A History of the World in 100 Objects (41 page)

Abd al-Malik is shown full-figure, standing and bearded, wearing Arab robes and a Bedouin scarf headdress, with his hand resting on a sword at his waist. It’s a fascinating image – a unique source for our knowledge of the dress and the regalia of the early caliphs. His pose is menacing, and he looks as though he’s about to draw his sword. The lines below his waist are almost certainly meant to represent a whip. It is an image to inspire fear and respect, an image that makes it clear that the eastern Mediterranean now has a new faith and a formidable new ruler.

A letter from one of his governors echoes the image’s implicit message:

It is Abd al-Malik, the commander of believers, a man with no weaknesses, from whom rebels can expect no indulgence! On the one who defies him falls his whip!

He cuts an impressive figure – although a less reverential source tells us that he had such appalling halitosis that he was nicknamed ‘the fly-killer’. But, bad breath or not, Abd al-Malik was the most important Muslim leader since Muhammad himself, because he transformed what might have been merely a string of ephemeral conquests into a state that would survive in one form or another until the end of the First World War.

Abd al-Malik was a new breed of Islamic leader. He had no personal memory of Muhammad, and he shrewdly saw how best to exploit the traditions of earlier empires – especially Rome and Byzantium – in order to establish his own, as Professor Hugh Kennedy, of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, explains:

In the years that followed the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, the caliphs were essentially the political and religious leaders of the Muslim community. All Arab Muslims in the first century of Islam realized that this was a new state – that what went on before wasn’t really relevant. These caliphs were not the successors of the Byzantine emperors or of the Sasanian king of kings. They might look to these people for solutions to administrative problems – how you collect money and indeed what sort of money you make – but they wouldn’t see themselves performing the same sort of role. This was a new dispensation
.

One of the administrative solutions that Abd al-Malik borrowed from the Byzantine emperors was how to manage the currency. Until now, the new Islamic empire had used hand-me-down coins from the pre-conquest era, or imported gold coins, especially those from Byzantium. But Abd al-Malik quickly saw that there would be economic instability if the quantity and the quality of the money supply was not controlled. He understood that coins are literally the stamp of authority, announcing the dominant power in the society using them – and he knew that that power was now his. In the pre-modern world, coinage was usually the only mass-produced item in daily use, and it was therefore a supremely significant element in the visual culture of a society.

So Abd al-Malik himself was stamped on this first overtly Islamic coinage. The leader of the faithful had ousted and replaced the emperors of Byzantium. But something quite unexpected happened to those coins with Abd al-Malik standing on them. After a few years they simply vanished. During the Hijri year 77 (
AD
697), the standing caliph coin was suddenly replaced with a design that could hardly be more different. There is no caliph, no figure, only words. It is a defining moment for Islamic public art. From now on no human image would be used in such a public arena for well over a thousand years.

The later coin is exactly the same size and weight as the earlier one, and it’s also made of solid gold. But this coin says that it was made in the year 77, just one year later than the earlier one, and now there is nothing to see but text. On the front it reads: ‘There is no god except God alone, he has no partner; Muhammad is the Messenger of God whom he sent with guidance and the religion of truth that he may make it victorious over every other religion.’ This is an adaptation of a text from the Qur’an. On the back of the coin is another Qur’anic text: ‘God is One, God is the Eternal. He begets not, neither is He begotten.’

The inscriptions on this coin raise two interesting points. First, this is almost the oldest Qur’anic text to have survived anywhere. Before Muhammad, Arabic was barely a written language at all, but now there was a vital need to record God’s words accurately, and so the first developed Arabic script – the ‘kufic’ script – was created. It is the script which appears on our coin. But this coin also tells us something else. If coins declare the dominant power in a society, it is clear that the dominant power in this empire is now not the emperor but the word of God. Portraiture or figurative art has no place in the official documents of such a state. The tradition of placing the ruler’s likeness on the coin, familiar across the Middle East since the days of Alexander nearly 1,000 years before, had been decisively abandoned, and the text-only coin remained the norm in all Islamic states until the First World War. Arabic, the language of God, inscribed on an Islamic coinage, became a fundamental tool for the integration and survival of the first Islamic state.

Abd al-Malik, Khallifat Allah, Deputy of God, Ninth Caliph and Ruler of the Faithful, died in
AD
705. But the message proclaimed on his coins of a universal empire of faith still has a powerful resonance.

