Pre-publication of chapter XXVII 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 XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI and XXXII form Part Eleven (How and why the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals failed) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
Until now, 16 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 17th (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.
———————–
Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Ali Qapu Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Western historiography enters a stage of exorbitant falsification when attempting to reconstitute the History of the Safavid dynasty of Iran (1501-1736). What stands at the forefront of the Western forgery and distortion of the History of Iran during the said period is the theory that the Safavid dynasty was ‘Shia’, and also that they ‘converted’ the Turanian population of 16th c. Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. Of course, such fictional conversion never took place, and the Safavid rulers would reject the fake division of Islam into two denominations, since they always proclaimed their Islamic authenticity and integrity, fully refuting the concept of a ‘divided Islam’.
However, this fake division is instrumental for the colonial distortion of History, because on this fallacy hinges the entire Western involvement in the Orient and the conflicts that the criminal and evil states of England, France and America generated across Afro-Eurasia. In order to fully and irreversibly embed the vicious divisive scheme of a supposedly bi-polar Islamic world revolving around two rival empires, namely the ‘Sunni’ Ottomans and the ‘Shia’ Safavids, the Western Orientalists, agents, explorers, diplomats, and statesmen invented the fallacy of the so-called “Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam”.
Of course, at the time (: early 16th c.), the Western colonial powers did not have the chance to impose their false version of History on the Ottomans and the Safavids; they even had not developed Oriental studies properly speaking in their already established pernicious universities. At the time, History was in the making. The only thing that the colonial empires could do, and which they viciously did, was to frame the divisive plot and to pull their diplomatic strings in order to trigger as many Ottoman – Safavid wars as they could. The distortive interpretation and the evil misrepresentation of these facts would come later – in due course of time.
And the malignant fallacy ‘happened’ truly when it ‘should’ have; when the collapsing Ottoman and Iranian empires were eroded through colonial infiltration and evil subversion, then the colonial gangsters and the 19th c. Orientalists started carrying out the projection of the already preconceived forgery onto the Western powers’ local stooges, who by means of shameful bribery and high treason (termed as ‘scholarships for studies in Western Europe’) started diffusing pathetic nonsense and bogus-academic lies in their respective countries only to fit the needs of their masters, namely the colonial powers. At the last stage, the monstrous and murderous forgery of France and England was presented as “History” worldwide only because their colonial empires subjugated almost the entire world and imposed the racist Anglo-French intellectual-academic contamination.
So, the historical forgery that the Western academic murderers have been teaching for over two centuries in their bogus-universities as “Oriental History” is merely the coverage of their inhuman deeds, which plunged Afro-Eurasia into ceaseless local and regional wars, countless rebellions, and two world wars. But the original concept behind the inhuman diplomacy of England and France was already there at the beginning of the 16th c., when they started fallaciously calling Iran, namely a totally Turanian country, “Persia”; this was preposterous. Soon afterwards, they started also naming the Ottoman Empire “Turkey”, which is another expression of their evilness and forgery, because the Ottoman Empire was in reality the most anti-Turkic state in World History.
No less than eight (8) times the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran came to war during the period of 235 years of Safavid rule over Iran. Actually, the wars started in 1514 and ended 1736 with the fall of the Safavids; of course, the historical fact of 8 wars does not mean in this case only 8 years consumed in wars! Most of these wars lasted many years. And actually, the Ottoman-Iranian wars did not end with the demise of the Safavid dynasty. Wars were resumed at the times of the Turanian Afsharid dynasty of Iran (1736-1796) and also during the period of the Turanian Qajar dynasty of Iran (1789-1925). So, from 1514 until 1823, in only 309 years, the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Empire made eleven (11) wars one upon the other. In total, during 309 years, the two empires were engaged in wars against one another for no less than 81 years. About:
If one takes also into consideration the fact that both empires made many other wars with numerous neighboring empires (such as the Mughal Empire, the lately risen Russian Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) and several colonial kingdoms (Spain, Portugal, France, England, etc.), one concludes easily why the two empires gradually collapsed. Furthermore, taking into account first, the diplomatically instigated and deliberately machinated twelve (12) wars between the Ottomans and the Russian Empire, which took place during a period of 350 years (1568-1918) and lasted for no less than 57 years, and second, the five (5) wars between the Iranians and the Russians, which occurred over the span of 177 years (1651-1828) and kept going for 19 years, one can plainly assess the evilness of the divisive intrigues that the Western European colonial diplomats instigated across Afro-Eurasia, and the unprecedented bloodshed that they caused.
Gate of Felicity (Bâbüssaâde), Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Imperial Hall with the throne of the sultan, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Central Hall, Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Open recess (iwan) of the Yerevan Kiosk, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Scene from the Surname-ı Vehbi, located in the Topkapı palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Battle of Chaldiran (1514); Grand painting at the Chehel SotounPalace (despite the fact that the battle ended with Ottoman victory), Safavid Isfahan
The Third Courtyard of the Topkapı Palace in the Ottoman Constantinople, as depicted in a miniature of the Hünername, 1584
Paintings in the main hall of the Chehel Sotoun Palace,Safavid Isfahan
All the wars, which were machinated and instigated by the colonial English and French diplomacies, needed a sophisticated coverage, e.g. some fake reasons, which would ‘explain’ or ‘justify’ to anyone why these wars happened (or ‘had’ to happen). To be convincingly fake, these reasons were based on a total distortion of the identity of both empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid; these distorted identities, which ‘explained’ the Ottoman – Safavid wars to the average public opinion in Europe at the time, became later the vertebral column of the fallacious Western Orientalism and its entirely fake branches, namely Turkology and Iranology.
To describe the extent and the depth of the Western Orientalist fallacy, suffice it that I herewith state the following: a major topic for Turkologists to study should become the Safavid Empire of Iran as a Turanian state, because it was ethnically a Turanian Empire whereby the outright majority of the population used to speak diverse Turkic languages as their native tongues.
Similarly, a major topic for Iranologists to study should become the Ottoman Empire, because an overwhelmingly Iranian culture permeated the state to such extent that, when Mehmet II entered Constantinople on 29th May 1453 and proceeded to the Palace of the Eastern Roman Emperors, the first words that he uttered were neither in Ottoman Turkish nor in Medieval Greek nor in Arabic, but in the classical, literary language of all Turanians, i.e. in Farsi.
The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes;
the owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.
These verses written c. 180 years before the conquest of Constantinople (1453) by the great Iranian poet Saadi (known as Saadi Shirazi, 1210-1291) reveal
– the absolutely identical nature of the Turanians and the Iranians,
– the common cultural background of all Iranian and Turanian nations,
– key elements of the Iranian-Turanian apocalyptic and soteriological eschatology,
– the last moments of the ailing Iranian rule (Chosroes: the last major Sassanid emperor Khusraw Parvez; 570-628), and
Mehmed II, by uttering these verses, clearly indicated that he viewed his victory in terms of Iranian-Turanian culture and eschatology, before all the other eventual or hypothetical parameters involved in the topic (Palaeologi-Ottoman imperial family rivalry; Christian-Muslim religious conflict; Eastern Roman-Turkic ethnic quarrel; economic interests).
In fact, there should have never existed Turkology and Iranology within the context of Western Orientalism, if this unit of academic disciplines were to serve the true purpose of exploration and search for the historical truth. The reason is simple: Turan and Iran have always been an indivisible historical – cultural entity.
However, the false portrait of the Ottoman and the Safavid empires, which had been systematically produced by the 16th c. colonial powers, involved two dimensions of distortion of the reality, namely religious and ethnic. Then, 19th and 20th c. French and English academics and explorers misinterpreted the 16th c. Ottoman – Safavid wars that their countries’ duplicitous diplomats had instigated as of both, religious and ethnic, reasons; and in both cases, these scholars lied, pretty much like today’s Orientalists lie when presenting, teaching and propagating the following forgery: “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids”.
In fact, at the beginning of the 16th c., with the exception of Eastern Iranians (namely the Tajik / Dari speaking populations), there was not one Persian ethnic alive; Iran had already been almost entirely Turanized at the ethnic-linguistic level. Farsi was a highly respected and widely used language of Literature, History, Spirituality, Art, Architecture and Culture that all the educated people felt obliged to learn in young age at the various madrasas of the cities, the towns and the villages of Iran. But in reality, Farsi was at the time a dead language like Latin in 16th c. Germany.
Only later and mainly during the 20th c., following the aggressive and extensive English involvement and the shameful colonial rule of Iran, which was carried out by local puppets, a ‘new’, systematized ‘modern education’ was imposed on all Iranians, the true, traditional Iranian History (based on Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and many other illustrious epic poets) was forcefully and calamitously replaced by the fake, materialistic, atheistic and evil Iranian ‘History’ of the Orientalists, and Farsi became obligatorily the meaningless ‘national’ language. These tasks have been completed by the pathetically ignorant, uneducated and charlatanesque soldiers, who were later called “Pahlavi dynasty shahs”.
The Universal Empire of Iran disappeared, and a fake, nationalistic, ‘Persian’ pseudo-kingdom was established only to implement the ensuing culturally anti-Iranian and ethnically anti-Turanian, nationalist tyranny. It was a villainous Freemasonic plot and eschatological conspiracy against Iran, involving many ulcerous English, French, American and other enemies of Imperial Iran, who postured as ‘friends’ of ‘Persia’ or ‘admirers’ of the ‘Persian civilization’. They only wanted to fool the Iranians and to insult Iran diachronically, after the absurd and abominable example given by ancient rascals like Herodotus and Aeschylus.
While the rocambolesque and even wacky Pahlavi pseudo-dynasty was in power, the criminal English colonials prepared their substitute, namely several pseudo-theologians, who composed pathetic theoretical systems, triggered absurd religious fanaticism, and engulfed the entire Iranian nation in colonial dilemmas and utmost confusion of political nature. Farsi, as the language of the systematized Western education, was indeed revivified particularly among the incessantly increasing urban populations, who started forgetting their native tongues, notably Azeri, Turkmen and other.
During the time of the Pahlavi bogus-Iranian ‘shahs’ (1925-1979), a ‘white’, nationalist terror was imposed on the misfortunate nation; the use of other languages was strictly prohibited. However, this linguistic revival is a fake, and it looks like an awakening of the mummy. The people, who speak Farsi as a native language in today’s Iran, are of Turanian ethnic origin in their outright majority; even worse, their culture is entirely Turanian–Iranian, and their most celebrated rulers and beloved emperors are all Turanians, like Shah Isma’il I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty.
This does not mean that there are not several genuine Iranian languages spoken today in Iran by native speakers; of course, there are many: they speak Baluch, Lori, Bakhtiari, Gorani, Faili, Kalhori, Gilani, Laki, Talysh, etc. But these ethno-linguistic groups represent rather small minorities in Iran. These populations are certainly of Iranian ethnic origin, but they share the common Iranian-Turanian culture with all the populations of Turanian ethnic origin in Iran and in many other countries.
The present situation in Iran looks strange and absurd to all the local victims of the diffusion of Western propaganda of educational-academic-intellectual character; in fact, the systematic propagation of the erroneous Western notion of ‘nation’ or ‘ethnic group’ triggered only troubles and conflicts. This noxious development relates to the inhuman intellectual perversion that is called ‘Enlightenment’ in the Western world. This consists in intellectual darkness and educational paranoia that caused numerous wars over the past 250 years.
For millennia, various ethnic groups -Iranian and Turanian- speaking different languages, shared always their common culture and tradition without feeling or caring about the unsubstantiated and otherwise nonexistent, fake borders and the evil division lines that the 18th c. Western European concept of ‘nation’ produced worldwide. This historical reality of Turanian-Iranian indivisibility was irrevocable within the universal Iranian Empire, which was the supreme blessing of God and the best present that the divine world had bestowed upon Mankind.
Whatever fallacy the Western Orientalists may eventually invent and include in their often nonsensical bibliography falls apart in the light of all historical sources and texts. If the modern Western academia and intellectuals cannot understand the true reality, this is due to their degenerate minds, the advanced rottenness of their decomposed educational and social structures, and the nauseating putrefaction of their moral core.
Then, the fabrication of the fake divide “Turks vs. Persians” helped the criminal colonial powers spread divisions among the Turanians of Western, Central, Southern and Northern Asia, and the Caucasus region. The parallel creation of the fake divide “Sunni Muslims vs. Shia Muslims” was instrumental in plunging the entire Islamic world in permanent strife. Then, the combined fallacy “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids” is an explosive mixture geared to prolong and perpetuate the catastrophic division of all the populations living between the Bosporus and the Indus River Delta.
However, if they destroy the evil deeds of the local puppets of the Anglo-Saxon colonial governments, these populations could triumphantly unite in a secular super-state of ca. 450 million people and thus become the new superpower and Western Asia’s real locomotive of nations. Alternatively, if the existing colonial divisions are allowed to further exist, they can trigger new fratricidal wars among the Turks, who are culturally Iranian, and the Iranians, who are ethnically Turks.
For all the aforementioned national divisions and historical distortions to be duly presented and propagated worldwide by the Western historical forgers in a complete manner, a key point had to be invented: the supposed Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. This Orientalist fallacy hinges of the misrepresentation of the mystical Safavid Order, which founded an entire empire for themselves: the Turanian Empire of Safavid Iran.
However, the falsification of the identity and the deeds of the Safavid Order would never be successfully undertaken worldwide, if the entire Western world was not already totally confused about two totally different issues, which were systematically presented to the average people of all the Western countries as supposedly ‘one’ by their religious, academic and intellectual authorities alike: spirituality and religion.
Nevertheless, spirituality and religion are totally distinct activities of the spiritual and the material hypostases of the human being.
Sultanahmet Square in Ottoman Constantinople: the Eastern Roman hippodrome and Obelisk of Theodosius, which was transported from Luxor
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Safavid Isfahan
Procession of the guilds in the hippodrome as per a miniature of the Surname-i Vehbi (1582)
Naqsh-e Jahan, the imperial square in Safavid Isfahan
—————- BLUE MOSQUE, OTTOMAN CONSTANTINOPLE —————-
Blue mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii): built between 1609 and 1617
Blue mosque, part of the interior decoration
Blue mosque, the mihrab (center) and the minbar (right)
—————– SHAH MOSQUE, SAFAVID ISFAHAN —————————-
Shah Mosque (Masjid-e Shah): built between 1611 and 1629
The winter hypostyle
The dome
——————————————————–
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
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: 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
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
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
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
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?
—————————————————
List of the already pre-published chapters of the book
Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
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
Pre-publication of chapter X 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 VI, VII, VIII, IX and X form Part Three (Turkey and Iran beyond Politics and Geopolitics: Rejection of the Orientalist, Turcologist and Iranologist Fallacies about Achaemenid History) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
Until now, 14 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 15th (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.
———————————————————
Ahura Mazda, as preached by Zoroaster and as worshipped by the monotheistic Achaemenid dynasty, was heavily impacted by Assur (Ashur), the Sargonid Empire of Assyria, and the Assyrian monotheism, which is at the origin of every Biblical and Islamic concept of monotheism.
History of Religions is a field that was never duly explored by Western Iranologists in their effort to write the History of Ancient Iran and to represent spirituality, cult, mysticism, imperial epiphany, morality and transcendental faith in Pre-Islamic Iran. And for a very good reason! As it had happened in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia and Canaan for millennia before the rise of the Achaemenid dynasty, Iran was also the terrain in which numerous religious conflicts took place.
These spiritual and material clashes lasted long and were at times far more ferocious than a) the Catholic Frankish Crusades undertaken by the Western European rulers, b) the 4th–5th c. Christian massacres of hundreds of thousands of followers of the Ancient Egyptian, Berber, Roman, Greek and other religions, and c) the 4th–17th c. Christian killings of thousands of adepts of any theological-Christological system that happened to be considered as ‘heretical’ by the Roman Church, i.e. the Arians, the Monophysites (Miaphysites), the Nestorians, the Iconoclasts, the Paulicians, the Bogomiles, the Knights Templar, etc.
Although Western Iranologists several times managed to successfully identify the existence of opposite beliefs, concepts, cults and faiths in texts and monuments, they basically ended up with a very confusing and misleading representation of the History of Ancient Iranian religions. More specifically, they failed to systematize the presentation of all these opposite beliefs, faiths and religious systems, which were developed in Ancient Iran, and to denote them by means of independent specific names, which could eventually be merely conventional.
Yet, the existing historical sources reveal to us that without a systematized historical-religious study of the material record, the History of the Achaemenids, the Arsacids and the Sassanids will definitely remain largely incomprehensible. However, fully plunged into their catastrophic materialism, ideological militantism, and obdurate sectarianism, the racist academics of the Anglo-Saxon colonial countries have shown only little interest to accurately assess numerous historical facts on the basis of the existing textual/epigraphic evidence and to identify their reason as due to spiritual polarization, moral conflict, and religious clash.
They insidiously distorted the History of Ancient Iran by attributing socioeconomic causes and imperial motives to all the historical facts and developments that took place, thus projecting their wretched mindsets and perverse opinions onto the historical past that they purportedly wanted to ‘interpret’.
In this regard, we can find a very good example in the well-known case of turmoil that took place at the end of the reign of Kabujiya / Cambyses: the end of the great emperor, who invaded Egypt, Libya and the Sudan (i.e. Cush / Ancient Ethiopia), the pernicious attempt of the Magi to obtain imperial and spiritual power by helping the preposterous impostor Gaumata to usurp the throne, the ensuing chaotic situation, and the final prevalence of Darius I the Great testify to a formidable religious clash between two diametrically opposed and antagonistic priesthoods.
Behistun Inscription and relief, near Hamadan (Ecbatana, NW Iran): Darius I the Great steps on the body of the impostor Gaumata; the conspiracy against the Achaemenid court and the ensuing clash were entirely spiritual and religious of character. The Mithraic Magi never accepted the monotheistic preaching of Zoroaster which was sacrosanct for the Achaemenid court. That’s why in later periods the Mithraic Magi traveled to Rome and imposed their evil polytheism there.
This terrible confrontation reveals an enormous opposition between the irrevocably monotheistic Zoroastrian Achaemenid dynasty, imperial court, administration and the Zoroastrian priests (from one side) and (from the other side) the polytheistic Mithraic Magi, who repeatedly attempted to subvert Iran, control the imperial court, and then corrupt Zoroastrianism. The earliest cosmological myths and mysteries of Mithra (or Mehr), which seem to originate from the wider Khorasan region (today’s Northeastern Iran, Southeastern Uzbekistan, Northwestern Afghanistan, and Tajikistan), recount his exploit to slay the ‘celestial bovines’; much later, following the diffusion of Mithraism across Central and Western Europe, this trait gave birth to the evil religious, spiritual, and cosmological concept of tauroctony.
For the Achaemenid court and the vicars of Zoroastrian monotheism, Mithraism was an abomination. Different mythologization of the same divinity denotes always the existence of very divergent priesthoods, and it therefore testifies to a very dissimilar religion. One should never confuse between a) Mithra (Mehr) as a Zoroastrian divinity subordinated to Ahura Mazda and b) Mithra as the central divinity of Mithraism to which a totally contrasting array of counterfeit mythical themes were ascribed. About:
Parthian relief from Zahhak Castle in East Azerbaijan province, Iran: a bird (possibly eagle) stands on the back of a ball. This may be the very original mythical narrative and form of Mithraic tauroctony.
A negative consequence of Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylonia is the fact that the contact with the millennia-long, spiritually powerful, polytheistic Babylonian priesthood of Marduk strengthened the Mithraic Magi enormously and enriched the Mithraic theology considerably. It was then that numerous polytheistic Babylonian concepts, traits, elements, themes and trends were transferred into the early Iranian Mithraism, notably the motif of the dying and resurrected Tammuz, the concept of ‘ab ovo’ Creation, the narrative of the powerful hero and hunter (with the traits of Gilgamesh / Nimrud being passed onto the Iranian Verethragna), and the theme of the mystical banquet. About:
Above: Terracotta plaque of the Amorite Period (2000-1600 BCE) of Babylonia, depicting the earliest representation of Tammuz (Dumuzid in Sumerian) dead in his coffin, before his resurrection; below: Marduk depicted on a Kudurru stele of the Kassite Babylonian king Meli-Shipak II (1186-1172 BCE), one of the last kings of the Kassite dynasty.
Zoroastrianism stands in firm opposition to the ‘ab ovo creation’ concept (which is the earliest form of the evil and pathetic ‘Big Bang’ theory):
The strong Zoroastrian faith of the Achaemenid rulers, their steadfastness, and their prevalence throughout the empire (xšāça) prevented the evil Magi from controlling spiritually and fanaticizing the masses with the aforementioned mythological topics in the central Iranian provinces, namely the Iranian plateau. However, Mithra and his evil Magi traveled southeastwards to the Indus Delta region and westwards to Anatolia, Caucasus and Scythia (Russia–Ukraine).
