Subscribe now

At the southeastern edge of the Persian Gulf, the black rocks of the Musandam Peninsula thrust northwards like a knife towards the Persian plateau, pinching the waterway into a chokepoint only 30 miles wide. Named for the Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda, this narrow channel is the Strait of Hormuz, and as recent events have proved, it is one of the world’s most important, but also one of its most vulnerable, maritime highways. Ordinarily, through this strait passes 20% of global energy supply, 36% of commercial helium, and a third of agricultural fertiliser, all upon the backs of supertankers the length of aircraft carriers. Such is the hulking mass of these vast ships, among the largest mobile structures humans have ever constructed, there is only a four-miles-wide channel in the strait where the water is deep enough for them to pass.

As surely now the entire world knows, in response to the American and Israeli airstrikes upon its leadership and military infrastructure beginning on the 28th February, the Islamic Republic of Iran began launching missiles and drones at tankers passing through the strait, alongside claims it had begun laying sea-mines in the channel. Though at least twenty-eight ships are confirmed to have been struck since the start of the war, the real damage was done by the skyrocketing cost of insurance; eventually insurers pulled their war-risk coverage entirely and the flow of traffic through the strait was brought to a halt. A few weeks before a typical day would see 138 ships pass through the waterway; suddenly that number fell to zero. Energy markets did not react well.

Or rather, not quite zero. Reports soon emerged that Iran was allowing Chinese vessels to pass through the strait, an exception explained by the fact China is both a nominal supporter of the regime and the single largest buyer of its oil. Later, the Iranian government announced the ships belonging to four more nations — Russia, India, Iraq, and Pakistan — would be allowed transit. Soon afterwards several other Asian countries like Thailand and Malaysia were also making deals for passage.

Quite what the terms of these deals were hasn’t been disclosed, but it was reported that some ships had been paying a $2 million toll in cryptocurrency in return for safe passage. Since then the Iranian parliament has moved to sign this toll into domestic law, while government officials made the formal recognition of Iran’s control over the strait part of its 10-point peace plan. Indeed, Iranian armed forces have proclaimed that the waterway will “never return to its former state”.

Despite the ceasefire agreed on last week, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has barely resumed. On the day after the agreement was reached, Iran closed the channel once more after Israel continued to bombard Hezbollah in Lebanon. More recently, it has emerged that Iran cannot find the mines it laid in the water, further throwing the strait’s reopening into doubt. Meanwhile, Russia and China both vetoed a UN Security Council resolution requiring Iran to restore freedom of navigation to the shipping corridor. Though Britain, the EU, and the UN have all called for shipping through the strait to remain toll-free, President Trump, ever a man for a business opportunity, has floated the possibility of a joint venture with his erstwhile enemy, suggesting he wouldn’t mind Iran enforcing a maritime tollgate as long as the US gets a cut. He seems unbothered by the precedent this would set.

At the time of writing, the strait remains closed, with the latest development being that the US Navy is now blockading the blockade, preventing even the ships that have paid the toll to pass through. Presumably the strategy is to make Iran, whose oil and gas exports make up 15-25% of its GDP, feel the biting effects of the strait’s closure themselves. Whether this will be effective or not is at this stage unclear.1 As I wrote last week, it is ideologically and theologically impossible for the Islamic Republic to be seen to be capitulating to the ‘Great Satan’. If I had to offer a tentative prediction to how this might shake out, I wonder if the regime might eventually be willing to agree to curbs on its uranium enrichment in exchange for continued control over the strait, which would take us back to a JCPOA-type situation but with the added wrinkle that Hormuz is no longer a free shipping lane. Despite President Trump’s bluster, it seems the new warfare paradigm means even the world’s most powerful military has little ability to prevent a handful of drones and mine-laying small boats scare the insurance industry into shutting down shipping. It seems unlikely Iran will give up this new found leverage, which it sees as both a security guarantee and a means of funding its rebuild.2

The world has reacted to all this as though it were unprecedented. But sadly it is not. For most of recorded history, whomever controlled a narrow stretch of water tended to charge a toll to pass through it. What we are witnessing in the Persian Gulf is not novel, but the unfortunate return of a centuries-old tradition. I suspect the Iranian precedent may soon inspire copycats the world over; in fact, developments elsewhere suggest it is almost certain that we are witnessing the end of the era of free seas.

But to understand what will come next, let us first look to history.

In the early part of the 16th century, the Portuguese, after opening trade routes with the spice merchants of India by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, devised a plan to control all sea trade between Europe and Asia. While the Treaty of Tordesillas guaranteed that Portugal would not have to compete with Spain for the Indian Ocean trade, they did still have to contend with the Arab and Indian ships who had dominated the routes for centuries prior. Their solution was to seize three chokepoints: Aden, to control the Red Sea; Malacca, to control the route to China; and Hormuz, to control the Persian Gulf. At these junctures they constructed forts and extracted tolls from the ships that wished to pass. The fort upon Hormuz island tariffed merchants unchallenged for over a century, until 1622, when the Safavid Persians worked with the English East India Company to throw the Portuguese out. But the toll wasn’t a Portuguese invention: the Kingdom of Hormuz, an Arab polity, had extracted shipping taxes from the island as early as the 11th century. Perhaps ironically given what’s happening today, it was the Iranians who ended the centuries-old practice after taking possession of the island in 1622.

In Europe, perhaps the most infamous maritime toll was that extracted by the Danish on the Øresund, the narrow waterway that connected the Baltic to the North Sea (see top image). All ships had to call in at Helsingør and pay their dues on their way past; if they refused they were fired upon by cannons atop castles on either bank.3 In an elegant piece of fiscal engineering, the Danish crown reserved the right to purchase the goods at whatever price the captain declared, thereby deterring the understatement of the value of the hold, and the subsequent tax (normally 1-2% of the cargo’s value). For centuries, the tolls constituted up to two-thirds of Denmark’s state income. So hated was this rent-seeking it caused several wars.

Meanwhile on the Rhine, feudal lords and robber barons tolled the river for a thousand years, building castles at every narrow bend, sometimes stretching iron chains across the water so ships couldn’t pass without paying. On the Bosphorus, the Athenians, Byzantines, and Ottomans, all at various points in history charged levies on ships making passage between the Black Sea and Mediterranean. Centuries before the Portuguese arrived, both the Srivijaya Empire and Malacca Sultanate grew rich upon tolls levied on trade through the Strait of Malacca. Meanwhile the Barbary pirates of North Africa extracted what was essentially an unofficial toll for maritime traffic passing through the Strait of Gibraltar in return for not being boarded and enslaved.

Thus it was largely the norm through history, if one happened by luck of the geographical draw to be able to control a narrow channel of water, to charge merchant ships for passage. It was only the rise of truly global seapowers that created the principle of free seas.

In 1609, a Dutch lawyer named Hugo Grotius published a book called Mare Liberum (The Free Sea). Grotius argued that the ocean should belong to no one, that every nation had a right to sail its waters, and that maritime trade should move unencumbered by monopoly rights and taxes. While this sounds rather noble it was in fact motivated by commercial interests: he was the counsel to the Dutch East India Company and keen to establish a legal precedent for the breaking of the Portuguese and Spanish monopolies on the Indian and Pacific oceans.

The Dutch set about agreeing bilateral treaties with various European nations, staying neutral in many of the continent’s wars in order to maintain its free shipping rights. This led them to supply both the French and American forces during American Revolutionary War, something that angered the otherwise dominant naval power in the world at the time, Britain. After declaring independence in 1776, the United States began enshrining the principle into all its treaties with other nations. Soon afterwards Britain followed suit, using the might of the Royal Navy to enforce it around the world. Britain, the US, Russia, and other European nations paid Denmark an enormous one-time fee to end the toll on the Øresund in 1857. The tolls on the Bosphorus and Dardanelles were removed under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Since 1945, the role of global policeman of the waves has largely been played by the United States. For nearly eighty years world trade has benefited from free seas, with the United Nations codifying the principle in 1982 as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.4 But alas, laws are generally only as effective as their enforcement. While the United States has seen a diminishment in its relative strength on the world stage (due to the emergence of China as a Great Power peer), the true damage to free seas has been the asymmetrical warfare possibilities offered by drones and other autonomous weapons. Now a mid-sized regional power like Iran can hold the world economy hostage for a remarkably low sum. Drones cost a few tens of thousands of dollars; anti-ship mines can be laid from fishing boats. As we’ve seen in Ukraine, this new paradigm enables a small power on the defensive to resist the full military might of a Great Power many times its size and strength. In fact, it even enables non-state actors to impact the global economy.

In recent weeks, the Houthis, an Iran-allied militia operating in Yemen, have been operating a similar blockade in the Bab-el-Mandeb — the strait connecting the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea — allowing only ships that distance themselves from the United States or Israel to pass through. This is the latest in a series of disruptions to maritime traffic the Houthis have been responsible for over the last few years. As early as 2023, the rebel group began attacking ships associated with Israel, in response to the latter’s attacks on Gaza. By March 2024, over 2000 ships had been diverted away from the Red Sea, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars of additional fuel costs, as well as weeks of additional journey time. Following the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip late last year, the Houthis have since paused their attacks on commercial ships, but in recent days have been threatening to close the Bab-el-Mandeb completely. If Iran succeeds in maintaining its toll in Hormuz, it’s no great leap of logic to imagine the Houthis trying to enact something similar in the Red Sea, with their ally’s support. Suddenly, the world’s two most important energy corridors are hostage to malicious actors and there appears little the world can do about it.

With the precedent set, it may not be long before other nations begin following suit. I mentioned above how the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne ended the maritime tolls the Ottoman Empire once charged for passage through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. In actual fact, Turkey is permitted to charge something classed as a “lighthouse, rescue, and medical fee” under the Montreux Convention, which is technically not a toll but a charge for services the Turkish government provides passing traffic. Though it complies with international law, from the point of view of shipping companies the fee is indistinguishable from an ordinary toll. Originally, the fee was nominal, set to be the equivalent of one Germinal franc per ton, then updated in 1983 to USD $0.8063 per ton. It remained so until 2022, when the Turkish government claimed it wanted to end “39 years of victimisation” and raised the fee fivefold, subject to a review every year. After another hike in 2025, today the fee sits at $5.83/ton, netting the Turkish government over $227 million a year. While this is still a pittance compared to the billions collected by Egypt and Panama from their respective canals (artificial waterways are treated differently from natural straits under international law), the direction of travel is clear. Turkey has long chafed under the strictures of the Montreux convention; if ships now have to pay to pass through Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb, why should they not do the same for the Turkish straits? Turkey is a far more serious a military power than Iran, and unlike the Islamic Republic and their allies the Houthis, it controls both sides of its strait.

For decades, Turkey has also been mooting the possibility of building the Istanbul Canal — a separate waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. This was in large part because the Turkish government would have been able to charge far higher fees to transiting ships. Perhaps now it won’t need a canal to do so.

Even more pertinent to global trade than the Bosphorus, Hormuz, or Bab-el-Mandeb is the Taiwan Strait. The hundred miles-wide channel separates the island of Taiwan and mainland China and through it passes one fifth of all global maritime trade (worth $2.45 trillion in 2022). Among that traffic is over 30% of China’s imports and nearly 16% of its exports.

In the last days of 2025, the People’s Republic of China conducted the most recent of their many military exercises simulating a blockade of Taiwan. It is thought by some analysts that China is more likely to attempt its long-stated goal of reunification with the island by such a manoeuvre, rather than a full frontal amphibious assault. In this way it could essentially hold the island under siege, waiting for it to capitulate by exerting economic and diplomatic pressure on it and the rest of the world, without necessarily needing to fire a bullet. Of course this would be an enormous risk to China itself, given its reliance on the waterway for its own trade, and the risk of open war with the US, which has long maintained a ‘strategic ambiguity’ over whether it would come to Taiwan’s defence. But Iran has shown how little force is needed to disrupt the shipping industry in a given corridor; by exerting just enough pressure to cause insurers to think twice about underwriting ships bound for Taiwan (something often referred to as a ‘grey zone embargo’), but not enough to warrant a military response from the island and its allies, there might be a goldilocks zone where China can engineer what it wants without risking open war. It could frame this as a quarantine and maintain a facade of ‘peaceful intent’.

If China does reunify with Taiwan, whether by a blockade or otherwise, it would then have tremendous leverage over the global economy. It could use its control of both coastlines flanking the channel to enforce a toll of its own, potentially squeezing regional rivals like Japan and South Korea, or those further afield like the US and Europe. This is without mentioning the resulting control over Taiwan’s semiconductor fabs, which in the context of the emerging military capabilities of AI are perhaps the most geopolitically significant manufacturing sites in the world.

Of similar import to Taiwan is the Strait of Malacca, which carries a similar portion of world trade. Today, the neighbouring countries of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore are all happy beneficiaries of the free seas arrangement and seem unlikely to wish for a maritime toll in the manner of the Srivijaya and Portuguese empires of centuries long past. However, if tensions between the US and China escalate beyond the Taiwan Strait, Malacca becomes a vital geopolitical vulnerability for both sides: China depends on it for energy imports; the US and its allies for trade with East Asia. It would likely become a key flashpoint in any future war.

In the coming decades, as the Arctic sea ice retreats in the wake of a warming climate, the Northern Sea Route, along the northern coast of Russia, will become an ever more important shipping lane. Russia has spent billions upgrading infrastructure along the Arctic coast; every year the ice-free summer sailing window increases. Russia already collects fees for mandatory icebreaker escorts through the waters, something which is only like to increase in the future.

There are over two hundred major international straits across the world, at least two dozen of which are of significance to global commerce. Most overlap with the territorial waters of one or more nation states. The entire system of global shipping as we know it today rests on the assumption that freedom of transit is guaranteed by international law, an assumption that is beginning to look in doubt for the first time since 1945. A recent study in Nature estimated the expected value of trade disrupted at maritime chokepoints at $192 billion annually, with the Taiwan Strait and Suez Canal accounting for the largest shares. That figure was calculated before the Hormuz crisis; it is almost certainly higher now.

Freedom of navigation was never a natural condition of the seas. It was an artefact of naval hegemony, sustained by the polite fiction that all nations shared an equal interest in keeping the waters of the world open. Sadly, the cost of closing a strait has plummeted, while the means for reopening one does not yet exist. Right now there are 400 ships stranded in Persian Gulf, unable to reach the open ocean. It’s unlikely all will be able to leave without paying for the privilege.

The end of free seas appears nigh. We will all be the poorer for it.

Subscribe now

This is the seventh and final in a series of posts on the history and culture of Iran, one of the world’s great civilisational centres. Read the first here, second here, third here, fourth here, fifth here, and sixth here.

Some three millennia past a small group of people arrived onto the Persian plateau. They came from the north, from the thundering steppelands of Central Asia. Such was the cultural heft of the language and gods that they, the Ārya, brought with them, the country they adopted eventually came to bear their name, Aryānām, ‘Land of the Aryans’. Or in modern parlance, Iran.

Out of the fusion of the elite Ārya and the tribes already inhabiting the mountains and tablelands of Iran there was birthed a mighty civilisation. A civilisation that over the centuries fathered empires, erected wonders, produced transcendent art, made wars, and accumulated vast troves of treasure. But riches and power attract conquerors, and few places on earth have been conquered quite so many times.

First came Alexander, the self-styled King of Asia. He broke the Persians upon the plains of Gaugamela in 331 BC, and subsumed the plateau into his short-lived empire. Thereafter followed two centuries of Greek rule. But Aryānām endured to rise again.

Next came the Arabs under the black flag of their Prophet. Upon the desert wastes of al-Qadisiyyah the Muslims crushed the Sassanids in 636 AD. This time the conquest was more total; the Arabs brought with them a new god, a new book, and a new language of the state. But again, despite the odds, Aryānām managed to stay distinctly Iranian, and rose again.

Then came the nomads from the north, pouring onto the plateau one after the other like waves out of a vast grassy sea. First came the Ghaznavids, then the Seljuks, Khwarazmians, the dreaded Mongols, and Timurids. Though the plateau was forced to bow before the hooves of the Turkic and Mongolic hordes for century after century, the fish always in the end ate the whale. Every time a new dynasty conquered Iran, the hard men of the steppe lost their old ways, adopting instead the customs and culture of the plateau. Thus, Aryānām endured it all.

