Cyrus, Darius, And Glory
In a high, desolate desert in south-central Iran, there stands a lonely building as spare and bleak as its surroundings. Centuries of blowing sand have rounded the edges of the large building stones, and reamed out the cracks between them. But this structure is no ruin, far from it. The most awesome aspect of the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the world's first emperor, is that it is quite well enough preserved to let the viewer imagine the day when the king was buried there 2,525 years ago.
The tomb is not large: it looks like a one-car garage elevated on a stepped platform about fifteen feet high. Only the educated eye of the archaeologist may note the tomb's most extraordinary feature, which is its ordinary-looking gabled roof, slanted to shed heavy rains in a land where rain seldom falls. Such Nordic gables were the architectural style of lands far to the north; they had been brought to Iran by Cyrus's ancestors as part of their cultural baggage; and they thus symbolize the key event in Iranian history: the displacement of the aboriginal peoples by the Aryans from the north.
Within a couple of miles of Cyrus's tomb, in the confines of the mostly vanished ancient capital called Pasargadae, lie a few more of the works of this first king of kings. His private palace and his audience hall are there, though reduced to two white-stone floors like a pair of tennis courts, carrying square pedestals for many toppled columns and one that still stands (capped, when I was there, by the twiggy nest of a discriminating stork). Architecturally, this remnant city cannot compare with renowned Persepolis. Yet harsh, stark Pasargadae, silent but for the sighing wind, remains a compelling monument to history, stirring the visitor to connect himself, as a fellow human being, across the chasm of time to a towering king who liked to say,"Soft lands breed soft people."
One day in Teheran I met a remarkably accomplished scientist named Hind Sadek-Kouros, a paleological archaeologist who took her Ph.D. at Harvard. She had exciting news to tell, news of early man in Iran. Digging in Azerbaijan, she had found stone tools of the kind used by Homo erectus, the first man to walk upright. Her discovery pushed back the earliest date for the presence of man in Iran to a million years ago or more. Much remains to be discovered about man's origins everywhere, but Iran is certainly one of the sites where he has walked longest.
Evidence of Neanderthal Man, who lived 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, was found by American archaeologist Carlton Coon, and there are many signs of the Stone Age men of 15,000 years ago. At that time, an ice age in Europe and North America, Iran was a verdant, forested land of tumbling rivers whose waters emptied into inland seas that filled what are now the central deserts (shells and fossil fish are often found there). At length the rivers built fertile alluvial plains into the seas, and the hunters and berry-gatherers came down from the mountains to live on the meat of the animals that grazed in the new savannahs. After several millenniums, the women among these peoples learned not only to harvest wild emmer, the ancestor of wheat, but also to save seeds gathered in the fall and plant them in the spring. The arrival of agriculture heightened the need for storage; pottery, the archaeologists' main source of clues to prehistoric life, came into use. By the fifth millennium B.C., the villagers of what is now western Iran knew basketry (as basket designs on vases show), textile-making (as clay spindles show), and cosmetics (as pestles and mortars show). The artifacts found with this pottery, in such digs as Roman Ghirshman's excavation of the ancient village of Siyalk, 110 miles south of Teheran, included flint knives, polished axes, shell necklaces, bone tool handles carved like the head of a gazelle, and, as the Stone Age drew to an end, objects of hammered copper. Families buried their dead under the hearths of their rammed-earth houses, a mere foot below the floor.
In short, the peoples of what is now Iran were on the way toward emerging as one of mankind's first major cultures, ahead of every other part of the world except Egypt (which developed the plow, the sailboat, irrigation, writing, and the calendar about 4000 B.C.), Mesopotamia (where the wheel was invented and the Sumerian city-states were founded about 3500 B.C.), and India (which built an urban civilization in the Indus valley about 2700 B.C.). Slowly the aboriginal Iranians developed the plow, the brick, the potter's wheel, and the casting of copper. They domesticated the sheep. But the ever harsher drought, drying up rivers and the inland sea itself in the gradual process of reducing Iran to the land that it is today, kept the population sparse and scattered, preventing widespread urbanization, which always and everywhere is the key to cultural greatness. Excavations since 1970, led by Harvard archaeologist Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, show that a sizable city, centered on a monumental building, existed at Tapeh Yahya, southeast of Kerman, perhaps as early as 4500 B.C.; and the future may bring other such discoveries among the innumerable mounds that in Iran bespeak once inhabited sites. But only when these people moved down from the Zagros Mountains to Iran's southwestern plain (now Khuzistan), which is a natural extension of Mesopotamia, did they build a major city, Susa, and the nation for which Susa was the capital, Elam. With that development, about 2500 B.C., this predecessor country of modern Iran initiated its two thousand years on the world stage as an advanced civilization, centuries ahead of Crete and Mycenae (2000 B.C.), Anatolia (1800 B.C.), China (1500 B.C.), Phoenicia (1300 B.C.), and the Hebrews (1200 B.C.).
