Persians
The Age Of The Great Kings
By Lloyd LLewwllyn-Jones
I picked up this book to gain a bit more substance to my
general feeling that Cyrus and Darius were great benevolent kings. I wanted more insight and the book certainly
delivered. Turns out the Achaemenid
held rule over Persian Empire for a two hundred years (~550 -330 BCE). It was a classic familial royal dynasty, with
classic familial intrigue, including assassins, poisoning, and conquests. Wrapped
into this family were brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, mothers, concubines,
and lastly eunuchs. It seems eunuchs played
a major part in the executions of palace tasks, which positioned them in the
thick of the whispering plots. The prime
King names were:
- Cyrus
II “the Great” (550–529 BC)
- Cambyses
II (529–522 BC)
- Darius
I (522–486 BC)
- Xerxes
I (486–465 BC)
- Artaxerxes
I (465–425 BC)
- Xerxes
II (425–424 BC)
- Darius
II (423–404 BC)
- Artaxerxes
II (404–359 BC)
- Artaxerxes
III (359–338 BC)
- Arses
(338–336 BC)
- Darius
III (336–330 BC)
The book lacked maps of which I recommend you have next to
you while reading. Over time of conquest
Persian Empire spanned east to west from Pakistan to Euro Asia north to south
from the Black and Caspian Seas to Egypt and the Indus Valley (India). Each King had a hand in a new conquest, new
palace, and maintaining the peace of their conquest. The reader is made aware that what gave the
Ruler Kings a benevolent reputation is they allowed those they conquered for
the most part to continue their beliefs and way of life. So one may reflect on who the founding fathers
of the USA modeled their governance on?
The book concludes with a chapter King Alexander the Great on
the conquest of the Great Persian. And an
epilogue on how this history shapes the minds of modern day Iranians, of which
I have an affinity for. Missing in this
history is Persia from 530 BCE to 600 AD under Alexander rule and then Muslim
rule, and then the crucial story of Iran
from 1905 through 1979 of secular politics, and finally the brutal IRGC rule
from 1979 to present day.
Why is this history important to me? Because it helps re-enforce my hope for the
IRGC to be removed from Iran.
1.
Page 31: Persians, divided into tribes by what
might be called kahns, found themselves brushing up against some ancient
indigenous peoples, including the culturally sophisticates, sedentary, city
living Elamites. Elam was one of the
most significant of Mesopotamian societies and had strong links to the great
players of the Near East world – The Babylonians and the Assyrian.
2.
Page 33:
The migratory nomads identified themselves as ayra, Ayrans, an ethnic
language label for groups of people who circulates in the geographic region
known as Aryavarta.
3.
Page 34: The
holy prayers, hymns, and rituals contained in the Avesta, the sacred teachings
of early Iranian Aryans, find ready reflection in Rig-Veda, the most important
compendium of religions teachings in the early Indian world. The Avesta and the Rig-Veda emerged from a
common ancestor.
4.
Page 37: A
technological tour-dr force, the bow was a compact little killing machine. It revolutionized warfare and played no small
part in the Eurasian takeover of Iran and the subsequent building of the
Persian empire.
5.
Page 38: The
Elamites were a distinguished and venerable people. They had occupied the, which made the one of
the longest-lasting and most culturally significant peoples of Mesopotamia.
6.
Page 50: Cyrus
was taught to ride a horse, shoot a bow, and to Page tell the truth – and in
each of these valuable life principles Cambyses proved himself to be a patient but
dogmatic master.
7.
Page 53: …it
was the Iranian nomads such as Persians and Meded who first introduced
trouser-wearing to the world.
8.
Page 57:
Cyrus’ connection to the Achaemenids was further solidified when their
most prince and khan, Arasmes, together with his young and energetic son, Hytaspes,
also pledged their support and loyalty to Cyrus and the Teispids of Anshan. With them came the fealty of all Achaemenids
en masse.
9.
Page 59:
The Persian soldiers were stopped in their tracks when their womenfolk
opened their robes, flashed their genitals, and shouted out to them, “where are
you off to, you quitters?! Do you want
to crawl back to where you came from? It
is because of that, in subsequent decades, when the king of Persia travelled To
Pasargadae, he reportedly always presented gifts of gold to the brave local
women.
