Res Novae Romanae: A Revolution of the Third Century TL

[MorningDew]

So a standard form of Berber develops? Interesting!

What is the ttl modern name for North Africans? (something derived from mauri, a roman name for Berbers is likely. Maybe "Maros"?)

 

[guinazacity]

snip

And at least between the agonistici, literacy is shooting up!

 

[Chris Oakley]

For those of us just tuning in late, what does AUC stand for?

 

[Salvador79]

MorningDew,
Nice question.
Many groups will continue to live in North Africa.
Of course, there's the Egyptians whom Greeks and Latins will continue to call so, while they'll continue to call themselves something like reme-n-kemet.
Then, there's the Hellenised Cyrenians, who are currently undergoing Berberisation, but I don't know yet what the future will hold for them exactly.
Then there's the newly unifying nation for which I have proposed merely the name of their language (Libyan, or in Latin Libyana, after the Greek word for the continent, instead of the autonym Tamazight). As they call themselves Amazigh / free, I imagine that in time even culturally suprematist Romans will switch to something like Amazigi (they won't fall for the front vowel switch in the plural).
This name so far only refers to a religiously uniform group. Berber tribes who remain pagan will continue to be called both by their tribes' names and Mauri, which, I thinnk, won't become an umbrella term as Berber paganism and Judaism are likely to become marginal.
Then there are the Latin- and Neopunic-speaking, city-dwelling, non-Agonistic, mercantile, seafaring people of the coast. They surely won't be thrown in with the New Berbers. In the East, OTL Tunisia, they'll likely be called Africans, and maybe that name sticks for the rest, too, as far West as Tingis. Or maybe not, I don't know yet.

Chris,
AUC stands for ab urbe condita, the way OTL Romans counted their years, and TTL's people will continue or resume to count. Beside that, of course some Christians will follow the AD logic, Jews will have their own counting system and so on. Whethe

 

[Salvador79]

Sorry, cant edit properly from my phone. Last sentence was meant to read: whether there will be global standardisation I don't know yet, but I tend to say AUC remains limited to a space that defines itself as bearers of a culture in the broad tradition of Rome.
AUC and not CE because CE is from AD, and ITTL christianity will not become Rome's state religion.

 

[Salvador79]

Cont.:

Marble Stone from Synagogue in Beersheba, Judaea



Our next object is both solid and of a simplistic beauty; it exudes an air of peacefulness. Yet, it served its purpose only a short span of its life. It is a testament to the controversies and divisions within the land of Juda and the Jewish community in the time period we are looking at now.

It is a marble cube, each of its sides of roughly 80 cm length, with carved ornaments on one of its sides. It was found in the old town of Beersheba together with other relics which altogether belonged to a bet knesset, or in Judaeo-Greek Koiné: synagogue , building.

Most prominent among the symbols is the hexagrammatic Seal of Solomon. When this stone was chiseled and the synagogue built, it was a highly controversial sign – and it would remain so for many centuries. When this synagogue was built, somewhere between 1010 and 1020 AUC, it signaled a specific position in the political and religious controversies which had gripped the Jewish community.

The revolution at the beginning of the 11th century had caught recently formed Jewish cultural elites unprepared. It stopped the development towards religious homogenization in its tracks and reverted several trends which had emerged since the Roman-Jewish Wars of the 9th century.Ever since the destruction of the Second Temple and the devastation of Judaea by imperial Roman troops, a social and intellectual elite group which had emerged from among the Second Temple Pharisees had achieved a relative philosophical monopoly. They ultimately canonized the Tanakh, and in the formulation of another canon named “Mishna”, they cemented a trend towards abstracted and prima facie depoliticized notions of the Covenant, the sacred, the pure and peace (shalom).

These developments had taken place in Roman-controlled towns like Yamna, Sepphoris, and Tiberias, as well as in Parthian and later Sassanid Mesopotamian towns like Nehardia and Sura. After several terrible failures, these rabbis argued, the expectations of deliverance by a Messiah should be turned into a more abstract concept and postponed to a distant future. Concrete customs and laws centered around the temple had to be given a more abstract character severed from any concrete place and time. Some economic aspects of religious laws were mollified, as in the permission to lend an orphan`s property to other Jews against the payment of interest, while other cultural prescriptions became more rigid, as in the case of the universalization of certain food taboos. In the diaspora, it appeared, a group of upper middle class theologians, the “amoraim”, and their respective schools would give Judaism a clear, cohesive and undisputed content, which would provide the religious communities over hundreds and thousands of kilometers with a unified identity, and which proclaimed to abstain from any overtly political aspirations.

But the views of the amoraim were not quite as widely accepted as they portrayed. Various older strands of thought from Second Temple Judaism like Essenism had not disappeared altogether. And large swaths of the Jewish population, who suffered from the general socio-economic decline in the late 10th century, proved far more susceptible for the political agenda of new resistance movements which drew on the heritage of the Zealots and the Sicarii.

When the revolution broke out in Africa and Egypt, charismatic leaders like Simon bar Hiyya (or, as he was named for his life among the Agonistic Christian rebel commune destroyed by the Romans, Simon of Thelepte) led a strong group of Jewish rebels to victory in various towns and regions of Juda. Among this group were Jewish debt servants, culturally assimilated slaves, and impoverished townfolk and peasants alike. They allied with other, non-Jewish revolutionary groups, and even found a modus vivendi with the equally insurgent, but culturally and economically more conservative Samaritan Kingdom to their North. They managed to maintain control over most parts of the former province of Arabia Palaestina.

