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The War against the Zanj in Nizami’s Khamsa.

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Taken from: The Alexander Romance in the Persian Tradition: Its Influence on Persian History, Epic and Storytelling by Haila Manteghi Amin.

 

Overall, Alexander waged three great wars. The first was against the Zangis (black people, known as Zanj in Arabic, the African population of the western part of the Indian Ocean); the second against the Persians; and the third against the Russians (altogether there were seven battles waged against the Russians). ………...

 

The Battle Against the Africans

……….. According to the Sharafnama, Alexander’s first battle followed the Egyptians’ accusation of tyranny against the people of Zang, upon hearing which Aristotle advised the king to help:

Perchance the king may gain strength should he lend

To this affair of Egyptians a helping hand,

Thus Egypt and all its surrounding lands to him would

Become subject, his name as champion become

Renowned and all his foes in dust cast down,

All his friends triumph, his foes be overthrown.

 

Among the sources to which Nizami might have had access, Bal‘ami is the only author to mention Alexander’s battle against the people of Zang (Zangistan).(1) In the Greek Alexander Romance, there is an episode devoted to Alexander’s voyage to Africa and traversal of Libya before hastening towards Egypt, although there is no account of any war against the African people. Nizami offers much more detailed information about the African campaign: he relates that “Alexander, following the counsel of his guide (dasturi rahnamun) took the battle standard from Macedonia ... He ordered his troops to leave the banks of the River Nile and march towards the desert.” Nizami then describes the battle with the African army in a single verse as follows:

On the right flank the Abyssinians fought; on left

The men of Barbary and at the battle’s heart

The wild African army [the Zangi] raged, a demon horde.

The episode of the war against Zangistan in the Sharafnama contains more than 430 verses in which Nizami developed the story with details of individual battles and their heroic acts. Just as in the Alexander Romance, each battle usually starts with an exchange of letters between the two leaders; in Nizami’s version, one also finds episodes in which Alexander sends a message to the other king before a battle and receives an answer. Normally, victory is not easy and Alexander must personally exert himself on the battlefield to ensure success. At the end of one of the battles against the Africans, Nizami provides some interesting information on how Alexander ordered that the Abyssinians be branded because they helped the people of Zang in a battle in which the Zang army suffered defeat, which is why (according to Nizami) the Abyssinians were slaves.

After the battle against the people of Zang, Alexander rested in a camp near the battlefield for about a week. Nizami also relates how Alexander built bridges over the Nile in order to transport the treasure he obtained as tribute from the people of Zang. ………….

 

Comparing this episode in Nizami’s Sharafnama with the Greek Alexander Romance suggests that Nizami replaced Alexander’s battle against the Tyrians found in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (2) with the battle against the Zang. This seems a reasonable supposition since this episode in the Pseudo-Callisthenes (2) is interpolated between the episode of Alexander in Egypt and his Persian campaigns. This motif was most likely inserted in the Alexander literature before the eighth century, through Arabic channels, since a letters in the work known as Rasa’l (Epistolary Romance)(3) deals with “fighting the Zanj”. Thus it appears possible if not probable that Nizami based his account of the battle against the people of Zang on the Rasa’l or on a common Hellenistic source.

 

(1) see my webpage on Muhammad Bal'ami: Tarjami i Tarikh Tabari (Translation of Tabari's History) (10th cent) from Persia.

(2) Pseudo-Callisthenes, the so-called Alexander-Romance, falsely ascribed to Callisthenes, survives in several versions, beginning in the 3rd cent. CE. It is popular fiction, a pseudo-historical narrative interspersed with an ‘epistolary novel’, bogus correspondence between Alexander the Great and Darius III.

(3) see my webpage; Salim Abu al ala: Risalat Aristatalis ila l’ Iskandar (About Aristotle and Alexander) (743)