurabi. What were the prospects of life for these barbarian systems of law on the alien ground of a decadent civilization whose domain the barbarians had overrun? The Hittite Law, in the redaction in which it happened to have been disinterred by twentieth-century Western archaeologists, dated from the later days of the second phase of Hittite history, for which the Carolingian Age of Western history would be the Frankish equivalent both in cultural terms of the contemporary state of society and in chronological terms of the passage of time since the emergence of a nascent new civilization out of a cultural interregnum. 4 Here we have an historical example of a law of barbarian origin successfully providing for the needs of a civilization in the first chapter of its history. Beyond this point, however, Hittite history does not carry us for, not long after the date at which the Hittite Code was promulgated in the redaction that had been unearthed, the homeland of the Hittite Society in Eastern Anatolia was overwhelmed by a barbarian Volkerwanderung from the Balkan Peninsula and the Aegean which had been set in motion by the catastrophic dissolution of the neighbouring Minoan Society, and thereafter the Hittite Civilization lingered on only in refugee communities, beyond the Taurus in Northern Syria and overseas along the ;

The

M

it was applied are set out in Smith, J. P. The Origin and (Chicago 1931, University of Chicago Press), p. 24, n. 2. 2 See Hrozny, B. Die Alteste Geschichte Vorderasiens undlndiens (Prague 1 943, Melantrich), pp. 114 and 167, Gotze, A.: Hethtter, Churriter und Assyrer (Oslo 1936, Aschehoug), pp. 64-65; Delaporte, L. Les Hittites (Pans 1936, La Renaissance du Livre), 1

articles in

History of Hebrew

which

:

Law :

:

P 2Ti. 3 See Cavaignac, E. Le Probleme Hittite (Pans 1936, Leroux), p. 105. The institution of wergeld thus turns out to be a common feature of Teutonic and Hittite barbarian law. 'The idea of settling conflicts by a money indemnity is not peculiar to the Germans. It is found among other peoples and is of a high antiquity. We come across it already, fourteen centuries before the beginning of our Era, among the Hittites of Asia Minor' (Lot, F. Les Invasions Germamques (Pans 1935, Payot), p. 166). 4 This Hittite law, as latter-day Western students had it, was a code drafted in the language of the Power that had exercised political hegemony over the Hittite World from the sixteenth century B C. onwards. It was written in the Akkadian cuneiform script on two clay tablets, containing one hundred paragraphs each, which were discovered on the site of the Hittite Empire's capital, Boghazqal'eh, in A.D. 1906-7. This redaction dated from the fifteenth century B.C. according to Hrozny, op. cit., pp. 166-7; from the thirteenth century according to Cavaignac, op. cit., p. 105. According to Delaporte, op. of which the second was made in the cit., p. 214, there were three successive redactions, fifteenth or fourteenth century B.C. English translations of the disinterred text will be found in Smith, J. M. P. The Origin and History of Hebrew Law (Chicago 1931, University of Chicago Press), pp. 247-74, and in Pritchard, J. B. Ancient Near Eastern Texts :

:

:

(Princeton 1950, University Press), pp. 188-97.


286

Italy, which were eventually absorbed by the Syriac and the Hellenic Society respectively. 1 It was as if, in the ninth century of the Christian Era, the collapse of the Carolingian Empire had resulted in the destruction of the nascent Western Christian Civilization at the hands of Scandinavian, Eurasian Nomad, and Muslim Arab invaders. If we are to follow the fortunes of barbarian law in a growing civilization farther than this point, we must turn from Hittite to Western history, where we find the law of the English barbarian settlers on ex- Roman ground in Britain succeeding, without any deliberate or systematic 2 'reception' of Roman law at any stage, in developing sufficiently, out of its own resources, to be able to provide for the needs of a civilization that has arrived at a high degree of social sophistication and economic

west coast of

complexity.

This unique ability of the English Common Law to keep pace with the growth of the Western Civilization could be explained as the effect of three distinct causes. In the first place, at the time of the post-Hellenic Volkerwanderung, the barbarian law of the English invaders of Britain was largely relieved of such hampering archaic institutions as wergeld thanks to the exceptionally rapid disintegration of the kin-group organization of society in a migration across the sea. 3 In the second place the ex-Roman population did not, in Britain, survive under barbarian rule as a distinct community, continuing to live under its own Roman law, as it survived in the Continental Teutonic successor-states of the Roman Empire. In Britain the provincials were exterminated, expelled, or assimilated by the English settlers. In the third place, at the opening of the second chapter of Western history towards the close of the eleventh century of the Christian Era the English law was carried forward and, above all, was effectively enforced, thanks to the exceptionally strong and efficient monarchy that was imposed on a politically united England by a Norman conquest. The survival of the English Common Law, however, was an exception that proved a rule; for the ancestral law of the other Teutonic barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire failed to stay the course. In all other cases we find Roman influence seeping in

from an

early date.

To

begin with, the earliest versions of all the Teutonic law-books, with the significant exception of the English, were drafted in Latin and, when we turn our attention from this point of form to matters of substance, we catch glimpses of Teutonic custom fighting a stubborn rearguard action against the moral pressure of Roman concepts and Christian ;

standards. The comparatively enlightened King Liutprand of the ultrabarbarian Lombards declares frankly, in a law promulgated in A.D. 731, 163 years after the Lombards' eruption into the comparatively highly cultivated social environment of Italy, that ordeal by battle is a Lombard iii. 139; IV. iv. 109; V. v. 88; and IX. vin. 438-9. to say that 'the Law' of England remained impervious to the influence of Roman Law after this influence had become prevalent in Western Christendom as a whole in consequence of the Justmianean juristic renaissance at Bologna in the eleventh century of the Christian Era (see X. ix. 31-34). 3 this point, see the passage quoted from Phillpotts, op. cit., pp. 25765, in the present Study, II. n. 90-91. 1

2

See I. i. 114-15; III. This is not, of course,

On

Common

LAW custom which

it is

his

power

the judgment of God lost their case through' this practice. 1

Burgundians had mellowed under

hundred years of 'There

is

287

to ban, though he is 'uncertain of * and* has heard that many litigants have unjustly

beyond

On

Roman

the other hand the genial influence within less than a

their crossing the Rhine.

hardly a trace of

German

ideas or institutions in the legisla-

Gundobad. 2 He has no resemblance to the old German chief, surrounded by his assembled warriors. His type and model is the political authority wielded by the Emperor or the great Praetorian Prefects. ... In

tion of

Law pecuniary compensation is almost universal other punishare almost unheard of. In Burgundy, besides the pecuniary sanction, there are many and various punishments for crime, some of them

the Salian

:

ments

even harsh and

cruel. This,

however,

it

has been observed, does not prove

a less civilised social tone, but rather the reverse. 3 The Burgundian legislator, in fact, is striving to abolish the vindictiveness of private conflicts by making the state the avenger of personal wrongs/ 4

The Burgundian Liber Constitutionum marked a radical departure from archaic Teutonic law not only in its character but in its application for, while the Lex Salica and other Teutonic law-books of that type were ;

merely communal prescriptions for the exclusive use of an intrusive barbarian war-band, Gundobad and Sigismund were enacting, as we have observed already, a 'common law' for their barbarian Burgundian followers and their Roman subjects. The Edictum Theodorici, 5 which was promulgated in the Ostrogothic dominions at about the same date, either circa A.D. 500 or circa A.D. 5ii-i5, 6 was a 'common law' in the same sense of applying alike to Theodoric's Ostrogoth followers and to

the

Roman

population under his rule and in this case the scales already ;

incline heavily in the Romans' favour. The contents of this barbarian war-lord's edict are drawn from Roman sources the Theodosian Code and the Sententiae of Paulus and the Ostrogoth masters of Italy are

referred to as 'barbarians' throughout the document. It is even more remarkable that the Visigothic Breviarium Aland, which was promulgated within a few years of Theodoric's Edictum and Gundobad 's Liber Constitutionum and was compiled, from the same sources as Theodoric's work, avowedly for the benefit of the Visigoths' Roman subjects, declares in its preamble that its prescriptions apply to 'both Romans and barbarians'. 7

The promulgation of these three codes of 'common law' by Teutonic war-lords on ex-Roman ground at the opening of the sixth century of 1 Liutprandi Leges, cxvin: 'Incerti sumus de iudicio Dei, et multos audivimus per pugnam sine msticiam [stc] causam suam perdere, sed, propter consuetudmem gentis nostrae Langobardorum, legem ipsam mutare non possumus.'

2 i.e. in his 'common law' for Burgundians and Romans (see p. 281, above). His version of Roman Civil Law for the use of his Roman subjects among themselves is not in question here. A.J.T. 3 Compare the corresponding contrast between the salutary severity of Hammurabi s Code and the inexpedient laxity of the Hittite Code, to which attention has been drawn 4 Dill, above. op. cit., p. 66. A.J.T. s See Hodgkin, T. Italy and Her Invaders, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1892-9, Clarendon Press, 8 vols), vol. in, pp. 276-7 and 309-14. 6 See Collmet, P. 'The General Problems raised by the Codification of Justinian', in Tijdschnft voor Rerhtsgeschiedems, vol. iv (Haarlem 1923, Tjeenk Willmk), pp. 6-7. ? Burns, C. Dehsle: The First Europe (London 1947, Allen & Unwm), pp. 329-30. :

:


288

the Christian Era was only the beginning of the transfusion of Roman law into the body of Teutonic custom. In the unstable social situation produced by the establishment of barbarian rule over Roman populations, legislation could not stand still. The rulers of the Teutonic barbarian successor-states followed the example of their Imperial

Roman

predecessors, from the Emperor Hadrian onwards, by issuing a spate of decrees ; and these decrees, in their turn, were inevitably coloured by the legal traditions of their Roman social The classic setting.

example

the corpus of rescripts, issued in Theodoric's name, which were largely drafted, besides being collected and published, by the Ostrogoth war-lord's Roman minister Cassiodorus. The Ostrogothic regime in is

Italy, however, met with an early violent end at Roman hands, and the Iberian Peninsula under Visigothic rule was the place where the natural course of events had time to work itself out before the Visigothic Power was overthrown, in its turn, by the more competent rival hands of the Visigoths' fellow barbarian invaders the Primitive Muslim Arabs.

The Visigothic King Receswinth (regnabat A.D. 649-72) restored to the former Roman territories under his rule the uniformity of law that they had enjoyed from the time of Caracalla until the Visigothic conquest. In A.D. 654 he put out of commission the Breviarium of his predecessor Alaric II (regnabat A.D. 484-507) and gave sole force of law to a code 1 compiling the decisions of the Visigothic Kings from Euric

down

to

Receswinth himself.

'These decisions are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Roman Law. Where else [in the field of Teutonic barbarian legislation] can one find anything comparable to Book I [of Receswinth's Forum], entitled De Legislatore, De Lege, in which an effort is made to formulate general .

.

.

principles of legislation

The end many

as

?'

2

of the story was the blending of Roman with Teutonic law in 4 different mixtures 3 as there were local customary laws in

Medieval Western Christendom. 5

The Infusion of a Decadent Roman Law into the Islamic Shan' ah This infusion of Roman Law into the custom of Teutonic barbarians who had no future was, however, neither so important an event nor so striking a feat as its surreptitious and unavowed yet unmistakable infiltration into the Islamic law of the Arab barbarian conquerors of other ex-Roman territories. The two elements that blended here were even more incongruous, and the result of their blending was the creation, not 1 Known under the alternative names of Liber ludicum and Forum ludiciorum, and eventually translated into Castihan as the Fuero Juezgo. 2 Lot, F. Lei Invasions Germamques (Pans 1935, Payot), pp. 182-3. 3 The close resemblance of medieval Spanish customary law to Scandinavian law leads Lot (op. cit., p. 183) to surmise that, in the Visigothic dominions, an unwritten Gothic customary law survived both the Bremanum Alanci and Receswinth's Forum ludiciorum. In France, this diversity of local customary laws survived even the effective political unification of the kingdom and was only ironed out by the legislation of the 'iconoclastic assemblies' convened by the Revolution. 5 The contributions of Roman Law on the one side and Teutonic Law on the other are set out by Lot, op. cit., pp. 245-7. :

4-

mam

LAW

289

just of a parochial law for a barbarian successor-state of the Roman Empire, but of an oecumenical law which was to serve the needs of a restored Syriac universal state and, after surviving the break-up of this political framework, was to govern and mould the life of an Islamic Society that, after the fall of the Caliphate, was to continue to expand until, at the time of writing, its domain had come to extend from Indonesia to Lithuania and from South Africa to China. Unlike their pagan and Arian Teutonic counterparts, the Primitive Muslim Arabs had been roughly shaken out of their archaic traditional way of life before they administered to themselves the additional shock of a sudden change of social environment by bursting out of the deserts and oases of Arabia into the fields and cities of the Roman and Sasanian empires. long-continuing radiation of Syriac and Hellenic cultural influences into Arabia had produced a cumulative social effect which had declared itself dramatically in the personal career of the Prophet

A

his achievements had been so astonishing and his personality so potent that his oracles and acts, as recorded in the Qur'an and the Traditions, were unquestioningly accepted by his followers as the source of law for regulating, not only the life of the Muslim community itself, but the relations between the Muslim conquerors and

Muhammad; and 1

their at first

many

times more numerous non-Muslim subjects.

The

speed and sweep of the Muslim conquests which brought half of what remained of the Roman Empire and the whole of the Sasanian Empire under the rule of Muhammad's successors within less than twenty years of the Prophet's death conspired with the irrationality of the accepted basis of the Muslim empire-builders' new-laid law to create a problem

which was hardly more awkward for the non-Muslim population of the Caliphate than it was for their Muslim masters; for, even when the Qur'an was eked out by the Traditions, the task of wringing out of these unpromising materials an oecumenical law for a sophisticated society was as preposterous as the demands for welling water in the wilderness that the Children of Israel were said to have addressed to Moses. 2 For a jurist in search of legal pabulum for sustaining social life, the Qur'an was indeed stony ground. The chapters dating from the nonpolitical Meccan period of Muhammad's mission, before the Hijrah, offered far less matter for the practical jurist than he would find in the New Testament; for this literary legacy of the politically disinterested first phase of the Prophet's career contained little beyond a patently sincere and monotonously reiterated declaration of the unity of God and denunciation of the moral and intellectual error of polytheism and

chapters afterwards delivered at Medina might look, at for at the Hijrah Muhammad achieved in his own lifetime a position that was not attained by any follower of Jesus 3 till the fourth century of the Christian Era he became the head of a idolatry.

The

first sight,

more promising

;

;

his utterances during this Medinese period were mainly concerned with public business. Yet it would be at least as difficult to elicit state,

and

1

See

3

The

and

B

III.

iii.

2

276-7.

difference between the respective political environments in Islam came to birth has been noticed in III. ni. 466-72. 2600

vn

L

Exod.

xvii. 1-7.

which Christianity

2$o


a comprehensive system of law for a sophisticated society from the Medinese surahs, unsupplemented, as it would be to perform the same the Epistles of Saint Paul. Like the apostlejuristic conjuring trick with missionary, the apostle-podesta found that the flurry of improvising provisional solutions, ad hoc, for a ceaseless succession of emergencies, serious or trivial, 1 left him no breathing-space for attempting to sort out these stray sibylline leaves into anything like a comprehensive or systematic code. Yet, even if Muhammad had succeeded, where Paul had failed, in performing this superhuman labour, the result would have been of less practical use to the Arabian prophet's successors than a Pauline code would have been to the Christian Roman Emperors for the private business of religious congregations in important cities of the Roman Empire in Paul's day actually had more in common with the public business of the Roman Empire in the fourth century of the Christian Era than had the public business of the agricultural, non-commercial, oasis-state of Medina under Muhammad's rule during the years A.D. 622-32 with the public business of the universal state, embracing all but a fraction of the Syriac World, of which Muhammad's thirtythird successor Mu'tamid found himself master upon his accession in ;

A.D. 870.*

In these compelling circumstances the men of action who built the let theory take its chance and resorted to self-help. In a legal no-man's-land where the oracles of the Qur'an were dumb and where even the beaten track (Sunnah) of concordant Tradition faded out, they found their way through by the aid of common sense, analogy, 3 consensus, and custom.

Arab Caliphate

'In the oldest period of the development of Islam the authorities entrusted with the administration of justice and the conduct of the religious life had in most cases to fall back on the exercise of their own ra'y (commonsense personal judgment) owing to the scarcity of legislative material in the Qur'an and the dearth of ancient precedents. This was regarded as a matter of course by everyone. Corresponding to this recognition of ra'y as an approved source of law are the instructions ascribed to the Prophet and the early Caliphs, which they gave to the officials sent to administer justice in the conquered provinces. ... In the digests which were developed from these simple origins we find deduction from decisions in allied cases expressly mentioned, i.e. the application of analogy (qiyds) as a methodical adjustment of equity (ra'y). 'We have there is evidence for it at a very early period a kind of popular element adopted among the constitutive sources for the deduction .

.

.

.

.

.

Muhammad's personal legislation in the Medinese The Early Development of Mohammedanism (London 1914, Williams & Norgate), pp. 5 and 12. 'It has been noticed that the word which we ordinarily render "reveal", and which literally means "send down", is properly applied to royal rescripts; the suppliant "raises" a petition and the sovereign "sends down the reply. The faithful at Medmah used to await fresh revelations each day somewhat as we in these days are on the look out for the morning paper.' 2 i.e. three hundred years after the birth of Muhammad in A D. 570. 3 'It is likely that [Muhammad] meant current practice to continue except where his had legislation abrogated it* (Margohouth, op. cit., p. 66). To begin with, the custom which counted for most was that of the Arabian oasis-dwellers and Nomads whose conquests re-established a Syriac universal state. The custom which eventually prevailed was that of the Arab empire-builders' converted subjects. 1 For these characteristics of surahs, see Margoliouth, D. S.:

'

LAW

291

of laws the conception of consensus (ijma), i.e. the general usage of the community which has been established by agreement in the larger circles of believers independent of the written, traditional or inferred law. 'It was quite natural, from the changed conditions after the conquests, that the formation of the law, not only in its special provisions, but particularly in the point of view they adopted in their method of deductive :

.

.

.

operation as laid down in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), was greatly influenced by what the authorities on the development of law in Syria and Mesopotamia were able to learn of Roman Law, sometimes of the special laws for the particular provinces. It was obvious that a quite uncultured people, coming from a land in a primitive stage of social development into countries with an ancient civilization where they established themselves as rulers, would adopt from among their new surroundings as much of the customary law of the conquered lands as could be fitted in with the conditions created by the conquest and be compatible with the demands of new The comparative study of one chapter of private law religious ideas. has yielded the most conclusive proofs of the thorough-going adoption of Roman Law, however, does not Roman Law by the jurists of Islam. 1 exhaust the sources drawn upon in the development of Muslim Law. The receptive character that marks the formation and development of Islam also found- expression, naturally first of all in matters of ritual, in borrow2 ings from Jewish Law. According to [von] Kremer, even many of the provisions of Roman Law that have been adopted by Islam only found a 3 place in fiqh through the intermediary of the Jews.' .

.

.

.

The Mosaic Law's Debt murabi

.

.

to the Codification

of the Sumeric

Law

by

Ham-

This Jewish Law, which had so long a history behind it already by the time of Muhammad's hijrah from Mecca to Medina, had originated, like the Islamic SharVah, as the barbarian customary practice of Nomads who had broken out of the steppes of Northern Arabia into the fields and cities of Syria; and, for meeting the same emergency of an abrupt and extreme change of social environment, the primitive Israelites, like the Primitive Muslim Arabs, had recourse to the existing law of a sophisticated society which they found in operation in the Promised Land. While the Decalogue at any rate in a pristine form, in which all the Commandments were couched in the lapidary style still preserved in the 4 would appear, on the face of it, to be a Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth native Hebrew product, the next piece of Israelite legislation, known to scholars as 'the Covenant Code', 5 betrays 1

Schmidt, F. F.

:

its

debt to the Code of

Ham-

Die Occupatio im Islamischen Recht, reprinted from Der Islam,

i

(btrassburg 1910).

Kremer, A. von: Culturgeschichte des Orients (Vienna 1875-7, Braumuller, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 535; English translation by Khuda Bukhsh, S.: The Orient under the Caliphs (Calcutta 1920, University Press), chap, vm, 'The Origin and Development of Muslim Law', Section 6, 'The Sources of Muslim Law'. The influence of local Medmese Jewish jurisprudence on the early school of Islamic jurisprudence at Medina is emphasized by Margoliouth, op. cit., p. 74: 'There is no evidence that Roman Law penetrated into this primitive city.' 3 Goldziher, I., in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. n (London 1927, Luzac), s.v. Fikh, quoted with the permission of the publishers. * A conjectural reconstruction of the whole Decalogue in this presumably original style will be found in Smith, J. M. P.: The Origin and History of Hebrew Law (Chicago 1931, University of Chicago Press), pp. 6-7. s The Covenant Code 'exists in two forms: one very short, viz. Exodus xxxiv, 17-26; 2

292


murabi more patently than the Shan* ah reveals to a Syrian

Roman

its

corresponding debt

law-book.

'It has been calculated that, out of forty-five, or possibly fifty-five, judgments preserved in this old Hebrew Law, thirty-five have points of contact with the Hammurabi Code, and quite half are parallel.' 1

This masterful influx of a code of Sumerian Law into legislation enacted at least nine centuries later in one of the local communities of a latter-day Syriac Society testified to the depth and tenacity of the roots which the Sumeric Civilization had struck in Syrian soil during the millennium ending in Hammurabi's generation. A First Syriac Civilization, affiliated to the Sumeric, had miscarried as a result of the insatiable aggressiveness of the Hyksos barbarians, who, not content with carving out for themselves a successor-state in the Syrian provinces of the Empire of Sumer and Akkad, had driven on into the Egyptiac World and had thereby eventually brought down upon Syria an Egyptiac counter-invasion. 2 On the political plane, Syria had been included, for

two centuries, in a reinstituted Egyptiac universal state and thereafter been partitioned, for two further centuries, between this Egyptiac Power and a rival Hittite Empire. On the cultural plane the subject Syrian

down to the reign of the Egyptiac Emperor Ikhnaton (imperabat circa 1380-1362 B.C.), to employ as their medium of literary expression the Akkadian language, conveyed in the cuneiform characters according to the Akkadian usage, had experimented in working out an Alphabet for the conveyance of their native Canaanite speech, and, after testing the adaptability of the cuneiform characters for alphabetic use, 3 had discarded them in favour of the notation possibly of Minoan origin which they immortalized by creating the historic Alphapeoples, while continuing,

the other more extended, viz. Exodus xx, 23 xxin, 33. This code is incorporated in two of the documents which compose the Hexateuch Exodus xxxiv, 17-26, in the J docuand Exodus the E document. These two documents arose in ment, xx, 23 xxin, 33, in the latter part of the ninth century or the early part of the eighth century B.C., J being probably a half-century or so older than E' (Smith, op. cit., p. 15). 1 Johns, C. H. W. The Relations between the Laws of Babylonia and the Laws of the Hebrew Peoples (London 1914, Milford), p. 49. In the third of the three lectures composthis book, the writer takes up the question whether the indubitable and, indeed, ing striking points of similarity between Hammurabi's Code and the Covenant Code are to be accounted for as products of a uniformity of Human Nature, in virtue of which we find different individuals or communities independently making similar responses to similar challenges, or whether these particular similarities are to be traced to a process of diffusion through which the Covenant Code has borrowed from Hammurabi's Code or both have borrowed from some common source. Johns' conclusion is that most of the matter which the Covenant Code shares with Hammurabi's Code has been borrowed by the Covenant Code from the earlier of the two compilations. He argues from the similarity, down to arbitrary details, of the provisions in the two codes concerning (i) debt slavery (Johns, op. cit., pp. 56-60; cp. pp. 39-46) and (11) the prescription of the penalty of burning alive for two particular offences (op. cit., pp. 60-6 1), and from the grouping of the laws, in both codes, in sets of fives and tens (op. cit., pp. 26-27 an d 61). Thus, in Johns' view, Sumerian Law, as finally codified by Hammurabi, is the main common element in the two codes. He does, however, allow for a subsidiary common element in the shape of a primitive customary law of the Semite Nomads of Arabia which may have been imported independently by Hammurabi's Amonte ancestors into Shmar and by the Hebrews, in their turn, into Palestine, and have been injected, in both cases, by the Nomad conquerors into the existing law of the conquered sedentary population (op. cit., 2 See II. 11. 388-91. pp. vi-vii, 28, and 32-33). 3 In this experiment, they were anticipating the work of the creator of the MedoPersian cuneiform Alphabet, which was invented to all appearance, quite independently about a thousand years later (see p. 247, above). :

:

CALENDARS

293

Finally, the Syrians had struck out for themselves, in all departments of life, a new civilization of their own which was affiliated to the Minoan, and not to either the Sumeric or the Egyptiac. Yet the

bet out of

Israelite

it.

Covenant Code

is

evidence that, through

all

these political and

cultural revolutions in Syria, the Sumerian Law, as embodied in murabi's Code, had remained in force among the descendants of

HamHam-

murabi's Syrian subjects and this in such vigour as to impress itself imperiously upon the callow legislation of the Canaanites' Hebrew barbarian conquerors. 1 In thus entering into the law of barbarians who happened, exceptionally, to be incubators of a higher religion, the Sumerian Law, like the Roman Law, made a greater mark on history than when it was influencing barbarians whose destiny was the usual inglorious exit of their kind. At the time of writing, the Sumerian Law was still a living force in virtue solely of its Mosaic offprint. On the other hand, the Islamic Short* ah was neither the sole nor the liveliest living carrier 2 of the Roman Law at the same date. In the twentieth century of the Christian Era the chief direct heirs of the Roman Law were the canons of the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Christian Churches. In the domain of law, as in other fields of social action, the master institution created by the internal proletariat was the universal state's principal beneficiary.

3.

Calendars; Weights and Measures;

Money

The Concern of Governments with Standard Measures Generally accepted and effectively operative standard measures of time, distance, length, volume, weight, and value are necessities of social life at any level above the most primitive. They are needed not only by manufacturers, stock-breeders, and agriculturists, but by hunters of the higher type that does not simply wait passively for game to turn up, but pursues a strategy dependent on ability to forecast and anticipate its 1 The Covenant Code was a selection from the Code of Hammurabi. 'There are 282 laws in the Code of Hammurabi, and only 50 in the Covenant Code' (Smith, op. cit., p. 1 8); and the selection had been made to suit the requirements of a much more backward society than that for which Hammurabi was legislating. 'The provisions in the case of each law in Hammurabi's Code are much more detailed and elaborate and presuppose a much greater experience with the practices of an advanced social and economic order* seem that wages for service were higher in Hammurabi's (ibid., p. 1 8). 'It would day than when the Covenant Code was drawn up' (ibid., p. 19). The legislation in the Covenant Hammurabi's Code on the subject of runaway slaves has no counterpart Code as we have it (ibid., p. 29). 'The Code of Hammurabi is much the more severe of the two and uses the penalty of capital punishment to a much greater extent' (ibid., p. 20), but, as we have seen in comparing the Hittite Code with Hammurabi's and the Teutonic barbarian laws with Roman Law, the absence of severe penalties may be evidence, not of humane feeling, but merely of impotence, on the legislator's part. Moreover, the law concerning the working off of debt by the enslavement of the debtor or members of his household to the creditor is less harsh in Hammurabi's Code than in the Covenant Code. Hammurabi's Code frees male and female debt-slaves alike after three years' service; the Covenant Code exacts six years' service from males and enslavement for life (with certain reservations and exceptions) from females (ibid., pp. 18-19). The Israelite laws prescribing the punishments for divers unnatural forms of sexual practice are likewise harsher than the corresponding provisions in the Hittite Code (see the comparative table in Cavaignac, E.: Le ProbUme Hittite (Pans 1936, Leroux), .

.

.

m

p. 109, n. i). 2 The continuous carriers of an institution are, of course, to be distinguished from reconverted renegades who have adopted the same institution de novo in a 'renaissance ',


294

movements and behaviour. Social currencies of these kinds are older perhaps far older than governments and they become matters of concern to governments as soon as these come into existence in their turn. The positive raison d'etre of governments is to provide central leadership for common social enterprises, and common entervictims'

;

political

measures. Again, the negative prises cannot be operated without standard raison d'etre of governments is to ensure at least a modicum of justice in the private relations between their subjects, and, in most private issues of a 'business' kind, standard measures of

some

sort are involved.

While

governments thus find themselves implicated ab initio in the maintenance and enforcement of standard measures as one of their essential functions which they cannot afford to neglect, they also eventually discover that the administration of these institutions for example, of the calendar can be turned to at one end of the scale and of a coinage at the other account by them incidentally for the secondary purpose of moving their public in the direction of their policy. In these various ways, standard measures concern governments of of every species but they are of particular concern to the governments universal states for two reasons. In the first place, such governments start life as parvenus who have to take active steps to win the obedience, and loyalty of subjects whom they have taken over, without ;

respect,

have consulting their wishes, from the former parochial states that they overthrown and replaced by force. In the second place, universal states, by their very nature, are confronted with the problem of holding toareas of territory gether far greater numbers of subjects and far wider than any single one of their parochial predecessors and for this reason, the social unity and uniformity that again, they have a special interest in standard measures promote when effectively enforced. ;

Calendrical Cycles Of all the standard measures here in question, a standard system of registering time is the earliest felt and the most persistently imperative need and the first necessity here is a measurement of the seasons of the ;

which continues, even in technically advanced societies, to be the indispensable basis of Man's unceasing struggle to win a livelihood from Non-Human Nature. But the problem of measuring the seasons soon carries the pioneer chronometrist into calculations of vastly within which the longer aeons of Time than the single year-period seasons revolve. The measurement of the seasons requires a harmoniza-

year-cycle,

1

tion of the three different natural cycles of the year, the month, and the are not day; the discovery that the ratios between these three cycles i At first sight it might look as if Man's primeval servitude to the seasons had been thrown off in a Modern Western factory in which the temperature and atmosphere were 'conditioned' by artificial regulation and in which the machinery was worked by shifts of of operatives for 24 hours in the day and for 365 days in the year. But this appearance successfully contracting out of the tyranny of Nature was, of course, an illusion. Factories Modern were fed by raw materials, and factory-workers by food, and in a Westernizing World, no less than in the Higher Palaeolithic Society, the ultimate constituents of both food and raw materials had to be wrested from Nature. Moreover, this continuing war with Nature was still being waged, even in this technologically precocious society, by such 'higher hunters' as the trawler and the whaler, as well as by their younger brothers the husbandman and the shepherd.

CALENDARS

295

simple fractions but surds leads a would-be harmonizer into thinking in terms of vaster cycles the products, not of observation, but of reasoning in which the elusive correspondences between the beginnings or between the ends of days, months, and years are found, by a mathematical computation, to recur after a formidably long lapse of time and, when the habit of reckoning with these ampler periods leads the budding astronomer to take into his account the real or apparent cyclic movements of the planets and the fixed* stars, besides those of the Sun, Moon, and Earth, the chronological horizon recedes to a distance which is not easy to express and is still less easy to imagine narrow- verged though it may seem to a latter-day cosmogonist in whose eyes our particular solar system is no more than one speck of star-dust in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself no more than one ci-devant nebula out of myriads of nebulae on their way from a flaming birth towards a deathly incineration. Short of this latest stage in the mental exploration of chronological magnitudes, the least common measure' of the recurrent coincidences between the apparent movements of the Sun and those of a single one of the fixed stars' had generated the Egyptiac 'Sothic Cycle* of 1,460 1 years, and a recurrent common cycle of the Sun, the Moon, and five 2 3 planets the Babylonic Magnus Annus of 432,000 years, while, in the ;

*

*

*

1 These 1,460 years were 'Sothic' years' i.e. years reckoned from heliacal rising to heliacal rising of the star Sothis (Sinus), its heliacal rising being the first occasion in the year on which the star is visible above the horizon before dawn. Throughout the life-span of the Egyptiac Civilization the Sothic-year was virtually coincident in length with the Julian year of 365^ days, whereas the Egyptiac official year was a conventional one of 365 days. Thus a period of 1,460 Sothic years was exactly equal to a period of 1,461 official Year's Day of the years, and in the course of a i,46o-years-long Sothic cycle the official year would travel right round the Sothic year-clock. The mathematical device of controlling the palpably inaccurate conventional year by relating it to the much more nearly accurate Sothic year must have been inaugurated in or been based retrospectively Year's Day of the official year actually coincided with on some year in which the the heliacal rising of Sinus. In the latitude of Memphis in the fifth and fourth millennia B.C. this astronomical event occurred on the igth July of the Julian Calendar, which in a date approximate that age corresponded to the isth June of the Gregorian Calendar the to the Summer Solstice and also to the beginning of the annual rising of the Nile Lower Nile Valley and the Delta. It seems a fairly safe guess that, at the time when the official year of 365 days was first put into commission, it was set to begin on a date which was of such paramount importance for the whole life of the Egyptiac World. The Egyptiac official year did actually open on the igth July of the Julian Calendar in each of the four-year periods A.D. 140/1-143/4, 1321/1320-1318/1317 B.C., 2781/2780-

New

New

m

c., and 4241/4240-4238/4237 BC Since the Egyptiac Calendar, with its Sothic correction, is known to have been in use at both the two first-mentioned of these dates, the inaugural year or retrospectively calculated starting-point must fall within one or other of the two last-mentioned four-year periods. Eduard Meyer opts for the earlier of the two alternatives, i.e. 4241/4240 4238/4237 B.C., on the ground that, by the time of the Old Kingdom, the Calendar was already a long since established instiGeschichte des Altertums, vol. i, Part II, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and tution (see Meyer, E Berlin 1913, Cotta), pp. 28-30). 2 See IV. iv. 23-24 and 37, and V. v. 56-57. 'Quarum [stellarum] ex dispanbus motiombus magnum annum mathematici nommaverunt, qui turn efficitur cum Sohs et Lunae et quinque errantium ad eandem inter se comparationem confectis omnium spatns est facta conversio. Quae quam longa sit, magna quaestio est, esse vero certam et defimtam necesse est' (Cicero: De Natura Deorum, Book II, chap. 20). 'Homines populariter annum tantummodo Sohs, id est unius astri, reditu metiuntur, cum autem ad idem, unde semel profecta sunt, cuncta astra redierint, eandemque totius anni descriptionem longis mtervallis retulermt, turn ille vere vertens annus appellan potest in quo vix dicere audeo quam multa saecula hommum teneantur* = De Repubhca, Book VI, chap. 22, in Cardinal (Cicero: Sommum Sctptoms, chap. 7 Angelo Mai's edition (Rome 1823, Mawman)). that was traditional in the Babylonic school 3 This the estimate appears to have been

2778/2777 B

.

.

.

.

296


stupendous

Mayan Grand Cycle

distinct constituent cycles

of 374,440 years, no less than ten

were geared together. 1

Governmental Methods of Keeping Count of Time Governments, like astronomers, find themselves concerned with computations of terms of years, as well as with the seasonal articulation of the recurrent year-cycle. Their interest in the seasonal calendar is obvious, for it is the key not only to the livelihood of their subjects, for which governments are held responsible in the last resort, but also to their own ability to command the resources without which they cannot

perform a government's recognized functions. Even in a technically advanced and highly industrialized state of society the parochial governments of a Westernized World in the year A.D. 1952 were having their policies dictated to them by the results of the last harvest and the prospects of the next one and in simpler states of society this domination of weather over policy had made itself felt a fortiori. Governments had not been able to mobilize and maintain armies without a sufficient surplus of food stocks with which to feed them, and they had been constrained to time their military campaigns to coincide with the slack season of the agricultural year (whichever of the seasons this might happen to be in the particular climate in which their dominions were situate and under ;

the particular system of agricultural production that was practised there).

In a state of society in which a money economy is either unknown or government even of a sedentary agricultural community may have to make an annual round of seasonal else only partially operative, the

migrations to draw on food-supplies which, under the technological conditions of the time and place, are less mobile than even august have already taken note of the Achaemenian Court's human bodies. of its time between three different imperial residistribution regular dences. 2 The Merovingian Frankish rulers of the most barbarous of the Continental Teutonic successor-states of the Roman Empire in one of the most backward of the Empire's former territories used to roam from one estate to another of their royal domain in order to browse on the fat of the land. Where the government has been of Nomad origin and has brought with it, out of 'the desert' into 'the sown', a war-band of

We

Nomad empire-builders who persist, in partibus agricolarum, in following their ancestral way of life, this migratory dance of attendance on the of astronomers (see Cumont, F. Les Religions Orientates dans le Paganisme Romain, 4th ed. (Pans 1929, Geuthner), pp. 164 and 289). Macrobius, in his commentary on the Somntum Scipioms, II. u, rushing in where Cicero had feared to tread, ventures on an estimate of his own in which he reckons the span of the Magnus Annus at 15,000 solar years, and Cicero himself had proposed a figure of 12,954 years in his Hortensius (inaccessible in A.D. 1952), according to Tacitus in his Dtalogus de Oratonbus, chap. 16. Cicero's and Macrobius's shots fell much nearer the mark than their Babylonic predecessors' conscientious calculations, if the true figure is 25,817 solar years (see Pickman, E. M.: The Mind of Latin Christendom (London 1937, Oxford University Press), p. 119). 1 See Morley, S. G. The Ancient Maya (Palo Alto, California 1946, Stanford University Press), pp. 262 and 289; Thompson, J. E. S.: Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: Introduction (Washington, D.C., 1950, Carnegie Institution of Washington), pp. 141-56. Like the Egyptiac Sothic Cycle, the Mayan Grand Cycle was a device for correcting the inaccuracy of an official year of 365 days. 2 See pp. 205-6, above. :

:

CALENDARS

297

seasons is, of course, a still more conspicuous feature of public business. Yet even the most primitive and rudimentary government cannot allow its enslavement to a tyrannous annual round to preoccupy its attention to the exclusion of all provision for reckoning in terms exceeding the length of a single year for the first concern of every government is to keep itself in existence the most incompetent government may last for a whole lifetime, and perhaps for a term spanning a number of successive generations; and the most naive administration soon discovers that it cannot remain in business without keeping some permanent record of ;

;

its acts.

For this purpose the gigantic astronomical cycles evolved by the chronometrists were, however, as useless as the miniature calendar of the annual round, since the spans of time to which the continuous acts of even the longest-lived governments had run had, in human history up to date, been of a lesser order of magnitude than even the relatively modest length of the Sothic period. Consequently, governments had had to work out methods of their own for dating events over a series of years.

One of their methods had been based on the distinctiveness of every individual human being and on the personal names in which this diswas expressed. They had taken to dating their acts by the names of magistrates with an annual term of office, such as the Assyrian limmu, the Athenian archdn epdnymus, and the Roman pair of consuls alternatively they had dated them by the series of regnal years tinctive individuality

;

of successive sovereigns ruling (short of accidents) for life. This system of dating does effectively distinguish every year in the count from every other its weakness is that, when the continuous life of the institution ;

employed as the

as a

life

time-measure happens to be prolonged for 1,050 years, Roman consulate was from the reputed date of its

of the

its abolition by the Emperor Justinian in A.D. of a list 541, eponymous magistrates becomes far too long to be retained in the memory with the ease with which it is possible, for example, to learn by heart the twenty-six letters of the Latin Alphabet in their arbitrary sequence and in these circumstances the denotation of a date by the citation of the consuls of the year no longer suffices to call the date to mind without a tiresome search through a list of perhaps a

institution in 509 B.C. to '

;

thousand pairs of names. The reckoning by reigns is ultimately open to the same objection, even when the names of individual sovereigns are grouped together under the names of dynasties, and when each individual reign is articulated, not only into single regnal years but into tax-assessment periods each extending over a number of years (the fifteen-yearly 'indictions' of the Later Roman Empire). The difficulty is not overcome by inventing an artificial cycle of official years with fancy* names, such as the Sinic cycle in which the years are named after animals (real and mythical) and other objects with auspicious associations for, if the cycle is kept within the manageably short compass of '

;

Sec V. vi. in and 224. The life-span of the consulate would have to be reckoned as having been 990 years if we were to take as the initial date the traditional year, not of the inauguration of the institution itself (509 B.C.), but of its first restoration (449 B.C.). 1

B

2669. vil

L2


298

the Latin Alphabet, it will recur so frequently that confusion will arise between one of its occurrences and another, while, if such confusion is to be avoided, this can only be done by drawing out the series towards the unmanageable length which the Roman consular fasti had reached by the year A.D. 541. The only satisfactory way out is to adopt the different method of choosing some particular year as an initial date and reckoning subsequent years from that date onwards in a numerical sequence which can, if necessary, be continued ad infinitum without in any way diminishing the convenience of the system for ready reckoning. 1 The dates chosen as the starting-points for new eras had in some cases been those of events of which the authenticity and the time of occurrence had been established beyond dispute. Classical examples were the eras starting from the Fascist occupation of Rome on the 28th October, 1922; from the establishment of the First French Republic on the 22nd September, 1792; from the Prophet Muhammad's hijrah from Mecca to Medina on the 1 5th July, A.D. 622 2 from the assumption of a formal claim to oecumenical authority in the Indie World by the Gupta Dynasty on the 26th February, A.D. 320; from the definitive establishment of the Seleucid Empire's Hasmonaean successor-state in Judaea in 142 B.C. and from the triumphal re-entry of the founder of the Seleucid Monarchy, Seleucus Nicator, into Babylon in 312 B.C. (an event which, for chronometrical convenience, was retrospectively equated with the ist of the Macedonian month Dius (October) of that year). There were other cases in which eras had been reckoned from events of which the precise date had been disputable. For example, there was no evidence that Jesus had in fact been born in the first year of a Christian Era that did not become current in divers provinces of Western Christendom till divers dates in and after the sixth century from the birth of Christ according to this computation 3 there was likewise no evidence that the city of Rome had in fact been founded in the year 753 B.C. from which later generations of Romans had reckoned their era post urbem conditam\ and the year 776 B.C., which figured as the first year of 'the First Olympiad* quadriennium, was admittedly not the ascertained first year in which the Olympian Festival had been celebrated, but merely the first year in which there was a record of the name of a victor in the games at the chronometrist's disposal for use as an eponym. In the third place there were cases in which eras had been reckoned from an imaginary event in the cosmogonical scheme of some particular school of theology for example, the supposed instantaneous creation of the World by the fiat of a unique and omnipotent personal God, which had been discrepantly dated the 7th October, 3761 B.C., by the Jews, the ist September, 5509 B.C., by the Eastern Orthodox Christians, 4 and ;

;

;

:

1

'New

2

This

have already been discussed, as symptoms of 'Futurism', in V. vi. 339-45. the proper correction for the popular traditional date i6th July, 622. D. S. Margohouth dates the Hijrah the 2oth September, 622 (Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (3rd ed. London 1905, Putnam), p. xx). 3 The traditional Christian Era is said to have been instituted in A D. 525 at Rome, by the Abbot Dionysius Exiguus, at the instance of the Pope. Even within the limits of Western Christendom it did not become generally prevalent till the ninth century. 4 The Eastern Orthodox Christian reckoning by 'Years of the World' appears to have :

eras'

is

CALENDARS

299

on the evening before the 23rd October, 4004 B.C., Old

6.0 p.m.

by the Anglo-Irish chronologist-archbishop Ussher

Style,

(vivebat A.D. 1581-

1

I656).

The

Inability

of

New

Eras

to

establish

themselves without Religious

Sanctions

In the two preceding paragraphs the eras passed in review have been marshalled in a descending order of the cogency of the evidence for the events chosen by their originators for setting their initial dates but, if ;

we now

resurvey these same eras from the standpoint of their relative success or failure in gaining a wide and lasting currency, we shall observe that the talisman by which their destinies had been decided had not been the touchstone of historical attestation, but the presence or absence of a religious sanction. In A.D. 1952 the historically dubious Western Christian Era was in the ascendant in the World on the unexpended strength of its ancient appeal to the former religious sentiment of its once Christian Western disseminators. The Islamic Era of the Hijrah, which was now on the defensive against the Christian Era,

was

still

holding

its

own, in so

far as

it

was succeeding

in doing so, in

living appeal to the surviving religious sentiment of a majority of its hereditary adherents, and not at all in virtue of its being, as it was, as impeccable historically as the Christian Era was vulnerable

virtue of

its

to assaults of the higher criticism. At the same date the Jews were still persistently reckoning by their hallowed version of the date of the

Creation. The vitality that was thus being displayed by the religious eras in A.D. 1952 was thrown into sharp relief by its contrast with the mortality rate of these consecrated eras' unhallowed secular counterparts.

The Era

of the First French Republic had been discarded by Revolutionary France herself in its fourteenth year on the ist January, 1806; the Era of the Italian Fascist Revolution had shared the downfall of Fascism itself; and even the Seleucid and Gupta eras, after remaining in use for centuries, and being adopted or imitated by successive epigoni and supplanters of their originators, had long since fallen out of use. 2 It is also significant that other secular events which, in the minds of contemporaries and Posterity, were no less epoch-making than those not cited above, were never taken as the starting-points of new eras even of new eras that were abortive. Cases in point are the beginning, in May 1703, of the building, at St. Petersburg, of a new capital for Russia that was to be Western from the start; 3 the landfall of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England on the 2ist December, 1620; the arisen at Constantinople in the seventh century of the Christian Era. In Russia, it was abrogated by Peter the Great, in favour of the Western Christian reckoning by 'Years of Our Lord', as from the ist January, 1700 The celebration of New Year's Day thenceforward on the ist January, in lieu of the ist September, was made obligatory (see Bruckner, A.: Peter der Grosse (Berlin 1879, Grote), p. 227). 1 See ix. 178. Bishop Ussher's chronology found its way into the margin of the Church of England's Authorized Version of the Bible. 2 'The tenacity of the Seleucid calendar was remarkable: Doura used it when under Roman rule and Jews down to the eleventh century, and it is said to have still been in use among Syrian Christians at the beginning of the present century' (Tarn, W. W. The

XL

:

Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938, University Press), p. 65). 3 See p. 221, above.


300

opening of a new chapter in Western history towards the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian Era (an event which could have been dramatically symbolized either in the crossing of the Alps by King Charles VIII of France in A.D. 1494, or in da Gama's landfall at Calicut on the 2oth May, 1498, or in Columbus 's landfall on one of the Antilles on the 1 2th October, 1492, or in the publication of the first Western might add to this catalogue the printed book in A.D. 1445-6). beginning, in the year A.D. 324, of the building, at Constantinople, of a new capital for the Roman Empire that was to be Christian from the

We

1

start,

334

and the crossing of the Hellespont by Alexander the Great in

B.C.

Evidently the recognition of the authenticity and the importance of is not enough, in itself, to make such an event eligible for serving as a mark for the measurement of Time. If the historic event is not consecrated by some religious sanction, its intrinsic merits as a starting-point for an era may count in practice for little or nothing. There is indeed a traditional association, which cannot be dissolved with impunity, between the measurement of Time by human intellects and the hold of Religion over human souls, and the ground for this is not difficult to descry. Religion dominates every side of life or aspect of the Universe that is recognized by Man as being out of his control, and in this respect there is a striking contrast between Man's relation to the heavenly bodies whose cyclic movements give him his measures of Time and the divers objects which he subjects to measurements of length, volume, weight, and value. Man has at least an illusion of being master of the flour that he metes out in a man-made vessel after having ground it from grain produced by a harvest that Man himself has sown and reaped he has a still greater sense of mastery over the piece of metal that he strikes into a coin after having smelted it from ore that he has detected in, and extracted from, the bowels of the Earth but the stars in their courses overawe him by their inexorable aloofness, though in truth the astronomer's intellectual mastery over them is a more wonderful achievement than any physical feats of miner, miller, husbandman, or

an event

;

;

metallurgist.

In caeloque deum sedes et templa locarunt, per caelum volvi quia nox et luna videtur luna, dies et

nox

et noctis signa severa,

noctivagaeque faces caeli flammaeque volantes .... nam cum suspicimus magni caelestia mundi templa super stellisque micantibus aethera fixum, et venit in rnentem solis lunaeque viarum, tune aliis oppressa malis in pectora cura ilia quoque expergefactum caput erigere infit, nequae forte deum nobis immensa potestas 2 sit, vario motu quae Candida sidera verset.

So 1

far

from readily

See pp. 218 and 238, above.

nth May, 2

falling into the delusion that

330. Lucretius: De

The

he can

affect the

move-

dedication date of the completed city was the

Rerum Natura, Book V,

11.

1188-91 and 1204-10.

CALENDARS

301

ments of the heavenly bodies, Man has found it difficult to shake off the contrary delusion that these movements influence human destinies.

The persistence of this superstition in the inaccessible subconscious depths of the Psyche, even in societies that had attained a degree of sophistication at which Astrology had been professedly discredited and repudiated, was attested by the rarity of the instances in which a revolutionarily rational reform of the Calendar had succeeded in establishing itself. The French Revolution, whose rationalized codes of Jaw went forth, conquering and to conquer, to the ends of the Earth 1 and

whose pedantically new-fangled weights and measures grammes and kilogrammes and milligrammes, metres and kilometres and millimetres enjoyed a succesfou and ran like wildfire round the globe, was utterly defeated in its attempt to supersede a pagan Roman calendar that had been rejuvenated through being consecrated by the Christian Church, though the substitute which the lucid French Reason offered was the one of a neatly proportioned new series of picturesquely a Brumaire, a Ventose, a Germinal, a Fructidor each cut to a uniform length of thirty days grouped in three ten-day attractive

renamed months

weeks. The batch of five supernumerary days that made up the tale of the ordinary (non-leap) year 'hardly marred the most sensible calendar ever invented too sensible for a country which calls the tenth, eleventh and twelfth months of the year October, November and December'. 2 Yet, while the fantastically erroneous lunar year of an archaic Meccan oasis-state had been adopted, as the calendar of Islam, by hundreds of millions of people over a vast area extending almost from end to end of the Old World, the 'sensible* calendar devised by French votaries of Reason did not manage to outlive its fourteenth year, and the shortness of its life testified that, after all, the French revolutionaries had been less wise in their generation than the Roman conservatives.

The Roman misnomers pointed out by a distinguished Modern Western historian in the passage quoted just above were neither casual nor imbecile but deliberate and sagacious. The six months originally denoted in the Roman calendar by numerals, and not by the names of gods, had not, of course, been wrongly numbered when their names had first been bestowed on them. Originally the Roman official year had begun on the ist March, in the spring of the solar year, and this month had been a convenient starting-point for the annual round of administration and warfare, as well as agriculture, so long as the Roman Government's range of action had extended no farther afield than a few days' march from the Pomoerium; for, under those conditions, an annual magistrate elect who had entered on his term of office on the 1 5th March could still take up the local command, assigned to him by the Senate, in time to take advantage of the spring campaigning season. When, however, in and after the Hannibalic War, the field of Roman military operations expanded out of Italy overseas into the Balkan Peninsula and the still more distant Iberian Peninsula, a magistrate, 1

2

See pp. 271-8, above. J. M.: The French Revolution (Oxford 1943, Blackwell),

Thompson,

p. ix.

302


appointed to one of these distant commands, who had to wait till the 1 5th March before setting out from Rome might find himself unable to

summer was at its height and the autumn was approaching. During the half-century immediately following the end of the Hannibalic War, this hampering loss of the best part of each annual campaigning season, with which the Roman state was threatened now that it had come to be fighting its wars in theatres at a distance of as much as several months' journey from the Italian homes of a Roman peasant soldiery, was at first largely offset by a discrepancy between the Roman official calendar and the actual cycle of the seasons resulting from the Pontifical College's cumulative neglect to keep the official year in step with the solar year by inserting intercalary months of the requisite length at the requisite intervals. For example, in the year 190 B.C., in which a Roman army inflicted a decisive defeat upon a Seleucid army on the Asiatic battlefield of Magnesia, the legions found time to arrive on the threshold of Sardis before the current season was over, because in that year the official I5th March fell on a day that was in reality the i6th November of the preceding solar year, while in the year 168 B.C., in which another Roman army inflicted an equally decisive defeat on a Macedonian army at Pydna, the official i5th March fell on a day that was in reality the 3ist December of the solar year 169 B.C. 1 In these two militarily critical years the campaigning season was thus salvaged for Roman military operations thanks to a calendrical error; but, whether this error had been dictated by military considerations or by superstition, its efficacy diminished as the Roman calendar was progressively brought back nearer to correspondence with the solar year. The additional time now needed for arriving at a theatre of war before the campaigning season would be too far advanced had therefore to be provided by some alternative means and, with this eminently practical consideration in mind, the Roman Government secured the passage of a law providing that, as from the year 153 B.C. onwards, the date on which the annually elected magistrates were to enter on their term of office was to be advanced, by two and a half months, from the I5th March to the ist January, 2 and in consequence January instead of March became the first month of the year. 3 Finding themselves thus constrained by raison d'etat to call upon their get into action before the

;

1 In these two cases the magnitude of the Roman calendar's deviation from the current solar year can be calculated because Livy has recorded the dates of eclipses in terms of the day of the official Roman month (see Douche*- Leclercq, A.* Htstoire des Sdleuctdes (Pans 1913-14, Leroux, 2 vols ), vol. i, p. 205). 2 The original provision in the United States for a four months' interval between the election of a President's electors and the President Elect's assumption of office was made with the similar practical purpose of ensuring that he should have sufficient time to convey himself to Washington by horse-traction from his home state, even if this happened to be Georgia or Hampshire. Within half a century of the year in which the Constitution had been adopted, the invention of steam-traction by railroad had stultified the practical purpose which this provision had originally been designed to serve, but it was not till the 6th February, 1933, that the interval was shortened by 36 days through the coming into force of the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution (see XII. ix. 496). 3 The definitive replacement of the ist March by the ist January as the Roman Year's Day seems to have taken place on the ist January 45 B.C. as part of Julius Caesar's

New

New

reform of the

Roman

Calendar.

CALENDARS

303

public to put up with one shock to its habits and prejudices, the Roman authorities forbore to aggravate an already somewhat vexatious demand upon the Roman People's capacity for adaptation by simultaneously asking them to alter the traditional names of six of their twelve months merely out of respect for a different kind of reason which would have been, not political, but sheerly pedantic. Satisfied with their success in meeting the bare practical need of the day, the Conscript Fathers let the names of the months alone, and more than a century was allowed to pass before two out of the six resultant misnomers were corrected. At length the architects of the Principate took the bold step of renaming the first two of those six months which a Roman poverty of imagination had hitherto left unanimated and unhallowed by the names of gods. The month that was now the seventh, though still called 'the fifth' (Quincwas renamed after Divus lulius, and the following month (pretilis), viously Sextilis) after Divus Augustus. The audacious innovation caught on, and in A.D. 1952 the calendars of both the Orthodox Christian and the Western World were still bearing the superscription of those two Roman statesmen in the month-names 'July* and 'August'. Such currency is indeed apotheosis, if not immortalization; yet, in thus achieving a nomenclatory tour de force that proved beyond the capacity of French revolutionary enthusiasts, the astute authors of the Julian Calendar were exceptionally successful. In the United Kingdom in the supposedly enlightened eighteenth century of the Christian Era, disturbances were caused by an Act of Parliament, passed in A.D. 1751, for replacing the inexact Julian by the virtually perfect Gregorian calendar. This amended calendar had first been introduced by Pope Gregory XIII as far back as A.D. 1582, and in the meantime it had been adopted in most of the leading states of the Western World. But, in the sacrosanct sphere of the Calendar, religious susceptibilities long inhibited English Protestants from embracing a Papistical innovation, even if it were astronomically correct; and, sure enough, when the Act was published, it became suspect of having a catch in it. By the year 1752, in order to bring the current Julian reckoning into line with the Gregorian reckoning when this was substituted for it, it was necessary to drop eleven days out of the calendar year in which the change was being inaugurated. In their superstitious fear of calendrical magic, the British public were impervious to the simple truth that the eleven days which

be dropped were only theoretical days on paper they jumped were being cheated of eleven days' pay, or perhaps even being docked of eleven days of life, and vociferous crowds went about demanding to have their stolen eleven days given back to them.

were

to

to the conclusion that they

;

1

The Conservation of Pagan Calendars by Churches Who had been the beneficiaries of calendars inherited by universal states from a dim religious past and rationalized by them at their peril ? 1 In fact, of course, everyone who was paid by the year or the month stood to gam, while anyone who was paid by the week or the day did not stand to lose, by the omission of eleven days in the month of September, 1752.


304

The marvellously exact, though formidably complex, Mayan calendar was bequeathed by 'the Old Empire* of the Mayas to the Yucatec and Mexic societies that were affiliated to the Mayan Civilization. The Sinic calendar was similarly bequeathed by the Empire of Ts'in and

Han

to the Far Eastern society affiliated to the Sinic Civilization. The Sumerian calendar, after having been bequeathed by 'the Realm of the Four Quarters* to the Babylonic Society affiliated ,to the Sumeric Civilization, and having survived to serve the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenian Empires in their turn, 1 acquired at this stage a new lease of life through being adopted by the Jewish Church that was the endur-

monument of Judah's fifty-years* exile by the waters of Babylon. The Roman calendar was bequeathed by the Roman Empire to the ing

Christian

Church and was transmitted 2 by

this original legatee to in the first place to the Orthodox Christian and societies, and thereby eventually to a number of universal

secondary recipients

Western founded by Orthodox Christian and Western empire-builders: e.g. the Muscovite Empire in the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy the Spanish Empire of the Indies the British Raj in India. By a still stranger caprice of Fortune

states

;

;

;

the archaic lunar calendar of Mecca, thanks to its adoption by Islam and by the Caliphate, became the calendar of the Iranic and Arabic Muslim societies and hence the calendar of the Ottoman Empire and of the Timurid Mughal Empire on Indian ground. This brief survey shows that in the histories of calendars the function most frequently performed by a universal state had been to take over a calendar from a primitive pagan past and to transmit it to a higher religion. In the process of transmission the universal state had some-

times stamped the pagan calendar with its own political imprint; yet, a calendar had been adopted from a universal state by a 'higher religion*, it was apt, notwithstanding the patent evidence of its unhallowed origin, to acquire the sacrosanctity with which the higher

when once

religions had been tempted to invest their casually acquired external accessories as well as their inner spiritual essence ; and a calendar that had received this consecration had to be taken as it had been found by

and universal states of a later generation who had inherited from some higher religion that had incubated them. The accoutrements of a church usually cannot be refurbished by any party except the Church's own recognized supreme authority, whatever that authority may be. In Northumbria in the seventh century of the Christian Era the abandonment of a traditional method of reckoning the date of Easter, which had survived in a Far Western Christendom, in favour of a civilizations

it

1 In the Jewish garrison-community at Elephantine" under the Achaemenian regime, the Babylonian calendar was current officially and the Egyptiac unofficially (Meyer, E. 'Zu den Aramaischen Papyri von Elephantine', in Kon. Preuss. Ak. Wiss., Gesammtsitzung vom 23 November, 19x1: Mitt, vom 26 October, pp. 1040-1). 2 With the important addition of a reckoning by Jewish weeks as well as by Roman months. The Jewish community's original count of weeks from the forgotten initial date at which this had been started was still being kept, in A.D. 1952, in all living communities with a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim background. This was an historically notable common practice of the three religions though Christianity and Islam had taken care to differentiate their practice from the Jews' and from one another's by choosing a different day of the week for their own equivalent of the Jewish Sabbath. :

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

305

novel method which was a Roman innovation, implied a recognition of the Roman Church's supremacy over the churches of 'the Celtic Fringe'. 1 In a Western Catholic Christendom in the sixteenth century of the Christian Era the Julian Calendar work of pagan genius though it was could not have been reformed by any other authority than the Papacy and the act of Pope Gregory XIII was as effective as it was uncharacteristic of the normally conservative ethos of an established universal church. ;

The Defeat of a Duodecimal by a Decimal System of Reckoning When we pass from calendars and eras to weights and measures and money, we enter a province of the field of social currencies in which the rationalizing intellect holds sway uncensored by those religious scruples that had sometimes welled up forcefully from the subconscious depths of the Psyche when Reason had sought to extend her rule over the reckoning of Time. The French Revolutionaries, who suffered such a shattering defeat in their attempt to inaugurate a rational new calendar and new era unfortified their

by an augur's indispensable

religious prestige, scored with success that eclipsed

new weights and measures an oecumenical

even the triumph of the Napoleonic Codes. And a kindred spirit, Ts'in She Hwang-ti, the revolutionary founder of a Sinic universal state, succeeded in imposing the current weights and measures of his own hereditary parochial state of Ts'in upon the conquered remainder of the Sinic World 2 without, apparently, provoking in this case the stultifying reaction by which, in other fields, his work, like that of his French confreres, was so largely undone within a few years of its recklessly

sweeping execution.

Though it is evident that weights and measures are a sphere in which the revolutionary intellect can disport itself with an unusual impunity, a comparison of the respective fortunes of the French and the Sumeric new model metric system suggests that the dazzling success of the French reformers' work was due, above all, to their judicious moderation in setting common-sense bounds to their pursuit of their ideal. They were uncompromising in reducing the bewilderingly variegated tables of the Ancien Regime to one single system of reckoning but they showed their practical good sense in irrationally following for this purpose the ;

inconvenient decimal system which had been unanimously adopted by all branches of the Human Race, neither on its merits nor as the result of some laboriously achieved diplomatic compromise between conflicting better plans, but simply because the normal human being was born with ten fingers and ten toes. It was one of Nature's unkind practical jokes that she had furnished some of the tribes of her vertebrate brute creation with six digits apiece for each of their four limbs without endowing the possessors of this See II. ii. 326, 332, and 335. See Fitzgerald, C. P. China, A Short Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset Press), pp. 136-7; Franke, O. Geschichte des Chinestschen Reiches, vol. i (Berlin and Leipzig 1930, de Gruyter), p. 233. 1

2

:

:

306


admirable natural abacus with the intellectual capacity for mathematical calculation, while she had dealt out to the Genus Homo a niggardly allowance of appendages that added up, not to dozens and double dozens, but only to decades and scores. Given the human anatomy, a decimal notation of Man's mathematical affairs was as inevitable as it was unfortunate. It was unfortunate because, on a decimal count, the basic scale of reckoning is divisible only by the low-powered number Two and the not very useful number Five, while the lowest number divisible alike by all the three key-factors Two, Three, and Four is Twelve. The decimal notation was nevertheless inevitable because, by the time when

any wits in any society had come to appreciate the intrinsic superiority of the number Twelve over the number Ten, the decimal notation had become ineradicably entrenched in practical life, in language, and perhaps even already in written records. The reformers of the French weights and measures forbore to kick against these ten-pronged pricks, but they had Sumerian predecessors who had been less wise in their generation. The Sumerian discovery of the virtues of the number Twelve was a stroke of pure intellectual genius, for there were no obvious sets of twelve articulations on the surface of the human body to guide a pioneer mathematician to the ideal choice for a scale of reckoning. The Sumerians not only saw the advantages of the number Twelve they took the revolutionary step of recasting their system of weights and measures on a duodecimal basis but apparently they did not realize that, unless they could also achieve the further, and far more difficult, step of leading their fellow men to substitute a duodecimal for a decimal basis of reckoning for all purposes, 1 the convenience of acquiring, for the simple purpose of weighing and measuring, a basic scale divisible by both the numbers Three and Four would be far more than offset by the inconvenience of having two incommensurable scales in operation side by side. This hopeless irreconcilability of an ideally convenient Twelve with a practically ineradicable Ten foredoomed an intrinsically superior duodecimal system of weights and measures to ultimate defeat, and assured a whole-hogging decimal system of a rapid victory. In the course of the four thousand years preceding the inauguration of the French decimal metric system the Sumeric duodecimal metric system had spread, notwithstanding its inherent handicap, to the ends of the Earth. Yet this long start in Time and Space did not save it from being almost entirely supplanted by its latter-day decimal competitor within 150 years of this rival system's promulgation. By A.D. 1952 the twelve ounces constituting a troy-weight pound and the twelve pence constituting a shilling in the antediluvian ;

;

Technically the step would be simple enough in a society employing the originally 'Arabic' numerals or any other application of the device of making the numerical value of a figure depend on its relative location in a group. All that would be needed would be the invention of two new figures to represent the numbers Ten and Eleven. The notations 10 and would then be released to stand respectively for Twelve and Thirteen. Twelve would be represented by 10, Twenty-four by 20, One Hundred and and so on The difficulty would he, of course, not in cyphering, but Forty-four by 100, in thinking, duodecimally; for the common cultural tradition of the Human Race the decimal count was so immemonally old a piece of mental furniture that it had come to be virtually a fixture. 1

Hindu

n

m

MONEY

307

metronomy of the United Kingdom were almost monuments of an unpractical stroke of Sumerian

the last surviving genius; and in an obstinately decimal-minded world it could not be maintained that this piously conservative loyalty to a provedly unsuccessful intellectual experiment was anything but a hindrance to the dispatch of business.

The Invention of Coinage

As soon as it has come to be recognized and accepted that honest dealing in weights and measures is a matter of social concern transcending the personal interests of the parties directly involved, and that therefore any government that aspires to be worthy of the name must make the giving of false weight and measure a prosecutable and punishable offence at law, the invention of money lies just round the corner. Yet this corner can only be turned by the taking of certain precise successive steps, and the requisite combination of moves in fact remained unachieved in the history of any society in process of civilization before the seventh century B.C., though by that time the species of societies called civilizations had already been in existence for perhaps as long as three thousand years.

The

first

of giving tion

and

was the invention of the commercially useful expedient

step

some

particular commodity or commodities the special funcstatus of serving as media of exchange and thereby acquiring a

utility. But this step did not, in itself, lead on to the invention of money when the commodities selected as media of exchange were multifarious and not exclusively

secondary use independent of their intrinsic

Mexic and Andean worlds, for example, by the time of the Spanish conquest, the substances known and coveted in the Old World as 'the precious metals' existed in quantities that seemed fabulous to the Spanish conquistadores, and the natives had long since learnt the art of extracting, refining, and working this local gold and silver ; but, though they valued it as material for works of art and ornaments, they had not thought of turning it to account as an exclusive medium of 1 exchange, though they, too, had hit upon this secondary use of commetallic. In the

1 Chronological facts forbid the otherwise almost irresistible conjecture that some report of this Mexic and Andean practice (so strange to the ears of denizens of the Old World) of estimating gold and silver, like any other commodity, at a valuation based on their mere intrinsic utility inspired a famous passage of More's Utopia: Gold and silver . . 'They keep an inestimable treasure, but yet not as a treasure. they do so use as none of them doth more esteem it than the very nature of the thing as without the deserveth. And then who doth not plainly see how far it is under iron which, men can no better live than without fire and water, whereas to gold and silver Nature hath given no use that we may not well lack, if that the folly of men had not set Whereas they eat and drink in earthen it in higher estimation for the rareness' sake. and glass vessels, which indeed be curiously and properly made, and yet be of very small value, of gold and silver they make commonly chamber-pots and other vessels that serve for most vile uses. Furthermore, of the same metals they make great chains, fetters Thus by all means possible they procure and gyves, wherein they tie their bondmen. to have gold and silver among them in reproach and infamy* (More, Sir Thomas: Utopia, English version, Book II. 'Of their Journeying or Travelling Abroad'). Utopia, however, was published before the end of A.D. 1516, and 'it is important to more than one detail had a likeness to remember that the Inca Empire of Peru, which Utopia, was not known till some fourteen years later; Cortes had not yet conquered Mexico* (Chambers, R. W. Thomas More (London 1935, Cape), p. 143). Evidently these dates rule out the possibility that the passage in Utopia, quoted above, could have been inspired by reports of Central American or Andean institutions. It may, however, .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

m

.

.

.


308

modities independently of the Old World and perhaps also independently of one another. In the Mexic World the Spaniards found cacao beans, cotton cloths, T-shaped pieces of copper, and quills stuffed with gold dust circulating 1 in the Andean World they found pimento, dried as media of exchange j

salt, coca, and copper being used for the same purpose. 2 There was also at least one instance in which they found sea-shells being employed in this way, as the cowrie shell likewise was employed round the shores of the Indian Ocean. 3 It will be

fish, cotton,

maize, chuno, birds' feathers,

seen that the civilizations of the New World came near to employing standard units of metal in the fashion which, in the Old World, had led to the invention of money more than two thousand years earlier, while the employment of shells a commodity without any intrinsic value of was an anticipation of that use of paper money which in the its own Old World had already arisen, before the Spaniards' conquest of the 4 Americas, as a sequel to the use of metallic coin. Yet, though the civilizations of the New World thus came within an ace of inventing money, they failed to take the final step, and the verdict of History on their achievements in this sphere is that 'a miss is as good as a mile*. In the commercially interwoven Egyptiac, Babylonic, Syriac, and Hellenic worlds by the date of the invention of money in the Hellenic World in the seventh century B.C., 'the use of the precious metals in bar form as measures of value had been a regular institution for thousands of years past. They circulated, not in the

form of coin minted by a state and guaranteed as legal tender, but as units of weight which passed from hand to hand in established forms such as rings, plaques, ornaments and so on, but which, in the act of payment, had to be verified by being weighed like any other commodity. >s This usage had perhaps become customary in the Sumeric World in the time of

its

universal state

6 ;

but a regular metallic

medium

was the raw material of money without being the thing

of exchange

itself.

have been inspired by reports of already discovered fringes of the Americas where 'the precious metals' were given the same valuation by the inhabitants as in Mexico and Peru whether in consequence of the radiation of one or other or both of these indigenous civilizations of the New World, or because even the more backward among the 'native* peoples had arrived independently, by the light of Nature, at the same common-sense valuation of gold and silver as their more progressive neighbours. 'We can only underthe travels of stand Utopia if we remember the Europe for which it was written Vespucci in every man's hands: Vespucci, who had found folk holding property in common and not esteeming gold, pearls or jewels' (ibid.). ;

.

.

.

Though the historic institutions of the Incaic Empire did not inspire Utopia, the imaginary institutions of More's ideal society did inspire one of the more beneficent and successful attempts, on the part of the Spanish conquerors of the New World, to fill the social vacuum which they themselves had produced by brutally shattering the fabric of Central American and Andean society. The Spanish philanthropist Vasco de Quiroga, who arrived in the Indies in A.D. 1530 as an enthusiastic disciple of More, succeeded in founding Indian pueblos on lines that were a deliberate attempt to reproduce Utopia in real life (Hanng, C. The Spanish Empire in America (New York 1947, Oxford University Press), p. 193). The present writer visited some of these on the 2 3rd-z6th April, 1953. 1 See Gann, T. Mexico from the Earliest Times to the Conquest (London 1936, Lovat Dickson), p. 174; Vaillant, G. C.: The Aztecs of Mexico (London 1950, Penguin), p. 132. 2 See Baudm, L.: Empire Socialiste des Inka (Pans 1928, Institut d'Ethnologie), p. :

:

U

174. 3 s

6

* See pp. 312-13, below. See ibid. Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. iii, ist ed. (Stuttgart 1901, Cotta), p. 79. See Rostovtzeff, M: Caravan Cities (Oxford 1932, Clarendon Press), p. n.

MONEY The

309

which conjured money into existence were taken in the seventh century B.C. by some Greek city-state, or perhaps by several of the commercially foremost Greek city-states of the day simultaneously, when their governments went beyond the existing practice of putting metallic media of exchange on a par with other commodities and thereby including them under the common ruling that made it an offence at law to give false weight and measure in the transfer of any commodity from hand to hand. These pioneer city-states now took the two revolutionary steps of making the issue of these metallic units of value a government monopoly and of stamping this exclusive governmental currency with a distinctive official image and superscription as a guarantee that the coin was an authentic product of the governmental mint and that its weight and quality were to be accepted as being what they purported to be on the face of them. When a government had assumed this prerogative, the clipping or filing of authentic coins became a political crime against the state and not merely an offence in civil law against some private individual on whom the fraudulently reduced lump of metal had been palmed off, and counterfeit coining by private individuals became a crime of the same order a crime which would be not a whit less heinous if the unauthorized coiner's politically bad money happened to be as good in weight and quality as the legitimate coinage decisive steps

of the realm. 1

The Diffusion of

the Use of Coinage Since the management of a coinage is evidently least difficult in a state with a minimum area and population, it was perhaps no accident that city-states should have been the political laboratories in which the invention was made. At the same time it is equally evident that the utility of a coinage increases with every enlargement of the area and

population in which it circulates as legal tender. Such Greek city-states as Phocaea, Lampsacus, Miletus, Aegina, and Corinth, which were pioneers in minting coin, were of miniature material dimensions and the narrow range of currency of these city-state issues was not appreciably extended when, as happened in several notable instances, two or three one, city-states situated in different quarters of the Hellenic World perhaps, in Ionia or on the Hellespont, a second in Continental European Greece, and a third in Sicily or Magna Graecia went into commercial partnership and arranged to issue uniform coinages which could all circulate de facto, if not dejure, throughout the issuing governments' combined domains. In the wide world beyond, where the writ of these petty governments did not run, their minted coinage was not accepted at its face value but was still treated like any unminted standard unit of metal whose value had to be assayed by weighing, every time the piece 2 changed hands. ;

1

be seen that the invention of coinage is analogous, in the field of commerce, that takes place in the field of criminal law when a governepoch-making change

It will

to the

ment

takes to treating crimes as political offences against itself instead of regarding

them

merely as personal injuries to be avenged by the private self-help of the victim or his surviving kinsmen, in regard to which the government's own responsibility, at its widest, is limited to promulgating a tariff of wergelds. 2 In out-of-the-way places with no coinage of their own, this practice of treating


3io

A regional jump in scale was achieved when, the sixth century

B.C.,

the Lydian

in the earlier decades of

Monarchy conquered

all

the Greek

city-states round the western coasts of Anatolia except Miletus, as well as the interior of the peninsula as far east as the River Halys, and issued

a coinage of electron (gold alloyed with silver), based on the local standard of the subjected Greek city-state of Phocaea, which was given a general currency throughout the Lydian dominions. The last and decisive step was taken when the Kingdom of Lydia, with its subject Greek citystates, was incorporated, in its turn, into the Achaemenian Empire. The Achaemenidae had the imagination to perceive the value, for a universal state, of this new invention which they had stumbled upon on the far western fringe of their South-West Asian World. They issued a gold coinage superior to the Lydian both in weight and in purity of metal, with a subsidiary silver coinage to supplement it, and they made the coining of gold an imperial monopoly. At the same time, with characteristic liberality, they permitted autonomous Greek and Phoenician city-states, client principalities, and even the Persian viceroys of imperial provinces, to issue, on their own account, not only small change in

copper, but also silver

money

to circulate side

by side with the

silver

issues of the imperial mints. 1 In a more jealous vein the

Roman Imperial Government in its day monopolized, throughout its dominions, the coining of silver as well as gold, and left nothing but copper cash to be issued by autonomous and allied states

asserted

members the

of the

Roman Commonwealth. 2 The

prerogative,

Roman

Imperial Government, of monopolizing the coining of gold was tacitly respected by the Arsacid Government, in spite of an insistence on their political independence which they vindicated successfully by force of arms on several critical occasions and, when the easy-going Arsacidae were supplanted by militant Sasanidae who asserted, not merely their independence of Rome, but a political parity with her, these self-conscious successors of the Achaemenids in the Cis-Euphratean portion of the former Achaemenian dominions found themselves debarred by economic inability from emulating their Achae-

by

;

menian ensamples and flouting their Roman contemporaries by taking to coining in gold as well as in silver. After the Primitive Muslim Arabs had achieved the unfulfilled ambitions of the Sasanidae by reuniting under a single oecumenical regime, for the first time since the death of Alexander the Great, the bulk of the foreign coins as if they were pieces of uncoined metal lasted for at least twelve hundred years after the invention of coinage on the shores of the Aegean. For example, 'at Mecca in Muhammad's day Roman gold pieces and Persian dirhems were already in circulation, but in commercial transactions they were valued by their weight' (Kremer, A. von Culturgeschichte des Orients (Vienna 1875-7, Braumuller, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 169). 1 See Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertwns, vol. in, ist ed. (Stuttgart 1901, Cotta), pp. 80-82. viceroy who presumed to issue a silver coinage with as low a content of alloy as the alloy content of his Achaemenian imperial master's gold coinage was, however, found guilty of high treason by Darius tpso facto, according to Herodotus, Book IV, chap. 166. 2 provincial silver coinage was issued at Alexandria, and for a time at Antioch as well, by local branches of the Imperial Mint; on the other hand, in the western provinces even the copper cash in circulation was mostly of Roman and not of local mintage (see Rostovtzeff, M.: The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford 1926, :

A

A

Clarendon

Press), p. 171).

MONEY

311

former Achaemenian dominions, including the latterly Roman provinces 1 in Syria and Egypt as well as the entire domain of the Sasanian Empire, successive attempts were made by the Umayyad Caliphs Mu'awiyah I (imperabat A.D. 661-80) and 'Abd-al-Malik (imperabat A.D. 685-705) to 2 restore the long-lost monetary unity of the Syriac World. There are 3 in the matter of indications, however, that, coinage, weights, and measures, the Caliphate did not in practice succeed in re-establishing a unity which was so triumphantly re-established under its aegis on the social, cultural,

and

spiritual planes.

The Invention of Paper Money The oecumenical Achaemenian gold coinage had given the then still recent invention of money an impetus that had sped it as the Revolutionary French decimal metric system and the Napoleonic Codes were to be sped in a later age on an irresistible and almost ubiquitous course of conquest. Coined money was launched on its historic career in India by the temporary annexation of the Panjab to the Achaemenian Empire itself. 4 The more distant Sinic World became ripe for adopting the new institution after Ts'in She Hwang-ti's revolutionary empire-building work had been salvaged through being tempered by the tactful hands of Han Liu Pang. In its first fumblings with this puzzling alien device, the Prior Han regime betrayed its failure to apprehend one of the essential principles involved when in 175 B.C. the Emperor Hsiao 180-157 B C sought to make up a shortage of

Wen (imperabat

currency by abandoning the imperial monopoly of issue and giving licences to local governors and princes of the Imperial House to mint copper cash. 5 The consequent inflation was eventually cured in 113 B.C. by the drastic steps of de-

monetizing

all

current coins and issuing a new imperial currency minted Ngan under the direct control of imperial officials,

exclusively at Ch'ang

See I. i. 76-77. See Wellhausen, J. Das Arabisthe Reich und Sem Sturz (Berlin 1902, Reimer), pp. 135-6 According to Ahmad Al-Baladhuri. Kitdb Futuh-al-Eulddn (English translation by Hitti, P K and Murgotten, F C. (New York- Columbia University Press), vol. i (1916), pp. 383-4, and part n (1924), pp. 263-6, 'Abd-al-Mahk started coming gold (in 1

*

,

ex-Roman

territory) at Damascus in A.II. 74, and his eastern viceroy Al-Hajjaj silver (in ex-Sasaman territory) at Kufah at the end of A.II. 75. The same authority reports that the occasion was a quarrel between the Umayyad and Roman Governments over a delicate question of images and superscriptions. According to Al-Baladhurl, the Caliphate had been selling to the Roman Empire Egyptian papyrus (which the Romans could not do

without) in exchange for Roman gold com (for circulation in the ex-Roman part of the Umayyad dominions). The water-mark on the papyrus (which was processed in Egypt before export) had been provocatively changed by Abd-al-Mahk from the sign of the Cross to the Qur'anic text 'Say He alone is God'. The Romans had threatened to retaliate by inscribing their as they believed, indispensable gold pieces with strictures on the Prophet Muhammad. This threat moved the Caliph 'Abd-al-Mahk to start coming gold for himself. According to the East Roman chronicler Theophanes, sub A.M. 6183 (Theophams Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor, vol i (Leipzig 1883, Teubner), p. 365), the Roman Imperial Government refused to accept these new Damascene gold pieces payment of the tribute which had been one of the stipulations in the treaty of A.D. 688 prolonging the peace settlement of A.D. 685, and this was the occasion of the recrudescence of war between the Umayyad Power and the Roman Empire in A.D. 692 (see Bury, J. B. A History of the Later Roman Empire (London 1889, Macmillan, 2 vols.), vol. n, p. 322; von Kremer, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 168-70. c

m

:

3

4 s

See Wellhausen, op. cit., loc. cit. See Meyer, op. cit., vol. cit., p. 80. See Fitzgerald, C. P. China, A Short Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset Press),

p. 161.

:


312

while at the same time granting an amnesty to the host of convicted coiners 1 who had continued to mint cash without licence in defiance of the Imperial Government's reassumption of its monopoly. But in 119 B.C., in the reign of the Emperor Wuti, in the course of preliminary gropings after some less arduous method of reinstituting a sound currency, the Imperial Government redeemed its compromised reputation for financial acumen by a quaint expedient based on a brilliant intuition of the hitherto undiscovered truth that metal is not the only stuff of which good money can be made. 'In the imperial park at Ch'ang Ngan the Emperor had a white stag, a very rare beast, which had no fellow in the empire. On the advice of a minister the Emperor had this animal killed, and made a kind of treasury note out of its skin, which, he believed, could not be copied. These pieces of skin were a foot square, and were made with a fringed border and decorated with a pattern. Each piece was assigned the arbitrary value of 2 400,000 copper coins. The princes, when they came to pay their respects to the Throne, were compelled to buy one of these pieces of skin for cash, and present their gifts to the Emperor upon it. This precaution ensured the circulation of "the White Stag Notes'*. The skin of the white stag was, however, a limited quantity, and the time soon came when this device ceased to supply the Treasury with much needed money.' 3

Leathern money in this case apparently made from sable pelts turns up again in Russia in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, at a time when she was politically associated with China under a common Mongol domination 4 but the invention of currency notes did not become effectively applicable till it had become associated with the two subsequent inventions of paper (invented in the penultimate chapter of 5 Sinic history under the Posterior Han Dynasty) and printing (invented in the early summer of the affiliated Far Eastern Society under the T'ang ;

6

Dynasty). Negotiable paper ('flying money'), in the form of cheques tallying with stubs retained by the Imperial Treasury at Si Ngan, was issued by 7 the T'ang Government in the years A.D. 807 and A.D. 809 but there is no evidence that the inscriptions on these cheques were printed. Paper ;

money on which

there was probably an imprint was issued in the Chinese province of Szechwan first by a group of private men of business, and later by the local government through the agency of a bank established for the purpose during the interval (durabat A.D. 90760) of political disunity in China between the extinction of the T'ang Dynasty and the re-establishment of an all but oecumenical regime by the Sung. 8 In A.D. 970 the invention of printed paper money was taken

the Sung Government, and in China and that date onwards until the reign of the third

up by

its

Ming

dependencies from sovereign

Yung Lo

See Fitzgerald, op. cit., p. 165. 2 Not 400,000 but 40,000, according to Ma Tuan-Lin: Win Hsien TungK'ao, quoting from the Dynastic History of the Prior Han, as translated in Carter, T. F. The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward, revised edition (New York 1031, Columbia University Press), pp. 222-3. AJ.T. 3 4 See Fitzgerald, op. cit., pp. 164-5. Carter, op. cit., pp. 76 and 225. s See 6 See ibid., pp. 1-6 and 190-1. ibid., pp. 28-32 and 201-4. 7 See 8 and See ibid., pp. 70-71 223. ibid., pp. 71-72 and 223-4. 1

:

MONEY

313

(regnabat A.D. 1403-25) paper money was continuously and ubiquitously current. 1 In the latter part of the twelfth century of the Christian Era

the practice was taken over from the Sung by the Kin barbarian invaders wrested the Yellow River Basin out of the hands of the

who had

Sung by

in A.D. 1124-42; and from the Kin it was taken over in succession 2 their more redoubtable supplanters the Mongols.