The old Jewish socio-economic and cultural elite did not approve of this revolution, which often expropriated them, and they did not keep quiet, either. When the Simonists called together a Great People`s Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, whose delegates could – in accordance with isonomic principles in place elsewhere in the Confederacy, too – only come from towns and villages where every Jew was allowed to vote, rabbinic and merchant elites denied the new Sanhedrin`s authority in interpreting the law and judging disputes among Jews. They formed their own Council of Elders in Tiberias.

Everywhere across the Levante, Jewish groups took sides. The community who built our synagogue in Beersheba evidently supported Simon and his new order. . The six-edged Seal of Solomon was, at this period in time, a clear commitment to a political understanding of messianism and the Covenant. The synagogues of conservative groups from the same time period would have carved law inscriptions into stone instead.

Of the other three symbols on the stone – the spica, sign of agricultural bounty, the bird – perhaps a dove -, a polysemous symbol linked in manifold ways to the Covenant between God and His People, and the eight-petaled rosette, only the latter tells us more about the group who built this synagogue.
This rosette is a fertility symbol of Babylonian origin. It indicates – although we cannot be sure about this – a Mesopotamian origin of this group. Perhaps they were among the recent immigrants from the Palmyrene or Sassanid Empires, which protected the rabbinic groups and where Simonist Jews were being persecuted ever since the outbreak of the revolution.

Undoubtedly clear, though, is that the group were not Neo-Essenes. Neo-Essene groups had not fought alongside Simon in the revolution, but they supported the new order and cooperated with the Simonists in the new Great People`s Sanhedrin. The Essenes remained a distinct group even within the new order, whose common ownership structures and egalitarianism suited them well otherwise, because of their ongoing stress on asceticism, which was not shared by the rest of Simon`s followers. Essenes, who rejected any emphasis on material abundance and pleasures and abstained from sexual intercourse, would not have chosen a fertility sign for their gathering place.

Looking beyond the symbolist surface, the material of the stone offers additional insights into the circumstances under which this group built their synagogue. The marble is from Egypt – testimony to the excellent, close relations between Simonist Juda and equally revolutionary Egypt across religious and linguistic borders. Looking at its edges, one can see that it was cut in one of the water-powered saw mills, hundreds of which were being built in the early decades of the 11th century as labour became more expensive with the abolition of slavery.

Further archeological information reveals to us that this stone has remained in its place, perhaps above the entrance of the synagogue, for not more than twenty or thirty years at the most. It is not unlikely that the synagogue of which it was a part has been destroyed in the Jewish Civil War of 1040-42.
After Simon`s death, the Great People`s Sanhedrin decided to construct a third temple in Jerusalem. Its priests would be Levitic Kohanim, but only politically friendly ones hand-picked by the People`s Sanhedrin. This decision has often been labeled the final piece which tipped the balance in favour of civil war and ultimate division – but the cup of strife and conflict had already been filled to the brim with property disputes, dissent on religious, civil and penal laws, and a host of other cultural differences which are hard to pin down exactly.

In the Jewish Civil War, our group is most likely to have supported the Great People`s Sanhedrin. Three years of war, in which the rest of the Confederacy supported the Sanhedrin, while Palmyra supported their conservative opponents, destroyed much of the Levante, but did not bring forth a clear victor.
As its result, the non-Greek, non-Samaritan Levante was divided into territories controlled by the Sanhedrin, who remained in the Confederacy of Free Citizenries, and territories controlled by the opposition, who became client statelets under the protection of the Palmyrene Empire.

But more importantly, it marked the ultimate rupture between Rabbinic and Third Temple Judaism. After the division between Samaritans and Judaeans, which occurred in the late 2nd century, and the split-off of Christianity in the late 8th and early 9th century, the community of Mosaic religions underwent a third division.

Our synagogue has not survived this split, but the religious, political and social group who built it has remained powerful in the Levante and in the town of Beersheba in the decades and centuries to come.

To be continued.

 

[Cuāuhtemōc]

Will the greater Confederacy intervene in the Jewish Civil War on the behalf of one of the factions or provide mediation?

 

[Salvador79]

As my comments were quite short about this question, I'll gladly elaborate.

The Sanhedrin's plans for the new temple provoked the conservatives so much that groups in many places turned militant. Then it's only a matter of months until some local conflict, over land or some other property for example, turns into armed conflict. Neither side accepts a supreme authority which could arbitrate. The Confederacy has just won a civil war against conservative slave-holding secessionists in the Med, so the conservatives likely won't accept their mediation efforts, which surely will have occurred because the Confed wants peace in its lands. The conservatives turn to another power for protection instead: the Palmyrene Empire.
And so the civil war also has the characteristics of a proxy war between the Confederacy and Palmyra.
Both are militarily strong, yet they'll avoid direct confrontation. And so the civil war simmers on until its parties are exhausted.
Then, Confederacyy and Palmyra support, through their diplomats, the brokering of a treaty. It's a sort of cuius regio eius religio sort of thing.
But the conservative Jewish civitates are lost for the Confederacy, they becpme puppet city states where Palmyra has their troops garrisoned, which helps them to extend their trade with the Nile Delta on favourable terms by the way...

