ôÒÕÄÙ ìØ×Á çÕÍÉÌ£×Á «áÎÎÁÌÙ» «÷×ÅÄÅÎÉÅ» éÓÔÏÒÉÞÅÓËÉÅ ËÁÒÔÙ ðÏÉÓË äÉÓËÕÓÓÉÑ   ? / !     @

òÅËÌÁÍÁ × éÎÔÅÒÎÅÔ

Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere

Chapter Six

Lev Gumilev

Part 2

The Phase of Ethnic Inertia

The 'golden autumn' of civilization. After people have survived upheavals they want quiet, not advance. They have already learned to understand that the individual who wants to display himself in all his originality is most dangerous for neighbours. But the danger can be avoided if the social imperative is changed. It is sufficient simply to invent or depict an ideal bearer of the best stereotype of behaviour, even if it has never existed, and to require everyone to copy it.

In the ancient world the cult of the king as god was created on that basis. Alexander the Great laid the basis of this perception of the world when Egyptian priests declared him son of the god Ammon. Alexander liked that, but his generals categorically refused to accept such a version as insulting to Alexander's parents, Philip and Olympias.

But the idea only died away for the time-being. It was revived under the successors of the Diadochi, especially in Rome, after Augustus. Rulers began to demand all the honours for themselves due to gods, which meant that the image of the ruler, even not his individual qualities but what was associated with duty, were deified. Rulers thus became examples for imitation obligatory for all.

The Romans well understood that scoundrels, murderers, and liars who, as people, deserved perhaps the blow of a knife in the belly, ascended the throne, but the principle of the 'divinity of the caesar' became an obligatory condition of decorum and loyalty to the established order. And the memory of the bloody centuries of the acme phase was so terrible that any guarantee of order seemed desirable.

In modern times, in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, a similar principle found embodiment in the image of the 'gentleman', an honest, educated person, which it was proposed should be imitated as far as possible. Deviation from the imitation was condemned, if not by law, by public opinion. Its pressure was sufficient.

In the East it was proposed to follow the example of a certain honoured hero of antiquity. In short, all manifestations of originality were persecuted for the sake of an ideal.

But it proceeded slowly. For people who did not want to disown their own originality, there remained the spheres of art and science, which seemed innocuous. He who seized a sword in the sixteenth century sat at home and wrote treatises in the eighteenth century, valuable if the author was talented, and senseless if he were a graphomaniac. And since there were always more of the latter, huge libraries were created filled with books there was no point in reading. It is called 'growth of culture'.

A similar situation built up in the Far East, which entered the inertial phase in the tenth century A.D. In China it was the Sung epoch, which left a vast number of objects d'art, not of such genius as those that survived from the Tang dynasty but made with even more virtuosity. In Tibet the monasteries were filled with books translated, but more often rewritten from old originals.

Of course geniuses appeared on this background (thinkers, scholars, poets), but there were not more of them than in the cruel acme phase. But they had good pupils, and disciples, and their conceptions had resonance. For example, the 'yellow faith' of the teacher Zonghawa (1355-1418) intellectually enriched not only separate consortia or sects but whole peoples (Mongols, Oirats, and some Tibetans). In Byzantine culture this role was played by monks of Mt. Athos (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), whose ideas, while not accepted in demoralized, doomed Constantinople, found a response in Great Russia.

But enough examples. Clearly, the inertial phase of ethnogenesis is a fall in the drive or vigour of the ethnic system, and a growth in the accumulation of material and cultural values. Let me test my conclusion on a neutral indicator, viz., the change in stereotype of behaviour at the level of the Romano-German superethnos.

From the world of Christianity to the civilized world. It would be surprising if such a grandiose phenomenon as change of stereotype of behaviour on the scale of a superethnos had not yet been noted or described. No, both has been done, though from an absolutely different position than mine, and in another system of concepts and terms. It doesn't matter! The terms of any account can always be translated into one's own. Direct observations do not lose value through that.

Werner Sombart wrote his Der Bourgeois. Zur Geistesgeschichte des moderated Wirtschaftsmenschen (On the Spiritual History of Modern Economic Man) in which he set himself the aim of showing how 'pre-capitalist man', i.e. 'natural man', was converted into the shallow, petty-bourgeois, Philistine person now observed everywhere. Before the rise of capitalism, according to Sombart, in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, 'the starting point for economic activity was man's need ... however much man spent, so much must he receive.' [+39] And only a fool could accumulate more.

