Empire: World History - 97. Cyrus the Great: Building the First Superpower

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Born the son of a khan, a tribal chieftain, Cyrus would go on to be a titanic figure of world history. He took Persia from being a minor regional power to the first superpower the world has ever seen. Conquering all of modern day Iran, then Turkey, and finally defeating the power of the day, Babylon: Cyrus undoubtedly deserves the sobriquet of the Great. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones to discuss the life of the founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to our brand spanking new series of Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Derrimple. It's very, very exciting to. announce what we're going to announce. Yes, we are going to be talking about Cyrus the Great in this episode, the man who founded ancient Persia, the world's first superpower. And with us, well,

we couldn't think of anybody better than Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, author of Persians, The Age of the Great Kings, a rather sumptuous, beautiful, may I say, beautiful book, this cover alone, so we'll tempt you in. And it's got all sorts of high praise from people we like very much on this podcast. It's got everyone that's ever been on this podcast, exactly. Yes, I know. Basically, our entire cast list for the series so far. Lloyd, welcome to the program. Well, thank you very much. It's a great, great pleasure to be here. Thank you. We're focusing our lens on Cyrus the Great, the man who founded ancient Persia today. And I've heard it said that Cyrus represents the world's first superpower. Do you think that is an accurate representation?

Yes, I think so. The title, The Great, gets bandied around so much with great abandon. But I think he is a man who actually earns that subrocracket, and I guess why he does that is because within one lifetime, within his lifetime, maybe starting at about the age of 18, 19, he grows from being a tribal leader in southwest Iran, disorganized tribes, to uniting them under one banner, conquering their northern neighbors, the meads, sweeping through the whole of Anatolia. terrifying and taking the Greek city-states of Asia Minor, swinging back, conquering Babylon. Which is a massive deal, presumably. Huge thing, huge. And with the fall of Babylon comes the whole of the Neo-Babolonian Empire. So within 20 years, we've already established an empire of a size that I just don't know how he himself ever conceived of it.

I don't think he ever saw it coming. And this is something that, although Cyrus is not a particularly well-known character in the West, he is a massive hero to Persians today, isn't he? And growing, in a sense, in stature, almost as we watch. He's a kind of a rallying centre for the Persian people. Yes, absolutely. So, sort of without any government sponsorship, the 29th of October has now been named Cyrus the Great Day. And it has been celebrated by Iranians inside or outside of Iran since at least 2016, there have been enormous tributes made to Cyrus at his tomb. It's as recent as 2016.

2016, absolutely, absolutely. Now, I mean, you said Iran, you said Persia, tomato, tomato. Shall we call the whole thing off? Or can you explain how this all works to us? Yeah, okay. It's a loaded use of terminology, which I refuse to. cowtow to, and I use both terms interchangeably because I don't think it's enough to say, oh, we use Persia for pre-Islamic times and Iran for post-Islamic times, or Islamic times. I don't think it's as clear as that at all. Very often it comes down to an individual's own feeling about the use of the word. Sometimes Persia is put forward by Iranians, Farsi speakers, because they like the kind of cultural kudos,

which is attached to that word, the depth of history, and being aware that sometimes Iran, of course, projected very much in the Western media as a pariah state, has kind of pejorative attachments to that word. Iranians use both, don't they? Often in the same sentence. They do both. Very often, and I do as well. I've learned over the years not to take it up as a huge issue for myself. A little bit of historical background, I suppose. The word of Iran comes from Aryan, which is, you know, the root of Aryan, which is a linguistic term and nothing more. than that. So we should quickly say nothing to do with Germanic master races as loved by the Nazis. Absolutely nothing to do with DNA, with blood, even necessarily with culture. It's a linguistic term purely. In 1931, the root of that word, Aryan, was used by Reza Shah to rename his country, Iran. So taking it from Aryan, Iran. And that's because he recognized well ahead of

Saeed, that there's a kind of orientalist spin on using Persia outside of the country, of course, because Persia, after all, is a Greek invention. It's a Greek name. So for centuries, we've been using the title of this country through a foreign lens, of course. You have a very nice story in your introduction that on the 28th of December 1934, a British minister in Tehran, Hugh Montgomery-Natchable Hugerson. Why do we don't? don't have people with these names running the foreign office still. Don't make a lot like that any longer, do they? Roked to the head of the Eastern Department of Britain's Foreign Office and said,

we have just received an absurd note from the Persian government, he expounded. It is asking us to speak of Iran and Iranian rather than Persia and Persians. And then you tell me what is the response was. Well, of course, he says, well, surely didn't have Rodotus set that up for us? Shouldn't we be following him? Like, you know, all British schoolboys, we should follow her? Heronitors. So, you know, I mean, there is, to be fair to the Greeks, to give them a little bit of if they do. There is an element of Persia within that as well. So the ancient Iranians themselves,

the ancient Persian tribe in southwest Iran called themselves pars, of course. So parsar, which is the same word as the modern place name. Well, now it's far. Fars, of course. And that's because the Arabs don't have a P in their alphabet, of course. And so after the Arab invasions, the P became an F, so just to make it easier for them, but the root is there. So just shifting our gaze back to Cyrus, I mean, what are the dates that we're talking about and what does the world look like? He was born around about 600 BCE, and he is the son of a tribal leader called Cambyses. Khan, the same word as we use today as a name.