 

[Salvador79]

Cont.:

[Following the butterflies fly east…]

Statue of Anahita, found near Behdesir


We leave the space of what had been the Roman Empire, and move eastwards to encounter our next object. It is a gilded clay and resin statue of the goddess Anahita, and it is much older than the two objects we have been discussing before. Anahita had been a member of the Iranian pantheon since time immemorial, along with Mithra and the supreme Ahura Mazda. This statue of hers was produced by a skillful Babylonian artisan in the 5th century – a time when shrine cults had become popular under the Hellenistic rulers of the region – and her association with lions, as in this statue, owes to her conflation with Ishtar in this particular region.

In 2520 AUC, she was found in a hoard near the East Persian city of Behdesir, where she must have been hidden and buried for almost exactly 1,500 years. We do not know where her shrine had stood, but in all likelihood, it had been somewhere in Persia. Anahita and her divine colleagues found herself thrown out and their shrines transformed into fire temples all over the region at around this point in time – after statues like these had been worshipped for over five centuries.

What had happened in Eranshahr to cause this?
There had always been an iconoclastic strand within Zoroastrianism, Persia´s dominant religion then and now. Under the Achaemenid, the Seleucid and the Parthian Empires, though, religious tolerance and diversity had been the norm.

This began to change with Ardashir and his establishment of the Sassanid Empire. Ardashir and Shapur, who had conquered vast territories and attempted to bring them under the control of a centralized state, relied on the Zoroastrian priests to a greater extent than the rulers of previous dynasties. Large religious schools were built and financed, and the priests fulfilled the roles of judges in more regions than they had before. But Shapur had also been a tolerant shahanshah, who came to terms with the Jews and Christians living in his Empire, and who even actively supported the prophet Mani.

Shapur, whose career had begun with victories worthy of his predecessor and dynastic founder, had reached the limits of his military potential when the former Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, whose legions had repeatedly been withdrawn in the fights between emperors and usurpers, turned into the Palmyrene Empire led by the King of Kings Odaenathus. Odaenathus had defeated Shapur once in 1007 already, and in the aftermath of his victory had won the allegiance of local rulers of Armenia, Osrhoene and Adiabene – especially the latter being important breadbaskets in dangerous proximity to Shapur`s capital, Ctesiphon.

Shapur had prepared the reconquest meticulously. But when he started his campaign in 1021, his attempt to break through Palmyrene defenses failed in the inconclusive Battle of Arbela. For months, the front see-sawed back and forth across Adiabene. Late in 1021, the fate seemed to turn in Shapur`s favour: Odaenathus fell ill of an unknown disease, or maybe he was poisoned, and died shortly thereafter.
Shapur gathered what forces he could muster and launched another attack, hoping to catch the Palmyrene armies disorganized, dispirited and off guard. His decision turned out to be fatal. Odaenathus` son, Hairan, who had been viceroy and commander of Palmyra`s strong home cavalry, was immediately accepted as the new military leader and king of kings. And Hairan led his well-equipped and disciplined army into battle at Hatra. In this battle, Shapur was wounded by an arrow, which pierced his chin. The disorganisaing effect of this event on the Sassanid army cannot be overestimated. Chaos and panic broke out. Although Shapur survived and retreated with the remaining Sassanid forces behind the Tigris, but his days as shahanshah were over. On the surface, his maiming facial wound was the reason why he could no longer be shahanshah. Below this, the resounding military failure was another, and perhaps stronger, motivation to see him replaced.

Shapur`s three sons – Bahram, Narseh and Hormizd – engaged in a struggle against each other for the succession of their father. The various families of the empire`s high aristocracy each backed a different brother. Hormizd, Shapur`s eldest son, ultimately secured the throne for himself by garnering the support of the Zoroastrian clergy, having established close personal ties with the aging mobedan mobed Kartir.

Kartir was a zealous Mazdaist reformer, and a fervent iconoclast. In Hormizd, he had finally found a monarch who backed his plans to enforce the Zoroastrianisation of more traditionalist Iranian peoples, the persecution of the heretic prophet Mani and his followers as well as of Jews and Christians, whom not only he suspected to be the Confederacy`s fifth column in Babylonia, and the removal and often destruction of "idols" - statues from the Zoroastrian pantheon like Anahita, which had been venerated in the various shrines, as well as statues of Buddha and of Hinduist deities in the lands of Hormizd`s Kushan vassals. Hundreds of shrines, Buddhist temples and other sacred places were turned into Zoroastrian fire temples.