There were, however, two classes, the rich signori and the mass of the people. But the difference between them was not so great. The signore, constantly risking his life, received many goods, and then squandered them on sumptuous hunts, feasts, and beautiful ladies. There was no point in saving money; he would perish all the same in the next war, and if not, then in the following one. Therefore, while you were alive and healthy enjoy yourself.

The peasant had as much land as he needed to feed himself and his family. The craftsman, according to Sombart, had the common sense not to work more than was necessary to earn a merry living. If these people had seen a Rockefeller they would have considered him mad.

But mediaeval Europeans did not consider the possessors of silk gowns and gold ornaments mad. They valued treasures and did not spare either their own or others' lives for them. They valued ringing, fine gold and not money, which they began to be attracted by only in the twelfth century. It was then that the 'passion for profit' arose which had only been observed up to then among Jews. [+40] Greed first gripped the Catholic clergy, then the burghers, and finally whole countries, but not to equal degree, and in different variants. Sometimes it pushed them to pillage overseas countries. Sometimes it was satisfied by trade which was also risky. Another path to riches was 'filthy money-lending. Others achieved their end by obtaining lucrative posts, and so on. But the guiding stimulus of activity everywhere was an instinctive striving for enrichment that had almost not been seen up to then.

One might suppose that greed arose with the development of opportunities to satisfy it. Sombart rejected the thesis that 'the capitalist spirit was created by capitalism itself. [+41] He also did not agree with Max Weber that there is a fink between Protestantism and capitalism. Instead he saw the cause of the development of the capitalist spirit ... in predispositions inherited from ancestors, [+42] i.e. he considered these propensities an inheritable attribute. Therefore there are special 'bourgeois natures', which Sombart divided into 'entrepreneurial' and 'middle class'. [+43] The former were gallant adventurers, founders of capitalism, and the latter dismal, moderate, thorough clerks whose mass and bulk filled the vacuum formed after the death of their predecessors.

According to Sombart the 'predisposition' to capitalism is observable not only at the level of the person or organism but also at the level of the ethnos. That convinced him of the biological nature of this phenomenon. [+44]

He classed Celts and Goths in the ethnoi 'with a weak capitalist predisposition', and placed only the Iberians below them ('a completely uncapitalist people') who were 'immune to the fascination felt by almost all peoples for gold'. [+45]

Ethnoi inclined to capitalism were divided into two types: 'hero folk' and 'trader folk'. [+46] Sombart put the Romans, Normans, Langobards, Saxons, and Franks among the first (and so the English and French), and the Florentines, Scottish Lowlanders, and Jews among the second, [+47] and also the Frisians, who, he said, 'were very early on considered clever, slippery trading people'. [+48] Sombart needed that in order to explain the mercenary mindedness of the Dutch and Lowland Scots, because there is a suggestion that Lowland Scotland was settled by, among others, Frisians. Sombart did not deal with the Slavs and Greeks, seemingly not considering them, in contrast to the Jews, as European peoples, which indicates that a superethnos rather than a geographical region fell into his field of view. That makes his analysis interesting for my theme, because he described, as a matter of fact, the transition from the acme phase to the inertial phase. But considering peoples (ethnoi) as stable systems, and subdivisions of races, Sombart had to explain the triumph of the 'petty-bourgeois spirit' in Tuscany by an admixture of Etruscan 'blood', although the Etruscans disappeared in the fourth century B.C., and the Florentines became petty-bourgeois in the fifteenth century. That gap of 2 000 years already puts one on one's guard and compels one to criticize the conception.

I suggest that Sombart's observations are true but his interpretation of them unsatisfactory. The Iberians were the oldest layer of Europeans, and were already in homeostasis at the time of the Romans. When one sees only the final phase of ethnogenesis, one cannot judge the foregoing ones. The descendants of the trading Etruscans are the Corsicans, who long ago lost the habits of their forefathers, and still preferred the vendetta to trade in the nineteenth century. I have written about the Celts above. The peoples Wed by Sombart as traders all had one common attribute, a high degree of mixed breeding. Tuscany lay on the road from the north to Rome. Across it passed, only after the tenth century, Swabian Ghibellines, Angevin Guelphs, Spaniards, French, and Austrians. And all sowed their gene fund among the Tuscan population. The Scottish Lowlands were a zone of contact between Scots, Angles, Norse Vikings, and French barons, who were planted there by English and Scottish kings because the borders were restless and troubled. The lower reaches of the Rhine, the region of the Frisians, were also a place of ethnic contact of a German, Roman, and Celtic population. That is the sole attribute there is in common for all the 'trader folk', but it is sufficient. One can add Southern Italy and Andalusia to their number (which Sombart seemingly overlooked). The picture is not changed.

