THE DIVINE RADIANCE

[...] Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes --all had worshipped the Lord of Wisdom, Ahura Mazda, and taken their strength from him and ruled in his name. He was lord of the rivers and mountains and the furthest reaches of the earth: he was a god who revealed himself in every flame, but he was also the god who breathed life into the Persians, guarded their cattle, protected them from enemies, gave them nourishment and peace and fair children. He spoke sternly out of the thundercloud, and in a more gentle voice beside running streams. He owed his position among men to the claim made for him by Zarathushtra, the greatest of the prophets Persia has given to the world.

It was this young prophet who gave form and substance to the strenuous worship of the god Ahuramazda, proclaiming that he was above all gods. A hundred years after Isaiah and a hundred years before Buddha, he brought into existence a monotheistic religion of extraordinary purity, possessing in the words of Albert Schweitzers "an astonishing affinity to Christianity."

[...]

In time, and perhaps even while Zarathushtra was still living, the doctrine became more complex. At first he spoke of the blinding glory of Ahuramazda, and from there he had gone to speak of the abstract virtues streaming from the god's countenance: Truth, Empire, Purity, Piety, Immortality, Perfection, the Blaze of Light.

Gradually these abstract virtues became identified as angels. The first of the angels was Sraosha, representing obedience to the divine law. His dwelling-place, according to the Avesta written long after the death of Zarathushtra, was a palace supported by a thousand pillars which glowed with their own light, the roof of the palace being spangled with stars. Sraosha drove in a chariot drawn by four white horses "swifter than the winds or the rain or the winged birds." He wore the shape of an unconquerable youth.

Mithra was another of the angels, and his history was perhaps the oddest of all, for in earlier days he was regarded as the greatest among the gods. Displaced from his supreme position, he became the leader among angels, the captain of the host against Evil (Ahriman), his place so high in the hierarchy that sometimes he was invoked together with Ahuramazda.

From him comes life and increase; to him women prayed for sons, he was the fatness of cattle and piety of priests. As Sraosha represented Truth, Mithra represented Empire. His single glance could hurl spirits of evil into distant corners. His spies incessantly reported him the affairs of earth: he could decide at his pleasure whether there would be peace or war between nations. In time, the cult of Mithra was to shake itself free of Zarathushtraism entirely, and to extend throughout the Roman Empire: there were temples to Mithra even in London.

Together with Mithra, often standing very close to him, was the goddess Anahita. She dwelt in the starry heavens, and her function was to watch over creation as the shepherd watches over his flock. She was the protectress, the gentle goddess from whom there flowed an ever-widening stream of blessing. She too had her chariot with four white shining horses. She was associated with rivers and all flowing things, and represented as a young and beautiful maiden, high-breasted and gold-sandaled, wearing a robe of pure gold and a cloak made of three hundred beaver skins. [...] Inlater Achaemenian times there were statues to her in all the big cities of Persia. She tempered the appalling majesty and power of Ahuramazda.

In the time of the Sasanians the books of Zarathushtra were edited and vast commentaries were compiled, only to be destroyed by the Arabs when they invaded Persia. A small part was carried secretly away. Today in Yazd and Kerman and Bombay, the ancient texts are still recited.

The importance of Zarathushtra's teachings is not to be measured by the number of his living disciples. In all ages the Persian mind has been saturated with the peculiar morality derived from him. Long ago he became a part of the fabric of their imaginations, and they can no more escape from him than they can escape from themselves.

(Research Zoroastrian influence on Judaism, Christianity and Islam)

EVEN TODAY, though the archeologists have been at work for a hundred years, we do not know where the Persians came from or how they brought about the beginnings of their empire. All we know of them is that about 1400 B.C., when Mycenae and Troy and Cnossus were falling to the Greeks, a small army of tribesmen emerged out of the great plains north of the Black Sea and the Caspian and made their way by slow stages towards the Persian Gulf. We know that they came with horses and short stabbing swords and lances, and that they were an Aryan people with long heads, high foreheads and thin noses, and their blood may have already been mixed with a slight Mongol strain. They were brothers of the Scythians and the Medes, who also emerged from the great grasslands. Yet the tribesmen who were later to be called Persians --the Assyrians knew them as the Parsua-- seem to have been of finer build than the Medes or the Scythians, slighter, hardier, and more warlike. At the beginning they can have numbered only a few hundreds. In time they were to conquer all the known world: Greece, Egypt, all of Asia Minor, all that was contained in the Assyrian empire, much of southern Russia and Afghanistan and northern India were to -fall under their sway.

We shall never know the names of the first Persians who set the tribesmen on the path of kingship. They had no writing and no arts except pottery-making and no records have come down to us except obscure phrases in Assyrian inscriptions which may or may not refer to them. For a while we catch glimpses of them occupying the lands to the west and south of Lake Urmiya. Here they seem to have carved out a small principality for themselves, and the records of the reign of the Assyrian King Shamsi-Adad (823-810 B.C.) speak of a sudden raid against them and the destruction of 1,200 of their cities, which may mean no more than the destruction of fortified huts. A little later we find them forcing their way through the Zagros Mountains and settling on the southern slopes, living in the shadow of the mountains. By this time they have become hardy warriors, and cylinder seals show them riding to battle with gay plumes in their helmets, the heads and breasts of their horses adorned with jewels. We find them living in primitive wooden huts, looking after their horses, watching over their flocks, tilling their fields and sacrificing to their gods occasionally we find them living in magnificent stonewalled, manytowered buildings. Like nearly all the other tribes in this area they seem to have worshipped a Divine Mother who wore on her breast the badge of the Sun and they reverenced the ibex whose curved horns were sacred to the moon.

They were a frontier people, living on the edge of the desert, with memories of having passed through the forbidding territories of the Kings of Elam, who ruled from Susa. They were good hunters and excellent warriors, proud of their independence; having no culture of their own, they were beginning to borrow from Assyria and Elam and the neighboring Kingdom of Urartu and even perhaps from the Egyptians through traders. Herodotus says they had no luxuries. They despised comfort, unlike the Medes who lived in the northeast and were closely related to them in race. Already the Medes had acquired a written language and were compiling the great code of laws which the Persians were to take over. Meanwhile the Persians were living strenuously in their fortified huts or in castles which were usually built on high plateaux. The princes who ruled them possessed absolute power; there were no slaves; every man had his appointed place in the community. They give the impression of people deliberately and quietly training themselves for conquest.

