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Malachi Smith's List: CULTURE & GEOGRAPHY

Persia:Page 1 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- Iran Archaeology
- Published: August 2008
- 11 more annotations...
- - Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran
  - A glorious past inspires a conflicted nation.
  - By Marguerite Del Giudice
    
    Photograph by Newsha Tavakolian
  - What's so striking about the ruins of Persepolis in southern Iran, an ancient capital of the Persian Empire that was burned down after being conquered by Alexander the Great, is the absence of violent imagery on what's left of its stone walls.
  - Among the carvings there are soldiers, but they're not fighting; there are weapons, but they're not drawn.
  - Mainly you see emblems suggesting that something humane went on here instead—people of different nations gathering peacefully, bearing gifts, draping their hands amiably on one another's shoulders.
  - In an era noted for its barbarity, Persepolis, it seems, was a relatively cosmopolitan place—and for many Iranians today its ruins are a breathtaking reminder of who their Persian ancestors were and what they did.
  - The recorded history of the country itself spans some 2,500 years, culminating in today's Islamic Republic of Iran, formed in 1979 after a revolution inspired in part by conservative clerics cast out the Western-backed shah.
  - It's arguably the world's first modern constitutional theocracy and a grand experiment: Can a country be run effectively by holy men imposing an extreme version of Islam on a people soaked in such a rich Persian past?
  - Persia was a conquering empire but also regarded in some ways as one of the more glorious and benevolent civilizations of antiquity, and I wondered how strongly people might still identify with the part of their history that's illustrated in those surviving friezes.
  - So I set out to explore what "Persian" means to Iranians, who at the time of my two visits last year were being shunned by the international community, their culture demonized in Western cinema, and their leaders cast, in an escalating war of words with Washington, D.C., as menacing would-be terrorists out to build the bomb.
Persia: Page 2 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- You can't really separate out Iranian identity as one thing or another—broadly speaking, it's part Persian, part Islamic, and part Western, and the paradoxes all exist together.
- But there is a Persian identity that has nothing to do with Islam, which at the same time has blended with the culture of Islam (as evidenced by the Muslim call to prayer that booms from loudspeakers situated around Persepolis, a cue to visitors that they are not only in a Persian kingdom but also in an Islamic republic).
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- - This would be a story about those Iranians who still, at least in part, identify with their Persian roots.
  - Perhaps some millennial spillover runs through the makeup of what is now one of the world's ticking hot spots.
  - Are vestiges of the life-loving Persian nature (wine, love, poetry, song) woven into the fabric of abstinence, prayer, and fatalism often associated with Islam—like a secret computer program running quietly in the background?
  - Surviving, Persian Style
  - Iran's capital city of Tehran is an exciting, pollution-choked metropolis at the foot of the Elburz Mountains.
  - Many of the buildings are made of tiny beige bricks and girded with metal railings, giving the impression of small compounds coming one after the other, punctuated by halted construction projects and parks.
  - There are still some beautiful gardens here, a Persian inheritance, and private ones, with fruit trees and fountains, fishponds and aviaries, flourishing inside the brick walls.
  - While I was here, two Iranian-born American academics, home for a visit, had been locked up, accused of fomenting a velvet revolution against the government. Eventually they were released.
  - But back in the United States, people would ask, wasn't I afraid to be in Iran?—the assumption being that I must have been in danger of getting locked up myself.
  - But I was a guest in Iran, and in Iran a guest is accorded the highest status, the sweetest piece of fruit, the most comfortable place to sit. It's part of a complex system of ritual politeness—taarof—that governs the subtext of life here.
  - Hospitality, courting, family affairs, political negotiations; taarof is the unwritten code for how people should treat each other. The word has an Arabic root, arafa, meaning to know or acquire knowledge of. But the idea of taarof—to abase oneself while exalting the other person—is Persian in origin, said William O. Beeman, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Minnesota.
  - He described it as "fighting for the lower hand," but in an exquisitely elegant way, making it possible, in a hierarchical society like Iran's, "for people to paradoxically deal with each other as equals."
Persia: Page 3 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- Wherever I went, people fussed over me and made sure that all my needs were met. But they can get so caught up trying to please, or seeming to, and declining offers, or seeming to, that true intentions are hidden.
- There's a lot of mind reading and lighthearted, meaningless dialogue while the two parties go back and forth with entreaties and refusals until the truth reveals itself.
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- - Being smooth and seeming sincere while hiding your true feelings—artful pretending—is considered the height of taarof and an enormous social asset.
  - "You never show your intention or your real identity," said a former Iranian political prisoner now living in France. "You're making sure you're not exposing yourself to danger, because throughout our history there has been a lot of danger there."
  - Geography as Destiny
  - Indeed, the long course of Iranian history is saturated with wars, invasions, and martyrs, including the teenage boys during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s who carried plastic keys to heaven while clearing minefields by walking bravely across them.
  - The underlying reason for all the drama is: location.
  - If you draw lines from the Mediterranean to Beijing or Beijing to Cairo or Paris to Delhi, they all pass through Iran, which straddles a region where East meets West. Over 26 centuries, a blending of the hemispheres has been going on here—trade, cultural interchange, friction—with Iran smack in the middle.
  - Meanwhile, because of its wealth and strategic location, the country was also overrun by one invader after another, and the Persian Empire was established, lost, and reestablished a number of times—by the Achaemenids, the Parthians, and the Sassanids—before finally going under.
  - Invaders have included the Turks, Genghis Khan and the Mongols, and, most significantly, Arabian tribesmen.
  - Fired with the zeal of a new religion, Islam, they humbled the ancient Persian Empire for good in the seventh century and ushered in a period of Muslim greatness that was distinctly Persian.
  - The Arab expansion is regarded as one of the most dramatic movements of any people in history. Persia was in its inexorable path, and, ever since, Iranians have been finding ways to keep safe their identity as distinct from the rest of the Muslim and Arab world.
  - "Iran is very big and very ancient," said Youssef Madjidzadeh, a leading Iranian archaeologist, "and it's not easy to change the hearts and identity of the people because of this."
Persia: Page 4 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- They like to say, for instance, that when invaders came to Iran, the Iranians did not become the invaders; the invaders became Iranians.
- Their conquerors were said to have "gone Persian," like Alexander, who, after laying waste to the vanquished Persia, adopted its cultural and administrative practices, took a Persian wife (Roxana), and ordered thousands of his troops to do the same in a mass wedding.
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- - Iranians seem particularly proud of their capacity to get along with others by assimilating compatible aspects of the invaders' ways without surrendering their own—a cultural elasticity that is at the heart of their Persian identity.
  - Welcome to Aratta
  - The earliest reports of human settlement in Iran go back at least 10,000 years, and the country's name derives from Aryans who migrated here beginning around 1500 b.c.
  - Layers of civilization—tens of thousands of archaeological sites—are yet to be excavated.
  - One recent find quickening some hearts was unearthed in 2000 near the city of Jiroft, when flash floods along the Halil River in the southeast exposed thousands of old tombs. The excavation is just six seasons old, and there isn't much to see yet. But intriguing artifacts have been found (including a bronze goat's head dating back perhaps 5,000 years), and Jiroft is spoken of as possibly an early center of civilization contemporary with Mesopotamia.
  - Youssef the archaeologist, an authority on the third millennium b.c., directs the digs. He used to run the archaeology department at the University of Tehran but lost his job after the revolution and moved to France. Over the years, he said, "things changed." Interest in archaeology revived, and he was invited back to run Jiroft.
  - Youssef thinks it may be the fabled "lost" Bronze Age land of Aratta, circa 2700 b.c., reputedly legendary for magnificent crafts that found their way to Mesopotamia.
  - But thus far there's no proof, and other scholars are skeptical. What would he have to find to put the matter
    unequivocally to rest? He chuckled wistfully. "The equivalent of an engraved arch that says, ‘Welcome to Aratta.' "
  - Prospects for more digs at the thousands of unexplored sites seem daunting. In Iran the price of meat is high, there aren't enough jobs, the bureaucracy is inscrutable, bloated, and inefficient, and state corruption—as described to me by three different people—is "an open secret," "worse than ever," and "institutionalized."
  - "The country has many needs," Youssef said, "and certainly archaeology is not the main subject."
  - But since Jiroft, "all the provinces are interested in excavating, and every little town wants to be known around the world like Jiroft. They're proud, and there are rivalries."
Persia: Page 5 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- Superpower Nostalgia
- The legacy from antiquity that has always seemed to loom large in the national psyche is this: The concepts of freedom and human rights may not have originated with the classical Greeks but in Iran, as early as the sixth century b.c. under the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great, who established the first Persian Empire, which would become the largest, most powerful kingdom on Earth.
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- - Among other things, Cyrus, reputedly a brave and humble good guy, freed the enslaved Jews of Babylon in 539 b.c., sending them back to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple with money he gave them, and established what has been called the world's first religiously and culturally tolerant empire.
  - Ultimately it comprised more than 23 different peoples who coexisted peacefully under a central government, originally based in Pasargadae—a kingdom that at its height, under Cyrus's successor, Darius, extended from the Mediterranean to the Indus River.
    
