The Persian empire: everything you wanted to know

Hungry for Seconds? Well, history's greatest dishes from History Hector is back the series too. To join us as we serve up stories of some remarkable delicacies from the past, search "History's greatest dishes" and follow the feed wherever you get your podcasts. [Music] Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's Best Selling History Magazine. [Music] I'm Ellie Corthorn. Today's episode is the latest in our everything you wanted to know series, where expert historians respond to popular online search queries and questions that you've submitted via our social media channels. This time, the topic is the Persian Empire. Our expert is Lloyd Lewellen Jones and putting your questions to him on everything from Persian gods to their wars with the Greeks was BBC History Magazine editor Robert R. So today, in the latest of our everything you wanted to know podcasts, we're going to be discussing the ancient Persian Empire. And joining us to explore this topic is Lloyd Lewellen Jones, who is professor in ancient history at the University of Cardiff, an expert in the Persian Empire. And in fact, he's currently working on a new history of that empire, which is called Persians, the Age of the Great Kings, and it's due to be published next spring. So Lloyd, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Thank you very much. I'm doing pretty well given the strange, strange times that we're living through, but doing okay. So thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. Fantastic. Thank you. And so now, as always, the questions for these episodes have come from a combination of popular search queries and also some you've sent in on social media. We had a really, really good response to this topic. Excellent. Great. Great. Yep. Thanks for all your questions. Before we begin, Lloyd, a very quick question, first of all, what is the best name for this empire? Because I've seen it called the Achaemenid, Persian, Iranian. All of these are valid. What I always say to my students is once you choose one way of describing it, stick to it. So yes, Persian Empire is okay. The first Persian Empire, some people call it the Achaemenid Empire, the first Iranian Empire, all of these things are fine. For today, let's call it the Persian Empire. So let's kick off with a fairly straightforward internet search query, which was, where was the Persian Empire? Okay. So the heart of the empire was in the Persian heartland itself, which today is in the province of Fas, which is in southwest Iran. So it's the area around the modern city of Shiraz. That's the absolute hub of the empire itself, but within a generation, really, the empire began to expand under Cyrus the Great. I'm sure we'll speak more about him later on. And by the time of its fall, that is, this conquest by Alexander of Macedon, it stretched from southwest Iran right the way out to the west to northern Greece across the deserts of North Africa, in Libya, right the way down the Nile into Ethiopia, to the north, it stretched up to southern Russia, to the east, it went all the way over to Pakistan and to northern India as well. So it was an empire of remarkable size. I mean, really quite something spectacular. The first, what we could call for antiquity, the first global empire, really, by far the biggest empire the world had ever seen at that time. So, I mean, does it compare in scale to things like the Roman Empire, Alexander the Great's Empire? How does it compare to those? Yes, it compares well to Rome, I suppose, if the axis for Rome is around Rome itself, then I suppose it's eastern border in the Sasanian period, in the second century, would be about sort of beyond Damascus to the Euphrates. So I suppose in terms of territory, it's the same size as the Roman Empire, but of course the trajectory is very different running from the center of Iran, east and west, of course, and that's important thing to remember. Going back to the origins of the empire, lots of people online have searched for the question who was the founder of the Persian Empire? Okay, fine. I mean, the ancestry of the Persians is really fascinating because they were a nomadic people who came from Eurasia originally from the steppes, and they moved into the Iranian plateau, as we now call it, around about 1000 BCE, and they settled there. Already there were indigenous Iranian peoples who were living there already, so the Ilamites, for instance, were a very long and established civilization down in the southwest of Iran, but these nomadic people brought very different kind of traditions and lifestyles and cultures with them. They were very much a kind of horse mentality, a horse culture from the steppes, and as they settled into the Iranian plateau, they split into different tribes, they were always tribal. So in the north, for instance, I'm sure people will heard of the Meeds, so they were kind of like the first cousins of the Persians who settled down in the south. So in a way, there was an attempt by the Meeds, first of all, to establish an empire before the Persians even started. The Meeds in a way kind of got a head start in empire building, situated in the north of Iran. They made alliances, for instance, with the Assyrians and later on with the Babylonians, and so they were kind of like a growing power in the north of Iran. The south of Iran, where the Persian tribes were based, really come into play around about 600 BC, and we find in an area called Anshan, which is located towards the west of southwest Persia. There we see a family growing, a dynastic lineage around a man called Tishpish. In the Greek sources, he's known as Tyspis. He starts what we call the Tyspid dynasty. There are three or four of these kings who are making very interesting sort of headways in gathering together alliances of different Persian tribes, bringing them under kind of one banner. And the person really who is the most successful at doing that, is one of these Tyspid kings. And of course, the Persians knew him as Kurush. We know him as Cyrus. Cyrus, the second, or Cyrus, the greatest. He's come down, preserved in Persian and classical memory. And it's really his remarkable kind of foresight in bringing together these very disparate Persian tribes under his one banner and unifying them in a way that nobody really had ever attempted to do before. And when he did that, he was able to march them north and actually defeat the growing power of the Meeds. Another group of tribal alliances, really, who were threatening the kind of autonomy of the Persians in the South. And from there on in, the rest is history. You know, Cyrus doesn't stop at just conquering these northern tribes in Iran. He immediately understands that the tribal median empire, if we can call it that, or re-tributory areas, stretched out in North Mesopotamia and into Anatolia as well. So all of these lands fell to Cyrus in one fell swoop. And he realized, really, it was only one hopskip in a jump over to the coast of Asia Minor, to the great Greek-speaking cities of Ionia. And of course, he led his men there and conquered Sardis, which was probably the wealthier city in the known world at the time. That fell to him quite easily. And as Cyrus returned to his Iranian heartlands in the South, he swung down south in Mesopotamia and conquered the Babylonian cities