Tag Archives: Rashid al-Din Hamadani

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.

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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:

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

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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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