The ENTIRE History of IRAN | 2,500 Years of Empire, Conquest & Survival | History Documentary
History Found
0:01 Every great civilization eventually disappears.
0:04 Its language dies.
0:06 Its religion is forgotten.
0:08 Its cities are buried under centuries of sand and silence.
0:13 That is the rule of history.
0:16 And it is nearly universal.
0:20 Iran broke the rule.
0:22 Over the last 2,500 years,
0:25 the land and people we now call Iran have been conquered by Greeks,
0:28 Arabs, Turks, and Mongols.
0:31 They have seen their capitals burned, their libraries destroyed,
0:35 and their ruling dynasties erased entirely, some of them more than once.
0:41 And yet, the Persian language survived every invasion.
0:46 The poetry of Roomie and Hafz written under foreign
0:50 occupation became the literary inheritance of the entire Islamic world.
0:56 A civilization that should have been
0:57 absorbed and forgotten instead absorbed its conquerors,
1:01 turning their religions, their languages,
1:04 and their cultures into something distinctly defiantly Iranian.
1:09 How does a civilization do that?
1:12 How does it bend without breaking again
1:14 and again across more than two dozen centuries?
1:18 That is the central mystery at the heart of this documentary.
1:23 In the chapters that follow, we will trace the full arc of Iranian history.
1:28 the glory and the catastrophe, the empires and the revolutions,
1:34 the poets and the kings to uncover what makes this civilization one
1:38 of the most resilient and most misunderstood in the history of the world.
1:45 Long before emperors marched their armies across the ancient world,
1:49 long before the name Persia stirred fear or wonder in distant lands,
1:54 there was the land itself.
1:56 The Iranian plateau rises from the earth like a fortress built by nature.
2:01 Ringed by the Zagros mountains to the west,
2:04 the Albor's range sweeping along the north
2:07 and vast salt deserts stretching across its interior.
2:10 This elevated heartland sits roughly 1 million square miles of mountain,
2:14 step, and arid plain.
2:17 It is a land of extremes.
2:19 Winters bite hard in the mountain passes.
2:23 Summers baked the central lowlands into cracked pale earth.
2:27 And yet along the river valleys
2:29 and mountain foothills where water found its way,
2:32 life took hold with remarkable tenacity.
2:39 This geography was never merely backdrop.
2:43 It was destiny.
2:45 The plateau sat at the very crossroads of the ancient world,
2:48 connecting Mesopotamia to the west with central Asia
2:51 to the east and the Indian subcontinent beyond.
2:55 Any civilization rising here would absorb, resist,
2:59 and ultimately shape the great currents of human history flowing around it.
3:06 The earliest permanent settlements appeared thousands
3:09 of years before the common era
3:11 in the fertile lowlands near what is today the southwestern region of Iran.
3:17 Here in the shadow of the Zagros Mountains
3:20 arose one of history's most overlooked civilizations, Elilom.
3:25 By around 3,000 B.CE,
3:28 E the Elummites had built a sophisticated society centered on the city of Susa,
3:34 a metropolis of temples, administrative buildings, and bustling trade networks.
3:40 Their script, their art,
3:41 and their political institutions placed them firmly among
3:45 the great civilizations of the ancient near east.
3:48 Contemporaries and rivals of Sumer and Babylon.
3:52 Souza itself would endure for millennia, changing hands and identities,
3:57 outlasting empires that believed themselves eternal.
4:04 Then beginning around 1500 B.CE and continuing for several centuries,
4:10 something transformative began.
4:13 From the steps of Central Asia, waves of semi-nomeadic peoples began moving
4:18 southward and westward onto the Iranian plateau.
4:21 These were the Indo-aranian peoples, sometimes called Aryans,
4:25 a word meaning noble in their own ancient tongue.
4:28 They brought horses, distinctive pottery,
4:31 and a reverence for fire that would eventually
4:34 evolve into one of the world's oldest living religions.
4:38 Gradually, two major groups settled and consolidated.
4:42 The Mes established themselves in the northwestern
4:45 regions in the cooler highlands near modern-day Hamadan.
4:49 The Persians drifted further south and east,
4:52 settling eventually in a region they would call Parsa,
4:55 known to the Greeks as Perseus.
5:01 For centuries, these groups remained tribal
5:04 confederations organized around kinship and cattle,
5:07 largely overshadowed by the thundering empires of Assyria
5:10 and Babylon pressing in from the west.
