Tag Archives: Darius I the Great

The Fake Texts of Ancient Greek ‘Historians’: the Behistun Inscription, Ctesias, Diodorus Siculus, Darius I the Great, and Semiramis

In a previous article published under the title ‘Aristotle as Historical Forgery, the Western World’s Fake History & Rotten Foundations, and Prof. Jin Canrong’s Astute Comments’, I wholeheartedly supported the position taken by the prominent Chinese Prof. Jin Canrong about Aristotle and I explained why Aristotle never existed as he is known today and most of his texts were not written by him, but by the pseudo-Christian Benedictine monks of Western Europe for the purpose of the ferocious imperial and theological battle that Rome carried out against New Rome-Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. You can find the table of contents and a link to the publication at the end of the present article.   

Contents

Introduction

I. A fictional concept: the origin of the fraud

II. A construct based on posterior textual sources

III. The deceitful presentation

IV. 5th century BCE texts found in 15th c. CE manuscripts do not make ‘History’.

V. Abundant evidence of lies and deliberate distortions attested in the manuscript transmission

VI. Darius I the Great, the Behistun inscription, and Ctesias

VII. The historical Assyrian Queen Shammuramat and the fictional Queen Semiramis of the ‘Ancient Greek sources’

VIII. The malignant intentions of the Benedictine liars: from the historical Darius I the Great to the fictional Semiramis

IX. The vicious distortions of the Benedictine liars: from Ctesias to Herodotus

The Behistun inscription

Introduction

In the present article, I will offer a typical example of text falsification carried out by the Catholic monks, who did not ‘copy and preserve’ manuscripts of ancient Greek and Latin texts, as it has been mendaciously said by Western European and North American academics and lying scholars, but they purposefully falsified, distorted, concealed, destroyed and/or contrived numerous texts.

This enormous forgery took place in Western Europe between the 2nd half of the 8th century and the 1st half of the 15th century; the colonial era was launched exactly afterwards. For this reason, few manuscripts with Ancient Greek and Roman texts date before the 8th c.; in fact, most of them have been either distorted and replaced or hidden in the vast libraries still owned, controlled and administered that the anti-Christian Roman Catholic Church.

The purpose of this devious and evil effort was the fabrication of a fake narrative about the forged antiquity and the supposed importance of the Western Europeans according to the needs of world conquest, prevalence and preponderance of the pseudo-Christian Roman Catholic Church; this bogus-historical dogma, as direct opposition to and ultimate rejection of Orthodox Christianity, would be initially imposed as the ‘scientific discipline of History’ in Western Europe and subsequently projected onto the rest of the world by means of colonial invasion, indigenous identity destruction, moral integrity demolition, cultural heritage disintegration, educational subordination, economic exploitation, military subjugation, and socio-political domination.  

In other words, the monastical scribes and copyists created an entirely fake Euro-centric past, which became the rotten foundation of Western Europe. This fallacy became known as Judeo-Christian world and Greco-Roman civilization. However, the decipherment of ancient languages (Egyptian hieroglyphic, Old Achaemenid Iranian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Sumerian, Hurrian, Hittite, Urartu, Ugaritic, etc) and the study of millions of original texts, which were not copies of earlier sources but contemporaneous to the events that they narrated, sounded the death knell of the era of history fabrication programs.

With the post-Soviet rise of the great continental powers (China, India, Russia, etc.), the economic-military-political-ideological-educational-academic-cultural tyranny of the Western World started being overthrown throughout the earlier colonized world. The historical forgery that the colonial rulers imposed collapsed, the falsehood of the Eurocentric dogma of World History started being revealed and rejected, and an overwhelming project of total de-Westernization appeared as a prerequisite for the liberation of the Mankind from the lies of the European Renaissance, the Western Humanities, the White Supremacism, the Western European colonialism and racism, as well as from the falsehood of numerous subsystems of the construct, such as Classicism, Hellenism, Orientalism, etc.  

In our days, it is imperative for anti-colonial scholars to unveil the distortions applied to Ancient Greek and Latin texts by the medieval monks. Consequently, historians from all over the world have to work together in order to denounce and obliterate the Western fraud and the fake History of the Western Man, which consists in arbitrarily taking 14th c. CE manuscripts as authentic narratives of Ancient History.

Jean Adrien Guignet (1816–1854), The Battle at Cunaxa (401 BCE), painting of 1843; typical example of the Western European forgery and of the bogus-historical dogma that European colonials wanted to impose worldwide as ‘History’! The narrative about the Battle at Cunaxa is to be found in Xenophon’s Anabasis; the purported Ancient Athenian author (430-355 BCE) died when Alexander the Great was born, but his text is saved in manuscripts dating back to the period between the 13th the 16th centuries, namely 1600-1900 years after the writer’s death. By selecting themes from the forged Ancient Greek ‘history’, Modern European artists plunged scholars and simple people into a delusion that they call ‘History’. https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/person_89597697

I. A fictional concept: the origin of the fraud

Apparently, the present brief article cannot be an exhaustive presentation of the Western fraud, and of the historical forgery that the Western monks, manuscript copyists, collectors, academics and propagandists attempted to impose worldwide through colonial conquests, massacres and tyrannies. However, I can still enumerate the major founding myths of the Western World.

Two thematic circles of historical distortions and fraudulent claims made by the Western academia revolve around the following two entirely fabricated entities, which have conventionally but erroneously been called

a) “the Greco-Roman world” and

b) “Biblical Israel” and “Judeo-Christian civilization”.

These ahistorical entities never existed. The original concept of those notions is purely fictional, and it therefore remains always unquestioned in the fraudulent Western universities. In this regard, the sources that the Western academics evoke to support their claims are posterior, untrustworthy, forged and therefore worthless.

At times, some of those texts represent merely ancient authors’ misperceptions of earlier texts and authors; however, more often, the ancient texts have been tampered with. On other occasions, ancient texts that refute the lies of other historical sources are hidden from the general public and conventionally discussed among the Western academic accomplices.  

Fake terms, nonsensical selection of artworks, intentional use of posterior sources, delusional Modern European paintings and many other techniques were involved in the fabrication of the bogus-historical dogma of the Western World; but how can a Roman relief related to events of the 1st c. CE be taken as relevant of the so-called ‘History of Biblical Israel’, since the Ancient Kingdom of Israel ceased to exist in 722 BCE and the entire population was taken captive to Assyria? All the same, if an author decides to illustrate the topic by means of an Assyrian relief, he surely risks revealing the truth, i.e. the fact that the fake Biblical world was an insignificant periphery of Mesopotamia.

In parallel with the delusion diffused at home and worldwide, the Western academia took good care to produce plenty of sick concepts and laughable notions in their effort to come up with pre-fabricated opponents. Before 100 years, this was done with Hitler and his fake Nazi ideology, which reflected Anglo-Saxon corruption, while being detrimentally opposite to the traditional German culture. Nowadays, fake Muslims are similarly produced by the Western secret services. These pawns, although ignorant, uneducated and idiotic, are foolish enough to portray the so-called Judeo-Christian civilization as the Dajjal, i.e. the Antichrist system, which was prophesied first in Ancient Egypt and in Hittite Anatolia and only much later in Christian and Muslim sources. But the Antichrist system is something real, whereas the Judeo-Christian civilization never existed; it is prefabricated delusion. Those who take it as real will be destroyed.

II. A construct based on posterior textual sources

The entire construct hinges on the deceitful presentation of several types of material forged, collected, concealed, interpreted, contextualized, narrated, repeatedly but intentionally discussed, supposedly questioned, and selectively popularized; this was due to the fact that the said material was incessantly utilized for the colonial needs and targets of the Western European powers (England, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, and more recently the US). In fact, the Western World’s fake History was created as the ultimate support of all colonial claims.

This process happened within a system in which posterior textual sources (preserved in medieval manuscripts) have occupied the central position, whereas the ancient epigraphic material, which was contemporaneous to the historical events under study, has been deliberately disregarded.

All later discovered data and pieces of information were either adjusted to the construct or methodically hidden; this is how the original concept, pathetically believed almost as a religious dogma, remained totally unchallenged down to our days.

III. The deceitful presentation

The quintessence of the deceitful presentation involves a vicious trick; people (pupils and students, but also scholars and intellectuals, as well as the general public) are taught and made accustomed to care mainly about the absolutely insignificant dates of birth and death of historical persons (authors, rulers, etc.), and not about the dates of the manuscripts in which these individuals are mentioned as supposed authors; this situation turns readers, students and scholars into pathetic idiots. 

Subsequently, we cannot seriously afford to describe Herodotus as a 5th c. BCE writer, because there is no manuscript with texts attributed to him, dating before the 10th c. CE. In addition, if we take into account the enormous number of other ancient authors decrying, denigrating and rejecting Herodotus’ absurdities and malignancy, we have to permanently and irrevocably obliterate Herodotus from the History of Mankind and consider his false, paranoid and racist texts as a double Crime against the Mankind:

first, with respect to the original narrative (to which we don’t have access as it was distorted by medieval monastical scribes and copyists) because the author attempted to disparage the superior Iranian civilization and the majestic Achaemenid universalist empire, while undeservedly praising the South Balkan barbarians, and

second, as regards the currently available text, which was forged as per the discriminatory intentions of the monks who altered and distorted it in their effort to fabricate the fake, modern divide (or dichotomy) East-West, and to offer a shred of historicity to it.

