Discovering Cyrus: a Persian Conqueror Astride the Ancient World

"This is a mammoth book, around 900 pages. I really like it because it’s full of the zest and enthusiasm of this young Iranian scholar looking at his own history. This is really important for me because I think that, in Iran today, ancient history is very political, as you can imagine. What the Iranians do with their pre-Islamic past is a hot potato. Therefore, within Iran itself, there is very little history being written by Iranian scholars. But the Iranian diaspora is producing scholars and I think that’s important. It goes back to my point about the Westernization of Persian history. Why are we Europeans and Americans writing this? We should be hearing Iranian voices. Zaghamee’s book is enthusiastic and it flows and it’s vibrant and lively. And yet, at the same time, he’s a very careful scholar. He goes into real detail on every aspect of what he could put together as a biography of Cyrus. Writing a biography of any Achaemenid monarch is almost impossible because most of the time we’re dealing with Greco-Roman sources. What he does with those sources is he takes them apart and tries to look for the Persian version—or the Near Eastern version—that sits behind them. The other thing he does, which I think is really interesting, is that he’s very aware of the reception of Cyrus within Persian culture across the millennium. So, where you might find stories of Cyrus the Great in embryo in tales from, for instance, the Shahnameh —the Epic of Kings—a medieval treatment of Persian history, he looks at those strands that maybe we as westerners wouldn’t immediately see, but are very much alive in the Iranian tradition today. It’s a big book and it’s not immediately useful for teaching, but it’s actually one that readers could sit with over a couple of months and really enjoy. It’s finely written. And it’s packed full of fact and packed full of interesting ideas on a slant, which I like very much indeed. We have royal inscriptions from Persia written in the Old Persian language, in cuneiform, but these, by and large, are very ahistorical. Really, they are boasts by Persian kings of the extent of the Empire and what they’ve done, plus lists of imperial titles. We only have one narrative account. That is the rather bogus account of Darius the Great’s accession to power. But there was no conception of writing down history as in the Greek form, like Herodotus . That’s not to say that the Persians didn’t have a concept of history. They just remembered it differently. And I think the way in which they used, or activated their history, was through poetry, through song, what Parry and Lord identified as ‘the oral tradition’. So, I think that, if we were to look for a Persian history, it would be more akin to a Homeric epic, than an ‘inquiry’ in the Herodotean style. That was something that really didn’t appeal to Near Easterners generally. And, of course, the Iranians, with their origins in Indo-European/ Eurasian society employed the same historical tradition as Mongols or Turks—essentially song and poetry in oral transmission is how they would have remembered. That’s a huge barrier for us. So, very often we have to rely on the Greek sources to give us narrative. What we are able to do now, of course, is to punctuate those narratives with genuine Persian things and it’s a concept that people were thinking about before the Achaemenid History Workshop started. In the 1940s, for instance, Robert Graves, the brilliant classicist, wrote a fantastic poem called “The Persian Version” in which he asks whether you can really imagine that the Greek story of the Battle of Marathon was how the Persians thought of it. He points out that it wasn’t something that was played out on stages in tragedies for them. It was just a skirmish and nothing more. That really encouraged me to take that stance in my book, as well. So, there are big source problems, but not insurmountable ones. It is quite remarkable. I think he truly deserves the title ‘the Great’. He must have been a man of genius. He came from an area in southwest Iran which today is Fars Province, around the area of Shiraz, towards the Zagros Mountains. He was known there as the King of Anshan—Anshan was the name of this ancient province. At the time of his birth, around about 600 BCE, the tribes in the north of Iran, the Medes, were becoming increasingly aggressive towards their southern Persian neighbours and they almost set up a protectorate in Persia, governed by high-ranking Medes. So, there was a great deal of hostility in the south, in the tribes of the Persians, with the Medes. It was Cyrus who first gathered the different confederacies of the Persians—the Persians were a very tribal society. They were an equestrian society. In my book I call the leaders of these tribes not ‘chiefs’, but ‘khans’, which is Eurasian and, I think, the right word for them; I want to get the reader to think of the Persians as part of the cultural world of Eurasia. Cyrus united these tribes under his banner and marched north with them. He defeated the khanate of the Medes. And with that, Cyrus inherited the nomadic empire of the Medes, which stretched around the Caspian Sea and into northern Turkey as well: so large swaths of land. From there he was unstoppable. He marched over the whole of Anatolia to the coast, put to death king Croesus and captured Sardis, the wealthiest city in the known world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Then, marching back to Persia, he decided to have a go at Babylon which was the greatest metropolis in the world at the time, but in a lot of trouble under its later kings, who had really let the city go. He conquered Babylon very easily. In fact, Babylon opened its doors to Cyrus, having been forewarned of the damage that could be done—he completely destroyed the city of Opis, about 50 miles north of Babylon. But what’s interesting about Cyrus is that, very craftily, in a very modern way, he used propaganda to endorse the conquest of Babylon, calling it a liberation from the oppression of its very weak rulers. And he used the Babylonian priests to write this document, which we call ‘the Cyrus Cylinder’, now in the British Museum. It put forward this idea that he had been blessed by the gods of Babylon, that the god Marduk had chosen Cyrus as his champion. Cyrus was very good at spin! The wording in the Cyrus Cylinder is found in the prophecies of Isaiah, in the Hebrew Bible, where Cyrus is the champion of YHWH, the Jewish God and gone down in history for liberating the Jews from their Babylonian bondage. Cyrus played very carefully to different audiences and I think that propaganda is one of the real successes of the Persian Empire. It was built on this idea of liberation, even though it really wasn’t. I always think of George Bush, when he first went into Iraq in the first Gulf War. He called it ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. I think we can call Cyrus’s Babylon campaign ‘Operation Babylonian Freedom’ in the same kind of way. He didn’t really have new tactics, or introduce new weaponry. What he did have was an incredible cavalry. The Persians had always been amazing horsemen. On Darius the Great’s tomb inscription it says: “I am as great a bowman as a spearman; I’m as great a spearman as a horseman; I am a great horseman.” It’s those three things that set the Persians apart. You might have heard of the so-called ‘Parthian shot’, for instance, where a rider could turn at 90 degrees and fire arrows behind him so he could circle his enemies. It was the tactics of the cavalry more than anything else that won the Persians their victories."