Eagle's Nest: The Fortress of Alamut

The Justanid dynasty of Daylam was founded in 189/805, and one of its rulers, called Wahsudan bin Marzuban (d. 251/865) is reported to have built the fortress of Alamut in 246/860. 

The tradition in this context has it that once the ruler, while on hunting had followed a manned eagle which alighted on the rock. The king saw the strategic value of the location and built a fort on the top of a high piercing rock and was named aluh amut, which in the Daylami dialect, derived from aluh (eagle) and amut (nest), i.e., "eagle's nest" as the eagle, instead of following the birds, had built its nest on that location. 

According to "Sar Guzasht-i Sayyidna", the term "Alamut" is aluh amut i.e., the eagle's nest, and an eagle had its nest there. 

Ibn Athir (d. 630/1234) relates another tradition in his "al-Kamil fil Tarikh" (Beirut, 1975, 10th vol., p. 110) that the eagle had taught and guided the king to this location, therefore, it was named ta'lim al 'aqaab (the teaching or guidance of an eagle), whose rendering into Daylami dialect is aluh amut.  The word aluh means "eagle" and amutis derived from amukhat means "teaching". ...

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Eagle's Nest

Magnificent castles and fortresses in remote, mountainous regions were built for refuge and defensive purposes by the Ismaili Muslims of Iran and Syria fleeing from persecution during the early middle ages. Often superior in construction to those built by the Crusaders, these castles withstood numerous offensives for over two centuries until the middle of the thirteenth century when most were captured and demolished by the Mongols.

Peter Willey describes the discoveries he made during the course of more than 20 expeditions to these Ismaili sites spanning the past forty years. The book is illustrated with photographs, maps and plans. As well as being a piece of original scholarship, it is also a readable personal account of the challenges encountered in expeditions to remote, inaccessible and often hazardous locations.

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Genesis of the word "Assassin"

Nevertheless, the most acceptable etymology of the word assassin is the simple one, it comes from Hassan (Hasan ibn al-Sabbah) and his followers, and so had it been for centuries.

The noise around the hashish version was invented in 1809, in Paris, by the French orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy, whom on July the 7th of that year, presented a lecture at the Academy of Inscriptions and Fine Letters (Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres) –part of the Institute of France- in which he retook the Marco Polo chronicle 'concerning drugs and this sect of murderers,' and associated it with the word. Curiously his theory had great success and apparently still has.

– Jacques Boudet, , Les mots de l’histoire, Ed. Larousse-Bordas, Paris, 1998.

Many scholars have argued, and demonstrated convincingly, that the attribution of the epithet 'hashish eaters' or 'hashish takers' is a misnomer derived from enemies of the Isma'ilis and was never used by Muslim chroniclers or sources. It was therefore used in a pejorative sense of 'enemies' or 'disreputable people.'

This sense of the term survived into modern times with the common Egyptian usage of the term Hashasheen in the 1930s to mean simply 'noisy or riotous.' It is unlikely that the austere Hasan-i Sabbah indulged personally in drug taking. ...

There is no mention of that drug [hashish] in connection with the Persian Assassins - especially in the library of Alamut ("the secret archives").

– Edward Burman, The Assassins - Holy Killers of Islam

 Hassan Ibn Al-Sabbah

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C R E E D

A L A M U T

 

www.alamut.com

 

Myths & Legends

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