The opportunity came in 596 B.C., when the Kingdom of Elam was destroyed by an invading army of Assyrians. Susa was plundered and razed to the ground, the royal sepulchres were desecrated and the images of their gods were carried away. Ezekiel tells the story: "There is Elam and all her multitude round about her grave, all of them slain, fallen by the sword, which are gone down uncircumcised into the nether parts of the earth, which caused their terror in the land of the living; yet have they borne their shame with them that go down to the pit." (Ezek. 32:24) The great empire of Elam vanished from the map, and into this vacuum, when the Assyrian armies withdrew, the sturdy Persians marched with their prince Teispes (675-640) at their head. They captured Anshan, once a stronghold of Elam, and Teispes began to call himself "King of the City of Anshan." It was the first of the Persian victories: there were to be many others.

It seems that Achaemenes, the father of Teispes, had prepared the ground and was chiefly responsible for training a hard-hitting force of cavalry, since forever afterwards the Persians regarded Achaemenes with a respect bordering on the reverence they paid to their gods. But they rarely spoke of his achievements. The man who gave his name to the royal line of Achaemenian Kings vanishes in the mist of history, and all we know of Teispes is that he extended the Kingdom and at his death divided it into two parts, giving the northern part to his son Ariaramnes and the southern part to his son Cyrus. Ariaramnes called himself "great King, King of Kings, King of the land of Parsa." Cyrus, more modest, or perhaps less powerful, contented himself with the title "great King of Parsumash." Within a few years Ariaramnes vanishes from the scene, but not before he had caused to be written in an ancient cuneiform script on a gold tablet which still survives the proudest of all the boasts uttered by the Persian Kings. Remembering that the hardy Persians had depended upon their horses for victory, he wrote:

THE LAND OF THE PERSIANS, WHICH I POSSESS,

HAS BEEN GRANTED UNTO ME BY THE GREAT GOD AHURA-MAZDA.

MY LAND IS FILLED WITH FINE HORSES AND GOOD MEN,

AND I AM THE KING OF THIS LAND.

Ariaramnes was the first to call himself "King of Kings," a title which Persian sovereigns have continued to employ until the present day, but we do not know how he lost his kingdom to his brother. For a few brief years Cyrus rules over Parsumash, Anshan, and Parsa He is followed by his son Cambyses, who married into the royal family of Media. From the union between the gentle King Cambyses and Princess Mandane was born a son called Kurush, whom we know as Cyrus the Great.

At great length and in enormous detail Herodotus and Xenophon have depicted the births the upbringing, and the military conquests of Cyrus, who captured Sardis and Babylon and ended for a thousand years the rule of the Semites in Western Asia. His childhood gamed his table manners, how he walked and how he addressed his soldiers --all these are recorded for us. He is the first Persian to be presented to us in three dimensions. We know that he was so handsome that long after his death Persian sculptors continued to model his features because they represented an ideal of physical beauty. He was tall and slender, with a straight nose, a firm chin, and thick lips. He had high coloring and walked a little stiffly, and was much given to laughter. He took his kingly duties seriously, but he was perfectly capable of being informal with his soldiers. He was merciful and deeply religious, but sometimes his enormous eyes flashed with anger and then the rage of kingship would descend upon him. At such moments he would drive himself and his armies into dangerous campaigns which swept him halfway across Asia, to die at last fighting some obscure tribesmen who, though a potential threat, were not worth conquering. Like Alexander he carved out a great empire, and like Alexander he did not live to organize it.

Herodotus, who often tells the truth when he seems to be telling extravagant stories, records that as the consequence of a dream interpreted to mean that the boy would command all Asia, his Median grandfather ordered him to be killed at birth. The herdsman Mithradates received the boy and was about to put him in a box and leave him in the hills for the animals to eat when he learned that his own wife had just given birth to a stillborn baby. The dead baby was substituted for Cyrus, who grew up to become a handsome and impudent herdboy. One day, when he was ten, Cyrus was playing the game of "Kings" in the same village street where Mithradates kept his oxen. Cyrus was elected "King" by the village boys and immediately set about distributing tasks among his subjects. One boy he ordered to build a palace, another became his bodyguard, a third was his prime minister, and a fourth his herald. It happened that one of the village boys playing the game was the son of a distinguished Mede. He refused the commands of Cyrus, who ordered his arrest and decreed a punishment‹a savage beating with whips. The boy escaped, ran to his father's house and complained about the behavior of the son of a herdsman. The boy's father complained to the King, who summoned Cyrus into his presence. "I did what I had to do," Cyrus said, "and if you are going to punish me, I am ready for it!" The King was troubled. He recognized that no son of a herdsman would dare to speak in this way, and he saw that the boy bore an extraordinary resemblance to himself. He asked for the herdsman to be brought before him. Soon the whole story came out, and then once again the King summoned his magicians and asked what should be done: should the boy be kept at the Court, or killed, or exiled?

In the end it was decided that since the boy had played the game of "Kings" and had therefore enjoyed all the prerogatives of kingship, though in a childish way, he presented no danger.

He had been "King," and would be King no more. So he was simply exiled to his father's Court in Persia. On the way he learned the full story of how he had nearly been killed at birth, and for the first time there came to him a thirst for revenge against his grandfather, the King of the Medes. A few years later, when he became King of Persia, he hurled his army at the Medes and conquered them. Once he received their surrender, he showed mercy. He spared the capital, Ecbatana. He spared his grandfather, only making him a prisoner. He retained the Median officials in their posts, and combined the Median army with his own. Media had grown until it reached out towards the Scythian tribes in the north and included all the land touching on the Black Sea north of the Babylonian empire. Assyria had perished some sixty years before, and now there was the Empire of the Medes and Persians stretching from the Halys River in Asia Minor to the borders of India. Two empires faced him: that of the Lydians in the west, and that of Babylonia on his left flank. He decided to attack the Lydians first.

In those days Lydia was at the height of her power. All the Greek cities of Asia Minor paid tribute to the King, Croesus. The Lydians had invented banking (it is now believed, however, that banking was invented by a coalition of prostitutes and priests in Babylonia for the purpose of fund-raising for their temples) and almost possessed a monopoly of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean; wealth and treasure poured into the capital city of Sardis. Croesus seems to have been an able monarch with an affection for philosophers and no particular love for ostentation, though he is remembered for his wealth. Once when the Athenian lawgiver Solon came to visit him, Goesus asked him who was the happiest of men, and Solon answered that the happiest man he had known was an obscure Athenian called Tellus who had brought fine sons into the world and lived to see his grandchildren around his knees, only to die gloriously in a battle against the city of Eleusis and to receive a public funeral at the place where he died. "Until a man is dead," said Solon, "one should not use the word happy, it is better to use only the word lucky."