IV. 5th century BCE texts found in 15th c. CE manuscripts do not make ‘History’.

People get therefore addicted to considering as a true and original ‘work’ (of an ancient author) the manuscript (or manuscripts) in which the specific treatise, essay or book was copied perhaps 10 or 15 centuries after the author composed it. Due to a long chain of intermediaries (namely library copyists, librarians, scholars, monks, collectors, purchasers and/or statesmen), the transmitted text may have been partly or totally changed.

There is absolutely no guarantee as regards the honesty, the good intentions, the unbiased attitude, and the benevolent character of the perhaps 5, 10, 20 or 50 persons who -living in different eras and without knowing one another- may have constituted the chain of (unknown to us) intermediaries between the hand of the author and that of the last copyist whose manuscript was preserved down to our times.

Example: very little matters today whether the ancient author Diodorus Siculus or Siceliotes (西西里的狄奧多羅斯) actually lived in the 1st c. BCE or in the 3rd c. CE; quite contrarily, what is important for history-writing is the fact that the earliest known manuscript of his famous ‘Bibliotheca Historica’ (世界史) dates back to the 10th c. CE.

Consequently, the first piece of information that should be stated after the name of any ‘ancient’ Anatolian, Macedonian, Thracian, Greek, Roman and other author is the date of the earliest extant manuscript of his works.

V. Abundant evidence of lies and deliberate distortions attested in the manuscript transmission

An extraordinarily high number of original sources excavated in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Canaan, Iran and elsewhere, and subsequently deciphered, can be dated with accuracy; example: the Annals of great Assyrian emperor Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) were written during his reign. They are contemporaneous and therefore original.

Part of the Annals of the Assyrian Emperor Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) that were written and depicted on the walls of imperial palace at Kalhu (modern Nimrud, in Northern Iraq): representation of the Assyrian campaign against Babylonia in 728 BCE; contrarily to the Ancient Greek sources, which were hypothetically preserved in manuscripts written 1500 years after the supposed author elaborated his narrative, the Assyrian texts are trustworthy and valuable sources of information, because they were formulated at the same time as the events therein narrated. But not one Ancient Greek relief or text was found to be contemporaneous with Herodotus’ fictional battle of Thermopylae.

However, in striking contrast to them, almost all the manuscripts with the works of ancient Greek and Roman authors whose texts have formed the backbone of the fraudulent historical dogma of the Western academia are not contemporaneous but posterior by, at times, 1500 or 2000 years.

Even worse, numerous ancient Greek authors’ texts were not preserved through a manuscript tradition at all; they were saved as references in posterior authors’ works. This concerns, for instance, Ctesias (克特西亞斯), an Ancient Carian (Anatolian) physician and erudite scholar, who lived and worked in the court of the Achaemenid Iranian emperor Artaxerxes II in the 5th c. BCE.

Later, willing to offer potential guidebooks to Iran and India for the use of various peripheral peoples and tribes of the Balkan region, Ctesias elaborated in Ancient Ionian (愛奧尼亞希臘語) two treatises to describe the state of things in Iran and in India. To the Western academic bibliography, his works are known (in Latin) as ‘Persica’ and ‘Indica’.

These texts were not saved integrally in manuscripts copied for the purpose of preserving Ctesias’ works, but they were preserved in Diodorus Siculus’ ‘Bibliotheca Historica’. Although he is not known through authentic and contemporaneous Iranian sources, we can deduce that Ctesias certainly spoke fluently the official language of the Empire and read Old Achaemenid cuneiform. Eventually, he may have also studied and learned Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform, namely two ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform languages and writings the use of which was maintained by Iranian scribes.

Apparently, Ctesias had a firsthand insight, as he lived for many years in Parsa (Persepolis), the capital of the Achaemenid Empire and he also traveled extensively along with the Iranian emperor. But, unfortunately, the following ordeal was produced.  

VI. Darius I the Great, the Behistun inscription, and Ctesias

One century before Ctesias served Artaxerxes II, the empire of Iran was saved by Darius I the Great (大流士一世; reign: 522-486), who overthrew a usurper, namely the Mithraic (密特拉教祭司) magus Gaumata (高墨达), and by so doing, preserved on the throne a dynasty of faithful Zoroastrian (瑣羅亞斯德教徒) monarchs.

To commemorate his great victory and the consolidation of the his dynasty, Darius I the Great had an enormous rock relief and a monumental inscription (貝希斯敦銘文) engraved on the rocks of Mount Behistun (貝希斯頓山), at a distance of 150 km west of Hamadan (哈马丹; Ekbatana/埃克巴坦那) in Western Iran (15 m high by 25 m wide and 100 m up the cliff). As it can be easily understood, these events occurred after the assassination of Cambyses, at the very beginning of Darius I the Great’s reign.

It goes without saying that the successors of Darius I the Great and the imperial Iranian administration knew perfectly well the historical details and were fully aware of the imperial inscription that immortalized the event, which had obviously become the cornerstone of the imperial education.  

Mount Bisotun (rather known as Behistun in Western bibliography)

The Behistun inscription  

Representation of the Achaemenid Iranian Emperor Darius I the Great in the Behistun inscription; he is trampling the defeated Gaumata.

Behistun relief of the defeated Elamite ššina rebel

In the vast Achaemenid Iranian Empire, Imperial Aramaic was the lingua franca in which people from different provinces (satrapies) used to communicate; numerous official documents were translated from cuneiform to alphabetic writing and sent to the various administrators (satraps). The Behistun papyrus from the Elephantine Island (in Aswan, Upper Egypt) contains an Imperial Aramaic translation of the Inscription of Behistun; excavated in 1906-1908 by the German Orientalist Eduard Sachau and published in 1911, the text is known as DB Aram and as TADAE C2.1+3.13. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_papyrus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbook_of_Aramaic_Documents_from_Ancient_Egypt

VII. The historical Assyrian Queen Shammuramat and the fictional Queen Semiramis of the ‘Ancient Greek sources’

However, one century later, when Ctesias lived in Iran, served the Iranian Emperor, and spoke Old Achaemenid Iranian (and if not, he was surrounded by the Empire’s top interpreters and advisers), something disastrously odd ‘happened’.

According to Diodorus Siculus, who explicitly stated that he extensively quoted from Ctesias’ text (Bibliotheca Historica, II 13), the imperial Carian physician and author appears to have attributed the Behistun inscription and the rock reliefs to none else than the Assyrian Queen Shammuramat (薩穆-拉瑪特), who was the queen consort of the Assyrian Emperor Shamshi Adad V (沙姆什·阿達德五世; reign: 824-811) and co-regent (811-805) during the first years of reign of her son Adad Nirari III (阿达德尼拉里三世; reign: 811-783)!

(Above:) stela of Shamshi-Adad V from the Nabu Temple at Kalhu/Nimrud; (below:) stela of Adad Nirari III from Tell al Rimush (also known as the ‘Mosul marble stele’)

(Above:) the stela of Shammuramat from the city of Assyria (Ashur); the great queen and queen mother is described as the wife of Shamshi-Adad V, the mother of Adad-Nirari III, and the daughter-in-law of Shalmaneser III (actually in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany); (below:) detail

Actually in the Maraş (Germanikeia/Kahramanmaraş) Archaeology Museum, the Pazarcık Stele was found in Kizkapanli, near the Pazarcik village, ca. 30 km SE of Maraş in Turkey; the monument was a boundary stele constructed by the Assyrian Emperor Adad-nirari III in 805 BCE. It demarcated the borders between Assyria and the Neo-Hittite kingdoms of Kummuh (later known as Commagene) and Gurgum. The queen mother Shammuramat is mentioned as taking part in the military campaigns undertaken by the Assyrian Emperor in the region.

Furthermore, in the ‘Ancient Greek’ text of Diodorus Siculus, the monumental inscription was said to be written in Assyrian cuneiform (Συρίοις γράμμασιν)! Even worse, in the same text (as preserved today), it was also stated that, in the rock relief, there was also a representation of the Assyrian queen!

Ctesias’ text, as preserved by Diodorus Siculus, is truly abundant in information, but it is historically impossible and therefore entirely forged. Due to this and many other texts, an enormous chasm was unnecessarily formed between

a) the historical queen Shammuramat of Assyria, whose historicity is firmly undeniable, due to the existence of several contemporaneous cuneiform sources excavated in Assyria, and subsequently deciphered and published,

and

b) the purely fictional Assyrian queen Semiramis (沙米拉姆) of the posterior Ancient Greek textual sources that were supposedly ‘preserved’ (but in reality deliberately distorted and forged) in the Benedictine manuscripts of Western Europe’s monasteries.

The fictional Semiramis of Western Europe: ‘Semiramis receiving news of the rebellion in Babylon’, painting by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (also known as Il Guercino; 1591-1666), 1624 (Oil on canvas, currently in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Semiramis called to Arms, by Alessandro Leone Varotari (also known as Il Padovanino; 1588’1649)

Semiramis Building Babylon (1861) by Edgar Degas

However, if we examine closely the facts, we will surely understand what truly occurred in this case; then, we will be able to fathom how the fake History of the Western world was fabricated.

