Admittedly, there are no narrative contemporary Persian accounts of Kuruš that has survived.
Historical events of the empire were recorded in the traditional eastern royal annals and chronicles of the era. These historical texts of the Persian Achaemenids, referred to in the writings of the ancient Hellenes and Judeans, are either entirely lost or not found yet.
The fire that Alexander and the Macedonians unleashed at Pârsâ (Persepolis) could have very well destroyed precious Persian archives written on perishable materials. Royal storehouses and archives preserved at various royal cities, capitals, of the empire could have been looted during the conquest of Alexander, or later fallen to the ravages of time and circumstances of history. The intent of the hordes of Hellenes who followed Alexander around Asia, was not to shine the light on the object of their unjustified destruction, only to record the glory of Alexander and their own people. We know how many camels and mules carried away the gold of the Achaemenids from Pârsâ treasuries, but not how many Persians were massacred by the Makedonians, whom by the account of their own historians, sacked, looted, raped and killed in their murderous bloodlust for golden Persian riches.
But fortunately other disparate materials with various historical value have survived: Fragments of Babylonian Chronicles, Hebrew Bible accounts, writings of various Hellenic writers, royal inscriptions, administration records, archaeological sites and finds...
To the breadth and depth of the surviving documents from and about the Imperial Achaemenids, from ordinary administrative records to imperial inscriptions, written in Âryâ [Old Persian], Akkadian, Aramaic, Elamite, Egyptian, Hebrew, Phoenician, Hellene, Latin, Lycian, Lydian, Phrygian, Carian and still some undecipherable languages, add the lack of historians skilled in theological, political, cultural, economical, and ideological analysis, and philologers skilled in all the official languages of the Persian Empire, as well as eastern and western modern languages, and all you end up with is a giant headache and an unsolvable mystery.
An empire so vast and kings so powerful had not existed in the known history before.
And so the true history of the Achaemenids has remained shrouded in mystery, caught in a chasm, somewhere between the biased Hellenocentricism and Biblical Judeocentricism.
While many beautiful books have been published on the magnificent art and architecture of the Imperial Achaemenids, the scholarly analysis of the Great Kings and the vast empire they ruled, for the purpose of placing them more appropriately in the annals of world history, using an unbiased framework of western scholarship is a relatively recent phenomenon.
In the early 1980s, a small band of mostly western scholars gathered a little west of Persepolis, in the city of Groningen in Netherlands, and started a series of scholarly discussions about the Persian Achaemenids in a forum called: “Achaemenid Workshop”. The scholarly debates were captured in articles in English, French, Dutch and German and published in a series of books. Achaemenid Workshops ended in mid 1990s. In Achaemenid History VIII: Continuity and Change, the last volume of Achaemenid Workshop series, editors declared that the time had come to share the results of their scholarly approach with a wider audience with the aim of mainstreaming the Achaemenid history: a noble goal which regrettably has not come to fruition. The level of discussions remains at the level of specialists and a full translation of the books in English is not yet available, making the most recent insights into the world of the ancient Persians unavailable to the interested public at large.
The most recent comprehensive history books on the Persian Achaemenids attempted by western historians are Professor Pierre Briant’s excellent Historie de l’Empire Perse (1996) later translated to From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002) and The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period by Professor Amélie Kuhrt (2007).
Both leaving ample room for further analysis by the military historians and tacticians as well as a Persian perspective, written by Iranians themselves. There is really no good way of ‘knowing’ another society, ancient or modern, eastern or western, as an observer, no matter how enlightened and sincere.
Mazdean scholars could further illuminate such valuable works by adding a more comprehensive perspective on the Mazdean religion of the Persian Achaemenids which is indispensable in providing clues to political acts that analyzed in vacuum would not by themselves be meaningful or reasonable. Impact of religion on the political behavior of the Achaemenids has been underestimated by the historians, but the emerging current views that the expansion of the empire was fueled by their religion, other than the desire for peace and order, cannot be accepted without further examination.
One cannot help but wonder what sort of 'Persian Perspective' is offered in recent academic books with titles of Persian Responses and Persian Perspectives written mostly or entirely by western scholars?
Hmmm...
Given the modern political tensions, it is unlikely that the known gap between the classicists, assyriologists, egyptologists, iranologists, achaeologists and philologists will be bridged any time soon to arrive at an unbiased image of the Persians.
Regrettably, modern political realities, uncritical acceptance of traditional classicist views of ancient history, ideological biases, cultural prejudices, and elaborate sincere intolerism are spilling into opportunistic books and movies where a handful of ‘heroic Spartans’ face hordes of ‘barbarian Persians’ in a mortal battle between naked democracy and dressed monarchy, reversing years of thoughtful scholarly work to arrive at a more balanced view of the Great Kuruš and the Persian Achaemenids.
At the same time, the modern tradition about the Great Kuruš presents a special problem for a novelist. Despite the awareness that many known historical tales about him are purely fictional, could they be ignored while writing about him?
The requirements of storytelling obscures the delicacy of the interpretive and literary choices made by a novelist; choices that by no means are easy, simple or straightforward, neither conclusive or incontrovertible, but rather a necessary filter to see clearly through the complexity of sources, passage of time, and fog of bias and ignorance.
So, developing a historical fiction based on the life of the Great Kuruš, which preserves a kernel of truth about the national icon of a modern nation, where there is so much and so little, is not for angels.
A fool then.
So, by openly admitting my own failings and adopting a particular point of view based on research, here are some preliminary thoughts in developing the Romance of Cyrus: Book of Kuruš.
My current thoughts about the Great Kuruš, while rooted firmly in my own Persian inheritance, are also an exploration of the life of a fascinating man whose memory belongs not just to the ancient Persians and modern Iranians but to world of mankind.
I leave it to the readers to decide whether my point of view is worth the journey.
