Alisher Navoi (1441–1501), the national poet of Uzbekistan, is the author of a number of poems in the Chagatay language, among them Stena Iskandara or ‘The Wall of Alexander’, an account of the conqueror's career and an exploration of the nature of kingship. Its title is only one of the most recent evocations of a persistent legend in the Persianate Middle East that Alexander the Great had built a wall somewhere in northern Iran as a barrier against the unclean Nations, Gog and Magog. Ferdowsi's Shahnameh also includes the construction of the wall against Gog and Magog among the deeds of Alexander (Iskandar). This long wall, which, as Gibbon put it, ‘excited the curiosity of an Arab caliph’ (Wathiq, in 842–44) (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1909], IV, p. 278), was regarded by the historian as imaginary, though Ibn Khordadbeh's account of the expedition Wathiq sent to discover it is circumstantial. (But the wall visited by Wathiq's emissary may have been the Great Wall of China.) What he discovered is less certain, for there have been several candidates for this wall, including the wall of Derbent in the Caucasus, the Iron Gate south of Samarkand and the Gorgan Wall in Northern Iran.
The authors of this impressive monograph mention none of the above accounts, regarding ‘Alexander's Wall’ as essentially a western legend originating with travellers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. 6). The wall itself was indeed described by Persian and Arabic authors, including Tabari (a local man), but without the attribution to Alexander. The connection with Alexander is certainly a figment, though the name, in inverted commas, has persisted in some recent scholarship; but the importance of the wall as a monument of Late Antiquity is made very apparent by this book.
Stretching for 195 km eastwards across Hyrcania from the Caspian Sea, studded with 30 forts, and perhaps linked to a further fortification, the Tammisheh Wall, the Gorgān Wall exceeds the length of any other wall in the Roman or Persian Empires. The city of Dasht Qal'eh on the Gorgān plain was a quarter of the size of Constantinople and larger than many contemporary Roman cities. What was it all for? The authors point to the dearth of intensive archaeological study relating to the Parthian and Sasanian Empires. This massive report is the outcome of a survey conducted from 2005–2012, which bids fair to transform understanding of the conflicts of Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity.
The authors convincingly argue for a date in the Sasanian period, probably under Peroz (457–484 c.e.), when the Huns were causing trouble on Persia's northern frontier. The wall was not just a wall but was associated with ditches, canals and aqueducts, constituting an irrigation system, as well as thousands of lime kilns; the size of the forts indicates a military population of many tens of thousands (all of whom obligingly dined on aged goats rather than seizing the younger and more valuable animals of the surrounding farmers, p. 623). The military camp is thus shown not to be a uniquely Roman phenomenon; in fact, it continued in Iran long after the Romans, according to Vegetius, had forgotten how to build one (p. 622). The ditch seems to feature in the semi-legendary account in Procopius of how the entire army of Peroz fell into a ditch and was destroyed (p. 597).
A military population of this size leads to firm conclusions about the nature of the Sasanian army. It has often been supposed that it was rather small, and that there was no standing army until the reign of Khosrow I (531–579 c.e.). This study belies that assumption and leads to consideration of the larger question of the degree of centralisation of the Sasanian Empire. While it is impossible to know whether local or central initiative came up with the idea of the wall (p. 618), maintenance and administration undoubtedly required input from the centre. Sasanian Persia, like most successful empires, was not a loose federation but a centralised state.
While the wall seems to separate the desert from the sown, the nomad world from settled agriculturalists, there is no guarantee that it marks the outer limit of Sasanian control. It may be an example of ‘defence in depth’, controlling lands on either side of the barrier. It seems likely, too, that the wall played a role in securing maritime trade across the Caspian and up the Volga, explaining the appearance of gold, silver and Sasanian coins in South Russia in the fifth to seventh centuries c.e.
The authors convincingly date the abandonment of the wall, followed by medieval decline and legendary memory, in the early seventh century, either as a result of Turkish invasion in 614–17 or in the first wars of the Sasanians against the armies of Islam, between 603 and 630. After this onslaught the region was split up into small principalities, with the wall running uselessly through the middle of one of them.
The Sasanian Empire that emerges from this book is one that was surely the equal of Rome, in strength, in the size of its cities and in its military development – as J. Howard-Johnston had long argued. If Sasanian research has been ‘the Cinderella of Near Eastern Studies’ (p. xi), this book has brought her much closer to joining in the ball. Separate chapters report on the landscapes of the Gorgān Wall, the forts, the brick kilns, the architecture, the ceramics, glass, animal bones and mineral remains, as well as on the underwater and archaeomagnetic surveys. Plentiful photographs make it easy to envisage the landscape and its changes over the centuries. Unfortunately there is no index.