5:13 They were to outside observers peripheral peoples of little consequence.
5:21 But the plateau had a long memory
5:24 and the mountains had a habit of producing extraordinary things.
5:30 For generations, the Mes had lived as scattered highland clans,
5:34 paying tribute to Assyrian overlords who viewed them as little
5:37 more than a source of horses and conscript soldiers.
5:40 But around 700 B.CE,
5:43 something shifted in the mountain kingdoms of the northwest.
5:47 A chieftain named Diosis,
5:50 described by the Greek historian Herodotus as brilliant and calculating,
5:54 understood that survival required unity.
5:58 He built a reputation as a supremely fair judge,
6:01 arbitrating disputes between quarreling tribes with such
6:05 skill that his fame spread across the highlands.
6:08 Then, in a move of breathtaking political theater,
6:12 he withdrew his services entirely.
6:15 As the tribes fell back into chaos, they did the only thing that seemed logical.
6:21 They made Dios as their king.
6:27 His first act was to build a capital worthy of that ambition.
6:32 Epatana, situated in the cool highlands near what is today the city of Hamadan,
6:38 rose from the earth as a monument to median power.
6:42 Ancient sources described it in almost mythological terms.
6:46 A city of concentric walls, each ring painted a different color,
6:51 the innermost gleaming with silver and gold.
6:54 Whether the legends matched the reality
6:57 matters less than what Ecatana represented,
7:00 a permanent center of gravity around which a people could
7:03 organize themselves as something more than a collection of tribes.
7:10 But it was Dios's grandsons who transformed
7:14 the Median kingdom into a true military empire.
7:19 Saxuray was a modernizer.
7:22 He reorganized his army along professional lines,
7:25 separating units by weapon type,
7:28 creating distinct divisions of spearmen, cavalry, and archers.
7:33 It was a reform that made the mess genuinely dangerous on an open battlefield.
7:39 His opportunity came from an unexpected direction.
7:45 The Assyrian Empire,
7:47 the most feared military machine the ancient world had yet produced,
7:51 was cracking under the pressure
7:53 of constant revolt and internal succession struggles.
7:57 Kaixur recognized that even great empires die when they exhaust themselves.
8:03 He forged an alliance with Neba Palasar of Babylon,
8:07 cementing it through the marriage
8:08 of his granddaughter to the Babylonian prince Nebuchadnezzar.
8:13 Together, they turned on Assyria with devastating coordination.
8:20 In 612 B.CE, their combined armies descended on Nineveh,
8:26 the Assyrian capital that the prophet Nam had called the city of blood.
8:31 After a siege that lasted months, the walls fell.
8:36 Nineveh was burned to its foundations.
8:39 The Assyrian Empire, which had terrorized the ancient Near East for centuries,
8:44 simply ceased to exist.
8:47 The ancient world had witnessed nothing quite like it.
8:53 The Mes claimed the northern and eastern
8:56 portions of the former Assyrian domains,
8:59 extending their reach from Anatolia in the west
9:01 to the borders of Central Asia in the east.
9:04 Under the last great Median king,
9:06 Ages, this empire reached its territorial peak.
9:12 It was vast, wealthy, and apparently unassalable.
9:20 And yet within the empire's own borders in the southern province of Parsa,
9:24 a Persian prince was growing up in the median court watching everything.
9:30 That Persian prince had a name.
9:33 Cyrus, second of that name, born of the Aayanid clan,
9:37 raised partly in the shadow of his Median grandfather's court.
9:42 He had watched Astiges rule.
9:45 He had learned what power looked like
9:46 from the inside and what its weaknesses were.
9:53 Around 559 B.CE, Cyrus became king of Anon,
9:59 a Persian sub kingdom within the median sphere.
10:02 For a time, he paid his tribute, kept his head down, and waited.
10:08 Then he stopped waiting.
10:13 The revolt against began around 550 B.CE.
10:19 And what followed was less a bloody war than a collapse.
10:23 Median commanders deeply resentful of Aiges defected to Cyrus mid campaign.
10:30 The Median army dissolved where it stood.
10:33 Aages was captured alive, reportedly treated with mercy,
10:38 and the great fortified capital of Ecatana simply changed hands.
10:43 The Median Empire did not fall on fire.
