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Jonathan
Jones, from the Guardian, questions all the favor the
British Museum is giving the Ancient Persians under its
exhibition of “Forgotten Empire: the World of Ancient
Persia”, asking his readers to rethink what the British
Museum wants them to believe.
Under the title “The evil empire” (Guardian, 8
September 2005), he starts, “Persia's kings are
history's great villains. Does the British Museum's show
do them justice?” and continues his discussion as
follows:
“The title of this exhibition is a bit misleading.
Forgotten Empire, the British Museum calls its spectacular
resurrection of ancient Persia. Yet the Persians are as
notorious in their way as Darth Vader, the Sheriff of
Nottingham, General Custer, or any other embodiment of
evil empire you care to mention. They are history's
original villains.
In its day, which lasted from the middle of the 500s BC
until the defeat of Darius III by Alexander the Great in
331 BC, the Persian empire ruled a vast portion of the
then-known world from the Nile to the Indus. It connected
the Mediterranean with modern Afghanistan. Rich beyond
dreams, powerful beyond dispute, the great kings ruled
from their mighty palaces at Susa and Persepolis,
tolerating the religions and cultures of subject peoples
and harvesting the creativity of near eastern civilisation
that had already, before they came along, invented writing
and urban life. It should have been enough to earn them
historical immortality.
Yet, of course, the leader whose name resonates down the
ages is Alexander the Great. The Persian kings, from their
lofty thrones, perceived the turbulent islands on the
western fringe of the empire as a marginal irritant, and
yet the Greeks were their nemesis. For the Persians had
the misfortune to be the others, the enemies - in short,
the Orientals - against whom the first European
civilisation defined itself.
The Middle East invented writing, but ancient Greece
invented history. Herodotus, "the father of
history", takes as his epic theme the struggle of the
Greek city states against the vast Persian empire - and
sees it as a war of liberation. The idea of democracy was
born in the fight against Persian despotism: that is how
Herodotus tells it. The Persian king Xerxes is the supreme
overlord of all baddies, turning his eye on the plucky
little Greek cities who, unexpectedly, fight back. Now you
remember the Persians: the guys with the strange beards
whom the Athenians beat at Marathon. Until Marathon, says
Herodotus, "no Greek could even hear the word Persian
without terror". In finding the courage to fight
Persia, the Greeks discovered their own identity as
citizens.
All western political theory is implicitly defined against
the ghost of Persia - from condemnations of
"tyrants" in the Atlantic republican tradition
to Marx's caricature of "oriental despotism". In
winning their nationhood, the Greeks consigned the
Persians to a miserable place in the world's memory.
The most vivid portrait of a Persian ruler isn't even in
this exhibition. It appears in a mosaic found in Pompeii,
now in the Naples Archaeological Museum, based on a lost
painting of Alexander the Great in battle. Through a
tangle of horses, men and spears, Alexander charges.
Darius stands helpless in his chariot, his face startled
and appalled, like a frightened rabbit. So much for
Persia!
This is how history is made - by writers and artists
recycling stories and images down the centuries. This
mosaic decorated the House of the Faun in Pompeii
centuries after the fall of Darius; millennia after that,
the victories of Alexander are still box office.
It takes Neil MacGregor's idealistic British Museum to put
the Persian point of view. Everything about Forgotten
Empire is calculated to turn history on its head. This is
archaeology meeting world politics. The very existence of
the exhibition is a diplomatic coup: in case you hadn't
noticed, Persia is now Iran. The loans from Tehran that
have made Forgotten Empire possible were negotiated before
the recent change of government and had to be renegotiated
at the last minute.
This is the kind of exhibition I expect of the British
Museum. Here at last is the enlightening encounter with
another culture that, in the Bloomsbury museum's years of
decline, was replaced by crap like an Agatha Christie
show. At the same time, it's laudably different from a
Royal Academy blockbuster: less swank, more thought. I can
promise you will not only be delighted by gold daggers and
chariots but leave with a sense of Persian history. It's
first rate.
