There are many books available on contemporary Iran, and on earlier periods of Iranian history, and several that cover the whole history of Iran from the earliest times—notably the monumental seven volume Cambridge History of Iran, and the huge project of the Encyclopedia Iranica, incomplete but nonetheless incomparable for the range and depth of knowledge of Iranian history it pulls together (and much more than history). This book does not attempt to compete with those, but tries rather to present an introduction to the history of Iran for a general readership, assuming little or no prior knowledge. In addition it aims to explain some of the paradoxes and contradictions through the history—probably the only way that they can be properly understood. And beyond that—especially in Chapter 3, which explores some of the treasury of classical Persian poetry—it attempts to give the beginnings of an insight into the way in which the intellectual and literary culture of Iran developed, and has had a wider influence, not just in the Middle East, Central Asia and India, but throughout the world.
1
ORIGINS: ZOROASTER, THE ACHAEMENIDS,
AND THE GREEKS
O Cyrus…Your subjects, the Persians, are a poor people with a proud spirit
(King Croesus of Lydia, according to Herodotus)
The history of Iran starts with a question. Who are the Iranians? Where did they come from? The question concerns not just the origins of Iran, but recurs in the history of the country and its people down to the present day, in one form or another.
The classic answer was that the Iranians were one branch of the Indo-European family of peoples that moved out of what are today the Russian steppes to settle in Europe, Iran, Central Asia and northern India in a series of migrations and invasions in the latter part of the second millennium BCE.
This answer at the same time explains the close relationship between the Persian language and the other Indo-European languages: particularly Sanskrit and Latin for example, but modern languages like Hindi, German and English too. Any speaker of a European language learning Persian soon encounters a series of familiar words, like distant friends, just a few of which include pedar (father, Latin pater), dokhtar (daughter, girl, German tochter), mordan (to die, Latin mortuus, French mourir, le mort), nam (name) dar (door), moush (mouse), robudan (to rob) setare (star), tarik (dark), tondar (thunder), and perhaps the most basic of all, the first person present singular of the verb to be, in Persian the suffix –am (I am—as in the sentence ‘I am an Iranian’—Irani-am). An English-speaker who has attempted to learn German will find Persian grammar both familiar and blessedly simple by comparison (no genders or grammatical cases for nouns, for example). Persian (like English) has evolved since ancient times into a simplified form, dropping the previous, heavily inflected grammar of old Persian. It has no structural relationship with Arabic or the other Semitic languages of the ancient Middle East, like Aramaic (though it took in many Arab words after the Arab conquest).
Long before the migrants speaking Iranian languages arrived from the north, there were other people living in what later became the land of Iran (Iran zamin). There were human beings living on the Iranian plateau as early as 100,000 BCE, in what is called the Old Stone Age, and by 6-5,000 BCE agricultural settlements were flourishing in and around the Zagros mountains, in the area to the east of the great Sumerian civilisation of Mesopotamia. Excavation of one of these settlements (at Hajji Feroz Tepe) has produced the remains of the world’s oldest wine jar, complete with grape residue and traces of resin (used as a flavouring and preservative), indicating that the wine would have tasted something like Greek retsina1. Peoples like the Gutians and the Mannaeans are mainly known from their contacts with Mesopotamia. Before and during the period of the Iranian migrations, an empire flourished in the area that later became Khuzestan and Fars—the empire of Elam, based on the cities of Susa and Anshan. The Elamites spoke a language that was neither Mesopotamian nor Iranian, though they were influenced (and sometimes conquered) by the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians, and transmitted elements of their culture on to the later Iranian dynasties. Elamite influence spread beyond the area usually associated with their empire, an example being Tepe Sialk (just south of modern Kashan), which with its ziggurat and other characteristics shows all the forms of an Elamite settlement. The ziggurat at Tepe Sialk has been dated to around 2900 BCE.