    So Persia was arguably the world's first superpower.
  - "We have a nostalgia to be a superpower again," said Saeed Laylaz, an economic and political analyst in Tehran, "and the country's nuclear ambitions are directly related to this desire."
  - Iran continues to enrich uranium, insisting that it wants only to produce fuel for its nuclear power plants, but highly enriched uranium is also a key ingredient for a nuclear bomb. As a deterrent, the UN has imposed increasing economic sanctions.
  - "At one time the area of the country was triple what it is now, and it was a stable superpower for more than a thousand years," said Saeed, a slender, refined man in glasses and starched shirtsleeves rolled to three-quarter length, sitting in his elegant apartment next to a lamp resembling a cockatoo, with real feathers. The empire once encompassed today's Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Jordan, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and the Caucasus region.
  - "The borders have moved in over the centuries, but this superpower nostalgia, so in contradiction to reality," he said, "is all because of the history."
Persia:Page 6 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- At the foundation of which, again, is Cyrus, and in particular something called the Cyrus Cylinder—perhaps Iran's most exalted artifact—housed at the British Museum in London, with a replica residing at UN headquarters in New York City.
- It can be read as a call for religious and ethnic freedom; it banned slavery and oppression of any kind, the taking of property by force or without compensation; and it gave member states the right to subject themselves to Cyrus's crown, or not. "I never resolve on war to reign."
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- - "When I go abroad, people get surprised when they realize that 65 percent of the college students here are girls. Or when they see Iranian paintings and Iranian architecture, they are shocked. They are judging a civilization just by what they have heard in the last 30 years"—the Islamic revolution; the rollbacks of personal freedoms, particularly for women; the nuclear program and antagonism with the West.
  - They know nothing of the thousands of years that came before, she said—what the Iranians went through to remain distinct from their invaders, and how they did it.
  - For instance, she said, after the Arabs came, and Iran converted to Islam, "eventually we turned to the Shiite sect, which was different from the Arabs, who are Sunni."
    
    They were still Muslims, but not Arabs.
    