Actually, what had happened with the Iranian conquest of Babylonia was that the millennia-long Assyrian monotheistic–Babylonian polytheistic controversy, which had caused a myriad of wars in Mesopotamia and throughout the Orient before the rise of Cyrus the Great, found other means of expression, being reproduced among other nations. In fact, the Mesopotamian spiritual-religious confrontation was simply transplanted within Achaemenid Iran. It was not a matter of mere coincidence that the Achaemenids appeared as the spiritual, intellectual and cultural offspring of Sargonid Nineveh; it was a normal consequence of the fact that Zoroaster had lived in monotheistic Nineveh, was educated there, was initiated into the Assyrian imperial universalism, and later tried to transfer the doctrine among Iranians.
The first film (movie) in the History of Mankind; the monotheistic Assyrian Emperor Tukulti Ninurta I (1244-1207 BCE) is portrayed twice, standing and then kneeling, in front of the aniconic representation of God as baetylus (betyl, i.e. a meteorite). From the Temple of Ishtar at Assur (Assyria), Iraq; nowadays in Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany
In terms of History of Religion, Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylonia (539 BCE) reversed, revenged and canceled the earlier downfall of Assyria and Nineveh (614-612 BCE) to the Babylonian armies of Nabopolassar I. In terms of Imperial History, Cyrus the Great postured as the God-blessed savior and the genuine restorer of the Sumerian – Akkadian – Assyrian-Babylonian universal(ist) monarchy, denouncing (and overthrowing) the Nabonid dynasty of Babylonia (625-539 BCE) in the same manner the Sargonids of Assyria (722-609 BCE) had decried Babylonian polytheism and Elamite insanity for millennia. About:
Epiphany of the only God Ashur (Assur) above the Tree of Life, next to it the Assyrian emperor Ashurnasirpal II (883-858 BCE), represented twice, officiates as emperor and as high priest, under the blessing of Assur. From the throne room of Kalhu (modern Nimrud in North Iraq), capital of Ashurnasirpal II
Of course, despite the evident Assyrian spiritual, intellectual, cultural and artistic impact, Zoroastrian monotheism is an original religious phenomenon and all the therein incorporated Assyrian monotheistic concepts were stated in purely Iranian terms and codes, symbols, connotations and forms. But this fact triggers two very simple questions:
– What did the original Iranian religion before Zoroaster look like?
– Was the original Iranian religion before Zoroaster a religious system that looked closer to Zoroaster’s preaching or to an early form of Mithraism?
Due to the lack of textual evidence antedating the establishment of the Iranian monarchy by Cyrus the Great, it is difficult to respond straightforwardly to these questions. Old Achaemenid cuneiform seems to have been invented by Assyrian imperial scribes only few decades prior to the establishment of the Iranian monarchy; the Iranian imperial scribes were indeed well-educated in Sargonid Nineveh at the time of Assurbanipal (669-625 BCE); that’s why they were also perfectly acquainted with, and very well versed into, Assyrian-Babylonian, Elamite, and (to some extent) Sumerian languages and cuneiform writings (Sumerian was already a dead language for 1500 years before the early Achaemenids; so to them it was like Latin to Western Europeans today).
Assur in Assyria (above) & Ahura Mazda in Iran (below)
Ashurnasirpal II is hunting under the auspices of Ashur
Darius defeated his enemies under the auspices of Ahura Mazda
However, we have several indications that, among the Iranian-Turanian nations, there was a long past of grave religious conflicts that ended with the prevalence of Zoroastrianism under Cyrus the Great.
First, all posterior sources narrate the ‘mythical’ and ‘heroic’ stages of Iranian Pre-history and Proto-history as reflecting a dual environment of permanent conflict between the Good and the Evil. Negative thought, word, action or deed among humans is indeed of spiritual origin and impact (Ahriman).
Second, the basics of Zoroastrian cosmogony and cosmology, the context of Zoroastrian moral world vision, and the quintessence of Zoroastrian soteriology show a certain number of potential parallels with Tengrism, i.e. the earlier form of Turanian religion. And this is exactly what has been missing until now in every historical-religious research about the Achaemenid Empire: the strong link between the pre-Zoroastrian Iranian–Turanian religious monotheistic system and Tengrism. There are many linguistic affinities in this regard; furthermore, basic Zoroastrian religious terms reflect pre-Zoroastrian monotheistic fundamentals that had evidently Turkic origin. The topic is very vast, but at this point, I will try to place it in a brief diagram:
Zoroastrianism is the religion based on Zoroaster’s preaching, which consists in the systematization of earlier Turanian Tengrism, after a deep spiritual study of Assyrian monotheism, cosmogony, cosmology, mythical worldview, imperial universalism, eschatology and soteriology; it seems that what Zoroaster, the Turanian prophet from Atropatene / Azerbaijan truly did was to contextualize elements of the early Tengrism and Tengri-related concepts within the Mesopotamian spiritual-cultural order, while preserving the Turanian–Iranian terms; he therefore created a new dogma and doctrine.
Supreme symbols of Tengrism: the sacred circle in the interior of the Mongolian yurt
Since the Mithraic Magi of the Achaemenid times were so evidently subversive against the universal empire of Cyrus the Great and Cambyses, we can deduce that the early Iranian Magi, who opposed Zoroaster and his system, defended an earlier, polytheistic system of faith that was in straight clash with the pre-Zoroastrian form of Tengrism, which was the original faith of the Turanians and the Iranians before the establishment of the Achaemenid dynasty. A series of systematic linguistic studies and historical-religious researches about the said topics would lead to impressive results. About:
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
CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES
CHAPTER XI: 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
CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids
PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS
CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire
CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism
CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates
PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM
CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE
CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet
CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam
CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History
PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’
CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’
PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’
CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate
PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash
PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM
CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur
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
CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor
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?
————————————————————-
List of the already pre-published chapters of the book
Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.
CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period
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
Россия, Украина и мир-II: 5000 лет русской азиатской идентичности против 500 лет англо-французского расизма и колониализма
uliššakkansalîmubalumithuṣi
ulibbaššiṭûbtubalu šitnuni
The peace is not established without conflict
The good relations don’t come without rivalry
Epic of Tukulti Ninurta (13th c. BCE)
Мир не устанавливается без конфликта
Хорошие отношения не бывают без соперничества
Эпос о Тукульти Нинурте (13 век до н.э.)
The times when peace and war alternated and rivalries were transformed into friendly relations between kingdoms have gone; we don’t live anymore in times similar to those of the great Assyrian Emperor Tukulti Ninurta I {lit. ‘My trust is in Ninurta’ (i.e. the divine concept of the Messiah for the Ancient Assyrians); reign: 1243-1207}. Those who are able to understand that World War I, World War II, and the Cold War were mere phases of the Great Game (Война теней or Большая игра) can now conclude that the Mankind entered into an undeniably eschatological clash that can only deteriorate down to the End.
All the perspicacious observers and the astute commentators do not waste their time in silly ‘geo-political analyses’ and ‘financial charts’ or econometrics, because they know that these bogus-sciences are entirely fake and deceitful. On the other hand and more importantly, eschatology is not relevant of religion (let alone theology) but does indeed hinge on Moral; the good, the just and the virtuous inherently disregard the evil, the promiscuous and the wicked. This is in their nature. Contrarily, the iniquitous, the vile and the abominable cannot accept the existence of the Good.
It is therefore inevitable that Russia ‘disturbs’; not because Putin and Medvedev are angelic beings, but due to
a) the nature of Russia as the Land par excellence, and
b) the character of Russians as the highest quality people of consciousness.
——- Scenes from the Great Game / Сцены из большой игры ————
Cartoon depicting Queen Victoria of England comforting widows and orphans during the Crimean War.
—————————————————————————–
Contents
I. The Western Anti-Russian Bias
II. Skillful Western European Falsification of Russian History
A. Erroneous contextualization of Archaeology of Northern Asia
B. Deliberate use of overlapping terms: Northern Asia, Siberia, and Scythia
C. Prehistory and Ancient History of Northern Asia are subject to modern borders and to the meaningless attempts for ‘national archaeology’
D. Failure to discern Northern Asia in its entirety and true dimensions
E. Deliberate, multifaceted distortion of the Asiatic Turanian Migrations
F. Minimization of the cataclysmic presence and prevalence of the Turanian nations throughout Eastern Europe
G. European academia-backed biases: malignant disregard of the spiritual value of Kievan Rus, and absurd focus on ethnic, racial and linguistic considerations
H. Erroneous focus on Kievan Rus and disastrous neglect for Volga Bulgaria
I. Concealment of the historical reality of the Turanian (‘Tatar-Mongol’) period
Содержание
I. Западный антироссийский уклон
II. Умелая западноевропейская фальсификация российской истории
А. Ошибочная контекстуализация археологии Северной Азии
B. Умышленное использование совпадающих терминов: Северная Азия, Сибирь и Скифия.
C. Предыстория и древняя история Северной Азии подчинены современным границам и бессмысленным попыткам «национальной археологии»
D. Неспособность различить Северную Азию во всей ее полноте и истинных размерах
E. Умышленное, многогранное искажение азиатско-туранских миграций.
F. Минимизация катастрофического присутствия и распространенности туранских народов по всей Восточной Европе.
G. Предубеждения, поддерживаемые европейскими академическими кругами: пагубное пренебрежение духовной ценностью Киевской Руси и абсурдная сосредоточенность на этнических, расовых и языковых соображениях.
H. Ошибочное внимание к Киевской Руси и пагубное пренебрежение к Волжской Булгарии
I. Сокрытие исторической реальности туранского («татаро-монгольского») периода
I am not racist either in my conviction or in my expression; Russians are not a Slavic-speaking, Christian nation of Eastern Europe, which was incepted before 450 years. This biased and utterly false definition belongs to the Anglo-French rascals and their inhuman wickedness. Russians are the multiethnic, multilingual, multi-religious, and multicultural nation that lives within and outside the borders of Russian Federation.
I. The Western Anti-Russian Bias
The English, the French and the Dutch are ethnically and culturally unrelated to Ancient Romans; but they intentionally usurped the Roman Heritage while also distorting it.
Even more preposterously, the English, the French and the Dutch inhabit only a small part of the lands ruled by the Ancient Romans; but they deliberately attempted to take control of the lands of the Roman Empire (and of many other territories), and they did so by means of colonies, proxies, regime change, and history falsification. This was instrumental for their need to lay a claim to the heritage of the Roman Imperial.
Contrarily to them, today’s Russians are ethnically and culturally related to the Turanian (Turkic-Mongolian) nations, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Caucasians, and the Northern Indians, i.e. all the major Asiatic nations with which they have interacted for millennia.
Even more importantly, today’s Russians inhabit the lands from where all the ancestors of the aforementioned nations emigrated to conquer the lands in which they dwell nowadays. Viewed diachronically, Russians (in both usages: Россияне and Русские) did not truly invade the lands south and east of Moscow (‘Muscovy’) and later in Sibir (Сибирь/Siberia), North-Northeast Asia, and Central Asia, neither did they assume colonial control over those territories. This is a fallacious reading of History; this preposterous intellectual forgery was indeed conceived-elaborated in and propagated first from the heinous and criminal academic institutions of France, England, and Holland. Interesting reading:
In fact, what has long been described as ‘Russian Conquest of Siberia, Caucasus and Central Asia’ is an effective attempt to reunify and pacify all the various peoples that had been endlessly roaming in the northern part of the so-called Euro-Asiatic landmass.
In reality,
what Genghis Khan achieved in a most formidable and spectacular manner in the 1100s and the 1200s,
what Genghis Khan’s descendants, and in particular Kublai Khan (志祖 /元世祖: Shizu of Yuan), attempted to ensure by dividing their forefather’s empire in the 1200s and the 1300s,
what Timur (Tamerlane) managed to accomplish by establishing an empire from Ganges River to Moscow and from Western Anatolia to the Altai Mountains in the 1300s and the 1400s, ….
… Ivan the Terrible, the Stroganovs (Строгановы/the accent is on the first syllable), and the Romanov (Романовы/the accent is on the penultimate syllable) were successful to implement in the 1500s through the 1800s.
This consisted in an unprecedented achievement and a uniquely outstanding feat, if we take into consideration the countless invasions, the incessant incursions, the endless wars, and the detrimental destructions that used to happen for thousands of years between the Kamchatka Peninsula in the East and Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula in the West.
However, this colossal achievement of pacification did not correspond to the evil targets of the inhuman maritime powers of France, England and Holland; quite contrarily, it damaged their interests irreparably. That is why these criminal states wanted to irrevocably negate the miraculous Russian triumph; and before they managed to demolish it in deeds, they have tried to destroy it in words. This is how and why the Western falsification of the Russian History started. Misperception and partial approach are at the origin of the racist portrayal of Russia by the Western academia.
Whereas the Western European sea powers usurped the Roman past, which does not belong to them, their political and academic elites do not want to accept that Czarist, Soviet and Republican Russia represents the summation of 5000 years of Asiatic civilization, the aggregation of a Turanian-Slavic confederacy, and the paramount example of peaceful multiculturalism.
Few people realize today that, even if the inhabitants of Ukraine did not speak a Russian dialect (which is what is now called Ukrainian ‘language’), the colonial powers of the West would find other victims to hire due to their bribery, corruption, false promises, and other evil techniques.
It is not the ‘Ukrainians’ that the criminal Western powers want to defend; not at all! This is a nave approach. London, Paris, Rome and Washington D.C. fabricate, show, support and promote the ‘Anti-Russians’. If they did not find elements of the local, Ukrainian, elite to first fool, second upend, and third utilize, they would pursue their tactics elsewhere.
It is not the ‘Ukraine’ that the criminal Western powers want to defend; not at all! This is a nave approach. London, Paris, Rome and Washington D.C. soil the Earth with the blood of innocent people caught between the two halves of a vice. The desecration of the land plays an extremely important role in the schemes of the sea powers. Any person, who fails to comprehend the evil spiritual agendas that secret organizations of the West (namely the Jesuits, the Freemasons, and the Zionists) want to implement, cannot have a clue of what this conflict and the forthcoming wars are all about.
(Note: If some readers find it odd that I use the definite article before the name of that land on the first line of the previous paragraph, they must come to terms with the fact that this was the original and correct usage in English in this regard. This in turn makes it automatically clear that Ukraine is not a nation, but a piece of land. These populations were actually never considered to be a nation before the 1990s. As a matter of fact, the definite article is prefixed to names of regions. About the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Ukraine#English_definite_article)
One should not confuse between the smokescreen (mainstream media and all the types of political discourse) used for the useful idiots (the atheists, the materialists, the evolutionists, the modernists, the consumerists, the rationalists, the fanatics, the agnostics, and the extremists) and the upper part of the ruling elites of the Western countries. They are aware -only too well- of their lawlessness, their iniquity, and their forthcoming end, and they try to effectively dissipate their sea (i.e. diabolical) nature, nonsensically shifting the focus on factoids, fake dilemmas, nonexistent concepts, and an enormous array of misinformation paraphernalia, involving false maps, memes, figures of speech, and associated techniques.
II. Skillful Western European Falsification of Russian History
In the previous, first article of the series, I explained the reasons and the targets of the systematic academic effort of the Western European powers to portray Russia as a European country and nation, also stating where it all leads. The article is here:
Russia, Ukraine and the World-I: ‘Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées’
Russian Special Operation in Ukraine: One Year after – 24 February 2023
In the present article, I will enumerate the critical points of Western European falsification of Russian History on which the Western Anti-Russian bias is founded.
A. Erroneous contextualization of Archaeology of Northern Asia
By limiting the study of prehistoric and early historical periods within modern borders and by classifying the material record as per modern, otherwise nonexistent terms, Western archaeologists prevent the adequate exploration of vast spaces within which human activities, cultures and civilizations were boundless because simply the modern (Western European) concepts of ‘state’ and ‘borders’ are worthless filth. In the links below, you get a brief impression of the intentional confusion created around the topic:
B. Deliberate use of overlapping terms: Northern Asia, Siberia, and Scythia
By using terms that are misplaced in time and by recurring to names attested in later historical sources, Western historians prevent the accurate understanding and the comprehensive representation of numerous human societies, cultures, movements, and migrations; the ensuing conclusions are therefore fragmentary and vague. The name of the Scythians is first attested in Assyrian-Babylonian and Achaemenid Iranian cuneiform texts in the 7th–6th c. BCE, but the lack of detailed topographical information makes the use of the term uncertain.
The Khanate of Sibir (Siberia)
Similarly, the name of Siberia (Sibir), which was a Turanian Muslim khanate formed after the dissolution of the enormous empire of Genghis Khan, cannot be used in replacement of the correct term ‘Northern Asia’, because Siberia represents only a small part of the Eurasiatic landmass’ northern circumference. The end result entails the abysmally wrong theory of Pan-Indo-Europeanism and the assumption that the Aryans (or Indo-Iranians, Indo-Europeans) are distinct from the Turkic or Turanian nations. Then, the preconceived, mistaken and absurd linguistic models are projected onto the diverse archaeological findings only to lead historians and explorers to the bogus-historical narrative, as per which no Turanians reached, lived in, and civilized Europe. The links below reveal only a small part of the erroneous schemes of the Western European academia:
——————————– The Andronovo culture misinterpreted / Андроновская культура неверно истолкована ——————————–
Spread of Andronovo culture
Chariot model from the Arkaim Museum
Map in full contradiction of the facts and the findings, geared to conform to agendas
———————————————————————-
C. Prehistory and Ancient History of Northern Asia are subject to modern borders and to the meaningless attempts for ‘national archaeology’
By persistently implementing a fragmentary approach to archaeological-historical research, by disaggregating European Bronze Age cultures from the wider Asiatic landmass (of which Europe is merely a marginal peninsula), and by aptly utilizing the so-called Kurgan hypothesis to ‘demonstrate’ that the Indo-European fallacy exists, the colonialist and racist academia of Western Europe set the foundations of the falsehood that makes of Russia an ‘Eastern European modern nation’. The dire results involve the division lines between the Russians and the Turanian nations, the dissociation of Russians from the great Asiatic civilizations (Mesopotamia – Anatolia, Iran, Indus River Valley, and China), and the removal of Central Asia from its rightful position as the very epicenter of World History.
Kurgan Temir, Arkaim – South Urals
Kurgan sites in NW Iran
The notorious Kurgan hypothesis and Indo-European expansion fallacy
D. Failure to discern Northern Asia in its entirety and true dimensions
Northern Asia has always been the pathway crossed by countless nomads, tribes, clans, families and armies, which sought to either find refuge in the West, i.e. the marginal confines of the Earth, or chase renegades and lawless fugitives there. This is how diverse Asiatics ended up in the faraway periphery that is now called ‘Europe’. This fact and the innumerable details of the process are at the origin of what is called Christian-Muslim, Turco-Mongol tradition. However, the racist Western academia, by failing to see Northern Asia in its correct dimensions, generated fake divisions between ‘Slavs’ and ‘Turanians’, deceitfully and criminally identifying the former with Christianity and the latter with Islam. That’s nonsense!
Nestorian Christianity was a major religion in Central Asia, China, India and Northern Asia. More particularly, there were many Turanian and Mongol adepts of Nestorianism, notably Dokuz Khatun, the wife of the Great Emperor Hulagu. This means that the so-called ‘Turco-Mongol tradition’ existed in reality as early as the 2nd millennium BCE, in spite of the deceitful scheme of the Western academia to describe it merely as a later phenomenon dating back to the 12th and the 13th centuries CE!
E. Deliberate, multifaceted distortion of the Asiatic Turanian Migrations
The term ‘Barbarian Invasions’ consists in heinous vocabulary and compact historical falsehood; it does not only reveal the incorrigibly racist mindset and mentality of the Western European academics and intellectuals, but it also involves a very systematic concealment of the true dimensions and the correct duration of the World History’s most seminal phenomenon. The fallacious representation of this millennia-long event by Western colonial historians is fragmentary and occasional. Whereas this truly momentous historical event generated numerous states, produced diverse cultures, terminated several empires, and facilitated the diffusion of diverse religions, the rancorous, biased Western scholars persistently avoid offering compulsory courses about it. Instead, they intermittently discuss it as an annex of Iranian, Roman or Chinese History. This is an outrage.
At the end, people get the extremely wrong impression that the Asiatic Turanian Migrations occurred in irregular intervals, whereas they constituted an endless development until the formation of modern states. In fact, there is no such period as ‘Migration Period’; the History of Mankind is a permanent migration. Furthermore, many important nations whose migration was recorded in different historical sources almost never appear in the title of a university seminar in spite of the existence of vast documentation.
In addition, an enormous amount of false maps offer a transvestite version of the historical reality. Few examples of distortion can be found here:
Presenting World History as the history of settled populations is the quintessence of racism.
