Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (28 page)

Strangely, Hodges and Whitehouse make no mention of these Sassanid and early Islamic cities.

Thus Arab tradition proved unreliable with regard to Samarra’s beginnings. It proved equally unreliable with regard to its end. Judging by the testimony of Ya’qubi, archaeologists expected to find a city founded in 836 and inhabited for around fifty years before being completely abandoned at the end of the ninth century. This was not however the case. On the contrary, Herzfeld was forced to concede, on the evidence of pottery, coins, and other artifacts, the continued existence of the metropolis into the tenth and even eleventh centuries.
[10]

Reflecting this, the
Encyclopaedia Iranica
admits to a “problem” regarding the traditional ceramic chronology at the site, conceding that Herzfeld’s excavations were carried out without due regard for stratigraphy, and that the city, contrary to traditional notions, continued to be occupied into the late tenth century and beyond:

“The problem of traditional ceramic chronology. At Samarra the finds included lustered wall tiles from the palace of Jawsaq al-Khaqani, al-Mutasem’s residence. The ornament includes several familiar elements: half-palmettes, Sasanian wing motifs, and leaf scrolls. Some of the tiles are painted with birds encircled by wreaths. A second, larger group of luster-painted tiles, set into the frame of the
mehrab
(niche) at the Great Mosque of Qayrawan in Tunisia, has much in common with the finds from Samarra. … Taking these two groups of tiles as his starting point, Ernst Kühnel proposed a hypothetical development of luster ceramics in Iraq: The earliest pieces were ornamented in polychrome; in about 246/860 a bichrome palette composed of brown and yellow came into use; and soon after the abandonment of Samarra as capital monochrome luster was introduced. The tiles from the palace of Jawsaq al-Khaqani were not found in place, however, and it is therefore not certain that they formed part of the original decoration. The reports about the Qayrawan tiles also leave room for doubt about the accepted dating (Hansman, pp. 145-46).

“The conclusion that new wares were developed in the Islamic world in the 3rd/9th century as a result of the importation of ceramics from China was based partly on the assumption that Samarra was occupied for only fifty years. Yet, although Samarra ceased to be the capital in 279/892, silver coins continued to be minted there until 341/952-53 (Miles). Furthermore, according to Ebn Hawqal, who probably visited the area in ca. 358/969 (pp. 243-44, 247; tr. Kramers, pp. 236, 239) and Maqdesi (Moqaddasi, pp. 122-23), who wrote in about 375/985, parts of it were still inhabited. As the excavations of 1911-13 were conducted without regard for stratigraphy, all that can properly be said about an object from the site is that it may date from 221-375/836-985, but it may be even later. On the basis of the Samarra finds alone there is thus no way of knowing whether new types were introduced all at once or at intervals over a period of a century and a half; for further information, it is necessary to turn to related finds from Susa, Siraf, and other sites.”
[11]

So, although Ya’qubi and other Arab sources claimed that Samarra had been occupied for only fifty years, in the ninth century, excavation has shown that it was in fact occupied during the tenth century, and that, furthermore, the artifacts found there can date from anywhere between the mid-ninth to the late tenth century, or “even later”. This last comment in fact gives the game away. The fact is, the pottery and material culture of tenth/eleventh century Mesopotamia is virtually indistinguishable from that of the eighth and ninth centuries. The blue-glazed barbotine ware, for example, so characteristic of all the early Islamic sites of the region, is in fact equally characteristic of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
[12]

Let’s look at this again: Arab history tells us that Samarra, a vast royal metropolis, was constructed in the second half of the ninth century, inhabited for about fifty years, and abandoned around 900 or shortly before; and this is the narrative accepted by Hodges and Whitehouse, who present the metropolis as proof of a flowering Islamic civilization during an age of depopulation and barbarism in Europe. Yet what the archaeologists have found is a city constructed by the Sassanid Persians in the latter years of the sixth and early part of the seventh century, a city that continued to be occupied into the late tenth and eleventh centuries. So, instead of a fifty year old settlement, we have a four hundred year old one! Yet here again there is a problem. In a four hundred year old settlement we would expect strata many meters in depth. Comparable epochs in the city of Babylon, for example, have produced anything from four to six meters. Yet the depth of strata at Samarra is nothing like this, and on the contrary would lead to the conclusion of a city settled only – as the Arab historians insisted – for about half a century!

