by Bruce Feiler
“Very good question. I think one reason was their religion. I don’t believe, according to the documents, that they were pure Zoroastrians. I think it was a broader, Iranian ideology, though Zoroastrianism gave them clear ideas about peace and friendship, goodwill and good thoughts. They had a religion based on respect. We have receipts from annual payments they made to gods other than their own. We have reliefs of them giving rations to other gods. And we have the best evidence of all, right here.”
Shahrokh brought us to a stop at the Great Audience Hall, the largest building on the site, measuring four hundred feet along each side. Of the original seventy-two columns, thirteen are still standing. At its peak, the hall could accommodate ten thousand people and was called the most magnificent room in the world. The most stirring feature of the building, though, is not its inner chamber but its external staircase. On the northeast corner sits an enormous stairwell, called the Apadana staircase, with two wings the length of a football field. The stairs are protected by a decorative front, like the pediment on a Greek temple, which displays more than eight hundred miniature carvings—each about three feet tall—of subjects from twenty-three countries bearing tribute to the king. The cavalcade reminded me of the parade of nations from the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
The carvings celebrate the stunning diversity of the empire and the individuality of each culture. The Ethiopians march with a giraffe, the Libyans with an antelope, the Assyrians with sheep, the Arabs with a camel. The Indians wear saris and lead an ass, the Ionians hold honeycombs and skeins of yarn, the Babylonians carry textiles and tug along a bull. In a sense, these delegations are the depiction of the post-Babel world, with twenty-three cultures expressing themselves in twenty-three different idioms. Although Jews were too insignificant to be included in the parade, a number of Jewish names do appear in tablets found in Persepolis, including Zechariah, Hezekiah, and Shabbatay, “born of the Sabbath.”
“If you look at this staircase, you can see that the main idea for the Achaemenids was unification,” Shahrokh said. “Theirs was the earliest united kingdom. And their iconography demonstrates this. Mesopotamian sculpture was very violent. In Assyrian carvings the subjects were often bound in chains. Here, everyone is smiling. They’re walking. They’re holding hands. This one is holding that one’s beer. This one is gently pushing the other. It’s a pretty friendly group.
“And here’s the most amazing thing,” he said. “Many of them have swords. That means they were allowed to go armed in front of the king. It’s against all logic. If your subjects hated you, you would never allow them to bring weapons into a meeting with you.”
“When most people think of Persepolis, they think of the power of Darius,” I said. “But when you think of Persepolis, you think of the positive relations among the people?”
“I do think of the Achaemenids’ power,” he said. “They created a vast empire, with a canal in Egypt, as well as a huge road system. Darius invented the world’s first postal system, for getting news to people in the provinces. Men would ride horses to appointed spots, hop off one horse and onto another, then ride on. The horse would then receive rations. Postal carriers had regular horses and fast horses, and could travel from here to the Mediterranean in seven days.
“But their biggest innovation,” he continued, “was their emphasis on personal happiness, which they believed was the fourth creation of the gods. In their inscriptions, their god created heaven, he created earth, he created man, and he created happiness for man. I found a name in one of the treasury tablets that says, ‘The Gate of Happiness.’ They named gates to happiness! And they were happy people. They had so many celebrations every month I don’t know how they could work.”
“I think of personal happiness entering the idea of statehood thousands of years later,” I said, “like the Declaration of Independence promising ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ It’s almost mind-blowing to think that even that idea started here, 2,500 years ago.”
“And like the United States, the Achaemenids believed they could draw strength from their diversity. When they designed Persepolis, they invited different artists from different countries to put different elements into the buildings. They wanted an international style. You see all these lotus flowers on the walls? They came from Egypt. They took the winged bulls from Assyria, and so on.
“So just imagine when people walked through the main palaces,” he continued. “They would say, ‘Oh, that’s an arch from Ionia, that’s a rose from Babylon. Those bricks look very Elamite.’ Everyone would find something that reflected themselves, so they automatically felt a part of the place. Persepolis was not only a palace to show power. It was a palace designed to keep the whole empire together in peace and happiness.”
