In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

by Tom Holland

  37 From the Denkard, a Zoroastrian text that dates from a few decades after the reign of Peroz. Quoted in the Cambridge History of Iran, p. 894.

  38 The exact date is uncertain, but it was some time in the late fifth or early sixth century—precisely the period when the Zoroastrian Church was coming into being. See Kellens, p. 1.

  39 Yasht: 13.100.

  40 Lazar P’arpec’i, p. 213.

  41 Mihr Yasht: 102–3.

  42 Ibid.: 7.

  43 Ibid.: 23.

  44 Ibid.: 2.

  45 Joshua the Stylite, p. 11.

  46 Christensen (1925), p. 93, argues that Kavad was in his thirties when he ascended the throne, but the majority of sources contradict this. The likelihood is that he was either fifteen or twelve when he became king. See Crone (1991), p. 41.

  47 Tabari: Vol. 5, p. 117. The stories of Sukhra’s heroism that have been preserved in Arab histories must ultimately derive from traditions propagated by the Karin.

  48 See Pourshariati, p. 380.

  49 Did this mean that the Parthian traditions of Mihr worship were so unacceptable to the standards of Zoroastrian orthodoxy as to constitute a rival school of religion? The question has provoked intense disagreement among Iranists. The late Mary Boyce, doyenne of Zoroastrian studies, argued that Mihr always ranked as a god subordinate to Ohrmazd, even in Parthia; but more recent scholarship has questioned this. See Pourshariati, pp. 350–68.

  50 For the history, and the rewriting of the history, of the three sacred fires, see the respective essays by Boyce. The likelihood that the Median temple, the Fire of the Stallion, was built as late as the fifth century is particularly striking. As Boyce points out, “no clearly datable objects have been found in the ruins earlier than the reign of Peroz.”

  51 Tabari: Vol. 5, p. 132.

  52 Letter of Tansar, p. 40.

  53 Quoted from a multiplicity of sources by Crone (1991), p. 23.

  54 Ibid.

  55 For the apocalyptic strain in fifth-century Iran, see Yarshater, p. 996.

  56 Tabari: Vol. 5, p.132.

  57 The best introduction to Mazdakism is Yarshater’s essay in the Cambridge History of Iran. He traces the origin of the movement all the way back to the third century AD. Crone (1991), in a typically bracing article, argues that the dating of Mazdak’s career to the reign of Kavad, which all the sources agree upon, is wrong, and should be placed several decades later. For criticisms of this theory, see Zeev Rubin (1995), p. 230, n. 11. For the argument that Mazdak never so much as existed, see Gaube.

  58 Procopius: History of the Wars, 1.6.

  59 Ibid.: 1.5.

  60 Procopius: On Buildings, 1.1.12.

  61 From The Book of the Deeds of Ardashir, quoted by Stoneman, p. 41.

  62 Ibid.: p. 42.

  63 Herodian: 6.2.2.

  64 Ammianus: 22.12.2.

  65 See Robert Adams, pp. 179–83, who estimates that the population of Mesopotamia grew by 37 per cent over the course of the Sasanian period.

  66 Ammianus: 24.8.3.

  67 Procopius: On Buildings, 3.3.10.

  68 Joshua the Stylite: p. 1.

  69 “Aspebedes” was almost certainly not his proper name, but a transliteration into Greek of his official title: the Spahbed, or “Generalissimo,” of the West. If this is the same Spahbed who took part in Kavad’s attack on Amida in 503, then “Aspebedes” was actually called Bawi. (See Joshua the Stylite, p. 76.)

  70 Procopius: History of the Wars, 1.11.

  71 Letter of Tansar, p. 43. Although ostensibly written during the reign of Ardashir, the identification of the events described with the Mazdakite revolt is almost universally accepted.

  72 Ibid.: p. 38.

  73 Ammianus: 24.6.3.

  74 Theophanes, p. 26. The description is of Khusrow II’s gardens at Dastagerd, but would certainly have been applicable to the great park of Ctesiphon.