DNA-based research in other countries in recent years has tended to emphasise the relative stability of the genetic pool over time, despite conquests, migrations and what look from historical accounts to be mass settlements or even genocides. It is likely that the Iranian settlers or conquerors were relatively few in number compared to the pre-existing peoples who later adopted their language and intermarried with them. And probably ever since that time, down to the present day, the rulers of Iran have ruled over at least some non-Iranian peoples. So from the very beginning the Idea of Iran was as much about culture and language, in complex patterns, as about race or territory.
From the very beginning there was always a division (albeit a fuzzy one) between nomadic or semi-nomadic, pastoralist inhabitants and the settled, crop-growing agriculturalists. Iran is a land of great contrasts in climate and geography, from the dense, humid forests of Mazanderan in the north to the arid, hot Persian Gulf coast; from the high, cold mountains of the Alborz, the Zagros and the Caucasus to the deserts of the Dasht-e Lut and the Dasht-e Kavir; and in addition to areas of productive agricultural land (expanded by ingenious use of irrigation from groundwater) there have always been more extensive areas of rugged mountain and semi-desert, worthless for crops but suitable for grazing, albeit perhaps only for a limited period each year. Over these lands the nomads moved their herds. The early Iranians seem to have herded cattle in particular.
In the pre-modern world pastoralist nomads had many advantages over settled peasant farmers. Their wealth was their livestock, which meant their wealth was movable and they could escape from threats of violence with little loss. Other nomads might attack them but they could raid peasant settlements with relative impunity. Peasant farmers were always much more vulnerable: if threatened with violence at harvest-time they stood to lose the accumulated value of a full year’s work and be rendered destitute. In peaceful times nomads would be happy to trade meat and wool with the peasants in exchange for grain and other crops, but the nomads always had the option to add direct coercion to purely economic bargaining. The nomads tended to have the upper hand and this remained the case from when the Indo-European pastoralist Iranians entered the Iranian plateau for the first time, right down to the twentieth century.
From these circumstances a system of tribute or what a Mafioso in another context would call protection could develop: the peasants would pay over a proportion of their harvest to be left alone. From another perspective, augmented with some presentational subtlety, tradition and perhaps charisma, it could be called taxation and government (just as in medieval Europe the distinction between robber baron and feudal lord could be a fine one). Most of the rulers of Iran through the centuries originated from among the nomadic tribes (including from among non-Iranian nomads that arrived in later waves of migration), and animosity between the nomads and the settled population also persisted down to modern times. The settled population (particularly later, when towns and cities developed) regarded themselves as more civilised, less violent, less crude. The nomads saw them as soft and devious, themselves by contrast as hardy, tough, self-reliant, exemplifying a kind of rugged honesty. There would have been elements of truth in both caricatures, but the attitudes of the early Iranian élites partook especially of the latter.
Medes and Persians
The Iranian-speakers who migrated into the land of Iran and the surrounding area in the years before 1000 BCE were not one single tribe or group. In time some of their descendants became known as Medes and Persians, but there were Parthians, Sogdians and others too (and the people known to modern scholars as the Avestans, in whose language the earliest Zoroastrian liturgies we
re compiled), who only acquired the names known to us later in their history. And even the titles Mede and Persian were themselves simplifications, lumping together shifting alliances and confederacies of disparate tribes.
From the beginning the Medes and Persians are mentioned together in historical sources, suggesting a close relationship between them from the very earliest times. The very first such mention is in an Assyrian record of 836 BCE, an account of a military campaign by the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III, which he and several of his successors waged in the Zagros mountains and as far east as Mount Demavand, the high, extinct volcano in the Alborz range, to the east of modern Tehran. The accounts they left behind listed the Medes and Persians as tributaries. The heartlands of the Medes were in the north-west, in the modern provinces of Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Hamadan and Tehran. In the region of the Zagros south of the territories occupied by the Medes, the Assyrians encountered the Persians in the region they called Parsuash, and which has been known ever since as Pars or Fars, in one form or another2.
