Response to Athens Dialogues: Stories and
Histories; Koder and Ray
The Heirs of Greek Civilization: Indians and
Turks?
After reading two fascinating
papers, one by Professor Koder and another by
Professor Prabha Ray, although intrigued and
certainly impressed, initially I could not fathom
how I could possibly write a response to two
papers that seemingly have little connections to
each other. Professor Koder explores the
fascinating phenomenon of Greek Byzantine writers
in the 15th century attributing knowledge of the
Greek Classics to Sultan Mehmed II, the Fatih
Sultan, who in his propaganda whether
self-consciously or otherwise claimed the mantle
of the Roman Caesars and adopted the title
Kayser-i-Rum. Professor Ray on the other hand
demonstrates the extensive maritime networks that
linked the Roman Mediterranean world to India. How
could these two topics have anything to do with
each other? The time gap between the two periods
under consideration is well over a thousand years.
At first glance such would be the natural
conclusion to be drawn from this interdisciplinary
exercise as a whole. Is it even worth the effort? My answer is absolutely yes. As the declared
objective of this conference brings to the fore we
have finally reached a point in scholarship where
not just the synchronic, but also the diachronic
impact of Greek civilization on the world is
increasingly an important focal point of
discussion. Despite the enormous time gap between
the heydays of maritime trade between India and
Imperial Rome in the early centuries of the first
millennium of the common era and the later surge
of the Ottoman Turks into Constantinople in 1453
AD that ended once and for all the vestiges of
Greco-Roman political hegemony over the
Mediterranean world, the two periods under
consideration offer us the same pertinent and
arguably timeless questions. Whose inheritance
exactly is the intellectual wonders and traditions
of the Classical Hellenes?
During the nineteenth century and arguably even
the twentieth century Greco-Roman civilization was
often in both Classical scholarship and among the
wider public seen as the inheritance solely of the
Western European world.The Greek-Barbarian
antithesis
[1] developed by
the Classical Greeks, mostly in Athens, to
denigrate all their neighbours, not just the
‘oriental, effeminate’ Persians
[2] , but also the wild western barbarians
[3] such as the Thracians, Romans and the Celts,
was conveniently remodeled and reinterpreted to be
the prototype of or rather an exemplum for a new
modern, western, European chauvinism or
‘orientalism’, as Edward Said puts it, towards the
Near East and sometimes the Far East
[4] . The very terminology, Near and Far which we
still use in scholarship are themselves of course
the residue of a Eurocentric world view.Thus an
odd distortion of the rhetoric of Greek
ethnocentrism
[5] was used to
render the Greek inheritance an exclusively
European one. Professor Ray also illuminates this
phenomenon in the case of the British Raj in
India. By some bizarre logic the Hellenic invaders
of Ancient India and even Roman merchants were
equated in the British imagination and propaganda
with 18th and 19th century British adventurers in
India.
Despite the fact that the territories covered by
the Empires of Alexander
[6] , the
Seleucids, and the Caesars included not just parts
of western Europe, but also the entirety of the
Near Eastern world and even parts of northern
India, the extent to which these regions also were
the legitimate heirs to the Greco-Roman cultural
and political tradition was not even seriously
contemplated in western scholarship. This
exclusion of the East from the heritage of the
Greeks in European literary discourse stretches
back as far as the capture of Constantinople in
1453.In that same year Aeneas Sylvius
Piccolomini, the Humanist bishop of Siena and
later Pope of the Renaissance, would mock the
views of some of his contemporaries that the Turks
were Trojan descendents or had anything to do with
the Homeric or Roman tradition
[7] .Yet
mythographers and pseudo-genealogists of the same
age were much more open to such possibilities and
even contemplated the ancient ‘kinship’ between
the infidel Turks and the most Christian nation of
the Franks (France) via their putative common
origins in the Homeric Trojans
[8] . Interestingly, even Aeneas, who wished to banish
the Turks from the list of civilized and
legitimate kingdoms of the world, felt obliged
nonetheless to place the hated Turks within the
boundaries of the Classical tradition by
identifying them with Herodotus’ Scythians
[9] .
