The Persian Empire

"I like it a lot. It was published in 1980 and it kind of disappeared underneath what was happening in academia at the time. In 1978 Edward Said published Orientalism and this made a major contribution to the way in which we began to look at Persian history. In 1980, at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, they started a seminar series called the Achaemenid History Workshop and its main focus was to look at whether the Persian Empire really was this empire of decadence. Was it in decline at the time of Alexander? Did Alexander just strike the death blow to this imperial system that was in sharp decline anyway? (The answer was ‘no’, by the way). All of that came out of Said’s conception of how the West had seen the East, and it was just a terrible accident of fate that Cook published his book on the eve of that revolution. The book received enormous criticism from the members of this Achaemenid Workshop in particular, who became the giants of Persian studies, like Heleen Scancisi-Weerdenburg, Pierre Briant and others. They saw it as the last vestige of an orientalist tract. John Cook, who was trained as a classicist, was in his 80s when he wrote the book. He used phrases like ‘in the Orient we can see’ or ‘the Oriental mindset’ and so forth, but never in a detrimental or patronising way. But they pounced on him as a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim, for this new kind of thinking about the Persian Empire. I often wonder if they really read Cook’s book properly, because what I see in his work is a very balanced and careful use of the sources. Cook trained as a classicist and knows his classical sources really well but, at the same time, throughout the book he is doing things that no other ancient historian was doing at the time. He was using cuneiform evidence. He was looking at Persian art and Persian architecture. He had travelled to Iran. It is quite clear that he loved the place. This is not a derogatory, orientalist diatribe of the kind that the critics immediately took it to be. It lost its kudos almost entirely. I don’t know how John Cook took it. I’ve never seen any rebuttal. I think he died shortly afterwards, sadly. “It’s one of my missions to get Persia into mainstream, popular discourse because it’s a fascinating area” But when you look at it today, I think his Persian Empire still stands as a very competent text, anticipating a lot of the questions that the Achaemenid Workshop itself was set up to answer and looked into over the next three decades. I go back to it time and time again because it’s reliable, it’s factual and you see a really good ancient historian grappling with questions that are still being grappled with today. So, if there’s a book I would like to reintroduce it’s this one. I would love to see it republished and remarketed to get the kudo s I think it deserves. I give my students sections of it to read because it’s a very straight, clear narrative history, which is what I like. It’s very readable and beautifully written, as well. He was in his prime in the 1950s and he has the beautiful rhetorical style of that era. It’s an elegant read. I also feel close to it because Cook ended his career at Edinburgh University, which is where I started mine. In fact, I reintroduced Persian studies to Edinburgh University and I was always aware that I was in the shadow of Cook. So, I’ve always kind of championed him. It’s a book that means a lot to me, but a book that is far cleverer, far more pertinent and far more aware of the genuine Persian sources than it’s been credited with."