What can all this mean? Here again we find that enigmatic hiatus that we have encountered again and again in the archaeology of the “dark age” irrespective of where we have looked. Was Samarra then constructed by the Sassanid Persians in the late sixth and early seventh centuries and abandoned for three hundred years, before being reoccupied by the Muslims in the tenth century?

The only evidence for a ninth century Samarra (apart from the discredited testimony of Ya’qubi), is the discovery of a rather small number of coins which appeared to concur with the latter. The numerous problems raised by early Islamic coinage would take a volume in themselves to investigate. We have already seen, for example, how Islamic coins of the mid-seventh century made their way to Scandinavia – a full two centuries before they were expected. Again, we should note that these early coins look entirely Persian, showing on one side the portrait of a Sassanid monarch and on the other a Zoroastrian fire temple. The only thing that distinguishes them as Islamic is a brief Arabic religious inscription and a number, presumed to be an Age of Hegira date. Something more shall be said about this thoroughly confusing topic in the final chapter; suffice here to note that there are very good grounds for believing the numbers found on these coins do not represent Age of Hegira dates, and that, furthermore, the entire system of notation was changed on more than one occasion by the early Muslim rulers.

Whatever we might say about traditional written histories and the dating of coins, we can say that the archaeology of Samarra and the other flourishing urban centers of Mesopotamia/Iran of the early Caliphate, looks as if it could equally belong, on the one hand, in the late Sassanid epoch, and, on the other, to the tenth or eleventh centuries. Furthermore, the depth of strata and the amount of archaeology uncovered would suffice for about a century at maximum, but certainly not the four centuries which apparently separate the rise of Islam from the abandonment of Samarra and Siraf in the eleventh century.

[1]
Michael McCormick, op cit.

[2]
Thomas Glick, op cit., p. 19

[3]
McCormick, op cit.

[4]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., pp. 117-8

[5]
Glick, op cit., pp. 20-1

[6]
Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 90

[7]
Ibid., pp. 90-1

[8]
See Pirenne, op cit., pp. 239-40. More recently, in 1999 a hoard found at Gotland in Sweden included “Arabic coins from the Sassanidian dynasty from the mid-7th century …” Ola Korpås, Per Wideström and Jonas Ström, “The recently found hoards from Spillings farm on Gotland, Sweden,”
Viking Heritage Magazine
, 4 (2000).

[9]
See D. Whitehouse,
Siraf III. The Congregational Mosque
(London, British Institute of Persian Studies, 1980); also Whitehouse, “Siraf: a medieval port on the Persian coast,”
World Archaeology
2 (1970), and “Excavations at Siraf. First-Sixth Interim Reports,”
Iran
, 6-12 (1968-74)

[10]
Herzfeld never published a detailed description of the site, only a series of aerial photgraphs. See Ernst Herzfeld,
Ausgrabungen von Samarra VI. Geschichte der Stadt Samarra
(Berlin, 1948). More detail is provided by K. A. C. Creswell,
Early Muslim Architecture
Vol. 2 (London, 1968), pp. 1-5, and J. M. Rogers, “Samarra: a study in medieval town planning,” in A. Hourani and S. M. Stern (eds),
The Islamic City
(Oxford, 1970).

[11]
Ceramics xiii. The Early Islamic Period, 7th-11th Centuries, in
Encyclopaedia Iranica
, at www.iranica.com/articles/ceramics-xiii

[12]
Ibid.

