Episode 109: Cornerstones

Wrapping Up Late Antiquity and Moving on to Early Islamic History

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 109: Cornerstones. In this program, we will bring our season on Late Antiquity to its close, introduce our new season on early Islamic history, and talk a bit about where we’ve been in the Literature and History podcast, so far. I want to begin this show with a story. This story is about a single block of stone.

The city of Orchomenus is in Boeotia, in Greece. Orchomenus is about 50 miles northwest of Athens, as the crow flies, and it sits at the west end of a fertile lowland, spotted with lakes and ringed with mountains. The town of Orchomenus is a minor tourist destination, home to an ancient Mycenaean acropolis on a promontory to the west. Close to the town center, there is a complex of ruins that includes a circular, vaulted Mycenaean period tomb, or tholos. This beehive tomb is famous within circles interested in Bronze Age Greek culture, but, in terms of famous tourist spots in Greece, certainly not in the same league as the Parthenon or Delphi. Usually dated to about 1250 BCE, the circular tomb sits surprisingly well preserved among younger ruins from the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods, its massive ashlar blocks still tightly pressed together, three thousand years being constructed.

Across the street from this old Mycenaean tomb, often called the Tomb of Minyas, there is a very old Christian church, built in the 800s CE. It’s called the Byzantine church of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, and though it’s 2,000 years younger than the Bronze Age tholos just a stone’s throw away down the street, the Orchomenos church is still an ancient building. Around the back of this old church, standing on leafy footpaths and listening to nuthatches and cicadas, you can see an inscription that states that the building was commissioned by an official working under the Byzantine emperor Basil I, some time between 867 and 886 CE. And you can see something else on the back of this old church. The lower blocks of this ancient Christian church were not quarried by Christians. The substructure, and the foundation of this 1,200-year-old church is built out of limestone blocks taken from the 3,200-year-old ruins nearby. One of these blocks in particular, a cornerstone on the northeastern side of the building, has Byzantine Greek on one side, and on the other, a Bronze Age Mycenaean floral motif, a single piece of limestone that shows thousands of years of bygone Mediterranean history, and a supreme emblem of how the medieval Christian world was built from the borrowed remnants, both material and ideological, of very ancient pagan civilizations.

This stone block, sitting unassumingly at about eye level in the back corner of this little church in a little town in the Greek countryside, neatly bookends almost everything we’ve covered in Literature and History. Someone quarried it in the thirteenth century BCE, the century of Homeric heroes, the Bronze Age collapse, and the Merneptah Stele. And someone hoisted it up in the late 800s, when the Abrahamic religions had reached their full ascendancy over much of the world. When the rock was first hewn into a square around 1250 BCE, north Africa and western Eurasia worshipped pantheons of deities and, and judging from the Bronze Age texts that survive, had a fatalistic sense of the cosmos as a place of giant, impersonal forces, typified by various gods of thunder, love, war, the sea, and so on. When the rock was raised to be the cornerstone of the church around 870 CE, these same regions believed mostly in one of three similar Abrahamic deities, wise, patriarchal figures who governed the cosmos, and offered rewards to those who honored the doctrines of their respective denominations.

In Literature and History, so far, we’ve seen how this rock was raised – how the Bronze Age gave rise to ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman civilization, then how classical antiquity evolved into Early Christianity, and then Late Antiquity, and then the early Middle Ages. There’s been a lot that we’ve left out. But through our 200 hours of episodes in the main sequence alone, we now have an overall grasp of the cultural history of the Mediterranean Sea, and its surrounding continents, leading up to the eighth century of the current era. We’re going to come back to this piece of stone soon – this Janus-faced block that sits in a small Greek churchyard where finches twitter up under the tiled eaves. What I want to do now, as this has been a long sequence of episodes that’s taken me quite a while to get through, is to review what we’ve learned about Late Antiquity, as a whole. [music]

Late Antiquity in Hindsight

We began this 24-program sequence back in Episode 86, with our general introduction to Late Antiquity. And we wrapped up the season last time in Episode 108, with Isidore of Seville, the Catholic polymath from late Visigothic Spain whose works would later be so important to the Middle Ages. As Late Antiquity is often said to commence with the ascendancy of the Roman emperor Diocletian in 286 CE, and Isidore of Seville passed away in 636, that means we have covered 350 years of cultural history over the course of this long season. We learned about the Greco-Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata and we read the longest surviving novel from antiquity, Heliodorus’ Aethiopica. We learned about the birth of the papacy and the office of the bishop, read Christianity’s earliest martyr stories, learned about the desert fathers and read the sensationally popular hagiographies, the Life of Antony and the Life of Saint Martin. We read the late Latin poetry of Ausonius and Rutilius Namatianus, and the last surviving epic from antiquity, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. We went through the works of Saint Jerome and spent ten hours on those of Saint Augustine, and then explored Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and the Babylonian Talmud. Moving, at the end of the season, into western Europe, we studied the Merovingian period historical works of Gregory of Tours, the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus, and the works of Isidore of Seville. It was a sprawling sequence of episodes, and I’m proud to have had you along.

This season of the podcast probably hasn’t earned me very many new listeners. Excepting Augustine’s Confessions, we didn’t deal with a single book that has the status of a household name. As we followed the details of Dionysus’ weird adventures in the Dionysiaca, and looked over the minor works of Ausonius and Venantius Fortunatus, we delved into some texts that are legitimately fairly obscure. Late Antiquity is not classical enough for Classics, nor medieval enough for Medievalists. Its science isn’t scientific enough for the Enlightenment, nor superstitious enough for the Middle Ages. Late Antiquity is an in-between time, a time with many moving parts and no clear center, and after the fourth century, a pinball machine of new barbarian groups and sects of Christianity zinging around roughshod over the deeply rooted institutions of Classical Antiquity. But during this in-between time, a lot of the world as we know it came to be. And while we’ve learned a lot over these past 24 episodes, there are a few overarching lessons that are worth reviewing now.

We came to understand the history of the early church in this sequence of programs. We learned that religion is the peanut butter of exegesis and the jelly of tradition spread over the bread of scripture, and although we encounter it as a sandwich, we need to remember that it comes from some very different parts. We learned that early Christianity was once manifold and diverse, and that slowly, through theological polemics often rooted in cultural clan wars and even the occasional vendettas of individual churchmen, dominant religious institutions hardened in Rome and Constantinople. We learned that in the systems collapse of Rome’s fall, the empire’s old administrative districts and leaders evolved into bishoprics, dukedoms, kingdoms. We learned that some of this great transition was dreadful to endure, but that at other junctures, it involved liberation and greater stability than before. The English poet and playwright Algernon Charles Swinburne, in 1866, reluctantly acknowledged Christianity’s triumph over the classical world, writing, in a famous line addressed to Jesus himself, “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray from thy breath.”¹ It’s a grim assessment of Christianity’s ultimate victory that doesn’t do justice to the way that the religion buttressed a basic social order during the tough times after Rome fell. The church wasn’t perfect. Its bishoprics were often nepotistic machines that provided old Roman aristocratic families with novel positions of power. But the church added stability to large regions, kept baseline literacy moving along, put tens of thousands of people to work and fed many more, and all of that was something, at least.

When we started this season on Late Antiquity, I told you a bit about how the period has historically been understood, leading up to the past half century of scholarship. We learned that traditionally, Late Antiquity has been thought of as a period of clashes between diametrically opposed groups. First, it has been understood as a period during which barbarians and Romans vied for control of the central and western Mediterranean. Second, Late Antiquity has been understood as a period during which Christians and pagans slugged it out until Christianity emerged as the sovereign religion of the Mediterranean and Europe. These two dichotomies – Romans vs. barbarians, and Christians vs. pagans, still have some usefulness to them, but as we’ve seen over the past fifty hours or so, they take a mottled gray period of history and try to turn it black and white.

Romans and Barbarians

Let’s start with the first of these two legendary clashes – the great fisticuffs between Romans and barbarians. During the late 300s and 400s CE, the western Roman empire petered out due to population migrations. Migrating populations came south and west through what is today Poland, Ukraine, and Romania. In the late 300s, they set up shop throughout the Balkans and Bulgaria. Other populations in what’s today Germany, Czechia and Austria, as the 300s gave way to the 400s, saw that Roman borders were less and less well guarded, and came over the Rhine and into Gaul, just as their counterparts from further east took an overland route down into Italy. By 430, barbarian groups had wrapped counterclockwise around the Balearic Sea and Iberian Peninsula, and an invasion of North Africa had begun. These migratory activities, regardless of all of the moralizing and commenting historians have done on the subject, were what ended Rome’s tenure on the Italian peninsula. Why did Rome fall? Population migrations. Wasn’t it because of moral wickedness and civilizational decadence and a gradual softening of the once hardy military due to new religions and an overall cultural climate of submission to totalitarianism that replaced a robust culture of republican participation in civic life? Nope. Population migrations.

The first great lesson that I hope we can take away from this season is about those migrating populations – those barbarians. Any one of us who has immigrated somewhere with children, and anyone who has known known children growing up in a country different than their parents’ country, and I imagine that’s most of us, can understand that human beings are culturally fluid. A Japanese kid growing up in the United States is going to be kind of United-Statesy, an American kid growing up in Japan is going to be kind of Japan-ish, and of course, Visigothic kids growing up in Moesia, and Vandal kids growing up in Belgica, were going to be a bit Roman. These transitions happen fast. In Late Antique Roman provinces like Dalmatia, Germania, Pannonia, and Thracia, semiautonomous barbarian populations pretty quickly absorbed Roman cultural influences. Second and third generation citizens of these regions, and sometimes first generations, learned to operate in a Roman world that was always already full of diverse populations, distinguishing themselves in posts all the way up and down the social ladder. When prejudices between ethnic groups within Roman borders rose up, or, when sectarian tensions arose between Nicene Christians and Arians, or when the latest strongman general made a bid for the throne, then well-armed groups with especially, or entirely barbarian backgrounds were readymade power blocs capable of military action. But many of these conflicts can be understood as different subgroups of Rome’s internal population vying for resources, rather than invasions by outsiders, hence the more generic term “population migrations” rather than the more traditional “barbarian invasions.”

None of this is to say that there weren’t through-and-through Vandals, up in the woods of what’s today Germany, worshipping Vandal gods, not knowing a word of Latin, and not caring about Romans other than that they were the dudes on the other side of the Rhine with stuff to steal. Nor is it to say that there weren’t oodles of pureblooded Romans in the empire’s privileged centers, like Rutilius Namatianus, revering the empire’s ancient past. Between these two extremes, however, there was everyone else, an upper crust that tended to trace ethnic roots to the southern side of the limes germanicus, but a greater population that hailed from all over the place, and proved capable of Romanizing within half a generation when given the opportunity. There were clashes, then, between Romans and barbarians, but these two groups were so imbricated with one another that by the year 400 and after, the Alarics, Stilichos, Odoacers, and Theodorics of the period were more Roman than they were anything else.

