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I may have mentioned this before but I really think you would enjoy Gore Vidal’s novel “Creation”. It takes place at around the time your novel does. It’s about a Persian prince who’s a descendant of Zoroaster and he’s fluent in Greek and has spent years working as an ambassador in Lydia. Because he’s a member of the hereditary priesthood, there is a really vivid scene discussing using saoma/haoma in one of the rites he’s presiding over and things go haywire. While in Halicarnasus or Athens, he meets Herodotus who he calls a fraud because of his depictions of the Persians. His mother is a Bactrian witch (I think). The character is given a commission to travel on behalf of the Persian King to China, and he passes through India, the steppes of Central Asia and makes it all the way to China at the time of the Five Kingdoms. It’s called “Creation” because the main character is also a mystic who seeks enlightenment and wants to know what other cultures believe is the origin of all things on earth, so he discusses the ideas of the pre-Socratics, the Persians, the Magi, and then meets the founders of Jainism, Buddhism, and in China he meets Lao Tzu and Confucius. It’s literally mind-blowing. I read it 2020 and finished in two sittings because I couldn’t stop reading it.

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