Before we get to the books you recommend, can you give us a brief overview of the period of existence of the Persian Achaemenid empire, its geographical extent, and what lies behind its power?
was the first of the three great Persian empires of antiquity. conventional dating is from 559 to 330 BC. C., that is, from the founding of the empire under Cyrus the Great, emerging from central Iran and quickly establishing a foothold in present-day Turkey and throughout the Middle East. and runs then to the reign of darius iii, who was defeated by alexander of macedonia. In its time, it was the largest empire the world had ever seen, based in central Iran in the ancient province of Fars. It stretched to the Libyan deserts in North Africa and down the Nile to Ethiopia. to the north, it extended to southern russia and, to the east, it reached present-day pakistan. So, it was an empire of colossal size and it really held itself together due to its remarkable stewardship. their communication processes were almost nil. it had great road systems and its satraps, its governors, were stationed throughout the empire, bringing a kind of unity and harmony.
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building an empire obviously involves conquest. the Achaemenid army was very strong. but, having conquered different regions, the Persians adopted a very different format for administering their empire than, say, the British or the Romans. the Romans and the British stamped their imperial authority on local areas. You can identify a Roman site whether you are in North Africa or Italy. the buildings are the same. the Persians never did that. they adopted a more laisser-faire attitude and, while tribute and taxes came in, did not interfere with local systems. in fact, they encouraged Persian satraps to work with local dynasties to keep pre-existing systems going. that does not mean that there were no rebellions and there were no uprisings. Egypt was always a difficult place to control, but overall it was a remarkably peaceful and functional empire.
Are there particular things we learn from studying the Achaemenid Empire, or particularly important reasons for studying it?
I think so. what is happening in universities and within academia right now, this idea of decolonizing the curriculum, is very important. for too long we have been involved in this myth of eurocentrism and it all relates to the persian empire. the grand narrative we have, of the birth of freedom over tyranny in ancient greece, with battles like marathon, thermopylae, and salamis, really needs to be tempered. we have to look at the Persian version to see that there was a very different rhetoric and that the Persian empire itself was not a thing of oppression, depravity and decadence. those are the buzzwords authors have used for millennia, emphasizing the contrast between the free west and the corrupt east. that is still happening in our newspapers every day. look at social networks; that image is still there.
We have to correct that error. we have to show that the Persians and other Orientals were sophisticated and cultured, sympathetic, thoughtful and scientific, everything that a harmful brand of Orientalism says they are not.
Tell us a little bit about the book you just finished writing.
It’s my first business book. the publishers wanted something about the Achaemenid empire. so it is simply called the Persians. what i have tried to do is put up front what i think is the most important way to see persia and that is through persian sources. When Greek sources are used, I have used those that have more prestige in Persia than others. For example, I’m pretty down for herodotus. I don’t think it’s a very reliable source for things like court society, although it’s pretty good on the big picture of persia. ctesias of cnidus, I believe, is a much more reliable source on court life and, more importantly, on the transmission of genuine Persian stories. I’m using Greek sources which I think have more meat on their bones than others, but I’m using as many Persian sources as I can for what I call “the Persian version” of the story.
“it was an empire of colossal size and it was really held together by its extraordinary stewardship”
I really hope it’s a book that stimulates the popular imagination, but also has a different vision, which is to stop being Eurofocused on ancient history. we’ve done enough of that. I’ve managed to write the marathon battle in a sentence and a half, for example. it was of very little importance to the Persians. xerxes’s invasion of athens has a chapter because i think the persians were more aware of that; they themselves historicized it. the persians is a very cool look at persia and i really hope it works. I have a feeling it will go quite well, certainly on the back of bbc 4’s ‘art of persia’. it had incredible uptake, so there’s clearly an appetite for things persian out there. one of my missions is to bring persia into mainstream popular discourse because it’s a fascinating area.
when will the book be published?
It’s scheduled for 2022, but it could come out earlier because I’m almost done.
let’s move on to the books you recommend: the first is the persian empire of j. meter. Cook. tell us why you have chosen this.
