Introduction
Alexander’s story, widely reflected in world literature from antiquity to the Middle Ages and beyond, has been the subject of a multitude of studies and research.Footnote 1 In Neo-Persian literature, there is a considerable number of Alexander-books.Footnote 2 These are either poems of an epic character in rhyming distichs (mathnavi) or extensive stories in prose that tell the adventures of the Greek king, for which there is now a wide range of critical literature.Footnote 3
In addition to various Alexander-books in Persian literature, we also know works that, although not entitled Eskandar-nāmeh or “Book of Alexander,” largely contain the Alexandrian matter. This is the case, for example, in an eleventh- or twelfth-century work in prose dedicated to the figure of King Darius III, entitled Dārāb-nāmeh (The Book of Darius) and attributed to Abu Taher Tarsusi,Footnote 4 in which, despite the rather misleading title, the events of Alexander take up about two-thirds of the total volume (see below). There are also works of a historical (historical-geographic) or religious nature, many of which contain chapters dedicated to the Macedonian king,Footnote 5 but we will not focus on them in this article.
The remote source of the Persian Alexander-books seems to be the Greek Alexander Romance of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, of which four recensions (α, β, γ, δ) are traceable, a text composed by a native of Alexandria at some date after 200 BC and possibly much later (the earliest extant version in ancient Greek is from the third century AD). Several manuscripts attribute the work to Alexander’s court historian Callisthenes, who died before Alexander and therefore could not have written a full account of his life. According to Cary, this text “was subsequently elaborated and enlarged by the addition of much material, especially letters supposed to have been written by Alexander and others.”Footnote 6 It was translated into Latin in the fourth century AD by Julius Valerius (Res Gestae Alexandri Macedonis, widely popular in medieval Europe), and later, as is known, was reworked into the main European languages.Footnote 7 In the pre-Islamic period the Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance was translated into Syriac and from there probably into Pahlavi. The Syriac version essentially became the source of many translations and re-elaborations in the languages of the Middle East, starting with Pahlavi and Arabic.Footnote 8 But it is necessary to keep in mind that another source plays a fundamental role in the transmission to the medieval Muslim world of the figure of the great Macedonian. In the Koran,Footnote 9 in which a reflection of the Pseudo-Callisthenes’ text is captured, probably mediated by the Syrian source, we find a figure called the Two-Horned (Dhū-l Qarnayn), a prophet of the monotheism that he spreads to the four corners of the world, which some exegetical currents recognize as the Alexander of the Greek tradition.Footnote 10
In general, it can be observed that, in Persian literature, Alexandrian material is further enriched with fantastic and marvelous elements,Footnote 11 which also draw on local folklore, especially in the prose versions intended for a wider audience.Footnote 12 In short, the Alexandrian matter emerges in the very rich and varied Persian literary tradition, involving, as Angelo Piemontese asserts, universal history, cosmography, boating, military art, environmental mirabilia, mechanics or technical inventiveness, sapiential epistolography, hermeticism, moral philosophy, political doctrine, Koranic commentary, and anecdotes.Footnote 13
Here we will dwell, however, on a very particular aspect, which concerns more the Alexander leader and explorer than the Alexander prophet-missionary. That is, the focus will be on the characters and functions of an extraordinary “metal army” present in Alexander’s war against the Indian King Porus in at least three Persian Alexander-books written between the tenth and fourteenth centuries.
