Persia
Article
Persia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 24, 2021 and January 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “King Shahryar of Persia”; “Basically nobody in Elam/Medea/Persia would even notice”; “The Persian version changes things around so that Alexander is secretly the descendant of the rightful Shah of Persia”. It most often appears alongside Babylon, China, Egypt.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: May 24, 2021
- Last seen: January 10, 2024
Appears In
- Book Review: Arabian Nights
- Against Ice Age Civilizations
- Book Review: The Alexander Romance
- Book Review: Cyropaedia
Related Pages
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- Babylon (3 shared issues)
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- China (3 shared issues)
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- Egypt (3 shared issues)
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- Alexander the Great (2 shared issues)
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- Assyria (2 shared issues)
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- Middle East (2 shared issues)
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- Persian army (2 shared issues)
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- Persians (2 shared issues)
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- Rome (2 shared issues)
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- Sparta (2 shared issues)
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- Thebes (2 shared issues)
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- 15th century Sicilian manuscript (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Our tale begins in Samarkand. One day the king, Shah Zaman, comes home unexpectedly and sees his wife cheating on him with a black man. He kills her in a rage, then falls sick with grief, and is taken to the palace of his brother, King Shahryar of Persia. While there, he sees King Shahryar's wife cheat on him with a black man. He tells King Shahryar, who kills his wife in a rage too, then also falls sick with grief. The two grief-stricken kings decide to wander the world, expecting that maybe this will help in some way.
Diversity: Including Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Moroccans (always sorcerers), suspiciously Arabic-seeming Chinese, and blacks. This last group is mostly found as slaves, which felt anachronistic until I looked it up and learned more about the massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East. In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude. Of course, the author is very concerned about the excessive masculinity of black slaves, especially the fact that your wife is probably cheating on you with one. When one adulterer is late to a meeting with her slave beau, he swears "an oath by the valor and honor of blackamoor men (and don't think that our manliness is like the poor manliness of white men)" to ignore her from then on unless she is more timely. I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence. Elsewhere in diversity: Jews are usually doctors or merchants, but everyone's a merchant so this isn't so remarkable. The one time a Christian appears in the stories I read, he's a drunkard - which wasn't the stereotype I was expecting, but which I guess makes sense under the circumstances.
Flying Carpets: I understand these show up somewhere in the full 30-volume edition, but there was not a single flying carpet in all 580 pages of my abridged version. Long-distance travel, when needed, was usually performed by genie. There was also a mechanical flying horse invented by a Persian sage. When you pressed a button on the right side of its head, a bag would inflate and it would fly into the air; when you pressed an identical button on the left, the bag would deflate and it would land. This sage got angry at a prince and came up with a plot to kill him; he showed the prince his flying horse and told him to try riding it by pressing the button on the right. The sage figured that the prince would press the button on the right, lift off into the heavens, and - not knowing the secret of landing - never return. Of course, it took the prince three seconds to think "maybe if the button on the right makes it go up, the one on the left will make it go down", and it did, so the prince landed easily. The sage was put in prison for attempting to assassinate the prince, and everyone lived happily ever after, plus the prince kept the mechanical horse and went on cool adventures. I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.
Basically nobody in Elam/Medea/Persia would even notice.
There is no single Alexander Romance. Every culture from Ethiopia to Russia added their own bits and adapted it to their own needs. The Persian version changes things around so that Alexander is secretly the descendant of the rightful Shah of Persia; the Jewish version adds bits about how Alexander knelt before the High Priest of Jerusalem and said that the LORD was the one true God. Someone from Syria added the bits about Gog and Magog; nobody knows who added the parts with the 36-foot-tall giants, the three-eyed lions, the sphere-people, or the headless men. This makes it hard to review “the” Alexander Romance - some historians describe it as more of a genre than a single story.
Nectanebo was a pharaoh who was also a wizard. He ruled Egypt wisely; when enemies attacked, he would magically vaporize their armies from afar. One day he scryed some enemies approaching Egypt’s border (probably the Persian army of Cambyses?); when he tried to vaporize them, the magic didn’t work. He realized that the gods had decreed that Egypt must fall, so he fled to Macedonia, working as a magician-for-hire to make ends meet.
As Alexander advanced, King Darius of Persia sent him increasingly insulting letters, to which Alexander sent back letters with dazzlingly witty responses to the insults. For example, from Darius, heavily edited for length:
But when we reflected that there was one Cyrus, the Persian, who reduced to obedience a vast number of men and cities and nations, we were then compelled to change our opinion and decide that to rule men might be a task neither impossible nor even difficult, if one should only go about it in an intelligent manner […]
Xenophon was a mercenary who fought beside Persians, making him potentially qualified to know things about Cyrus. He was a member of Socrates’ inner circle along with Plato, making him potentially qualified to know things about political philosophy (Plato’s Republic might be a response to Cyropaedia or vice versa; classicists aren’t sure).
Cyropaedia consists of eight books, exploring themes like: Who Even Were The Persians? This question has bothered me for a long time.