Characene

Where the ships stopped

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The Tigris and the Euphrates come together and run into the head of the Persian Gulf through a delta of marsh and date palm. Everything arriving by sea from India, Arabia and East Africa had to be landed there and transferred to river craft for the journey up to Babylonia and onward to Syria — and everything going the other way had to be transferred back.

Alexander founded a city at that point. It was destroyed by flooding, refounded by Antiochus IV, destroyed again, and refounded a third time in the 140s BC by Hyspaosines, the Seleucid satrap of the region, who raised the ground level on an artificial mound, put his own name on it, and around 127 BC began calling himself king.

That is the commonest way a state begins in this part of the world: a governor left in charge by an empire that has stopped being able to remove him. The Seleucids were losing their provinces in exactly these decades — to the Parthians in the north-east, to Bactria in the east — and Characene is the piece that came off in the south.

The kingdom lasted three hundred and fifty years as a Parthian vassal, which is longer than most of the successor states that came off the Seleucids, and it did it by being the place the goods changed hands.

The name of the city turns up most often in other people's inscriptions. At Palmyra, eight hundred kilometres north-west across the desert, merchants set up monuments honouring the men who had brought a caravan safely home from Spasinou Charax on the Gulf. There was a resident Palmyrene community in the port, and one inscription records a Palmyrene whom the king of Characene appointed governor of Tylos — which is Bahrain.

The transfer

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What Characene did was unload ships and load boats, and take a percentage.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant's handbook of the first century AD, describes the Gulf traffic; Pliny gives distances and cargoes; Isidore of Charax — a man of this city — wrote the Parthian Stations, an itinerary of the road from Antioch across Mesopotamia and Iran to Arachosia, stage by stage with the distances, which is one of the most useful geographic texts to survive from antiquity and exists because somebody here needed to know how far things were.

The goods are the ordinary list of the ancient long-distance trade and are worth naming because they explain the position. Pepper, cinnamon and spices from India and further east; pearls from the Gulf itself; ivory, tortoiseshell, cotton textiles, precious stones. Going the other way: silver, glass, wine, coral, linen, and coin. Roman gold and silver turn up in Indian hoards in quantity, and a substantial part of it went through this delta.

The kingdom minted continuously — a long series of tetradrachms and drachms with Greek legends that decay over three centuries into unreadable imitation, which is exactly what was happening to the Greek legends on the coins of the Punjab at the same time — and that series is most of what the dynastic reconstruction rests on. It will not support a greatest king or a last one.

It also had competition it could not control. The Palmyrenes ran the desert route from here to the Mediterranean; the Parthians took a share upstream; and when the Romans wanted the Indian trade in bulk they went by the Red Sea instead. A transit kingdom holds a chokepoint only for as long as the chokepoint has no alternative, and the Gulf always had one.

Three polities on one toll

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Characene lived on tolls and on nothing else, and it is not alone. A whole class of polities did the same across sixteen centuries and half the world — Palmyra, Derbend, the Nabataeans, the Zurayids of Aden, the Rustamids of Tahert, Srivijaya, Trebizond, and a run of them on the Melaka strait from Pasai to Johor. Three state the type most clearly.

Palmyra taxed a road across a desert. An oasis with water in a place with none, midway between Damascus and the Euphrates, whose merchant families financed the caravans and raised the archers that escorted them, and whose surviving tariff inscription of AD 137 lists the duty on slaves, purple wool, olive oil and camel loads.

Derbend taxed a pass three kilometres wide between the mountains and the Caspian — the only practicable land route between the steppe and Iran, walled by a Sasanian emperor and held for two centuries by an emirate that lived on what went through it.

Characene taxed a transfer: the point where sea cargo had to become river cargo, because ships could go no further.

The three are separated by eight hundred years and three thousand kilometres and they are the same object. A small permanent settlement on a route with no practical alternative, producing little itself, whose entire political history is other people's need to pass — and in all three cases a polity that outlasted much larger neighbours precisely because it was worth more to everyone functioning than conquered.

The differences are instructive too. Palmyra used its position for something else for thirteen years, and is remembered almost entirely for those thirteen. Derbend never tried, and nothing that happened there is worth dating. Characene sits between the two: it never attempted anything either, and the one event in its history is a Roman emperor arriving and going away again.