Early Christian Historiography

We’ve talked enough about the end of the western empire in our show enough, and I don’t think the subject requires much more airtime. So let’s move onto the second dichotomy – the subject of Christians and pagans. We often hear the adage that history is written by winners, and applying that maxim to Late Antiquity, it’s safe to say that history was written by Christian winners. Having so much of the period’s history written by a single group means that our picture of Late Antiquity has long been distorted. Such distortions are not unique to Christian historians, of course – as we learned in this same season, Greek and Roman historians wrote some very silly and tendentious stuff, just as, as we’ll soon see, some early Islamic historians did during the ninth and tenth centuries. When an ideologically motivated group exercises sovereignty over a period’s history, a few different things happen. First, some events get captured just fine. Second, other events get distorted. And third, still other events get ignored. Let’s start by considering what Christian historians like Eusebius, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, and Agathais get right about Late Antiquity.

These writers are, naturally, interested in events related to contemporary Christianity. The spread of bishoprics and dioceses are within their wheelhouse, as are the distributions of alms within various districts, the logistical management of churches, and the manifold deacons, nuns, priests, monks, and other personnel central to the religion’s institutional footprints in various regions. We can trust that they generally set down logistical records of Christian councils and synods with accuracy, and that in describing major regional events, like the Vandal invasion of North Africa in 429, the Franco-Visigothic war in the 490s, and the Justinian Plague of the 540s, Late Antiquity’s Christian historians have a reasonable degree of objectivity. All of this – the operations of Nicene Christianity on the ground, and the major events of several centuries – is valuable stuff, and Late Antiquity’s Christian historians can be counted on for a solid substratum of information on the period.

Where these historians are most liable to distort the facts, to move us onto the next subject, is on subjects having to do with Christian sectarianism. From the second century onward, Late Antiquity’s Christian historians wrote about Christians with different ideas than theirs as heretics, apostates, betrayers, maniacs, perverts, and predators. Read Jerome on Jovinian, or Augustine on Pelagius, and you will see red hot fury – a level of vitriol that seems incommensurate with the minor theological differences that prompt it. This vitriol makes sense. The power and income of the Proto-Orthodox and Nicene clergies required delegitimizing Christianity’s other sectarian energies. Put much less cynically, Jerome and Augustine and others believed in Nicene Christianity as it had come to be in the late 300s, and in denouncing their rivals, they were doing what they thought was right. However, the venomousness with which Late Antique Christian theologians and historians wrote about Christian sectarianism had profound downstream consequences.

The notion that there were Christians during Late Antiquity, and then that there were pagans during Late Antiquity, hangs on the incorrect assumption that Christians were just one thing. The Visigoths and the Vandals were Christians, too, though they were Arians, and these theological differences exacerbated other rifts in late Roman society, and had vast military and territorial repercussions. And all over the Mediterranean, there were hundreds of different Christian movements, most of them lost to history, with the ones that we know about only available through the ireful distortions of the period’s Christian historians. Christian historians of Late Antiquity, then, energetically misrepresent a lot of the creedal debates happening within Christianity itself, fulminating against ideological rivals, slandering theological opponents, and even, in the pages of historians like Gregory of Tours, writing tacky little fantasy stories in which they themselves argue adversaries into the ground.

So far, we’ve considered how Late Antique Christian historians are fairly impartial on subjects like ecclesiastical recordkeeping, and major geopolitical events. And we’ve considered how the same historians are the most fervently partisan when discussing Christian factions other than theirs. Besides presenting facts objectively, and distorting facts, there’s another thing that historians can do, and that is ignoring facts. When we went through the first half of Augustine’s City of God, we watched him disparage the gods and goddesses of Roman tradition. He made fun of the sheer number of Roman deities whose names were on record by the 410s CE – a god of waves hitting the shore, a god of waves receding from the shore, a god to help a groom lead a bride home, a goddess to help the groom pierce the bride’s hymen, and the point, of course, is that Romans had an absurd number of Gods in their theological annals. What Augustine ignored, however, was that in 410 CE, when he was writing all of this, most Roman religions looked like Christianity – there were cultic groups, esoteric rites based on personal salvation, and if not actual monotheism, at least ascendant savior deities. Augustine had been a part of one of these religions. Manichaeism, like Isiac religion, Dionysian cult religion, the cult of Cybele, and the cult of Mithras, and others had as its main aim the salvation and ennoblement of the individual, just as Christianity did.

I feel like I’ve mentioned these popular cults a lot in Literature and History, and I’m fine with that. Last year I went to Eleusis, in Greece, for the first time. Eleusis was the most important pilgrimage site in the ancient Roman world for centuries. Next to the Dome of the Rock, and the Pyramid of Saqqara, I would personally consider the Eleusis complex the most historically consequential religious site in the Mediterranean. Yet when I was there, I had the place mostly to myself, and stood in the Anaktoron, or holiest of holies, alone, wondering where in the hell everyone else was. And the answer to that question, I think, takes us back to Late Antiquity’s Christian historians, and the disingenuous way they wrote about pagan religion. When we read the works of the church fathers, pagan religion is either wicked and corrosive, or it’s a clown car – a highlight reel cherry picked from Roman poetry rather than the actual sacred rites and rituals contemporary to Roman life during the centuries of the empire. Eusebius never tells us that the hopeful adherents of Isis sought exaltation in the afterlife, nor that Mithraeums were places where worshippers took stock of their ethical behavior and shared meals together, nor that thousands of people went to Eleusis every year to fast and pray and hear a sacred story of seasonal renewal. Late Antique Christian historians are often the best we’re going to get at having a written record, but the fury of their partisanship fogged the glass every time they touched on pagans, or denominational differences, and as a result, up until the past generation or so, we have been under a very profound misconception. This misconception, once again, has been that there were Christians and pagans, when in reality, there were different kinds of Christians, and different kinds of pagans, and many of the pagans were doing Christian-y stuff, and pretty much everyone was practicing some sort of salvific religion that gave them hope during tough times, just as so many of us still are today. [music]

Late Antiquity: a More Integrated Epoch than Generally Understood

A whole lot of what we read during this season of the podcast taught us this one, rather inspiring lesson about the Late Antique past – that Christians and pagans, beyond the polemic texts of church fathers, were not so antagonistic toward one another, after all. Here we see Lucian of Samosata making fun of Christians a bit, but also finding them a wholesome and harmless group. There, on the other side, we see Christian theologians like Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr, and the church fathers who came after them, Christian to the bone, but still fond of pagan philosophy and formed indelibly by their rhetorical training as Romans. Here we have the poet Ausonius, a gentle old pagan who eulogized nature and colleagues and friends, among the latter pagans as well as Christians. There we have Nonnus who wrote a giant and zany epic about Dionysus, but also a beautiful retelling of the Gospel of John. Here we have Augustine, who never converted to anything, because his philosophy was an unchanging ideology of horizontal dualism and Platonic transcendence, even though it went through several different rebrandings as he got older. There we have Boethius, both Christian and pagan, whose most famous book offers consolations from both. Here we have Isidore of Seville, who drank deeply from both pagan and Christian knowledge, and passed both on to posterity. And there, we have the Talmud, a hardheaded, practical book that reminds us that plenty of people during the period were neither Christian, nor pagan, but knew about both, and knew full well how to get along with both.

What I just summarized to you there was most of the past fifty hours of what you’ve heard in the podcast, a zigzagging bundle of books that, in spite of the best efforts of partisan Christian historians of the period, suggests that religion in Late Antiquity was a blob of multifarious interrelated activities and not a war between two clearly defined groups. This is not to minimize the pagan persecutions of Christians, nor the Christian persecutions of pagans, that transpired during the period. We read the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and explored literally every text having to do with Christian persecution leading up to the year 200. We learned how the monastic movement had its roots in the Decian persecution of 250, a persecution that led a group of Christian isolationists to flee into the open country southwest of Alexandria, Egypt. We learned about the brutality unleashed on Christians during the Diocletianic persecution, and later, the brutality unleashed on pagans by the Theodosian and Justinan law codes. It’s silly to adopt a starry-eyed revisionism and imagine Late Antiquity as a time of joyous conviciencia.

It’s just as silly, though, to ignore the thousands of pages of primary sources that we’ve gone through in this season, sources that teach us that between 300 and 650 CE, barbarians and Romans, and Christians and pagans, were all a big, intermingled population flowing down through the river of history together. The Christian historians of Late Antiquity needed to tell a different story, and so they wrote a tale of Christian believers, intrepid, isolated, unique, and deadlocked into mortal combat with others in a world seeming to rumble every day with an imminent apocalypse. But beyond the cloisters of the Christian clergy, among workaday Christians and their pagan friends and counterparts, Roman and barbarian, and Romebarian, if you will, among those not overly disposed to ideological xenophobia, we can imagine that although Late Antiquity was no picnic, its centuries wore on much like any other centuries through which our imperfect species has stumbled. We humans are perennially fond of prophecies about one ideology triumphing over all others, or one ethnic group doing the same. Fortunately, the empirical details of history, our daily lives, and the presence of others can serve as healthy correctives to these dangerous fantasies, just as they always have.

Late Antique bakers, then, still baked. Late Antique sailors still sailed, lumberjacks still cut wood, blacksmiths hammered metal, seamstresses sewed, drunks drank, fletchers fletched, hucksters hustled, plowmen ploughed, and quarrymen cut stone. And speaking of cutting stone, let’s return to that cornerstone on the northeastern side of that church in Orchomenus, Greece, with its half Byzantine Greek side, and its half Mycenaean side. That old block is a testament to life grinding onward through the centuries, surprisingly unchanged. But that very ancient stone, quarried in the 1200s BCE, and then carted over to the church in the 800s CE and hoisted up to reside in the wall of a Christian building, where it still does today – that stone still does typify a change. This change transpired over the 2,000 years that we’ve explored in the 200 hours of this podcast so far. And it’s a change that can be described reasonably quickly. When that big stone block was installed in the Mycenaean tomb on the west side of that street in Orchomenus in, say 1250 BCE, the Mediterranean world was a sparsely populated place, where religion was linked to geographical origin, and, excepting local oracles, and the priests of indigenous temples, groves and springs, professional clergies were few and far between. When that big stone block was moved across the street two thousand years later, in, say, 875 CE, several different clergies had become the most powerful and enduring organizations in western Eurasia and North Africa, and religious ideologies, from being the indigenous products of various places, had become transoceanic identity markers that have played important roles in human populations, ever since.

When I saw that stone block in person in that sun-dappled churchyard in Orchomenus, Greece on a winter afternoon not too long ago, I thought, “That’s what I’ve done in L&H. I’ve told that thing’s story. How they chopped it out of a mountain and put it into a tomb. How the Classical Greeks built stuff around it. How two thousand years later, it was moved into a different building to honor Jesus. And how not many people remember that that stone block came from just across the street.” It was a nice spot, there on a mild January day with finches chirping in knotholes and up under the church’s eaves. And I decided, as I stood there looking at it, that even though Literature and History was about to enter the medieval world of knights and damsels and yeomen, Late Antiquity – those unsung centuries between 200 and 700 – had taught me far more about the how the modern world came to be than any other sequence of the podcast thus far.

