“Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia” at The British Museum 2005

Date: 18-09-2005
Owning Institution: The British Museum, London
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010  
Subject:   Classical Antiquity    

The ancient Persians accomplished many things, including the invention of the world’s first chariot-driven postal system, the creation of a global currency and the establishment of an empire more than two million square miles in extent. But the concept of written history seems never to have appealed to them, so as a people they have been transmitted to posterity almost exclusively by Greek writers such as Herodotus – and because the Greeks regarded themselves as the sworn enemies of the Persians, their piecemeal accounts are less than trustworthy, to say the least. The true story of the Persians’ actual exploits and motives, their political and religious beliefs, their morality and way of life, remains not so much a closed book as an unwritten one.

Hence the title of the British Museum’s new exhibition, “Forgotten Empire”, formed from a cornucopia of ancient Persian statues and friezes, finely wrought jewellery, gold and silver tableware and a multitude of coins, seals and cult objects. It paints a necessarily blurred portrait of a society that survives only in the form of fragments and relics: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The works are displayed in the labyrinthine and cramped circuit of low-lit galleries that constitutes – in such contrast to the vast and airy emptiness of Norman Foster’s Great Court – the British Museum’s temporary exhibition space. On this occasion, the effect is not entirely inapt, resembling a treasure trove stumbled upon in the gloaming.

One of the smallest but most thrilling exhibits in the show is a square silver plaque excavated from the great palace of Persepolis, principal seat of the Persian emperors from 550 BC to 330 BC – the year when Alexander the Great sacked Persepolis, after which the city was never to be inhabited again. The same text appears three times, the proud words of Darius I himself, delicately incised in the beautiful, wedge-like scripts of Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian: “This is the kingdom which I hold, from the Scythians who are beyond Sogdiana, thence unto Ethiopia; from Sind, thence unto Sardis – which Ahurmazda the greatest of the gods bestowed on me. Me may Ahurmazda protect, and my royal house.” The foundation plaque is battered but still brightly burnished. Its pathos is tangible.

Persepolis survives as a ruin, but a sense of its former splendour is conjured up by the inclusion of a set of massive nineteenth-century plaster casts made from the stone reliefs on the western façade of the Palace of Darius. They might only be replicas, but because of their relative antiquity – the casts were made by the Weld-Blundell expedition to Persepolis in 1892 – they preserve many fine details now lost from the original carvings on the palace, in modern-day Iran, as a result of erosion caused by wind and pollution. At each side are massive depictions of a fiercely muscular lion – semi-abstracted, to the point where it resembles a massive piece of heraldry – clinging to the back of a hapless bull and sinking its great teeth into the beast’s hindquarters. The message is clear. Those who tangle with mighty Persia, red in tooth and claw, are liable to meet a swift and bloody end.

Other elements of the reliefs reinforce the message by emphasising not only the indomitable power but also the awesome extent of the Persian empire. Delegations of eclectically dressed figures climb stairs and otherwise fictively process towards the middle of the palace façade. Each bears a gift such as a bowl, animal skin, spice jar or bracelet. They come, from all corners of the world, to pay tribute to those who rule them. Even in replica these reliefs are stunning, and the display at the British Museum is enhanced by the inclusion of numerous, breathtakingly delicate fragments from the original Persepolis reliefs themselves, many from the National Museum of Iran. One shows a Persian charioteer, wearing his hair and beard in characteristically tight ringlets, urging his horses on. Another shows an Ethiopian, carrying an elephant’s tusk as tribute, together with a camel that he leads by the nose. The style of ancient Persian art is less remote and hieratic than that of the ancient Egyptians, although it is a long way from the expressive humanity of Greek sculpture. The figures are impassive. It is impossible to fathom their thoughts.

