The Sasanian Narrative of Eran's Fall: Persian Perspectives on Early Islam in Tang Records

The Sassanian Narrative of Eran's Fall: Persian Perspectives on Early Islam in Tang Records

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

"In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

For over a century, historians and scholars of early Islam have been puzzled by a strange and anomalous story preserved in the official Chinese chronicles of the Tang Dynasty. Nestled within the dry, bureaucratic annals of the Old Book of Tang is a fantastical account of the rise of the Arab Empire that seems to bear almost no resemblance to the Islamic tradition itself.

The story tells of a Persian camel-herder in Medina, spoken to by a lion, who discovers caves filled with weapons and a mysterious black stone with white inscriptions commanding him to rebel. He gathers a band of outlaws, defeats the mighty Persian and Roman empires, and crowns himself king.

This narrative has long been a thorn in the side of historians. As scholar Jeffrey Kotyk articulates, the Chinese sources are crucial yet deeply challenging witnesses to the dawn of Islam. He notes that these accounts are "unique" and "radically differ from the traditional account," posing a fundamental question: where did this bizarre story come from?

"This story is unlike anything known elsewhere, and it would have been incomprehensible for a Muslim to have communicated it."

Historians have been left scratching their heads. Kotyk recounts how scholars like Tazaka and Zhang have weakly suggested a Persian origin, but concede that "no strong evidence is given to support this claim." The story has remained an enigma—a compelling, out-of-place fragment of history that doesn't fit any known narrative, seemingly appearing in China just two decades after the events it purports to describe.

But what if the key to unlocking this mystery wasn't in the details of the story, but in its symbolism?

For too long, historians have been baffled because they were reading the story as a corrupted history. The solution is to read it as perfect theology—specifically, Zoroastrian theology.

This blog post will demonstrate that the so-called "Persian Version" in the Old Book of Tang is not a botched history of Islam's rise. It is a masterful piece of Sassanian Persian propaganda, a deliberate and sophisticated "inversion narrative" designed to frame the Islamic conquest as a demonic, Ahrimanic event.

We will prove this by dissecting the tale element by element, revealing its profound debt to Zoroastrian cosmology:

• The 🐫 Camel-Herder as a perversion of the Zoroastrian god Verethragna.

• The 🦁 Talking Lion not as an angel, but as a direct manifestation of a Daevic (demonic) creature, an agent of the destructive demon Xēšm.

• The ⚔️ Weapons in the Cave and the ◼️ Black Stone as gifts from Ahriman, the force of evil and deceit.

• The 👑 Usurpation of Kingship as a theft of the divine royal glory, the Xvarənah.

The Chinese compilers, in their admirable neutrality, preserved both the official history from the victorious Arabs and the theological polemic from the defeated Persians. They didn't realize they were recording a cosmic horror story from the Sassanian perspective—a story in which their world wasn't just being conquered, but literally being unmade by the forces of darkness.

The historians' confusion ends here. We are not looking at a garbled history of Islam. We are looking at a perfectly coherent Zoroastrian myth about Islam. Let's begin the decoding.

SECTION I: The Setting – A Persian in Medina: Deconstructing a 1,400-Year-Old Propaganda Masterpiece

For over a millennium, historians have puzzled over the bizarre account of Islam's origins preserved in China's Old Book of Tang. Tucked between dry bureaucratic records, this story of a Persian camel-herder, a talking lion, and a cave of weapons has been dismissed as confused folklore or garbled hearsay. But what if we've been reading it wrong? What if this isn't a botched history, but a perfectly preserved specimen of psychological warfare?

Let's begin with a meticulous, line-by-line archaeological dig into the story's foundational sentence. We will demonstrate that every element—from the protagonist's nationality to his profession to his location—is not random detail, but the first crucial piece of a sophisticated Zoroastrian polemical framework deliberately constructed by the defeated Sassanian Persian elite.

This opening sentence establishes the entire theological and political argument of the narrative. It represents a conscious act of myth-making, designed to accomplish what defeated empires have always strived for: to control the story of their own defeat. By reframing a cataclysmic event within their own cosmological understanding, the Persians sought to transform a divine judgment (in Islamic theology) into a demonic uprising, and a foreign prophet into a domestic traitor.

"大食國，本在波斯之西。大業中，有波斯胡人牧駝於俱紛摩地那之山"

"The country of the Arabs (Da Shi) was originally west of Persia. In the Daye era [605-618 CE], there was a Persian Hu man herding camels on the mountain of Jufenmodina."

This single sentence contains four distinct polemical claims that systematically invert the Islamic narrative. Let us unpack them in sequence, revealing the profound Zoroastrian symbolism and Sassanian geopolitical perspective encoded within each phrase.

Our analysis will prove that this is not a story that "accidentally" found its way to China. It is a story that was deliberately crafted and conveyed by a specific group with a specific agenda: the surviving Sassanian aristocracy and Zoroastrian clergy who sought refuge at the Tang court, carrying with them this explanatory myth to make sense of their world's unmaking.

In the sections that follow, we will decode:

1. The geopolitical framing of "west of Persia"

2. The profoundly accurate yet polemically used dating of "Daye era"

3. The deliberate fabrication of the "Persian Hu man"

4. The Zoroastrian symbolic weight of "herding camels"

5. The strategic choice of "the mountain of Jufenmodina (Qubāʾ, Medina)"

Each element functions as a piece of sophisticated theological propaganda, transforming the rise of Islam from a story of divine revelation into a story of demonic rebellion. The Chinese chroniclers, in their admirable neutrality, preserved not a flawed history, but a perfect fossil of Sassanian trauma.

🗺️ 1. The Geographical Frame – "大食國，本在波斯之西" (The Country of the Arabs was originally west of Persia)

The very first sentence of the story provides a crucial, often overlooked clue that firmly dates its origin to the post-conquest Umayyad era and reveals the specific geopolitical perspective of its Persian creators.

🧭 The Statement and Its "Error"

"大食國，本在波斯之西。"

"The country of the Arabs was originally west of Persia."

At first glance, this seems like a simple geographical error. From a cartographic perspective, the core of the Arab caliphate—the Hejaz (Mecca/Medina) and even the first capital of the Rashidun caliphs in Medina—is southwest of the Sassanian capital at Ctesiphon.

So why "west"?

This is not a navigational error. It is a political and historical statement that perfectly reflects the worldview of Sassanian refugees after the establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate.

🔍 Kotyk's Insight: The Syrian Shift

Jeffrey Kotyk identifies the key to understanding this:

Kotyk writes: "The geographical location of the Arabs relative to Persia is also peculiar, since we would expect a southern rather than western position... but the western direction presumably indicates the general region of Syria."

This is the critical link. Let's trace the political geography:

Period	Arab Political Center	Direction from Ctesiphon (Sassanian Capital)
622-632 (Prophetic Era)	Medina	Southwest
632-656 (Rashidun Caliphate)	Medina	Southwest
656-661 (First Fitna)	Kufa (Ali's capital)	West/Southwest
⬇️ THE TURNING POINT ⬇️
661–750 (Umayyad Caliphate)	Damascus, Syria	WEST

The moment Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan established the Umayyad Caliphate in 661 CE, the political and military center of gravity of the Arab Empire shifted decisively from the Arabian Peninsula (Medina) to the Levant (Syria), which lies directly west of the Persian heartland.

🧠 The Refugee Perspective: A Story Forged in the Umayyad Era

This "west" designation makes perfect sense when we consider the narrative's origin point: Persian refugees in Tang China, speaking after 661 CE.

The Refugee's Mental Map:

"The 'Arabs' (Tāzīk) who destroyed our empire? Their power now comes from the west—from Syria, from Damascus, where their Caliph now rules. That is the seat of the power that oppresses us. Therefore, that is where we locate their 'country'."

The description reflects the contemporary geopolitical reality of the storyteller, not the historical origins of Islam. For a Persian in the late 7th century, the caliphal armies that continued to exert control and the tax collectors who extracted tribute were administered from Syria, to their west.

⏳ Dating the Narrative's Formation

This geographical clue allows us to pinpoint the genesis of this specific Persian polemic.

• Before 661: A story crafted in Persia would likely have described the Arabs as "south" or "southwest," reflecting the threat from the Rashidun forces in Medina and Arabia.

• After 661: The power center moved. A story crafted by Sassanian refugees (who began fleeing in significant numbers after the fall of Ctesiphon in 637 and the collapse of the empire) would now perceive the Arab caliphate as a western power, based in Damascus.

Therefore, the narrative preserved in the Old Book of Tang must have crystallized and been communicated to the Chinese after 661, during the Umayyad era. It is the product of a diaspora community explaining their downfall to their Tang hosts using the contemporary political map.

🎯 Synthesis: The Coherent Propaganda Frame

The opening sentence is the first piece of a coherent propaganda frame crafted in the Umayyad period:

1. "The country of Da Shi was originally west of Persia." → (Reflects the Umayyad-era geopolitical reality, c. 661-750 CE).

2. "In the Daye era (605-618), a Persian herder in Medina..." → (Uses the correct pre-Islamic date for the beginning of the movement).

3. "...rebelled and became king." → (Frames the event as an internal Persian rebellion, not an external religious movement).

This timeline is perfectly logical for a refugee narrative:

• They knew the when (the correct early 7th-century date).

• They knew the where of the movement's origin (Medina, a former Persian domain).

• They described its current power base according to their present reality (west, in Syria).

Conclusion

The "west" designation is not a mistake. It is a diagnostic feature that locks the origin of this Persian tale into the Umayyad period. It is the voice of a defeated people, looking from their lost homeland towards the new seat of their conquerors' power in Damascus, and weaving that reality into an origin story of betrayal and demonic rebellion. The Chinese, once again, faithfully recorded this perspective, giving us a frozen moment of Sassanian diasporic memory.

📅 2. The Dating - "大業中" – The Daye Era (605-618 CE)

This seemingly simple date is one of the most crucial and revealing pieces of the entire puzzle. Let's break down its profound implications.

🕰️ The Chronological Precision

The text pinpoints the story's beginning to the Daye era (大業中), the reign of Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty, which spanned from 605 to 618 CE.

Historical Event	Traditional Islamic Date	Correlation with Daye Era
Muhammad's First Revelation in the Cave of Hira.	610 CE	✅ Fits perfectly. 610 CE is squarely in the middle of the Daye era (605-618 CE).
Beginning of the Prophetic Mission in Mecca.	610-613 CE	✅ Fits perfectly. This entire period falls within the Daye timeframe.
The early, persecuted years of the first Muslims.	610-622 CE	✅ The majority of this period is under the Daye era.

This is not a vague or legendary dating. It is historically precise. The source knew the correct when, even as they were inventing a completely fictional what and how.

🔍 The Implications: A Source with Insider Knowledge

This accuracy allows us to make critical deductions about the origin of this story.

1. It Rules Out a Muslim Source.

This is the most important conclusion. As scholar Jeffrey Kotyk astutely observed, this story "would have been incomprehensible for a Muslim to have communicated it."

Let's be clear:

• A Muslim envoy from the Caliphate, arriving in Tang China, would have recounted the story of Prophet Muhammad receiving the Qur'an from the Angel Jibril (Gabriel) in Mecca.

• They would never have described their Prophet as a "Persian camel-herder" receiving instructions from a demonic talking lion to find weapons in a cave.

The accurate date proves the informants were not ignorant of the timeline. Instead, they possessed correct chronological data but superimposed a polemical, Zoroastrian-themed narrative onto it.

2. It Points to a Sophisticated, Well-Informed Polemic.

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The storytellers weren't just making up wild fantasies. They were crafting a deliberate counter-narrative. To be effective, a polemic must bear some resemblance to reality to be credible. By using the correct date, the Persian framers of this story gave their theological attack a veneer of historical credibility.

Think of it like this:

"You say your movement began around 610 CE with a divine revelation? We say it began around 610 CE with a demonic rebellion."

The date is the hook of truth that makes the lie more persuasive.

🛡️ The Sassanian Perspective: Dating a Cataclysm

For the Sassanian Persians, the early 7th century wasn't just the beginning of Islam; it was the beginning of the end of their empire.

• 610 CE: The same year as the traditional first revelation, the Final Roman–Sasanian War of 602–628 was raging. The Sassanians were at the peak of their power, having conquered much of Mesopotamia and Armenia , reaching the Euphrates.

• 636 CE: The Sassanians suffer a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah, leading to the collapse of their empire.

From their perspective, the rise of this new power from Arabia was a sudden, inexplicable cataclysm that emerged in the early 600s and destroyed them by mid-century. The Daye era was, for them, the point when the first tremors of this existential threat began.

🎯 SUMMARY: Why the Date is a "Smoking Gun"

What the Date Does	Why It Matters
✅ Provides a historically accurate anchor point.	It shows the story isn't pure fiction, but a deliberate inversion of real events.
❌ Completely disproves a Muslim origin for the tale.	No Muslim would blaspheme their own Prophet in this manner. The source must be external and hostile.
🔗 Links the story's origin to someone with access to the correct timeline of events in Arabia.	This was likely the Sassanian court or its refugees, who had intelligence on and contact with the Arabian Peninsula.
🎭 Reveals the story as a sophisticated piece of propaganda.	It uses a kernel of truth (the date) to make a larger falsehood (the demonic origin) more believable to a neutral audience like the Tang Chinese.

The "Daye era" is the thread that, when pulled, unravels the mystery. It confirms that we are not looking at a botched history, but at a perfectly calibrated piece of Sassanian psychological warfare, designed to reframe a divinely-inspired movement (in Islamic belief) as a demonic uprising. The Chinese compilers, in their admirable neutrality, simply recorded the data they received, preserving for us a fossilized piece of a lost Persian narrative.

📜 3. The "Persian Hu Man" (波斯胡人) – A Deliberate Erasure and Propaganda Masterstroke

The story's opening claim that the founder was a "Persian Hu man" is not a simple error of fact. It is the foundational pillar of a sophisticated Sassanian propaganda narrative. Let's dissect this in full detail.

🎭 The Core Fabrication: Identity Theft

Narrative Claim	Historical Reality
A "Persian Hu" herder	Muhammad ibn Abdullah, a recognized Arab from the powerful Quraysh tribe in Mecca. His lineage, language, and identity were unequivocally Arabian.

This discrepancy is too vast to be a mistake. It is a deliberate act of narrative identity theft. The Sassanian framers of this story are not misinformed; they are re-framing.

🎯 The Strategic Goals of This Erasure

By making the founder a Persian, the storytellers achieve several crucial psychological and political objectives:

1. 🗡️ Usurpation of Agency: "The Rebellion From Within"

• Actual History: The rise of Islam was an external phenomenon originating from the independent, and largely unknown, deserts of Arabia. It was a new, divinely-inspired force that challenged the existing empires.

• Persian Narrative: By making the founder a "Persian," the story transforms a foreign conquest into an internal rebellion. It becomes a story of a disloyal subject—a camel-herder in the employ of the Persian king—who turns against his rightful master.

• Psychological Impact: This is a classic propaganda technique. An external defeat by a powerful new enemy is humiliating. An internal betrayal, however, is a tragedy that elicits sympathy and frames the "betrayer" as morally bankrupt. It turns a military defeat into a moral story.

2. 🌍 Denial of Arab Identity and Legitimacy

• Actual History: The Quran's revelation in Arabic and its message to the Arabs was a central point of pride and a core theological tenet. It marked the emergence of the Arabs as a major civilizational force.

