the older Persian epics, the first man was not Adam, but Kayumars, who built his kingdom at Bakhdhi, which is the name for Balkh in the Hymns of Zarathustra. It was in Balkh, they say, that Zarathustra, the Zoroastrian Moses, first preached his revelations. It was here that some say he died, about 2,700 years ago. Seven centuries later, during the reign of the Kushan kings, Balkh was second only to Rajagriha as Buddhism’s most holy place on earth. Monks from as far away as Ceylon made pilgrimages here. Sombre historians and Muslim scholars still quarrel about the dynastic Barmakids of Balkh, who went on to become courtiers, viziers and warriors for the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. Khalid ibn Barmak even ended up as the governor of Mesopotamia. But were the Barmakids Muslim converts from Zoroastrianism or from Buddhism? It’s hard to say.
Within the remnants of an old ring of walls that encloses Balkh and its surroundings to a length of about ten kilometres, the scatterings of Zoroastrian fire temples clutter gardens and pastures amid the detritus of Buddhist stupas, convents and monasteries. The townspeople sometimes engage in spirited quarrels over tea at the bazaar about which ruin is Zoroastrian and which is Buddhist, and in those debates, both sides can be right. Down through time, Zoroastrians and Buddhists took converts from each other and stole or traded temples and shrines. When Islam came along, the custom carried on. It’s rare to come across a Muslim shrine here that cannot claim a pedigree dating back to some earlier holy site.
From the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, Balkh was also an epicentre of the Nestorian Church. Its schismatics had been driven east after Rome declared them heretics at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Nestorian missionaries from Balkh travelled far and wide, and it was the Nestorian Church that introduced Christianity to China during the enlightened years of the Tang Dynasty. Their churches flourished as far east as Canton until the fourteenth century, when the Ming Dynasty chose to purge “foreign influences” and even to erase their legacy from China’s memory. But history is not so easily disappeared. The story of how the Chinese Nestorian Church was founded is inscribed upon a massive eighth-century stone tablet that was buried near the Chongren Buddhist monastery at the Silk Road’s eastern terminus at what is now Xi’an, the resting place of the famous Terracotta Army. The tablet was lost to the world until the seventeenth century. At the base of the monument, the identity of the man who commissioned the work in 781 is revealed, in Syriac script: “The Lord Jazedbuzid, Priest and Vicar-episcopal of Cumdan, the royal city, son of the enlightened Mailas, Priest of Balkh.”
Long before the European Enlightenment, there was Hiwi al-Balkhi, also known as Hiwi the Heretic. He was a ninth-century Jewish contrarian who busied himself composing more than two hundred rationalist objections to the miracles of Hebrew scripture. Little remains of his effort except some fragments of text and the rousing controversies he set off in the writings of Jewish scholars from Babylon to Andalusia. Hiwi was also a poet—Balkh is renowned for its poets—and his work may have been the first to employ Hebrew verse for purposes beyond its sacred function in the synagogue. Balkh’s Jewish quarter persisted for ten centuries after Hiwi. The people were weavers, gardeners and merchants. After the Arabs came, the Jews were obliged to pay a special tax, like all non-Muslims, but they were outwardly much like everybody else, except that they were wine-drinking monogamists who liked to wear conical fur hats. The Jews were gone by the 1930s, but the Jewish quarter is still remembered in Balkh by the name of the neighbourhood Jehodanak: the Town of the Jews.
A century after Hiwi there was Ibn Sina, the Prince of Physicians. A polymathic genius from a Balkh Ismaili family, Ibn Sina was known to medieval Europe as Avicenna, and is still known to modern scientists as “the father of modern medicine.” Among Roman Catholic historians, Ibn Sina is known for his profound influence on Catholicism’s foundational theologian, Thomas Aquinas. Among philosophers, Ibn Sina is perhaps best remembered for his critique of Aristotelian metaphysics. Otherwise forgotten are Ibn Sina’s numerous pioneering texts on geology, paleontology, astronomy and physics.
