Iran's Cultural Influence and Cultural Influences on Iran

by fulltimestudent 1 Replies latest social current

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  fulltimestudent

  I had an idea to jot down some thoughts on cultural influence in and out of Iran. I thought one or two paragraphs would give me a useful summary for my Rome and Persia study unit. Seven or eight hours later I had to stop, it was consuming too much time. And, I'm not going to get back to any time soon.

  I thought some here may find it interesting. Its very rough, not much more than a series of notes strung together. But, as you will see, Asia (predominatly East Asia) and Iran had a big influence on each other. And I think I've only scratched the surface.

  I'll have to post it is segments to make it digestible.

  This is an attempt to demonstrate the cultural influence of Iran and its broader area of influence, both internally and externally. I set out to briefly summarise some important aspects of Iranian cultural influence and found that it was so complex that my attempt can hardly still be called a summary. For convenience, this overview treats West Asia, say from the Eastern Mediterranean coast to the Himalayas and the Chinese border regions, plus Asia Minor, as a whole. I've run out of time to explore the wider cultural influences, but I present this as, at least, a start to an understanding of the cultural influences at work in West Asia, generally and the Iranian area more specifically.

  The area we call Iran must have been one of the most culturally diverse areas of the ancient world. It's also one of the most complex cultural experiences that we can find anywhere in history. It's so tangled that it is difficult to tell the story of these influences.

  We will probably never know the full story, but, from our contemporary western viewpoint, we could think first of the city of Ur, homeland of a possibly mythical patriarch and progenitor of the Hebrew people, that is, if the city named Ur and located (then) near the mouth of the Euphrates river is the same city as the one mentioned in the OT.

  In any case, the connection between the Hebrews and the geopolitical area we call Iran, can be made in other time periods also. The capture of Israel and Judah by the Babylonians and the deportation of the elites to Babylon exposed the nascent future religion of Second Temple Judaism to many other influences. When Cyrus, named as the Messiah in Hebrew texts, permitted those elites to return to their homelands, many deportees who had grown up in Babylon and the surrounding area, elected to stay in Babylon. Working as merchants and traders, they became a significant part of Iranian life and surely absorbed some of the other cultural influences that affected all the peoples of Iran, and in turn, Iranian peoples passed on their hybridised ideas to other peoples. For example, the work known as Talmud Bavli (Babylonian Talmud) comprises the Mishnah and the Babylonian Gemara, the result of 300 years of analysis of the Mishnah by Jewish scholars in Babylon. Hence Iranian culture surely had an effect on Judaism also.

  Moving to other possible areas of early Iranian influence, Sinologist Victor Mair, basing the suggestion on a study of foreign loanwords in ancient Chinese, thinks that Iranian soothsayers were employed by the elites of the Western Zhou dynasty, prior to the eighth century BCE. (Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road, pp. 34,35). And, it has also been suggested that late Han Daoists, borrowed an Iranian word, garo-dmana, to describe the highest heaven (daluo)
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  fulltimestudent

  Section 2

  And, we can't leave out the Hellenising influence of Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, and the subsequent Seleucid Empire and the founding of Greek colonies all across the vast territory won by Alexander. Hellenic ideas infiltrated the Empire of Alexander and his successors. Hellenism, as a cultural thought system, would have included the ideas of the Greek philosophers. The Pre-Socratic Milesian Philosophers seem to have been among the first that we know of as speculating on the nature of life. And its noteworthy that Miletus, located on the cost of Asia Minor was on a trade route with links to the older cultures of Babylon, Egypt, Lydia and Phoenicia. And what do make of the proposals of Heraclitus and his cosmological concepts of fire, did those ideas percolate into Iran and were they an influence in the development of Zoroastrianism?

  In what way these other influences changed religious thinking, is often not clear. For example, from its founding in the Indian sub-continent, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, Buddhism flourished to the east of Iran. It seeped slowly north from its homeland through what is now, eastern Afghanistan, its path marked by Buddhist monuments, now in ruins (as researched by Aurel Stein). That seems, from our contemporary viewpoint, to be the main route by which Buddhism reached China, Korea and Japan. (Although, I believe a case can be made for a southern route also, through those parts now named Bangladash, Assam, Myanmar and S.E. Asia). We also have some evidence for at least Buddhist visits to Alexandria and Athens. And, considering the extensive sea trade between Red sea ports and south India and Sri Llanka in Roman times, we have to think that south Asians (Indian) merchants and seafarers lived in Red sea ports and Egypt at times. Some were likely to have been Buddhists. Were any small temples or shrines established for them to worship in?

  In its movement north, from the south, Buddhism became part of the culture of the Khushan Empire. The Khushanscontrolled vast territories, from the mouth of the Indus river, east to near modern day Bangladash, and north past the end of the Himalayas up into the heartland of Iran, and west into Bactria. Trading was a particular interest of these people also, and they controlled vast sections of the trading markets.