Something unusual happened during my conversation with Shahrokh. Linda grabbed my notebook and began jotting notes. She had never done this before, on this trip or any other trip we’d taken. By the time Shahrokh and I finished, she was sitting on the stairs, cuddling the notebook. I went over to see her.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“It’s very emotional.”
“Emotional?”
“This experience. Being here, feeling the places, breathing the air.” She began to cry. “I thought I understood what happens to you on these trips,” she said. “But being here, seeing all this . . . It’s so much more powerful than I imagined.”
We sat quietly for a moment. I wanted to touch her but felt restricted by Muslim dictates.
“Iran is supposed to be a pariah,” she continued. “But now that I’m here, I’ve never had this feeling of wanting to go deeper in a society. The fact that 95 percent of Pasargadae is unexcavated, and that every Iranian we’ve met keeps bringing up Cyrus and the idea of mingling of cultures. It’s just so untapped. It saddens me.”
“But we’re Americans. Aren’t we taught to love everything new?”
“That’s the point. In America we pride ourselves on being innovative. We’re entrepreneurs. I love that, but being here makes me believe that we’re missing out on something.” She looked at me with her big, open brown eyes. The tears had smeared around them. “I just wish we weren’t so cut off from this place. For the first time in a long time, I can see a source of hope.”
The four of us—Kamran, Shahrokh, Linda, and I—set out for a small cliff on the Mountain of Mercy where several Achaemenid kings were buried. The tombs, carved directly into the mountain, reminded me of similar graves in Petra, in Jordan. From the perch, Persepolis looked like a train set laid out beneath us. Past the ruins, Kamran pointed out the skeletal shell of a tent, large enough to hold a one-ring circus. I could see shreds of blue and pink fabric flapping in the wind. These remains, scarcely thirty-five years old, come from what many observers have called the grandest party of the twentieth century, and what I now realized was the ongoing struggle to define the legacy of Cyrus.
By October 1971, the shah of Iran was already losing his grip on authority. To bolster his image, he announced that he would hold a celebration marking the 2,500th anniversary of Cyrus’s rise. Though pedants pointed out that 2,500 years from 559 B.C.E. was actually 1941, the shah pushed forward, stuffing his chandeliered big top with Limoges china, Baccarat crystal, and what he called the greatest gathering of heads of state in history. Sixty-nine countries sent representatives, including twenty kings, five queens, twenty-one princes and princesses, sixteen presidents, four vice presidents, three prime ministers, and two foreign ministers. The guest list reads, in part, like a rogues’ gallery of the late twentieth century, including Haile Selassie, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Imelda Marcos. President Nixon sent Spiro Agnew.
At the start of the three-day event, the shah stood before Cyrus’s tomb in Pasargadae. “Cyrus, great king of kings,” he orated, “noblest of the noble, hero of the history of Iran and of the world, rest in peace. For we are awake. We will always stay awa
ke.” At the closing gala, guests were treated to a meal airlifted from Maxim’s in Paris that was so lavish the restaurant was forced to close for fifteen days to prepare it. Courses included quail eggs topped with caviar, crayfish mousse, roast lamb with truffles, and roast peacock stuffed with foie gras. Dessert was port-glazed figs with raspberries served with Dom Pérignon rosé 1959. In an homage to the Apadana staircase, guests witnessed phalanx after phalanx of soldiers dressed as Iranian figures from history. Afterward, the dignitaries traipsed to Persepolis in the suddenly freezing temperature and watched a sound and light show on the ruins, the women wrapped in blankets. When a fireworks show was delayed by an explosion on the launching pad, many thought they were victims of a terrorist attack.
“It was really a terrible embarrassment,” Kamran said. “I remember watching on television. They said the party cost $120 million. And Iran was such a poor country. It was the beginning of the end of the shah.”
