In the last article in this series, I summarized the origins of the cosmopolitan ideal in the Greco-Roman world, its Christianization, its parallels in Asian society, and briefly touched upon its relationship to the modern liberal order. There’s more to say on that topic, and we will circle back round later. It had been my plan for this to be a brief dyad that concluded with a summary of modern cosmopolitanism—namely, classical liberalism and the global community it has engendered, together with their ills—and some thoughts on what an ethical cosmopolitanism might look like as a political sensibility for the future. But on reflection that plan seemed to me rushed, prudish rather than chaste, and therefore easily given to avoidable oversights. I’m not a political historian, scientist, or theorist, and so I’m already working to some degree outside of my wheelhouse; so, all the more reason to be careful, take my time, and cover the available bases in moving from something like a comparative historiography of cosmopolitanism to something like a constructive theory. In this piece, especially, I want to cover an alternative cosmopolitan tradition: the one developed across Central, South, and East Asia, and therefore intersecting with the Greco-Roman tradition through the conquests of Alexander the Great and the forays of the Roman Empire into the East, but also possessed of a distinctive ethos whose particular contours account to some extent for the diversity and dissent on the contemporary world stage about what a true citizenry of the world could mean. This may, in fact, require several issues to do well.
The reader should here recall that, as established in the previous installment, the language and concept of “cosmopolitanism” is in no small part derived from the distinctive cultural history of the Mediterranean and the philosophical cosmology of the people living in it. To think of the kosmos as a polis requires that one has a concept of something called a kosmos and that one has a concrete referent of something called a polis; to describe the kosmos as a polis is only meaningful if one thinks of the physical universe as fundamentally ordered and logical and that the clearest image of that logic in human society is the organizational city-state as it emerged in Archaic and Classical Greece and became standard in the Eastern Mediterranean down to and through Roman times, even after the concepts of the amphictyony and the federated koinon emerged as larger-scale means of organization.1 When we turn to Asia, we are not turning to a series of cultures with hermetically sealed alternative worldviews, as though the idea of kosmos were wholly incomensurate with what we find there or as though the structure of the polis had no analogies. But in turning to the East, we are dealing with a plethora of civilizations whose shared universe of referential thinking tends to push the Hellenic tradition to the periphery rather than to the center and whose political, social, and religious histories are dominated by other factors than those that characterize the West. Even when Western phenomena unite East and West—like, say, the presence and popularity of Christianity in both premodernity and modernity—the role those factors play in Asian societies simply has a different impact than in the Greco-Roman world and its various afterlives. So if we are to think of a Central, South, and East Asian tradition of “cosmopolitanism,” it will need to be one that goes from the ground up in the cultures of those regions and that converges with the Hellenic tradition rather than one that we sketch merely by applying Greek models as interpretive ciphers.
The first true analogue to cosmopolitanism in the Near East or Southwest Asia, verging on Central Asia, emerges with the rise of the Assyrian Empire. As Eckhart Frahm opens his magisterial book on the empire’s history,
The roots of Assyrian civilization reach well into prehistoric times. More than ten thousand years ago, the area in northern Iraq that would later see the birth of the Assyrian kingdom played an important part in the emergence of agriculture, animal husbandry, and other technologies of civilization. There is no evidence that the people who produced these developments were early ‘Assyrians.’ But between 2500 and 1700 BCE, a tangible Assyrian identity began to take form, with sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic features that would define Assyrians until the end of the Assyrian kingdom,” and, indeed, well beyond it.2
The context for the development of that culture was to some degree geographically and historically fated: Neanderthals lived in this area of the Fertile Crescent, marking long-term hominin viability here; anatomically modern humans were there before and after the Agricultural Revolution; pottery was developed here.3 The heartland of Assyria, “a triangle marked by the cities of Nineveh in the north, Arbela in the east, and Ashur in the south,” “[d]emarcated by the western fringes of the Zagros Mountains in the east, the southern foothills of the Taurus range in the north, and the Syrian Desert in the west…is a land of rolling hills and plains, crossed by the southward-flowing Tigris River and its main eastern tributaries, the Upper and Lower Zab.”4 Assyria is not necessarily the most fecund area of the cradle of civilization, but it is arguably better suited as a trade circuit between the Levantine Coast and what is now Iran to the East than Babylon was; stretching out from the pivot of Anatolia and the Levantine Coast and spanning downwards and outwards into Central Asia beneath the steppe, it was the range of many waves of nomads in the ancient Bronze Age history of the Near East, including the Amorites and Arameans and Hebrews and so forth that Canaanites, Ancient Israelites, Ancient Judahites, and the authors of the Hebrew Bible look back on as distant ancestors and adversaries, and who appear in various Near Eastern texts as objects of anxiety. Assyria—first in the so-called “Old Assyrian” period (2017-1792 BCE), and then much later, after its rebirth in as the “Neo-Assyrian” period of rampant expansion in the first millennium BCE—was the first polity to try and encompass the entirety of the Near East under its rule successfully, and to reflect the possibility and the promise of cultural exchange across the various people groups of the Near East. The threats of assimilation and annihilation that this constituted for vassal states who fell afoul of Assyrian rule—most famously ever after, the Northern Kingdom of Israel, centered in Samaria—were epic, of course, but the Assyrian accomplishment cannot be reduced to its villainization in biblical literature (and indeed, even biblical literature eventually gets over its own antipathy for the Assyrians).
