From Great Kuruš to Cyrus the Great...
Well, it is impossible to uncover and read everything that has been written about Great Kuruš over a period of nearly 25 centuries. But it is interesting to finger through the pages of history books and see how his historical image was developed during his time and later evolved throughout the ages.
Ancient Greeks were present in the imperial court of the Achaemenid Great Kings since mid 500 BCE and no doubt had a greater understanding of the Persian Empire than openly acknowledged. By the 4th century BCE, reportedly there were as many as 20,000 Greek mercenaries in the service of the Persian Great Kings. But unfortunately no contemporary accounts have survived, except for bits and pieces in later accounts of Hellenic historians.
The first known narrative account of Great Kuruš is as preserved in Histories [Historię meaning inquires] by Herodotus [485-425 BCE].
Some say Herodotus was the ‘father of history’. Others call him the ‘father of lies’.
In antiquities, he was admired for the art of storytelling.
We don’t know much about Herodotus. He was from Halicarnassus, Bodrum in modern Turkey, which was a part of the Persian Empire at the time and for some reason he either left voluntarily or was forced to leave his hometown by the Persian satrap. They say he traveled here and there. But exactly where and when is uncertain. According to the 10th century Byzantine Suidas Lexicon, Herodotus had a brother named Theodorus.
Thucydides [460-395 BCE], the Athenian general and historian, who wrote: History of The Peloponnesian War, one of the finest military histories of the period, did not care much for Herodotus.
Now while history of mankind did not start with the Histories of Herodotus, historiography probably did: not what happened, but what people thought had happened and wrote a narrative account of it. With only limited access to low-level officials in the fringes of the Persian Empire, if any, generations after actual events had long faded even from the best of memories, ‘why’ was ignored in favor of superficial ‘how’ by the Hellenic writers.
Narrative history as we know it today is the result of the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians and how the Hellenic writers, starting with Herodotus, wrote their own versions of it. Historical romance: more fiction than fact. Maybe just plain wishful thinking.
With their vast Empire, covering so many lands and so many people, the Great Kings could not, however, have given as much thought to the provincial Greeks as the ancient Hellenic writers seem to have imagined.
Curiously enough Herodotus himself hinted at this in Histories (Book 1:134):
“After their own nation [the Persians] hold their nearest neighbors most in honor, then the nearest but one - and so on, their respect decreasing as the distance grows, and the most remote being the most despised.”
However, since most of the information about Great Kuruš and the early part of the Persian Empire [about 80 years, roughly from 559 to 479 BCE] are derived from Histories, Herodotus is a source that cannot be ignored, even though his hostile bias toward the Persians is well attested to. But every line must be carefully weighed and measured for grains of truth.
Narrative structure of Histories seems to have a close affinity with the known Greek literature of his time: a literary account for the purpose of personal glory set within a very specific Greek context, where any extraordinary success and wealth was sure to bring on the wrath of jealous vengeful Greek gods.
The endless ‘digressions’ in Histories is a well-known structure common to the Persian literature of the later periods, where smaller stories are woven within the frame of a larger story, even though it was poorly executed by Herodotus.
He glossed over complexities of major wars to form the vast Persian Empire and the meddlesome interference of the Greeks with the Persian subjects in favor of telling irrelevant tales and glorifying a few minor military victories on the western fringes of the Persian Empire.
Herodotus wrote that he knew the name of all the ‘300’ Spartans who had died at the Battle at Hot Gates [Thermopylae], but curiously enough he thought the old pass ran from north to south. Was he ever there? Or to many other places he had written about? Or was it pure nationalistic romance? Or did the later Hellenic or medieval editors and translators of Histories corrupt his original document?
The most ancient medieval manuscript of Histories was produced in the 10th century mixing Attic and Ionic words. It is highly likely that the original version was corrupted by ancient editors who changed the language to make the ‘Book’ easier to read. Division of Histories to 9 books after 9 muses can also be attributed to the Librarians at the royal Library of Alexandria in 3rd or 2nd BCE.