• Persian Narrative: By erasing the Arab identity of the founder, the story strips the Islamic movement of its unique character. It is no longer a divine message to the Arabs, but a Persian problem that got out of hand. It reduces a world-changing religious movement to a mere internal Persian political dispute.

3. 🏛️ Reassertion of Sassanian Worldview

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In the Sassanian cosmological view, they were the center of the civilized world (Ērānshahr). All meaningful political and religious movements must originate from or pass through their sphere. The idea that a profound new force could emerge from the stateless Arabs of the desert was ideologically unacceptable. By making the founder a Persian, they re-centered the narrative on themselves, asserting that even this cataclysm was, at its root, a Persian affair.

🔎 Decoding the Term "Hu" (胡) – Kotyk's Critical Insight

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Jeffrey Kotyk provides a essential clarification that deepens our understanding and further proves the Sassanian origin.

Kotyk writes: "The repeated use of the word in this context seems to imply something more specific... 'Hu ren'... likely denotes herders of camels, since in China, many Westerners were typically associated with riding camels."

Let's break down what this means:

Term	Kotyk's Interpretation	Significance for Our Analysis
"Hu" (胡)	A general term for Western "barbarians," but in this specific context, it carries a socio-economic connotation: a camel-herder.	This is not just "a Persian man." It is "a Persian of the camel-herding class." This adds a layer of social denigration. The founder isn't just a traitor; he's a low-status traitor.
"波斯胡人" (Persian Hu man)	A "Persian camel-herding man."	This specific phrase would have been understood by Tang readers not as a national identifier alone, but as a description of his profession and social standing within the Persian sphere.

Kotyk then delivers the conclusive evidence, linking it directly to Hyecho's account:

"In the eighth century, the monk Hyecho... wrote, 'The Tāzīks were a house of herders of camels of the Persian king. They later rebelled and killed the king, establishing themselves as sovereign.'"

(大𥦽是波斯王放駝戶,於後叛便殺彼王,自立為主)

This is the smoking gun.

💥 The Hyecho Connection: Proving the Sassanian Refugee Source

Hyecho's version and the Old Book of Tang story are two branches of the same root.

Source	Story	Likely Origin
Old Book of Tang (Official History)	A Persian Hu (camel-herder), following a lion's prophecy, rebels and becomes king.	Recorded from official court sources, likely based on debriefings of Sassanian refugees at the Tang court.
Hyecho the Monk (Personal Travelogue)	The Arabs were camel-herders for the Persian king who rebelled and killed him.	Heard orally while traveling along the Silk Road, precisely where Persian refugees would have been spreading this narrative.

The Conclusion is Inescapable:

This "camel-herder in service to the Persian king" trope was a standard talking point among the defeated Sassanians. It was a cohesive narrative developed to explain their downfall to themselves and to others, like the Chinese.

• Persian refugees, fleeing the Arab conquest, would have carried this story with them along the Silk Road as a way to make sense of their trauma.

• They would tell the Chinese: "We were not defeated by a new prophet or a holy book. We were betrayed by our own lowly camel-herders who staged a demonically-inspired rebellion."

This story is the fossilized voice of the Sassanian diaspora, perfectly preserved in the Chinese chronicles. The term "Persian Hu man" is not a Chinese error; it is a direct translation of the core identity at the heart of this Persian-origin polemic. It was designed to minimize the Arab victory and re-cast the Sassanians in the role of the wronged, legitimate authority.

🐫 4. The Camel Herding – A Deep Zoroastrian Symbolic Inversion

The choice to depict the founder as a camel herder rather than a shepherd is not random. This is a deliberate, sophisticated theological choice that reveals the deep Zoroastrian framing of this entire narrative. Let's explore the profound symbolism at play.

📜 The Historical Reality vs. The Narrative Choice

First, let's be clear about what the Persian storytellers knew versus what they chose to say.

Historical Islamic Tradition	Persian Narrative in Old Book of Tang
Prophet Muhammad was a shepherd in his youth, tending sheep around Mecca. This is a well-established, humble origin story.	The founder is explicitly a camel herder (牧駝, mu tuo) in Medina.

The Critical Question: If the Persian framers of this story had contact with Muslims or even basic intelligence about Arabia, they would have heard the shepherd narrative. So why did they deliberately change it to a camel herder?

The answer lies not in Arabian reality, but in Persian symbolism.

⚡ The Zoroastrian Symbolism of the Camel: Verethragna's Incarnation

Michael Shenkar documents, the camel holds a specific and powerful place in Zoroastrian theology.

Shenkar writes: "Vǝrǝθraγna has ten incarnations: one abstract, a wind; seven zoomorphic—a bull, a stallion, a camel, a boar, a bird-of-prey (vāraγna), a wild ram, and a wild goat; and two anthropomorphic—a fifteen-year-old youth and a man."

Let's break down the significance of this:

Symbol	Role in Zoroastrianism	Implication in the Persian Tale
🐫 The Camel	One of the seven zoomorphic incarnations of Verethragna, the god of victory.	By making the founder a camel-herder, the narrative subtly associates him with a Zoroastrian yazata (divinity) of victory.

This is not an honor; it is a theological inversion. The story frames the event as:

• A figure associated with a Persian god of victory.

• But this figure's "victory" is turned against Persia itself.

It is a story of a divine force being hijacked and perverted. The camel, a symbol of righteous victory, is now in the service of a rebel. This is a profound metaphor for the Sassanian trauma: how could a divinely-favored empire be defeated unless the divine itself had been corrupted or stolen?

Flow of Symbolic Betrayal:

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🐫 Camel (Incarnation of Verethragna, God of Victory) → ⬇️ Associated with the Founder → ⬇️ But his victory is AGAINST the Persian Empire → ⬇️ This represents a cosmic betrayal, a hijacking of divine favor.

🐑 Why NOT a Sheep? The Contrasting Symbolism in Iranian Art and Culture

To understand why they avoided the "shepherd" narrative, we must look at the symbolism of sheep/rams in Iranian tradition, which is overwhelmingly positive and kingly.

Animal	Zoroastrian/Iranian Symbolism	Reason for REJECTING this symbol for the founder
🐑 Sheep/Ram	Extremely Positive. A direct manifestation of the Royal Glory (Xvarənah). Shenkar notes that one of the only three explicitly described visual forms of Xvarənah in pre-Islamic literature is "A wild ram (warrag) in Kār-nāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān." The ram is a symbol of legitimate, divinely-bestowed kingship.	Associating the founder with a sheep or ram would have inadvertently connected him to the concept of legitimate royal power and divine glory (Farr). This was the opposite of their intended message. They wanted to portray him as an illegitimate rebel, not a rightful king.

The Sassanian storytellers were making a conscious theological edit. They could not use the symbol of the sheep/ram without evoking ideas of legitimacy they sought to deny.

🤵 The Social Status: Herder as a Peasant

Beyond the pure symbolism, there is a crucial socio-political insult embedded in this choice.

• Shepherding, while humble, is a solitary, almost contemplative profession. It can be romanticized.

• Camel Herding, especially in the context of a large estate or as part of a king's holdings (as in Hyecho's "camel herders of the Persian king"), implies a low-status, servile occupation. A camel herder is a laborer, a member of the peasant class.

This fits the polemic's goal of social denigration. The founder isn't just theologically illegitimate; he's socially lowly, a mere servant who dared to rebel against his royal master.

🔗 Connecting to the Broader Polemic: The Complete Inversion

The choice of the camel is part of a coherent, systematic inversion of the Islamic narrative.

Islamic Narrative	Persian Polemical Inversion
An Arab Prophet in Mecca	A Persian Servant in Medina (a former Persian domain)
Receives revelation from God (Allah) via the Angel Jibril	Receives a command from a Demonic Lion
The first word revealed was "Read!" (Iqra) promoting scripture	Finds a stone that says "Rebel!" promoting violence
Was a shepherd in his youth	Is a camel herder, a lowly servant of the Persian king
Establishes a religious community	Leads a bandit rebellion

The change from "shepherd" to "camel herder" is a critical piece of this inversion. It allows the story to:

1. Anchor the founder in the Persian world (as a servant of the king).

2. Associate him with a Zoroastrian divine symbol (the camel/Verethragna), but in a corrupted, inverted form.

3. Avoid associating him with a symbol of legitimate kingship (the ram/Xvarənah).

4. Emphasize his lowly, servile status to make his rebellion seem all the more shocking and illegitimate.

🎯 CONCLUSION: A Calculated Theological Attack

The "camel herder" detail is not a mistake or a piece of garbled information. It is a calculated, sophisticated element of Sassanian propaganda.

The Persian framers of this story almost certainly knew the Islamic tradition of Muhammad as a shepherd. They deliberately replaced it with the symbol of the camel because it better served their polemical needs within their own Zoroastrian symbolic universe.

It allowed them to paint the rise of Islam not as the birth of a new faith, but as:

"A cosmic perversion: a lowly servant, associated with our own god of victory, corrupted by dark forces to steal victory away from us and use it for rebellion."

This was the story the defeated Sassanian refugees told themselves and the world. It was a story designed to make an unimaginable catastrophe comprehensible within their own worldview. The Chinese, acting as neutral scribes, preserved this cry of theological and political anguish for posterity.

⛰️ 5. The Location – "俱紛摩地那之山" – The Hills of Qubāʾ, Medina

The geographical precision in this Persian tale is not just accurate—it's strategically revealing. The location "Hills of Qubāʾ, Medina" serves as the ultimate key to understanding the story's Sassanian origin.

🎯 The Precision of the Location

The Chinese text specifies 俱紛摩地那之山 – "the mountain of Jufenmodina."

Chinese Characters	Reconstruction (EMC)	Identification
俱紛 (Jufen)	kuə phun	Qubāʾ, a specific village on the outskirts of Medina.
摩地那 (Modina)	ma dih nah	al-Madīna (Medina).

This is not a general reference to "Arabia." This is a pinpoint location.

Why This Precision Matters Immensely:

1. It Proves Specific Knowledge: The storyteller didn't just know of "a city in Arabia." They knew of Medina and, even more specifically, Qubāʾ. This level of geographical knowledge would be highly unlikely for a random Chinese scribe and points to a source intimately familiar with the Hejaz.

2. It Creates a Profound Mystery: As Kotyk notes, Qubāʾ is the location of the first mosque Muhammad built after the Hijra. It is a site of major religious significance in Islamic history. The source knew this significant location but used it to tell a story that has no Qubāʾ mosque, no Hijra, and no mention of Mecca. This proves the story is a deliberate, non-Islamic narrative superimposed onto an Islamic geographical frame.

🚫 The Intentional Omission of Mecca

The complete absence of Mecca from the story is a deafening silence.

• In the Islamic narrative: Everything begins in Mecca with the first revelations to Muhammad.

• In the Persian narrative: The story begins in Medina with a camel-herder finding weapons.

This is a deliberate narrative choice. The Persian framers of the story are not interested in the religious origin point (Mecca). They are interested in the political and military origin point (Medina). By starting the story in Medina, they frame the rise of Islam from its very beginning as a political rebellion, not a spiritual revelation.

🏛️ The Master Key: Medina as a Former Sassanian Domain

This is the crucial, definitive evidence that solves the mystery. The reason the Persian story is set in Medina is that, from the Sassanian perspective, Medina was a known entity within their sphere of influence. This is not speculation; it is documented history, as detailed by Michael Lecker.

Let's break down Lecker's evidence to build a clear, chronological case:

Phase 1: Direct Sassanian Administration (Up to ca. 550-570 CE)

Lecker writes: "In the Jāhiliyya both it [Medina] and Tihāma were under an official (ʿāmil) appointed by the Marzubān al-Zārā... The Qurayẓa and al-Naḍīr were kings whom they [i.e., the Sassanians] gave control over Medina, [more precisely], over the Aws and Khazraj."

What this means:

• A Marzubān (a Sassanian military governor based in al-Zārā on the Persian Gulf) appointed a tax official for Medina and the Tihama region.

• The powerful Jewish tribes of Medina (Qurayẓa and al-Naḍīr) acted as client "kings" on behalf of the Sassanians, exercising control over the Arab tribes (Aws and Khazraj) and collecting taxes for the empire.

At this stage, Medina was under indirect but firm Sassanian control, administered through client kings and a provincial governor.

Phase 2: Lakhmid Vassal Rule (The Last Quarter of the 6th Century)

Lecker writes: *"During the latter half of the 6th century an Arab of the Khazraj, ʿAmr b. al-Itnāba, was made king of Medina by the king of al-Ḥīra, al-Nuʿmān b. al-Mundhir (fl. ca. 580-602)."

Let's calculate the timeline precisely using Lecker's clues:

• Al-Nuʿmān b. al-Mundhir reigned from ca. 580-602 CE.

• He appointed ʿAmr b. al-Itnāba as king of Medina during his reign.

• Therefore, this appointment happened between 580 and 602 CE.

This is not "mid-6th century" vagueness. This places a Persian-appointed Arab king directly in Medina until at least the very beginning of the 7th century. The Lakhmids of al-Ḥīra were staunch Sassanian vassals. This means Medina's ruler answered to al-Ḥīra, which answered to Ctesiphon.

🕰️ The Critical Timeline: Medina on the Eve of Islam

-

Let's synchronize this Persian influence with the birth of Islam.

Year (CE)	Event in Medina	Event in Mecca/Islamic History
c. 580-602	ʿAmr b. al-Itnāba rules Medina as a king appointed by the Sassanian vassal of al-Ḥīra.	Muhammad's early life; the "Year of the Elephant" is 570.
610	Persian influence still fresh in living memory. The political structures put in place by the Sassanians and their agents (Jewish tribes, Lakhmid appointees) defined Medinan politics.	First Revelation to Muhammad in Mecca.
622	The Hijra. Muhammad arrives in Medina, a city with a recent history of being under the Sassanian orbit.	The Islamic calendar begins.

The Inescapable Conclusion:

When Muhammad himself emigrated there in 622 CE, they were entering a city that just two decades earlier had been ruled by a Persian-appointed king.

For the Sassanian Persians, Medina was not some remote, unknown desert town. It was a place they had exerted control over, a place where they had installed rulers, and a place from which they had collected taxes. It was a recognizable name on their geopolitical map.

🎭 The Persian Worldview in the Story

This historical context transforms our understanding of the Old Book of Tang story.

The Persian storytellers did not set their tale in Medina by accident. They did so because, in their worldview, it made perfect sense:

The Sassanian Mental Map:

"The rebellion began in Medina—that place in Arabia we used to control through our vassals. The rebel was a Persian camel-herder—one of our own lowly subjects. He rebelled against us."

This is why the story feels so "internal." It reflects a Persian-centric geopolitical perspective. The rise of Islam is framed not as the birth of a new world religion from the independent city of Mecca, but as a internal revolt within the Persian sphere of influence.

The accurate date (Daye era, 605-618) and the precise location (Qubāʾ, Medina) are the pillars of a sophisticated polemic. They use verifiable facts to anchor a total theological inversion. The Chinese, acting as neutral recorders, preserved this Sassanian cry of betrayal—a story meant for their ears to explain how the mighty Empire of Ērānshahr could have been brought low by a rebellion in a territory they once considered their own.

🎯 SECTION I CONCLUSION: The Thesis is Solidified – How the Introductory Sentence Says It All

The opening sentence of the Old Book of Tang's Persian tale is a masterpiece of polemical compression. It is not a garbled, confused account born of misheard rumors. It is a coherent and deliberate narrative construct, a perfectly engineered seed from which the entire inverted history grows. Every clause is a calculated move in a psychological campaign, built on a foundation of four strategic pillars:

1. ♟️ Political Grievance: "The country of the Arabs was originally west of Persia."

