We keep building walls when we know that walls are a temporary solution
Reading history can both depress and engender hope at the same time. It is depressing to see — especially in tales of the 1920s and 1930s, for instance — political and economic mistakes repeated today. On the other hand, it is uplifting to see how often catastrophe is either averted or overcome and we move forward as a species. Even repeating tragedy as farce can be seen as some sort of progress.
I have been enjoying Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads. It covers a part of the world that not only gave birth to civilisation and trade and huge empires but which, thanks to China, is once again capturing the focus from an increasingly moribund west. Or should that be West?
The western end of the great trade routes in what were the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire saw the fluid movement of peoples and great volatility that is familiar today. Rome and Persia were the competing powers for much of the early years covered in Frankopan’s history before the rise of Islam.
One story from this period is remarkable in showing how unlikely alliances form when existential threats to ways of life arise. Around the middle of the 4th Century, both Rome and Persia were threatened by — and suffered — attacks from the nomads gathering in the Asian steppes. These nomads swept south across the Caucuses and through the gap between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The great cities of the Tigris and Euphrates plains were attacked. Although this was Persian territory, the Romans in Constantinople could see that a defeated Persia would only weaken their own position. They would be next.
What happened next is astonishing. Remember that this is over 1,600 years ago. The Persians built a wall — akin to the Great Wall of China — between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. There were no Mexicans to pay for it, so the Romans helped out. Here’s how Peter Frankopan describes it:
United by a common interest in repelling the barbarian hordes, Persia and Rome now formed a remarkable alliance. To keep the nomads from descending through the Caucuses, a massive fortified wall was constructed, running for nearly 125 miles between the Caspian and Black Seas, protecting the Persian interior from attack and serving as a physical barrier between the ordered world to the south and the chaos to the north.
That’s a long wall. It had thirty forts along its length and was manned by 30,000 troops. Rome didn’t just help build it. They made “regular financial contributions to the maintenance” of the wall and even sent soldiers to help defend it. The idea of Persian and Roman soldiers serving alongside each other was as strange then as it is now to think of Russian and US forces allied against Daesh.
The wall, being a wall, worked. For a while. But walls have a tendency to crumble or to be circumvented. The nomads had their day, both in Rome and in Persia. We know that physical walls will fail but alliances point the way to something more lasting and worthwhile.
