by Bruce Feiler
Pasargadae is the forgotten face of Persia, overshadowed by its larger, more famous cousin Persepolis, fifty miles to the south and west. Built on the fertile Plain of the Water Bird, six thousand feet above sea level, Pasargadae is greener than any site I had visited in the Middle East, with hilly grasslands reminiscent of Switzerland, interrupted occasionally by ruins. The grounds were blanketed with newly blossomed red poppies and dotted with petite yellow daisies. The limestone columns that poked up from the greenery had the look and color of classroom chalk. The idea of gardens as paradise seems to have originated in Iran, and likely reached its apotheosis in Pasargadae, the personal creation of Cyrus the Great.
The man the Bible would ultimately hail as God’s “anointed one” rose to power in cloudy circumstances, shaded by legend. Born around 590 B.C.E., Cyrus II was said to be the son of an Iranian prince of the Achaemenid dynasty and his wife, the daughter of the prince’s rival, the king of Medes. A Delphic oracle purportedly warned the Median monarch that his grandson would threaten his realm. After becoming king of Pars in 559, Cyrus defeated the Medes and forged an unprecedented alliance with his former enemy. In an echo of David, he constructed a new capital for the united monarchy in a neutral place, the site of their final battle, Pasargadae. One account described the city as a large park, filled with wild animals, which the king used to hunt on horseback.
Cyrus’s ascendancy changed the world. For the first time in history, the Iranian plateau was unified under one leader, who quickly asserted his power over previously unimaginable spans, from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Two hundred years before Alexander, Cyrus defined the nickname Great. He first moved west, barreling through a panic-driven alliance formed by Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Sparta, to capture Lydia, on the coast of Turkey. His triumph was reportedly advanced when Lydian horses became unsettled by the odor of the camels ridden by Persian soldiers into battle. His western flank secure, Cyrus moved east, into Afghanistan and India.
But his most consequential feat was to strike at the heart of Mesopotamia’s two-millennium-old dominance of world affairs. Babylon, which had sacked Jerusalem at the start of the sixth century B.C.E., was already in decline half a century later under King Nabonidus, who had relocated to Arabia. Nabonidus returned to Babylon in 539 B.C.E. to confront the gathering threat from Persia, but he was too late. Cyrus crossed the Tigris and, according to Herodotus, dammed the Euphrates to parch the city. The Persians then entered without a battle, and local residents greeted Cyrus by spreading green branches before him. Cyrus was so confident of his control over the region that he flung open the city gates and told captives, including the Jews, they could return to their homelands.
Cyrus’s victory over Babylon forever reshaped the political geography of the Ancient Near East. Since starting my explorations of the Bible, I had been fond of describing the Fertile Crescent in the second millennium B.C.E. as being like a modern American shopping mall, with an anchor store—Egypt and Mesopotamia—on each end, and smaller, more vulnerable boutique stores—Canaan, Edom, Philistia, Israel, Judah—in between. By the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., this situation had changed irrevocably. Persia was rising to the east, Greece to the west. To overstretch my analogy, it was as if the Fertile Crescent Mall suddenly got a Target across the street on one side and a Wal-Mart across the street on the other. Whereas the anchor stores once competed only with each other, now they had to wrestle with their big-box rivals. To the boutique stores, like Israel and Judah, the new reality meant even more trouble competing and confinement to permanent second-tier status. It may be sacrilege to suggest it, but Jerusalem, capital of the mini-empire of David around 1000 B.C.E., by the mid–first millennium B.C.E. had become little more than a Gap store.
More significant was how the new political reality of the Ancient Near East quickly produced a new cultural reality. Simply put, Cyrus conducted himself with more compassion toward his subjects, more respect toward his victims, and more tolerance toward other faiths than any leader before him in history. He instituted a policy of placating the gods of his subjects rather than carting off their statues, as the Elamites, Hittites, Assyrians, and Babylonians had done. He rebuilt temples in his colonies. And in Babylon he actually celebrated the New Year’s rite of Marduk, the chief deity. In 1879 a cylinder was unearthed in Babylon that articulated Cyrus’s worldview, the most sweeping declaration of human rights ever found in the Ancient Near East. Cyrus couched his vision in the name of Ahuramazda, the god of Zoroastrianism.