Over the past 50 hours of this season on Late Antiquity and many before this season, you’ve learned how and why that rock was moved and raised. Increasingly, in the final centuries BCE, we sought saviors, and happy afterlives. We began to imagine the divine not as a band of marauders skirmishing with one another, but instead as a single being, an unseen agent of order at work behind all of reality. We began to think of time itself as divisible into epochs – of coming ages of prosperity and present ages of blight. Christianity was a symptom, and not a cause of this general change. We can detect the optimistic fragrance of Christianity all over the Late Antique pagan world – in the pages of Plotinus, which posit a sacred oneness of all things; in the annals of stoicism, with its logos and its faith in an ascendant singular god; in the plots of ancient Greek romance novels, which end with the virtuous rewarded and happy marriages; in Nonnus’ character Zagreus, that lesser-known version of Dionysus so very much like Jesus Christ; and in the chapters of Boethius, whose work as a logician and taxonomist was anchored in that very old Mediterranean hope that the world has a divine order undergirding it. And we can observe the pessimistic and cynical parts of Christianity throughout pagan Late Antiquity, too. Rutilius Namatianus, an eyewitness of the last century of Roman power in Italy, speaks in apocalyptic terms; Lucian of Samosata, just like so many Christian church fathers, saw a lot of pagan philosophy and religion as crackpot garbage; Seneca, like the Christian biographers of Saint Antony and Saint Martin, thought that the world was a mess due to people’s ungoverned emotions and appetites; Marcus Aurelius, like Augustine, wrote penitentially about his own life, wishing that he could be better – and there you have it all, Christians and pagans, saying the same stuff, exploring the same problems, and hoping the same hopes.

If you’ve listened to these past 24 episodes, then, I would guess that you thoroughly understand the point here I’m underscoring at the end of this season – that Christianity was consanguineous with other ancient Mediterranean ideologies, and that it evolved in concert with them. I have probably emphasized this point more often than is strictly necessary, and yet, still, this is an especially good time to remember that the building blocks of Christianity came from pagan quarries. Because now, speaking of consanguineous ancient Mediterranean ideologies, it’s finally time for us to move on from Season 6 of our podcast to Season 7, and to talk about another cornerstone.

This second cornerstone is 1,550 miles southeast of the one in Orchomenus. And this second cornerstone has a similar history. It was also part of a polytheistic past, and it was also repurposed for a monotheist present. It also hailed from an ancient period whose history and culture have been partly distorted by subsequent ideologically motivated historians. But unlike the Mycenaean block in the Orchomenus church, this second cornerstone is exceedingly famous. Billions have seen it, or pictures of it. Millions have kissed and touched it. It is called al-Ḥajar al-Aswad, or the Black Stone, and it is built into the Kaaba, at the center of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, set into the eastern corner of Islam’s most holy structure, most famously, by the prophet Muhammad himself.

Mecca, 570 CE

The Prophet Muhammad was born in about 570, in the city of Mecca, about halfway down the back of the Arabian boot. Let’s talk about Mecca, and what was going on there toward the tail end of Late Antiquity, because we’ll spend a fair amount of time there over the course of the next season. Mecca, in the year 570, was the axis of a large of a commercial ecosystem, where north and southbound caravans went up and down between Yemen and the Levant, and where goods from the Axumite kingdom over in Ethiopia might join cargoes full of wares from the Sasanian Empire and Indian Ocean. During the century before Muhammad’s birth, a powerful kingdom called Himyar flourished in what is today Yemen, ruled by Jewish leadership, until it was annexed by the Persians when Muhammad was a boy. Growing up, Muhammad and his fellow Meccan townspeople understood themselves to be at the center of a tristate region. To the northwest of Arabia was the Byzantine Empire. To the northeast was the Sasanian empire. To the west, just over the Red Sea, was the Christian Axumite kingdom of Ethiopia. These kingdoms, over the centuries of Late Antiquity, had various partnerships with Arabia. Increasingly, over the 500s, the ever-feuding Byzantine and Sasanian empires commissioned client kings from the Arabian Peninsula, whose mercenary forces crossed swords for their imperial employers in Mesopotamia and Syria. But although the Romans knew the northwestern extremes of the peninsula, and the Persians the northeast, a lot of Arabia itself, as of the year 570, was open, tribal country, and not under any imperial control.

The Roman emperor Augustus, way back in 24 BCE, aware of the riches to be had along the west Arabian coast, sent a scouting expedition on a long overland march to Yemen, but Rome did not ultimately attempt a conquest of Arabia. Ancient Roman geographers described Arabia’s topography and climate as natura maligna, or “malign nature,” and while the major imperial powers of Late Antiquity maneuvered around the gigantic peninsula with an eye on one another, in the case of the Sasanian Empire, sometimes holding northern fringes of it, Arabia, in Late Antiquity, mostly belonged to the Arabs.

The peninsula, itself the size of western Europe, contained swathes of terrain impassible to early medieval armies. Bedouin tribespeople, astride camels and aware of the peninsula’s watering holes, could cross Arabia’s central highlands and pasture their flocks in the peninsula’s inland regions. Caravans, with professional gear, expertise, and protected by tribal covenants, could crisscross Arabia to make a profit. But outsiders like the Byzantines and Sasanians, and before them Romans and Parthians, had never tried to build cities there. Arabia might be the axis of all of Eurasia and Africa, and the upper Red Sea the precise place where Indian Ocean trade goods flowed into the Mediterranean world. But the bulk of it, to outsiders, at least, was generally avoided. It was hot, dry, rugged, and unnavigable; in places thick with moving dunes as tall as mountains, where arid wadis mocked the thirsty and sudden raiders preyed on locals and foreigners alike.

However, inasmuch as the peninsula had a climate prohibitive to settlement by Roman and Persian cultures, it was not an empty place, nor one devoid of culture. And in order to demonstrate what it looked like in the year 570 CE, again the year that the Prophet Muhammad was born, I want to ask you to do something with me. I want us to go for a walk. We did this, years ago, in an episode about ancient Greek theater, when we took a stroll from the Athenian agora to the theater of Dionysus. Now, we need to do it again. We’re going to take a three mile walk from Mount Hira, northeast of central Mecca, to the Kaaba, the cube shaped shrine that is the center of Mecca, and the Islamic world, which holds the famous Black Stone in its eastern corner. This three-mile walk will teach us a lot about Late Antique Arabia. It is the year of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth, and it’s time for us to get a look at the world into which he was born. So take a deep breath. And come along with me, once again, to a faraway place and time. [music]

A Walk from al-Hira to the Kaaba

It is February 2nd, 570 CE, or, in the Islamic calendar, the 9th of Dhu’l Hijja, 54 BH, or Before the Hijra. We are Arabs, and we are on a pilgrimage. We are standing in the morning sun just south of a rocky promontory called Mount Hira, a little ways outside of town. It’s somewhat chilly in the dry air of the Hejaz, or western coastal fringe of Arabia, this time of year. The word Hejaz, which you’ll be hearing a lot in the next few episodes, comes from the Arabic verb hajaza, or “separate,” and indeed the mountainous west coast of our peninsula is a barrier. It’s easy for newcomers to get lost in the dry peaks around us and to the east of us, and as you move upward from the coastal lowlands along the Red Sea, the burly shoulders of Arabia rise into highlands, traversed by Bedouins and inland tribes, but not very often by townspeople.

This is an important distinction in the Hejaz – again the rugged west coast of the Arabian Peninsula. There are settled folks, who often make their living from commerce, manufacturing, tourism, and investment. And then there are country folks, who are on the move more often, setting up seasonal camps where the grazing is good, and then moving on when it’s time. During the pilgrimage, everybody comes to Mecca. It’s the month of Dhu’l Hijja, and it’s time for the Hajj, which was around long before the Prophet Muhammad was born, and was a big part of his world as he grew up.

The air around us is clear, and the morning shadows fall long. The basin in which Mecca is located is the permanent home of about 25,000 people on this day of February 2nd, 570 CE – a megapolis by the standards of Arabia, and so even if we weren’t going to take part in the annual pilgrimage and trade fair that accompanies it, visiting the city would still offer us plenty of spectacles.² From outlying paddocks and pastures, to merchant stalls hawking water and provisions to travelers, to the clustered rooftops of the city’s center, Mecca, during the Hajj is home to all kinds of people, from vagrants to bigwigs, from desert herdsmen to uppity aristocrats. Earlier, when we hiked the short distance up Mount Hira to watch the winter sunrise, as we looked down into the flatland where the main thoroughfares converge, we could see the city’s many economic strata coming together.

We spent the night out in the hills last night to save money. The Hajj is a religious pilgrimage, but it’s also a commercial event. By attending it every year, folks like us can pay our respects to one of Arabia’s most revered shrines. At the same time, though we can also make some money trading, and see old friends and extended family. Speaking of such, the day isn’t getting any younger. Let’s tighten up our sandals, wrap ourselves up in some wool, head down into town, and see what’s shaking.

As we walk westward along a main road, the sun rises higher over the Hejaz mountains behind us, and the February morning starts becoming a bit more comfortable. Some overachievers who have evidently already conducted their business are headed back out of town, their camels’ carrying bags completely empty. They look excited. We say hello, and we ask them how business is down in the town center. It’s great! one of them says. Biggest Hajj in years. We ask them what they got.

Well, one of them says, let’s just say we showed up with one camel, and now we have five! That’s a hell of a score, we tell them. What did you bring on one camel that you got four more camels for? At this, the outbound traders are exuberant. Gemstones. They’d come down from the Levant with precious minerals from the Byzantine empire – one of them is a lapidary from the town of Khaybar. Some rich Meccan clan leader, they tell us, really wanted a fancy necklace for his daughter, and so this patrician had traded them four camels for one box of gems. Quick handshake, hardly even looked at the precious stones. The camels were solid, too – nice teeth, all young and spirited. We chat a little more with these outbound traders – their sense of triumph is contagious, and then bid them farewell and wish them safe travels back up north to the town of Khaybar.

Being from Khaybar, and engaged in specialty trade, they’re probably from one of the Jewish Arab tribes rooted up north, and in nearby Yathrib, down south in Yemen, and really all over the Hejaz. As we get a little closer to town, we pass more traders and pilgrims like us, offering salutations and making a bit of small talk. The cool air is more and more filled with the scents of a Late Antique town. From a dairy comes the smells of cheese curds and butter, and the smoky sweet odor of a tannery district drifts in from another direction. Two guys working under the awning of a smithy yawn and wave at us. They’re going to make a lot of money this week, if they haven’t already – everybody comes to town looking for bits, buckles, and blades during the Hajj. We pass through a district of potteries, where kiln fires feel pleasantly warm in the winter air, where fine plates and cups are glazed in one building, and utilitarian storage containers and roof tiles mass produced in another.

For year-around Meccans, like the dairymen, smiths, and potters whose businesses we’re passing through, the Hajj, though occasionally annoying for the volume of tourism that it brings, is overall a net benefit. The city’s manufacturing industry goes into overtime during the pilgrimage, but so, too, does the hospitality industry. In the year 570 as well as today, Mecca saw an unusual amount of tourism, and from sacred lodging houses, to food sellers, to merchants hawking fodder for livestock, to entertainers, to sacred sites bolstered by tourist donations, Mecca’s economy in Late Antiquity received great boosts from visitors. From Mount Hira, where we started, an hour’s walk brings us most of the way into the city center, at which point we get a good look at the town, who lives there, and how it works.

