#ancient Iranian sword

[transgenderer]

minimizing dollars per sword-year...

I think those ancient Iranian swords are an insane good deal from this perspective. Like. You're not gonna find a 500 year old sword for less than 500 dollars. Or a ten year old swordfor less than ten dollars

[yunathun]

BEHOLD, I SHALL STIR UP THE MEDES AGAINST THEM-(PART 18)

BEHOLD, I SHALL STIR UP THE MEDES AGAINST THEM-(PART 18)

THE AMALEKITE-EDOMITE-KHAZARIAN ROMAN CAUCASIAN STATE BOMBS THE IRANIAN CONSULATE-EMBASSY IN SYRIA, THE MEDO-PERSIANS ONLY DESIRE RECOMPENSE, VENGEANCE, BLOOD, JUDGEMENT, DEATH, AMEN...

FROM THE KING JAMES BIBLE (KJV 1611) BY BROTHER J.R. WILLIS

THE LORD IS STIRRING UP THE MEDES AGAINST BABYLON-AMERICA-EDOM, AMEN:

United States of America, you are the Virgin Daughter of Babel, and soon the Edomite stronghold of Babylon the Great shall perish as it is written, Amen.

EDOM-(THE CAUCASIAN NATIONS), ARE THE VIRGIN DAUGHTER OF BABYLON & MUST DIE, THUS SAYETH THE LORD. THE MOST HIGH SHALL BURN AND DASH EDOM AND THEIR LYING BOULDER-ROCK HEADED DEMONIC SERPENT CHILDREN TO PIECES BY WAY OF THE MEDES-(IRAN):

MIGHTY KING DAVID OFJUDAH-YUDAH PROPHESIES AND SPEAKS AGAINST BABEL-EDOM:

PSALM 137:7-9

7 Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom-(THE CAUCASIAN NATIONS), in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof-(THE YEAR 586 BC, ANCIENT NEO- BABYLONIAN INVASION OF THE SOUTHERN KINGDOM BY CUSHITE-HAMITE KING NEBUCHENEZZER, OF CHALDEA, EDOM WHO ARE THE NEW SPIRITUAL BABYLONIANS-CHALDEANS, ASSISITED ANCIENT BABEL TO TAKE US YUDAH-JUDAH, INTO CAPTIVITY, AS THEY DESTROYED OUR HOLY TEMPLE, THEY CRIED & CHANTED, [RAISE IT, RAISE IT-DESTROY-LEVEL IT], UNTO THE FOUNDATIONS, ESAU-EDOM MUST DIE, AMEN),

THE 7 YEAR LONG BLOODY BATTLE OF MASADA- JERUSALEM, ISRAEL-OVER ONE MILLION BLACK JEWS ARE SLAUTERED & ENSLAVED BY EDOMITE ROME-RAISE IT, RAISE IT THE EDOMITES CRIED ALOUD WHILE THESE WRETCHED HEATHEN, RED- FACED SERPENT SEED DEVILS DESTROYED OUR HOLY TEMPLE TO THE FOUNDATION-([ROMAN GENERALS & CAESARS, VESPESIAN & TITUS).

8 O daughter of Babylon-(AMERICA-ESAU-AMALEK-EDOM-THE CAUCASIAN NATIONS-THE DAUGHTER OF EDOM-THE MOST HIGH IS CLEARLY DISTINGUISHING ANCIENT CHALDEA FROM THE NEW SPIRITUAL CHALDEA AS AMERICA IS THE –[VIRGIN DAUGHTER OF BABYLON, SHE IS A VIRGIN DAUGHTER OF ANCIENT BABYLON AND OF ROME BECAUSE SHE IS THE EPIDEMY & HEIGHT OF THE BABYLONIAN SECRET MYSTERY RELIGIOUS OCCULT & BECAUSE SHE HAS NEVER BEEN INVADED OR TOUCHED BY FOREIGN MILITARY CONFLICT, BUT SOON THIS GREAT WHORE WHO SITS UPON MANY WATERS SHALL BARE IT ALL, AND ALL WITHIN HER SHALL BE BURNT TO THE FOUNDATION THEREOF,AMEN),

who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us-(BABEL-BABYLON AMERICA IS THE SWORD & HAMMER OF THE EARTH THROUGH THEIR EDOMITE ROMAN MILITARY-EDOM SERVED THE MOST HIGH TO CHASTISE, SPANK & EXACT GREAT FATHER AHAYAH'S JUDGEMENT UPON THE NATIONS & VENGENCE UPON TRUE YISRAEL SO THAT WE MAY REPENT AND COME BACK TO OUR GLORIOUS FATHER IN THESE VERY END TIMES-AMEN).

9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones-(EDOM DASHED THE BRAINS OF OUR LITTLE ONES AGAINST THE STONES FOR COUNTLESS GENERATIONS-IT IS ONLY FITTING THAT IT SHALL BE DONE BACK UNTO YOU-THE LORD IS A MOST FAIR & JUST ELOHIM-AMEN).

ISAIAH 13:17-22

17 Behold, I will stir up the Medes-(PRESENT DAY MEDO-PERSIANS-IRAN) against them-(BABYLON-AMERICA-THE AMALEKITE NON JEW-ISH STATE), which shall not regard silver;

18 and as for gold, they shall not delight in it-(AMERICA CANNOT BUY OUT THE PERSIANS AS THEY HAVE DONE TO THE REST OF THE MIDDLE-EAST & ISHMAEL WHO ARE THE ARAB NATIONS-SAUDI ARABIA).

19 Their bows-(CONVENTIONAL BOMBS-NUCLEAR WEAPONRY-THE SWORD-THE WASTER), also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb;

20 their eyes shall not spare children-(NOT EVEN THOSE GIVING BIRTH IN HOSPITALS OR THEIR CHILDREN SHALL BE SPARED FROM THE ATTACK BY THE IRANIANS-TRUE TERRORISM SHALL COME FROM THE IRANIANS UPON THE WEST LIKE NEVER BEFORE).

And Babylon-(AMERICA), the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees-(ANCIENT BABYLONIAN SORCERERS-RICH WISE MEN-ESAU EDOM ARE THE NEW SPIRITUAL CHALDEANS)' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah-(COMPLETE NUCLEAR FIRE & BRIMSTONE).

21 “But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there-(YEMIM); and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures-(THE YEMIM-EMIM-IMIM); and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there-(YEMIM).”

22 It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there-(NO MORE FOREIGN MERCHANTS SELLING GOODS & MAKING A LIFE THERE);

22 neither shall the shepherds make their fold there-(NEVER AGAIN SHALL FOREIGNERS-THE HEATHEN GENTILE NATIONS MAKE FORTUNES DWELLING IN THAT WICKED NATION AS SHE IS BROUGHT TO COMPLETE RUIN & DESTRUCTION).

ISAIAH 13:19

19. “And Babylon-(AMERICA), the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah-(FIRE & BRIMSTONE-NUCLEAR WAR).”

****IMPORTANT NOTES****

(ARTICLE EXCERPT): 4-11-2024

PRESS TV DOT IR

'Punishing aggressor a necessity', Iran FM tells German counterpart Thursday, 11 April 2024 5:33 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 11 April 2024 6:19 PM ] Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock held phone talks on Thursday. Iran's foreign minister has told his German counterpart that "legitimate defense with the aim of punishing the aggressor is a necessity" after Israel's April 1 airstrike on the Iranian consular section in Damascus.

Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and Annalena Baerbock held phone talks on Thursday, during which the top Iranian diplomat also criticized Germany for its "neutrality" on the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Iran has pledged retaliation for the Israeli airstrike that killed seven Iranian military advisors at its diplomatic annex in the Syrian capital.

"When the Israeli regime completely violates the immunity of individuals and diplomatic places in violation of international law and the Vienna Conventions, legitimate defense is a necessity," Amir-Abdollahian said, according to a statement issued by the foreign ministry in Tehran.

The statement said the two ministers discussed the latest developments in the region and bilateral relations, emphasizing the necessity to maintain the path of dialog.

"The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is always based on avoiding tension," Amir-Abdollahian said.

Iran, the minister said, expected Germany to clearly condemn the Israeli crime in killing its military advisors.

"If a similar missile attack had taken place on one of the diplomatic places in the war zone in Ukraine, would the reaction of the United States and Europe have been the same?" he said.

Amir-Abdollahian addressed Baerbock's remarks about the need for a ceasefire in the Gaza war and the failure of efforts to halt the Israeli invasion of the besieged Palestinian territory.

"The reason why Germany's efforts to establish a ceasefire in Gaza have been fruitless should be found in the lack of German neutrality in this genocide," the Iranian minister said.

"Israel is an occupying regime and Palestine has the right to legitimate defense. In this regard, the only way to solve the current problems is to end the genocide and war crimes in Gaza," he added.

Amir-Abdollahian welcomed the resolution of misunderstandings between Tehran and Berlin regarding human rights.

In February, Baerbock appealed for an extension of a UN mission about 2022 riots in Iran during her speech to the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

"We expect Germany not to repeat baseless accusations against Iran and to defend the rights of thousands of women and children in Gaza and other parts of the world, where women's rights are constantly violated," Amir-Abdollahian said.

Baerbock spoke with her Iranian counterpart about "the tense situation in the Middle East" and the need for restraint, the German foreign ministry said.

"Avoiding further regional escalation must be in everyone's interest. We urge all actors in the region to act responsibly and exercise maximum restraint," the ministry wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The Iranian foreign ministry readout said Baerbock congratulated the advent of Eid al-Fitr, stressing that the Muslim festival carries the message of peace.

"In this tense situation, Germany requests restraint from the Islamic Republic of Iran," she said, it added.

As for the Israeli attack on Iran's consular section in Damascus, the German foreign minister said her country "clearly emphasized that diplomatic places enjoy complete immunity", the Iranian foreign ministry statement said.

The German government, she said, has tried and is trying to end the war in Gaza through a political solution, according to the statement.

****CONCLUSION****

THE LION OF JUDAH-YUDAH IS COMING TO DESTROY ALL HEATHEN NATIONS:

JEREMIAS 4:7

7. “The lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way; he is gone forth from his place to make thy land desolate; and thy cities shall be laid waste, without an inhabitant.”

For Judgement-(DEATH), comes for Esau who is Amalek, who are Edom, which are the Caucasian nations by way of the WRATH OF THE LAMB.

REVELATION 2:9

9. I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich)-(LORD YASHAYA KNOWS OUR OPPRESSION-AFFLICTION & DESTRUCTION AT THE HANDS OF OUR ENEMIES AS HE HIMSELF ENDURED THEM FOR US-BUT WE ARE RICH BECAUSE WE ARE THE LORD’S HERITAGE-WE ARE THE WORLD & THE WORLD WAS CREATED FOR US), and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews-(AMALEK-EDOM-THE CAUCASIAN NATIONS), and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan-(THESE WICKED SERPENTS ARE THE CHIEF HOUSE OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF).

