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S.M.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1566914,00.html

An exceptional empire

The US could learn from the Achaemenid dynasty's policy of tolerance

Hywel Williams
Saturday September 10, 2005
The Guardian

The history of the Middle East is the history of empire. And the story of the peoples of the Steppes who arrived in waves from the east is matched by that of the modern imperial powers who came in tanks from the west. Ancient Babylon and modern Israel are the opening and the latest chapters of a continuous story. In between come all the other forms of domination: Graeco-Roman and ancient Egyptian, Ottoman-Turkish, Franco-British and neocon American. Persia though is the instructive exception. Article continues


The rise to power of the Achaemenid dynasty in the sixth century BC and its expansion from the southern Iranian province of Fars was a dazzling military and political feat. At its peak the empire run by Cyrus the Great and his successors - stretching from Libya to Samarkand - was more flexible and tolerant than any of its successors or predecessors in the region.

The British Museum's new exhibition hits all the spots that the modern cultural exhibition aims for: gold jewellery glitters under carefully designed lighting, rampant beasts stare wide-eyed from the plaster casts of Persepolis, the imperial centre devastated by Alexander. And everywhere - on coins and stone reliefs - there are men in beards. Those carefully coiled and oiled tresses came to define the Persian male. But to the Greeks that beard's sensuality was a sign of decadent materialism.

Inevitably, a show like this has to be a display of material stuff - bull's heads, bracelets, silver bowls, glazed bricks and marble statues. This is a version of Persia as an affair of exquisite display and conspicuous consumption - precisely what the first commentators considered it to be and also why it deserved to die. It's as if in the year 4500 an exhibition explaining London circa 2000 consisted of the looted interiors of Bond Street jewellers. Although the intention is to recover a forgotten empire, the effect of all the objects is also somehow distancing. It's a sign of how difficult it is to recapture the Persian reality because that original life has had to descend through so many layers of manipulative commentary supplied by those who've claimed that history for their own purposes.

For the Persians the Greek city-states were just pinpricks, occasional irritants on their north-western frontier. But the histories of Herodotus and the speeches of Athenian politicians turned the fifth-century BC conflict into what it really was for the Greeks: a question of life and death, of brave democracy against imperial cruelty, of civilisation against barbarism.

But when it spread beyond the original Hellenic patch, Greek-style democracy - like that of the Americans today - was based on imposed regimes and intolerance of dissent. At the heart of the Persian empire was the theory of a hierarchical power centred on the majesty of the king. But that power was diffused through a reality of tolerance, both political and religious, of the regional centres as governed by the satraps. The central government knew it had to be laissez-faire to survive. Which is why, for example, there was no attempt at linguistic conformity. Elamite was the language of the Persian centre, but in the west Aramaic was the tool of communication. Egypt was ruled through its own language and the satraps used Greek to communicate with the Greek cities.

The recovery of Persian history was part of the 19th-century nationalist sense and the ridiculous cultural games played by the 20th-century Pahlavi dynasty combined bogus history with their brokerage facility as power pawns for the west. Reza Shah adopted the family name of Pahlavi "called after an ancient form of our Persian language" and used the excavation of Persepolis to self-serving dynastic effect. And the game of invented continuity carries on, with the Islamic republic printing on its banknotes the tomb of Cyrus - the ruler who respected the gods of the Babylonians he had conquered and allowed the Jews to rebuild the temple of Solomon.

The cylinder that records the details of Cyrus's tolerance may not glitter in its case, but is still this exhibition's most important object. Yet more fabricated history claims it as a proto-UN charter of human rights. But the truth is poignant enough to stand on its own: a policy that encouraged regime variety was native to the Middle East and rebukes all subsequent forms of overlordship in that playpen of the great powers.

· The Guardian and the British Museum will be holding a debate on October 18 titled The Unbroken Arc: Ancient Persia and Modern Iran; to book tickets, call the British Museum on 020 7323 8181 caradog@btconnect.com