One spring day in 1975, Professor Pinhas P. Delougaz, of the University of California at Los Angeles, unearthed in what was once Elam an exquisite vase in the shape of an ibex, not unique but still the sort of find that archaeologists spend their lives hoping for. Within an hour Delougaz was dead, from a heart attack evidently brought on by the thrill of the elegant discovery. This drama serves as a vivid measure of the excitement and depth of the Elamite culture. Susa was such a wondrous city that the French Archaeological Mission in Iran (headed for many years by Dr. Ghirshman) has not got to the bottom of the place in excavations that began way back in 1884. (In fact, this dig is an industry in itself, run from a vast crenellated headquarters building that looks like a chateau on the Loire.) The Elamite city that the French have so far exposed was an orderly place of long, broad thoroughfares, lined with the courtyard houses of rich merchants, and on high ground an acropolis for the royal palaces. The people who lived there at first used a pictographic writing, which scholars have not yet learned to read, but later they developed a cuneiform script suitable for their language, which is not related to any other known language.
Sharing the Mesopotamian plain, Elam absorbed Mesopotamian culture and warred with Mesopotamian states, notably Sumer and its successor, Babylonia, in the southern part of the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and Assyria in the north. In the eighteenth century B.C., the Elamites carried off the celebrated stele of Hammurabi, on which is engraved the legal code devised by the Babylonian king (the original is now in the Louvre, but the Teheran Archaeological Museum has a copy). Elam also carried its culture, presumably by war, into the Iranian plateau; at Siyalk Ghirshman found a thick layer of ash, indicating destruction of the village, followed by a switch in pottery style from the earlier painted kind to the monochrome red or gray used at Susa.
In many of the world's museums -including the Metropolitan in New York, the British Museum in London, and the Archaeological Museum in Teheran- you can spend an interesting hour or so looking at the little sculptures called Luristan Bronzes. They are mostly green-painted castings of horses, winged ibexes, dagger handles, urns, animal-head pins, bracelets, and plaques, as well as bits and headstalls intended for actual use on a horse, and chariot trappings. They were all dug up by peasants clandestinely and with no scientific control, from four or five hundred graves in the Iranian province of Luristan, during the course of about four years around 1930.
Luristan was part of Elam, and some of the bronzes are disk-headed pins depicting a woman giving birth: the mother goddess, it is thought, of the peoples of Elam and Mesopotamia. But "the collection as a whole bears a preponderant impress of foreign influence, both in form and subject," writes Ghirshman. In short, the bronzes from the period of greatest production, 1200 to 800 B.C., speak -particularly by their stress on horses and horsemanship- the message that the Aryans of the north had arrived among the original inhabitants of Iran.
The northerners burst out of the Eurasian plains of southern Russia in two migrations, one about 2000 B.C. and the other a thousand years later. The first migration did not penetrate what is now Iran so much as it did what are now Turkey and India. The evidence is not all in, but apparently the Hittite empire which ruled Asia Minor from 1900 to 1200 B.C. was founded by invaders who crossed the Balkans and the Bosporus. To the east, the Aryans travelled around the northern shore of the Caspian Sea, poured through the Khyber Pass, and quickly developed the strong civilization in the Indus valley that ultimately came to be India. But some of these first Aryans went south via the Caucasus, and got as far as the Zagros Mountains, while others parted from the Indus-bound migrants to enter Iran from east of the Caspian. These early arrivals melded with the original inhabitants and lost their Aryan identity, even though the crossbreeding produced some vigorous art, and a couple of energetic little kingdoms, as well as the stress on raising and training horses reflected in the Luristan Bronzes.