I like it a lot. it was published in 1980 and disappeared under what was happening in academia at the time. in 1978 edward said he published orientalism and this made a great contribution to the way we begin to see persian history. In 1980, at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, they started a series of seminars called the Achaemenid History Workshop, and their main focus was to see if the Persian Empire was really this empire of decline. was it in decline at the time of alexander? did alexander just deliver the deathblow to this imperial system that was in steep decline anyway? (the answer was ‘no’, by the way).
All of this grew out of Said’s conception of how the West had seen the East, and it was just a terrible accident of fate that Cook published his book on the eve of that revolution. The book received enormous criticism from members of this particular Achaemenid workshop, who became the giants of Persian studies, such as Helen Scancisi-Weerdenburg, Pierre Briant, and others. they saw it as the last vestige of an orientalist treatise. John Cook, who trained as a classicist, was 80 years old when he wrote the book. he used phrases like ‘in the east we can see’ or ‘the eastern mentality’ and so on, but never in a prejudicial or condescending way. but they pounced on him as a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim, for this new kind of thinking about the Persian empire.
I often wonder if they really read the cookbook correctly, because what I see in their work is a very balanced and careful use of fonts. cook was trained as a classicist and knows his classical sources very well but, at the same time, throughout the book he is doing things that no other ancient historian was doing at the time. he was using cuneiform evidence. he was looking at Persian art and Persian architecture. he had traveled to iran. it’s pretty clear he loved the place. this is not a disparaging orientalist diatribe of the kind that critics immediately took for it. he lost the praise of him almost completely. I don’t know how John Cook took it. I have never seen any rebuttal. I think he died shortly after, unfortunately.
“one of my missions is to bring persia into mainstream popular discourse because it is a fascinating area”
but when you look at it today, I think his Persian empire is still a very competent text, anticipating many of the questions that the Achaemenid workshop itself was set up to answer and explored over the next three decades. I come back to it again and again because it’s reliable, it’s factual, and you see a very good ancient historian grappling with questions that are still grappling today.
then, if there is a book that I would like to re-introduce, it is this one. I would love to republish and market it to get the kudos I think it deserves. I give my students sections to read because it is a very direct and clear narrative story, which is what I like. it’s very readable and beautifully written, too. it was at its best in the 1950s and has the beautiful rhetorical flair of that time. it’s an elegant read.
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I also feel close because Cook finished his degree at the University of Edinburgh, where I started mine. in fact, i reintroduced persian studies at the university of edinburgh and was always aware that i was in the shadow of cook. So, I have always defended it. it is a book that means a lot to me, but a book that is much smarter, much more relevant, and much more aware of genuine Persian sources than it is given credit for.
let’s move on to discover cyrus: a persian conqueror astride the ancient world by reza zaghamee.
This is a gigantic book, around 900 pages. I really like it because it’s full of the enthusiasm of this young Iranian scholar looking at his own story. this is very important to me because i think that in iran today, ancient history is very political, as you can imagine. what the Iranians do with their pre-Islamic past is a hot potato. therefore, within iran itself, there is very little history written by iranian scholars. but the Iranian diaspora is producing scholars and I think that’s important. goes back to my point about the westernization of Persian history. Why do we Europeans and Americans write this? we should be listening to Iranian voices. zaghamee’s book is enthusiastic, flowing, vibrant and lively. and yet, at the same time, he is a very careful scholar. He goes into real detail about every aspect of what he could put together as a biography of Cyrus.
Writing a biography of any Achaemenid monarch is next to impossible because most of the time we are dealing with Greco-Roman sources. what he does with those fonts is he takes them apart and tries to find the Persian version, or the Near Eastern version, that is behind them. the other thing that he does, which i think is really interesting, is that he is very aware of the reception of cyrus within persian culture throughout the millennium. so where can you find stories of cyrus the great in embryo in tales of say the shahnameh the epic of kings a medieval treatment of persian history look at those threads that maybe we as westerners wouldn’t see of immediate. , but they are very much alive in the Iranian tradition today.