This is not a geographical observation; it is a political declaration. By framing the Arab caliphate as a western entity, the storytellers immediately establish a crucial theme: proximity and betrayal.

• The Implied Narrative: "This was not a distant, foreign power. This was our neighbor, a force that emerged from within our own sphere of influence." This sets the stage for the core polemical claim: the Arab conquest was not a foreign invasion, but an internal rebellion. It re-centers the story on Persia, making the catastrophe a Persian tragedy rather than an Arab triumph.

2. 📅 Accurate Chronology: "In the Daye era [605-618 CE]..."

This is the hook of credibility. The storytellers knew the correct timeframe for the beginning of Muhammad's prophethood (610 CE). This precise dating is devastating proof against the theory of a Muslim source.

• The Masterstroke: They use a verifiable truth to anchor a complete falsehood. By getting the when right, they lend insidious credibility to their fabricated what and how. It signals to the listener: "We know the timeline of these events. Trust us on the details."

3. 🎭 Identity Theft & Theological Framing: "...there was a Persian Hu man herding camels..."

This is the heart of the inversion. Let's break down its genius:

• "Persian Hu man": A deliberate act of identity erasure. The real Muhammad was an Arab from Mecca. By making him a "Persian," the narrative transforms him from a foreign prophet into a domestic traitor. This directly serves the "internal rebellion" thesis.

• "Herding camels": This is not a random profession. As we have shown, the storytellers almost certainly knew the Islamic tradition of Muhammad as a shepherd. They changed it to a camel herder because in Zoroastrian symbolism, the camel is an incarnation of Verethragna, the god of victory. This is a theological inversion: a figure associated with a Persian god of victory uses that power against Persia. It frames the event as a cosmic perversion, a hijacking of divine favor by dark forces.

4. 🗺️ Geopolitical Context: "...on the mountain of Jufenmodina [Qubāʾ, Medina]."

This is the strategic setting. The omission of Mecca is intentional and profound.

• Why Medina? Because Medina, as proven by Michael Lecker, was a city with a documented history of Sassanian influence, with a Persian-appointed king ruling there until c. 600 CE. For the Persian storytellers, Medina was a known quantity, a place within their mental map of control.

• The Narrative Shift: By placing the origin story in Medina—the seat of political and military power—instead of Mecca—the seat of religious revelation—they frame the entire movement from its inception as a political and military rebellion, not a spiritual awakening.

The historians' bafflement, as expressed by Kotyk—"it would have been incomprehensible for a Muslim to have communicated it"—is now completely resolved.

We are not listening to a Muslim voice. We are not even listening to a neutral Chinese voice.

We are listening to the voice of the defeated Sassanian elite.

This introductory sentence is the crystallized cry of a shattered empire. It is the product of Zoroastrian priests and Persian nobles who fled to the Tang court, weaving their national trauma into an explanatory myth for their Chinese hosts. It was designed to portray their catastrophic, inexplicable loss not as a failure of their armies or a judgment against their state, but as the work of dark, supernatural forces that corrupted their own world from within.

The opening sentence says it all: This is a story of our world, our subject, our godly symbols turned against us, in a place we once controlled, at a time we remember well. Our defeat was not a defeat; it was a betrayal. The Chinese, in their role as impeccable record-keepers, preserved this fossilized piece of Sassanian memory, allowing us to hear, over 1,300 years later, the echo of a fallen empire telling the story of its fall.

🦁 SECTION II: The Demonic Revelation – A Lion's Prophecy of Rebellion

If the first sentence of the Persian tale established a deliberate geographical and historical falsehood to reframe the conflict, the next line unleashes the full, terrifying force of the Zoroastrian polemic. We now move from the stage-setting of political grievance into the heart of theological warfare. Here, the story completely abandons any pretense of historical accuracy and plunges directly into a cosmic battle between light and darkness, systematically dismantling and inverting the foundational story of Islamic revelation through a perfectly constructed Zoroastrian lens.

This passage represents one of the most sophisticated acts of religious polemic from the ancient world. It is not a simple mockery; it is a point-by-point theological inversion, designed to portray the birth of Islam not as a divine mercy to mankind, but as an Ahrimanic (satanic) plot against the divinely-ordained order of the Sassanian Empire.

"忽有獅子人語謂之曰：「此山西有三穴，穴中大有兵器，汝可取之。穴中並有黑石白文，讀之便作王位。」"

"Suddenly, a lion spoke to him with human speech, saying: 'West of this mountain are three caves. The caves are filled with weapons; you may take them. Within the caves, there is also a black stone with white writing; read it and you will attain the king's position.'"

This is the moment of "revelation" in the Persian counter-narrative. It is the demonic parallel to the Prophet Muhammad's experience in the Cave of Hira. Where the Islamic tradition speaks of a trembling Prophet embraced by the Angel Jibril (Gabriel) and commanded to "Recite!" in the name of a merciful God, the Persian story presents a lowly camel-herder receiving a seductive promise of power from a talking wild beast, commanding him to "Take!" and "Read!" for the purpose of usurping a throne.

Let's dissect this astonishing passage element by element. We will reveal how each component—the messenger, the location, the objects, and the promise—functions as a deliberate cipher, designed to "decode" and corrupt the sacred history of Islam into a tale of demonic inspiration, violent insurrection, and illegitimate power. This is not a story of a prophet receiving a book; it is a story of a rebel receiving a weapon and a forged mandate, a narrative crafted to explain a world-shattering catastrophe as the work of supernatural evil.

🦁 1. The Messenger: "A lion spoke to him with human speech..."

This is the polemical masterstroke of the entire narrative - the systematic replacement of divine revelation with demonic instruction through perfect Zoroastrian symbolism.

Narrative Element	Zoroastrian Theological Reality	Polemical Significance & Demon Connection
A Talking Lion	The lion is explicitly classified as a Daevic (demonic) creature. As the Bundahišn states: "He fabricated fifteen species:... tigers, lions, leopards—which they call 'mountain-runners'..." These are all categorized under the "wolf species" created by Ahriman. The text emphasizes these are "Evil-created wild animals" from "dark seed, of dark and broken form."	This is the most brutal theological inversion. In Islam, revelation comes from Angel Jibril (Gabriel), a being of pure light. The Persian story replaces him with a demonic beast. The lion specifically represents Xēšm, the demon of wrath and destruction, who "fashions the most of all" evils and causes "great desolation."

➡️ The Perfect Demonological Match: Xēšm (The Demon of Wrath)

The connection between the lion and the demon Xēšm is precise and devastating:

Evidence from Bundahišn	Connection to the Talking Lion
"Xēšm with the bloody club" - described as doing the most "desolation" of all demons.	The lion's prophecy leads directly to violence, rebellion, and the desolation of the Sassanian Empire.
"Wherever Xēšm makes his camp, many creatures are destroyed and he causes great desolation."	The lion's message establishes a "camp" of rebellion that destroys the Persian Empire.
Xēšm's instruments include demons who cause "perverse thinking" (Tarōmad) and "doubt" (Mihōxt).	The lion's speech seduces the herder with perverse thinking - promising kingship through rebellion instead of divine legitimacy.

🎯 The Inversion Flow - From Divine to Demonic:

🦁 Talking Lion (Agent of Xēšm) → ⬇️ Replaces Angel Jibril (Divine Messenger) → ⬇️ Divine Revelation becomes Demonic Prophecy → ⬇️ Leads to Great Desolation (Fall of Sassanian Empire)

📜 Supporting Evidence: The Lion's Demonic Nature in Zoroastrian Tradition

The Bundahišn leaves no doubt about the lion's evil origins:

"The Evil Spirit created the wolf-thief small, of dark worth, of dark birth, of dark seed, of dark and broken form, black and biting..."

This description of the "wolf species" that includes lions emphasizes their Ahrimanic origin - born from darkness, corruption, and evil essence.

Furthermore, as Mostafa Ekhtesasi confirms in his study of Sassanian seals:

"Zoroastrianism denounces the lion as an evil animal, and Bundahishn classifies the lion under the wolf species... Zoroastrianism also considers the lion an animal created by Ahriman... Lion, eventually, turned out to be a symbol of evil in both Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism."

While Ekhtesasi notes lions appeared on Sassanian seals for their "royal manner and heroic character" (reflecting pre-Zoroastrian traditions), the theological position is clear: in orthodox Zoroastrian doctrine, the lion is a creature of Ahriman.

🔥 The Ultimate Polemical Attack

By making a lion the messenger, the Persian storytellers accomplished a devastating theological attack:

1. It denies the divine origin of Islam - Instead of words from God, it's a message from a demonic beast.

2. It connects Islam to the destructive force of Xēšm - Framing the Arab conquests as an act of cosmic destruction rather than divine will.

3. It inverts the entire narrative - What Muslims see as divine guidance, the Persians portray as demonic seduction.

The talking lion isn't just a mythical element - it's a carefully chosen theological weapon that would have been immediately understood by any Zoroastrian familiar with their demonology. The message is clear: "This isn't a new religion from God - it's a destructive plague unleashed by Xēšm himself, speaking through his beastly servant."

This proves beyond doubt that the creators of this story were not just Persian, but were steeped in Zoroastrian theological tradition, specifically using their understanding of demonology to explain and denounce the rise of Islam.

⛰️🗡️ 2. The Revelation: "Caves filled with weapons; you may take them."

This element of the narrative represents a brilliant and maliciously creative act of theological inversion. The Persian storytellers did not merely replace a holy site with a military one; they systematically corrupted the most fundamental principles of Zoroastrian ethics to frame the Islamic revelation as their exact demonic opposite.

Narrative Element	Islamic Reality vs. Polemical Framing	Significance
"Three Caves" filled with Weapons	The Islamic tradition knows caves of profound spiritual significance: the Cave of Hira (where the first revelation occurred) and the Cave of Thawr (a place of refuge). They are sites of contemplation, divine communion, and protection.	The Persian narrative inverts the cave's purpose. It is not a place for receiving scripture, but for procuring armaments. The message is not "Recite!" (Iqra) but "Rebel!" This transforms the early Muslim community from a group of believers into a band of armed insurgents. The "revelation" is a call to violence, not piety.

🔢 The Profound Significance of "THREE" Caves: The Ultimate Corruption

The specification of "three caves" (三穴, sān xué) is not a random detail or a mistake. It is a deliberate and devastating polemical attack, mirroring and inverting the core Zoroastrian ethical principle known as the "Three Good Things" or the "Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds" (Humata, Hūkhta, Huvarshta).

In Zoroastrianism, this triad forms the foundational path to righteousness:

1. Humata (Good Thoughts) - Purity of mind and intention.

2. Hūkhta (Good Words) - Truthfulness and righteous speech.

3. Huvarshta (Good Deeds) - Actions that uphold Asha (cosmic order) and combat evil.

The Persian storytellers take this sacred triad and create a perfect demonic counterpart.

➡️ The Inversion of the Sacred Triad:

Zoroastrian "Good Triad"	Persian Tale's "Evil Triad" (Three Caves of Weapons)
1. Good Thoughts (Purity of Mind)	1. Cave of Rebellious Intent (The thought of usurping the rightful king)
1. Good Words (Truthful Speech)	2. Cave of Demonic Prophecy (The lion's words commanding rebellion)
1. Good Deeds (Righteous Actions)	3. Cave of Violent Action (The deeds enabled by the weapons—war and insurrection)

The "three caves" symbolize a complete, anti-Zoroastrian program for existence. Instead of a path that leads to the preservation of cosmic order (Asha), it offers a path that leads to its destruction through Evil Thoughts, Evil Words, and Evil Deeds.

🎯 The Complete Inversion Flow

The corruption is total and systematic:

⛰️ Cave of Hira (Site of Spiritual Revelation)

→ ⬇️ INVERTED INTO

⛰️🗡️ Three Caves of Weapons (Site of Military Rebellion)

→ ⬇️ WHICH ITSELF INVERTS

🙏 Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds (Zoroastrian Path)

→ ⬇️ INTO THEIR DEMONIC OPPOSITE

😈 Evil Thoughts, Evil Words, Evil Deeds (Ahrimanic Path)

Final Result: 

📖 "Recite!" (Iqra) becomes "Take up arms!"

🔥 The Polemical Masterstroke

This is not just storytelling; it is high-level theological warfare. The creators of this narrative were almost certainly Zoroastrian priests or deeply educated laymen who understood that to truly vilify an enemy, one must not just slander their actions, but demonize their very moral and metaphysical foundation.

By framing the origin of Islam around these "Three Caves," they communicated to any Zoroastrian hearing the story that:

"This is not merely a political rebellion. This is a cosmic inversion. Their revelation is the exact opposite of our path to righteousness. It is a doctrine born from the same structure as our holy triad, but corrupted to serve Ahriman instead of Ohrmazd."

The Chinese chroniclers, unaware of this profound theological subtext, simply recorded "three caves." But for the Persian audience for whom this story was first crafted, the message was chillingly clear: the rise of Islam represented the activation of a counter-religion, perfectly designed to destroy everything they held sacred.

◼️📜 3. The Scripture: "A black stone with white writing..."

This element represents the most sophisticated layer of the Zoroastrian polemic, moving beyond simple inversion into the realm of profound theological corruption. The description of the revealed object is not arbitrary; it is a precise demonic counterpart to the Quran, built directly from Zoroastrian cosmogony.

Narrative Element	Symbolic Interpretation	Polemical Significance
"黑石白文" (Black Stone with White Writing)	In Zoroastrian color symbolism, black is the quintessential color of Ahriman, associated with darkness, evil, and impurity. White is the color of Ohrmazd, representing light, purity, and truth.	A black stone with white writing is a symbol of inverted truth or deceptive revelation. It represents goodness (white) corrupted by and emerging from a foundation of evil (black). This is the polemic's depiction of the Quran itself: a message that may appear righteous but is born from a demonic source. It is the antithesis of the pure, luminous divine word.

🔗 Connection to the Bundahišn: The Ahrimanic Template

The description of the "black stone" finds its direct origin in the Zoroastrian description of Ahriman's very essence and creation. The Bundahišn provides the exact template:

"The Evil Spirit created the wolf-thief small, of dark worth, of dark birth, of dark seed, of dark and broken form, black and biting..."

- Bundahišn, "On the Nature of the Wolf Species"

Let's break down the perfect correlation:

Bundahišn Description of Ahriman's Creations	Correlation to the "Black Stone"
"of dark worth"	The stone has no divine value; its worth is in its destructive potential.
"of dark birth"	The stone is "born" from the cave, a site of demonic revelation, not divine origin.
"of dark seed"	The stone is the "seed" from which the illegitimate rebellion grows.
"of dark and broken form"	A "stone" is the antithesis of a living, luminous divine word; it is inert, hard, and "broken" from the cosmic order.
"black and biting"	BLACK is the key identifier. Its "bite" is the destructive command it contains.

The "black stone" is, therefore, not just a symbol of evil—it is a physical manifestation of Ahriman's creative power, an exact parallel to the evil animals created "of dark seed, of dark and broken form."

⚫⚪ The Symbolism of "White Writing on Black"

This combination is the ultimate expression of demonic deception. In Zoroastrianism, Ohrmazd's creation is characterized by pure, undiluted light. Ahriman's invasion introduces pollution, mixture, and corruption.

