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What is Hinduism A Guide for the Global Mind David Frawley
The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery’s manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slaveholding groups as either “genuine slave societies” or “societies with slaves.” This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five “genuine slave societies” in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalog of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.
Noel Lenski is Professor of Roman History at Yale University. A recipient of fellowships from the Humboldt and Guggenheim Foundations, he has published extensively on Roman imperial history, including Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century AD and Constantine and the Cities: Imperial Authority and Civic Politics
Catherine M. Cameron is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is an archaeologist of the American Southwest and has conducted a worldwide, cross-cultural study of captive-taking in prehistory. Cameron is the author of Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World, coeditor (with Paul Kelton and Alan Swedlund) of Beyond Germs: Native Depopulations in North America, and editor of Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences.
What Is a Slave Society?
The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective
Edited by NOEL LENSKI
Yale University
CATHERINE M. CAMERON
University of Colorado, Boulder
With the assistance of JOSHUA FINCHER
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List of Figures page vii
List of Maps viii
List of Tables and Charts ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Slavery and Society in Global Perspective 1 Noel Lenski and Catherine M. Cameron
1 Framing the Question: What Is a Slave Society? 15
Noel Lenski
Part I Ancient and Late Antique Western Societies
2 Ancient Greece as a “Slave Society” 61
Peter Hunt
3 Roman Slavery and the Idea of “Slave Society” 86
Kyle Harper and Walter Scheidel
4 Ancient Slaveries and Modern Ideology 106
Noel Lenski
Part II Non- Western Small- Scale Societies
5 The Nature of Slavery in Small-Scale Societies 151 Catherine M. Cameron
6 Native American Slavery in Global Context 169
Christina Snyder
7 Slavery as Structure, Process, or Lived Experience, or Why Slave Societies Existed in Precontact
Tropical America 191
Fernando Santos-Granero
8 Slavery in Societies on the Frontiers of Centralized States in West Africa 220
Paul E. Lovejoy
III
9 The Colonial Brazilian “Slave Society”: Potentialities, Limits, and Challenges to an Interpretative Model Inspired by Moses Finley 251
Aldair Carlos Rodrigues
10 What Is a Slave Society?: The American South 272
Robert Gudmestad
11 Islands of Slavery: Archaeology and Caribbean Landscapes of Intensification 290
Theresa Singleton Part IV Non- Western State Societies
12 Was Nineteenth-Century Eastern Arabia a “Slave Society”? 313
Matthew S. Hopper
13 Slavery and Society in East Africa, Oman, and the Persian Gulf 337
Bernard K. Freamon
14 Ottoman and Islamic Societies: Were They “Slave Societies”? 360
Ehud R. Toledano
15 A Microhistorical Analysis of Korean Nobis through the Prism of the Lawsuit of Damulsari 383
Kim Bok-rae
16 “Slavery so Gentle”: A Fluid Spectrum of Southeast Asian Conditions of Bondage 410
Anthony Reid
Conclusion: Intersections: Slaveries, Borderlands, Edges 429 James F. Brooks
6.1 “Choctaws Painted as Warriors Who Carry Scalps,” by Alexander de Batz page 172
6.2 Conquering warrior effigy pipe 173
6.3 “Eight Heads: No Two Alike,” shell cup engraving from Spiro 181
12.1 Reenactment of an Omani zijrah, Muscat 323
12.2 Air route to Baghdad via Amman and the desert 324
12.3 Men pollinating date palm, Oman 325
12.4 Slaves rescued from Arab dhow near Zanzibar 327
12.5 Pearl divers at work, Persian Gulf 328
15.1 Nobi document with a hand shape rather than a handwritten signature 386
15.2 Young woman with a water jug 387
15.3 Chosun gisaengs (courtesans) bathing in a river 388
15.4 A young bi carrying a tray with wine and food dishes 391
15.5 “Nothing happened in a gisaeng’s house” 392
15.6 “A boy picking a red flower” 393
15.7 The process of trial at the government office 397
15.8 Rice threshing. A man lying idly supervises farm tenants 399
Maps
2.1 The Ancient Greek World page 65
7.1 Location of Tropical American Slaveholding Societies 193
8.1 Igbo and Ibibio Hinterland of the Bight of Biafra 228
8.2 Fuuta Jalon and the Upper Guinea Coast, ca. 1800 236
8.3 Sokoto Caliphate and Frontiers, ca. 1850 238
9.1 Colonial Brazil 256
12.1 Arabian (Persian) Gulf 318
16.1 Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period 414
Notes on Contributors
Kim Bok-rae is Professor of European Culture and Tourism at the Andong National University, South Korea. She received her doctorate in history from the University of Paris I. Her interests involve comparative history among China, Korea, and Japan. She has published several articles on Korean nobis in comparative perspective: “Nobi: A Korean System of Slavery,” in Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (2003); “Korean Nobi Resistance under the Chosun Dynasty(1392–1910),” in Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia (2005); “The Third Gender: Palace Eunuchs,” in Children in Slavery through the Ages (2009); and “Debt Slaves in Old Korea,” in Bonded Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean Worlds (2013).
James F. Brooks is Professor in the Departments of History and Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was president of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe from 2005 to 2013 and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (2002) and Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre (2016).
Catherine M. Cameron is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is an archaeologist of the American Southwest and has conducted a worldwide, cross-cultural study of captive-taking in prehistory. She is the author of Captives: How Stolen
People Changed the World (2016), coeditor of Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (2015), and editor of Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences (2008).
Bernard K. Freamon is Professor of Law Emeritus at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, New Jersey. His recent publications include an edited collection entitled Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition (2013) and “ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Human Right to Freedom from Slavery under Islamic Law,” published in the Fordham International Law Journal (2015): 245–306. He continues to write, consult, and lecture on the issues of slavery and slave trading in Islamic legal history.
Robert Gudmestad is Professor of History at Colorado State University and is the author of A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (2003) and Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (2011).
Kyle Harper is Professor of Classics and Letters and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (2011), From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013), and The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017). His work has explored the economic, social, and environmental history of the period spanning the ancient world and the early Middle Ages.
