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I first published a version of this piece two years ago, but new research has come to light that means it requires a re-write. This is the most up to date story of the origins of the Black Death, as we understand it today.

In 1338, among a scattering of obscure villages just to the west of Lake Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan, people began dropping dead in droves. Among the many headstones found in the cemeteries of Kara-Djigach and Burana, one can read epitaphs such as “This is the grave of Kutluk. He died of the plague with his wife.” Recently, ancient DNA exhumed from these sites has confirmed the presence of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, cause of the condition that became known as the Black Death. The strain detected in those remote graveyards of Central Asia has been identified as the most recent common ancestor of the plague that went on to kill as much as 60% of the Eurasian population in the great pandemic of the 14th-century.1

The bacterium spent six years creeping silently through the far-flung villages and towns of Central Asia, Yuan China, and down into India, leaving no trace in the historical record, but presumably leaving a trail of death in its wake. However, in 1344, an army marching south from Delhi was decimated by a “pestilence” before it ever reached its destination. In his journal, the Arab traveller Ibn Batutta described a sickness spreading through the southern Indian city of Madurai in the same year, writing, “Whoever caught it died on the morrow, or the day after.”

Rumours of a plague began to reach the Near East. The Arab historian Ibn al-Wardi wrote, “It began in the land of darkness… [and] it has been current for fifteen years… Plague sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more and decimating the population. It destroyed mankind with its pustules… How amazingly does it pursue the people of each house! One of them spits blood, and everyone in the household is certain of death.”

In 1347, an army of the Golden Horde was besieging the Genoese trading colony of Caffa, on the Crimean peninsula, when a sickness rampaged through the camp. The contemporary Italian chronicler Gabriele de’ Mussis wrote of the deaths of “thousands upon thousands every day… [They] died as soon as the signs of disease appeared on their bodies: swellings in the armpit or groin caused by coagulating humours, followed by a putrid fever.” According to writers of the time, the increasingly desperate Mongol army, losing its strength hour by hour, turned to biological warfare and hurled the corpses of their dead over the city walls.2 When Genoese survivors of the battle fled in ships bound for Italy, they took the plague with them. Europe, with its densely populated cities, poor sanitation, and extensive trade networks, never stood a chance.

Millions perished all across the Old World, writhing in agony from the swollen buboes. As well as these lumps forming in their glands, internal bleeding turned the infected’s skin black, their lips and noses became gangrenous, and they couldn’t stop retching blood. If any of the pustules burst or were split, foul-smelling black pus and blood oozed out.

In Constantinople and Florence, at least half of the population perished. In Venice it was almost three-quarters. Fifty-six thousand people died in Marseille in a single month. Eight hundred people died a day in Paris, including Queen Joan of France. In Avignon, Pope Clement VI consecrated an enormous field so it could serve as a mass grave for sixty-two thousand dead. It didn’t take long for the pestilence to reach Britain and Ireland, where half of the population soon died. The Irish monk John Clynn, in his empty monastery, wrote that the Black Death had, “stripped villages, cities, castles, and towns of their inhabitants so thoroughly that there is scarcely anyone left alive in them… The whole world is encompassed by evil… I, waiting among the dead for death to come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard… I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future.” Where these words end, the hand of another wrote, “Here, it seems, the author died.”

The ships crisscrossing the Mediterranean brought the sickness along with their goods bound for Egypt, the Levant, and Cyprus. The disease was soon travelling the caravan routes of Arabia, reaching Mecca in 1349 where it killed thousands. In the Asyut region of Upper Egypt, tax records show that the population collapsed from 6000 to 116 — a fall of 98%. “Cairo became an empty desert,” wrote Maqrizi, “and there was no one to be seen in the streets.”

Confused and terrified, those still living were desperate for an explanation for the calamity. A Parisian medical institution published a treatise blaming the alignment of “three planets in Aquarius,” which had caused a “deadly corruption of the air.” King Edward III of England was more biblical when he blamed the general wickedness of the people, while the Florentine Matteo Villani, wrote that, “It was thought that the people, whom God by grace had preserved in life, having seen the extermination of their neighbours… would become better, humble, virtuous… overflowing with love and charity for one another. But… the opposite happened.” In Germany and France, wild rumours circulated that the disease was caused by Jews poisoning the wells; the pogroms that ensued were vicious, with one report that “all the Jews between Cologne and Austria” were rounded up and burnt alive. The violence against European Jews became so bad that the Pope intervened and issued proclamations that forbid further attacks. Whether this made any difference or not is unclear.

By pandemic’s end, Europe lost at minimum one-third of its population, with the most conservative estimates putting the death toll at 25 million out of 75 million. “We have lost almost everything,” wrote the famous poet Petrarch, in a letter to a friend, “and found no rest… Last losses are beyond recovery, and death’s wound beyond cure. There is just one comfort: that we shall follow those who went before… The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, we dream. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming. I wish I could have woken before this.”

Of course, we now know that the primary vector of Yersinia pestis transmission was the fleas feasting upon the backs of rodents, like rats, or larger mammals like camels. Although the disease could be caught by touching or inhaling infected tissues, the primary route was via the fleas vomiting bacilli into the bloodstream before they commenced feeding on the host, or by the bacilli in their faeces coming into contact with cuts in the skin. Once in the blood, bacilli travelled through the body until they were intercepted by the lymph nodes, where they multiplied rapidly until they swelled, according to Boccaccio, to the size of apples or eggs.

Interestingly, the rural outbreaks seemed to have been more devastating than those in the cities, meaning that the key determinant in the spread was not the density of human hosts, but of rat colonies. Those that fled the urban centres for the apparent safety of the countryside found no respite among the villages and hamlets, where the death rate was often higher.

That the pandemic should have emerged from the Eurasian steppe should come as no surprise: it is one of the world’s great plague basins. The arid landscape lends itself perfectly to the spread of bacteria like Yersinia pestis, whose flea-hosts are prone to dramatic swings in reproductive rates with only small changes in environmental conditions like temperature and precipitation. Recent studies have revealed that just a single degree increase in temperature can lead to a 50% increase in plague prevalence in the great gerbil, the primary host rodent of the Central Asian steppes. Warmer springs and wetter summers lead to greater density in both the rodent and the flea populations, leading to a greater plague prevalence among them. Then when climatic conditions change, a subsequent drop in rodent numbers leads to an increased density of fleas per gerbil, increasing the likelihood that they look to jump to a new host, like humans.

In all, the Black Death pandemic of the 14th century raged across Eurasia for eight years, killing untold millions, but, as it turns out, this was not the first time it had swept across the world.3

The first great bubonic plague in recorded history broke out some eight centuries before the medieval Black Death ravaged Europe.4 In the traditional story of this pandemic, as told by Byzantine chroniclers, the sickness had its origin in Ethiopia, then travelled up through trading barges of the Nile Delta, before reaching the port city of Pelusium in Egypt in 540 AD. From there it travelled, once more on the back of black rats hidden on grain ships, to Constantinople in 541 AD.

The Byzantine historian, Procopius of Caesarea, wrote that the plague was one “by which the whole human race came near to be annihilated.” The symptoms were the same as in the later outbreak — swollen buboes under the armpits and groins, septicaemia poisoning the blood. At its peak in the spring of 542, over 10,000 people were dying per day in Constantinople.

Both war and trade facilitated the spread of the bacterium across the Byzantine Empire and beyond. The Emperor Justinian, after whom the plague came to be named, had spent much of his reign beating back the Ostrogoths, Vandals, Berbers, Franks, Slavs, and Avars, in his attempts to restore the glory of the Roman Empire. It’s probable that the military supply trains, particularly in the shipments of grain, were excellent means of transmission for the rats and fleas carrying the plague. To make matters worse, the outbreak came soon after a series of volcanic eruptions had dimmed the sun, affecting crop yields across Europe. The population, already afflicted by the ravages of war, hunger, and half a decade of unseasonal cold, were in no position to resist a pestilence too.

We know now that the plague didn’t have its origins in Africa, like the Byzantines thought. Instead the plague had been carried to the Great Lakes region across the Indian ocean via merchant ships from Asia, where it had been devastating the continent for years. In 2018, scientists detected a strain of Yersinia pestis basal to the Justinian plague in the DNA of steppe nomads in Central Asia, suggesting that this outbreak had its origins in that plague basin too. It’s been conjectured, though not yet confirmed, that the Hun migrations of the fourth and fifth centuries might have had a hand in spreading the pestilence from the Eurasian steppe into Europe. This might explain the presence of the plague that has been detected in the remains of early Anglo-Saxons in Edix Hill, Cambridge, buried before the plague had reached Byzantium. This suggests a second transmission route into Europe, perhaps via the Baltic.

All told, some 50 million people were killed by the Justinian Plague — roughly half of the world’s population. But even this was not the first time Yersinia pestis had wrecked havoc upon the human populations of Eurasia.

Agriculture was introduced to Europe sometime in the 7th millennium BC by farmers from Anatolia. The spread of farming practices was followed by population growth and technological innovation, like pottery, the wheel, and metallurgy. This allowed the rise of trading networks for the first time, and for increasingly dense settlements. In the region that today encompasses Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova, the Trypillia Culture was able to build enormous settlements that could host as many as 10,000-20,000 residents. Archaeological evidence from these sites suggests humans and animals living close together in high densities. While this was no doubt a useful source of food and nutrients for the human population, it would also have created ideal conditions for disease transfer.

Curiously, the mega-settlements of the Trypillia culture suddenly disappear from the archaeological record around 5400 years ago. In fact, populations decrease all across Northern Europe to such an extent that the period has become known in the field as the Neolithic Decline. Recent DNA evidence has suggested a possible answer: Yersinia pestis.

In 2018, a team of researchers found ancient traces of the plague bacterium in 4900-year old remains in Sweden. A few years later, traces of the bacterium were found in a 5000-year old skull in Latvia. It was tentatively suggested that these finds correlate with the Neolithic Decline, and might explain the large die off within these farming societies. However the cases were isolated, with some of the infected buried with uninfected, suggesting there wasn’t an epidemic comparable to the Black Death outbreaks that would come in later millenniums.

However, a paper published in 2024 revealed a much greater prevalence of the pestilence. The DNA of 108 individuals from Scandinavia dating from 5,300-4,900 BP has revealed a Yersinia pestis infection rate of some 17% — an extraordinarily high number. The researchers pieced together a story of a multi-generational plague that infected the population in three different outbreak events. As the bacterium was found in the deceased’s teeth, it seemed highly likely, said the researchers, that it was the cause of death. The scientists suspect that Yersinia pestis hadn’t yet acquired the ability to transmit via fleas, but was instead spread by aerosol transmission, like covid or the flu, though it’s also possible that human lice might have carried the disease instead.

But not everyone was convinced these early strains were great killers at all. A paper published in January of this year argued that what afflicted these Neolithic farmers was less a plague than a severe infection of the gut - nasty, occasionally fatal, but not the pustulous harbinger of doom it would become in later years. Others, sifting the gallery graves of Germany’s Wartberg culture, turned up the bacterium in just two individuals out of a hundred and thirty-three - no epidemic at all. How deadly this first instance of the plague was remained an open and contested question.

Within a few centuries, the Neolithic peoples of Europe were almost entirely replaced by a new people. These newcomers had their origins in the Pontic grasslands of the Dneiper basin at the far western edge of the Eurasian steppe. It’s wondered if, as steppe pastoralists, they had a higher resistance to the plague, which had so often emerged from the same region.

The last time I wrote about this topic, back in 2024, this was as complete a story as it was possible to tell. It seemed the origins of the plague were inextricably linked to the origins of civilisation itself. Once humans began cultivating crops and living in crowded, sedentary villages alongside livestock, it was then that animal-borne diseases like the plague jumped across to humans.

But, it turns out, that story was wrong.

The farmers of Neolithic Europe were not the first to catch Yersinia pestis. The Black Death was older even than that.

Some three thousand miles to Europe’s east, amid the snowridden taiga of southern Siberia, the River Angara feeds the ice-black waters of Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake on earth. For thousands of years, small bands of hunter-gatherers made their home along its riverbanks. They speared fish from its waters, hunted elk and musk deer and marmot in the nearby hills, laid their dead to rest in cemeteries strung out along the river’s edge. These people built no villages, tilled no fields, kept no herds except their dogs. Yet the plague found them too.