The Behistun inscription is trilingual, as it was written in Old Achaemenid Iranian (the earliest form of written Iranian languages), Babylonian, and Elamite; this was a very common practice during the Achaemenid times (550-330 BCE). The main figure of the associated rock relief is Darius I the Great, evidently the representation of a male royal.

One way or another, with respect to the Behistun inscription and rock relief, Ctesias certainly knew everything that we know today after the successive decipherments of the Old Achaemenid, Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform writings, or perhaps even more, due to the then extant oral tradition.

VIII. The malignant intentions of the Benedictine liars: from the historical Darius I the Great to the fictional Semiramis  

The Behistun inscription is not Assyrian; the representation is not that of female royal; and the monument is totally unrelated to Shammuramat, who had lived 300 years before Darius I the Great and 400 years before Artaxerxes II’s physician Ctesias. More importantly, by that time, the Assyrian Empire did not occupy the lands surrounding Behistun. Accompanied by Iranian imperial officers and his associates, Ctesias certainly learned all the details of the monumental inscription that we can now read in articles, courses, lectures, books and encyclopedias.

The narrative was a triumph for Darius I the Great and a spectacular rebuttal of the vicious Mithraic Magi who had supported the defeated evil sorcerer and villain Gaumata. Apparently, writing a guidebook for Iran to help marginal people of the Empire’s Balkan periphery, Ctesias did not have any reason to say lies. Moreover, we don’t have any reason to believe that Diodorus Siculus needed to distort the truth to that extent, when copying and thus preserving Ctesias’ masterpiece for the posterity.

However, the transmission of the details about the Behistun inscription embarrassed the Benedictine copyists who wanted to denigrate Darius I the Great and to portray his great empire in a most derogatory manner. They had already proceeded in this manner, distorting other manuscripts, forging texts, and fabricating their pseudo-historical narratives at will.

That is why Ctesias’ pertinent text, which had certainly been preserved in its original form within Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica, was intentionally distorted by the Benedictine ‘Holy Inquisition of Libraries’, which fabricated the myths of today’s Western world some time after the middle of the 8th c. CE. To be accurate, Ctesias’ historical description was entirely replaced by a fictional and historically nonsensical account.

The unbelievable lies -invented and included in Diodorus Siculus’ quotations from Ctesias- risked making of the fictional queen Semiramis a world ruler! Whereas the Assyrian Empire at the end of the 9th c. BCE did not control even the western half of today’s Iranian territory, the unequivocally mythicized Semiramis had supposedly sent her armies up to India where those fictitious Assyrian soldiers were trampled by the elephants. This worthless narrative that replaced Ctesias’ original text may very well have been invented as a ‘historical’ excuse for Alexander the Great’s failure to advance deep inside India.

The fictional Semiramis of Modern Europeans: she condemns her husband Ninus to death; painting by Nicolaus Knüpfer (1609-1655), created after 1622. Currently in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

IX. The vicious distortions of the Benedictine liars: from Ctesias to Herodotus

But if the fictional Semiramis’ Indian campaign is entirely false, so are then the preposterous narratives of Herodotus about Darius I the Great’s and Xerxes I the Great’s campaigns in the insignificant and barbarian circumference of South Balkans. These texts involved evil purposes, heinous anti-Iranian biases, fictional battles, racist discourses, vicious lies, incredibly large number of the Iranian armies, and absurdly high number of Iranian casualties.

The mendacious but idiotic Benedictine monks, who wrote those slander tales did not apparently expect that, sometime in the future, excavations would bring to light splendid Iranian antiquities, original cuneiform documentation, and trustworthy contemporaneous historical sources, whereas a systematic effort of decipherment would offer to people all over the world direct access to historical texts written in dead languages, thus irrevocably canceling Herodotus’ nonsensical report and, even more importantly, the later distortions that the Benedictine monks made on their worthless manuscripts.

In any case, had those fictional campaigns against ‘Greece’ had a shred of truth to them, they would have certainly been documented one way or another in various Old Achaemenid, Babylonian, Elamite, Imperial Aramaic, Egyptian hieroglyphic or other sources; but they were not.

Even worse, the meaningless and ludicrous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and their likes would have been commemorated by the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, and the Attalids all the way down to the Romans and the Eastern Romans. But we know quite well that the nonexistent, fictional past of the so-called Ancient Greek world was absolutely irrelevant to them: precisely because it had not yet been fabricated.

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Aristotle as Historical Forgery, the Western World’s Fake History & Rotten Foundations, and Prof. Jin Canrong’s Astute Comments

https://www.academia.edu/114770216/Aristotle_as_Historical_Forgery_the_Western_Worlds_Fake_History_and_Rotten_Foundations_and_Prof_Jin_Canrongs_Astute_Comments

Contents

I. Aristotle: a Major Founding Myth of the Western World

II. When, where and by whom was the Myth of Aristotle fabricated?

III. The Myth of Aristotle and its first Byproducts: Scholasticism, East-West Schism, the Crusades & the Sack of Constantinople (1204)

IV. Aristotelization: First Stage of the Westernization and the Colonization of the World

V. Aristotelization as Foundation of all the Western Forgeries: the so-called Judeo-Christian Heritage and the Fraud of Greco-Roman Civilization

VI. The Modern Western World as Disruption of History

VII. The Myth of Aristotle and the Monstrosity of Western Colonialism 

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Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran

Pre-publication of chapter X of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian–Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters VI, VII, VIII, IX and X form Part Three (Turkey and Iran beyond Politics and Geopolitics: Rejection of the Orientalist, Turcologist and Iranologist Fallacies about Achaemenid History) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.

Until now, 14 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 15th (out of 33). At the end of the present pre-publication, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in gray color. 

In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.

The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.

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Ahura Mazda, as preached by Zoroaster and as worshipped by the monotheistic Achaemenid dynasty, was heavily impacted by Assur (Ashur), the Sargonid Empire of Assyria, and the Assyrian monotheism, which is at the origin of every Biblical and Islamic concept of monotheism.

History of Religions is a field that was never duly explored by Western Iranologists in their effort to write the History of Ancient Iran and to represent spirituality, cult, mysticism, imperial epiphany, morality and transcendental faith in Pre-Islamic Iran. And for a very good reason! As it had happened in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia and Canaan for millennia before the rise of the Achaemenid dynasty, Iran was also the terrain in which numerous religious conflicts took place.

These spiritual and material clashes lasted long and were at times far more ferocious than a) the Catholic Frankish Crusades undertaken by the Western European rulers, b) the 4th–5th c. Christian massacres of hundreds of thousands of followers of the Ancient Egyptian, Berber, Roman, Greek and other religions, and c) the 4th–17th c. Christian killings of thousands of adepts of any theological-Christological system that happened to be considered as ‘heretical’ by the Roman Church, i.e. the Arians, the Monophysites (Miaphysites), the Nestorians, the Iconoclasts, the Paulicians, the Bogomiles, the Knights Templar, etc.

Although Western Iranologists several times managed to successfully identify the existence of opposite beliefs, concepts, cults and faiths in texts and monuments, they basically ended up with a very confusing and misleading representation of the History of Ancient Iranian religions. More specifically, they failed to systematize the presentation of all these opposite beliefs, faiths and religious systems, which were developed in Ancient Iran, and to denote them by means of independent specific names, which could eventually be merely conventional.

Yet, the existing historical sources reveal to us that without a systematized historical-religious study of the material record, the History of the Achaemenids, the Arsacids and the Sassanids will definitely remain largely incomprehensible. However, fully plunged into their catastrophic materialism, ideological militantism, and obdurate sectarianism, the racist academics of the Anglo-Saxon colonial countries have shown only little interest to accurately assess numerous historical facts on the basis of the existing textual/epigraphic evidence and to identify their reason as due to spiritual polarization, moral conflict, and religious clash.

They insidiously distorted the History of Ancient Iran by attributing socioeconomic causes and imperial motives to all the historical facts and developments that took place, thus projecting their wretched mindsets and perverse opinions onto the historical past that they purportedly wanted to ‘interpret’.

In this regard, we can find a very good example in the well-known case of turmoil that took place at the end of the reign of Kabujiya / Cambyses: the end of the great emperor, who invaded Egypt, Libya and the Sudan (i.e. Cush / Ancient Ethiopia), the pernicious attempt of the Magi to obtain imperial and spiritual power by helping the preposterous impostor Gaumata to usurp the throne, the ensuing chaotic situation, and the final prevalence of Darius I the Great testify to a formidable religious clash between two diametrically opposed and antagonistic priesthoods.

Behistun Inscription and relief, near Hamadan (Ecbatana, NW Iran): Darius I the Great steps on the body of the impostor Gaumata; the conspiracy against the Achaemenid court and the ensuing clash were entirely spiritual and religious of character. The Mithraic Magi never accepted the monotheistic preaching of Zoroaster which was sacrosanct for the Achaemenid court. That’s why in later periods the Mithraic Magi traveled to Rome and imposed their evil polytheism there.

