JOST A MON

I came across a reference to Muhi al-Din Lari in Ziauddin Sardar's magisterial Mecca: The Sacred City. Lari was supposed to be a hugely influential miniaturist, famous for his 16th century pilgrimage guide to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the Kitab Futuh al-Haramayn. The book, written in mystical and ecstatic Persian prose and illustrated by Lari, was produced in various editions - in Mecca, Turkey, Persia and India. Its depiction of the Sacred Mosque became the de facto standard for imagery of the Kaaba for centuries thereafter.

Sardar called Lari an Indian painter. He also said that very little is known about the man's life. He is supposed to have died around 1526, but I've also seen 1521 as a possible year of death. A brief bit of rummaging about the internet located a book that said Lari was Persian, though his chief work, the pilgrim's guide (written about 1505 or so), had been dedicated to the sultan of Gujarat. I suppose this is possible - Lari might refer to a person from the Iranian town of Lan, not far from Shiraz. Indeed, another book said he was a student of a famous Persian scholar who did indeed travel to Lar. On the other hand, there is a Lar in Uttar Pradesh too.

In the early 1500s, a famous artist would have had a selection of patrons to choose from - the Lodis in Delhi, the Bengal sultanate, even the Bahmanis in the Deccan, besides the rulers of Gujarat. What would prompt a painter from North India to seek the favour of a Gujarati sultan? It's still possible, of course, that Lari was, indeed, Iranian. His teacher wanted to move to India in search of cultural patronage, and it's possible that he either accompanied his teacher, or that he was inspired by the idea to seek the patronage of a Western Indian king.

I'd be interested to learn how Sardar determined that Lari was Indian. Where was he born? Where did he live? When did he go on his pilgrimage? What are the other works he created? How is it known when he died? Perhaps there are still myriads of Persian manuscripts that haven't been translated which might tell us more about this early polymath.

(At any rate, I have drafted an article with as much information as I could find and put it on Wikipedia's sandbox. If I can find a couple more citations and add a bit more to the piece, I might be happy enough to post it as an article.)

There's been a veritable spate of TV programmes on Ancient Rome lately. Just a week or so ago was Caligula by the lovely Mary Beard. This overlapped historically (and a little bit thematically) with Catharine Edwards' Mothers, Murderers and Mistresses: Empresses of Ancient Rome. Three months ago was Margaret Mountford's Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time, and that was an update on Mary Beard's programme on Pompeii (Life and Death in a Roman Town) from about two-and-a-half years earlier. Last year, we were treated to a series on the religions of Rome (pagan, Christian, Papish) by Simon Sebag Montefiore, as well as a search for its forgotten ruins (amphitheatres, canals, forts, lost cities) with Dan Snow. We've had a three-parter called Treasures of Ancient Rome hosted by Alastair Sooke, which shows us that the Romans may have been famed for murther and engineering, but that they were great artists as well. Mary Beard, too, has been extra busy, because her show on the lives of common Romans (Meet the Romans) was also shown last year.

There have been two programmes on Hadrian and his wall (in the Timewatch series of 2007, and by Dan Snow the following year). There have been several programmes on gladiators (Gladiator Graveyard), most recently in Timewatch again (2007), as well as one from 2003 titled The Colosseum: Rome's Arena of Death. Terry Jones explored the cultures of Rome's contemporaries - the people the Romans liked to call Barbarians (2006). More ambitious than all of these was a six-parter titled Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire also in 2006.

And these are just the BBC programmes. The other channels have not been negligent. Channel 5 has done its bit to promote the imperium (programmes on Julius Caesar and gladiators) as well as Channel 4 with its various Time Team digs uncovering Roman Britain.

You get the drift. Serious obsession with the Romans in these here British Isles. That's all right, it's all classical history and good fun.

So what do these programmes cover? Blood and sensation (peacetime and wartime) and some religion and art. Where are the stories of republican Rome? How did the Romans become a superpower? Where's Roman science? Engineering? Literary Rome? Mercantile Rome? 