10:47 It fell in silence from within.
10:53 Cyrus absorbed rather than destroyed.
10:57 Median nobles retained their positions.
11:01 Median customs and court protocols continued.
11:05 He understood something that most conquerors never grasped.
11:09 That the machinery of empire is more
11:11 valuable than the satisfaction of demolishing it.
11:14 His next target was Croasis,
11:20 the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia in western Anatolia.
11:25 Croasis had famously consulted the oracle at Deli before marching east,
11:30 receiving the prophecy that if he crossed the river Halis,
11:33 he would destroy a great empire.
11:36 He crossed the river.
11:38 He did destroy a great empire, his own.
11:44 The two armies clashed near Sardis around 547 B.CE.
11:50 Crowis's retreated, believing the campaign season was over.
11:54 Cyrus pressed forward through winter,
11:57 surrounded the Lydian capital, and took it within weeks.
12:01 The man who had been the richest king in the known world was now a captive.
12:09 Lydia fell.
12:11 But what came next would define Cyrus's legacy for 3,000 years.
12:19 In 539 B.CE.
12:22 Cyrus turned south and east toward Babylon, the greatest city on earth.
12:28 a metropolis of perhaps 200,000 souls ringed by walls so massive that the Greek
12:33 historian Herodotus claimed two four- horse chariots
12:36 could pass each other on top of them.
12:40 The city seemed impregnable.
12:44 It surrendered almost without a fight.
12:48 Babylonian priests and merchants disenchanted
12:51 with their own king Neonadus opened the gates.
12:55 Cyrus entered not as a conqueror but as a liberator grasping
12:59 the hands of Marduk's statue in the ancient ritual of legitimate kingship.
13:04 The city celebrated.
13:10 Then came the act that echoes loudest across history.
13:14 Cyrus issued a decree recorded on a small clay barrel now known
13:18 as the Cyrus Islander that recognized the religious
13:21 traditions of all peoples within his empire.
13:23 permitted deportes to return to their homelands and explicitly
13:27 repudiated the Assyrian and Babylonian practice of mass forced resettlement.
13:32 The Jews of Babylon, exiled for decades by Nebuchadnezzar,
13:36 were free to return to Jerusalem.
13:39 The Hebrew Bible records Cyrus's name
13:41 with a reverence reserved for almost no foreign ruler.
13:45 Isaiah calls him a shepherd, a Messiah.
13:53 Scholars debate how much of this tolerance was
13:56 genuine philosophy and how much was brilliant political calculation.
14:02 Perhaps it was both.
14:04 An empire stretching from the Aian coast to the edges
14:07 of Central Asia could not be governed through brute terror alone.
14:12 It required legitimacy in the eyes of dozens of peoples, languages, and gods.
14:18 Cyrus gave them that legitimacy and they gave him in return compliance.
14:27 His empire was by that point the largest the world had ever seen.
14:32 Nothing in human history had yet reached its scale.
14:39 He died around 530 B.CE CE on campaign in the eastern
14:44 steps fighting nomadic tribes along the central Asian frontier.
14:49 The ungovernable edges where every great empire eventually bleeds out.
14:54 His body was brought back to passade
14:57 where a simple stone tomb still stands today.
15:01 A traveler in antiquity reported an inscription carved above the entrance.
15:06 I am Cyrus, King of Kings.
15:09 Do not begrudge me this small monu.
15:14 Cyrus left behind the largest empire the world had ever seen.
15:19 He also left behind the question every empire must eventually answer.
15:24 Who comes next?
15:29 His son Kamises II inherited the throne and pushed
15:32 the Persian frontier further still conquering Egypt in 525 B.CE.
15:38 and adding the ancient kingdom of the Nile to the Aanid realm.
15:42 But Cambisces died in mysterious circumstances in 522 B.CE.
15:48 returning from campaign, leaving no clear air.
15:52 What followed was a crisis that could
15:54 have unraveled everything his father built.
16:00 Into that vacuum stepped a man named Gamata, a Magus who claimed to be Smurdis,
16:06 the brother of Cambisces whom Cambes had secretly murdered years earlier.
16:11 Whether Gata genuinely believed his claim or was a deliberate impostor,
16:17 history has never fully settled.
16:20 What is certain is that a Persian nobleman of royal aanid blood,
16:24 a young military commander named Darius,
16:26 decided the man on the throne was a fraud.
