REFERENCES

1 ORIGINS: THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE

1  In the eighteenth century the earliest translations of Sanskrit texts were beginning to arrive in the West, notably Anquetil Duperron’s translation of the Avesta. His work was taken up by Sir William Jones, a judge in the Indian judicial system, who initiated the study of comparative philology, which led to the idea of a seminal language that came to be called Indo-European or Aryan.

2  John Keay, India: A History (London, 2000), p. 21.

2 THE ACHAEMENID DYNASTY

1  In 597 BC Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. He returned with a large number of Jews, who were kept imprisoned as slaves. This ‘Babylonian Captivity’ continued until 538 BC when Cyrus, having defeated the Babylonian prince Belshazzar, had the prisoners released and permitted them to return to their homeland. This has since been regarded as an act of great benevolence by Cyrus, a figure synonymous with good in the biblical texts.

2  A ‘forward’ capital as identified by Vaughan Cornish for the purpose of further advance in that direction and or defence against a strong and hostile foe. See Vaughan Cornish, The Great Capitals: An Historical Geography (London, 1923) and Chapter Nine, note 2.

3  There are many accounts of how this took place. See Chapter Four.

4  Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. de Sélincourt, revd J. Marincola (London, 1996). Much of what we know about the Persians actually comes from their great enemy, the Greeks. This does not mean that Persia would inevitably be seen in a bad light. On the contrary, the Greeks felt considerable admiration for the Persians, and much of what was said by Herodotus and others was often more favourable to the Persians than it was to the Greeks.

5  The Greek word oikoumene used in this sense originally meant the habitat of mankind. Arnold Toynbee talked of the ‘old world oikoumene’ as being the Mediterranean–Middle Eastern region, which he saw as having possessed a fundamental historical unity. See Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World (London, 1976), chapter Four. In modern times, the term oecoumene or ecumene has been used rather generally to indicate the centre of the inhabited world. The universal state in the sense used here would be the state that established a position of dominance over the ecumene. See Geoffrey Parker, The Geopolitics of Domination (London, 1988), pp. 9–10.

6  Herodotus, Histories, p. 417.

7  G. Regan, Battles that Changed History (London, 2002), p. 11.

3 THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE ACHAEMENIDS

1  Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth (London, 1976), p. 184.

2  Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. de Sélincourt, revd J. Marincola (London, 1996), p. 533.

3  R. N. Sharp, The Inscriptions in Old Persian Cuneiform of the Achaemenian Emperors, Central Council for the Celebrations of the 25th Century of the Foundation of the Iranian Empire (Tehran, 1971), p. 96.

4  Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London, 2010), pp. 165–70.

5  Herodotus, Histories, p. 588.

4 CYRUS THE GREAT IN HISTORY AND LEGEND

1  Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. de Sélincourt, revd J. Marincola (London, 1996), p. 3.

2  Another version was that a sudden storm put out the flames and this was taken as a sign that Croesus should be spared.

3  The river that Herodotus called the Araxes would have been generally known in antiquity as the Oxus. Persian influence was being extended northwards into those lands from which the Aryans had originally expanded outwards. Known today as the Amu Darya, it flows from the Tien Shan mountains into the Aral Sea and forms part of Transoxiana, a large Central Asian river basin.

4  A. Baehrens, Poetae Latini Minores (Leipzig, 1883), vol. V, p. 402.

5  Unlike Herodotus, in The Persians Aeschylus was dealing with a contemporary event. He is said to have fought at the battle of Marathon and probably also Salamis. This means that he was an active participant in the events depicted and he would have reflected the common attitudes to them at the time of writing.

6  Aeschylus, ‘The Persians’, trans. S. G. Benardete, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene et al., vol. I (Chicago, IL, 1956).

7  Quoted in J. Curtis, Ancient Persia (London, 2013), p. 41.

8  Arthur M. Young, Echoes of Two Cultures (Pittsburgh, PA, 1964), p. 12.

9  G. L. Hunter, The Practical Book of Tapestries (Philadelphia, PA, 1925), p. 226.

10  Young, Echoes of Two Cultures, p. 54.

5 PERSEPOLIS: CITY, THRONE AND POWER

1  See Chapter Fifteen for further information on the Shahnameh.

2  J. Gloag, The Architectural Interpretation of History (London, 1975), p. 58.

3  R. N. Sharp, The Inscriptions in Old Persian Cuneiform of the Achaemenian Emperors, Central Council for the Celebrations of the 25th Century of the Foundation of the Iranian Empire (Tehran, 1971), p. 87.