The Mongols' sweeping conquests round all the shores of the Great Eurasian Steppe carried the western frontiers of an empire based on China up to the Euphrates and the Carpathians and thereby made China momentarily accessible to Iranic Muslim and Western Christian and the paper money current in China at the time is menMarco Polo 3 and at least seven other pre- Renaissance Western

observers tioned by

;

authors, as well as by a number of Muslim authorities. 4 In Hulagu Khan's appanage of the Mongol Empire in Iran and ' Iraq, in the reign

of his descendant Gaykhatu Khan (dominabatur A.D. 1291-5), in the year A.D. 1294, an issue of printed paper notes, with a bilingual inscription in Chinese and Arabic, was uttered in the commercial capital, Tabriz. The local business community did not take kindly to the innova-

and their protests were so violent that the issue had to be withdrawn after two or three days' trial. It has been conjectured that some

tion,

of this historic but unprofitable printed paper money may have been unloaded on to the hands of the Venetian and Genoese merchants 5 residing in Tabriz at the time.

The

Utility of a Monetary Currency as a Medium for Governmental Propaganda Who had been the principal beneficiaries from this institution of money in the divers material media in which it had been issued by innumerable governments parochial and oecumenical, ephemeral and

rather longer-lasting since its invention in the Hellenic World in the seventh century B.C. ? Undoubtedly this device had proved, on balance, a convenience in the private transactions of the issuing governments' subjects in spite of the socially subversive fluctuations of inflation and deflation, and temptations to borrow and lend at usurious rates, which the invention had brought in its train. But a greater benefit had assuredly accrued to the issuing governments themselves for the issue of money is an acte de presence which brings a government into direct and constant contact with at least an active, intelligent, and influential minority of its subjects, even where the circulation does not extend through the entire population; and this monetary epiphany which does not cease to be ;

1 Yung Lo withdrew it from circulation (no doubt in view of the inflation that had occurred in the latter days of the Mongol regime in China, and, before that, in the latter days of the Sung). No further issues of paper money were made in China till A.D. 1851 when the Manchu Dynasty, in its turn, was declining towards its fall (see Carter, op. cit.

,

P. 76). 2

See Carter, op. cit., pp. 72-76 and 224-5. An English translation of the passage, accompanied by valuable notes, will be found The Book of Ser Marco Polo, translated into English and edited by Sir Henry Yule, 3rd ed., revised by Henri Cordier (London 1903, Murray, 2 vols. 1920, supplementary volume), vol. n, pp 423-30. * See Carter, op. cit., pp. 76-79 and 225-6. s See ibid., pp. 128-9 and 238. 3

in

;


314

impressive by becoming familiar not only automatically fosters a government's prestige and authority it also gives a government a magnificent opportunity for deliberately indoctrinating its subjects with sentiments, beliefs, and views. The hypnotic effect of a coinage even on the minds of a population under alien rule who resent this political yoke and abominate the Power by whom it has been imposed, is conveyed in a classic passage of the New Testament. ;

Him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, to in His words. And when they were come, they say unto Him "Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man; for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth. Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not ? Shall we give, or shall we not 'They send unto

catch

Him

:

give?" 'But He, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them "Why tempt ye me ? Bring me a penny, that I may see it." And they brought it, and He saith unto them: "Whose is this image and superscription?" And they said unto him: "Caesar's". And Jesus answering said unto them: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's".' 1 'And they could not take hold of His words before the people, and they marvelled at His answer, and held their peace.' 2 :

This

automatic moral profit which the prerogative of issuing money yielded, even in a formidably adverse political and religious environment, was of incomparably greater value to the Roman Imperial Government

than any mere financial gains which the management of the mint might incidentally bring in. The Emperor's likeness on a coin gave the Imperial Government a certain status in the minds of a Jewish population which not only regarded Rome's dominion as illegitimate but treasured, as the second of ten commandments believed to have been received by Moses

from Yahweh viva voce, the explicit injunction: 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above or that is in the Earth beneath or that is in the water under the Earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous god.' 3 When in 167 B.C. the Seleucid sovereign Antiochus IV Epiphanes had placed a statue of Olympian Zeus in the Holy of Holies of Yahweh 's temple at Jerusalem, the horror and indignation of the Jews at seeing the 'abomination that maketh desolate' 4 'standing where it ought not' 5 were so intense that, thenceforward, they could not rest until they had thrown off every vestige of Seleucid rule. Again, when in A.D. 26 the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate smuggled into Jerusalem, draped and under cover of night, Roman military standards bearing the Emperor's image in medallions, the reaction of the Jews was so vehement as to compel Pilate to remove the offensive emblems from the precincts of the 6 Holy City. Yet in their holy land the Jews had schooled themselves 1

2 3

s

6

Mark

xn. 13-17. Cp. Matt. xxn. 15-21; Luke xx. 20-25. xx. 26. Cp. Matt. xxn. 22; Mark xii. 17. 4 Dan. xi. Exod. xx. 4-5. Cp. Deut. v. 8-9. 31 and xn. xi. Mark xin. 14. Cp. Matt. xxiv. 15. Josephus. Antiquitates, Book XVIII, chap, in, i Bellum ludaicum, Book II, chap.

Luke

;

,

2-3-

MONEY

315

meekly, not only to seeing, but to handling, using, earning, hoarding, and by all these compromising actions progressively countenancing, the abominable image on Caesar's coinage, and had thereby anticipated in action the observation of their future Roman chastiser Vespasian that sordid money does not smell. 1 The Roman Government was not slow to perceive the value of an oecumenical coinage as an instrument of policy.

'From the middle of the first century onwards the Imperial Government had appreciated, as few governments have done before or since, not only the function of coinage as a mirror of contemporary life of the and artistic aspirations of the age but also its immense and unique possibilities as a far-reaching instrument of propaganda. Modern methods of disseminating news and modern vehicles of propaganda, from postage-stamps to broadcasting and the press, have

political, social, spiritual

we their counterpart in the imperial coinage, where yearly, monthly novelties and variations in types record the say, daily sequence of public events and reflect the aims and ideologies of those who might almost

control the state.* 2

The designers of the a combination of image

Roman

imperial coinage could make play with for giving visual form to the issuing government's political directives. The Umayyad successors of the Roman Empire in Syria, Egypt, and North-West Africa, and the innumerable Muslim governments that had succeeded the Umayyads in their turn down to the time of writing, were required to perform the

and superscription

more skilful feat of conveying their messages to their subjects by superscription alone, since the Jewish tabu on graven images had been adopted by the Prophet Muhammad. In this inverted Psyche's task of spinning straw out of gold, they were fortunate in operating with a version of the Alphabet whose beauty, like that of the Sinic characters, when displayed by a master of calligraphy, could still be appreciated even by an eye whose owner's mind was illiterate. This capacity of a superscription, even when unsupported by an image, to transmit to the

still

users of a coinage the message impressed on it by its makers was attested by the variety and abundance of the issues uttered by Muslim states.

Demand for

Conservatism in the Reproduction of Coin Types one There is, however, golden rule that has to be rigidly observed if a coinage, iconic or aniconic, is to produce its psychological effect. A type that has once caught the imagination of its clientele will not retain its hold unless it is reproduced in successive issues with blind fidelity. The abortive first essay in an Umayyad gold and silver coinage made by the founder of the dynasty, Mu'awiyah, himself is recorded

The

User's

'Reprehendenti fiho Tito, quod etiam urmae vectigal commentus esset, pecuniam pensione admovit ad nares, sciscitans num odore offenderetur; et, illo negante, "Atqum", inquit, "e lotioest"' (Suetonius Tranquillus, C. The Lives of the Caesars, 'Divus Vespasianus',chap.xxin, 3). 2 Toynbee, J. M. C. Roman Medallions (New York 1944, The American Numismatic The Hadnamc School: A Chapter in the History eandem: See further Society), p. 15. of Greek Art (Cambridge 1934, University Press), pp. 2-5 and 24-159, for the 'province* com series, p. 5 for the 'exercitus' coins; and Sutherland, C. H. V.: Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy, 31 BC -AD. 68 (London 1951, Methuen). 1

ex

pnm3

:

:


3 i6

been boycotted by the public because it did not bear on its face the reassuringly familiar symbol of the Cross which was the hall-mark of the antecedent Christian Roman mintage. 1 Vexatious experiences of this kind no doubt explain the rigid conservatism of the Attic and to have

Achaemenian mints, which continued to strike their primitive Athenian and Daric archers' in latter days when the artificers' fingers must have itched to replace these stiff archaic types by something in a more lifelike modern style. Such sedulously mummified coin-types may indeed *

'owls'

continue not only to pass current but to be uttered for centuries after the disappearance of the government whose image and superscription they bear. Silver dirhems (drachmae) bearing the image of Athena's owl were still circulating in the highland fastness of the Yaman 2 down to the date of the Umayyad Caliph Abd-al-Malik's (imperabat A.D. 685-705) new oecumenical gold and silver issue, though by that time more than nine centuries had gone by since the native Attic issues of silver 'owls' from an Athenian mint had been discontinued by the Athenians themselves. 3 After a brief taste of the novel experience of being a province of a universal state, the Yaman promptly took advantage of the weakening of the Caliphate's hold in the latter days of the 'Abbasid regime in order to revert to her familiar way of life as a 'hermit kingdom'; and in A.D. 1952 the most popular monetary medium of exchange in the dominions of the Imam of San' a, as well as in the adjoining Arabian regions of the Hadramawt and the hinterland of Aden, was the Maria Theresa dollar of an extinct Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy wjiich, in the Hapsburg dominions themselves, had ceased to be legal tender as long ago as A.D. i858. 4 The writer of this Study, when he was travelling on foot in f

1

See Wellhausen,

J.

:

Das Ardbische Reich and Sein Sturz

(Berlin 1902, Reimer),

p. 136.

During the interval between the annexation of the Yaman to the Medmese nucleus of the Arab Empire, in the last days of the Prophet Muhammad's lifethe and time, Caliph 'Abd-al-Malik's new issues, these Himyante silver 'owls' were actually m circulation, in small numbers, throughout the Arab dominions, side by side with Sasaman silver and wi^h Roman silver and gold. 3 This change of Attic coin types appears to have been made soon after the liberation of Athens from Macedonian occupation in 229 B.C. (see Ferguson, W. S. Hellenistic Athens (London 1911, Macmillan), p. 245). * See Hans, J.: Zwei Jahrhunderte Maria-Theresien-Taler, 1751-1951 (Klagenfurt 2

See

ibid., p. 136.

:

1950, Hans), p. 16.

MTT

Of the 320 million that had been minted since A.D. 1751, more than 150 million had been minted within the thirty years ending in A.D. 1950 (see ibid pp. 3 and 10). Between A.D. 1751 and A.D. 1866, 82,727,621 had been minted in divers Hapsburg mints; between 1867 and 1935, 163,202,763 had been minted at Vienna; between 1935 and 1949, 72,326,022 had been minted at Vienna, Rome, London, Paris, Brussels, and Bombay (see ibid., pp. 14-15). The number minted at Vienna and exported to the Levant had been 15 million in 1925 and 15^ million in 1927 (see ibid., pp. 3 and 22); and, during the years 1935-9, 19,445,000 MTT, minted at Rome, had been imported by the Italian ,

authorities into Abyssinia (p. 34).

MTT

The type of the which thus made its fortune so far afield from the QueenEmpress* dominions was the issue minted at Gimsburg in A.D. 1780, which was the last of Maria Theresa's year reign (p. 7). More than a hundred years later, in the last decade of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, of this type were circulating in a vast area extending in Africa from Algeria to the Upper Niger and to Madagascar and in West Asia as far Southas Maskat and Trebizond (according to a map, cited by Hans, p. 1 6, in Peez, C., and Raudnitz, J. Geschichte des Mana-Theresien-Thalers (Vienna 1898)), and they were also circulating in China, side by side with Mexican dollars, circa A.D. 1900, according to Kann, E. The Currencies of China (Shanghai 1928), cited ibid. In was the officially recognized coin of the realm from about the beginAbyssinia the

MTT

:

:

MTT

MONEY

317 out-of-the-way districts of the Kingdom of Greece in A.D. 1911-12, found that gold Napoleons' of the French Second Empire were the most convenient coins to carry in his stocking for the image and superscription of a bankrupt French political adventurer then still retained all their prestige in the eyes of Greek peasants and Vlach shepherds, ;

though forty years had passed already since Napoleon Ill's capture by the Prussians and deposition by his own French subjects. On this showing, it might be anticipated that the English gold 'sovereign', of which Englishmen saw the last in A.D. 1914, might still be circulating in Albania 1 for generations, and in Arabia for centuries, after that portentous date. ning of the nineteenth century until the Italian occupation in the years A.D. 1936-41 (Hans, p. 24). For more than a hundred years, dating from the Ottoman Government's unsuccessful attempt in and after A.D. 1837 to replace the by the Mejidiyeh in its Arabian provinces as well as in the rest of the Empire (p. 21), the triumphantly resisted repeated attempts to drive it out of circulation by the substitution of alternative metallic currencies. It did not begin to lose its hold upon the loyalty of its Abyssinian and Arabian addicts until after the liberation of Abyssinia from Italian occupation in A.D. 1941, and then it succumbed, not to any more attractive metallic currency, but to a belated adoption of the latter-day Western institutions of paper money, cheques, and bonds. In A.D. 1,867 a British expeditionary force in Abyssinia had found itself compelled to import large quantities of MTT, specially minted at Vienna for its use, because the Abyssinian public had been unwilling to take payment in gold sovereigns (p. 20); in A.D. 1941 another British expeditionary force in Abyssinia found the public eager to surrender exchange for British East African paper money (see Hans, op. cit., p. 41, citing Lord Rennell of Rodd: British Military Administration of Occupied Territory

MTT

MTT

MTT m

in Africa during the years 1041-1947 (London 1948, H.M. Stationery Office): see pp. 365-7> 37-i 373-4, 379). Yet there were indications (see Hans, op. cit., pp. 50-51 and was still being hoarded in large quantities in its old 53-54) that in A.D. 1950 the domain. fine silver com was, after all, proof against the two dangers, to which a paper

A

MTT

note was exposed, of being eaten by termites and being devalued by politicians. 1 During the general war of 1914-18, both the Albanians and the Arabs welcomed the opportunity of being paid by the belligerents for continuing to conduct their own intertribal feuds in the role of their respective foreign paymasters' partisans. So long as they might go on fighting one another, they did not greatly care whether it was the Entente Powers or the Central Powers that were financing their customary activity, but they were unanimous and intransigent in insisting that they must be paid for their services in gold, cash down not because they foresaw a coming catastrophic depreciation of paper money with a prescience denied to the wily financiers of Lombard Street and Wall Street, but for the simpler reason that, in Albania and Arabia, an invention that had been made in China only a thousand years back (see pp. 312-13, above) had not succeeded in acclimatizing itself yet by the beginning of the twentieth century of the Christian Era. The European belligerent governments fighting, as they were, for their lives, and therefore clutching at straws could not resist purchasing the nominal support of rival Albanian and Arab war-bands, and, to buy this dubious asset, they ruefully disgorged some of the gold that they had so ruthlessly withdrawn from circulation at home. An amusing sequel to this war-time tragi-comedy was witnessed by the writer of this Study at the Paris Peace Conference of A.D. 1919-20. The moving spirit of the Hashimite Hijazi Arab delegation was Colonel T. E. Lawrence, and, when he was on his delegation's official business, he used to make a point of wearing the highly distinctive uniform of an officer of the Hijazi Army. One day, in a corridor of the Hotel Majestic, the present writer had the good fortune to see this picturesque and animated figure run into a weary-looking official of the British Treasury. In a flash, Lawrence had whipped out from under the folds of his robe a magnificent dagger with a head of chased gold, and was holding it under the Treasury official's nose, saying: 'Do you know what that is made of?' 'No, I don't,' said the Treasury official rather testily. 'A hundred and fifty of your sovereigns,' Colonel Lawrence retorted; and the intended shock was duly registered by his victim. During the antecedent hostilities, while Colonel Lawrence had been having the fun of carrying bags of 'sovereigns' on camel-back and dispensing them to the Hijazi allies of His Britannic Majesty's Government, the Treasury official had been saddled with the vexatious task of trying in vain to induce these Arab recipients of 'sovereigns' to part with them again in exchange for Indian piece goods, which he had dangled, line carrots, before a knowingly irresponsive donkey's nose. The Arabs had found a better use for British 'sovereigns than that. So long as the gold remained in the form of minted com, it might


3 i8 (e)

THE SERVICEABILITY OF IMPERIAL CORPORATIONS i.

The

Difficulty of Creating

Standing Armies

and Maintaining a Mobile Standing Army

Our survey of

imperial installations and imperial currencies has indicated that these had been features in the life of all the universal states that had come into existence down to the time of writing; and indeed it is difficult to imagine any universal state establishing or maintaining itself without roads and postal arrangements, garrisons and colonies, a provincial organization, a capital city, one or more official languages and scripts, a code of law, a calendar, a set of weights and measures, and the rudiments or equivalents of money. By contrast,

standing armies, civil services, and citizenships life of different universal states in various degrees of development ranging over the whole gamut between the rudimentary bud and the full-blown flower and, because of this, they provided criteria for arranging the score of universal states on our panel in a tentative order of comparative maturity. 1 In the role played in the lives of universal states by organized military force, the extent of the variation had been particularly great. In the history of 'the Old Empire' of the Mayas there was no certain evidence for the existence of armed forces even in the form of a police cordon to keep out barbarians from beyond the imperial frontiers. The Spanish Empire of the Indies had been almost equally innocent of armaments on land during the two centuries and more that had elapsed between the domestication of the epigoni of the conquistador'es and the establishment of a common land-frontier between the Spanish and the British dominions in the New World in the territorial settlement after the Seven Years War. During the intervening age the only permanent professional troops in the Indies had been the few hundred halberdiers in the ceremonial bodyguards of the Viceroys of New Spain and Peru. It had not been till A.D. 1762 that the Spanish Empire in the Americas had found it necessary to provide itself with a standing army and a imperial corporations

were

to

be found in the

;

militia. 2

In the Achaemenian Empire, the Caliphate, and the Mughal Raj the felt) slip through their fingers; so they had converted it into dagger handles, which were not only more beautiful but more secure, since they could be carried more snugly on the person and were riveted to an automatic caretaker in the shape of a formidable

(they

steel blade. 1 Of our twenty-one civilizations, the Hittite, Iranic, Arabic, Mexic, and Yucatec had apparently failed to produce universal states. On the other hand, the Egyptiac, Synac, Indie, and Far Eastern societies had produced recurrent universal states, while, in the histories of the Sumenc, Hindu, Andean, and Russian universal states, there had been a break of continuity which not only permitted but constrained a student of History to treat as separate instances the Sumenan regime at Ur and the Amonte regime at Babylon; the Mughal Raj and the British Raj; the Incaic Empire of the Andes and the Spanish Empire of the Indies; and the pre-Petnne dispensation and the post-Petnne

dispensation in Russia. See the table of contents of the atlas in vol. xi. 2 Hanng, C. H. The Spanish Empire in America (New York, 1947, Oxford University Press), pp. 124, 125, and 145. The Empire of the Indies was not, of course, as defenceless as it might appear to have been, for down to A.D. 1763 it was more or less effectively insulated by the Spanish Navy from direct contact with the dominions of any other Power except France in Louisiana. :

STANDING ARMIES

319

1 standing army included garrisons at strategic points along the frontiers and in the interior 2 as well as the emperor's personal bodyguard at the 3 headquarters of the imperial administration; the 'small but efficient which even the later Mughal emperors managed to keep standing army',

'consisted of cavalry and matchlockmen, and its kernel was the imperial park of artillery, without which no great fortress could be 4 but, when there was a call for mobile armies of any forcibly reduced' considerable strength, all three empires depended upon levies ad hoc. In all three the first ban was furnished by the imperial people itself. The Mughal and Achaemenian empires could call up their feudal cavalry, and the Caliphate its henchmen quartered in the cantonments (Arabs under the Umayyad Caliphs and Khurasams under the 'Abbasids). When, however, it was a question of a major military enterprise, these

up

;

5 empires had to call upon the population at large. When Xerxes invaded mobilized his personal bodyin he not Greece B.C., only European 480

guard and his Persian fief-holders and the rest of the manhood of the Perso-Median imperial people; he also raised levies from the subject 6 population of all the provinces. The regular spring and autumn raids from Cilicia into the East Roman Empire which were one of the institutions of the Caliphate for some two hundred years, until the tide of war turned in the East Roman Empire's favour at last in the second quarter of the tenth century of the Christian Era, were made by Muslim volunteers from all over the Caliph's dominions who assembled and dispersed behind the double screen of fortresses known as the Thughur and the 'Awasim. 7 On the other hand, standing armies capable of providing mobile forces for campaigns, besides imperial bodyguards and provincial garrisons, were maintained by the Roman, Han, Manchu, Ottoman, Danubian Hapsburg, and Napoleonic empires, by the British Raj in India, and 8 by the post-Petrine Russian imperial regime. The histories of these standing armies show that mobility is difficult to maintain. With the a lapse of time a mobile professional force tends to degenerate into sedentary militia. The Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy and the British Raj counteracted this tendency by deliberately organizing a local militia, distinct from the mobile army, to man chronically restless limites. There were the Croat See pp. 120-1, above. 3 See See pp. 123-4 and i3-ii above. pp. 182-3, above. 4 Spear, T. G.P. Twilight of the Mughuls (Cambridge 1951, University Press), pp. 7-8. 'The Mughul tram of artillery, in maintaining internal security, had something of the potency of the Tudor monopoly of gunpowder. The artillerymen were generously paid, Europeans were freely engaged at high rates, and even supplied with servants so that they should be relieved of all labour save that of aiming the guns' (ibid., p. 8). A detailed account of the Mughal artillery is given in Irvme,W. The Army of the Indian 1

2

:

Moghuh (London

1903, Luzac), chaps. 10-12.

See p. 183, above. 6 See the army list in Herodotus, Book VII, chaps. 61-99. 7 See II. n. 368, with n. I, and the present volume, p. 121, above. 8 After the Russian Empire had been equipped with a Western-model professional army by Peter the Great, efforts continued to be made to improve this army's professional standards. In A.D. 1731 an officer's cadet corps was founded, with places for 150 Russian nobles and 50 Livlanders. In A.D. 1732 garrison schools were started (see Mettig, C.: Die Europaisierung Russlands tm Achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Gotha 1913, Perthes), pp. 82 and 314). s


320

and Serb

territorial regiments which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Christian Era, held the line of the Save for the Haps-

burg King-Emperor against their Bosniak and Turkish hereditary J and there were the Pathan militias whom the British Indian military authorities on the North- West Frontier of India recruited adversaries

;

during the century beginning in A.D. 1849 ^rom among the wild tribesthe principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. These Danubian Hapsburg and British Indian sedentary limitanei were of minor importance compared to the mobile armies which they supplemented, whereas in the Ottoman military system the Kurdish foederati who, under the command of their own tribal chiefs, held the Ottoman frontier over

men on

2 against Persia, and the Turkish feudal cavalry whose fiefs were sown thick over the Empire except in the more remote of the Arab provinces, 3 together considerably outnumbered the Padishah's Slave-Household. Yet the existence of this border militia and provincial feudal array did not

preserve the Janissaries, after the death of Suleyman the Magnificent, their mobility and changing, in their turn, into a militia, cantoned in Constantinople and the provincial capitals, which became ever more unwarlike and ever more seditious part passu, till there was nothing to be done with this once magnificently soldierly force except to annihilate it in order to rebuild an Ottoman professional army from the foundations this time on an alien new model derived from the West. 4 In the Manchu and Roman empires the originally mobile banners' and legions likewise struck root through vegetating in fixed stations the banners' in the interior of China and the legions on the frontiers of the Roman World.

from losing

*

*

The Creation of a Mobile Standing Army Empire In the history of the

Roman

Imperial

in the post-Diocletianic

Army

Roman

this loss of mobility

of

which the danger did not become apparent so long as the prestige of the 5 Empire stood so high that no outsider ventured seriously to attack it was one of the causes of the catastrophe in which the Empire all but

came

to grief in the third century of the Christian Era. The improvisanew mobile army was the creative act of that desperate age and,

tion of a

;

though it was achieved in adverse circumstances at the eleventh hour, it proved so great a success that it prolonged the life of the Empire for one and a half centuries even in the West and for three and a half centuries in the East and the Centre. 6 2 See I. i. See pp. 117-18, above. 389-90, and pp. 121-2, above. See pp. 124-6, above. For Sultan Selim Ill's tragic failure, and Sultan Mahmud II's grim success, in coping with the task of superseding the Janissaries, see III. iii. 48-50 and IX. vm. 239. s See p. 184, above. 6 This impressive chronological evidence of the success of the Diocletiano-Constantinian reorganization of the Roman system of imperial defence would seem, to a layman's itself to refute Zosimus's savage critique of it in his Histonae, Book II, eyes, to suffice chap, xxxiv. Zosimus submits that the withdrawal of units from the frontiers to create a mobile reserve in the interior exposed the Empire to uncontested invasion, located the troops in places not requiring defence, brought rum upon the cities which they were stationed, and demoralized the troops themselves in the process. Zosimus does not mention the telling truth that, during the century ending A.D. 284, when the 1

3

m

m

m

STANDING ARMIES

321

The

truth that a military force can be kept mobile only by relieving it of sedentary tasks had been perceived and translated into action by the genius of Julius Caesar. Out of the thirty-two legions that he had in hand at the close of his civil wars, he posted twenty-six on the frontiers and kept six in reserve. 1 Thereafter, Augustus posted all his twenty2 3 whether from lack of his adoptive eight legions on the frontiers father's strategic insight or because a further bout of civil wars had left him with that amount less of man-power and sinews of war at his command. 4 Apart from the 4,500 men in the nine praetorian cohorts con5 stituting the Emperor's personal bodyguard and the 1,500 men in the 6 three urban which as their cohorts, original designation (' Metropolitan Battalions') pointedly proclaimed were a semi-civic force, Augustus's army possessed no striking force, no field army, no reserves, and the only means of reinforcing the garrison of one sector of the imperial frontier was the drafting of a detachment (vexillatio) from the 7 garrison of another sector. Domitian carried the process of immobilizing the legions one stage farther by ruling that each legion was to have a 8 camp of its own. After Hadrian had made a rule of the already prevailfor the legions, like the auxilia, to be recruited locally, 9 ing tendency,

m

frontier defence had still been operation, the Empire had suffered more grievously from barbarian invasion than it suffered thereafter, under the new system, during the century ending in A.D. 378. His flagrantly incorrect ascription of the Augustan system to Diocletian, the pagan innovator whose reforms a Christian Constantme had merely carried through to completion, seems to indicate that Zosimus's critique of a policy which he falsely attributes to Constantme's initiative was at least partly prompted by religious animus. 1 See Grosse, R. Rbmtsche Militargeschichte von Galhenus bis zum Beginn der Byzantimschen Themenverfassung (Berlin 1920, Weidmann), p. 55. 2 This appears to have been the establishment of Augustus's standing army in 16 B.C. The number was reduced to 25 by the loss of three legions in Varus's disaster in Germany in A.D. 9. This number was raised to 27 by Gams or (more probably) by Claudius. By the end of the civil wars of A D. 69 the number had perhaps risen to 31. It was reduced to 29 by Vespasian, but had been raised again to 30 by A.D. 83; and this seems to have been regarded as the standard establishment for the next no years. To maintain this Sarmatia in figure, Trajan appears to have replaced one legion lost by Domitian A.D. 92, and another lost by himself, and Marcus Aurelius to have replaced two lost Hadrian in Britain and in Palestine (perhaps) by respectively. Thereafter, Septimius Severus raised the standing army to a higher strength than it had ever yet possessed by adding his three Legiones Parthicae to Marcus's thirty (see Parker, H. M. D. The Roman Legions (Oxford 1928, Clarendon Press), chaps. 3 and 4, pp. 72-117, and compare the Cambridge Ancient History, vol x (Cambridge 1934, University Press), pp. 123 and 221). 3 See p. 184, above. * At the moment when this final bout of civil wars was brought to an end by the overthrow of the last of Augustus's competitors for the mastery of the Roman World, the victor had on his hands perhaps as many as sixty legions. In his res gestae, Augustus claims to have replanted 300,000 discharged soldiers in civilian life by either repatriating them in their original communities or settling them in new colonies. Twenty-eight legions was presumably the maximum establishment that, in Augustus's view, an exhausted world could be expected to support. s The original strength of both a praetorian and an urban cohort was 500 men. The strength of the praetorian cohorts was raised from 500 to 1,000 momentarily during the crisis of A.D. 69 and then permanently in A.D. 193 by Septimius Severus. Septimius also raised the strength of the urban cohorts from 500 to 1,500 (see Durry, M.: Les Cohortes Pretonennes (Pans 1938, Boccard), pp. 82-87). 6 For these, see pp. 123 and 184, above. By Vespasian's time (imperabat A.D. 70-79) the number of urban cohorts appears to have risen to four stationed in Rome and the two posted in the provinces at Lyons and at Carthage respectively (see the Cambridge Ancient History, vol. xi (Cambridge 1936, University Press), p. 135). 7 See Grosse, op. cit., p. 55. 8 See Suetonius Tranquillus, C. The Lives of the Caesars, 'Domitianus', chap. 7.

Augustan system of far

m

:

:

9

See Durry, op. B 2660 vn

cit., p.

246.

M


322

and had carried to completion the Augustan system of fixed frontier defences, 'the whole Roman Army was degraded into being a bevy of 1 gendarmes and customs officials'. In the third century, 'when the whole empire became one single gigantic fortress assaulted simultaneously from all sides, the old method of frontier- defence inevitably proved totally inadequate, and the need for a strong field army that could be at any point inevitably declared itself ever Before the third century was over, this need had been met. Gallienus (imperabat A.D. 260-8) made a beginning by detaching the cavalry from the legions and grouping them under an independent command, 3 and the work of reorganization was continued by Aurelian (imperabat A.D. 270-5)* and was completed by Diocletian (imperabat

brought into action rapidly

more

2

insistently'.

A.D. 284-305).

Out of the

best of the battered units of the Augustan Army, without discrimination between legionary vexillationes 5 and auxiliary cohorts any and alae, the third-century reformers built up a mobile army of all arms ; and, within this category of troops trained and equipped to accompany the emperors on campaign (Comitatenses)** there were gradations of mobility, proficiency, and privileged proximity to a throne that dire necessity of state had now transformed into a portable camp-stool which was pitched from day to day wherever the need for the emperor's 7 presence might happen at the moment to be the greatest. Within the Comitatenses there came to be an e*lite of Palatini* an inner guard com9 posed of the Scholae and the Candidati, and a personal bodyguard of Protectores and Domestici 10 who provided the new mobile army with the 2 Grosse, op. cit., p. 56. Ibid., p. 56. 4 See ibid., ibid., pp. 15, 18, and 56. pp. 56-57. s Diocletian's time the seem have been to By Augustan legions already broken up into detachments (vextllationes) of the strength of the cohorts which had always been the units of the auxtha and had also been the principal subdivisions of the legions themselves since the reforms of Manus. At the same time the auxiliary cohorts of infantry and alae of cavalry had become detached from the legions with which they had been brigaded under the Prmcipate. After this dissolution of the Augustan legion of 10,000 to 12,000 men (including its complement of auxtha), the name legion came to denote a vexillatto of perhaps no more than 500 men. The fifth-century Notitia Digmtatum catalogues 174 legions, as against the 33 in the army of the Prmcipate after the addition of three to the previous total by Septimius Severus (see Grosse, op. cit., pp. 30-32). 6 A Latin inscription (C.LL. vi. 2759) witnesses that the Comitatenses were in existence at latest by A.D. 301 (see Grosse, op. cit., p. 59). 7 After the foundation of Constantinople on a site where the new political capital of the Roman Empire could simultaneously serve as a military base for the defence, in depth, of both the Lower Danube and the Upper and Middle Euphrates frontier (see pp. 217-18, above), the Imperial camp-stool was pitched here more often than not; and this gravitation of the Imperial headquarters to the shores of the Bosphorus is reflected in the distribution of the standing cantonments of the Comitatensian infantry legions (excluding the Palatini) according to the Notitia Dignitatum. No less than twenty of these units were cantoned in Thrace, as compared with nine apiece in Oriens and Gaul, eight apiece in Eastern Illyncum and Africa, and five apiece in Western Illyncum, Italy, and Spam (see Grosse, op. cit., p. 90). 8 First heard of in A.D. 365 (see ibid., p. 61). The name was, of course, by that time an anachronism; for it was more than a century since the Roman Empire had been governed from the Palatine Hill. The Scholae, once unofficial clubs organized by officers, in the Empire's halcyon days, to provide amenities for their leisure hours, had become part of the working organization of the Army in consequence of their feat of surviving the general dissolution of institutions in the third century. 10 The Praetorian Cohorts had perished in the last gusts of the hundred-years-long social tornado by which the Roman Empire had been ravaged. Diocletian had depressed 1

3

See

STANDING ARMIES

323

1 equivalent of a much-needed staff college. The leavings of the Army, when the mobile Comitatenses had been formed out of it, were assigned to a frontier force (Ripenses, Riparienses, Limitanei) 2 which was frankly 3 permitted to be the sedentary militia that the Army of the Principate had tended to become sub rosa4 ever since it had been cantoned along the frontiers by Augustus, while the mobile standing army embodied in the Comitatenses constituted at last, after a dearly paid-for delay of

nearly 350 years, that mobile reserve which had been designed, on a smaller scale, by Divus lulius. 5 Esprit de corps

The superiority of a mobile standing army over a sedentary militia in professional technique is surpassed both in degree and in importance militiaman tends to be drawn back by its superiority in esprit de corps. into civilian life and ethos by a fixed domicile, by marriage, and by the

A

pressure on him to engage in gainful occupations in order to support a family which cannot live on a soldier's pay. This masterful process of demilitarization overtook the Roman Army of the Principate after the removal, by Septimius Severus, of the ban on marriage while with the 6 colours, and it overtook the Janissary Corps after the relaxation of its discipline upon the death of Suleyman the Magnificent. By contrast, a professional soldier in a mobile standing army is 'conditioned' by an insulating way of life and a differentiating discipline into being first and their status and reduced their importance by keeping them at the long since evacuated seat of imperial government at Rome (Grosse, op. cit., p. 59, citing Aurehus Victor, 39,

and Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum, 26). Thereafter, Constantme the Great had abolished them after they had fought on the losing side at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on the 28th October, A.D. 312 (see Durry, op. cit., pp. 170 and 393; Grosse,

47,

op.

cit., p.

60).

2 See ibid., pp. 66 and 68. ibid., pp. 6163 and 9396. are ignorant of the date at which the soldiers of the frontier garrisons became adscnpti glebae by being given personal and hereditary holdings of land to cultivate, but there is no doubt that, from the fourth to the sixth century of the Christian Era, the frontier troops were in fact 'a militia of sedentary peasants' (ibid., pp. 64-65). 4 In theory the Army of the Principate was always mobile, and the symbol of this theory was the legal inability of the serving soldier to contract a valid marriage so long as he was with the colours. Considering, however, that, upon a soldier's honourable discharge, a permanent illicit union could be converted into a legal marriage and children already born of it be legitimized retrospectively (see p. 132, above); that the soldiers' families were allowed to live in civilian canabae adjoining the camps and that the men were free, while still on active service, to cultivate the prata legionum, it is evident that the difference de facto between the pre-Severan legionary and the post-Diocletianic lirmtaneus was not by any means as great as the difference in theory. The rights of contracting a legal marriage while on active service and of leasing plots in the prata legionum were granted to soldiers by Septimius Severus (see Grosse, op. cit., p. 248; The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. xn (Cambridge 1939, University Press), p. 32). 5 Not the least part of this price of a long delay was a formidable increase in the total strength of the Army in an age when the economic resources of the Empire were dwindling. Even after Septimius Severus had increased the number of the legions from 30 to 33. the Army of the Principate had amounted to not much more than 300,000 men. Diocletian raised the figure by perhaps something like two-thirds, from about 300,000 to about 500,000 (see Grosse, op. cit., p. 253). Within this total, the field army may have had a nominal strength of 148,000 infantry and 46,500 cavalry (see ibid., p. 254). 6 See Grosse, op. cit., p. 248. In the post-Diocletianic Army, both the soldier and his wife (if he were married in lawful wedlock) were tax-free after he had completed five years' service (see ibid., p. 202). Nevertheless, private soldiers as well as officers were still apt to get entangled in civilian business concerns in the sixth century of the Christian 1

See

3

We

;

Era (see

ibid., p. 278).


324 foremost a

member

of his corps and paying only a secondary and concommunity which bears the cost of keeping him under arms and, if and when the interests of community and corps diverge, the professional soldier is apt to become, in relation to the community, that portentous creature, the unsocial human being, ditional allegiance to the civilian ;

who,

1 as Aristotle sees him, is 'either a beast or a god'. In this predicaprofessional soldier can, indeed, either sink to a depth of

ment the

inhumanity or rise to a height of heroism that are alike beyond the range of his brethren who have not put themselves outside the pale of civilian through being initiated into a professional military fraternity. In sacrificing himself to his professional duty the soldier is, of course,

life

happiest

when

esprit '.Q

de corps gives the same orders as patriotism.

tiv* y

ayytiXov AaKeSaifioviois on r^Se rot? KCIVWV prjâcn, 7m0dîevor

/cci/zefla,

and

famous epitaph by Simonides on the Three Hundred Spartans to the last man but one, 2 at Thermopylae was to inspire a worthy counterpart in Housman's epitaph on a British army of mercenaries that likewise faced and met certain death in pitting itself against overwhelming odds in order to purchase eventual victory for its cause this

who

fell,

by checking the

first

onset of a formidable invader.

These, on the day when Heaven was falling, The hour when Earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended They stood, and Earth's foundations stay What God abandoned, these defended, ;

And

saved the

No doubt, in all situations, ment

sum

;

of things for pay.

the professional soldier's First

Command-

is

Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die ;

yet there are degrees of heroism which can be measured by the desperateness of the situation in which the soldier obeys the call to give his life. The Spartan soldier who died in 480 B.C. and the British soldier who died in A.D. 1914 in the act of saving a civilization was not confronted with so severe an ordeal as the Assyrian soldier who, in 610-609 B.C., 3 made the same supreme personal sacrifice in the baneful cause of striving

to

undo the World's accomplished deed of

liberating itself

from the

scourge of Assyrian militarism; for the moral of Assyria's last army, field again and perished in that last campaign, had been proof against the shock of seeing Assyria herself laid desolate and her fortress-capital Nineveh taken by storm and put to the sack two years

which took the

Aristotle: Politics, Book I, chap, i, 9-12 (p. I2S3A), quoted in I. i. 173, n. 3. tragic story of the sole survivor AnstodSmus has been told, with sympathetic insight, by Herodotus, Book VII, chaps. 229-31, and Book IX, chap. 71 (see III. iii. 3 See IV. iv. 63, n. 3). 475 and 480. 1

2

The

STANDING ARMIES

325

In 610 B.C. Assyria still lived within a defeated but undismayed army's lines at Harran, as in A.D. 1848 Austria survived in Radetsky's camp within the Quadrilateral of Hapsburg fortresses in Lombardy. earlier.

1

In deinem Lager ist Osterreich, sind einzelne Trummer. 2

Wir Andern

While manfully standing to arms for a new trial of strength with who had won the preceding round, the Assyrian army in

adversaries

610

B.C. hoped as sanguinely against hope as Radetsky's army in A.D. 1848 that, this time, they would retrieve their country's fortunes by rescuing her from the very jaws of destruction. While the Assyrians duly failed in their forlorn hope, Radetsky's army played a capital part in winning for the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy a seventy years' reprieve from her eventually inevitable doom of disruption by the 3 mounting force of Nationalism. Yet, though Radetsky's success might be less romantic than the Assyrians' failure, it was the fruit of a greater tour de force in the art of leadership. The Assyrian army of 610 B.C., like the British Light Brigade of A.D. 1854 an d Expeditionary Force of A.D. 1914, was a military formation of a homogeneous national texture fighting in its own national cause without any conflict of mutually incompatible loyalties, whereas the Austria that, in A.D. 1848, was incarnate in Radetsky's camp on the banks of the Po was a miniature reproduction of the house divided against itself in the valley of the Danube. The troops who in that year held together in Lombardy under Radetsky's command had to withstand a twofold psychological assault upon their esprit de corps. They were being asked to go on fighting for a state which not only appeared to have dissolved already in their rear, but which, for many of them, was not their own country but was, rather, their country's hereditary oppressor whose yoke had just been broken, not by their Italian opponents in the field, but by their own kinsmen on the home front in a revolutionary upheaval that was threatening to rankle into an outright civil war. Radetsky's army in the Quadrilateral was a mixed multitude in which German

This steadfastness of Assyrian military moral in 610-609 B.C. will appear the more it is recalled that, although by that date the Assyrian state had been in serious adversity for no longer than about sixteen years, since the death of Asshurbampal in 626 B.C., the Assyrian soldier had been living under a severe personal strain for more than a hundred years past, ever since the opening of the fourth and final bout of Assyrian militarism m 745 B c. (see IV. iv. 476-7) had first carried him away from home on distant, protracted, and consecutive campaigns. In the fragments of Assyrian law, dating from an earlier chapter of Assyrian history, that Modern Western archaeologists had recovered, a significantly high proportion of the legislation was concerned with situations arising from a soldier's return home from foreign service after so long an absence that his wife had given him up for dead. (Convenient English translations nnd commentaries will be found in Smith, J. M. P.: The Origin and History of Hebrew Law (Chicago 1931, University of Chicago Press), pp. 233-45, an v avrojj.o\ovvra)V an* avrov; (i Clem. ad. Cor., chap. 28). MrJTt,s vpcuv oeaeprcop evpedfj (Ignatius ad. Polycarpum, chap. 6). These passages are printed in Harnack, op. cit., pp. 9495. 7 AiKalov ovv o~riv fir] \LTroraKreiv r)fj.d$ O-TTO rov ^cA^juaros- avrov (i Clem. ad. Cor., chap. 21, printed in Harnack, op. cit., p. 94). 1

2

3

8

Rom.

9

See Harnack, op. cit., pp. 35-36. Matt. xi. 30, as translated into Latin by Tertullian:

10

nack, op. 11

Rom.

vi. 23.

cit., p. vi. 23,

De Monogamid,

chap. 2 (Har-

36).

as translated into Latin

by Tertulhan.

12 'ApcoKfre a> arparcvcaOc, atiques, d'mfideles, suivre le train de leurs peres, par cette seule raison qu'ils ont preVenus chacun que c'est le meilleur' (No. 98). 'On a beau dire, il faut avouer que la religion chretienne a quelque chose d'etonnant. "C'est parce que vous y tes ne", dira-t-on. Tant s'en faut; je me roidis contre, pour cette raison-la mthne, de peur que cette prevention ne me suborne. Mais, quoique j'y sois ne, je ne laisse pas de le trouver amsi* (No. 615). There is an admirable candour and sincerity in this last passage, in which the critic is applying his critique of the geographical relativity of human institutions to his own ancestral faith. An agnostic John Stuart Mill did not have to exercise the same high

M

making the same point 'The World, to each individual, means the part of

virtues in

:

it with which he comes in contact: his party, his sect, his church, his class of society; the man may be called, by comparison, almost liberal and large-minded to it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. He devolves upon his own world the responsibility of being in the right against the dissentient world of other people; and it never troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance, and that the same causes which make him a Churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin' (Mill, J. S.: On Liberty > chap. 2 (p. 80 in the Everyman edition)). The writer's attention was drawn to this passage by Mr. Martin Wight.

whom

CHURCHES AS A HIGHER SPECIES OF SOCIETY

433

The Causes of the Dissension and the Prospects of Transcending it The words that we have put into the mouth of our imaginary advocatus diaboli were true to fact, and the facts were surprising, because it was also true that this provincialism, of which the higher religions stood convicted in practice, was the antithesis of the revelation which was their common essence. The higher religions had revealed a new insight into the nature of God which carried with it, as its necessary corollary, a new view of the relations of human beings with one another. If God is One, He cannot be either Athena Poliuchus or Fortuna Praenestina or any other of the innumerable local godlets who had been these two city-goddesses' neighbours and rivals; and He must have 'made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the Earth'. 1 If God is Love, he cannot be *a man of war', 2 and the Psalmist errs and sins in singing blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight'. 3 If God is not contained in any of His creatures, then Man's corporate self-worship of himself is idolatry, even if this worship is paid, not to a parochial and militant Athena Poliuchus, but to an oecumenical and pacificatory Dea Roma. More*

over, the higher religions did not merely stand for these truths; they had put them into action. Their entry into the World had been an epiphany of God and at the same time a liberation of Man. It had freed

Man

In the his previous bondage to his own corporate self. to Man had been able overcome of the religions, higher power spiritual the political barriers between parochial states and even the cultural barriers between parochial civilizations. 5 How had the churches come to reimpose on their adherents the very bonds from which they had once set them free ? One answer to this perplexing question was perhaps to be found in the fact that the higher religions' ability to convert souls had been limited by Man's inability to learn except through suffering, so that the missionary's labour of love had had to wait upon the conqueror's work of destruction. In doing the Devil's work for the ephemeral aggrandisement of his fatherland and the trivial satisfaction of his own petty personal ambition, the conqueror is doing God's work without either 4

from

6 knowing it; for, in destroying the political liberty of his the deified victims parochial states, he is unintentionally and corporate unconsciously bringing religious liberty to souls that, in the days of their own country's perversely lamented sovereign independence, were fast bound in the misery and iron 7 of spiritual servitude to a religion of corstrikes down a deified parochial porate selfworship. When the conqueror scale of social life by incorstate, his stroke does not simply enlarge the it simultaneously transmutes the an into a statelet empire; porating

willing or

1

Acts

2

As Moses chants

4

On

xvii. 26.

this point see

Exod. xv. 3. Meyer, E.: Geschichte des Altertums, 4th

ps

3

in

ed., vol.

i,

cxhv. i. Part I (Stutt.

gart and Berlin 1921, Cotta), pp. 155-6s See V. v. 527-68, passim, and V. vi. 1-49, passim. 6 'Nun gut, wer bist du denn?' 'Ein Teil

von jener Kraft das Gute schafft.' Goethe: Faust, 11. 1335-6, quoted in

'Die stets das Bose will 7 Ps. cvii. 10.

und

stets

II.

i.

282.

434

RELATION OF CHURCHES TO CIVILIZATIONS

structure of social life by splitting the primitive social atom and accomplishing, in this blind act of social alchemy, that momentous separation of the Church from the State which gives individual souls their opportunity to 'seek the Lord if haply they might feel after Him and find

HimV When the parochial state has been liquidated by the force of a conqueror 's arms, its former citizens are converted on the political plane into subjects of the empire that this conqueror is building but they are not thereby converted automatically into worshippers of the imperial gods. Superstition or policy or a subtle combination of the two considerations usually deters the victorious war-lord from giving this further turn to his screw. In consequence, the subjects of a parvenu oecumenical regime are apt to find themselves free to follow any religion that they may choose and, while some of them will now voluntarily abandon the worship of hereditary parochial divinities who have disconcertingly ;

;

proved to lack either the inclination or the strength to preserve their former temporal power inviolate against the gods and men of the victorious empire, 2 it is rare for these sheep without a spiritual shepherd to take their religious cue from the turn of political events by voluntarily transferring their ecclesiastical allegiance to the high god of the Imperial Power that has robbed the former parochial states of their political 3 liberty. When, for example, Rome conferred freedom of religious choice

on Spartan and Athenian souls by converting them from citizen-devotees of a deified Sparta and Athens into Rome's political subjects, their liberated hearts were captivated, not by Divus Caesar or by Dea Roma, but by Cybele, Isis, Mithras, and Christ. This religious and ecclesiastical effect of a military and political cause was divined by Deutero-Isaiah at a turning-point in history 4 when Cyrus was setting himself to build into an Achaemenian Empire the political debris of Syriac and Babylonic parochial states which had been pre5 viously broken in pieces by an Assyrian battering-ram. The Judaean

prophet was correctly interpreting the political empire-builder's unconscious religious mission in 'the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.' 6 An access to the hearts of Mankind was indeed being opened for Judaism by the flying columns of Cyrus's army that

were sweeping up Judah's destroyer, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, into the net of an Achaemenian universal state which was to dwarf, not only this Babylonian successor-state of the Assyrians, but the Assyrian Power itself at its short-lived apogee. Yet the Achaemenian Empire, like every other 'universal state' up to date, had been 'universal' in the psychological sense of being oecumenical-minded without also being universal in the literal sense of having actually inherited the Earth ; 7 for hitherto the military conquerors' salutary achievement of breaking down 1

Acts

xvii. 27.

See the illuminating passage quoted from Eduard Meyer in V. vi. 30, 11. 15-17, and the references ibid. (vol. vi, p. 33, n. i) to two other passages in which the same author recurs to this theme. 4 See 3 See V. vi. p 424, above. 36-38. 2

5

Ps. Ixxii. 4.

6 Isa. xl. 3.

7

Matt.

v. 5.


435

had gone if measured by the extreme degree of the previous disunity of Mankind, had never been literally world-wide. During the five or six thousand years that had seen the rises and falls, up to date, of the species of society that we have labelled civilizations', even the most devastatingly successful of the would-be world conquerors had fallen ludicrously short of their vainglorious aim. Alexander's Macedonians had refused to cross the Hyphasis and had never seen the Tiber; and the Mongols, who had once marched simultaneously on China and Hungary from opposite gates of the Khaqan's camp, had gained no foothold in India or in Western Christendom and had been repulsed with ignominy from the thresholds of Egypt 2 and Japan. 3 barriers, far

though

it

*

1

Against this historical background there might be some significance in

one feature of a Modern Western secular

civilization

which was

historically unprecedented, though intrinsically superficial. While other civilizations too had burst their bounds and had incorporated into their

own body

social the

domains of neighbouring

societies either entire or

in part, the Western Civilization had been unique in establishing for itself a literally world-wide dominion. At the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era a society which, till then, had

been leading an obscure and undistinguished existence in Ultima Thule, at the extreme north-western corner of the habitable zone of the Old 4 World, had suddenly and surprisingly launched out upon the oceans and taken in the rear its Orthodox Christian and its Arabic and Iranic Muslim rivals who had been pressing hard upon Western Christendom overland since the failure of her medieval attempt to expand at their 5 expense across the Mediterranean in 'the Crusades'. In the course of the four and a half centuries that had passed since the launching of the Western oceanic voyages of discovery down to the time of writing, a post-da Gaman Western Civilization had become as worldwide as the high seas in which it had found its medium of expansion. Along these ubiquitous oceanic waterways it had propagated itself over the entire traversable and habitable surface of the globe, and had drawn into its net all other surviving civilizations as well as all surviving primitive societies. The social and psychological phenomena arising from these encounters between the Western Society and its contempor6 aries were not, of course, new departures. They could all be illustrated from the histories of previous encounters of the kind, in which the operations had been on a less than world-wide scale such, for example, as the impact of the Hellenic Civilization on the Syriac, Egyptiac, Babylonic, Hittite, Indie, and Sinic civilizations in the chapter of Hellenic history that had been opened by the conquests of Alexander 1 This unfulfilled possibility of Hellenic history has been discussed by Livy in a famous passage (Book IX, chap. 16, ad fin., to chap. 19, inclusive). Cp. Tarn, W. W.: Alexander the Great (Cambridge 1948, University Press, 2 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 396-7. 2 See I. i. 350 and IV. iv. 446-7. 3 See IV. iv. 93 and V. vi. 310, n. 2. 4 See Toynbee, A. J. 'The Unification of the World and the Change in Historical Perspective* in Civilisation on Trial (New York 1948, Oxford University Press), pp. 62XII. ix. 465-72. 96, and the present Study, IX. vin. 217-18 and s See I. i. 38 and IX. vni. 346-63. in Part examined IX, passim. These phenomena are :

e*, c'est Phomme spirituel, c'est I'homme celeste, dont parlent les

V6das comme

1'fivangile, et les

Such sainthood

les nô-platoniciens.' 1

indispensable for the maintenance of societies and simplest and lowest kind because even of unselfishness and determination and courage and

even those of the the

Mages comme

minimum

is

pettiest

vision that is required for making social life possible on Earth far exceeds the range of the natural altruism of a social animal. I will

not cease from mental

fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in Till we have built Jerusalem

my hand,

In England's green and pleasant land, 2 a resolution that can be taken only by a soul that, through eyes enlightened by communion with God, sees This World consecrated and illumined by God's indwelling presence. And the courage to abide by this resolution, in the face of disappointment and defeat, can be kindled only by a vision of the invincible action of God which reduces to insignificance the fickle fortunes of a desperate human battlefield.

is

For while the

tired waves, vainly breaking here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creaks and inlets making, Comes, silent, flooding in, the main.

Seem

And

not by eastern windows only, daylight comes, comes in the light In front the Sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright.' 3

When

;

This ideal of conduct is inspired by the saint's communion with God, and there is no effective alternative stimulus. The ideal of the sage breaks down because it tries to make Man become, not a saint inspired by the grace of a God who is Love, but a very god in himself in virtue of his own spiritual prowess; and for Human Nature this, if it were an attainable goal, would prove an intolerable burden. The moral impracticability of the enterprise is betrayed by the spiritual sterility of the aim. The Stoic or Epicurean philosopher seeks to be an isolationist God Incarnate ; the Hinayanian arhat schools himself for the self-annihilation of the Buddha, not for the self-sacrifice of Christ. Such attempts at a withdrawal from the suffering and sorrow of This World without a return cannot bring salvation to Man because they are not truly godlike. 4 This breakdown of a nobly austere Hellenic and Indie ideal of *en1 Amiel, H. F. Fragments d'un Journal Intime, new edition by Bouvier, B. (Paris 1927, Stock; Geneva 1927, Georg, 2 vols.), vol. i, pp. 290-1. * Blake, William: Jerusalem. 3 Clough, Arthur Hugh Lines Written on the Bridge of Peschiera. * See V. vi. 132-48, and pp. 391-2, above. :

:

5i6


lightened self-interest* proclaimed the bankruptcy of its basely selfindulgent Modern Western caricature and the writing on the wall of this Circaean 'City of Swine* was clear to read even before the outbreak of a Second World War. ;

'In A.D. 1933 the state of the World already afforded a crushing refutation of the creed of Humanism which had inspired the march of Western Civilisation for more than four hundred years and which had received its definitive formulation in nineteenth-century England in the apotheosis of "Enlightened Self-Interest".

'The enthronement of this nakedly pagan goddess is announced to many examples at random in the following sentence of a pamphlet which was published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and which went into its twelfth edition in A.D. 1850: "It is curious to observe how, through the wise and beneficent arrangement of Providence, men thus do their greatest service to the take one out of

public

when they

are thinking of nothing but their

own

gain."

1

'While formally ascribing to Divine Providence the ultimate credit for newly discovered beneficence of the Old Adam, the votaries of En-

this

lightened Self-interest were unavowedly replacing Christianity by a worship of unregenerate Human Nature. And the lie direct, which, in the name of Deism, is given in this passage to the teachings of the New Testament and to the doctrines of the Christian Church, seemed unanswerable in the particular time and place in which the pamphlet was written and disseminated. In mid-nineteenth-century England the uncompromising denunciations of economic acquisitiveness in the New Testament were reverentially but unhesitatingly explained away as Oriental hyperboles, and the ecclesiastical ban upon usury was openly laughed to scorn as a superstition, because the superiority of the children of This World over the children of Light, in practical wisdom, seemed conclusively demonstrated in the eyes of those in authority in that generation. On the other hand in the year 1933, which saw the failure of the World Economic Conference and the World Disarmament Conference, the nineteenthcentury proposition seemed as ludicrous a paradox as the Christian view of life, and of human relations, had seemed in the Western World of A.D. 1850. In Victorian England, as in Periclean Athens and in Medicean Florence, Humanism had seemed sufficient unto itself, because Man was then experiencing the momentary sensation of being triumphantly master of his own fate through the power of his own apery or virtu or science, without needing the intervention of God either to chasten or to inspire him. By the year 1933 it was once more manifest that, "when they" were "thinking of nothing but their own gain", men were not only quite incapable of serving the public, but were even impotent to manage their

own personal affairs to their own personal advantage. So far from being the great constructive driving-force in social life, the myopic pursuit of selfish personal interest was shown to be doomed, a priori, to miss its mark. Self-interest had proved, once more, to be a target of human aims on which direct hits could never be registered. This object of human desires could only be attained incidentally by people who stumbled across it on their road towards a transcendental goal of endeavour ; and it followed that, if and when self-interest, private or social, was ever successfully 1 Easy Lessons on Money Matters for the Use of Young People, izth ed. (London 1850, S.P.C.K.), quoted by J. M. Keynes: Essays in Persuasion (London 1931, Macmillan),

p. 85.


517

realised in this fortuitous way, it would turn out to be something with no recognisable likeness to the earthly paradise of Homo Economicus. 'Thus, as so often before, the so-called paradoxes of Christianity were proved to be truisms, while the children of This World were numbered

once again among "the

silly

people

who do

not even

know

their

own

silly

business". They were, in fact, most ludicrously convicted, in this chapter of history, of having sacrificed their own substantial interests to an academic dream. For the histories of the World Disarmament Conference and the World Economic Conference completed the proof that "Enlightened Self-Interest'*, so far from being an automatic, self-regulating psychological mechanism for making all things work together for Man's good, was nothing more than an intellectual abstraction which had no counterpart at all in the realm of practical life.' 1

The association of the words 'enlightened' and 'self-interest* is, indeed, a contradictio in adjecto when 'enlightenment* is taken to mean a blindness to everything supernatural and superhuman in Man's vision of the Universe. In such a Weltanschauung, in which the Heavenly Light has been 'blacked out', 'enlightenment' does not lead even to the common-sense conclusion that the interest of the individual is inseparable from 'the greatest good of the greatest number'. Within the narrowing moral horizon of a godless universe, in which piety towards the dead has become inept, and providence for the unborn quixotic, a concern for the living generation of his fellow men also ceases to be within the moral capacity. Thus, paradoxically, pure rationalism as a rule of conduct leads to the conclusion that the only 'realistic* applied course is to abandon Society to the irrational play of Chance ; and this individual's

philosophy of prosaic despair begets a policy of monochronistic hedonism 'Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die.' 2 Brevis hie est fructus :

homullis. 3

Thus a society whose ever more complicated structure depends for its maintenance upon planning on the grand scale may lose the indispensable minimum of moral virtue at the moment when it has attained the 4 requisite degree of intellectual capacity. It is, no doubt, emotionally abhorrent, as well as intellectually inept, to make irrevocable sacrifices in the hope of unguaranteed rewards and, since, in terms of wordly ;

every human endeavour may be proved by the event to be so much labour lost, Man would paralyse his powers of action altogether if he were ever to succeed in devaluing to zero the moral reward that is intrinsic in doing right, whatever the material consequences. Action is results,

creation and this godlike activity is possible for God's creatures only in so far as they surrender their wills to their Maker and thereby consecrate their action to the service of an actor whose plan is not subject ;

to the miscarriages that so often overtake the best laid schemes of mice and men. The surrender of Man's will to God was the first and last

commandment

of a religion whose Founder had chosen this

1 Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M. Survey of International Affairs, 1934, Milford), pp. 4-5. 2 i Cor. xv. 32. Cp. Luke xii. 19 and Eccles. ii. 24. 3 Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book III, 1. 914. 4 See IV. iv. 184-5. :

watchword 1933 (London

518


its name; and isldm was offered for love's sake in the prayer of Saint Ignatius Loyola:

to be

'Suscipe, Domine, universam meam libertatem; accipe memoriam, intellectum et voluntatem omnem. Quidquid habeo vel possideo, mihi largitus es id tibi totum restituo, ac tuae prorsus voluntati trado gubernandum. Amorem tui solum cum gratia tua mihi dones, et dives sum ;

satis,

nee aliud quidquam ultra posco.' 1

The evaporation of this prayer out of a desiccated heart had deprived Modern Western Homo Economicus of the faculty which his Nazi Western adversary had aptly labelled Aktionsfdhigkeit. The self-same 'enlightened self-interest' that had given him the technical skill to build a liner or a sky-scraper or a wireless station or an atom bomb plant had robbed him of the moral power to act on the unselfseeking motives, and to take the long views, which his marvellous technique required of him in order to allow it to bear fruit. An eighteenth-century English Whig landowner, who had put his treasure into the founding of a family, a

his grandchildren would not live to see with the eye of the flesh in the glory of the timber's full-grown stature. A twentieth-century Ministry of Agriculture planted soft wood to replace the hard wood that it felled; and, in this greediness for quick

would plant avenues which even

it was advertising its disbelief in its own immortality, however loudly it might shout Le Roi est mort! Vive le Roi! The business men who had taken over from the landowners the management of a British Conservative Party had restricted the horizon of politics to the range of their own myopic commercial vision. Apres moi le deluge, if business is

returns,

booming

today.

In June 1936, at a moment when the Western World was faced with a choice between checkmating Italy's aggression against Abyssinia and condemning itself to wage a Second World War, a British statesmanmanufacturer who gave the coup de grace to collective security betrayed an utter unawareness of the issue that was at stake. In Neville Chamberlain's eyes at that juncture, Great Britain's stand in support of the Covenant of the League of Nations was not a far-sighted attempt to avert a political catastrophe by upholding a moral principle; it was a perverse freak of pedantry which, by making bad blood between Great Britain and Italy, threatened to check the incipient recovery from the great depression that had afflicted the Western World in the opening years of that decade. This transitory return of economic prosperity was, for Chamberlain, the supreme reality that dominated his field of vision.

'The National Government

.

.

.

was able

to point to a recovery

which

In The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, edited by Rickaby, S. J., Joseph (London 1915, Burns & Gates), p. 209, the original Spanish text is given with the following English translation: 'Tomad, Sefior, y recibid toda mi hbertad, mi memoria, mi entendimiento, y toda mi voluntad, todo mi haber y mi poseer: vos me lo distes; vos, Senor, 10 torno, todo es vuestro, disponed & toda vuestra voluntad. Dadme vuestro amor y gracia, que esta mi 1

basta.'

'Take, will, all I

O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my have and possess: you have given it to me; to you, O Lord, I return it; all is

yours; dispose of it entirely according to your that is enough for me.'

will.

Give

me your love and grace,

because


519

All around exceeded that of any great industrial nation in the World to-day were signs that the national prosperity was still mounting/ This was the leading note of an after-dinner speech, delivered by Chamberlain on the loth June, 1936, in which he expressed the opinion that the continuance of economic sanctions against Italy on behalf of her victim, 1 Abyssinia, was 'the very mid-summer of madness', and of another

address, delivered on the zyth of the same month, in which the same speaker asked whether a political opponent of his would 'suggest that we should expose our people to the risk of those horrors which so shocked us when they were applied to Abyssinia?' 2 .

The Youth, who daily farther from the Must travel, still is Nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended At length the Man perceives

.

.

East

;

And

fade into the light of

it

die away, 3 day.

common

And, 'where there is no vision, the people paladins push their 'realism* to a point

perish'. The epigoni of the at which 'enlightened self4

in the craven spirit of interest' spells an unheroic self-immolation those Egyptian fallah-conscripts who, with rifles grounded and bayonets unfixed, used to kneel in orderly ranks with their throats meekly uplifted for the Sudanese Mahdist warrior to cut at his ease. These poor creatures allowed themselves to be massacred for lack of even that modicum of public spirit that was needful for saving their own skins 5 their Mahdist adversary conquered in virtue of a visionary willingness to die for his leader and his faith and, when this Sudanese ;

;

6

man armed was overcome physically by a did not fail him. The 2nd September,

stronger than he, his 1898, which saw the annihilation of the hosts of the Khalifah of the Mahdl Muhammad Ahmad at Omdurman, 'was the last day of Mahdism, and the greatest'. 7 The virtue of the barbarian who dies fighting for his tribe against hopeless odds undismayed by the calculation that, on an 'enlightenedly was exhibited self-interested' reckoning, he is sacrificing his life in vain on that day by the aged standard-bearer who charged a battalion armed with magazine rifles, 8 and by the three survivors out of thirty thousand

strong vision

dead who stood facing three thousand victors, with their arms round the 9 till Death claimed them likewise. The same spirit was shown thirty-seven years later by the Amhara when, in A.D. 1935, they ran to meet certain defeat and death at the hands of a Western aggressor

staff of their flag,

1 See Toynbee, A. J. and Boulter, V. M. Survey of International Affairs, 1935 (Lon2 See don 1936, Milford), vol. h, pp. 462-4. op. cit., p. 446. 3 Wordsworth Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. :

*

Prov. xxix.

s

By

contrast,

1

8. it

was observed that the Spartans usually came

off

with comparatively

an exceptionally strong determinalight casualties, just because they went into battle with tion to lose their lives rather than survive with dishonour (see the passage quoted from Xenophon in III. hi. 63). xi. 21-22; cp. Matt. xii. 29; Mark iii. 27. Steevens, G. W.: With Kitchener to Khartum, loth ed. (Edinburgh and London 1898, Blackwood), p. 204. 9 See See ibid. ibid., pp. 282-3.

6 7

Luke

520


whose armoury had been reinforced, since the turn of the century, by the invention of aircraft and of poison-gas. Ktlvoi

fj,i>,

yvjjivoi

Kal /3ap/3apoL avSpcs eov

piKU>$ov$ OVK opovv oAA' auTooêSn;, cr' cAcuflepcu, ov

opyava

n

KaXajs jj,apvd(jivoi Ka ^/iefe 8* ol fjifyaXoL Kal Kaprcpoi, ol 1? 'Atorjv

rwv avrwv oovvwv

yevaaficvoLcri

aooi;

6aviv

palp', aAA* ov ddvarov rov 'AprfCov OVTTOTC rolov TOIS CTTLOpKOVrnV OOJpOV OO>K 00$. 1

In a Modern Western social milieu in which the reductio ad absurdum of an 'enlightened self-interest* seemed to be extinguishing the vision without which Society cannot endure, the writer's generation had lived to see the example of a primitive barbaric virtue inspire a demonic

Neo-Paganism. Fascism and Nazism had been formidable, in their brief hour, in so far as they had succeeded in winning the allegiance of good characters and in appealing to the better side of bad characters and the touch of moral attractiveness, which was their strength, was due to their melodramatic repudiation of the laisser-faire, the utilitarianism and the surtoutpas de zele that had been the pedestrian principles of a commercialminded age of Western history. This militant totalitarianism, 2 aping the tribalism of Primitive Man, had, of course, been only a pathological exaggeration of a parochial patriotism, caught by the West from a 3 resurgent Hellenism at the dawn of the Modern Age of Western 4 history, which, since this renaissance, had gradually come to be perhaps ;

four-fifths of the effective religion of five-sixths of the people of the 1 These Greek verses were first published in The Times, under a letter from the writer of this Study, on the 22nd April, 1936. The following translation, by G. M. Gathorne Hardy, appeared in The Times, under a letter from him, on the 25th of the same month: Without our arms or art, these men could dare War's utmost fnghtfulness, since men they were, And, in close fight, to death untrembhng passed, Still freemen, battling nobly to the last. But we, whose science makes us strong and great, Are doomed to share the tortures of their fate, Yet not their soldier's grave; the gods in scorn Withhold that privilege from men forsworn.

3 See X. ix. See pp. 439-40, above. 7-8. This reversion, in a Modern Western World, to the principal cult of Hellenic an or tacit its avowed of carried with as had it, corollary, repudiation generally paganism Christianity. At certain times and places, however, this Western Neo-Paganism had had the hardihood to try to turn Christianity to its own account by treating it as if it were an ancestral pagan religion which it was convenient to preserve as an integral part of the social heritage of the secular community as, in the Athenian city-state, the worships of Demeter and Dionysus and All Souls had been associated with the corporate selfworship of Athena Pphuchus as part-and-parcel of a totalitarian communal life in which there was no distinction between Church and State. This had perhaps been the prevalent attitude towards Christianity in Modern Italy during the century immediately preceding the Counter-Reformation; and, in the same spirit, the Modern French bourgeoisie had shown signs, in the nineteenth century, of reverting to a worldly-wise Catholicism from an 'enlightened' anti-clerical agnosticism. This latter-day movement in France was

2

*

sketched in A.D. 1929 in the following terms, in a private letter to the writer of Study, by an eminent French student of French life and politics 'In my opinion, the renaissance of French Catholicism is closely bound up with evolution of the French bourgeoisie itself. In 1848 the bourgeois took fright at Revolution. Until then they had been, at bottom, Voltairians (though this did

this

:

the the

not


521

Western World. 1 The hold gained by this Neo-Hellenic corporate selfworship on a majority of ex- Christian hearts was due to its power of inspiring its votaries to give their lives on its behalf. Under the ashen deposit of enlightened self-interest* this fire lay hidden, yet unextinguished, in the hearts of Neville Chamberlain's countrymen and Winston Churchill was able to blow it into sudden flame when the Fascist Powers scattered the ashes, to their own undoing, by assault and battery. When, in the summer of A.D. 1940, a Modern Western 'nation of shopkeepers' woke up to find itself with its back to the wall, it upset all Hitler's calculations, and thereby doomed him to ultimate defeat, by emulating the antique virtue of the Sudanese at Omdurman and the 2 Abyssinians at Lake Ashangi. This unconsciously far-sighted folly that could move men to die for their country showed that the Modern Western cult of patriotism whether in the Apollinean democratic or in the Dionysiac totalitarian vein was in truth a religious revival in the spiritual vacuum left in human hearts by the evaporation of a higher religion. But the tragedy *

;

prevent them from holding that "religion is wanted for the people"). Towards 1848 they began to say to themselves: "The curt is the best support of the gendarme" Thus they tended to become Catholics out of social apprehension but these were Catholics without conviction. Their children, brought up in the Church, accepted the Catholic religion in another spirit towards the end of the century. The younger generation was suffering from the excessive individualism of the age; it sought in the Church a moral armour against anarchy. This Catholicism was of a higher kind, but it was not yet really religious; it was a political Catholicism to a large extent. On the eve of the War (that is, since about 1907) a new phase set in. The younger people, tired of pure mtellectuahsm, found vent action, in sport. They felt the approach of the War and prepared themselves for meeting it. Their Catholicism took the form of an affirmation of faith, of action, of devotion to their country.' This movement was carried to extremes by the moving spirit of Action Franfatse, Charles Maurras, who 'explicitly commended the Catholic Church on the ground that it had de-Christianized Christianity and had thus laid the foundations for a Neo-Pagamsm devoted to the cult of the sovereign national state'. This audacious attempt 'to press a church which was supra-national in the essence of its being into the service of a militant nationalism which claimed an ultimate and absolute value for itself drew down upon Maurras' head, in January 1914, a condemnation of his journal, together with several books from his pen, by the Second Congregation of the Index at the Vatican; but, in confirming this decree, Pope Pius X forbore to make it public, in deference to representations from eminent French Catholics who had 'welcomed Monsieur Maurras' lefthanded benediction of their faith on the calculation that the force of his personality and the charm of his literary style would propagate the faith in certain quarters in France, of regaining a particularly among the younger generation, where it had little prospect footing under any other auspices'. After a delay that was partly due to the dossier' s of the decree the Vatican in mislaid January 1914 was archives, having been temporarily confirmed by Pope Pius XI on the 29th December, 1926, and was published early in 1927. (See Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1929 (London 1930, Milford), pp. 480-1, 483-4* 487-8). This exploitation of a Catholic Christianity for pagan political purposes was, of course, only one of a number of diverse movements in the life of a nineteenth-century French Catholicism which was at the same time giving birth to great philosophers, great mis;

m

V

and great saints (see IV. iv. 582). p. 478, above. Churchill's decision in August 1940 to send powerful reinforcements from the British Isles to the British armies in the Middle East at a moment when the Battle of Britain was at its height in the air, when the victorious German armies were massed along the continental shores of the Channel, and when Great Britain was hourly expecting to be invaded on the ground by an enemy against whom she was momentarily defenceless, was an act of imaginative courage that is worthy to rank with the three this Study in a passage great Roman deeds that have been compared with one another in General War of A.D. (III. in. 269) written about six years before the outbreak of the sionaries, 1

See

2

1939-45-

B

2000. vn

S

2

522


of this Neo-Paganism was that its blinkered idealism only availed to its self-sacrificing votary 's foot on the lowest rung of a ladder which had been scaled, to the summit, by the martyr, the bodhisattva, and the saint whose lead the neo-pagan's forefathers had once followed. reinstituted worship of Leviathan is not the happy substitute that Frazer holds it to be 1 for the neglected worship of a One True God. The only heart in which self-interest is truly enlightened', and therefore practically effective as a motive for action, is the heart of the saint who identifies his self-interest with the service of God and who therefore sees the field of action from God's angle of vision. He surveys the field from a height at which the authentic lineaments of the everlasting hills are not obscured by the mirage of uncertainty which pervades the landscape when it is regarded from the pedestrian human level. The saint is not paralysed by a horror of seeking unguaranteed rewards at the cost of irrevocable sacrifices, because he is convinced that the standpoint from which human action appears to be the unprofitable pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp is one that gives a falsify ingly fragmentary vision of Reality. Such godlike enlightenment inspired the confidence and fortitude that Jesus and Socrates and More displayed when they forbore to embrace opportunities held out to them for saving their lives at the price of compromising the truth which it was their mission to proclaim. replace

A

*

this, as the duke of Norfolk and Sir Thomas More chanced to in familiar talk together, the duke said unto him "By the mass, Master More, it is perilous striving with princes. And therefore I would wish you somewhat to incline to the King's pleasure; for by God's body, Master *

After

fall

:

mors est." quoth he. "Then in good faith is there no more difference between your Grace and me, but that I shall die today and

More, Indignatio *

"Is that

all,

you tomorrow."

principis

my Lord?" '

2

Sir Thomas More had continued a good while in the Tower, Lady, his wife, obtained license to see him who, at her first coming, like a simple ignorant woman, and somewhat worldly too, with this

'When

my

;

salutation bluntly saluted him the good year, Master More", quoth she, "I marvel that you, that have been always hitherto taken for so wise a man, will now so play the fool to lie here in this close filthy prison, and be content thus to be

manner of '

:

"What

shut up amongst mice and rats, when you might be abroad at your liberty, and with the favour and goodwill both of the King and his Council, if you would but do as all the bishops and best learned of this realm have done. And, seeing you have at Chelsea a right fair house, your library, your books, your gallery, your garden, your orchard, and all other necessaries so handsome about you, where you might in the company of me your wife, your children, and household, be merry, I muse what a God's name you mean here still thus fondly to tarry." After he had a while quietly heard her, with a cheerful countenance he said unto her: "I pray thee, good Mistress Alice, tell me one thing." *

See the passage quoted on pp. 383-4, above. Roper, William The Life of Sir Thomas More, edited by E. V. Hitchcock (Early English Text Society, original series No. 197, London 1935, Oxford University Press), pp. 71-72, as quoted with modernized spelling in R. W. Chambers, Thomas More 1

2

:

(London 1935, Cape),

p. 300.


523 that?" quoth she. "Is not this house", quoth he, "as nigh heaven as mine own?" 'To whom she, after her accustomed homely fashion, not liking such talk, answered, "Tilly vally, Tilly vally". "How say you, Mistress Alice", quoth he, "is it not so?" ' "Bone deus, Bone deus, man, will this gear never be left?" quoth she. ... So her persuasions moved him but a little.' 1 '

"What

is

'

'

The time has come', in the words ascribed to Socrates at the close of an address to his judges which was nominally a defence but was actually a refusal of a possible avoidance of the death-penalty, 'the time has come for us to go I, Socrates, to my death, and you to carry on with your lives. Which of these two destinations is the better ? That is a riddle which can be read by God alone/ 2 i TO ^rjv \LV can KarOave.lv TO KaT0avLv oc tfiv Kara) vo/uêrcu; 3

TLS o?Sei>

No human being in this life can answer this question in terms that will guarantee to him, as his dividend, the maximum of worldly advantage; but a Socrates can answer it, in terms that will ensure his own condemnation to death, in the strength of his communion with a God from whose love 'nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to 4 separate us'. In the light of the truth that a goal can often best be reached by aiming, not at it, but at some more ambitious goal beyond it, 5 we can now see the explanation of the paradox that, by striving single-mindedly to act as good citizens of the Civitas Dei> the saints succeed incidentally in saving the situation for social life in This World within the vastly larger

framework of their own spiritual field of activity. 6 Even a mundane law and order can be effectively established on Earth only on the model of a building that 'we have from God a house not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens'. 7 5.

The Promise of Exorcizing

The

the Perilousness of

Mimesis

anatomy of a civilization is, as we have 8 seen, its dependence on mimesis as a 'social drill' for ensuring that the rank-and-file of Mankind shall follow their leaders. In the change over from a Yin-state into a Yang-activity which takes place at the genesis of a civilization through a mutation in the character of a primitive 9 society, the rank-and-file transfer their mimesis from the ancestors to creative human personalities of the living generation; 10 but the avenue Achilles' heel in the social

1 Roper, ed. Hitchcock, pp. 82-84, as quoted with modernized spelling in Chambers, pp. 25-26. 3 2 Plato: Euripides: Polyeidus, fragment 2. Apology, 42A. 5 See * Rom. viu. pp. 388 and 510, above. 39. 6 On this The III. iii. see spiritual peril to which a terrestrial embodi267-9. point ment of the Ctvttas Dei exposes itself by such incidental mundane achievements is examined on pp. 545-8, below. 8 In III. iii. 7 2 Cor. v. i. 245-8 and IV. iv. 119-33. 'The mass of Mankind plods on, with eyes fixed on the footsteps of the generations that went before, too indifferent or too fearful to raise their glances to judge for themselves whether the path on which they are travelling is the best, or to learn the conditions by which they are surrounded and affected' (Galton, Francis: Hereditary Genius (London

1869, Macmillan), p. 197).

I0

See

II.

i.

192.

524


1 thereby opened for a social advance may end in a ianua lett, since no human being can be creative except within limits, and even then no more than precariously, and, when an inevitable failure has bred an equally inevitable disillusionment, the discredited leader is apt to resort to force in order to retain an authority that is morally forfeit. In the this Civitas Dei this peril is exorcized by a fresh transfer of mimesis time from the limitedly and precariously creative human personalities who are the ephemeral leaders of mundane civilizations to a God who is the source of all human creativity and whose own divine creativity is

infinite.

This mimesis of

God

can never expose

human

souls that devote

and disillusionments that are to attend the mimesis of the even most apt godlike human beings, and that produce, when they do arise, that moral alienation of a restive proletariat from a now merely dominant minority which is one of the symptoms of social decline and fall. The communion between the Soul and the One True God cannot thus degenerate into the bondage of themselves to

it

to those disappointments

a slave to a despot, for in each of the higher religions, in diverse measure, the vision of God as Power is transfigured by a vision of Him as Love and the presentation of this Loving God as a Dying God Incarnate is a theodicy which makes the imitation of Christ immune against the tragedy inherent in any mimesis that is directed towards unregenerate

;

human

personalities.

In the story of Christ's temptation in the wilderness at the beginning of His Ministry, 2 and of His Passion at the close of it, 3 He is presented in the Gospels as refusing, at the price of the Cross, to exercise a spiritually sterile option of imposing His divine will by an act of power.

Let a renegade Dionysus indulge an ungodlike lust for human glory by 4 conquering all the Kingdoms of the World, and an unedifying animus human his pitifully unsuspecting persecutor by dealing him, against out of the blue, a blasting blow. A divinity who subjugates India and takes his revenge on Pentheus 5 demonstrates his power of taming men's bodies at the cost of alienating their feelings, while a death on the Cross draws all men unto Him. 6

God who

suffers

'The story of the Temptations is, of course, a parable of His spiritual wrestlings. ... It represents the rejection, under three typical forms, of all existing conceptions of the Messianic task which was to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. Should He use the power with which, as Messiah, He is endowed to satisfy the creature wants of Himself and His human brethren, so fulfilling the hope of a "good time coming" which prophets had presented in the picture of the Messianic Banquet (cf. e.g. Isaiah xxv, 6)? Should He be a Caesar-Christ, winning the kingdoms of the the glory of them by establishing an earthly monarchy and (cf. e.g. Isaiah ruling from the throne of David in perfect righteousness ix, 6, 7) ? Should He provide irresistible evidence of His divine mission, appearing in the Temple courts upborne by angels, so that doubt would

World and

1

2 3 5

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book I, I. 1112; Book V, 1. 373. Matt. iv. i-n; Mark i. 12-13; Luke iv. 1-13. 4 Matt. Matt. xxyi. 53; John xviii. 36; xix. u. Luke iy. 8; 6 See V. vi. 265-6. John xii. 32.

iv. 5.

CHURCHES AS A HIGHER SPECIES OF SOCIETY be impossible

(cf. e.g.

Daniel

vii,

13,

525

14 and Enoch) ? Every one of these

conceptions contained truth. When men are obedient to the Kingdom of God and His justice, everyone will have what he needs for food and clothing (St. Matthew vi, 33). The Kingdom of God is the realm of perfect

where God's righteous

justice

authority of Christ

will is

done

(St.

Matthew

vi,

The

10).

absolute and can claim the support of the hosts of Heaven (St. Matthew xxviii, 18; xxvi, 53). Yet, if any or all of these are taken as fully representative of the Kingdom and its inauguration, they have one fatal defect. They all represent ways of securing the outward obedience of men apart from inward loyalty; they are ways of controlling and the Kingdom conduct, but not ways of controlling hearts and wills of God, who is Love, cannot be established in that way/ 1 is

.

.

.

In the imitation of Christ, this God who is Love draws the Soul towards Himself by evoking a love that is a response in kind to His and ;

because, in this communion of loves, there is no alloy of coercion, a travail in the Soul which begins as an exercise of mimesis bears fruit in a reception of grace, through which the Soul is enabled to partake of the

inward

spiritual qualities

taken as

whose outward

visible manifestations

it

has

rule of life. Instead of ending in frustration, disillusionment, and strife, 'imitation' (/xôn?) here flowers into an 'assimilation* 2 (ofMOLwais) of Man's nature to God's. The 'light caught from a leaping its

which was imparted

to Plato's disciples 'by strenuous intellectual intimate personal intercourse' with the Master, 3 now 4 but, instead of reappears as the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost an esoteric initiation within the sanctum of an Academy which being none but a properly qualified mathematician may enter, 5 the pentecostal

flame',

communion and

;

fire is

a grace that

God

can give to any

human

soul that truly seeks

it.