A few weeks ago there was published a new paper which details the discovery of Yersinia pestis in startling prevalence among these hunter-gathers, who lived some 5,500 years ago. Nearly forty percent of the individuals sampled had traces of the bacterium in their bones - a detection rate rivalling that of the plague pits of mediaeval London. The researchers found two waves of pestilence, separated by four or five centuries, swept through these communities. Whole families, and especially children, were wiped out in a single stroke, suggesting that the plague was even at this early stage deadly, and spread human-to-human. Like the outbreaks of Neolithic Europe, there were no black and oozing buboes, no fleas acting as the vector. It was likely passed from person to person pneumatically, like a common cold.

As with the outbreak of the 13th century Black Death with which I began this essay, this 35th century BC plague’s original source was likely a rodent of the steppe - in this case, the marmot. Its meat and fur drew the hunter-gatherers in; they could never have known the danger that lurked upon its back.

This discovery undoes the tidy story that seemed to be emerging a few years ago. The plague was not civilisation’s making. It took not the crowding and poor sanitation of dense settlements to create a disease of such destruction. It seems Yersinia pestis was already haunting Man long before he first settled down, first took up the plow, first harnessed his beasts of burden. The pestilence, fabled horseman of the apocalypse, was already stalking the steppe in time immemorial, just waiting to ride forth.

4

Interestingly, the anthropologist Wendy Orent has argued that the first trace of the bubonic plague in the written record is actually found in the Old Testament, which relates how the Philistines returned the Ark of the Covenant to the Israelites because they had been afflicted with mysterious “swellings”. Divine punishment or Yersinia pestis?

Notes

Bauer, Susan Wise (2013). The History of the Renaissance World

Frankopan, Peter (2015). The Silk Roads

Frith, John (2012). “The History of Plague – Part 1. The Three Great Pandemics”, in Journal of Military and Veterans Health Vol 20. No. 2.

Le Page, Michael (2024). “The plague may have wiped out most northern Europeans 5000 years ago”, in New Scientist (2024)

Macleod, R., Seersholm, F.V., De Sanctis, B. et al. (2026). “Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago”, in Nature

Oumarou Hama, H., M. Drancourt, P. Slavin, and F. Sebbane. 2026. “Commentary on Seersholm Et al.: Yersinia pestis Infection Is Not Synonymous With Deadly Plague in Neolithic Scandinavia”, in American Journal of Biological Anthropology

Sarris, P. (2021). “New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian”, in Past & Present (2021).

Schmid, Boris; et al (2015). “Climate-driven introduction of the Black Death and successive plague reintroductions into Europe”, in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, Vol 112 (2015).

Seersholm, F.V.; Sjögren, KG.; Koelman, J.; et al. (2024) “Repeated plague infections across six generations of Neolithic Farmers.” Nature 632, 114–121 (2024).

Spyrou, Maria A.; et al (2022). “The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia”, in Nature 606, pages 718–724 (2022).

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To bookend the end of our Understanding China series, here is another round of photography of the country, this time from the short-lived Republican Era.

After a decade of revolts and uprisings, the Qing, the last imperial dynasty of China, fell in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911. In its place rose the short-lived Republic of China. Though nominally a democratic republic, the government was from the start beset by infighting and authoritarian tendencies. China soon entered its Warlord Era, a decade-long period when control over the country was divided among warring military juntas jostling for control. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek managed to briefly reunify the country in 1928 and oversaw something of a peaceful few years, but his betrayal of the Communists in his ascent to power made him bitter enemies. In 1931 the Japanese conquered Manchuria; by 1937 they’d begun a full-scale invasion of the entire country. WWII devastated the fledgling Republic, and in its weakened state was eventually overthrown by Mao’s People’s Liberation Army in 1949.

There to witness firsthand this tumultuous period of Chinese history was amateur photographer Donald Mennie. Born in the tiny Highland village of Golspie, it’s not known quite how the Scot came to make his way to China, but it seems he was there by at least 1899. He worked first in Beijing before finding a job in Shanghai. His father had been a druggist and it seems Donald had followed him into the trade, working for A.S. Watson and Co — a health and beauty brand that still exists today. He rose to become the Managing Director of the firm and in that role was one of the most powerful foreign businessmen working in China. One must presume he lived and worked in the Shanghai International Settlement, the portion of the city that fell under British and American jurisdiction - terms foisted upon the Qing as part of the Treaty of Nanking. If so, he was likely there when the Japanese invaded the colony in 1941, immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbour. He didn’t live to see the end of the war, dying in a Shanghai sanatorium in 1944.

Alongside his professional career, Mennie spent his spare time taking photographs of the country he called home, the surviving plates providing a fascinating window into China’s Republican Era. The photographs below were mostly taken between the years 1915-1920. There is a serenity to them that belies the chaos then engulfing the country, an emptiness that makes it seem as if the 500 million inhabitants of the world’s most populous nation had just upped and left. A century is but the blink of an eye in the long arc of history, and yet, one can’t help but wonder, how much of this China remains?

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If you liked this post, see the others in the series.

- Photographs of Old China I

- Photographs of Old Russia

- Photographs of Old Japan

- Photographs of the Old West

- Photographs of Old Persia

- Photographs of Old Venezuela

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This is the third in a series of posts on the history and culture of China. Read the first part here, and the second part here.

There is a tendency here in the West to think of history as a straight line. A state of linear progression from our ape-like ancestors to Homo sapiens to agriculture and cities and civilisation, a more or less upward trend in technology, living standards, and moral virtue. Eastern traditions however, tend to conceive of history as a circle. China is no different.

For more than two thousand years China was governed by a succession of dynasties that rose, blossomed, began to rot, and then collapsed in on themselves, before the process began anew. The cycle went thusly: the Mandate of Heaven is bestowed upon a virtuous founder and his dynasty, order is restored to Zhongguo (中國), the Middle Kingdom; a golden age ensues. But then, inevitably, his weak and unvirtuous descendants let the empire slide into venal and moral decay; Heaven withdraws its favour, uprisings spring up, China falls into a state of luan (亂), chaos; the dynasty falls. The realm shatters into warring fragments, until somewhere among the ruins, a man with nothing left to lose raises his banner and begins the process of reunification once more.

Such is the deep-rootedness of this perception of history it appears as the great moral lesson of perhaps China’s most famous work of literature, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (c. 14th century) - its opening line familiar to every educated Chinese: 話說天下大勢．分久必合，合久必分 - The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. The last imperial dynasty fell in 1912, and one can read the events that followed as yet another instance of the inevitable descent into luan: the Chinese civil war, the barbarism of the Japanese invasion, and the calamities of Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ and Cultural Revolution. From the chaos of the 20th century has returned a confident, powerful, and stable China once more.

Fear of luan goes a long way to explain much about the country in the modern day. Disorder is feared more than tyranny, by both state officials and much of the populace. ‘Stability’ remains among the most favoured words in the CCP’s jargon, and is used to justify its vast surveillance apparatus, social credit system, and censorship.

The cyclical conception of history emerges naturally from a Taoist understanding of the cosmos. In fact, as we saw last time, Taoism, as well as Confucianism and Legalism, were born from their own period of luan - the Eastern Zhou era of Chinese history. In many ways the three schools of thought can be read as guides for extending the periods of order and stability, while trying to prevent the slippage into luan. Each of China’s many dynasties employed a different blend of the three schools in their governance of Zhongguo.

In this essay, we will trace the grand arc of Chinese imperial history through the turning of the dynastic wheel and its accompanying philosophical syntheses, from its first violent unification to the height of its last and largest empire. It is a story of order and chaos, of the flowering and ruining, over and over again, of one of the world’s greatest civilisations.

Throughout the tumult of the Eastern Zhou period (771-256 BCE), there existed among the warring states still a symbolic deference to the Zhou king, who lived in a great palace at Chengzhou. Since the crown’s flight east to establish a new capital in 771 BCE, its status had slowly diminished to become little more than a symbolic figurehead, used to legitimise the succession of the noble-houses-turned-kings, akin perhaps to the Pope in mediaeval Europe. The Zhou dynasty was only truly ended in the 3rd century BCE by the fearsome king of Qin.

Qin was among the seven states jostling for power by the Warring States period (481-221 BCE). It lay to the west, upon the fertile fields of the Guanzhong Plain, which lay about the River Wei, the largest tributary of the Yellow River. It was flanked by the imposing Qinling Mountains to the south and Long Mountains to the west, providing it a natural fortress from which to build strength. As early as the 4th century BCE, a Qin statesman named Shang Yang reformed the Qin government along Legalist lines - influenced by the same early scholars in the tradition as Han Fei. He had also likely read the famed work of military strategy, The Art of War, reorganising the Qin army along its principles of total victory, instead of the following traditional rules of gentlemanly warfare that had governed Chinese conflicts up until then. The Qin kingdom subsequently became a machine of war, employing iron weapons and chariots. Before their blades fell first the Han kingdom, then Zhao, then Wei, Chu, Yan, and last, Qi. By 221 BCE the riverlands of the Huaxia were at last reunited under a single ruler - Ying Zheng, King of Qin. This title was no longer enough for him though; upon victory he proclaimed himself Shi Huangdi (始皇帝), the First Emperor.

Shi Huangdi was a devoted convert of Han Fei, and set about constructing his empire along purely Legalist lines. He centralised the administration, reduced the power of the old noble families, and implemented a system of strict laws and punishments. In an act reminiscent of Mao’s cultural reforms two thousand years later, he tried to break up traditional loyalty to the family by separating the population into units of five to ten households. Each individual’s crimes were the responsibility of the unit, and people were incentivised to spy on and report their neighbours. He tore down the fortifications that had separated the old states and commissioned the building of a great wall along the northern border of his kingdom. Though little remains today of Shi Huangdi’s original structure, it was he who first began building the Great Wall of China. He also built a vast network of roads, upon which he mandated the digging of standardised ruts in which the wheels of standardised carts turned, as well as a vast network of canals, which helped link the riverlands together.

Freedom of speech was greatly curtailed. Education reserved only for the purposes of serving the state. He also set about destroying much of the fruits of Chinese early philosophy and literature, burning all works that didn’t champion his favoured Legalism (especially Confucian and Taoist texts), the state of Qin, or his family line.1 As part of this clampdown, it is said he buried many dissenting scholars alive, or burnt them at the stake. He took incredibly seriously the Han Fei maxim, “the intelligence of the people is not to be relied upon any more than the mind of a baby.” To enforce compliance from his child-subjects, lawbreakers were brutalised via forced labour, mutilation, or execution.

Towards the end of his life, Shi Huangdi became obsessed with the subject of his own death. He sought the counsel of scholars on the secrets of immortality, and ordered the construction of a vast terracotta army to accompany him on passage to the next world. He died in 210 BCE on a tour of his eastern domains, possibly poisoned by one of the many elixirs his alchemists had brewed for him to extend his life. He left behind the foundations of what would become China — a vast centralised state, governed by a brutally effective Legalist framework. In many ways he was the archetypal tyrant, his iron fist responsible for the unification of a people and a land, but at the cost of thousands of lives.

Inevitably, the First Emperor’s successors were weak. They lost Heaven’s favour and Zhongguo soon fell into luan once more. But this time it would be no king reunifying the empire, but instead a peasant.

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This is the second in a series of posts on the history and culture of China. Read the first part here.

To understand the West, one must reckon with the interwoven inheritances of Athens and Jerusalem. To understand modern Iran, one must grapple with the dualism of Zarathustra, the grief of Karbala, and the imperial humiliations of the 19th and 20th centuries. And to understand China, one must look back to a single, extraordinary burst of intellectual productivity, two and half millennia ago.

Out of the chaos of the collapsing Zhou dynasty, scholars across the Yellow River basin found themselves displaced from the state bureaucracies in which they had once plied their trade. They turned instead to the key question of their time: how to end the instability now engulfing their lands? Of the so-called ‘Hundred Schools of Thought’ that competed for influence amid the tumult, three rose above the rest. Confucius called for the centring of ritual and filial piety, the turning of the state into a vast moral family. Laozi preached the importance of following the natural order of the cosmos, or the Tao (the Way). Han Fei believed that people are governed by neither virtue nor restraint, but by strict laws, clear rewards, and fear.