The difference between 'signori' and 'entrepreneurs' is not so great. Both are people of vigour and zest, or drive, but in different modi. The former are vain, the latter greedy, but these differences are not essential. What is important is that both differ markedly from the petty bourgeois, clerks, and real bearers of the 'capitalist spirit' which, in my view, is only an impoverishment of the original creative zest that always arises during an upsurge of drive. The 'petty bourgeois' condemn the 'signori' only because they would like to be like them but cannot. [+49] They are the remnants of the creative soaring from which only the 'motive of gain' remains for them, i.e. these are harmonious individuals, and even people with subdrive.+ [+50] But it follows from this that we are faced with an ordinary entropic process similar to the cooling of a hot gas that converts it into water and then into ice; by that one can understand a state of homeostasis, the limit of any process of ethnogenesis.

And now let me put Sombart's observations into the schema of ethnogenesis proposed above. In the ninth to eleventh centuries, when there was still no 'capitalist spirit' in Europe, there was also no active ethnic cross-breeding. People lived in small ethnic groups that had been formed recently and were protecting their originality. The fact that these newly born ethnoi consisted of different racial components is of no significance. Their stereotypes of behaviour were original. The tasks facing any one' ethnos were common for each of its members. Drive was equally displayed in all strata of the population, as a consequence of which the social states were fluid. Cowardly barons died, and valiant villeins became either knights or free townsmen.

In the twelfth to fifteenth centuries there was a division. In the monolithic ethnoi there was a complicating of social systems, a strengthening of the monarchy, a waste of people of excess drive in the Crusades or in neighbouring countries (the Hundred Years' War). And in zones of ethnic contact, 'trader folk' appeared and grew rich. In the acme phase of the superethnos they lived through the dissensions, enjoying the patronage of rulers. But gradually they gathered strength and a second down turn began, to the inertial phase most comfortable for them. It was similar to the cooling of steam, being converted into water, at first hot, and then warmish.

As we already know, any change of aggregate state of a medium requires a big expenditure of energy, in our case vigour or drive. Like any energy, drive operates through a difference of potentials. This difference can arise either from an impulse of drive, a natural phenomenon, or through close interethnic contact in which the drive of one ethnos exceeds that of the other. The results will be different: destruction of the natural landscape is recorded only in the second variant, which I have demonstrated in a number of examples.

At the same time one must note that destruction in the anthropogenic landscape is not by any means the rule, but a deplorable exception, fortunately quite rare. If it were otherwise, then, after 50 000 years of the existence of neoanthropes, the whole geobiocoenosis would have been destroyed and man himself would have perished from hunger on an Earth made infertile. One must consequently recognize that man's impact on the biosphere takes two opposing directions, life-asserting and life-denying.

In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries 'cooling' of the Romano-German superethnos proceeded rapidly. People of drive went to colonies and either died there or returned sick. Harmonious individuals worked persistently at home, in their fields, workshops, counting houses, and university lecture halls. They never struggled for advantages, in practice onerous for them. And that is how 'trading people' – Florentine money-changers, accommodating diplomats, intriguers, and adventurers – took the place freed by the people with drive. They were foreign to the local ethnos but precisely because of that extremely convenient for the monarchs, especially when they had no homelands.

And suddenly, luckily for them, Watt's steam engine was built and subsequently technically improved. Towns grew and became polyethnic. People began to live without ties with their ethnos, sometimes maintaining only remote contact with it. And that is how the 'capitalist spirit' of Europeans developed, so well described and abused by Sombart.

But why did that happen so easily? Only because, figuratively speaking, the water cooled and froze. But when it is all turned to ice, i.e. when the phase of obscuration sets in, the mercenary-minded tradesmen – bacteria who eat away the guts of the ethnos – will perish, but a relict of the ethnos may remain.

Civilization and nature. The conception of ethnogenesis that I have proposed here would be subjective if we did not have a scale for comparing it. But there is a scale; it is the history of the anthropogenic landscape, i.e. the history of the interaction of technique and nature, through the mechanism called an ethnos. In the phase described, people's attitude to their natural environment changes sharply, once again through a lowering of the ethnic system's drive.