Croesus was unlucky. He had recognized very early the formidable power of Cyrus. He tried to awaken Egypt and Babylonia to the common menace and succeeded in procuring an alliance between them against Persia. Before the armies could move, Cyrus was marching against Asia Minor. The first battle, near the Halys, was indecisive. Winter was approaching. Croesus assumed that Cyrus would withdraw his forces and returned leisurely to Sardis, then believed to be an impregnable fortress, guarded by the best equipped soldiers in all Asia. The Lydians were excellent cavalrymen; so were the Persians. But Cyrus possessed camels and decided to throw them into the battle for Sardis, believing that the presence of the camels would frighten the enemy's horses, for everyone knows that horses are instinctively afraid of camels. The ruse succeeded. Croesus's horses turned and fled, but the Lydians hurled themselves off their horses and fought on foot. They were brave, but no match for the Persians, who sent them fleeing behind the high, stern walls of the city. Then the city was besieged. For fourteen days it held out. At last the walls were breached, and the Persians poured through.

[...]

So Croesus was pardoned, and Cyrus held him in high esteem, retaining him as a councillor in his court. Lydia had fallen; the empire of Cyrus extended to the shores of the Mediterranean; and the world shuddered.

The strength of Cyrus lay in his own character and in the character of the army he led. His soldiers were accustomed to privations, but they possessed an inner fire. "The Persians are proud, too proud, and they are poor," Croesus said once, unwittingly explaining the reasons which brought about his own defeat. Unlike the Lydians, they despised armor: they wore only leather breastplates. They lived simply, and were close to the earth. It had been hammered into them from their earliest childhood that they had only three tasks to perform well in life --to ride well, shoot straight, and speak the truth, by which it was meant that they should speak the true words of the prophet Zarathushtra and worship the god Ahuramazda and the other gods. Half-enviously, Herodotus recounts the stern simplicity of their ceremonies; there were no flute-players, no garlands, no pouring of wine. Before worshipping, a Persian would simply stick a spray of myrtle leaves in his headdress. For a few more years this spartan simplicity remained; then, as more plunder fell into their hands, the Persians learned to enjoy magnificence.

It could hardly have been otherwise. With all the treasure of Lydia in his hands, and with the Lydian army marching under his own generals, Cyrus turned his attention to Babylonia, then ruled by the scholarly King Nabonidus, whose chief interest seems to have been antiquarian research. Cyrus was in a mood for conquest. He was also exalted by his successes in Lydia, and when he reached the river Gyndes and one of his sacred white horses entered the water and attempted to swim across and was drowned, he showed for the first time that sullen, determined rage which overcame him often in later years. He decided to make war on the river, saying that for daring to kill his beautiful high-spirited horse he would reduce the river to a stream in which a woman might enter without wetting her knees. He held up the march against Babylon, divided his army into two parts, marked out on each side of the river a hundred and eighty channels running off from it in various directions, and ordered the men to set to work and dig. The river squandered its force in three hundred and sixty channels, and having defeated the river, Cyrus marched on to Babylon.

[...]

After the great triumphal march in Babylon, he settled down to the enjoyment of his empire. He saw the dangers of luxury and did his best to combat them, but gave his officers the utmost license, saying they deserved to do as they pleased and to adorn themselves in costly Median costumes and wear high-heeled shoes, so long as they continued to practice their military exercises strenuously. He made no attempt to invade Egypt. In the ten years that remained to him there were no revolts throughout his vast dominion. He showed an astonishing forbearance to his enemies and was notable for his zeal in making gifts. He allowed the Jews, whom Nebuchadnezzar had transported to Babylonia, to return to Palestine and declared according to the Jewish records that it was his divine mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews owed their new existence as a nation entirely to his magnanimity, and called him the "anointed of God." He was tolerant of all religions. He returned the gods which the Babylonians had carried off to their own shrines. He was one of those rare men who remain human when cloaked in majesty.

He died mysteriously --Herodotus says it was during a border-raid against the Massagatad who lived on the shores of the Caspian-- and was buried at Pasargadad in a great limestone tomb raised on a platform above the ground. The tomb remains, empty of every vestige of its imperial owner. We know that the King was placed on a golden couch and wore his vestments and his tiara, but nearly two hundred years after his death, when Alexander the Great reached Pasargadad, he found the body lying on the floor of the tomb, plundered of all the royal ornaments. Such was the fate of the greatest of the Persian Kings, the man who was called "the Father of his people" by the Persians, and who called himself "the King of the World.

IN THE province of Fars in South Persia the religion of Zarathushtra lived on quietly. Here the priests attended to the sacred fires, and the poems of the prophet and fragments of ancient literature survived. The eternal war waged between the spirits of light and the spirits of darkness was quietly accepted in this province, where the rule of the Parthian Emperors was least effective. The rulers of the land were feudal princes, usually relatives of the Parthian Emperor, but the spiritual rulers were the high priests, who diligently served the gods Ahuramazda, Mithra, and Anahita, and saw that the injunctions of the prophet were rigorously observed --no corpses were to pollute the earth, no flames were to be blown out, the divine radiance must be worshipped, and all must pay appropriate penances for their sins. In all Persia there was no place where the ancient Zoroastrian rituals were so carefully observed as in the province of Fars, where the tombs of the Achaemenian Kings remained to remind believers of the splendor of their past. In Fars men dreamed of a time when a purely Persian dynasty would be on the throne.

During the early years of their rule the Parthians had despised the Zoroastrian faith. Now, as their hold on the people diminished, they began to make concessions to the faith which the Persians had secretly upheld since Achaemenian times. The Parthian King Vologases III ordered that the ancient Zoroastrian texts be carefully collected and preserved. When a ruthless sovereign begins to make concessions, the people, suddenly made aware of their power, begin to claim still greater concessions. So it happened then: there followed a vast upsurge of feeling for the ancient Persia which the Parthians thought they had stamped out of existence. The priests fanned the flames. A man living during the closing years of the Parthian Empire could almost have prophesied that rebellion would break out in Fars and that the leader of the rebellion would be a young Prince, perhaps belonging to a priestly family, claiming descent from the Achaemenian Kings, ruthless and determined in war, a strict observer of the Zoroastrian faith.