Just as Western liberal democracy is fundamentally rooted in the philosophical rationalism of ancient Athens and the moral universalism of Jerusalem, China’s political philosophy is still today largely defined by the terms set out in those three strands of thought. When Xi Jinping talks of ‘harmony’ and ‘a community with a shared future for humanity’, he is invoking Confucian ideals. When Deng Xiaoping during his economic reforms argued that the Party should ‘cross the river by feeling the stones’, he was referencing an ancient Taoist principle. Han Fei, meanwhile, would have enthusiastically approved of the construction of the most sophisticated surveillance state in history, and its accompanying social credit system, all in the name of maintaining social order. These three conflicting philosophies are in large part the “Chinese characteristics” in the oft-quoted party line of the CCP, “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

China is of course such a vast, sprawling behemoth that one could spend a lifetime studying its culture and still not fully comprehend it. That being said, if one can understand these three schools of thought - Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism - one finds a large part of Chinese history, and the Chinese present, suddenly becomes comprehensible. In this essay we will explore the story of the three men credited with their founding, and the core ideas that have shaped Chinese society ever since.

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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 it makes sense of itself, its place in the world, and what it makes of you.

The defining story of the 21st century is and will continue be the rise of China. Much ink has been spilled in the West about the geopolitical and economic ramifications of this fact. But how many of us outside the Sinosphere can honestly claim to understand its motivations, its grievances, the philosophical and historical forces shaping the decisions of its leaders and people? The series that I will be writing here over the course of the next few weeks is my humble attempt at Understanding China.

There is an apocryphal quote of uncertain origin often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. China is a sleeping dragon, when she wakes she will shake the world. It matters not that the Corsican never said these words, so often are they quoted that the phrase has over the last century or so taken on a life of its own. In fact, it was referenced by no less than the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping himself, in 2014. China has woken, he said, but it is peaceful, friendly, and civilised.

The endurance of the quote is no doubt down to its pithy encapsulation of Western paranoia about the Far Eastern nation. When the European empires found in 19th century Qing China an enormous, yet troubled nation, they were able to dominate it economically and militarily, forcing it into a series of humiliating treaties. But there was from the start a fear of what might happen if and when China caught up. Here in 2026, there can be little doubt that the dragon has awoken once more.

China’s economy approached twenty trillion dollars in 2025, second only to America’s in raw size, first in terms of purchasing power parity. Its factories produce a third of all manufactured goods made on earth — almost as much as the United States, Japan, Germany, and South Korea combined. It forges half the world’s steel, launches two-thirds of its ships, makes seventy percent of its electric cars, eighty percent of its solar panels, sixty percent of its wind turbines, seventy percent of its drones, and eighty percent of its lithium-ion batteries. China laid down more concrete in three years of the 2010s than the United States poured in the entirety of the twentieth century, and has built more than thirty thousand miles of high-speed railway — more track than the rest of the world put together. And it has lifted eight hundred million of its own people out of poverty in little more than the duration of a single lifetime — roughly equivalent to the populations of the EU and US combined.

Unlike the inward-looking Ming dynasty of yesteryear, China no longer forgoes naval power. The modern nation builds warships two hundred times faster than America, and has the largest navy in the world by number of ships. It also boasts the largest standing army by active-duty personnel, and the third largest airforce by number of aircraft. Its defence budget has grown every year for three decades without interruption, the longest unbroken military expansion ever recorded. Economically, militarily, and geopolitically, then, China has long surpassed the nations that once humiliated it — Britain, France, Russia, Japan. Today its only peer is the world’s other superpower, the United States.

The rise of China is and will continue to be the defining geopolitical story of the 21st century. Much ink has been spilled about what this means for the world, for Asia, for the West. Will China be an aggressive superpower? Will the US and China fall into the Thucydides Trap? Will a conflict over Taiwan ignite WWIII? Will China seek to dominate other powers as they once dominated it? These are consequential questions, perhaps the most consequential questions of our time, but they are impossible to attempt to answer without some understanding of China’s own motivations, its goals, its grievances. And to truly comprehend another civilisation, with a very different intellectual heritage to our own, one must know its philosophy, history, and culture.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Cosmographia will be attempting to do exactly that. The dragon has awoken. Let us try to understand how it thinks.

The story of China’s origins begins not in the core provinces of China itself, but instead upon the jagged peaks of the Tibetan plateau. There, three miles above the sea, among the glaciers and jade lakes and windswept ribbons of mineral rock, begin the two rivers that have long breathed life into Chinese civilisation.

The first runs east-northeast through the Bayan Har Mountains, descending in great cataracts onto a plateau of golden earth dusted with loess, a fine wind-borne silt blown northwards from the same mountains as begins the river. The water chews at its banks until by the lowlands it has turned the colour of mustard. For that reason the Chinese call it Huang He (黄河), the Yellow River. It is the most sediment-laden torrent on earth; before it was dammed it bore 1.6 billion tonnes a year. Where it crosses the lowlands of the North China Plain it has built up its bed so high above the surrounding country it runs in some places thirty feet above the fields.

The other river, born too of Tibetan glaciers, takes a more circuitous route. It descends first southwards before in a great meandering arc it loops back east through the Three Gorges, ploughing a twisting rut through four thousand miles of alluvial plain out to the sea. The Chinese call this — the longest river in Asia, third longest in the world — the Chang Jiang (长江), the Long River. Westerners know it as the Yangtze.

The twin basins of these great rivers, and the lands lying between, were the cradles of Chinese civilisation. Hunter-gatherers were using grindstones along their banks to process wild grains and tubers here as early as 23,000 years ago. Just as in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, it is likely they first ate the seeds of the plants that would eventually become their crops as a small part of a varied diet. Then due to climatic changes which made other food sources sparser and grasses more common, the cereals became an ever-increasing part of their calorific intake. By at least 10,000 years ago, fully formed farming communities were cultivating millet in the loess soils of the north, while rice was grown along the wetter fields of the Yangtze watershed.

Five thousand years of population growth, technological innovation, and increasing societal complexity saw the region’s first cities emerge along the Yellow and Yangtze riverbanks — roughly two thousand years after Mesopotamia. From these cities, in time, emerged competing kingdoms. And out of those kingdoms’ long entanglement, slowly and unevenly, came an idea. Along the Yellow River first, then southward, there emerged the concept of Huaxia (華夏): the conviction that, for all their warring, the people of the riverlands were one.

Few nations are as obsessed with history as China. Like many other societies, the ancient Chinese believed in a long-lost primordial state of perfection, where the lands were governed by a perfect balance of cosmic, natural, and human forces. But in contrast to, say, the Judeochristian tradition, it was not revelation that would enable the return to Eden, but instead the lessons of history. For this reason there was from China’s earliest days a compulsion to study the past, written down in vast encyclopaedic treatises like The Book of Documents, with a reverence reserved in other cultures only for scripture. Knowledge of the canonical histories was paramount for elites, and mandatory learning for those wishing to serve the government bureaucracy. It was the interpretations of history that would legitimise an emperor, sanction a building project, or forewarn of a coming disaster.

Along with this intense study of the past was the obsession with recording and documenting for posterity the events of the day, so future generations could learn its lessons too. There is perhaps no better illustration of this compulsion than under the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), when the imperial bureaucracy’s Historiography Office compiled the minutiae of current affairs into records called Daily Calendars. These calendars were then compiled into annual Veritable Records, which were in turn used to write reign-length National Histories, which were then used to make Standard Histories, accounts of an entire dynasty.

Any attempt to unweave the origins of Chinese civilisation must reckon with the fact that the official histories detailing the emergence of the Chinese state don’t quite line up with the physical remains that have been uncovered by archaeologists in the last century and a half. There has been some attempt to link the Xia, the first dynasty in the traditional account, to the Erlitou culture, a Bronze Age society that existed in the Yellow River valley from approximately 1900 to 1500 BCE. But in truth the linkage remains speculative.

However, for our purposes, we don’t need to unpick the continuities or breaks between the prehistoric Yangshao, Hongshan, Dawenkou, Longshan, and Erlitou cultures, nor how they map onto traditional Chinese historiography. As we are primarily concerned with understanding how China makes sense of itself, it matters less what actually happened than what was said to have happened. After all, nations are not born from history, but from myth.

One of the more popular of the many Chinese creation myths goes something like this: In the beginning there was a formless void. Then out of this primordial nothingness there coalesced a cosmic egg. The egg cracked and out of it emerged yang, a clear white substance, which ascended to become Heaven, and yin, a murky black yolk, which fell downwards to become the Earth. Between the two was Pangu, the first being, who was so tall his head swayed among the heavens while his feet were planted upon the earth. Eventually Pangu grew old and died. In death his remains gave life to the earth: his breath became the wind and clouds, his voice thunder, his left eye the sun, his right the moon. Mountains were formed from his limbs, rivers from his blood, soil from his muscles. His hair and beard became the stars and planets, while his skin and its hairs became grass and trees. His sweat pooled into rain and lakes, while the various worms in his body, touched by the wind, became the black-haired commoners.

Ruling over the early world was said to be a series of demigods known as the Three Sovereigns, who helped create humankind and impart upon them knowledge and technologies. Chief among them was Huangdi (黃帝), the Yellow Emperor, who was said to have lived in the third millennium BCE. He is traditionally credited as the ancestor of the Han Chinese, inventor of writing, the calendar, music, mathematics, and countless other things. His remains are said to lie in a tomb on Qiao Mountain, north of Yan’an. Supposedly offerings were brought here as early as 442 BCE, and emperors have been patronising the shrine since at least the Tang period. Chiang Kai-shek was the last leader of the nation to make an offering in person, though even today the Chinese Communist Party still sends officials to attend the Qingming (Tomb-sweeping) Festival every year.

After the Sovereigns came the Five Emperors, perfect sage-kings who ruled over a mythological golden age. During the reign of the second-to-last of these, Emperor Yao, there raged a catastrophic flood. Yao appointed a man called Gun to try to deal with the disaster, but after nine years trying to block the water with dams and dikes, he was deemed a failure and executed. The task then fell to Gun’s son, Yu, who took the opposite approach: he dug canals which carried the deluge out to sea. His reward for successfully abating the centuries-long flood was to inherit the throne, becoming the founder of China’s first dynasty, the Xia.

It’s interesting that the traditional story of the origins of the first Chinese imperial dynasty should involve water management, as it lends credence to the idea that China’s geography incentivised the formation of a large state.

Both the Yellow and Yangtze River basins are extremely prone to flooding. Some of the sediment that makes the Yellow River so fertile sinks to its bottom and stays there. As a result, the riverbed slowly but steadily rises over time, making the waterway higher than the plain it traverses. For this reason, those living along its banks have always had to live in the shadow of a recurring natural disaster. To prevent the deluge, locals have for thousands of years built and maintained levees along its edge. But it is not enough for a single village to maintain its section of the river, for a lapse upstream could still result in the community’s flooding. Instead, the whole Yellow River basin must be coordinated in its flood prevention strategy — something only possible in a large state.

Similarly, the monsoon rains every summer require a system of dams, embarkments, and reservoirs to manage the seasonal glut of water pouring down the Yangtze. It was perhaps the need for mass coordination in flood prevention that saw China’s earliest city, Liangzhu, emerge along its watershed some 5,000 years ago. Residents built one of the earliest large-scale water management systems in world history. Alas it was not enough, for it’s believed a particularly bad rainy season eventually overwhelmed the flood defences and destroyed successive harvests, which eventually doomed the city.

After the mysterious Xia, was said to have come the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600-1046 BCE). Here we are on more solid historical ground, as this is the period we see for the first time the emergence of a writing script. The Shang kings (the Xia, Shang, and the later Zhou all had kings, not emperors), ruled from a city called Yin, near the modern town of Anyang in northern Henan, along the Yellow River. They governed by divination, using oracle bones: diviners would carve questions concerning the weather, harvests, military expeditions, or the fortunes of the royal family onto turtle shells or ox scapulae, to which would then be applied intense heat until the bones cracked. From the exact shape of the fissure the diviner would interpret the answer. Under the Shang, divination was statecraft: the king was the intermediary between the living and the dead. Through the bones the king communed with his royal ancestors, who in turn served the high god, Shangdi (上帝), Highest Deity, who was too transcendent to worship directly.

Hundreds of thousands of oracle bone fragments have been recovered from the Shang period. The characters carved onto them are a rudimentary form of the Chinese script still used today, making it the longest continuously used writing system in the world. A few hundred of the characters present on Shang bones could still be more or less deciphered by a well-read Chinese-speaker.

The Shang were eventually overthrown by the Zhou, a frontier people from the loess hills west of the river heartland. Their leader, Wu, raised an army and led it east to defeat the last Shang ruler, Di Xin, whose corruption and moral depravity, according to the traditional account, was famed throughout the land. The defeated sovereign was said to have fled back to his palace, climbed onto a platform of treasure, and burnt himself alive.