It’s a big book and it’s not immediately useful for teaching, but it’s actually one that readers can sit with for a couple of months and really enjoy. it is finely written. and it’s packed with facts and packed with interesting ideas on a slant, which I really like.
You have mentioned that the historian has to rely more than he would like on Greek sources when writing about ancient persia. Was there a written culture that was simply lost, or did the Achaemenid empire produce no written works of literature or history?
We do have royal inscriptions from persia written in the old persian language, in cuneiform script, but these are generally very ahistorical. in reality, they are boasts by the Persian kings about the extent of the empire and what they have done, as well as lists of imperial titles.
We only have a narrative account. That is the rather false account of Darius the Great’s rise to power. but there was no conception of writing history as in the Greek form, as Herodotus. that is not to say that the Persians did not have a concept of history. they just remembered it differently. And I think the way they used, or activated their history, was through poetry, through song, what Parry and Lord identified as ‘the oral tradition’. So, I think that if we were to look for a Persian story, it would be more akin to a Homeric epic than a Herodotean-style ‘inquiry’. that was something that didn’t really appeal to Near Easterners in general. And, of course, the Iranians, with their origins in Indo-European/Eurasian society, used the same historical tradition as the Mongols or the Turks: essentially songs and poetry in oral transmission, that’s how they would remember it. that’s a big barrier for us. therefore, very often we have to rely on Greek sources for a narrative.
What we can do now, of course, is punctuate those narratives with genuine Persian stuff and it’s a concept that people were thinking about before the Achaemenid history workshop started. in the 1940s, for example, robert graves, the brilliant classicist, wrote a fantastic poem called “the persian version” in which he asks if you can really imagine that the greek story of the battle of marathon was how the persians thought it . he points out that it was not something that was played on stage in tragedies for them. it was just a skirmish and nothing more. that also encouraged me to take that stance in my book.
So, there are big root problems, but not insurmountable.
Cyrus was the founder of the Achaemenid empire. Where did he come from and what was it that prompted him to establish the empire? how did this enormous political power suddenly arise in the middle east?
is quite remarkable. I think he really deserves the title of ‘the great’. he must have been a man of genius. he came from an area in southwestern iran that is now fars province, around the shiraz area, towards the zagros mountains. there he was known as the king of anshan; Anshan was the name of this ancient province. at the time of his birth, around 600 BC. By c., the northern Iranian tribes, the Medes, were becoming increasingly aggressive towards their southern neighbors in Persia and almost established a protectorate in Persia, ruled by high-ranking Medes. So, there was a lot of hostility in the south, in the Persian tribes, with the Medes. It was Cyrus who first brought together the different confederations of the Persians—the Persians were a very tribal society. they were an equestrian society. in my book I call the leaders of these tribes not ‘chiefs’ but ‘khans’, which is Eurasian and I think is the right word for them; I want the reader to think of the Persians as part of the Eurasian cultural world. Cyrus united these tribes under his banner and marched north with them. he defeated the khanate of the Medes. And with that, Cyrus inherited the nomadic empire of the Medes, which stretched around the Caspian Sea and also in northern Turkey: such large swaths of land. From there it was unstoppable. He marched over all of Anatolia to the coast, killed King Croesus, and captured Sardis, the richest city in the known world.
then, returning to persia, he decided to try it in babylon, which was the largest metropolis in the world at the time, but in great trouble under its later kings, who had actually let the city go. he conquered babylon very easily. In fact, Babylon opened its gates to Cyrus, after being warned of the damage he could cause: he completely destroyed the city of Opis, some 50 miles north of Babylon. but the interesting thing about cyrus is that, very cleverly, in a very modern way, he used propaganda to support the conquest of babylon, calling it liberation from the oppression of its very weak rulers. and he used the Babylonian priests to write this document, which we call ‘the cylinder of Cyrus’, now in the British museum. he presented this idea that he had been blessed by the gods of babylon, that the god marduk had chosen cyrus as his champion. cyrus was really good at spinning!
