Empire: World History - 98. Darius the Great: Ruling from India to the Mediterranean

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

The Persian Empire that Darius took control of was already mighty and powerful; his predecessor, Cambyses, had conquered Egypt, further expanding its territory. But it was under Darius it reached its zenith. Stretching all the way from the Mediterranean in the west to India in the east, from the Gulf of Oman in the south to southern Russia in the north, Persia under Darius was truly a global superpower. Listen as William and Anita are once again joined by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones to discuss the life of Darius 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.mptopopuk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnum. And me, William Durumple. Well, we just couldn't get enough of him. I don't think we will ever get enough of him. Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, the fabulous author of Perj.

The Age of the Great Kings is with us back again. We locked the door. We changed the locks. We put a stump of wood against the door. See, there's no way out. Thank you for being with us again. Oh, you're honestly so welcome. I'm really enjoying yourself.

Okay. Well, today we're going to be talking about Darius, another great. Cyrus the Great last time. Derrius the Great. Nobody's ever been called like, you know, Tony the crap, have they? It's like a thing, isn't it? Kevin the second raider. John, King John Neely got that, didn't it?

King John. That is true. Bad King John. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, look, Darius, the reason that we're talking about Darius is because he takes us right to their peak of the Persian Empire, when the empire is stretched out to the Mediterranean in the west, India in the east, the Gulf of Oman in the south and southern Russia in the north.

I've heard it said that if Cyrus were Trajan, then it would be Darius who would be Hedrian. Yes, that's quite nice. Yeah, absolutely. I guess Cyrus did the heavy lifting and then Darius gets to enjoy the. The fruits. The fruits of it. Yes, absolutely. And what a wealthy, wealthy fruit they had as well.

I mean, there was no empire on earth that challenged Persia because it was the only superpower, you know. There was no Macedon to challenge it. There was no threat from the east, you know. India was in no state to do it. There was nothing further east to do it either. So it went absolutely unrivaled. Very, very interesting point. Right.

Let's get straight into this. And dates and origin stories. So who was he? when was he born? And he wasn't the son of Cyrus. This is the important first point. He probably had no connection to Cyrus's bloodline at all. In his great Bissitton inscription, near Kermann Shah, he carves in letters 30 feet off the ground.

So no one can get to it, an alterer. But the gods could see it, that he was from the same lineage of Cyrus. That is highly unlikely. Clearly not true. And yet he then goes on about the true. Truth and the lie. Talks about the lie all the time. As I am truthful, so may you judge me on my truth, he says.

Wasn't it Hitler who said, if you tell a lie, tell a big one? So I think this is, you know, again, Darius is one of those great self-propagandists, really. He really invents a story for himself. But his story is actually one of regicide and of revolt. But he sets himself up as a very, very successful ruler. Is it actually quite a humble beginning, like one of the possible Cyrus stories that, you He was a quiver bearer who rises through the ranks, nothing like that. I doubted very much.

We know his father. We know his grandfather. He is very aware of his lineage and he puts the name of his family on all of his inscriptions, really. And we know he comes from a really great Khanate family. So he is up there, you know, probably, you know, have been brought up alongside Cyrus's family in this nexus of interaction that goes on among these tribes. And in fact, we know that Darius as a young man,

the daughter of another Khan called Gobrias and so forth. So this kind of interrelationships of these tribes were there. So he is the son of a man called Vistaspah, who was very, very higher at Cyrus's court, one of his right-hand men, so probably grew up within the shadow of the royal family, but used that opportunity to actually overthrow Cyrus's own blood and to take the throne himself. And he depicts himself in that same Behushtun inscription that you referred to as this larger-than-life figure with his rivals, the liars, chained and manacled. Yeah, one of them actually are on the belly of one conquered rebel in front of him. All of them are called liar kings because they dared rebel. They followed Drauga, this sense of irreligiosity, heretics, almost, we might say, in this just war.

that Darius was fighting to become king. And all the time he talks about how he has become king thanks to Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda made me king because of Ahura Mazda. I am king. And in one incredible inscription from Susa, he says, Ahura Mazda is mine. I am Ahura Mazda's in this perfect synergy of God and king working together. And we should remind people who may not have listened to the first podcast,

Ahura Mazda is, he's the biggest cheese in the pantheon. is the great cheese of the Iranian pantheon. His name means the wise lord. And I think Dariah saw him as his own personal god or a dynastic god. He always depicts him floating above, immediately above him. Absolutely, absolutely. Always in proximity. Looking very like him even. A doppelganger, essentially. Okay, so describe looks. I'm doing it again. Describe looks and personality. And what date, did we give a date of when we think he was born? Unlike Cyrus, of whom we have no real life-like image. We do know what Darius looked like, or certainly how Darius had himself depicted. We've got some beautiful images of him, carved at Bissetoun and other reliefs at Precipolis,

dating to around 500 BCE. He came to the throne around 524 BCE after a series of rebellions. He was, well, by Persian standards, a very good-looking man. He had that very distinctive Persian hook-nose, which actually Xenophon says, all people, all Iranians loved hook-nose men, because Cyrus the Great had a hook nose and ever since they all aspire to be hook-nosed which is really sad that today Iran is the centre of rhinoplasty across the world. Exactly.

