Athena in China
Take a look at the cover of any of Aurel Stein’s books after Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan (1904), and on the title page, and often also embossed on the front cover, you’ll find this image: a vignette of the goddess Athena in confrontational pose, brandishing a thunderbolt in her right hand and holding on her left arm the aegis, a terrifying goatskin shield tasselled with snakes and bearing the head of the Gorgon Medusa.
The picture is the work of Stein’s friend and collaborator, the artist Fred Andrews, and it’s based on a discovery Stein made while excavating at Niya, a site in the Tarim Basin in what is now Xinjiang, the extreme north-western region of China. Stein was investigating the ancient Buddhist cultures of the Silk Road, and in a third-century-AD rubbish tip (“its odours … still pungent after so many centuries”) he uncovered hundreds of letters written on wood, in an Indian language and script. The letters were sealed with clay, and the clay bore the personal seal-impressions of the senders of the letters:
From an historical point of view they claim exceptional interest, for they have furnished convincing evidence of the way in which the influence of classical Western art asserted itself even in distant Khotan. It was a delightful surprise when, on cleaning the first intact seal impression that turned up, I recognised in it the figure of Pallas Athene, with aegis and thunderbolt, treated in an archaic fashion. This particular seal … was found thereafter to recur frequently, and probably belonged to an official who was directly connected with the administration of the ancient settlement.
On another letter Stein found “a seal with Chinese lapidary characters in juxtaposition with one showing a portrait head unmistakably cut after Western models.” This was quintessential Silk Road, “half-way between Western Europe and Peking,” the arena where Indian, European and Chinese cultural currents intermingled.
But it was Athena who became Stein’s emblem, and I’ve idly wondered for some time what the image meant to him.
Athena was a goddess of the intellect and the arts, an embodiment of those things that make human society civilized. She’s a goddess of war, too, obviously so in an image like this one. But Athena presides over the rational aspects of warfare, the strategy and tactics rather than the bloodletting (though that’s a pretty subtle distinction), justified war rather than aggression. So what a book under the sign of Athena promises is intellectual activity in the cause of human civilization, and that’s a fair summary of what Stein achieved in Central Asia.
But another question I had was how far Stein appreciated the history of his vignette of Athena. Because, coincidentally or not, the image he chose to adorn his books is an extremely significant one.
The best way to communicate this is to show you some coins. One from Macedonia to start with,
followed by one from Sicily,
and rounded off by one from Afghanistan/Pakistan:
These coins are of kings called Antigonus, Pyrrhus and Menander, the first two from the third century BC and Menander’s from about 140 BC. Stunningly, despite being from opposite ends of the known world, they depict the same figure of Athena.
Menander was the most successful of a series of Greek kings who ruled in what is present day Afghanistan and Pakistan, and this Athena remained a consistent feature of the coins of his successors, even one of the very last Greek kings, Strato II, who ruled a tiny kingdom somewhere near Lahore at the end of the first century BC:
This is a very sorry-looking issue indeed, and it speaks volumes about Strato’s straitened circumstances. But Athena is still there, even if she appears to have become left-handed.
Why is this image so important to the Greek kings? The thinking these days is that the Athena represented on the coins is a reminiscence of a particular statue of the goddess: the tutelary deity of Pella, the capital of Macedonia, known as Athena Alkidemos, Athena “Defender of the People.” Athena Alkidemos of Pella in turn evoked Alexander the Great, whose capital was at Pella, and for whom Athena was an important patron. We’re told that when Alexander advanced into battle he was preceded by a sacred shield of Athena from her temple at Troy, carried by a senior bodyguard. What Antigonus, Pyrrhus, Menander and Strato all have in common is a need to associate themselves with the charismatic person of Alexander, who had dramatically changed the face of the Greek world, and in the case of Menander and Strato had made their rule as Greek kings in Central Asia possible in the first place.
Stein’s discovery in Xinjiang throws the net even wider, of course. The functionary in Niya was using as his official seal, half a millennium after Alexander’s death, an image that had originated 3,000 miles to the west.
Did the official have any clue of the significance of the image? It’s doubtful. The knowledge of what Athena Alkidemos meant, the mystique of the long-dead Alexander that these kings wished to confer on themselves, quite possibly disappeared with the fall of Strato’s kingdom. And what of Aurel Stein? What did he understand by it?