6

1 Temple, William: Readings in St. John's Gospel: First Series, Chapters i-xn (London 1939, Macrmllan), pp. xxvi-xxvn. 2 See V. vi. 165, n. 6, and Athanasius, De Plato, Theaetetus, I76A-E, quoted Incarnattone, chap, hv, 3, quoted on p. 513, n. 2, above. 3 Plato's Letters, No. 7, 34IB-E, quoted in III. in. 245.

m

*

Acts

5

Mrjbtis dyajLifrp7)Tos clairco

n. 1-4.

institute of philosophy at 6

See V.

vi.

165-6.

is said to have been inscribed over the entrance to Plato's Athens (Tzetzes: Chthades, Book VIII, 1. 973).

THE ROLE OF CIVILIZATIONS LIVES OF CHURCHES

B.

(I)

IN

THE


the foregoing inquiry has convinced us that the churches embodying

IFthe higher religions are diverse approximate projections on Earth of one and the same Civitas Dei, and that the species of society of which this Commonwealth of God is the sole and unique representative is of a spiritually higher order than the species represented by the civilizations, we shall be encouraged to go farther in our experiment of inverting the assumption, on which we have tacitly proceeded in previous Parts of this Study, that, in the relation between churches and civilizations, the civilizations* role is dominant and the churches' role subordinate. Instead of dealing with churches in terms of civilizations, as hitherto, 1

we

shall boldly make the new departure of dealing with civilizations in terms of churches. If we are looking for a social cancer, we shall find it, not in a church which supplants a civilization, but in a civilization which supplants a church and, if we have thought of a church as being a chrysalis through which one civilization reproduces itself in another, we shall now have to think, inversely, of the 'apparented' civilization in this genealogical series as being an overture to the epiphany of a church, and of the 'affiliated* civilization as being a regression from this higher ;

level of spiritual attainment.

This finding answers a question which, in an earlier context, 2 we have been led to raise through noticing an apparent inconsistency in Plato's reading of one of the riddles of human destiny. Which, we have asked ourselves, are the true catastrophes: the breakdowns of civilizations or their births ? Our answer now will be that the birth of a civilization is a catastrophe if it is a regression from a previously established church, 3 while the breakdown of a civilization is not a catastrophe if it is the overture to a church's birth.

The second

of these two interdependent conclusions is, as will be life of a civilization as a whole, in all chapters of its history and on all planes of its activity, of a truth that has already 4 impressed itself on us in our study of the political institution in which a disintegrating civilization is apt to embody itself in the penultimate seen, an application to the

rally before its final dissolution. We have seen that universal states succeed in being creative in so far as they serve beneficiaries other than themselves, and that the beneficiaries of universal states who have made the most fruitful use of their secular benefactors' services have been the churches. We can now see that, in discharging this creative mission of helping churches to come to birth, universal states are acting not simply on their own account but as representatives and agents of the 1

See

3

On

*

p. 420, above. this point see the passage

*

In IV.

quoted from Metternich's memoirs on In VI, passim, but especially in Parts A and B, on pp. 1-52, above.

iv.

585-8.

p. 512, above.


527

embodied in them and, while their official mandate which is to avert, and not merely to postpone, the dissolution of a disintegrating societymay be an inherently impracticable task, they may find comcivilizations

;

pensation for a perhaps inevitable failure here in the magnificent success of enabling a dying civilization to complete the fulfilment of its historical raison d'etre. If we take, as a test case for the verification of this thesis, the genesis of the Christian Church, and cite the tenuous yet significant evidence afforded by the transference of words from a secular to a religious

meaning and usage, we shall find this philological testimony supporting the view that Christianity is a religious theme with a secular overture, and that this overture consisted, not merely in the Roman political achievement of an Hellenic universal state, but in Hellenism itself, in all phases and aspects. Christian Church is indebted for its very name to the technical term employed, in the city-state of Athens, to denote the general assembly of the citizen-body when it was meeting to transact political, as distinct from judicial, business; but, in thus borrowing the word ecclesia (cK/cAâta), the Church gave it a dual meaning which was no part of the original Attic usage but was the reflection of a new political order, in which Athens and all other surviving city-states of a disintegrating Hellenic World had been incorporated into the Roman Empire without losing their identities as units of local government and life on the municipal level. In Christian usage, ecclesia came to mean both a local Christian community 1 and the church universal. When the Christian Church, local and universal, came to be articulated into the two ecclesiastical classes of 'laity' and 'clergy', and when the 'clergy', in turn, came to be graded into a hierarchy of 'orders' in an ascending scale of dignity and authority, culminating in the 'order' of 'bishops', the requisite terms of ecclesiastical administrative art were likewise borrowed from an existing secular Greek and Latin vocabulary. The 'laity' of the Christian Church was suggestively designated by an archaic Greek word (Aad?) which denoted the people as distinct from those in authority over them, with a connotation of amenability to the word of command. In the vocabulary of the Homeric Epic the word had been used of the naively loyal comitatus of a barbarian war-lord in a post- Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history it had been revived to serve as a technical term for the naively submissive labour force on one of the of the large-scale agricultural estates which the Hellenic conquerors Achaemenian Empire had taken over from a dispossessed Persian landed 2 The ambivalency in the nuance, half-heroic and halfaristocracy. servile, which the word had thus come to acquire by the date of the beginning of the Christian Era, aptly fitted the 'laity' of a church which, its

The

;

on

its

By

own spiritual plane, was both militant and authoritarian. contrast, the 'clergy' took its name from a Greek word (K\fjpos)

When

the 'outdoor' Hellenic Civilization gave place to the 'indoor* Orthodox and civilizations, the word ecclesia, in its local meaning, came to be applied, not only to the local Christian community, but to the parochial building in which it assembled for congregational worship. 2 For this Persian landed aristocracy, see pp. 123-4, above. 1

Western Christian

528

CIVILIZATIONS IN THE LIVES OF CHURCHES

had been specialized in a juridical sense an inherited estate, and in a political sense to allotted share of a conquered territory. This political usage, which had been borrowed from Spartan conquerors in the Peloponnese 1 by Athenian conquerors in the Archipelago and Macedonian conquerors in Egypt and South- Western Asia, had given the word a rather unfortunate connotation by the time when the Christian Church began to work out its ecclesiastical organization. The Church adopted the word, nevertheless, to mean the portion of the Christian community that God had allotted to Himself to serve Him as His professional

whose general meaning of

mean an mean an

to

'lot*

allotted share of

2

priesthood. As for the 'orders' (ordines) of clergy in the Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy, they took their name from the politically privileged classes in the Roman body politic, which were known as ordines both collectively and severally (ordo senatortus, ordo equestris), to distinguish them from the common run of Roman citizens. The members of the highest order in the Christian hierarchy came to be known as Overseers' (emoTcoTrot), and the initial preposition, as well as the literal meaning, of this compound Greek word are likewise to be found in the title (tyopoi) which had been given in the Spartan body politic to the members of a board of supreme executive officers who were appointed by election but were constitutional despots during their term of office. 3 The Christian Church's sacred book taken over from the Jews and

eventually augmented by the addition of an exclusively Christian 'New Testament' to supplement and retrospectively reinterpret 'the Old Testament' of Jewish origin was presented by the Church as its credentials in the belief that this was the authentic Word of God Himself. In so far as the Bible was not referred to as 'the Books' (rd pif$Xla)par excellence, it was designated by a term long since current in the vocabulary of the Roman inland revenue. In the fiscal terminology of a post-Hannibalic Roman Commonwealth the word scriptura signified the tax payable for the right to graze cattle on the public lands in the devastated areas in the South of Italy, because an entry in the official

would-be grazier had duly paid his tax, was the warrant that authorized him to make use of the public pasturelands. The Greek equivalent of the Latin scriptura was ypa^TJ, and in a latterday Kingdom of Greece at the time of writing there was a district in the Southern Pindus, between the plains of Thessaly and the west coast, which was still known as the Agrapha because the agents of an Ottoman inland revenue and an East Roman inland revenue in an earlier age register, certifying that a

See

*

III.

iii.

53, 57,

and

68.

'The following seems to be the sequence of meanings by which the word KXypos arrived at this peculiar sense (i) the lot by which the office was assigned [as in Acts i. 26] (li) the office thus assigned by lot [as in Acts i. 17] (m) the body of persons holding the office* (Lightfoot, Bishop J. B., in his edition of Saint Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, 7th ed. (London 1882, Macmillan), p. 247). This usage cannot be traced back to the Old Testament; for, though, according to Num. xviii. 20, God is the K\^povoiiia of Aaron, and, according to Deut. xviii. 2, He is the /cAiypoy of the Levites, 'the Jewish priesthood is never described conversely as the special "clerus" of Jehovah, while on the other hand the metaphor thus inverted is more than once applied to the whole 2

:

;

Israelite people' (Lightfoot, op. cit., p. 246).

;

3

See

III. ni. 56.


529

had never succeeded even

in inscribing in their registers, not to speak of actually collecting, the taxes due from the wild highlanders in this mountain fastness. As for the two 'testaments* of which the Christian

scriptures consisted, they were called 8z07y/cai in Greek and testamenta in Latin because they were thought of as being the equivalents of legal

instruments in which

His

The

God had declared to Mankind,

in

two instalments,

Human

Life on Earth. for the ordering of 'training* (acr/c7?Trjp in its application to Christ so far escaped the desecration suffered by the verb from the same Latin root ; for, even in ex-Christian Western minds, the predominant association of the word 'Saviour* was still with 'Our Lord'. But in its older Latin rendering, which had been 'conservator', the key word of Christianity had not been spared by sacrilegious hands. In being applied to the 'conservator' of some national museum or public park, or a member of 'The Thames Conservancy Board', the word had been 'converted' to a respectably illicit use and the American usage of the adjective in the phrases 'a conservative estimate' and 'a conservative figure* could also perhaps pass muster however great the gulf might be between the caution that was the virtue of a reputable business man and the love that had moved God to become Man in order to become Man's Saviour. It would be difficult, however, to whitewash the political application of the ;

i

John

iii.

8.

*

See V.

vi.

374, n. 3.


537

term which was its most familiar usage in a twentieth-century Western World; for in this context a 'conservative' meant the supporter of a political party whose raison d'etre was the defence of material vested interests.

As twentieth-century Western students of History watched 'holy day* contracting into 'holiday', and 'the Christmas holidays' bringing with them a commercially profitable boom in retail trade instead of a spiritually regenerating reminder of Man's salvation through God's incarnation, they would realize that they were being carried away by a process of 'dis-etherialization' which was the inverse of what had

happened when pagan Hellenic words had been converted to Christian uses; and the same tale was told by the lapse of the word 'news' from

meaning 'the good news' (euayye'Aiov) of the Gospel to meaning the uninspiring output of a commercial newspaper press. In New Mexico the 'know-how' which there had once signified the innocent craft of Zuni priests 1 had come to signify a lethal technology of atomic warfare that had been worked out at Los Alamos. But words and bell-peals were not the only evidence for the 'conversion' of spiritual treasures into worldly goods by an egocentric Western human nature. This misappropriation was also attested by positive and historic political acts. 'Frederick II had been the ward and pupil of the great Innocent, founder of the Church as a state. He was an intellectual man, and we need not wonder to find in his conception of Empire a reflection of the Church. The whole Italian-Sicilian State which the Popes coveted as their Patrimony of Peter became, as it were, the Patrimony of Augustus for this gifted monarch, who sought to release the secular and intellectual powers that were fused into the spiritual unity of the Church2 and to build a new

empire based on

these.' 3

In an earlier part of this Study 4 we have briefly followed the course of an internecine struggle waged without compromise between the belligerents and without mercy for a Medieval Western Christian body social that their strife

was rending asunder

which a victorious Papacy

to the point of 'unconditional surrender*. But this was one of those Pyrrhic victories in which the victor appears, in retrospect, to have been a felo de se, 5 while his victim proves to have been inextirpably

pushed

hydra-headed. 'Let us grasp the

full significance

of Frederick's Italian-Roman State:

mighty pan-Italian seignory, which for a short time united in one state Germanic, Roman and Oriental elements Frederick himself, Emperor of the World, being the Grand Signor or Grand Tyrant thereof, the first and last of these princes to wear the diadem of Rome, whose Caesarhood was not only allied with German kingship like Barbarossa's but with Oriental-Sicilian despotism. Having grasped this, we perceive that all the and Montefeltre, the Visconti, Borgia, tyrants of the Renaissance, the Scala a

i

P 'z 3

See Benedict, Ruth: Patterns of Culture (Cambridge, Mass. 1934, Riverside Press),

AJ.T. See pp. 402 and 446, above, and IX. viii. 394-5 Kantorowicz, E.: Frederick the Second, 1194-1250, English translation (London

1931, Constable), pp. 561-2. 4 i n IV. iv. 560-7.

5

IV

. -

1V -

567-7L


538

and Medici, Frederick

II,

are down to the tiniest features the sons and successors of the diadochi of this "Second Alexander"/ 1

Nor was this the end of the monstrous proliferation of hydra heads from Frederick's mortal coils; for the North Italian city-state despotisms 2 that were multiple replicas of Frederick's abortive oecumenical Caesaro-papacy reproduced themselves, in their turn, on the nationstate scale, in the Transalpine and Transmarine outer circle of an Italianized Western World at the opening of the so-called Modern Age of Western history; 3 and these epigoni of the diadochi of Frederick the frustrated despoiler of Pope Innocent III were the successful despoilers of Innocent's successors 4 when a golden opportunity was offered to them by the folly of a Martin V and a Eugenius IV in crowning Innocent 5 pyrrhic victory over Frederick's natural heirs with a not less pyrrhic 6 over the Conciliar Movement. victory scrutiny of the fundamental political and economic institutions of a secular Modern Western Society reveals that these were plunder from the Papal constitution of a Medieval Christian Commonwealth 7 like the desecrated altars and dislocated drums of columns that had been built into acropolis-walls at Athens and at Ankara, or like the marble shafts, robbed from ruined temples, that supported the roofs of post-Hellenic basilicas and mosques. With silent eloquence these spoils proclaimed the Christian origin of a Western

I V's

A

Civilization that

had

forfeited its title to its Christian

name. 8

in this sense, the secular civilization of the Modern Western World an emanation of the spirit of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, what had

If,

was been the source of the demonic power in virtue of which a would-be empire-builder who had been frustrated in his own lifetime had succeeded in producing this amazing posthumous effect? The riddle receives its answer when we remind ourselves of the reason why the II came so much nearer than his grandfather Frederick I to achieving their dynasty's arch-ambition. The abiding aim of the Hohenstaufen line was, within Ottonian bounds, to make a belated reality of an abortive Carolingian attempt to revive the Roman Empire

Emperor Frederick

Western Christendom as it had been revived in Orthodox Christendom, two generations before Charlemagne's day, by the genius of Leo Syrus. What was it that nerved Frederick I Hohenstaufen to ignore the twin portents of Charlemagne's and Otto I's successive fiascos? What motive impelled him to make a third essay in an enterprise in which his two greatest predecessors had so signally failed ? And what was it that gave his grandson the hardihood to renew the struggle in which his in

2 See III. iii. Kantorowicz, op. cit., pp. 493-4. 354-7. See III. in. 300-1, 305, and 357-63; IV. iv. 198-200; and IX. viii. 363 and 395. * See ibid. 4 See IV. iv. 576-8. 5 See ibid. 566-8. 571-6. 7 See ibid. 530-43. Mr. Martin Wight comments: 'The most striking instance of this that I have come across is that the Papacy "invented", not only diplomacy and international finance, but also the National Debt. "The system of exchanges adopted in the Middle Ages originated chiefly in the nature of the papal revenues, which, due from all parts of the World, were to be transmitted to the Curia from every separate country but it is equally worthy of remark that the system of national debt by which we are even now enveloped, and which maintains so important an influence on the operations of commerce, was first fully developed in the States of the Church" (Ranke, History of the Papacy, Bk. iv, 2, adinit.).' 8 See I. i. 32-34. 1

3

'

;


539

grandfather, in his turn, had been worsted ? The grandfather had been inspired by the Caesaro-papal 'absolute* conception of the Imperial 1 2 prerogative that had been enshrined in the Justinianean Corpus luris of a latter-day Constantinopolitan Roman Empire for, in the Western Christendom of Frederick Fs day, this treasure, which had recently been disinterred at Bologna, 3 had still been an exciting new discovery. 4 The ;

grandson was inspired by the more vivid and convincing experience of inheriting the throne of the Sicilian Successor-state' of an East Roman 5 6 Empire in which Leo Syrus and his successors had succeeded in reasserting the Constantinian Roman Imperial ideal of 'Caesaro-papism* in the 'real life* of public administration, and not just in the lecture rooms

of academic professors of a rediscovered Justinianean Summa. It will be seen that the monstrous birth of a Modern Western secular civilization from the womb of a Medieval Western Respublica Christiana, which had been made possible by the mistakes and sins of the Medieval Western Church, was made practicable by the renaissance of the Hellenic institution of an 'absolute' state in which Religion had been a department of Politics. It will also be seen that, in Western Christendom, this renaissance of Hellenic political 'absolutism' was not achieved without external aid. Charlemagne's native Western attempt to revive the Roman Empire had been a fortunate failure; Frederick II Hohenstaufen's audacious repetition of Charlemagne's enterprise was a sinister posthumous success because the Stupor Mundi Occidentalis was able, in his Sicilian hereditary dominions, to draw upon the credit of East Roman statesmen who had duly performed the feat an enterprise beyond Charlemagne's powers of resuscitating the Constantinian

Roman Imperial regime. When a civilization of body

the third generation breaks

its

way out of

a

ecclesiastic, is a renaissance of the 'apparented' civilization of the

second generation the invariable and indispensable means by which this delivery is accomplished ? If we look at the history of the Hindu Civilization, we shall find there no parallel to the resuscitation of an

unhappy

2 See iv. 347-50. pp. 265-8, above. After the irruption of the Lombards into Italy in A.D. 568, Bologna had been the north-westernmost outpost of a Constantinopolitan Roman Empire in extremis for the best part of two centuries before its incorporation into the body social of Western Christendom through the conquest of the Exarchate of Ravenna by the Lombards in the course of the quarter of a century ending in A.D. 751. 4 See IV. iv. 557. The renaissance of a Justinianean Roman law in a Medieval Western Christendom is examined further in X. ix. 30-31. s Frederick's 'Oriental-Sicilian despotism', as Kantorowicz calls it, was, of course, a 'successor-state', not only of the East Roman Empire, but of the Arab Caliphate as well, since the greater part of the East Roman dominions west of the Straits of Otranto which Frederick's Norman predecessors had conquered in the eleventh century of the Christian Era had previously been reconquered by the East Romans from North-West African Arab conqutst adores who, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had overrun a Lombard and 401-2). In Sicily the Apulia and an East Roman Sicily (see IV. iv. 343~4> 3 56-7, descendants of the Arab conquerors had not been dislodged by a Norman military conin the island and they exerquest that had deprived them of their political ascendancy cised a potent cultural influence over their new Western Christian barbarian masters. the Byzantine, since the with in was influence Arab this harmony In its political aspect, of the East Roman Empire, had descended imperial tradition of the Caliphate, like that a Constantinian, Diocletiamc, and Sasanian channel from an Achaemenian *

See IV.

3

;

through

fountain-head. 6 See IV. iv. 346-7, 352, and 592-693.


540

which was achieved first in Orthodox Chrisand then in Western Christendom on the strength of a Byzantine fait accompli. Hindu history records no corresponding revival of the Empire of the Mauryas or the Empire of the Guptas. When we turn, however, from India to China, and look at the history of the Far Eastern Civilization in its homeland, we do here find an unmistakable and striking counterpart of the Byzantine revival of the Roman Empire in the Sui and T'ang revival of the Empire of the Han. 1 This Far Eastern renaissance of the universal state of an antecedent 'absolute' Hellenic polity

tendom by native

political genius,

indeed, the classic case for by comparison even with the Empire, not to speak of 'the Holy Roman Empire', the Sui and T'ang Empire stands out as a solid success and this success was 2 due, as we have seen, to a command of the administrative means civilization

East

is,

;

Roman

;

required for achieving the political objective. Not only the political tradition but the administrative personnel of the Han Empire had survived the interregnum between the dissolution of the Sinic Civilization

and the emergence of its Far Eastern successor. It had found asylum in the great cultural citadel which a disintegrating Sinic Civilization had provided for itself by expanding southwards up to the southern watershed of the Yangtse Basin and over it to the seaboard. The Confucian civil servants who reappeared in strength towards the close of the sixth century of the Christian Era, to administer a politically reunited South and North of China as a resuscitated Sinic universal state, surpassed their eighth-century Byzantine equivalents in cultivation and efficiency, as well as in numbers, in the measure in which the sub-continental citadel of Sinism between the Hwangho-Yangtsekiang watershed and the south coast of China surpassed in extent the ring-wall of the city of Constantinople, which was Hellenism's narrow- verged citadel during the interregnum between the dissolution of the Hellenic Civilization and the emergence of an Orthodox Christendom. As for Charlemagne's abortive 'Holy Roman Empire', the administrative reason for its failure 3 was that, in the West in Charlemagne's day, there was not even an exiguous remnant of the former Roman civil service for a would-be

empire-builder to enlist. In the light of this disparity in the amount and in the value of the initial assets in these three different undertakings, it is not surprising that the renaissance of the Sinic Civilization in the Far Eastern World should have gone farther than the renaissance of Hellenism in either a Western or an Orthodox Christendom. For the purposes of our present inquiry it is significant that the civilization of the third generation in whose history the renaissance of its predecessor of the second generation had been carried to the greatest lengths should likewise have been the most successful in its generation in shaking itself free from the trammels of the church which its predecessor had brought to birth. *

* 3

See pp. 19-21, above.

On

pp. 370-2, above. See further X. ix. 20 and 665-7. There was, of course, an economic reason as well (see II.

490).

ii.

345; IV.

iv.

322-3 and

CIVILIZATIONS AS REGRESSIONS The Mahayanian Buddhism

541

had bidden fair to captivate a moribund Sinic World as thoroughly as a moribund Hellenic World had been captivated by Christianity had reached its zenith in the Far East at the nadir of the post-Sinic interregnum; 1 but it had swiftly declined thereafter to a level of nonentity to which Christianity had never yet sunk either in Orthodox Christendom or in the West. On this showing, we must conclude that the 'renaissance' of a dead civilization spells a 'regression' from a living higher religion, and that, that

is pushed, the greater the backsliding will be but be challenged to show why, even if this inverse variation were to prove to be a 'law' of History, it should be deplored as a catastrophe rather than be applauded as a triumph. Our judgement must indeed seem paradoxical to a Far Eastern Confucian civil servant or to a Western rationalist technician who believed in his heart that 'Man makes Himself' 2 and that, in Man's competent conduct of Mankind's 3 proper business, the episode of the rise and fall of the higher religions had been a disturbing and discreditable interlude.

the farther the revival

we may

;

still

Respice finem ; for renaissances, as we 4 closely, are apt to unfold themselves progressively by resuscitating elements of the life of the 'apparented' civilization in a chronological order that is the inverse of their historical process of resuscitation which sequence in their original appearance. starts with the revival of a universal state that had been the last achievement of the antecedent society's dominant minority goes on to resus-

The

reply to this challenge

shall see

is

when we study them more

A

the philosophy in which an imperial civil service had been schooled, and thence to resuscitate the styles of politics, architecture, civilizasculpture, and literature that, in the history of the 'apparented' tion, had been in vogue in earlier ages, until the pageant of a dead civilization's history has been dramatically re-deployed in reverse order on a living civilization's stage. This evocatory exercise of the imagination is manifestly bound to expose those souls that indulge in it to a risk of through being distracted by a pursuit of incompatible citate

derangement

ideals.

In Far Eastern history the tension produced by this inner psychic discord had from time to time sought relief in the outward form of a at any rate, of followers persecution of adherents of the Mahayana or, of the Buddhist monastic way of life by the secular public authorities at the instigation of the champions of Confucianism. The most exten-

had occurred, as might be less prosperous chapter of the T'ang and second the expected, during of power at a time when the Dynasty's three-centuries-long tenure were Confucian scholar-administrators beginning to feel less secure in the saddle and therefore less inclined to go on tolerating the persistence alien religious life which was a standing in their midst of a

sive

and

persistent of these persecutions

parvenu

i

See

in P

Eliot, Sir Charles:

Hinduism and Buddhism (London 1921, Arnold,

3 vols.), vol.

'* %fanMakes Himself was the title of a book published in A.D. 1936 by a distinguished Western archaeologist, V. G. Childe (see p. 480, n. 3, above). 3 Pope: An Essay on Man, Ep. ii, 1. 2. 4 In Part X, passim, in vol. ix.

542


challenge to the restored Confucian regime. These major persecutions inflicted in A.D. 845 and subsequent years. 1 But, even before the evocation of a ghost of the Sinic universal state by the Sui Dynasty in A.D. 589, there had been a persecution of the kind in A.D. 446* in a To Pa Eurasian barbarian 'successor-state' of the defunct Han Empire in Shansi which had sought to disguise its vulgar origin under the archaizing name of 'Wei'. At first sight it is surprising to find the Mahayana exciting the hostility of an ex-barbarian Power which had won its certificate of cultural respectability, and thereby made its political fortune, through its own conversion to the Mahayana in the preced3 ing chapter of its history. On a closer view we can see that the revulsion the which declared itself in 'Wei' in A.D. 446 in an against Mahayana act of political coercion was the reverse side of a renaissance of the pre-Buddhist pagan Sinic culture which, in the 'Wei' Principality, reached its climax in the last decade of the fifth century of the Christian Era in the pedantically thoroughgoing Sinomania of the 'Wei' prince

had been

Hiao Wen-ti. 4 In the Western World, in contrast to the course of the corresponding renaissance in Orthodox Christendom and in the Far East alike, the universal state of the antecedent civilization had never been successfully resuscitated the failure had been most signal when Frederick II Hohenstaufen had drawn upon Leo Syrus's Byzantine achievement in a last ;

attempt at retrieving Charlemagne's Austrasian failure; and, in consequence, the political renaissance here had cut its way back behind the oecumenical last act of Hellenic political history till, in the hands of Frederick IFs fourteenth-century Italian diadochi and sixteenth-century it had arrived at a resuscitation of the parochial which had been both the strength and the weakness of the patriotism Hellenic Civilization at the culmination of its growth and on the eve of its breakdown. 'There is high tension and hard encounter between the Christian Faith and any form of civilization'; 5 and Modern Western Man's attempt to combine an ancestral Christianity with a resuscitated Hellenic idolization of a parochial political community had set up a tension in Western souls which had become all but intolerably high

Transalpine epigoni,

by the middle of the twentieth century. Europe 's infatuation for the Greeks and Romans dates from the sixteenth century, when she began her great political and military reorganisation. She admired them in all things even those arts in which the Middle Ages had excelled them because they taught her how to organise armies, how to wage wars, and how to build up great states.' 6 From the sixteenth century onwards the West had been seeking all '

the time to realize simultaneously a pagan Hellenic ideal of political 1 See Eliot, Sir Charles: Hinduism and Buddhism (London 1921, Arnold, 3 vols.), vol. Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches, vol. 11 (Berlin 1936, iii, pp. 267-8, and Franke, O. de Gruyter), pp. 496-8 and 572. 2 See Eliot, op. cit., vol. iii, p. 252, and Franke, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 203-4. * See V. v. 3 See V. v. 356, with n. 6. 477-8. s Burgmann, Bishop E. H.: The Church's Encounter with Civilisation (London 1948, Longmans), p. 18. 6 Ferrero, G. Peace and War, English translation (London 1933, Macmillan) 'Paganism and Christianity', p. 194. :

:

:

REGRESSIONS

CIVILIZATIONS AS 543 absolutism which, in the course of Hellenic history, had eventually choked the seeds of an Hellenic ideal of individual liberty, and a Christian ideal of individual liberty which was a corollary of a Christian belief in the value of every human soul in the of God; 1 and each of these sight

two incompatible movements had been carried

to a climax in the

French

Revolution. 2

'We live in a state of permanent disharmony. The family, social life, manners and morals bear the stamp of Christianity politics and war draw their inspiration from the classic and pagan tradition; law, literature, philosophy, art, and history are subjected to the competing influence of both. What is the State ? An end or a means ? Paganism and Christianity have each given a clear and definite answer. Paganism said that it was an end; Christianity replied that it was a means.' 3 ;

.

.

.

.

.

.

1 Mr. Martin Wight comments on the original draft of this passage 'Paganism came nowhere near the combination of political fanaticism and spiritual coercion which is the essence of a Modern Western "totalitarianism", for these are characteristic of a postChristian Neo-Pagamsm of the transfer of the religious "drive" and exclusive claims of Christianity to a debased secular creed, as you suggest on p. 554, below which is indeed the supreme evidence, up to date, of a civilization of the third generation being a :

regression. Conversely it is very disputable whether Christianity can make an exclusive claim to the ideal of individual liberty. It certainly provided the milieu in which the Hellenic seed of individual liberty was able to germinate and come to flower in the Western Civilization; but in Eastern Christendom it did the reverse, and provided the milieu for the flowering of the older bulb of sacred monarchy, in which the unbiased reader of the Old and New Testaments and of the Fathers would be much more likely to see the natural political expression of Christianity than he would be likely to see it any form of individual liberty. Christianity, in fact, seems capable of accommodating itself to any political regime: all that it asserts is that every political regime must be responsible to God, or (as Ferrero says) that the state, whether monarchic or democratic,

m

means, not an end. 'Indeed, are you not here evading the question whether "the ideal of individual

is a

The writer's answer to Mr. Wight's question would be that, in his belief, the Modern Western in contrast to the Medieval Western ideal of individual liberty on the secular plane had been derived from a Christian, not from an Hellenic, source. As he saw it, the Late Modern Western ideals of political and economic liberty were secularized versions of an Early Modern Western ideal of religious liberty for the individual conscience, and this ideal of liberty on the plane of religious practice and conviction had been inspired by the Christian belief in the value of every human soul in the sight of God, inasmuch as this belief could be taken to imply that no human authority neither a church militant on Earth nor any secular potentate had a right to intervene between an individual human soul and the God who had created it and had undergone an Incarnation and a Crucifixion for its sake The writer agreed that this deduction from a universal and unquestioned Christian belief about the relation between human souls and God had not been drawn in Western Christendom before the Early Modern Age and had not been drawn in any of the other Christendoms independently at any time but he would submit that it was a legitimate deduction and that, whether or not its legitimacy were admitted by other students of History, the deduction had at any rate been made in an Early Modern Western Christendom as a matter of historical fact. While the writer of this Study thus held that the Modern Western ideal of individual liberty had a Christian root, he would agree that its severance from its Christian root, and its 'counter-transfiguration' into a secular ideal of individual liberty on the political and economic planes, had indeed been symptoms of regression; and in his view this secularized version of a Christian ideal was not only regressive it was also untenable. In repudiating a religious sanction for individual liberty which had been provided by a Christian belief in the value of each and every soul in the sight of God, a post-Christian Modern Western homo democraticus had reduced his pretension to individual liberty ad absurdum for the claims that were now being put forward by this homunculus merely in his own right, and no longer m God's name, could not stand against the claims of a totalitarian state to sacrifice the individual liberty of any and every homunculus on the ;

;

;

an idolized corporate humanity, the great beast-god Leviathan. 3 See Ferrero, op. cit., pp. 196-7. Ibid.,

altar of 2

p. 199.

544


The

weapons, plucked from an Hellenic charnel house, with Man had brought to the ground the Hildebrandine Respublica Christiana had been as destructive as the material weapons with which Cromwell's soldiers had once shattered the west window of Winchester Cathedral. spiritual

which Modern Western

'When ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing where it ought not (let him that readeth understand), then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains/ 1 2 Nevertheless, there is a bow in the cloud. At Winchester, on the morrow of the Puritan iconoclast's deed, it must have looked as if a mighty work of Medieval Christian art had been utterly destroyed and in truth it ;

had been damaged beyond all possibility of reinstatement in its inimitable medieval pattern. Yet the broken and scattered fragments were pieced together again, by the piety of a later generation, in a labour of love that sheer disorder though it might have suggested to the eye of the original artificer was in truth a new pattern, 3 fraught with unpremeditated beauty and letting in unforeseen light in the sight of eyes open to the self-revelation of a God who makes all things new. 4 boy once watched, spell-bound, while this miracle of creation conjured out of destruction 5 was being lit up by the level radiance of a setting summer sun ; and a man could catch a glimpse of the spiritual meaning of this visual allegory as he recalled it in his mind's eye in after-life, in the light of his generation's experience of a forty years' wandering in the wilderness. If the same sunlight could thus shine again through the same glass in a new pattern offering a fresh vision, might not the eternal and unchanging incorporeal light of the Beatific Vision again illuminate men's souls in a society that had been broken and remade by the sufferings of a Time of Troubles ?

A

1

Mark

xiii.

14; cp. Matt. xxiv. 15-16.

2

Gen. ix. 12-17. See Bergson's exposition of the relativity of the concept of disorder in the passage Evolution Crtatrtce, 24th ed. (Pans 1921, Alcan), pp. 239-55, m V. v. quoted from 3

U

419, n.

5.

*

Rev. xxi.

s

The

5.

Destroyer's unintentional and unwilling service to the Creator has been i. 271-99.

illustrated in II.

C.

THE CHALLENGE OF MILITANCY ON EARTH CAUSES OF REGRESSION

(I)

the preceding chapter we have observed that a secular civilization that breaks out of a body ecclesiastic is apt to win its way with the aid of elements in the life of an antecedent civilization that it brings back to life but, if we have seen here how an insurgent civilization takes advantage of its opportunity, we have still to see how the opportunity

IN

;

1 arises; and evidently this 'beginning of evils* is to be looked for, not in the resourcefulness of the erupting civilization, but in some weak point, or false step, of the church at whose cost the eruption is achieved. One formidable crux for a church is manifestly inherent in a church's

raison d'etre.

A church

or recapturing, This

is

militant

World

on Earth

for the purpose of winning, Dei not by extinguishing life and this means that a church has to

for the Civitas

on Earth

2

but; by transfiguring it; deal with secular as well as spiritual affairs

and to organize itself on was the only method so far discovered by Man for managing mundane human relations on any scale beyond the narrow range of direct personal intercourse between one human 3 being and another. The gross institutional integument with which a church thus finds itself compelled to clothe its etherial nakedness, in order to do God's business in a recalcitrant environment, is as incongruous Earth as an institution, since

this

with a church's spiritual nature as the alien shell that is appropriated by a hermit crab and it is not surprising to see disaster overtaking a terrestrial outpost of the Communion of Saints which, in This World, cannot do its own proper spiritual work without being drawn into grappling with secular problems and finding itself forced to attack these with institutional tools. The most celebrated tragedy of the kind is the history of the Hildebrandine Papacy; and in another context 4 we have observed how Hildebrand was dragged over the precipice by an apparently inevitable concatenation of causes and effects. He would not be a true and loyal servant of God if he did not throw himself, with all his might, into the ;

reclaim the Western Christian clergy from the spiritual task of trying to sexual and financial corruption in which they were wallowing in his day; he could not reform the clergy if he did not effectively organize the Church he could not effectively organize the Church without vindicatin matters ecclesiastical he could ing her lawful authority over the clergy not do this without arriving at a demarcation between the respective ;

;

jurisdictions of

Church and

State; and, since the field of the

Western

day included some ground that ground that was debatable, besides

Christian clergy's activity in Hildebrand's

was indisputably secular, and much the ground that was admittedly ecclesiastical, Hildebrand was i

3

B

Thucydides, Book II, chap. See III. ui. 223-30.

2009.Vll

*

12.

4

T

led,

See V. yi. 149-68. 1V 552-4I* -

-

by


546

a sequence of steps in which each step seemed to be necessitated by the preceding one, from inspiring a spiritual revival in Christian souls to engaging in a conflict with 'the Holy Roman Empire' which carried the Church right into the arena of power politics and was fought out, by force of arms, in successive rounds of ever-increasing intensity and embitterment, over a period of two centuries, with eventual results that were disastrous alike for a Medieval Western Christendom's two master institutions, the Papacy and the Empire, and, worst of all, for Western

Christendom itself. This tragedy of the Hildebrandine Western Church is a prominent, though by no means unparalleled, example of spiritual regression precipitated by a church's becoming entangled in mundane affairs and committed to secular modes of action unintentionally, and indeed against its will,

There

as an incidental consequence of its doing its own business. however, another broad road leading to the same spiritually

is,

destructive worldliness

and more

insidious.

A

which is more frequented, more characteristic, church incurs the risk of falling into a spiritual

regression in the very act of living up to its own standards by striving sincerely to do God's will on Earth. For the will of God is partially expressed in the righteous social aims of the secular mundane societies,

and these mundane ideals are apt to be achieved incidentally in a religious society very much more successfully than they ever have been, or can be, achieved in a mundane society which aims at these objects direct, and at nothing higher. This is a necessary consequence of one of the laws of

life

that

we have observed

in other contexts 1

the principle

most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming, not at that goal itself, but at some more ambitious goal beyond it and, in the history of the Church Militant on Earth, two classic examples of the working of this law were the achievements of Saint Benedict and of Pope Gregory that the

the Great. 2 Both these saintly souls were bent upon the spiritual aim of promoting the monastic way of life in the West, and Gregory was also devoted to the further purpose as unworldly as the other of giving light to them that sit in darkness 3 by bringing the heathen within the Christian Church's fold. Yet, as a by-product of their spiritual work, these two unworldly men of action performed economic prodigies that were beyond the powers of secular statesmen. Gregory incidentally saved from starvation the urban proletariat of Rome at a moment when the Constantinopolitan Government of an expiring Roman Empire was quite incapable of doing its duty by a derelict imperial city which, at the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries, was an exposed Western outpost of a once oecumenical Power whose frontiers had contracted till its centre of gravity now lay in Anatolia. And Gregory not only responded to the urgent challenge of an immediate economic emergency within the walls of the city that was the seat of his bishopric in the same power of the ;

same

spirit,

intending *

a

it

he and his hero Benedict between them or knowing

it,

laid,

without

the firm religious foundations on which the

See pp. 388 and 510, above. See III. lii. 265-9 and IV. iv. 184-5.

3

Luke

i.

79.

CAUSES OF REGRESSION

547

Medieval and a Modern Western economic life was subsequently erected. This incidental economic handiwork of two singleminded servants of God would be praised by Christian and Marxian historians alike with united voices, albeit with discordant minds. Yet, should these praises become audible to Benedict and Gregory in an Other World, these saints would assuredly recall, with a pang of misgiving, their Master's saying: 'Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you* 1 and their misgiving would certainly turn to anguish if they were enabled to revisit This World and to see with their own eyes the ultimate moral consequences of the eventual economic effects of their immediate spiritual endeavours during their life on Earth.

immense

edifice of a

j

The

disconcerting truth

is

that the incidental material fruits of the

spiritual labours of the Civitas Dei on Earth are not only certificates of its spiritual success; they are also snares in which a spiritual athlete who has been touched by the sin of pride, or has perhaps merely rested 2 sluggishly on his oars,

may be trapped more diabolically than an impetuous Hildebrand is ruined by the spiritual disaster of entanglement in politics and war. In the medieval chapter of the Benedictine story, the Cistercian spiritual pioneers who founded their abbeys in a the foothills of the Yorkshire Moors could hardly themselves by seeking out this forbidding material environment, they were imperilling their successors'

wilderness

among

have foreboded

that, in sacrificing

souls.

Was not the physical hardship of marooning themselves in this bleak landscape almost beyond endurance, even for a mortified monk? Was it not an edifying spiritual exercise to undertake, in faith, the humanly 3 impossible task of making the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose ? How could they have foreseen that they were giving the initial impetus wool industry and a metallurgical industry that would go from strength to strength till, seven hundred years from then, these economic exercises of aspirants to a spiritual prize would make England 'the workshop of the World* ? How could they have foreseen that, within only three hundred years, a mounting material wealth that was the almost inevitable reward of spiritual virtue would be tempting their abbots to break their rule, in the spirit and even in the letter, by building massive meat-kitchens in their abbatial quarters as a witness against themselves ? Or that, within four hundred years, the discredit brought

to a

upon the Order by such conspicuous sins against its professed ideals would be seized upon by a covetous laity as an excuse for despoiling the monasteries as Israel had spoiled the Egyptians ? The unfolding tale had taught Posterity that material riches which can be harvested with impunity by saints who neither seek them nor value them nor notice them may be the undoing of clerics of common clay who covet them for their own sake and pursue them to the neglect of their spiritual calling.

'The gulf which appeared between abbot and convent was largely caused by the accumulation of wealth. As time went by, the estates of the 1

Luke

2

For these two

3

Isa.

vi.

26.

xxxv.

i.

alternative

ways of incurring nemesis, see IV.

iv.

245-61.


548

monasteries became so enormous that the abbot found himself almost fully occupied in the administration of his lands and in the various responsibilities which this entailed. similar process of division of estates and duties was taking place at the same time among the monks themselves. Each monastery was divided into what were practically separate departments, each with its own income and its own special responsibilities. The officer in charge of each department was known as an obedientiary*. To him certain sources of income were assigned he had his own household and servants and the burden of his office was such as to occupy a very large part of his time. Any monk of average intelligence and ability could count on receiving some form of office in due course, and would spend a good many years of his monastic life in the administration of his

A

.

.

.

*

;

;

.

.

.

.

.

.

department. 'As Dom David Knowles says "Save in monasteries such as Winchester, Canterbury and Saint Albans, where strong intellectual or artistic interests existed, business of this kind was the career which absorbed all the talent of the house". .* For such as had administrative gifts, but were not blessed with any property on which to exert them, the monasteries, with their vast estates, offered much scope.' 2 .

.

.

:

.

Of such

it is

.

written that 'he ... that received seed

among

the thorns

he that heareth the word; and the care of This World, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful'. 3 Yet the monk who has fallen out of the running in the race for a spiritual crown by degenerating into a successful man of business does not exemplify the most deadly form that spiritual regression can take. The worst temptation that lies in wait for citizens of the Civitas Dei in This World is neither to plunge into politics nor to slide into business but to idolize the terrestrial institution in which a Church Militant on Earth is imperfectly though unavoidably embodied. If corruptio optimi is pessima, an idolized church is the one idol that is more pernicious than is

the idolized

A

human

ant-heap that

men

4 worship as Leviathan.

in danger of lapsing into this worst of all forms of idolatry in so far as she lapses into believing herself to be, not merely a depository of truth, but the sole depository of the whole truth in

church

is

a complete and definitive revelation of it. 5 For the value of a vessel is proportionate to the value of its contents, and, if the contents are believed to be inestimably precious, the guardians of the vessel may rate so high the adventitious sacrosanctity of a paltry alabaster box that, rather than

when

their testing time comes, purpose for which it has been entrusted to their keeping by God. 6 The idolization of an ecclesiastical institution may be the outcome of a laudably prudent determination to

break

it,

they

may sacrilegiously

from using the spikenard

refrain,

for the divine

preserve a divinely revealed truth by making sure that

its

earthly integu-

1 Knowles, Dom David: The Monastic Order in England, 943-1216 (Cambridge 1940, University Press), p. 438. 2 Moorman, J. R. H. Church Life in England in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge 1945, University Press), pp. 279-80, 283, 353. 3 Matt. xiii. 22. Cp. Mark iv. 18-19; Luke viii. 14. * The idolization of institutions has been discussed in IV. iv. 303-423. s See Niebuhr, Reinhold: Faith and History (New York 1949, Scribner), pp. 238-40 :

and 242. 6

Mark

adv. 3-9.

Cp. Matt. xxvi. 6-13; Luke

vii.

36-50; John

xii.

1-9.

CAUSES OF REGRESSION ment

shall

be tough enough to outlast any mundane

549 institution that

might jeopardize the revelation by crushing its container. Yet, if the maker of the iron vessel falls down and worships his handiwork when it has duly proved itself more than a match for the colliding vessel of clay, it were better for him that he should never have purchased this material security for his spiritual treasure at so ruinous a moral cost. A church is prone to set her feet on this easiest and sheerest of all the descents of Avernus when she has suffered some heavy blow, and particularly prone if the stroke has been struck by the members of her own household who are proverbially a man's most grievous foes, 1 though their intimacy with their victim also makes them his shrewdest critics. The classic exemplar of this perhaps least readily retrievable form of regression had been the Counter- Reformational Tridentine Roman Catholic Church as non-Catholics saw her. 2 For four hundred years already, down to the time of writing, she had been standing on guard, in a posture that was as rigid as her vigilance was unrelaxing, massively armoured with the helmet of the Papacy and the breastplate of the hierarchy, and continually presenting arms to God in the recurrent rhythm of an exacting liturgy. In justification of her stand, this steel-clad figure could quote Scripture

:

we

wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of This World, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and,

'For

having done

all,

to stand.' 3

The subconscious purpose of this heavy institutional panoply in which the Tridentine Church had encased herself was assuredly a determination to outlast the very toughest of the contemporary secular institutions of This World above all, the upstart civilizations of the third generation. In the twentieth century of the Christian Era a Catholic critic of the Reformation could argue with force, in the light of four hundred years of Protestant history, that a Protestant impatience of even the lighter equipment of pre-Tridentine Catholicism had been premature. Yet that verdict, even if cogent, would not prove either that the casting off of impedimenta would always be a mistake or that the Tridentine multiplication of them had not also been an error. Institutional armour is possibly an indispensable means of survival for a Church Militant on Earth, but it is none the less certainly a mundane embarrassment which makes the Church Militant by that much spiritually inferior to the Kingdom of Heaven, where 'they neither marry nor are given in 4 marriage, but are as the angels', and where each individual catches God's with Him, 'like light caught from a communion from personal spirit 5 leaping flame'. The awe inspired by the spectacle of Tridentine Catholicism in the heart of a twentieth-century Christian observer of a different persuasion 1 Matt. x. 36, following Micah vii. 6. 2 Catholics, of course, did not admit that their devotion to their church amounted to

an idolization of her. 3 Eph. vi. 12-13. *

Plato's Letters,

No.

4 7,

quoted in

III.

iii.

245, and

on

Mark

p. 525, above.

xii.

25.


550

was tempered by reminiscences of an Assyrian 'corpse in armour* standing magnificently but not invincibly at bay in the breach at Nineveh in 612 B.C. and of long since extinct giant reptiles which had 'swelled and hardened up to their doom' 2 by assiduously reinforcing their carapaces, plate upon plate, till they had condemned themselves to stagnate 'awash in pools where water would bear some of their otherwise 3 crushing weight.* In the museums of a latter-day Western World the fossilized bones of the dinosaurs and the cap-a-pie steel carapaces of fifteenth-century Western men-at-arms bore concordant witness that 'there is no armour against Fate'; 4 and the same truth was advertised in the spectacle of a derelict Great Wall of China and of desolate termitebuilt towers of Babel that would surpass the Great Pyramid in massiveness and the Empire State Building in height if translated into human 1

dimensions, scale for scale. 5

*A social pattern no longer open to change has, in fact, quite unconsciously signed its own death warrant. Just at the very moment when the system seems most perfected, when the structure seems most complete, and when inner peace and harmony seem to give the way of life a kind of perfection, the cracks in the structure make their appearance, the fission becomes evident, and the changes so long resisted precipitate a cataclysm.'

The

6

verdict 7

upon the idolization of an institution, ecclesiastical or 'Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.' 8 We have now laid our finger on some of the causes of regression from higher religions to vain repetitions of secular civilizations, and in each case we have found that the calamity is precipitated, not by a saeva necessitas 9 or any other external force, but by an 'Original Sin' which is secular, is:

innate in a terrestrial

Human

Nature. 10

See IV. iv. 484. Heard, Gerald: The Source of Civilisation (London 1935, Cape), p. 71, quoted in 3 427. Heard, op. cit., loc. cit. 4 5 See III. 111. Shirley, James- Death the Leveller. 107-8. 6 Tannenbaum, F. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York 1947, Knopf), pp. 108-9. 7 Mr. Martin Wight comments: 'A Roman Catholic critic would reply to you here, in words that you so often quote, "Respice finem". The whole of the foregoing passage is anticipation: it has not yet come true. Is it not the fact that the Roman Church is incomparably more vigorous and influential in the twentieth century than at any time since the Council of Trent? Whereas in 1870 it inscribed the Infallibility of the Pope among its dogmas, at the apparent nadir of its fortunes, as an act of defiance, in 1950 it was able still further to scandalize a secular Western World by adding the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin as an act of self-confidence. Is it not equally likely, at the time of writing, that the Roman Church in its Tridentine panoply will be the only Western institution capable of challenging and withstanding the neo-pagan totalitarian Communist state, and is not this borne out by the particular fear and hatred with which Moscow regards the Vatican ? If this be so, the figure of the dinosaur's carapace will be less apt than that of a long and successfully sustained siege, and the Tridentine phase of Catholic history may appear in retrospect like the Churchilhan phase of British history from the fall of France to D-Day. You prejudice the outcome. "Respice finem".' A Catholic friend of the writer's comments on the same passage 'The odd thing about the post-Tridentine and twentieth-century Catholicism, surely, is its eternal youth the wonderful sprouting of new orders and congregations oif both religious and Jay folk the "Jocists", the Grail, the "Pays de Mission" priests in the banheue of Pans, the Society of the Divine Word (Pater Schmidt and the Chinese cardinal). Even at the time of the Counter-Reformation itself there had not been such a flourishing of mystics.' 8 Luke ix. 24. Cp. Matt. xvi. 25 and x. 39. 9 See IV. iv. See IV. iv. 120. 7-39. 1

2

IV.

iv.

:

:

:

,

(S5i) (II) (a)


AUGURIES OF SPIRITUAL RECOVERY

If regressions from higher religions are effects of Original Sin, are we driven to conclude that, since Original Sin is reborn into This World at the birth of every new-born child, 1 such regressions are inevitable? If they are, this would mean that the challenge of militancy on Earth

was so prohibitively severe 2 that no church would ever be capable of standing up to it in the long run and that conclusion, in turn, would drive us back towards the view that the churches are good for nothing ;

better than to serve as ephemeral chrysalises for vainly repetitive civilizations. 3 Is this the last word? Before we resign ourselves to a suggestion that God's inflowing light is doomed to be perpetually

overwhelmed by an uncomprehending darkness, let us cast our eyes back once again over the series of spiritual illuminations brought into the World by the epiphanies of the higher religions for these chapters of past spiritual history may prove to be auguries of spiritual recovery from the regressions to which a Church Militant is prone. We have -noticed 4 that the successive milestones in Man's spiritual advance that are inscribed with the names of Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, and Christ all stand at points where a surveyor of the course of secular civilization would report breaks in the road and breakdowns in the traffic and the empirical evidence has given us reason to believe that this coincidence of high points in Man's religious history with low points in his secular history may be one of the 'laws' of Man's terrestrial life. If so, we should expect also to find evidence of the working of a converse 'law' that the high points in secular history coincide with low points in religious history, and that the religious achievements that accompany mundane declines and falls are therefore not merely spiritual advances but are also spiritual recoveries. They are, of course, presented as recoveries in the traditional version of the story. 'The call of Abraham', for example, which the recent discoveries of our Modern Western archaeologists have enabled us to locate, in our chart of secular history, as a spiritual accompaniment to the secular catastrophe of the downfall of the Empire of Sumer and Akkad, is presented in the Hebrew legend as a sequel which was God's opening move for the redemption of Mankind from the consequences of the Fall of Adam to a defiance of God by the self-confident builders of a mundane Tower of Babel. 5 The mission of Moses which, in the same secular chart, appears as an accompaniment of the comparable secular calamity of the break-up of 'the New Empire' of Egypt, is presented in the legend as a move to rescue God's Chosen People from a spiritually unpropitious enjoyment of the flesh pots of Egypt in her heyday by ;

;

1 'Ethics, like backbones, come out of non-existence into existence de novo in each individual development' (Huxley, Julian: Evolutionary Ethics the Romanes Lecture, 1943, reprinted in Huxley, T. H. and J.: Evolution and Ethics, 1893-1943 (London 2 See II. h. 260. 1947, Pilot Press), p. 107. 3 This view has been examined on pp. 392-419, above. * On pp. 423-5, above; see also pp. 701-2 and 762, below. s Gen. xii. 1-6, against the background of Gen. xi. t


552

exposing them to the spiritually fortifying experience of hungering and 1 thirsting in the wilderness. The Prophets of Israel and Judah, whose floruit is located by the secular historian in the Time of Troubles of a Civilization, were moved by a compelling concern own their in belief, was a divine command) to preach to their (which, countrymen a repentance from the spiritual backslidings into which

broken-down Syriac

had lapsed when he had broken out of the wilderness into a land flowing with milk and honey which had not yet been blighted by Assyrian militarism. The Ministry of Christ, whose Passion, as a secular historian sees it, is fraught with all the anguish of an Hellenic Time of Troubles, is presented in the Gospels as an intervention of God Himself for the purpose of extending to the whole of Mankind a coveIsrael

God with an Israel whose epigoni in Jesus' generation had alloyed their spiritual heritage with a Pharisaic formalism, a Sadducaean materialism, an Herodian opportunism, and a Zealot fanaticism. On this showing, four blazing outbursts of spiritual illumination had been sequels to spiritual eclipses besides having been accompaniments of mundane disasters, and we may surmise that this sequence of spiritual recoveries had been something more than a happy chapter of accidents. In another context 2 we have observed that physically hard environments are apt to be the nurseries of mundane achievements, and, on this nant previously made by

analogy, it is to be expected that spiritually hard environments will have a correspondingly stimulating effect in the field of religious endeavour. A spiritually hard environment may be defined as being the 3 city of swine' in which the Soul's spiritual aspirations material well-being. This Circe's magic is too much for the general run of Mankind and in such adverse spiritual circumstances a majority is apt to find its way, like Odysseus' shipmates, into the sorceress' pigsties. Yet all is not lost; for the miasma of worldly

atmosphere of 'the

are

swamped by

;

prosperity that stupefies the mass will provoke spiritually sensitive and

strenuous souls into an utter defiance of the charms of This World. Even on the relatively low level of barbarian virtue, the fortitude of a single hero may avail, as Odysseus showed, to save the situation and at the level of the higher religions the failure of the priest is the signal for the prophet. We have noticed, in passing, 4 the classic case of the early Christian martyrs who bade defiance to the bourgeois comfort and security of ;

a Trajanic, Hadrianic, and Antonine

Age by insisting on

sacrificing their

moral punctilio. Their spiritual heroism outraged pagan contemporaries who would fain have made believe that a transient Indian Summer' was not October but June, yet were uneasily aware that the

lives for a

*

Christian martyrs' apparently fantastic contemptus mundi was inspired insight. The same insight was displayed by Saint Francis of Assisi when he revolted, in disgust and alarm, against the empty life of luxury that his purse-proud father had provided for him,

by a devastating

1

See

3

Plato: Respubhca, 3693-3720, cited in II.

*

In IV.

II.

ii.

iv.

24-25. 60-61.

i.

193, n.

i,

2

In

and

II.

II. ii.

ii.

31-73.

23, n. 2.


553

and raised the rebel standard of Holy Poverty against a bourgeois prosperity that, in the Medieval Western Christendom of his day, was still only in its budding infancy. Saint Francis* father was the prototype of the commercially successful Western business man who was to inherit the Earth in the course of the next seven centuries and, in an epoch in which Homo Economicus Occidentalis was thus going from strength to ;

strength,

it

exasperated

him

to hear the Franciscan repetition of Saint

1 Behold, the World that commands our love is fugitive!' some the hundred Yet, eight years after Pietro Bernardone's day, apparently boundless vista of material progress, that had displayed itself

Gregory's cry:

as alluringly as ever to a twelfth-century Umbrian clothier's nineteenthcentury English and American successors, had been effaced by the grimly different prospect that Saint Gregory had once depicted.

'To-day there is on every side death, on every side grief, on every side on every side we are being smitten, on every side our cup is being filled with draughts of bitterness. Yet the lusts of the flesh so blind our spirit that even a world that has turned bitter still charms us. We pursue it as it flees from us we cling to it as it collapses and, since we cannot arrest its collapse, we are sinking with it while we hold on to it in its fall. Once upon a time this world could hold us by its sheer attractiveness to-day this poor world is so riddled with such fearful afflictions that the World itself now drives us into the arms of God.' 2 desolation

;

;

;

;

Saint Gregory had divined that souls alienated from God by mundane prosperity might be reconciled to God by the agony of seeing an earthly paradise turn to dust and ashes. As the light of common day faded away into the darkness of night, the clouds of glory might shine out again. Was the experience of sixth-century Rome an augury for a twentiethcentury world ? In the twelfth-century springtime of Western mundane prosperity the vision of Saint Francis had been out of range of the spiritual capacity of Vhomme moyen sensuel, as the vision of the martyrs Nereus and Achilles had been in the second-century Pridian Summer* of Hellenism. But might not the pelting blows of mundane adversity avail to strike the scales from off the eyes of the grandchildren of Silas 3 Lapham, as dumb sermons in stones had once opened the eyes of Gregory's congregation to the truth which the pastor of their souls was preaching to them among the ruins of Imperial Rome ? If the PalaeoPaganism of the aeon of human history before the epiphany of the higher religions had never been able to extinguish a spark of True Religion that 4 lay smothered in pagan souls, and if the crashing fall of the civilizations of the second generation had stimulated this long-hidden spiritual fire to burst out into a blazing flame, was it likely that a latter-day NeoPaganism would be capable of putting out the conflagration ? This 'vain repetition of the heathen' 5 lacked the stability and the qui diligitur fugit* (Saint Gregory the Great: 'Sermo Habita ad Sanctorum Nerei et Achillei, Die Natalis Eorum', in Homiliae Quadraginta in Evangelia, No. xxviii (Migne, J.-P. Patrologia La tin a, vol. Ixxvi, col. sentences have been quoted in IV. iv. 60-6 1). other which from 1212), 2 Saint Gregory, op. cit., partly quoted already in loc. cit. 3 Howells, W. D.: The Rise of Stlas Lapham, reprinted in 'The World's Classics' series (London 1948, Cumberlege); first published at Boston, Mass., in A.D. 1884. 5 See 4 See pp. 759-68, below. pp. 446-7, above. 1

'Ecce

Populum

mundus

in Basilic^

:

B

2009

vn

T 2


554

staying-power of its palaeo-pagan prototype, in the measure in which it surpassed a Palaeo-Paganism in driving-force and in this last respect the difference between these two generations of Paganism was great indeed. The Neo-Paganism was a high-powered enormity 1 charged with the spiritual potency of higher religions whose place this Abomination of Desolation had sought to usurp and this spiritual force was much greater than that of a pristine pagan Human Nature for, if it is true that human passions are always characterised by unlimited and demonic 2 potencies of which animal life is innocent*, this is true a fortiori of ;

;

;

*

human

passions reinforced by a powerful higher religious inspiration. the morrow of a Second World War, this daemonic goad was threatening to drive a Westernizing World into the supreme public crime and catastrophe of physical self-destruction through a third

On

world war waged with atomic weapons but this appalling prospect was merely the unveiling of a goal towards which a secularized Western Society had been heading ever since it had erupted out of a medieval Respublica Christiana. This terminus of the broad road along which he was travelling had not caught the eye of Modern Western Man ;

during the deceptive interlude of prosperous mundane progress that

had begun with the ending of the Western Wars of Religion and had continued until August 1914. Secular-minded Westerners who had lived and died in those halcyon generations had imagined that their utilitarian version of Neo-Paganism, in which all Enthusiasm' was anathema, was the impregnable essence of their agnostic faith, whereas in reality this low temper was no more than a temporary reaction against the effervescent ferocity of the Wars of Religion. In the Western Age of Reason' this ferocity had been driven underground without being eradicated from Western souls; and it was to erupt again, with a force *

*

accumulated through a long repression, in the ensuing Age of the Wars of Nationality and Ideology'. After a Second World War a world that was being secularized in the process of being Westernized was faced with a choice between two

alternative possibilities. One possibility was that the vicious momentum of a Neo-Paganism that had run away headlong with the bit between its teeth might carry a Westernizing World over the precipice that had been the bourne of all other civilizations known to History; and in that event the flame of Religion might flare up again out of the wreckage as it had once burst out of the ruins of a Hellenized World. The other possibility was that neo-pagan souls might be smitten with a creative contrition, as well as with an unnerving dismay, by the revelation of the destructive

powers and impulses which their reactionary religion had evoked in them, and that they might seek salvation and haply find it by turning again to the divers higher religions in which their fathers had received 3 In the catastrophic event, partial revelations of the Beatific Vision. Man would be relieved of further spiritual responsibility at the cost of 1

The

particular sense in

defined in IV.

iv.

which the word 'enormity'

is

used in

this

Study has been

133-7.

2 Niebuhr, R.: The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. quoted on p. 508, above. 3 See pp. 442-3, above, and pp. 716-36, below.

i

(London

1941, Nisbet), p. 191,

THE BOW

IN

THE CLOUD

555

he took the alternative and less melodramatic course he would have to abide a bout of those perplexing and physical annihilation; but

if

tormenting questions that are the salt of spiritual life. In returning to Religion, would a neo-pagan soul be finding her way back out of the broad way that leadeth to destruction into the narrow way which leadeth unto life? Or would she be merely burying herself in a blind alley? Should she hearken to a voice saying, 'See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil', 2 and to an oracle declaring 'Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God'? 3 Or should she be influenced by the jibes of Mephistopheles pointing out that, whether or no a man can enter the second time into his mother's womb and be born, 4 a baby kangaroo is certainly not enter5 ing into the Kingdom of God when it creeps back into the cosy physical Nirvana of its mother's pouch. Was the still small voice luring the Soul 1

into a sluggard's Faulbett, 6 or was it calling it to Eternal Life ? That was the fateful question to which Mankind would have to find its answer, if Mankind survived. (b)

GROWTH

POSSIBILITIES OF SPIRITUAL

Would

a return to Religion be a signal spiritual advance ? Or would be an abject and inept attempt at an impossible evasion of the hard facts of Life as we know it? Our answer to this question will partly depend on our estimate of the possibilities of spiritual growth in This World. In a previous chapter 7 we have touched upon the probability (as it appeared to be on the morrow of a Second World War) that the literally world-wide expansion of a secular Modern Western Civilization would translate itself into political form at no distant date through the establishment of a universal state which would fulfil at last the ideal of a polity of this species by embracing the entire habitable and traversable surface of the planet in a commonwealth that would have no physical frontiers because it would have no neighbours. In the same context 8 we have considered the possibility that, within some such literally oecumenical mundane framework, the respective adherents of the living higher religions might come to recognize that their once rival forms of worship were so many alternative approaches to the One True God along avenues offering divers partial glimpses of an identical Beatific Vision. The differences between the divers religions, and between the divers sects of each religion, which had so long been stumbling-blocks for faith and targets for the sceptic's arrows, might then prove to correspond to differences between divers psychological types of Human Nature which required a diversity of spiritual means and methods if they were to arrive at an identical spiritual goal. 9 We threw out the idea that, in this light, the historic living churches might eventually give expression to it

the unity in their diversity by growing together into a single terrestrial i

Matt.

3

John iii. 3. Goethe: Faust,

6 ? 9

vii.

13-14. Cp.

Luke

xiii.

24. 4

John

iii.

4.

1692, quoted in II. i. 281. On pp. 433-6, above. This possibility is discussed on pp. 716-36, below.

2

Deut. xxx.

s

John

8

On

15.

hi. 5.

1.

pp. 436-42, above.

556


Church Militant. Supposing that this were to happen, would it mean that the Kingdom of Heaven would then have been established on Earth ? In a Westernizing World in the twentieth century of the Christian Era, this was an inevitable question, because some kind of earthly paradise was the goal of most of the current secular ideologies. If this question were to be answered in the affirmative, that would, in the writer's belief, be a misconception which would give Mephistopheles an opening for sarcasm and Mankind an occasion for disillusionment. In the writer's belief, however, the true answer was in the negative, and this for several

reasons.

One manifest reason was exhibited by the nature of Society and the nature of Man. Society is nothing but the common ground between the fields of action of a number of personalities x and human personality, ;

we know

This World, has an innate capacity for evil as well as for -good. This meant, as we have often observed, 2 that, in any terrestrial society, unless and until terrestrial Human Nature should undergo a moral mutation which would make an essential change in its character, the possibility of evil, as well as of good, would be born into the World afresh with every child, and would never be wholly ruled out as long as that person remained alive. The challenge, ordeal, struggle, and drama of Man's spiritual life repeat themselves in the experience of each single soul in contrast to the impersonal accumulation and transmission, from one generation to another, of Man's scientific knowledge and technical 'know-how'. 3 This was as much as to say that the replacement of a multiplicity of civilizations and a diversity of higher religions by a single Church Militant on Earth would not have purged Human Nature of Original Sin and this moral limitation on the possibility of perfection in This World had a political implication which limited the possibility still further. So long as Original Sin continued to be an element in terrestrial Human Nature, there would always be work in This World for Caesar to do and, since the labourer is worthy of his 4 hire, and thankless tasks command high salaries, there would still be Caesar's things to be rendered to Caesar, as well as God's things to God. 5 Human Society on Earth would not be able wholly to dispense with institutions; and, since institutions are relations between human beings that extend beyond the narrow range of a direct personal intercourse in which love can make regulation superfluous, 6 an institution can never be founded entirely on the voluntary basis of the individual's will to make it work. If it is to be a going concern, it must be reinforced by habit and be backed, in the last resort, by the sanction of force. In fact, institutions are perfect reflections of the moral imperfection of Human Nature and these social products of Original Sin would always have to be administered by a secular arm. A state of society in which this secular power would be subordinated to the ecclesiastical would be a higher and a happier dispensation than a 'Caesaro-papal' absolute regime in which there would be no disat

any

rate as

it

in

;

;

;

1

3 5

See III. iii. 217-48. See X. ix. 697-704, below. Matt. xxn. 21.

2

* 6

e.g. in IV. iv. 120, and on p. 551, x. 7. Cp. Matt. x. 10.

Luke See

I. i.

454-5.

above.

THE BOW

IN

THE CLOUD

557

between the Church and the secular community; but to subordinate the secular power would not be to eliminate it; and, if the Church did seek to eliminate the State altogether, she would be defeating her own highest purposes; for Caesar gleichgeschaltet would live on underground in the constitution of his ecclesiastical supplanter, and a prison-house of totalitarianism that had been broken open by the Church's emancipation from the State would be reconstituted through the Church's false step of usurping the State's place instead of being content simply to vindicate her own. In looking into the causes of regression, 1 we have seen the Hildebrandine Church drawn into the arena of power politics with tragic consequences for Western Christendom as well as for the Church herself merely through a dispute over the line of demarcation between the ecclesiastical and the secular domain; and we have seen the Tridentine Church exposing herself to a risk of incurring the doom of Lot's wife through putting tinction

too

much

of her treasure into her concern to save her

life

as a terrestrial

institution. 2

The historic tragedy that had overtaken a Medieval Western Christian Church as the penalty for some inkling of the fate

fighting Caesar with mundane weapons gave that a church would bring upon herself if

she were to go to the length of stepping outright into Caesar's bloodempurpled shoes; and so, even if a united and concordant Church Militant were to have won a fully world-wide allegiance and to have entered into the heritage of the last of the civilizations, the Church on Earth would not be a perfect embodiment here on Earth of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church on Earth would still have sin and sorrow to contend with as well as to profit by as a means of grace in a world where learning comes through suffering, and she might find herself unable, for a long time to come, to divest herself entirely of her historic panoply of ecclesiastical institutions. Some residue of her ancient institutional armaments would remain indispensable to her so long as she had to go on struggling for mundane survival but a still necessary incubus would none the less inevitably still weigh her down as ;

1

On

pp. 545-50, above.

Mr. Martin Wight comments: 'On p. 549, above, your criticism of the Tridentine Church is that it has encased itself in "institutional armour". But institutional armour is not a weapon peculiar to Caesar: as you say above on p. 545, a church has to act and exist institutionally as well as a secular society. To this extent, therefore, the Church is not "fighting Caesar with his own weapons" in the implied sense of weapons to which she is not herself entitled. But further: the characteristic weapons of the Tridentine Church have been (i) the tightening up of dogma, from the Creed of Pius IV down to the definition of 1950; (n) the Holy Office and the Index, for the suppression 2

.

of heresy; (m) the founding of new orders [of religious], of whom the Jesuits (though chronologically they are just pre-Tridentine) are the most important. Now, none of these were "Caesar's weapons". Indeed the relationship is exactly the reverse: (n) and (m) are weapons which have made such a strong impression on Caesar that in his new totalitarian mood he has set about imitating them for his own purposes, in the shape of secret police, censorship, storm-troopers, and stakhanovites. It is therefore rather a case of Caesar fighting the Church with the Church's weapons (compare what you say above, on p. 554). And, if you reply that the Church had no business to use weapons like the Inquisition and the Index in the first place, that is a point certainly on which Christians will legitimately differ (and I will tend to agree with you) but are not (i) and (m) the appropriate, indeed the ultimate, weapons of any Church?' As regards (i), the writer of this Study would refer to what he has said about Theology in previous chapters of this Part. ;


558

Christian was oppressed, till an advanced stage of his painful pilgrimage, by the burden of sin that still lay bound upon his back. A socially victorious Church Militant, contemplating this forbidding prospect, might hear the insidious voice of Mephistopheles whispering ' 'defeatism* in her ear. I suspect you are beginning to realize, the *

tempter

might

insinuate, 'that

your victory

is

an

illusion. It

could never, of

course, have been anything else; for, after all, you had set yourself, hadn't you, an impossible task. "Thy Kingdom come! Thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven!" Why, that is the very definition of just what is inherently unattainable. Who lives in Rome must do as

Rome does; and in This World, which is Mankind's concentration camp, there are only two alternative practicable courses of action for Man to choose between (a prisoner is lucky to have a choice, even if only between two extremes). Man can either put the whole of his treasure in This World, or can withdraw his last farthing from his terrestrial banking account. Bet your life on This World, and you can throw yourself wholeheartedly into the satisfying enterprise of turning a prison-yard into an earthly paradise ; give up This World as a bad job, and you can detach yourself from mundane entanglements with a no less satisfying singleness of mind. In either of these directions there is an open road, but surely you can see that there is no middle course. If you had paid more attention to History, you would have observed that the whole of

had been reconnoitred long ago by earlier yes, and traversed too by Epicurean, Stoic, and Buddhist philosophers the trail leading towards an earthly paradise has been blazed by those practical men of this very tricky terrain

pioneers.

The way of detachment has been surveyed

;

action who have discovered the secret of tapping organized collective human power. The facts are public knowledge, yet you have lightheartedly ignored them. What levity! What impudence! You have been just asking for disillusionment. No wonder you are down in the mouth!'

In this Mephistophelian attack on the ideal of a Church Militant on Earth the one true statement is that the topic is familiar ground. We have 1 explored it already in surveying the alternative ways of life the ways of Archaism, Futurism, Detachment, Transfiguration that present themselves to souls challenged by the disintegration of a mundane society, and we have discovered that there is no salvation for the Soul in seeking either an earthly paradise or a Nirvana. Salvation is to be sought and found in a transfiguration of This World by an irradiation of the Kingdom of God an intellectual paradox which is an historical

fact.

The

truth

is

that This

World

is

neither a

kingdom

for

Leviathan

nor an irreclaimable of God. It

is

spiritual wilderness, but a province of the Kingdom a rebellious province which has been betrayed by the sin of

and unlawfully declaring its independence and has thereby brought upon itself the self-imposed penalties of misrule and distress; but this act of rebellion has neither invalidated God's sovereignty nor alienated His love, and He is concerned to re-inaugurate His rule not because He has any need of this insignificant province's products and revenues, but because His compassion for His creatures pride into ungratefully

1

In V.

vi.

49-168.

THE BOW makes

Him

IN

THE CLOUD

yearn to redeem them from their

559

and

self-inflicted sin

suffering. ? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray ? And, if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep than of the ninety and nine which went not astray. Even so, it is not the will of your Father which is in Heaven that one of these little ones should perish/ 1

'How

gone

think ye

astray,

The human shepherd has to rescue his lost sheep by an act of power which the dumb animal plays a purely passive part; but God's human flock has gone astray, not by innocent misadventure, but by

in

a rebellious act of will which a repressive act of power could override but not reverse. Man's rebellion against God can only be extinguished by a conversion of the rebel's heart. 'I say unto you that joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no 2 repentance.' .

.

.

God's province in This World has to be reclaimed by a divine king who wins the sinner's heart by becoming incarnate and by dying for him on the Cross; and Christ's work has to be followed up by representatives of a Church Militant that

is

in the

World

yet not of

it.

'The direct identification of the Church, as an organised institution taking its part in the process of history, with the Kingdom of God ... is just as bad theologically as the view which regards the Church as a mere instrument in preparation for the Kingdom of God. The only wholesome view is one which regards it as being constituted as the Church by the powers of the Kingdom of God within it, and yet as being always composed of people still citizens of This World, so that those powers manifest themselves partially and fitfully, and the historical Church is a mixed body.'

3

In mundane history the device of dual citizenship had been a stroke of genius that had made unity in diversity practical politics at the cost of putting an exacting psychological strain on the citizen who had to reconcile his two allegiances. This had been the arcanum imperil of the

Roman Commonwealth and of every parochial federal state in the Hellenic and in the Western body social. In the divine government of the Civitas Dei the same method had been used for the higher purpose of bringing back a dissident province into conformity with God's will through a voluntary return of rebel souls to their pristine allegiance ; and the tension was proportionately greater in the souls of God's

human agents who, in order to do His will by serving Him in His work of reclamation through love and not through force, had to live, so long as they were on duty in this arduously pacific campaign, as citizens of This World and of the Civitas Dei simultaneously. The citizen of This World who has deliberately repudiated his 2 Luke xv 7Matt. XVIH. 12-14. William Temple in a letter, written in August 1943, that is quoted in Iremonger, F. A.: William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury (London 1948, Cumberlege), p. 420. '

3


560

allegiance to God, or has never been aware of being the lawful subject of a heavenly sovereign, can make the best of This Life under the consoling illusion that he is living in the best of all possible worlds ; but the citizen

of This World

who

is

loyal to his higher allegiance

is

bound

in conse-

quence to feel and to suffer through feeling that, in working for God in This World during a spiritual Time of Troubles that is coeval with terrestrial history, he is living and breathing in an element that is not native to his soul like a diver working at sea-bottom on the salvaging of a foundered ship, or like the denizen of a Mediterranean dolina who, in the fantasy of a Platonic myth, one day finds his way up to the true 1

surface of the Earth.

my

'In belief the Earth is of a vast order of magnitude, and only a tiny fraction of it is accounted for by the habitat of those of us who live between the Straits of Gibraltar and the eastern end of the Black Sea

We

live round this [Mediter(TOVS p<XpL *HpaK\eiwv arTjXojv OLTTO ith a Western scholar's hood etymologically as well as genetically, or whether this Old Persian word was represented by the New Persian 'khud', meaning helmet by itself and cock's-comb in the compound 'khud khurus*. 3 Though, on the face of it, it seems unlikely that the same Achaemenian emperor Darius should divide the same people into two groups on different lines in different official inscriptions, it cannot be demonstrated that these two formulas for dividing the Saka into two are equivalent to one another. 4 Lack of space is A. T. Olmstead's explanation in his History of the Persian Empire (Chicago 1948, University of Chicago Press), p. 149. 5 The plural of the ethmkon, standing for the name of the country. 6 Asagarta is mentioned four times, and the ethmkon Asagartiya twice, in the text of 'DB'. Professor Roland G. Kent. 7 These discrepancies between the contents of the divers official lists enable us to arrange them in the chronological order of their successive redaction with one exception: we are left in doubt about the chronological relation between 'DPe' and 'DZd'. Both these lists are evidently later than 'DB' (on the assumption that the reason why Gadara and 'those in the Sea', which appear in 'DB', are omitted in 'DZd' is simply lack of space or inadvertence, and not because these two peoples were not yet included in the Achaemenian Empire at the time when 'DZd' was composed). 'DPe' and 'DZd' are also both evidently earlier than 'DSe', 'DNa', and 'XPh'. The chronological relation between 'DZd' and 'DPe' themselves is, however, impossible similarly to establish from the internal evidence, because different items point to opposite conclusions. From the absence in 'DZd' of 'those beyond the Sea', who appear in 'DPe', as they do in all

UNIVERSAL STATES

588

It is not easy to make out on what principle, if any, the names included in these official lists have been selected. It is clear that they are only a selection from a larger list, since the names of several other coun-

are mentioned incidentally e.g. Margu, Varkana, the Yautiya by Darius in his record of the events of the year 522-521 B.C. in associations which show that Margus was embraced in the Viceroyalty of Bakhtris and Varkana in the Viceroyalty of Parthava, and that the Yautiya were Persians. In the lists, however, Varkana is never named, though Haraiva, which would appear to have had the same status as Varkana within the Viceroyalty and Taxation District Parthava, is named in the lists invariably and similarly MarguS is never named in the lists, though they invariably name Suguda, which, like Margus', was a canton within the Viceroyalty and Taxation District Bakhtris'. Moreover, the peoples mentioned in Herodotus 's gazetteer of the taxation districts, either by tries

;

name or as the anonymous neighbours of other peoples who are mentioned by name, amount to seventy-three in all, according to the reckoning adopted in this Annex ; and we have to conclude that Herodotus or his intermediary obtained from official Achaemenian sources about twice as many names as are mentioned in the Achaemenian official lists even when we have allowed for Herodotus 's several times repeated error of inserting the same people twice or three times over under different names which he had

failed to recognize as

being synonymous, and

when we have

also recognized the possibility that, in naming peoples included in taxation districts with seaboards on the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and

the Black Sea, the Herodotean list may have supplemented its official source by adding other names that were household words in Hellas. 1 The omission of the name of Cilicia in all six official lists, and the 2 special treatment of Parsa in three of them, are features that would

suggest in themselves that these lists were intended to be representative of the tax-paying subject population each name standing either for a single taxation district or for a single viceroyalty 3 but this explanation is ruled out by the inclusion of Arabaya, the KuSiya, the Akaufaciya, and the Saka Haumavarga, since the Arabs, the African Ethiopians, and the three latest lists, we might infer that 'DZd' was earlier than 'DPe', if the opposite conclusion were not just as strongly commended by the absence in 'DIV of the Putaya and the Kuiya, who appear in 'DZd' as they do in all the three latest lists likewise Two further points of difference both also tell in favour of dating 'DPe' earlier than 'DZd'. 'DPe' mentions the Saka without distinguishing between two varieties of them, whereas 'DZd' distinguishes two varieties though we cannot be sure that its distinction between 'the Saka of the Marshes' and 'the Saka of the Plains' is identical with the distinction, made in the three latest lists, between 'Saka Tigrakhauda' and 'Saka Haumavarga'. Moreover, the order of the names in 'DPe' indicates that Zraka is still included in the Viceroyalty of Parthava, whereas the order in 'DZd' indicates that Zraka has already been detached from Parthava and attached to HarahvatiS. On this showing, 'DZd' has tentatively been placed after 'DPe' in the Table. 1 On the other hand, such names as the Outioi in Herodotus' Taxation District No. 14, and the Dadikai and Aparytai in his No. 7, can have reached him only from Achaemenian official sources, though they do not appear in any of the official lists. 2 See p. 584* above. 3 Professor G. G. Cameron comments: 'The omission of Cilicia and special treatment of Parsa indicate to me not a list of tax-paying subjects but simply a list of areas where there was a satrap'. But will not the imperial territory administered by satraps have been co-extensive with the imperial territory inhabited by tax-paying subjects, even though, within this total domain, the respective areas of particular satrapies and particular taxation districts did not coincide ?

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE

589

the Colchians are known from Herodotus, and the Saka Haumavarga are known from other Hellenic sources, 1 to have been, not tax-paying subjects, but 'gift-bringing' allies. Moreover, while the number of the taxation districts seems unlikely ever to have risen from an original figure of twenty to as many as thirty-two, and the number of the viceroyalties, at its highest, will have fallen short of thirty-two a fortiori* the four taxation districts into which Media had been partitioned on the testimony of Herodotus are all embraced, in all the official lists, under the single name 'Mada', while on the other hand the three components of the single viceroyalty of Bactria namely the two subject peoples Bakhtris and Suguda and the allied people known as the Saka Haumavarga who were brigaded with them are separately mentioned in all the official lists, each under

own name. The generally accepted view that Suguda was an integral part of the Viceroyalty of Bakhtris rests on the fact that it is placed immediately after Bakhtris in all six lists and the same reasoning suggests

its

;

was always included

in the Viceroyalty of Parthava and that Zraka was originally also attached to Parthava and was subsequently 3 transferred, at least for a time, to the Viceroyalty of Harahvatis'.

that Haraiva

It is thus 'evident that the selection of names in the official lists is not the roll-call either of the viceroyalties or of the taxation districts or of either of these two sets of administrative units together with the 'extern4 ally associated' allies. At least nine names out of a total of thirty-two that appear on one or other of the lists are those of countries which never, so far as we know, constituted either separate viceroyalties or even separate taxation districts and there are at least two taxation districts in the Herodotean gazetteer Nos. 17 and 19 which are not represented by any of the names in the official lists. None of this, however, is surprising, since we may feel sure that the purpose for which this selection of names was made by Achaemenian officials was not that of enabling twentiethcentury Western scholars to reconstruct the Ariaramnan Achaemenian administrative geography. It is indeed manifest that the posi;

Empire's purpose of the

that of the

accompanying visual representaand spectator an impression of the Imperial Dynasty's and Imperial People's achievement in cona quering and holding an empire of so vast an extent and so variegated racial and cultural composition. This intention is indicated in 'DB' in the observations in 7-9, which immediately follow the recital of the list and which are recapitulated more briefly in 'DNa', 4, in the same tive

lists, like

tions of throne-bearers,

context.

The

latter

is

to give the reader

passage continues as follows

:

'If you say to yourself: "How manifold were those lands that King Darius possessed", look at the representations of the throne-bearers, and then you will recognise then verily you will know that a Persian fight2 See further pp. 683-4, below. See further pp. 644-5, below. In both 'DB' and 'DPe' the three names Parthava-Zraka-Haraiva appear conParthava in 'DSe', after secutively in this order, and Haraiva is placed immediately before 'DNa', and 'XPh', while in 'DZd', conversely, Haraiva is placed immediately Parthava On the other hand, Zraka is placed immediately after HarahvatiS in 'DZd', 'DSe' and 'DNa'. In 'XPh', Zraka-Parthavaand immediately before HarahvatiS *

3

m

Haraiva are cited consecutively again in this order. Zraka, Asagarta, Maka, Dana, HvarazmiS, Haraiva, Suguda, ThataguS, Putaya. 4-

UNIVERSAL STATES

590

ing-man's spear has pressed forward far then verily you will a Persian fighting-man has given battle far from Parsa.'