By removing Anahita from her shrine, Kartir and Hormizd had severed various ties. She had been a visible bond between the people of Babylonia and the Sassanid Empire. Papak, the legendary forefather of the House of Sassan, had been a priest in a temple of Anahita. Anahita`s fall thus mirrors Hormizd`s departure from what had been a path of success for a very long time. The increased power of the clergy upset the clans of the high nobility, who were the ones wielding military power, commanding both retinues of skilled professional cavalry and vast armies of conscriptable peasants who worked as tenants on the lands of the noble clans. Religious oppression bred dissatisfaction, on which regional potentates seized. Less than five years into Hormizd`s reign, popular unrest stirred in Bactria and Sakastan. Median, Choresmian and various Parthian clans were rumoured to plot controversies. Hormizd reacted with purges and executions. His brothers became his first victims. When the Banu Lakhm, with whom his father Shapur had begun to knit an alliance, turned against the Sassanids and allied themselves with Hairan, who had begun to call his capital and realm by the Aramaic name of Tadmur, and this alliance conquered almost all the remaining Sassanid possessions in Babylonia, subjecting Ctesiphon to yet another devastating plundering, Hormizd`s star had sunken, too. He was strangled in his sleep by a group of conspirators. His only son, who went by the same name, temporarily suffered the same fate as our gilded goddess: he had to hide in a cave.

With Hormizd`s death, the flight of his son and the defeat of the troops loyal to the House of Sassan by a new alliance led by Vazamar, the Sassanid Empire ceased to exist after little more than half a century.

The new centre of power in Eranshahr had shifted to the East. Vazamar and his Warazid dynasty elevated Balkh to the position of imperial capital. They based their power on close ties, including marital ones, with the resurging Kushans and a newly emerging group of horse-back warriors from the steppe, the Kermikhiones, who served first as mercenaries for the Warazids, and were later elevated to the position of a new clan of the high Iranian nobility. The new empire´s breadbasket was no longer Mesopotamia, which had been lost to Tadmur, but the Indus Valley. And Vazamar, who returned to the policy of religious tolerance in his much less centralized empire, was a strong supporter of Buddhism, who resumed the ample Kushan sponsorship of viharas and the production of new magnificent statues of the Buddha.

But while Anahita remained hidden, and no new or old shrines were restored in the Persis in the foreseeable future, Hormizd the younger allegedly returned from his hideout as a young adult. He united the dispersed small fiefs of his distant cousins and uncles throughout the Parsis and, accepting Vazamar as his overlord, established a unified Persian satrapy within the overarching framework of the new Warazid Empire. Under the relatively autonomous rule of nobles from the House of Sassan and the guidance of mobeds and herbads of a staunchly Mazdaist Zoroastrianism, Persia remained a defiant stronghold of iconoclastic Zoroastrianism in the new and diverse empire.

 

[Salvador79]

Small edits in the last update to enhance readability and flesh out the transition from Sassanid to Warazid Empire a little.

No comments on my destruction of the Sassanid Empire?
How plausible are my butterfly effects in your view?

(The basic chain of dominoes goes: earlier and deeper division of the Roman Empire --> Palmyrene Empire forms under the capable leadership of Odaenathus and consolidates, instead of Zenobia plunging into conquests (ITTL Odaenathus never marries Zenobia, and his son Hairan isn`t killed) --> Palmyra not only fights off Sassanid intrusions, but also intrudes into Sassanid-held territories and, with them being closer to the empire`s centre of gravity, manages to incorporate them better than Rome had been able to --> the Sassanids lose their aura of strength and invincibility earlier, while their empire is still a fragile construction --> worse infights; policies also conducted IOTL become contested ITTL and polarise the realm --> divided Sassanid Empire is a weaker political magnet for e.g. Arabian tribes than IOTL, while victorious Palmyra/Tadmur becomes a stronger one --> another military defeat and the loss of Babylonia --> the window opens for a different dynasty and coalition to take the place of the weakened Sassanids.)

If you find any fault, please tell me, as I am not really an expert on Iranian history.
If you find the scenario plausible: what might be the implications? (I have some ideas fleshed out for North-Western India, but it´s not carved into stone yet, and the whole question of Central Asia is still relatively open, since I have to seriously adapt my initial plans, which featured a strengthened Sassanid Empire instead of its overthrow.) So, if anyone wants to see something specific included in the timeline, there is a bit of space. Who would you like to make a relevant appearance, resp. whose appearance would you consider plausible and consistent? Sogdians? Kidara and co.? New sects? New political groups? ...?

 

[guinazacity]

I'm not an expert in sassanian history, but the update is really good so far.

You mentioned the shahanshah believed Christians and jews were a confederate fifth column. Are there actual groups on the east that follow democratic ideologies such as the good citizens?

 

[Cuāuhtemōc]

Small edits in the last update to enhance readability and flesh out the transition from Sassanid to Warazid Empire a little.

No comments on my destruction of the Sassanid Empire?
How plausible are my butterfly effects in your view?

It's hard for us to comment since we're hardly experts on Iranian history. It's kind of left field for me. I would've assumed that the partition of the Roman Empire would've made the East susceptible to a Persian conquest and not have the Sassanids collapse and lose out to a new dynasty. But history is full of twists so I'd say it's fairly plausible.

 

[Salvador79]

I'm not an expert in sassanian history, but the update is really good so far.

You mentioned the shahanshah believed Christians and jews were a confederate fifth column. Are there actual groups on the east that follow democratic ideologies such as the good citizens?