Stein was certainly very interested in Alexander. In a career of remarkable discoveries in Central Asia, one thing he never left behind was the deep fascination for Alexander that he’d formed in childhood. Describing a tour of Swat in 1926, for example, Stein candidly admits that his interest in Alexander even exceeds his devotion to Xuanzang (also spelled Hsüan-tsang), the seventh-century Buddhist monk whose account of his travels from China to India guided Stein’s exploration of the Chinese borderlands:
May the sacred spirit of old Hsüan-tsang, the most famous of those pilgrims and my adopted ‘Chinese patron saint’, forgive the confession: what attracted me to Swat far more than such pious memories was the wish to trace the scenes of that arduous campaign of Alexander which brought the great conqueror from the foot of the snowy Hindukush to the Indus, on his way to the triumphant invasion of the Panjāb.
The ultimate aim of this expedition was a longstanding preoccupation of Stein, and indeed an obsession shared by many Europeans who had visited the territory to the west of the river Indus: to locate Aornos, a seemingly impregnable fortress captured by Alexander in 327BC.
An image of Athena carrying associations of Alexander would have been an entirely apt one for Stein to stamp upon his books. But while I’m certain he and Andrews recognised the kinship of the seal image from Niya with the “Greco-Bactrian” coins of kings like Menander and Strato, I’m not so sure he would have read Alexander himself into it. When Stein discusses it, he describes it as as imitating “an archaic type of Athene Promachos”, a similar notion of the goddess as a protective deity, but the link to Athena Alkidemos of Pella and thence to Alexander had not yet been traced.
If so, it is sheer serendipity that it’s Athena Alkidemos that we find at the front of Aurel Stein’s books, since his career could hardly find a more appropriate patron goddess. Like many of the the men who studied the archaeology and ancient history of Central Asia, Alexander drew Stein to places, geographical and intellectual, far removed from the classical education of his childhood, but without ever quite losing his grip. Indeed sometimes it seems to me that the West can never contemplate this part of the world without Alexander the Great muscling in.
Related articles
- Athena (brooklynrenee3.wordpress.com)
And the Persian for “Naples” is?
Last week I read the most fascinating book I’ve read in ages. If I go on to say that this book compares the fragmentary papyrus remains of an ancient Greek novel with the fragments of a medieval Persian epic poem, this may well be the moment you and I part company, dear reader. And if you do abandon this blog and find something more interesting to do, I quite understand. It came as a surprise to me too.
But why did I find it so interesting? The Greek text is a few pages of a novel, maybe written in the first century BC, entitled Parthenope or Metiokhos kai Parthenope (“Metiokhos and Parthenope”), while the rather longer fragment of Persian poetry is a chunk of the Vamiq u ‘Adhra (The Ardent Lover and the Virgin), written by the poet ‘Unsuri in Ghazni, now Afghanistan, in the eleventh century AD. By chance, the very small parts of each work that survive overlap, and it’s perfectly clear that the Persian poem is an imitation of the Greek novel. The link or links between the two texts must be pretty close: there may well have been an Arabic or Persian prose intermediary version of the Greek novel that ‘Unsuri turned into Persian verse, but it’s also possible that the “translation” from Greek to Persian was direct–that ‘Unsuri or more likely a collaborator read Greek, in other words. For what it’s worth, mosaics representing Parthenope and Metiokhos in what was the east of the Roman Empire, at Antioch and at Zeugma on the upper Euphrates, indicate the popularity of the story.
It all makes for quite a disorienting reading experience. In this Afghan poem, written a generation or so before the Norman Conquest, we find ourselves reading about ‘Adhra’s father Fuluqrat (Polykrates), tyrant of Shamis (Samos), with his court poet Ifuqus (Ibykos: “In Iran and Rum and Hindustan/ They told good things about him”). Meanwhile Vamiq recounts the story of Hurmuz (Hermes) discovering for the first time how a tortoise shell can be made into a lyre, and compares himself to Landrus (Leander) in his passionate devotion, and ‘Adhra to Haru (Hero) in her beauty. The plots, or rather the plot, of the novel and poem is the classic plot of an ancient novel: beautiful boy and beautiful girl meet, instantly fall in love, are separated by misfortune, and the girl maintains her virginity (‘adhra is Arabic for “virgin”; and parthen- also means “virgin” in Greek) despite numerous mishaps and enforced journeys with pirates and slave-traders far and wide. Among other places, ‘Unsuri’s poem seems to have taken ‘Adhra and the reader to Righiyun (Rhegion) in the south of Italy, and possibly Tarentum (Tartaniyush). Naples may have marked the limit of Parthenope’s travels to the West. Presumably at the end of the story boy and girl were reunited and lived happily ever after, but we’ve no clear evidence for that.
