Cambyses

Sahra al-Beida, the White Desert at sunset

Herodotus relates that Cambyses II, son of the great Cyrus, a man inclined to excesses, murder and sacrilege, who finally surrendered to insanity (“for it is said moreover that Cambyses had from his birth a certain grievous malady, that which is called by some the «sacred» disease: and it was certainly nothing strange that when the body was suffering from a grievous malady, the mind should not be sound either”, Herodotus 3.33) committed one of his greatest follies toward the end of his days. He sent an army of 50,000 men against the temple of Amun in Siwa to the northwest of the impressive Lybian Sand Sea, without almost any supplies and ammunition. Herodotus transmits several versions of this tragic story which may be true, but never any convincing trace has been found of the people caught up in the desert:

It is known that they arrived at the city of Oasis, which is inhabited by Samians said to be of the Aischrionian tribe, and is distant seven days’ journey from Thebes over sandy desert: now this place is called in the speech of the Hellenes the “Isle of the Blessed.” It is said that the army reached this place, but from that point onwards, except the Ammonians themselves and those who have heard the account from them, no man is able to say anything about them; for they neither reached the Ammonians nor returned back. This however is added to the story by the Ammonians themselves: – they say that as the army was going from this Oasis through the sandy desert to attack them, and had got to a point about mid-way between them and the Oasis, while they were taking their morning meal a violent South Wind blew upon them, and bearing with it heaps of the desert sand it buried them under it, and so they disappeared and were seen no more. Thus the Ammonians say that it came to pass with regard to this army. (Herodotus, 3.26)

As recently as November last year, a team of Italian researchers announced – apparently with no absolute confirmation – to have found in a valley the bones of the unfortunate army. That there are bones indeed you can see in this video. Here, no doubt, lots of people had died. But it is not easy to point out that they were the lost army of Cambyses.



Herodotus, writing on another subject, gives us an interesting clue to whether the bones are of Persians or Egyptians, and modern investigators do not seem to have taken account of his wisdom:

I was witness moreover of a great marvel, being informed of it by the Egyptians; for of the bones scattered about of those who fell in this fight, each side separately, since the bones of the Persians were lying apart on one side according as they were divided at first, and those of the Egyptians on the other, the skulls of the Persians are so weak that if you shall hit them only with a pebble you will make a hole in them, while those of the Egyptians are so exceedingly strong that you would hardly break them if you struck them with a large stone. The cause of it, they say, was this, and I for my part readily believe them, namely that the Egyptians beginning from their early childhood shave their heads, and the bone is thickened by exposure to the sun: and this is also the cause of their not becoming bald-headed; for among the Egyptians you see fewer bald-headed men than among any other race. This then is the reason why these have their skulls strong; and the reason why the Persians have theirs weak is that they keep them delicately in the shade from the first by wearing tiaras, that is felt caps. (3.12)

We have celebrated the Holy Week by immersing ourselves in this vast Western Desert of Egypt, traveling from Cairo to Abu Simbel through the oases of Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla and Al-Kharga. We will tell more about this periplous in the following days.

Full moon in the White Desert

From the small oasis of Abu Minqar to the west opens to the sight the relentless route – or rather its absence – along which the 50,000 soldiers of Cambyses disappeared. Right here emerges the miracle of a fountain of red water, a thick flow of hot water in which we could not avoid plunging with all due respect, sharing our lustral bath with the ablutions of the handful of inhabitants of the oasis.