In the year A.D. 180 there was born to the high priest of the temple of Anahita in Istakhr, not far from the ruins of Persepolis, a son called Papak. We know little about the son, and still less about the father, who was called Sasan. We do know that Papak suddenly revolted against his overlord, the Prince of the province of Fars, and defied the Parehian Emperor to remove him from the provincial throne. The Parthian Emperor, busily fighting the Romans in the west, protested. He seems not to have been unduly perturbed. There had been rebellions before; they had been put down mercilessly. Papak's son, who bore the name of Artaxerxes, pronounced Ardashir in the local dialect, began rallying the people to his flag. With the blessing of the Zoroastrian priests, he overthrew the local barons and princes and marched north to Isfahan and Kerman. It was the beginning of the explosion which was to blast the Parthian dynasty from the throne.

Following the tradition of Cyrus, who rose out of a small community of dedicated men and in his own lifetime conquered most of the known world, Ardashir set out to conquer the Parthians and extend the borders of the Persian Empire. In three savage battles he defeated the Parthians, captured and killed the last Parehian King and would have killed all the Parthian Princes if some of them had not escaped to Armenia. He gave himself the title of "King of Kings of the Aryans," and not far from Persepolis, on a great bluff of yellow rock facing the Mervdasht Plain, at a place now called Naqshi-Rustam, he ordered a memorial of his triumph to be carved, so that his name and his victory should never be forgotten.

The carving remains, fresh and glowing in the sunlight, three times larger than life. A few yards away, hidden from the plain, are the tombs of the Achaemenian Kings, but Ardashir so placed this carving in his own honor that he acquires priority over the Achaemenians. He leads the procession. Almost casually, he has placed himself above all other Persian Kings.

In the carving, Ardashir shows himself receiving the diadem, the pledge of power, from the great god Ahuramazda. Both are on horseback. Under the horse of the King lies the last of the Parthian Kings, Artabanus. Under the horse of Ahuramazda lies "the one who lies," the devil Ahriman, with two snakes coming from his head. Behind Ardashir, holding a fly-whisk, is a guard, perhaps his son Shapur, which means "the son of the Shah." The god holds a sceptre, but no guard accompanies him, for he has no need of guards. There quietly, almost contemplatively, king confronts god. There is a strange tranquillity in the carving. Both king and god wear flowing gowns which hang in loose folds to the ground. Ribbons fall from the diadem, which is not incised deeply, but only suggested. The horses are not war-horses, but high-stepping ceremonial ponies. Once no doubt the carving was painted. We can guess the colors --the ring gold, the King's gown of purple ornamented with white, this being the color of the imperial robe of state of the Achaemenian Kings, the ponies white and spotless. Look at the carving more closely. The arms are elongated to suggest power, but it is power held in reserve. The bodies of the riders are supple --we shall see this same suppleness throughout the art of the Sasanian dynasty. In Achaemenian art the animals usually have more life than the men who stand beside them. Here the men completely dominate the animals. Part of the king's face has flaked away, but we can still recognize the face which meets us on the coins he issued: large eyes, a long, pointed nose, a curled beard woven in three long strands, an expression of extraordinary energy and concentration, as befits a man who believed himself touched by the divine radiance, without which no man can become a king.

Proud, imperious, determined to be at once King, Emperor, and High Priest of the newly created state, Ardashir concentrated all power in his own hands. Five and a half centuries had passed since the last of the Achaemenians perished, but he was determined to revive the glories of the past. "The King's power," he said once, "derives from his military power, and this can only be maintained by taxes, and all taxes in the end fall upon our farmers. It behooves us therefore to protect our farmers and treat them always with justice." These wise counsels he seems to have put into practice, for there is no evidence of rebellion within Persia during his reign.

[...]

WHEN Ardashir's son Shapur came to the throne, he had already been acting as regent for some years. He had a softer and fuller face than his father, but there was hard metal in him, and he had none of his father's intense feeling for Zoroastrianism. He first turned to the east. A long inscription at Naqsh-i-Rustam records his victories in northern India. He captured Peshawar, watered his horses in the Indus, crossed the Hindu Kush, conquered Bactria, and seized Samarcand. The Roman Empire was going through a period of convulsions. One after another, Emperors were being proclaimed, only to fall victim to paid assassins. Shapur marched west, conquered Armenia (which had long been the hereditary foe of Persia), invaded Syria, and captured Antioch, the wealthiest city of Asia and the chief Roman base. The Romans were compelled to fight or see all Asia Minor, Egypt, and perhaps Greece fall to the power of the Persians.

The Roman Emperor was Valerian, an old man, who had shown himself in the past a capable general. He was loved by his troops and feared by his enemies. But when he put himself at the head of a Roman army, he seems to have had a premonition of the fate in store for him. At the battle fought outside the city of Edessa, the ailing Emperor was captured alive, together with 70,000 Roman legionaries. The triumph of Shapur was complete.

Never before had a Roman Emperor fallen into the hands of an oriental power. It is probable that the Emperor was put to death shortly after his capture, but for many years afterwards legend and rumor asserted that Shapur used the man as a mounting-block whenever he mounted his horse, the ailing Emperor bowing low to the ground and allowing his back to support the feet of the Persian King. They also say that when he died, he was skinned, and the skin was stuffed with straw. Then the stuffed Emperor was thrown into the corner of a Persian temple until he rotted away.

At Naqsh-i-Rustam, far in the south of Persia, and not far from the extraordinary monument which celerates Ardashir's conquest of the throne, there is another carving in honey-colored rock celebrating the abasement of a Roman Emperor. Valerian kneels before Shapur, who rides a gaily caparisoned horse. The Emperor is very small, very tense, his arms thrust out as he pleads for mercy, his cape billowing, as though at fiat very moment, quite suddenly, at the prompting of the Persian King, he had fallen to his knees, and this very suddenness had sent the cape whirling. Shapur smiles down at him, one hand on his sword-hilt, the other raised in a gesture of triumph, his whole body assuming a pose of victory, while the great plumes above his crown climb so high that they thrust through the frame of the rock. Guards stand behind Shapur, impassive, impersonal. But these guards are only decoration. The artist has caught the moment of supreme victory and supreme abasement, and at first glance we are aware only of the two rulers confronting one another.

