Grousset, Rene

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THE ROLE OF IRAN IN THE HISTORY OF ASIABY RENE GROUSSETASIA is divided both historically and geographically into twodistinct areas, the Near East and, on the other hand, India andthe Far East. Separating them is a formidable barrier of deserts andmountains. India and the Far East are connected by their commonorientation toward the Southern Ocean, the ports of Indo-China andthe oasis of Serindia, the continental Indo-China, avenues of com-munication which have helped to maintain constant relations be-tween the two, of which the most striking evidence is the spread ofBuddhism. The Near East, on the contrary, with the Mesopotamianhinterland, looks to the West, toward the Mediterranean, as is clearfrom the diffusion of Alexandrianism and, later, of Islam, not tomention the earlier, Aegean-Asiatic connections.The link between these two contrasted Orients is Iran, a bridgethrown by nature, in the Myocene period, across the ancient seaof Central Asia or Thetis, joining providentially the Mediterraneancountries, the Mesopotamian region and Asia Minor, on the onehand, to the compact area of Turania, India, and Yellow AsiaMajor, on the other. Thus Iran, the true Middle Kingdom of theAncient World, is an historical pivot.This fact becomes evident even in pre-historic times. The latestarchaeological discoveries have revealed a series of Eneolithic cen-ters all around the periphery of Iran, distinguished by an admirablepainted pottery at Harappa, and Mohenjo Daro in the Indus Valleyin the pre-Aryan period ; at Nal in Beluchistan ; at Anau on thefrontier of Russian Turkestan and Khorassan, not to mention thesites found earlier at Snsa and in the Transcaucasus region (Page5 ) . Seals from pre-Aryan India that can be dated accurately be-ween 2500-2200 B.C. found in Chaldea by the Watelin Expeditionshow that even then continuous cultural relations were maintainedbetween India and Sumer by way of Iran. It was a question whetherthe Iranian plateau also had had a part in the Mesopotamian-Susaculture, the influence of which was felt even into pre-Aryan India,as the style of cutting in the Mohenjo Daro seals shows; but theexcavations of Dr. Contenau at Nihavand in 1932 provided theanswer, for an important style of pottery was found which hadTHE ROLE OF IRAN IN THE HISTORY OF ASIA 45relations to both Susa I and Susa II. 1 The pre-Aryan Iran musthave been a kind of Susiana Major with Susa itself, Anau, Harap-pa, and Mohenjo Dfciro perhaps only outlying extensions, and itsinfluence must have been felt even in China, judging from thepainted pottery recently found in Ho-nan and Kan-suh by the Swed-ish expedition directed by Professor Ahdersscn and Professor Arne.When the Indo-Iranians migrated from the Russian steppes, firstinto Iran, between 2000 and 1500 P>.C, and then into India, between1500 and 1000 P>.C, the "focal" role of Iran became both morespecific and of wider import.The Iranians made their first historical appearance in Asia inthe Mitanni Empire, about 1500 B.C., Iranian in the names of itsaristocracy, and in religion as well, the Mithra cult. This empirewas connected with the great Pharaohs of Egypt of the EighteenthDynasty, and these two, the Mitanni and the Pharaohs, were respon-sible for keeping the Orient on an even keel. About this same time(1760-1185) Babylon had been conquered by the Kassites, whohad come down from the mountains of Luristan, another peopleunder the rule of an Iranian aristocracy.This is the racial group who seem to have been responsible forthe admirable "Luristan bronzes" recently discovered. These showa style in which new vigor is infused into animal motives that hadalready been heraldically conventionalized in Susa and Chaldea, abolder, freer rendition which is both realistic and synthetic and isstrikingly individual. This animal art of Luristan, the first Iranianart known, was evidently carried by the Kassites of Luristan totheir near neighbors, the Medes of Ecbatana (Hamadan) and Rayy,and still further, beyond these Iranians who had become sedentarypopulation, to the Iranians who were still barbarian and nomadic,up in the Great North, the "Scyths" of the Russian and Turkestansteppes. The Scyth domination of Medea dates from 633 to 615B.C. Indeed, the animal art of the Scythian bronzes borrows itsbasic motives from Luristan. adapting them to a more barbaricconception. Thus the Luristan ibex, and all the other members ofthe goat tribe, to which is now added also the horse of the plains,are contorted in a dramatic struggle with the great cats, which alsoISusa I being the earlier, Susa II. the subsequent, but related, style ofpottery found by the French Expedition at Susa. The question has beeneven more strikingly and conclusively answered by discoveries of the Ameri-can expedition at Damghan, soon to be published.