Matthew S. Hopper is Professor of History at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He is the author of Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (2015), which was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He was a Fulbright fellow in Tanzania and Oman, has been a visiting fellow at Yale University and the University of Cambridge, and was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Peter Hunt is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His works on ancient slavery include two books, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (1998) and Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery (2018), as well as contributions to The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. I, The Cambridge History of the World. Vol. 4, and the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries.
Noel Lenski is Professor of Classics and History at Yale University and formerly at the University of Colorado. A Humboldt and Guggenheim fellow, Lenski has published extensively on Roman imperial history, including the monographs Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century AD (2002) and Constantine and the Cities: Imperial Authority and Civic Politics (2016). His work on slavery stretches back more than a decade and includes seminal articles such as “Captivity and Slavery among the Saracens in Late Antiquity (ca. 250–630 CE)” in Antiquité Tardive (2011) and “Constantine and Slavery: Libertas and the Fusion of Roman and Christian Values” in Atti dell’Accademia Romanistica Costantiniana (2012).
Paul E. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor at York University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His publications include The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: New Directions in Teaching and Learning (2013) and Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (2016). Founding director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and Its Diasporas and Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History (2000–15), he has received an honorary degree from the University of Stirling (2007), the Distinguished Africanist Award from the University of Texas, Austin (2010), Life Time Achievement Award from the Canadian Association of African Studies (2011), and Graduate Studies Teaching Award from the York University (2011). He is general editor of the Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora, Africa World Press.
Anthony Reid is currently Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University. He writes on Southeast Asian history, most recently A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (2015). In 1983, he edited Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia
Aldair Carlos Rodrigues is Professor of Colonial Brazil at UNICAMP –University of Campinas, Brazil and teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is author of Limpos de Sangue (2011), and his current project about Brazil and the African Diaspora focuses on the formation of Dahomey and its impacts on political identities in the interior of Portuguese America during the eighteenth century.
Fernando Santos-Granero is a senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Graduated from the London
School of Economics, he has done extensive fieldwork among the Yanesha of central Peru, as well as historical research of Upper Amazon indigenous societies and regional economies. He is the author of The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru (1991) and Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (2009), and coauthor with Frederica Barclay of the books Selva Central: History, Economy, and Land Use in Peruvian Amazonia (1998) and Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (2000).
Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. He is the author or editor of seventeen books, including most recently On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (2017, coedited with John Bodel), and has worked on premodern social and economic history, historical demography, and the comparative global history of labor regimes, state formation, and inequality.
Theresa Singleton is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University. She is the author of Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation (2015).
Christina Snyder is the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. Her books include Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (2010) and Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (2017).
Ehud R. Toledano is Professor of Middle East History and the Director of the Program in Ottoman and Turkish Studies at Tel Aviv University (TAU), Israel. With a PhD from Princeton University, he has conducted extensive research in Istanbul, Cairo, London, and Paris, and taught courses on the Middle East at TAU, UCLA, UPenn, Oxford, and other leading universities. Among the sixteen books he has written and edited is As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in Islamic Middle East (2007).
Acknowledgments
This volume was born from a conference held during September 27–28, 2013, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The event created a tremendously stimulating atmosphere, in which our fundamental question was examined from multiple global and theoretical perspectives. The results of those discussions have developed into the chapters in this book, some of which arise from the original papers delivered at the conference, others from contributions solicited later. Although some of the original participants were unable to submit a chapter, we wish to thank them for their inspiring discussions and insights. These include Daina Ramey Berry (University of Texas, Austin), Gwyn Campbell (McGill University), Walter Hawthorne (Michigan State University), and Joseph Miller (University of Virginia). David Lewis, who attended the conference without delivering a paper, was surely one of the most helpful interlocutors. His subsequent published work has demonstrated a powerful grasp of the problems this volume poses. During fall semester 2013, we also co-taught a course at the University of Colorado entitled “Slavery: A Global Perspective,” which was intended to involve students in the What Is a Slave Society? conference and to introduce them to the broader world of slavery, past and present. This was a wonderful group of students who challenged us to think even more deeply about the ideas we were presenting in both the course and the conference.
The conference succeeded because of the skilled and efficient work of Sandra Crowell, University of Colorado Classics Department
Program Assistant, who arranged travel, receptions, dinners, and much more for our many attendees. Lesa Morris, Anthropology Department Program Assistant, offered parallel help. During the conference, three graduate students provided enthusiastic assistance: Erin Baxter, Paxton Bigler, and Lindsay Johansson. Erin also served as videographer. The conference was funded by grants from a variety of CU entities: the Center for Western Civilization, IMPART, the Graduate Committee for Arts and the Humanities, the Vice Chancellor’s Research Council, the Dean’s Fund for Excellence, the President’s Fund for the Humanities, the Kayden Award Committee, and Classics Department Course Fees. We are grateful for their confidence in this endeavor and pleased to offer these studies in return. The conference was also sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Department of Classics, Department of History, and Mediterranean Studies Group. The slavery course associated with the conference was supported by a grant from the University of Colorado’s Gamm fund for interdisciplinary courses.
Translating the stimulation and excitement of a conference to written form is often a challenge, but the authors of these chapters have been a delight to work with. These prominent and enormously busy scholars met all of our many deadlines without complaint, making our editorial job easy. During the course of the project, we also requested chapters from scholars who had not attended the conference but whose work, we realized, would add enormously to the resulting book. We thank Bernard Freamon (Seton Hall University), Anthony Reid (Australian National University), Aldair Rodrigues (University of Campinas, Brazil), and Theresa Singleton (Syracuse University) for crafting excellent papers that add greatly to this volume.
Noel Lenski benefited greatly from interchanges with Dan Tompkins, who was especially generous with his knowledge and materials on Moses Finley, as well as Richard Talbert, who kindly supplied his special issue of the American Journal of Philology, dedicated to the theme of “Moses Finley in America,” immediately after its publication. David Lewis and Kostas Vlassopoulos shared valuable ideas and critical advice on both of Lenski’s chapters. Lenski also delivered the paper that became the first chapter of this volume not just at the initial conference but also at conferences held at the Institute
for the Study of the Ancient World and Yale University in 2014, and Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. The Yale audience, soon to be colleagues, offered invaluable advice and criticism, especially David Blight, Emily Greenwood, Ed Rugemer, and Stuart Schwartz. Blight and Rugemer as well as Eckart Frahm have been extremely helpful on questions of comparative bibliography.