The cause of the second migration is, like that of the first, uncertain, overgrazing of the homeland, perhaps. The Aryans thrust out, some toward Europe, others once again through the Balkans to Asia Minor and this time on to Egypt (the wave included the Philistines, settlers of Palestine), and still others through the Caucasus. East of the Caspian these new invaders met firm resistance from their distant cousins in India, and were deflected westward to the Iranian plateau. This time the Aryans came with large numbers of horses, arms, flocks, and families, prepared not to blend into the existing population but to dominate it. "What occurred must have been somewhat analogous to the struggle of the Roman Empire against the barbarians," writes Ghirshman. But the Aryans were not barbarians. Besides the Nordic gable, they brought with them knowledge of brick and stone masonry, fortifications, urban life, and a prince-and-slave society.
Gradually distinct tribes formed among the Aryans, most memorably the Medes and the Persians. The distinctions between them were trifling; ethnically speaking, one man's Mede is another man's Persian. Yet forming significant kingdoms was among the Iranians a tardy process, compared to the rapid leap in Egypt or Sumer from hunter society to monarchy. Part of the reason is that the Iranian conquerors needed a lot of time to bring the indigenous inhabitants into submission. But at length among the Medes there came a couple of kings who unified the tribe as a nation, and by 584 B.C. made Media the first large Iranian power, stretching west to the Tigris and east to what is now Teheran, with a capital at Ecbatana, today's Hamadan. The Persians, for their part, came to rest about 700 B.C. around Shushtar, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. This was part of Elam, but the declining Elamites could not prevent the Persians from moving in. The Persians built at least two imposing terraces of cyclopean stone, which may have been royal cities; one of them, Masjid-e-Sulaiman, was precisely on the spot where British petroleum engineers discovered Iran's first oil in 1908, and it was they who called the attention of archaeologists to the still existing terrace. The first Persian king, who rose to power in the seventh century B.C., was Achaemenes (Hakhamanesh), significant chiefly because from him comes the name of Iran's greatest dynasty, the Achaemenians. But from his descendants (including a now forgotten Cyrus I) emerged the king who became the foremost figure in Iranian history: Cyrus II, Cyrus the Great.
By the time Cyrus became king, Persia was already a large domain, probably including most of the modern province of Fars, centered on what was to become Persepolis and adjoining Media on the north. For openers, empire-builder Cyrus grabbed off the remnants of Elam and the sparsely populated Indian Ocean littoral eastward to what are roughly the modern borders of Iran. In a battle at Pasargadae in 550 B.C. he overcame Media, and with that began to aspire to nothing less than the conquest of the entire known world, beginning in the west.
In that direction, the once important nation of Urartu (present-day Armenia) had already been taken by the Medes, and Cappadocia and Cilicia (parts of modern central Turkey) proved to be pushovers. But between Cyrus and the Mediterranean Sea there yet lay Lydia, kingdom of the pecunious Croesus. Cyrus sent camels against Lydia's famed cavalry. King Croesus had learned from the Oracle at Delphi that he would "destroy a great empire," but he did not grasp that the empire would be his own. His terrified horses fell back in defeat, and Cyrus went on to capture, one by one, the rich Greek cities on the Ionian coast. The whole campaign took only two years.
Cyrus recognized that the "known world" he wished to conquer included Egypt, Carthage, Ethiopia, and Greek colonies on the Mediterranean coast as far as Gibraltar, but for the time being he thought he had better seize the known world to the east (except for distant, legendary China). In about a year he took lands as far away as what are now the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He rushed west again and fell upon Babylon by diverting the unfordable Gyndes River, a tributary of the Tigris which protected the city, into many shallow hand-dug channels. There he freed the forty thousand Jews held in the Babylonian captivity. A few years later, putting down a revolt in the east, Cyrus died in battle. His troops brought his body back to Pasargadae, and laid it to rest in the tomb with the Nordic roof.