That and Lebanon are the two biggest place for nose jobs for those who don't know what rhinoplastie is. And I just think let it be. It's a jolly good nose. Absolutely. It's a beautiful, elegant nose. He wears a long, long beard.

Beard, of course, is the symbol of wisdom of Makisnau as well, which is all beautifully curled and coiffured, probably with elaborate oils to set it in place. Can I ask, but in every image that you get of all those Persian warriors, the immortals lined up on the steps of Persepolis, they've all got those fancy haircuts. Do we know anything about coiffure in ancient Persia? We do indeed. We know that there were beauty specialists who were trained in setting hair and beards. We know also that false hair was used to be plaited into wigs.

This is to build up the ringlet-y look. To build up the ringlets and so forth. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, hair was one of the tributes demanded of certain territories of the empire. So human hair. Wow. And they would just put them into wigs and to increase their own girliness. Precisely, precisely.

And we also know that the king alone and his mother had access to a very beautiful perfume from India, which they called Labizos, which was reserved for, you know, high royalty, which was worth more than gold by weight, apparently. How interesting, because the moguls claim that they bring Atter of roses from Persia. Ancient India had a great tradition. You'll go right. It really did, really did. So, yes, we know quite a lot about their beauty regimes,

including, of course, smearing chol around their eyes to give them these dark outlines as well. And, Cole, you're talking about eyeliner these days. We used the same thing. I'm wearing it now. Yeah, exactly the same thing. No Persian warrior would go into battle without his hull. And his curlers. Yeah, it was very, very manly. So do we know what his personality was like? Because we're now so much later and there are more sources and you're brilliantly one of the people who goes into sort of the sources from the east. So what do they say about what's he like? You get the sense that he is a bureaucrat to his fingertips. Every eye is dotted. Every tea is carefully crossed. there is nothing too small that Darius will not give his attention to. There is an absolute explosion of administrative texts in this period. Because only two generations ago, Cyrus is wandering around with horses in a stable and sort of herding goats. That's right, exactly. Two generations on, you've got an entire bureaucracy.

A rich bureaucracy, absolutely, where red tape conquers the world, essentially. And I think the Iranians have certainly picked up their... love of red tape from this period. Darius establishes bureaucratic offices across the whole of the empire. And he's very, very clever in what he does with language. First of all, he creates a written form of Old Persian. And he gets his scribes to work on this. They work with the model of Acadian or Babylonian cuneiform, but they simplify it into an alphabetic language. So it's actually very easy to read once you've read the 33 signs. And there are even word dividers, so we can read these texts very easily. And these texts are used for imperial statements. So these are

carved into rock surfaces or into stone. The other thing he does then is uses the Aramaic language as the lingua franca of the whole of the empire. Aramaic is a Semitic language. It's cousin of Hebrew. It can be written with ink or with paint on pot shards, on papyrus. And this really becomes the connecting language of the whole empire. So whether you're in Egypt or Bactria, or in Skithia or in Elam, your scribes are all speaking the same language. Have you done a calculation of just how much of the earth is now Persian Empire? I mean, what are we talking, length and breath? Well, let's say of the known earth at that time, okay? So let's say from the Mediterranean, so say from Italy over to China, the shores of China, I would say that it's going to

to have to be 70% of the earth was Persia at the point. It's just astonishing. I mean, just like that hang in the air for one moment, that's extraordinary. It is incredible. And you know what? People traversed this empire regularly. The road system was so good. The communication system was second to none.

You know, they had a kind of postal service, which only has been bettered by broadband, really. I mean, Willie, you're a great traveller. Imagine we have documents, okay, saying, that a traveller goes from Memphis, Cairo, to Kandahar, to Kandah in Afghanistan, over a period of about four months, and on every way station, they are provided with food and lodgings all in advance. They have these kind of chits, and they hand them in and say, can I have my flour and my beer and my place to sleep tonight, please? So if you're running or you're in charge of 70% of the world at that time, one presumes

it's not all smooth going. I mean, there must have been over the last 200 years people saying, I don't want this. I don't want to be part of this. Constantly, the difficulty when you get an empire that size, of course, is border control as ever. So there are always skirmishes on borders. This is why the Greeks become problematic because they're sitting over there on the Western borders, on the fringes. They're never really stable. And if you look at the Persian royal inscriptions, these catalogs of territories underneath Persian control, they shift constantly. Sometimes, I think under the beginning of Darius's reign, we have 22 countries. Later on in Israel, we have 33. That goes back down to about 28 during Xerxes reign. So there's always shifting territories. And the Persians are very conscious and very proud of this. So when they build Persepolis, you have these images up and down the stairs of all the different nationalities, the Indians, the Medes, the Lydians, the Cilicians. And it's really amazing the way in which the sculptural approach actually tells us a lot about the ideology of empire from the Persian point of mind, because the delegates from different parts of the empire

