Iran: Empire of the Mind (10 page)

…A hideous life-sized doll, filled out with straw,
In the skin of the Roman Emperor, Valerian…
Swung in the wind on a rope from the palace flag-pole
And young girls were brought there by their mothers
To be told about the male anatomy.…
¹⁵

But the inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam says the Roman captives were settled in various places around the empire, and there is evidence of this at Bishapur and at Shushtar, where the Romans showed their engineering expertise by building a combined bridge and dam, the remains of which can still be seen (along with other Roman-built bridges elsewhere). It may be that Valerian, rather than surviving only as a stuffed skin to be giggled at, lived out his days as
pontifex maximus
of a Persian city. Given the other evidence of Shapur’s generally humane conduct (and the spirit of
the Naqsh-e Rostam relief itself, which seems to show magnanimity rather than brutal humiliation of the enemy), it may be that the former story is just a rather gruesome fable, reported by uncritical Roman historians who had no idea what really had become of Valerian after his capture, but were ready to believe the worst of the Persians. Large numbers of ordinary people, including many Christians from Antioch and elsewhere, were brought back and settled in Persia by Shapur after his campaigns. In addition to the wars with Rome, both Ardashir and Shapur campaigned in the east against the Kushans, eventually establishing Sassanid rule over large parts of what are now Central Asia, Afghanistan and northern India.

Ardashir and Shapur made changes in government that may have paralleled the beginnings of some deeper changes in society. Government became more centralised, the bureaucracy expanded, and from the devolved system of the Parthians (sometimes, probably misleadingly, described as a kind of feudalism) a new pattern evolved.
¹⁶
New offices and titles appeared in inscriptions, including
dibir
(scribe),
ganzwar
(treasurer) and
dadwar
(judge). The old Parthian families continued, but were given court offices and may thereby, one may say, have been domesticated (we could draw a parallel with the way that Louis XIV house-trained the French nobility at Versailles after the Fronde civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century). This changed role for the great nobles may in time have helped initiate another phenomenon of social, cultural and military significance—the emergence of a class of gentry, the
dehqans
, who in later centuries controlled the countryside, its villages and its peasantry on the Shah’s behalf, and provided the armoured cavalry that were the central battle-winning weapon of the Sassanid armies (though in the interim the great noble families retained much of their power in the provinces, and the cavalry were provided in large part by their retainers, as in the time of the Parthians).

In several other ways the long reign of Shapur continued and fulfilled the policies set in train by Ardashir. Following the precedent set by his father at Ferozabad and elsewhere, Shapur was also a great founder of cities—Bishapur and Nishapur among others. The establishment of these cities
¹⁷
and the growth of old ones, abetted by the expansion of trade
within and beyond the large empire (especially along the silk routes but also, increasingly, by sea to India and China) brought about changes in the Persian economy. Bazaars of the kind familiar later, in the Islamic period, grew up in the cities, a home to merchants and artisans, who formed trade guilds. Agriculture expanded to meet the demand for food from the towns and nomadic pastoralism receded in significance. The spread of land under cultivation was facilitated by the use of
qanat
—underground irrigation canals that carried water as far as several kilometres from highland areas to villages where it could be distributed to fields (The
qanat
are still a distinctive feature of the Iranian landscape—the maintenance shafts are visible from the air as long chains of pimple-like openings in the ground, each surrounded by a ring of spoil.) Agriculture was also expanded in Mesopotamia, where if properly irrigated the rich soils of the great river valley were potentially very productive indeed, capable of yielding several crops a year.

Culturally, the resettlement of Greeks, Syrians and others from the Roman empire brought in a renewed burst of interest in Greek learning, and new translations into Pahlavi were carried out (Pahlavi was the Middle Persian language spoken in the Sassanid period, simplified from the more grammatically complex Old Persian spoken in Achaemenid times). In time, recognised schools of learning, including in medicine and other sciences, grew up in cities like Gondeshapur and Nisibis. Inscriptions also record Shapur’s pious establishment of fire-altars named for various members of his family. These each would have involved an endowment to support the priests and their families (the proliferation of fire-temples as a feature of Mazdaism had begun in the Arsacid period). These endowments, along with similar ones established by the great nobles, enhanced the economic and political power of the priests (
mobad
).

Dark Prophet

Another phenomenon that emerged in the reign of Shapur was a new religion—Manichaeism, named after its originator, the prophet Mani. Aside from a more or less vague idea of a dualistic division between good and evil, Mani and his doctrines are obscure to most people today, but on
closer examination his ideas and his movement turn out to be enormously influential, in surprising ways, especially in medieval Europe.

Mani was born in April 216 in Parthian Mesopotamia, of Iranian parents descended from a branch of the Arsacid royal family, who had moved there from Hamadan/Ecbatana. There is a story that he was born lame, and some have suggested that his pessimism and his disgust at the human body had something to do with that. As with other founders of world religions, he was born into a troubled time and place. His parents seem to have been Christians,
¹⁸
and he was strongly influenced by Gnostic ideas in his formative years. (The Gnostics were an important sect of early Christianity, though some believe their ideas predate Christianity, incorporating Platonic ideas. Similar movements in Judaism and even, later, Islam, have been identified and labelled ‘Gnostic’. Broadly, they believed in a secret knowledge—
gnosis
—that derived from a personal, direct experience with the divine.) At some point before about 240 Mani claimed to have received a revelation that told him not to eat meat or drink wine or to sleep with women. The doctrine of Mani incorporated Christian elements, but depended heavily on a creation myth (if it can be called that) derived from Mazdaean concepts, particularly the pessimistically and deterministically-inclined forms of the branch of Mazdaism called Zurvanism, which had been particularly important in Mesopotamia for several centuries, drawing on indigenous traditions like that of astrology.