A well-dressed young man comes up to us and offers us some news – Al-Nabigha is reciting this year, he says – not a rawi (or bard) reciting the poetry of Al-Nabigha, but the great poet himself, riffing his original satires. We tell the promoter we’ll be sure to attend and hear this master poet of Arabic doing his thing. Another youngster approaches us and tells us that there will be an auction – a couple of glitzy Meccan homes are going to be changing hands. We make our way into a thicker and thicker thoroughfare, and the sun, having finished coming up, seems to be promising quite a nice day. And standing in the crowd, in this great congregation of the Late Antique Arabian world, we listen to the people around us.

There are plenty of Arabs, like us. They might come from a country tribe, or a city tribe; they might be well-off or just getting by, but here, at this metropolis of early Medieval Arabia, there are Arabs of all stamps, speaking many different dialects of Arabic, depending on where they’re from on our gigantic peninsula. Arabia, in the year 570 – especially its central inland highlands and deserts, is a foreboding place to outsiders. But Arabian people get around, and always have, on horseback, camelback, and on foot; in trade ventures, nomadic migrations, and solo wanderings that are the subjects of some of our most famous qasidas, or odes. As of 570, in fact, we’re getting around more than ever, because the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, way up north, have been hiring able-bodied fighters for generations to serve in the borderland between them. This has brought money and upward mobility to the northern reaches of Arabia. But it’s also brought culture, and new commercial connections. That poet Al-Nabigha who’s going to be performing tonight – he was a court poet up in the Lakhmid capital on the southern Euphrates. In other words, al-Nabigha worked for the Arab client kings of the Persian state, and so he is a man of the world as much as almost anyone in the year 570 CE.

So, the crowd around us, here in the center of Mecca on this February morning, contains plenty of Arabs, and while some of us are country folk gawking at the sights of the Meccan pilgrimage, others have traveled all over the place – the fringes of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, the Levant, Yemen, and Axum over in Ethiopia. The crowd around us is also home to various outlanders from all over. If we listen as we walk, we’ll hear a lot more languages than Arabic. There is, of course, some Aramaic. This is the lingua franca of the Near East, and it’s a semitic language like our very own Arabic. We’ll hear some Hebrew, also a Semitic language. Though the Jews of the Hejaz region speak Arabic, many know the ancestral language of Hebrew, and might lapse into it during a trade negotiation for convenience or privacy. Also, on the streets of Mecca during the Hajj and accompanying trade fair, we would hear Pahlavi, or Middle Persian, the language of the gigantic empire to our northeast, together with its colonies in Yemen and the northern Persian Gulf coast. If we walked along the trading stalls and food vendors a little while longer, we’d also hear some Ge’ez, another Semitic language, and the tongue of the Axumite empire over in Ethiopia, and also, some Greek. The Byzantines, in 570 CE at their high water mark, control the Levant and Egypt, and Byzantine Jerusalem is just 770 miles up the coast – a long haul, but still within our greater Meccan wheelhouse.

We make our way through the throng, pausing to watch a street performer, and then again to grab some food, and then again because you run into an old friend. We do have some small business to conduct, but at present, we’re heading directly toward the sacred heart of the city. It’s still relatively early, after all, and the Kaaba and the square around it should be a little less crowded before midmorning. As we get to the perimeter around the city’s famous shrine, we see two very well-dressed townsmen. Clad in a tasteful balance of the latest fashion, and looking healthy and well-fed, these two appear in their element. One of them offers us a courteous nod. The other ignores us. We have a pretty good idea of who these two aristocrats might be.

As of February of 570, almost everyone in Mecca would know the name of a certain tribe. Now, as I said before, you and I would be from a tribe, and a clan within that tribe. It’s important to understand that in Late Antique Arabia, some tribes were nomadic consortiums that roved around getting along by means of subsistence animal husbandry. Other tribes, however, were more like syndicates – organizations of kith and kin that had monopolies or predominant shares in regional economic sectors. In the year 570, as we offer our polite nods toward the well-dressed dude who nodded at us near the Kaaba, the most famous Arabian tribe in history controls the Meccan trade and tourism sector. This tribe is called the Quraysh.

The Quraysh have controlled the city of Mecca for a century. They are a wealthy tribe, using their power base in Mecca to fund and control trade up and down the west coast of Arabia. Just now, in February, they have caravans returning from Yemen, freighted with myrrh from the heel of the Arabian Peninsula, together with silk and other exotic goods from the Indian Ocean. In the summer, they Quraysh will dispatch caravans on the long road north to the Byzantine centers of Gaza and Damascus, making a killing on various key goods they’ve acquired throughout the year. The guys talking near the entrance to the Kaaba courtyard – they’re very likely Quraysh. They’ve organized this pilgrimage and trade expo. Everybody here stands to make some money, but the Quraysh may stand to make the most money of all.

Passing through the perimeter of the Kaaba courtyard, past the Quraysh noblemen, we enter the central square, and one of the most sacred places in sixth-century Arabia. The Kaaba, and we’ll learn more about it in future episodes, is today a squarish building about 36 feet in length, and 43 feet in height. It’s been rebuilt over the centuries, but we can reasonably suppose that in 570 CE, the Kaaba was basically the same cube shaped building that it is today, with a certain Black Stone inset in its eastern corner. As we come into the already crowded plaza to pay our respects, the Kaaba’s courtyard is home not only to a squarish structure, but also various statues and totems erected over the years during prior pilgrimages. And the question that I now want to ask you is this. We are two run-of-the mill Arabs. We are visiting a cosmopolitan Late Antique city that is a regional religious – one might say, Mecca. Why do you think we’ve come to the Kaaba? What do you think our religion is, in this pre-Islamic Arabian city, during the year of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth? I am honestly curious as to whether any one listening to this show could answer this question, as it is a massively important question. Thus, I’d better answer it. [music]

The Religious Climate of Mecca in 570

Earlier, we learned that Roman geographers decried Arabia’s climate as natura maligna, or “malign nature.” The description evokes a place beyond the reach of imperial civilization, where societies might persist ungoverned by the laws of Late Antique empires. And for five hundred years prior to 570, to generation after generation of immigrants and refugees, the harsh climate of Arabia was a modest price to pay for the relative stability that the region offered. Exactly 500 years before Muhammad’s birth, back in 70 CE, the Second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed. For centuries afterward, through the Kitos War, through the Bar Kokhba revolt, and during various Byzantine persecutions of Jews, Arabia, and especially western Arabia, offered Jewish refugees a place to live. And Jews weren’t the only religious refugees who set down roots in Arabia.

After the First Council of Nicaea in 325, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451, various Christian sects were declared heretical, and as a result of these persecutions up north, Christian refugees came south into Arabia, including Syriac Christians, like Melkites, Jacobites, and Nestorians, along with Copts, and Armenian and Ethiopian Christians, in addition to Jewish Christian sects, like the Nazarenes, Ebionites, and Elkasaites. These denominations, though not welcome in the Byzantine Empire, found ways to live and work in Arabia.

Five hundred years of Jewish and Chrisitan residents had changed western Arabia by the year Muhammad was born. To return to the subject of our morning walk through Mecca in February of 570, these changes are evident as we walk into the square that is home to the Kaaba and its inset Black Stone. Arabic speaking Jews and Christians are all around us, comfortably mingled with other pilgrims who worship local Arabian deities. The Kaaba is built for everyone, regardless of background. Pagans worshipping around us honor a god called Hubal, the lovers Isaf and Na’ilah, Yaguth, and most famously, Allāh and his daughters Allāt, Manāt, and al-‘Uzzā. There are statues and stones and venerated objects all over sacred plaza, honoring the ancestral deities of various tribes and regions. But the Kaaba itself, as we finally reach it after our morning walk, is not honored in homage an indigenous Arabian deity. The Kaaba was built – at least, as Arabs in February of 570, we believe the Kaaba was built – by the Biblical patriarch Abraham, or as we call him, Ibrahim. We circle the shrine seven times, as we have on prior pilgrimages, following the foot tracks of other pilgrims, because this is what is done here at the Kaaba.

According to our traditions, Ibrahim’s castaway son, Ismail, came down to Mecca with his mother Hagar. Poor Hagar wandered back and forth between two rocky promontories called Safa and Marwa just adjacent to the Kaaba. Hagar was looking for water for her young son. Fortunately for Hagar, God came to help, sinking a well called the Zamzam Well, which, as of 570, is a primary water source for pilgrims who have come to pay their respects to the Biblical Abraham. When we stand in the Kaaba’s sacred square, we think of Ibahim, father of Ismail, the father of many of our tribes. As pilgrims to Mecca at this juncture of Late Antiquity, don’t think of Abraham as a figure from Judaism or Christianity. He is our forefather, and this is his place. Of course the Jews and Christians revere him, and come to Mecca to honor the structure that, according to tradition, Abraham built. He’s Abraham. We call him Ibrahim, but everyone knows about him.

We might, as pilgrims, be allowed to peer inside of the Kaaba, in the year 570, if the Quraysh leaders who control the site are disposed to let pilgrims into the building. And if, as we draw closer to the Kaaba and look reverently at the Black Stone on its eastern corner, we wait in line and actually take a respectful look inside, we might see a painting of the Virgin Mary, and a painting of Jesus in the Kaaba.³ Just as we would revere Abraham as workaday Arab pilgrims in Mecca, we would know about Jesus and Mary, too. Over the course of five hundred years of cohabitation, Arab culture in the Hejaz had absorbed many stories from the New Testament as well as the Tanakh.

Though we have internalized a great many stories about Abraham, Ishmael, Jesus, Mary, and more, we are not Christians or Jews. Rather Abraham, and Job, and Jonah, and John the Baptist, for us, are folkloric figures, revered for their legendary lives and deeds, but not at the exclusion of Arabian deities, too. After we finish looking respectfully into the Kaaba, we take a few steps back, and relax a little. Around us are solemn conversations about religious matters. We might hear a conversation to our left in which Jesus, and jinn, or Arabian spirits, are discussed with equal awe. We might hear a prayer, in which a supplicant voices penitence toward both the virgin Mary and the Arabian goddess al-‘Uzzā. Maybe we’d overhear some visitors talking about Adam and Eve, and another pair who’d transgressed against God, Isaf and Na’ilah, whose statues stand nearby. The Kaaba, and around it Mecca, and around it the Hejaz – this was a region with an immense amount of religiosity, but no orthodoxy, where in the minds of ordinary Arabs, monotheistic religions were honorable and charged with the grandeur of their long traditions, just as indigenous polytheistic religions were honorable due to the tribes and clans who practiced them. The natura maligna, or “malign nature” of Arabia in 570 was harsh, but it offered a wondrous freedom of religion, and the Kaaba at the center of Mecca, as we stand in front of it in the growing morning warmth, reflects this religious pluralism. The Kaaba of 570, regardless of all of the subsequent religious history written during the later Middle Ages, is the supreme emblem of Late Antique religion – a place where polytheism and monotheism coexisted, and no theology was the boss.

