Non-fiction book reviews - Persia

This forum is for updated versions of the site's main pages, and for resources for students of Alexander. Posting is limited.
If you quote any material from anything on pothos.org, please ensure you include a link to the original work and give due credit.
Post Reply
Alexias
Strategos (general)
Posts: 1099
Joined: Thu Nov 26, 2009 11:16 am

Non-fiction book reviews - Persia

Post by Alexias »

NON-FICTION BOOK REVIEWS – PERSIA

Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 A.D., J. Wiesehöfer (English trans. A. Azodi), I.B. Tauris, 1996; reprint 2001 (332 pages).
Reviewer: Nick Welman

Wieshöfer's (a German) book consists of three parts: Achaemenid Persia, Parthian Persia and Sasanid Persia. If you are interested in Alexander, only the first 144 pages are relevant. But Wiesehöfer proves that he is a master of his subject and even the concise information about Achaemenid Persia found here is very readable, fascinating and full of food for thought. Wiesehöfer for once and for all does away with the concept that Persia was a weak state when Alexander entered it in 334 B.C.: the great majority of the élite of subject peoples saw the Persian king as the guarantor of stability, order and prosperity. Real dangers did not threaten the empire until the Macedonian invasion. Whether you want to read about the position of Persian women ("active, enterprising and resolute" - even "both attractive and dangerous"), the religious status of Persian kings or common life in Achaemenid times - Wiesehöfer's study is academic, entertaining and accurate. When your interest in ancient Persia is stretching even beyond Alexander's time, this book is a wonderful buy. If you care only about the Achaemenids dealing with Alexander, paying the full book price to read only the first hundred pages or so is still something you should really consider.

From Cyrus to Alexander, P. Briant, 1996. English translation: 2002 (1024 pages).
Reviewer: Nick Welman

Though I have to admit I did not yet finish all 1000+ pages of Briant's history of the Persian Empire - I am already convinced this is the book to buy if you really want to possess an in-dept study of Achaemenid Persia. Forget about Olmstead. Wiesehöfer is much shorter and therefore more appropriate to the casual reader. If you want to go all the way, no one surpasses Briant.

The Persian Empire, J.M. Cook, New York, 1983 (275 pages; 24 pages of photographs).
Reviewer: Nick Welman

The inner sleeve of Cook's The Persian Empire reads: "In meeting the long-standing need for a new and authoritative history of the Persian Empire..." Now, two decades later, we may conclude that Cook did somehow fail to achieve his goal. His book seems to have more or less slipped into oblivion. It has never been reprinted. Far more studies quote Olmstead (1948) than Cook. Your only chance to buy this one is on the second hand market - it appears you will have a reasonably fair chance to get hold of a copy. Why did this study not become one of the best known modern overviews of Achaemenid Persia? One can only guess what happened. Cook wrote The Persian Empire after his retirement - in 1976 - as a professor of Ancient History and Archaeology at Bristol. It might be that his academic star was fading. But, in all aspects, this is a far more enjoyable, readable book than Olmstead's study. And I am convinced it does more justice to the complex, alien and intriguing society that ancient Persia actually had been - before Alexander came rushing in. The book roughly consists of four parts: an overview of the sources (literature, excavations) that we possess about ancient Persia - a narrative of the rise of the empire - an overview of Achaemenid administration, art, religion, kingship - a narrative of the fall of the empire. What Cook maybe lacks is an elaborate system of sources and references. He attests that Philip II had forged an alliance with Artaxerxes III Ochus, but fails to mention that Arrian is the only ancient author who mentions this pact. So Cook's comparison of this alleged agreement to the Hitler-Stalin pact prior to World War II may be over the edge. We might accuse Cook of occasionally drawing to many conclusions from to little facts. But this hardly denies the overall quality of the work. My personal copy of Cook's book is now full of pencil marks. On almost every page Cook has written something that struck me as remarkable, memorable, informative. Maybe its weakness is that the book seems to be aimed at two groups at the same time: to scholars it might prove not scholarly enough; to the general public it might appear to academic. It is not popular history. It is not a purely academic study. Maybe this accounts for the limited exposure that The Persian Empire has had. For anyone interested in Alexander, Cook's work is one of the finest studies on ancient Persia that one could get hold of. He at least discusses the reign of Darius III in some detail. I would much prefer Cook's personal insights and - sometimes - hastily drawn conclusions above any other study treating the Achaemenid Empire as if bisecting a dead animal.