Put simply, the creation of Manichaeism was a queasy, dystopic creation, in which the good, the light, had been overwhelmed and dominated by the evil, the demonic, identified with matter. Through copulation and reproduction (inherently sinful) evil had imprisoned light (the good spirit) in matter and had established the dominance of evil on earth. Jesus was able to liberate man from this miserable condition, but only briefly, and the only real hope was the eventual liberation of the spirit in death. This dismal and ugly vision of existence obsessively proliferated many personifications and principles derived from Mazdaism, and was presented as a religion of liberation (liberation from material existence and evil). Mani wrote down a series of religious texts and liturgies, many of which were quite beautiful. He was allowed to preach the new religion all over
the Sassanid empire, after a meeting with Shapur in 243 at which he impressed the Shah favourably
¹⁹
(presumably the king failed to question him too closely—but Shapur was distinguished by a tolerant attitude to all religions, including Judaism and Christianity. It is tempting to wish that he had made an exception in Mani’s case). Mani accompanied Shapur in some of the campaigning that year against the Romans, which is coincidental because the great neo-Platonist, Plotinus, was apparently accompanying the Roman emperor through the same campaign, on the other side.

The teachings of Mani spread rapidly and widely, and beyond Persia into India, Europe and Central Asia (where they survived longest as an open rather than a persecuted, underground movement, yielding most of the authoritative texts from which Manichaeism is understood by academics today). Mani organised teams of scribes to translate and copy his writings into different languages.
²⁰
His followers formed a hierarchy of believers, with an exclusive Elect of pharisaic priests at their head, who were able to follow the purity rules and the rules of abstinence and chastity and the other life-hating mumbo-jumbo to their fullest extent. But everywhere the sect was despised and declared heretical—especially by the Mazdaean Magi, but also by the Jews, and the Christian church, and even by Gnostics like the Mandaeans. Eventually Mani returned from his travels (after Shapur’s death) to a less tolerant atmosphere, and the Magi—who hated and anathematised him more than anyone else, for his subversion and distortion of their own beliefs—were able to have him imprisoned and killed in February 277, apparently, by being crushed over a period of twenty-six days by some very heavy chains.

But by then the damage was done. It would be foolish to attribute
all
the evils of religion to Mani, but he does seem to have done a remarkably good job of infecting a range of belief systems with the most damaging and depressing ideas about impurity, the corruption of material existence and the sinfulness of sexual pleasure that anyone could ever have come up with. Of course, his notions (especially those about the corrupt and sinful nature of sexual relations) were useful also to those with a wish to elaborate metaphysically upon misogynistic impulses. To those with
a deterministic bent too. His thinking was a kind of Pandora’s box of malignity, the particles from which went fluttering off in all directions on their misshapen wings. As Bausani said, Mani seems to have constructed myths out of a sense of the ‘monstrosity of existence’:

… myths that have the particularly unpleasant characteristic of not being natural and rising from below… not based on a wide-ranging religious sociality like the Zoroastrian ones, for they are almost the personal dreams of an exhausted and maniacal intellectual
.
²¹

But his ideas were complex, varied and innovatory, and not all bad. They may have had some influence on Islam subsequently—like Mohammad later Mani had declared himself to be the ‘seal of the prophets’ and there are other parallels
²²
(though the central tenets of Islam were intrinsically anti-Manichaean in spirit, and the Prophet Mohammad was clear that of all the sects ‘All will be saved except one: that of the Manichaeans’
²³
). Despite the condemnation heaped on the heresy, it seems to have continued as a tendency and as an underground sect. But the most startling story is that of his influence in the West.

Of all the fathers of the Christian church, probably the most influential was St Augustine of Hippo. Augustine wrote wonderful books that explained the Christian religion to the uneducated; explained the downfall of the Roman empire in Christian terms, absolving the Christians of blame (some, like Gibbon, have remained unconvinced); explained in touching and humane terms his own life, his own sense of sin and his own (late) conversion to Christianity (‘O Lord, Make me chaste—but not yet’). His presence in the thought of the church in later centuries was dominant. He also explained the reasons why Manichaeism was heretical in a Christian context. But the remarkable fact is that, before he converted to Christianity, Augustine had been an avowed Manichaean, had converted others to the sect, and may have served as a Manichaean priest. It has been disputed, but the imprint of Manichaeism on Augustine’s thinking is obvious and heavy.

Many of the ideas that Augustine’s teaching successfully fixed in Catholic Christian doctrine, notably that of original sin (strongly associated by him with sexuality), predestination, the idea of an elect of the saved,
and (notoriously) the damnation of unbaptised infants, originated at least partly in debates that had been going on earlier within the Christian church, though those discussions had been influenced in turn by similar Gnostic ideas to those which had inspired Mani. But many of these key concepts— especially the central one, original sin—also show a striking congruence with Manichaean doctrine. Surely Augustine could not successfully have foisted upon the Christian church Manichaean ideas that the Church had already declared heretical? Yet that seems to have been what happened, and Augustine was accused of doing precisely this by contemporaries—notably by the apostle of free will, Pelagius, who fought long and hard with Augustine over precisely these theological problems in the early years of the fifth century; and lost, and was himself declared a heretic. Perhaps the most damaging decision ever taken by the Christian church.
²⁴