• A pure white text would represent a divine message from Ohrmazd.

• A pure black stone would represent outright, honest evil.

But a black stone with white writing represents something far more dangerous: truth corrupted at its source. It is Ahriman's ultimate deceit—taking the appearance of goodness (white writing/truthful words) and planting it upon a foundation of absolute evil (the black stone/Ahriman's essence). It is the textual equivalent of a poisoned well.

This directly mirrors the lion's prophecy: the message (white writing) promises kingship, a seemingly good outcome, but its source (the black stone, the demonic lion) reveals its true, destructive nature.

➡️ The Complete Inversion Flow:

📖 Quran (Eternal, Luminous Divine Word from Allah)

→ ⬇️ INVERTED INTO

◼️📜 Black Stone with White Writing (Ahrimanic, Deceptive Object)

→ ⬇️ WHICH EMBODIES

😈 "Dark seed, dark birth, black and biting" (The nature of Ahriman's creation)

→ ⬇️ FINAL RESULT:

✨ Divine Guidance becomes Demonic Instruction

🎯 The Polemical Conclusion

For the Zoroastrian audience, the message is unmistakable:

"Do not be deceived by the content of this new scripture. Look at its origin! It emerges from blackness, from the very substance of Ahriman's creation. Its words may seem white and pure, but they are a deception, a corruption written upon a foundation of evil. This is not a book of light; it is a weapon of darkness, designed to destroy our world."

The Chinese scribe who recorded "黑石白文" had no idea he was documenting a complex theological argument. But in those four characters, the Persian storytellers encoded their ultimate judgment on Islam: it was not merely a false religion, but the textual embodiment of the Evil Spirit itself, a deceptive revelation designed to lead the faithful into rebellion and the world into desolation.

👑 4. The Promise: "Read it and you will attain the king's position."

This final element of the "revelation" strikes at the very heart of Sassanian ideology. The promise isn't just about political power—it represents the ultimate cosmological rebellion against the divinely-ordained structure of the universe as conceived by the Sassanian state.

Narrative Element	Political & Theological Meaning	Significance
"讀之便作王位" (Read it and you will attain the king's position)	In Sassanian ideology, kingship was legitimized by Xvarənah, the Divine Royal Glory, bestowed by Ohrmazd upon the righteous ruler through proper lineage and Zoroastrian piety. The King of Kings stood at the center of a cosmic and social order.	The promise of kingship from a demonic lion (agent of Xēšm) is the ultimate sacrilege. It frames the establishment of the Caliphate not as a divine plan, but as an illegitimate usurpation fueled by dark forces. The founder is not a prophet receiving a community of believers, but a rebel receiving a promise of kingship from the forces of evil.

🏛️ The Sassanian Cosmic Order: What Was Destroyed

As Touraj Daryaee's research illuminates, the Sassanian system was an intricate theological-political construct where the King of Kings (Šāhān Šāh) occupied a central, cosmic position:

The King's Divine Role:

-

• The king was considered bay ("divine/majestic"), his lineage tied to deities.

• He stood at the center of the world—Sassanian coins showed the sun and moon revolving around him, making him "king of the four corners of the world."

• His duty was to battle chaos and restore order, mirroring Ohrmazd's cosmic struggle against Ahriman.

• Through rituals like Nowruz and Mihragan, he maintained the sacred bond between kingship and the social classes.

The Rigid Class System (PĒŠAG):

-

The society was organized into four sacred estates, each with divine purpose:

1. Priests (āsrōnān) - Maintained religious order and law

2. Warriors (artēštārān) - Protected the empire

3. Husbandmen (wāstaryōšān) - Sustained economic prosperity

4. Artisans (hutuxšān) - Lowest status, viewed with suspicion

This system was "two pillars which were inseparable"—religion and state supporting each other in a cosmic battle against disorder.

💥 The Islamic Conquest: Cosmic Annihilation

The Arab conquests didn't just defeat an army—they annihilated an entire cosmological worldview.

What Was Destroyed:

• The King of Kings, who embodied divine order, was overthrown and replaced by a Caliph whose legitimacy came from a completely different theological framework.

• The sacred class system collapsed. The rigid hierarchy of priests, warriors, and farmers—each with their designated fire-temples and cosmic functions—was rendered meaningless.

• The "idea of Iranshahr"—the urban, Zoroastrian empire as the center of the world—was shattered.

For the Zoroastrian priests and nobles who crafted this story, the most devastating aspect was that the conquerors came from what they considered the lowest social strata. As Daryaee notes, the early Muslim community included many merchants and artisans—precisely the class the Zoroastrian establishment viewed with suspicion and placed at the bottom of their social hierarchy.

🎯 The Polemical Masterstroke in the Promise

The Persian storytellers take this cosmic trauma and encode it into the lion's promise:

The Demonic Inversion of Sacred Kingship:

Sassanian Reality	Persian Tale's Inversion
Kingship from Ohrmazd through Xvarənah	Kingship from a Demonic Lion through rebellion
Divinely ordained social order	Illegitimate usurpation of proper hierarchy
King as cosmic center maintaining order	Rebel as chaos-bringer destroying order
Proper lineage and Zoroastrian piety	Demonic inspiration and armed insurrection

➡️ The Complete Inversion Flow:

-

👑 Sassanian Kingship (Divine Xvarənah from Ohrmazd)

→ ⬇️ ANNIHILATED BY CONQUEST

🏴 Caliphate (Succession to Prophet Muhammad)

→ ⬇️ INVERTED IN THE STORY AS

👑 Usurped Kingship (Promise from Demonic Lion)

→ ⬇️ REPRESENTING

😈 The victory of Chaos over Cosmic Order

🔥 The Deeper Message: Explaining the Unthinkable

-

For the defeated Sassanian elite, this story wasn't just propaganda—it was theological explanation. How could the divinely-favored King of Kings, supported by the sacred class system and the cosmic order, be defeated?

Their answer: It wasn't a legitimate military defeat. It was a demonic plot.

The promise "read it and you will attain the king's position" encapsulates their entire explanation:

• The Arab success wasn't due to military skill or divine favor

• It was the result of Ahrimanic manipulation—the dark forces tricking a lowly camel-herder into overthrowing the proper order

• The Caliphate wasn't a legitimate government—it was illegitimate rule established through demonic pact

The Chinese record of this promise preserves, in five characters, the cry of a civilization that saw its entire cosmic understanding destroyed, and could only explain it as the work of the ultimate enemy—Ahriman himself, speaking through his beastly servant to corrupt the world and bring about the ultimate desolation.

🎯 SECTION II CONCLUSION: The Demonic Covenant Revealed

This single sentence—this "demonic revelation"—represents a work of polemical genius that operates on multiple sophisticated levels. It is not merely a fanciful story, but a systematic, point-for-point theological inversion that takes the core components of Islamic sacred history and corrupts them through a Zoroastrian cosmological lens. The Persian framers of this narrative demonstrated a profound understanding of both their own theology and the beliefs of their conquerors, weaving them into a coherent and devastating counter-narrative.

⚔️ The Systematic Inversion: A Side-by-Side Comparison

The precision of the polemic is breathtaking. Every foundational element of the Islamic origin story is meticulously countered with its Zoroastrian antithesis:

Islamic Foundation	Persian Inversion	Zoroastrian Meaning
The Angel Jibril (Gabriel), a being of pure light and divine obedience, delivers the message.	A Demonic Lion, a creature of the "wolf species" created by Ahriman, an agent of the destructive demon Xēšm.	Divine Messenger becomes Demonic Beast. The force of cosmic order is replaced by the force of wrath and desolation.
The Cave of Hira, a site of spiritual contemplation and divine communion where the first revelation occurred.	Three Caves of Weapons, an armory for military rebellion that inverts the Zoroastrian ethical triad of "Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds."	Sacred Space becomes Military Stronghold. Spiritual revelation becomes a call to violent insurrection.
The Quran, the eternal, luminous Divine Word, revealed to an unlettered prophet.	A Black Stone with White Writing, symbolizing truth corrupted at its source—goodness (white) emerging from an evil foundation (black), embodying Ahriman's "dark seed."	Holy Scripture becomes Demonic Artifact. The pure word of God becomes a deceptive object of Ahrimanic origin.
The Caliphate, succession to the Prophet, a community of believers established under divine guidance.	Usurped Kingship, a political position gained through demonic promise, illegitimately seizing the authority of the Shahanshah.	Divine Succession becomes Demonic Usurpation. The proper cosmic order is overthrown by chaos.

This is not a random collection of mythical elements. It is a structured antithesis, a mirror-image narrative designed to portray Islam as not just a false religion, but as an anti-religion—a perfect inversion of the divine order.

🌌 From Political Fable to Cosmic Drama

With this sentence, the story transcends the realm of political propaganda and becomes a full-blown cosmological drama. The rise of Islam is no longer framed as a historical event, but as an Ahrimanic plot to corrupt the divine order and steal the kingdom of Ērānshahr.

• The struggle between Ohrmazd (light, wisdom, order) and Ahriman (darkness, ignorance, chaos) is no longer abstract.

• It becomes terrifyingly concrete: Ahriman, through his agent Xēšm, has successfully orchestrated the destruction of the Sassanian Empire—the very embodiment of Ohrmazd's order on Earth.

• The "Persian camel-herder" is not just a rebel; he is the unwitting pawn in this cosmic war, seduced by dark forces to overthrow the divinely ordained structure of reality.

This narrative must be understood as the product of profound civilizational trauma. The Persian storytellers were not merely spreading propaganda; they were attempting to make the unbearable comprehensible.

How could the empire of the King of Kings, blessed with the Divine Glory (Xvarənah), protected by the sacred class system, and upholding cosmic order, be so utterly defeated?

Their answer: It wasn't a legitimate defeat. It was supernatural sabotage.

This explanation transforms a humiliating military catastrophe into a theological tragedy. Their world was not bested by a superior enemy, but betrayed by the cosmos itself—the dark forces had temporarily gained the upper hand in the eternal struggle.

The promise "read it and you will attain the king's position" is the ultimate expression of this despair. It frames the Caliphate not as a legitimate successor state, but as an illegitimate entity born from a demonic pact, a kingdom founded on a corrupted covenant with the powers of darkness.

SECTION III: The Rebellion Begins – Weapons of Mass Sedition

The narrative now executes a crucial pivot—from demonic prophecy to concrete action, from theological warfare to political indictment. Where the previous section established the source of the message as Ahrimanic, this passage documents the first implementation of the dark directive. This is where the polemic shifts from spiritual inversion to criminal accusation, systematically transforming the sacred founding of a religious community into the operational launch of a treasonous conspiracy.

The "Hu man" ceases to be a passive recipient of supernatural communication and becomes an active participant in the cosmic crime. He moves from hearing the lion's sedition to executing its commands, transitioning from a vessel of demonic inspiration to a field agent of earthly rebellion. This moment represents the precise instant where the Ahrimanic plot leaves the realm of words and enters the arena of history.

"胡人依言，果見穴中有石及槊刃甚多，上有文，教其反叛。"

"The Hu man followed the words, and indeed found in the caves stones and many spears and blades. Upon them was writing, teaching him to rebel."

This single sentence serves as the crucial bridge between supernatural incitement and earthly insurrection. It functions on three distinct polemical levels simultaneously:

1. As Fulfilled Prophecy: Validating the lion's demonic message by showing its accuracy.

2. As Criminal Evidence: Documenting the discovery of the instruments of treason.

3. As Theological Perversion: Completing the corruption of Islamic revelation's core elements.

Let's dissect how this passage continues the systematic inversion of Islamic sacred history while introducing devastating new layers of political accusation. We will reveal how every detail—from the act of "following the words" to the specific inventory of discovered objects—is engineered to frame the birth of Islam not as a spiritual awakening, but as a premeditated act of armed sedition against the Sassanian world order.

🦁➡️👤 1. The Obedient Disciple: "The Hu man followed the words..."

This phrase is a masterstroke of polemical characterization, designed to systematically dismantle the image of the Prophet and reconstruct him as the antithesis of a spiritual leader. The two words "依言" (yī yán - "followed the words") are loaded with deliberate, negative connotations that paint a picture of blind, unthinking, and morally complicit obedience.

Narrative Element	Islamic Counterpart	Polemical Significance
"依言" (Followed the words)	The Prophet Muhammad's careful, often fearful, questioning, and gradual reception of revelation from Angel Jibril. The traditional account describes him trembling, seeking reassurance from Khadija, and initially fearing he was possessed by a jinn or becoming a poet. This portrays a profound human spiritual struggle.	This flips the entire dynamic. The founder is portrayed not as a courageous spiritual leader grappling with the overwhelming weight of divine contact, but as a compliant puppet who immediately and unquestioningly carries out a demonic command. The emphasis is on obedience to evil rather than submission to God (which is the meaning of Islam). It reinforces the core theme of seduction and effortless manipulation by dark forces.

🎭 The Deliberate Characterization: A Portrait of Ignorant Complicity

The storytellers are making four distinct, damning points about the founder's character through this simple phrase:

1. He is Spiritually Blind and Unintelligent:

• A true prophet, in Zoroastrian or any Near Eastern prophetic tradition, is supposed to discern the source of a spiritual message. He is meant to be a spiritual watchman.

• The "Hu man" demonstrates zero capacity for spiritual discernment. He does not question the nature of the talking lion. He does not doubt the morality of the command. He is portrayed as intellectually and spiritually vacant, a blank slate for Ahrimanic inscription.

2. He is Morally Bankrupt:

• The command is to rebel and seek kingship—acts of profound social and cosmic disruption in the Sassanian worldview.

• His immediate compliance shows he possesses no inherent moral compass. He is not seduced away from goodness; the story implies he has no innate goodness to begin with. His readiness to "follow the words" reveals a pre-existing inclination toward rebellion and disorder.

3. He is a Passive Tool, Not an Active Leader:

• The phrasing denies him any agency. He is not a "founder" or "leader"; he is a follower—and he follows the words of a demonic beast. This reduces the entire movement to a top-down plot orchestrated by Ahriman, with the "Hu man" as the first and most crucial dupe.

4. He is the Anti-Hero:

• Where cultural heroes in Persian epic tradition (like those in the Shahnameh) display wisdom, courage, and moral fortitude in the face of supernatural challenges, this "Hu man" exhibits the exact opposite: gullibility, passivity, and moral weakness.

⚖️ The Polemical Contrast: Inverting the Spiritual Archetype

The inversion is constructed through a perfect, mirror-image contrast:

The Islamic Prophet Muhammad	The Persian "Hu Man"
Experiences terror and doubt upon first revelation, seeking comfort and verification.	Experiences no doubt, immediately complying with the bizarre and sinister command.
Grapples with the divine, showing the profound human struggle of prophethood.	Accepts the demonic without question, showing no spiritual depth or struggle.
Is a active recipient who must spiritually prepare for and internalize the message.	Is a passive vessel who mechanically "follows the words" like a programmed agent.
His story is one of spiritual transformation and growing conviction.	His story is one of instant, blind obedience to a clearly evil source.

➡️ The Deliberate Inversion Flow:

🤲 Muhammad's Spiritual Struggle & Moral Scrupulousness

→ ⬇️ INVERTED INTO

🦁👤 The "Hu Man's" Immediate, Unquestioning Obedience to a Demonic Command

→ ⬇️ FINAL POLEMICAL MESSAGE:

✨ Divine Submission (Islam) is Framed as Demonic Compliance

🎯 The Ultimate Insult

By portraying the founder as immediately obedient, the Persian polemicists delivered their ultimate insult: The success of Islam was not due to divine power or the compelling character of its prophet. It was due to the terrifying efficiency of Ahriman's plot and the perfect gullibility of his chosen tool.