4  W. H. Forbis, The Fall of the Peacock Throne (New York and London, 1980), p. 57.

5  Sharp, Inscriptions in Old Persian Cuneiform, p. 87.

6  J. Hicks, The Emergence of Man: The Persians (New York, 1975), p. 28.

7  G. Parker, Power in Stone: Cities as Symbols of Empire (London, 2014), Chapter Fourteen.

6 THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA: RELIGION AND EMPIRE

1  The uncertainty concerning Zarathustra’s place of birth is demonstrated by the fact that he has also been claimed by many other places as far afield as Azerbaijan in the west and Transoxiana in the north.

2  Zurvanism developed in order to tackle the problems of good and evil inherent in Zoroastrianism. This version of the religion was most influential during the period of the Sasanian dynasty.

3  Mithra and Mithraism came to be better known in Europe well after the end of the Achaemenid dynasty through its incorporation into the pantheon of Roman gods. Mithras became much favoured by the Roman army and was very much associated with the military throughout the Roman Empire. A temple of Mithras was excavated by archaeologists in London in the 1950s and from this much was learned of the Mithraic tradition.

4  R. Ghirshman, Iran (London, 1954), p. 162.

5  The gold tablet of Ariaramnes is now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

6  Inscription at Persepolis, translated by R. N. Sharp in The Inscriptions in Old Persian Cuneiform of the Achaemenian Emperors, Central Council for the Celebrations of the 25th Century of the Foundation of the Iranian Empire (Tehran, 1971).

7  Paul Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra (London, 2002), pp. 26–30.

7 PARADISE GAINED

1  Aryan became a general name used for the peoples of Central Asia. The word is actually Sanskrit and means noble or high born. In the Indian context, this indicated that these people came as conquerors, quickly dominating the native peoples of South Asia. The linguistic evidence demonstrates that they were closely related to both the Romans and many of the migratory peoples of southwest Asia. During the twentieth century it became associated particularly with the prevalent racism of the time.

2  D. R. Lightfoot, ‘The Origin and Diffusion of Qanats in Arabia: New Evidence from the Northern and Southern Peninsula’, Geographical Journal, CLXVI/3 (2000).

3  Ronald King, The Quest for Paradise: A History of the World’s Gardens (Weybridge, 1979), p. 21.

4  The Old Persian pairidaēza derives from the two words pairi (around) and daēza (wall).

5  Encyclopedia of World Religions (London, 1975), p. 174.

6  Xenophon, Oeconomicus, Book IV, trans. E. C. Marchant (Cambridge, MA, 1923).

7  King, Quest for Paradise, p. 25.

8  Ibid., p. 22.

9  Paul Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra (London, 2002), p. 8.

10  Lightfoot, ‘Origin and Diffusion of Qanats in Arabia’.

8 ALEXANDER OF MACEDON AND THE HELLENISTIC INTERLUDE

1  G. Regan, Battles that Changed History: Fifty Decisive Battles Spanning Over 2,500 Years of Warfare (London, 2002), pp. 18–19.

2  Ibid., p. 20.

3  Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. V (Oxford, 1939), pp. 47–58.

4  The Sogdians were a people whose territory was in upper Transoxiana and who had been conquered originally by Cyrus himself. Throughout the Achaemenid period they had been either in the empire or highly influenced by Persia and its culture. In this way their relationship to the Persians was similar to that of the Macedonians to the Greeks.

5  The early death of the great conqueror has been put down to many different causes. It certainly seems that on his arrival in Babylon he engaged in a huge bout of drinking, which must have weakened him. After this he developed a fever from which he failed to recover. Another suggestion was that he was poisoned. Whatever the cause, his death put an end to the great aim of unifying the ancient world under Hellenic control and so creating a fitting successor state to the Achaemenid Empire. See T. Gergel, ed., Alexander the Great: Selected Texts from Arrian, Curtius and Plutarch (London and New York, 2004), pp. 137–45.

6  Ibid., p. 143.

7  Geoffrey Parker, Sovereign City: The City State Through History (London, 2004), pp. 53–4.

8  Ibid., p. 56.

9  Ibid., p. 50.

9 EMPIRE REVIVED: THE SASANIDS

1  Geoffrey Parker, Power in Stone: Cities as Symbols of Empire (London, 2014), Chapter Three.

2  Vaughan Cornish, The Great Capitals: An Historical Geography (London, 1923), pp. 36–59. Cornish proposed the theory of the ‘forward capital’, which was a capital situated close to the most dynamic or endangered frontier. Such a capital would be well located to direct military activity in the frontier areas. If the frontier was an expanding one and as a result territory was gained, the capital would sometimes be moved even closer to the frontier to keep as close as possible to the new theatre of operations. This might even take it for a time into territory still claimed by the opposing power.