the wording on the cylinder of cyrus is found in the prophecies of isaiah, in the hebrew bible, where cyrus is the champion of yhwh, the jewish god and went down in history for freeing the jews from their Babylonian bondage. cyrus interpreted very carefully to different audiences and i think the propaganda is one of the real successes of the persian empire. he was built on this idea of liberation, although in reality it was not. i always think of george bush when he first entered iraq in the first gulf war. he called it ‘operation iraqi freedom’. i think we can call cyrus’s babylon campaign ‘operation babylonian freedom’ in the same way.
what was the root of the force of cyrus? Did it develop particularly novel military tactics or technology, or was there a particular commodity behind the empire’s economic strength?
didn’t really have any new tactics or introduce any new weapons. what he did have was incredible cavalry. the Persians had always been amazing horsemen. In the inscription on the tomb of Darius the Great it says: “I am as great an archer as I am a spearman; I am as good a spearman as I am a horseman; I am a great rider. It is those three things that distinguish the Persians. You may have heard of the so-called “Parthian shot”, for example, in which a horseman could turn 90 degrees and shoot arrows behind him to surround his enemies. It was cavalry tactics more than anything else that earned the Persians their victories.
Her next book is The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period by Amélie Kuhrt.
This is another great doorstop of a book, with over 1000 pages. it was originally published in two hardcover volumes and went into paperback a few years later. it is the most valuable teaching tool for me. I teach several courses on ancient persia and this is an amazing compendium of all kinds of sources on the persian empire. uses ancient Persian inscriptions, Babylonian texts, Aramaic texts, Hebrew texts, Greek and Latin texts. they are all there translated and with kuhrt’s very helpful, very competent and very intelligent comments as well. she is one of the big names in ancient near eastern studies and i admire her a lot. Before the Persian empire, she had already published a two-volume history of the ancient near east, which is a gigantic undertaking, from 3000 B.C. c. until 300 BC she knows what she’s doing and what she was able to do in the sourcebook is bring together the richness and variety of Persian sources.
In some respects, the Persian empire is still just the tip of the iceberg, because what you can’t do in that reference book is put together all the visual evidence, even though there is some visual material there. the visual material, of course, is even richer than the textual material. she’s not really able to do much of the archaeology, or much of the iconography, but it’s a starting point. she tries it the texts themselves are all there, with modern translations and updated commentary. It is the most useful tool for anyone who wants to delve into the source materials for the study of Persia.
let’s move on to the palace of darius at susa: the great royal residence of achaemenid persia by jean perrot.
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This is a very beautiful book. it is a large-scale book, translated from the original French. It was funded by the Institute for Iranian Studies. how they managed to finance it, I don’t know, because it originally sold for £30 and is a rich, colourful, image-filled, coffee-table book.
First of all, it has the visual appeal, which I love. But what’s really magnificent is that it details the archaeology, art, and architecture of a single site, the royal city of Susa. Susa was one of the major palace centers of the Achaemenid Empire and is also one of the oldest cities in the world, dating back to at least 4000 BC. this book gives a wonderful description, first of all, of the archaeological site and the layers and layers of civilization there. then the author focuses on the palace itself. we can see the layout of the palace, the wonderful apadana, or throne room, and the council and harem. then there is the wonderful art that has survived from susa, most particularly the colorful brick compositions showing immortals or royal guards in their costumes and magnificent beasts: bulls, lions, etc.
“there are big root problems, but not insurmountable”
is a magnificent visual compendium of the Persian empire. it really makes you visually think of the persian world and for me right now it’s an important book because the biblical book of esther is set in the city of susa. The book I am about to write next is a commentary on Esther’s book, but looking at Esther from a Persian perspective. There is a great deal of scholarship on Esther in the field of Biblical studies, but very few of them have any real understanding of Persian history or Persian culture. the book of esther itself is a product of the fourth century bce. it was written by someone who knew a great deal about the workings of the Persian court. my comment will essentially bring in all the Persian material, just to show how au fait the author of ester is with it.
but I want to go one step further and do what is called an ‘iconographic exegesis’. An idea that has become very popular in Germany and Switzerland over the last decade is that literature only takes us so far, but that there is also a wonderful world of iconography. a biblical scholar named othmar keel in the 1970s and 1980s made this amazing commentary on the book of psalms and the song of songs using ancient near eastern iconography. I think esther, which is a very visual book, lends itself to the same kind of process, of trying to look at it through as many visual sources as possible. for example, when i talk about the beauty of esther, described in chapter 2 of the book, i will draw on images of persian women and that sort of thing.