However people with drive play havoc, the triumphant Philistine is a phenomenon far more deadly as regards the nature that feeds us. In this phase no one needs risk, because the necessary victories have been won, and reprisals against the defenseless have begun. And who is more defenseless than the blessed biosphere?

It was proclaimed that 'man is the king of nature', and he began to draw tribute from it calmly and systematically. Cotton plantations covered the once green hills of Dixieland, and in a certain, quite short time converted them into sand dunes. The prairies were ploughed, the harvests were immense, but only for a while; then dust storms blew, ruining gardens and crops in the eastern states as far as the Atlantic. Industry developed and yielded immense profits, but the Rhine, the Seine, and the Vistula became open sewers. The environs of settlements and towns are polluted by industrial wastes, and poisonous chemicals are dumped into rivers. No people with drive would ever have thought of such an idea; it is impossible to explain anything to them. But does it need explaining? For this is not the last phase of ethnogenesis.

Ethnoi that bear on their shoulders the huge load of the culture accumulated by their forefathers behave just the same. No technical advance in itself entails progressive development without the involvement of people, although it may be eroded by the constant action of destructive time. Egypt of the Old Kingdom and Sumer had a higher level of cultivation than Egypt of the New Kingdom and Assyria, which conquered Mesopotamia. It is seemingly a matter not of things but of people, or rather of their stock of creative energy, i.e. drive. Technique and art can therefore be regarded as indicators of ethnic processes, as a kind of crystallization of the drive of past generations.

But perhaps I am overindulging in political history? For it is accepted to consider that history and nature study are so remote from one another that it is not justified to compare them. John Stewart Collis wrote in his The Triumph of the Tree:

No doubt Saint Paul was right to preach against the people of Antioch, and other prophets to lay their curse upon other cities. But they did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Those sins were not moral; they were not theological they were ecological. That pride and that luxury might have been a great deal more pronounced and yet no harm befallen them; the green fields would have continued to yield them increase and the limpid water to bring refreshment: that immorality and that impiety might have spread further and mounted higher, and still the strong towers would not have shaken and the massive walls would not have crumbled: but because they had been unfaithful to the land upon which they lived and which God had given them; because they had sinned against the laws of earth, and despoiled the forests, and loosed the floods, they were not forgiven, and all their works were swallowed in the sand. [+51]

Brilliant, but not true! The immorality and impiety in the cities were the prelude to savage treatment of forests and fields, because the cause of the one and the other was a lowering of the ethno-social system's level of drive. During its preceding rise a characteristic feature had been severity toward itself and neighbours. With lowering, 'philanthropy', forgiveness of weaknesses, and then neglect of duty, and then crime, had been characteristic. And a habit of the latter led ,o transfer of the 'right to outrage' from people to the landscape. An ethnos' level of morality is the same phenomenon of the natural process of ethnogenesis as predatory destruction of living nature. Because we have caught the link, we would have been able to write the history of the anthropogenic landscape, i.e. that deformed by man; because the meagerness of the direct descriptions of resource-use in old authors can be supplemented by descriptions of the moral standard and political collisions of the epoch studied. It is the dynamics of the described relationship that is the subject-matter of ethnology, the science of man's place in the biosphere.

As a matter of fact I have described the manifestation of a micro-mutation that can be characterized as restoration of equilibrium disturbed by an impulse of drive. The latter is reflected in the nature of a region no less than in people that inhabited it. A surplus of energy leads to the development of new needs and consequently to a reorganization and restructuring of the enclosing terrain. I cited examples of this above; I now need to generalize them and determine their trend.

As a rule a striving for improvement and provision of amenities is characteristic of the first phase. An ethnos that is beginning to live does I not imagine that an end awaits it also. And if some such idea had entered anyone's head, no one would have wanted to listen to him. There is therefore a desire to build forever, sparing no efforts. The riches of nature still seem inexhaustible, and the job is to arrange unhampered winning of them. Sometimes that leads to rapacity, but the strict order established and maintained by the social system limits the initiative of private persons. Indeed, if the English kings and their sheriffs had not introduced cruel laws against poachers, who were called 'Robin Hoods' in the Middle Ages, there would have been not only not a single deer left in England, but most likely not a single unfelled tree and untrampled meadow. Perhaps it is better to admire not the heroes of English folk ballads but their enemies, although both were bearers of mounting drive which the killed animals, alas, lacked. For them the Hundred Years' War, which cost many human lives but postponed death of the nature of Old England and La Belle trance, was a good thing.