In short, the intention of the

lists is

to

succinctly expressed in a boast inscribed

convey the

know

fact that is

on the foundation

that

more

tablets of the

apadana at Persepolis and is reproduced in identical terms in an inscription found in situ at Ecbatana: the Achaemenian Empire extends 'from the Saka who are beyond Suguda to the KuSiya, and from HiduS to 1

Sparda'. At the same time the circumspect compilers of the official lists did not allow their enthusiasm for advertising the extent and variety of the Achaemenian Empire to lead them into mentioning names that might

have drawn attention to other facts which would have betrayed a damaging truth. The Ariaramnan branch of the dynasty that proudly reigned over this far-flung empire had learnt by the bitter experience of their anarchic inaugural year 522-521 B.C. that they could not depend on the loyalty of more than a minority even of the two imperial peoples, the Parsa and the Mada and they had accordingly taken the precautions of partitioning them both for fiscal purposes, of degrading dissident Parsa to the status of tax-paying subjects, and of deporting dissident Mada to islands in the Persian Gulf. But, the more necessary these political precautions were held to be, the more inexpedient it would have been to draw attention to them; and the very frankness of the account in *DB' of the rebellion of the Yautiya Parsa explains why this name of ill omen does not appear on any of the six official lists, though it is tactlessly included, in the Hellenized form 'Outioi', in Herodotus 's recital of the peoples brigaded, in his taxation District No. 14, with the Harahvatiya (disguised in the terminology of Herodotus 's source as 'the Thamanaioi', signifying 'the borderers'). As for the no less tell-tale name 2 'Asagarta', the imprudent mention of it in 'DPe' is never afterwards The official lists do, in fact, skilfully achieve the dual purpose repeated. of advertising the grandeur of the Ariaramnan Achaemenian Empire without exposing its seamy side to public view. But, of course, the more successful these lists are in achieving the combination of purposes which they were designed to reconcile, the harder they make it for the historian to wring out of them the truth for which he is seeking. The information drawn, at least in part, from Achaemenian official that has been sources, though perhaps only at second or third hand ;

incorporated by Herodotus into his history, is presented by him in what profess to be three official documents: a gazetteer of Darius 's original 3 twenty taxation districts; an itinerary of the Achaemenian Empire's Great North- West Road, 4 associated by Herodotus with a map of the 1 See Junge: 'Satrapie und Natio', pp. 15-16; Cameron, G. G 'Darius, Egypt and "the Lands beyond the Sea" ', in The Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 11, JanuaryOctober 1943 (Chicago 1943, University of Chicago Press), pp. 307-13. The present

is to p. 312, n. 31. Its historical associations

reference

were known to twentieth-century scholars, thanks to six it (four times in the place-name form and twice in the ethnic form) in Darius's narrative, in 'DB', of the events of the year 522-521 B.C. a narrative that was as frank as the official lists of dahydva were discreet. 3 Herodotus, Book III, chaps. 89-96 (see p. 178, above). 4 See p. 82, n. i, above. 2

mentions of


591

World, engraved on a brass goras

plate, wh'ich the turn-coat 'quisling', Aristaof Miletus, is alleged to have brought with him on a mission to Cleomenes I of Sparta in the of Cleomenes to

King hope persuading invade the Achaemenian Empire as a champion of the Imperial Government's malcontent Asian Hellenic subjects; 1 and a field-state of the expeditionary force with which Xerxes crossed the Dardanelles in 480 B.C. 2 The last two of these three alleged documents may be more or less authentic. A written statement of the order of battle of Darius III Codomannus's army at Gaugamela was, after all, captured on the field by the victors and has been reproduced, on the authority of Alexander's general Aristobulus, by Arrian in his Alexander's Expedition 3 and this order of 4 battle corresponds to a field-state given by Arrian at an earlier point. On the other hand the so-called gazetteer bears tell-tale marks of being an ;

amateur compilation in which first-rate official information, drawn from more than one official source, has been used but, in being edited, has, here and there, been misinterpreted and also been 'scrambled' (no doubt, unintentionally). The order in which the twenty taxation districts are placed by Herodotus to consider this point first cannot be the original order for, as our six extant official lists of dahydva testify, an official list drafted in the ;

Imperial Chancery would normally have started, in a recital in which Parsa was being omitted because it did not pay taxes, by naming Mada and Huja (Ovja), the two countries that shared with Parsa the distinction of constituting the heartland of the Empire. 5 By contrast, Herodotus 's gazetteer starts with Yauna, goes on to Sparda in Yauna's immediate hinterland, and then recites all the other districts with seaboards on the Black Sea or on the Mediterranean Katpatuka, Cilicia, Syria, and Egypt before penetrating into the interior of the Empire. Even then this Herodotean gazetteer does not mention Huja (in Herodotus 's terminology, 'the Kissioi'), BabiruS (in Herodotus 's terminology 'Assyria') or Mada until after it has made a flying leap to the Thatagu[?d or v]iya (Graece Sattagydai) in the Upper Indus Basin. The concentration of interest on the western seaboards of the Empire, where the Achaemenian dominions overlap with the eastern fringes of the Hellenic World, is likewise displayed in the order in which the gazetteer mentions the peoples embraced in a taxation district extending from the west bank of the Lower Halys to the Asiatic shore of the narrow seas connecting the Black Sea with the Aegean. We may presume that the most important of the cantons in this district was Katpatuka (Graece Kappadokie), since the only one of them that is mentioned in the Achaemenian offiof dahydva. Yet, instead of starting with the Cappadocians and proceeding from east to west, the gazetteer, (alias 'White Syrians') in its enumeration of the peoples in this taxation district, starts with

this

is

cial lists

2

Ibid., Book VII, chaps. 61-99. Herodotus, Book V, chaps. 49-54. Arrian: Expeditto Alexandn, Book III, chap, xi, 3-7. 4 In Book III, chap, vin, 3-6. s Parsa is of all our six extant official lists. Mada is placed second head the at placed and DPe, and in DZd, DSe, DNa, XPh, and third in DPe. Huja is placed second in third in DZd, DSe, DNa, XPh. The one exception to this general rule of precedence is the placing of Media tenth in (i.e. in the place that Media occupies in Herodotus's 1

3

DB

DB

gazetteer).

UNIVERSAL STATES

592

the Hellenic communities along the Asiatic shore of the Straits and proceeds thence from west to east till it arrives at the Cappadocians last of all. It is perhaps conceivable that this drastic departure from the order of precedence observed in lists of dahydva inscribed by the Imperial Government had been made in the provincial chancery of one or other of the three westernmost viceroyalties on the Asiatic mainland Yauna, Karka, or Sparda before the list came into private Hellenic hands but it would seem more likely that the provincial chanceries would have abode by the Imperial Chancery's practice, and that the violent change of order through which the western lands of the Empire have been given precedence over the heartland will have been the work of a private Hellenic man of letters whether this was Herodotus himself or was some predecessor of his who was concerned to adapt the Achaemenian official information that had come into his hands to the requirements of a book which was to be read to and by an Hellenic public and which must ;

Achaemenian Empire in a perspecnot to Achaemenian, but to Hellenic eyes. This officious Hellenic literary rearrangement of the official order of precedence of the Achaemenian Empire's lands and peoples has had its nemesis. It has caused Herodotus, or his unofficial Hellenic intermediate source, to lose his way in the maze of the Empire's vast interior as soon as he has had to let go of the alternative guide-rope which he has imtherefore present

tive calculated to

its

picture of the

commend it,

provised for himself, after taking his starting-point in Yauna, by following the coastline of the maritime western lands, first north-eastward along the coast of the Black Sea and then south-eastward along the coast of the Mediterranean. Even this cue taken from Physical Geography for the filling of the first six of the twenty spaces in his blank form for a gazetteer of the Achaemenian taxation districts has already led the Hellenic amateur archivist into one error which would have involved him in difficulties in any case. It has led him to assign one of the twenty pigeonholes at his disposal to the principality of Cilicia and, though, down to the time of writing, the researches of Modern Western archaeologists had not yet disinterred an official list of Darius 's original twenty taxation districts, it could be taken as almost certain that Cilicia was not numbered among the twenty, considering that Cilicia was not included in any of the six already known lists of dahydva and that, on this showing, we must conclude that Cilicia ranked juridically as a sovereign independent state in spite of the political fact that this state happened to be one of the Empire's 'gift-bringing allies'. But the Herodotean gazetteer is vitiated by a far more serious flaw than its abandonment of the official order of precedence and its inclusion of a nominally independent state in the list of imperial taxation districts: it has drawn its information from more than one source, and at least two of its sources reproduce respectively two administrative maps which are not merely different from one another but are actually incompatible and which therefore cannot both be delineations of one and the same network of geographical subdivisions of the imperial domain. In the Herodotean gazetteer there are instances of the same peoples figuring twice over because they have ;


593

been attributed to two different taxation districts under two different names which Herodotus has not recognized as being the synonyms that they are in fact; there is at least one instance of the same territories figuring twice over because they have been assigned to two different administrative units which therefore cannot both have figured side by side on one and the same administrative map, though either of them may have figured simultaneously with the other on one of two different maps that will have been in force simultaneously for two different purposes and there is also at least one instance of the same whole district figuring twice over under two different names. In consequence, Herodotus has found himself left with more names on his hands than he can find room for in his twenty pigeon-holes, and his desperate search for apparently vacant nooks and corners to house the surplus names has misled him ;

into attributing geographically non-contiguous peoples to the same taxation district and, worse still, into introducing districts with overlapping

on

to what purports to be the same administrative map. our eye travel down Herodotus 's list of his twenty taxation districts in the order in which he has presented them to us, we shall catch him adding to his embarrassments as he proceeds. After having reduced the number of the pigeon-holes at his disposal from the necessary twenty to nineteen by erroneously assigning one pigeon-hole to Cilicia, he goes on to reduce the number to eighteen by counting in Harahvatis twice over, through a failure to detect that the Thamanaioi (alias Harahvatiya) who occupy a pigeon-hole in one of his sources are identical with the Paktyes (alias Harahvatiya) to whom he has already just assigned the pigeon-hole which, in another of his sources, the same Harahvatiya occupy under this different name. A twentieth-century Western scholar could identify the habitat of Herodotus's Paktyes because their name like that of Herodotus's Dadikai (Tajik) and Aparytai was still borne by a living people. In the twentieth century of (Afridi) the Christian Era the North-East Iranian people whom foreigners knew as Afghans were still calling themselves 'Pakhtana', 'Pashtana', Tathan*

frontiers If

we

let

J in the divers dialects of their Iranian language ; and this survival of the name locates Herodotus's Paktyes in the Achaemenian dahyaus that is

named

'Harahvatis" (eventually Hellenized as 'Arakhosia, Latine Ara-

lists. But this same Harahvatis is also represented by Herodotus 's 'Thamanaioi', as we can verify by comparing Herodotus's

chosia') in the official

gazetteer of Darius I's taxation districts with his field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary force, since the two peoples called Outioi and Mykoi who are grouped with the Thamanaioi in the gazetteer are grouped with the Paktyes in the field-state. It is natural enough that one and the same dahyaus should have been known by three alternative names for, while 2 'Harahvatis" is the name of the country' and 'Paktyes' is the proper name is a 'Thamanaioi' of the people inhabiting it, descriptive title. The sur;

1 These were the plural forms; the corresponding singular forms Takhtun' and Tashtun' were still closer to the Greek singular form Taktys'. 2 The country seems to have taken this name from the river that was its lifeline (see A V. W. Jackson in The Cambridge History of India, vol. i (Cambridge 1922, University Press), p. 321, n 2, Olmstead, A. T. History of the Persian Empire (Chicago 1948, University of Chicago Press), p. 46, n. 59).

UNIVERSAL STATES

594

New

Persian language, of the word 'daman', meaning the vival, in a skirt of a garment and, by analogy, a 'borderland' or 'march', tells us 1

that 'Thamanaioi' means 'the borderers'; and HarahvatiS had, in fact, been the south-easternmost territory of the Achaemenian Empire until

Darius had relegated it to the interior by annexing Sind and the country, corresponding in area approximately to a latter-day Makran, which (though not named in any of the official lists) is included in Herodotus 's gazetteer as his District No. 17, inhabited by Parikanioi and by Asiatic Ethiopians.

Thus, as a result of two mistakes the assignment of one pigeon-hole (No. 4), instead of none, to the Cilicians, and the assignment of two pigeon-holes (Nos. 13 and 14), instead of one, to Harahvatis' in order superfluously to provide for both of Harahvatis"s two synonyms 'PakHerodotus ran through his twenty pigeontyes' and 'Thamanaioi' holes without having disposed of all the names that had been thrust upon him by his divers sources. As we can see from the final shape of the gazetteer as he eventually published it, there were at least four names still on his hands after he had assigned his twentieth and last pigeon-hole to the Indoi. These four names were, first, a second set of Parikanioi, who were distinguished from the set already stowed by him in Pigeonhole No. 17 by being bracketed, not with Ethiopians, but with Orthokorybantioi second, these Orthokorybantioi who were bracketed with ;

the

still

unhoused

set of Parikanioi

;

third, the

Armenians

;

fourth, the

Sogdoi.

Herodotus had only known it, two, at any rate, out of these four surnames need not have worried him for these two were already accounted for in the description of his District No. 12 which he had copied from one of his sources: 'the Baktrianoi as far as the Aiglai'. 'Aiglai', like 'Thamanaioi', is a descriptive title, if its meaning is 'allies' 2 and the people denoted by this title are the Saka Haumavarga of the official lists who, in the foundation tablets at Persepolis and Ecbatana, are called 'the Saka who are beyond Suguda', 3 i.e. the Saka inhabiting the upper basin of the River Jaxartes (alias Sir Darya), which, at the time of writing, bore the name 'Farghanah'. This surviving name is manifestly derived from that of the Parikanioi whom Herodotus found associated with the Orthokorybantioi; these 'parikanioi' (the Avestan 'pairikas', meaning If

plus

;

;

1

In the

Kingdom

of Afghanistan in the early decades of the nineteenth century there

were at least two areas bearing the name 'daman', and one of these the 'Damaun' that 'comprehends all the country between the Salt-range, the Sohmauny Mountains, the Indus and Sungur in Upper Sind' (Elphinstone, M.: An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, 2nd ed. (London 1839, Bentley, 2 vols.), vol. li, p. 55) may well have been included within the bounds of the Achaemenian dahyduS whose people Herodotus calls 'Thamanaioi' in his description of his Taxation District No. 14. Another 'daman' was to be found in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era at the opposite extremity of the Kingdom of Afghanistan, to the north of Kabul, in the direction of the Hindu Kush. The pleasantness of this land, and the unpleasantness of its inhabitants the Tajiks (Herodotus's 'Dadikai'), are described at first hand by Alexander Burnes m Cabool, A Personal Narrative of a Journey to, and Residence that City in the Years 1836, 7 and 8, 2nd ed. (London 1843, Murray), pp. 146-66, and by Burnes' companion Captain John Wood in A Journey to the Sources of the River Oxus, new ed. (London 1872, John Murray), ,

pp. 110-16. 2 See further pp. 644-5, below. 3 See p. 590, above.


595

2 either 'sorcerers 11 or 'fairy people' or 'fairy- worshipping people' ) are identical with the 'allies' (' of the Achaemenian Aiglai') Empire who were also officially known as 'Saka Haumavarga' ; the 'Orthokorybantioi', Herodotus had found bracketed with the 'Parikanioi' in one of his sources, are 'the Pointed-Hood Saka' who are bracketed with 'the

whom

Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka' in the three latest of the six official lists; 3 and the Sogdoi, though not mentioned by name in the description of District No. 12, are included in it by implication, since a district which extended from Bactria as far as a Farghanah which was the habitat of the Empire's

Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka allies could not have

the intervening country out, and this intervening country was Sogdiana. The Sogdoi had thus, after all, been provided for, and the Sakan Parikanioi had no right to a place in the gazetteer of taxation districts, since, like the Cilicians, left

they were, juridically, not tax-paying subjects of the Achaemenian Empire, but gift-bringing sovereign independent allies. In the formula 'as far as the Aiglai' the term 'as far as' was evidently being used in an exclusive, not in an inclusive, sense, and the couple of names TarikanioiOrthokorybantioi' must have come into Herodotus's hands from a list, which like the six extant official lists, was not a gazetteer of taxation districts, but was a selection of dahydva of divers status. This satisfactory solution of half his residual difficulties must, however, have escaped Herodotus's notice; for the expedient by which he has sought to extricate himself is the unlucky one of stuffing the Parikanioi and Orthokorybantioi into Pigeon-hole No. 10, already assigned to Media, and stuffing the Sogdoi into Pigeon-hole No. 16, already assigned to the Parthoi, Areioi, and Khorasmioi. This desperate remedy has made nonsense of the gazetteer in two several ways: it has resulted in the Sogdoi and the Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka of Farghanah figuring in the gazetteer twice over in different contexts, and it has resulted in the attribution of non-contiguous peoples to the same taxation district. The Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka not to (who

ought

fig-

ure in any taxation district at all) appear in District No. 10 as Parikanioi', besides appearing as 'Aiglai' in the description of District No. 12] the Sogdoi appear in District No. 16 nominatim, besides being included by implication in District No. 12. On the point of non'

it is, of course, geographically inadmissible to brigade with Parthia, considering that the intervening territory Sogdiana MarguS is known, from the evidence of 'DB', to have been included in Bakhtris; it is a geographical absurdity to brigade with Media 'the

contiguity,

1 In the Avestan Iranian language the feminine singular 'pairika' means 'witch*. Professor Roland G. Kent. 2 See Nyberg, H. S.. Die Rehgionen des Alten Iran, in Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen-JEgyptischen Gesellschaft, 43. Band (Leipzig 1938, Umnchs), pp. 297, 314 seqq., 340, 469. 3 In another context in his field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary force Herodotus catches an echo of the official distinction between the two branches of the Saka, only to confound them with one another. After giving, in Book VII, chap. 64, a description of 'the Pointed-Hood Saka' he calls them 'Skythai wearing stiff upright pointed kyrbasiai' he goes on to say that these particular Skythai were called Sakai Amyrgioi (i.e. Saka the Persians. Herodotus did not notice that the Orthokorybantioi whom Haumavarga) by he had brigaded with the Medes in his gazetteer were the same people as 'the PointedHood Saka' of his field-state.

UNIVERSAL STATES

SQ6

Pointed-Hood Saka', who were separated from Media by the whole breadth of the Viceroyalty of Parthava, and a fortiori to brigade 'the Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka' with Media, since these were separated from

Media not only by the Viceroyalty of Parthava but also by the subempire of BakhtriS beyond that. After having fallen into these errors as the price of disposing of three out of his four surplus names, Herodotus fell into another error in disposing of Armenia. The process of reasoning that led him to the manifestly erroneous conclusion that the Armenians were brigaded with Southern Afghanistan in one and the same taxation district may perhaps be reconstructed as follows. As Herodotus was re-examining his divers materials in search of a vacant space in which Armenia could be stowed, we may conjecture that his eye caught, in one of his cahiers, an entry that had been transliterated into Greek 'Paktyike and Armenioi and the adjoining peoples as far as the Black Sea* and here (if our guess is right) he fancied that he had found salvation; for 'Paktyikos' is the Greek adjective corresponding to the Greek substantive 'Paktyes'; and the Paktyes already had a pigeonhole of their own in District No. 13 (duplicating District No. 14, which had also been assigned by Herodotus inadvertently to the Paktyes under their alias 'Thamanaioi'). Now that the Armenians had proved to have been included in the same administrative area as the Paktyes, Herodotus's last difficulty will have seemed to him to have been overcome. He had only to replace Taktyes' by 'Paktyike and Armenioi and the ;

adjoining peoples as far as the Black Sea' as the label for his District No. 13, and he would have completed his task of making all the names in his divers cahiers fit into the twenty pigeon-holes at his disposal. At this point it must have escaped his notice that the peoples adjoining the Armenians as far as the Black Sea could be none other than the

Moskhoi, Tibarenoi, Makrones, Mossynoikoi, and Mares, to whom he had already assigned a separate pigeon-hole of their own (his District No. 19); and furthermore he cannot have been fully alive to the improbability of an apparent solution which was committing him to the thesis that peoples with a frontage on the Black Sea could have been included in the same taxation district as a people whose home lay at the eastern extremity of the Empire. All the same, when he came to write his introductory note for his gazetteer as he was now presenting it, the awkwardness of this thesis seems to have forced itself upon his attention. The first sentence of the

introductory note runs:

'When Darius had set up his viceroyalties and had appointed viceroys for them, he assessed taxes that were to be paid to him by single peoples in some cases and in other cases by syndicates in which a people's neighbours were brigaded with

it.'

We may guess that this sentence was a correct statement of the truth, that it was copied out by Herodotus verbatim from one of his sources; but, as he copied the word 'neighbours' (nXrjcrLoxwpovs), a

and

misgiving must have assailed him.

He must

have recollected

that, in


597

the gazetteer as he had now edited it, the Armenians of Eastern Anatolia figured in the same district as the Paktyes of Eastern Iran. This must (he would have reassured himself) be correct, since one of his sources (as interpreted by him) had vouched for it and, besides, he would find himself with the Armenians on his hands again if he were to reject this welcome solution now on second thoughts. All the same, he was bound to feel uncomfortable about a solution of a particular problem that was in flat contradiction with the general statement in one of his sources that all members of a taxation-syndicate were contiguous with one another. He could not leave it at that, considering that he had taken for the label of his Taxation District No. 13 a statement by one of his authorities that the Paktyes (whom he knew of as an East Iranian people) were syndicated with the Armenians and with peoples adjoining the Armenians who had a seaboard on the Black Sea. So Herodotus (if our reconstruction of his process of composition is correct) uneasily took up his pen again and amplified the introductory note by appending the following contradictio in adjecto ;

:

'And in other cases he passed over the adjoining peoples and assigned the [non-contiguous] peoples on the farther side of [the peoples that he had passed over] to the same taxation district as the peoples [on the nearer side of them].* This additional sentence, which makes the introductory note selfcontradictory, was, we may suppose, extorted from Herodotus by his own previous manipulation of the contents of a gazetteer that he had compiled, at his peril, from more than one source; but this does not mean that the entry Taktyike and Armenioi and the adjoining peoples as far as the Black Sea' had made nonsense in the original context out of which Herodotus had lifted it in order to substitute it for the entry Paktyes', taken from a different source, with which he had mistakenly assumed that an entry opening with the word Taktyike' must be identical. All that was the matter with the entry beginning Taktyike' was that it belonged to the political map of the Achaemenian Empire as this had been organized by Cyrus II after he had ousted Astyages from the throne of Media, and not to the fiscal map of the Empire as this had been organized by Darius I after the anarchic year 522-521 B.C. When it was retransferred to the political map, to which it properly belonged, from the fiscal map, into which Herodotus had mistakenly introduced 1

4

.this

it

entry would

make

sense, as

we

shall see. 2

Administrative Geography and Political History

The

coexistence of two different administrative maps of the Achaeone fiscal and the other political of which Herodotus has thus unwittingly preserved an indication in his gazetteer, throws light on a dark passage in the Empire's political history.

menian Empire

The 1

constant ideal of the Achaemenian regime was to govern as far

A tentative

reconstruction of the authentic list of Darius's original twenty taxation presented in Table VI, folding out opposite p. 772, below. pp. 604-11, below.

districts is 2

On

598

UNIVERSAL STATES

as possible with the consent of the governed ; and, while the originator of this ideal had been the founder of the Empire, Cyrus II, the restorer

of the Empire, Darius I, showed for example, by his policy in Egypt had taken the founder's ideal to heart. The difference between Darius 's position and Cyrus's was one not so much of ideals as of possibilities of putting ideals into practice. The nemesis of Darius 's assassination of a reigning emperor who, truly or falsely, had claimed to be Cyrus's son Smerdis had been the outbreak of the widespread tmeute of 522-521 B.C., and the nemesis of this terrible year had been a grievous and irretrievable blow to the system, which Cyrus had created, fostered, and succeeded in bequeathing to his successors, of governing with the consent of at least a large minority of the governed. Though Cyrus IFs usurpation of Astyages' Median throne had not been either accomplished or maintained without bloodshed, Cyrus seems nevertheless to have managed to achieve the all-important political objective of sparing the Median imperial people's susceptibilities by saving their 'face'. He seems to have been able to avoid creating the impression either that the Medes were being ousted by the Persians or that the House of Cyaxares was being supplanted by the Cyran branch of the House of Achaemenes. He ascended the Median throne as a grandson of Astyages who had been substituted for his grandfather by the suffrages of a preponderant party among the Medes themselves, and he associated his own people the men of ParsuwaS, AnSan, and Parsa with their imperial kinsmen the Medes on a footing, not of superiority, but of strictly equal partnership. The same fundamental policy of conciliation was likewise applied by Cyrus in the far more difficult case of his conquest of the Nee-Babylonian Empire. Thanks to the Babylonian priesthood's quarrel with Nabonidus, Cyrus was able to occupy the throne of Babylon as the Babylonian priesthood's champion and candidate. As for the peoples of Eastern Iran and North- Western India that he too

whom

Cyrus appears to have brought under his rule between his enthronement in Media circa 556-550 B.C. and his attack on the NeoBabylonian Empire in 539 B.C., the speed and ease with which he established his authority over these vast tracts of territory was perhaps his reward for presenting himself there as a champion of Sedentary Civilization against Nomadism (a cause in which he eventually proved 1

his sincerity by losing his life in its pursuit); for a majority of the sedentary peoples in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin and the Indus Basin had suffered cruelly from Eurasian Nomad invasions within living memory. Cyrus IPs policy of governing as far as possible by consent was reflected in the structure of his administrative map. His normal practice seems to have been to respect the territorial integrity of the ci-devant empires that he had converted into viceroyalties within a universal state and, during Cyrus's own reign, the Lydian Empire where there was an abortive revolt shortly after the original conquest 2 seems to have been ;

1 The overthrow of Astyages by Cyrus Nabonidus-Cyrus Chronicle, 556-555 B.C.

II is dated 550-549 B.C. in the Babylonian in another Babylonian historical document, 'Kyros', in Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopadte der

according to Weissbach, F. H.,

s.v.

Classischen Alter tumstutssenschaft,

Neue

2

See Herodotus, Book

I,

:

Bearbeitung, Supplementband IV, cols. 1142-3. chaps. 1 54-60.


599

the only one of Cyrus's territorial acquisitions which the conqueror found himself compelled to partition between two separate viceroyalties as the price of maintaining his hold upon it. 1 The former NeoBabylonian, as well as the former Median, Empire was converted by Cyrus intact into a single viceroyalty; and in the North-East, on the

Achaemenian Empire's most dangerous

frontier, where the transwere the formidable Eurasian Nomads, a Viceroyalty of BakhtriS that was a sub-empire in itself was either preserved by Cyrus or perhaps actually called into existence by him to serve as the Empire's principal anti-Nomad march. In Herodotus 's gazetteer of Darius 's taxation districts the boldly generous Cyran political map has, for the most part, been replaced and this, of course, correctly by a cautiously repressive Darian fiscal map

frontier barbarians

reflecting the usurper's reaction to his fearful ordeal in Darius's assumption of the Imperial Crown had as

522-521

B.C.

we know from

Darius 's own record been the signal for a widespread attempt to throw off the Achaemenian yoke (light though this had been so far) and to re-establish the pre-Cyran regimes in empires that Cyrus had deprived of their former sovereign independence. The Medes, for instance, who, in accepting Cyrus II, had been accepting as a legitimate heir to the Median throne a scion of the Cyran branch of the House of Achaemenes whose mother had been a Median princess, could have no such grounds for feeling any loyalty to a pretender, descended from the Ariaramnan branch of the Achaemenidae, who had no Median royal blood in his veins and who had won the imperial throne by assassinating a reigning emperor who had at least professed to be Astyages' greatgrandson. In A.D. 1952 there was no means of knowing for certain whether the Smerdis whom Darius had assassinated had indeed been the authentic son of Cyrus II or whether he had been the impostor that Darius asserts that he was; 2 and there was also no information about the previous 1

2

See pp. 671-3, below. expert opinion has been given to the writer by Professor Roland G.

The following

Kent: accept the account of a true Smerdis, son of Cyrus, and of a false Smerdis, the for several reasons, (i) The account of Darius himself on the Behistan Rock, and the account by Herodotus, agree in the essentials, though differing in details. (2) If Darius had slam the true Smerdis, son of Cyrus and brother of Cambyses II, and if the fact had been known widely enough to have resulted in the sundry uprisings related by Darius in his inscription, it is hardly conceivable that no hint of this should have come down in the literature, and especially that the inveterate gossip Herodotus, in all his lengthy account of the event, should have given no indication that there was a differing version. (3) Further, if Darius had had to justify his slaying of the real brother of Cambyses, he would have had at hand a much better account to set before the World, and a true account at that, better than what in that case would have been a cock-and-bull story about his having slain an impostor. 'When Darius slew (true or pseudo-) Smerdis, he needed no fanciful story to justify him. All that he had to say was that Smerdis' father had wrongfully deprived his (Darius's) grandfather Arsames of the throne of Persia (or Persis), and that he was avenging the wrong done to his line. Old Arsames was no longer physically able to reassume the sovereignty, so Darius took it for himself. He did not need to invent a pseudo-Smerdis, so why place himself in the position of a liar about the whole matter? Therefore, in view of the concurrent testimony of the Inscription of Behistan and of Herodotus, I believe that the true Smerdis had been murdered previously (unless he had died of natural causes just at that time) and that a Magian named Gaumata had assumed his place and was presently killed by Darius and his helpers. Note that Darius '1

Magian Gaumata,

6oo

UNIVERSAL STATES

relations between the two branches of the House of Achaemenes perhaps because there had never been a moment at which it had suited either branch to give publicity to facts which, it might be suspected, were to neither branch's credit. Supposing that the Smerdis whom Darius assassinated had been, and been known by Darius to be, the helpers on the inscription, and that the names agree, with but slight variations, with those given by Herodotus.' A statement of the case for the contrary thesis that the reigning emperor whom Darius assassinated was the authentic Smerdis, the son of Cyrus II, is presented by A. T. Olmstead in his History of the Persian Empire (Chicago 1948, University of Chicago lists his

Press), p. 109, as follows: 'Darius claims that Bardiya [Graced Smerdis], younger brother of Cambyses, was put by that brother. Yet there is complete disagreement between our sources as to the time, place, and manner of his murder. Darius puts the episode before the Egyptian

to death

expedition of Cambyses, Herodotus during it, and Ctesias after. The official version followed by Herodotus blames a certain Prexaspes for the actual murder, but there was doubt as to whether "Smerdis" was killed while hunting near Susa or was drowned in the Erythraean Sea. After the death of Cambyses, we are expected to believe, Prexaspes publicly recanted his story, informed the people of the secret murder of the "true" Bardiya, and then in repentance committed suicide. Deathbed repentances we all know as frequent devices of the propagandist after a suicide, the dead man can tell no tales. Furthermore, the "false" Smerdis was false only in claiming to be the son of Cyrus, his actual name was Smerdis! The height of absurdity is reached when we are informed that so alike were the "true" and the "false" Smerdis that even the mother and sisters of the "true" Smerdis were deceived! Contemporary Aeschylus had no doubt that Mardos, as he calls him, was a legitimate monarch and that he was slain by the wiles, not of Darius, but of Artaphrenes, one of the "Seven" (Aeschylus, Persae, lines 774-7). Last, but the "false" Bardiya far from least, Darius so continuously insists that all his opponents in particular are liars that we are convinced he "doth protest too much". It is significant that in Herodotus, Book III, chap. 72, Darius is made to give an elaborate defence ;

.

.

of lying.' The present writer, who was only an amateur in Achaememan history, was not competent to judge between the authorities on points on which these disagreed with one another. On the issue here in question he would confine himself to recording that, in the first draft of the present passage, he had rashly ventured to opt for the view that Danus's victim had been the authentic Smerdis son of Cyrus II, and that he had been convinced of this as a result of several times rereading 'DB'. The impression made on his mind by Danus's ostensibly frank account of the dramatic events of the first year of his reign had been just the opposite of the impression that Darius himself, in 'DB', is manifestly striving to create At each repetition of Danus's assertion that he alone is speaking the truth and that each of his rivals is a liar, one reader, at any rate, had come more and more strongly to suspect that Darius must have some portentous lie and crime on his own

conscience, and he had actually concluded this now expunged passage in his first draft by quoting the line from Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, scene n, on which Olmstead concludes his statement of the case for the prosecution. (This might, of course, have been a subconscious reminiscence of the passage, quoted above, in Olmstead's book, which the present writer had read several years back.) On this last point, Professor R. G. Kent, in a note to the present writer, suggests that, in calling his rivals 'liars', Darius is using the word in the technical theological sense of subscribers to a false religious doctrine (i e. to a religion other than Danus's own worship of Ahuramazda). Evidently this interpretation of the compound substantive 'he-follower' though the non-technical translation 'liar', in the (O.P. draujand) would be possible in 'DB', 63 and 64; on plain ordinary meaning of the word, would also be possible the other hand, in 52 the verb 'he lied* (O.P. adurujiya) is used no less than nine times running to stigmatize the pretensions of Danus's defeated rivals. The same verb is used with the same plain meaning in n, with reference to the 'false' Smerdis' claim to be the authentic Smerdis; in 16, with reference to Nidmtu-Bel's claim to be Nebuchadrezzar the son of Nabomdus, and in 49, with reference to the Armenian Arkha son of Haldita's claim to be Nebuchadrezzar the son of Nabomdus As for 10, the most natural interpretation of the sentence 'After that the Lie waxed great in the country, both in Persia and in Media and in the other provinces', is surely not that the worship of Ahuramazda receded before the advance of rival religions, but that there was a widespread disposition to accept, at its face value, the 'false' Smerdis' claim to be the true Smerdis, because (in the words of the last sentence but one before this sentence) 'when Cambyses slew Smerdis, it did not become known to the people that Smerdis had been slam'.


601

owner of the name and in consequence the legitimate heir of was conceivable that, from the Ariaramnan branch's standDarius, in thus assassinating the true Smerdis, would have simply

rightful

Cyrus point,

II, it

been taking a belated but justifiable revenge for an earlier coup d'etat, whatever the date and circumstances of this might have been, which had resulted in the deposition of Darius 's grandfather Arsama, and exclusion of his father Vis'taspa, from the throne of Parsa, after Darius 's great-grandfather Ariyaramna had ruled in Parsa and had, perhaps, even exercised a suzerainty over his brother Cyrus I's appanage in Parsuwas and AnSan as well. This Ariaramnid point of view, however, was not calculated to appeal to the peoples who had acquiesced in the rule of the Cyran branch of the Achaemenidae. These peoples might not much care whether the emperor whom Darius had murdered was or was not the genuine Smerdis son of Cyrus, or whether Darius had or had not been justified in murdering him, whatever his identity might be. A murder which, in Darius's eyes, would have been primarily an incident in a family quarrel if it was not the exposure and punishment of an imposture, as Darius himself declared it to be, was, a sensational piece of news for the Cyran House's former because it was subjects above all, for those of them who were Medes conclusive evidence that the Cyran House had now become extinct, without having left any legitimate male heir to succeed to its title. If the Smerdis whom Darius had just murdered was not the authentic 1

son of Cyrus, then either this impostor or Cambyses must previously have taken the authentic Smerdis' life; and, on either of these two alternative possible hypotheses, the Cyran House's subjects now found themselves absolved from their allegiance by the disappearance of the dynasty to which this allegiance had been owed. Unlike the death of Cambyses, the death of Darius's victim, whoever he might have been,

was now no surviving legitimate repreCyrus II and evidently two successive pieces of sensational news, the second was followed by pronunciamientos of insurgents who claimed to be the legitimate representatives of dynasties that Cyrus II had deposed and superseded.

had made

it

certain that there

sentative of the imperial line of Astyages and this was why, in contrast to the first of these

;

The gruesome fate of all these rivals of Darius's who fell into Darius's hands (as every one of them did, sooner or later) did not deter others from trying their luck in turn. The rendition to Darius of the Elamite pretender Acina by the Elamites themselves was followed by the pronunciamiento of a second pretender to the Elamite throne in the person of Martiya. The overthrow of Nidintu-Bel, the pretender to the throne of Babylon, was followed by the pronunciamiento of a second See Cameron, G. G. A History of Early Iran (Chicago 1936, University of Chicago pp 212 and 214. In a letter to the present writer, Professor Cameron drew his attention to Sidney Smith's rejection of his thesis that Cyrus I of AnSan was under his brother Anaramnes of Parsa's suzerainty (see Smith, S. Isaiah, Chapters XL-LV, Literary Criticism and History (London 1944, Milford), p. 122, n. 31, referring to p. 28). If the case for Cameron's thesis rests on the attribution of the title 'King of Kings' to Anaramnes in 'AmH', it would, no doubt, be invalidated by Professor R. G. Kent's finding (see p. 622, n. i below) that 'AmH' was a forgery made by Artaxerxes II for a 1

Press),

political purpose.

UNIVERSAL STATES

602

pretender, Arkha. The defeat, flight, capture, and execution of the Median pretender FravartiS was followed by the pronunciamiento of a second Median pretender, Cisantakhma. Moreover, the pretenders in Media, unlike those in Elam, were the leaders of a genuine national revolt, and this national revolt was not confined to the Medes themselves the other peoples of the former Median Empire the Northern the people of Varkana, the Parthava, and, above all, the Asagartiya, Arminiya revolted likewise, and the Armenians seem to have given Darius more trouble than the Medes themselves. Most significant of all, ;

Darius 's title was disputed by some of his fellow Persians. Martiya, the second insurgent in Elam, was a Persian in nationality, though he claimed to be a scion of the former Elamite royal family; and so was Vahyazdata, the insurgent in Yautiya, a country which Darius expressly describes as 1

2 lying within the bounds of Parsa. These facts, for which our authority is Darius himself, make that some Persians, as well as most Medes, believed that the

it

clear

murder

committed by Darius, if not a previous murder by some other hand, had extinguished the last legitimate representative of the houses of Cyrus I and Cyaxares which had been united in the persons of Cyrus II and his sons, and that they were therefore now morally free to make their own choice of a ruler, and certainly free from any obligation to accept Darius 's claim to be Cyrus IPs legitimate successor. This was why the death of Darius 's victim in 522 B.C. had the same catastrophic effect as Nero's suicide in A.D. 69. The consequent certainty that now, at any rate, no authentic heir of the legitimate dynasty remained alive opened the flood-gates for an outburst of anarchy. This is the background against which we have to read the Median portion of Herodotus's gazetteer of Darius's taxation districts. In this we shall see, 3 Media is partitioned into four separate districts. Besides District No. 10, which is duly labelled Media* by Herodotus, there is his district No. n, which appears to cover a strip of territory extending westward, between the Elburz Range and the Central Desert of Iran, from the narrow passage between them that was

gazetteer, as

*

known

as 'the Caspian Gates'. There is also Herodotus's District No. which appears to cover the Basin of Lake Urmiyah, together with the former territory of Assyria to the east of the Tigris (annexed by Media when she had partitioned the Assyrian Empire with her Babylonian ally) and with the former kingdom of Urartu (annexed by Media subsequently). It is probable, too, that Herodotus's District No. 15 likewise is another fragment of Media, consisting of the steppe country round the lower courses of the rivers Aras and Kur, where they join one another before their common debouchure into the Caspian Sea. Finally, we find a detachment of Medes marooned, far from home, in the islands of the Persian Gulf, as one of the peoples included in Herodotus's District No. 14. The Median origin of these dbracints is revealed in the fieldstate of Xerxes' expeditionary force, in which their equipment and 1 8,

armament

are described as being almost identical with those that the

i

See'DB'

3

On

22.

pp. 623-32, below.

*

Sec 'DB',

40.

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE 1

Medes wore; and

their inclusion in District

No. 14 was,

603

also significant, interned there next door to the dissident

since these dissident Medes were Persian clan called the Yautiya (Outioi). District

No. 14

The

in fact, a prison for the

is

south-western quarter of

most heinous of the Median

and Persian offenders against Darius and, as a further precaution, the prisoners there had been chained to the loyal Harahvatiya (alias Paktyes, alias Thamanaioi) in Southern Afghanistan, who had been rewarded for their trustworthiness by being conscripted to serve as ;

2

jailers.

Herodotus 's gazetteer of Districts Nos. 10, n, 18, 15, and 14 thus informs us that Darius took the opportunity of his redivision of the

Empire

for fiscal purposes in order to insure himself against the risk of Media by breaking Media up for these

a fresh national insurrection in

purposes, besides deporting a portion of the Median people but there are two other passages in Herodotus 's work in which Media is credited with a much wider extension, at any rate towards the north, than can be attributed to the district labelled 'Media' and numbered '10' in the 3 gazetteer of Darius 's taxation districts. When Herodotus is indicating the region of.Media which was the home, according to the Cyrus legend, of the hero's bucolic foster parents, and again when, in quite a different 4 context, he is discussing the boundaries of 'Europe' and 'Asia', he makes Media march on the north with the country of the Saspeires, and these Saspeires with the Colchians, who have a seaboard on the Black Sea; and these two passages, while in harmony with one another, are incompatible with the administrative geography of the gazetteer; for, in the gazetteer, District No. 18, in which the Saspeires are included, also comprises the Matienoi and the Alarodioi, and in A.D. 1952 it could Herodotus 's rendering of the still be discerned that the 'Alarodioi' ethnikon of 'Urartu', which was situated in the basin of Lake Van and along the middle and upper reaches of the valley of the River Aras and the Matienoi, who stamped their name on the basin of Lake Urmlyah, must have lain between the Saspeires a people who had bequeathed their name to the canton of Isbir in the upper valley of the River Choroq and the environs of Hamadan, to which the name 'Media' is confined in the gazetteer. This means that, in the two passages now ;

Herodotus is including in Media at least one district which not included in Media in the gazetteer; and the explanation must be that these passages record the political boundaries of the Viceroyalty of Media as these had been established by Cyrus before Media had been of her insurpartitioned by Darius for fiscal purposes in consequence rection in 522-521 B.C. Herodotus is here describing a Viceroyalty of Media which includes Urartu as well as the Basin of Lake Urmiyah between Urartu and the heart of Media round Ecbatana. We can now also see that these two passages are not the only places in which Herodotus is writing in terms of a political map which is antecedent to but on paper, at any rate, has not been superseded by

in question, is

*

2 3

Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 80. See further pp. 622 and 640, below. In Book I, chap. no.

+

In Book IV, chap. 37.

UNIVERSAL STATES

6o4

purposes, of perilously large This officially surviving integral Viceroyalty of Media has a counterpart and neighbour in an officially surviving integral Viceroyalty of Armenia, and this is the geographical entity that has found its way into Herodotus 's edition of the gazetteer of Darius 's taxation districts in the formula Taktyike and Armenioi and the adjoining peoples as far as the Black Sea', which Herodotus has taken for the description of his Taxation District No. 13. The region to which the name 'Armina* or 'Arminiya' had originally attached seems to have been the country occupying the upper basin of the Tigris and extending thence farther north-westward into the north-west corner of the basin of the Euphrates, where the two arms of the Upper Euphrates unite which the Assyrians had called 'Nairi'. The first wave of Assyrian settlers in Nairi some of whom had been established in the reign of Shalmaneser I in the thirteenth century B.C. had been submerged by the cataclysm of the Aramaean Volkerwanderung out of the North Arabian Steppe at the turn of the second

Darius 's precautionary partition, for political units that

Cyrus

II

had

fiscal

left intact.

and the last millennium B.C. Thereafter, Asshurnazirpal II had reasserted the Assyrian Crown's authority over dissident descendants of these Assyrian settlers in 882 B.C. and had annexed the Aramaean principality of Bit Zamani in 879 B.C. In this quarter the extension of Assyrian rule had been at its widest circa 799 B.C. thereafter, the whole of Nairi except an isolated enclave round Amedi (Latine Amida, Arabice Diyar Bakr), the former capital of Bit Zamani, had been conquered from Assyria by Urartu the south-western part of the lost Assyrian domain in Nairi (i.e. the province later known to post-Alexandrine,Hellenic geographers as Sophene) had then been reconquered by Tiglath-Pileser III in 739 B.C.; but the south-eastern part (Graece Arzanene) had remained a debatable territory; 1 and the eventual beneficiaries from a ;

;

stubborn, long-drawn-out, and indecisive contest between Assyria and Urartu in this arena had been the Thracian-speaking followers of the Mushkian (i.e. Phrygian) war-lord Gurdi (Graece Gordios). In 695 B.C., Sennacherib had attempted, without success, to dislodge

Gurdi 's war-band from Til-Garimmu (Hebraice Togarmah), astride the road leading south-eastward from Sivas in the upper basin of the River Qyzyl Irmaq (Graece Halys) to Malatiyah (Assyriace Meliddu) in the valley of the Tokhma Su (a west-bank affluent of the Upper 2 Euphrates). Upon the collapse of the Assyrian Power after the death of

Asshurbanipal, the Mushkian invaders to whom Gurdi had bequeathed his name swooped down from the north-west towards the heart of Assyria till their path was crossed by Sagartian invaders swooping down from the north-east upon the same objective if the Kardoukhoi whom Xenophon and his comrades encountered in the tangle of mountains known to post- Alexandrine Hellenic geographers as Gordyene south of the River Bohtan (Latine Centrites) 3 are to be identified with the descendants of Gurdi 's men, and if the latter-day place-name Si'irt 1 These vicissitudes in the history of Nairi are recorded in Forrer, op. cit., pp 25-33 2 See and 84-87. ibid., pp. 80-8 1. 3 See Xenophon: Expeditio Cyri, Book III, chap, v, 14 Book IV, chap. in.


605

(Armeniace Sghert or Sgherd), borne by a town near the confluence of the River Bohtan with the Eastern Tigris, testified that the northwestern branch of the Iranian-speaking Nomad Asagartiya had once pushed their way that far westward from their previous habitat some-

where

The

to the east or south-east of

seventh-century Median

Lake Urmiyah.

1

metropolitan territory of Assyria east of the Tigris and the contemporary Phrygian settlers in the region known by the Assyrians as 'Nairi' and by the Achaemenidae as 'Armina' seem to have met at the south-eastern corner of the Upper 2 Tigris Basin without falling out with one another. By the time, in or after 585 B.C., when the course of the River Halys, from the point where it emerged from the Kingdom of Cilicia down to its mouth, was accepted by the Median and the Lydian Empire as the frontier between them, 'Armina' must already have been incorporated into the Median Empire but the simultaneous insurrection of Armina and Mada against Darius in 522 B.C., and the strength of the resistance that the insurgents in Armina offered to Darius 's forces, are facts which indicate that the settlers in the

;

previous relations between Armina and grounds of this friendship

Mada had been

friendly;

and

be found in the perhaps title Taktyike and Armenioi and adjoining peoples as far as the Black Sea' which Herodotus has taken for his description of Darius's thirteenth taxation district if we are right in seeing in this formula the description, not of any Darian taxation district, but of an integral Viceroyalty of Armenia which, like the integral Viceroyalty of Media, will have been a clue to the'

to

is

established under the Median imperial regime of Cyaxares and Astyages; will have been maintained as a going concern under the MedoPersian imperial regime of Cyrus II, Cambyses and a soi-disant

Smerdis and ;

will not

have been

officially

abolished by Darius

I

in being

by him

for fiscal purposes. The formula suggests that the whole of the territory added to the Median Empire by Cyaxares to the west of Urartu, to the east of the

partitioned

Lower Halys, and to the north of a Kingdom of Cilicia which bestrode the middle course of the Halys in the neighbourhood of Mazaka, had been included by Cyaxares in a single viceroyalty and, if this interpretation is correct, it would mean that Cyaxares had reconciled the Phrygian ;

1 This identification is suggested ologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, Band

E.: 'Zarathustra, Teil I', in Archd(Berlin 1929-30, Reimer), pp. 76-124, on p. 81, the following cautionary comment* 'This inter"Gurdi's men", and, even more, the interpreta-

by Herzfeld, I

Professor G. G. Cameron makes pretation of "Kardoukhoi" as meaning tion of Si'irt as being an echo of "Asagartiya", is really playing with fire. I want more linguistic evidence.' A derivation of the ethmkon 'Kardoukhoi' and the place-name 'Gordyene' from the personal name 'Gurdi (Gordios)' is, indeed, impugned by the appearance of 'the wide-spreading Kurti warriors' in the annals of the Assyrian King Tukulti-Nmurta I, who reigned in the second half of the thirteenth century B c. (see Luckenbill, D. D.: Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia (Chicago 1926-27, University of Chicago Press, 2 vols ), vol. i, pp. 141, 152, 164, 171), and in the record of the campaign in the accession year of King Tiglath-Pileserl (regnabat 1114-1076 B c.) (see op. cit., vol. i, pp. 222 and 229). If these Kurti were one of the Phrygian hordes that overwhelmed the Empire of Khatti at the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., the personal name of the seventh-century Phrygian war-lord Gurdi will have been derived from the ethmkon 'Kurti', not vice versa, and will have signified 'the Phrygian*. * So far from clashing, they appear to have amalgamated for the latter-day Kurds, who perhaps bore Gurdi's name, spoke an Iranian, not a Thracian, dialect. n. i.

;

UNIVERSAL STATES

606

Nairi-Armina to a voluntary acceptance of a Median overlordship by taking them into partnership with the Median imperial people and conferring on them a sub-empire covering the Median Empire's western marches. This would be a counterpart of the policy by which Cyrus II, in his day, appears to have reconciled the Bactrians to a Medo -Persian overlordship and, in this case as in that, we can see that the two parties were bound to one another by a common interest which constituted a practical guarantee that the paramount Power's generosity would not be abused by the beneficiaries from it. Though the Phrygian invaders of Nairi-Armina and the Median invaders of Adiabene might have been competitors in the scramble for the spoils of a settlers in

;

defunct Assyrian Empire, they still had an abiding common interest in standing shoulder to shoulder against a surviving common enemy who remained formidable after Assyria had been annihilated. This abiding common enemy was the Nomad Power which had erupted out of the Great Eurasian Steppe into South- West Asia before the end of the eighth century B.C. If we have been right in thinking that, at some date between 556 B.C. 1 and 539 B.C., Cyrus II took the Bactrians into partnership and entrusted to them the surveillance over their Nomad neighbours the Saka Haumavarga in Farghanah, we may perhaps now go on to hazard the guess that, in making this settlement of his north-eastern frontier, he was following a precedent that had been provided for him by Cyaxares' settlement of his north-western frontier

at some date between 610 and 585 B.C. We may guess that Cyaxares had taken into partnership the Phrygian settlers in the country which the Achaemenian lists of dahydva call 'Armina', and that he had entrusted to them the surveillance over Nomad neighbours of theirs whose tribal name was Paktyes and who had established themselves in the sixth century B.C. within the bend of the Halys, in the country which the

Achaemenian

lists call

2

'Katpatuka'. If the Paktyes were one of the Eurasian Nomad peoples who, in and after the eighth century B.C., had erupted out of the Great Eurasian Steppe into South- West Asia through the gap between the Pamir

Plateau and the south-east corner of the Caspian Sea, 3 1

See

it

would not be

p. 598, n. i, above. Professor G. G. Cameron makes the following comment: 'This is a fine theory and makes sense but I want much more to go on than the name [Paktyikfi standperhaps ing for Paktyes]; I want more proof.' 3 See III. in. 400-1. In the writer's belief, all the Nomad hordes who had ever invaded South- West Asia had always come through this gap and had never come over or round the Caucasus. He would not, of course, deny that, at times, Nomad peoples in occupation of the Volga -Don steppe had made raids round the eastern end of the Caucasus Range into the Kur-Aras Basin and beyond, but he would deny that this route had ever given passage to permanent migrants. Herodotus's statement, in Book I, chaps. 103-4, that this was the route by which the Cimmerians, with the Scyths at their heels, had broken into South-West Asia (at the turn of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.) was, in the writer's judgement, not derived from any authentic record of the event, but was merely an inference from the fact that, in Herodotus's day, the only extant Scyths known to Herodotus were domiciled in the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe. Herodotus was transporting his Scyths from there to Media by, not the shortest, but the shortest practicable, route but his premiss that the Scyths living in his day on the Black Sea Steppe must have been the Scyths who had invaded South-West Asia two or three centuries earlier was, in the present writer's opinion, erroneous. It was, surely, more likely that, when the Scyths had erupted out of the Central Asian heart of the Eurasian Steppe, 2

;

;


607

surprising to find Eastern Anatolia subsequently occupied by one wing of a horde whose other wing had occupied Eastern Iran for, throughout the four thousand years or so of Eurasian Nomad history, each successive wave that broke upon the northern escarpment of the Iranian Plateau tended to split into divergent streams following diverse lines of least resistance. While the left wing of a horde that had mounted the plateau would be inclined to head south-eastward for the plains of the Indus Basin, the right wing of the same horde would be inclined to sweep on westwards, along the corridor between the southern foot of the Elburz Range and the northern edge of the Central Desert of Iran, till it arrived ;

at congenial pasture-lands in the basin of Lake Urmlyah and, beyond country in the lower basin of the rivers Aras and Kur,

that, in the steppe

adjoining the west coast of the Caspian Sea. From these temporary camping grounds a subsequent horde, following at the first horde's heels, might then drive these forerunners of theirs on again up the Aras Valley, either to entangle themselves in the mountain maze over1 hanging the south-east corner of the Black Sea or, if they were more fortunate, to travel on still farther westward over the watershed between the basins of the Aras and the Qyzyl Irmaq (Halys) until eventually they debouched into the Anatolian Peninsula. This had been the story of the Sanskrit-speaking Nomad invaders of South- Western Asia in the eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C. whose left wing had descended upon the Indus Basin while their right wing had made its appearance in Azerbaijan, Mesopotamia, North Syria, Transcaucasia, and Anatolia under the name Mitanni and perhaps also as the 'marianmi'. 2 In a subsequent invasion of South-West Asia by Iranian-speaking peoples which had brought the Medes and Persians into Iran, the deployment of the

invading war-bands had been remarkably symmetrical. In this invasion as its course can be reconstructed by inference from the eventual locations of the participants after they had come to rest the Persians must have been in the van in an echelon in which the Yautiya and the Ma&ya formed the advance guard and the Parsa proper the main body, with the Asagartiya bringing up the rear while the Medes, following close behind, must have split the Persian vanguard into a right wing, which was pushed by Median pressure north-westthey had been split (as in the eleventh century of the Christian Era the Turks, and in the thirteenth century the Mongols, were to be split) by the Caspian Sea into two wings, one of which had made its way between the Caspian and the Pamirs into South-West Asia and India, while the other had made its way between the Caspian and the Urals into the Great Western Bay of the Steppe to the north of the Black Sea. Professor Cameron queries: 'What drove the Hurri into Mesopotamia [in the seventeenth century B.C.] and later brought Urartu into increasingly bloody contact with Assyria? Must it not have been the pressure of new peoples from across the Caucasus?' The present writer sees no need for this hypothesis. Nomad invaders breaking in via the Caspian Gates and/or non-Nomadic Caucasian highlanders could surely have supplied the driving force, without its being necessary also to postulate a Nomad invasion via Derbend. 1 In this mountain bunker, lost tribes whose names Mares, Sannoi, Skythnoi (Xenophon, op. cit., Book IV, chap, vn, 18, and chap, vm), Sakasenoi, Taokhoi (ibid., revealed their provenance from 1-14), Sirakes chap, iv, 18; chap, vi, 5 chap, vii, the Eurasian Steppe, rubbed shoulders with others whose names showed that they had found their way into the same blind alley out of Anatolia. This was, for example, the provenance of the Tibarenoi (from Tabal) and of the Moskhoi (from Phrygia and, before ;

that, 2

from South-Eastern Europe). See the Note on Chronology in

x.

199-202.

UNIVERSAL STATES

608

wards, and a left wing which the same Median pressure pushed away towards the south-east. When, in and after the ninth century B.C., first the Assyrian and then the Achaemenian records progressively bring to light the positions in which the divers participants in this Iranian Volkerwanderung had established themselves, we find the Medes in the centre, astride the Great North-East Road leading up from Babylonia on to the Iranian Plateau via Behistan, with the Yautiya and the Ma&ya at the outer extremity of either flank, the Parsa between the Yautiya and the Medes, and the Asagartiya immediately to the rear of the Parsa. On the south-east flank the Yautiya are in North-Eastern Laristan, the Maciya in South-Western Laristan, the Parsa in Fars and in Luristan (Parsuwa), and the Asagartiya in Kirman. On the north-west flank, the right-wing fraction of the Yautiya can be detected in the latter-day Armenian name Uti (Graece Utene), 1 which attached to a district between the Qarabagh and the south bank of the River Kur in Transcaucasia. The right-wing fraction of the Maciya (Graece Mykoi) can be detected in the name Muqan, Mughkan, or Mughan 2 which attached to the patch of steppe to the south of the confluence of the rivers Aras and Kur. The right-wing fraction of the Parsa turn up in Parsua, which was the Assyrian name for a canton in the North-Western Zagros, somewhere to the south-south-east of the basin of Lake Urmiyah, 3 while the right-wing fraction of the Asagartiya (Assyriace Zikirtu) is located in the Assyrian records somewhere to the east or south-east of

Lake Urmiyah. This bifurcation into a westward-riding and a south-eastward-riding likewise to be the history of the Turkish-speaking Nomads who were to break upon the Iranian Plateau in the eleventh century of the Christian Era. 4 It would have been strange if the wave of Iranian-

column was

1 See Adontz, N. Histoire d'Armeme, Les Origmes (Pans 1946, Union Generate Armenienne de Bienfaisance), p. 308. In Strabo* Geographica, Book XI, chap, vn, i (C 508) and 8 (C 514), these north-western Yautiya are called Ouitioi. 2 See Le Strange, G. The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge 1905, Univer:

sity Press), pp. 175-6.

The evidence for the existence of this north-western Parsua, and for its location somewhere to the north of the Upper Zab [ ? i.e. the upper course of the Lesser Zab] is set out by Sidney Smith in Isaiah, Chapters XL-LV, Literary Criticism and History (London 1944, Milford), pp. 11920 (notes 24 and 25, referring to p 28) See also Forrer, op. cit pp. 8990, and Adontz, op cit., pp. 1003 and 366-9 The name of this Parsua, like the name Madai (Mada, Media), first occurs in the annals of Shalmaneser III. According to Konig, F. W. Alteste Geschichte der Meder und Perser (Leipzig 1934, Hinnchs), p. 8, Parsua is first heard of in 844 B.C., Madai in 836 B c. Cp Cameron, G G. A History of Early Iran (Chicago 1936, University of Chicago Press), pp 143-4. 3

,

:

This instance is also a reminder of the fact (noticed on p. 606, n 3, above) that the frontier of the Eurasian Steppe between the Pamir Plateau and the south-east corner of the Caspian Sea was not the only sector on which an erupting horde of Eurasian Nomads was apt to fan out in diverse directions in the course of its farther advance. In and after the eleventh century of the Christian Era the fanning out, as far afield as India on the left and Anatolia on the right, of the Turks who had crossed the frontier between the Pamirs and the Caspian was matched by a corresponding dispersion of their brethren who had simultaneously broken out of the heart of the Steppe into its Great Western Bay through the gap between the Caspian and the Urals. Some of these Turkish-speaking 4

invaders of the Western Bay moved north-westward up the Volga towards Great Bulgaria (Qazan), others moved south-westward into the Kuban, while others, advancing due westward, crossed first the Don and eventually the Carpathians, when a remnant of the Ghuzz (alias Cumans) found asylum on the Hungarian Alfold from the pursuing Mongols (see XIII. x. 54-55). A simultaneous eruption north and south of the Caspian Sea was, indeed, normal.


609

speaking Nomads this time Saparda, Cimmerians, Scyths, Paktyes, and Kaspioi (Latine Caspii) who broke upon the same plateau out of the same steppe in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., had not splayed apart in the same two divergent directions; and the word 'Paktyike* in Herodotus's description of District No. 13 in his gazetteer is not the only piece of evidence that points to this conclusion. The tribal name of a detachment of the Paktyes established in Anatolia may also perhaps be detected in the place-names Paktye, borne by a town at the neck of the 1 Gallipoli Peninsula before the end of the sixth century B.C., and Paktyes, borne by a mountain near Ephesus, 2 and likewise in the personal name 3 Taktyas* which, in Herodotus's history, is borne by a Lydian whom Cyrus put in charge of Croesus's captured treasure, and who took this opportunity to place himself at the head of a Lydian insurrection against

Achaemenian rule. It is also worth noticing that the Kaspioi, whom Herodotus locates in the corridor leading out of Khurasan into Azerbaijan, as one of the peoples in his District No. 1 1, and in the lower basin of the rivers Aras and Kur, as one of the peoples in his District No. 15, appear in his field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary force in an association which suggests that there must have been another detachment of Kaspioi who, like the other wing of the Paktyes, were established somewhere in Eastern Iran. 4

On this line of reasoning, we may interpret the Taktyike' in Herodotus's description of District No. 13 of his gazetteer as standing for Paktyes who were not the well-known bearers of the name in Eastern Iran, where it had survived down to the twentieth century of the Christian Era in the form Pakhtun-Pakhtana. The Paktyes whom Herodotus had found associated with the Armenians would not be these fifth century of the Christian Era, for example, the Huns were invading the Indian and the European peninsula of Asia at the same moment, while in the seventh century B c. the westward advance of detachments of Cimmerians and Scyths south of the Caspian into Anatolia was accompanied by a simultaneous westward advance of other detachments of the same two peoples north of the Caspian into the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe (where the passage of a band of Cimmerians, in advance of a pursuing band of Scyths, was attested by the name 'Cimmerian Bosphorus' by which the Straits of Kerch were known in Hellenic parlance). It will be evident that, when a Nomad horde thus erupted north and south of the Caspian Sea simultaneously, and then fanned out both in the Great Western Bay of the Steppe and in South-West Asia, its extreme right and left wings might eventually come to rest at an enormous distance apart. On the map of the Old World in the twentieth century of the Christian Era, for example, the fanning out of the Bashkirds was commemorated by the survival of their name both in the Southern Urals and in SouthWestern Baluchistan and in the light of this latter-day parallel it is not surprising to find the Boudmoi, whom Herodotus (Book IV, chaps. 21 and 108) locates within the timbered country north of the steppes east of the River Don (locates, that is, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bashkinstan), also figuring (in Book I, chap. 101) as one of the tribes of the Medes under the name Boudioi, or again to find established on the banks of the River Kuban the right wing of the Smdoi whose left wing stamped this originally Eurasian Nomad people's name first on the River Indus and eventually on the whole l See Herodotus, Book VI, chap. 36. Indian sub-continent. 2 See Strabo: 39 (C 647). 13 (C 636), and chap, i, Geograptnca, Book XIV, chap, i, 3 Book I, chaps. 153-6. * This eastern wing of the Kaspioi is mentioned in Book VII, chapter 67, between the Gandaro-Dadican brigade on the one side and the Sarangian (Perstcd Zraka) contingent on the other side. The Persian commanders of the Gandaro-Dadican brigade and of the Caspian contingent are brothers. These Eastern Kaspioi, like the Eastern Paktyes, are described in this context as wearing stsyrnat (sheepskin coats). See pp. 635-6, below.

In the

,

B

2009. vii

X

UNIVERSAL STATES

610

whom Herodotus had allotted both No. 13 under their own name and his District No. 14 under the descriptive title 'borderers' (Thamanaioi) the Armenians' Pactyan associates would be a western branch of the Pactyan horde who had established themselves in Eastern Anatolia and who must have been Pactyan denizens of Harahvatis', to his District

;

associated with, if not identical with, the intrusive Nomad occupants of the same territory who bore the name Cimmerians'. 1 The Greek

form Taktyike' would be an Hellenic man of letters' rationaliform of the substantive Takty-' taking the non- IndoEuropean plural ending in 'k' which was endemic in the region between the Caucasus and Mesopotamia; 2 and this plural Taktuk' would reappear in the second and third syllables of the name 'Katpatuka* which, like the name 'Armina', makes its first appearance in history in the Achaemenian lists ofdahydva. 'Katpatuka' would signify 'the Paktyes domiciled in Khatti', as distinguished from their brethren and homonyms who were domiciled in the South-East Iranian dahydus known as adjectival

zation of a plural

Harahvatis'. If Cappadocia and the peoples along the north coast of Anatolia between Cappadocia and Colchis, exclusive of Colchis itself, had in truth been thus associated with Nairi-Armina in a single viceroyalty 1 A remnant of the Cimmerians who had swept westwards as far as the west coast of Anatolia in the seventh century B.C. appears to have survived in Cappadocia, to judge by the fact that the name by which Cappadocia was subsequently known in the Armenian language was Gamir (see Prasek, J. V.. Geschichte der Meder und Perser (Gotha 1906,

Perthes, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 148). 2 The acquisition of a plural ending in 'k' was one of the penalties entailed in settling within this area. This fate overtook the Armenian language and, among other substantives in it, the Armenians' own name for themselves, for 'Haik', as the Armenians called themselves, is the plural of a singular form 'Hay' which would appear to denote an inhabitant of the country, occupying the north-west corner of the Euphrates Basin, which the Hittites had once known as 'Hayasa' and which the Hellenic geographers were later to know as 'Armenia Minor'. Gurdi's war-band, likewise, became known (if there is any substance in our conjecture on p. 604, above) as 'Gordi-k' (Graced Kardoukhoi) in the mountain bunker between the Rivers Bohtan (Latine Centrites) and Tigris which brought their south-eastward trek to a halt and which came to be known, after them, as 'Gordyene'. The Taokhoi whom Xenophon and his comrades encountered in the highlands in the hinterland of the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea were perhaps a lost tribe of Transcaspian Nomad Daha who had acquired the same inevitable plural in 'k' after finding their way into this 'living museum' in which so many splinters of broken peoples silted up (though there was also a cape and a town called Taokhe and a canton called Taokhene outside the 'k' area, along the coast of Pars (see Strabo Geographtca, :

Book XV, chap, and

in,

3

(C 728), and Ptolemy: Geographia, Book VI, chap,

iv,

2, 3,

7)).

The

who had headed

the Eurasian Nomads' seventh-century ride into Saparda, Anatolia, in the van of the column in which the Paktyes, Cimmerians, Scyths, and Kaspioi followed behind them in echelon, reappeared as Sevordi-k some fourteen centuries later, when circa A.D. 750-60 they sacked an outpost which had been established at Bardha'ah by the Arab Muslim conquerors of the Sasaman Empire. The historical evidence bearing on this incident is discussed in Marquart, J. Osteuropaische und Ostasiattsche Streifzuge (Leipzig 1903, Dieterich), pp. 36-40, and in Macartney, C. A.: The Magyars in the Ninth Century (Cambridge 1930, University Press), pp. 87-90 and 1746. These Modern Western students of the origins of the Magyars had been led astray by the Byzantine scholar-emperor Constantme Porphyrogemtus's erroneous assertion that these survivors of the Saparda who had invaded South-West Asia in the seventh century B.C. were a detachment of the Magyar horde. The form in which Constantine presents the Saparda's name Zdâproi aayaXoi is manifestly a transliteration of an Arabic original 'Sawardiyah al-asfaP, 'the lowland Sawardiyah' in the plain between the Qarabagh and the River Kur, as contrasted with 'the highland Sawardiyah' somewhere else. Mas'udi's and Istakhri's description of these descendants of the Saparda as being 'a kind of Armenian' is not so wide of the mark as Constantme's blunder.


611

by the policy of Cyaxares and Cyrus II, it would follow that Persia and Media were not the only political divisions of the Achaemenian Empire that Darius partitioned in his new fiscal map. Besides dividing Persia into two fragments, one of them now officially tax-paying and the other still nominally exempt, and Media into four fragments, Darius will also have divided Armenia into three by erecting the peoples between the northern boundary of Armenia Proper and the Black Sea coast of Anatolia into a separate taxation district, duly reported by Herodotus as his District No. 19, and by detaching Cappadocia from Armenia, at any rate for fiscal purposes, to constitute a taxation district Herodotus 's District No. 3 in which we find Cappadocia brigaded with a province, administered from Dascylium near the Anatolian coast of the Sea of Marmara, which had already been detached politically from Lydia.

1

We

are now perhaps in a position to take the full measure of the grievous change for the worse in the domestic life of the Achaemenian Empire which was the nemesis of Darius 's assassination of the reigning emperor and usurpation of the Imperial Crown. Under the Cyran branch of the House of Achaemenes, as under the foregoing Median dynasty, the Empire had (if we have been right in our reconstruction of its history) been securely grounded on the paramountcy of a broad association of imperial peoples the Medes, the Persians, the Armenians, and eventually also the Bactrians who were bound to one another by their common enjoyment of a privileged status and their common loyalty to a dynasty by whose generosity this status had been conferred 2 upon them.

A

sadly different picture is presented in Herodotus 's gazetteer of Darius 's taxation districts; for, in spite of the errors and confusions, here and there, that we have been attempting to clear up,

Herodotus 's gazetteer does bring to light something that none of the dahydva betray. As a result of the revolts against Darius's assumption of the Imperial Crown which had broken out in 622 B.C. among the privileged paramount peoples of the Empire as well as among the subject peoples, Darius had found himself constrained to reduce to a dangerously narrow compass the once broad basis of voluntary support on which Cyaxares' and Cyrus IFs regime had safely rested. Of the four former imperial peoples, the Bactrians alone had retained their previous position intact. The Persians had been partitioned most invidiously into a still privileged remnant of loyalists in Ears and a batch of dissident communities the Yautiya and Maciya in Laristan and the South-Eastern Asagartiya in Kirman who had been degraded to the ranks of their own former subjects. Media had been

six official lists of

four fragments partitioned, for fiscal purposes, into 1

This separate province, known in Hellenic parlance

in addition to the

as 'Hellespontme Phrygia',

must have been detached politically from Lydia already before the date of Danus's division of the Achaemenian Empire into taxation districts, since Herodotus testifies to its separate existence on the political map, not only in the first decade of the fifth century D c., at the time of the Ionian Revolt (see Book VI, chap. 33), but already as early as the reign of Cambyses, when the governor of Dascylium, Mitrabates, was at loggerheads with the viceroy of Sardis, Orcetes, who had been Cyrus's appointee (see Book III, chaps. 120 and 126, and the present Annex, p. 671, below). z

On

this point, see Herzfeld, op. cit., pp. 117-18.

UNIVERSAL STATES

612

deportation of the dtracints who had been marooned on the islands in the Persian Gulf. Armenia had been partitioned for fiscal purposes into three fragments. No doubt Darius felt rueful about having to take these precautionary measures. They were a poor substitute for the goodwill that the House of Achaemenes had forfeited in consequence of the extinction of the Cyran branch and the transfer of the crown to the Ariaramnan branch through the assassination of a reigning emperor who had professed himself to be Cyrus's authentic son and Cambyses' legitimate successor. know that Darius did his utmost retrospectively to justify his acts and to regularize his position. He published his own account of the obscure and controversial events of the year 522-521 B.C. on the cliffface at Behistan in the three languages of the imperial capitals, 1 and arranged for the distribution of an Aramaic translation of the text, in a portable form, throughout his dominions. 2 He married two of Cyrus's daughters and one of his granddaughters whose father had admittedly been the genuine Smerdis, 3 whether the Smerdis whom Darius had assassinated had been the murderer's subsequent wife's father or an impostor. He also, as his inscriptions and bas-reliefs record, took care to employ Medes as well as Persians in posts of high confidence and 4 responsibility. In the light of these recorded evidences of Darius 's general policy, we could have guessed even without the help of the direct evidence that we have gleaned from Herodotus that, in taking

We

his precautions to make it impossible for an integral Persia, integral Media, and integral Armenia ever again to be carried away by an antiAriaramnan national movement, as each of these three great subempires had been carried away in 522-521 B.C., Darius would have

taken pains to avoid any unnecessary provocation. The straightforward way of guarding against the danger in Media and Armenia would have been simply to abolish the two sub-empires and to break each of them up into a number of smaller viceroyalties 5 but, as we have seen, there are indications in Herodotus 's work that, on the post-Darian map of the Achaemenian Empire, an integral viceroyalty of Media and an integral viceroyalty of Armenia still survived side by side with the smaller districts into which either of them had been dissected by Darius for fiscal purposes. This coexistence of an old political with a new fiscal map was revealed to us by an examination of inconsistencies in the Herodotean gazetteer which we traced back to a confusion in certain places between the two coexistent maps; and ;

See V. v. 499, n. 3. 'By the favour of Ahuramazda this inscription in other ways I made. In addition, it was in Aryan, and has been made on leather. Afterwards this inscription was sent by me everywhere among the provinces; the people universally were pleased' ('DB', 70, Professor R. G. Kent's translation in Old Persian^ p. 132). A well-thumbed fragment of the Aramaic translation had been retrieved by Modern Western archaeologists from the debris of the loyal Jewish military cantonment at Elephantine* (see Hoonacker, A. van: Une Communautd Judto-Arameenne a ttphantine t 1

2

.

en Egypte, aux vi e et

V siecles av. J.-C.

.

.

(London 1915, Milford),

p. 32).

See Olmstead, A. T. History of the Persian Empire (Chicago 1 948, University of Chicago Press), p. 109. 4 See Junge, P. J.: Dareios I (Leipzig 1944, Harrassowitz), pp. 129-30, with n. 13 to * On chap. 5. pp. 603-11, above. 3

:

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE the

official

empires

is

613

preservation of Cyaxares* and Cyrus IPs sacrosanct sub-

indeed what

we should have expected a priori,

for an official

them would have been flagrantly impolitic. Besides keeping open the wounds unavoidably inflicted on the pride of high-spirited imperial peoples who had constrained Darius to subdue them by force of arms in 522-521 B.C., so drastic a precautionary measure as this would abolition of

have advertised Darius 's lack of confidence in the finality of a victory which had indeed been glorious just because it had been so hardly won. We shall therefore not be surprised to find that Darius officially respected the integrity of the Cyran viceroyalties, but at the same time we must not allow ourselves to be hoodwinked by Darius into imagining that the power of the dangerous viceroyalties was not broken in fact as a result of the partitioning of these particular viceroyalties into a larger

of smaller districts on Darius 's new fiscal map. Darius was not named 'the huckster' 1 for nothing, and his precocious appreciation of the potency of economics and finance in public affairs gave him the cue for solving his political problem of taking precautions without giving provocation by attracting attention to what he was actually doihg. Darius was aware of the power of the purse and he will have perceived that a viceroy or some insurgent nationalist leader who might have disposed of a viceroy as Darius himself had disposed of Smerdis would not find it easy to try conclusions with the Imperial Government when the control of revenue within his viceregal boundaries had been transferred from him to several district intendants of finance, each separately and directly responsible to the Imperial Chancery. Of course, in an empire in which most of the provinces were economically

number

;

backward, and in which a money economy was still in its infancy, the power of the purse was modest if measured by twentieth-century Western standards; yet, combined with the weapon of secret intelligence, which the Central Government will have also acquired by setting up a new financial administrative network independent of the existing network, the separation of political and fiscal a viceroy's capacity for making mischief. reduce would greatly powers Darius must have perceived that his new network of taxation districts, operating unobtrusively behind the facade of an old network of vicethe effective engine of imperial administraroyalties, would be, de facto, political administrative

tion in a huckster-emperor's hands. The local variations in the relation of the new fiscal map to the old are significant. The policy of breaking up, on the fiscal political map map, viceroyalties that were politically dangerous was applied, as we shall see,

not only to Media and Armenia, but also to 'Babylon-cum-

Beyond the into the two

2 River' (Tahat Babili u Ebir-Nari'), which was partitioned taxation districts Babirus and Athura, and to West Anatolia,

1 'Darius's assessment of tribute and other similar measures of his provoked the Persians into coming the mot that Darius was a huckster, Cambyses a despot and Cyrus a father in allusion to Danus's vice of dealing in a huckster's spirit with all affairs of and contemptuousness, and to Cyrus's virtue of state, to Cambyses' vices of irritability and to the consequently invariable beneficence of his acts' (Herodotus, Book

gentleness

III, chap. 89). 2

See Professor G. G. Cameron

,

s

u -, observation quoted on p. 657, n.

3,

below.

UNIVERSAL STATES

614

which was partitioned into the two taxation districts Sparda and Yauna, though in either of these two cases, likewise, the political viceroyalty 1 appears to have been kept intact. By contrast, the loyal Viceroyalty of Harahvati was enlarged politically by the addition of Zraka, 2 and was still further enlarged on the fiscal map by the attachment to it, for taxing purposes, of the disaffected Persian cantons Asagarta, Yautiya, and Maka, in Kirman and Laristan, to constitute the Herodotean Taxation District No. 14..* The loyal Viceroyalty of Bakhtris', again, seems to have been left intact not only on the political map but also on the fiscal map, where it constituted the Herodotean Taxation District

No.

i2. 4

be seen that Darius 's policy was as adroit as any policy could be in the adverse circumstances with which the Ariaramnan usurper had condemned himself to have to contend yet a sovereign who has acquired the nickname huckster stands convicted of not being loved; and, for all that Darius could do, it was beyond his power, and beyond his successors' power, to put the Achaemenian Empire back on to the broader basis of consent and support on which it had rested in the auspicious Cyran initial chapter of its history. When Darius and Xerxes then proceeded to strain the weakened structure of their regime by embarking on an ambitious forward policy of incorporating the remainder of the Hellenic World, together with its Nomad hinterland on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, it is no wonder that they should have run into a catastrophe. It will

;

*

'

The Ambiguity of Homonyms

The

foregoing general account of the administrative geography of the

Achaemenian Empire must now be supplemented by some consideration of the evidence

which was

partly anticipated in the preceding discussion twentieth-century Western scholars seeking

at the disposal of

and locate particular countries and peoples named in the extant sources of information, both official and Herodotean. One of the difficulties that beset an investigator in this field was the frequent occurrence of an identical name in more than one place on the map, and it may therefore be useful to face this fertile source of confusion before plunging into details. The occurrence of these homonyms was confusing in two ways. In the first place it was apt to leave the investigator in doubt as to whether he was confronted with a single people or with two or more distinct and separate peoples bearing such-and-such a name. Cases in point were the uncertainty about the existence of a north-western detachment of 5 Paktyes in Cappadocia (Katpatuka) and of a south-eastern detachment of Kaspioi in Arachosia (Harahvatis) or thereabouts. 6 In the second place it was not always possible, even where the recurrence of a name was not in doubt, to be sure that the recurrence was anything more than to identify

1

2 3

s

See pp. 657 and 678, below. See p. 589, with n. 3, above, and p. 637, below. 4 See See pp. 622 and 637, below. p. 644, below. 6 See See pp. 608-10, above. p. 609, above, and pp. 635-6, below.


615

a coincidence that was a phonetic accident of no historical significance. 1 In the third place, even if it could be demonstrated or at least be

shown to be probable that the homonyms really were recurrences of the same name in the same language, it was not always possible to determine the recurrent name's character. On the one hand it might be a genuinely proper name, whose occurrence in different places was evidence that the two or more peoples bearing it were akin to one another and that they had reached their eventual locations from some

common original centre of dispersion, however remote from one another might be the regions in which they had respectively come to rest at the end of their divergent migrations. A number of apparent examples of the fission and fanning out of Eurasian Nomad peoples in the course of their eruption out of the Steppe into the regions round about have come to our notice already in our discussion of the geographical dis-

We

tribution of the Paktyes. 2 have, however, also already come across names that are manifestly not proper names but are descriptive epithets

or labels which bear their meaning on their face and which in some cases are known to have been current side by side with genuine proper names which they had not driven out of currency. classic example is the multiple nomenclature of one branch of the people whose proper name was Paktyes. 3 The south-eastern Paktyes lived, as we know, in a country that bore the proper name Harahvatis (Latine Arachosia) in virtue of being situated in the basin of a river which in the Avesta is called the Harahvaiti. 4 This dahydus is called exclusively by the name of the country in the official lists, and this place-name Harahvatis (ethnikon Harahvatiya) is duly reproduced in the Hellenized form 'Arakhosia' (ethnikon Arakhotoi) in the works of post-Herodotean Hellenic geographers. In Herodotus's work, on the other hand, the name 'Arakhosia' never occurs. In his field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary force, Herodotus calls the people of Arachosia by their national name 5 Taktyes', while in his gazetteer of Darius 's taxation districts he calls

A

their descriptive label 'thamanaioi', meaning 'borderers'. 6 evident that the same title 'borderers' might have been conferred

them by It is

by the Achaemenian

authorities, whether officially or informally, on half a dozen different peoples who would have had nothing in common with one another beyond their geographical location on one or other of In a cautionary comment, Professor G. G. Cameron recommends a prudent adherence to the hypothesis of a non-significant coincidence unless and until convincing evidence in favour of some other explanation presents itself. 'I feel', he writes, 'that there are passages in which you have leaned too heavily on homonyms. I believe, for example, that many town names go back to such primordial times that any attempt to deduce tribal, ethnic, or linguistic conclusions is hopeless. I am innately suspicious of such things. We thought, for example, that Arbela meant "the Four God City", and so it could have been interpreted in Semitic; but now earlier documents present us with Urbillum, which is by no means so explainable. The name, consequently, is preSemitic.' After receiving this wise and kindly caution, the writer of this Annex could not plead that he had not been warned. 2 See 3 See pp. 606-9, above. pp. 593-4, above. * See Jackson, A. V. W., in The Cambridge History of India, vol. i (Cambridge 1922, n. 2. University Press), p. 321, s See Herodotus, Book VII, chaps. 67 and (?) 86 (if 'Paktyes' is to be read here as an 1

emendation for a repetitive 'Kaspioi'). 6 See Herodotus, Book III, chap. 93

UNIVERSAL STATES

616

the Achaemenian Empire's far-flung frontiers; and in this case an identical label would have been presumptive evidence, not that the peoples bearing it were akin, but, on the contrary, that they had nothing to do with one another. On a latter-day map of Iran and the regions round about, there were, as we have already noticed, 1 at least two damans': one between the eastern escarpment of the Iranian Plateau and the west bank of the Indus, and the other at the southern approaches to the Hindu Rush in the basin of the Kabul River; and there was evidently no reason to suppose that there was any national affinity between these eastern and northern borderers of an Afghan Empire. In the administrative geography of the Achaemenian Empire the only borderers labelled, in the extant sources, with the word daman' were the Paktyes of Arachosia but there was another word signifying 'border' in the Old Persian language which did occur in at least four places on the Achaemenian and Hellenic map of Iran, and this was 'paraitaka'. One such 'paraitaka' was the first district of Media which Alexander found on his path in his twelve days' march in the spring of 330 B.C. *

*

;

from his winter-quarters in Persis (Parsa, Fars) to Ecbatana (Hamadan), 2 and these indications locate this paraitaka' in the latter-day province of 3 Ispahan. This was evidently the border province of Media over against and that will have been the country of the Paretakenoi who are Persis, cited by Herodotus in his list 4 of the tribes of the Medes. This 'paraitaka' between Media and Persis may also be the Partakka or the Partukka mentioned in the Assyrian King Esarhaddon's record of the Assyrian cavalry's operations on the Iranian Plateau, between the Zagros and the Central Desert, in 673 B.C., 5 since on the same expedition the Assyrians also raided a country called Patush Arri, and this name is evidently identical with the name of the Pateiskhoreis who were one of the tribes of the Persians according to Strabo. 6 There was, however, another Median 'paraitaka', known to post-Herodotean Hellenic geographers and likewise included in Media by them, 7 though not mentioned by Herodotus, 8 near the intersection of the Great North-West Road and the Great *

1

On

2

See Arrian. Expedttio Alexandra, Book

p. 594, n.

i,

above.