Fake map giving a very partly and very partial idea of the 2nd – 5th c. CE invasions of Asia’s western confines (which are called ‘Europe’); these invasions were one phase of the endless migrations that permanently determine the historical development.
History is an endless movement of people; all are migrants.
The state of Attila threatened Rome and Constantinople
The Hephthalites threatened Sassanid Iran
Another fake map showing that the Slavs came from nowhere or fell from the Moon!
F. Minimization of the cataclysmic presence and prevalence of the Turanian nations throughout Eastern Europe
In fact, from the time of the Turanian Pazyryk culture (Пазырыкская культура / 600-300 BCE; in the Ukok plateau of the Altai Mountains), which was erroneously defined as ‘Scythian’ by the racist Western European academics, an endless process of migrations created, strengthened, weakened and demolished kingdoms and other types of state in Central and Western Asia and as far as Central Europe.
Pazyryk culture in the Altai Mountains, Russia; burial mounds
Pazyryk: close to the borders of Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia
Typical samples of Pazyryk Culture artifacts and archaeological findings
Pazyryk Culture as exhibited in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Actually, the plains of Eastern Europe were already inhabited by Turanian nomads as early as the first years of the Roman Empire; later, the rise of the Turanian Rouran Khaganate (330–555 CE) in Central and Eastern Asia triggered numerous successive migrations because fleeing nomads forced semi-nomads and other migrants to move further to the West. The trajectory followed by the Turanian Tiele (Dili) tribes must have been extremely embarrassing for the disreputable liars of filthy institutions like the universities of England and France; in and by itself, it reveals much – and in full rejection of their interpretational schemes.
Gaochang (高昌/Kocho, near Turfan/Xinjiang-Eastern Turkestan) was invaded by the Rouran Khagan in 460 CE.
With the establishment of the Avar Khaganate (587-825), the rise of the First Turkic Khaganate (552-603), the formation of the Old Great Bulgaria (632-668) in the area of modern times’ Novorossiya and in the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and with the settlement of the Cuman and Kipchak nomads throughout the plains of Ukraine and Russia, massive Turanian populations already inhabited a very large part of Europe. The process only intensified during the Western Turkic Khaganate (581-742), which functioned also as a secure passage from Central Asia to Eastern Europe for many nomadic populations.
Impartial and honest scholars do not need to wait until as late as the 12th and the 13th centuries in order to make state of the arrival of Turanian / Tatar-Mongol populations in Eastern Europe; however, the racist Western European academics do not cover this topic but rather avoid referring to the said period. Unfortunately, this period is rather presented in a summarizing form. The following topics should be taken into account, when one examines closely the History of Eastern Europe from the 1st to the 9th c. CE:
Xi’an, China: tomb of the Sogdian nobleman and trader An Jia. Arrival of a Turkic leader (left); 579 CE
Xi’an, China: tomb of the Sogdian nobleman and trader An Jia. Negotiations between An Jia and a Turkic leader (left); 579 CE
Shoroon Bumbagar tomb mural – Mongolia, 7th c. CE
G. European academia-backed biases: malignant disregard of the spiritual value of Kievan Rus, and absurd focus on ethnic, racial and linguistic considerations
Today for Russians, it is not Kievan Rus that matters most; it’s Volga Bulgaria. All Russians know very well that, when Ivan the Terrible attempted a series of conquests and carried out a unification effort, he basically wanted to bring peace to a vast territory which had already been united under Genghis Khan only to be divided again among his children and grandchildren. In a way, the closest possible parallel to Ivan IV’s effort was Timur’s triumph. None of these two conquerors undertook a religious war. The famous Oprichnina operation fully demonstrates that Ivan IV killed more Christians than Muslims. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprichnina
It was only later that the historical link to the Kievan Rus became preponderant among the elites of the multiethnic, multilingual and multicultural kingdom of Russia. One has also to admit that this Russian link -for many long centuries- was never challenged by any ethnic group, social stratum, or religious/royal authority throughout the territory of Ukraine. The link to Kievan Rus, although historically valid and linguistically arguable, did indeed represent only one of the numerous imperial aspirations that the rising power of Moscow claimed to possess, namely the eschatological.
In other words, it was not an ethnic or national declaration but a spiritual-imperial-ecumenical assertion. And it was quite solemn. Muscovy, as a continuation of the multiethnic state of Kievan Rus, was not the reconstitution of the same state, but a continuity from the spirituality of Vladimir the Great (Владимир Святославич /958-1015; ruled after 980), who was married with (the daughter of the Eastern Roman Emperor Romanos II and the sister of the Eastern Roman Emperor Basil II) Anna Porphyrogenita (Анна Византийская – Άννα Πορφυρογέννητη /963-1011; princess consort after 989), introduced Eastern Roman Orthodox Christianity in his state, and also adopted Eastern Roman Law (Codex Justinianus/Code of Justinian, formally Corpus Juris Civilis: “Body of Civil Law”). About:
Vladimir the Great talks with a Greek theologian about the Christian faith; from the 15th c. Königsberg Chronicle, which is believed to be a copy from the 13th c. Radziwiłł family of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
Kievan Rus was a multiethnic principality without ecumenical ambitions; but Christian Orthodox Muscovy postured as Third Rome, after the Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire (1453), therefore in absolute opposition to, and detrimental rejection of, the schismatic church of Rome whose pope had been excommunicated (1054) by the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael I Cerularius.
Enthronement of Michael I Cerularius, from the Madrid Skylitzes manuscript
The aforementioned facts are enough for any honest explorer to understand that the true importance of Kievan Rus lies in spirituality, and not in the ethnic continuity. Any state that lays claim to Kievan Rus must therefore reject the schismatic Catholic Church in order to be possibly taken seriously. Today’s Russians and Ukrainians are racially / ethnically unrelated to the ethnically diverse populations of Kievan Rus. Russians are the offspring of the numerous ethnicities that were amalgamated over the centuries throughout the space between the river Dniester and the Kamchatka Peninsula, whereas Ukrainians are Russians with linguistic particularities due to the fact that the westernmost parts of the Russian imperial territory had been partly occupied by Poland-Lithuania (formally the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; 1569-1795) and Austria-Hungary.
However, any association with the heretic orders that rule Vatican and the Catholic Church, any relationship with the modern, anti-Christian states of England, France, Holland, and the US, and any tolerance towards (let alone adaptation to) the lawless laws, the blatant immorality, the sexual debauchery and the inhuman anomaly that prevail in the Western world make any claim to Kievan Rus absurd, invalid and ludicrous. In fact, the present pseudo-state of Ukraine is at the very antipodes of the Kievan Rus in every sense.
H. Erroneous focus on Kievan Rus and disastrous neglect for Volga Bulgaria
As I already said, when it comes to the History of Russia, Volga Bulgaria is definitely more crucial than Kievan Rus for the Russians today. This is so because it highlights the Turanian nature of the Slavs; it underscores Islam’s anteriority over Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe, and it also emphasizes the historical reality of the extensive ethnic amalgamation that took place in Eastern Europe for over more than two millennia. These conclusions are not new, and I am not the first to explicitly state these truths, but it will be essential for the Russian establishment to make of them the standard-bearer of the country’s sovereignty and the pinnacle of the national positioning worldwide.
Volga Bulgaria was apparently inhabited by Turanian populations and its capital was located at Bolghar (Болгар), 180 km north of Kazan and more than 900 km east of Moscow. Yet, one of the foremost Muslim geographers, scholars, and leading magistrates of the Abbasid Caliphate, Ibn Khordadbeh (ابن خرداذبه; 820–913) wrote in his grand opus ‘Book of Roads and Kingdoms’ (كِتَاب ٱلْمَسَالِك وَٱلْمَمَالِك/Kitab al Masalik wa ‘l Mamalik) that the ruling title of the khan of Volga Bulgaria was “King of Saqaliba”, i.e. ‘king of (all) Slavs”.
The Iranian Muslim potentate was writing in Baghdad, but exactly the same details can also be found in the famous report (‘Risala’; الرسالة / كتاب إلى ملك الصقالبة) that was composed by Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who was not just a mere traveler but the official delegate of the Abbasid Caliph to the court of Almış, the Great Khan of the Bulgars. Ibn Fadlan, who was invited by the Khan to preach Islam in his kingdom, and was the first to do so in Eastern Europe in 922, called the Great Khan the ‘King of Slavs’, clearly denoting this ruler’s prominence among all the Slavs. This means that Islam was diffused in Eastern Europe no less than 67 years before the prince Vladimir of Kiev accepted Orthodox Christianity.
The Khan (king/’basileus’) of Volga Bulgaria and the Eastern Roman delegates
Modern painter’s imaginative representation of Ibn Fadlan, dressed in white, reading Caliph’s al-Muqtadir proclamation to King of Volga Bulgaria Yiltawar (also known As Aydai Khan); the painting is located in Bolgar State Historical and Architectural Museum, Russia.
Page from ibn Fadlan’s manuscript
The itinerary from Baghdad through Bukhara to Bolgar
B. A. Gilvanov, the arrival of the Caliph’s embassy in Bolghar
Bolgar, capital of Volga Bulgaria according to modern painter’s imagination
Bolghar today
It is quite interesting that the manuscript with the report composed by Ibn Fadlan was found in Mashhad (NE Iran) by the great Bashkir Turanian scholar, intellectual, activist Ahmed Zeki Velidi Togan, one of the most prominent Jadid thinkers. About:
It is however preposterous to see Western scholars like Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, illustrious Sovietologist and permanent secretary of the Académie Française, speak about Batu Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, and state that he pillaged Kiev(1240), while shamelessly hiding the fact that the great Turanian conqueror also invaded and demolished the Muslim kingdom of Volga Bulgaria; in fact, Batu destroyed Bolghar in 1236 before proceeding to the West and unifying those divided territories under his pacifying rule.
Genghis Khan (miniature of a manuscript of Rashid al-Din’s Jami al-Tawarikh)
Even more outrageous is the attempt of the French academician to intentionally misinform her readers and audience by saying that only after the Turanian (the term Tatar-Mongol being inaccurate) conquest of Eastern Europe, Islam was diffused in that vast region for the first time (“La population installe l’islam”; 07:43/ «Les voyageurs au fil des siècles. Découverte de l’espace russe» by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kodw9azYVUI). The truth is that the outright majority of the Eastern European populations were already Muslims for more than 300 years before the thunderous and superb conquests of the illustrious offspring of Genghis Khan.
Khan Batu in the miniature of a manuscript (above) and in the modern popular imagination (below)
I. Concealment of the historical reality of the Turanian (‘Tatar-Mongol’) period
The fallacy of the so-called ‘Tatar-Mongol Occupation of Russia’ and its ‘annex’, namely the pretended ‘Russian Liberation from the Tatars’, complete the wicked assemblage of distorted facts, misinterpreted events, delusional factoids and gibberish discourse that the racist Western European academics teach as “Russian History” in their vicious universities. In fact, there is no ‘Mongol’ but Turanian presence throughout Eastern Europe; but this started more than seven (7) centuries before the destruction of Kievan Rus by Batu Khan. The so-called Mongol invasions were simply an internal Turanian affair. There were no anti-Christian feelings during the conquest of Kievan Rus, pretty much like there was no anti-Muslim sentiment during the invasion of Volga Bulgaria.
‘Tatar-Mongol’ is a charlatanesque term deliberately used in order to diffuse wrong impressions and erroneous conceptualization of the historical events; the invading armies were Turanian. The local populations in Volga Bulgaria, Cuman-Kipchak confederation, Kievan Rus, Christian Alania, Vladimir-Suzdal, and Khazaria were predominantly of Turanian origin too. How could one scholar possibly speak of a ‘Turanian occupation of Turanians’? This would be an oxymoron.
For this reason, the Western European factories of falsehood, which pretend to be ‘centers of learning’, produce fake names in order to plunge the non-specialists and the credulous victims of their propaganda into endless confusion, thus positioning their deceitful narrative. One can describe the Turanian invasions of Genghis Khan and his descendants as a ‘civil war’ among Turanians or even as fratricidal clashes that spanned across Asia (with Europe being just an Asiatic peninsula). However, these events, in spite of the great number of casualties, were in reality merciless conflicts of tribal leaderships; the causes for them were issues of spiritual purity, moral integrity, Turanian identity, and imperial honesty.
The racist historians and the biased intellectuals of the Western European countries lack the academic ability, the free will, and the fair judgment to view things as they truly happened and in the way their champions felt them at the time. By continually projecting their immoral mindsets, worthless values, and conceited character, they get a shallow understanding of each historical development, and they always fail to fathom that it did not happen as they could expect or even imagine. Then, when the historical facts have to be distorted enough in order to be adjusted to the criminal agendas of the Western European elites and the colonial governments, their bigotry and partiality reach the level of madness.
The myth of the ‘Tatar-Mongol Occupation of Russia’ is the key ruse point of the racist Western historiography about Russia. This is the result of the discriminatory theory of racial purity. This approach was subtly diffused among Russian academic, intellectual and political elites over centuries; it forces Russians to believe that they were initially a small country which later expanded. This is wrong. Nations are not races with racist elites, but cultural communities organized in culture-based states that are open to all the inhabitants, and secret organizations have no right to exist.
Russians must not feel closer to Kievan Rus than to Volga Bulgaria and the other Turanian states of Asia and Europe that stretched at the time over today’s Russian territory; preponderantly, Russians are ethnically the offspring of all the Turanian khanates and nations, which were formed throughout the territory of Russia and several adjacent states. Slavicization (Russification) came later. Studying the topic of the Turanian invasions, Russians should not feel sentimentally linked to Kievan Rus. Their ancestors were truly on both sides of the war.
The 16th c. pledge made to Kievan Rus by the Muscovite authorities was entirely spiritual and eschatological, not ethnic – let alone political. This must become crystal clear, because it will play a decisive role in the much needed, forthcoming victory of Russia and annexation of Ukraine. Russians today must emancipate themselves from the czarist need for a European Russia; they have to envision their remote past as an all-encompassing heritage,
Representations of eschatological concepts involving Kievan Rus and Third Rome-Russia
As intentionally racist fabrication of the Western academia, the so-called ‘Tatar-Mongol Occupation of Russia’ is fully refuted and utterly invalidated by historical facts and sources that the disreputable professors of English, French, Dutch, Belgian, American, Canadian, Australian and other universities do their ingenious best to hide. In fact, from the middle of the 13th to the middle of the 16th c., there were no religious fanaticism, ethnic enmity and social divisions throughout Eastern Europe.
On the contrary, after the incorporation of the Kievan Rus, there were frequent mixed marriages at all levels; as they were fluent in Turkic dialects, numerous Rus princes quite often got unreservedly married with Turanian princesses, thus getting the favor of their Emperor of the Golden Horde. There was no rancor and no hatred from the Christians against the Tengrists and the Muslims and vice versa, in striking contrast to what the villainous Anglo-French scholars ruthlessly attempt to represent, further drawing their lines of division. One can publish endless series of volumes, stating facts and referring to historical sources that totally discredit the criminal Western European academics, their vicious fallacies, and their murderous pseudo-historical divisive lines.
A typical example is the case of the prince Yuri Danilovich (Юрий Данилович; 1281-1340/prince of Moscow/Muscovy after 1303), who was vassal of the Sultan Giyas al-Din Mohammed Öz Beg (غیاث الدین محمد /Султан Гийас ад-Дин Мухаммед; 1282-1341; reigned after 1313/also known as Özbeg Khan /Узбек-хан / اوزبیک خان), the great emperor of the Golden Horde. Giyas al-Din Mohammed was born Tengrist, but accepted Islam before being coronated. Yuri Danilovich managed to get married with the emperor’s sister Konchaka (Кончака; died 1318), who was authorized to become Christian Orthodox; Yuri Danilovich’s loyalty to the Golden Horde -at the very moment the vast empire adopted Islam as official religion- fully shows that at the time everything was very different from the vicious, divisive narrative that Western academics have ceaselessly and shamelessly have propagated. About:
Due to the fact that Rus/Slavic-Turanian Christianity was the Orthodox faith (and not the schismatic Catholic heresy), the two more systematized faiths were viewed as they truly are, i.e. quasi-identical, and this facilitated the conversions from either side. In this regard, a typical example is Tsarevich (Czarevitch) Peter Ordynsky (i.e. Peter of the Horde; Пётр Ордынский/died 1290), who was also known as Peter Rostovsky (Пётр Ростовский) or Dair Kaydagul Orda-Ichinov (Даир Кайдагул Орда-Ичинов); great-grandson of Genghis Khan, nephew of Batu Khan and Berke (or Birkai) Khan (Бәркә хан; died 1266), the prince of the Golden Horde was the son of prince Orda-Ejen (or Orda Ichen) and grandson of Jochi. He accepted Christianity; he was baptized Peter and he saw formidable spiritual visions. Then, Bishop Ignatius of Rostov {Игнатий I (епископ Ростовский); died 1288} solemnly declared Peter Ordynsky and Boris Vasil’kovich (1231-1277) brothers under the vaults of the church; the latter was the vassal -to the Golden Horde- prince of Rostov. Before dying, Peter Ordynsky became a monk and established a monastery; he was early canonized in 1547. About:
Berke Khan; painting by the distinguished Tatar painter Rushan Shamsutdinov (born 1946; Рушан Галяфович Шамсутдинов) on the basis of the description by the 14th c. Coptic Christian historian Al-Mufaddal ibn Abi al-Fada’il (المفضل بن ابي الفضائل) who wrote a historical book about the Mamluks, also including a report about the visit of a state visit (1263) to the palace of the Jochi Ulus.
Other illustrious cases of noble intermarriages between Christian Rus princes and Turanian imperial families involve Gleb Vasil’kovich (Глеб Василькович; 1238-1278), who was the first prince of Beloozero (Белозерское княжество; 1238–1486), another small vassal state of the Golden Horde, and St. Fyodor the Black (also known as Theodore Rostislavich / Феодор Ростиславич Чёрный; ca. 1233-1299), another vassal of the Golden Horde and ruler of Smolensk and Yaroslavl, who was later (1463) canonized. The former got married with one of the daughters of Sartaq Khan (Сартак), who was the oldest son of the conqueror Batu Khan; and the latter wedded the daughter of Möngke Temür (or Munkh Tumur/ Мангутемир; died in 1280), who was the grandson of Batu Khan.
Coin of Möngke (Mengu) Timur Khan; Bulghar mint 1273
Built by Batu Khan, Sarai was the capital of the Golden Horde and the world’s most refined, most lavish, and most marvelous city of the 14th c.; amongst others, Ibn Battuta visited and described the Muslim world’s true capital of those days. One century later, Sarai was depicted in the map designed by the Venetian cartographer Fra Mauro around 1450.
I will continue in the next article of the series; but at this point, I have to conclude that for the Russians the only path to victory involves
a) an accurate perception of their historical identity as a non-European, Asiatic Empire, and
b) a resolute rejection of the misperceptions, the inaccuracies, the distortions and the divisive sentimentalism that Western colonial historians and academics projected onto them in order to confuse them and make them unable to exploit in the best possible manner the chances that History offered to Northern Asia.
Napoleon I Bonaparte, who failed to win over the Russians, knew it, understood it and said it; but today’s criminal Western regimes do their best to hide the statement.
“Dig up a Russian and you will find a Tatar!”
1812 – Napoleon retreats from Moscow as it burns; painting by Viktor Mazurovsky (1859-1944)
Today’s Russian leadership must make the big leap; in it, they will have to combine
– Genghis Khan’s military acumen,
– Tamerlane’s martial ingenuity,
– Ivan IV’s imperial tenacity, and
– Nikolai II’s pledge to Kievan Rus-Third Rome.
But all these mental faculties, personal advantages, and moral challenges will need to be backed by the adamant spirituality and the concealed forcefulness that typified Stalin only 70 years ago.
Yet, it will be up to the forthcoming Last Czar to manifest the vitality that will irrevocably remove the Anglo-French perfidy and the Roman outrage from the surface of the Earth.
Russia, Ukraine and the World-I: ‘Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées’
Russian Special Operation in Ukraine: One Year after – 24 February 2023
Россия, Украина и мир-I: «Москва, равнины Украины и Елисейские поля»
Российская спецоперация в Украине: год спустя – 24 февраля 2023 г.
Содержание
I- Историческая справка
II- Западный колониализм против России: проекция фальшивых концепций и исторической лжи на российские элиты
III- Западный уклон: европеизация России как дерусификация
IV- Где заканчивается заблуждение европейской России?
V- Ложная идентичность для россиян означает поражение в большой игре (в Войне теней)
VI- Падение Романовых: из-за ложной концепции «России как европейской империи»
Contents
I- The Historical Background
II- Western Colonialism against Russia: Projection of Fake Concepts and Historical Falsehood onto Russian Elites
III- Western Bias: Russia’s Europeanization as De-Russification
IV- Where does the Fallacy of European Russia End?