The "Hu man" is not a formidable enemy to be respected; he is a pathetic puppet to be pitied and despised. His "obedience" is not a virtue but the hallmark of his damnation, the proof that he was from the beginning a willing participant in the cosmic crime of overthrowing the divine order of Ērānshahr.

🗡️📜 2. The Arsenal of Rebellion: "Stones and many spears and blades"

This is not a random inventory of weapons. The specific choice of "石" (stones) and "槊刃" (spears and blades) is a deliberate, calculated insult that serves multiple polemical purposes, reinforcing the core themes of the narrative: the primitive brutality of the rebels and the illegitimate, violent nature of their movement.

Narrative Element	Symbolic Meaning	Political & Cultural Accusation
"槊刃甚多" (Many spears and blades)	These weapons represent pure, straightforward military insurrection. Unlike the spiritual "armor" of faith or the "sword" of truth in religious metaphor, these are literal, crude instruments of violence.	This directly frames the early Muslim community not as a religious movement, but as a pre-armed insurgent group. The caves become arms caches, proving the rebellion was a premeditated, violent conspiracy to overthrow the established order. It's an accusation of sedition from the very beginning.
"石" (Stones) alongside weapons	While continuing the "black stone" motif of deception, their placement alongside weapons suggests crude, primitive tools of rebellion. Stones are the most basic, unrefined weapon imaginable, requiring no craftsmanship or technology.	This reinforces the class and cultural insult: a lowly camel-herder, using the most primitive means available, dares to overthrow the divinely-ordained King of Kings and his sophisticated empire. It emphasizes the "barbaric" nature of the uprising against Persian civilization.

⚔️ The Deliberate Choice of Weapons: An Insult in Specificity

The Persian storytellers' choice of these specific weapons over others is a masterclass in polemical detail. They could have described a royal armory with swords, axes, and armor—but they didn't. They chose weapons that conveyed maximum cultural contempt.

Why STONES?

• The Ultimate Primitive Weapon: Stones require no technology, no smithing, no skill to produce. They are the weapon of the absolutely desperate, the unprepared, or the truly primitive. This frames the rebels as savages, not soldiers.

• Symbol of Crude Brutality: Throwing stones is an act of raw, undisciplined violence. It contrasts sharply with the disciplined, organized warfare of a professional army like the Sassanian spāh.

• Psychological Warfare: To the Persians, being defeated by an enemy wielding stones would be the ultimate humiliation. It suggests they were overthrown not by a superior force, but by a chaotic, brutish mob.

Why SPEARS and BLADES (槊刃)?

• The Weapons of the Commoner and Nomad: Spears and simple blades are the weapons of nomadic tribesmen, hunters, and bandits—not the weapons of a professional, organized military. The Sassanian heavy cavalry (aswārān) was the epitome of military sophistication, clad in full armor. The spear is the weapon of the infantryman, the light skirmisher, the other.

• Lack of Sophistication: The list pointedly excludes the sophisticated weapons of the Persian arsenal: the composite bow (a symbol of Parthian and Sassanian martial prowess), the war axe (a noble and royal weapon), the mace (a symbol of royal authority), or the laminated armor that made the Persian cataphract so formidable.

• Association with Arabs: The spear was famously the primary weapon of the pre-Islamic Bedouin warrior. By highlighting spears, the story ties the rebellion directly to the "barbaric" Arabs of the desert, playing into longstanding Sassanian prejudices against the nomadic tribes on their borders.

🏛️ The Contrast: Sassanian Refinement vs. Arab "Barbarism"

The polemic draws a stark, insulting contrast between the two sides:

The Sassanian Military (as described by Daryaee)	The Rebel Arsenal in the Story
Heavy Cavalry (aswārān): Clad in full body armor, with armored horses, wielding lances, bows, swords, and maces. A "walking tower" of technology and discipline.	Spears and Blades: The weapons of light infantry and skirmishers, lacking the technological and tactical sophistication of a standing army.
Sophisticated Siege Equipment: Catapults, battering rams, and moving towers, often built with Roman/Gothic engineering knowledge.	Stones: The most primitive siege weapon imaginable.
Elephant Corps (pīlbānān): The "tanks of the ancient world," inspiring terror and awe, symbolizing imperial power.	No technology, no discipline, only crude numbers.
A Rigid, Divine Class Structure: Warriors (artēštārān) were a sacred estate, trained in military academies (artēštārestān).	A camel-herder: The lowest of the low, from an estate with no martial role, suddenly leading a rebellion.

The message is clear: The sublime, divinely-ordered civilization of Iran was not defeated by a worthy adversary, but overwhelmed by the crude, brutal, and chaotic force of Ahrimanic rebellion. It was a victory of primitive quantity over sacred quality.

🎯 The Complete Inversion Flow

The choice of weapons completes the systematic re-framing of Islamic history:

📖 The Quran as a Spiritual Weapon and Guide for a Community of Believers

→ ⬇️ INVERTED INTO

🗡️🪨 Spears and Stones as Physical Weapons for a Band of Insurgents

→ ⬇️ REINFORCING THE NARRATIVE THAT

🕌 Religious Movement becomes Armed Insurgency

✨ Divine Victory becomes Demonic Usurpation by Brute Force

The "Arsenal of Rebellion" is the polemical proof that the rise of Islam was not a spiritual awakening, but a carefully armed and brutally executed coup against the cosmic order, led by a savage force that respected neither the laws of man nor the gods.

✍️🔥 3. The Incendiary Text: "Upon them was writing, teaching him to rebel"

This is the polemical climax of the entire passage, the point where the Persian narrative delivers its most devastating and direct accusation. The phrase "上有文，教其反叛" ("Upon them was writing, teaching him to rebel") is not merely an inversion; it is a deliberate and brutal act of ideological assassination, transforming the very soul of Islamic revelation into its exact opposite.

Narrative Element	Islamic Reality	Polemical Genius
"上有文，教其反叛" (Upon them was writing, teaching rebellion)	The Quranic revelation is a complex text emphasizing monotheism, spiritual and moral transformation, social justice, eschatology, and submission to God (Islam). Even the later Medinan verses that discuss fighting are explicitly contextualized within self-defense against persecution and the defense of the nascent community. The overarching message is one of establishing a moral and spiritual order.	This is the ultimate reduction and the most brutal inversion: the divine text is re-imagined as seditious literature. The message is stripped of all theology, morality, and spirituality. It is rendered as purely political and criminal: "rebel." This directly answers the existential question every defeated Persian noble and priest must have asked: "Why did they attack us? What was their motive?" The story provides a simple, damning answer: "Because their 'scripture' commanded them to."

🎯 The Ultimate Accusation: From Religion to Revolution

The Persian storytellers are making a specific, terrifyingly simple claim: Islam's primary purpose was not worship, but political insurrection.

The Core Polemical Argument:

1. It Denies Divine Origin: By stating the text's sole message is "rebel," the story completely erases any concept of divine revelation. There is no mention of God (Allah), no judgment day, no prayer, no morality—only a command to commit treason.

2. It Reduces Faith to Politics: The spiritual struggle (jihad al-akbar) and the community of believers (ummah) are replaced with a simple, violent power grab. The "religion" is merely the ideological justification for a military campaign.

3. It Frames the Conquests as Premeditated: The early Muslims were not defending themselves or spreading a faith; they were following written instructions for sedition they had possessed from the very beginning. The caves were not a place of spiritual retreat but a terrorist cell's arms depot and training manual.

This transforms the entire Islamic historical narrative. The Hijra becomes a tactical relocation. The battles of Badr and Uhud become opening campaigns in a pre-planned war. The establishment of the Caliphate is not the organic growth of a religious community, but the successful execution of a rebellion's final phase.

🗣️ The Voice of the Vanquished: Answering the Unanswerable

This element of the story is where the raw trauma of the Sassanian defeat is most audible. For the Zoroastrian Persian, the Arab conquests were an unfathomable catastrophe. How could the Empire of the King of Kings, favored by the gods, be destroyed?

The standard explanations were psychologically unacceptable:

• "Our empire was weak." (Unthinkable for a culture that believed in its divine mandate)

• "Their faith was more true." (Theologically impossible for a Zoroastrian to admit)

• "Their military was superior." (Demoralizing and humiliating)

The story provides a psychologically comforting alternative: The conquest was not a legitimate military or spiritual defeat. It was the result of a demonic conspiracy. The Arabs did not win because they were better; they won because they were more ruthless and more deceived, acting on a supernatural, evil imperative that normal human morality and strategy could not counter.

The message to the Tang Chinese audience, and to themselves, was: "Do not admire these conquerors. Do not see their success as a sign of divine favor. They are not pious; they are pawns. Their book is not holy; it is a handbook for treason, authored by the forces of darkness that temporarily triumphed over our light."

➡️ The Final Inversion Flow: The Complete Corruption of Revelation

This phrase completes the systematic demolition of Islam's foundational pillars:

📜 The Quran: A complex divine revelation guiding all aspects of life and spirituality

→ ⬇️ INVERTED INTO

✍️🔥 A single, incendiary command: "REBEL"

→ ⬇️ FINAL POLEMICAL REALITY:

🕌 A Religious Community becomes a Seditionist Cell

🤲 Submission to God becomes Treason against the King

✨ A Divine Mission becomes an Ahrimanic Plot

The genius of this polemic lies in its brutal simplicity. It bypasses all theological debate and reduces a world religion to a single, criminal act of rebellion. In the archives of the Tang dynasty, the voice of a lost empire echoes, insisting to history that their conquerors were not prophets, but puppets, and their holy book was not a guide to salvation, but a manual for destruction.

🎯 SECTION III CONCLUSION: The Crime is Documented

This deceptively simple sentence—"The Hu man followed the words, and indeed found in the caves stones and many spears and blades. Upon them was writing, teaching him to rebel"—is the polemical heart of the entire narrative. In a single, devastating stroke, it moves the Ahrimanic plot from supernatural incitement to tangible, historical crime, providing a complete and falsified evidence trail for the Persian interpretation of history.

This passage accomplishes three crucial polemical objectives with forensic precision:

1. It Demonstrates Criminal Compliance: The phrase "followed the words" transforms the founder from a passive recipient of revelation into an active participant in a demonic conspiracy. He is not a visionary struggling with divine contact, but a willing agent carrying out a criminal instruction. This establishes mens rea—a guilty mind.

2. It Provides Material Evidence: The "stones and many spears and blades" are the corpus delicti—the physical proof of the crime. This isn't a spiritual movement gathering in homes; it is an armed cell stockpiling weapons in hidden caches. The discovery of the arsenal proves the rebellion was premeditated and materially prepared, not a spontaneous religious awakening.

3. It Creates a Damning Paper Trail: The "writing teaching rebellion" is the smoking gun. It frames Islamic scripture not as a complex theological text, but as a straightforward manual for sedition. This is the ultimate reduction of a world religion to a single criminal purpose: to overthrow the established order.

⚖️ The Indictment Preserved in Amber

The genius of the Chinese record lies in its absolute neutrality. The Tang scribes, with no theological axe to grind, simply documented the testimony presented to them. In doing so, they preserved what amounts to a complete polemical indictment—a charge sheet against the early Islamic movement, accusing it of:

• Conspiracy to Commit Treason (plotting with a demonic entity)

• Illegal Arms Trafficking and Stockpiling

• Seditious Libel (possessing and distributing writings that explicitly teach rebellion)

The stage is now irrevocably set. The trial is over before it has begun. The verdict is clear: this was not a religion, but a criminal insurgency.

🎭 The Complete Picture of Sedition

This sentence completes the systematic transformation of Islamic sacred history into a record of criminal conspiracy. Every element of a successful rebellion is now in place:

Element of the Conspiracy	Narrative Fulfillment
The Mastermind & Incitement	The Demonic Lion (Agent of Xēšm)
The Willing Conspirator	The Persian "Hu man" (The Traitor Within)
The Operational Arsenal	Stones, Spears, and Blades (The Means of Violence)
The Seditious Manifesto	The Writing Teaching Rebellion (The Criminal Intent)

➡️ The Flow of the Criminal Narrative:

🦁 Demonic Incitement (The Lion's Prophecy)

→ ⬇️

👤 Willing Conspirator ("The Hu man followed the words")

→ ⬇️

🗡️ Arsenal Acquisition ("found... many spears and blades")

→ ⬇️

📜 Seditious Manifesto ("writing, teaching him to rebel")

→ ⬇️

⚔️ ACTIVE REBELLION (The next logical step)

The narrative has meticulously built its case. The foundational claim is now established: Islam did not emerge from a desert prophet's communion with God, but from a cave filled with weapons and a text of treason, its first follower a gullible traitor obeying a demonic beast. The Persians, in their profound trauma, could only understand their world-shattering defeat not as a failure of their armies or their gods, but as the success of a perfectly executed cosmic crime.

SECTION IV: The Fall of Empires – Banditry as Statecraft

The narrative now reaches its devastating and inevitable climax. Having meticulously constructed a framework of demonic inspiration, criminal conspiracy, and seditious intent, the Persian storytellers now detail the movement's catastrophic success. This final passage marks a crucial shift in tone and focus: it is no longer a theological allegory about the corruption of revelation, but a brutal, political-military history written from the perspective of the catastrophically vanquished. The meteoric rise of the Caliphate is framed not as a divinely-ordained triumph of a new faith, but as the shockingly successful escalation of a bandit insurgency—a story of how common brigandage, supernaturally empowered, humiliated the established order of the ancient world.

"於是糾合亡命，渡恆曷水，劫奪商旅，其眾漸盛，遂割據波斯西境，自立為王。波斯、拂菻各遣兵討之，皆為所敗。"

"Thereupon, he gathered men who had forfeited their lives [亡命, wángmìng], crossed the Euphrates River, plundered merchant caravans, and his followers gradually grew in number. Subsequently, he carved out the western territory of Persia and proclaimed himself king. Both Persia and Rome [拂菻, Fúlǐn] dispatched troops to subdue him, but all were defeated by him."

This passage is the ultimate crystallization of Sassanian trauma. It performs a breathtaking act of historical reduction, transforming the complex, multi-generational history of the Arab conquests—driven by religious zeal, political skill, and military innovation—into a simple, linear story of criminal enterprise, territorial theft, and the humiliating impotence of established imperial power. It is the cry of a civilization that saw its world destroyed and could only process that destruction by framing the victors not as worthy successors, but as a cosmic anomaly, a violent pathogen that temporarily infected the body of the civilized world.

🏴‍☠️ 1. The Bandit Army: "Gathered men who had forfeited their lives [亡命, wángmìng]"

This is a deliberate and profoundly insulting choice of terminology. The term 亡命 (wángmìng) is not a neutral word for "followers" or "recruits." It is a specific, loaded term that carries the full weight of the Persian polemical agenda.

🔤 Decoding "亡命 (wángmìng)" Character by Character

To understand the depth of the insult, we must break down the term etymologically:

• 亡 (wáng): This character means "to perish," "to lose," "to flee," or "to be dead." It implies something that is gone, destroyed, or voided.

• 命 (mìng): This character means "life," "destiny," "fate," or "mandate." It refers to one's very existence and ordained place in the world.