The version of Histories we have today is mostly embellished with typical Greek formulaic pairing of opposites: a heroic rise to power followed by ignoble fall due to ‘hubris’, Greek word for divine retribution.
What captured the imagination of the ancient Greeks and the later Roman writers was not the spectacular rise of such an unprecedented world ruler, but the bloody fall of a greedy barbarian king: the ‘story’ of the violent death of Great Kuruš at the hands of the ‘fictional’ Tomyris, defending her lands and revenging her dead son. It was a ‘story’ that later found its way into western arts and crafts: in paintings and tapestries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period.
Here is what Herodotus wrote in Histories [Book 1:201-214] compiled from various translations:
“After Cyrus conquers the Babylon, he covets the subjugation of Massagetai, perhaps a Scythian tribe on the eastern fringes of the Persian Empire.
At the time, the Massagetai were ruled by a woman named Tomyris, whose husband had died and she was now their ruler. Cyrus sends a message to her pretending courtship and claiming that he wants her to be his wife.
An offer that Tomyris refuses – perhaps the King of the World did not suite a ‘queen’ whose tribe reportedly [by Herodotus] shared their women in common and sacrificed their elderly together with some sheep, stewed their flesh and feasted on it, thinking this was the most blessed way to end one’s life.
‘Jilted’ Cyrus builds a bridge over the River Araxes, crosses into the Massagetai territory and begins overt hostilities. He and the best of this army march some distance back toward Araxes, leaving behind the sick and weak warriors – a strategy recommended by Croesus, the former Lydian King now in Cyrus’ service, to lure the enemy into a trap. These Persians left behind are attacked by one third of the Massagetaian army, and although they defend themselves, they are all massacred.
After the Massagetai has finished killing, they start eating, drinking and feasting on Persian provisions until they all pass out drunk.
Cyrus and the Persians returning to camp attack the murderous drunkards. They kill some and capture many more, among them the son of Tomyris, a general of the Massagetai.
Tomyris sends a message to Cyrus to return her son and even though Cyrus has ‘unjustly’ wreaked damage on one third of her army, he could leave her lands unharmed.
An offer Cyrus ignores.
When the son of Tomyris finally sobers up and realizes his predicament, he begs to be released from his fetters. Cyrus agrees and as soon the young Massagetai general is free, he somehow kills himself.
Tomyris gathers her army and attacks Cyrus. They fight hard. The Massagetai prevails and many Persians are killed, including Cyrus, ending his imperial reign of thirty years less one (29 years).
But Tomyris is not done yet. She fills a wineskin with human blood and searches high and low on the battlefield for the body of Cyrus among the dead. When she finds him, she thrusts his head into the wineskin and tells him to quench his thirst for blood.”
Herodotus wrote: “Of the many stories told about the death of Cyrus, this account seems to me to be the most credible version.”
Really?
Does it not sound more like another moralizing Hellenic ‘story’ about the Persians and women - both considered a serious threat to the masculine world of the 5th century BCE Greeks? A ‘Persian’ king who greedily covets the lands of others and a ‘woman’ who savagely desecrates the bodies of the fallen male enemies in battle with outmost brutality and cruelty?
It was Herodotus himself who wrote: “… no Persian ever thought himself worthy to be compared with Cyrus.” [Book 3:160]
If so, shouldn’t we expect to have heard of the Persians avenging the death of Great Kuruš under such bizarre and bloody circumstances? A beloved and revered Emperor who had brought most of the known world under the sway of the Persians and had made them Masters of Asia?
But there is nothing mentioned in Histories and no such records found yet in Babylonian clay tablets and fragments still waiting to be deciphered.
Nothing mentioned in the Holy Bible either.
Wouldn’t the horrific death of ‘God’s anointed’ have merited a small foot print in the Biblical Books of Isaiah or Ezra or other Judean prophets?
With imagined and invented stories about cannibalism, incest, castration, wickedness, hubris, and what not, Herodotus, like so many like him throughout the recorded ‘history’, put his penmanship in the age-old service of dehumanizing the enemy so the killing of the innocent could be justified and vindicated.
