The book of the year is The Scythian Empire by the American historian and scholar Christopher Beckwith. You should not expect narrative history. You should not even expect much continuity. You should not expect irony or grace. Beckwith is not Gibbon. He is not Macaulay. He is not even Tom Holland. He is not trying to write literature: but he writes literature anyway, scholarly literature. Some of you will not be able to take it, this scholarship, but it is bold, singular, remarkable. I have read all of Beckwith’s last four books: he is the only author one has to read. Other authors write too much: that’s the problem with literature. But Beckwith only writes when he has something to say, and the saying of it is difficult and one can see this in his writings, since he repeats himself, or starts an argument, and then continues it or corroborates it 50 pages later, or adds something decisive to a picture he set up 15 years before. I confess that though I had read all of his handsome Princeton University Press books, and got quite a few things out of them, I did not see the entire drift of the argument until The Scythian Empire.
The argument is revolutionary. It is that Karl Jaspers was right. There was an Axial Age. Jaspers supposed that something in common had happened in the time of Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu and Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the others. All the historians dismissed Jaspers because it was a speculation. But Beckwith has found evidence for the fact that all of these figures were related to each other. The evidence is in literature, and also in language. In one sentence: the Axial Age was the Scythian Age. Beckwith’s hypothesis is that one people, the Scythians, connected East to West for four or five important centuries BC, that they had one language, that they had one god, that they had one colossally significant ruling system, with a pride in its lineage so immense that everyone – including the people we now call Chinese, but at the time had no name for themselves, copied it – and that they, always useful, had an entirely novel method of waging war.
Beckwith lacks the ability to summarise his own claims in the manner of a best-selling historian, or is too dignified to descend to selling his wares. So I shall do it for him:
- The Scythians, the nomadic peoples of Central Asia, were the first to ride horses. Consequently, they invented close-fitting dress, with distinctive boots and hats; they invented a short composite bow; they were extremely skilled horsemen. All of this has obvious influence on Persian and Chinese dress as they adopted Scythian ways.
- The Scythians worshipped a great God, in relation to which other gods were false or inferior. This God, tanri or tengri, was the first great universal monotheist god. The God of the Israelites was only a tribal god until the Israelites learnt from the Persians and rebuilt their temple to this great God.
- The Scythians invented feudalism: a form of politics based on equality amongst the warrior class, but then, outside of war, involving hierarchies of lordship and vassalship running from king reciprocally downwards to serf. There were no slaves. And the king was ‘king of kings’.
- We have made mistakes about ancient history because of the names of tribes, ‘Medes’, ‘Persians’ etc., and because we suppose that the original Indo-Europeans were ‘Iranian’. So we tell the history in pieces, pixellated, rather than as a whole. Beckwith even made this mistake in his old book Empires of the Silk Road (2009), though it contained the germ of his latest argument. In fact, as he now shows, the Scythians, also called Skuda, or Sugda, or Saka, conquered (and were conquered by) the Medes and made them Scythian; they conquered (and were conquered by) the Chinese and made them Scythian. They conquered them in military manner, but also, even in defeat, conquered them in dress and in language. We should not think of the Scythians, as Wikipedia or the old books would have it, as an empire of the Caucasus, but as a cultural empire stretching across the entire pasture that runs from Hungary in the west to Ordos in the east, dominating all of Central Asia from Iran and Anatolia to Mongolia. Their enemies paid them the compliment of copying their ways.
- The Scythian language left a trace in almost all ancient languages. Beckwith argues that the ‘Avestan’ language in which Zoroaster wrote was in fact Scythian. He argues that the Chinese city Handan and the Persian city Ecbatana were both derived from Scythian Agamatana. He shows that the word ‘Aryan’ comes from the Scythian word for ‘royal lineage’, Harya. It was a universal word. Herodotus said the Medes were originally called Aria. Beckwith shows that Darius, supposedly a Persian, claimed to be “an Ariya and seed of an Ariya”, that is, of the great Scythian ruling lineage. Even more remarkably, the word Harya was transcribed into Chinese in several forms, one Hsia or Xia (originally a word for summer) and the other Hua (originally a word for flower). There was no word for ‘Chinese’ in antiquity. But the Hsiung-nu, once thought to be ‘Huns’, were in fact Scythians: these were the nomadic neighbours of what we now think of as the Chinese. The ancestors of the Chinese recognised the Aria concept, and used it of the Hsiung-nu: but, also, as they began to adopt Scythian techniques and style and words, they began also to use Scythians words of themselves. So the word for a ruling lineage, Harya, then Hsia or Hua, was first used of the nomads to the east and north, but, then, it was used for themselves: to claim that whoever was uniting the Chao, Chin, Han etc. was part of a universal ruling lineage. It is of great significance that the generic word for the Chinese world, ‘all under heaven’ or Tianxia, was derived from the Scythian word for great god, Tengri and of course Hsia (Xia). The word Hua is still part of the names of both modern Chinese states.
