Tag Archives: Aramaic

Bulgarians Mentioned in Egyptian Papyri from Fayoum

What was Ordinary in the Antiquity looks Odd today, due to the Greco-centric Fallacy of the Biased European Colonial ‘Academics’

A while back, I received a brief email from a Bulgarian friend, who urgently asked me to watch a video and comment on the topic. The video offered links to a blog in Bulgarian and to an Austrian site of academic publications. The upsetting affair was the mention of a Bulgarian, or to put it rather correctly of a Bulgarian item or product which was imported in Coptic Egypt. As I understand Bulgarian to some extent, due to my Russian, I read the long presentation of the informative blog, and then replied to my friend. The video was actually a most abridged form of the article posted on the blog of a non-conventional Bulgarian blogger.

Contents

Introduction

I. Fayoum, Al Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus), and Ancient Egyptian Papyri

II. Karl Wessely and his groundbreaking research and publications

III. Papyrus fragment 1224 of Karl Wessely’s SPP VIII 

IV. Βουλγαρικ- (Vulgarik-)

V. Eastern Roman Emperor Maurice’s Strategicon and the Bulgarian cloaks

VI. Historical context and the Ancient History of Bulgars  

VII. Historical context, the Silk Roads, and Bulgarian exports to Egypt  

VIII. Academic context and the Western falsehood of a Euro-centric World History

i- the conceptualization of World History

ii- the contextualization of every single document newly found here and there

iii- the stages of historical falsification that were undertaken over the past 500 years

iv- the forgers themselves and their antiquity

v- and last but not least, several points of

a) governance of modern states

b) international alliances, and

c) the ensuing captivity of all the targeted nations, each one well-adjusted into the preconceived role that the forgers invented for it

Introduction

What follows is my response on the topic; although it concerns an undeniably very specific affair, it helps greatly in making general readership aware of how deeply interconnected the Ancient World was, of how different it was than it is presented in conventional publications, and of how many layers of fact distortion, source concealment, systematic forgery, academic misinterpretation, and intellectual falsification have been adjusted to what average people worldwide think of as ‘World History’. In brief, the modern Western colonial presentation of World History, which was dictatorially imposed worldwide, is nothing more than a choice-supportive bias and a racist construct. You can also describe it as ‘Hellenism’, Greco-centrism or Euro-centrism.

—————— Response to an inquisitive Bulgarian friend ——————

My dear friend,  

Your question and the associated topic are quite complex. 

The video that you sent me is extremely brief and almost introductory.

Папирусът от Фаюм

However, in the description, it offers two links.

I read the article in the blog; I noticed that it was published before 12-13 years (13.10.2011). Папирусът (който щеше да бъде) с истинското име на българите?

https://d3bep.blog.bg/history/2011/10/13/papirusyt-koito-shteshe-da-byde-s-istinskoto-ime-na-bylgarit.834395

The author seems to have been taken by surprise due to the Fayoum text, but as you will see, there is no reason for that.

The second link included in the video description offers access to Tyche, an academic annual (Fachzeitschrift) published by the Austrian Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altertumskunde, Papyrologie und Epigraphik der Universität Wien. But this is an introductory web page (https://tyche.univie.ac.at/index.php/tyche) that has links to many publications, which you can download in PDF.

You must not be surprised by such findings; they are old and known to the specialists; there are many Bulgarian professors specializing in Ancient Greek. Some of them surely know about the text. But it is in the nature of the Western sciences that scholars do not write for the general public; it is very different from what happened in the Soviet Union and the other countries of the Socialist bloc. Reversely, all the average bloggers, who find every now and then a historical document known but not publicized, think that they discovered something incredible, but in most of the cases, we don’t have anything to do with an extraordinary discovery. Simply, History has been very different from what average people have been left to believe.

I. Fayoum, Al Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus), and Ancient Egyptian Papyri

Fayoum by the way is an enormous oasis. It has cities, towns and villages. In our times, it was one of the strongholds of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Former president Muhammad Morsi got ca. 90% of the votes locally. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faiyum

The discoveries of papyri in Egypt started mainly in the 19th c.; excavators unearthed tons of valuable documentation, unfortunately in fragmentary situation most of them; indicatively: 

https://archive.org/details/faymtownsandthe00milngoog

https://archive.org/details/faymtownstheir00gren/page/n9/mode/2up

Such is the vastness of the documentation that either Egyptologists or Coptologists or Hellenists, there are many scholars of those disciplines who specialize in papyri only: the Papyrologists. 

Fayoum map with Ancient Greek names

Fayoum Lake (above) – Wadi El Rayan waterfalls (below)

Temple of Soknopaios at Soknopaiou Nesos (Island), Fayoum (viewed from the SE)

Fayoum: a tourist destination

Another major site of papyri discovery is Oxyrhynchus (Ancient Greek name of the Egyptian site Per medjed / Oxyrhynchus is merely the Ancient Greek translation of Per medjed), i.e. the modern city of Al Bahnasa. Indicatively: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri

To get a minimal idea of the vastness of this field of research, go through the following introductory readings:

Cairo Fayum Papyri: http://ipap.csad.ox.ac.uk/Fayum.html

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayoum_papyri

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_papyri_from_ancient_Egypt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_papyri_and_ostraca

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalen_papyrus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri

II. Karl Wessely and his groundbreaking research and publications

The fragment of papyrus that mentions in Ancient Greek an adjective, which means «Bulgarian» in English, was found in the Fayoum (you can write the word with -u or -ou). It was first published by a great scholar C. (Carl or Karl) Wessely (1860-1931).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Wessely

He was one of the 10 most prominent scholars and philologists of the 2nd half of the 19th and the 1st half of the 20th c. He published a voluminous series of firsthand publications of discoveries, which was named Studien zur Paleographie und Papyruskunde (SPP). As you can guess, this took decades to be progressively materialized. Here you have an online list: 

https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Studien_zur_Palaeographie_und_Papyruskunde

Unfortunately, the volume VIII (Leipzig 1908), which is mentioned in the article of the blog, is missing in the wikisource list!

No problem! You can find the PDF in the Internet Archives site. Here is the link: 

You will find the text’s first publication on page 189 of the book; this is the page 63 of 186 of the PDF. This means that you will find this indication at the bottom of the PDF:  189 (63 / 186).

This volume, as stated on p. 7, contains «Griechische Papyrusurkunden kleineren Formats», i.e. Greek papyri documents of smaller format. If you find it strange that on the first page of the main text (137 (11 / 186) as per the PDF), the first text has the number 702, please remember that this is an enormous documentation published in the series of volumes (SPP) published by Wessely between 1900 and 1920.

III. Papyrus fragment 1224 of Karl Wessely’s SPP VIII  

As you will see, the text slightly differs from what is shown in either the blog article or the video. It is indeed the 1224 papyrus fragment as per the enumeration of the publication. Similarly to many other cases, most of the text is lost; this is quite common. Few things are easy to assess, if you through the entire volume; apparently the background reflects Coptic Egypt, which means that all the texts date between the early 4th and 7th c. CE. This is clearly visible because the dating system is based on indiction, which was a Roman system of periodic taxation and then chronology. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiction 

This Latin word was accepted in Greek: ινδικτιών, 

We can also understand that the person, who wrote this specific document, was following (not the Julian calendar but) the Coptic calendar, because on the 8th line the remaining letters αρμουθί (armouthi) help us reconstitute the well-known Coptic month of Pharmouthi (or Parmouti) which corresponds to end March-beginning April (in the Julian calendar) or April and early May in the Gregorian calendar. In Arabic, it is pronounced ‘Bermouda’ (unrelated to the Bermuda islands).

About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmouti

It has to be noted that the pagan Greek calendar was abolished, and that the use of ‘Greek’ (‘Alexandrine Koine, to be correct) in the Fayum papyri texts and elsewhere does not imply ‘ethnic’ membership but rather religious affiliation (in this case, in contrast to Coptic).

About the Coptic calendar: 

https://st-takla.org/Full-Free-Coptic-Books/Coptic-Synaxarium-or-Synaxarion_English/Eng_Senexar-Senksar-08-Bermoda-Coptic-Month.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_calendar

https://www.copticchurch.net/calendar

In addition, you can see the first letter of the word «indiction» ι (ι) after Pharmouthi. 

Apparently, this papyrus documented a transaction effectuated by a certain Cyril (Cyrillus / Κύριλλος). Only the letters «rill» (ριλλ) are saved, as you can see, but the high frequency of the name among the Copts makes of this word the first choice of any philologist. By the way, the name is still widely used among today’s Copts as «Krulos». 

I fully support Wessely’s reconstitution of the document on lines 7, 10 and 11.

Line 7 (εγράφη out of εγρα-), i.e. «it was written»

Line 10 (απείληφα out of -ειλ-), i.e. «I received from»

Line 11 (και παρών απέλυσα out of -αρω-), i.e. «I set free by paying a ransom or I disengaged or I released». Details:

Now comes a thorny issue, because on line 6, Wessely wrote «λαμιο(υ)» (: lamio reconstituted as lamiu), and went on suggesting a unique term «χαρτα-λαμίου» (charta-lamiou). This is not attested in any other source. Λάμιον (lamium) is a genus of several species of plants, whereas Lamios (Λάμιος) is a personal name. About:

http://encyclopaedia.alpinegardensociety.net/plants/Lamium/garganicum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamium

Also: (ἡμι-λάμιον) https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dh(mila%2Fmion 

But «χαρτα-λαμίου» (in Genitive declension) is a hapax. Still the opinion of the first explorer and publisher is always crucial; but as in many other cases, these people publish such an enormous volume of documentation that they do not have enough time to explain their suggestions and reason about their choices. To them, publishing hitherto unpublished material is undisputedly no 1 priority. 

Other scholars attempted a different approach; they hypothetically added «υιός» (yios), i.e. «son», before λαμίου (Lamiou)

Personally, I find it highly unlikely. First, I most of the times support the first explorer’s / publisher’s approach. 

Second, I believe that those, who add «υιός» (yios), i.e. «son» on line 6, are forced to reconstitute Βουλγαρικ̣[ὸς on line 5. This is most probably wrong.

But Wessely did not attempt something like that, preferring to leave the only saved word on line 5 as it is «Βουλγαρικ̣».

Now, what stands on lines 1 to 4 is really too minimal to allow any specialist to postulate or speculate anything. Perhaps there was something «big» mentioned on line 3 («-μεγ-»/«-meg-»), but this is only an assumption. Also, on line 4, we read that something (or someone) was (or was sent or was bought) from somewhere, because of the words «από της» (apo tis), i.e. «from the» (in this case, «the» being the feminine form of the article in Genitive declension). 

IV. Βουλγαρικ- (Vulgarik-)

Now, and this is the most important statement that can be made as regards this fragment of papyrus, the word that stands on line 5 is undoubtedly an adjective, not a substantive! This is very clear. This means that the word is not an ethnonym. In English, you use the word «Bulgarian», either you mean a Bulgarian man (in this case, it is a noun) or a Bulgarian wine (on this occasion, it is an adjective). Bulgarian is at the same time a proper noun and an adjective in English.

However, in Greek, there is a difference when it comes to names of countries and nations. When it is a proper noun (substantive), you say «Anglos» (Άγγλος), «Sikelos» (Σικελός), «Aigyptios» (Αιγύπτιος), etc. for Englishman, Sicilian man, Egyptian man, etc. But you say «anglikos» (αγγλικός), «sikelikos» (σικελικός), «aigyptiakos» (αιγυπτιακός), etc. for adjectives of masculine gender. 

Discussing the word attested on line 5 of the papyrus fragment 1224 of Karl Wessely’s SPP VIII, I have to point out that in Ancient ‘Greek’ and in Alexandrine Koine, there is a vast difference between Βούλγαρος (Vulgaros) and βουλγαρικός (vulgarikos). 

The first denotes a Bulgarian national, someone belonging to the ethnic group / nation of Bulgars and/or Bulgarians. At this point, I have to also add that these two words in English are a modern academic convention to distinguish Proto-Bulgarians (Bulgars) from the Bulgarians, who settled in the Balkan Peninsula. However, this distinction did not exist in Late Antiquity Greek texts and in Eastern Roman texts. 

The second is merely an adjective: βουλγαρικός (vulgarikos), βουλγαρική (vulgariki), βουλγαρικόν (vulgarikon) are the three gender forms of the adjective: masculine, feminine and neutral. 

So, as the preserved part of the word being «βουλγαρικ-» (vulgarik-), we can be absolutely sure that the papyrus text mentioned a Bulgarian item (a product typical of Bulgars or an imported object manufactured by Bulgars) — not a Bulgarian man.

All the same, it makes sure the following points:

a. in 4th-7th c. CE Egypt, people imported products that were manufactured by Bulgars in their own land (Bulgaria).

b. since the products were known, imported and listed as «Bulgar/Bulgarian», people knew the nation, which manufactured them, and its location.

c. considering the magnitude of the documentation that went lost, we can safely claim that there was nothing extraordinary in the arrival of Bulgar/Bulgarian products in in 4th-7th c. CE Egypt.

d. the papyrus in question presents the transaction in terms of «business as usual». 

This is all that can be said about the papyrus text, but here ends the approach of the philologist and starts the viewpoint of the historian. However, before presenting the historical context of the transaction recorded in the fragmentarily saved papyrus from Fayoum, I have to also discuss another issue, which was mentioned in the blogger’s interesting discussion.

V. Eastern Roman Emperor Maurice’s Strategicon and the Bulgarian cloaks

Of course, as anyone could expect, several historians and philologists would try to find parallels to the mention of Bulgarian imports made in this papyrus fragment.

And they did. In his presentation, the blogger already mentioned several academic efforts. So, the following paragraphs, which are to be found almost in the middle of the article (immediately after the picture), refer to two scholarly efforts to establish parallels:

«Публикуван е за пръв път от SPP VIII 1124, Wessely, C., Leipzig 1908 и по – късно препубликуван от Diethart, в публикация с многозначителното заглавие  „Bulgaren“ und „Hunnen“, S. 11 – 1921. Въпреки това папирусът не стига много бързо до родна публика.

“По пътя” един учен, Моравчик, стига и по – далеч при превода. Той разчита в откъсите и думата “Пояс” и включва в теорията ново сведение(Mauricii Artis mllltaris libri duodecim, Xll (ed. Scheffer), p. 303) , където се казва, че пехотинците трябвало да носят “ζωναρία bм λιτά, xal βουλγαρική cay ία” – т.е. смята, че става дума за носен в Египет от военните “български пояс”(сведенията за публикациите дотук са по Иван Костадинов).

Вдясно виждате лична снимка. Коптска носия от 4-ти век н.е. Пази се в етнографския музей на александрийската библиотека. По необходимост за пустинния климат е от лен. Оттам вече аналогиите оставям изцяло на вас.

Папирусът “идва в България” късно. По спомени казвам ,че мисля, че първият публикувал го е доста уважаваният Иван Дуриданов, който с радост представя на българската публика вече 4 деситилетия предъвкваният от западната лингвистика български папирус. Той публикува радостна статия, с която приветства откритието».

https://d3bep.blog.bg/history/2011/10/13/papirusyt-koito-shteshe-da-byde-s-istinskoto-ime-na-bylgarit.834395

Certainly, Gyula Moravcsik (1892-1972) and Johannes Diethart (born in 1942) proved to be great scholars indeed. About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyula_Moravcsik

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Diethart

The adjective Vulgarikos, -i, -on («Bulgarian» in three genders) is attested in a famous Eastern Roman text, which is rather known under the title «Maurice’s Strategicon»; this was a handbook of military sciences and a guide to techniques, methods and practices employed by the Eastern Roman army. It was written by Emperor Maurice (Μαυρίκιος- Mauricius /reigned: 582-602) or composed according to his orders. About:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_(emperor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategikon_of_Maurice

https://www.academia.edu/35840787/_Maurice_s_Strategicon_and_the_Ancients_the_Late_Antique_Reception_of_Aelian_and_Arrian_in_Philip_RANCE_and_Nicholas_V_SEKUNDA_edd_Greek_Taktika_Ancient_Military_Writing_and_its_Heritage_Gda%C5%84sk_2017_217_255

I did not read Moravcsik’s article, but I read the Strategicon; it does not speak of «Bulgarian belts», but of «Bulgarian cloaks». In this regard, the blogger mentions a very old edition of the text, namely Mauricii Artis mllltaris libri duodecim, Xll (ed. Scheffer), p. 303). This dates back to 1664:

https://search.worldcat.org/title/Arriani-Tactica-and-Mauricii-Artis-militaris-libri-duodecim-:-omnia-nunquam-ante-publicata-Graece-primus-edit/oclc/22059562

At those days, all Western European editions of Ancient Greek texts involved Latin translations. Scheffer’s edition of the Strategicon can be found here:    

https://books.google.ru/books?id=77NODQEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=ru&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (page 303)

George T. Dennis’ translation (1984) makes the text accessible to English readers:

https://archive.org/details/maurices-strategikon.-handbook-of-byzantine-military-strategy-by-maurice-dennis-

In the 12th chapter, which is the last of the Strategicon, under the title “Mixed Formations, Infantry, Camps and Hunting”, in part I (Clothing to be Worn by the Infantry), on page 138 (University of Pennsylvania Press), the word σαγίον (sagion) is very correctly translated as “cloak”. The author refers to “βουλγαρικά σαγία” (Latin: sagia Bulgarica) in plural; this is rendered in English “Bulgarian cloaks”, which are thought to be very heavy. Already, the word σαγίον (sagion) is of Latin etymology. About:

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dsagi%2Fon

and https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100436640

Also: https://greek_greek.en-academic.com/151302/σαγίον 

In that period and for more than 1000 years, what people now erroneously call «Medieval Greek» or «Byzantine Greek» (which in reality is «Eastern Roman») was an amalgamation of Alexandrine Koine and Latin. There were an enormous number of Latin words written in Greek characters and in Alexandrine Koine form. Indicatively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek

At this point, I complete my philological commentary on the topic. I read the Strategicon of Emperor Maurice when I was student in Athens in the middle 1970s. 

I did not remember the mention of Bulgarian cloaks, but I know however that the Bulgars, who founded the Old Great Bulgaria, appear in Eastern Roman texts at least 100 years before the purported establishment and growth of that state (632–668). The academic chronology for the First Bulgarian Empire may be correct (681–1018), but the dates given for the Old Great Bulgaria and the Volga Bulgaria (late 7th c.–1240s) are deliberately false. General info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Great_Bulgaria  and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Bulgarian_Empire 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Bulgaria  and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgars#Etymology_and_origin

VI. Historical context and the Ancient History of Bulgars  

It is now time for me to briefly discuss the historical context within which the aforementioned topics took place. Let’s first ask some questions: 

Is it strange that a Fayoum papyrus of the 3rd-7th c. CE mentions Bulgarian products that arrived in Egypt? 

Is it odd that in Emperor Maurice’s Strategicon we find a mention of Bulgarian cloaks used or not used by the Eastern Roman army?

In both cases, the response is «no»!

From where did these Bulgarian products come?

Where did Bulgars (or Bulgarians) live at the time?

My personal response is somehow vague: they came from some regions of today’s Russia’s European soil, either in the southern confines (the Azov Sea, the northern coast of the Black Sea, and the North Caucasus region) or in the area of today’s Tatarstan and other lands north-northeast of the Caspian Sea. 

It is not easy to designate one specific location in this regard, and this is so for one extra reason: it seems that there were several tribes named with the same name, and they were distinguished among themselves on the basis of earlier tribal affiliations, which may go back to the Rouran Khaganate (330-555 CE). There are actually plenty of names associated with the early Bulgars, notably the Onogurs, the Kutrigurs, etc. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutrigurs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onogurs

Central Asia ca. 300 CE

Many readers may be taken by surprise because I go back easily from the time of the Old Great Bulgaria (630-668 CE) to that of the Rouran Khaganate and the Huns. All the same, there is no surprise involved in this regard. Western European historians deliberately, systematically and customarily underestimate across the board the value of Oral History and attempt to dissociate Ethnography from History; these approaches are wrong. It is quite possible that, from the very beginning of the establishment of Rouran Khaganate, many tribes, clans or families (which later became nations) started migrating. The very first Bulgars (Bulgarians) may have reached areas north of the Iranian borders in Central Asia or in Northern Caucasus much earlier than it is generally thought among Western scholars. See indicatively:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouran_Khaganate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6kt%C3%BCrks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Turkic_Khaganate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Turkic_Khaganate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Great_Bulgaria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubrat

Great Old Bulgaria

Now, the reasons for which I intentionally date the first potential interaction of Bulgars/Bulgarians with other tribes (or nations) in earlier periods are not a matter of personal preference or obstinacy. There is an important historical text named «Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans». It has not been duly comprehended let alone interpreted thus far. About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalia_of_the_Bulgarian_Khans

https://web.archive.org/web/20120204205748/http://theo.inrne.bas.bg/~dtrif/abv/imenik_e.htm

From the Great Old Bulgaria to the beginnings of Volga Bulgaria

Three Russian copies of the text have been saved (in Church Slavonic); they date back to the 15th and 16th c. They are generally viewed as later copies of a potential Old Bulgarian text of the 9th c. Other specialists also pretend that there may/might have been an even earlier text, in either Eastern Roman («Medieval Greek») or Bulgar, which was eventually a stone inscription. 

In this document, the highly honorific title «Knyaz» (Князь) is given to Asparuh (ca. 640-700) and to his five predecessors. I must add that the said document was always an intriguing historical source for me due to two bizarre particularities to which I don’t think that any scholar or specialist gave due attention, deep investigation, and persuasive interpretation.

First, the antiquity of the document is underscored by the fact that the early Bulgar calendar, which is attested in this text, appears to be an adaptation of the Chinese calendar. This fact means that the primeval Bulgars, when located somewhere in Eastern Siberia or Mongolia, must have had dense contacts with the Chinese scribal and imperial establishment; perhaps this fact displeased other Turanian-Mongolian tribes of the Rouran Khaganate and contributed to the emigration of those «Ur-Bulgaren». The next point is however more impactful on our approach to the very early phase of the Bulgars.

