But there is no time to linger in China. It is important to know whether the proud tower of Iran rises high, and whether the golden palace of Byzantium has fallen to pieces? The eye-piece scans the Near East - and Iran is nowhere to be seen!
In place of Iran, the Arab Caliphate with its capital in Damascus stretches from the Pamirs to the Pyrenees. But Constantinople stands as before, and in the Church of St. Sophia mass is sung in honor of Virgin Mary Odigitriya who had granted the Orthodox Christians victory over the fire-worshippers (Persians), the pagans (Bulgars), and the Muslims (the Arabs who had conquered Syria, North Africa, and Transcaucasia).
But three hundred years earlier it was not at all possible to foresee that a handful of nomad pastoralists and camel herders would occupy first place in the world, and that petty traders from tiny towns (Medina and Mecca) would become the vice-regents of former kingdoms. The prediction did not take into account something very important that could not be recorded from up high by the most exact instruments.
It was even more strange that the victorious Arabs were stopped by the small tribe of Khazars living along the lower reaches of the Terek and Volga, in the reeds and riverside thickets of those rivers. Who were these Khazars? What did they derive their strength from? How far would their successes extend? Those are questions the space observer was not in a position to answer, although he had hopes that one of his forecasts would be confirmed; the vital forces of barbarism (and he considered the Khazars savages) should triumph over the gilded rot of civilizations. To test that conclusion he turned his telescope to the west.
Alas! There, where kingdoms of Vandals (in Africa), Visigoths (in Spain), Ostrogoths (in Italy), Franks (along the Lower Rhine), Burgundians (in the valley of the Rhone), and Anglo-Saxons (in Britannia) had been formed in the fifth century, lay ruins. The Vandals and the Ostrogoths were destroyed by the Byzantine Greeks, and the Visigoths by the Arabs. The Franks, having conquered Gaul to the Pyrenees and subdued the Burgundians, had suffered a very violent turmoil. Of what? Of everything! The state, the Merovingian dynasty, morals, customs, the economy, military might, and spiritual culture.
All their neighbors had attacked the descendants of the bold conquerors: the Celts in Britanny, the Basques in Gascony, the Frisians in Lower Country, the Avars in Upper Germany, and the Arabs on the coasts of the Mediterranean. The Franks defended themselves as best they could, sometimes successfully (as in A.D. 732 at Poitiers, when they beat off an Arab sortie that had driven from the Ebro to the Loire), but more often badly. The Angles and Saxons, who had surprised the Celts at first by their cruelty, had gone over to the defensive, so that instead of coordinating their forces, they had created seven mutually hostile kingdoms. Ravaged Italy was held by the fierce tribe of Langobards; like the other Germans of the time, they proved quite incapable of establishing order in the conquered lands.
It turned out that barbarism, too, was not salvation from troubles, and that something else was needed to create a culture one could live by. But what that something was is not visible and clear to the astronaut. The interpreter, refusing to make a forecast, therefore asked for the last seance to be held in the first half of the twelfth century after which, if he did not cope with predicting the future, the method of research would have to be changed completely.
Fourth observation. The twelfth century. Course - countersunwise. Western Europe, which had fallen to pieces, is on the upgrade that is called feudalism. Everywhere there are wars, big ones, medium ones, little ones, internal and overseas. The last-named are waged under the grandiloquent title of 'Crusades' to Palestine, where the first colony of Europeans - the Kingdom of Jerusalem - is noticeable even from a cosmic height. A fierce war to wrest the Iberian Peninsula from the Arabs and Berbers shakes Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarra. It is called the reconquest and proceeds with varying success. In the north-east of Europe the Germans begin a drive to the east. They slaughter the Slavs on the banks of the Elbe and the Prussians on the shores of the Baltic. The French Normans have already conquered the English and Sicilian kingdoms and the princedom of Antioch. They were foremost in boldness, organizing ability, and enterprise, yielding the palm in the realms of literature and art to their southern neighbors the Provencals. Toulouse was a worthy rival of Paris and Rome.
