The challenge of the obscure
(Or how I read a totally brilliant book with a title that didn't deliver what I expected then realised I couldn't have done any better)
Hello and welcome,
To new subscribers, it is great to have you. To long-time readers, greetings and thanks!
It is getting cold up in Yorkshire (UK) but the sun is still shining and it feels strange not getting ready for a new term of teaching, but for those of you who are (as teachers, students, or both), good luck and enjoy!
This week and next, I want to reflect with you on a great book I read over the summer, and as always, I have also added it to Reading Suggestions.
New histories or the same old thing?
These days, it is a matter of principle that we need more diverse histories - we need stories about people who have been left out, places on the ‘margins’, moments that were ignored. Follow publishers, universities, teachers’ associations and history blogs online and you’ll hear it. Talk to people who write history and people who read it, people who make films about it or visit historical sites: we need to hear about the things we were never told.
And yet, look for new podcasts, TV shows, books, university hires, courses and Youtube channels and the vast majority of what is out there looks pretty familiar: mainly Europe and the US, mostly in the last 300 years (and, really, the last 100), usually connected with war or high politics.
There has definitely been a twist of the kaleidoscope on these topics. It is now getting easier to find out more about women, indigenous people and people of colour, experiences of disability or of sexual and gender diversity, and ‘everyday’ life…. in Europe and the US, mostly in the last 100 years, usually connected with war or high politics.1
My aim here is not to have a moan. Sometimes it is annoying seeing the same old topics filling the shelves in Waterstones or Barnes and Noble, but as a historian, I’m mainly interested in how things got a certain way and what makes them easy or difficult to change. And a brilliant book I recently read made me stop and think about this from a different angle.
The book is by a fantastic scholar, Khodadad Rezakhani. It is called ReOrienting the Sasanians.2 It isn’t very long, but it is packed full of fascinating details, brilliant summaries of epically tangled debates and some massive footnotes which, to a fellow history writer, testify to weeks and months spent understanding a topic inside out and back to front just to make sure that a single sentence is correct. Being able to do this and still deliver a readable narrative is what we all (should) aim for.
I expect I’ll re-read it and I will definitely be going back to it for years to come for reading suggestions.
But what is it about? Well, that is what I want to talk about here. Khodadad is, mainly, a scholar of the Sasanian Empire, which ruled large parts of West and Central Asia between the third and seventh centuries CE. Unless you happen to be an early medievalist, and even then, an early medievalist with some global interests, I’m guessing that doesn’t help very much!
We can do better, mainly thanks to generations of scholars like Khodadad. The region ruled by the Sasanians was historically one of the places where large, complex, urban civilisations had arisen quite early: its capital city, Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad), is right in the heart of the Tigris-Euphrates basins, which together have given us the terms ‘Mesopotamia’ (between the rivers) and ‘the Fertile Crescent’ (describing the rough shape of the area watered by these two huge river systems).
I will give you a map, I promise, but I want to drill down into the geographical in more detail, so bear with me.
Persia (a whistle-stop tour)
Before the Sasanians, this region had been ruled by several long-lasting regimes, including the Parthians, often also called the Arsacids (from 247 BCE to 224 CE) and before them, the Achaemenids (550 BCE-330 BCE). Before them, it was broadly the area where ‘ancient Mesopotamian’ civilisations arose between roughly 3000 and 1500 BCE. If you like museums and books about ancient wonders of the world, you may know these civilisations from ‘featured items’ such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (no longer in existence but illustrated in so many ‘7 Wonders…’ compilations), ziggurats, or stepped pyramid, often with temples on tope, and cuneiform writing systems.
The later Achaemenids might be familiar to you from such blockbuster hits as ‘300’ and any film about Alexander III of Macedon (you know, that Alexander). These are mostly based on ancient Greek histories about major wars fought between the Greek city states (or Alexander, after he conquered the city states) and the Achaemenids.
Inevitably, the Achaemenids don’t come across terribly well, as ‘the enemy’ in these stories. However, they are presented as hugely rich and powerful and, in comparison to the ‘barbarians’, whom the ancient Greek authors thought inhabited the rest of the world, they were seen as sophisticated and ‘civilised’: the enemy, but a worthy enemy.