Petrograd manuscript of Nominalia

The Old Bulgarian calendar and the Nominalia of the Bulgarian khans

Second, although for most of the rulers immortalized in the historical document, the duration of their lifetimes or tenures are of entirely historical nature (involving brief or long periods of 5 up to 60 years of reign or lifetime), the two first names of rulers are credited with incredibly long lifetimes. This is not common; actually, it does not look sensible; but it is meaningful.

More specifically, Avitohol is said to have lived 300 years, whereas Irnik is credited with 150 years. But we know who Irnik was! Irnik or Ernak was the 3rd son of Attila and he is said to have been his most beloved offspring. Scholars fix the beginning of his reign in 437 CE, but this is still not the important point. The crucial issue with the partly «mythical» and partly historical nature of the text «Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans» is the fact that the two early rulers, whom the Bulgarians considered as their original ancestors, are credited with extraordinarily long and physically impossible lives. General reading: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avitohol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Huns

This can therefore imply only one thing: at a later period, when the earlier memories were partly lost for various reasons, eventually because of the new environment namely the Balkan Peninsula, in which the then Bulgars were finding themselves, Avitohol and Irnik were retained as the leading figures of ruling families, and not as independent rulers. Consequently, the dates given for their lives were in fact those of their respective dynasties. It was then that the very early period of Bulgar History was mythicized for statecraft purposes, mystified to all, and sanctified in the national consciousness.

Many Western scholars attempted to identify Avitohol with Attila, but in vain; I don’t think that this attempt can be maintained. So, I believe that the Bulgars were one of the noble families of the Huns (evidently involving intermarriage with Attila himself), and that before Attila, the very earliest Bulgars were ruled by another dynasty which had lasted 300 years. But if it is so, we go back to the times of the Roman Emperor Trajan (reign: 98-117 CE), Vologases III of Arsacid Parthia (110–147 CE) and the illustrious Chinese general, explorer and diplomat Ban Chao (32-102 CE) of the Eastern Han dynasty. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vologases_III_of_Parthia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_Chao

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan

The latter fought for 30 years against the Xiongnu (Hiung-nu/匈奴, i.e. the earliest tribes of the Huns, consolidated the Chinese control throughout the Tarim Basin region (today’s Eastern Turkestan or Xinjiang), and was appointed Protector General of the Western Regions. He is very famous for having dispatched Gan Ying, an envoy, to the West in 97 CE. According to the Book of the Later Han (Hou Hanshu/後漢書), which was compiled in the 5th c. CE by Fan Ye, Gan Ying reached Parthia (Arsacid Iran; in Chinese: Anxi, 安息) and gave the first Chinese account of the Western confines of Asia and of the Roman Empire. About:

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiung-nu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiongnu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Ying

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Later_Han

It is n this historical environment that we have to place the very early ancestors of the Bulgars.

Noin-Ula carpet, embroidered rug imported from Bactria and representing Yuezhi

VII. Historical context, the Silk Roads, and Bulgarian exports to Egypt  

Consequently, I believe that it is more probable that the Bulgarian products of those days were first appreciated by the Iranians and later sold to Aramaeans, Armenians, Iberians and other nations settled in the western confines of the Arsacid (250 BCE-224 CE) and the Sassanid (224-651 CE) empires, i.e. in Mesopotamia and Syria, and thence they became finally known in Egypt as well.  

The incessant migrations from NE Asia to Central Europe and to Africa, as a major historical event, were not separate from the ‘Silk Roads’; they were part, consequence or side-effect of that, older and wider, phenomenon. Actually, the term ‘Silk Roads’ is at the same time inaccurate and partly; the magnificent phenomenon of commercial, cultural and spiritual inter-exchanges, which took place due to the establishment (by the Achaemenid Shah Darius I the Great) of a comprehensive network of numerous older regional trade routes, is to be properly described as ‘silk-, spice-, and perfume-trade routes across lands, deserts and seas’. About: https://silkroadtexts.wordpress.com/

It has to be said that, after the Achaemenid Iranian invasion, annexation and occupation of Egypt, Sudan and NE Libya (525-404 BCE and 343-332 BCE), Iranian settlers remained in Egypt; they were known to and mentioned by the Macedonian settlers, who manned the Macedonian dynasty of Ptolemies (323-30 BCE). General info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Achaemenid_conquest_of_Egypt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Achaemenid_conquest_of_Egypt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Persian_Egypt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Dynasty_of_Egypt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-first_Dynasty_of_Egypt

Those Iranian settlers were called ‘Persai (ek) tis epigonis’ (Πέρσαι τῆς ἐπιγονῆς), lit. ‘Iranian settlers’ descendants’. About:

Pieter W. Pestman, A proposito dei documenti di Pathyris II Πέρσαι τῆς ἐπιγονῆς

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41215889

Xin Dai, Ethnicity Designation in Ptolemaic Egypt https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329265278_Ethnicity_Designation_in_Ptolemaic_Egypt

https://elephantine.smb.museum/project/work.php?w=H9YQWMB5

See a text from the time of the Roman Emperor Domitian (reign: 81-96) here: https://papyri.info/ddbdp/p.athen;;23

See another text from the time of the Roman Emperor Nerva (reign: 96-98) here:

https://papyri.info/ddbdp/p.ryl;2;173A

There were also in Egypt Jewish Aramaean descendants of the early Iranian settlers: “οἱ τρ(ε)ῖς | Ἰουδαῖοι Πέρσαι τῆς ἐπιγονῆς τῶν [ἀ]πὸ Σύρων κώ- | μης” (lit. Jewish Iranians, who were the descendants of an Aramaean town) – From: Database of Military Inscriptions and Papyri of Early Roman Palestine https://armyofromanpalestine.com/0140-2

Please note in this regard that the title given to the web page and the document is very wrong and extremely biased: “§140 Loan between Jews and Lucius Vettius”; the three persons who received the loan were not ethnic Jews. Their religion was surely Judaism, as it was the case of the renowned Samaritan woman with whom Jesus spoke according to the Gospels. Several other nations accepted Judaism, notably Aramaeans in Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia (they were called ‘Syrians’ by the Macedonians and the Romans). It is well known that there were many clashes and strives between them and the ethnic Jews. The latter were few and lived either in Jerusalem (and its suburbs) or in Egypt (in Alexandria and many other locations) or in the centers of Talmudic academies in Mesopotamia (namely Nehardea, Pumbedita and Mahoze / Ctesiphon). About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehardea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumbedita

https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10292-mahoza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctesiphon

If I expanded on this topic, it is precisely because the merchants, who were most active across the Silk Roads, were the Aramaeans, and that is why Aramaic became almost an official language in the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, whereas at the same time it turned out to be the lingua franca alongside the trade routes. Furthermore, a great number of writing systems in Central Asia, Iran, India, and Western Asia were developed on the basis of the Aramaic alphabet. Last but not least, Arabic originates from Syriac, which is a late form of Aramaic. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Aramaic#Name_and_classification

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet#Aramaic-derived_scripts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_language

It is therefore essential to state that the Bulgarian products, which (either from North Caucasus and the northern coastlands of the Black Sea or from the regions around the north-northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea) reached Egypt (via most probably North Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine), were transported on camels owned by Aramaean merchants and due to caravans organized and directed by Aramaeans.

It is also noteworthy that, during the Arsacid times, several buffer-states were formed between the eastern borders of the Roman Empire and the western frontiers of Parthia: Osrhoene, Sophene, Zabdicene, Adiabene, Hatra, Characene, Elymais, Gerrha (the illustrious port of call and major trade center of the Persian Gulf that rivaled with Alexandria in the Mediterranean), the Nabataean kingdom, and the short-lived but most formidable Tadmor (Palmyra). This situation favored the world trade between East and West, as well as North and South. General info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osroene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabdicene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataean_Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elymais

https://www.academia.edu/23214313/Meluhha_Gerrha_and_the_Emirates_by_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyrene_Empire

The great rivalry and ferocious antagonism between the Romans (and later the Eastern Romans) and the Iranians after the rise of the Sassanid dynasty (224 CE) did not affect in anything the good relations and the trade among Egyptians, Aramaeans, and Iranians; there were numerous Aramaean populations in both empires, so, we feel safe to conclude that any products from lands north of Caucasus mountains and north of Iran were transported by Aramaeans via Palestine or Nabataea to Egypt.

Aramaic inscription from Hatra, NW Iraq

There have been additional reasons for the good feelings of the Egyptians toward the Iranians, and they were of religious nature. The Christological disputes generated enmity and great animosity between

a) the Copts (: Egyptians) and the Aramaeans, who adopted Miaphysitism (also known as Monophysitism), and

b) the Eastern Romans and the Western Romans, who thought they preserved the correct faith (Orthodoxy).

One has to bear always in mind, that in order to define themselves, the so-called Monophysites (also known more recently as ‘Miaphysites’) used exactly the same term (i.e. ‘Orthodox’), which means that they considered the Eastern Romans and the Western Romans as heretics. The patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem were split. Atop of it, other Aramaeans (mostly in Mesopotamia and Iran) accepted the preaching of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who was also deposed as a heretic (in August 431). For the aforementioned religious reasons, the Eastern Roman armies were most loathed in Syria, Palestine, North Mesopotamia (today’s SE Turkey), and Egypt as oppressors. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophysitism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorianism

In addition, one has to take into consideration the fact that the Jews, who inhabited the eastern provinces of the Roman (and later the Eastern Roman) Empire, were also pro-Iranian and they expected that the Iranians would liberate them one day from the Roman yoke pretty much like the Achaemenid Iranian Emperor Cyrus delivered their exiled ancestors from the tyranny of Nabonid Babylonia (539 BCE).

The Axumite Abyssinian invasion of Yemen (ca. 530 CE; in coordination with the Roman Emperor Justinian I), the ensued Iranian-Axumite wars, the Iranian invasion of Yemen (570 CE; known as the Year of the Elephant among the Arabs of Hejaz), and the incessant battles and wars between the Eastern Roman and the Sassanid Iranian armies were closely watched by all populations in Egypt. The third Iranian conquest of Egypt (618 CE) was a matter of great jubilation for Copts and Jews; Egypt was annexed to Iran for ten (10 years), before being under Eastern Roman control again for fourteen years (628-642 CE) and then invaded by the Islamic armies. General info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksumite%E2%80%93Persian_wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Sasanian_War_of_572%E2%80%93591

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Sasanian_War_of_602%E2%80%93628

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_conquest_of_Egypt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuzistan_Chronicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_Egypt

Iranian Emperor Khosrow (Chosroes) I Anushirvan on Coptic textile fragment

Indicative of the good Egyptian feelings for the Sassanid emperors and Iran is a tapestry weave found by Albert Gayet in his 1908 excavations in Antinoe (also known as Antinoöpolis, i.e. the town of Sheikh Ibada in today’s Egypt); this is a textile fragment of legging that dates back to the late 6th and early 7th c. (Musée des Tissus, in Lyon-France; MT 28928). It features the scene of an unequal battle that has been identified as one of the engagements between the Sassanid and the Axumite armies in Yemen; Iranian horse-archers are depicted at the moment of their triumph over Abyssinian infantry opponents, who appear to be armed with stones. In the very center of the scene, an enthroned figure was often identified with the great Iranian Emperor Khosrow (Chosroes) I Anushirvan (Middle Persian: Anoshag ruwan: ‘with Immortal Soul’), who was for Sassanid Iran as historically important as Justinian I, his early rival and subsequent peace partner, for the Roman Empire. About:

http://warfare.6te.net/6-10/Coptic-Textile-Battle-Tissus.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antino%C3%B6polis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khosrow_I

This was the wider historical context at the time of the arrival of the first Bulgarian exports to the Sassanid Empire of Iran, the Eastern Roman Empire, and Egypt more specifically. And the Bulgarian cloaks, as mentioned in Maurice’s Strategicon, make every researcher rather think of heavy winter cloaks, which were apparently not necessary for the Eastern Roman soldiers, who had to usually fight in less harsh climatological conditions. It is possible that those heavy cloaks were eventually used by the Iranian army when engaged in the Caucasus region, and thence they were noticed by the Eastern Romans.

With these points, I complete my philological and historical comments on the topic. However, the entire issue has to be also contextualized at the academic-educational level, so that you don’t find it bizarre that not one average Bulgarian knew about the topic before the inquisitive blogger wrote his article and the YouTuber uploaded his brief video. 

VIII. Academic context and the Western falsehood of a Euro-centric World History

This part does not concern the Fayoum papyri and the Strategicon of Emperor Maurice; it has to do with what non-specialists, the average public, and various unspecialized explorers do not know at all.

This issue pertains to

i- the conceptualization of World History;

ii- the contextualization of every single document newly found here and there;

iii- the stages of historical falsification that were undertaken over the past 500 years;

iv- the forgers themselves and their antiquity, and last but not least; and

v- several points of

a) governance of modern states,

b) international alliances, and

c) the ensuing captivity of all the targeted nations, each one well-adjusted into the preconceived role that the forgers invented for it.

As you can guess, one can write an encyclopedia on these topics, so I will be very brief. Attention: only at the end, you will understand that all these parameters fully precondition the topic that we already discussed, and any other that we have not yet discussed, because simply it does not exist as a standalone entity but as a fact entirely conditioned by what I herewith describe in short.

What I want to say is this: if tomorrow another Fayoum discovery brings to light a 3rd c. BCE papyrus with the mention of something Bulgarian (Voulgarikon), this will not affect in anything the prevailing conditions of the so-called academic scholarship. In other words, do not imagine that with tiny shreds of truth unveiled here and there, you are going to change anything in the excruciatingly false manner World History was written.

i- the conceptualization of World History

It may come as a nasty surprise to you, but what we know now about History is not the conclusion or the outcome of additional discoveries made one after the other over the past 400-500 years. Contrarily, it was first preconceived, when people had truly minimal knowledge of the past, and after they had forged thousands of documents and manuscripts for at least 500-600 years, long before the early historiographical efforts were undertaken during the Renaissance.

After they destroyed, concealed and rewrote tons of manuscripts of Ancient Greek and Roman historiography from ca. 750 CE until 1500 CE, Western European monks and editors, philosophers and intellectuals, popes, scientists and alchemists started propagating their world view about the assumingly glorious past of their supposedly Greek and Roman ancestors – a nonexistent past that the Renaissance people were deliberately fooled enough to believe that they had lost and they had to rediscover it. In fact, all the discoveries made afterwards, all the decipherments of numerous ancient writings, and all the studies of original material from Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, Caucasus, Central Asia, China and India was duly processed and adjusted in a way not to damage or challenge in anything the preconceived scheme which was named ‘World History’ by the vicious and criminal Western European forgers.

This means that you should never expect ‘new discoveries’ to challenge the officially established dogma of the Western academia; it is not about Bulgars and the past of today’s Bulgarians, Thracians, Macedonians, etc., etc., etc. It is about all. What type of position the Bulgarians, the Russians, the Turks, the Iranians, the Egyptians and all the rest occupy in today’s distorted historiography had been decided upon long before the establishment of the modern states that bear those names. 

ii- the contextualization of every single document newly found here and there

Any finding unearthed by anyone anytime anywhere means nothing in itself; this concerns every historiographer, truthful or dishonest. What truly matters for all is contextualization. It so did for the original forgers. Theirs was an arbitrary attempt; they contextualized the so-called ‘Ancient Greece’ in a way that would have been fully unacceptable, blasphemous and abominable for the outright majority of all the South Balkan populations during the 23 centuries prior to the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine the Great.  

It was peremptory, partial and biased; according to the fallacious narratives of the forgers, centuries were shrunk and shortened in order to fit into few lines; moreover the schemers stretched geographical terms at will; they did not use various terms, which were widely employed in the Antiquity; they passed important persons under silence, while exaggerating the presentation of unimportant ones. This is what contextualization was for the forgers: they applied a Latin recapitulative name (Graeci) to a variety of nations, which never used this Latin term or any other recapitulative term for them; they applied a non-Ionian, non-Achaean, and non-Aeolian term (Hellenes) to them and to others; and after the decipherment of many Oriental languages, they did not rectify their preposterous mistakes, although they learned quite well that the two fake terms about those populations (Graecus and Hellene) did not exist in any other language of highly civilized nations (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, Hurrian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Old Achaemenid Iranian).

Consequently, every other information, data and documentation pertaining to any elements of the said context was concealed, distorted or misinterpreted in order to be duly adjusted to the biased context that had been elaborated first.

iii- the stages of historical falsification that were undertaken over the past 500 years

Following the aforementioned situation, many dimensions of historical falsification were carried out and can actually be noticed by researchers, explorers, investigators and astute observers. The ‘barbarian invasions’ (or Migration Period) is only one of them; I mention it first because it concerns the Bulgars. Long before distorting the History of Great Old Bulgaria and that of Volga Bulgaria systematically, Western historical forgers portrayed Bulgars and many other highly civilized nations as barbarians. Why?

Because the historical forgers of the Western World hate nomads! This is an irrevocable trait of them; that’s why they fabricated the fake term ‘civilization’ in their absurd manner: originating from the Latin word ‘civitas’, the worthless and racist term ‘civilization’ implies that you cannot be ‘civilized’ unless you are urban. This monstrous and unacceptable fact reveals the rotten roots of the hideous, vulgar, sick and villainous Western world and colonial academia.

In the Orient, there was never a cultural divide between urban populations and nomads; some nomadic tribes were considered as barbarians; that’s true. But also settled populations and urban inhabitants were also considered as barbarians (like the Elamites, who were considered as inhuman by the Assyrians). The rule was that the settled nations were nomads in earlier periods. But the status of a society was irrelevant of the consideration and the esteem (or lack thereof) that others had about a certain nation. This started with the Romans and their interpretation of the South Balkan, Anatolian, and Cretan past. It was then re-utilized and modified by Western Europeans. To some extent, the papal approval was tantamount to acquisition of credentials and to promotion to ‘civilized nation status’. Actually, this is today the nucleus of the whole problem concerning Ukraine.

That is why the so-called Migration Period was so terribly distorted by Western historians. Western historians deliberately preferred to stay blind and not to study the Ancient Mongol chronicles (notably the Secret History of The Mongols) in order to avoid assessing the Mongol-Turanian standards and principles of civilization. Had they proceeded in the opposite way, they would have discovered that, for the nomads, it is the settled people and the urban populations, who are barbarians, decayed and shameful.

The truth about the fallacious term ‘Migration Period’ is simple: there was never a migration period before 1500 CE (and certainly none afterwards), because every century was actually a migration period. Human History is a history of migrations.

The distorted linguistic-ethnographic division of the migrant nations helped forgers to dramatically increase the confusion level; as a matter of fact, there was no proper ethnic division (in the modern sense of the term) among Mongols, Turanians, Slavs and several other migrant nations. The languages change when people migrate and settle, resettle, move again, and end up in faraway places. For Muslim historians, the khan of the Saqaliba (: Slavs) was the strongest of all Turanian rulers. The arbitrary distinction of the migrant nations into two groups, namely Indo-European and Ural-Altaic/Turco-Mongolian nations was done deliberately in order to intentionally transform the face of the world and adjust it to the so-called Table of Nations, a forged text that made its way into the biblical book of Genesis in later periods (6th–4th c. BCE). General reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khordadbeh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Roads_and_Kingdoms_(Ibn_Khordadbeh)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_from_the_Varangians_to_the_Greeks

The Western academic tyranny is so deeply rooted that, irrespective of your political, ideological or philosophical affiliation (fascist, Nazi, communist, conservative, social-democrat, liberal, atheist, evolutionist, creationist, anarchist, etc.), you always have to adjust your seminars, courses, lectures, contributions, books and publications to the fallacy of Genesis chapter 10. The absurd logic of this system is the following: “since no Bulgars are mentioned in the Table of Nations, they must be a later tribe”. Then, believe it or not, whatever documentation may be found in Aramaic, Middle Persian, Pahlavi, Brahmi, Kharosthi, Avestan, Sogdian, Tocharian, Chinese or other texts about the Bulgars will be deliberately presented as irrelevant to Bulgars. If a new Sogdian document is found in Central Asia (dating back to the middle Arsacid times: 1st c. CE) and there is a certain mention of Bulgars in the text, the criminal gangsters and the systematic fraudsters of the Western universities and museums will write an enormous amount of articles to stupidly discredit the document or attribute the word to anything or anyone else.

iv- the forgers themselves and their antiquity

The above makes it clear that the foundations of today’s Western academic life, historiographical research, sector of Humanities, and all the associated fields of study were laid by the Western European Catholic monks and only after the end of the Eastern Roman imperial control, appointment and approval of the Roman popes (752 CE).

This changes totally the idea that you and the entire world have of the History of Mankind because it means that the Benedictine-Papal-Roman opposition to and clash with the Eastern Roman Empire (and the subsequent schisms of 867 and 1054) were entirely due to the resolute papal attempt to forge the World History, to substitute it with a fake History, and to diffuse all the Anti-Christian schemes that brought the world to today’s chaos. As the Muslims were totally unaware of the confrontation, the Crusades were undertaken against (not the Caliphate but) Constantinople. All the Christian Orthodox monasteries and libraries were controlled by Catholic monks, scribes, copyists and priests who had the time (from 1204 until 1261) to rob whatever manuscripts they had to rob, destroy whatever manuscripts they had to destroy, and leave all the rest as ‘useless’ to their enterprise.  

That is why modern scholars are ordered to jubilate every time a papyrus fragment is found in Egypt with few lines of verses from Homer, Hesiod and the Ancient ‘Greek’ tragedians, historians or philosophers! They publicize these discoveries in order to make every naïve guy believe that the bulk of their forged documentation is genuine. But it is not.

v- and last but not least, several points of

a) governance of modern states

The consolidation of the historical forgery was top concern for the colonial puppets of the Western European powers and for the powers hidden behind the scenes. I still remember the blogger’s comments about the late 19th and early 20th c. Bulgarian statesmen, politicians and academics, who were not so enthusiastic about the Fayoum papyrus! He made me laugh at; of course, he was very correct in writing what he did. Absolutely pertinent! But also very naïve!

He failed to remember that the top Ottoman military officer in Salonica during the First Balkan War, lieutenant general Hasan Tahsin Pasha (also known as Hasan Tahsin Mesarea; 1845-1918), as soon as he learned that the 7th Bulgarian Division was coming from the northeast, decided on his own to surrender the Salonica fortress and 26000 men to the Greek crown prince Constantine, being thus deemed a traitor and sentenced to death by a martial court.  