Townsmen competed with the feudal lords. Venetian and Genoese galleys ploughed the azure main of the Mediterranean, bringing the ship-owners overseas luxuries and incomes prodigious for the times. Florentine money-lenders were extending their tentacles to all the capitals of Europe. The Roman clergy and the patriciate were not only demanding from the Pope the right to dictate the mode of life and legal norms to Catholics, but were also appropriating part of the income from church tithes to themselves. Everything was seething and in full swing; everything was being rapidly ruined and renewed, but the now wary cosmic observer declined to predict what would come of it. And that was the best he could do.
But the distance from the object of study provided an opportunity that was lost in close up. This is generalization which is just as real and necessary as detailed elaboration for deepening a narrow theme. Entities became clear for the space traveler that were only comprehensible mentally for earthmen. From high up it is clear that such unlike ethnoi as Spaniards and Swedes, Scots and Neapolitans, English and Czechs, constitute an entity, are aware of it, and even call themselves the 'Christian world', excluding from that definition the Greeks, Bulgarians, Russians, and Irish. Unity of the dogmas of faith does not embarrass them because they invest the title with a quite non-religious sense. They therefore oppose themselves to the eastern pagans, living on the shores of the Baltic, to the schismatics who do not, in principle, acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope (at a time when they themselves do not want to reckon with the Papacy), and to the Muslims.
But the Muslims in turn oppose themselves to all 'nonbelievers', although they wage the cruelest wars against their own Shiites (the Shiah is a party, here a confessional trend with a political coloring). In both cases ethnic fragmentation prevented a decisive victory over opponents, and the astronaut decided not to predict Victory for either the disturbed 'Christian world' or the divided 'world of Islam', between which Byzantium was squeezed.
In the thirteenth century Constantinople was the richest city in Europe. Robert de Clari wrote that 'two-thirds of the property of the world was in Constantinople and one third dispersed throughout the world'. 12 And in fact the wonderful structures that skilled craftsmen had embellished with objects of refined luxury; the markets full of the grain from Alania, the furs, caviar, and slaves from Rus, the silks from Baghdad and China, the wines from Greece, the horses from Hungary and Bulgaria; the schools where the poem about the bold Digenes Acritas and the verses of Roman the Sweet Singer were studied together with Homer and Plato, the radiant temples and powerful walls made the city a special small world, organically blended into the body of the Byzantine Empire.
But all around the capital, on both sides of the Bosphorus, on the sun-drenched hills of Thrace and Bithynia goats grazed, cicadas chirped, and sunburnt peasants pruned grapevines or gathered olives from rented allotments or in the fields of the landowners. And the semi-savage highlanders of Epirus and the Taurus made swords and arrows to repulse enemies - Catholics and Muslims. The luxury of the capital was not for them. Their lot was labour and war.
The capital and the provinces had ceased to think and feel alike, and that means to act in agreement. The educated bureaucrats of the capital had created a civil party in order to curb the provincial landlords, who knew how, and wanted, to defend their homeland. 13
Unlike the Romano-German 'Christian world', young and on the way up, although very painfully, the Orthodox world of Byzantium was experiencing its golden autumn in the thirteenth century. Much lay behind - the fiery speeches of St. John Chrysostom, the grandiose thoughts of Justinian, the loss of Syria, Egypt, and Italy, the frenzy of the iconoclasts, and the restoration on the ruins of the Eastern Roman Empire of a powerful Greek kingdom that united, under Basil II (976-1025), almost all the Orthodox lands of the Near East. But that prosperity was followed by calamity in 1071 when Asia Minor, overrun by the Seljuk Turks, Southern Italy, conquered by Norman French, Serbia, which had rebelled against the Greeks, and then Bulgaria, where the Bogomils called in Pechenegs to fight the Orthodox in 1086, were lost all at once. Such a combination of calamities could not have been a matter of chance. Something was obviously rotten in the state. But what?
What would the cosmic observer think about that? He might with equal success have predicted the triumph of the brilliant urban civilization and the ruin of the disintegrating Byzantine bureaucracy. But in both cases he would have been wrong.
Hypertrophy of civilization brought Byzantium to the verge of death, while the charm of culture drew to it the hearts of sincere friends and allies who did not spare life for the sake of beautiful ideals.