The modern era saw the rise of industrialised, world-spanning empires and they too were soon snuffling like hounds along the borders of mighty Persia. The Great Game saw both the British and Russian empires use Iran as a staging ground for their great power competition, but despite the plunder, partitions, and invasions, still Aryānām endured.

More recent days have seen Iran suffer coups, revolutions, and a withering bombardment from the air. But beneath the beetle-browed tyranny of the ayatollahs, behind the bristling mountains of missiles and drones, beneath the threats of cultural evisceration from above, there remains among ordinary Iranians a deep sense of their inheritance of three thousand years of civilisational history. But this begs the question, how was Aryānām able to endure countless invasions, foreign occupations, and, at times, almost genocidal murder of its people, and still retain the sense of itself as a distinct culture?

The answer lies not with the plateau’s armies, religions, or its mountainous borders. Iranian identity has survived because of something far more delicate: poetry.

Let me explain.

Subscribe now

In 1772, a Lutheran pastor and philosopher named Johann Gottfried Herder, published an essay entitled Essay on the Origin of Language. Herder, a one-time student of Kant, had grown frustrated with the French Enlightenment’s insistence that human reason was universal, that culture was merely local colour, and that all peoples of the world would eventually converge upon the same monolithic, rational civilisation, if given sufficient time. Perhaps it was because he himself was a German, writing at a time when the seed of German nationhood was just then beginning to germinate, but he was not so keen to dismiss cultural differences.

Instead, Herder argued that every people possesses a unique Volksgeist, a unique spirit, and this coalesces first around a shared language. He believed literature plays a key role in giving shape to the identity of a people and culture, as it is through language that humans first come to understand and reason about the world. In this vein, it was, Herder thought, Homer who gave birth to the idea of ‘greekness’, who shaped Greek thought and identity with his epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Similarly, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid gave voice to Roman identity, while the Eddas shaped the Norse’s conception of themselves. As he wrote, ‘A poet is the creator of the nation around him; he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.’

Thus Herder, perhaps inadvertently, gave birth to the idea of Romantic Nationalism: ‘What a treasure language is when kinship groups grow into tribes and nations! Even the smallest of nations … cherishes in and through its language the history, the poetry, and songs about the great deeds of its forefathers.’ Central and Eastern Europe was then still a patchwork of principalities, duchies, and kingdoms roughly stitched together in multiethnic conglomerates like the Holy Roman, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But Herder’s ideas gave intellectual heft to the idea of building nation states around a shared language and history. Soon, intellectuals were attempting to write themselves a national mythos all over the continent: František Palacký began eagerly writing a Czech-language history; Vuk Karadić was soon doing the same for Serbia; while Douglas Hyde in the 18th century founded the Gaelic League to ‘de-Anglicise’ Ireland in order to better distinguish itself from its colonial overlord. Though the works predate Herder’s writings, we can view James Macpherson’s fabricated epics of a legendary Gaelic poet named Ossian in the same light — as an attempt to build a cultural and linguistic basis for Scotland’s ancient nationhood.

There is in this idea as language forming the basis for an identity a special place for poetry. It is the mother tongue of the human race, coming in almost all languages before prose, before reason, before law. A child does not learn about their country from its constitutional charter. They learn it through lullabies, through myths, and through national epics.

In Finland, a rural doctor named Elias Lönnrot spent years tramping through the boreal forests of his homeland collecting runic song and oral poetry, before transcribing them into the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. Finnish intellectuals later used the poem to argue it was a nation in its own right, and not merely a province of Sweden or Russia. In Italy, it was Dante who gave the fragmented peninsula a shared language once again when he wrote his Divine Comedy in the Tuscan vernacular instead of Latin. When the nationalists of the Risorgimento began unifying Italy in the 19th century, they use Dante’s works as evidence that the idea of a unified nation was centuries-old. In Russia, Pushkin wrote Eugene Onegin in Russian over the aristocratic French held to be superior by the court, and in so doing helped define the national consciousness. In Ukraine, that role was played by Taras Shevchenko; in Scotland, Robert Burns; in England, Chaucer.

But of all the peoples who have used poetry to preserve their identity against the tides of history and foreign domination, perhaps none have done so more tenaciously, or for longer, than the Iranians. There is a good argument to be made that no single poem has done more to hold a civilisation together than the Shahnameh.

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the sixth in a series of posts on the history and culture of Iran, one of the world’s great civilisational centres. Read the first here, second here, third here, fourth here, and fifth here.

I. THE VIEW FROM THE PLATEAU

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Iranian.1

You are the inheritor of one of the oldest civilisations on Earth. Your forebears built the first great empire in history, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus. Your poets and mathematicians and physicians were among the greatest minds of the mediaeval world. Your literature, your art, your architecture are among the finest treasures humankind has ever produced. You know this. It is in your blood.

You are also a Shia Muslim. You carry with you the memory of Karbala, the grief of the murder of the Prophet’s own grandson; you rage at this betrayal, committed by the hands of your fellow Muslims no less. You mourn Husayn every year. You beat your chest in the street. You sing dirges and chant elegies. You know the world to be fallen, that justice has long been denied the righteous, but you know too that one day a saviour must come to set it right.

Recent days and weeks and months have not been good to you. Your countrymen and women were months ago cut down in the street for the crime of asking for a better government.2 Now you can only watch on helplessly each night as missiles fall upon your homeland. Here is but the latest act in an ancient war, Good vs Evil, Truth vs the Lie, the Oppressed vs the Oppressors.

Those dropping the bombs claim to be your liberators, but you can only wonder, was Gomorrah liberated by the fire and brimstone? For two hundred years your country has been subjected to the whims of western powers. The Russians took your northern provinces; the British tried to take your tobacco, and when that was denied them, they helped themselves to your oil instead. When you tried to take it back by democratic means, the Americans overthrew your government and installed a puppet king, a decadent and oppressive tyrant. When your people overthrew that Shah, they called you terrorists. They conspired to impoverish your country, they sanctioned your economy into oblivion, they armed your enemies — both Israel and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — and now they are bombing your cities.

From where you stand, the game is clear, only its rules have been rigged from the start. The West speaks of democracy but destroys it when the results are inconvenient; it speaks of human rights but backs dictators who serve its interests; it speaks of sovereignty but violates yours at every turn. Israel, meanwhile, occupies Muslim land, kills Muslim civilians, men, women, and children, and is shielded from the consequences by the same America that has long lectured you about the rules-based international order. They have stopped pretending there are rules now, but that matters little: the thin veneer of legality had never served you much in the past.

Now imagine you are told, commanded even, by the same powers that did all this, to behave. To be reasonable. To come to the negotiating table and make concessions. You watch as men in blue suits and red ties claim your country an existential threat to world peace and security.3 These, the same people who invaded two of your neighbours (Iraq and Afghanistan), carpet-bombed three more (Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen), demand your country make sacrifices to keep the peace.

You might not love your government. You might even hate it. But you have seen what happens when the bombs fall. Over the last twenty years you have seen regimes toppled in Iraq, in Libya, in Afghanistan. You know there is no plan for what comes after. You know the powers that be will leave your nation to anarchy and ruin, if that is what best serves their interests. You know they do not care if you live or die.

The Islamic Republic is not on the side of the angels. Its actions — against its own people, against its enemies, against the civilians of Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria — have been monstrous. It has murdered its own women for the crime of showing their hair; it has funded militias that have killed tens of thousands across the Middle East; it has for decades imprisoned, tortured, and executed dissidents with an alarming savagery.

But the regime’s narrative of itself, the story it tells to justify its existence, is built from genuine grievances. And if you too had absorbed those grievances, those memories, that history, you might well conclude, as the founders of the Islamic Republic did, that the struggle between Iran and the West is not a simple geopolitical rivalry, but an existential struggle of cosmic significance.

Since the events of 1979, few western commentators, policymakers, and war-makers have proved willing or capable of reckoning with why the Islamic Republic of Iran sees the world as it does. Journalists appear dumbfounded by the regime’s hostility to the ‘Great Satan’; politicians seem amazed at Iran’s reluctance to come to terms; security hawks can’t understand why the Islamic Republic mistrusts every word that comes out of the mouth of the American government.

This series on Iran has been an attempt to see things a little differently. We have looked at how Iran’s geography has shaped its history; seen how the Iranians first came to arrive onto the Persian plateau; traced Iran’s influence on world theology, through Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Islam; we have through its architecture seen the plateau’s ability to produce the most transcendent art; and seen how the the events of 1979 had their roots in the years, decades, and centuries past. Now it is time to bring the story up to the present moment. Let us try to see the world as it looks from the plateau, today.

Subscribe now

II. THE GUARDIAN AND THE GUARD

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the fifth in a series of posts on the history and culture of Iran, one of the world’s great civilisational centres. Read the first here, second here, third here, and fourth here.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 transformed Shahist Iran into a theocratic republic, ending a two and a half millennia-long tradition of monarchical government. It was a pivotal moment in modern history, changing not only Iran but the entire geopolitical landscape of the Middle East; it even brought down an American president. But no event, no matter how seismic, happens in a vacuum. The events of 1979 had their roots in the years, decades, and centuries before Ruhollah Khomeini returned from his exile. Indeed, to understand the forces behind the rise of the Ayatollah, there are three key dates in history one must reckon with: 680, 1501, and 1953.

Subscribe now

I. YEAR OF THE CALAMITY: 680

In early October of the year 680, a few dozen men and their families approached the town of Kufa — a city in what is now Iraq. This caravan had crossed the scorched wastes of the Arabian Desert, first setting out from Mecca, the holy city. They were at long last approaching their journey’s end. Or so they thought.

As the travellers neared the town several thousand mounted soldiers appeared ahead of them on the road. Blocking their path, their captain asked the caravan’s leader, a man named Husayn, to swear allegiance to the Umayyad Caliph Yazid I. Husayn refused.

The travellers were shepherded north, away from Kufa, closer to a town called Karbala, where they were held for a number of days. Every so often new orders would arrive for the troops, each time asking Husayn to submit. He remained obstinate. Eventually, the arguments between Husayn’s men and the soldiers boiled over. The soldiers began firing arrows into the camp, killing dozens. Some fought back, but it was little use. Soon, so the story goes, only Husayn himself was left standing, clutching to his breast the body of his infant son, whose throat had been impaled with an arrowshaft. He fought bravely, but his doom was inevitable. He was stabbed to death, and, for good measure, decapitated. Some forty-eight years after the death of the Prophet, his grandson had been cut down by soldiers of his own faith.

The massacre at Karbala would prove the single most consequential event in the history of early Islam, forever cleaving the faith in two. Unlike the schisms in Christianity, between West and East, between Catholic and Protestant, the sundering of Islam had its roots amid the religion’s earliest days. Perhaps that’s why the divide is bitterer even than those.

Muhammad himself had been an outsider, a man who stood against the wealthy merchants of Mecca and declared their gods false. The powerful Quraysh tribe mocked him, persecuted his followers, drove him from the city. His message was radical: submit to the one God and you shall be raised up; cling to your idols and your wealth and you shall be cast down. It was from the very beginning a theology born in opposition to worldly authority. If the Prophet himself had been rejected by the powerful, then perhaps power itself was suspect. Perhaps the righteous would always be persecuted. Perhaps Muslims should never trust a man upon the throne.

After Muhammad died in 632, there was an intense disagreement about who should succeed him as ruler of the faithful. From that first dispute there was opened a wound that has never healed, not in thirteen centuries. One faction insisted leadership should be hereditary, passing down the Prophet’s bloodline to Ali; another preferred Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law. When the elders of the new faith gathered at Saqifah,1 it was Abu Bakr who was elected first of the caliphs. Supporters of Ali claimed this mattered not, for the Prophet had intended the mantle to pass to his son-in-law, election or no.

Abu Bakr, and the two caliphs that followed him, Umar and Uthman, oversaw the expansion of an empire at a speed hitherto unseen in history. To conquer so much in so short a period of time necessarily involved making compromises: tolerating tribal customs among the conquered; cultural exchange with neighbours; accommodating the Arab families who had once resisted Muhammad, only converting when they saw which way the wind was blowing. Ali and his supporters could only watch on in disgust.

For Ali was an idealist. He insisted upon a purer Islam, a stricter adherence to the Prophet’s original principles. This made him the natural focus of dissent for all those who felt the caliphate had strayed from the righteous path. It also made him enemies. When Ali finally became caliph, civil war erupted almost immediately. He tried to make peace, and for his troubles was assassinated — sliced in the head with a poisoned sword by a Kharijite fanatic, a member of a radical sect who felt Ali had betrayed the cause by negotiating with his rivals at all. Into the power vacuum stepped the Umayyad dynasty.

It was against this Umayyad usurpation that Ali’s second son, Husayn, rode to Karbala some twenty years later. His father’s murder had not quelled the dissent; if anything it had only embittered his supporters further. They came to be known as Shi’at Ali — the Party of Ali. They despised Yazid, the second Umayyad caliph, who presided over a court that had gradually adopted both Byzantine and Persian decadence, including, most controversially, wine-drinking. To Husayn, the Islamic rulers now bore little resemblance to the austere community Muhammad had founded upon the sands of Hejaz; the caliphate looked now more like the Meccan authorities that resisted the Prophet. Husayn’s rebellion was, in his eyes, a bid to return Islam to the Prophet’s original vision. He had been promised support by the people of Kufa, but Yazid’s soldiers got their first. They intimidated its people into silence. The supporters who had pledged their swords melted away. When the Prophet’s grandson arrived with his small band of followers, he found not an army of faithful waiting to join him, but the swords of his enemy.

In later years a shrine was raised upon the site of Husayn’s martyrdom; it stands there to this day. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, the day of Ashura, millions of Shia Muslims all over the world take to the streets in mourning.2 They beat their chests, they weep, they process through the cities in great black-clad rivers of grief. Some self-flagellate. Some draw their own blood. Nowhere is the mourning so wretched as in Iran, where Ashura has become intertwined with the nationalist mythos.3 Grieving Husayn is seen as a rejection of tyranny, a protest against oppression, part of the spiritual struggle on behalf of Allah. In the late seventies, the corrupt Shah played the role of the decadent caliph; ever since the Ayatollah’s ascendence, the Great Shaitan that is the United States of America, and its friend, the thieving Zionist Israel, have become the latest incarnation of the oppressors.

The analogy is imperfect, but there is an echo of the Christian idea of a redemptive martyrdom in Shiism. Husayn’s death takes on a crucifixion-like significance; it is the defining moment in the Shiite story. Indeed, the sense of betrayal, and subsequent hatred of Sunnis, can perhaps be understood by way of another analogy: historian Michael Axworthy likened the Shia experience to what it would mean for the Christian church to have been governed, from its very first generation, by the descendants of Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilot.

Mixed in with the grief and the anger too is a deep sense of injustice. The world was sullied by the events of Karbala, and will not be cleansed until it is made right again.

And so, after Karbala, the Shia became the perennial underdogs of the Islamic world, forever the minority, forever conscious that the majority had taken the wrong path. The Umayyads consolidated political power across the empire and the Sunni tradition has ever since been ascendant. In time, Sunni theology and law would be codified through the collective consensus of scholars and the authority of established caliphs: a tradition deeply legalistic, rooted in precedent and communal agreement, bearing a resemblance to the Rabbinic Judaism of the Talmudic sages (another imperfect but useful analogy), with its intricate commentaries and emphasis upon correct practice. The Shia, meanwhile, developed along different lines. Shorn of political power, they invested their hopes not in the consensus of the scholarly community but in the authority of divinely guided leaders — the Shia Imams, descendants of the Prophet through Ali and Husayn, who formed an alternative line of spiritual succession to the Sunni caliphs. If the Sunni tradition was reminiscent of Rabbinic Judaism, Shia Islam bore certain structural resemblances to Catholic Christianity: a hierarchical clergy; intercessory spiritual figures, akin to saints; a theology in which suffering and sacrifice are redemptive; and a devotional calendar centred, much like Good Friday, upon the death of a martyr.