too, ending, of course, with Babylon itself. So the empire really came from an amazing kind of opportunistic mindset of Cyrus. I don't think he was anything he ever started out thinking. You know, I think he wanted to unite his tribes and give some strength to the Persians. But what happened within a course of his lifetime was he begins laying down the blueprint of a very successful empire. He was a man of real genius and real vision, but also a man who understood how to play opportunity to his best advantage. Now, we had a question on Instagram from Owen Cross and Owen wanted to know, what made the Persian Empire so successful? That's a good question Owen. It was a successful empire. And as I say, the blueprint is written down with Cyrus. I think part of it is the fact that the Persians didn't barge in and change running or operating institutions if they didn't need changing. So while they often install satiraps, that is, we could call them governors or vice-rise, in different parts of the empire, they also worked very closely with local dynasts, local administrators, local bigwigs too. And we see that there is a real continuity of tradition that is maintained by the Persian overlords, which is something that we don't see in Rome, for instance. Rome will put in their own men in different parts of the empire and Romanize the whole process. The Persians never do that. So they don't force a Persian language on captive peoples. They don't impose any religious identity on captive peoples. What the Persians are interested in is allowing their empire to run smoothly with satirats integrating with locals, establishing an upholding traditions that kept going for generations, and as long as the tribute, the taxation kept pouring in to the central administration in Iran, then the Persian great kings were quite happy with that. But they had no concept of stamping Persian nests onto conquered peoples. So as many of your listeners will be aware, if they've travelled widely around the remains of the Roman Empire, whether they're in central Italy, or northern Britain, or in Syria, you can spot a Roman town at a Roman city, a mile off, because it will always have the same things. It will always have a forum, a basilica, a theatre, an arena. These are the hallmarks. You stamp Rome on its empire. The Persians never attempted anything like that. They didn't see the necessity of that at all. They believed in something which is very modern, really, as a concept. And that is multiculturalism. Persian old Persian texts even have a word that can be translated as integrated peoples multiculturalism. It was a very refreshing way of thinking about empire. I still think I'm no fan of empire at all. But if empire was to be imposed, then I would rather have the Persian version than anything else. We had a few questions actually about this multicultural makeup of the Persian Empire, and there was an interesting one from Daniel O'Donnell, who may or may not be the Irish singer on Facebook. Daniel wrote in to say, "Are there any instances or examples that occurred throughout the lifetime of the empire that involved race relations, ethnic tensions, or conflicts that stem from perceived institutional racism towards different minority groups within the empire?" So I suppose he's saying, yes, it's a multicultural empire, but were there times when the dominant Persians did mistreat ethnic groups within him? Yes, interesting question, very good question. I'm not sure if I'm totally comfortable with terms such as racism, for instance, in antiquity, okay? It's another ball game. I don't think the Persians, to be fair to them like the Romans, really saw race as an issue. Ethnicity and a nationhood, I think they do see as an issue. No, by and large, the building of the empire and the maintenance of that empire was by and large peaceful, but let's not be just run the bush here, okay? A lot has been said about this kind of Pax Persica, you know, the Persian peace in which they established and maintained their empire, but of course you do not create an empire simply by going around holding hands and being friends with everybody, okay? When Cyrus started his campaigns to the dying days of the empire, warfare was endemic, the suppression of revolts could be vicious and bloody, and that's the reality of running any empire. So in this respect, the Persians were no different. It's just that they tried to maintain an equilibrium sense of balance and a sense of peace for longer than others, I suppose, but there were moments when that all collapsed around them. So in, for instance, Egypt was of course a very important aspect of the empire for the Persians because, of course, it was such a wealthy area, had connections to the Mediterranean, to the gold reserves and the turquoise reserves in Ethiopia, and yet the Egyptians were not a particularly easy people to rule, and several times during the Persian occupation, there were serious apparitions, and of course, it came to the point where Egypt actually broke away from the empire and regained its independence for some 60 years before it was reconquered and brought back in as well, and that was done with dreadful scenes of bloody violence and insurrection and horrific repercussions for the Egyptians as well, especially under Attyxerxes III, who was known even to the Greek historians as being somewhat of a tyrant. Likewise, if cities or states rebelled against the Persians, the payback would be huge, for instance, in the Levant, in the cities of Phoenicia, the city of Siden rebelled against the Persians, against Attyxerxes III, and his response to that was complete destruction of the city. The enslavement of its population and the deportation of any others who weren't enslaved, and this is a policy, of course, deportation, removing people from one, their homestead to another part of the empire, which had been carried out, for instance, by the Assyrians, by the Babylonians, so in that respect, the Persians were following and Near East and President. So there is nothing unusual in a way about the use of force for the acquiring and maintenance of the empire, but it's the way in which the Persians looked towards peace as a norm, which is a little bit out of kilter with other ancient civilizations. And so I suppose developing on this theme, we had Jessica Roberts on Facebook wrote in to say, "What distinguished the Persian Empire from other empires at this time, and how did people who became part of the empire view the Persians?" Yes, so in every empire-building event, there are going to be different takes on the good or the bad of that. I've recently been watching Jerry Mimp-Haxman's 4-part BBC series on the British Empire. And there, one of the questions he constantly asks, various members of different communities he encounters in India and in Africa and Australia, was there any good to come out of the British Empire? And quite surprisingly, many of them say an idea to the idea that yes, there was. While others, of course, are absolutely against it. And I think it wouldn't have been any different if you'd ask citizens of subjects under the Persian King as the same kind of question. So there were always pockets of resistance and always pockets that would not accept the hegemony of the Great King. While others readily gave their support to the Great King, we might call them