No Bulgarian (or other) official had ever the authority to go beyond the limits specified as regards either borderlines or historical approaches and conclusions.

b) international alliances, and

The same is valid today; it would be bizarre for Bulgarian professors of universities and academics to teach, diffuse, publish and propagate ideas, concepts and interpretations that contravene the worldwide norm that the Western colonials imposed across the Earth. It is as simple as that: Bulgaria, as EU member state, participates in many academic projects like Erasmus, etc. The professor, who would challenge the lies and the falsehood, which are at the basis of the so-called European values, principles and standards, would automatically become a problem for his rector, who would be receiving most unpleasant if not threatening calls from every corner of the Earth, as well as demands to fire the uncooperative, ‘controversial’ professor.

c) the ensuing captivity of all the targeted nations, each one well-adjusted into the preconceived role that the forgers invented for it

Actually, it is not a matter of Bulgaria and how the true History of Bulgaria is hidden from the Bulgarians; the same is valid in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Sudan, Israel, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, etc. As I lived in all these countries, I have personal experience and deep knowledge as regards their pedagogical systems and the contents of their manuals. In Egypt, schoolchildren study the History of Ancient Egypt down to Ramses III only (ca. 1200 BCE) and next year, they start with the beginning of Islam (642 CE). Why?

Because during the falsely called Roman times, Egyptian mysticisms, religions, spirituality, cults, sciences, arts, wisdom, cosmogony, cosmology, and eschatology flooded Greece, Rome, the Roman Empire, and even Europe beyond the Roman borders. The Egyptian pupil must not learn that the Greeks, the Romans, and the Europeans were dramatically inferior to his own cultural heritage. That’s why stupid and illiterate sheikhs, ignorant imams, and evil theologians intoxicate the average Egyptians with today’s fake Islam, which is not a religion anymore but a theological-ideological-political system at the antipodes of the true historical Islam. It cuts the average Egyptian from his own cultural heritage, thus making him stupidly care about the wives and the prematurely dead children of prophet Muhammad, as well as other matters of no importance for the spiritual-cultural-intellectual phenomenon of Islam.

Best regards,

Shamsaddin

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Download the article (text only) in PDF:

Download the article (with pictures and legends) in PDF:

The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

Pre-publication of chapter XIX of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XVII, XVIII, XIX and XX form Part Six (Fallacies about the Early Expansion of Islam: the Fake Arabization of Islam) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapter XVII and XX have already been pre-published.

Until now, 15 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 16th (out of 33). At the end of the present pre-publication, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in gray color. 

In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.

The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.

———————————————————  

Bosra (South Syria), Bahira Monastery

This process is associated with the fabrication of numerous fake terms, such as ‘Muhammedanism’, ‘Arab invasions’, ‘Arab conquests’, ‘Arab civilization’, etc. also involving the denigration of Islam as ‘religion of the Arabs’. The ‘Arabization’ of Islam is a paranoid Western Orientalist effort to reduce Islam to the level of a religion of just one nation, which – in addition – was the realm of repugnant barbarians; that’s why Orientalists and Islamologists always tried to portray the early Islamic invasions as ‘Arab’. About the reasons for which the initial Arab – Yemenite invasions (633-638) were successful, I already spoke in the previous chapter XVII (Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE; see sections VI to X).

But there is certainly more to it. First, among the Islamic armies’ soldiers, who advanced after 640 either in the direction of the Iranian plateau and Caucasus or toward Egypt, the Arabs constituted already the minority. Most of the soldiers of the Islamic armies after 640 were Yemenite, Aramaean, and Axumite converts and, speaking about the Islamic armies two decades later (after 661), one has to add also new Turanian and Egyptian converts.

Major centers of Aramaean Syriac Jacobite (Monophysitic/Miaphysitic) Christianity in 7th c. CE Syria and Mesopotamia

In the Umayyad Caliphate, Medieval Greek and Syriac Aramaic were the two official languages, while Arabic was only the religious language for the Muslim minority. And the Arab warriors, who settled in Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere, were so few that they were racially-ethnically assimilated with the local populations. The gradual, linguistic Arabization of the local populations in Yemen and in the formerly Eastern Roman provinces of the Orient was due to the fact that Arabic was the religious language.

In the lands where Islam was spread and became the official religion, there was no Arab culture diffused, because as I already said (chapter XVII, section I), to accept Islam the Arabs of Hejaz were de-Arabized and compactly Aramaized in the first place. This means that the ethnically Arab Muslim soldiers, who fought at Yarmuk and Qadissiyyah, were not culturally Arab anymore. They were indeed culturally Aramaized Arabs, thanks to their acceptance of Islam. There is no such thing as Arab culture in Islam.

Apparently, Arab culture existed before Islam in Hejaz and the desert, involving polytheistic cults, barbarian traditions, lawlessness and total absence of rudimentary civilization. To all the surrounding, civilized nations {namely the Yemenites, the Aramaeans, the diverse nations of Iran, the Eastern Romans, the Egyptians, the Sudanese Meroites (: Cushitic Ethiopians), the Axumite Abyssinians, and the Somalis of Other Berberia and Azania}, the pre-Islamic Arabs were known as the only barbarians of the wider region, and this was valid for many long centuries.

Homs/Emessa, Syria: Saint Mary Church; seat of the Syriac archbishopric and also known as Church of the Holy Girdle, it is a historical Syriac monument built over an underground church that dates back to 50 CE. Homs is famous for its black stones and rocks of which this church and many early mosques were built.

It is enough for anyone to read the text of the Periplus of the Red (‘Erythraean’) Sea (an Ancient Greek text written by an Alexandrian Egyptian merchant and navigator of the 2nd half of the 1st c. CE), so that he gets a very clear picture. Paragraph 20 of the said text, particularly if compared with earlier or later parts of the text, is quite revelatory of the rightfully deprecatory view of the Arabs that all the other ancient nations had.

Directly below this place is the adjoining country of Arabia, in its length bordering a great distance on the Erythraean Sea. Different tribes inhabit the country, differing in their speech, some partially, and some altogether. The land next the sea is similarly dotted here and there with caves of the Fish-Eaters, but the country inland is peopled by rascally men speaking two languages, who live in villages and nomadic camps, by whom those sailing off the middle course are plundered, and those surviving shipwrecks are taken for slaves. And so they too are continually taken prisoners by the chiefs and kings of Arabia; and they are called Carnaites. Navigation is dangerous along this whole coast of Arabia, which is without harbors, with bad anchorages, foul, inaccessible because of breakers and rocks, and terrible in every way. Therefore we hold our course down the middle of the gulf and pass on as fast as possible by the country of Arabia until we come to the Burnt Island; directly below which there are regions of peaceful people, nomadic, pasturers of cattle, sheep and camels“.

The text is to be found online here (translation by Wilfred H. Schoff):

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea#Periplus

This barbarism took an end with the preaching of Prophet Muhammad, who transferred Aramaean culture, education, intellectuality and spirituality among the Arabs. All the themes and topics discussed by Prophet Muhammad, either in his revelations (Quran) or in his explanations (Hadith), were Aramaean. Of course, and with reference to developments taking place during the middle of the 7th c., there was an evident differentiation between a) Christian Aramaeans and b) Muslim Aramaeans and Muslim Arabs; but the differentiation was only religious, and not cultural. Culturally, the groups a) and b) were identical; and religiously they differed only partly and not fundamentally. But the perfidious colonial Orientalists have always been intentionally oblivious of this fact.

Founded by Mor Mattai the Hermit in 363 CE, Mor Mattai Monastery is situated 20 km north of Mosul and consists in a major center of Aramaean Syriac Jacobite culture and faith.

Deyrulzafaran (or Derzafaran; ‘the Saffron Monastery) is mainly known as Mor Hananyo Monastery, being located 5 km from Mardin (SE Turkey) in the famous Tur Abdin region, major center of Aramaean culture, faith and letters. In the Antiquity, there was a temple dedicated to the Assyrian-Babylonian and later Aramaean divinity Shamash; it was then converted to fortress by the Romans. The Syriac monk Mor Shlemon turned it into a monastery in 493 CE. Finally in 793, the bishop of Mardin and Kfartuta, Mor Hananyo, renovated it.

Surely there are ancient Oriental parallels to what happened to the Arabs in the early 7th c.

The Aramaeans and the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and the Anatolians, the Greeks and the Romans – all those who accepted the preaching of Jesus and belonged to the early Christian communities (except for the Jewish converts) – were culturally Hebraized (in the first two centuries of our era).

There is no such thing as Aramaean or Phoenician or Egyptian or Greek or Roman culture in Early Christianity. Aramaean culture revolved around Astarte or the ‘Syrian Goddess’, Baal, and many other Aramaean deities, myths and concepts; Phoenician culture was developed around Baal and other local divinities and myths; Egyptian culture was related to Isis, Osiris, Horus and the Heliopolitan religion or the Theban dogma of Amun or the Memphitic cult of Ptah or the Hermupolitan Ogdoad. Greek culture (which had earlier involved a highly politicized theater, Olympic games, philosophy, calamitous indifference for religion, and quasi-total ignorance of spirituality) and Roman culture were already heavily impacted by numerous Oriental religious, esoteric, spiritual and cultural-behavioral systems. Then, the diffusion of Early Christianity among them (up to the middle of the 2nd c. CE) consisted in cultural Hebraization.

What happened culturally to Arabs with their acceptance of Prophet Muhammad’s preaching had occurred already to the Aramaeans, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Anatolians, the Greeks and the Romans, who accepted Early Christianity in the 1st – 2nd c.

Similarly, the Ancient Hebrews were not exempt of overwhelming foreign cultural impact. When in Egypt, they were heavily impacted by Atenism (also known as Amarna monotheism), which was the official, aniconic and monotheistic religion of Pharaoh Akhenaten in the middle of the 14th c. BCE. Excerpts from the Hymns to Aten, which were composed in Ancient Egyptian and written in hieroglyphic writing by the pious monotheist and great reformer Pharaoh, were later reproduced, word by word, in the Psalms of the otherwise ‘Hebrew’ Bible.

At this point I have to also add that Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1353–1336), after his fourth year of reign, changed his theophoric name to Akhenaten, so that it does not contain the first component, which – as name of the polytheistic Theban religion’s main god Amun – was considered as an abomination by the Egyptian monotheists, after the solemn proclamation of Atenism.

And who were the Ancient Hebrews after all? Who was Abraham? An early 2nd millennium BCE Babylonian (from Ur, Southern Mesopotamia), who abandoned his land in order to preserve his monotheistic faith and openly reject the polytheistic religion that was imposed there at the time. The Assyrian-Babylonian impact on what is called Ancient Hebrew religion or Judaism is absolute, compact, and irreversible. The Old Testament is an Assyrian-Babylonian cultural, religious, intellectual, and spiritual byproduct.

Discussion near the mosque of a village (from the 43rd maqamah of the Maqamat al-Ḥariri); by the Iraqi painter and calligrapher Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti (13th c.); the illustrations of the famous Muslim painter show that rural life continued following exactly the same Aramaean patterns before and after the diffusion of Islam.

The aforementioned approach is extremely embarrassing to colonial Orientalist forgers and to Western pseudo-Christian Evangelical, Taliban-fashion theologians, who should rather be considered as the real instigators and the original perpetrators of Islamic terrorism, which they have studiously and scrupulously produced because of their vicious anti-Islamic hatred that they have ceaselessly diffused. That is why it is vitally important for them to stick the label ‘Arab’ onto the entire phenomenon of ‘Islamic Civilization’, ‘Islamic History’, ‘Islamic religion’, and ‘Islamic armies’.

However, there is even more to it, if one examines the fundamentals of the divine revelation as spelled out in Islam’s holy text and the associated explanations. The historical reality is that Muhammad, either one accepts him as prophet or not, never pretended that he was preaching a ‘new’ religion; according to his revelation (the Quran) and explanations (the Hadith), Islam (lit. ‘submission to God’) was the only true faith (‘religion’) of Adam. In fact, according to the prophet Muhammad’s world conceptualization, there has been only one religion in the History of Mankind; it was preached by various prophets, either they were/are known to humans as such or not. All prophets were sent by God to correct deviations, because beyond the only and true religion (which involves total devotion to God), there have been across the ages numerous deformations, distortions, deliberate alterations, and pernicious modifications of the true religion, and of the preaching / revelation of the various earlier prophets.

The birth of prophet Muhammad in presence of humans and angels; miniature illustration on vellum from Rashid al-Din Hamadani’s famous masterpiece Jami’ al-Tawarikh (lit. ‘Compendium of Chronicles’), which is also known as ‘Universal History’ (Tabriz-Iran, 1307)

Prophet Muhammad on his death bed (Jami’ al-Tawarikh)

Prophet Muhammad reveals to Ali (both protected by halos of golden flames) secrets he unveiled during Mir’aj (transcendental travel to the spiritual universe); from the Ottoman Turkish ‘Tarjuma-i Thawaqib-i manaqib’ (translation of stars of the legend), which was ordered by Sultan Murad III (1574–1595) to be done (in 1590) from the Farsi abridgement (14th c.) of Aflaki; found in Baghdad and purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1911 (MS M.466, fol. 96r). According to this tradition, ten thousand of the hundred thousand secrets were revealed to Ali as the rightful successor to prophet Muhammad. Ali had difficulty keeping them, and that is why he shouted them into a well; however, a young man made a flute from the tree, which grew from the reed in the well. People came from all over to hear the young man play, and then prophet Muhammad requested to hear the youth perform, declaring that his notes “were the interpretation of the celestial mysteries that he had confided to Ali”. The flute was used ever since as part of the Mevlevi ritual dance (samaa). Jalal ad-Din Rumi has apparently borrowed the story of the barber, who shouted the secret of the Phrygian King Midas’ donkey ears into a hole over which reeds grew, and subsequently the winds whispered the secret to all. The early spirituality of the true Islam was greatly appreciated by Muslims of the Golden Era of Islamic Civilization, but there is nothing Arabic in it.

It is the aforementioned, outspoken universality of Islam that has deeply upset and dramatically embarrassed Western Orientalist forgers, colonial radicals, Catholic-Jesuit schemers, and materialist-atheist extremists. And this explains why they tried to imitate some Eastern Roman historians of the 8th c., who collectively called all the Muslims ‘Saracens’, a deprecatory term that is historically false enough to reveal either the ignorance or the evilness of the users.

However, to Eastern Roman Christian Orthodox theologians, like John Damascene (or John of Damascus), Islam was merely the latest Christological heresy. This is what Vatican, the pseudo-Christian Evangelicals, and the anti-Jewish Zionists do their ingenious best to conceal; because the Eastern Roman Christian Orthodox truth destroys their absurd lies and diabolical conspiracies.

The multiply controversial gold coins of the Umayyad caliph Abd al Malik ibn Marwan (reign: 685-705); during his reign, there was an apparent effort to impose Arabic as the official language of the divided Caliphate and to replace Christian signs (notably the Cross) with the declaration of Islamic faith. However, the caliph ruled only on a small part of the territory that most people usually see as enormous on the mostly false maps of the Umayyad Empire, and this was due to the fact that he was facing a multiple revolt. Even worse, following a defeat, he had to be tribute to the Eastern Roman Empire. But to his greatest surprise, when he tried to pay with these new coins, the Roman Emperor Justinian II (reign: 685-695 and 705-711) refused to accept them because they were of an unknown type and of evidently unacceptable character. This attitude triggered a new war; the offense was not only the absence of Christian symbols, but also the Arabic inscription with the Islamic declaration of faith (‘bismallah, la illah illa-allah muhammad rasul allah’, i.e. ‘in the name of God, there is no god but God alone; Muhammad is His messenger’) on the reverse and the presence of three standing figures on the obverse.

As there no names written on the coins, every discussion is basically a matter of assumption, but there are specialists, who suggest that the three figures are none else than prophet Muhammad (center), Abu Bakr, and his paranoid daughter Aisha, who was the last wife of the prophet. Abu Bakr was indeed one of the early followers of Islam (the very first being Ali ibn Abi Taleb, who was the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law). Abu Bakr, was selected by a small group of vicious Meccan renegades at the time prophet Muhammad was dying – in straightforwardly anti-Islamic rejection of the solemn investiture of Ali by the prophet at Ghadir Khumm on the 16th March 632 (18 Dhu al-Hijjah), i.e. only three months before prophet Muhammad’s death (8 June 632), in the 11th year of the Islamic calendar (Anno Hegirae). The heinous, anti-Islamic nature and practices of the Umayyad dynasty, which existed only after the massacre of the rightful heir of Ali and against the will of the quasi-totality of the Muslims, is the reason for which this interpretation can be considered as possibly correct.

The much loathed and decried, lawless and illegitimate caliph sought to ‘prove’ that he was the rightful ruler and that he represented a line of succession approved by prophet Muhammad. Of course, this was preposterous because at the very end of the prophet’s life, Abu Bakr acted openly and deliberately against Muhammad’s will, whereas the rancorous and hysterical Aisha supported the killers of Fatima and later of Ali. An extra reason for which we can accept this effort of interpretation is the fact that this shameless and absolutely anti-Islamic depiction caused an unprecedented outcry (because it was taken as a clear sign of overwhelming rejection of Islam by the court at Damascus) up to the point that these blasphemous coins were all ordered to be destroyed shortly after they were minted. As his wretched empire experienced divisions, civil wars, and real trichotomy, the shy and coward Abd al Malik ibn Marwan decided not to further risk his otherwise useless throne.

The supposedly powerful (according to Western colonial liars and forgers) Umayyad Empire was a multi-divided terrain of which Abd al-Malik Marwan controlled only a small portion (highlighted in red); the lands controlled by his opponents al-Mukhtar and al-Zubayr are colored in green and blue; and the territory under Kharijite power is shown in yellow. This chaotic period (680-692) is typically called ‘Second Fitna’, i.e. conflict, sedition, or civil strife; the word has many connotations, but the most accurate description of the historical fact would be ‘civil war’.

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FORTHCOMING

Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey

2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists

By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu

(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTENTS

PART ONE. INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities

A. Examples of fake national names

a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!

b) Tataria – Not Russia!

c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!

d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!

e) Khazaria – not Israel!

f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!

B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish

C. The Preamble to My Response

CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.

CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.

CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment

A. Orientalism

B. Conceptualization

C. Contextualization

D. Concealment

PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT

CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece

PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY

CHAPTER VI:  The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times

CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists

CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan

CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran

PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM

CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet

PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED  

CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another

CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’

CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur

CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World

CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West

CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk

PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION

CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?

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List of the already pre-published chapters of the book

Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.

Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran

https://www.academia.edu/105664696/Iranian_and_Turanian_Religions_in_Pre_Islamic_Iran

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CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period

https://www.academia.edu/105386978/Alexander_the_Great_as_Iranian_King_of_Kings_the_fallacy_of_Hellenism_and_the_nonexistent_Hellenistic_Period

CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty

https://www.academia.edu/52541355/Parthian_Turan_an_Anti_Persian_dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

https://www.academia.edu/105539884/Parthian_Turan_and_the_Philhellenism_of_the_Arsacids

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CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire

https://www.academia.edu/105053815/Arsacid_and_Sassanid_Iran_and_the_wars_against_the_Mithraic_Christian_Roman_Empire

CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism

https://www.academia.edu/105117675/Sassanid_Iran_Turan_Kartir_Roman_Empire_Christianity_Mani_and_Manichaeism

CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates

https://www.academia.edu/96142922/Iran_Turan_Manichaeism_and_Islam_during_the_Migration_Period_and_the_Early_Caliphates

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CHAPTER XVII: Iran–Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th-8th c. CE

https://www.academia.edu/105292787/Iran_Turan_and_the_Western_Orientalist_distortions_about_the_successful_early_expansion_of_Islam_during_the_7th_8th_c_CE

CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History

https://www.academia.edu/105565861/The_systematic_dissociation_of_Islam_from_the_Ancient_Oriental_History

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CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’

https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

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CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

https://www.academia.edu/61193026/The_Fake_Persianization_of_the_Abbasid_Caliphate

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CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash

https://www.academia.edu/96519269/From_Ferdowsi_to_the_Seljuk_Turks_Nizam_al_Mulk_Nizami_Ganjavi_Jalal_ad_Din_Rumi_and_Haji_Bektash

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CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur

https://www.academia.edu/104034939/From_Genghis_Khan_Nasir_al_Din_al_Tusi_and_Hulagu_to_Timur_Tamerlane_

CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order

https://www.academia.edu/105230290/Timur_Tamerlane_as_a_Turanian_Muslim_descendant_of_the_Great_Hero_Manuchehr_his_exploits_and_triumphs_and_the_slow_rise_of_the_Turanian_Safavid_Order

CHAPTER XXVI: The Timurid Era as the Peak of the Islamic Civilization: Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

https://www.academia.edu/105267173/The_Timurid_Era_as_the_Peak_of_the_Islamic_Civilization_Shah_Rukh_and_Ulugh_Beg_the_Astronomer_Emperor

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Download the chapter (text only) in PDF:

Download the chapter (with pictures and legends) in PDF:

Russia, China, the Decayed Muslim World, and the Crumbling, Savage Western World – I

By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Fake states of fake Arabs and fake Muslims

II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions

III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians

IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials

V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials

VI. What Russia and China must do

Introduction

Fourteen years ago, on 4th December 2007, I published an article under title ‘Russia, Islam, and the West’, which -within few days- was officially (ИноСМИ / Inosmi) translated into Russian (‘ Россия, ислам и Запад’). I wanted to briefly elaborate on how things would develop and to also identify possible allies for Russia within the so-called ‘Islamic World’.

As the translated version of the article was extensively reproduced, I noticed that it was also well understood. Example: the great portal Centrasia (www.centrasia.org), while republishing the Russian translation, added an over-title for the use of its readers to state the following: “Экспансия западного мира не столько решала проблемы, сколько распространяла их вширь” (The expansion of the Western world did not so much solve problems as spread them in breadth). Indeed, there could not be better summary of my article’s contents. The over-title was indeed an excellent reflection of my original perception and ultimate conviction, namely that the West wanted to use the senseless Islamic World against Russia.