Based on the language spoken, at least in elite circles, which itself evolved over centuries, each of these empires (Achaemenid, Parthian/Arsacid and Sasanian) are all referred to as ‘Persian’ and the area where they ruled is often called ‘Persia'. And, even if I’m glossing over a truly epic level of complexity here (which I am), it was a culturally diverse but also distinctive region across these many centuries.
In fact, the Sasanians directly copied imagery from the Achaemenids in order to present their own power, as in the famous rock carvings at Naqsh-e Rostam, now in modern Iran. So, people across these centuries were also interested in reflecting on and reinforcing that sense of historical and cultural cohesion.
This region was, therefore, one of the great ‘power blocs’ of the ancient and medieval world, but it has also fallen into a pattern in historical scholarship of being ‘the other’, known mostly from how outsider, often enemy, authors, like the ancient Greek writers Herodotus and Thucydides, then later Roman writers like Ammianus Marcellinus or Procopius, wrote about it.
Right next to ‘Persia’, sits the Mediterranean, which gave rise to cultures which were unusually good at self-recording and self-monumentalising. The Greeks and the Romans loved statues, huge infrastructure projects (helpfully, usually made of stone or concrete) and written histories.
On top of that, since ancient times, the Mediterranean has been probably the most deeply studied region in the world. The Romans studied the Greeks, then in the European Middle Ages people studied the Romans. Then, in the Early Modern period (c. 1500 onwards), Europeans started travelling and conquering their way around the world, still studying the Romans and Greeks. As a result, all of those lovely Greek and Roman goodies have been preserved, excavated, studied and published more than the remains of probably every other part of the ancient world put together.
In comparison, all of the Persian empires, including the Sasanians, apparently produced less (or less durable) buildings and writings, and what they did has been less well preserved, studied and collected until much more recently.
At this point, I know: I still haven’t given you a map and that was a long introduction to say ‘the Sasanians were a Persian Empire around at the same time as the Romans, and we know a lot less about them than we do about the Romans’.
But keep bearing with me just a tiny bit longer…
West Asia/Central Asia
You see, if I were to give you that map now - one of the many maps of the Sasanian Empire available on the web - it would show you the Sasanians pretty much where I have just described: their capital in Mesopotamia, with a dense web of cities in the Fertile Crescent, a western border with the Roman Empire and then a huge swathe of territory drifting out to the east.
For many of us, our eye would be drawn to the Mediterranean as a key way of fixing all of this in space, because (see above) we are familiar with Mediterranean history. And anyway, maps of the Sasanians will often just cut off the easternmost edges of the empire where, in any case, exact borders are not well-known. This further hints to us visually that it was the west not the east that mattered.
Conventional histories and depictions of the Sasanians present them as a West Asian empire.
This is what Khodadad is pushing back against with his intriguing ‘Re-Orienting’ title. Instead, he says, it is that eastern parts of the map (especially those labelled Sakastan, Bactria and Sogdiana, below) that should interest us, because the Sasanians’ ideas of authority and their real power lay as much in these areas (i.e. Central Asia) as in the traditional ‘cradle of civilization’ in West Asia.
In order to make this case, what Khodadad actually does in his book is present a narrative, political history of Central Asia from around the 5th century BCE to around the 9th century CE.
I should say, I’m not revealing any hidden truths about this book, or making out that I’m telling you what the author doesn’t even realise he’s doing. Khodadad is completely clear in his introduction that this book is the study we didn’t previously have of Central Asia over the long term.
Why, then, focus on the Sasanians in the title? (They make up perhaps 20-30% of the actual content.)
Finding an audience, finding a story
I have not asked Khodadad this question, so this is my interpretation based on reading the book and my own experiences:
As a scholar of the Sasanians, for the author, even though the book is not mainly about the Sasanians (in terms of page count), it is and always was a book about the Sasanians in the sense that that is what he was setting out to understand and explain. We are never deposited like marooned space-farers into some past time. As always arrive via our own particular journey and perspective.
Placing the book within ‘Sasanian studies’ gives it at least one core audience. It may not be entirely about the Sasanians, but it will definitely be relevant and important for anybody studying them. Placing a book within an existing field is not just (or even mainly) about selling to an audience, but about changing how people think. If a book can become a ‘must have read’ for engaging with a topic, as this one should for the Sasanians, then you can potentially change how a whole field of history thinks, rather than just targeting individual scholars.
