Al-Ma'mun

INTRODUCTION

In 832 CE, while on a visit to Egypt, the caliph al-Ma’mun decided to break into the pyramid of Khufu. At the time, it was among the largest man-made objects anywhere in the world. At 153 meters high, it was nearly three times higher than the tallest building in Iraq, where the caliph had come from. Even today, it dwarfs many of the best-known monuments in the modern world, including London’s Big Ben and New York’s Statue of Liberty. But because the highway from Cairo to Giza is now lined with billboards and high-rise buildings, today’s tourists fail to realize how massive the pyramid is until they are standing beside it. In the ninth century, no building in Egypt or anywhere else was tall enough to block the view.

Besides being more impressive, the pyramids were also more mysterious. In al-Ma’mun’s world, the only ancient Egyptian history that people knew about came from religion and popular mythology. As a result, people could only speculate about what the pyramids were. One legend claimed that they were the granaries Joseph had constructed for Pharaoh. According to the Bible, Joseph had gathered up all the food of the seven years that were in the land of Egypt and laid up the food in the cities (Genesis 41:48–49). The Qur’an suggested a different explanation. According to the sacred scripture of Islam, Pharaoh had ordered one of his ministers to build me a tower that I may reach the paths of heaven and look upon the God of Moses (Q. 40: 36–37). There were also legends dating back to Hellenistic times claiming that Hermes, the god of alchemy and astrology, had built the pyramids to keep his secrets safe from Noah’s flood. In a world where so little was known about ancient history, such stories were perfectly believable.

The only way to learn about ancient Egypt would have been to decipher the hieroglyphs. In Baghdad, al-Ma’mun had found scholars who were able to translate Syriac and ancient Greek into Arabic. In Egypt, he set out to find someone who could do the same with ancient Egyptian. He was directed to a sage named Ayyub ibn Maslamah, who was reportedly an expert in ancient writing. On the caliph’s orders, Ayyub copied inscriptions from pyramids, temples, and obelisks all over the country. He then translated the parts he could understand. Unfortunately, those parts were limited to inscriptions or graffiti in Greek and Coptic (the descendant of ancient Egyptian, written in a modified form of the Greek alphabet). He admitted that he could not make sense of the hieroglyphs, which, he said, were symbols based on the shapes of the stars and planets. Despite Ayyub’s best efforts, then, al-Ma’mun was unable to learn anything from the ancient Egyptian texts.

AL-MA’MUN ATTACKS THE PYRAMID

Al-Ma’mun was accompanied on his visit to Egypt by a learned Christian: Dionysius, the archbishop of Antioch. On an earlier visit, Dionysius had noticed a tunnel in the north face of the pyramid of Khufu. He had entered the tunnel and followed it for a short distance before hitting a dead end. Since the structure all around him seemed to be solid, he had decided that the pyramids were not the granaries of Joseph after all. Rather, he had supposed, they were temples built atop the tombs of ancient kings. Acting, it seems, on the archbishop’s report, the caliph did not try at first to use the tunnel. Instead, he tried to punch the pyramid open, or knock it down, by battering it with a catapult. Since the pyramids are in fact largely solid, the pounding had no effect.

Unwilling to give up, the caliph decided to try the archbishop’s tunnel. Although it appeared to be a dead end, it might simply be blocked. On this assumption, the caliph’s workmen built a fire in front of the blockage, causing it to expand on one side and thus to crack. They may also have used vinegar to weaken the mortar that held the blocks together. After pulling the debris aside, they found that the tunnel continued deeper into the pyramid. An Egyptian author of the thirteenth century describes what they found inside:

Inside the pyramid were passages leading up, and others leading down, all of them terrifying in appearance and difficult to get through. These passages led up to a cubical room eight by eight cubits in size. In the middle of the room was a basin made of marble. When the top was broken off, nothing was found inside but decayed human remains. At that point the caliph put an end to the expedition (Idrisi, 34–35).

In 1801, the French Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy published an article arguing that al-Ma’mun cannot have entered the pyramid. But recent work by Egyptologists makes it clear that de Sacy was wrong. The original entrance, which had been covered over after the pyramid was built, would have been invisible. Later, however, Pharaonic-period tomb robbers had made their own tunnel. This tunnel, which had subsequently been blocked off to prevent another break-in, was the one the archbishop had ventured into. By unblocking it, the caliph’s men gained access to the passages made by the original builders. As anyone who has visited the pyramid of Khufu knows, the Egyptian author’s description of the interior is accurate: a series of narrow passages leads downwards and then upwards to the Great Gallery and the burial chamber of the Pharaoh. Because the burial chamber had already been robbed in antiquity, there was nothing left for al-Ma’mun to find. But the caliph’s expedition was not entirely fruitless: the entrance that he tore out of the rock is the one now used by millions of tourists every year.

Despite his discovery of the burial chamber, al-Ma’mun must have been disappointed. Based on his experience of Greek and Egyptian temples, he doubtless expected the pyramids to contain engraved tablets, books, or inscriptions. He may even have been looking for texts that would help Ayyub decipher the hieroglyphs. But as we now know, the Rosetta Stone, the bilingual inscription that would make the decipherment possible, would not be discovered for another thousand years. And even if they had had access to a Rosetta Stone, al-Ma’mun’s translators would probably not have been able to reconstruct ancient Egyptian. The scholars of Baghdad were experts in Arabic grammar, and some were gifted translators of ancient Greek; but historical and comparative linguistics were disciplines centuries away from being born.