collaborators. If we were sitting on the other side, a really good example of this, for instance, occurs at the Conquest of Egypt by Cambyses when one of the chief naval officers, who was also served the Pharaoh as an administrator and a priest, a man called Watchhor Rosnet, he readily threw in his lot with Cambyses and actually gave Cambyses the kind of intelligence information that he needed to break his way into Egypt. And of course, consequently, he benefited from that. He was still found around in the reign of Darius the Great, his Cambyses successor, still in positions of high authority and some 100 years after Watchhor Rosnet's death. His statue was re-stored and cleaned and given a primary position in a temple, biotics, oxy to third. So the memory of this Egyptian helper, a collaborator from the other side, lasted long in the Persian memory. So there were always going to be dissenters and there were always going to be supporters. Now, you've mentioned a few candidates for this already I expect, but we had a question on Instagram from Molly the historian and she wanted to know who is the most famous Persian. Oh, that's really hard. That's really hard. I guess if you were to ask this question on the streets of Iran today, the answer would be Cyrus, kurush. There's a huge, huge sort of popularity drive being built up around a rather cult figure of Cyrus, a great amongst the young in Iran today. If you were to ask an ancient Greek, who's the most famous Persian, they would have said Xerxes, without any doubt whatsoever, because Xerxes was the ultimate oriental despot for them. Where do I sit on all of this? Well, they've all got their pros and their cons, you know. I guess I have, although I don't like him as an individual, I do admire the work of Darius, the first Darius, the great, in the fact that he was this remarkable bureaucrat who gave cogency to the idea of empire by building roads, increasing the communication system, leveeing taxes correctly, drawing up laws, the King's laws, the data, which the Persians are so proud of. So I think Darius, the first, took the administration and the kind of idea of the empire to another level. But without Cyrus, of course, there wouldn't have been an eye prior to start with. And I do have a soft spot for Xerxes. In my new book Persians, I completely rewriters it were, the Persian Wars. And I tried to look at the Persian Wars from the perspective of Xerxes. And what was he aiming to do? And of course, he's been written out of history by Herodida, as this kind of megalomaniac, this man-child, really. But if you look at him from the Persian version, you see a very different sort of Xerxes arising. I wouldn't want to say who was the most famous Persian beyond that, but let's say that they're the three big contenders. OK, well, actually, you've just alluded to a subject that a lot of people have been asking about. And that is about the Persian Wars, the Greco-Persian Wars, and the Persian interaction with the Greeks, which I suppose for Europe, a lot of people in Europe is probably perhaps how they know them best, really, through the Greek angle. Yes. It's not just an angle, though, is it? It's absolute myth-making. That's been going on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. I read recently a new volume on Spartans, and there is the old myth again of this kind of European supremacy and the positive barbarian ism of the Persians. They have been marginalized as military power, as an economic success. All of these things, they've been forced to give way to this myth-making machine, which has been in operation since the time of Herodotus. And of course, because in the West we have thrown in our lot with the classical world, we see ourselves as the heirs of classical civilization, then we really haven't given the Persians the position that they weren't in ancient history and ancient studies. And that seems bizarre to me, because without really understanding the power of the Persians, then we are really failing to do justice to our understanding of the ancient world on mass. Without them, we fail to really understand what Greece was all about. You know, much of what Greece did in the latter part of the fifth century, in the fourth century, in terms of its own structural identities, what it means to be Greek, were constructed only in opposition to the Persians. But to write the Persians out of that equation is a foolhardy and a dangerous thing to do. So my work and a work of many of my colleagues in accumulated studies over the last 20, 30 years has to give Persia its place in history again, it's right for place. I always talk about the Persian version that we should be looking always for the Persian take on things, looking at the Persian sources written in Old Persian Kineiform language, looking at the material culture that the Persians were creating, the archaeology of Persia to see, to try, to liquidize, temper, the hostile and certainly hyperbolic vision of European, Western history that's being created as a legacy of the Greeks. Well, I think I might know your answer to the first question we had in this topic, which I'll read it out anyway, we had Robert Kenz on Facebook, and his question was, were the Persians really the bad guys, or is that ancient Greek propaganda? You're absolutely right, it's fully propaganda. I mean, it's not entirely propaganda, because the Greeks actually had a strange admiration for the Persians as well, and that does come through even in the works of Herodotus, but more so in the fact that Margaret Miller's wonderful book Athens and Persia has proved to us how fashionable, persica, Persian things were in the Greek world, and especially in Athens, so Persian clothes, Persian crockery, Persian slaves, it was a kind of a must have thing, but really it worked on the level if you make the analogy, I suppose, to the kind of Indian things that were coming into Britain during the 1890s, 1900, this kind of colonial sense of dressing the part, which still goes on today, of course. So there was this kind of sneaky admiration for the Persians, but by and large, what we have in the Greek historiography, certainly in history writing, but also in tragedies and comedies, and even in things like the Greek novel is by and large, either a fantastical, oriental spectacle of decadence, or we have out and out xenophobia and bigotry about the Persians. So yes, I mean, we can never touch our Greek sources without understanding that there's a heavy bias and a very heavy agenda going on. So we had another question on this topic from Luke Divini or Divini on Facebook, and his question was, what was the Persian view of the Battle of Marathon? Did they think it was a big deal? And I suppose within that question is the idea, you know, the Greco-Persian Wars or the Persian Wars mattered hugely to the Greeks. Did they matter as much to the Persians? No, no, absolutely not. They really didn't. No, you know, the Persians are not really going to record defeat in their inscriptions anyway. So we're not going to expect to see the lamentations about, you know, coming home with your legs between your legs any more than you find in Roman sources or Egyptian sources for that matter. It doesn't work like that, but it would be very wrong to think that the Persians thought so highly of these, what are, after all, border skirmishes? Marathon