are positioned in the order of proximity to Persia, starting with the west and then the east. So right to the top of the staircase are the closest relations, and that's the Medes. Then we have the Elamites, then we have the Babylonians and so forth and so on. And on the other side, we have the Parthians and so forth, then working out to Bactria and so forth. And right down the far end of the Western staircase is Nubia, Ethiopia. With a delegation there, bringing ivory tusks and an ocarpie. Ocarpi, an actual animal of the ocarpies? How they got it there, I'll never know.

What health it was in when he got there, I don't know. Very grumpy o'carpie tribute, yeah. So, I mean, you know, we're jumping a step because we're talking about the vastness of this, but we haven't actually said it doesn't come to him easy. I mean, like you said beautifully before, you know, empires are built on blood and bones, and Darius comes to the throne, not without bloodshed. Tell us about how he does, Seas power.

Okay, well, Cyrus's son and heir, Cambyses, was a very able king, in spite of the slur that Herodotus has placed on him, and he conquered Egypt in 525 BCE, secured it as a major Persian territory. And I can't under-emphasise what that means. means for the Persians. Is that the first time Egypt is properly conquered? Yes, absolutely. So this means all of the wealth of Egypt becomes Persians. More importantly, the kudos of ruling over such an ancient

culture becomes theirs. And just in the way that Cyrus depicted himself as a worshipper of Marduk in Babylon, so Kambaises becomes a worshipper of Amun and Ra and all of the gods of Egypt, and actually even becomes the pharaoh, so he takes on pharonic names. When, after three years, Cambyses hears that his brother, Bardia, has set himself up as an alternative king back home in Persia. Cambyses makes his way back home, and in Syria he dies. Mysteriously. A very mysterious death. We don't know how he died.

Was he knocked off, and who did it? Possibly Darius. There is a very strange line in the Bissiton inscription that Darius puts there, which says simply, Cambyses, he died his own death. Oh. Very curious line. Does that mean suicide? Possibly, possibly.

Pover old Cambises, however he goes, he goes. And Darius, quite clearly, then kills his brother, the rightful king, Bardia. Now, in the Bissetian inscription, he goes out of his way to talk about the fact that this Bardia was actually killed by somebody who looked exactly like Bardia. It's a very tall story. Very tall story. Gaumeta, this looky-likey, a major, so a priest, a priest, established himself as king, saying I am Bardia and the people fell for the lie.

And so what I did, Dariah says, is I killed that wicked majors. I killed the imposter. Yeah, I killed the imposter, but of course, there was no imposter. Is that because he would have started, like, you know, even then, Regicide would have not have been kindly looked upon. So this sets him, exonerates him completely. He has no royal blood on his hands. Absolutely.

And especially, of course, the Persians were so proud of their royal family, no Cyrus and Cambyses. You don't touch this family. Yeah. So Darius needed to create this version of history for himself. Alternative facts is what I call it, of course. So if the Cyrus cylinder could be said to be the first Declaration of Human Rights, then the biggest student inscription is the first bit of kind of completely dodgy propaganda by a tyrant. Completely in utterly.

And all the way through it, Darius holds up his hand and says, honest to God, quite literally, honest to God. By your Hulah, Mazda, this is all true. Honest, gov. Honest gov. But, of course, the fact then that he talks for the next five columns, of the text about the rebellions that erupted in every part of the empire, including in Persia, in Elam, in Babylonia, two eruptions of rebellions there, all the way across the empire. And you see the line of all these defeated lyre kings with the halters around their necks,

and then the final one at the end who's added later with the tall hat, the Scythian. The Skithian king, right at the end, absolutely. So what you get a picture of is chaos, chaos in the empire for three years, either direct, directly dealing with rebellions himself, he goes to Babylon twice, or employing members of his army, trusted generals to go off and do the deeds for him, including his dad. When you say dealing with, are you talking about sort of retinues of troops slaughtering when they get into a place that is uprising? Essentially that, absolutely. He does give us some facts and figures in the Babylonian version.

So he talks about in Babylon itself, for instance, he said he slew everyone who rebelled, nobody lived. And in media, he has this very gruesome description of taking the pretender to the medium throne, a man called Fatavish, and dragging him in front of his palace at Hamadan, and cutting off his ears, cutting off his nose and his lips, and then finally impaling his body on a stake outside the palace so everybody would see. This is what happens to a rebel. You have a wonderful description of the Pistun inscription in your wonderful book, And you say the inscription is a masterful compilation of fake news, a rich melange of untruth, spin, and pure bravato. It's Trump world in sort of 500 BC.