There are, however, some changes afoot all around us. As Arabs living and working during the late sixth century, we are aware of a population among us called hanifs. You or I might be a hanif in 570, and no one would think anything of it. A hanif, in the year 570, is an Arab who understands and honors many of the traditions of Judaism and Christianity, but is not a Jew or Christian. Hanifs are often concisely described as Arab monotheists, and so as we leave the sacred precincts of the Kaaba, we might pass hanifs in addition to Jews, Christians, and polytheists. Hanifs, by later historians, were understood as precursors to Muslims. In the year 570, hanifs fit right in with everyone else, having many of the core values of Judaism and Christianity, but also the bedrock virtues of the old Arab tribal world – honesty, sincerity, patience, gratitude, respect, charity, and more – these values are shared by monotheists and polytheists alike.

As we complete the central rite of our pilgrimage, and join the general festival crowd for a day of trade, tasty food, street performances, and later, poetic recitations, we have no illusions about where we live. The Late Antique Hejaz is no utopia. Life here is hard. Making a living in a world of scant natural resources, of shifting tribal confederations, where your clan might go to war with another clan over some minor transgression or point of honor – getting by here requires firmness of character and physical fortitude. But it’s not uniquely hard. The sixth century hasn’t been a picnic up in Europe or the Byzantine Empire, or up in the Sasanian Empire, either. Eurasia had its first encounter with the Bubonic Plague in the 530s. Volcanic winters over the next decade caused widespread famine up north, as well. The new barbarian kingdoms – the Merovingians, the Visigoths, and the newly formed Lombards, as of 570, are sometimes little more than checkerboards of warring fiefdoms, rather similar to the polities of Arabia’s Bedouin interior, fighting long tribal conflicts not terribly high in casualties, in the atomized communities where empires once were, or where empires would soon be.

Mecca, then, was a Late Antique Eurasian city like many others we’ve encountered. It was a pilgrimage city, like others we’ve encountered, where religion was business as well as spirituality, and faith and mercantilism were mixed in culturally enriching ways. Within the splash zone of great empires, Mecca in 570 felt the effects of their wars, their cultures, their persecutions, their migrations, their recessions, and their boom times. Like so many other Late Antique cities, Mecca was a confluence of monotheism and polytheism, a place where Job and Jesus were respected alongside old pagan gods, where various sects of Christianity kept the religion alive more in vernacular stories and sacred rituals than with punctilious Greek New Testaments; where Jews were indispensable and fascinating, notwithstanding the fact that they often preferred to keep to themselves. Neither off the beaten path, nor even particularly remote, Mecca in 570 was crackling with potential. Having absorbed so many hundreds of years of outlanders, with their religious creeds, and having these creeds present both physically and ideologically in the sacred Kaaba and its environs, it’s little wonder that in the next generation, Mecca sent something back. [music]

Muhammad and the Black Stone

As Meccans and their guests went about the Hajj in the year 570, the Prophet Muhammad’s mother Amina was pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Abdullah, the Prophet’s father, had died on the way home from a business trip up to Gaza. Muhammad’s mom passed away from an illness when the boy was about six. In some ways, Muhammad’s was an inauspicious beginning. Orphaned, he ended up being raised by an uncle. In other ways, though, Muhammad began life on reasonably solid footing. He was born a member of that prosperous Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca, and within that tribe, an up-and-coming clan called the Banu Hashim. Once born, the boy grew up under the care of a Bedouin wet nurse outside of town. The idea was that fresh highland air and nature were healthier for youngsters than the miasma of a Late Antique city, and there was surely some truth to it.

There are many hagiographical elements in the ancient Islamic biographies of Muhammad. Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham, al-Waqidi, ibn Sa’d, and al-Tabari pass on a fair number of miracle stories about the infancy, childhood, and boyhood of the Prophet, though these later chroniclers lived centuries after Muhammad did. A lot of Muhammad’s early life, notwithstanding the later miracle stories, sounds like it a was pretty ordinary life for a Meccan boy growing up in the 570s. Born into the Quraysh tribe, it made sense that he’d go into the caravan business. Smart, trustworthy, hardworking, and with an excellent memory, he became what we might call a trading agent, working the summer caravan circuit up to Byzantine Syria, and probably shaking hundreds of hands from all over the world during his long career. At 25, famously, he married a widow named Khadija. She was older – perhaps 40, but she was also a wealthy and talented businesswoman, and their long and happy union is one of the great tales in world history. They had kids, and, according to ample evidence from things that happened later on, they believed in each other.

When Muhammad was 35 years old, in about 605 CE, a fire destroyed much of the Kaaba. The sacred shrine had a new roof put on it, a roof built out of Greek timbers from a ship that had wrecked along the Red Sea coast, installed by a Coptic carpenter from Egypt.⁴ The smallest details about Muhammad’s life, by the way, point to just how cosmopolitan his world was. Anyway, it was on this occasion, as the structure was being rebuilt, that the heads of the Quraysh tribe who ruled Mecca could not agree on which clan’s leader ought to be allowed to set the sacred Black Stone back into the corner of the building. The kingpins decided, at least according to later prophetic biographies and sayings collections, that Muhammad would arbitrate the situation.

Muhammad had the leaders of the Quraysh clans put the sacred Black Stone onto a cloak. The clan leaders all lifted the cloak together, hefting the Black Stone as one tribe, unified, and then Muhammad himself, an orphan and respected trade agent whom everyone agreed was trustworthy, set the Kaaba’s cornerstone back into its customary place. This was the kind of person he was, before he ever became a prophet. He knew Mecca, and how it worked. He was also a man of the world, who’d seen a lot of it, and learned a lot from what he had seen.

Even in Muhammad’s day, the Black Stone, al-Hajar al-Aswad, was old. Today, some traditions hold that the Black Stone was given to Abraham by the angel Gabriel when the Kaaba was first built, others, that it was from the Garden of Eden. It’s also possible that the Black Stone was the just the relic of an epoch when Arabs set unusual rocks in sacred locations for worship, being revered more due to its long history than its earliest origins or intrinsic properties. The later chronicler Al-Kalbī, writing about the pagan goddess Allāt and her shrine in the nearby city of Ta’if during the life of Muhammad, wrote that the goddess Allāt was actually just a square rock that people came to revere.⁵ Whatever the Black Stone’s origins, heavenly or earthly, its story is similar to the far more obscure cornerstone in the church in Orchomenos, Greece. The Black Stone of Mecca came from a polytheistic world. It was adapted to fit a monotheist world, set in place in 605 CE by Muhammad himself.

We took an imaginary walk, a little while ago, in this episode. Though we ended up at the center of Mecca, circling the Kaaba, we started at the edge of town, on the slope of Mount Hira, in the fresh morning air of February. Muhammad, several years after he set the Black Stone in place, became fond of taking walks out that way, into the fringes of town to the northeast. Mount Hira, called Jabal al-Nour in Arabic, rises up out of an east-west ridge of igneous rock, overlooking valleys to the north and south. At its top is a small cave – a cave where Muhammad went to spend time alone and think. He was 40 years old, when it happened, in the year 610. At 40, alone and lost in thought in the cave atop al-Hira, Muhammad heard the words, “[Recite]! In the name of your Lord who created: He created man from a clinging form. [Recite]! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One who taught by the pen, who taught man what he did not know.”⁶ This revelation, the first verse of the Qur’an ever revealed to Muhammad, was the most important thing that happened in the Middle Ages, because it completely changed the history of the world. And it did not happen in some isolated, insular hinterland. It happened in Mecca, a place teeming with the theological energy of Judaism, Christianity, and paganism, a quintessentially Late Antique city that over the course of the next two generations, became the most influential Late Antique city of all. [music]

Islamic History and the Middle Ages

Those of us who grow up outside of Islam have a fundamentally different sense of the cusp between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages than Muslims do. If you go to high school and college in the United States, like I did, Rome falls, then the Middle Ages squat, malodorously, for five or six hundred years over Europe, and then the Renaissance shows up and moves things forward. Islam has never had a very central place in this old tripartite story. For traditional Anglophone studies of the Middle Ages, Muslims decisively show up during the First Crusade of 1096-1099. By this time, however, Islam was almost 500 years old, and it was an enduring fixture over much of the earth.

To citizens of the Abbasid caliphate, in, say, the year 900, Europe was quite an obscure place. The Afghan-American historian Tamim Ansary writes that during Islam’s opening centuries, “To Muslims, everything between Byzantium and Andalusia was a more or less primeval forest inhabited by men so primitive they still ate pig flesh. . .[Muslims] knew that an advanced civilization had once flourished further west: a person could still make out traces of it in Italy and parts of the Mediterranean coast, which Muslims regularly raided; but it had crumbled. . .before Islam had entered the world, and was now little more than a memory.”⁷ To an Abbasid citizen of modern-day Iraq or Iran, then, Europe, during, say, the 900s – all of it – was a barbarous place. To Muslims today, whose histories of what I was taught to call the Middle Ages focus on the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid caliphates, and the Caliphate of Córdoba, rather than Europe, there was no medieval period.

I want to talk, now, a bit more about the next few seasons of Literature and History – where we’re going, and why. And I’ll start with a personal anecdote. Because of my own upbringing, I always found the way that I was taught the Middle Ages to be a bit strange. My aunt on my dad’s side married a Kuwaiti, and she immigrated there in the early 1970s. Subsequently, I grew up hanging out with five Kuwaiti cousins every summer at our grandparents’ farm in Ohio. My cousins spoke Arabic in addition to English, they grew up around Islam, and my uncle was Shia – a little unusual for Kuwait, but all I cared about when I was a kid was that he took us on motorcycle rides, cooked tasty food, looked like a movie star, was really funny, and – and this is true, he could walk around on his hands even in his 40s and 50s, which, when I was nine, basically made him a comic book superhero as far as I was concerned. As I got older, of course, I learned more from my family about what it had been like to grow up on the Arabian Peninsula, and as kids who were dual citizens of Kuwait and the US, my cousins always seemed larger-than-life – globe trotters at home shooting trap in rural Ohio just as much as they were hanging out in stretch tents in family reunions with their dad’s side of the family back home. Because of them, maybe, I always felt that the way I was taught the history of the Middle Ages was just a little bit off. Where some of my family was from, after all, at the ancient junction of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, the so-called Middle Ages were the beginning.

Subsequently, it’s taken me a while to figure out how Literature and History ought to cover the Middle Ages. For years, I have called this show, “a podcast covering Anglophone literature and its roots,” and while the “roots” part required some hard work and stretching on my part, the “Anglophone literature” part was something on which I had 13 years of formal instruction between undergraduate and graduate school. Years ago, I thought that I’d reach Bede and Beowulf with a sigh of relief, pulling our frigate into the more familiar harbor of Anglo-Saxon literature and intermittently aiming the prow toward western European giants like Chrétien de Troyes and Dante. But the more I thought about putting an increasing focus on Anglophone literature, the more bored I became at the thought of the podcast’s years to come. I like William Langland and John Gower, the Gawain poet and Geoffrey Chaucer, but I’ve also been reading them since the age of 16. Now that I’m over 40, the thought of teaching a fairly standard procession of medieval English authors, together with the basics of scholastic philosophy and the slow stirrings of Protestantism sounds, for good or for ill, like a pretty well-traveled road.

