It does not matter which book I pick for
reading, Alexander is always in the
back of my mind. This is also the case when I hold The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (ISBN 978-0-141-44209-9),
were it only because Alexander the Great
spent nearly three years of his short life in Oxiana, corresponding more or less to today’s Afghanistan.
Robert Byron travels fromVenice , via Jerusalem , Damascus and
Bagdad (Iraq )
to Persia in 1933 and
finally reaches Afghanistan
in 1934, keeping a detailed diary of his journey. In those days the King of
England, George V, was still emperor of India; Afghanistan was ruled by King
Nadir Shah who was assassinated in November 1933 to be succeeded by his 19
years-old son Zahir Shah; the Imperial State of Persia was governed by Reza
Shah Pahlavi; meaning that the reader gets a good picture of the peculiar
background against which the story evolves.
Robert Byron travels from
What captivates me especially is the fact that part of the roads correspond exactly to those followed by Alexander some 2,000 years earlier. The landscape is a commanding factor in antiquity as well as today and the obvious itineraries always follow the same rivers, oasis and towns, skirting the same deserts and mountains, using the same passes and goat-tracks.
Byron is mostly interested in Islamic art and evidently he finds lots of examples along his journey, giving very detailed and lively descriptions, especially in
This book is extremely interesting from different points of view, either for its detailed Islamic architecture and art, or for daily life in that part of the
No comments:
Post a Comment