The “Book of Kings” (Shāh-nāmeh) of Ferdowsi
The first most famous example of Alexander-books in neo-Persian literature is contained in the Shāh-nāmeh (The Book of Kings), a monumental poem in 50,000 couplets by Ferdowsi (940‒1020), the most famous composer of the Iranian epic.Footnote 14 In this work, the poet dedicates a long chapter to Alexander,Footnote 15 as he considers him, to all intents and purposes, an Iranian sovereign. This is not only because he actually dominated Persia, but also because of his origins, presented by Ferdowsi as Iranian on his father’s side, Dārāb, who had married Nāhid, the daughter of Faylaqus/Filiqus, the Qaysar of Rum.Footnote 16
In the episode of Alexander’s war against the Indian King Porus (Fur, in the original Persian), the Greek king finds himself in difficulty before an army that is far more numerous than his own, and is also better armed, having at its disposal a host of elephants. These are animals unknown to the Greeks and Alexander must even have a wax statue of an elephant built by the wise Greeks (filsufān-e Rum), probably to natural size, in order to understand the problem he has to face. After that he consults the same wise men to find a solution; then he orders a team of skilled blacksmiths, coming, says the text, from Persia, Greece and Egypt, to build an army of thousands of metal knights mounted on iron horses pulled by means of wheels/carts. Let us read the verses about this Ferdowsian episode:
This iron army must clearly serve to counter the imposing force of the elephants of the Indian King Porus. Alexander seems aware that, in the face of the bewilderment and terror caused to the Greeks by the Indian elephants, only a device of great psychological impact on the enemy can prevent the defeat of his army. The effect of this iron army—which reminds us, in a completely different context, of another famous army, complete with carts and horses, unearthed by excavations in China in 1974Footnote 18—is not limited, however, to the psychological one. It is clear that, seen from afar, the iron army will misleadingly increase the number of Greek knights that King Porus and the Indian army believe they are facing. Actually Alexander ordered his blacksmiths to build real war machines that, as we shall see, will serve to annihilate the spearhead of the enemy forces, namely the elephants. Alexander shortly thereafter orders his men to fill the bellies of the iron horses with naphtha, or oil, and we will see immediately how this strange iron army will prove to be the decisive weapon:
This decision to fill the bellies of the metal horses with naphtha is Alexander’s true “secret weapon.” The naphtha inside the iron horses is set on fire, and in front of the Indian army a terrifying vision suddenly appears: an army of flaming knights. The Indian soldiers are horrified and terrified. But the elephants, on the other hand, do not get scared and, on the contrary, launch an attack:
When the elephants of the Indian King Porus hurl themselves at the iron army, they are burned and frightened by touching them with their trunks, thus being rendered powerless and harmless:
This strange “war machine”—that is, the army made up of the hot and flaming iron horses—was able to get Alexander out of trouble and solve the battle in his favor by neutralizing the elephants of King Porus.
One might expect that this episode of the Ferdowsian Alexander-book would be taken up by its imitators. But neither NezāmiFootnote 23 in his famous Eskandar-nāmeh Footnote 24 of 10,500 couplets nor Amir Khosrow of DelhiFootnote 25 in his Alexander-bookFootnote 26 make any mention of the iron army; both poets even pass over Alexander’s war with Porus, perhaps having conceived in their poems another drawing of the Macedonian king, less centered on the epic-war tone and more on the sapiential-prophetic and symbolic one.
The Dārāb-nāmeh Attributed to Tarsusi
We find again the same motif of the iron army in a Persian text in prose, that has all the air of a traditional tale or a folk prose narrative (dāstān) indebted to oral tradition,Footnote 27 the Dārāb-nāmeh (The Book of Darius) attributed to the aforementioned Tarsusi, an author of the twelfth century.
It occurs exactly at the moment when Alexander must face the elephants of the Indian king, similar to the episode from Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings which we examined up close a little while ago. Let us read this passage and then move on to some considerations. Alexander, not knowing what to do in face of the elephants of King Porus, summons Aristotle:
Alexander asked Aristotle: “What is the solution you propose to [win] our battle?” Aristotle answered: “You have to build talismans for your problem to be solved.” Alexander then ordered the blacksmiths, lance makers and foundrymen to be called and they gathered together everyone who was able to work with a smith’s hammer and so they forged horses and knights, placing wheels under their feet. Then they filled the belly [of the metal figures] with sand and sulfur, wetting it with naphtha and they took it all to the opposite bank of the river and at night they lined up in such a way that Fur was totally unaware [of what was going on]. They arranged twelve thousand copper men and horses in rows and placed the army behind them.