At about 250 CE, when major divergences from OTL begin to occur, there were many Christians and Jews in Mesopotamia. As for centres of learning, there must have been TTL´s Academiae Martis in the towns where the legions were garrisoned, plus a few minor schools of philosophy like everywhere in the urban Hellenised world. In OTL, religion and philosophy were pretty apolitical there. Until 250, the only thing that had changed from OTL was the military academies. In an early update, I´ve alluded to soldiers from Eastern legions being involved in the Good Citizens conspiracy which killed both Decius and Uranius, so there are some Good Citizens among the soldiers who now have become Palmyrene soldiers. Judging from where they were stationed, this primarily concerns Upper Mesopotamia / Assyria.
After 250 CE, revolutionary ideas could have trickled in from the West with refugees, with missionaries, and with merchants. And they could have grown from the few domestic seeds described above (mainly military ones).
Refugees are unlikely. There must have been tens of thousands at least during the Decian persecutions, but by this time, the Agonistici were just about to form in Africa. The Christian refugees arriving from Western Syria in the early 250s will have brought their OTL-style Christianity which tends to give the Caesar his due.
Merchants are unlikely, too. Successful trade is based on good connections; the Confederacy`s former landowning class, at least those of its members who haven´t been lynched and haven´t fled, has nothing to do and they tend to have such good connections. Thus, it is quite likely that in its early years, the young Confederacy`s foreign trade is mostly run by members of the former Roman upper class, among whom enthusiastic support for the revolution is unlikely to be widespread.
Missionaries – and the active reception of ideas coming in from the West by Mesopotamians themselves – are the only plausible options for foreign influences. I´m positive that both things occurred, and as a corollary, that Agonistic Christians, Simonist Jews, unruly peasants, rebellious slaves and democratically minded intellectuals existed to some extent in Mesopotamia, too.
How many will they be? Some factors speak against large numbers: 1.) the language barrier in the case of Agonistic Christians (the only major Aramaic-speaking centre of Agonistic rebellion are parts of OTL Northern Syria; few Mesopotamian Christians will have known Greek, Latin, Libyan/Berber or Kemetic/Coptic); 2.) the comparatively limited percentage of slaves in relation to the overall population in Mesopotamia (an unbroken tradition from Achaemenid through Seleucid and Parthian times, and when Rome occupied parts of Assyria in the 2nd century, this wasn´t exactly at the height of the Roman slave market); 3.) the relative loss of much of the Greek heritage in Southern Mesopotamia / Babylonia after centuries of Parthian rule, which limits the fertile ground for the adaption of a Platonism-based political philosophy like that of the Good Citizens.
While I think one can say that revolution is not exactly around the corner in late 3rd century Mesopotamia, the undercurrents are there.
Another important factor hasn`t been mentioned by me so far: what the Palmyrene imperial state did, if they persecuted such groups, if they provided them with ample opportunities for rebellion etc. Fortunately, the next update is going to be just on the Palmyrene Empire, or Tadmur as they`re calling themselves now. There won`t be a revolution, so much can be spoiled, but there will be some changes, too.


@Cuauhtemoc,
that was my initial thought, too. But OTL´s Odaenathus held out pretty well against the Sassanids even with much less troops than what I endowed him with ITTL, and in the 3rd century, Sassanid attacks on Roman territories were more like hit-and-run, even though Rome`s defenses weren`t exactly the strongest at this moment. So I thought I´d give this Palmyrene thing a chance to survive, too.
Weirdly enough, I`ve done similar things in other regions, too. The Gallo-Roman Empire, through its Alemannic foederati, has gained ground in Germania, and the Confederacy, through its Agonistic Berber nomads, knits new ties Southwards beyond Rome`s former empire into the Sahara.
When I reflect upon it, I think my underlying logic was that Rome wasn`t so weak after all in the 3rd century (when you look at its population size, for example) as it was apathetic and self-destructive. With new dynamics, even four separate post-Roman states, when they stop fighting against each other – as is the case ITTL after the defeat of Postumus, Probus and Mucianus – may be able to take on the one (well, in the case of the Gallo-Romans, there are more than one…) inimical neighbor they`re faced with.

 

[Salvador79]

Oh, and all of that is, of course, no longer a worry to Hormizd`s heirs, the Warazids, after Hormizd had lost Mesopotamia. Beyond the Zagros, ideas of a democratic and egalitarian revolution will take quite a while to appear.

 

[Practical Lobster]

It seems plausible enough, although the situation with an apparently massive Persian "Satrapy" under the Warazids seems fraught with the potential to get, for lack of a better term, weird - I wouldn't be surprised if the Warazids lose their hold on this region quickly or alternatively bring it closer under their control, but the current situation is unlikely to endure.

At this point you can do a lot with the steppes. Sogdians are always cool, I'm personally somewhat biased in their favor. Historically the Kidarites I believe did an enormous amount of damage to the settled peoples of Central Asia - damage that wasn't undone until the rise of the Hepthalites. However, any major nomadic people who come onto the scene are likely to do the same, I imagine.

Keep up the great work though! Excited to see where this goes and you know I'm a sucker for Iranian steppe nomads.

 

[altwere]

I'm enjoying this.

 

[Salvador79]

Cont.:

Bema Seat from Ctesiphon

Our last object from the turbulent decades after the Roman millennium was crafted in Babylonia, too – but it is clearly a contemporary of the Libyan psalter and the stone from the Beersheva synagogue. No carbon-dating is necessary in this case.

