PERSIAN PEREGRINATION Miles Lewis 2010
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PERSIAN PEREGRINATION Miles Lewis 2010 CONTENTS 1 Introduction 2 ancient history 5 Islamic history 18 modern history 25 time line 30 Persian Christianity 36 vernacular architecture 40 ancient architecture 43 post-Achaemenid architecture 54 Islamic architecture 60 construction 73 environmental design 85 gardens 91 conservation 101 18 September: Tehran 105 19 September: Choqā Zanbīl 107 20 September: Mahan 111 21 September: Kerman 114 22 September: Yazd 118 23 September: Shiraz 131 24 September: Bishapur 140 25 September: Persepolis 148 26 September: Esfahan 164 27 September: Kashan 191 28 September: Taq-e-Bostan 211 29 September: Maragheh 218 30 September: Tabriz 221 1 October: Qazvin 230 2 October: optional 232 references 237 For convenience, location references are made to the Lonely Planet guide, Andrew Burke & Mark Elliott, Iran (Footscray [Victoria] 2008), and Hema Maps, Iran, 1:2,500,000 (Hema Maps, Brisbane, no date), and their spelling is used where possible. Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day, How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp Abode his Hour or two, and went his way1 1 Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, xvi. 2 Persian Peregrination introduction haunted by those plains of amber, those peaks of amethyst, the dignity of that 1 crumbled magnificence, that silence of two thousand years. Iran is too big a country for simple generalisations to be very useful in explaining it. But it is helpful to start by thinking of it as the place where the great nomadic traditions of the steppes of central Asia washed up against the static cultures of the Mesopotamian valley. Its ancient wars were not so much in the Mesopotamian mould of rival city states rising and falling in power, while new barbarian invaders swept down at intervals from the north. They were more the east to west migrations of races such as the Aryans and the Mongols. But culture travelled in the opposite direction – that is, from Mesopotamia into the Iranian plain. Even when it was not under the same rule, early Iran tended to look like a provincial variant of Mesopotamia, adopting Mesopotamian forms such as cuneiform script. The ziggurat at Choqā Zanbīl is the only unequivocal example of the type outside Mesopotamia itself. At Hasanlu, in the north-west, some houses were lined with ceramic tiles which may or may not have been imported, but which certainly aped those of Assyrian palaces.2 The next important distinction, though one of which rather too much is made today, is that Iranians are Aryan rather than Arabic. The very word ‘Iran’ means Aryan, and it was in common use even before, on the last day of 1934, the government announced that the country was to be called Iran. As was then correctly stated, the province of Pars (Fars), from which the name Persia derived, was only a single section of the country. It was also more extravagantly claimed that the birthplace of the Aryan race was Iran. Not surprisingly, the suggestion for the change originated at the Iranian legation in Berlin.3 The reality is that Iran is not so very different from its neighbours. The Egyptians are not Arabs, and nor to a large degree are the Iraqis, but it is because those countries were more thoroughly assimilated into the Arab world that their culture became Arabic and they are perceived as Arabic today. Conversely Turkey, which is the close to Iran in many respects, is not really Turkish: the numbers of the Saljuq and Ottoman tribes cannot have been enough to submerge the genetic stock of their Hittite and other predecessors. The vast majority of the people of Iran are indeed of Indo- European origin, but their blood has been mixed with that of the Arabs, Turks, Mongols and other peoples. Some areas are still inhabited by tribes of Arab and Turkish race and speech. There are also the Kurds, who inhabit part of western Iran and are of Indo-European stock, with a language is akin to Farsi. But there appears to be no trace left of the primeval inhabitants who began, 1 Harold Nicholson, quoted in Hobhouse, Gardens of Persia, p 18. 2 Matheson, Persia, p 92, quoting the work of Prof R H Dyson. 