Cyrus with Golden Caviar: Persepolis Revisited
Since the destruction of Berlin in 1945 and the end of the Germania project, there have been no further attempts to build new cities designed exclusively for the display of imperial power. A number of new capital cities have been built but they have been mostly intended as administrative centres, far from having any realistic aspirations to display great power. The post-imperial great powers after the Second World War eschewed such projects and they returned their seats of power to earlier capitals. Moscow, Beijing and Delhi were inherited by the new post-imperial governments of the Soviet Union, China and India respectively. Geopolitically, at least, the legitimacy provided by the former imperial capitals appeared to be more powerful than the promotion in stone of the ideas and ideologies which these republics now espoused.
Since the Second World War there has been only one attempt to revive a fallen empire and, significantly, this was the ancient empire of Persia. This first great empire of the ancient world had astonishingly survived in one form or another for most of the next 2,500 years but by the twentieth century it had become quite insignificant on the world scene. It was a dinosaur from the past still living among those great powers which had come into existence long after it had lost its own great power status. In the attempt to revive this empire, its purpose-built capital, Persepolis, the first of the imperial cities to be examined in this book, had one final part to play. By the twentieth century the world had undergone many changes since the city had been the ceremonial capital of the world superpower of its time. However, in the late twentieth century the ruins of the old imperial city were brought briefly back to life for the purpose of commemorating, and even resurrecting, the Persian Empire of antiquity.
The first Persian Empire, the Achaemenid, was for some 200 years the world’s greatest power. It dominated much of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East until its defeat by Alexander of Macedon in the fourth century BC. Persepolis fell to the new conqueror in 331 BC and Alexander wreaked destruction on the city. He had chosen Babylon to be the capital of his new empire but he died before his dreams could be fulfilled. Following the subsequent Hellenistic period, during which Alexander’s successors ruled, the Persian Empire was revived under the Sassanian dynasty which ruled until its defeat by the Arabs in the middle of the seventh century, after which it became for a time part of their Islamic Empire. By the ninth century Persia had regained its independence, remaining in this position until the twentieth. It did so under a number of Islamic dynasties, all of which claimed their legitimacy through their relationship to the earlier ones.
The last of these dynasties was the Pahlavi in the twentieth century. Reza Khan, who was crowned shah in 1926, was actually a Persian general who had staged a coup in the previous year, replacing the much weakened Qajar dynasty with his own. By this time Persia had come strongly under the influence of the great powers of the time, especially Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Their interest in the country was to a certain extent strategic but more importantly it was in Persian oil, which was in great demand with the coming of the age of the internal combustion engine.
Reza Shah wished to associate his new dynasty with the pre-Islamic Persian past and especially the great age of the Achaemenids. However, at the same time he saw that if Persia was to regain any of its lost glory there had to be modernization. In order to achieve this he undertook a radical programme of westernization which included the secularization of the legal system, the establishment of secular state schools, a state bank and a national university in the capital, Tehran. The wearing of western dress was made obligatory. In 1938 the name of the country was officially changed from Persia to Iran. This was a name derived from the Aryan peoples who had moved during the first millennium BC from the centre into the Asian peripheries and had become rulers there. The Persians were members of this racial group, a fact used to add to the illustrious heritage which the shah was attempting to present to his people and to the world. This root and branch modernization and secularization was very similar to that happening at the same time in adjacent Turkey under Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’. Reza Shah greatly admired the Turkish leader and followed the Turkish model whenever he could.
However, one significant way in which the shah differed from Atatürk was that in the Second World War he favoured the German side. This resulted in his forced abdication as a result of pressure from the British and Russians in favour of his young son Mohammad Reza, who had shown himself more inclined towards them. The young heir accepted his new role, realizing the necessity of remaining firmly on the side of the allied powers if he wanted to avoid the fate of his father. In 1943 the first conference of the ‘Big Three’ – the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States – took place and Tehran was chosen for this. The first draft of the new post-war world order thus came into existence in the Iranian capital. While the shah was officially the host for this momentous event, his role was really that of a spectator and this made it abundantly clear to the young monarch how insignificant his country had become in the modern world. It was this which sowed the seeds in his mind of the idea of returning his country to its former status as a great power.
