I love history, and periodically I run across amazing things while digging through the old books I’ve accumulated over the years. This one may be new to you, but, on the off chance it jogs your memory, do you remember that time the Persians built a Great Wall?
The Chinese get a lot of credit for the Great Wall of China, and rightfully so. It’s an amazing feat of engineering and sheer bloody-mindedness. It’s not the only one of its type, though. Wherever raiders troubled a frontier, the thoughts of great empires naturally turned to walls. Or army-sized counter-raiding parties, depending on how much attention they could afford to give the raiders. (For examples of the latter, see the Roman invasion of Caledonia or Caesar’s invasion of Germania, but that’s another story.)
China’s wall, obviously, still exists, and I’d love to see it one day. Other walls remain with us only in legend, e.g., the Gates of Alexander. And others have, as Galadriel put it, faded from memory entirely. Even without memory, though, eventually somebody starts wondering why those hillocks are all in a straight line like that….
Which brings us to the Great Wall of Gorgan. Constructed at the height of the Sassanid Empire’s power in Persia, it spans from the Caspian Sea into the mountains to the west, protecting Hyrcania and Media (northern Iran, these days) from invasions by the nomads to the north. This wasn’t just a fence with a few guys patrolling it, either, but a sizable fortification with between fifteen and thirty-five thousand men guarding it. That would be enough to stop not just raiding parties, but modest-sized armies. (Nomads didn’t tend to get siege equipment and specialists until after they’d conquered settled territories, which the wall was intended to prevent in the first place.)
The Sassanid Empire went the way of all things, though, and gradually fell to constant harassment from the Romans (the Near East wasn’t big enough for both of them) and a bunch of upstarts from Arabia with a new religion they wanted to share. The wall wasn’t maintained and soon joined its builders in the dust, which the successors to the successors (to the fifth power) to the Sassanids probably regretted when this guy named Temüjin showed up with a hundred thousand of his friends and family and forever changed the geopolitical and genetic landscape of Asia.