Here you have the links:

https://www.academia.edu/26051442/Russia_Islam_and_the_West_by_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/26051219

https://inosmi.ru/world/20071210/238309.html

https://centrasia.org/newsA.php?st=1197397080

In that article’s last part, I put a title that appeared very odd, even to several Egyptian and other African friends of mine (at the time, I was living in Cairo): “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. In that part, I explained why only these two countries could possibly be Russia’s allies against the Western colonial contamination that threatens the entire world. The reason for this statement is that only these two countries had maintained until that time a correct sense of historical-cultural identity and an imperial-level establishment and diplomacy. As a matter of fact, the rest of the so-called Islamic world is constituted by fake states-puppets of the colonial powers (from Morocco and Nigeria to Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia); unfortunately, the uneducated, ignorant, and idiotic elites of these neo-colonial structures never realized what ‘national integrity’ means.

I. Fake states of fake Arabs and fake Muslims

This is so because, by describing these states as ‘puppets’, I don’t only suggest that the local governments receive and execute orders dictated by the Western colonial capitals (Paris, London, Washington D.C., etc.), often being also blackmailed by them in the most obscene manner, but I also specify that these states were entirely pre-fabricated by the colonial elites and administrations to the slightest detail.

What I imply by mentioning the ‘detail’ is simple: not only the location of the false and troublesome (notably in the Halaib triangle) borderline between Egypt and Sudan was decided by the English colonials long before the two modern states came to exist (in order to offer their successors in the colonial institutions and governments the chance of future manipulation of either local ‘governments’), but also the lack of railway connections between first Cairo and Khartoum and second Suez and Port Sudan had been programmed before the beginning of the 20th c. So, colonialism means also ‘deeds carried out with long-term perspective’; actually, it does not occur in a wide array of sectors of social activities, but across the board.

Neo-colonial governments in Algiers, Riyadh, Baghdad, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere were totally deprived of any substantive nation-building tools; entire nations were stripped of their historical-cultural identity, and their elites -which used to have idiotically been sending their children to ‘study’ in French, English, US, Canadian and Australian universities- were plunged into a scrupulously elaborated delusion that turned them into pure and permanent servants of their former colonial masters.

Even worse, all Muslim, African and Asiatic nations have been scrupulously disconnected from one another, and thus, to study Egyptology and Coptology a Nigerian has to move to England or America, whereas a Moroccan willing to specialize in Assyriology or Iranology needs to pursue university studies in France. Similarly, Muslims in Senegal and Sierra Leone have no idea about Islamic History, Art History, Architecture, Sciences, Wisdom, Spirituality and Literature in Central Asia, whereas Egyptian and Syrian Muslims know nothing about the great Islamic dynasties that ruled Eastern or Western Africa and the existing Islamic monuments there. In other words, the fake neo-colonial structures have been totally disconnected from one another at the intellectual, academic, cultural, educational and scientific levels, each of them being calamitously tied to its former colonial center.  

The aforementioned unprecedented ignorance and reciprocal disconnectedness was complemented by colonially promoted confusion and darkness. When it comes to the confusion that prevails among Muslims worldwide, the first point to mention is the materialistic evaluation of human interests, which is an entirely anti-Islamic trait and an alien element among historical Muslim societies that revolved around axes of spiritual, intellectual and scientific endeavors.

The short-sighted materialistic viewpoint on the human endeavors and interests was projected by the colonial elites onto the local Muslim populations and it permanently destroyed the Islamic moral order, eliminating all cultural values that had prevailed for many long centuries (in several cases for more than a millennium) and turning therefore all Muslims into miserable replicas of corrupt Westerners. The very use of money, the existence of the Banking system, the shameful fallacy of the so-called ‘Islamic Economics’, and the economic structure itself of today’s Muslim countries are an anathema against prophet Muhammad.

The colonially promoted confusion took also the form of a pathetic race for ‘socioeconomic development’, involving the catastrophic deformation of the traditional urban landscape throughout the Islamic world. As -generation after generation- young students were pushed to Engineering and Economis, all the neo-colonial structures and the corrupted or demented pseudo-Muslim societies were even more strongly tied to the Western colonial capitals.

Last, backwardness, obscurantism and darkness were diffused in the form of false theories, disruptive ideologies, and nonsensical theologies; by believing in the Pan-Arabic falsehood, hundreds of millions of non-Arab Aramaeans, Yemenites, Copts (Egyptians), Sudanese Cushites, and NW African Berbers were permanently prevented from achieving proper nation-building. By embracing Nasserism, Baathism and other catastrophic schemes, dozens of millions of people engulfed themselves in wars, conflicts, bloodshed, abject poverty, and irreversible misfortune.

And by accepting the pathetic, anti-Islamic doctrines of today’s totally uneducated and deeply ignorant pseudo-theologians and bogus-imams, African and Asiatic Muslims were diverted from Islamic spirituality, wisdom, moral, sciences, intellect, education, religion, culture, and civilization. Even worse for them, they were diverted to a trivial and pathetic, bogus-Islamic theological indoctrination of which all the foundations, all the elements, all the concepts, all the parts, and all the words had been previously examined, considered, authorized and approved by the Western Orientalist colonial academia, before being projected onto the local masses due to the determinant commitment of the military, administrative, diplomatic and political gangsters who controlled the vast lands of the Mughal Empire, the detached territories of the Ottoman Caliphate, the colonial puppet state of Pahlavi Iran, as well as many other earlier Muslim sultanates, khanates and emirates.

Wherever there was a sound, secular, culturally original, socially strong state, as in the case of Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia, the criminal English, American, Canadian, Australian and French diplomats employed all possible means to diffuse the fake Islamic theologies, the nonsensical political doctrines, the absurd politicization of the Muslim societies, and the villainous ideologization of the deliberately kept-ignorant masses. In total negation of today’s fake Muslim societies, there cannot be politics in a historical Muslim society; and there was no politics in both, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia.

In other words, all the present dimensions of social-intellectual-educational-political life in today’s fake Muslim countries had been pre-fashioned by the colonial powers in order to permanently function detrimentally against all their users, adherents, admirers, supporters and followers onto whom they were projected systematically, tyrannically and criminally. I expanded on this topic in my article titled ‘Why Former Ottoman Provinces cannot become Proper States’ that I published before 10 years: https://www.academia.edu/26064731/Why_Former_Ottoman_Provinces_cannot_become_Proper_States_By_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis?auto=download

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CHINA, INDIA, RUSSIA, IRAN AND TURKEY: THE WORLD’S FIVE MOST IMPORTANT CONTINENTAL EMPIRES FIRST CANNOT BE REVIVED AND SECOND CAN PROSPER ONLY AS SECULAR STATES

Ming dynasty Emperor Zhu Houzhao (朱厚照; 1491-1521)

15th c. painting of the Forbidden City

Forbidden city Beijing

Qing China map 1820

Qing dynasty Emperor Kangxi (康熙帝; 1661-1722)

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Superior to the paranoid lunatic Ottoman Selim I and stronger than the lascivious Ismail Safavi, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad rather known as Babur (1483-1530) was the founder of the Mughal Empire; incomparably the most adventurous, the most impulsive and the most intellectual emperor of his times.

Emperor Humayun (1508-1556) and his son Akbar

Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) receiving the four-year old Abdul Rahim following the assassination (1561) of his father Bairam Khan, who was Akbar’s leading general and mentor: miniature from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), which was commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of the reign. It was written by Abu’l Fazl between 1590 and 1596, illustrated between c. 1592 and 1594.

Diwan-i-Aam (Hall of Public Audience) in the palace of the Great Mughal Emperor in Agra

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‘Moscow under Ivan the Terrible’ (1902) is a famous painting by Apollinary M. Vasnetsov; the 19th-20th c. impression that the Russians had about the beginning of the tiny Muscovy principality before 350 years was very inaccurate, erroneous, and biased. This is so, because they projected their own ideas on their own past that they viewed through the binoculars of their distorted education and historiography.

Mikhail Romanov (1596-1645) and his father, the patriarch Philaret, distribute alms, in an illustration of the first Romanov coronation. From the Coronation Album of Mikhail Fedorovich; the manuscript “The Book of the Election to the Highest Throne of the Great Russian Tsardom of the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail Fedorovich of All Great Russia Autocrat” was produced in Moscow few decades after the event (in 1672-1673). From the 1856 reprint edition.

Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg; when Russia ceased to be Russia and started imitating Western Europe corrupt pseudo-kingdoms, insidious academics, fake intellectuals, and uncivilized politicians, the divisions and the discords started. Peter I and Catherine II are the true reason of the fall of the Romanov.

When you have Western European theater, opera and dance in a theoretically Christian Orthodox Empire, sooner or later your contaminated state will collapse; Nicholas II could not save anything (here in his coronation along with Alexandra Feodorovna, 1896).

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Shah Tahmasp I of Iran & Emperor Humayun of the Mughal Empire Hindustan enjoying Nowrouz festivities, as depicted on the Chehel Sotoun palace in Esfahan

Shah Abbas I the Great (1571-1629)

The imperial Naqsh-e-Jahan (‘The Image of the World’) square in Esfahan, Safavid Iran’s most flamboyant capital

Safavid Iran, 1511

General view of the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Shah Mosque (below), and the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (in the middle), Isfahan

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Stupid Ottomans! They abolished the only valuable military units they had, namely the Janissaries; the absurd development took place at the time of the idiotic Sultan Mahmoud II (1785-1839). Instead of killing all the uneducated, ignorant, dark and pathetic sheikhs, muftis, qadis and imams that contaminated and destroyed the Ottoman Empire with the fallacy of their anti-Islamic “sunnah”, Mahmoud II closed down the illustrious Bektashi Order and the formidable Janissary elite infantry, thus issuing the death warrant of his otherwise wretched state. Today, people confuse two totally different terms: ‘Ottoman Empire’ and ‘Ottoman Civilization’. All factors of the Islamic civilization in the territory of the Caliphate were indeed persecuted by the pathetic, corrupt, cruel and villainous Ottoman dynasty. As it used to be said at the time, to be a member of the Ottoman family you had to have killed your brother! The ominous empire was the World History’s most anti-Turkish state.

Topkapı sarayı at the time of Selim I (1512-1520)

Official ceremonies in the Ottoman palace were a spectacular and costly affair that was impermissible in an absurd state ridiculously governed by pathetic, biased and ignorant theologians who took their stupid theology as tantamount to the religion of Islam.

Topkapı sarayı (طوپقپو سرايى) in Ottoman Constantinople; the historical name ‘Istanbul’, which was attested in sources for more than 100 years before the fall of the Eastern Roman imperial capital (1453), became the official name of the city only thanks to Kemal Ataturk. The absurd measure of turning Ayasofya Museum to a fanciful pseudo-mosque for political circus automatically cancels the popular city name and imposes the re-introduction of the old name that was the official appellation when the monumental edifice was operating as a real mosque (1453-1923).

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II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions

The two most notable exceptions from this chaotic and nefarious situation have been Turkey and Iran; the Turkish exception is entirely due to the greatness of the scope and the depth of understanding of Kemal Ataturk, who was one of the very few minds to timely, accurately and plainly identify the colonial goals. The founder of Modern Turkey had understood that Islam as religion was already defunct during his time and that the uneducated, ignorant and worthless Muslims of the early 20th c. were to be re-educated from scratch and on the basis of their own culture in order to later rediscover the true historical Islam in all its width, depth and height.

Kemal Ataturk knew that all that the criminal colonial imperialists of France, England and America wanted to do was to aptly utilize and duly instrumentalize the uneducated and silly Muslims of his time, turning them to fully operable tools of Western hegemony. The basic tools of this instrumentalization were the following:

– the deceitful ideologization (theologization) of the Islamic religion,

– the execrable politicization of the Muslim societies,

– the Orientalist falsification of the History of all Asiatic and African nations, and

– the linguistic, educational, academic and cultural subordination of all, Muslim and non-Muslim, Oriental nations to the Western European and North American barbarism and inhuman model of life, which was produced in Western Europe starting with the Evil Renaissance and diffused worldwide due to the genocidal colonialism

But theology is not religion; today’s fake Muslims do not believe Islam as religion, but pseudo-Islamic theological systems that contain a modern and ahistorical bogus-interpretation (i.e. a misinterpretation) of the values of Islam, thus fully eliminating Spirituality and turning Moral from a profound understanding of virtues to a silly obedience of other humans, which is “shirk” (شرك) according to the dogma of Islam.

It goes without saying that the aforementioned situation (or condition of being) does not only consist in religious deviation for Muslims but also constitutes supreme humiliation and final demise for any nation. Kemal Ataturk was triumphantly confirmed by all the historical developments that followed his death.

The uneducated, ignorant and stupid Muslims of Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc. fell exactly into the trap of their utilization and instrumentalization by the West; from 1948 to 1967 to 1973, the fake Muslims of the wider region did indeed function as fully programmed automatons. More they hated the Zionists, stronger the state of Israel became. This does not mean that the Zionist state is rightful and correct; it is not. But this does not matter (or does not play any role) anymore, when the Aramaean Muslims of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine and the Coptic Muslims of Egypt are so wrong as to become dehumanized automatons focused on wrong choices that can bring only grave deterioration and final destruction.

Having no national identity, believing in a pseudo-theology (that they mistook for religion), being truly disconnected from one another, being totally unaware of one another’s historical past and cultural heritage, and acting -at the political level- like conveniently submissive monkeys of the Westerners, these fake Muslims do not have a chance in the billion to ever win. Automatons do not win; humans do. Automatons act as per their pre-fashioned mechanism and then get decomposed to pieces.

The Iranian exception was basically due to the earlier imperial tradition (Safavid, Afshar and Qajar). The English interfered in Iran in the early 20th c. in a multifaceted and multilayered manner. They deposed the true, imperial dynasty and imposed an ignorant soldier as ‘king’, after duly cheating, bribing and corrupting him; this poor and uneducated guy did not even know the historical Iranian name ‘Pahlavi’ and its meaning, but the academic instructor and tutor, whom his colonial masters assigned to him, gave him this name as ‘royal family name’ – which constitutes the most shameful and most disgraceful stigma of Iranian History.

The reason for the English intervention in Iran in the late 19th and early 20th c. is still unknown to most people worldwide. For many long centuries, the evil Anglo-French diplomacy, vicious colonial trickery, and incessant machinations pitched the silly Ottomans and the naïve Iranians in interminable wars that weakened both empires; even worse, when Constantinople and Isfahan/Tehran did not fight against one another, most probably one of the two ailing empires made a war with the Russians. This unprecedentedly disastrous series of developments occurred despite the fact that both, the dynasties and the populations of the two empires, were Turanian in their majority and the local culture in both realms was a millennia long Iranian-Turanian amalgamation.

But with Kemal Ataturk turning the world’s most anti-Turkic empire (namely the wretched Ottoman Empire) into Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, the path was open for the much needed merge of the two great states into one; but this eventuality (that had been fully materialized by Tamerlane in 1402) was the real horror of the Western colonial powers for no less than four centuries (1500-1900).

The reason of the colonial fear was the fact that the Ottoman state and the Iranian Empire were equally Iranian and Turanian at the same time; in either case, the majority of the local population was Turanian, whereas the popular culture and tradition constituted an amalgamated Turanian (nomad / military-martial) and Iranian (settled / academic-intellectual) common heritage. So, by intervening colonially in Iran, the English intended to

– devilishly ‘Persianize’ Iran (an attempt that had no historical precedent),

– reduce the universal-ecumenical Empire of Iran into a ‘national Persian kingdom’, and thus

– transform untouchable Iran into a malleable ‘Persia’.

By so doing, the evil colonials knew beforehand that they would trigger enormous reactions from the part of Azeris, Turkmens and others, who would never accept ‘their’ Iran (so, a Turanian-Iranian entity) to be degraded into a Farsi (‘Persian’) state.

However, not even an interference of this scale was enough for the English and the French to fully control developments in Iran. As the English occupied the formerly Ottoman land of Mesopotamia (Aram-Nahrain or ‘Iraq’), the colonial conspirers mobilized several naïve Shia religious leaders and turned them against the puppet soldier king Reza, whom they had imposed on his fake throne in the first place.

As the colonial ‘explorers’, ‘advisers’ and ‘friends’ pushed the idiotic, credulous and unsuspicious Reza to westernize Iran and to stupidly send his son, the crown prince Muhammad Reza, to Switzerland for ‘studies’ (which would also further westernize him: 1931-1936; at the age of 12-17), they instigated anti-royal hatred among the silly ayatollahs and the other useless religious leaders, whom they urged to react against the ‘atheist’ king Reza, whom they had raised to power for a start. This has always been the criminal nature of the Western colonial evilness: you don’t only raise a silly puppet to prominence and power; you also prepare the puppet’s opponents and eventually the puppet’s murderers.

The situation went out of control, when the soldier’s son, after being educated as crown prince in Switzerland, proved to be a perspicacious successor to the much undeserved throne of Iran. As a matter of fact, and clearly to his credit, Muhammad Reza, by noticing the conflicting agendas of the various colonial powers and by identifying tremendous discrepancies in the ultimate goals of the major lobbies of power (or secret societies) in the Western World (Jesuits, Freemasons and Zionists), understood a large and critical part of the overall scheme, took therefore his role seriously, and following the path of Kemal Ataturk, attempted to modernize Iran in order to make it truly competitive to Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and the major Western nations. This was exactly what the evil Western colonials did not want to happen, because Kemal Ataturk has always been the man whom they hated most and for a good reason: if there were another 3-4 men like the founder of Modern Turkey, as perspicacious as he was, as determined as he was, and as audacious as he was, then the entire colonial rule would crumble in Asia, Africa and Europe, ultimately and rightfully plunging the Western World into the well-deserved final implosion and irreversible decomposition. That’s why Iran’s position has severely degraded since 1979 and the so-called ‘Islamic revolution’.

III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians

It could not happen otherwise, because the nonsensical theory published by Khomeini and known under the name ‘Velayat-e Faqih’ {‘the Governance of the (Islamic) Jurisprudents’} did not exist (and consequently was not practiced) earlier, throughout the History of Islamic Caliphates; it is a modern concept, although many efforts were made to attach some historical credibility to it. As far as the so-called ‘Shia Muslims’ are concerned, quite unfortunately, this theory was the effective counterpart of the ‘Political Islam’ that the colonial Orientalists, diplomats and politicians diffused among /imposed on the so-called ‘Sunni Muslims’. I use the expression ‘so-called’, because in reality the distinction into Sunni and Shia Muslims is also fake, but this is not a topic on which I can further expand here. About: https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

The degradation of Iran’s position at the international level was stopped to some extent (not because an improvement was made in the unfortunate realm ruled by a puerile elite that failed to identify the anti-Iranian and anti-Turanian schemes of the Western colonial gangsters but) due to rather external factors. Despite the fact that Turkey followed a different trajectory, also Ankara’s position at the international level started gradually being severely degraded in 2002-2003, when the Western colonial fabrication ‘AKP’ was forcefully imposed on Turkey’s political life by direct and multileveled Western colonial interference.

The Turkish generals were constantly, boldly and gravely threatened by the US, NATO, EU, UK, and other governments and international bodies not to intervene, not to undertake a -much needed- coup, and not to cause the -much demanded- physical death of the disreputable US-UK-Israel puppet Erdogan, Turkey’s silliest, most ignorant, most uneducated, most pathetic, and most ludicrous prime minister and president.

The fact that Turkey’s Islamists came to and stayed in power only due to systematic Western colonial support clearly shows their absolutely non-Muslim, evil nature, and their servile character, which is the epitome of the disbeliever, the unfaithful and the perfidious. It also heralds the forthcoming destruction of Turkey, because this is the ultimate goal of the Western colonials, who brought the stupid Islamists of the AKP to power in order to duly, effectively and irrevocably utilize them for their plans.

Having a decomposed, divided and useless army (due to ceaseless post-2016 purges), a collapsed economy, half a trillion external gross debt, and a current account deficit of $36.7 billion in 2020, Turkey will need more than a decade to recover from the nonsensical and paranoid governmental policies of the idiots, who imagined it possible to govern a 21st c. country with oral utterances of a prophet who lived before 1400 years and with the prescriptions of a holy book manifested to indigenous people in Hejaz 300 years after the Roman Empire became Christian.

What is even worse for the brainless humanoids that support Turkey’s impossible Islamization is the fact that Muslim kingdoms and empires during the Islamic times were not governed (and did not have to be governed) on the basis of the Shariah in the way today’s uneducated and ignorant Muslim theologians understand this very vague and currently misinterpreted term. Quite contrarily, many times caliphs and sultans ruled against the Islamic Law; this is a vast topic that goes out of the scope of the present article, but at this point, I want only to indicate the original mistake and the defective approach to which are due the false interpretations and the erroneous conclusions of almost all modern Muslim theologians.

IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials

Instead of duly studying and carefully examining what truly occurred during all the periods of Islamic History and subsequently concluding thereupon, today’s fake Muslim theologians theorize on the basis of various historical texts (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh, Kalam), which by definition they cannot understand in their original, correct and accurate contextualization. When you hear silly people using this style of wooden language «theologian X said: ‘about this topic prophet Muhammad said that’», you can be sure that you have in front of you an idiot duly utilized by the colonial powers in order to harm all interlocutors who would accept such fully unrealistic purposes, positions and pretensions.

This is so, because whatever prophet Muhammad (or any other individual, prophet, high priest, mystic or layman) said does not truly matter; what really matter are the moral principles, the spiritual concepts, and the divine values that are contained in what the prophet (or any other person) said. Actually, words have worth only as expression of principles, concepts and values; otherwise they are absolutely empty, meaningless and useless.

Why the use of wooden language consists in an absurdity possible to be perfectly utilized by one’s own enemies is easy to understand; the safe losers are always the ignorant, the idiotic, and the unrealistic people, as they can be easily entrapped.

First, it is a matter of idiocy to imagine that, by using citations, one can replace 1400 years of History. Citations are tantamount to nothing; only diachronic practices reveal what Islam has been.

Second, only due to lack of proper education can one think that one may be able to understand any text written or words uttered before 1400 years in the exact sense and with the correct connotation that they had at the time; this is so irrespective of language, ethnic origin, religion, literature and culture. Connotations of words always change, and this is nothing ignorant theologians can possibly speak about. Now, the much needed task to identify the specific connotation that a word had when used within a specific text would demand the skills of honest and consummate scholarship, but unfortunately there cannot be acceptable scholarship in cases of indoctrination.