in particular is nothing more than a border skirmish. And I think if Darius had hung around long enough, he probably could have taken Greece then and then, but Darius wanted to move his men away from Greece because he had far bigger fresh to fry, and that was India. He needed to capture India. That's what he wanted to do is, and so he took his men away from Greece. Without the sort of thought in the side of Greece at that point, India could have fallen completely at the whole. It's subcontinent possibly to Persian control, but the forces were dissipated. Now, when it comes to the campaigns of Xerxes, there is something of a different agenda, of course, because here we do have a king who's leading his armies into war, as was typical for a king in Monarchs, that's what they were supposed to do anyway. So while he failed to cat, while Xerxes failed to capture the whole of Greece, if you think about the achievement that he had, they were quite remarkable. So, first of all, of course, we must acknowledge that not all Greek city-states were anti-Persian, and many of them marched at the side of Xerxes. When he gets to Thermopylai, its mission accomplished, he kills the Spartan king. Now, for a king to kill a king, that's ideal. That's what it's all about. He marches on Athens and burns it to the ground, mission accomplished. So then it goes wrong in the sea battles, and one land battle afterwards, and Xerxes decides to go home, but he decides to leave mainly because, again, there's a bigger problem in the empire, and that's a revolt in Babylon. It's always a fractured city, and so Xerxes needs to put more of his attention there. But I don't think it was ever the kind of loss that the Greeks wanted it to be. So, for instance, Eskolas, in his Great Play Persians, Persia, 472 BCE, of course, has Xerxes returning to Caesar in rags, pale and wane and mourning for his losses, presented as the most heubristic of kings. I don't think that ever happened. And I think we can maybe draw our attention back to a very famous passage in Herodotus, where Darius, the great supposedly, instructed one of his table servants that he was to whisper in Darius' ear every night before dinner, Sire, remember the Athenians. Now, it's really only an Athenian or an Athenian lover who could possibly have written that, because I don't think Athens was on Darius or Xerxes' minds very often at all. And sticking to this subject, we had a question from Udice's Teneo on Facebook, and he wrote in, "Why were the Greeks much better soldiers by comparison than the Persians?" And I suppose we should ask question whether that was true, and maybe he's thinking something like the Mopoli where famously, or apparently there were far fewer Greeks soldiers, but I don't know how true this is. I do not think they were greater soldiers than the Persians. You know, where's the evidence for a Greek empire of the size of the Persians? Let's not diminish the Persian military force under Cyrus, under Darius, and Darius. He's right the way through up until Darius III. The Persians had their own trained military. At the center, the core of their army, the mortals, the bodyguards of the Great Kings, but then they used mercenary troops from across their own empire, including, of course, many Greeks fighting in a Greek style. So we can't say that there's an easy answer to this. That there was a Persian style of fighting or Persian army. arms, and then greek arms. The armies of the ancient world were a mishmash, a melange of different types of people, different types of weapons and different types of style. I think that Alexander of Macedon's one-appsmanship on Persia in terms of the military did count, however, of course it's not necessarily a Greek way of fighting, but Alexander's Macedonian serrissers, I think, did have a huge kind of surprise element for the Persian troops when they first met at Isis, for instance. But by the time Gaugamela was fought, Darius had also trained up his soldiers in the use of the serrisser, too. So I wouldn't feel comfortable in ever saying that the Greeks had superior battle forces or superior ways of fighting. I don't think that's the way it worked in antiquity. And one thing I want to stress about the bigger picture of how Persia is presented from Greece right the way to modern historiography is this whole idea of a rise and fall scenario. Already by Plato's time, Plato was talking about other glory days when Xerxes and Darius were there, and then there was this slided to depravity, harry and intrigues, and orgyastic kings, where, of course, they lost control because the Persians no longer were men. Well, this kind of thing is still being dropped out in popular history writings even today. There was no decline in the Persian Empire back in the 1980s when the accumulated history workshop was first founded in Holland. And this was a consortium of people working on Persian history to see if we couldn't disentangle it from the classical historiography. The question that was asked in the 1980s was, "Okay, was Persia really in this state of decline when Alexander came in?" Because the rhetoric was often about, you know, Persia was so corrupt, so desperate at this point that Alexander almost put it out of its misery, you know, it was death blow. Now we know from really dealing with indigenous sources from Iran, from different parts of the empire, including from bacteria, that is modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Alexander went after the destruction of Persepolis. Now we know that the empire was in a very fine state of being. And that Alexander inherited empire, which was strong and vibrant and working in terms of the economy, in terms of communications. And we know that because Alexander didn't change a thing. Everything that was was up and running under the rise of the third, he continued. So it's not a slow demise of a weak decadent civilization that Alexander encounters, that we encounter here. I think if anything, we should think of Alexander's invasion of Persia as a kind of mugging and a kind of quick cutthroat death, which was unexpected and not warranted. So the question can never really be why did the Persian Empire fall? I think for better question, therefore, as some of your listeners have already asked, why did it last so long? Now what was it to both the Persian Empire that made it so successful? Certainly there's no rise and force in our area to play out here. Still to come on the history extra podcast. Some of the Greek sources, which are quite reliable here, Caticia and others, for instance, who lived at the Persian court. Stay, for instance, that when the Persian king dined, he ate separately to the rest of his court behind a daffinous curtain, and then would perhaps call in favoured courtiers to share a cup of wine with him. We've talked a lot about the Greek view of the Persians, but we had a nice question came in from Nessa Kennedy on Facebook. And she asked, "How did the Persians view other cultures such as the Greeks or the Egyptians?" And she followed that by saying, "What ordinary people hostile to those countries, or they simply viewed as military rivals?" That's a great question. I think by and large, the Persians were truly fascinated by other peoples and truly warmed to them. And how do we know this? Well, you know, we have no diaries or no letters that