Combined, 亡命 (wángmìng) means:

1. "One who has forfeited their life" – A person who has lost their right to live under the law, an outlaw.

2. "One who has fled from their destiny/status" – A person who has abandoned their proper social role and obligations.

3. In a classical Chinese context, it specifically referred to fugitives from justice, debtors, exiles, and men who had cut all ties to civilized society to live as bandits or mercenaries.

🎯 The Polemical Genius of Choosing "亡命"

By using this term, the Persian storytellers accomplished several devastating rhetorical goals when addressing their Tang Chinese audience:

1. It Denies Religious Legitimacy:

• The early Muslim community saw itself as the Ummah—a sacred community of believers (mu'minun) bound by a divine covenant.

• Calling them wángmìng strips away this spiritual identity. They are not a religious community; they are a gang of fugitives and outcasts. Their bond is not faith, but shared desperation and lawlessness.

2. It Frames Them as Social Outcasts:

• In the highly structured, hierarchical societies of both Persia and Tang China, a person's mìng (命) – their life, destiny, and social station – was of paramount importance.

• A wángmìng was the lowest of the low: someone with no social standing, no honor, and no future within the civilized order. This perfectly reinforces the earlier portrayal of the founder as a low-status camel herder.

3. It Portrays Them as a Threat to All Civilized Order:

• Wángmìng were not just criminals; they were a direct threat to the Mandate of Heaven (天命, Tiānmìng) in China and the Divine Glory (Xvarənah) in Persia. They were chaos agents who disrupted the harmonious social and cosmic order.

• By using this term, the Persians were telling the Chinese: "These are not a neighboring state with whom you can have dignified relations. They are the enemy of all settled, civilized states like ours. They are a pestilence."

4. It Dismisses Military Discipline as Savage Ferocity:

• The highly disciplined, motivated, and tactically innovative early Muslim armies were one of the key reasons for their success.

• The term wángmìng dismisses this entirely. Their success in battle is reframed not as superior discipline or strategy, but as the desperate ferocity of men with nothing to lose—a savage, unthinking horde.

➡️ The Complete Inversion Flow

🕌 The Ummah (A Sacred, Cross-Tribal Community of Believers bound by Faith and Law)

→ ⬇️ INVERTED INTO

🏴‍☠️ 亡命 (A Gang of Fugitives, Outlaws, and Men Who Have Forfeited Their Lives)

→ ⬇️ POLITICAL RESULT:

✨ A Religious Movement becomes a Criminal Syndicate

⚔️ A Devout Army becomes a Desperate Mob

🤝 Diplomatic Partners become Enemies of Civilized Order

The choice of 亡命 (wángmìng) is the ultimate verbal weapon. In two characters, the Persian refugees managed to communicate to the Tang court that the forces that had destroyed their empire were not just conquerors, but were fundamentally illegitimate, uncivilized, and existentially threatening to any structured state. It was the final, desperate attempt to ensure that their conquerors would never be seen as legitimate by the other great power of the age.

🌊 2. The Act of War: "Crossed the river, plundered merchant caravans"

This is where the Persian polemic executes one of its most brilliant maneuvers: the systematic erasure of a humiliating military defeat and its replacement with a narrative of criminal banditry. The choice of the specific river is the key that unlocks this entire deceptive framework.

🔍 Etymological Breakdown: Decoding "恆曷水" (Héng Hé Shuǐ)

Let's perform a rigorous linguistic analysis to confirm the river's identity.

Chinese Character	Middle Chinese Reconstruction (Baxter-Sagart)	Approximate Pronunciation	Corresponding Middle Persian Sound
恆 (Héng)	/həŋ/	"heng" (with velar nasal)	Tigr- (The -ng perfectly captures the velar -g- sound)
曷 (Hé)	/hat/	"hat" (with final -t)	-it or -āt (The final -t is a direct match)

Conclusion: 恆曷 (Héng Hé /həŋ hat/) is a near-perfect phonetic transcription of the Middle Persian name for the Tigris: "Tigrit" (/tigrit/) or "Diglit" (/diglit/).

The linguistic evidence is conclusive. The story explicitly names the Tigris River.

❓ The Critical Question: Why the TIGRIS and Not the EUPHRATES?

This is the masterstroke. The historical Battle of al-Qādisiyyah (636 CE)—the decisive clash where the main Sassanian army was annihilated—was fought near the Euphrates River. A truthful account would mention the Euphrates. The deliberate choice of the Tigris reveals the story's polemical agenda.

River	Historical & Religious Significance	Why It Was REJECTED for the Story
🏞️ Euphrates (Frāt)	- Site of al-Qādisiyyah, the decisive battle. - More sacred in Zoroastrian tradition: The Bundahišn praises it by name, saying it "nourishes the earth" and was dug by the legendary King Manuščihr.	Mentioning the Euphrates would force an acknowledgment of the catastrophic military defeat at al-Qādisiyyah. The storytellers could not bear to narrate the destruction of their glorious army in a pitched battle.
🌊 Tigris (Diglit)	- The river of the Sassanian heartland. - Flowed past the capital Ctesiphon (al-Madā'in). - The final defensive barrier before the capital.	By choosing the Tigris, the storytellers can skip over the embarrassing battle entirely and reframe the conquest as a criminal incursion into the Persian homeland, focusing on the sack of the capital.

The Polemical Genius: The storytellers use a true geographical detail (the Tigris was indeed crossed during the campaign against Ctesiphon) to craft a completely false historical narrative. They jump from the "revelation" in Medina directly to the invasion of the Persian heartland, surgically removing the inconvenient truth of their army's decisive defeat hundreds of miles away.

⚔️ The Great Inversion: From Imperial War to Bandit Raid

The phrase "渡恆曷水，劫奪商旅" ("Crossed the Henghe [Tigris] River, plundered merchant caravans") is where the historical record is systematically dismantled and rebuilt as a criminal indictment.

Narrative Element	Historical Reality	Polemical Framing & Significance
"Crossed the Henghe River"	The Muslim armies crossed the Tigris as part of a coordinated military campaign against the Sassanian capital, Ctesiphon, after their victory at al-Qādisiyyah.	Framed as a simple river crossing by a band of outlaws. It strips the event of its strategic military context and scale.
"Plundered merchant caravans" (劫奪商旅)	The conquest involved sieges and set-piece battles for control of cities and resources. The "plunder" was the systematic spoils of war from a fallen empire.	This is the core of the inversion. It reduces the conflict to common brigandage and highway robbery. The conquerors are not soldiers but bandits; their motive is not empire-building but theft.

➡️ The Deliberate Narrative Inversion Flow:

⚔️ The Battle of al-Qādisiyyah (Clash of Empires)

📍 (Fought near the EUPHRATES) 📍

→ ⬇️ DELIBERATELY ERASED & REPLACED

🌊 Crossing the TIGRIS River

→ ⬇️ INVERTED INTO

🏴‍☠️🛣️ "劫奪商旅" (Plundering Merchant Caravans)

→ ⬇️ FINAL POLEMICAL REALITY:

👑 Imperial Warfare becomes Bandit Raid

🎯 The Ultimate Polemical Goal

By choosing the Tigris and framing the crossing as banditry, the Persian storytellers achieved multiple objectives:

1. Denied Military Legitimacy: The Arab armies are not recognized as a legitimate military force. They are looters and thieves.

2. Erased Humiliating Defeat: The destruction of the Sassanian army at al-Qādisiyyah—the event that truly broke Persian power—is completely written out of history in this narrative.

3. Framed the Conquest as Crime: The fall of Ctesiphon and the loss of the Sawad (Mesopotamia) is portrayed not as a military conquest, but as a large-scale robbery, an act of violent theft by a mob.

4. Appealed to Chinese Sensibilities: For the Tang Chinese audience, who valued border stability and trade along the Silk Road, the label "bandits who plunder merchants" would have been the ultimate condemnation, framing the Arabs as a threat to the civilized, commercial world order.

The mention of the Tigris is not a mistake; it is the cornerstone of a sophisticated lie. It allows the Persians to tell a story of their downfall that replaces the shame of military defeat with the outrage of criminal victimhood, transforming the architects of a new world empire into nothing more than glorified highwaymen.

👥 3. The Disorderly Mob: "其眾漸盛" (His followers gradually increased)

This four-character phrase is a masterclass in polemical minimization. It deliberately avoids any language that would confer legitimacy, organization, or divine favor upon the growing Muslim community, instead framing it as an amorphous and suspect gathering.

🔬 Etymological & Contextual Breakdown

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Let's analyze the precise meaning of each character in the context of Chinese historical writing:

Chinese Character	Literal Meaning	Contextual & Polemical Connotation
其 (qí)	"His/Their"	Points back to the "Persian Hu" founder. This personalizes the movement, making it about a single rebel leader rather than a divine cause.
眾 (zhòng)	"Multitude / Crowd"	This is a neutral-to-negative term for a large group of people. It is the word for a mob, populace, or mass, and pointedly NOT the word for an army (軍, jūn) or organized followers (兵, bīng).
漸 (jiàn)	"Gradually / Little by little"	This implies a slow, almost accidental or organic growth, like a stain spreading. It denies the notion of rapid, miraculous conversion or divinely-inspired expansion.
盛 (shèng)	"Prosperous / Flourishing / Vigorous"	While positive, its combination with 眾 (crowd) creates the image of a swelling mob, a group growing in size and audacity, not in virtue or legitimacy.

The Combined Meaning: "His crowd gradually grew and became vigorous." This is the language one would use to describe a gang of bandits attracting new recruits in a hideout, not the founding of a religious civilization.

⚖️ The Deliberate Omission: What the Phrase AVOIDS Saying

-

The polemical force lies in what the storytellers chose not to say. They had a lexicon of legitimate terms at their disposal, which they systematically rejected.

What the Story COULD Have Said	What the Story ACTUALLY Said (其眾漸盛)	The Polemical Effect
其軍漸盛 (His army gradually grew)	Uses 眾 (crowd/mob)	Denies military legitimacy. They are not soldiers.
其兵漸盛 (His troops gradually increased)	Uses 眾 (crowd/mob)	Denies martial organization. They are not a disciplined force.
其徒漸盛 (His disciples/followers increased)	Uses 眾 (crowd/mob)	Denies religious legitimacy. They are not acolytes of a true faith.
其國漸盛 (His state/nation grew)	Uses 眾 (crowd/mob)	Denies political legitimacy. They are not building a kingdom.

The message is clear: This is not an army, a faith, or a state. It is a leaderless mob growing in number and boldness, Thus the narrative creates a stark, insulting contrast between the two sides:

The Sassanian Spāh (Army)	The "Followers" in the Story (其眾)
A professional, divine estate (artēštārān) in a rigid class system.	An undisciplined crowd (眾) with no social structure.
Trained in military academies (artēštārestān), using sophisticated manuals.	Implied to be untrained rabble gathered by a camel-herder.
Led by generals (spāhbed) with royal titles.	Led by a lowly social upstart.
Fought in set-piece battles with complex tactics.	Engages in banditry ("plundering merchant caravans").

➡️ The Deliberate Narrative Inversion Flow:

🪖 The Islamic Conquests: A disciplined military and religious movement

→ ⬇️ INVERTED INTO

👥 其眾 (His "Crowd/Mob")

→ ⬇️ CHARACTERIZED AS

📈 漸盛 (Gradually swelling in size)

→ ⬇️ FINAL POLEMICAL REALITY:

⚔️ A Historical Conquest becomes a Disorderly Mob's Crime Spree

🎯 The Ultimate Goal: Denial of Civilizational Status

By using 其眾漸盛, the Persian storytellers accomplish their final goal: the complete denial of civilizational status to the Arab conquerors.

They are not portrayed as the founders of a new, powerful empire (the Caliphate) that could rival Tang China or replace Persia. They are depicted as a successful criminal enterprise—a mob that got too big and too powerful, but remained a mob nonetheless. This framing served to:

1. Salvage Persian Pride: Their sublime civilization wasn't replaced by another; it was overwhelmed by a disorderly horde.

2. Warn the Tang Chinese: The story presents the Arabs not as a diplomatic peer, but as a destabilizing, uncivilized force whose power was based on banditry, not statecraft.

In four carefully chosen characters, the Persians defined their conquerors for the Chinese court: not as emperors, but as the chieftains of a vast and troublesome mob.

👑 4. The Illegitimate King: "Carved out territory and proclaimed himself king"

This final clause represents the polemical culmination of the entire narrative, delivering the ultimate accusation: the founder of Islam was not a prophet, but a usurper who committed the cosmic crime of seizing the divine authority of the King of Kings.

🔬 Linguistic & Conceptual Breakdown

The phrase "遂割據波斯西境，自立為王" is loaded with terminology of treason and illegitimacy. Let's break down the devastating connotations of each term:

Chinese Term	Literal Translation	Polemical Connotation & Usage
遂 (suì)	"Thereupon / And so"	Implies a direct, logical consequence of the previous banditry. The plundering naturally led to this act of usurpation. It frames the rise as a causal, criminal process, not a spiritual or political evolution.
割據 (gē jù)	"To cut apart and occupy"	This is one of the most damning terms in Chinese political discourse. It is never used for legitimate founding emperors. It is exclusively used for warlords, rebels, and separatists who violently carve up the territory of the legitimate empire. It implies a violent, illegitimate seizure that dismembers the unified body politic.
波斯西境 (Bōsī Xī Jìng)	"The Western Territory of Persia"	This is a precise geographical description of the province of Āsōrestān (Iraq) and the Sawad (Mesopotamia), the heartland of the Sassanian Empire west of the Iranian plateau. This was not a border region, but the economic and administrative core of the empire, home to the capital Ctesiphon.
自立為王 (zì lì wéi wáng)	"Proclaimed himself king"	This is the ultimate act of arrogance in the Chinese and Persian worldview. A true king receives his mandate from Heaven or the gods (Xvarənah). One who "proclaims himself" king is a usurper and a fake, his authority based solely on his own ambition and military power, not divine sanction.

The Combined Meaning: "And so, he carved out and occupied the western territories of the Persian Empire and had the audacity to proclaim himself king." This is the language of high treason.

⚖️ The Ultimate Accusation: Theft of Divine Kingship

The Persian storytellers are making their most profound theological and political claim: the Caliphate was founded on an act of cosmic theft.

Sassanian & Chinese Political Theology	The Persian Tale's Accusation
Sassanian: The Šāhān Šāh (King of Kings) rules by Xvarənah, the divine glory bestowed by Ahura Mazda. His authority is part of the cosmic order.	The founder steals kingship. He takes by force what can only be rightfully given by the divine. This is not just a political crime; it is a cosmic crime against the divine order (asha).
Chinese: The Emperor rules by the Mandate of Heaven (Tiānmìng). A usurper who seizes power without this mandate is a rebel who brings disorder.	By using the term 自立為王, the story frames the founder exactly as such a rebel—a man without the mandate, who creates disorder, not order.

The Genius of the Compression: The most devastating polemical move is the chronological collapse. The story implies that Muhammad himself ("the Hu man") was the one who launched the invasion, conquered Mesopotamia, and proclaimed himself king. This erases the entire first century of Islamic history—the Rashidun Caliphs, the actual military commanders like Khalid ibn al-Walid and Sa`d ibn Abi Waqqas, and the complex process of state formation.

Why This Compression?