Certainly, I use Khan because I think it's the most appropriate kind of word that I can get across to the readers that we're in a tribal situation. We don't really know what the Persians call their leaders. But we are in a world of nomads. There are no permanent settlements in Iran at this time. Everybody really is moving around. So we have in the southwest the huge Persian-speaking peoples, the tribes that make up the peoples called Persians. Notable for wearing trousers, you say. This is one of the things we owe to them. One of the huge things, absolutely, when trousers rule the world. And to the north, we have another one of these great, huge groups of people, disparate tribes, called the Meads, who are hill people and slightly

very much mountain peoples, absolutely, very, very fierce. We have over in the east another group of fearsome tribal peoples, the Partha, who become, in many centuries later, the Parthians and so forth. So there's a huge mix of Iranian-speaking peoples settling and merging and moving around the vast Iranian plateau, essentially, you know, leading their, their herds following the weather, as all nomads always do. And indeed, they still do the Bacteari, have their migrations to this day? Oh, most definitely. Huge. I mean, you know, you can really look at current, you know, modern movements of the Iranian nomads and, you know, plotted onto antiquity very, very easily. They are also coming in touch with indigenous peoples as well. So the people who were in Iran before

the tribes migrated there. In particular, important to the Persians were people called the Elamites. And they were very much a Mesopotamian society. They shared a great deal of cultural wars with the Babylonians, who were their sort of neighbours. And they're agricultural. I mean, they are rooted.

Absolutely, rooted peoples and urban peoples as well. So the great city of Sousa is their capital. With a script too, with a cuneiform script. Yes, yes, yeah. Oh, yeah, with a very developed, very sophisticated script. And I think for the first time the Persians get in contact with these peoples. And there's actually a very interesting sort of synergy that develops amongst the Persian nomads in the Southwest and their immediate neighbors in Elam. There doesn't seem to be any hostility between them.

And in fact, now we begin to understand that the Elamite connection is the missing link we've long been looking for to understand something about the rise of the Persians. And particularly in matters religious. You make a very good case that Elamite gods have a very strong influence. Absolutely, absolutely. Elamite gods, I think generally Elamite religious practices, including things like sanctuaries, shrines, all of this. They have a huge impact on the Persian speakers who they encounter. And Cyrus's origin story sounds, I mean, you know, it's familiar because it sounds a lot like Zeus's origin story or indeed Krishna's origin story.

So tell us about that. Well, we've got about six or seven of them, to be honest. Herodotus tells us one of the most famous, which he says, he knows four other versions. And in this one, Osiris is the grandson of the king of the Medes, Astyages. And one day, Astyages has this terrible dream and his interpreters interpreted for him. And in one dream, first of all, his daughter, who has married this Persian and has given birth to Cyrus, he dreams that she has vine leaves emerging from her genitals, and then in a second dream, she urinates with such force that it sweeps across all nations. And of course, he wakes up

with something of a sweat, as you could understand. And then the interpreter say, well, the child that your daughter has just given birth to will sweep through the nations, and he will conquer you as well. And of course, in a typical sort of folk tale motif, the old king of the meads panics and he gets one of his henchmen, a man called Hypargas, to take this infant child out into the mountains to expose him to the elements so the child will die. But being soft of heart, rather like the huntsman in the Snow White story, Hypergas can't do it and the child is left and then found by an old shepherd and his wife who raise him to manhood and then recognizing in him some kind of inbued greatness. And of course, he goes on then to grow up, realize what

his heritage is, and to take the throne of media, as was indeed predicted in his mother's dream. But he speaks because he's got parents that are both median and Persian. His father is Persian, his mother is median. He has both languages. Well, if we choose to believe it, it's a great piece of propaganda, of course, you know. Right. Let me tell you another of the birth story. So another one is that he was. born to Persian parents only, to a goat herd and to a bandit. And these are therefore, you know, people of the soil, purely of Persian extraction, no median blood in them whatsoever. So what we see in some of the birth stories of Cyrus, of course, is a propaganda campaign where he is appealing

to the people that he is ruling or has taken over their territories. Well, I mean, and let's not forget the other one, which is very much Romulus and Remus, the reboot, which is, He's brought up by a dog and puppies. Absolutely. Brought up by a dog. Absolutely. I should say here, I've actually met a woman who was brought up by a wolf. And I used to work in a mother tree's home on my first little rabbit hole here.

I actually have met a real-life Mowgli. And this woman was rescued from a family of wolves outside Delhi. And she couldn't speak. She had no spoken language. But she was very vivacious and lively and could indicate things very well with her hands and noises. So these stories are not necessarily made up. Absolutely. And I think the continuity of some of these stories is really, really fascinating, isn't it?