    "We were Iranian."
  - In fact, the first thing people said when I asked what they wanted the world to know about them was, "We are not Arabs!" (followed closely by, "We are not terrorists!").
  - A certain Persian chauvinism creeps into the dialogue. Even though economically they're not performing as well as Arab states like Dubai and Qatar, they still feel exceptional.
  - The Arabs who conquered Iran are commonly regarded as having been little more than Bedouin living in tents, with no culture of their own aside from what Iran gave them, and from the vehemence with which they are still railed against, you would think it happened not 14 centuries ago but last week.
  - I met a woman at a wedding who gave off the air of an aging movie star, her dapper husband beside her wearing his white dinner jacket and smoking out of a cigarette holder, and it wasn't five minutes before she lit into the Arabs.
Persia: Page 7 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- "Everything went down after they came, and we have never been the same!" she said, wringing someone's neck in the air.
- And a friend I made here, an English teacher named Ali, spoke of how the loss of the empire still weighed on the national consciousness. "Before they came, we were a great and civilized power," he said, as we drove to his home on the outskirts of Shiraz, dodging motorcycles and tailgaters.
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- - Echoing commonly stated (though disputed) lore, he added: "They burned our books and raped our women, and we couldn't speak Farsi in public for 300 years, or they took out our tongues."
  - The Iranians spoke Farsi anyway. The national language has been Arabized to some extent, but Old Persian remains at its root.
  - The man credited with helping save the language, and the history, from oblivion is a tenth-century poet named Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi is Iran's Homer.
  - Iranians idolize their poets—among many, Rumi, Sa‘id, Omar Khayyám, Hāfez (whose works are said to be consulted for guidance about love and life as much as, if not more than, the Islamic holy book, the Koran). When the people were oppressed by the latest invader and couldn't safely speak their minds, the poets did it for them, cleverly disguised in verse.
  - "Sometimes they were executed," said Youssef the archaeologist, "but they did it anyway."
  - So today, although Iran is home to many cultural denominations (and languages) other than Persian—Turkmen, Arab, Azeri, Baluchi, Kurd, and others—"everyone can speak Farsi," he said, "which is one of the oldest living languages in the world."
  - The poet-hero Ferdowsi, a sincere Muslim who resented the Arab influence, spent 30 years writing, in verse with minimal use of Arabic-derived words, an epic history of Iran called the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings.
  - This panorama of conflict and adventure chronicles 50 monarchies—their accessions to the throne, their deaths, the frequent abdications and forcible overthrows—and ends with the Arab conquest, depicted as a disaster.
  - The most heralded character is Rostam, a chivalrous figure of courage and integrity, a national savior and "trickster hero," according to Dick Davis, a Persian scholar at Ohio State University who has translated the Shahnameh into English. "The stories of Rostam are their myths," he said. "This is how the Iranians see themselves."
  - The work is haunted by the idea that those ethically most fitted to rule are precisely the ones most reluctant to rule, preferring instead to devote themselves to humankind's chief concerns: the nature of wisdom, the fate of the human soul, and the incomprehensibility of God's purposes.
Persia: Page 8 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- The original Shahnameh is long gone, and all that's left are copies, including one in Tehran's Golestan Palace museum.
- the Iranians like to make little ceremonies out of everything, if they can.
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- - I had to wear a surgical mask to protect the manuscript from stray saliva and the condensation from my breath, and Behnaz put on white cotton gloves. She gently lifted the book, which dates to about 1430, out of its box and gingerly turned the pages with the tips of her fingers while I examined its 22 illustrations with a magnifying glass.
  - They depicted scenes the collective cultural memory is steeped in—someone tied to a tree while awaiting his fate; Rostam unwittingly killing his own son, Sohrab, in battle; men on horseback with spears fighting invaders on elephants—all precisely drawn and vibrantly colored, using inks that were made from crushed stones mixed with the liquid squeezed from flower petals.
  - It is said that just about anybody on the street, regardless of education, can recite some Ferdowsi, and there are usually readings going on at colleges or someone's apartment or traditional Persian teahouses, like one in south Tehran called Azari.
  - The walls were covered with scenes from the Shahnameh, among them the one of Rostam killing Sohrab. A storyteller did a one-man dramatic reading, and afterward musicians played traditional music and sang about yearning for the love of a woman or for the love of Allah.
  - People sat together at long tables or stretched out on platforms covered with Persian rugs, smoking their tiny Bahman cigarettes and clapping to the music, while waiters brought dates and cookies and tea in delicate little glasses with little spoons, followed by kebabs, yogurt milk, pickles, and beet salad.
  - "They Can't Control What's Inside Us"
  - Take the New Year: Nowruz, a 13-day extravaganza during which everything shuts down and the people eat a lot, dance, recite poetry, and build fires that they jump back and forth over.
  - It's a thanksgiving of sorts, celebrated around the spring equinox, and a holdover holiday from Zoroastrianism, at one time the state religion of the Persians.
  - By the time the Arabs arrived, bringing what was for them the new idea of worshipping a single God, Persians had been doing it for more than a millennium.
Persia: Page 9 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- These days some officials see the bond with antiquity as a focus for hope. "We are a nation with such a history that the world could listen to us," Iranian Vice President Esfandiar Rahim Mashaee told me.
- "We hope that by taking pride in our archaeological sites, the people realize their capabilities, and it imbues the soul of the nation."
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- - But conservative Islamists who have no interest in reviving Persian identity can still hold sway. At times the government has tried to diminish the importance of Nowruz or replace it with a different New Year, such as the birthday of Imam Ali, the historical leader of the Shiite Muslims.
  - "They would bring forces and arrest people," my friend Ali said. "But they couldn't get rid of Nowruz because we've been practicing Nowruz for 2,500 years! They don't really control us, because they can't control what's inside us."
  - That has never stopped Iran's leaders from trying, or foreign powers from interfering—particularly after the country was discovered, around the turn of the 20th century, to be sitting on what Iran claims is an estimated 135 billion barrels of proven conventional oil reserves, the second largest in the world after Saudi Arabia.
  - Adding to the drama is that the Persian Gulf is located along Iran's southern border. On the other side lies much of the rest of the world's crude, in the oil fields of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
  - There's also a hairpin waterway in the gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil passes every day. So Iran is in a unique position to threaten the world's oil supply and delivery—or sell its own oil elsewhere than to the West.
  - Oil was at the root of a 1953 event that is still a sore subject for many Iranians: the CIA-backed overthrow, instigated and supported by the British government, of Iran's elected and popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.
  - Mossadegh had kicked out the British after the Iranian oil industry, controlled through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), was nationalized, and the British had retaliated with an economic blockade.
  - With the Cold War on and the Soviet bloc located just to the north, the U.S. feared that a Soviet-backed communism in Iran could shift the balance of world power and jeopardize Western interests in the region.
  - The coup—Operation TP-Ajax—is believed to have been the CIA's first. (Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy's grandson, ran the show, and H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the Persian Gulf war commander, was enlisted to coax the shah into playing his part.
  - Its base of operations was the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the future "nest of spies" to the Iranians, where 52 U.S. hostages were taken in 1979.)
  - Afterward, the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was
    returned to power, commercial oil rights fell largely to British and U.S. oil companies, and Mossadegh was imprisoned and later placed under house arrest until he died in 1967.
  - To Iranians like Shabnam Rezaei, who has created the online magazine Persian Mirror to promote Iran's cultural identity, Operation TP-Ajax set the stage for later decades of oppression and Islamic fundamentalism. "I think if we had been allowed to have a democratic government," she said, "we could have been the New York of the Middle East—of all of Asia, frankly—a center for finance, industry, commerce, culture, and a modern way of thinking."
Persia:Page 10 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- For the Love of God
- The shah had his own uses for Persian identity. He was big on promoting Persepolis and Cyrus while at the same time pouring Western music, dress, behaviors, and business interests into Iran.
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- - One attempt to instill nationalistic pride, which backfired and helped turn public opinion against him, was the ostentatious celebration he staged in 1971 to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of Persian monarchy.
  - It featured a luxurious tent city outside the entrance to Persepolis, VIP apartments with marble bathrooms, food flown in from Paris, and a guest list that included dignitaries from around the world but few Iranians.
  - The shah's vision apparently involved too much modernizing too fast, and many Iranians bristled.
  - "We were getting westernized," said Farin Zahedi, a drama professor at the University of Tehran. "But it was superficial, because the public had no real understanding of Western culture." Iranians experienced it as a cultural attack and rebelled in the press and with street demonstrations.
  - The more paranoid the shah became, the more heavy-handed were his secret police—SAVAK, created in 1957 with the help of American and Israeli advisers.
  - At least hundreds of people are believed to have been executed by SAVAK; many others were imprisoned, tortured, and exiled, and more than a thousand were killed by the army during demonstrations.
  - So when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spoke in the late 1970s of liberating the people from this latest yoke, they were moved by his eloquence and moral rectitude, and for a time the reemergence of religion after the shah's relentless modernism felt like a cleansing.
  - Yet many Iranians by nature are not particularly religious, in the sense of being mosquegoers and fasters.
  - "They have a powerful soul and spirit," said a carpet salesman named Arsha, "but that is not the same." There's a tendency to follow more of a Zoroastrian model from antiquity, with its disdain for rules and for the presumption that an intermediary, such as a mullah, is required to know Allah.
  - The spiritual journey has tended to be more inward, in keeping with the Persian proverb "Knowledge of self is knowledge of God."
  - So while Iranians at first were open to the idea of an increased role of Islam in public life, they weren't prepared for it to be forced on them with such rigor, especially given the Koran's specific instruction that there should be "no compulsion in religion."
  - They certainly didn't expect the clerics to take over commerce, government administration, the courts, and day-to-day life, down to and including how to go to the bathroom and how to have sex.
  - Punishments reminiscent of the Dark Ages—public stonings, hangings, the cutting off of fingers and limbs—were put into effect.
  - The central government now discourages some of these archaic practices, but stubborn conservative mullahs out in the provinces cling to the old ways. Beneath it all is the spiritual aim to serve Allah and prepare for paradise.
  - "They're forcing heaven on me!" Ali said.
Persia: Page 11 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

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- At his home one night, half a dozen friends sat in a circle and confided how awful it was to be trapped in an environment of fear and secrecy, not knowing if a friend or a loved one has been put in a position to make reports on what you're thinking and saying and doing.
- "The ayatollahs and the ordinary people—everyone has to pretend," said a soft-spoken locksmith with a huge mustache named Mister D. "You don't know who is telling the truth; you don't know who is really religious and who isn't."
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- - The Persians have a saying: The walls have mice, and the mice have ears.
  - "You can't trust your own eyes," Ali said.
    
    "If you breathe in or breathe out," Mister D said, "they know."
  - The Generation of the Revolution
  - As for the revolution's effect on Persian identity? A typically Iranian thing seems to have happened.
  - For ten years the doors to the West were closed, and conservative clerics running the government went about trying to minimize any cultural identification that was pre-Islamic, a period referred to in much of the Muslim world as Jahiliya, age of ignorance.
  - In official documents, where possible, references to Iran were replaced with references to Islam. Zoroastrian symbols were replaced with Islamic symbols, streets were renamed, and references to the Persian Empire disappeared from schoolbooks.
  - For a time it seemed that Ferdowsi's tomb—a big, pale-stone mausoleum outside the holy city of Mashhad, with a beautiful reflecting pool leading up to it and chirping birds racing about the columns—might be destroyed. Even Persepolis was in danger of being razed. "But they realized this would unite the people against them," Ali said, "and they had to give up."
  - The people had welcomed the removal of cultural junk from the West, said Farin, the drama professor, as we sipped tea in her tasteful Tehran apartment. "But we soon realized that the identity the government was introducing also was not exactly who we were."
  - In the cultural confusion, "elements of the old culture"—traditional music, Persian paintings, readings from Ferdowsi—were rekindled. "We call it 'the forgotten empire.' "
Persia: Page 12 Ancient Soul of Iran - National Geographic Magazine

12 pages from the National Geographic on Iran/Persia and the Iranians/Persian people.