Then begins the battle of the Greeks with the Indian army of King Porus who, we are informed, was also reinforced by the presence of elephants equipped with armor whose bodies are described by Tarsusi as being “as big as mountains.” Moreover, in this army, there are also furious bulls led by warriors.
As can be seen from these passages, there are few differences from Ferdowsi’s version and these focus on specific details: for example, one reads that the army had been forged in copper instead of iron; the knights were 12,000 instead of 1,000 in Ferdowsi’s story; the wheels are placed directly under the legs of the horses (in Ferdowsi the text is more vague, and it could be understood that the horses and knights are placed on carts). But certainly the most interesting detail, and which makes the real difference between the two texts, is the presence of another primary character, Aristotle, while in Ferdowsi’s text there is only generic reference to “Greek wise men” (filsufān-e Rum). Aristotle appears here in a new role as the designer of “talismans” (telesm), a word that here refers to a technical deviceFootnote 29 rather than to a talisman with its magical-supernatural features.
Tarsusi is roughly a contemporary of Nezāmi who, in his Eskandar-nāmeh in two parts, makes Greek philosophers the privileged interlocutors of the Macedonian king. For example, in the second part (Eqbāl-nāmeh) three philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) entrust the king with “books of advice” (pand-nāmeh) that he will take on his journey to the East. And a philosopher, Apollonius, will accompany him, proving decisive with his “technical” advice in resolving more than one difficult situation, namely by inventing special automatons defined in the text with the term telesm,Footnote 30 which Tarsusi also uses. It is clear that in this episode Tarsusi shows an attitude similar to the poet Nezāmi, that is, he underlines the “wisdom” and Alexander’s ability to make use of science rather than the ability or cunning of the king.
Let us return to Tarsusi’s text, which continues like this:
They pushed the talismans forward.Footnote 32 When Porus’ troops saw those talismans, they advanced and the elephants as usual attacked with their trunk touching the horses and the knights [of metal], but they were burned since those talismans were red-hot. As a result, all the elephants withdrew, and so Alexander’s army started striking them with swords, arrows, clubs, spears, axes.
So, thanks to these extraordinary copper war machines, Tarsusi’s Alexander, just like Ferdowsi’s, manages to defeat the imposing army of the Indian King Porus. The two stories, as one can see, are very similar in their structure, but a detail emerges above all at the lexical level that cannot escape our attention: horses and copper knights are indicated with the precise term telesm, or talismans. In all probability we find a reflection in Tarsusi’s account of the ancient link between the art of the blacksmith, the one who forges metal in fire, and the magic and alchemical arts (think here of the use of copper and sulfur, two fundamental elements of this art), well attested in the Greek world and even before in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian ones.Footnote 33 The knights and horses of this copper army are undoubtedly a human artifact, the result of a technique at every stage of their construction and use, but the terminology used unequivocally signals a strong ancient magical dimension.
The Episode in Various Recensions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes
It should be investigated at this point what might be the source of this motif, i.e. the iron or copper army that appears in the two Persian Alexander-books examined so far. Upon a further examination of the historical and legendary works written in Greek about the Alexandrian events, we find no mention of this or a similar motif in the episode of the battle with Porus or in the Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus Siculus (first century),Footnote 34 or in the Parallel Lives Footnote 35 of Plutarch (second century), or even less in the Anabases of Arriano (second century).Footnote 36
However, something similar can be found in the Pseudo-Callisthenes’ text, a work considered as a distant source—through various mediations—of the Alexander-story contained in The Book of the Kings of Ferdowsi and probably to some extent also later of The Book of Darius attributed to Tarsusi. Let us see what the Pseudo-Callisthenes says in the chapter on the battle of the Macedonian king with the Indian King Porus:
As Alexander was leaving, he saw the regiment of Porus’ animals. He racked his brains and thought hard, and what do you think the cunning fellow did? He had all the bronze statues he possessed and all the armour he had taken as booty from the soldiers heated up thoroughly until they were red-hot, and then set up in front of the army like a wall. The trumpets sounded the battle-cry. Porus ordered his beasts to be released. As the beasts rushed forward, they leapt on to the statues and clung to them; at once their muzzles were badly burnt and they let go immediately. That is how the resourceful Alexander put an end to the attack of the beasts.Footnote 37
The passage of the Pseudo-Callisthenes’ text (third century), which is reproduced very faithfully in the Armenian version (fifth century),Footnote 38 is decidedly more sober than the Persian versions analyzed above. On the Indian side it can be seen that elephants are not expressly mentioned; we read of generic beasts or wild animals.Footnote 39 The most substantial differences concern the Greek part. Alexander does not have any ad hoc metal army built or forged, but—according to the text—uses “bronze statues and weapons” previously won as booty to create a sort of metal barrier burned by fire, to be placed between his army and the ranks of the enemy. The practical effect is always the same: the Indian beasts, venturing to bite on this red-hot barrier made up of “bronze statues,” burn themselves and become useless in the battle.