It is Trump world. And of course, you know, I've been teaching this stuff to my students for years and years and years. And really, when Trump came to power, I was able to teach this period with so much more kind of energy. than I'd ever come before. And in fact, I got my students in class. One of the tasks they had to do was, imagine, you know, tweet the essence of the Bissetan inscription in 26 words, you know? Brilliant.

And they all employed Trumpisms all the time because they really do match together. Bardian the Major, sad. Exactly. It is. It was all of that. But yeah, make Persia great again. I have to read one more sentence. It's so good.

You say, Darias the Great, was antiquity's most confident, bold and successful propagandists. utterly cynical. He seems to believe only in self-justification of his own power and its preservation, as if, as it is often claimed, propaganda is indeed the art of persuasion, then Darias must be credited as a master of the craft. He certainly was. He would have given Gurbos a run for his money. But the difference with Darias is what comes afterwards is actually very good and does truly empower the empire. All right. So we've got bad Darias who goes around sort of, you know, slaughtering and you're, you know, you're were very sweet about talking about the impaling, but he actually did use to impale people through the bottom. Oh yeah, yeah, up there's the bottom. Okay, so we're now coming to 519 BC, and he's a bit more secure because he's put down these rebellions in a really ruthless kind of way. At what point does consolidation become expansion? Is that always in his mind that he has to build the empire,

make the empire bigger always? Yes, I think so. I believe it is. You know, looking at the models had set before him. In the two previous generations, it's all been about expansion. So he must have that on his mind as well. And because of our sources, which fixate on the West so much, of course, the Greek sources, we tend to forget that Darias' main ambition, really, was to take India. That's what he really wanted. Which is the richest place in the ancient world. Oh, by far. And of course, he does take the north of India down to the Punjab. And I think had he not been interrupted by rebellions in Egypt and by the skirmishes in the West amongst the Greeks, then I think much more of India would have fallen to him. It's already quite clear that the

Persians taxed India more than any other of the provinces because it was so wealthy. And I think there's a lot more work to be done, you know, on accumulated Indian relations as well. It's funny, you should say that because I was speaking to the art historian Vidya Dehya the other day. And she was saying that the great unwritten piece of art history in Indian art is the Persian influence on the art of Ashoka's period and the early Buddhist art where you have all these winged animals, you have winged lions, winged bulls, and then in some of the early Buddhist cave temples in the Western Ghats, you have these double bull or double horse capitals that are clearly modelled on Persepolis.

And of course it was, you know, an easy, accessible interaction between these two countries as well. I mean, you know, it's not a huge journey. The Indus has easily crossed. Easily traversed, yeah, absolutely. So I think he did have expansion in his mind, but not expansion to the West, expansion to the East is what he wanted. Okay, I mean, he extends into Thrace as well,

which is sitting, you know, between modern day Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. He's also got an alliance secured of the Royal Family of Macedon. And so, you know, that's, again, that's slightly nipping at the West's heels here, isn't it? Absolutely, pushing in, pushing in all the time, absolutely. And do you say in your book,

which I had never read before, that Macedon is, in fact, a very Persianate court. Extremely Persianate, you know, to jump forward to the world of Philip and Alexander, of course, you know, who bring down the Persian Empire. They would have been brought up in a Persian milieu. None of this was new to them. Even Philip II, Alexander's father, you know, had seven wives, which actually outdoes deraias by one, you know, which is a very, you know, the kind of concubineage and the plural marriages, very Persian.

Their whole court setting in Macedon was Persian. It's so far from what we're taught at school. Completely, Anatolay, completely. Alexander is a Greek. Aristotle is his teacher. We're totally in the Hellenized world. Not true. Not in the slightest.

Not in the slightest. That's fascinating. You brought up women. Tell me more about women's position in this empire. The first thing to say is that one of the ways in which Darias secures his hold on the empire is by marrying all of the available royal women of Cyrus's house, particularly this one extraordinary woman who's one of the great women of antiquity. Atossa, tell us about her. Yes, so Darius's chief wife is Atossa, or Odasha, as she is known in Old Persian,

and she was the eldest daughter of Cyrus the Great. She becomes more prominent in the empire in the reign of her son, however, because she was the mother, of course, of Xerxes, who became Darius' heir. He also marries her sister, Ishtaduna, as she's known in Old Persian. He marries Cambysi's daughter. He marries Vardier's daughter, all of these women together. She must have been thrilled with the Bessius Stun ascription. Indeed, absolutely. Yeah, it's really interesting. I always wonder what did these women think about the usurpion of their brother's throne, you know, and there they find themselves in the usurper's

