Do You Recognise Iskandar? November 2, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Medieval , trackback
There is always a pleasure in seeing what an almighty mess humans can make of ‘historical’ traditions. Take the following story about someone who is known by every reader of this blog, but who has arrived here, some fifteen hundred years after his death, in a guise that is not (ahem) particularly reminiscent of the historical original. Beach has run together a series of traditions from that period from Persia (modern Iran): not all appear in the same text.
Iskandar was a prophet of God and a Persian royal. He had grown up though with the King of Rome, because the Roman king’s daughter had married the King of Persia, Darab, but had then been sent away (pregnant) because she had such appallingly bad breath. Iskandar grew up to challenge Darab’s son (Iskandar’s brother) and, having defeated him in battle, he took over the land of the Persians where he was welcomed as a good Muslim. He married one of Darab’s grand-daughters Buran Dokht (his niece?), who was very likely an Iranian goddess, Anahita, and she helped him in his adventures in India and tried to ignore his dalliances with other women, including the forty Greek virgins he deflowered in a single night, and the Chinese maiden who brought him to ecstasy in the far east. Iskandar saw many other marvels in his expeditions in the orient including the land of giant spiders and the land of bearded women with male and female genitals. He proved a wise ruler and God always protected him until the whispering tree at the world’s end announced his death. Oh and Iskandar never lost a battle.
So do you recognize the description of Alexander the Great? The sources all come from middle Persian tradition. These rely on earlier now lost Persian texts from late antiquity, and ultimately Pseudo Calisthenes. Forget the philology though. Just ask yourself what we would make of Alexander if this was the only bit of evidence left? It is scary and yet in the cases of some heroes – Robin Hood, and Arthur, say – this is exactly the quality of evidence that we have. As it is we have enough evidence that we can follow the trail of bread crumbs backwards. ‘Rome’ is a generic Persian term for the north Mediterranean; the whole birth confusion topos allows Alexander to conquer and yet, simultaneously, be Persian; while the land of bearded transsexuals remains as mysterious as it doubtless was to Iskandar… Can anyone come up with other references to individuals whose lives have been so dramatically twisted out of recognition? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com There is that great line at the end of the Magnificent Seven: ‘Farmers always win’. At the end of every book they should have ‘story-tellers always lie’.