V- False Identity for Russians means Defeat in the Great Game
VI- The Fall of the Romanov: due to the False Concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’
Before almost 60 years, a famous French song offered the most convincing, artistic yet not academic, proof of the indivisibility that characterizes Moscow and the plains of Ukraine; it was the famous hit ‘Nathalie’ performed by Gilbert Bécaud (1964). The verses described the case of a flirt between a male French tourist and a female Russian guide.
So legendary this song became, thus breaking the ice of the aptly stage-managed Cold War (just like France under Charles de Gaulle had superbly withdrawn from the otherwise useless NATO ‘alliance’ one year earlier: on the 21st July 1963) that the famous but purely hypothetical Café Pouchkine (café Pushkin), mentioned in the song’s verses as a meeting point for the French tourist and Nathalie, became real in 1999 (Ресторан «Кафе Пушкинъ»).
Dans la salle des Conférences, de gauche à droite, Messieurs Couve de Murville, Brejnev, le général de Gaulle et Monsieur Podgorny, à Moscou, URSS le 22 juin 1966General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (R) and French President George Pompidou at the airport.
Actually, it was there that Chirac encountered Putin and created a political friendship that marked the 2000s.
And it is this song that makes state of the geographical and historical unity that exists between the Red Square and the plains of Ukraine; when the verses describe the bond between the French tourist and Nathalie, the respective backgrounds are narrated in order to offer a spectacular impression of the two lands. In this metaphor, the French tourist is represented by the illustrious Champs-Élysées Avenue in Paris, whereas Moscow and the plains of Ukraine speak for Nathalie.
“Moscou, les plaines d’Ukraine et les Champs-Élysées, οn à tout melangé et l’on à chanté” (Moscow, the plains of Ukraine, and the Champs Elysees; we got them all mixed up and we sang).
I- The Historical Background
Now, this song appears to be the lost ruin of a remote past; however, this impression is entirely false, being due to the excessive propaganda made as regards this subject. Ignorant rascals promoted to ‘authors’ or ‘intellectuals’, criminal liars masqueraded as ‘journalists’ or ‘geopolitical experts’ produced an enormous volume of nonsensical trashy literature in support of the undeniable UK-US-NATO involvement in the purely Russian land named Ukraine.
If Ukraine consists today in the greatest threat to worldwide peace, this is due to the lack of proper reaction against the incessant evildoing, which started as early as the 1990s. In fact, many people are presently able to fathom that the times of Adenauer and de Gaulle are definitely bygone for Europe; this is due to numerous grave mistakes which were made by the rather mean and apparently incompetent people who succeeded these great statesmen. That is why the assessment of what happened in Ukraine is rather an effort of meditation à la recherche du temps perdu (in search of the lost time/в поисках утраченного времени).
The problem with the examination of the root causes of the present Ukrainian quagmire is the fact that, if we widen the context of our search, the origin of the trouble appears to be even older. Then, the beginning of the ordeal goes back to the time of Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Khrushchev, Nicholas II Romanov, and Alexander II or rather Peter I (the Great), the boyar (aristocrat) Vasily Golitsyn (1643-1714; Василий Васильевич Голицын) and the Treaty or Perpetual Peace (Вечный мир; 1686), when Russia recovered Kiev from Poland.
Similarly, we can go back in time incessantly transposing the problem; we can reach the time of Michael of Russia (Михаил Фёдорович Романов; 1596-1645), Filaret (Feodor Nikitich Romanov/ Фёдор Никитич Романов; 1553-1633), Boris Godunov (Борис Фёдорович Годунов; 1552-1605), Nikita Romanovich (Никита Романович; 1522-1586), Ivan IV Vasilyevich (known as The Terrible/Иван Васильевич Грозный; 1530-1584), Ivan III of Moscow (Иван III Васильевич; 1440-1505) who got married with Zoe (renamed Sophia Palaiologina/Софья фоминична Палеолог; 1449-1503), the niece of the last Eastern Roman Emperor with the blessings of the great enemy of Orthodox Christianity, the Pope Paul II.
However, this method is futile; even if we go back to the time of the so-called Vasily I of Moscow, who was merely a prisoner of the Emperor Tokhtamysh, the ruler of the Blue and White Hordes (Тухтамыш/Tuqtamış, توقتمش; 1342-1406), when Moscow (or Muscovy) was merely a Tatar village, if we refer to the days of Dmitry Donskoy (Дмитрий Иванович Донской; 1350-1389) and if we direct attention to the period of Daniil Aleksandrovich (Даниил Александрович; 1261-1303), the youngest son of Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky (Александр Ярославич Невский; 1221-1263) ‘prince of Kiev’, we consistently encounter scarce documentation, later sources, excessive postulation, false interpretation, intentional distortion, concealment of intentions and facts, undeniable destruction of the material record, sectarian historiography, biased narratives, and -in one word- complete reconstruction of the historical evolution.
Vasily I of Moscow (Василий I Дмитриевич) and Sophia Palaiologina represented on the vestment (sakkos) of Photius (14th c.–1431), metropolitan of Kiev (in Moscow)
The Emperor of the Blue and White Hordes Tokhtamysh as represented in a miniature of the Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible
Tamerlane advancing against Tokhtamysh
But there was no Ukraine at the time of the Kievan Rus kingdom; no land, no country, no people and no language of ‘Ukraine’. In fact, any person well versed in Slavic and Russian linguistics knows that this word originates from the term ‘krai’, which denotes basically an administrative division in Modern Russian. Present in most Slavic languages, ‘krai’ means ‘edge’, ‘territory’ or ‘region’; in Czech, it is okraj.
‘Ukraina’ means then the border areas or the confine / periphery of a land.
There were no Ukrainians at the time of the Kievan Rus kingdom (882-1240) for a very good reason: there were no ‘Russians’ properly speaking. The amalgamated populations of the rather tiny state varied; they were basically Turanian, Slavic, Teutonic (: German) and Scandinavian. The entirely fake History of Eastern Europe, as it was fabricated by Western European and North American universities over the past 200-300 years, involves a great number of disinformation tools. The three main subjects that the colonial forgers of England, France and America worked laboriously to effectively conceal are the following:
– the overwhelming presence of Turanian peoples in Eastern Europe eclipses by far the existence of nomads and settlers of other origin;
– the early Slavic populations (Saqaliba) were considered by all historical Islamic authors as integral part of the Turanian nations;
– the diffusion of Islam in the wider region of today’s Ukraine and European provinces of Russia antedates the propagation of Christianity in the same lands; and
– the fallacy of Europe as a continent.
Kubrat’s Bulgaria, ca. 650 CE
The Bulgarians divided by the Khazars, 9th c.
Kimek–Kipchak confederation
Kievan Rus was a small multi-ethnic Christian state with significant Turanian population
Volga Bulgaria was an enormous Eastern European Turanian kingdom that accepted Islam long before the Kievan Rus adopted Eastern Roman Christianity.
With respect to the aforementioned three circles of topics, numerous academic terms have often been deliberately used in order to distort the truth in front of the eyes of non-specialized readership. Even worse, scores of scrupulously forged, fake maps have also been produced and they are abundant in books, scholarly reviews, mass media, and the Internet, whereas in many cases, simply they are absent, because they gravely disturb the fabricated myths and the vicious lies that Western Europe’s criminal academics and disreputable universities intend to present as ‘History’. Examples:
II- Western Colonialism against Russia: Projection of Fake Concepts and Historical Falsehood onto Russian Elites
The aforementioned reality heavily impacts all forces, regimes and governments, scholars and journalists involved in the present conflict. This is so because, before they became active parts in the ongoing military confrontation, they were entirely formed educationally-intellectually-academically-culturally-ideologically by means of an enormous amount of forged concepts and historical distortions (i.e. of so-called ‘myths’) that they unconsciously accepted and calamitously believed and which led them to the decisions and the acts that caused the Ukrainian quagmire. In other words, the Western anti-Russian racism and the intention of the Western colonial centers to effectively colonize Russia existed since the late 15th and the 16th centuries; simply this attempt would not be materialized at the military level but otherwise.
Even more troublesome is the fact that these destructive concepts and distortions are not only a matter of our time, but also of the historical past (the last 500-570 years). In other words, this affair concerned many generations of Russians, who lived and acted, decided and performed under the impact of concepts forged and distortions made by Western European and North American scholars, diplomats, statesmen, agents and intellectuals. I don’t mention the Ukrainians at all here, because simply they are Russians, either they like it or not; in addition, the negation of the Russian identity of the populations that inhabit the plains of Ukraine is the last propagated Western fallacy and crime.
The victims of the said propaganda can easily understand the veracity of my previous statement, if they search in every historical book, every encyclopedia, every scholarly publication, every review, magazine and newspaper published before 1910 worldwide in order to find the term “Ukrainian nation” or “nation of Ukraine”; after a long effort, they will fail, because simply there was never an Ukrainian nation and not one government accepted such a nonsense before 1910. But this is another issue.
Speaking about generations of Russians confused and deceived by Western lies and historical falsehood, I imply mainly that the ‘myths’ of yesterday generated the wrong decision-making of today, and the misperceptions of today trigger the mistakes of tomorrow. There has therefore been a chain of lies (diffused by the Western powers and believed in Russia) and mistakes (made by the Imperial, Soviet and Republican establishments) that has lasted for about five (5) centuries. In fact, it antedates the Romanov dynasty and it foregoes the birth of Ivan IV the Terrible.
Ivan IV the Terrible: an Asiatic monarch fluent in Turkic languages
Even the way 19th c. Russian painters viewed their past fully demonstrates that they knew that their identity was Asiatic and Oriental, i.e. not Western and not European; Pyotr Korovin’s painting (1890) depicts Ivan IV in Kazan.
This topic is not easily identified, let alone understood, by today’s Russian academic, educational, intellectual and political establishment. And it constituted always an unknown and unscrutinized point that led to divisions, defeats, troubles or -even worse- failures to exploit splendid opportunities. So serious it is that it affects the Russians’ perception of their true national and imperial identity. Why? Because this was the foremost target of the pernicious Western colonial establishments as regards Russia.
All these distortions and falsifications undertaken by the major centers of power in Western Europe (Rome, Paris and London) have indeed a common denominator; this was the Western colonialism, namely the conquest of the world, and the imposition of vicious and evil intellectual, pseudo-religious, academic, educational, scientific and sociopolitical establishments, which totally dismantle and utterly destroy the local culture and civilization, faith and spirituality, traditions and behavioral systems (the way of life) wherever it is spread. As this reproach hinges on the criminal acts of the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the English that are known as the main colonial powers, many will react pretending that Muscovy/Russia was never colonized.
This is exactly what Russians never paid attention at! In fact, what I state consists in a very subtle form of intellectual, academic, artistic, educational, scientific, ideological, socio-behavioral and imperial/political colonialism. In fact, the Western colonial establishments composed myths and elaborated falsifications that they subsequently projected onto the Russians without them realizing the trap, because they were nominally independent and eventually a militarily formidable state. The reason for this enduring but unnoticed development is double:
– first, the trap appeared as a propulsion, a praise, and a glorification of Russia; and
– second, it was linked with Russia’s apparent modernization, consolidation and fortification.
III- Western Bias: Russia’s Europeanization as De-Russification
In fact, the Western colonial establishments diffused numerous false concepts and scores of historical falsification which would drastically incapacitate the Russian state (Росийская держава/ Rossiskaya derzhava) from making most of its chances to prevail worldwide as a Christian Orthodox Oriental state inhabited mainly by Asiatic and Turanian peoples. Initially, the Western effort took the form of ‘taming’ or (even more provocatively) ‘civilizing’ the supposedly brutal Russians; in other words, they attempted to gradually ‘Europeanize’ Russia, but in this case there are four critical parameters, namely
– first, 17th c. ‘Europe’ was a nebulous, false, and truly revisionist concept that negated the true historical evolution from the Scythian, Cimmerian, Celtic, Punic and Roman Antiquity down to the Fall of Constantinople (1453) and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494);
– second, the concept of ‘Europe’ was then overwhelmingly rejected by the outright majority of the European nations, irrespective of ethnic origin, language, religion (Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism), and state;
– third, in reality, this bogus-concept was essentially the method of few Western European powers to colonize the Germans, the Russians, and the numerous other nations of Eastern Europe, by destroying their cultures, traditions and faiths and by projecting onto them the vicious and evil falsehood (and version of bogus-historical narrative) that Rome, Paris and London had fabricated in straightforward denial of their Christian past; and
– fourth, cultural Europeanization was aptly confused with scientific-technological modernization, which was apparently sought after by Russian monarchs, who were willing to consolidate their vast, apparently Oriental and Asiatic, empire.
Renaissance and all the subsequent Western European intellectual movements are the epitome of worldwide revisionism or anti-historical revanchism. However, to fully comprehend the intertwined nature of Renaissance and Colonialism, one has to realize that the first to be colonized were the colonial countries themselves, namely Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England; this is valid in the sense that these lands were the first to succumb to the evil and inhuman elites that masterminded, concocted and later spread the spiritual disease of the Renaissance, thus taking hold of the local power due to their schemes (initiating kings, noblemen and priests into evil religious orders).
Confusing modernization with Europeanization, Peter I helped Europeans colonize his own country, thinking that this torturous deformation of Russia’s identity, nature and character could ever be beneficial.
Pyotr Potyomkin: an entirely Oriental and Asiatic, Russian diplomat and statesman
When it comes to Russia’s enduring Europeanization, which proved to be absolutely calamitous for all Russians and for the Russian state’s natural interests, the kingdom of France played a great role, already before Peter I the Great (Пётр I/Пётр I Алексеевич; 1672-1725). From the days of Jacques Margaret (1565-1619), Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) and Pyotr Potyomkin (also spelled Potemkin; Пётр Ива́нович Потёмкин; 1617-1700 / distant relative of Grigory Potemkin, the 18th c. statesman in whose honor was named the early 20th c. Battleship Potemkin), dense series of cultural, intellectual and imperial exchanges started taking place.
First, travelers wrote about Russia, pejoratively depicting the country and the people as purely ‘backward’; simply because corruption, faithlessness, evilness, debauchery and lawlessness did not have any place in the Russian Empire, and the local morals had not softened as in Western Europe, Russia appeared to those Western Europeans as ‘uncivilized’. Then, historians and linguists, philologists and historians of art started therefore writing about the vast empire, which they wanted to represent as they wished it to be, and not as it truly was. Furthermore, scores of Italian architects were dispatched to Russia, whereas countless German princesses married Russian noblemen and princes only to corrupt the land from the top to the bottom. About:
In fact, what even today’s Russians seem to easily forget is that, due to the need of modernization, several Russian czars opened the way to Europeanization, which was tantamount to utter de-Russification. Catherine II {1729-1796; Екатерина II; born as German princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst / София Августа Фредерика фон Анхальт-Цербст-Дорнбург (Романова)} had to appear at times in the Russian national costume (also involving veil) and at times in her Western dresses. About:
IV- Where does the Fallacy of European Russia End?
It caused an undeniably deep division inside the Russian Empire, because the Christian priests, monks and laymen reacted to what they considered rather as Satanization of Holy Russia. If I expanded on the topic, it is due to the fact that the aforementioned situation still today affects Russia directly. For instance, when Putin speaks positively about Peter the Great, this constitutes in fact an oxymoron, because at the same time, the Russian president opposes Russia’s Europeanization today. But this is the whole problem: in fact, Peter ‘the Great’ (?), in his time, was acting in the exactly opposite direction from that of Russia’s incumbent president.
I fully support President Putin’s efforts to block the spread of Western lawlessness, inhumanity, corruption and putrefaction in Russia; more importantly, the outright majority of the Russians today support him in this effort, irrespective of faith, ethnic origin, language, and culture. However, the truth is that Peter I acted differently (and very mistakenly as per my evaluation), willing to oppose and diminish the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Russian education and culture. So, I have to admit that Ivan the Terrible, Tamerlane, Stalin or even Genghis Khan are far more suitable prototypes and heroes for today’s Russia in the great national effort to defend the land from the evil intentions of the criminals who rule the West. Then, the fact that this discrepancy obviously exists today only jeopardizes Russia’s national interests and clarity as regards the national identity of the great country.
——————————————————-
The greatest Russians of all times: Genghis Khan (above), Timur/Tamerlane (middle) and Stalin (below)
——————————————————-
In a way, it would make sense if Russia’s liberal opposition, which consists in a shame and a disgrace for all Russians, expanded much on Peter I as the model. If they want to introduce in Russia today the Western European and North American decadence, depravity and decay, thinking that this is ‘modernization’, it is Peter I who took similar measures before 300 years openly supporting the presence and spread of Freemasonic lodges in his empire; but this development had negative impact on Russia’s pledge to the Holy Rus, the Kievan kingdom. About:
Putin compares modern-day Russia to the times of Peter the Great on tsar’s 350th anniversary
The scrupulously elaborated and systematically projected onto all the successive Russian establishments (Imperial, Soviet and Republican) concept of Russia as a European nation is the Western countries’ most fallacious distortion and most pathetic falsity about the vast country. It repeatedly damaged gravely the national interests of Russia. As a forgery, it helps identify the real intentions of Russia’s permanent enemies; to them, Russia would then be ‘good’ if limited in a portion of European Russia’s territory, let’s say in the triangle St Petersburg, Volgograd and Nizhny Novgorod, thus sending Moscow back to the 1500s.
The Western fallacy of a ‘European Russia’ provides with an expiry date for what the Russian Empire has always been. With Russia ‘becoming’ a state double the size of Ukraine, with the entire Caucasus region in flames, with an independent Tatarstan (enlarged with the annexation of Bashkortostan, Chuvashia and Udmurtia), and with the secession of a Karelia-Komi-Nemets ‘state’ in the North, the path will be open for the detachment and colonization of Siberia and Northern Asia by the criminal Western European and North American colonial gangsters.
V- False Identity for Russians means Defeat in the Great Game
In addition to fallacy, deception, corruption and historical forgery, the existence of ‘colonial empires’ involves a lengthy and meticulous agenda for all continents, target prioritization, and -above all- deception continuity and, if necessary, adaptation. Whereas the British and the French colonial empires were not dissolved but merely transformed after the end of WW II (with scores of unsuspicious, credulous, and subservient Asiatics, Eastern Europeans, Africans and Latin Americans endlessly enrolling to ‘study’ in the colonial universities-factories of falsehood), the dissolution of the Russian (or Soviet) Empire became a constant parameter of the perverse and criminal expansionism of the Western powers. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, they insist on the dissolution of the Russian Federation that they persistently depict as a ‘vast’ Russian ‘Empire’. To the Russians, this sounds as merely Western propaganda, and this is right – but only up to a certain extent. Quite unfortunately and more importantly, this is also historiography, colonial conceptualization, and foreign policy target.
The ‘reason’ that the Western academics, experts, diplomats and statesmen evoke in order to possibly justify their claims and demands, policies and targets is founded on the concept of ‘European Russia’ that they had long created and projected onto their agents (or interlocutors or sympathizers of ‘brothers’ or friends) in Imperial Russia. In 1850 or 1900, these naïve Russians, who believed in the good intentions of the evil Western administrations, could not understand where this vicious concept leads to; had they survived until 2022-2023, they would have understood very clearly the erroneous choice that they had made.
Who were these agents of the Western establishments?
Sergei Witte
They were high rank Russian academics, noblemen, generals, and quite often members of the imperial family; when it comes to German princesses, they were the embodiment of Russia’s Europeanization, because Germans, who are also an Asiatic origin nation, had been Europeanized, i.e. corrupted, first. Politicians and members of the State Duma (Государственная дума/Gasudarstvennaya Duma), ministers and even prime ministers, the likes of Witte (Sergei Witte/Сергей Юльевич Витте; 1849-1915), Stolypin (Pyotr Stolypin/Пётр Аркадьевич Столыпин: 1862-1911, assassinated) and, last but not least, Kerensky (Alexander Kerensky/Александр Фёдорович Керенский; 1881-1970), were the leading agents of the Western states and establishments, not in the sense of payroll agent of foreign countries, but due to their confusion between modernization and Europeanization.
Alexander Kerensky
Later, after the October revolution, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (also known as Leon Trotsky/Лев Троцкий; 1879-1940) became the main champion of Russia’s foremost Europeanization; his paranoid theory of permanent revolution is the quintessence of Western European colonialism. In fact, by this term, Trotsky merely denoted the accomplished status of Asia’s, Africa’s and Latin America’s Europeanization. English colonials had a rather shorter way to describe it: “Make the world England”.