bed. That's politics, though, isn't it, you know? I mean, there's so many beautiful works of fiction. I mean, they do deal with a hellenized world. I've just, you know, basically told from the women's sides from Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes and stuff. I mean, that hasn't been done in the East, but these are victims of rape and pillage and they're miserable, miserable. Yeah, absolutely. However, unlike the women of Greece who have no economic rights, social rights whatsoever, the royal women of Persia could be enormously wealthy. They held vast estates in and around the royal capitals, but also as far afield as in Babylon. particularly you say the queen mothers. They're the key women. The queen mother especially. So while the

king could have many, many queens and many more concubines, of course, he could only ever have one blood mother and she reigns supreme. And we know Darius's mother remarkably because she is the most conspicuous woman in the records that survive from his reign. Her name is Irdabama. And that's an elamite name. So that suggests to me that his father was Persian, his mother was Elamite, which is interesting, which is probably why Darius gives so much attention to the city of Sousa in his reign. What do we know about her? I mean, if there's so much written about her, what do we know? We don't know anything about her life per se, you know, a narrative of her life. But what we do know is about her wealth. I mean, quite remarkable, because we have these tablets,

which attest to the fact that she had her own slaves, her own estates, which were manufacturing cereal crops, wine, beer, textile workshops. Women of enormous influence. You write also about her bureaucrat. She has a chief bureaucrat, yes. Yeah, a man called Rastor, who we know about. He has his own seal, probably depicting his de Barma on it. And these women, while they have no appearance in the public art of Iran at all, ancient Iran at all, which suggests to me there's a kind of Harim mentality about these, women being hidden away, but not lacking. power, of course. This is what people fail to understand when we talk about Harim very often. It feels like the Ottomans. I mean, we sort of talked about the very similar kind of thing,

yeah. Or the Mughals, absolutely. And the Queen Mother is the big woman in the Mughal world. The Mughal court has always been the thing I've drawn inspiration from because there you see women travelling independently. Going off on pilgrimage. Pilgrimages, absolutely, go into their estates, doing all this, but still within the confines of Harim, which of course is about separation. And I think it all comes down to the fact that we in the West cannot conceive of being a powerful woman, perhaps, without being seen. But there is no honour in being seen within a traditional society like the Mughals or Iran. The honour comes from being an invisible entity. You know, even the Great Kings didn't show themselves in public very often. They don't press the flesh in the way of modern monarchy. I was last week in Rural Rajasthan, and still to this day in Rural Rajasthan, the high cast keep their women locked away. and are veiled, and it's the low-cast women that are publicly seen and are building the roads or are working on public sites. It still survives. Absolutely. There is something going on there, and I think the work I do on the Harim has been criticized a lot by other Persian historians

who are unwilling to see this as a reality of life. If the Persian Empire was a family-run business, which is what it was, the heart of that business was the domestic quarters of of that family. And what goes on amongst the women, the men, the husbands, and the sons of that family obviously will have repercussions across the whole of the empire. Now, we see that all the time in the mogul sources, in the Ottoman sources, in the Mongol sources constantly. But it's almost as though today Persian historians are afraid of being tainted once again with a sense of orientalism. But actually to talk about the harem is not about being orientalists. Once we dismiss the idea of scatter cushions and, you know, jewels in the belly button and all this kind of thing

and see it as a political institution. Then actually we're on to something about understanding the dynamics of how an empire runs from inside. And you can take it further and actually say this is where it begins, that the Islamic palace courtly system, which has the men's quarters and the women's quarters, the Mardana and the Zanana, as you would have it in India, begins in the Persian court. And you can see it at Persepolis. You can see it at Persepolis. You can see it ensues in the archaeology. Absolutely, you can. Absolutely. And the book of Esther, of course, which I've written on recently, is all about that. The whole thing centres on the power that a woman can hold within the confines of the court of women, if we want to call it that,

to take into the political sphere of men at the same time. Yeah. I mean, I'm always minded whenever we talk about this of Bettany Hughes, who sobered us up really pretty quickly when we were starting to get quite excitable about the power that some Ottoman women had, with the number, the vast number who had no power, no agency, were disposable and would scrape into the wall, please send me home, I want to go home. Before we leave it, we should also say this is emphatically a slave society. It's being built by prisoners of war who are being maimed. The bits that they don't need for their specific job is being cut off. So if they're, I mean, horrific stuff is happening. I don't want to romanticise the Harry at all. And I will say that we must.

remember that for the thousands of concubines who are brought into court, these are the result of basically sex trafficking, war captivity. I mean, it's horrific. It is horrific. It is horrific. It is not, it's not lovely being a woman. No, for that tiny percent, life was good, but it's tiny. Okay. Well, look, join us after the break when we talk about Darius and his consolidation of his whole particularly of Egypt. It's a very fascinating story. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about basically Darius' expansionism, and one part of the way he did that was by marrying lots of people from disparate places that he conquered. It's a story as old as time.