—Ed.46 THE OPEN COURTcame from Luristan, but were endowed by the Scyths with a moreviolent ferocity. In place of the symmetrical confrontation of Luris-tan, which becomes rather meager, these northern nomads invent acomplex interplay of muscles which are encrusted, indeed smothered,with a flamboyant elaboration of minor details wrought likejewelry.Thus at the dawn of history, the "Scythic" world, nomadicpopulations of Scyths, Sarmathians, and Sacians who covered thewhole of the area that is today Southern Russia, Russian Turkes-tan, and part of Chinese Turkestan, was like a vast Outer Iran, pro-ducing a variant of the Iranian style, which was carried still furthereast to determine the art of Siberia and of the Huns, thereby ex-erting a great influence on the Chinese art of the Han dynasty.While the first great wave of Iranian influence was spreadingout in this way to the northeast through the nomadic Iranians ofthe steppes, the settled Iranian populations to the west, in Iranproper, under the Persian dynasty of the Achaemenids, were sub-jugating the whole of Hither Asia and reaching beyond this toAfrica, on the one hand, and the Balkan Peninsula, on the other,creating the first really organized empire of the ancient world (550-330). It was, indeed, so remarkably organized that it took on aspecial ethical character, very tolerant, the conscious protector ofthe subject peoples, until, thanks to the missi domimci of the suc-cessive rulers, a Darius or an Artaxerxes, and to the Royal Roadsand the unfailing, watchful guardianship of the court at Susa,there gradually grew up, in place of race hatred and conflict, anAchaemenian Peace, the prototype of the Pax Romana. The ad-vantages of this peace were not only political, but, as we are justbeginning to realize, also cultural. It was the Achaemenian statethat first gave the Orient the idea of a Universal Empire fromwhich the Buddhists, as M. Przyluski has just shown, derived thenotion, reinterpreted to their ends in spiritual terms, of King Chak-ravartin, the Universal Monarch . In the same way it was the hy-postyle halls of the Achaemenids, adapted from the colonnades ofEgypt, and the palace of Persepolis fashioned on the model of aPharaonic temple, which gave the Indians, influenced by the longAchaemenian domination in the Punjab, the idea of the Mauryapalace of Pataliputra (about 300 B.C.) Thus Achaemenian Persiaserved as intermediary between Egypt and India. Later she servedTHE ROLE OF IRAN IN THE HISTORY OF ASIA 47as intermediary between Ionia and India, as is evident in the firstIndian reliefs, those of the capitals of Asoka (274-237), and thoseof Sanchi (first century, B.C.), where the Greco-Achaemenian in-fluence is very marked.After the maelstrom of Alexander, in the Parthian period (250B.C. to 224 A.D. ), Iranian influence continues without diminution.The role of the Parthian dynasty of the Arsakids is usually dis-missed with the generalization that it was profoundly influenced bythe Hellenic culture to the west, without taking account of thefact that while the Parthian culture was being llellenized from theMesopotamian side, it was also, in the opposite, eastern direction,carrying an Iranian influence into India. Too little recognition ismade of the fact that, at the beginning of the Christian era, Par-thian dynasties were ruling on the lower Indus, one of the bestknown being that of Gondophares, who was reigning when SaintThomas went to preach in India. Or, again, there is Indian evidenceof the importance of the Parthians in their land in the traditionthat Pahlava families, that is, Pehlevies or Parthians, imposed theirrule even to the Dekhan. It is even more interesting to note that anumber of these Parthians who were in close touch with the civili-zation of India were converted to. Buddhism, some becoming so de-vout even that they entered Buddhist religious orders and went asmissionaries to China. The Chinese texts tell of a number of Par-thian princes who were among the first Buddhist apostles to prose-lytize in China during the Han period. They are always called An-she, which is the Chinese version of Ar-sak or Arsakides. ThusAn-she-kao, who went to China about 150 A.D., did more than anyother person to convert the country to Buddhism, and according toM. Sylvain Levi and M. Masson-Oursel, it was apparently the in-fluence of the Mazdean angelology which gave rise in Buddhism atabout this time to the so-called Amida cults, which were An-she-kao's special interest. The cults of the Maitreya Bodhisattvas, whichwere derived from Mithra, and of Amitabha, are