You know, how we keep on coming back to these. And the idea of foundling children in particular, you know, goes throughout mythology across the whole of the ancient Near East. So we have Saga and Pekhad being put into a basket and floated down the river Euphrates. We have Moses on the Nile. Same story, yeah. Well, and again, and again, I refer you to Krishna also floated down a river. I mean, these are sort of pan-global. memes. We'd call them memes, ancient memes, I suppose, wouldn't it? So until the age of six,

we don't know too much. As William said, you know, he does seem to speak Medean fluently, which is very, very useful. What do we know for sure? Is there anything that we know for sure about his childhood, apart from, you know, these disparate claims of his uniqueness and specialness? The only thing I think we can be certain of is that his education initially would have been amongst the women of his tribe. At the age of about six, he was taken away from them, and then from there on in spent his life with the menfolk. And there are three things, which all our sources agree on,

that Persian boys, from there on in, spent the rest of their lives in the saddle. They were exemplary horsemen. I mean, by far the greatest horsemen in world history, I would say, maybe challenged by some of the indigenous American tribes of the 17th to the 18th century. Or the Mongols? Or possibly the Mongols, absolutely.

But they spent their whole lives on horseback. So they were taught to ride the horse, to fire the bow, which of course was their weapon of choice, and always to speak the truth. That's something that all of our ancient sources talk about, actually, this reliance in the Persian mind on the concept of Arta, Arta, the old Persian word for truth. truth, honesty, but it also means then recognizing authority, recognizing the gods. It's a moral code that they live by. We should maybe point at this for our Indian listeners who will have heard the word Arta

and have a very different meaning. But it's very important to say that old Farsi and a Vestan are absolutely the first cousins of Sanskrit. Oh, completely and utterly. Completely and utterly. We can join the dots between them very, very easily indeed. We see the common root with these languages.

And in terms of religion, there is, again, great commonality between old Zoroastrianism, with its emphasis on fire and the hearth, and again, the early Rig Vedic. Even now, Arias Samar, you know, sort of it is very much a fire form of Hinduism. I went to a wedding last week in Jaipo, and the couple went around a fire. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Also, another word that's cropped up that listeners in India will be very familiar with, and I know this opens a whole can of worms, but the term aria, Aryans, Aria and Aryans. So tell us why this is a problematic, or has proved to be a problematic word in the modern era.

Yeah, it's problematic, of course, because, you know, first of all, it's a construct, and nothing more than that, you know, William Oriental Jones, when he was trying to, you know, deal with some of these early languages back in the end of the 17th, 18th century coined this term Aryan for this linguistic group. And I think it is nothing more than that. Nowadays, we're more content to say, you know, it's an Indo-European group or an Indo-Iranian group of languages. But the word for many centuries that's been used for that by academics and others is Aryan. What was great about Jones in the 18th century when he came up with this theory, in contrast to the use of Aryan

something exclusive in later Nazi ideology, was this was a linguistic group that spanned Asia from Iceland to India. That's exactly it. It's a huge expanse of a linguistic family, and nothing more than that. It isn't even to do with cultural practices necessarily, although, of course, there are some shared ones,

but there are many disparate things. And it certainly has nothing to do with race or DNA whatsoever. That's where, of course, you know, it was hijacked by the Nazis, but actually more predominantly amongst current far right white supremacists, far more even than the Nazis, everything. They get far more strength and pleasure out of misunderstanding the term than ever occurred in the Third Reich. But the Persians understood themselves to be Aryan-speaking people. That's not a construct.

Absolutely. So what happens when Cyrus is growing up? The Meads are an aggressive and dangerous force to the north. The Meads are growing in power all the time and they really come into their own when they make an alliance with the Babylonian kings. Babylon, the wealthier city on earth at that time, was of course subject to the Assyrians. And so the Babylonians got together with the Meads to form this power, which actually overthrew the Assyrian Empire in 612 BCE. we have the fall of Nineveh and the re-emergence of Babylon as this superpower. But now we're, you know, befriended by these tribes in the north of Iran. And because of their loyalty to Babylon,

the Babylonian king gives the meads a whole swath of land, which today would be north Iraq, right the way into eastern Turkey as well. So they suddenly find themselves with this huge arc of land stretching from Anatolia right the way around the Caspian Sea in this huge tracts of land that they can now claim as their own. And this presumably threatens the Persians who are now surrounded? That's exactly it. But also the Meads have this new sort of sense of self-worth, I suppose, and they push their authority south into the Iranian plateau, threatening the Persian lands. This is where Cyrus comes into his own. He is the first to unite the groups of Persian nomads against this threat from their northern cousins.

Well, to understand how he does that, we need to know why he's important and his father is an important man at this time. Cambysius. Now, tell us about Cambyses and most importantly, what happens when Cambyses dies. Yes. So, I mean, our sources are not fulsome about Cyrus's father, Cambyses, but certainly he had made some kind of. of impact on the Khans, the tribal leaders of Persia, and had left his own tribe, that is the tribe that comes from an area called Parzagad, Pasagadai, not too far from modern-day Shiraz, kind of in charge, the first among equals, if you like. So when Cambyses dies, Cyrus, his son, takes over without any hostilities or any threats from other tribal leaders.