Third, the easiest persons to manipulate are always the imbeciles, who believe in a doctrine, while abstracting its elements and giving to the doctrine’s terms the meaning that they want (which did not exist historically) or can (due to their ignorance and lack of education). Such unsophisticated people usually attribute to their doctrine’s words absolute value, whereas the only absolute value is that of the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind each word’s original meaning.

However, due to their crudeness, these people cannot imagine that, before duly comprehending the meaning of a word, they have to recover first the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind it. So, they end up projecting their own, debased personal beliefs and conclusions onto the texts that they mechanically read (or at times learn by heart) without ever reaching the true meaning of the texts’ contents; but this process is well known to colonial academia.

Consequently, these persons convert their own personal misery into a permanent fight for egoistic self-confirmation and self-justification, and the abstractly taken elements of the doctrine that they believe in have unfortunately -in reality- only a subliminal psychological importance to them.

The hysterical screams of today’s fake preachers, sheikhs and imams during the Friday prayer khutbahs (sermons) are not a matter of Religion to be studied, but of Psychology. The same is valid for the various heretical pseudo-Christian pastors of the West, namely the Evangelicals, the Baptists, the Mormons and their likes.

There is no religion that forces the believers to scream hysterically; only theological-ideological indoctrination can cause this devious and disastrous behavior. However, this form of pseudo-Islamic indoctrination is what the colonial powers want to achieve among today’s fake Muslim preachers, sheikhs and imams, because only under these circumstances they can easily manipulate these miserable people subliminally.

This subliminal passion fully detaches these people from down-to-Earth reality, rendering them pliable enough for all those, who -for one reason or another- want these ignorant and misfortunate persons to fight for their unrealistic purposes, thus causing enormous damages to themselves, to their societies, and to their country’s national interests, institutions, and governments.

And that’s why Turks must drastically and resolutely remove Erdogan and AKP from power at all costs and as soon as possible. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey is not a fake state like Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia; and -as I already said- it cannot be ‘Islamized’. If a pseudo-Islamic dictatorship is imposed in Ankara, Turkey will simply cease to exist.

As soon as the basic traits of the state will be altered and stop functioning, Turkey will be dangling in the vacuum. This will not turn the entire structure into ‘Islamic’, as the corrupt and besotted Islamist slaves of the US, NATO, EU and UK believe before and after making their cursed and useless prayers. After the alteration of Turkey’s basic traits, the state will soon disappear, as it will have been canceled. The entire country would then suddenly find itself under the status of the Treaty of Sevres. The decomposition, which will ensue, will be far worse than that of the Ottoman Empire or, more recently, of the USSR; it will rather look like the present case of Yemen.

V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials

So, more than 15 years have passed after I published the aforementioned article, but I still stick to my conclusion: “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. This is still valid, not because the two countries improved their standards and strengthened their positions, but mainly due to the fact that many other Muslim countries totally collapsed and fell into chaos or fully capitulated to the evil elites of the Western World. Many countries still existed back in 2007, but do not exist as such anymore: Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Sudan. And many other countries, like Turkey and Iran, saw their power waning: Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. However, the situation of Turkey and Iran no longer concerns Ankara and Tehran only, due to the considerable changes that occurred at the international level with respect to the world balance of power.

Internal conflicts accentuated the growing social tension in the US; the refugee crisis plunged EU and UK into an impasse; despite the undeniable mistakes made in the Ukraine crisis (2013-2014 and 2022-2023) and in parallel with the successes marked in Syria (2015-2023), Putin managed to re-establish an impressively rehabilitated Russia at the epicenter of international relations; India and Brazil made themselves felt in the world affairs; Germany remained the sole economic power of EU; and China was transformed into one pole of the bipolar system that seems to prevail for the time being. Despite Beijing’s continuous affirmation of its dedication to a forthcoming multipolar world, we still do not -properly speaking- attest such a situation. It rather seems that many powers would find a China-US bipolar world good for them, at least for some time.

Turkey and Iran, under similar conditions, can cause serious trouble – not only if pitched against one another, but also if transformed into an obstacle on a country’s way to rising to prominence. The same is also valid for the fate of all other Muslim countries; an eventual dismemberment of just one of them or also a potential war between two of them can dramatically affect the interests of a major power. For the time being, Russia, China and Iran have managed to establish an alliance at many levels, involving also Tehran’s recent adhesion to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (as a full member state). About: https://www.academia.edu/53029736/From_the_Great_Game_to_the_Final_Game_Iran_Full_Member_State_of_the_SCO_as_the_Greatest_Event_of_the_21st_Century_text_pictures_and_legends_

Contrarily to Iran, Turkey followed an erratic path for all intents and purposes. After having been a fully accredited, modern Western state and society (thanks to Kemal Ataturk), Turkey got contaminated after 2002 by Islamism, anachronism, extremism, radicalism, obscurantism and self-destructive hysteria to significant extent. But as a Muslim country, Turkey is the sole NATO member state. This hiatus consists in a tragi-comical situation that can no longer exist; it leads to extinction.

In a rather recent article published in Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s foremost newspaper, on 21st September 2021, the distinguished Prof. Dr. Erol Manisali (1940-2022), a leading Kemalist intellectual and academic, made an extraordinary comparison; his article’s title was quite indicative in this regard (Erol Manisalı, AKP’nin ‘Osmanlıcılığı’, İngilizin ‘Brexit’ine mi benziyor! / https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/erol-manisali/akpnin-osmanliciligi-ingilizin-brexitine-mi-benziyor-1870529): «Does AKP’s ‘Ottomanism’ look like the ‘Brexit’ of the English?»

Prof. Manisali was absolutely right; Brexit was disastrous indeed for England, and Ottomanism (also known as Neo-Ottomanism) is definitely calamitous for Turkey. However, Prof. Manisali still clarified several points in which Brexit is (and is made) less disastrous than the forgery and the paranoia of Ottomanism. On the other hand, it is true that the two options have indeed something in common. Both political concepts constitute a form of retreat or isolation that can end up in seclusion and implosion.  

VI. What Russia and China must do

In the present article, I don’t intend to examine the troubles that will be caused by so virulently unrealistic purposes. I will come up with another article to examine the catastrophic perspectives that inconsistent, nonsensical and pathetic doctrines like Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism, Neo-Czarism, and Neo-Qingism may eventually cause if given some consideration and trustworthiness. Here, I intend to discuss the dangers ensuing from the subtle and smart utilization of such delusions that the crumbling Western colonial powers may make. For the Russian and Chinese aspirations to establish a multipolar world, these dangers may be lethal. That is why I will also suggest several measures that Moscow and Beijing must take; in addition, I propose the introduction of these methods to several other countries.  

Before all the rest, it is essential for many people worldwide to understand how the colonial powers of Western Europe and North America managed to survive. Both, the EU and the US seem to be collapsing and disintegrating nowadays; NATO has already been described as ‘dead’ by a member state’s head! And after five centuries of English colonialism, two world wars, one cold war, an unnecessary adhesion to the EU, and a final Brexit, England looks like a 15th c. country in a 21st c. world. The 15th century was a terrible period indeed for Western Europe, which was a barbarian periphery that experienced many wars and lost much blood in the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). At the very end of the 15th c., Western Europe was plagued with so many problems that the local kingdoms would irrevocably implode and disappear, if they did not expand colonially.

This reality must be carefully observed today by Chinese and Russians alike, because similar situations do not exist in their own national past. Consequently, the presently ailing Western states may well manage to survive by repeating exactly the same method, i.e. by exporting their own problems to others; their tactics in Ukraine do clearly confirm my assessment. Certainly, this involves more wars, more conflicts, more bloodshed, and greater risks; but the paranoid Western elites do not try to avoid them! Quite contrarily, they try to trigger them.

The silly but dangerous AUKUS bellicose rhetoric is just one example. It is absurd to take the Western political propaganda about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ at face value. They did not want to impose ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They are criminal enough to want to trigger only the situation that the entire world has clearly attested in the aforementioned misfortunate countries. The same can also happen eventually to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, and so on.

This means that the ensuing dangers are real and great, because the pulverization of numerous countries will cancel the long propagated dream of a peaceful multipolar world and significantly modify the scope of the historically founded and humanely prepared, multiply beneficial strategy One Belt One Road (OBOR/一带一路). How can Russia and China react to the chaotic plans of the Western World? To this question I will respond in the next part of this series of articles.

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History of Achaemenid Iran 1B, Course I – Achaemenid beginnings 1B

Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Outline

Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia

6- Western Orientalist historiography

The modern Western European specialists on Iran were first based on the Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin sources and on travelers’ records and descriptions. On his way to China, the Italian Franciscan monk Odoric of Pordenone was the first European to probably visit (in 1320) the ruins of Parsa (Persepolis) that he called ‘Comerum’. The site was then known as Chehel Minar (چهل منار /i.e. forty minarets) and later as Takht-e Jamshid (تخت جمشید/i.e. the throne of Jamshid, a great hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography about which we discussed). The Venetian Giosafat Barbaro visited the same location in 1474 and, being the victim of the delusions about which I spoke already, he attributed the erection of the majestic monuments to the Jews!

After the rise of the Safavid dynasty and the formation of the two alliances (the French with the Ottomans and the English with the Iranians), an English merchant visited Persepolis in 1568 and wrote a description that was included in Richard Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages’ (1582). Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions were first noticed and reported by the Portuguese António de Gouveia, who visited the site in 1602 and wrote about it in 1611. It is only in 1618 that the Spanish ambassador (to the court of the Safavid Shah of Iran Abbas I/1571-1629; reigned after 1588) García de Silva Figueroa associated the location with the great Achaemenid capital that was known as Persepolis in the Ancient Greek and Latin sources.

The Italian Pietro Della Valle spent five years (1616-1621) in Mesopotamia and Iran, visited Persepolis (1621), made copies of several inscriptions that he noticed there and took them back to Europe, along with clay tablets and bricks that he found in Babylon and Ur. This was the first cuneiform documentation brought to Europe. With respect to Persepolis he wrote that only 25 of the 72 original columns were still standing.

Good indication of the lunacy that Western Europeans experienced at those days due to their erroneous reading of the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historical sources about Achaemenid Iran is the following fact: after traveling in Asia and Africa, Sir Thomas Herbert wrote in his book (1638) that in Persepolis he saw several lines of strange signs curved in the walls. These were, of course, Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions, but at the time, the modern term ‘cuneiform’ had not been invented; however, excessively enthused with Greek literature about Ancient Iran, he ‘concluded’ that these characters ‘resembled Greek’! He mistook cuneiform for Greek! So biased his approach was!

The term ‘cuneiform’ (‘Keilschrift’ in German) was coined (1700) by the German scholar and explorer Engelbert Kaempfer, who spent ten years (1683-1693) in many parts of Asia. The monumental site of the Achaemenid capital was also visited by the famous Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruijn (1704) and the famous jeweler Sir Jean Chardin, who also worked as agent of Shah Abbas II for the purchase of jewels. He was the first to publish (1711) pertinent copies of several cuneiform inscriptions.

The German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr took the research to the next stage when he copied and published (1764) the famous rock reliefs and inscriptions of Darius the Great; in fact, he brought complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe. He realized that he had to do with three writing systems and that the simpler (which he named ‘Class I’) comprised 42 characters, being apparently an alphabetic script. Niebuhr’s publication was used by many other scholars and explorers, notably the Germans Oluf Gerhard Tychsen, who published the most advanced research on the topic in 1798, and Friedrich Münter, who confirmed the alphabetic nature of the script (in 1802). 

The reconstitution of the Iranian past proved to be far more difficult a task than that of the Ancient Egyptian heritage. This is so because, if we consider the Old Achaemenid Iranian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphics as the earliest stages of the two respective languages and scripts, Coptic (the latest stage of the Egyptian language) was always known in Europe throughout the Christian and Modern times, whereas Pahlavi and Middle Persian (the corresponding stages of the Iranian languages) were totally unknown. For this reason, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, the first French Iranologist and Indologist, played a key role in the decipherment of the cuneiform writing, although he did not spend time exploring it. But having learned Pahlavi and Farsi among the Parsis of India, he managed to study Avestan and he translated the Avesta as the sacred text of the Zoroastrians was preserved among the Parsi community. Pretty much like Coptic was essential to Champollion for the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the pioneering work of Anquetil-Duperron and the knowledge of Avestan, Pahlavi, Middle Persian and Farsi helped the French Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend make critical breakthroughs and advance the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid.   

Grotefend’s Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1802, but it was rejected; in fact, he had deciphered only eight (8) letters until that moment, but most of his assumptions were correct. He had however to wait for an incredible confirmation; after Champollion completed his first step toward the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, he read the Egyptian text of a quadrilingual inscription on the famous Caylus vase (named after a 18th c. French collector). Then, Champollion’s associate, the Orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, announced that Grotefend’s reading of the imperial Achaemenid name ‘Xerxes’ did indeed correspond to what the Egyptian hieroglyphic text testified to. This situation generated an impetus among Orientalist scholars and explorers; until the late 1830s and the early 1840s, Grotefend, the French Eugène Burnouf, the Norwegian-German Christian Lassen, and Sir Henry Rawlinson completed the task.

Shush (Susa), an Elamite and later an Achaemenid capital, was explored in 1851, 1885-1886, 1894-1899, and then systematically excavated by the French Jacques de Morgan (1897-1911), whereas Pasargad (the early Achaemenid capital) was first explored by the German Ernst Herzfeld in 1905. Persepolis was excavated quite later, only in the 1930s by Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Not far from Hamadan (the ancient capital Hegmataneh/Ekbatana of the Medes), the splendid site of Mount Behistun (Bisotun) had become world-famous even before it was excavated (initially in 1904) by Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson (sponsored by the British Museum). This was due to the fact that the famous trilingual Behistun inscription and the associated reliefs were carved at about 100 m above ground level on a cliff, and explorers had to scale the cliff. Several fascinating descriptions of the extraordinary location were written by travelers and visitors, before academic work was carried out there. Putting his life in risk, Rawlinson copied the Old Achaemenid text in 1835, and this helped him advance considerably the decipherment of the script. 

Without the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid, it would be impossible for Rawlinson to decipher the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, and later for others to read the Hittite script which enabled us to have access to the most important and the most original Anatolian literature of pre-Christian times.

Behistun (Farsi: Bisotun / Old Iranian: Bagastana, i.e. ‘the place of God’) was mentioned by Ctesias, who totally misunderstood the inscription, attributing it to the ‘Babylonian’ Queen Semiramis and describing it as a dedication to Zeus! In reality, the text is part of the Annals of Emperor Darius I the Great, duly detailing his victory over a rebellion; the Iranian monarch dedicated his triumph to Ahura Mazda. Now, Semiramis seems to be an entirely misplaced Ancient Greek legend about the historical Queen of Assyria (not Babylonia!) Shammuramat. The Assyrian queen was consort of Shamshi Adad V and co-regent with her son Adad-nirari III (during his reign’s early phase). But the Assyrian Queen had nothing to do with Mount Behistun and the Achaemenid Iranian inscription.

In the early 17th c., Pietro della Valle was the first Western European to come to Behistun and sketch the remains. As a matter of fact, many European travelers and explorers visited Behistun, saw the impressive inscription, and disastrously misinterpreted it, due to their preconceived ideas, mistaken readings, and unrealistic assumptions.

A foolish English diplomat and adventurer, Robert Sherley, visited the location in 1598, and he considered the astounding reliefs and the inscriptions as ‘Christian’! Napoleon’s subordinate, General Claude-Matthieu, Comte de Gardane, visited the place in 1807 only to see in the monuments the representation of ‘Christ and his twelve apostles’! In 1817, Sir Robert Ker Porter thought that the impressive relief and inscriptions detailed the deeds of Emperor Shalmaneser V of Assyria and the transportation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to the NE confines of Assyria. Last, quite interestingly, the German spiritual-scientific society Ahnenerbe, which used Hitler for their non-Nazi, highly secretive projects, explored Behistun in 1938.

7- Early sources of Iranian History: Assyrian-Babylonian Cuneiform  

The early sources of Iranian History are Assyrian-Babylonian historical documents pertaining to the military, commercial and/or administrative activities of the Neo-Assyrian kings in the Zagros mountains and the Iranian plateau; these sources shed light on the earliest stages of Median, Persian and Iranian History, when the ancestors of the Achaemenids were just one of the many tribes that settled somewhere east of the borders of the Assyrian Empire.

Since the 3rd millennium BCE, Sumerian and Akkadian historical sources referred to nomads, settlers, villages, cities, strongholds and at times kingdoms situated in the area of today’s Iran. Mainly these tribes and/or realms were barbarians who either partly damaged or totally destroyed the Mesopotamian civilization and order. That’s why they were always described with markedly negative terms. On the other hand, we know through archaeological evidence that several important sites were located in the Iranian plateau, constituting either small kingdoms or outstanding entrepôts and commercial centers linking Mesopotamia with either India or Central Asia and China.

For instance, settled somewhere in the Middle Zagros, the Guti of the 3rd millennium BCE constituted a barbaric periphery that finally destroyed Agade (Akkad), the world’s first empire ever; and in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Kassites descended from Middle Zagros to Babylon, after the Old Babylonian kingdom was destroyed (in 1596) by the Hittite Mursilis I, and they set up a profane kingdom (Kassite dynasty of Babylonia) that the Assyrians never accepted as a heir of the old Sumerian-Akkadian civilization.

As both ethnic groups learned Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian, their rulers wrote down their names, and thus we know that neither the Guti nor the Kassites were a properly speaking Iranian nation; the present documentation is still scarce in this regard, but there are indications that some of these people bore Turanian (or Turkic) names. 

For thousands of years, South Zagros and the southwestern confines of today’s Iran belonged to Elam, the main rival of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. Viewed as the true negation of the genius of Mesopotamian civilization, Elam was ruled by the ‘kings of Shushan and Anshan’; the two regions corresponded to Susa (and the entire province of Khuzestan in today’s Iran) and South Zagros respectively. The name that modern scholarship uses to denote this nation and kingdom is merely the Sumerian-Akkadian appellation of that country. In Elamite, the eastern neighbors of the Sumerians called their land ‘Haltamti’. Their language was neither Indo-European (like Old Achaemenid and Modern Farsi) nor Semitic (like Assyrian-Babylonian); it was also unrelated to Sumerian, Hurrian and Hattic, the languages of the indigenous populations in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Recent linguistic research offers tentative approaches to the relationship between Elamite and the Dravidian languages, thus making of it the ancestral language of more than 250 million people.

Elamite linear and cuneiform writings bear witness to the life, the society, the economy, the faith and the culture of the Elamites, as well as to their relations with the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But they cannot help us reconstitute the History of the Iranian plateau, because the Elamites never went beyond the limits of South Zagros.

With the rise, expansion and prevalence of Assyria (from the 14th to the 7th c. BCE), we have for the first time a Mesopotamian Empire that showed great importance for the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau; consequently, this means that, for the said period, we have more texts about these regions, which earlier constituted the periphery of the Mesopotamian world, but were gradually incorporated into the ever expanding Assyrian Empire. Thanks to Assyrian cuneiform texts, we know names of tribal chieftains and petty kings, cities, fortresses, ethnic groups, etc., and we can assess the various degrees of Assyrianization of each of them; but it is only at the time of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BCE) that we first find a mention of the Medes and the Persians. The former are named ‘Amadaya’ and later ‘Madaya’, whereas the latter are called ‘Parsua’ (or Parsamaš or Parsumaš).

Assyrian cuneiform texts about the Medes and the Persians more specifically are abundant during the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) and at the time of the Sargonids (722-609 BCE). It is noteworthy that the Parsua were first located in the region of today’s Sanandaj in Western Iran and later they relocated to the ancient Elamite region of Anshan (today’s Iranian province of Fars), which was devastated and emptied from its population by Assurbanipal (640 BCE). After the great Assyrian victory, which also involved the destruction of Susa, Assyrian texts mention the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, Cyrus I, as Kuraš, king of Parsumaš. He sent gifts to Nineveh and he also dispatched his eldest son (‘Arukku’ in Assyrian from a hypothetical ‘Aryauka’ in Ancient Iranian) there – nominally as a hostage, but essentially as a student of Assyrian culture, sacerdotal organization, and imperial administration and procedures.

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III

Tiglathpileser III

Sarrukin (Sargon of Assyria) with his son and successor Sennacherib (right)

8- Pre-History in the Iranian plateau, and Mesopotamia

During the 4th, the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE, the major hitherto excavated Iranian archaeological sites are the following:

Tepe Sialk

Located near the modern city of Kashan, in the center of the Iranian plateau, and excavated in the 1930s by the Russian-French Roman Ghirshman, the site was first occupied in the period 6000-5500 BCE. The remains of the zikkurat (dating back to around 3000 BCE) show that it was the largest Mesopotamian style zikkurat. Tepe Sialk IV level (2nd half of the 4th millennium BCE) testifies to evident links with Sumer (Jemdet Nasr, Uruk) and Elam (Susa III). The site was abandoned and reoccupied in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BCE (Tepe Sialk V and VI). Its location and the archaeological findings let us understand that the site was a key commercial center that linked Mesopotamia with Central Asia and China.

Tureng Tepe

Located close to Gorgan in Turkmen Sahra (NE Iran) and excavated by the American Frederick Roelker Wulsin in the 1930s and by the French Jean Deshayes in the 1950s, the site was inhabited in the Neolithic and then continually from 3100 to 1900 BCE, when it appears to have been the major among many other regional settlements and in evident contact with both, Mesopotamia and Central Asia. There was a disruption, and the site was occupied again only in the 7th c. BCE (Tureng Tepe IV A) by newcomers.

Tepe Yahya

Located at ca. 250 km north of Bandar Abbas and 220 km south of Kerman, the site was of crucial importance for the contacts between Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley; it was also in contact with Central Asia. Excavated by the Czech-American Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky, the site was inhabited from ca. 5000 to 2200 BCE and then again after 1000 BCE. The genuine ‘Yahya Culture’ covered the first half of the 4th millennium BCE. The Proto-Elamite phase started around 3400 BCE (Tepe Yahya IV C); few proto-Elamite tablets have been unearthed from that stratum. This period corresponds to the strata Susa Cb and Tepe Sialk IV. During the 3rd millennium BCE, the site appears to have been the center of production of hard stone carving artifacts; dark stone vessels produced here were found / excavated in Mesopotamia. Similar vessels and fragments of vessels have been found in Sumerian temples in Mesopotamia, in Elam, in the Indus River Valley, and in Central Asia.

