The Enduring Legacy of Persia

Of the world's six pristine civilizations — Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus, China, Mesoamerica and Andean South America — every one but China was conquered, converted and culturally replaced. Egyptian hieroglyphs were forgotten for 1,400 years until Champollion. Sumerian and Akkadian were entirely dead languages by the time of Christ. The Indus script remains undeciphered; its descendants no longer write it. The Aztec and Inca were extinguished as states within a single generation of contact. Iran is the great exception.

The Iranian plateau has been overrun at least seven times by world-historical conquerors: Alexander the Great (330 BCE), the Arab caliphate (636 CE), the Seljuk Turks (1037), Genghis Khan (1219), Tamerlane (1380s), the Afghan Ghilzai (1722), and Anglo-Russian imperial interference (1813–1953). Each conquest could plausibly have ended Iran as a distinct civilization. None did.

Instead, an extraordinary pattern repeats. The conquerors arrive; within two generations they have adopted Persian as their court language, married into the local aristocracy, patronised Persian poets and built domes in the Iranian style. The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad — though Arab in dynasty — was administered in the Sasanian tradition by Iranian viziers. The Mongol Ilkhanate wrote its great chronicle, Rashid al-Din's Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh, in Persian. The Ottoman court read Saʿdi and Hafez. The Mughal Empire of India conducted its official business in Persian until 1837. The conquerors became Persianised; Persia did not become anything else.

"The Persians are the first historical people; Persia was the first empire that passed away. While China and India remain stationary, and perpetuate a natural vegetative existence even to the present time, this land has been subject to those developments and revolutions, which alone manifest a historical condition."

The instruments of survival were three: a language too prestigious to abandon, a literary canon (the Shahnameh especially) that re-asserted Iranian memory at every crisis, and an administrative tradition so refined that every new dynasty needed Iranian bureaucrats to run their empire. As Ferdowsi wrote at the very moment Iran was being absorbed into the Islamic world: basī ranj burdam dar īn sāl sī / ʿajam zinda kardam badīn pārsī — "Much I have suffered in these thirty years / I have brought Persia to life again with this Persian tongue."

In October 539 BCE, the army of Cyrus the Great entered Babylon without a battle. What he did next was, by the standards of antiquity, almost incomprehensible. Instead of looting the temples, deporting the population and executing the elite — the standard practice of Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian conquerors — Cyrus issued a decree, recorded on a clay cylinder now in the British Museum, that:

• Abolished forced labour (corvée) in the conquered territories.
• Guaranteed freedom of religion to every people of the empire.
• Restored deported communities — including the Jews of the Babylonian Captivity — to their homelands.
• Authorised the rebuilding of destroyed temples at imperial expense, including the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
• Recognised the legitimacy of local rulers and customs under the imperial umbrella.

The Hebrew Bible records the same edict three times — Ezra 1:1–4, 2 Chronicles 36:22–23, and Isaiah 45, which goes so far as to call Cyrus God's "anointed" (māshīaḥ) — the only non-Israelite figure to receive that title. A replica of the Cyrus Cylinder is on permanent display at United Nations Headquarters in New York; in 1971, on the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah of Iran presented the original to UN Secretary-General U Thant, who called it "an ancient declaration of human rights."

The Achaemenid empire that followed translated this ethic into the world's first explicitly multi-ethnic, multi-religious state. The Apadana reliefs at Persepolis show delegations from twenty-three subject nations — Medes, Elamites, Babylonians, Egyptians, Lydians, Bactrians, Indians, Ethiopians, Scythians — bringing tribute not as captives, but as participating peoples, each in their own dress, weapons and offerings. There is no whip; there is no chain. It is the first time in the visual record of the human race that the conquered are shown with dignity.

Around 1200 BCE — long before the Buddha, long before Confucius, two centuries before Homer — the Iranian prophet Zarathustra (Greek: Zoroaster) preached on the eastern plateau what is arguably the oldest revealed monotheism. Three doctrines of his teaching, set down in the Gāthās, spread outward through Persian-ruled Jewry into Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and from there into the moral vocabulary of the modern world:

• Free will and moral choice — the cosmos is the arena of an ethical struggle in which every individual must consciously side with truth (aša) against the lie (druj).
• Eschatology — bodily resurrection, individual judgement after death, the bridge of reckoning (Chinvat), heaven, hell, and a final renovation of the world (frashō.kərəti) at the end of time.
• A saviour to come — the future Saoshyant, born of a virgin mother, who will defeat evil and inaugurate the new age.