Mecca is the near miss. The sharifs there lived on the pilgrimage as much as on tolls, and a destination is a different kind of asset from a route — it is paid for rather than taxed, and it cannot be bypassed by anyone, which is a stronger position than any of these three ever held.

Ardashir takes the delta

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Ardashir of Persis took Characene around 222, two years before he killed Artabanus IV and took the Parthian empire itself. The sequence was Fars first, then Kerman, then Elymais and the Gulf coast, and this kingdom is one of the pieces picked up on the way.

It is a small ending and it is characteristic. Characene had been somebody's vassal for three hundred and fifty years, first the Seleucids' and then the Parthians', and had survived a Roman emperor turning up in person. What finished it was not a great power at all. It was the neighbouring vassal, moving early, while the empire both of them belonged to was busy fighting itself.

The Sasanians renamed the province Meshan and kept the port working, because there was nothing else to do with a delta at the head of a gulf. Cargo went on being transferred there through the Sasanian centuries and then under the caliphate, on a larger scale each time.

What Characene leaves behind is a name in somebody else's inscription. At Palmyra the merchants who had travelled with a caravan put up monuments to the men who brought it safely back from Spasinou Charax, and that — a mention in a receipt, filed at the other end of the route — is a fair summary of what a transit kingdom is.

Apologos

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The kingdom ended in 222 and the job did not, because the job was geography. The Tigris and Euphrates still met and still ran into the Gulf through a delta, and sea cargo still had to become river cargo somewhere.

The Greek name for the port at that point was Apologos. In Arabic it is al-Ubulla, which is the same word, and it is still the same word a thousand years later — one of the very few Greek place-names in Mesopotamia that survived the language that put it there.

Why Basra is where it is

Ubulla sat on the estuary and was feverish. So when the Muslims founded their own city in the delta they built it twelve miles inland, on the desert edge, where the air was better, and called it Basra.

The two were joined by canal. The Nahr Ma'qil came down from the north-east, bringing the ships from Baghdad; the Nahr al-Ubulla ran south-east from Basra to the Gulf at Abadan. Those two channels and the estuary enclosed what everyone called the Great Island, with Ubulla at its south-eastern corner where its canal met the water.

Ibn Hawkal in the tenth century reckoned that Basra's canals exceeded a hundred thousand, of which twenty thousand would take a boat. The gardens along the Ubulla canal were held to be one of the four earthly paradises. Mustawfi, four centuries later, describes palm groves so thickly planted that you cannot see a hundred paces, and dates good enough to export at a profit to India and China.

Where the Ubulla canal met the estuary there had been a whirlpool that wrecked ships. According to Ibn Hawkal it was got rid of by an Abbasid princess — some say Zubayda — who loaded a number of vessels with stones and sank them on the spot until the thing was blocked.

What happened on the canals

The delta was not only prosperous. On the Nahr Abu'l-Khasib, one of the smaller southern canals, the Zanj built their stronghold in the ninth century — the fortified city they called al-Mukhtara, which held out against the caliph's armies through fifteen years of continuous war before the rebellion was put down.

Then the Mongols came through, as they did everywhere, and this countryside went with the rest. Qazwini in the thirteenth century describes Ubulla and its neighbour Shikk Uthman as ruined. Ibn Battuta, a century after that, found Basra still populous but strung out among ruins — the mosque of Ali standing two miles from the inhabited quarters, the old city wall traceable two miles beyond that, and only three quarters of the town still lived in. Ubulla he found reduced to a village.

And then it moved back

The last turn is the one worth the chapter.

Medieval Basra, the inland city, is now the ruins called Zubayr. Modern Basra is not there. It was built on the estuary at the mouth of the canal — on the site of Ubulla, which is to say on the site of Apologos.

Fifteen centuries after Hyspaosines raised his mound above the flood and put his own name on the city, and after a Greek port name had passed into Arabic, and after the harbour had been moved twelve miles inland for reasons of health and then abandoned, the traffic went back to the same square mile of mud. Everything that ever mattered about Characene was true of the ground rather than of the kingdom, and the ground is still there doing it.