Two of six · Early medieval history
In the centuries after the Roman empire fell, a great many peoples across the world were
in the middle of inventing themselves: taking names, drawing borders, and acquiring
ancestors.
A surprising amount of what they said about it survives. Almost none of it was written for
us, and that turns out to be exactly why it can be trusted.
Historians call the centuries after the fall of the Roman empire the early medieval period. The older nickname, the Dark Ages, was never really about the people who lived through it. It was about the sources.
There is far less surviving writing from these six hundred years than from the periods on either side of them, and most of what does survive was produced by somebody with a case to make.
That sounds like a problem, and it is also the opening. A document that is arguing for something usually tells you who it was arguing with.
In the 730s, in a valley in central Mongolia, two brothers of the ruling family of the Turkic khaganate raised carved stones for their dead. A khaganate is a steppe empire; this one was a serious military power on the northern border of Tang China, which was at that moment the richest and most sophisticated state on earth.
The stones carry the oldest substantial writing in any Turkic language — the family that includes modern Turkish. They also carry a second inscription, in Chinese. The two texts do not say the same thing, because they were meant for two different audiences who were never going to read them side by side.
Every exhibit on this page has two sides. Read the first, then press the button underneath to turn it over. You can turn it back again at any point.
One face of the monument is written in Chinese. It was composed at the court of the Tang emperor, who sent his own craftsmen several hundred miles north to cut it into the stone.
Imperial inscriptions of this kind follow a well-worn pattern, and this one keeps to it faithfully. The dead man is praised. The relationship between the two houses is described as close and cordial. The whole arrangement is presented as settled, long-standing and agreeable to everybody concerned.
If this were the only face of the stone, the story would be a simple one. A cooperative neighbour on the northern frontier, remembered warmly by the greater power he served.
Every exhibit that follows is built the same way. There is an account meant to travel, and an account meant to stay at home, and the useful thing is very often the distance between the two.
A nation almost always presents itself as old. That is what national stories are for. They explain that the people in charge have been here all along, that the borders follow something real, and that the whole arrangement is natural rather than recent.
In this period the claim is often demonstrably new. Groups that had existed for two or three generations were acquiring names, territory and ancestors at speed, and because it happened so recently you can frequently see the joins.
Before you read them, one question, because your answer is a fair sample of what most people bring to this period.
Of these three origin stories, which would you expect to hold up best against the evidence?
Religions travelled enormous distances in these centuries, and they arrived in places that already had gods, temples and settled ways of talking about all of it.
A missionary cannot simply hand somebody a set of ideas. In order to say anything at all, you have to use words your audience already knows, and those words arrive carrying meanings of their own. So the thing that gets delivered is never quite the thing that set out. Decisions get made in the crossing that nobody sat down and made.
Three cases follow. A religion that changed its clothes at every border. An empire that tore itself apart over what a picture is. And a translation project that had to invent the vocabulary it needed while it was already using it.
In a small stone hall in Fujian there is a seated figure in the posture you would expect of a Buddha, inside a building that reads as a perfectly ordinary local temple.
For a very long time that is exactly what everybody took it to be. Visitors came and made offerings accordingly.
The Byzantine empire was what remained of the Roman empire in the east, ruled from Constantinople, and for well over a century it tore itself apart over religious images.
Stated flatly, it can sound like a dispute about decoration. Images were removed from churches, then restored, then removed again. Emperors and patriarchs lined up on both sides throughout, and the argument outlasted most of the people having it.
The Abbasids were the dynasty that ruled the Islamic world from Baghdad, and over roughly two centuries they paid for one of the largest translation projects in history.
Greek works on medicine, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy were rendered into Arabic, often by way of Syriac. Caliphs and wealthy Baghdad families funded it, and it ran for generations.
Put like that, it sounds like a transfer operation. Books in one language, and then the same books in another.
Everything so far was made by somebody with an argument. Chronicles, inscriptions and origin stories are all aimed at a reader, which means they can be checked against other evidence but never entirely taken at face value.
There is a second kind of evidence that is much duller and very much harder to fake. Nobody names a river in order to inform the future. Nobody sets up a government office so that it will be remembered. Things like these record how people lived as a side effect of people living, and a side effect has no motive to mislead anybody.
Four of them below. The third is the strongest kind of all, where somebody preserves a thing precisely by attacking it.
The Guadalquivir runs through Córdoba and Seville and out to the Atlantic. Spaniards say the name without thinking about it, in the way you would say the name of your nearest main road.
A divan is a long low seat without a back, the sort of thing that ends up in a hotel lobby or a waiting room. The word reached English through French, and French had it from Turkish, and by the time it arrived it carried no trace at all of where it began.
Bede was a monk in the north of England and the finest historian anybody in western Europe produced for several centuries. He had a low opinion of the British church — meaning the Christianity of the Britons, who had been in Britain before the English arrived.
It calculated Easter by the wrong method. Its clergy wore the wrong haircut. And worst of all, in his view, it had made no serious effort to convert the incoming English. He set the complaint out at length, and then moved on to the people he approved of.
Walthamstow. A postcode, a street market, the far end of an Underground line. Several hundred thousand people say the name every day, meaning nothing whatsoever by it beyond where they are going.
One more exhibit, and it behaves differently from all the rest.
Everything above rewards turning over. There is an account on the first side and, on the second, a motive, an older name or a quieter version of events, and the second side is the one you actually wanted.
This one turns over exactly like the others.
Found on a mountainside above the Zarafshan valley in the 1930s: a bundle of documents on leather, wood and paper. Legal contracts, accounts, correspondence, a marriage agreement.
It is exactly the sort of material that any administration anywhere produces continuously and that nobody ever thinks to preserve.
Nothing is missing from the Mugh documents. They have been read, catalogued and published in full. Every legal formula is intact and the handwriting is clear.
What is not there is Divashtich himself. Not the man's motives. Not what he believed he was doing on that mountain. Not whether he expected the terms of his surrender to be honoured.
He kept the sort of records that a person keeps, and a person does not write down the thing you want to know.
The other face is always there. It is simply not always the one you were looking for.