The impact of the Persepolis palace reliefs on the art and culture of subsequent centuries has been incalculable. These memorable depictions of men bearing tribute to a great emperor seem to point forward, through the centuries, to that central image of Christian art, that of the Adoration of the Kings, who come from afar to carry gifts to the Son of God. But the Christian image brilliantly inverts the message of worldly might enshrined at Persepolis, so that instead of coming to pay tribute to an emperor in his palace, the Kings travel the world to pay homage to a mere swaddled babe in a tumbledown manger. The Nativity story is itself heavily coloured by associations with Persia. The Kings are also referred to as Magi, who were historically astrologers of the Persian court, priests of the sun-god Mithras. They come from the east. Folk memories of the might and mathematical sophistication of the ancient Persians are inextricably intertwined with Christian legend and Christian art.

The palace reliefs must certainly have had a strong influence on the art of their own time. There is even perhaps a link between them and the finest flower of Greek art, the great frieze that once decorated the temple of the Parthenon in Athens – the lion’s share of which, in the form of the Elgin Marbles, occupies a gallery just a short walk away from the rooms housing “Forgotten Empire”. After all, the Parthenon was built to replace another temple that had been destroyed by the Persians when they had sacked the city half a century before. Constructed on the orders of Pericles, in the aftermath of resounding Greek victories over the old enemy, it was intended to symbolise the permanent expulsion of the Persians from Greek soil. It may well be that the great frieze carved in bas-relief by Phidias and his workshop was deliberately modelled on the reliefs at Persepolis – and that this was the Greeks’ way of thumbing their noses at their foes, in the medium of art. They adopted the form of Persian state propaganda but reversed its message, while infusing its stark geometry with a naturalism which, itself, declared the maxim that was the cornerstone of post-Socratic Athenian thought: man is the measure of all things.

It is one of the virtues of this exhibition – and one of the great virtues of the British Museum as a whole, under Neil MacGregor’s emphatic and thoughtful directorship – that it makes the viewer think about the larger patterns of history and the bridges that span the notional divide between so-called East and West. There is a strong element of missionary intent behind “Forgotten Empire”, in that it clearly seeks to undermine or at least complicate the traditional Greco-centric view of the Persians as, essentially, barbarians at the gate. The people who created such extraordinary objects as the Oxus Treasure – which includes numerous masterpieces of goldsmithery so sophisticated that their like would not be seen, again, until the Renaissance creations of Cellini – were clearly very much more than that.

In fact, to return to the Greek sources of our knowledge about the ancient Persians, having seen this exhibition, is to become more keenly aware of how often Greek superciliousness is tinged with respect and fascination for the culture of those whom – officially at least – they regarded as their sworn enemies. There is a brilliant passage in Book One of Herodotus’s Histories, “The Customs of the Persians” (Chapters 131-40), in which he admiringly notes their habit of taking elements from the culture of every people whom they conquer, and making them their own: “they have taken the dress of the Medes… and in war they wear the Egyptian breastplate… and among other novelties they have learnt pederasty from the Greeks.” He approvingly notes their abhorrence of liars, and marvels among other things at their practice of deliberating on affairs of weight while drunk – “and then, on the morrow, when they are sober, the decision to which they came the night before is put to them once again”.

Herodotus also tells the tale of how, when Xerxes retreated from Greece after an unsuccessful campaign, he was forced to leave his camp and his army of chefs behind him. One of the Greek victors, Pausanias, went into his abandoned tent. “When Pausanias saw it, with its embroidered hangings and gorgeous decorations in silver and gold, he summoned [the Persian] bakers and cooks and told them to prepare a meal of the same sort as they were accustomed to prepare for their former master. The order was obeyed and when Pausanias saw gold and silver couches all beautifully draped, and gold and silver tables, and all prepared for the feast with such magnificence, he could harcly believe his eyes.” Wandering among the extraordinary gold and silver tableware on display at the British Museum, it is hard not to feel like a little like Pausanias himself, walking into that tent two and a half thousand years ago and being overwhelmed by the sheer magnificence of the Persian imperial world.