Of Ancient Scrolls and Scriptures...

To some people, Zoroasterianism might sound like a strange, new political philosophy, but at least one Harvard professor is educating students about what is actually an ancient Iranian religion to further Americans' understanding of the Near East and its history.

The Aga Khan Professor of Iranian History, Richard N. Frye has studied and taught courses on subjects from Zoroasterianism to the study of languages like Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, Kurdish and Pashto. A member of the Near Eastern Studies Center, the Linguistics Department and the History Department, not to mention the chairman of the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Affairs and a former editor of an archeological journal, Frye is involved in as many academic concerns as the numbers of languages he speaks.

`The Earth Shaker'

One of Frye's earliest academic concerns as a faculty member at Harvard was to persuade the University to establish a Middle Eastern Studies Center.

An undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana and a former graduate student of Harvard's History Department, Frye has studied Middle Eastern subjects since he was in junior high, when a copy of Tamerlane, the Earth Shaker fascinated him for the first time with that part of the world. With his extensive background in oriental studies, both at Illinois and at Harvard--and later in 1946 as a member of the Society of Fellows here--Frye felt that Harvard needed to offer a more comprehensive program of study on the Middle East. It was at that point, four decades ago, that he became involved in an effort to promote the study of that part of the world.

"When we started there was nothing about the Middle East here [at Harvard] in the post-World War II era," he says. "So I was working with the anthropologist Carl Coon trying to get a program started. At that time there was only the Semitic Languages Department, and that was kind of dormant."

Unfortunately, Frye says, Coon soon left to do work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he felt there was more support for a Middle Eastern Studies Program. Frye was left to administrate most of the expansion of Harvard's program alone. Despite this seeming setback, he succeeded in capturing the interests of University officials, who decided to consider how Harvard could set up a Middle Eastern Studies Center.

"People got interested here [at Harvard]," he says. "They brought in the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation and [the oil company] ARAMCO to decide if there was a need for a Center for Middle Eastern Studies."

Frye says the center finally opened in 1956, at about the same time that Russian and East Asian Studies Centers were set up at the University. He also says that it was at this time that the Aga Khan endowed a chair for Middle Eastern history, to which Frye was appointed.

"This field has to be endowed," Frye says, "because no university will support it. It's too esoteric. `Iran? Iraq?' people ask, `Where is that?' No one wants to study anything west of Wooster."

"The University looks at the department and says, `You haven't got hundreds of students,' so it doesn't offer money." says Frye, who lectures in six different Indo-European languages. "The problem is that people haven't found out about the Middle East yet. There's a war in Afghanistan, but people in America think the country is in Africa."

And Frye says that the students the department does recruit tend to be from Europe or the Middle East itself.

"It's really pretty much an international program," he says. "There's not much interest here. People in Asia and Europe know the importance of the area, but in Kansas people are not as concerned."

With few students--there are about 14 graduate students in the center this year--and even fewer professors, Frye has had to expand his expertise to teach the myriad languages, art and anthropology courses that are required for the complete study of the Near East.

"Over the years I've taught Hebrew, Arabic, early, middle and late Persian, Turkish and Pashto," Frye says. "And that's actually pretty difficult. One of the things people don't realize is that all those languages are very different. It would be like having one professor of romance languages."

Frye says that he has also been involved with teaching Near Eastern religions like Manichaeanism and Zoroasterianism. Currently he teaches a course in Sogdian language, the language of people residing near the Soviet-Chinese border, the History of Pre-Islamic Central Asia, and middle Persian (300 to 700 A.D.) language.

Persian Culture

His expertise in Persian studies led Frye to leave Harvard temporarily to become director of the Asia Institute at the University of Shiraz in Iran from 1967 to 1975. And it was while he was working at the Institute, coordinating programs for Middle Eastern students, that he collected much of the information with which he currently performs his own research on ancient Persian culture, including scrolls and reproductions of inscriptions which are more than 1500 years old.

"Most of the things hangind over there," says Frye, referring to several yellow parchments in his office, "are Imperial inscriptions about a victory against the Romans or they are dictates from the Emperor or a lot of times, they are funerary inscriptions."

Frye says that he collected his scrolls, which are relics from Zoroasterian religious rites, on an archeological expedition through the deserts of Iran.

"When you find the [funerary] inscriptions you make a latex imprint of the stone, and then you have to hold it up to the light or to a mirror to read, because it is backwards," Frye says. "The scrolls can tell you a lot about the customs and history of an area."

Because information about the ancient Middle East is so limited, Frye says that he must rely on ancient pottery, tools, spears, and even coins to gain information about Persia and Central Asia.

"You have to use everything," he says, "inscriptions, coins, Greek scrolls, Chinese scrolls, anthropology, history, government, East Asia, the Middle East, Russia--you name it--you have to use anything you can get."

His work on inscriptions and ancient coins led to Frye's recent publication of The History of Ancient Iran in 1984.

Crimes and Killings

Frye, an ancient historian, does have views on Middle Eastern problems of today.

"History is made by fanatics," he says. "Particularly the history of Central Asia. When I first taught a class on Central Asian history here, I asked the students what they knew about the area, and Ghengis Kahn was what everyone anwered. He killed hundreds of people. What we remember are the crimes."

In fact, the emphasis on this crime and killing mode of historical analysis, Frye believes, is the root of many problems in the Middle East today.

"This is the way we teach history," he says. "We emphasize people who kill. I saw a world where there was peace, and now it is gone. The Pakistanis hate the Indians; the Jews hate the Arabs. There is the whole Iran-Iraq conflict. There is no gain."

And Frye says he feels that until the Middle East resolves its problems with fanatics and hatred, it will cease to progress with the rest of the world.

"The study of the Middle East is a tremendous field," Frye says. "I have been burdened by it, but I have also been fascinated by it. I am retiring next year, and [Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukranian History Omeljan] Pritsak is retiring next year--but we are the only two who are actively engaged [in keeping the study of the area popular]."

Frye says that he will continue to promote Middle Eastern studies after his retirement, as he wishes to maintain his committment to the area, but adds that he hopes future generations of teachers and researchers will want to study the region, as well.

"We have to pass the teaching on. And you just wish you could pass on the feeling," Frye says. "I'm very ambivalent about how that will work, but you just have to have humor and hope."