- Beckwith’s scholarship is manifest most exactly and speculatively in his philological work: he evidently is the master of all the languages. He shows even that the word ‘noble’ in the famous Four Noble Truths of Buddha is – yes, arya, ‘noble’, where ‘noble’ in fact means ‘of the ruling lineage’. Buddhism is a religion for wise rulers.
- In fact, he shows that Buddha was a Scythian, called Sakamuni or Sakyamuni, ‘sage of the Sakas’, that is, the Scythians. In this he resembled Anacharsis, a Scythian philosopher who went to Greece in the sixth century BC, and was a later hero of the Cynics. Beckwith also claims that Zoroaster, the first great theological monotheist, was a Scythian. What made Scythian thought distinctive was that it recognised what Beckwith calls antilogies: opposites and binaries. Truth and falsehood, good and evil. Zoroaster was a traditionalist in that regard. But Anacharsis and Buddha tried to break with old Scythian philosophy, by showing how to overcome the antilogies, through what became Greek scepticism or Indian meditative practices and arguments. Beckwith also shows that this was taken to China. Lao Tzu, he speculates, is a rendering of the Buddha’s personal name, Gautama (via Lao Tan and Kao Tan): Lao Tzu was also what we would now call a non-dualist.
This is astonishing. Maximal suggestiveness and maximal ability to justify it at the highest scholarly level. It is almost nowhere in anyone else’s books. I checked the literature on Tianxia, which is a newly prosperous subject, as Chinese scholars try to show that it is a superior concept to the western ‘state’: and nowhere in this literature is the etymological root of Tianxia explored. Our scholarship is still insulated. Chinese scholars offer Chinese etymology. Indian scholars say Buddha was Indian. Persian scholars begin every argument with the Persian language. Scholars, politically, everywhere in the world are as cosmopolitan as you please – since political cosmopolitanism is cheap – but hardly any of them are cosmopolitan in the scholarly sense: it takes too much work, requires too much erudition, needs a remarkable combination of learning and perspicacity. Only Beckwith can manage it.
He calls himself Christopher I. Beckwith on his books. Perhaps this is just the polite American attempt to distinguish himself from all the other Christopher Beckwiths. (As if that were necessary.) To an Englishman it might come across as a bit vainglorious, as if, like Claudius, he is “I, Beckwith”. But he deserves it. He is the only Beckwith. His book is a marvel. It is heavy going. Jared Diamond, it ain’t. But, unlike Diamond, who had two good ideas (that Greece has a convoluted shoreline, and that the Americas have a north-south axis while Asia has an east-west axis – and, alright, all that stuff about “guns, germs and steel”), Beckwith has done more than look at a map: he has studied the old books.
His own books, published since 2009, are remarkable. Empires of the Silk Road emphasised the concept of the comitatus, the band of brothers who would swear loyalty to a leader, to die before him in battle, and to share the spoils of victory. This is one of the most important political inventions ever made, for worse or better. Warriors of the Cloisters told the world that – forget the university which we always think is European – the ‘college’ has its ancestry, as George Makdisi used to argue, in the Islamic madrasa,but that the madrasa, unexpectedly, was in turn derived from a Central Asian institution, the vihara. The Greek Buddha showed that Pyrrho’s sceptical precepts and Buddha’s early precepts (before Buddhism became the business of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path) were identical. And The Scythian Empire finally drives a Scythian short sword through the entire continent to show that there was a single world in the sixth century BC.