While in the years following the end of the war Iran remained under the influence of the great powers, a strong nationalist movement arose which succeeded in moving the country into a more independent position. This included taking greater charge of its own oil production, a move which initially did much harm to the country’s economy and resulted in considerable destabilization. In the 1950s the shah softened the Iranian stance and in this way presided over a period of considerable economic success. At the same time he continued to dream of reviving the glories of ancient Persia and its Aryan past and saw further economic development as an important step towards achieving this end. In the 1960s he founded the National Resurrection Party, dedicated specifically to the revival of the greatness of his country. At the same time he continued to maintain a close relationship with the west during the years of the Cold War and this ensured that he continued to receive the military aid which helped build up powerful armed forces.
By the 1960s the idea of the revival of past greatness seems to have completely taken over the shah’s mind and the needs of the economy were increasingly neglected. The shah stressed the continuity of Persian history and even attempted to trace a tenuous relationship between the Pahlavi and the Achaemenid dynasties. As the centrepiece of this upsurge of national pride it was decided to hold a great celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great: 1971, the date chosen for this, was quite an arbitrary one but it was accepted and preparations went ahead. The intention of the shah was to demonstrate to the Iranian people and to the world at large the heritage of their country and the role which his dynasty was playing in its preservation.
In Tehran great preparations were made including the placing of bas-reliefs with ancient Persian themes in prominent sites across the city. Most important was the construction of an enormous tower incorporating an archway intended to be symbolic of the whole event. This was the Shahyade (‘Souvenir of the Shah’) Tower. Inside was an extensive display of precious artefacts illustrating the history of Iran. The whole vast structure was incorporated into a massive archway and was located at the end of a grand avenue leading from the centre of the city. In this spectacular position it was intended to be the unmissable symbol of the empire and an impressive culmination for great events in the capital.
However, the pièce de résistance of the events was planned to take place not in the modern capital but in Persepolis, the ancient capital itself. Although lost in the sand by the nineteenth century, its name had remained as an evocative symbol of power. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the leader who came to symbolize fearsome eastern power, recalls its glory when he asserts that his ultimate wish was to take this city as Alexander had done over a millennium before:
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, Act II, Scene V
There was also to be a role for Pasargadae, which was where the impressive tomb of Cyrus the Great still stood in lonely isolation in the plain north of Persepolis.
It cannot be denied that the great ceremonial celebrations which took place in Persepolis in the summer of 1971 were spectacular. Large numbers of heads of state, with the monarchs being given pride of place, were invited, together with ambassadors and other high officials and huge tents were put up to accommodate the guests for the lavish banquet which was to be the centre of the event. A history of it all gives some flavour of the extent to which the shah went in providing luxurious food and drink for his guests:
In the sparkling light of huge crystal chandeliers, hung from a ceiling of pure silk, six hundred guests drawn from royalty and the world’s executive power sat down together for a five hour banquet of the century … Chef Max Blouet of Maxim’s de Paris had created … such minor triumphs as quail eggs stuffed with the golden caviar of the Caspian Sea, saddle of lamb with truffles [and] roast peacock stuffed with foie gras capped by its own brilliant plumage … There were some 25,000 bottles of wine.1
The only thing in the banquet which had actually come from Iran was the golden caviar from the Caspian. It is significant that the French President Pompidou stated that he was unable to attend. A number of other heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II, also made their apologies.
In his address at the tomb of Cyrus, the shah concluded with the exhortation, ‘Sleep, O Cyrus, for we are awake.’ Throughout the proceedings, the emphasis was always more on Cyrus than on Darius, who had actually built Persepolis, and the shah announced that the Iranian calendar was to be changed with Year One being the date of the accession of Cyrus. The Cylinder of Cyrus on which were itemized many of the deeds of the great monarch, became one of the emblems of the whole extravagant celebration.2
After the banquet was over, the ruins of Persepolis became the backdrop for great processions of Iranian soldiers dressed in the uniforms of ancient Medes and Persians. The link between the remote past and the present day was stressed and the continuity of Iranian history was the underlying theme. The feeling was engendered that day ‘that the departed shades of the former lords of Asia were hovering unseen over the stage of their former glory’.3 However, to Axworthy it was all folie de grandeur on a sublime scale.4 Certainly it was also Hollywood at its most extravagant.