For a Classicist, at least, it’s pretty stunning to find a classical Greek text exerting that kind of influence way to the east in the borderlands of India, a millennium after it was composed. ‘Unsuri was a court poet of Mahmud of Ghazni, and that court, enriched by Mahmud’s military incursions into India, was a major cultural centre. This was where the great polymath al-Biruni was based for the last decades of his life, and also where the national epic of the Persian people, Firdausi’s Shahnama, “The Book of Kings”, was realised. In al-Biruni’s case, we know that his writing was greatly influenced by Greek thinking: al-Biruni is a remarkable figure, simultaneously the author of the first great study of India, and a mind deeply versed in Aristotle, although very prepared to disagree with the Greek master. He may also have had some kind of working relationship with ‘Unsuri, since they shared some topics in common (both wrote about the Buddhas of Bamiyan, for example, and both about Vamiq and ‘Adhra). Nevertheless, the notion that Greek literature, as opposed to philosophy, science or mathematics, could find such a positive reception on the eastern fringes of Islamic world is an arresting one.
This Classicist has a couple more reasons to be interested in ‘Unsuri’s poem, all of them related to my personal preoccupation with Bamiyan. The first is just a tantalising possibility. The text of Vamiq u ‘Adhra was discovered by the Pakistani scholar Mohammad Shafi in around 1950, reused as stiffening in the binding of an old Arabic theological handbook. A note found along with the leaves of poetry seems to be an inventory of books belonging to a man named Zaki b. Muhammad b. ‘Ali ‘Abd ul-Hamid al-Bamiyani, and the al-Bamiyani at the end of this individual’s name may suggest that the library where this copy of Vamiq u ‘Adhra originated was at Bamiyan. The manuscript itself dates to the twelfth century, and at that time Bamiyan was a thriving and important city, as indeed it was right up to its destruction by Genghis Khan in 1221.
An origin in Bamiyan for the manuscript is an appealing possibility, but a less tenuous connection is that ‘Unsuri, author of Vamiq u ‘Adhra, wrote another poem entitled Khing but u Surkh but (The Moon-white idol and the Red idol), another romantic tale, also lost, which offered an explanation of the great Buddha statues at Bamiyan, celebrated marvels in the medieval Islamic world: Khing but, “Moon-white idol” and Surkh but, “Red idol” were the established names in Islamic accounts for the smaller and larger Buddha at Bamiyan. ‘Unsuri’s poem on the Buddhas shared the same metrical and rhyming system with his Vamiq u ‘Adhra, an epic system also used for romances, and in fact it’s often unclear which fragments belong to Vamiq u ‘Adhra and which to Khing but u Surkh but. But we know that the latter poem described how two lovers were separated and died apart, but were buried together, their tombs being the two gigantic Buddha statues.
(Recent research has suggested that these names for the Buddhas originated very early in the Islamic history of Afghanistan. The statues were carved in the sixth and seventh centuries AD, but by as early as AD 800 Bamiyan had been converted to Islam. When Muslim witnesses first described the Buddhas, then, the statues retained some of the rich decoration they’d enjoyed when Bamiyan was still Buddhist. Since the destruction of the Buddhas in 2001 German researchers have established that the statues were repeatedly repainted during the Buddhist period, but in their final form were painted white (khing) in the case of the smaller Buddha, and red (surkh) in the case of the larger. It’s not often that historical and literary sources mesh so neatly with archaeology.)
In my book on Bamiyan I used the fact that ‘Unsuri wrote a poem about them to illustrate how diverse Muslim attitudes to the giant Buddhas have historically been. To listen to the Taliban you would think that, as religious images, they were an obvious affront to Islam. But the fact is that they survived for well over a thousand years in an Islamic culture, treated (as I’ve mentioned) as wonders of the God-created world. Here in ‘Unsuri’s poem they were the romantic leads.
This brings us round to what I think is the most important thing that Vamiq u ‘Adhra has to tell us about Bamiyan. I’ve described ‘Unsuri’s patron, Mahmud of Ghazni, as a great patron of the arts. This was the case in literature and natural science, and also in the visual arts: for example, beautifully decorated Ghaznavid palaces once lined the river Helmand near Lashkar Gah (the Ghaznavids’ winter capital), a place with entirely different associations today. But it’s fair to say that isn’t how Mahmud’s seen in all quarters. Take for example Mullah Omar, spiritual head of the Taliban, who repeatedly in the run-up to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 cited Mahmud of Ghazni as a precedent for his own policy. A story, and it is just a story, is told of Mahmud’s plundering of the Hindu temple at Somnath on the coast of Gujarat: the priests in the temple, so we’re told, tried to buy back their idol, a Shiva linga, from Mahmud, to which he is supposed to have responded, “I am the idol-breaker (but-shekan), not the idol-seller (but-furosh).” According to the folktale Mahmud is the perfect Islamic warrior, undistracted from pious idol destruction by the seduction of money. In 2001, when foreign organisations offered to pay Afghanistan to preserve the Buddhas, Mullah Omar responded with Mahmud’s (alleged) words, and of course proceeded to break the idols of Bamiyan.