Of course, the Assyrians also inherited and built upon a long history of city-building, administration, and culture generation in the Near East and especially in Mesopotamia, trickling from South to North: in the Uruk period (4000-2900 BCE), the Early Dynastic period of the Sumerian city-states (2900-2300 BCE), the short-lived Akkadian (2300-2200 BCE) and Ur III periods (2112-2000 BCE).5 As Amanda Podany writes, there were certain continuities across the Near East that the Assyrians capitalized on: “the writing system and the system of scribal training”: “people’s passionate trust in family as the bedrock of society”; “what we now think of as religion,” emblematized in the fact that the “ancient gods and goddesses who were worshiped in Uruk when it first grew to be a city were still being worshiped when Alexander of Macedon conquered the region more than 3,000 years later”; moreover, that everyone assumed that everyone’s gods were real, active, involved in everyday life, and accessible through temples, cults, and priesthoods; and, finally, kings, a constant so powerful that “in three millennia no viable alternate system of government ever developed.”6 Afterwards, the Babylonians and the Haxamanishiya, or Achaemenid Persians both capitalized on these same systems, building up the apparatus of the administrative, elite, and cultural commons in the Near East whose foundations were laid by the Assyrians.7 By comparison, the Assyrians are less sophisticated than their successors, but what they were able to do was largely by transformations of the Assyrian model of suzerainty and vassalage.
The Assyrians engaged in some of the behaviors that we talked about in the last post as distinctive of the cosmopolitan ideal, considering the world as they knew it to be at least theoretically susceptible to unification into a single state, with common political, economic, and cultural experiences providing unity across otherwise serious ethnic and customary differences. The Assyrians, like the Greeks, exemplify a thematic ambiguity and dark side to cosmopolitanism as an intellectual tradition perhaps already evident to the reader, which is its own utility for imperial projects. But the first real “cosmopolitans” in anything like a Greek sense in this bunch were the Achaemenids, and the theme of universalism (in the sense of an all-encompassing context of the world and its people as a single society) would be an integral aspect of Persian identity up until the Muslim conquests. The self-identification of the Persian kings as Shahansah, “King of kings” (cognate to kshatriya in Sanskrit) implied their aspirations: rulers like Kourosh (Cyrus), Darayavaush (Darius), and Kshayarsha (Xerxes I) saw themselves as the divinely designated sovereigns not just for a particular ethnic group nor even of a specific region, but of all the peoples of the world. Their habit of taking numerous regnal offices and titles (especially King of Babylon, which Cyrus took in 539 BCE; King of Sumer and Akkad, the title of the old Akkadian emperors; sar kissatim, “King of the Universe,” and sar kibrat ebretti, “King of the Four Corners of the World,” and Pharaoh of Egypt, and so forth), their sponsorship of return from exile for displaced peoples, of the formalization of local customs and traditions, of a lingua franca, Aramaic, by which the various peoples of the empire could communicate with one another, their support, quest for patronage from, and protection of the numerous gods and cults of their domain: all of these things bespeak a sense of a common humanity with a common political, social, and economic fate, and a common (and eclectic) pantheon in control of that fate. True: the Achaemenids, the Parthians, and the Sasanians, as much as anyone else, projected their own norms and values onto their subject peoples and their peripheral adversaries, judging their suitability or deficiency by how well they matched Persian norms, just as Greek cosmopolitanism judged non-Greeks largely by their degree of Greekness (and Romans did the same, etc.). Nor is it any less true that the Persian Empire’s cosmopolitanism was crafted by brutal warfare, or that it was any less based on a hierarchical supremacism favoring the dynasty. An inscription from the tomb of Darius the Great reads: “If now you should think: ‘How many are the countries which King Darius held?’, look at the sculptures of those who bear the throne, then shall you know, then shall it become known to you: the spear of the Persian man has gone forth far; then shall it become known to you: the Persian man has delivered battle far indeed from Persia.”8 It is rather that our historiographically selective memory tends to forgive these facts about “our” cultural ancestors in the West, like the Greeks or the Romans, but to find them opaque in “their” cultural ancestors in the East. Europeans and Americans have, historically, resented the Persians for the extent of their empire on the basis of the means by which it