But let's talk about Egypt in particular, because Egypt is not, you know, you don't assume that there's a swing door to Egypt where you just walk in. It is a great ancient and powerful civilization. How does Darias get his hands on it? Well, of course, he inherited from Cambyses, who had done their hard work and conquered the place. But Egypt was taking quite easily, it seems. There was very little rebellion or kickback.

There was a turncoat, wasn't there? There's a fascinating guy called Wadjor Rosnett, who seems to be a bit of a mover and shaker in facilitating the Persian way into Egypt. I mean, we would call him a collaborator, I think. And that's a loaded term with many, many different interpretations, but certainly he sold out something of Egypt or himself to get the Persians into power.

And he serves Cambysius very well. But then when Darius comes to the throne, he continues to serve Darius as well. And he is the man, really, that Darius needs to teach him how to be an Egyptian pharaoh, because that's what Darius needs to do to consolidate his role in Egypt. And the most extraordinary thing of all, which I didn't know about at all, till I read your wonderful book, is this canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, which even the Romans didn't have. So they're a protein Suez Canal type business.

So a huge steely that was found at Suez, written only in Old Persian, says, I am a foreign man, a Persian man who has come from afar. I'm a Persian from Persia. The Persian's still taught like that today, don't they? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And he says, I built a canal from a river which is called Nile to the Red Sea. Huge, slice of land. Amazing. Can I read it because the inscription is so extraordinary.

This is your translation. I'm reading back to you. King Darius proclaims, I am a Persian from Persia. I seized Egypt. I ordered this canal to be dug from a river called Nile, which flows in Egypt, to the sea which goes to Persia. So this canal was dug, as I had ordered, and ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia, as was my desire. Can you see what they've done there, though? They've opened up a trade route like never seen before. So now you could get from the Mediterranean down the Nile into the Persian Gulf and into India as well. It's incredible. Extraordinary.

And are we sure that it was built? I mean, do we have the archaeological evidence that this thing actually worked? Nothing has been done on that, which is a great shame because it's bound to show there must be a huge scar in the land somewhere in the eastern desert of Egypt, but it's not been looked for. I've been working very recently on Indian trade with. Roman Egypt. And the flaw in this, they travel very easily with the monsoon from India as far as Baranique. Yeah, yeah. The port on the Red Sea. But it's a very risky trip from Baranique to the Nile. And there are robber tribes and so on. And there are also people die in the desert. They get lost. And there's these inscriptions in various wadis between the Nile and the Red Sea, where, for example,

there's a family of wine exporters called the Petikius family who send wine. all the way from Italy. And this is something that the Indians wanted to buy. And there's lots of references to Italian wine, the Kianti of its day, being drunk in Kerala. And certainly that Darias got there first, but you know, good archaeological work needs to be done on this. But this is my bug bear. The Persian period in Egypt is not popular among Egyptologists. It's the forgotten period, you know. It's a great shame because it's so rich. No, it should be said the Egyptian influence in Persia is not popular with Persians. And the biggest surprise when I went to Persepolis for the first time was seeing all that Egyptian stuff, which no one photographs.

Absolutely. Yeah, the architecture, Persepolis architecture, is virtually lifted from Thebes. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm just tantalized by this Suez Canal before the Suez Canal. But also, his gaze is drifting towards what we now call Ukraine. So this is like a vast, ambitious project. Is it imperial overreach, would you say at this time? I mean, does he have the manpower and the wealth to do what he wants to do? Well, it certainly plays out as overreach. I think what scuppers the Skiffian campaign into this area, which we call Crimea, is something which has foiled military leaders across the centuries.

Napoleon, Hickler, they all succumbed, basically, to the Crimean weather. And that's what Darius was completely unprepared for. He would have had his scouts and so forth, you know, to think about the terrain and the range of weather there. But I think it came to a very different story when he actually tried to march his men into that area. It was a complete disaster. It must have lost a lot of lives and many more casualties.

And he retires from that with his tail between his legs. As Cyrus had before him. Yes, exactly. There had always been areas, which we're almost impossible to conquer, just like Alexander founded Afghanistan, exactly. There are these pockets of the world, which maybe Putin is discovering as well, that are resistant to invasion, really.

Can we talk about how, you know, the bits that he did manage to keep and grow worked? Because, I mean, you sort of touched on the postal service, which was magnificent. I want to know more about how that worked, because Herodotus said, there is nothing mortal that is faster than the system the Persians have devised for sending messages. I mean, how did they? By pigeon, by man, by, you know, boat. I mean, how did it all work? By man on horseback.

So this is the precursor of the famous Pony Express, essentially, that appeared in the West in America in the 19th century. And the Caravansarai system. Way before the caravansarized system set it up. So we know that every kind of 30 Parasang or so, which Parasang is about three miles, something like that. Such a lovely word. I love Parasag. There is a service station set up, essentially, where you could have a meal, you can sleep overnight. should you want, or you can just quickly change horse and ride on to the next service station.

