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By Gertrude Bell
'Her notable highbrow talents and masculine manner make Persian images, her first booklet on an jap topic , all of the extra interesting.' - Geoffrey Nash
When Gertrude Bell's uncle was once appointed Minister in Tehran in 1891, she declared that the good ambition of her existence used to be to go to Persia. a number of months later, she did. And so begun a life of shuttle and a lifelong appeal with what she observed because the romance of the East, which developed right into a deep figuring out of its cultures and humans. This shiny and impressionistic sequence of sketches, her first foray into writing, is an evocative meditation that strikes among Persia's heroic earlier and its lengthy decline; the general public face of Tehran and the otherworldly 'secret, mysterious lifetime of the East', the lives of its ladies, its lush, enclosed gardens; from the bustling towns to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan.
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Additional info for Persian Pictures: From the Mountains to the Sea
Sample text
C. The fact is that by the time they were able to leave, every man in the Macedonian army— Alexander foremost—simply hated the place. That winter, instead of enjoying the spoils of conquest, they'd been forced into a miserable, windswept existence among stone and marble ghosts. Under the Achaemenids, Persepolis had been supplied with a constant stream of varied provisions, but Alexander had wrecked that infrastructure and the Macedonians were left with only the thirty thousand sheep they had seized from the Uxians.
In ancient times, unlike today, the region stretching from Farah to Lake Sistan and along the Helmand River valley to Kandahar was fertile and well populated, despite the "wind of 120 days" that roared in from the northwest every summer. The army halted around Kandahar to await the end of winter and accumulate food before proceeding north. While it was in camp, news arrived that Satibarzanes, reinforced by Bactrian cavalry, had broken back into Areia to raise a new revolt. Bessus had also dispatched cavalry farther west against Alexander's supply line and had named a new rebel satrap of Parthia.
The identity of the primitive Parapamisidae is intriguing because Arrian describes them as Indians, probably thinking of them as the "mountain Indians" he described at Gaugamela. If Curtius is correct about their utter isolation, the possibility also exists that they were aborigines in the territory—today's Suleiman range, or White Mountains—not yet acculturized by either the Iranians or Indians. In the fruitful Kabul valley, the army found sustenance, and was rewarded not so much by Alexander's impetuous leadership as by the advent of warm weather and ripening crops.