There were friends in the Abyssinian plateau, and in sun-baked Nubia, and in the green forests of Rus, and in the snowy wastes of Mongolia. The old enmity between Chalcedonites (Orthodox), Nestorians, and Monophysites had lost actuality. The Orthodox world, politically divided, was aware of its cultural wholeness, which would have seemed eternal from cosmic heights.
But where was the Arab Caliphate? It was no more. The sovereign of the Muslims still sat in Baghdad, but there were few who reckoned with him. The emirs of Spain and North Africa had become independent rulers. Central Asia, Iran, and Syria had been conquered by the Seljuk sultans, and in Arabia itself the Karmathians - the Muslims' worst enemies - were playing havoc. Karmathian fortresses rose on the heights of Lebanon. Ismailites, who thought like with them, lay hidden in the towns of Persia and the mountains of the Pamirs, and their co-religionist - the self-styled Fatimid (descendant of the sister of the Prophet Muhammed) - sat on the throne of Egypt.
The political disorganization was no less than in feudal Europe, but on its background there was a flowering of Muslim culture and erudition, because scholars were respected everywhere, and no sultan - a hand against them. The culture of Islam spread deep into Africa, to the islands of the Malay Archipelago, and up the Volga to Great Bulgar.
Yes, but what became of Khazaria? Why is there no sign of it? Again the fragmentary character of the observations and incompleteness of the analysis deceived. I can now say quite definitely that the method of my astronauts was faulty, although it coincided with the school of aggressive dilettantism very common on Earth. Wherever history is not traced year by year, and wherever the events described are not tied up with one another, even when remote in time and space, a proper conclusion cannot be drawn.
But the method of narrow specialization, in which systems links are also ignored, is also fruitless all the same, in spite of its looking scientific. For wherever there is no global link of cause and effect, any degree of detail is doubtful.
Since my imaginary space travelers are clever beings, they obviously drew a similar conclusion from their observations. They therefore stopped the work of the instruments, having ignored the Far East of the twelfth century, and landed their scholarly confrere on Earth in the lower reaches of the Volga, i.e. in the very center of the territory being studied. They proposed that he should study the history of the observed period, in order to understand what was what. Otherwise, they threatened him with being converted into a research worker, and they knew quite clearly the difference between being that and being a scholar.
I met this man from another planet on the slope of a big mound, when I was searching there for Khazar burials and fragments of Khazar pottery. It was frightening for me at first because he was ghostly, but then we talked, and he told me many interesting things about the history of the Khazars and their times. Don't be surprised. Thor Heyerdahl also talked with A'Khu, so there is a precedent. For a long time I was afraid to publish a Russian translation of our talk because there are orientalists in Leningrad who would have demanded a record of the text from me, the author's name, and his signature, and I have none of those. We communicated by telepathy, his name sounded such that there are no letters to write it down, and I cannot produce proofs, because a flying saucer whirled by in the middle of our conversation, gathered up my interlocutor, and disappeared. So I kept quiet, in order not to be accused of mystification or being a mystic. But orientalists can do that.
Later, however, I plucked up courage. I believe there are indeed people among us who know what a 'literary ploy' is. But orientalists will not read me, because they don't read books, but translate texts. If they do read my book, however, they will all the same pull everything to pieces, as they can't help it. So I made up my mind, having recalled not the other-planetary word, but our own, 'may be', after which I wrote the interpretation of ethnic history presented below, and its possibilities for clarifying the causes of ethnogenesis.
Mankind as the species 'Homo sapiens'. We are accustomed to say 'Man and Earth' or 'Man and Nature', although it is already explained in secondary school that this is elementary, primitive anthropocentrism, inherited from the early Middle Ages. Of course man has created technique, which had not been done either by the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era or the saber tigers of the Cainozoic. But, for all the achievements of the twentieth century, each of us has his inner nature which constitutes the content of life, both individual and species. And no one, other things being equal, rejects what instincts tell him. Man has remained within the bounds of the species and within the Emits of the biosphere (one of the envelopes of planet Earth). Man combines the laws of life inherent in him with specific phenomena of technique and culture, which, though enriching him, do not deprive him of his involvement in the element that gave birth to him.