Cyrus was not only the world's first great emperor; he was a humane man, who treated his victims benevolently, honored their gods, and set higher standards for the profession of kingship than most other monarchs down through the centuries. His son and successor, by contrast, was a brute who had earlier kicked his pregnant wife to death. He adored flattery, not blinking even when a courtier told him, "I do not think you are the equal of your father, because you do not have a son like the son he left behind." Nevertheless, before he mysteriously committed suicide, he managed to capture Egypt and pack the pharaoh back to Iran. Upon his death, according to Herodotus, the seven young nobles who formed the imperial council met and agreed to accept as king him among them whose horse should neigh first at dawn the next day. One groom made sure that his master would win by providing a delectable, neigh-worthy mare for the stallion. In this way the noble named Darius became king, although his own account of his ascent, which he left engraved on stone, differs in ways that do not make nearly as good a story.
Whatever the truth, Darius turned out to be second only to Cyrus as "Great King, King of Kings," and even more than Cyrus, the architect of the Persian Empire. Despite his chance choice, Darius had the royal blood of Achaemenes in his veins, for he descended from a collateral branch of the family. Darius ruled for thirty-five years, at first putting down rivals (he fought nineteen battles at the rate of nearly a battle a month, and defeated nine upstart kinglets), then giving the empire the institutions that Cyrus had been too busy to devise. He had to keep the subject populations contented enough not to revolt (for the conquered masses greatly outnumbered the ruling Persians), but disciplined enough to pay heavy taxes to support the court and the armies.
Darius employed inspectors, called "the ears of the king," to spy on his own satraps, a function similar to the recent Shah's Imperial Inspectorate. To bind his empire together, to use Iran on a large scale as a land bridge between east and west, Darius built the world's first highway network. The stone-paved Royal Road, 1,679 miles long, ran from the empire's winter capital at Susa to Ionian Ephesus on the Mediterranean, and Persian nobles drove along it in four-horse chariots. An eastern route ran via the Khyber Pass to the valley of the Indus, and another branch went to Babylon and Egypt. Royal couriers, changing horses at 111 relay stations, could carry mail from Susa to Ephesus in seven days; it was they who inspired Herodotus to the famous phrase that (as adapted for the inscription on the Main Post Office in New York City) reads: "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." Completing an Egyptian plan, Darius dug a canal between the Red Sea and the Nile, a forerunner of Suez.
With 360,000 soldiers -six army corps, each with six divisions of 10,000 men- Darius enlarged the empire until it measured 2 million square miles and contained 10 million people. Crossing the Bosporus, he pushed his borders to present-day Bulgaria (but could not take Greece); pressing eastward, he took what is now the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, hard by the westernmost bulge of China. Where the Kabul River joins the Indus, in today's Pakistan, Darius built a fleet and sent it down the Indus, across the Arabian Sea, and up the Red Sea to Egypt. He gave the empire "the law of the Medes and the Persians, which altereth not" (in reality it was derived from Hammurabi's Code); and when under it Darius's Babylonian friend the Biblical prophet Daniel was condemned to be thrown to the lions, the king let the law take its course. He made the economy work by establishing a common coinage based on the gold daric. Perceiving all these accomplishments to be excellent, Darius gathered sculptors and engravers at a stone cliff at Behistun (near modern Kermanshah), on the heavily travelled road from Babylon to Ecbatana, and set them to work on a monument to himself. Two hundred feet up on the jagged and jumbled face of the cliff, the artisans flattened an area about 50 feet high and 60 feet wide, like a gigantic billboard, and along the top carved a bas-relief of bearded Darius standing with one foot on a fallen foe as he faces a dozen captives with their hands manacled behind their backs. Beneath are cuneiform inscriptions enough to make a small book, written in Elamite, Babylonian, and Old Persian, boasting of Darius's conquests and achievements. This is the most important historical document of the time; unfortunately, it and a few others, mostly repetitious, are the only long texts by Persians about their empire. It is plain that they could write; whether they did write, and if so what happened to the writings, is unknown; and modern Persians, to their embarrassment, have to go to the Greeks, chiefly Herodotus, to learn their own history.