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persia iran people antiquity arabs islam zoroaster cyrus culture aryan pride nationalism revolution west uranium-enrichment nuclear usa on 2008-07-24
- A young underground Persian rap singer named Yas joined us then. He had black spiky hair, stylishly long sideburns, handsome eyebrows shaped like two black bananas, and around his neck he wore a silver fravahar, the Zoroastrian winged disk that signifies the soul's upward progress through good thoughts, words, and deeds.
- He's part of the Generation of the Revolution, who grew up after 1979 and account for more than two-thirds of the country's 70 million people.
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- - Variously described as jaded and lacking belief in their futures—"a burned generation," as Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi put it—they are increasingly leaving for Europe and elsewhere.
  - Some have a rich consciousness of their Persian past while at the same time supporting the idea of Islamic unity; some feel only Persian or only Islamic; and others immerse themselves in Western culture through television programming received on illegal satellite dishes. Farin said: "They're schizophrenic."
  - Yas raps about Persian poets, grandparents, and the history of Iran.
  - One of his most popular cuts, "My Identity," was in response to the movie 300, about the famous battle at Thermopylae between the Spartans of Greece and the so-called Persian immortals. "The Greeks were portrayed as heroic, innocent, and civilized," Yas said. "The Persians were shown as ugly savages with a method of fighting that was unfair."
  - The movie set off a tirade from Iranians here and abroad, who experienced it as a cultural attack. In defense, Yas rapped about Persepolis and Cyrus but also chastised his fellow citizens for resting on the laurels of greatness past.
  - An irony is that the Islamic revolution—at times referred to here as the "second Arab invasion"—appears to have strengthened the very ties to antiquity that it tried so hard to sever; it has roused that part of the national identity that remains connected to the idea, memorialized in places like Persepolis and Pasargadae, of Iranians as direct descendants of some of the world's most ancient continuous people.
  - A civil engineer named Hashem told me of a recent
    impromptu celebration at Cyrus's tomb. People text messaged each other on their cell phones, and a couple of thousand "coincidentally" showed up, buying multiple entrance tickets to support restoration of the tomb. The celebration was informal. No speeches, no ceremony. "Just to honor Cyrus and show solidarity."
  - As Farin put it, shaking her lowered head with an air of world-weariness, "there has been this constant onslaught on our identity, and the reaction has always been to return to that deepest identity. Inside every Iranian there is an
    emperor or an empress. That is for sure."
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- Where I Live cannock chase & Staffs area
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VDARE.com: 02/21/09 - Saturday Forum: Immigration Reformer Invented "Hate Facts" Concept; etc.

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- A TX Reader Explains The "Southern Dimension" Of The "Patriotic Immigration Reform" Movement
- From:
  
  Don Reynolds (email
  him)
- 13 more annotations...
- - Re:
    
    "A
    Pennsylvania Reader Says Immigration Reform Patriots
    Have Better Things To Do Than Argue About The Civil War;
    etc."
  - I have read and re-read this note several times and it
    is priceless.
  - I must
    thank the writer for reminding me,
    and many other Southerners, of the fact that our Yankee
    cousins strongly disapprove of many things that we
    think, do, and believe.
  - I cannot estimate the magnitude
    of misinformation that packed into this short note, but
    I am convinced that the writer actually believes every
    word.
  - I certainly hope he will continue with his
    South-bashing, notably his disrespectful remarks about
    
    Robert E. Lee and other
    
    Confederate leaders. He’s the perfect example of why
    this Union of States cannot continue indefinitely.
  - We
    are different people and our societies are incompatible.
  - Is there a Southern dimension to the
    "Patriotic
    Immigration Reform" movement in this country?
    Undoubtedly the South is the most consistent and steady
    part of that movement.
  - If you map the
    
    Senate votes in favor of amnesty for illegal aliens,,
    you will find that very few of those votes were from the
    eleven states of the former Confederacy.
  - It is Yankee
    senators to see who is trying to force amnesty on this
    nation.
  - Mr.
    Cleburne did not write his article to annoy
    anyone...nor should his article about the Civil War. He
    was rightly responding to the silly comparisons of
    
    Obama to Lincoln lately, which are at least
    premature and probably deliberately misleading.
  - Let me be the first of what will likely be many
    Southerners who will encourage this writer to disrespect
    the South. It makes our job much, much easier.
  - Reynolds is a city planner and economist. His previous
    letters about bias in journalism, the
    U.S.
    enemy identification problems, the folly of a third
    party and Ron Paul are
    
    here,
    
    here,
    
    here and
    
    here.
  - Patrick Cleburne comments:
    Before his death, the South was well defended on
    
    VDARE.COM by
    Sam
    Francis. Subsequently, the task is often handled by
    Mike
    Scruggs (see
    
    here). This
    
    letter by Scruggs is also of interest.
Ancient man used stone 'sat nav' to navigate across country | Mail Online

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britain ancient stone-age forts hills satnav travel southern-britain prehistoric isoceles-triangle on 2009-09-20 and saved by 3 people
- Stone Age satnav: Did ancient man use 5,000-year-old travel chart to navigate across Britain
- By
  David Derbyshire
  
  Last updated at 9:07 AM on 15th September 2009
- 12 more annotations...
- - It's considered to be one of the more recent innovations to help the hapless traveller.
    But the satnav system may not be as modern as we think.
  - According to a new theory, prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a similar system based on stone circles and other markers.
  - Connected by triangles: Some of the sites created by Stone Age man (below)
  - The complex network of stones, hill
    forts and earthworks allowed travellers to trek hundreds of miles with
    'pinpoint accuracy' more than 5,000 years ago, amateur historian Tom
    Brooks says. The grid covered much of southern England
    
    and Wales and included landmarks
    such as Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, claims Mr Brooks, a retired
    marketing executive of Honiton, Devon.
  - He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites
    in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least
    two other sites using isosceles triangles - these are triangles with
    two sides the same length.
  - This, he says, is proof that the
    landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were
    built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from
    A to B.
  - For more complex journeys, they would have broken up the route into a series of easy to navigate steps.
  - Anyone starting at Silbury Hill in
    Wiltshire, for instance, could have used the grid to get to Lanyon
    Quoit in Cornwall without a map.
  - Mr Brooks added: 'The sides of some
    of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are
    accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.
    