Villainous rascal and paranoid gangster Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Trotsky
It is not a coincidence that Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization also involved Ukraine’s annexation of Russian Crimea; it was apparently due to Khrushchev’s latent but extant Trotskyism. This was also attested in the case of Khrushchev’s attempt to breach the territorial integrity of the Kazakh SSR. About:
Kazakhstan from the Göktürks (Celestial Turks) and Genghis Khan to the Jadid Intellectuals to Nursultan Nazarbayev, ch. XVIII unit c:
What matters most in this regard are not the persons, but the calamitous results brought about following the projection of this malicious concept onto Russia; one has also to take into consideration the opportunities that the Russian Empire lost due to the confusion between technological modernization and Europeanization that prevailed in the minds of the Russian elites.
To many it may sound bizarre that Rome, France and England first, and the US at a later stage, supported and promoted or tolerated the expansion of the Russian Empire during several centuries (16th-19th) only to plan to split and dismember it at a later stage; however, this colonial attitude is not strange at all. It only demonstrates the permanent and menacing character of the Western colonialism. The Imperial Russian expansion in the Black Sea and the Caucasus regions, in Northern and Northeastern Asia, and later in Central Asia was aptly utilized by the colonial powers, England and France, as an instrument necessary for the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, Safavid-Afshar-Qajar Iran, and Qing China.
A critical moment of the Great Game: the Russian invasion of Samarkand (1868); from the painting of Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin (Николай Николаевич Каразин; 1842-1908)
To view it correctly, the inception and the projection of the false concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’ is tantamount to declaration of war against Russia; historically, it consists in the birth certificate of the Great Game. It definitely constitutes an act of enmity against Asia in its entirety and against all the historical nations, cultures, and empires of Asia, which -throughout the millennia- civilized the barbarians of Asia’s most worthless and most pathetic peninsula: Europe.
VI- The Fall of the Romanov: due to the False Concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’
In brief, the subtle but venomous, slow and multilayered projection of the concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’ onto the Russian elites prevented the czars from forging an alliance with the sultan at Constantinople, the shah at Esfahan, the Great Mughal (Shahanshah-e Hindustan/شاهنشاهی هندوستان) at Delhi, and the Tianzi (Son of Heaven/天子) at Beijing in order to set up a common front against the European colonial expansionism in Asia and drown the colonial gangsters in the sea.
Ottoman Empire (end 16th c.)
Safavid Iran (early 16th c.)
Mughal Empire (early 18th c.)
Qajar Iran (19th c.)
The aforementioned point alone stands as convincing proof that Russians today must rewrite their National History, removing Western European revisionism, distortions, fake concepts, and historical falsehood, in order to allow for a veracious, true and accurate perception of Russian History; this would definitely lead to the formation of a consummate, all-encompassing, and genuine Russian national identity, which would be the solid foundation of every decision-making process.
Qing China 19th-early 20th c.
An example of the extremely calamitous impact that a) the false concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’, b) the erroneous perception of the Russian national identity, and c) the mistaken, hitherto colonially written History of Russia exerted on the imperial decision-making is Nicholas II’s alliance with France and England before and during WW I. Acting under the confusion triggered by the aforementioned parameters, the last of the czars, although recently canonized, led his empire from defeat to defeat, his people to certainly undeserved death, and his throne to an end.
It is impermissible for a continental empire to ever make an alliance with maritime powers, which by definition constitute the embodiment of falsehood, inhumanity, barbarism, and evilness; this fact leads to destruction, because as an expression of the sea, i.e. the aboriginal chaos, sea powers play always a destructive role in the human affairs until they are annihilated – which is what they always deserve.
World History, Spiritual Revelation, and Human Civilization are the exclusive domain of continental empires, land kingdoms, and societies closely related with plains, plateaus, hills, mountains and valleys. Coastal states existed, but they never generated civilizations; at their best, they rather reflected the values, the concepts, the virtues and the principles that were identified, cherished and defended first by societies developed far from the sea.
In the eve of what is, conventionally and mistakenly, called World War One (in fact, it is an episode of the Great Game), Russia and Austria-Hungary were ostensibly continental empires; Germany and Italy, in spite of their, then recent, colonial expansion in Africa were continental empires that occupied overseas lands only to prevent England and France from further enlarging their monstrous colonial empires that spread death, oppression, corruption and inhumanity worldwide. This means that, after the disintegration of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, the only maritime powers were England and France and, to lesser extent, Holland and Belgium.
Imperial Russia’s misfortunate alliance with Paris-controlled Serbia was an awful trap. All other circumstances and instances, events and incidents cannot weigh-in on a proper decision-making, when the fundamental principles and the theoretical prescriptions impose a resolute approach based on identity consideration, foe identification, and strategic alliance evaluation.
The alliance with France and England was for Russia the stupidest decision ever made by any czar, also consisting in the Act of Death Certificate for the Romanov dynasty. England, as an island, cannot exist as an independent state as per the criteria of every historical continental empire. If one takes into account the despise with which all the great historical rulers and emperors from Sargon of Akkad to Alexander the Great to Tamerlane looked down at all the islands in general, one gets conclusive evidence about the worthlessness of the islands in terms of civilization, spiritual authority, and imperial rule.
Similarly, ever since her devilish inception, France was the foothold of a maritime monster that unfortunately Justinian I and General Belisarius failed to eliminate; the Merovingian myth details in length the abominable deeds of the Quinotaur, the maritime beast-ancestor of the villainous Merovingian dynasty, thus fully unveiling the evil nature of that state irrespective of the form that it may take. Unfortunately, Nicholas II Romanov failed to read the Chronicle of Fredegar to possibly fathom the Anti-Christian nature and character of the disreputable state of which he disastrously made Holy Russia an ally! About;
Quite contrarily, if Russia was fully and irrevocably perceived as an Asiatic Empire, the continental dimension of Holy Russia would lead Nicholas II to an alliance with the Kaiser, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, the Sultan at Constantinople, and the Shah of Qajar Iran. This alliance would be the only normal and natural expression of Russia’s historical and geographic identity. The ensuing result would be of entirely breathtaking and spectacular dimensions.
Having no apparent need to maintain armies close to the Imperial German, Austrian-Hungarian, and Ottoman borders, Romanov Russia and Qajar Iran would eliminate the ahistorical bogus-state of Afghanistan, which is a filthy, devilish English colonial invention and fabrication (geared to merely weaken Iran); soon afterwards, no less than five million (5.000.000) Russian and Iranian soldiers would overwhelmingly invade India, irreversibly obliterating the criminal colonial presence of England in South Asia, triumphantly liberating the local multi-ethnic populations, and effectively establishing fraternal relations among the adepts of all the different religions, cults and faiths.
With the inevitable defeat and final division of France (between Germany and Italy), Russian, Austrian-Hungarian and Italian regiments would irrevocably eradicate the presence of Anglo-French colonials in Egypt, Sudan and the Eastern Mediterranean. After the prompt pacification of the three continents, an enormous German-Russian-Spanish-Italian operation would be undertaken against the ‘British Isles’ to totally eliminate every notion of insular rule and independent state in England.
Nicholas I’s total failure to understand the Asiatic nature of Russia throughout the millennia and his inability to exert continental force against the maritime powers’ treachery, evilness, and putrefaction caused Russians not only a terrible defeat in WW I, a Civil War, and an unnecessary regime change, but also a terrible bloodshed during WW II, a Cold War, the needless disintegration of the USSR in 1991, and ever since, the absolutely unneeded fratricidal conflict in Ukraine – an entirely Russian land and population that the sea powers attempt to corrupt.
The maritime powers’ evilness is identical with marine erosion; they appear friendly and innocent in order to cheat and they show their true face later. At the end, the Russians will understand the real meaning of the verse: “Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées“. In fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with either the French or the Ukrainians and the Russians. It simply means that in Moscow and in the plains of Ukraine there must be as many brothels, cabarets, night bars, sexual debauchery, and inhuman anomaly as in les Champs-Élysées.
By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu (Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)
Pre-publication of chapter XVI 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 XIV, XV and XVI belong to Part Five (Fallacies about Sassanid History, History of Religions, and the History of Migrations). The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
—————————————————
Hsiung-nu soldier from Saksanokhur, Tajikistan
However, soon afterwards, Europe faced two major threats that lasted many centuries: the Islamic armies and the Manichaean subversion. Despite their ferocity and their conquests, at a certain point the Islamic armies were stopped either in Western or in Eastern Europe. But the Manichaean tidal wave that hit Europe back was disproportional and beyond any expectation. Starting from the Eastern Roman Empire and the entire Caucasus region and as early as the 7th c. CE, the Paulicians triggered an enormous religious, social and imperial destabilization across vast lands. The famous Eastern Roman Akritai, i.e. the imperial Eastern Roman guards and frontal forces against the Islamic Caliphate, were – all – Paulicians, having rejected the Christian Orthodox Constantinopolitan theology. Digenes Akritas, the Eastern Roman Empire’s greatest hero and Modern Greeks’ most revered and foremost legendary figure was a Paulician, not an Orthodox.
Constantinopolitan patriarchs, emperors and theologians persistently described the Paulicians as Manichaeans; they used the same term also for the Iconoclasts. This does not mean that these religious, spiritual and esoteric systems of faith were ‘Manichaean’ stricto sensu, but they were definitely formed under determinant Manichaean impact. The same concerns the Bogomiles across the Balkans, Central and Western Europe, starting in the 10th c., the Cathars across Western Europe from the 12th c. onwards, and also many other religious, spiritual and esoteric systems that derived from the aforementioned.
The Muslim friends, partners and associates of the Paulicians were also groups formed under strong Manichaean impact and historically viewed as such; known as Babakiyah or Khurramites or Khorram-dinan, the 8th c. religious group setup by Sunpadh and led in the 9th c. by Babak Khurramdin made an alliance with the Eastern Roman Emperor Theophilos (829-842), an outstanding Iconoclast, and not only repeatedly revolted against the Abbasid Caliphate but also fought along with the Eastern Roman army in 837 in the Anti-Taurus Mountains to recapture Melitene (Malatya), and on many other occasions. The Khurramite commander Nasir and 14000 Iranian Khurramite rebels had no problem in being baptized Iconoclast Christians and taking Greek names (Nasir became then known as Theophobos), which shows the Manichaean origins and affinities of the Iconoclasts and the Khurramites.
The state of the Paulicians
The massacre of the Paulicians
Kale-ye Babak, the impregnable castle of the Babakiyah (or Khurramites) near Kaleybar – East Azerbaijan, Iran
Afshin brings Babak as captive in Samarra. from a manuscript miniature of the Safavid times
Babak Khorramdin statue from Babek city in Nakhchivan province of Azerbaijan
Within the context of early Islamic caliphates, the Manicheans prospered, definitely marked by their superiority in terms of spirituality, letters, sciences, philosophy and cosmology. It was relatively easy for them to reinterpret the Quran as a Manichaean scripture; it was totally impossible for the uneducated and naïve early Muslims to oppose Manicheans in open debate or to outfox Manichaean interpretative schemes. Among the leading Muslim erudite polymaths, mystics, poets and translators of the early period of Islamic Civilization (7th – 8th c.), many defended all major pillars of the Manichaean doctrine and even the dualist dogma; Ibn al Muqaffa is an example. The illustrious translator of the Middle Persian literary masterpiece Kalila wa Dimna into Arabic was a crypto-Manichaean Muslim, and surely he was not the only. Ibn al Muqaffa was executed as per the order of Caliph al-Mansur (754-775), but the first persecution of the Manicheans started only under the Caliph al-Mahdi (775-785); however, this was the time many groups and movements or Manichean origin started openly challenging Islam and the Caliphate in every sense. However, it is noteworthy that the greatest Caliph of all times, Harun al Rashid (786-809), had a very tolerant and friendly stance toward Manicheans of all types.
Abu’l Abbas al-Saffah proclaimed as the first Abbasid Caliph: the Abbasid dynasty opened the door for a cataclysmic Iranian cultural, intellectual, academic, scientific and spiritual impact on the Muslim world.
However, it is only as late as the time of Caliph al-Muqtadir (908-932) that the Manicheans, persecuted in the Caliphate, left Mesopotamia in big numbers, making of Afrasiab (Samarqand) and Central Asia the center of their faith, life and activities. This was not a coincidence; many Turanians had already been long date enthusiastic Manichean converts and adepts, whereas several Manichaean monuments unearthed in Central Asia date back to the 4th c. At the time of al-Mansur, the Uyghur Khaqan (: Emperor) Boku Tekin accepted Manichaeism as official state religion in 763; the Uyghur Khaqanate stretched from the Tian Shan mountains and the Lake Balkhash (today’s Kazakhstan) to the Pacific. For more than one century, Manichaeism was the state religion across the entire Northeastern Asia.
During the same time, Manichaeism was diffused in Tibet and China. Similarly with what occurred in the Islamic Caliphate, Manicheans in Tibet and China had it easy to reinterpret Buddhism in Manichaean terms. As a matter of fact, Chinese Buddhism is full of Manichaean impregnations. For this reason, several anti-Buddhist Chinese emperors (like Wuzong of Tang in the period 843-845) confused the Manicheans with the Buddhists and persecuted them too. However, Manichaeism was for many centuries a fundamental component and a critical parameter of all social, spiritual, intellectual and religious developments in China. And this was due to the incessant interaction of Turanians and Iranians across Asia. About:
During the Sassanid and early Islamic periods, the central provinces of Iran had to embrace many Turanian newcomers. This was one of the numerous Turanian waves that the Iranian plateau and its periphery had to welcome across the millennia. A vast and critical topic of the World History that was excessively distorted and systematically misrepresented across various disciplines of the Humanities is the chapter of the major Eurasiatic Migrations. Various distorting lenses have been used in this regard. It is surely beyond the scope of the present chapter to outline this subject, but I must at least mention it with respect to the persistent Orientalist efforts to divide and dissociate Iranian from Turanian nations across several millennia.
If one accepts naively the ‘official’ dogma of Western colonial historiography, one imagines that all the world’s major civilizations (Sumerians, Elamites, Akkadians-Assyrians/Babylonians, Egyptians, Cushites-Sudanese, Hittites, Hurrians, Urartu, Phoenicians, Iranians, Greeks, Romans, Dravidians, Chinese, etc.) were automatically popped up and instantly formed by settled populations. Modern historians, who compose this sort of nonsensical narratives, are monstrous gangsters intending to desecrate human civilization and to extinguish human spirituality. All civilizations were started by nomads, and there was always a time when all indigenous nations (each of them in its own turn) were migrants.
But modern Western historians intentionally and criminally misrepresent the major Eurasiatic Migrations in a most systematic and most sophisticated manner, by only introducing – partly and partially – aspects of this overwhelming and continual phenomenon, like spices on gourmet dishes. I do not imply that the Eurasiatic Migrations were the only to have happened or to have mattered; there were also important migrations in Africa, the Pacific, and the continent of the Aztecs, the Mayas and the Incas. However, I limit the topic to the migrations that are relevant to the History of Iran and Turan. So, those who study Ancient Roman History are customarily told that, ‘although everything was fine and civilized Romans prospered in peace’, suddenly some iniquitous barbarians arrived to invade Roman lands and to embarrass the civilized settled populations altogether; this type of bogus-historical presentations is a Crime against the Mankind, because it distorts the foremost reality of human history, namely that we have all been migrants.
There is no worst bigotry worldwide than that of settled populations.
Yet, every manual of history would be easily rectified, if few extra chapters were added, at the beginning and during the course of the narration, to offer an outline of parallel developments occurred in the wider and irrevocbly indivisible Eurasia.
The discriminatory, truly racist, manner by which the civilized migrants are presented in various manuals of (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Cushitic, Anatolian, Roman, Greek, European, Russian, Iranian, Dravidian, and Chinese) History helps only reinstate the vicious and immoral axiom that ‘History is written by the victors’. Every historian, who does not consciously write in an objective manner to reveal the truth and to reject the paranoia of the aforementioned adage, is an enemy of the Mankind.
Beyond the aforementioned points, many historians today will try to find an excuse, saying that, by writing about let’s say the so-called ‘barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire’, they intentionally reflect the Roman viewpoint, because they rely on Roman historical sources. This could eventually be accepted, if stated in 1820, when the modern science of history had not advanced much, and only few archaeological excavations had taken place. But if this is seriously expressed as an apology today, it constitutes an outrage. The least one can say to these forgers is that they must first obtain an interdisciplinary degree, before publishing their nonsensical manual, or – alternatively – study several paperbacks on the History of the Migrant Nations (in this case: Huns, Vandals, Goths, etc.).
An even greater mistake that modern historians make is that they present the continual phenomenon of Eurasiatic migrations in a most fragmentary manner; this creates, by means of Nazi propaganda, the wrong idea and the distorted impression that all of a sudden, every now and then, new migrants appear in the horizon, coming out of the vast Asiatic ‘nowhere’. This is an aberration and a fallacy. The absurd factoid, which is deceitfully called “Invasions of the Roman Empire” and is peremptorily dated between 100 CE and 500 CE, is merely an academic fabrication. Why?
First, there were incessant migrations before and after the said period.
Second, the aforementioned factoid is a fallacy due to the fact that, during the same period, other migrations took also place, but the specialists in Roman History do not mention (or even do not know) them; however, these migrations (that they fail to even name) constitute intertwined phenomena with those that they present in their manuals, and consequently their presentation is a conscious and plain distortion.
Third, the events are always portrayed as a menace of barbarism, as breach of Roman legitimacy, and as violation of a hypothetical right of the Roman Empire to exist. This is an outrage; the Roman Empire was not a sacrosanct institution. In many aspects, its lawless formation, barbaric expansion, and bloody wars constitute some of the World History’s bleakest pages. But criminal colonial historians never discussed ‘unpleasant’ topics with the correct terminology; they did not write for instance about the barbarian Roman demolition of Carthage, the monstrous Roman sack of Corinth, the savage Roman invasion of Seleucid Syria or the lawless Roman annexation of Egypt.
This is the disgusting bias of the Western colonial historiographers: when a negative development takes place against Rome, it is ‘bad’; and quite contrarily, when an undesirable occurrence happens to others, it is ‘good’. And in order to represent this vicious bias as ‘historical truth’, they mobilize a great intellectual effort, involving many methods. In this regard, the Eurasiatic migrations are absurdly fractured into many parts, and many of these parts are deliberately concealed, when focus is made on only one of them. The pseudo-academic methods involved to disguise and conceal the topic are numerous.
First, some migrations are not presented as such, but named after the migrant nations; examples: Scythians, Sarmatians, Celts. And yet, these nations are basically known due to their migrations across vast lands.
Second, other migrations are not mentioned as such, but called after the name of the location where excavations brought to light the material remains of a migrant nation’s civilization; example: Andronovo culture, Afanasievo culture, etc.
Third, several migrant nations of different origin are regrouped after the geography where they spread; this is totally paranoid, because no one can possibly ‘regroup’ the Vandals, who crossed Central and Western Europe, reached North Africa, settled in Hippo Regius and Carthage, and then attacked Greece, Sicily, Rome, Sardinia, Corsica and the Iberian coastlands, with the Huns, who crossed Siberia, Russia, and Ukraine, settled in Eastern Europe and attacked the Balkans, Italy and Gaul.
Fourth, several migrant nations are dissociated from one another migrant nation of the same ethnic origin (example: Huns and Turkic nations), whereas in cases of severe distortion, different names of the same nation, attested in diverse historical sources, are tentatively presented as names of two different nations (example: Huns and Hsiung nu whose name is erroneously spelled Xiongnu).
Fifth, several parts of migrant nations are arbitrarily dissociated from their ethnic counterparts and presented separately as settled nations (example: White Huns or Hephthalites).
Sixth, the ethnic origin of several migrant nations is confusingly presented (example: the Bulgars, who were a Turkic nation, are often included in Europe’s ‘Migration Period’ and categorized along with Slavs, whereas they should have been mentioned in the ‘Turkic migrations’!).
To the aforementioned inaccuracies, distortions and prejudices, a plethora of false maps is added to comfortably reduce the size of kingdoms, empires and nations whose existence did not happen to please the discriminatory minds of the perverse Anglo-French and American colonial historians. About:
The end result of this systematization of Western colonial falsehood is that great and highly civilized conquerors and emperors like Attila, Genghis Khan, Hulagu Khan, Kublai Khan, Timur Lenk and others appear as mysterious meteorites, who came from “nowhere”, as barbarian invaders, and a “scourges of God”, whereas in reality they all (and many others) were far more educated, more cultured, more competent and more heroic than any Greek, Macedonian, Roman or European king or general. To the aforementioned historical reality additional, deceitful tactics and insidious procedures have been added by the criminal, racist, Western European and North American ‘historians’: they definitely proved to be able to write 100000 words to deplore the destructions supposedly caused to the Human Civilization by Attila, Genghis Khan, Hulagu Khan, and others, but when they happen to write about the fact that Alexander the Great burned Persepolis, they remain malignantly and partially silent, abstaining from any due criticism.