Ferruginous waters at the source of Abu Minqar. The jet arrives at about 40ºC

And under the jet, there is Wang Wei himself in body and soul, with all the desert around

Cambises

Sahra al-Beida, el Desierto Blanco al atardecer

Cuenta Heródoto que Cambises II, hijo del gran Ciro, hombre inclinado a los excesos y fácil para la vesania asesina y para el sacrilegio, y finalmente entregado a la enajenación mental («se dice, en efecto, que Cambises padeció de nacimiento una grave enfermedad que llaman algunos mal sagrado; ciertamente no es increíble que padeciendo el cuerpo grave enfermedad, tampoco estuviese sana la mente» 3.33), cometió hacia el fin de sus días una de las mayores locuras. Envió un ejército de 50.000 hombres contra el templo de Amón en Siwa, al noroeste del imponente Gran Mar de Arena líbico. Allá los mandó sin apenas provisiones ni pertrechos. Heródoto apunta varias versiones de la trágica historia. Puede que esta sea cierta, aunque nunca se encontró rastro fehaciente de los hombres devorados por el desierto:

Consta que llegaron hasta la ciudad de Oasis (que ocupan los samios, originarios, según se dice, de la tribu escrionia), distante de Tebas siete jornadas de camino a través del arenal; esta región se llama en lengua griega Isla de los Bienaventurados. Hasta este paraje es fama que llegó el ejército; pero desde aquí, como no sean los mismos amonios o los que de ellos lo oyeron, ningún otro lo sabe: pues ni llegó a los amonios ni regresó. Los mismos amonios cuentan lo que sigue: una vez partidos de esa ciudad de Oasis avanzaban contra su país por el arenal; y al llegar a medio camino, más o menos, entre su tierra y Oasis mientras tomaban el desayuno [un poco antes ha contado Heródoto otra versión en que los soldados hambrientos echaban suertes para devorar a uno de cada diez], sopló un viento Sur, fuerte y repentino que, arrastrando remolinos de arena, les sepultó, y de este modo desaparecieron. Así cuentan los amonios que pasó con este ejército (Heródoto, 3.26)

Hace poco, en noviembre del año pasado, un equipo de investigadores italianos anunciaba —parece que de manera no del todo acreditada— el hallazgo en un valle de los huesos mondos de aquellos desventurados. Huesos, como se aprecia en este vídeo, sí que los hay. Aquí sin duda ha muerto gente. Pero no es fácil demostrar que sea el ejército perdido de Cambises.



Heródoto, hablando de otro asunto, nos da una curiosa pista para averiguar si los huesos son de persas o de egipcios, y no parece que los modernos investigadores hayan tenido en cuenta su sabiduría:

Instruido por los egipcios, observé una gran maravilla. Los huesos de los que cayeron en la batalla están en montones, aparte unos de otros (pues los huesos de los persas están aparte, tal como fueron apartados en un comienzo, y en el otro lado están los de los egipcios). Los cráneos de los persas son tan endebles que si quieres tirarles un guijarro, los pasarás de parte a parte; pero los de los egipcios son tan recios que golpeándolos con una piedra apenas podrás romperlos. Daban de esto la siguiente causa, y me persuadieron fácilmente: que desde muy niños, los egipcios se rapan la cabeza, con lo cual el hueso se espesa al sol. Y esto mismo es la causa de que no sean calvos, ya que en Egipto se ven menos calvos que en ninguna parte; y esta es la causa también de tener recio el cráneo. En cambio la causa de tener los persas endeble el cráneo es esta: porque desde un comienzo lo tiene a la sombra, cubierto con el bonete de fieltro llamado tiara (3.12)

Nosotros celebramos la Semana Santa sumergiéndonos en el inmenso Desierto Occidental egipcio, transitando desde El Cairo hasta Abu Simbel por los oasis de Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla y Al-Kharga.

Luna llena en el Desierto Blanco

Hablaremos del periplo estos días. Desde el pequeño oasis de Abu Minqar, hacia poniente se otea la implacable ruta —o su ausencia— en la que desaparecieron los 50.000 soldados de Cambises. Justo aquí brota el milagro de una última fuente de aguas rojizas, un grueso caudal de agua caliente en el que no pudimos evitar zambullirnos con todo respeto, compartiendo nuestro baño lustral con las abluciones del puñado de habitantes del oasis.