Shapur was so proud of his conquest of Rome that he caused four more rock carvings of the same scene to be made in the province of Fars. Some of these carvings are cluttered with the presence of the Imperial Guard, row upon row of them. It seems a pity. Such triumphs are more effective when depicted simply.

With this carving at Naqsh-i-Rustam there is the beginning of a purely Sasanian art. The old Achaemenian forms are preserved, but they are given more life. The sculptures of Achaemenian times have a strange stillness about them, as though life were welling up in the figures at noonday, quietly waiting to reveal itself: no one is in any hurry, all patiently await the word of the King. These Achaemenian faces are grave and mature: they have exhausted action, the world has been conquered, almost there is nothing left to do. But in Sasanian art the wind blows free, there is more light, more movement, more experiment. The swords flash in the sun. The Achaemenians seem never to have felt the need to depict a triumph with any sense of movement: it was enough to show the immense parade of soldiers and tribute-bearers. They had their settled faith in Ahuramazda. They had no restlessness. The Sasanians however were restless, delighting in movement, in the flow of draperies, in swift horses, sudden ambushes, quick alterations of mood. Their horses plunge headlong. They are on fire with the chase. Yet demonstrably they belong to the same race as the Achaemenians and worship at the same altars.

[...]

In A.D. 545 Chosroes I, known as Nushirvan, meaning the Blessed, signed a treaty of peace with the Emperor Justinian. Then for fifty years there was no fighting between them. Many years after the long reign of Chosroes I came to an end, an obscure missionary in Arabia was asked for the date of his birth and answered: "I was born in the reign of the Blessed King." Mohammad, whose armies destroyed the Persian empire, was speaking of Chosroes.

THERE WERE three supremely great Kings of Persia: Chosroes I was the second. He had a long, ascetic face and wore a look of extraordinary gravity at all times, but he was a man of peace. He surveyed the land, visited all the cities of the empire, saw that taxes fell equitably on the people. Vast numbers of Persians had died, and he placed the orphans in his personal care. He rebuilt the canals and restocked the farms, which had been destroyed in the wars. He built strong fortifications at the passes and placed subject tribes in carefully chosen towns on the frontiers, so that they could act as guardians of the state against invaders. Justinian paid him 440,000 pieces of gold, as a bribe to keep the peace, but he seems to have been a man who genuinely enjoyed the fruits of peace and saw no reason to continue a senseless war. He was tolerant of all religions, though he decreed that Zoroastrianism should be the official state religion, but he was not unduly disturbed when one of his sons became a Christian. He rebuilt the winter palace at Ctesiphon, and the great arch of his palace, called Takt-i-Kisra ("The Arch of Chosroes"), still remains and in its time was the widest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world.

In this vast palace Chosroes received the world's ambassadors and planned the defence of his empire, serving as King, high priest, and lawgiver. Stories were told of his nice sense of justice. Once an ambassador asked why the square in front of the palace was irregularly shaped. Chosroes answered that it could not be otherwise because part of this land was owned by an old woman who declined to sell at any price. He refused to force her to sell. Other stories were told of how he gave dowers to the poor, sent promising students to college, and sensibly discussed intricate problems of religion with foreign priests and philosophers. He set artists to work, for the country was now rich and huge wealth flowed into the imperial coffers.

The splendor of those last days of the Sasanian empire has become proverbial. Once again there was a flowering of taste. The quick curving dramatic line, which we associate with Sasanian art, seems to have reached its highest perfection during his reign. It was a time comparable to the Elizabethan period in England, the Renaissance in Italy, the reign of the Emperor Ming Huang in China. Tolerance, a delight in art, the coming of tradesmen and artisans from all corners of the world, innumerable translations of foreign works, Greek, Latin, and Indian, helped to foster an artistic rebirth. More than anyone else, by his character and his love of sumptuous decoration and his instinctive understanding of art, Chosroes seems to have been responsible for the change. Yet to the end there was a curious remoteness about him. He rejoiced in his majestic position and was regarded by his subjects as though he were a god. He sat on a golden throne, its legs inlaid with rubies. Above his head, a gold crown hung from the immense vaulted ceiling of the palace. Before him the sign of his power and wealth, and also of his priestly functions as one who was in eternal communion with the god Ahuramazda and could therefore bring seasonable weather to the Persians lay a great jewel-encrusted carpet representing a garden, the ground wrought in gold, the pathways of silver, the blossoms, fruit, and birds in pearls, rubies, diamonds, and emeralds. The carpet, which covered nearly 1,000 square feet, represented spring, paradise, majesty. A man seeing the King as he sat in cloth of gold, blazing with jewels, with the carpet before him, could not help being deeply impressed, seeing so much glory and flashing fire at the King's feet. Costly draperies hung over the open archway. The walls were polychrome stucco, painted over with immense murals. Before the King, high officers of state, themselves on fire with jewels, knelt in impassive splendor. Here for the Persians and all the subject races lay the heart of the mystery of Kingship, which the Sasanians, like the Achaemenians before them, elevated to the height of an intricate and sumptuous art, to be imitated but never rivaled by the Byzantine Emperors, who derived their regal costumes and regal processions from the Persians.

The habits and customs of royalty in the West derive straight from Persian models.

When Chosroes I died in A.D. 579, the influence of the Persians extended as far as Abyssinia and the Altai mountains on the borders of China; it reached down into India and included all Cappadocia and Syria. But already cracks were appearing. Once more the Romans were beginning to fear the expansion of Persia. There were border wars, the Turks were pressing down on the northern border, and both Persia and Rome found themselves looking apprehensively in the direction of the tribesmen pressing down from Central Asia. The Romans sent ambassadors to the mysterious figure who held the strings of power in the northwest. "In the valley of the Golden Mountain," they related afterwards, "we found the Great Khan in his tent, seated on a chair with wheels, to which a horse might be occasionally harnessed." In time, the Turks were to conquer Persia, but the real danger, unknown to anyone at Ctesiphon, came from the followers of the obscure missionary in Arabia. Within a few years of Mohammad's death the Sasanian Empire was to perish, while half of the Roman Empire was to fall into Arab hands.

