Robbert Bosschart has
just published an Updated Version 2023 to his book All Alexander’s Women, which deserves
special attention.
Of particular interest is this newly reworked Chapter Persia's Historical Memory of Alexander, where the author focuses on the Persian side of history. The Achaemenids did not have a counterpart for the Greek writers and chroniclers, and relied instead on the verbal transmission of Alexander’s life and deeds by mouth of their storytellers.
This new information is too good to be kept hidden in the dust of times, and I am very happy to share hereafter the most important information together with some of the magnificent illustrations.
Persia's Historical Memory of Alexander
For
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Early Persian/Arab authors who included history themes in their writings, based their texts both on oral history accounts and on written documents. From Umara in the 7th century AD up to Masudí in the 10th century they used all sorts of sources, including the first Arabic translations of the pseudo-Kallisthenes’ Alexander Romance.
As times went by, the most popular versions of Alexander’s exploits became more and more sensational and sexy, big adventure tales usually known as the Iskandar-Nama, the Book of Alexander. As a result, their reports about Alexander’s reign are quite entertaining literature, but in historical accuracy ‘few and far between’.
Therefore it is interesting to find that the only text with specifically Persian memories of Alexander’s life and deeds is, again, that of a simple storyteller. Or not exactly ‘simple’, for Abu Taher al-Tarsusí describes himself as «a compiler of histories and narrator of mysterious facts». The saga that Tartusi published under the title of Darab-Nama (‘Tale of Darius’) was a written version of an ancient folk story. From the 12th century AD on it became very popular.
The oldest manuscript we have is dated to 1580 AD, in an edition illuminated with precious miniatures made in India for the Mughal emperor Akbar. Painstaking research on this and other, later versions finally yielded in 1965 the definitive edition of the Darab-Nama. In his introduction, Professor Zabiholla Safa underlined that the text is based on oral source material that is much older than the Arabic translations of the Alexander Romance. In other words, the Darab-Nama reflects Persia’s own historical memory.
Its title is rather misleading, because only 386 of the 1159 known pages concern Persia’s glory years under the revered figures of Darius the Elder and his successor. But the bulk of the text, 773 pages long, displays an elaborate tale of how his fictional granddaughter, princess ‘Buran-dokht’, first opposes, but finally permits Alexander’s conquest of Persia.
A unique characteristic of the Darab-Nama is that here, Alexander does not get the brilliant leading role. That privilege is reserved solely for the purely Persian personage Buran-dokht. As long as the story takes place in Persia, Alexander is even portrayed as a hotheaded, at times stupid or cowardly, and always vulnerable young man, with no special military talents. More than once, Buran-dokht has to come and save him. Only after the story has moved to foreign lands, Alexander is allowed to become a brilliant warrior and wise statesman.
The Iskandar-Nama became a popular (and often hilarious)
adventure tale with lots of action and sex
Of course, like many other works of oral literature, the Darab-Nama has been compiled over the centuries by successive storytellers. This makes it even more impressive that in Tarsusí’s final version, the text still manages to retain Persia’s popular memory of three historical facts concerning Alexander.
The most extensive of the three is the (re)appearance of a goddess from a legendary past, Anahita. Time and again she intervenes to promote and protect Alexander’s kingship. To begin with, as Nahid, Alexander’s secret mother, who succeeds in placing him on the throne of the Western empire called “Rum“. Then she pops up briefly as queen Aban-dokht, who becomes his lover, and presents him with the capital of Persia, Estakhr. Finally she shines forth on hundreds of pages as the divine Buran-dokht, who ends up marrying him and setting him on the throne of the empire. Which means that even in islamic Iran, popular folklore still remembered –from 1500 years back!– the goddess Anahita, her role as Giver of Kingship, and her blessing for Alexander.
The second historical fact reported about Alexander in the Darab-Nama refers to his double Persian marriage «according to core royal usage»; that is, the multiple political marriages practised by Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great in the 6th century BC. This is told as follows:
«Buran-dokht took Alexander by the hand, made him sit on the throne and saluted him as King of Iran. Then they sent messengers and letters from Estakhr to all the provinces to announce that Buran-Dokht and Alexander had married.
The gates of the treasuries were opened, gold was distributed profusely, and with both of them installed on their thrones on equal footing, they had seven months of celebrations. In accordance with the core royal usage, Alexander was also given in marriage the daughter of King Shahush».
So here Alexander marries a daughter of king Darab and a daughter of a king called Shahush. History tells us that in Susa, in 324 BC, Alexander married princess Barsine/Stateira, daughter of Darius III, and the princess Parysatis, last daughter of a king we know as Artaxerxes III Ochus, but who was called ‘Vahush’ in Old Persian. So the «daughter of King Shahush» in the Darab-Nama evidently is the daughter of Shah Vahush, as Artaxerxes III was known to his court.
The Persian warrior-queen Buran-dokht repeatedly
saves Alexander from his enemies.