But the truth about Mahmud is there, if we look hard enough, in the Vamiq u ‘Adhra. Far from being driven by religious zealotry, Mahmud was motivated by the human and practical demands of an impressive court, a professional army and expansive ambitions: he needed money, and the wealthy temples of India were good sources of it. Cash was his motivation for invading India, not the saving of souls. Now Mahmud no doubt dressed up his activities as the actions of a pious Muslim bringing enlightenment to idol-worshipping Indians. But in actual fact the position of the Ghaznavid empire in the borderlands between the world of Islam and India required a ruler in his perilous position to be quite liberal, for the day, in the relations he maintained with other faiths. For example, there was an Indian quarter in Ghazni, home to Indian contingents which formed an important part of Mahmud’s invading forces. We even hear of the widows of Mahmud’s fallen Indian soldiers committing sati, an entirely unIslamic practice.
In the Vamiq u ‘Adhra Mahmud, or maybe his successor Ma’sud, enjoyed a Greek popular story of a couple that met in the famous haikal or but-khana, temple, of Hera on Samos, one of them an assertive young woman who holds her own in philosophical debate on the nature of Love in the company of men, and later fights in battle. Literature is not life in any straightforward way, of course, but it’s equally clear that the notion of Mahmud as a model of puritanical zealotry can’t survive the sophisticated and gloriously polychromatic environment of his court at Ghazni, or the pleasure palaces beside the Helmand.
I’m deeply grateful to Jean-Marie Lafont, another Classicist who has strayed into Central Asia, for drawing my attention to this remarkable literary phenomenon. The book I’ve been reading is by Bo Utas and the late Tomas Hägg, The Virgin and her Lover: Fragments of an Ancient Greek Novel (Leiden, 2003).
An Ode for the Road
For reasons that will emerge, I’m intrigued by the practice of travelling with a copy of your favourite classical author in your pocket; and I’m struck by the fact that Horace seems to be the most commonly chosen travelling companion. In Horace’s fifth satire, when he describes setting off on a journey with Heliodorus, there’s a theory that Heliodorus is a book (it was the name of the author of a book called The Wonders of Italy, or possibly The Wonders of Medicine) rather than a flesh-and-blood companion, so that’s kind of appropriate for starters.
It isn’t always Horace. The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński did all his foreign reporting accompanied by a gift from his editor, “a thick book with a stiff cover of yellow cloth. On the front, stamped in gold letters, was Herodotus, THE HISTORIES.” Europeans trudging through Afghanistan in the nineteenth century cited chapter and verse on Alexander’s itinerary with such accuracy that I can’t help but suspect they had copies of Quintus Curtius Rufus’ Histories of Alexander the Great secreted somewhere about their persons.
Virgil is another favourite, and with him the unhealthier aspects of this practice come to the fore. Abraham Cowley was the author, among other things, of an epic, The Civil War, which he wrote as the English Civil War unfolded in the 1640s (and which mutates from an epic into a satire as Cowley’s favoured side, the Royalists, lose ground.) According to John Aubrey he “alwaies had a Virgil in his pocket”, and his reverence for the Aeneid is very obvious in The Civil War: he even imitates Virgil’s “half-lines”, lines left unfinished by Virgil at his death (he died before the Aeneid was completely finished), but which Cowley thought were deliberate, and expressive.
But Cowley’s devotion to Virgil didn’t stop at the odd half-line. Aubrey recounts a story of Cowley using his pocket Virgil to consult the “Virgilian lots” (sortes Vergilianae) with the future Charles II, opening the pages of the Aeneid at random as a way of predicting the future. And predictably enough, Cowley and the prince happen on Dido’s curse of Aeneas at the end of Aeneid 4, where the queen of Carthage prays that Aeneas will see his friends fall before his eyes, make peace on unjust terms, and die before his time: Virgil was telling them what would happen to the prince’s father Charles I.
That is a story with many variants, and it doesn’t always involve Cowley. But we can establish that Cowley had a habit of consulting the sortes Vergilianae. Dr Johnson quotes a letter written by Cowley in which he discusses the prospects for an alliance with the Scots. Cowley is confident of a positive outcome to negotiations: “The Scotch will moderate something of the rigour of their demands; the mutual necessity of an accord is visible; the king is persuaded of it. And to tell the truth (which I take to be an argument above all the rest) Virgil has told me something to that purpose.” Virgil has told me… The text in the pocket has become the intimacy of a direct word in the ear.