This terrible confrontation reveals an enormous opposition between the irrevocably monotheistic Zoroastrian Achaemenid dynasty, imperial court, administration and the Zoroastrian priests (from one side) and (from the other side) the polytheistic Mithraic Magi, who repeatedly attempted to subvert Iran, control the imperial court, and then corrupt Zoroastrianism. The earliest cosmological myths and mysteries of Mithra (or Mehr), which seem to originate from the wider Khorasan region (today’s Northeastern Iran, Southeastern Uzbekistan, Northwestern Afghanistan, and Tajikistan), recount his exploit to slay the ‘celestial bovines’; much later, following the diffusion of Mithraism across Central and Western Europe, this trait gave birth to the evil religious, spiritual, and cosmological concept of tauroctony.

For the Achaemenid court and the vicars of Zoroastrian monotheism, Mithraism was an abomination. Different mythologization of the same divinity denotes always the existence of very divergent priesthoods, and it therefore testifies to a very dissimilar religion. One should never confuse between a) Mithra (Mehr) as a Zoroastrian divinity subordinated to Ahura Mazda and b) Mithra as the central divinity of Mithraism to which a totally contrasting array of counterfeit mythical themes were ascribed. About:

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/mithras/display.php?page=tauroctony

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tauroctony

Parthian relief from Zahhak Castle in East Azerbaijan province, Iran: a bird (possibly eagle) stands on the back of a ball. This may be the very original mythical narrative and form of Mithraic tauroctony.

A negative consequence of Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylonia is the fact that the contact with the millennia-long, spiritually powerful, polytheistic Babylonian priesthood of Marduk strengthened the Mithraic Magi enormously and enriched the Mithraic theology considerably. It was then that numerous polytheistic Babylonian concepts, traits, elements, themes and trends were transferred into the early Iranian Mithraism, notably the motif of the dying and resurrected Tammuz, the concept of ‘ab ovo’ Creation, the narrative of the powerful hero and hunter (with the traits of Gilgamesh / Nimrud being passed onto the Iranian Verethragna), and the theme of the mystical banquet. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumuzid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_egg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_cosmogony

https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cosmogony-i

https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cosmogony-ii

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/bahram-1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verethragna

Click to access Henkelman-Gilgamesh.pdf

https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/great-flood/flood3_t-gilgamesh/

https://www.ancient.eu/gilgamesh/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh

Above: Terracotta plaque of the Amorite Period (2000-1600 BCE) of Babylonia, depicting the earliest representation of Tammuz (Dumuzid in Sumerian) dead in his coffin, before his resurrection; below: Marduk depicted on a Kudurru stele of the Kassite Babylonian king Meli-Shipak II (1186-1172 BCE), one of the last kings of the Kassite dynasty.

Zoroastrianism stands in firm opposition to the ‘ab ovo creation’ concept (which is the earliest form of the evil and pathetic ‘Big Bang’ theory):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_egg#Zoroastrianism_mythology

The strong Zoroastrian faith of the Achaemenid rulers, their steadfastness, and their prevalence throughout the empire (xšāça) prevented the evil Magi from controlling spiritually and fanaticizing the masses with the aforementioned mythological topics in the central Iranian provinces, namely the Iranian plateau. However, Mithra and his evil Magi traveled southeastwards to the Indus Delta region and westwards to Anatolia, Caucasus and Scythia (Russia–Ukraine).

Actually, what had happened with the Iranian conquest of Babylonia was that the millennia-long Assyrian monotheistic–Babylonian polytheistic controversy, which had caused a myriad of wars in Mesopotamia and throughout the Orient before the rise of Cyrus the Great, found other means of expression, being reproduced among other nations. In fact, the Mesopotamian spiritual-religious confrontation was simply transplanted within Achaemenid Iran. It was not a matter of mere coincidence that the Achaemenids appeared as the spiritual, intellectual and cultural offspring of Sargonid Nineveh; it was a normal consequence of the fact that Zoroaster had lived in monotheistic Nineveh, was educated there, was initiated into the Assyrian imperial universalism, and later tried to transfer the doctrine among Iranians.  

The first film (movie) in the History of Mankind; the monotheistic Assyrian Emperor Tukulti Ninurta I (1244-1207 BCE) is portrayed twice, standing and then kneeling, in front of the aniconic representation of God as baetylus (betyl, i.e. a meteorite). From the Temple of Ishtar at Assur (Assyria), Iraq; nowadays in Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany

In terms of History of Religion, Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylonia (539 BCE) reversed, revenged and canceled the earlier downfall of Assyria and Nineveh (614-612 BCE) to the Babylonian armies of Nabopolassar I. In terms of Imperial History, Cyrus the Great postured as the God-blessed savior and the genuine restorer of the Sumerian – Akkadian – Assyrian-Babylonian universal(ist) monarchy, denouncing (and overthrowing) the Nabonid dynasty of Babylonia (625-539 BCE) in the same manner the Sargonids of Assyria (722-609 BCE) had decried Babylonian polytheism and Elamite insanity for millennia. About:

https://www.livius.org/articles/person/cyrus-the-great/

https://www.livius.org/sources/content/cyrus-cylinder/

https://www.livius.org/sources/content/mesopotamian-chronicles-content/abc-7-nabonidus-chronicle/

https://www.livius.org/pictures/a/tablets/abc-07-nabonidus-chronicle-obverse/

http://www.etana.org/node/6612

https://www.ancient.eu/Cyrus_the_Great/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Babylon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabonidus_Chronicle

Assur in symbolic representation

Epiphany of the only God Ashur (Assur) above the Tree of Life, next to it the Assyrian emperor Ashurnasirpal II (883-858 BCE), represented twice, officiates as emperor and as high priest, under the blessing of Assur. From the throne room of Kalhu (modern Nimrud in North Iraq), capital of Ashurnasirpal II

Of course, despite the evident Assyrian spiritual, intellectual, cultural and artistic impact, Zoroastrian monotheism is an original religious phenomenon and all the therein incorporated Assyrian monotheistic concepts were stated in purely Iranian terms and codes, symbols, connotations and forms. But this fact triggers two very simple questions:

– What did the original Iranian religion before Zoroaster look like?

– Was the original Iranian religion before Zoroaster a religious system that looked closer to Zoroaster’s preaching or to an early form of Mithraism?

Due to the lack of textual evidence antedating the establishment of the Iranian monarchy by Cyrus the Great, it is difficult to respond straightforwardly to these questions. Old Achaemenid cuneiform seems to have been invented by Assyrian imperial scribes only few decades prior to the establishment of the Iranian monarchy; the Iranian imperial scribes were indeed well-educated in Sargonid Nineveh at the time of Assurbanipal (669-625 BCE); that’s why they were also perfectly acquainted with, and very well versed into, Assyrian-Babylonian, Elamite, and (to some extent) Sumerian languages and cuneiform writings (Sumerian was already a dead language for 1500 years before the early Achaemenids; so to them it was like Latin to Western Europeans today).

Assur in Assyria (above) & Ahura Mazda in Iran (below)

Ashurnasirpal II is hunting under the auspices of Ashur

Darius defeated his enemies under the auspices of Ahura Mazda

However, we have several indications that, among the Iranian-Turanian nations, there was a long past of grave religious conflicts that ended with the prevalence of Zoroastrianism under Cyrus the Great.  

First, all posterior sources narrate the ‘mythical’ and ‘heroic’ stages of Iranian Pre-history and Proto-history as reflecting a dual environment of permanent conflict between the Good and the Evil. Negative thought, word, action or deed among humans is indeed of spiritual origin and impact (Ahriman).

Second, the basics of Zoroastrian cosmogony and cosmology, the context of Zoroastrian moral world vision, and the quintessence of Zoroastrian soteriology show a certain number of potential parallels with Tengrism, i.e. the earlier form of Turanian religion. And this is exactly what has been missing until now in every historical-religious research about the Achaemenid Empire: the strong link between the pre-Zoroastrian Iranian–Turanian religious monotheistic system and Tengrism. There are many linguistic affinities in this regard; furthermore, basic Zoroastrian religious terms reflect pre-Zoroastrian monotheistic fundamentals that had evidently Turkic origin. The topic is very vast, but at this point, I will try to place it in a brief diagram:

Zoroastrianism is the religion based on Zoroaster’s preaching, which consists in the systematization of earlier Turanian Tengrism, after a deep spiritual study of Assyrian monotheism, cosmogony, cosmology, mythical worldview, imperial universalism, eschatology and soteriology; it seems that what Zoroaster, the Turanian prophet from Atropatene / Azerbaijan truly did was to contextualize elements of the early Tengrism and Tengri-related concepts within the Mesopotamian spiritual-cultural order, while preserving the Turanian–Iranian terms; he therefore created a new dogma and doctrine.