16:30 Along with six co-conspirators, Darius moved swiftly.
16:34 They found Galata killed him and Darius seized the throne.
16:43 It was by any honest account a coup.
16:50 The new king understood immediately that legitimacy was his most urgent problem.
16:56 How do you convince an empire of millions
16:58 that your seizure of power was righteous?
17:02 You write it in stone 600 ft above the ground in three
17:07 languages where no enemy can reach it and every traveler must look up.
17:15 The Behistan inscription carved into a sheer cliff face along the main road
17:20 between Babylon and Ecatana is one
17:23 of history's most extraordinary acts of political propaganda.
17:27 Darius had craftsmen chisel his version of events across
17:30 a vast rock face in old Persian Elumite and Babylonian.
17:35 He is depicted in relief, his foot resting on the fallen Galmata
17:40 while defeated rebel leaders stand bound before him.
17:44 The gods, the text insists, gave him this victory.
17:49 The lie, if it was one, was literally carved into the mountain.
17:58 That same inscription would become 2,000 years later
18:01 the key that unlocked the uniform writing system entirely.
18:06 When the British officer Henry Rollinsson painstakingly
18:09 copied the text in the 1830s and4s, its triilingual nature allowed scholars
18:14 to finally decode ancient Mesopotamian languages.
18:18 Darius's propaganda became an archaeological Rosetta Stone.
18:26 But Darius was far more than a propagandist.
18:29 Once the throne was secured, he turned his formidable energy towards
18:34 something no Persian ruler had yet attempted,
18:37 systematically organizing the machinery of empire.
18:44 He divided the realm into roughly 20 administrative units called satropies.
18:49 Each governed by a satrap, a trusted official who collected taxes,
18:54 maintained order, and answered directly to the king.
18:58 Crucially, military commanders and financial inspectors
19:02 in each region reported independently to the crown,
19:06 creating overlapping chains of accountability
19:08 that checked any single satrap's power.
19:12 Darius understood bureaucracy the way Cyrus had understood conquest.
19:20 Binding these provinces together was the Royal Road,
19:24 a highway stretching nearly 1,700 m from Sardis
19:28 on the Aian coast to Susa in the Persian heartland.
19:32 Royal couriers riding in relays could cover this distance in roughly 7 days.
19:38 a speed of communication that the ancient world found almost miraculous.
19:44 Herodotus marveled at them.
19:46 Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness stops these couriers.
19:53 Those words would one day be inscribed on a post office in New York.
20:01 To unify commerce across this vast territory, Darius introduced the Derek,
20:07 a gold coin bearing the king's
20:09 image along with standardized weights and measures.
20:13 For the first time, a merchant in Anatolia and a merchant
20:17 in Bactria could conduct business in a shared language of value.
20:24 And then there was Pepilolis.
20:30 Beginning around 518 BCE, Darius initiated construction of a ceremonial capital
20:37 on a great elevated platform in the Fars region, the Persian homeland.
20:42 Tens of thousands of workers paid
20:45 wages that administrative tablets still record.
20:48 Raised towering columned halls decorated with carved
20:51 delegations from every corner of the empire.
20:54 An image of unity rendered in stone.
20:58 The empire Darius had so carefully constructed was about
21:01 to collide with a world it had never fully reckoned with.
21:06 Along the western edge of the Aeanid realm on the Agian coast
21:09 of what is now Turkey lay a scattering of Greekeaking cities known as Ionia.
21:15 These cities had been absorbed into Persian control for decades
21:19 governed by local tyrants who answered to the sat traps.
21:23 For most Ionians, Persian rule was tolerable if not beloved.
21:28 But in 499 B.CE, simmering resentment boiled over into open revolt.
21:38 The rebellion began in Malletus, led by a man named Aristagaras,
21:42 who had the ambition of a king and the luck of a gambler.
21:45 He appealed for help to the Greek mainland,
21:47 and while Sparta declined, Athens sent 20 ships.
21:51 It was a modest contribution, but a fateful one.
21:55 When the rebels marched inland and burned the regional capital of Sardis,
22:00 Darius received the news with cold fury.
22:03 An attendant was said to remind the king of Athens three times
22:07 each day so that he would not forget who had humiliated him.
22:14 The Ionian revolt was crushed by 494 B.CE.