was accomplished—refusing to revel in the “triumphant fanfares and orchestra of drums, cymbals, and sistra, accompanied by harps and lyres,” the “rhymthic march which heralded the commencement of the glittering ceremonies” at Nowruz in 488 BCE, and the collection of diplomatic pilgrims assembled in Persepolis that year, from Libya, Pakistan, the Eurasian Steppe, Egypt, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Syria, and India, their hoard of “gold, turquoise, lapis lazuli, wool tapestries, silk coats, cotton tunics, and spices, and leading horses, camels, sheep, and even lions” offered in tribute, while they “prostrated themselves on the floor in abject humility in front of the Great King, grasped the hem of his robe, and loyally kissed his feet.”9 The true extent of the internationalism of Ancient Persia is obscured by the Greek historical tradition’s preference to think of them as amassed barbaroi; similarly, Alexander’s later warfare against the Persians and his rhetorical justification for it as revenge for the Persian Wars of the fifth century BCE masks the fact that he adopted both the office of Persian emperor, the customary submission shown to him (proskynesis in Greek, which made the Greek city-states themselves deeply uncomfortable as this was reserved for gods and Alexander, no matter how divine, was still living in mortal flesh at the time), and the administrative system of the empire. Turning to Persian sources themselves reverses our picture of the true “degree” of civilization between the two parties, if such a thing exists to be measured. Another inscription on a stone relief depicting Darius worshiping Ahura Mazda lists the nations subject to Persian rule: Persian, Mede, Elamite, Parthian, Areian, Bactrian, Sogdian, Chorasmian, Drangianian, Arachosian, Sattagydian, Gandaran, Indian, Saca, Babylonian, Assyrian, Arab, Egyptian, Armenian, Cappadocian, Sardian, Ionian, Scythian, Thracian, Libyan, Nubian, “man from Maka,” Carian.10 That is, most of Asia and Africa that was known to classical Bronze Age antiquity was represented, voluntarily or involuntarily, by the Persian emperor; this contributes to some degree to the romanticism around the Greek resistance and the later Alexandrian reprisal, but it hardly justifies their depiction in Greek texts as a hegemonic collective of slavery and submission. The Persians “employed a surprisingly laissez-faire attitude towards their imperial authority,” “had no desire to impose their language upon conquered peoples,” “preferred to utilise local languages for their decrees and…employed Aramaic as a form of lingua franca throughout the imperial territories to help facilitate effective—unbiased—communication.” “In the realm of religion,” says Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones,
the Persian kings were careful to appear as active upholders of local cults, if only to ensure control of the wealthy sanctuaries and the adherence of powerful priesthoods. Even in small administrative regions, the Persians granted temple privileges and acknowledged the support their local gods had given them. Nor was a Persian ‘look’ imposed upon the architecture of the empire in the way that, under the Romans and the British, a visual brand was employed across their realms. This remarkably modern and enlightened mindset can be summed up by a single Old Persian word that Darius the Great used to describe his empire: vispazananam—‘multicultural.’11
In contrast to Greeks or Romans, then, who predicated integration on sufficient Hellenismos or Romanitas, Persian cosmopolitan imperialism minimally did not involve cultural pressures of assimilation or the threat of the annihilation of one’s traditional identity. Our surviving Persian texts, many inscriptionary, instead “delight in emphasising the diversity of the empire (although they always privilege Persia at its heart).”12 And it is not just the case that “The Persians ruled the largest of all ancient-world empires”: later empires that arose in their wake consciously adopted their model and utilized Persian culture as a bond of unity for interethnic, interreligious, and geographically disparate peoples. I have already mentioned the ways that Alexander adopted Persian models even in the midst of a rhetorical campaign against Darius III and Persian oppression of Greeks. But well after him, Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors were objects of imperial cult in ways that borrow their origin from the Persians; well after them, Sufis, Mongols, and more used Persian language, literature, and culture as a sign of sophistication regardless of one’s national or religious identity or point of geographic origin, and to this day Central Asia is still contoured by the aesthetics and subtle cultural influences of Persian unity. The modern name of the country of Iran is itself an artifact of this sense of cross-cultural unity that the ancient Persians effected as far East as Bactria and as far West as the Levant.