    One of the monuments was on Silbury Hill, Wiltshire. It was part of a giant geometric grid used for navigating
  - 'So advanced, sophisticated and
    accurate is the geometrical surveying now discovered, that we must
    review fundamentally the perception of our Stone Age forebears as
    primitive, or conclude that they received some form of external
    guidance.'
  - On the question of 'external guidance', he does not rule out extraterrestrial help.
  - However, Mike Pitts, editor of
    British Archaeology, said: 'The landscape of southern Britain was
    intensively settled and there are many earth works and archaeological
    finds. It is very easy to find patterns in the landscape, but it
    doesn't mean that they are real.'
The dogu have something to tell us | The Japan Times Online

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dogu jomon-culture japan venus figurines far-east asia neolithic the-dogu art london-museum exhibition culture civilization on 2009-10-03 and saved by 2 people
- Friday, Oct. 2, 2009
- The dogu have something to tell us
- 39 more annotations...
- - Neither human nor animal, Japan's Jomon sculptures are a mystery to be enjoyed
  - By VICTORIA JAMES
    
    Special to The Japan Times
  - LONDON — They are, according to their kanji, part earth and part spirit, somewhere between animal and human. They are dogu,
  - the most remarkable products of Japan's Jomon Period, a Neolithic era before the advent of rice cultivation, when the Japanese archipelago supported higher population densities than any other pre-agricultural society in the world.
  - The dogu are humanoid forms shaped in clay, large and small, richly decorated or homely and unadorned.
  - Some 18,000 of them have been unearthed to date, in Jomon-period settlements stretching from Kyushu, north through Tohoku to Hokkaido.
  - The oldest are nearly 10,000 years old, the youngest a mere 2,300. Yet despite their advanced age, they're on the move.
  - Sixty-seven dogu, loaned from collections across Japan, have taken up temporary residence in the British Museum, London, for a new exhibition: "The Power of Dogu."
  - In December, they return home for three months' display at Tokyo National Museum.
  - The dogu are oddly hypnotic, a parade of the beautiful, brutal and uncanny: a cat-faced dogu, designed without legs; a dogu with an outsize heart-shaped face; a sturdy dogu wearing an enigmatic triangular mask, and perhaps most famous of all, a "goggle-eyed" dogu from Kamegaoka covered in stippled and corded markings.
  - Tanabatake "Venus": A big-bottomed dogu from Nagano Prefecture, 2500-1500 B.C.
    
    CHINO CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION
  - There are dogu with horns, with flat heads, bow-legs, dogu wearing bodices, knee-pads, dogu holding pots.
  - Some dogu invite immediate empathy, like the fragmentary figure of a mother cradling a baby; others, like the lofty standing dogu, nearly half a meter tall, appear hieratic and inscrutable.
  - It seems hard to believe they could all represent a common phenomenon, one to which Meiji Era archaeologists in 1882 first gave the name "dogu."
  - "The rich diversity of the dogu tradition is one of the themes we wanted to present in the exhibition," explains curator Dr. Simon Kaner, an archaeologist of the Sainsbury Institute who specializes in the prehistory of Japan.
  - "The Japanese archipelago during the Jomon period was occupied by a large number of different groups of people, or different societies — we should talk not of Jomon culture but Jomon cultures, Jomon peoples and not Jomon people.
  - They probably spoke a number of different dialects and expressed themselves through a huge range of pottery styles — over 400 local styles have been recognized to date."
  - Indeed, the dogu are both an intensely local form of expression, and also manifest a shared urge by Neolithic peoples around the world to represent the human form in clay.
  - Humanoid figures of a comparable age have been found as far afield as Mexico, Turkey, Ecuador, Romania and Egypt.
  - Curiously, Japan's nearest neighbors do not appear to have had an equivalent tradition.
  - "There are very few ceramic figures from the Korean Peninsula," says Kaner. "And in China the human form was represented by painting on pots, or by very different forms, like the 'temple' or 'shrine' from Niuheliang, which has life-size unbaked clay figures around the walls."
  - So what did the dogu mean to their Jomon makers?
  - The British Museum exhibition is part of an ongoing debate in the field of Neolithic studies as to the nature and purpose of early sculptural representation of the human form.
  - The 1960s saw a proliferation of theories around so-called "mother goddess" figures, often nicknamed "Venus." (Indeed, pride of place in the current exhibition goes to a big-bottomed dogu known as the Tanabatake "Venus" — a label Kaner agrees is "not very helpful.")
  - Dogu aesthetics: A hollow clay figure, 1500-1000 B.C., from Chobonaino, Hokkaido.
    
    © OGAWA TADAHIRO / HAKODATE CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION
  - The "Venus" theory has declined in popularity in recent years, while scientists working on a hoard of 2,000 figures found at Catalhoyuk in Turkey announced earlier this month a new hypothesis that the artifacts were not ritual objects, but simply toys.
  - The function of dogu remains mysterious
  - Many were, like the Catalhoyuk figurines, "everyday" objects — the majority have been found broken, some in heaps. If they were toys, what does that imply about the status of children, or the very idea of childhood, in Jomon cultures?
  - Some dogu were, certainly, given special treatment — placed alongside burials or "enshrined" in pits.
  - Kaner thinks "there is scope for both 'everyday' figures and objects of veneration within the dogu tradition."
  - Whatever their ritual or workaday function, the dogu are also, irresistibly, art. Their whimsical forms enchant, and their craftsmanship — some dogu are large and hollow, many are perfectly balanced and freestanding — is undoubted.
  - An essay in the handsome catalog makes a case for the dogu as art, and for the current exhibition as a "turning point" in the wider recognition of that artistry.
  - Their first champion in this regard, however, was the avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto, whose "The Myth of Tomorrow" was unveiled in Shibuya Station last year.
  - Okamoto's work, both painting and sculpture, was profoundly influenced by his affinity with Jomon design.
  - He wrote of one encounter with a piece of Jomon pottery: "My blood boiled to a tremendous heat and then burst into flames."
  - On another occasion, he reflected: "The violent existence of Jomon ceramics manifests itself in a pulse of energy that can never be grasped by normal aesthetics and intellectual control."
  - Another Jomon enthusiast was Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata, who had a dogu on his desk. It is a lugubrious figure with a heart-shaped face, and Kawabata described in an essay how "it is sitting here in front of my writing paper and speaking to me."
  - Dogu still speak — albeit through rather different media today. They feature in the "Understanding Japanese History" comic-book series narrated by cult robocat Doraemon, whose human sidekick Nobita remarks that they "look like aliens."
  - In the PlayStation game "Dokioki," the dogu are indeed aliens. Shinji Nishikawa's "Dogu Famir," a seven-volume comic series, features a family of figurines trying to fit into everyday life — shopping, attending school and protecting the usual assortment of scantily-clad manga heroines from an evil, UFO-controlled dogu.
Archaeologist Claims Human Sacrifice Performed At Cahokia Mounds - Phantoms and Monsters Wiki

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anthropologist tim-pauketat cahokia-mounds human-sacrifice demales males decapitation figurines serpents north-america native-americans mississippian-culture on 2009-10-05
- Archaeologist Claims Human Sacrifice Performed At Cahokia Mounds
  
  
  
