Persepolis

Okay.

So King Xerxes, he was an ancient Persian king who built the ancient city of Persepolis in Iran.

Oh.

Like huge.

Around 518 BCE, Darius began construction of a new ceremonial capital on a great elevated terrace in the Fars region, the traditional Persian homeland.

The site was Persepolis.

Thousands of workers, many of them paid wages recorded on clay tablets that still survive, raised columned halls and audience chambers decorated with reliefs, showing delegations from every corner of the empire bringing tribute.

The carvings depicted Armenians leading horses, Indians carrying ivory, Ethiopians with giraffe skins, and Lydians offering gold.

Greek cities emerged with new confidence that would fuel their classical age.

Persia remained vast and wealthy, yet the experience planted a quiet question inside the empire.

If the Greeks could resist, what else might prove difficult to hold? While Xerxes campaigned, the court at Persepolis had grown into a world of ceremony and intrigue.

In 465 BCE, he was murdered in his bedchamber by Artabanus, the commander of the royal guard.

And actually, it's really interesting for those of you that love history.

In 1936, a team of archeologists from the University of Chicago who were digging at Persopolis, which was a ceremonial capital of Persia.

Remember, Susa was one of the administrative capitals of Persia.

And in this dig, they unearthed what has been called the treasury relief.

When the mighty Persian Empire fractured into chaotic, empire-wide civil war, Darius crushed 19 rebel armies in a single year, executed every warlord who challenged him, and forged the largest, most powerful juggernaut of an empire the ancient world had ever seen.

He built world-spanning highways, invented currency and the mail system, constructed palatial wonders at Persepolis, and ruled over 44% of the global population with an iron fist wrapped in visionary administrative genius.

Long before emperors, Caesars, or Tsars ruled the Earth, there was only one King of Kings.

and the stone he carved to commemorate his power still looms over that valley 2,500 years later.

This is an engraving chiseled into a side of a mountain.

And it's accompanied by a picture of Darius killing a giant lion with his bare hands.

There's also a version of this that can be found in the Hall of 100 Columns in the Palace of Persepolis.

There are many, many carvings of Darius killing lions in fistfights.

So they are the greater part of this Greek fleet.

And it's only with that defeat that you have – Aeschylus was celebrating the Persei, this play that's written to sort of imagine the reaction of the news back in Persepolis, back in the Persian heartland when they hear of what this disaster at sea that they've been defeated.

It's then that the king decides, I'll just leave this to somebody else.

You can sort this out for me.

The Temple of Apollo at Corinth is only 20 years old.

Construction has begun on the ancient city of Persepolis, and Cyrus the Great's limestone tomb 56 miles northeast of Shiraz is barely a decade old.

Confucius is teaching in China and the Buddha in India.

Etruscan artists are finishing the terracotta masterpiece, The Psychophagus of the Spouses.

CHAPTER IX The Wretched End and Fruitless Repentance of King Antiochus At that time Antiochus returned with dishonor out of Persia.

For he had entered into the city called Persepolis, and attempted to rob the temple and to oppress the city, but the multitude running together to arms put them to flight, and so it fell out that Antiochus being put to flight returned with disgrace.

Persepolis, otherwise called Elimaeus, now when he was come about ecbartana he received the news of what had happened to nicanor and timotheus and swelling with anger he thought to revenge upon the jews the injury done by them that had put him to flight and therefore he commanded his chariot to be driven without stopping in his journey the judgment of heaven urging him forward because he had spoken so proudly that he would come to jerusalem and make it a common burying-place of the jews But the Lord, the God of Israel, that seeth all things, struck him with an incurable and an invisible plague.

For as soon as he had ended these words, a dreadful pain in his bowels came upon him, and bitter torments of the inner parts.

And indeed, very justly, seeing he had tormented the bowels of others with many a new torments, albeit he by no means ceased from his malice.

To abandon that name, for some, felt almost like breaking away from a collective memory that stretched back to ancient days.

when kings ruled from Pasargadae to Persepolis, and when diverse peoples lived under a single empire.

Despite the criticism, the decision remained.

Iran became the official name used in documents, international treaties, newspapers, and maps around the world.

El claro ejemplo de que está, eh, vinculado todo es precisamente el factor treinta y tres, digámoslo así.

[se ríe] Palacio de Persépolis, Fars, en Irán, en el paralelo treinta y tres grado norte.

Capital imperial persa erigida sobre la latitud treinta y tres grados norte.

Darío I El Grande trazó la Apadana, Apadana ceremonial y los salones de cien columnas exactamente en la franja geodésica sagrada del paralelo treinta y tres.

Por eso os digo que sí, para mí eso sí que fue hecho por ellos.

Las logias lo ordenaron.

Bien, el palacio de Persépolis lo acabamos de ver en Irán.

Muy bonito y así una pena que lo destrozaran tanto y robaran tantas reliquias, por desgracia.

I love these old books.

And if you actually read the ancient sources, the Persians had their own Thermopylae, okay? 330 BC, Alexander the Great is marching into the heart of Persia toward Persepolis.

And at a narrow mountain pass called the Persian Gates, a Persian general named Ari de Barzanus decides he will hold the pass.

And he does.