The Ancients - Rise of the Persians

Episode Date: September 4, 2022

The Achaemenid Empire, or better known as the First Persian Empire, was one of the largest empires in History - led by Cyrus the Great it covered 2.1 million square miles. But where did it come from? And what do we know about their society? It was in their DNA to travel and explore - so why did the Persians settle on the Eurasian plateau?Tristan is once again joined by Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from Cardiff University to talk about the rise of the Persians and how they fit into this turbulent period of ancient history. The first society to have worn trousers, the original cowboys, and some of the first peoples to domesticate animals - the rise of the Persian empire dramatically effected intercontinental relationships for years to come.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, we're going east, we're going to the Middle East, we're going to ancient Persia, we're talking about the Achaemenid Persian Empire. But today, actually, we're going to ancient Persia. We're talking about the Achaemenid Persian Empire. But today, actually, we're not talking about the empire at its height. We're not talking about the empire at the time of Alexander the Great and its eventual fall. We're talking about the empire's

rise, the rise of the Persians. Where did the Persians originate from? How did they come to settle on the Iranian plateau? What do we know about their society and how they interacted with Mesopotamian civilizations, other cultures that were already present in that area of the ancient world when the Persians arrived? Well, to explain all, we have got an absolute legend, a person who's been on the podcast before. He's a brilliant speaker. He knows everything about the Persians. He is a world expert on this topic. I'm, of course, talking about Cardiff University's Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones.

Lloyd's been on the podcast a couple of times before to talk about topics such as Persepolis, the Persepolis fortification texts, and other great centres of the accumulated Persian Empire, such as Susa, Ekbatana and Pasargada. It was wonderful to get Lloyd back on the podcast to give us an overview of how the Persian Empire came to be, how the Persians rose to prominence in this area of antiquity. And I've got no doubt you're going to absolutely love this one because Lloyd is such a good storyteller.

So without further ado, to talk all about the rise of the Persians, here's Lloyd. Lloyd, it is so great to have you back on the podcast. Well, Tristan, it's a great joy to be here. Thank you for asking me. You are more than welcome. And once again, we're talking Persians. And this time, the rise of the Persians, because Lloyd, I guess it almost feels as if to fully understand the Persian Empire, the whole nature of it and the people who were running it and so on and so forth. the whole nature of it and the people who were running it and so on and so forth, you kind of have to take a step back and have a look at where the Persians came from, how they came to control an empire. Yes, I think you're right. And for me, the more I look at the origins of the Persians,

essentially their Eurasian ancestry, the more they begin to slot into place as I begin to explore them in their high empire. You know, the thing is, of course, you know, they didn't come ready-made as kind of empire builders, and they have to work their way up to that slowly, slowly. So it's by their own experiences, I suppose, which define them, of course. I was talking only recently, actually, with a biblical scholar, and he was saying to me, what is it then with the Persians that sort of make them different from other Near Eastern monarchs? You know, what kind of things would I see if I were to look at Persian inscriptions, you know, of Darius's period, for instance? I said, well, one of the interesting things that the Persians never articulate in their

sources is this idea of the king as the shepherd. And of course, in ancient Near Eastern texts, this is there all the time, that the king is the shepherd of his people. And if anybody knows the Hebrew Bible, then of course, you know, David is the great shepherd of the flock of Israel and this kind of stuff. And it's conspicuous by its absence in the Persian royal inscriptions, which of course goes back and back and back, therefore, into the legacy of where they come from. And that's because sheep had very little to do in the consciousness of the Persian people. They were herdsmen, but their herds were composed of cattle and horses, of course. So, you know, even like the animal world of the Persians was very different from those of Mesopotamians that

they eventually met up against. And, you know, these kind of things really are very symptomatic, therefore, of a society's cultural mores and ethics and where it sits down. So, you know, a very familiar motif like the king being the shepherd simply doesn't have any cogency within a Persian setting at all. And I pushed a bit further than that. I thought, okay, what about, what do they have then? Well, it's the cow is everything.