And, of course, succession issues are always difficult in any society. So I think Cambysius had done a good job in preparing the tribes for Cyrus' accession to power. I don't know what the quality is, you know, but there must have been something about him. I always see him as an incredibly charismatic individual.

Roughly what age is he at this time? I'm thinking he's about 18, 19 at this point. So he's had many, many years of learning under his father and the other men of his tribe. And he's just in the right place at the right time and the right person to do the job. So, Lloyd, how exactly is a king proclaimed in ancient Persia? It's nomination, first of all, by the former head. It's the agreement of other tribal leaders.

But then there is a ceremony, but it doesn't have anything to do with a crown. It's not a coronation. It's an investiture. And we know that the coat, the gaunika, the sort of long-sleeved garment, which we still see worn in places like Afghanistan just on the shoulders. Hamid Khazai is preferred. Precisely. Yeah, absolutely.

That was the image of royal power, essentially. And quite literally, it was thought that the king's essence, his far, his glory emanated into his clothes. And so it was always a mark of honour when the king gave away one of his coats, one of his robes to a member of his court, you know, somebody who would be particularly favourite. So it's the origin, really, of the ceremony of Ghaelat, which we see in Persianate societies across the ages. But it's really the transmission of the essence of the king into that. So, you know, in successive centuries, many decades after Cyrus had died,

every Achaemenid king of Persia went to the homelands to Pasagadai, where Cyrus was born and where he was buried. And in a ritual, he put on the robe of Cyrus. which was, incidentally, the humble robe of Cyrus. It was the robe of a horseman, of a cowboy, essentially, not some grand, gilded, golden garment at all. That's interesting. Yeah, and they drank mares' milk at that point, and they ate pistachio nuts.

So in other words, they reverted back to their nomadic roots as horsemen, tribesmen. When he is invested as king, do his people rejoice? Is he a popular choice? Do they love him and what do they love about him? Yes, I think they do. I think it's because he's got this sort of inbuilt charisma. In old Persian, and today in actually a new Persian as well, we have this world called

Farr. Farr is a kind of emanating loury, luminouscence, yes, quite literally a shine. If you think of it, it's gone into sort of iconography as the halo. So the halo around the prophet or the halo around Jesus or whatever it may be. every Persian king was thought to have that, which is given to him by Ahura Mazda. So he has this, no Persian king ever claimed to be a god. However, he was the viceroy of God. That's without a doubt.

So in those images in Persepolis, you always have Ahura Mazda hovering over. You should say who Ahura Mazda is, because if you're not Zarastrian, you may not know. Hora Mazda is the chief god of the Persian pantheon. He's the creator god, the great, great creator god. He is the truth personified. He is the wise lord. That's what his name means. And he is, I think, predominantly in the Echemenid period, especially under Darius the Great in Xerxes, he is the god amongst all gods. He is the go-to god. There were many, many other gods in the Pantheon of the Iranians, and of course they adopted lots and lots of these Elamite gods as well. But Eruramazda is the

go-to royal god, I think, for the dynasty. The Persians saw themselves in polar terms. truth, good. And then there was Drauga, darkness, the lie. There's Huramazda and there's Ariman, who has to be his ying to the yang. It's about perfect balance between this. And everything in Persian religion really was about the individual's choice to walk whichever path he saw best for him. There would be repercussions, but it's down to individual choice. I suppose it comes down to faith is what would you say. Well, Ahura Mazda's chosen representative on earth is now Cyrus. Join us after the break when we find out what Cyrus does.

Welcome back. So Cyrus is the new king. All hail Cyrus, son of Cambyses. Is he married at this point or is he not married at this point? I think he would be very unlikely if he wasn't married. We know of one name of a wife, but there probably were many. That's because, of course, in a tribal society, intermarriage with the daughters of other Khans or sisters of Khans was fundamental, but our records only name one woman at this point. He goes immediately into action against these pesky meads in the north, and actually he lowers them down into his tribal territory at Pasagadai,

and there we have a battle, the Battle of Pasagadai, one of those great battles that twists history, starts off a, started off afresh almost, because he defeats the meads. Hang on, we're missing the best story because initially the Persian's retreat and what happens. So the women of Persia, they kind of line up, they're ashamed of their menfolk, and they lift up their skirts and point to their genitals and say, if you're not man enough, get back in here. So the men are shamed. And that sends them back into battle. Turn on their heels and they slaughter the enemy.

There are famous pictures of this. It was one of those orientalist images that reappeared and gave great delight to slightly pervy Victorian painters. That's exactly. And there's also stories that Cyrus then gave the women of Persia gold coins. And this was a tradition that went on like a kind of bizarre Monde Thursday ritual for the rest of his reign. We don't know whether there's any truth in that. But the point is they go back into battle and they defeat the meat. Absolutely.