***END OF SUMMARY***

NOW WHO SHALL DENY THIS REPORT?

J.R.WILLIS-(YUNATHUN ZION)

AUTHOR: A RACE OF DEMONS REFINED 2017 AUTHOR: SPIRITUAL CRIMES 2018 AUTHOR: THE PROPHECIES AUTHOR: THE BOOK OF DAEMONOLOGIE YEAR 2020

[ashitakaxsan]

A Good Omen

  Just the same an ancient persian sword was found in Krasnodar(see in a old post of mine https://ashitakaxsan.tumblr.com/post/698956033583972352/ancient-iranian-sword-unearthed-in-russia )now an other significant discovery opens up to us a perspective,to what  worthy events have taken place long ago.

Namely iranian Inscriptions were discovered in a ruined mosque,in a small village in Armenia,that can help trace the history of the Iranian lion symbol back several hundred years,it’s what a member of Iran’s Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and Tourism has said.

It turns out that Armenian inscriptions place the history of the lion symbol in Iranian petroglyphs 600 years earlier than archaeologists originally thought, ISNA quoted Morteza Rezvanfar as saying on Friday.

In one of these Persian inscriptions, a lion is engraved with a sword in hand next to the name of Imam Ali (AS), he added.

According to historical documents, this motif dates back to the time of the Qajar king Fath Ali Shah who reigned from 1797 to 1834, but these newly discovered inscriptions may push that date back over 600 years, he explained.

In addition to the lion and sun symbol, which dates back thousands of years, the first image of a lion holding a sword in inscriptions discovered in Iran, dates back to Qajar-era (1789-1925), and before that, the lion symbol have always had its feet on the ground, he noted.

 Iran, also known as Persia, historic region of southwestern Asia that is only roughly coterminous with modern Iran. The term Persia was used for centuries, chiefly in the West, to designate those regions where the Persian language and culture predominated, but it more correctly refers to a region of southern Iran formerly known as Persis, alternatively as Pars or Parsa, modern Fars.

My little say:

The nation of Persia,are the real natives of the land,the Persians are the Ancestores of todays Iranians,their origin has nothing to do with “Indo-European”,because the Indo-European theory is a severe fabrication made by weird Western intellectuals. As the iranian artifact found there this just says:if any nasty entity attempts  there to pull something  it will find Iran opposing,to any scheme.

Source:https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/484342/Inscriptions-found-in-Armenia-may-push-back-history-of-Iran-s

[vintagegeekculture]

Where do we get the wizard archetype who most often appears with long white hair and beard, sharp features, spectacles, and a dark blue conical hat and robe covered with stars and crescent moons? Wherever he came from, he's very versatile. He can do it all from grim-and-gritty sword and sorcery to cereal box mascot. Even J.K. Rowling couldn't escape it and made Dumbledore, her paragon of wizardness, the character who best fits this description.

Why do wizards typically wear robes with stars on them and a pointed hat?

If you’ve ever worn a robe at a graduation, you’d find it interesting to know that you’ve just participated in a custom going back to the middle ages. Oxford University, after all, was founded in 1096, the same year the First Crusade began. As most early colleges had priests and clergy as teachers, they wore robes and gowns, and it was a habit the students picked up, too, since it marked them as different from the townies. If you disliked wearing a robe for graduation, imagine wearing one all the time, the way early college students did.

But even more than that, because college graduates wore a robe in their occupation, over time it was a sign of having a distinct (and occult) profession, like being a medieval alchemist, doctor, or court astrologer. Remember that the boundary between doctor, astrologer, and alchemist were vague, since medieval medicine required zodiac charts to diagnose illnesses, and alchemy required astrological cooperation and used astrological and stellar symbols (for example, the silver liquid in thermometers we call quicksilver is also known as Mercury, because the alchemists associated it with the planet).

Every single court in Europe in the middle ages had a court astrologer – Nostradamus for example, was court astrologer to Catherine d’Medici in Italy. Tycho Brahe was a court astrologer.

I heard a very interesting argument that the ornate robes actually come from the Islamic world, where learned men, astrologers, and alchemists often had robes with ornate calligraphy, such as prayers, woven in.

As for the pointed hat, there are a lot of theories. One is that it got associated with court astrologers and alchemists because Jews wore yellow pointed hats in the middle ages (see Ivanhoe, where the Jew moneylender Isaac wears something like this), and Jews were associated with black magic and the occult. It is true many court astrologers and doctors are from Jewish families (Nostradamus had a Jewish father), however, I think a better explanation might be another Middle Eastern religion, Zoroastrianism. The conical Iranian hat (aka the smurf hat) was worn by the Magi, the Zoroastrian priestly class in Persia, who's practices give us the word magic and mage. Regardless of their origin, cone hats are visual shorthand for the east, other cultures, and exotic places full of black magic in the European mind. How far back does this go? Well, Trojans were often depicted with Iranian cone hats by the Ancient Greeks.

Remember: every adult wore a hat in the Western world until the 1950s. In the 30s and 40s, going outside hatless was considered notable and striking. Just look at any street scene in a black and white photo.

As for the wizard's magic wand, it's a phallic male fertility symbol, of a kind common in primitive magic practices, like a pagan maypole, representing erect strength, and imposing your will. Sometimes, Freud is 100% right. Alan Moore wrote a lot about how all wizards are, regardless of gender, male in nature. Unfortunately, I can't summarize Alan Moore's writing on magic because I don't really understand them.

As for where wizards come from....I mean...a belief in sorcerers probably predates homo sapiens in our present form. If you expected to hear wizards were invented by the coca-cola company in 1952 for a soda ad, I hate to disappoint you. Not everything was created by Madison Avenue to sell nylons. Some ideas have deep antiquity that predate us as a species.

There's some signs that Neanderthal man, and possibly earlier non-human hominids, had a belief in magic and ritual, and that there was one person, with a special role, who's job was to interact with the spirit world. There is a 20,000 year old ice age painting on a cave wall in France of a man transforming into a half-beast, known among anthropologists as "the sorcerer." Incidentally, the oldest depiction of a sorcerer we have, from the Ice Age? He's got a beard.

You know, I once was dedicated to figuring out exactly how magic "works." You know, for fantasy worldbuilding, the same way the Flight of Dragons books figured out how dragons worked biologically. I came to the conclusion that magic use in a human body accelerates your body temperature uncomfortably (heat, after all, is a byproduct of most changes in energy), which is why sorcerers wear roomy robes that breathe like Arabs in the desert, and why evil sexy sorceresses on Frazetta and Rowena Morril covers wear Elvira outfits.

[animegirl]

It is based on Persian and Persian culture: its horns were inspired by the Sasanian dynasty (the Persian Empire). Her name Nilou is a shortened form of Niloufar, which literally means “lotus/water lily” in Persian (so don’t be shy to include that, or you want to block the Persian aspects about her, because you didn’t mention where the name come from just the meaning of it). Lotus is also a symbol of beauty/fertility in Old Persian You can also see Hanna on her back, Hana tattoos is famous in India and Iran. The stones on her clothing are clearly based on Persian stones. The food she was eating was “tahchin” a Persian rice cake dish, and I thing that’s also why a piece of tahchin was missing. Like we know Nilou’s favourite food is Padisarah pudding which is based on a Persian dessert called Sholeh Zard, both of the food were made with two flowers padisarah pudding (padisarah flower and sumeru roses) Sholeh Zard (Safran and Rosewater). She also dances Persian and not Arabic or Egyptian (the Erimi dances belly dance, but not Nilou). We also know that she dance on the sabzeruz festival (birthday of Nahida, Sabze means green/grass and Ruz means day in Persian, which also reflects the dendro Archon) Sabzeruz is based on the Persian New Year called Nowruz, this day is celebrated in spring. The Nowruz traditions also include wheatgrass, translated into Persian it is called Sabze. Just as Sabzeruz celebrates the birth of Nahida, the must-see grass on Nowruz symbolizes the birth of the new year. In addition, half of the scene altars are also decorated with Persian Nowruz flowers, which could be inspired by the design of Padisarah that Nilou loves so much. In her bursed: haftkasvar is an ancient persian word, the modern word for it would be haftkeshvar sun in which literally translates to seven countries. I thing this would be a reference to the zoroastrian concept of the world being divided into 7 regions. Abzendegi or Abe zendegani literally translates to "water of life", both fitting her hydro vision and the meaning of her name. dance of samser is referencing dance of shamshir or raghse shamshir, which is persian for sword dance. the people of sumeru are essentially prohibited from performing publicly by the akademiya, nilou risks herself by overstepping this law for the sake of the plan in the AQ, similarly, the people of iran are prohibited from performing publicly and they, especially the women, have been showing so much bravery and resistance recently by dancing or singing publicly knowing it puts their lives and the lives of their loved ones at risk. in nilou's demo, she says "to the world, youre invisible. it never stops, to notice you" which reminds me of how little media coverage iranians got during the protests and how western media outlets dismissed it entirely. she then goes on to talk abt showing them through dance, which, again, parallels iranian women showing resistance by overstepping laws that forbid them from dancing and singing publicly. and finally, in nilou's story quest, she talks abt speaking up and letting your voice be heard which was just a general statement but it reminded me of the protests taking place in iran at the moment. the padisarah is one of nilou's ascension materials and in its description there is a huge mention of anahita, the zoroastrian goddess of water and fertility. zoroastrianism is also an ancient persian religion. 

Also I don’t really thing that she is based on Egypt, Egypt is known as the city of desert or something like that. So why is Nilou not a desert girl but a rainforest girl? Because she is most likely inspired by Indian and Persian. The Persian Empire and Indian is known as the city of rainforest or the place to be know for rainforest (something like that). furthermore people in Iran are also pale (sure they are also brown Persian, but we are talking about nilou). Anyways, I hope I could clear some info, bye.

Nilou = Goddess Hathor

Nilou's character design is heavily based on the Ancient Egyptian Goddess of Love Hathor. Like my previous post about Cyno I'm going to break down the larger references to the Egyptian gods these Genshin characters are based on.

First up Appearance! Nilou's headpiece has Hathor's iconic curved horns. Hathor's horns have been interpreted many ways over the years. Generally shown as a flat piece facing forward on a hat of sorts.

Now Hathor's horns make sense when drawn in hieroglyphics like this. But they make less sense when placed on a 3d subject like the statue above.

Leading to modern artists interpreting hathor's horns in other ways. Mostly one horn on either side of the head instead of a U on top of the head. Hathor is not as well known as Anubis or Ra. Meaning there are only two modern media depictions to pull from. Aaaaand the only one to show her with her horns is the really bad, white washed to hell, movie "Gods of Egypt".