3 Wilber, Riza Shah Pahlavi, pp 162-3. six thousand years ago, to settle on the land and to practice a primitive form of agriculture.1 Persia has been left as it was before man's advent ... Here and there he had scraped a bit of the surface, and scattered a little grain; here and there, in an oasis of poplars and fruit trees outlining a stream, he had raised a village, and his black lambs skipped under the peach-blossom; but for miles there was no sign of him, nothing but the brown plains and the blue2 or white mountains, and the sense of space .... Cyrus the Great once commented that at one end of his kingdom his subjects might be dying of cold, while at the other they were being suffocated by intense heat.3 But the heart of Iran is a vast desert covering many thousands of square kilometres at a height of between 500 and 1500 metres above sea level. This desert is crossed by few tracks, and is shunned even by the nomads. Yet on the edge of this desert most of the great cities of Iran have flourished, from Siyalk, in about 4000 BC, to modern Tehran. The desert and its raised rim constitute the Iranian plateau. It is bounded on the north by the Alborz range, on the west by the Zagros mountains, and on the south by the wide belt of mountains that shut off Kerman from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.4 On the higher mountains the snow falls in winter, building up a reserve of moisture for the dry summer months; there are also winter and spring rains. All of the larger centres of population and the majority of the smaller ones are situated near or in the mountains because of the availability of water, and many settlements obtain this by means of the qanats discussed 5 below. The Dasht-i Lut,. Khansari & Yavari, Espace Persan, p 8. 1 Lockhart, Persia, pp 6-9. 2 Vita Sackville-West,, quoted in Hobhouse, Gardens of Persia, p 18. 3 Blunt, Isfahan, p 23. 4 Beazley & Harverson, Living with the Desert, pp 1-2. 5 Lockhart, Persia, pp 5-6. 4 Persian Peregrination Iran is effectively landlocked, for while it may have access to the Caspian, the Aral Sea, the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf, these act less as outlets than barriers, and historically all commerce followed overland routes.1 In the centre of the Iranian plateau are two desolate salt deserts the Dasht-i Kavir and the Dasht-i Lut, which act as a barrier between east and west and divert migrating peoples either east towards India or west towards Mesopotamia.2 The plateau looks east across the less dramatic highlands near the modern boundary of Iran to the bleak, ominously named Dasht-i Naumid and Dasht-i Margo (deserts of hopelessness and death) in Afghanistan, and most travellers between Central Asia and the Near East have had to endure the rigours of the Plateau. The merchants on the Silk Road and the Mongol hordes alike followed in the footsteps of the Aryan Iranians who, early in the second millennium BC, entered the plateau at its north-eastern corner and moved westward into Iran along the northern fringe of her central desert. There are strong historical links between the plateau and the similar country of western Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Herat, Balkh and Merv were important cities of Khorasan, the greatest province of medieval Iran, and Farsi is still widely spoken throughout the region between the Hari Rudd and the Oxus. In the nineteenth century Turkmen raids and Russian incursions south over the Oxus, together with moves in the ‘Great Game' involving Afghanistan, broke the political unity of the Khorasan, but the way of life of the indigenous peasants remained unchanged.3 The population is heterogeneous. E G Brown, on his visit in the 1890s, found that Persian [Farsi] was not even spoken in the north-east, where a version of Turkish was used. Only when Qazvin was reached did Persian predominate, and even as far as Qom Turkish was generally understood.4 He repeatedly commented on the different racial characteristics of each region, and even more tellingly quoted the attitudes of one group to another. The Isfahanis were regarded as mean by other Persians, and the merchants of Isfahan were said to ‘put their cheese in a bottle, and rub their bread upon the outside to give it a flavour’.5 The ‘Persian’ view of Tabrizis was expressed in a couplet: Zi Tabrízí bi-juz bízí na-bíní Haman bihtar ki Tabrízí na-bíní [From a Tabrízí you will see nothing but rascality Better if that you see no Tabrízí at all]6 But really a similar account could be given of racial attitudes within, for example, the British Isles. The Iranian identity is defined by religion as well as by race. Today 93% of Iranians are Shiahs, whereas in the Moslem world as a whole Shiahs are only 1 George Salles in Ghirshman, Persia from the Origins, p ix. 2 Frye, Heritage of Persia, p 7. 3 Beazley & Harverson, Living with the Desert, pp 1-2. 4 Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians, p 52. 5 Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians, p 214. 6 Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians, p 84. 10% of the population, and Iran is surrounded by Sunni states.1 The four official faiths are Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, but there is strong discrimination against the minorities.2 The language has changed little in the last thousand years, and Iranians can still read such works as Firdausi's Shah-Nameh, or Book of Kings, completed late in the tenth century,3 or Jalal ad-Din’s Mathnavi: Nightly the souls of men thou lettest fly From out the trap wherein they captive lie.