So far, an ordinary dynastic succession: a vassal rises against his lord, a dynasty falls. However, what made the Zhou conquest more consequential than most was the justification for their usurpation.

King Wu died not longer afterwards, and the throne fell to his infant son. Governance of the kingdom — which was by then creeping south from the Yellow River basin to include the northern tributaries of the Yangtze — fell to Wu’s brother, the Duke of Zhou. It was he who is traditionally credited with formalising the doctrine that has ever since defined political legitimacy in China: Tianming (天命), the Mandate of Heaven.1

The Shang, the Duke explained, had once held the favour of Heaven. They had been virtuous, ruling justly and performing the proper rites. But over the course of time they had gradually lost their virtue. The last Shang king had been a drunk and a tyrant who burned his ministers alive and held orgies in lakes of wine.2 So Heaven had withdrawn its favour and bestowed it instead upon the virtuous house of Zhou. The coup, then, had divine favour, and was therefore legitimate.

The Mandate of Heaven was a revolutionary piece of political philosophy. A westerner might be forgiven for thinking it another version of the Divine Right of Kings, which for so long provided the theological justification for European monarchies. But Tianming is more subtle than that. The favour of Heaven is not determined by birth alone, it is in principle meritocratic. The Mandate could pass to a peasant if he proved virtuous enough; indeed, more than one Chinese dynasty was founded by a man of obscure birth. There is also only ever one Son of Heaven, Tianzi (天子). The empire under Heaven, Tianxia (天下), is by its nature unity. Division is an unnatural state; fragmentation means the Mandate has been lost and not yet re-bestowed. The right condition of the world is a single sprawling state under a single all-powerful ruler. Heaven communicates its displeasure through floods and droughts and earthquakes and popular unrest. A wise dynasty reads the signs and corrects course. An unwise one goes the way of the Shang — to ruin.

The idea would go on to outlive the Duke of Zhou and his dynasty, invoked as it was by every successive Chinese imperial dynasty until the fall of the Qing. In fact, there is an argument to be made a version of it still underlies the People’s Republic of China today. Though the government would not define itself in these terms, more than one scholar has suggested that there remains a tacit understanding among Chinese citizens that the CCP’s right to rule flows from delivering competence and order, and that the loss of either forfeits that right.3 But more on this later.

The Zhou lasted for eight centuries, twice as long as any other dynasty. In fact, they probably hold the world record for dynastic longevity; by way of comparison, the longest-ruling English dynasty, the Plantagenets, lasted only three hundred years. Though they often get short shrift in the history books, much of what we know today as China had its beginnings under the Zhou. The pictographic script of the Shang evolved into a more sophisticated writing system. The first classic texts of Chinese literature were set down on scrolls. Coinage was introduced, grand irrigation and flood control works were constructed, and a professional bureaucracy began to take shape.

But despite their achievements, the Zhou had long since sown the seeds of their downfall. The Mandate of Heaven was a double-edged sword: it legitimised their rule in the dynasty’s earliest days, but it could be weaponised against them if they ever faltered. And by 771 BCE falter they did.

In that year the centre lost its hold. A coalition of disaffected nobles and steppe raiders sacked the capital. The king was killed and his son was forced to flee east to establish a new court at Chengzhou (modern day Luoyang). The royal house never recovered its authority. For the next five centuries the Zhou kings would reign more as figureheads than as sovereigns, the Son of Heaven proving little more than a paper title. The great parcels of land that previous Zhou rulers had given out as rewards to other noble houses became in essence separate kingdoms. These kingdoms, hungry for power, went to war.

The Eastern Zhou period, as these years are known, is divided by historians into two halves: the Spring and Autumn period, and the Warring States. It was an age of luan (亂, chaos), of blood and fire. But out of the ruin was born something new: philosophy. It was during this time that there lived and taught the aged recluse, Laozi; the military strategist, Sun Tzu; the legal scholar, Han Fei; and of course, perhaps China’s most famous son, Confucius.

3

I hear that on Chinese social media platforms commentators occasionally invoke Tianming ironically when complaining about government performance.

Notes

Allan, Sarah (2007); “Erlitou and the Formation of Chinese Civilization: Toward a New Paradigm”; Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 66, no. 2

Chang, K. C. (1976); Early Chinese Civilisation

de Bary, W.T.; Bloom, Irene (1975); Sources of Chinese Tradition

Keay, John (2009); China: A History

Twitchett, Denis et al. (1978); Cambridge History of China

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In 331 BC, Babylonian astrologers began to notice strange portents among the stars. First, they watched in horror as the Earth’s shadow passed across the face of the Moon; ill news for an ill time — a total lunar eclipse normally heralded the death of a king. Plague soon broke out in the city. The dead mounted up in the streets. But the heavens showed worse was yet to come: one night a meteor tore through the sky. The scholars checked the records; there could be no doubt — an invasion loomed. The same night lightning flashed twice, one of which killed a dog. Another bad omen. Hurriedly, the astrologers rushed to warn the Achaemenid ruler, Darius III. But the Persians had never cared much for Babylonian superstitions. He sent them away, their advice unheeded. The next month Alexander the Great broke the Persian army upon the plains of Gaugamela, entering Babylon victorious not long afterwards.

If this came as a shock to their erstwhile Persian overlords, the Mesopotamians weren’t surprised. They had long known how to read the language of the gods, how to interpret the heavens. Darius’ demise was written in the stars — he should have listened.

The Akkadian epic known as the Atra-hasis (c. 18th century BCE) purports to tell the story of a primordial cataclysm. Millennia ago, when the earth was still young, humans had grown so numerous that the racket of their living was keeping the gods from their slumber. Enlil, lord of the storms, most powerful of the gods, became so enraged that he loosed a thousand plagues upon the earth. But despite the diseases and famines he set upon the world, the god Enki kept thwarting the apocalypse by helping the humans survive. Enlil decided upon a new plan: he would send a flood to destroy humanity for good. But this time, he would ensure Enki’s compliance by having all the gods swear an oath of silence; no one could now warn the mortals of the coming danger.

A wise man, named Atra-hasis, sensed something was amiss. He turned to Enki, with whom he had a special bond, and asked him for advice. The god of the water remained bound by his sacred pledge not to tell of the coming flood, but he was cunning. He found a way to communicate with Atra-hasis indirectly, by whispering to him through the walls of his reed-hut. This speech is recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and is full of clever puns and double meanings. Atra-hasis understood the coded message and built himself a great ship.

As the deluge washed over the world, the gods realised they had made a terrible mistake. Without humans offering them sacrifices in their temples, they had nothing to eat, and began to go hungry. Fortunately, when the waters receded, Atra-hasis, so grateful for having survived, offered up to the heavens slaughtered goats and sheep in oblation. Half-starved, the gods greedily ate up the sacrifice and promised not to flood the world again.

At the heart of this myth lies the keystone of ancient Mesopotamian belief. The gods need humanity, dependent as they are on sacrifices for sustenance. At the same time, humans are dependent on the gods, subject to their every whim and fickle fancy. It was vital then that they understand the gods’ will, but since the flood no mortal could commune directly with the divine. Instead they must look to omens. They must look to the stars.1

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In our recent poll on which world civilisation to tackle next, China came out the winner by quite some distance. So to whet the appetite, here are some breathtaking 19th century photographs of the country.

The Qing, the last dynasty of imperial China, ruled from 1644-1912. At their height, the ethnically Manchu emperors oversaw what was likely the wealthiest, most populous nation on earth. After they had ridden down from Manchuria and toppled the preceding Ming dynasty, the Qing nearly doubled China’s territory in their conquests of Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. The relative peace and prosperity brought to the core provinces saw a population explosion from 150 million (c. 1700) to 450 million (c. 1850). They also oversaw a golden age of culture, producing huge encyclopaedic compilations of poetry and history, exquisite porcelain, and the masterwork novel, Dream of the Red Chamber.

However, the Qing are also known to posterity for their long and painful collapse. Their failure to recognise a changing world saw them fall behind the European empires in technology and industry, leaving China more vulnerable than they could ever hope to understand. The Opium Wars with Britain, the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion (30 million dead), and finally the anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion brought what was once the most advanced society on earth to its knees. This period of history is what the Chinese call their ‘Century of Humiliation’, and it was only brought to an end by the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, when the boy-emperor Puyi was forced to abdicate. The Qing therefore built the China we see today, both in its borders and its grievances.

Perhaps its due to their doomed, all-to-late attempts to modernise the Chinese state, perhaps its the refined yet decadent imperial splendour of the Empress Dowager Cixi, or perhaps its the pity one inevitably feels when a mighty and proud civilisation is brought low, but there is something otherworldly about the twilight of the Qing period. The dynasty seems out of time, a relic of long lost world, something you could never have imagined overlapping with something as modern as photography. But overlap they did.

John Thomson was born in Edinburgh in 1837 (about 15 minutes from where I live, incidentally), but aged 25 he decide to leave Scotland for Singapore. There he established with his brother a photography studio and spent about a decade travelling across China, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and Sri Lanka, all the while documenting the people and landscapes he found in extraordinary photographs.

Thomson travelled more extensively across China than almost any Westerner of his day. He transported his bulky camera equipment, explosive chemicals, and fragile glass plates across the country, from the cities of Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, up to the Great Wall, and far inland to the remote provinces, where most residents had never seen a white man or a camera before.

I am always quite taken with people like John Thomson, who for reasons unknown are committed to documenting the plurality of human life and culture at great personal risk. (Frank Hurley was another, as was Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Frederick Monsen, and Kate Marsden) As you’ll see below, his choice of subject matter was as diverse as you’d hope for an ethnographic record, taking photos of everyone from vagabonds to princes, from the mighty port cities of the coast to the aboriginal villages of Taiwan. Thanks to him, we can now a century and a half distant catch a glimpse of the twilight of the Qing.

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If you liked this post, see the others in the series.

- Photographs of Old Russia

- Photographs of Old Japan

- Photographs of the Old West

- Photographs of Old Persia

- Photographs of Old Venezuela

After a bit of a breather, I think it’s time for another civilisational deep dive.

Our recent series on Iran was undoubtedly the most popular thing I’ve yet written on Cosmographia. After receiving so much positive feedback I hinted at series close the idea of doing something similar for other great civilisational centres of history, and since then I’ve had a number of readers requesting various places to focus on next.

There’s a number of civilisations I’d love to write about, but how to choose? Well, it occurred to me that I don’t have to, I could let you choose instead.

As with the Iran series, the goal will be to explore the philosophy, history, and culture of another civilisation in an attempt to better understand how its modern incarnation makes sense of itself, its place in the world, and what it makes of us here in the West. With that in mind here are five candidates.

China — The Dragon has in the last few decades awoken from its long slumber, and looks set to dominate the next century of world geopolitics. But how many of us outside the Sinosphere truly understand its motivations, its grievances, the philosophical and historical forces shaping the decisions of its leaders and people?

Russia — The great northern Bear has always defied categorisation — half-European, half-Asiatic, never quite at home in either; a civilisation that has for a thousand years been unable to decide if Europe is friend, model, or enemy. From the Kievan Rus to the war in Ukraine, the answer keeps changing.

Arabia — How a few desert tribes bequeathed a theological and cultural inheritance that today encompasses 411 million Arabic speakers, 22 countries, and 2 billion believers, and how that inheritance still shapes the politics of half the world.

Turkey — Another civilisation that can’t quite decide what it is: European or Asian? Secular or Islamist? NATO ally or Eastern power? Few parts of the world have seen so many empires grace its soils: Hittites, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans; few parts of the world have reinvented itself quite so many times.

Japan — The archipelago at the eastern edge of the world is today at something of a crossroads. For much of its early history it looked to China as its cultural and political lodestar, before eventually forging its own path; in more recent years it has cast its eyes eastwards towards North America and Europe beyond. But with the recent rise of modern China, it once again has something of a decision to make, pivot westwards once more or try somehow to remain outside the orbit of its behemoth neighbour.

I’ve set the poll to close at the end of the weekend, so get your votes in quickly. I’ll likely need at least a couple of weeks of research before I can kick off the new series, so in the meantime, I’ll post some other standalone pieces on various topics.