As you can see the headpiece matches Nilou's. Nilou's even has the curved arch connecting the two horns in an attempt to mimic the arch of the sun disk in Hathor's horns. Nilou also has the bikini top thing going on, but that's more in reference to the Persian belly dancer stereotype. The reason Hathor has a bikini top in gods of egypt is because most ancient art of her shows her topless or at least with one tit out. Gods of Egypt decided to be boring and stay pg-13.

Of course like with Cyno and Anubis the connections don't stop at design.

Hathor is the goddess with a thousand names (joking). But the list is long she's goddess of the sky, the moon, the sun, love, motherhood, agriculture, the east, the west, providing for the dead, rare minerals/gold copper lapis lazuli, guardian of miners, incense, guardian of travelers/foreigners, cows, sycamore trees, wine, drunkenness, war, and cosmetics.

Like I said it’s a lot. Here’s the ones that fit Nilou and the dead flower goddess Nilou represents. Hathor goddess of rebirth/lotus flowers.

Nilou’s name means “blue lotus”. In Egyptian mythos the lotus represents death and rebirth and it’s common to find art of Hathor with a blue lotus flower. This is because Hathor was depicted both as a motherly goddess that welcomed you into the world and as a goddess of death that offered you food and drink in the afterlife. The OG definition of I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it.

(Pretend one of them is hathor all the hathor one's have her tits out like I said before. Since I'm cross posting this on Hoyolab no tits for you.)

Hathor is also the Goddess of Music and Dance which is Nilou's whole thing. She was also the Goddess of Joy and Gratitude. If you play Nilou's Story Quest you find she spreads happiness to all the people of the bazaar. So much so they often give her gifts in thanks.

Hathor was also credited with the creation of the Nile in some stories. Scholars list this as her being the goddess of moisture? For some reason. But really all that matters is it's some sort of water connection. Hathor is more well known as a sky goddess. The Milky way gets it's name because of the sky was considered cow Hathor and the milky way her milk. Seeing as space isn't an element in Genshin they went with water. But they still reference this connection in Nilou's character trailer.

(She's literally looking at the Milky way my guys.)

Hathor is the goddess of rare minerals and was worshiped in mines far into the Sinai Peninsula (Outside of Egypt's Borders) as a protection goddess for miners. But the rare gemstone most commonly associated with her is Lapis Lazuli. Nilou's gemstone stone decorations are most likely this stone. Lapis Lazuli has been mined in the middle east since ancient times most specifically in Isreal. But it is cheaper than Blue Sapphire the other option for Nilou's ornaments.

Lastly Hathor is known as The Eye of Ra. Enacting Ra's will/punishment on humanity. Other's have been the Eye of Ra but Hathor's story is the most infamous. It's said that once she took the form of Sekhmet she refused to stop killing humans. None of the other gods were strong enough to beat her in a fight. So they spilled Beer/Wine along the Nile, Sekhmet came and drank thinking it was the blood of her enemies. She got so drunk she past out and Ra was able to remove the blessing transforming her back into cow Hathor the gentle. There are no other stories of Hathor channeling the Eye of Ra after this occasion.

As a playable Genshin character Nilou is required to be good at combat. But it doesn't hurt to have her source material be a gentle soul with a secret blood thirsty warrior within.

So to summarize Hathor is a goddess of lotus flowers, music, dance love, joy, gratitude, moisture, the sky/milky way, lapis lazuli, protection, and war. All characteristics that can be found in Nilou. Along with a nice horn head piece.

So what do you think? Is Nilou secretly a goddess of Love? Are there any connections I missed?

Check out my Cyno breakdown Here! and Follow to find out when I post Candace's breakdown! Also Thanks for reading this monster of a post.

[renehw]

A bone scabbard chape, made in Iran c. 500 BC, from @allardpierson in Amsterdam. The kings of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 559-331 BC) managed to conquer and subdue vast territories due to their effective military. The most famous soldiers of their armed forces are the so-called ‘Immortals’, a 10,000 strong elite corps according to Greek sources. Palace reliefs depict guardsmen and soldiers in court dress. Persian infantrymen usually carried a short sword known as ‘akinakes’. The scabbard of these swords were sometimes decorated with embossed gold or gilded stucco. The chape of those scabbards could be made of ivory or bone with carved reliefs. The one seen here has a goat’s head as decoration. #allardpiersonmuseum #allardpierson #amsterdam #scabbard #chape #military #sword #iran #iranian #achaemenid #achaemenidempire #bone #goat #decoration #ancient #ancientart #ancientneareast #ancientneareasternart #history #art #archaeology #miltaryhistory #arthistory #akinakes (bij Allard Pierson Museum) https://www.instagram.com/p/CHVkOPeHqGO/?igshid=1q4bjr25dso0o

[peashooter85]

Bronze Persian sword, 1st millennium BC

from Baidum Fine Antiques

[inky-duchess]

Fantasy Guide to Weapons

So I have a post about swords already but I have decided to update it with a look at more weapons that can be wielded in fantasy battles. These weapons below were wielded in different time periods and by different sorts of warriors. Each link shows the damage these weapons could do to armour or the human body. (disclaimer: do not attempt this at home and there mentions and sights of blood and dismemberment.)

Swords

Swords are to fantasy as sand is to a beach. But they aren't always the common cross shape we see. Swords come in all kinds of sizes and all kinds of ability.

Anatomy of a typical blade

Crossguard: This is the part of the sword between the hilt and blade. This protects the hand from slipping and can be used as a weapon in itself.

Hilt: This is the part you hold. Also called a grip. Most gilts would me wrapped with leather for comfort and for better grasp.

Blade: The sharp end, duh

Pommel: This is a weight screwed into the hilt meant to ensure the sword is balanced.

Fuller: This is a hollow running up the sword. It makes the sword lighter.

Edge: The sharpened sides of the blade. Swords can be singular or double edged.

The point: The pointy bit at the top to stick into the enemy. (jon snow logic)

Kinds of swords

Gladius: An Ancient Roman blade used by gladiators and then legionaires. There is no crossguard. It is also called a shortsword. Made for stabbing rather than slashing.

Xiphos: A double-edged, single-handed sword used by Ancient Greeks. The blade is commonly leaf shaped made for slashing.

Rapier: This is a slender blade used by Renaissance warriors. This blade might not be able to hack a head but its light weight makes the blade an asset in speed. The rapier often had a caged-like crossguard to protect the hand from injury.

Katana: The infamous Japanese curved samurai sword. This is single-edged and the blade is hammered thin. Like most Japanese swords it was made for speed and deadly sharp.

Scimitar: A curved blade with a singled edge popular in Central Asia. The scimitar ranged from a thick sword to thin, wielded most effectively on horseback.

Shamshir: The shamshir is a curved Persian/Iranian sword. Shamshīr which means "lion's fang" is a one handed blade often single edged.

Longsword: The go to Medieval and Renaissance weapon commonly used with with two hands. The Longsword was a slender blade, hammer straight and was typically double edged.

Khopesh: The Khopesh is a hooked-shaped African blade wielded by the guards of Egyptian Pharaohs.

Mace/Morning Star

The Mace is probably the second most common weapons seen on the battlefield. The Mace is a thick ball of steel usually spiked resting on top of a haft of wood. The Mace is an easy enough weapon to use (step 1: beat opponent until subdued). The Mace and morning star are fixed upon the halft while the flail is the more mobile one swinging from the half by rope or short chain. You can see it in action right here.

Warhammer

The Warhammer was a weapon wielded by some medieval soldiers made of a haft of wood and an hammer-like head. The actual blade itself could be blunted like hammers we see today or edged like blades, meant for cutting as well as crushing. The back usually featured a hook-like pommel that could also be used as a weapon, able to pierce armour and flesh. The Warhammer was an effective weapon in battle.

Poleaxe

The Poleaxe was the weapon usually wielded by infrantry in the middle ages. It was constructed from a wooden haft with a steel head, usually curved at the front for slashing, set with a spike at the back and top for stabbing. The Poleaxe would be used for charging and for defence. The whole idea behind this many pronged weapon was to puncture, slash from a safe distance. The haft of the weapon could be used to trip and to maim an opponent. You can see it in action here. There were many variations of the Poleaxe namely the bill and the Halberd.

Pikes

The humble Pike is often mixed up with a Halberd and the Poleaxe. It is a long weapon, formed of a metal spike and a long wooden halft. The Pike would be used en masse by infrantry to deflect calvary and protect cannoniers and artillery from attack. Pikes were very effective if one wanted to stopper a full blown calvary charge. Outlaw King has a scene where this can be seen.

Axes

Axes have been used in battle for millenia. The Axe is a weapon that has evolved through out history and over the course of many cultures. Axes were used by soldiers in battles and raids, both as a close-quarters weapon and as a long range weapon. The Axe had numerous forms: throwing axes such as the francisca, short-hafted hand wielded axes and long-hafted Lochaber axes.

[city-of-ladies]

Weapons in the tombs of Parthian era women

“One of the most important finds in the domain of Iranian Studies in this century to date has occurred very recently in the district of Vestemin in northern Iran. The findings are of significance in two ways. First, a very large hoard of weapons (swords, daggers, spearheads, and arrowheads) dated to the Parthian era (c. 250 BCE-224 CE) have been discovered at Vestemin in 2015. Up to the time of these finds, examples of actual Parthian weapons have been very few excepting samples of swords and daggers housed at the Iran Bastan Museum in Tehran (even these are little known to Western scholarship) (Farrokh, Karamian). Second, many of the weapons were discovered buried alongside the bodies of Parthian women. 

Especially remarkable is the fact that Parthian daggers were buried in equal numbers in both female and male crypts at Vestemin. Twelve Parthian daggers for example were buried with females and eleven of these with males. Parthian spearheads and arrowheads were also distributed in an equivalent fashion alongside both male and female burials. One of five long swords discovered at Vestemin had also been interned alongside a female skeleton. The data  would suggest that in the case of military culture, females enjoyed an honored status in the military culture of ancient Iran. This is clearly indicated by the fact that females were not differentiated from males with respect to weaponry. These findings corroborate historical sources as well as archaeological findings, the role of women in the context of Iranian martial culture, not just in ancient Iran (known to Westerners as Persia) but also to the Iranian speaking Scythians and Saka in ancient Eastern Europe and Central Asia (before the arrival of Hun-Turkic). Examples of such findings became known with the discovery of the tombs of (Iranian-speaking) Scythian and Sarmatian women alongside with their weapons.

(...)

Each year in Iran a national Olympiad takes place in Fereydanshahr area where tribal women from different regions of Iran engage in competitive horseback riding, sharpshooting, and various other martial athletic skills. This is notable given that Iran is currently administered by a conservative Islamic theocratic establishment yet these types of competitions are commonplace throughout Iran’s tribal regions, notably Luristan. And despite the current political apparatus in Iran, an ancient martial cultural tradition has endured.”