The historical Turks were indeed in a way related
to the Scythians, but certainly not to the
Trojans, at least directly
[10] . What is
obvious though is the extent to which the
Classical tradition together with the
Judeo-Christian tradition that also arguably
derived from a related cultural milieu, determined
the ways in which the western world or Christendom
viewed the world. However, is it accurate to say
that this Classical cum Judeo-Christian tradition
was exclusively Western or European? Fanciful
genealogies that traced the ancestry of
individuals and whole peoples to figures either in
the Classical tradition or in the Jewish bible are
as frequently found in Islamic religious,
historiographical and geographical literature as
in the corresponding Christian literature of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance.By way of example
by the seventeenth Century Oghuz, the eponymous
ancestor of the Oghuz Turks from whom both the
Seljuks and the Ottomans derived, was widely
recognized in Turkish ‘historiography’ as the
descendent of Nuh (Noah) via Yafes (Japheth)
[11] .
While Mehmed the Conqueror was claiming the
mantle of the Roman Caesars, further to the east a
contemporary figure, albeit a rather less
significant warlord, in Badakhstan (modern day
Afghanistan) by the name of Shah Sultan Muhammad
Badakhshi claimed that he was the direct
descendent of none other than Iskandar Zulkarnain
(Alexander the Great) son of Filikus Rumi (Phillip
of Rome/Macedon)
[12] . This Shah
Sultan Muhammad, supposedly a descendent of
Alexander, was esteemed by his more powerful
neighbours in Central Asia, precisely and only
because of his fabulous ancestry.The Amir
Zia-ud-Din, a respected sayyid of Kashgar in
present day Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang), then
called Moghulistan (the land of the Mongols)
[13] , visited Badakhstan to ask for the
hand of one of the prince’s daughters in marriage
for his patron Yunus Khan, the Chagatai Mongol
Khan of Moghulistan, the direct descendent of
Genghis Khan
[14] and one of
the most powerful princes of his time. Shah Sultan
readily agreed to the match and sent his fourth
daughter Shah Begum to Yunus.Yunus himself would
later become the maternal grandfather of the
famous Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur, the Timurid,
Moghul emperor of India
[15] .
Both the Moghuls in India and their Mongol
forbears in Central Asia and Persia were
fascinated with Alexander the Great and the Turks
were no less enthusiastic about him. The
extraordinary level of diffusion of these
traditions about the Macedonian conqueror is
reflected by the fact that one of the best known
Alexander romances of the Muslim world the
A’ina-yi Sikanderi in Persian
was written during the Mongol Ilkhanid period in
the rival Turk/Mamluk dominated court of the Delhi
Sultanate by Amir Khusrow, a Turkic Indian whose
family derived from the Mongol Kara-Khitans. Sultan Alauddin Khalji, his patron and master, the
Turco-Afghan ruler of Delhi, inscribed on his
coins the legend Sikander-i-sani, ‘the Second
Alexander’ and aspired to imitate his hero by
becoming a conqueror of the world
[16] .
Alexander together with the more recent
conquerors of the known world such as Chinggis
Khan and Tamerlane
[17] became a
by-word for extraordinary feats of military
achievement among the Turco-Mongol rulers of the
Islamic world. The Turkish admiral Sidi Ali Reis,
who visited the court of the second Mughal Emperor
Humayun in Delhi in ca.1555 AD, in order to both
impress and intimidate his host boasted that his
sovereign Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman
Sultan, had conquered all the lands conquered by
Alexander the Great and more, to which Humayun in
amazement supposedly commented that surely no-one
deserved the title of Padishah (emperor) except
the Ottoman Sultan
[18] . Such was
the esteem in which Alexander was held by the
Turco-Mongols that at the far eastern end of the
Muslim world a late 16th century sultan of Aceh in
Indonesia, then under heavy Ottoman Turkish
influence, would bear the name Sikander Muda (c.
1583-1636), the young Alexander, and liken his own
less impressive conquests in Malaysia and Sumatra
to the deeds of the Macedonian conqueror
[19] .
The romanticized history of Alexander the
Macedonian and his Hellenic Empire was thus as
cherished in the East as in the West. So how
outlandish or preposterous was it for a Turkish
Sultan of Constantinople to claim that he was the
heir to the legacy of Alexander and Julius Caesar? Well no more than the claims of Ivan the Terrible,
the Tsar of Russia to being the descendent of
Augustus Caesar
[20] or a German
Saxon Duke Otto claiming to be the heir of the
Roman tradition and calling himself the Holy Roman
emperor. If the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks who
were never a part of the Greco-Roman world can
later claim the mantle of heirs to this ancient
tradition then why can’t the Turks, Russians or
even the Mongols? After all they all had the
distinction of ruling over areas that had formerly
formed a part of the Greco-Roman world.