By this time the shah had become totally intoxicated by the whole project and what it represented and was far more concerned with linking his dynasty to the glorious past than with the welfare of his people. None of this pomp and display was to save the Pahlavi dynasty. Rather than covering it in borrowed glory, as had been intended, it actually increased the dissatisfaction of the Iranian people with their monarch. The summer of festivities emptied the exchequer, weakened further the economy and put the shah’s relationship with his people under ever greater strain.
Meanwhile, Iran was showing little sign of regaining any of the former glory for which the shah yearned. The international position of the country failed to improve and it became ever clearer throughout the 1970s that in reality it was becoming ever more dependent on the Americans. The result of this was increased restiveness among the population and this led to a resurgence of Islam which had played little part in the shah’s great schemes. The Ayatollah Khomeini, a respected Islamic cleric from the holy city of Qom, became the undisputed leader of the new Islamic movement. It was he rather than the shah who became the leader whom the Iranian people saw as being able to deal with their humiliating situation and resolve their problems.
In 1979 the dynasty, self-proclaimed heir to two and a half millennia of power, was toppled and the shah was forced to go into inglorious exile. He was replaced by an Islamic Republic with the Ayatollah Khomeini as its first supreme leader. Islam, marginalized by the shah, returned to centre stage and the secular state which the Pahlavis had attempted to establish was swept away and replaced by a theocracy. The symbols of power created by the shah were either destroyed or put to new uses. The Shahyade Tower in Tehran was renamed the Azadi (Freedom) Tower and was converted into a symbol of the Islamic revolution. What was left of the grandeur of the shah was from then on used to commemorate the new, and very different, masters of the country.
The Pahlavis had sought to bring back the pre-Islamic past but after 1979 Persepolis returned again to being the ruin it had been for most of the time since Alexander’s conquest. At first largely ignored by the new regime, it soon became frequented by tourists, who like others before them marvelled at the long-gone power and splendour of Darius and his successors. The tents erected in 1971 gradually fell away and disappeared into the sand. The signs of the great celebrations themselves soon became part of that past which the shah had attempted to resurrect.
This effort to restore a long-vanished empire was in many ways the last vainglorious gasp of the traditional imperialism deriving from ancient empires and their dynasties. In the years after the Second World War new political forms had been superseding most of the empires. These accorded more closely with the desires of their peoples and were better adapted to contemporary world conditions. In the 1970s, while the last shah was looking back to a dynastic past, the world was changing fast. Ironically, this change had been foreseen in the Tehran Conference of 1943 which took place in the shah’s capital but in which he had been but a spectator. The neo-imperialism of the post-imperial great powers certainly represented a form of continuity with the past but these powers were employing twentieth-century ideologies rather than ancient dynasties as their justification. In the case of Turkey, to which the last shah’s father had looked for guidance, nationalism was the creed used to underpin the state and no attempt was made to resurrect the old Ottoman Empire. This had been consigned to history by Atatürk and under him the country followed quite a different, and far more realistic, path than that of its neighbour. Atatürk looked outwards towards modern Europe while the Shah’s Iran had looked inwards to a Middle Eastern world which was long gone. It also looked back nostalgically to a form of imperialism which had little part to play in the new global system. New forms of power were emerging which in the following decades were to render traditional ones outdated and increasingly irrelevant.
There was also a much bigger change in wider geopolitical arrangements taking place as a result of new global perspectives. In many aspects of life, the world was by then being viewed as an entity and problems and issues were seen as being most effectively addressed in the context of the terrestrial whole. The changes were beginning to have the effect of making economic power ever less linked to political power and so less dependent on it. Out of all this a new form of global power was coming into being which was necessitating the reappraisal of existing political arrangements.
The Azadi Tower, Tehran. Originally this was built as a centrepiece for the Shah’s great commemoration of the establishment of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great. Following the Islamic Revolution it was adopted as one of the symbols of the new Iran.
The symbolism arising from this new scenario was still in its infancy but it was to be very different from that of the past. The invocation to ‘look on my works’ was soon to be replaced by very different physical manifestations of the emerging global order.