Such collisions have occurred many times, but the biosphere found a way out of the impasse. Nature sometimes changes more quickly than history.

As I have already said, the process of the obscuration of Western Europe was interrupted by an impulse of drive in the ninth century, but the wounds inflicted on the biosphere then were not healed. In Gaul and Britannia, because of heightened humidity, the forests and meadows were restored; in Italy and Andalusia lemon and orange groves were grown, but in dry Northern Africa the desert encroached. Whereas the Roman cavalry had obtained horses in the second century from the countless herds pastured on the southern slopes of the Atlas, in the eighth century the Arabs had begun to raise camels there. There was no change of climatic conditions there because this was a zone of a stable anticyclone, the Azores anticyclone. But it was impossible in those natural conditions to restore the thin layer of humus in a few centuries. From the second century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. the Romans had systematically driven the Numidians, the ancestors of the Tuaregs, south. The latter moved away with their herds, which gradually converted the dry steppe into the stony desert of the Sahara. And at the eastern end of Eurasia the Chinese played the role of the Romans, pressing the Hunni northward and converting the wooded slopes of the Yinshan into the boundary of the stony Gobi desert, and the Ordos steppe into a chain of sand dunes. There, it is true, the anthropogenic processes were combined with the heterochronism of heightened moisture in the and and humid zones, but it is easy to make allowance for that phenomenon to be sure that it does not alter the conclusion.

There is a suggestion that natural processes – droughts and floods – are as devastating for the nature of a region as the activity of man armed with the technique of his time. But it is not so! Natural processes create reversible changes. The repeated parching of the Great Steppe in Eurasia, for example, caused a shifting of the dry steppe and semi-desert northward and southward from the stony Gobi. But the subsequent humidification led to an opposite process; the desert was overgrown by steppe grasses, and the forest encroached on the steppe. And, parallel with that, the anthropocoenoses were restored – the nomads migrated with their herds 'for grass and water'.

But ethnogenesis is a natural process; consequently it should not, of itself, create irreversible changes in the biosphere; and if it does, then obviously some other factor is involved. What? Let us look.

In the Great Steppe ethnogenesis began three times in the historical period: in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. with the Hunni; in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. with the Turks and Uighurs; and in the twelfth century with the Mongols and, in the Sungari taiga alongside, the Manchus. All these regenerated ethnoi were descendants of aborigines, their predecessors. They did not expend their surplus of drive on changing nature, because they love their land, but on creating original political systems (the Hunnic clan power, the 'Eternal Ehl', the Mongol ulus), and on campaigns against China and Iran. In that aspect the nomads were like the By­zantines. And it was not by chance that both are regarded, from a standpoint of Eurocentrism, as 'second-rate' or 'defective', although, from the angle of the need to protect the environment, the Europeans and the Chinese should have learned from the Turks and Mongols.

But the worst in the phase of civilization is the stimulus of unnatural migrations, or rather the resettlement of whole populations from a natural to an anthropogenic landscape, i.e. into towns. Although each town, irrespective of its size, exists at the expense of natural resources, it accumulates such a great technical base within it that newcomers from quite dissimilar countries can five in it. They are able to feed themselves in the urbanistic landscape, for example, through exploitation of the aborigines who created and maintained this artificial landscape. The most tragic thing in this collision is that the migrants set up a feedback with the aborigines. They begin to teach them, to introduce technical improvements suitable for the native terrain of the migrants but not for the countries to which they have been mechanically transferred. This projection is sometimes remediable; and sometimes flourishing countries are even converted not into deserts but into badlands where the destructive effect of technique is irreversible.

Such a fate overtook Mesopotamia as a consequence of the calamities of historical fate. There the Sumerians turned the marshes into an Eden, and the Semitic Akkadians built a town called 'The Gateway of God' (Bab-elom) or Babylon. Why are there only ruins on its site now?

Who destroyed Babylon? It seems improbable that a city that was the cultural and economic centre of the Near East for 1 500 years, perished for no fundamental reasons. So what were they? And what was the mechanism of their action? There is no answer in the literatures.