other contribu-tions from Iran to the Mahayana Buddhism. Finally, in the arts,it seems probable2 that the only explanation for the character of thefirst Indian school, that of Mathura, which took shape in the Indo-Scvthian period, is the importance in its formation of Parthian art.2This is the \vriter"s own theory.SILK TAPESTRYSixteenth Century(Collection of Mrs. William H. Moore)THE ROLE OF IRAN IN THE HISTORY OF ASIA 49There is noteworthy evidence of the Parthian indebtedness in thepeculiar conventions of the drapery folds.In the Sasanian period the influence of Iran on the rest of Asiabecame tremendously important. The true Iranian culture, freedfrom the superficial Hellenistic veneer imposed by the Parthians,was deliberately reestablished, net only in politics, where the Sapursand the Chosroes resumed the direct succession of the Darius andthe Artaxerxes, but also in the arts where, in the third century A.D.,the monuments of Naksh-i Rustem and Naksh-i Rejeb carry on thegreat traditions of Persepolis and Susa, and it was this resuscitatedIranian spirit which began again a wide expansion. On the westthe Byzantine culture, which does not really begin until the time, ofDiocletian, was really just Greece and Rome Iranized. The lastRoman emperors and the first Basileis of Byzantium simply copiedthe Persian conception of monarchy, even to imitating the court ofthe great Sasanian king, and the fashion was followed, even to suchdetails as nomenclature. How significant it is that the "Roman"general who, under Justinian, reconquered Rome from the Germanbore the typically Sasanian name Nerses!To the east and the northeast the civilization of Afghanistan andall Chinese Turkestan was in all material aspects Sasanian, thoughoddly enough, despite the fact that in Persia itself the Sasanian cul-ture was profoundly Mazdean, it was here closely associated withBuddhism. M. Hackin, Director of the Musee Guimet, has dis-covered at Bamian, west of Kabul, great Buddhist frescoes in which,beside the Buddha and Buddhist monks, Sasanian princes are shown,typical Sapurs and Chosroes, bearded and crowned as they appearin the standard representations on the bas-reliefs and coins, and alsoelegant Iranian "knights." These figures show that these Buddhistfrescoes, which date from the fifth century A.D., are really theearliest Persian paintings known. Moreover, this school of Irano-Buddhist painting was not limited to Afghanistan, but in the seventhand eighth centuries it spread to the oases of Chinese Turkestan,where it appears especially around Khotan, in the paintings of Dan-dan-Uilik, at Kutsha in the frescoes of Kizil. and at Karashar, thatis to say, both north and, south of the Tarim basin. Especially atKizil in the Buddhist paintings that date between 550 and 750 A.D.,which Yon Le Coq brought back to Berlin, there is a whole reper-toire of elegant knights, pages, and lovely ladies, so unmistakably50 THE OPEN COURTIranian that they are the immediate link between the Sasanian paint-ings of Bamian and the first Persian Islamic miniatures. The Oasisof Kutsha, right in the Gobi Desert, was at this time a kind of Per-sian Sasanian colony, differing from Persia only in that these Iran-ians in Chinese territory, instead of being Mazdean, were ferventBuddhists. Thus Iranian culture persisted after the Sasanian Em-pire was overwhelmed by Islam. Moreover, the Iranization of thisregion was continued from the seventh to the ninth century by theManicheans, who were driven out of Persia by the persecution,first of the Sasanians, and then of the Muhammadans, and went,about 750, to convert the kingdom of Uigur in the Turfan district,where their priests produced decorated books in the first half ofthe ninth century, fragments of which have come down to us torepresent the first known Persian illuminations.The very individual Iranian spirit had such vitality that, insteadof being crushed by Islam, as might be expected, it was really forti-fied thereby. For really, from the ninth century on, Islam put itsincomparable expansive power at the service of Persian culture.Everywhere to the east, where the Koranic faith took root, whetherin Turkestan or India, it carried with it the triumph of Persian cul-ture. The two were as closely connected as, in the classical world,Buddhist proselytizing had been with the Hellenistic Gandhara style.Especially the Samanids, an Iranian dynasty that reigned overKhorassan and Transoxiana in the tenth century (874-999), ac-complished a great deal in this respect. Crusaders of Islam, thegreat Samanid Emirs, forcibly converted the Turkish tribes beyondTashkent and the Aral region, and in imposing the Muhammadanfaith, they also imposed upon them, as a cultural model, the