A century after Ibn Sina, Balkh was a teeming city of perhaps 200,000 people when the eleventh-century poet Omar Khayyam was a schoolboy here. His classic Rubaiyat was unknown to the English-speaking world until the 1800s. In Khayyam’s day, Balkh was still a city of Persians, Turks and Chinese, who practised Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Zoroastrianism. Their leavings are a muddle, and it doesn’t help that no one has ever undertaken a systematic archaeological survey of the place. UNESCO scientists have placed Balkh on their wish list of world heritage sites. It easily ranks with Angkor Wat or Tenochtitlán or Petra. You’ve probably heard of those places. Chances are you’ve never heard of Balkh. Don’t be hard on yourself.
In the frightening country called Afghanistan that we hear about in the West, Balkh cannot exist. That country is the “graveyard of empires.” The real Afghanistan is the womb of empires. Even in its blighted twenty-first-century form, Afghanistan is a concoction of at least a half-dozen major ethnic groups and more than thirty languages from long-lost civilizations loosely contained within the shrivelled remnant of the Durrani Empire, the eighteenth-century Pashtun imperialism that supplanted the ancient Turk, Mongol and Persian dynasties. The Durrani Pashtuns came from Kandahar, and it was they who first imposed “Afghanistan” upon the maps of the world. The Durrani Empire once covered a vast realm, from the Amu Darya to the Arabian Sea, and from the Iranian Khorasan to Delhi. In the upheavals of the Durranis’ long and grisly history of conquest, the child’s-play imperialism of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan wars barely rates as a footnote.
But Balkh does exist. It is situated in the real country of Afghanistan. It is a small town in a big province that is also called Balkh, and in the summer of 2010, in the place where the Taliban throat slitters are supposed to be, children lead flocks of goats through groves of pistachio. Instead of the vast plantations of opium we always hear about, there’s wheat, barley, flax and cow pasture, though here and there, you might notice a plot of cannabis. Eccentric, long-haired malangs, decked out in garlands of plastic flowers, amuse passersby with their poems and their hashish-induced visions of Islam’s elysian afterlife. Stroll through Balkh around noon, and you come upon families gathered in copses of mulberry and Oriental plane trees for their midday meals of cherries and naan and melons. They will notice straight away that you are some sort of kafir from a faraway country. They smile and wave hello. Salaam. The word does not mean “war.”
For some reason, there is neither a tomb of Zarathustra in Balkh, nor a grand shrine of Kayumars, the Persian Adam, but there is a particular tumulus that everyone swears is the tomb of Seth, Shiith Ibn Adam. It is situated on the outskirts of town, embedded within a strange outcropping of clay and surrounded by a cheek-by-jowl amalgam of derelict mud-walled huts. The little tomb complex is painted sky blue and adorned with tattered green flags that flutter in the breeze. The crypt itself is open to the heavens, but it is covered by an unlikely shroud of green tarpaulin. Under a thatched roof at the entrance, an old man with a long white beard sits cross-legged behind a low bench, and he will take coins in exchange for holy cards, mementos and verses from the Quran written on little scraps of paper. Saddled horses doze in a grove of great-crowned chenar trees nearby.
Across an open field, arising from a hardscrabble plain, there is what appears to be a long ridge of steep cliffs climbing to a plateau. But once you’ve made your way through a ravine, you see that you’ve come through one of the ancient gates of the old city’s fortress, the Bala Hissar, and the cliffs are in fact the old fortress walls. Inside the fortress, a hollow expanse of goat pasture forms a nearly perfect circle more than a kilometre across. The Bala Hissar was sacked and ruined by Genghis Khan in 1220. The walls were built up again by the Timurids, who also built a grand citadel and a splendid mosque within. But there’s nothing left now except scattered shards of pottery and the sad little tomb of some long-forgotten warrior where a family of nomadic Kuchis has made a home, with a small garden, in the shade of some scrubby trees around a burbling spring.
From atop the Bala Hissar’s northern walls, six storeys high, you can look out on a prairie that fades into the horizon. A chaotic eruption of ragged clay hills in the middle distance is all that remains of the Buddhist monastery and university of Nava Vihara. It had been