Supreme symbols of Tengrism: the sacred circle in the interior of the Mongolian yurt

Since the Mithraic Magi of the Achaemenid times were so evidently subversive against the universal empire of Cyrus the Great and Cambyses, we can deduce that the early Iranian Magi, who opposed Zoroaster and his system, defended an earlier, polytheistic system of faith that was in straight clash with the pre-Zoroastrian form of Tengrism, which was the original faith of the Turanians and the Iranians before the establishment of the Achaemenid dynasty. A series of systematic linguistic studies and historical-religious researches about the said topics would lead to impressive results. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengri

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashavan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashina_tribe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amesha_Spenta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6kt%C3%BCrks

https://www.discovermongolia.mn/blogs/the-ancient-religion-of-tengriism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengrism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithra

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FORTHCOMING

Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey

2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists

By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu

(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTENTS

PART ONE. INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities

A. Examples of fake national names

a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!

b) Tataria – Not Russia!

c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!

d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!

e) Khazaria – not Israel!

f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!

B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish

C. The Preamble to My Response

CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.

CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.

CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment

A. Orientalism

B. Conceptualization

C. Contextualization

D. Concealment

PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT

CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece

PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY

CHAPTER VI:  The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times

CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists

CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan

CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran

PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM

CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED  

CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another

CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’

CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur

CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World

CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West

CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk

PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION

CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?

————————————————————- 

List of the already pre-published chapters of the book

Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.

CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period

https://www.academia.edu/105386978/Alexander_the_Great_as_Iranian_King_of_Kings_the_fallacy_of_Hellenism_and_the_nonexistent_Hellenistic_Period

CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty

https://www.academia.edu/52541355/Parthian_Turan_an_Anti_Persian_dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

https://www.academia.edu/105539884/Parthian_Turan_and_the_Philhellenism_of_the_Arsacids

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CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire

https://www.academia.edu/105053815/Arsacid_and_Sassanid_Iran_and_the_wars_against_the_Mithraic_Christian_Roman_Empire

CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism

https://www.academia.edu/105117675/Sassanid_Iran_Turan_Kartir_Roman_Empire_Christianity_Mani_and_Manichaeism

CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates

https://www.academia.edu/96142922/Iran_Turan_Manichaeism_and_Islam_during_the_Migration_Period_and_the_Early_Caliphates

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CHAPTER XVII: Iran–Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th-8th c. CE

https://www.academia.edu/105292787/Iran_Turan_and_the_Western_Orientalist_distortions_about_the_successful_early_expansion_of_Islam_during_the_7th_8th_c_CE

CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History

https://www.academia.edu/105565861/The_systematic_dissociation_of_Islam_from_the_Ancient_Oriental_History

—————————————   

CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’

https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

——————————————  

CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

https://www.academia.edu/61193026/The_Fake_Persianization_of_the_Abbasid_Caliphate

——————————————– 

CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash

https://www.academia.edu/96519269/From_Ferdowsi_to_the_Seljuk_Turks_Nizam_al_Mulk_Nizami_Ganjavi_Jalal_ad_Din_Rumi_and_Haji_Bektash

————————————————  

CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur

https://www.academia.edu/104034939/From_Genghis_Khan_Nasir_al_Din_al_Tusi_and_Hulagu_to_Timur_Tamerlane_

CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order

https://www.academia.edu/105230290/Timur_Tamerlane_as_a_Turanian_Muslim_descendant_of_the_Great_Hero_Manuchehr_his_exploits_and_triumphs_and_the_slow_rise_of_the_Turanian_Safavid_Order

CHAPTER XXVI: The Timurid Era as the Peak of the Islamic Civilization: Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

https://www.academia.edu/105267173/The_Timurid_Era_as_the_Peak_of_the_Islamic_Civilization_Shah_Rukh_and_Ulugh_Beg_the_Astronomer_Emperor

———————————————————————–

Download the chapter (text only) in PDF:

Download the chapter (pictures & legends) in PDF:

History of Achaemenid Iran 1B, Course I – Achaemenid beginnings 1B

Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Outline

Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia

6- Western Orientalist historiography

The modern Western European specialists on Iran were first based on the Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin sources and on travelers’ records and descriptions. On his way to China, the Italian Franciscan monk Odoric of Pordenone was the first European to probably visit (in 1320) the ruins of Parsa (Persepolis) that he called ‘Comerum’. The site was then known as Chehel Minar (چهل منار /i.e. forty minarets) and later as Takht-e Jamshid (تخت جمشید/i.e. the throne of Jamshid, a great hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography about which we discussed). The Venetian Giosafat Barbaro visited the same location in 1474 and, being the victim of the delusions about which I spoke already, he attributed the erection of the majestic monuments to the Jews!

After the rise of the Safavid dynasty and the formation of the two alliances (the French with the Ottomans and the English with the Iranians), an English merchant visited Persepolis in 1568 and wrote a description that was included in Richard Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages’ (1582). Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions were first noticed and reported by the Portuguese António de Gouveia, who visited the site in 1602 and wrote about it in 1611. It is only in 1618 that the Spanish ambassador (to the court of the Safavid Shah of Iran Abbas I/1571-1629; reigned after 1588) García de Silva Figueroa associated the location with the great Achaemenid capital that was known as Persepolis in the Ancient Greek and Latin sources.

The Italian Pietro Della Valle spent five years (1616-1621) in Mesopotamia and Iran, visited Persepolis (1621), made copies of several inscriptions that he noticed there and took them back to Europe, along with clay tablets and bricks that he found in Babylon and Ur. This was the first cuneiform documentation brought to Europe. With respect to Persepolis he wrote that only 25 of the 72 original columns were still standing.

Good indication of the lunacy that Western Europeans experienced at those days due to their erroneous reading of the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historical sources about Achaemenid Iran is the following fact: after traveling in Asia and Africa, Sir Thomas Herbert wrote in his book (1638) that in Persepolis he saw several lines of strange signs curved in the walls. These were, of course, Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions, but at the time, the modern term ‘cuneiform’ had not been invented; however, excessively enthused with Greek literature about Ancient Iran, he ‘concluded’ that these characters ‘resembled Greek’! He mistook cuneiform for Greek! So biased his approach was!

The term ‘cuneiform’ (‘Keilschrift’ in German) was coined (1700) by the German scholar and explorer Engelbert Kaempfer, who spent ten years (1683-1693) in many parts of Asia. The monumental site of the Achaemenid capital was also visited by the famous Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruijn (1704) and the famous jeweler Sir Jean Chardin, who also worked as agent of Shah Abbas II for the purchase of jewels. He was the first to publish (1711) pertinent copies of several cuneiform inscriptions.

The German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr took the research to the next stage when he copied and published (1764) the famous rock reliefs and inscriptions of Darius the Great; in fact, he brought complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe. He realized that he had to do with three writing systems and that the simpler (which he named ‘Class I’) comprised 42 characters, being apparently an alphabetic script. Niebuhr’s publication was used by many other scholars and explorers, notably the Germans Oluf Gerhard Tychsen, who published the most advanced research on the topic in 1798, and Friedrich Münter, who confirmed the alphabetic nature of the script (in 1802). 

The reconstitution of the Iranian past proved to be far more difficult a task than that of the Ancient Egyptian heritage. This is so because, if we consider the Old Achaemenid Iranian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphics as the earliest stages of the two respective languages and scripts, Coptic (the latest stage of the Egyptian language) was always known in Europe throughout the Christian and Modern times, whereas Pahlavi and Middle Persian (the corresponding stages of the Iranian languages) were totally unknown. For this reason, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, the first French Iranologist and Indologist, played a key role in the decipherment of the cuneiform writing, although he did not spend time exploring it. But having learned Pahlavi and Farsi among the Parsis of India, he managed to study Avestan and he translated the Avesta as the sacred text of the Zoroastrians was preserved among the Parsi community. Pretty much like Coptic was essential to Champollion for the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the pioneering work of Anquetil-Duperron and the knowledge of Avestan, Pahlavi, Middle Persian and Farsi helped the French Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend make critical breakthroughs and advance the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid.   

Grotefend’s Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1802, but it was rejected; in fact, he had deciphered only eight (8) letters until that moment, but most of his assumptions were correct. He had however to wait for an incredible confirmation; after Champollion completed his first step toward the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, he read the Egyptian text of a quadrilingual inscription on the famous Caylus vase (named after a 18th c. French collector). Then, Champollion’s associate, the Orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, announced that Grotefend’s reading of the imperial Achaemenid name ‘Xerxes’ did indeed correspond to what the Egyptian hieroglyphic text testified to. This situation generated an impetus among Orientalist scholars and explorers; until the late 1830s and the early 1840s, Grotefend, the French Eugène Burnouf, the Norwegian-German Christian Lassen, and Sir Henry Rawlinson completed the task.

Shush (Susa), an Elamite and later an Achaemenid capital, was explored in 1851, 1885-1886, 1894-1899, and then systematically excavated by the French Jacques de Morgan (1897-1911), whereas Pasargad (the early Achaemenid capital) was first explored by the German Ernst Herzfeld in 1905. Persepolis was excavated quite later, only in the 1930s by Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Not far from Hamadan (the ancient capital Hegmataneh/Ekbatana of the Medes), the splendid site of Mount Behistun (Bisotun) had become world-famous even before it was excavated (initially in 1904) by Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson (sponsored by the British Museum). This was due to the fact that the famous trilingual Behistun inscription and the associated reliefs were carved at about 100 m above ground level on a cliff, and explorers had to scale the cliff. Several fascinating descriptions of the extraordinary location were written by travelers and visitors, before academic work was carried out there. Putting his life in risk, Rawlinson copied the Old Achaemenid text in 1835, and this helped him advance considerably the decipherment of the script. 