Since this is the Daily Sceptic, I should say that this is all relevant to our business here, too. Pyrrho – you might not have heard of him – was reputedly the first sceptic. (Even now we speak of Pyrrhonian Scepticism). Pyrrho travelled to India with Alexander the Great in the 320s. Beckwith (in his book The Greek Buddha) says that the texts suggest that Pyrrho agreed with the Buddha. How does this work?
1. Beckwith relies on a remarkable passage about Pyrrho quoted [deep breath] in a lost work by Timon quoted [deep breath] in a lost work history by Aristocles quoted [deep breath]by Eusebius in his Preparation for the Gospel. In it Pyrrho says all questions are adiaphora, undifferentiated by logical differentia, astathmeta, unstable, unbalanced, unmeasurable, and anepikrita, unjudged, unfixed, undecideable. Therefore we should be adoxastous, without views and saying about everything that “no more is than it is not or it both is and is not or it neither is nor is not”.
2. Beckwith relies on an early text for the Buddha, the Anguttura-nikaya from the Pali canon, the oldest surviving tradition. In this the Buddha announces the Trilaksana, the three characteristics of all dharmas. “The Buddha says, ‘All dharmas are anitya, impermanent… all dharmas are duhkha, unsatisfactory, imperfect, unstable… all dharmas are anatman, without an innate self-identity.” Beckwith says that the Buddha’s saying is so close to Pyrrho’s they are a translation of each other. (By the way, the last argument of Pyrrho that I quoted above – “it no more is” etc – is identical to the famous catuskoti of Nagarjuna, the most famous para-sceptical Buddhist philosopher.)
Let me summarise the entire argument of The Scythian Empire, if I can. It is that the Scythians invented a very dynamic political system. It was godly, kingly and feudal: hierarchical but reciprocal, and with a streak of egalitarianism running through it, and no slavery. It was an empire on horseback. This system influenced the sedentary orders it encountered from Egypt to China: so that all the great civilisations of the past were no longer simple or single, but were duplex systems, compositely formed out of 1) king and slaves (or in the case of the Greeks citizens and slaves) but also 2) this other kingly-feudal idea, with no slavery but graded hierarchy. Remarkably, China was built on a Scythian concept. In addition, it is very likely that Scythians saw things very clearly: insisting on duality (black/white, good/evil etc). And then it may have been particular Scythian philosophers who complicated things one step further: so that Anacharsis, Buddha and Lao Tzu tried to break through the dualities and suggest something else – and along the way invented scepticism.
Yes, indeed: those late Scythians invented the form of thought which was opposed to the imposition of a singular order from above. A form of thought that proposed that truth, though formerly opposed to falsehood, might be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, to establish.
(RIP my oldest friend Matthew Neale, of Cambridge, Cairo and Kathmandu, who studied Arabic, Greek, Pali, Sanskrit and was fascinated by the Sextus Empiricus/Nagarjuna sceptical harmonies: the last thing he did, before he died, was write a review of Beckwith’s Greek Buddha.)
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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If they are intent on doing this, one might suggest that mileage is obtained from the odometer at the yearly MOT rather than a privacy destroying network of CCTV.
At least it could be less bad.
That would be common sense, unfortunately it would remove instant pricing control from government.
You would still be able to drive where and when you like and pay after! that’s not what the ptb are doing this for they want, at the moment control, by financial or technological means
Not to mention a lucrative black market in “clocking”? Reporting mileage on changing a vehicle mid-way through the year?
And pay-per-mile will not apply to false plated vehicles or overseas registered ones in difficult to trace places. There are many of the latter around London and I expect in other cities too.
If pay-per-mile ANPR surveillance is implemented, false plated vehicles will be very rapidly caught (or should be).
A work colleague was able to show that a speed camera had recorded a similar vehicle to his falsely showing his registration number. Great, he avoided the fine but was stopped many times in the months afterwards because the cops ANPR pinged his plate as ‘dodgy’.
A bit later he heard that someone had been stopped in a car with his plate after a passenger was seen exposing himself. A likely story – we teased him mercilessly at the pub.
Indeed….You don’t know who you’re cloning!
If ANPR infra is extended that far I’d guess it would be repeatedly damaged
Not necessarily as the DfT provides a very useful way of finding out if a reg no actually exists via its website.