As with any persecuted minority, the Shia developed strategies for survival. The sixth Imam, Ja’far al-Sadiq, codified a doctrine that would prove deeply significant to Shia history: the principle that the faithful are permitted to conceal or deny their beliefs in order to save their lives. It bore a resemblance to the ‘mental reservation’ of Jesuit Catholics after the Reformation, and it served much the same purpose, allowing the Shia to survive under hostile Sunni rule. It also earned them a reputation among Sunnis as slippery and devious, a reputation that has never entirely faded.

Al-Sadiq’s ideas have long been associated with Shia ‘quietism’ — a retreat from politics, a cultivation of modesty and private virtue, an acceptance that the world was unjust and that the faithful must endure until God saw fit to set things right. This was the dominant tendency for much of Shia history. But it was not the only one. The revolt of Abu Muslim in the eighth century — a rising fuelled in part by Shia grievances — toppled the Umayyads and installed the Abbasid dynasty in their place. Later, the Ismaili sect, a branch of Shiism that broke from the mainstream over the identity of the rightful Imam, would produce, among many others, a sect known as the Assassins, a secretive order of killers who operated from mountain fortresses in the Alborz, terrorising Sunni rulers across the Near East. The tension between patience and resistance, between quietism and revolution, would endure throughout Shia history, right up until 1979.

Whether quietist or revolutionary, Shiites, ever the minority, endured. But crisis struck in the ninth century, when the eleventh Imam died without a visible heir.4 For a community that had staked its identity upon an unbroken chain of divinely appointed leaders, this was a rupture of existential proportions. But from the crisis of succession there emerged an explanation that would come to define the dominant tradition within Shiism, known as Twelver Shiism: the eleventh Imam did have a son, a boy who had gone into hiding, or occultation, and who would return at the end of days to establish the rule of God upon earth. Here was a messianic, millenarian doctrine bearing a resemblance to both the Christian expectation of the Second Coming and the Zoroastrian tradition of the Saoshyant, the future saviour who would purify the world in fire. It gave the Shia a powerful eschatological hope. But it also created a new and destabilising question: without the Imam, who was to lead the Shiite faithful? Without a living, breathing authority at the head of the community, who could say what God required?

That question would go unanswered for six hundred years. In the meantime, the Shia remained scattered across the Islamic world: communities in southern Mesopotamia, pockets near Qom upon the Iranian plateau, enclaves in the mountains of Lebanon, small populations in Central Asia and the Arabian Gulf. Aside from a few minor Shia dynasties — the Fatimids in Egypt, the Buyids in Iraq and western Iran — they generally lived under Sunni rulers, practising their faith in private, mourning Husayn, waiting for a deliverance that never came.

That is, until the sixteenth century.

II. YEAR OF THE CONVERSION: 1501

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the history and culture of Iran, one of the world’s great civilisational centres. Read the first here, second here, and third here.

If you are British and make pretence to write in the travel genre — as I have occasionally been wont to do — there are two modern greats in the canon you must reckon with. There is of course Bruce Chatwin, haunter of the Patagonian wastes, herald of Aboriginal songlines, wry witness to a failed West African coup. And then there is Chatwin’s own hero, the laconic and reticent aesthete, Robert Byron, who loved Byzantium as much as he despised Rome.

In 1932, Byron came by chance across a photograph of a Ziyarid tomb-tower standing alone upon the Caspian steppe. Then and there he resolved to embark upon a journey across the navel of the world — from Venice to the Levant, through Mesopotamia and up onto the Persian plateau, where he traversed Iran and Afghanistan with the aim of discovering the origins of Islamic architecture, which he believed lay upon the storied plains of Central Asia. His account, a masterpiece of the genre, reads less like a traditional travelogue and more like a detective thriller; he navigates the perils of labyrinthine mountain passes, the dust of the open deserts, and the oppressive bureaucracy of the Shahist regime, all in search of long-decayed architectural wonders. The reader is dragged along on this adventure, captivated by an enthralling premise: here are the hulking skeletons of long-lost civilisations; we need only follow their trail to unlock the secrets of the ancients.

Given the current state of the world, it may be some time before any of us can follow Byron onto the plateau. Indeed, we can do little more than hope against hope that none of those precious and irreplaceable treasures are struck by the projectiles currently raining down upon that antique land. But we can at least distract ourselves with their heritage from afar; we can pay homage to their artistry by attempting to finish what Byron started. Can we trace through time the history of Iranian architecture? Let us try.

Subscribe now

The first people to build monumental architecture on the land that is now Iran were the Elamites (3200–539 BCE). The building style of this pre-Iranic people was clearly heavily influenced by that of the slightly older Mesopotamian civilisation to their west. This can be seen most clearly in Dur Untash — a monstrous ziggurat built by King Untash-Napirisha somewhere around 1250 BCE. Lying some 20 miles southwest of Susa, the greatest of Elamite cities, the massive stepped-pyramid resembles those built in Uruk and Ur in prior centuries. The mud-brick structure once rose 52m in height, and was topped by a temple for Inshushinak, lord of the local pantheon. Typical of Elamite buildings, onto its bricked walls were carved decorative motifs — a feature inherited by the Achaemenian Persians.

In 553 BCE, a minor Persian chieftain named Cyrus rebelled against his Median overlord. He toppled his erstwhile ruler and quickly conquered for himself what was then the largest empire in history. The Persians were famously tolerant of the practices, traditions, and gods worshipped within their borders, and were more than happy to subsume the best parts of other cultures into their own. Their architecture too reflected this cosmopolitanism. Cyrus built himself a great palace at Pasargadae, but the greatest of the Persian builders was Darius I, the usurper. He ordered the construction of a grand ceremonial complex at the place the Greeks called Persepolis.

It was here that Darius and his son Xerxes received the representatives of their subject states, come to pay tribute, so the building was designed to embody the might and majesty of the empire. Considerable work had to be done before building could even commence on the site, carved as it was into an irregular and rocky mountainside to ensure the complex stood high above the plains. Surrounding the complex was a walled garden of cypress, pomegranate, and cherry trees (the English word ‘paradise’ derives from the Old Persian word for garden, pairidaeza), while its centrepiece was the famous Apadana, a great hypostyle hall. Though the sands of time have steadily eroded away its splendour, a handful of the original 72 columns still stand today, though much reduced from their once-lofty height of 24 metres. Upon their capitals were carved twin-headed bulls, eagles, and lions, symbolising the might of the crown. The narrow columns supported a light roof, creating a space reminiscent of an enormous pergola. We can see the influence of Median architecture (whose columns were made of wood rather than buffed stone), as well as the great Egyptian hypostyle halls of Luxor — indeed many of the craftsmen who built it were likely Egyptian,1 alongside Ugarits, Greeks, and Babylonians — but rather than the dark forest of columned Karnak, the Achaemenian structure was open and airy.2 It has been suggested that perhaps the Apadana was through the Medes partly influenced by the structure of Iranian tents, from the days long past when the ancestors of the Persians still roamed nomadic upon the Central Asian steppe.

Alexander famously set Persepolis alight during his conquest of Asia and it was two hundred years before Iranians ruled the entirety of Persia once more. The Parthians (247 BCE – 224 CE) — heralding from Parthia, at the northeastern edge of the Iranian plateau — are often overshadowed by the Achaemenian Persians who came before them and the Sassanians who came after. But it could be argued their contribution to the history of architecture transcended both. Indeed, they invented one of the key features of all Islamic building, which in later centuries would become a key structural element of everything from the bustling madrasas of Cairo to the towering Taj Mahal: the iwan.

The arch had been present on the Iranian plateau since the days of the Elamites; many of their tombs were covered over with a simple barrel-vault (essentially an arched tunnel). The Parthians however applied the structure in an entirely novel way: replacing the post-and-lintel hall was a single, soaring barrel that functioned as a cavernous, open-ended room. Until this point, the weight of such a large arch would have pushed laterally to either side to the point of collapse. The Parthians’ innovation was to build flanking vaulted corridors either side of the walls of the central iwan, which acted as supporting buttresses.

In later centuries, after sweeping aside their Iranic cousins, the Sassanians (224 – 651 CE) built an iwan hall that remained unchallenged in size and grandeur for centuries afterwards. The construction of Taq Kasra has historically been credited to the Sassanian King of Kings Khosrow I, but in truth historians aren’t exactly sure when it was built, with estimates ranging from the 3rd to 6th centuries. This is a shame because it is no doubt one of the landmark monuments in the history of architecture. Here the architects extended the iwan hall to a breathtaking height (37m high, 26m wide, 50m long); it was so tall in fact that it remains the largest free standing vault in the world to this day. It is thought the cavernous hall served as the throne room for Sassanian kings, who sat upon a 30 metre high dais. Once upon a time the interior walls would have been decorated with lavish patterns made from a rudimentary plaster called stucco. Just as with Darius’ Apadana, the intent was to awe visitors to the imperial capital.

Not content with building the largest iwan hall ever constructed, the Sassanians also deployed the structure for another purpose. Across a number of monuments they erected enormous barrel-vaults not as rooms for their own sake, but which instead functioned as grand entranceways. These yawning maws typically opened onto a larger, more elegant space, which was often domed.

The Mesopotamians built mud-brick domes as early as the 3rd millennium BCE, while the Achaemenians held festivals in domical tents, which again harkened back to the nomadic days of old. The Parthians built a circular hall with a wooden dome measuring 17m across in their capital Nyssa as early as the 1st century CE. But the Sassanians figured out how to build domes in stone, inventing in the process another of the great features of Islamic architecture: the squinch.

The squinch is an answer to the age-old architectural question: how do you place a circle atop a square? In the West, the Byzantines solved this conundrum with pendentives and corbels; upon the Persian plateau, the Sassanians used small trumpet arches to span the diagonal gap at each of the four corners — squinches.

Forever after, the dome-on-squinch became the fundamental unit of Iranian architecture. As did the iwan-gateway. We can see both Sassanian innovations deployed in the Palace of Ardashir (c. 224 CE). To fully appreciate the importance of this particular structure to world architecture, I think its worth quoting Robert Byron at length here:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

This palace, founded at the beginning of the third century AD, is a landmark in the development of building. Its revelation of the squinch, a simple arch across the angle of two walls, coincides with the appearance of the pendentive, a kite-shaped vault supported by an angle pier, in Syria; and from these two inventions derive two primary architectural styles, in the wake of two religions: medieval Persian, branching into Mesopotamia, the Levant, and India; and Byzantine-Romanesque, spreading to the confines of northern Europe. Previously, there was no means of placing a dome on four square walls, or on a building of any shape whose inside area much exceeded that of the dome itself. Henceforth, as squinches and pendentives became enlarged, and as the former were multiplied into zones of stalactites and bats'-wings, a dome became possible to buildings of all shapes and sizes. The Christian expansion of this possibility reached its height in St Sophia at Constantinople, and began a second life with Brunelleschi's dome at Florence. The Mohammadan is waiting to be mapped, by anyone who can keep his temper among the jealousies of modern archaeology. But one thing is certain. Without these two principles, of which one has its prototype here, architecture as we know it would be different, and many objects most familiar to the world's eye, such as St Peter's, the Capitol, and the Taj Mahal, would not exist.

Some three-and-a-half centuries prior to the Prophet Muhammad’s birth, we can see three of the features that will go on to define Islamic architecture — the iwan, the squinch, the dome — have already been invented. But they would not reach their grandest heights until after the Arabs arrived onto the Persian plateau in the 7th century CE.

The earliest mosques were modelled on the Prophet’s own courtyard in Medina: a walled rectangle open to the heavens but for a basic cover on the side of the qibla wall (the side facing Mecca), to protect from the heat. Carved into the qibla was a mihrab, or prayer niche, but otherwise the space was unadorned. But then, as the new faith expanded out of its homeland on the Arabian Peninsula, it encountered and subsumed the architectural traditions of other civilisations. The open courtyard was soon roofed over with a post-and-lintel structure, held up by forest-like arcades. The Great Mosque of Damascus and the earliest portions of the Great Mosque of Cordoba reflect this early style, which is essentially a type of hypostyle hall. But the mosque would truly become the mosque only after Islam met Persia.

Tarikhaneh in Persian roughly translates as ‘God’s home’, and we can see in this structure, one of the earliest mosques built in Iran (c. 8th century), the Arabic and Iranic already beginning to meld. We have an open courtyard flanked by an iwan-punctuated arcade of pointed arches.3 But as yet no dome.

The Friday Mosque of Isfahan initially followed a very similar design to Tarikhaneh, the only variation being two minarets added ~975 CE.4 But that all changed in the 11th century when the Seljuks came streaming onto the Persian plateau from the Central Asian steppe. Though Turkic themselves, after their conquest they — like so many of Iran’s invaders — became Persianate, themselves contributing greatly to the culture they adopted. At Isfahan a succession of Seljuk sultans attempted to one-up their predecessors by building a series of ever-larger domes. In doing so they invented a new type of squinch — consisting of a barrel vault above two quarter-domes — and several new types of domical structures: the eight-ribbed dome; the double-shell dome; and the five-pointed star dome.

After a fire damaged the mosque in 1122, the Seljuks decided to take the opportunity to add an enormous iwan entrance hall opposite the mihrab. For reasons unknown the builders decided to add three more monumental iwans on the cardinal points of the mosque’s courtyard. This was the first appearance of the four-iwan plan in Islamic architecture — something that would soon spread with Turko-Persian rulers as they conquered cities from Samarkand to Delhi.

After the Seljuks came another persianised Turkic people, the Khwarazmians, and after them, the dreaded Mongols. Despite their reputation for razing cities to the ground, the part of Chinggis Khan’s vast empire that eventually seceded into the Ilkhanate (essentially the lands from Iran to Turkey) added a particularly beautiful layer to the palimpsest of Iranian architectural history: that of colour.

Constructed as a mausoleum for an Ilkhanid Mongol khan in the 14th century, the Tomb of Öljaitü’s defining feature is an enormous brick dome — one of the largest in the world, measuring 25 metres in diameter by 50 metres in height. The double-shelled dome, which has been called the Islamic equivalent of Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence (which it predates by a hundred years), used a network of arches cleverly sandwiched between two cones to better distribute the weight. This was far from the first pointed dome, but marks a step on the way to increasingly bulbous and conic forms of later structures, like the Taj Mahal. Most striking of all though is the dazzling blue which adorned its exterior (which was recently restored). Here we see one of the earliest instances of the tiled tessellations of Islamic monuments that inspires awe from Bukhara to Istanbul.

The tomb’s octagonal base is crowned with no fewer than eight minarets; these once looked out over a beautiful garden — a nod perhaps, to Cyrus the Great’s pairidaeza. This garden flourished with minimal maintenance up until the 17th century because of carefully designed qanats — specially designed water channels built into the ground.

Following the Mongols out of the Central Asian steppe was the last of the great horselords, Timur the Lame. His plundering of cities from India to Anatolia financed an extraordinary flowering of art and architecture across Iran and Transoxiana. The building of the Timurids rulers saw not major innovation, but instead an exquisite refinement of all the Persian architectural inventions of prior centuries.

Ground was broken on the Goharshad Mosque at Mashhad in 1418 and it took more than a decade to complete the structure. Here we see the now standard four-iwan courtyard, but the arches are taller and more slender than their Seljuk predecessors; the dome over the prayer hall is a fully mature double-shell dome, its exterior profile a graceful pointed bulb; and the surfaces are covered in the most glorious mosaic faience: pieces of individually cut and glazed plate, fitted together like Penrose tiling to create intricate geometric and vegetal patterns in deep blue, turquoise, white, green, yellow, and purple. Islam permits no images of sentient beings, but who needs them when geometry itself is elevated to the highest art.

The Timurids also pushed muqarnas to new heights. This structural form emerged from the Seljuk squinch and consisted of small nested niches which honeycombed archways until they formed three-dimensional tessellations of their own. Again, at the Goharshad Mosque this form reached a complexity hitherto unseen.5

But even Goharshad is not the crowning achievement of Persian architecture. That mantle belongs to another.

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the third in a series of posts on the history and culture of Iran, one of the world’s great civilisational centres. Read the first here, and second here.

I. PROPHET OF FIRE

Centuries before Muhammad smashed the idols of the Ka’bah, before Siddhartha Gautama sat under his fig tree, before Moses led his faithful out of Egypt, a man named Zarathustra waded out into the cool waters of the Daiti River.