At some of my worst moments in thinking about how to treat the Middle Ages in Literature and History, I thought of some of the more traditional subjects to be covered without much enthusiasm. Medieval scholastic philosophy, cartloads of hagiographies and martyr tales, bitter tracts against the latest heretical sects, and a fair amount of snuffling around the same questions about the Problem of Evil and the mechanics of salvation that we’ve already heard so much of – some of the textual remnants of the Medieval period are pretty dry. Though I can and will work through some of the major papal controversies, the Norman Conquest, and the genesis of Middle English, there are also, already good podcasts and audiobooks on these subjects. The question I came to was this. How can I, after the journey we’ve taken so far, constrict the story that the podcast has been telling, teach the Middle Ages as they’ve traditionally been taught in the Anglophone world, and steer the course toward Shakespeare? When I was younger, I would have have loved nothing more than to offer you the standard motorcade of medieval English and French authors who were taught to me in college. But dropping the scope of the podcast so far, and leaving the grand old Mediterranean behind, and the story of how that stone block in Orchomenos was lifted, as I recorded this present season on Late Antiquity – that just seemed like a very strange thing to do.

As I wondered how to proceed, something else happened. Listeners reached out. You reached out on Patreon, through email, and through social media, and what I heard most often was the same sentiment I was feeling already – that none of us wants Literature and History to zoom in on just northern Europe between 700 and 1400, to set our watches to Greenwich Mean Time zone, and ignore the other 23. The audience of this show lives all over the world. And collectively, we think about the years between 700 and 1400 very differently, depending on where we grew up. We can’t cover everything in Literature and History. But we can and should continue to explore the wide and interrelated cultural history of west Eurasia in the way that we’ve already been exploring it thus far.

I will, as I said, be happy, in upcoming seasons, to teach the Middle Ages as they were taught to me. From the Dream of the Rood to Chaucer, early English literature is in my blood, and close to my heart. But I’d also like to branch out from there, and teach texts I learned in graduate school, and after. France had one hell of a 12th century, and Iceland had one hell of a 13th, and Persian and Arabic literature begins to flow like a river after the ninth century, and it never stops. When we zoom out a bit from Europe and take a more widescreen look at human history, the civilizational milestones of the Middle Ages are just as impressive as the ones that came before.

In Baghdad and Toledo, in Damascus and Cairo, and Constantinople, too, human ingenuity thundered along as brightly as it ever had, under the pens of al-Ghazali, Averroes and Maimonides. In Europe, Peter Abelard was one of the finest philosophers ever to have lived, and he had predecessors and successors, too, and Thomas Aquinas was of the same caliber. In literature, the Middle Ages saw Arabic and Persian texts exploding across what are today six time zones. But in fact, many epics were born in the Middle Ages – epics from Iceland, and Ireland, and Iran, and Germany, and Wales, and Spain, and bushels of vernacular literature came into being everywhere. The Middle Ages don’t seem very Medieval, when we consider that the Persian astronomer al-Sufi first observed the Andromeda Galaxy in the tenth century, and the Persian mathematician al-Biruni and his colleagues used the scientific method to calculate the circumference of the earth in the eleventh century and hypothesized the existence of additional continents. And speaking of additional continents, Norse explorers, just after 1000 CE, crossed the Atlantic, set foot on Newfoundland, and actually located those continents. These events, contrary to widely held stereotypes about the Dark Ages, make Greco-Roman antiquity look a bit like paddling around in a bathtub for a thousand years. We have to zoom out a bit more to see this bigger picture, and do a bit of extra reading, but the zooming out and the extra reading in question are absolutely worth the effort.

A Broad, but Not-Too-Broad Approach to the Middle Ages

Since I announced my intention to teach the Medieval period from a little bit more global perspective, a few of you have pushed back. There are those who are just not very interested in medieval literary history beyond what is sometimes called the “western canon,” whatever on earth that means. To those, I will simply say that for the entirety of the Middle Ages, the most western part of Europe was the Iberian kingdom of Al-Andalus, and so the most western European cultural history was occurring in a region where Arabic was the dominant language, and so there’s some western canon for you. Others, however, have expressed more reasonable misgivings about the show’s plans to spend multiple upcoming seasons well outside of the customary greenswards and parish churches of Medieval Europe. If we go international for a while, so to speak, won’t the focus of the show become too diffuse? Won’t it take decades just to cover a century? Let’s talk about that.

I have read, and listened to works that offer the history of the world. A chapter on the Gupta Empire here, then the Jin Dynasty there, then a bit on the later Roman Empire, then a section on early Mayan civilization, along with a machine gun of names and dates, all of it very important. I don’t know a better way of teaching world history. But I also know that that approach – hopscotching between continents and civilizations – doesn’t work very well for me, pedagogically speaking. I hear great bricks of facts, but I can’t build anything out of them. Armies and empires move like wrecking balls, but I don’t quite grasp what they stand for, and who they are. I learn through stories. The stories can be dry and academic. They can be offered by a master narrator. But I need, personally speaking, to connect things, and to see causality and interrelationships. I learn best through understanding the mechanics of interconnected systems, and not through the memorization of discrete facts. That’s why this podcast started with the earliest extant remnants of human writing, and moved forward from there.

It is, specifically because of this learning and teaching style, that I think spending the next season on early Islamic history will be an excellent choice. Islam was the culmination of the entire theological story that Literature and History has been telling for the past 200 hours, beginning with cuneiform in Iraq in 3,100 BCE. Everything that we have learned in our show, especially the past 50 hours on Late Antiquity, will be excellent preparation for understanding the epic story of how Arabia exploded like a volcano in the seventh century and took over the Sasanian and much of the Byzantine Empire. It’s going to be a fantastic season – I know, because it’s already mostly written, and I’m thinking ahead to what’s next, and what a more panoramic presentation on the Middle Ages will allow me to do, as a teacher.

We will, as a host and listeners, need to steer a careful course through the rest of the Medieval period. I don’t want to be too diffuse. I can’t teach you the literary history of the whole world. But I think I can offer a literary history that’s a bit more encompassing than the one that was taught to me, and that still includes the things that were taught to me. As I said, I will happily produce upcoming shows on the traditional tentpole works of medieval literature that so many of us know. I will also produce upcoming shows on other works of medieval European literature that native English speakers like me don’t study often enough, like the Middle Welsh Mabinogion the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, the eddas and sagas of Iceland, the Old Spanish Poem of the Cid, and more. Search for podcast or even audiobook content on these, and you’re hard pressed to find anything. But even more so, there is a growing body of medieval Arabic and Persian literature that is now available in strong English translations that I am brimming with excitement to teach you about. Abu al-Atahiya Abu Nuwas, Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, Nizami Ganjavi, Rumi, Hafez – these titans of world literature should have been sifted alongside authors of the European Middle Ages and early Renaissance a long time ago. They are fun. Even in translation, their talent is awesome to behold. With just a little bit of background – and we’ll have that background when we get to them – medieval Arabic and Persian literature is straightforward, too. At present, if you search on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for something in English on Beowulf, or Dante, or Chaucer, you’ll have oodles of material to listen to. If you search for Hafez, or Ferdowsi, or Abu Nuwas, or the early Arabic Qasidas, or odes, there’s next to nothing, even though the latter authors are household names much of the world over. I’d like to do what I can to help with that. All of the literature I just described is part of the same west Eurasian vortex, and it all has roots in the cuneiform tablets of the silty banks of the lower Euphrates that we discussed all the way back in Episode 1.

So the plan, if you want to see it in detail, is online at literatureandhistory.com/upcoming-seasons, and there’s a link to that in your podcast app. The literature that I plan to cover over the next few seasons, to be clear, will not be fully global in scope. We’ll predominantly be spending time in the same places we’ve already been. The good old Enuma Elish and Epic of Gilgamesh were from Iraq, the Book of the Dead and Athanasius and the Dionysiaca from Egypt, the Old Testament from the Levant and further east, still, Heliodorus and Lucian from Syria, Augustine from Algeria, Apuleius from Tunisia, and programs on Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and the Talmud concerned themselves a fair amount with the Asian side of Eurasia – heck, we’ve barely spent any time in Europe at all. Thus, in continuing a more panoramic presentation of literary history, beginning with the foundational events of later Arab and Persian empires in the next season, I think we’ll persist with what we’ve been up to, all along. We learned how the Orchomenos cornerstone was raised up to reside in the wall of that church in Greece. We will now learn how the Black Stone came to be inset in the east corner of the Kaaba. Because what happened in western Arabia between 570 and 661 CE, as you’ll soon see, is just the next chapter of the same gigantic story.

After we learn about Pre-Islamic Arabia and its literature; after we learn the saga of the Prophet Muhammad’s life; after we read what is actually in 114 surahs of the Qur’an and learn where it came from; after we learn about the great Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 and how it opened the way for the Rashidun caliphate between 632 and 661; after we learn about the Sunni-Shia split; after we learn about the Umayyad caliphate’s continued expansion; after we learn about the early Abbasid caliphate, the twilight of Zoroastrianism in modern-day Iran, the birth of Sufism, and the historiography of all of this – after we learn about all that, the literary and cultural history of the whole western supercontinent opens up, splendorous and interconnected. It will take about a year. When the game is up, and we move on to Season 8, and explore headline medieval topics like Old English, Bede, Beowulf, the Exeter Book, the Carolingian Renaissance, and some Old Irish poetry as well, we will have heard the full story of how Abrahamic ideology was born. And as the Crusades begin, and after, as we proceed through the rest of the medieval period, the literature of the Islamic world will continue to be a part of our story, in multiple upcoming seasons devoted to the subject. As historian Will Durant wrote in 1950, at the close of his 200-page discussion of Islamic civilization in his volume on medieval history, The Age of Faith,

As. . .generations are moments in a family line, so civilizations are units in a larger whole whose name is history; they are stages in the life of man. Civilization is polygenic – it is the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths; no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed. Therefore the scholar, though he belongs to his country through affectionate kinship, feels himself also a citizen of that Country of Mind which knows no hatreds and no frontiers; he hardly deserves his name if he carries into his study political prejudices, or racial discriminations, or religious animosities; and he accords his grateful homage to any people that has born the torch and enriched his heritage.⁸

It’s a terrific mission statement, this call to understand civilization as a team effort, as relevant today as it was in 1950. And in the next few seasons, I hope to show you, as we take a look at the rise and golden age of Islam alongside the literature of the European Middle Ages, that the years between 700 and 1200 CE were far less medieval than is commonly understood. [music]

My Dog, the Empiricist

I have a Chocolate Lab. I think I’ve mentioned my dog before He’s old now. He and I used to run miles and miles together, but now, it’s mainly walks. The old fellow strolls along, and occasionally lapses into a galumphing jog when he sees another dog coming down the sidewalk. Mainly, he shuffles, in no particular hurry, while I listen to audiobooks or podcasts or catch up with friends on the phone, or just as often, walk and think. My dog shuffles along, and he sniffs.

