A trip to Iran

Owing to the state of my kitchen (covered in a thin film of plaster dust from the post-earthquake renovations) I've eaten takeaway the last couple of nights. Last night I went to Philadephio's and had a Moroccan pizza, marinated lamb chunks and mint/yoghurt sauce, with a nice dark beer. Tonight I went to my neighbourhood souvlakerie and while I waited for my order, I looked at a book about the glories of ancient Iran; Persepolis, Naqst-i-Rustam and Shiraz. So I took my beef souvlaki home and teamed it with an appropriate glass of Shiraz (not from Iran but from Australia). The people in the shop must be Iranian, as there are several books there about Iran. I don't know if souvlaki is an Arab invention, I thought it was Greek, but I guess that something much like souvlaki is eaten across the Arab world, like kebabs, and probably Greek souvlaki originates with the Ottoman empire that took over Greece and the eastern world for several centuries. I don't know; the ethnology of food is fascinating subject and complex. (Get hold of Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish food - the story of the Diaspora told through the food of Jewish communities across Europe and Asia)
   What interested me in the book about Iran was the picture of  a stone relief of Emperor Shapur, (Parthian or Sassanid, I forget which) seated in triumph over the grovelling figure of the Roman emperor, Valerianus. A nice moment of shoe-on-the-other-footness, given the Roman love of portraying their own emperors triumphing over sundry "barbarian" races.  Here the Roman is seen as the barbarian, offering tribute to the sophisticated and civilised emperor Shapur, representing the superiority of his people and culture over that of Rome.
     It's just like my Thursday night Moroccan pizza; pizza, that most Italian of foods, topped by a characteristically Arab taste combination of lamb and minted yoghurt. The pizza base is held hostage by the topping, just like Valerian's submission to Shapur!
     The ancient world was far more multicultural than we think; people didn't travel fast, but they still travelled, and fought each other and created mixed-race babies and mixed-race food. An Arab merchant might have two wives, one at either end of the Silk Road, one Chinese and one Caucasian, both Muslim. Ibn Batuta, the great Arab traveller, travelled to China via India well before Marco Polo. The Phoenicians travelled as far as Cornwall for tin, and Viking yobboes (Justinian's Varangian guard) carved runic graffiti into the balustrade of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, a Byzantine Christian cathedral that was converted into a mosque by the Ottoman Turks. Sicily, at the centre of the Mediterranean, was home to the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the odd Roman or two, the Moors, the Normans and the Spanish; each group contributed something to Sicilian culture to make something quite unique.
    Multiculturalism; it does make life more interesting.