Meanwhile Rome and Persia faced one another, supremely confident in the belief that they were the only two great powers and that one must destroy the other. The successor of Chosroes I was the young and talented Prince Hormizd, who found himself simultaneously at war with Romans, Turks, and Huns. Bahram Chobin, his greatest general, flung the Turks and Huns back into the arid wastes from which they sprang, but he failed to defeat the Roman legionaries. Hormizd, more scholar than strategist, ordered Bahram Chobin's abrupt dismissal. The general turned against the King, and the army made common cause with the nobles: Hormizd was dethroned in a palace revolution, thrown into prison, mutilated, and killed. His successor was Chosroes II, known as Parviz or "The Conqueror." With him the four-hundred-year-old dynasty went swiftly to its decline.

[...]

In the spring of 633 a grandson of Chosroes called Yezdegerd ascended the throne, and in that same year the first Arab squadrons made their first raids into Persian territory.

It was the beginning of the end. Yezdegerd was a boy, at the mercy of his advisers, incapable of uniting a vast country which was crumbling into a number of small feudal kingdoms. Rome no longer threatened. The threat came from the small disciplined armies of Khalid ibn Walid, once one of Mohammad's chosen companion-in-arms and now, after the Prophet's death, the leader of the Arab army. Ctesiphon was stormed. The great carpet with its border of emeralds representing green meadows and watercourses of pearls fell into the enemy's hands and was cut up into small pieces, one fifth going to the Caliph Omar, another fifth to Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet, and the rest being divided among the Arab soldiers. The great carpet was only part of the plunder. There were vast stores of silver and gold, costly robes, chests full of amber and musk, a horse made of gold with teeth of emeralds, a ruby mane, and trappings of gold. The armory of the Persian King contained a helmet, breastplate and greaves of solid gold inlaid with pearls. All these were removed, until the White Palace at Ctesiphon was stripped bare. Across the sands innumerable camels carried the treasure away, but the great palace, built of solid brickwork, hard as iron, remained. Today only one crumbling wall and a large part of the vaulted roof remain, and there is no longer any sign of the gold stars which were once painted on the blue vault and all the marble facing has disappeared, but like a huge and empty eye, the vault still looks across the plain, still terrifying in its splendor and its power.

After the Arab attack, Ctesiphon was never used as a palace again. The Arabs converted it into a mosque, and the banner of the Prophet hung where once had hung the banner of the Sasanian King.

For a little while longer the Persians fought back. But they were no match for the fanatical fury of the Mohamadans. In the battle of Nehavend in A.D. 642 the Arabs with an army of 30,000 destroyed a Persian army five times their number. Even then Yezdegerd fought on, never surrendering, refusing all offers of peace, rejecting all threats, maintaining the hopeless struggle for nearly ten years more, until at last he was assassinated near Merv. When Firdausi came to write the Shah Nameh, that immense epic describing the real and imaginary past of the Persians, he deliberately ended it with the death of Yezdegerd.

The empire fell. For eight hundred and fifty years the Persians were to be ruled by foreigners. In turn the Arabs, the Seljuk Turks and the Mongols ruled the land. The Sasanian empire survived in the hearts and the legends of the people. Ardashir, Shapur, Chosroes the Blessed, Chosroes the Conqueror, the beautiful Queen Shirin, and the tragic Yezdegerd lived on. In later years people came to believe that a daughter of Yezdegerd married Hussayn, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, and that somewhere in Persia, wandering mysterious and alone, there was an uncrowned King descended from this marriage who owed his title to his double descent from Mohammad and the Achaemenians. With every new conquering dynasty, the Persians fought back with peaceful weapons: they infiltrated the courts, and subtly influenced their conquerors, until the conquerors became more Persian than the Persians. Defeated for eight hundred and fifty years, they never recognized defeat.

THE SMALL compact Arab army brought the Persian empire to its knees. Under a succession of great generals, the Arabs went on to conquer Egypt, North Africa, and Spain. Within a hundred years of the Prophet's death, they had forced their way into central France, the armies of the Moslems being defeated at last by the army of an obscure princeling, Charles the Hammer. The Persians fought with more slender weapons --scholarship, an unerring taste in art, a natural sense of supremacy. Soon the conquerors were conquered. A hundred years after the battle of Nehavend, Persian culture was making so deep an impression upon the Arabs that the marauding tribesmen were beginning to behave like Persians, wearing Persian clothes and reciting Persian poetry and subtly accepting Persian ideas. The world had been lost, only to be won again.

In nearly everything, the Persian temperament differed from the Arab temperament. The Persians were a settled people, who liked bright colors, flowing draperies, luxury after hard riding and hunting, the majesty of Kings. The Prophet said all men were brothers, the Prophet himself being brother to the meanest Negro slave, while the Persians wondered how a peasant could be the brother of a nobleman. They were feudal and caste-ridden and believed deeply in the portentous god given powers of Kings, visible or invisible. They were both gay and disputatious by instinct, and did not take easily to dogma. For more than a thousand years they had worshipped fire and regarded the summer and winter palaces of their Kings as the centers from which the beneficent influence of Ahuramazda spread out like the rings on the surface of a pond when a stone is thrown into it. They were passionately fond of women, flowers, and animals. The stern morality of Mohammad met the fierce Persian delight in luxury, their love of the splendor in all created things. It was inevitable that Persian Mohamadanism would become, in time, profoundly different from the Mohamadanism practiced by the Arabs. In the end the Persians succeeded in inventing their own form of Mohamadanism, and in so doing they split the Mohamadan world in two.

They set up their own places of pilgrimage and against the whole testimony of the Koran offered subdued worship to the descendants of the Prophet, and they continued to perform in the guise of a Mohamadan festival the great spring festival which was once performed by the Achaemenian Kings. To this day, the Arabs regard the Persians as heretics. The Orthodox Moslems call themselves Sunnis, meaning that they follow the Sunna, the remembered words and actions of the Prophet. Persian Moslems are called Shi'a, meaning "those who have broken away."

For about a hundred and fifty years after the Conquest, the Persians were governed by officers of the Mohamadan Caliphs, first from Medina and afterwards from Baghdad. These officers were determined to obliterate all vestiges of Zoroastrianism and of the Sasanian state. They destroyed and defaced, wherever they were able, the monuments of the Persian Kings. They milked the wealth of Persia. Arab armies were continually putting down small rebellions in Persia.

