Namak Magazine - Remembering the Forgotten Empire

Go to Issue 01.03 Overview | Download this article as a PDF
The article on this page is an extended web version of the one that appears in the magazine. You can download the shorter, printed version using the link above.

Remembering the Forgotten Empire
Kamin Mohammadi
Namak Magazine, Fall/Winter 2005 - pg. 20

In the soaring halls of London’s British Museum, something unusual is happening. Unusual because venerable institutions like this usually store and display history, always one step removed from actually participating in the evaluation — or re-evaluation in this case — of history itself...

With the British Museum’s new exhibition, Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia, this is exactly what the museum is aiming to do. Taking as its starting point the disservice done to this great civilization by Greek historians such as Herodotus and Ptolemy (and now American Oliver Stone), who depicted the Persians as despotic and ruthless tyrants, the exhibition’s ambition is no less than to shed new light on this neglected empire while challenging the myths that have come down to us by the Greeks, the Persians’ fatal enemies. Judging by the number of visitors the show has attracted since its opening (90,000 in its first 8 weeks), there are plenty of people around willing to re-evaluate the given view.

The exhibition focuses on the Empire’s glory days between 550 BC and 330 BC, when the Persians ruled over the largest empire in the ancient Near East seen before or since which stretched from North Africa to the Indus Valley and from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. Persian rulers Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes established highly sophisticated networks of power, initiated far-reaching legislation, and created monumental architecture.

As Iranians, we know all this, so the pleasure of this exhibition comes on other levels. It gives us the opportunity to see, for the first time, the largest collection of art and artifacts relating to the Achaemenid Empire gathered in one place: the show not only uses the British Museum’s own substantial collection, but has been loaned important pieces from the Louvre in Paris and also The Persepolis Museum and Tehran National Museum, both in Iran. This is the first time such cultural ties have been forged with the Islamic regime of Iran. The British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor has been negotiating the loans with Tehran for over two years but the agreements hung in the balance after the election of President Ahmadinejad when the new government hesitated for several tense weeks. Finally however, most of the agreed exhibits from Iran arrived three weeks before the opening, meaning the show was mounted in record time.

The politics surrounding this show didn’t stop there. While most reviews have been positive, there has been the odd dissenting voice, still keen to judge Achaemenid achievements against the Western framework of the Greek model and keen to belittle the glories of the civilization which informed so much of subsequent Greek and Roman rule. The exhibition itself makes its position clear from the start: throughout the nemesis of the Achaemenid Empire is referred to as Alexander of Macedon rather than Alexander the Great, guaranteed to please those Iranians who still harbor resentment at the Greeks.

All of these considerations aside, the exhibition itself is a jewel of a show. For such a vast empire, and the extravagant promises of the fanfare surrounding it, the three rooms devoted to redressing the reading of history feel small, particularly when filled with monumental column bases and casts of friezes taken from the walls of Persepolis’ various palaces in the 19th-century by European archeologists, now in better condition than the originals sitting in the Fars desert. The scale of the buildings at Persepolis is hard to comprehend in this setting but the show’s real strength lay in the displays of smaller objects that define the luxury and fine details of life and how it was lived. The fragments of household objects are exquisite, such as a small lapis lazuli head of a clean-shaven prince or the large black limestone statue of a mastiff sitting on guard, and polished to a high shine (both these objects are on loan from Iran). The gold and silver of the household objects dazzles: gold rhytons (horn-shaped drinking cups) are decorated with winged lions or griffins and amphora handles are bronze and silver ibex.
The cases containing jewels were another highlight: the beautifully elaborate gold hoop earrings are styles you can still find today in Tehran’s bazaar, making it clear that the Iranian aesthetic is one that transcends invasions and religions, a strong sense of beauty and expression that has retained its artistic integrity through the millennia.

This was also apparent with some of the architectural motifs and glazed tiles that decorated wall friezes from the palaces of Susa. The Achaemenids took the art and architecture of the empires they conquered—the Assyrian and Babylonian empires—and employed them to build huge palace complexes that were homages to their own greatness. They were accomplished icon creators, masters of writing their own myth: at the start of the show there is a cut-stone box and, from within it, a dazzling silver tablet inscribed with Old Persian cuneiform. Found in the main hall of Persepolis, and on loan from Iran, the text proclaims: ‘ I am Darius the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries… Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair…’ Closing the exhibition, in pride of place, is the simple clay cylinder that has been called by many the first charter of human rights. Made of clay and discovered in 1878 in excavation of the site of Babylon, the Cyrus Cylinder also speaks to us across the ages—Cyrus refers to himself as ‘King of the world, great king… king of the four quarters’ and goes on to speak of restoring the temples and religious cults of the different people of Babylon. In 1971 the United Nations published a translation of it in all the official UN languages and a copy resides in the UN building in New York.

This exhibition sets out to restore the Ancient Persian Empire to its rightful place in the history of civilization and it largely succeeds. It presents a rich and tolerant empire that innovated devolved government and multiculturalism and which enjoyed the finer things in life. With nothing left of Persian history written in their own words and with Persepolis thoroughly looted by Alexander (he left with 3,000 camels mounted with goodies after burning the place), this was never going to be an easy task, and even if the artifacts and art on show aren’t enough to definitively convince everyone, they can at least provide a tantalizing glimpse into a world that has been almost unknown in the West. For us Iranians this show is a much-too-rare chance to be proud of our glorious culture in a time when most representations of Iran are woefully negative.