Classical history, of course, includes the Greeks. Here too we have rich amounts of programming (although nowhere in the league of the Romans). There's the usual stuff - Troy, Sparta, Athens, the battles against the Persians. Luckily there's also been some delightful programmes on Greek science (Aristotle, the Antikythera mechanism), as well as a recent cultural round-up by Michael Scott. But, again, it appears we are fated to see the same tired topics repeated over and over.

Can't we have some coverage of the post-Alexandrian Hellenic world? It extended to north-west India and lasted for centuries, brilliant blends of local cultures with that of the Greeks. What about Ptolemaic Egypt? And, again, mercantile Greece? Or its amazing scientific achievements? True, some of its mathematics was covered by Marcus du Sautoy, and some of its optics by Simon Schaffer. But there's a  world of Greek thought just waiting to be shown on TV, surely.

There's more to Ancient Egypt than the Pyramids and King Tut, too. A nice recent programme was on the reconstruction of a boat supposedly sent by Queen Hatshepsut to Punt - although nobody really knows where Punt is. Another one was on the search for Rameses's lost city. (These searches for lost cities always seem to be high on a TV programmer's agenda.)

But there's far more to ancient history! The decipherment of ancient scripts? (You could do a nice programme of about an hour on the topic, using the epic of Gilgamesh as focus. Or an entire series, using a great text from each of the ancient civilisations. How about six parts - Sumer, Egypt, China, India, Maya, and the earliest alphabet (was it Phoenician?)) The hunt for the historical Hanging Garden of Babylon? Again, a stirring subject, with much controversy and any amount of to-ing and fro-ing amongst the historians. What about the spread of Hindu and Buddhist culture out of India? I don't think I've seen much about the Persians (although I recall there was some chatter when the British Museum organised its massive exhibition a few years ago). There could even be a kind of thematic coverage of great thinkers and philosophers - toss Confucius, Buddha, Mahavira, Zoroaster, and a couple of Greeks into the mix - and compare and contrast! I could go on and on.

I've been in this country for ten years, and I've found the quality of its public broadcasting superb, a true wonder. Now if only its coverage would widen.

I dip once every so often into Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, a superb study of linguæ francæ (okay, I know that's incorrect and it should be lingua francas, but what's not to like about 'æ'?), and I find that I've forgotten what I've read the previous time. So it's a nice sort of infinite loop to be in. Or worrisome, if you want to think like that.

But anyway, that's neither here nor there. I remember reading elsewhere that Ashoka, once he was postbellumly saddened and enlightened, put up his edicts across his vast empire - from Afghanistan all the way south to the borders with Tamil country. In most places, the edicts were written in a script representing an Indian language, but out west, where the neighbours were Greek-speaking (Bactria and all),  they were set down in Greek and - I learn from Ostler - in Aramaic.

Ashoka's Edict in Kandahar, Afghanistan

This is a Greek transliteration of his edict - found in the 1950s (?):

δέκα ἐτῶν πληρη[....]ων βασι[λ]εὺς
Πιοδασσης εὐσέβεια[ν ἔδ]ε[ι]ξεν τοῖς ἀν-
θρώποις, καὶ ἀπὸ τούτου εὐσεβεστέρους
τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ἐποίησεν καὶ πάντα
εὐθηνεῖ κατὰ πᾶσαν γῆν• καὶ ἀπέχεται
βασιλεὺς τῶν ἐμψύχων καὶ οἱ λοιποὶ δὲ
εἲ τινες ἀκρατεῖς πέπαυνται τῆς ἀκρα-
σίας κατὰ δύναμιν, καὶ ἐνήκοοι πατρὶ
καὶ μητρὶ καὶ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων παρὰ
τὰ πρότερον καὶ τοῦ λοιποῦ λῶιον
καὶ ἄμεινον κατὰ πάντα ταῦτα
ποιοῦντες διάξουσιν.

And this is the Aramaic as written in Hebrew.