3  ‘The Laws of the Medes and the Persians’ had been one of the main unifying features of the otherwise devolved Achaemenid Empire. As has been seen, the Medes had very much been the mentors of the Persians in the creation of their empire, and a common legal system was something that was always considered an essential feature of empire.

4  The German Schlieffen Plan was the brainchild of General von Schlieffen, who was commander of the German army before the First World War. Faced with the possibility of war on two fronts, east and west, the plan was to attack what was perceived to be the weaker power, France, and, having defeated that power, to move the might of the German army eastwards to deal with the far more formidable Russian threat. While Schlieffen had his priorities wrong, Shapur got them right.

5  ‘Sacred space’ is a term used in political geography to describe an area with very special associations for a people. It is likely to have been their first homeland and, although it may have lost its former importance in real terms, it has a special historical and cultural significance.

6  R. N. Sharp, The Inscriptions in Old Persian Cuneiform of the Achaemenian Emperors, Central Council for the Celebrations of the 25th Century of the Foundation of the Iranian Empire (Tehran, 1971), p. 96.

7  Manichaeism was the religion of the prophet Mani, who was born into a Christian family near Ctesiphon just before the Sasanian victory over the Parthians. The religion he preached was a kind of fusion of Christianity, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. However, its dominant doctrine, the confrontation of good and evil, light and darkness, certainly owed most to the Zoroastrian tradition.

10 ISLAMIC PERSIA AND PERSIAN ISLAM

1  This was all very similar to the Norman invaders of England in the eleventh century. They inherited the wealth and estates of their Anglo-Saxon predecessors and in this way established themselves as a new ruling class. Since they had secured the blessing of the pope for their enterprise, that conquest also had a religious dimension. Nevertheless, the Anglo-Saxon culture survived and evolved into what eventually became English culture.

2  Alessandro Bausani, The Persians, trans. J. B Donne (London, 1971), pp. 71–2.

3  Geoffrey Parker, Power in Stone: Cities as Symbols of Empire (London, 2014), pp. 48–9.

4  The Shuubiyya movement is sometimes seen as having been a debate among theologians and intellectuals and sometimes as a wider proto-nationalist movement. According to H.A.R. Gibb, it was very much a debate over the position of Persia within Islam. He considered that it was a question of whether Islamic society ‘was to become a re-embodiment of the old Perso-Aramaic culture into which Arabic and Islamic elements would be absorbed, or a culture in which the Perso-Aramean contributions would be subordinated to the Arab tradition and Islamic values’. Of course the Shuubiyya wished the historic Persian culture to prevail and bent all its efforts to this end. H.A.R. Gibb, ‘The Social Significance of the Shuubiyya’, in Studia Oriental Ioanni Pedersen (Copenhagen, 1954), p. 108.

5  The word ‘Assassin’ was used by the Crusaders and derives from the Arabic Hashshashin, the takers of hashish. This drug seems to have been used by them not only in rituals but to give to those chosen to commit the murders so that they would be in the right frame of mind.

11 FROM PERSEPOLIS TO SAMARKAND: THE PERSIAN LEGACY IN CENTRAL ASIA

1  At the very beginning of the Achaemenid Empire, Cyrus had been concerned with security on the northern borders. In order to protect these he had invaded Central Asia. There he had come up against the Massagetae and it was in battle with them that he was killed. This episode demonstrated very clearly the danger that always came from this direction.

2  The Silk Road was not a road at all. It is a collective name for a number of routes that linked together the western and the eastern parts of Eurasia. Many Central Asian rulers desired that the route should pass through their territories and one of the most successful of these routeways remained that through Transoxiana.

3  The Turks were, in fact, early converts to Islam. They had made contact with the Arabs in the early eighth century and soon converted to Islam. It was they who took Islam eastwards towards China and established the religion firmly throughout Central Asia. By the time of the Samanids the region had been thoroughly permeated by Islam.

4  H. M. Said and A. S. Khan, Al Biruni, His Times, Life and Works, Hamdard Foundation (Karachi, 1981), p. 47.

5  The Koran was in Arabic and so throughout the Islamic world this language had to be learned. All religious study in the madrasas was invariably in Arabic. As a result, after the Arabic conquest, Persian was relegated to being the language used in the home and in the day-to-day activities of the people.

