Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West - 'Magisterial' Books of the Year, Independent

by Tom Holland

We can never know for sure what happened at a battle such as Salamis, when the sources on which any interpretation must depend manage to be simultaneously contradictory and full of holes: one might as well look to complete a half-broken Rubik’s Cube. No matter how often the facts are studied, twisted, and rearranged, it is impossible to square them all; a definitive solution can never be found.

Yet even Salamis, notoriously hard to make sense of though it is, can appear prodigally rich in detail in comparison with, say, the early history of Sparta. That particular topic, one eminent scholar has baldly confessed, ‘is a puzzle to challenge the best of thinkers’.

But at least the sources for Greek history, no matter how patchy, derive from the Greeks themselves. The Persians, with one key exception, did not write anything at all that we can identify as an account of real events.

Tablets inscribed by imperial bureaucrats do survive, together with royal proclamations chiselled on palace walls, and, of course, the ruins of the astounding palaces themselves. Otherwise, if we are going to attempt to make any sense of the Persians and their empire, we must rely, to an alarming degree, upon the writings of others.

Herodotus, ever curious, ever open-minded, is the exception that proves the rule. ‘Philobarbaros’ – ‘barbarian-lover’ – one indignant patriot labelled him:22 the closest to the phrase ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ that ancient Greek approached. Yet even Herodotus, writing about remote and peculiar peoples whose languages he did not speak, has to be excused the occasional inaccuracy, the occasional prejudice, the occasional tendency to treat early Persian history as a fairy tale.

Three obvious responses to the challenge present themselves. The first is to accept Greek prejudices at face value, and portray the Persians as effete cowards who somehow, inexplicably, conquered the world. The second is to condemn everything that the Greeks wrote about Persia as an expression of racism, Eurocentrism, and a whole host of other thought-crimes to boot. The third, and most productive, is to explore the degree to which Greek misinterpretations of their great enemy reflected the truth, however distorted, of how the Persians lived and saw their world.

And yet the Persians remain shrouded in obscurity. Perhaps this is hardly surprising. There have been no golden death-masks to give a face to their rediscovery – only scholarly tomes and journals.

The study of Persia, even more than that of Greece, depends on the minutest sifting of the available evidence, the closest analysis of the sources, the most delicate weighing of inferences and alternatives. This is a field in which almost every detail can be debated, and certain themes –

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; but I hope, even so, that my attempt to build a bridge between the worlds of academic and general readership does not end up appearing as vainglorious as did the two-mile pontoon which Xerxes built from Asia to Europe, to the horrified derision of the Greeks.

It is, after all, an epic as powerful and extraordinary as any to be found in ancient literature; and one that is, despite all the many imponderables, not myth but the very stuff of history.

Listen now to a further point: no mortal thing Has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration; There is only a mixing and then a separating of what was mixed, But by mortal men these processes are named ‘beginnings’. Empedocles

The gods, having scorned to mould a world that was level, had preferred instead to divide it into two. So it seemed to those who lived in the Zagros, the great chain of peaks which separates the Fertile Crescent from the upland plateau of Iran.

Yet these mountains, though savage, were not impassable. One road did snake across them: the most famous in the world, the Khorasan Highway, which led from the limits of the East to the West, and joined the rising to the setting of the sun.

One empire, in particular, for centuries synonymous with cruel and remorseless invincibility, had sent repeated expeditions into the mountains, dyeing the peaks, in its own ferocious vaunt, ‘like wool, crimson with blood’.

The Assyrians, inhabitants of what is now northern Iraq, were city-dwellers, a people of the flat, alluvial plains; but to their kings, warlords who had spread terror and extermination as far as Egypt, the Zagros was less a barrier than a challenge.

Themselves the patrons of a proud and brilliant civilisation, sumptuous with palaces, gardens and canals, the kings of Assyria had always seen it as their duty to flatten ...

This, the wilds being what they were, had proved a calling without limit. Not even with their incomparable war-machine could the Assyrians pacify all the mountain tribes – for there were some living in the Zagros who clung to the peaks like birds, or lurked in the depths of thick forests, so backward that...

Ashur,

Nimrud

Nin...

Increasingly, the Assyrians had fallen into the habit of moving entire populations, shunting them around their empire, transplanting one defeated enemy into the lands of another, there to live in the houses of the similarly transported, to clear weeds f...

Assyria’s greatest king, Sargon II.

Not that captives were the only source of wealth to be found in the Zagros. Wild and forested though the mountains were, and often bitter the climate, the valleys were famous for their clover-rich pasture.

Over the centuries, and in increasing numbers, these had been attracting tribes who called themselves ‘Arya’ – ‘Aryans’: horse-taming nomads from the plateau to the east.

Even once settled, these immigrants had preserved many of their ancestors’ instincts, filling the valleys of their new homeland with great herds of long-horned cattle, and preferring, wherever possible, to live in the saddle. The Assyrians, no horse-breeders themselves, would speak in won...

It was relatively easy for the Assyrian army to cherry-pick these as tribute, for the finest horses, by universal consent, were those bred by the Medes, a loose confederation of Aryan tribes settled conveniently along the Khorasan Hi...

The tribute of horses from the mountains had become the lifeblood of her greatness.

And yet, in Assyria’s supremacy lay the seeds of its own downfall.

The mountains were a mish-mash of different peoples, Aryans and aboriginals alike, with even the Medes themselves ruled by a quarrelsome multitude of petty chieftains.

In 615 BC,

Cyaxares

Assyrians’

Nineveh,

Four years later, and all traces of the Assyrian colossus, which for so long had kept the Near East in its shadow, lay obliterated.

To the victors, naturally, had fallen the spoils. Media, precipitately elevated to the rank of great power, seized a huge northern swath of the defeated empire. Her kings, no longer small-time chieftains, could now indulge themselves in the occupations proper to their newly won status – throwing their weight around and scrapping with other great powers.

In 61...

In...

Lyd...

the Halys, a river flowing midway between Media and Lydia,

new king of Media, Astyages,

badlands of Armenia and what is now Azerbaijan,

Astyages’

King of Lydia

Pharaoh of...

Khorasan Highway

Iranian plateau

Ecbatana,

kings of Media,

Commanding the trade of East and West, it also opened up to its master the whole range of the Zagros, and beyond.

Here, for the Median clan chiefs, in particular, was a thoroughly alarming development. The surest guarantee of their freedom from royal meddling, and of the continued factionalism of the kingdom itself, had always been the inaccessibility of their private fiefdoms