@@ British: Persia's kings are history's great villains @@
Arash
September 8, 2005
The evil empire
Persia's kings are history's great villains. Does the British Museum's show do them
justice?
By Jonathan Jones
Jonathan.Jones [AT] guardian.co.uk
letters [AT] guardian.co.uk
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 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 civilization 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
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 civilization 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 in battle. Through a tangle of horses, men and spears,
Alexander charges. Darius III 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 III; 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 III, 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 civilizations" 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 civilization.
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 off-putting 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.
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Critics/critics/2003/04/10/JonathanJones.gif
* Jonathan Jones joined The Guardian in 1999. He enjoys contemporary and old art, and
finds it hard to understand why the two are often seen as irreconcilable. He writes
for art magazines including frieze, gives regular talks at Tate Modern including a
series called Painting Bites Back, and recently wrote catalogue essays about Chris
Ofili and Gary Hume. So he likes painting. Jonathan Jones is currently writing two
books, one about Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the art of war, and second on
the seductive art of Thomas Gainsborough.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,,1564733,00.html
RBRK
mash_ghasem
> Guardian UK
> September 8, 2005
>
>
> The evil empire
>
> Persia's kings are history's great villains. Does the British Museum's show do them
> justice?
>
in binAmoos hAye cheshme chap az zoor chapieh cheshme-shon be avazeh
zaneshon miAn sorAgeh toe (Arash joon) and now they are authority
in Persian kings!!! xodA rahm kardeh they didn't talk about
Ghyath_abadi Kings va ellaA rooz would be rozzeh mahshar. BTW, why
an arab mother fucker like you are upset what Brits say about
Persia?
.