  75 Ibid.

  76 Genesis: 2.8.

  77 Daniel: 7.3. The Book of Daniel is conventionally dated to the mid-second century BC, some four hundred years after Daniel himself is supposed to have lived.

  78 Ibid.: 7.18.

  79 Cassius Dio: 68.30.

  80 Jeremiah: 51.7.

  81 Ibid.: 51.37.

  82 Procopius: History of the Wars, 2.13.13.

  83 For the identification of the Harranian rituals as described by Christian and Muslim sources with the akitu festival, see Green, pp. 156–7.

  84 Letter of Jeremiah: 72.

  85 Berosus, pp. 20–1.

  86 Ammianus: 23.6.25.

  87 Genesis: 11.28. Muslim and some Jewish traditions identify Ur with Urfa, the ancient city of Edessa, not far from Harran. There seems to be some support for this attribution in the fact that Abraham received his first revelation from God not in Ur but in “Haran”—which was almost certainly Harran. However, most scholars agree that the Ur mentioned in Genesis was the ancient city of the same name in Chaldaea, in the south of Mesopotamia. This had its final flourishing as a major cultural centre during the first half of the sixth century BC, under the Babylonian monarchy—precisely the period when the Judaeans were in exile in Babylon and the Book of Genesis was reaching its final form. Therefore, the exiles’ desire to link their ancestor to a sophisticated place of origin probably explains the association of Abraham with a city that is specifically described in Genesis (11.28) as “Ur of the Chaldaeans.” Of course, this strongly implies that Abraham himself was a mythical, rather than a historical, figure—which, by and large, is the current scholarly consensus. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that doubts about the historicity of Abraham entered the academic mainstream in the 1970s—precisely when scepticism about what Muslim tradition had to say about the origins of Islam was also gaining currency in scholarly circles.

  88 Ibid.: 12.1–2.

  89 Ibid.: 17.8.

  90 Ibid.: 17.5.

  91 Letter of Tansar, p. 64. The reference is to Persia itself, but the market place of Persia lay in Ctesiphon, not Iran.

  92 Genesis: 17. 9–10.

  93 Exodus: 20.4.

  94 b. Berachoth 8b. Quotations from the Talmud are often prefaced by one of two letters—“b” and “y”—which indicate whether they derive from the “Bavli,” or Babylonian Talmud, or the “Yerushalmi,” or Palestinian Talmud.

  95 b. Avodah Zarah 16a.

  96 Denkard: 3.229. Though composed in the early ninth century, the material that this source incorporates mostly dates from the Sasanian period.

  97 Elishe: p. 63.

  98 Elishe: p. 63.

  99 There is a late and fantastical tradition that narrates the rise to power of one last exilarch—Mar Zutra. He supposedly exploited the chaos unleashed by the Mazdakite revolt to carve out an independent Jewish state before being toppled by Kavad and crucified on a bridge in Ctesiphon. For a long time, there was an “uncritical acceptance of the fabulous stories as literally true, factual historical accounts, though with the exclusion of the more miraculous of the miracles” (Neusner [1986], p. 98). As the leading contemporary historian of the Mesopotamian Jews has conclusively demonstrated, however, the evidence is patently “inadequate, indeed incredible” (ibid., p. 104).

  100 b. Hullin 62b.

  101 Nowhere are we specifically told this, but the enthusiasm with which Jews flocked to serve in Kavad’s armies is inexplicable unless we presume as much.

  102 Eusebius: Preparation for the Gospel: 9.18. The phrase is a quotation from an otherwise largely vanished book named Concerning the Jews of Assyria, by a second-century BC Jewish historian named Eupolemus.

  103 Such, at least, is the overwhelming scholarly consensus, which dates the start of the transcription of the Talmud to around AD 500.

  104 Exodus Rabbah 15.21.

  105 b. Sanhedrin 98a.

  106 Genesis Rabbah 42.4.

  107 b. Sanhedrin 36a. The rabbi was Jehuda ha-Nasi, who lived in the late second century AD.