- bnd.com - Human sacrifice! Victims buried alive! Read all about it in "Cahokia -- Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi."
- 27 more annotations...
- - According to this new book by University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology Tim Pauketat, the mound builders were not always the idyllic, corn-growing, pottery-making, fishing-hunting gentle villagers depicted in various dioramas at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville.
  - Pauketat said these long-vanished people practiced human sacrifice of women and men on a mass scale and weren't always careful to bury only the dead.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - Based on years of study of artifacts including many from the extensive excavation of the site's Mound 72 during 1967-71, Pauketat's book is getting national attention. The Washington Post described it as "undeniably hot." A national online review service used the headline, "Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi."
  - But the "virgins" angle may be a bit of an overstatement, said Pauketat, but not by much.
  - "In the book I do not use the word virgin. I used female sacrifices," he said, noting that close study of the pelvic area of some of 53 female skeletons found in a huge pit below the mound showed clear signs of childbirth.
  - "They were selecting women of a certain age, but it's not like they're selecting virgins," he said. Most of the sacrificial victims were in their early 20s, he said.
  - The existence of 260 skeletal remains including of women all retrieved from within and under Mound 72 was not previously unknown in the metro-east. But because of the book, it's sensational news in other parts of the country, especially in big Eastern cities where residents are unfamiliar with the Midwest's often savage early history.
  - Pauketat said that the vast collection of data from the mound excavation included reports from the original archaeologist who found finger bones extended deep into the sand below some of the skeletons, evidence that victims were alive when buried.
  - "That's the interpretation of the original excavator. He's quite sure of that. I talked to him in person," Pauketat said.
  - "Basically, the book came together after we reached a critical threshold, all of the little pieces started falling into place. A lot of pieces from the Mound 72 dig are important because they help make sense of all the other pieces that have been found."
  - Ancient Cahokia, which reached its peak about 1150 A.D. with a population of 20,000, was a religious center of farmers and hunters that probably influenced much of what archaeologists call the Southeast Ceremonial Complex, a string of similar but smaller sites found from Illinois to northern Florida.
  - It was abandoned about 100 to 200 years later and its descendants are believed to be the various tribes from historic times.
  - At the time of its zenith, Cahokia rivaled London in population and was America's most-populous city until Philadelphia eclipsed it in the 18th century.
  - About 80 of the original 120 mounds survive, including Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthen structure north of Mexico.
  - In this society, often referred to as the Mississippian Culture, women played much more of a role than convenient sacrificial victims, Pauketat said. And even in this death ritual, women were respected, unlike some of the men whose remains were found with heads lopped off.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - "The women never show injury. There is no trauma. So that means either they drank poison or they were strangled. But, that's speculation. They were very carefully placed into these pits," he said.
  - Ancient Cahokia's big draw, according to the book, was religion
  - And in the practice of various religious rites, evidence has been found that women were the rivals of this society's male religious leaders.
  - Pauketat said the evidence is in the form of curious female figurines carved from a type of clay found just south of St. Louis known as flint clay. The reddish substance dries rock hard.
  - Just last month, a small, 4-inch high female figure was found at a state-run archaeological dig in East St. Louis. Pauketat said only 23 other such figurines are known, including the largest, about 16 inches high.
  - The elevated status of women in religion in Cahokian society is illustrated, Pauketat said, by the decorations on the figurines that include a highly prized serpent figure, and of depictions of staple foods like corn and squash.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - On some figurines, baskets that have been interpreted as holding the bones of ancestors also have been carved into the statues.
  - "Clearly, a lot of the artwork of female gods and female figureheads show that women were probably highly elevated at Cahokia."
  - Pauketat said that at Cahokia, religion drew people from small farming villages all over the metro-east and from where present day St. Louis stands.
  - "People recognized in that place (Cahokia) a supernatural power on a scale and of a kind that was probably unknown in North America north of Mexico," he said
  - As for the female sacrifices, Pauketat said important women may have been chosen because of their status.
  - "These female sacrifices might not have been of unimportant people. This may have been a very honored role to fill. It may have been people who were impersonating some kind of corn goddess," he said, "And their duty was to die."
Pre-Islamic period of Afghanistan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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afghanistan pre-history tribes bactria indo-aryans sanskrit pashtoon swat-valley greeks persians hindus islam taliban ashoka on 2009-10-05
- In a letter to his mother, Alexander described his encounters with the western and northern tribes (Afghans) thus: "I am involved in the land of a 'Leonine' (lion-like) and brave people, where every foot of the ground is like a wall of steel, confronting my soldier. You have brought only one son into the world, but everyone in this land can be called an Alexander.”
  Add Sticky Note
- Under the Seleucids, as under Alexander, Greek colonists and soldiers colonized Bactria, roughly corresponding to modern Afghanistan's borders.
- 49 more annotations...
- - However, the majority of Macedonian soldiers of Alexander the Great wanted to leave the east and return home to Greece.
  - Later, Seleucus sought to guard his eastern frontier and moved Ionian Greeks (also known as Yavanas to many local groups) to Bactria in the third century BCE.
  - Mauryan Period (305-180BCE)
  - The founder of the empire, Chandragupta Maurya, confronted a Macedonian invasion force led by Seleucus I in 305 BCE and following a brief conflict, an agreement was reached as Seleucus ceded Gandhara and Arachosia (centered around ancient Kandahar) and areas south of Bagram (corresponding to the extreme south-east of modern Afghanistan) to the Mauryans.
  - While the Diadochi were warring amongst themselves, the Mauryan Empire was developing in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent.
  - During the 120 years of the Mauryans in southern Afghanistan, Buddhism was introduced and eventually become a major religion alongside Zoroastrianism and local pagan beliefs.
  - The ancient Grand Trunk Road was built linking what is now Kabul to various cities in the Punjab and the Gangetic Plain.
  - Commerce, art, and architecture (seen especially in the construction of stupas) developed during this period. It reach its high point under Emperor Ashoka whose edicts, roads, and rest stops were found throughout the subcontinent.
  - Although the vast majority of them throughout the subcontinent were written in Prakrit, Afghanistan is notable for the inclusion of 2 Greek and Aramaic ones alongside the court language of the Mauryans.
  - Inscriptions made by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, a fragment of Edict 13 in Greek, as well as a full Edict, written in both Greek and Aramaic has been discovered in Kandahar.
  - It is said to be written in excellent Classical Greek, using sophisticated philosophical terms. In this Edict, Ashoka uses the word Eusebeia ("Piety") as the Greek translation for the ubiquitous "Dharma" of his other Edicts written in Prakrit:
  - "Ten years (of reign) having been completed, King Piodasses (Ashoka) made known (the doctrine of) Piety (εὐσέβεια, Eusebeia) to men; and from this moment he has made men more pious, and everything thrives throughout the whole world. And the king abstains from (killing) living beings, and other men and those who (are) huntsmen and fishermen of the king have desisted from hunting. And if some (were) intemperate, they have ceased from their intemperance as was in their power; and obedient to their father and mother and to the elders, in opposition to the past also in the future, by so acting on every occasion, they will live better and more happily." (Trans. by G.P. Carratelli^[6])
  - The last ruler in the region was probably Subhagasena (Sophagasenus of Polybius), who, in a ll probability, belonged to the Ashvaka (q.v.) background.
  - Greco-Bactrian rule
  - In the middle of the 3rd century BCE, an independent, Hellenistic state was declared in Bactria and eventually the control of the Seleucids and Mauryans was overthrown in western and southern Afghanistan.
  - Graeco-Bactrian rule spread until it included a large territory which stretched from northeastern Iran in the west to the Punjab in India in the east by about 170 BCE.
  - Graeco-Bactrian rule was eventually defeated by a combination of internecine disputes that plagued Greek and Hellenized rulers to the west, continual conflict with Indian kingdoms, as well as the pressure of two groups of nomadic invaders from Central Asia—the Parthians and Sakas.
  - The Kushan Empire, ca. 150 BCE–300 CE
  - In the third and second centuries BC, the Parthians, a nomadic Iranian people, arrived in ancient Afghanistan.
  - The Parthians established control in most of what is Iran as early as the middle of the 3rd century BC;
  - about 100 years later another Indo-European group from the north—the Tocharian Kushans (a subgroup of the tribe called the Yuezhi by the Chinese)—entered the region that is now Afghanistan and established an empire lasting almost four centuries.
  - The Kushan Empire spread from the Kabul River valley to defeat other Central Asian tribes that had previously conquered parts of the northern central Iranian Plateau once ruled by the Parthians.
  - By the middle of the 1st century BCE, the Kushans' base of control became Afghanistan and their empire spanned from the north of the Pamir mountains to the Ganges river valley in India.
  - Early in the 2nd century under Kanishka, the most powerful of the Kushan rulers, the empire reached its greatest geographic and cultural breadth to become a center of literature and art.
  - Kanishka extended Kushan control to the mouth of the Indus River on the Arabian Sea, into Kashmir, and into what is today the Chinese-controlled area north of Tibet.
  - Kanishka was a patron of religion and the arts. It was during his reign that Mahayana Buddhism^{[citation needed]} , imported to northern India earlier by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (ca. 260 BCE–232 BCE), reached its zenith in Central Asia.
  - Though the Kushanas were predominantly Zoroastrian themselves^{[citation needed]}, they also supported local Buddhists and Hindus as well as the worship of various local
  - Sassanian Rule, ca. 300–650
  - In the 3rd century, Kushan control fragmented into semi-independent kingdoms that became easy targets for conquest by the rising Iranian dynasty, the Sassanians (ca. 224–561) which annexed Afghanistan by 300 CE.
  - Sassanian control was tenuous at times as numerous challenges from Central Asian tribes led to instability and constant warfare in the region.
  - The disunited Kushan and Sassanian kingdoms were in a poor position to meet the threat of a new wave of nomadic, Indo-European invaders from the north.
  - The Hephthalites (or White Huns) swept out of Central Asia around the fourth century into Bactria and to the south, overwhelming the last of the Kushan and Sassanian kingdoms.
  - Some have speculated that the name Afghanistan land of the Afghans derives from which could be an adjective such as brave, chivlarious, valour, which was to use for the people in today's Afghanistan. Historians believe that Hepthalite control continued for a century and was marked by constant warfare with the Sassanians to the west who exerted nominal control over the region.
  - By the middle of the sixth century the Hephthalites were defeated in the territories north of the Amu Darya (the Oxus River of antiquity) by another group of Central Asian nomads, the Göktürks, and by the resurgent Sassanians in the lands south of the Amu Darya.
  - It was the ruler of western Göktürks, Sijin (aka Sinjibu, Silzibul and Yandu Muchu Khan) who led the forces against the Hepthalites who were defeated at the Battle of Chach (Tashkent) and at the Battle of Bukhara.
  - The Shahi Kings
  - The Shahi dynasties ruled portions of the Kabul Valley (in eastern Afghanistan) and the old province of Gandhara (northern Pakistan and Kashmir) from the decline of the Kushan Empire in third century to the early ninth century.^[7]
  - They are split into two eras the Buddhist Turk-Shahis (also known as the Kushano-Hephthalites and the later Hindu-Shahis with the change-over occurring around 870, and ruled up until the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan.
  - When Xuanzang visited the region early in the 7th century CE, the Kabul valley region was ruled by a Kshatriya king, who is identified as the Shahi Khingal, and whose name has been found in an inscription found in Gardez.
  - The Turk Shahi regency was overthrown and replaced by a Mohyal Shahi dynasty of Brahmins who began the first phase of the Hindu Shahi dynasty.
  - These Hindu Shahi kings of Kabul and Gandhara may have had links to some ruling families in neighboring Kashmir and other areas to the east.
  - The Shahis, though Hindu, were rulers of a predominantly Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Hindu and Muslim populations and were thus patrons of numerous faiths, and various artifacts and coins from their rule have been found that display their multicultural domain.
  - In 964AD, the last Mohyal Hindu Shahi was succeeded by the Janjua overlord, Jayapala, of the Panduvanshi dynasty.
  - The last Shahi emperors Jayapala, Anandapala and Tirlochanpala fought invading Muslim Turks from Central Asia and were gradually defeated and eventually exiled from their domains into northern India.
  - Archaeological remnants from Afghanistan's pre-Islamic period
  - Along ancient trade routes, however, stone monuments of the once flourishing Buddhist culture did exist as reminders of the past. The two massive sandstone Buddhas of Bamyan, thirty-five and fifty-three meters high overlooked the ancient route through Bamyan to Balkh and dated from the third and fifth centuries.
  - Most of these early Zoroastrian, Greek, Hellenistic, Buddhist, and Hindu cultures were replaced by the coming of Islam and little influence remains in Afghanistan today.
  - They survived until 2001, when they were destroyed by the Taliban.
  - In this and other key places in Afghanistan, archaeologists have located frescoes, stucco decorations, statuary, and rare objects from as far away as China, Phoenicia, and Rome, which were crafted as early as the 2nd century and bear witness to the influence of these ancient civilizations upon Afghanistan.
History of Afghanistan: Islamic Conquest