History of the Persian Empire, A.T. Olmstead, University of Chicago Press, 1948 and 1959 (568 pages).
Reviewer: Nick Welman

This book about ancient Persia has survived half a century - still being reprinted, sold, read and being readily available. To me, however, Olmstead was a bitter disappointment. I will gladly admit that Olmstead's book is a great feat of scholarship. The problem of the book is its focus: it looks upon ancient Persia still very much through the eyes of the chauvinistic Greeks. Olmstead dedicates two full chapters to the science of the Achaemenid era, but then only discusses Greek scientists: Democritus of Abdera, Hippocrates, Plato, Socrates and Athenian astronomers. He talks about Philip's and Alexander's aggression against Persia as "the crusade". The Hellenic influences on Persia he addresses as "fresh breezes from the west". The big problem with studies about Achaemenid Persia is that we possess rich materials from Herodotus, focusing on the mighty early kings Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. It is this bias that is annoying about Olmstead's work: events up to Xerxes' defeat at Salamis comprise roughly the first 280 pages - more than half of the book. On the Persian calendar this barely covers the first century of the empire: 559 to 465 BC. From that point on Olmstead's attention shifts almost exclusively to developments in the Greek world: the wars between Sparta and Athens are discussed in detail. Olmstead's treatment of later Achaemenid history, after Xerxes, remains quite sketchy to say the least. His book should have been entitled "History of the Persian Era" - not "Empire". So one downside of Olmstead's book is that it confirms - probably not intentional - popular misunderstandings about ancient Persia as an empire that soon became weak and lost its vitality as well as its leading role in the early Antique world. Modern studies have inspired new debates about these questionable viewpoints. Another downside is that Olmstead apparently did not 'love' Persia that much that he could free himself from anti-Persian Greek propaganda. It seems he is siding with the Greeks, not with the Persians. Although Olmstead was a child of his times and his work was of outstanding quality in 1948, modern insights may have made Olmstead's overall approach obsolete. Perhaps it is that eurocentric approach that accounts for Olmstead's popularity? To many readers in America and Western Europe it might be rather comfortable to find this undertone that presents Greece as the society that inspired progress and development, not Persia. Anyone that wants to broaden his or her perspective on Alexander's time by reading books about ancient Persia would be advised to start with reading Wiesehöfer's, Briant's or Cook's studies. Olmstead should be the last one on your list.

Alexander de Grote - De Ondergang van het Perzische Rijk [Alexander the Great - The Fall of the Persian Empire], Jona Lendering, Athenaeum - Polak & Van Gennep Publishers, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2004; reprint 2005. ISBN 90.253.3144.0
Reviewer: Heinrich Müller

Lendering’s book is the first biography of Alexander (=A) that unhesitatingly uses the oriental sources, including some recently discovered cuneiform texts, and consistently tries to show how Alexander’s conquest was experienced in the east. Alexander de Grote is a bold attempt to tell “the other side of the story” but, to be honest, Lendering (=L) has greater ambitions than the oriental sources allow. He is the first to admit this. He points out that at the moment, we have not enough Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian or Indian texts yet (“Let’s hope this book will be outdated soon”, page 14). So, for the time being, we are still forced to rely mostly upon the usual Greek and Latin sources. Yet, unlike other recently published books [1], L makes a methodological point of listening to the voices of the nameless conquered people.

L’s method is not unlike that of Arrian and his modern epigones: he has two sources (Arrian and the Vulgate), and assumes that where they are in agreement, we can accept their information as more or less reliable. L always sticks to this principle and carefully notes disagreements. For example, on page 146, he tells that the Vulgate mentions the murder of the Persian commander of Gaza, adds that Arrian ignores this, and summarises that we can not know what happened. It is interesting to compare this unadorned treatment with that by Bosworth, who says more or less the same and adds that “the fact that the episode is singularly revolting is no argument against its historicity” [2]. This type of innuendo is absent from L’s book.