Well, Virgil can play with people’s heads: Cowley’s consultation of the Virgil in his pocket is a bit like Jackson Knight’s consultation of a medium (supposedly channelling Virgil himself) when he was writing his Penguin translation of the Aeneid (just in case anyone thought Morrissey’s inclusion in the Penguin Classics was the maddest thing to happen to that series).
Chaps with Horace in their pockets are a more stable bunch all round, I like to think. But if that’s true, it has a lot to do with the focus of Horace’s poetry. His most famous and quoted poems are the Odes, and the concerns of these short lyric poems weren’t the profound mysteries of existence delved by Virgil (a figure further amplified by the strange mythology that built up around him after his death). Horace is all about the demands of this life we’re living, the inevitability of aging and death, the pleasure of the present moment. His genius is to give incomparable expression to simple principles of living. Carpe diem, etc.
As he set off to travel on foot to Constantinople in 1933 Paddy Leigh Fermor packed an Oxford Book of English Verse and, a gift from his mother, “the Loeb Horace, Vol. I”, containing the Epodes and Odes; and as he walked across Europe he memorised his favourite odes. That special relationship with Horace featured in Leigh Fermor’s most famous exploit, when he captured the German General Karl Kreipe, commander on Crete, and had him smuggled out to Cairo. As they climbed Mount Ida, Kreipe muttered the first line of Horace’s ninth ode, Vides ut alta stet niue candidum Soracte, “You see how Mt Soracte stands white with deep snow,” and Leigh Fermor responded with the rest of the poem:
The general’s blue eyes had swiveled away from the mountain top to mine – and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” “Ah, yes, Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.
Horace, whom both Germans and British had managed to convince themselves was the perfect encapsulation of their respective gentlemanly codes, established a mutual understanding between these two officers. Between them, for example, they managed to piece together the superb conclusion to the Regulus Ode (3.5), where the Roman general Regulus, heroically insisting on going to meet his death at the hands of the Carthaginians, leaves Rome as nonchalantly as a man heading off for a relaxing weekend at his country house.
If Horace was an Englishman, or alternatively a German, he was a piece of home, wherever that was. I like the way a lot of these travelling Horaces are gifts from people back where the travellers started: it was Leigh Fermor’s mother who gave him the Loeb edition of Horace, and in the case of Raymond Asquith, who was to die on the Somme, it came from his wife. On November 1, 1915 he wrote to her (quoted in E. Vandiver, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford, 2010), 60-61):
I have determined to devote 5 minutes a day to serious reading and began this day on the Odes of Horace, pleasantly surprised as I always am to find how astonishingly good they are. It was wonderfully clever of you, my sweet, to find that minute Horace for me.
In more peaceful times Gladstone took Horace on the train with him during a General Election “far back in the ‘sixties'”, writing translations of the Odes which he later published (my thanks to Emily Pillinger for pointing me to that one). Michael Gilleland on his wonderful blog describes a copy of Horace owned by Stendhal, “pierced by the tip of a sword or a bayonet” in Napoleon’s Jena campaign of 1806: how Stendhal came by the book is an interesting question. Gilleland also finds in Holbrook Jackson’s Anatomy of Bibliomania (1950) a reference to a devotion to Horace on the part of the French poet François de Malherbe (1555-1628) comparable to Cowley’s obsession with Virgil:
Malherbe, the father of French poetry, had for sole favourite Horace, whom he called his breviary; Horace was his companion when out walking, and he laid him on his pillow at night…
“For some,” as Gilleland comments, “Horace is a kind of holy book,” and that’s true. I could well be overstating the difference between Horace-carriers and Virgil-carriers. It’s worth pointing out that the Loeb edition of Horace’s Odes and Epodes that Leigh Fermor took with him was dedicated to Professor Hiram Corson of Cornell University, who used to “contact” the greats of English poetry: Tennyson assured Corson from beyond the grave that he shouldn’t worry about smoking a pipe. (That detail owed to Peter Wiseman’s great article on Jackson Knight in Talking to Virgil.)
I generally come back to Central Asia sooner or later in these blogs, and of course Horace accompanied the classically educated men who extended, or attempted to extend, the Empire into the NW of India. On the title page of the most influential of travellers’ books in that period and part of the world, Alexander Burnes’ Travels into Bokhara (1834) is a well-chosen passage from Odes 1.22, another poem that Leigh Fermor and Kreipe found they had in common, in which Horace playfully claims that a morally pure man, integer uitae scelerisque purus, need fear nothing “whether he travels across the seething Syrtes or the inhospitable Caucasus or the lands lapped by the legendary Hydaspes.” The Hydaspes is the Jhelum, westernmost of the five rivers of the Punjab, and Burnes could interpret “Caucasus” as the Indian Caucasus, the Hindu Kush: he crossed both these physical barriers in his travels, but integer uitae he was not, and he paid the price for his immoral behaviour by dying at the hands of a Kabuli mob in 1841.