Aguas ferruginosas en la fuente de Abu Minqar. El chorro sale a unos 40ºC

En efecto, ahí debajo está Wang Wei en cuerpo y alma, con todo el desierto alrededor

The little prince

In the Objects found section of the blog A vajszínű árnyalat. we have found this postcard, portraying Crown Prince Ahmad Mirza one year before his ascendence to the throne of Persia on July 16, 1909 as Ahmad Qajar Shah, the last ruler in his dynasty. The date of the postmark is March 1911, but this is only ante quem. In the collection of Darius Kadivar we find the other side of the card as well – happy times when it was enough to write for an address as few as “to Mr. Seid Rahim in Tehran” – bearing, oddly enough, another stamp and postmark with a three months earlier date. But this is just an ante quem as well. The quo is printed with Eastern Arabic numbers immediately under the image: ۱۳۲۶ that is 1326, indicating the period between February 4, 1908 and January 22, 1909 according to the Islamic calendar. During the reign of Ahmad Shah, just like in all times since the acceptance of Islam, this was the official calendar. Only after his overthrow in 1925 was it officially changed by Reza Pahlavi – at odds with the clergy and in favor of the country’s ancient roots – for that Persian calendar of Zoroastrian origin, also polished by Omar Khayyam, which counted in solar instead of lunar years the time that had passed since the hijra, thus setting back by forty years the calendar of the country. By when the number of the years could have made up for the loss, his son Mohammed Reza Shah also translated the starting point of the calendar at the year of the foundation of the ancient Persian Empire, so that the pro-Shah emigration even today writes 2567. After the Islamic Revolution – who knows why – they did not return to the Islamic calendar, only the starting point of the Persian calendar in vigor was set again to the year of the Hijra. It is an odd impression to read in the date of the Islamic newspapers, above the name of Allah, the names of the twelve Zoroastrian archangels with which the Persian calendar marks the twelve months – or, more precisely, the twelve zodiacal signs.

The Crown Prince – here to the left already shahinshah, King of the Kings – on these pictures looks with that infinitely melancholic glance into a world accessible only to him, which is the attribute of a nation fatigued under the burden of twenty-five centuries of a highly refined civilization. Of a nation whose very verbal infinitives serve, in an unparalleled way, to express the past time, so that they have to create a separate stem to express the present. This characteristic melancholy is felt everywhere among Persians. And it is not just the consequence of the current political situation, not that “hopelessness that rules the heart of every young Iranian” as The Labyrinth writes, or as the letter quoted by him puts it: “in our 20s and 30s we are already old and will become older still.” For in the non-Persian regions of the country, among the energetic Kurds, in the Armenian quarter of Isfahan, or in Tabriz inhabited by the lively Torkis, Azeri Turks, there is no trace of this melancholy which, on the other hand, was already noted a hundred and fifty years ago by the great Hungarian orientalist Ármin Vámbéry arriving from Turkey to Persia. And this same melancholy radiates from the poems of Khayyam, Rumi or Hafez. And even the predecessor of Ahmad Shah, King Xerxes, while inspecting his army that surpassed any other in number before the great campaign of his life

pronounced himself a happy man, and after that he fell to weeping. Artabanos, having observed that Xerxes wept, asked him: “O king, how far different from one another are the things which thou hast done now and a short while before now! for having pronounced thyself a happy man, thou art now shedding tears.” He said: “Yea, for after I had reckoned up, it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive when a hundred years have gone by.” (Herodotus, Histories, 7.46)