T
he territories which came under the dominion of Islam during the seventh century formed by far the most advanced and prosperous regions of the Mediterranean, or classical, civilization. In Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, the House of Islam came to include cultures and civilizations whose roots lay in the remotest antiquity. With the conquests of Alexander, in the fourth century BC, all these lands had come under the influence of Hellenism, an influence which acted as a spur to the cross-fertilization of ideas and led to a flowering of science and technology. Great academies and centers of learning were established, and the cities of the region supported an educated and articulate population, whose levels of literacy have perhaps only again been equaled in the twentieth century. By the sixth century AD the wealth and prosperity of these territories had reached its apogee. Persia in particular, which under the Sassanids had become a world power on a par with Rome, was a veritable hive of commercial and intellectual innovation. New ideas, travelling along the Silk Road from China, began to appear in the Iranian Plateau; and it is possible that some of the most important Chinese inventions, such as paper-making, had already reached the Sassanid territories before the arrival of Islam.

With the conquest of Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and Persia, the Arabs therefore came into the possession of some of the most technically and culturally advanced regions of the world. In the words of James Thompson and Edgar Johnson, “The Arabs … incorporated as part of their new empire areas that had originally been the cradle of occidental civilization. … To administer these areas the[y] … could do nothing but take over what they found of the Byzantine and Persian administrations and employ as governors trained and experienced natives; they had nothing of their own to offer in this field. The same thing is true in the domain of culture. Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Persia were provinces of Hellenistic civilization, and Sassanid Persia had also developed a civilization of its own. Moreover, in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, under the stimulus of Christianity a new literature and art had developed. Indeed, recent cultural developments in all these countries just before the Mohammedan conquest seemed to point to a new outburst of oriental activity.”
[1]
What then did the Caliphs do with this rich legacy? As we have seen, the opinion which has held sway now for over a century is that they enthusiastically embraced the intellectual and philosophical traditions of the above-named peoples, and that under them science and philosophy flourished as never before. We have seen how Robert Briffault waxed lyrical about “The incorruptible treasures and delights of intellectual culture” of the Caliphate, which “were accounted by the princes of Baghdad, Shiraz and Cordova, the truest and proudest pomps of their courts.”
[2]
And similar opinions, if not quite so poetically expressed, are encountered regularly in the most up to date historical publications. But how true a picture is it? Is it really conceivable that a civilization which regarded war as a sacred duty, which looked upon the taking of slaves as a divinely-sanctioned activity, and which regarded the execution of apostates and heretics as a heavenly command could be so enthusiastic about the efforts of philosophers?

It is undeniable that, to begin with at least, some Muslim rulers did patronize universities and other seats of learning.
[3]
Scientific and philosophic treatises were indeed composed, and there is no doubt that Arab, or at least Arabic-speaking scholars were in possession of many classical texts not generally available in Europe. These men, it is evident, made important contributions, in various areas of scientific and scholarly endeavor. In addition, the Arabs, or rather the Arab rulers of the Near East (for the great majority of the population remained non-Arab in language and non-Muslim in religion for several centuries after the conquest), learnt the secrets of paper-making, printing, the compass, and various other crucial technologies from the Chinese between the eighth and eleventh centuries, which technologies they utilized and eventually (inadvertently) spread to Europe. Yet we also know that, in the years before the Arab conquests, Persia in particular was a conduit through which flowed new ideas and techniques from India and China; and everyone admits that most of the new technologies and methods medieval Europeans learned from the Arabs were not Arab or even Near Eastern at all, but Chinese and Indian. Europeans used the Arabic names for these things (such as “zero”, from the Arabic zirr), because it was from Arab sources that they learned them. But they were neither Arab nor Middle Eastern.

