The lens is shifted to the west. The broad dry steppe from the Orhon to the Volga is bloodstained. Hook-nosed, bearded H are quitting their native land on the banks of the Selenga and Onon and fleeing, pursued by stocky, broad-faced Hsien Pei, because 'their horses are faster and their weapons sharper than those of the Hunni'. 9 Only small bands of fugitives remained of the powerful Hunni state. Some found refuge behind the Great Wall of China, others in the mountain defiles of the Tarbagatai Mountains, and others on the banks of the Yaik (now the Ural) and Volga-the Hsien Pei pursuers did not go so far.10
But things were not easy for the victors either. The conquered pastures became deserts under their very eyes. The Bet-pak-dala (Hungry Steppe) was growing, the Gobi was spreading south and north, wells and springs sank deep into the ground, rivers became low, Lake Balkhash was drying up, and reeds began to grow in the shallows of the Sea of Aral turning it into the 'Oxus marsh' . It was only possible to live on the Great Steppe in the foothills of glacier-crowned mountain ranges from which little streams of fresh water flowed even in summer. The outlook there was very gloomy. The bearers of the old nomad culture, the Hunni, split up and dispersed. The eastern groups became vassals of the Chinese, the western, having lost many of their wives and most of their children during the retreat of 158-160 A.D., began to steal women from the Alans and Ugrians. The Ryn Sands (between the Ural and the Lower Volga) settled by the Hunni fed them so meagerly that they could be expected either to die out completely or to assimilate with the aborigines (Ugrians, Alans, and the Chionites).
The Hsien Pei confederacy disintegrated, lasting only half-a-century. The tribes making it up separated and became mutual enemies. All the visually gathered facts forced a logical conclusion-the ancient Central Asian culture had collapsed and there were no grounds for supposing it could revive.
But the opinion about the West European culture of that time would have been diametrically opposite. The flourishing steppes around the Black Sea were populated in the second century A.D. by two peoples (ethnoi) -the Alans on the Kuban and the Don, and the Goths on the Dnieper.
Great deep rivers ruled out even the thought of a possible drought. The Alans' economy was already a settled one - tillage was combined in it with transhumance herding. The grain surplus went to the eastern part of the Roman Empire, which paid for the cereals with the products of handicrafts and objets d'art. The Alans already knew the potter's wheel. Their heavy armor was made in the best workshops of Asia Minor and Hellas. Their armored cavalry anticipated the future European knight's armament. All that hinted that a cloudless future lay before the Alans.
And the Goths, who had migrated from Southern Scandinavia to the estuary of the Vistula in 155 A.D., continued a victorious march to the lower reaches of the Dnieper, and from there threw themselves as far as the Aegean Sea where Corinth and Athens, Byzantium and Miletus and famous Ephesus became their victims. The Goths were the best warriors and most capable pupils of the philosophers and heretics of the Near East, whose culture they imbibed as a sponge soaks up water. The Goths subdued or drove away all the ancient tribes of Eastern Europe, with the exception of the Rossomoni with whom they were forced to reckon.
It was obvious for an observer that the Gothic ethnos and its culture were on the rise.
By comparison with the Goths and Alans the forefathers of the Slavonic tribes of the Middle Danube seemed an insignificant sprinkling. Although the dispassionate computer of the hypothetical spacecraft would have noted their existence, the interpreter would justly have paid no attention to them.
On the southern borderlands of the Caspian Sea, from the Oxus (Amu Darya) to the Tigris, lay the Parthian Kingdom. For five centuries (from 250 B.C.) it divided the Oecumene into East and West, lying in the very middle.
The Parthians were the most advanced people of Eurasia. They created feudal institutions before all other peoples. At the head of their state stood four ruling clans: the Pahlavis, who represented the ruling dynasty, the Surenas, the Karenas, and the Mihranis, who would succeed the royal family if it died out. Below them in the hierarchy there were consecutively seven noble clans, 240 noble families, and a host of dihaans, who were similar to the Polish petty schlachta or Spanish hidalgos - poor knights. Lower down still were enserfed peasants, urban craftsmen, and the slaves captured in the endless wars on Parthia's eastern and western frontiers.
The Parthian nobility patronized the culture, or rather the cultures, formed in these lands. The Parthians themselves came from the slopes of the Kopet Dag as warriors who drove the Macedonian conquerors out of the holy land of Iran. But the natives of that country, the Persians, considered the Parthians foreign Turanian conquerors also. Feeling themselves isolated the Parthians thirstily drank in the philosophy of Hellenism, the teaching of the Indian Buddhist monks, and the preaching of the first apostles of Christianity but, equally with these strange ideologies, esteemed the Indian cult of holy fire and the Bactrian teaching of Zarathustra about the eternal struggle of Good and Evil - of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Tolerance was the principle of Parthian culture, and Parthia therefore became an asylum for exiles and outcasts from all the countries around, including Jews, who in that century were the main population of ancient Babylon.