As a biological form mankind is the sole species with a vast number of variations which have spread over the whole surface of the globe in the post-glacial period. The density of the species' distribution varies but, with the exception of the polar ice-caps, the whole of the earth is man's habitat. And it should not be thought that there are 'virgin lands' anywhere, where man's foot has not trod. Present deserts and jungle are full of traces of Paleolithic campsites; the forests of the Amazon grow on redeposited soils once disturbed by the farming of ancient inhabitants; traces of structures we do not understand have been discovered on the rocks of the Andes and Himalayas. In other words, the species Homo sapiens has repeatedly and constantly during its existence, modified its distribution over the earth's surface. And like any other species it has striven to master the greatest possible space with the greatest possible density of population. 14 But something has prevented it and limited its opportunities. What was it?
Unlike most mammals Homo sapiens cannot be called either a gregarious or an individual animal. Man lives in collectives that are regarded, depending on the point of view, sometimes as a socium, sometimes as an ethnos. Or rather each human being is simultaneously a member of a society and a representative of an ethnic national group, but these two concepts are incommensurable and lie on different planes, like length and weight, for example, or a degree of heat and an electrical charge. Mankind's social development has been well studied, and its regularities formulated, by historical materialism. A spontaneous development of social forms through socioeconomic formations is inherent only in man, who lives in a collective, and is not linked in any way with his biological structure. This point is so clear that there is no need of labouring it. But the question of ethnic national groups, which I shall call ethnoi so as to avoid terminological confusion, is full of absurdities and is extremely confused. One thing is certain: there is no person on earth outside an ethnos. Everybody answers the question 'Who are you?' by 'a Russian', 'a Frenchman', 'a Persian', 'a Masai', etc., as a rule, without pausing for a minute to think. Conscious ethnic affiliation is consequently a universal phenomenon. But it has not always been so.
The definition of the concept 'ethnos'. What significance, or rather what sense, does any one of the people listed above attach to his reply? What he calls his people, nation, tribe, and what he sees as his difference from his neighbors, are still an unresolved problem of ethic diagnostics. For an ordinary person the problem does not exist, just as he does not need a definition of the difference between fight and dark, heat and cold, bitter and sweet. In other words, feeling functions as a criterion. That is sufficient for ordinary life, but not for understanding. There is a need for a definition. But that is where inconsistency arises. 'An ethnos is a phenomenon determined by community of origin'; 'an ethnos is the result of culture on the basis of a common language'; 'an ethnos is a group of people resembling one another'; 'an ethnos is a gathering of people united by common self-awareness'; 'an ethnos is an arbitrary, conventional classification grouping people according to some formation or other' (which means that the category of ethnos is not real); 'an ethnos is a result of the geographical environment, i.e. of nature'; 'an ethnos is a social category'.
Generalizing the views of Soviet scholars, diverse in details, on the relation of nature and social man, one can single out three points of view: (1) a 'single' geography reduces all man's activity to natural patterns; (2) some historians and ethnographers consider all phenomena connected with mankind to be social, making an exception solely for anatomy, and sometimes physiology; (3) manifestations of social form of the motion of matter are distinguished, plus a complex of natural forms (mechanical, physical, chemical and biological), in the anthropogenic processes. The third conception seems to me to be the only correct one.
The point of view of M.I. Artamonov, a famous archaeologist and historian of the Khazars, has a special place. In his view, born of long concern with archaeological, i.e. dead, cultures and memorials that lack self-development, but are demolished by the course of time, 'ethnos, like class, is not a social organization but a state or condition' and 'man's dependence on nature is less, the higher his cultural level; that is a copybook maxim'. It is hard to agree with that.
Let me begin with the last thesis. Man's organism is part of Earth's biosphere and is involved in conversion of the biocoenosis. No one can prove that a professor breathes differently than a Bushman or reproduces in an asexual way, or is insensitive to the effect of sulphuric acid on his skin, that he can not eat or, on the contrary, will make a dinner of 40 persons, or that gravity affects him differently. And all that is the dependence on nature of the organism itself, which acts and thinks, is adapted to a changing environment, and itself alters the environment, adapting it to its needs, and is united in collectives, and creates states within them. The thinking individual constitutes a single whole with the organism, and does not therefore go beyond the limits of living nature, which is one of the envelopes of planet Earth.