It is said that at the time of his revelation, Zarathustra was thirty years old. He had been wandering the wilderness in search of the Truth for a decade or more, spending much of his time in solitary contemplation and prayer. As part of a celebration of the spring equinox, the Iranian had gone down to the river to draw water from the deepest and purest part of the stream. After plunging his jug into the cool and clear waters, he turned back to find before him a figure formed of celestial light. The Being spoke, revealing himself as a servant of the god of truth and light, and began his instruction on the order of all things.

Zarathustra undoubtedly deserves a place in the pantheon of the most influential prophets in world history, but the foggy veil of time makes it difficult to identify which doctrines within the religion that takes his name stem back to his original teachings. Indeed, scholars can’t even agree on the time in which he lived. Traditional Zoroastrian teaching places him around 600 BC, alongside an Achaemenian prince named Vishtaspa, whose own historicity is far from certain. But linguistic analysis of the Gathas, the hymns which though written down centuries after Zarathustra’s death are thought to descend via oral tradition from his mouth, reveals that he likely lived much earlier. There is little consensus among historians, but the best guess places the prophet somewhere between 1500-1000 BC; in other words, he lived and taught long before the founders of all the world’s other major religions.

Known to the Greeks as Zoroaster, his Iranic name meant something like “owner of golden (zarath) camels (usthra)”. His father was Pourush’aspa (owner of many horses), Doughdova (milkmaid) his mother. The names all suggest a pastoralist lifestyle, which taken alongside the likely period in which he lived, and the fact he spoke Avestan, a northeastern Iranic language, suggests Zarathustra had his revelation roughly around the time the Iranians first began making their way onto the plateau. Whether it was the changing landscape that brought on a corresponding change in belief, or whether it was the singular vision of a particularly charismatic man, we will never know.

Whatever the impetus driving the change, we can be fairly confident that Zarathustra was reforming pre-existing practices, rather than inventing something entirely novel. We can see this in the fact that writing was for the first few centuries of the tradition seen as something demonic and to be avoided — a holdover belief from the steppe that took some time to shake. Another indication is the fact that the Persian word div, which is a cognate of both the Latin and Sanskrit (all three being descendant tongues of the original Indo-European language of the Yamnaya) words for gods, was in the Zoroastrian context associated with demons. This suggests that Zarathustra relegated what had been a series of deities to the rank of minor demons.1 In their place he elevated Ahura Mazda, once only the god of the sky, equivalent to the Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, and Vedic Indra, to the throne of ultimate creator. Initially, Ahura Mazda oversaw the cosmic battle between the lord of darkness and lies, Ahriman, and the servant of light Spenta Mainyu (Bounteous Spirit), without entering the fray himself. But over time the story changed so that the battle between light and darkness, truth and lies, was fought between celestial twins, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, born at the beginning of time.2

Alongside the dualism, Zoroastrianism introduced for the first time in recorded religion the concept of a messiah, the Saoshyant, who would be born at the Frashokereti (End of Days) to a virgin mother. It also stressed the individual’s freedom to choose between a life of Good or Evil, the consequences of which would be played out in the afterlife. Heaven, hell, angels, demons, judgement, resurrection, apocalypse, and a messiah — all these concepts familiar to those raised in a Judeo-Christian context had their origins not in Jerusalem, but upon the Persian plateau.

Indeed, historians now think it almost certain that the Israelites were heavily influenced by Zarathustra’s teachings. In the year 587 BC, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple of Solomon, and brought back thousands of the city’s elite to his capital in Mesopotamia. The exile of fifty years was perhaps the most influential period in the development of the tradition that would become Judaism, when the Israelites began to collect and codify their history and identity into the Torah, the Five Books of Moses which today open the Hebrew Bible. As their beliefs began to coalesce into a form recognisable to us today, it seems they were influenced by the ideas of others. This was likely when the Babylonian/Sumerian story of the primordial Flood entered the canon, for instance; so too ideas tracing back to Zarathustra.

The Jewish conception of a mashiach, or messiah, was a title initially reserved only for a king or high priest ritually anointed with oil. But in the centuries after the Babylonian Exile, the messiah became a figure of increasingly eschatological significance. Under the brutal Seleucid oppression of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (2nd century BC), messianism became increasingly eschatological, and the eschatology became increasingly apocalyptic. The idea culminates in the Book of Daniel: “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Daniel 12:2) This was taken further by the Christian Book of Revelation, which foretells Christ’s triumphant return to do battle with the Antichrist in a scene reminiscent of Zoroastrian dualism. Indeed, it’s interesting that the Gospel of Matthew should explicitly refer to three magi attending the birth of the messiah in Bethlehem; magi was the name given to Zoroastrian priests.

In this way we can trace several ideas from Zoroastrianism to Judaism, from Judaism to Christianity, and from both to Islam.3 By the time Arab armies poured onto the Iranian plateau well over a thousand years after the Babylonian Exile, the conquest in some ways heralded the homecoming of many of Zarathustra’s ideas in a modified form.

But Zoroaster was far from the last Iranian prophet.

II. APOSTLE OF LIGHT

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the second in a series of posts on the history and culture of Iran, one of the world’s great civilisational centres. Read the first here.

There are three great forces that drive human history: geography, technology, and culture. We will begin with geography.

I. MOUNTAIN, DESERT, AND OIL

The vast and jagged expanse of elevated terrain that today we know as the Iranian plateau extends across an area far greater than that enclosed by the borders of the modern nation state of Iran. The platform of dust and rock sweeps southeast from the conjoinment of the Pontic and Taurus Mountains in eastern Anatolia, a region known to antiquity as the Anti-Taurus, through Iraqi Kurdistan, southern Azerbaijan, Iran itself, and eastwards onto Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan. The central plateau averages about a thousand metres above sea level, and was raised upwards aeons ago by two opposing collisions between three of the Earth’s tectonic plates. Along the western and southern edge, the Arabian and Eurasian plates collide to raise the barbed peaks of the Zagros Mountains, while in the east the Eurasian is being shunted in the opposite direction by the Indian plate, raising the deserts of the interior towards skies that never rain as if the land was caught in a vice.

Speaking of deserts, the arid wastelands of the Dasht-e Kavīr and the Dasht-e Lūt that mark the centre of the plateau are surrounded on all sides by a formidable ring of mountains. They are bound in the west by the Zagros; in the north by the Alborz, which themselves rim the edge of the Caspian Sea; in the northeast by the Kopet-Dag Range, which has long provided a porous bulwark against the black sands of the Karakum; in the east by the forbidding Hindu Kush; while to the south the two thousand foot plateau drops off suddenly and without warning into the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. There, the oceanic crust of the Arabian plate that has through its tectonic collision been thrust upwards out of the bowels of the earth has resulted in a region of unfathomable mineral wealth: trillions upon trillions of marine organisms which lived and died in time immemorial are today harvested in the mountainous valleys and watery depths of the Gulf by the billions of barrels. Though these commodities are generally thought of as resources of only recent geopolitical import, from the earliest days of civilisation the Sumerians and Babylonians made use of the thick black bitumen that seeped out of the ground to build their boats and houses.

With such hostile topography, civilisation upon the Persian plateau has always formed a ring shape. The bleak wastes of the deserts have for millennia remained largely empty, while the great civilisations of Iran concentrated their cities and monuments in the mountain valleys that encircle the void at their centre. The ancient cities of Elam arose in the lowlands of Khuzestan; the Median kingdom was centred on the western edge of the Alborz; both the Persians and Sassanians originated from the valleys of Persis, at the southeastern edge of the Zagros; while the Parthians first erupted out of the Kopet-Dag highlands.

The ring of mountains and seas that enclose the plateau has long acted as both strength and weakness for the peoples that have found themselves encircled within them. Such challenging geographical barriers have enabled a degree of security over the centuries (though as we shall see, plenty of invading armies have managed to thread their way through the mountain passes) and have played a vital role in maintaining the sense of a distinct Iranian identity over the course of millennia as empires rose and fell about them. The trouble with mountains though, is they make for hard living; where wide, flat plains enable rich agriculture and easy trade access (e.g. Mesopotamia, Nile Valley), narrow mountain passes and poorly connected valleys breed insularity and tribalism, and most were long suitable only for a poor pastoralist lifestyle. Indeed, there is a reason all the great Persian dynasties made sure to conquer the fertile lowlands of Mesopotamia once they had consolidated power over the plateau.

At the same time, however, those same narrow mountain passes acted as great funnels of trade. With the arteries of commerce so narrowly concentrated, an opportunity presents itself to whomsoever can control them. Throughout history, one need not to have conquered the entirety of the plateau to dominate it; instead one needed only to be able to tax the key mountain gateways. This fact was further compounded by Iran’s location at the centre of Eurasia, marking as it does the halfway point between the great civilisations of the East — China, India — and those of the West — Mesopotamia, Egypt, Europe. The Parthian Empire benefited greatly from the trade between Han Dynasty China and the Roman Empire, as did the Abbasid Caliphate between the Tang and Byzantines, and the Mongol-ruled Ilkhanate between mediaeval Europe and the Yuan.

Indeed, Iran still benefits today from its strategic position. The plateau marks the crossways between the Arab, Turkish, Russian, and Indian spheres of influence. And that’s without mentioning its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas must pass. By closing the strait in recent days, the Islamic Republic has in affect taken hostage the energy supplies of both Europe and Asia. Beware those who hold the plateau.

II. THE HORSE, THE WHEEL, THE MOTHER OF TONGUES

We turn now to the second great driver of history: technology.

The eighty-six Iranic languages still extant today are a sub-grouping of the more than three hundred Indo-Iranic languages which are themselves the largest branch of the Indo-European language family — a collection of tongues spoken today by 3.2 billion people, some 46% of all people on Earth. One can plot these languages on a chart that resembles an ancestral tree, and like an ancestral tree, one can trace a language back through its ancestral line. The branches of this linguistic tree sweep backwards from the Indian sub-continent, from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, from the Iranian plateau, from the Central Asian steppe, all the way back to its trunk upon the banks of the lower Dnieper River, in what is now Ukraine.

Around 5000 years ago, a group of people whom archaeologists call the Yamnaya abandoned their farms and their plows upon those black and fertile soils and took instead to the open grassland of the great Eurasian Steppe. They drove before them great herds of sheep, goats, and cattle and pulled behind them wooden wagons that rolled on solid-disc wheels. The Yamnaya themselves were not the inventors of the wheel; instead the most likely candidate (though it’s still intensely disputed) was the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture that preceded them in the lands of Western Ukraine. But the Yamnaya used the technology to expand their horizons in a way thitherto unseen in human history.

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the first in a series of posts on the history and culture of Iran, one of the world’s great civilisational centres.

We in the West are the intellectual progeny of two intertwined traditions — classical antiquity and Christianity — and our modern secular humanist values are the product of those traditions. Like fish in a tank, we struggle to see the waters in which we swim and find it difficult to identify this line of descent, taking instead our modern values as entirely self-evident and emerging spontaneously. As such, we are often unable to understand that other traditions/civilisations do not take the same values for granted, coming as they do from different lines of philosophical heritage.

To truly comprehend another civilisation, therefore, one must know its philosophy, its history, its culture; only then can you attempt to understand how they make sense of themselves, their place in the world, and what they make of us.

In light of recent events, it’s clear we could all benefit from a deeper understanding of Iran.

East of the Holy Land, east of Mesopotamia, east of Sumer, the land begins to rise. It rises out of the river plains and the silted lowlands of the Tigris and climbs, ridge upon ridge, through the jagged folds of the Zagros Mountains until it breaks upon a vast tableland a thousand metres above the sea. This is the Iranian plateau. It stretches for twelve hundred miles from west to east, walled in by four mountain ranges and two seas. In its interior there is almost nothing. Two great deserts of salt and sand — the Dasht-e Kavīr and the Dasht-e Lūt — yawn empty and bescorched. Indeed, in the summer months the Lūt is the hottest place on earth. The wind that crosses it carries no moisture; it strips the rock bare and scours the sand into yardangs that resemble the fallen bones of some long dead beast.

With such forbidding geography, one would be forgiven for thinking the lands of the plateau would be boundless and bare. Yet, people have lived here for a very long time.

Some of the first tribes of Homo Sapiens to have left Africa made their home in these highlands. It’s thought that in the remote valleys of the Zagros Mountains some of our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals. Later, soon after the first farmers began planting wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent to the west, hillsmen in those same valleys domesticated the humble pea and lentil. Not long afterwards they tamed the goat too. And as the lands of Sumer gave birth to the earliest urban culture known to history, the Elamites began forging a culture of their own in the lowlands of Khuzestan, raising great cities at Anshan and Susa. From there they warred with the great Akkadian Empire, which was eventually finished once and for all by Gutian nomads who raided the silted plains of the Tigris and Euphrates from their strongholds upon the plateau. But all this was merely preamble compared to the splendour of what came after.

Some forty centuries ago, a new people began to emerge out of the Central Asian steppe. They called themselves Ārya, the noble ones, and they came from the north: out of the grasslands beyond the Oxus, down through the passes of Khorasan, into the highlands with their horses and their war chariots and their god of the sky. This first wave split in two: one group passed straight over the Iranian plateau and into the Levant, where they founded the Mitanni kingdom; the second meanwhile threaded their way through the labyrinthine passes of the Hindu Kush and onto the Gangetic basin, where they began the Vedic Age of India.

But some of the Ārya stayed upon the steppe. We have not yet the data to trace their exact transformation but after another thousand years of haunting the plains their descendants emerged from the great grasslands as something distinct to their forebears: they had become the Iranians. These peoples would dominate the steppe for two and half millennia, with the Scythians riding their horses as far west as the Greek Aegean, while the Sogdians dragged their caravans from the Caspian Sea to the courts of imperial China. But it was the small group who headed south to settle the highlands of the land that in time would come to bear their name that we most associate with the tribe.

Around the same time as the Iranians first entered Iran, a man among them climbed into the mountains at the far northeastern edge of the plateau. Upon those lofty peaks he sat in silence. His name, or the name that came down to us, was Zarathustra Spitama. What he saw or heard up there we can only guess at through the hymns attributed to his hand — the Gathas, among the oldest religious texts on earth — but what he brought back down from the mountain would go on to shape the faith of far more than just Zoroastrianism, the religion he founded. He declared that the universe was a battleground between Truth and the Lie, between a god of light and wisdom, Ahura Mazda, and a spirit of darkness and destruction, Angra Mainyu. He declared that human beings must choose between light and dark. He declared that the dead would be judged, that the righteous would be raised, that a saviour would come at the end of days to purify the world in fire. Heaven, hell, judgment, resurrection, apocalypse — these concepts did not originate in Jerusalem. They were born up there, upon the plateau.

As the Iranians settled the valleys and passes of Iran, they mixed and intermarried with those they found there. They absorbed the beliefs and customs and genes of those they had overrun, and out of this mixing there emerged, slowly, over centuries, something new. Two tribes coalesced above the others: the Medes in the northwest; the Persians in the south. And it was the Persians, under a tribal chief named Cyrus, who in the sixth century BC exploded out of the highlands and built the largest empire the world had ever seen, stretching from the Bosphorus to the Indus. The columns of Persepolis were raised up; the Royal Road was cut into the earth for seventeen hundred miles; twenty-three nations sent tribute to the King of Kings.

That empire eventually fell to Alexander, who burned Persepolis in a drunken rage. But from its ashes the Parthians rebuilt an Iranian kingdom, and after them the Sassanids rebuilt it again. They reformed Zoroastrianism and fought Rome to a standstill for four hundred years. Then the Arabs came with a new god and a new book and broke the Sassanids at al-Qadisiyyah in 636 AD, and that should have been the end of it. But it was not.

The Persians, conquered, did what the Persians have always done. They swallowed their conqueror whole. Within a century they were running the Arab empire — its bureaucracy, its scholarship, its poetry, its philosophy. The greatest scientists and physicians and mathematicians of the Islamic Golden Age were, overwhelmingly, Persian. The language of high culture from Constantinople to Delhi was Persian. When the Turks conquered Iran the Turks too were persianised. When the Mongols conquered Iran and annihilated its cities and slaughtered its people in numbers untold, the Mongols too, within a generation, became Persian — commissioning miniature paintings and reciting verses from the Shahnameh, the great national epic of the Iranian people. And when the Safavids seized power in 1501 and forcibly converted the country to Shia Islam — an act of religious revolution as radical as anything in the Christian Reformation — they did not sever the link to Persia’s deep past. Instead, they fused it with something new, and forged from the union the strange, proud, grieving, defiant thing that is modern Iran.

