By the time the Persians took charge, around 550 BCE, a lot of consolidation had already been done: in each region, earlier conquerors had drawn various local tribes and towns into single systems ruled by one monarch from a central capital, whether Elam, Ur, Nineveh, or Babylon. The Persians profited from the work (and bloodshed) of their predecessors.
Yet the Persian Empire stands out for several reasons. First, the Persians were the counter-Assyrians. They developed a completely opposite idea of how to rule a vast realm. Instead of uprooting whole nations, they resettled them. They set the Hebrews free from captivity and helped them get ba
ck to Canaan. The Persian emperors pursued a multicultural, many-people-under-one-big-tent strategy. They controlled their enormous realm by letting all the different constituent people live their own lives according to their own folkways and mores, under the rule of their own leaders, provided they paid their taxes and submitted to a few of the emperor’s mandates and demands. The Muslims later picked up on this idea, and it persisted through Ottoman times.
Second, the Persians saw communication as a key to unifying, and thus controlling, their realm. They promulgated a coherent set of tax laws and issued a single currency for their realm, currency being the medium of communication in business. They built a tremendous network of roads and studded it with hostels to make travel easy. They developed an efficient postal system, too, an early version of the Pony Express. That quote you sometimes see associated with the U.S. Postal Service, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift complet
ion of their appointed rounds,” comes from ancient Persia.
The Persians also employed a lot of translators. You couldn’t get away with saying, “But, officer, I didn’t know it was against the law; I don’t speak Persian.” Translators enabled the emperors to broadcast written descriptions of their splendor and greatness in various languages so that all their subjects could admire them. Darius (“the Great”), who brought the Persian Empire to one of its several peaks, had his life story carved into a rock at a place called Behistun. He had it inscribed in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, fifteen thousand characters devoted to
Darius’s deeds and conquests, detailing the rebels who had tried and failed to topple him and the punishments he had meted out to them, essentially communicating that you did not want to mess with this emperor: he’d cut off your nose, and worse. Nonetheless, citizens of the empire found Persian rule basically benign. The well-oiled imperial machinery kept the peace, which let ordinary folks get on with the business of raising families, growing crops, and making useful goods.
The part of Darius’s Behistun inscription written in Old Persian was decipherable from modern Persian, so after it was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, scholars were able to use it to unlock the other two languages and thus gain access to the cuneiform libraries o
f ancient Mesopotamia, libraries so extensive that we know more about daily life in this area three thousand years ago than we know about daily life in western Europe twelve hundred years ago.
Religion permeated the Persian world. It wasn’t the million-gods idea of Hinduism, nor was it anything like the Egyptian pantheon of magical creatures with half-human and half-animal shapes, nor was it like Greek paganism, which saw every little thing in nature as having its own god, a god who looked human and had human frailties. No, in the Persian universe, Zoroastrianism held pride of place. Zoroaster lived about a thousand years before Christ, perhaps earlier or perhaps later; no one really knows. He hailed from northern Iran, or maybe northern Afghanistan, or maybe somew
here east of that; no one really knows that, either. Zoroaster never claimed to be a prophet or channeler of divine energy, much less a divinity or deity. He considered himself a philosopher and seeker. But his followers considered him a holy man.
Zoroaster preached that the universe was divided between darkness and light, between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between life and death. The universe split into these opposing camps at the moment of creation, they had been locked in struggle ever since, and the contest would endure to the end of time.
People, said Zoroaster, contain both principles within themselves. They choose freely whether to go this way or that. By choosing good, people promote the forces of light and life. By choosing evil, they give strength to the forces of darkness and death. There is no predestination in the Zoroastrian universe. The outcome of the great contest is always in doubt, and not only is every human being free to make moral choices, but every moral choice affects that cosmic outcome.