3

For

s

See Cameron, G. G.

III,

chap, xix,

2.

this 'paraitaka' at the south-eastern extremity of Media, see further Strabo: 26 (C 80), Book XI, chap, xin, 6 (C 524), Book XV, Geographica, Book II, chap, i, 6 (C 729), Book XVI, chap i, 8 (C 723) and 14 (C 726), chap, in, chap, n, 17 4 See Herodotus, Book I, chap. 101. (C 744) :

A History of Early Iran (Chicago

1936, University of Chicago

Press), pp. 172-4. In spite of the similarity of their names, these two districts are not identical, since they are mentioned side by side (see I Aickenbill, D. D. Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia (Chicago 1926-7, University of Chicago Press, 2 vols ), vol. 11, PP- 519, 540, 566). 6 See Strabo: i (C 727), cited by Cameron, ibid. Geographtca, Book XV, chap, in, Eserhaddon's record runs: Tatush Arra, a district on the border of the salt desert, of on the the distant Medes, which lies in the land edge of Mount Bikm, the lapis fathers had trodlazuli mountain, the soil of whose land not one among the kings den' (Luckenbill, op. cit., vol. n, pp. 519, 540, [560], 567). ? See, for example, Strabo Geographica, Book XI, chap, xii, 4 (C 522); Book XV, 8 (C 739). 12 (C 732); Book XVI, chap, i, 2 (C 736) and chap, in, 8 Herodotus's Paretakenoi cannot have been the inhabitants of this western 'paraitaka', considering that, in his itinerary of the Achaemenian Empire's Great North-West Road in Book V, chaps. 49-54, Herodotus does not assign to Media any of the territory through which this road ran. According to the passage in Book V, chaps. 52-53, the road ran from 'Armenia* through 'Matiene' into 'Kissia' (see pp. 629-30, below).

my


617 North-East Road. 1 There was a third 'paraitaka' on one of the borders of Sogdiana which cannot be located exactly from Arrian's narrative 2 of Alexander's operations there, and there was a fourth the latter-day Sakastene (Seistan) astride the lower course of the River Hilmand between Zarangiane (Zraka) and Arachosia (Harahvatis'). 3 Obviously there was no more affinity between the inhabitants of these four 'paraitakas' in an Achaemenian Iran than there was in a Medieval Western Christendom between the inhabitants of the March of Ancona, the March of Brandenburg, Denmark, and Finmark, or between the inhabitants of the County Palatine of Durham, the quarter known as the Pallant within the walls of the city of Chichester, a Kur Pfalz astride the Rhine and an Ober Pfalz at the northern tip of Bavaria. While 'borderers' denoted by the synonyms 'paretakenoi' and 'thamanaioi' is one of the descriptive labels on the map of the Achae-

menian Empire, another is 'pairikas', meaning people practising an have observed already 4 that this objectionably distinctive religion. Graece was of several descriptive titles of an one name, 'parikanioi', Iranian-speaking Nomad people, marching with Sogdiana in the upper valley of the Jaxartes (Sir Darya), whose national name had not been

We

preserved.

The Achaemenian

confounded

imperial authorities,

who had

originally

people with a host of others of their kind under the generic title 'Saka' signifying 'Eurasian Nomads', appeared to have subsequently distinguished them from other Nomads by calling them alternatively 'Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka' ('Saka Haumavarga'), in allusion this

one of their religious rites, and 'the Allies' (the Herodotean 'Aiglai'), in allusion to their exceptionally favourable juridical relation with the

to

Achaemenian Empire. But

this particular people had no monopoly of being in a treaty relation with the Achaemenian Imperial Government or of drinking hauma or, again, of practising an objectionable religion 5 and accordingly, when we find another people labelled 'parikanioi' in Herodotus 's gazetteer, we cannot infer from the common name that ;

these two peoples had anything in common beyond their common failure to win approval for their respective religions, whatever these may have been. This common label 'pairikas', rendered 'parikanioi' in Greek, was undoubtedly affixed to each of the two peoples to whom Herodotus applies it; for in A.D. 1952 the upper basin of the Sir Darya, which had once been the habitat of 'the Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka', still bore the name 'Farghanah', while the name of a place called Farghan, 60 kilometres to the east of Tarum and 120 kilometres to the north of Bandar Abbas, 6 together with the name of the neighbouring Mount Furghun, attested the former presence of people labelled 'parikan' just '

See p. 210, n. 3, above. 1-2. See Arnan: Expeditio Alexandri, Book IV, chap, xxi and chap xxii, 3 See Tarn, W. W. The Greeks in Bactna and India (Cambridge 1938, University Press), p. 95, following Isidore of Charax: Parthian Stations, chap 18. 1

2

.

On pp. 594-5, above. s For example, the Hellenes who burned their fathers' corpses and the Callatian Indians who ate their fathers' corpses (see Herodotus, Book III, chap. 38) were, no doubt, both alike stigmatized as 'painkas' by devout Zoroastnan Persians who exposed their fathers' corpses to be devoured by carrion-eating birds and beasts. 6 See Herzfeld, op. cit., p. 83. 4

B 2069.VH

X2

6i8

UNIVERSAL STATES

to find 'parikanioi' whom Herodotus presents in his gazetteer as yoke-fellows of the Asiatic Ethiopians in Darius 's 1 eighteenth taxation district.

where we should expect

A third descriptive epithet that was rife in the Achaemenian Empire,

by side with heathens' and 'borderers', was Highlanders'. 'Akaufaciya', which bears this meaning in Old Persian, figures as the name of the people of an Achaemenian dahydu$\ 2 and 'parvata', which, like 'kaufa', was an Iranian word meaning 'mountain', 3 appears in side

Greek dress in Herodotus's ethnikon 'Aparytai' and in Ptolemy's ethnika Tarouetai' and Tarautoi'. 4 Did one of the pre-Indo-European languages current on the plateaux of Anatolia, Armenia, and Iran have a word meaning 'hill country' which generated the name 'Tabal' in 5 Assyrian records of the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries B.C. ? In the Assyrian usage of this word there is an ambiguity for, while it is used generically to signify the whole of the highlands of the Taurus and Antitaurus, it is also used specifically as the proper name for one particular principality in this region which bestrode the upper waters of the rivers of Cilicia in the country afterwards known to Hellenic geographers as Cataonia. 6 This variety of usage leaves us in doubt as to whether the Tibarenoi in the Herodotean Taxation District No. 19, towards the eastern end of the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, were just the local highlanders ('people of the tabal'), or whether 'Tibarenoi', as applied to them, is a proper name which informs us that these were descendants of refugees from the East Central Anatolian principality of Tabal who had ;

taken refuge in this north-eastern fastness from assaults by Moskhoi falling upon them from the west or by Saparda, Paktyes, Cimmerians, and Scyths falling upon them from the east, or both. Similarly we are left in doubt as to whether the Mount Tabor above the headwaters of the River Jordan was named after the Mount Atabyrios in Rhodes by Philistine settlers on the coast on which they stamped their own name or whether the two mountains are both called 'tabal' simply because 'tabal' means 'mount'. However that may be, it is easier to believe that the 'highlanders' (Graece 'Tapouroi'; Arabice 'Tabari') who gave the name 'Tabaristan' to the country between the Elburz Range and the south coast of the Caspian Sea, bore the same name as the Tibarenoi of Anatolia because both peoples happened to live in a hill country, than it is to believe that the identity between the two names is evidence that the two peoples had a common ancestry and the wisest course here is no doubt the third alternative of refraining, in default of positive evidence, from seeing in the resemblance between the two names 'Tibarenoi' and 'Tapouroi' anything more than an accidental coincidence. There are at least three other cases in which corresponding doubts arise. Considering that the Iranian word 'daha* (Sanskrit 'dasa') means 7 'brigand', how are we to know whether the dahz' (Latine Dahae, Davi), ;

;

'

* See See further p. 623, below. p. 668, below. 4 See See p. 647, with n. 5, below. p. 647, n. 6, below. 6 See s Hence the 'Tubal' of Gen. x. 2. Forrer, op. cit., p. 73. 7 This ethnikon 'Davi' is implied in the personal name 'Davus', representing a Greek DSos, which is borne by slaves in Latin translations of Attic comedies written in the third century B.C. 1

3


619

whom we

find at divers points on our map bear an identical name in virtue of having a common ancestry, or whether they bear it merely as

the stigma of a disreputable

word which appears

that the

common

profession

in Hellenic dress as

?

Again, considering

'Amardos' or 'Mardos'

seems to be merely a rendering of the Old Persian word 'martiya' meaning 'man', how are we to know whether the north-western neighbours of the Tapouroi in the Elburz Range who bore this name, and their homonyms in the North-Western Zagros (the latter-day Mardistan, east of Lake Van) and in Persis, were branches of a single people which had split, like its sister-peoples the Yautiya, MaSya, Parsa, and Asagartiya, in the course of travelling across the Iranian Plateau, or whether the only thing that the three bands of 'mardoi' had in common was that, 1

common Iranian tongue, they had, all three, elected to style themselves 'the men' par excellence in allusion to their common pursuit of the same manly calling of robbery under arms ? 2 In the third place in their

we

tell whether the Yaudheya whose habitat between the Panjab and Rajputana were akin to the Yautiya (Outioi) of Laristan and to the Ouitioi of Transcaucasia, or whether 'the identity of these names tells us merely that the two peoples who bore them in India and in South- West Asia both took

find ourselves at a loss to

was

in the borderland

3

pleasure in calling themselves 'the warriors'. After this precautionary reconnaissance of some of the pitfalls graven across a scholar's path by the ambiguity of homonyms, we have now to

hazard ourselves on this treacherous ground. The one slightly encouraging feature in a foolhardy enterprise is that there is manifestly some safety in numbers. Where we have only a single name to confront with a single name the hypothesis for example 'Tapouroi' with 'Tibarenoi' of an accidental coincidence is, no doubt, our most prudent recourse.

we have a pair of names to confront with a corresponding example the Greek 'Tibarenoi' plus 'Moskhoi' with the Assyrian 'Tabal' plus 'Mushki' (the Biblical 'Tubal' plus 'Mesech'), or, again, the Mount 'Tabor' plus River 'Jordan' of Palestine with the But, where pair

for

Mount 'Atabyrios' of Rhodes plus River 'lardanos' of Crete the hypothesis of sheer coincidence would seem less probable and it would seem decidedly improbable where we have a four-in-hand on either side as, for example, in the correspondence between the 'Yautiya (Outioi)' plus 'Maciya (Mykoi)' plus 'Asagartiya (Sagartioi)' plus 'Parsa (Persai)' of South-Western Iran with the 'Ouitioi' plus 'Muqan' plus 'Asagartiya' plus 'Parsua' of North-Western Iran. In this last case, at any rate, we can confidently infer that our four associated pairs of homonyms are less likely to have been the product of Chance than to be the monument of an historical fission of each of four co-migrant peoples ;

into

two diverging wings.

See pp. 607-8, above. This question is raised by Strabo in Book XI, chap, xiii, 3 (C 523). 3 For the Yaudheya, see Rapson, E. J., in The Cambridge History of India, vol. i, p. 528, and de la Vallee Poussin, L.: L'Inde aux Temps des Mauryas (Pans 1930, Boccard), *

2

p. 16.

UNIVERSAL STATES

620

Notes on Names and their Locations In the following discussion of outstanding questions of interpretation

and identification, we shall follow the order in which the names of peoples and countries occurring in our sources have been entered in Table V, attached to this Annex, which folds out opposite p. 772. In each successive line we shall deal first with the Old Persian name in the left-hand column of the table, and shall then consider, in connexion with it, the Herodotean name or names that have been equated with it in the table, before proceeding to deal with the next Old Persian name in the lefthand column. The Pdrsd (Graece Persai) who retained the status of a privileged imperial people in the Achaemenian Empire after its reorganization by Darius I were only a fraction of the Persian people. For one thing, they did not include the Nomad rearguard of the Parsa who had become one of the tribes of the Achaemenian Empire's Central Asian Nomad subjects the Pointed-Hood Saka (alias Massagetae) for these dilatory ;

mount the northern escarpment of the Iranian Plateau till circa 130 B.C. Nor did Darius's Parsa or Herodotus's Persai include the right wing of the Parsa, known to the Assyrians as Parsua, which, Tarsioi' did not

1

Medo-Persian occupation of Western Iran, together with the right wings of the three companion peoples Yautiya, Maciya, Asagartiya in Ardalan, in Azerbaijan, and still farther north and north-west, in the lower basin of the rivers Aras and Kur. Though a fourfold community of name would appear to testify to a common national origin, these north-western representatives of the four Persian peoples had all, no doubt, long since become Medes in their political feelings as the north-western Asagartiya, at any rate, showed by embarking on the forlorn hope of rising in revolt against Darius at the call of a leader claiming to be a descendant of Cyaxares after the revolt in Media Proper had been crushed and after the leader of that revolt had been captured at Raga (Rayy) and been executed at Ecbatana. 2 It is more significant that the Parsa (Persai) of our lists do not include even the whole of that portion of the Persian people that had been under the sovereignty of the House of Achaemenes (HakhamaniS) since the reign of Achaemenes' son Teispes (CispiS, regnabat in the course of the original

had

settled,

circa

675-640

The

B.C.).

patrimony of the House of Achaemenes had been the canton of ParsuwaS or ParsawaS (Assyriace Parsumas or Parsamas) in the upper basin of the River Karkhah, to the south of Media and to the north of the plains of Elam (i.e. it had been the latter-day country of 3 Luristan). ParsuwaS is mentioned in the Assyrian records as early as original

See Tarn The Greeks in Bactria and India, pp. 292-4. See 'DB', 32-33. This location of ParsuwaS, which is Cameron's, has been adopted in this Study, as against the view (advocated by Sidney Smith in his Isaiah, Chapters XL-LV, Literary Criticism and History (London 1944, Milford), p. 28) that ParsuwaS was not a separate and distinct country from Parsa, and was not situated in Luristan, but was identical with Parsa and was therefore situated in Pars. On this view the appanage of the Cyran elder branch of Teispes' line was AnSan alone, not Anan-cum-Parsuwa, while the appanage of the Ariaramnan younger branch was a Parsa with which ParsuwaS was identical. In the present writer's amateur judgement, Sidney Smith's identification of ParsuwaS with 1

:

2

3


621

2

1

815 B.C., and Achaemenes (regnabat circa 700-675 B.C.) must have been on the throne when ParsuwaS sent a contingent to the army of the antiAssyrian alliance, headed by Elam, which defeated Sennacherib at Halulah. 3 Achaemenes' successor Teispes is described in later records as 4 'King of the city of AnSan', which must have lain somewhere on the border between ParsuwaS, Elam, and Babylonia 5 and it appears to have been in Teispes' reign (circa 675-640 B.C.) that the Achaemenian Dynasty achieved an immense extension of its dominions by adding to ParsuwaS and AnSan the whole left wing of the Persian group of Iranian peoples on the farther side of Elam in the latter-day provinces of Pars, Laristan, and Kirman. 6 Teispes must have found his opportunity as a tertius gaudens during the great Assyro-Elamite war that had broken out in 663 B.C. and that ended, after continuing for about a quarter of a century, in the destruction of Elam and the exhaustion of the Assyrian winners of a ;

Pyrrhic victory. Teispes divided these expanded dominions between his elder son Cyrus I (regnabat circa 640-600 B.C.), to whom he bequeathed the dynasty's patrimony in ParsuwaS and Anan, and his younger son Ariaramnes,' to whom he gave the dynasty's new acquisitions in the South-East. The fortunes of the elder branch of the house were depressed when, after the destruction of Elam, Cyrus I of Ansan was compelled by one of Asshurbanipal's generals to acknowledge Assyria's 7 but thereoverlordship and to surrender one of his sons as a hostage after there was a dramatic reversal of fortunes which may have been a ;

Parsa was less convincing than Cameron's location of it in Lunstan, and this for two reasons. In the first place a ParsuwaS with which Assyria came into military collision in the early years of the seventh century B.C. seems more likely to have lam in Lunstan than to have lam in Pars, on the farther side of Elam. In the second place it seems unlikely that, when Teispes was dividing his dominions between his two sons, he should have assigned to his younger son Ariaramnes his own hereditary patrimony ParsuwaS and have bequeathed to his as he will have done if Parsuwa is identical with Parsa elder son Cyrus I nothing more than his new acquisition AnSan. Teispes' partition of his dominions would be less difficult to account for on the view that he assigned to his elder son Cyrus I his own ancestral patrimony ParsuwaS in Lunstan, together with an AnSan that had been the earlier and the nearer of Teispes' two acquisitions, while he assigned to his younger son Ariaramnes his later and more distant acquisition Parsa. It is geographically possible that Teispes, starting from Lunstan, should have pushed his way into Pars via AnSan in the north-west corner of the lowlands of Elam. 1 See Cameron: A History of Early Iran, p. 179. 2

See ibid., p 179. This battle is dated 692 B.C. by Cameron, loc. cit.; 691 by Sidney Smith in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. m (Cambridge 1925, University Press), p. 68. * See Cameron, op cit p. 180. s F. W. Konig, in his Alteste Geschichte der Meder und Perser (Leipzig 1934, Hmrichs), which lay in the northp. 9, locates AnSan somewhere not far from the district of Der, east corner of Babylonia. Sidney Smith, in his Isaiah, Chapters XL-LV, p. 121 (note 27, referring to p. 28), identifies Der with the latter-day Badrah, just on the 'Iraqi side of the 'Iraqi-Persian frontier, east by south of Baghdad. This location of AnSan would appear to refute decisively Sidney Smith's statement, in op. cit., p. 28, that 'both ParsumaS and AnSan designate the province round Pasargadae'. In the immediately preceding sentence, Smith testifies that AnSan was 'known to the Babylonians from early Sumerian times' i.e. from times when 'the province round Pasargadae', alias Parsa, Persis, Pars, was far beyond the horizon of the Land of Shinar. This last point is made by Weissbach in P.-W., loc. cit., col. 1142. See also the present Study, p. 204, above. 6 See Cameron, op. cit., p. 212. 7 See Cameron, op. cit., p. 204. Sidney Smith argues, in Isaiah, Chapters XL-LV that this would have been ultra vires for Cyrus I p. 122 (note 31 referring to p. 28), if he had been already under the suzerainty of his brother Anaramnes, as Cameron with n. i, above). suggests that he was (see p. 601, 3

,

UNIVERSAL STATES

622

consequence of the sudden rise of the Median Power upon the collapse of Assyria after Asshurbanipal's death. The crown of Parsa, which Ariaramnes had inherited from his father Teispes, was certainly never worn by Ariaramnes' grandson Hystaspes, the father of Darius I J and, since we find a scion of the elder branch of the House of Achaemenes Cambyses I (regnabat circa 600-559 B.C.), son of Cyrus I and father of Cyrus II reigning over Parsa as well as over Parsuwa, with the title 'King of the City of AnSan', under the suzerainty of King Cyaxares of 2 Media, it seems possible that the deposition of the Ariaramnan branch of the Achaemenidae may have been a consequence of a Median act of intervention that had restored the Cyran branch's fortunes, though it is also possible that King Ariaramnes* son King Arsames may have retained the throne of Parsa till he was ejected from it by Cambyses I's son Cyrus II as one of the moves iti this empire-builder's career of self;

3

aggrandizement. The only indication in Darius and Xerxes' official lists of dahydva that the Parsa to which these lists give the place of honour did not include the whole of the Persian territory which had been inherited by the successors of Teispes is the separate mention of Maka in all six lists and of Asagarta as well in *DPe'. But we should not have known how to interpret the appearance of these two names in the official lists if the key had not been given to us by Herodotus 's list of the peoples comprised in his Taxation District No. 14, in which we find not only the

Mykoi (Maciya) and the south-eastern Sagartioi (Asabut also the south-eastern Outioi (Yautiya), 4 attached to the

south-eastern gartiya),

Thamanaioi

(i.e.

the Paktyes in Arachosia) 5 and to the Sarangai (Zraka).

1 'Cyrus the Great was a great-nephew of Ariaramnes, and a second cousin of Hystaspes father of Darius. I think we must credit Danus's statement that he was the ninth king of the Achaememan line; and to me the reasonable way to enumerate them is Achaemenes, Teispes, Cyrus I, Cambyses I, Cyrus II, Cambyses II then, turning to the other line, Ariaramnes, Arsames, Darius. Hystaspes was never King, since both he and his father Arsames were living when Darius won the throne (so DSf, 12-15, and XPf, Professor Roland G. 20-25), so that only Arsames could bear the royal title.' Kent, in a note to the present writer. The texts, with English translations, of two inscriptions found at Hamadan (Ecbatana), which purport to have been dictated by King Ariaramnes (AmH) and by his son and successor King Arsames (AsH) respectively, are published in Kent, R. G. Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon (New Haven, Conn. 1950, American Oriental Society), p. 1 16, with bibliographies on p. 107. See also Kent: 'The Oldest Old Persian Inscriptions', in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. Ixvi, No. 3, July-September 1946, pp. 206-12. Kent's conclusion is that 'the inscriptions of Ariaramnes and Arsames were inscribed in the time of Artaxerxes II, to do honour to the royal ancestors of Ariaramnes' line apparently as a part of anti-Cyrus activity by Artaxerxes'. 2 See Cameron, op. cit., p. 218, and the present Study, p. 204, above. 3 'Cyrus II deposed Arsames from his throne, yet not in a bitter struggle, for Arsames retained his life and apparently his liberty, and was still living when his grandson Darius became ruler of the Empire after the death of Cambyses II, son of Cyrus the Great (so in DSf, 12-15, an d in XPf, 20-25). Possibly there was some arrangement as to alternate overlordship [cf. Sidney Smith, Isaiah, Chapters XL-LV, p. 29. A. J. T.], which Cyrus unilaterally abrogated as is usually the case in such matters. Thus it resulted that Hystaspes, son of Arsames, never had a throne of his own, and is never called King in the O P. inscriptions when Darius mentions him as his father, though Xerxes normally gives the title to his father Darius when he names him in the inscriptions.' R. G. Kent, in J.A.O.S., vol. Ixvi, No. 3, pp. 210-11, following F. H. Weissbach, in P.-W., Supplementband IV, cols. 1132-44, s.v. 'Kyros', who points out in cols. 1141-2 that, in the Babylonian Nabonidus-Cyrus Chronicle, Cyrus II is called 'King of AnSan* shortly before 548 B.C., but 'King of Parsu'in547 B.C. See also the present Study, 4 See s See pp. 637-41, below. p. 204, above. pp. 593-4, above, and p. 633, below. :


623

Parsa in the political and constitutional sense of the domain of a privileged Persian imperial people did not, as it emerged from the upheaval of 522-521 B.C., include either Laristan or Kirman on the one hand or Luristan on the other. Not only the disaffected south-eastern Ma&ya, Yautiya, and Asagartiya, but also a ParsuwaS that had been the original patrimony, had to the ranks of the Empire's tax-paying subjects.

Achaemenian Dynasty's

now been degraded

While two-thirds of what had formerly been Parsa had now been attached to Harahvatis', the whole of the former ParsuwaS had been merged in Huja(the Viceroyalty of Greater Elam).

As for Mada, we should never have known from the non-committal mention of the name in all six official lists that it had been partitioned on the Darian fiscal map into the four fragments that the Herodotean gazetteer reveals to us. One of these fragments, Herodotus's District No. 10, which he calls

Media' par excellence, appears (as soon as we have stripped away an adventitious pair of remote Sakan peoples) 1 to be confined to the environs of Ecbatana (Hamadan) and to the upland section of the Great North-East Road to the south-west of Hamadan as far as the latter-day town of Kirmanshah inclusive. Another fragment of Media seems to be represented by Herodotus's 2 District No. u, embracing the countries of the Kaspioi, Pausikai, of this is to the location district and Dareitai. Pantimathoi, perkey *

A

of these four names, if we are right in interthe people living in the neighbourhood of the

haps to be found in the preting

it

to

mean

last

Caspian Gates. 'Duvaraya', the locative singular case of the Old Persian word meaning 'door', occurs in *DB', 32; and in the New Persian language the compound word 'dar-band' (meaning literally 'door-barrier') came to be the technical term for one of those fortified and garrisoned passes that played so important a part in the administrative as well as the strategic geography of the Ottoman Empire under this name, and of the East Roman Empire under the graecized Latin name 'Kleisoura' (i.e. 'claus3 The Caspian Gates commanded one of the only two nonura'). trans-desert roads between the main body of the Achaemenian Empire and its vast outlying territories on the farther side of the Central Desert of Iran. The road through the Caspian Gates from Mada to Parthava circumvented the north-western end of the desert; the road from Kirman to Arachosia circumvented its south-eastern end and in 522to be of critical impor521 B.C. both these strategic routes had proved tance. The south-eastern route had carried the Yautiyan rebel Vahyazdata's expeditionary force on its daring raid from Parsa to the basin of the Kabul River; the north-western route would have brought the Median rebel Fravartis's troops to the support of the insurgents in ;

1

2 /cat

See pp. 594-5, above. flavoiKai /cat UavrLâOoi of A 1 would appear to be the right reading. The TJavaol Tlavol /cat /Za^rt/Aaôt of RV 77avTt/za#ot of S looks like an attempt to rationalize a

The

which has arisen from

a IJavaiKai TlavriâSoi of

accidental omission of one of the two consecutive 3

See

p. 82, n. 3, above.

BCPA C

/cat's

which has arisen from the of the correct text.

UNIVERSAL STATES

624

Hyrcania (Varkana) and Parthia (Parthava), who had raised the standard of revolt in Fravartis"s name, if they had not, like the North- Western Asagartiya, waited to rise until after FravartiS had been crushed. As it turned out, Darius was able to detach troops to the aid of his father Hystaspes, the Viceroy of Parthava, from Raga via the Caspian but the inciGates, and this reinforcement decisively turned the tide dent served to illustrate the Caspian Gates' strategic importance, and Darius manifestly took both these lessons to heart. After the flames of rebellion had been stamped out, he made sure of his control over the Kirman-Arachosia road by attaching Kirman to the loyal viceroyalty of Harahvatis'. The security of the Caspian Gates must have concerned him equally, and the occurrence of the name Dareitai among the names of the peoples in Herodotus 's eleventh district suggests that this district included the Caspian Gates within its boundaries. Ptolemy places 'the Dareitis district' at the north-eastern extremity of Media, to the east of Rhagiane (the district round Raga, Graece Rhagai), with 'the Ouadasr

;

soi' in

between. 2

be located at the Caspian Gates, this gives us a clue to the location of the three associated peoples. It is clear that they cannot have lain east of the Caspian Gates, since the immediately adjoining territories in that quarter were Hyrcania and Parthia in District No. 1 6. They are unlikely to have lain between the Elburz Range and the Caspian Sea, since there is no evidence that the south coast of the If the Dareitai are to

3 Caspian, west of Hyrcania, was ever under Achaemenian rule. There-

fore they are likely to have lain west of the Caspian Gates and, if so, we can perhaps detect the imprint of the former presence of the detachment of Kaspioi that is here associated with the Dareitai in the latter;

day place-name Qazwin.

We may

also

perhaps detect in Herodotus's

Pausikai the Paesici or Pesticae who, in a

Roman

version of a post-

See 'DB', 35-37. 2 See Geographia, Book VI, chap, ii, 6. 3 Professor G. G. Cameron, commenting on this passage, makes the point that, since Hyrcania was undoubtedly embraced in the Achaemenian Empire, it seems unlikely that the rest of the southern shore of the Caspian Sea will have remained independent Where, he asks, were the Cadusians, if not here ? Certainly the Cadusians were to be found in this coastal strip, at its north-western end, to the north of the Gelai (see p. 631, below) But is there any evidence that the Cadusians were ever the Achaememdae's subjects, or even their allies ? We hear of inconclusive Achaemenian punitive expeditions into Cadusian territory, and of Cadusian troops serving in Achaemenian armies, but, after all, Continental European Greece was likewise invaded by Darius I and Xerxes, and Continental European Greek soldiers of fortune were hired by Xerxes' successors. Have we any warrant for assuming that Achaemenian authority was any more effective in Cadusia than it was in, say, Attica ? No doubt, at first sight it is not easy to give credence to a map in which Gilan and Tabanstan (the latter-day Mazandaran) are depicted as lying outside the frontiers of an empire that encircles them by coming down to the shore of the Caspian on either side of them, round the mouths of the rivers Aras and Kur to the north-west and round the mouth of the River Atrak to the east, besides controlling a corridor of territory, connecting Western Iran with Khurasan, between the southern face of the Elburz Range and the north-west corner of the Central Desert of Iran. A closer inspection, however, brings out the fact that this strip of territory is a natural fastness, where an invader who has managed to surmount or outflank the southern rampart of mountains will be baffled on the seaward slopes by forests and in the lowlands by jungles and swamps. It is perhaps relevant to recall that the Arab Caliphate, in its day, touched the shore of the Caspian round the mouths of the rivers Aras and Kur, and extended eastwards through the Caspian Gates across the Oxus to Farghanah, without succeeding in bringing Gilan or Tabaristan under its rule (see II. ii. 447-8). 1


625

Alexandrine Hellenic gazetteer, 1 are associated with the Amardi, and whom this association would locate somewhere to the north-west of Qazwin, in the upper part of the basin of the Safid Rud, above the gorge in which it breaks through the Elburz en route for the Caspian. This, in turn, would lead us to look for the Pantimathoi, who were the fourth people in this district, somewhere to the west of Qazwin. This is where the Assyrian records appear to locate the north-western branch of the Nomad Persian people named Asagartiya (Assyriaci 'Zikirtu' and 'Zakruti'; Graced Sagartioi), 2 whom Ptolemy likewise locates to the east of the Zagros ; 3 and it is also just where we should expect to find a remnant of these north-western Asagartiya surviving after the next eruption of Nomad peoples on to the Iranian Plateau from the Eurasian Steppe had sent a fresh stream of migrants pouring westward through the Caspian Gates into the basin of Lake Urmiyah and beyond it into the basin of the rivers Aras and Kur. The country between the two provinces of Ardalan and Qazwin lay astride the habitual westward route of Eurasian Nomad Volkerwanderungen south of the Caspian Sea, but it was one of the most mountainous sections of this route and was therefore one in which no migrant Nomad people would linger by preference. It would therefore not be surprising to find a batch of Asagartiya still entrenched here between one batch of Kaspioi just behind them, round Qazwin, and another batch of Kaspioi just in front of them, to the north of Lake Urmiyah and in the lower valleys of the rivers Aras and Kur. On a latter-day map, this country between Qazwin and Ardalan was called 'Khamsah', which is the Arabic word for 'five', and we may perhaps venture to identify this name with that of the frontier fortress called Tanzis" which the Assyrians built somewhere on the border between the independent territory of Asagarta and the Assyrian protectorate called Mannai in the relatively open southern part of the 4 Urmiyah Basin, between the south end of the Lake and Parsua. If Panzis is an Assyrian version of 'panca', which means 'five' in the Old Persian language, we may perhaps hazard the guess that 'Khamsah' may have been an Arabic translation of a previous local Iranian place-name, and that the five entities commemorated in this place-name may have been five tribes constituting the north-western branch of the Asagartiya. A Eurasian Nomad horde was apt to be an association of constituent tribes and hordes thus constituted would sometimes style themselves ;

'the so

many

so-and-so'

e.g.

'the ten

[tribes of]

Uigurs' (Turcice

name might be as a simple The Panchalas, who are associated

'Onugur') or whatever the number and the

way

of advertising their strength.

with the Kurus in the legendary tradition of an archaic age of Indie a confederacy of five tribes who history, were believed to have been Mela's Chorographta, Book III, chap, v, 39 and 42. They reappear Histona Naturahs, Book VI, chap, xvn (xix), 50. See Cameron, op. cit., pp. 149-50; Kdnig, op. cit., p. 16; Herzfeld, op. cit., p. 82; Forrer, op. cit., p. 75 and the present Annex, p. 608, above. 3 Ptolemy: Geographta, Book VI, chap, li, 6. For the site of PanziS, see Forrer, op. cit., p. 75; Adontz, op. cit., pp. 102 and 367. TanziS, the strong fortress that lies over against the lands of Zikirtu and Andia' (Sar1

In

Pompomus

in Pliny's 2

;

gon's record of his eighth campaign (714 B.C.) in Luckenbill, op.

cit.,

vol.

11,

pp. 150-1).

626

UNIVERSAL STATES

took their name from their number. 1 If the north-western Asagartiya" did style themselves 'the Five Tribes', the Old Persian word 'panca', meaning 'five', might perhaps account for the first two syllables of an old Persian compound proper name that makes its appearance in Greek dress as Tantimathoi'. If these considerations carry any conviction, they indicate that Herodotus 's Eleventh District was a chain of cantons, running west and east from the Asagartiya in Khamsah through the Kaspioi round Qazwin as far eastward as the Caspian Gates inclusive. It is noteworthy that neither the Herodotean gazetteer nor any of the Achaemenian official lists mention by name the Median district that had for its local capital the city of Raga, in the neighbourhood of a latter-day Tehran, where the Median pretender Fravartis' had made his last stand. 2 Raga will either have been included in the canton of the Kaspioi round Qazwin, or else it will have been left out of the reckoning on account of its being an autonomous temple-state 3 like Jerusalem, Comana Cataoniae, and Comana Pontica. Is another fragment of Media to be detected in Herodotus's District No. 15 ? This possibility is suggested by the fact that the two names here associated by Herodotus the Sakai and the Kaspioi recur on a post-

Alexandrine Hellenic map side by side in the lower basin of the rivers Aras and Kur in two countries called Sakasene 4 and Kaspiane. The Sakan contingent in this Herodotean pair of peoples stamped their name on a canton called 'Sakasayana' ('Saka-land') in the province of 5 Utene, between the Qarabagh highlands and the River Kur, whose name, as we have seen, commemorated the former presence of these Sakas' local forerunners, the north-western branch of the Yautiya. In the field-state of the army assembled by Darius Codomannus at

Gaugamela in 331 B.C., Sakesinai are brigaded with the Albanians, 6 Cadusians, and Medes. Sakasene is cited by Strabo in association with Araxene and with 'Matiane in Media'; 7 and in this context both Sakasene and Araxene are described as being 'in Armenia'. 8 The Armenia which Strabo, or his source, has in mind in this passage is evidently the Great Armenia that had eventually been brought into existence by the progressive expansion of a successor-state of the Seleucid Empire which, after the defeat of Antiochus III by the Romans in 190 B.C., had been founded by Artaxias, Antiochus's viceroy in one of the Seleucid Empire's two Armenian provinces. 9 Artaxias' Armenian king1 See Keith, A. Berriedale, in The Cambridge History of India, vol. i, p. 1 18 These Panchalas' Kuru associates were perhaps the left wing of an ex-Eurasian Nomad people whose right wing had given its name to the River Kur in Transcaucasia, to the northwest of Panzis. 2 See 'DB', $ 32. 3 See Nyberg, H. S.: Die Religionen des Alien Iran (Leipzig 1938, Hinrichs), pp. 314 et seqq. and 342. * The Sakapen of Ptolemy: Geographia, Book V, chap, xin, 9. s See Adontz, op. cit., p. 308. Utne is Ptolemy's Oten (see Geographia, Book V, 9). chap, xin, 6 See Arnan: Expeditio Alexandri, Book III, chap, viu, 4. 7 See Strabo: 2 Geographica, Book II, chap, i, 14 (C 73), Book XI, chap, vn, (C 509). Cp. Book XI, chap, xiv, 4 (C 528). 8 Strabo, loc. cit. See also Book XI, chap, vni, 4 (C 51 1). 9 See ibid., Book XI, chap, xiv, 5 (C 528) and 15 (C 531).


627

dom

did not acquire an exclusive title to the name 'Armenia' until Artaxias' descendant and successor Tigranes (regnabat circa 96-55 B.C.) had annexed the adjoining Armenian successor-state of the Seleucid 1 Empire in the Upper Tigris Basin (Graece Sophene, Assyriace Nairi). But in his record of the details of the previous expansion of the kingdom founded by Artaxias, before its culmination in the reign of Tigranes, Strabo mentions 2 its acquisition from Media of 'the Phaunitis' (?), 3 'Basoropeda' (Vaspuragan) and Kaspiane. This Kaspiane must be the 4 country of the Kaspioi whom Ptolemy locates on the western edge of Armenia Media, adjoining (i.e. the Greater Armenia that had come into existence since 190 B.C.); and here the Kaspioi had bequeathed their name to 'the Caspian mountain range* which is Ptolemy's name for the watershed between the basins of lakes Van and Urmiyah along which he locates the boundary between the Armenia and the Media of his day, and at whose southern extremity he locates the meeting-point of Media

and Armenia with Assyria. 5 This ex-Median Kaspiane had also stamped its name on a canton called 'Kasbi-k' (i.e. 'Kaspioi'), which is mentioned by the Armenian historians Agathangelus and Faustus of Byzantium 6 as having been in existence in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian Era near the town of P'aitarakan in the angle between the rivers Aras and Kur just above their confluence. At an earlier date this Kaspiane must have occupied the whole of the steppe country in the lower basin of the rivers Aras and Kur from the northern rim of the basin of Lake Urmiyah on the south to the southern foothills of the Caucasus Range on the north ;

for in another passage Strabo records that Kaspiane extended north of the River Kur into the South-East Caucasian country called Albania. 7

Even if it had not been expressly stated by Strabo, in a passage cited above, that Kaspiane had been part of Media before its annexation to Armenia, we could have inferred from the evidence presented by Herodotus that this Kaspiane astride the lower course of the River Aras must have been the home of one of the two or more detachments of the Kaspioi whom he mentions in his work ; for Herodotus has no other name than 'Caspian* for the Caspian Sea (in contrast to the usage of the postAlexandrine Hellenic geographers, who took to calling it 'the Hyrcanian Sea') this Herodotean usage means that the section of the shore on which Herodotus 's informants had access to this sea (and they had not only sailed on it but had coasted all round it, for they had discovered that it was landlocked) 8 must have been inhabited by people called 'Kaspioi' and the only Kaspioi on record who unquestionably possessed ;

;

See ibid Book XI, chap, xiv, 15 (C 532). 2 See ibid Book XI, chap, xiv, 5 (C 528). 3 Cp. the Thavene' of Book XI, chap, xiv, 4 (C 528). In his Geographta, Book VI, chap. 11, 5. s See Book 6. 3 and 4. Cp. V, chap, xni, 6 See Agathangelus. A History of Tindates the Great and of Saint Gregory the Illuminator's Preaching, chap, i, French translation, in Langlois, V.: Collection des Historiens Anciens et Modernes de VArmeme, vol. i (Paris 1867, Didot), p. 115, col. 2; Faustus- An Historical Library, Book IV, chap. 50, and Book V, chap. 14, French translation, ibid p. 267, col. i, and p. 288, col. 2. 7 See Strabo5 (C 502). Geographica, Book XI, chap, iv, 8 See Herodotus, Book I, chap. 203. 1

,

,

4-

,

UNIVERSAL STATES

628 a seaboard

name

on the Caspian Sea were the Kaspioi who had given their once Median Kaspiane on the steppes round the mouth of

to this

the River Aras. Herodotus also knew that the River Aras flowed into the 1 Caspian Sea at the end of a course running from west to east. Considering the wildness of the peoples adjoining the Caspian Sea both in and after the Achaemenian Age, it is improbable that Herodotus 's sources could have learned of the existence of the sea to which they gave the name 'Caspian', or could have ascertained that the River Aras debouched into it, unless this section of the shore of the Caspian Sea, together with a hinterland inhabited by Kaspioi, had been made accessible to geoits having been brought under Achaemenian rule. seems legitimate to infer that the lower basin of the rivers Aras and Kur, as far as the adjoining section of the Caspian shore, must have been included within the Achaemenian Empire's frontiers; and, if this inference is justified, then this Kaspiane which was next-door neighbour to a Sacasene seems the obvious location for the Kaspioi who are associated with Sakai in Herodotus 's District No. 15. The westernmost of the divers fragments of Media that figure in Herodotus 's gazetteer in his District No. 18, 'the Matienoi, Saspeires and Alarodioi\ and, as we have observed already, 2 the habitats of both the Alarodioi and the Saspeires are easy to identify. The Alarodioi are the people of the former Kingdom of Urartu, which extended over the basin of Lake Van and over the upper valleys of the Eastern Euphrates (Murad Su) and the Aras. The Saspeires are the inhabitants of the

graphers through It

canton of Isbir, north of Urartu, in the valley of the River Choroq. It remains to locate the country named after the Matienoi whom Herodotus associates with the Alarodioi and the Saspeires in the present context.

These easterly Matienoi must have been a quite separate branch from those who, in the Achaemenian Age, were living within the bend of the Halys near the meeting-point between Cilicia, Cappadocia, and 3 Phrygia; and, unlike those Western Matienoi, the Eastern Matienoi seem by this time to have been extinct; for, in the field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary force, the Eastern Matienoi do not appear, whereas their homonyms the Western Matienoi, and their neighbours and associates the Alarodioi and the Saspeires, are all credited with contingents whose equipment is described and whose commanders are named The Alarodioi and Saspeires are brigaded under a single command and are both paraded in the same sub-Moschian equipment as the Kolkhoi. 4 In this context the absence of the Eastern Matienoi from the muster-roll is conspicuous; and this indicates that in 480 B.C. they were no longer in the land of the living. On the other hand the presence of their name in the gazetteer indicates that at this time some country was still called after

them. 1 See Herodotus, Book IV, chap. 40. In all other passages in which Herodotus mentions a river 'Araxes' (i.e. in Book I, chaps. 202 and 205, and in Book III, chap. 36), he is confounding the Aras with the Oxus or the Jaxartes or both.

2


3

The

evidence for the location of the Western Matienoi is reviewed in the Note on 4 See in x. 201. Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 79.

Chronology


629

noun 'Matienoi' in Herodotus's work stands for a placename, and not for the name of a living people, in those passages in which Herodotus is not referring to the Western Matienoi on the River If the proper

Halys, this place-name is not always used to denote an area of identical extent. In the description of Darius 's Eighteenth Taxation District the name designates only those portions of this district, whatever they may

prove to have been, that were not embraced in either Urartu or Isbir. There are other passages, however, in which the region bearing the name of these apparently extinct Eastern Matienoi manifestly stands, in Herodotus's mind, for 'a roof of the world* from which a number of the 1 principal rivers of South- West Asia the Aras, the Diyalah (Gyndes), 2 in these and and the Lesser Zab flow out in all directions passages 'the Matienoi' is evidently a comprehensive label for the whole of ;

including the domains of the Alarodioi and the Saspeires. of the Great North- West Road, which Herodotus or his map source had under his eye while he was writing the account of Aristagoras of Miletus 's unsuccessful solicitation of Cleomenes I of Sparta on the eve of the Ionian Revolt of 499 B.C., 3 the name 'Matienoi' was applied to the ex- Assyrian territories (Mygdonia, Adiabene, and Chalonitis in the nomenclature of the post- Alexandrine Hellenic geographers) that had been annexed by Media in the Medo-Babylonian partition of Assyria in 4 610-609 B.C. and, since the rest of Herodotus's description of this map District

On

No.

1

8,

the

;

See Herodotus, Book I, chaps. 189 and 202. When, in chap. 202, Herodotus writes that the Araxes and the Gyndes 'flow out of the Matienoi', the river represented by his 'Araxes' is manifestly the Aras, though in the same context the same name 'Araxes' means, not the Aras, but the Oxus, when it is described as constituting the frontier between Cyrus's empire and the ranges of the Central Asian Nomad Massagetae, and when it is said to have forty mouths of which only one flows out into the Caspian Sea, while the rest lose themselves in swamps and lagoons (i.e. in the marshy borders of the Sea of Aral). 2 See Herodotus, Book V, chap. 52. In this passage, Herodotus mistakenly locates the source of the Greater Zab in his Armenia. 3 See Herodotus, Book V, chaps. 49~54* In the detailed description of the Great North-West Road in Herodotus, Book V, chaps. 52-54, the text of the relevant passage in chap. 52, as it had reached the hands of Modern Western scholars, ran as follows: 'In Armenia there are fifteen stages of posting-stations, making 56^ parasangs, and among these stations there is a guard-house. Four navigable rivers flow through this the country, which all have to be crossed by ferry first the Tigris then a pair that have same name, though it is not the same river and does not rise from the same source for the one that comes first in the itinerary rises among the Armenians and the one that comes second among the Matinoi. The fourth of these rivers is called the Gyndes this (Cyrus once distributed its waters into 360 channels). When one breaks out of Armenia into the Matieman country, there are four stages and when one passes out of this country into the Cissian country there are eleven stages, making 42^ parasangs, up on whose banks stands the city of Susa.' likewise navigable to the River Choaspes In this text there were three things that must be wrong. In the first place a figure, in of number Matine, must have dropped out, for this was the parasangs giving the the chart for which this entry was missing, and, in the text as it stood, only country the aggregate of the numbers of parasangs, given country by country with the exception of MatiSne*, fell short, by 137, of the total number of parasangs given in chap. 53. In the second place, in the text as it stood, the aggregate of the numbers of posting-stages, of posting-stages given given country by country, fell short, by 30, of the total number in chap. 52. In the third place the text as it stood differed from all other known accounts of the boundaries of Armenia in including within them the navigable section of the course of the Greater Zab and a fortiori in including any part of the courses of the Lesser 1

:

;

;

;

m

Zab and of the Diyalah. These errors required one addition to the text and one transposition of sentences in order to make the whole description self-consistent and to eliminate the incorrect inclusion in Armenia of the courses of the Diyalah, the lesser Zab, and the lower

UNIVERSAL STATES

630

agrees with his gazetteer of Darius 's taxation districts, it follows that, in the gazetteer as well as on the map, these ex- Assyrian territories were 1 associated, under the name 'Matienoi', with Urartu and Isbir. This conclusion raises the question of the geographical practicability of this administrative arrangement. What practicable route was there for

maintaining communications between this fragment of Assyria and

Urartu? And where was the common centre from which these two portions of Taxation District No. 18 could both be administered? The via line of communications between the two territories cannot have beeij the Great North- West Road; for this road, as Herodotus charts its course, ran north-westwards out of the ex- Assyrian territory embraced in 'the Matienoi' into Armenia direct, without passing through Urartu en route. Nor can the line of communications between this ex- Assyrian territory and Urartu have run to the east of the River Tigris over the highlands of Gordyene in the angle between the Tigris and the Centrites (Bohtan); for, when Xenophon and his comrades took that route in 401 B.C., they found no road; they had to fight every inch of their

way across the mountains; and, when they had struggled through to the north bank of the Centrites, they found themselves, not in Urartu, but in 'Armenia* (or, more precisely, in Arzanene). 2 Nor was there any reaches of the Greater Zab and, after these requisite emendations, the corrected text would read: 'In Armenia there are fifteen stages of posting-stations, making 56^ parasangs, and among these stations there is a guard-house. When one breaks out of this Armenia into the Matieman country, there are four [and thirty] stages, [making 137 parasangsj Four navigable rivers flow through this country, which all have to be crossed by ferry first the Tigris then a pair that have the same name, though it is not the same river and does not rise from the same source; for the one that comes first in the itinerary rises among the Armenians and the one that comes second among the Matienoi. The fourth of these rivers is called the Gyndes (Cyrus once distributed its waters into 360 channels). And when one passes out of this country into the Cissian country there are eleven stages, making 42^ parasangs, up to the River Choaspes likewise navigable on whose banks stands the city of Susa.' On the outward journey from Susa, the road, after passing out of 'Cissia* into 'Matiene', will have intersected with the Babylon-Ecbatana road (see p. 210, n. 3, above); then crossed first the Diyalah and next the Lower Zab to Arbela, crossed the Upper Zab to the site of Nineveh on the east bank of the Tigris and crossed the Tigris at the crossing taken by the former Assyrian military road leading to Nain (i e. at or near the site of Nineveh, and not as far north as Bezabde, where in 331 B.C. Alexander was to cross the Tigris in the opposite direction). The road will then have run through Nisibis (giving a wide berth to the Tigris gorge between the Tur 'Abdin highlands (Mount Masius), in the angle of the Tigris, and the highlands of Gordyene on the farther side), and will finally have passed out of the Khabur Basin into the Upper Tigris Basin and simultaneously out of Matiene into Armenia between the Tur 'Abdin on the right hand and Mount Izala on the left. This pass leading out of the Khabur Basin into the Upper Tigris Basin was one of the positions at which the Armenian insurgents had 29-30). brought Darms's flying columns to a halt in 522-521 B.C. (see 'DB', The distance by road, as measured on a map that was up to date in A D. 1952, from Mardin via Diyarbakr, the head-waters of the Western Tigris and Kharput to the crossing of the Euphrates en route from Kharput to Malatlyah worked out at approximately 312^ kilometres, making about 52^ parasangs. Allowing for possible variations in the route and possible inaccuracies in both sets of measurements, this came sufficiently near to Herodotus's figure of 56^ parasangs for the Armenian section of the Great North-West Road to make it likely that the south-eastern terminal of this section was at or near Mardin, considering that the north-western terminal is expressly stated by Herodotus to have been at the crossing of the Euphrates between Armenia and Cihcia. 1 This group of dahydva reappears in 'the Syspiritis as far as Kalakhan and Adia8 (C 503), and chap, xiv, bene' mentioned in Strabo: Geographtca, Book XI, chap, iv, 12 (C 530). 2 See 15; Book IV, chap, iii, Xenophon: Expeditio Cyri, Book III, chap, v, especially IV. m. i. ;

,

;


631

other practicable south-and-north route anywhere between the east bank of the Tigris and the crest of the Zagros Range for the upper valley of the Greater Zab is, not a passage, but a cul-de-sac, as a remnant of the Nestorian Christians were eventually to demonstrate by ensconcing themselves in this fastness. 1 If the former metropolitan territory of Assyria was in truth associated ;

with Urartu in one and the same taxation

district on the Darian fiscal of the Achaemenian Empire, these two territories' practical point of junction and seat of administration must have lain somewhere to the east of the North- Western Zagros in the basin of Lake Urmiyah. From the Urmiyah Basin there were practicable routes leading not only southwestward into Assyria but also westward into the basin of Lake Van and north-westward into the upper valley of the River Aras. The practicability of these lines of communication radiating from the Urmiyah Basin is attested by the long history of the warfare between Assyria and Urartu

map

The Assyrian name for this relatively open country was 'Mannai', which might be a contraction of a local name which was subsequently Hellenized as 'Matienoi' by Herodotus or his source; and this location of -Herodotus 's eastern 'Matienoi' is confirmed by the reappearance of this name precisely here on the post- Alexandrine Hellenic map of South-West Asia. We have already noticed 2 that, in a passage that occurs twice in Strabo's work, a 'Matiane in Media' is associated with Araxene and Sakasene, and Strabo elsewhere gives further indications which are in consonance both with these and with one another: Matiane is Media 3 Atropatene's northern neighbour; the northern parts of Media extend from the Caspian Gates and Rhagai (Raga) as far west as Matiane and Armenia 4 the Matianoi, as well as the Medes, march, under the lee of the Parakhoathra Range, with the Kadousioi 5 (who are located along the west shore of the Caspian Sea, immediately to the north of the Gelai, 6 s 7 i.e. of Gilan), while, according to Ptolemy, Martiane [sic] also marches with the [eastern] flank of Assyria along its whole length, and with the southern border of the Kaspioi who lie in Media. These fragmentary pieces of evidence, taken together, locate the name Matiane' in the basin of Lake Urmiyah; and the lake itself is called 'Lake Martiane' by Ptolemy and 'Lake Mantiane' by Strabo in one 9 passage. We may conclude that the basin of Lake Urmiyah, as well as in this arena.

;

*

2 On See II. n. 257-8. p. 626, above. Strabo Geographica, Book XI, chap, xiii, 2 (C 523). * Ibid., is In this statement Strabo perhaps following Polybius, Book V, 7 (C 525). chap. 44, 9, ^here the Matianoi are associated with the Kadousioi as two of Media's neighbours on the north. s See 8 (C 514). Strabo, Geographica, Book XI, chap, viii, 6 See i (C 510). Pliny identifies the i (C 508), and chap, vm, ibid., chap, vn, Cadusn with the Gelae or Gaeli in a passage (Histona Naturahs, Book VI, chap, xvi which he mentions them in juxtaposition with the Matieni. (xvm), 48) 1

3

m

Geographia, Book VI, chap, n, 5. 'The Old Persian word martiya meaning "man", which gives certain other placenames, is an easy source for a change of Mat- to Mart-.' Note by Professor Roland G. 7

8

Kent. 9 Strabo Geographica, Book XI, chap, xiv, 8 (C 529). In this passage, Strabo locates his 'Lake Mantiane' in Armenia, but nevertheless it is clear that he is referring to Lake Urmiyah, since he mentions Lake Van ('Lake Arsene, alias Lake Th6pitis) in the next

UNIVERSAL STATES

632

the ex-Assyrian territory that had fallen to

Media

in the partition of

610-609 B.C., was associated with Urartu and Isbir in the Eighteenth Taxation District that the administrative capital of the whole district lay somewhere in the Urmiyah Basin and that on this account the whole of District No. 18 was sometimes called 'the Matienoi' for short. This usage would also be politically convenient, since the name of an extinct people would not awaken any such politically dangerous memories as might still come to life at the sound of the names 'Media* and 'Assyria*. The Eastern Mitanni had, in truth, been dead since the annihilation of their empire by the Hittites and the Assyrians in the fourteenth century B.C. In the last phase of its history this EastMitannian Empire had been ruled from a capital somewhere in the basin ;

;

of the River Khabur in Mesopotamia. The survival of the name in the basin of Lake Urmiyah testified that this had been a previous station of the Mitanni on their westward trek from Central Asia via the Caspian

Gates and

possible that, after moving their political headquarters Khabur Basin, they had still retained summer pastures in the Urmiyah Basin, like their Turkish-speaking Eurasian Nomad successors the Black Sheep Tiirkmens and White Sheep Tiirkmens in the fifteenth century of the Christian Era. The routes between Mesopotamia and the Urmiyah Basin across Adiabene were under the control of ;

down

it is

into the

the Mitanni when, at the height of their power, they exercised a 1 suzerainty not only over Asshur but also over Arrapkha. If we now cast up the total of figures in Euboic talents which Herodotus gives for the four taxation districts into which the Viceroyalty of Media had been carved up, we shall see that Media had been penalized financially as well as politically; for the total comes to 1,000, and this is the figure which, in the Herodotean gazetteer, is the assessment on Babylonia, which was a much more populous and wealthy country in the Achaemenian Age than all four fiscal sections of Media added together. In order to be sure that these two figures were truly comparable, we should have, of course, to be sure, first, that (except for the payments in kind explicitly mentioned in this context) they both of them represented comprehensive valuations of imposts of all kinds, including the costs of maintenance of the Imperial Court and Imperial Standing Army during their alternating periods of residence at Ecbatana and at

Babylon, and on this point we are in the dark. Yet, even allowing for this uncertain element in the comparison, it looks as if the Darian assessment on Media had been exceptionally heavy. 1

'

sentence. In this passage Strabo says that 'Mantiane means 'ultramarine blue' (Kyane); but this is actually the meaning of the Armenian word 'kapoit' which can be detected in the alternative name 'Kapauta* (corrupted into 'Spauta* in the extant text) which Strabo 2 (C 523). comparison of XI. xiv, gives to Lake Urmiyah in Book VI, chap, xm, 8 (C 529), with I. ni, 4 (C 49), in which Strabo cites the fifth-century Lydian historian Xanthus's observation of geological phenomena indicating that areas which were now dry land had once been covered by the sea, shows that the 'salt lakes in Armenia and the Matienoi and Lower Phrygia' which Xanthus had cited as evidence in support of his thesis must be respectively Lake Van, Lake Urmiyah, and the Tuz Golii (Graec& Central Anatolia. Tatta) 1 See Gotze, A.: Hethiter, Churriter und Assyrer (Leipzig 1936, Harrassowitz), pp. and 98-99 116-17. Professor G. G. Cameron equates Arrapkha with the latter-day

A

m

Kirkuk.

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE The dahyduS

called 'Huja' (written

y

l

Vvja

)

in the official

633 lists

and

'Kissiof by Herodotus included the wild highland northern and northwestern hinterland of Elam as well as the ancient seat of civilization in the lowlands ; and both the official and the Herodotean name are taken from the hill-country and not from the plains. Huja reappears in the Greek 'Ouxioi', the Arabic plural Ahwaz, and the New Persian placename Khuzistan. 1 'Kissioi' must stand for 'Kassites', 2 whose rearguard in the Zagros, marching with the south-eastern paraitaka of Media,

on through the Achaemenian Age to give a rough reception to Antigonus when, after Alexander's death, the Macedonian war-lords were fighting over the division of the Achaemenian Empire's carcass. 3 In the absence of any indications to the contrary, we may take it that this Greater Elam, which constituted a single taxation district (the Herodotean District No. 8) on the fiscal map, also constituted, on the lived

political

map, a

single viceroyalty.

In the South-Eastern Quarter of the Achaemenian Empire, the Harahvatis (written Harauvatis\ Graece Arakhosia) of the Achaemenian lists is, as we have seen, 4 the dahydut whose people Herodotus calls 'Thamanaioi', (signifying 'borderers') in his gazetteer and by their

name Taktyes' in his field-state. Eastward, the Achaemenian Harahvati seems to have extended as far as the west bank of the Indus in a region which, in the nineteenth national

still known as 'the Daman' as well as 'the Darajat'. At least, this seems to be the most convincing interpretation of Herodotus 's statements that the city of Kaspatyros and the Pakt-

century of the Christian Era, was

yan country (i.e. Harahvatis) marched with the northernmost and most warlike of the Indoi, who were sent to collect the gold from the Indian 5 Desert, and that the city of Kaspatyros and the Pactyan country had also been the point of departure from which Scylax of Caryanda and his shipmates had sailed down the Indus, out into the Indian Ocean, and up the Red Sea to an Egyptian port on a voyage of exploration on which 6 they had been dispatched by Darius. This interpretation of these two statements of Herodotus 's is borne out by Eratosthenes' statement 7 that 'the Arakhotoi' (i.e. the Viceroyalty of Harahvatis), as well as the Paropanisadai (i.e. Gadara) to the north of them and the Gedrosians (i.e. Herodotus 's Taxation District No. 18) to the south of them, extended eastwards as far as the west bank of the River Indus before Seleucus Nicator's cession of portions of these provinces to Chandra-

gupta Maurya. If Herodotus's 'Kaspatyros' is a less accurate Hellenic rendering than Hecataeus's 'Kaspapyros' for this Indus river-port's authentic name, Herzfeld may be right in reconstructing an original Sanskrit name 1

See Le Strange, G.: The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge 1905, Univer-

sity Press), p. 232, and the present Study, p. 209, n. 3, above. 2 It is noteworthy that the two names of the original patrimony of the

House of

Cyran branch in Luristan and Pusht-i-Kuh ParsuwaS and AnSan have both been passed over in the official and m the Herodotean nomenclature alike. 3 This incident has been noticed on p. 210, n. 3, above,

Achaemenes and

*

6 7

On

its

s See pp. 593-4, above. Herodotus, Book III, chap. 102. See Herodotus, Book IV, chap. 44. Preserved in Strabo: Geographica, Book XV, chap, ii, 9 (C 724).

UNIVERSAL STATES

634 z

'Ka3yapa-pura'

and, whatever the exact location of this river-port

;

may have been, we may venture to interpret its meaning as 'the Caspians* and to see in it the entrepot between an inland navigation in the Indus Basin and overland caravan routes between the Indus Valley and

city',

Eastern Iran via the passes through the Sulayman Range. In the early years of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, when English observers were obtaining their first view of the eastern fringes of a then dissolving Afghan Empire, there was a busy seasonal migration through these passes between the Daman, along the west bank of the Indus, and both Qandahar 2 (in what had once been the heart of the Achaemenian dahydut Harahvatis') and Kabul (in the former

dahydus Gadara) and we may guess that, in so conservative a quarter of the Oikoumene, this traffic in which trade was combined with the seasonal movement of flocks and herds between summer pastures on the Iranian Plateau and winter pastures in the Indus Valley 3 had been ;

carried on, year by year, ever since the Achaemenian Age. If the traffic in truth already active in Darius 's day, 4 this would have been the consideration that prompted 'the Huckster' 5 to explore the possibility

was

of extending an already flourishing trade-route, on one section of which the goods were already water-borne, from the inland waterways of the Indus system out into the Indian Ocean and round Arabia to the Red Sea ports of the Egyptian province of his empire 6 and, if Kaspapyros, wherever its exact site may have been, 7 was the river-port on which the ;

1

See Herzfeld, op.

2

The place-name

cit., p.

94.

'Qandahar' seems to be neither a survival of the place-name from the personal name 'Alexander', hut to stand for 'Gondophareia', the city of the Parthian Suren Gondophares (see Tarn, W. W. The Greeks in Bactna and India (Cambridge 1938, University Press), p. 471), who was reigning in the first quarter of the first century of the Christian Era (see ibid pp. 344 and 347). 3 See the descriptions in Elphmstone, M. An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and its Dependencies, new ed. (London 1839, Bentley, 2 vols ), vol. i, pp 378-88, and vol. n, pp. 58-59, and Burnes, A.: Travels into Bokhara (London 1824, John Murray, 3 \ols ), vol. li, pp. 415-16. 4 Tarn, in op. cit., p. 100, n. 3, points out that Darius I obtained ivory from Arachosia according to the inscription from the apadana at Susa, line 43, and that Darius III Codomannus obtained elephants from it according to Arnan: Ezpeditio Alexandn, Book III, chap, vm, 6, in the context of 4. s Herodotus, Book III, chap. 89, quoted on p. 613, n. i, above. 6 Danus who, like Peter the Great, had a keen eye for natural resources, communications, commerce, and finance is likely to have been as much excited as were the British empire-builders in the early nineteenth century of the Christian Era over the prospect of the profits to be made by developing the trade via the Indus waterway between Iran and the Oxus Basin on the one hand and the Indian sub-continent and the Indian Ocean on the other. A notion of the report that will have been submitted to Darius by Scylax may be obtained by reading Alexander Burnes' 'Report of the establishment of an Entrepot, or Fair, for the Indus Trade', printed as Appendix I to his Cabool, 2nd ed. (London 1843, John Murray), on pp. 283-303. In the history of the Achaemenian, as in that of the British, Raj, military conquest was the sequel to commer1

'Gadara nor

a derivative

,

cial exploration. 7 Some light on the probable location of the historic entrepot named Kaspapyros is thrown by Burnes' discussion, in the report cited just above, of the respective merits of divers alternative possible locations for a projected entrepot for the Indus trade that was to be established under British auspices. After entering into a comparative consideration of the four entrepots in the Indus Basin that were currently frequented by the Loham Afghan traders Dera Isma'il Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan in the Darajat (Daman) on the west bank of the Indus, Multan near the south-east bank of the Lower Chenab, and Bahawalpur near the south-east bank of the Sutlej, not far above its conand then proceeding also to consider Qalabagh, on the west fluence with the Chenab bank of the Indus, as the northernmost feasible point, and Mithankot, likewise on the

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE traffic

from Gadara

we can

635

from Harahvatis converged, 1 Gandarian city* and why Hero-

as well as the traffic

see why Hecataeus 2 called it 'a dotus located it in 'the Pactyan country', in spite of its being a Caspian foundation. Hecataeus 3 also describes Kaspapyros as being *a "shore" or "promontory" (Graece "akte") of the Scythians*, and we have already seen reason 4 for numbering the Kaspioi among the Eurasian Nomad peoples who had broken out of the Steppe and mounted the Iranian Plateau, between the Caspian Sea and the Pamirs, in the eighth or seventh century B.C. While the right wing of these Caspii will have ridden on due west to bequeath their name first to the Caspian Gates and then to the Caspian Sea after they had been brought to a halt in the lower basin of the rivers Aras and Kur against the barriers of the Qarabagh and the Caucasus, the left wing will have swerved leftwards and ridden across Parthava, Haraiva, and Harahvatis till they were brought to a halt 5 against the barrier of the Sulayman Mountains. We shall probably not west bank just below the confluence between the Indus and the united waters of the five rivers of the Panjab, Burnes opts for Dera Ghazi Khan. 'It embraces tiot only the trade of the Punjaub and India, of Candahar and Cabool, but of the more remote capitals dependent on them, Herat and Bokhara. From Bombay to Dera Ghazee the water communication is open, and from the Upper Indus the intercourse is equally available. In former times many roads led down upon this town from the west. Time and peace will, in all probability, again open these now forsaken lines; and thus will be concentrated in one point all the desirable means of approach' (op. cit., p. 287). If ever a fragment of Scylax's report to Darius were to be recovered from the Achaememan archives at Susa or Persepohs, it would not be surprising to find it anticipating the latter-day English explorer's words. 1 The itinerary (originally recorded by the surveyors attached to Alexander's expeditionary force) of one route leading from the Caspian Gates to some point on the west bank of the Indus had been preserved in two versions by Strabo in a couple of passages 8 (C 723)) (Geographica, Book XI, chap, vm, 9 (C 514), and Book XV, chap vm, derived from Eratosthenes' work, and by Pliny (Histona Naturahs, Book VI, chap, xvn .

.

.

(xxi), 61-62). This route ran from the Caspian Gates via Hecatompylus in Parthia to Alexandria in Areia (Herat), and thence to Ortospana (Kabul) either direct, over the mountains, through Bactna, or alternatively in a southward loop via Prophthasia in Drangiana and the provincial capital of the Viceroyalty of Arachosia (? Qal at-i-Gilzai). From Ortospana (Kabul) the route followed the valley of the Kabul River eastwards to the Indus. In both the passages in Strabo's Geographica, Ortospana (Kabul) is described as being 'the point of access to the junction of the three roads from Bactna ('OprdcrTrava iri rr)v IK BaKTpajv rptoSor)', but, of course, this description applies only for a traveller approaching Ortospana (Kabul) by the roundabout southern alternative route, since the direct route through the Bactnan hill-country would have brought the traveller to 'the junction* i.e. to the twin cities KapiSa and Kam, astride the confluence of the Panjshir and Ghorband tributaries of the Kabul River (see p. 640, \vith n 2, below) on his way to Ortospana. 2 As quoted by Stephanus of Byzantium, s.v. 'Kaspapyros'. 4 On 3 pp. 608-9, above. Apud Stephanum. s This hypothetical route of the South-Eastern Kaspioi in the Volker\\anderung of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. was demonstrably followed by their fellow Saka the Tura in the Volkerwanderung of the second century B C. In the Avesta the Tura make their appearance, in company with the Airya (? Alanoi), Sainma (Sarmatai), Samavas (? Sannoi) and Daha (Dahai), among the Iranian Nomad peoples on the Central Asian Steppe who gave Zarathustra a good reception when he made his hijrah (see Nyberg, op. cit., pp. 237, 249-51, and 297). A district of Khwarizm still bore the name Tur in the Sasaman Age (see ibid., p. 251). The emergence, after the beginning of the Christian Era, of the legendary Turan patriarch Fryana's name in the Hellemzed form 'Phlianos' in the Hellenic city-state of Olbia on the Black Sea coast of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe indicates that one detachment of the Tura had accompanied the Sarmatians in their westward trek north of the Caspian Sea (see ibid., pp. 237 and 251). Another detachment of Tura, however, must have mounted the c

UNIVERSAL STATES

636

be far wrong if we locate these Eastern Kaspioi here, between the Eastern Paktyes in the Hilmand Basin to the west of them and the middle course of the River Indus to the east. 1 In the Herodotean field-state they do not figure in the gazetteer the Eastern Kaspioi are mentioned immediately after the Gandarioi and the Dadikai, who, in the gazetteer, figure in Taxation District No. 7, and the Caspians' commander is the brother of the commander of the Dadico-Gandarian brigade. On the other hand the Kaspioi are also associated with the Paktyes by being paraded, like these, in the sisyrna the Greek name for the sheepskin or felt top-coat, Pactyice 'pustm', which in the early nineteenth century was still a distinctive feature in the national costume of the Western Afghans, and which Elphinstone 2 describes as 'a large cloak of well-tanned sheep-skin with the wool inside, or of soft and pliant grey felt. This garment is worn loose over the shoulders, with the sleeves hanging down, and reaches to the ankles.*

If the reader feels

moved

to ask

how

an ex- Central Asian people

who

had founded a

new

torrid

city in the Indus Basin could have persisted, in their abode, in suffocating themselves under this ancestral article

of arctic dress, the writer has a twofold rejoinder to make. He can point out that the Circassian refugees from the North-Western Caucasus who were settled by the Ottoman Government in Transjordan in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era showed a comparable conservatism in clinging to their ancestral costume; and he can quote Elphinstone 's authority for the fact that, in the Daman in the same century, the sisyrna was still part of the Eastern Afghans* winter dress.

'Though their summer dress is nearly the same as that of India and even in winter they wear turbans, ... at that season they wear brown and grey woollen great coats and posteens.' 3 .

.

.

.

.

.

also

On

this showing, Herodotus 's parade of the Eastern Kaspioi in sisyrnai not incompatible with a location which would allow them to have been the founders of the river-port of Kaspa-pyros in the tropical lowlands of is

the Middle Indus Basin. Iranian Plateau and then wheeled south-east; for in the 'Abbasid Age the name Turan was borne by a canton in Eastern Baluchistan in the neighbourhood of the latter-day Khanate of Qal'at (see Le Strange, op. cit., pp. 331-2), and in the twentieth century of the Christian Era a community of Turis was still to be found alive among the Sulayman Mountains in the upper valley of the Kurram River, immediately to the south of the Kabul Valley (Gadara). These Turis were said to have formerly been pastoral nomads who migrated twice a year between summer pastures in the Kurram Valley and winter pastures round Qalabagh on the west bank of the Indus north of the Salt Range (see Pennell, T. L. Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier (London 1912, Sceley Service), pp. 55-56). On their way from the Central Asian Steppe to the eastern edge of the Iranian Plateau, the Tura had bequeathed their national legend to a school of epic poetry that was to arise in their wake in the former Achaememan dahyduf Zraka, on which the name Seistan was stamped by the hoof of the Saka horse en route (see V. v. 600-2). 1 If W. H. Schoff, in his edition of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (London 1912, Longmans Green), p. 189, is right in deriving the latter-day name 'Kashmir* from an original Sanscrit compound 'Kasyapa-mata* meaning 'home of the Kasyapa', we may infer that another detachment of the Eastern Kaspioi lodged itself in Kashmir, and that the name of a forgotten people was posthumously interpreted as the name of a legendary pre-Gautaman Buddha in the hagiography of the Mahayana. a In 3 op. cit., vol. i, p. 313. Elphinstone, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 59. :

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE While

637

thus seems possible that Darius's Harahvatig may have extended eastward as far as the west bank of the River Indus, it is certain that, on the political map, the Viceroyalty of Harahvatis' in the later 1 years of Darius I's reign extended westward to include Zraka in the latter-day Seistan, and that, on the fiscal map, the taxation district in which Harahvatis was included (the Herodotean District No. 14) extended south-westward as far as the north-east shore of the Persian Gulf, to include the Asagartiyd (Sagartioi) in Kirman, the Yautiyd (Outioi) in North-Eastern Laristan, the Maciyd (Mykoi) in Southwestern Laristan, along the seaboard, 2 and the Median deportees ('the 3 dtracints') on the inshore islands. On the evidence, which we have already noticed, 4 of variations in the order of the names on the official lists, we can conclude that Zraka must have been transferred from the Viceroyalty of Parthava to the Viceroyalty of Harahvatis between the dates of composition of 'DPe' and 'DZd', and we can discern two considerations, either or both of which may have moved Darius to make this change in the political map. On the one hand it would have the effect of diminishing the territory and population of a viceroyalty whose leading people had demonstrated its hostility to the Ariaramnan branch of the House of Achaemenes in 522-521 B.C., when the Parthians, as well as the Hyrcanians, had risen against their viceroy, Darius's father Hystaspes. In the second place, this transfer would widen the corridor between the loyal Viceroyalty of Harahvati and those dissident Persian tribes the South- Eastern Asagartiya in Kirman and the South-Eastern Yautiya and Maciya in Laristan whom Darius had attached to HarahvatiS for fiscal purposes after having degraded them to the ranks of his tax-paying subjects from their previously privileged status as constituent clans of the imperial people. The South-Eastern Asagartiyd (Sagartioi) are described in the Herodotean field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary force 5 as being a still cul6 turally conservative Nomad people who fought only as cavalry and whose master weapon was the lasso. Their language was Persian, and in 480 B.C. they were attached to the Persian infantry in Xerxes' army, but their equipment was betwixt and between the Persian and the Pactyan and this last piece of Herodotean information suggests that these Sagartians* country must have been Kirman (O.P. Karmana; Latine Car7 mania), which lay immediately to the north-east of Laristan and Pars, while it faced Zraka and Harahvatis across the south-eastern end of the Central Desert of Iran. In the twentieth century of the Christian Era a people who made their livelihood by stock-breeding could not have it

;

1

2

See See

p. 589, with n. 3, above. p. 622, above. In the field-state of

Xerxes' expeditionary force the Outioi and are paraded in Paktyan equipment, but the Outian and Mykan contingents are brigaded with one another under a separate command (see Herodotus, Book VII,

Mykoi

3 See pp. 602 and 623, above. s J n Book above. VII, chap. 85. 6 They still had a prejudice against metal weapons, except for poignards ('enkheiridia'). 7 According to Strabo Geographtca, Book XV, chap, ii, 8 (C 723), Carmania marched with the south-eastern paraitaka of Media: i.e. Carmania included the latter-day canton of Yazd, as is expressly stated by Ptolemy: Geographia Book VI, chap, vi, 2. 'Karmana is mentioned in DSf, Professor 35, as a source of gold for Darius's palace at Susa.' Roland G. Kent.

chap. 68). 4

On

p. 589,

.

t

638

UNIVERSAL STATES

won

a living off a landscape that had come to be a desert punctuated at rare intervals with oases intensively cultivated by irrigation. This desert, however, was at least partly man-made. As recently as the 'Abbasid the forests with which the mountains of Kirman had originally been clothed had not yet all been cut down, and in an earlier age, when the forests were still intact, Kirman seems likely to have had sufficient

Age

1

rainfall to

keep large tracts of the country

and its pastoral Sagartian occupants numerous, prosperous, and powerful.

will

fit

to serve as pasture-land,

have been proportionately

Though these south-eastern, unlike the north-western, Asagartiya are not mentioned by name in Darius 's inscription on the cliff at Behistan as having taken part in the disorders of 522-521 B.C., the fact that their name is mentioned in only one of the six official lists of dahydva 2 suggests We may infer that they had been one of up arms against Darius under Vahyaz-

that they too were in disgrace. the Persian clans that had taken

data 's leadership; and, since the force which Vahyazdata detached to invade Gadara could hardly have covered the immense distances that it did cover unless it had been mounted, we may guess that the Sagartian horse were the backbone of it. As for the Yautiyd, who were Vahyazdata 's own clan, the measure of their disgrace might be gauged from the fact that their name was passed over in all the official lists and the reason for this official ostracism was revealed in the creditably frank account of Vahyazdata 's movement which Darius had made public in his Behistan record. 3 The truth and Darius does not attempt here to conceal it was that Vahyazdata's challenge to Darius 's pretensions was by far the most dangerous of all the crises with which this Ariaramnan pretender to a Cyran imperial crown found himself confronted in that terrible year; for, while the Armenians may have been Darius 's most resolute, and the Medes his ;

most powerful, adversaries on a strictly military reckoning, Vahyazdata was politically by far the most formidable of all Darius 's competitors. The Elamites, Margians, Thataguf? d or v]iya and Saka were fighting simply for the recovery of their local independence, while the Babylonians (without their former subjects' goodwill) and the Medes (with their former subjects' active support) were fighting for the re-establishment of their pre-Cyran empires; but none of these non-Persian opponents of Darius's aspired, as Darius himself aspired, to reign without a peer over the whole Oikoumene as the acknowledged legitimate successor of the universal monarch Cyrus II. Vahyazdata alone challenged Darius in terms of Darius's own pretensions. Vahyazdata of Tarava, like Darius, was a Persian; and so, for that matter, had been Martiya of Kuganaka; but Martiya had aimed at nothing more ambitious than to put himself at the head of a nationalist movement in Elam, and he had accordingly proclaimed himself to be a scion of the Elamite royal family. 4 In sharp contrast to the modesty of See, for example, Le Strange, op. cit., pp. 315 and 316. 3 See In 'DPe'. 'DB', 40-48. See 'DP', 22-23. Martiya's bid for the crown of Elam suggests that he may have been a Persian whose native city, Kuganaka, lay, not in Parsa (Pars), but in ParsuwaS (Lunstan). 1

2

*


639

Martiya's pretensions, Vahyazdata had the audacity to impersonate Cyrus IPs son Smerdis himself, whose claim to the imperial throne, were he really still alive, was incontestably paramount over the claim of a usurper descended from the Ariaramnan branch of the Achaemenidae. Vahyazdata's pronunciamiento won the support, not only of his own Yautiya clansmen, but of a strong enough faction in Parsa at large, including at least some of the garrison of the imperial palace there, to enable him to establish himself in Parsa as king and this fait accompli was a dire blow to Darius 's cause, considering that Parsa had been the appanage, not of Cyrus the great-grandfather of the Smerdis whom Vahyazdata was impersonating, but of Darius 's great-grandfather Ariaramnes. Moreover, Vahyazdata did not make the mistake of resting on his oars. Like Darius, he promptly sought to vindicate his pretension to ;

legitimacy by vigorously taking the offensive against all who ventured it; and, in his military operations for taking possession of Cyrus IFs patrimony, he gave proof of high strategic ability. He made it his first objective to occupy the basin of the Kabul River in Gadara a node of strategic routes 1 where, once entrenched, he would have been able at once to cut the communications between Darius 's two principal supporters the viceroys of Harahvatis and Bakhtris, to establish contact between his own forces and the insurgents in the Panjab 2 (Thatagus), and perhaps to rekindle the flames of revolt in the Viceroy of Bactria's disaffected canton Margus, which marched with the disaffected cantons Parthava and Varkana in Darius 's father Hystaspes' viceroyalty of Parthia. The stakes for which Vahyazdata was playing when he detached a force to occupy the Kabul Basin were nothing less than the establishment of his rule over the whole South-East and whole North-East of the Achaemenian Empire; and, if once this had been achieved, the provinces in the Indus Valley would inevitably also have fallen into his lap. If Vahyazdata's eastern plan of campaign had succeeded, Darius 's cause would have been lost, and Vahyazdata could have afforded to wait for the news of Darius's death before attempting to settle accounts with the would-be restorer of the Median Empire, to contest

Fravartis.

Vahyazdata did come within an ace of success, for the Viceroy of Harahvatis, Vivana, did not succeed in making contact with Vahyazdata's expeditionary force until this had reached the pair of twin cities 3 See p. 635, n. i, above. Thatagus was in revolt, on the testimony of 'DB', 21. KapisakamS (written as a single word, like Budapest, without the use of the sign for dividing words that was possessed by the Old Persian script) is the name given to this 45. This is manifestly identical with the Kapisa- Alexandria of pair of cities in 'DB', the post-Alexandrine Hellenic geographers (see Tarn, The Greeks in Bactna and India, and 460-2, together with map 3 at the end of the book). Darius has pp. 96-98, 139-40, here given us the pre-Hellenic name of the west-bank twin of the east-bank city of Kapisa. Kam will have occupied the site which, in latter-day Pakhtu parlance, was called 'begram', 'the city', par excellence (see ibid., p. 462). This pair of cities attained the zenith of its importance m the Kushan Age. Kujula, the founder of the Kushan Empire (see ibid., p. 338), will have taken his surname Kadphises to commemorate his acquisition of a KapiSa which had lost none of its strategic importance during the five and a half centuries that had passed since Vahyazdata's cause had been lost, and Darius's won, in a battle at this key point 522-521 B.C. Kujula Kadphises' second successor 1

2 3

m

UNIVERSAL STATES

640

and Ghorband tributaries of the Kabul River, where the road running north-eastward from the dahyduS of Harahvati in the Hilmand Basin via Ghaznah and Kabul (Graece

astride the confluence of the Panjshir

Kophen,

Sinice Ki-pin) divided into three branches 1 threading their the Hindu Kush by as many different passes one road

way through

2 making north-eastwards for the upper valley of the Oxus, while the other two roads both led by diverse routes to Balkh, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Bactria. Even after Vahyazdata's expeditionary force had been headed back by Vivana's pursuing column out of Gadara into HarahvatiS, the invaders turned and fought a second battle, this time on Arachosian soil, at Gandutava; and, after that, they marched on the 3 capital of the Arachosian viceroyalty, ArSada, itself, and had arrived there before Vivana was able to catch up with them again and to take

them

prisoners.

man other than Darius himself could claim to have won Cyrus IPs imperial crown for the Ariaramnan branch of the Achaemenidae, that man was Vivana and Darius showed his recognition of the loyalty of the Eastern Paktyes and their viceroy in the year of his ordeal by extending this viceroyalty 's area to include not only Zraka but also the three disaffected Persian cantons in Kirman and Laristan Asagarta, the Yautiya, and Maka and even the Median deportees who had been marooned on the islands in the Persian Gulf off the Maka coast. 4 Yet it could have been said of the Paktyes who had fought so effectively for Darius in 522-521 B.C., as aptly as it actually was said of the Croats who If

any

;

fought for Francis Joseph in A.D. 1848-9, that the loyalists received from the Emperor as their reward what the rebels received as their 5 punishment for the enlargement of the viceroyalty of Harahvatis was accompanied by an assessment of the corresponding taxation district No. 14 in the Herodotean gazetteer at the figure of 600 talents. The exorbitancy of this assessment on a district consisting of little else than steppes, mountains, and deserts is indicated by a comparison with the figure of 700 talents which was Darius 's assessment on Egypt. As far as the three disgraced Persian clans and the deported Median offenders were concerned, this assessment was, no doubt, intended to be penal but, in giving us the aggregate figure, Herodotus leaves us in the dark as to the quota which the loyal HarahvatiS and Zraka had the honour to ;

;

be invited to contribute.