This book really gives me a wonderful visualization, a way of thinking about the colorful world of the Persian court in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. c.
And which Dario built Susa?
originally it was the work of dario i, that’s dario el grande. probably born in susa and from that area. we know that his mother’s name was irdabama and that is definitely an elamite or susa name. the likelihood that he was born there is really emphasized by the fact that he glorifies the city. he built these wonderful palaces and made a great move in building the city. we have a beautiful inscription from susa dating to the reign of darius, in which he speaks of the building of the palace itself and that it was a labor of love. he talks about commissioning different people from different parts of the empire to come and work in the palace: that the people of egypt brought gold and did the gold work and the ivory work; that the Babylonians were famous for their bricks and they came and did brick building; that the assyrians transported the wood from lebanon. there’s all this kind of rhetoric.
is throwing around this idea that the whole empire is for your use. and uses the wealth of the empire to build a superstructure in Susa for himself, as a monument to the belief that the empire works in harmony and is better together, so to speak.
You mentioned that modern Iran has a complicated relationship with its pre-Islamic past. is it easy to do archeology in iran?
For the last 40 years, the British really haven’t had much of a presence in Iran when it comes to archaeology. I am the director of the ancient iran project for the british institute for persian studies (bips), and although we often receive funding requests from academics who wish to work in iran, very, very few of them obtain visas or permits to dig. other countries are much more successful. right now, for example in persepolis, italians are working with iranian archaeologists on that amazing site.
There is still a lot of archaeological work being done inside Iran, but not much by the British and Americans. It is a great shame, but it is a product of the politics of the moment.
finally we have the creation of gore vidal, which is a novel. tell us why you have chosen it.
is set around 450 BC. It tells the story of a man, a courtier in Persia, the grandson of the Zoroastrian prophet, who is the best friend of Xerxes. Gore Vidal was one of the great historical novelists. that of him Julian of him is a masterpiece in its evocation of antiquity. what i found with the creation was that the court of persia comes to life with such vibrancy and color, but also with such practicality. Vidal has clearly read the historical sources. he must have looked at art and architecture.
The story is very carefully crafted. the realia, the signs of everyday life, are repeated very well. but the biggest questions, the big questions of Persian history, are also wonderfully handled. He’s also aware of the things we talked about earlier, that the Persians didn’t craft their history in the same way that we do in the West. he indulges in that, delights in that, of telling stories within stories. is a truly fantastic book in its evocation of Persian life.
The hero travels to India and China as well, which is very doable. We know that the Iranians had very strong links with India in this period and it is also very likely that they had contacts, through intermediaries, with China. It is a sweeping epic story. The hero not only meets Darius and Xerxes, but he also meets Buddha and Confucius. it’s a philosophical adventure story, so to speak.
Buddha and Confucius were Xerxes’ contemporaries?
very feasible. the buddha (siddhārtha gautama) lived in india sometime between the 5th and 4th centuries bce. c.; Confucius was absolutely contemporary with the Achaemenid kings.
And is the hero an identifiable historical figure? Or is it an invention of Gore Vidal around which real historical events take place?
vidal has this interesting story, which is the warp, and then the plot is this really fascinating insight that he has about the fact that these great religious thoughts were happening at the same time in the middle east and the far east. so Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Confucianism flourished, or should I say sprouted, at the same time. so he’s putting together this idea that the ancient world was very interconnected, not just through trade routes or warfare, but also in ways of thinking and theology. it’s a bit ahistorical, as Zoroaster probably circulated his teachings around 1000 B.C. c., not in 450 a. c., that’s just a little push it gives to ahistoricity. but otherwise, it’s this wonderful adventure story with a kind of theological mesh that’s woven together as well. It’s a very good read.
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