I don’t know if Burnes had a Horace in his pocket, and to be honest I hope not (it would tarnish the brand), but a later traveller in these parts did, a much better person named Aurel Stein. In 1900, during an expedition to investigate lost cultures in the Tarim basin (now in the Xinjiang “autonomous region” of China), described in Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan (1904), he was surveying the headwaters of the Yurungkash (White Jade) and Karakash (Black Jade) rivers in the Kunlun mountains. The survey took him through a landscape he found oppressive, arid and depopulated. But finding a stream and some rare sunshine Stein (to my surprise and delight when I first read Sand-buried Ruins) pulls out a copy of Horace:
I enjoyed the splash and sound of the water after those silent dead ravines, and sat cheerfully by its side until my baggage appeared at dusk. It was pleasant to read in the tiny seventeenth-century edition of Horace, which always travels in my saddlebag, of the springs that gave charm for the poet to another mountain region far away in the West. And then the question touched my mind: What is this vast mountain world in human interest compared to the Sabine Hills? It has no past history as far as man is concerned, and what can be its future?—unless destiny has reserved the prospects of another Klondyke for the auriferous rivers of Khotan.
Stein’s copy of Horace boasted an interesting provenance, having formerly belonged to his uncle Ignaz Hirschler, a pioneer of eye medicine who was also a campaigner for Jewish emancipation in Austro-Hungary, and an important inspiration for the young Stein: he had specifically requested this book of Hirschler’s at the latter’s death in 1891 (Jeanette Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeological Explorer (1977), 11-12). In the Kunlun mountains Stein was probably reading Horace’s ode on the Bandusian spring, often thought to be at his estate in the Sabine hills east of Rome (though in fact a landmark of Horace’s youth, further to the south of Italy.) The supposed site of Horace’s estate has drawn foreign visitors in large numbers for at least three hundred years, and the reason is this peculiarly intimate appeal that Horace exerted for modern Europeans. When James Boswell, Dr Johnson’s biographer, visited the site of the villa, he “Saw ruins: fell on knees and uttered some enthusiastic words.” “Horace was an Englishman,” I wrote a long time ago. But Horace was also a German and a Frenchman and a Hungarian, a poet whose Latin lyrics expressed a widely shared ideal of gentlemanly conduct. To a British-Hungarian archaeologist (and gentleman) deep in unfamiliar territory Horace embodied humanity amidst desolation.
A treasured memory of my own is explaining to a British friend as we drove through the Hindu Kush why at difficult moments I repeat a tag of Horace to myself:
sperat infestis, metuit secundis
alteram sortem bene praeparatum
pectus.
It is untranslatable, but it means that the best attitude is to be optimistic in hard times, but pessimistic when times are good. It comes in a poem (Odes 2.10) where Horace discusses, and gives a name to, the Golden Mean, aurea mediocritas, a life lived by the principle of moderation in all things.
And yes, I had a copy of Horace in my pocket when I travelled in Afghanistan, a gift from my wife.
A witness to suttee
The idea of this blog was to let me share mindworms (intellectual earworms, I mean: please don’t be put off), and this one’s been haunting me all weekend. It’s a description of sati or suttee, the self-immolation of the widow (or in this case widows) of a dead man at her husband’s funeral. There’s some contemporary resonance, I suppose. I’d certainly like to hear how the nineteenth-century debates on suttee, which resulted in a ban on the practice by the British imperial authorities, would play out in newspapers and blogs and on Twitter today. General Napier’s response to the argument that the religious customs of different communities should be sacrosanct, for which I’m grateful to Brian Williams, would come in for some criticism, I’m sure. But it’d be hard to argue he’s wrong on the basic issue.
The account comes from the autobiography of Dr Martin Honigberger, a Transylvanian physician at the court of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, Sikh ruler of the Punjab at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Like many of the other Europeans employed by Ranjit Singh, Honigberger was also an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist and coin-collector, keen to uncover evidence of Greek activity in what is now Pakistan, Afghanistan and N-W India. In Thirty-five Years in the East (1852) Honigberger described his travels and medical activities. What follows is just a part of his description of the funeral of Ranjit Singh in 1839, pp. 101-3 of this edition if anyone wants to read further.