10. Page
60: Cyrus decided that in peace the
Medes were to be on equal footing with the Persians. Thereafter throughout the Achaemenid period,
Medes were routinely appointed to high office at the Persian Court.
11. Page
61: It was Croesus who first created a
two-part coinage system in which coins of pure gold and pure silver (at a fixed
portion of three to forty)replaced the single coin of white gold.
12. Page
62: Cyrus spared Croesus’ life, brought
him to court in Persia, and valued him as a royal advisor.
13. Page
66: Decades of emulating Assyrian policy of plundering and demanding tribute of
defeated rulers saw Babylon’s treasury swell with loot. … In a bid to add to
his collection of Judaean ephemera, in 597 BCE Nebuchadnezzar deported its king himself, Jehoiachin of Juda,
and no fewer than 10,ooo subjects into Babylonia. The effects of Babylonian exile were profound
and far-reaching. The exile transformed
Judeans into Jews. From being one of
many captive people they emerged as the People of the Book.
14. Page
71: Cyrus was also fashioning himself as
a servant of the Hebrew god and a benefactor of the Jews. In538 BCE he decreed that the temple in Jerusalem
should be rebuilt at his own expense.
15. Page
72: The parallels with Marduk’s
championship of Cyrus are clear, and it is feisable to think that the
Babylonian scribes and the Hebrew prophets drew on a common image of Cyrus as a
champion of the gods.
16. Page
76: Cyrus had decided that his new
empire deserved – and needed – a focal point for ceremonial purposes, and
although Pasargadae was never intended to be the palatial complex of the size
of Persepolis, it was planned to be the focal point of a new-found Persian
kingship.
17. Page
79: When Jewish priests and scribes working
in Persian-occupied Jerusalem and Babylonia, depicted the Garden of Edan, the
locale or the garden of God, they modelled it on a Persian paradise.
18. Page
80: All in all, Pasargadae demonstrated
Cyrus’ sophisticated appreciation of the trappings of kingship and it remained
an important ceremonial Centre throughout the empire’s existence.
19. Page
84: The Achaemenids prized poetry as
much they prized their horses, and a popular tradition for Cyrus-stories told
through verse quickly developed.
20. Page
102: In spite of the heroics, Bardiya
was quickly overwhelmed…with the last son of Cyrus lying dead on the floor all
eyes turned in expectations towards Darius.
One question hung in the air: who should be king now? …. The Gang of Seven had come together for
the sole purpose of eliminating Bardiya.
A deep sense of solidarity existed between them. So it is impossible that the question of
succession had never arisen. It had
probably been settled already because, following Cambyses’ death, it was Darius
alone who managed to hold control and certain contingents of the Persian and
Median army that had fought in Egypt.
21. Page
104: Darius’ Bisitub account of his
succession was a masterful compilation of fake news. It was a rich mélange of untruths, spin and
pure bravado. Darius the Great was
antiquity’s most confident, bold, successful propagandist. … To be Truthful was
to be loyal to the crown and faithful to god.
In the binary world of Persian theological thought, Drauga and Arta were
polar opposites. The Lie was implicitly
the opposite of the Truth and both Truth and the Lie were interlocked in a
nexus of cosmic power struggles. … If
Darius did not lie as such, then he certainly championed the dissemination of
an elaborate series of alternative facts.
22. Page
106: The man Darius killed was Bardiya
Son of Cyrus, brother of Cambyses, and Persia’s legitimate king. All the time, the real traitor, the follower
of the Lie was Darius himself.
23. Page
126: The Old Persian term for the divine
commandment, as well as royal one, is data. It is the
one of the keywords of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions; it means, to all intents
and purposes ‘law’.
24. Page
131: Gimillu’s story is
fascinating. He is one of the few people
from antiquity for whom we have records created as the events happened. After his fa;;, and once the sust settled,
the Enna Temple undertook major administrative reforms in order to ensure that
opportunities for larceny and embezzlement were severely curbed.