Farrokh Kaveh, Karamian Gholamreza, “Weapons in the tombs of Parthian Era women in Northern Iran a preliminary report”

[aboutanancientenquiry]

A Kazakhstani movie based on Herodotus’ narrative about Tomyris and the death of Cyrus the Great -its national and political implications and a Persianate point of view on it

“Tomiris is a 2019 Kazakhstani feature film directed by Akan Sataev, which tells the story of the queen of the Massagetae, Tomyris, and the Persian king, Cyrus the Great. The film co-stars Almira Tursyn, Aizhan Lighg, and Ghassan Massoud.

The film was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Kazakhstan. The idea to create a film about Tomyris was brought by Aliya Nazarbayeva, the youngest daughter of the first president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev. She was later employed as a general producer of the film.

The premiere of the film took place in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan on September 25, 2019. The film received mixed reviews from critics and, as of July 2020, grossed $1.3 million against a production budget of $6.5 million.

Cast[edit]

Almira Tursyn – Tomiris

Aizhan Lighg – Sardana

Ghassan Massoud – Cyrus

Berik Aitzhanov – Kurtun

Adil Akhmetov – Argun

Zarina Yeva - Tana

Erkebulan Dayirov – Kharasp

Azamat Satibaldi – Kavaz

The film was ordered by the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Kazakhstan. The idea of a film about Tomyris was brought to creation by Aliya Nazarbayeva, the daughter of the first president of Kazakhstan.[8] Filming began in December 2017, and scenes were shot in different parts of Kazakhstan. The Massagetae heroes speak the ancient Turkic language, while the Persian heroes speak new Persian in the film, despite the fact that modern historians consider the Massagetae to have been a nomadic Iranian people.[9][10] The film's budget was 6,5 million USD.[7]

The plot of the film is built on the story of Herodotus, who called his version one of the many stories about the death of Cyrus the Great.[11] The filmmakers took into account many features of the culture and life of the Massagetae, in particular, their pointed hats and tribal meetings, at which the most important issues were resolved. However, the language spoken by the Saka nomads, which is an artificially created proto-Turkic language, is controversial. The clothes worn by the Massagetae in the film are also disputable, as they are probably too heavy for the Central Asian region. The vicinity of the Amu Darya River has a very hot climate, so the summer clothes were lighter and of a different style.[11]

Almira Tursyn, a psychologist, was chosen from 15 thousand people to play the role of Tomyris. She took professional lessons of horseriding and archery and learned to use swords and knives.[12]

Release and critical response[edit]

The film was theatrically released in Kazakhstan on October 1, 2019. The distribution rights of the film were sold to Blue Swan for Italy, SND Films for France, Art Mood for Spain, AT Entertainment for Japan, Gulf Film for the Middle East, Challan for South Korea, Paradise/MGN for CIS, Shaw for Singapore, Program 4 Media for Romania, Siyah Bayez Movies for Turkey, and Well Go USA for the United States.[13][14] Distribution in the United States and Canada was picked up by Amazon Prime Video.[15]

The film received mixed reviews, largely because Herodotus's version of events is not generally accepted by historians and researchers,[16] and unlike in the film, Massagetae are Scythian people speaking an Iranian language, while in the movie all characters are represented by modern Kazakh (featuring Mongolian physiognomy and speaking a Turkic language). Criticism came from both the Kazakh and Iranian public mainly for considering the film as a feminist approach to the history of both Muslim countries. The Iranian public also criticized the film for using Herodotus's description of King Cyrus's death.[16]

Some observers believe that the film was aimed to make Dariga Nazarbayeva's potential presidential bid in the future, the daughter of Kazakhstan's former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, more acceptable among ordinary Kazakhstanis.[17]

The film won the Nouveau Genre Great Prize at France's 2020 L'Étrange Festival.[18]

As of July 2020, it had grossed $1.3 million against a production budget of $6.5 million.[19]

From the article of Wikipedia on the film Tomiris ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomiris_(film) )”

Ghassan Massoud as Cyrus the Great in the film Tomiris

“The Legend of Tomiris Rewrites History and Makes It More Kazakh 

By Javeed Ahwar - November 15, 2020

The Legend of Tomiris (2019) is a lame adaption of Herodotus’s account of Cyrus the Great’s encounter with a Steppe warrior Tomiris (See Rollinger 2012). There is no doubt that the film is a not a historically accurate adaptation, nor the intention of makers, I believe, have been making something based on historical facts. Tomiris (the film) is a prime example how arts become a tool for nationalist politics in today’s time. Regarding the ethnic origin of Scythians, there is almost a consensus among Turkologists and scholars of Central Asian studies about their Iranian ancestry. Distinguished Turkologist Svat Saucek defines Scythians as nomadic Iranians—the natives of Central Asian Steppes, who were driven out from this region by Kipchak Turks between the fourth and sixth centuries (2000, xii, 28). Furthermore, historian A.I. Melyukova writes, “From the end of the 7th century B.C. to the 4th century B.C. the Central- Eurasian steppes were inhabited by two large groups of kin Iranian-speaking tribes—the Scythians and Sarmatians” (2008, 97). Based on the existing scholarship, Massagetae, a sub-division of Scythians which Tomiris belonged to, were not a Turkic group, quite on the contrary, they were in war with the latter until they were fully replaced by them in the Steppes. The question rises if a moviemaker can go that far in manipulating historical facts and is it then fair to call it a historical drama. I leave it for the readers to decide.

Coming to the story of film, it is narrated by Al-Farabi, a universalist middle ages scholar of Iranian origin, who is introduced as “Al-Turki” and given a Kazakh phenotype in the film. Al-Farabi is shown sitting in a traditional office-like atmosphere in Damascus (Syria) while writing the story of Tomiris for the Arab world. The story starts with the birth of Tomiris and the maternal death of her mother, queen to the Massagetae tribe’s chief Spargap. Being the first child to her father, she gets treated as a prince and trained in hunting, sword fighting, archery and politics by her father. Spargap gets killed by his rival tribe leaders Kurtun and Kavaz, shown as loyal puppets to the neighboring Iranian Khwarazmians. Tomiris survives several assassination attempts and seeks asylum at Savromat tribe and marries with Argun, the prince of Saprap tribe. After avenging her father and brothers’ bloods, she unites the Steppe tribes in war against Khwarazmians, part of the Persian King’s domain. The interval scene begins with Tomiris receiving an invitation from Cyrus. Argun and his son Spargap decides to visit Babylon the quarter of Cyrus the Great. The conversation does not go well between the two. After rejecting Cyrus’s proposal to join Persia in their conquest of the Egypt, persuaded by his subject Gubar, Cyrus kills the entire delegates. Gubar, the messenger of Cyrus, brings their death bodies to Tomiris also proposing her to marry the king of kings. Tomiris, now a widow, not only rejects the marriage proposal of the Shahenshah, but also avenges the death of her son and husband killing the entire Persian delegates and declaring a war with Persia. Cyrus the Great putting his plan of conquering the Egypt on halt, wages a war with the Steppe tribes and gets killed at the hand of an ordinary warrior of Tomiris.

Why Tomiris? Aliya Nazarbayeva—daughter of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the ex-president of Kazakhstan and writer-actor Timur Zhaksylykov   have pinned down the story to cater to Kazakh youth who seek glory in the past. Tomiris (2019) not only makes a 700 B.C. historical figure speak Kazakh, it is supported by poor cast playing Persians and Khwarazmian. Neither the Kazakh nor the Persian dialogues are intelligible to present Kazakh and Persian speakers. Was it a deliberate move? It might be the case but saying “Bezugarid”— instead of “Bezugarid in the film” tells us the failure of writers and makers to integrate a Persian writer in the project and cast Persian speaking characters.

On the technical aspect of the film, starting with the cinematography, it is too monotonous to impress. It does not live up to the prestige of Tomiris and Cyrus the Great. In particular emperor Cyrus is portrayed as an understaffed king and with not much aura around him. Produced on a budget of USD 6.5 million, it is justifiable. Furthermore, Babylon looks not different from the depiction of Arabian lands in Hollywood movies. The tents and deserts where Tomiris and her tribe resides are shown in an egalitarian way all looking alike. The life conditions are shown very hard. I argue that Tomiris the film is an attempt by Kazakh artists to rewrite history in a problematic way. The film could be made about heroic deeds of nomadic tribes without making it ethnically Kazakh or Turk. Being a multi-ethnic and language country, Kazakhstan can claim heir to Scythians on territorial but not on an ethnolinguistic ground. What makes this film problematic is the makers attempt to give Scythians the Kazakh language, the Mongoloid facial features and calling Tomiris as “türk tarihinin ilk kadın hükümdarı”—the first female ruler in Turkish history.

The film is not supported by good casting including the leading character Tomiris played by Almyra Tursyn. Her performances in entirety and particularly in the emotional scenes fails to create an impact.  A Syrian actor Hassan Massoud fails to shine as the Cyrus the Great in the film. Leading characters like Tomiris, Argun, Spargap and Sardana remain superficial in their approach towards their characters. My best performed scene from this film is the labor scene when Spargap’s wife gives birth to Tomiris. She excels in that scene, the rest looks like a Turkish Soep opera with blunt expressions seen throughout. Considering this region’s multiethnic and multilinguistic and religious feature, I would like to see movies which moves beyond the chauvinistic, black and white, and fictitious treatment of history. Such a movie might please a historically uninformed Kazakh, but it definitely is not for a well-educated Kazakh or Central Asian.  

References cited:

Soucek, Svat. 2000. A History of Inner Asia. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press.

Melyukova, A. I. 2008. “The Scythians and Sarmatians.” In The Cambridge History of EarlyInner Asia, edited by Denis Sinor, 97-118. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press.

Rollinger, Robert. 2012. “Cyrus According to Herodotus” Encyclopedia Iranica, Vol. XII, Fasc. 3, pp. 260-262; available online at https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/herodotus-iv (accessed online at November 10 2020).

© Javeed Ahwar

JAVEED AHWAR

I am a persianate coming from Afghanistan. I completed my undergraduate studies at Kabul University in Law and Political Science in 2009. I obtained my first master degree from the OSCE Academy in Bishkek in Politics and Security in Central Asia in 2010. I obtained my second master degree [Advanced LLM in European and International Human Rights Law] from Leiden University/Netherlands in 2015. In 2018, I was able to acquire my third master degree/research master in Cultural Anthropology from Utrecht University in Netherlands in 2018. Since 2019, I am doing my PhD in Eurasian Studies, an inter-university PhD program between Humboldt University in Berlin and Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.”