As

for the

Maciyd (Mykoi),

their

name cannot have been

associated

Kamshka's name will have commemorated the future emperor's birth or upbringing in a Kam which will have reverted by his day to its pre-Hellenic appellation. Pliny's state92, that Kapia (Lattne ment, in his Histona Naturahs, Book VI, chap, xxm (xxv), Capisa) had been destroyed by Cyrus I indicates that it was he who had annexed the Kabul Basin (Gadara) to the Achaememan Empire. 1 See the passage of Strabo's Geographica cited on p. 635, n. i, above. 2 An account of Captain John Wood's passage of this Pass of Khawak, from the Oxus Basin into the Panjshir Valley, in April 1838, will be found in his A Journey to the Sources of the Oxus, new ed. (London 1872, John Murray), pp. 272-5. 3 The Elamite text of *DB', 47, informs us that ArSada was the seat of Vivana's administration. Tarn, in The Greeks in Bactria and India, pp. 94 and 470, locates it in the neighbourhood of the latter-day Qal'at-i-Ghilzai on the River Tarnak, north-east of Qandahar. * See Herodotus, Book III, chap. 93, and the present Annex, pp. 602 and 623, above. s See V. v. 293, n. 2, and p. 114, with n. 6, above.


641

Ariaramnan Achaemenid minds with such unpleasant memories as the names of the Yautiya and the Asagartiya, considering that either they themselves or their country, Maka, are mentioned in every one of the six official lists. At the same time, the Maftya cannot have emerged from the ordeal of 522-521 B.C. with an altogether clean bill of political health, or they would not have been sentenced to share with the Yautiya and Asagartiya the punishment of being degraded to the status of taxin

paying subjects. The two cantons Yautiya (Outioi) and Maka (Mykoi) can both be located approximately. Vahyazdata's native city Tarava had bequeathed its name to a latter-day Tarum on the eastern edge of Laristan. The mountain (kaufa) called Parga, where he made his last stand, 2 must be one or other of the twin cities Burk, standing on a hillock like a earners hump, and Furg, with its castle on a hill, which were still in existence 1

'

Abbasid Age. 3 Maka (Mykoi) was commemorated in the Abbasid the place-name Mahan on the road running north-westward from the port of Huzu, on the Lari coast opposite Qays Island, to Laghir en route for Shiraz. 4 In the twentieth century of the Christian Era the name still survived on the Lari coast itself at Mughan, near the mouth of the Darghaband River, and at Maghu or Mughu farther east, near the Lari coast's southernmost point. The islands on which the Median deportees were marooned were presumably those strung along the same coast, of which Kishm was the largest and Hormuz the only one that was eventually to become a famous name. In settling these disaffected Medes here, Darius was, no doubt, consciously achieving two purposes simultaneously. He was interning dangerous ex-rebels in a chain of prisons, provided for him by Nature, where they would be impotent to do any more mischief to his regime and, in the act, he was confirming the hold of his empire upon one of its frontages on the Indian Ocean by planting penal settlements on islands that were too uninviting to attract voluntary colonists. 5 The choice of these islands as the places of internment for irreconcilable rebels was all of a piece with the opening up of a continuous water-route from the Indus-port Kaspapyros to the head of the Red Sea, and with the reopening of the canal from the head of the Red Sea to the Mediterranean via the Nile. These three measures must have been so many in the

'

Age in

;

parts of a comprehensive plan for securing the command of the Indian Ocean and thereby obtaining a water-route round Arabia to supplement 1

2

'DP', 'DP',

40. 42.

See Le Strange, op. cit p. 292. 'The Fdrs Ndmah writes the name Purk or Purg* [compare the Greek word 'pyrgos' A.J.T.] 'and says that its castle was impregnable, being built of stone and very large.' * See ibid., p. 257, n. i. 5 Danus's Median deportees were not the only d&racints to be marooned on these islands For example, Megabyzus, the Persian general who had reconquered Egypt for the Achaememan Empire after the insurrection led by Inar6s, was exiled by Artaxerxes I to the Persian Gulf, where he was interned in a place called Cyrtae (see Ctesias: Persica, BooksXIV-XVII, 71 (40) in J. Gilmore's edition (London 1888, Macmillan), p. 154). In this context, Ctesias uses the same word as Herodotus: 'dtracinP (Graced 'anaspastos'). The survivors of the sack of Miletus in 494 B.C. were deported, not to the islands, but to the mouth of the River Tigris on the gulf coast of Babylonia (Herodotus, Book VI, 3

,

chap. 20).

B

2069 VII

Y

UNIVERSAL STATES

642

the long and devious land-route between the eastern and western extremities of Darius *s empire. 1 The two peoples Southern Parikanioi and Astatic Ethiopians who, in the Herodotean gazetteer, together constitute Taxation District No. 17, do not either of them figure in any of the official lists, and they are not associated with one another in the Herodotean field-state. The Parikanioi are paraded here in Pactyan equipment under a separate command of their own 2 the Asiatic Ethiopians are brigaded with the Indoi. 3 The survival of the name 'pairikas' ('heathen*) 4 in the place-name Farghan 60 kilometres to the east of Tarum and 120 kilometres to the north of Bandar 'Abbas, under the shadow of a Mount Furghun, was 5 evidence, as we have already noticed, that these Southern Parikanioi were the Outians' (Yautiya's) immediate neighbours towards the east. Their country will have been the south-eastern extremity of Kirman and the western part of Makran; and the eastern part of Makran, between the Southern Parikanioi and Sind, will have been the country of 'the Asiatic Ethiopians'. may presume that this district was annexed by Darius at or after the date of his annexation of Sind, as part of his policy of giving his empire a frontage on the Indian Ocean. While he made it a separate administrative unit for fiscal purposes, he will have attached it for political purposes either to the Viceroyalty of Harahvatis or to Hidus. In A.D. 1952 the first of these two possibilities seemed the more likely on considerations of geographical convenience, which was all that a historian then had to go upon, in the absence of documentary evidence on the point. In the South-Eastern Quarter of the Achaemenian Empire the predominant culture was the Pactyan, to judge from the adoption of the Pactyans' equipment by their neighbours and administrative associates the Kaspioi, Outioi, Mykoi, and Parikanioi. On the same test we shall conclude that the Bactrian culture was predominant in the North-East, and that this culture was an offshoot of the Median for the Bactrians are paraded in a sub-Median equipment, 6 and this Bactrian equipment ;

We

;

1 In this enterprising and far-sighted combination of measures, Darius showed a more lively sense of the importance of sea-power in the Indian Ocean for an empire strung out athwart the Middle Eastern land-bridge than was shown in the sixteenth century of the Christian Era by the 'Osmanhs when they gave way in the Indian Ocean to the Portuguese. The counterpart, in the Mediterranean, of the voyage of exploration into

the Indian Ocean on which Scylax of Caryanda was sent by Darius was the commission given by him to Democedes of Crotdn to conduct a squadron on a corresponding voyage of exploration into Democedes' own native waters. This Mediterranean expedition of Danus's was abortive (see Herodotus, Book III, chaps. 135-8), but it is further evidence of Darius's sea-mmdedness, and the story of Sataspes' attempt to circumnavigate Africa from the Mediterranean coast of Egypt via the Straits of Gibraltar (see Herodotus, Book IV, chap. 43) shows though this enterprise, too, ended in failure that Darius had bequeathed his sea-sense to his son and successor Xerxes. 2 3 Ibid., chap. 70. Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 68. 4 See s On p. 617, above. p. 595, above. 6 See Book to Herodotus, VII, chap. 64. According Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 61, the three distinctive features of the Median equipment were a soft felt cap, trousers, a dagger suspended from a belt and worn on the right thigh, and 'the great bow'. This description exactly corresponds to an equipment portrayed on the Achaemenian basreliefs as being worn by one of the two imperial peoples, and from this it follows that the other imperial people's equipment, as portrayed on the bas-reliefs namely a taka (Gallic^ toque) instead of a soft tiara ('Phrygian cap'), and an ample robe instead of a riding coat and trousers must be the national dress of the Persians. Herodotus tells us


643

worn by the

is

Parthians, Chorasmians, Sogdians, Gandarians, Dadicae, while the Areioi are equipped partly Bactrian fashion 1 partly Median fashion.

and and

When we go on to in viceroyalties

compare the grouping of the north-eastern peoples and taxation districts with their grouping in military

commands, we find that in the North-East, as in the South-East, the military and civilian organizations do not coincide. For example, the inhabitants of Hyrcania (Varkana), who in the Achaemenian Age were,

for civil administrative purposes, so subordinate an element in the Viceroyalty and Taxation District of Parthia (Parthava) that their name is not mentioned either in the official lists or in the Herodotean gazetteer, though it figures in Darius 's narrative of the events of 522-521 B.C., are paraded in the field-state under a separate command and in Median 2 equipment, in contrast to the Bactrian equipment of the Parthians; and the Sogdians likewise appear here under a separate command, though in every one of the six official lists they are associated with the Bactrians. Conversely the Saka Haumavarga of Farghanah are brigaded with the Bactrians in the field-state, though Farghanah and Bactria were not con-

tiguous (Sogdiana lay in between), and though the Saka Haumavarga, allies of the Achaemenian Empire, differed in status from the

who were

Bactrians, who were tax-paying subjects. The Chorasmians (Hvarazmiya), again, are brigaded with the Parthians, though Khwarizm and Parthia

were insulated from one another territorially by the Qara and by the Daha in Transcaspia.

Qum

Desert

The civil, as well as the military, administrative geography of the North-East Quarter is fairly clear. The Viceroyalty of Parthava (Parthia) with which the Herodotean Taxation District No. 16 will have been coextensive touched the south-east corner of the Caspian Sea in Varkana (Hyrcania). To the north it included Hvdrazmit (alias Hvdrazmly; Latine Chorasmia, Arabice Khwarizm), along the lower course of the River Oxus (Amu Darya); and the Viceroyalty of Parthava must therefore also have included the Daha, whose name though it is mentioned in the Achaemenian official lists only in 'XPh' was still extant in the 'Abbasid Age in Dihistan 3 at the western end of Transcaspia. Parthava (Parthia) Proper was approximately conterminous with the latter-day provinces of Western Khurasan and Kuhistan and the viceroyalty extended, east of that, to include Haraiva (Graece the Areioi, who had bequeathed their name to the city of Herat), but not ;

Book VII, chaps. 61-62, that, on active service at any rate, the Persians wore the more practical Median dress, and that the Kissioi (? i.e. the Persian troops from Parsuwa) did likewise, except for retaining their native headgear the mitre (perhaps this was a taka with a low crown). The Bactrians were not armed with the Median 'great bow', but they did wear the Median cap (see ibid., chap. 64). This cap was also worn by all the Eurasian Nomad peoples, from the Saka Haumavarga in Farghanah to the Scyths on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, except for the 'Pointed-Hood' Massagetae; and we in

guess that, whatever may have been the origin of the cap, the wearing of trousers had been taken over by the Medes from the Nomads when they were learning from them

may

m

a chariot. the art of riding a war-horse instead of driving him 1 See Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 66. The Areioi are armed with the Median 'great 'reed but are Bactnan not with the bow', bow', equipped like the Bactrians in other

respects. 2 3

Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 62. See Le Strange, op. cit., pp. 379-81.

644

UNIVERSAL STATES 1

MarguS (Merv), which belonged to the viceroyalty of Bactria, and a 2 fortiori not Suguda (Sogdiana), whatever Herodotus may say. Finally, on the south-east, the Viceroyalty of Parthava had, as we have seen, 3 included Zraka, on the north-east shore of the Hamun-i-Hilmand, before the transfer of Zraka to the Viceroyalty of HarahvatiS. The Viceroyalty of Bdkhtril (Bactria) with which the Herodotean Taxation District No. 12 will have been coextensive included BakhtriS Proper and Suguda (alias Sugda; the Sogdoi). Bakhtri Proper, which had bequeathed its name to the city of Balkh, lay between the south bank of the River Oxus (Amu Darya) in the middle section of its course and the northern flank of the Hindu Rush. Suguda (Sogdiana) stretched north-eastwards from the north bank of the Oxus, opposite Bactria, to the south bank of the southern elbow of the River Jaxartes (Sir Darya), where Suguda marched with the Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka's country in 4 Farghanah. The heart of Sogdiana was the valley of 'the golden river* whose Old Persian name translated into Greek as 'polytimetos', 'the had surprecious', by the post-Alexandrine Hellenic geographers vived, down to the time of writing, as the Zarafshan on whose banks stood the latter-day cities of Samarqand and Bukhara. The Sakd Haumavargd (Sakai Amyrgioi) 5 adjoining Suguda in Far6 ghanah were under the Viceroy of Bactria's supervision, to judge by the fact that they are brigaded with the Bactrians both in Herodotus 's field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary force and in Arrian 's field-state of the army assembled by Darius Codomannus at Gaugamela in 331 B.C. 7 but they were the Achaemenian Empire's allies, not its subjects, 8 and ;

2 See See 'DB', 38. pp. 595-6, above. On pp. 589 and 637, above. * These boundaries are on the of Eratosthenes, by Strabo in his given, authority 8 (C 514). Geographtca, Book XI, chap, vm, 5 This 'Amyrgioi', to which the Iranian compound epithet 'Hauma-varga* has been contracted in its rendering into Greek, may be compared with 'Aspourgianoi' a people located by Strabo (Geographtca, Book XI, chap, n, (C 495), and Book XII, chap, in, 29 (C 556)) on the north-east coast of the Black Sea, at the mouth of the River Kuban, whose name, as it appears in Greek, presumably represents an Iranian 'Aspavarga'. If the Old Persian root varga- means 'pressing out' or 'drinking' (see the note by Professor R. G. Kent on p. 587, above), 'Aspavarga" would be a label for a Eurasian Nomad people who milked mares or who drank qumiz. On either of these two conjectural interpretations, 'Aspavarga' and 'Haumavarga' would be complementary terms by which the Saka would be classified according to the difference of the source from which they extracted their indispensable intoxicant. While the Saka Aspavarga would be continuing to extract it from mare's milk, the Saka Haumavarga would have learnt to extract it from a plant growing in the Central Asian highlands into which they had been driven by the pressure of more powerful hordes on the steppes. See further Rostovtzeff, M.: Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (Oxford 1922, Clarendon Press) for the Aspourgianoi (pp. 152 and 160) and for Aspourgos, son of Asandrokhos, who became king of the Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus towards the end of the last century B c. (pp. 152-3, 156, 166). 6 Sogdiana was bounded on the east by the farther bank of the Jaxartes (i.e. the north-western bank above the southern elbow) as far as the river's sources, according to i. Ptolemy: Geographta, Book VI, chap, xn, 7 See Arrian: Expeditto Alexandn> Book III, chap, viii, 3. 8 Bessus, the viceroy of Bactria, was in command of 'the Indoi who were next-door neighbours of the Bactrians', besides commanding the Bactrians themselves and the Sogdians. 'Brigaded with Bessus's command were the Sakai one of the Asiatic Scythian peoples but, unlike the other three peoples, these Sakai were not subjects of Bessus's, but were serving because they were Darius's Allies' (Arrian, ibid.). According to Ctesias, Books X-XI, 38 (7) in J. Gilmore's edition (London 1888, Macmillan), pp. 135-6, this alliance had been contracted with the Saka Haumavarga (Sakai Amyrgioi) by Cyrus II. 1

3

u


645

perhaps described in the name 'Aiglai' by which Herodotus refers to them without recognizing who these 'Aiglai' were for Herothis status is

;

dotus's

word

'Aiglai' recurs in

'

1 Ptolemy's 'Augaloi' and perhaps also in

the Augasioi' whose name was found by Stephanus in his text of Strabo's 8 (C 513), where the reading had Geographica, Book XI, chap, viii, subsequently come to be 'Attasioi' in the text that had reached the hands of Modern Western scholars. It had been conjectured by Tomaschek that these were three independent attempts to reproduce in Greek an Iranian word 'aogazddo', which would have been a derivative of the

Avestan word 'aoganh', meaning 'strength', 2 and which might therefore have been coined to designate 'reinforcements', 'auxiliaries', 'allies'. The location of Ptolemy's 'Augaloi', as well as their name, would fit the Achaemenian Empire's Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka allies in Farghanah; for Ptolemy places them 'below' (i.e. south of) the latioi (i.e. the Jats, alias Massagetae, alias 'Pointed-Hood Saka') and the Takhoroi (i.e. Tokharoi); and he places these latioi and Takhoroi on the northern 3 section of the Jaxartes (i.e. around and down stream from Tashkend). As for the Saka Tigrakhauda (the Pointed-Hood Saka), whom Herodotus 'knows by their national name as Massagetae, they were presumably neighbours of the Saka Haumavarga, since in the official lists 'DB' and 'DPe* the Saka are mentioned simply as such, without any attempt to draw the distinction between two different kinds of Saka that 4 is drawn in all four later lists. According to Herodotus the Massagetae marched with the Achaemenian Empire along the Oxus at the time when Cyrus II made his disastrously unsuccessful attempt to conquer them. Herodotus 's description 5 of the marshes and lagoons in which all branches of 'the Araxes' lose themselves, except for one solitary branch that finds its way to the Caspian Sea, shows that 'Araxes' must mean 'Oxus' in this context; and his description of the denizens of these marshes 6 corresponds to the label by which, in 'DZd', 'the Saka of the Marshes' are distinguished from 'the Saka of the Plains'. There is, however, no evidence that either Herodotus's 'marshmen' or Darius's 'Saka of the Marshes' are to be identified with the 'Water Saka' 'Apa whom Polybius 7 describes as a mounted Saka', Graece 'Apasiakai' Nomad people, living between the rivers Oxus and Don, who have to cross the

Oxus

in order to raid Hyrcania.

Ptolemy: Geographia, Book VI, chap, xii, 4. Professor R. G. Kent comments: 'It is very hazardous to see in Greek Aiglai, Augasioi, Augaloi a Grecizing of Avestan aogaz-da (so properly transcribed), meaning 'strength-giving or -making' (roots do- and dhe- are phonetically merged into one, da-, in Iranian). The compound does not actually occur in the Avesta, but its form would be certain. If you cite the Avestan word for strength, it should be aogah- (from auges-), which is more perspicuous. The use of nh for Avestan s > h between vowels is no longer current, as it develops only in certain intervocalic positions, while -h- is its phonetic antecedent even there. In the Greek words the Ai- and the Au- are difficult to equate, even as corrupt borrowings unless there is some popular etymology to a more familiar word, or to something that seems to make meaning.' 3 These locations for the Saka Haumavarga, the Saka Tigrakhauda, and the Tokharoi are evidently those which they had occupied at the moment when the Tokharoi (alias westward out of the country of the Issedones (Wusun). had been Yuechi) just pushed * See * See ibid., chap. 202. Herodotus, Book I, chap. 201. 6 In loc. cit. Cp. Strabo: Geographica, Book XI, chap, viii, 7 (C 513). 7 See Polybius, Book X, chap. 48. 1

2

:

UNIVERSAL STATES

646

These Apasiakai are located in what would appear to be the same position along the Oxus west of Bactria by Eratosthenes, according x and here the to Strabo, if we accept Tarn's emendation of the passage with the are associated Massagetae. Ptolemy brings the MasApasiakai 2 3 sagetae south of the Oxus, into Margiane (Margus). Darius tells us ;

campaign in which he re-subjected the insurgent Saka whose was Skunkha, he had to cross the sea. We know, from the eviprince dence of the head-dress worn by Skunkha on the Behistan bas-relief, that Skunkha 's Saka were 'the Pointed-Hoods' and not 'the Hauma-(?) drinkers'; and, since Herodotus's and Eratosthenes' location of the Massagetae somewhere along the right bank of the Oxus suggests that the sea which Darius had to cross in order to get at them must have been an arm of the Sea of Aral, we can perhaps locate the south-eastern borders of 'the Pointed-Hood Saka', alias Massagetae, as adjoining the Oxus from a point below the western frontiers of Bactria and Sogdiana to some point as far north-west as the south-eastern extremity of Chorasmia, and their western borders as adjoining the Sea of Aral but we do that, in the

;

know how

Nomad

peoples extended northwards into the heart of the Eurasian Steppe, or at what point on the course of the Jaxartes, to the north and north-west of the river's southern elbow, they marched with the Saka Haumavarga. We can, though, be sure that, in addition to the Apa Saka on the Middle Oxus and the marshmen in the Oxus Delta, there were other Massagetan peoples who, like the Saka Haumavarga, were 'Saka of the Plains' in fact, whether or not this latter label is used in 'DZd' to designate the

not

far this great confederacy of

Saka Haumavarga exclusively. 4 A link between the North-East Quarter of the Achaemenian Empire and its dominions in the Indus Basin was constituted by the dahydut which is called Gaddra in the Old Persian version, and Pa~ar-u-pa-ra-e1

8 (C 513), as amended by Tarn in viii, and India, p. 91, n. 3, to read* 'And Eratosthenes says that the instead of 'the Arachotoi') adjoin the Bactnans on the west along the

See Strabo: Geographica, Book XI, chap,

The Greeks

in Bactria

Apasiakai (sic, Oxus.' 2 See 2. Geographta, Book VI, chap, x, 3 In 'DB', in the tantalizingly mutilated 74. 4 If the Achaemenian imperial authorities found some difficulty in hitting upon labels or nicknames to distinguish 'the Hauma-( ?)dnnkmg Saka' who were their allies from 'the Pointed-Hood Saka' who were at least nominally their subjects, it is not surprising to find the Hellenic geographers confounding the two kinds of Saka with one another. After accurately distinguishing 'the Heathen' ('Pankamoi') from 'the Pointed-Hoods' ('Orthokorybantioi') in his gazetteer without realizing that these two outlandish names that he is cramming into one of his four Median taxation districts have anything to do with the Saka (see pp. 594-5, above), Herodotus falls, in his field-state (Book VII, chap. 64), into the blunder of identifying the Saka who wear stiff pointed hoods with the Saka whom the Persians call 'Amyrgioi' (i.e. 'Haumavarga'). On the other hand, Strabo is not conclusively convicted of being guilty of the same blunder when he states that Spitamenes, when Alexander had made Bactria and Sogdiana too hot to hold him, 'sought asylum with the Augasioi (sic, following Stephanus, instead of "Attasioi") and the Khorasmioi, who were two of the peoples belonging to the nation of the Massagetai and the Sakai' (Geographica, Book XI, chap, viii, 8 (C 513)). Spitamenes may have taken refuge with the Augasioi (alias Saka Haumavarga of Farghanah) first, and then moved on to the country of the more distant Khorasmioi and this second asylum would have been safer politically, besides being more remote geographically, than the first, if at this date the Khorasmioi had become 'one of the peoples of the Massagetai' in the sense that they had transferred their allegiance from a declining Achaemenian Power to the formidable Nomad confederacy against which a now decrepit Achaemenian Imperial Government had ceased to be able to protect them. ;


647

sa-an-na in the Babylonian version, of the official lists, and Gandarioi in Herodotus's catalogue of the peoples in his Taxation District No. 7. The Babylonian synonym for an Old Persian 'Gadara', which reappears in the post- Alexandrine Hellenic name Taropanisus', had been interpreted by Modern Western scholars, in terms of the language of the Avesta, as meaning [the country which is] 'beyond' ('para') [the mountain range that is] 'higher than the eagle' ['upairisaena'], i.e. the country that is 'trans Hindu Kush'. Since this poetic geographical expression

must have been coined by speakers of the Avestan language in which it is couched, it must have designated people who lived on the opposite side of the Hindu Kush from the Oxus Basin, and this locates these 'Paraupairisaena' in the basin of the Kabul River. This was the location of Gadara likewise; and the prima-facie inference from the official equation Gadara Para-upairisaena in the Achaemenian official lists is that, in the Achaemenian Age whatever permutations and combinations in the administrative geography of this region may have been 1 the two names were inaugurated by the Macedonian conquest synonyms for an identical administrative area in the Kabul River Basin. 2 Besides the Gandarioi, however, Herodotus, in his description of his Taxation District No. 7, mentions three other peoples whose

homes we

still

have to

locate.

Two

of these other three peoples in the Herodotean District No. 7 could be identified through the survival of their names down to the time of writing. Herodotus's Dadikai were still on the map as the Tajiks who were to be found in the Kabul River Basin in the Kuh-i-Daman, between the Upper Kabul River and the Panjshir River, and in the Kuhistan, between that and the Hindu Kush, 3 as well as in the Upper Oxus Valley above Bactria and Sogdiana on the left bank in Badakhshan and on the right bank in the territory that had been labelled Tajikistan in the administrative geography of the Soviet Union. 4 Herodotus's 5 Aparytai ('highlanders') were still on the map as the Afridis who were to be found at the eastern end of the Safid Kuh, on the watershed between the Kabul River and the Kurram River, just to the south of the

Khyber 1

Pass. 6

See, for instance, Tarn, op.

cit.,

p. 100.

2

These Taropamsadai', alias 'Gandarioi', must be the people described in Arrian's Darius III Codomannus's army at Gaugamela (III. vm. 3) as 'the Indoi who were next-door neighbours of the Bactnans' and who were brigaded with the Bactnans under Bessus's command (see p. 644, n. 8, above). 3 See Elphinstone, M. An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, new ed (London 1 839, field-state of

:

A

Personal Narrative of a Bentley, 2 vols.), vol. i, pp. 408-11; Burnes, A.- Cabool: Journey to, and Residence in, that City in the Years 1836, 7 and 8, 2nd ed. (London 1843, John Murray), pp. 149-51. * have no information about the boundary between the Dadikai in the adminisand Bactria in the administrative geography trative, as distinct from the ethnic, sense of the Achaemenian Empire. Ptolemy's statement (in Geographia, Book VI, chap, xn, bounded that was Bactria and the Caucasian Mountains Proper' not i) 'by Sogdiana only on the south along the Oxus River and on the west (i.e. by the Bactrian province Margiana), but also on the east, may signify that the Upper Oxus Valley on the north bank, and consequently also on the south bank, was included in Bactria, not in Dadike". s According to Herzfeld, op. cit., p. 99, 'parvata' was one of the Iranian words for 'mountain'. Professor Kent notes that the word 'parvata', with epenthesis to 'paurvata / is extant in Avestan. 6 These 'Aparytai' must be the people described in Arrian's field-state (III. viii. 4) as 'the Indians called the highland Indians' who in 331 B,C. were brigaded, not with

We

UNIVERSAL STATES

648

Neither of these peoples is named in any of the official lists but the fourth people included in the Seventh Taxation District according to the Herodotean gazetteer are the Sattagydai who appear in the official lists as the Thatagu[l dor v\iyd\ and Thataguf, the dahydusfrom which this people derive their name, is not so easy to locate. Considering that Gadara Proper had immediate next-door neighPara-upairisaena bours on the north in Bactria, on the west in Areia, and on the south in Arachosia, we are led to look for the Thatagu canton of the Herodotean Taxation District No. 7 in the country immediately to the east of Gadara Proper i.e. in the Panjab, which adjoined Gadara across the Indus. 1 Herzfeld points out 2 that in the Achaemenian bas-reliefs the Thatagu [? d or v]iya are portrayed in loin-cloths, which indicates that their country lay somewhere on the plains of the Indus Basin, and not up in the highlands of Eastern Iran and the difficulty of finding a location for ThataguS anywhere within the limits of Gadara to the west of the Indus certainly suggests that the Thatagu [? d or v]iya must have lived to the east of the Indus that is to say, on the plains, extending south-eastwards from the east bank of the Indus opposite the mouth of the Kabul River, which were watered by seven streams, from the Indus to the Sutlej 's lost south-eastern neighbour inclusive. 3 ;

=

;

the Gandarians, but with the Arachosians under the satrap of Arachosia's command. In Ptolemy's Geographta, Book VI, chap, xvm, Herodotus's 'Aparytai' appear as the 'Parouetai' (sic, instead of the reading Tarsuetai' in the latter-day text) who are the southernmost community of the Paropamsadae ( 3) and who are presumably the inhabitants of the Paroutan Mountains (the latter-day Safid Kuh) that constitute the boundary between the Paropamsadae and Arachosia, since they also figure (ibid., Book VI, chap, xx, 3) as the northernmost community in Arachosia. This location on the border would account for their transfer to Arachosia from Gadara at some date before 331 B c. Ptolemy's Tarautoi* (Book VI, chap, xvn, 3), who are located in Areia next door to the Paropamsadai, are evidently likewise 'highlanders' Hellemzed in a slightly different transliteration of the same underlying Iranian word, but their location suggests that their highland home lay in the country of the latter-day Hazaras, on the watershed of the rivers Kabul, Hilmand, and Han Rud, and not in the Safid Kuh, where the name 'Aparytai-Parouetai-Parautoi' was still borne by the latter-day Afndis. 1 The only substantial objection to locating ThataguS in the Panjab is a financial one. The Panjab must always have been a rich country in virtue of its agricultural and pastoral products, and therefore, if the Herodotean Taxation District No. 7 did include even only a part of the Panjab, it is surprising that it should have been assessed at a lower figure than any other district. Moreover, Thatagus", whether a rich country or a poor one, had been in rebellion in 522-521 B.C., and Darius was not the man to let off re-subjugated rebels lightly in their tax-assessments, as he showed by the enormous figure at which he assessed the poverty stricken South-Eastern Asagartiya, Yautiya, and MaCiya. The lowness of the assessment on the Herodotean District No. 7 could perhaps be reconciled with a location of one of its constituent cantons in the wealthy Panjab on the supposition that, if ThataguS did he in the Panjab, it included no more than a fraction of it e.g. the north-western corner, to the north-west of the Salt Range. 2 In op. cit., p. 99. 3 i e. the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej, together with a former river, south-east of the Sutlej, adjoining the Indian Desert, that had subsequently dried up. This lost river was remembered under divers names. *Hakra* and 'Wahmdah' (see The Early History of India, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1914, Clarendon Press), p. Smith, V. E 92) and 'Sarasvati' (see Rapson, E. J., in The Cambridge History of India, vol. i, p. 45). The Panjab is designated accordingly as the land, not of five, but of seven, rivers in the Avestan gazetteer of the Zoroastnan World (Vendidad, i. 18), as well as in the Vedas (e.g. in Rigveda, vm. 24 and 27). The 'Hapta Hindu' of the Avesta and the 'Sapta Smdhava' of the Vedas are philological equivalents of one another; and Herzfeld, loc. cit., taking this figure 'seven' as his cue, suggests that the name reproduced in Old Persian as 'Thatagus"' may represent a compound, in some Iranian or Sanskrit dialect, of the Indo-European word for 'seven' with some word meaning 'stream'. The identification of the Hapta Hindu of Vendiddd, i. 18, with the Panjab is corroborated by the :

m


649

be supported by our finding that, if we do not locate Thatagus here, we shall be left with a vacuum in a piece of territory that can hardly have lain outside the frontiers of an Achaemenian Empire which, before the end of Darius I's reign, had come to include not only the basin of the Kabul River down to the west bank of the Upper Indus but also the Lower Indus Valley as far north as a point where Hidu$ (Indoi) the Herodotean Taxation District No. 20 marched with Harahvati ('the Pactyan country'). In one of the appendixes to his gazetteer, Herodotus 1 tells us, as we have already noticed, 2 that the northernmost of all the Indoi were next-door neighbours of the city of Kaspatyros and the Pactyan (not the Gandarian) country on the one hand and next-door neighbours of the Indian Desert on the other and this means that, at the farthest, Hidu (Indoi) cannot have extended farther north than the southern extremity of the Panjab, i.e. than the neighbourhood of the latter-day city of Multan. Darius must have annexed the Lower Indus Valley from this point downwards to the sea

This conclusion

will

;

as part of his comprehensive plan for opening up through communications by water, via the Indus, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, his Red Sea-Nile canal, and the Eastern Mediterranean, between the eastern and western extremities of his empire. 3 The name Hldu (Indoi) means the country of the people known as

the Sindhu or Sauvira-Sindhu in Sanskrit literature. These had 'entered India shortly before the Persian period and worked southwards*, 4 and both the date of their arrival and the contemporary occurrence of another people bearing the name Sindoi on the banks of the River Kuban, in the throat of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, suggests that the Indoi in Sind will have been the left wing of a Eurasian Nomad horde whose right wing will have diverged to the north of the Caspian Sea in the course of the Volkerwanderung of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. 5 In giving their name to the province of Sind and to the description of it, in this passage of the Avesta, as being a region of 'abnormal heat' (see Jackson, A. V. W., in The Cambridge History of India, vol. i, p. 324); but, even if the identification of the Achaemenian 'ThataguS', too, with the Panjab were also to carry conviction, the countries called Hapta Hindu and Thatagus might be geographically identical without there being any common element in the etymologies of their names. A different interpretation of 'Thatagu' from Herzfeld's is given by Kent in his Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon, p. 187: '(9atagu- sb. "Sattagydia", a province of the Persian Empire Elam. sa-ad-da-ku-i$>

From &ara "hundred", Av. sata-, Skt. Akk. sa-at-ta-gu-u, Gk. EaTrayvSia -KO.TQV, Lt. centum, N. Eng. hundred, pIE kmto-m,-\- gav- "cattle": of hundreds cattle" (hardly "[Land of] Seven Streams", with Hz. AMI "having .

.

.

fatdm, Gk.

i.99n., 3 100-2, 8.73,

Konig Ru iD

63).'

The name

'having hundreds of cattle* fits the Panjab as aptly as the name 'Land of Seven Streams', and thus there seems to be no etymological obstacle to the equation Panjab, which is commended by the negative geographical consideration ThataguS that there is nowhere else where we can locate ThataguS, and by the positive indication that is to be found in the tropical dress in which the Thatagu[ ? d or v]iya are portrayed. Professor G. G. Cameron comments: 'I find it very difficult to reconcile ThataguS with the Panjab. Must it not rather be on the slopes of the Hindu Kush ?' But, if that had been its location, would it not have had to be labelled 'having hundreds of sheep and goats' ? And would not its denizens have had to be portrayed, not half-naked, but

=

muffled up in sisyrnai ? 1 In Book III, chap. 102. 3 See p. 634, with n. 6, above. 4 Tarn, op. cit., p. 171 based on H. Liiders.

B

2QG9.VH

Y2

2

s

On

p. 633, above.

See p. 608,

n. 4, above.

UNIVERSAL STATES

650

great river by whose united waters this province was traversed, the left wing of the Sindoi will have started a process which was to end in their name being applied to the whole sub-continent embraced within the J Sulayman and Himalaya mountain ranges and we can already see the ;

*

name Indian' in Herodo tus's usage. While, in Herodotus 's mind, the word 'Indoi' means in the first instance the nation inhabiting Darius 's Twentieth Taxation District and living on the banks of 'the river' [Indus], 2 and while he believes that Sind is the eastern edge of the Oikoumene,* with nothing to the east of its beginnings of this progressive extension of the

inhabitants except the Indian Desert that set for them their eastern boundary, he also knows of Indians, living south of the Achaemenian 4 province Hidu, who were independent of Darius he is aware that the Indians consist of many peoples not all speaking the same language 5 6 7 and, when, both in the gazetteer and in another context, he calls the ;

;

Indians 'by far the largest nation in the World', he is manifestly using the word 'Indians' to cover not merely the Indoi in Sind but all the inhabitants of Sind's vast south-eastern hinterland, where, between the Indian Desert and the Arabian Sea, it passes over into Gujerat and Malwa and Maharashtra and the Deccan. On the other hand, Herodo tus's location of 'the northernmost of the Indoi' no farther north than the latitudes of 'the Pactyan country' (i.e. Arachosia) and the Indian Desert, and his statement in this context that these were the Indoi who were sent to get from the Desert the gold 8 in which the Indian taxation district paid its enormous annual contribution to the Achaemenian 9 Imperial Treasury, show that, unlike the source from which Arrian obtained his field-state of the army assembled by Darius III ultimately Codomannus at Gaugamela a hundred years or so after the date at which Herodotus was writing, Herodotus did not reckon among the Indoi any of the peoples then in occupation of the Indus Basin to the north of Huius's northern boundary in the neighbourhood of Multan. 10 In thus excluding from the limits of India Proper the Panjab as well as Gadara, Herodotus was in agreement with the Sanskrit Scriptures; and there is a piece of evidence which suggests that, without knowing 1 'Sanskrit "Sindhu-s" and Old Persian "hi(n)du" agree absolutely in etymology, as original initial s before a vowel became h in Iranian, and the aspirated voiced stops became voiced non-aspirates in Iranian. This explains the variation between Hind and Sind; "India" is from the Iranian with loss of the initial h.' Professor R. G. Kent.

2

4 6 8

10

See See See See

Herodotus, Book

Book Book Book

How

was

Darius, the

River

whom

3 See ibid. III, chap. 98. 5 See Book III, chap. 98. III, chap. 101. ? i n Book V, chap 3. III, chap. 94. 9 See Book 102. III, III, chap. chaps. 94-95. it that, at some date between the reigns of the first Darius and the last

name

came to be applied to the peoples in the basin of the Kabul calls 'Aparytai' and 'Gandanoi'? The explanation might be annexation to the Achaemenian Empire by Darius, was attached for

'Indoi'

Herodotus

that HiduS, after

its

purposes to the dahyduS Gadara to constitute a single viceroyalty, though for purposes it was erected into a separate taxation district (Herodotus's District No. 20, which appears in his gazetteer as a separate unit from his District No. 7). If Gadara was united with HiduS for political purposes, this would account for the extension of the name 'Indoi' to the peoples in the Kabul River Basin, and for their retention of the name even after the rest of the Indus Basin, including the home of the authentic 'Indoi' in Sind, had recovered its independence as it had before Alexander's descent political fiscal

upon

it.

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE he

651

may have been

following Vedic authority through a chain of intermediate informants. In describing the gold-getting Indoi who were the northernmost of all the peoples bearing the name, Herodotus states 1 that these were 'the most warlike of the Indians' and that their culture (Graece 'diaita') was 'approximately the same as that of the Bactrians'. This must be an echo of the usage of the term 'Bahlika' (i.e. 'Bakhtris", 'Baktroi') in the Sanskrit Scriptures as a disapprobatory generic name a counterpart of the Avestan term 'pairikas' to cover the swarm of Eurasian Nomad peoples and the once sedentary victims of their invasion including not only the Bactrians Proper (Bhallas), but also the Qibi (Graece Sibai), it,

Malavas (Graece Malloi), Kshudrakas (Graece Oxydrakai), 2 Madda, Maddava, Madra, Madraka, Bhadra, and what not who, in the Volkerwanderung of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., had poured out of the Eurasian Steppe into the Panjab and beyond, without troubling to legitimize themselves in Brahman eyes by conforming to the ritual demands of Vedic orthodoxy. 3 The national names of these intruders are not mentioned either by Herodotus or in any of the Achaemenian official lists. -They have been preserved in Sanskrit and in post- Alexandrine Hellenic literature. But it seems reasonable to surmise that, in the administrative geography of the Achaemenian Empire, they figure

anonymously as the Thatagu[?d or v]iya (Sattagydai) together with those northernmost peoples of the Viceroyalty of Hidus who were more Bactrian than they were Indian in their way of life. 4 The name of one of these heathen Bahlika peoples that looms large in Sanskrit literature, and that had been located in the Kabul River Basin by students of Indie history, 5 is conspicuous by its absence from both the Achaemenian official lists and the Herodotean gazetteer. Where are the Kambojas ? In Sanskrit literature they are described as living in a cold country and manufacturing warm clothes from wool and fur, and 6 they are associated with the Yonas (Hellenes) by A$oka Maurya. These indications point to a location in the Paropanisus; and this is in fact 7 Ptolemy's location of a people whom he calls 'Tambyzoi' and places on the southern frontier of Bactria, about half-way along. If we may conjecture that 'Tambyzoi' is a corruption of an original 'Kambyzoi', we learn from this passage of Ptolemy's Geographia that the national name which appears in Sanskrit as 'Kamboja' was transliterated into Greek on the same system as the personal name which appears in Old In Book III, chap. 102. rearguard of these Oxydrakai who had made their way to the south-eastern edge of the Panjab is located by Ptolemy (Geographia, Book VI, chap, xn, 4) in the mountains of Sogdiana under the name Oxydrankai. 3 See de la Vallee Poussm, L. L'Inde aux Temps des Mauryas (Paris 1930, Boccard), pp. 1 2-1 6; Tarn: The Greeks in Bactria and India, pp. 169-71. 4 The portrayal of the Thatagu[ ? d or v]iya in loin-cloths does not disqualify them from being reckoned among the Bahlikas, since, as is evident from Elphinstone's account quoted on p. 636, above, of the dress of the nineteenth-century Afghan occupants of the Darajat, an immigrant Central Asian people on the plains of the Indus Valley might revert to its ancestral dress in the winter even if it had taken to wearing a tropical undress in the summer. s e.g. by de la Valise Poussm in op. cit., p. 15. 1

2

A

:

6 7

See ibid. In Geographia, Book VI, chap,

xi,

6.

UNIVERSAL STATES

652

Persian as 'Ka'^bujiya', in Elamite as 'Kan-bu-si-ja', in Akkadian as 1 'Kam-bu-zi-ia', and in Greek as 'Kambyses'. The question remains: Why did Kambujiya Fs father Rums' I of

Parsuwal and Ansan name his son 'the KambojV ? And this question raises an antecedent one: Why did Rums' I's father CispiS (Graece 2 Teispes) name his son 'the Kuru'? It is evident that the personal

names that thenceforth alternated in the Cyran, in contrast to the Ariaramnan, branch of the Achaemenidae are taken from the national names of two non-Persian peoples but it seems improbable that Cambyses I of ParsuwaS-AnSan (regnabat circa 600-559 B C can have been ;

-

named after the Kambojas whom we find subsequently established on the southern flank of the Hindu Kush, and a fortiori improbable that Cyrus I of ParsuwaS- Ansan (regnabat circa 640-600 B.C.) can have been named after the Kurus whose 'plain', the 'Kuru-kshetra', is located in Sanskrit edge of the Indian Desert, on the divide between the basins of the Indus and the Ganges. 3 clue to the solution of this problem may perhaps be found in the appearance of the same two words 'Kamboja' and 'Kuru' as place-names in Transcaucasia as well as on the Hindu Kush and in the Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit literature had preserved a memory of Uttara-Kurus 4 living beyond the Himalaya ; and at the time of writing the principal left-bank affluent of the River Aras was still called the Kur, while this River Cyrus, as it was likewise called by Hellenic geographers, had a left-bank affluent called by them the Cambyses, which gave the name 5 'Cambysene' to a north-western tongue of the steppe country, called by them Kaspiane, 6 in the Lower Kur-Aras Basin. Thus in Transcaucasia the two names Cyrus (Kuru) and Cambyses (Kamboja) were not only both on the map, as they were in India and on its north-west frontier, but were found in immediate juxtaposition, which suggests that in literature near the north-eastern

A

A Modern

Western scholar, Sylvain Levi, cited by Tarn in op. cit., pp. 138 and had tentatively equated the national name 'Kamboja' with the Paropanisadan place-name KapiSa, one of the two constituents of the double city KapiSakamS (see p. 639 n. 3, above); but Professor R. G. Kent had pointed out to the present writer that in the Elamite usage of the cuneiform script which, unlike the Old Persian usage, shows nasals before consonants, Old Persian 'Kapiakam' is transcribed 'Qa-ap-pi-i-a1

170,

qa-nu-i', in contrast to the Elamite rendering 'Kan-bu-si-j,a* for Old Persian 'Kabujiya*. This Elamite testimony showed that there was no nasal in the initial syllable of the name KapisV, and this discrepancy told against LeVi's equation Kapia = Kamboja. 2 See Weissbach, F. H., s.v. 'Kyros', in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopadie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Neue Bearbeitung, Supplementband IV, col. 1128. 3 There was another 'Kuru Plain* (Graece Kyrou alias Kourou alias Korou Pedion) in Western Anatolia, round the confluence between the River Hermus and its rightbank tributary the Phrygius, just to the north of the city of Magnesia-under-Sipylus (for the location see Strabo: Geographica, Book XIII, chap, iv, 5 (C 626) and 13 (C 629); Beloch, K. J.: Gnechische Geschichte, 2nd ed., vol. iv, Part II (Berlin and Leipzig 1927, de Gruyter), pp. 458-61). In Anatolia, as in Hindustan, 'the Kuru Plain' was a battlefield on which the political fate of a sub-continent was repeatedly decided. Kyroupedion was the scene of the overthrow of Lysimachus by Seleucus Nicator in 281 B.C. and of Antiochus III by the Romans in 190 B.C. Kurukshetra, between the River Jumna and the lost River Sarasvati, was the historic battlefield of Panipat, besides being the scene of the legendary war between the Kurus and the Pandus which is the theme of the Mahdbhdrata. * See Keith, A. Berriedale, in The Cambridge History of India, vol. i, p. 118. s See Strabo: I (C 501) and 5 (C 502); chap, Geographica, Book XI, chap, iv, xiv, 4 (C 528). 6



653

Transcaucasia the two peoples who thus stamped their national names on the local landscape must have been closely associated. It is perhaps almost as unlikely that the Cyran Achaemenidae will have derived their personal names from a pair of peoples in Transcaucasia as it is that they will have derived them from two peoples in and near India. But the occurrence of the two names in Transcaucasia as well as and in Transcaucasia at close quarters indicates in and near India that we have here two more names of Eurasian Nomad peoples who took part, and this in one another's company, in the Volkerwanderung of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. and, if, like so many of their ;

Kurus and Kambojas split into two wings whose paths diverged so widely, it does not seem unwarrantable to guess that a central

fellows, these

detachment of this pair of migrating peoples may have found its way to Luristan and there have been taken into partnership by KuruS Fs father CispiS.

have come, circa 670 B.C., 1 under the suzerainty of a the Assyrian records knew as Kashtaritu (Persice 2 3 Khsathrita) and located, at his first appearance, in the Kassite country riorth-east of ParsuwaS. This Khsathrita the to the was leader of an just anti-Assyrian coalition in which Medes and Mannaeans were associated with migrant Eurasian Nomads Cimmerians and Saparda 4 and the accommodation of a Kuru-Kamboja detachment of this horde in Parsuwa may have been part of the arrangement on which KhSathrita and of Parsuwas came to terms. The settlement of Eurasian Nomad Cis'pis' immigrants in Luristan is attested by the 'animal style' of the local school of bronze-work; 5 and some such reinforcement of the Achaemenian Power would also account for the sudden vast extension of its domain, at some date during Cis'pis'' (Graece Teispes') reign (regnabat circa 675-640 B.C.), from ParsuwaS in Luristan and AnSan in the Pushti-Kuh south-eastwards over Parsa (Pars). Teispes himself, for that matter, was the namesake of the Cimmerian war-lord TeuSpu who Cis'pis'

war-lord

seems

to

whom

crossed swords with Teispes' Assyrian contemporary Eszrhaddon (regnabat 681-668 B.C.), 6 even if he was not Teupu himself; and the folk-tale in which the mother of Cyrus I was called 'the bitch' 'Spako' 7 according to Herodotus may reflect the memory of a dynastic marriage between the House of Achaemenes and the House of the Scythian war-lord Ispakai who was riding hard at the Cimmerians' heels. 8 Whatever may be the correct historical interpretation of these Nomad names in the personal nomenclature of the Achaemenidae from Cis'pis 1

2

See Cameron, op. cit., p. 180. Esarhaddon'a KhSathnta was identified by Modern Western scholars with Hero-

dotus's Phraortes (i e. Fravarti) on that another FravartiS, the pretender to be 'Khsathrita of the House of Alteste p. 177, and Konig, F. W. :

the strength of Darius's statement, in 'DB', 24, Median throne in 522 B.C., gave himself out Uvakhs'tra (Cyaxares)'. See Cameron, op. cit., Geschichte der Meder und Perser (Leipzig 1934,

to the

Hmnchs), p. 30. 3 See Cameron, op. cit p. 177. 4 See Cameron, op. cit., p. 178; Konig, op. cit., p. 27. * This point is made by Cameron, op. cit., pp. 183-4, and by Konig, ,

6

See Luckenbill, op.

7

In Book I, chap. no. See Konig, op. cit., pp. 27-31

8

cit.,

vol.

ii,

;

op.

cit., p.

pp. 516, 530, 546. Luckenbill, op.

cit.,

vol.

ii,

pp. 517 and 533.

32.

UNIVERSAL STATES

654

(Teispes) onwards in the Cyran branch of the house, they must mean that the Cimmerians, the Kurus, the Kambojas, and the Scyths had played some part in Achaemenian history that had been auspicious as well as important.

Having now completed our review of the dahydva to the east of Western Iran, the heartland of the Achaemenian Empire, we have next

we take ship at the Indus out into the Indian Ocean, and then follow in the wake of Alexander's admiral Nearchus up the Persian Gulf, instead of following in the wake of Darius 's admiral Scylax round Arabia, we shall come to port in the dahydut which is called BdbiruS in all the Achaemenian official lists, and Babylonia by every Hellenic geographer with the one exception of Herodotus, who, for some private reason of his own, systematically calls Babylonia 'Assyria' 1 (the ninth to survey the

Kaspapyros,

dahydva

sail

to the west of the heartland. If

down

taxation district in his gazetteer). In the South- West Quarter of the

Achaemenian Empire, on which dahydul to BabiruS (Babylonia) is the Asshur of the Babylonian and Athurd of the Old Persian text of the official lists; and both the name and the area covered by it appear in Greek as the Syroi defined as 'the whole of Phoenicia and the so-called Philistine Syria, together with Cyprus' who constitute Herodotus 's Taxation District No. 5.

we have now

The name

set foot, the next

'Asshur', as applied to this dahydus,

is

manifestly the

term which, before the incorporation of the Neo-Babylonian Empire into the Achaemenian Empire, had been used in the Neoofficial

1 It is certain that Herodotus does mean Babylonia by 'Assyria*. In the gazetteer, for instance, he writes 'Babylon and the rest of Assyria* in between 'Susa and the rest of the Cissians* country* and 'Ecbatana and the rest of Media* (Book III, chaps. 91-92). 'Assyria* must mean Babylonia here, and so it must likewise in the field-state, where he states that the Assyrian contingent included the Chaldaeans, who were, of course, in occupation of South-Western Babylonia at this date (Book VII, chap. 63). In another

m

another he uses place he calls Nabonidus 'king of Assyria* (Book I, chap. 188), and 'the Babylonian country* and 'the Assyrian country* as synonyms in consecutive sentences, and explains that he is talking about an official administrative area: a 'satrapy* in the sense of a viceroyalty (Book I, chap. 192). Thus Herodotus's 'Assyria* certainly includes the whole of Babylonia Book III, chap. 155, is another example of this usage a passage describing and there is no evidence that it includes anything besides; for, the down-stream coracle traffic on the River Euphrates, his words 'the Armenians who live above (i.e. up-stream in relation to) the Assyrians' (Book I, chap. 194) can hardly be compelled to yield the meaning that his 'Assyria* was conterminous with his Armenia and therefore included Mesopotamia as well as Babylonia. The dahyduf officially styled 'Asshur' in Akkadian and 'Athura* in Old Persian did include Mesopotamia, as we shall see, but this official Assyria, unlike Herodotus's private 'Assyria', did not include Babylonia. It is the dahyduf that Herodotus calls 'the Syroi* (Book III, chap. 91). Herodotus is aware that this, and not Babylonia, is the district that is called Assyria by 'the Barbarians' (i.e. the Orientals). 'The Barbarians', he writes in Book VII, chap. 63, 'used the name "Assynoi" to mean the people whom the Hellenes called and these 'Syrioi* are the people whom Herodotus includes in his Fifth "Syrioi" Taxation District ('the whole of Phoenicia and the so-called Philistine Syria, together with Cyprus'), not the people of an 'Assyria* which contains Babylon and which is the ninth district in his list. Why did Herodotus deliberately adopt this private and peculiar usage of the word 'Assyria' to mean Babylonia? His words in Book I, chap. 178, suggest that his intention was to convey the historical truth that, in his day, Babylonia was the sole extant representative of a civilization, common to a still surviving Babylonia and a now extinct Assyria, which Herodotus labels 'Assynac* (e.g. in Book I, chap. 199), not 'Babylomc', because he is aware that Assyria, before her downfall and annihilation, had been the paramount Power in this society.

m

'


655

Babylonian Empire's administrative geography to designate that part of the defunct Assyrian Empire that had fallen to Babylon's share in the partition of or scramble for Assyria's spoils between Babylon, 1 Media, Egypt, and Cilicia; but the exact limits of this Neo-Babylonian

dominion labelled 'Assyria* which the Achaemenian Empire had inherited are not easy to ascertain. may be sure that the Neo-Babylonian Empire's 'Assyria' did not include the border cantons of Babylonia on the east and north-east

We

Gambalu, Der, and Kar-Asshur which Assyria had detached from Babylonia and annexed to herself in and after the reign of Tiglath-

e.g.

2

746-727 B.C.). These authentically Babylonian cantons must simply have been 'disannexed', and it is also possible that the Babylonians may have now taken their revenge by annexing to Babylonia cantons higher up the Tigris, in the direction of the City of Asshur, which were as authentically Assyrian as Kar-Asshur and Der Pileser III (regnabat

were Babylonian. But how far up the Tigris had the Neo-Babylonian Empire's writ run ? We know from Herodotus 's itinerary of the Achaemenian Empire's Great North- West Road 3 that neither the section of this highway east of the Tigris, running from Susa to the neighbourhood of Nineveh, nor the section west of the Tigris, running from the neighbourhood of Nineveh to the southern boundary of Armina, somewhere just north-west of Mardln, traversed either BabiruS or Athura (alias Asshur, alias Syria) at any point and this means that the Median share of the Assyrian Empire must have included, in addition to the metro;

politan territory of Assyria east of the Tigris, at least the portion of the Department of Nineveh that lay on the west bank, together with three departments Tille, Nasibina (i.e. Nisibin), and Izala which, on the

post-Alexandrine Hellenic map, were embraced in the province labelled with the imported Macedonian name 'Mygdonia'. This, however, was not the south-western limit of the ex-Assyrian territory west of the Tigris that the Medes had occupied. Though, in

609 B.C., during the Allies' final campaign against the remnant of the Assyrian Army in the neighbourhood of Harran, Nabopolassar had penetrated (if we are to accept his claim) as far as Izala and even Urartu, not only these countries but Harran itself had fallen into Median hands in the event; Harran had remained in Median hands from circa 607606 B.C. onwards and it had not been acquired by the Neo-Babylonian Empire de facto, whatever the position may have been dejure during the 4 that is to say, till Astyages of intervening half century, till 555 B.C. Media was already so gravely preoccupied with the insubordinateness of Cyrus II of Ansan that Nabonidus of Babylon could venture to eject the Median garrison from Harran with impunity. Since in the Achaemenian Age the country round Harran (i.e. the upper basin of the River Balikh) was certainly not included either in Armenia or in Cilicia or in the fragment of a partitioned Media which Herodotus labels 'Matiene', ;

1

2

See Herodotus, Book I, chap. 106. See Forrer, op, cit., pp. 95-102, with the

map

of 'the development of Assyria, Herodotus, Book V, chaps, 49-54. According to Olmstead, op. cit., pp. 36-37. According to Adontz, op.cit., pp. 283-5 and 296-9, the date of Nabomdus's occupation of Harran was 553 B.C.

745-606.'

3

UNIVERSAL STATES

656

Neo- Babylonian Empire's must have been left within the bounds of the Neo-Babylonian province of Asshur by Cyrus II when, after his conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 B.C., he kept it territorially intact as a single viceroy alty this eleventh-hour acquisition of the

within his

own

universal state.

Wherever the northern boundary of the Achaemenian dahydus and Athura- Asshur- Syria may have run, we of A.D. 1952 it comprised territory to the east as well as territory to the west of the River Euphrates ; for the country through which, in 401 B.C., Xenophon and his comrades found themselves marching after they had crossed from the right to the left bank of the Euphrates was still Syria 1 and, in Arrian's copy of both the fieldstate and the order of battle of Darius III Codomannus's army at Gaugamela in 331 B.C., the Syrians from Syria 'Between the Rivers' were brigaded with the Syrians from 'the Hollow Syria* under the single command of Mazaeus. 2 The portion of the province and taxation district labelled Syria-Asshur-Athura which lay west of the Euphrates was called 'Hollow' by the Hellenes because it was traversed by the northernmost section of the Great Rift Valley which after breaking southward out of the Taurus at Mar* ash and running up the Orontes Valley, through the Biqa down the Jordan Valley, and through the Wadi 'Arabah, the Gulf of Suez, the Red Sea, and the Danakil Trough continues up the Valley of the River Hawash in Abyssinia into Kenya Colony along a track punctuated, at this southern, as at the northern, end by lakes. The Babylonian name for the portion of Syria known on this account as 'Hollow Syria' in Greek was 'Beyond the River* (Babyi.e. beyond the River loniace Ebir-nari, Aramaice 'Abar-Nahara) 3 from as the distinguished portion of Syria 'Between the Euphrates, Rivers' Euphrates and Tigris. The capital of this Achaemenian dahydut 'Athura', the province comprising the Neo-Babylonian Empire's eventual share of the Assyrian Empire's spoils, was situated in the portion 'Beyond the River', 15 parasangs (i.e. just over 89 kilometres) to the north-west of the crossing of the Euphrates at Thapsacus. 4 For the capital of a province astride the western elbow of the Euphrates, this position was well chosen, since it was within easy reach of the more extensive but less populous and less wealthy eastern portion of the dahydus that lay 'Between the Rivers', while it stood just within the portion, lying 'Beyond the River', which contained the industrially,

Darian taxation

know that

district called

like the Syria

j

e

,

commercially, and navally important Phoenician city-states with their miniature impend in imperio. 5 Indeed, the 'Beyond the River' portion of Athura- Asshur- Syria overshadowed the 'Between the Rivers' portion 1 See Xenophon: Expeditio Cyri, Book I, chap, iv, 19. 2 See Arnan: 6, and chap, xi, Expeditio Alexandri, Book III, chap, vm, 4. 3 In a letter to the present writer, Professor G. G. Cameron points out that, in the Akkadian text of 'DSP, 3g, 11. 30-35, 'Ebir-nari' is employed as the translation for 'Kara hya Athuriya* ('the Assyrian people') of the Old Persian text. Since the passage from there was a mountain by name of Lebanon states that 'the cedar timber, this brought; the Assyrian people, it brought it to Babylon' (Professor R. G. Kent's translation in Old Persian, p. 144), it is certain that Syria between the west bank of the Euphrates and the eastern shore of the Mediterranean was comprised within the Achaemenian dahydul labelled 'Athura'. s See 4 See Xenophon, op. cit., Book I, chap, iv, lo-n. p. 582, above.


657

to such a degree that in popular, as distinct from official, usage the term 'Beyond the River* was employed as a name for the whole province.

This popular usage

is followed in private business documents drawn in Babylonia in the reigns of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius I 1 and in the Book of Ezra, and eventually even in the Aramaic inscriptions on

up

provincial coins struck circa 340 B.C. by the governor of Athura, 2 Mazaeus, though we know from the field-state and the order of battle preserved by Arrian that 'Between the Rivers', as well as 'Beyond the

was included in Mazaeus's province. the Achaemenian official lists Athura- Asshur is mentioned as a different dahydus from BabiruS, but this does not mean that Athura was from first to last a separate viceroyalty, any more than the mention of Suguda, side by side with Bakhtris, means that Suguda was not under the Viceroy of Bakhtris 's administration. Athura is, in fact, placed in immediate juxtaposition to Babirus in the three latest of the official lists ('DSe', 'DNa', 'XPh'), as well as in the earliest ('DB'); and this is an indication that Athura and Babirus, like Suguda and Bakhtrig, still constituted a single viceroyalty down to the year in which 'XPh' was inscribed. The Babylonian private documents that mention Athura under the popular name 'Ebir-nari' inform us in so many words that this dahyaut was under the administration of the Viceroy of Babylon until at least the sixth year of Darius Fs reign. 3 On the other hand the governor of 'Abar-Nahara' (i.e. Athura), Tatnai, and the Emperor Darius I corresponded with one another direct, and not via the Viceroy of Babirus, according to the Aramaic document embedded in the Book River',

In

all

'

of Ezra (chapter v. 6-chapter vi. 12), whatever the value of this document may or may not be as historical evidence. 4 Perhaps we may infer that Darius 1 left the original Viceroyalty of Babylon, which included

Athura

as well as Babylonia, still intact on the political map, but it, on his new fiscal map, into two separate taxation districts.

dissected

Athura had, however, certainly been separated from BabiruS for political as well as for fiscal purposes by the time when Xenophon and his comrades traversed Athura en route for Babirus in 401 B.C. Indeed, in that year the two provinces were not even conterminous for, after crossing the River Khabur ('Araxes') just above its confluence with the Euphrates, Cyrus the Younger's expeditionary force, on the next stage of its advance down the left bank of the Euphrates, found itself marching through Arabia (Persice Arabaya) for a distance of 125 parasangs (i.e. about 742^ kilometres) before entering Babylonia 5 at a point not more ;

1 See Leuze, O. Die Satrapieneinteilung in Syrien und im Ziveistromlande von (Halle (Saale) 1935, Niemeyer), pp. 25, 36-37, and 70. :

2

See Leuze, op. 3 See Leuze, op. Babih u Ebir-nan

cit.,

p.

520-320

no.

pp. 36-37 and 70. On the occurrence of the formula Pahat Babylonian texts, Professor G. G. Cameron comments in a letter to the present writer 'When a Babylonian says "Babylon and Ebir-nan", he can only mean that there was a single administrative unit comprising Babylon and Assyria [i.e. the dahyduS known in Old Persian as Athura] in official terms.' 4 'It is difficult to regard this ... as historical, or at any rate as belonging to the period in question. It looks as though it had originally referred to some other episode at some later time' (Oesterley, W. O. E.: A History of Israel, vol. n (Oxford 1932, Clarendon Press), p. 85). s See Book i and 5, and chap, vii, i and 14-16. Xenophon, op. cit., I, chap, v,

m

cit.,

UNIVERSAL STATES

658

than about 13^ parasangs (i.e. just over 80 kilometres) to the northwest of 'the Median Wall'. The dahydut called Arabia in Greek and Arabdya in Old Persian, which in 401 B.C. thus extended across the middle course of the Euphrates into the desert and steppe country of South-Eastern Meso1 potamia according to Xenophon, also extended, according to Herodotus,

to the shore of the Mediterranean at the south-east corner of that sea, along a short stretch of coast between a point south-west of Gaza and a place called lenysos. Since the next stretch of the coast, extending from lenysos south-westwards, for the distance of a three days' journey, to the north-east corner of Egypt, was, according to Herodotus in the same context, part of Athura (Syria), it looks as if a corridor of territory had been cut out of Athura and granted to Arabaya by the Achaemenian

Imperial Government expressly in order to give Arabaya an outlet on the Mediterranean; and we can read between Herodotus 's lines 2 that this cession of territory had been a reward for services rendered by the Arabs to Cambyses in assisting his passage across the desert from Syria when he was invading Egypt. In thus placing their Arab allies in charge of the desert sections of two such vital lines of Imperial communication as the route from Babylonia to Syria up the Euphrates and the route from Syria to Egypt along the Mediterranean coast, the Achaemenian Imperial Government were no doubt moved by the same considerations that had led them to place their Hauma-( ?)drinking Sakan allies in charge of their borderland over against the Great Eurasian Steppe. They had realized that, in a steppe and desert country, the only effective police force that a sedentary Power could find to perform the task of keeping the local Nomad occupants in order was the local Nomad nation-in-arms itself, and that, if these high-spirited and self-confident Nomads were to be induced to police themselves on the Achaemenian Empire's behalf, they must be given the honourable status of free allies. The Achaemenidae were assuredly wise thus to adopt Nabonidus's fruitful policy of conciliating the Arabs instead of reverting to the Assyrians' sterile policy 3 of trying to crush them on a terrain on which the Arabs were bound in the long run to have the advantage over the troops of any sedentary Power. The Arabs had to be brought to a halt by diplomacy if not by military operations, since they had been erupting out of Arabia into 'the Fertile Crescent* simultaneously with the Iranian Nomads' eruption out of Central into South- Western Asia in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. 4 Indeed, the Arabian frontier that Darius had inherited was perhaps little less formidable than the Central Asian one. have no information about the boundaries of the Achaemenian know that the temple-state of dahydus Arabaya at other points.

We

We

Jerusalem

lay,

not in Arabaya, but in Athura, though Judah had never

See Herodotus, Book III, chap. 5. In Book III, chaps, 4-7 and 88. See Abbott, N.: Tre-Islamic Arab Queens', pp. 4-5, in The American Journal oj Semitic Languages and Literatures^ vol. Iviii, No. i, January 1941 (Chicago 1941, University of Chicago Press), pp. 1-22, for Arab-Assyrian relations from the reign of * See III, hi. 423. Tiglath-Pileser III to that of Asshurbampal inclusive. 1

2 3


659 been included in the Assyrian Empire, but had been annexed to the Assyrian province of the Neo-Babylonian Empire by Nebuchadnezzar. Presumably Nabonidus had intended to annex Edom likewise to Asshur when he had conquered Edom in 553 B.C., 1 but here the Arabs were the tertii gaudentes, for, when the remnant of Edom reappears on a postAlexandrine Hellenic map, this 'Idumaea' lies as far north as the Negeb, in the former territory of the Hebrew tribe of Simeon, while the former territory of Edom in the Wadi Arabah, round Petra, has become the domain of 'the Agricultural Arabs* ('the Nabataeans'). We may guess that, in addition to Petra, the oasis of Tayma, in the North- Western Hijaz, which Nabonidus had reached and had liked so well that he had f

preferred it to Babylon as a residence, had subsequently become part of the Achaemenian Empire's Arabian sphere of influence. It will be seen that the Achaemenian dahyaut Arabaya embraced at least as much of the North-West Arabian and South-East Mesopotamian Steppe as the Arab phylarchy of the Banu Ghassan, which was in charge of the Roman Empire's Arabian marches on the eve of the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors' eruption out of the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. The status of the Achaemenian dahydus Arabaya must also have been much the same as that of this Ghassanid phylarchy and its Lakhmid counterpart which performed the equivalent service for the Roman Empire's rival and the Achaemenian Empire's successor the Sasanian Empire. 2 In all three cases, Arab Nomad peoples whose pastures adjoined the borders of a sedentary Power were recognized by that Power as its autonomous allies in consideration of their undertaking the wardenship of the desert marches. do not know, however, whether 'the King of the Arabs' 3 with whom Cambyses negotiated for his expeditionary force a free passage overland from Syria to Egypt was the ruler merely of a local Arab principality that had supplanted the Edomites at Petra, or whether the same Arab prince's authority also extended south-eastward to Tayma in the Hijaz and perhaps north-

We

eastward, as well, to Hatra in Mesopotamia. 4 Mudrdya was Egypt; the Putdyd appear to have been the Libyans to the west of Egypt as far as the hinterland of the cluster of Greek citystates on the bulge of Cyrenaica Kusa was the Napatan Kingdom which 5 occupied the south of the Egyptiac World. Herodotus includes the two Hellenic communities Kyrene and Barke, as well as the Libyans his Number Six as adjoining Egypt, in the same taxation district on the assume and we were that, itself, political map, may they Egypt likewise brigaded with Egypt in the same viceroyalty. On the other hand Herodotus reckons the Ethiopians who were Egypt's next-door ;

6 neighbours as gift-bringing allies and not as tax-paying subjects; and the maintenance of a permanent garrison of professional troops at

See Olmstead, op. cit., p. 37. See p. 131, n. 3, above, and VIII. vhi. 50-51. See Herodotus, Book III, chaps, 5 and 7. 4 See Cameron, G, G., in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies^ University of Chicago Press), p. 309. 5 See II. 11. 116-17. 6 See Book III, chap. 97. 1

2 3

vol.

ii

(Chicago 1943,

UNIVERSAL STATES

66o

1 Elephantine by the Achaemenian Imperial Government is evidence that control over the Kingdom of Napata was only nominal. The North- Western Quarter of the Achaemenian Empire which was probably the quarter that was of least account in Persian eyes before the shocking disaster of 480-479 B.C. begins with the dahydus named Armina (alias Arminiya; Graece Armenia), which figures in Herodotus's description of his Taxation District No. 13 as one of its three constituent 2 parts. We have already given reasons for believing that, in the Darian

its

division of a re-established Achaemenian Empire into taxation districts, the Armenian sub-empire was dissected into three districts: Armenia Proper the strip of country between the northern boundary of Armenia Proper and the south shore of the Black Sea and a western district consisting of Cappadocia-cum-Dascylitide. And we have suggested that Herodotus has inadvertently preserved the description of a Viceroyalty of Armenia in which all these three taxation districts were comprised thanks to his having mistaken this description of a political unit for a description of one of its three fiscal subdivisions. The taxation district in question was, on this view, confined in reality to Armenia Proper; and this was 'a small country' 3 consisting of the Upper Tigris Basin together with the north-west corner of the Upper Euphrates Basin. The boundary between the taxation district consisting of this Armenia Proper and its western neighbour, the taxation district Cappadocia-cumDascylitide, will have run to the east of the road from the latter-day city of Sivas (Graece Sebasteia) on the Upper Halys to the latter-day city of Malatiyah (Graece Melitene, Assyriace Meliddu). The boundary between Armenia Proper and its northern neighbours the coastal peoples will have followed approximately the watershed between the Upper Euphrates Basin and the Black Sea. What was the boundary between an Achaemenian Armenia and its eastern neighbour Urartu which, on the political map of the Achaemenian Empire, was included in the Viceroyalty of Media4 and which, on the Darian fiscal map, was associated, as is recorded in the Herodotean 5 gazetteer, with the Hyspiritis and with a Matiene or Matiane which embraced the Median share of Assyria as well as the basin of Lake Urmiyah? Under the Achaemenian regime at as early a date as 401 B.C. the western frontier of Urartu over against Armina already ran rather farther to the east than Urartu *s Assyrian adversaries TiglathPileser III and his successors had ever succeeded in pushing this ;

;

when, in 401 B.C., Xenophon and his comrades, marching northwards, crossed the watershed between the Upper Tigris Basin and the basin of the Eastern Euphrates (Murad Su), and debouched into the valley of the Eastern Euphrates' left-bank affluent the Teleboas (the stream draining the plain of Mush), they found themselves passing out of Armenia, not into Urartu, but into another Armenia called 'the Armenia to the West'. 6 This valley of the Teleboas and the frontier back; for

1

3

4 6

2 See p. 119, with n. 7, above. pp. 604-11, above. Strabo: Geographtca, Book XI, chap, xiv, 5 (C 528). 5 See See pp. 603-4, above. pp. 628-32, above. See Xenophon, op. cit., Book IV, chap, iv, 4.

See


661

section of the Eastern Euphrates Valley into which it opened 1 thus lay on the Armenian side of the boundary between Armenia and Urartu in

the Achaemenian Age but in the Assyrian Age they had lain inside the Urartian Kingdom's frontiers. The conquest of this piece of territory by 2 King Menuas of Urartu (regnabat circa 828-785 B.C.) is recorded in an on a stele found near Mush in the of Trmd. 3 We may inscription village perhaps infer that during the bout of anarchy in South- West Asia at the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., between the collapse of the Assyrian and the establishment of the Median Power, Gurdi's Mushkian war-band which was then overrunning the former Assyrian territory of Nairi in the Tigris Basin overran the former Urartian territory in the Teleboas Valley as well, and that, when the Medes eventually imposed their rule on the autochthonous Urartians and on the intrusive Mushkians alike, they respected this accomplished fact in settling the boundary between an Urartu which they were incorporating into Media ;

and an Armenia which they were making Median Commonwealth.

itself

a

into a sub-empire within

Teleboas had in fact thus been transferred from some date between the end of the Assyrian and the beginning of the Median Age, this might prove to be the explanation If the valley of the

Urartu to Armenia

at

of two puzzling pieces of nomenclature. In the first place it might ex4 plain how the Mushkian (i.e. Phrygian) followers of Gurdi, who, in their

own

5 language, called themselves Haik, came to be known in the official neither as Haik nor as Mushki nor as terminology

Achaemenian

Gordians, but as 'Arminiya'. This Old Persian ethnikon of a place'Arminiya' may represent the Urartian word Urmeniuhi-ni which occurs in Menuas' inscription found in the neighbourhood of Mush as the name of one of the conquered local cities which he had rased to the ground and, in confirming the cession of this Urartian canton called Urmeniuhi-ni to the Mushki intruders who called themselves Haik, the Medes, and the Persians after them, may have labelled these new owners of this transferred piece of Urartian territory with the Urartian local

name

;

place-name. If this conjecture carried conviction, it might also explain the dahydus that is labelled 'Arminiya' or 'Armina' in the Old Persian text of the Achaemenian official lists is labelled 'tl-ra-as-tu

why (i.e.

'Urartu') in the Babylonian texts.

Now that Urartu, save for the one

Urmeniuhi-ni, had been swallowed up in the dahyduZ labelled 'Mada', the Babylonian archivists might have applied the label 'Urartu* to a dahydus which contained the only piece of ex-Urartian territory that had not lost its identity and that had been labelled with its historic Urartian local name in the Old Persian official nomenclature. 6 district of

1

The two

districts together constituted the Taronitis of Strabo: Geographica,

Book

XI, chap, xiv, 5 (C 528). 2 According to Adontz, op. cit., pp. 185 and 193. 3 See Adontz, op. cit., pp. 153-4 and 221, and PrdSek, J. V.: Geschichte der Meder und Perser (Gotha 1906, Perthes, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 148. * See pp. 604-5, above. 5 Presumably taking this name from their jumping-off ground in a Hayasa, to the north-west of the north-western elbow of the Western Euphrates (Turcicl Frat Su, alias Qara Su), which eventually acquired the name 'Lesser Armenia* (see p. 610, n. 2, above). 6

This tentative explanation of the origin of the name 'Arminiya' or 'Armina*

is,

of

UNIVERSAL STATES

662

'The Armenia to the West', which Xenophon and his comrades entered in entering the valley of the Teleboas, must in 401 B.C. have been a separate province of the Achaemenian Empire from the 'Armenia' which they had entered when they had left the country of the Kardoukhoi behind them in crossing from the south to the north bank of the Centrites (Bohtan) for these two Armenias were under the administra1 tion of different viceroys: 'Armenia' under Orontes and Artuchas; 'the Armenia to the West' under Tiribazus. 2 The portion of 'Armenia' through which they marched from the north bank of the Centrites to the headwaters of the Eastern Tigris was the province which the 3 Assyrians had called Ulluba and which the post- Alexandrine Hellenic were to call Arzanene and the village, containing a resigeographers dence for the viceroy, through which they passed en route f will have been the seat of administration for Orontes' and Artuchas' viceroyalty. As for Tiribazus's viceroyalty 'the Armenia to the West', its name indicates that it must have included the westernmost parts of Armenia Proper, and this means that it must have extended westwards from the Taronitis down the valley of the Eastern Euphrates (Turcice Murad Su) through Acilisene 5 into the extreme north-west corner of the Upper Euphrates Basin, beyond the right bank of the Western Euphrates (Turcice Frat Su, alias Qara Su), which the Hittites had called Hayasa and which, in the Roman Age of Hellenic history, eventually came to be labelled 'Armenia Minor' to indicate that it was the only piece of Armenian territory left outside the 'Armenia Major' which King Artaxias and his successors had united under the sovereignty of their house since 6 190 B.C. We may also presume that 'the Armenia to the West', which Tiribazus was administering in 401 B.C., included Sophene, the ;

;

course, highly speculative. One alternative possible derivation for 'Armina' is 'Enmena', the name of the father of the last known king of Urartu, Rusas III (rcgnabat 610-585 B.C. according to Adontz, op. cit., p. 193). Another possible derivation is 'Arumu-m', meaning the country of the Aramaeans who had flooded out of the North Arabian Steppe into Nain at the turn of the second and the last millennium B.C. (see p. 604, above) and whose name had eventually come to the ears of Hellenic explorers of the southern shore of the Black Sea as the 'Arimoi' of the Iliad, Book II, line 783. This last of our three alternative etymologies for the name 'Armina' is commended by the Upper Tigris Basin's latter-day name 'Dryar Bakr', which signifies in Arabic the lands occupied by an Arab Nomad tribe called the Bakr which had pushed its way in from Mesopotamia some time before the Muslim Arab conquest of the Upper Tigris Basin (see Le Strange, G. The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge 1905, University Press), p. 86. On this analogy it might be conjectured that the Upper Tigris Basin had derived its Old Persian name 'Armina', representing an Urartian 'Arumu-m', from a previous wave of Semitic-speaking Nomad immigrants from the South. 1 See Xenophon, op. cit., Book IV, chap, m, 3-4. 2 See 3 See ibid, chap, iv, 4. Forrer, op. cit., pp. 85-87. * See Xenophon, op. cit., Book IV, chap, iv, 2. s Strabo makes Acilisene march with the Antitaurus (i.e. along the Sophene along watershed between the Upper Tigris Basin and the Upper Euphrates Basin) and also lie between the Taurus and the Euphrates valley bottom ('potamia') above the point where this bends southward (Geographtca, Book XI, chap, xiv, 2 (C 527)). The two indications in this passage can be reconciled if 'the Taurus' here means the Dersim Mountains in the quadnlateial between the two arms of the Euphrates, and if 'the Euphrates' here means the Eastern Euphrates (Turcice Murad Su). Acilisene' would then be approximately coextensive with the latter-day Turkish vilayet of Kharput. Another passage (Geographica, Book XII, chap, m, 28 (C 555)), in which Strabo says that AcihsenS is demarcated by the Euphrates from Armenia Minor, would be reconcilable with the previous passage if, in this second passage, 'the Euphrates' means the Western Euphrates (Turcice Frat Su, alias Qara Su). 6 See pp. 626-7, above, and 664-6, below. :

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE Armenian canton

in the

Upper

663

1 Tigris Basin which lay immediately

to the west of Arzanene. If these were approximately the bounds of 'the Armenia to the West* which was one of the political divisions of the Achaemenian Empire in 401 B.C., Tiribazus's viceroyalty was perhaps the matrix of an Armenian successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire, with its capital at Arsamosata in the lower valley of the Eastern Euphrates, in the neighbourhood of Kharput, whose King Xerxes 2 was brought to heel by the Seleucid King Antiochus III circa 212 B.C. 3 Since Xerxes was sub4 sequently liquidated by his Seleucid conqueror, it looks as if Xerxes' ci-devant kingdom, and Tiribazus's ci-devant viceroyalty, survived in an Armenian province of the Seleucid Monarchy consisting of Acilisene, 5 Sophene, Odomantis, 'and other territories' whose military governor, 6 Zariadris, declared his independence after his former Seleucid master Antiochus Ill's catastrophic defeat by the Romans in 190 B.C. 7

Zariadris' Armenian successor-state of the Seleucid Empire did not include 'Armenia Minor', to the north-west of the north-western elbow of the Western Euphrates, since we know 8 that, soon after the year 183

Armenia Minor was under the rule of a 'satrap' of its own, named Mithradates, whose acts show that, notwithstanding his title, he was an independent prince de facto. We do not know whether this de facto independence had been acquired by Armenia Minor at the time of the fall of the Achaemenian Empire or at the time of the liquidation of Xerxes of Arsamosata or at the time of Zariadris of Sophene 's secession from the Seleucid Empire in 190 B.C. do know, however, that Zariadris had a brother military governor of a sister Armenian province of the Seleucid Empire who seceded simultaneously, and that the Armenian province which this colleague of Zariadris' named Artaxias was administering at the time lay on the middle course of the River 9 Aras, in the district where, at some date between 190 and 183 B.C., he laid out a new capital which he called Artaxata after his own name. B.C.,

We

1 2 (C 527), states that Sophene lay Strabo, in his Geographica, Book XI, chap, xiv, between Mount Masms (i.e. the watershed between the Upper Tigris Basin and the Khabur Basin) and the Antitaurus (i e. the watershed between the Upper Tigris Basin and the Upper Euphrates Basin). 2 The name of this King Xerxes of Arsamosata was perhaps commemorated in the name of the province called Xerxn6 or DerxSne (the latter-day Dersim) astride the Western Euphrates above Acilisene and Armenia Minor and below the Caranitis. 3 See Polybius, Book VIII, chap. 23 (25), as interpreted by Edwyn Bevanin The House 1

of Seleucus *

(London

See Bevan,

1902,

Edward Arnold,

2 vols.), vol. n, pp. 15-16.

ibid.

Odomantis is likely, to judge by its Macedonian name, to have lain on the Mesopotamian side of Mount Masius, between an Anthemusias and a Mygdoma which had likewise been named after cantons of the Seleucids* Macedonian homeland. 6 'The name "Zariadris" obviously contains as its first element Avestan "zaî-", Sanskrit "han-", meaning "yellow, gold-coloured, yellow-green". In trying to identify its second element, the -dr- in "Zariadris" makes me think of Avestan "vazra-", Sanskrit "vajra-" (the first element in Old Persian "vazraka", meaning "great"), with Median z = Old Persian d from Indo-European g(h), meaning the club of Indra in Sanskrit, which was the thunderbolt or lightning. So "Zariadris" = "za'n-vadri-s"' or "za'n-vazn-s", meaning "having (or wielding) the yellow club (the lightning)".' Note by Professor R. G. Kent. 7 See Strabo, Book XI, chap, xiv, 5 (C 528) and 15 (C 531-2). s

8

See Bevan, op. cit., vol. n, p. 123. This must be the terminus ante quern, if Strabo (Geographica, Book XI, chap, 6 (C 528)) is correct in reporting that Artaxias employed Hannibal's services in piece of town-planning.

xiv, this

UNIVERSAL STATES

664

Achaemenian parlance, the name 'Armina' or 'Arminiya' had we have argued that it did, not the former Chaldian Kingdom of Urartu, but its western neighbours Hayasa (Latind Armenia Minor) and Nairi (Latine Acilisene, Sophene, and Arzanene), which, at the moment of the collapse of the Assyrian Empire, had been overrun by Gurdi's war-band of Phrygian-speaking Mushki barbarians, the Haik, it is surprising to find the name Armenia adhering, in 190 B.C., to a district on the course of the Middle Aras which not only lay, as the If,

in

signified, as

Teleboas Valley likewise lay, within the former frontiers of the Kingdom of Urartu, but was actually situated in the extreme north-eastern corner of the Kingdom of Urartu's former dornain, at the farthest possible remove from the region, adjoining the western and south-western frontiers of Urartu, which had been overrun by Gurdi's war-band at the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. At what date, and in what circumstances, had the name 'Armenia' come, by the year 190 B.C., to extend as far afield as the middle course of the Aras Valley, where at that date Artaxias was administering an Armenian province on the Seleucid Monarchy's behalf, and where, after declaring his independence, he founded the city of Artaxata ? Recollecting that, in the Achaemenian official lists, the Old Persian name 'Armina' is rendered as Urartu' in the Babylonian versions of the texts, we might be inclined, on first thoughts, to jump to the conclusion that, when Gurdi's war-band had crossed the north-western elbow of the Western Euphrates (Frat Su, alias Qara Su) towards the close of the seventh century B.C., they had overrun, not only the Assyrian dominions in Nai'ri and the Teleboas Valley, but the whole of the adjoining Kingdom of Urartu as well, and that, in consequence, Urartu had been brigaded by Median and Persian empire-builders with Nairi and Hayasa to constitute the Achaemenian dahydus called 'Armina' within a subempire that also included both Cappadocia and the strip of country between Armina and the Black Sea, instead of being brigaded with the Urmiyah Basin (Matiane) and Adiabene to constitute Herodotus 's Taxation District No. 18 within a Greater Media. Might not this association be just another of Herodotus 's blunders? And would not the identification of Xenophon's 'Armenia' with Urartu, and of Xenophon's * Armenia to the West' with Nairi plus Hayasa, make sense of Xenophon's data as well as Strabo's? This explanation of the adhesion of the name 'Armina' to the middle course of the River Aras in 190 B.C. would be an attractively simple one, but, on further consideration, we shall see that, after all, it will not fit the facts. In the first place, Xenophon's 'Armenia', which lay in the Upper Tigris Basin between the north bank of the River Centrites (Bohtan) and the Tigris-Euphrates watershed, can hardly have formed part of the same Achaemenian viceroyalty as Urartu if the Teleboas Valley belonged to a different viceroyalty called 'the Armenia to the West', since the head of the Teleboas Valley is traversed by the only practicable route between the Upper Tigris Basin and the Basin of Lake Van, which had been the former Kingdom of Urartu's nucleus and heart, so that an 'Armenia to the West' that comprised the Teleboas Valley *

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE would

virtually

665 have insulated 'Armenia* and Urartu from one another.