The object is a marble seat, like a simple throne. Although in size and shape it looks fit to seat a human being, it never served this purpose. When it served its function, it was situated in an elevated position at the end of a flight of steps. Its design was to exhibit its emptiness. Our throne is a Manichaean Bema seat, and perhaps one of the first of its kind.

The festival of Bema, as it is still being celebrated by millions worldwide, marks the end of the Manichaean religious year and a month of fasting. Also like the Christian Easter, it is celebrated in spring, with masses which are at the same time feasts, confessions, lectures and initiations. The Bema seat is ostensibly empty – it is the seat of the martyred prophet Mani.

The Manichaean Bema festivity was, logically, established after the prophet`s death. Mani was put to death during the reign of the last Sassanid shahanshah Hormizd, probably in 1023. The first written sources attesting to the celebration of the Bema festivity stem from the late 1030s. This seat bears on its back side, now barely visible, the consonantic Aramaic inscription “mlk mlk Hrn br Dynt yhb” (phoneticised: Malyk Malyki Hairan bar Udaynath yiheb”, translated: “King of Kings Herodianus, the son of Odaenathus, has given [this]”. If we believe this inscription, it means that the seat must have been produced no later than 1048, the year of Hairan`s death. This means that our Bema seat is one of the oldest in the entire world.

The seat and its inscription speak to us about the changes which the young Palmyrene Empire, founded by Hairan`s father Odaenathus, underwent under its second king of kings. When Hairan triumphantly returned to Palmyra after the conquest of Babylonia, he erected a new splendid temple for Bel, the god he worshipped like his ancestors had done before him.

But Hairan was aware that he ruled over a highly multicultural empire with strong centrifugal tendencies, and he observed the subversive influences trickling in from the Confederacy in the West with anxiety. Especially in the Mesopotamian cities and countryside, local kings, city councils and other vassals of his had seriously trouble keeping their increasingly unruly population under control. Hairan, who had learnt a lot about political pragmatism from his father, knew that he wouldn`t be able to control the situation with his imperial troops alone. Especially since these imperial soldiers – in contrast to the local forces commanded by Palmyrene tribal leaders –, although so far loyal to the triumphator, were no small problem themselves, either: Odaenathus had “inherited” them from the Roman Empire, and they had seen themselves as defenders of this Roman Empire. The first generation of these legionaries had mostly become veterans now and had been substituted by men drawn from the local Mesopotamian, Armenian, and Syrian population. But the question of how they could understand themselves and their mission was still painfully unanswered.

He had to build a new identity, Hairan knew. This was something Odaenathus, the pragmatic overlord, had neglected to do, or perhaps consciously decided not to pursue. Hairan began by switching the language of his inscriptions and his central administration from Greek to Aramaic, the language spoken by a narrow-margin majority of his subjects. But this alienated the cities of the Greek Decapolis on the other hand and did nothing to integrate Armenians, Amorites, or Arabs.

Then, a few months later, Mani was killed in Ctesiphon, and tens of thousands of his disciples fled from the Sassanid Empire into Hairan`s realm. They were educated people, grateful to Hairan who granted them asylum. And they gained new converts in the Assyrian towns.

Hairan, King of Kings of Tadmur, was the most prominent among these converts. His turning into a “hearer” in the Manichaean community was, in all likelihood, driven rather by political than by spiritual motivations. But it changed the nature of both the young Manichaean cult and the even younger Tadmurite Empire deeply.

With state support, much more ample than that previously provided by Shapur, Manichaeism spread fast. With Hairan`s conquest of Babylonia, the Manichaean community belonging to Tadmur grew disproportionately in size, and the community`s spiritual centre, Ctesiphon, was brought under control. The donation of the impressive Bema seat for a great gathering hall of Manichaeans in Ctesiphon was perhaps a celebration of this conquest. Hairan founded dozens of monasteries, where the Mani Codex was copied and taught by electi, where new electi were initiated, and where travelling electi, the emerging new spiritual and intellectual elite, found repose on their journeys. Soon, Armenian and Arabian translations of the Mani Codex began to appear, and the cult spread North- and Southwards.

But Hairan´s sponsorship also changed the cult in both indirect and direct ways. Indirectly, it contributed to the formation of a so-far only implicit concept of the Good Ruler, who was not an electus and couldn`t even be one – Manichaeism developed a binary concept of separate state and church hierarchies –, but who took a very significant role in the quest of liberating the light particles of the suffering deity from their imprisonment in the corpses of the demons.

More directly, Hairan insisted – and he conditioned his ample donations on such changes – on the elimination of the Shapuragan from the officially canonized Mani Codex, which thus came to comprise only six books in Syriac Aramaic, and none in Middle Persian. Not all Manichaeists supported this decision, and so in 1031, the young Manichaean faith underwent its first schism, with a small group following the Apostle Psattiq splitting from the rest of the community and insisting on the inclusion of the Shapuragan in the Codex, which would henceforth be called the Psattichean heresy.

Politically, the adoption of Manichaeism as a quasi-state religion broadened Hairan`s support base and provided a narrative for the young state. But it also polarized and disequilibrated the polity.