Without the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid, it would be impossible for Rawlinson to decipher the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, and later for others to read the Hittite script which enabled us to have access to the most important and the most original Anatolian literature of pre-Christian times.

Behistun (Farsi: Bisotun / Old Iranian: Bagastana, i.e. ‘the place of God’) was mentioned by Ctesias, who totally misunderstood the inscription, attributing it to the ‘Babylonian’ Queen Semiramis and describing it as a dedication to Zeus! In reality, the text is part of the Annals of Emperor Darius I the Great, duly detailing his victory over a rebellion; the Iranian monarch dedicated his triumph to Ahura Mazda. Now, Semiramis seems to be an entirely misplaced Ancient Greek legend about the historical Queen of Assyria (not Babylonia!) Shammuramat. The Assyrian queen was consort of Shamshi Adad V and co-regent with her son Adad-nirari III (during his reign’s early phase). But the Assyrian Queen had nothing to do with Mount Behistun and the Achaemenid Iranian inscription.

In the early 17th c., Pietro della Valle was the first Western European to come to Behistun and sketch the remains. As a matter of fact, many European travelers and explorers visited Behistun, saw the impressive inscription, and disastrously misinterpreted it, due to their preconceived ideas, mistaken readings, and unrealistic assumptions.

A foolish English diplomat and adventurer, Robert Sherley, visited the location in 1598, and he considered the astounding reliefs and the inscriptions as ‘Christian’! Napoleon’s subordinate, General Claude-Matthieu, Comte de Gardane, visited the place in 1807 only to see in the monuments the representation of ‘Christ and his twelve apostles’! In 1817, Sir Robert Ker Porter thought that the impressive relief and inscriptions detailed the deeds of Emperor Shalmaneser V of Assyria and the transportation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to the NE confines of Assyria. Last, quite interestingly, the German spiritual-scientific society Ahnenerbe, which used Hitler for their non-Nazi, highly secretive projects, explored Behistun in 1938.

7- Early sources of Iranian History: Assyrian-Babylonian Cuneiform  

The early sources of Iranian History are Assyrian-Babylonian historical documents pertaining to the military, commercial and/or administrative activities of the Neo-Assyrian kings in the Zagros mountains and the Iranian plateau; these sources shed light on the earliest stages of Median, Persian and Iranian History, when the ancestors of the Achaemenids were just one of the many tribes that settled somewhere east of the borders of the Assyrian Empire.

Since the 3rd millennium BCE, Sumerian and Akkadian historical sources referred to nomads, settlers, villages, cities, strongholds and at times kingdoms situated in the area of today’s Iran. Mainly these tribes and/or realms were barbarians who either partly damaged or totally destroyed the Mesopotamian civilization and order. That’s why they were always described with markedly negative terms. On the other hand, we know through archaeological evidence that several important sites were located in the Iranian plateau, constituting either small kingdoms or outstanding entrepôts and commercial centers linking Mesopotamia with either India or Central Asia and China.

For instance, settled somewhere in the Middle Zagros, the Guti of the 3rd millennium BCE constituted a barbaric periphery that finally destroyed Agade (Akkad), the world’s first empire ever; and in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Kassites descended from Middle Zagros to Babylon, after the Old Babylonian kingdom was destroyed (in 1596) by the Hittite Mursilis I, and they set up a profane kingdom (Kassite dynasty of Babylonia) that the Assyrians never accepted as a heir of the old Sumerian-Akkadian civilization.

As both ethnic groups learned Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian, their rulers wrote down their names, and thus we know that neither the Guti nor the Kassites were a properly speaking Iranian nation; the present documentation is still scarce in this regard, but there are indications that some of these people bore Turanian (or Turkic) names. 

For thousands of years, South Zagros and the southwestern confines of today’s Iran belonged to Elam, the main rival of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. Viewed as the true negation of the genius of Mesopotamian civilization, Elam was ruled by the ‘kings of Shushan and Anshan’; the two regions corresponded to Susa (and the entire province of Khuzestan in today’s Iran) and South Zagros respectively. The name that modern scholarship uses to denote this nation and kingdom is merely the Sumerian-Akkadian appellation of that country. In Elamite, the eastern neighbors of the Sumerians called their land ‘Haltamti’. Their language was neither Indo-European (like Old Achaemenid and Modern Farsi) nor Semitic (like Assyrian-Babylonian); it was also unrelated to Sumerian, Hurrian and Hattic, the languages of the indigenous populations in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Recent linguistic research offers tentative approaches to the relationship between Elamite and the Dravidian languages, thus making of it the ancestral language of more than 250 million people.

Elamite linear and cuneiform writings bear witness to the life, the society, the economy, the faith and the culture of the Elamites, as well as to their relations with the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But they cannot help us reconstitute the History of the Iranian plateau, because the Elamites never went beyond the limits of South Zagros.

With the rise, expansion and prevalence of Assyria (from the 14th to the 7th c. BCE), we have for the first time a Mesopotamian Empire that showed great importance for the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau; consequently, this means that, for the said period, we have more texts about these regions, which earlier constituted the periphery of the Mesopotamian world, but were gradually incorporated into the ever expanding Assyrian Empire. Thanks to Assyrian cuneiform texts, we know names of tribal chieftains and petty kings, cities, fortresses, ethnic groups, etc., and we can assess the various degrees of Assyrianization of each of them; but it is only at the time of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BCE) that we first find a mention of the Medes and the Persians. The former are named ‘Amadaya’ and later ‘Madaya’, whereas the latter are called ‘Parsua’ (or Parsamaš or Parsumaš).

Assyrian cuneiform texts about the Medes and the Persians more specifically are abundant during the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) and at the time of the Sargonids (722-609 BCE). It is noteworthy that the Parsua were first located in the region of today’s Sanandaj in Western Iran and later they relocated to the ancient Elamite region of Anshan (today’s Iranian province of Fars), which was devastated and emptied from its population by Assurbanipal (640 BCE). After the great Assyrian victory, which also involved the destruction of Susa, Assyrian texts mention the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, Cyrus I, as Kuraš, king of Parsumaš. He sent gifts to Nineveh and he also dispatched his eldest son (‘Arukku’ in Assyrian from a hypothetical ‘Aryauka’ in Ancient Iranian) there – nominally as a hostage, but essentially as a student of Assyrian culture, sacerdotal organization, and imperial administration and procedures.

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III

Tiglathpileser III

Sarrukin (Sargon of Assyria) with his son and successor Sennacherib (right)

8- Pre-History in the Iranian plateau, and Mesopotamia

During the 4th, the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE, the major hitherto excavated Iranian archaeological sites are the following:

Tepe Sialk

Located near the modern city of Kashan, in the center of the Iranian plateau, and excavated in the 1930s by the Russian-French Roman Ghirshman, the site was first occupied in the period 6000-5500 BCE. The remains of the zikkurat (dating back to around 3000 BCE) show that it was the largest Mesopotamian style zikkurat. Tepe Sialk IV level (2nd half of the 4th millennium BCE) testifies to evident links with Sumer (Jemdet Nasr, Uruk) and Elam (Susa III). The site was abandoned and reoccupied in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BCE (Tepe Sialk V and VI). Its location and the archaeological findings let us understand that the site was a key commercial center that linked Mesopotamia with Central Asia and China.

Tureng Tepe

Located close to Gorgan in Turkmen Sahra (NE Iran) and excavated by the American Frederick Roelker Wulsin in the 1930s and by the French Jean Deshayes in the 1950s, the site was inhabited in the Neolithic and then continually from 3100 to 1900 BCE, when it appears to have been the major among many other regional settlements and in evident contact with both, Mesopotamia and Central Asia. There was a disruption, and the site was occupied again only in the 7th c. BCE (Tureng Tepe IV A) by newcomers.

Tepe Yahya

Located at ca. 250 km north of Bandar Abbas and 220 km south of Kerman, the site was of crucial importance for the contacts between Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley; it was also in contact with Central Asia. Excavated by the Czech-American Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky, the site was inhabited from ca. 5000 to 2200 BCE and then again after 1000 BCE. The genuine ‘Yahya Culture’ covered the first half of the 4th millennium BCE. The Proto-Elamite phase started around 3400 BCE (Tepe Yahya IV C); few proto-Elamite tablets have been unearthed from that stratum. This period corresponds to the strata Susa Cb and Tepe Sialk IV. During the 3rd millennium BCE, the site appears to have been the center of production of hard stone carving artifacts; dark stone vessels produced here were found / excavated in Mesopotamia. Similar vessels and fragments of vessels have been found in Sumerian temples in Mesopotamia, in Elam, in the Indus River Valley, and in Central Asia.

Not far from Tepe Yahya are situated several important sites that testify to the strong ties that the entire region had with Sumer and Elam in the West, the Indus River Valley in the East and Central Asia in the North; Jiroft gave the name to the ‘Jiroft culture’ which is better documented in the nearby site of Konar Sandal and covers the 3rd millennium BCE. Further in the east and close to the triangle border point (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan), Shahr-e Sukhteh was an enormous site which thrived between 3200 BCE and the end of the 3rd millennium BCE. It was associated with both, the ‘Jiroft culture’ and the Helmand culture, which was attested in several sites in South Afghanistan. Elamite texts were also found in that site, which already offered many surprises, involving the first known artificial eyeball and the earliest tables game with dice.

