The monumental stairways of Persepolis
A 1971 "UNESCO COURRIER" SPECIAL ISSUE -
Part I
"Iran, Cultural crossroads for 2,500
years"
By Peter Avery, Lecturer in Persian at the University of Cambridge.
Dean of King's College 1967-1968
The monumental stairways of Persepolis
WITHOUT the genius ol Iran the culture of mankind would have been exceedingly impoverished. Between 546 and 331 B.C. the great Achaemenid Empire, built by Cyrus and consolidated by Darius (521486 B.C.), continued and perfected, on a far larger scale than had ever been known, the ordering and interchanges of an Imperial state whose beginnings had been traced by the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Once the latter had been conquered by the Iranians, the "law of the Medes and Persians which changeth not" sheltered the development of civilization from the Aegean Sea to the Indian Ocean.
Significantly, the Acheamenids sup-plied their own word for "law", data which passed into Armenian, Hebrew and Akkadian, to signify what it meant by its root meaning, "tc arrange" or "put in order".
The ancient languages which adopted this word indicate the Achaemenid Empire's dominance over an area which included the Caucasus and Armenia, Israel on the Mediterranean seabord, and the Tigris-Euphrates Basin. It also stretched into Central Asia in the northeast, and Asia Minor In the west.
From the crossroads the Medes and then the men of Persis, Cyrus and Darius, marched along routes which quartered the compass, to create the model of the universal, cosmopolitan state.
During the reign of Artaxerxes I (466-424 B.C.) Greek historians and man of science travelled in the Empire to acquire the learning of the East . Had Democritus (d. 361 B~C.) no met Babylonian scholars and mathematicians under the aegis of the Achaemenid Empire, he would probably not have worked out his atomic theory. His father had entertained the Emperor Xerxes when the Iranian "Great King" had been in Thrace in about 460 B.C.
Leaving those ancient eras when Iran set the style for uniting nations, the more recent Islamic culture can be cited as a phenomenon which would riot have existed without contributions made in cities such as Baghdad, Bukhara, Herat, Ray, Isfahan, Shiraz and Tabriz from the 8th to the 17th centuries A.D. There the poetry, faience, architecture, metalwork, miniature painting and calligraphy which are the characteristic adornments of Moslem culture were perfected.
The ethos of all these cities was Iranian, so extensive had. former Persian empires been. Baghdad, from 750 to 1258 the seat of the Caliphs of Islam, who were Islam's religious and juridical heads, is near the site of Ctesiphon on the Tigris, and Ctesiphon's great arch still stands as the memorial of the splendour of the winter capital of the Persian Sassanid Empire (224-651 A.D.). Bukhara and Herat were jewels in north-eastern Iran, where Achaemenid and Sassanid influence reached the Oxus and Hindu Kush, and the Persian language prevails to this day.
Islam was the faith revealed in the seventh century to the Arabian Prophet Mohammed. Shortly after his death the Arabs' expansion at Iran's and Byzantium's expense made Islam inheritor of an Iranian civilization whose beginnings are traceable to 4000 B.C. Then a pottery existed on the Iranian Plateau with designs which reveal that the leap from realism into abstract stylization had already been made; made first of all by prehistoric Iranian potters.
From this discovery it is evident how In the clear atmosphere characteristic of Iran, man's genius was early diverted from observation and imitation of natural objects to transmuting observation into the ordering of abstract design.
Objects seen -- animals poised to spring, birds in flight-- were transformed Into universal concepts by the ingenuity of prehistoric Iranians, and Iranians have maintained this capacity to universalize the particular in thei rarts ever since, thus displaying the highest mark of civilization.
The art of those first potters can be seen again in the bounding gazelles and partridges on the wing that decorate the pages of sixteenth century manuscripts as motifs incidenta to more fully developed scenes, of princes carousing or embattled agains backgrounds of landscapes which are in a Chinese style and include tents from the Steppes of Central Asia; or of philosophers such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina), discoursing to pupils on theme preserved from defunct Greek schools but taught in medieval Iranian college courtyards.