Histories starts and ends with Great Kuruš. The ending is rather abrupt with an anecdote from Great Kuruš, after a story about the Persian governor of Sestos, a small port in Hellespont. “The Athenians… led him [Persian governor] to the hill overlooking the city of Madytos. There they fastened him to a wooden plank, and hung him up on it, and then they stoned his son to death before his very eyes.” [Book 9:120] One wonders how ‘civilized’ these Athenians were.
Herodotus is believed to have been alive during the early years of the Peloponnesian War [431-404 BCE].
No matter what he had written about the Persians, by the time of his death, the Persian Empire was not only not destroyed, it was stronger and more splendid than ever, while the Athenians and Spartans and their allies were arming to engage in one of the bloodiest and longest civil wars of their history.
Maybe Histories was just a desperate attempt to persuade the Athenians and Spartans to fight the Persians, a foreign enemy, instead of turning their bloody swords on each other.
Herodotus said: “... for it would seem to be easier to deceive and impose upon a whole throng of people than to do so to just one individual...” [Book 5:97.2]
Interestingly enough, all the ‘hidden’ messages of eternal conflict between east and west in Histories were not detected by ancient historians, but by the late 19th century western classical historians.
A bit of Histories to reflect on.
Apparently Kambujiyâ II peacefully succeeded his father to the imperial throne of the Achaemenids. Nothing connects him to a campaign in Central Asia where his father seems to have met his ‘bloody’ end. But from the imperial inscriptions of Great Dâriuš at Bagastâna, we know that this eastern territory of the Empire was firmly in the hands of the imperial Achaemenids eight years later with Persian satraps governing the region.
The first known account conflicting with Herodotus surfaced in Kyropaideia [Cyropaedia – Education of Cyrus], written by the pro-Spartan Athenian mercenary, Xenophon, the contemporary of the Younger Kuruš [Cyrus the Younger] in the 5th century BCE.
Kyropaideia was a literary work, meant as a model for educating good rulers. Great Kuruš, the good king, was son of Cambyses, the King of Persians, from tribe of Persidae who were named after Perseus, son of Greek god Zeus and mortal Danaë. Great Kuruš died of old age in bed after a long and typically moralizing Athenian speech. “When he was asleep, he had a vision telling him to prepare to die. He immediately got out of bed, sacrificed to Zeus, gave a very long speech, gave his right hand to everyone, covered himself, and so died.” His royal sons, the bad kings, immediately set out to destroy the Persian Empire through luxury and decadence.
Although the authorship of the last chapter of Kyropaideia is in dispute, it reflects both the general attitude of the contemporary Greeks about the Persians, as well as the development of a more complex web of relationships between them. While Persian Achaemenid Queens were seen by the misogynist Greeks as the real powers behind weak Great Kings, by then the armies of Greek mercenaries were in the service of the Great Kings and contenders to the Persian throne. Apparently there were no high-minded Hellenic ideals when it came to accepting the Persian gold.
Xenophon, however, could have chosen a historical or a contemporary Athenian or Spartan to idealize as the best model for a ‘perfect ruler’. He chose Great Kuruš, a Persian.
Interesting.
Even to a worldly pro-Spartan Athenian commander, a Persian Great King was still the ‘Perfect Ruler’. The ‘Best’ – possessing the same virtues that Xenophon claimed for himself.
Persica, the next known ‘historical’ account conflicting with both Herodotus and Xenophon about Great Kuruš was written by Ctesias, a Greek doctor serving in the imperial court of Artakhšaçâ [Artaxerxes II, 404-359 BCE]. Persica was a fanciful tale of eunuchs, Persian palace intrigues, and powerful Achaemenid queens who enjoyed influence with the Great Kings: sort of a story that to the Greeks who had no regards for women and the mere mention of a woman was scandalous, was a sure sign of moral decay at the Achaemenid court.
After all what sort of men allowed women to interfere with the political affairs of an empire?
