A modern map of Persia stretches like a great arrowhead from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean, lying between India and Russia. Afghanistan, Turkey, Iraq, and Arabia are its neighbors. Obtain an ancient map - such as a map which Emperor Darius, "the King of Kings," might have looked upon twenty-four centuries ago - and you will see the Persian Empire stretching into the eastern Mediterranean, including large parts of Greece and all of Egypt, and reaching out to include vast areas of southern Russia and making deep inroads into Central Asia, Pakistan, and northern India. The Persian Empire swallowed up the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires, and went beyond them. It was the greatest empire the world had ever known, and for two centuries its capital was the capital of the world. Today only the core of this empire remains. But the Persians, who rarely regret the past, do not believe the glory has departed. Speaking quite confidently, "Glory lay over this land from the beginning."
For them Persia is far more than a country: it is a place of splendor, where the gods dwell and the ancient heroes still walk the land, where the remote past and the immediate present live side by side.
If the Persians were the first world-conquerors, they were also among the most tolerant empire-builders the world has ever seen. They worshipped the god Ahuramazda, Lord of the Sun and of the Shining Heavens, but they never attempted to proselytise and allowed astonishing freedom of self-government among the subject peoples. They released the Jews from Babylonian captivity, restored their ritual vessels and assisted them in rebuilding their Temples. They even rebuilt the walls from Athens to the Piraeus which the Spartans had leveled. For over two centuries they maintained a world of law, peace and justice over an area which extended from the Indus and the Oxus to the Nile and the Aegean. When the Greeks spoke of the Persians, it was always with awe mingled with envy and the desire to imitate. When Alexander the Great became master of the Persian Empire, he assumed quite naturally the robes and the powers of the Persian Emperors and consorted more with Persians than with Greeks. He borrowed the design of a world empire from Darius, and modeled himself on Cyrus. There was nothing capricious in his choice of a model. There is a sense in which the wars between the Greeks and the Persians were civil wars, fought by two superbly gifted people of the same race.
There is an extraordinary continuity in the Persian face: lean, intense, with wide eyes, firm chin, delicate nostrils, and with the suggestion of a strange inner excitement. So little has changed that sometimes you have the feeling that the people are only waiting to step back into the remote, unobtainable and dazzling past.
No one who has ever been to Persia can forget the fierce gentleness of their wit and their addiction to stories so adroitly embroidered that the teller is drowned in the embroidery. It is partly the fault of the language, which is soft and resonant and tends to carry the speaker away into the wildest improvisations, a language wonderfully suited to the audacious. This crisp and enticing language convinces easily.
Persian belongs to the great group of Indo-Aryan languages, English being the very last language to be developed. Coming back to Persian is like coming back to the source. Like English, Persian is a language which cries out for poets: and there has been no dearth of poetry in Persia.
Unfortunately the Persian poet most familiar in the West is one of the least typical. Omar Khayyam is recognised in his own country as an excellent mathematician and astronomer, and the hero of some curious legends, but he is given little recognition as a poet. Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Ruhaiyat describes only one aspect of the Persian character: their love of wine and women, a raw anguish at the thought of the impermanence of the world. In English the poem has the sound of trumpets, but in the original Persian it has more of the sound of muffled drums, a slow lament.
So it is unfortunate that nearly all translations from Persian fail: we miss the softness of the Persian syllables and the sound of running water that flows through their poetry. We miss much in an English version of the Ruhaiyat, and forget that when he is talking about the Tavern he means the House of Love, and when he is talking about grapes and wine, he means the Truth which God pours out upon the heads of men, though he also means real grapes pressed into real wine - for the poem can be interpreted on many levels of thought. Through Persian poetry we gain an astonishing insight into the Persian character, its defiance, sense of splendor, and its mysticism and reliance upon God. Although Omar Khayyam is not typical, and he is often pedestrian in the Rubaiyat, there are moments when he is completely convincing.
Persians attitude towards Mohammad, in whose name they were conquered by the Arabs, was one of unwillingness and they refused to accept orthodox Islam, and transformed it into something closer to their heart's desire, clothing it in enchantment. They turned orthodox Islam upside down, spun fairy tales around it, elevated Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, almost above the Prophet himself, and came to believe in time that the sacred cities of Islam were in Persia itself.
We owe a debt to Persia we can never repay. So much that is bright and glittering and desirable was invented by them. They were the first to invent angels, which the Jews borrowed during the Babylonian captivity, and the Christians borrowed from the Jews. The most beautiful of all decorated domes are in Persia. They invented chess and polo, and the first known highways for wheeled traffic were the royal roads built by Darius. And half of our fairy tales have Persian origins. Their intellectual and spiritual contributions to the world derive from the enchanted interpretation of the world they saw before their eyes: for them the world was a flame, forever quivering, forever bright, forever leaping. For them the world was magic. The very word magic comes from their fire-worshipping priests, the Magi who attended upon Xerxes and Darius. And remembering the Magi who attended the birth of Christ, the third century theologian Sextus Julius Africanus wrote: "Our first knowledge of Jesus came from Persia."
We shall understand Persia best by looking at her long history, where the rise and decline of four great dynasties seemed to follow the same pattern, as though the Persians themselves remained unchanged through all recorded time, reacting in the same way to the challenges thrown down by succeeding dynasties. As we look at their history unfolding before us, it seems sometimes that there is little change: Xerxes and Shapur and Shah Abbas might be brothers. Centuries separated them, but it is their likeness to one another that we remember. Perhaps it could hardly be otherwise. Persia lay at the crossroads between the East and the West, and at the same time the country was almost inaccessible with its huge deserts and barricades of mountains. Being conquerors, Persians became a hardy, earthy people, devoted to their land and their memories of conquest, delighting in the world around them, cultivating the arts, generous in conversation, living as much in the past as in the present, and always dreaming of human majesty, so that every Persian saw himself in some way as a King. Thus they brought into being Kings who were very much like themselves, but touched with a more fiery light than that which shone on their own faces.
(See the <A HREF="http://www.virtualtourist.
com/m/.211130/article/197/1/?s=W"> Gallery</A> on the right for several more pictures)
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