Source: https://www.javeedahwar.blog/2020/11/the-legend-of-tomiris-rewrites-history.html

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“To achieve a modicum of control around the country, the Safavid state resorted to various strategies beyond punitive expeditions to regions in revolt. One way of reducing subaltern power was to try and restrict the spread of firearms, a relatively new form of weaponry that was initially limited to the state. Like many contemporary states, the Safavids sought to halt their spread among the wider population. The people of Lar—a major manufacturing center of firearms—were prohibited from carrying guns at the time of Shah `Abbas I. In the late seventeenth century such orders were still in place in remote areas. Bénigne Vachet, traveling in western Iran in 1690, claimed that in all of Iran mountaineers were forbidden from carrying any other arms than batons. Such bans naturally had little effect. Ambrosio Bembo, traveling in the Kurdish Ottoman–Safavid borderlands in the 1670s, observed how not even peasants in those regions were without “an arquebus or sword or bows and arrows.”

Much more effective was the forcible resettlement of populations, a long-standing practice pioneered by the ancient Assyrians. Resettling a recalcitrant border tribe into the interior was typically designed to break up vested tribal power. Shah `Abbas thus deported the Qazaqlu from Qarabagh to Fars. Deportation was often a precautionary measure. We hear of tribes being moved away from the front lines in the face of imminent war, for fear that they might side with the enemy. 

Depopulation was also a byproduct of the scorched-earth policy that the Safavids often engaged in. An example is Shah `Abbas’s removal of the entire Armenian population from the Aras River region in the face of Ottoman aggression in 1603–4. Most often the aim was the protection of borderlands. The northern frontiers, perennially exposed to raids by Uzbek, Turkmen, and Lezghi tribesmen, were a favored destination for deportations of this kind. Dividing the Qajar tribe into three groups, Shah `Abbas resettled many of its members to the north, making them guard Ganja in the Caucasus and Astarabad and Marv on the Central Asian frontier.

The same ruler sought to strengthen central control by relocating a large number of Qizilbash tribal folk to Georgia. `Abbas encouraged the Turkmen Göklen to settle around Astarabad so as to protect the Khurasan border against raids by the Yomut, a rival Turkmen tribe.

Frequent raids by Lezghi marauders as well as Russian pressure on Daghistan made Shah `Abbas II move large numbers of Turks to Georgia, prompting an uprising against Safavid rule in 1659.

Kurds, renowned for their martial qualities, were often deployed for defensive purposes. Many thus ended up in Khurasan. A number of Kurds were also sent to Kitch and Makran in Baluchistan to help defend those remote marches. Chardin gave the following numbers for troops defending the borders in the mid-seventeenth century: 6,000 for Kirmanshah; 50,000 each in Armenia and Georgia; and 8,000 each in Khurasan and Qandahar.

State authority was not founded on military means alone. In fact, force was not the principal form of control, even if the threat of armed intervention was always the ultimate deterrent. Isfahan used “soft” power much more widely and, arguably, more effectively to keep the provinces in check. This came in different forms, ranging from the appointment of shadow officials to alliance building by way of marriage and various tributary arrangements. In all of this, the ultimate purpose was to secure loyalty, a commodity that was structurally in short supply. As Patricia Crone puts it, the premodern state did not inspire any loyalty. Yet managing a state was predicated on at least some form of (temporary) loyalty. To achieve this was to engage in perpetual negotiation and bargaining.

Negotiation typically involved some form of mediation by brokers or middlemen, vakils. The vakil, a person who could deal with both parties and a central figure in Iranian politics, operated on different levels. Provincial governors were well advised not to take up their position in provincial outposts without good representation in Isfahan, since leaving the court would unleash a wave of intrigue against them. They would often stay in the capital themselves, dispatching a relative in their stead; and if they took up their post, they would leave a vakil to represent their interest. Until they were recalled to Isfahan to account for their behavior, these officials usually remained at a safe distance from the capital, where agents and family members interceded on their behalf. Some hardly ever showed up in the region to which they had been appointed, although few would go to such extremes as the muhrdar, keeper of the royal seals, who waited twenty years before visiting Qum, the province assigned to him by Shah Tahmasb.

One time-honored way of keeping individual power in check was to appoint mutually controlling officers. This began at the central court, where the nazir (steward of the royal household) checked on the grand vizier and in turn was controlled by a number of other officials. The vizier of a khassah province typically had a nazir and a vaqa’i`-nivis (registrar) as assistants, who acted as shadow officials charged with the task of monitoring him. According to Chardin, in Mazandaran the vizier and his assistant were expected to report on each other. The fiscally important Caspian provinces, moreover, were headed by a vazir-i kull, whose task it was to control the vizier in financial and juridical matters. In Bandar `Abbas, the shahbandar, harbor master, and the local khan operated in similar fashion. Chardin attributed the relative lack of rebellion in Safavid Iran to the ubiquity of such institutionalized mutual control.

Alliance building was the most commonly used control strategy. It came in various forms. One was to keep the sons of local rulers as hostages in the capital, conditioning them as loyal Safavid subjects. This age-old practice was especially common with regard to outlying regions such as Georgia, Daghistan, and `Arabistan. Shah `Abbas kept Constantin Mirza, son of the Georgian King Alexander, in Isfahan. Alqas Mirza, a Lezghi prince, was sent at a young age as a hostage to Isfahan, renamed Safi Quli Khan, reared in the harem, and in 1666 appointed governor of Yerevan.

A more benevolent form of cementing loyalty through alliances involved marriage arrangements between the Safavids and ruling families, officials in high military, administrative, and religious positions. This type of arrangement was particularly common in the case of Georgia. Shah `Abbas solidified the nexus with its royal house by giving Constantin Mirza’s sister in marriage to Prince Hamzah Mirza. A century later, Gurgin Khan, the Georgian commander-inchief of the Safavid army, married a daughter of Ja`far Quli Khan. of Sistan in a union designed to strengthen ties between Isfahan and that remote area. Sexual politics might even extend to the “barbarian” periphery. Shah Tahmasb gave a daughter in marriage to `Adil Giray, a Tartar chief whom he kept as a hostage, in hopes of preventing the Tatars from siding with the Ottomans.

In the borderlands, where power was by definition a matter of negotiation, operating with tact and sensitivity was especially important. Borders looked linear to foreigners entering and leaving Iran at clearly defined transit stations, yet they were above all permeable frontier zones, unpacified mountains and deserts inhabited by tribal peoples whose loyalty might be temporarily bought but could never be taken for granted. The Arabs and Kurds along the Ottoman borders, the Lezghis in the Caucasus, the Turkmen in Khurasan, and the Baluchis and Afghans on the eastern marches were notorious for their unwillingness to submit to outside authority.

In an approach that goes back to antiquity, the Safavids sought to bring security to such areas by making alliances with tribal chiefs, enlisting them through arrangements in which the latter pledged to defend the frontier in exchange for maintaining their local autonomy. This might take the form of a tribe submitting to the shah as “lovers of the shah,” shah-seven, as Kurds from the Hakkari region did when they disavowed loyalty to the Ottomans and offered their service to the Safavids, thus facilitating the taking of Van by the latter.

The tribal support the state needed, for intelligence and actual assistance in case of war, gave great leverage to the chieftains. The shah picked the Lezghi ruler, the shamkhal, but always from one of the local princes and with the consent of local forces, thus ensuring the stability that was the ultimate rationale of any such arrangement. In 1595 Shah `Abbas I agreed to a temporary subordination of the shamkhal to Russia, stressing that he was an Iranian vassal even if he was an underling of the czar.

In the Safavid–Ottoman borderlands, especially, too much pressure from Isfahan or Istanbul might drive a tribe into the arms of the other regime. Iskandar Beg Munshi called the Kurds fickle, deploring their tendency to switch sides in the conflict with the Ottomans. A policy of leniency and accommodation was vital in such conditions. This is probably why Khalil Khan, the governor of Bakhtiyari territory, was just deposed—as opposed to executed—after his people had risen in revolt against his violent oppression, and why he managed to regain his post twelve years later. Similarly, Shah `Abbas II received Mansur Khan, the ruler of Huwayza, with great pomp and circumstance in Isfahan in 1645, after he had led a rebellion against the Safavids.  Sulayman Khan, the Kurdish beglerbeg of Ardalan, in 1657 took the side of Istanbul and tried to escape to Ottoman territory. Caught, he was only exiled to Mashhad for this act of treason. Not only that, but Shah `Abbas II, who had little interest in conflict with either the Kurds or the Ottomans, allowed him to be succeeded by his oldest son, Kalb `Ali Khan.

Loyalty was often literally bought, either with cash or by way of lucrative concessions. When Imam Quli Khan, the governor of Fars, marched against Basra in 1628, he got the Arab tribes en route to render him a variety of services by handing out “cash grants, robes of honor, and other gifts in profusion.” The Afghan warlord Mir Ways in the early eighteenth century served as qafilah-salar, supervisor of the caravan trade between Iran and India. The Safavids also made more institutionalized arrangements with various tribal peoples.

Shah `Abbas II coopted the Lezghis through a mutually beneficial tributary arrangement: They sent gifts to Isfahan as a token of fealty, and in turn received 1,700 tumans per annum from the shah to ensure stability and the protection of the border against other marauders. This arrangement included the resettling of large numbers of tribesmen from the mountains of Darband and Qubbah.The same ruler paid the Kharazmian ruler Abu’l Ghazi Khan an annual allowance of 1,500 tumans during a decade of gilded captivity in Isfahan, and kept disbursing this sum even after Abu’l Ghazi had escaped and regained power in Central Asia, simply to keep him from turning against Iran. After the shah had conducted several campaigns against the Uzbeks, he struck a deal whereby they received an annual stipend in exchange for a promise to desist from raiding—a promise they promptly broke following the shah’s death in 1666.”

- Rudi Matthee, Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. pp. 144-148.