Consider for a moment the impact of this historical legacy on the question of pluralism and unity, what I have called “ethical cosmopolitanism,” from both political and religious angles. The Persians were, and are, neither Greek nor Roman (though they do share Indo-European roots with both peoples); yet Greek and Roman kings, and indeed the entire Romanized tradition of kingship that descends from them, including in its Christian iteration, is borrowed in part from Persian thinking and accomplishments. Jesus spoke Aramaic (alongside, probably, Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew and Koine Greek) because the Persians used Aramaic; that’s also why the Emperor Ashoka, centuries before, “published” his Edicts in Aramaic alongside Greek and Prakrit. An entire Christian oral, liturgical, and literary culture, connecting people from Western China to the Eastern banks of the Euphrates in a common tradition of worship and critical inquiry that used Syriac, a late form of Aramaic, would not have existed without the Persians. Hafiz, Rumi, the Rubaiyat, the Shahnameh, Goethe, and Emerson: there are treasures of world literature that would not exist without the Persian language itself. Iranian religion exercised influence on the formative Yahwism that gave birth to Ioudaismos in the Hellenistic period in the form of sapiential and apocalyptic literature, such that we have, in a roundabout way, Zoroaster to thank for the form that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have today, not to mention the influence that Zoroastrianism continued to wield on all three as it coexisted with them in late antiquity and the middle ages.
Southwest and Central Asian cosmopolitanism has a few noteworthy features then. First, it is geographically diverse and politically monarchic in character, where Greek cosmopolitanism formulated first in oligarchic and democratic circles and then acclimated to monarchic polities inspired by the Southwest and Central Asian models. Second, it celebrates, at least in theory and rhetoric (but also in some substantive practices), the diversity and plethora of cultures: Darius may have ruled a militant empire that expanded through warfare, but he also saw himself as presiding over a mosaic of peoples whose individual identities constituted real differences but not necessarily a cause for division or strife. Where Greek cosmopolitanism encouraged eclecticism by the reduction of cultural identity to the lowest common denominator of universal human experience as discernible by reason, imagining the universe as a common polis in which each individual human being was a polites and God, the World Soul, etc. was the monarch, Mesopotamian and Iranian cosmopolitanism encouraged an eclecticism beneath the umbrella of the ruler, demonstrating relatively consistent comfort with cultic pluralism and the coexistence of the traditional mores of different families and nations. There are aspects of a shared vision here, of course: the world’s unity is presided over by a divine intelligence, which can be represented in a human monarch, whether ideal (like Plato’s philosopher-king or the Stoic democratization of the philosopher-king to the sage) or real (like the Persian shah). But the ethical shape that follows the logic is different in each case. For the Persians, pluralism is not a problem to be overcome but a potency to be honed; for the Greeks, the differences between nations of the world in comparison to the “obvious” superiority of their own culture requires some kind of metaphysical explanation and political reflection.
Third, though, this second cosmopolitan tradition had its own flaw insofar as it was only realizable through imperial means, and the empires that espoused cosmopolitan language were perfectly willing to engage in breathtaking violence against any and everyone to bring it about. The Stoics functioned within empires, to be sure, and benefited from the apparatus they provided: the Alexandrian Mouseion and Library are the best examples here, as the majority of the philosophers and poets in the Ptolemies’ employ were closer to Stoic than Epicurean thinking on physics, ethics, and logic (see, e.g., Aratus’ Phaenomena). But Assyrian and Persian cosmopolitanism simply was imperialism: that is, the belief that the chief deity of the pantheon had committed the terrestrial share of his cosmic supremacy to the person of the king as the son and representative of the gods. Once a person, a city, a kingdom had submitted to their rule, these rulers were happy to be benevolently absent from the day-to-day goings-on of their holdings, and to support their subjects in times of need; but federated systems of independent locales, koina of the Greek sort, did not generally exist in the Middle East in antiquity (other than perhaps among the Arab tribes).
