Historian deciphers the Persian Empire avoiding Eurocentrism – 11/28/2023 – Darwin and God
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We are used to seeing the Persian Empire, the first superpower in the history of the world, through the eyes of the Greeks who were its subjects and enemies from the 6th century BC. Sovereigns like Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes practically only speak to us through the mouth of the Hellenic writer Herodotus and his rocambolesque “Histories”. Well, a book has just arrived in the country that turns this traditional perspective upside down and finally helps us see Persia at that time from an Iranian perspective, not a European one.
It is “The Persians: The Age of the Great Kings” (check out the full book sheet below), a beautiful work by Welsh historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, from Cardiff University. I wrote a little about the book in one of my columns months ago, when there was still only an edition in English. The author, in fact, has participated in the British podcast “Empire” in several episodes of its current series on Persia/Iran — it’s worth checking it out, and we’ll talk more about the podcast here soon.
Llewellyn-Jones’s work is a tour de force for a number of reasons. I highlight the main ones here:
1)The ability to use Persian non-literary sources — monuments, bureaucratic documents, letters, etc. — to build a vivid, up-close portrait of what it was like to live everyday life as an ordinary person and member of the court in a huge, connected territory that ranged from present-day Bulgaria to Pakistan;
2) The accurate ethnographic insights, comparing the Persians of 2500 BC to other peoples who would end up forming empires based on aristocracies of steppe knights — Huns and Mongols are examples that come to mind;
3)Very interesting data about the prehistory of Persian religiosity, before Zoroastrianism became an official “almost monotheistic” (in fact, dualistic) faith. We see things like Mesopotamian influence, especially Elamite, elements like the cult of the dead and the figure of the king and, as a bonus, the role of “Messiah” attributed to Cyrus the Great by the Judaism of the book of Isaiah.
In short, highly recommended.
The Persians: The Age of Great Kings
Author Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Translation Renato Marques
Publishing company Review/Planet
How much R$ 119.80; 480 pages.
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