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beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration;
    There is only a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed, But by mortal men these processes are named 'beginnings'.
    Empedocles
     
     

THE KHORASAN HIGHWAY

     
     
     
     

Woe to the Bloody City

     
    The gods, having scorned to mould a world that was level, had preferred instead to divide it into two. So it seemed to those who lived in the Zagros, the great chain of peaks which separates the Fertile Crescent from the upland plateau of Iran. Yet these mountains, though savage, were not impassable. One road did snake across them: the most famous in the world, the Khorasan Highway, which led from the limits of the East to the West, and joined the rising to the setting of the sun. In places, as it climbed through the Zagros Mountains, winding alongside river beds, or threading between jagged pinnacles and ravines, it might be little more than a footpath - but even that, to those who used it, was a miracle enough. Only a beneficent deity, it was generally assumed, could ever have fashioned such a wonder. Who, precisely, and when, no one really knew for sure,* but it was certainly very ancient — perhaps, some said, as old as time itself. Over the millennia, the Khorasan Highway had been followed by any number
     
     
    * Although the Greeks plumped for Semiramis, a Syrian warrior-goddess who was also supposed to have founded Babylon .

    of travellers: nomads, caravans — and the armies of conquering kings.
    One empire, in particular, for centuries synonymous with cruel and remorseless invincibility, had sent repeated expeditions into the mountains, dyeing the peaks, in its own ferocious vaunt, 'like wool, crimson with blood'. 1 The Assyrians, inhabitants of what is now northern Iraq, were city-dwellers, a people of the flat, alluvial plains; but to their kings, warlords who had spread terror and extermination as far as Egypt, the Zagros was less a barrier than a challenge. Themselves the patrons of a proud and brilliant civilisation, sumptuous with palaces, gardens and canals, the kings of Assyria had always seen it as their duty to flatten resistance in the wilds beyond their frontiers. This, the wilds being what they were, had proved a calling without limit. Not even with their incomparable war-machine could the Assyrians pacify all the mountain tribes — for there were some living in the Zagros who clung to the peaks like birds, or lurked in the depths of thick forests, so backward that they subsisted entirely on acorns, savages hardly worthy of the royal attention. These too, however, with regular incursions, could be taught to dread the name of Assyria, and provide her with the human plunder on which her greatness had come increasingly to depend. Again and again, punitive expeditions would return from the mountains to their native plains, to the sacred cities of Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh, while in their wake, naked and tethered, followed stumbling lines of captives. Increasingly, the Assyrians had fallen into the habit of moving entire populations, shunting them around their empire, transplanting one defeated enemy into the lands of another, there to live in the houses of the similarly transported, to clear weeds from the rubble, or cultivate the abandoned, smoke-blackened fields.
    These tactics had in the end had due effect. By the late eighth century bc , the reaches of the Khorasan Highway had been formally absorbed into the empire and placed under the rule of an Assyrian governor. 'Grovelling they came to me, for the protection of their lives,' boasted Assyria's greatest king, Sargon II. 'Knowing that otherwise I would destroy their walls, they fell and kissed my feet.' 2
    Not that captives were the only source of wealth to be found in the Zagros. Wild and forested though the mountains were, and often bitter the climate, the valleys were famous for their clover-rich pasture. Over the centuries, and in increasing numbers, these had been attracting tribes