In the second century A.D. Parthia's eastern rival the Kushan Empire, broke up, while the Roman attack on Mesopotamia and Armenia petered out. The Parthian kings and grandees were not only aesthetes but were also fighters.
The space interpreters, examining the computer's data, undoubtedly would have concluded that the beautifully organized system of the Parthian Kingdom, capable of resistance, was a model of the way the progressive part of humanity would develop.
On my assumptions it is not allowed to look into the future, and that is a pity, because in A.D. 224-226 only fragments of its past grandeur remained of Parthia. But the spacecraft's eye-piece has moved on, and is now over Rome.
Unlike Parthian Iran and Sarmatia, the Roman Empire of the second century A.D. would also have presented the space observers an example of completion and perfection that had nowhere to develop, and nothing to develop for.
From the sun-drenched banks of the Euphrates to the Atlantic, and from the parched steppes of the Sahara to the heather hills of Caledonia, the land of the Picts, one law prevailed, one and the same administration functioned, a single bilingual Hellenic-Latin culture flourished, and the overwhelming majority of the population of the polyethnic empire were loyal to the authorities.
Farming, carried on to perfection on tiny plots of land, fed 50 million people. A wall along the Rhine and the Danube, and legions that did not know defeat, guarded the northern frontier, beyond which isolated tribes of Germans lived in the dense forests, and in the steppes between the Danube and the Carpathians the remnant of the Sarmatian ethnos, the Iazyges. Neither of these, nor even more the Celts of Hibernia (Erin), the Moors of the Atlas Mountains, and the Arabs of Transjordan represented the least danger to the regular army. And there where foci of resistance did arise (the Dacians in the thickets of the Carpathian foothills, the Jews in the valley of the Jordan, the bucolic pastoralists of the delta of the Nile, and the Moors of the southern slopes of the Atlas), the enlightened generals Trajan and Hadrian had not left even a trace of these peoples, enabling their successors Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Verus to occupy themselves with philosophy, both Stoic and Epicurean. Rome, whose population rose to two million, began to be called the Eternal City, since no one could imagine that a stable position that suited everyone could be altered. That would also have been the conclusion of the space observer.
The events taking place around 155 A.D. in a narrow strip of the earth's surface stretching from Scandinavia to Palestine could have interested neither him, nor even a quite earthly outside spectator. For the fact that tribes of Marcomanni and Quadi had broken up on the Roman Empire's fortified line of the Danube and disappeared from the face of the earth was small beer, not worth remembering. The fact that a sect had appeared in Syria and Asia Minor that worshipped the Crucified God was a curiosity for the commonsense people of the time. For was it so important, they suggested, that there were fools who preferred an otherworldly existence to an easy, gay life. Well, let them get together in the evenings to talk about salvation beyond the grave; let them not visit the theatre and not enjoy the 'dancing wasp' (Roman strip-tease), so long as they observe the laws, pay their taxes, and bow to the statues of the emperors, because the Roman lick-spittles put the authorities on the same level as the divinities of Olympus. And if, for some incomprehensible whim, they refused to bring sacrifices to the statues of the emperors, they should be punished for not honoring the powers that be, as had been done under all the philosophically minded rulers. But for some reason the punishments did not lessen the number of Christians, but had corrupted the heathens from the people, who had become so addicted to denouncing their acquaintances that Trajan had forbidden the magistrates to accept denunciations of Christians, telling them to commit only those for execution who declared themselves to be such. But there were plenty of these also.
But is it worth our while to talk about this theme? For anyone who looks at Earth from outer space socially perspective phenomena are the important ones, and not psychological eccentricities with hysterical syndromes. For only one thing is interesting - how far the forecasts are true.
Second observation. Fifth century. Course - countersunwise. The cosmic strangers tensely await a new seance of observations, without altering the position of their eye-piece. At last! Again the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean are outlined but instead of Rome there are ruins, instead of flourishing Gaul and Spain, there is a mosaic of territories ceded to barbarians. Everything is mixed: Burgundians, Visigoths, Franks, Suevi, Alans, Almoricans, and remnants of Gallo-Romans around Lutetia (Paris). Vandals hold the coastal part of the province of Africa, while in the interior savage Moors spread terror. Angles and Saxons have landed in Britannia, deserted by the Roman legions; they conquer this country that called on their aid against the raids of Picts and Scots from highland Caledonia (now Scotland). And an these conquerors were descendants of small, weak tribes from the coasts of the North Sea and Baltic, and natives of the Black Sea steppes driven from there by the onslaught of the Huns.