tell us this, but we can see it actually in the monumental art and architecture of places like Persepolis and Susa, where we have a really curious blend of architectural styles. So, for instance, we will have Syrian and Assyrian winged bulls next to Egyptian style doorways. What the Persians did really was, when they went to these different parts of the world that they conquered, they saw things which they responded to that they liked, and they bring elements of this back, and they molded it to their own uses. And somehow they harmoniously put together these disparate architectural and artistic styles to create something which is really harmoniously and identifiably a humanit Persian as well. We also see Persepolis, for instance, on the staircase of the East Portico of the Appadana, the Great Throne Hall, these amazing carved scenes of tribute bearers bringing their gifts to the king, and they come from all parts of the empire. Starting with media and Elon, we have peoples from Cappadocia, from Greece, from Egypt, from India, or bringing the different gifts. And what you see in the stonework, in the crafting of these images, is just a very clear articulation of detail. It's as though the Persian artist and therefore the commissioner, who is the king of these images, is simply fascinated by the ethnic diversity of his empire. And there is no question of these images being derivative, for instance. If we think about the way in which Egyptians, pharonic Egyptians, would often depict themselves in contrast to foreigners, foreigners are usually depicted on a smaller scale. Or in Rome, for instance, foreigners are very often depicted at the feet of the emperor, below the foot of the emperor. In fact, there's none of this going on. There is harmony expressed in these reliefs. Persian nobles hold the hands, quite literally fingers intertwined with diplomats from different parts of the empire. And on his tomb, at Nakshi Rostam, near Persepolis, Darius shows himself quite literally being uplifted on a platform of throne, a taft in Persian, which are upheld by all the representatives of the Persian empire. And in the Kuneiform inscription which accompanies it, he says, "If you want to know what my empire was like, look at the representations of the people who support me." And then he names them, this is the Egyptian, this is the Scythian, this is the Indian, this is the whatever. And what he's saying there is really, it's kind of the slogan is, the empire is better together. We are doing this together. Now, we have to concede, of course, again, going back to some of these really good questions earlier on about the nature of empire. And of course, it's a dream in stone, it's what Darius' artists are creating there. Because, of course, while these wonderful motifs were going up on the walls of Persepolis and Suza and Epipatana and other great imperial cities, of course, there were might be rebellions in other parts of the empire, which were being put down with brute force. So the world is never as it was, of course, in the images from Persepolis. But it is a very, very different way of thinking about empire. If you think about how the immediate predecessors to the Persians, the Assyrians, visualized their power base or their power building from the war reliefs, which many of the great ones are now in the British Museum, which show, of course, successive subject peoples being terrorized. Terror as a weapon of power was the way in which the Assyrians articulated their own strength. The Persians completely reject that. You can look in vain on the walls of Persepolis and Suza and the other great palaces to see any images of warfare whatsoever. The Persians simply did not promote that as their first step towards projecting an image of their empire. Now, you've mentioned a few of these places already, but we had a question in from Tara Atkinson on Twitter. And she said, "What was the function of the royal capitals such as Suza, Persepolis, and what would the experience of visiting them have been like?" It's worth bearing in mind that the accumulated monarchy was always a peripotetic one. That is to say, they retained their kind of nomadic past, and they traveled around the country constantly. So throughout the year, they would move, and they moved according to the weather. So, for instance, in Suza, which is on the border of modern-day Iraq, in the summertime, you can imagine. I mean, the heat there is, well, it's like a furnace. It gets to 45 degrees there. It's no good. At that time, the court would be located in the north, in the mountains, in the cool of Hamadan, ancient Ekipatana. Then they would have trundled down the huge, huge plateau of Iran. Don't forget Iran is a vast, vast country. And in the spring time, they would have reached Persepolis. And Persepolis was one that really was the truly ceremonial capital, I suppose. This was the area where the new rules, the Persian New Year was celebrated. After that, they would then move on mass. And you have to imagine, you know, this is a whole kind of state on the move. Thousands and thousands of people and animals moving together slowly, slowly setting up camps, setting up tents and moving on day by day, until they reached Sousa again in the spring and then Babylon and then back to Ekipatana. And that's the way that they moved around constantly. It's really interesting, you know, this is why we can never really trust our Greek sources. The Greeks don't know anything about Persepolis until the Alexander historians start talking about it hundreds of years after the fall of the Persian Empire. They know of Sousa, but they don't really know of anything else at all. That's why we have to be suspect with our sources. Sousa was a great administrative center. Some of the main roads of the empire ended at Sousa. So you could take the royal road from Sousa to Sardis, for instance. But all of them had a grandeur to them. The Persians had no concept of stone building before really the reign of Cyrus the Great. But when they achieved stone buildings, when they decided, okay, this is going to be for us. They did it on a monumental scale. And truly, I mean, for a subject of the empire coming from, say, North India or from Ethiopia, I don't think they would have seen buildings on the kind of scale that we still see in the ruins of Persepolis. Really overwhelming. A theatricality to the kind of buildings too. If you want to get an image of what they were like, you can read the opening chapter of the book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible, which is set in Sousa. And it goes out of its way to describe the beauty of the Sousa palace made from marble and sandstone and limestone and decorated with inlays of different colored stones. And also, of course, planted with gardens. And that's another feature of Persian buildings was the integration of the stone building with the outdoor space, the garden itself. The garden was known in Old Persian as Padassu, which comes into the Greek as Paladis and our paradise as well. So this idea of a walled garden attached to a stone building, a pavilion or a portico is something which goes very, very deep into the Persian imaginations of the Persian mind. And really was operating in Persia right the way up until the the revolution when new monuments, new palaces were being built. The same structure