Zoroaster saw the drama of the universe vested in two divinities—not one, not thousands, but two. Ahura Mazda embodied the principle of good, Ahriman the principle of evil. Fire served as an iconic representation of Ahura Mazda, which has led some to characterize Zoroastrians as fire worshippers, but what they worship is not fire per se, it’s Ahura Mazda. Zoroaster spoke of an afterlife but suggested that the good go there not as a reward for being good but as a consequence of having chosen that direction. You might say they lift themselves to heaven by the bootstraps of their choices. The
Persian Zoroastrians rejected religious st
atues, imagery, and icons, laying the basis for the hostility toward representation in religious art that reemerged forcefully in Islam.
Sometimes Zoroaster, or at least his followers, called Ahura Mazda “the Wise Lord” and spoke as if he was actually the creator of the entire universe and as if it was he who had divided all of creation into two opposing aspects a short time after the moment of creation. Thus, Zoroaster’s dualism inched toward monotheism, but it never quite arrived there. In the end, for the ancient Persian Zoroastrians, two deities with equal power inhabited the universe, and human beings were the rope in a tug of war between them.
A Zoroastrian priest was called a magus, the plural of which is
magi
: the three “wise men of the East” who, according to the Christian story, brought myrrh and frankincense to the infant Jesus in his stable were Zoroastrian priests. The word
magician
also derives from
magi.
These priests were thought by others (and sometimes themselves claimed) to possess miraculous powers.
In the late days of the empire, the Persians broke into the Mediterranean world and made a brief, big splash in Western world history. Persian emperor Darius sallied west to punish the Greeks. I say “punish,” not “invade” or “conquer,” because from the Persian point of view the so-called Persian Wars were not some seminal clash between two civilizations. The Persians saw the Greeks as the primitive inhabitants of some small cities on the far western edges of the civilized world, cities that implicitly belonged to the Persians, even though they were too far away to rule directly. Emperor Dari
us wanted the Greeks merely to confirm that they were his subjects by sending him a jar of water and a box of soil in symbolic tribute. The Greeks refused. Darius collected an army to go teach the Greeks a lesson they would never forget, but the very size of his army was as much a liability as an asset: How do you direct so many men at such a distance? How do you keep them supplied? Darius had ignored the first principle of military strategy: never fight a land war in Europe. In the end, it was the Greeks who taught the Persians an unforgettable lesson—a lesson that they quickly forgot, however,
for less than one generation later, Darius’s dimwitted son Xerxes decided to avenge his father by repeating and compounding his mistakes. Xerxes, too, came limping home, and that was the end of Persia’s European adventure.
It didn’t end there, however. About 150 years later, Alexander the Great took the battle the other way. We often hear of Alexander the Great conquering the world, but what he really conquered was Persia, which had already conquered “the world.”
With Alexander, the Mediterranean narrative broke forcefully in upon the Middle World one. Alexander dreamed of blending the two into one: of uniting Europe and Asia. He was planning to locate his capital at Babylon. Alexander cut deep and made a mark. He appears in many Persian myths and stories, which give him an outsize heroic quality, though not an altogether positive one (but not entirely villainous, either). A number of cities in the Muslim world are named after him. Alexandria is the obvious example, but a less obvious one is Kandahar—famous now because the Taliban con
sider it their capital. Kandahar was originally called “Iskandar,” which is how “Alexander” was pronounced in the east, but the “Is” dropped away, and “Kandar” softened into “Kandahar.”
But the cut Alexander inflicted closed up, the skin grew over, and the impact of his eleven years in Asia faded. One night in Babylon he suddenly died, whether from the flu, malaria, too much drink, or poison, no one knows. He had stationed generals in various parts of the territory he had conquered, and the moment he died, the toughest ones claimed whatever terrain they happened to hold, fashioning Hellenic kingdoms that endured for a few hundred years. For example, in the kingdom of Bactria (now northern Afghanistan) artists made Greek-looking sculptures; later, when Buddhist inf
luences seeped north from India, the two art styles mixed, resulting in what is now known as Greco-Buddhist art.