One circumstance helped immeasurably to unify the Persian spirit. Mohammad himself had never been on Persian soil, but his son-in-law Ali had fought in the wars of succession within the boundaries of the country. The Caliphate had passed into the hands of the Companions of the Prophet. Abu Bekr, Omar, and Othman had each briefly ruled over the empire of Islam. The Persians with their belief in the divinity of the sovereign adopted Islam, while refusing to accept the doctrine of the elective Caliphate. They believed that the Caliph, the spiritual and temporal ruler of Islam, must be descended from Mohammad or at least related to him by marriage. Accordingly, they regarded Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, as their rightful King, and when Ali was stabbed to death in Kufa, their loyalty went to Ali's son, Hussayn. But the Ommayad Caliphs from their capital in Damascus were determined that the succession should -remain in their hands. When Hussayn set out from Mecca to Kufa, expecting to be greeted with open arms by the people, an army sent out by the Ommayad Caliph was waiting for him. Hussayn was heavily outnumbered.

On the night before the battle, Hussayn and his followers dug a trench behind them and filled it with burning faggots to cut off their own retreat. On the -next morning, sword in one hand, Koran in the other, he led his followers against the enemy. One after another they fell to the Ommayad arrows, until only Hussayn remained alive. Two of his sons and six of his brothers lay dead around him when the Ommayads stepped forward to put an end to a life they had deliberately spared until the last moment. Then thirty-three Ommayad soldiers attacked him simultaneously, every man thrusting at him with a sword or a lance. They trampled on his body, cut off his head and brought it triumphantly to Kufa. There the governor of the city struck the head with his stick, and in the awful silence that followed, an old man was heard saying: "Gently! Alas, I have seen those very lips kissed by the Prophet of God!"

A shudder ran through Islam. The Ommayad Caliph soon came to realize the enormity of his crime. The women who had accompanied Hussayn and his youngest son were spared, and later sent back to Mecca, but the harm had been done. On that day, the tenth day of the month Moharran, Islarn received its worst blow. Henceforward "Revenge for Hussayn!" became the watchword of the Shia's, and every year in this same month they performed the passion play describing the death of the martyr Hussayn. Their most fervent wish was to be buried near Kerbela, some sixty miles south of Baghdad, where the tomb of the martyr was at once a place of pilgrimage and an accusation against the reigning Caliphs. For the Shiites, Kerbela remains the holiest place in the world.

Hussayn was dead, but there still remained the descendants of his flesh. He was the first Imam, and all his descendants in the line of succession were given this title. The Shiites believe there have been twelve Imams, and the last of them, Mohammad, is said to have disappeared somewhere within the city of Samarra about A.D. 874. They believe he is still alive and will return in the last days, riding a white charger, to convert the whole world to the Shiite faith. This twelfth Imam, also known as the Mahdi, is the invisible and spiritual Emperor who rules over their lives.

From Damascus, the Ommayad Caliphs, styling themselves the Vice-regents of God on earth and claiming spiritual powers as well as earthly dominion, continued to rule over the new Moslem empire which extended from Arabia to the gates of Constantinople. Cultivated and pleasure-loving, surrounding themselves with artists from Byzantium, Egypt, and Persia, strangely tolerant, they held power for nearly a hundred years. It was the Ommayad Caliph, employing Byzantine architects, who built the Dome of the Rock, wrongly called the Mosque of Omar, on the site where Abraham sacrificed the ram instead of Isaac and where Mohammad alighted on his mysterious night journey to Jerusalem and where once had stood the Temple of the Jews, Fourteen Caliphs followed one another on the throne of Damascus. Nearly all were able. Two, Abd-el-Malik and his son Hisham, would have been regarded as formidable and talented rulers at any time, ruling wisely, extending and strengthening the Moslem empire, cultivating the arts, building superb buildings which remain to this day as exquisite examples of architecture. Only the Persians, continually revolting in the distant provinces, seemed curiously lacking in respect for them.

Persia seethed with revolt. Conspiracies and secret societies abounded. A certain Abu Muslim, a Persian who spoke of himself as belonging to the Prophet's family, went about preaching the gospel of revolution against the detested Caliphate. At Merv he solemnly unfolded the black flag of the Prophet and announced the time had come to place on the Prophet's throne someone who was closer in blood than the reigning Caliph. He preached a revolution against the corruption - of the Caliphate in the face of the misery of so many ; of the subject peoples. For his purpose he chose æ the next Caliph a descendant of one of the Prophet's uncles, Abu'l-Abbas. The revolt succeeded. Under the genius of Abu Muslim, who went secretly about the country organizing the peasants and the landed gentry, a small secret society became overnight an army on the march. In 749, at Nehavend, where the Sasanian army was defeated a little more than a hundred years before, an Abbasid army surrounded and besieged the army of the Ommayads. The end of the Ommayads came soon after. The followers of the descendant of the uncle of Mohammad, led by Persian officers, began to hound and destroy the enemy like wild beasts. Not content with massacring the princes of the Ommayad dynasty, they opened up the graves of dead princes and Caliphs, nailed their long dead bodies to crucifixes and afterward burned them. All except two of the graves of the Caliphs were desecrated. The lone survivor, Prince Abd-ar-Rahman, a grandson of Hisham, succeeded in escaping to North Africa and later to Spain, where he inaugurated the new Ommayad dynasty which sprang up around Cordova.

THE NEW DYNASTY of the Abbasids was not Persian, but it came into power as the result of forces which had grown spontaneously out of the Persian character. Persians had led the revolt, financed it, and maneuvered the enemy into untenable positions. The ruthlessness of the Persians, avenging the death of Hussayn the martyr, led to the desecration of the Ommayad graves. Subdued for a hundred years, the Persians were beginning to exert their strength.

Gradually the new dynasty began to assume a purely Persian character. The new capital was Baghdad, not far from the imperial Sasanian city of Ctesiphon. Abu'lAbbas, called "the Blood Shedder" from his success in exterminating the Ommayads, was followed by his brother Mansur, who elected to rule with all the trappings of a Sasanian King, wrapped in the inaccessible majesty of kingship. There had been times when the Ommayad Caliphs felt so secure they had wandered without guards through the streets of Damascus. All this was changed. The new Caliph could be approached only by specially privileged visitors who were compelled to crawl on their knees to the throne. A Caliph was on the throne, but, in fact, a Persian ruled. The Grand Vizier, Khalid, was the son of a Zoroastrian priest. Khalid and his son and grandsons became so powerful that no political action could take place without their consent.

Incredible wealth poured into their hands, and it is from this family, known as the Barmecides because they were descended from a certain Barmak, that we derive the phrase "a Barmecidal feast."

Under the Barmecides the position of Grand Vizier increased vastly in importance. They not only controlled the finances of the empire, but they commanded the army.