Modern scholars from Mary Boyce to Norman Cohn trace the entire apocalyptic tradition — Daniel, the New Testament Apocalypse, the Quranic Day of Judgement — to a Zoroastrian origin transmitted through the period of Persian rule over Judah (539–332 BCE). The everyday ethics of the religion are summarised in three Avestan words still spoken at Zoroastrian weddings: humata, hūxta, huvarshta — "good thoughts, good words, good deeds."

Persia also produced two further universal religions of the late ancient world: Manichaeism (3rd c. CE), the gnostic faith of the prophet Mani, which at its height stretched from Roman North Africa to Tang China; and the radically egalitarian movement of Mazdak (5th–6th c. CE) under Khosrow I's father, which preached communal property and the abolition of the privileges of the nobility a thousand years before the European peasants' wars.

Within the Islamic period, the Iranian inheritance produced Persian Sufism — the mystical theology of Bāyazid Bastāmī, ʿAttār, and above all Rūmī, whose poetry of universal love ("Come, come, whoever you are…") is now the best-selling verse in the United States. The verses of Saʿdi inscribed at the entrance to the United Nations Hall of Nations — "The children of Adam are limbs of one body, created from a single essence" — are the single most-quoted statement of human fraternity in modern international politics.

Almost every administrative concept that the modern state takes for granted was first systematised by the Achaemenids and refined by the Sasanians:

• Provincial governance — twenty satrapies, each headed by a governor and audited independently by royal inspectors (the "King's Eyes and Ears") — the template for every later imperial bureaucracy.
• The state postal service — the 2,500-km Royal Road from Sardis to Susa, with relay stations every 25 km. Herodotus's tribute — "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these messengers" — is engraved on the New York General Post Office.
• Standardised coinage — the gold darīk and silver siglos of Darius I, the first widely-circulated state currency.
• A trilingual chancery — Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, with Aramaic as the working administrative language of the empire — an institutional accommodation of linguistic plurality without modern parallel until the 20th century.
• Land-tax cadastres — Khosrow I's 6th-century reform replacing arbitrary harvest collection with a fixed survey-based tax was adopted wholesale by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates.
• The vizierate — the very word vizier derives from Pahlavi vichīr, "decision-maker." Every Islamic dynasty for a thousand years staffed its chancery on the Iranian model.

When the founders of the United States quoted Cyrus's tolerance, when Thomas Jefferson kept two copies of Xenophon's Cyropaedia in his library (his annotations survive), when Hugo Grotius cited the Persian respect for treaty in the founding of international law — they were drawing on a tradition that had been working out the practical problems of pluralistic governance for two thousand years.

The map of modern science is dotted with Iranian names that few non-specialists recognise as Iranian. A short, far-from-exhaustive inventory:

Persian is one of only four languages on earth — alongside Greek, Chinese and Tamil — with an unbroken literary tradition extending back more than two and a half millennia. The chain runs:

• Old Persian (c. 600–300 BCE) — the language of Darius I's Behistun inscription, written in a partially-alphabetic cuneiform invented specifically for the Achaemenid royal monuments.
• Middle Persian / Pahlavi (3rd c. BCE – 10th c. CE) — the language of the Sasanian court and the Zoroastrian sacred texts.
• New Persian (9th c. CE – present) — written in a modified Arabic script, structurally continuous with Pahlavi, enriched with Arabic vocabulary but never grammatically arabised.

What makes Persian extraordinary is its conservatism. A literate Iranian today can read the 11th-century Shahnameh, the 13th-century Masnavī of Rūmī and the 14th-century Dīvān of Hafez with far less effort than an English speaker needs for Shakespeare — and with essentially no help to read 19th-century prose. By contrast, an English speaker cannot read the Beowulf manuscript at all, and modern Greeks need substantial training to read Homer.

For a thousand years — roughly 1000 to 1900 CE — Persian was the international high language of the eastern Islamic world, from the Ottoman court at Istanbul to the Mughal court at Delhi, from the Bosphorus to Bengal. The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II wrote Persian poetry. The Mughal emperor Akbar's chronicle, the Akbar-nāma, is in Persian. British colonial India conducted official business in Persian until 1837 — the East India Company's first language exam for officers was Persian, not Hindi or Urdu. The word pyjama, the word bazaar, the word khaki, the word caravan, the word tulip, the word spinach, the word chess — all reached English through Persian.