The Pseudo-Callisthenes therefore speaks of unspecified “bronze statues,” and not of horses or knights, which appears to be an obvious and happy fantastic extension of the Greek source by the Persian authors, even if evidently it cannot be excluded a priori that such an extension had already been started in some phase before the appearance of this material in the sphere of the Iranian world. And in fact it can be noted that in the eastern versions such as the Syriac (sixth‒seventh centuries), the Hebrew (tenth‒eleventh centuries) and the Ethiopian (much later, however, being from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), there are elements closer to the Persian versions than to the model of the Pseudo-Callisthenes.
For example, in the Hebrew version, which is almost contemporary to the Shāh-nāmeh of Ferdowsi, we see the presence of incendiary material, hollow statues, and wheels or rather carts:
Alexander then took counsel as to how to combat them. As a result, he ordered that hollow bronze statues be made and he had them filled with burning coals. They were then placed on iron carts which he ordered to be brought close to the elephants. Thinking that the statues were real men, the elephants stretched forth their trunks to seize and to devour them. The statues in the meantime had become heated by the fire. Thus when the elephants smelled the fire, they drew back and were unable to approach the Persian forces.Footnote 40
In the Syriac version (sixth‒seventh centuries), which could be one of the sources of the Shāh-nāmeh through mediations unknown to us (Pahlavi or Arabic summaries and/or re-elaborations), instead of statues we find “brazen images” (i.e. figures in material similar to brass) that have the form—and here is the interesting point as it is close to the Persian versions—of “men and quadrupeds.” Also here, as in the later Hebrew version, there is the element of the cart:
Then he [Alexander] sat down and reflected in his mind, and gave orders to bring such brazen images as could be found among his troops. And when the images were collected, which were in the form of men and quadrupeds—now they were about twenty-four thousand in number—he ordered a smith’s furnace to be set up; and they brought much wood and set fire to it, and heated those images in the fire, and the images became glowing coals of fire. Then they took hold of them with iron tongs, and placed them upon iron chariots, and led the chariots before the ranks of the warriors; and Alexander commanded horns and trumpets to be sounded. When the wild beasts that were in the ranks of the king of the Indians heard the sound of the trumpets, they rushed upon the ranks of Alexander’s army; and since the brazen images which were full of fire were in the van, they laid hold of them with their mouths and lips, and burnt their mouths and their lips. Some of them died (on the spot), and some of them retired beaten and fled away to the camp of the king of the Indians.Footnote 41
Among the eastern Alexander-books, the Ethiopian version is the one closest, in this context, to the Persian versions examined so far. It seems it has retained considerable vestiges of the lost early Arabic translation of the Syriac version.Footnote 42 This could suggest a common Arabic source on which the Ethiopic version and the Shāh-nāmeh drew, a hypothesis that deserves a deeper investigation not possible here.