[ayearinfaith]

𝗔 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗙𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗵, 𝗗𝗮𝘆 𝟳𝟰: 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗼-𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗼-𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻 The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) religion is the proposed reconstruction of the beliefs held by the ancestral Proto-Indo-Europeans. Though we lack direct evidence for it, the echoes found across the historical record and in modern Indo-European peoples enable us to make strong conjectures about this ancient faith. Names and words in PIE are generally prefixed with a “*-“ to represent their theoretical status. 𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗧𝗵𝗲�� 𝗪𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗪𝗲 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄 The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived as a (more-or-less) single people roughly 6-7 thousand years ago in what is now Southwestern Russia and Eastern Ukraine. They were some of the first humans to domesticate the horse and spread across Eurasia from Europe’s Iberian Peninsula to the South Asian Ganges Delta. Modern Indo-European peoples include but are not limited to: Non-Dravidian people of the Indian sub-continent (Bengalis, Nepalis, Hindustanis, Punjabis, etc.), Persians (aka. Iranians), Kurds, Greeks, Balts (Lithuanians and Latvians), Armenians, Albanians, Slavs, Germans (Scandinavians, Netherlanders, Englishmen, etc.), Celts, and Western Europeans (French, Spaniards, Italians, etc.). The study of these ancient ancestors is the result of a great marriage of physical and linguistic anthropology. On their own, each source of evidence has major blind spots; physical anthropology can only trace what artifacts have survived, especially tricky with an ancient nomadic people who used stone and other long lasting materials sparingly, and linguistic reconstruction is a completely theoretical activity in the absence of any recorded language. By pairing common word origins, we can tell what technology and concepts were common (ex. Almost all branches share the etymology for “wheel” but not for “sword”) which can inform the minimal archaeological finds, which can in turn inform linguists which proposed reconstructions are more likely than others. Just as we can use these tools to determine their technology and migrations, we can guess at more immaterial things like culture and beliefs. Major pillars of this are the 𝘝𝘦𝘥𝘢𝘴 and to a lesser extent the 𝘈𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢, the oldest written texts in Indic and Aryan culture, respectively, both of which were written in a language quite similar to Proto-Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit and Avestan), which was spoken some 3-4 thousand years ago. Germanic mythology is another strong pillar, valuable due to being well attested and written about, as Germanic peoples were one of the last of Europe to Christianize. Though Greek mythology has been popular across Europe since the Roman Empire, it is a weak pillar for reconstruction as many of its elements are traceable to non-Indo-European sources (mostly Semitic). Baltic mythology is also prized, as the Baltic languages are the most conservative, i.e. most similar to PIE, but recorded pre-Christian myths are sparse. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵𝘀 The following is a general overview of some of the most widely agreed upon aspects of PIE religion. There was, before the creation of the universe, a state of non-existence or void (Greek “Chaos”, Norse “Ginnungagap”). After that come three figures: the primordial cow, the progenitor of humankind, *Manu, and a third being *Yemo. The word *Yemo means “twin” (compare to Norse “Ymir”, Hindu “Yama”, and Latin “Remus”). This is generally taken as his relationship to *Manu, but also quite probably is an allusion to *Yemo’s hermaphroditic nature. Likely *Yemo was some form of giant or supernatural being, a cosmic man as opposed to the literal man *Manu. *Yemo is sacrificed along with the cow by *Manu, and from his body the world is formed. It is likely that *Yemo’s myth continues with him as the lord of the land of the dead. The world of the Proto-Indo-Europeans was a flat disk surrounded by water, with the realm of the gods above and that of the dead either below or beyond the world surrounding ocean. Notably, there was likely not a central world tree or mountain, like the Norse Yggdrasil, Greek Olympus, or Hindu Meru; that is most likely a Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian, Udmurt, etc.) loan. The land of the dead was guarded by a supernatural dog (Greek “Cerberus”, Hindu “Sharvara”, Norse “Gamr”). PIE gods have two defining features; their association with the sky and their immortality, which likely was originally credited to a special diet (Hindu “Amrita”, Greek “Ambrosia”, the Norse Idunn’s apples or Odin’s wine). The central gods were *Dyḗus, god of the daylit sky, *Dhéǵhōm, the earth goddess, and their three children, twin sons, who likely represent the sun and moon, and their daughter *Héusōs, goddess of the dawn. The number three is also of special significance and there was likely a triple-fate goddess (Norse “Norns”, Greek “Klothes”), though this is notably absent in the Indo-Aryan branch. The two best reconstructed narratives are the “Chaoskampf”, in which *Dyḗus or his chosen hero slays a serpent, and the cattle raid myth, in which the primordial cow is stolen and must be retrieved through combat by a hero. 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 As mentioned above, the number three was likely an auspicious number to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. A somewhat less well attested, but still popular reconstruction, is the character of *Trito (“Third”) who would have been the hero who rescues the primordial cow and slays the serpent. This idea of threes was expanded by a French mythographer and linguist, Georges Dumézil in 1929 into what is now referred to as the trifunctional hypothesis. The idea was that PIE society had three classes, which was reflected in their myths; a priestly/scholarly class, a military class, and a herding/farming class. While the theory overall has largely fallen out of favor, aspects of it persist. Many of the mythical battles, like the Norse Æsir-Vanir war or the Greek Titanomachy, have been proposed as mythologized accounts of conflicts or integrations of these three parts. Another tripart proposition is that the PIE cosmos was divided into three skies; the daylit sky, the night sky, and the liminal sky of dawn/twilight.  In this model, each sky has its own deities who may not trespass on each other, with *Dyḗus the god of the daylit sky representing the warrior class, *Werunos (compare to Greek Ouranos and Hindu Varuna) god of the night representing the priestly, and a liminal god associated with agriculture (ex. The Greek Kronus, a harvest god who falls between Ouranos and Zeus). Distinctive from *Dyḗus, a hammer wielding storm god has been proposed, though evidence is limited to just a few of the European branches, implying he was likely a later development. His name is reconstructed as *Perkwunos, the “lord of oaks”, likely referencing the way lightning strikes tall trees. Image credit: The Seven Gods, Maxim Sukharev, 2010’s

[ashitakaxsan]

В России нашли древний иранский меч

Археологические новости большой важности: богато украшенный иранский меч был недавно обнаружен во время раскопок в Черноморском регионе, в современном Краснодарском крае России. Tehrantimes.com дает нам полное изображение в деталях:https://href.li/?https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/477732/Ancient-Iranian-sword-unearthed-in-Russia

Меч, датируемый IV-VI веками нашей эры, вместе с несколькими реликвиями были обнаружены в захоронении воина, который был жителем Таманского полуострова, сообщает в субботу Heritage Daily.

Меч указывает на политическую и культурную связь с Сасанидской или Неоперсидской империей из современного Ирана и Ирака, вероятно, подаренную в качестве дипломатического подарка или взятую в качестве военного трофея, говорится в отчете.

Кроме того, в ходе археологического проекта были обнаружены фрагменты сбруи, пряжек и наконечников ремней, а также предметы высокого статуса, такие как стеклянные кувшины, деревянная и металлическая посуда и деревянные ящики с истлевшими тряпками.

Нет сомнений в том, что упомянутый воин был представителем элиты Фанагории и был носителем военно-аристократической культуры Боспорского царства в период Великого переселения народов, считает один из участников проекта.

Древний город Фанагория был греческой колонией, впервые основанной на Таманском полуострове тейскими колонистами в VI веке до нашей эры после конфликта с персидским царем Киром Великим. Город преврати��ся в крупный торговый центр, который вместе со связанным с ним некрополем занимает площадь более 2223 акров.

Изображение ниже: король Кир Великий: Source:https://heritage-history.com/index.php?c=resources&s=char-dir&f=cyrus1

Во многих отношениях Иран под властью Сасанидов стал свидетелем огромных достижений персидской цивилизации. Эксперты говорят, что искусство и архитектура нации пережили общий ренессанс во время правления Сасанидов.

В ту эпоху такие ремесла, как обработка металлов и гравировка драгоценных камней, стали очень изощренными, поскольку государство поощряло образование; многие произведения как с Востока, так и с Запада были переведены на пехлеви, официальный язык сасанидов.

Легендарное богатство сасанидского двора полностью подтверждается наличием более ста образцов чаш или тарелок из драгоценного металла, известных в настоящее время. Одним из лучших примеров является серебряная пластина с частичной позолотой в Метрополитен-музее в Нью-Йорке. Династия была уничтожена арабскими захватчиками в период с 637 по 651 год.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: I hugely appreciate how educated you are with your education in the Classics (at either Oxford or Cambridge I think) but I ask with sincere respect how does any of it inform your privileged life in this day and age? It’s easy to say how much we should value our European traditions and heritage it is quite another to live it out don’t you agree? What do you personally get from it?

This is a very relevant question and I apologise if I have stalled in answering it as I was busy with work and life to formulate a worthy reply. But your question is an important one indeed for anyone who harkens to the past as a guide for the present and the future.

I won’t waste space here and tick box all the purely academic reasons why the Classical world is still relevant for us today. I think you can find that in easy to read books and articles written by eminent Classicists who do an admirable service in making the Classical World come alive for the general public (Mary Beard, Bettany Hughes, Emily Wilson, Edith Hall, Peter Jones, Bernard Knox, Robin Lane Fox, Paul Cartledge, and Donald Kagan amongst others that come to mind). But it’s an uphill battle to be sure.

Classics - at least in United Kingdom - has been regressively marginalised with each passing generation starting from school up to university entry. It has an image problem. Few pay much attention to scholars of Latin and Greek. The impression is that Classicists are snobbish and is the education of privileged elitists who master languages that are not spoken. They learn to write them only to read them better. They slap your hands when you write a Latin word common in Sallust or Livy, rather than in Cicero. There is some truth to that sadly. To a large extent Classicists themselves have not been a good advertisement for why anyone should appreciate let alone study the classical world.

At one end those educated in the Classics can come across as encouraging elitism, snobbish pedantry and a sniffy social superiority and at the other end those not versed in Classics but through Hollywood (any sword and sandal film like Gladiator etc) and PC white washed TV series (BBC’s Troy is a good example) have formed a romantic attachment to the ‘heroic’ past by having blue pilled themselves into escapism. Both extremes makes Classics a fetish rather than a guide for life through the beauty and power of the language and culture of the singular Greeks and Romans.

The study of Classics can become the proverbial dog who can dance on two legs, but for what practical purpose? There is the rub. Classics, at its best, offers the historical, philological, and literary foundation and discipline to apply a critical method to every general aspect of learning - and living.

I was fortunate that I had Classicists - both within my family and also my teachers - who were cultured and had led such interesting lives and were able to marry their Classicist mind to their life experiences (often through the experience of war). So learning European languages was not just to get one’s head around arid esoteric articles by 19th-century Frenchmen on the Athenian banking system or Demosthenes’ use of praeteritio and apophasis, but also to appreciate the genius of Dante,Voltaire and Goethe. Classics should never just be about philology though because it can result in a life mostly missed.

Perhaps others might call it privileged but I consider my childhood blessed because I was surrounded by family members who were educated in the Classics - more rare than one might suppose. Through my great aunts and grandmother they instilled the discipline that the mastery of Latin and Greek fuelled the ability to speak and write good English -- and why the latter mattered as much or more than the former.

By the time I left both Cambridge and Oxford behind, I could cite passage numbers in Greek texts of what Thucydides and Plutarch thought of Nicias. But it was only when I went through Sandhurst to pass out as a commissioned army officer did it truly jump off the page and become alive for me.

Moreover having had long fire side conversations with both my grandfather and father - both Oxbridge educated Classicists and both served in distant different types of wars as swashbuckling officers - did I use that learning to understand why for example was Nicias such a laughably mediocre general of the Peloponnesian War. And this was essentially the practical point of reading Thucydides and Plutarch about Nicias in the first place.