They have an astounding victory. and even though Herodotus spins lots of stories about Astyages, the King of the Meads, being treated kindly and so forth, we know from Babylonian records, and thank goodness we have them, that Astyages, the King of the Meads was executed. He was far too much of a problem for Cyrus. And so Cyrus takes over all of these median lands, which don't forget, go right the way up to the Highless River in Anatolia. So he takes his men off in that direction across the rough terrain of Anatolia, they cross the Highless River and they keep on going towards the coast, plodding on westward. Is it at this point that he's sort of declared and his fame starts spreading as King of the Meads and the Persians? Absolutely. King of the Meads and the Persians. Just to clarify the geography and taking over now in this campaign, what is now Turkey.

The whole of Turkey, absolutely. So he pushes right the way to the western shores of Turkey. It's the areas that lots of people go to for holidays, of course. So Sardis, which is now certainly the wealthiest of the Greek-speaking cities of Asia Minor, these were very much Greek polis, but under the rule of a king, Cresus, a very wealthy man, as rich as Cresus, as rich as Cresus, we've heard of him. The first king to produce coinage in gold and silver, well, Cyrus set his eyes on this and thought, well, I'll have some of that. And he storms the citadel of Sardis.

It takes about six or seven months for the citadel to fall. But when it does, the rest of the Greek city states quickly come over to Cyrus's side. They're in danger of being conquered themselves. So suddenly Cyrus is in charge of the whole of Turkey, the whole of northern Iraq and the whole of Iran. So I'm fascinated because this whole series is called empire. And sometimes empires are built on religious fervor or some kind of ideological belief. sometimes it's all about the money, honey. So what is it in Cyrus's case? What is driving him forward and forward and forward to take all of these enormous swathes of land that you described? I think it's excitement. I think it's desire to know more to expand his horizons of who he is as an individual. I do not think that Cyrus went into his added life thinking, I will create an empire because I don't think the Persians had a word for empire. empire. Oh, that's interesting. They've never seen it. They'd not experienced anything of this. The best

they had was tribal unity every now and then. But they could never have thought in that kind of scale. The parallels are the Mongols, the Ottomans, these nomadic groups who suddenly erupt and take the cities? Precisely. And there's an opportunism in it. And I wouldn't deny that there's money in it because, you know, economic success comes with imperial success. Of course it does. The impact it has on the world around this growing superpower is remarkable, especially for the Greeks sitting on the other side of the Aegean, having been very comfortable with the kind of life they had negotiating and benefiting from these wealthy city states in Asia Minor, suddenly they found that all of these Greek city states were being cut off from them. And as they saw the advance of this great superpower, now, this new, unnamed, unknown superpower. Yeah, where the hell did that come from? Where did that come from?

Absolutely. Who is this Cyrus coming? You know, they never really got over it. There's a wonderful fragmentary Greek poem written around the middle of the fifth century. So after Cyrus had died, but recalling the first stages of empire building, and it says, it's really good for an old man to sit by the fire on a winter night, munching chickpeas. And if somebody comes and sits with you, you should always ask him, oh, what's your name? where are you from? How old were you when the Persians came? It's really amazing. And just another thought. I mean,

how did people express that they were part of the empire, whether vows are fealty? Did you have to pay taxes? I mean, what bound these together in an empire? You can go and conquer a place, but it doesn't necessarily belong to you. No. Unless it belongs to you. You say tax. I say tribute. I say gift. We have a word in old Persian, Barji, which is translated variously as tribute, gift and tax. But of course, that's what the Persians wanted. As long as their tribute, their taxation, poured into the central coffers, then everybody was happy, essentially. The Persians established satrapies across the whole of their empire. So these were governors, essentially, working in the Persian system. But one thing the Persians never did was to change the system of governance that was already in operation

in different parts of the empire. So no ethnic cleansing, no putting your man in charge, none of that at all took place. None of that whatsoever. A certain amount of putting a man in charge, so there was always an overseer who worked according to the Persian version of things, but in conjunction with local dignitaries who had lots more experience in that area than they ever did. This is the one thing I find really fascinating about the Persian Empire as a whole. It's the fact that here we've got a very different model of empire, I think. In that, the Persians never imposed their language. This is fascinating.

This is where it's quite different from many other empires of antiquity. They never imposed an architectural style, for instance. They never imposed one bureaucracy on people. And in fact, what they did all the time was adapt to. the local ways. What we see in Persian art, therefore, is this wonderful amalgamation of Syrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, indigenous Persian styles. It's completely the other way around than we're thinking of. And this is where I get very frustrated with the fact that Persia hasn't been taken seriously as an ancient power. Because, you know, in Britain, our politicians

for centuries now have been taught that Greece and Rome were the models of civilization, and especially, of course, the Roman model of conquest. And of course, you know, when the British went out from the end of the 18th century onwards conquering and setting up their world, that's what the model was. So, I mean, you know, you could tell a British city wherever it went because essentially it was neoclassical, you know, there were bungalows in northern India, all of this kind of thing, you know, all over Asia and the Middle East we have that. And it's so much in the DNA of the British politicians who were setting this up