  108 b. Yevamot 20a.

  10
9 b. Berakhot 58a.

  110 b. Kethuboth 111b.

  111 b. Shabbat 30b.

  112 Numeri Rabbah 14.10.

  113 See Marcel Simon, p. 196.

  114 b. Gittin 57a. The references to Jesus in the Talmud are notoriously elliptical and enigmatic, and have traditionally—for understandable reasons—been skated over by both Christian and Jewish scholars. For a fascinating and persuasive survey, see the recent book by Peter Schäfer, who demonstrates how the “[mainly] Babylonian stories about Jesus and his family are deliberate and highly sophisticated counternarratives to the stories about Jesus’s life and death in the Gospels” (p. 8).

  115 Numeri Rabbah 14.10.

  116 Abodah Zara 2a.

  3 New Rome

  1 Propertius: 3.22.21.

  2 The quotation comes from Athenaeus, 6.273A–275A.

  3 Plutarch, Roman Questions: 61.

  4 This process had begun long before the formal absorption of Greece into the Roman Empire, and seems initially to have drawn upon contacts between Rome and the Greek settlements in Italy. “The Greeks imposed the Trojan legend upon the West as a form of Hellenic cultural imperialism, only to see it appropriated by the westerner to define and convey a Roman cultural identity” (Gruen, p. 31).

  5 Livy: 26.27.

  6 Virgil: 6.852–3.

  7 Aristides: 26.59 and 99.

  8 Virgil: 6.792–3

  9 Ibid.: 1.279.

  10 Such, at any rate, is the claim made by our admittedly hostile Christian sources. It is possible that their accounts of the humiliations inflicted upon Valerian reflect a measure of wishful thinking.

  11 Cicero: 17.

  12 Optatianus Porphyrius, Carmen: 4, line 6. The poem was composed to celebrate the founding of Constantinople, and clearly suggests that the new city’s status as a rival to Rome was manifest from the very beginning.

  13 Eusebius, Life of Constantine: 3.54.

  14 The earliest reference to this tradition can be dated to the fifth century AD. See Sozomen: 2.3.2.

  15 See Fowden (1991) for a much earlier source which implies that the porphyry actually came from Rome.

  16 Chronicon Paschale, p. 16.

  17 Zosimus: 1.58.4.

  18 Procopius: History of the Wars, 1.11.9.

  19 Procopius: On Buildings, 1.5.10.

  20 Zosimus: 2.35.2.

  21 Corippus: 3.244.

  22 The Oracle of Baalbek, line 166.

  23 Procopius: The Secret History, 14.2.

  24 Ibid.: On Buildings, 2.6.6.

  25 This derives from Procopius (The Secret History, 30.21–3), who was admittedly almost rabid in his undercover hostility to Justinian. Nevertheless, even if some of the details of the changes to court ceremonial may have been exaggerated, the drift towards ever-greater formality is irrefutable.

  26 Procopius: The Secret History, 8.27.

  27 Ibid.: 8.24.

  28 Novels 43, prologue.

  29 Novels 98: 16 December 539.

  30 Cicero, On the Orator: 1.197.

  31 Novels 111.

  32 CJ Constt. Summa, preface.

  33 The notion that the emperor constituted the law dated back at least to the fourth century AD.

  34 John Lydus: 3.44.

  35 A decree of Theodosius II (r. 408–50), quoted by Kelly, p. 187.

  36 Procopius: The Secret History, 7.10.

  37 Even the lowest figure we have, Procopius’s estimate of thirty thousand, is staggering. All ancient historians exaggerated battle casualties, but the massacre in the Hippodrome undoubtedly resulted in a prodigious death toll.

  38 John Lydus: 3.70.

  39 Novels 72: 538.

  40 Procopius: 1.14.52.

  41 Ibid.: On Buildings, 2.1.11.

  42 Whether Procopius exaggerated the scale of Justinian’s contributions to the fortifications of Dara is a moot point. See Croke and Crow.