Here she defeats the Indian king Poros, when she grabs
his war elephant by the trunk and overturns him.
(Miniature illustrating a Darab Nama manuscript of 1720 AD,
now in the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin)
The third popular memory of a historical fact embedded in this saga recounts Alexander’s decision to promote mass-marriages for the better integration of conquerors and conquered into one realm; a theme that takes up some 20 pages in the Darab-Nama. This is how the story goes:
Alexander and his army happen upon an island of women, and thousands of these invade the camp «searching for men». Alexander suspects that in reality they may be hostile, but soon understands they only want to make love —and then fears that his own men will “go berserk”, causing even worse problems. So he allows his wise chancellor –whose name is given as Plato— to apply a miracle-working solution.
Plato calls upon the women and asks them: «By the will of God, and so be all the Angels your witnesses, will you give yourselves in legal union to the men that will enter your city?» They agree. The storyteller concludes: «When the women were trying to seduce the men, it was the work of the Devil; but as soon as they were conveniently and legally married, it became God’s work, and Alexander could no longer be held responsible for any problems arising of their arrival».
Clearly, this is a remembrance of the mass-marriages (in reality, the legalization of de facto marriages) that Alexander organised in parallel with his double wedding at Susa in 324 BC. Out of his own purse, as Arrian reports in VII, 4, 8, he paid dowries for the Persian and other Oriental women who had taken up with his officers and soldiers, so they could be legally married.
The list totalled some 10,000 dowries, and the classical sources say that Alexander disbursed over 10,000 talents of silver for them; an amount equivalent to 150 million dollars of today. It is understandable that these marriages, converting thousands of concubines into legal wives, left an indelible memory among the Persians.
Just as important was Alexander’s pledge that he would care for their offspring. Arrian notes in passing that he promised his veterans that their children from Oriental partners “will be educated as Makedonians”. But Diodoros tells more: he registers (in his Book XVII, 110, 3) that Alexander has set up a specific fund and appointed the necessary teachers to ensure that the 10,000 children his men have had with “women who were taken in war” will be educated “as is the right of free men”.
Alexander and his wise chancellor Plato receive Queen Sabaterah,
who reigns over an island where only women live,
and they all want sex with men.
Plato will ensure that they become legal spouses.
(Miniature from the 1720 AD manuscript of the Darab-Nama)
In Book XVIII, Diodoros adds that Alexander had decided to apply his integration policy on a much broader scale:
«…he intended to establish cities and to transplant populations from Asia to Europe and in the opposite direction from Europe to Asia, in order to bring the largest continents to common unity and to friendly kinship by means of intermarriages and family ties».
Alexander’s intermarriage policy found lasting approval in Persia, as shown by the positive comment of the storyteller in the Darab-Nama on the “miraculous solution” devised by Plato. In fact, all three of Tarsusí’s historical storylines, repeated again and again in the saga, must have met with notable approval of his Persian audience. After all, no storyteller makes a living by irritating his public.
Around the year 1000 AD, the prominent court poet Farrukhi Sistaní affirmed: “The story of Alexander’s exploits and his travels has found listeners everywhere, and everybody knows those tales by heart”. So Tarsusí and the storytellers before him had to take into account that among their public, there always would be people who remembered some previous version of the Alexander Romance.
As a case in point, their public in Ghazna could perfectly well remember an Eskandar-Nama compiled around 1015 AD out of stock tales of Persian storytellers that simply copied episodes from the pseudo-Kallisthenes Romance, with some fancy (and errors) added. In that text, Alexander is the undisputed hero of the saga. But to entertain the audience, this Eskandar-nama turns him into a comical figure who not only conquers kingdoms, but also women galore. He seduces princesses, amazons, warrior beauties, servant girls, widow queens, noble dames and even fairy queens (!) far and wide. With the result that this Alexander suffers all the problems of a bumbling man with too many wives and/or concubines.
When Alexander is listening to the deathbed pleas of king Darab, who begs him to treat his family well, Roxana makes her appearance in this Eskandar-Nama. “She is still young, you could marry her,” suggests Darab. (Here, Roxana is said to be not a daughter, but one of the wives of the Persian king.) Alexander answers hastily that this is a petition he will not agree to:
“God forbid that I should desire your wife, for I already have four wives, all free women, plus 40 concubines from here and from Greece.”
Roxana is an unavoidable heroine in all the Oriental translations of Romance episodes. So she also has to appear in the Darab-Nama. Well, more or less. When introducing his top star the princess Buran-dokht, Tarsusí takes the precaution of telling his public that «elsewhere she was also called Roshanak».
In other words, despite the fact that the following 773 pages prove without a shadow of doubt that his majestic Buran-dokht has nothing in common with the insignificant Roxana, Tarsusí still thought it wise to bow –if only once– to the Alexander Romance.
For my comments on
Robbert Bosschart’s Third Edition, please refer to my earlier blogpost: All Alexander's Women.
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