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Some two hundred and forty kilometres off the coast of Louisiana, beneath two thousand metres of warm Gulf water and another six kilometres of mud and salt and ancient seafloor, there lies a black lake. It is known to geologists as the Thunder Horse Oilfield and at its peak it produced a quarter of a million barrels a day. The reservoir lies within a fold of Miocene sandstone, capped by a stratum of salt that was laid down nearly two hundred million years ago, when the supercontinent of Pangaea was first beginning to crack along the seam that would become the Atlantic.

All the world’s great oilfields are in part the result of ancient tectonic movements. The hydrocarbons of the Persian Gulf were raised towards the surface by the Arabian plate’s collision with Eurasia’s underbelly; the North Sea is a failed Jurassic rift where the crust began to tear apart and then thought better of it, leaving behind the deep grabens that hold the Brent and Forties oilfields;1 the West Siberian basin, the largest hydrocarbon basin in the world, is a Permian-Triassic rift that was for vast swathes of deep time covered over with a sea; the Caspian is a stack of three different oil basins, born of three different tectonic collisions and ruptures.

Oil is not distributed evenly across the globe, a fact which has had profound implications for the geopolitics of the last hundred years; indeed, as recent events have proved it affects us still. The oilfields lie where they lie because of the fickle movements of the earth’s crust in aeons immemorial. Long-vanished oceans and ruptured supercontinents created the conditions for the wars and instability of the Middle East, the ‘New Great Game’ rivalries over the Caspian, and Europe’s grovelling energy dependence on a hostile power.

But the era of oil is drawing to an end, and the dawn of the Electric Age is only just beginning. In 2025, more than a quarter of total global car sales were EVs; by 2030 that figure will be forty percent. Wind and solar are the fastest-growing energy sources in history, and the latter is now by far the cheapest. Exponential improvements in batteries meanwhile are on their way to solving intermittency. Electric motor-driven drones are revolutionising warfare. Despite a few rather loud protestations from certain quarters, the technology stack of electromagnetism has now surpassed that of thermodynamics; battery + motor is both cheaper, denser, and more efficient than the combustion engine. If anything, the ongoing Iran war fuel crisis will only accelerate the trend of electrification, as countries around the world seek to end their energy dependence on a now fragile-looking Gulf. The hydrocarbon century is being supplanted by that of the battery, the magnet, and the photovoltaic cell.

For those looking forward to a world without petropolitics I have some bad news: this new energy paradigm is still just as tectonic-dependent as the one it is replacing. The technologies of the electric stack are forged from a different family of minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, the seventeen rare earths, the platinum-group metals, manganese, graphite, gallium, germanium, tellurium — but their distribution across the globe is just as uneven as oil and gas. The world is not finished with the key geopolitical question of the long twentieth century: which countries happen by chance to sit upon the rocks that fuel the global economy. Only the rocks have changed.

To understand the coming competition over these resources, we will first look at the geological hand each region of the world has been dealt. We will then address how China has managed to position itself as the dominant player in the production and refinement of these key minerals, before reviewing how the other powers have reacted to this fact thus far. Finally, we will end with an assessment of where each of China, the US, Russia, and Europe currently sit, and the moves they have available to them, at this vital moment, the dawning of the Electric Age.

I. THE GEOLOGY

The first thing to note about the rare earth elements (REE) is that they are not, in fact, rare. Cerium, the most abundant of them, is more common in the earth’s crust than copper or lead. Even the rarer ones like thulium or lutetium are more common than silver. The name comes from a time when they were all but impossible to separate from the other minerals in which they were encased. What is rare, however, is to find them in deposits concentrated enough to make their extraction economical. Quite where those deposits are is of course a question of plate tectonics.

The rare earths come, principally, from four kinds of geological event. The first is along tectonic rifts, when a plume of magma rises through the widening rack and cools into rocks unusually rich in these elements. The vast pit mine at Bayan Obo, in Inner Mongolia (the world’s largest rare earth element deposit), was formed in this way; as was Mountain Pass in California; Mount Weld in Australia; and the frozen deposits of southern Greenland.

The second event takes place at the surface. In southern China, hundreds of millions of years of tropical rain have eroded the local granite into soft and porous clay, and over that long span of time the rare earth ions in the rock have come loose and been caught on the surface of clay particles, where they can be washed out with a simple chemical rinse. These weathered clays supply something like ninety percent of the world’s heavy rare earths. At the moment, China and Myanmar are the only countries in the world to extract REEs from regolith deposits, as these formations are known, though projects are underway in the US, Malawi, Madagascar, Brazil, Chile, and Australia.

The third kind of rare earth deposit is found, strangely enough, upon sand beaches. In a few places around the world — namely India, Australia, and Brazil — rare earth grains eroded from mountains far inland, and then carried out to sea by rivers, are concentrated on sandy beaches by the waves washing them back onto shore.

The fourth and final place to find REEs are in the deepest parts of the ocean. In a few select places, some four to six kilometres below the waves, the ocean floor is sprinkled with potato-sized lumps of black metallic rock. These polymetallic nodules — concretions of manganese, iron, nickel, cobalt, copper, and rare earths — accrete from seawater at a rate of millimetres per million years. The largest known concentration lies on the abyssal plains of the central Pacific, between Hawaii and Mexico, in a stretch of seabed called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which holds an estimated twenty-one billion of them. There is thought to be more cobalt and manganese in this single stretch of seabed than in all the world’s terrestrial reserves combined.

The other key minerals for the ongoing electrification of the world are similarly uneven in their distribution. Lithium has accumulated in the salt flats of the high Andes, where rising mountains have starved the land of rain and trapped lithium-rich brines in basins with no outlet to the sea. It has also concentrated in a type of igneous rock called pegmatite in Western Australia, Canada, and the United States. The overwhelming share of the world’s cobalt meanwhile is infamously sourced from a single belt that stretches from northern Zambia (where I used to live) to southern DRC, where the slow collision of two African plates squeezed cobalt dissolved in hot, salty water out of the basement rock half a billion years ago. The vast majority of the world’s platinum is concentrated in a single sheet of crystallised magma beneath the Highveld of South Africa, while nickel has been made easily accessible by the tropical weathering of rocks in Indonesia and Brazil, with smaller quantities also found in Australia, Canada, and Siberia.

As you can see, geology has not been generous. The raw materials of the future are scattered like pearls across a few select locales. Just as with the oilfields, there are a few large prizes in a few specific places, but there are plenty with none at all.

II. THE DRAGON

So far we have looked only at the distribution of the deposits of these key minerals. But they are of no value where they are in the ground. They must be extracted and processed until they have been separated and refined into sufficient quantities before they become useful. The current map of the world’s production (i.e. the percentage mined by each country per year) looks as follows.

As of 2025, mineral mining is even more concentrated than the reserve deposits. Despite holding only half of the world’s cobalt, the DRC is currently responsible for three-quarters of global production, while Indonesia supplies 67% of the world’s nickel despite having only 44% of the world’s reserves. The story is even starker in rare earths. Despite their noteworthy deposits, neither Brazil, Myanmar, India, Vietnam, or Greenland extract them in any great quantity. Meanwhile China, the US, Canada, and Australia all extract a disproportionate amount of the minerals compared to their global share of reserves — though the later three are utterly dwarfed by the former. But these are just the numbers for extracting the raw ore; when we consider the refining of the minerals into a usable product the concentration becomes severer still.

Unlike with oil and gas, China has been reasonably well-endowed with the mineral reserves of the future, in the form of rare earths and lithium deposits. But it is in its dominance over refinement that the superpower holds its leverage over the raw materials of the Electric Age. It dwarfs every other nation in its refining capacity of rare earths, cobalt, and lithium, and is not far off rivalling Indonesia in nickel, despite having no great reserves of the mineral of its own. By way of comparison, at its peak Saudi Arabia controlled only about a third of the world’s oil reserves and thirteen percent of its production. China’s grip on the rare earths, lithium, and cobalt supply chains are in a different category altogether.

This dominance is no accident, but a deliberate policy decision taken by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s. He identified the unique opportunity offered by the reserves at Bayan Obo, then leveraged China’s cheap labour and lax environmental rules to become the industry’s world leader.2 Deng is often quoted in Western media as saying, “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths,” giving the impression of grand strategic plan, but in truth he would have had no way of knowing back in 1987 quite how important these minerals would be in the 21st century.

Lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and manganese are the constituent parts of rechargeable batteries — those that power our phones, laptops, drones, and electric vehicles, and which increasingly store the energy generated by solar panels and wind turbines. The rare earths, meanwhile, particularly neodymium and dysprosium, are used to make the extremely strong permanent magnets which drive the motors of every modern EV, every wind turbine generator, as well as the guidance systems of fighter jets, and propulsion systems of submarines. Gallium and germanium are core ingredients in the semiconductor industry, used in radar systems, fibre optics, LEDs, and solar cells. Tellurium is the active ingredient of thin-film solar panels, while platinum and palladium are essential catalysts in fuel cells.

Without these minerals, the modern world simply does not function. And it is no coincidence that the country that dominates their global supply should also dominate the manufacture of all the technologies just mentioned. Chinese factories now produce over seventy percent of global EVs, eighty percent of its solar panels, sixty percent of its wind turbines, seventy percent of its drones, eighty percent of its lithium-ion batteries, and the overwhelming share of its consumer electronics.

However, there has been a cost. China’s dominance in these critical minerals has come at the expense of their environment. Rare earth extraction and refining is an incredibly polluting industry.

The chemical makeup of the rare earth metals makes their separation exceedingly difficult. Their atoms differ from one another only in their innermost electron shells, which makes them very hard to separate. To do so, plant operators must run liquid solvents through hundreds of stages of mixer-settler tanks, decanting and remixing in long counter-current cascades, each stage achieving only a tiny enrichment in the desired element. A full heavy rare earth separation circuit can require more than a thousand stages. Per tonne of separated oxides, the process produces around twelve thousand cubic metres of waste gas, seventy-five cubic metres of acidic wastewater, and a tonne of low-level radioactive residue. Before a clean-up program taken in the early part of this decade, Bayan Obo’s tailings pond had covered eleven square kilometres, and held something like one hundred and eighty million tonnes of waste, which was migrating slowly toward the Yellow River. The toxic waste products resulted in an “epidemic of cancer” in the villages near the refineries. With such lax regulation, and droves of cheap labour to work in the truly horrendous working conditions, China was able to outcompete Western producers, many of whom had to leave the market in the early 2000s.

III. THE REST

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Off the cool waters of the eastern Mediterranean blows a wind the Arabs call Shamal. It pours over the Aleppo Plateau and Syrian Desert before curving southeastwards over the flat and fertile plains of Mesopotamia. Any moisture blown with it off the sea is caught by the lofty peaks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, where it collects in small streams and rivulets that run down towards the lowland basin that lies between them. By the time the Shamal reaches Iraq it is hot and dry, often in the summer bringing with it great storms of dust and sand, visible from space. Such is the dearth of moisture in the air in southern Iraq, a land once known as Babylonia, and before that, Sumer, it almost never rains. A poor place, one would think, for civilisation. But it is not so, for these plains are saved from the desert by two serpentine torrents: the Tigris and Euphrates, which run down from the mountains to the north and east and bring silt and life to the plains. It was here of course that humans first urbanised, built the first great city in world history, Uruk, and the empires that followed it.

It was the rivers that created the region of fertile bounty where the world’s first cities were born; and it was the mountains that created the rivers. But what created the mountains? The answer is of course the shuddering movements of the earth’s crust far beneath the surface. The story is the same the world over: from the Indus to the Nile, from the Yellow River to the Andean highlands, the earliest cradles of civilisation all clustered along or near tectonic faultlines. This was no coincidence, for civilisation is the daughter of plate tectonics.1

But the landscapes that fostered the world’s earliest cities and states did not form in the same way. There are four different kinds of tectonic boundary, and each produces a different sort of landscape. And each sort of landscape selects, in time, for a different sort of civilisation. Let us look each of them in turn.

I. COLLISIONS

We will begin with the oldest: Mesopotamia. As I already alluded, the land here is flat and parched and scorchingly hot. In the summer months the temperature climbs above fifty degrees and bakes the earth into the salt-cracked flats. In the south there are no mountains or hills. There is no precipitation. By every reasonable measure this should be the last place on earth to host a civilisation. And yet, it was here that more than five thousand years ago the world’s first cities raised their walls and their ziggurats from the clay.