But Ahmad Shah – described by his contemporaries as “an extremely intelligent young man, highly educated, with a wide knowledge of both Eastern and Western culture, and well read in history, politics, and economic theory” – had even more reasons for melancholy. In Persia the Russian imperialists on the north and the English to the south had been competing with each other for a century in seizing the resources of the country, until in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 they divided Persia in spheres of interest, obstructing any development since the times of the shah’s great-grandfather, inciting to anti-government riots the tribes making up almost a quarter of Persia’s population, and extracting exclusive concession on the Iranian oil discovered in 1908. In this vacuum since the 1870’s the most bewildering adventurers, fools and agents had been appropriating the political and cultural stage, preparing the way to the so-called Constitutional Revolution between 1905 and 1911, during which the father of the shah was forced to abdicate, and Ahmad “ascended weeping to the throne”. In the following three years he put on thirty kilos. During his reign the English, “for safety’s sake”, occupy and in the WWI use as a hinterland the country that had previously declared its neutrality, contributing to the great famine of 1918-19 which killed a tenth of the population, and then, at the sight of the gradual development of parlamentarian democracy, they convinced the illiterate general of the only efficient Persian military force, the Persian Cossacks, to seize the power, taking advantage of the absence of the shah who in 1925 traveled to France to the funerals of his father. The general establishes his dictatorship in the service of the English interests under the self-created name Reza Pahlavi Shah. Ahmad Shah dies five years later, at the age of thirty-two in Paris.


In the best summary of twentieth-century Persian history, in his less than hundred pages long The Shahinshah, Ryszard Kapuściński portrays the reign of Reza Pahlavi and of Mohammed Reza by narrating about a dozen of photos, from the illiterate Cossack sergeant accompanying a prisoner to his son escaping from the revolution at the airport. I have always been fascinated by this narrative, not only because of the sharp eye and precise style of Kapuściński, but also because of the ingenuity of the method. However, since I have made better acquaintance of old Persian photos, although my appreciation of Kapuściński has not decreased, nevertheless I see better how much these photos offer themselves to such an analysis. In Persia, before the arrival of photography, there was hardly any tradition of the portrait, thus the early photos do not mirror those centuries-old, detailed and inconscious rules of composition and closedness that have been pointed out even in the photos of Hungarian peasants by Ernő Kunt. These photos possess some kind of a magic spontaneity, by which they promise to tell something more, deeper and more personal about their subjects than contemporary Western photographies do.

The grandfather of Ahmad Shah, Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar (1896-1907)

The children of Ahmad Shah

The figure of Ahmad Shah still represents the end of the real Persian imperial rule for many Persians, and even the monarchist emigration is divided between the Qajar party and the Pahlavi party. Essays, a romantic film (Homayun Shahnavaz’s Shah-e kamoush [The silent shah], 2005), and even a separate blog is dedicated to his memory, several families keep at home one of his official ruler’s portraits, and his image, accompanied by the symbol of the Empire, the shir o khorsid, also pops up in the Persepolis of his distant descendant Marjane Satrapi, the second best summary of twentieth-century Persian history.

Front-page of the Illustrated London News not much before
the English, in order to save the world peace threatened
by Persia, in 1915 occupied the country
(or: nothing new under the sun)

Ahmad Shah. Behind him, wearing a cloak, General Reza Khan, shortly before his takeover

Dying and resurrecting

Zoroastrian dakhmeh, “tower of silence” near to Yazd in Central Iran

Plato in his dialogues often gives a myth in the mouth of some of his speakers. Sometimes one of the well known Greek myths, but much more often some intricate story of faraway origin that obviously proclaims of either having been composed by himself, or having been thoroughly transformed to his own taste. The purpose of these myths, as Catalin Partenie writes in her selection made in 2004 for the Oxford World’s Classic series, was on one hand to adjust historical, philosophical, political or scientific concepts of large breadth to the genre of storytelling customary in banquets and to present them as sanctioned by the authority of tradition, and on the other hand to expound some truth in an indirect and hidden way, and thus stimulating further thought, just like parables do. The best known one is of course the legend of Atlantis in the Timaeus that Plato pretends to derive from Egypt, but here belongs also the story of the androgynes cut in two halves, or that of the ring of Gyges in The Republic that made his owner invisible and which has also served as an inspiration for Tolkien.

In The Republic Socrates also narrates the vision of Er of Pamphylia who dies in a battle, but then revives on the funeral pyre and tells of his journey in the afterlife, of the souls who, according to their actions while in life, descend for a thousand years of punishment under the earth or for the same amount of pleasures to the sky, and then by choosing themselves new forms of life return to the earth again.