So in the earliest kind of literature, we have the Avesta, these religious texts. The first animal that's created is the cow. You know, and this is what mattered to them. They were cow herders. They were cowboys, essentially, on the plains, long, long, long before they were empire builders. And I mean, you've kind of hinted at it there then. So when trying to tell the story of this

early time in the Persian story, is it very much you have to focus on sources, on the Persian version, which I know you're so keen to stress? Absolutely. It's my passion. And I don't think actually at this point there is nothing else. And so in a way it's incredibly liberating because I don't have to look at anything through some sort of Greek or Roman Orientalist prism, you know. You're free of that, which is a real joy. But then saying that, of course, there aren't really many written texts that we have from this period at all. We have a rich archaeology, but we do have these religious texts which are written down many centuries later. But the Avesta, the Gathas, these great religious, what becomes Zoroastrian texts, they have within them memories of a much earlier past. I'm talking about maybe a society around about

1500 BCE. These hymns, these religious prayers and teachings are filled with this kind of imagery of these pastoral nomads. But more than that as well, the language of the Avesta, a language which we call Avestan, which is a kind of proto-Iranian language, bears so many similarities with languages like Sanskrit in particular, you know. who settle in northern India and the Iranians who move into the Iranian plateau really do come from the same ethnic and certainly the same linguistic line as well. How interesting. So, I mean, just to kind of elaborate on that, if we now focus on their origins, where exactly do the Persians come from, do we think? So, most people now believe that the roots of these Iranian peoples were located somewhere in central Eurasia. So kind of just a little bit west of Mongolia, I suppose. And they were obviously moving in vast tracts of land in these great steppes, the great plains of central Eurasia, they were nomads. And they always,

even when they became empire builders, the Persians remained nomads as well. It's something that perhaps we find difficult to conceive of because, you know, they left great palaces like Susa and Ecbatana and Persepolis. But actually, these were only, in a way, very elaborate way stations for them, sort of service stations on these were only, in a way, very elaborate way stations for them, sort of service stations on these grander routes that they took, you know, as they crisscrossed their empire. And this comes from this deep, deep nomadic ancestry. It's there in the DNA that they carried with them. And it's quite clear that these nomadic people, principally then they were cattle drivers, cattle herders. They were reared on horseback, just as modern Mongolians still are. I mean, they were the greatest horsemen of antiquity.

And that, of course, really paid off for them in later centuries when they really were empire builders, because nobody that they approached in Mesopotamia or Greece had any of the skills that they had inherited from their ancestors. Everything about the later Persian world is actually still located around the concept of the horse. It is the supreme equine culture more than anything else. So, for instance, you know, whereas in Elam and in Babylon and the rest of the Middle East, ancient Middle East, sheep are used for sacrifice. It's the horse, which is the sacrificial animal for the cult of kings or for the cult of great gods and white stallions in particular. Horse names are given to everybody. So the ancient Persian word for horse is Aspa.

everybody so the ancient Persian word for horse is aspa so this is where we get you know in Herodotus and so forth still these kind of horse compounded names like aspathetes aspadates and so forth so horse compounds are there all the time so they were really seen as the as the ultimate horseman and I suppose therefore if the horse is your central figure pretty pretty much, I suppose, in the way that if you were to look at, for instance, Native American indigenous peoples, and I'm thinking of peoples like the Sioux, or perhaps more importantly, the Comanche, who in the 17th century, you know, got hold of Spanish horses for the first time and immediately adapted to them. And then for 300, 400 years, their entire culture was built around the horse. Their empire building, Comanche empire building was built around the horse warfare. Everything to do with them, their rituals, their rites, their clothing,

all developed around the horse. Well, we can see exactly the same thing going on in Central Asia way, way back 1,500 BCE. So the Persians, for instance, and this seems really trivial, but it's a very important point. The Persians were the first people ever to wear trousers in history. And that's not out of any kind of vanity project. It's because, of course, for practical reasons, if you're spending 18 hours a day on horseback, you need something, some kind of protective garment that's going to enclose your legs and thighs and stop them from chafing. And this is the reason why the Persians become the first trouser wearers in the world. And it's