Non-Manichaeans were still an overwhelming majority, and they would remain a majority in the foreseeable future, with both Christian and Jewish communities as well as polytheistic groups and tribes forming replies, rejections, and cultural antidotes to the Manichaean takeover, and the same is true to a certain extent for various Gnostic sects, too.
Manichaeans formed influential networks, and adherence to their cult was certainly an advantage when you wanted to advance in Tadmur`s imperial army or its slowly growing central administration. With some Arabian tribes like the Banu Lakhm, or Armenian noble clans like the Mamikonian converting to Manichaeism and others, like the Banu Ghassan or the Arsacids, not, tensions and conflicting loyalties began to emerge and exert their divisive influence especially in the periphery. Hairan influenced the selection of Manichaean bishops, attempting to use the potential which the allocation of lucrative membership fee, tithes or voluntary alms provided for maximum political gains in loyalty and alliance-building. This bore the potential for future centralization, but also for bloody civil warfare.

But although Hairan officially converted and inofficially demoted other religions to the second rank, he exercised similarly targeted and divisive policies among the other organized, scriptural religions, too. Hairan supported the conservative Jewish exilarch Samuel bar Issa and granted him some juridical autonomy over his coreligionists, while persecuting the less loyal Simonist Jews – laying the ground for the trust which the Council of Elders in Sepphoris would put in Hairan and the Empire of Tadmur to back them in the Jewish Civil War, an engagement for which Hairan was rewarded with new vassals and garrison towns in the West.
And while Hairan violently persecuted Agonistic and other Novatianist Christians, he also sponsored new church and school buildings for the moderate Cornelian branch in Edessa, attempting to foster a greater sense of autonomy from Antiochia in these groups and bestowing great honors upon the pliant Bishop Paul.

But our Bema seat is connected to this early era of the Tadmurite Empire in more than just the ways explained so far. Being massive, it was never destroyed. But it has evidently ceased to function as a cultic object in the meantime. When the Tadmurite Empire broke down many years later, turmoil broke out, and the Manichaean community was thrown into great calamities. The first Great Temple of the Light at Ctesiphon, where this Bema seat had stood, was destroyed, and the seat was exposed to the elements. It shared the complicated and troublesome fate of the Manicheaen community and the Tadmurite identity, who, at this moment shortly after the Roman millennium, all just began to knit themselves together into a new cultural, political and social web.

 

[Salvador79]

altwere,
glad to hear that!

Practical Lobster,
as for Persia and its place in the Warazid Empire, you´re quite right. Something`s going to happen.
I love Sogdians, too One little problem with a greater role for them is that trade between South/West Asia and China, which was always a main source of income for them, stagnated and decreased at the turn of the 3rd/4th centuries, not just because of OTL´s Roman decline (which won`t take place ITTL), but also because of China`s in the wake of the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians.
And then there´s people who say that the 3rd, 4th and maybe even 5th centuries were a climatic disaster in Central Asia, with much less rain than at other times. Do you - or anybody else - happen to know more about this?

 

[Salvador79]

Although I´m still curious what you think about Manichaeism as a state religion for Palmyra, I´ll already post the next update, for I won`t be able to write anything over the weekend...

From: Lynna Helena Ioannitis: Political Transformations at the Dawn of the Hydrodynamic Age. Vicita: Vicita Academy Press, 2763 AUC, pp. 21-25:

An Age of Innovation​

The early decades of the Confederacy`s existence truly were an era of innovation. The old philosopher Heraclitus seemed to have put the condition socialis of the early Confederacy in just the right words: “Panta rhei”, everything flows. Not only the political constitution, but also legal structures, public institutions and increasingly even technologies underwent an almost-permanent change, each transformation exerting influence on the other domains.

Land reform and synergeia

Landless peasants and slaves had not only thrown off their yoke in many parts of the Confederacy; they had also assumed control over the often large and complex agricultural compounds they had been toiling on for years. These compounds or estates were not just large tracts of land, groves and vineyards. They also consisted of oil presses, wine cellars, sometimes even of grain mills and stone quarries. Where they fell into the hands of those who had always worked with them, usually they were not split up. Instead, they were run collectively, and these collectives now reaped the profits from their hard work.

As tensions decreased and the political situation calmed down to a certain degree, these collectives pressed for a legalization of their land ownership, and they almost always obtained such titles, given the fact that most civitates had an overwhelmingly rural population, and this population had in many cases been, in its large majority, unpropertied before the revolution. This took on dozens of different forms, as was to be expected from spontaneous processes undertaken in polities whose citizens were not judicially erudite and were only about to gather political experience.

It was the Good Citizens who initiated a harmonization of these land reforms and a formalization of the new economic entities across the many civitates. In accordance with their philosophical principles, they sought to cement the system of broad and shared ownership, which would be both economically more productive than a splintering of the compounds, more conducive to political stability and support for the revolutionary system than less equal systems, and more conducive to a behavior of civic responsibility, which the Good Citizens valued above all else.

