116 | CHAPTER 4
Arena well to the south of Syria- Mesopotamia, the traditional amphitheater
of empire.
Our three commonwealths—Iranian, East Roman, and Islamic—have
helped us, then, to analyze how empires and cultures, especially religious cul-
tures, interacted and often reinforced or supplemented each other across the
Eurasian Hinge zone, throughout the First Millennium and beyond. Bear in
mind that the commonwealths overlap, so a given region may—perhaps be-
cause of the diversity of its populations, or the strategic character of its posi-
tion—come under more than one commonwealth at once. The Caucasus, for
example, belonged to the Iranian cultural zone, extensively adopted Christi-
anity, and ended up—its more southerly regions—under Muslim rule. The
same point may indeed be made about the entire Eurasian Hinge, in the
sense that from the Sasanian world Mithraism and Manicheism (for exam-
ple) entered the Roman Empire, while from Roman territory Christianity
penetrated Iran. This large- scale cultural interaction between the two em-
pires/commonwealths paved the way for the coming (or rather—recalling
the Achaemenids—the return) of the “Near Eastern unitary state,” namely
the Caliphate.^86 In short, our “shift” from West to East, from the Mediterra-
nean paradigm to the Eurasian Hinge, can hardly be called “arbitrary”—see
again the epigraph to this chapter.
The Mountain Arena
The Caucasus is the northernmost tip of the central leaf of our East- West
triptych. It is the point where the Mountain Arena’s rim impinges on the
alien nomadic world of the North, and it was one candidate for where Alex-
ander built his great iron gate to keep the wild steppe tribes of Gog and
Magog—in other words, the Huns—out of the settled world to the South.^87
(This was the forerunner of the Sasanians’ elaborate defenses in the Cauca-
sus.) Because the Mountain Arena is the focus of my shift away from the
Mediterranean paradigm, it merits a more careful description at this point.
This denotes no particular insistence that human life and thought was being
“determined” by geography, beyond the responses any society of humans will
make, given certain environmental pressures or opportunities. The most I
would claim is that landscape and climate favor the evolution of distinctive
cultural, economic, and social forms, which eventually may—or may not—
constitute a basis for establishing a political entity.^88
The arc from the Persian Gulf to Palestine, popularly known as the Fertile
86 Cf. Becker, Islamstudien [2:74] 1.18–19.
87 Van Bladel, in Reynolds (ed.), Qurʾān in its historical context [1:31] 186.
88 Cf. Haldon, Millennium 5 (2008) [4:49] 348–50.