Darius created an empire where farmers raised wheat, barley, grapes, and olives; beekeepers produced honey; fishermen exploited the rivers and the Persian Gulf; workmen made shoes, tunics, and furniture; sea captains sailed beyond Gibraltar, or went to Ceylon for spices; caravans transported clothing, ores, balks of teak and cedar; and banks lent money, made investments, and accepted checks. Artisans flourished; witness such examples as the lovely lapis lazuli jug in the Archaeological Museum in Teheran, or the golden Oxus Treasure (so named for the dry riverbed where it was found in 1877) of Achaemenian art in the British Museum: snake bracelets, armlets, necklaces, and earrings.
In architecture, the Persians drew together styles and techniques from their own past and from their whole empire to create breathtaking splendour, especially at Persepolis.
Persepolis is Iran's entrant in the sweepstakes that measures the world's ancient architectural achievements against one another, its Roman Forum, Angkor Wat, or Machu Picchu.
As the emperor Darius designed it, Persepolis was neither quite a capital nor quite a city, but rather, in the words of author Jim Hicks, a "colossally immodest salute" to his own glory. When Darius was not out on his horse adding another province or two to his empire, he lived in lowland Susa in the winter and mountainous Ecbatana in the summer. He built Persepolis almost exclusively to stage the ceremonies of the Persian New Year, the spring equinox. When you put your foot on the threshold of the main entrance to Darius's palace, precisely where Darius put his foot so long ago, you notice that the stone is hardly worn. Persepolis was chock-full of royal palaces, treasuries, storehouses, and something that might have been a harem, but devoid of any place for ordinary mortals to live, except for the barracks of the imperial guards.
For Persepolis's site, Darius chose a short, rocky slope hard up against the westward-facing slope of the Mountain of Mercy. He probably started construction (according to recent research by Canada's scholarly former Ambassador to Iran James George) at the summer solstice almost exactly 2,500 years ago: the shadow of a stick held vertical just as the sun appears over the mountain on June 21 is precisely in line with the fronts and backs of all the main buildings. Why did Darius choose the solstice? His reasons appear to have stemmed from his Zoroastrian religious beliefs. "In the cosmic struggle between Light and Darkness, between Ahuramazda (or Ohrmazd) and his dark twin Angra Mainu (or Ahriman), June 21 was the most sacred day of the year_the day when there was the most light and the least darkness, when Ahriman's shadow was the least present," writes George.
Once Persepolis was lined up to the sun, Darius's masons, using stones as big as 24 feet by 7 feet on the face, built a front wall 50 feet high and side walls that ran back on a level until they melded into the mountain. Into the three-sided box thus formed workmen cast stone obtained from levelling the high side of the slope until they created a 32-acre platform measuring 1,400 feet from north to south, and 1,000 feet from front wall to mountainside (and_to throw in one more statistic_just 5,800 feet above sea level). At the north end of the front wall, masons cut twin staircases that rise, parallel to the wall on both right and left, for sixty-nine steps, to landings, and then reverse, for forty-two more steps, to reach the platform. The staircases served for horses as well as men, for with treads 15 inches deep and a rise of only 5l/2 inches perstep, they climb at a gentle angle; and they are 22l/2 feet wide.
The sensation I got when I reached the top of the stairs was that I could spend two rapturous days exploring every corner of this sun- struck, walkable plateau, and I did. The first sight is the Gateway of All Nations, once a sort of palatial waiting room with lofty interior columns and a roof. Three of the four columns are standing, but the plan of the building is mainly suggested by the massive doorjambs of its east and west entrances. From the front of each of these jambs emerges a colossal winged bull, bearded and crowned (but defaced, literally by latter-day Moslems heeding Islam's ban on the representation of visages). Through the gatehouse and to the left, you reach a parade ground, floored with the living rock as Darius's masons levelled it, or with gravel where it was filled. And 50 yards across this space lies Persepolis's largest, most sumptuous, and best preserved palace, Darius's great Hall of Audience, the Apadana. Christopher Marlowe's poem springs to mind:
Is it not passing brave to be a King, And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
Persepolis perfected must have been stately, brilliant, and the greatest gallery of sculpture extant. Luckily, a large proportion of the sculpture survives, the best of it being the bas-reliefs on the base of the Apadana. They show groups of bearers bringing New Year's tribute to the Persian throne at Persepolis from the whole vast distant empire, and constitute perhaps the most engrossing sociohistorical documentary ever put into stone.