25. Page
140: Concubine women afforded important
links between the satrap and local families, and good politicians recognized
that concubines could have an unofficial political influence, since they had
the intimate ear of the satrap.
26. Page
141: The advantage of employing local
elites to defend Persian interests was clear. … Local elites found working
along side the Persians was more profitable than antagonizing them.
27. Page
142: It was under the Achaemenid rulers
that the world experienced its first use of coinage.
28. Page
145: A fast and efficient postal relay
system called in Old Persian pirradazish (express runner) connected
major cities. … No society came close to
matching its competency until modern age.
29. Page
149: The court, too, moved around with
the weather. In the summer the court resided in the cool mountains of Ecbatana.
In the winter it resided in Babylon and Susa in the south. In spring it resided in Persepolis and
Pasargadae. Thousands of people were
affected in each move.
30. Page
157: Darius was proud of his newly built
palace at Susa. He commissioned the
creation of a series of finely carved cuneiform inscriptions to testify to the
multi-ethnic labor of love which went in to its construction.
31. Page
159: The Susa Charters list no fewer
than sixteen regions of the empire that furnished raw materials or labor to
Darius’ building project.
32. Page
160: Persepolis was by far the largest
and most spectacular of the Achaemenid palaces and today it is the most
stunning of antiquity’s ruins.
33. Page
165: We must remember that the art of
Persepolis was not created to be quasi-photographic reflection of reality.,
Persian art does so in order to transform it and make it inspiring. Persepolitan art should be read as an
ideological discourse on the theme of royalty and imperial might, organized
around evocative images of the power of the Great King himself.
34. Page
166: Soon after the consolidation of
imperial power under Cyrus and Cambyses, Achaemenid nobles became the owners of
a very large number of slaves. …a substantial number of slaves performed
domestic work
35. Page
169: It is clear that these old Greeks,
ripped away from their homes many decades before, were kurtash (kurd) …
the story does provide a very grim perspective of Persia’s labor system. The story’s emotional pull stands in stark
contract with Persepolis tablet’s clinically cold administrative language.
36. Page
171: all indicate that the kurtash
were slaves. It was slave labor that lay
behind the hallmarks of physical presence of Persia’s empire.
37. Page
174: The word harem is therefore a term
of respect, evoking personal honor. IN
royal practice harem refers to a king’s women and to all other individuals under
his immediate protection. ..therefore
they followed in peripatetic lifestyle in court.
38. Page
175: We have noted how the Achaemenid
dynasty was essentially a family-run business.
At the heart of the operation was the harem.
39. Page
179: Her name was Irdabama. Recent scholarship suggest that in all
probability, she was the mother of Darius I and thus the most important and
influential woman of the empire.
40. Page
203: In Persepolis records we find and
Elamite word of common usage: ziyan.
It literally means a ‘place of seeing’ and it was used to refer to a temple,
shrine or cult building. Zyian refers to
a place of divine epiphany, a locale where the gods are seen or experienced.
41. Page
205: Because of associations with the figure
of the king and the symbols of power, some scholars argue that the man emerging
from the winged disc is Ahuramazda himself.
42. Page
206: ..in an inscription found from Susa
whare Darius confidently stated that
Ahuramazda is mine, I am Ahuramazda. …
The figure is Ahuramazda, the god who supports the king; the king
receives the glory through the gift of divine khvarenh. (Khvarenah, also known as Farr in
New Persian, is a mystical radiant force believed to emanate
from individuals chosen by God, granting them both the divine right to
rule and the cosmic ability to govern justly)
43. Page
208: The Persians put much emphasis on
the concept of dualism and recognized for every good there is a bad …Ahuramazda met
his counterpart in the form of AngraMainys, an evil spirit who is said to have
created ‘non-life’ that is a form of existence diametrically opposed to that which
is good.
44. Page
211: Zarathustra emphasized the
dualistic nature of the Creation of Ahuramazda and asked followers of the faith
to play their part in rejection of the Lie and the establishment of the Truth
and to this day Zoroastrians maintain a personal commitment to three principal tenants:
to have good thoughts, to speak good words, and to perform good deeds.
