"Island of Ghosts"

[stoutfellow]

I just finished reading Island of Ghosts, by Gillian Bradshaw. It's a historical novel, set in Roman Britain in the time of Marcus Aurelius, and centers on one of the leaders of a troop of Sarmatians who have been posted there, in the Roman service. It's the first book I've read by Bradshaw, and I found it quite enjoyable. She does a good job of presenting the culture clash between the Romans and the Sarmatians (and, to a lesser extent, the Britons as well); her hero, Ariantes, is intelligent and flexible enough to grasp the Roman way of doing things, at least partly, and to present the Sarmatian point of view in terms the Romans can understand.

Bradshaw's research is fairly solid, as far as I can tell. On the much-disputed question of the stirrup, she comes down on the side of early invention. In an afterword, she writes

I am fully aware that many scholars - principally medievalists - say that stirrups were invented by the Goths in the fourth century A.D. or the Franks in the seventh, or even the Normans in the ninth. I was flabbergasted to discover that they were wrong. If any scholars are reading this, may I beg you to go check the evidence?

Her principal reference on this point is Rostovtzeff's Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, although she also mentions a couple of later books by Tarn and Sulimirski. The Britannica seems to agree, in its articles on Sarmatia and on the spur, but Lynn White, in Medieval Technology & Social Change - yes, a medievalist - writes

N. Vesselovsky orally assured Rostovtzeff that he had excavated stirrups from Sarmatian graves in the Kuban region, but Rostovtzeff did not see these discoveries, nor were they ever published, despite their obvious interest

Now, Rostovtzeff wrote in the 1920s and White in the '60s (and Bradshaw in the '90s); I have no idea what evidence might have been discovered since, but I think Bradshaw is being unfairly harsh. (White, incidentally, credits the Chinese with the invention, though he notes possible unsatisfactory precursors from Central Asia and India.) Still, it's a historical novel, not a history, and a minor anachronism - if it is one - is forgivable.

Quibbles aside, I enjoyed the book and will probably look for more by the author.