Twenty-three delegations walk in the three registers of this hand-chiselled filmstrip of obeisance to the emperor. The Elamites bring a leashed lioness, who turns her head to snarl at two men carrying her cubs. A group from the northeast leads a stately two-humped Bactrian camel and bears vessels full of precious goods. The barefooted Egyptians tug at a bull; crinkly-haired Ethiopians (some of whom lived in Egypt) lead an okapi and carry an elephant tusk; the dhoti-clad. Indians bring axes and a donkey. And if the carvings please the eye now, they must have stunned it in Persepolis's heyday, for they were painted in bright colors (carved figures inside the palaces also had real-gold crowns, bracelets, and necklaces, and beards of bronze and lapis lazuli). Thus did Darius leave posterity a panorama of the civilization of his time.
The end of Persepolis came when Alexander attacked it in 330 B.C. and set it afire. Though the city was built of stone and brick, the tapestries and roof beams burned so hot that in Xerxes' audience hall the columns literally exploded. Over the centuries sand blown down from the Mountain of Mercy and mud from the dissolved bricks joined the ashes of Alexander's fire to cover the ,ruins of Persepolis as deep as twenty feet in places, marvellously preserving the sculpture. The explorer Pietro della Valle, visiting in 1621, found twenty-five of the Apadana's columns protruding from the rubble; another visitor, in 1627, found nineteen; another, in 1698, seventeen; another, in 1821, fifteen. From the height of the inscription above the ground, I would judge that the covering dirt must have been four or five feet deep when a reporter named McIlrath of the Chicago Inter Ocean chiselled his name into the Gate of All Nations in 1897.
Six miles from Persepolis, there stands a high cliff into which have been deeply cut four enormous Greek crosses. Above the frieze, in the upper square of the vertical bar, bas-reliefs in two registers show many small human figures whose heads support the heroic sculpture above them, a king worshipping a flame, with a winged-disk symbol hovering overhead. These crosses are all tombs (though now empty), and one of them, the second from the right, is certainly the tomb of Darius, because the inscription above it says so. Archaeologists guess that the other tombs are those of Darius II, Artaxerxes I, and Xerxes. All the kings immortalized by these tombs, plus some others, ruled the Persian Empire after Darius, in what amounts to a long slide into decadence and utter defeat.
Only Xerxes, Darius's son, is memorable. Coveting conquests like those of his forebears, he took aim on Greece, which had turned back a thrust by Darius at Marathon in 490 B.C. The fifty-oared galleys of Xerxes' navy, lashed side by side, anchored fore and aft, and decked over, formed a bridge a mile and a quarter long over the Hellespont, and in 480 B.C. the Persian king marched probably 200,000 soldiers (Herodotus says 2,641,610) across it to take Thrace and Macedonia. Athens and Sparta put aside their differences to join in the defense of the lower peninsula at the narrow defile called Thermopylae. Leonidas and his three hundred stopped the Persians there, but a Greek traitor showed the invaders a route through the mountains. Xerxes took Athens, and moved his navy into the narrow channel between Athens and the island of Salamis. Having learned from a Greek spy that Greek sailors were scared sick of the Persians, he set up a throne on the seashore and prepared to watch the rout. But the spy had been a plant, a Greek trick; the valiant enemy rammed and sank scores of Persian ships and forced the rest to retreat. Squirming on his throne, Xerxes had to watch his fleet turned to wreckage while the bodies of his men washed up on the shore. Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis; these historic battles put Persia on the skids.