At Cambridge University Press, Asya Graf, Editor of Archaeology and Renaissance Studies, encouraged us in the initial stages of developing this book project and Beatrice Rehl was equally helpful and encouraging as we moved through the remaining stages. Our thanks go to three anonymous scholars who reviewed this book’s initial proposal and made important suggestions about its development, as well as the two anonymous reviewers who read the full manuscript and helped all of us to perfect our chapters. Indeed, “Reader B,” whose expertise in the history of slavery globally and of Greek slavery in particular was formidable, contributed a wealth of suggestions that helped both authors and editors vastly improve their work. As this book came together, we had superb editorial assistance from Josh Fincher, who skillfully developed a referencing system for each chapter (no small task with scholars from multiple disciplines), built the bibliography, copyedited the entire document, and later produced its index. University of Colorado grad student Lindsay Johansson provided editorial assistance at the beginning of the project, and retired University of Colorado graphic artist Dave Underwood drew all the maps.
Introduction: Slavery and
Society in Global
Perspective
Noel Lenski and Catherine M. Cameron
What is a “slave society”? At first glance it might seem simply to be a society that allows some individuals to hold others in a position of subordination as property. Just as humans treat cattle, sheep, or dogs as their “own,” some societies permit their members to treat humans by right of ownership as slaves.1 Any society that permits this could –in a general sense – be called a slave society. For some historians and social scientists, however, the phrase “slave society” constitutes a sociologically definable class that distinguishes a select and limited group of geo-temporally delimited cultures as different in quality and quantity from the many other social contexts in world history that permit slaveholding. Such “genuine slave societies,” as they have been termed, are to be distinguished from “societies with slaves,” where slavery also exists, but on a smaller and less intensive scale. For this subset of scholars, “Slave Societies” (and here we begin using capitals and quotation marks to set off this specialized sense of the term, a practice maintained throughout this volume) are few in number, many would say as few as five – ancient Greece and Rome, modern Brazil, the Caribbean, and the US South. They are also thought to be
1 Jacoby 1994 attempts to link the rise of slavery with the domestication of animals and the rise of animal husbandry. His article is useful for its collection of references to slaves as “animals” across a broad pool of (mostly Western) sources. It does not account for the fact that slaves are referred to and treated as animals (especially dogs) in societies without developed husbandry; see Rushforth 2012, 15–71. On the same theme, see also Keith Bradley 2000.
unique in history in that they alone can be said to incorporate slaves and slavery at a “structural location” central to the functioning of that society’s economic and cultural elite.
This distinction between “Slave Societies” and “Societies with Slaves” was first developed by groundbreaking ancient historian and sociologist Moses Finley in the 1960s. Finley expanded on the idea in two important monographs from 1973 and 1980, and the distinction was then adopted widely by other Greek and Roman historians until it has become a virtual corollary of ancient slavery studies.2 It has also enjoyed widespread currency among modern historians, particularly historians of the West, which – Finley posited and subsequent Western scholars have maintained – was historically exceptional in developing “Slave Societies.” Yet the idea has gained purchase even beyond the study of Western history to such an extent that it affects both the discourse and the methodology of many slave studies across disciplines up to the present.
The chapters presented in this volume arose as papers presented at a conference held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, during September 27–28, 2013, under the title “What Is a Slave Society? An International Conference on the Nature of Slavery as a Global Historical Phenomenon.” The conveners of the meeting and editors of this volume organized the event in order to interrogate Finley’s construct. Neither is of the belief that the “Slave Societies/Societies with Slaves” binary remains useful or even tenable in light of ongoing studies of the practice of slavery in a variety of cultures across global history. Nevertheless, both are convinced that the model’s supporters still have a case to make, and that those of us who would question a paradigm so widely deployed should offer a forum for debate and perhaps also an alternative for its replacement. They posed the title of the conference – and of this volume – as a question with the deliberate intent of inviting inquiry, discussion, and potential dissent.
In the same spirit, this volume, containing chapters by most of the original attendees and four further contributors, all revised in dialogue with one another, retains contrasting and at times contradictory opinions about the subject. As a collection of individual studies by multiple authors with unique perspectives, it makes no apologies
2 Finley 1968, 1973a, 1980
for melding a series of divergent approaches and conclusions. Each author has been invited to engage not just the theme of the conference but also the content of the other chapters. The result is thus not a coherent line of argument, let alone a continuous narrative, but rather a series of debates, or an interconnected grid of opinions about the nature of slavery and slaveholding across history. The conference thus began with a question, and the resulting volume maintains an interrogatory stance.
This book opens with a lengthy chapter on the origins of the idea of the “Slave Society” written by Noel Lenski and intended to provide background and a jumping-off point for the debate that follows. It explores the rise of the model and its subsequent effects on the study of ancient history as well as its interpenetration into fields of history, sociology, and anthropology well beyond the Classical world. The chapter then questions the tendency to restrict the “Slave Society” distinction to just five Western cultures by illustrating how five nonWestern societies not mentioned by Finley and his followers seem to fit his criteria for inclusion in the club. Having indicted the model’s ethnocentrism, the chapter then moves to more fundamental problems with its construction. It explores issues arising from its assumptions about fundamental similarities between ancient and modern slave systems. It then formulates a new model that attempts to measure the “intensity” of slaveholding practices by comparing them with an “ideal” form of slavery that would balance equally benefits to the master with disadvantages to the slave. This model may or may not replace the Finleyan construct, but it should at least provide a credible alternative to the black-and-white distinction it has imposed.
The thematic chapters of this volume are articulated into four parts. The first explores Ancient and Late Antique Western Societies It begins with Chapter 2 on Classical Greece by Peter Hunt, which opens with the fundamental question of definitions. Hunt examines the long-standing dichotomy between “property definitions” of slavery and Orlando Patterson’s subjective definition based on violent domination, natal alienation, and dishonor.3 While acknowledging the validity of Patterson’s depiction of slavery, Hunt argues that the notion of property is determinative of the slave state. Slave societies,
3 Patterson 1982, 1–17.
he contends, are those that most obviously treat humans as property. In addition, he reiterates Finley’s emphasis on the structural location of slavery as a matter of paramount importance: slave societies are characterized by the predominance of slaves as the primary suppliers of surplus for the elite. By this definition, Athens was by all means a “Slave Society.” Slaves were held as chattels, the proportion of slaves in its population – 20–50 percent of aggregate – was large, and these provided the primary source of surplus production. Sparta, by contrast, was not, for its helots retained limited but tangible rights in property and inheritance that set them above chattel slaves.