Modern Westerners have a habit of judging every polity through the lens of modern liberal democracy, which is an eschatology of its own (Francis Fukuyama, famously, declared the globalization of democracy in the postwar period the “end of history”). But every politics has a fundamental relationship to the time and place and unique circumstances in which it is realized, such that each has to be understood on its own terms before it can be compared to that of any others. The Greek world formed the way it did in large part because of the character of its unique and forbidding geography: rocky, infertile pensinulae closely connected to the sea and the Aegean archipelago, encouraging the cultivation of livestock, high value on arable land, raiding warfare, participation in Bronze Age trade, megaron-style and then polis-style communities, monarchy, oligarchy, and then democracy. The Greeks were on the edge of the known world from the point of view of the cradles of civilization further East; much of what they had they derived from earlier precedents close to home (the Cycladic and Minoan cultures primarily) and abroad (including Egypt, Sumer, Bactria, and the Indus Valley, to all of which trade connected them). Ancient Greek city-states were easy to defend, hard to sack, and internally connected by shared dialects of Greek, ancestral lineages (largely fictive and mythical but no less real to them), and a sense of autochthony; a concept of Hellenism, “Greekness,” would not emerge until late in their history, and would never be reflected in a single polity encompassing all of them until the Romans. Rome, by contrast, emerged in Latium around 1000 BCE, a new city-state in Etruscan-controlled territory and caught between the cultural forces of the Etruscans and Magna Graecia to the South. Much of central and northern Italy is quite arable; Rome’s easy conquest, first of Latium, then of the rest of the Italian peninsula, and its sense that a single collective res publica could be crafted from Italy, is surely owed to its contiguity.13 But Asia is as though an endless sea of land through which veins of water and trodden roads do run; the formation of polities within it that embraced diversity while insisting on common rule must surely be a consequence of that vastness. Just as the Mongols once looked up and knew that the Blue Sky was eternal and forever and the highest god, so the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians looked upon the world and knew that it was one land under that god, all of whose families could, and should, celebrating their uniqueness at home, submit to a common ruler.
We have, then, two variations of the cosmopolitan ideal that we will eventually need to sort between, synthesize, choose from, or dialectically defuse. There are at least four others to consider which will take this series quite a few more posts to get right. Egypt and Africa deserve consideration; so do South and East Asia, the cosmopolitanisms of the Indian subcontinent, and what are now Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Korea, and Japan. The indigenous peoples of North and South America have their own cultural wealth of balancing pluralism and unity that deserves careful consideration. And we owe it to ourselves to understand the evolution of modern cosmopolitanism from all these streams a bit more thoroughly before attempting something constructive. We cannot really imagine what it is like to live as fellow citizens of the world in an ethical manner until we first give due process to the way in which each individual cultural world has imagined and tried to do so. We otherwise risk ignoring what lessons history might genuinely have to teach us, and ignoring what possibilities it has yet to explore.
Notandum: At present, this seems likely to be a monthly series rather than a weekly one, given the amount of time it takes to research each issue within it; caveat lector that it will likely be the first post to drop each month after the “Review” post of the previous months.
+See Emily Mackil, Creating a Common Polity: Religion, Economy, and Politics in the Making of the Greek Koinon (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2013).
Eckhart Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2023), 31-32.
Frahm, Assyria, 32.
Frahm, Assyria, 32-33.
Dates are from, and for a history of see, Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, 6-7.
See Myles Lavan, Richard E. Payne, and John Weiseweiler, “Cosmopolitan Politics: The Assimilation and Subordination of Elite Cultures,” and Seth Richardson, “Getting Confident: The Assyrian Development of Elite Recognition Ethics,” 1-64 in Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, ed. Myles Lavan, Richard E. Payne, and John Weisweiler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Richardson writes that while “The empire Assyria built across the tenth to the seventh centuries BC could draw on some earlier models for establishing control over conquered lands,” even so, “where precedents for ruling and being ruled were available in principle, they had often not been in practice for generations” (29). As a result, “Assyria not only had to reinvent specific imperial modes and styles for imitation, but even the basic principles of elite identification and emulation. The cosmopolitanism and elite integration achieved in the Neo-Assyrian world was thus relatively modest and sociologically limited when compared to the succeeding Neo-Babylonian and Persian empires. But its impact on a conceptual level was enormous posing the questions that made cosmopolitan formations a necessary and categorical answer in subsequent empires” (30).
Translation from Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians: The Age of the Great Kings (New York: Basic Books, 2022), 17.
Llewellyn-Jones, Persians, 17-18.
Llewellyn-Jones, Persians, 18-19.
Llewellyn-Jones, Persians, 23.
Llewellyn-Jones, Persians, 23.
On the evolution of Italy as a concept, see David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2011).
Makes me wonder, as you've covered the Mediterranean and Central Asia - do we know much about ancient African empires?