As our knowledge of early medieval history has improved, it has become ever more clear that virtually all of the learning previously attributed to “the Arabs” had little or nothing to do with them.
[4]
Thus for example the claim that the Arabs discovered the distillation of alcohol, which was regularly found in textbooks until the middle of the twentieth century, is quite simply false. Alcohol had been distilled in Babylonia prior to the Arab conquest.
[5]
Under the Arabs, distillation techniques were improved; but they did not invent distillation. Again, the claim that the Persian Al-Khwarizmi invented algebra is untrue; and it is now widely admitted that the Greek mathematician Diophantes, building on the knowledge of the Babylonians, was the first to outline the principles (in his
Arithmetica
) of what we now call algebra.
[6]
Al-Khwarizmi did make a number of important contributions, such as the quadratic equation and the introduction of the decenary numerical system from India, but in many other respects his work was not as advanced as that of Diophantes. Furthermore, he clearly owed much to the fifth century Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata, whose 121-verse
Aryabhatiya
expostulated on astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, methods of determining the movements of the planets and descriptions of their movements, as well as methods of calculating the movements of the sun and moon and predicting their eclipses. And we note too that Aryabhata was manifestly the source of the astronomical ideas attributed to Al-Zarkyal and Al-Farani, which Briffault places such store in.

There is another important consideration to remember: Whilst “Arab” scientists and philosophers of this time used Arab names and wrote in Arabic, the great majority of them were not Arabs or Muslims at all, but Christians and Jews who worked under Arab regimes. The Saracen armies which conquered the Near East in the seventh century imposed their faith and their language in the corridors of power; and the subdued peoples were forced to learn it. At no time, not even at the beginning, did genuine Arabs and Muslims show much interest in science and scholarship. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. In fact, during the eighth and ninth centuries, “the whole corpus of Greek scientific and philosophical learning was translated into Arabic, mainly by Nestorian Christians.”
[7]
We know that “Schools, often headed by Christians, were … established in connection with mosques.”
[8]
The leading figure in the Baghdad school was the Christian Huneyn ibn Ishaq (809-873), who translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own,
The Reformation of Morals
. Throughout the Muslim world it was Christians and Jews (especially the latter), who did almost all the scientific research and enquiry at this time. And there is much evidence to suggest that the efforts of these scholars were often viewed by their Muslim masters with the deepest suspicion. Certainly there was not the encouragement to learning, much less to new research, that is so frequently boasted.

Even the limited number of “Arab” scholars who were not Jews and Christians were rarely Arabs. We are told that Al-Kindi was “one of the few pure Arabs to achieve intellectual distinction.”
[9]
More often than not they were actually Persians. This was the case, as we saw, with the mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, and also with the great philosopher Avicenna, among many others. The Persian origin of so much “Arab” learning reminds us again that a great deal of what has been attributed to the Arabs was in reality Persian, and that, prior to the Islamicization of Persia in the seventh century, the country had, under the Sassanids, been a cultural and intellectual crossroads, bringing together the latest mathematics from India, the latest technology from China, and the latest philosophy from Byzantium; and making important contributions to all of these herself. This leads to the suspicion that “Al-Khwarizmi” and “Avicenna” (Ibn-Sina), were scholars of the Sassanid period, whose works were translated into Arabic and their names “Arabized” during the Abbasid period. Alternatively, at the very least, it would appear that they were representatives of the final flowering of Sassanid science and philosophy – representatives of an ancient tradition of learning which had nothing to do with Islam, but which survived for a while under the new Islamic regime.

Yet leaving aside for the present the question of the identity of the “Muslim” or “Arab” scholars, there is much that can be said about the Arab attitude to learning, which no one will dissent from. Everyone agrees that the classical learning which the Arabs valued was invariably that of a purely practical or utilitarian nature. The sciences (especially medicine) and mathematics were indeed patronized and encouraged by the early Caliphs at least. However, all the other learning of antiquity, most especially the liberal arts and the literature, were not valued at all. Indeed, there is very good evidence to show that the Arabs treated these parts of the classical heritage with indifference and even outright hostility. The parts of classical literature to which we refer are of course those which we perhaps now value most: the histories, the plays, and what might be called the “Literature” of the time. This type of writing of course took in the vast majority of what we now call Classical Letters; and almost all of it is lost.