In the year 336 B.C., two princes came to power, one in Persia and one in Greece, one a poltroon and one an innate hero. The Persian was Darius III, the temperamental opposite of his derring-do namesake. The Greek was twenty-year-old Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon. Most of Persia's battles during the history of the empire had been struggles with Greece, a formidable civilization unable to win wars because its city-states would not unite and fight together. To Alexander and most Greeks, Persia was the historic, dangerously powerful enemy. But Alexander went to war with four new assets: his own confidence and will power; a united Macedonia behind him; foot soldiers loyal directly to him; and an elite, devoted cavalry recruited from the nobility. Crossing the Hellespont in 334 B.C., Alexander first routed Persian troops at Issus (near modern Turkey's Alexandretta), where Darius fled, well before the battle was decided, leaving behind his mother, wife, and children. Alexander detoured to conquer Egypt and found Alexandria (he ultimately gave his own name to seventeen cities). He returned and backed the Persians up against the Zagros foothills of modern Iraq, where Darius again fled the field. The Greek then undertook a leisurely looting of Darius's capitals, Susa and Ecbatana, and of Persepolis. Since Alexander was not in the habit of destroying captured cities, scholars think he may have been out of his mind with drink when he burned Persepolis; in any case, the place must have been devastated after the Greeks seized treasure (including 5,500 tons of silver) that according to Plutarch required 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels to remove. Alexander finally caught up to Darius in 330 B.C. on the Iranian plateau about 150 miles east of modern Teheran; but the last Achaemenian had just been killed by his own men. Seven years later, Alexander, too, died, in bed, at Babylon, never having returned to his birthplace.
If Iranians have had to derive their factual ancient history from Greek historians and from modern French and American archaeologists, they have ingeniously and independently created a national mythology that endows the site of Persepolis with another kind of meaning. Only in the West is this ancient city known by its Greek nickname. The proud people of Persia have perennially referred to the site as Takht-e Jamshid, or Throne of Jamshid, an allusion to the beginnings of Iranian myth. In attempting to understand the revolution of 1979, it helps, I think, to know something of the heritage of heroic mythology that may have been, subconsciously or not, on the minds of those rioters in the streets.
Like so many national cultures whose people immortalize their antiquity in literary forms, the Persians counted on their bards to tell of the heroics of olden times; and at length the most significant poet in Persian history collected these tales into an epic masterpiece. Just about 999 years ago, a landowner, later to be known simply by his literary title, Ferdowsi (Of Paradise), completed forty thousand lines of rhymed, metered verse based on a heritage of stories passed on by word of mouth up to that time. Entitled Shahnama (Epic of the Kings), this saga of mythical and historical kings, queens, and warriors became the race memory of Persia's otherwise illiterate people. Poets then and poets now recite the heroic deeds and tragic failings of the fifty kings who traditionally inhabited the Iranian Empire until the Moslems arrived. It is still recited in a purely Persian language, untainted with any of the Arabic words adopted after the Moslem conquest. In the process Jamshid, most outstanding of the early mythical kings, melded with the Zoroastrian temple of Persepolis in the creative consciousness of the Persian people.
In the beginning the Zoroastrian god, like the Judeo-Christian counterpart, created matter out of nothing. Next he created man "to become the key to all those close-linked things," says Ferdowsi. From Kiyumars, the first mythical king, came civilization. But it took Jamshid, the fourth king, to improve and develop the Iranian civilization during his reign of seven hundred years: Having received the divinely ordained Farr or nimbus that would identify all future kings, Jamshid designed weapons of war and fabrics worn at feasts. He defined the crafts of artisans and identified the social classes. He discovered certain minerals and medicines to please his people. After two hundred years spent in these pursuits, the wise king boarded a ship that took him from one land to another. At the end of another fifty years he celebrated the grandeur of his kingdom in a spectacular fashion, according to Ferdowsi. "With the aid of the royal Farr, he fashioned a marvelous throne, which at his bidding was lifted by demons into the air. He sat upon that throne like the sun in the firmament. To celebrate, that day was called a new day_the festival of Now-Ruz_the first day of the new year."
But the epic of Shahnama is concerned not only with the virtuous rise but also with the iniquitous fall of its kings, and Jamshid is no exception. For the dualism of good and evil inherent in men's character is the essence of the religion that Zoroaster laid down in the sixth century B.C. Iran's mythology as retold by Ferdowsi diligently reflects this insight. So after three hundred years had passed, during which Jamshid guided the peace and pleasures of his people, he became consumed by pride, thereby losing the royal Farr, and "the world became full of discord."