One other important fact which we should briefly
acknowledge is the fact that the trade networks of
antiquity so ably illuminated by Professor Ray,
covered the entirety of the Mediterranean world,
the Near East, South Asia, East Asia and even the
steppe of Inner Asia. The civilizations of the
world in recorded history never existed in
splendid isolation.The neologism Afro-Eurasian
interactive system
[21] has lately
been coined to describe this immense system of
trade networks that by the 5th century AD saw
Roman glass being exported as far East as Silla in
modern day Korea
[22] and even
earlier in the 1st century AD the phenomenon of
the excessive intake of Chinese silks emptying the
coffers of the Roman upper class elite
[23] at the other end of Eurasia.
The Kushans, a Tocharian-Scythian people
[24] , whose empire flourished
simultaneously with the Roman Principate, the
Parthian Empire and the Chinese Han Empire, in
what is now Central Asia and India, are a prime
example of how interconnected the civilizations of
antiquity actually were.Situated at the very
center of the vast trade networks between the
Mediterranean world and East Asia, the Kushans
would use the Greek alphabet
[25] as part of
their writing system and trade actively with both
the Greco-Roman world and the Chinese
[26] .Greco-Roman artistic traditions
would have quite a significant impact on the art
and architecture of the Kushans, especially in the
realms of sculpture and ornamentation
[27] , and via them on the artistic
tradition of East Asia
[28] . Thus via
the Kushans Greek art became part of the cultural
legacy of East Asians.
Even in realms traditionally thought to be
exclusively a western inheritance from the Greeks,
philosophy and the natural sciences, Islam was as
much the heirs of the Classical Greeks as the
Latin west. Avicenna and Averroes knew their
Aristotle arguably much better than their ‘Latin’
contemporaries. What all this shows quite clearly
is that the Greco-Roman civilization is the
heritage of the entire Afro-Eurasian world not
just the west. Are the lessons and precedents set
by the Greeks, for instance their democracy and
the sciences needed only in Western Europe? Are
they only applicable in the Western, European
context? Are they incompatible with the Eastern
mindset? All these issues have been raised before
in scholarship.Democracies have been shown to
flourish in non-Western settings in East Asia and
South Asia and scientific research in the Greek
tradition flowered in the Islamic East under the
Abbasids, the Ilkhanids and the Timurids before it
was rediscovered in the West
[29] . In our
multi-polar world it is m ore essential than ever
before to acknowledge the global reach and impact
of the Classical Tradition. Only then can the
legacy of the Ancient Greeks be well and truly
appreciated.
Footnotes
For in depth discussions on
the Greek-Barbarian antithesis see Hall, E. (1989)
Inventing the Barbarian: Greek
Self-definition through Tragedy , Oxford;
Tuplin, C. (1999). ‘Greek Racism?’ in G. Tsetskheladze, ed.,
Ancient
Greeks West and East , Leiden, Boston and
Köln, 47-76; Isaac, B. (2004).
The Invention of Racism in Classical
Antiquity , Princeton and Oxford; Kim, H.J. (2009).
Ethnicity and Foreigners
in Ancient Greece and China , London.
For an in depth analysis of
the reality of Greek-Persian interrelations see
Miller, M. (1997).
Athens and
Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in
Cultural Receptivity , Cambridge.
For an expression of Greek
attitudes towards the ‘barbarians’ of Europe see
Aristotle
Politics 1327b
23-6, who defines the
barbaroi in Europe as free, but
deficient in intelligence and skill, and
Thucydides’ tirade against the European Thracians
(7. 29-30).
Said, E. (1979).
Orientalism , New York. For a
counter-argument see Irwin, R. (2006).
For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists
and their Enemies , London, esp. 9-18.
Isaac, B. (2004), 302.
Dani, A.H. and Bernard, P. (1994), ‘Alexander and his successors in Central
Asia’ in J. Harmatta, ed.,
History of Civilizations of Central Asia ,
Paris, 67-97.
Meserve, M. (2008).
Empires of Islam in Renaissance
Historical Thought , Cambridge Mass.;
London, Harvard University Press, 1.
Meserve (2008), 47-8.
Meserve (2008), 74-5. On
Herodotus’ Scythians see Rolle, R. (1989).
The World of the Scythians , tr. G. Walls, London, and Kim (2009),
100-115.