I spent many hours in my down time during my service in Afghanistan between missions re-reading dog earred favourite Classicist texts. I began to see the ghosts of the Greeks in the characters of those with whom I was serving. Some began to resemble Sophoclean characters - especially the less well-known ‘losers’ like Ajax and Philoctetes - the sort of tragic heroes whom we root for but the odds are against them - think of any American Western film or the more pathological Tarantino films. Like Sophocles I saw majestic characters (some special forces operators) out of place in a modernising world who would rather perish than change - but in a context where their sacrifice schools the lesser around them about what the old breed was about and what was being lost.

A running thread from a childhood spent in many other countries - from South Asia to the Far East - to the present day is learning to appreciate our landscape as the Ancient world did. The cultivation of curiosity of cultures was seeded in childhood. Respecting and even admiring other cultures - Indian, Iranian, Chinese and Japanese primarily come to mind - led me to appreciate and treasure my own cultural heritage and traditions. The DNA of both the Roman and Greek world went far and wide and so teasing out their fingerprints was fun. In northern Pakistan, we came across ‘Alexander’s children’ - children with blonde and blue eyes who were said to be descended from Alexander the Great’s time in Afghanistan and India - and wandering around the banks of the Jhelum river imagining how Alexander beat his respected foe (later ally) King Porus at the Battle of Hydaspes in 326BC.

These days despite having a busy corporate career I help support running a French vineyard managed foremost by two exceptional cousins and their French partners. As such the Classics still resonate in how I look at the land beyond the vineyard - bridges, roads, towers, walls  - and imagine the Greeks not with ink and papyrus but as men of action, farmers and hoplites, in a rough climate on poor soils. I suddenly envision them pruning and plowing in Laureion, the Oropos, and Acharnae, more like the rugged local farmers with whom come harvest time I roll my sleeves up and get my hands dirty in the vineyards than as the professors in elbow patches who had claimed them.

Knowing and learning about the Classical roots of our Western heritage isn’t just a question of culture it’s also about what personally motivates us in life and how that determines how we make consequential choices in life.

I live in fear of one Greek word  ‘akrasia’. Ancient Greek philosophers coined the term to explain the lack of motivation in life. Most of the philosophical conundrums explored by contemporary philosophers were already explored in Ancient Greece. In fact, Ancient Greek philosophers laid the solid foundation for all philosophical approaches that appeared throughout history: theories of Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche would never exist without Socrates, Plato or Aristotle.

Among the many problems that baffled the Ancient Greeks, one of them gets quite a lot of attention today. Why don’t we always do what’s best for us? Why do we abandon good decisions in favour of bad ones? Why can’t we follow through on our plans and ideas?

Many people would say that the answer is simply laziness or decision fatigue, but Ancient Greek philosophers believed that the problem lay much deeper, in human nature itself. ‘Akrasia’ describes a state of acting against one’s better judgement or a lack of will that prevents one from doing the right thing. Plato believed that akrasia is not an issue in itself, because people always choose the solution they think is the best for them, and sometimes it accidentally happens that they choose the bad solution because of poor judgement. On the other hand, Aristotle disagreed with this explanation and argued that the fault in the human process of reasoning is not responsible for akrasia. He believed that the answer lies in the human tendency to desire, which is often far stronger than reason.

As with almost all philosophical concepts, a consensus has never been reached and akrasia remains open to interpretation. But its practical consequences are all too real in today’s world. Motivation is what makes us unpredictable and persistent, and the life circumstances of the modern world often make motivation disappear.

Today - regardless how old or young one is - many are more and more tempted to exchange a long-term goal for an immediately available pleasure in all its forms from the emotional band aid of porn from a lifeless relationship (or a lack of one) to escaping loneliness for the false intimacy of social media friendship. The lack of motivation can cause us to reduce ourselves to someone else’s standards when we know we can be or do better. 

The Greeks felt that the way you think and feel about yourself, including your beliefs and expectations about what is possible for you, determines everything that happens to you. When you change the quality of your thinking, you change the quality of your life. I’ve been deeply influenced by Aristotle’s idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. “The control of the appetites by right reason,” is how he defined it. Another way to reframe this is to say, “Virtue is knowing what you really want,” and then building the intellectual, spiritual, and moral muscle to go after it.

To be cultured - as opposed to be merely educated - is how you put what you’ve learned to work in your own life, seeing the world around you more deeply because of the historical, literary, artistic and philosophical resonances that current experiences evoke. This is the privilege of being cultured. For me Classical stories come often to my mind, and some times provide guides to action (much as Plutarch intended his histories of famous men to be guides to morality and action). The classics then are a part of my mental toolset and the context I think with some of the time. I see that as the real blessing in my life.

Thanks for your question.

[cincinnatusvirtue]

The Battle of Kalka River.  The Mongols invade Russia. (May 31st, 1223)

Nomads from the steppes of Eurasia have since the time of antiquity presented a challenge to many of the civilizations that encountered them.  From the ancient Iranian Scythians giving the ancient Greeks and Romans problems on the frontiers of their sphere of influence.  To the later Huns, Avars, Magyars and Turks among others coming in successive waves from the East to West.  All left their imprint on almost everyone who encountered them.  This was by and large due to a style of warfare many had not yet mastered, mounted archery.  A form of light cavalry that doubled as early mounted infantry.  The steppes were an ideal place for equestrian warfare and it is believed to be one of the first places horse domestication took place.  Horses were used in cavalry elsewhere over the ages but on the steppes, those nomads who mastered horse riding and combined it with archery proved very difficult to counter in battle until the age of gunpowder later begin to obscure this type of warfare.  More than any other migration of nomads from the steppe, the Mongols were most successful in their conquests and lasting influence on the world writ large.  They would establish an empire that would be the world’s largest contiguous empire, albeit as a continual and united empire it was short lived, but even later in its varied sub divisions it would be influential.

The Mongols arose from what is modern day Mongolia, sandwiched between Northern China and Eastern Russia (Siberia).  The Mongols were in fact made of a number ethnolinguistically related troops that inhabited a variety of environments and terrain from forested valleys to deserts and most famously the sprawling and rolling hilly terrain of the steppe.  In this environment, Mongols bred and raised their most important asset, the horse.  The Mongol horse was not the heaviest nor the fastest horse in the world, especially in comparison to others but it was one of the most robust endurable horses in existence and this would be a difference maker for the Mongols.  This robust stamina was the result of breeding and existing on the diverse terrain of Mongolia’s forests, mountains, deserts and grasslands.  The grasslands provided them their sustenance and the Mongol horse was able to travel great distances and adapt to many climates and types of geography due to the tests on its endurance at home.  In turn, the Mongol horse provided the Mongol warrior unprecedented distances traveled in any season and type of weather.

The Mongols in addition to their horses specialized in horse mounted infantry, they held regular archery contests to practice marksmanship and even learned to shoot arrows on horseback while facing in reverse. More impressively, they timed loosening the arrow while all the horse’s hooves were off the ground at once as this improved accuracy and had a steadying effect on the trajectory of the projectile.  Mongols would adapt other styles of warfare too, including some heavy cavalry with heavier armor and lances and swords, they also developed infantry consisting of archers and artillery for sieges but their most effective form of warfare proved to be horse mounted archers.  The Mongol bow was known as a composite bow, not especially large but made of flexible bone and sinew mixtures making them more flexible and robust when compared to the wooden large longbows of Europe and elsewhere.

The Mongols were somewhat divided for centuries living as many different tribes but in the late 12th century would unite under the rise of a warlord whose father was murdered when he was a boy and then raised in times of captivity and freedom in harsh conditions.  His name was Temujin Borjigin or better known to history as Genghis Khan.  He managed to unite the Mongol tribes through warfare and diplomacy and in addition to being a capable warrior he proved to be an even more adept politician and leader of men.  He would unite the Mongol tribes into a more singular polity that would become the Mongol Empire, reigning as the Great Khan or Emperor.  His main focus was the unity and stability of his people.  He set many of the core tenets that defined the Mongol Empire.  Genghis believed in a relatively meritocratic society, one where individuals with excellent skill sets could rise to important positions within the empire regardless of dint of birth.  His major caveat was they must be loyal.  Loyalty and hospitality went hand in hand with merit.  Violations of this code of ethics was to the Mongols the ultimate insult.  Genghis not only implemented his meritocracy among the Mongols but among the various peoples they would encounter and come to conquer.  Various military specialists along with artisans and talent in a variety of fields would be utilized.  He also established a level of religious and domestic tolerance.  

The Mongol Empire wasn’t typically one of direct mass occupation and colonization like in the ancient Roman sense.  The Mongols tended to make vassals of the peoples they conquered and ruled with varying degrees of direct or indirect rule.  The internal policy and cultural practices of subjugated peoples were respected with some degree of occupation and Mongol presence so long as the tenets of loyalty and respect to the Great Khan were adhered to.  More overtly this meant vassal leaders had to pay their monetary tribute or tax, attend meetings when summoned and provide auxiliary troops when demanded by the Khan, so long as this was obeyed, typically the Mongols left everyone to their day to day devices.  When matters were deemed to be of interest to the Khan he and his subordinates would typically demand the vassal adhered to their summons, if disobedient they would be punished.  The Mongols sought to rule through fear and intimidation and to pacify enemies through mind games and a fearsome reputation that would keep their vassals and opponents in line.  To resist was to be subjected to near total anhilation on the battlefield and within sacked settlements.  The Mongols are believed to have killed peoples in the tens of millions during their various conquests and military expeditions.  10-15 million in the Iranian plateau alone are believed to have been killed.  Nevertheless, tolerance was again practiced so long as the Mongol code of honor and loyalty were respected.  Buddhism, Islam & Christianity among others were all found to be practiced by those under the Mongol yoke with religion varying widely by region.  In time the Mongol Empire spanned from the Korean Peninsula in the East to the reaches of Poland and Hungary in the West and from the steppes Central Eurasia in the North to the jungles of northern Vietnam in the South.  The Mongols themselves started out practicing a form of paganist shamanism that incorporated animal and ancestral worship as well as worship to a great sky god, it was known as Tengrism.  This religion would be relatively common among the various steppe peoples over the ages.