Several important prehistoric Mesopotamian sites demonstrate parallels and contacts with the aforementioned sites, notably

– Tell Halaf (near Ras al Ayn in NE Syria; the Neolithic phase lasted from 6100 to 5400 BCE, and the Bronze Age covers the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE),

– Tell al Ubaid (near Ur in Dhi Qar governorate; 6500-3700 BCE),

– Tell Arpachiyah (near Nineveh; the site was occupied in the Neolithic period, like Tell Halaf and Ubaid),

– Tepe Gawra (close to Nineveh; the site was occupied from 5000 to 1500 BCE),

– Tell Jemdet Nasr (near Kish in Central Iraq; 3100-2300 BCE), and

– Uruk {near Samawah in South Iraq; type site for the Uruk period (4000-3100 BCE), it was a major Sumerian kingdom and it was the world’s most populated city in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE with ca. 40000 inhabitants and another 90000 residents in the suburbs}.

In the next course, I will present a brief diagram of the History of the Mesopotamian kingdoms and Empires down to Sargon of Assyria – with focus on the relations with Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau.

Tepe Sialk

Tureng tepe

Tepe Yahya

————–

To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α

By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

https://vk.com/video429864789_456239757

https://ok.ru/video/5416043547224

https://www.brighteon.com/ca749192-7c1b-4a9d-901d-5f530611c965

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1B

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_9011%2Fall

https://ok.ru/video/5452334828120

https://www.brighteon.com/491e7afe-d4f6-4100-909c-3f35b9c57323

————————   

To listen to the audio, clink the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_8990%2Fall

https://megalommatis.podbean.com/e/history-of-achaemenid-iran-1a-course-i-achaemenid-beginnings-1a/

—————————— 

Download the course in PDF:

History of Achaemenid Iran 1A, Course I, Achaemenid beginnings 1A

Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Tuesday, 27 December 2022

Outline

Introduction; Iranian Achaemenid historiography; Problems of historiography continuity; Iranian posterior historiography; foreign historiography; Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia

1- Introduction

Welcome to the 40-hour seminar on Achaemenid Iran!

It is my intention to deliver a rather unconventional academic presentation of the topic, mostly implementing a correct and impartial conceptual approach to the earliest stage of Iranian History. Every subject, in and by itself, offers to every researcher the correct means of the pertinent approach to it; due to this fact, the personal background, viewpoints and thoughts or eventually the misperceptions and the preconceived ideas of an explorer should not be allowed to affect his judgment.

If before 200 years, the early Iranologists had the possible excuse of studying a topic on the basis of external and posterior historical sources, this was simply due to the fact that the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing had not yet been deciphered. Still, even those explorers failed to avoid a very serious mistake, namely that of taking the external and posterior historical sources at face value. We cannot afford to blindly accept a secondary historical source without first examining intentions, motives, scopes and aims of it.

As the seminar covers only the History of the Achaemenid dynasty, I don’t intend to add an introductory course about the History of the Iranian Studies and the re-discovery of Iran by Western explorers of the colonial powers. However, I will provide a brief outline of the topic; this is essential because mainstream Orientalists have reached their limits and cannot provide us with a real insight, eliminating the numerous and enduring myths, fallacies, and deliberately naïve approaches to Achaemenid Iran.

In fact, most of the specialists of Ancient Iran never went beyond the limitations set by the delusional Ancient ‘Greek’ (in reality: Ionian and Attic) literature about the Medes and the Persians (i.e. the Iranians), because they never offered themselves the task to explain the reasons for the aberration that the Ancient Ionian and Attic authors created in their minds and wrote in their texts about Iran. This was utterly puerile and ludicrous.

And this brings us to the other major innovation that I intend to offer during this seminar, namely the proper, comprehensive contextualization of the research topic, i.e. the History of Achaemenid Iran. To give some examples in this regard, I would mention

a – the tremendous, multilayered and multifaceted impact of the Mesopotamian World, Civilization and Heritage on the formation of the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, and more specifically, the determinant role played by the Sargonid Empire of Assyria on the emergence of the first Empire on the Iranian plateau;

b – the ferocious opposition of the Mithraic Magi to the Zoroastrian Achaemenid court; 

c – the involvement of the Anatolian Magi in the misperception of Iran by the Ancient Greeks; and

d- the utilization of the Ancient Greek cities by the Anti-Iranian side of the Egyptian priesthoods, princes and administrators.  

To therefore introduce the proper contextualization, I will expand on the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Sargonid times, not only to state the first mentions of the Medes and the Persians in History, but also to show the importance attributed by the Neo-Assyrian Emperors to the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau, as well as the numerous peoples, settled or nomadic, who inhabited that region. 

There is an enormous lacuna in the Orientalist disciplines; there are no interdisciplinary studies in Assyriology and Iranology. This plays a key role in the misperception of the ancient oriental civilizations and in the mistaken evaluation (or rather under-estimation) of the momentous impact that they had on the formation of the World History. There are no isolated cultures and independent civilizations as dogmatic and ignorant Western archaeologists pretend.

Only if one studies and evaluates correctly the colossal impact of the Ancient Mesopotamian world on Iran, can one truly understand the Achaemenid Empire in its real dimensions.

2- Iranian Achaemenid historiography

A. Achaemenid imperial inscriptions produced on solemn occasions

Usually multilingual texts written by the imperial scribes of the emperors Cyrus the Great, Darius I the Great, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, Darius II, Artaxerxes II, and Artaxerxes III, as well as of the ancestral rulers Ariaramnes and Arsames.

Languages and writing systems:

– Old Achaemenid Iranian (cuneiform-alphabetic; the official imperial language)

– Babylonian (cuneiform-syllabic; to offer a testimony of historical continuity and legitimacy, following the Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great, who presented himself as king of Babylon)

– Elamite (cuneiform-logo-syllabic; to portray the Persians in particular as the heirs of the ancient land of Anshan and Sushan that the Assyrians and the Babylonians named ‘Elam’ and the indigenous population called ‘Haltamti’ / The first Achaemenid to present himself as ‘king of Anshan’ is Cyrus the Great and the reference is found in his Cylinder unearthed in Babylon.)

and

– Egyptian Hieroglyphic (if the inscription or the monument was produced in Egypt, since the Achaemenids were also pharaohs of Egypt, starting with Kabujiya/Cambyses)

Imperial inscriptions are found in: Babylon (Cyrus Cylinder), Pasargad, Behistun, Hamadan, Ganj-e Nameh, Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rustam, Susa, Suez (Egypt), Gherla (Romania), Van (Turkey), and on various items

B. Persepolis Administrative Archives

This consists in an enormous documentation that has not yet been fully studied; it is not written in Old Achaemenid as one could expect but mainly in Elamite cuneiform. It consists of two groups, namely

– the Persepolis Fortification Archive, and

– the Persepolis Treasury Archive.

The Persepolis Fortification Archive was unearthed in the fortification area, i.e. the northeastern confines of the enormous platform of the Achaemenid capital Parsa (Persepolis), in the 1930s. It comprises of more than 30000 tablets (fragmentary or entire) that were written in the period 509-494 BCE (at the time of Darius I). The tablets were written in Susa and other parts of Fars and the territory of the ancient kingdom of Elam that vanished in the middle of the 7th c. (more than 130 years before these texts were written). Around 50 texts had Aramaic glosses. More than 2000 tablets have been published and translated. These texts are records of transactions, distribution of food, provisioning of workers, transportation of commodities, etc.;  few tablets were written in other languages, namely Old Iranian (1), Babylonian (1), Phrygian (1) and Greek (1).

The Persepolis Treasury Archive was found in the northeastern room of the Treasury of Xerxes. It contains more than 750 tablets and fragments (in Elamite) and more than 100 have been published. They all date back in period 492-458 BCE. These tablets are either letters or memoranda dispatched by imperial officials to the head of the Treasury; they concern the payment of workmen, the issue of silver, and other administrative procedures.  Only one tablet was written in Babylonian.

The entire documentation offers valuable information as regards the function of various imperial services, namely the couriers, the satraps, the imperial messengers, the imperial storehouse, etc. The archives shed light on the origin of the imperial administrators, as ca. 1900 personal names have been recorded: 10% were Elamites (who had apparently survived for long far from their country after the destruction of Susa by Assurbanipal (640 BCE), fewer were Babylonians, and the outright majority consisted of Iranians (Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Sakas, Arians, etc.).

C. Imperial Aramaic

The diffusion of the use of Aramaic started already in the Neo-Assyrian times and during the 7th c. BCE; the creation of the ‘Royal Road’, the systematization of the transportation, the improvement of communications, and the formation of the network of land-, sea- and desert routes that we now call ‘Silk-, Spice- and Perfume- Road’ during the Achaemenid times helped further expand the use of Aramaic. The linguistic assimilation of the Babylonians, the Jews and the Phoenicians with the Aramaeans only strengthened the diffusion of the Aramaic, which became the second international language (‘lingua franca’) in the History of the Mankind (after the Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian). Gradually, Aramaic became an official Achaemenid language after the Old Achaemenid Iranian.