In his methodological section (page 13), L adds that agreement of his main, Greek sources is insufficient to establish what really happened. We must also study texts from Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and India. Although this seems obvious, it is still something new. Using oriental sources, L achieves some interesting results, e.g.:
• He makes it clear that the reign of Artaxerxes IV Arses was marked by civil war, offering the Macedonians an irresistible opportunity to attack.
• He shows that before the battle of Gaugamela, the Persian army was discouraged by a lunar eclipse. Following Van der Spek [3], L argues that the eclipse was a very evil omen indeed and (going one step beyond Van der Spek) L implies that Alexander attacked an army that was just waiting for an opportunity to desert king Darius. I found this the first truly convincing interpretation of what happened at Gaugamela. (This chapter can be found in an English translation at http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_z7.html .)
• L suggests that as satrap of Bactria, Bessus officially was the intended successor or “mathishta” [4], which explains why he automatically became king after the death of Darius. This can be deduced from the Alexander Chronicle, a cuneiform source that has been dated by Van der Spek to the reign of Alexander [3]; L gives a slightly different but convincing reconstruction.
• On page 343-354, L reconstructs the circumstances of Alexander’s death as they would have appeared to the Babylonian astronomers, who had predicted what was going to happen. L’s bold identification of the exact prophecy with a tablet in the Louvre, merely hinted at by Van der Spek [3], is in my view, a triumph. These pages are, to the best of my knowledge, the first successful attempt in the “alexandrography” to use an eastern perspective. They are the best part of the book.

Admittedly, L is sometimes a bit too optimistic about the possibilities of the oriental sources. I am not yet convinced that his date of the battle of Issus (ca. 6 November 333; page 109 and 382) can be deduced from the Astronomical Diaries. (L has a more convincing astronomical argument.) Nor do I believe that the brief remark in the Diaries that gold arrived in Babylon in August 325 necessarily refers to gold from India that was guarded by Macedonian soldiers (page 314). On the other hand, it must be said that precisely because of the scarcity of eastern sources L is right to squeeze every possible drop of information from them. And it must be added that he is careful to introduce his suggestions with caveats like “maybe”.

Of course the book is essentially a biography, but L often steps aside from this road and focuses on a detail. He presents the sources, explains the complications, offers a solution (when possible), and returns to his main narrative. The result of this Herodotean approach is that the book is a real page-turner. I learned that…
• Diodorus’ statement that the defenders of Tyre “fashioned shields of bronze and iron and, filling them with sand, roasted them ... and made the sand red hot” is – in L’s words – “one of the mysteries ancient metallurgy”: before the sand would have turned red, the shield should already have melted (page 142).
• one of the motives for founding Egyptian Alexandria was to blackmail Athens: the price of grain was artificially kept high (page 158).
• Alexander’s invasion of Iran took place in a “little ice age” (page 201-202); in an earlier posting at Pothos, L mentioned that 330 was the coldest winter in the past seventy-five centuries.

The digressions are nice, although sometimes unnecessary. (On page 318, there’s an amusing catalogue of fish from the Indian Ocean, which serves to prove that the Fish Eaters of the Makran were not really poor but is also a bit too long.) The illustrations are sometimes too fine for the paper that is used, the table of contents is too long and the bibliography is too short [cf. note 4].

On the other hand, L introduces several really new sources. He uses the oriental information to challenge the now common opinion – once proposed by Badian and accepted by Bosworth and Worthington – that Alexander was some sort of tyrant, or even suffering from a mental illness. As L indicates, many erratic acts, like the cruel punishment of Bessus, can be understood when we take into account that Alexander had Iranian subjects who expected him to punish a regicide in an Iranian style.

L’s disagreement with the current orthodoxy does not mean that he returns to “the old Alexander” of Tarn, Lane Fox and Hammond. In fact, L appears to be looking for a third way. In his view, it seems, the conqueror is not just forcing his will on the conquered, but is also being changed by his subjects. I think this is right. I have seen how the Russian occupiers of Berlin adapted themselves to the Germans they had conquered. L is the first Alexander historian who seems to have fully understood how conquest is a process that transforms both the occupied and the occupier. This, added to L’s superior command of western and eastern sources and the fact that he has visited almost every battlefield, makes Alexander de Grote; De ondergang van het Perzische Rijk probably the best book on the Macedonian conquest of Asia in a decade or two.

Heinrich Müller, Berlin, Germany, 8th February 2005
(Many thanks to Alexander Meeuws for checking if I had really understood L’s Dutch book.)
NOTES
[1] E.g., Ian Worthington, Alexander the Great: Man and God (2003); Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (2004), W. Heckel and J. Yardley, Alexander the Great. Historical Sources in Translation (2004).
[2] A.B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire (Cambridge 1988) page 68.
[3] R.J. van der Spek, “Darius III, Alexander the Great, and Babylonian scholarship” in Achaemenid History 13 (2003) 289-346. According to the acknowledgements of L’s book and Van der Spek’s article, the two authors have closely collaborated.
[4] The relevant arguments are derived from a book by H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg (Yauna en Persai. Grieken en Perzen in een ander perspectief, Groningen 1980), which is not mentioned in L’s book, but see L’s website http://www.livius.org/man-md/mathishta/mathishta.html.
Post Reply