this kind of thing, of course, that really shocks the Greeks. I mean, really, really traumatically shocks them to their core when they encounter Persians for the first time. They can't get their heads around the fact that why would these people cover their legs in this way? And so therefore we get even like the articulation of masculinity. What does it mean to be a man is therefore encoded in Persian thought around this idea of the clothed body. You know, legs are clothed, you wear jackets with long sleeves, very often over long sleeves, actually to cover the hands

because your reins can go inside them then, you know, from the biting winds of the steps. And of course, when you compare that with the Greek ideal of nudity and the gymnasium, well, I mean, these two societies were complete loggerheads then. But this conception of the clothed body, the trouser-wearing warrior

has to go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into the DNA of indigenous Persian culture. I mean, a slight tangent there and kind of keeping on the horse point a bit longer. So when you do get the Persian Empire emerging, is there any correlation with what you've said, with why the Persians placed so much importance on provinces such as Bactria, ancient Afghanistan, places which also seem to carry this renowned equine culture down through centuries of the ancient world? Yes, absolutely. Without a doubt. I mean, all of that eastern sphere of the empire was supreme horse breeding territory. And of course, you know, there was a long standing relationship between the Iranians and the peoples of modern day Bakhtiyah, you know,

modern day Afghanistan, Pakistan as well. I mean, they, you know, they were swapping cultural ideas, swapping artifacts, and indeed swapping weaponry such as horses. When the peoples of the steppes moved into the plateau of Iran, they separated, of course, into different branches. And in the north, around the Caspian Sea, we have the Medes who settled there. And they really were the top-notch horse breeders of all the Iranian-speaking peoples. But they also, of course, they occupied a land around the Zagros, which is so rich in alfalfa that it was absolutely the perfect breeding grounds for horses. And really, in the imperial period, it became the royal stud farms were around there. Now, even before the growth of Median power, so we're into the sort of 9th and 8th centuries BCE, the Medes were

already being known by the Assyrians as the primary exporters of horses. Horses were not bred very well in Mesopotamia across the Zagros. And so the Assyrians, during the height of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, they used the Medes as their major source of war horses as well. And occasionally also, they sort of rammed their way into media and went on horse-stealing raids as well. But yes, I think you're right. These Iranian peoples, they bring with them the memory of the horse and the importance of the horse remains, especially in the eastern satrapies, without a doubt. So these Iranian peoples, they arrive on the Iranian plateau, the Medes, the Persians,

Parthians I'm presuming as well, all there. And you mentioned the Assyrians there, and it therefore begs the question, who was already living in this part of the world when, let's say, the Persians arrive? That's a good question. Of course, the Iranian plateau, well, there's say, the Persians arrive? That's a good question. Of course, the Iranian plateau, well, there's evidence of civilization there dating back to 3,800 BCE. So there are very, very old settlements there, especially in central Iran, where we have some of the oldest evidence for domestication of animals such as donkeys and dogs, for instance,

in that part of the world. Again, about 4000 BCE even for some of those things, places like Tepisi Alk near modern day Kashan. These peoples lived in the lowlands. They lived in the highlands. So especially in the area of the Zagros in Luristan. So in the north of Iran, northwest of Iran, in the Zagros there, the Luristan peoples were, again, a brilliant horse breeding people. They've left many artifacts with us, wonderful, wonderful ironwork. That's what they really specialized in. And they were in constant contact with the Assyrians and with the Urartians as well from what would now be southern eastern Turkey. what would now be southern eastern Turkey. But then down in the south, in the southwest corner really of the plateau, straddling the plains, the flat plains that come down from the Zagros

at the bottom of Iran and across into what is now Iraq, Mesopotamia, were the Elamites, of course. And these were a very, very sophisticated Mesopotamian people. They were great urban dwellers. So it was the Elamites, of course, that built the great city fortress of Susa down in the south, modern day Shush, just across the border from Iraq in Iran. They were great temple builders. They were absolutely, you know, properly urbanized Mesopotamians, really, with all the traditions of Mesopotamia behind them. They're often the forgotten Mesopotamians in a way, largely due to the fact that the Elamite language is the most difficult to learn and decipher. And only a few people really in the world today can master Elamite texts.