Today Persian is the official language of three countries — Iran (as Fārsī), Afghanistan (as Darī) and Tajikistan (as Tājīkī) — and is spoken natively by roughly 110 million people, with another 50 million as a second language. Across Central Asia, the Caucasus and parts of the Indian subcontinent, an educated person's library still includes the same six poets that an Iranian library does: Ferdowsi, Saʿdi, Hafez, Rumi, Khayyam and Nezāmī.

"The Persian language and its great poetic tradition are recognised as a vehicle of an immaterial heritage of humanity that has, for more than a thousand years, transcended political and religious frontiers."

Several elements that the modern eye reads simply as "Islamic" or "Eastern" architecture are in fact Iranian inventions adopted across three continents:

• The double-shell brick dome — perfected by Seljuk masons in the 11th century, the direct structural ancestor of the domes of Mughal Agra, Ottoman Istanbul (Sinan's mosques) and ultimately Christopher Wren's St Paul's.
• The four-iwan courtyard plan — Sasanian in origin, codified by the Seljuks; the basic plan of every Friday mosque from Cairo to Lahore.
• The chahār-bāgh garden — the "four-fold garden" divided by water channels representing the four rivers of paradise. The Taj Mahal's garden, the Generalife at the Alhambra, the gardens at Humayun's tomb, and even — through the Mughal-Mongol intermediary — features of Versailles, all descend from this Iranian template.
• The Persian carpet — the Pazyryk carpet (5th c. BCE), preserved in Siberian ice and now in the Hermitage, is the world's oldest surviving knotted-pile carpet. The 26-million-knot Ardabil Carpet (1539) in the Victoria & Albert Museum is the masterpiece William Morris campaigned to acquire.
• The Persian miniature — the workshop tradition of Tabriz, Herat and Isfahan that produced the illustrations of the Shahnameh and shaped Ottoman and Mughal painting for four hundred years.

A short ledger of everyday inheritances most people never trace:

• Every time you write an algorithm or solve an equation in algebra, you are using the legacy of al-Khwārizmī.
• Every time the UN debates religious freedom as an inalienable right, it is in part the legacy of Cyrus.
• Every hospital in the world that combines patient care, teaching and research is the descendant of Gundishapur.
• Every postal service with its inviolability of the mails descends from Darius's couriers.
• Every chess game preserves the Sasanian game of chatrang, with its Persian terms shāh ("king") and shāh māt ("the king is dead") still echoing in the English "checkmate."
• Every formal garden in the Mughal, Persian or Andalusian style is a Persian chahar-bagh.
• Every reading of Rumi on a meditation app, every quotation of Khayyam in a graduation card, every tulip in a Dutch field (the bulb was first cultivated in Iran and carried to Holland from Istanbul in the 16th century) — Persia is in the texture of ordinary modern life.
• Nowruz, the Iranian new year at the spring equinox, is celebrated by some 300 million people in twelve countries; the UN declared 21 March International Nowruz Day in 2010.
• Iran has 27 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the tenth-most of any country, and a further dozen on the tentative list.

"For thousands of years, Persians have been creating beauty. Sixteen centuries before Christ there went from these regions or near them a people called Kassites… and twelve centuries before Christ another people, the Hyksos, going westward, conquered Egypt and ruled it for two hundred years. The Persians, far from being defeated, were destined to give their literature and arts to their conquerors."

Five thousand years after the proto-Elamite scribes of Susa pressed the first reed-stylus into wet clay, ninety million Iranians still write — in a script different from cuneiform but in a tongue continuous with the language of Darius — letters to one another that begin with verses of Hafez. The Nowruz tablecloth is still spread at the spring equinox. The Shahnameh is still recited. The conquerors are studied in school as episodes in a longer story; Iran itself remains the protagonist.

It is this — not any single monument, not any single conqueror, not any single poet — that is the central fact about Persian civilization. In a world where almost everything else has been swept away and replaced, here is a people who have lived in the same country, spoken a recognisable form of the same language, celebrated the same new year and called themselves by the same name for more than two and a half thousand consecutive years. There is nothing else like it on earth.