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afghanistan islam conquest arabs sassanians qadisiya kushans turks samarkand abbasid shia iran scholarship learning on 2009-10-05
- Islamic Conquest
- Afghanistan History
- 13 more annotations...
- - In 637 A.D., only five years after the death of the Prophet
    Muhammad, the Arab Muslims shattered the might of the Iranian
    Sassanians at the battle of Qadisiya, and the invaders began
    to reach into the lands east of Iran.
  - The Muslim conquest
    was a prolonged struggle in the area that is now Afghanistan.
  - Following the first Arab raid into Qandahar in about 700, local
    rulers, probably either Kushans or Western Turks, began to come under the control of Ummayid caliphs, who sent Arab
    military governors and tax collectors into the region.
  - By the
    middle of the eighth century the rising Abbasid Dynasty was
    able to subdue the area.
  - There was a period of peace under the
    rule of the caliph, Harun al Rashid (7&S-809), and his son, in
    which learning fluorished in such Central Asian cities as Samarkand,
    located in what is now the Soviet Union.
  - Over the
    period of the seventh through the ninth centuries, most inhabitants
    of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, the southern parts
    of the Soviet Union, and some of northern India were converted
    to Sunni Islam, which replaced the Zorastrianism,
    Hinduism, Buddhism, and indigenous religions of previous
    empires.
  - During the eighth and ninth centuries, partly to obtain
    better grazing land, ancestors of many of the Turkic-speaking
    
    groups now identifiable in Afghanistan settled in the Hindu
    Kush area.
  - Some of these tribes settled in what are now Ghor,
    
    Ghazni, and Kabul provinces and began to assimilate much of
    the culture and language of the already present Pashtun tribes.
  - By the middle of the ninth century, Abbasid rule had
    faltered, and semi-independent states began to emerge
    throughout the empire.
  - In the Hindu Kush area three shortlived,
    local dynasties emerged. The best known of the three,
    the Sammanid, ruling out of Bukhara (in what is now the Soviet
    Union), extended its rule briefly as far east as India and west
    into Iran.
  - Although Arab Muslim
    intellectual life still centered on Baghdad, Iranian Muslim
    scholarship, i.e., Shia Islam, at this time
    predominated in the Sammanid areas.
  - Bukhara and neighboring Samarkand were centers of
    science, the arts, and Islamic studies.
  - By the mid-tenth century
    the Sammanid Dynasty crumbled in the face of attack from
    the Turkish tribes to the north and from a rising dynasty to the
    south, the Ghaznavids.
The Real Story of Nazi Egyptology | Heritage Key

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owen-jarus germany nazi-germany egyptology hitler universities national-socialism learning archaeology professors aryan science art on 2009-10-18
- “Since its inception, National Socialism strove for implementing a new system of education in agreement with its doctrine across the country's institutions of learning,” Professor Schneider wrote.
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- No power of the world will (make) me take my pride; I don't want to be pitied, rather I pity the other. But there is one thing I have learnt in these days (...): to hate.
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- - Professor Schneider said that it appears as if the Ministry of Propaganda found it intolerable that a Jew have these editorial responsibilities and pressured Steindorff heavily to quit.
  - “There was a directive from Berlin that Steindorff could no longer be the protagonist of those publishing projects in Germany, those should go to a Nazi official.”
  - Steindorff was forced to quit the journal in 1937 and in 1939 left for the United States.
  - Walther Wolf, the SA uniform wearing Egyptologist mentioned earlier, was his replacement. Schneider believes it’s probable that Joseph Goebbels himself made the decision to force Steindorff out.
  - Steindorff wrote in 1945, after he was safely in the United States that,
    