Honigberger is appalled by suttee, and he makes that perfectly clear at the end of this excerpt. But for the most part he describes what he saw with a doctor’s detachment and attention to detail: the woman unveiling herself for the first and only time in public as she walks to her death; the mirror held before her face so that she can be sure she is betraying no fear; the simple clothes and bare feet. I’ve made no change to Honiberger’s text except to break up his long nineteenth-century paragraphs. The elaborate tomb that Honiberger mentions, erected on the site of Ranjit Singh’s cremation, still stands in Lahore.
Early in the morning subsequent to that on which the death of the maharajah happened, I went down the Tukht (coronation-square), accompanied by Col. Henry Steinbach (lately in the service of the maharajah, Gholab Sing, in Cashmere, now in Europe), and we directed our steps towards the large yard, which we had to cross, in order to get betimes to a convenient place close to the funeral pile. This was erected between the walls and the fortress, in a small garden, the conflux of the people having been so enormous in the fortress.
In the large yard, we observed one of the four ranees (queens) coming out of the harem on foot and unveiled, for the first time in her life. She was slowly proceeding towards the place where the royal body was lying, and she was surrounded by about one hundred persons, who kept themselves at some distance, while accompanying her. Close to her side there was a man carrying a small box, containing the remainder of her jewels (as she had already distributed some ), which she made presents of, handing them one by one to the people on her right and left. Two or three steps in front of her, there was a man moving in a backward direction, his face turned towards her, and holding a looking-glass, that she might convince herself that her features were unaltered, and no fear visible on them. At the distribution of the jewels, Col. Steinbach made the observation that, had we stretched out our hands to receive a present, it certainly would not have been denied; but we thought proper to leave it to the poorer people, because we occupied lucrative posts.
It is curious, indeed, that this was the very ranee whom Runjeet Sing married in the first year of my residence in that country, ten years having passed since I witnessed the nuptials at Nadoun. She was, as I mentioned before, a daughter of Sunsarchund, and she had a younger sister, whom the maharajah at the same time took also for a wife, and conveyed them both to Lahore; the latter, I am told, had died of consumption during my absence. As for the former, although I was present at her wedding, I nevertheless had never seen her before, and it was only on her last fatal walk, which she took to her funeral pile, that I could behold her.
The funeral train, accompanied by many thousands of spectators, was now proceeding; all were on foot, their abode in the fortress not being far distant from the place of the ceremony. The four ranees only were carried, in open palanquins, behind the deceased, after them followed the seven female slaves, barefooted; some of them appeared to be not more than fourteen or fifteen years of age. The ranees, too, were barefooted, their silk dresses were simple, and without any ornaments, and they appeared to be indifferent to the awful though voluntary fate which awaited them. Perhaps our hearts throbbed more at the view of this dismal train than those of the poor victims themselves.
The body of Runjeet Sing was placed on a board, to which it was probably fastened, and was carried on a light and decorated bier constructed in the shape of a ship; the sails and flags of the vessel were made of rich golden and silk stuff (kimkab), and of Cashmere shawls. A number of people carried the bier from the interior of the fortress up to the funeral-pile, there the board with the body was taken out of it and deposited on the ground, where, on what was a small garden, now stands a summood, i.e., a tomb of the royal family Runjeet Sing, Kurruck Sing and No-Nehal Sing, i.e., the father, son, and grand-child, together with their wives and slaves. The costly ornaments of the richly decorated bier were given to the mob; the Brahmins performed their prayers from the Shaater, a book written in the Indian or Sanscrit language; the Gooroos, or priests of the Sikhs, did the same, from their holy scripture called Grunthsaheb, and the Musselmen accompanied them with their “Ya, Allah! Ya, Allah!”
A slow, but not displeasing rumbling of the drums, and the murmuring of the people, gave to the whole scene a melancholy aspect, and was peculiar to the country. The funeral pile which displayed itself before the eyes of the spectators, was constructed of dry woods, amongst which there were pieces of aloe; it was about six feet high and square. After the prayers of the Brahmins and Gooroos, which lasted nearly an hour, the minister and other sirdars ascended by a ladder the funeral-pile, upon which ignitible matters and substances, as cotton seeds, &c., were strewn, and the royal body was respectfully placed in the middle of the pile, together with the board.
After this, the ranees ascended the fatal ladder, one by one, according to their rank, the slaves followed, and the minister showed himself very officious in affording them assistance. The ranees placed themselves at the head of the royal body, and the slaves close at its feet. There they cowered, remaining in silent expectation for the fatal moment, when a strong thick mat of reeds being brought, with which the whole were covered, oil was then poured over the mat, the minister and sirdars descended, and the pile was lighted at each corner. In a few moments, the deplorable victims of an abominable and fanatic ceremony had ceased to exist.