King Attila with the Turul bird in his shield (Chronicon Pictum, 1358)
It would be far easier for all to tell the truth: ‘Asia is Turan’ for most of its territory. And the moral lesson must be drawn: the existence of a ‘state’ is not a reason for anyone not to invade its lands. States are not sacrosanct; and in any case, the territory occupied by the nation that setup the local state, in all cases of historical states, was also invaded by the ancestors of that nation in the first place.
The biased Western colonial historians carry out all these distortions as tasks in order to promote the lawless interests of their own disreputable states; for this reason they always concealed the following unwavering reality: throughout World History, various fundamental concepts like ‘land’, ‘state’, ‘nation’, ‘sacred place’, etc. have had different connotations among nations of nomadic migrants and nations of settled populations.
Furthermore, several fundamental concepts, which are valid among settled nations, have no validity at all among nomads and migrant nations, and vice versa. In addition, some basic concepts that exist among nomads and migrant nations start being altered and becoming different if and when these nations happen to settle somewhere ‘permanently’. The concept of ‘universe’ and the deriving imperative of ‘universalism’ are fundamental notions of nomads and migrant nations; notably, the Akkadians (early Assyrians – Babylonians), who first produced significant literary narratives to detail the concept, were also a migrant nation that had settled only few centuries before writing down in cuneiform texts their world views.
The History of Eurasiatic Migrations, in and by itself, highlights the extensive presence of Turanians in Iran since times immemorial. Thanks to the Turanians of the Achaemenid Empire, the Turkic nations of Central Asia, China and Siberia came to get detailed descriptions of faraway regions and lands, such as Mesopotamia, Syria-Palestine, the Caucasus Mountains, the Anatolian plateau, the plains of Ukraine and Central Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, and Egypt. Consequently, further the interaction between Iran and Rome progressed, more details about the western confines of Europe reached the Turanian nomads who were moving around Lake Balkhash (Kazakhstan), Yenisey River and Baikal Lake (Siberia), Orkhon River (Mongolia), the Tarim Basin (China), the Oymyakon River (Yakutia, Eastern Siberia) and other circumferences. The incessant waves of migrations to the West and to the South were not blind and desperate movements of uninformed barbarians, who ran like crazy on their horses; only the distorted publications of Western colonial historians contain similar, nonsensical conclusions.
The pattern of the Turanian military horsemen and skillful soldiers is absolutely prominent and protruding in the History of the Early Caliphates; but it is merely the continuation of a millennia long tradition. This consists in a very embarrassing fact for all the Western Orientalists specializing in Early Islamic History, and more particularly with focus on the 8th c. CE, the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate, and the rise of Abbasid Baghdad. They therefore constantly come up with incredible assumptions, farfetched arguments, nonsensical explanations, and sly innuendos to explain how and why so many Turanian soldiers and military heads appear in the Islamic Caliphate. In fact, without Turanian military skills, the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus may have not been overthrown.
It is well known that the early Islamic armies advanced up to Merv in today’s Turkmenistan (651) and they stopped there. For the next hundred years, the only Islamic advance in Asia was effectuated only in today’s Baluchistan province of Pakistan; only at the end of the 7th c. and the beginning of the 8th c., the Islamic armies reached the Indus Delta and Gujarat. But how the Islamic Caliphate started being flooded with Turanian soldiers as early as the last decades of the Umayyad rule, if there had not already been massive Turanian populations in the Sassanid Empire of Iran? If the Turanian nations were confined ‘somewhere in Eastern Siberia and Mongolia’ (as per the distortions of colonial Orientalists), why did they appear to be so deeply involved in battles and developments that took place in Mesopotamia and Syria during the first half of the 8th c.? The answer to this question is very simple: there were always massive Turanian populations in the Pre-Islamic Iranian empires.
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
————–
To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α
Introduction; Iranian Achaemenid historiography; Problems of historiography continuity; Iranian posterior historiography; foreign historiography; Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia
1- Introduction
Welcome to the 40-hour seminar on Achaemenid Iran!
It is my intention to deliver a rather unconventional academic presentation of the topic, mostly implementing a correct and impartial conceptual approach to the earliest stage of Iranian History. Every subject, in and by itself, offers to every researcher the correct means of the pertinent approach to it; due to this fact, the personal background, viewpoints and thoughts or eventually the misperceptions and the preconceived ideas of an explorer should not be allowed to affect his judgment.
If before 200 years, the early Iranologists had the possible excuse of studying a topic on the basis of external and posterior historical sources, this was simply due to the fact that the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing had not yet been deciphered. Still, even those explorers failed to avoid a very serious mistake, namely that of taking the external and posterior historical sources at face value. We cannot afford to blindly accept a secondary historical source without first examining intentions, motives, scopes and aims of it.
As the seminar covers only the History of the Achaemenid dynasty, I don’t intend to add an introductory course about the History of the Iranian Studies and the re-discovery of Iran by Western explorers of the colonial powers. However, I will provide a brief outline of the topic; this is essential because mainstream Orientalists have reached their limits and cannot provide us with a real insight, eliminating the numerous and enduring myths, fallacies, and deliberately naïve approaches to Achaemenid Iran.
In fact, most of the specialists of Ancient Iran never went beyond the limitations set by the delusional Ancient ‘Greek’ (in reality: Ionian and Attic) literature about the Medes and the Persians (i.e. the Iranians), because they never offered themselves the task to explain the reasons for the aberration that the Ancient Ionian and Attic authors created in their minds and wrote in their texts about Iran. This was utterly puerile and ludicrous.
And this brings us to the other major innovation that I intend to offer during this seminar, namely the proper, comprehensive contextualization of the research topic, i.e. the History of Achaemenid Iran. To give some examples in this regard, I would mention
a – the tremendous, multilayered and multifaceted impact of the Mesopotamian World, Civilization and Heritage on the formation of the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, and more specifically, the determinant role played by the Sargonid Empire of Assyria on the emergence of the first Empire on the Iranian plateau;
b – the ferocious opposition of the Mithraic Magi to the Zoroastrian Achaemenid court;
c – the involvement of the Anatolian Magi in the misperception of Iran by the Ancient Greeks; and
d- the utilization of the Ancient Greek cities by the Anti-Iranian side of the Egyptian priesthoods, princes and administrators.
To therefore introduce the proper contextualization, I will expand on the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Sargonid times, not only to state the first mentions of the Medes and the Persians in History, but also to show the importance attributed by the Neo-Assyrian Emperors to the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau, as well as the numerous peoples, settled or nomadic, who inhabited that region.
There is an enormous lacuna in the Orientalist disciplines; there are no interdisciplinary studies in Assyriology and Iranology. This plays a key role in the misperception of the ancient oriental civilizations and in the mistaken evaluation (or rather under-estimation) of the momentous impact that they had on the formation of the World History. There are no isolated cultures and independent civilizations as dogmatic and ignorant Western archaeologists pretend.
Only if one studies and evaluates correctly the colossal impact of the Ancient Mesopotamian world on Iran, can one truly understand the Achaemenid Empire in its real dimensions.
2- Iranian Achaemenid historiography
A. Achaemenid imperial inscriptions produced on solemn occasions
Usually multilingual texts written by the imperial scribes of the emperors Cyrus the Great, Darius I the Great, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, Darius II, Artaxerxes II, and Artaxerxes III, as well as of the ancestral rulers Ariaramnes and Arsames.
Languages and writing systems:
– Old Achaemenid Iranian (cuneiform-alphabetic; the official imperial language)
– Babylonian (cuneiform-syllabic; to offer a testimony of historical continuity and legitimacy, following the Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great, who presented himself as king of Babylon)
– Elamite (cuneiform-logo-syllabic; to portray the Persians in particular as the heirs of the ancient land of Anshan and Sushan that the Assyrians and the Babylonians named ‘Elam’ and the indigenous population called ‘Haltamti’ / The first Achaemenid to present himself as ‘king of Anshan’ is Cyrus the Great and the reference is found in his Cylinder unearthed in Babylon.)
and
– Egyptian Hieroglyphic (if the inscription or the monument was produced in Egypt, since the Achaemenids were also pharaohs of Egypt, starting with Kabujiya/Cambyses)
Imperial inscriptions are found in: Babylon (Cyrus Cylinder), Pasargad, Behistun, Hamadan, Ganj-e Nameh, Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rustam, Susa, Suez (Egypt), Gherla (Romania), Van (Turkey), and on various items
B. Persepolis Administrative Archives
This consists in an enormous documentation that has not yet been fully studied; it is not written in Old Achaemenid as one could expect but mainly in Elamite cuneiform. It consists of two groups, namely
– the Persepolis Fortification Archive, and
– the Persepolis Treasury Archive.
The Persepolis Fortification Archive was unearthed in the fortification area, i.e. the northeastern confines of the enormous platform of the Achaemenid capital Parsa (Persepolis), in the 1930s. It comprises of more than 30000 tablets (fragmentary or entire) that were written in the period 509-494 BCE (at the time of Darius I). The tablets were written in Susa and other parts of Fars and the territory of the ancient kingdom of Elam that vanished in the middle of the 7th c. (more than 130 years before these texts were written). Around 50 texts had Aramaic glosses. More than 2000 tablets have been published and translated. These texts are records of transactions, distribution of food, provisioning of workers, transportation of commodities, etc.; few tablets were written in other languages, namely Old Iranian (1), Babylonian (1), Phrygian (1) and Greek (1).
The Persepolis Treasury Archive was found in the northeastern room of the Treasury of Xerxes. It contains more than 750 tablets and fragments (in Elamite) and more than 100 have been published. They all date back in period 492-458 BCE. These tablets are either letters or memoranda dispatched by imperial officials to the head of the Treasury; they concern the payment of workmen, the issue of silver, and other administrative procedures. Only one tablet was written in Babylonian.
The entire documentation offers valuable information as regards the function of various imperial services, namely the couriers, the satraps, the imperial messengers, the imperial storehouse, etc. The archives shed light on the origin of the imperial administrators, as ca. 1900 personal names have been recorded: 10% were Elamites (who had apparently survived for long far from their country after the destruction of Susa by Assurbanipal (640 BCE), fewer were Babylonians, and the outright majority consisted of Iranians (Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Sakas, Arians, etc.).
C. Imperial Aramaic
The diffusion of the use of Aramaic started already in the Neo-Assyrian times and during the 7th c. BCE; the creation of the ‘Royal Road’, the systematization of the transportation, the improvement of communications, and the formation of the network of land-, sea- and desert routes that we now call ‘Silk-, Spice- and Perfume- Road’ during the Achaemenid times helped further expand the use of Aramaic. The linguistic assimilation of the Babylonians, the Jews and the Phoenicians with the Aramaeans only strengthened the diffusion of the Aramaic, which became the second international language (‘lingua franca’) in the History of the Mankind (after the Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian). Gradually, Aramaic became an official Achaemenid language after the Old Achaemenid Iranian.
Except the Aramaic texts attested in the Persepolis Administrative Archives, thousands of Aramaic texts of the Achaemenid times shed light onto the society, the economy, the administration, the military organization, the trade, the religions, the cults, the culture and the spirituality attested in various provinces of the Iranian Empire. At this point, only indicatively, I mention few significant groups of texts:
– the Elephantine papyri and ostraca (except Aramaic, they were written in Hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Coptic, Alexandrian Koine, and Latin) – 5th and 4th c. BCE,
– the Hermopolis Aramaic papyri,
– the Padua Aramaic papyri, and
– the Khalili Collection of Aramaic Documents from Bactria (48 texts written on leather, papyrus, stone or clay, dating from the period 353-324 BCE, and mainly from the reign of Artaxerxes III whereas the most recent dates from the reign of Alexander the Great).
Here I have to add that the widespread use of Imperial Aramaic and its use as a second official language for Achaemenid Iran brought an end to the use of the Elamite (in the middle of the 5th c.) and, after the end of the Achaemenid dynasty and the split of the state of Alexander the Great, contributed to the formation of two writing systems, namely Parthian and Pahlavi which were in use during the Arsacid and the Sassanid times. Imperial Aramaic helped establish many other writing systems, but this goes beyond the limits of the present seminar.
3- Problems of historiography continuity
There are no historical references to the Achaemenid dynasty made at the time of the Arsacids (Ashkanian: 250 BCE-224 CE) and the Sassanids 224-651 CE); this situation is due to many factors:
– the prevalence of another Iranian nation of probably Turanian origin, namely the Parthians and the Arsacid dynasty,
– the rise of the anti-Achaemenid, anti-Zoroastrian Magi who tried to impose Mithraism throughout Iran during the Arsacid times,
– the formation of an oral epic tradition and the establishment of a legendary historiography about the pre-Arsacid past during the Sassanid times, and
– the scarcity of written sources and the terrible destructions that occurred in Iran during the Late Antiquity, the Islamic era, and the Modern times (early Islamic conquests, divisions of the Abbasid times, Mongol invasions, Safavid-Ottoman wars, Western colonial looting, etc.).
This situation raised Western academic questions of Iranian identity, continuity, and historicity. But this attempt is futile. Iranian historiography of Islamic times shows that these questions were fully misplaced.
4- Iranian posterior historiography (Iranian historiography of Islamic times)
With Tabari (839-923) and his voluminous History of Prophets and Kings we realize that there were, in spite of the destructions caused because of the Islamic conquests, historical documents on which he was based to expand about the Sassanid dynasty; actually one out of the 40 volumes of the most recent translation of Tabari to English (published by the State University of New York Press from 1985 through 2007) is dedicated to the History of Sassanid Iran (vol. 5). And the previous volume (vol. 4) covers the History of Achaemenid and Arsacid Iran, Alexander the Great, Nabonid Babylonia, Assyria and Ancient Israel and Judah.
Other important Iranian historians of the Islamic times, like Abu’l-Fadl Bayhaqi (995-1077), Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318) who wrote the truly first World History, Alaeddin Aṭa Malik Juvaynī (1226-1283), and Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi (ca. 1370-1454), did not expand much on pre-Islamic periods as the focus of their writing was on contemporaneous developments.
However, the aforementioned historians and all the authors, who are classified in this category, represent only one dimension of Iranian historiography of Islamic times. A totally different approach and literature have been illustrated by Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings). Abu ‘l Qasem Ferdowsi (940-1025) was not the first to compose an epic in order to standardize in mythical terms and legendary concepts the pre-Islamic Iranian past; but he was the most successful and the most illustrious. That is why many other epic poets followed his example, notably the Azeri Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209) and the Turkic Indian Amir Khusraw (1253-1325).
Within the context of this poetical historiography, historical emperors of pre-Islamic Iran appear as legendary figures only to be then viewed as materialization of divine patterns. The origin of this transcendental historiography seems to be retraced in the Sassanid times, but all the major themes are clearly of Zoroastrian identity and can therefore be attributed to the Achaemenid world perception and world conceptualization.
It is essential at this point to state that, until the imposition of modern Western colonial academic and educational standards in Iran, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and the corpus of Iranian legendary historiography was the backbone of the Iranian cultural, intellectual and educational identity.
It is a matter of academic debate whether an original text named Khwaday-Namag, written during the Sassanid times, and now lost, is at the very origin of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography. The 19th c. German Orientalist Theodor Nöldeke is credited with this theory that has not yet been proved.
All the same, the spiritual standards of this approach are detected in the Achaemenid times.
5- Foreign historiography
Ancient Greek (in reality, Ionian and Attic), Ancient Hebrew and Latin sources of Achaemenid History exist, but first they are external, second they appear to be posterior in their largest part, and third they often bear witness to astounding inaccuracies, fables, untrustworthy data, misplaced focus, excessive verbosity without real substance, and -above all- an enormous and irreconcilable misunderstanding of the Iranian Achaemenid reality, values, world view, mindset, and behavior.
The Ancient Hebrew sources shed light on issues that were apparently critical to the tiny and unimportant, Jewish minority of the Achaemenid Empire; however, these Biblical narratives concern facts that were absolutely insignificant to the imperial authorities of Parsa. One critical issue is concealed by modern scholars though; although all the nations of the Empire were regularly mentioned in the Achaemenid inscriptions and depicted on bas reliefs, the Jews were not. This undeniable fact irrevocably conditions the supposed ‘importance’ of Biblical texts like Ezra, Esther, Nehemiah, etc. All the same, these foreign historical sources are important for the Jews.
The Ionian and Attic accounts of events that were composed by the Carian renegade Herodotus, the Dorian Ctesias, and the Athenian Xenophon present an even more serious problem. They happened to be for many centuries (16th – 19th c.) the bulk of the historical documentation that Western European academics had access to as regards Achaemenid Iran. This situation produced grave biases among Western academics, because they took all these sources at face value since they had no access to original documentation. The grave trouble persisted even after the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing and the archaeological excavations that brought to daylight original Iranian imperial documentation.
Only recently, at the end of the 20th c., leading Iranologists like Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg started criticizing the absolutely delusional History of Achaemenid Iran that modern Western scholars were producing without even understanding it by foolishly accepting Ancient Ionian myths, lies and propaganda against the Iranian Empire at face value. This grave problem had also two other parameters:
– first, there was an enormous gap of civilization and a tremendous cultural difference between the Iranian imperial world view, the spiritual valorization of the human being, and the Zoroastrian monotheism from one side and the chaotic, disorderly and profane elements of the western periphery of the Empire. The so-called Greek tribes in Western Anatolia and in the South Balkans were not only multi-divided and plunged in permanent conflict; they were also extremely verbose on common issues, they desecrated the divine world with their nonsensical myths and puerile narratives, and they defiled human spirituality with their love stories about their pseudo-gods. But, very arbitrarily and quite disastrously, the so-called Ancient Greek civilization had been erroneously taken as ‘classics’ by modern Europeans at a time they had no access to Ancient Oriental sources.
– second, the vertical differentiation between Imperial Iran as the blessed land of divine mission and the disunited and peripheral lands of conflict, discord and strife that were inhabited by the Greek tribes was reflected on the respective, impressively different types of historiography; to the Iranians, few words written by anonymous scribes were enough to describe the groundbreaking deeds of divinely appointed rulers. But for the Greeks, the useless rumors, the capricious hearsay, the intentional lie, the nefarious expression of their complex of inferiority, the vicious slander, and the deliberate ignominy ‘had’ to be recorded and written down.
The fact that Herodotus’ and Xenophon’s long narratives have long been taken as the basic source of information about Achaemenid Iran demonstrates how disoriented and misplaced modern Western scholarship is. But by preferring to rely mainly on the Ancient Greek lengthy and false narratives, and not on the succinct, true and chaste Old Achaemenid Iranian inscriptions, they totally misrepresent Ancient Iranian History, preposterously extrapolating later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations.
And whereas Ancient Roman authors, who wrote in Latin (Pliny the Elder, Seneca the Younger, etc.), and Jewish or Christian historians, who wrote in Alexandrine Koine, like Flavius Josephus and Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima, reproduced the style of lengthy narratives that turns History to mere gossip, the great Babylonian scholar Berossus was very reluctant to add personal comments to his original sources or to allow subjective considerations and thoughts to contaminate his text.
In any case, the vast issue of the multilayered damages caused by the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historiography to modern Western academics’ perception and interpretation of Achaemenid Iran is a topic that deserves an entirely independent seminar.
————–
To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α
The Earth is one and undividable; the historical presence of several major empires over the past 45 centuries does not consist in a division but rather in a union around the same human, universalist-ecumenist ideals. From Sargon of Akkad (薩爾貢/سارگون) to the Qing, the Romanovs, the Ottomans and the Qajar, various empires incarnated these very old, common to all, and permanently cherished ideals in their respective locations. And by entering in endless commercial, cultural and spiritual exchanges, the great realms of Afro-Asia gave new dynamics to the magnificent soar made by the original civilizations that started in the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE in Mesopotamia (美索不达米亚/ بین النهرین) and Egypt. And the Silk-, Spice- and Frankincense Routes across Lands, Deserts and Seas, which are commonly called ‘the Silk Roads’, demonstrated very well the supreme human value, i.e. the Unity of Earth Life, removing in reality all the frontiers across the main landmass where the Mankind dwells. About:
Starting with the late 15th and early 16th c., mankind was hit with an unprecedented plague that originated from a minor and insignificant peninsula, which had never been viewed as the center of a civilization or the location of a meritable kingdom by any civilized nation: Europe. I mainly refer to the current territories of Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium and England. These lands alone represent nowadays the historical meaning of what people define as “Europe” today.
I. Europe is not a Continent
There is a troublesome hiatus in this regard, and it is necessary to make things clear. When people across the world think today of ‘Europe’ as a so-called continent (‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’), they only demonstrate to what great extent they have been deceived by the propaganda that emanated from the aforementioned modern states. This delusion of a ‘Europe – Continent’ does not exist in History; it’s a fake. The inhuman means of its propagation do not concern the scope of the present article, but surely involve the education, the publications, the mass media, the psychological operations (psy-ops), the so-called ‘political life’ (a low level farcical act), and the pseudo-culture that these states imposed at home and abroad.