Some forty million years ago, the Arabian plate began driving north into the underbelly of Eurasia. It is driving still, at a rate of twenty-five millimetres a year, roughly the rate at which fingernails grow. Slowly and steadily, over millions of years, this slow crumpling of the earth raised the Zagros Mountains, a chain of peaks over a thousand miles long. As they rose, to their west was sunk a declivity — the subsiding foreland basin that we call Mesopotamia. It’s that declivity that draws down the moisture from the mountains and waters the otherwise parched plains below.

Such is the quantity of water and silt carried by the Tigris and Euphrates that if irrigated upon the surrounding lands it produces an area of extraordinary fertility. The first to do so were the Sumerians, who built a constellation of early cities at Eridu, Uruk, Lagash, and Ur.2 They invented writing, accounting, mass-produced pottery, and state bureaucracy. After them came the Akkadians, and after them the Babylonians and Assyrians. Even now, millennia later, farmers in Iraq still irrigate their fields in much the same way as the ancients did.

But cross over the mountains to the other side of the faultline and the same tectonic collision has created a very different landscape, and with it a very different civilisation. East of the Zagros the Iranian plateau rises a thousand metres above the sea — a great slab of crust caught like a vice between Arabia and India. Here there are no great rivers; in contrast to Mesopotamia the moisture of its nearby seas is kept out by the mountains that ring the plateau. As a result its centre is dominated by two enormous deserts: the Dasht-e Kavīr and the Dasht-e Lūt. And yet civilisation arose here too.

Ancient Iranians solved their water problem by digging a sophisticated system of qanats — underground aqueducts that transported water from mountain aquifers to their settlements and fields. The tectonic movements that raised the Persian plateau created a honeycomb of underground chambers in which ground water has collected over thousands of years. Even today, it's estimated some thirty-seven thousand of these gently sloping water tunnels are still in use, providing cool water to towns and villages and farms.

The civilisation this produced was a different kind from its Mesopotamian neighbours. A river civilisation often concentrates along the banks of its waterway; cities cluster close together and compete over the irrigable fields that lie between them. Power begins to concentrate, war and violence become part of the culture. Social stratification and inequality necessarily arise from the environmental conditions; you get the incredibly unequal cities of Uruk and Ur, as well as multi-city empires like that of Sargon of Akkad.3 But a civilisation arising in the mountains, with their labyrinthine valleys and poor roads, where water is dispersed along tens of thousands of channels and thus cannot be easily monopolised by an elite class, resists centralisation. In place of a totalising monarchy we see a federation of tribes, a loose patchwork of chiefdoms and clans centring on valleys and oases, each largely sufficient unto itself, bound only loosely by trade.

This is precisely why the Persian Achaemenid empire, when it rose in the sixth century BCE, did not attempt to remake its provinces into a single homogenous mass. It governed instead through satrapies, each of the twenty-three with its own governor, customs, and laws, bound to the King of Kings only by tribute and the Royal Road. Otherwise the peoples of its cosmopolitan empire were left largely alone; quite unlike the Mesopotamian Assyrians they replaced as the dominant power in the Near East, who sought total domination over their conquered subjects.

Mesopotamia centralised because of its rivers; Persia federated because of its aquifers. The same tectonic collision created two different kinds of state, either side of its mountains. And three thousand kilometres to the east, an even grander collision created the conditions for similarly different societies.

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This week we’re going to get stuck into the topic of how plate tectonics shaped the emergence of ancient civilisations, and how it still affects the geopolitics of today.

Some two thousand kilometres south of Cairo, among the highlands of Ethiopia, the earth is tearing itself asunder. Far beneath the Afar Triangle a great plume of molten rock rises from the mantle, causing the earth’s crust to buckle and crack, splitting Africa along a seam that runs from Syria to Mozambique. The Great Rift Valley, as this cleft is known, has been forming slowly over the last twenty-five million years. The mountains it has raised catch the summer monsoon rains as they sweep westwards from the Indian Ocean; the waters pour down their eastern flank into the tributaries of a mighty torrent, the Blue Nile, which carries the water and silt north across thousands of miles of desert until its yawning delta disgorges into the Mediterranean. The fertile plains that line the upper reaches of the river gave birth to Egypt, one of the great civilisational centres of the world. Every year, as if attuned to a great cosmic clock, the river burst its banks and a new layer of water and silt would spread over the Egyptian soil, turning it black and fertile. Without that flood there’d have been no Egypt. Without the Ethiopian highlands, there’d have been no flood. The Great Sphinx, implacable and mute, raises its dreaded head because of the movements of the earth’s crust some thirty miles beneath its feet.

The story is similar the world over.

If we take a map of the world’s tectonic plates, and then superimpose upon that a map of ancient civilisations, something remarkable becomes evident. Each of the world’s earliest urban centres appeared along or very near the boundaries between the plates of the Earth’s crust.

Mesopotamia and Persia sit astride the Arabian-Eurasian collision. The Indus Valley and the Gangetic plain were forged by the same earth-shattering impact that raised the Himalayas. The Yellow and Yangtze basins, both cradles of the earliest Chinese civilisation, were shaped by the ancient suturing of the South China block to the Eurasian plate. Phoenicia and Carthage cling to coastlines compressed by the African-Eurasian convergence. Greece and Rome rose on subduction-driven volcanism. The Olmec emerged on the Cocos subduction zone while the Norte Chico and the cultures that followed them were lifted into being by the Nazca plate plunging beneath South America.

Given the vast swathes of land that in theory ancient cultures could have emerged upon instead, this correlation seems to suggest more than mere coincidence. We know that to live atop a tectonic boundary is to run the risk of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, but it seems there must have been something about these faultlines that brought great benefits too. Indeed, given their proximity to all the major cradles of ancient civilisation, it seems they may have even been necessary for the independent invention of agriculture, urbanisation, and the development of complex societies. As Lewis Dartnell put it, civilisation is a child of plate tectonics.1

But what, you may be asking, is the precise mechanism at work here? That is what we’ll explore in the next post: the tectonic origins of civilisation, and how the four types of plate boundary influenced the nature of the civilisations that arose along their faultlines.

But the story does not end with antiquity. The same forces that created civilisation in the first place still shape the world we live in today. For the past century, the geopolitics of the modern age has been a story of hydrocarbons; the rich deposits of the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, and the West Siberian basin, which have so keenly shaped modern history, exist because of tectonic movements millions of years old. But as the world electrifies, a new tectonic paradigm is emerging. Lithium concentrated in the closed basins of the Andes, cobalt mineralised along the Albertine Rift, rare earths locked into ancient Chinese cratons — the materials of the coming century, just like oil and gas, are not evenly distributed. We will explore how plate tectonics will shape the coming Great Power competition in a third post.

The pharaohs knew not the source of the floods that built their power and their kingdom. The Minoan kings of Crete knew not why the earth shook beneath their feet. But if we can better know the geology of our earth, we can better understand the forces that will shape the next century.2

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Last week President Zelensky of Ukraine made a rather momentous announcement: Ukrainian forces had recaptured a piece of territory from the Russians without deploying a single soldier on the ground. Instead, the victory had been achieved by a brigade made up entirely of drones and unmanned vehicles. Quite how many of the machines involved were fully autonomous, or remote-operated by a human behind the frontlines, wasn’t disclosed. But no matter the ratio, this feels an important milestone in the future of warfare. Perhaps it won’t be long before wars can be fought entirely with machines.

It should come as no surprise that this latest evolution in the history of military technology should have been born upon the flat plains of Ukraine. It is far from the first time the vast grasslands that run like a spine across Eurasia have reshaped the way humans make war. The steppe has been acting as humanity’s forge for four thousand years.

It was here that the horse was first domesticated. Here that the wheel was first used in warfare. From here that mounted archers terrorised the ancient world for two thousand years. Here that the largest tank battles in history were fought. And it is here, now, that the first robot battalion has won a victory without the need of a single human being on the ground.

But why the steppe? Well, the answer once again lies with geography.

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The Eurasian Steppe is the largest temperate grassland on Earth. It runs more or less unbroken for five thousand miles from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Greater Khingan in the east, an expanse wider than the Atlantic Ocean. Geographers tend to break the grasslands into subsections; the western edge, which stretches across Ukraine and southwestern Russia, is known as the Pontic Steppe, named after the Black Sea, which it borders (the Greeks called the latter Pontos, meaning ‘sea’). The Pontic is a vast tableland of black-earth plains famed for their agricultural fertility. Its farms and feathergrass fields are crossed by great rivers — the Dneiper, the Don, the Volga — but otherwise the land is featureless. It is a bad place to be a soldier. Flat, treeless, and windswept, there is no cover, no place to hide. A single figure will make a silhouette against the sky for miles around.

In his magnum opus, A History of Warfare (1993), military historian John Keegan observed that “about seventy per cent of the world’s 60 million square miles of dry land is either too high, too cold, or too waterless for the conduct of military operations.” The geography of the remainder must necessarily shape the way warfare is fought upon it. Nowhere is this more apparent than the steppe.

On the flat plains, where the enemy can see you coming from miles distant, speed and range are everything. The foot soldier, unable to take cover, unable to strike with speed, is never more vulnerable than he is upon the steppe. Hence, over the centuries, the geography of these regions has produced by means of natural selection a spate of new military technologies in an attempt to solve that fundamental vulnerability. Let us look at them one by one.

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Consider this a trial of a new post format — a short dose of geohistory, featuring a map I’ve made myself and a few hundred words of explanation. Let me know what you think.

There were none among the wild peoples of the steppe who did not worship the sky. Such was and is the implacable vastness of the heavens that smother the roiling hills that run from Hungary to Manchuria that one cannot help but feel the weight of the cosmos press down upon your back. Perhaps that’s why those who for centuries rode nomadic across the spine of the world galloped out of the terra incognita of their vast inland sea to wash like waves upon the settled civilisations of Europe, China, and Persia. Perhaps like toothpaste in a tube the weight of the sky above simply squeezed them forth.

Greek Zeus, Norse Thor, Vedic Indra, Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda — all began life as a storm god of the steppe sky. There is no shelter from their lightning bolts upon the plains, no mountains or trees to break the winds. The summer months see black storms of incalculable fury sweep across the land. Winter is little better. Freezing winds and whipping blizzards turn the desert of grass white and the eyes of men blind.

The soil is thin and poor. It cannot support agriculture. All that grows are coarse grasses, milkwort, wild hemp. In the spring small flowers can turn the hills momentarily white, red, or purple. But most often the steppe is a featureless green or ruddy brown, blank and bare.

Upon this pasture feasts gazelles, marmots, and antelope; hunting them are wolves, wild cats, and the Corsac fox. Hawks, falcons, and enormous eagle-owls wheel about the skies searching for the shrews, voles, jerboas, and great gerbils that hide in the grass. Upon the backs of these rodents are fleas that have for centuries carried Yersinia pestis — the plague bacterium responsible for the Black Death. But the animal that we most associate with this biome is of course the fleet-footed horse.

It’s hard to fathom the sheer vastness of the Great Eurasian Steppe. Its rolling hills of temperate grassland tumble across two continents, seven nations, and 8000 kilometres; it covers 7% of the world’s entire land surface; if it were a country it would be second only to Russia in size.

Its influence on history is hard to overstate. Half the world today speaks a language of the first true steppe nomads - the Yamnaya of the Pontic Steppe, who fifty centuries ago abandoned their ploughs to rust in the black soils of Ukraine and turned instead to the open plains of Eurasia. They were the first steppe people to leave their mark, but far from the last. The Scythians traded and warred with the Persians and Greeks; the Huns overran Rome; the Magyars took Hungary; the Bulgars the Balkans; the Turks Constantinople. Onto the Persian plateau poured the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, the Khwarazimians, the Timurids. Such was the terror of the Chinese of their steppe enemies, they built a wall over 13,000 miles long in attempt to keep them out. But still the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Göktürks, Jurchens, and Manchus poured through. And I have not even named the most notorious horde of all.

But the steppe was always more than just a staging ground for conquest. It has long functioned as Eurasia’s highway, along which passed ideas, theologies, music, alphabets, and technologies. The wheel, silk, paper, movable type, trousers, the magnetic compass, the stirrup, and gunpowder all flowed across the tangle of tracks that today we call the Silk Road.

The world would not be the same without the Great Steppe; I would not be the same. My patrilineal DNA shows that among my ancestors were the first nomads, those whose remains still lay strewn across half the world in kurgan burial mounds. If you have Eurasian heritage, the chances are you are their descendant too.