The new coin issued by Abd al-Malik showing text adapted from the Qur’an

Today there is no caliph. The title was long claimed by the Turkish sultans, but the office itself was abolished in 1924. A universally accepted caliph has historically been a rare thing, but the dream of a single Islamic empire – a caliphate – remains potent in the modern Islamic world. I asked the social anthropologist Professor Madawi al-Rasheed to comment:

Muslims today, at least some sections of the Muslim community worldwide, aspire to this ideal of the caliphate as the embodiment of the Muslim community. It is related to the spread of the internet, of new communication technology that allows Muslims from different backgrounds to imagine some kind of relationship with other Muslims, regardless of their culture, language or ethnic group. So it can be found among second-generation Muslims in Britain, let’s say, those who have lost the cultural background of their parents and have developed linkages with other Muslims of their age who may have come from different parts of the Muslim world. It aspires towards a globalized identity, an identity where you have bonds based on belief rather than ethnic background or even nationality.

The yearning for one Islamic community, inspired and guided by the word of God alone – that dream, first clearly articulated in physical form on the coin struck in Damascus more than 1,300 years ago, is still very much alive.

From the heat of Arabia, the rise of the Islamic empire and the reshaping of Middle Eastern politics after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the next object takes us to the chill of East Anglia and a place where, just over seventy years ago, poetry and archaeology unexpectedly intersected and transformed our understanding of British national identity. The discovery of this object – a helmet – was part of one of the great archaeological finds of modern times. It speaks to us across the centuries, of poetry and battle and of a world centred on the North Sea.

At Sutton Hoo, a few miles from the Suffolk coast, one of the most exciting discoveries in British archaeology was made in the summer of 1939. Uncovering the tomb of an Anglo-Saxon who had been buried there in the early 600s, it profoundly changed the way people thought about what had been called the ‘Dark Ages’ – those centuries that followed the collapse of Roman rule in Britain. Angus Wainwright, the National Trust archaeologist for the East of England, sets the scene:

There are a number of large mounds, high up on an exposed ridge – about 100 feet up – looking down towards the River Deben. One of the biggest mounds, which we call, excitingly, Mound 1, is where the great ship grave was discovered in 1939, and we’ve got about eighteen or twenty other mounds around.

It was in this grave ship that the famous Sutton Hoo helmet was found, together with an astonishing range of valuable goods drawn from all over Europe: weapons and armour, elaborate gold jewellery, silver vessels for feasting, and many coins. Nothing like this had ever been found before from Anglo-Saxon England. The big puzzle, when the excavation took place, was that there was no body in the grave. But Angus Wainwright has an explanation:

People wondered whether this could be a cenotaph, a burial where the body had been lost – a sort of symbolic burial. But nowadays we think a body was buried in the grave but because of the special acidic conditions of this soil it just dissolved away. What you have to remember is that a ship is a watertight vessel, and when you put it in the ground the water percolating through the soil builds up in it and it basically forms an acid bath, in which all these organic things like the body and the leatherwork and the wood dissolve away, leaving nothing.

The discovery of this ship burial captured the British public’s imagination – it was hailed as the ‘British Tutankhamen’. But the politics of 1939 lent a disturbing dimension to the find: not only did the excavation have to be hurried because of the approaching war, but the burial itself spoke of an earlier, and successful, invasion of England by a Germanic-speaking people. Angus Wainwright describes what they found:

Very early on in the excavation they discovered ship rivets – the iron rivets that hold together the planks of a ship. They also discovered that the wood that had made up the ship had rotted completely away, but by a rather mysterious process the shape of the wood was preserved in a kind of crusted blackened sand. So by careful excavation they gradually uncovered the whole ship. The ship is 27 metres long; it’s the biggest, most complete Anglo-Saxon ship ever found.

Ships were very important to these people. The rivers and the sea were their means of communication. It was much easier to go by water than it was by land at this time, so that people in, say, modern Swindon would have been on the edge of the world to these people, whereas people in Denmark and Holland would have been close neighbours.

We still don’t know who the owner of the boat was, but the Sutton Hoo helmet put a face on an elusive past, a face that has ever since gazed sternly out from books, magazines and newspapers. It has become one of the iconic objects of Britain’s history.

It is the helmet of a hero, and when it was found, people were at once reminded of the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem
Beowulf
. Until 1939, it had been taken for granted that
Beowulf
was essentially fantasy, set in an imaginary world of warrior splendour and great feasts. The Sutton Hoo grave ship, with its cauldrons, drinking horns and musical instruments, its highly wrought weapons and lavish skins and furs, and not least its hoard of gold and silver, was evidence that
Beowulf
, far from being just poetic invention, was a surprisingly accurate memory of a splendid, lost, preliterate world.

Look at the helmet, decorated with animal motifs made out of gilded bronze and silver wire and bearing the marks of battle. Then see what
Beowulf
has to say:

To guard his head he had a glittering helmet
that was due to be muddied on the mere-bottom
and blurred in the upswirl. It was of beaten gold,
princely headgear hooped and hasped
by a weapon-smith who had worked wonders
in days gone by and embellished it with boar-shapes;
since then it had resisted every sword.