Persia is a civilisation that does not die. It has been conquered, sacked, burned, occupied, partitioned, humiliated; it has endured foreign religions, foreign alphabets, foreign armies; it has watched its cities reduced to rubble and its libraries fed to the flames. But after each defeat she rises once more. Despite all the ructions this land has endured, modern Iranians still share 65% of their ancestry with the goatherders who stalked the valleys of the Zagros nine thousand years ago. The plateau abides.

In the Western imagination, this place calls to mind two opposing visions.

There is Persia: great enemy of the Greeks, the decadent bastion of Orientalist fantasy, of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, of turquoise domes and rose gardens and beautiful carpets. The Persia of Darius and Xerxes, of Hafez and Rumi. The Persia that gave us the word ‘paradise’. This Persia is rich, lovely, distant, and, in our minds, long dead.

And then there is Iran: black-robed, theocratic, hostage-taking Iran. The Iran of beetle-browed Ayatollahs, of ‘Death to America’, of women beaten to death in the street for showing their hair, of a nuclear programme that keeps neocons up at night, of thirty thousand protestors murdered in a single month. This Iran is the Iran upon which the US and Israel say they rain down their missiles.

But the truth is not so dichotic. Iran is Persia and Persia is Iran. One cannot understand one without the other. The turquoise domes stand still (American missiles not withstanding). Ordinary Iranians still read Hafez. The Eram Garden of Shiraz still blooms. And the forces that shaped the modern Iranian state — the geography, the history, the theology, the memory of foreign interference — did not arise spontaneously in 1979. They are the product of four millennia of civilisation layered on top of itself, each stratum bleeding into the next.

What makes the Iranians the Iranians? How did a scattering of steppe nomads become the progenitors of one of the world’s great civilisations? How did a sandy plateau of desert and mountain produce Zarathustra, Cyrus, Attar, Rumi, and Ruhollah Khomeini? As we watch hellfire rain down upon that ancient and storied landscape, we owe it to civilisational posterity to at least attempt an answer to these questions.

Over the next few weeks, we will attempt to see the world as it looks from the plateau. We will begin with the land and the peoples who first settled it. We will examine the religious and literary ideas that Iran loosed upon the world — ideas whose influence most Westerners feel without knowing their origin. We will follow the cycle of empire: Medes, Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanid, each one rising from the ashes of its predecessor. We will watch the Arabs, the Turks, and the Mongols pour through the mountains and be consumed, one by one, by the civilisation they thought they had conquered. We will witness the Safavid revolution that made Iran Shia, and follow the long unravelling of the modern era — the oil, the coups, the revolution, the wars — to the broken regime that by its fingernails still bloodily clings to power, sending forth drone swarms from behind its mountains to set fire to the world.

The goal is not to retell Iran’s entire history. It is instead an attempt to map the mind of a civilisation far older than our own, to understand how it sees itself and its place in the world, and how it sees us. As you read these very words bombs rain down from the sky upon an antique land. No one can say for certain what will come after this war is over. But if we are to understand how we came to this juncture, if we are to understand what might come next, we must understand what came before.

If you’d like to follow this series, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll receive:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• A 16th-century woodcut of Edinburgh for your wall (for annual subscriptions only!)

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

This is the fifth and final part of a series on Uruk, the world’s first Great City. You can read part I here, part II here, part III here, and part IV here.

Beginning somewhere around 2200 BC, global climatic changes precipitated long periods of drought in several locations around the world. It’s wondered if this drought might have initiated the collapse of the Liangzhu culture in China, the Indus Valley civilisation of India, and Egypt’s Old Kingdom, which all went into decline soon afterwards. It certainly seems to have affected the Akkadian Empire.

For about a century, about 50% less rain fell upon the Taurus Mountains, meaning the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were, for a time, no longer the great torrents they had once been. With less water and silt binding the topsoil together, prolonged dust storms rampaged across the once-fertile plains every winter. The ecology began to break down, crop yields plummeted, towns were abandoned. The famine was most acute in the north, so there was a great migration of people southwards into the lowlands of Sumer. Once again, a climate crisis precipitated a flood of refugees heading towards Uruk.

To make matters worse, the famine also affected the hill tribes of the Zagros Mountains. Here, a fierce nomadic people known as the Gutians had long tended their flocks amid the mountain passes. But they had another way of feeding themselves too, one they had practiced for centuries: raiding the rich lands of Mesopotamia. As the famine got worse, the Gutians increased their raids. It wasn’t long before the Akkadian Empire, already on its knees, was overrun. The Gutians stormed Akkad, Sargon’s great city, and destroyed it so utterly that its ruins have never been found. The Curse of Akkad blames the destruction on Naram-Sin’s crimes; the gods’ wrath at the king who declared himself divine had laid to waste all he built.1

For a time, the Gutians set themselves up as the new rulers of Mesopotamia. An illiterate people, they cared little for matters of the state, neglecting and even deliberately destroying key infrastructure, like Sargon’s roads, irrigation canals, and great public buildings. Instead they ran their empire much like a mafia organisation, demanding tribute from the cities of Mesopotamia at the point of a sword. The Gutians were contemptuous of both their Sumerian and Akkadian subjects, brutalising them at every opportunity. We can only imagine what it was like to live in Uruk during this difficult period, when the markets were short of bread, prices were soaring, and an influx of people fleeing Gutian oppression put ever more pressure on the fields about the city. It is no wonder that Uruk erupted into open rebellion.

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the fourth part of a series on Uruk, the world’s first Great City. You can read part I here, part II here, and part III here.

While Uruk was reigning supreme as the dominant power in Sumer between the years 3500-3000 BC, other settlements did not sit idle. Slowly but surely, a constellation of other Sumerian cities grew large enough to challenge Uruk’s dominance. First to rise was a city called Kish, which was located about 150 kilometres, or 93 miles, further north, not far from where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers seem to pinch closer together. One Sumerian poem tells the story of Kish’s most famous king, a warrior named Aga. He was said to have marched a great army southwards, sweeping towards Uruk. He laid siege to the famous city, putting its famed walls to the test. But Aga failed to reckon with one thing: Uruk’s king, the heroic Gilgamesh, did not lose battles. Gilgamesh broke Kish’s armies and restored Uruk’s dominance over the lands and cities of Sumer.

But Ur would prove a different sort of challenger. This city lay to Uruk’s southeast, at the point where the Euphrates River used to meet the Persian Gulf, when the sea levels were higher than they are today. Ur’s location meant it emerged as the great seaport of Sumer, with ships laden with goods from Arabia, southern Iran, and even as far away as India, coming to make berth in its harbour. As we have seen, Sumer had an abundance of clay and farmed food, but it was rich in few other natural resources. The entire region, including Uruk, needed to import metals, stone, and wood from elsewhere.

Just as the Israelite kings described in the Bible would centuries later, Sumerians sourced their cedarwood from Lebanon and their spices from Arabia. From Afghanistan they got their tin and lapis lazuli, from India their gold, from the Taurus Mountains of Turkey their silver, and from Cyprus they procured their copper. All these goods passed through Ur’s port, and the commerce made the city rich. Presumably, it was this money that helped fund the defeat of Uruk in battle somewhere around the year 2550 BC.

We don’t know any details of this battle, not where it was, nor most of the combatants. All we know is the name of Ur’s leader, Mesannepada,  and its outcome. Ur took the kingship and eclipsed Uruk as the regional heavyweight. Perhaps it was in honour of this great victory that the people of Ur crafted what is perhaps the most beautiful object in all Sumerian culture.

The Standard of Ur is a hollow box made of wood, upon which is inlaid a dazzling mosaic of white seashells, red limestone, and blue lapis lazuli. On one side of the standard are rich images of the Urians at war, brandishing spears and daggers, riding donkey-pulled wagons and leering at badly injured prisoners, perhaps the vanquished soldiers of Uruk. On the reverse side, the imagery is more peaceful, with some Urians enjoying the music of a lyre and drinking wine, while other figures till the fields and shepherd flocks of sheep. It’s not quite known what this object was made for, but it has been suggested the twin sides depicting peace and war might reflect the duties of kingship. Thousands of other objects of immense value, like richly decorated gold daggers, diadems, and statuettes, have been recovered from Ur’s Royal Cemetery, showing the vast wealth the city’s elites were able to accrue. But treasure can do only so much. Soon, Ur would be eclipsed by another.

The city of Lagash lay to the north of Ur and to the east of Uruk, on the banks of the River Tigris. Like Ur, Lagash was an entrepôt of trade, but in this case the city specialised in one particular commodity: slaves. As has probably become clear, the lands of Sumer during the third millennium BC were an exceptionally violent place to be. Burgeoning city states made war on one another and terrorised the rural hinterlands that lay between them, fighting over the most fertile stretches of land.1 For a city like Lagash, war and banditry meant a regular supply of slaves, upon whose bodies it built its power.

About a century after Ur had defeated Uruk in battle, the city of Lagash had gone to war with a smaller neighbour-city called Umma. Lagash’s ruler, a man named Eannatum, defeated the army of Umma, and laid waste to the city. One Sumerian tablet, known as the Stele of Vultures, describes the victors diverting the water away from vanquished Umma, setting fire to its temples, and putting its soldiers to the sword. The victory seemed to give Eannatum a taste for battle, for he soon conquered vast swathes of Sumer, forging what is arguably the first multi-city empire in recorded history. He even ventured into the eastern lands of Elam, in modern Iran, where he laid waste to the great city of Susa, a city which would in later centuries become the capital of the Persian Empire. It’s not known if Eannatum conquered Uruk militarily, there’s certainly been no evidence discovered to indicate so, but it seems the first great city of Sumer did submit in some form or another, probably paying tribute to Lagash. 

Eannatum appears to have ruled his bloodied empire much in the same way he conquered it: with an iron fist. And as happens so often through history, an iron fist tends to sow with its violence the seeds of rebellion. The city of Umma, so ruthlessly crushed by Eannatum, would have its revenge. Cities all over Sumer soon began to rise up in revolt at the oppressive rule, and Lagash’s empire began to totter. Umma’s ruler, a man called Lugalzagesi, seized this chance for vengeance. His armies quickly conquered a swathe of smaller cities loyal to Lagash. Then they took Kish, and then the great city of Ur, and then even the mother-city herself, Uruk. Then and only then, when Lugalzagesi had made himself the supreme ruler of Sumer, did he turn on his most bitter enemy. His forces stormed Lagash’s walls and laid the city to ruin. Its buildings were levelled and thousands of its inhabitants murdered. Even by the standards of Sumerian warfare, the destruction wrought upon that city was considered shocking at the time. Indeed, scribes recorded that the desecration of Lagash’s temples would soon bring the wrath of gods upon the heads of those responsible.

For now though, Lugalzagesi was the most powerful man in the entire Near East. And for his newly conquered empire, which now encompassed all of Sumer, he would need a fitting capital. Only one city would do: the city of Uruk. It speaks to Uruk’s storied history as the greatest city in Sumer, in the world, in fact, that the conqueror from Umma would choose it to be the focal point of his empire. But, though Lugalzagesi ruled from the city, he didn’t leave much of a mark upon it. Apart from a few scattered inscriptions, he left no identifiable buildings, no monuments in the fabric of the city. The Urukians weren’t to know it, but Lugalzagesi’s brief, war-struck reign, was to be the last time their city enjoyed such preeminence over all the lands of Sumer. It would never again reach these heights.

Lugalzegesi spent much of his twenty-four years as King of Uruk, King of Kish, King of the Land, as his titles read, out on campaign, fighting skirmishes with rebel cities and conquering new swathes of territory. But the man from Umma made the same mistake as the kings of Lagash. Ever greedy for new lands, he overextended himself, and stretched his armies too thin. Sumer was ripe for the taking. But who would take it?

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and learn more about the world, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll get:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• A 16th-century woodcut of Edinburgh for your wall (for annual subscriptions only!)

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the third part of a series on Uruk, the world’s first Great City. You can read part I here, and part II here.

By the middle of the fifth millennium BC, Eridu, Uruk, and other small towns like them were springing up across Sumer. But within a thousand years, Uruk had become something qualitatively different to all the rest: a megacity, home to tens of thousands of residents and covering an area as much as ten times greater than its nearest peer. So how did Uruk make the leap from provincial town to bustling metropolis? How was Uruk able to take the step that no other settlement in the history of humankind had so far been able to?

The answer once more lies with geography. The high temperatures of the Holocene Climatic Optimum had begun to tumble. A colder world meant more water was locked up in the frozen poles, and sea levels dropped. The bountiful marshland of the Persian Gulf began to recede, and the ground was given back to the desert once more. This was of course a problem for the local people. By this time, southern Mesopotamia had become the most densely populated region on Earth, supported by the array of animal and plant life found among the wetland, but hemmed in on either side by desert and mountain. As their hunting and fishing grounds receded, and their food sources dwindled, many people began to migrate northwards. As people have done throughout history ever since, when faced with hardship in the rural hinterlands, the desperate and hungry flocked to the towns. In the face of a changing climate, the burgeoning urban centres must have seemed a refuge — evidence of Man’s triumph over nature. Uruk was uniquely placed to benefit from this movement of people.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and learn more about the world, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll get:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• A 16th-century woodcut of Edinburgh for your wall (for annual subscriptions only!)

Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

This is the second part of a series on Uruk, the world’s first Great City. You can read part I here.

In the foothills of the Taurus Mountains, in what is now southern Turkey, lie the ruins of an unusual archaeological site. Göbleki Tepe, as it is known, meaning ‘Pot-bellied Hill’, is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site, famous for its rings of giant T-shaped megaliths, the oldest ever discovered. These pillars weigh as much as 50 tonnes each and are decorated in carvings of people and wild animals, like foxes, snakes, and leopards, suggesting that, like Stonehenge in Britain, these megaliths were of ritual significance. They are 11,000 years old.

At first, the archaeologists excavating the site presumed people couldn’t have lived at Göbleki Tepe for lack of nearby water, believing instead that nomadic hunter-gatherers could only have built the complex for religious purposes. If true, this claim would upend our understanding of ancient history – perhaps civilisation, with its sophisticated building, its complex religion, its ability to corral large numbers of people to work together, came before agriculture, and not the other way around, as had been long believed.

More recent discoveries have tempered this paradigm shift slightly. Sophisticated water capture systems connected to underground cisterns show that, actually, the builders of Göbleki Tepe had solved the local water problem. Archaeologists have also uncovered the unmistakable signs of dwellings. People did live here. But were they hunter-gatherers? Well, the answer is probably neither a simple yes or no. They undoubtedly hunted many of the prey animals they carved onto their megaliths – boars, wildfowl, cranes. But there are signs of grain processing too: rudimentary grindstones, hearths, and huge limestone vessels that may have been used to store grain, have all been uncovered at Göbleki Tepe. Some of the troughs have shown trace signs of fermentation, suggesting perhaps the brewing of beer. It’s worth saying that at this point that only a small portion of the site has been fully excavated, so there’s still so much we don’t know. However, it appears at this stage that Göbleki Tepe, and a few other nearby sites, are what we might call ‘transition settlements’ – built by people that were somewhere between hunter-gatherers and a farming community. They were likely occupied only part of the year. Perhaps their builders spent the more bountiful seasons out among the hills hunting their game, living on the move, retreating back to the confines of their houses and megaliths only in the leaner months, when they had to resort to rudimentary agriculture, and placating the gods, to feed themselves.

A few millennia after the abandoned Göbleki Tepe was mysteriously covered over with earth, the town of Çatalhöyük [pronounced Chatal-Huyuk] a few hundred miles to its west was booming. Here, a collection of square mud-brick houses were built right up against one another into a structure resembling a cubist honeycomb. Composed entirely of houses, with no public or communal spaces, the town had no streets. Instead, its inhabitants, who may have numbered as many as 8000, reached their homes via ladders and beams stretched across the town’s roofs. The interior of these dwellings were often decorated with painted walls and carved bull heads, while signs of long distance trade are evidenced by their possession of obsidian tools, a material not found nearby. In a practice that would later be emulated elsewhere in the towns and villages of the Near East, the Çatalhöyükians would bury their dead beneath the floors of their homes, suggesting some form of ancestor worship.