But what's very clear is they had a deep interaction with the peoples of Babylon and later Assyria. And in fact, there was no love lost between any of these different societies. So it was commonplace for the Elamites to attack the Babylonians or the Assyrians, and then inevitably attacks would follow on their lands as well. or the Assyrians, and then inevitably attacks would follow on their lands as well. Most spectacularly, I suppose, in the reign of Ashurbanipal, the great king Ashurbanipal, when he attacked the city of Susa, he actually razed it to the ground completely. He dug up the tombs of the former kings of Elam. He sowed salt across the harvest fields of the Elamites so they couldn't grow anything again,

completely devastated the city. But within 50 years, it rose again in what we call the Neo-Elamite period. And now that we understand a lot more about these Neo-Elamites and where they sat in the landscape and how they interacted with people both to the west and the east of them. We understand now that, in fact, the Elamites are the missing link in our history of Persia, because as these Iranian peoples were moving from the steppes into the Iranian plateau, they divided themselves up. So you've already mentioned the Parthians, for instance. They stayed very much in the northeast of Iran. We have the Medes who went into the north of Iran around the Caspian, as I've just said. And then the Persians, the tribe that we're dealing with themselves, settled down in an area in southwestern Iran, which nowadays we call Fars province.

And that province abutted up against Elamite lands. There was a particular area of this settlement for the Persians, which in ancient texts they called Anshan or Zanshan. And this became the kind of stomping ground of the Persians who became the leaders of the build-up to empire, I suppose. So these tribal people settled in this area called Anshan, and Anshan was very, very Elamite-ized, I suppose. And so we realized that actually there was a great deal of cultural exchange, and it does seem to be quite a harmonious settlement of these two people who, in so many respects, were so unalike. These Iranian-speaking nomads who really didn't, you know, they didn't build within Alshan. They still lived in tented accommodation. And then these very sophisticated

urban Mesopotamian language-speaking Elamites. And yet somehow, some kind of synergy and exchange took place between them. And we know that because we've discovered some amazing tomb sites in Anshan. There's one which we call the Arjan Tomb. It dates to about 650 BCE. So it's just brushing up, you know, towards the sort of time towards Cyrus the Great. And in there, we found all sorts of amazing, I mean, it's a fantastic, a small sort of barrel vaulted tomb, but the treasures in there were really amazing, including a magnificent sort of bronze bathtub sarcophagus. We found candelabras in bronze, magnificent gold and silver beakers, amazing bracelets and torques. All of them, all of the design on it is anticipating what we will later go on to call Achaemenid art.

You know, you can really see the birth of something which blossoms later on into what we would call properly Achaemenid Persian. So there's no doubt that there must have been a great sort of cultural synergy, an exchange of ideas going on between these people. We find it also in the imperial period itself at Persepolis, in the wonderful archive of the Persepolis treasury archives and the fortification texts. These are the cuneiform documents that talk about the rations given to servants and so forth. A lot of the archive there is given over to religious personnel as well. And we find constantly in the Persepolis archives that the gods worshipped around Persepolis tend to be

that the gods worshipped around Persepolis tend to be, outnumbering, say, 20 to 1, they tend to be Elamite gods rather than Persian or Iranian gods. So Humban, the great god of Elam, is given more sacrifices than any other god we know. So there's a longevity of tradition going on in this world. We see it also in the way in which the Achaemenid Persians chose locales in which to build. So at Nargshirostam, not far from Persepolis, we have there the necropolis of the Achaemenid kings. Well, they carved their great tombs into this rock face, which was clearly already a sacred sanctuary for the Elamites, because we have rock carvings of Elamite gods and goddesses, including a remarkable snake goddess, on the same facades as the rocks in which the tombs were cut as well.

So the Achaemenids were clearly very aware, actually, of promoting themselves as a sort of strange continuation of the indigenous Elamites who were there, while never forgetting their Euro-Asian roots at the same time. Really quite remarkable. All this month on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'll be asking, who really were the Vikings? How did they become so successful in spreading across Northern Europe and beyond from the late 8th to the 11th centuries? What are the stories we tell about them? And what legacy do they leave behind for us today?