In Chapter 3, Kyle Harper and Walter Scheidel join forces to argue in favor of the Finleyan model. They begin by situating Finley’s scholarship in its historiographical context. Reacting to Marx’s historical materialism and Weber’s conquest thesis, the former of which argued that the ancient economy was based in a “slave mode of production” and the latter that it depended on war captives for the generation of slaves, Harper and Scheidel point out that Finley charted a new path that emphasized the property nature of the slave–master relationship: the defining feature of the chattel slave was not his universality qua laborer nor her capture in battle but rather the fact of being treated as a piece of property. Harper and Scheidel continue by inferring that Rome’s heavy dependence on slave labor – and thus on commoditized laborers – may have helped propel it to economic prosperity and even toward progressive sociocultural development. They then turn to questions of scale and structural location in an effort to prove that Roman Italy in particular was home to an economy built on and by slaves who then disappeared, by and large, when that economy collapsed in the fifth century.
Noel Lenski closes the first section with a chapter that explores how Finley developed his model within his own mid-twentieth-century context. It begins by exploring the various intellectual strains undergirding Finley’s thought: Marx, Bücher, Meyer, Weber, and Polanyi. From these Finley derived his assumptions that the ancient Greek, and, by extension, Roman, economies were fundamentally primitive, based in agriculture, averse to free labor, and unique in ancient world history for the intensity of their slaveholding. Early on, his desire to understand what was unique about Classical Greek slavery (by which he meant Athenian slavery) led Finley to the conclusion
that Greece’s invention of personal freedom necessitated the use of chattel slaves – making it the world’s first “genuine slave society.” He then grafted this idea onto a theory developed by István Hahn that emphasized the importance of large-scale private property holding and the availability of free-market exchange as catalysts for the growth of what Hahn termed the Skavenhaltergesellschaft. Lenski goes on to question the validity of Finley’s model as a tool for comparing the slaveholding practices of ancient societies like Greece and Rome with the modern US South, which was always the paradigm for Finley’s “Slave Society.”
Part II of this book treats Non-Western Small-Scale Societies. In its first chapter, Catherine Cameron covers a broad spectrum of smallscale societies from across the globe, many of which fulfilled all of Finley’s criteria for inclusion among the canon of “Slave Societies.” Opening each section with a quotation from Finley, the chapter systematically lays out a kind of koine of captive-taking among these societies: they regularly raided for captives, often women and children but sometimes also men, and then detained these in subordinate statuses, sometimes over the short term but often throughout their lives and at times even across generations; they did so in numbers that varied widely from context to context but sometimes reached as high as 25 percent of the aggregate population. Their slaves were often structurally important to social differentiation, constituting the main avenue through which elite male status was expressed; they were treated as property, whether of individuals or, more commonly, male heads of household, and were gifted or exchanged for other goods. They were also economically productive, generating surplus while providing leisure for their elite owners. Ultimately, while small-scale societies display significant differences with more complex state-based social systems, in certain instances, they clearly intensified the practice of captive-taking and slaveholding to the point that they too could be considered “Slave Societies” within the terms of their own social complex.4
In Chapter 6, Christina Snyder explores the bewildering variety of slaveries practiced in native North America. Captive-taking and
4 Many of these ideas are explored in greater detail in Cameron 2016a
slaveholding on the continent preceded European contact and persisted in its aftermath, with native practices often conforming themselves to colonial patterns over time. In all instances precontact slavery was based on captive-taking, and many – though not all –native societies were “open” to the incorporation of captives into their cultures.5 Some, however, like the Northwest Coast peoples, developed robust systems of trans-generational slavery.6 Several – like the Cherokee or Chickasaw – merged their native traditions with colonial patterns by organizing plantations populated by African slaves, and others – like the Westos – came to specialize in slave raiding and trading as the basis of their economies.7 Overall, Snyder argues, slavery in Native American societies was in constant flux, ever shifting in its forms, purposes, and intensity to meet changing social and economic circumstances. These insights obviously cast a shadow over attempts to view colonial New World slavery in essentializing terms, for it too developed over time and even in dialogue with the native forms – Amerindian and African – it encountered.
In Chapter 7, Fernando Santos-Granero carries the argument to tropical Native America, between southern Florida and the Gran Chaco of South America. He demonstrates the diffusion of captivetaking and slaveholding here too in the precontact period. Focusing on five societies, he shows how some of these – like the Kalinago and Conibo – practiced regular captive-taking raids and then used their victims as slaves for the remainder of their lifetimes, while others –like the Tukano, Chiriguaná, and Guaicurú – held slaves alongside serf-like or tributary dependent populations. Using three approaches, one structural, a second processual, and a third phenomenological, Santos-Granero shows that, while the groups he treats may not qualify as Finleyan “Slave Societies” for want of a “slave mode of production,” they were societies structured around captive-taking and slaveholding. Thus, at least from the slaves’ perspective, there would have been little difference between the level of violence and alienation imposed in these societies as compared to those that fit Finley’s model more comfortably.