The Huns were a mixture of Asiatic Hunni and Uralian Ugrians who had not only not perished in the Caspian sand dunes but had extended their power from the Yaik (Ural) to the Rhine. Attila is leading a numerous horde, augmented by Ostrogoths, Gepidae, Rugi, Heruli and Slavs, to the walls of Orleans and Aquileia. Rome is paying tribute to the Hun king.
What became of all the marvelous culture, engineering, art, and philosophy? The old gods had been declared demons in all the cities of the Empire not yet sacked by the Germans. But these cities were not defended by the descendants of Italian legionaries, while these same Germans only did so for pay.
It has to be admitted that the prediction was mistaken.
The forecast about the Eastern Empire proved to have as little truth. The very dreamers who had offered themselves up for execution during the period of universal well-being had won out there. Now, in the fifth century A.D., their descendants are telling the secular power, whose representatives are only parishioners and not servants of the Church, what to do. But among the servants of the Church there is not even a ghost of the friendly spirit that united the Christians of the second century. People were divided by hostility, old as the human race, but now dressed in the garb of confessional disputes. The Donatists, who rejected contact of the Church and State, were strong in North Africa. Arians spread their doctrine among the German tribes. Nestorians had found support in Syria and Mesopotamia, and Monophysites in Egypt and Armenia; only Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy remained Orthodox. In these currents of theological thought, it should be noted, there was concealed a kernel of future ethnoi, but from outer space these fine nuances are indistinguishable by the most sensitive instruments. From high up it seems that, since people were killing each other in the name of slogans, the slogans should be cleared away and all would live in peace. But since interference in history is ruled out, a new forecast can be made - the degenerating antique culture must give way to as yet unspoiled barbarians: Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and of course the Huns, who knew how to unite and draw all their neighbors after them. So it could, and even should, have been thought in 452 A.D., but in 453 the Hun federation broke up, and in 469 the remnants of the Huns, broken by the Byzantines, fled into nowhere and disappeared from the pages of history.
In Iran the Parthian aristocracy has been succeeded by the Persian monarchy, an alliance of throne and altar, i.e. of the Zoroastrian clergy and the dihaans or village lords. The aristocracy was unbroken but became an opposition to the shah's centralized authority, or rather to the bureaucracy of the shah's divan (or chancellery). The money to maintain the luxurious court and to pay the dabiri (officials) did not come from taxes on the poor peasants, hardly able to keep alive, but from imposts and duties on the transit silk trade between China and Europe.
The system of state and society had become rigid, excluding any progress. But it seemed as unbreakable as a rock, because all its elements were so complicated that any reorganization would prove fatal. Once a year, it was said, the Persian shah gave a feast for all the estates of Iran and pronounced a traditional speech at it: 'You are the happiest people in the world. The grandees of course live worse than me, but better than the dihaans, and they better than the urban craftsmen, but these live better than the peasants who live better, than the slaves; but the slaves live better than the criminals in prison who are better off than those condemned to death, and those who are hanged are better off than those who are impaled.' After the speech he drank a cup of wine and withdrew, while the lucky Persians feasted and dispersed. If that is not true, it is cunningly invented.
But if one adds to the description of the social system that the Persians successfully defended their frontiers in the fifth century against the Greeks in the west and the Hephthalite highlanders of Hindu-Kush in the east, broke the steppe tribes of the Chionites and Kidarites, subdued the Georgians and held the Armenians in subjection, then another forecast should be made, that the Persian kingdom would be much more stable than rebellious Byzantium, and the cult of fire, which had endured for and was hallowed by centuries, would probably outlive the dismembered Christian Church. Well then, let us draw a conclusion for the new seance of observations, i.e. three hundred years later.
One surprise follows another. The steppes withering in the second century have again grown green. The space observer could not know that the Atlantic depressions and Pacific monsoons that bring moisture to Eurasia were shifting their path a thousand kilometers to the south. In the fifth century A.D. they were again passing over the steppe zone and watering the Mongolian and Jungarian steppes.
Nomads of the Tölös tribes, one of which, the Uighurs, made itself famous in the history of Asia, crossed the shrinking Gobi Desert from the south. Failures, criminals, deserters, and suchlike elements fled there, forming the Kushan Horde in the Great Steppe. Following them, from Hansu to the slopes of the Hangai arrived the band of a Prince of the Ashin dynasty, altogether 500 families, which laid the basis of the Old-Turkic ethnos, saving themselves from the enemy.