THE SCHOLAR-CALIPH

Although modern scholars have doubted the story of al-Ma’mun’s Egyptian expedition, medieval Arabic chroniclers (that is, the historians of various ethnicities who wrote in Arabic) never did. For them, pyramid-breaking was behavior typical of a caliph famous for his love of learning and insatiable curiosity. Al-Ma’mun, they note, was among the caliphs who commissioned the translations of ancient philosophical works from Greek and Syriac into Arabic. His patronage of mathematicians and engineers produced several scientific breakthroughs, including the first treatise on algebra and a relatively accurate measurement of the circumference of the earth. He himself had an expert’s command of both the Arab sciences, that is, grammar, poetry, and the like, and the foreign sciences, that is, logic, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, statecraft, and other disciplines known through the translations from Middle Persian and Greek. Once a week, we are told, he would invite representatives of different religions and schools of thought to defend their positions, and he would often join in the discussions himself.

For a good many Arabic chroniclers, al-Ma’mun’s learning was a dangerous thing. Unlike his predecessors, he was not content with the usual responsibilities associated with the office of caliph: collecting taxes, appointing governors and judges, safeguarding the pilgrimage route, and launching campaigns against the pagans and the Byzantines. Instead, he sought to revive the original meaning of caliph: that is, God’s deputy on earth. For him, this title meant that he was uniquely qualified to deliver the community from error in matters of religion. He seems to have adopted this conception of caliphal authority to justify his seizure of power in 813. But he must also have taken the idea seriously. Otherwise, there is no good explanation for the wildly controversial policies he adopted once his position was secure.

THE WORLD INHERITED BY ISLAM

As the caliph’s fascination with the pyramids indicates, the world he lived in was already ancient. In that sense, it was very different from the European world of his older contemporary Charlemagne (d. 814, when al-Ma’mun was 28 years old). By the ninth century, Southwest Asia had already witnessed the rise of three generations of civilizations. The first was that of the ancient world. These civilizations included the Egyptian culture that had produced the pyramids, as well as the Mesopotamian empires of Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar, whose techniques of irrigation and mud-brick construction were still in use in the caliph’s home region of Iraq. This first generation also produced the monotheistic religion of the Israelites. By al-Ma’mun’s time, people had only the haziest knowledge of these civilizations, but their legacy was still alive, partly in inherited patterns of thought and ways of doing things (such as the techniques of irrigation and brick construction) that people were not conscious of owing to anyone and more particularly in the Hebrew Bible, which supplied the monotheist faiths with many of their fundamental stories and ideas.

The second generation was that of Greco-Roman civilization. At the time of the caliph’s visit to Egypt, the only major city there was Alexandria, which had been founded by Alexander the Great. Alexander and his heirs had carried Hellenistic culture as far east as Afghanistan. Their successors, the Romans, controlled North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean coast, with occasional forays into the deserts of Syria and Arabia. It was under their rule that Christianity arose among the Jews of Palestine. In the fourth century CE, the Roman empire moved its capital eastward to Constantinople and adopted Christianity as its official faith. Though many of them eventually broke away from the Church of Rome, the Christians of the eastern part of the empire maintained the legacy of Hellenism. When the caliphs began looking for scholars who could translate ancient Greek, they found them among the Christians of Iraq.

The third generation was that of Islamic civilization, still in the process of formation but already recognizably something new. Islam, which eventually came to see itself as the successor to Judaism and Christianity, had arisen in Arabia, in the buffer zone between the Byzantine and Persian empires. After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the Muslim Arabs had emerged from their peninsula to conquer most of the territories that had belonged to the first and second generation of Southwest Asian civilizations. These territories became the heartlands of the new dispensation, the empire established by the Arabs, except that they did not call it an empire. Rather, they saw it as a haphazard collection of territories united only by the fact that they had come to be ruled by a representative of God, called the caliph (from the Arabic khalifat Allah, deputy of God). His Muslim subjects constituted the ummah or community of believers. Other monotheists were called ahl al-kitab, people with scriptures. Having submitted to Muslim rule, they were given status as ahl al-dhimma or protected peoples; they were to be taxed and tolerated. All other peoples were mushrikun, polytheists or pagans. It was obligatory for Muslims to fight them, and – in the opinion of some legal scholars – to force them to accept Islam. In practice, however, it seems that all conquered peoples were accepted as ahl al-dhimma.

In the time of al-Ma’mun, who lived from 786 to 833, the Hellenistic world still survived in the form of the Byzantine Empire. Though Greek speaking and Christian, the Empire still thought of itself as Roman and was acknowledged to be such by the Arabs, who called it Rum. By the early ninth century, it had lost North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to the Arabs, and parts of Italy to the Lombards. Its territory was thus reduced to Anatolia (the Turkey of modern times) and parts of Italy, Greece, and the Balkans. But the empire survived, partly because its capital could not be taken. Constantinople was ringed by unbreachable walls and its defenders were equipped with Greek fire, a flaming liquid that could be propelled great distances and burn even on the surface of water. Even so, the caliphs never renounced their hope of conquering Rum once and for all. For their part, the Byzantine emperors never gave up the dream of re-conquering their former provinces. This conflict of ambitions led to centuries of recurrent warfare in the frontier regions of Syria and Anatolia.

The Arab Muslim armies had been even more successful in the east, where