I picture him, the ancestral steppeman, a lone figure on horseback. He gazes out over a mirror of green. A soft wind makes the grass shimmer and dance before him. The last curling embers of the dying day begin to ignite the horizon. He has miles to go before he sleeps. Miles to go before he sleeps.

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After a brilliant guest essay on the landscapes of religion a couple of months ago, is back with another fascinating theological exploration.

N.B. This piece should be taken only as a brief exploration. I’ll be taking all my translations from the King James Version, since even with its inaccuracies it’s the greatest of all English translations, and one of the masterpieces of the English language. I’m not a Biblical scholar, and I don’t read Hebrew. I’m not well-versed in any of the ancient mythologies (Canaanite, Sumerian, Hittite, Zoroastrian, et al.) that surrounded the Hebrews, clearly influencing the developing scriptural account of their creator god, Yahweh. My purpose here is just to get down a few preliminary notes on Yahweh himself — his eeriness and his peculiarity, as a mythological character. Because Yahweh is not quite like any other deity. Even taking him purely as a literary figure — neither believing nor doubting — always leaves me with the same electrical sense of Yahweh’s essential, incomparable strangeness.

The Hebrew Testament, or Tanakh, is a palimpsest. The collections known today as the Masoretic texts — Torah (Instructions/Law), Nevi’im (Books of the Prophets), and Kethuvim (Poetic Books, and others) — are really libraries, and the books within those libraries are really the collective creations of many hands, over many centuries. The God of these books is known alternately as Yahweh or Elohim, often as both. Yahweh (יהוה), usually anglicized as “Jehovah,” stands for the personal name of the Hebrew god, whose true pronunciation was lost with the end of the First Temple Period. Yahweh appears to have been the name of an older Canaanite storm god (and war god), adopted by the Hebrews as their protector, eventually identified as the god of the Abrahamic covenant. His transformation into the only God, creator of Heaven and Earth, was an unruly one, surely influenced by the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda (the first known monotheistic deity), during the Hebrews’ Babylonian exile, wherein most scholars believe the Torah was compiled.

The word Elohim (אֱלֹהִים), on the other hand, is a plural Hebrew term for “gods” and “godhood,” which appears to have developed out of the supreme god of the older Canaanite religion, “El.” Elohim is the name used by the so-called Priestly Redactor, or P Source, which presides over the Torah’s lineages, descriptions of rituals, and laws, usually insisting on the remote majesty of God. This person, or people, under Persian rule constructed the Torah as it was later to be passed down, compiling and adding to the original, the so-called Yahwist (or Jahwist), or J Source. This source, which may have gone back to the court of Solomon, in the First Temple Period, figures Yahweh somewhat anthropomorphically, and seems focused on communicating the ancient Hebraic stories with an emphasis on moral corruption and humankind’s uneasy relationship to the divine.

For many scholars, the intertwining of these two sources explains why so many of these stories come in doubles—starting with the two distinct creation stories in the Book of Genesis. The first of these accounts uses Elohim, which suggests God the imperious creator and judge. The second of these accounts uses both terms, Yahweh Elohim (generally translated into English as “Lord God”), and, with Yahweh’s roots in an ancient semitic word meaning “to be,” suggests the more personal aspects of God, his intimate and often troublesome relationship to human beings. It’s not until later, in the Book of Exodus, that this god will definitively call himself Yahweh, revealing the name to Moses, identifying explicitly as the deity of the ancestral, Abrahamic covenant. All Jewish, Christian, and Muslim problems spill out over the millennia, from this moment.

As a literary and mythological figure, the Yahweh of the Hebrew Testament is simply sui generis. In my own short lifetime of reading, I’ve never encountered any personage quite like him: no other deity, understood as the only true deity (even within a hierarchy of local divinities), a maker of the universe, solely responsible for the creation of all things, and sometimes too for their destruction; all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere, and universal. Yet also peculiarly focused on his favorite embattled individuals, and that little desert people he binds himself to, holding them and them alone responsible for carrying on his work in the world. These very characteristics — omniscence, omnipotence — give Yahweh an irony and ambiguity which seem genuinely beyond human comprehension. Only appropriate, for a God that transcends category, image, and name. The entire, later, Book of Job seems to me a post-exilic, theological attempt to address that very ambiguity — and to illuminate just what is so haunting and inevitable about Yahweh, as a figure.

The first account of the Genesis creation — the priestly account — is a tightly-ordered construction: six days of systematic creation, and a day of rest. “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” goes the beautiful phrase. And it repeats with each day, until it climaxes with the making of humankind itself, the latest in a long chain of creations: “So God created man in his own Image, in the Image of God created he him; male and female he created them.” God (Elohim) commands these people to be fruitful and multiply, gives them dominion over the earth, and pronounces everything good.

The second account is the Yahwist’s account, and here things are much more complicated. For one, in this account, Yahweh is identified as an artisan: “And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” He sets this man in a garden, planted “Eastward in Eden.” In this account, man is not the crowning jewel of all created things: man is alone, tasked with dressing and keeping the garden. It’s not until Yahweh realizes the man is lonely that he creates other things to keep his gardener company — first animals; later Eve, out of Adam’s own body. Yahweh begins his relationship to this clay man Adam with a stern injunction: eat from any tree you like, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which he placed in the garden, along with the tree of life. Eat from that tree, says Yahweh, and death will follow. From his first words, Yahweh defines himself, irrevocably, as a god of the phrase, “Thou shalt not.” And it is not too much to say that we’ve been dealing with this literary fact for the last three thousand years.

Already things are quite strange in this story, aren’t they? Immediately we’re confronted by several unanswerable questions. But we must keep in mind this idea of humankind being made out of God’s own image. Such a statement doesn’t merely mean we’re like Yahweh: it means, first of all, that Yahweh is like us. That whatever makes us peculiarly human comes out of Yahweh first, and was originally a characteristic of his. It’s jarring to read so many of these Tanakh stories, and see Yahweh — who is supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful — behaving in scandalously human ways: threatening to forget things he has previously vowed, asking questions he ought to know the answer to, appearing not to know any number of things the creator of the earth really ought to know.

That is, when we read these stories, and wonder why it is that a god who knows everything, sees everything, and understands everything frequently appears all too like a person — evincing disgust, pride, worry, even jealousy — we must remember that these are only human qualities because they were Yahweh’s to begin with. His actions as a character in the Tanakh (and beyond), are the actions of an uncreated being, a sort of inherent, universal principle of creation, who has given his unruly creative impulses to his own creations, and subsequently unleashed the genius and ridiculousness of humanity onto the earth. Metaphysically speaking, our humanness, in all its beauty and misery, is the worldly emanation of Yahweh’s original uncreated essence, the essence of “I am,” intertwined with the quirks of being, breaking fitfully into this material zone of time and space, where it can only be understood in the limited realm of our human senses. And when Yahweh himself appears here, in this material zone, confining himself to just these three or four dimensions, we get the sense that he is only coming across partially, fractionally — sometimes monstrously, even childishly; other times like an ironic trickster; sometimes like an angry or disappointed parent.

In this sense, Yahweh combines all the aspects of divinity which could be gleaned from any grand study of world mythologies: he really can embody almost anything, and as such, he is profoundly unsettling. As much of the Torah later reveals, Yahweh’s own sense of what is good and what is evil seems frequently obscene, even cruel; his sense of justice is profound and profoundly destructive. Yet the genius of the Yahwist ensures that this is all of a part with Yahweh’s essential unknowability — even as he reveals himself to the Hebraic patriarchs in increasingly abstract ways, ending up mostly a disembodied voice in symbols and dreams, or else speaking through the angels, his lesser Elohim.

But let’s return to Eden. Any parent knows the moment they say “Thou shalt not,” they have forever implanted in their children’s minds the idea of doing exactly that. Yet this is how Yahweh sets up his creations, from the first. Assuming that Yahweh really does know everything, and really is omnipotent, we must also assume that everything proceeds exactly as Yahweh intends it, and that whatever happens is something he has foreseen. This is why the tree and the forbidden fruit have always appeared like a kind of willpower test for humankind — a test we thoroughly and permanently fail. Yet I’ve always felt it to be more complicated than that. Given an apparently deathless infinity in paradise (no matter how perfect that paradise), one would eventually, inevitably, want to see what it would be like for it to end. Indeed, Yahweh is clear about this: eat the fruit, and you will know what it is like to die. History will begin. Agriculture will begin. You will have to give birth to other human beings, brothers will kill themselves, and the whole story of humanity will unfold, once you’ve done so.

In a sense, Yahweh has provided humankind a way out of paradise, and told them exactly how to go about choosing it. Since surely Yahweh knew that, given enough time, given that they were made in his image (the image of a creator who couldn’t help but create a witness to his wonders), they would eventually choose it. The serpent which slinks up to Eve is, then, something like a principle of entropy, or novelty — that nothing can stay the same forever (or if it does, then it is an infinite Paradise, infinite purgatory, or infinite hell), but that beings will eventually desire to experience something else. Here we can’t discount the fact that human impatience and curiosity are an inheritance from Yahweh himself. In this sense, it appears Yahweh does feel something like love for his creations, because he gives them a genuine choice, and allows them real freedom. The serpent — like the Adversary in Job — is perhaps best understood as the engine of this choice, an inevitable point along the line of eternity, in which that choice is finally offered, as it was always going to be.

So we’re given that beautiful picture of Even and Adam eating the fruit, and discovering their own nakedness, then hiding from Yahweh as he comes “...walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” What a stunning image: the creator of everything, walking, moving in the garden, with them. We don’t know if this is normal for Yahweh, if Eve and Adam are accustomed to living with their own maker, in the guise of a walking, speaking being. We only know this is how Yahweh comes to them, asking, in the tone of a disappointed parent who already knows the answers to his questions: “Where art thou?” and “Who told thee, that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereon I commanded thee, that shouldest not eat?” Then comes the litany of curses on them both, and on the serpent for its part; then the exile from Eden.

Yet there’s one last troubling thing. We don’t often remember that the act of eating the fruit is only part of the reason for this exile. There’s another reason: “And the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. And now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever.” So Yahweh sends them out of the garden, and places the cherubim at the gate, “...to keep the way of the tree of life.” We learn two things here. First, that the knowledge of good and evil is one of the things which makes the Elohim divine (note that infamous “one of us”). Second, that going further, eating from the tree of life, is apparently impermissible, and immortality out of the question. Here more questions proliferate: Would eating from both trees have made them fully divine? Or simply cancelled each other out, restoring Adam and Eve to their Edenic state? Were they not immortal before? If not, were they expected to procreate? And where did these trees come from? Why did Yahweh make them to begin with? Why did he place them where he placed his children? Were they perhaps the source of Yahweh’s divinity? All these questions are lost, as humankind falls inevitably into history.

Of course, this history begins, in the next story, with a murder: the first farmer, Cain, kills his brother, the shepherd Abel, who is Yahweh’s favorite. Again, Yahweh appears, asking questions he ought to know the answers to: “Where is Abel thy brother?” and “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood cryeth unto me, from the ground.” Cain is made a cursed vagabond, and goes off to bed his wife and build a city someplace called the land of Nod, even further eastwards from Eden. Yet it’s not out of Cain’s lineage that the next great figure, Noah, emerges. Instead, Noah comes out of the long lineage of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son.

We’re not told where the women have come from, for Cain and Seth to mate with, nor where the mates for their sons originated. If not the product of incest, then has Yahweh been making other people? Or were there already other people, other beings? And did Yahweh make them? When Adam and Eve were exiled, did they end up in the same state in which these other human beings already lived? Following the lineage of Seth, culminating in Noah, we’re told the population of humankind expanded across the earth, while the “Sons of God” (perhaps angels, or just the elect descendents of Seth) mated with their daughters, and Yahweh populated the earth with giants. In passages like these, the palimpsestic quality of the stories seems most obvious: we see just how many legends, of varying kinds and ages, crash up against each other in the text. And again — the questions are endless.

What’s remarkable about the ensuing Noah story is its framing: “And God saw, that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. | And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. | And the Lord said, “I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth: both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air: for it repenteth me that I have made them.” I’ve always found this passage incredibly moving. Yahweh decides to take a look into the thoughts and hearts of his creations, and is horrified. He simply cannot believe humankind’s wickedness — only evil continually — yet it isn’t just our actions but our thoughts which disturb Yahweh. So much so, his reaction is not just to wipe out humanity, but to destroy every living thing he ever created. Immediately life itself seems a terrible mistake, if it could have led to this level of inner evil.