Ctesias wrote that the father of Great Kuruš was a bandit and his mother was a goat herder. He wrote that when Great Kuruš campaigned in the unknown Land of Derbicae, the Persian cavalry was put to flight by elephants and the King fell off his horse. An Indian drove a javelin below his hip joint into the upper part of his thigh. On his death bed, Great Kuruš bequeathed the imperial throne on his elder son and appointed his younger son to rule over the Bactrians and urged them both to obey their mother in all things. According to Ctesias, three days later, Great Kuruš died of his wound, having ruled for some 30 years.
Blinded by greed for glory and gold, the Macedonian Alexander and his deadly army arrived in mid 4th century BCE. But unlike the previous Greeks and Spartans, they had not come to seek the golden favor of the Great King, but to steal the Persian gold and call themselves legitimate heirs to the Achaemenids.
In the 7th century, some ten centuries after the bloody Macedonian invasion of Persia, Muslim Arab armies brought the next wave of devastation to the Persians.
Nearly three centuries later, the incomparable Ferdowsî revived the Persian language [New Persian: Farsi]. He recorded all the Persian history that was still remembered in astonishing 55,000 double verses in the Epic of Shâh Nâmeh, the Book of Kings: A labor of love that took some thirty years to compose, divided into 3 sections of mythical, legendary and historical periods.
While the memory of the Sassanid Emperors had survived the bloody swords of invading Arabs, the memories of Great Kuruš and the Persian Achaemenids, already over thirteen centuries old, had by then faded into myths and legends.
The ruins at Pârsâ had become known as the seat of the mythical King Jamšid, as Takht-e-Jamshid. Tomb of Great Kuruš in Pasargadae was now known as the Tomb of the Mother of Sulaiman, King Solomon of the Hebrew Bible. The rock-cut tombs of Great Dâriuš and his descendants had become Nagh’sh-e Rustam, after Rustam, the legendary hero of Shâh Nâmeh.
The Tomb of Great Kuruš was turned into a mosque in the 13th century.
Almost all who passed through the famed ruins of Pârsâ carved their own names into the legacy of Achaemenids, not knowing the wealth and wonder that had been destroyed by the their own hands of ignorance and greed.
Lizards ran where lions used to roam…
European visitors of the 14th centuries and later were the first ones who correctly identified the ruined palaces of the Persian Achaemenids at Pârsâ based on the writings of the ancient Hellenic historians. Cuneiform writings were copied and chunks of still remaining stone monuments were broken off and hauled back to Europe to decorate private homes with ‘artifacts’ from exotic Persia.
In 1498, Giovanni Nanni da Viterbo, known as Annius of Viterbo, wrote Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII cum commentariis (Antiquities) in Rome, producing a simplified forged history of ancient Persia, where Bible and ancient history were aligned. While the nature of his dubious invention was commonly known, it became highly influential because it fitted well with the Biblical history - it was not true, but it could have been.
Kyropaideia of Xenophon was rediscovered by the Italians of the 15th century who ignored the fact that Great Kuruš was a Persian King. In the cunning hands of Machiavelli, Great Kuruš became Cyrus, one of the princes in il Principe who had formed a state, using wars to keep soldiers and subjects happy and looting to be generous like Caesar and Alexander.
Within a century, Cyrus the Great emerged as the ideal prince: a model for contemporary European rulers.
American Revolution and the loss of the colonial America, French revolution and the political realities of the 18th century Europe created a new interest in the history of ancient Greeks to explain the decline of the imperialistic colonialism and predict the future based on past history.
Histories and Kyropaideia were translated again to English and French.
At first, Great Kuruš and the Persians received a favorable treatment, where Athenians became an example of political disorder and civil lawlessness. In one hand Great Kuruš was a wise king; in the other was the failed Athenian democracy - the good kings of Europe would prevail over the waves of misguided revolutionaries.