and still is today, that they are unable to see that there is actually another model for empire. Now, empire I don't think is a good thing. I don't like it at all. But at least the idea that the Persians had was a very different form of empire. And if the British had only recognized there is a different form of empire out there, then at least, you know, it wouldn't have taken away from the experience of colonialism, but it would have given millions of people around the world a more dignified economy. experience of being themselves. Well, in this growing domain of Cyrus, who seems to be doing this

very, very well, and better than some of the people who will come after him, we haven't talked about Babylon. Now, Babylon is the jewel. Babylon is the prize. Tell us why it is so very important. It is the mega city. It is the mother of all cities. It's the New York of its day, would you say, or the New York plus Shanghai. Yeah, it's the New York. It's the Shanghai. It's the Shanghai. It's the Hong Kong. It's the whole shebang. I mean, there is no place like it on earth. I mean, it is multicultural.

It is so wealthy. It has an empire which goes right the way across the Levant into northern Egypt, right the way down into Arabia. It controls the trade routes, the spice routes, all of this. And Cyrus wants it. I don't think he ever conceived of it before, but now on his way back to Iran, he thinks, well, we'll pop down the Euphrates and we'll take this. I have a question. Can you paint a picture of the hanging gardens for me? Because, you know, I remember collecting those PG-tipped cards.

This is a controversial thing. What were they? What did they look like? Okay. Well, brace yourself. Okay. They weren't in Babylon. What? We really doubt that they were in Babylon. Stephanie Dali has done a really, really fine job on exposing the fact that they

really, the hanging gardens were an Assyrian invention. And probably if they existed at all, Sorry, my brain's just going. They were in the city of Nineveh. So unfortunately, yeah, the hanging gardens are really only mentioned by Herodotus and by Greek historians. You're killing me here. I know. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry to burst bubbles wherever I go. But there is, yeah, there's no evidence in the archaeology for these things. But when they were talked about, and according to my PG-Tips collector's card that I collected when I was nine, why do we have such in detail descriptions of terraces? Terruses, absolutely. What's that about, Lloyd? I think the Assyrians certainly had that. We have iconography showing Assyrian gardens built in that kind of style, terraced gardens, essentially, but nothing from Babylon, nothing at all. And, you know, Babylon has been extensively excavated, and there is no evidence for any of this whatsoever. One of the things, Lloyd, that you do wonderfully well in your books

is that you use the Bible as a serious historical source. It is. And Babylon, at this point, we should say, is full of Jews who've been brought from Jerusalem. Tell that whole story. Yes. So in the 680s, Nebuchadnezzar the second had conquered Jerusalem. He had done something which is typically Babylonian and the Syrian deported en masse, the populations of Judah. And now they found themselves in Babylonia. And we get, of course, from the Hebrew Bible, all these wonderful stories about them in the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel. but also in the Psalms, very famously, by the rivers of Babylon. Actually, the translation is a lot more prosaic than that.

If we were to translate that correctly, it would be by the irrigation canals of Babylon. Can I just say you're ruining everything? You're spoiling absolutely everything. Don't turn to me for a film about Babylon, really. I'll just ruin everything. So these people are there, I think, though, alongside many other hundreds of different nationalities, because depopulation or the movement of peoples to discombobulate them really from their lands was something which the Babylonian kings enjoyed doing.

So I think this is adding to the multi-ethnic nature of the country. And again, in your books, you make wonderfully clear that the deported Jews are actually treated very well and integrated very much into the court and that we know about the Persian court, partly because we have such wonderful descriptions of them and positive descriptions in, for example, Bester. That's exactly right. Yeah, we haven't talked about, I mean, does he just walk in and say, you know, this is a very wealthy place, which I guess could pay mercenaries. So does he just sort of say, hello, I'm here? How does he do it? He does walk into Babylon, unopposed, but that's because he has a bit of a ploy. So as he's going down with his troops, down the Tigris,

he reaches a city about 50 miles north of Babylon called Opis. And there he just lets his troop run riot. They rampage through the streets. They plunders. they pillage, they kill, they rape, they completely destroy the city, and they even kill the Babylonian crown prince, Belchazza, known to us again from the Bible, of course, leaving the King of Babylon without an heir. And this really foreworns the Babylonians about what would happen to them. And so following the advice of the Babylonian priest and the Babylonian elite, they simply opened the gates of Babylon to Cyrus and his troops who walk peacefully. And Cyrus honors the Babylonian gods. Marduk, who is the great god of Babylon, is honored.

He certainly does. But this is the pragmatic thing about Cyrus. And the Persians generally, when they encounter gods in different cultures, they immediately conform to the teachings, theologies of those civilizations. So to make himself a legitimate king in Babylon, He needs the support of the Babylonian priests. These are the elites. These are the people who will record history after all. And so he courts them. And he courts them, of course, by worshipping Marduk, the great God of Babylon,

by repairing his Esagila, the great temple in the middle of Babylon, and also undertaking repairs to the city generally as well. We have a text called the Cyrus Cylinder, which is now in the British Museum, one of the most important PR texts. I have to say, Lloyd, that I have many Persian friends, and they love your books and they love you. But the one thing they really, really don't like is what you have to say about the Sarasilina. I know.