Eskandar-nāmeh In Prose Copied by ʿAbd al-Kāfi ibn Abi al-Barakāt
There is another important prose text not easy to date (about twelfth‒fourteenth century) entitled Eskandar-nāmeh,Footnote 43 which, according to its editor Iraj Afshār, is a Persian version of Pseudo-Callisthenes.Footnote 44 But the text in question is actually much wider than that of the known Pseudo-Callisthenes, since it is largely enriched with additional autochthonous elements and various other events.Footnote 45 A closer look at the passage about Alexander’s war with King Porus reveals other new and interesting elements:
When Alexander saw Porus’s army and the elephants, those awesome mountains of iron, he was alarmed, for neither he nor his men had ever seen so many elephants in one place. His men complained: “We cannot battle elephants; and we have no power against mountains of iron.” Alexander replied: “Be not dismayed, for God is on our side. Have courage. They shall be defeated in no time.” He then summoned the people of Pars. Five thousand men who had accompanied him from Pars came to his presence, all dexterous marksmen. He ordered them to build boxes; and he chose 2.000 of them to carry out his plan. He ordered 1.000 young, strong camels to be smeared with tar and he had the boxes placed upon the blackened camels, each box manned by an archer with his bows and arrows. He then summoned all the Arabs in the army, and two dark Arabs mounted every camel. They set for the lines of elephants with bottles of naphtha and with fire. And Alexander positioned his troops, giving the right wing to the Iranians [not “Indians” as in Southgate’s translation] and the left to the Rumis, while he and the nobles stood in the center of the troops.
When Porus’s army arrived before that of Alexander, Porus said to the elephant drivers: “Wait until you see how we fare in the battle. If, God forbid, we are defeated, use the elephants.”
When the armies started the attack, Alexander’s men charged at the elephants with the blackened camels. They beat the drums while the Arabs on the back of the camels cried “Allah Akbar”, and threw the bottles of flaming naphtha at the elephants, who, terror-stricken, turned to flee. But the marksmen continued shooting at them from the boxes, killing more than 400 elephants, and putting the rest to flight. When Alexander saw that the Arabs and the men from Pars had defeated the Indians, he rejoiced. He attacked the enemy with all his men and broke their lines.Footnote 47
After reading this passage, to doubt that it may be a Persian version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes would be understandable because the episode is constructed in a completely different way from the Greek source. To cite only a few differential elements, and limiting the subject matter to the abovementioned passage, there are no statues or images that are found in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (and in the eastern versions examined above). Moreover, they are not general attacking beasts, but it is explicitly said that they are mounted camels of Alexander’s army, whose drivers are armed with bottles full of naphtha that are thrown at the elephants; also the underlining of the presence, in Alexander’s army, of “dark Arabs” is clearly an element that has little to do with the Greek source. Rather, there is some similarity with the Persian texts previously examined from Ferdowsi onwards, which explicitly speak of the incendiary material as naft, focusing on the significance of the burns inflicted on the enemy’s elephants. The author, however, does not consider the “iron army” of the great Ferdowsian poem, which a Persian author of the twelfth century could hardly ignore. His Alexander prefers to rely on living knights and camels, something that can lead us to believe that it is a deliberate and conscious choice. In this prose Eskandar-nāmeh, Alexander’s cunning is specially highlighted: here he does not resort to an iron army, but prepares a team of apparently harmless camels. The Indian King Porus mistakenly avoids using his breakthrough units, the elephants, underestimating the level of threat the camels could pose. Evidently these camels were prepared in such a way as to seem (although the text does not explicitly say so) in the distance almost a normal caravan of merchants. It is not by chance that Porus, when later he sees the ranks of the elephants routed by the “sappers” armed with incendiary bottles, takes the blame for the mistake saying: “Alas, all is lost. It was a mistake to save the elephants first,”Footnote 48 as he had not thrown them into battle from the beginningt, having not even remotely sensed the danger.