Appearing first as victims of the Assyrians and as tributaries, within a century or so the Medes and Persians were fighting back, attacking Assyrian territories. Later traditions recorded by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE mention early kings of the Medes called Deioces and Cyaxares, who appeared in the Assyrian accounts as Daiaukku and Uaksatar; and a king of the Persians called Achaemenes, who the Assyrians called Hakhamanish. By 700 BCE (with the help of Scythian tribes) the Medes had established an independent state, which later grew to become the first Iranian Empire; and in 612 BCE the Medes destroyed the Assyrian capital, Nineveh (adjacent to modern Mosul, on the Tigris). At its height the Median Empire stretched from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, and south to the Persian Gulf, ruling the Persians as vassals as well as many other subject peoples.
The Prophet Who Laughed
But probably rather before the first mentions of the Iranians and their kings appear in the historical records, another important historical figure lived—Zoroaster or Zarathustra (modern Persian Zardosht). That is, he is a historical figure because it is generally accepted that he lived and was not just a man of myth or legend; but his dates are unknown and experts have disagreed radically about when he lived. Compared with Jesus, Mohammad or even Moses, Zoroaster is a much more indistinct figure and little is known for sure about his life (the best evidence suggests he lived in the north-east, in what later became Bactria and later still, Afghanistan—but another tradition has suggested he came from what is now Azerbaijan, around the river Araxes, and others have suggested a migration from the one locality to the other). As a key figure in the history of world religions and as a religious thinker, Zoroaster certainly ranks in importance with those other prophets. But it is also difficult to establish the precise import of his teaching, for the same reason that the details of his life are obscure—because the Zoroastrian religious texts that are the main source for both (notably the Avesta) were first written in the form they have come down to us more than a thousand years after he lived, around the end of the Sassanid era, in the sixth century AD.3 The stories about Zoroaster they contain are little more than fables (though some of them correspond with information from Classical Greek and Latin commentators, showing their genuine antiquity—for example the story that at birth the infant Zoroaster did not cry, but laughed), and the theology combines what are undoubtedly ancient elements with innovations that developed and were incorporated much later.
So although Zoroastrian tradition places his birth at around 600 BCE (and associates him with an Achaemenian Persian prince, Vistaspa) most scholars now believe he lived earlier. It is still unclear just when, but it is reasonable to think it was around 1200 or 1000 BCE, at the time of or shortly after the migrations of Iranian cattle-herders to the Iranian plateau. This view is based on the fact that the earliest texts (the Gathas, traditionally hymns first sung by Zoroaster himself) show significant differences with the later liturgical language associated with the period around 600 BCE; but also on the pastoral way of life reflected in the texts, and the absence in them of references to the Medes or Persians, or the names of kings or other people known from that time. It seems plausible that Zoroaster’s revelation arose in the context of the changes, new demands and new influences associated with the migration; and the self-questioning of a culture faced with new neighbours and unfamiliar pressures. The religion was the result of an encounter with a new complexity. It was to some extent, a compromise with it, but also an attempt to govern it with new principles.
Other evidence supports the view that Zoroaster did not invent a religion from nothing, but reformed and simplified pre-existing religious practices (against some resistance from traditional priests), infusing them with a much more sophisticated philosophical theology and a greater emphasis on morality and justice, in this period of transition. One element to support this is an early tradition that writing was alien and demonic—suggesting that the Iranians associated it with the Semitic and other peoples among whom the migrants found themselves in the centuries after the migration4. Another telling indication is the fact that the Persian word div, cognate with both Latin and Sanskrit words for the gods, in the Zoroastrian context was used for a class of demons opposed to Zoroaster and his followers—suggesting that the reforming prophet reclassified at least some previous deities as evil spirits.5 The demons were associated with chaos and disorder—the antithesis of the principles of goodness and justice represented by the new religion. At the more mundane level they also lay behind diseases of people and animals, bad weather and other natural disasters.