6  Timur came to be best known to Elizabethan England through the play Tamburlaine the Great by Christopher Marlowe.

7  Much information about Timur and his activities comes to us from foreign travellers, including ambassadors. Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo was one of the most informative of these.

8  J. Ure, The Trail of Tamerlane (London, 1980), p. 170.

9  W. H. Forbis, Fall of the Peacock Throne (New York and London, 1980), p. 65.

10  Ure, The Trail of Tamerlane, p. 191.

11  J. Marozzi, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (London, 2004), p. 33.

12  Quoted ibid., p. 201.

13  Luc Kwanten, Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia, 500–1500 (Philadelphia, PA, 1979), p. 268.

14  Marozzi, Tamerlane, pp. 210, 277.

15  R. Grousset, A History of Asia, trans. D. Scott (New York, 1963), p. 88.

12 PARADISE OF BLISS: THE PERSIAN LEGACY IN INDIA FROM THE TIMURIDS TO THE MUGHALS

1  C. Irving, Crossroads of Civilisation: 3,000 Years of Persian History (London, 1979), p. 71.

2  George Curzon, quoted in J. Marozzi, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (London, 2004), p. 222.

3  R. Grousset, A History of Asia, trans. D. Scott (New York, 1963), pp. 89–90.

4  Quoted in K. Hopkirk, Central Asia: A Traveller’s Companion (London, 1993), p. 163.

5  V. A. Smith, The Oxford History of India, ed. P. Spear (Oxford, 1982), p. 320.

6  Despite the great Persian heritage of the Timurids, Babur always regarded himself as a Turk. The Babur-nama was originally written in Turkish but was transcribed by his son Humayun and translated into Persian under the direction of his grandson Akbar. It was first translated from Persian into English by John Leyden and William Erskine in 1836.

7  Geoffrey Parker, Power in Stone: Cities as Symbols of Empire (London, 2014), pp. 108–9.

8  Ibid, p. 110.

9  J. Keay, India: A History (London, 2000), pp. 311–15.

10  The many cities built over the millennia on the site of Delhi gave rise to the tradition of the ‘seven cities’ of Delhi. In fact there were more than seven and each of them came to symbolize a particular regime or empire. Parker, Power in Stone, Chapter Six.

11  L. Nicholson, The Red Fort, Delhi (London, 1989), p. 80.

12  François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656–1668 [1670], trans. A. Constable (Oxford, 1916), pp. 60–70.

13  Keay, India, pp. 310–11.

14  The idea of the ‘East’ as being homogeneous and different was something very basic in Victorian geopolitical thinking. Rudyard Kipling expressed this in his poem ‘The Ballad of East and West’: ‘Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. / Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.’ The whole concept has been re-evaluated by post-colonial theorists, such as Edward Said in his book Orientalism (London, 1978).

15  Following the deposition of the last shah, the Peacock Throne was removed from the Royal Palace. It is currently in the vaults of the National Bank in Tehran and is not on public display.

13 CYRUS WITH GOLDEN CAVIAR: THE LAST DYNASTY SALUTES THE FIRST

1  Lord Curzon saw Persia as being ‘one of the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world. The future of Great Britain . . . will be decided, not in Europe, not even upon the seas and oceans which are swept by her flag, or in the Greater Britain which has been called into existence by her offspring, but in the continent where our emigrant stock first came, and to which as conquerors their descendants have returned. Without India the British Empire could not exist.’ G. N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London, 1966), p. 10.

2  The existence of oil in Persia had been known over the millennia, as it was the substance that fuelled the Zoroastrian fire temples. The ease with which fires could be lit and maintained must have been a factor in the importance of fire in that religion.

3  The choice of Pahlavi as the dynastic name was a deliberate attempt to invoke the glorious past of pre-Islamic Persia. During the Parthian period their tongue came to be called pahlavanik (heroic) and this persisted through the Sasanid period. This distinguished Middle Persian from the Old Persian of the Achaemenids. The word survives in modern Persian as pahlavan, meaning hero or brave man.

4  W. M. Shuster, The Strangling of Persia (London, 1912). Morgan Shuster, an advisor to the American government on Persian affairs, hated the British Empire and his harsh judgement on British policy in Persia was a product of the rise of the USA as a world power. His book had a considerable influence on the policies of the new dynasty.