This great city was founded by the Amorites in the nineteenth century B.C. and conquered by the Assyrians in the seventh century B.C. The conquest was bloody, uprisings were put down brutally. Neighbours joined in the war (Elamites and Chaldeans). The Chaldeans, a tribe of eastern Arabia, overthrew Assyria in 612 B.C. and became the masters of Babylon, whose population was as much as a million, but included very few descendants of the ancient Babylonians. [+52] The culture and economy of the city outlived its founders, and the system, with a new ethnic replenishment, continued to function. Despite all the bloodshed, the stable anthropogenic landscape was not destroyed until the sixth century B.C.

The economy of Babylon was based on a system of irrigating Mesopotamia, the surplus water being drained into the sea via the Tigris. That was rational, since the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris carried much suspended matter from the Armenian uplands during floods, and choking of the fertile sod by gravel and sand was undesirable. But in 582 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar concluded peace with Egypt by marrying Queen Nikokerti (Nitocris), who subsequently passed to his successor Nabonidas. Along with the Queen arrived her suite of educated Egyptians. Nikokerti suggested to her husband, seemingly not without consulting her closest advisors, to dig a new canal and increase the irrigated area. The King of the Chaldeans adopted the Egyptian Queen's plan, and in the 560s the Pallukat canal was dug, which began above Babylon and irrigated a vast area of land beyond the river flood plains. [+53] What happened as a result?

The Euphrates began to flow more slowly, and the alluvium settled in the irrigation canals. That increased the outlay of labour on maintaining the irrigation network in its old state. The water from the Pallukat, which passed across dry territories, caused salting of the soil. Farming ceased to be profitable, but the process dragged on for a long time. In 324 B.C. Babylon was still such a big city that the romantic Alexander the Great wanted to make it his capital. But the more sober Seleucus Nicator, who gained possession of Babylon in 312 B.C., preferred Seleucia on the Tigris and Antioch on the Orontes to it. Babylon was deserted, and in 129 B.C. became the booty of the Parthians. At the beginning of our era it was in ruins, in which a small settlement of Judeans made their quarters. Then it disappeared.

But could one capricious queen really ruin a huge city and a flourishing country? Obviously her role was not decisive. For if the king in Babylon had been a local resident he would either have understood himself what devastating consequences an ill-considered measure would have or he would have consulted fellow-countrymen and have found capable people among them. But the king was a Chaldean, his army consisted of Arabs, his counselors were Jews, and none of them even bothered about problems of the geography of the country, conquered and bled white. The Egyptian engineers mechanically transferred their techniques of land improvement from the Nile to the Euphrates. The Nile carried fertile silt during its flood, and the sand of the Libyan desert would drain away any quantity of water, so that there was no danger of salting of the soil in Egypt. The most dangerous thing was not even a mistake but the failure to pose the problem where it should have been posed. For the inhabitants of Babylon, who had replaced the Babylonians killed in war and carried off and dispersed, everything seemed so clear that they didn't even want to think about it. But the consequences of the next 'victory over nature' killed their descendants. That is the difference between the 'geography of population' and ethnology. Bare statistics figure in the former, but in the latter the problem of the relation between an ethnos and the terrain in the different phases of ethnogenesis.

The consequences of land improvement in Mesopotamia could not be corrected, although attempts were made. In the seventh to ninth centuries A.D. the Arabs had vast amounts of cheap labour at their disposal. They obtained Negro slaves from Zandj (Zanzibar) whom they called Zindji. They forced these slaves to gather up salt crystals in baskets in the environs of Babylon. The idea of improving the soil that way was impractical, because the fine crystals were not visible to the naked eye. And the work was ghastly, murderous in fact – under the scorching sun, with hands eaten away by the salt, and without hope of rest!

The desperate Blacks rose in revolt. The uprising lasted from A.D. 869 to 892 and ended, as was to be expected, in the death of all these unfortunate people. But, furthermore, having sacrificed their own lives, which no longer gladdened them, the Zindji destroyed the Baghdad Caliphate, because the vice-regents of Egypt and Khorasan broke away from Baghdad, the bandit Ya'qub Saffar reached the capital's walls, and the sectarians of Bahrein, the Karmathians, achieved independence. That happened because all the Caliph's forces had been thrown against the Zindji, and all his funds were needed to hire Turkomans to reinforce the depleted army.

The Turkomans, warlike steppe dwellers, having seen that they were the sole real force in Baghdad, began to change the Caliphs to suit themselves and to suppress the indignation of their employers, the Arabs, by force. They were only expelled with the help of hillmen, the Buidi, Shi'ites, who were enemies of everything Arab, and who made the Caliph their puppet.

That was the price of the second attempt at