Both Göbleki Tepe and Çatalhöyük can be seen as the first tentative steps on the road to full urbanisation. Indeed, elsewhere, small villages and towns were appearing all over the Fertile Crescent, made possible by the calorific surplus provided by agriculture. Trade was conducted between these settlements. Some, like Tell Brak in Syria, even began to blossom into minor urban centres. As the region began to densify, it would be only a matter of time before one would make the leap and become the world’s first metropolis. But to do so, it would need a helping hand from geography.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and learn more about the world, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll get:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• A 16th-century woodcut of Edinburgh for your wall (for annual subscriptions only!)

• Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

This week, in a series of posts, we’ll be telling the story of Uruk, the world’s first Great City.

The oldest surviving work of narrative literature in history, the three-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, tells the story of a wild man named Enkidu. With strength “as mighty as a rock from the sky”, Enkidu lives upon the steppe with the “beasts of the wild”. He runs over the hills with the herds, completely at one with nature. That is, until he comes across the beautiful woman Shamat, bathing naked by the watering hole. So entranced is he by his first sight of a woman, Enkidu makes love to her for “six days and seven nights”. His sexual appetite finally sated, the wild man tries to return to his previous life, but finds the animals no longer respond to his calls. Confused, he returns to the arms of Shamat, who entreats him to return with her to the city of Uruk. She tells him of its sacred temples, great squares, and crowds of people. There your godlike potential will be turned into real power, she tells him. Then she feeds him bread and ale and he becomes merry. His hairy body shaved, skin anointed in oils, dressed in expensive clothing, Enkidu departs with her for Uruk. Upon reaching its walls, the wild man does battle with the city’s king, the two-thirds god, one-third human, Gilgamesh. Enkidu is defeated, but the two become fast friends and go on many adventures together. In short, Enkidu is tamed. The wild man has been civilised by the city.

Many themes permeate the Epic of Gilgamesh: the impermanence of life; the universality of grief; the human need for meaning. But the poem can be read in another way too: as an extended meditation on the city, which at the time of the epic’s writing was still a novel invention. Enkidu represents what the Greeks called the barbarian wild, while Shamat embodies the allure of the polis, the city, civilisation itself. It is no coincidence that the first great work of literature in history is set in Uruk, the mother of cities, birthplace of writing; the urban centre that provided the model for all future cities.

If you, like Enkidu, had approached Uruk during its heyday, some 5000 years ago, you would have been met by a dazzling sight. Upon the parched plains of southern Mesopotamia – a land once known as Sumer – a gleaming city would have been visible rising from the flats at some 8 miles distant, like a ghostly apparition in the desert. Winking on the horizon would have been the shining white plaster adorning two monstrous ziggurats – temples dedicated to Inanna, goddess of love and war, and Anu, god of the sky. As you slowly made your way towards the metropolis, you would have passed through farms growing barley and wheat, irrigated by a complex tangle of canals dug at great human cost. Along the road towards the city, you would have been accompanied by rudimentary sled vehicles, heaped with goods and pulled by oxen and donkeys. Your way may have been blocked by shepherds driving before them flocks of sheep for the slaughter, perhaps an offering for the gods at the temple. Looming above you would have been the mighty city walls – said to have been built by King Gilgamesh himself – standing well over 20 feet tall, some 6 miles in circumference. Joining a thronging crowd of traders passing through one of the city gates, you would have entered a bustling metropolis, home to as many as 80,000 people. Inside, you’d have passed through a bountiful garden of date palms and fruit trees before entering the city proper. Then, a labyrinthine network of narrow, winding streets connected three square miles of dense urban centre. Mudbrick and limestone houses with flat roofs and cone-mosaic ornamentation were packed in close together, their lack of windows and shadowed alleyways designed to keep out the worst of the blazing Mesopotamian sun. Richer dwellings may have had their own courtyards but otherwise open space was at a premium, found only in the large public squares near the temples. Enormous granaries stored the city’s grain, industrial districts produced kiln-fired pottery and metal tools en masse. Markets traded fruits, bread, wine, jewellery, slaves, even animals like dogs, monkeys, and ibex. The city’s coffers were stuffed with gold, silver, pearls, copper, tin, and lapis lazuli. Many of these goods were brought by the boats docked at Uruk’s harbour on the Euphrates. The river’s freshwater was ushered deep into the city by canals, while underground clay pipes disgorged waste outside the walls. The city’s inhabitants wore ornamented, ankle-length skirts known as kaunakes. On their downtime they would have drunk beer from a communal jar through straws, perhaps telling each other stories or enjoying the music of tigi drums, flutes, and the zam-zam.

Uruk was, in short, a thriving metropolis. But while such cities are familiar to us today, Uruk would have been a stupefying sight to most people of the time. The overwhelming majority of the world’s population would still have lived in small communities, scattered villages where everyone knew one another, where clan and family were the social glue that bound society together. Uruk, on the other hand, with its monumental architecture, its tens of thousands of residents, its relentless economy, was something totally novel.

It’s hard to overstate what changed with Uruk. Indeed, we could go so far as to divide human history into two distinct periods. Before Uruk, and after it. As the world’s first great metropolis, the city changed the course of human history forever.

To understand the scale of this stepchange, we must return to the icy shores of the Last Ice Age, and the very beginning of the human story of urbanisation.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and learn more about the world, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll get:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• A 16th-century woodcut of Edinburgh for your wall (for annual subscriptions only!)

This week, in a series of three posts, we’ll be telling the story of Uruk, the world’s first Great City. The next shall follow in a few days.

Subscribe now

My father was a preacher. I was born in Kentucky, but when I was two years old, my family moved to a quiet, new suburb of Denver, in Colorado. At the time, our county was one of the fastest-growing places in the United States. It still seemed so young: I remember riding my bicycle to the edge of our subdivision, at which point the houses and fences would stop and give way immediately to long, rolling fields of dry yellow-green grass. In the background would be the Rocky Mountains — in the summer, since we didn’t have the money to go skiing in the resorts, we’d drive into the mountains, staying in the YMCA camp at Estes Park, hiking National Park trails. Once, we drove down to New Mexico, to Ghost Ranch, and saw the old ancestral cliff dwellings of the Pueblos not far from there. I remember driving to the Great Sand Dunes, and to Hot Sulphur Springs, and all the way up Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuously-paved highway on the continent. At the uppermost stopping place, the air was so thin you grew winded every twenty feet you walked. It was like this, many, many summers: the landscape, huge and humbling, making clear just how small I was in the face of it, making clear that the Spirit which was in the world — which seemed so obvious in the purple sunsets, or in the waving tops of the pine trees; in the enormous valleys between peaks of mountains whose vertiginous roads we wound our little van down, listening to great romantic pieces of classical music by Copland, Dvořák, Holst, Beethoven — was immense, incomprehensible. But that there was a Spirit at work in it all, I had little doubt.

After eight or nine years, my family moved again to a small town called Rolla, in Missouri, at the edge of the Mark Twain National Forest. Nature here was plainer, wetter. The chiggers and ticks made the woods feel much less hospitable, though it didn’t stop us from roaming when we could. The most beautiful parts of Missouri are down along the rivers, places where you might take a raft and drift along for hours — I’ve still never experienced anything like the stretched-out sense of time that settles on those low Missouri rivers. Later, I would stand at the site of the Cahokia Mounds, across the Mississippi from my adopted city, St. Louis, where a thousand years ago a great world civilization flourished. On that site stood a city, which the archaeologists said was larger than London, at the time. I felt the presence of the Spirit there, too — or really, what had once been a Spirit, but was now gone, fled from that place with the people who made it, disappearing long before any European eyes ever set sight on it.

In that small town, I eventually disavowed any talk of spirits. A pompous little thirteen-year-old atheist, I’d walked up to my parents one day, and declared I’d had enough of this God business, and would no longer go to services (though they made me go anyway). A few years before, I’d given the confirmation class sermon, in front of the whole congregation at the First Presbyterian Church. I was a good speaker and performer, I’d even made it to the state championship of the Optimist Club Oratorical Contest in the seventh grade, and been in the local repertory theater’s production of The Music Man. I had sung and played various instruments in front of people since I was five years old. I was a good preacher’s kid, I had talent, I could put on a show — but that was all it was to me. Real art and true music were beautiful and good consolations for the loss of the Spirit: but church was a pageant — a dull, White, inoffensive, Protestant pageant. There was beautiful old music, but very little art, little opulence and little beauty, just lots of green and purple carpets and stoles, and oak panels, in a sanctuary with a brown wooden ceiling like Noah’s Ark turned upside-down. And there was my own father on the stage every Sunday morning, talking about God and mercy and all-encompassing love — things I’d never seen or felt within a church, or in any crowd of people of any kind.

“Wherever two or three are gathered in my name…” I would hear those words read from the Gospel of Matthew, and in between thoughts of sex (I spent nearly all my time in church thinking about sex), I would think, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. Get more than one person involved in this fragile game, and there would no longer be any room for the Spirit. The Spirit wasn’t going to be found in any congregation, in any building, in the midst of any collective — the Spirit was out there. It was in the wilderness. Just like Jesus Christ, and Mohammed, and Zoroaster, and all the rest of those religious wildmen knew: it was in the landscape, rebounding from proper human humility before Nature. It was back in the mountains in Colorado: moving in the trees, quiet, an energy animating and undulating in everything. Gather two or three people together, and the noise would only drown out the Spirit, because the Spirit was something you encountered in silence, as a bare-naked, solitary soul, in the face of all the complexities of the natural world — or else not at all. If these earnest Midwest Christians had had any real religious feeling whatsoever, I thought, they would’ve torn the walls of their church down right there and then, and gone off to drift down rivers, to pray at the edges of burial mounds, and climb to the tops of the Rocky Mountains. A real congregation would build its roofless sanctuary out of pine trees and rocks — then they might stand a chance of hearing the noiseless sound of God, moving across the face of the landscape.

Of course, none of this was really understood by me, at that time. Understanding came later, as it does. I was lucky enough years later to travel to Europe, performing in cathedrals across Austria and Hungary, later in France. Twice I went to Paris, and each time we spent the evening in Montmarte, and I hiked the steps up to the Sacre-Coeur. As I sat down inside the Basilica, I thought about the religion whose two-thousand years of bloodiness and beauty had resulted in the birth of me. The first time I did this, I could only think of the bloodiness. How many poor, desperate souls have knelt here just like this, convinced by this church of their guilt, of things like Hell and Original Sin? Yet the second time, two years later, I found myself thinking only of the beauty. How many poor, desperate souls have knelt here just like this, and humbled themselves before the Spirit, and prayed for love and peace? In Chartres, my troupe played in the city’s famed Gothic cathedral, then sat for a Sunday Vespers. As the French Sister of the Chemin-Neuf (whose ecumenical monastery we were living in) sang out the liturgy, I couldn’t stop my tears. Who knew anything about Yahweh, Allah, Adonai, Elohim — God? Who cared? In this temple, with this music, staring at stones erected by generations of men and women to testify to it — there was some kind of Spirit. It was right, correct. It belonged here, this exalting structure belonged here, and the Spirit could pass for a while inside it: the high ceilings gave it room to come and go but never trapped it, never named it. The place had earned its right to its religion, and there could be no better argument than its extraordinary beauty.

These days, whenever I wander around Hampstead Heath (which is every day I can), I find it confirmed again and again: there is a right religion of a landscape. The old churches in London are like those in France, if a little less grand than the best Gothic: they’ve learned to live with the landscape, to testify to their religion in a delicate way. Even if I tend to feel more holiness in the damp green of the Heath, when I go into a beautiful old church I still sense balance. A delicate truce, between that European, Christian cathedral spire and the Spirit of the dirt outside it. I sense how, in time, with patience, these might intertwine into the same thing: how that idea of God might also contain, in an architectural expression, the religion of the landscape, too. And this land has been religioned so many times over: by ancient Briton magic; by Romanized Greek deities, making England the farthest, final place ever reached by the riot of Pan (in Latinized, abstract terms of course); by one Teuton tribe after another, subsequently de-Paganized; by Norsemen, who worshiped the old Sky God as their War God; and finally by Norman Europe, and that strangest of all secular religions, Chivalry.

When I walk in the Heath, and see the spires of churches, imagining the old plans of London — I sense that underneath its awkward modern surface, the old harmony between these visions still subsists, thrums, just barely audible. And it’s through that curious harmony, established by uncountable souls across time, that one peculiar old desert religion, dreamed up by a tribe caught between citadels of empires — Memphis, Babylon, Damascus, Alexandria, Rome — and transformed into a vast initiate mystery, a shattering global force, by the followers of a rabbi whom some people think was God Himself… that this strange religion could somehow, just barely, contain the history of the landscapes it had spread to, so long as time and patient human agency worked to balance it, like so.

Though I haven’t yet been to see the great mosques of Morocco, Egypt, or Turkey — though I haven’t yet been to Mecca, Medina, Baghdad, or Tehran — I assume I’d feel the same there: another desert religion, Ishmaelite children of the Prophet, somehow triumphing in their passage out of nomadism into the ruling of cities, nations, halves of continents. All while slowly, laboriously, working to harmonize their religion — born ineluctably from the desert; its quiet, stark wisdom that distrusts all images — with new landscapes, new territories. When I look at photographs of the most exquisite Mughal architecture, I think: how similar to a Gothic cathedral, or to the opulence of the Vatican. Where the once-pagan Europeans turned to Rome and Greece, the once-pagan Arabs turned to Persia to aid them in their civilizing project. And as Islam rolled eastwards into India, meeting with even older religions and cults of the Indus River Valley (religions so deeply embedded and obviously true, I get dizzy when I think about them), how it carried with it that exquisite, baroque beauty, that elaborate taste for ornament—building its gorgeous testaments to the power of Allah, in a landscape still patiently watched over by the Spirits of Brahma, Shiva, Atman, Kali.

Or how that wily child of the Hindus, Buddhism, spread north to Tibet, then to China, most ancient center of organized human life, and mixed with its Dao, or its peculiar civic religion of Confucianism. New breeds, new philosophies, new structures resulting there, too. Then, leaping over the bay into Japan, mixing with Bushido, Shinto. To see Chinese temples and Japanese castles — to observe a Japanese tea ceremony, which I still long to do — and in seeing them, witnessing the quiet progression of centuries, of the telling of the story of the Lotus Tree, how the thousand rings of a thousand immortal Bodhissatvas and Buddhas slowly came to rest, in shrines once meant for people’s favored gods of Luck, Money, and Ancestry. Again and again: a tense, exalted harmony.

How the Easter Island heads speak their own peculiar religion, telling us about the mana of the watery gods of the Polynesians — of all human adventurers surely the bravest. And how the Aborigines of Australia sing the country, in the oldest unbroken human tradition we know of. Or how the Totem Poles of the Pacific Northwest communicate the entire cosmos of a culture which determined for itself, over eons, just how to manifest its own particular communication with the place. The more I observe the richness of human religions and history, the more convinced I become that there is a right religion of a landscape, that it cannot be composed in a day, not even erected in a century, and it certainly cannot be superimposed on the land. It’s not all benevolent: much of it pours out from catastrophes of war and disease, as surely as it does from the simple experience of men and women, standing or staying put in a place, trying to join with its peculiar hum. But it’s true nonetheless.

There is a right religion of a landscape. I’m uniquely equipped to say this, because I’ve lived in its opposite, which is the United States of America. I knew it when I fell out of worship as an adolescent — that I felt no Spirit in the churches, in the towns, or in the cities I’d live in afterwards. Because the Spirit was simply not there. You cannot hear God through the concrete, or contain Him in an upside-down Ark. In America there was never time to harmonize that strange Middle Eastern faith with the landscape of the Ojibwe, the Cherokee, the Potawatomi, the Oneida, the Apache, the Sioux. Look at the cliff dwellings, at the mounds, at photographs and reconstructions of the cities of the old Iroquois Confederacy: there you’ll find the right religion of the landscape. Look at Machu Picchu, look at Teotihuacan — surely these are the architectures of their chosen place, made by the people who had grown and lived there long enough to understand it?