Conclusions
The Persian authors, Ferdowsi and Tarsusi in particular, do not emphasize Alexander’s cunning as does Pseudo-Callisthenes, but rather underline his wisdom in this episode. If Ferdowsi introduces Alexander to us in consultation with the Greek wise men (filsufān-e Rum), Tarsusi, the supposed author of Dārāb-nāmeh, goes even further. He offers us a version of the episode in which he highlights the extraordinary role of Aristotle, whom the Islamic world also perceives as the master of the great Macedonian. In this regard, Tarsusi seems very close to Nezāmi who, as we have seen above, had built the whole second part of his Eskandar-nāmeh on the relationship between Alexander and the philosophers, presenting the Greek king as a wise man surrounded by wise men, certainly not as a “smart” character and easily resorting to expedients.Footnote 49 From this point of view, the episode narrated in the third Persian Alexander-book (see above), in which philosophers and wise men do not appear, is perhaps more faithful to the spirit of the distant Greek source.
A second consideration concerns the increase of the technical-engineering aspect that characterizes the solutions of the Alexander of the Persian authors compared to the Greek model. An entire enormous factory was set up by Ferdowsi’s Alexander with 1,200 blacksmiths, “technicians” coming from Persia, Egypt, and Greece, as if to say that the best international know-how of the time came from those regions. Even Tarsusi, in the footsteps of Ferdowsi, amply underlined the technical aspect with the difference that here Aristotle is presented as an “engineer”: it is he who invents the telesm, the decisive weapon. In the Eskandar-nāmeh of the twelfth‒fourteenth centuries, the author, while renouncing the Ferdowsian iron army, invented a new military technique ante litteram, sending the troops to the assault with unprecedented “incendiary bottles” thrown by camel-drivers.
Another important element to note in this episode of Alexander’s war against King Porus, particularly in the comparison between the Persian Alexander-books of Ferdowsi and Tarsusi and that of Pseudo-Callisthenes, is the presence of wheels, that is, mobility. Ferdowsi with his iron army moving on wheels/carts creates a perception of living knights and horses and therefore creates a more believable apparent threat to the elephants and soldiers of the Indian enemy. The final effect is also psychologically more impressive than that created by the “bronze statues” of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, which stand as a formidable but completely static barrier. It is true, as has been shown above, that the element of the wheels (or of the carts) was already present in the Syriac version. This further corroborates the hypothesis that Ferdowsi drew on materials deriving indirectly from this source. Tarsusi, as we have seen, explicitly places the wheels under the legs of the horses, further accentuating the aspect of mobility and the likelihood of it being Alexander’s army in the eyes of the enemy. Moreover, it should be remembered that, in the Syriac version, the wheels were placed not under the horses, but under a cart that carries the “brazen images … in form of men and quadrupeds.” In short, Tarsusi, in painting the scene of the iron army, is certainly more incisive and realistic even than the alleged Syrian source.
Ferdowsi seems to us more convincing also from the more general point of view of the construction of the episode, which is artistically very effective and with great visual impact. It should be noted that in the chessboard of the battlefield Ferdowsi has planned to counter the elephants of King Porus with metal horses in various colors, to make the army more real, and not only with simple soldiers. I used the word “chessboard” not by chance. As is widely known, in the original Indian chess transmitted through Persia to the West,Footnote 50 the elephant, whose European counterpart is the bishop, and the horse have about the same value, although they move with different patterns. Can it be assumed that Ferdowsi had in mind the game of chess in building the episode of Alexander’s battle against the Indian King Porus? In order to better face his opponent’s elephants, Ferdowsi perhaps finds it more convincing that the metal soldiers are mounted on horses and that they are not just pawns on the “chessboard” of the battlefield.
Compared to the most remote source, the text of Pseudo-Callisthenes, and to the closest ones (Syriac text, further summaries or Arabic/Pahlavi reworkings), the Persian authors have not only passively received the inherited materials, but have undoubtedly been able to enliven the scene of Alexander’s battle against the Indian King Porus, moving onto the battlefield an entire blazing and phantasmagorical army of metal, and giving us perhaps one of the most amazing episodes of the eastern legend of the great Macedonian.