ideal ofIran. This made such an impression that a century later, about1000 A.D., when the Turks took their revenge and, first under theGhaznavids and then under the Seljuks, conquered in their turnEast and West Iran, their domination made no break in Persianhistory, for they were already, in spirit, three-quarters Iranian.It was at the court of the first Turkish Sultan, Mahmud of Ghazna(998-1030), that Firdausi composed the Shah-nameh, and eightyyears later the great Seljuk monarch, Malek Shah (1072-1092),was, as his name indicates, a great Paniranian ruler, restoring theancient empire of the Darius and the Chosroes. And what is more,these Iranized Turks undertook on their own account to recom-THE ROLE OF IRAN IN THE HISTORY OF ASIA 51mence the Islamic campaign of conquest which had heen allowedto lapse for several centuries. Thus, about 1000, Mahmud of Ghaz-na conquered northwest India, the Indus basin, and opened up theway for his successors, the Afghans, pure Iranians these, underMuhammad of Ghor (1187-1206) to conquer even the GangesValley (1200). In four centuries of unbroken progress from Mu-hammad of Ghor in the thirteenth century to Akbar in the sixteenth,the Turco-Afghan sultans who came down from the Khyber Passsubjugated almost the whole of India, creating an immense Indo-Muhammadan empire which is called, thanks to goodness knowswhat historical romanticism, Moghul, hut which was really purelyand simply an Indo-Iranian empire. What are the Taj Mahal or theMosques of Bijapur and Golkonda, what are the Moghul miniatures,but a new chapter in the art of Isfahan?Meanwhile in Iran proper the dynasties of Iranized Turks whofollowed the Seljnks had in the thirteenth century been swept outby the Mongol conquest of Genghis Khan and his followers. Surelythe Iranian culture would he wiped out by such a devastating catas-trophe? But once more Iran's destiny reversed all expectations,for from the day when the dynasty of the Ilkhans (1256-1349), abranch of the Genghis-Khans, was established on the throne inthe person of ITulagu, Persia became, along with China, the chiefbeneficiary of the Mongolian unification of Asia and the Mongolianpeace which prevailed from Tabriz to Pekin. It is most significantthat, as M. Pelliot has just pointed out, Marco Polo and his unclesin all their travels across Central Asia and China (1260-1295) de-pended entirely on the Persian language to make themselves under-stood. Marco Polo never knew Chinese, yet even in China itselfhe could get along with Persian, for Persian had at that time be-come a kind of lingua franca or Hindustani all across Central Asiato the chief commercial cities of the Celestial Empire, the commonlanguage of business and trade. By 1300 it was as if the Mongolconquest in Central Asia had been intended only to advance thespread of Persian culture.The Timurid conquest checked, to a certain extent, the progressof Iranian prestige, for while the Timurid Emirs (1369-1500) werealways faithful disciples of Persian literature, they did undertaketo create an independent Jaghatai—Turkish literature, based onPersian models. In spite of this, however, the prodigious develop-52 THE OPEN COURTment of Persian miniature painting under the last Timurids (1500)and under their successors, the Shaibanides (1500-1599) at Buk-hara, Samarkand, and Herat, shows how faithful these Turko-Mongul dynasties of the sixteenth century still were to the greattradition of the Iranian aristocratic art patrons.Finally, with the Safavids (1502-1736) and the current Pah-levi dynasty, purely Persian rulers came to the throne, so that Iranonce more returned to its own native tradition, undeflected. Isfahanunder Shah Abbas I (1587-1629) was to the rest of Asia what theVersailles of Louis XIV was to Germany, Italy, or Moscow, theideal city of dreams, the model of ambitious imitation. From thefrontier of Godavari to the Golden Horn, in the yourte of the Kash-gar chiefs, as in the palace of the Uzbek Khans, Isfahan was copied.For the Persia of Shah Abbas was the great Asiatic power, andthe first Asiatic state which undertook to combine, with a perfectclassicism in literature and the arts, an adaptation in politics toEuropean forms, an adjustment which was again attempted in theeighteenth century by the Moscow of Peter the Great, and in thenineteenth by the Japan of Meiji-tenno. Everyone who has travelledin the East knows that the Persia of today, under His Majesty,Pahlevi Shah, holds the same place as the great cultural power ofMiddle Asia.

The Role of Iran in the History of Asia.

http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4483&context=ocj

The Role of Iran in the History of Asia.

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