So why was I disappointed? I was left flat - not by the
superb show but by the Persian empire itself. The British
Museum wants us to believe Persia was traduced by the
Greeks. It wants to show us an alternative Persia from the
evil empire vilified by Hellenic historians. Yet
everything confirms this Greek "myth" of a
supremely rich, powerful, bureaucratically faceless
empire. The real difference between the Greek version and
the version we get here is that the Greeks made the
Persians glamorous in their villainy.
The Persian kings, their wives, ministers, soldiers and
myriad subjects are a void at the heart of this
exhibition. They don't emerge, in their own art, as
individuals, only as warriors in profile, with the same
neat beards. In Herodotus, the Persian ruler Darius, when
he was told of Athenian support for rebels in Asia Minor,
called for his bow, took an arrow, shot it into the air
and cried: "Grant, O God, that I might punish the
Athenians!" Compare that with the real voice of a
Persian king, on a clay tablet telling of the construction
of the palace at Susa: "Saith Darius the King:
Ahuramazda, the greatest of the gods - he created me; he
made me king; he bestowed upon me this kingdom, great,
possessed of good horses, possessed of good men ..."
The Greek fantasy of a monarch convulsed with anger,
demanding his bow, is so much more dramatic, more human.
The same contrast between Greeks and Persians is
unavoidable when you contemplate the most imposing
monuments here. Unfortunately, they appear in a
19th-century collection of plastercasts; the reliefs that
survive on the ruins of the palace at Persepolis are
inaccessible, unless you fancy a trip to Iran. I find it
hard to enjoy reproductions. Nevertheless, some judgments
are possible. The celebrated frieze of various peoples
paying tribute is imposing. But the figures have a static
quality. No one runs, nothing overlaps. Even the wonderful
carving of two immense lions, or the black stone mastiff
from Tehran - an original - succeed through mass rather
than movement.
If you wanted to claim, as a newspaper did this week, that
Persia was "the greatest of all ancient
civilisations" you'd be better off picking a venue
other than the British Museum. Just a walk from the show
are the Elgin Marbles - the frieze of the Parthenon
created after the Athenian acropolis was razed by the
Persians. The Greek masterpiece is full of motion and
emotion, from horses barely reined in, to a heifer being
led to sacrifice.
Where's the passion in Persian art? Its very beauty - and
it is beautiful - lies in its strange stillness; you see
this most in the painted brick profiles of palace guards.
Yet this praise has to be qualified. This kind of glazed
brick decoration isn't original to the Persian empire;
they got it from Babylon - to be precise, from the
neo-Babylonian kingdom that they subdued. This isn't about
east versus west. With our idiocy being what it is, the
British Museum runs a risk of confusing us into equating
Persia with the near-eastern origins of civilisation. The
Persian empire followed, and conquered, the Assyrians and
neo-Babylonians - and was about two millennia after Ur.
All these cultures were greater than Persia's, as a quick
tour of the British Museum will indicate.
The Persian empire was admirably curious about the
cultures it absorbed: in Egypt the Persian kings paid
homage to Egyptian gods. It assimilated the cultural
heritage of the entire eastern Mediterranean world,
including that of Greece; a wonderful silver and bronze
amphora handle in the shape of an ibex rests on a mask of
a Greek satyr. But all this openness has an emptiness at
its heart. No one is even quite sure what the Persians
believed - how strange, in an ancient world so full of
gods, from Osiris to Zeus to Jehovah, that only a single
case is filled with religious offerings. Were they just
boring bureaucrats?
Yet we do get a glimpse of what they loved. They liked to
live it up. The most startling things here are gold and
silver drinking vessels in the shape of horns - just a
taste of the opulent lifestyle of the Persian court. That,
too, becomes a little offputting as you admire one gold
bracelet too many.
It sounds as if I'm kicking against this exhibition. I
suppose I am, yet it is archaeology at its most
impressive. You might even say it is archaeology versus
history. The Greeks wrote history. The Persians are
recovered here through archaeology - the study of objects
retrieved from the sand. Yet history wins. The Persian
empire visible in its surviving artefacts turns out to be
as grandiose, luxurious and remotely despotic as Herodotus
said it was.”
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