was happening. Now, in your last answer, you mentioned the Esther story from the Bible. And we had a question about that actually, which might be interesting to turn to now from Schmick B3 on Instagram. And they wanted to know, are there any records of the biblical Esther? And I suppose they mean beyond the Bible. Are there any Persian sources? No, none whatsoever. I'm actually the second book I'm writing at the moment is actually a commentary on the book of Esther from the Persian perspective, trying to bring together the evidence for Persia from the book of Esther. I believe the book of Esther was written around about 400, 354, 400 BCE. So I think it is a Persian period piece of work, apart from chapter nine, which I think is much later. That's another another talk. But I do not think that it encodes history. I do not think that Esther was a real person, nor was Mordekai. I believe that they are folk tale characters created by a Jewish writer to give the Jews of Susa a sense of belonging. And I think that's what it's all about. The Jews were doing very, very well in Susa in the Persian Empire in general. And I think this story was written to kind of embrace that idea that a Jewish girl could be a queen. There is no evidence for her because I do not think she ever existed anymore than say had enough Troy existed. But it's a wonderful literary creation, literary motif, and does something for the identity of the Jewish people. However, there are lots of Persian Rialia in the book of Esther. And that's because I think whoever wrote this book knew the Persian world extremely well and also knew the Persian court extremely well. So I get a sense that he was a Jew who worked in some level within the court, maybe not on the highest levels. But he knows about Harim's and Ministers and rituals of gift giving and audiences and all of that. All of that can be verified without a doubt. And as I said, the architectural layout even of the palaces are pretty well observed. But the core, the core story itself I think is a kind of fairy tale, a little novella based on the on Jewish identity. And it's importance. Yeah, it's importance to the Persian world. So is even the underlying story, this idea of there being a threat to the Jewish community within Persian is even that not true, do you think? I don't think so. I think the whole section on the threat and purim, I think that's a much later addition, about 200, 300 years later written during the Macabeean period. The Macabees, as many of your listeners will know, is a period of great upheaval in Israel itself. And a great moment when the Macabees, this ruling clan of Jews, need to sort of stamp down their authority and also give an identity of Jewishness. I've always felt very uncomfortable about the way in which the trajectory of the story of Esther develops. And then suddenly there is really bizarre incident of gross violence that goes on. And it just doesn't make sense to the rest of the story at all. So the best way I can describe it is that yes, chapter 9, so the whole idea of purim and Jewish identity is really a later addition. Okay, and we had a couple of questions about everyday life within the Persian Empire. So I might ask them together if that's okay. We had Erica, SMCM on Instagram, wrote into ask, what did the everyday life of a Persian look like? And then on a related note, Matilda Dexo, also on Instagram, wanted to know what it was like to be a woman in the Persian Empire. Trying to find out about the reality of daily life of any Persian is very difficult, mainly because most of what we have are royal inscriptions and records of the higher echelons of Persian society. So certainly I could tell you what high ranking Persian nobles war, what they act, but it's almost impossible for us to dig down to a lower level to find out the daily life of an average Persian. It's a great shame. However, what we do have at our disposal is a vast archive of Kuneiform documents. We call them the Persepolis fortification texts. And these are rational accounts of people living in and around Persepolis at the time of Derias the Great. It's like a little sort of photoshopped really of one moment in Persian history. Now, some Persians come into play in that, but mainly the documents are concerned with a group of people called Kurtash. And this word has been translated as workers. I think actually slave is a better translation. And from these documents we learn how these slaves, these workers received certain amount of rations depending on what kind of work they were doing and where in Persepolis as well. It's quite dark elements that come out from a study of these documents in relation to the Kurtash. Many of them of course were war captives or were sold into slavery. They were often put to work in cohorts of people and not necessarily kept together as families at all. From the rations that they give, I would say that it's kind of subsistence living is what they've given. Not a great deal of food and certainly not excess calories. So that kind of work is able to be done on the empire and it's people's. But unfortunately, as to the life of a kind of an average subject living in Sousa for instance, we know nothing and that's a great shame. It's one of our great losses. And I don't know how we're ever going to rectify that. We have to use our classical sources for bits and pieces but always of course with the caveat that we can't be sure. Now when it comes to women, good work has been done on women in Persia, mainly of course of the highest echelons or royal women, queens and princesses, women who are called by the title of Dukshan. the fish, the fish being in the plural, so the wires of kings, the daughters of kings. And these women could have very high status indeed and be extremely wealthy. One of the women that comes out in the Persepolis documents, time and time again, is a woman called Ildabama. And she has a huge workforce, these curfews, over 500 of them, working on different estates in different parts of Iran. One of her estates is quite near to Shiraz. She has her own steward. She has her own seal, which is quite remarkable. And so on the present issue in the Persepolis fortification text that my colleague, Voter Henkelmann, has suggested, and I think very rationally, that this was probably the mother of Darius the Great. So the king's mother, of course, has the highest status of all the women in the land. So documents tell us about this kind of thing. But what they don't tell us really is about kind of relationships that women had with their husbands. We know nothing of wedding ceremonies, that kind of stuff. At the lowest rung of the lander, the slave women, foreign slave women, we do know more about actually, because again, they are recorded. They're lives recorded in these ration tech. So an interesting detail, for instance, a group of Ionian women. So these are women who are captured or come as prisoners of war from the Greek city states of Ionia, and whether they're living with their husbands or not, we don't know, but they are at Persepolis. And there's a group of them who are pregnant, and they all give birth. And upon giving birth, these women are issued with rations in addition, but above and beyond, they're usual rations, or mostly because they're nursing mothers. They need more calories to keep these children healthy and