Since the loss of Classical Literature is one of the great conundrums of history, it is incumbent upon us here to take a broad view of the question.

* * *

We know that in the sixth century, as before, the West was largely a cultural and economic backwater of the Mediterranean Civilization. Some reasonably large urban centers existed in Spain, but even these were small in comparison with those of the East, whilst Gaul and Britain, as well as Germany (with the exception of Trier), were devoid of real cities. Yet such urban centers as existed in the West all had libraries, both privately and publicly owned. The great majority of the volumes contained in these collections – the hundreds of thousands of books written by Greek and Latin authors over a period of ten or eleven centuries – were written on papyrus, and they needed the type of society which generated them in order to survive. They needed a literate and wealthy class of laypeople who could appreciate and patronize them. They also needed governmental support. Great public libraries and academies of the type which flourished in the territory of the Roman Empire could not survive without the economic assistance of kings and emperors. This assistance had been forthcoming and generously given until the middle of the seventh century. Any loss of tax revenue would have placed these collections in jeopardy. In times of economic recession “cultural” activities are usually first to be hit.

The closing of the Mediterranean to trade in luxuries, following the arrival of Islam, would have had such a result; but it would have dealt another and far more lethal blow. Henri Pirenne noted that one of the products of the East which disappears in the seventh century is papyrus. Until the first quarter of that century, Egyptian papyrus is ubiquitous in the records and documents of western Europe, but by the 640s or 650s it disappears more or less completely, to be replaced by parchment. Now parchment, of course, was immensely expensive in comparison with papyrus, and there can be no doubt that the loss of the papyrus supply would, on its own, have had a devastating effect upon the state of literacy and literature in Europe. Pirenne himself recognized this, and rightly saw the disappearance of papyrus from the West as a seminal event.

The great majority of works of the classical authors, of which an estimated 95% - 98% have been lost, were written on papyrus. A whole industry existed employing scribes to copy these books, which were then sold to other libraries, academies, or private collectors. Papyrus is more delicate than parchment and disintegrates after a few centuries if stored in a humid environment. But this did not matter as long as there were fresh supplies upon which to make new copies and rich patrons to pay for them. The disappearance of both these in the seventh century meant that, in Europe at least, the great majority of the classical works were doomed to disappear. It is known that even those works written on parchment were frequently lost when, in later centuries, old parchments were reused many times, after being cleaned of existing texts. The very expense of parchment made such catastrophes all too commonplace.

The one institution in Europe that could save the classical works was the Church; and we know that from the middle of the seventh century many monasteries had large collections of the “pagan” authors. Indeed, the great majority of the literature of Greece and Rome that has survived into modern times was preserved not – as is so often claimed – by the Arabs, but by European monks of the sixth and seventh centuries. Thus for example Alcuin, the polyglot theologian of Charlemagne’s court, mentioned that his library in York contained works by Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Statius, Trogus Pompeius, and Virgil. In his correspondences he quotes still other classical authors, including Ovid, Horace, and Terence. Abbo of Fleury (latter tenth century), who served as abbot of the monastery of Fleury, demonstrates familiarity with Horace, Sallust, Terence, and Virgil. Desiderius, described as the greatest of the abbots of Monte Cassino after Benedict himself, and who became Pope Victor III in 1086, oversaw the transcription of Horace and Seneca, as well as Cicero’s
De Natura Deorum
and Ovid’s
Fasti
.
[10]
His friend Archbishop Alfano, who had also been a monk of Monte Cassino, possessed a deep knowledge of the ancient writers, frequently quoting from Apuleius, Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, Varro, and Virgil, and imitating Ovid and Horace in his verse.