It personalizes the conflict and simplifies the polemic. The entire catastrophic event—the loss of the Sassanian heartland—is blamed on a single, evil individual, the same "Persian Hu man" who was seduced by the lion. It creates a clean, villainous arc from demonic inspiration to banditry to ultimate usurpation.

🎭 The Polemical Contrast: Caliph vs. Usurper

The narrative creates a perfect, mirror-image inversion of Islamic history:

The Islamic Caliphate	The Persian Tale's "King"
Successor (Caliph) to the Prophet Muhammad, leading a community of believers (Ummah).	A usurper (自立為王) who leads a mob (其眾) of bandits.
Authority derived from succession to prophethood and the maintenance of divine law.	Authority derived from military force and the seizure of land (割據).
A new form of theo-political governance that replaced empires.	A mere warlord who carved up a piece of a pre-existing, legitimate empire.

➡️ The Deliberate Narrative Inversion Flow:

🤲 The Caliphate (A new religious polity based on succession to the Prophet)

→ ⬇️ INVERTED & CHRONOLOGICALLY COLLAPSED INTO

👤 A Single Founder

→ ⬇️ WHO COMMITS THE ACTS OF

🗡️ 割據 (Carving out territory)

👑 自立為王 (Proclaiming himself king)

→ ⬇️ FINAL POLEMICAL REALITY:

✨ A World-Historical Revolution becomes a Personal Act of Demonic Usurpation

🎯 The Final Polemical Goal

This final phrase achieves the ultimate goal of the entire narrative: to provide a theologically and politically satisfying explanation for the Sassanian defeat.

The Persians could tell themselves and the Chinese:

"We were not defeated by a new civilization or a divinely-favored faith. Our glorious empire was dismembered by a deluded puppet of Ahriman, a former subject who used demonic inspiration and bandit tactics to steal our most fertile lands and arrogate to himself the sacred title of King. His kingdom is built on sand, on theft and rebellion, not on divine mandate."

In this one sentence, the Caliphate is stripped of its religious significance and historical complexity and is branded forever in the Chinese record as a illegitimate, warlord state, born from treason and destined for disorder.

💥 5. The Humiliation of Empires: "波斯、拂菻各遣兵討之，皆為所敗"

This final clause is the climax of the entire polemic, where the story confronts its own central trauma: the undeniable, world-shattering fact of defeat. The language used here is not that of a neutral historian, but of a traumatized civilization trying to process the impossible. Every single character is loaded with meaning and reveals the Sassanian psychological state.

🔬 Atomic Character Breakdown: The Language of Humiliation

Let's dissect every character to reveal the deliberate narrative framing.

Chinese Character	Literal Meaning	In-Context Translation & Polemical Connotation
波 (Bō)	Wave	Part of "波斯" (Bōsī): Persia. The name itself evokes a recognized, established power.
斯 (Sī)	This, Here
拂 (Fú)	Brush Away, Whisk	Part of "拂菻" (Fúlǐn): The standard Tang term for the Roman Empire. Naming both superpowers emphasizes the scale of the insult.
菻 (Lǐn)	A Kind of Grass
各 (Gè)	Each, Respectively	Highlights that this was a coordinated or simultaneous action by both great empires. It wasn't one loss; it was a universal defeat of the old order.
遣 (Qiǎn)	To Dispatch, Send	A term of imperial authority. It frames the action as a legitimate power sending its forces to deal with a problem.
兵 (Bīng)	Soldiers, Troops	This is crucial. The empires send soldiers (兵), while the "Hu man" leads a mob (眾). The story acknowledges the legitimacy of the empires' military might right before describing its humiliation.
討 (Tǎo)	To Punitively Attack, Suppress, Chastise	This is the most important verb in the sentence. It does not mean "to fight" or "to battle" as an equal. 討 (Tǎo) is what a sovereign does to a rebel, criminal, or insubordinate vassal. It carries a powerful moral and hierarchical judgment: Persia and Rome were righteously punishing an insolent upstart.
之 (Zhī)	Him, It	The object of the punishment: the "Persian Hu man." He is reduced to a single, contemptuous pronoun.
皆 (Jiē)	All, Without Exception	A word of totality and completeness. There were no partial victories, no stalemates. The defeat was absolute and universal.
為 (Wéi)	By	Indicates the passive voice.
所 (Suǒ)	(Passive voice marker)
敗 (Bài)	To Defeat, To Rout	The final, brutal verb. It signifies a military defeat, a crushing.

🎭 The Psychological Drama in the Syntax

The sentence structure itself tells the story of the trauma:

1. The Legitimate Actors: 波斯 (Persia) and 拂菻 (Rome) are named with their full, formal titles.

2. The Righteous Action: They 各遣兵討之 (Each dispatched troops to punish him). This establishes the expected, proper moral and military order.

3. The Cosmic Reversal: 皆為所敗 (All were defeated by him). This short, devastating phrase shatters the established order. The syntax flips: the legitimate subjects (Persia/Rome) become the passive objects of the verb, and the criminal object (之, "him") becomes the active subject of the sentence.

The unspoken question hangs in the air: How could the punishers become the punished?

⚖️ The Polemical Conclusion: Explaining the Impossible

For the Zoroastrian Persian, this outcome was not just unlikely; it was theologically and cosmologically impossible. The King of Kings, holder of the Divine Xvarənah, and his only rival, the Roman Emperor, were both defeated by a camel-herder from the desert.

The Old Book of Tang story provides the only explanation that made sense to them:

The story has already provided the answer: this was not a man; he was a vessel for Ahriman.

The sequence of the narrative is the argument:

1. 🦁 A demonic lion (agent of Xēšm) provides the prophecy.

2. 👤 A treasonous puppet follows the words.

3. 🗡️ They find an arsenal of rebellion.

4. 📜 They receive a seditious manifesto.

5. 🏴‍☠️ They act like bandits.

6. 👥 They gather a disorderly mob.

Therefore, the only logical conclusion for their victory is:

😈 They had supernatural, demonic backing.

➡️ The Final Polemical Flow:

🏛️ 波斯、拂菻 (The Legitimate Superpowers)

→ ⬇️

⚖️ 各遣兵討之 (Righteously dispatch troops to PUNISH the rebel)

→ ⬇️ CONFRONTED BY

🏴‍☠️😈 The Rebel with Demonic Backing

→ ⬇️ RESULTING IN

💥 皆為所敗 (Total, inexplicable defeat)

→ ⬇️ FINAL REALITY:

🌍 The Old World Order is Shattered by Ahrimanic Power

The Chinese scribe recorded a simple statement of fact. But encoded within it is the scream of a civilization that watched its gods fail and its world end, leaving only one terrifying explanation: the Dark Spirit himself had finally won a decisive battle.

🎯 SECTION IV CONCLUSION: The World Undone

This passage is not merely a story; it is the crystallized scream of a civilization witnessing the utter annihilation of its world and the catastrophic collapse of its entire cosmological framework. What began with a single, lowly Persian camel-herder in Medina ends with the fall of empires, because in the Sassanian worldview, the two were inextricably linked. The health of the king and the order of the state were a reflection of the cosmic order. A rebellion against one was an assault on the other, and the success of that rebellion could mean only one thing: the cosmos itself had been corrupted.

⚖️ The Great Inversion: A World Turned Upside Down

The Persian narrative constructs a complete, mirror-universe history where every sacred pillar of their civilization is systematically replaced by its demonic counterpart.

The Sassanian Cosmic Order (What Should Be)	The Persian Tale's Reality (What Has Happened)
A King ruling by Divine Glory (Xvarənah) from Ohrmazd.	A Usurper proclaimed by a promise from a Demonic Lion.
A Scripture (Avesta) providing divine law and order.	A Seditious Text on a black stone, teaching only "rebel."
A Holy Army (Spāh) of the warrior estate (artēštārān).	A Swelling Mob (其眾) of bandits and discontents.
Imperial Warfare to uphold cosmic order against chaos.	Highway Robbery (劫奪商旅) for crude material gain.
A Civilization centered on urban, Zoroastrian Ērānshahr.	A Criminal Enterprise originating from a cave.

The Sacred has Been Replaced by the Criminal: Faith has been inverted into banditry, a religious community has been re-cast as a gang, and divine succession has been transformed into a usurper's proclamation. The story is a relentless polemical machine, designed to deny any shred of legitimacy, spirituality, or nobility to the conquerors.

😱 The Trauma of the Incomprehensible

For the Sassanian psyche, the Arab victories were not just defeats; they were impossible events. The "Two Pillars" of their world—the mighty Sassanian Empire and the venerable Roman Empire—were simultaneously shattered by an enemy that, from their perspective, had no history, no civilization, and no right to victory.

• How could the King of Kings, the center of the world around whom the sun and moon revolved, be defeated?

• How could the divinely-ordained class system, with its sacred fire-temples, be obliterated?

The only answer that made sense within their theological framework was that this was not a historical or military phenomenon, but a cosmic one. The enemy they faced was not a nation, but a manifestation of cosmic evil. They were not fighting the Arabs; they were fighting Ahriman's latest and most successful plot. The conquest was not the rise of a new faith, but the temporary triumph of the Lie (druj) over Truth (asha).

📜 A Complete Alternative History

From beginning to end, the narrative provides a comprehensive, falsified answer to the question: "What happened to us?"

The Persian Explanation of the Arab Conquests:

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🦁 The Incitement: The demon Xēšm, in the form of a lion, initiates a plot to corrupt the world.

👤 The Traitor: A lowly, gullible Persian camel-herder is chosen as the perfect pawn.

🗡️ The Arsenal: Ahrimanic weapons are provided in hidden caves.

📜 The Manifesto: A deceptive, seditious text commands the act of rebellion.

🌊 The Invasion: The mob crosses the sacred Tigris, the river of the Persian heartland.

🏴‍☠️ The Method: They engage in banditry, plundering their way to power.

👑 The Outcome: Through demonic aid, they successfully usurp the throne of the King of Kings.

The story that began with a single camel-herder in Medina ends with the fall of empires because, in this telling, that single event was the beginning of the end of the world. It was the moment the Ahrimanic poison entered the body of Ērānshahr.

The profound value of the Chinese record lies in its dispassionate objectivity. The Tang bureaucrats had no stake in the Zoroastrian-Islamic cosmic war. They simply recorded the testimony of the Sassanian refugees at their court. In doing so, they preserved the ultimate expression of historical trauma: the moment a great empire, faced with its own inexplicable demise, could only process its downfall by attributing it to the work of the devil.

The Old Book of Tang does not contain a garbled history of Islam. It contains a perfect fossil of Sassanian despair. It is the voice of the last Zoroastrian intellectuals, ensuring that their version of the fall—the Ahrimanic version—would survive the destruction of their libraries, the desecration of their fire-temples, and the end of their age. They ensured that history would remember that, in their eyes, they were not defeated by men, but betrayed by the cosmos.

THE CROWNED SOURCE: Profiling the Storyteller – Prince Pērōz III and the Tang Court

For centuries, scholars have treated the bizarre Persian tale in the Old Book of Tang as a piece of anonymous folklore or a garbled rumor. But this is a mistake. When we break down the story’s specific details—its geographical precision, its sophisticated theological inversions, its deliberate political framing—a clear and startling profile of the storyteller emerges. This is not the voice of a common refugee or a merchant. This is the voice of a high-ranking Sassanian prince, steeped in Zoroastrian state theology, crafting a sophisticated polemic for a specific diplomatic purpose: to secure military aid from the Tang Empire.

The evidence points overwhelmingly to one man: Pērōz III, the son of the last fully recognized Sassanian King of Kings, Yazdgird III. He was not merely recounting a story; he was presenting a legal and theological dossier to the court of Emperor Gaozong, designed to portray the Caliphate as an illegitimate, demonic entity that the Tang, as the other great civilized empire, had a duty to help destroy.

1. 👑 Political Status: A King Who Lost His Throne

Profile Characteristic	Evidence from the Old Book of Tang Story	Match with Pērōz III
A Claimant to the Throne	The entire narrative is obsessed with the theft of the "king's position" (王位, wáng wèi). The lion's promise, the black stone's inscription, and the entire plot revolve around the illegitimate usurpation of kingship. This is not a general grievance about invasion; it is the specific, existential complaint of a king who has lost his throne.	Perfect Match. Pērōz was the crowned prince and legitimate heir of the last Sassanian Shahanshah, Yazdgird III. He spent his entire adult life (651-708 CE) in exile, first in Tokharistan and then at the Tang court, engaged in one relentless pursuit: rallying support to reclaim his stolen throne. The story’s core theme is a mirror of his personal and political reality.

The Connection: A common refugee might lament lost homes or family. A king laments his lost crown. The story's singular focus on the illegitimacy of the new rulers and the theft of kingship is the cry of a dethroned monarch, not a displaced peasant.

2. 🏛️ Education: A Master of State Theology

Profile Characteristic	Evidence from the Old Book of Tang Story	Match with Pērōz III
A Master of Zoroastrian State Theology	The story is not just anti-Islamic; it is a masterclass in Zoroastrian polemical inversion. It uses elite theological concepts: - The camel as an incarnation of Verethragna - The lion as an agent of the demon Xēšm - The three caves as a corruption of the ethical triad "Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds" This requires deep, systematic knowledge of Zoroastrian cosmology, not just popular folklore.	Perfect Match. As the Sassanian Crown Prince, Pērōz would have been educated by the highest echelons of the Zoroastrian clergy (the mobedān). His curriculum was the theology of royal legitimacy—the very doctrines that justified the Sassanian family's divine right to rule. He wouldn't just know myths; he would know how to weaponize them. The story uses the exact theological framework he was raised in to systematically dismantle the legitimacy of the Caliphate.

The Connection: The story's polemic is too precise, too theologically grounded to come from a merchant or soldier. It reflects the mindset of the Zoroastrian imperial elite, for whom religion and state were inseparable. Pērōz wasn't just telling a story; he was waging theological war.

3. 🗺️ Geopolitical & Military Insight

Profile Characteristic	Evidence from the Old Book of Tang Story	Match with Pērōz III
Strategic Geographical & Military Insight	The story correctly identifies the Tigris River (恆曷水) as the key geographical feature. This reveals an understanding of the conquest as a targeted strike against the empire's core. It focuses on the crossing that led to the heartland and the capital, Ctesiphon, not the initial, decisive battle at al-Qādisiyyah on the Euphrates.	Perfect Match. A crown prince was educated in the empire's geography, military strategy, and administrative centers. He understood that the true deathblow was not the loss of a border army at al-Qādisiyyah, but the breaching of the Tigris and the fall of Ctesiphon. A common soldier's story would focus on the battle he fought in; a king's story focuses on the loss of his capital and throne.

The Connection: The choice of the Tigris over the Euphrates is a "view from the throne." It reflects the strategic perspective of the central government, for whom the defense of the capital was the ultimate priority. This is the geographic memory of a ruler, not a foot soldier.

4. 🎯 Diplomatic Objective: A Casus Belli for the Tang Court

Profile Characteristic	Evidence from the Old Book of Tang Story	Match with Pērōz III
A Diplomat Seeking Military Intervention	The narrative is not a neutral history. It is a propaganda piece engineered to achieve a specific goal: to demonize the Arab enemy and frame their rule as an unnatural, cosmic crime that cries out for a righteous military response. It provides the ultimate casus belli.	Perfect Match. Pērōz's entire existence at the Tang court was a permanent diplomatic mission. He was the "Persian Governor-in-exile," officially recognized by Emperor Gaozong. In 678 CE, the Tang court, influenced by Pērōz, made a serious attempt to raise an army to restore him to the Sassanian throne. The story is his brief. It answers the question a Chinese emperor would ask: "Why should I spend blood and treasure to restore you?" The answer: "Because the force that stole my throne is not a legitimate government, but a demonic plague that threatens the cosmic order itself."