alive for that matter. But then it's really interesting. We learn in the document that women who give birth to male children are given twice as many rations as a woman giving birth to daughters, which says something straight away, doesn't it, about gender hierarchy and gender ideology within the Persian world? So we have to read between the lines. We have to read very carefully, but we can get some of these things out. The other thing to point out about women, I suppose, within the heartland of Persia itself, is there almost complete absence from the iconographic record? So you can look in vain for an image of a woman on the walls of Persepolis, for instance. They simply are not there. In fact, there's only one female thing at Persepolis, and that's the image of a lioness. And she's only there because she's got her cubs with her too. What does this mean? It doesn't mean that women were not agents in their own right, did not have power, did not have status. What I do think suggests is that women lived in a, or occupied a kind of, it was a kind of harry mentality. And what I mean by harry mentality is not, you know, that they were sequestered away and lived their lives in pleasure on scatter cushions and stroking Persian kittens. It's not above that. It's about this idea of public visibility. Today, I think we are so obsessed with the idea that to be known, to be powerful, you have to be visible. In antiquity for women, there was no honor in visibility. Remaintaining your invisibility, your sort of sense of purdour from the public sphere is where your power and your status actually sits, to bring you back to the book of Esther, for instance, you know, the very thing that kicks off the story of Esther is when the king, the Persian king, Xerxes, demands that his wife, Vashti, comes out from the harem and shows herself her beauty to the drunken men at his banquet. Now, what the biblical author is really telling us there is, this is unacceptable behavior on the part of the king and the part of the ministers of his court who want to look at this woman. They are dishonoring her by doing that. So I think what we have in operating at the Persian court and the very highest levels of Persian aristocratic society is a kind of a segregation, a separation of the sexes in which invisibility, public invisibility, is the key to status. And let's not forget that it was very difficult, even to see the Persian king himself. The whole idea of a modern monarchy and going around pressing the flash of admirers is something that no accumulate king would ever want to do. The accumulated kings in themselves were invisible. Some of the Greek sources, which quite reliable here, Cotiseus and others, for instance, who lived at the Persian court, say, for instance, that when the Persian king died, he ate, separately, to the rest of his court behind a diaphanous curtain. And then would perhaps call in favored courtiers to share a cup of wine with him. But the whole idea of visibility was something that doesn't work in a Persian context. Monarchy was a reserved private, sacred, higher affair. And I think that goes for the women as well. Now, another popular internet search query was, what was the main religion in the Persian Empire? And I guess maybe there were many. You're absolutely right, Rob. I mean, it's almost impossible to say. For some people, they make the claim that what we see in the inscriptions of Darius the Great and King's afterwards, because of his adherence to a god called Ahura Mazda is Zoroastrianism. Well, at best, I think we could call it proto-Zoroastrianism, because we're far too early to call this a fully developed form of Zoroastrianism as we know today, but the term itself actually wasn't even concocted until the 19th century. I think what we see is a very pragmatic approach to religion and to the use of gods by the different kings of the Persian Empire. We don't know anything, for instance, of Cyrus the Great's religion. He makes no comment on his own as it were boyhood faith or national faith. What we see with Cyrus is actually being very pragmatic. So when he's in Babylon, he is very, very happy to worship Babylonian gods. He shows himself, in fact, as an adorant, as a faithful follower of the god Marduk, the great god of Babylon. And in the Cyrus cylinder, this great propaganda piece that is commissioned by Cyrus, it is Marduk himself who says, "I searched throughout the world, "looking for a champion, and I found him "in the figure of Cyrus." Know those words, really interestingly, are echoed again in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, in the prophecies of Isaiah, this part of the book of Isaiah was written during Cyrus's reign, in which it is Yahweh, the Hebrew god, who says, "I searched around the world "to look for a champion, and behold, I found him "in Cyrus." And of course, very famously, Cyrus, the great, get the title of Messiah, Messiah, God's anointed in the Hebrew Bible, the only Gentile ever to receive that title, which shows then that, you know, Cyrus was all things to all people. He was willing to be a Babylonian god worshiper, willing to be a worshiper of the invisible Jewish god. We don't have any reference to him worshipping a Hura Mazda, interestingly enough. That's something that Darius picks up on. Now, if we were to just rely on the royal inscriptions, we would only see a Hura Mazda, and a few references to what Darius calls the other gods who are, so there is an idea, therefore, of a pantheon of some kind. But when we start looking at the Kineha from text from Persepolis, this is where we see another religious world emerging, which was running concurrently with the worship of a Hura Mazda, and that's the presence of the very ancient gods of Ilam. So these very, very old indigenous Iranian gods are still being worshipped, alongside the newer gods brought into the Persians thousands years before, and that's the really quite remarkable mix of deities and religious thought that's going on. The magi, the priests of a Hura Mazda are certainly in operation at Persepolis, but we see them holding cultic titles and rituals next to the priests of Ilamite gods as well. Of course, it's something that the ancients, apart from the Jews by the time we get to the Second Temple period, that the ancients never got themselves worked up about. A god is a god is a god, and all can be worshipped. And we see that in action very much in the Persian Empire. - Now, coming on to the end of the Persian Empire, we talked a bit about this earlier, but essentially it comes to an end when Alexander the great conquers it. And is that it basically, from then on, does it no longer return to its former glories? - No, it is, as I say, sort of mugged and killed on the spot, really. It's a very quick, very sudden end to the dynasty, to the Okiminid clan disappears with the murder of Darius III. Incidentally, of course, he's not killed by Alexander. He's killed by one of his own family, which kind of gives Alexander, therefore, the opportunity to create a piece of propaganda, to say that, I've come in as a hero to try to save Persia from its own self-destruction or to avenge the death of Darius III. The family dies away. Persia of course does not. Persia continues its essence of itself under Alexander's rule. Alexander never really brought the center of Iran completely