For the early history of
the Turks see Findley , C.V. (2005).
The Turks in World History ,
Oxford, 21-55, and Sinor, D. (1990). ‘The
Establishment and Dissolution of the Turk Empire’
in D. Sinor, ed.,
The Cambridge
History of Early Inner Asia , Cambridge,
287, 295.
Findley (2005), 64.
Elias, N., ed., and
Denison Ross, E., trans. (1895, reprint 2008).
A History of the Moghuls of
Central Asia: The Tarikh-i-Rashidi of Mirza
Muhammad Haidar, Dughlat , New York, 107.
For background information
on Moghulistan see Kim, Hodong (2000). ‘The Early
history of the Moghul Nomads: The Legacy of the
Chaghatai Khanate’ in R. Amitai-Preiss and D. Morgan, eds.,
The Mongol Empire
and its Legacy , Leiden, 290-318.
Roemer, H.R. (1986). ‘The
Successors of Timur’ in P. Jackson, ed.,
The Cambridge History of Iran ,
vol. 6, Cambridge, 119.
Ibid.
Akhtar, N. (2007) ‘ Visual
illustrations of the Life of Alexander in Persian
Manuscripts’ in H.P. Ray and D. Potts, eds.,
Memory as History: The Legacy of
Alexander in Asia , New Delhi,76-88, 86. For information on earlier Alexander romances in
the Muslim East see Bladel, K. (2007). ‘The Syriac
Sources of the Early Arabic Narratives of
Alexander’ in the same volume, 54-75.
For the history of the
Mongol conquerors see Grousset, R. (1944)
Le conquérant du monde : vie de
Gengis-Khan , Paris, and Hookham, H. (1962).
Tamburlaine the
Conqueror , London.
Sidi Ali Reis,
Mirat ul-Memalik , A. Vambéry,
trans.,
The Travels and
Adventures of the Turkish Admiral Sidi Ali
Reïs (London, 1899),
e-resource:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/sidialireis/txt_023_hindustan.html.
http://www.asnlf.net/asnlf_int/acheh/history/rulersofacheh/iskandarmuda/sultan_iskandar_muda.htm.
Madariaga, I. (2005).
Ivan the Terrible: The First Tsar
of Russia , New Haven and London,
97.
Chase-Dunn, C. and Hall,
T. (1997),
Rise and Demise:
Comparing World-Systems , Boulder, CO.,
149.
Francis, P. (2002).
Asia’s Maritime Bead trade: 300 B.C. to
the Present , Honolulu, 89.
Thorley, J. (1971). ‘The
Silk Trade between China and the Roman Empire at
its Height, Circa AD 90-130’,
Greece and Rome , Second Series, Vol. 18,
No. 1, 71-80.
See Enoki, K., Koshelenko,
G.A., and Haidary, Z. (1994), ‘The Yüeh-chih and
their migrations’, in J. Harmatta,
History of Civilizations of Central
Asia , vol. 2, Paris,171-189, 172.
See Harmatta, J. (1994). ‘Languages and Literature in the Kushan Empire’ in
J. Harmatta, ed.,
History of
Civilizations of Central Asia , vol. 2,
Paris, 417-440, 422-433, and Mukhamedjanov, A.R. (1994). ‘ Economy and Social System in Central
Asia in the Kushan Age’ in Harmatta, ed.,
History of Civilizations of Central
Asia , vol. 2, Paris, 265-290,
280.
J. Mukhamedjanov (1994),
286, and Puri, B.N. (1994). ‘The Kushans’ in J. Harmatta, ed.,
History of
Civilizations of Central Asia , vol. 2,
Paris, 247-263, 257-8.
Pugachenkova, G.A., Dar,
S.R., Sharma, R.C., Joyenda, M.A., and Siddiqi, H. (1994). ‘Kushan Art’ in J. Harmatta, ed.,
History of Civilizations of Central
Asia , vol. 2, Paris, 331-395, 333, 348,
367, and 372. See also Puri (1994), 258.
Grayson, J.H. (1985).
Early Buddhism and Christianity
in Korea: A Study in the Emplantation of
Religion , Leiden, 3-4.
Kennedy, E.S. (1968). ‘The
Exact Sciences in Iran under the Saljuks and
Mongols’ in J.A. Boyle, ed.,
The
Cambridge History of Iran , vol. 5,
Cambridge, 659-679.