    During my darkest days at Leipzig, some weeks after the pogrom of November, 1938, he came to our house in Leipzig and invited me and my wife to go with him and find asylum in his house at Bonn, though to give us sanctuary might well have resulted in his confinement in a concentration camp.
  - In 1938 Steindorff was in a desperate situation and was saved by an Egyptology colleague Dr. Hans Bonnet.
  - A Base in Egypt
  - When the Nazis took over Germany they inherited the Cairo office of the German Archaeological Institute.
  - In other countries a special SS unit, the Ahnenerbe, was used to conduct archaeological research. Professor Schneider explained to me that the SS left Egypt alone and archaeological work was done by the institute`s Cairo office.
  - The Cairo office operated until the war started in 1939. During that time Professor Schneider believes that the Nazis used it as a base to advance their interests in the Middle East.
  - It was “a local outpost that could be instrumentalized for the government,” he told me. Germany had a number of interests in the area, including talking to Arab leaders who opposed Jewish settlement in Israel.
  - The head of the institute, after the Nazis came to power, was Hermann Junker. He was an established Egyptologist. During the time of Nazi rule he conducted digs in the Cairo-Memphis area and Nubia. But, he spent the bulk of his energy excavating at the Great Pyramids at Giza.
  - He was, “deeply involved in national socialism and a member of the NSDAP and other Nazi organizations during the war,” said Schneider.
  - I asked Professor Schneider whether the Nazis got involved in his fieldwork, directing him to excavate at the Great Pyramids or telling him to look for certain artefacts.
  - Schneider said that he has found no evidence of that kind of control. He believes that, when it came to excavations, Hitler’s government let Junker pursue his own agenda.
  - The details on what the institute was being used for are still being researched. But there is evidence that is was used for more than archaeology.
  - In June 1945 George Steindorff, now living in the United States, wrote a letter to John Wilson, a professor at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. In the letter he discussed the involvement of different German Egyptologists with Nazism.
  - He wrote about Junker that,
    
    It is very difficult to describe the character of this man because he has none. I have heard that it was rumored in England that Junker acted as a spy in Egypt. I do not believe it. He was too clever to compromise himself by such activity. He played safe.
  - However, he used his position and the State Institute to promote Nazi propaganda. The Institute was always available for Nazi meetings, Junker's house was always open to Nazi guests, chiefly Austrian. Every Nazi found a cordial reception in the German Institute in Cairo. I appreciate Junker as a scholar of the first order. More than that, I am sorry I cannot say. At best, his actions and opinions have always been ambiguous.
  - The Göttingen Manifesto
  - Hermann Kees was a professor of Egyptology at the University of Göttingen.
  - According to Schneider’s research he was president of an extreme right-wing group Deutschnationale Volkspartei and played an indirect role in driving Albert Einstein out of Germany.
  - He was, “instrumental in the expulsion of Jewish faculty in 1934, after the laws for the restitution of the Civil Order were put into force,” Schneider wrote.
  - In 1934, after the death of German president Paul von Hindenberg, Hitler implemented a series of laws that barred Jews, and people opposed to Nazism, from serving in government positions.
  - Albert Einstein (then based in Berlin) and his colleage at Göttingen, Nobel Laureate James Frankh, both resigned in protest. They were hoping that other professors would resign in solidarity.
    
    That didn’t happen.
  - Fourty-two professors at Göttingen published a manifesto condemning Frankh's resignation and calling for a faster implementation of the "necessary measures of purging."
  - “This happened fast,” wrote Schneider. “One day after the publication of the manifesto, the first six Jewish professors were relieved of their duties. The man who initiated the manifesto and the expulsion of Jewish faculty was Hermann Kees.”
  - Einstein’s and Frankh's hope had failed at Göttingen.
  - Kees certainly didn’t hide his far-right views. On Akhenaten he wrote,
    
    One is certainly wrong to portray Amenophis IV as a gushing idealist who wished to turn the world's quarrels to eternal peace by the gracious sermon of human reconciliation and who therefore declined any warfare abroad.
    
    To be a great reformer, he lacked the creative force to anticipate, in the way of a seer, issues that were fermenting and wanted to take shape, and to shape them, and not the least did his personality lack authoritative charisma, carrying the stigma of repulsive ugliness.
  - He himself possessed too many traits that were contrary to the Ancient Egyptian ideal of a master race; he was licentious, effusive, led by emotions, morally debauched and obstinate.
    
    Courtesy German Federal Archive and wikimedia. Photo of a model of "Germania" Hitler's revamped Berlin. It would have included a museum where Nefertiti's bust was close to Hitler's.
  - Hitler’s Own Views
  - Hitler’s own personal views on Egyptology remain something of a mystery. Professor Schneider said that more archival research needs to be done to determine this
  - He does appear to have had an interest in Egyptian Art.
  - Professor Schneider sent me an intriguing photo, dating to February 1939. It shows the opening of an Ancient Egyptian Art exhibition in Berlin. Sitting on the front row is Hitler himself.
  - Unfortunately I cannot post this photo on the web since the copyright is still valid and is held by a photography firm.
  - Schneider points out that Hitler was particularly interested in the bust of Nefertiti and vetoed its return to Cairo.
  - Hitler was planning to build a new museum in “Germania,” (his name for what would have been the transformed city of Berlin). According to Professor Schneider’s research the bust of Nefertiti would have been close to that of Hitler himself.
  - A Turning Point in Egyptology
  - It’s difficult to gauge the full impact that the events of 1933-1945 had on German Egyptology. But certainly the impact was negative.
  - “This was, what I think, a decisive turning point in the international history of Egyptology,” Said Professor Schneider.
    
    “Germany lost its status and it has to struggle for many decades after the war until it again became recognized and appreciated (in) the discipline,” he said adding, “Germany had basically sacrificed, through the NS regime, its academic standing.”
  - The loss of people such as Steindorff, hindered the country’s knowledge base.
  - “They came not only from Egyptology but dozens of other disciplines, they established their fields of knowledge abroad, above all in the United States, and had they been given a perspective in a Germany without National Socialism they possibly would have stayed there.
  - And many important strands of thinking or pools would have developed in Germany that now developed in the States,” said Professor Schneider.
  - “(The) people who stayed in Germany, or younger generations, as a direct consequence were different people than those who would have lived and had a career in (a) Germany without the Nazis,” he said.
  - “It is difficult to say how the discipline would look today without National Socialism but we can very certainly say that Germany would have a different standing today.”
  - The German Archaeological Institute in Cairo did eventually reopen after the way and today Germany is again a centre of Egyptological research.
  - Herman Kees and Walther Wolf were both removed from their positions after the war. Although in 1963 Wolf did get a professorship at the University of Münster. Kees notes were confiscated as part of de-nazification efforts something which hindered his writing efforts.
  - Years after the war Hermann Junker, while writing his memoirs, would choose to not write about the time of Nazi rule. Only saying that, “this was a dark time.”
  - About The AuthorOwen Jarus
    Owen Jarus is a freelance writer based in Toronto ,Canada. He has written articles on archaeology for a variety of media outlets including The Canadian Press newswire (CP), U of T Magazine, The Mississauga News and The Guelph Mercury. Education: BA from the University of Toronto in History, Geography and Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations. BJourn in Journalism from Ryerson University.
    Last three pieces by this author: The Egyptian Pharoah Who Helped Win a Nobel Prize, 2,000 year old, Ten Commandments scroll image now on Heritage Key, Interview: Jean-Francois Millaire on Exploring Gallinazo Group