5 Snyder 2010; Rushforth 2012; cf. Cameron 2011
6 See Donald 1997.
7 See Bowne 2005
Paul Lovejoy continues this section in Chapter 8 with an examination of “Slavery in Societies on the Frontiers of Centralized States in West Africa.” Focusing on the interior of Upper Guinea in the eighteenth century and the Bight of Biafra in the nineteenth, when the Muslim states of Fuuta Jalon and Sokoto dominated the interior of these regions, Lovejoy draws into doubt the validity or usefulness of the Finleyan “Slave Society” even as he also questions some of the terms of discussion inherent in this volume: ideas of “statehood,” of “society,” of “modes of production” are none of them easily applicable to the African societies he investigates. Even so, slaves – people who could be bought and sold and who were subject to the will and whim of their masters – existed in these regions before Western contact, and societies that fit Finley’s criteria for recognition as “Slave Societies” were also present and indeed common. Exploiting this situation, Aro merchants traveled the Cross and Niger Rivers collecting marketable slaves traded from the Igbo and Ibibio who were then sold to Western slavers. So too the small-scale societies surrounding the Sokoto Caliphate simultaneously retained slaves of their own and were subject to enslavement by the hulking “Slave Society” on whose frontiers they lived. In this sense, slave societies were common in this region of West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Ultimately, then, the notion of the slave society – when used as a descriptive term – remains useful as a way to identify societies that are fundamentally shaped by the institution of slavery. The chapters in this section would seem to agree, however, that the use of the notion of a “Slave Society” to establish a firmly bounded sociological category is as likely to distort as enhance interpretation. All indicate that too keen a focus on the illusory ideal of an archetypal “Slave Society” is at once overly rigid and less than productive of meaning for those seeking to explain the complexity of slaveholding systems across cultures. Part III of this volume treats Modern Western Societies and offers a more sympathetic reading of the Finleyan idea. Aldair Carlos Rodrigues opens in Chapter 9 with an examination of “The Colonial Brazilian ‘Slave Society’: Potentialities, Limits, and Challenges to an Interpretative Model Inspired by Moses Finley.” Brazil was the largest importer of African slaves in the transatlantic complex and it used these slaves to recreate a colonial version of the status regimes of the metropolis. At the start of the colonial period, slavery was
still very much alive in Portugal, albeit in a system restricted to the social elite. But the New World recreation of Portuguese slavery allowed entrepreneurs and social climbers to employ slave-owning as the fundamental tool for the creation and assertion of status. This is confirmed by demographic analyses that have emphasized that slaveholding occurred across a broad spectrum of social statuses in Brazil before the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1850, giving it a solid purchase across Luso-American society. A closer look at regional variation demonstrates that the use of African slaves predominated in coastal regions with sugar production and access to the transatlantic market, while São Paulo and Amazonia made heavier use of indigenous peoples, often as semi-servile dependents, until late in the eighteenth century. After refuting recent efforts to downplay the difference between colonial and metropolitan slaveholding, Rodrigues closes with a look at recent research that has recovered a place for slave agency in Brazil, particularly in studies emphasizing the creative adaptation of the European tradition of godparenthood and African traditions of warfare. Thus, while defending the usefulness of Finley’s model, Rodrigues acknowledges the limitations imposed by its emphasis on the perspective of masters rather than slaves.
In Chapter 10, Robert Gudmestad explores the question in North America with “What Is a Slave Society? The American South.” He accepts the challenge to look past the Finleyan binary and apply Lenski’s new intensification model to this context. Beginning with a survey of the history of slavery in North America, he shows how the introduction of cash crops invited the intensification of African slaveholding by white colonists. Over the course of the seventeenth century, these created the normative and administrative apparatus necessary for the large-scale use of slavery out of whole cloth, for the British had abolished slavery in the metropolis some four centuries earlier. The patchwork nature of American colonial settlement and the variegation in landscape and climate led to tremendous variability in American slaveholding. This tended to be smoothed out in the late eighteenth century as slavery intensified in the warmer climates of the South even as it withered in a North active in the invention of abolitionism. Even so, Gudmestad emphasizes that the Southern states hardly used slaves in any uniform way, as regards both their demographic and their economic importance. Ultimately, the welding
together of the United States after 1789 created a Manichaean political and economic system, unique in world history for the tensions it created over the question of slavery. When the country fissured in 1860, it was the level of intensification that dictated whether states would side with the Union or the Confederacy. In this sense, intensification best describes the patterns of slaveholding that emerged in some areas and the opposing trends that came to prevail in others.
In Chapter 11, Theresa Singleton introduces material culture to the debate in her exploration of “Islands of Slavery: Archaeology and Caribbean Landscapes of Intensification.” After problematizing the whole notion of “the Caribbean” as a unified geographical, let alone political, space, she explores how the differential bias in Caribbean slave archaeology for larger plantations has masked the diversity in the scale and practice of slaveholding and other forms of dependent labor. She then turns to a diachronic investigation of the development of slavery, starting with encomiendas of the sixteenth century and moving to the large-scale plantations associated with English and French colonization in the region following the sugar revolution. Controlled by large-scale investment interests and populated by enslaved African laborers, these geo-temporal contexts did indeed give rise to structures Finley characterized as a “Slave Society” in places like Barbados, Jamaica, and St. Domingue. More difficult to explain is why these economies turned from indentured white to enslaved black labor, as is the question of why the Spanish waited to develop intensive slavebased production until the nineteenth century, a period when slave production was de-intensifying in the British and French contexts. The “Slave Society/Societies with Slaves” binary may then be useful in the broadest terms for modeling the Caribbean, but its two-dimensional simplicity falls short of offering an explanatory model for the regional variability characteristic of the Caribbean as whole.
Part IV of this book looks at Non-Western State Societies in a series of five chapters. The first, Chapter 12, by Matthew Hopper, covers nineteenth-century Eastern Arabia, which was home to tens of thousands of slaves who worked in the production of pearls and dates. Overturning entrenched notions that Islamic cultures hold slaves only for purposes of military or bureaucratic service, household maintenance, or sexual exploitation, Hopper elucidates a highly sophisticated, market-driven slave system that concentrated slaves
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Title: The Princess Athura: A romance of Iran
Author: Samuel W. Odell
Illustrator: Jay Hambidge
Release date: May 26, 2022 [eBook #68174]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1913
Credits: MFR, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINCESS ATHURA: A ROMANCE OF IRAN ***
THE PRINCESS ATHURA
A ROMANCE OF IRAN
BY SAMUEL W. ODELL
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1913, by T Y. C C
Published April, 1913
THE PRINCESS ATHURA A Romance of Iran
CHAPTER I
THE GREAT KING’S LAST
BATTLE
IT was morning on the plains of Asia. Long-legged herons stood in the shallows of the yellow Jaxartes, bathing their feet in its sluggish flood and warming their bodies in the first rays of the sun. They were silently and uneasily watching a host of armed men drawn out in long battle-lines across the lowlands bordering the southern margin of the stream.
