McCants - Founding gods, inventing nations: conquest and culture myths from antiquity to Islam

Founding Gods, Inventing Nations

William F. McCants

Copyright 2012 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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ISBN 978-0-691-15148-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCants, William Faizi, 1975

Founding gods, inventing nations : conquest and culture myths from antiquity to Islam / William F. McCants.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15148-9 (hardcover)

1. Middle EastCivilizationHistoriography. 2. Middle EastCivilizationPhilosophy. 3. CivilizationPhilosophy. 4. Mythology, Middle Eastern. 5. Middle EastIntellectual life. 6. Middle EastColonization. 7. GreeksMiddle EastHistory. 8. RomansMiddle EastHistory. 9. ArabsMiddle EastHistory. 10. AcculturationMiddle EastHistory. I. Title.

DS57.M434 2012

939'.40072dc22 2011009295

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Palatino

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR MY FATHER,

who loves to tell the story of the founding of his nation, Texas

Gifts of the Gods: The Origins of Civilization in Ancient
Near Eastern and Greek Mythology

Inventing Nations: Postconquest Native Histories of
Civilizations Origins

The Sciences of the Ancients: Speculation on the Origins of
Philosophy, Medicine, and the Exact Sciences

Thanks to Michael Cook, who advised the dissertation that became this book and encouraged me to publish it; to Peter Brown, who helped me develop its Hermetic kernel; and to Patricia Crone, who gave generously of her time and insight and introduced me to classicists with similar interests at a seminar on postcolonial ethnic chauvinism in antiquity. The seminar came too late to incorporate their thoughts into my dissertation, but I have now referenced their published work throughout.

Thanks also to my editor at Princeton University Press, Rob Tempio, for sticking with the project; to Ben Holmes and Dalia Geffen for ironing out the wrinkles; and to Princetons anonymous reviewers, whose criticisms made the book much better. Any errors that remain are, of course, mine.

I am grateful to my family (Mom, Dad, David, Halleh, Martha, and Sina) and scholarly friends who kept the wind at my back. Of the latter, I want to thank Vahid Brown, Michael Doran, Najam Haider, Thomas Hegghammer, Stephanie Kaplan, Stephen Lambden, Todd Lawson, Afshon Ostovar, Sam Parker, and Farzin Vejdani. A special thanks to Michael Horowitz, who provided very helpful feedback at the last minute.

This book could not have been written without the support of my wife, Casey, and my colleague and friend Sholeh Quinn. With two little daughters, Ariana and Eva Daisy, and a full-time nonacademic job, I had no spare moments to work on the manuscript. Casey, determined that I should publish it, gave me every Sunday as Book Day. Sholeh, equally determined, showed me how to make the revisions without making a mess. Thank you both from the bottom of my heart.

Founding Gods, Inventing Nations

IN THE NINTH century AD, Ab Mashar, an Iranian Muslim astronomer from Balkh (in modern-day Afghanistan), wrote that Adam and his grandson Hermes had founded the arts and sciences before the biblical Flood. Fearing that the coming Flood would eradicate all the arts, Hermes inscribed knowledge of them for posterity in temples he built in Egypt. After the Flood, a second Hermes from Babylon retrieved this knowledge, and, through his student Pythagoras, it passed to the Greeks. Prefacing this account, Ab Mashar explained that the Hebrews equated the first Hermes (a god in Greek mythology) with the biblical Enoch; that the Arabs equated him with the mysterious Idrs mentioned in the Quran; and that the Persians equated him with the ancient Iranian king Hshang and identified Adam with their first man and king, Gaymart.

Ab Mashars account is heavily indebted to pre-Islamic thought about the origins and transmission of the arts and sciences. But it also reflects the social and intellectual tensions of ninth-century Iraq, the center of an Islamic empire whose Arab founders were losing their political dominance. At that time, scholarly elites with divergent learned traditions were competing for cultural ascendancy. Some of them were oriented toward Mecca and Jerusalem, others toward Persepolis, and still others toward Athens. They, like Ab Mashar, wrote about the origins and transmission of the arts and sciences not only out of antiquarian interest but also to tell their contemporary audiences what arts and sciences they should value and who should preserve them. Through their accounts of civilizations origins, they defined themselves and their groups, legitimated their authority, and differentiated their learning from competing traditions and claims. Comparing their accounts synchronically provides a map of early Muslim elites and the tensions between them; comparing them diachronically shows how the identity of these elites changed in response to political and social developments.

To understand what is unique about early Muslim theorizing on the origins The status of these traditions and those of the conquerors were worked out textually in the postconquest period through lists and histories of civilizational firsts. What these texts suggest is that the dominant understanding of civilizations origins that emerged three hundred years after each conquest was the product of a complex process of borrowing in which the conquerors took from the conquered and vice versa, and the conquered took from one another. Their reasons for doing so had as much to do with the immediate political and social dilemmas created by empire as they did with the workings of detached antiquarian pursuits.

There is at least one major difference between the three postconquest periods. The Greeks and Romans came to the Near East with a learned high culture, and native elites contested it, adopted it, or did something in between. But the conquering Arabs had no comparable learned culture; consequently, the conquerors and conquered argued over the next three centuries about the content of not only Islamic but also Arab identity and scholarship. As this book demonstrates, the orientation of early Islamic culture was not fixed toward Arabia, and its content drew as much from pagan learning and mythology as it did from religious scripture. What we know today as Islamic culture is the product of a contested process of self-legitimation in the first three centuries of the Islamic eraa process reflected in the mythmaking of the period and whose protagonists drew heavily on the lore of non-Arab and pagan antiquity.

In all three postconquest periods, etiological speculation clustered around four subjects: divine providence, first inventors, founders of native civilization, and the origins of the sciences. A fifth subject, theories of cultural formation in prehistory (