Over the years, I’ve decided that I have a lot in common with him. We’re both animals, and we both like to move. When he was just a year or two old, and we lived in the mountains, we would run rain or shine or snow, going up single track paths through pine forests, shoes and paws padding over rocks and roots, sweat and slobber among the conifers and sap, laughing, panting, and exchanging conspiratorial glances because it seemed too good to be true to run through the woods at top speed together, four legs and two legs, a couple of happy idiots. Now, though, like I said, he’s slowed down, and he sniffs.

I think my dog is an empiricist, rather than a rationalist. Each chemical remnant of another organism passing, the scent of geese going by in the wind, the puddles and pellets of other animals, the residues of dropped potato chips and popcorn in the grass around picnic tables, and idiosyncratic smells that he lingers on for a long time – these are all worth pausing to investigate, each one taken in by his magnificent brown snout, each scent, or cluster of scents, a node of intrinsically valuable information. He is inspirational in this way, a wiggly little archaeologist who knows that just under the surfaces of things, there are secrets and stories, that the same quotidian walk is always different, and that you can never sniff the same path twice.

I don’t think he is a rationalist, as he sits on the couch next to me, pondering abstract questions and making deductions from first premises. He is not one to entertain syllogisms, nor to propose grand theories, nor to imagine that an extrasensory world of perfect forms glows over a sublunary world of defective actuality, nor to wonder whether the cats, and magpies, and squirrels he sees are fated for posthumous salvation. He is here, fur and sinews, claws and ears, moment after moment, paws slapping through autumn puddles and yellow eyes enlivened by spring grass, coming up out of the river every time like he’s just been born into the world, shaking a halo of crystalline droplets out of his drippy brown coat, and then onward and upward, to sniff, and sniff.

When he goes down the path, he doesn’t bring a big agenda with him, other than hoping for a dog treat or a donut someone dropped. He’s slow and thorough these days, sniffing because he likes doing it, not because he wants to understand the cosmos or justify the ways of God to dogs. I don’t know whether he became how he is because of me or vice versa, and look, I know that dogs aren’t customarily troubled by great existential questions, but when I watch him, I feel like maybe I learned a little bit about how to be who I am, and do what I do, from him. Because when he’s sniffing, he’s focused. He’s there. A little tug on his harness, and no, thank you, sir, I’m sniffing this little clump of grass. I call his name, and the same thing – sorry, I didn’t hear you, there’s some slime on the underside of this log that’s unlike other slimes I have encountered, so please wait a moment you stupid and obtuse human, because at least one of us needs to assess this fascinating slime. At least, that’s how I imagine his internal monologue is, sometimes.

I’m the same way. I like particulars, and not universals. I enjoy practice more than theory. I like individual books, and not conjectures that squish all of them together. I like to read, and to write, not to theorize about reading and writing. I like studying individual cultures, kingdoms, movements, and people, and not spouting hypotheses that try to appraise all of them at once. I think we live in an era that has some aberrant intellectual instincts. We look into the past, and we want to hierarchize, and evaluate before we even understand. Was the rise of Christianity a good or a bad thing? Who was better, the Greeks or the Romans? Why did human civilization arise independently in Mesoamerica, the middle Mississippi, Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus River – what’s the grand story? Anybody who offers you answers to those silly questions is full of it. Answering them would require continents of evidence, impartial standards of evaluation, and hundreds of people. Besides, why futz around with such giant, nebulous queries, when we have these steady slabs of information all around us, straight from the past, called books, that we can sniff – I mean read?

Taking Stock after 9 Years of Podcasting

We English majors take a lot of flak, and we deserve it. We’re divas, dressed in corduroy blazers, shawls, fussy shoes and calculatedly eccentric eyeglasses. We’re a pain in the ass. However, get us in front of a book, and away we go. As superfluous as society sometimes deems us, we understand that each novel, poem, play, and work of non-fiction is a closed system. An analysis of that system’s parameters can be performed with complete confidence and accuracy. How many characters are in the story? This many. How many metaphors? That many. What happens to Hamlet at the end? He dies. How many lines in a sonnet? Fourteen. What’s Walden about? A dude living in a cabin in Massachusetts. What happens to Macbeth at the end? Kidnapped by aliens. Just kidding, he dies, too. For all that we are accused of being froufrou window dressing on the intellectual world, we English majors do have hard analytical rules that govern our work.

Being a former English major, I am most efficient in our podcast when I’m dealing with literature. I was taught to sniff, so to speak, poetry, drama, and fiction, and to sniff it vigorously. When I presented Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca in this season, as bruisingly complex as these stories are, I knew that everything that I told you about the internal parameters of each book was true. None of it hung on scholarly consensus. None of it was synthesized from a combination of ancient historians, archaeology, and modern works of history. None of it, like so many events in early Islamic history that we’ll learn about, is understood differently by different sects. The Aethiopica is a romance novel, the Dionysiaca is an epic about Dionysus, Hamlet dies at the end, and Macbeth, regrettably, does not get kidnapped by space aliens, but instead changes into a werewolf, just kidding, a vampire. What I mean to say here is to make a very simple but perhaps counterintuitive point that the study of literature can be a very hard science. When we sit down in front of a text, we can make observations about it that are completely true. When we sit down in front of ten texts, we can make observations about all of them together that are completely true. That’s about the maximum number, though – we drink a lot, and our memories aren’t very good.

Jokes aside, though, my point here is that this podcast is, ultimately, about books, and literature. We are currently deep within a period of what we might call monotheization, and so many of the books that we’ve been reading, and will soon read, have had to do with the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are, for me, far harder subjects to teach than ancient poetry. The genesis of the Abrahamic religions is something that affects all of us, something that must be covered with particular with rigor and precision, something that must be discussed respectfully, but at the same time something that requires frankness and candor.

I have an interview episode coming up next time, and I asked for listener questions at the end of the previous show. I’ve received quite a few. One common question was what my favorite episode, or sequence of episodes is, in this podcast. It was a great question. It made me think about how differently the episodes of Literature and History sound to me, versus how they sound to the show’s audience. Put simply, when I listen to the show, as with anyone who makes something, I remember how each part of it was made. I remember, for instance, that the episodes on ancient Greek theater were easy to write, as were those on epics. These works of narrative literature have beginnings, middles, and ends. Presenting them in an audio program is a lot of fun. But they’re not what I’m the most proud of. I’m most proud of shows and sequences that took work. When I cover someone like Venantius Fortunatus, the Merovingian court poet we met a couple of episodes ago, I read his entire body of poetry, together with all biographical materials available and some secondary scholarship. Then I sort it and organize it into an outline. Then I write the show. When I cover something like Augustine, or the Talmud, the challenge is tripled. The works are longer, sometimes unlovely chunks of dense prose hundreds or thousands of pages long. They’re also tied into sacred histories, and even their rough spots must be treated with consideration. Thus, while I hope that the episodes in this podcast are of a relatively even quality and thoroughness, I know that behind the scenes, different segments took wildly different quantities of effort. I am most proud of episodes and sections that take tangled, unruly, non-narrative subjects and make stories out of them. I learn from stories, as I said, so I try to teach with them. I’m most proud of shows that cover subjects most of us haven’t heard much about, and ones that took all of my research and pedagogical abilities to produce.

This past season on Late Antiquity has been a long one – 25 episodes with soundtracks and songs, averaging over two hours each, but the amount of time that it’s taken me has been so immense that at times I’ve been surprised that I even still have any listeners. Some of the reasons for slowdowns had to do with life stuff. Beyond the podcast, I’m a mid-career person who, like so many of us, has taken on more family responsibilities as the years have gone by. But within the show itself, I’ve also spent the last few years tackling some really, really challenging episodes. Doing shows on the Ante-Nicene church fathers, early saints’ lives and martyr tales, Saint Jerome, minor Latin poets and upcoming ones on the life of Muhammad, the Qur’an, and the hadiths – these are episodes that have in cases months of research behind them, for which I hire specialists to proofread, and cycle through multiple drafts. I am often, like a dutiful English major, or like my dog sniffing a stump, just lost in my work – absorbed in particulars. A moment like this, though, is a good one to look up, and take stock for a moment.

I have been at this for nine years, now. The full text of the show, including bonus episodes, comes to about 2.1 million words, and 271 hours of content; a hundred or so hours of music, a hundred or so vocal songs, and hundreds of interstitial musical breaks. 2.1 million words doesn’t mean anything to most people, but picture it like this. The average paperback book today has about 300 words per page. By that count, Literature and History is about 7,000 pages, or 23 books in length. Those 7,000 pages entail research, footnotes, multiple drafts, book purchases, and most of them are formatted for web presentation, and given accompanying quizzes. For nine years, I’ve done all of this on top of a full-time job as a technical writer.

And I’m doing alright. If this work weren’t to some extent its own reward, I would have thrown in the towel, and I would never have been able to tell the story of the Orchomenos cornerstone. I do have help from some of you – pledges on Patreon, bonus content purchases and donations on the website – a small segment of the audience of this podcast is really generously helping to cover expenses. When I need a rarer scholarly edition of a book now, or I want to pay a specialist to read over one of my episodes, I make that happen, and it means that your current support of Literature and History has helped me make this sucker built to last. But I still need more help than I’m getting. This past year has seen a flurry of podcast-related expenses – a new music computer, I had to completely rebuild the podcast website, and most consequentially, Apple and Patreon forced all content creators to move to a monthly subscription model, rather than a per-episode pledge. I’m trying to look on the bright side of that change. I’ve always hoped to be able to do two of these shows a month, but never quite managed to do it. With a baseline of one per month, I know I’ll always be able to deliver something very high quality on the 15th. Further, from time to time, as I’m going to do this summer, I’ll release free multi-episode sequences simultaneously. Especially over the next twelve months, I feel like I owe that to you guys, after the recent lean years we’ve had. But in any case, if you’ve never contributed to the show, now is a really good time for it. And if you’re a Patreon supporter offering a dollar per month, now would be an equally really good time to up that to a three-dollar pledge per month, or otherwise increase your monthly pledge amount just a bit. I haven’t had a day off since October. It’s March. I have a huge year planned for Literature and History, and could use a bit more of a tailwind to run this course.

This podcast’s strengths are also its weaknesses. Our approach is chronological. We go through cultural molehills as well as mountains, because molehills often tell us as much about history as mountains do. Molehills, though, aren’t exactly an easy sell. The most popular history podcasts tend to zing around from Caligula to Nostradamus to Nazis to Lincoln’s assassination. Caligula can tell you a lot about ancient Rome. But so, too, can Propertius. And Lucretius. And Lucian of Samosata. Between history’s battles and scandals, and beyond its circus tents of sex and violence, are the broad boulevards and country lanes of everyday life. That’s what I try to teach in this show, though it doesn’t make for good clickbait – the long, slow river of our cultural evolution, and not just the rapids and waterfalls.