Now that I put the crown of the kingdom of Iran, Babylon, and the nations of the four directions on the head with the help of Ahuramazda, I announce that I will respect the traditions, customs, and religions of the nations of my empire and never let any of my governors and subordinates look down on or insult them as long as I am alive. From now on, till Ahuramazda grants me the kingdom favor, I will impose my monarchy on no nation. Each is free to accept it, and if any one of them rejects it, I never resolve on war to reign.
Part of this reads like propaganda, for sure; Cyrus never hesitated to use war to advance his realm. But in matters of culture, his actions backed up his words.
No group benefited more from Cyrus’s magnanimity than the Jews, and no document heralds his greatness more than the Bible. Cyrus is mentioned by name twenty-five times in the Hebrew Bible and is alluded to many times more. The Book of Ezra is dedicated almost entirely to trumpeting his patronage. It opens with Cyrus announcing that in addition to sending the Jews back to Jerusalem, he will pay to rebuild the Temple. “The Lord God of Heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has charged me with building him a house in Jerusalem.”
The irony is sharp: David, perceived as the great hero of the Bible, is denied the right to build the First Temple; Cyrus, an alien, is credited with building the Second. Even when the residents of Jerusalem object to a new House of God, the Israelites cite Cyrus’s edict to his eventual successor, Darius I. Darius endorses the construction. The era of Achaemenid tolerance would last for the next two hundred years, reshaping the world in its wake.
The world, in turn, reshaped Persia. On the far southern edge of Pasargadae sits a curious structure. A stone hut with a gabled roof, about the size of a doghouse, rests atop a six-level base modeled on the ziggurat. From top to bottom, the structure measures thirty-six feet. For centuries local Muslims referred to this building as the Tomb of the Mother of Solomon. Unclear on its origin, they credited this and other ruins around Pasargadae to Solomon, because the Koran, cognizant of his construction of the Temple, presents him as a great builder.
In reality, this tomb was built for Cyrus. He died in battle in 530 B.C.E. near modern-day Kazakhstan and was buried in Pasargadae in a gold sarcophagus, surrounded by his weapons, jewelry, and a cloak. The tomb today is enclosed by a fence, but I was able to bribe the gatekeeper and scurried to its top. Inside the vacant chamber, a graduate student from Shiraz was inspecting an inscription. “O mortal, I am Cyrus the son of Cambyses, who founded the empire of Persia, and was king of Asia. Grudge me not therefore this monument.” Two centuries later, Alexander the Great was so impressed that Cyrus had made such a humble plea to posterity that he ordered the burned and looted tomb restored.
But Ali Khazaee said the inscription was probably ordered not by Cyrus but by Darius. The same mix-up applies to a nearby bas-relief, he said, showing a man with an Egyptian crown, Assyrian wings, and an Elamite garment. Though it was once labeled Cyrus, Ali believed it was Darius but stressed that its significance lay in its amalgamation of styles.
“Art has no boundary,” he said. “Some scholars believe Achaemenid art is a complete imitation of others, because they took elements from here and there. I believe the Achaemenids’ talent was to take all different forms and combine them to produce something entirely new.”
Before coming to Iran, I went back and flipped through Myths and Their Meaning to see if the book mentioned Persia. It did not, even though Persia dominated the eas
tern Mediterranean for almost a century during the heyday of ancient mythology. Next I flipped through the prayer book I used as a child to see if it had anything about Persia. It, too, did not, even though the Bible credits Persia with liberating the Israelites from their national humiliation.
My journey had shattered that silence. Here, on the eastern flank of the Fertile Crescent, unmentioned in the story of Western civilization, barely uttered in the religious dialogue of today, is a culture whose lessons for our time may be the most relevant of the entire Ancient Near East. One city, above all, tells that tale.