At the centre of Zoroaster’s theology was the opposition between Ahura Mazda, the creator-God of truth and light, and Ahriman, the embodiment of lies, darkness and evil (though in the earliest times Ahriman’s direct opponent was Spenta Mainyu—Bounteous Spirit—rather than Ahura Mazda, who was represented as being above the conflict). This dualism became a persistent theme in Iranian thought for centuries: modern Zoroastrianism is much more strongly monotheistic, and to make this distinction (and others) more explicit many scholars refer to the religion in this early stage as Mazdaism. Other pre-existing deities were incorporated into the Mazdaean religious structure as angels or archangels—notably Mithra, a sun god, and Anahita, a goddess of streams and rivers. Six Immortal archangels (the Amesha Spenta) embodied animal life, plant life, metals and minerals, earth, fire and water (the names of several of these archangels—for example Bahman, Ordibehesht, Khordad—survive as months in the modern Iranian calendar, even under the Islamic republic). Ahura Mazda himself personified air, and in origin paralleled the Greek Zeus, as a sky-god.
The modern Persian month Bahman is named after the Mazdaean archangel Vohu Manu—the second in rank after Ahura Mazda, characterised as Good Purpose and identified with the cattle who were the second class of beings to be created by Ahura Mazda after man himself. Part of the creation myth in Zoroastrianism is the story that, after all was created good by Ahura Mazda, the evil spirit Ahriman (accompanied by six evil spirits matching the six Immortals) assaulted creation, murdering the first man, killing the sacred bull Vohu Manu and polluting water and fire. The importance of cattle to the nomadic early Iranians is shown by the frequent appearance of bulls and cattle in sculpture and iconography from the Achaemenid period—but many of these images may have a more specific religious significance, referring to Vohu Manu.
Fig. 1. This image of a bull attacked by a lion has normally been taken to symbolise Noruz, the Iranian New Year, with spring replacing winter at the spring equinox (21 March). But it may have a more precise Mazdaean significance, referring to the assault of the evil spirit Akoman on the embodiment of Good Purpose (and cattle), Vohu Manu.
The name Ahura Mazda means Lord of Wisdom, or Wise Lord. The dualism went a long way to resolve the problem of evil that presents such difficulties for the monotheistic religions (the origin of evil in the world was Ahriman, against whom Ahura Mazda struggled for supremacy) and at least initially
permitted a strong attachment to the ideas of free will (arising out of the necessity of human beings choosing between good and evil), goodness emerging in good actions, judgement after death, and heaven and hell. Some scholars have suggested that within a few centuries, but at any rate before 600 BCE, Mazdaism developed in addition a theory of a Messiah—the Saoshyant, who would be born miraculously at the end of time from a virgin mother and the seed of Zoroaster himself.6 But the dualism implied other difficulties, which emerged later. One such was that of how Ahura Mazda and Ahriman themselves came into existence. To explain this some later followers of the Iranian religion believed in a creator-god, Zurvan (identified with Time, or Fate), who prayed for a son and was rewarded with twins. The twins became Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. This branch of Mazdaism has been called Zurvanism.
It was a characteristic of the new religion that philosophical concepts or categories became personified as heavenly beings or entities—indeed these seem to have proliferated, a little like characters in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. One example is the idea of the daena, which according to one later text appeared to the soul of a just man after his death as a beautiful maiden, the personification of all the good works he had done in life, saying:
‘For when, in the world, you saw someone sacrificing to the demon you, instead, started adoring God; and when you saw someone carrying out violence and robbery and afflicting and despising good men and gathering in their substance with evil actions you, instead, avoided treating creatures with violence and robbery; you took care of the just and welcomed them and gave them lodgings and gifts. Whether your wealth came from near or from afar, it was honourably acquired. And when you saw people give false judgements and allowed themselves to be corrupted with money and commit perjury you, instead, undertook to tell the truth and speak righteously. I am your righteous thoughts, your righteous words, your righteous actions, thought, spoken, done by you.’7
Iran: Empire of the Mind Page 2