Where the armed host stood was a sandy plain, about two miles wide. Beyond this was a low range of sand-hills, which trended away to the southeast, enlarging the plain as they receded from the river. Cutting through hills and plain to join the river-bed was a dry watercourse, where, in winters only, a torrent flowed. In it were some stunted trees and scattered thickets of shrubs. To the north of the river was a vast plain on which the dry, yellow grass had been withered by summer sun and wind. Far in the east appeared dimly through a blue haze the summits of high mountains. Westward the river had yet to flow half its length to the Oxian swamps. Here it was wide and shallow and its banks were low and marshy
The rays of the sun sparkled on the brazen breastplates and shining blades of battle-axes, on the spear-points and gilded helmets, of two hundred thousand men, who here awaited the approach of a far more numerous host coming down from the east along the river towards them. The light rested softly upon the stern, bearded faces of veterans of many wars and the softer cheeks of young men on this, their first campaign. They were men of Iran for the most part, though some were Assyrians, Babylonians, Arabs, Hebrews, or Greeks from the Ionian cities. They were followers of Cyrus, the King of Kings, the Great King, ever victorious Lord of the World.
Those about to attack them were Touranian horsemen, known to ancient history as Scythians, Massagetæ, Sacæ, and to modern history as Tartars, Turks, or Kalmuks. The hearts of the soldiers of Cyrus were glad. For the long, dusty marches in pursuit of an ever retreating enemy would now end in a riot of blood and slaughter, and perhaps they might then set their faces homeward. No doubt of victory entered their minds. They were led by Cyrus, the invincible. It mattered not if the enemy outnumbered them three to one, as their scouts had reported. There would be more killing and a greater victory
Racial hatred, reaching back beyond history and tradition to the distant age when the first family of man threw off branches to different parts of the earth and the branches immediately claimed the pleasant places and fought each other for them, animated both parties to the coming conflict. The folklore of the early Aryans is largely composed of tales concerning heroes who had saved their people from the ravages of those fierce men of the North, the Touranians. Century after century the wandering hordes of the great northern plains hovered, like threatening clouds, along the boundaries of Iran, looking across the mountains from their own arid and wind-swept abodes to the rich and pleasant hills and valleys of the South. The children of those tribes, in the days of Tamerlane and Mohammed, broke over all barriers, crushed Eastern civilization, and put back the clock of progress a thousand years.
Once even before the time of Cyrus, the wild Touranians had passed over the mountains and pushed through into Mesopotamia, bearing woe to the nations. Then, one day, their captains sat down to a banquet prepared by the conquered ones and instead of meats were fed with sword-blows and dagger-thrusts. Having thus been deprived of leaders, the Touranian conquerors had suffered disaster; and all had been either killed, enslaved, or driven back across the mountains. Stories of that invasion were thereafter told at every fireside of the Bactrians, Medes, Persians, and their kindred tribes; and the mothers in Iran frightened their children into obedience by threatening to hand them over to the dreaded monsters of Touran.
Having conquered all civilized Asia, Cyrus had thought to rest in his palaces at Hamadan, or Susa, Babylon, or Pasargadæ; but there had come word from ancient Balk, or Bactra, the mother city of all Aryans, warning him that the Touranians were gathering for war in numbers so immense that help must be sent. The great war-king had at once responded. With half a million men he had marched into Bactra, to the aid of King Hystaspis, who, under him, ruled there, and, passing through the mountains on its northern border, he had driven back the leading troops of the enemy. The Touranians had retreated, seeking to draw him into the great plains, where they hoped that they might crush him with overwhelming numbers. He had followed carefully, building forts as he advanced, that his supplyline might be safe, and leaving strong detachments to guard them. With less than half his army, though its best part, he had arrived at the great river, Jaxartes, and had waited there for the enemy to assemble and attack him. Now they were coming and he was ready. Cyrus had chosen the battle-ground. He had marched out of his camp, situated a mile or so down the river, and had taken position where the narrow plain enabled him to mass his forces, with the sand-hills to protect his right, the river his left, and the dry watercourse his front. The enemy, coming down towards him, would be compressed into an ever narrowing field where their immense superiority in numbers would not give them undue advantage. Knowing that the Touranians were all mounted and were accustomed to charge in mass at headlong speed, he hoped to draw them into the great ditch at his front in such confusion that the impetus of their assault would be broken. For this purpose he threw out to the east of the ditch about one thousand paces a curtain of light cavalry, which had orders to draw an assault, retreat rapidly before it, and take refuge behind the infantry. The position of the infantry was a line about halfway down the western slope of the water-course, and it would not be perceived by the pursuers until they should arrive at the upper margin of the eastern slope. Keeping five thousand of his heavy cavalry, known as the Imperial Guard, in reserve on the high ground at his extreme left near the river, he had stationed the remainder, about fifteen thousand strong, behind the crests of the sand-hills at his extreme right; and it would be their duty
as soon as the Touranians should join battle, to make a détour to the right, descend from the hills upon their rear, and there attack. Thus, by the grace of Ahura-Mazda, Cyrus hoped, the enemy would be placed between his veteran infantry and his invincible cavalry, and so be ground to pieces.
Near the margin of the river in front of the army was a group of men whose dress and demeanor denoted them leaders. One of these, to whom the others gave worshipful attention, was mounted on a noble Nisæan stallion. He was watching the distant mass of enemies with searching attention. He seemed indeed a king and worthy to be a King of Kings. Historians and storytellers have surrounded him with heroic luster. His countenance was eagle-like. His forehead was high, his nose sharp and slightly bridged, and his chin firm. The piercing glance of his black eyes never failed to read men nor to impress them with the necessity of instant obedience to orders. His demeanor was humorous and kind toward friends but fierce and terrible to evil-doers or to an enemy. Despite his sixty years, forty of which had been spent in war, his body was erect and soldierly. A helmet, glittering with gold, was on his head, and from beneath it his straight gray hair fell to the collar of his cloak. A white, silky beard covered the lower portion of his face and lay upon the silver breastscales of the flexible coat-of-mail which covered his body and hips. Brazen greaves, fastened to soft leathern breeches, protected his limbs. His only weapon was a short sword, pendent from a belt around his waist. The trappings of his horse were rich. Its chest and neck were also protected by link mail.