In a region of breathtaking archaeological sites, Persepolis may take the prize. Poised on an elevated plateau at the base of Koh-E-Rahmat, the Mountain of Mercy, Persepolis exudes an air of regal isolation and opulence, as if the walls of Versailles had been flattened in a tornado and left hundreds of inner columns still standing, along with the occasional statue from the king’s private bath. Though Persians called it Parsa, from the tribe that dominated the region, the city was known in Greek by the contraction of Persia and polis, Persepolis. At thirty-five acres, Persepolis is the same size as Herod’s Temple Mount compound, and, at 5,800 feet, it’s the original mile-high city. The Roman writer Augustus described it as “the most beautifully constructed city.”
Darius I began building Persepolis sometime after 520 B.C.E., and work continued for the next sixty years, under the reigns of Xerxes and Artaxerxes I. The entire complex was built over three levels on an enormous raised terrace that included fortifications, a monumental stairway, a palace, and a ninety-three-room treasury. Alexander the Great burned the city in 330 B.C.E. Plutarch wrote that it took ten thousand mules and five thousand camels to carry off the booty.
Because it’s built on a platform, thirty miles from modern-day Shiraz, Persepolis still reveals itself to the visitor with levitating charm, a magic carpet over the green hills of Pars. “The important thing about Persepolis is the location,” Kamran said as we approached. “The temperature here is just right. They have four seasons. The underground aqueduct is perfect. The climate is so good the fields in this area have two, sometimes three crops a year.”
Through a glass gate, we were led into a laboratory, covered with tablets, dusty language books, and antiquated computers, where we met the chief of Achaemenid research at the Iran National Museum and the startling new face of Persian archaeology. Almost exactly my age, Shahrokh Razmjou was taller, darker, better looking, thinner, gentler, more learned, and even more articulate than I, though he was speaking his seventh language and I was speaking my first. He had a boyish smile, huge, frameless glasses, and an aw-shucks demeanor that seemed more like Christopher Robin than Indiana Jones. Linda squirmed on meeting him, choked up when we left, and for months afterward I referred to him simply as “your boyfriend.”
“My Iranian boyfriend,” she corrected, to separate him from the myriad others.
Above all, he inspired in me a passion and intimacy with the ancient world unrivaled since I’d first met Avner. One of the cruelties of Middle Eastern politics is that, because Shahrokh and Avner come from countries that don’t speak to each other, it would take a feat of diplomatic strength worthy of Hercules for them to meet.
Shahrokh Razmjou fell in love with archaeology when he was seven years old, but his dream was nearly stymied by the revolution, when the mullahs asserted that anything that occurred before Mohammed was jahiliyyah, ignorance. Overnight, undergraduate ancient history classes were canceled, teachers reassigned. Shahrokh began buying up textbooks from rare book markets to teach himself the necessary language skills, including cuneiform.
“Didn’t the library have them?”
“Yes, but I wanted to continue my studies at night.”
His first day of university, he talked his way into a master’s program in archaeology whose enrollment was a mere ten people. Twenty years later, in another sign of the dwindling zeal of the revolution, enrollment had climbed to one hundred. I asked if that pleased him.
“Why not? We need an army of archaeologists. Even if we had a hundred people working on the same topic, that would be brilliant, we’d have a hundred different opinions.”
I picked a piece of paper off his desk and sketched a map of the Ancient Near East, with the Fertile Crescent at its heart. “Ten thousand years ago people began to take these rivers and create civilization. That happened first in Sumer, then Babylon, then Assyria. There are rivers in Iran. Why did it not happen here?”
“We don’t know if it happened here or not,” he said. “One problem is that we don’t have enough information about Iran, because Iran is an almost unexcavated country. During the nineteenth century, Europeans were more interested in sites that were mentioned in the Bible, especially Mesopotamia and Egypt. According to the latest reports, we have half a million known sites in this country that are not dug.”
“Half a million?”
“That’s why I say we need an army of archaeologists. Take Sumer; in the third millennium B.C.E. it had one of the most famous civilizations in history. Recent excavations in Jiroft, in southeast Iran, show a huge civilization at the same time, unfortunately unknown until today. Jiroft had a very strong trade system with other countries, and one of their roads went directly to Mesopotamia. The writing and engraving in Jiroft seems to have influenced that in Sumer.”
“So you think Jiroft should get more attention, like Ur?”