I've stayed in working caravansarise in Central Asia and in my travels in the late 80s. They were still operating. You arrived at this and the gates would open at night and the gates were closed behind you and there'd be the courtyard and then you'd look up at the stars and then the darkened rooms and figures moving around. Superve. That's the kind of thing we're thinking about. And, you know, these service stations were government-run institutions where the travellers could turn up and with his little document written in hynaiform on clay, say, please will you hand me over my rations for tonight?

My horse needs the fodder. This is as much as being rationed for him. I'm supposed to have this much bread and this much beer. And that's the working way of all of these. The communication across the empire was second to none. It was really, really remarkable. So you could go from Sardis on the coast of Turkey right the way down to Sousa in the southwest of Iran without you kind of constantly changing horses within about two and a half weeks, which is remarkable. It's remarkable. Amazing. Yeah. And it is communication is comms that keep empires together and cutting those makes them fall apart. Yeah. I love that even today when you're driving along those Persian roads through the desert, you still see the remains of those caravansar eyes. Everywhere, absolutely. Some clearly from this period, crumbling to almost nothing,

then more recent ones beside them. Yeah, it should be said as well that the kings themselves, of course, were constant travellers. They retained their nomadic habits. So even though they built these superstructures like Pacepolis and at Sousa, a great palace as well, these were really stop-offs, essentially great service stations, so they would stay for a matter of weeks. And then, just like the moguls, they would travel in huge convoys. How big were the convoys? Because we've talked about the moguls with their thousands and thousands of retinue. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people. It is the state on the move.

And obviously two camps working at one time, a camp that goes ahead to set up, to put up the tents, to cook the food. And then slowly, you know, the royal camp would arrive. This starts with the Persians, it goes to the moguls and the British adapt it. So when the British arrive in India, they have the same system. Yeah. Even as late as Curson. Constantly traversing their empire. I constantly doing the bureaucracy of the empire on the move as well.

What does he build? What is peculiarly derius? He was a very big builder. So Persepolis is his great building project. And really, it's the first true monumental stone palace built in Iran. And it became the dynastic centre, really. every successive Persian king was building at Persepolis until Alexander came and burnt it down. Lloyd paint us a picture of Persepolis.

For anyone that hasn't seen it, it is up there with the pyramids as the greatest building of antiquity. Yeah, it is one of the greatest ruins of antiquity. It is so evocative. When I first went to 23, four years ago, I remember I cried because I never believed I would get there to begin with. And then when I saw the scale of it, it was overwhelming. It's vast. It just goes on and you get so exhausted, wandering around in the heat. It really is. And I'm going to go to some of my dear classicist friends now and say something I've often said. Persepolis makes the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens look like a garden shed.

You're really spoiling for a fight, aren't you? Yeah, I am. I am. Honestly, it is the architecture of empire. It truly is. It is. It is built on a platform, an artificial platform, attacked 30 metres high with two huge. sweeping staircases which lead up to it. And this is the architecture of imperial spectacle is what it's all about. A huge throne hall called the Apodana could hold 120,000 people in it. There are banqueting halls held up by a hundred columns. There are huge parade grounds. There are gardens with flowing waters and fountains and then a myriad of small palaces for the successive kings to live in, plus there are reams as well. and a huge treasury where all of the wealth of Persia is stored. And yet it's not entirely clear what it's for, you write.

No, so problematic are the facts that are no obvious kitchens anywhere? Seriously? Yes, yes, yes. And I think what happened was the kings went there for probably for the Nourouz for New Year. It's a Nauru's picnic site. It's just a picnic. It is, where they, you know, received their embassies and so forth. We should perhaps say, for those who don't know it, that Naurus is the great Persian festival. 20th of March, 21st of March. It still is for the Russians. The Russians still have

Noroos, yeah. The only time I've ever missed an international flight was getting stuck in a Norus traffic jam on the way to LAX, where the whole of the Persian diaspora was going off for a picnic. So what do you do during Norawes then? What happens? Is it feasting? Is it praying? What happens? It's feasting, it's partying, it's being social, it's seeing family, it's seeing friends today. It's difficult to know what it was back in the Akemenid period, or even if they knew it as no ruse, but certainly some kind of spring festival was important for that. So you can imagine that for most of the year, Persepolis was covered with white sheets, as it were, you know, sort of locked up and with a caretaker. Because the actual, the bureaucrats,

the civil servants with their little kineiform tablets and their little seals, they were at Sousa. They were everywhere. They were everywhere. So we have a bureaucracy in Sousa, bureaucracy in Hamadan, we have a bureaucracy in Persepolis, they're all keeping the empire ticking over, but the king is constantly on this rotation. One thing I think is interesting to think about, when the king arrived at Persepolis, as vast as it is, there's only limited space for where the king and his immediate family could go. There's enough room for them. So I think in the plane around Persepolis, at the bottom of this huge terrace, there must have been a city of tents for miles just like the Shah built. Absolutely. You. It's a city. It's a city. It's a city of town.