שנן 10 פתיתו עביד זי מראן פרידארש מלכא קשיטא מהקשט
מן אדין זעיר מרעא לכלהם אנשן וכלהם אדושיא הובד
ובכל ארקא ראם שתי ואף זי זנה כמאכלא למראן מלכא זעיר
קטלן זנה למחזה כלהם אנשן אתהחסינן אזי נוניא אחדן
אלך אנשן פתיזבת כנם זי פרבסת הוין אלך אתהחסינן מן
פרבסתי והופתיסתי לאמוהי ולאבוהי ולמזישתיא אנסן
איך אסרהי חלקותא ולא איתי דינא לכלהם אנשיא חסין
זנה הותיר לכלהם אנשן ואוסף יהותר.

And this is an English translation (of the Greek) by G. P. Carratelli:

Ten years (of reign) having been completed, King
Piodasses made known (the doctrine of)
Piety 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.

I've copied all these texts shamelessly from a Wikipedia page.

Why Aramaic? Well, that was the main language of communication across the Near East and the erstwhile Persian empire. (Recall it had fallen less than a century earlier.) Rather unchauvinistically, the Achaemenid rules of Iran didn't impose their own lingo on their subjects. The Greek bit is slightly more comprehensible - there were Greek-speaking peoples dotting the sundry Alexandrias set up by that maniac eponymous conqueror all the way from Greece to the Hindu Kush. According to Carratelli (the translator above) it appears that the Seleucid rulers of the area were in the process of establishing Greek as official bureaucratic language, but because it's unlikely that Ashoka was propagandising outside his empire, he must have been aiming his bilingual texts for Greeks living within it. (Why is it unlikely?)

Seleucus Nicator and Chandragupta Maurya (Ashoka's grandfather), as is well known, had signed a treaty establishing peace along their frontier. One of the terms was to allow intermarriage between Greeks and Indians, which would allow the former to skirt around the caste rules that dominated daily life under the Mauryas, establishing their position in society. (Prior to the discovery of the edict, it had been thought that Greeks achieved a status as fallen kshatriyas or not-impure sudras only later.) Clearly this socialisation of the Greeks had attained a natural level by the time of Ashoka, and his edict implies how widely understood this equilibrium was.

As for the Aramaic text, it contains Avestan religious words to denote Buddhist concepts, and is clearly addressed to the Iranian people living in the region. But they were not necessarily Zoroastrian (scholars are quite clear that they were non-Zoroastrian Mazdians, whatever that is, or some variant of Indo-Aryan religion). Carratelli suggests that Ashoka was aiming his message at the Scythians (Sakas) who had been living there for yonks.



Reference:
G. P. Carratelli, G. Garbini, 'A Bilingual Graeco-Aramaic Edict by Asoka', Serie Orientale Roma XXIX, 1964.

If you have wondered why Isocrates (436-338 BC) is not as well-known as, say, Plato, wonder no more. Michael Anderson has the scuttlebutt in his Ancient History Blog.

There’s no end to weirdness in Europe, and Vlad the Impaler is about as weird as a historical character can get. Soon after taking up the throne of Wallachia (1457), he invited the nobility to an Easter feast and – well, Executed Today has the story.

Speaking some more of seriously weird things: there was much faith in putting one’s fate in the hands of chance (or God) – even secular arguments were sought to be settled by means of trial by fire. One of the last such trials occurred in Florence in 1498, as Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog reports in Barbecuing Friars in Late Medieval Florence.

74,000 years ago, human beings were passing the Malay peninsula on their great migration across the planet. Archaeological digs in Perak revealed a sumptuous burial of a man, which showed that Malaysia was no civilisational backwater. Judith Weingarten has the story of the digs and the feisty woman who conducted the research in her blog Zenobia: Empress of the East.


According to the Vedas, a mighty river called the Saraswati flowed through the plains of north India. There have been efforts to identify this river - which no longer exists (in its original size, at least) - and there are controversies galore about its history. Researchers in geology, linguistics, archaeology, history, and climate science have contributed, and Michel Danino has a post discussing some of this interdisciplinary work.