  43 Isaiah: 40.15.

  44 Ibid.: 40.17.

  45 Genesis: 22.18.

  46 Tractate Paschale 8. The rabbi himself, Eleazar ben Pedat, was born in the Holy Land.

  47 “Ambrosiaster,” a commentator on St. Paul’s letters who was long mistaken for St. Ambrose. Quoted by Cohen, p. 159.

  48 I am indebted to Shahrokh Razmjou for alerting me to this.

  49 b. Kiddushin 70b.

  50 Galatians: 3.28.

  51 Ibid.: 3.25–6.

  52 The first known use of the phrase “Old Testament” occurred in the writings of Melito of Sardis (c. AD 180), and that of the “New Testament” in Irenaeus’s Against Heresies (4.91), from around the same time.

  53 Gospel of St. John: 14.6.

  54 Gospel of St. Matthew: 28.19. See also 2 Corinthians: 13.13.

  55 Acts: 2.2.

  56 1 Corinthians: 12.13.

  57 “Letter to Diognetus” (a): 5.

  58 Ignatius, “Letter to the Ephesians”: 6.

  59 Gospel of St. Matthew: 19.21.

  60 Ibid.: 7.15.

  61 Tertullian, The Prescription Against the Heretics: 21.

  62 Ibid.

  63 Romans: 15.19.

  64 Gospel of St. Matthew: 5.18.

  65 Tertullian, Against Praxeas: 2.

  66 Irenaeus, Against Heresies: 1.8.1.

  67 For the value placed on eyewitness accounts by both early Christian writers and classical historians, and the concurrent suspicion of written evidence, see Alexander (1990) and Byrskog. Unfortunately, the question of whether the canonical gospels do indeed preserve eyewitness accounts is not one that can be tackled in a single footnote.

  68 See, for instance, the Gospel of Thomas, a number of Infancy Gospels, and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew—the same text which features Christ’s conversation with His mother from the womb. In some of these gospels, Christ makes the birds come to life, not to amuse His friends, but to demonstrate to a killjoy Jew that it is permissible to work clay on the Sabbath.

  69 See Origen: 1.1. No trace of the Gospel of Basilides has survived, however, so we are entirely dependent upon the reports of his enemies for a sense of what might have been contained within it.

  70 Irenaeus, Against Heresies: 1.24.4.

  71 Origen: 1.1.

  72 Clement of Alexandria: Stromateis 7.106.4.

  73 Justin Martyr: 47.

  74 t. Hul. 2.24.

  75 Gospel of St. John: 3.7.

  76 Alan Segal (p. 1) gives the metaphor a more biblical colouring: “Like Jacob and Esau, the twin sons of Isaac and Rebecca, the two religions fought in the womb.” See also, for a more radical phrasing of the same metaphor, Boyarin (2004, p. 5): “Judaism is not the ‘mother’ of Christianity; they are twins, joined at the hip.” As with so many other aspects of the history of ancient religion, the question of when Judaism and Christianity “parted ways” has been revolutionised over the past few decades. In the words of Carleton Paget, this constitutes “the most significant recent development in the discussion of Jewish–Christian relations” (p. 18). Carleton Paget’s is the best, most nuanced overview of recent scholarship (pp. 1–39).

  77 Bardaisan, p. 49.

  78 Evidence for this can be adduced from a site such as Sardis, in what is now western Turkey, where a synagogue built around AD 400 adjoined a colonnade that contained shops owned by a healthy mix of Christians and Jews. If this was the state of affairs in what was, by then, a Christian empire, then something similar almost certainly prevailed in third- and fourth-century Mesopotamia. See the essay by Rutgers.

  79 See Becker, p. 380.

  80 See Rouwhorst, pp. 81–2.

  81 See Weitzman. Others argue that the translation was made by Jews who had already been baptised.

  82 Eusebius, History of the Church: 3.27. Paul did not, in fact, advocate the abandonment of the Torah by Jewish converts, but that was rarely appreciated, either by the Gentile Christians who so admired him or by the Jewish Christians who often regarded him with deep suspicion.