After the revolution, Khomeini’s infamous “hanging judge,” Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, went to the other extreme and proposed destroying Persepolis as a symbol of pre-Islamic ignorance. (Khalkhali later went on Iranian television to poke the charred bodies of U.S. military personnel killed in the failed mission to free the hostages in the U.S. embassy.) The ayatollah’s plan to dynamite Persepolis sounds similar to what the Taliban carried out against two Buddhist statues in Afghanistan in 2001, calling them “un-Islamic idols.” But just before Khalkhali’s scheme was carried out, local Shirazis, led by the governor, stood in front of the bulldozers, prompting Ayatollah Khomeini to nix the plan, though he still eliminated Cyrus’s name from street signs across the country.
In the back-and-forth between Cyrus the Wonderful and Cyrus the Apostate, the most rousing amicus brief in support of the king does not come from Persepolis, Pasargadae, or any of the inscriptions stored in museums across the West. It comes from an unnamed Hebrew prophet writing in the late sixth century B.C.E.
We pulled out our Bibles. The Book of Isaiah is the longest, some say the most beautiful, and certainly the most influential of the twenty-one books of the Hebrew prophets. It contains sixty-six chapters, but for several hundred years scholars, clergy, and lay readers alike have agreed that the prophesies should be divided into two, three, or even more sections. The first thirty-nine chapters belong to the self-identified “Isaiah of Jerusalem,” who was called to be a prophet in 739 B.C.E. The next sixteen chapters, 40 through 55, appear to belong to an unnamed prophet who lived in exile and was part of an Isaian school, in the same way that Greek philosophers or Renaissance painters were later surrounded by schools of disciples, some of whose work was occasionally assigned to their master. The last eleven chapters, 56 through 66, are sometimes assigned to this prophet, sometimes to a third, other times to a redactor, living in Jerusalem, who merged the two voices into a unified whole. The prophet of the middle verses arose around 540 B.C.E., on the eve of Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon, and is commonly called Second Isaiah or Deutero-Isaiah.
Second Isaiah appears at yet another moment of transition for the children of Israel and casts the events of history as a tale of redemption. His primary goal is to comfort Israel, whose sons are “like an antelope caught in a net.” The prophet pleads with God to forgive the sins of the past. “You have hidden your face from us, / And made us melt because of our iniquities,” he cries.
We are the clay, and you are the potter,
We are all the work of your hands.
Be not implacably angry, O Lord,
Do not remember iniquity forever.
God responds with some of the most compassionate words in prophetic literature:
Comfort, oh comfort my people,
Says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
And declare to her
That her term of service is over,
That her iniquity is expiated;
For she has received at the hand of the Lord
Double for all her sins.
God, the prophet suggests, feels pain at how he has treated the Israelites. “I was angry at my people,” he says. “I defiled my heritage.” God and humans, searching for each other since the first light of Creation, finally find each other in grief.
And God, once again, reaches out. He promises to rescue humans, and thus rescue himself. “I am about to do something new,” he declares. This new thing, he says, will produce a new Eden. “You shall be like a watered garden, / Like a spring whose waters do not fail.” This new thing will be a new flood.
As I swore that the waters of Noah
Nevermore would flood the earth,
So I swear that I will not
Be angry with you or rebuke you.
This new thing will be a new exodus. It was the Lord, after all, “who made a road through the sea / And a path through mighty waters.” This new thing will be another expression of the cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation. The rivers of Babylon have become the latest waters God will split, allowing the Israelites to pass on to dry land.
So what does God do? He summons a “swooping bird from the East / From a distant land, the man for my purpose.” He delivers nations to this savior and renders their swords into dust. God earlier did something similar with Nebuchadnezzar, but this time he goes further. He says of his new deliverer, “He is my shepherd, / He shall fulfill my purposes!” And then, in Isaiah 45, he calls out to this figure directly.