They were the undisputed profiteers of high honors and dignities. The Caliph himself withdrew from conduct of affairs, tending to live more and more in his harem. Whenever he appeared in public, he was followed by his chief executioner, and the leather mat for the victim's head always lay near the throne.

More and more, Persian habits and ideas invaded the court. Sasanian titles and forms of government were revived. Persian songs were sung, and Persian wines were drunk, and the courtiers wore Persian costume. Baghdad, built in the reign of Mansur, began to take on the aspect of a Persian city. It was given the name of Medina-es-Salaam, meaning the City of Peace, and for five hundred years under the Abassid Caliphs, the empire was at peace. There were countless revolts in Khorusan, sallies against Byzantium, raids against the Turks pressing down from the north, but on the whole, so great was the power of the Caliph and the Grand Vizier, that peace within the borders of the empire was maintained.

It was a time of luxury and extravagance and excitement, and at the same time, of a strange, wayward asceticism. The tall, dark, slender Mansur would shut himself up in his harem, enjoy all the delights which wealth and power could give him, and then suddenly spend days, weeks, and months in calm devotion to the Scriptures. He built magnificent mosques at exorbitant expense, but he took care through his Grand Vizier that the government was administered inexpensively, with the result that he earned the title of "Father of Farthings." Before he died, he ordered that a hundred tombs should be dug for him, so that no one would be able to desecrate his grave. None of these hundred tombs contained his body, for at his own wish he was secretly interred in another.

[...]

The new inroads of western culture boded ill for the Persians, who saw their own influence at court receding. Worse still in the reign of Mamun occurred the death of the saintly Imam Reza, the eighth descendant of Ali, and therefore to the Shia's the most saintly person on earth, the true vice-regent of God. Imam Reza, married to the Caliph's daughter, was journeying with Mamun as the Caliph was making a tour of inspection of the eastern provinces. At a place called Sanabad the imperial procession halted, while plans were made for building a shrine in honor of Harun-al-Raschid. Imam Reza and Mamun the young and saintly prince with the feverish eyes of the devoted servant of God, and the Caliph descended from the Prophet's uncle were seen everywhere together. All Persian hopes were fixed upon the youth who wore only a loose white flowing gown and who seemed to possess the gift of performing miracles. It was said that he spoke in dreams with the Prophet, and that to touch his gown was to acquire eternal merit. He was more popular than the Caliph, for the very existence of the world hung on his lips. For the Persians the young Prince represented "the great King," the Father of all earthly creatures. He was the eighth of his line; there would never be more than twelve Imams, for had not Mohammad promised that the world would come to an end with the death of the twelfth, that there would be a blaze of fire, and Mohammad himself would once more appear among men, riding a white horse?

Rumor, legend, or deliberate malice spread the story that the Caliph gave the Prince a bunch of poisoned grapes. All we know for certain is that he died suddenly and tragically, and in his honor the name of Sanabad was altered to Meshed, meaning "the place of martyrdom." Today this small city in northeastern Persia, close to the borders of Afghanistan, is accounted the most sacred spot on earth after Kerbela, where Hussayn met a martyr's death. The shrine at Meshed, lovingly and exquisitely designed, contains the bodies of Caliph Harun-al-Raschid and of the Imam Reza. Harun-alRaschid lies somewhere under the pavement, but the tomb is unmarked --a sign of contempt.

By the fourteenth century, Meshed had become the most sumptuous, the most highly decorated, and the most revered of all Persian shrines. In 1601, the Emperor Shah Abbas did not think it beneath his dignity to walk the entire distance between Isfahan and Meshed in order to trim the thousands of candles in the sacred courts and acquire, at immense cost, the Koran said to have been inscribed in the Imam's own hand. The gravest claims were made for the pilgrimage to Meshed. It was recorded that Mohammad had once said: "A part of my body is to be buried in Khorusan, and whoever goes there on pilgrimage, Allah will surely destine to paradise, and his body will be haraam, forbidden, to the flames of Hell: and whoever goes there with sorrows Allah will take his sorrow away." Ali, the famous Commander of the Faithful, was even more explicit. He said of those who make the pilgrimage and earn; the title of Meshedi, "though their sins be as many as the stars, as the leaves of trees, they will all be forgiven."

Mamun ranks with Mansur and Harun-al-Raschid as one of the great Caliphs. He established observatories, encouraged music, allowed his court poet the utmost license to say what he pleased, and showed himself to be remarkably liberal. He seemed too to have a special affection for the Persians. He died at the age of forty eight and was succeeded by his brother Mutassim, who lacked Mamun's finesse, his stern gaiety and his genius in inspiring affection.

Mutassim, the son of Harun-al-Raschid by a Turkish slave-girl, distrusted the Persians. He surrounded himself with a bodyguard of 4,000 Turkish soldiers who inspired such terror in the people of Baghdad that gangs went out to waylay them, knowing that they would probably be killed, but determined to put an end to "rule by 4,000 Turks." The Arab historian Yaqubi says that whenever it happened that one of the Turkish bodyguard was killed, no one ever gave evidence against the perpetrators of the crime and everyone was secretly delighted. Frightened, clinging desperately to safety, Mutassim decided to place himself out of reach of his enemies. In A.D. 836 he removed himself from Baghdad and built for himself a new capital at Samarra, a few miles from the city. The Assyrian King Sargon had once done exactly the same thing, with disastrous effect.

[...]

Wave upon wave of invaders had descended upon Persia, coming from the shores of the Caspian or out of central Asia or from Arabia, and all in time had fallen under the spell of the Persians, learned the Persian language, adopted Persian manners, cultivated Persian arts. Innumerable wars were fought, towns fell, all their inhabitants were massacred, and yet Persia continued to exist, uplifted by an immense spiritual vitality. Compelled to accept foreign doctrines, the Persians improvised, played for time, conveniently translated and transmuted the alien element until it took on the appearance of something they had themselves invented, so that even Islam failed to conquer them and they adapted it for their own purposes, making it more mysterious and poetical, and altogether more Persian. There is Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) gazing calmly on the mountain of skulls, and just as calmly Sultan Hussayn composes poetry in a court given over to poets, as the Timurid dynasty falls slowly to its decline. The genius of the Persians was in their power to absorb all foreign influences and subtly transform them. At their worst times, when the country was split apart at the mercy of marauding armies, they produced their greatest poets.

Title: The Splendor of Persia

Author: Robert Payne

Imprint: New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957

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