Throughout the ages, Europe was never viewed as a ‘continent’ (in the sense we mean now); it did not actually consist in a continent, and -even worse- it was not the land of a civilization that impacted World History. Europe did not represent a unity of culture, tradition, faith, ancestry or language in any sense. In reality, all the useless elements of Asia and Africa ended up in Europe one way or another. And more tragi-comically for the well-propagated Fake History of Europe, the few civilized elements of Asia and Africa, which generated a rudimentary civilization on what is now called ‘European soil’ (Cyprus, Crete, Rome, Macedonia), did so by merely reproducing Asiatic and African values, arts, traditions, concepts and techniques and by bringing with them forms of spirituality, faith, moral, piety and virtue that were typically African or Asiatic in their original form.
What puts European colonials’ pseudo-historical propaganda beyond all intents and purposes is the fact that the very few civilized kingdoms, which were formed on what is now called ‘Europe’ did not identify themselves as ‘European’, did not view ‘Europe’ as a cultural unity or imperial entity, and did not care for the largest part of what we now call Europe, because simply it was worthless to them.
Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the absolute embodiment of Anti-Greek or Anti-Hellenic ruler, deployed enormous effort to succeed to the Achaemenid rulers of Iran. He was not the invader of many lands, as the modern European pseudo-historical propaganda projects him to be; he only conquered the entire Achaemenid Iran because he wanted to be an Asiatic king of kings. That’s why he deliberately made of Babylon his capital and of the Sogdian princess Roxanne his wife. But the central and northern part of the Balkan Peninsula, which would be easy to conquer, fully disinterested him. And the same is also valid for Southern Italy and Sicily where Ionians and Dorians had established colonies, let alone the useless plains of Gaul and the plateau of the Iberian Peninsula.
Achaemenid Iran
And the Roman Emperors repeatedly and convincingly proved that to them Egypt was more important than Gaul, Anatolia was more worthwhile than Iberia, and Syria was more significant than Britain. Romans undertook a naval expedition against Arabia Felix (today’s Aden), but not around the otherwise useless coasts of Sweden, Norway and Finland. Optimus princeps Trajan (98-117; 圖拉真/ تراژان), the greatest Roman emperor of all times, carried out military expeditions down to Characene (today’s southern Iraq and Kuwait) and up to Caucasus Albania (today’s Azerbaijan), but he did not have the slightest concern about the shores of today’s Poland and Estonia or the Azov Sea and the plains of Ukraine. Even more exemplarily, not one Roman Emperor bothered to invade Hibernia, today’s Ireland. About:
Through conquests and treaties, the Romans controlled in Africa a definitely larger territory than in Europe, but today’s forged maps are systematically produced in a way to scrupulously conceal this historical reality. Even worse, scholarly Orientalist bibliography is kept far from the hands of the average public (and therefore not duly popularized in education manuals, publishing houses, and the mass media) in order not to reveal the overwhelming and cataclysmic diffusion of Oriental cults, concepts, virtues, values, lifestyles, faiths, esoteric rites, mythologies, worldviews, religions, arts, symbolisms, cosmogonies, cosmologies, systems of eschatology and messianic soteriology, rites, ceremonials, forms of spirituality, wisdom and erudition across all European territories of the Roman Empire, and also in other lands in Europe. Quite contrarily to the pseudo-historical dogma that the European colonial intellectuals produced by fallaciously naming an entire period ‘Hellenistic and Roman Times’, this same period is indeed ‘Orientalist and Orientalizing Times’, due to the above mentioned prevalence of Oriental cultures and civilizations throughout Europe.
II. Colonial Gangsters, Division of the World, and the East-West Divide
A fake concept for Europe and a bogus-historical dogma were not the only calamities with which the European kingdoms affected the rest of the world; in fact, they were only two and among the last. The six colonial kingdoms used their military edge to inflict great empires and primitive structures with all sorts of disaster, destruction, ruin, death, and unadulterated inhumanity. Settler colonialism and intellectual-spiritual-cultural-intellectual-educational-academic-religious colonialism started with the evil treaty of Tordesillas (1494; پیمان تردسییاس /托德西利亚斯条约) and they soon attained unprecedented levels of monstrosity with the evil deeds of the Spanish and the Portuguese conquistadors. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519-1521; فتح امپراتوری آزتک توسط اسپانیا /西班牙征服阿兹特克帝国) before exactly 500 years and the destruction of the highly civilized Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (特诺奇蒂特兰/ تنوختیتلان) only heralded what would follow. About:
The division of the seas as per the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)
In the beginning of the 16th c., when such terribly inhuman crimes started being perpetrated by the first colonial empires, namely Spain and Portugal, there were still several human empires on Earth: in 1520, the Ottoman Empire covered a sizable territory in Western Asia, Northeastern Africa, and what is now called Southeastern Europe. In Western Africa, the Mali Empire (Manden Kurufaba) was still powerful, although superseded by the Songhai Empire.
In Iran, the Safavids were in power, controlling vast lands from Central Iraq to Herat to Baluchistan. The formidable Turanian-Mongolian Empire of the Golden Horde had split, but from today’s NE Balkans and Poland to the Pacific Ocean, a number of Muslim, Buddhist and Tengrist Turanian-Mongolian khanates controlled a really enormous territory. You needed only to speak Chagatay Turkic to cross (from west to east) the vast lands of the Qasim Khanate, the Crimean Khanate, the Nogai Horde, the Khanate of Kazan, the Astrakhan Khanate, the Uzbek Khanate, the Kazakh Khanate, the Khanate of Sibir (Siberia), the Turpan Khanate, the Yarkand Khanate, and the Four Oirat confederacy. In China, the Ming dynasty was still powerful, and in 1526, Timur’s (Tamerlane’s) great-great grandson Babur took power in Delhi, eliminating the earlier sultanates and founding the formidable Gurkanian Empire of South Asia, which is better known as the Mughal Empire.
The Golden Horde (Turanian-Mongolian Empire)The divided Turanian-Mongolian Empire around 1500The Ottomans around 1520The Safavid Empire of Iran around 1520 which according to Western colonial propaganda was called ‘Persia’, although it was a Turanian Empire.The Mughal Empire of South AsiaThe Songhai Empire in the 15-16th c.
However, none of these empires’ human elites had an idea about the monstrous plans and the atrocious deeds of the then otherwise insignificant colonial barbarians, who aspired to conquer and disfigure the entire world through evil conspiracy, deceitful schemes, pernicious practices, and utterly inhuman deeds. The naivety of the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Ming emperors hinges on the fact that they did not studiously monitor the deeds of the colonial powers; furthermore, they mistook the European colonials for humans, and they did not make proper plans as to how to oppose them. The worst mistake of the great Asiatic and African empires was that they did not perceive the forthcoming encounter and clash in terms of long-term perspective, eschatological agenda, and human race extinction. Still, all these empires cherished traditions and beliefs that described the ‘evil’ extensively; but the Asiatic imperial elites failed to timely identify the European colonials as the evil par excellence.
Hitherto unconceivable concepts were then introduced, and the fallacious version of History, peremptorily produced by the European colonial elites, was instrumental in projecting onto the entire world the aberration of a division between East and West (or Orient and Occident). This forgery had a double headed axe’s use:
a) it made the colonial elites, academics, diplomats, administrators, army officers, soldiers, societies and average people in general utterly believe in their ‘proven’ superiority (whereas they are indeed multiply inferior, degenerate and inhuman), and
b) it convinced the targeted nations’ elites, academics, diplomats, administrators, army officers, soldiers, societies and average people in general that they were irrevocably inferior (whereas they are indeed superior, law-abiding and human in every sense).
III. Colonial Weaponization of Knowledge and Deceitful Schemes against the Entire Mankind (1494-1925)
None of the 16th c. great imperial establishments of Asia and Africa realized the extent of the colonial perversion, subversion and systematic falsification of the World History. Study, research, exploration, knowledge, erudition and wisdom were traits, activities, qualities and virtues invariably attested throughout millennia in Asia and Africa; however, the entire scope and the final target were always the same, namely the discovery of the truth and the improvement of understanding. There was never a claim of superiority and such an attitude or claim would appear as absurd; there was competition and quite often synergy.
All the intellectuals of Ionia, Attica, Aeolia and Macedonia willingly acknowledged that they went to Mesopotamia, Egypt and Iran to be educated in the vast temples- universities of the Oriental capitals, because there was only darkness in the multi-divided and backward, petty states of South Balkans. Scholars from all backgrounds and lands used to flock to Nineveh, to Babylon, to Iwnw (Heliopolis), and to Persepolis, and later to Alexandria, to Antioch, to Nisibis, to Ctesiphon, to Istakhr, to Gundishapur, and during Islamic times to Baghdad, to Cordoba, to Cairo, and to Samarqand without idiotic prejudices of ethnic or national, ancestral or racial superiority.
However, the weaponization of knowledge, as attested in magnificent colonial grand opuses like the famous Dutch “Hortus Malabaricus” (1669-1676) and the illustrious French “La Description de l’Égypte” (1809-1829), showed that the insidious European colonial adventure was not a simple military expedition, an economic exploitation, and a national enslavement, but it consisted in the total deprivation of the colonized nations from their natural and national resources, their urban and architectural environment, their traditional knowledge and cultural heritage, and their own identity.
La Description de l’Égypte – the cover page of the monumental voluminous publication
Even worse, the European colonial plague constituted a systematic and permanent projection of the false identity of subaltern and subservient humanoid onto all the civilized Asiatic and African humans; they had been civilized, but they were forced into abandoning their culture and civilization, into being barbarized and enslaved, and into being transformed into humanoid automatons to serve their barbarian masters, i.e. the inhuman monsters of Portugal, Spain, England, France, Holland and Belgium. European colonialism was therefore the complete, irreversible and ultimate dehumanization of the ‘Other’. In the History of Mankind, we can describe European colonialism as the Crime of Crimes.
Simply, in the case of Luso-Spanish, Dutch, and Anglo-French colonialism, the ‘Other’ was the entire world, and the vicious gangsters and forgers were the most worthless barbarians of Asia’s westernmost and most uncivilized peninsula. The result of the detrimental shock was evident: the Mughal Empire could not last more than 180 years after the publication of the “Hortus Malabaricus”, and the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist less than 100 years after the publication of the “Description de l’Égypte”. The morale of the story is easy to figure out: when the foreigners know ‘your’ possessions better than you do, you better ask the astrologers how much time is left before your state disappears.
The French colonial empireThe English colonial empire
This is so because, if foreigners know ‘your’ possessions better than you do, this means that your state is already useless and dysfunctional. It also means that your religion is apparently worthless and your sacred texts evidently valueless; and this is true, not in the sense that the religion and the sacred texts in question are meritless, but because you lost their true meaning and therefore your understanding of them is nil.
IV. Naivety and Subsequent Fall of the Oriental Imperial Elites: Mughal Empire, Qing China, Czarist Russia, the Ottomans & Qajar Iran
It is interesting that the Opium Wars started only few years before the Mughal Empire disappeared. In 1839, the power of Bahadur Shah II was not greater than that of a puppet king in the Balkans or a tribal leader in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cornered among the Ottomans, the Russians, the English in ‘India’, and the English puppets in the pseudo-state of Afghanistan, the Iranian Qajar shahs could do nothing either to help the Chinese Qing or to organize their own defense with the much demanded final dissolution of Afghanistan and with an attack against British India.
It was too late for them; or perhaps one could say that for Imperial Iran, it was already too late in 1501, when the young shah Ismail Safavi, almost adored as the Messiah/Mahdi Incarnate in his early years, was spending his nights in fabulous banquets and sexual orgies, while the Luso-Spanish armadas were sailing across all oceans, which were literally prohibited to all Muslims, Chinese and the rest by virtue of the Treaty of Tordesillas of which no Iranian intelligence ever heard anything before the 20th c.
Ismail Safavi
Under such circumstances, no one has a doubt why Fat′h-Ali Shah Qajar (reign: 1797-1834) did nothing else except losing one more war to the Russians and spending his long days and his even longer nights with his 1000+ concubines, thus laboriously producing no less than 100 children and ca. 600 grandchildren (although several trustworthy historical sources include even higher numbers of heirs). The same is valid for the pious but stupid Ottomans whose best way of correcting a mistake was to commit another.
Fat′h-Ali Shah Qajar
And what is the difference between the last Mughal (Bahadur Shah II) and the last Ottoman (Vahdettin)? Having got a kick in the ass, the former died (1862) in Rangoon (Myanmar) where he was exiled; having experienced the same miserable fate, the latter died in exile (1926), in Sanremo (Italy); either in the East or in the West, an exile is an exile. It is therefore a permanent shame and an irrevocable disgrace. No one can raise a claim to Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism or Neo-Ottomanism without being similarly destroyed and eradicated from the surface of the Earth. And quite instructively, today’s China does not play into the Neo-Qing game; neither does Republican Russia develop Neo-Czarist delusions.
Bahadur Shah II, the powerless Mughal emperor when he was still on his throneThe exiled Bahadur Shah II in his small cabinVahdettin, the most execrable and the most miserable of all Ottomans leaves his palace to sail on an English ship to Italy where he lived in exile for the last years of his shameful life
The Opium Wars did not signal only the beginning of the European-American-Japanese colonization of China; they also heralded the beginning of the end for the Romanov. Yet, it was a period of stability for Russia – or so it seemed. From 1825 until 1881, when Alexander II was assassinated at the age of 63, Russia was ruled by only two czars, namely Nicholas I and his son. But there was no foresight, no real study of the European colonials, and no identity clarity.
The Zionist assassination of the Freemason czar Alexander IIRussia’s most shameful spot: the room where Nicholas II and his family were assassinated, thus paying for the mistake to associate Holy Russia to the unholy and devilish colonial states of France and England. Russia’s and the Romanov dynasty’s destiny would be different, if Nicholas II became the ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary and liberated India from the English colonial contamination.
Few people understand that only identity clarity can offer success in the governance of a realm and in the status it rejoices at the international level; on the contrary, identity confusion leads mathematically to defeat and destruction. Imperial Russia was in fact a Western European colonial fabrication – not by means of military invasion but by virtue of colonial stratagems. Colonial investors, agents and diplomats bribed, corrupted and utilized Russian noblemen and royals, and through subtle machinations convinced the Romanovs that they were a ‘European’ power. Thus, the Anglo-French colonials pulled the Russians into their historical forgery, persuaded them that the ‘Russians’ were ‘Indo-Europeans’, dragged them into the fallacious scheme ‘Christianity vs. Islam’ (whereas the English, the Dutch and the French elites were virulently anti-Christian), and engaged them in the same colonial competition (not anymore “Scramble for Africa” but for the entire world). However, all these developments were calamitous for Russia, and finally they led only to the demise of the entire dynasty.
The Russians were subtly made to believe that the ‘common’ enemy that they had with the English and the French was the Islamic World; this was a success of the Anglo-French colonial diplomacy. In fact, the Russians had much in common with the Muslims, whereas they had nothing in common with the Anglo-French colonial contamination.The Opium Wars: one of the worst shames of the History of MankindPu Yi, the last of the Qing emperors
As a virtually Turanian, Asiatic and Oriental superpower (like the Golden Horde), Russia had to support China in the Opium Wars, by making an alliance with Iran and by attacking Afghanistan and invading British India. But when you are an Asiatic and you think you are a European, you cannot possibly opt for the correct decision. That’s why identity clarity matters above all, when it comes to national survival. Identity recognition is a very serious and at times painful process; usually, you are neither what you think (are taught that) you are, nor what you would like to be. Only a very neutral and objective/objectivist standpoint toward past atrocities and a strict detachment from national/nationalist/nationalistic narratives, present dreams, and wishful thinking can offer you the key to your identity.
Similarly, during WW I, Russia had to be the ally of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Japan and Iran against France and England. In such a case, having no apparent reason to keep significant military forces in their western borders, the Russians could support the Ottomans against the English in Mesopotamia, Palestine and Hejaz, while three (3) million Russian soldiers with their Iranian allies could eliminate the fake state of Afghanistan and march on Delhi, invading the English colony and controlling the southern parts of Asia.
States function like human beings; the same rules apply to an individual and to a group of individuals. When someone does not do the correct thing, a mishappening takes always place. Wrong choices are constantly met with disastrous results; It was very unfortunate that the Russians participated with France and England in the vicious dismemberment of Qing China and that, in 1858-1860, through several ‘unequal treaties’ (the expression is an acknowledged historical term), they detached Outer Manchuria (外滿洲 / Приамурье). That’s why less than 60 years after Alexander II did this injustice to China, his grandson Nicholas II was deposed and assassinated. Alexander II was assassinated too (1881); but after his tragic death, Holy Russia still continued to exist. However, after his grandson’s assassination (1918), Holy Russia was no more. The ‘holy’ had been progressively but completely desecrated through the alliance with England and France.
V. Intellectual Colonialism and Orientalism
While the intellectual elites of the European colonial powers composed their false historical dogma on the basis of the intellectual-academic-cultural movements that we now call ‘Renaissance’, ‘Classicism’, and ‘Enlightenment’, arbitrarily distorting the past of their own lands, they also misinterpreted the History of Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire that they –also deliberately and erroneously- associated with them; it was a real usurpation of another nation’s past and cultural heritage. Then, peremptorily selecting earlier rejected philosophers of Ionia, worthless and forgotten politicians of Attica, long dismissed Aeolian poets, self-styled historians of Carian origin, authors of obscure past and unknown ancestry, repudiated tragedians and duly banished comedians, as well as forms of decayed lifestyle involving pedophilia and homosexuality, ritualistic orgies, and other absolutely pathetic and barbarian practices and traditions of various South Balkan tribes, they fabricated -out of thin air- what we now call ‘Ancient Greece’.
Ancient Greece never existed as a historical entity in the sense Ancient Phoenicia did. The royal divisions of the Ancient Phoenicians did not impact their culture and values that are now recognized for their coherence, consistency and uniformity. Quite contrarily, the disparate cultural elements that appear in the historical sources, the divergent religious beliefs and faithless lifestyles that are documented by means of archaeological evidence, and the incessant conflicts that pitched one ‘Ancient Greek’ city against another bear witness to the undeniable reality that ‘Ancient Greece’ never existed. In case, during the Antiquity and the Christian Times, the name had only a geographical connotation. In Islamic Times, it was duly forgotten. It is one more colonial fabrication (just like the European ‘Continent’!) geared to be an element of destructive propaganda and a double headed axe. This is what we now call ‘Hellenism’, i.e. a racist ghost.
Hitherto unconceivable concepts were then introduced, and the fallacious version of History, peremptorily produced by the European colonial elites, was instrumental in projecting onto the entire world the aberration of a division between East and West as per which
a) all the positive values, virtues, elements, contributions and exploits were delivered by the Ancient Greeks and Romans (the so-called ‘West’),
whereas
b) all the negative values, sins, disorders, embarrassments, and shames were caused by all the Ancient Oriental nations, the Eastern Christians of all denominations (Orthodox, Miaphysitic/Monophysitic, and Nestorian), and all the Muslims (the so-called ‘East’).
It goes without saying that the latter (b) were (or rather ‘had to be’) ‘lower’ than the former (a)!!
To add insult to injury, the colonial academic elites turned their intellectual and scientific robbery of the colonized nations’ natural and national resources, urban and architectural environment, traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, and diachronic identity into an unprecedentedly enormous academic fallacy. Colonial explorers, epigraphists, linguists, archaeologists, philologists and historians deciphered dozens of ancient scripts, surveyed and excavated dozens of thousands of archaeological sites, penned millions of speeches, articles, manuals and books, and filled thousands of libraries and museums with an enormous documentation which consists basically in a calamitous, venomous and discriminatory misrepresentation of the historical past of Asia and Africa. This enormous falsehood is now called Orientalism. All the discoveries, analyses, syntheses, conclusions and interpretations of the colonial Orientalist scholars were published and popularized only in a way to preserve the earlier constituted pseudo-historical dogma intact; this means automatically that vast part of the said documentation was concealed far from the average public.
There are many deliberately erroneous aspects of Orientalism; it goes beyond the scope of the present article to refute the atrocities of the Western colonial Orientalists. However, I must herewith mention a persistent and critical dimension of historical falsification that concerns the use of the forged World History that the Western colonials make.
When you initially write and teach a ‘World History’, based on historical sources that cover the period 500 BCE – 1500 CE and then, at a later stage, you discover numerous anterior sources, which reveal to you (with respect to the outright majority of the world’s historical nations) diverse aspects of spiritual exploration, intellectual endeavor, scientific research, cultural life, artistic genius, economic activity, state governance, public administration, military expedition, imperial conceptualization, and interstate relations that cover 2-3 millennia of History (which antedate the period you initially knew about), then you have to amend all your earlier criteria, preconceived ideas, measures of evaluation, moral standards, virtues, world views, concepts, and standpoints, values, theories, ideas, assumptions and conclusions, because they are -most probably- entirely wrong.
