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

by Tom Holland

Ever after, when referring to the Persians, the Greeks would invariably say, ‘the Medes’. Such confusion was hardly surprising. What were the ethnic complexities of the Zagros to a people so far distant from them?

So it was that Cyrus, disdaining to stamp out the revolt in Lydia in person, had instead taken the opposite route from Ecbatana, following the Khorasan Highway as it wound ever east.

This, for Persians and Medes alike, was to journey back into their past, towards the legendary homelands of their ancestors, ‘rich in pastures and waters … the abode of cattle’,24 where everything seemed on a more heroic scale, the plains much vaster, the mountains touching the sky.

Fighting his way into the uplands, gazing at last towards the Hindu Kush, Cyrus would have been able to watch the dawning of the sun over the peaks of Central Asia – ‘the undying, swift-horsed sun; who, foremost in a golden array, takes hold of the beautiful summits, a...

The badlands would never entirely lose their turbid character, for their new master, chameleon-like as ever, was careful to portray himself as the heir of the region’s traditions, leaving the local noblemen to continue in their rumbustious ways – but in the cause, henceforward, of the Persian king.

The establishment of an immense arc of provinces, stretching from the Hindu Kush to the Aral Sea, served to fence off the approaches to Persia where they had always been most vulnerable, in the north-east, which previously had lain wide open to incursions from the steppes of Central Asia.

Gandhara,

Ba...

Sogd...

And bulwarks of much besides. Savages, as all civilised peoples were agreed, belonged exactly where Cyrus was pinning them, in the remote bleakness of the rim of the world.

slant-eyed Saka,

Sogdiana

Kazakhstan,

A leader of the Saka, captured by Cyrus and treated with notable chivalry, duly submitted to the invaders, and his people, taking service with the Persian king, soon established themselves as the most ferocious of the imperial troops.

But this had been only a single tribe. Beyond its homeland lay further plains, bandit-haunted and drear, their immensity mocking all human ambition – even that of the greatest conqueror ever known.

River Rangha,

This branding of his identity upon the land of the Saka proclaimed an imperious dual message. No more would the untamed war-bands beyond the Jaxartes be permitted to raid southwards; and no more would those behind it have to fear for their security.

Cyrus’ strategy had always been to menace his enemies and to reassure his slaves – and by 540 BC, with the eastern frontier stabilised, he felt ready to put it to its ultimate test.

wealthy flat-lands

arriviste,

Yet he would also have known that its inhabitants were no backward frontiersmen, untutored in the propaganda of despots. Indeed, it was they who regarded the Persians as savages. Cyrus, a man who specialised in overturning hostile preconceptions, chose to meet this new challenge head on.

In truth, Persian firepower being what it was, this had been the only sane policy for the defenders to adopt.

The one army which sought to defy the invasion had been summarily obliterated; for Cyrus, as he had shown in Lydia, was not averse to the occasional atrocity when he felt that it might serve a salutary purpose. Yet his preference, by and large, was to live up to the high-flying claims of his propaganda. His regime once established, there were no more pogroms.

Achaemenids,

Ur

U...

To many, inevitably, there appeared something fearsome, even monstrous, about this prodigy. When Cyrus at last fell in battle he was seventy, his appetite for conquest still unassuaged, for his death had come north of the Jaxartes, far beyond the limits he had once set on his own ambitions.29 In her triumph, the queen of the tribe which had killed him was said to have decapitated his corpse, and dropped the head into a blood-filled wineskin, so that the old man’s thirst might glut itself at last. This was to cast Cyrus as a spirit of the kind that haunted the imaginings of the Near East, a demon of the night, eternally hungry for human flesh.

He died in the summer of 529 BC. His corpse, redeemed from the tribe that had killed him, was brought back to Persia, where an immense stone tomb stood waiting to receive it.

Less a city than an assemblage of palaces, pavilions and gardens, the site certainly bore ample witness to the scale of the Persians’ greatness – but it also suggested just how disorientating and precipitous their rise had been. Beyond the masonry, herds of livestock still roamed the bleakness of the open hills and plains. Winds gusting across the featureless landscape coated gilded doorways and columns with dust. Even the palace complex itself, despite being built of stone, conveyed in its layout more than a hint of camps and tents.

Pasargadae:

Now, with Cyrus dead, manoeuvrings among the clans and tribes of Persia would affect millions. Could a successor hope to take Cyrus’ place, or was the empire of the Persians, suddenly deprived of its founder’s charisma, doomed to vanish as rapidly as it had emerged?

progeniture,

Far-sighted as ever, though, Cyrus had understood the danger and sought to insure against it, carefully providing for the hopes of both his sons.

Cambyses, crown prince,

Bardiya, governor of...

Either way, due notice had been given to the world of Cyrus’ plans for its future: Cambyses was to sit on the throne of the Persians, and Bardiya was to be his lieutenant.

Atossa

Rhoxsane,

Even as Cyrus’ corpse was laid to rest in a sarcophagus of gold, inside a tomb carefully oriented towards the rising sun, amid the prayers and lamentations of its Magian attendants, Cambyses moved to claim his birthright.

The monarchy of the world was now his. True, as he took his place upon his father’s throne, a few eyes may have turned towards his brother; but Bardiya, confirmed in the governorship of his great fiefdom in the east, gave no sign of any treacherous intent.

Cyrus’ last will and testament proved to have been most cunningly constructed. Both brothers had much to gain by interlocking their interests. It might have been thought that Cambyses would have sought, as his priority, to avenge his father’s death – but that would have required him to lead a mass...

Whether tacitly or not, the two brothers formed a compact. Bardiya was to be left undisturbed in his province, but he would guard his brother’s back;

Such a campaign, of course, could not be rushed. The might of the pharaohs may have been much diminished from its ancient splendour, having grown dependent upon the support of shiftless mercenaries, and been leeched of income by over-mighty temple priests, but it still posed a formidable challenge.

Cambyses spent four years preparing for the invasion. The subject nations of the empire were leaned upon to provide tribute and levies. Ships were built or commandeered, and a Persian king, for the first time in his country’s history, became the master of a great and powerful navy.

Intelligence was gathered and carefully analysed. When the Persians finally met the Egyptians in battle, it is said that they did so with cats pinned to their shields, reducing their opponents’ archers, for whom t...

Pelu...

All the while, the battle fleet was gliding along the coast. With navy and army shadowing each other in a perfectly co-ordinated amphibious operation, the Persians advanced to seize their golden prize. Resistance was brutally crushed. Egypt submitted. Her people hailed as pharaoh the ‘Great Chief of the Foreign Lands’.

But the speed of Cambyses’ victory had been delusive. A land so ancient and mysterious was not easily absorbed into anyone’s empire.

Change in Egypt had never been a straightforward matter, and it so happened that the most pressing challenge, to tame and tax the priesthood, was also the most intractable.

Cambyses, brutal in a way that native pharaohs had never dared to be, did succeed in forcing requisitions from the bloated estates of the temples, but the effort took him four years and naturally won him the eternal enmity of the priests.