Except the Aramaic texts attested in the Persepolis Administrative Archives, thousands of Aramaic texts of the Achaemenid times shed light onto the society, the economy, the administration, the military organization, the trade, the religions, the cults, the culture and the spirituality attested in various provinces of the Iranian Empire. At this point, only indicatively, I mention few significant groups of texts:

– the Elephantine papyri and ostraca (except Aramaic, they were written in Hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Coptic, Alexandrian Koine, and Latin) – 5th and 4th c. BCE,

– the Hermopolis Aramaic papyri,

– the Padua Aramaic papyri, and

– the Khalili Collection of Aramaic Documents from Bactria (48 texts written on leather, papyrus, stone or clay, dating from the period 353-324 BCE, and mainly from the reign of Artaxerxes III whereas the most recent dates from the reign of Alexander the Great).

Here I have to add that the widespread use of Imperial Aramaic and its use as a second official language for Achaemenid Iran brought an end to the use of the Elamite (in the middle of the 5th c.) and, after the end of the Achaemenid dynasty and the split of the state of Alexander the Great, contributed to the formation of two writing systems, namely Parthian and Pahlavi which were in use during the Arsacid and the Sassanid times. Imperial Aramaic helped establish many other writing systems, but this goes beyond the limits of the present seminar.

3- Problems of historiography continuity

There are no historical references to the Achaemenid dynasty made at the time of the Arsacids (Ashkanian: 250 BCE-224 CE) and the Sassanids 224-651 CE); this situation is due to many factors:

– the prevalence of another Iranian nation of probably Turanian origin, namely the Parthians and the Arsacid dynasty,

– the rise of the anti-Achaemenid, anti-Zoroastrian Magi who tried to impose Mithraism throughout Iran during the Arsacid times,

– the formation of an oral epic tradition and the establishment of a legendary historiography about the pre-Arsacid past during the Sassanid times, and

– the scarcity of written sources and the terrible destructions that occurred in Iran during the Late Antiquity, the Islamic era, and the Modern times (early Islamic conquests, divisions of the Abbasid times, Mongol invasions, Safavid-Ottoman wars, Western colonial looting, etc.).

This situation raised Western academic questions of Iranian identity, continuity, and historicity. But this attempt is futile. Iranian historiography of Islamic times shows that these questions were fully misplaced.

4- Iranian posterior historiography (Iranian historiography of Islamic times)

With Tabari (839-923) and his voluminous History of Prophets and Kings we realize that there were, in spite of the destructions caused because of the Islamic conquests, historical documents on which he was based to expand about the Sassanid dynasty; actually one out of the 40 volumes of the most recent translation of Tabari to English (published by the State University of New York Press from 1985 through 2007) is dedicated to the History of Sassanid Iran (vol. 5). And the previous volume (vol. 4) covers the History of Achaemenid and Arsacid Iran, Alexander the Great, Nabonid Babylonia, Assyria and Ancient Israel and Judah.  

Other important Iranian historians of the Islamic times, like Abu’l-Fadl Bayhaqi (995-1077), Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318) who wrote the truly first World History, Alaeddin Aṭa Malik Juvaynī (1226-1283), and Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi (ca. 1370-1454), did not expand much on pre-Islamic periods as the focus of their writing was on contemporaneous developments.

However, the aforementioned historians and all the authors, who are classified in this category, represent only one dimension of Iranian historiography of Islamic times. A totally different approach and literature have been illustrated by Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings). Abu ‘l Qasem Ferdowsi (940-1025) was not the first to compose an epic in order to standardize in mythical terms and legendary concepts the pre-Islamic Iranian past; but he was the most successful and the most illustrious. That is why many other epic poets followed his example, notably the Azeri Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209) and the Turkic Indian Amir Khusraw (1253-1325).

Within the context of this poetical historiography, historical emperors of pre-Islamic Iran appear as legendary figures only to be then viewed as materialization of divine patterns. The origin of this transcendental historiography seems to be retraced in the Sassanid times, but all the major themes are clearly of Zoroastrian identity and can therefore be attributed to the Achaemenid world perception and world conceptualization.

It is essential at this point to state that, until the imposition of modern Western colonial academic and educational standards in Iran, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and the corpus of Iranian legendary historiography was the backbone of the Iranian cultural, intellectual and educational identity.

It is a matter of academic debate whether an original text named Khwaday-Namag, written during the Sassanid times, and now lost, is at the very origin of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography. The 19th c. German Orientalist Theodor Nöldeke is credited with this theory that has not yet been proved.

All the same, the spiritual standards of this approach are detected in the Achaemenid times.

5- Foreign historiography

Ancient Greek (in reality, Ionian and Attic), Ancient Hebrew and Latin sources of Achaemenid History exist, but first they are external, second they appear to be posterior in their largest part, and third they often bear witness to astounding inaccuracies, fables, untrustworthy data, misplaced focus, excessive verbosity without real substance, and -above all- an enormous and irreconcilable misunderstanding of the Iranian Achaemenid reality, values, world view, mindset, and behavior.

The Ancient Hebrew sources shed light on issues that were apparently critical to the tiny and unimportant, Jewish minority of the Achaemenid Empire; however, these Biblical narratives concern facts that were absolutely insignificant to the imperial authorities of Parsa. One critical issue is concealed by modern scholars though; although all the nations of the Empire were regularly mentioned in the Achaemenid inscriptions and depicted on bas reliefs, the Jews were not. This undeniable fact irrevocably conditions the supposed ‘importance’ of Biblical texts like Ezra, Esther, Nehemiah, etc. All the same, these foreign historical sources are important for the Jews.

The Ionian and Attic accounts of events that were composed by the Carian renegade Herodotus, the Dorian Ctesias, and the Athenian Xenophon present an even more serious problem. They happened to be for many centuries (16th – 19th c.) the bulk of the historical documentation that Western European academics had access to as regards Achaemenid Iran. This situation produced grave biases among Western academics, because they took all these sources at face value since they had no access to original documentation. The grave trouble persisted even after the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing and the archaeological excavations that brought to daylight original Iranian imperial documentation.

Only recently, at the end of the 20th c., leading Iranologists like Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg started criticizing the absolutely delusional History of Achaemenid Iran that modern Western scholars were producing without even understanding it by foolishly accepting Ancient Ionian myths, lies and propaganda against the Iranian Empire at face value. This grave problem had also two other parameters:

– first, there was an enormous gap of civilization and a tremendous cultural difference between the Iranian imperial world view, the spiritual valorization of the human being, and the Zoroastrian monotheism from one side and the chaotic, disorderly and profane elements of the western periphery of the Empire. The so-called Greek tribes in Western Anatolia and in the South Balkans were not only multi-divided and plunged in permanent conflict; they were also extremely verbose on common issues, they desecrated the divine world with their nonsensical myths and puerile narratives, and they defiled human spirituality with their love stories about their pseudo-gods. But, very arbitrarily and quite disastrously, the so-called Ancient Greek civilization had been erroneously taken as ‘classics’ by modern Europeans at a time they had no access to Ancient Oriental sources.

– second, the vertical differentiation between Imperial Iran as the blessed land of divine mission and the disunited and peripheral lands of conflict, discord and strife that were inhabited by the Greek tribes was reflected on the respective, impressively different types of historiography; to the Iranians, few words written by anonymous scribes were enough to describe the groundbreaking deeds of divinely appointed rulers. But for the Greeks, the useless rumors, the capricious hearsay, the intentional lie, the nefarious expression of their complex of inferiority, the vicious slander, and the deliberate ignominy ‘had’ to be recorded and written down.

The fact that Herodotus’ and Xenophon’s long narratives have long been taken as the basic source of information about Achaemenid Iran demonstrates how disoriented and misplaced modern Western scholarship is. But by preferring to rely mainly on the Ancient Greek lengthy and false narratives, and not on the succinct, true and chaste Old Achaemenid Iranian inscriptions, they totally misrepresent Ancient Iranian History, preposterously extrapolating later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations.

And whereas Ancient Roman authors, who wrote in Latin (Pliny the Elder, Seneca the Younger, etc.), and Jewish or Christian historians, who wrote in Alexandrine Koine, like Flavius Josephus and Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima, reproduced the style of lengthy narratives that turns History to mere gossip, the great Babylonian scholar Berossus was very reluctant to add personal comments to his original sources or to allow subjective considerations and thoughts to contaminate his text.

In any case, the vast issue of the multilayered damages caused by the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historiography to modern Western academics’ perception and interpretation of Achaemenid Iran is a topic that deserves an entirely independent seminar.

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To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α

By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

https://vk.com/video429864789_456239757

https://ok.ru/video/5416043547224

https://www.brighteon.com/ca749192-7c1b-4a9d-901d-5f530611c965

————————    

To listen to the audio, clink the links below:

HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)

https://vk.com/megalommatis?w=wall429864789_8990%2Fall

https://megalommatis.podbean.com/e/history-of-achaemenid-iran-1a-course-i-achaemenid-beginnings-1a/

—————————— 

Download the course in PDF: