Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  We pulled into a nearly empty parking lot with bright morning sun streaming along the face of the rocky cliffs and the broad open valley that swept by. Soon we were not alone. As the morning warmed up, other cars pulled into the lot, and, high up the tall slab of broken limestone, their passengers could be seen making their way up the access trails as bright blotches of color against the sun-splashed stone.

  The cool, crisp air was ideal for a morning hike. I dug into the slope and began the trudge. Every five or ten minutes I stopped to look back over the fertile valley. Some historians believe that Bisotun was chosen as the site for what would have been a victor’s memorial because it was here that Darius had vanquished Gaumata, the last of the impostors. But why would he make his statement, in pictures and text, so distant from the caravans that would plod by far below? In twenty-first-century terms it was bad advertising strategy, placing a rock billboard out of view of the passing traffic.

  Apparently I knew nothing of promulgating a message in the ancient world, because the reliefs and the text did draw attention, for about two thousand years. Explorers, military men, and diplomats from France, Italy, and England, with other Middle Eastern religions on their mind, believed the reliefs represented either the twelve lost tribes of Israel or Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles. Linguistic light began to appear in the late eighteenth century, when Carsten Niebuhr, a surveyor from Germany, reproduced the text in a published description of his travels in Iran. This enabled Georg Friedrich Grotefend to begin work on cracking the cuneiform code. In 1802 he concluded, correctly, that each of the wedge symbols stood for a letter of the alphabet rather than a syllable, and the arrangement of the wedges did not represent a pictorial sign, as in the case of hieroglyphics or East Asian languages.

  The most persistent pursuer of the mystery of Bisotun was Henry Rawlinson, an officer in the British East India Company. Between 1835 and 1893, with the help of boys from the surrounding valley, Rawlinson used boards and ropes to get a closer look at the portions of the text too difficult to view. The effort paid off. He and a team of Asian linguistic scholars were ultimately able to connect the wedge-shaped symbols into an entire rendering of Darius’s message.

  I have always found this to be one of the most humbling experiences in the ancient world—visiting temples, monuments, and memorials whose scale reflects the vision of their builders. To fully appreciate them we have to dismiss any views on the religious values they represent and even the megalomania that often drove their construction, and see them solely through the eyes of their own times. And considering the tools and technical knowledge available to build them, the accomplishments loom greater than the battles and other events they commemorate.

  For all the weight that Bisotun carries in Persian history, the site has also been a source for legends, and like most legends, how much is truth and how much is fiction is encrypted within the stone of the mountain. According to Ferdowsi, the eleventh-century poet and crafter of legends, there was once a man named Farhad, who had fallen in love with Shirin, the wife of King Khosrow. Once this was found out, Farhad was punished by being ordered to find water within the mountain. But there was a caveat—if his labors bore fruit, the king’s wife would be his. For years Farhad toiled away, and one day water sprung from a hole he had dug. But rather than being rewarded with a bride, Farhad was told that Shirin had passed away. He lost his mind and died on the spot. But it was all a ruse. Shirin was alive and well, and was devastated on hearing of Farhad’s death.

  Ferdowsi would never let a tale end on such a bleak note. When Farhad was told the grim news, fake though it was, he hurled his axe down the mountain. The axe was made from the wood of a pomegranate tree, and where it landed a pomegranate tree later sprouted, and fruit from the tree had the power to heal the sick.

  We had another stop to make. A few miles out of Kermanshah we pulled into a parking area on the north side of the road. Sohrab told me nothing as we got out of the car and followed a paved path that led through what appeared to be a roadside rest area with a reflecting pool as its centerpiece. We strode on a little further, and the figurative curtain was pulled back.

  We were at Taq-e Bostan. In simple terms, Taq-e Bostan is a series of gigantic relief sculptures carved onto a rock face and framed by archways topped with the images of women in various forms of dress—luxurious, thinly veiled, and in some cases no dress at all. In historical terms, Taq-e Bostan is another celebration of Persian glory in large-scale stone images. Call them stone billboards that once advertised the greatness of the empire for passing traders.

  In Persian terms, the carvings at Taq-e Bostan are still “young”—less than two thousand years old, having been chiseled out of the rock between the fourth and seventh centuries. True to their times, they portray the Sassanid kings Ardashir II, Shapur II, Shapur III, and Khosrow II in suitably regal fashion. In one of the reliefs, Ardashir II is becoming ruler of the empire as he and another figure, believed to be his predecessor, Shapur II, trample Julianus Apostata, a vanquished Roman emperor, with their feet. In another, Khosrow II demonstrates his kingly qualities by shooting a boar while saddled on his favorite horse. Both horse and rider are decked out in full warrior gear. Smaller reliefs portray the kings enjoying their favorite pastime—hunting. The god Mithra also appears, standing on a lotus flower and bearing a barsum—a handful of branches that was the symbol of divine power. For anyone wondering what the whole display is about, inscriptions—captions, in contemporary terms—are cut into the rock. The inscription for Shapur III reads:

  This is the figure of Mazda-worshipping Lord Shapur, the king of kings of Iran and Aniran, whose race is from the Gods. Son of Mazda-worshipping Lord Shapur, the king of kings of Iran and Aniran, whose race is from the Gods, grandson of Lord Hormizd, the king of kings.

  Little of this would have been eye opening in Greece or Rome, or other parts of the world where ancient cultures once flourished, but in today’s Iran, reliefs like those at Taq-e Bostan have added meaning. They are ever-present reminders that much of Persian culture, and therefore the Persian identity, predates the arrival of Islam. In today’s Iran, the Islamic message attempts to sweep away over five thousand years of history, but Persia’s past continues to bleed through, a litany of indelible facts that cannot be washed away. For many Iranians, reliefs like those at Taq-e Bostan also stand as a symbol of lost greatness, with the kings of former dynasties replaced by a government of hardline mullahs and two Supreme Leaders whose ruling principle has been adherence to a religious doctrine that has no deep roots in Persia’s cultural history.

  Leaving Kermanshah we headed south and then east on the way to Esfahan, skirting the Zagros Mountains and snow-capped Mount Sefidkhani, its graceful ridge rising above the winter-brown valleys. Cross-country driving is often like this in Iran, using the broad, sweeping valleys to zigzag around the mountain ranges that cut north and south, east and west, dividing the landscape into distinct regions that, interwoven, form the identity of the country.

  Halfway between Kermanshah and Esfahan we passed through Arak, an industrial city that straddles the fault lines of ancient and modern Iran. The name itself carries the weight of history. Arak derives from the Arabic Al-Iraq, which linguists speculate may have descended from the Hebrew erech, meaning “long.” Erech was also mentioned in the book of Genesis as a city in the kingdom of Nimrod. Etymology aside, in the eighth century BCE, the region stretched from Arak to the border of today’s Iraq and beyond, under the rule of the massive and sprawling Median Empire. The ruins of ancient cities stand, or lie, as remnants of the Arab spillover from the Babylonian kingdom.

  Arak, today, is one of Iran’s industrial centers, a product of Mohammad Reza Shah’s modernization campaign to thrust the country into the twentieth century before it passed into the twenty-first. In 1974 Wagon Pars began making railroad cars and engines, and the bright blue-and-white trains have managed to reach speeds of one hundred miles per hour. Arak also generates steel, aluminum, and petr
ochemicals, but its highest-profile and most controversial industry has been the heavy water reactor at Khondab, about twenty miles northwest of the city.

  Whether the reactor has been producing so-called heavy water to aid in the production of weapons-grade plutonium has sent jitters through countries worried about Iran’s nuclear program, rumbles at least as tremulous as the 2018 quake that shook Kermanshah. Inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and studies by nuclear experts have been—fittingly, in Iranian terms—inconclusive. Concrete was poured into the reactor core in January 2016, and the IAEA has stated that there is no evidence that the heavy water from the reactor has been used to produce weapons-grade fuel. Yet Iran is still Iran, one of the few countries in the world capable of combining the facts of hard science with political ambiguity.

  6

  Hamedan

  City of the Jewish Queen

  The great god is Ahuramazda, greatest of all the gods, who created the earth and the sky and the people, who made Xerxes king, and outstanding king as outstanding ruler among innumerable rulers. I am the great king Xerxes, king of kings, king of lands with numerous inhabitants, king of this vast kingdom with far-away territories, son of the Achaemenid monarch Darius.

  —Cuneiform inscription at Ganjnameh

  The layout of Hamedan is emblematic of today’s Iran. The center is dominated by a traffic roundabout where six radial roads converge. In the center stands a circular relief sculpture of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the first Supreme Leader appears, as he does everywhere, severe and grim-faced, his bushy eyebrows hovering over darkly piercing eyes. The majority of Hamedan’s residents pay him little notice as they circle through the roundabout, while small bundles of flowers left beneath Khomeini’s stern gaze wither in the midday sun. It is a grim metaphor: Shiite Islam lies at the core of Iranian society, around which most Iranians navigate while trying to ignore it as much as possible.

  Still, there is a normalcy to Hamedan, an “anywhere” feel, as there is an “anywhere” feel to Des Moines, Iowa, and other cities in Middle America. With half a million residents, Hamedan is neither a traffic-choked megalopolis like Tehran nor a regional backwater. It lacks the spellbinding architecture of Esfahan and the cultural legacy of Shiraz, but it has a university with two thousand students and other landmarks that give it a place on the Persian map. And some historians believe it to be one of the oldest cities in the world, dating to at least 1100 BCE.

  We rolled into Hamedan after a two-hour drive from Kermanshah, zigzagging through the smooth rolling hills and open fields that form the apron of the Zagros Mountains. I had been to Hamedan once before, in June 2009, during the postelection riots that followed the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Being a university town, it was inevitable that the turmoil in Tehran would find its way there. On the day I arrived, there had been clashes between protestors and the security forces, but by late afternoon the dustups had settled into a tense standoff. The Revolutionary Guard had parked their troop carriers around Azadi Square and other strategic points in the city, from where they eyed the troublemakers with the same severe gaze as Khomeini at the roundabout.

  Now something else was brewing, but this time more personal than political, or historic, or cultural. An hour out of town Sohrab had made a couple of calls from the car and spoke in the coy, mellifluous tone men use when they are conversing with women they are not married to. He had a wife and three children, but over our many hours of road talk he freely admitted that he “played around a bit,” so I sensed he had inserted a late-day dalliance into the day’s itinerary.

  Since we had left Tehran, Sohrab was allowing me much freer rein. In the capital, the discovery of an American wandering loose without his guide could have left him with many questions to answer to the authorities. But here in the hinterlands, the risks were reduced, so he agreed to drop me at Hamedan’s famous stone lion and pick me up a few hours later at the mausoleum of the Avicenna, the eleventh-century physician and, many claim, the founder of modern medicine. In between—he said with a straight face—he had to have the car serviced.

  Hamedan’s stone lion is just that—a lion carved from a block of stone hauled out of the nearby mountains.

  The lion is one of a pair that guarded the gates of the city for almost a thousand years, well after the Arab invasion of 633 CE. The Iranian Organization of Cultural Affairs claims it was left by Alexander the Great when he tore through the Persian Empire in 331 BCE. The Macedonian conqueror made it in honor of one of his soldiers, Hephaestus, who passed away in Ecbatana (Hamedan’s former Persian name). But another narrative claims that the lion was carved during the Arsacid dynasty, which ruled the Kingdom of Armenia from 54 to 428 CE. This is proven—as much as any archaeological claim can be—by the style of stone, later also found on sarcophagi in the area.

  Whatever the origin of the lions, in 931 the Zoroastrian warrior Mardavij tried to move the lions to the city of Rey while attempting to wrest control of Hamedan from Muslim invaders, but one was destroyed. The lone lion remains, though badly weather-beaten and with a broken paw, a reminder of the many invasions Iran has borne.

  It was a beautiful spring afternoon. The rays of the late-afternoon sun streamed through the thick boughs of the oak trees. Young mothers pushed baby strollers along the pathways as they ran errands to the neighborhood markets. Old men gathered on wooden benches, leaning on canes and playing endless rounds of backgammon and chess.

  I was strolling along one of the footpaths when I was approached by a young man dressed in neat slacks and a button-down shirt, carrying the clean-cut look of a medical student. His name was Javad, and he worked as a journalist for one of Hamedan’s media outlets. Or so he said. Naturally, he asked where I was from, and naturally, when I told him, his eyes brightened. Then he was not about to let me go. One after the other, the questions tumbled out: How long had I been in Iran? Had my ideas about Iran changed? What would I tell friends back home? But something did not feel right. I was used to being bombarded with questions by curious Iranians, but Javad rattled his off as though he was reading from a prepared script, like a junior interviewer who needed to polish his skills. Government informants are known to linger around tourist areas, eyeing foreign visitors to latch on to, and then pepper them with questions as a way of feeling them out. With luck, they might uncover a Western journalist, or better yet—the gold medal—a foreign intelligence agent.

  I answered with the appropriate evasiveness: Yes, Iran was impressive. No, it was not what I thought. And then I told him that I had to meet my guide. He asked where. At the mausoleum of Avicenna, a good ten-minute walk away, I told him, thinking that would shake him off, but no. With Persian politeness, he offered to escort me there. So as long as I had to bear him I decided to get the most of it—to grill him as he had grilled me. I asked him if, as a working journalist, it was possible to write anything he wanted.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, a little too quickly.

  “Really, anything?”

  “Of course—as long as it is factual.”

  “And opinions?”

  “Oh, that’s no problem. We can express any views.”

  “Any at all?”

  “Yes—as long as they have validity.”

  And so it went. Maybe Javad wasn’t a government informant. But if he wasn’t, it was clear that he was only capable of scripted answers, talking points issued in journalism school to prospective regime toadies. What he believed, if he believed anything at all, was never going to be revealed to an American visitor he had corralled in a park.

  Then Javad became curious. He asked about restrictions on American journalism: Was it true that newspapers in the U.S. could publish anything they wanted?

  “Well, almost, but certain standards have to be maintained.”

  “What if lies are spread, about people’s reputations?”

  “There are laws against slander and libel.”

  He had heard that European countries had laws against such th
ings like hate speech—didn’t Americans believe in any limits?

  Javad’s questions were horribly reductive, but the fact that he had posed them at all held promise. He could have been of two minds: he may have absorbed just enough regime propaganda to get him a job as a journalist, or as a working journalist he may have harbored genuine curiosity about the principles of international media. Both could have been true. Or neither. Maybe he simply wanted to feel me out. There was no way to tell. He was a cipher, and therefore the perfect public face of an authoritarian government.

  We were passing through Azadi Square, which had been chockablock with military personnel transport trucks the last time I was there. But now students were gathered at a colorful juice bar that opened onto the street, and others were lounging on the grass, flipping through textbooks as they absorbed the receding rays of the early summer sun. I fumbled through a few more answers to Javad’s inane questions, and then we arrived at the mausoleum of Avicenna. With customary Persian politeness he wished me a pleasant time in Iran and thanked me for showing interest in the country. For the first time I actually believed something he said. But before he could get away I thought I’d get mischievous. I asked him where I could find the home of Shirin Ebadi. The 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner and international human rights advocate had been born in Hamedan.

  Javad’s grin vanished into a look of confusion. “Oh, she doesn’t live here anymore,” he said.

  I knew that. Shortly after the 2009 postelection riots Ebadi had to flee Iran, driven out by crackdowns and intimidation, and since then she had divided her time between London and Toronto. Her office in Tehran had been closed, her sister briefly detained. This was long-common regime practice—to harass the relatives of dissidents living safely outside the country as a way of intimidating and muzzling them.