under his control, farce province the homeland of the Persian Empire was always problematic for him. And I think that's the reason really why he burned down Persepolis when he did. It was not, as the Greek sources say, in retaliation for the burning of Athens and Derserxes. No, no, no. It was actually because the Persians around Persepolis simply would not submit to him. So he burns down their chief center, brings them into line that way. Alexander's successors only have a very tentative hold on central Iran. Susa is still routinely mentioned in the royal texts of the Salukids. But really, Southwestern Iran is really run by small kind of local diners. It's nothing on the scale of the great kings of the empire at all. It kind of diminishes and shrinks, but doesn't go away. The death of Alexander, of course, and then the fall of the Greek successor kingdoms. We have the rise of the Parthians, which is sometimes called the second Persian Empire. These were very different people to the Achaemenids. They came from northeastern Iran, another kind of tribal people as well, but with a very different kind of take on the world, a very eastern vision of the world, as opposed to the Achaemenids. And they last, of course, for about 500 years. They're giving very short drift very often in the histories of Iran and of the ancient world in general. But then, when the Sasanians come along and defeat the last Parthian kings, they, in many respects, reactivate the Achaemenid Empire once again. The Sasanian Shars and Adashir, the first, and then his successor Shappur and so forth, they come from the same ancestral heartland as the Achaemenids, and they were acutely aware of their Achaemenid heritage, to such an extent, of course, that they carve images of themselves beneath the tombs of the Achaemenid kings at Noxu-Rostamnia Persepolis. They used Persepolis as a royal center, and they activate constantly a memory of the Achaemenid past in his letters to the Caesars, Shappur, the second, for instance, says, "I know that my ancestors held an empire which outdid yours in strength and in distance, and I claimed that empire back." So they were aware of the legacy of the Achaemenids. In the long term, what happens to the Achaemenids in Persian memory is quite interesting. By the time we get to the Middle Ages, and the early Middle Ages, the conquest of Iran by the Arabs, the Arab Muslims, the Achaemenids have all but disappeared from popular thought and popular memory. Around about 1,000 CE, a remarkable poet called Katsim Fadauci wrote this epic called Shakhna-May, the epic of kings. It's about the size of the Elyad and the Odyssey put together, and in that he tries to write the kind of national history of the Iranians, and there's a lot of legend and mythology in the first part of it, the first sort of half of it really is given over that way. And then as we get closer to Fadauci's old time, 1,000 CE, history kind of gets thicker. So the presence of the Sassanian kings in this wonderful narrative is there. We can see the other shears and the shabhours and the others. We can see that. But there is no real trace of the Achaemenids. Only in one section would sit right at the middle of Shakhna-May, do we get a sense of that. And that's in the story of the ruler whom Fadauci calls Iskander Alexander, of course. According to Fadauci, Iskander was actually a son of a Persian king called Dara, Darius, of course. So Fadauci's version of the fall of the Achaemenid Empire doesn't chime with reality at all. For Fadauci, Alexander of Macedon was simply another Persian shah. Why does he do that? Well, that's because Fadauci needs to write out the conquest, the fall of the Achaemenids by Alexander. Because for Fadauci, there can only be one great conquest. There can only be one moment where Persianness, Persian identity is tested. And that, of course, is the Arab invasion and the coming of Islam. So the history of the Achaemenids has been remodeled in popular narrative. Really, the kind of activation of Persian history doesn't come into Iranians, national conscious, again, until the beginning of the 20th century. Under the last shah, Muhammad Reza Shah, who of course went into exile in 1979, there was a huge push to reactivate a Kemenid history. Again, it was being taught in the schools. And the Shah himself saw himself absolutely and utterly as the heir of Cyrus the Great. In 1971, he held this huge spectacle at Persepolis and at Pasagad, celebrating 2,500 years of unbroken Persian rule starting from Cyrus and finishing with him. But of course, when the revolution occurred in 1979 and into 80, the Kemenid history suddenly stopped being taught. And because, of course, as it is now, pre-Islamic history is political dynamite in the Islamic Republic. And I don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran has ever really settled its mind on how to play, how to project or how to deal with its pagan past. It's still very much up in the air. So the history of the Kemenids in the post-Kemenid world is complex and interactive and plays with all sorts of issues of identity, monarchy and religion. And finally, we've had quite a lot of questions about the legacy of the Persian Empire. And I thought perhaps a good one to sum those up was Charlotte Sikorsky on Instagram, who said, can we still see the influence of the Persian Empire today? I think we can. It's in ways that perhaps you wouldn't think about. For instance, without the Persian's, that the Kemenid Persians, there wouldn't have been a Sasanian court culture. So the way in which the Kemenids conducted their sense of being ceremonial, that kind of thing, the Sasanians inherited. And when the Sasanians started indulging in that, so the Byzantines did. And so did the early Islamic caliphate, as well as the Indian moguls, the Ottomans. So very much the kind of idea of monarchy and the idea of sovereignty and ceremonial is very much part of a world that was created under the Kemenids. So you really see a kind of longevity in that. In ideas of communication and multilingualism, I think that's also inherited from the Persians as well. And why I think the Persians are important to bring to the historical foreground is the possibilities that they give us for thinking about different approaches to empire, as I've emphasized here, a more holistic approach where people are valued and equal if and should empire exist at all. There was a different way of doing empire. And it proved to be worthwhile and it proved to be effective. But of course, it was kind of written out of history because of the Greek and later Latin authors who dominated the discourse. And therefore, the way of dealing with subject peoples was really modeled on the Roman Empire, which, let's face it, was pretty brutal and very one-sided. As I say, I'll re-emphasize it again. I don't like the idea of empire, but I think if you have to live under an empire, if it is imposed upon you, I think there are better models to take than the Romans. And I think that's why it is important to look at the Persians and think, OK, there could have been a very different world created after the fall of the U.K. minutes. That was Lloyd Llewell in Jones. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Ben Uett and Jack Bateman. Tune in tomorrow for a conversation about the excavations at Sutton Who. (upbeat music)