I'm Dr Kat Jarman and throughout September I'll be examining the big questions about the Vikings with a host of experts and answering all of your burning questions about the Viking Age as well. So for everything you always wanted to know about the Vikings, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It is really remarkable, isn't it, Noy? So from what you were saying there, the Persian identity from its time when they settled on the Iranian plateau, it's very much influenced, significantly influenced by the Elamites. And you can see that for the centuries following. That's right, exactly. And it doesn't stop. It really doesn't. We even see it in some of the artworks. So for instance, the great Apadana

scenes where we have all these tribute bearers bringing their gifts to the artworks. So for instance, the great Apadana scenes where we have all these tribute bearers bringing their gifts to the great king. Well, we have Elamite versions of those dating to a thousand years before. And even at Bissetun, where we have this magnificent portrait of Darius the Great standing on the belly of a keen usurper, even that is based on an Elamite image, or certainly a pre-Elamite image of a Bronze Age king called Anubunini, who is standing in his own relief on the body of a fallen enemy, being led by the hand by the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar. And it's quite clear that Darius or his artists knew of this relief. And Darius, therefore, was being moulded into the same kind of visual language that was literally

imprinted upon the landscape of the Zagros at that period. How interesting indeed, Lloyd. If we keep moving on from that, so that's the Persian relationship with the Elamites, and you can see its legacy. But what about with the Medes? Is it a bit less cordial with the Medes during these earlier stages? united by a DNA and a kind of a base language, which we will call old Iranian. OK, but there are differences in dialect between these different peoples. So they might have understood each other, but there's a possibility that, you know, maybe they didn't. As they settled in different parts of the plateau, maybe their languages develop at different rates and, you know, become more and more influenced by indigenous peoples or the peoples that they encounter. But certainly they share a DNA root and something of a linguistic root. But that doesn't mean to

say that they were necessarily the same peoples in the way in which they saw the world or saw themselves. Very often, you know, people, even if actually, if you look in the Old Testament, the book of Daniel, whoever wrote the book of Daniel, probably in the Hellenistic period, couldn't tell a mead from a Persian at all, you know, because we often conflate them, don't we? You know, the meads and the Persians, we kind of run them all into one. Well, they are very different peoples. And I think sometimes it's really to do with the kind of the politics of the day shaped peoples in different peoples. And I think sometimes it's really to do with the politics of the day shaped peoples in different ways. We know that in the South, the tribe that we call the Parsa, the Persians, they did certainly come into contact with the Assyrians over the other side of the

Zagros Mountains. They're there in the texts and the annals of Sennacherib, for instance, but they're not major players in the Assyrian mind. They're there. They're called people of the rib. And I suppose the rib must be the Zagros mountain itself. So they're aware of them, but they're not much use to them. However, the Assyrians think very differently of the Medes because, as I've already said, they wanted their horses. The Persians didn't have the kind of horse breeding sophistication that the Medes had. So that made them desirable and brought them really into the play of the power politics of the day, really. Now, the Assyrians had a major enemy, and that, of course, is the Babylonians.

a major enemy, and that, of course, is the Babylonians. Under Sennacherib and the other kings of the Neo-Assyrian period, there was a very tense and very often terse relationship between Babylon and Assyria. And while the Medes would be impressed by the Assyrians for more and more tribute, you know, these gifts of horses, they began to feel more and more tribute, these gifts of horses, they began to feel more and more discontent with the relationship. And so they started to appeal to Babylon to help them. And so actually what we find is the Babylonians and the Medes gang up together. And what they do actually is they storm Nineveh 612 BCE and bring the Assyrians to their knees. They destroy Assyria. So this tribal confederacy in the north, because it joins forces with this superpower in the center of Mesopotamia, suddenly finds itself a major player in the political sphere. Now, all of these Iranian

peoples, including the Medes, operated on a tribal system with a headman of the tribe. We don't really know what they were called, but in my book, Persians, I call them Khans because I think it's a good Euro-Asian name. You know, it's the kind of thing that we hear with the Mongols afterwards. It gives this idea that they were tribal leaders, disunited very often and doing their own things, driving their herds around in their own patches of land, but perhaps coming together for what we might call a powwow once a year. This is where horses and cows would be exchanged, maybe where tribal marriages, intermarriages were made, these kind of things. And out of that, really, we see one group of men becoming kind of stronger than the others. Out of it, there arrives this guy called Kayaksaris. This

