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Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
Ancient Persians: Their Great Culture, Kings, and Faith
I have been intrigued by Persian history for a very long time and know its culture, people, and practices like the back of my hand. It hits close to home as well since it is a culture that had absorbed a good part of modern-day Pakistan in terms of the traditional, religious, and ethnic factors involved. Extremely fascinating!
The Persians throughout their history, such as we know it, lived peacefully in the region just north of the Persian Gulf (modern day Iran). For the most part, they were left unbothered by the epic power struggles broiling to the west in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt. They were Indo-European peoples who spoke a language similar to Sanskrit and who worshipped gods very similar to the gods of the Vedic period in India. Life was hard in the region they controlled; the coastline afforded no harbors and the eastern region was mountainous. Only a few interior valleys supported the peoples; in part because of the geography, the Persians never really united into a single peoples but rather served as disparate vassal states to the Medes, who, from their capital at Ecbatana, controlled the area east of the Tigris river.
In this state, somewhere around 650 BC, a new religion suddenly took hold. While we know little or nothing about the Persians in this period, we know the man who invented this new religion. Called Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek), his new religion and new gods captivated the spiritual and social imagination of the Persians. In its roughest outlines, Zoroastrianism is a dualistic religion; in Zarathustra's cosmos, the universe was under the control of two contrary gods, Ahura-Mazda, the creating god who is full of light and good, and Ahriman, the god of dark and evil. These two evenly matched gods are in an epic struggle over creation; at the end of time, Ahura-Mazda and his forces will emerge victorious. All of creation, all gods, all religions, and all of human history and experience can be understood as part of this struggle between light and dark, good and evil. Zoroastrianism, however, is a manifestly eschatological religion; meaning and value in this world is oriented towards the end of history and the final defeat of Ahriman and all those gods, humans, and other animate forces arrayed on the dark side of creation.
Darius extended the Persian empire to its farthest reaches, extending through his conquests all the way into Macedon just northeast of Greece. When the Greek cities of Asia Minor revolted against the high tributes demanded of them by the Persian empire, the Athenians joined in and conquered and burned Sardis, the capital of Lydia, in 498 BC. The Athenians, however, lost interest in the Greek struggle against Persia and, by 495 BC, Darius had reconquered Asia Minor. Eager to prevent any future threats to the empire by Athens or any other Greek city, Darius set out to conquer the whole of Greece. And he almost made it.
Only a decade later, Xerxes I, the successor to Darius I, was driven out of Europe completely by the Greeks. Over the next few years, all of the Greek cities in Asia Minor would become independent and Athens, which had led the fight against the Persians, would become the dominant political force in the Greek world. The Persian empire, however, hung on for another century and a half, surviving numerous revolts and succession problems. In 340 BC, Alexander the Great set out to conquer the Persians in his own punitive expedition. Even though the ruler of Persia, ironically named Darius II, had a much superior force, Alexader manage to win battle after battle against the Persians until, in 331 BC, he crossed the Euphrates into Mesopotamia. In 330 BC he entered Babylon after Darius II had fled (eventually to be assassinated) and the infinitely long history of Mesopotamia folded into a new history, that of the Hellenistic period and the Greek and later Roman domination of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
www.wsu.edu
The Persians throughout their history, such as we know it, lived peacefully in the region just north of the Persian Gulf (modern day Iran). For the most part, they were left unbothered by the epic power struggles broiling to the west in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt. They were Indo-European peoples who spoke a language similar to Sanskrit and who worshipped gods very similar to the gods of the Vedic period in India. Life was hard in the region they controlled; the coastline afforded no harbors and the eastern region was mountainous. Only a few interior valleys supported the peoples; in part because of the geography, the Persians never really united into a single peoples but rather served as disparate vassal states to the Medes, who, from their capital at Ecbatana, controlled the area east of the Tigris river.
In this state, somewhere around 650 BC, a new religion suddenly took hold. While we know little or nothing about the Persians in this period, we know the man who invented this new religion. Called Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek), his new religion and new gods captivated the spiritual and social imagination of the Persians. In its roughest outlines, Zoroastrianism is a dualistic religion; in Zarathustra's cosmos, the universe was under the control of two contrary gods, Ahura-Mazda, the creating god who is full of light and good, and Ahriman, the god of dark and evil. These two evenly matched gods are in an epic struggle over creation; at the end of time, Ahura-Mazda and his forces will emerge victorious. All of creation, all gods, all religions, and all of human history and experience can be understood as part of this struggle between light and dark, good and evil. Zoroastrianism, however, is a manifestly eschatological religion; meaning and value in this world is oriented towards the end of history and the final defeat of Ahriman and all those gods, humans, and other animate forces arrayed on the dark side of creation.
Darius extended the Persian empire to its farthest reaches, extending through his conquests all the way into Macedon just northeast of Greece. When the Greek cities of Asia Minor revolted against the high tributes demanded of them by the Persian empire, the Athenians joined in and conquered and burned Sardis, the capital of Lydia, in 498 BC. The Athenians, however, lost interest in the Greek struggle against Persia and, by 495 BC, Darius had reconquered Asia Minor. Eager to prevent any future threats to the empire by Athens or any other Greek city, Darius set out to conquer the whole of Greece. And he almost made it.
Only a decade later, Xerxes I, the successor to Darius I, was driven out of Europe completely by the Greeks. Over the next few years, all of the Greek cities in Asia Minor would become independent and Athens, which had led the fight against the Persians, would become the dominant political force in the Greek world. The Persian empire, however, hung on for another century and a half, surviving numerous revolts and succession problems. In 340 BC, Alexander the Great set out to conquer the Persians in his own punitive expedition. Even though the ruler of Persia, ironically named Darius II, had a much superior force, Alexader manage to win battle after battle against the Persians until, in 331 BC, he crossed the Euphrates into Mesopotamia. In 330 BC he entered Babylon after Darius II had fled (eventually to be assassinated) and the infinitely long history of Mesopotamia folded into a new history, that of the Hellenistic period and the Greek and later Roman domination of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
www.wsu.edu
Comments on this journal
The great difference between the Persians and the Greeks was that where as the Greeks were always the aggressors, the Persians fought (and fought hard!) when their territory was impinged upon and mostly won. The Persians were lovers of great architecture (mass and form) as well as of fine things...silks, gold, embroidery, sculpture, design). Thankfully shadows of the vast Persian Empire are still very much with us in that region of the world.