In the group of officers surrounding the Great King, there were two of no less royal birth than he. One was Hystaspis, King of Iran, his cousin, one of the Achæmenides, the family that had ruled in Iran for ages. Cyrus had been King of Fars, or Persia, before he became King of Kings. Hystaspis had ruled in Bactra, the ancient seat of the Aryan race. Astyages was king of Medea and grandfather of Cyrus, whose mother was a Medean princess. He claimed suzerainty over all Iran. Cyrus had conquered his grandfather in war and, having dethroned him, had stepped up into the exalted position of King of Kings. He had then placed Persia under control of Hystaspis, who
loyally supported him and acknowledged him as the overlord of all Iran. Cyrus was a warrior. Hystaspis was a student, a lover of peace and a mystic, though he ruled his people well as a statesman and showed qualities of a great warrior when necessity demanded. In his youthful days he had known the famous Zoroaster, the seer of Iran, who had reduced to writing the ancient songs and the ritual of religious worship of his race and had preached new life into its creed. Hystaspis was milder, more benevolent, and less alight with energy than Cyrus.
Prince Darius Hystaspis, son of the King of Iran, was the other royal person in the group. He had dismounted from his war-horse and, with folded arms, was standing at its head, also watching the enemy. Six feet in height and well-proportioned, youthful and gallant, he was an ideal soldier. A helmet of gold and silver leaves covered his black, short-cropped hair save at the temples. A coat of leaf-mail protected his chest and his limbs halfway to the knee and was confined at his waist by a broad leather belt studded with gems set in golden buttons. A bronze plate further protected his breast, and greaves of the same metal were fastened to his leather riding-breeches as a protection to his legs. High-laced leather shoes encased his feet. A short sword hung at his belt, and a short-handled battle-ax swung from the saddle on his horse. A soldier from boyhood and already a veteran, having served in Cyrus’ last campaign against Babylon, yet he was, like his father, a student, and had learned wisdom of the greatest seer of that age, Belteshazzer, the Hebrew. His shaven cheeks were fair and glowing with the health of right living. His eyes were blue and clear and were set deeply beneath dark eyebrows and a lofty forehead. He was the idol of all Aryans, and, next to Cyrus, the hero of the army. He was commander of the Imperial Guard, and to him had been entrusted the duty of leading the Guard in the flank movement by which Cyrus hoped to crush the enemy.
Otanes, a giant in size, the noblest of Iran’s seven great nobles, was another of the group. He was shield-bearer to Cyrus and commander of his chosen body-guard. There was also Hydarnes, another of the seven nobles, a short, heavy man whose long, upturned mustache and beetling eyebrows were his most prominent features. He was
commander of the Persian infantry Vomisces, one of the seven nobles and commander of the allied infantry, the Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew levies, and Gobryas, another one of the seven, a young man, blood-brother and closest friend of Prince Darius, were in the group. There was also Prexaspes, a Medean noble, commander of the light-armed cavalry, a brave, ambitious man, richly dressed in jeweled armor and having his hair and whiskers curled and perfumed. He was a cynical, unscrupulous, and pleasure-loving man, but energetic, resourceful, and brave. Of him we shall hear much in this story A number of orderlies waited near by to receive and transmit the Great King’s commands.
The herons in the Jaxartes have become restless but have not yet flown. While they wait and while Cyrus is watching the enemy, we may study the private soldiers to whose blows he will owe his victory, if he wins. They were not of the same quality as those effeminate men who, in later years, were unable to withstand the Greeks under the great Alexander. This was true at least of the Aryans who constituted the bulk of the army.
Passing along the front of the light-armed cavalry, we observe the dusky Arab, with his curved scimiter and long javelin, his bow and arrows. He is clothed in turban, short tunic, loose cloak, brazen breastplate, and leathern breeches. He is mounted on the beautiful, swift horse of the desert which he loves as his own brother. Here also we see famous bowmen from Edom and Canaan, slingers from the Mediterranean isles, and Syrians from Mesopotamia, severally arrayed in their national costumes. When we pass along the lines of infantry, we note a distinctive army dress. Each soldier wears on his head a high, round felt cap; on his body, a stout, leathern, tight-fitting jacket, or tunic, with skirt extending halfway to the knee, and on his legs linen trousers, confined at the ankles by the tops of the soft leathern shoes with which his feet are shod. A bronze breastplate covers his chest, and bars of the same metal are on his arms and shoulders. The front rank, as it stands in position, is protected by wicker shields, covered with heavy leather, braced with metal bands. These shields are about seven feet long and are placed upright with the pointed lower ends thrust into the earth. Behind them, as a wall,
the spearmen are comparatively safe from the enemy’s javelins and arrows. If the fight comes to close quarters, the shields may be easily thrown down; then for his further protection, the soldier must rely on a small, round targe held in place by straps on his left forearm.
Each heavy-armed infantryman in the six front ranks carries a heavy spear about seven feet long and a short sword somewhat like a long dagger. A short-handled battle-ax with sharp, shearing blade and pointed beak is hung by a strap over his shoulder. The soldiers in the rear ranks, instead of the heavy spear and battle-ax, carry bundles of light javelins, for casting at short range, and long bows with sheaths of arrows, for fighting at long range. Protected by the wicker wall and the hedge of spears in the fore, they will meet the assault with showers of darts cast over the front ranks or, advancing behind the charging spearmen, will gall the enemy thus before the shock of the hand-to-hand fight comes.
At intervals along the lines stand the captains of hundreds and commanders of thousands, distinguished from private soldiers only by richer armor and plumes of horse-hair on their caps.
We next note the soldiers of the Imperial Guard. They are all large men, none of them over forty years of age, every one of noble birth, and all belong to the military class of Iran. They know but one calling, that of arms. All had entered military service at the age of sixteen, had been enrolled in the Guards at the age of twenty, and will remain there until they shall reach their fortieth year, at which time they will either be made civil officers or promoted and placed in command of companies and divisions of the imperial armies. Their armor consists of brazen helmets for their heads, chain-mail for their bodies, and brazen greaves for their legs and arms. A round shield, held on the left forearm in battle, will give further protection. A long, sharp javelin, a sword, and a battle-ax are their weapons. Their horses are protected by chain-mail on neck, forehead, and breast.