is how we know him in the Greek. Anyway, we've got some idea of what he might have been called in old Iranian, and it translates as spear thrower. So it gives us a kind of idea of that he was this kind of military character. And what he does, essentially, he begins to kind of not exactly unite the tribes of the Medes, but certainly arise more and more as a figurehead for the Medes. So somebody who can do the necessary diplomacy with the Babylonians, somebody who will give the Medes a face on the political sphere, I suppose. So he rises in power time and time again. Now, of course, Herodotus, the Greek historian, when he tries to think about these people, the Medes, he's going on nothing other than a bit of hearsay

and a lot of fantasy. So if you look at what we call the Median logos in Herodotus, this kind of discursus on who the Medes were, there's a great deal of fantasy in there indeed. And I think we can be fairly confident dismissing a lot of it, or at least we can try to look for the Persian version that sits behind it. So a really good example of this is he talks about the first of these kings, a man whom he calls Diocese, who was the first kind of to invent the ceremonial of kingship, like a kind of invisibility of kingship, which we certainly see played out in later Persian society. I'm not sure if we can really historically pin it down to one man. But then he also talks about the founding of the city of Ekbatana. Now, Ekbatana in the north of Iran, it's about half an hour's drive from Tehran. It's certainly a huge archaeological site, and we know that it

flourished under the Achaemenids. We know it was one of the imperial capitals there. But the archaeology of the Achaemenid and even in pre-Achaemenid period is zilch because the city has grown up over any remains that might have been there. But Herodotus nevertheless talks about this being a really splendid sort of median city is what he calls it. And he says that there were, I think he says, seven concentric walls built around this vast city. And each of the walls was a different colour, you know, so there's a red outer wall, then there's a blue inner wall, then a green inner wall, and in you go until you get to the second wall, which is pure silver, and a final wall,

which is pure gold. And in the middle of this sits the palace of the chief of the Medes, whom Herodotus calls a king. Now, what on earth is going on here? I mean, there's no archaeological evidence for any of this, and it would be hard to think of any near eastern city with seven or more city walls. Even Babylon doesn't have that kind of thing. What's going on? I think what Herodotus is getting wrong or is hearing and getting mixed up somewhere along the sort of Chinese whisper that goes on over the centuries is probably one of these confederation meetings of tribes. And what he's seeing there probably is tents. You know, it's a mangled version of seeing tent

upon tent, blue tents, red tents, silver tents, and so forth, all in this huge campsite. Ecbatana was never a stone city in the way that Mesopotamians built their cities. It was only the locale, I think, for these kind of tribal confederacies when they came together once or twice a year to do their stuff. But nevertheless, from this confederation, the Medes became land grabbers, really taking advantage of the vacuum after the fall of Assyria to take on board swathes of land in the north of Mesopotamia, which ran into what would today be eastern Turkey as well. So they became huge landowners. So if you think of a kind of huge crescent really from the border of southern Turkey, eastern Turkey, right the way across the Zagros into the curve of the Caspian Sea. All of this is the land of the Medes. So really, they were the first kind of Iranian peoples

to start empire building, okay, even though it's still a confederation of tribes. Now, with that, of course, they became very wealthy as well. So they, you know, plundered the temples of Assyria, plundered the palaces of Assyria. A lot of treasury was going back into the coffers back in Media. And of course, they became rapacious for more land and more wealth as well. And so they started to look south into Persia to see what they could get out of there. And this made the Persians very uncomfortable. Again, the Persians were a group of tribal peoples,

very often by this point united under one figure. We will call him Cyrus I or Cyrus of Anshan, okay? So this name becomes an important sort of dynastic name for these people. He himself was descended from a guy called Tishpish. Herodotus calls him Tyspies, hence we get the Tyspid dynasty. So Cyrus the Great's dynasty is actually the Tyspids from Tishpish. So as they see this kind of incursion of interest, let's call it that first of all, from the Medes looking down about what they could possibly do in Middle and Southern Persia. So the tribes of the South began to unite more and more as well. So really this kind of aggressive hints that were coming from the North bonded the Persians in the South. Now, after Caxares died, his son Astyages, becomes king, and he has got a far more blatantly obvious land-grabbing policy.