In the second place the passage (whatever

its

provenance

may

be) in

which Strabo informs us that, in 190 B.C., the middle valley of the River Aras was already Armenian territory, contains further information which indicates that this was the only part of the former domain of the Kingdom of Urartu that, at this date, was, as yet, Armenian. Strabo not only states explicitly that Armenia had been *a small country' down to the time of Zariadris* and Artaxias' simultaneous declarations of independence in 190 B.C. he goes on, in this passage and in a subsequent 1

;

2

to give a catalogue of the successive territorial acquisitions by which Artaxias and his successors progressively built up a Kingdom of

one,

Armenia Major which, in Strabo 's own day, extended from the east bank of the Western Euphrates to the western shore of the Caspian Sea round the debouchure of the rivers Aras and Kur, and from the watershed between the Khabur and the Tigris along Mount Masius to the south bank of the River Kur and to the farther side of its head-waters. This progressive aggrandisement of Artaxias' Armenian kingdom was crowned by his descendant Tigranes' annexation of the sister Armenian 3 kingdom of, the House of Zariadris but this eventual preponderance of the Artaxiads over the Zariadrids was the cumulative result of a ;

previous progressive expansion of the Artaxiad dominions in other quarters at the expense of divers non- Armenian peoples and states and, in this context, Strabo gives us three pieces of information which throw light on our present problem. In the first place the Armenian language i.e. the historic Armenian language, of Indo-European origin, which had been carried from Hayasa to the east side of the Euphrates by Gurdi's Phrygian-speaking Mushki followers whose own name for themselves was 'Haik' had become the common language of the heterogeneous population of Armenia Major only as a consequence of the political unification of all these peoples under the Artaxiad Crown. In the second place, one of the countries at whose expense the Artaxiads had enlarged their dominions had been Media. In the third place the Median territories which the Artaxiads had annexed to their expanding Kingdom of Armenia Major had been Kaspiane, Phaunitis, and Basoropeda. 4 Of these three territories which, according to Strabo, had previously ;

belonged to Media, one, namely Basoropeda (Armeniacd Vaspuragan), lay on the east side of the Van Basin in the heart of Urartu and therefore within the limits of the canton which Herodotus calls 'Alarodioi'

and which he associates, not with Armenia, but with the Saspeires and the Matienoi who, together with these Alarodioi, constitute, as we have 5 seen, his Taxation District No. 18. Another of the three ex-Median districts annexed by the Artaxiads, namely Kaspiane, lay in the Lower is assigned by Herodotus, as we have likewise Taxation District No. 15, labelled 'Sakai and Kaspioi'. must infer that in 190 B.C. both the Lower Aras-Kur Basin and the

Aras-Kur Basin and seen,

We

6

to his

1

2

In Geographtca, Book XI, chap, xiv, Ibid., f 15 (C 531-2).

3

Ibid., 4 Ibid., s

On

15 5

5

(C 528).

(C 532). (C 528).

pp. 628-32, above.

6

On

pp. 626-8, above.

666

UNIVERSAL STATES

Van

Basin were still Median, and not yet Armenian, in the political and a fortiori that they were then still non- Armenian-speaking countries, considering that, according to Strabo, the Armenian language made its way there only in the wake of the Artaxiad House's conquests. The Media to which these two districts thus still belonged in 190 B.C. will have been the Media Atropatene (the latter-day Azerbaijan) that was one of the Iranian successor-states of the Achaemenian Empire and we may infer that, in the scramble for possession of the former Achaemenian dominions after the overthrow of the last Darius by Alexander, the territories on which Atropates, the founder of the successor-state that came to be called after him, had succeeded in laying hands had been the Herodotean Taxation District No. 18, save for Adiabene, together with the Herodotean Taxation District No. 15. Media Atropatene will have continued to hold the portions of these sense,

;

ex-Achaemenian territories comprised in Kaspiane, Basoropeda (Vaspuragan), and the Phaunitis until it lost them to a rising Artaxiad Power at some date subsequent to the year 190 B.C. But, like the Basin of Lake Van, which still belonged to Media Atropatene at that date, the middle valley of the River Aras, which was the nucleus of the Artaxiad Kingdom and which was already Armenian in 190 B.C., had been part of the former Kingdom of Urartu and must therefore likewise have been included in the Herodotean Taxation District No. 18 originally. At what date, then, had this section of the Aras Valley become Armenian instead of Median ? In the absence of any other information on this point, we can only say that there is no evidence to indicate that the transfer had taken place until after the fall of the Achaemenian Empire, while there is one piece of evidence which suggests that the district in the middle valley of the Aras, of which Artaxias was military governor, on behalf of the Seleucid King Antiochus III, in 190 B.C., may have been taken from Media Atropatene and annexed to Armenia by Antiochus III himself after his liquidation of the Armenian King Xerxes of Arsamosata at some date after his subjugation of Xerxes in 212 B.C. The conqueror, whoever he may have been, who annexed the middle valley of the Aras to Armenia must have arrived there by forcing his way into the Aras Basin up the valley of the Western Euphrates and over the Frat Su (Qara Su)-Aras 1 watershed; and, if there is any substance in our conjecture that the name of the province called Derxe'ne (Xerxene), astride the Western Euphrates immediately above Acilisene, commemorates Xerxes of Arsamosata 's conquest and annexation of this district, we may further infer that Derxene also marks the limit of Xerxes' conquests in this direction. If so, the middle course of the Aras must have been annexed to Armenia by some successor of Xerxes and his only successor, down to the year 190 B.C., had been Antiochus III. On this showing, we may abide by our previous finding that, in the Achaemenian Age, no portion of the former Kingdom of Urartu except the Teleboas Valley (the Tardnitis) was included in the dahydus whose Old Persian name was 'Armina', notwithstanding the fact that the ;

1

On

p. 663, n. 2, above.


667

Babylonian rendering of 'Arrnina* is 'Urartu'; and we may confirm our identification of the Achaemenian 'Armina' with a territory confined to the Upper Tigris Basin and the north-west corner

official

of the Upper Euphrates Basin, corresponding to the Assyrian 'Nairi' 1 together with the Hittite 'Hayasa'. The peoples lying between Armenia Proper and the Black Sea whose country was embraced, on the political map, in the Viceroyalty of Armenia, while it constituted, on the fiscal map, the Herodotean

Taxation District No.

were, as enumerated by Herodotus in his

19,

gazetteer and rearranged in their apparent geographical sequence from east to west, the refugee Mares who had inherited their name from the or perhaps Eurasian Nomad 'mariannu' 2 and were to bequeath

Human

to the latter-day Georgian canton Imerethia in the upper basin of the River Rhion (Phasis) the refugee Moskhoi who were to bequeath their name to the latter-day Georgian canton Meskhethi round the headwaters of the River Kur the Makrdnes on the northward descent from the watershed on which, in 400 B.C., Xenophon and his comrades were to catch their first glimpse of the Black Sea 3 the Mossynoikoi along the seaboard to the west of Trebizond; 4 and the Tibarenoi along the seaboard to the west of the Mossynoikoi. 5 The Herodotean Taxation District No. 19, which these peoples occupied between them, must have been bounded on the west, like Armina, by the Viceroyalty of Katpatuka, and on the east by 'the Kolkhoi and adjoining peoples as far as the Caucasis Range' who, according to 6 Herodotus, were 'gift-bringers' and not tax-payers. In 400 B.C. there were Colchians astride the road leading from the country of the Makrones to Trebizond 7 and, if, in the Achaemenian Age, the Colchians occupied the seaboard without a break from this point eastwards to the Caucasus, they must have insulated the Mares and Moskhoi from the Makrones, Mossynoikoi, and Tibarenoi unless the Mares and Moskhoi were at this time located somewhere farther to the west than the Georgian 8 cantons that were eventually to be called after them. However that may it

;

;

;

;

1

In this connexion

force (Herodotus,

it is

that, in the field-state of Xerxes expeditionary 73), the Armenians are associated, not with the

noteworthy

Book VII, chap.

Urartians ('Alarodioi'), but with the Phrygians and other peoples of Central Anatolia. are equipped like, and are brigaded with, the Phrygians (of whom they are stated, in this passage, to be an offshoot) and the Armeno-Phrygian equipment is described as being a sub-variety of the Paphlagonian. We may guess that the culture represented by this equipment was really Hittite rather than Paphlagonian in origin. 2 See the Note on Chronology in x. 200-2. 3 See Xenophon, op. cit., Book IV, chap, vii, 27, and chap, vin, i. * See ibid., Book V, chap. iv. s See 1-3. ibid., Book V, chap, v, 6 In Book III, chap. 97. 7 See 8-9. Xenophon, op. cit., Book IV, chap, viii, 8 In Anatolia, as in Iran, the brigading of the national contingents, as described in the across their grouping for civil cuts of Xerxes' field-state expeditionary force, partly administrative purposes, as described in the gazetteer of Danus's taxation districts. The two peoples at the two extremities of District No. 19 the Moskhoi and the Tibargnoi are brigaded under one command; the Makrones and Mossynoikoi under another; and the Mares with the Colchians, who were a non-tax-paying people not included within the bounds of the Nineteenth District. To judge by Herodotus's description of their equipment, the Colchians, as well as all the peoples of the Nineteenth District, belonged to the same cultural group as the Saspeires and the Alarodioi. The Tibarenoi, Makrones, Moschian equipment, the Kolkhoi, Alarodioi, and and Mossynoikoi are paraded

They

,

m

UNIVERSAL STATES

668

and adjoining peoples as far as the Caucasis Range' seem more likely than the peoples in his Taxation District No. 19 to represent the Akaufaciyd ('the People of the Mountains*) whose name appears in 'XPh' alone among the official lists. The Kingdom called Cilicia in Greek and Khilakku in Assyrian is left be, Herodotus's 'Kolkhoi

unmentioned

in the official lists of

status of sovereign independence,

dahydva though

in deference to its juridical de facto relation to the

its

Achaemenian Empire may be more accurately conveyed by Herodotus in his erroneous inclusion of districts as his District

No.

it

among Darius 's

original twenty taxation

1

4.

At the turn of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Khilakku had been merely one of nine or ten petty principalities in South-Eastern Anatolia, between the Upper Euphrates and the Upper Halys, over which the Assyrians had asserted a suzerainty that had been short-lived and at no time very firmly established but, in the subsequent scramble at the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. for Assyria's derelict dominions, Khilakku had distinguished herself from her neighbours by her Autolycan deftness as 'a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles* 2 and by the tact almost equal to the Vicar of Bray's with which she had succeeded in keeping on good terms with surrounding Great Powers who were on bad terms with one another. The measure of her achievement was that, after having enlarged her original patrimony four- or five-fold, she had succeeded, without having to forfeit any of her territorial gains, in securing a place for herself within the framework of the Achaemenian universal state on the juridical footing of a sovereign independent ally of the Imperial Power. Three indications of the tracte of the Kingdom of Cilicia's expanded frontiers within the Achaemenian imperial framework are to be found in Herodotus 's history. This Achaemenian Cilicia marched with the ;

Viceroyalty of Armenia along a navigable section of the River Euphrates where the Great North- West Road crossed the river out of Armenia and the once land-locked into Cilicia. 3 On the Mediterranean shore statelet of Cilicia now had a long and valuable coastline on the Mediterranean the boundary between Cilicia and the Viceroyalty of Syria was Cape Posideium (Arabics Ras-al-Basit), that is to say, a point on the

mouth of the River Orontes. 4 On the Anatolian Mazaka where, on a postAlexandrine Hellenic map, the name 'Cilicia' still attached to one of the coast to the south of the

Plateau, in the region containing the city of

provinces of a latter-day Kingdom of Inland Cappadocia the Kingdom of Cilicia in the Achaemenian Age bestrode the River Halys from a point below the river's exit from the Armenian highlands where it had its source to a point beyond its southward bend where Cilicia gave way on the right bank to the country of the Western Matienoi and on the left

bank

to Phrygia. 5

We

Saspeires in sub-Moschian equipment. may guess that the culture represented by equipment was really Urartian rather than Mushkian in its origin. 1 See pp. 592-3, above. 2 Shakspeare: The Winter's Tale, Act IV, scene ii. 3 Herodotus, Book V, chap. 52. * Book 3 Book III, chap. 91. I, chap. 72.

this


669

In terms of the political geography of the Assyrian Age, these indications tell us that, to the south, Khilakku had annexed at least six once

independent principalities Tukhana (Graece Tyana) and Atuna or Tuna (Graece Tynna) between the original Khilakku and the Taurus Range Tabal (Bit Burutash) in the Antitaurus Qu'e 1 (Graece Akhaioi) 2 Sam'al 3 in the North Amanus and Unqi, astride the lower reaches of the River Orontes, where first Antigonus Monophthalmus and then Seleucus Nic^tor was to choose the site for the capital city of a South-West Asian empire. 4 To the east, Khilakku must have annexed at least two 5 principalities, for, as we have seen, the Cilician territory on the west bank of the Euphrates into which the Great North- West Road ran after crossing the river out of Armenia must have been the region round Malatiyah (Graece Melitene, Assyriace Meliddu), and Khilakku could not have annexed Meliddu without having also annexed at least the :

;

;

;

;

6 intervening south-western part of the principality of Kammanu. may also guess that Khilakku had acquired Kummukhu (Graecb Commagene) along the Euphrates immediately to the south of Meliddu and immediately to the north of the river's western elbow, and Gurgum

We

(whose capital Marqasi was to bequeath its name to Mar'ash) between Kummukhu and Sam'al. On the other hand the Babylonians must have managed to lay hands on Carchemish, Arpaddu, and Til Turi between the elbow of the Euphrates and the eastern frontiers of Sam'al and Unqi for they undoubtedly had access overland, through territory of their own, from the elbow of the Euphrates to their dominions in Ebir-nari. Again, Herodotus 's itinerary of the Great North-West Road informs us ;

a province of Kammanu in the upper basin of the right-bank tributary of the Euphrates, immediately adjoining Meliddu to the north-west must also have lain outside the bounds of the Kingdom of Cilicia and must have been included within the Achaemenian dahydus Katpatuka. Herodotus tells us 7 that, from the We can be sure of this because T Road entered Cilicia after crossing est Northwhere the Great point the Euphrates out of Armenia, this road ran through Cilician territory for the distance of only 15 J parasangs (just over 89 kilometres); and, on the assumption that the point of entry into Cilicia was the river-crossing on the road from Kharput to Malatiyah, Herodotus 's figure yields us

that

Til-Garimmu

Tokhma Su

W

1

Qu'e, with

to be found

its

well-placed ports and with the largest area of prime agricultural land in Anatolia west of Lydia and the Dascylitis, was Khilakku's

anywhere

greatest prize.

to Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 91. survived as late as A.H. 163, in the reign (A.D. 775~8s) of the 'Abbasid Caliph Mahdl (see Ahmad al-Baladhurr Kitab Futuh al-Bulddn, vol. i, translated by P. K. Hitti (New York 1916, Columbia University Press), pp. 263-4). s On 4 See p. 629, n. 4, ad finem, above. p. 201, above. 6 While this principality of Kammanu that was Khilakku's eastern neighbour perhaps derived its name from the city of Comana, the latter-day province of the Kingdom of Inland Cappadocia called Chammanene, in the bend of the Halys where Herodotus locates ? the Western Matienoi, was possibly called after Prince Kamana or Kamamas ( Hebraic^ Haman, Graced Haimon) of Carchemish, whose father King Aias campaigned in SouthEast Anatolia in the first half of the eighth century B.C. (see Cavaignac, E. Le ProbUme Hittite (Pans 1936, Leroux), p. 165; Delaporte, L.: Les Htttites (Pans 1936, La Renaissance du Livre), pp. 335-6)7 In Book V, chap. 52. 2 3

Hyp-Akhaioi according

The name

:

UNIVERSAL STATES

670

two pieces of information: from the Euphrates crossing the road must have run north-westwards over the Uzun Yaila to Sivas in the upper valley of the Qyzyl Irmaq (Halys), and it must have run out of Cilicia into Cappadocia only a short distance to the north-west of Malatiyah town, that is to say, at the boundary between the former principality of Meliddu and Til-Garimmu. 1 Herodotus's figure of 15! parasangs allows of no other location for this sector of the frontier between Cilicia and Cappadocia, and a fortiori it allows of no other alinement for the Great North-West Road in this stretch for either of the two alternative routes running westward from Malatiyah via Mazaca (the latter-day Qaysari), in contrast to either of those running north-westward from Malatiyah via Sivas, would carry the road through what must indubitably have been Cilician territory for many times the distance only 15^ parasangs that Herodotus gives for this Cilician section. An alinement via Sivas also has two other points in its favour: it would allow for the at first sight surprisingly long distance of 104 parasangs which Herodotus gives for the Cappadocian section of the road from the Cilician-Cappadocian frontier to the crossing of the Halys out of Cappadocia (in the narrower sense) into Phrygia; and it would allow for an alinement through Hattusas (BoghazqaFeh), the site of the former capital of the Hittite Empire, which must once have been the centre from which all ;

roads in Eastern Anatolia radiated. What were the affinities of the people, called Khilakku in Assyrian and Kilikes in Greek, who had built this miniature empire circa 600 B.C. ? When the principality of Khilakku makes its first appearance in history at the turn of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. it has Mita's Mushki 1 Herodotus tells us that, where the road crossed the Cilico-Cappadocian frontier, it ran through a pair of gates and passed by a pair of guard-houses. This description in the Herodotean itinerary of the Great North-West Road is to be interpreted in the light of an eyewitness's account of the security arrangements on the Cilico-Synan frontier in 401 B.C. At this point in their anabasis, Xenophon and his comrades passed through a pair of gates in a pair of walls extending from the Mediterranean shoreline to the cliffs overhanging it. The north wall was manned by a Cilician garrison, the south wall (in normal times) by an imperial garrison, and there was a no-man's-land, three hundred bet\veen (Xenophon, op. cit., Book I, chap, iv, yards wide, 4-5). Evidently this was

m

the layout at road-crossings between autonomous and imperial territory where there was no frontier river to provide a natural insulator such as the Euphrates provided between Cilicia and Armenia, and the Lower Khabur between Arabaya and Syria. There were gates, for example, between Arabaya and BabiruS (see ibid., chap, v, 5); and Xenophon's mention of a pair of guard-houses, as well as a pair of gates, on the frontier between Cihcia and Syria suggests that, on the Great North-West Road, the pair of gates mentioned by Herodotus may have been located at the point, a few miles to the north-west of Melitene" on the more easterly of the two Melitene-Sebasteia roads, which is

labelled 'praetonum* in the

Roman

itineraries (see J.

G. C. Anderson's

map

Asia

Minor (London 1903, John Murray)). It may be noted, in passing, that Xenophon's account of

his itinerary shows that the territory of the 'sovereign independent* Kingdom of Cilicia had been drastically reduced, since the date of Herodotus's official sources, by the Imperial Power which was in theory

Cihcia's ally. In 401 B.C. Dana (i.e. Tyana) of Cappadocia (Xenophon, op. cit., Book

was already part of an Imperial Viceroyalty 20); and this means that the I, chap, n, Government must have Cilicia by this time not only Tyana but detached from Imperial the Cilicia astride the River Halys which had been the historical nucleus of the Cilician Kingdom. Moreover, the pair of gates and guard-houses which in 401 B.C. marked the

frontier between Cilicia and an Imperial Viceroyalty of Syria stood between the shore of the Mediterranean and the cliffs of the Amanus on the east coast of the Gulf of Alexandretta (ibid., chap, iv, 1-5); and this means that by this time the former principality of Unqi had been transferred from Cilicia to Syria. Thus by 401 B.C. Cilicia had already been reduced to its latter-day limits between the Taurus and the Amanus.


671

for its neighbours on the south-west in Lycaonia and the ubiquitous Gurdi's Mushki for its neighbours first on the south, in Tyana, in the

reign of Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria (regnabat 746-727 B.C.), and then on the north-east in Til-Garimmu, astride the road running southeast via Nairi to Assyria, in 695 B.C. 2 Our line of least resistence would be to guess that the Khilakku were Phrygians like their neighbours; and this guess would not conflict with the Hellenic evidence; for, in the 1

appearance of the Kilikes in Hellenic literature, they are located in the south-west corner of Hellespontine Phrygia, at the head of the Gulf of Edremid (Adramyttium), in Thebe under Mount Plakos. earliest

Hector's wife Andromache was one of them, and her father had been king of this north-western Cilicia till Achilles had killed him and sacked Thebe. 3 It looks as if the Kilikes had been the advance-guard of the Phrygian barbarians who had broken out of South-East Europe into the Hittite World at the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C.

The Kilikes who had settled at Thebe would be a detachment that had wheeled to the right after their passage from the European to the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles the Khilakku of Mazaka would be a detachment that had wheeled to the left, marched eastwards along the plain between Dascylium and the Mysian Olympus, and climbed on to the Anatolian Plateau at In Onii, like their Hittite predecessors and like their Galatian successors some fifteen hundred years later. Herodotus 's Taxation District No. 3, which included the dahyauS called Katpatuka (Cappadocia), had two peculiarities. The first of these was its size. From the upper basin of the Tokhma Su tributary of the Euphrates and from the upper reaches of the Halys it extended right across Anatolia to the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles, and it was broad as well as long, for there is no indication that it embraced less than the whole of Inland Phrygia, and that country extended south-westwards into the upper basin of the River Maeander. The second peculiarity of this taxation district was that it straddled a former international frontier uniting, as it did, ex-Median territory to the east of the Middle and ;

Lower Halys with ex-Lydian

territory to the west of

it.

This feature of Herodotus's District No. 3 was peculiar without being unique, considering that his District No. 14 similarly united HarahvatiS with the three south-eastern cantons of Parsa; and, even if there had not been this parallel case, there could not have been any doubt about the facts. The administrative union of ex-Lydian territory to the west of the Halys with the ex-Median dahydul Katpatuka was attested by the consensus of several different pieces of evidence, positive as well as negative. In the first place it was on record that a territory administered from Dascylium, on or near the south shore of the Sea of Marmara, had been detached from Lydia since Cyrus IPs day. 4 In the second place this ex-Lydian territory did not appear under any separate and distinctive * See See Konig, op. cit., p. 15. Forrer, op. cit., p. 80. Iltad, Book VI, 11. 395-7 and 414-28. 4 We know from Herodotus, Book III, chaps. 120, 126, and 127, that Orcetes, who had been appointed Viceroy of Sardis (Sparda) by Cyrus II, had a colleague and rival named Mitrabates who was governor of 'the province of Dascylium', i.e. the northern and north-eastern parts of the former Lydian Empire (see p. 611, n. i, above). i

3

UNIVERSAL STATES

672

name of its own in any of the official lists of dahydva l and, among all the dahydva named in any of the lists, there is no dahydus' except Katpatuka to which this ex-Lydian territory could have been attached as it must have been attached to one or other recognized dahydus if it was \

not recognized as a separate one in its own right. The only dahydva on the mainland of Anatolia that are named in any of the lists are Sparda (Sardis), which was the viceroyalty from which the Dascylitis had been detached; 'the lonians on the mainland', who were insulated from Dascylium by the Viceroyalty of Sardis; Karka (Caria), which was insulated from Dascylium a fortiori] and Katpatuka. The process of exhaustion seems to force upon us the conclusion that, at the dates at

which all our six official lists were drawn up, the ex-Lydian territory whose seat of administration was at Dascylium was attached to the ex-Median dahydus Katpatuka. This conclusion, which is thus presented to the investigator by the negative evidence of the official lists taken in conjunction with Herodotus 's mention of a separate governorship of Dascylium in the days of Orcetes' administration at Sardis, is positively corroborated by Herodotus 's description of the third taxation district in his gazetteer for he describes ;

this district as including, in addition to the Cappadocians (alias Syrioi), who lived to the east of the River Halys, five peoples who lived to the

west of the Halys namely the Paphlagones immediately to the west of the Lower Halys the Mariandynoi to the west of the Paphlagones, in the hinterland of the Hellenic city Heraclea Pontica; the Asiatic :

;

Thracians, between the debouchure of the River Sangarius into the Black Sea and the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus the Phrygians, whose domain extended from the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara southwards to the headwaters of the River Maeander and south-eastwards, through Lycaonia, to the north-western face of the Taurus Range and the Asiatic Hellespontine Hellenes along the Anatolian shore of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles. The names of two other peoples in this district the Western Matienoi within the southward bend of the River Halys and the enigmatic Ligyes are added in the field-state of Xerxes expeditionary force. 2 ;

;

'

1 Arguments against the conjecture that this continental territory may be the dahydul designated by the label 'those in the Sea' are set out on p. 679, n. i, below. 2 See Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 72, and, for the Western Matienoi, also Book I, chap. 72. The evidence about the location of the Western Matienoi is examined in the Note on Chronology in x. 201. As for the Ligyes, it is not inconceivable that they might have been the left wing of the Latin-speaking people whose right wing comes into the light of history in the second century B c. along the French and Italian Rivieras and in the North-Western Appennmes. The Hittites themselves were an Indo-European-speaking some of the documents in the people of the centum group whose language extant Hittite Imperial Archives retrieved at Boghazqal'eh was considered by Modern Western philologists to have a closer affinity with Latin than with any other Indo-European language. In this connexion it might be noted that the Illynans another Indo-Europeanspeaking people of the centum group who on the European side of the Black Sea Straits were at this time wedged in between the Itahci and the Thracians had also made their way into Anatolia, to judge by the name of the Mount Ellurya (i.e. Illyna) which figures in the political geography of the Hittite World in the second millennium B.C. as the scene of a battle between the Hittites and the Gasga in the sixteenth year of Mursil II 's reign (see Delaporte, L. Les Hittttes (Pans 1936, La Renaissance du Livre), p. 122). An immigration of Illynan peoples into Anatolia is also attested by the name of the Veneti, occupying a strip of the Anatolian coast to the east of the Mariandynoi, whom the fieldstate of the Trojans' allies in the Second Book of the Iliad (11. 851-5) appears to equate

m

:


673

Another piece of information which confirms the official lists' testimony ex silentio that the Dascylitis was at this time united with KatCtesias' statement 1 that, as a prelude to Darius 's campaign the beyond Bosphorus against the Scythian horde on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, the Viceroy of Cappadocia was sent on a naval reconnaissance for the viceroyalty whose viceroy was selected for this mission is likely to have been the north- westernmost viceroyalty in the Achaemenian Empire within the imperial frontiers as these stood before Darius inaugurated the forward movement into Europe. In the light of the divers pieces of evidence reviewed above, we may perhaps now take it as proven that the Achaemenian viceroyalty designated Cappadocia* by Ctesias in this passage embraced the whole of Herodotus 's Taxation District No. 3, including the ex-Lydian territory, to the west of the River Halys, that was administered from 2 Dascylium. But in the light of Herodotus 's description of his Taxation if we have been right in interpreting this as the District No. 13 description of a viceroyalty which has been mistakenly applied by Herodotus to one of this viceroyalty 's fiscal subdivisions 3 we have now to ask ourselves whether the viceroyalty designated 'Cappadocia' by Ctesias may not have included other taxation districts besides Herodotus 's District No. 3. If the formula Taktyike and Armenioi and the adjoining peoples as far as the Black Sea' does in reality designate, not just a taxation district, but a viceroyalty embracing the three taxation districts numbered 13, 3, and 19 in Herodotus 's gazetteer, then the viceroyalty in which Herodotus 's Taxation District No. 3 was embraced will have united an ex-Lydian Dascylitis not merely with an ex-Median is

patuka

;

*

Cappadocia, but with an ex-Median Armenia as well, and this viceroyalty have extended eastwards from the eastern shores of the Straits not merely as far as the upper reaches of the Halys but as far as the eastern boundaries of an Achaemenian Armenia over against an Achaemenian Urartu and Adiabene that were included in Herodotus 's Taxation District No. 18 and in the Viceroyalty of Media. 4 It will, in fact, have included all the country on the Asiatic side of the Straits that had been overrun by Phrygian invaders from Europe between the end of the

will

and the beginning of the sixth century B.C. This conclusion that Armenia and Cappadocia-cum-Dascylitide together constituted a single viceroyalty in Darius 's day is not impugned by the appearance of both the names 'Arminiya' and 'Katpatuka' side 5 by side in all our six official lists. We have already noticed that at least either never constituted in the lists named other of the nine dahydva as we far districts so taxation or even separate separate viceroyalties know and, if Modern Western scholars were right in taking the repeated thirteenth

;

with the Paphlagomans, and by the name of the city of Dardanus, which was to cling to the straits on whose Asiatic shore this Dardanian settlement had once stood. 1 See Ctesias. Persica, Books XII-XIII, 47 (16), in J. Gilmore's edition (London 1888, Macmillan), pp. 150-1. * Professor G. G. Cameron comments. 'Almost but not quite I am fully persuaded

now

that the

Greek Dascylium

is

Katpatuka.'

*

See pp. 604-11, above. The tracte of these boundaries

5

On

3

is

discussed on pp. 660-7, above.

p. 589, above.

B 2609

VII

Z

UNIVERSAL STATES

674

juxtaposition of names of dahydva in the lists e.g. the juxtaposition of bracketed Suguda and Bakhtrig in all six as evidence that dahydva thus 1 together were included in one and the same viceroyalty, this would apply to Arminiya and Katpatuka, which are placed next to one another, in that order, in four out of Darius's five lists (namely in DB', 'DPe', 'DSe', 'DNa'), while in the fifth Darian list, 'DZd', they appear to have been separated only by the single name 'Yauna'. This is presumptive evidence that, at any rate down to the end of Darius's reign, Arminiya and Katpatuka, like Bakhtri and Suguda, were combined to constitute 4

a single viceroyalty. 2 viceroyalty of this size proved, however, too unwieldy to be retained intact. In the field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary force the constituent peoples of the Herodotean Taxation District No. 3 alone are already distributed among no less than four separate brigades one consisting of the Paphlagones and Western Matienoi and a second of the Mariandynoi, Ligyes, and Cappadocians, while the Asiatic Thracian contingent constitutes an independent command and the Phrygians are brigaded

A

with the Armenians of Herodotus's Taxation District No.

13.

At

least

408 B.C., when Cyrus the Younger was appointed by his father King Darius II to an extensive civil jurisdiction and military as early as

command

in Anatolia, the original Viceroyalty of Armenia-cum-Cappadocia was broken up; for Cyrus the Younger was made Viceroy of Cappadocia and of Great Phrygia' (i.e. Southern Phrygia), but Northern though Lydia was included (alias 'Hellespontine') Phrygia was not in his sub-empire, 3 and we may gather ex silentio that Armenia was not included in it either. By 401 B.C. the Viceroyalty of Cappadocia had been compensated for its loss of Armenia and the two Phrygias by having been enlarged, at the expense of the Kingdom of Cilicia, by the addition of the Tyanitis 4 and therefore also, by implication, of Cilicia*

See p. 589, above. Since it is hardly conceivable that the whole of a viceroyalty embracing Armenia can have been administered from Dascylium, at the far western extremity of its domain, we must suppose that Orcetes of Sardis' contemporary Mitrabates of Dascylium was, not a viceroy in his own right, but the lieutenant-governor of a viceroy whose seat of 1

2

administration was more centrally situated. 'Lieutenant-governor' is the literal meaning of the Greek word v-napxos, by which Herodotus designates Mitrabates in Book III, chap. 126, and, considering the vagueness of the Hellenic usage of such terms, this interpretation is not invalidated by the use of the same designation in chap. 120 for Orcetes, who was certainly a viceroy and not a viceroy's subordinate. Considering that the Dascylitis must have been detached by Cyrus II from Lydia as a precautionary measure to guard against the possibility of a repetition of Paktyas' revolt (see pp. 5 8-9, above), we should have expected a priori to find the Dascylitis not merely detached from a dissident viceroyalty but attached, in order to make assurance doubly sure, to some other viceroyalty on whose loyalty Cyrus II could rely as we may presume that he could rely on the loyalty of Armenia, in virtue of his being Astyages' heir. Even as it was, Orcetes found himself able to liquidate Mitrabates and re-annex the Dascylitis to the Viceroyalty of Sardis (Sparda) during the anarchic year 522-521 B.C. If the Dascylitis had been erected into a separate viceroyalty on its own account, and had not been attached to Armenia besides being detached from Lydia, it would have remained still more helplessly exposed to the risk of aggression by an ambitious viceroy of Sardis. 3 See Xenophon, op. cit. Book I, chap, ix, 7, cited on p. 183, n. 7, above, and in IX. viu. 548, n. i. Considering that Pharnabazus, the governor of the Dascylitis, was not subordinated to Cyrus the Younger in 408 B.C., we may perhaps infer that Pharnabazus had already, before that, been a viceroy his own right, and that his father Pharnace's, who had been governor of the Dascylitis as early as the summer of 430 B.C. (see Thucydides, Book II, chap. 67), had previously enjoyed the same status.

m

4

See Xenophon, op.

cit.,

Book

I,

chap,

ii,

20.


675

on-Halys as well. By the same date, Armenia had not merely been detached from Cappadocia but had been partitioned into two separate 1 viceroyalties, as we have seen. The dahydut called Sparda in the official lists is Herodotus 's Taxation District No. 2, whose constituent peoples are the Mysoi, Lydoi Lasonioi Kabalioi and Hygennees. The Spardiya whose name was adopted as the official label for this dahydus because it had already attached itself to Sardeis, the city that was the seat of the local administration in virtue of having once been the capital of a Lydian Empire were the western vanguard of the host of Eurasian Nomad peoples who had broken out of the Steppe into South-Western Asia between the Caspian Sea and the Pamirs before the end of the eighth century B.C. 2 At their first emergence above our historical horizon, we see the Saparda (as the Assyrians called them), already poised on the western rim of the Iranian Plateau, astride the road leading down via Behistan towards Babylonia. 3 In the third decade of the seventh century B.C. we find Esarhaddon battling with a coalition of Medes, Saparda, and Cimmerians under the leadership of the barbarian war-lord Kashtaritu 4 (Khsathrita) and, though Assyria's victory in this round of the struggle y

y

y

;

in the establishment of three new departments labelled Madai, Bit Kari, and Saparda, these territorial gains had all been lost 5 of the again before 667 B.C. The next 150 years or so in the history Saparda are a blank but, after leaving a trace of their westward passage

was registered

;

in the course of those years in the Sevordi-k who long afterwards, in the in eighth century of the Christian Era, were to assert themselves in Uti,

6 the angle above the confluence of the rivers Kur and Aras, the Spardiya in the Achaemenian official (as they are called in Old Persian) reappear lists of dahydva as the eponyms of a dahydus named Sparda at the 7 western extremity of Anatolia in the country known in Greek as Lydia. 2 See pp. 608-10, above. have been the right wing of the horde, if the same national name are located who is to be detected in the 'Sabadioi' by Ptolemy, Geographia, Book VI, 6, in the south-east corner of Bactna. chap, xi, 4 See p 653, with n. 2, above. s See Ferrer, op. cit,, p. 93; Konig, op. cit., pp. 27 and 37. 6 See p. 610, n. 2, above. 7 Professor G. G. Cameron comments: 'It is surely only by straining that one can connect the name of the dahydul Sparda with the Saparda in Media.' Certainly at first seem to be the most likely explanation of the sight a mere accidental coincidence might 1

On

3

These Saparda

p. 662,

above.

will

as far apart as Western Iran and Western appearance of the same name in locations Anatolia at dates separated by as long a Time-interval as 150 years. The writer offers the following reasons for thinking that a more probable explanation is to be found in the carried its name with it. (i) We know that at migration of a Nomad horde which had same 150 years, least one other horde, the Cimmerians, did in fact migrate, within those name with it (see p. 610, n. i, above), (ii) We its from Western Iran to Anatolia, carrying

that the Saljuq Turks likewise travelled from Western Iran to Anatolia in the eleventh century of the Christian Era, and the Mongols of Hulagu's horde in the the Saljuqs and thirteenth century, (in) We know that in the Aras Basin, which both in the seventh the Mongols traversed en route, the name that had made its appearance in B.C. sixth in the and Lydia asSapardiya, was century century B.C. in Media as Saparda, borne in the eighth century of the Christian Era by a then still extant people called his explanation is Sevordi-k. The writer would submit that facts (i) and (ii) show that that it is probable. credible, and that fact (in) indicates added to have and Harhar Saparda to it in his Sargon claims to have conquered and 14). In a list of receipts of tribute sixth year (Luckenbill, op. cit., vol. ii, pp.

know

n

UNIVERSAL STATES

676

We must conclude that the Spardiya had invaded Anatolia in company with their previous associates the Cimmerians, and that they had subsequently entered the service of Alyattes King of Lydia (regnabat circa 614-557 B.C.) to fight for him against their former comrades. This conjecture would explain not only how their name had come to attach itself first to the capital city of Lydia and eventually to Lydia as a whole, but also how Alyattes had managed to turn the tide in Lydia's favour in her struggle with her Cimmerian assailants and also to make a beginning of the conquest of the Hellenic city-states along the west coast. 1 Alyattes* Spardiyan foederati will have supplied Lydia with the redoubtable cavalry who, by 585 B.C., had won for her the dominion of all Anatolia west of the River Halys and of the Kingdom of Cilicia, except for a 2 Lycia that was shielded by mountains and for a Miletus that could feed itself

from overseas. The Achaemenian official use of the name 'Sparda' on in popular usage long enough for

to designate Lydia must have lived the Jews to label the diaspork in the

Roman province of Asia' Sephar dim* 'Saparda') to distinguish them from the 'Ashkenazim' in the 3 Scythian wilderness into which some of the more adventurous spirits the among diaspora had been drawn by the commercial openings along the Roman Empire's Continental European frontiers. The Eurasian Nomad origin of the Saparda, alias Spardiya, gives us a clue to the provenance of one of the peoples located in the Achaemenian (i.e.

dahydus 'Sparda' by Herodotus. These 'Hygennees' of the gazetteer who must also be the people whose name has dropped out of the text of the field-state between the Asiatic Thracians and the Kabelees 4 are 5 manifestly the left wing of the Sigynnai whom Herodotus locates somewhere beyond the Danube, in the hinterland of the- Veneti at the head of the Adriatic. In this remote north-western settlement the Sigynnai were still advertising their Eurasian Nomad origin by continuing to wear 'Median' (i.e. Sakan) dress. The missing link between these Sigynnai in the Austrian Alps and the Hygennees in South- Western Anatolia is 6 supplied by Strabo's description of the Siginnoi whom, in company with the Derbikes and the Kaspioi, he locates somewhere in the eastwest chain of mountains constituted by the Elburz and the Caucasus. 7

during his eighth campaign (714 B c.), Sargon records, as received from Saparda, 'prancing horses, swift mules, camels native to their land, cattle and sheep' (Luckenbill, op. cit., vol. 11, p. 147). This is just the tribute that is to be expected from a Eurasian Nomad horde that has only recently erupted out of the Steppe. On the other hand, Professor Cameron's scepticism would be vindicated if Sargon's Saparda should prove to have been identical with the land of Shepardi which, together with Azalzi, was annexed to Assyria by Tukulti-Nmurta I in the thirteenth century B.C. (Luckenbill,

op.

cit., vol.

i,

p. 152).

See Herodotus, Book I, chaps. 15-16. See ibid., chap. 28. 3 According to PriSek, op. cit., vol. i, p. 115, n. 5, the 'Ashkenaz' in the latter-day text of Gen. x. 3 is a corruption of 'Ashkuz', which is the form in which the nomen Scythicum appears in the Assyrian records. 4 See 5 I n Book Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 76. V, chap. 9. 6 Strabo: 8 (C 520). Geographtca, Book XI, chap, xi, 7 While Strabo's account of these Siginnoi agrees with Herodotus's account of his Sigynnai in the description of their peculiar breed of horses (see p. 688, below), the independence of Strabo's source is attested, not merely by the difference in geographical location, but also by the difference in the Hellenization of the name; by the labelling of the people's cultural affinity, not as 'Median', but as 'Persian'; and by the mention of 1

2


677

As

for the other peoples mentioned in Herodotus's description of his Taxation District No. 2, the Mysoi, in the highlands between and

Lydia

Hellespontine Phrygia, are convicted, by the survival of their name in the Lower Danube Basin in the form 'Moesi', of having been one of the Phrygian-speaking barbarian peoples who had broken out of SouthEastern Europe into the north-west corner of the Hittite World in the

second millennium

B.C.

The

Kabelees, whose name reappears on the post-Alexandrine Hellenic map of Anatolia in the names Cabalia and Cibyra, to the northwest of the Lycian Milyas, and who figure on the Hittite map of Anatolia as the principality of Hapalla, must have occupied the country between the south-east border of Lydia and the north-west border of Pisidia. Herodotus associates the Kabelees (Kabalioi) with the Lydians in cal1 ling both of them 'Mei'ones', and Strabo supports this association by his statement 2 that Lydian was one of four languages that were current in the Cibyratis. At the same time the Kabelees also had cultural associations with their eastern neighbours, to judge by Herodotus's parade of both the Kabelees and the Lasonioi in a Cilician equipment and by the presence of a detachment of Kabelees at the eastern end of the Pam3 phylian coast, where there was another city named Cibyra. Herodotus's Lasonioi are as enigmatic as his Asiatic Ligyes. If they are not identical with the Kabalioi, 4 the only space still vacant for them on the map is Pisidia, and the only name of which their name is reminiscent is 'Rasena', which is said to have been the Etruscans' own name for themselves. This conjectural location and conjectural affinity are at any rate not incompatible with one another; for the only section of the coastline of Anatolia from which the Anatolian progenitors of the Etruscans could have taken to the sea was the section between the eastern end of the Greek settlements along the coast of Pamphylia and the northern end of the Phoenician settlements along the coast of Syria. 5 The dahydus called the Yaund who are on the Mainland (' Yauna tyaiy uskahya") in Official List *DPe', and, with less precision, the Yaund sans phrase in *DSe' and 'XPh' and Yauna (i.e. the name of the country, not the people) in *DB' and 'DNa', is coextensive with Herodotus's Taxation District No. i, constituted by the I6nes Asiatic Magnates, Aiolees, y

points that are not mentioned by Herodotus e g. that their chariots are four-horse chariots, that the charioteers are women, that the best female charioteer is rewarded by being given licence to practise sexual promiscuity, and that they indulge in cranial deformation Strabo's testimony to the existence of 'Sigmnoi* who were Persian in their culture and who lived somewhere within or immediately adjoining what had once been the domain of the Achaememan Empire is corroborated by the name of Themistocles* confidential slave Sikmnos (see Herodotus, Book VIII, chaps. 75 and no), who is Plutarch's Life of Themistodes, chap. 12, as being 'a Persian by birth', and described

m

whom

Themistocles employs as his go-between in his secret negotiations with Xerxes in 480 B c. On the analogy of the latter-day Attic slave-names that were Latinized as 'Davus' and 'Geta', the name 'Sicmnus' would inform us that Themistocles' confidential agent was by birth a member of an ex-Eurasian Nomad people akin to the Getae and the : Dahae. Herodotus, Book VII, chaps. 74 and 77. 2 See Strabo 17 (C 631). Geographica, Book XIII, chap, iv, 3 See 2 (C 667). ibid., Book XIV, chap, iv, * Herodotus seems to identify them with the Kabelees in the field-state (Book VII, chap. 77), though he gives no indication of their being identical when he mentions the Kabalioi and the Lasonioi side by side in the gazetteer (Book III, chap. 90). s See I. i. 114, n. 3.

UNIVERSAL STATES

678

Kdres, Lykioi, Milyai, and Pamphyloi (the Asiatic Dorians are added in the field-state). 1 All these peoples, including the non-Greek-speaking Carians, Lycians, and Milyans, were Hellenes or sub-Hellenes in culture, and all of them except the Milyai were on the seaboard. The Milyai, who on the post- Alexandrine Hellenic map of Anatolia survive in the immediate hinterland of the Lycian coast and in Western Pisidia, 2 will have been a refugee remnant of the eponymous people of a country called Mira which, on the Hittite map of Anatolia, had perhaps extended as far north as the upper course of the Phrygian Cayster in the 3 neighbourhood of Afyun Qara Hisar. In the three latest of the official lists 'DSe', 'DNa', and 'XPh' the name Karka as well as the name Yauna or 'the Yauna' (sans phrase), makes it appearance and, if the identification of Karka with Caria is correct, the introduction of the name signifies that the original dahydus Yauna had been partitioned and that the detached portion, now labelled 'Karka', was made up of the last four peoples named in Herodotus's description of his First Taxation District. The reduced Yauna and the new Karka, between them, like the original Yauna, will have extended round the Aegean coast of Anatolia and the western half of its Mediterranean coast continuously, all the way from the southern border of the Asiatic Hellespontine Hellenes in the taxation district Dascylitis-cumCappadocia to the western frontier of the seaboard of the Kingdom of Cilicia. The dahydus' known as Sparda will thus have been completely landlocked but there is no evidence that any of the cantons of Yauna and Karka, except Caria Proper and Lycia, were ever under the administration of any other authority than the Viceroy of Sparda. In practice, Sparda, the whole of a reduced Yauna, and at least the Pamphylian canton of Karka seem usually to have constituted a single viceroyalty; and this association is indicated in the official lists by the immediate juxtaposition to one another of Sparda and Yauna in 'DB', 'DPe', 'DSe', and 'DNa', and their separation only by a single intervening name in 'DZd', and 'XPh'. Though, even in combination, these three dahydva covered a very small area by comparison with the size of the taxation district Cappadocia-cum-Dascylitide, and a fortiori with the size of the Viceroyalty Arminiya-plus-Katpatuka, the ratio between the two Anatolian viceroyalties, as measured in human terms of population and wealth, is indicated by Herodotus's figures. The combined annual assessment of his Taxation Districts Nos. i and 2 is 900 Euboic talents 200 more than the assessment on Egypt and only 100 less than the assessment on Babylonia4 while the combined annual assessment of Herodotus's y

;

;

See Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 93. See Strabo: Geographica, Book XIII, chap, iv, 17 (C 631), and Book XIV, chap, 9 (C 666). 3 See 'A note on Hittite Sites and Locations on Maps 15-16', in vol. xi. 4 The mercantile and industrial seaboard of the Achaememan Empire from the Black Sea Straits to the Philistine coast inclusive, together with the Empire's two great cerealto have been on a markedly and would producing viceroyalties, Egypt Babylonia, appear higher level of wealth than the peoples of the interior on the Iranian, Armenian, and if the equipment paraded in the field-state of Xerxes' expeditionary Anatolian plateaux, force may be taken as an approximate indication of comparative standards of living, and 1

2

iii,


679

three Taxation Districts Nos. 3, 13, and 19 amounts, notwithstanding the enormously greater extent of their aggregate area, to only 1,060 that is, to only 160 talents more than the combined talents in all figure

for Districts Nos.

i

and

2.

The dahyaus called Those in the Sea ('tyaiy drayahya') in 'DB', 'DPe', and 'DSe', and Those who live in the Sea ('tya[iy] drayahiya darayatiy') in 'XPh', must be identical with the Isles (Nesoi) in the Aegean Archi1 pelago which are mentioned by Herodotus, in an appendix to his criteria of affluence. On this against the foil of their vast poverty-stricken north-eastern hinterland. It is also noticeable that, among the nonHellenic peoples of the western seaboard, the specifically Hellenic type of elaborate and costly equipment is gaming ground. It is worn by the Philistines and Phoenicians (Herodotus, VII. 89), as well as by the non-Greek-speaking Cilicians (VII. 91), Lycians (VII. 92), and Canans (VII. 93), and by the Greek-speaking but imperfectly Hellenic Cypnots (VII. 90). 1 The locative case of the Old Persian word 'draya', 'sea', must mean 'in the Sea* in the sense in which an island is in the sea. It could not mean 'on sea' in the sense in which Boulogne was 'on sea' in virtue, not of being surrounded by the water like an island or floating on the water like a ship, but of standing on the continent, though on the coast of it. When the draftsman wants to describe the continental Yauna as being situated on the coast, he does this by using the locative, not of the word 'sea', but of the word 'mainland'. He calls them 'Yauna tyaiy uSkahya' (in 'DPe' see p. 677, above). To convey this meaning through the use of the word 'sea* he would have had to introduce a preposition meaning 'alongside of or 'near' to govern the substantive. Moreover, the label 'those alongside of the sea', if the draftsman had used it (and as a matter of fact he did not use it), would have been useless as a distinguishing mark; for, whereas the Aegean Archipelago was the only dahyduf in the Achaememan Empire that lay in the sea, there were at least eighteen dahydva, even before the separation of Hellespontine Phrygia from Cappadocia, that were on sea in the sense in which Boulogne was on sea. Besides Cappadocia, the viceroyalties or taxation districts or autonomous territories of Sparda together with 'the Yauna on the Mainland', Karka, Cihcia, Syria, Arabaya, Egypt, the Coastal Peoples north of Armenia, Colchis, KaspianS, Parthia-cum-Hyrcama, the Pointed-Hood Saka, Babylonia, Huja, Parsa, Harahvati-cum-Maka, the Asiatic Ethiopians, and HiduS all had seaboards on some sea or other: the Sea of Aral, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean Sea, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean. If it had occurred to Darius to label any of these continental dahydva with a sea-front 'the viceroyalty on the seaside' par excellence, the dahydut on which he would have conferred this title would certainly not have been the Dascylitis-cum-Cappadocia. It would have been HiduS, the viceroyalty which he himself had added to the Empire for the sake of its seaboard on the Ocean a seaboard that was invaluable for Darius because the acquisition of it had enabled him to open an oceanic line of communications between the eastern and western extremities of his dominions. are Professor G. G. Cameron comments- 'Your note is by no means convincing. scarcely in a position to put ourselves in a draftsman's shoes.' And a chronological point telling against the identification of the dahyduS called 'those in the Sea' with the islands of the Aegean Archipelago has been brought to the writer's attention in the following comments by Professor R. G. Kent: those in the Sea", I note that, while the 'Regarding your equation "tyaiy drayahya term occurs in the "DB" list, at the very beginning of Danus's reign, Herodotus says other revenue came specifically, in Book III, chap. 96, that "as time went on, however, also from islands and from the peoples living in Europe as far as Thessaly". This seems to me to indicate that the twenty districts did not, at the time of Danus's accession, include any significant island element, certainly not enough to have a place in the "DB" list. Therefore I cannot yet abandon the interpretation that George Cameron gave me, possibly starting from our late friend A. T. Olmstead, that "tyaiy drayahya" means "those by the Sea", namely a section with their capital at Dascylmm. As Dascyhum seems to be associated with certain lakes (see any classical dictionary s.v. Dascylmm or Daskyhon), the term "those by the Sea" might not be very inexact after all. Further, the islanders were no very important element in the Persian Empire, as they contributed only 17 triremes to the Persian fleet (Hdt. VII. 95), whereas even the Pamphyhans and the Asiatic Dorians each contributed 30, and no other national or territorial unit sent if

body armour and metal helmets may be taken as the two western seaboard, Egypt, and Babylonia stand out

test the

:

We

=

m

than 50.' In answer to this objection of Professor Kent's, the present writer would venture to

less

UNIVERSAL STATES

680

gazetteer, as one of the new districts subsequently added to Darius's original twenty. In the field-state, in which the Islanders (Nesiotai) duly 2 appear among the naval contingents, they are explicitly described as 1

being lonians of the same Athenian origin as the lonians of the Anatolian mainland, and as wearing the Hellenic equipment. When the five Old Persian texts in the official lists are checked off against one another, it becomes clear that, besides Herodotus 's literal translation 'the Islanders', 'those in the Sea* have a second synonym in 3

'the toque- wearing Yauna' ('Yauna Takabara') who figure in 'DNa' the only one of these five lists in which 'those in the Sea' do not appear. The headgear of the Achaemenids' far western subjects, the Hellenic recall that, while Herodotus does speak of the tribute from the Aegean islands as being supplementary and subsequent to the tribute assessed by Darius on his original twenty taxation districts, Herodotus also goes on to indicate that Darius embarked on his forward policy in Hellenic waters almost immediately after he had completed the effective reassertion of his authority throughout the Achaemenian Empire. The sequence of events, as Herodotus gives it, is (i) the liquidation of Oroetes the satrap of Sparda, who had been Cyrus's appointee and who had played for his own hand during the interregnum between Cambyses* death and Darius's triumph (III. 126-8); (n) the deportation of Democde'B from Sardis to Susa (III. 129); (111) the dispatch of a naval reconnoitring expedition from Sidon, with Democedes on board, which made a systematic survey of the coasts of the Hellenic World and penetrated as far to the west as DemocedeV homeland Crotdn on 'the ball' of 'the toe* of Italy before its activities were brought to an end by DemocdeV machinations (III. 136-8); (iv) 'after this, Darius made the first of his annexations of foreign territory, Hellenic or non-Hellenic, by occupying Samos' (III. 139). From this sequence of events in Herodotus's narrative two points seem to emerge (i) the annexation to the Achaemenian Empire of one important Aegean island, Samos, occurred rather soon after Darius's effective assertion of his sovereignty over Sparda and 'the Yauna on the mainland' (who must also have been under Oroetes' jurisdiction before his liquidation); (n) the annexation of Samos was the second move in a deliberate and ambitious plan for a forward policy of maritime expansion in the Hellenic World (see further IX. vm. 433-4), in which the first move had been the dispatch of a naval reconnoitring expedition to Magna Graecia. It seems not improbable that the list of dahydva in 'DB', in which 'those in the Sea' already figure, was not inscribed until after the annexation of Samos. The mighty work at Behistan, where the cliff-face had to be chiselled smooth before the long record was inscribed on it, must, after all, have taken a considerable time to carry out; and, if, by then, Samos was already in Darius's hands, that might have sufficed, in his eyes, to justify the mention, in 'DB', of a new dahyduS of which Samos was, in Darius's ambitious intentions, only a first instalment. As regards Professor Cameron's identification of 'those in the Sea' with the inhabitants of the territory whose capital was Dascylium, the test of its convincingness is, surely, the applicability of this descriptive appellation, not just to Dascylium itself (whether the south shore of the Sea of Marmara or the north-east shore of Lake Manyas was the site of this local administrative centre), but to the whole of the area that the Governor at Dascylium administered. If we are right in thinking that the Dascylitis was part of a viceroyalty embracing Cappadocia and Armenia (see pp. 671-7 above), this will have been one of the most conspicuously 'continental' and 'non-maritime' viceroyalties of the Achaemenian Empire; and, even if the Dascylitis at this date had already :

constituted a separate viceroyalty confined to Hellespontine Phrygia, the metropolitan area which was the great plain stretching east and west from the foot of the Mysian Olympus to the east bank of the River Gramcus would have been most unlikely to suggest the descriptive label 'in the Sea', since, although the plain does run parallel to the south shore of the Sea of Marmara, it gives the visual impression of being landlocked because it is secluded from the Marmara by a coastal range of hills The sea is out of the picture, as the present writer could testify from a first-hand acquaintance with the country. He knew the eastern end of the great plain well, and he had also had two glimpses of the western end the first between 3.0 and 4.0 p.m. on the 22nd April, 1923, en route by train from Izmir (Smyrna) to Banderma (Panormos), and the second on the evening of the 28th October, 1948, when there was still just light enough for him to catch a bird's-eye view of the landscape en route by air from Athens to Istanbul. 2 See Book ' See Book III. chap. 96. VII, chap. 95. 3 For visual evidence, see the masterly Table II in Kent, R. G.: 'Old Persian Texts IV: the Lists of Provinces', in the Journal of New Eastern Studies vol. ii, JanuaryOctober 1943 (Chicago 1943, University of Chicago Press), pp. 302-7. y


681

islanders, like the headgear of their far north-eastern subjects the Massagetan Saka Nomads ('Saka Tigrakhauda", 'the Pointed-Hoods'),

must have struck the Imperial Authorities tive as to

as being so quaintly distincwarrant the use of an allusive nickname as an official label.

The word 'toque', that, in A.D. 1952,

which was the current French name for the headgear was still being worn by members of the legal profession in France and by shepherds and brigands in Baluchistan, informs us that the authentic 'taka' was the fluted outward curving tall hat a top -hat without a brim in which the Persians are portrayed on Achaemenian bas-reliefs; but there is evidence that the Aegean Islanders' peculiar headgear, notwithstanding the official designation of it as a 'taka', was not, in fact, this Persian 'stove-pipe' hat, but was the lowcrowned or crownless broad-brimmed hat that was known in Greek by the alternative names 'kausia' ('scorcher') and 'petasus' ('wide-awake'). In the Akkadian version of 'DNa' the Old Persian words 'Yauna Takabara' are paraphrased in the words 'the Second lonians who wear shields on their heads'. 1 To post- Alexandrine Athenian eyes the crownless variety of the same headgear, as worn by an impostor dressed up as an Asiatic Macedonian from Seleucia, looked like a mushroom. 2 This mushroom-like or shield-like Aegean insular headgear was to have a romantic history in a post-Achaemenian age. From the Archi-

pelago the fashion spread westward to Attica as is attested by its appearance here and there, on the Elgin Marbles, upon the heads of and northward to Macedonia, riders in the Panathenaic procession where it became so characteristic a feature of the national dress that 3 it established itself as one element in the 'gorgeously transfigured' royal insignia.

worn by

it was dyed crimson with the precious juice labour from the sea, and the diadem was in some way tied round it or under it, its ends hanging loose about the neck. The diadem itself was inwrought with golden thread/ 4

'As

the kings,

won by immense

of the Achaemenian Empire by a bevy of Macedonian successor-states, founded by officers who had served under King Alexander, ennobled a headgear that had once been the quaint monomark of one of the most outlandish of all the Achaemenian

The sudden replacement

Empire's subject peoples into the sovereign emblem of royalty 5throughout an Oikoumene extending from the Nile to the Ganges; and in '[matuj^.m^nu a -un-tu a ma-gi-na-ta ina qaqqadi-u-nu na-u-u.' See Plautus: Tnnummus, Act III, scene m, 11. 43-44* and Act IV, scene ii, 11. 3 and Macedonian outfit, 9-10. When the sycophant makes his appearance in his Asiatic 1

2

Charmides exclaims: Pol, hicquidem fungino generest: capite se totum tegit. Hilunca facies videtur hominis, eo ornatu advenit. This crownless variety of the 'petasus' is portrayed on coins of King Antimachus, the brother, and King Demetrius II, the son, of King Demetrius the Euthydemid Bactrian Greek conqueror of the Mauryan Empire (see the plate of coin-portraits following p. 539 in Tarn, W. W. The Greeks in Bactna and India (Cambridge 1938, University Press)). 3 Bevan, E. R. The House of Seleucus, vol. ii, p. 274. .

:

4 Ibid. s

Cp. Bouche^Leclercq, A.: Histoire des Seleucides (Paris 1913, Leroux, 2vols.),

This romantic change in the significance of the petasus came

B 2669.VII

Z2

to

be reflected in a

UNIVERSAL STATES

682

two thousand years after the fall of the last of the postAlexandrine Macedonian peritura regna, the petasus duly dyed purple and duly girt with a diadem whose ends hung loose in a symmetrical pair of pendant tassels could still be seen, on state occasions, adorning the heads of the ecclesiastical princes of a Roman Christian Church under A.D. 1952, nearly

the latter-day

name

of 'the cardinal's hat*. who are on the Mainland' and 'those in the Sea' (described in 'DNa' as 'the shield-shaped-toque-wearing Yauna) are distinguished both from one another and from another dahydut called 'the Lands that are beyond the Sea (dahyava tya para dray a)' with complete clarity in the sequence 'the Yauna who are on the Mainland and those in the Sea and the Lands that are beyond the Sea'. This third formula recurs in 'DSe' as 'those who are beyond the Sea (tyaiy para draya),' and in 'XPh' as 'those who live beyond the Sea (tyaiy para draya darayatiy)', while 'DNa', which designates 'those in the Sea' as 'the shield-shaped-toque-wearing Yauna', designates 'those beyond the Sea' as 'the Saka beyond the Sea (Saka tyaiy para draya)'. The Nomads to whom the word 'Saka' in this phrase refers cannot be identified for

In 'DPe' 'the Yauna

certain.

We cannot tell whether they are the Scyths on the Great Western

Bay of the Eurasian Steppe in the

to the north of the Black Sea or the

Getae

Lower Danube Basin

(an advanced guard of the Massa-getae on the Oxus) or the Odrysae in the valley of the River Maritsa (Graece Hebros). Whatever the reference here may be, it is clear that, just as the undifferentiated 'Saka' of 'DB' and 'DPe' are sorted out in 'DSe', 'DNa', and 'XPh' into 'Hauma-(?)drinking Saka' and 'Pointed-Hood Saka', so, in the same three later lists, the undifferentiated 'Lands that are beyond the Sea' of 'DPe' which is rendered by Herodotus as 'the are sorted out into an easterly peoples living in Europe as far as Thessaly' overseas dahydut, to which 'DNa' applies the name 'Saka', and a 1

westerly one which is called 'Skudra' in 'DSe', 'DNa', and 'XPh' alike. The location of this last-mentioned Achaemenian dahydus is established by the reappearance of its label in Ptolemy's geography and in Stephanus of Byzantium's gazetteer as the name of a Macedonian town-

not too obscure to be ignored. Ptolemy 2 locates this townlet Skydra in Emathia, and mentions it between Tyrissa and Myeza. The Achaemenian Empire's loss of all Darius 's Continental European

let that is just

called

3 acquisitions except Doriscus as a consequence of the disaster of

480-

corresponding change in the connotation of the term by which it had been designated in 'DNa'. The Old Persian compound word 'taka-bara', used in this context to describe a subject people wearing a peculiar national head-dress, was taken over into the Armenian language in the form Yagawor' to denote the wearer of the 'taka' in the different sense of a king's crown. 'In Armenian the word "t'agawor" is the usual word for "king" The takfur of Sis is, of course, the Armenian "t'agawor", Old Iranian [actually, not Old Iranian, but Middle Iranian or Pahlawl, as Professor Kent points out A.J.T.] "taga-bara", "crown bearer" (Frye, R. N., in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. x, No. 2, September 1947, pp. 237 and 236). In Ottoman Turkish the same compound word was taken over in the form 'tekfur', and was used in the Armenian, as distinct from the Achaemenian, sense as a technical term to denote the East Roman Emperor. For example, in Turkish the ruin of the East Roman Imperial Palace Blachernae was called 'Tekfur Serayi', and Mount Ganos, on the European shore of the Sea of Marmara, 'Tekfur Daghi'. 1 2 Herodotus, Book III, chap. 96. Geographia, Book III, chap, xni, 39. 3 See Herodotus, Book VII, chaps. 105-7, C1 *ed on p. 120, above. .

.

.

'

THE ACHAEMENIAN EMPIRE B.C.

was

683

to cost

Skydra the fulfilment of a manifest destiny. In the choice of Skydrt for the seat of administration of a province that was intended soon to include the whole of Continental European Greece, the lieutenants of Darius who were organizing his new Continental European dominions for him showed the same eye for the structure of the military and political geography of the Balkan Peninsula as Ghazi 479

Evren6s, the lieutenant of the Ottoman Sultan Murad I (imperabat A.D. 1360-89), was to show when he established a powerful Ottoman military 1 colony on the same Emathian plain at Yenije Vardar, in the neighbourhood of the site of Pella. Emathia, as King of Macedon

Philip Amyntou to demonstrate, afforded a base of operations from which a land power could dominate Continental European Greece in one direction and the Morava Basin in another. If Xerxes had been as successful as either Philip or Murad I in his empire-building enterprise in SouthEastern Europe, an Achaemenian Skydra might have lived to play as great a part in history as a Macedonian Philippi or Philippopolis or as a

was

Roman Lugdunum or Colonia Agrippina. If we now cast our minds back over this survey of the administrative geography of the Achaemenian Empire, we can perhaps make out the lineaments of 'the as well as the taxation districts, into viceroyalties, it was divided during the period of forty-two years between the disaster of 522-521 B.C. and the disaster of 480-479 B.C. The vice-

which

royalties in this period

number. They were

size

and consequently few

in

Greater Media, including Adiabene, Urartu, the Hyspiritis, and

I.

the

were large in

:

Lower Aras-Kur

Media Proper, and embracing n, 15, and 18. Greater Elam, including Ansan and ParsuwaS, and coextensive Basin, as well as

Herodotus 's Taxation Districts Nos. II.

10,

with Herodotus 's Taxation District No. III. Harahvatis, including Zraka,

as well,

and embracing Herodotus 's

8.

South-Eastern Parsa, and Makran Taxation Districts Nos. 14 and 17.

IV. Parthava, including Gurgan, Dihistan, Khwarizm, and Herat as well, and coextensive with Herodotus's Taxation District No. 16.

V. Bakhtris', including Suguda and Margus as well, and coextensive with Herodotus's Taxation District No. 12. VI. The Indus Basin, consisting of Gadara and Hidu, and embracing Herodotus's Taxation Districts Nos. 7 and 20. VII. Pahat Babili u Ebir-nari, consisting of BabiruS together with Athura, and embracing Herodotus's Taxation Districts Nos. 9 and 5. VIII. Egypt together with Libya, coextensive with Herodotus's Taxation District No. 6. i Graece Yanitza" (see Khalkokondhylis, 'La6nikos' (i.e. Nik61aos)* De Origine et Rebus Gestis Turcarum, Book IV, ad finem, on p. 218 of I. Bekker's ed. (Bonn. 1843, Weber); Hammer, J. von: Histoire de V Empire Ottoman, vol. i (Pans 1835, Belhzard, Barthes, Dufour et Lowell), pp. 224-5; Gibbons, H. A.: The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford 1916, Clarendon Press), pp. 146-7; Mordtmann, J. H., s.v. 'Evrenos', in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. ii (London 1927, Luzac), pp. 34-35).

UNIVERSAL STATES

684

IX. Taktyike and Armenioi and the adjoining peoples as far as the Black Sea', embracing Herodotus's Taxation Districts Nos. 13, 19,

and

3.

X. Sardis, together with 'the Yauna who are on the mainland* and Karka, embracing Herodotus 's Taxation Districts Nos. i and 2. in the Sea' and The Lands that are Beyond the Sea', would seem, like the names of the two Roman provinces Germania Superior and Germania Inferior, to commemorate ambitious programmes of conquest which were frustrated at an early stage, and the title Saka Tigrakhauda may be placed in the same category, con-

As

Those

for

these two

sidering

Skunkha

titles

how will

it is that Darius I's punitive expedition against have had any lasting results.

unlikely

The Achaemenian Empire's Historical Background Our survey of the administrative geography of the Achaemenian Empire has also brought to light some of the reasons why Cyrus II was able to extend his rule so rapidly and easily over so vast an area and why thereafter Darius and Xerxes, when they set out to add new dominions to Cyrus's bequest, ran up against unforeseen limits which they found themselves unable to pass. The area which Cyrus had conquered and which Darius had resubjugated after a sharp recrudescence of anarchy in 522-521 B.C. was an area in which the hearts of the population had been prepared by previous sufferings for the acceptance of an oecumenical peace at almost any price. From the Indus Basin to 'the Yauna on the Mainland', and from Egypt to the countries lying under the lee of the Caucasus, the peoples' spirit had been broken by one or other or both of two scourges: the third bout of Assyrian militarism that had been launched by Tiglath-Pileser III in 745 B.C., and the third eruption of aggressive Nomad peoples from the Eurasian Steppe, which had broken upon the eastern frontiers of Assyria and Urartu circa 715-714 B.C. The peoples who had come within the range of either the furor Assyriacus or the terror Scythicus had been schooled to become the Achaemenian Empire's victims or beneficiaries, in whichever of the two alternative lights they might look upon a fate that was mild by comparison with Assyrian cruelty or Cimmerian savagery, however poorly it might compare with idealized memories of a parochial sovereign independence that had long ago ceased to be practical politics. But the expectations of docility which the Achaemenian empire-builders had come to take for granted as a result of their facile successes in a psychologically devastated area were rudely disappointed as soon as they attempted to impose the same oecumenical peace outside the limits within which the Assyrians and the Sakas had ploughed up the ground for them. Cyrus II himself, foresee that,

for example, paid with his life for his failure to attacked the Eurasian Nomads on their own

when he

terrain he was going to encounter a much more vehement resistance than had been offered to him by neighbouring sedentary peoples for whom their submission to his dominion had brought with it some ,


685

security against Nomad raids in compensation for the loss of an illusory national independence. Darius I was lucky to escape with his life when emboldened, perhaps, by his success in momentarily subduing 'the Pointed-Hood Saka' on the River Oxus and the Aral Sea, who had

been Cyrus's bane he went on to attack the more distant 'Saka beyond the Sea' on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe. Finally, Xerxes brought upon himself a disaster from which the Achaemenian Empire did not ever completely recover when he tried to deal with the Continental European Hellenes, who had never felt the touch of either the Assyrian or the Scythian lash, as Cyrus had found himself able to deal with 'the Yauna on the Mainland', who had 1 previously been broken in by the Cimmerians and the Spardiya. In their encounters with unbroken peoples, whether sedentary or Nomad, the Achaemenidae were only successful in so far as they showed a politic generosity. Their Arab neighbours, for instance, to whom they accorded the status of autonomous allies, do not seem to have given them the trouble that these Arabs' forebears had given to high-handed Assyrian militarists; and 'the Hauma-( ?)drinking Saka' of Farghanah, to whom the same status had been accorded by Cyrus II, proved their

by fighting magnificently for the last Darius in 331 B.C. historical importance of the Eurasian Nomad Volkerwanderung

faithfulness to the alliance at

Gaugamela

The

of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. is one of the features in the background of the Achaemenian Empire that our survey has thrown into relief. 2 When Darius boasted that 'a Persian fighting-man's spear has pressed forward far', 3 a Massagetan Skunkha might have com-

mented if his ruthless Achaemenian conqueror had left him life in his body and a tongue in his head that the Saka fighting-man's battle-axe had pressed forward farther. The Persians might have caught up and conquered the Sindoi on the shore of an ocean which was to be labelled with the Sindians' name when Darius's admiral Scylax sailed on over it to the Red Sea coast of Egypt but they had never come within striking distance of the Sindians' right wing on the banks of the Kuban. 'The ;

peoples to the north of the Caucasus snap their fingers at the Persians down to this day', as Herodotus wrote at some date during the reign of Xerxes' successor Artaxerxes I. 4 Again, the Persians might have caught up and conquered the Thataguf? d or v]iya on the cow-pastures of the Panjab, but they had never subjugated the Kuru on their plain

between the Sutlej and the Jumna. They might have caught up and conquered the advance-guards of the Scyths, Cimmerians, Paktyes, and Spardiya in Anatolia, but they had been foiled by the Scyths' of the Black Sea. They might have right wing on the steppe to the north the rule on their Odrysai in the Maritsa Basin momentarily imposed i

The

was set by the physical psychological limit to Achaemenian annexations that and Eurasian Nomad ravages is noticed again in IX. vm.

limits of previous Assyrian

^2 Professor G. G. Cameron comments: 'The Vblkerwanderung of the eighth and seventh centuries is, I see, to you, as it is to me, a terrific development hitherto insufficiently emphasized.' * Herodotus, Book III, chap. 97. 3 'DNa', 4, quoted on pp. 589-90, above.

UNIVERSAL STATES

686

and even on the advance-guard of the Getai in the Lower Danube 2 Basin, but the solitary lost tribe of the Odrysai on the Hungarian Alfold had remained immune, and 'the Great Horde* of the Getai 1

whom the Persians called 'the Pointed-Hoods' quickly shook off an ineffective Persian yoke. The Achaemenian tax-collectors had never come near the Agathyrsoi, and we may guess that they were not able to pester the 'Pointed-Hoods' for more than a few years. It will be seen that Skunkha could have made a telling retort to Darius, and he could have crowned it by reminding him that, where the Eurasian Nomad invaders in partibus agricolarum had eventually been brought to heel by sedentary Powers, this had been achieved the Massagetai

through the prowess of renegade Nomads who had enlisted in these sedentary Powers' service. If the Lydian Monarchy had broken the force of the Cimmerian horde in Anatolia and had imposed its own rule as far eastward as the River Halys, the Lydians had owed their success to the valour of their mercenary Spardiya Nomad cavalry; 3 and, as for the conquest of the World by the elder branch of the House of Achaemenes, did not the alternating names Rums' and Kambujiya, borne by their princes from Cyrus I onwards, testify that their fortune had been made for them by the valour of Kuru and Kamboja Nomad

reinforcements ? 4 In order to take the

measure of the impetus of this Eurasian Achaemenidae into power in South-West Asia, we have to remind ourselves that this was not the only front on which it had erupted. In the opposite hinterland of the Steppe, in the Upper Basin of the Yellow River, it had broken eastwards full

Nomad Volkerwanderung

that carried the

5 upon the Chou Power in 771 B.C., more than half a century before it had broken westwards upon Assyria and Urartu. This eruption in the eighth century B.C. was comparable in violence to the eruption in the eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C. which had carried the 'mariannu'

into Anatolia

and Syria and the Mitanni into Anatolia and Mesopotamia,

not into Midian. 6

if

On

the other hand, in contrast to both these

eruptions, the intervening eruption, which had carried the ancestors of the Medes and Persians out of the Eurasian Steppe on to the Iranian Plateau, must have been relatively mild; for their advent left no mark on the Assyrian records as we have seen, 7 the Assyrians do not mention ;

them

than the third quarter of the ninth century B.C., and then only because the Assyrians themselves have pushed their way up on to the plateau, and not because the Medes and Persians have descended earlier

upon the plains. The only trace of Medo-Persian penetration to the west of the Zagros Range before the eve of the overthrow of Assyria See Herodotus, Book IV, chaps. 92-96. Supposing that 'ag-' in the name rendered 'Agathyrsoi' in Ionic Greek may be equated with the Sanskrit ' the oft repeated Persian claim that the empire "possesses good horses and (i.e. as well as) good men".* translation. 3 Sophocles- Antigone, 11. 350-1, Gilbert Murray's 4 Wmlock, H. E. The Rise and Fall of the Middle Kingdom of Thebes (New York 1 947, 2

Professor G. G.

.

Macmillan), pp. 153-5-

UNIVERSAL STATES

688

which is actually a description of an Egyptiac work of art made on the morrow of the Eurasian Nomad Volkerwanderung of the eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C., might have been a paraphrase of either Herodotus 's description, written in the fifth century B.C., of

scholar,

a horse

still

in use

among

the Sigynnai in the Austrian Alps, or Strabo's

description, written or copied round about the beginning of the Christian Era, of a horse still in use among the Siginnoi in the Elburz

or the Caucasus and the correspondence is the more impressive considering that there is no indication in Winlock's book of his being acquainted with either of these two passages of Hellenic literature. ;

'Their horses', writes Herodotus in his account of the Sigynnai, 'are said to be shaggy all over, with a coat five fingers thick. They are small, with snub muzzles, and cannot carry a rider, but they fly like the wind when yoked to a chariot, and consequently the people of that country are charioteers/ 1 'The Siginnoi', writes Strabo in his account of these, 'have small shaggy

ponies (hipparid) which cannot carry the weight of a rider, so they yoke them in four-in-hands. >2

Strabo 's Siginnoi and Herodotus's Sigynnai were evidently the descendants of participants in the Eurasian Nomad Volkerwanderung of the eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C. who had strayed into the fastnesses of the Elburz or Caucasus and the Alps and had survived there as 'living museums* of the chariot-driving conquerors whose wheel-borne fleets had swept across South-West Asia into Egypt some twelve or thirteen hundred years before Herodotus 's day and some sixteen or seventeen hundred years before Strabo 's. 3 It was left for the Spardiya, Paktyes, Cimmerians, Scyths, Kaspioi, and other hordes of the swarming 'Umman Manda' to surpass the feat of their forerunners the Maryanni and Mitanni by breeding horses that a fighting-man could ride and, after this Sakan light cavalry had gone the way of the Hyksos chariotry, it was left for the Sarmatians to surpass the feat of their forerunners the Cimmerians and the Scyths by breeding 'the great hofse* whose backbone could bear the weight, not only of a man, but of a man clad in mail cap-a-pie, in addition to the horse's own hardly less complete suit of armour 4 a horse which was to carry to victory the Goths at Adrianople in A.D. 378 and the Normans at Hastings in A.D. 1066, besides playing his part, beyond the opposite shore of the Great Eurasian Steppe, in bringing a Sink Civilization to the ground and rearing a Far Eastern Civilization to replace it. In the Achaemenian Age the cataphract is already in the arena. At Plataea in 479 B.C. he is ;

represented by Masistius, 1

2

5

and

at

Herodotus, Book V, chap. 9. Strabo: Geographica, Book XI, chap,

Gaugamela xi,

in 331 B.C.

8 (C. 520).

by the Saka

Another surviving remnant of the chariot-driving Eurasian Nomad host that had erupted out of the Steppe in the eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C. is perhaps to be detected in the Hemochoi ('Chariot-drivers') who, in the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history, were to be found in the fastness between the north-east shore of the Black Sea and the north-west end of the Caucasus Range (see Strabo: Geographica, Book II, chap, in, 31 (C. 129); Book XI, chap, ii, i (C. 492) and 12-14 (C. 495~6); Book XI, chap, v, 6 (C 506); Book XVII, chap, ni, 24 (C 839)). * See IV. iv. s n. See Herodotus, Book IX, chap. 22. 439, 4. 3


689

Haumavarga in the heavy brigade that contested the field with the 1 Macedonian horse so stubbornly. In 331 B.C., however, the cataphract's great days were

Manda

to come. The cavalry of the age were the Umman who had opened the way for the establishment of

still

light horse

the Achaemenian Empire by their wild ride from the heart of the Steppe to the Jumna and the Indus Delta and the Aegean and the Carpathians and beyond the Carpathians into the Hungarian Alfold. 1 See the account, in Arrian: Expedttio Alexandri, Book III, chap, xin, 2-4, of the opening engagement between Danus's Bactnan and Sakan cavalry and Alexander's In Paeomans. this and 'Alexander's engagement troops suffered mercenary cavalry heavy casualties, not only because they were overborne by the Orientals' superiority m numbers, but because the Sakas and their horses had the advantage of being more efficiently protected by defensive armour'.

ANNEX MOSCOW'S CHANGES OF FORTUNE AND THEIR HISTORICAL CAUSES C

VI.

(ii)

(c) 4,

BOTH the eclipse of Moscow in the early eighteenth century and her recovery of her pristine status of being the capital of All the Russias in the early twentieth century can be explained, at least in part, in terms of the relaxation and reapplication of an external pressure. Though Moscow had begun her career as an outpost of Russian Orthodox Christendom against the primitive pagan tenants of the north-eastern forests, 1 she had made her political fortune from the fourteenth century onwards as the main bulwark of a remnant of Russian Orthodox Christendom against an aggressive Western Christendom which had advanced eastward, overrunning the White Russian and Ukrainian marches of Russia, till, by the middle of the fifteenth century, the eastern frontier of Poland-Lithuania had come to lie within a short march of Moscow's western gate. The situation thus established had persisted for more than a century and a half. It was not till after the Polish occupation of Moscow itself in A.D. i6io-i2 2 that the tide turned and Muscovy began to liberate Russian Orthodox Christian territory that had been conquered by Poland-Lithuania at earlier dates. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, Poland-Lithuania had become so feeble that the pressure on Russia from that quarter had diminished to vanishing-point, and in consequence Moscow had lost the significance previously attaching to her as the defender of Russia's march against the Western World which had been one of the causes of Moscow's both gaining and keeping a position of primacy inside the Russian World itself. During the ninety-two years that elapsed between the removal of the capital of the Russian Empire from Moscow to Saint Petersburg and the completion of the eighteenth-century partition of Poland, the balance of power on Russia's western march tipped more and more heavily in Russia's favour until in A.D. 1795 Russia recovered the last of the Russian Orthodox Christian territories that had been conquered by Western Christian Powers since the fourteenth century, with the sole exception of Eastern Galicia. In this rather exceptional chapter in the history of Russia's politico-military relations with the West along this land-frontier, Moscow's role of serving as guardian of the 3 gate was naturally at a discount, and it was probably no accident that this was also the age in which Moscow was at her nadir and Saint Petersburg at her zenith in the domestic history of the Russian body social.

However that may be, there can be no doubt that Moscow's recovery of prestige, which was the necessary prelude to her reattainment of her lost prerogative of serving as the political capital of All the Russias, *

See

II.

ii.

154.

a

See

II.

ii.

157.

3

See

II.

ii.

158, n.

i.

MOSCOW'S CHANGES OF FORTUNE

691

began from the moment when the pressure of the Western World on Russia once again became formidable. When the Polish Western invaders' feat of occupying Moscow in A.D. 1610-12 was repeated by French Western invaders in A.D. 1812, Moscow once again played the beau rdle while Saint Petersburg was enjoying an inglorious security; and thereafter the successive German invasions of Russia in A.D. 1915 and A.D. 1941 indicated to Russian minds that the renewal of Western aggression under Napoleon's leadership had been, not a meaningless curiosity of history, but an earnest of a danger against which any government of Russia would have, in future, to be perpetually on its guard. The Polish and French invaders who in turn had momentarily occupied Moscow, and the German invaders who had only just failed to repeat the exploit, had all made their way into Great Russia along 'the duck walk' of comparatively dry ground between the parallel upper courses of the Dniepr and the Baltic Dvina, and the attractiveness of this narrow passage for Western invaders re-established the strategic importance of Moscow, in view of her situation covering 'the duck 1

walk's' eastern exit.

be seen that, at the time when the Bolsheviks retransferred the government from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, the original capital of the Russian Empire offered the same double advantage that had drawn the capital of the Roman Empire away from Rome to the neighbourhood of the Bosphorus in the time of Diocletian and ConstanIt will

seat of

tine the Great. In the 'geopolitical' circumstances of the day, Moscow was not only more conveniently situated than Leningrad for serving as

the administrative capital of the Soviet Union as a whole ; it was at the same time a more convenient point of vantage for simultaneously keeping an eye on that frontier from beyond which the most formidable threat to the Soviet Union's security was now to be apprehended. reader who is interested in this 'geopolitical' question may perhaps think it worth while to compare this Annex with II. (v), vol. ii, pp. 157-8, in which the same vicissitudes in the fortune of Moscow and Saint Petersburg have been rather differently interpreted. When writing that passage in A.D. 193 1, the writer did not realize that Moscow had now again become a bulwark of Russia on a once more dangerous western land-frontier, besides continuing to possess the attraction, which she had never ceased to possess, of being the most convenient

A

D

centre of administration for the interior. What had become obvious to the present writer in A.D. 1952 after a German invader had all but encircled Moscow in the war of A.D. 1939-45 had no doubt been manifest to

Lenin and

his

companions twenty-five years *

See

II.

ii.