“Not more than Ur, but something equal to Ur. You can’t ignore one and say, ‘Okay, civilization began in one and not the other.’ Until three years ago, nobody had heard about Jiroft. Now we have to rewrite our history books.”
“There’s one thing I’ve always wondered about that period,” I said. “The Bible has Abraham living in Ur around 2000 B.C.E. When he leaves, why does he go west, toward Harran, and not east, toward Iran?”
“It is very difficult to speak about that period. We don’t know the precise relations between Elam and Mesopotamia. The two traded, but somehow they were always fighting. Even today, there is an unseen border between these two areas. Not just a geographical-political border but a cultural one as well. On one side were the Elamites, on the other the Mesopotamians. The same with the Qajars in Iran and the Ottoman Empire. And more recently, the Iran-Iraq war.”
“What would explain such a line?”
“I don’t know exactly. You can see such borders in other places. The Great Wall of China was to protect the Chinese from the northern people. Between Iran and Iraq we have an invisible wall. Even if the two sides are living in peace, there is always something to keep them separated.”
We stepped into the blazing sun and proceeded up the monumental staircase at the entrance to the compound. Labeled “perhaps the most perfect flight of steps ever built,” by Ernst Herzfeld, the excavator of Persepolis in 1920s, the 111 steps have a height of only five inches each, compared with seven and a half inches for a normal stair. The low rise was designed for horses or nobles in long cloaks to ascend more easily.
Unlike Pasargadae, with its scattered remains, the buildings at Persepolis are concentrated on a great terrace, fourteen hundred by one thousand feet, as long as the Acropolis but five times as wide. Arriving at the plateau, we were greeted by a forest of columns, slabs, and statues. Most of the excavation of Persepolis was completed in the 1930s by the Oriental Institute of Chicago. As a sign of Iran’s cultural warming with the West, the institute had just returned three hundred tablets, which Shahrokh received to much fanfare.
The entrance to the city is the stately Gate of All Nations, with sixty-foot columns flanked by two standing bulls with wings and human heads, as in Assyria. Muslim observers in the twelfth century likened them to Buraq, the winged horse on which Mohammed made his night journey to heaven. The capitals have back-to-back bird heads that look like the pushmi-pullyu llamas from Doctor Dolittle. The gate boasts graffiti going back nearly two centuries, including “STANLEY, NEW YORK HERALD, 1870” and “F. W. Graf Schulenberg, 1931.”
Sir Henry Morton Stanley was the Welsh-born reporter who tracked down the missing Scottish missionary David Livingstone in Africa in 1871 and introduced himself by saying, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Schulenberg was the Nazi ambassador to Russia in the 1930s who was executed in 1944 after trying to execute a coup against Hitler. Persepolis’s status as a crossroads of the world clearly did not end with Alexander’s sacking.
But why was Persepolis so prominent? The Achaemenids had a summer residence in Susa and a winter residence in Hamadan, both to the northwest. Persepolis had no discernible raison d’être. For most of the last century, the leading explanation held that the city was a ceremonial center, used for the New Year’s festival of No Ruz. But Shahrokh disagreed. Persepolis, he said, was more likely a dynastic residence, a showplace for the grandeur of the Persian empire. And how would he characterize that empire?
“Some aspects show that they were a very open people,” he said. We were walking through the main courtyard, where visitors once waited to enter one of the ceremonial buildings. Dwarfed by the columns, dressed in rumpled khakis and a blue jean shirt, Shahrokh Razmjou looked like a fourteen-year-old boy on a school field trip.
“Until the Achaemenids,” he continued, “the tradition with leaders like Ashurnasirpal was to destroy your enemy and burn them to the ground. But the Persians introduced a different way. Darius began with violence, but afterwards he gave his subjects freedom, as Cyrus had done. We have inscriptions from Asia Minor and Egypt that show Darius saying, ‘Ahuramazda gave this land to me, and there was chaos here. So I put everyone in their place and didn’t let them beat one another.’ There were periods of hostility, but for two hundred years there was largely peace among these countries called the Pax Persica.”
“So if everybody before them wiped out the gods of their enemies, why were the Achaemenids suddenly so open-minded?”