Well, the fact is it is not a Persian document. I'm sorry, folks, but it is not. It was created by Babylonian priests. It is written in the Babylonian language. It was found in Babylon. It is a Babylonian document. Well, we're not talking about a scroll. We're talking about a big lump of clay.

It's a sort of. It's a kind of like a squished oblong brick in a way, squished in. And it looks as dull as the dust it is made from. You are breaking a million Persian hearts and every minute you go here. But it is so fundamental to our understanding of the development of the Persian Empire. It really is. So what does it say? What does it say about Cyrus?

So first of all, we should perhaps say what the legend of the Syrians. The legend is that it's the first text of human rights, that it's like a precursor of the United Nations Charter and all this. There are lots and lots of stuff written saying, you know, Cyrus says in it, you know, peoples throughout my realm will have freedom to worship what they want. Slavery, I will put an end to. Well, you can look in vain for those kind of words in it. It's simply not there.

She had in Abadi, you know, when she collected her Nobel Peace Prize 20 years ago, she quoted from a bogus translation that she had found online, all these things about religious freedom and religious tolerance. it's not there and she of course was mortified when she found out. But doesn't Neil McGregor writes battle all this in his British Museum book? He's a great supporter of the Cyrus Silder. Yes, it's a great myth. It's not there.

It's not that. Cyrus knew no more about human rights than he knew about flying to Mars. You know, it is not on his agenda. It is not the language he spoke. This is a slave society. However, what is fascinating about the text is that it does, say, look, Marduk looked for me and he called me by name, he took me by the hand and he brought me into Babylon. Now, the remarkable thing is, if we open the Hebrew Bible and we go to Isaiah chapter 41,

42 and 45, we find exactly the same wording, but coming from Yahweh, the Hebrew God, I called him by name, Cyrus, you will go and conquer to the ends of the world. I take him by the hand. Exactly the same phrase is being used. So your contention in not only your lovely Persians, the age of the great king, but your book this year that you produced, the extraordinary detailed analysis of the book of Esther, which is a book I've never read in the Old Testament,

which is always, of course, there. And you paint this picture of the Jews and the Persians mixed together in an incredible cultural matrix. Completely. I mean, Cyrus in Isaiah gets an extraordinary title. He is called, in Hebrew, Messiah, Messiah, the anointed one. He is the only non-Jew ever to get the title of Messiah. And this is why, of course, he has such a great press among Jews to this day, rightly so as well.

Reza Palavi, the Crown Prince, this Sunday on Cyrus Day, made a speech about the relationship of Israel and Persian. on this. Precisely. It's been a wonderful, progressive, interrelated, cultural highlight of world history, I think, and it's a terrible shame where we are with it now. We should remember the past more. One thing I should say is that he allowed the Jews to return to their homeland, but many thousands of Jews didn't do that. Actually, we know that the amount of Jews who actually went back to Jerusalem and refounded the temple on his orders and with the funding that the Persian state supplied as well, were quite limited. By and large, the Jewish population was so comfortable living in Babylonia

and then spreading into Iran that they stayed there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. The great Talmud, the great teachings of the Jews, of course, on the Bible, were written in Babylon, and much of the Hebrew Old Testament was edited during, the Persian period as well. So in my book on Esther, there's a bigger book I want to write really on this relationship because I think there are lots of kind of hidden great kings. I found it fascinating, your book of Esther, all new to me. There's things like, you know, when the Hebrew scribes were thinking about what is the greatest Jewish king we had, when it must be Solomon. What did Solomon have? Well, Solomon must have had 800 wives and 300 concubines, and he must have had a huge palace

this size, we get all the dementia, and he must have had these many horses and these many chariots. All of that is modelled, of course, on the Persian Great King. Because Solomon is archaeologically invisible, isn't he? We can't find him in the archaeological record. Completely naturally. That's because really he might have been an Iron Age chief, but he was certainly not this huge king. So he's constructed in the mould of a Persian great king. I mean, you see, how much percentage is Cyrus then in Solomon? I mean, that's fascinating. You think he's a lot. Yes, I think it's a fair bit.

I mean, not just Cyrus. I think generally the akimid monarchs are there. Just, you know, break further hearts. Is it a very tragic end to Cyrus? How does he actually die? Well, there are as many deaths of Cyrus as there are births of Cyrus. Wow, okay. So you pays your money, you take your pick.

He probably died on campaign in the East, furthering his enterprises, probably in Afghanistan-ish area, but we're not really sure. Chasing Scythians? chasing Skithians or chasing other barbarian eastern tribes. There's one great story where he's killed by a female warrior called Tamiris. I love this first of the story, who cuts off his head and then covers it with blood. Yeah, plunges it into a bucket of blood and says, they're insatiable Cyrus drink as much as you can.