He has got real ambitions to station his troops in central Iran and then push down into the south. And one of the things that he does, which is very distressing for the Persians in the south, does, which is very distressing for the Persians in the south, is that he forces them to pay travel rents, for instance. So taxes on what were once, of course, open highways that anybody could have done. Now he starts putting up border police and so forth. All the indications are that he wants to build for himself an empire. And this really begins to make the Persians very, very twitchy indeed. And it's this policy of incursion into the south that really leads slowly over three generations to the rise of Cyrus the Great and the final repulsion of the Medes from Persian territory. It's a lashback against this kind of, what would we call it, colonisation process, I suppose, that the Medes were certainly keen on by the end of the 7th, beginning of the 6th century.

Right. So in regards to the rise of the Persian Empire, instead of Cyrus the Great, Cyrus II, one of the most significant initial acts of this, therefore, is almost to throw off the Median yoke, as it were. Yes, absolutely. That's their first concern. And I think at the time, that was their only concern, to be honest. You know, as the Medes moved deeper and deeper into southwestern Iran, so, of course, their tribal lands were being threatened, their independence, their whole identities, even though they are Iranian peoples, nevertheless, they are very different Iranian peoples. And their tribal lands mean everything. So essentially what happens in the historical process of empire building

actually really first starts as a rebellion against Astyages and the Medes to push them out of Iran. And it comes to a head, really, at a huge battle in the Iranian heartland, Pasargadae, which, of course, is the tribal homeland of Cyrus himself. You know, he was a Pasargadae boy. That's where he builds his palace later on, and that's where he's buried as well. The Battle of Pasargadae, I think, is one of the most important battles in Persian's history, very often completely forgotten. We get some accounts of it in Herodotus and some better accounts, actually, in Ctesias, another Greek historian of the 4th century. And we know that it was fought in the flat plains of Pasagadae, and that really it was only a final push by the Persians that got the upper hand on the battlefield

because it did look as though the victory was going to go over to the Medes. But in fact, it turned around at the end. There's a lovely story Ctesias tells in which the Persians were ready to give up and walk away when their women folk met them on the hills and as the men were coming over the hills looking really dejected, the women lifted up their skirts and they shouted to them why didn't you crawl back

inside from where you came you cowards and so the men turn on their heels and go back into battle one more time i don't know if we can put anything on that but it's a great story and certainly you know it's supposed to have rallied the men again to fight for their land and for their for their women folk again and what happens then is that essentially the Medes retreat as quickly as they can north, but the Persians just don't drive them out. They pursue them. And that's the interesting twist that happens then. You know, then they become the aggressors, so much so that they actually chase the king,

Astyages, back into the area around Ecbatana. And then there are various stories of what happens to him. So there are some stories which say that Cyrus treated him very kindly, that he gave him a satrapy in the Eastern Empire to look after. But actually, a Babylonian document now confirms that, of course, Cyrus actually had him killed. We know there's no surprise there. But what's very interesting is the way in which later Persians and then Greeks told stories about Cyrus's birth. And one of the stories, one of many stories that circulated in antiquity about Cyrus, who was already a legend in his lifetime, was that he, of course, was the grandson of this Astyages of Media. And so, actually, he had a right to the Median throne anyway. You know, it was his by right. But, unfortunately, when Astyages' daughter was pregnant with the soon-to-be Cyrus,

he had these terrible nightmares. One of them showed a vine which grew out of his daughter's genitalia and kind of covered the earth. And another one which he had was where she urinated with such force that it completely drowned the whole of Asia. So he woke up with some cold sweats, not surprisingly, and had his dream interpreters come and say, the child that your daughter will bear will be greater than you. And in a kind of motif that we find very frequently, of course, in the ancient world. So it's there in the story of Moses or Romulus and Remus and so forth. The child was cast out, he was put out to die. But in one of the stories, it's a local shepherd and his wife who rescue the baby and bring him up. In another story, it's a she-wolf who raises the baby and