Genghis Khan had famously by the early decades of the 13th century and in quick fashion conquered much of China and Central Asia with his 4 sons serving as subordinates along with other capable generals known as Noyans.  Genghis had also done much to establish capable military force that played to the Mongols best strengths which mirrored the robust qualities of their horses.  For starters the Mongols needed a system of command which allowed for greater mobility and tactical flexibility.  It needed to adapt to many environments and cover great distances and rely on a lot of initiative. A structure delineating the number of men in a particular unit of the army in sizes of tens (arban), hundreds (zuun), thousands (mingghan) and then tens of thousands (tumen).  This allowed the armies to have a clear command structure that was numerically consistent generally and could have operational flexibility and divide into groups for varied purposes, small groups for infiltration, reconnaissance and skirmishing.  While larger bodies of troops would strategically divide as needed to cover more ground and operate separately but yet supportive of the greater mission.  Mongol troops provided their own horses, roughly 3-4 on campaign and took turns using the horses over great distances, this rotation allowed each horse to cover ground while not exerting as much force with a human on it, allowing the other to replenish for use in battle and to replace those lost.   The soliders lived off horse’s milk and even blood to help with their food.  Plentiful grasslands on the steppe, kept their horses stocked with endless food supplies.  The Mongols emphasized mobility on a strategic and tactical level.  Their horses due to their robust nature could cover 100 miles in a day in suitable terrain whereas most armies of the day could only cover a fraction of that coverage.  Mongols also emphasized intelligence, often years in advance of a campaign, learning through trade on the intercontinental trade routes of the Silk Road all they could about the culture and military prowess of peoples in faraway lands.  The Mongols gathered this data and used it to calibrate how effective opponents would be against their own tactics. 

Mongol tactics were indeed built around horse archery and indeed played to their particular strengths, speed, deception, surprise and psychological warfare at which they were adept.  One psychological element was to attack opponents in winter as a preferred time of year.  Usually, armies were used to a limited fighting season due to the difficulties of travel during very rainy or snowy weather.  The Mongols dealt this if it meant they could use the element of surprise to their advantage and fight and army piece meal, destroying smaller components not concentrated due to an unexpected arrival and forced to proceed more slowly in bad conditions.  Mongols also preferred to avoid melee combat or close contact, hence the emphasis on archery which allowed them to fire multiple arrows from a distance.  Though the Mongols would finish off an enemy in close contact with their more heavy cavalry, their lancers kept in reserve until the right moment.  Their best known tactic was one that combined deception with the horses physical prowess for stamina and the psychological upset of throwing the enemy off-guard.  It was known as a feigned retreat.  The Mongols typically were more lightly armored than many of their opponents, their armor was more flexible in material overall.  However their horses might not be faster or more powerful in terms of speed but in terrain of their choosing the Mongol horses’ stamina would turn the table of their enemy.  By pretending to retreat a certain distance an encouraged enemy usually would pursue, sometimes a few miles and sometimes for days on end.  Leading the enemy to ground of the Mongols choosing, then suddenly using well planned signals from banners and coordinated music, the Mongols would do an about face on the now exhausted opponent who would usually be unsupported and isolated from the rest of their army, allowing the Mongols to attack them.  By the time the rest of the exhausted opposing army caught up, their vanguard would be destroyed and the more active Mongols got a second wind that would create fear and confusion in the enemy sending them into a rout.  The Mongols would this repeatedly on campaign after campaign with almost always the same result...victory.  Finally, the Mongols preferred flanking maneuvers and the ability to surround the enemy rather than straight ahead attacks which put them at a disadvantage against more heavily armored enemies.  Flanking and surrounding the enemy demoralized them, threw them off balance and physically wore them down to the point where they could be exhausted and picked off at the leisure of the Mongols.  The Mongols were very systemic but adaptable in their wearing down of the enemy as reflected in these tactics.  Much like a predator hunts prey.

In 1219 ,the Mongols conquered the Khwarezmian Empire, a Turco-Persian polity in Central Asia.  The campaign lasted three years before Genghis returned to Mongolia in success.  One of his trusted generals named Jebe planned to venture further west in an exploratory campaign to prep for further Mongol invasions later, Genghis approved of this and Jebe and another Noyan by the name of Subutai marched westward toward the Caucasus Mountains and the Kingdom of Georgia which they ravaged using an army consisting of roughly 20,000 troops.  They fell back to Azerbaijan and planned to head to Baghdad before heading north once more in the spring of 1221.

Hiring local guides, Jebe and Subutai’s army crossed the wintry mountains which caused many deaths to exposure from the cold but nevertheless they made it through and onto familiar terrain, the steppes of modern southern Russia and Ukraine.  The Mongols encountered a confederation of various Caucasian peoples supported by the Turkic Cumans.  The battle that ensued was indecisive, the Mongols then met with the Cumans and convinced the Turks that they would share the spoils of war with their fellow steppe nomads in exchange of the Cumans to abandon their allies which they did, leaving with a loaded baggage train of treasure.  The Mongols from their killed off the last of the Caucasian peoples resistance and then pursued the Cumans only to attack them from behind.  The remnants of which they chose to pursue.  In the meantime, the Venetians from Italy which had trading posts on the Black Sea sent an emissary to make peace with the Mongols.  They agreed to destroy any non-Venetian European trading posts in exchange for intelligence of European peoples and armies in particular which the Venetians were happy to supply.  Indeed the Mongols attacked Venice’s rival fellow Italian Republic, that of Genoa, destroying Genoese trading posts in the area.  Meanwhile, the Cuman had retreated to the Rus in Kiev where they sought refuge and alliance against the Mongols.  Warnings which the Rus ignored for over a year, finding the Cumans who frequently warred with the Rus not especially trustworthy.  The Rus for their part were a confederation of East Slavic tribes that had over the course of the centuries and with former Viking leadership in years long gone fused into a bunch of princely states headed by Kiev above all others, collectively they were known as the Rus or Kievan Rus.  These were the precursors to the modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian peoples.

By 1223 word now reached the Prince of Kiev Mstislav III, that the Mongols were advancing towards Kiev with the goal of dealing with the Cumans.  Mongol ambassadors arrived to negotiate handing over the Cumans in exchange for goods from the Mongols.  The Rus killed the ambassadors and sent their corpses back to the Mongols, violating the code of ethics in which hospitality was always to be accepted and reciprocated or else punishment would be needed.  The Rus were now determined to drive off the Mongols who saw their feud with the Cumans as troublesome to their borders, despite the Mongols saying the matter shouldn’t concern the Rus.  Kiev reached out to the other princely-cities of the Rus to form an alliance against the Mongols, they would be supported by the Cumans.

The Mongols had hoped for reinforcements from Jochi, son of Genghis Khan but these would not be forthcoming due his own illness.  Instead the Mongols decided to retreat eastward which forced the Rus and the Cumans to decide what to do.  They decided to pursue the Mongols.  Jebe and Subutai decided to leave a rearguard to serve as a sacrifice, this small force of 1,000 men were defeated by the Rus.  A minor victory which only encouraged the Rus further to pursue the Mongols.  What the Rus did not realize in their hastened pursuit was that were being lured into the Mongols feigned retreat over the course of several slow going days, believed to be nine total.  It wasn’t until they reached the Kalka River, a small tributary of the Dniester that the tides would turn.

The Battle of the Kalka River would take place on May 31st, 1223 but its details are not very specified in terms of tactics and maneuvers.  The basic idea was that the Mongols has forded to east bank of the river while the Rus and Cumans pursued from the west bank all the while firing arrows fired facing backwards, slowing the Rus advance.  The Mongols would await for the Rus to give a good portion of their vanguard across the river before their about face which saw them launch an attack of surprising speed ferocity which transitioned from the horse archer attack to heavier cavalry attack.  The Cumans were said to have fled right away and with the Rus vanguard quickly eradicated.  Meanwhile, the Rus were still in the process of crossing the river, the various Rus princes and their armies possibly numbering 80,000 total didn’t travel altogether, instead they arrived on the battlefield in gradual succession.  To the newcomers surprise, their fellow Rus & Cumans were in a panicked retreat westward.  They formed an open gap to allow the retreating Cumans to ride through.  The Mongols exploited this by riding through themselves and them enveloping the already retreating Rus and the new reinforcements who had no time to prepare.  Only Mstislav the Bold of all the Rus princes managed to fight his way out of the Mongol trap.  Meanwhile a number of Rus formed a encircled enclosure on a nearby hill to provide a beacon of help to those fleeing.  The Mongols quickly surrounded this enclosure and bombarded it smoke bombs to cause confusion and showered it with arrows driving up casualties.  The Rus in the camp surrendered only for the Mongols to massacre them.  The Mongols took Mstislav III of Kiev and are said to have wrapped him in a carpet and placed him and other Rus nobles under a wooden victory platform upon which the Mongols sat atop them and feasted and toasted their victory while their collective weight crushed the air out of the Rus nobility’s lungs, killing them.

The Rus feared a Mongol attack on Kiev proper as a follow up but it never materialized.  Nevertheless, the Rus and Europe at large had its first and hardly last taste of the Mongol Empire.  Instead of attacking Kiev, the Mongols proceeded east and made vassals of some other Cumans and the related Volga Bulgars, another Turkic group of tribes.  Before they met up with the rest of the Mongol army elsewhere.  Genghis Khan was reportedly quite happy with the exploits of Jebe and Subutai and lauded praise on them for achieving the longest cavalry raid in history of 5,500 miles total drawn out over 3 years.  Jebe would pass away shortly after this campaign and Genghis himself would die in 1227 with the succession of the empire divided among his sons rather than just one son, though nominally his son Ogedei was the next Great Khan, after which the empire would increasingly fracture.  Meanwhile Subutai, sometimes regarded as one of the greatest generals of all time, learned a lot about the Europeans for the first time and instead of conquering them, gained valued information for a later date and later battles, with the long term goal of conquering the Rus and Europe beyond...

[sophiaholmes221b]

Sophia Holmes and the Study in Pink

Epilogue

"I'm bored!" I cry, pacing the living room of 221B Baker Street.

"You're not the only one," dad groans from his position on the sofa. "No cases, no juicy murders - London's dried up."

I growl furiously, and toss a newspaper across the room.

It's been two whole weeks since the Pink Lady case, and London seems to have run out of creative ideas for cases. It's true we've had clients, but only boring ones like: "My Gran died, and I think it was murder." You see my problem?

The doorbell rings and my eyes light up at the sound. "Single ring," I whisper.

"Maximum pressure," dad adds.

"Just under half a second," I smile.

"Client!" we both yell, and dad stands up and starts towards the door as Mrs Hudson brings up the client.

The client is dressed in traditional Iranian robes and his face is almost completely covered in a variety of scarves. It makes him difficult to deduce, but maybe that's his intention.

"Mr and Miss Holmes," he greets us in a low voice as he bows.

Dad and I bow back respectfully, and dad gestures for him to sit on the sofa. "What do you have for us?"

"A diamond," he begins slowly, and dad stops pacing.

"The Jaria diamond?" The man nods.

"It is one of our country's most valued possessions, Mr Holmes. It is said that the great God Meromes cast it out of a star from the sky to protect our ancient land. You can understand why we need it back?"

Dad raises his eyebrows and starts pacing again. "I wouldn't believe everything you hear."

"Are you implying that there is no God then, Mr Holmes?" the client demands, standing up from his seat.

I mirror him, pushing my chair back under the table. "Of course there isn't," dad scoffs. "It's a figure of peoples imagination - there is no God."

The client draws a large scimitar from underneath his robes and dad rolls his eyes.

"Dull," he says, just as the sword comes down.