Words for birds
What is this bird saying?
An odd question for openers, maybe, but the call of the male black francolin or black partridge, francolinus francolinus (fr-fr from now on), must have something about it, because there seem to be versions of what the fr-fr says in practically every language spoken across its range, and that stretches from Turkey to India. It used to be wider still, but as Percy Molesworth Sykes put it, fr-fr makes “splendid shooting and equally good eating”.
In the ancient world the fr-fr, known as the attagas (or attagen, attagena), was a celebrated delicacy, and that’s how I first came across it, in a poem by the Roman epigrammatist Martial. It’s in a collection called Xenia, “Gifts” (about AD 85), poems describing presents sent home with party guests at the festival of the Saturnalia, and the fr-fr is there as a particularly tasty bird: in fact the poem in full runs, “Of the flavours of birds, the foremost is reckoned to be/ the taste of Ionian fr-frs.” But in the course of making a pretty tenuous argument about this poem I discovered that an elaborate folktale had been woven around the fr-fr‘s call: the birds, so the story went, had been captured in Lydia and taken to Egypt, and the Egyptians suffered punishment for mistreating them in the shape of a failure of the all-important Nile flood. Ever since, the birds have commemorated the vengeance visited on the Egyptians, crying tris tois kakourgois kaka or tris tois kakois ta kaka, “Threefold evils on the evildoers!”
Another tale of mistreatment is told on modern Cyprus. A young wife gets into an argument with her cruel mother-in-law about the baking: were there twenty-four or twenty-three loaves? Eventually the mother-in-law loses her temper and pushes the girl herself into the oven, but God takes pity on her and turned her into a fr-fr. Now the bird protests for eternity, ’kostethera, ‘kostethera, pethera!, “Twenty-four, twenty-four, mother-in-law.”
When Babur, founder of the Moghul Empire, wrote about what he called the durraj in his memoirs, the Baburnama, there aren’t any stories attached, unfortunately; or at least he doesn’t record any. But it’s a fascinating passage. He’s describing the fauna and flora of his new possession, Hindustan, in effect north-west India, and when he gets to the fr-fr he writes,
“It has a fantastic cry. Sher daram shakarak [“I have milk and a little sugar”] can be heard from its cry. It says sher like qit, but it pronounces daram shakarak quite correctly. The partridges is Astarabad say qat meni tuttilar [“Quick, they have seized me!”] , and those in Arabia and thereabouts say bi’sh-shukri tadumu ‘n-ni’am [“With gratitude good things endure”].”
So Babur gives us three versions of the fr-fr‘s call, in Persian, Turkish and Arabic: the text and translations here are from Thackston’s version of the Baburnama, which I enthusiastically recommend. But what seems clear here is that Babur doesn’t regard these as words attributed to the fr-fr by Persians, Turks and Arabs. He thinks the birds are actually speaking their local languages, though Persian not so fluently: “It says sher [“milk”] like qit, but it pronounces daram shakarak [“I have a little sugar”] quite correctly.”
Perhaps Babur’s just being naively open about something common to all these attempts to fit human words to a bird’s mating call: all of them are confusing birds with humans at some level. (The proper ornithologists sternly eschew anthropomorphism and go for clip, gek-ge-gek, gek-ge-gek; or lohee-uha-which-a-whick; or compare it to “the harsh grating blast of a cracked trumpet”, if anyone happens to know what that sounds like.)
A few more versions, mainly courtesy of Hobson-Jobson: two in Urdu, lahsan piyaz adrak, “Garlic, onion and ginger”, and khuda teri qudrat, “God is thy strength!”; and two from the British in India, which I can’t help thinking offer a snapshot of the military life led by the “sportsmen” most likely to encounter the fr-fr: “Be quick, pay your debts” and “Fixed bayonets, straight ahead!”
Sir Richard Francis Burton offers another Arabic version, man sakat salam, “who is silent is safe,” along with the observation, “All primitive peoples translate the songs of birds with human language, but, as I have noticed, the versions differ widely.” True enough, except that I don’t think there’s anything exclusively “primitive” about all this. There’s no doubt, though, that behind this confused babel of languages attributed to francolinus francolinus there’s a very simple impulse shared by Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Turks and even Englishmen, to give a human shape to the non-human world.
Whether any of these “translations” sound anything like the fr-fr is another matter.
Addendum, 22.09.2013: a beautiful image of Babur’s durraj from a manuscript of the Baburnama in the British Library, by the artist Mansur. My thanks to BL Asian and African for this!