400.

earlier.

VII.

A

(i)

AND

(ii),

ANNEX

CHURCHES AS GHOSTS A

'DIE-HARD' upholder of the thesis that the histories of churches are incidental to the histories of civilizations might still be unwilling to confess defeat, even if he found himself unable to refute our argument that the churches are neither cancers preying upon civilizations nor of their kind. He might chrysalises serving them for the reproduction still fall back on a third hypothesis. If the churches are neither chrysalises nor cancers, may they not be ghosts ? In the main stream of this Study

not checked our course in order to discuss a third possible alternative presentation of churches in terms of civilizations which is even less convincing than the other two; but this explanation of

we have

churches as being the ghosts of civilizations perhaps deserves brief consideration in an annex. The most plausible piece of evidence that can be cited in support of this diagnosis is the last phase in the history of the tion. When, in the eleventh century B.C., 'the

Egyptiac CivilizaEmpire' petered

New

of Amon-Re out, the Pharaonic Crown was assumed by the Chief Priest of Thebes ;' and thereafter, when, in the tenth century, this ecclesiastical continuation of 'the New Empire' collapsed in its turn and the greater was 'peacefully penetrated' by Libyan part of the Egyptiac World barbarians, an uncontaminated remnant of the Egyptiac social heritage was still preserved in four temple-states under the rule of the priests of the local divinities: Amon-Re of Thebes, Ptah of Memphis, Re of

and Horus of Letopolis. These four ecclesiastical principaliby the barbarian squatters who occupied the rest 2 of the Egyptiac Civilization's domain. What was the source of the to make himself master of the Imperial prestige that enabled Hrihor local four the and Throne, corporations of priests, in the next chapter of the story, to take over the government of their respective cities ? If these local ecclesiastical principalities were respected by the incoming barbarians, was that not because they were recognized as being legatees of the Egyptiac culture? And was not Hrihor's political standing due, more specifically, to his ecclesiastical status as Chief Priest of a once local god who had become the High God of an Egyptiac Pantheon because his city had become the capital of an Egyptiac universal state which had been both founded and refounded by local Theban princes ? 3 Would Hrihor have found himself in a position to step into Pharaoh's shoes 4 if his ecclesiastical office had not carried with it, ex officio, the which had been presidency of a Pan-Egyptiac 'established church' hundred years four III some Thothmes the Emperor organized by Heliopolis,

ties

were

left inviolate

before Hrihor's day? 5 See II. ii. 116, n. i; IV. iv. 421 and 515-17; and p. 190, above. 3 See See IV. iv. 422; V. v. 269-70 and 352-3. pp. 213-15, above. 4 The possibility that Hrihor may have usurped the Chief Priest's throne as a step towards usurping Pharaoh's has been noticed on p. 190, n. i, above, s See I. i. 145, n. 5 IV. iv. 421 and V. v. 530. 1

2

;

;

CHURCHES AS GHOSTS

693

We may

go on to observe that the local temple-states, in which the Egyptiac culture was preserved, like a fly in amber, from the tenth century B.C. onwards for some fourteen hundred years, 1 had had their counterparts in the derelict domains of other broken-down civilizations. For example, the Hittite Civilization, which suffered a violent death soon after the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., was 2 still living an ecclesiastical Jife-in-death in Strabo's day, some twelve hundred years later, in the twin temple-states which had crystallized round the shrines of the Goddess Ma in the Pontic Cappadocian city 3 of Comana and in its South Cappadocian namesake. In the same sense the temple-state at Jerusalem, which was licensed by Cyrus the founder of the Achaemenian Empire and was extinguished by the Edomite usurper Herod the Great, was an ecclesiastical 'ghost' of a secular Syriac parochial state Judah that had been done to death by Nebuchadnezzar.

After the temple-state at Jerusalem, in its turn, had gone the way of the original Kingdom of Judah, Jewry still contrived to preserve its

communal

identity in diaspora thanks to a corporate religious life that its historic ecclesiastical citadel; and this Jewish

survived the loss of

achievement -will remind us that a temple-state is only one variety of a social phenomenon which, in this Study, we have learnt to think of as a 'fossil'. If we now call to mind other examples of the general pheno-

menon

that is exemplified in a post-Exilic Jewry, we shall observe that a majority of our 'fossils* had been preserved in an ecclesiastical sheath. The Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist fossil of an extinct Indie Civilization was, in fact, still embodied, at the time of writing, in a number of living temple-states the ecclesiastical principality of the Dalai Lama in Tibet and its satellite temple-states in Mongolia. 4 The fossil of an extinct Babylonic Civilization that survived in the Mesopotamian city of Harran down to the time of the 'Abbasid Caliphate preserved its :

identity by remaining faithful, in a Christian and Muslim environment, to an ancestral pagan religion and astral philosophy. 5 The Monophysite,

Nestorian, and Zoroastrian fossils of an extinct Syriac Civilization like Jewry, to retain their identity in diaspora by maintaining their corporate religious organization. The existence of temple-states in particular, and 'fossils' in general, does suggest that there are such things as ecclesiastical 'ghosts' of defunct secular societies; and this impression will be reinforced if we

managed,

1

The

temple-state of Amon-Re at Thebes did not have so long a life as its three perished in the struggle for possession of the Egyptiac World

sisters in the Delta. It

between Napatan, Assyrian, and Saite competitors in the eighth and seventh centuries B

IV. iv. 422, n. 3). Strabo Geographic^ Book XII, chap, ii, 3 (C 535), for the South Cappadocian 32-36 (C 557-9)) for the Pontic Comana; Book XII, Comana; Book XII, chap, in, chap, in, 31, for the shrine of Men Pharnacis at Cabeira. 3 These two Hittite ecclesiastical principalities were the most remarkable representatives of a group which also included, among others, those ruled by the priests of Cybele at Pontic Cabeira and in the piece of Central at Pessmus and by the priests of Anatolian territory that was eventually converted into the domain of the Seleucid Greek Antioch-towards-Pisidia of (see IV. iv. 312, n. i). city-state 4 The writer did not know whether, in the year A.D. 1952, these temple-states still survived in Outer Mongolia under a Communist regime. s See IV. iv. 101, n. i V. v. 125, n. i; and IX. viii. 408, n. 5. c. (see 2 See

:

Mn

;

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

694

turn over the page of an historical atlas of Christendom; for this will show us at a glance that, while ecclesiastical geography is apt to reflect political geography, the political map that an ecclesiastical map reproduces is usually not the map of the political world of the day but a map which, on the political plane, has long since been obsolete. In another context 1 we have already observed that in the ecclesiastical map of a Medieval France the archbishoprics are 'ghosts' of the provinces of the Diocletianic Roman Empire, while the bishoprics are 'ghosts' of the Roman municipalities of Gallia Togata and the independent cantons of Gallia Comata as they had stood on the eve of Julius Caesar's conquests. In the ecclesiastical map of a Medieval Italy the archbishoprics commemorate the competition of Milan and Ravenna with Rome, between the third and the eighth century of the Christian Era, for the distinction of serving as a regional centre of Roman imperial administration, while the bishoprics are ghosts of the municipalities of the Italy of the Emperor Augustus. In the ecclesiastical map of a Medieval East Roman Empire the archbishoprics correspond, not to the army-corps districts (themata) which were the units of contemporary provincial organization, 2 but to the provinces of the Roman Empire in the Age of Justinian. In this medieval ecclesiastical map of Eastern Orthodox Christendom, what is true of the boundaries of the archbishoprics is not true of the boundaries of the patriarchates; for, as we have noticed elsewhere, 3 the lines of demarcation between these major units of medieval ecclesiastical organization do not correspond, as they might be expected to correspond, to those between the major units of political organization in the Roman Empire of either Constantine's or Justinian's day. In contrast to the politically anachronistic boundaries between the bishoprics, the boundaries between the patriarchates turn out to be politically up to date and, when we look into the historical reason for this anomaly, we find that it was the result of action deliberately taken by the Medieval East Roman Government, which had enlarged the area of its own metropolitan Patriarchate of Constantinople, at the expense of the two neighbouring patriarchates of Antioch and Rome, to make the Patriarchate of Constantinople coincide in area with the Medieval East Roman Empire itself. This modification of traditional ecclesiastical frontiers by political fiat was a characteristic East Roman act of state for we have seen in another context 4 that the assertion of the supremacy of the State over the Church was a constant aim of East Roman imperial policy; and, when the East Roman Imperial Government found itself unable to control the Patriarchs of Antioch and Rome because their sees were situated in territories where the East Roman Government's writ did not run, it made the best of what was a bad job from its standpoint by high-handedly annexing to its own tame Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose incumbent was under the Emperor's thumb, those outlying fringes of the ecclesiastical dominions of the Patriarch of Antioch and the Pope of Rome Western Cilicia ;

;

1

3

On On

p. 192, above. p. 191, above.

2

4

See II. ii. 79-81 and 153-4; an d IV. In IV. iv. 320-408 and 592-623.

iv.

332.

CHURCHES AS GHOSTS

695

one case and Greece, Sicily, and the 'toe' and 'heel* of Italy in the other case which happened to lie within the East Roman Empire's

in the

political frontiers.

This alteration of the boundaries of the patriarchates to serve the Roman Government's purposes can be seen, on a longer historical perspective, to have been a passing incident in a rivalry between these ecclesiastical Great Powers which was an old story by the time when the East Roman Empire was conjured up in the eighth century of the Christian Era by the genius of Leo Syrus, and which did not cease when the East Roman Empire perished, at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at the hands of Western Christian crusaders'.

East

*

In this light

we can see that the

patriarchates too, like the archbishoprics

and the bishoprics, of Christendom are ecclesiastical 'ghosts' of defunct bodies politic. Whereas the bishoprics are ghosts of city-states and cantons, and the archbishoprics are ghosts of Diocletianic Roman provinces, the patriarchates are ghosts of political Great Powers that had contended with one another in the international arena of the Hellenic World in the third and second centuries B.C. before the balance of power had been overthrown by the triumph of the Roman Commonwealth over all its competitors. On this view, the Papacy is the ghost of the Roman state the Patriarchate of Alexandria is the ghost of a Ptolemaic successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire; the Patriarchate of Antioch is the ghost of a Seleucid successor-state of the same ci-devant oecumenical power; the Patriarchate of Conof the Macedonian stantinople is the ghost of the ephemeral appanage whose realm had once momentarily straddled war-lord ;

Lysimachus, and extended from Rhodope to Taurus before it was extinin 281 B.C. in the final round of the conflict for the division guished of the spoils of Darius between the successors of Alexander the Great. This latter-day re-emergence, in an ecclesiastical guise, of an abortive successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire which had been the Straits

political

snuffed out more than six hundred years before the foundation of the thesis that churches Constantinople is a striking exemplification of are ghosts of defunct secular polities and societies. On the morrow of the Battle of Corupedium a victorious Seleucus Nicator and Ptolemy would have been astonished to learn that their defeated and slain

Lagus them again in Lysimachus was one day to take the field against of Alexandria, Patriarchates the Antioch, between warfare a ghostly and Constantinople. The Roman soldiers and statesmen who imposed

rival

1

into the ring of patriarchal sees was a Constantinople's success in forcing an entry and Antioch had been feat. The patriarchal status of Rome, Alexandria, on the Bosphorus was established de facto already before the parvenue New Rome in their customary rights, ture founded, and all three sees were expressly confirmed Council of Nicaca (sedebat A.D. 325). The canomco, by Canon 6 of the Oecumenical A.D. 381) declared (Canon 2) that there of Constantinople i

remarkable

(sedebat Oecumenical Council ecclesiastical map were five patriarchates in the East. This was the logical 'layout for an of the Roman Empire that was to follow the pattern of the political map (see pp. 191-2, and Antioch corresponded respectively to above)- for the patriarchal sees of Alexandria each of the three other eastern the civil 'diceceses' of Egypt and the Orient, and this gave to be the locus of a Asiana, and Thrace a presumptive title

Pontus, contrived to bring the areas ol separate patriarchal see. As it turned out, Constantinople own patriarchal jurisdiction. all these three civil 'dioeceses' under her 'dioeceses'

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

696

Rome's yoke upon the necks of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies would have been no less surprised to see these subjugated Macedonian monarchies come back to life to challenge Rome's supremacy in an ecclesiastical arena. Yet the Eastern Orthodox patriarchates' rejection

Roman See's claim to supremacy was, sub specie historiae, the reopening of an issue that had been closed on the political plane by Scipio's victory at Magnesia and Octavian's victory at Actium. Does the evidence so far presented suffice to obtain judgement in favour of the advocates of 'the ghost theory' of the relation between churches and civilizations ? The Roman instance is the classic example, and it would seem reasonable to take this as our test case. Is not Hildeb rand's attempt to build a Respublica Christiana on the foundation of the Roman See a true parallel to Hrihor's attempt to sustain a tottering 'New Empire' of Egypt by placing the Pharaonic Crown on the head of the Chief Priest of Amon-Re of Thebes ? And is not the subsequent of the

temporal power of the Popes, and of the other prince-bishops in Western Christendom, in their local ecclesiastical principalities, a true parallel to the temporal power of the temple-states of Thebes, Memphis, Heliopolis, and Letopolis after the failure of Hrihor's more ambitious 1

enterprise

P

This theory is applied to the Papacy by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury in a celebrated passage :

man

consider the originall of this great Ecclesiasticall Dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof; for so did the Papacy start up on a Sudden out of the Ruines of that Heathen 'If a

Power/ 2

The voices of 'the barefooted fryars singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter' 3 must indeed have sounded like the ghostly echo of a pagan Roman liturgy when they floated into Gibbon's ears on the evening of the 1 5th October, 1764,* though, when he harvested the inspiration .

.

.

had germinated in his mind on that memorable occasion, Gibbon came to adopt, not 'the ghost theory', but 'the cancer theory', of the relation between the Roman Church and the Roman Empire. 5 'The ghost-theory', however, was implicit in a phrase of Bossuet's (vivebat A.D. 1627-1704) which Gibbon appears to have been consciously 6 echoing when he summed up The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by saying that he had 'described the triumph of that

Barbarism and Religion'. 7 Bossuet had said: 'Rome, devenue la proie des barbares, a conserve par la religion son ancienne majeste'; 8 and This parallel has been suggested already in IV. iv. 471, n. 2. Hobbes, Th.: Leviathan, Part IV, chap. 47. The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, edited by Murray, J. (London 1 896, Murray), p. 302, quoted in IV. iv. 59-60. * See XIII. x. 4 See the 105-107. passage quoted from Pickman on pp. 5 3 3, above. 6 The echo of Bossuet's phrase in Gibbon's has been pointed out by Meissner, P., in Grundformen der Enghschen Geistesgeschichte (Stuttgart and Berlin 1941, Kohlhammer), 1

2 3

p. 8.

? Gibbon, E. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. Ixxi, already quoted in I. i. 42 and IV. iv. 58. 8 Bossuet, J.-B.: Discours sur VHistoire Universelle, Book III, chap. i. :

CHURCHES AS GHOSTS

697

Gibbon, in another passage of his work, 1

explicitly made Bossuet's after the loss of her legions and

point in his own observation that, provinces, the genius and fortune of the popes again restored the supremacy of Rome'. It will be seen that Bossuet's dictum agrees with Hobbes' as a statement of Christian Rome's relation to her pagan predecessor, though these two seventeenth-century Western philosophers are poles apart in the inference that they draw from an identical *

2 hypothesis. What to Hobbes' mind is a damning exposure is to Bossuet's mind a crowning glory; and, in taking this auspicious interpretation for granted, the seventeenth- century bishop is taking his cue from a fifth-century Pope. Preaching in Rome on the festival of the Apostles Peter and Paul, Pope Leo the Great (pontificali munere fungebatur A.D. 440-61) called his heroes 'the true founders of the city'. 4

It is they who have raised thee to thy present pinnacle of glory, in order that as a holy family, a chosen people, a priestly as well as a royal city that has become the capital of the World in virtue of being Blessed Peter's Holy See thou mightest reign over a wider realm in the strength of our divine religion than in the exercise of an earthly dominion. Successive victories have added to thy territories till thou hast extended thy sovereignty far and wide over land and sea; yet the empire that has been made subject to thee by thy prowess in war is not so far flung as the domain that has been brought into thy fold by a Christian Peace.' 3 1

In chap. xhx.

2

Mr. Martin Wight notes 'The ghost theory had

a special appeal for English comlawyers, who after the Reformation were apt to regard Canon Law as a malignant form of haunting. The point is made by Charles II's lord chief justice Sir Matthew Hale (vivebat A.D. 1609-76), in The History of the Common Law of England, chap, v (2nd ed. (London 1739, Walthoe), pp. 71-72): "Rome, as well Ancient as Modern, pretended a kind of universal Power and Interest, the former by their Victories, which were large, and extended even to Britain itself; and the later upon the Pretence of being Universal Bishop or VicarGeneral in all Matters Ecclesiastical, so that, upon Pretence of the former, the Civil Law, and, upon Pretence of the later, the Canon Law was mtroduc'd, or pretended to some kind of Right, in the Territories of some absolute Princes, and among others :

mon

here in England." 'Bryce makes the same point, with more detachment, in Studies in History and Jurisprudence (Oxford 1901, Clarendon Press, 2 vols ), vol. n, pp. 245-6. Cp. Heine, Hemnch: Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophic in Deutschland "Rom" wollte herrschen; 'als seine Legionen gefallen, schickte es Dogmen in die Provinzen' (Religion and Philosophy in Germany, translated by John Snodgrass (London 1882, Trubner), p. 22: "Rome always desired to rule; when her legions fell she sent dogmas into the provinces").' 3 'Isti sunt qui te ad hanc glonam provexerunt, ut gens sancta, populus electus, civitas sacerdotalis et regia per sacram Beati Petn sedem caput Orbis effecta, latms praesideres religione divina quam dommatione terrena. Quamvis enim multis aucta victorns lus imperil terra manque protulens, minus tamen est quod tibi belhcus labor subdidit quam quod pax Christiana subiecit.' Pope Leo the Great- Sermo Ixxxn, In Natah Apostolorum Petn et Fault (Migne, P.-J.: Patrologia Latma, vol. liv (Paris 1846, Migne), cols. 422-3 (quoted in Vogt, J. Orbis Romanus (Tubingen 1929, Mohr), pp. another passage 31-32). In the present Study, on p. 72, above, we have already quoted of the same sermon in which Pope Leo points out the services rendered, not by ChrisThis Church. the Christian pair of comtianity to Rome, but by the Roman Empire to to the Emperor plementary ideas is anticipated in a passage of a memorial, addressed Marcus Aurelms (imperabat A.D. 161-80) by his Christian contemporary and subject, Bishop Mehto of Sardis, which is quoted by Eusebius (Historia Ecclesiastica, Book IV, are coeval (the 7-11). Melito points out that the Church and the Empire chap, xxvi, in the reign of the propagation of Christianity through the Empire having started founder of the Empire, Augustus) he also suggests that the Empire, even during the the spiritual first two centuries of its, and the Church's, history, has gained more from mundane convenience of support of the Church than the Church has gamed from the the Pax Romano (see p. 72, n. i, above). .

;

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

698

In this vision of Rome's destiny as it appears to Leo's eagle eye, the Christian 'ghost' of Rome is more robust than its pagan 'original!'. Which of these two appearances is the wraith, and which is the creature of flesh and blood ? Is Hobbes right in maintaining that Romulus and

Remus have made the fortunes of Peter and Paul ? Or is Leo right in maintaining that Peter and Paul have saved the situation for Romulus and Remus ? This issue was debated in public between a successor of Leo and a servitor of Leviathan during an episode in a conflict between the Papacy and the Kingdom of Italy which had been formally settled by the signature of three agreements at the Papal Palace of the Lateran on the nth February, 1929,' but which smouldered on, and kept on flaring up, because it was an incident in a still undecided battle, on a wider front, between the worship of God and the worship of Man's corporate self. In a speech delivered in the Chamber of Deputies at Rome on the 1 4th May, 1939,* Benito Mussolini reopened the issue by suggest-

ing that Christianity would never have become a universal religion if the grandeur and decadence of Imperial Rome had not given her her opportunity. Italy has the singular privilege, of which we ought to be proud, of being the one European nation that is the seat of a universal religion. That religion was born in Palestine, but Rome was the place where it became Catholic. Had it stayed in Palestine, most probably it would have been one of those innumerable sects that flourished in that derelict environment sects like the Essenes and the Therapeutae, for instance and most probably, too, it would have flickered out without leaving a |

trace of

its

influence.

.

.

.

was in Rome that Christianity found its favourable environment. It found it, in the first place, in the lassitude of the governing classes and the consular families, who, in the time of Augustus, had become effete, run to fat and gone sterile it found it, above all, in the swarming ant-heap of Levantine humanity which was the plague of Rome's social sub-soil a public for whom a speech like the Sermon on the Mount opened up horizons of revolt and revenge.' 3 'It

;

This offensively patronizing and provocatively controversial parenthesis in a militant political pronouncement drew fire from Pope Pius

XI

in an address

which he gave next day

to a deputation

from the

1 For this settlement and its aftermath, see Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1929 (London 1930, Milford), pp. 422-78. 2 The text will be found in Mussolini, B.: Scntti e Discorsi, vol. vn (Milan 1934,

Hoepli), pp. 34-35.

3 L Italia ha il privilegio singolare, di cui dobbiamo andare orgogliosi, di essere Tunica nazione europea che e sede di una rehgione universale. Questa rehgione e nata nella Palestina, ma e diventata cattolica a Roma. Se fosse nmasta nella Palestma, molto probabilmente sarebbe stata una delle tante sette che fionvano in quell* ambiente arroventate, come ad esempio quelle degli Esseni e dei Terapeuti, e molto probabilmente si sarebbe spenta, senza lasciare traccia di se. 'II Cnstianesimo trova il suo ambiente favorevole in Roma. Lo trova, prima di tutto, nella lassitudine delle classi dirigenti e delle famighe consolan, che ai tempi di Augusto erano diventate stracche, grasse e sterili, e lo trova, sopra tutto, nel bruhcante formicaio dell* umanita levantina che afliggeva il sottosuolo sociale di Roma, e per la quale un discorso come quello della Montagna apriva gli orizzonti della nvolta e della rivendi.

cazione.

.

.

CHURCHES AS GHOSTS

699

Mondragone and, when Mussolini

taken aback by the reception of his ill-considered excursion into the interpretation of history sought, in the Senate on the 25th May, to improve the defences of an exposed position without overtly surrendering any ground, his elaboration of his thesis led him floundering deeper into the mire and gave his formidable adversary an opening for striking a winning blow. In a letter of the 3Oth May, 1929, addressed to Cardinal Gasparri, the Pope had the last word. Jesuit College of

;

We

expect to be treated to heretical pronouncements and Catholicism. There has been an attempt to emend them, but this attempt has not been altogether successThe divine mission to all the nations preceded the ful, to Our mind. calling of Saint Paul; and this was also preceded by the mission of Saint Peter to the Gentiles. Thus the universality of the Church both by is already there at the very outset of the Church's right and in fact history and of the Apostles' preaching. Through the work of the Apostles and of their apostolic fellow-labourers, this universality very soon surpassed the limits of the Roman Empire which, as everybody knows, was very far indeed from being coextensive with the whole World [as] known [to the Ancients]. If all that was intended was a reference to the facility for the diffusion and organisation of the Church that was providentially provided in the organisation of the Roman Empire, all that was necessary was a reference to Dante and Leo the Great two great Italians who, in a few magnificent words, have stated, in lapidary form, the substance of what has become a commonplace in second-hand restatements by innumerable other voices.' 1 'Least of

all

did

on the very essence of .

.

Christianity

.

In this encounter, Pope Pius discomfited Mussolini as signally as Pope Leo had discomfited Attila and the invocation of the Apostles on Christian Rome's behalf was indeed an argument to which there was no retort. Thomas Hobbes himself, shrewd in argument though he was, had simple-mindedly let the cat out of the bag in a sentence immediately ;

preceding the passage of his Leviathan that we have quoted. In defining the period in which the Papists' 'whole Hierarchy or Kingdome of Darknesse may be compared not unfitly to the Kingdome of Fairies' by dating it 'from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for Bishop Universall by pretence of Succession to Saint 2 Peter', Hobbes has made, in advance, the admission that the Papacy is

what it is in virtue of being the heir of the Apostolic Christian Church, and not in virtue of being the ghost of the pagan Roman Empire. These findings may confirm us in the conclusion, reached in an 'Men che

tutto Ci aspettavamo espressioni ereticali sulla essenza stessa del Cristiae del Cattolicismo. Si e cercato di rimediare: non Ci semhra con pieno successo. ... II mandate divmo alle genti universe e anteriore alia chiamata di San Paolo; antenore a questa il mandato di San Pietro ai gentih; I'umversalita si nscontra gia di dmtto e di fatto agh inizi pnmi della Chiesa e della predicazione apostolica questa per opera degh apostoh e degh uommi apostolici ben presto piu vasta dell' Impero Romano, che, come e npto, non era di gran lunga tutto il mondo conoscmto; se si yoleva soltanto ricordare l'utilit& providenzialmente preparata alia diffusione e organizzazione della 1

nesimo

;

Chiesa nella organizzazione

Magno, due grandi

dell'

impero romano, bastava ricordare Dante e Leone poche e magnifiche parole dissero e scolpirono la

Itahani, che in

sostanza di quanto poi innumen altn ndissero.' 2 Hobbes, op. cit., loc. cit.

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

700

earlier context, that 'the analogy between Hildebrand's Roman hierocracy and Hrihor's Theban hierocracy breaks down'; and, if our Roman case in point is a fair test case, as we have taken it to be, we may infer that the higher religions cannot be accounted for as being the ghosts of civilizations any better than they can be explained as being their cancers or their chrysalises. 1

1

In IV.

iv.

517.

VII.

A

(iii)

(a\

ANNEX

I

SPIRITUAL ACHIEVEMENT AND MATERIAL ACHIEVEMENT: ARE THEY ANTITHETICAL OR INTERDEPENDENT? IN previous passages 1 we have suggested that the circumstances favourable to spiritual and to secular progress are not only different but are Some antithetical. This is one of the themes of the Parable of the Sower *

:

and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded arrived at our conclusion, not intuitively, but empiriin time a process of progressive cally, as a result of tracing backwards was the latest stage and, of which Christianity enlightenment spiritual found that each of in Christian belief, the highest so far reached. those preceding stages of spiritual advance had taken place in social circumstances which, like those which saw the birth of Christianity, a failure of mundane endeavours and by the suffering were marked

among

fell

no

fruit'

2

;

thorns,

but

we

We

fcy

When we turn from Christianity to consider the other three living higher religions, we find their histories likewise conforming to our apparent 'law' that spiritual achievement and material

which such

failure entails.

achievement are

antithetical.

Christianity was born of a disintegrating Hellenic Civilization's experience of suffering at the climax of its Time of Troubles, and it came of final age in the social interregnum following the Hellenic Civilization's of the Roman Empire. The histories of the dissolution at the

break-up

Mahayana, Hinduism, and Islam reveal the same pattern of relation 3 between spiritual and secular life. The Mahayana and Hinduism both emerged during a period, running from the second century B.C. to the fourth century of the Christian Era, when the Indie World was suffering under an intrusion of the Hellenic Civilization in the form of military invasions by Bactrian Greek war-lords and their Kushan successors. Thereafter, the Mahayana captivated Far Eastern hearts during a social interregnum that followed the dissolution of the Sinic Civilization upon the break-up of the Empire of the Posterior Han at the turn of the second and third centuries of the Christian Era. As for Islam, it achieved its amazing metamorphosis from being the heresy of a barbarian prophet into being a higher religion in its own right under the Arab Caliphate, which was the second and last phase of a Syriac universal state and it rose to the occasion in an age when the break-up of the Caliphate was the dissolution of the Syriac Civilization. In the history of ;

announcing

Islam at this stage the rise of Christian monasticism and Christian dervish movement and in Islamic mysticism had its parallel in the below. pp. 425 and 551, above. See also pp. 759-68, iv. 7. Cp. Matt. xiii. 7 and Luke vm. 7. this use of the term is confined the to which sense the in that is, Hinduism, the crust of the ritual reliStudy of the devotional religion which grew up, beneath with the growth of devotional Mahayaman gion of the Vedas, contemporaneously Buddhism beneath the crust of an ascetic Hmayaman Buddhism. 1

On

2

Mark

3

e

m .

.

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

702

mysticism and in this case, as in

that, an outburst of spiritual life at a of mundane catastrophe was the secret of the triumphant religion's success in converting both the human sheep left shepherdless by the disappearance of a secular universal state and the wolf-like invading barbarians. The same 'law' seems to be exemplified in the history of Zoroastrianism. In another context 1 we have observed that this higher religion forfeited its prospect of becoming a universal church when it was conscripted to serve as the ecclesiastical instrument of a Sasanian State dedicated to the political mission of expelling an intrusive Hellenism from the Syriac World. In the light of this spiritual penalty which Zoroastrianism incurred as the price of obtaining the political patronage of an Imperial Power in the third century of the Christian Era, it is significant that her previous loss of the patronage of an Imperial Power, through the overthrow of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., had been followed by a marked increase of intensity in the radiation of her spiritual influence. ;

moment

'The end of the Persian period by no means saw the end of Parsee Zoroastrian] influence on Jewish eschatology. Indeed, on the contrary, from this time onwards the influence becomes much stronger and more forceful and apparently more conscious, in contrast to the previous chapter of history, in which the adoption of Parsee ideas [by Judaism] was generally a more unconscious process. It is a peculiar phenomenon, of which there are many examples, that states and peoples do not exert their cultural and spiritual influence effectively until after their own political collapse. The culture of Ancient Greece was not transmitted to the Ancient World (it would be substantially true to say) until after the independence of the Greek city-states had been decisively abolished by Philip of Macedon; and the culture of Rome was not acquired, in the true sense, by the Germans before Rome's world empire had collapsed under the blows of the Teutons. There seems to be something like a law of Nature that peoples cannot sow, from a full hand, the golden seed of their spiritual treasures until they have renounced, or been compelled to renounce, earthly goods. This is certainly true of the religious ideas of Parseeism, and indeed of Iranian religion in general. These ideas radiate, with an unprecedented penetrative power, all over the domain of an expiring Ancient World when, but only when, the [i.e.

Persian

Monarchy has

collapsed.'

2

It will be noticed that the student of religious history who is the author of the passage just quoted draws attention to our apparent 'law' of antithesis governing the conditions that make respectively for spiritual and for material achievement, but that, in the examples of its working which he cites, he does not confine himself to the field of Religion, but compares the case of Zoroastrianism with secular cultural phenomena which may be classified likewise as being 'spiritual' though they do not fall within the religious sphere of spiritual life. This raises the question whether our 'law', if it is a law for Religion, is likewise a law for spiritual life in a wider sense, in which the term 'spiritual' would cover aesthetic 1

In V.

2

Gall, A. von: BaaiXcta TOV

v.

659-61.

@cov (Heidelberg 1926, Winter), pp. 263-4.

SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL ACHIEVEMENT

703

and other non-religious cultural experiences and activities. Our 'law' has in fact been propounded, with this wider application, by an exiled Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher-prophet, Nicolas Berdyaev, in pursuance of an idea originally suggested by the German philosopher Oswald Spengler's sharply drawn antithesis between the connotations of the two German words Kultur and Zivilisation. Culture has always proved Life's greatest failure. An antithesis would seem to divide culture from the "life" that Civilisation attempts to realise. When a mighty German state is finally established, Capitalism and Socialism accompany it; and its main efforts are directed to assert its will to world power and organisation. But Goethe, the great idealists and romantics, great philosophy and art, will be missing from this mighty Imperialist and Socialist Germany. They will have been supplanted by technique, which has its repercussions even upon philosophical thought in (in the gnosiological currents). Conquest is the method now applied *

spheres at the expense of the integral-intuitive apprehension of Being. The mighty civilisation of the British Empire holds no place for either Shakspeare or Byron, just as Dante and Michelangelo are inconceivable in [the] Modern Italy which erected the ponderous monument to Victor Emmanuel and established Fascism. And herein lies the tragedy of both Culture and Civilisation.' 1 all

Does a 'law' which has thus suggested itself independently to the minds of divers students of history fit the facts of non-religious spiritual unequivocally as it appears to fit the facts of religious experience ? field of Religion we have noticed a number of signal testimonies to this law's validity without so far having stumbled upon any conflict? If we ing evidence. Is this equally true in the field of secular culture extend our empirical survey into this other province of spiritual life, we shall find here that the examples of the working of the law are also life as

In the

in this province, by some no striking, but that they are contradicted, less signal breaches of it. of the working of our 'law' in the secular One of the classic

examples by Berdyaev in the passage just quoted. In the secular culture in Germany it is notorious Western the Modern of history that the great age of German music, literature, and art falls within the that began for Germany with period of political and economic adversity the Thirty Years War (gerebatur A.D. 1618-48) and that ended for her with the foundation of the Second Reich in A.D. 1871. And this classic German instance is not a solitary one. 'The golden day' in which a wave of artistic creativity, set in motion by a Medieval Italian Renaissance, 2 touched New England, in her turn, after having fructified Germany, was extinguished by the political triumph of winning the Civil War and by the economic triumph of winning the West. 'The law of inverse operation' is likewise illustrated by the history of cultural field

is

cited

Persian literature. Just as the religious tendril of the Iranian genius flowered after the fall of the Iranian Empire of the Achaemenidae and withered after the rise of the Iranian Empire of the Sasanidae, so its aesthetic potentiality in the medium of Poetry did not reveal itself until i

1936, Berdyaev, N.: The Meaning of History, English translation (London *

p. 212.

See

in

-

files), "i. X 37-

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

704

Empire had opened an Islamic chapter of Iranian history; and, even then, it had to wait until after the Persian genius had been decisively expelled from the arena of political life. The Islamic Persian literature did not come to flower during an age when the Persians, after their momentary military and political overthrow at the hands of the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors, had come back into political power in the Syriac World, first as henchmen and ministers of the Abbasid Caliphs 1 and then as founders and rulers of successorstates of a crumbling 'Abbasid Empire. The Islamic Persian literature in which the Persian language served as the vehicle for poetry such as had never before been begotten by the Persian artistic genius came to flower at a moment when the Persian successors of the Abbasids were being supplanted by barbarian Turkish war-lords; the patron of Firdawsi was the Turk Mahmud of Ghaznah and, under Turkish and Mongol barbarian patronage, Persian literature continued to flourish so 2 long as the Persians remained fast bound in the misery and iron of of fall the nine hundred after the But, when, years political adversity. Sasanian Empire and five hundred years after the fall of the Samanid march-state in Transoxania, 3 a Turkish-speaking dynasty paradoxically re-established a powerful and militant Persian national state, the golden chain of Persian poets broke off short as abruptly as the chain of German composers of music when, two hundred years after Germany's political and economic catastrophe in the Thirty Years War, a materially puissant Prussia- Germany was conjured into existence by Bismarck. 4 The law of inverse operation can also be seen at work in the aesthetic field in the province of Visual Art, as well as in the provinces of Music and Literature. In another context 5 we have noticed that, in a latter-day museum at Sparta, the specimens of an original, distinctive, and promising 'pre- Lycurgean' Lacedaemonian art are sundered from the specimens of a commonplace 'post- Lycurgean' art by a gap corresponding chronologically to the period during which Lacedaemon was a formidable political and military power in the Hellenic World in virtue of her devotion to a 'Lycurgean' agdge which deliberately and coldbloodedly concentrated on producing military efficiency and prowess at have also noticed, in the cost of sacrificing every other aim in life. the same connexion, that the fifth, fourth, and third centuries B.C., during which the Lycurgean' regime held Sparta in its grip and inhibited her from indulging her previously manifest artistic genius, were the very centuries in which, in other Hellenic city-states, the visual arts after the fall of the Sasanian

f

'

;

We

*

were at their apogee. This contrast between the artistic promise of 'pre-Lycurgean' Sparta and the conspicuousness of Art by its absence in the Sparta of the Lycurgean' Age has an historical parallel in the contrast between the masterly perceptiveness with which an Upper Palaeolithic Man depicted on the walls of his cave -dwellings the animals that were his game, and '

2 Pa. 3 See II. ii. See pp. 148-51, above. 10. 142. cyii. apparent inability of the Persian genius to express itself simultaneously in poetry and in politics has been noticed already in I. i. 360, n. i, and II. ii. 77, n. x. Compare I. i. 363, n. 3, and the passage quoted ibid., pp. 393-4, from Mirza Muhammad s In III. ni. Khan of Qazwin. 66-67. 1

4

The


705

the unimaginativeness of the perfunctory decorations scratched or painted on the pottery of this magnificent primitive artist's Neolithic successor, who not only forged ahead of his aesthetically superior predecessor in the technique of fashioning stones into tools, but also demonstrated his own all-round superiority in economic capability by capping his invention of earthenware with the discovery of agriculture a revolution in the material conditions of human life which, at the time of writing, still remained unsurpassed by any of the material achievements of any of the civilizations. If the dumb archaeological record that, midway through the twentieth century of the Christian Era, was the only extant evidence for the transition from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Neolithic way of life were ever to be illuminated by the dawning glimmer of an historical twilight that had revealed something of the inner history of the transition from a 'pre-Lycurgean' to a 'Lycurgean' Sparta, would it become apparent in the earlier, as in the later, tragedy that the artist's

genius had been stifled by a will to power ? These parallels, in the spiritual provinces of Visual Art, Music, and Literature, to our examples of the working of 'the law of inverse operation' in the field of Religion are impressive as far as they go; but an unprejudiced 'survey reveals that, in the non-religious field of spiritual life, such evidences of the validity of our 'law' are counterbalanced by instances of breaches of it. The case of Sparta, for example, is offset by the case of Athens for the Periclean Athens who made herself 'the education of Hellas' 1 in the fifth century B.C. did not have to purchase her artistic and intellectual pre-eminence in the Hellenic World of that age at the price of renouncing the material power which an artistically barren contemporary Sparta was cultivating at the cost of everything else. On the contrary, at the very time when the Athenians were creating their exquisite works of art ;

and literature, they were also building up their material power and this on a basis far broader than any that the Spartans had ever dreamed of to a pitch at which Athens, single-handed, proved almost strong enough to impose her dominion upon all the other city-states of Hellas. On this practical, power-building side of their multifarious activity in 'the Classical Age' the Athenians had begun by carrying through the econo-

mic revolution of abandoning subsistence-farming in favour of cultivating specialized crops, and manufacturing specialized industrial wares, for export in exchange for imports of foodstuffs for their own con2 sumption at home; in order to expedite this profitable new foreign commerce they had built up a merchant marine; and, on the twofold foundation of their newly acquired wealth and maritime experience, they had founded a navy which, as a weapon of war, outclassed the Spartan phalanx in subtlety as notably as in range. The potency of the Athenian Navy in the fifth century B.C. is expounded as follows by an anonymous Athenian student of public affairs whose observation of the Athenian democracy of his day was as keen as his dislike of it :

'[The] accidents [of geography] have played into the hands of Athenian A phrase attributed to Pericles himself by Thucydides, Book II, chap. 41. 2 See I. i. 24-25; II. 11. 36-42, and III. in. 122. 1

B

iiGOt)

vii

Aa

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

706

sea-power. The subjects of a land-power can club together a number of small communities and then go into action [against the paramount power] with concentrated forces; the subjects of a sea-power, in so far as they are islanders, are not in a position to bring their communities together in a physical union; they are insulated from one another by salt water; the paramount power rules the waves; and, even if the islanders could manage to slip through the blockade and concentrate their forces on a single island, they would [simply] die of hunger. As for Athens' subject communities on the mainland, the big ones are kept in subjection by intimidation and the small ones really by a [latent] economic sanction, since there is no community [in the world] that can do without imports and exports, and these will be denied to any community that does not show itself amenable to the rulers of the sea. And then the rulers of the sea can [count on being able to] do something that the rulers of land empires can do [only] occasionally: they can devastate the territory of their superiors in military strength. They can coast along an enemy shoreline where the enemy is either not on the spot at all, or anyway not in strength, and then, on the approach of [substantial] enemy forces, they can retire on board ship and stand out into the offing tactics which condemn the enemy's relieving land-force (d Trt^fj 7rapa/3or]dajv) to have the worst of it. Then the rulers of the sea can make a naval expedition to any distance you like from their home base, while a land-power's range of action from its home base is limited to a few days' journey (marching overland being a slow business, and the ration-carrying capacity of a land-force being limited to not more than a few days' supply). Moreover, a land-force must either have friendly country to traverse or must fight its way through, whereas a naval force [is master of the initiative] where it finds itself in superior strength it can disembark a landing-party; in the contrary event it is under no compulsion to try a landing at that particular point; it can [just] go coasting along till it reaches either 1 friendly country or an enemy in inferior strength.' :

The versatility of the Athenians of the Periclean Age in simultaneously cultivating diverse capacities of human nature is eulogized, as a distinctive quality version of a

which is the secret of their greatness, in the Thucydidean famous Periclean speech :

'We cultivate the Arts without extravagance and the Intellect without Our politicians do not neglect their private affairs, and effeminacy. the rest of us devote ourselves to business without losing touch with politics. We are unique in regarding men who take no part in politics as being not merely unambitious but unprofitable; and we are all sound judges, if not creative statesmen, in public affairs. ... In short, I maintain that the Commonwealth of Athens is the School of Hellas and that the individual Athenian will never meet his equal for gallantry, self-reliance, .

.

.

adaptability, versatility, and distinction, in whatever situation he may find himself. The proof that this is no empty boast, but is sober reality, is afforded by the power of our country, which is the fruit of our national character.' 2

This simultaneous pre-eminence in artistic and material prowess, which is characteristic of Periclean Athens though not of Sparta or Auctor Atheniensis Anonymus: Institutions of Athens (edited by Kalinka, E.: Berlin and Leipzig 1913, Teubner), chap, li, 2-5. 2 1-2. Thucydides, Book II, chap, xl, 1-2, and chap, xli, 1

SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL ACHIEVEMENT Persia or Germany in any age had had parallels in a World in both seventeenth-century Holland and

The apogee

707

Modern Western

seventeenth-century

Dutch painting and Dutch scholarship had been contemporaneous with the apogee of Dutch commerce and Dutch naval, military, and political power and in the twentieth century of the Christian Era France looked back to the reign of Louis Quatorze as 'le Grand Siecle' because in that age she had performed the twin feats of only just failing to impose her dominion upon all the other countries of the West and completely succeeding in making herself 'the education of Europe* France.

of

;

thanks to the simultaneous brilliance of her achievements in the Arts. Thereafter, when Great Britain was harvesting the lion's share of the political and economic fruits of Holland's pyrrhic victory over Louis XIV's France, the consequent expansion of British commercial and naval power was accompanied in the realm of Literature by the achievement of a minor 'Augustan Age'; and the classic prototype of all 'Augustan ages', in which a Latin literature had come to its finest flower, had been contemporary with a reprieve which had been won by a Roman political genius for a disintegrating Hellenic Civilization through the establishment of an Augustan Peace. If, with these conspicuous breaches of our 'law' in mind, we now re-examine the passage, quoted above, in which Berdyaev propounds this 'law' as one that governs the ebb and flow of secular culture, we shall find flaws in the particular pieces of evidence that he cites in support of his thesis. If, in his citation of English history, Berdyaev had argued his case in terms of Music, he could have pointed out that, in the musical province of secular cultural life, A.D. 1688 was as inauspicuous a date in England's history as A.D. 1871 in Germany's, and he could have inferred that a Modern Western bourgeoisie was apt to bury its musical talent as soon

as it began to make money in business. Even in this province, however, the English example only partially bears out a 'law of inverse operation' to which the German example conforms with exactitude; for, while it is true of English, as of German, history that music 'slumped' when business began to boom, it is not true, in the English case, that music did not begin to blossom until the country's economic and political life had been overtaken by adversity. The floruit of German classical music, whose terminus ante quern is A.D. 1871, has also a terminus post quern in

we have noticed, this floruit is exactly coincident in duration with the 'trough' in the curve of Germany's political and economic fortunes between the Thirty Years War and the foundation of the Second Reich. On the other hand the musical talent of the English bourgeoisie, which ceased to be cultivated when 'the Glorious Revolution' of A.D. 1688 was followed by a steep and steady rise in British commercial prosperity and naval power, was already being cultivated with ardour in the Elizabethan Age in which the English were enjoying an intoxicating spell of naval and commercial power without having to wait for the doldrums of the seventeenth century in order to come A.D. 1648; for, as

into 1

its

own. 1

Mr. Martin Wight notes: Trench music

partially bears out the

law of inverse

708

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

history, even Music only partially bears out our while Poetry which is the secular art that Berdyaev singles out for citing in his English illustration of his thesis yields perhaps more evidence against his argument than in favour of it. Berdyaev 's contention that 'the mighty civilisation of the British Empire holds no place for either Shakspeare or Byron' is, no doubt, borne out, as far as Byron is concerned, by the portentous spectacle of the eclipse that overtook the muse of Byron's older contemporary Wordsworth after the postNapoleonic triumph of a British Industrial Revolution. If Byron (vivebat

Thus, in English

'law',

1788-1824) or, for that matter, Shelley (vivebat A.D. 1792-1822) or Keats (vivebat A.D. 1795-1821) had lived to the same ripe old age as Wordsworth (vivebat A.D. 1770-1850), Wordsworth's history suggests that these younger contemporaries of his likewise might have found the spiritual climate of a Victorian England adverse to their poetic genius. On the other hand, Shakspeare's life-span was, of course, coeval with the Elizabethan Age, and this chronological correspondence is no mere coincidence, for the poet was neither hostile nor indifferent to the political and economic triumphs of his countrymen in his lifetime the excitement of sighting opportunity, and the exultation of rising to the occasion, which was the stimulus of the Elizabethan English pirate and merchant adventurer, was likewise the inspiration of the Elizabethan English playwright and man of letters. The same fire coursed through all Elizabethan English veins and this feature of an Elizabethan Age of English history reappears in a Victorian Age. Tennyson and Browning were children of the Victorian Age in the same significant sense in which Shakspeare was a child of the Elizabethan and the last decade of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, in which the resurgence of Germany's material power was celebrated by the death of the last of the German classical composers of music, 1 saw the recession of Victorian England's material power portended by the deaths 2 of the two most characteristic of the Victorian English poets. 3 A.D.

;

;

;

operation, it reached its greatest heights (as did French painting) during the first fifty years of the regime of the Third Republic [i e. during a half-century in which, on the military and political plane, France was under the shadow of the catastrophe of A D. 1870-1]. Martin Cooper's recent book on French Music (London 1951, Oxford University Press) bears the sub-title "From the Death of Berlioz to the Death of 1-aure" (A.D. 1869-1924), which is the richest and most varied period in the history of French music. It may be noticed that this is an example of Music's flourishing in a period which, on the plane of practical affairs, was one of political decline but of economic prosperity. In France, at any rate, the bourgeoisie proved to be as good a patron of the Arts as the Crown had once been.' Mr. John Lodge comments on Mr. Martin Wight's note: 'I think that this is a matter of opinion. Bizet (vivebat A D. 1838-1875) died young but was a composer of genius as well as charm, and Berlioz (vivebat A D. 1803-1869) is to French music what Hugo and Delacroix are to French poetry and French [visual] art. He is their greatest romantic. If you prefer the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in painting, x Brahms died in A.D. 1897. you will probably prefer their contemporaries in music.' 2 Tennyson died in A.D. 1892, Browning in A.D. 1889. 3 Mr. Martin Wight comments: 'In this application of the law of inverse operation to the history of English poetry, the argument is open to two criticisms (i) It assumes the comparability and literary-historical equivalence of all the poets that you mention, and (n) those that you mention are arbitrarily selected. The mam massifs in the poetic range do roughly coincide with periods of political power: Spenser, Shakspeare, Donne, with the Elizabethan-Jacobean expansion Milton with the Cromwellian epoch (if one regards him, like Clarendon, as a personal example of Withdrawal-and-Return, writing his masterpiece in a retirement from politics during the Restoration doldrums); Dryden :

;


709 Nor, in the provinces of Poetry and the Visual Arts, is our 'law* borne out by Italian history any more convincingly than it is by English history. It is true, as Berdyaev points out, that a Cavourian Italy, like a Bismarckian Germany, blindly buried what survived of her artistic talent in her obsession with the pursuit of material power but the two arts of which Dante and Michelangelo were respectively masters neither survived in Italy to wilt at the advent of the Risorgimento nor waited in Italy to blossom until the Italians had tasted the political and economic adversity that began to overtake them at the turn of the fifteenth and ;

sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era. The floruit of the Italian school of Western Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture was coeval with the age in which the city-states of Northern and Central Italy were successful in maintaining their political independence and in making their country the workshop and emporium of the World J and in a Late Medieval Italy, as in an Elizabethan and in a Victorian England, the contemporaneity of the blossoming of these arts with the achievement of material power was not just a chronological coincidence. Here, too, there was an inner psychological connexion between these two diverse manifestations of virtu. To find an Italian illustration of the working of our 'law* in the secular field, Berdyaev would have had to surrender Poetry and the Visual Arts and take his stand on Music ; for here the Italian pattern is in truth the same as the German. A golden chain which begins with Palcstrina (vivebat A.D. 1526-94) and ends with Verdi (vivebat A.D. 1813-1901) does exactly span the political and economic 'trough' in Italian history which extends from Charles VIII's crossing of the 2 Alps in A.D. I494 to Victor Emmanuel's entry into Rome in A.D. 1870. the Italian Opera coincides in date with the nadir of of The zenith Italian wealth and power, and this synchronism is too suggestively reminiscent of its German counterpart for us to be able to dismiss it as a freak of Chance. What is the upshot of the foregoing survey ? It has already made two things clear. In the first place, our 'law' that spiritual achievement and ;

material achievement are antithetical proves not to have equal validity in all cultural provinces. Its manifest operation in the field of Religion was the clue which originally led us to formulate it; and we can now see that

we might

also

have arrived

at

it

by another road

if

our starting-

and Marlborough (but in the later Augustan Age we Chatham. Gray scarcely fills the bill, though Johnson, would exactly fill it), and the Romantics, from their con-

\vith the ape of William lack a poetic peak to correspond to

and Pope

whose genius was not poetic, ventional beginning with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 down to their dim 'Georgian' swan-song with Rupert Brooke dying at Scyros in 1915, with the postNapoleonic Pax Bntanmca. But most critics would judge that the general level of poetical genius in this series descends, running transversely to the ascending line of a Golden Age and Tennyson in political power they would see the Elizabethans as terms of a Silver Age. And by common consent the two highest poetical peaks, Shakof the at the come range. So perhaps one gets the law of beginning speare and Milton, inverse operation working within the limits of a broad coincidence of poetical and political

achievement.

worth noting that there is a fairly considerable massif, whose chief peaks are Yeats and Eliot, rising out of the waste land of Britain's loss of Great Power status in the twentieth century fairly considerable, but not big enough in relation to the whole range to show a poetical efflorescence succeeding or coinciding with a collapse of 'It is

political power.' i See III. 111. 342.

2

See

ibid.

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

?io

point had been, not Religion, but Music. If, however, our starting-point had been Poetry, the Persian and German exemplifications of the working of the 'law' would have been offset by the Attic, Italian, French, and English breaches of it; while, if we had started with a survey of the social conditions in which the Visual Arts have blossomed and wilted, we might have been led, by the evidence in this field, to formulate the precisely contrary 'law' that spiritual achievement and material achieve-

ment

not antithetical, but interdependent for the consensus of the and Dutch evidence in this sense would probably have weighed more heavily in our estimation than the contrary evidence from Sparta and from the Stone Age. Can we bring any order out of the apparent confusion into 'which our well-tried empirical method of inquiry might appear to have led us in this instance ? One conclusion that is suggested by the facts now before us is that there is an intrinsic incompatibility between the quest of the Beatific Vision, which is the goal of Religion, and the pursuit of material power in any of its forms. Another conclusion is that the secular vein of spiritual activity is a middle term between Religion on the one hand and the pursuit of material power on the other. When we dissect this secular are,

;

Attic, Italian,

spiritual activity into its diverse expressions in Music, Poetry, Visual Art, we find that Music is apt to obey the same 'law' of ebb

and and

flow as Religion, and Visual Art the same 'law' as the pursuit of power, while Poetry behaves equivocally reacting in German and Persian

Music and

Religion, and in Attic, Italian, French, and EngVisual Art and the pursuit of power. These tentative conclusions seem warrantable; for the truth is that Human Life on Earth is lived in two societies simultaneously the Ergastulum of Leviathan and the Commonwealth of God and each of these ways of life has its own spiritual dynamic the inspiration of the Grace of God and the stimulus of the Pride of Life. 2 The evidence suggests that Visual Art is apt to respond to the Pride of Life more readily than to a Grace of which the price is material adversity that those adverse conditions of material life that are propitious for Religion are also propitious

history like

lish history like

1

:

;

for Music and that Poetry, in contrast to both her sister arts, is a turncoat chamaeleon, who can take colour from the stimulus of Pride as readily as from the inspiration of Grace. ;

The

which Poetry had followed the course of Religion mundane adversity and then wilting at the breath of mundane prosperity was presented by the Islamic chapter of Persian history and in this case it was manifest that Poetry had drawn its inspiration from a religious source. 'The close connexion between Poetry and Belles Lettres on the one hand and Sufi-ism and Mysticism on the other, at any rate in Persia, is obvious, so that the extinction of the one necessarily involves the extinction of the other. 3 classic case in

in first blossoming at the breath of

;

'

See V.

vi, 149-68 and 365-9; and pp. 558-61, above. 'Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, caelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui' (St. Augustine: De Civitate Dei, Book XIV, chap. 28). 3 Letter, dated the 24th May, 1911, from Mirza Muhammad Khan of Qazwin to Professor E. G. Browne, quoted in I. i. 394 (cp. loc. cit., p. 363, n. 3). 1

2


711

After the forcible conversion of Persia from the Sunnah to the Shi' ah by the Safawis, the triumphant Shi'i divines waged a relentless war as well as Mysticism was against the dervish monasteries, and Poetry eradicated in the destruction of a religious institution in which Mysti-

cism and Poetry

alike

had found a

spiritual

home.

We may also cite one conspicuous case in which the course of Religion had been followed by Visual Art. A classical Hellenic art which had

gone into decline at the onset of the second bout of an Hellenic Time of Troubles at the turn of the third and second centuries B.C. had been whose eventually discarded by an latter-day generation of Hellenes of Life in Pride of the them had sickened of suffering experience favour of a revolutionary Byzantine art whose aim was not to portray 2 the body but to minister to Religion by expressing the Soul. 1

Note by

MARTIN WIGHT

on VII.

A

(Hi)

(a\ Annex I

SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL ACHIEVEMENT: THE LAW OF INVERSE OPERATION IN ITALIAN VISUAL ART think your generalization about the floruit of Italian art is so broad be inaccurate: it requires closer analysis. The four great poets come squarely at the beginning and at the end of the political independence of the city-states: Dante and Petrarch in the fourteenth century, when Italy finally emancipated itself from the remains of Imperial and Papal political control; Ariosto (vivebat A.D. and Tasso (vivebat A.D. 1544-95) in the sixteenth century, I

as to

1474-1533)

The fifteenth century, which was Italy fell under Spanish control. the political heyday of the city-states, produced no great poet. Here there is something of inverse operation. It is also visible in Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. These ascended steadily up to the High Renaissance in the two generations after the collapse of the city-state cosmos in A.D. 1494, and the supreme or were stimulated by the 'invasion of the barartists lived when

through

was deeply influenced by Savonarola and experienced the destruction of Florence as a Great Power. Raphael, whose life has fewest political rapports, was summoned to Rome by Julius II, the last the role of a Great Power. pope under whom the Papal States played Leonardo was in the service of Lodovico Sforza, under whom Milan lost its Great Power status, and he ended his life in the service of the French conqueror. Michelangelo's life was interwoven with the collapse of the Papacy as a temporal Great Power, and he was practically the last of republican Florence before the city was engineer of the fortifications a satellite of Spain through the Medici restorato reduced being finally tion of A.b. 1530. Venetian art ascended from the Bellini through Giorto its peak in Titian (vivebat circa 1485gione (vivebat A.D. 1475 ?-i5io) while Venice lost her Great 1576) and Tintoretto (vivebat 1518-94), Power status in the twin battles on land and sea of Agnadello and Diu barians'. Botticelli

i

See V.

vi

2

287-91.

See IV.

iv.

54-55-

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

712

and Berenson sees the political catastrophe as a challenge by responding to which the Venetian artistic tradition was etherialized and

in 1508;

carried to

its greatest heights. 'But even while such pictures [as the early works of Titian] were being painted, the spirit of the Italian Renaissance was proving inadequate to Life. Life began to show a sterner and more sober face than for a brief moment it had seemed to wear. Men became conscious that the passions for knowledge, for glory, and for personal advancement were not at the bottom of all the problems that Life presented. Florence and Rome discovered this suddenly, and with a shock. In the presence of Michelangelo's sculptures in San Lorenzo, or of his "Last Judgement'*, we still hear the cry of anguish that went up as the inexorable truth dawned upon them. But Venice, although humiliated by the League of Cambrai, impoverished by the Turk, and by the change in the routes of commerce, was not crushed, as was the rest of Italy, under the heels of Spanish infantry, nor so drained of resource as not to have some wealth still flowing into her coffers [an example of the golden mean of the stimulus of blows?]. Life grew soberer and sterner, but it was still amply worth the living, although the relish of a little stoicism and of earnest thought no longer seemed out of place. The spirit of the Renaissance had found .

.

.

way to Venice slowly; it was even more slow to depart. 'We therefore find that towards the middle of the sixteenth century, when elsewhere in Italy painting was trying to adapt itself to the hypocrisy of a Church whose chief reason for surviving as an institution was that it helped Spain to subject the World to tyranny, and when portraits its

were already exhibiting the fascinating youths of an earlier generation turned into obsequious and elegant courtiers in Venice painting kept true to the ripened and more reflective spirit which succeeded to the most glowing decades of the Renaissance. 'It is scarcely to be wondered at that the Venetian artist, in whom we first find the expression of the new feelings, should have been one who by wide travel had been brought into contact with the miseries of Italy in a way not possible for those who remained sheltered in Venice. Lorenzo Lotto, when he is most himself, does not paint the triumph of Man over his environment, but in his altar-pieces, and even more in his portraits, he shows us people in want of the consolations of religion, of sober thought, of friendship and affection. They look out from his canvases as if begging for sympathy. 'But real expression for the new order of things was not to be found by one like Lotto, sensitive of feeling and born in the heyday of the Renaissance, to whom the new must have come as a disappointment. It had to come from one who had not been brought in personal contact with the woes of the rest of Italy, from one less conscious of his environment, one like Titian who was readier to receive the patronage of the new master than to feel an oppression which did not touch him personally; or it had to come from one like Tintoretto, born to the new order of things and not having to outlive a disappointment before adapting himself to it.' .

.

.

1

Thus, while superficially there seems to be a broad contemporaneity between the blossoming of Italian art and the achievement of material power by the city-states, if it is examined more closely a different relationship is seen. There is a time-lag between the political zenith and i Berenson, Bernhard: The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, revised ed. 1932, Oxford University Press), pp. 31-33.

(London


713

the artistic zenith. The supreme artistic achievements of the High Renaissance are an after-glow of the political Golden Age of the citystates whose passing Guicciardini laments at the beginning of his history, or like the shower of stars emitted by a rocket when it reaches the highest point of its trajectory, Michelangelo and Titian being the two brightest and most long-lasting just as El Greco was a still more delayed coruscation of the East Roman Empire (cp. IV. iv. 360-1). There are two other striking examples of such inverse operation in the history of European Visual Art. One is provided by Spanish painting Velasquez is to the decline of the Spanish Monarchy as Titian is to the decline of Venice, or as Michelangelo to the decline of Florence and Papal Rome. The other is a more important example. The only movement in European painting which can be compared with the Italian Renaissance, in the richness of its variety within a coherent tradition and in its profusion of great artists, is the French painting of the nineteenth century; and this appears as a 'compensation* for the postNapoleonic political decline of France. Impressionism* was first used as the name of a school in A.D. 1863, and the floruit of the great Impressionists and Post- Impressionists was in the generation and a half be:

*

tween 1871

arid 1914.

Against these three examples of inverse operation can be put the Dutch school, which, as you say above (p. 707), had its apogee in Rembrandt contemporaneously with the apogee of Dutch power, and the British school, which, if we roughly identify it with Reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner, runs from A.D. 1723 when Reynolds was born to 1851 when Turner died, and coincides closely enough with 1

British political supremacy.

Perhaps the Flemish Renaissance could be pressed into service on the side of the examples of inverse operation, and seen as having the same relation to the independent Burgundian Power as the Italian Renaissance

has to the Italian city-states, with Bruegel in the role of Michelangelo or Titian. 'The whole school provided, in fact, a kind of Gothic swan-song with Pieter Brueghel [sic] as its final climax.' 2 The German Renaissance is more difficult to fit into the pattern and Rubens escapes through the net altogether. But perhaps enough has been said to suggest that there is at least as much inverse operation as interdependence in the case of the Visual Arts, and that the Visual Arts are therefore not less ambiguous than Poetry in this respect. ;

However, three last points need to be made, (i) This is only a cursory survey of European painting. To discover a 'law' of the Visual Arts that could claim any validity one would have to examine the art of at least the Byzantine World, Persia, India, and China as well. And probably the findings would be equally ambiguous. For example, 'it is noticeable that, throughout Indian history, architecture and sculpture have followed the moving centres of political power'. 3 Similarly the Mughal 1 Mr. John Lodge comments: 'I would add Hogarth (vivebat A.D. 1697-1764), and so cover the period more completely.' 2 Newton, Eric European Painting and Sculpture (London 1941 Pelican Books), p. 92. 3 edited by Sir Richard Wmstedt (London 1947, John Irwin in Indian Art, essays Faber), p. 92. :

,

.

B

2609. vii

.

.

Aa2

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

7 i4

at its zenith produced a great school of painting on the other hand, Rajput painting seems to have been stimulated by the decentralization of art patronage that accompanied the decline of the Mughal centuries. Raj, and flowered in the eighteenth and nineteenth between artistic the to define of The relationship seeking danger (ii) and material achievement is that the political environment, which is

Empire

;

deteronly a conditioning factor, becomes subtly exaggerated into the minant. For example, were the French Impressionists a response to a of the challenge of the political decline of France, or a development would prefer the inspiration of Constable and Turner ? An art historian latter explanation. El Greco was born in Crete, worked in Venice perhaps as Titian's pupil, and settled in Spain when Philip II was at the of the East height of his power. Is he to be treated as a late coruscation as an apprentice of the Venetian school at its zenith, or Roman

Empire,

epiphenomenon of the Spanish political apogee ? Or was he an inspired vagrant who cross-fertilized schools like a wandering bee? Most art historians would regard him as an isolated figure who cross-fertilized only his own genius and whose influence was not fully felt until the French Post-Impressionists. With Rubens, again, was not the inspiration that he gained from the Italian masters when he was in Mantua more important than the political regime of the archduke Albert and archduchess Isabella in Flanders which enabled him to develop the in terms of an interinspiration, so that he must properly be described national baroque movement? It seems that individual genius in art is more closely conditioned by artistic tradition than artistic tradition itself is conditioned by the political and social environment. The ultimate truth about artistic activity, as about all spiritual activity, is in terms of the wind blowing where it listeth and 'light caught from a leaping flame'. of 'inverse operation' needs to be analysed with (iii) The concept much more precision before it can be really useful. At least three different kinds of inverse operation are seen from your discussion, (a) There is the time-lag or 'after-glow', when an artistic tradition has been established during a period of political prosperity, but produces its supreme achievements after political prosperity has ended. The Italian Renaissance is the classic example, (b) There is what might be called, by contrast, the 'radiant morning', when an outburst of artistic genius accomas panies the beginnings of political power, but the artistic level sinks material power expands. I have suggested that English poetry illustrates 1 this. (c) There is simple compensation, when an artistic efflorescence comes after the loss of material power, and the artistic tradition has not in any notable way been established earlier. The classic examples are as the artistic

German or Italian music. Can we say that (a) tends

to be illustrated by the Visual Arts, (b) by Poetry, and (c) by Music ? It looks as if a tradition in the Visual Arts ascends slowly to its highest point and then falls sheer away, while a tradition in Poetry scales its highest point in about a generation and then descends gradually away. But this would be a generalization from far

too few examples, and every example changes 1

See

p. 708, n. 3,

above.

its

shape, like Proteus,

SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL ACHIEVEMENT when you try to German poetical and seems

pin

it

down and

classify

it.

For

715

instance, the great

efflorescence coincides with the musical efflorescence therefore to illustrate (c) rather than (b). But on second

thoughts they can both be made to illustrate (b). For it is inaccurate to regard the period from 1648 to 1871 as a continuous undifferentiated nadir of material adversity for Germany. From 1740 onwards the prostrate giant was stirring and preparing himself for 1871, and we could if we chose regard Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Holderlin as the expression of the political renaissance of Germany, just as we regard the Elizabethan poets as the expression of the English Befreiungskrieg against Spain. The same is true of Music, for did not Bach, the first of the supreme masters, regard it as the climax of his career when in 1747 he was summoned to visit Frederick the Great at Potsdam ? It is this protean quality of our paradigms, rather than their insufficient quantity, which makes an inquiry of the kind pursued in this 1

Annex

so unsatisfactory to the social scientist, who requires scientific precision and seeks firm laws in dealing with human history. But it seems to me that spiritual and artistic activity is intrinsically not

susceptible to treatment by the scientific method, and that the 'laws' which you discuss do not aim to be demonstrable and universally valid, but are of a quite different character. Their aim is to refine the appreciation of a relationship between spiritual facts and their material contexts, not to demonstrate a causal connexion; their method is qualitative, not quantitative; and they are apprehended, not by the scientific mind, but by something much more like the aesthetic sensiof which the quotation from Berenson above is an tivity of the critic

example. Mr. John Lodge comments- 'There is so much that has had to be passed over. about Camocns in relation to Portuguese voyaging and its consequences, and Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Calderon in the Spanish picture? Plow about Pushkin 1

How

and Tchaikovsky (not to mention Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and others) in the story of Russia?'

A

VII.

(a\

(iii)

ANNEX

II

HIGHER RELIGIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES IN the main stream of this Study we have struck upon the probability that each of the higher religions might satisfy some widely experienced human need, and the possibility that each of them might correspond and 1

minister to one of the psychological types into which Human Nature appears to be differentiated. These vistas of which we have caught a glimpse in passing are perhaps worth exploring further. may begin with a point on which we touched in an earlier passage of the same chapter. 2 Each of the higher religions had been apt to lay stress on some particular aspect of God's relation to Man, or of the individual soul's relation to the religious community, or of the religious community's relation to the political; and, even when it had not repudiated the complementary antithetical aspects in theory, it had been apt to ignore them in practice owing to the difficulty of bringing opposite poles together into a single harmonious Weltanschauung and way of life. When this insistence on one aspect, to the depreciation of others, had been carried far, it had been apt to evoke a counter-insistence on opposing aspects which could not be suppressed with impunity because they, too, had a truth and value which Human Nature could not afford to sacrifice. The counter-movement might take the form either of a new current within the old religion or of a new religion altogether and, when it declared itself, it was apt to 'compensate' for the previous depreciation of the aspect which it was championing by unduly emphasizing this aspect in its turn thereby laying itself open to a reaction against itself in the original direction against which it had set its own face. The difficulty of reconciling the two poles of an antithesis cannot in fact be solved by holding to the one and despising the other 3 and a man is constrained to serve two masters as best he may, when he cannot dispense with either. On the plane of Religion the feminine epiphany of the Godhead as the Great Mother is difficult to reconcile with Its masculine epiphany as the Father of gods and men. The forbidding aspect of God as a jealous aloof judge is difficult to reconcile with the consoling aspect of God as a loving intimate saviour. The aspect of worship as a social act performed by a congregation, under the leadership of a priest who is a necessary mediator between the laity and God because he has a monopoly of the power to celebrate the liturgy, is difficult to reconcile with the aspect of worship as a direct communion between the individual soul and God, in a 'flight of the alone to the Alone' 4 without witnesses or intermediaries. The primitive undifferentiated identity of the religious with the secular community is difficult

We

;

;

1

On

3

Luke

*

2

pp. 442-3, above. xvi. 13; cp.

Matt.

vi.

8 la part de verite qu'il y a en eux. Perhaps this French writer whom I have quoted, a Jesuit who besides being a Patristic scholar is profoundly concerned with the theology of missionary activity, may be quoted

Alexandria. 'Nous trouvons chez ces deux

VII. A (hi) (a), Annex II, 'Higher Religions and Psychological Types', p. 716, above. On pp. 458-60, above. 3 On p. 532, above, and in VII. C (n) (a), Annex, 'The Prehistoric Background', p. 766, n. 3, below. * On p. 429, above, s On pp. 461-3, above. 6 Acts xvii. 22-31. 7 Rom. li. . 14-15. 8 Dame"lou, Jean Le Mysttre de VAvent (Paris 1948, Editions du Seuil), p. 10. 1

2

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

742

further for a modern liberal Catholic statement of the conception of the praeparatio evangelica as the Christian doctrine of comparative religion :

'II est tres frappant de voir que les premiers Chretiens se sont trouve"s, vis-a-vis du monde dans lequel ils e"taient, exactement dans la situation dans laquelle se trouvent nos missionnaires en pays paiens: une petite

6 1 ranger dans un monde qui totalement ferm et hostile. Par exemple quand saint Paul pour la premiere fois est al!6 a Athenes et a commenc k prcher 1'fivangile sur l'Aropage, il se trouvait dans la meme situation que les premiers missionnaires qui sont alls en Chine ou au Japon et qui ont parl aux sages de la-bas.

minorit^ leur

d'hommes apportant un message

tait

.

.

.

'L'angoisse qui oppresse certaines ames aujourd'hui, consiste k se demander si le christianisme n'est pas d6pass, s'il n'est pas vieilli. Ceci ne concerne que certaines structures tout exte"rieures du christianisme, mais non son essence: le christianisme est, et restera toujours, jeunesse

du monde, parce qu'il est pr6cis6ment chronologiquement au terme du deVeloppement de 1'Histoire. Et la vraie relation du christianisme avec toutes les autres religions, c'est justement que ces religions a son gard sont anterieures, sont primes. Je ne dis pas qu'elles sont fausses en tous points: le judaisme n'est pas faux, le bouddhisme n'est pas faux, les civilisations fetichistes ne sont pas fausses; elles sont vieilles, c'est-k-dire que, par rapport au christianisme, elles sont dans un 6tat d'antriorit6 chronologique et, en quelque sorte, des survivances; le christianisme, qui les acheve, est apparu et dsormais tout ce qu'il y a de bon en elles est accompli dans le christianisme. Entre le christianisme et elles, nous avons la juxtaposition dans 1'espace de choses qui sont historiquement successives et c'est un fait curieux que ce rapport de simultaneity entre des ralites entre lesquelles

le

rapport essentiel est

un rapport de suc-

cession.' 1 I think the Christian critic might point to two places where your emphasis is different, and implies the spiritual equivalence of the four Higher Religions rather than the praeparatio evangelica. You describe Matteo Ricci as having sought 'a reconciliation, on Christian initiative, between hitherto exclusive-minded religions'. 2 But the above passage from Danielou is the authentic position of Matteo Ricci, who 'approached these alien faiths with sympathy, understanding and reverence', not because he thought that they were as good as Christianity, but because he saw them in the way in which St. Paul saw the Law, as 'our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ'. 3 Christian charity will always enjoin 4 respect for the genuine agnosticism of a Symmachus, but belief in the Christian Revelation is not compatible with an acceptance of Symmachus's position, and, although you infer the contrary, there would surely be no difference between St. Ambrose and Father Ricci on that point. Again, the resemblance between the sacraments and rituals of Christianity and Paganism cannot be adequately described for the Christian by 'the simple truth that it is a family likeness', 5 which once

more

implies spiritual equivalence.

'Ce que nous rencontrons versal qui est k la fois 1

Danielou, op.

3

Gal.

iii.

24.

cit.,

une

Ik, c'est cette espece de sacramentalisme unisorte d'intuition profonde du sens sacral des

pp. 10 and 21-22. * p. 442, above.

2 5

p. 441, above. p. 459, above.

THE CRUX FOR A CHRISTIAN HISTORIAN choses et en

m&me

temps qui ne donne pas

la grace,

qui

743

la signifie seulefera le chris-

rnent. C'est une sorte de pierre d'attente, d'appel. Que tianisme? Creera-t-il des rites distincts de ceux des autres religions? Pas du tout. Le christianisme prendra tous ces gestes sacres de toutes les religions, mais il les chargera de la grace du Christ. Alors cette eau du Gange, dans la mesure ou elle devient le baptme, devient le moyen de la r6gnration surnaturelle des homm.es. C'est bien le meme repas, mais ce pain qui aura 6te" brise n'est pas seulement un symbole, effectivement il nous fait cornrmmier a la realit meme de J6sus-Christ. Alors nous voyons tres bien ce qui se ressemble et ce qui est different. C'est presque pareil et c'est totalement different. C'est pareii quant au geste mais c'est different parce qu'il y a toute la difference entre la figure et la realite, entre le geste qui est un geste d'attente et le don. Et c'est la 1'essentiel du christianisme: le don par Dieu de la grace divine et de la vie divine.' 1 .

.

.

But there has always been

a tension in the relationship of Chriswith other religions a tension between apprehending them as a praeparatio evangelica and apprehending them as obstacles to the spreading of the Gospel. This tension reflects the inherent ambiguity of other religions, which are at the same time both 'precursors' and 'adversaries' ; and it springs from the essential nature of a revelation which is at once 5.

tianity

:

exclusive and universal, which proclaims itself as Truth among partial truths and falsehoods, which makes absolute claims and knows (in a sense) that they will be rejected, which is a light shining in a darkness that has not comprehended it.

'Some speak grudgingly or fault-findingly about the heights of the non-Christian religions and are inclined to lay all stress on their horrible depths. Others assiduously emphasise the heights of these religions but remain largely silent about the dark sides. Both, therefore, have a distorted view of these religions, not so much because they unduly vituperate or unduly praise them (although they certainly do so), but because they have a distorted view of Man, whose nature is angelic and satanic. We as well as the demon in Man, wherever Hinduism, in China or anywhere else.' 2

must honestly recognise the angel

we

find him, in Christendom, in

You

describe the 'diabolical' theory of Paganism as an 'ingenious hypoWestern Christian missionaries'. 3 But it goes

thesis' of 'Early Modern back at least to St. Paul,

rov

4

Acooyxou.

You imply

uncharitable, of course,

who saw Paganism

as bondage to ra aroiêta a perverse 'hypothesis'. Perverse and application can be and often has been, but it

that its

it is

originates in spiritual insight into the intrinsically demonic potentialities of Paganism. What St. Paul describes in Rom. i. 20-25 is part of the experience of every missionary: that other religions are not only fore-

shadowings of Christianity, but also genuine autonomous

idolatries,

manifestations of the forces of spiritual evil that Christ came to van5 quish. Consequently Christian missionary thought has always moved 1

Danielou, op.

2

Kraemer, Hendnk: The Christian Message

cit.,

pp. 75-76. in

a Non-Christian World (London

1938, published for the International Missionary Council by the Edinburgh House Press), p. 286. 3 VII. (in) (a), Annex II, 'Higher Religions and Psychological Types', in the 4 Gal. iv. first draft; cp. p. 459, above. 3 and 9; Col. ii. 8. s Matt. xii. 29, Luke x. 18, John xii. 31, xvi. n. Cp. Col. i. 13, ii. 15, i John ni. 8 t

A

UNIVERSAL CHURCHES

744

between two poles, an emphasis on the similarities in Paganism to Christianity, and an emphasis on the radical otherness of Christianity. The first view is perhaps represented most clearly today by Roman Catholics like Danielou, who are in the tradition of Matteo Ricci, while the 'radical' view has its classic modern expression in the book already quoted of Kraemer's, a Calvinist scholar who has had long missionary experience in the Far East. The two views are complementary: there is not contradiction between them, but a necessary tension. Therefore 'le rapport du christianisme aux autres religions est d'une part histonque, c'est-a-dire qu'il y a entre le christianisme et les autres religions une relation "chronologique", dans la mesure ou il represente ce a quoi tout le reste aboutit; mais c'est en meme temps une relation "dramatique", c'est-a-dire que, s'il est vrai que le christianisme acheve, il faut dire aussi qu'il detruit et que, par consequent, les religions paiennes d'une part s'epanouissent en lui, et d'autre part meurent pour lui faire .

.

.

1

place.'

The

'dramatic* relationship becomes most apparent at the point where another religion rejects its vocation of being a precursor of Christianity and passes over into the attitude of an adversary, as the Jews themselves did when confronted with Jesus Christ. This is how Danielou sees the ultimate opposition tradition

between the Syriac tradition and the Indie

:

'Bouddha adversaire.

a 6te Tun des grands precurseurs du Christ et sera son dernier Bouddha, representant eminent de la religion cosmique,

prebibhque, est a la fois celui qui dans les profondeurs du passe a prepare myst^rieusement 1'Inde a recevoir Jesus-Christ, en faisant 1'education de son ame, et c'est encore lui qui dans le drarne spirituel 2 supreme du monde, quand Israel lui-meme "sera intgre", disputera Tame de 1'Inde au Christ, en opposant a 1'universahsme chretien 1'umversalisme de la religion cosmique, qui est ce qui lui ressemble le plus, la caricature de la cathohcite, le syncretisme.' 3

Perhaps the most that can be said about the history of this tension in the Christian attitude to other religions is that, as Christianity has become less concerned with primitive religions of the kind that it superseded in the Roman Empire and has become more concerned with the other Higher Religions, so its emphasis has shifted from apprehension of the demonic character of other religions to recognition of their praeparatio evangelica. But this, once again, has taken place within the abiding framework of tension, of a 'dramatic* relationship, because these spring from the very nature of spiritual life and of Christianity itself. Now, as always, Christianity comes not only to fulfil, but also to purge.

'When

the

word "approach"

is

taken in the sense of Christianity as a

system approaching the non-Christian religions as total religious systems, there is only difference and antithesis, and this must be so because they are radically different. To minimise this results in a weakening and blurring of the true character of Christianity. Wilamowitz in his ... book on The Faith of the Greeks mentions as one of the principal reasons of the victory of Christianity in the Ancient World the fact that it rejected all other gods and proclaimed the absolute monarchy of the 2 Rom. xi. 3 Danielou, op. cit., p. 9. Danielou, op. cit., pp. 67-68. 51. total religious

1

THE CRUX FOR A CHRISTIAN HISTORIAN

745

One Living God;

in other words, that it remained true to its essential nature. To remain true to its essential character is also to-day the unbreakable law of Christianity/ 1

Let it be added that

for a Christian to speak of the demonic potentialiof other religions does not preclude recognition of the possibility of demonic perversion of Christianity itself: it implies it. The Christian will be grateful for your insistence that 'the intransigence of the Christian martyrs degenerated into the intolerance of Christian persecutors', 2 and will confess the spiritual truth in your criticisms of Christianity, 3 even when he disagrees with the way in which they are formulated. Corruptio optimi pessima. For the Christian, the discussion of the relations between Christianity and the other Higher Religions has to start ties

from

its

recognition that Christians,

more than anyone

else, are

under

judgement. "The only valid and indestructible foundation of missions is the apostolic consciousness of joyful obedience to God's Will as manifested in the revelation in Christ, and our gratitude for this divine gift. All questions of superiority in the field of cultural experience or psychological religious experience are irrelevant in this context. pretensions whatever, derived from presumably superior ethical or religious or cultural elements, have anything to do with the apostolic claim and obligation of

No

Christianity. Its only foundation is the objective and plain reality of God's revelation in Christ, and therefore, speaking fundamentally, it is quite immaterial whether the World asks for it or not. The only way to

become wholly purged from

all kinds of superiority-feeling is, not the direct pursuit of a sympathetic or generous spirit towards other cultural experiences, however praiseworthy and valuable this may be, but the radically apostolic attitude; for this presupposes the not less radical humility that issues from the fact that all men of all civilisations (the "Christian" included) are, in the light of God's revelation, forlorn sinners and rebellious children of God.' 4

6. For these reasons the Christian critic will, I think, be dissatisfied with your handling of 'the crux for an historian brought up in the Christian tradition', and will hold that your solution of the problem of the relationship between Christianity and the other Higher Religions fails to be in Christian terms. He will be able to accept neither your premiss of the spiritual equivalence of the Higher Religions derived from the secondary civilizations nor the conclusion, to which it in5 evitably leads, that they have a common destiny. He will note that in due course you qualify your assumption by tentatively suggesting a Indie religions which has led to an apparently spiritual deficiency in the 6 inconsistent assimilation to Christianity; but it will seem to him that of the with the in harmony* or 'symphony' of the end, your argument *

7

Higher Religions, you yourself capitulate 1

Kraemer, op.

cit

,

to a

Hindu mode

of thought.

pp. 300-1.

* On pp. 440-1 and 452, above. p. 439, above. 5 pp. 442~3 above. Kraemer, op. cit., p. 300. 6 VII. A and Karma', p. 758, below; VII. A (ui) (a), Cm) (d) 3, Annex, 'Immortality Annex II, 'Higher Religions and Psychological Types', pp. 719, 725, n. i, and 735,

2

On

A study of history, Volume 7 - Universal Churches

A Study of History

History of Philosophy, Volume 7 (Modern Philosophy)

A study of history, Volume 5 - Disintegration of Civilizations

A study of history, Volume 4, Breakdowns of Civilizations

Christ's Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism

Lost Churches of Mississippi

ADVANCES IN CATALYSIS VOLUME 7, Volume 7

A Companion to the Study of History

A Study of War (Volume I)

A Study of War (Volume II)

History Of Dogma Volumes 1-6 of 7 Volume set

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford History of the Christian Church)

Regression: A Universal Experience

Religions of Rome: Volume 1: A History

Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History

A History of Indian Philosophy, Volume I

A History of Indian Philosophy (Volume IV)

A History of Indian Philosophy, Volume 2

A History of Marxian Economics, Volume II

A History of Modern Drama, Volume 1

A Concise History of Mathematics Volume 1

A History of Indian Philosophy, Volume I

Religions of Rome: Volume 1: A History

Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches' Past

Onomastica Uralica volume 7

A Study of Concepts

Torrid Teasers Volume 7

Ma'ariful Quran Volume 7

A study of history, Volume 7 - Universal Churches