But not in American cities, and not in American churches. What goes on there is far removed from what goes on in the landscape — removed from wherever the Spirit might actually be heard, what I heard in the mountains, or saw brushing the tops of the pine trees. What goes on instead is quiet insanity. It’s implicit in the origin: a land of wild hope for the religiously pure — which is to say, the religiously insane. Puritanism, which had banished icons, theology, Rome, and left the lonely soul in agonizing personal relation to God, fleeing the resonances of the landscapes of the Old World which it couldn’t stand. It cast off, in search of a radical New, an Eden it imagined in its dreams: unblemished, untouched, untrammeled by anything older, or less pure. It brought my ancestors there, cold, shivering, insane. It arrived, and it spilled over the continent, and soon enough it rolled across to the Pacific, abolishing everything in its path.

And so that Christly desert religion, which in Europe just managed to grow into the landscape, was in America only superimposed roughly, on top of the land. Puritan Protestantism — a stark religion, without intercession — already drove its harshest adherents crazy (as all theophany must, eventually). But in an American continent of unbounded wilderness, second only to the Steppe, the Outback, the Amazon, or the Sahara in its obliterating, inhuman scale… in that continent, the naked zealous soul who speaks to God, and claims that God speaks back, simply cannot stay sane. This is not just poetry: what indigenous peoples understood — and still understand — is that there is a correct way to worship the Spirit in America. It took them thousands of years to learn it. To this day, in Native communities, Spirit worship is often amazingly well-harmonized with Christianity. Because they understand that the Spirit is as vast as the land, and as uncontainable. One has to make careful negotiations with it, propitiate it, in order to live with it, in order to perceive it correctly.

Only consider what happened as newer, weirder religions formed, in the established United States. Charismatic evangelical revival abolished the idea of the landscape entirely: it worshipped only Pentecostal Fire and words; it drowned in an abstract mobile purity — embodied by a Demigod Jesus, a righteous warrior who defends pious souls against everything outside the church, since everything outside the church is always some kind of demon. Mormonism, whose testament turns indigenous Americans into wandering Israelites, goes further and further west, until it finally drives off into the desert, haplessly trying to turn Christianity back towards its original landscape. Yet Joseph Smith’s attempt to create a kind of abortive Islam out of Christianity — codifying a new law from the angel-given holy writ of the final prophet — abolished everything in either older religion which made any natural sense. So the Mormon idea of the afterlife wields that totally American evangelical religion, which takes its dictation like a direct telegraph from God, and directs it towards a perverse but logical conclusion: the ascension of an Edenic elect to the status of Godhood themselves.

American belief goes even further into insanity the further west it goes, and even the wildest doctrines of Mormonism seem tamed compared to Scientology, the ultimate Californian religion (California being a place in the mind, not a landscape). It’s the nuttiest science fictional religion of a nutty, science fictional age: no pretense to existing within a land, a culture, a society — only a state of mind, at the furthest edge of the paranoid American fringe. An obscure series of texts and levels, an unholy fusion of 20th-century psychiatry, fudged physics, and charismatic charlantinism (and of course, being American, a successful corporate scam). Unlike theosophy or mystic fascism, unlike Occultism or the Golden Dawn (or any other Old World attempts to forget Christianity in the 20th century), Scientology isn’t even perverse enough to oppose itself to a reigning religion, or a landscape, or an oppressive society. It’s American insanity at its most recursive — dreaming of particles, past lives, time-hopping projections. It’s the end result of religion contorted away from all rhythm and sense of place, dissociated from the human body in nature. And by now we’ve added to these many newer religions: transhumanism, Hollywood celebrity, internet projection, manifestation, mindfulness (though really these are anti-religions, just like Scientology finally is). Because the United States of America is a place where the religious come to be driven insane by a landscape they cannot understand.

I’m not sure where this leaves me: weird American boy, transplanted to the boggy island most of his ancestors left behind centuries ago. I’m even less sure what religion means to me in general, let alone what Christianity means to me in particular. But I can always be sure of this much: I know what a landscape means to me. Sometimes I even sense what the Spirit of a landscape is — even if it can only be caught in glimpses, little mystical percepts in the cracks between history, life, or the changing face of nature. I may not be able to put into better words than this, the right religion of the landscape, but I feel certain it’s there, always to be slowly discovered and understood. It’s why I want to travel the world someday, to discover the religion of each new landscape I encounter, even if it means discovering all religions are the same — though I doubt it. I think back to the Rocky Mountains, to Colorado, the pine trees, the Spirit there. I think of my beloved Hampstead Heath, whose winter-stripped trees I can see from my window as I write this. To walk in a place is to set yourself within the memory of all the Spirits who have lived there: you hear them in the wind, whispering and arguing with each other sometimes, other times singing in tune.

If there’s a Spirit that created me, I suspect it can only be found poised within that balance, in that delicate truce between it, and the other religions of the landscape. I suspect it because I was born in a place devoted to the idea that such things must be ignored. When I look back to my homeland these days — and see the rest of the world doing the same, biting its nails — I think: don’t be so surprised by the insanity of my people, they don’t understand what’s driven them to where they are; they don’t understand why they’re still being driven insane. And then I think there’s only one real hope for peace for them — for us — in the end. I felt it once, in the breeze, in the pine trees, and the mountains: the religion of the landscape. Something which is almost impossible to see, if you’re standing in America.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and learn more about the world, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll get:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• A 16th-century woodcut of Edinburgh for your wall (for annual subscriptions only!)

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Last October, economics blogger published a post exploring the possibility of a networked state of modern cities. He used the example of Hong Kong, for so long the entrepôt between West and East, as the ideal of what such a city might look like.

Before its autonomy was significantly curtailed in recent years, Hong Kong enjoyed low taxes and a very favourable regulatory environment; it maintained a separate currency, enjoyed a common law legal system familiar to westerners, and had its own legislature.1 These features allowed it to serve for decades as the key economic conduit connecting the rich economies of the West with the developing economies of the East.

Indeed, much of the foreign capital that helped develop China into the manufacturing behemoth it is today flowed first through Hong Kong. Without the city, it would likely have taken China considerably longer to develop. With this in mind, Noah asks:

What if every country had a quasi-independent city like that?

Imagine a Hong Kong in India. A Hong Kong or two in Europe. A Hong Kong in Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, the United States, and so on. Each city would formally be a part of the host country, subject to the laws and authority of the central government there. But in practice, each city would be granted a degree of autonomy — its own laws, its own taxes, its own trade policy, its own immigration policy, its own currency and monetary policy. As with Hong Kong, the host country could decide how much mobility to allow between the entrêpot city and the mainland.

Noah imagines these cities forming a network, harmonising laws and regulations to enable frictionless trade across the world, with free movement of people, capital, and goods. In essence, the network would enjoy a Schengen-Area-like agreement between cities, rather than nations. This way, the more cosmopolitan types — the “citizens of nowhere” — could live their metropolitan, international lifestyles in these entrepôts, while the more nativist types can be comforted by the fact their nations as a whole are not subjected to the same degree of globalisation.

Noah imagines the obvious economic benefits of these cities would ensure their defence was guaranteed by their respective host nations. But if any country became greedy and moved to subsume the free city and its wealth back into its control (as China has begun to do with Hong Kong), then a sort of Nato Article 5 clause between the network of cities could act as a deterrent. In this way, the network of cities would act much as the Hanseatic League did in the Middle Ages, when various cities across Northern Europe formed a lucrative trade network that was powerful enough to wage and win wars against the kingdoms that threatened it.

This struck me as a very exciting, if somewhat politically unrealistic, idea. So I thought it would be fun to take it a step further, and draw up a list of candidate cities that I think would make the most sense for a global network of free ports.

The key criteria was location: which cities could most practically function as the gateway to their respective regions. Every major region and trade corridor should have at least one network city, and we should probably favour those cities which already function as significant ports or commercial hubs. However, in the richer economies, I thought it more interesting to focus on cities that are currently underperforming their geographic potential, rather than choosing some of the already well-connected global cities like New York. I also thought it would be better to exclude national capitals, as realistically they would be much harder to pry away from host countries.

Without further ado, here are the cities of the Neo-Hanseatic League.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and learn more about the world, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll get:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• A 16th-century woodcut of Edinburgh for your wall (for annual subscriptions only!)

Subscribe now

East Asia and Pacific

Hong Kong

It seems only right that we should begin with the city that inspired Noah’s post. Even diminished in recent years, it remains one of the world’s great deep-water ports and financial centres, sitting at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, the world’s largest manufacturing cluster. The goods produced in Guangzhou, Shenzen, and Dongguan flow right past the island every day.

Nagasaki, Japan

For centuries, the city acted as Japan’s only window to the outside world: during the Edo period (1603-1868), Japan sealed itself off from foreign contact, only permitting a handful of Dutch traders to land upon Nagasaki’s Dejima island. Being closer to Shanghai and Seoul than Tokyo, the city could play that role once again. Free to alter its own immigration and regulatory culture, the city could attract a host of foreign talent, investment, and trade, which might help somewhat alleviate Japan’s multi-decade economic stagnation and demographic decline.

Busan, South Korea

The world’s sixth busiest container port, primary gateway to the booming South Korean economy, and sits at the nexus of the Japan-China-Korea shipping lanes.

Vladivostok, Russia

Currently Russia’s largest city on the Pacific Coast, and home to Russia’s Pacific Fleet, but has largely been held back from emerging as a thriving trade city by a suspicious Moscow. It sits in an enviable geographic location — with Tokyo, Beijing, and Seoul all far closer than Russia’s western cities. Being surrounded by the most dynamic economies on Earth, it could if given autonomy become the primary gateway for vast mineral wealth of Siberia.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

With semiconductors today being arguably the world’s most important strategic resource, Taiwan is perhaps the most geopolitically significant location on Earth, given that it is home to the only company in the world (TSMC) able to manufacture cutting-edge computer chips. Though having a network city on its shores would likely do little to alleviate the sabre-rattling from the Chinese mainland, its importance to the global economy means we cannot not have a Taiwanese city on the list. Kaohsiung is the island’s most significant port, it’s close to the semiconductor supply chain and already home to a major free trade zone.

Singapore

Singapore is the closest thing we have in the world today to a network city. As the most prosperous nation on earth (as measured by GDP per capita by PPP), it is living proof that cities built on good governance, low taxes, and a business-friendly regulatory environment can eclipse even nations in economic development. It sits right on the Straits of Malacca, the single most important shipping chokepoint on Earth. Noah himself suggests it as the capital of the Neo-Hanseatic League — and I agree!

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

The primary economic engine of, and gateway to, one of the fastest-growing economies on Earth. A major beneficiary of supply-chain diversification away from China and a major node in the global economy of the future.

Surabaya, Indonesia

One of the oldest ports in all Southeast Asia, it was once the largest city in the Dutch East Indies. Though since eclipsed by the nation’s capital, Jakarta, Surabaya remains one of the busiest trading ports in Asia. Growing more slowly than neighbours Malaysia and Vietnam, Indonesia, with its population of 280 million people, would stand to benefit hugely from a Hong-Kong-esque gateway city.

South Asia

Read more

Subscribe now

This post is the sixth in a series on Christopher Columbus. If you missed them, read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here, and Part V here.

Columbus was always a self-pitying malcontent. So when he was manacled and led down into the hold of the La Gorda,1 the caravel shipping him from the Caribbean back to Spain, he took great pains to wallow in his despair as much as possible. The captain of the ship offered to remove his chains; Columbus refused, wanting to arrive in Spain in the state that would most shock the court. He spent the weeks at sea writing a long, whining letter to Juana de la Torres, a former governess to the royal children, and his best contact in the Spanish court. In it he rages against Bobadilla (the man who arrested him), against his accusers, against the ingratitude of the crown. He compares himself to a loyal servant betrayed by a wicked steward. He insists that everything he did was for the glory of God and the enrichment of Spain. He shows no awareness whatsoever that his own cruelty and incompetence had brought him to this impasse. The letter reads like the ravings of a man who has lost contact with the reality of his own actions. He had sailed west as an explorer and returned as a tyrant, and yet in his own mind the narrative remained the same: he was the hero, chosen by God, persecuted by lesser men.

Here is a just a small sample of his self-pity:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

They judge me over there as they would a governor who had gone to Sicily, or to a city or town placed under regular government, and where the laws can be observed in their entirety without fear of ruining everything; and I am greatly injured thereby. I ought to be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a numerous and warlike people, whose customs and religion are very contrary to ours; who live in rocks and mountains, without fixed settlements, and not like ourselves; and where, by the divine will, I have placed under the dominion of the King and Queen, our sovereigns, another world, through which Spain, which was reckoned a poor country, has become the richest. I ought to be judged as a captain who for such a long time up to this day has borne arms without laying them aside for an hour, and by gentlemen adventurers and by customs and not by letters, unless they were Greeks or Romans, or others of modern times of whom there are so many and such noble examples in Spain; or otherwise I receive great injury, because in the Indies there is neither town nor settlement.

Elsewhere in his letter, Columbus claims to have opened “the gate to gold and pearls”, to have secured “precious stones, spices, and a thousand other things.” As we have seen, all he had mustered was a few small nuggets of poor quality gold alloy and a handful of pearls. Columbus also claims to have resolved “never to touch a hair of anybody’s head”. This from the man that hanged Europeans who rebelled against his governorship, that cut off the hands of the native Taíno who did not proffer the required gold quota, that cut out the tongue of a woman and forced her to parade around the colony naked,2 that cut off the nose and ears of a starving man who dared eat some of the corn he had picked. And when he talks of his fellow colonists, he sounds like a whining schoolboy, complaining to his teachers in language drenched in cavil sycophancy. He refers to the colony (that he oversaw!) as a “den of thieves”, his men as “a dissolute people, who fear neither God, nor their King and Queen, being full of vices and wickedness.”

When the ship docked at Cádiz, the spectacle of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea being led ashore in chains caused a public scandal. The man who had ridden at the King’s bridle, who had been saluted as a grandee, who had sat in the presence of royalty — here he was, shuffling off a gangplank like a common criminal. Ferdinand and Isabela, whatever they privately thought of Columbus’ governorship, were embarrassed. They had wanted him removed from power, not humiliated. They ordered him freed after six weeks in jail, summoned him to the Alhambra Palace in Granada, and expressed their displeasure at Bobadilla’s heavy-handedness.

Columbus appeared before the monarchs with his sleeves rolled up so the marks from the irons were visible on his wrists. He wept (of course he wept). He begged forgiveness. He admitted his faults — or at least, he admitted to allowing himself to be a victim to other people’s faults. The sovereigns restored his freedom and his wealth. They did not restore his governorship. That was gone forever. Nicolás de Ovando would sail as the new governor of the Indies.3 Columbus could keep his titles of Admiral and Viceroy, but they would be empty offices. The man who had discovered the New World would have no authority over it.

Despite this setback, Columbus petitioned for funding for another voyage. The Monarchs demurred, unsure about sending so controversial a man back to the Indies. While he waited for a verdict, Columbus retreated to a monastery. There, his religious mania, his conviction that God had selected him for a special purpose, began to manifest itself in a frenzied study of scripture. Over the course of several years, he compiled a manuscript that has come to be known as the Book of Prophecies. It was a collection of biblical passages, prophecies, and theological speculations that Columbus believed demonstrated his divine mission. He had become convinced — utterly, unshakeably convinced — that his voyages were foretold in scripture, and that the gold he would find in the Indies was destined to fund a new Crusade to retake Jerusalem. Once the Holy City was liberated, the Second Coming of Christ would follow. Columbus envisioned himself as far more than just an explorer; he was herald of the Apocalypse. The Taíno might well have agreed.

He had also taken to signing his name in a strange, coded manner — a pyramidal arrangement of letters that scholars have never fully decoded. And he now called himself Christo Ferens, the Christ-Bearer, identifying himself with his namesake Saint Christopher, who carried Christ across a river. The woolweaver’s son from Genoa now saw himself as a figure of eschatological importance.