Of course, we discover that there is one person Yahweh does approve of — Noah, from the trusty Sethian lineage — so Yahweh preserves him and his family, while he floods the earth. Out of some sense of mercy, we must suppose, Yahweh gives all living creatures a do-over, a chance to start again (with the same exact commandment as before: “Be fruitful and multiply”). Though just how Yahweh expects things to go differently this time is hardly clear. Once Yahweh has delivered Noah’s family to safety, he presents Noah with the first promise: “And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more, by the waters of a flood, neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.” Yet the sign of the covenant seems to be less for humanity, than for Yahweh himself: “...and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature…”

Again, Yahweh’s actions are subtly confounding. Why does an all-powerful, all-knowing God need to remember anything? It’s as if Yahweh fully expects to look into human hearts again and be horrified, and in a blind rage begin preparing a second deluge—and only the rainbow he sets in the cloud will remind him not to; will remind him that this was already tried once, only it didn’t seem to take. This is the first time we encounter this formulation, Yahweh “remembering” his covenant, as he’ll “remember” each of the later patriarchs. “And God remembered Abraham,” or “God remembered Jacob” we’re told throughout the Torah, as though Yahweh is always in the business of forgetting his own people, needing continual reminders of his promises to them. Subtly confounding — and yet, in line with the subdued cosmic irony of the Yahwist’s accounts of these tales, it conforms with the idea of a God who will simply never be totally legible to us, even as we keep recognizing pieces of ourselves in his statements and actions.

Yahweh’s strangeness only multiplies in the next major stories, beginning with the account of the Tower of Babel. Crucially, this is the first story after Noah and the flood: humankind spreads out again, yet their first action is to build a tower to heaven, as if to force their way back into paradise. Again, Yahweh appears not to notice, until he actively decides to take a look: “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. | And the Lord said: Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language: and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. | Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” In some sense, Yahweh is not always apparently present, he can’t always tell what his people are up to, until he descends to them in some form. He’s also speaking in plural again, to his Elohim, as he did in the garden. And again, he’s clearly bothered by what humankind is getting up to. His commandment in the garden didn’t help, and the flood failed: now he worries a single civilization, under a single language, involved in a single obsessive project, would be capable of doing anything it chose to. So of course he descends and scatters humankind again, apparently forever.

But it’s with the introduction of Abraham that Yahweh becomes heavily involved in particular human affairs, and it’s at this point that he begins to seem most like a person. Still, Abraham and his wife Sarah are the only people Yahweh speaks to directly. To the local kings, whom Abraham is constantly getting into trouble with, Yahweh appears in dreams, warning them not to mess with the man he’s chosen. To Hagar, the Egyptian mother of Abraham’s first child, Yahweh sends only an angel. Yet to Abraham, Yahweh is constantly promising things: nations, lands, generations, children. And it’s to Abraham whom Yahweh declares that male circumcision will be the signifying covenantal act, which poor Abraham must undergo at the ripe old age of ninety, along with all his servants and his son Ishmael.

Yet the most extraordinary of all Yahweh stories is the account of his visit to Abraham, on his way to destroy the cities Gomorrah and Sodom, where Abraham’s nephew Lot resides with his family. Yahweh arrives literally at Abraham’s home: “And the Lord appeared to him, in the plains of Mamre: and he sate in the tent doore, in the heat of the day.” I can’t be alone in finding in this passage a rather beautiful echo of that first time we see the Yahwist’s vaguely-corporeal God, in Eden, “walking in the cool of the evening.” It’s a marvelously evocative image: Abraham lounging in the door of his tent as three men approach him — one of whom he immediately recognizes is Yahweh. Abraham invites these men into his tent, and we’re greeted with the incredible scene of Yahweh eating dinner at Abraham’s table, apparently in something resembling a human form.

It’s at this point Yahweh announces that Abraham’s ancient wife, Sarah, will be blessed with a son. Now another stunningly ironic scene occurs: “Therefore Sarah laughed within her self, saying, After I am waxed old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?” Yet Yahweh in his omniscience clearly knows Sarah’s thoughts: “And the Lord said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying; Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old? | Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the time appointed will I return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son. | Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not: for she was afraid. And he said, Nay but thou didst laugh.”

Here we have two characteristic qualities of Yahweh in tandem — first, his tendency towards haughty rhetorical questions, inflamed with his own omnipotence: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” This is a formulation that will reoccur constantly throughout the Tanakh — eventually reaching a kind of incantatory apotheosis in the closing chapter of the Book of Job. Yahweh never explains his actions: he offers every desperate human question with his own question, always some form of: “Didn’t I create everything?” “Am I not the reason for your existence?” “Who are you to challenge the source of life, your own maker?” Just as he later instructs Moses in Exodus: “Tell them I AM sent you.” Yahweh’s answer to every human question is an implacable, unmoving fact: “I am.” No other answers could ever suffice; Yahweh is like the principle of nature itself, which has no real reason as to why it sometimes helps us and sometimes hinders us. The point may be that we will only understand when we stop asking.

But there’s also his tendency to put on a kind of performance. Notice the order of the actions: Yahweh doesn’t confront Sarah directly, when he sees in her thoughts that she finds the whole thing patently ridiculous. He asks Abraham, apparently right in front of Sarah herself, so she can hear. But Abraham doesn’t get a chance to answer: Sarah responds reflexively, and denies it, at which point we can almost imagine this strangely humanoid Yahweh, sitting in the tent, turning directly to her to say the only words he ever says to anyone but Abraham: “Nay but thou didst laugh.” It’s impossible for me to read this story and not experience the palpable personality of Yahweh, who seems almost delighted with the tricks he can play through his omnipotence.

The performance continues, as the three men leave to head out to Sodom, with Abraham leading the way: “And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do; | Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?” This is simply extraordinary. We are either being granted a peak into Yahweh speaking to himself (in which case, we are confronted also with the curious picture of an all-knowing and all-seeing God actively wondering what he ought to do — as if he had to consult his own divinity); or else, Yahweh is airing this question in the open, with Abraham right there to hear him as wonders aloud, clearly teasing him. Finally Yahweh decides to tell Abraham that he’s on his way to destroy the city: “I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me: and if not, I will know.” At which point, the other men head off, towards Sodom — and in the next story, these two will appear as angels to rescue Lot and his family, while Yahweh (despite what was said about going down to see the city) mysteriously stays behind.

What happens next is just as extraordinary: for the first time in the Tanakh, a human being addresses Yahweh with a moral injunction of his own: “And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? | Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou also destroy, and not spare the place for the fifty righteous, that are therein? | That be far from thee, to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, and the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” At which point we are confronted with, essentially, a comedy routine, in which Abraham successfully talks Yahweh down from fifty, to forty, to thirty, to twenty, and finally to ten people — with Yahweh agreeing each step of the way, not to destroy the city if he can find so many righteous people amongst its citizenry. The punchline to this, of course, is that Yahweh apparently doesn’t find even ten people: after the angels rescue Lot’s family, he wipes the city from the face of the earth, with a rain of brimstone and fire.

Yet even then, we can only marvel at Abraham’s audacity, telling his own God, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” As if to say — in a reversal of the logic of the flood — Come on then, can you really call yourself a great god if you’re prepared to punish good people for what evil ones have done? I wonder if we don’t see, in this moment, just why Yahweh likes Abraham: the old patriarch has no illusions about his dependence on the whims of his creator, yet in important situations appears capable of addressing Yahweh with the same level of irony Yahweh wields when addressing him. Of course, one of Yahweh’s later acts will be to test Abraham’s commitment to their covenant, calling on him to sacrifice his son Isaac, which Abraham resigns himself to. Tellingly, it’s an angel of the Lord — not Yahweh himself — who appears to Abraham mid-sacrifice, telling him he doesn’t have to go through with it.

From this point on, the actual voice and figure of Yahweh will only wane, arriving more and more in dreams, or communicated to the people through their prophets. Joseph, for instance, never hears directly from Yahweh, and only receives premonitions. Moses encounters Yahweh’s words from the burning bush, then apparently direct from God, and again at the top of Mount Sinai. But increasingly, the force of Yahweh’s personality takes a backseat to the particular struggles of the Hebrews throughout their messy history, as the voices of the prophets arise again and again to decry their failures to fulfil the covenant, particularly in their idolatry of other gods. The Book of Job is the last time Yahweh appears as a speaking character, as if to answer, once and for all, the issue of Yahweh’s capriciousness, why we shouldn’t try to fathom the whims of the Godhead, let alone attempt to understand the suffering with which he might afflict even the least sinful man in the world. All of Yahweh’s strangeness, in the end, comes down to this essential unknowability. He is all too human, and all too remote, at once.

There remains much to be said about Yahweh’s peculiarity as a deity — not to mention the fact that these very qualities clearly haunt the psychology of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim society, all the way down to our own time. To ponder our relationship to nature, or to our birth, or to our suffering, or to the confusion and chaos of the world, will — at least in our part of the globe — necessarily lead us back to Yahweh. Though truthfully, there’s little comfort or clarity to be had in it. Yet it doesn’t absolve us of the necessity. Any dip back into the Hebrew testament — particularly the Torah, and the accounts of the Yahwist — can only confront us with the essential strangeness of these texts, which we’ve tended to take for granted over the centuries. Perhaps in doing so — in returning to some of that strangeness, embedded in the deepest parts of our own minds, and the stories which shaped them — we will understand something about where we came from. Perhaps we’ll understand something about who God (whomever that may be) really is.

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After six weeks of exclusive focus, I wrapped up our Understanding Iran series last weekend. All in all, it came to seven posts, ~25,000 words (or the equivalent of ~140 pages of A4), and ~2 hours of combined reading time. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I certainly learned a lot; I hope you did too.

At the outset, I described the series as an exploration of the philosophy, history, and culture of Iranian civilisation in an attempt to better understand how the modern nation makes sense of themselves, their place in the world, and what they make of us here in the West. Whether I succeeded in that endeavour or not, I’ll leave to your judgement.

In case you missed any posts among the seven, here is a quick overview with links:

• UNDERSTANDING IRAN

  • An introduction to the three thousand year-old civilisation and the series. (Free to read)

• PEOPLE OF THE PLATEAU

  • The geography of Persian plateau and the story of how the Iranians first came to settle it. (Paid)

• THE LIGHT AND THE LIE

  • Mapping the enormous influence Iran has had upon world theology, through Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Islam. (Paid)

• BUILDING PARADISE

  • Tracing the history of Iranian architecture through the plateau’s finest monuments. (Paid)

• GRIEF, GUILT, AND THE MAKING OF A THEOCRACY

  • How the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had its roots in centuries past. (Paid)

• THE VIEW FROM THE PLATEAU

  • An attempt to see the world, the West, and the recent war, as the Iranians do. (Paid)

• THE PLATEAU ABIDES

  • No matter what happens with this war, this ceasefire, this regime, Iran will endure, thanks to its poetry.

I’ve now written quite a few long series on Cosmographia — on the History of Networks, on Christopher Columbus, on the Holy Land, on Uruk — but I think Understanding Iran is the finest I’ve yet produced. It was certainly by far the most popular, suggesting a large appetite for deep civilisational dives like this. Given that, I will definitely be doing something similar for other parts of the world — Russia, China, Arabia, etc. — at some point in the future. For now though, we’ll return to regular programming of stand-alone posts for a little while. I’ve got some interesting posts lined up for the next few weeks: how the geography of the steppe has shaped military technology over the centuries, from the chariot to the drone; how the hydrography of a river shapes the culture that emerges along its banks; how geography plays a role in the emergence of democracies, among others.

The art I used across this series was that by the French painter Eugène Flandin, who along with the architect Pascal Coste, travelled across Persia from 1839 to 1841. I became so taken with the drawings that somewhere around the third week I decided to look up how much an early edition of their illustrated travelogue, Voyage en Perse (1851), would cost to purchase. I have a similarly old edition of one of Tennyson’s Arthurian poems illustrated by Gustave Doré that I picked up for about £150, so I assumed this little-remembered travel book would be similar. Alas no — a volume containing only half the original drawings would set you back $25,000. I think I’ll have to continue viewing them on Wikimedia Commons instead!

A few readers have requested a printable version of the series so they can read it on paper, so I’ve collected all the posts into a PDF file you can download at the bottom of this post. But first, here’s a reading list for any among you who would like to go deeper on Iran.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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II. THE GUARDIAN AND THE GUARD

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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.

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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

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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.

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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:

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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.

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