But man differs from other animals in that he makes tools, creating a qualitatively different layer, the technosphere. The works of man's hands, from both inanimate and animate substances (tools, works of art. domestic animals, cultivated plants), fall out of the cycle of conversion of the biocoenosis. They may only either be preserved or, being unconservated, are broken down and destroyed. in the latter case they are returned to the womb of nature. A sword dropped in a field becomes rusty, converted into iron oxide. A ruined castle becomes a mound. A feral dog becomes a wild animal, the dingo, and a feral horse a mustang. This is the death of things (of the technosphere) and nature's recapture of material stolen from her. The history of ancient civilizations shows that though nature suffers loss from technique, she ultimately takes her own back, with the exception, of course. of objects that are so transformed as to become irreversible. Such are the flint tools of Paleolithic times, the polished slabs at Baalbek, concrete squares and plastic articles. They are corpses, even mummies, that the biosphere is powerless to take back into its womb, but processes of inert matter (chemical and thermal) can return them to their original condition should our planet suffer a cosmic catastrophe. Until that happens they will be called memorials of civilization because even our technique will one day become a memorial.
So the concept 'ethnos' is introduced into the problem of the relation of man, as the bearer of civilization, with the natural environment in the sense of a stable collective of individuals that opposes itself to all other similar collectives, that has an inner structure, in each case peculiar and a dynamic stereotype of behavior. It is through ethnic collectives that mankind's link with the natural environment is realized, since the ethnos itself is a phenomenon of nature.
Running ahead of my story, let me say that ethnoi are a phenomenon at the boundary of the biosphere and the sociosphere, that has a very special function in the structure of Earth's biosphere. Even though this seems a declaration, the reader for whom this book has been written now knows that the author is not trying simply to present a formulation but to show the whole way it was achieved and the grounds that convince him that the conception proposed meets all the demands made of scientific hypotheses at today's level of science. After that reservation we can now pass on to the system of proofs.
NOTES
1 V.I.Vernadsky. Khimicheskoe siroenie biosfery Zemli i ee okruzheniva (The Chemical Structure of Earth's Biosphere and Its Environment), Nauka, Moscow, 1965, pp. 283-288.
2 Giovanni Gentile. The Transcending of Time in History. R. Klibansky and HJ. Paton (eds.). Philosophy and History. Essays presented to Ernst Cassirer. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1936, p 103.
3 Ibid., p 104.
4 Wilhelm Dilthev's Gesammelte Schrifien, Vol 7. Verlag von B.G. Teubner. Leipzig, Berlin. 1927, p 161.
5 Patrick Gardiner. The Nature of Historical Explanation. Oxford University Press. London. 1955, p 109.
6 Anatole France. Penguin Island Translated by A.W. Evans. The Sun Dial Press, Inc., New York, 1908, p VI.
7 Karl Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Collected Works, Vol.- 3. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, pp303-304.
8 Karl Jaspers. Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. Artemis-Verlag, Zürich, 1949.
9 N.Ya. Bichurin. Sobranie svedenii o narodakh, obitavshikh v SredneiAzii v drevnie vremena (Digest of Information about the Peoples Inhabiting Central Asia in Ancient Times), Vol. 1. Nauka, Moscow-Leningrad, 1960, p 175.
10 See: L.N. Gumilev. Khunny (Hunni), Nauka, Moscow, 1960, pp. 236-241.
11 See: L.N. Gumilev. Khunny v Khitae (The Hsiung Nu in China), Nauka, Moscow, 1974.
12 Charles Diehl. Les grands problemes de l'histoire Byzantine. Libraire Armand Colin, Paris, 1947, pp 9-10/X.
13 Ibid., pp 87-88.
14 V.1. Vernadsky. Biosphere. Izbrannye sochineniya v 5 tomakh. Vol. 5. lzdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, Moscow-Leningrad, 1960, pp 24-31.