In the last post in this series, I compared Columbus to Kurtz, the character from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Here was a man who had gone into the wilderness with grand ambitions and emerged transformed — not into something greater, but something twisted and broken. The parallels are imperfect but hard to ignore. Like Kurtz, Columbus had gone to the edge of the known world. Like Kurtz, he had found not the riches and glory he sought, but something far darker. Like Kurtz, he had become the tyrant of a remote colony, dispensing arbitrary justice, mutilating the natives, losing his grip on reason. And like Kurtz, he had wrapped his descent into savagery in the language of civilisation and mission.

In his bizarre and self-serving prophetic writings, we see Columbus attempting to justify all that he had done. Even more than that, he was trying to prove that he was the real victim in all this, and that his enemies, by conspiring against him, were going against the will of God.4

The fourth voyage departed Cádiz on 9th May 1502. Four ships, about 140 men. Among the crew were Columbus’ brother Bartholomew and his thirteen-year-old son Ferdinand, whose account of the voyage would later become one of the most important sources for his father’s life. Columbus was fifty-one, arthritic, half-blind from ophthalmia, and consumed by a millenarian fervour that alarmed even those who cared about him. But he was still, when it came to the practical business of sailing, an extraordinary seaman.

Read more

Subscribe now

As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, I am soon to be a father. Needless to say, this fact is occupying a great degree of headspace, and as such it feels only right that I should attempt to write about it from time to time. However, I must confess, there is something in the idea of ruminating on the concept of fatherhood that seems rather embarrassing — to do so seems pat, passé, cringeworthy. Fatherhood feels as something one should only do, rather than reflect too deeply upon. There is something in that feeling, I think, that reveals how we conceive of fathers in the modern age.

There was an old concept of fatherhood, accepted for most of human history: the father as patriarch, provider, protector — emotionally distant perhaps, even authoritarian. We have in the last century or so swept away that too rigid and perhaps damaging model, but I’m not sure we have adequately replaced it. The necessary and important advocation for women has elevated the role of the mother to as least as important as, if not more so, than that of the father. But we have not yet fully defined what an ideal modern father should look like. There has been emphasis on what they should not be — absent (literally or emotionally), domineering, protagonistic — but less an articulation of what they should be. The best we seem to be able to come up with is a sort of anxious uncertainty: fathers should be involved but not overbearing, present but not controlling, tender but not weak, providers but not distracted workaholics.

I have a sense that this is perhaps just one small manifestation of a much larger problem: the lack of a positive conception of men and masculinity in the 21st century. So focused have we been on making space for women that we have forgotten to articulate what it should mean to be a good man in this new egalitarian age. The male loneliness epidemic, the nihilistic abandon of those who have opted altogether out of work, society, sex, has been well documented; they do not stem from nowhere. Many modern men simply do not know how to be men.

Fatherhood can obviously be a vital path to meaning and moral growth; indeed I hope it will be so for me. As such, we must make a better effort of defining what it is for the next generation of men. For myself, I am fortunate enough to have been blessed with a great role model: my own father. As for others, well, what must we do when we want to learn about life and meaning? We turn to literature, to the great thinkers and writers of the past. We should not be so anxious to throw out the baby with the bathwater; there are truths in their words worth heeding.

Below are a collection of quotes spanning three thousand years, ordered roughly chronologically, that give a sense of how our conception of fatherhood has changed over time — and how much has stayed remarkably constant. They won’t tell you how to be a father, but they might help you understand what you’re trying to do, why it matters, and why, though it has never been easy, it has always been a struggle worth enduring.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and learn more about the world, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll get:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• A pyre shall be lit for the primordial Sky Father in your honour

Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

This post is the fifth in a series on Christopher Columbus. If you missed them, read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, and Part IV here.

As the battered and beleaguered Niña limped into Lisbon harbour on 4th March 1493, Columbus must have felt both terror and triumph. He had survived the impossible. He had crossed the Ocean Sea, found the Indies, and returned alive to tell the tale. The Atlantic storms that seemed bent on sending his ship to the depths had failed to kill him. God had preserved him. He was sure of it.

But now he found himself in the capital of his enemy. Years earlier the Portuguese court had rejected his proposals, mocked his theories, dismissed him as a crank. And now here he was, delivered by tempest to their doorstep, carrying news that would forever change the world’s map. Columbus’ paranoia, never far from the surface, was in overdrive. He suspected (wrongly) that the Portuguese had sent ships to intercept him. He feared (correctly) they would claim his discoveries as their own. When officials came aboard to inquire about his voyage, he refused to cooperate, waving his Spanish royal commission and demanding to see the King. Perhaps surprisingly, João II offered to receive him at Vale do Paraíso, north of the city.

The meeting was a tense affair. The Portuguese monarch had twice spurned Columbus a decade earlier. Now here was that same obstinate Genoese claiming to have achieved what João’s own advisors had deemed impossible. Columbus, ever lacking in tact, seems to have rubbed salt in the wound. According to one account, he boasted of his discoveries and chastised the King for not backing him when he had the chance. João reportedly listened with impressive patience, then informed Columbus that, according to the Treaty of Alcáçovas, signed with Spain in 1479, whatever lands lay south of the Canary Islands belonged to Portugal. Columbus’ discoveries, therefore, were Portuguese.

We can imagine Columbus’ horror. All that effort, all that risk, and now at the moment of triumph he was to have it taken away by those that had once laughed him out of Portugal. He couldn’t bear it. He insisted his voyage had been sanctioned by the Spanish crown, that his discoveries belonged to Ferdinand and Isabella. The two men parted on civil terms, though neither trusted the other. Columbus stayed over a week in Portugal before finally setting sail for Spain. It would later emerge that João immediately began preparing a fleet to claim the new lands for himself, only to be stayed by urgent Spanish diplomacy. The subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas prevented war between the Iberian powers by dividing the world between them.

Columbus finally made anchor at Palos on 15th March 1493, almost exactly seven months after he had departed that same port with three ships and a crackpot theory. Now he returned with two ships (the Pinta, presumed lost in the storm, had limped in separately), a handful of bewildered Taíno captives, some gold nuggets, exotic birds, strange plants, and tales of lands beyond the sea.

The news spread like wildfire.

The court of the Catholic Monarchs was then sitting at Barcelona. Columbus made his way across Spain in a manner approaching a Roman triumph. Crowds gathered to see the strange Indians he had brought with him — naked, bronze-skinned people adorned with gold jewellery, who looked at the Spaniards and their cities with as much curiosity as the Spaniards looked at them. For Columbus, who had spent a decade being laughed at, dismissed, and patronised, this must have been intoxicating. He was finally being treated as the visionary he had always believed himself to be.

In mid-April, Columbus entered Barcelona for his audience before Ferdinand and Isabella. Here was the sailor, son of a woolweaver from a poor Genoese family, being welcomed as a hero by the most powerful monarchs in Christendom. He displayed his treasures: the gold, the cotton, the parrots, the curious arms, the mysterious fruits, and of course the Taíno themselves.1

Columbus was permitted to sit in the presence of royalty, an extraordinary honour for a man of his birth. He recounted his voyage, described the islands he had found, the docile natives, the rumours of gold. Ferdinand and Isabella listened. When he finished, they smiled.2 All his honours and privileges were confirmed. The title of “Don” was bestowed upon him and his brothers. He rode at the King’s bridle. He was saluted as a grandee of Spain. A magnificent new coat of arms was blazoned for him, combining the royal castle and lion of Castile and León with his own anchors.

This was the greatest moment of Columbus’ life. If ever there was a time when the man who had staked his life on a dream could savour his vindication, this was it. The courts of Europe buzzed with news of his discoveries. Within weeks, printed copies of his letter announcing the voyage were circulating across the continent. The Pope himself issued bulls recognising his discoveries. Columbus was, for a brief shining moment, the most famous man in Europe.

But the chip on his shoulder, carved from decades of rejection and mockery, would not abate with but a few weeks of adulation. Columbus remained fundamentally the same man: jealous, paranoid, status-obsessed. In his letters to the sovereigns, he spent as much ink reminding them of his promised privileges as he did describing his discoveries. He was incapable of simply enjoying his triumph. Even now, at the peak of his fame, he was already fretting about those who might try to diminish it.

And there was the small matter of what, exactly, he had found. Columbus had promised the monarchs a route to the Indies, access to the fabulous wealth described by Marco Polo. What he had delivered was a handful of small islands, some naked natives, and a modest quantity of poor quality gold. Ferdinand and Isabella had invested heavily in his voyage. They expected returns. The pressure was already building on the proposed second expedition — the one that one that would find the great cities of Cathay, the gold-roofed palaces of Cipangu, the spices and silks of the Orient.

Columbus assured them it was all just around the corner.

Read more

Subscribe now

Mercury is the smallest and innermost planet in our solar system. It is also the quickest to orbit the Sun, a fact noted by the ancient astrologers of Babylon, who referred to it on their tablets as “the jumping one” as they traced its erratic movements across the stars. The Romans meanwhile thought it their fleet-footed messenger god.

The Roman figure of Mercury, who played the crucial intermediary between Jupiter and Aeneas in Virgil’s greatest epic, The Aeneid, was the deity of commerce and trade. For this reason he was often depicted holding a bag of coins alongside the caduceus, a staff formed of olive branches and snakes, which symbolised peace.

The Roman deity derived originally from the Greek Hermes, who was among the oldest attested gods in the Aegean pantheon, appearing in Hesiod and Homer, and mentioned by an older name on Mycenaean Linear-B tablets. Indeed, Hermes himself is probably a later iteration of a pre-Hellenic god, one lost to us behind the misty veil of prehistory.

Alexandrian Greeks would later reimagine the ancient deity as Hermes Trismegistus — the “thrice-greatest Hermes” — a syncretic figure to whom was attributed the Hermetica, a collection of medieval pseudepigrapha that for many alchemists and sorcerers formed the foundational text of their dark arts. Mixing their metals and muttering their incantations, the astrologer-magickians of the Middle Ages noted the wet and shining lustre of the liquid they knew both as quicksilver, and because of its invisciditude, Mercury (☿). Building on the work of the Arab philosopher, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (c. 721-816), Paracelsus (1493–1541) elevated the metal to one of his Tria Prima (Three Primes), which alongside the four classical elements of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, and the other two primes, Sulphur and Salt, formed the basis of all matter.

The homonyms of metal, planet, and god were not to the alchemists a coincidence, but a sign of their cosmic interdependence.

Following the Ptolemaic conception of the cosmos, Dante placed Mercury in the second celestial sphere of his Paradiso. Here were placed souls who had served God faithfully, but not always perhaps for the right reasons.

Shakespeare meanwhile uses Mercury as something of a reality principle in Love Labour Lost, the play that serves as the closest the Bard ever got to literary criticism. Concerned with the use and abuse of language, the play ends with the line, “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. <You that way; we this way.>” In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare invokes Mercury in a zodiacal sense, “Now Mercury endow thee with lying,”, and in Winter’s Tale, the planet’s appearance has similarly negative connotations: “Who, being as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper up of ill-conceived trifles.”

In Keats’ masterwork “Lamia”, the “ever-smitten Hermes” plays a leading role, leaving empty his “golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft,” following the rumour of a nymph more beautiful than all the rest. For once Hermes is acting on his own behalf, rather than on that of other gods.

H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways” meanwhile invokes the god as lord of the wayfarers:

But more than the many-foamed ways
Of the sea,
I know him
Of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
Who awaiteth.

Despite the two planets who orbit in between, the speed of Mercury’s revolution around the Sun means it is it which is most often the closest planet to us here on Earth. And as Mercury moves alongside us it appears sometimes as if its motion across the sky reverses — the so-called retrograde motion that has for millennia been recognised by astrologers as an omen of ill portent.

Though fast moving, Mercury spins on its axis very slowly, meaning its 88-earth-day year is shorter than its 176-earth-day day. Its surface is pockmarked with the craters of celestial missiles long-since hurled from beyond its meek atmosphere and weak magnetic field. It is fitting that among the metallic compounds that form 70% of the planet’s mass is its namesake, Mercury, the chemical element, albeit in only trace amounts. Despite its proximity to the Sun, Mercury’s slow rotation means its equatorial regions experience long bitter nights of −170 °C (−270 °F) and exhausting, scorching days of 420 °C (790 °F). With only the most minor of axial tilts, the planet’s poles lie in eternal shadow, which has led some to wonder if perhaps frozen water survives in its frigid polar regions.

Long thought to have orbited the earth in the second celestial sphere, Copernicus recognised Mercury as the planet closest to our star in his 1543 heliocentric model of the solar system. One hundred years later, after centuries of appearing to Man only in the early morning or early evening, it was Pierre Gassendi who first watched through a telescope the procession of the rocky world across the face of the Sun in 1631. And it was when studying Mercury in 1847 that Urbain Le Verrier noticed its slow precession before the Sun could not be explained by Newtonian physics, a puzzle not resolved until Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

In more ways than one, Mercury has long been the messenger between worlds.

I had rather be Mercury, the smallest among seven, revolving round the Sun, than the first among five revolving round Saturn.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1771)

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to support this work and learn more about the world, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You’ll get:

• 3x articles per week on art, history, and mythology

• Unlimited access to the entire archive (250+ articles and essays)

• I shall on your behalf offer sacrifice upon Mercury’s altar, bringing you great favour in trade and commerce

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

I have been fortunate enough through writing this substack to meet and even befriend some gifted writers and historians. One such friend is , who published a brilliant piece in The Point earlier this week on wrestling with the implications of the late, great Harold Bloom’s ideas regarding literary influence.1

Sam writes:

As originally laid out in his 1973 book, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, “influence” for Bloom is the water in which all great writers — but especially poets — are forever swimming. To become a serious author of any real enduring merit, one must necessarily take on certain literary precursors, writers who have spurred one to write for oneself. But for Bloom this is no simple craft tradition, passed down benevolently from generation to generation. For Bloom, what begins as literary inspiration ends up as sublimated agon, as endless conflict, manifesting in the work as the buried tensions of an intergenerational competition for literary immortality.

Because each new generation of writers is in competition with all others, living or dead, for inclusion in the halls of worldly memory, each artist must develop ways of strategically, even unconsciously, “misreading” the work of the precursor. So T.S. Eliot’s poetry becomes a struggle with Alfred Lord Tennyson and, more covertly, Walt Whitman. Whitman himself is always tussling with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poetry of the King James Bible. William Wordsworth has to fend off the over-influence of John Milton and Shakespeare to achieve a comparable Romantic success. The young Shakespeare himself engages in a brief agon with his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, before becoming one of the few writers in the Bloomian cosmology to rise out of the field of influence entirely. Shakespeare, according to Bloom’s appraisal, owes nothing to anybody. In fact, all of us now owe most of ourselves to Shakespeare — so much so that any academic or critical attempts to destabilize the Bard’s preeminence only prove how embarrassing the debt has become. As the history of the written word goes on, the burden of influence accumulates, until finally young writers feel such a pang at their own belatedness, they wonder whether they’ll ever be able to add a single thing to their scandalously rich inheritance.

Bloom’s ideas on influence are scoffed at in the Academy these days, but as Sam says in his piece that all rather smacks of the bitter rankling of a generation of failed artists crushed under the weight of their forebears’ brilliance. Much easier is it to question Shakespeare’s preeminence, to problematise Milton, to dismiss entirely the brilliant sun of James Joyce, than to confess to the dream of swimming in the same waters as these literary leviathans.

But if one opens one’s eyes, influence as agon is everywhere one looks in the history of western art. What were Giotto’s frescos but a wrangling with the weighty history of Byzantine icons? What were Michelangelo’s works of terribilità but contentions with his twin burdens: the rediscovered sculptures of antiquity, and the all too-living, all too-brilliant, Leonardo da Vinci? Caravaggio wrestled with Raphael, Velàzquez with Titian, the entire French Academy with Poussin. Picasso struggled so intensely — with Cézanne’s geometry, with El Greco’s elongations, with Toulouse-Latrec’s demimonde, with the radical abstraction of African sculpture — that he, like Shakespeare, cannibalised his art form to such an extent that he appears to rise above influence altogether.

Not only does Bloom’s conception of influence strike me as both wholly and utterly true, it has the potential to be, as Sam recounts in his piece, horrifyingly crippling. But it needn’t be. It can be a call to arms.

Read more