As Jamshid's virtue declines, there comes upon the scene a Faustian desert warrior who submits his will to the devil and triumphs as emperor after he orders an ignominious death for Jamshid (he was sawed in two). This evil king's thousand years of iniquity end when an upright soldier named Faridun kills the evil monarch and inherits the royal Farr. Good King Faridun gives the land of Iran to his youngest son, Iraj. But the jealous spirits of two other sons, Salm and Tur, unite in a plot to murder Iraj. A daughter is born to Iraj's widow and Faridun sadly but dutifully brings up the child. She marries a descendant of Jamshid and bears a son, Manuchehr. Faridun also raises him, determined to make him a single-minded warrior who will wreak vengeance for the death of his grandfather Iraj. Manuchehr overwhelms each of Iraj's wicked brothers in battles, and becomes king after the death of his great-grandfather Faridun. This theme of vengeance for the unjust death of an Iranian king or warrior is repeated over and over in the telling of Iran's heroic tales.
If vengeance is the mission of Iran's mythical heroes, for the warrior Rustam, greatest of them all, it is the consuming motive of three hundred years of service to Iran's monarchs. Born in the reign of Manuchehr, Rustam comes from distinguished parents. His father is a mighty warrior magically reared by an eagle-like bird known as Simorgh, and his mother is the beauteous daughter of an Arabian king.
Rustam's size at birth is so great that his mother faints from labor pains and a feather from the omnipotent Simorgh provides for the safe delivery of the baby. His mother awakes and gives the child a name by crying: "I am now free [rustam] and my suffering has ended." It is no surprise that Rustam needs ten foster mothers to give him milk as a babe, and five men's meals to nourish him to adulthood. He grows to the height of eight men, "so that his stature was that of a noble cypress."
No other legend from the Shahnama has been so enthusiastically adapted for pictorial and theatric entertainment as the tale of the renowned and redoubtable Rustam. Compared to the lion or elephant in strength, Persia's Promethean hero exercises his vengeance with maces, swords, lassos, and lances, but most often with a taut bow whose arrows inevitably find their targets. His constant companion in adventure is the lion-hearted, elephant-sized horse Raksh.
But Rustam is a hero with a flaw. His single encounter with a woman produces a son named Sohrab. Years later Rustam is leading his army to victory over the nation called Turan, Iran's traditional enemy since Faridun created it for his infamous son Tur. Sohrab is manipulated by the Turan king to lead Turan's forces into a battle that can only end in the downfall of father or son. Rustam and Sohrab meet in single combat that lasts two days, such is the stamina of the two warriors. Only when Rustam succeeds in planting his dagger in Sohrab's chest do father and son recognize one another and their tragic destiny.
Rustam's flaw, as the American interpreter Reuben Levy has shown in his English translation of the Shahnama, is his monstrous pride. Pride has led him to kill his own son, and his pride will carry him to the final scene of his life. When a malevolent half-brother challenges his martial ardor, Rustam rushes impulsively to his fate, which is to ride into a concealed pit bristling with up-pointed swords and scimitars. Dying, Rustam aims his bow for the last time and the arrow fatally wounds his assailant.
At Rustam's death the saga is only half told. Legendary exploits of Darius and Alexander under Persian names follow. Alexander is depicted as a wise and courageous leader whose troops visit Persepolis and then overwhelm the fleeing troops of Darius III. The saga moves majestically into the historical segment of Iran's national epic when it narrates the reigns and romances of the Sassanian shahs.
This easy transition from mythical kings with human characteristics to historical kings with mythical adventures has a traditional Persian flavour. European archaeologists focus on the cliffside tombs of Darius, Xerxes, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II, six miles from Persepolis, but the Iranians still refer to this place as Naqsh-i-Rustam, or Picture of Rustam, simply because they see no objection to confusing history and mythology. Persian parents name their children Kiyumars and Jamshid after the mythical kings as readily as Ardashir and Khosrow after historical kings. Fact and fiction, for the Iranian imagination, seem forms that fit familiarly into the same Persian miniature. This characteristic has moved Sir Roger Stevens to write, in The Land of the Great Sophy: "There can be no proper understanding of what underlies modern Iran unless we recognize the significance of this triumph of legend over history, or art over reality, this preference for embellishment as against unvarnished fact, for ancient folk beliefs as against new-fangled creeds."
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Title: Fall of the Peacock Throne Author: William Forbis Imprint: New York, Harper & Row, 1980