“When Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 B.C., the world was old,” wrote historian A. T. Olmstead in his History of the Persian Empire. The term “Persia” represents a Western mistake in naming. Just as those in the South Pacific once thought the United States was actually named “Massachusetts” because of all the trading ships that emanated from there, Westerners had much familiarity with a portion of Iran called “Persia.”
Millennia prior to the founding of Rome, well before the appearance of cities in Greece, Iran existed. Over 7,000 years ago, Olmstead relates, “numerous tiny hamlets sheltered a peaceful agricultural population which satisfied its aesthetic instincts through fine wheelmade pots with superb painting.”
Thus, the artistic culture for which Iran shone through the millennia until the fall of the Shah in 1979 dates back before even the knowledge of writing.
Like that of ancient Japan, the history of Iran in its earliest times comes down as a mixture of mythology and events. From the Aryan people, the name Iran originates, (the historic Aryans, not those invented in National Socialist fantasies).
Minor kings gained authority into the 800s B.C., mostly in Parsus and Media. Over the next two centuries, Medians expanded their power and constructed an empire that pushed toward the Mediterranean. By the mid 500s, Cyrus the Great took charge of the growing empire. The devout Zoroastrian saw extending his empire as far as possible as a duty to his Zoroastrian faith.
This faith which sprung from Iran saw the cosmos as divided between forces of good and evil with the one God on the side of Truth and Light against Lies and Darkness.
Around the time that Cyrus smashed the Babylonian Empire, he had a vision that he interpreted as coming from the Truth. It identified YHWH, the unpronounceable name of God in the Jewish faith, as a warrior on the side of Truth. Cyrus established a protectorate over Judah that created a type of special relationship between the peoples that extended on and off through, again, the fall of the Shah.
Iran (again, better known by the mistaken moniker of the Persian Empire) sat in the middle of the civilized world. To their east lay the civilizations of India and China, thousands of years old even then. To the west lay the seeds that would germinate into Greece, Rome, then the great Germanic, Slavic, and Nordic peoples who would drive the development of Europe.
For the next nine centuries the civilization of Iran, whether called Persians or Parthians historically, tangled with the West. Greece generally prevailed, starting with defeating attempted invasions of the Continent and ending with Alexander the Great conquering all of the civilized Middle East. The various Hellenistic empires that came of that degraded and declined until the Romans established themselves in the Levant.
Through the 500s A.D., Rome and the Parthian Empire/Iran battled for regional supremacy. Much of the time the overextended Romans got the worse of the struggle. A much more fundamental force, however, would overwhelm both of the civilizations that had worn each other down and out over the centuries.
The marriage of Islamic fervor and Arab restlessness conquered the Parthian Iranians and also seized the Asian lands of the Byzantine Romans almost all the way to their capital of Constantinople. Arab armies overwhelmed all obstacles in establishing a relatively short-lasting empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the Indus River.
Mores and values of a nomadic desert people and their austere faith clashed with the material and intellectual opulence of the worlds they conquered. By the 900s, the Arab supremacy weakened under the influence of the cultures they conquered, including the Iranians. A school of thought inspired by a pupil of a pupil of the great Al Farabi established the Sidjistani Society of thinkers.
Much like Benjamin Franklin’s Junto eight centuries later, members openly discussed great ideas associated with the humanities. They saw a path of intellectual renewal paved by Green philosophy, Christian ethics, Islamic law, and a touch of mysticism and politics. They sought to elevate culture above what the Arabs had established, writing at one point about “the crude expressions of the Koran, which were adapted to the understanding of an uncivilized desert people.”
At the same time as Otto the Great established the remarkable Holy Roman Empire, one of the world’s great minds came into being. Known as Ibn Sina in the East and Avicenna in the West, this Iranian had one of the greatest impacts on human thinking since Aristotle. He used the ideas of Al Farabi to understand the concepts of Aristotle, then used that understanding to expand thinking in the areas of religion, philosophy, medicine, and other sciences.
Many of these paths of inquiry ran parallel to what the Scholasticism movement would do in Europe two and three centuries later. The Crusaders introduced Avicenna to Europe and likely started the process that led to those later developments.
Iranian literature wedded its ornate and structured styles of poetry and prose to the Arab’s cultural depth of feeling and emotion to produce an advanced literary culture. One of the greatest expressions of Arabian literature, the Thousand and One Nights, came first from Iranian compilations. During the 900s and until the Turkish inroads into the area, almost every person with the power of speech was also a lyrical poet.
As Will Durant wrote in his Age of Faith, “poems were written to be read aloud or sung; and everyone in Islam, from peasant to caliph, heard them gladly.” A common party game was for one person to start a poem, then have other guests add lines and continue it until exhaustion of interest or a natural end point.
During this period Iranians excelled in the creation of beautiful pottery, small wonder since they had showed themselves superior craftsmen and artisans in this realm since prehistory. “At its best,” wrote Durant, “Persian pottery showed a subtlety of conception, a splendor of color, a refinement of workmanship, second only to the Chinese and Japanese.”
By the 1960s the absolute monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, known as the Shah of Iran, administered the nation. He encouraged his people to adopt Western ideas and lifestyles, but feared that political liberalization would unleash the malevolent force of Islamic fundamentalism.
The Shah had a preference for Israel and the United States that was equalled by his concern over Arab backlash if he appeared too friendly to either. For example Amir Asodollah Alam, an Iranian noble of ancient lineage who served as the right hand of the Shah, wrote in his diary in 1969, “Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister of Israel, has died. I’ve arranged for HIM (His Imperial Majesty) to offer discreet condolences to the Israeli president, without risking trouble from the Arabs.”
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Shah risked that response as he declined a Soviet request to fly shipments of weapons to their Arab allies trying to destroy Israel.
The Iran that has existed since the Shah’s fall is a molecule in a drop in a bucket of time since their civilization emerged. The past 46 years have seen the people of a country with incredible resilience of culture and history under the heels of a brutal and stupid theocracy inspired by control and hatreds.
The Iran of the mullahs is not the Iranian people of history. Should Israel’s actions result in their liberation, one can be optimistic that with the right support, the real Iran that astounded the world for thousands of years with its intellect and art will finally resume its place amongst the nations of the world.
Last week Reza Pahlavi, the heir to the throne of Iran, addressed his people and said “The end of the Islamic Republicis the end of its 46-year war against the Iranian nation.”
“Now is the time to rise . . . May we be together soon. Long live Iran.”