To me the most interesting detail in this story has always been the name of the protagonist, archetype of Aeneas of Dante. This name – in contrast to all the other Platonic myths – does not sound Greek at all. As if Plato, contrary to his custom, conserved here a foreign – Pamphylian? – name that can in fact hint to the foreign origins of this myth.

The commentaries obviously slide over this name, or if they don’t, then they fabricate a whole series of gratuitous Greek etymologies eclipsing even those by Heidegger and Isidore of Seville, like for example Bernard Suzanne does:

The name of Er (èr, contracted form of ear) means “spring” (the season). But this name, whose only mention, at 614b, is the genitive form èros, evokes much more than that. It looks like the masculine form of Hera, the name of Zeus’ wife, except for the smooth breathing replacing the rough one. And if we look at what Plato has to say about the etymology of Hera in the Cratylus (404b-c), we see that he associates it with love (eros) through the adjective “lovable (eratè)”, but also with air (aer), which, applied to Er, opposes him to Gyges the earthling : hope is not in our material, earthly nature, but in our celestial, godly power of thought and understanding, and in the power of love that sets it on the move. Panphulos, the name of Er’s tribe, means “of all tribes or races”. Shorey suggests in a note that he might as well have translated “to genos Pamphulou” by “of the tribe of Everyman”. And while we are at names, the name of Er’s father, Armenius (tou Armeniou) is a close call for Harmony (armonia), a concept dear to Plato and central to the whole Republic, as well as to the myth of Er, with the “harmony of the Sirens” mentioned at its center (617c).

Reading the 5th-century History of Armenia by the first Armenian historiographer Movses Khorenatsi, in chapter I, 15 I find the story of the Armenian king Ara and the Assyrian queen Semiramis. Ara, son of Aram was an extraordinarily beautiful man, and the queen desired him to be either her husband or her lover. She sent several embassies to him with gifts, supplications, flattery and menaces, but all in vain: Ara remained faithful to his wife. Thus Semiramis finally went with her army upon him. They clashed under the mountain that received its name Ararat from Ara, and although the queen commanded the king to be brought to her alive, he fought heroically and remained dead on the battlefield. The queen had his corpse brought to her, and – a surprising turn – had it placed on the roof of her palace. When she was asked for the reason, she answered: “I have ordered my gods to lick his wounds, and he will be restored to life.” However, as the dead fails to resurrect and begins to decompose, she commands it to be cast in a ditch, while she has dressed up one of her paramours similar to Ara in Armenian clothes and presents him to the court like this: “The gods licked Ara and brought him back to life, fulfilling our wish and pleasure. Therefore from now on they are all the more to be worshiped and honoured by us, as they fulfill our pleasures and accomplish our desires.”

Our way across Lake Van from Tatvan to Van, on the way from Istambul to Iran. The environments of Lake Van were the cradle of Armenian civilization, the central region of “Greater Armenia”

It is observed that when Christian chroniclers mention such impostures in the pagan stories quoted by them, then they are usually “rationalizing” miraculous legends, disputing the power of the pagan gods to work miracles, for this is obviously a prerogative of God. It looks like Khorenatsi did the same with the story of Ara and Semiramis. For in the Armenian mythology collected from folk tradition, Ara was in fact “licked to life” by the divine dogs, the aralezks (whose Armenian name also means “Ara-lickers”), and he thus returned from the afterlife.