When you discover millions of texts in several languages and you get a clear idea of how life was 2000 or 3000 years before the moment you -arbitrarily and due to lack of sources- had taken as the ‘beginning of History’, then everything that you ‘knew’ (before the astounding discovery and the subsequent enrichment of knowledge) is wiped out, obliterated, and considered as obsolete once forever.
If we eventually suppose that the peremptory aberrations and the arbitrary conceptualizations of the Renaissance European colonial intellectuals were not malignant schemes providing only for the enslavement of the entire Mankind but mere errors and erroneous assumptions, then we can safely conclude that all these earlier aberrations and conceptualizations had to be immediately, completely and adequately amended in the light of the enormous amount of evidence unearthed, deciphered, studied, analyzed and interpreted.
Enuma Elish, the ancient Assyrian-Babylonian holy text that consists in the first human narrative of the Creation. After the discovery, decipherment, publication and study of the world’s earliest myths, epics and holy texts, everything changes, and we cannot afford to use posterior criteria to evaluate earlier masterpieces of spirituality and literature. On the contrary, all earlier, Assyrian-Babylonian and Egyptian, cultural and spiritual criteria apply to the evaluation of posterior epics and holy texts, notably those of the Hebrews, the ‘Greeks’ and the Romans. The Hawara papyrus with text of Homer’s Iliad. After the decipherment, study and publication of Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Hittite holy texts, myths and epics, the only value that Homer’s epics can possibly have is the one that the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Hittite criteria allow us to assess.
The fact that this development did not happen at all and the evident practice that today’s West European and North American colonial academics and intellectuals continue diffusing the same, preconceived and widely imposed falsehood are enough to convince all persons of good intentions that the European pseudo-historical dogma has always been deliberately and inanely false from A to Z.
VI. The Fake Science of Geopolitics
Since the misrepresentation of the ‘Other’ reached such extent, it was normal for the colonial elites to develop additional nonsensical theories, which were laboriously portrayed as ‘scientific disciplines’. In fact, they were merely wishful thinking defense mechanisms that lacked historicity, objectivity, authenticity, veracity and congruity; in brief, they were tools of propaganda and means to fool the eye. One of these arbitrary schemes is what people now call ‘geopolitics’. There is no geopolitics in any sense, and there can’t be any; the term is totally meaningless and self-contradictory.
Coined by the Swedish political scientist and politician Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), the term ‘Geopolitics’ (initially Geopolitik in Swedish and German) contains two linguistic elements in striking contradiction to one another. Being composed of two Ancient Greek words (γη+πολιτική/ge+politiki) that mean ‘earth’ (or ‘land’) and ‘politics’, the term was geared to purportedly describe “the study of the effects of Earth’s geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations”.
This assumption raises many points; first, ‘earth’ (γη) is not ‘geography’; second, ‘geography’ (lit. description of the earth) was already an ancient science that the Ancient Greeks and Romans learned from the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and other ancient and highly civilized nations. Modern geography is a scientific discipline dedicated “to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of the Earth and planets”, but Modern Geography and Ancient Geography are two completely different disciplines, methods, concepts and endeavors. This is still preliminary.
The main problem of the term ‘Geopolitics’ (‘earth’ and ‘politics’) is precisely that the Earth (or land) is unrelated to politics, and actually no politics can possibly apply to the Earth or most of the surface of the Earth. ‘Politics’ constitutes a very specific and historically marginal system of governance that can concern only a city-state (polis). There is no ‘politics’ in an empire, a kingdom, a nomad confederation, and a sizable realm of any racial, ethnic, linguistic, cultural and spiritual background. There was no ‘politics’ in Ancient Egypt, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Hittite Anatolia, Cush (Ancient Sudan), Carthage, Iran, Yemen, Turan, and China. There was no ‘politics’ in any Balkan or Anatolian kingdom; and there was no ‘politics’ in Seleucid Syria, Attalid Pergamum, Bactria, Sogdia or Kushan.
Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Alcibiades taken by Socrates. Politics can exist in a small city-state with no hereditary rule. However, a major state, let alone an empire, cannot be ruled by means of politics. As it is only the result of negotiations, material compromises, desecrated social life, corruption and impiety, politics is an improper, immoral and calamitous system even for the unfortunate cities-states that happen to be organized in this manner. But Western Europeans could not possibly understand this reality, because they had disastrously idealized the misery of Ancient Athens, one of the world’s most disreputable states.
Ancient Rome offers a good example in this regard; there was no politics in the Kingdom of Rome (Regnum Romanum; 753–509 BCE); there was politics in the Roman Republic (Senatus Populusque Romanus; 509-27 BCE); and there was no more politics in the Roman Empire (Imperium Romanum; 27 BCE-476 CE).
Subsequently, there was no ‘politics’ in the Eastern Roman Empire, in the Sassanid Empire of Iran, in the Gupta Empire, in Han, Tang, Yuan or Ming China, in the Islamic caliphates, sultanates, emirates, and khanates, in the Christian kingdoms of Western Europe or in any other nomadic confederation, realm or dominion. No system of governance can possibly be called ‘politics’ except for the republican administration of a city-state with democratic participation in the rule.
Certainly, the currently prevailing confusion makes everyone imagine that politics means governance and vice versa, but this represents only one more aspect of the multifaceted colonial propaganda that was diffused worldwide during the 19th and the 20th c. Useless to add, for any sizable realm larger than a modest self-governed city, there is no ‘politics’ today; the system is a tyranny disguised as ‘republic’ or ‘democracy’ and there cannot be any comparison between today’s fake politics and Ancient Roman or Athenian politics, except in terms of corruption, evil character, pernicious attitude, and social disorder.
So, to return to the initial point, “the effects of Earth’s geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations” (as per another definition of the fake term) should be rather called “geo-imperium”, “geo-tyranny”, “geo-dictatum” or “geo-control”; perhaps the best term would be “geo-sovereignty”. This is also proven by the deplorable contents that all the Western colonial academics, intelligence and military experts, diplomats and intellectuals invariably gave to the fake term ‘geo-politics’. Suffice it that one studies these ‘contents’ to realize that ‘geo-politics’ is an ahistorical mixture of criminal colonial targets with incessant distortions of the historical past. It has nothing to do with the ‘governance of one city with non-hereditary rule.
Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) came up with a debased theory, as per which the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, Qing China, Japan, and the colonial pseudo-state of Afghanistan were facing existential threats from the so-called ‘two monsters’, namely England and Russia. This nonsense can only be the invention of a cruel American pro-French/pro-Republican colonial, who felt that -despite France’s disproportionate control of African lands- Paris did not play an important role in the so-called ‘Big Game’ between Russia and England. Had the Vietnamese Nguyen dynasty survived the French colonial onslaught, Mahan would surely have invented a much larger ‘zone of threatened realms’ (probably between the 10th and the 40th parallels north, not only between the 30th and the 40th parallels north)! He presented himself as a Christian, but he was a Biblical racist and therefore a pseudo-Christian.
Until today, Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) is viewed as the principal heresiarch of the geo-political fallacy. All that he did was to draw fake lines, which did not represent historical realities in any sense. His long celebrated ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904) reflected the harsh antagonism of German, Russian and English scholars and explorers in parts of today’s Central Asia and Western China. Many people read this book, but do not know that it was written immediately after the first expedition (1900-1901) of Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) in Central Asia, during which the Hungarian Jewish-English explorer and British Intelligence officer carried out surface surveys, extensive reconnaissance, and excavations at Dandan Oilik, an oasis of the Taklamakan Desert. Mackinder’s book was published only months after Aurel Stein’s ‘Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan Personal Narrative of a Journey of Archaeological & Geographical Exploration in Chinese Turkestan’ (1903).
Mackinder’s texts reflect colonial concepts, diplomatic efforts, and Orientalist terms and explorations; at the time, Aurel Stein was still using currently obsolete terms like ‘Serindia’ (China, Indochina and India viewed as an entity) and ‘Innermost Asia’ (Central Asia, Western China, Mongolia, Central and Eastern Siberia) because his time was a period of pioneering research in those territories that had not been visited by Western European colonials until then. At those days, colonial Orientalists had already gathered enough evidence to fully document the History of Turan and to understand how internal Turanian (Turkic and Mongolian) conflicts generated endless historical waves of immigrants either to the South (in today’s China) or to the West (in today’s Central Siberia, Central Asia, Iran, Western Siberia, Eastern and Central Europe). This reality is hidden behind Mackinder’s concept of ‘pivot’ that he defined as the central point in his otherwise nonexistent ‘World-island’. However, his pivot area was not historically pivotal. Worse, it never existed as a geo-historical entity!
Even if we take the Afanasievo culture (3300=2500 BCE; in the Altai Mountains) and the Andronovo culture (2000-900 BCE; north of the Aral Lake) as signs of early and successive migratory waves, we cannot afford to define today’s NE Siberia, Central Siberia, Central Asia, and Iran’s northern and central parts as the real geographical ‘pivot’ of History. Quite contrarily, pivotal for the World History was the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’ – another pseudo-historical term that denotes Mesopotamia, Syro-Palestine and Egypt. It is from there that civilization spread to the rest of the world. But in 1904, these regions were controlled by the Ottomans (Mesopotamia and Syro-Palestine) and the Anglo-French colonials (Egypt), and there was not much at stake. Contrarily, in the lands that Mackinder described as ‘pivot’, the possible limits of a) the German involvement, b) the English infiltration, c) the Russian advance, and d) the Chinese presence were unknown, whereas all borders were essentially ill-defined.
Last, Mackinder’s tripartite division of the world {into World-Island, offshore islands (England and Japan), and outlying islands (America and Oceania)} is nonsensical either at the historical or the geographical level. Why didn’t he include Indonesia? Probably because it was already colonized by the Dutch and nothing was at stake there. Inane!
On the other hand, Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) produced a geopolitical system that reflected many historical concepts and approaches to imperial governance. In strong contrast with Mackinder’s bizarre abstractions and ahistorical maps, Haushofer’s ideas appear sound and solid. But they are not … ‘geopolitical’! They represent merely a traditional imperial worldview, and they constitute the basics of the state prosperity and expansion as documented in 18th dynasty Kemet (Egypt), Sargonid Assyria, Achaemenid or Sassanid Iran, Han or Tang China, the Abbasid caliphate, and the Timurid Empire.
As a matter of fact, there is nothing ‘new’ or ‘modern’ in Haushofer’s ideas; they are correct, but they constitute the antipodes of the colonial nonsense that we nowadays call ‘geo-politics’. I simply wonder why the distinguished German scholar did not have the courage to decry ‘geo-politics’ as a fake science and to portray the Anglo-Saxon colonial paranoia as the supreme danger for the Mankind’s survival.
The notion of the organic state, the theory of Lebensraum, the need for self-sufficiency-self-reliance (autarky), and the division of the world into spheres of influence or distinct realms (pan-regions) can be found in cuneiform, hieroglyphic, Chinese, Middle Persian, Arabic and Farsi historical sources – millennia before Haushofer put them down on a piece of paper. But they were not described as ‘geopolitical notions’; they were viewed as basics of imperial governance. The only element that did not exist during the Antiquity and the Christian-Islamic times is the delusion of dichotomy between land power and sea power. But in this, Haushofer was apparently influenced by those whom he had to firmly oppose but failed to do so: his Anglo-Saxon opponents.
As it could be expected, on the earlier basis of ahistorical sketches and arbitrary aberrations, further fallacies and false notions were progressively added. Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943) expanded the erroneous concept as per which today’s NE Siberia, Central Siberia, Central Asia, and Iran’s northern and central parts are the ‘pivotal’ area. He then peremptorily and therefore erroneously divided the Afro-Asiatic landmass into a) the so-called ‘heartland’ and b) the ‘rimland’. These jolly delusions never existed in the History of Mankind; they actually do not consist in any worthwhile synthesis or serious interpretation of the existing historical sources. They only reflect the Anglo-Saxon regimes’ final goals, and the evil methods that they intend to use in order to achieve them; in other words, one can surely describe them as ‘wishful thinking’ and properly decry them as the most serious threat against the entire Mankind.
Fake lines, fake borders, fake concepts and fake science: geo-politics
Before ending this unit, I feel obliged to shift the discussion from the false and fake ‘geo-politics’ to the true and genuine ‘geographical determinism’. When it comes to topics pertaining to the Earth’s impact on empires, peoples and cultures, one has to point out that these topics did not come to surface only in Modern Times; they have constituted an integral part of all the major civilizations of World History. They were known as part of the ancient wisdom, knowledge and sciences; and this was already known to Orientalists, historians and philologists. This knowledge we presently define as ‘geographical determinism’.
Ancient erudite scholars, high priests, mystics and explorers always viewed the material universe as hinging on the spiritual universe; consequently, they were adamant in identifying concordances between the two entities. Part of their scientific knowledge and understanding depended on their spiritual wisdom and exploration. Among the scientific disciplines that they developed and which they viewed as an undividable unity of spiritual and material knowledge and wisdom, ‘geographical determinism’ was only one.
Geographical determinism was not only a concept and a theory, but a practice and a set of criteria as to how to live in Ancient Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Hittite Anatolia, Elam, Cush, Canaan-Phoenicia, and Iran. The same is valid for Carthage, Yemen, the Indus Valley, Turan, and China. The choice of dwelling places, the urban plans, the construction of temples and palaces, the orientation of cities, the identification of sacred sites, the direction of prayer, the selection of specific locations for rock reliefs and inscriptions, the recognition of the correct spots to place enormous statues, pillars and obelisks, altars and thrones, in one word everything, depended on the conclusions drawn after a deep study of geographical determinism.
NinevehEtemenanki, the world’s holiest location as per the BabyloniansIshtar’s Gate, Babylon – Berlin MuseumParsa (Persepolis), the Achaemenid capital of Iran. Not only the selection of major sites (for palaces and temples) but also the minor details of a society’s daily life were arranged on the basis of geographical determinism.
In fact, the interconnection of the spiritual and material universes is the sole factor that denotes and specifies the nature and the traits of every single geographical point, therefore revealing its uniqueness, importance and possible use. High priests, mystics and hierophants were able to duly explore and describe the locally particular interaction of the five elements (i.e. Ether, Soft Waters, Earth, Air, and Salt Waters) and the subsequent generation of electromagnetic flow per point. This is how they concluded as regards the eventual use of the geographical point, ground, space or area.
It matters little whether you delve in Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Iranian Cosmogony and Spiritual Ontology (see above, as regards the five elements) or you explore the Traditional Chinese Wuxin (五行) Ontology, as per which the five elements are the following: Metal (initially conceived as Gold and corresponding to Ether), Water (evidently conceived as Soft Waters), Earth, Wood (corresponding to Air) and Fire. The conclusions were always identical. At the end of the day, either you were at the banks of Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Huang-he (黃河/Yellow River) or Chang Jiang (黃河/Yangtze), geographical determinism functioned always as (to use a modern term) a fully accredited ‘urban environmental acupuncture’.
Traditional Chinese Wuxin (五行) Ontology
The ‘woke’ attitude to transfigure the term and turn ‘geographical determinism’ into ‘environmental determinism’ reveals only the ignorance and the paranoia of the corrupt left-wing social-justice movements and ideologies that currently exist in the worthless and already defunct Western world. This is so, because ‘geography’ meant always the study of the environment (not only the earth) in historical periods.
VII. From the Great Game to the Final Game
European colonial powers’ expansion brought destruction, barbarism, pandemics, wars, deaths, misery, poverty, inhumanity, demolition of cultures, and deracination of millions of people. European colonialism caused also two world wars and a 44-year long ‘cold war’. For these nefarious results and for all the crimes perpetrated, the European colonial states (Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium, and England) and their derivatives (USA, Canada, and Australia) will have to pay dearly for their attempt to annihilate so many historical nations, destroy their traditions, and uproot their cultures.
Quite unfortunately, the Western colonial and neo-colonial powers did not regret and did not repent for the calamitous and inhuman deeds that they carried out worldwide. There is a serious reason for this grave mistake and unacceptable attitude; the unrepentant savages of US, UK, NATO and their allies are controlled by forces that push the world to the edge, as they advance in the implementation of an eschatological agenda that provides for the extermination of more than nine tenths of the current world’s population. If this claim appears farfetched, one has only to read the text of the magnificent monument known as the Georgia Guidestones; it will be enough.
The persistent manner by which the ruling classes of the colonial powers seek to achieve the extermination of the largest part of world’s population is not a reason for inactivity and despair. There are opposite forces actually working to avert the evil plans, cancel the targets, and lead the colonial powers to self-destruction, social chaos, climactic disorder, ultimate implosion, and total decomposition. Constituting a continuation of the Shanghai Five, which started in 1996 as a mutual security agreement between China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) consists in the greatest alliance in the History of Mankind as it represents more than 40% of the world’s population and almost 25% of the global GDP.
Offering a multi-level synergy in diverse fields, such as security, economy and cultural cooperation, SCO was launched in 2001 with the additional engagement of Uzbekistan; it was considerably enlarged in 2017 with the participation of Pakistan and India as full members. Observer status was offered to Mongolia (2004), Pakistan, India and Iran (2005), Afghanistan (2012) and Belarus (2015). Dialogue partner status was extended to Sri Lanka (2009), Turkey (2012), Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Nepal (2015).
SCO expanded in parallel with the groundbreaking Belt and Road Initiative (OBOR) and in cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU: Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia as members and Uzbekistan, Moldova and Cuba as observers). On 17th September 2021, Iran was accepted as full member state (the technical and legal processes may take more than a year to be completed) and Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia were granted dialogue partner status.
Tacikistan’ın başkenti Duşanbe’de Şangay İşbirliği Örgütü’nün (ŞİÖ) Devlet Başkanları Zirvesi düzenlendi. Zirve toplantısına katılan İran Cumhurbaşkanı İbrahim Reisi (solda), Tacikistan Cumhurbaşkanı İmamali Rahman (sağda) tarafından karışlandı. ( İran Cumhurbaşkanlığı – Anadolu Ajansı )
Governed by consensus, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is not the anti-NATO or anti-EU as many people think; however, if we take into consideration the brilliant failures of NATO where one member sabotages the goals of the other and the final impasse of the European Union where every plan has been in deadlock after the European refugee crisis (2015) and the Brexit referendum (2016), no one needs to repeat the experience of these two bodies or to function similarly. The Turkish-Greek row for the case of NATO and the courageous, constant and resolute opposition of the Visegrad Group to the Brussels authorities constitute the perfect examples in this regard.
Being a forum for cooperation, synergy and engagement rather than a typical regional alliance, SCO will be able to gradually encompass Southeast Asia and Africa, thus leaving US, UK, Canada, Australia, France and Holland to implode all on their own. To mark an outstanding success as the world’s first superpower with human face and without colonial past, Beijing must steadily maintain a multilayered approach to international affairs, distinguishing bilateral alliance from multilateral cooperation.
Drawing on hitherto successes and capitalizing on its enormous resources, China must act as the liberating force within a world plagued with colonial divisions, racist concepts, discriminatory prejudices, delusional Euro-centric theories, and historical falsifications. Creating the image of a popular superpower, China must build on Education, Culture, Intellect, Science, Humanity and Justice, unveiling to all and demolishing forever the myths, the delusions, the aberrations and the forgeries that supported the West European and North American colonial adventure, i.e. mankind’s worst nightmare.
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 nemeqi – https://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:
(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:
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 bornMain 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.
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.
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 cityNasibina-Nisibis-Nusaybin (SE Turkey): a major Aramaean city Hatra (NW Iraq): a major Aramaean city Dura Europos on Euphrates (Eastern Syria): a major Aramaean cityTadmur-Palmyra (Central Syria): a major Aramaean city Bosra (Southern Syria): a major Aramaean city Rekem (Petra, Jordan): a major Aramaean city of the Nabataean dynastyHegra, 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).
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).
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.
Syriac Aramaic in Serto writingSyriac 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.
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/
Dair Mar Eliya (Monastery of St. Elijah) in North Iraq: Nestorian monastery of the 6th c.Nestorian Gospel in SyriacThe 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 illuminationsCoptic manuscriptCoptic 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.
Manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud with text from the tractate KiddushinManuscript 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.
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_tripsThe Mithraic temple of Anahita at Bishapur near KazerunThe 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 manuscriptsRepresentation of Zurvan, the all-consuming ‘god’ of time
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 ArtTypical sample of rupestrian Cappadocian ArtThe 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.
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.
————————————————————-
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.
The Sassanid Empire of Iran in its greatest extent at 621 CEHeraclius’ 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The hills around the Yarmouk riverYarmouk RiverMaps 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!
Peshitta manuscripts with miniaturesAramaean 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.
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 ArtGrand 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.
megalommatiscomments 