Absolutely. In 1971, that's right, exactly. I've met old ladies in Lebanon, Mrs. Frangier, who was the wife of the Prime Minister, who still regards that as the highlight of her life, that the Shah's party at Persepolis. Wow, incredible, incredible. The only person I didn't like was, I think was it Nixon? Nixon and Mrs. Nixon, they were like performing monkeys compared to the Persians. Wonderful. We talked about a Huramaster, and Persepolis, it doesn't sound like it's a place of worship,

It really is a picnic spot more than anything else. There are certainly religious elements attached to it. There is something which some people have interpreted as an altar. And certainly within the confines of Persepolis, at the back built into the rock, are several tombs for the kings. And only about four miles away from Persepolis is the great site of Naqshirostan,

which is the necropolis for the kings. With those strange towers? Yes, these very, very odd. What are they? Fire towers. whatever they might be. So there is a religious element there, but I don't think the whole of this epapeutic is it's not a temple. It's not a functioning temple in any way. We haven't really talked about worship and religion. What do you do? If you are a devout Persian, Iranian at this time,

what does your faith require of you? What do you do? Who do you pray to you and how do you show your loyalty? It's very hard to know, and probably this is the most contested aspect of the study of ancient Iran. I was surprised by this in your book. I thought we all knew. there was Zoroastrian, and that was an open and closed book. I'm not comfortable necessarily in calling them Zoroastrians, because even the term itself, of course, is a 19th century term. If anything, I will call them proto-Zoroastrians, because I can see elements of what develops into Zoroastrianism going on there, especially the worship of a Hora Mazda, the attention

and rather sacred quality, which seems to be attached to fire and water, for instance. but it's very hard to push much beyond that. A lot of our problem also comes from the fact that Herodotus tells us what he thinks Persian religion is all about. And the way in which he does this is to basically make Persia the antithesis of Greece. So Greece has built temples, images of the gods, sacrifice, prayer, ritual. The Persians he creates are the topsy-turvy part of that. So he says, oh, the Persians worship in the open.

air, they don't have idols of gods, they worship just the air itself. None of this can be actually confirmed in the Persian sources themselves, where we do find sanctuaries, we do find the cults of dead kings, we do find sacrifice taking place. And a lot of this work is coming from the readings of these fortification texts from Persepolis. Which are cuneiform tablets found by Hertzfeldt in the 1930s, excavating. That's right. And my colleague, Vauta Henkelmann, is doing an amazing job at looking at the religious landscape of the Persians now, which was heavily influenced by the Elamites as well. You know, these older, sort of settled Mesopotamian peoples there. So the definitive history of Achaemenid religion is yet to be written, but we're much more confident about it than we were

even 10 years ago. But it's still a rather hazy subject for us. The other religion that one associates with ancient Persia is Mithraism and Mithras. Now, Mithras definitely is there, isn't he? Because he's also a Vedic god, but he doesn't have a prominent role at this point. No. So in Darius's inscriptions, it's a Hura Mazda who gets all of the attention. Two points. In the Bisseternian inscription, Darius also mentions, and this is the words he uses, the other gods who are. In other words, the other gods who exist. So he acknowledges there are others, doesn't name them at all. However, by the time we get to Attic Xerxes the second, so this is a good 120 years after Darius, he, this particular king, seems to be more of an adorant of Mithras, who he mentions quite a lot in

his inscriptions, and also the water goddess Anahita as well. So they've always been there, it's quite clear, but Darius and Xerxes don't have much of an interest in them. I'm fascinated by the way that Mithras travels, because he's there a little bit in this period. But of course, we see him going into the Roman Empire. We see him under San Clemente in Rome. And then as far as Inveresque and Hadrian's wall. Incredible, isn't it? Incredible.

And very often related to Roman soldiers, of course. That's what they liked about him was his martial qualities. And then there are those who think that the whole the bodhisattva matria is a version of Mithras. And he enters Buddhism and heads off China. Yeah. And his very earliest forms, the Western materials. He is a god of justice. That's what he really is concerned about.

But he'll bring his justice to bear on rebellious people or whatever with his club. So there's a warrior aspect. He's also a sun god. He's a solar god early on as well. And, of course, is associated with horses as well. So in a way with Mithra, there's something for everybody, almost, you know. And he becomes very, very big in the Parthian and in the Sasanian period, which is when he begins to rub shoulders with the Roman Empire, of course.

You know what? We've run out of time. Oh, it's so good. I'm loving this. Will you come back? Because we want to talk about Darius, moving his own focus to Greece, which explains quite a lot of the beef, Herodotus, may well have with Darias. So join us then. Till then, it is goodbye for me, Anita Arnum. And goodbye from a very excited William Dara.