Not far from Tepe Yahya are situated several important sites that testify to the strong ties that the entire region had with Sumer and Elam in the West, the Indus River Valley in the East and Central Asia in the North; Jiroft gave the name to the ‘Jiroft culture’ which is better documented in the nearby site of Konar Sandal and covers the 3rd millennium BCE. Further in the east and close to the triangle border point (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan), Shahr-e Sukhteh was an enormous site which thrived between 3200 BCE and the end of the 3rd millennium BCE. It was associated with both, the ‘Jiroft culture’ and the Helmand culture, which was attested in several sites in South Afghanistan. Elamite texts were also found in that site, which already offered many surprises, involving the first known artificial eyeball and the earliest tables game with dice.

Several important prehistoric Mesopotamian sites demonstrate parallels and contacts with the aforementioned sites, notably

– Tell Halaf (near Ras al Ayn in NE Syria; the Neolithic phase lasted from 6100 to 5400 BCE, and the Bronze Age covers the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE),

– Tell al Ubaid (near Ur in Dhi Qar governorate; 6500-3700 BCE),

– Tell Arpachiyah (near Nineveh; the site was occupied in the Neolithic period, like Tell Halaf and Ubaid),

– Tepe Gawra (close to Nineveh; the site was occupied from 5000 to 1500 BCE),

– Tell Jemdet Nasr (near Kish in Central Iraq; 3100-2300 BCE), and

– Uruk {near Samawah in South Iraq; type site for the Uruk period (4000-3100 BCE), it was a major Sumerian kingdom and it was the world’s most populated city in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE with ca. 40000 inhabitants and another 90000 residents in the suburbs}.

In the next course, I will present a brief diagram of the History of the Mesopotamian kingdoms and Empires down to Sargon of Assyria – with focus on the relations with Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau.

Tepe Sialk

Tureng tepe

Tepe Yahya

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To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α

By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

https://vk.com/video429864789_456239757

https://ok.ru/video/5416043547224

https://www.brighteon.com/ca749192-7c1b-4a9d-901d-5f530611c965

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1B

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_9011%2Fall

https://ok.ru/video/5452334828120

https://www.brighteon.com/491e7afe-d4f6-4100-909c-3f35b9c57323

————————   

To listen to the audio, clink the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_8990%2Fall

https://megalommatis.podbean.com/e/history-of-achaemenid-iran-1a-course-i-achaemenid-beginnings-1a/

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Download the course in PDF:

The Battle of Yarmouk (20 August 634 CE) – Comments & Revelations I: without the Aramaeans’ utilization of Islam, prophet Muhammad’s religion would be blocked in Hejaz

Contents

I. Ancient, Christian, and Muslim historiographers

II. Oversights and errors attested in the existing bibliography

A. ‘Battle techniques’

B. ‘Two great empires exhausted and weakened’

———- EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS —————-

Borders, fronts, rebellions, divisions and fights

1- Post-conquest Iran

2- Eastern Roman Empire

3- Upper Egypt and the Sudan (: historical Ethiopia)

4- Internal conflicts transported from Hejaz to Syria and Mesopotamia

——————————————————————————-

C. ‘History of states’ and not of peoples and cultures

D. Poor conceptualization of the early Islamic conquests by modern scholars

—— EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS ———

Ethno-linguistic groups

Religious groups

i- the Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites)

ii- the Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians)

iii- the Gnostic Aramaeans

iv- the Manichaean Aramaeans

v- the Copts (Monophysitic Christian Egyptians)

vi- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, followers of Rabbinical Judaism

vii- the Persians and other Iranians followers of various Iranian religions

viii- the Eastern Roman Orthodox Christians, who sided with the Patriarchate of Constantinople

———————————————————————————

E. The demographic structure of the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Western Iranian provinces: the Aramaeans

F. The central provinces of the Islamic Caliphates: the lands of the Aramaeans.

G. Lack of historical criticism in Islamic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies

III. The astounding scarcity of contemporaneous sources

IV. Critical incidents during the Battle of Yarmouk

V. The true dimensions of the Battle of Yarmouk and of its outcome

An early 7th c. drawing on a 5th c. biblical manuscript: the unusual and unnecessary representation of Job and his family is correctly viewed by modern scholars as a cryptographic representation of Heraclius and his family, notably his second wife Martina, his sister Epiphania, and his daughter Eudoxia. There is a clear reason for this allegory; by associating Heraclius with Job, the calligrapher and painter interpolated the concept of the Righteous Suffering and projected it onto Heraclius. The apparently Monotheletist artist wanted to praise the Monotheletist emperor for his patience and tolerance toward the Orthodox extremists among the Constantinopolitan clergy, who incessantly insulted the basileus. He therefore identified him with the Biblical person that embodies the concept of the Righteous Suffering, which is of entirely Assyrian-Babylonian origin as the illustrious epic Ludlul bel nemeqihttps://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1189&context=cop-facbooks

The battle that led to the withdrawal of the Eastern Romans (‘Rum’ – therefore not ‘Greeks’) from Syria, Palestine, and North Mesopotamia has been the object of numerous studies, essays, chapters of books, and treatises. Modern Orientalist historiographers distorted and/or concealed the historical realities that determined the fact. They impacted their writings with unnecessary astonishment, unsolicited admiration, bizarre bewilderment, and at times childishly subjective descriptions. It is as if they are either blind or predetermined to disorient readers from the historical truth. It is most unfortunate that this situation prevails, despite numerous military experts delving into historical texts, many philologists scrutinizing posterior sources, and several historians publishing the corpus of the textual evidence as regards the event.

The confusion of the average reader and learner is completed with the modern, definitely unscholarly, Islamist pamphleteering as per which ‘the faith in the only true God’ gave the victory to the less-experienced, numerically inferior, and surely ill-equipped and poorly armed (if compared with the Eastern Romans) Muslim armies. I will not expand on this nonsense, because it would only prove that all victors and conquerors were true believers and all the defeated armies belonged to disbelievers – which is absurd.

I. Ancient, Christian, and Muslim historiographers

At this point, I have to highlight that, when it comes to the attitude toward History and historiography, there is a deep chasm between our modern world (after 1500) and past generations that lived in the Antiquity or during the Christian and Islamic times. The modern theories that History can ‘teach’ and that, by studying History, one can avoid past mistakes did not exist before the modern world; these theories are wrong, insane, inhuman and disastrous.

‘History’ does not ‘teach’, and not one Muslim, Christian, Manichaean, Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Babylonian or Egyptian ever thought or expected that History could possibly ‘teach’ him anything. In their perception of the world, there was clarity whereas modern minds are terribly confused about a critical issue: recording facts (historiography) is not History. History is what happened. No one can reconstitute it in its entirety, except by living in the past and being present in the events.

Historiography, i.e. simple recording of facts, did indeed happen for more than five millennia, but not for the purpose of ‘teaching’ or being ‘taught’. This reality determined all ancient historical records, be they Ancient Egyptian Annals, Babylonian Chronicles, Assyrian Annals, Greek and Roman history writing, Christian and Muslim Chronography or other. And for the purpose of objectivity, in most of the cases, the authors eliminated their personal views and considerations; and this is quite normal, as we all understand that a fact is always a fact per se, irrespective of the author’s (or narrator’s or historian’s) personal favor and/or understanding.

For the above reasons, serious, decent and valuable ancient authors did not include in their narratives what was evident to all: the historical context. Contextualization would be tantamount to self-devaluation for an historian like Tabari or Theophanes or the anonymous, 7th c. CE, Aramaean author of the Syriac Chronicle of Kirkuk, which is mainly known as ‘History of Karka de Beth Selok’. About:

https://syriaca.org/place/108

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/bet-selok

http://www.csc.org.il/db/browse.aspx?db=sb&sL=H&sK=History%20of%20Karka%20de%20Beth%20Selok&sT=keywords

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Karka

(Throughout the present article links to the Wikipedia are included only for further research and access to historical sources and bibliography – not for the contents of the entries that are often impertinent and biased and the ensuing conclusions misplaced)

Ka’ba-ye Zardosht (Zoroaster’s Kaaba): one of the holiest shrines of the Sassanid Empire of Iran at Naqsh-e Rustam, ancient Achaemenid necropolis; it is to be noted that there were several pre-Islamic times’ holy buildings in rectangular shape. They were located in Iran and in Yemen. The Kaaba of Najran was the Christian cathedral in Yemenite Najran (currently under Saudi occupation).
Saint Sophia: the Eastern Roman Empire’s greatest cathedral was not a holy shrine for the Monophysitic and Nestorian Aramaeans and the Copts (Egyptians), because they viewed the Patriarchate of Constantinople as heretic. This played an enormous role and impacted the historical developments back in the 630s.

II. Oversights and errors attested in the existing bibliography

Contrarily to Ancient, Christian and Muslim authors and people, who did not expect ‘History’ (but their holy books) to teach them the correct path in life and who did not repeat past mistakes by delving into moral depths (and not into useless historical manuals), we need extensive contextualization to accurately perceive and correctly understand epochs that totally differed from ours. This is what is terribly missing from the studies of almost all the scholars who were interested in the Battle of Yarmouk.

Yarmouk battlefield in Jordan today

A. ‘Battle techniques’

Many scholars focused on the battle techniques of Khalid ibn al-Walid (592-642 CE). But however successful these techniques may have been, military dexterity does not explain why the bulk of the indigenous populations of the eastern provinces (North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica) of the Eastern Roman Empire did not rebel against the early Muslim rule. The battle of Yarmouk may have been won by the Muslims, but 10 or 20 years later a violent local rebellion could have eventually terminated the foreign rule. But this did not happen.

Typical samples of worthless bibliography and lectures:

https://ospreypublishing.com/yarmuk-ad-636-pb?___store=osprey_rst

https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/182545/battle-yarmuk-636-ce-rethinking-%E2%80%98conquest%E2%80%99-late-antique-near

https://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-abstract/5/2/241/117317/The-Battle-of-Yarmouk-a-Bridge-of-Boats-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext

One of the wrong diagrams that one can find in the Internet nowadays; suffice it that you read Tabari and you will understand the mistakes.
This type of diagrams can never explain historical processes; it is therefore wrong, confusing and disorienting.

B. ‘Two great empires exhausted and weakened’

Several authors explained the early Islamic victories by referring to the exhaustion of the then known world’s two greatest empires, namely the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran. This is correct and true, but still it does not help us understand why the outright majority of populations of the western provinces of Iran and the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire did not rebel against the foreign invaders in the first 2-3 decades of Islamic rule. However, this fantasy is reproduced even in serious UNESCO documentation on the Silk Road: https://fr.unesco.org/silkroad/sites/default/files/knowledge-bank-article/vol_III%20silk%20road_the%20arab%20conquest.pdf

The Sassanid Empire of Iran and the Eastern Roman Empire at the time prophet Muhammad was born
Main movements of Eastern Roman and Sassanid Iranian armies

———- EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS —————-

Borders, fronts, rebellions, divisions and fights

In this regard, it is noteworthy to point out a quadruple phenomenon that took place in the first decades of Islamic rule in the Caliphate’s central provinces:

1- Post-conquest Iran

The first rebellions against the new rule started early in Iran, but they occurred in remote provinces (Gilan, Mazandaran, Azerbaijan) that were inhabited by nations other than those living in the former western provinces of Iran. In any case, both great empires, the Eastern Romans and the Iranians, were multi-ethnic imperial structures.

2- Eastern Roman Empire

The first line of Eastern Roman defense against the Islamic Caliphate was created alongside the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains, whereas the upper flow of Euphrates became the border between the two empires. This is the location where the formidable Akritai appeared to fight and stop every advance of the Omayyad or Abbasid armies to the West, apparently coordinating with the Islamic opposition to the pseudo-Islamic rule of the caliphs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akritai

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digenes_Akritas

3- Upper Egypt and the Sudan (: historical Ethiopia)

Upper Egypt totally escaped the Islamic rule, as Nobatia was incepted as Christian Coptic kingdom with capital at Faras (almost on the present Egyptian-Sudanese borderline). The Islamic rule in Masr (Egypt) did not exceed beyond the region between Al Minya and Assiut (ca. 350 km south of Cairo), and while Seville, Cordova, Sicily, Crete, Samarqand and the Delta of Indus belonged to the Islamic Caliphate, Coptic monasticism flourished in Thebes of Egypt (today’s Luxor; from Al Uqsur, ‘the military camps’) where all ancient Egyptian temples and antiquities, notably Deir al Bahri and Deir al Madina, had become monastic cells. Two other Christian Sudanese kingdoms rose further in the South: Makuria and Alodia, limiting the Islamic presence in Eastern Africa to the Red Sea coastland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobatia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makuria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alodia

4- Internal conflicts transported from Hejaz to Syria and Mesopotamia

The only conflicts that took place in the early Islamic Caliphate’s central provinces (i.e. the lands that belong today to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, SE Turkey, Iraq, SW Iran, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar and the northern parts of Saudi Arabia) were those related to the ‘new’ faith, prophet Muhammad’s preaching, and the interpretation of this faith’s prescriptions as regards the governance of the state. This means, in other words, that the Arabs of Hejaz, brought with them to Syria-Mesopotamia the deep divisions that characterized their society (acceptance, rejection and/or distortion of prophet Muhammad’s religious revelation) even before prophet Muhammad’s death (632 CE). These divisions were ferocious and the bloodshed tarnished irrevocably the History of Islam, although it really paled if compared with the bloodshed caused after the official imposition of Constantinopolitan-Roman Christianity as the sole religion throughout the Roman Empire. And the early converts from the newly occupied lands that earlier belonged to the Eastern Romans and to the Sassanid Iranians vividly participated in these divisions, debates, polarizations, conflicts and civil wars.

This quadruple phenomenon was never studied per se until now, and to duly investigate it one needs to delve in the ethnic and religious/theological conflicts that took place in the two great empires (the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran) for about 300-400 years before the Battle of Yarmouk. This clearly demonstrates that not one specialist of the Early Islamic History can be taken seriously without the knowledge of at least two among the following languages and religious/literary traditions: Coptic, Syriac Aramaic, Middle Persian, Medieval ‘Greek’ (‘Roman’: the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire), Manichaean, and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (: the language of Rabbinical Judaism).

—————————————————— 

C. ‘History of states’ and not of peoples and cultures

Numerous authors write on the topic, while focusing on State History (Eastern Roman, Sassanid Iranian, Omayyad and Abbasid Islamic); this is one way ticket to misperception, misunderstanding, and distortion. States are not representative of subject nations and peoples, but of ruling elites and their doctrines; in their effort to secure their interests, states destroy all historical, literary, religious or theological documentation that would challenge them. States are to some extent the reason for the scarcity of documentation that characterizes the 7th and the 8th centuries CE (or, to put it otherwise, the first 100-150 years AH/anno Hegirae).

D. Poor conceptualization of the early Islamic conquests by modern scholars

Most researchers failed to contextualize the early Islamic conquests, because they were unable to properly conceptualize the historical developments in the first place. Battles are undertaken by social groups or eventually states, but socio-cultural processes and historical developments are generated by peoples and nations. So, the proper manner to approach the topic is to view it as an affair of various nations and ethno-linguistic and religious groups that lived in the wider region between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, from the Taurus Mountains to the Indus River Delta, and in-between the Nile and Syr-Darya (Iaxartes River) in Central Asia.

——– EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS ————

In this regard, it is essential to conclude from the aforementioned that the only pertinent manner to tackle the topic is via interdisciplinary studies. Until now, no effort was displayed in this direction; and yet, there can be many combinations of interdisciplinary studies applying to this case.

Ethno-linguistic groups

During the 6th–7th c. CE, the main nations which lived in the lands that, after the Islamic conquests, became the central provinces of the Islamic Caliphate were:

i- the Aramaeans,

ii- the Copts,

iii- the Persians and other Iranians, who manned the imperial administration at Tesiphun (Ctesiphon) and controlled the Iranian military outposts,

iv- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, and

v- the Eastern Romans, who were organized in small communities living in the major cities of the eastern provinces of the empire, notably around the Chalcedonian patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria.

This means that at those days the outright majority of the populations living in lands belonging to today’s SE Turkey, Syria, Iraq, SW Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and the North of Saudi Arabia were Aramaeans.

And the outright majority of the populations living in the Nile Valley were Copts. 

Urhoy-Edessa of Orhoene-Urfa (SE Turkey): a major Aramaean city
Nasibina-Nisibis-Nusaybin (SE Turkey): a major Aramaean city
Hatra (NW Iraq): a major Aramaean city
Dura Europos on Euphrates (Eastern Syria): a major Aramaean city
Tadmur-Palmyra (Central Syria): a major Aramaean city
Bosra (Southern Syria): a major Aramaean city
Rekem (Petra, Jordan): a major Aramaean city of the Nabataean dynasty
Hegra, the necropolis of the Aramaean Nabataean kingdom, at 350 km distance north of Yathrib (Madina)
Charax Spasinu (South Iraq): a major Aramaean city

Religious groups

When it comes to ethno-religious and linguistic groups existing at those days (6th–7th c. CE) in the aforementioned region, we enumerate the following:

i- the Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites) Although entirely anti-Constantinopolitan, the Christian Aramaeans were divided into Miaphysitic (Monophysitic) anti-Chalcedonian Christians and Nestorian anti-Ephesine Christians (see below no ii).

https://syriacpatriarchate.org/

http://www.jacobitesyrianchurch.org/

https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Malankara-Syriac-Orthodox-Church

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_Orthodox_Church

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcedonian_Christianity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Chalcedonian_Christianity

Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites) formed the outright majority of the populations living in the Eastern Roman provinces of Syria, North Mesopotamia, and Palestine.

The term Monophysitic (Monophysitism/Monophysites) being quite pejorative, it is currently replaced by Miaphysitic (Miaphysitism/Miaphysites). The most common appellation of the church is Jacobite, after St. Jacob Baradaeus (also known as Jacob bar Addai).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Baradaeus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophysitism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miaphysitism

Deir Zafaran (also known as Mor Hananyo) Monastery, near Mardin (SE Turkey): a high place of Syriac Jacobite (Miaphysitic/Monophysitic) Christianity

It is also necessary to underscore that the noun/adjective ‘Syriac’ is totally unrelated to the land of Syria (in such case the adjective is ‘Syrian’), but denotes a late phase of Aramaic that survived down to our days, being one of the main liturgical languages in the History of Christianity. Syriac alphabet derived from Aramaic alphabet (in the 1st c. CE) and, similarly, Arabic alphabet derived (in the 4th c. CE) from Nabataean Aramaic alphabet; Aramaic and Hebrew were the two original languages in which the Old Testament was written.

https://www.syriaca.org/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_alphabet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriac_literature

Syriac Aramaic in Serto writing
Syriac Aramaic in Estrangelo writing

Monophysitic Aramaeans were essential for the formation and the diffusion of historical Islam. Their overwhelming rejection of the Constantinopolitan theology and of the anti-Aramaean policies of the Eastern Roman Empire totally alienated the Aramaeans from the authorities that ruled them. For Monophysitic Aramaeans, the Eastern Roman Empire was ruled by heretics. And as the illustrious Aramaean theologian, historian and erudite scholar Tatian (112-185 CE) demonstrated in his magnificent opus Oratio ad Graecos (Address to the Greeks), the enormous cultural gap between Aramaeans and Greeks played a considerable role in the destabilization of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire (and subsequently of the Eastern Roman Empire), because the Constantinopolitan authorities cooperated basically with the Greek-speaking minority.

The determinant role played by the Monophysitic Aramaeans in the formation and the diffusion of historical Islam is highlighted by the case of Sergius Bahira, the Syriac Jacobite (Monophysitic) monk, who encountered prophet Muhammad in young age, when he accompanied his uncle Abi Taleb ibn Abd el Muttalib to Syria and other provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahira

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Christian_views_on_Muhammad#Early_Middle_Ages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Talib_ibn_Abd_al-Muttalib

ii- the Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians)

These Aramaeans followed Nestorius in his doctrine that was a radical form of what is called Diophysitism (belief in two natures/hypostases of Jesus); they are called Nestorians, although the term is not regarded as correct (being tantamount to calling the Muslims ‘Muhammedans’). Nestorians rejected the Council of Ephesus (431 CE), pretty much like the Monophysites/Miaphysites rejected the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE).

h ttps://news.assyrianchurch.org/category/education/english-articles/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_Church_of_the_East

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaldean_Catholic_Church

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_East

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyophysitism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorianism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Ephesus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Chalcedon

Dair Mar Eliya (Monastery of St. Elijah) in North Iraq: Nestorian monastery of the 6th c.
Nestorian Gospel in Syriac
The Anikova plate: representation of the Siege of Jericho; masterpiece of Sogdian Nestorian Art from Semirechie (southeastern Kazakhstan and northeastern Kyrgyszstan). Probable date: 8th-9th c.
Ecclesiastical provinces of the Nestorian Church in the 10th c.
Nestorian communities in the 10th-11th c.

Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians) formed the outright majority of the Sassanid Iranian provinces of Central and South Mesopotamia, South Transtigritane, and Arabia, namely Huzistan, Meshan, Asurestan, Nodshiragan (Adiabene), and Arabestan.

