Evolving Moloch recently tweeted an account of the Bloody Falls Massacre of 1771, a historical event in which a group of (mostly) Chipew
Medieval Persian folklore includes mention of two outstanding conquerors who invaded Iran from opposite directions: Eskandar of Rum, and Afrāsīāb of Turan. Eskandar is known to be Alexander the Great ("Rūm" = "Rome" i.e. Greece). But who on earth is this Afrāsīāb person? "Turān" is the old Persian name for the Central Asian steppe. But we know nothing of the Achaemenids' dealings with the people on their eastern borders; almost all of our knowledge comes from Greek writers who focused on the western portion of the empire. Some think that Afrāsīāb is a fictional character (like another villain of the Shahnameh: the demon-king Zahhāk, who derives from the mythical dragon Aži Dahāka). But I think it's also possible that he was a real person—perhaps some Scythian warlord—who fought against Persia and was remembered for it in Persian mytho-history.
A good comparison here is with Attila the Hun, another would-be conqueror from the steppe. Like Afrāsīāb, Attila was remembered and commemorated in the folk traditions of the local people—in this case, Germanic poems like Widsith, the Nibelungenlied, and the Poetic Edda. The difference is that in Attila's case, we also have contemporary, reliable historical accounts which historians can use to corroborate (or not) the references to Attila in poetry: no need to uselessly speculate on who this mysterious "Atli" figure was or whether he existed. No such corroborating witness exists for Afrāsīāb. So we can't even know if he was real or mythical.
A modern Persian wanting to learn about the earliest history of his or her civilization is much better served by reading Herodotus than Ferdowsi. Likewise, a modern Greek is going to get much better information about earliest Greece from the records of the Egyptians and Hittites than from the poetry of Homer. Adopting a discerning eye towards different sources of historical evidence often means that the most accurate and reliable history of a culture doesn't come from that culture at all, but from outsiders—this is a point which modern commentators of Native American history often don't want to accept. Who knows the most about the early Alaskan Tlingit? People who can read Russian, that's who.
The flipside, however, is that when documentation for a period is sparse, people can start to confuse lack of evidence for lack of incidence: "we don't know a lot about the eastern Persian Empire, so not a lot must have happened." But that's not going to be the perspective of someone from ancient Persia—certainly not if they're from one of the eastern satrapies after their village has been sacked. To assume that everything of significance that happened in Persia happened with Greece is to make the same mistake as that critic ("What is this to me, the duel between Iran and Turan?"). Modern histories of Persia ignore Afrāsīāb; they can only go where the evidence takes them. But the Shahnameh apparently puts Afrāsīāb on roughly the same level as Eskandar—that fact might (might!) be a clue that something big did happen out on the eastern Persian frontier, which could be compared to Alexander's invasion. Maybe. The record is silent.
Trying to reconstruct the history of the frontier-beyond-the-frontier is a tricky business. Sometimes you get lucky, like with the Kiowas (on whom more in a future post): where written history, oral history, archaeology, linguistics, and winter counts all come together to form a coherent picture of the Kiowa past which reaches back a thousand years. And sometimes you get unlucky, like with the Arapahoes, who are invisible to the archaeological record and whose early history is a giant mystery. And then there are enigmas, like the Suhtai, on whom all a person can really do is guess. All of this is of course highly relevant to any attempt at making a map of peoples who lived beyond the reach of recorded history. Crumbs...
And as for the Bloody Falls Massacre: the Wikipedia article tells me that "in 1996, Dene and Inuit representatives participated in a healing ceremony to reconcile the centuries-old grievance." I can't really argue with that, I suppose. Healing is good, reconciliation is good.
But it is hard to hold a healing ceremony for a massacre that nobody remembers. Did you take notice of the fact that it has a name: "the Bloody Falls Massacre"? Why? Who named it that? Do you suppose it would it have a name, or be remembered at all, among the Chipewyans, still to this day, after 248 years, if no one had been there to write it down? Perhaps... but I'm inclined to think likely not. It was just one raid, after all. One among thousands of sanguinary struggles that took place on the lonely tundras, of which the world knows not.