Maybe that explains all the fuss about Oasis and ticket pricing.
Not to mention all that extra date storage.
Exactly what I was about to suggest – no need for high tech and intrusive tracking systems.
For an ideologically driven government it doesn’t matter if a policy is ruinously expensive to implement, counterproductive, absurd, illogical, pointless. It will be done anyway.
The insane economical policies of various communist governments caused mass famine and destruction where millions perished. They didn’t care.
The ultimate aim of evil is destruction itself. It doesn’t want to demolish existing systems to replace them with something better; it just wants to demolish them.
None of this net zero nonsense will achieve anything. The world will not be cleaner, greener, a better place to live. It will be poorer, uglier, colder, a sort of dystopian wasteland where nothing works any more.
And it will be a dystopian world which the Tory party did more than its fair share of creating. Shameful, unforgivable behaviour by the Tories, who have danced to another tune for 25 years…
Yes! The Conservative party shifted left in 1997 when Blair won and have been labour lite ever since. If only they had the backbone to stick to solid right of centre policies.
If they did, many more younger people would still have a future. Well done!
Here’s a thought…….
Build more roads!
Then people will use their cars more, use more fuel and the tax revenue from fuel duty will increase.
Journey times will be shorter per trip but the volume of trips will massively outweigh that.
Productivity will increase, business will boom and, again, the tax take from increased business activity corporation tax etc will increase.
But that will increase atmospheric CO2…..or not really…….
‘A residence time of only 4 years for all CO2 molecules, regardless of origin, is consistent with the conclusion that nature is dominant in driving changes in CO2 concentration. Fossil fuel emissions serve only a minor role.’
‘Since 1750, additions to the atmospheric CO2 concentration derived from natural emission sources associated with biological processes are about 4.5 times larger than the contribution from fossil fuel emissions (e.g., 22.9 ppm per year from nature, 5.2 ppm per year from fossil fuel combustion).’
‘In other words, observed CO2 data contradict the climate narrative that says anthropogenic fossil fuel burning is driving CO2 concentration changes.’
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/08/30/new-study-co2s-atmospheric-residence-time-4-yearsnatural-sources-drive-co2-concentration-changes/
A dangerous, subversive thought-crime.
Your social credit score demerits have been recorded and you are hereby enrolled in the mandatory citizen-loyalty ‘residential’ training programme.
Whatever method of discouraging car use they choose the loser will be motorists who are the enemy of government when it comes to the fake climate agenda and the mass immigration agenda. They will switch to pay per mile as they are trying to coerce us all into EV’s with the no road tax bribe. But they also need us off the road as we continually fill the country up with millions more migrants. How many people do government think can comfortably live in these small Islands which are now the most densely populated part of Europe? 70 million, 80million, 100 million? How many?
Do we pick one of those suggested answers, or are they yearly figures?
Well I only ask because there seems to be no limits. Soon we will require a ring road around the Orkneys
Road taxes and vehicle taxes we know are not used to repair or improve the road network, it like N.I is just another way Governments rinse the public.
I do not believe the argument that cheaper fuel increases car driving miles, why would it?. Perhaps a few more people might go on a few more trips, but my guess is the majority of us use our cars as and when we need too.
So if the Government reduced the taxes on fuel it would leave more disposable income in the nations pockets which could contribute to house purchases, putting back into the economy through Retail etc.
It won’t happen though because all Governments want is more of our money such that they can increase control over us so they can hold on to power.
“majority of us use our cars as and when we need too”
Yes we still have the issue of wear & tear with advisable oil changes & services to keep things going.
And send to Ukraine, just a loan of course of. what was it last time six billion?
just wondering when the British taxpaying public will see those loans paid back into the tax system?
I was heavily involved in bidding to install & operate the LRUC (lorry Road user scheme) abandoned in 2006. Admittedly this was before smart phones, but through the scheme development the various bidders discovered all sorts of problems that hadn’t been anticipated. In the event it was going to cost about the same to introduce it as would have been collected.
A big problem was foreign vehicles. We were in the EU then & discrimination against an EU vehicles wasn’t allowed. Maybe that’s eased now? But what to do with cars & trucks arriving at Calais?