Nestorian Aramaeans were essential in the formation and diffusion of historical Islam. Their staggering rejection of both, Constantinopolitan Christianity and Sassanid Mazdeism (the official Iranian imperial religious dogma that consisted only in a later form of the Achaemenid Zoroastrianism), was highly determinant for the early success of the caliphs. At this early point, I only state the well-known (but not deeply understood) fact that, for ca. 180 years before the arrival of the Islamic armies in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, the Nestorians called Virgin Mary ‘Mother of Christ’ and not ‘Mother of god’, in striking opposition to the Constantinopolitan theologians, monks and courtiers. In this manner, Nestorian Aramaeans proved to be the real precursors of prophet Muhammad and his teachings. As a matter of fact, at the beginning of the 7th c. CE, the Nestorians were closer to the early Quranic text, which may have reached them through hearsay (before the early Islamic armies), than to the Nicene Creed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed

Constantinopolitan theology and the anti-Aramaean religious and economic policies of the empire totally alienated the Aramaeans from the ruling authorities. Even worse, in Iran, the Nestorian Aramaeans were persecuted in definitely crueler manner than the Monophysitic Aramaeans were in the Eastern Roman Empire. And the ceaseless Eastern Roman – Sassanid Iranian wars devastated -more than any other territories- the lands inhabited by the Aramaeans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Persian_Wars#Byzantine%E2%80%93Sasanian_wars

iii- the Gnostic Aramaeans

Their surviving remnants are nowadays the Mandaeans. There are about 100000 Mandaean Aramaeans worldwide, but due to the ongoing persecution and oppression, most of them live currently in the Diaspora, and not in their historical land, i.e. Central and South Mesopotamia (Iraq) and South Transtigritane (SW Iran).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandaeans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandaeism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandaic_language

http://www.mandaeanunion.org/

Mandaean rituals
Mandaeans

Gnostic Aramaeans were essential in the formation and diffusion of historical Islam. Their participation in Muslim spiritual life is at the origin of the formation of groups like the legendary Ikhwan Safa, whose rituals have been later reproduced by numerous Islamic mystics, spiritualists, occultists and scholars from the Qarmatians and the Isma’ilis to all types of Batiniyya (‘esoterism’) wise elders and great spiritual scientists, like Muhammad al Fazari, Al Ghazali, Abu ‘l Qassim ibn al Saffar, Maslam al Majriti, and Muhyieldin ibn Arabi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brethren_of_Purity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qarmatians

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isma%27ilism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batiniyya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batin_(Islam)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_Ibr%C4%81h%C4%ABm_al-Faz%C4%81r%C4%AB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslama_al-Majriti

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Saffar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Arabi

Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, (‘Epistles of the Brethren of Purity’), Book I – on the mathematical sciences; Western Iran, ca. 14th c.

Even the communication manners and literary style of the Ikhwan Safa’s treatises and manuals appear to be Gnostic in their essence. What is nowadays erroneously called ‘Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity’, which is in fact the compendium of their wisdom, consists of letters or ‘messages’ (رسائل), being thus a reminiscence of the typically Gnostic manner of sharing knowledge, wisdom and spiritual practices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_the_Brethren_of_Purity

iv- the Manichaean Aramaeans

The religion composed, proclaimed and propagated by Mani was displayed in 242 CE in front of the formidable Sassanid shah Shapur I to whom the prophet of Manichaeism dedicated one of his books, titled Shabuhragan. Shapur I did not adhere to the new religion, but he realized its imperial importance for the Sassanid state and supported the young prophet (born in 216 CE) in his mission. It is not wrong to consider Manichaeism technically as a type of Gnosticism, but it was indeed a Gnostic system apart from the rest.

Aramaeans, Persians, Iranians, Sogdians, Turanians, Mongolians, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Romans, Armenians and many other nations wholeheartedly accepted Manichaeism, which was the first religion in the world to have adepts from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The last Manicheans performed their rites in China’s eastern coastland before 150-100 years. Following the rise of Mazdeism (a later form of Iranian Zoroastrianism) and the prevalence of Kartir among the Sassanid courtiers, Manichaeism was persecuted and Mani was tortured to death, but the diffusion of Manichaeism was not impacted; quite on the contrary! Mani’s faith spread and many Manichaean communities existed at the times of the Islamic conquest in both, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran. Aramaean Manichaean communities in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine greatly impacted Islam in many dimensions.

Almost 400 years before prophet Muhammad postured to be the last of the prophets, the prophet of Manichaeism claimed to be the ‘seal of the prophets’. Manichaean hierarchy seems to have been diffused among many Muslim esoteric spiritual orders. Some of the greatest historians and chronographers of Islamic times, like Tabari, al Biruni, and al Nadim, expanded on Mani and the Manicheans. The five prayers that a Muslim must perform daily seem to have been a compromise between the four daily prayers of the Manichaean ‘hearers’ (laymen) and the seven daily prayers of the elects (ecclesiastical hierarchy). Prophet Muhammad’s discussions with earlier prophets, during the Isra and Mi’raj nocturnal voyage to the Celestial Jerusalem, seem to exactly reflect similar considerations. Furthermore, the ablutions before the prayer appear to be a repetition of Manichaean practices. In addition, the Ebionite and Elcesaite impact on Manicheans seems therefore to have been passed on to the Muslims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isra_and_Mi%27raj

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Isra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_prophet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites#Judaism,_Gnosticism_and_Essenism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elcesaites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani_(prophet)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabuhragan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism

Was Mani crucified? The question remains unanswered, as several Islamic sources reported a dire end following a terrible persecution unleashed by the Sassanid imperial priesthood against the prophet of Manichaeism.
The diffusion of Manichaeism eclipsed that of any other religion before the Modern Times; but Manichaeism was state religion only once: among the Uyghur nation of Central Asia.

The religion of Mani may have by now gone extinct, but its impact on Islam was tremendous. Many scholars tried to retrace fundamental concepts of Islam to the beliefs of several Jewish or Christian groups and notably the Nazarenes, but it would make more sense to closely examine how some of Mani’s innovative concepts found their way into prophet Muhammad’s cardinal tenets and world conceptualization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazarene_(sect)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_the_Nazarenes

Although Christianity accepted the Ancient Hebrew prophets as such, Islam is characterized by a definitely different approach, as it makes of Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isma’il, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David and Solomon prophets as well (also extending the status of prophet to John the Baptist and Jesus). Furthermore, it is noticeable that Islam’s position on prophethood is flexible enough to encompass other historical figures or outstanding persons not directly known to the small Meccan community of the times of Muhammad ibn Abdullah. However, this fresh approach to World History, which is a novelty for Christianity and Judaism, was absolutely Manichaean or origin. Mani first introduced the concept by accepting Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus as earlier prophets and by thus giving to his religious system a universal-imperial dimension that was badly needed for a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious empire.

Manichaean Aramaeans were systematically persecuted in both, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran; it was therefore quite normal for them to support the replacement of the double yoke with an Arab state and administration that they would be able to fully staff and operate (along with other Aramaeans who were followers of other religions, notably Christianity), taking into consideration the fact that the uneducated, uncultured and primitive Arabs of Hejaz, who had never formed any kind of proper state, would be definitely and absolutely unable to face such a challenge.

In the early Islamic times, there have been many notable Manichaean scholars, who prospered in the Islamic Caliphate; as Abbasid Baghdad became a center for either Manicheans or Manichaean converts to Islam, many Manicheans of other origin flocked there to contribute to the illustrious Beit al Hikmah (بيت الحكمة/House of the Wisdom) university, library, archival organization, academic center of translations, research center, botanical garden, and observatory. Abu Hilal al-Dayhuri, a Berber from Maghreb, was one of them. On the other hand, elements of the criticism that Abu Isa al Warraq addressed to Islam and to prophet Muhammad seem to be Manichaean of nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab%C5%AB_Hil%C4%81l_al-Dayh%C5%ABri

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Isa_al-Warraq

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

However, one must admit that, despite similarities, loans and impact, Islam and Manichaeism soon became rival systems and most of the Islamic erudite scholars portrayed Mani in a rather negative manner. This approach made of Muslims the major opponents of the Manicheans, after the Christians and the Jews; but this situation is attested in rather later periods (9th–10th c.). However, this is not quite strange, if we take into consideration the fact that the Old Testament god Yahweh was portrayed as the Demiurge (i.e. the Satan) by Mani. 

v- the Copts (Monophysitic Christian Egyptians)

As close allies of the Monophysitic Aramaeans (see above unit i-), they were ferocious enemies of the oppressive Constantinopolitan administrative hierarchy and Patriarchate. Similarly with the Monophysitic Aramaeans, who belonged to the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and rejected the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch (which sided with Constantinople), the Monophysitic Copts followed the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and rejected the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.

Coptic manuscript with illuminations
Coptic manuscript
Coptic Gospel with illumination representing the four Evangelists.
Coptic manuscript with illuminations

Similarly with what happened in North Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine where the followers of the Constantinopolitan doctrine-related patriarchates (in Antioch and Jerusalem) were not numerous, as they constituted the Greek-speaking minority of those regions, in Egypt, the followers of the Constantinopolitan doctrine-related patriarchate (in Alexandria) were few, and they constituted the Greek-speaking minority of Egypt.

This leads to a detrimental conclusion as regards the Eastern Roman Empire and its chances to maintain control across its eastern provinces, namely North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica; both, the Constantinopolitan authorities and their local stooges were loathed and reviled by the outright majority of the local populations that would certainly do all that it took to get rid of the heretical rulers at Constantinople. All they needed was an opportunity, and prophet Muhammad’s preaching in Hejaz was apparently more important for them (as a tool) than to Arabs (as a faith).

vi- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, followers of Rabbinical Judaism

After the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE) and the failure of the Bar Kokhba (136 CE) rebellion, the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Zealots did not have a chance to survive as religious-spiritual-intellectual systems among the Judaic Jews. Ever since, Judaism has revolved around the Pharisees, who thus formed what is now known as ‘Rabbinical Judaism’. As Ancient Hebrew was already a dead language, all Jews were already speaking Aramaic. Expelled from Aelia Capitolina (former Jerusalem), Jews could stay in Palestine or preferably settle in Arsacid (and after 224 CE, Sassanid) Iranian Mesopotamia.

They then (and over several centuries) elaborated a new religious book that marks a clear line of separation between their ancestors’ religion (Ancient Hebrew religion based exclusively on the Old Testament) and their new religion; this book is the Talmud, which is the product of the criminal priests who never repented for having killed the ancient prophets of Israel. Today, most scholars hide the critical fact that Judaism (i.e. Rabbinical Judaism or Talmudic Judaism) is totally different from and diametrically opposed to the Ancient Hebrew religion. As priestly literature and theological exegesis, the two different Talmud collections, namely the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalemite Talmud, were written in Aramaic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud

Manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud with text from the tractate Kiddushin
Manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud with text from the tractate Rosh ha-shannah

Contrarily to the Judaic Jews, who were marked by the composition and the diffusion of the Talmud among them, the Aramaean Jews in their totality turned to Early Christianity; this concerns the Samaritans of the time of Jesus and many other Aramaean Jewish communities that prospered in Syria and Mesopotamia, notably in Dura Europos where the Synagogue fully reveals the impetus and the magnificence of Aramaean Art. By the time of prophet Muhammad there was no Aramaean Jew.

Although late 6th c. and early 7th c. CE Jews wholeheartedly supported the Sassanid Iranians in their wars against the Eastern Roman Empire (in striking contrast with the early Muslims of the period 610-628/629, who clearly regretted the early Iranian advance and conquests, and later rejoiced with the final Eastern Roman victories) and in spite of many unfortunate incidents that occurred between the early Muslims and the Hejaz Jews (during prophet Muhammad’s lifetime), the early (634-651 CE) Islamic conquests were enthusiastically accepted by the Jews of the wider region, who found their ally and protector in the ominous figure of Omar ibn al Khattab, as he allowed them to enter Jerusalem, no less than 568 years after they were kicked out of there by the Romans. Jews actively supported the early Islamic Caliphates, notably the Umayyad state of Damascus, the Abbasid Empire of Baghdad, and the Umayyad caliphs of Córdoba (Andalus).

vii- the Persians and other Iranians followers of various Iranian religions

Being only one of the Sassanid Empire’s nations, the Persians lived in the province of Fars, which in Ancient Greek was translated as Persia; there cannot be confusion between ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Persians were/are only one of the Iranian nations.

https://www.academia.edu/43365931/Iran_is_not_Persia_and_Persia_is_not_Iran

The Persians controlled the administrative machine of the Iranian Empire during the Achaemenid times (550-330 BCE) and during the Sassanid times (224-651 CE), whereas the Parthians, another Iranian nation of Turanian origin, controlled the administrative machine of the empire during the Arsacid times (250 BCE-224 CE).

The Iranian Empire had always many imperial capitals, notably Pasargadae, Persepolis, Susa, Babylon, Ecbatana, Nisa (Mithradatkirt/Parthaunisa), Qumis (Hecatompylos), Ray (Ragae), Tesifun (Ctesiphon), and Istakhr; on the other hand, Praaspa (Adur Gushnasp/Takht-e Suleyman), at an elevation of 3000 m, in the northern part of Zagros Mountains, was permanently the Zoroastrian religious capital of the empire.

In the Mesopotamian provinces of the Sassanid Empire of Iran, there were few and rather small Persian communities; in these western provinces of Iran were also settled people originating from other Iranian nations that were indigenous in the central, eastern and northern provinces of the empire. They were dispatched to the imperial administration at Ctesiphon and they served in the army. But they were a minority among the indigenous Aramaeans of Central and Southern Mesopotamia, Transtigritane, and the Persian Gulf’s southern coastlands.

This reality has not been either assessed or revealed by any type of specialists who studied and wrote about the topic of the early Islamic conquests. Yet, it is uniquely determinant and utterly explanatory. It changes drastically our scholarly approach to the topic (see below unit E).

Another critical dimension that impacted greatly the fate of the Sassanid Empire of Iran was its religious multi-division. If we leave the Nestorian Aramaeans, the Gnostic Aramaeans, the Manichaean Aramaeans, other Manichaean Iranians (notably the Sogdians), and the Aramaic-speaking Jews aside, the Persians and the other Iranian nations of the Sassanid Empire were spiritually and religiously divided. Among them, there were adepts of the following religious systems:

1- Mazdeism: the imperial religion and Zoroastrian doctrine established by Kartir;

2- Mithraism: the popular religion that made of Mithra a god of polytheistic features;

3- Zurvanism: Mithra broke away from Zoroastrianism and Zurvan from Mithraism;

4- Mazdakism: the subversive socio-religious system of rebellious mobedh (priest);

5- Gayomardism: an offspring of Mazdeism and Mithraism, with monotheistic traits;

If one adds to the numerous aforementioned religions, several religious systems prevailing among nations of the Iranian periphery and border regions, notably Buddhism, Turanian Tengrism, and other Central Asiatic and Indus River valley religions, one gets a complete picture of the internal divisions that existed in the Sassanid Empire of Iran and finally lef to its destruction.

Sassanid Iranian relief with representation of the high priest, mystic and reformer of Zoroastrianism Kartir, a primary initiate who can be viewed as the founder of Mazdeism, i.e. the late form of Zoroastrianism that was instituted as official dogma in Sassanid Iran. Possibly Turanian (Turkic) of origin, Kartir (or Kerdyr) can be held as main responsible for the execution of Mani and the persecution of Manicheans in Iran until the end of the Sassanid times. Long before the Arabs of Hejaz heard of the Mi’raj story (prophet Muhammad’s nocturnal, transcendental travel to the Temple Mount and thence to the Celestial Jerusalem), the Iranians learned about Kartir’s celestial journey in the Heaven. There is also another (parallel?) Middle Persian story about the celestial journey of the sublime initiate Arda Viraf in the Heaven; however, the Middle Persian manuscripts of Arda Wīraz namag seem to date back to the 9th c., although the entire narrative echoes Sassanid traditions. About: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/kartir / https://www.academia.edu/37850211/The_nature_of_spiritual_journeys_in_Zoroastrianism_based_on_Kartir_and_Arda_Viraf_trips
The Mithraic temple of Anahita at Bishapur near Kazerun
The heroic elements of the Sassanid times’ Mazdeism were preserved in the Iranian epics of Islamic times, thus leading to a very different form of Islam than what Muhammad preached in Mecca; Esfandiyar faces Simurgh. Without Iranian epics composed 300 years after the death of prophet Muhammad, one cannot possibly identify correctly the cultural-spiritual-intellectual-artistic-educational environment of Iranian, Turanian, Central Asiatic, Caucasus and Indian Muslim societies. In fact, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh became the second Quran for Ottoman sultans, Mughal emperors, Iranian shahs and Eurasiatic Muslims.
Gayomard (Keyumars) fighting evil spirits; a reminiscence of Gayomardism of the Sassanid times was preserved in the Iranian epics of Islamic times.
The execution of Mazdak, the preacher of the world’s first religion which evangelized a communist social structure without property, as represented in Islamic times’ miniatures of manuscripts
Representation of Zurvan, the all-consuming ‘god’ of time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zurvanism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdakism

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/gayomart-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyumars

viii- the Eastern Roman Orthodox Christians, who sided with the Patriarchate of Constantinople

As I already said, the few Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Orthodox Christian communities, settled in Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and several other cities in North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica, supported the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Constantinopolitan imperial administration, but they were largely outnumbered by the local Aramaean (in Asia) and Coptic (in Africa) populations (which rejected the Patriarchate of Constantinople and its local stooges). That is why the few Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Orthodox Christian communities were greatly loathed: they ultimately functioned as tools of the imperial oppression and persecution of all those who disagreed with the Constantinopolitan theologians.

These populations and their ecclesiastical authorities, namely the Patriarchate of Constantinople and its dependencies in the East, i.e. the three minor institutions at Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria that were unrepresentative (as they were accepted as ‘patriarchates’ only by the tiny local minority of the Greek-speaking populations of the respective cities), wanted to monopolize the term ‘Orthodox’, but this was merely their propaganda, against those whom they called ‘Monophysites’. It would be however wrong to imagine that there was concord within the sphere of influence of the Patriarchate of Constantinople; there was discord and division instead.

Caesarea of Cappadocia (Kayseri): the city walls erected by Justinian in the middle of 6th c. The early Islamic conquests were stopped in the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains beyond Cappadocia. The bulk of the Eastern Roman population was centered between Caesarea and Smyrna (Izmir) whereas Cappadocia was the holy land of Eastern Roman Christianity.
The rupestrian Cappadocian Art: one of Christianity’s most stupendous contributions to Art
Typical sample of rupestrian Cappadocian Art
The highland of Cappadocia where many hundreds of cells and churches have been built and hewn in the rock.
Caesarea: The basis of the Eastern Roman defense against the Islamic Caliphate for more than 400 years

The new theological-Christological dispute revolved around the ‘energy’ and the ‘will’ (thelesis) of Jesus, in the sense of whether they were one or two (human and divine) and, if two, what the relationship of the two energies or two wills was. As a matter of fact, it was the resurgence of the old dispute (about the ‘nature’ (physis) of Jesus), which had given birth to what we now call Miaphysitism/Monophysitism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoenergism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monothelitism

This new division concerned mainly vast populations living in the central provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, namely Anatolia (Turkey), Constantinople, the Balkan Peninsula, southern and eastern Italy, Sicily, and Carthage. The division had already reached the top of the imperial structure, as Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople were accused of Monoenergism and Monothelitism. And the fact that Heraclius got married with his niece Martina (as second wife) unleashed an abysmal hatred against him from the part of the uncompromising ‘Orthodox’ theologians, monks and priests, as they viewed the marriage as incestuous.

This, briefly presented, was the situation in which the two great empires, the Eastern Romans and the Sassanid Iranians, found themselves in the eve of the battles that ended with the loss of the eastern provinces of the former and the final dissolution of the latter. As I said in the last paragraph of the EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS, there has to be an academic focus on interdisciplinary studies and research, which will certainly unveil many points and elements of common faith shared by Muslims and followers of other religions (notably Manicheans) or Christian denominations (notably Miaphysitic/Monophysitic and Nestorian). This will greatly impact our understanding of the Eastern Roman and the Iranian defeats, because it may reveal that these early battles (and the Battle of Yarmouk was only one) had been already won before they were fought; furthermore, it will also explain why the situation, which arose as a consequence of these battles, proved to be irreversible for many long centuries.

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E. The demographic structure of the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Western Iranian provinces: the Aramaeans

No scholar examined in detail the demographic structure of the populations that inhabited the central territories of the early Caliphate outside Hejaz and Yemen. This has much to do with the above EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS. A detailed demographic study covering the period 224-750 CE would reveal that the bulk of the Aramaean populations living in the Western Iranian provinces and in the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire were

1- ethnically different from the nations that ruled both empires (the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans and the Persians);

2- religiously opposed to the official imperial religions of both empires;

3- systematically persecuted and marginalized by both imperial administrations and armies;

4- detrimentally devastated by the incessant wars fought between the two empires, because the ordinary battlefield was precisely located in their own lands, namely the Western Iranian provinces and the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire (and consequently the bulk of the populations of the ruling nations, namely the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans and the Persians, was not significantly affected by these wars); and

5- linguistically very close to the Arabs of Hejaz, because in fact Arabic was a southern Syriac dialect and the Arabic writing derived from Syriac Aramaic.

Ctesiphon: the remaining part of the then world’s most magnificent palace. Taq-i Kisra (or Al Mada’in) was the Sassanid palace in Mesopotamia and the archway is the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world. One of the best samples of pre-Islamic Aramaean-Iranian Art.
In fact, Ctesiphon (Tesifun) in today’s central Iraq was an enormous agglomeration involving four cities; one of them, Seleucia, known as Mahoze in Aramaic, was the worldwide center of Nestorian Christianity.
The Great Mosque of Damascus is a masterpiece of Aramaean Art.

F. The central provinces of the Islamic Caliphates: the lands of the Aramaeans.

No scholar noticed that, in addition to the aforementioned points, for about five (5) centuries (661-1258), the central regions of the Islamic Caliphates (Umayyad or Abbasid) were exactly the lands of the Aramaeans. The first Islamic capital was at Madinah, but this was soon terminated, as the Umayyad dynasty was based in the Aramaean city par excellence: Damascus. The determinant impact of the Aramaean universities, academies, monasteries and scriptoria (notably those of Urhoy/Edessa, Nisibis/Nusaybin, Tur Abdin, Mahoze/Ctesiphon, and Kerkha/Kirkuk) on the formation of the Islamic educational, academic, intellectual and scientific life changed totally the backward, uncivil and primitive environment in which prophet Muhammad’s preaching was undertaken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Edessa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephrem_the_Syrian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abgarid_dynasty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edessa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Nisibis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nusaybin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Gondishapur

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tur_Abdin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctesiphon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Mada%27in

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ctesiphon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_Garma%C3%AF_(East_Syriac_ecclesiastical_province)

The Sassanid Empire of Iran in its greatest extent at 621 CE
Heraclius’ campaigns’ 611-628

This historical process and development made of the early Arab fighters, the so-called Sahaba, a marginal element that played almost no role in the History of Islamic Civilization. In other words, the Islamic Civilization in its early stage was clearly an Aramaean – Iranian civilization with significant Coptic, Yemenite and Jewish contributions; at a later stage, Berber, Turanian, African and Indus River Valley contributions to the Islamic civilizations have also been attested. However, there was never an ‘Arab civilization’ or -as per the French Orientalist forgers- “une civilisation arabo-musulmane”.