Thus, the new legal entity of the “Synergeion Eleutheron” (engl.: free cooperative) was created. The Synergeion was a legal person with natural persons as members. Each member was to be equal, i.e. every member held an equal share of the Synergeion and enjoyed equal voting rights on its matters. Along with this new legal entity, a new form of land ownership under Roman law was created, too: the “ager cultus in collaboratione libera”, or, as it was abbreviated in Vulgar Latin, “collabus”. Ager collabus could not be bought, sold, or transformed without a consensual decision of both the ekklesia synergetika/comitium sociorum (the co-operative`s general assembly) and the ekklesia politika/comitium civitatis. On an ager collabus, only the specified Synergeion was allowed to settle, cultivate, erect machinery etc., and the Synergeion was not allowed to conclude “locatio conductio operarum” contracts (=to hire employees), although it can pay others a fixed amount of money for a limited service on their grounds (contracts of the “locatio conductio operis” type, e.g. to repair a mill). Synergeia could admit new members, members could leave the Synergeion, and membership could be transmitted to heirs, but membership was tied to actual participation in the economic activities of the Synergeion. (For absences, the provision of pending membership was instituted later.) The Synergeion`s movable properties were indivisible property of the Synergeion and could only be sold through common decision.

Cranks and Rods
Synergeia became not only a stable and loyal rural backbone of the Confederacy, but also powerful economic enterprises. The key to this development was the strenuousness of their daily work and the multitude of creative minds who attempted to dodge this hard work and still enjoy its fruits. Oil presses, grain treadmills and heavy saws needed to be operated – without slaves, and in most regions also without any availability of cheap workforce in these first egalitarian decades.

Thus it was small wonder that the technological innovation which was made by a Synergeion in Hierapolis in Asia Minor around 1015 spread like wildfire throughout the Confederacy and was copied wherever geography permitted it. The innovation was nothing very sophisticated: two simple pieces of iron. But they allowed for the construction of most effective water-powered saw mills. In Hierapolis, waters from a tributary of the Meander River drove a large wheel, which rotated its axle and with it a cogwheel, which geared transmission onto another cogwheel, on whose axle two cranks were mounted, one at each end of the axle. The cranks were connected with rods to frame saws. Through the crank-and-rod mechanism, circular motion was elegantly transformed into reciprocating motion.

Such sawmills increased the productivity to such an extent that they began to be applied also for lighter materials such as wood. Now, the forces of nature did the work in which humans had had to toil for ages, and the humans reaped nice profits. Sawmill-owning Synergeia often invested and became milling centres, expanding into oil and grain milling businesses, too. Large private estates, as they still existed in Cyprus, Crete and other islands, soon competed in this business, too, in order to remain competitive.
Elemental Forces
But not every Synergeion was lucky enough to be situated near a fast-flowing water. In the 1040s, a Synergeion from the Jewish Mediterranean coast came up with the idea of fitting a mill with a wheel with sails, as they used them on their small ships, which was turned by the force of the blowing winds. The idea of windmills spread even faster than the innovation in watermills, and soon, both ideas were combined in various machines.

Among the more revolutionary applications was the combination of windmill wheel, crank-and-rod and an Archimedean Screw in the 1060s (the latter had been used for centuries to pump water out of mines, but they had to be operated manually or pedally) in a copper mine in Cilicia, which facilitated mining considerably and allowed the Confederacy to use gold and silver from its own mines for its coins, instead of reminting foreign coins, which had, for a while, been the cheaper solution given the price of free, non-servile labour in mining precious metals.
Confederal and municipal schools
The general abolition of slavery, implemented across the entire Confederacy in the 1020s, had even more far-reaching effects. In the days of the Principate, not all slaves had worked on estates or in mines. A significant amount had been personal slaves working in private households and living with the family that owned them.

These (mostly urban) slaves would have become unemployed with the abolition of slavery. Many of their former owners had lost their social positions and sources of income anyway, and were unable to pay them more than the bare minimum they had given them in naturals when they had been their slaves. Some were downright happy to be rid of the obligation without individually manumitting their slaves (which had often been accompanied with a small start-up present from the former owner), others felt obliged to rehire their former slaves as free contractual employees at ridiculous wages, but most former slave-owners chafed somewhat, and most of the former house slaves ended up on the streets. This, at least, had been the experience the Alexandrians had made – and it was an experience the Good Citizens had found horrible. In Alexandria, all able-bodied men had been absorbed into the army which defended the emerging Confederacy. But even so, the women, children and less militarily able had remained a problem.

When, more than a decade later, the slaves of Italy, Greece, Asia and the islands would be freed, Vicarii with Good Citizen background had developed a plan. Quite a few of the house slaves had not been without some education; many were even explicitly hired as teachers for the children of wealthy Romans. Thus, the Confederacy set up a huge confederal orphanage at Pontinium, where emancipated child-slaves were housed and educated – by former house slaves who were hired as teachers and caretakers by a Confederal magistrate tasked with running this unique institution of education. Although this was an incredibly costly measure, some proud civitates like Pergamon, Athens and Corinth copied the measure on a smaller scale. The Confederacy`s near-complete control over the Mediterranean sea trade was filling the confederal coffers with tax and customs money which made the effort possible.

In the middle run, the investment paid off: it created not just an educated workforce, but also an incredibly loyal administrative class – for the majority of those who had been educated in these schools went on to become scribes, treasurers, managers of public infrastructure operations, officers in the vigilia etc.

To be continued with a paragraph I´ll tentatively give the title “Seeing the light(s)”

 

[guinazacity]

snip

God, this almost makes me want to live there. I can't wait for when the three emperors decide it's time for round two.