Thus said the Lord to Cyrus, his anointed one—
Whose right hand he has grasped,
Treading down nations before him,
Ungirding the loins of king . . .
I will give you treasures concealed in the dark
And secret hoards—
So that you may know that it is I the Lord,
The God of Israel, who calls you by name.
For the sake of my servant Jacob,
Israel my chosen one,
I call you by name,
I hail you by title, though you have not known me.
Few passages in the Prophets echo with such epoch-making fanfare. The God of the Hebrew Bible, longing since the Garden of Eden for an everlasting relationship with humans, following a history of being thwarted by nearly every human he tapped to be his personal envoy, after yet another seismic exile of his stiff-necked people, extends his sacred blessing to a king who doesn’t even know him. And he terms that man his anointed one.
The appellation anointed one is the common translation for the Hebrew word mashiah, which is also rendered in English as messiah. Mashiah comes from the verb mashah, which indicates the applying of oil to an object or person by rubbing, pouring, or smearing. In the Hebrew Bible, Saul, David, Solomon, and several other kings were called “the Lord’s anointed,” as were priests and at least one prophet, Elisha. The word mashiah as a noun, applied to a specific person, implying that this person receives a divine commission to secure peace and freedom for God’s chosen people, is used only once in the Hebrew Bible, here, and it’s in reference to Cyrus.
Messiah is a loaded word today, because of its association with Jesus and the disagreement among members of different faiths over whether Jesus was the Jewish messiah. The Greek translation for mashiah, for instance, is kristos, the root for Christ. But mashiah to mean a transcendent individual, the future son of David, who would appear at the end of time and introduce a new age of peace for Israel and the nations, was not widely used in the Ancient Near East in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. That idea came during the last centuries of that millennium. That notion of the messiah bears striking similarities to the Zoroastrian belief in a series of saviors, or “bringers of benefit,” as the Avesta calls them, who will heal the world and brighten existence. No matter the interpretation, the idea of the messiah in Ancient Near East religion shows intriguing connections to Persia.
Still, even if Second Isaiah does not use the word mashiah as it would come to mean, he does use the word for Cyrus, augmenting it by calling th
e Persian king God’s “shepherd,” whose “right hand he has grasped.” Collectively, these terms represent an unprecedented expression of respect in the Hebrew Bible. Second Isaiah considers Cyrus a vessel for good so transformative that what follows his liberating Israel from Babylon will be a new era in God’s dominion over the earth. God vows to raise up the tribes of Jacob and “make you a light of nations.”
Kings shall tend your children,
Their queens shall serve you as nurses.
They shall bow to you, face to the ground,
And lick the dust of your feet.
And you shall know that I am the Lord—
Those who trust in me shall not be shamed.
Many scholars regard the vision of a God-centered world in Second Isaiah as the most universal expression of God’s glory in the Hebrew Bible. The time has come, God says in Isaiah 66, “to gather all the nations and tongues; they shall come and behold my glory.” Having dispersed the tongues after the Tower of Babel, now he aspires to unite them in his honor.
At first glance, the vivid universalism of Second Isaiah would seem to make the anonymous prophet an ideal candidate to bring together all believers of God. Second Isaiah could be the unifying vessel so desperately needed among rival monotheists. Instead his words rub at the sensitive division that rends Jews and Christians in particular. The focus of dispute lies in a series of verses known as the Servant Songs (42:1–4, 49:1–6,50:4–11, 52:13–53:12). In these passages, God promises to choose a servant who will teach his true way to the nations. This servant shall not shout aloud nor make his voice heard in the streets. “He shall not grow dim or be bruised / Till he has established the true way on earth.” In some verses, the servant appears to be a person, in others a group, in some a real figure, in others imaginary.
More than half a millennium after these verses were recorded, early Christians began seeing in them a prophecy of Jesus. They pointed to parts of the second Servant Song, “The Lord appointed me before I was born, / He named me while I was in my mother’s womb,” and especially the fourth.