On the western edges of the Great Steppe Ugrian tribes (Bulgars) defeated the eastern Huns in 463 A.D. and spread from the Volga to the Lower Danube. And to the north of the Bulgars, from west to east in the wooded steppe belt, spread settlements of Slavs, as far as the right bank of the Dnieper.
Even the outline of the Caspian Sea was different. In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. its level reached its lowest ever - minus 34 meters (six meters lower than in the twentieth century). The delta of the Volga then stretched almost to the Buzachi Peninsula, and an immense tract of fertile land was not inundated. This country was settled by Khazars, who spread from there to the lower reaches of the Terek.
The world had really been transformed in 300 years, but not quite as the interpreter in the spacecraft had suggested.
But if the astronaut could still recognize the world changed by history and appreciate the magnitude of the mistake of the forecast, he would not have believed his eyes when he saw the valley of the Huangho, where Han China was located. For a period proved to have been omitted in which the Yellow Headdress Uprising rumbled across this unhappy land, destroying the culture, that drove the people to execution. The uprising was suppressed by the regular army and volunteers, who then destroyed each other, freeing space for bands of condottieri who put soldier-emperors on the throne of China, under whom the fratricide and despotism reached its culmination, which provoked an uprising of the Hunni who conquered northern China. The population of China was then divided; the rich fled south, beyond the Yangtse, leaving the poor to the mercy of the conquerors.
The age of the 'five hordes' began (there were actually 27). The Hunni were succeeded by the Hsien Pei Muyongs, and they by the Tanguts, and the Tanguts by Tibetans crushed by the southern Chinese, the latter being driven back by the steppe Hsiung Nu. Finally, the Tabghatchi, who arrived in China from the banks of the Kerulen, were victorious. They defeated all their rivals, but adopted the culture of the local population, the Chinese language, and Buddhism. In the fifth century, an immense chimera lay in the place of Han China, savage, senseless, and gradually becoming enfeebled. 11
But in the south, where the Chinese emigrants mixed with the local tribes, a second chimera was created - evil, cowardly, and treacherous. Between North and South a stubborn war that no one needed was being waged, the only which the cosmic stranger would have seen (leaving out the origin of the situation in accordance with the conditions of the exercise), once more convinced of the wrongness of his predictions and the capriciousness of the course of the history of various peoples.
But the interpreter is not lost. He is shrewd. Noticing that Buddhism is successfully spreading throughout China in the fifth century A.D., he ascribes the inertness that the two ethnoi of China - both the southerners and the northerners - are sunk in, and that enables savage tyrants and usurpers to push people into senseless bloodshed, to this 'enervating and mystic doctrine'. And it all looks very connected because the events of three centuries are omitted.
A logical forecast can again be given -the position of the peoples of the Far East is hopeless. The philosophy of 'inactivity' and 'contemplation' will not give them a chance to overcome the crisis; stagnation and decline he ahead of China, which will be obvious during the next seance in the eighth century.
And it is not worth getting discouraged because the first forecasts did not turn out. The astronaut lacked experience then, which was why some details remained unallowed for. That made for error, but it will not happen again.
Third observation. The eighth century. Following the Sun. A new disillusionment with the method employed! In China, united and powerful, rules Hsüan Tsung, an emperor of the Tang dynasty that had subdued Middle Asia (658 A.D.), North Korea (668 A.D.), Central Asia (745 A.D.), and the Pamirs (747 A.D.). Within the country there was plenty; the price of rice had never been so low in all the history of China. The population grew up to 57 million. Education is valued highly. State examinations had been introduced for grades of rank, and all officials read (or knew how to read) Confucius and Lao-tzu. Ch'ang-an, the capital of the empire, was a city of a million population where schools, a theatre, and a conservatory for singers and dancers functioned. The best poets of China Li Po and Tu Fu read verses to the court aesthetes; those not interested in verses listened to debates between Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks who had visited India and Khotan, while others wrote the history of the past Sui dynasty (A.D. 581-619).
So, instead of stagnation and decay, an unprecedented flowering and a prospect of spread of the power of an enlightened, humane monarchy throughout Asia.
All the astronauts of our spacecraft draw such a conclusion. But if they had kept China in the field of their eye-piece for even a year they would have seen how three of the best armies of the Tang Empire were routed: one by Arabs in the valley of the River Talas, a second in Manchuria by the Khitans, and the third in the jungles of Yunnan by Tibetans and local tribesmen. And in another five years a rebellion by border troops not only destroyed the might of the Tang Empire but also brought calamities to the population of China perhaps comparable only with the terrible epoch of the Three Kingdoms. Once more the wrong moment!