Eventually, however, those kingdoms weakened, Greek influence faded away, the Greek language fell out of use here, and the Persian substratum welled back to the surface. Another empire came to occupy much the same territory as that of the ancient Persians (though not as much of it). The new rulers called themselves Parthians, and they were formidable warriors. The Parthians battled Rome to a standstill, preventing their expansion east. Their armies were the first to include cataphracts—knights in full metal armor riding huge armored horses, much like the ones we associate with Europe’s feud
al ages. These Parthian knights were like mobile castles. But mobile castles are cumbersome, so the Parthians had another cavalry corps as well, lightly clad men riding naked horses. As a b
attle tactic, the light cavalry sometimes pretended to have been routed; in the hot middle of the fighting, they would suddenly turn tail and race away. The army they were fighting would break ranks and chase after them, losing all order as they clamored, “Get ’em, boys; they’re on the run; let’s finish ’em!” whereupon the Parthians would suddenly wheel around and fire into the disorganized rabble their opponents had become, annihilating them in minutes. This was later known as a Parthian shot, and when you hear the phrase “parting shot,” you may actually be hearing a corruption of the phrase “Parthian shot.”
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The Parthians were originally nomadic herders and hunters from the mountains northeast of Persia, but once they appropriated the frame of the old Persian Empire, they became, for all practical purposes, Persians. (Their name, Parthian, is probably a corruption or variation of “Persian.”) This empire endured for centuries without leaving much of a trace, because they took little interest in art and culture, and mobile castles get recycled for scrap metal once the warriors inside them die.
While they lasted, however, the Parthians protected and promoted trade, and caravans moved freely within their borders. The Parthian capital was known to the Greeks as Hecatompylos, “the hundred gated,” because so many roads converged there. In the bazaars of Parthian cities, you could probably hear gossip from all quarters of the empire and the societies it bordered: the Greco-Buddhist kingdoms in the east, the Hindus to the south of them, the Chinese of the further east, the waning Greek (Seleucid) kingdoms in the west, and the Armenians to their north. . . . The Parthians had little social i
ntercourse with the Romans, unless fighting counts. The civilizational blood that made the Parthians Persian didn’t get across that border, and so again the Mediterranean and Middle worlds diverged.
Around the time the Parthians began their rise, China was unified for the first time. In fact, the glory years of China’s seminal Han dynasty coincide almost exactly with the period of Parthian dominance. In the West, the Romans began their great expansion near the beginning of the Parthian era. Just as Rome was beating Carthage for the first time, the Parthians were taking Babylonia. Just as Julius Caesar was tearing up Gaul, Parthian power was peaking in the Middle World. In 53 BCE the Parthians crushed the Romans in a battle, capturing thirty-four thou
sand legionnaires and killing Crassus who, along with Caesar and Pompey, had been coruler of Rome. Thirty years later, the Parthians dealt Mark Antony a stinging defeat and established the Euphrates River as the border between the two empires. The Parthians were still expanding east when Christ was born. The spread of Christianity went little noticed by the Parthians, who favored Zoroastrianism in a lukewarm sort of way. When Christian missionaries began trickling east, the Parthians let them in; they didn’t care very much about religion, one way or another.
The Parthians always operated on a feudal system, with power distributed down through many layers of lords. Over time, imperial power leaked away into this ever more fragmented feudalism. In the third (Christian) century, a provincial rebel overthrew the last of the Parthians and founded the Sassanid dynasty, and this quickly expanded to occupy all the same territory as the Parthians and a little more besides. The Sassanids didn’t alter the direction of cultural change; they only organized the empire more effectively, erased the last traces of Hellenic influence, and complete
d the restoration of the Persian fabric. They built monumental sculptures, enormous buildings, and imposing cities. Zoroastrianism enjoyed a huge resurgence—fire and ashes, sunlight and darkness, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman: it was the state religion. Missionary monks had been roaming west from Afghanistan, teaching Buddhism, but the seeds they dropped would not grow in the soil of Zoroastrian Persia, so they turned east, which is why Buddhism spread to China but not Europe. Countless Persian tales and legends of later times go back to this Sassanid period. The greatest of the Sassanid kings, Khusrow
Anushervan, came to be remembered (by Persian speakers) as the archetype of the “just king,” conflated perhaps with Kay Khosrow, the third king of Iran’s mythical first dynasty, something like an Arthurian figure presiding over a Persian Camelot and served by noble warriors.
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