As he aged, Buddha advised the sangha to ‘meet in harmony, don’t fall prey to worldly desires’ and to ‘preserve their personal mindfulness’, but he refused to appoint an heir: ‘I’ve taught the dharma, making no distinction of inner and outer … If there is anyone who thinks: “I’ll take charge of the Order” … the Tathagata [himself] does not think in such terms. Why should the Tathagata make arrangements for the Order? I’m now old, worn out.’
In Kushinagar, he achieved in bodily death the elevated state of parinirvana, after which his adepts cremated him and distributed his bones and relics among his followers, who started to build domed stupas in which to store and revere them. Buddha left no writings, but his son Rahula and the sangha preserved his teachings until a council started to organize his order. Buddha did not claim to be a god, merely a sage, and did not wish to create a structured religion, leaving a metaphysical worldview instead. His popularity revealed the human need for a higher mission, to mitigate the terrifying unpredictability of life and the inevitability of death but also to share values and rituals across oceans and peoples: its power was that it offered salvation to all.*
After his death his followers formalized his ideas and rituals, and Buddha himself was soon regarded as divine, his very fingernails revered. Yet it needed a wheel-turning political leader to transform the movement into a world religion. It took time – but the wheel was turning.
Darius never made it to Buddha’s north-eastern India but he conquered Gandhara and Kamboya in the west, recruiting Indian troops who later served in the Persian armies that attacked Greece. He was curious enough to appoint a Greek sea captain, Scylas of Caryanda, to sail from the Red Sea to explore the Indian coast. Then, after a Scythian raid, he ordered his Greek allies, expert seamen, to build a pontoon bridge of boats, lashed together, across the Bosphoros – and invaded Russia and Ukraine.
* Their books were collated into the Bible – exceptional because it records the unique survival of the Jewish people and faith in the face of political and physical destruction. But it became a book of universal significance because the founder of Christianity, Jesus, was a practising Jew who revered and fulfilled its prophecies. In turn, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, studied and revered both Old and New Testaments, which he often cited in his own sacred text, the Quran, making them also sacred for Islam. There is slim evidence that the biblical story of the Tower of Babel might have been influenced by the Babylon ziggurat, but there is no evidence that the Jews deported to Babylonia hated the ziggurat or called it anything other than ‘the temple of Marduk’. Babylon may have influenced the Book of Revelation, but the Whore is probably a much later metaphor for the Roman empire.
* According to the Greek historian Herodotos writing a century later, Astyages (Rishtivaiga) suffered a nightmare about Mandana in which she urinated a golden jet that flooded his empire. But when Mandana became pregnant, Astyages dreamed that a vine grew out of her vagina until it was entwined around the whole of Asia: the child would unite the Medes and Persians.
* The Persians and Medes ‘introduced trouser-wearing to the world’, writes Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. In Egypt, Greece and Iraq, people mainly wore robes of light cloth. In 2008 the mummified body of a boy from 500 BC was discovered in an Iranian salt mine wearing a tunic and baggy ‘harem’ trousers. Herodotos was horrified by the vulgarity of trousers: ‘The Athenians were the first Greeks to endure the sight of Persian clothing.’ Yet the trousers caught on.
* Greeks had started to write captions on their drinking cups. Around 750 BC, one of the earliest examples, at the Greek settlement on Ischia in the Bay of Naples, a Greek named Nestor etched three lines on to his drinking cup that combined verse, storytelling, theology, sex and drinking: ‘Nestor’s hearty-drinking cup am I. He who drinks this cup will soon take fire with fair-crowned Aphrodite’s hot desire.’
* They saw the world as a system that could be studied by lovers of wisdom, philosophoi. Around 500 BC, the contrarian philosopher Heraklitos of Ephesus first used the word cosmos – order – to mean the universe. ‘All things come into being by conflict of opposites,’ he said, ‘and everything flows’ in a constant evolution: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice.’ His view of the infallibility of gods and kings is always relevant: ‘Eternity is a child moving counters in a game; the power of kings is like a child’s game.’ Finally he was the first to define war as one of the engines of human development: ‘War is the father of all and king of all; and some he shows as gods, others as men, some he makes slaves, others free.’
* Between 750 and 650, a group of writers, later personalized as ‘Homer’, wrote two epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, channelling ancient Mycenaean tales. Homer called the Greeks ‘Argives’ or ‘Achaeans’, but a common ancestor named Hellen was invented in a poem Catalogue of Women to give them a name for themselves: Hellenes. It was the Romans who much later called them Graeci, after the first Greek-speaking tribe they encountered.
* This was common to all societies in ancient Greece: there was no concept of sexual identity. The relationship between an older man – the erastes – and a youth, generally fifteen to nineteen – the eromenos – was a normal stage in male life; most men married and had children as well as intimate friendships with other men. But the virile man took the position of sexual superiority.
* At the apogee of Athens, a third of its people were enslaved.
* There was another type of Greek state. In the wild, mountainous north, closer to the peoples of the Balkans and the Eurasian steppe, Greek kingdoms Macedonia and Epiros were ethne, semi-tribal states that had evolved into military monarchies.
* The Egibi family were the first known business dynasty in history: they dealt in property, land, slaves, trading and lending, surviving adeptly through dynasties and conquests. An archive of 1,700 clay tablets reveals their dealings over five generations from about 600 to 480 BC, referencing promissory notes and divisions of land. They married their sons to the daughters of other rich families. Dowries included land, silver, slaves and entire businesses. Starting as land managers under Nebuchadnezzar II and rising to become judges under Nabonidus, they now switched to serving Cyrus and would prosper even more under his successor (but one) Darius. They progressed from lending to rulers to becoming officials for the Great Kings.
* The cylinder is surely the most successful PR document of ancient times and its reputation as the ‘first declaration of human rights’ is absurd: Cyrus and his times had no concept of human rights.
* The Jewish writers of the Bible based their idea of the Garden of Eden on the Persian pairidaeza.
* The Scythians were skilled horsemen but also exquisite craftsmen. Like their fellow Aryans, the Persians, they revered fire as the senior of their seven gods, whose relations with men were mediated by transgender shamans. ‘Their favoured intoxicants,’ wrote Herodotos, ‘were hashish with fermented mare’s milk.’ Scythians cherished silver and gold artefacts, beautifully worked, but they were a civilization that ritualized aggression. They crucified and beheaded their enemies, scalped them (scalping developed simultaneously in the Old and New Worlds), flayed them and used their skins to cover their quivers, their blood as a drink and their heads, sliced below the eyebrows, as drinking cups. Every hundredth prisoner of war was sacrificed. As for their own dead, Scythians removed their brains and guts, which they ate, and interred them in burial chambers, filled with gold artefacts, sacrificed slaves and relatives and horses, all covered by mounds.