William Mitford, a British historian of mid 18th century, who wrote History of Greece in 10 volumes, produced a more balanced view of the Persian Empire. He was convinced that a written account by the Persians had existed at one time. He regarded Histories as a source which selected history rather than writing it according to objective parameters: stories chosen by Herodotus were not to be taken as true stories that reported actual historical events.
But Great Kuruš and the Persian Achaemenids were ‘Asians’ at a time when secular colonization of Asia had replaced the failed religious crusades of the Middle Ages and a successful ‘European’ alternative had to be found.
So, the favorable tide quickly turned by the poison pen of John Gillies, the royal historiographer of Scotland in late 18th century, who found in ruthless aggression of 6th century BCE Philip of Macedon the characteristics that was needed for an 18th century European monarch. In his History of Greece, translated into French and German, he wrote: “Persians were weak people without a culture of their own, incapable of holding political and military power... Persian army was like cattle... Zoroaster’s religion was the extravagant doctrine of two principles... with innumerable absurd ceremonies... the Persians had been continuously degenerating from the virtues which characterize a poor and warlike nation...”
Well... imagine all this insight just from reading Herodotus and Xenophon in English.
Once the Macedonian Philip and Alexander were seen as the ‘right’ kind of kings for the Europe of the 18th century, then all their enemies became the ‘wrong’ kind of rulers: Persia and all of Asia were the kind of kingdoms that deserved to be destroyed in the hands of Alexander.
The ‘Oriental’ Asia was everything that ‘Occidental’ Europe was not: rich, mystical, sensual and weak, where ‘Classical’ Europe was intellectual, strong, virtuous, and warlike.
Colonization and plunder of the rest of the world by the Europeans was now sanctified by ancient history.
Soon, ancient Persia became just another ‘Oriental Monarchy’, part of a mysterious intriguing East, with perfumed secluded sensuous harems filled with half-naked women for the pleasure of Muslim rulers.
Persian Achaemenids became even more ‘Oriental’ than the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
Sadly, it was not until the 19th century when the true memory of Great Kuruš and the Persian Achaemenids was restored to the Persians themselves during the rule of Qajar [Ghajar] Dynasty.
In 1867, George Rawlinson, brother of Sir Henry Rawlinson, wrote in Fifth Oriental Monarchy about ancient Persia:
“The Persians seem, certainly, to have been quick and lively, keen-witted, capable of repartee, ingenious, and, for Orientals, farsighted... [but] we cannot justly ascribe to them any high degree of intellectual excellence... A want of seriousness, a want of reality, and, again, a want of depth, characterizes the poetry of Persia, whose bards do not touch the chords which rouse what is noblest and highest in our nature...”
Well, it seems Persians were not farsighted enough to be British.
One wonders what kind of a chord Ferdowsî, ‘the Persian bard’, roused in the noble British, when he wrote centuries earlier:
“If it is not in Iran, let myself not be. Calamity will it be if Iran is destroyed...
Well said the poet that to die with honor, is far better than to live under victorious foe.”
But in all fairness, it is impossible to translate Persian poetry into English language while preserving its splendor, complexity, fullness and beauty.
Later, the strategic location of Persia dictated a more pragmatic British policy.
In 1892, Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy to India, wrote in Persia and the Persian Question:
“If Persia had no other claim to respect, at least a continuous national history for 2,500 is a distinction
which a few countries can exhibit.”
In 1908 oil was discovered by the British in the old territory of Elamites around Susa, modern Khuzestân and the interest of the world in Persia took an entirely new dimension. And the rest is history.
In 1935, change of ‘Persia’ to ‘Iran’ by the Pahlavi Dynasty broke the western association of the modern country with her rich history.
In 1971, Cyrus Cylinder became the official symbol of the 2,500 Years Celebration of Iranian Monarchy, when during royal pomp, Muhammad Reza Shah, the last King of the Pahlavi Dynasty linked his rule directly to Great Kuruš and the imperial Achaemenids.
When the Iranian revolutionary fire raged and burned an ancient monarchy in 1979, flames engulfed the legacy of Great Kuruš and Cyrus Cylinder in controversy.
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