Cyrus, having satisfied himself that the Touranians were really coming to battle, turned to his generals and said: “At last the Touranians have decided to fight! We must not only repel this attack
but must utterly destroy them, so that hereafter the terror of our name shall command peace! Take no prisoners! This day we shall avenge the wrongs of Iran in the death of its ancient enemies! Should it happen that I be slain in this battle, my cousin, the King of Iran, will command. In case he also should fall, his son, our beloved Prince, will command.”
His piercing black eyes rested a moment upon the Prince’s countenance. The latter flushed with pleasure at the honor done him, and bowed in acknowledgment. The King continued: “The King of Iran will remain at my side. I shall need his advice. There will be no change in the plans announced last evening. With the help of AhuraMazda, this day we will fill that torrent-bed with Touranian dead! You, Prince of Iran, have the most important duty. Ride down upon their rear as soon as you see their front ranks engaged with our infantry. Officers, go to your places! Let the skirmishers advance farther into the plain!”
The group scattered, each officer riding to his place. Cyrus and the King of Iran retired across the torrent-bed to the eminence at the rear of the left wing of the army The Prince of Iran mounted and hurried to his command. Trumpets sounded. The light cavalry of the skirmish line moved briskly out upon the plain. The Touranians came on, a vast throng with but little semblance of order. Their leaders rode in advance at intervals, and the front ranks only preserved an irregular alignment. The two opposing forces slowly drew near each other. The shaggy coats made of hairy skins, the tall, peaked caps, and the fierce, dark faces of the Touranians soon became plainly visible to their opponents. The former were surprised at the apparent weakness of the latter and began to utter shouts of derision and defiance. These shouts presently blended into a great roar as the soldiers demanded of their leaders the right to charge.
But the Touranian leaders were wary. They thought that but a fraction of the Persian army was here, possibly an advance guard sent out to delay their progress. They were puzzled and hesitated. But when the enemy halted at long bowshot distance and sent a flight of arrows into their crowded battalions, they lost control of their men. Screams of agony arose, and a roar of angry shouts. Another
flight of arrows and a third smote the Touranians. Their own bowmen sought to reply, but their bows were weak and their arrows fell short. Then came a vast forward movement of the mass. Leaders were swallowed up in the midst of galloping squadrons. The skirmishers of Iran retreated, but turned in their saddles and shot backwards with fatal effect. Eager to overtake the flying archers, the Touranians threw caution to the winds and urged their horses to full speed. The earth shook with the beat of a million hoofs, and the air was rent by the terrific volume of savage war-cries. No line of infantry ever formed could have withstood the impetus of that charge if unprotected by ditch or wall.
The herons, affrighted, spread their broad wings, sprang out of the yellow waters of the Jaxartes, and hastily flapped away. The conflict had begun.
After pausing at the margin of the torrent-bed to send one last flight of arrows into their pursuers, the skirmishers of Cyrus quickly descended into and crossed it, passed through the ranks of the infantry, which opened to permit their passage, and formed in line on the ridge beyond. The Touranian leaders were surprised when the fugitives disappeared from their view in the chasm as if the earth had swallowed them up, and, guessing the reason, frantically screamed orders for their men to halt. But the noise was so great that the orders were unheard. The shaggy horses of the leading ranks came at full speed to the margin of the torrent-bed and, unable to halt, plunged headlong down into it. Many horses and riders went down and were ridden over, crushed and mangled. Some retained their footing and struggled across the bottom of the ditch and up the opposite slope to assault the Aryan infantry But the momentum of their rush was lost. The gleaming hedge of spears, protruding from behind the wicker shields, was terrible to horse and rider. The Touranians struck at the spear-points with their curved scimiters and endeavored to force ways between them. Masses of horsemen poured into the great ditch and struggled forward. Pushed on from behind, those in front could not avoid contact with the darting spears, which, in the hands of sinewy and practiced veterans, gashed horse and rider and threw them down in dying, struggling heaps.
The rear ranks of Cyrus’ army came into action. They hurled clouds of javelins and arrows over the heads of the men in front upon the confused mass of assailants. The slaughter was horrible. But the Touranians in the front could not retreat had they desired. Those in front were crowded on, over dead and dying, upon the darting spears and against the wicker shields, overthrowing the shields and pushing back the Aryan infantry by sheer weight. Especially at the extreme left, where Cyrus was watching the struggle, did this backward movement of his lines take place. Here the water-course was wider and shallower than elsewhere and the advance was not so difficult. Here and there the Touranians succeeded in getting between the Aryan spears and with fierce strokes opened ways into the midst of the infantry. The latter, dropping their spears, fought with battle-ax and sword. The contest became a mad swirl of screaming, plunging horses, shouting men, gleaming swords, and slashing axes. Heads were crushed, limbs lopped off, bodies hurled to earth, horses brained and hamstrung. Ever the stout veterans of Cyrus faced their enemy, unterrified, sweating, grunting, and cursing, as they stabbed and hewed; but they were forced back step by step.
Cyrus watched the struggle with anxiety. There seemed no end to the on-pressing masses of the enemy. More and yet more poured down into the vale of death and pushed across to the assault. Javelins and arrows were becoming exhausted. The infantrymen were fighting furiously, but were beginning to show weariness. Casting his eyes often to the distant hills, he presently noted with satisfaction that the Prince of Iran and his guards were passing down into the plain at the rear of the enemy’s left. He then ordered the light-armed cavalry to the assistance of the infantry at the center and right, and placing himself at the head of that division of the Imperial Guard held in reserve, he led it into the affray just as the infantry, pressed back by sheer weight of numbers, seemed about to be overwhelmed. The heavy horsemen of the Guard rode forward smartly and plunged into the battle. Prodigies of valor were performed. The infantrymen, seeing their King in their midst swinging his battle-ax with deadly effect, renewed their efforts. Huge Otanes with mighty strokes and protecting shield endeavored to ward off from Cyrus all blows aimed at him. King Hystaspis of Iran rode along