Where else could this book be put?
It was number three that got me thinking.
Assuming I had been the editor for this book, and then assuming for argument’s sake that I felt it needed a title was more related to the majority of the content, what would I have called it?3
I’m crap at titles anyway, which may be a factor, but I came up with… nothing of any real use:
Ancient and Early Medieval Central Asia?
Western Central Asia in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages?
Central Asia from Alexander to Islam?
These are all pretty terrible. None of them is as catchy as Khodadad’s actual title.
None of them is as intriguing.
All of them put the focus on period labels that were originally created in and for Europe (i.e. the concepts of Antiquity and the Middle Ages). One of them is even worse for (again) putting the focus on a traditional, European ‘hero’ figure as the axis around which history turns.
The other problem, though, is that if somebody were browsing the library, the bookshop or the latest ‘new releases’ lists on a publisher’s website, who is the target for a book about ‘Central Asia c. 500 BCE to 800 CE’?
There definitely are people studying these places and times, but basically none of them does so under that heading. There are (as only a sample):
Kushan specialists, who work on the Kushan Empire (a really big part of Khodadad’s book), which ruled large parts of Central Asia and northern South Asia around the turn of the first millennium CE. Kushan studies is definitely A Thing, even if it isn’t a huge field, but for many people who study it, the Kushans are part of South Asian/Indian history rather than Central Asia. That isn’t about where the Kushans were, but about where, when and how they first came to be studied, which was largely in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
‘China’ specialists, working on the so-called ‘Western Regions’, which overlap or border with the easternmost areas in Khodadad’s book. They mainly focus on sources that look from the outside in, but from the east rather than those Greek and Roman sources looking from the outside in from the west.
Buddhism specialists, who look at the spread and development of Buddhism across the late first millennium BCE and early first millennium CE. That is right in period and some of the most amazing sources (especially the fantastic document archives from Dunhuang) come from Central Asia, but Buddhism studies are (understandably) mainly interested in the ‘Buddhism’ part of the story, not so much the political history that Khodadad is writing.
‘Silk Road’ scholars, who are interested in the movement of goods and merchants across Central Asia in the relevant centuries. Again, though, the focus here tends to be on long-distance journeys, and often on single biographies of people who travelled a lot. Alternatively, they focus on particular kinds of goods (most obviously, silk).
Numismatists (scholars of coins), whose work is absolutely vital to understanding what was going on politically and economically in Central Asia in these centuries but which has its own very particular debates, conventions and techniques and in which it is possible to really only care about the coins, not the history they relate to.
(All of these, and many other fields, can also overlap. If, like me, you’re a Terminator 2 fan, think ‘Or you can do combinations…’): Sasanian numismatics, Buddhism under the Kushans, coins on the Silk Road, etc.)
Then, there are other groups who periodically take centre stage in Khodadad’s book, like the ‘Hephthalites’ (problematic term) and Alkhon Huns, who don’t so much have ‘fields of study’ as a succession of Sith emperors and their disciples (apparently, I’m feeling very filmic this week): in every generation there can only be one. Tracing the history of their study is like following a family tree backwards, looking for that one person who thought this group of ancient people was The Coolest Thing Ever and maybe passing that enthusiasm on to a student.
Once you have a sense of the various fields that might come under ‘Central Asia c. 500 BCE to 800 CE’, it is also essential to remember that they often don’t talk to one another, and for quite good reasons (as well as bad ones).
So you could be reading a book by a scholar of Buddhist ideas about charity in Central Asia in the 4th century CE [title may not exist in real life] and another book about numismatics along the Silk Road, which covers the 4th century CE [many titles like this exist in real life but I am not referring to a specific one here].
Not only might the two works not refer to or know about one another, but they may not even share many references to other works in common.
They may spell all of the names of overlapping places and people differently.
They may have chosen different positions in debates about exactly when and where certain things happened (and, indeed, their whole field may have chosen so long ago that it is no longer even considered controversial and therefore isn’t made explicit in footnotes), so that for you, as reader, it is impossible to tell that two different events or rulers, spelled differently and located differently in space and time, are in fact the same event/ruler.
