Into the Land of Bones. Frank L. Holt

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      Inside the city, the sparkling oasis turned ugly. Decaying bodies and bleached human bones lay scattered in the streets. One of Alexander’s men reported seeing packs of dogs gnawing at the dead, while a few stalked and snapped at fresher meals still alive but helpless against the hounds.⁹ The outraged Greeks shuddered as they witnessed this alien spectacle. It was not, of course, the ordinary sight or smell of death that unsettled these veterans of Alexander’s wars. They had made careers of wading through blood pooled deep in captured cities and bodies piled high on battlefields. They had massacred entire populations when so ordered, or when the rush of victory carried them too far to stop. They had certainly witnessed on many occasions the glut of dogs and carrion birds on the dead and dying of war.

      Bactra was different. Alexander’s army had not stormed its gates or scaled its walls. The dogs inside were not growling over the bones of battle casualties. The thing that so shocked the Greeks and Macedonians was that they had entered, unopposed, a city quite alive with normal trade and human traffic, its people going about their daily affairs with a wary eye on the newcomers but not the slightest regard for the carnage around them. As part of their religion, the Bactrians literally tossed their dead to the dogs and even hastened the process by letting these hounds execute their old, sick, and invalid citizens. No one intervened. In fact, the dogs were kept for just this purpose. In their own language, the locals called their hounds something like Devourers or Undertakers and let them do a dirty but sacred job that in Greece would be the work of a tomb or funeral pyre. Alexander and his troops denounced the use of Devourer dogs as a barbaric custom, whereas the Bactrians in turn could not believe that anyone would be so depraved as to set a dead person afire. Alexander had cremated his father back in Macedonia; no one in Bactria could imagine such a sacrilege. What were the two cultures to do, now that fate had thrown them together? How should the living henceforth treat their dead, now that one of the world’s youngest conquerors had arrived in one of the world’s oldest cities?

      To Alexander’s credit, his policy was generally to respect local customs and religions. This had been true in Egypt, where the king paid homage to the bewildering beliefs of that exotic civilization. Indeed, Alexander would in time be mummified and buried there.¹⁰ When the Indian sage Calanus fell ill in Alexander’s camp, the king allowed—even assisted—the preparation of an elaborate funeral ritual culminating in the man’s astonishing self-immolation on a blazing pyre.¹¹ At Pasargadae in Persia, Alexander took special care to restore the aged tomb of Cyrus, and he later punished those who defiled that hallowed ground.¹² Alexander accommodated all sorts of local traditions on his long march from Greece to India, but at Bactra he bristled and would not budge: the Devourer dogs had to go. This decision gave the first hint of an epic struggle that would become as political and religious as it was military. Bactria would be treated unlike any other part of Alexander’s immense empire. The Greeks and Macedonians saw it as particularly alien and developed a singular distaste for its population. In the eyes of Alexander’s troops, nowhere needed civilizing more than this bleak landscape where warlords hid in the hills and a cruel religion brutalized the streets.

      Of course, the tired and ill-tempered invaders were not entirely fair. As one Greek author complained when he later read of the Devourer dogs, Alexander’s compatriots “tell us nothing but the worst” about the native peoples they met in central Asia.¹³ Their biased accounts left out the extraordinary local achievements revealed to us today through the great efforts of archaeologists. The region was certainly urbanized, wealthy, and well irrigated. We must therefore be wary of the ancient propaganda that the conquering Greeks first brought civilization, high art, and economic prosperity to the backward Bactrians. In fact, the land was enjoying one of its periodic golden ages. Thus, Alexander’s army did not find the region in quite the ruined condition that exists today, although the invaders soon did their part to level its towns and cities, burn its croplands, and scatter its population. For a time, the Greeks and Macedonians themselves turned Bactria into a tempestuous wasteland that had to be rebuilt in order to regain something of its former (unacknowledged) glory. That cycle would continue down through the ages, with repeated invasions and periods of rehabilitation, as noted in chapter 1. Some of these eras were worse than others (the Umayyads and Mongols stand out for the long-term effect of their incursions), but it began with Alexander: the extent to which he actually brought high civilization to Afghanistan is the extent to which he destroyed what had been there since the Bronze Age.