The Connection: The story's timing, content, and purpose align perfectly with Pērōz's documented activities at the Tang court. It is the perfect tool for a king-in-exile trying to secure a powerful patron for a war of reconquest.

🎯 The Verdict: The Fingerprint Matches

When we combine these profile characteristics, a single, compelling identity emerges:

• Only a King would be so obsessed with the illegitimacy of his usurpers.

• Only a Theologically-Trained Prince could craft such a sophisticated Zoroastrian polemic.

• Only a Heir to the Throne would understand the strategic significance of the Tigris and Ctesiphon.

• Only a Diplomat Seeking an Army would create a narrative designed to provoke military intervention.

No other figure in the 7th century fits this profile. The "Persian Version" is the voice of Pērōz III himself, or someone in his immediate circle, using the full arsenal of Sassanian royal ideology to convince the Tang court that his personal cause was a righteous, cosmic war. The Chinese chronicles, in their impartiality, preserved not just a story, but the last political weapon of the House of Sasan.

🤝 The Audience: Emperor Gaozong of Tang – A Masterclass in Diplomatic Persuasion

To understand the story's design, we must understand the man and the bureaucracy it was pitched to: Emperor Gaozong and the Confucian scholar-officials of the Tang court. Pērōz III was not just telling a story; he was conducting a sophisticated psychological and political campaign, meticulously crafted to push every button that would motivate a Chinese Emperor to act.

🎯 Button 1: The Mandate of Heaven & The Cosmic Justification for War

The most powerful concept in Chinese political philosophy was the Mandate of Heaven (天命, Tiānmìng). A ruler held the mandate as long as he upheld order, virtue, and justice. A rebellion could be justified if the current ruler had lost the mandate through tyranny or incompetence.

How Pērōz Pushed This Button:

Pērōz's Narrative	Implication for Gaozong's Mandate
The "revelation" comes from a Demonic Lion, a creature of chaos and destruction, not a heavenly source.	The Arab Caliphate was founded by a force of cosmic disorder. It is, by its very nature, illegitimate under the heavenly system.
The "scripture" is a black stone with white writing, a symbol of inverted truth and deception.	Their rule is based on a lie, not virtuous truth. It is a corrupting influence on the world order.
Their first act is "plundering merchant caravans," the epitome of social chaos and the antithesis of benevolent rule.	They are not rulers; they are bandits. They do not bring order; they bring desolation.

The Implied Plea to Gaozong: "You, the Son of Heaven, are charged with punishing those who have lost the Mandate and restoring order. Here, before you, is a regime that never had the mandate—it was born from a demonic pact. Your divine responsibility is to crush this cosmic anomaly."

Button 2: The Protection of the Civilized World & The Silk Road

The Tang Dynasty's wealth, power, and cultural identity were inextricably linked to the Silk Road. Protecting this trade network from barbarian threats was a primary imperial duty. The Confucian court valued stability, agriculture, and commerce, and despised nomadic raiders who disrupted them.

How Pērōz Pushed This Button:

Pērōz's Narrative	Implication for Tang Geopolitical Interests
The Arabs are framed as "plunderers of merchant caravans" (劫奪商旅).	This directly frames the Caliphate as the archenemy of the Silk Road, the very lifeblood of the Tang economy and its connection to the West.
They are "bandits" (胡人 in a negative context), not a legitimate state.	Legitimate states collect taxes and protect trade. Bandits plunder it. By denying the Caliphate statehood, Pērōz makes them a lawless threat to all civilized nations, not a diplomatic peer.
Their success is due to treachery and theft, not virtue or skill.	This assures Gaozong that they are not a formidable, virtuous enemy to be respected, but a criminal enterprise that can and should be dismantled by a righteous power.

The Implied Plea to Gaozong: "Your empire's prosperity depends on the Silk Road. These people are not traders; they are its destroyers. To protect your own wealth and the civilized order, you must eliminate this threat. This is not a war of choice; it is an act of economic and civilizational self-defense."

Button 3: The "Righteous War" (義戰, Yì Zhàn) and Benevolent Pacification

Confucian doctrine was wary of militarism but endorsed "Righteous Wars"—conflicts waged to punish evil, rescue the oppressed, and restore peace. The ideal was a benevolent emperor pacifying rebellious regions and bringing them back into the fold of civilization.

How Pērōz Pushed This Button:

Pērōz's Narrative	Implication for a "Righteous War"
The founder is a "Persian" camel-herder rebelling against his rightful king.	This frames the conflict as an internal Persian rebellion, not a foreign conquest. Pērōz is the legitimate king appealing for help to put down a treacherous subject.
Pērōz is the rightful, hereditary ruler (正統, Zhèngtǒng) in exile.	Gaozong would be acting as a benevolent overlord restoring a righteous king to his throne, a classic trope of Chinese statecraft and a powerfully justified reason for intervention.
The story erases the Arab identity of the founder.	This was genius. It prevented Gaozong from seeing this as a risky war of aggression against another powerful ethnic group. Instead, it was presented as assisting a loyal vassal (Persia) in restoring internal order.

The Implied Plea to Gaozong: "I am not asking you to conquer a new land. I am asking for your help to pacify my own rebellious subjects and restore legitimate rule. You will be acting as a benevolent father-figure, punishing the wicked and supporting the righteous. This is the very definition of a 'Righteous War.'"

🎭 Conclusion: The Perfect Pitch

Pērōz III’s story was a diplomatic weapon of immense sophistication. To the Confucian court, it presented the Caliphate as:

1. Cosmically Illegitimate (violating the Mandate of Heaven)

2. Economically Destructive (threatening the Silk Road)

3. Politically Treacherous (a rebellion, not a legitimate state)

4. Militarily Weak (winning through demonic trickery, not virtue or skill)

And it presented the proposed war as:

• A Righteous Act to restore order.

• A Pragmatic Necessity to protect Tang interests.

• A Manageable Intervention to pacify a rebellion, not a clash of empires.

For a brief moment, it worked. Gaozong was persuaded, and plans were drawn up for a Tang army to march west and restore Pērōz. Although the campaign ultimately faltered, the story itself succeeded in its final objective: it ensured that the Sassanian version of events—a tale of cosmic betrayal and illegitimate rule—was immortalized in the official history of the world's other great empire, a final, enduring act of resistance from a prince who refused to let his kingdom die without a fight.

🕰️ Resolving the Timeline: The Final Years of the Sassanian Dynasty in Exile

The conflicting accounts in the Old Book of Tang (舊唐書) and the New Book of Tang (新唐書) regarding the death of the Sassanian prince Peroz (卑路斯, Bēilùsī) have long posed a challenge for historians. The Old Book states he died in 708 CE (景龍二年), while the New Book claims he died around 679 CE (咸亨中). This discrepancy is critical for understanding when the "Lion's Prophecy" story, with its plea for military aid, first reached the Tang court. By synthesizing both accounts, cross-referencing their agreed-upon events, and understanding the nature of the sources, we can reconstruct a coherent and most probable timeline that resolves this centuries-old contradiction.

⚖️ Side-by-Side Analysis of the Two Narratives

To resolve the contradiction, we must first lay out the skeletal narratives of both texts, highlighting their points of agreement and divergence.

Event	Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tangshu) Narrative	New Book of Tang (Xin Tangshu) Narrative	Analysis & Synthesis
1. Initial Flight & First Appeal (c. 651)	After his father Yazdgird III's death, Peroz flees to the Yabghu of Tokharistan for protection.	Same: Peroz enters Tokharistan  for safety after his father's death. Sends envoys to report the crisis. Emperor Gaozong declines to send troops due to the great distance.	✅ Strong Agreement. Both texts confirm Peroz's initial survival strategy and the Tang's initial refusal of military intervention. This is the first diplomatic context for a story like the "Lion's Prophecy."
2. Appointment as Dudu (都督) & Foundation of Persian Protectorate (龍朔元年, 661 CE)	In 661, Peroz reports being harassed by the Arabs. The court sends Wang Mingyuan to the Western Regions, who establishes the Persian Protectorate (波斯都督府) at Jiling City (疾陵城, Zaranj) and appoints Peroz as Dudu (Governor).	Same: At the same time, the Tang is organizing the Western Regions. They establish the Persian Protectorate at Jiling City and appoint Peroz as Dudu. It is soon after destroyed by the Arabs.	✅ Strong Agreement on the key event of 661 CE. This is the peak of Tang symbolic support. The "Lion's Prophecy" would have been a perfect rhetorical tool to secure this symbolic legitimization from the Tang.
3. Peroz's Journey to Chang'an (咸亨中, c. 670-674 CE)	Peroz personally comes to court (自來入朝). Emperor Gaozong bestows favors, appointing him General of the Right Guard (右武衛將軍).	Same: Although he had lost his state, in the Xianheng era he still came to court (猶入朝) and was appointed General of the Right Guard. He then dies (死).	🚫 MAJOR CONTRADICTION. The Old Book describes this as a triumphant personal audience. The New Book uses it as the conclusion of Peroz's life, stating he died shortly after. This is the core of the dating problem.
4. The Failed Restoration Attempt (儀鳳三年 / 調露元年, 678 CE)	In 678, Emperor Gaozong orders Pei Xingjian (裴行儉) to escort Peroz back to be crowned King of Persia (波斯王). Pei only goes as far as Suyab (碎葉) and turns back. Peroz returns alone, cannot enter his country, and is gradually encroached upon by the Arabs. He remains a guest in Tuhuoluo for over 20 years.	In 679, Emperor Gaozong orders Pei Xingjian to escort Peroz's son, Narseh (泥涅師), who was a hostage, back to his country to be re-established as king. Pei turns back at Suyab. Narseh then remains in Tuhuoluo for 20 years.	🚫 MAJOR CONTRADICTION. The Old Book claims it was Peroz on this mission. The New Book claims it was his son, Narseh. This is the second major point of conflict.
5. Final Years & Death	In 708 CE (景龍二年), Peroz again comes to court (又來入朝). He is appointed General of the Left Guard (左威衛將軍), soon falls ill, and dies (病卒). His country is extinguished, but his followers remain.	After his 20-year exile, around 707-710 CE (景龍初), Narseh (泥涅師) again comes to court (復來朝) and is appointed General of the Left Guard. He dies of illness.	✅ Agreement on Event, ❌ Disagreement on Person. Both texts record a final, tragic return to Chang'an around 708 CE by a Sassanian prince, who is given a title and then dies. The Old Book says it was Peroz; the New Book says it was Narseh.

The contradictions between the Old Book of Tang (舊唐書) and the New Book of Tang (新唐書) regarding the final Sassanians are not true errors, but a result of narrative compression and conflation. By synthesizing both accounts with known historical chronology, we can reconstruct the poignant, tragic timeline of the last two legitimate Sassanian kings, Peroz III and his son Narseh.

The core revelation is that both kings died in quick succession around 708 CE, after a lifetime of exile, explaining why the later New Book of Tang blended their stories.

🕰️ The Corrected Chronology: A Father-Son Tragedy

Year (CE)	Event	Source & Explanation
🟡 c. 661	🏛️ Peroz III appointed Governor of the "Persian Protectorate" Following his pleas, the Tang court establishes the Persian Protectorate (Bosi Dudufu) with its capital at Zaranj. This is a symbolic gesture of support.	Old Book: "列其地疾陵城為波斯都督府，授卑路斯為都督。" This is the first, most logical moment for the "Lion's Prophecy" to be formally presented to the Tang court—a theological casus belli to justify this political act.
🟡 c. 670-674	👑 Peroz III's First Personal Appeal to Emperor Gaozong After losing his protectorate to Arab advances, Peroz III journeys to the Tang capital, Chang'an. He is received with honor.	Old Book is CORRECT: "咸亨中，卑路斯自來入朝，高宗甚加恩賜，拜右武衛將軍。" New Book is WRONG to say he died here. He was only in his late 30s. This was his prime lobbying period.
🔴 679 CE	⚔️ The Aborted Restoration Mission The Tang, persuaded by Peroz's petitions, orders a military mission to restore the Sassanians. The general, Pei Xingjian, turns back at Suyab.	New Book is MORE CREDIBLE: "詔裴行儉將兵護還...至安西碎葉，行儉還。" Critical Synthesis: It was Narseh (泥涅師), not Peroz, on this mission. Sending the young prince was less risky than sending the aging king.
🔴 c. 679-700	🏜️ Two Decades of Exile - 👴 Peroz III: Remains at the Tang court in Chang'an, the recognized "King in Exile." - 👦 Narseh: Is left in Tokharistan (吐火羅) with his father's loyalists, trying and failing to rally support.	Old Book (on Narseh): "客於吐火羅國二十餘年，有部落數千人，後漸離散." Synthesis: This 20-year period applies to Narseh in Central Asia, not Peroz in China.
🟢 708 CE	💔 The Final Act: Dual Deaths 1. The aging Peroz III makes a final appearance at court. 2. He is given the title Left Guard General. 3. He dies shortly after. 4. His son, Narseh, returns to China around the same time, his own health broken by decades of failure, and also dies.	Old Book is CORRECT on the sequence: "至景龍二年，又來入朝，拜為左威衛將軍，無何病卒。" (It specifies this was Peroz). New Book's Conflation: "病死，西部獨存." The compilers, seeing both father and son die in quick succession, merged the events.

👥 Why the Conflation Occurred: The "Double Death" Hypothesis

The New Book of Tang, compiled later, simplified a complex, two-generation tragedy into a single narrative.

The "Double Death" Timeline (c. 708 CE):

👑 Peroz III (b. 636, age ~72) → ⬇️ Returns to court in 708 CE, honored, and dies.
👑 Narseh (b. ~660, age ~48) → ⬇️ Returns from exile around the same time, dies soon after.

From the perspective of the later Tang historians:

"The Persian king—first the father, then the son—came to our court. They were both given titles. They both died. Their story is one of continuous failure and death in exile."

It was a natural, if inaccurate, compression of a sad and complicated story.

📜 The Final Verdict: Honoring Both Sources

Claim	Old Book of Tang	New Book of Tang	Most Probable Truth
Who came to court in 708 CE?	✅ Peroz III	(Implied to be Narseh)	Peroz III. The contemporary record is more reliable.
Who was sent on the 679 CE mission?	(Vague, implies Peroz)	✅ Narseh	Narseh. Sending the young prince on a risky mission makes more strategic sense.
Who died when?	✅ Peroz III in 708 CE	(Conflates both deaths)	Both died c. 708 CE. Peroz died at court; Narseh, having failed, returned and died shortly after.

💎 Conclusion: The Last Echo of Ērānshahr

The "Lion's Prophecy" was the weapon of a king, Peroz III, who fought his war not with armies, but with stories. The Tang histories, even in their contradictions, bear witness to his forty-year struggle. He outlived his patron, Emperor Gaozong, and saw his son's last hope for restoration extinguished in the deserts of Central Asia.

The final, heartbreaking synchronicity—that father and son, the last scions of a 400-year empire, died in quick succession in a land far from their ancestral home—was too poetically tragic for later historians to separate. In compressing their stories, they unintentionally created a monument to the total and final extinction of the Sassanian royal line. The story of the demonic lion was the last, desperate political act of a dynasty that had run out of all other options

THE END

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