This podcast’s host’s strengths are also his weaknesses. I’m pretty good at producing the episodes, at this point. I always want anything that comes out on the Literature and History feed to be high quality, and I feel like it always has been. I follow my dog’s lead, keeping my head down, and staying focused, but I do it so often sometimes it’s to my own deficit. Word of mouth has been the only thing that’s ever spread the news about this program. But I’ve resolved this year to make some more efforts to spread the word about Literature and History. It is fine and well to be a stodgy scholar, moiling away one’s time after work with books. However, if, after nine years of doing this show, I’m still not making a living with it, it logically follows that I do need to join the twenty-first century somewhat more actively. I’ll be trying to meet people where they are a bit more, rather than crossing my fingers and hoping that they somehow find this podcast. Anything you can do to help in the coming year to get the word out about this show, even if it’s as mundane as liking a post, will help Literature and History’s future.

The show itself will continue in the format it always has. Longform, single narrator, scholarly deep dives, with what I hope is a nice soundtrack. No ads, needless to say, and no paywall. I’ll get help in coming seasons from speakers familiar with Arabic, Persian, Old Irish, Old Norse, and other languages pertinent to our story. I’ve learned a lot from talking with all of you about how to produce this podcast as well as I possibly can, and the core of my efforts will always be on making excellent, researched, accessible episodes, free for all.

And I have one more request. I am looking for a good literary agent. Since graduate school, I’ve finished writing three novels and two collections of short stories. This has been an ambition of mine since I was nine – to write and publish fiction, since before podcasts existed. I’ve been writing fiction since I was in fifth grade, and as someone who has devoted his life to literature, the fiction that I’ve written is, I hope, worth reading. I haven’t mentioned this in the podcast, because, let’s be honest, we don’t really care if our English professors have written poetry on the side, or have a play that they’ve completed, and it feels tacky for me to use this otherwise educational platform to try and get something else out there. But, I’m not getting any younger, and with my typical workweek, I just don’t have much time to research agents and publishing houses, so I thought I’d ask you guys for help. As I said before, I’ve been pretty solid these past nine years at the actual nose-to-the-grindstone writing process – I’ve just been commensurately poor at making any sustained efforts to publicize the work I’ve done, and thank goodness I have you guys, who have helped spread the word about Literature and History for me. Anyway, I’m looking for a literary agent to mainly just get some advice at this point. I do have a fairly large audience, millions of literature-related downloads, and have been featured in various publications, so I hope I don’t look like a complete schmuck. If you know any literary agents who are eligible, or are involved in the industry, please send me an email. Unrequited artistic ambitions are not uncommon things to have, but, having told so many stories from other people, I would love to finally get to tell some of my own, too.

To be very, very clear, though, I am not looking for an offramp from Literature and History. While going to a monthly episode release was unexpected, now that I – well, we – have made the change, I am quite sure that a baseline of one show per month is something that I can handle. This project is for me what sniffing is for my beloved Chocolate Lab – a constant and fresh input of empirical information. It’s now a part of who I am. Reading and writing go together for me, and Literature and History requires reading and writing on an industrial scale, which I greatly enjoy. To return to an earlier metaphor, the podcast, even the repetitious and labor-intensive parts of it, is now a cornerstone of my own life. As we move into the next few seasons on the Middle Ages, I hope you’ll help me produce strong educational content that’s free for the public, and teach medieval literature in a way that’s widescreen, multilingual, and not just friars, fiefdoms, dioceses, and damsels in distress. [music]

Announcing The Actual First Novels

I have one more announcement to make. This should be no surprise, but, as with every time I wrap up a season of Literature and History, I have a new sequence of five bonus episodes. The new bonus sequence, which is available at a link in your podcast app, is called The Actual First Novels. This series covers five full novels from antiquity that we did not read in the main series. Ancient novels, in spite of the efforts of many scholars, including me, remain a very obscure genre. For some reason, when we think of ancient Greece, we think of Athenians spouting philosophy, Spartans doing leg presses, Zeus having sex with everyone, and Hera being angry about it. We do not think about novels. However, there are, as of my recording of this episode, twelve surviving novels from before 300 CE, two long summaries of novels, and eight fragments of novels that once existed, not to mention long prose fiction written by Christians in the genres of Acts, Gospels, and Apocalypse literature. A critical mass of this work was produced during the 100s CE, and the relative peace of the Nerva-Antonine Dynasty, which stretched from 96-192 CE, seems to have ushered in a renaissance of prose fiction.

We’ve already read some of this fiction. In the main series, we’ve read four of antiquity’s surviving novels, including Petronius’ Satyricon, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Lucian’s True Story, and Heliodorus’ Aethiopioca. But I wanted to read more. Within all of that ancient fiction, there is a core of books that are sometimes called “The Big Five.” They are five novels that tell variants of the same story in very different ways. It is, ultimately, an optimistic story, and one often called the “Hellenistic romance,” though I think “romantic adventure” might be a better description. In each of these books, a hero meets a heroine. They fall in love. Sometimes they get married. But then, disaster strikes. The boy and the girl embark on a series of adventures, sometimes together, sometimes separately – adventures involving shipwrecks, pirates, bandits, military campaigns, imprisonment, seductions, despair, more seductions, and eventually, after the hero and heroine are bandied about for a few dozen chapters, they are safely reunited, married, and live happily ever after. The romantic adventure story, sometimes set in contemporary times, and sometimes in the remote historical past, was one of the most common plots of the second century CE, and maybe the most common plot of all.

In my new bonus series, we will begin with a book that has fallen into the cracks between Classics and Religious Studies departments, but that is a perfectly good candidate for history’s first surviving novel. The Greco-Jewish novel Joseph and Aseneth, now tentatively dated to the late Ptolemaic period, is about the biblical Joseph, how he met his Egyptian wife Aseneth, how she fell for him and they got married, and how some adventures befell them afterward. While Joseph and Aseneth isn’t commonly included in discussions of ancient Greek fiction among classicists, Joseph and Aseneth is a novel that reminds us that dozens of apocryphal and pseudepigraphal works about biblical characters were produced by Jews and Christians during and after the second century BCE, and that while a few of these have been canonized, the bulk of it can be simply described as prose fiction, without, I hope, offending anyone. Joseph and Aseneth, the first volume of The Actual First Novels, teaches us that the roots of the ancient novel were sacred as well as secular.

The rest of The Actual First Novels, however, takes a much more standard look at the core of what survives from ancient Greek fiction. Volume 2, Callirhoe, covers the ancient Greek novel Callirhoe, dated from about 50-100 CE, a romance novel that is surprisingly dark at times. Alternating between saccharine romance at one point, bloody warmongering in the next, and surprisingly rich characterization in between, Callirhoe is the earliest surviving romantic adventure story from ancient Greece, and it often gets the credit for being the first novel, as well. It is often a cluttered, silly book, but from time to time, it also contains astounding flights of psychological realism, in which three dimensional characters, neither heroes, nor villains, display their complex interior worlds on pages almost 2,000 years old.

The third volume of The Actual First Novels is on Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesian Tale, a book generally dated to the 100s CE. An Ephesian Tale is one of those texts that is so stunningly terrible that is an absolute blast to read. A three-ring circus of sex and violence, in which a young couple from Ephesus careens all over the ancient Aegean in a series of completely implausible adventures, An Ephesian Tale proves that erotic prose literature didn’t have to be good in order to have an audience during antiquity. It also invites us to consider what kind of role erotic literature played in imperial Roman society.

Sex is also at the core of the fourth volume of The Actual First Novels, which is about a book called Leucippe and Clitophon, penned by an author named Achilles Tatius, probably in the late 100s CE. Leucippe and Clitophon, written perhaps a hundred years after Callirhoe, demonstrates a change in the genre of the ancient romance novel. In a word, Leucippe and Clitophon is more ironic, more satirical, and more self-conscious than its predecessors. It serves up the genre’s cardinal offerings of seduction, sex, and violence. But it’s also really funny, deriding its protagonists even as it tells its story, and making fun of the very conventions that it utilizes. Leucippe and Clitophon, candidly my favorite ancient Greek romance novel, is also gorgeously written, everything from its scenic descriptions to its psychological analyses to its sultry seduction scenes being done in consistently masterful prose.

Consistently masterful prose also fills the pages of the fifth and final novel of The Actual First Novels, probably the most famous ancient Greek novel of all. This is Daphnis and Chloe. The story of a goatherd and a shepherdess, Daphnis and Chloe takes place on the island of Lesbos. Unlike other ancient Greek romantic adventure novels, Daphnis and Chloe doesn’t toss its hero and heroine all over the known world and cram them into a series of absurd adventures and coincidences. Daphnis and Chloe is a pastoral love story, in which a couple of teenagers slowly fall for each other over the course of the passing of numerous richly described seasons. It’s a beautiful book, a suitable epilogue to the prose literature of antiquity, and what I expect will be the last ancient Greek text I’ll ever cover in Literature and History.

The Actual First Novels bonus series, while it takes you through the plots, backgrounds, and scholarship on these ancient novels, also explores some of the history behind them. Where did ancient novels come from? Why were romantic adventure stories so popular during the pax romana? What do these books tell us about sex in ancient Roman society? What do ancient Greek and Roman novels have in common with Christian devotional fiction written during the same period? And finally, why on earth does hardly anyone know about ancient novels? What happened that made them so obscure? By the time we get to the end of The Actual First Novels, we’ll have answered all of those questions.

So, I sure hope you’ll join me for that new bonus series, ten and a half hours long, and on sale for just $12.50 at literatureandhistory.com/bonus-content and there’s a link to that page in your podcasting app. And as much as I hate grubbing for money, again, now would be a really good time to make a pledge, or to up your pledge by a dollar or two, if you can. I’m going to be going full throttle with the podcast this year, and doing a great job on early Islamic history is going to take everything I have.

The next show, Episode 110, Questions, will be released in one week. It will be a one-off interview show, in which I, the podcaster, answer questions from you guys that you’ve sent over the past month and a half. If you are just here for the educational content, though, I encourage you to skip Episode 110, and go straight on to Episode 111: Pre-Islamic Arabia.

In the next, next episode, we will discuss what was going on across the Arabian Peninsula in the 500s CE. Today’s episode gave us a sense of what Mecca looked like in 570 CE, the year of Muhammad’s birth. But Mecca was just one town in a peninsula that was itself the size of western Europe. Arabia, in 570, was at the axis of Eurasia and Africa. It was a place with ancient traditions, but also a place that was changing as the empires and kingdoms around it, decade after decade, used Arabia and Arabs, in commerce and proxy wars with one another. No one in their right mind, in the year 570, would have expected Arabs to invade and take over all of the Sasanian empire, and much of the Byzantine empire, in less than a century. No one would have expected a new monotheism to rise up from Arabia and become the dominant religion of the central supercontinent. No one would have expected that within two centuries, Arabic would be on the lips and mosques of millions, from the lower Indus, to Portugal, from the Aral Sea, to Yemen. No one would have expected any of this, but all of it happened. So join me, over the next season, as we explore early Islamic history. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and I’ll see you next time.

References

---