This automatically cancels the theoretical importance of the early Islamic conquests that are absurdly amplified and incommensurately over-magnified by both Western scholars and Islamic terrorists; in fact, the real winners were the inhabitants of the central regions of the Islamic Caliphates, i.e. the Aramaeans, who saw others fighting for their cause (to get rid of the double, Eastern Roman and Sassanid Iranian, yoke), for the transfer of the imperial capital into their land, and for the establishment of an imperial elite manned basically by them. In addition to the Aramaeans, the Persians and other Iranians and Turanians managed also to make their way into the new imperial administration. But prophet Muhammad had never spoken about an … ‘Islamic’ empire….

G. Lack of historical criticism in Islamic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies

Taking all the aforementioned determinant parameters into account, reading the historical sources from the viewpoint of historical criticism, and viewing the historical facts in the light of the hitherto unevaluated critical factors, modern scholars can come up with a totally different interpretation/interrelation of sources and a dramatically contrasting reconstitution of the historical past, which would be diametrically opposed to the nonsense of military experts, who focus exclusively on battle techniques, and to the absurd and paranoid, pseudo-religious belief, as per which ‘god’ was involved in the events that took place in the 630s and 640s and shook the world between the Mediterranean, the Indus River valley, and Central Asia. Historical criticism of all sources relating to these events is indispensable and inevitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_criticism

Hadhrat Ali’s tomb in Najaf; Ali ibn abi Taleb (599-661) was designated as the first caliph, but after meeting fierce opposition, he was accepted as the fourth caliph. The early divisions of the small Muslim community after the death of Prophet Muhammad are an extra reason for historians to apply today extensive historical criticism and to reject the absolutely reconstructed and erroneous version of History.
The tomb of the 3rd imam Hussein ibn Ali (626-680) at Kerbala. The sons of Ali had to become caliphs in his stead. But the grandson of prophet Muhammad (Hussein) was slaughtered by the son of prophet Muhammad’s worst enemy (Mu’awiya ibn Abī Sufyan / Muawiyah son of Abu Sufyan). If this situation does not impose extensive historical criticism, this means that today’s fake academics receive orders from the powers that be as regards what to study, what not to explore, and how to investigate the topics of their research. Yet, what happened in Kerbala (680 CE) illuminates very well what occurred after the Hudaybiyah treaty when Abu Sufyan rushed to Palestine to meet Emperor Heraclius and deceive him.

III. The astounding scarcity of contemporaneous sources

The first serious difficulty that every modern historian faces, when dealing with the early Islamic conquests, is the extreme scarcity of contemporaneous historical sources. A recent and highly commendable scholarly publication, titled ‘Seeing Islam as Others saw it: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam’ (by prof. Robert G. Hoyland), enumerates ca. 140 different authors, manuscripts, texts or inscriptions (categorized as a. sources; b. apocalypses and visions; c. martyrologies; d. chronicles and histories; and e. apologies and disputations) that involve various narratives in Syriac Aramaic, Coptic, Greek, Armenian, Middle Persian, Christian Arabic, Jewish Aramaic, Latin and Chinese primary sources, which date back to the period between 620 and 780 CE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Islam_as_Others_Saw_It

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Hoyland

As it can be easily understood, most of the above mentioned texts were not written with the specific purpose to detail the battles and the events that took place in the area under study in the 630s and the 640s; consequently, their mention of facts and their references to episodes were rather brief, because the main scope of the narrative was other. The Eastern Roman chronicler and monk Theophanes the Confessor (758-817) presented the longest description of the events by an Eastern Roman author. His text is to be found in Medieval Greek and Latin translation: J. P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, cviii (vol.108, col.55-1009). But when Theophanes wrote his venerated Χρονογραφία (Chronographia), at least 150 years had passed after the Battle of Yarmouk was fought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophanes_the_Confessor

https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0700-0800__Theophanes_Abbas_Confessor__Chronographia_(CSHB_Classeni_Recensio)__GR.pdf.html

Still this is fine if compared with the Muslim Arabic sources; the scarcity of 7th c. CE Islamic sources is spectacular. The Islamic sources of that period are much scarcer than the non-Islamic sources. Even worse, as the Arabs of Hejaz were not civilized and kept no historical records of their otherwise primitive and therefore dreary societies, a long formative period had to first pass, until -under clear Aramaean, Persian, Coptic and Jewish guidance- some rudiments of historiography be formed.

Most of the first, important historians of Islamic times were of non-Arab origin:

1- Muhammad ibn Ishaq (704-767) was the grandson of an Aramaean young boy held captive in a Christian monastery in Shetata (Ayn al Tamr) in Mesopotamia;

2- Al Waqidi (747-823) was the son of a Persian lady of noble ancestry whose family introduced letters, arts and music to uncivil and primitive Hejaz;

3- Tabari (or rather Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari/ محمد بن جرير الطبري; 839-923) was an Iranian born in the southern coastlands of the Caspian Sea (Tabaristan), a location to which he owes the name by which he became widely known. Tabari’s Chronography was not different from the Eastern Roman historiographical tradition, as he started his narrative from the Creation. Tabari accumulated an enormous, unprecedented documentation, and he mentioned explicitly his sources for each and every part of his colossal text (a recent, unilingual English translation needed 40 volumes of ca. 300 pages each to be published), making it unattractive to the non-specialists. But Tabari wrote no less than 230 years after the Battle of Yarmouk was fought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Ishaq

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Waqidi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Tabari

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Prophets_and_Kings

https://archive.org/details/HistoryAlTabari40Vol/History_Al-Tabari_10_Vol

The situation is even worse, when it comes to Islamic religious, theological, biographical, and hagiographical literature. The earlier manuscripts that survived down to our days date back to the 8th, 9th and 10th c., while few existing exceptions are in truly fragmentary condition and cannot be taken as ‘proofs’ properly speaking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_early_Islam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_historians

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biographies_of_Muhammad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagiography#Islamic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith_manuscripts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Quranic_manuscripts

The scarcity of the contemporaneous sources makes the interdisciplinary research imperative for the case of the early Islamic conquests and for the study of the first decades of caliphs’ rule. The contrast or the agreement between two different sources and the often divergent perspectives offered can help drastically stimulate the research orientation and push scholars toward hitherto unidentified areas, which may then grant a far better understanding of the historical facts than present-day clichés do. 

The Teaching of Jacob (Διδασκαλία Ἰακώβου/Didaskalia Iakobou; Doctrina Jacobi) is an example in this regard; preserved partially in Medieval Greek manuscripts and integrally in Latin, Arabic, Ge’ez and Slavonic translations, the text consists in a debate among Jews as regards their eventual conversion to Christianity. It seems to be dated back to 634 CE, and it provides some of the earlier references to the Islamic conquests. In fact, it contradicts all Islamic sources, because it describes prophet Muhammad (without naming him) as waging wars in Palestine. However, the brief excerpt that concerns these facts makes state of an alliance between Palestinian Jews and the Arab armies. On the other hand, those among the Palestinian Jews, who had converted to Christianity (or rather were forced to), saw in the person of the ‘warrior prophet’ the Antichrist and even expected the imminent return of the Christ, also regretting that it took them long to identify Jesus with the Biblical Messiah.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_of_Jacob

The Teaching of Jacob, Slavonic translation

The Syriac ‘Chronicle of 640’, written by Thomas the Presbyter, consists in a particular Christian Chronography down to the year 640 CE; the scribe, who copied the manuscript ca. 85 years later (724 CE), added an extra text containing the list of the Umayyad caliphs, who had reigned until that year. The Chronicle contains critical references to the early Islamic attacks and conquests, also stating that an enormous bloodshed followed the battle “between the Romans and the Tayyaye of Muhmd (the Arabs of Muhammad)”, which took place on 4th February 634 CE in Palestine, east of Gaza. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Presbyter

Two years later (636 CE), the Syriac ‘Chronicle of 640′ mentions explicitly the Sassanid Iranian debacle (without however naming the Battle of Qadissiyyah) and the subsequent arrival of the Islamic armies in NE Mesopotamia and notably Mardin (today in SE Turkey), which was the religious capital of the Tur Abdin Aramaean Miaphysitic/Monophysitic monasticism; these events also caused great bloodshed there. However, by dating these events in 636 CE {year 947, indiction 9, of the Seleucid Era (starting 312-311 BCE)}, the author makes it impossible for us to date the Battle of Yarmouk in 636, which is nowadays the tendency of several scholars who rather follow Theophanes’ text. On the contrary, Tabari makes it very clear that the Battle of Yarmouk occurred days after the death of Abu Bakr in August 634 CE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_al-Qadisiyyah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Persia

https://www.academia.edu/40350196/The_Capture_of_Jerusalem_by_the_Muslims_in_634

https://c.worldmisc.com/read/when-was-the-battle-of-yarmouk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yarmuk

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/14273/20391

Another brief and fragmentary inscription written on a blank page of a 6th c. Syriac copy of the Gospel of Mark makes state of the failure of the Eastern Roman army to properly defend the eastern regions of the empire; the same expression is used in Syriac (Tayyaye of Muhmd), but the dating is arbitrary. The inscription may well have been written in the 630s, but we cannot specify when exactly. Modern scholars have the tendency to deliberately mistrust the historical authors in order to fabricate the version of historiography that pleases them, and that is why several specialists assumed that the inscription’s author mistook Gabitha for Yarmouk; the inscription mentions a battle between the Eastern Romans and the Muslims in Gabitha (Jabiyah, in Syria) and the modern scholars translate it as ‘Yarmouk’ (in Jordan). It would be however more interesting to focus on similarities and dissimilarities between Syriac and Arabic, because practically speaking the same noun (Gabitha, Jabiyah) ended up having two totally different meanings. If one applies Syriac reading to the Quranic text before vocalization, the surprises may be phenomenal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_on_the_Arab_Conquests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabiyah

http://www.allinjordan.com/index.php?cGc9Q2l0aWVzJmN1c3RvbWVyPUJhdHRsZStvZitZYXJtb3Vr

IV. Critical incidents during the Battle of Yarmouk

Tabari starts his narration of the events of the year 13 AH (634-635) with the Battle of Yarmouk; it expands on the illness and the subsequent death of Abu Bakr later. This cancels automatically the falsely reconstructed entry of the Wikipedia that dates the event back to 636 CE. Tabari’s two previous units are:

– Those who say Abu Bakr led the pilgrimage

– Those who say Umar led the pilgrimage

It is quite interesting that, in the introductory text for the events of the year 13 AH (before the description of the Battle of Yarmouk), Tabari states clearly that Abu Bakr, after his return from Mecca to Madina (when the hajj was completed), prepared the armies to be sent to Syria. Tabari narrates the developments, based on many different chains of earlier sources. There were many recruits of Yemen, because the Yemenites had recently accepted Islam (630 CE). So, even in these early battles, we cannot speak of ‘Arab armies’, but of Arab and Yemenite armies; the Yemenites are a Semitic nation, but as different from the Arabs as the Jews are from the Aramaeans, and pre-Islamic Yemenite languages and writings were very different from Arabic.

At this point, one has to point out that, before and after the death of prophet Muhammad (632), the early Islamic state in Hejaz, Yemen, Oman and the desert was in a tumultuous situation and incessant rebellions were exploding every now and then here and there, which means that the Islamic army units were in continuous readiness. However, despite this fact, the preparations for the dispatch of the army to the southern confines of Palestine and Syria, as narrated by Tabari, seem to have been rudimentary. In other words, I want to state that, for an event of so cataclysmic importance, the preparations were minimal.

This can only mean one thing: there were ongoing communications and coordination with Aramaeans based in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia as regards a) attrition activities that they would possibly undertake against the Eastern Roman armies, b) defection of Aramaean soldiers from the Eastern Roman armies, and c) public opinion preparation for the forthcoming arrival of the Islamic armies and for the acceptance of the early Islamic faith (which was not what people think today that Islam is). And these developments (in Syria, and not in Hejaz) are exactly what made the difference, irrespective of the battle outcome. Otherwise, an early Islamic victory and invasion could be met with local population resistance and then the dispatch of another imperial army from Constantinople or Cappadocia would demolish once forever the initial state structure that the Arab and Yemenite armies may have imposed for a year or two in Damascus, Emessa (Homs), Caesarea Maritima, and Jerusalem.

Four separate armies were dispatched from Madina at the same time and each of them took a different road, but when they reached the region of Yarmouk River, they decided to unite, because the Eastern Romans outnumbered them. The same tactic was followed by the Eastern Romans. In some early skirmishes a Muslim force under Khālid ibn Saʿīd was defeated. Tabari states that the two armies encamped at a relatively close distance from one another without fighting for several months.

At that point, Tabari gives the date of Abu Bakr’s death, namely in the middle of the month Jumadah al Akhirah of the Islamic calendar (16 August 634), and specifies that the event took place “ten days before the victory (in the battle of Yarmouk River)”. It is noteworthy that prophet Muhammad’s worst enemy and late convert to Islam Abu Sufyan bin Harb accompanied the army and was appointed as the ‘preacher’ (qass). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%C4%81%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%A3

During the description of the battle, Tabari mentions the arrival of the messenger from Madinah, namely the rider who announced the death of Abu Bakr only to Khalid bin Walid, the army leader, keeping it secret from all the fighters for obvious reasons. Tabari narrates also discussions that took place in intervals between Khalid bin Walid and George (Jurjah bin Budhiyah; also mentioned as Jarajis), one of the commanders of the Eastern Roman armies, who finally accepted Islam, performed a brief Islamic prayer (only two prostrations; rak’atayn), and then fought with the Muslims against the Eastern Roman army.

At another point, Tabari mentions an incident between Al-Ashtar (Malik bin al Harith al Nakha’iy, also known as Malik Al-Ashtar; a Yemenite origin Muslim) and ‘a man of the Romans’, who suggested a single combat with any Muslim fighter – a challenge that Al-Ashtar accepted. After the two combatants exchanged many blows, Al-Ashtar said to the ‘Roman’ opponent: “Take that, because I am a youngster from the Iyad tribe”! The ‘Roman’ fighter responded: “May God increase the number of people like you among my people; because, by God, if you were not of my people, I would have supported the Romans (meaning the Eastern Romans), but now I will not help them”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malik_al-Ashtar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyad_(tribe)

The hills around the Yarmouk river
Yarmouk River
Maps and diagrams about historical developments are useless, as they only offer information of one dimension; one grasps the reality as regards the Battle of Yarmouk only when understanding that the outright majority of the local Aramaean populations passionately desired and wished for an Eastern Roman defeat, expecting the Muslim warriors as liberators. This occurred not because these populations believed in the faith preached by prophet Muhammad, but due to their need to use the Muslim armies in order to get rid from the tyrannical Eastern Roman rule. This truth has been systematically obscured by Western historians who came up with cheap propaganda and empty rhetoric, in order to repeat the divisive clichés that are necessary to the criminal colonial regimes of the West.

Incidents like the aforementioned totally change the image that modern scholars have created as distortion of the historical reality. The Islamic army did not actually need to be numerous; the battlefront would not be the most critical location as regards the battle outcome. Even more so, because if the first battle had been lost, the second would have been victorious in any case!

V. The true dimensions of the Battle of Yarmouk and of its outcome

The linguistic affinity between Aramaeans and Arabs was such that we can easily infer that most of the Islamic fighters could easily communicate in the language of a sizeable part of the Eastern Roman army (the Aramaean soldiers recruited from the lands of today’s SE Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine). There is no doubt about the knowledge and use of Syriac Aramaic among Arabs, due to their long professional involvement across the frankincense and spice trade routes. Even more importantly, the well-documented diffusion of Christianity among the Arabs bears automatically witness to their great skills of Syriac Aramaic in terms of reading comprehension, listening comprehension, written composition, and usage. How close to prophet Muhammad may this situation have been? Extremely close!

The cousin of his first wife, a learned man named Warraqah (: lit. ‘paper’) ibn Nawfal was a Christian convert. The religiosity of those days was such that we can safely claim that Khadijah’s cousin was reading every day excerpts from the Peshitta (the Syriac Bible). To all those, who discuss issues pertaining to prophet Muhammad’s education, knowledge and familiarity with Christological disputes, although it is certain that Khadijah’s husband -in young age- traveled repeatedly to territories of the Eastern Roman Empire (where he may have had month-long discussions with monks, theologians and learned merchants), the easiest response would be:

– Already in Mecca, there were Peshitta copies of the Bible, in the small houses of prophet Muhammad’s relatives!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waraqah_ibn_Nawfal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshitta

Peshitta manuscripts with miniatures
Aramaean Art of the Book

Also many Aramaeans involved in the trade between Yemen and the Mediterranean could communicate in the provincial Hejaz dialect that we now call ‘Quranic Arabic’. Language issues are mentioned in the Quran, and not without reason. In fact, Arabic sounded like a rough and uncouth dialect to the Aramaeans of Damascus or Antioch, two great cities each of which had larger population than the totality of the (Hejaz and desert) Arabs. On the other hand, the lexicographical poverty of pre-Islamic Arabic, if compared to the treasure of Syriac Aramaic (which also contained loans from other languages), was viewed by the Hejaz Arabs as ‘linguistic purity’; this situation led them to the aberration that their dialect was more ‘ancient’ or more ‘original’, whereas in fact it was more ‘isolated’ and more arid than Syriac Aramaic. And this situation is reproduced nowadays when people, who are well versed in the Quranic text (which stays close to the pre-Islamic Arabic’s ‘purity’, although it is far more elaborate), try to read Ibn Sina’s Al-Isharat wa al-Tanbihat; they fail to grasp anything.

The religious-cultural similarity between the Arabs, who had just accepted prophet Muhammad’s preaching, and the Christian Aramaeans (either Nestorian or Miaphysitic/Monophysitic) was even more stupendous. Of course, when it comes to religion, tiny differentiations are known to have been reasons of terrible strives and wars, but in this case, there was a tremendously different issue. The Arabs had already rejected their idolatry and polytheistic concepts in order to adopt a faith that had a great number of common points with both, Nestorian and Miaphysitic / Monophysitic Christianity. In other words, they had made the first step in the direction of Miaphysitic/Monophysitic and Nestorian Christianity, and this was how the Christian Aramaeans viewed them; of course, to some Aramaean monks, the Arabs were perceived as heretic, but still this is far ‘better’ than just ‘heathens’.

The truly negative view of Islam was particular only to Constantinople and to Rome; but this detrimental judgment of Islam had basically imperial and material motives; in other words, Muhammad ‘was’ for the imperial ruling class the Antichrist, because his religious system was effective in seriously and irreversibly damaging their imperial posture, material benefits, and ecumenical appeal. Suddenly, the major challenges of 300 years of Christian imperial rule (namely Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius) that the Constantinopolitan theologians had managed to overcome appeared to be extremely weak and minor compared with the latest: Muhammad.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutyches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorius

The difference was simple; the earlier challenges (namely Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius) emanated from within the Roman Empire, and the Constantinopolitan elite proved to be able to squelch them, oppressing and persecuting leaders and followers of the ‘heresies’. But Muhammad emanated from outside the Roman Empire. He early managed to secure an independent basis for his faith, and thence he attacked the Eastern Roman provinces that were inhabited by populations, which overwhelmingly rejected the Constantinopolitan doctrine; it was only normal for these populations to massively opt for the standard bearers of the new faith.

In fact, they perceived the arrival of the Muslim armies as liberation from the Roman – Constantinopolitan tyranny. The Anti-Muhammadan rhetoric of the Medieval Latin sources is merely an evil propaganda of the losers; the reality is simple: either they accepted Islam or remained Monophysitic, Nestorian, Gnostic or Manichaean, the Aramaeans, who constituted the quasi-totality of the local populations in Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and the southern coastland of the Persian Gulf, did not rebel against the rule of the Caliphate. And the Arab rulers accepted the importance of the lands of the Aramaeans, and that’s why they abandoned their marginal towns and sketchy villages in Hejaz and set up their capitals in the lands of the Aramaeans.

After all, this new doctrine appeared at the time as merely a new Christological dispute and heresy, and its followers were few and originated from lands that had never been historically important and which remained historically unimportant. But the loss for the theological elites of Constantinople and Rome was abysmal; in fact, pretty much like Constantinople was the New Rome, Damascus and Baghdad were meant to be the Final Rome. That is why Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius were never called ‘the Antichrist’, but prophet Muhammad was!

The Umayyad Mosque at Damascus: a masterpiece of Aramaean Art
Grand Mosque of Damascus: the spectacular mosaics in the arcade around the iwan reveal the splendor of the Aramaean Art.

At this point, I terminate the present, first article of the series; in a forthcoming article, I will reveal other critical points explicitly mentioned in the historical sources that modern Western scholars sulphurously disregard, conceal or misinterpret only to advance their historical forgery and intellectual fallacy; in this they are imitated and followed by the disreputable, ignorant and vicious, pseudo-Muslim sheikhs, imams, professors, muftis, qadis and preachers, who have been fabricated and put in place by the English and French colonials in full disruption of the Islamic historical continuity. Yet, these -widely unknown- points help us first achieve a deep and comprehensive understanding of the facts that took place in the 620s-630s and then get the real picture of the entire historical process without the smokescreen of today’s misplaced version of historiography.

In fact, what most people believe today as History of Islamic Conquests and Early Islamic History is entirely false. It is a fairy tale that turns a) most of the Westerners into absurd Muhammad-haters and Islam-deniers and b) most of the Muslims into useful-idiots and naïve believers of a pseudo-Islamic theological doctrine that has nothing in common with the religion preached by prophet Muhammad and ever since advocated by hadhrat Ali and his descendants. It is not a matter of Westerners accepting Islam and Muslims accepting Christianity as faith, but as historical process. Islam was not preached by prophet Muhammad in order to be imposed worldwide. That’s why both groups need to first interpret Emperor Heraclius’ evident reluctance to fight against the Islamic armies. This was the only man in the world who, before meeting with prophet Muhammad’s personal envoy Dahyah al Kalbi, encountered his worst enemy.

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