45. Page
214: significance of the historical
Zarahustra in history of humanity consisted in his metaphysical interpretation
of morality, especially his idea that the fight between good and evil was the real
force in the order of the universe.
46. Page
215: As the rituals were performed, the
priests prepared a sacred drink from the haoma plant by mashing its twigs with
a mortar and pestle. The paste was mixed
with mare’s milk and was drunk by the priests, who quickly be came intoxicated
with its powerful hallucinogenic properties.
47. Page
220: The mix of deities is best defined
as a Persian pantheon, and the combination of blended Indo-European and Mesopotamian
gods and goddess support the notion that the Achaemenids had proclivity to
merge ancient Iranian and ancient Elamite concepts of the divine and the rituals
of their worship.
48. Page
223: In Book 3 of his Laws, written around
360 BCE, the Greek philosopher Plato reserves a place for a relatively
long exposition on Persian society,
dedicated by and large to a description of, and explanation for, degeneracy. ‘Since the time of Xerxes whose career resembled
that of misfortunate Cambyses, he writes hardly any king of the Persian had
been truly “great” except in title and magnificence. I hold that the reason for this is this the
shocking life that they always lead. I call that a sore losers view)
49. Page
226: He was around sixty-five years
old. Darius had been a remarkable ruler. His vision of an empire linked together by bureaucracy,
communication systems, and the law propelled Persia into an age of world domination. Even his Athenian enemies admitted that
Darius has been an exemplary monarch.
50. Page
232: Outside the tomb chamber, in the
panel above the doorway a carved relief depicts the king standing on a three-stepped
pedestal in front of a fire alter; both king and alter are supported by throne
bearers representing the twenty-eight nations of the empire.
51. 235: Who is the real Xerxes, known to the Persians? His subjects did not know him and Xerexes’ of
courses. They knew him as Xshayarash, a
good Old Persian name meaning ‘ruling over heroes’.
52. Page
280: The Egyptian revolt came to an end
in 454 BCE, after a six long, bloody years of conflict.
53. Page
281: It was into this world of fear that
Ezra stepped. He was a Jewish scribe and
priest who had been born and educated in Persia. He had been commissioned by Artaxerexis I to
return to his homeland and to ensure that Persian laws were being honored. Before departing Mesopotamia, Ezra started a
campaign to return all Jews to their homeland throughout Babilonia informing them
of impending return to the Promised Land and rebuilding the Temple of Solomon.
54. Page
283: According to the Hebrew Bible, the
temple was completed in the sixth reginal year of Darius II, which would place
the event around 418 BCE.
55. Page
334: Parysatis must have been around
ninety years old when she died. She was
one of the great women of ancient history who achieved prominence while living
in the shadow of men, yet excelled in controlling them all.
56. Page
337: The great failing of the
Achaemenids was their terminal inability to deal with the royal succession of
power.
57. Page
338: Finally, after years of plotting,
and by eventually eliminating all his key rivals, Ochus was appointed as Artaxerxes’
heir, very shortly before the old king died t age eight-six. It was December 359 BCE. He had been renowned for being a gentle
ruler, a friend to his subjects.
58. Page
343: The Great King Artaxerxes, the King
of Kings, the King of Countries, the King of this Earth, says I am the son of
King Artaxerexes II. Artaxerxes was the
sin od Darius II. Darius the Great. Darius was the son of a man named Hystaspes. Hystaspes was the son of a man named Arsames,
the Achaemid.
59. Page
380: In 651 CE the Sasanian empire fell
to the Arabs of the south and Iran becam an Islamic State. The new Muslim administration overturned a millennia’s
worth of Iranian political, social, and cultural institutions as access to
power meant that Iranians needed to adopt Arabism and Islam.
60. Page
385: The ai of the anniversary festival
was to identify the Shah not only wit Cyrus the Great himself but to associate
him with the great historical monuments of Iran’s pre-Islamic past and to
celebrate all that is glorious in Iran’s ancient heritage before the shameful
Arab conquest and Muslim takeover of Persia.