5  In the early twentieth century, racialist ideas were widespread. In Europe, and most especially in Germany, one of the most vicious aspects of this was anti-Semitism, which eventually led to the Holocaust during the Second World War. Reza Shah was highly embarrassed by the weakness of his country, and in these circumstances it is not really at all surprising that, desirous of bringing back its former greatness, he should have attracted the racialism that included the Iranians as an Aryan people.

6  John A. Boyle, Persia: History and Heritage (London, 1978), p. 64.

7  J. Lowe et al., Celebration at Persepolis (Geneva, 1971), quoted in Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin, Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (New York, 2005), p. 78.

8  Paul Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra (London, 2002), p. 171.

9  Michael Axworthy, Iran: Empire of the Mind (London, 2008), p. 256.

10  Quoted in Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra, p. 11.

11  The cost was certainly immense and is said to have been as much as $200 million. Rather than being the celebration of the return of greatness under the Pahlavis, the emptying of the exchequer marked the beginning of the end of the dynasty. James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American–Iranian Relations (London, 1988), pp. 133–4.

14 FROM SHAHYAD TO AZADI: THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC AND THE ANCIENT LEGACY

1  Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin, Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (New York, 2005), pp. 99–100.

2  Koorosh-e Kamali-e Sarvestani, Fars, Foundation for Fars Province Studies, trans. R. Parhizgar (Shiraz, 1996), p. 7.

3  M. Rastegare Fasai, Farsnameh, Ebn-e Balkhi (Shiraz, 1995), pp. 50–51.

4  Sarvestani, Fars, p. 10.

5  S. A. Khamene’i, Takhte-Jamshid (Persepolis), Iranian Cultural Heritage Organisation (1988), pp. 1–2.

6  Quoted in Lindsey A. Allen, The Persian Empire (London, 2005), p. 184.

7  L. P. Elwell-Sutton, ‘The Pahlavi Era’, in Persia: History and Heritage, ed. John A. Boyle (London, 1978), p. 64.

15 LOST IN TRANSLATION?

1  Word similarities that support this view of a common root language include pedar (father), see Latin pater; dokhta (daughter), see German Tochter; tondar (thunder); madar (mother) and mordan; see French mort (death).

2  Paul Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra (London, 2002), pp. 36–45.

3  John Curtis, Ancient Persia (London, 2013), pp. 84–7.

4  Roger Stevens, The Land of the Great Sophy, 2nd edn (London, 1971), pp. 32–3.

5  Michael Wood, In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (London, 1997), p. 119.

6  Farnoosh Moshiri, The Drum Tower (Dingwall, 2014).

7  William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book V (Oxford, 1970); Charles Dickens, ‘A Christmas Tree’, Household Words, Extra Christmas Number (1850).

8  Serious attempts to appreciate the full complexity of The Arabian Nights and its influence on subsequent literature include Peter L. Caracciolo, ed., The Arabian Nights in English Literature (Basingstoke, 1988), and Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 1994).

9  An interesting glimpse into the world of the miniaturists may be seen in a novel by the modern Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, trans. Erdağ M. Göknar (London, 2001).

10  Jalal al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell (Berkeley, CA, 1984).

16 THE FIRST SUPERPOWER?

1  Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London, 2010), pp. 165–6.

2  Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. V (Oxford, 1939), pp. 47–8.

3  Michael Axworthy, Iran: Empire of the Mind (London, 2008).

4  Brian Dicks, The Ancient Persians: How They Lived and Worked (London, 1979), p. 9.

5  H. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, Geographical Journal, XXIII (1904).

6  H. Mackinder, ‘The Seaman’s Point of View’ and ‘The Landsman’s Point of View’, in Democratic Ideals and Reality (London and New York, 1919).

7  The more vulnerable sea peoples in the ancient world were in fact conquered by the Persians. The Ionian Greeks of Anatolia and the Phoenicians of the eastern Mediterranean coast were subjugated and incorporated by the Achaemenids. The Ionian Greeks were then supported by the Athenians and their neighbours and became a major factor in the Persian determination to defeat them and bring them into their empire.

8  Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ (1837). In this story, the emperor appears in what he thinks are the finest robes he has ever worn. The reality, as is pointed out by one small child in the watching crowd, is that he is not wearing any clothes at all. This can be taken as a metaphor for the twenty-first-century world in which fresh thinking and completely new geopolitical clothing is needed. See Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes: Radical Alternatives in Contemporary Thought’, in Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century (London, 1985).

9  Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought, p. 157.

CONCLUSION: POWER AND PARADISE

1  M. Axworthy, Iran: Empire of the Mind (London, 2008), p. XV.