Because he has killed her son. Yes, her son. And so many, of course. And this is something we have to remember. while the Persians had a remarkably tolerant, less a fair attitude to maintaining empire, they built their empire, of course, on bloodshed and bone, you know, and it was maintained that way, and they could be as vicious to anybody who broke their system as any other empire before or after them. And we have to remember that, you know, it's not all songs and roses and holding hands.

It was still an imperial enterprise with a lot of brute force behind it. But the nomads get their own back. They lure him deeper and deeper into their territory and then they turn. That's right. But, you know, there's other stories where he dies very comfortably in his bed, in his tent, at Pasagardai with his sons at the side. So we simply do not know. We have to say, we have to do the tomb of Cyrus, which is almost my favorite place in Iran. It is quite amazing.

You know, it stands almost on its own now in this. vast plateau. And there would have been, of course, many, many buildings around it and formal gardens. Ah, Cyrus created the first formal garden in Persia. Paradisos, paradise, the first time we get the use of this. And he created in miniature his empire there, with the flora and the fauna from all over his empire were brought together. Could I ask you just finally? And we'd love to have you back again because we want to talk about Darias with you as well. But there seems to be, I mean, this reinvigoration of Cyrus or this need to claim Cyrus in modern day Iran, which is very un-Iranian, as we understand it, the Iran of the Ayatollahs. What is going on here? Tell us what

that is all about. Oh, you know, the way that Cyrus has been used and abused over the last 50, 60 years is really quite extraordinary. I need to take you back, first of all, to the early 1970s when the last Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Shah, was kind of obsessed with Cyrus. He really saw himself as the direct heir of Cyrus the Great. In 1971, he has this huge kind of Durbar, where he invites world leaders from all over, and they come to, first of all Persepolis, and then they're all trundled off to Passa Guard and in front of the tomb, you know, in his military uniform and so forth. He stands in front of the tomb, and he raises his hand, and he says in his very awkward way, the Shah and Verena wasn't comfortable in front of the media, rest.

Sleep well, Osiris, for we are here. So very hubristically saying, you know, I am the new Cyrus. Well, of course, you know, the Iranian newspapers. But the Persians love this now. Well, they do now. But at the time, they went crazy about it because, like, there were newspapers the next morning with cartoons in them. There's a very famous one where a man comes home from work early and he finds his neighbor, next to neighbor Cyrus, in bed with his wife. And lifts his hand unanimously and says, rest well.

Cyrus for we are here. And of course, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in the Jaff at the time in exile, he thunders back to Iran saying, you know, anybody who uses this title, King of Kings is anathema to Islam. But that's exactly why today Cyrus's tomb has become a gathering point for opposition against the regime, against the mullahs, and without any central organization, people gather in their tens of thousands at it. And I've seen it growing in. that way. First of all, I'd go to Pasagad, maybe taking a group of visitors there, and I'd see some roses scattered on the tomb. And then I'd see groups of people coming to picnic around the tomb and throwing flowers on it. Then I began to realize at Nourouroos, groups of my Iranian friends

and colleagues were going there, making kind of pilgrimage really at the New Year's ceremonies. and then, and about 2018, captured on the internet, which you can still see on YouTube, they were about, well, it's hard to pin down, but it said about 120,000 people assembled at the tomb and began to circumnavigate it, just like you do the Carba. Like the Carba, yeah, yeah. And shouting, you know, long-lived Cyrus, long-lived Silas. Well, of course, the regime went crazy, and one Mueller, an octogenarian mullah, said, you know, this is so un-Islamic. The Shah used to say exactly the same thing, but we are an Islamic

state and we have gone through a revolution. This is unacceptable. So now Cyrus is very much being used as this binding force. Yes, a binding force for the young Iranians. And let's not forget, Iran's population is the youngest on earth. 70% of the population of Iran is under 45. Change will happen. This is the power of history and this is why we study this stuff. This is why it's worth remembering. I say to my students every day, ancient history is not a dead subject. It is alive and it is vital and it's happening all around us. And these kids in Iran are taking Cyrus out on their mobile phones, quite literally into the streets. They're creating a new Cyrus as well. There are wonderful websites coming up with new kind of superhero Cyruses being designed by them in

the imagination. I love it. It's not the Cyrus. of history necessarily. I don't care. Let them have the Cyrus that they need. That's what I say. Thank you so much, Lloyd. That was absolutely fantastic. And if you'd like to hear the next two episodes of Empire in which Lloyd tells the story of Darias the Great at the very peak of the Persian Empire, you can do it right now. All you need to do is join the Empire Club as a friend of the show, or a gold-tier member. And you'll get to hear the next two episodes of Empire if you do. You can also by Lloyd's incredible book for a discount. That is Persians, the Age of the Great Kings,

which has been one of my favourite reads this year, and it's a wonderful, wonderful book. I'm so pleased, and other people can now enjoy it as much as you have. All you need to do is go to www.w.mpiripoduk.com. That's www.mirepoduk.com. And if you do sign up, see you in just a minute. And if not, we'll see you on Thursday as usual. Till then, it's goodbye from me, Anita.

Arnhann. And goodbye from me, William Drupu.