brings it up. So Romulus and Remus, all of that there. Whatever it was, clearly this is a fantasy, but the story was being told to make Cyrus the legitimate heir of media. So where did this story get told, first of all? Well, in my mind, it was told, first of all, in media, so that they could justify for themselves the fact that, you know, they have actually a conqueror who is actually was born to be one of their own. It suited Cyrus very well as well. But I mean, that's the way it goes. Because, you know, in other stories we have of Cyrus's birth, he is the son, for instance, of a goat herd and a thief who are Persian born and bred, nothing to do with media whatsoever. So obviously that's a story that

appealed to the Persians, you know, a son of the soil makes good and so forth. So there are many, many, many stories, variations, and they all have a political or propagandistic agenda to them. It's so, so interesting, Lloyd, and my mind instantly goes to a very striking, very clear parallel, which is how the ancient Egyptians under the Ptolemies created the story that Alexander the Great was actually the son of Nectanebo II, the last native Egyptian ruler, to legitimise Macedonian rule over Egypt. It's fascinating how you get it with the Medians as well. It's exactly the same, isn't it? Oh, completely, Natalie. And, you know, there are folk motifs which weave throughout to this. So one of the stories, part of the story we get in Herodotus is that

the Median king Astyages commands his chief officer, a man called Hippargus, to take the infant Cyrus, you know, still wrapped up in his swaddling clothes, and to kill him, you know, take him out into the mountains and kill him there. But Herodotus tells us the tale where Hippargus takes the baby, puts him to die, but then can't do it, and finds a shepherd. And in a way, you know, it's part of the old Snow White motif, isn't it? You know, the huntsman takes the princess out into the forest to kill her, can't do it because he's too gentle-hearted and all this kind of stuff. So we see layers and layers of what we would call folk tales built into these, which are typical kind of hero legends really, aren't they? You can see how important Cyrus was to his people, even generations after. Lloyd, you absolutely can. I mean, we're

going to have to start wrapping up now because Cyrus is definitely a podcast for another day. Such an amazing figure he is. But Lloyd, I mean, lastly, and very quickly, as like an overarching last thought, it's been absolutely brilliant to talk about the rise of the Persian Empire today. I mean, why is the rise of the Persians, why is it so significant in our ancient history? You know, I'm always very keen to look for a global antiquity wherever we can. It's important that we do it. And I think what we see, if we recognise what the Persians were, they were another people, a Eurasian people, who suddenly became major players in a Mesopotamian and a European theatre of history. a Mesopotamian and a European theatre of history. And I think that's what's really, truly brilliant about it. You know, what we find if we study the Persians is that we're making interconnections all the time,

that no historical civilisation is an island, that there are constant interactions across huge swathes of time and huge swathes of land. And I love the idea that because we can look at the Eurasian origins of these people who become the Persians, we are so much closer linked, therefore, to the peoples of northern India, to the peoples of China. You know, suddenly you begin to see a world which is far more densely populated and far more interactive than we ever would have thought. If we just keep our spotlight on Greece and Rome, we are going to miss all of this. This is why I

think the Persians, throughout their long history, I mean, right the way, you know, throughout the Sasanian period into the medieval world and right the way down into the 21st and into the 22nd century, this is why they are major world players, because their land really does straddle East and West. It really genuinely is there, you know. They are the bridge that takes us historically and culturally into all these different places. Lloyd, that's absolutely brilliant, and that's a great point to finish on.

Last but certainly not least, Lloyd, your book coming out on this topic is called? It's out. It came out in April. It's called Persians, the Age of the Great Kings. And it's published by Wildfire Books in all good bookshops now. Fantastic. And it is a great read. So we've only just scratched the surface just at the start. Lots more to look into with that book, especially. And Lloyd, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast my friend you're very welcome anytime well there you go there was professor lloyd llewellyn jones explaining all about the rise of the persians i hope you enjoyed this episode it was wonderful

getting lloyd back on the podcast now last things for me you know what i'm going to say if you want more ancients content in the meantime you know what you can do you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below because every week we write a bit of a blurb that newsletter explaining what's been happening in team ancient history hit world and of course if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on spotify apple podcasts wherever you get your podcasts from we the whole team will be greatly appreciated but that's enough from me and i'll see you in the next episode