I think that there are too many common elements in the stories of Ara and Er to be independent from each other. Apart from their similar names, there is the name of Ara’s father ‘Aram’ which in Greek recalls the ethnonym ‘Aramaic’, thus Platon logically could have changed it for the ethnonym Armenios, ‘Armenian’ which fits better to the origin of the story – or perhaps he converted an original attribute ho armenios, ‘the Armenian’ into tou Armeniou, ‘(son) of Armenios’. Pamphylia was an existing region in southern Anatolia, in the direction of Greater Armenia when seen from Athens, especially if we consider that the sailor nation of the Greek looked with repugnance on the countries in the interior of the continents – a good example for this is the Anabasis of Xenophon marching across this same Armenian region – and they might have hinted to them like lying somewhere, anywhere behind the seashore region nearest to it. And finally the fate of the protagonist dying in a battle to then resurrect and bring news from the afterlife makes it almost impossible that it was not this very story which was heard by Plato and rearranged for his own purpose.

If it were only this much, it would be already interesting enough. However, there is another twist in the story. The corpse put on the roof, the aralezks “licking it to life”, and even the decomposed body cast into a ditch evoke the Zoroastrian funeral ritual, as it was described by another Greek source, the History of Herodotus (I, 140) like this:

What follows is reported about their dead as a secret mystery and not with clearness, namely that the body of a Persian man is not buried until it has been torn by a bird or a dog. The Magians [= the Zoroastrian priests] I know for a certainty have this practice, for they do it openly.

In the Zoroastrian religion, neither earth nor fire can be contaminated with dead corpses. Instead, they put them on “towers of silence” (in Persian dakhmeh) built on high places outside of the towns, and later they place the bones cleaned by predatory birds and sunshine in ossaries. In modern Iran still there is one such tower near to Yazd, the city of the greatest Zoroastrian community that we have also seen. And as the renowned scholar of pre-Christian Armenian culture James Russell explains in his Zoroastrianism in Armenia (1987), this religion became dominant in Armenia after its conversion into a Persian province. And near to the Armenian town where, according to Armenian mythology, the corpse of Ara was licked to life by aralezks, and which thereafter was thus called Lezk or Aralezk, on an altitude there stood a similar Zoroastrian shrine. After the conversion of Armenia to Christian religion – first among all countries, in 303 – it was converted into a church in honor of the dying and resurrecting Saviour.

I wanted to know where Lezk is and how it is called today, but in vain. The name of this locality can be found on the web only in the relations of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. And where the map of 1914 of Van vilayet, published in the history of Van by Hovannisian, shows it – about ten kilometers to the north of Van city – there in the modern map of Turkey no locality can be found. It is possible that it was deserted in 1915 together with several other hundreds of Armenian settlements.


However, this story has one more twist in store. In fact, the scholars of Armenian mythology compare the story of Ara and Semiramis to the most important metaphor of dying and resurrecting nature, celebrated year by year from Mesopotamia through Syria and Greece to Egypt: to the story of a goddess and her lover – Inanna and Dumuzi, Ishtar and Tammuz, Cybele and Addis, Venus and Adonis –, so beautifully evoked by Thomas Mann, where the young man is wounded to death by some infernal power, but his divine lover resurrects him, and she even manages to obtain the right to spend half of the year with him in the sunshine, so that he must spend only the other half down in the other world – usually with the infernal rival of the goddess. It is not by chance that Khorenatsi also narrates in the following chapter that Semiramis, „as she liked the region very much”, had also a castle built near to Van on a cliff, so that she could spend a part of the year – the summer – there, and go back to Ninive only for the winter. This castle, albeit ruined, still stands, and its strange position made it a favorite topic for the engravings of those few 19th-century Western travelers arriving this far away.

“Citadel of Semiramis” near to Van, engraving by Eugène Boré, 1838

The name of Tammuz and Ara were connected not only by erudite mythographers, but also by Armenian folk tradition, and one of their most popular dances bears the name of “Tamzara”, Tammúz-Ara. Since 1915 this dance has not been performed in Eastern Anatolia, but the Anatolian Armenians of the diaspora have preserved it together with the rest of their traditions. In the video below it is performed by the Armenian Folk Dance Society of New York. Even if it has no lyrics, there is enough history behind it so that we can include it in our “history sung” thread as well. We wish the violent death of this culture was also followed by a resurrection.