124 | CHAPTER 4
states, members of the Islamic Commonwealth, notably the Umayyads in
Spain and later the Fatimids in Eg ypt, who both disposed of useful navies.
But for Achaemenids, Sasanids, Umayyads, and Abbasids alike either the
center of power or at the very least, in the case of the Umayyads, crucial re-
sources of manpower and wealth for maintaining it, lay east of Syria. Their
presence on—as distinct from around—the Mediterranean Sea was second-
ary in the sense of incomplete and/or transitory. For Muslims, the Indian
Ocean felt much more theirs than the persistently Christian Mediterranean
ever could.^123
If we are to talk about “world empire” in Antiquity, it is to the Achaeme-
nids and the early Caliphate that we must turn. For these there was no direct
competitor on the world stage, India and China being too remote. Rome, by
contrast, even though it bulks so large on the horizon of historians from the
Atlantic world, was always twinned by Iran. And this was in fact the more
usual situation: not for the Eurasian Hinge zone to form or focus world em-
pire, but for the Mountain Arena to embroil the powers circumjacent to it.
Syria- Mesopotamia, in particular, suffers from a crucial weakness—but also
strength—that guarantees enmeshment in its affairs to whoever controls
Iran or the Eastern Mediterranean. As the sometimes extensive but usually
short- lived empires of Sargon of Akkad, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleu-
cids, and—later and on a lesser scale—the Hamdānids of tenth- century
Mosul and Aleppo demonstrated, the Fertile Crescent cannot maintain
long- term political autonomy. It is too easily threatened from neighboring
regions whose geography makes them natural fortresses and power centers:
in the North and Northwest, Anatolia; in the East, as Herodotus recalls in
the very last sentence of his Histories, the Iranian plateau;^124 in the South,
Arabia; in the Southwest, Eg ypt, which was deeply involved in Syria during
the Eighteenth Dynasty; and in the West, the Mediterranean. To confine
ourselves to the First Millennium: before the Arab conquests, Anatolia and
Eg ypt belonged to Rome’s Mediterranean empire; Arabia was as yet quies-
cent. Therefore either Iran or Rome had to dominate the Fertile Crescent,^125
or they had to learn to coexist within it, ideally in an equilibrium of mutually
recognized power, as “the world’s two eyes.”^126 The Umayyads and early Ab-
123 C. Picard, “La Méditerranée musulmane, un héritage omeyyade,” in A. Borrut and P. M. Cobb
(eds), Umayyad legacies (Leiden 2010) 365–402 ; id., “Espaces maritimes et polycentrisme dans l’Islam
abbasside,” Annales islamologiques 45 (2011) 23–46.
124 Cf. Dio Cassius [4:49] 40.28.4, on mid- first- century BCE Antiochenes viewing the Iranians as
“neighbours and people of kindred ways.”
125 See A. Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea (Philadelphia 2004) 119–28, esp. 126–27, for a subtle
account of the interchangeability of Sasanian and Roman power in Syria in 540, according to Procopius;
also H. Börm, “Der Perserkönig im Imperium Romanum,” Chiron 36 (2006) 299–328.
126 Cf. D. Kennedy, “Parthia and Rome: Eastern perspectives,” in D. L. Kennedy (ed.), The Roman
army in the East (Ann Arbor 1996) 73–74.