Their focus and interests may be so different that you have no way of knowing how the movement of coins on one hand and ideas about charity on the other ever affected one another, or if they did.
Their sources of evidence and the methods used to squeeze meaning out of them may be radically different and unfamiliar, leaving you unsure how certain each scholar is of their conclusions in relation to the other.
Khodadad himself sums up this difficulty in the first chapter of ReOrienting the Sasanians:4
A historian of this area, then, basing their work on textual evidence and often working off of a main narrative [specific to their background of study], would be lost in this world of multiple languages, coins, seals and archaeological material. Even worse is the case of a historian not concentrating on the history of the region who simply, due to the sheer variety of sources, would be almost unable to get beyond the first page of any modern study. The students of this region should only be pitied, although not many exist due to the fact that it would be simply cruel to ask an undergraduate student to page through detailed studies of coinage, archaeology or seals of this region.
The challenge of obscurity, or why aren’t we ever told about this?
Again, the purpose here (Khodadad’s or mine) is not simply to have a moan. Instead, I think we are both grappling with how to answer a question we get a lot, as scholars of places and times out of the traditional spotlight:
Why aren’t we ever told about this?
The challenge is ‘this’. Most of this post has been spent explaining what the ‘this’ in Khodadad’s book is.
The Sasanians themselves are unfamiliar to most people. But the book isn’t really about the Sasanians, so much as the world that enabled the Sasanians to exist and underpinned their power, which gets you into stuff that is even more unfamiliar: the Kushans, Bactria, Sogdiana; and then into things that are familiar to literally a number of people I could count on my fingers, like the numismatic controversies over the correct date of a particular ruler of the Alkhon Huns.
Now imagine ‘this’ as a Netflix series or a book in Waterstones: what do you call it? What picture do you put on the cover that helps people pick it out from the thousands of other options?
‘Popular’ history readers and the most arcane of scholars are exactly alike in this respect: we don’t tend to pick things up at complete random. We are drawn down paths that already exist, even if we’re searching for our own little patch of wilderness to understand.
Coming back to where I started, that is probably why diverse histories of already pretty familiar things are so popular at the moment. The story of [something we all know less about] in relation to [something we are all pretty familiar with] takes us from that familiar path into some new wilderness.
Obviously, the goal, eventually, is for there to be more paths, so that we all have the chance to wander off into new briar patches that catch our attention and speak to our own unique experiences and predilections.
As obscure as the Sasanians might seem on a world historical stage, in the context of Central Asian studies, they actually are that path, giving people a route into a new story that takes us away from the Fertile Crescent and challenges the idea that there are geographically pre-determined ‘important places’.
‘Reorienting’ is a challenge for everyone who works on the traditionally obscure, though, because first we have to find, or convince people to pretend that there is, a path that leads to our ‘this’. There isn’t a quick fix. what is needed is exactly the sort of detailed, slow work that goes into great books that make something look (comparatively) short and easy.
But, in the meantime, when you’re browsing the history section of whatever media you prefer, have a look for the well-worn paths, the super-highways and the newly-opened briar patches. Pick out which are which, follow them back and across and between one another. (They mostly lead to Rome, one way or another!)
Because the reasons why we study one thing and not another are often as interesting as the things themselves.
And, if you want to set out with an expert and extremely engaging guide to somewhere off the beaten track, obviously, do check out Khodadad’s book. I’ll be talking more next week about, you know… what it says, rather than what it’s about.
Though you’ll spend longer looking for work foregrounding class, age (especially old age) and cultural diversity within what is broadly defined as ‘white’ experience, and most especially Gypsy and Traveller communities. Good luck also finding histories written at a national or global scale, which consider regional difference within nations. This seems to be a bigger problem in Europe than the US, but it is frustrating as somebody who grew up outside the ‘London bubble’ in England to see histories of the UK using only London-based evidence and the same is often true for Paris, Berlin, Madrid…
Rezakhani, Khodadad, ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity, Edinburgh Studies in Ancient Persia (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
I don’t dislike the title! I think it is great! But as a thought exercise, I found this a good way of burrowing into things I’ve thought about for a longer time relating to the histories we don’t know even know we don’t know.
p. 19.