Retrofitting to older vehicles, maintenance, annual certification of units. Simple things like, who owns the unit in the vehicle. Who pays for the 30million needed. How is it enforced. Big bang or rollout.
Then the privacy issues. Do you get a bill with a snail trail of where you’ve been? To whom, car owner? Does everyone want their wife/husband/boss, whoever is the bill payer knowing everywhere they’ve been?
The issues are endless.
Anyone who is a member of the RAC should leave ASAP. The organisation has gone rogue. They should make clear to this awful organisation why they are doing this as well. The RAC obviously cares not one jot about its members, virtue signalling to the Govt is the main aim.
ABD & Fair Fuel are much better, I joined the former just to have updates on what ‘attacks’ against the motorist are in the pipeline.
Modern EV cars are smart phones on wheels in constant contact with the network, in that respect I would have thought EVs could go on to a pay per mile scheme right away.
The problem is with older cars, well no problem really for this Government, just impose a huge tax hike in lieu of being able to retrospectively put older vehicles on to pay per mile. Then, jack up the ULEZ schemes as well and they will be well on to the road of driving all old cars off the road. The Government will soon be getting petulant that few people are buying EVs and so many are still driving old cars that this would seem to be the way to go. Indeed next month’s budget could well see the Government take the first steps in ‘driving’ old cars off the road and moving to a high tech full surveillance transport system.
you can see it coming – they are releasing bits and pieces and seeing what the reaction is, we need to fight back against road charging with all our might….
First they came for the smokers etc, or should that be “far right”.
There are lots of ideas like this that could make sense if there was trust between the population and the government. See also gun control, ID cards etc.,
Mark my words, ULEZ will be converted into a generalised road charging scheme, with no waivers for electric cars, within 12 months.
Was this 20MPH mentioned in their manifesto? I must confess that I didn’t pay attention to a bunch of Globalist lackies, but would be interested if they even cared to mention it.
The idiots in charge are still wedded to the idea that BEVs are going to replace ICEVs, which is the root of this latest Government-created problem.
If only they could accept reality, and unfortunately politicians have no understanding of economics and only see the immediate, never the unseen.
Extract from Cafe Hayek:
Like a cost benefit analysis!
A halfway ground could be to turn some motorways into toll roads. Most toll roads already do ANPR for payment. All the small roads around me, though, are single lane with passing places and I doubt that the cost of installing the cameras would ever be recouped.
What might be even better would be to sell the rights and responsibilities of the road to investors and use the money to pay down the debt.
Of course, that’s not what will happen. They’ll sell the rights and then splurge the money on something shockingly wasteful and then still have a mountain of debt.
About those 2001 fuel protests, didn’t they threaten the hauliers and the companies that they worked for to remove their licenses. How very 21st century!
You know how they put trigger warnings on comedies from the 90s and beyond, well the way things are going, 90s comedies will be ‘problematic’, not because of some politically incorrect comments, but they show how much BETTER it was. Chatting to your local Doctor, short Airport visit (with fluids) and people having the freedom to jump into their car and go for a drive….Very problematic.
As far as I am aware, the US will not allow the use of its GPS system for raising money with pay-per-mile. The other option is the EU Galileo system that the UK is no longer part of but perhaps that is part of Two Tier’s smoozing in Germany and France.
It is so obviously a terrible idea for all the reasons you give that no wonder the slimy wankers at treasury love it.
A war against country people who are generally lower paid and have to drive longer distances
If I had been an RAC member, I would have immediately terminated my membership and switched to the AA (whom I’m already with). So many of these supposed ‘service’ organisations are turning into rampant ‘woke campaigning’ ones, to which the customer reaction has normally been “go [green] woke, go broke”. Let’s hope the RAC sees sense, and rids itself of this green cronyism, else it may find itself in a rapidly declining state.
I think if anyone thinks that any government, especially this government, will replace fuel duty with pay per mile, they are living in cloud cuckoo land. There is no way that they will give up the tax currently earned on all that fuel sitting unused in the tanks. If I put £50 in my car, that is instant tax for the modern day highwaymen which would take a month to recover at my mileage. No, pay per mile will never replace the current car tax, fuel duty etc etc and will only ever be charged in addition to the current method of fleecing us.