      Just a few weeks before Alexander arrived in Bactra, a warlord named Bessus held a raucous war council in the city. If we can trust a deserter’s account of that meeting, passed down through the centuries, this Bessus put on quite a show.¹⁴ Amid great feasting and drinking, Bessus tried to rally the martial spirit of his assembled friends and followers. He boasted of their power and belittled that of the invaders. He invoked the gods of the land to aid his cause and reminded his listeners of his own personal stake in their war against the Greeks.

      Two years earlier, Bessus had fought against Alexander in the Battle of Gaugamela (October 1, 331 B.C.E.) near modern-day Irbil in Iraq.¹⁵ At that time, Bessus was the satrap of Bactria under Darius III, the “King of Kings” who ruled the Persian Empire. The Persian king and his satrap were kinsmen, and Darius desperately needed Bessus and the renowned cavalry from Bactria to help stop the relentless progress of the Greeks and Macedonians.¹⁶ Alexander’s troops had already captured the western third of the empire, and at Gaugamela the fate of everything else would be decided in a few desperate hours of dusty fighting. Darius’s plan, captured after the battle, clearly assigned Bessus and the Bactrian contingent the main task of meeting— and destroying—Alexander’s personal assault against the Persian left wing.¹⁷ During the battle, Bessus and his soldiers fought well, but found themselves pinned down while Alexander charged through a gap in the line and chased Darius from the field. With his own cavalry still intact, Bessus disengaged. According to one modern analysis of Bessus’s conduct that day, “no commander could be blamed for ordering a withdrawal in such circumstances. Later he [Bessus] could reasonably claim that others had let him down, that it would have been suicidal to remain where he was, and that he had not been defeated.”¹⁸

      When Darius and Bessus met again, what remained of the Persian army and its officers must surely have struggled to explain how they had lost to an invading force five times smaller than their own. Whose cowardice had caused such a debacle? No doubt Bessus was still defending his actions when, at Bactra in 329 B.C.E., he argued along the lines quoted above and blamed everything on Darius: It was Darius’s incompetence, not his own poor judgment or Alexander’s generalship, that had gotten everyone in this mess.¹⁹ That is why Bessus had arranged the assassination of Darius in 330 B.C.E. The Persian King of Kings had first been deceived, arrested, and shackled and then shut into a locked wagon to be hauled along like a doomed animal.²⁰ The Bactrian cavalry saluted Bessus as Darius’s royal successor, calling him Artaxerxes V. In time, as Alexander drew near, the conspirators stabbed Darius and left him for dead. They hastened to the safety of Bactria’s hills, as warlords are still wont to do.

      Alexander had not taken this news well. He had beaten Darius, torched the largest palace at Persepolis to settle old scores, and begun to see himself as the rightful new King of Kings in conquered Persia. The brutal murder of Darius deprived Alexander of his coup de grâce and destabilized the newly won empire. The war should have been over, but instead this criminal Bessus claimed Darius’s throne—Alexander’s throne—and defied the superpower to stop him. Alexander would have to invade Bactria to bring this madman to justice. To prepare the way, the king made a speech at Hecatompylus (cited in chapter 1), in which he denounced Bessus and his cabal as a threat to the civilized world. This operation would carry the leader of the Greek and Macedonian world well beyond the original mandate of the League of Corinth. Technically, the alliance had finished its job with the fall of Persia. If necessary, however, Alexander was prepared to go it alone against Bessus. He allowed the unwilling to turn back homeward and paid the rest handsomely to sign on as volunteers with his Macedonians. That is why Alexander needed to frame an essentially personal war in terms СКАЧАТЬ