22:19 Militus was sacked, its population scattered.
22:23 But Darius had made his decision.
22:26 The Greeks would answer for Sardis.
22:32 His first expedition faltered when the Persian fleet was wrecked
22:36 in a storm off the coast of Mount Athos in 492 B.CE.
22:41 He sent a second force 2 years later, roughly 25,000 men crossing the Aian
22:47 by ship under the generals Datus and Artifans.
22:50 The island hopped across the sea, burning Eretria,
22:53 and then landed on the plane of Marathon 26 mi northeast of Athens.
23:01 What happened there in 490 B.CE
23:04 has echoed through Western civilization ever since.
23:08 A Greek force, smaller but fighting on ground of its own choosing,
23:12 attacked the Persian line at a run.
23:15 The Athenian hoplights, armored and disciplined,
23:18 folded the Persian flanks inward and drove them back to their ships.
23:23 Persia lost thousands of men.
23:26 Athens lost fewer than 200.
23:29 A messenger, the legend says, ran the entire distance to Athens
23:33 to announce the victory before collapsing dead.
23:37 The marathon race carries his name to this day.
23:44 Darius died in 486 B.CE before he could launch his revenge.
23:49 That task fell to his son Xerxes,
23:53 who conceived something on an entirely different scale.
23:57 He assembled the largest invasion force the ancient world had ever attempted.
24:01 Perhaps 200,000 soldiers by cautious estimates and bridged the helispont
24:07 with a double line of boats to walk them into Europe.
24:13 The Greeks fractious and divided had perhaps 40,000 defenders in total.
24:20 At the mountain pass of Thermopil in 480 B.CE.
24:24 300 Spartans under King Leonidus and several
24:27 thousand allies held the Persian army
24:29 for 3 days before a Greek traitor revealed a path around the pass.
24:33 The Spartans died where they stood.
24:36 Xerxes marched to Athens and burned the Acropolis, but the sea would undo him.
24:47 In the narrow straight of Salomies,
24:49 the Greek Admiral Themeisticles lured the Persian
24:52 fleet into waters too cramped for its size.
24:56 The Greeks crushed them.
24:58 Xerxes watched from a golden throne on the shore.
25:02 The following year at Plataya 479 B.CE,
25:07 Greek land forces destroyed what remained of the Persian army.
25:15 Persia never invaded Greece again.
25:18 The long decades of conflict wound to a formal
25:21 close with the peace of Colas around 449 B.CE.
25:26 Acknowledging the boundaries neither side could breach.
25:32 The wars left both civilizations forever changed.
25:37 Greece emerged with a soaring confidence that would fuel its golden age.
25:42 Persia had not been destroyed, only stopped.
25:46 The empire remained vast and powerful, but a new question had entered the world.
25:52 If Persia could not conquer Greece, what else might resist it?
25:57 The wars with Greece had not broken the Aminid Empire.
26:02 They had, however, revealed something unsettling about its interior.
26:06 While Xerxes marched and fought,
26:09 the palace at Pipilus had grown into a world of its own,
26:13 dense with ceremony, rivalry, and whispered ambition.
26:20 In 465 B.CE, Xerxes was murdered in his bed chamber.
26:27 The assassin was Artabanis, the commander of the royal guard,
26:31 a man trusted absolutely and therefore dangerous beyond measure.
26:36 Within months, Artabbanis himself was killed by Artig Xerxes I,
26:40 the son who emerged from the chaos to claim the throne.
26:44 It was a pattern that would repeat
26:46 with grim regularity across the empire's final century.
26:54 What is often overlooked in accounts of this period is
26:57 how much power flowed through the women of the royal court.
27:01 Figures like a mistress, the wife of Xerxes, and later Perisatis,
27:07 mother of Artag Xerxes II, wielded genuine political influence.
27:12 They managed alliances, settled scores, and shaped succession.
27:17 Persian royal women held property, commanded households,
27:21 and appear in the administrative tablets from Pipilus,
27:24 receiving rations and issuing orders.
27:27 These were not figures ornamental to power.
27:31 In many cases, they were its architects.
27:37 By the 400s B.CE.
27:39 the empire's vast provincial structure had
27:42 become both its strength and its vulnerability.
27:46 The Satraps, governors of territories stretching from Egypt to Central Asia,
27:51 controlled enormous wealth and private armies.
27:55 When central authority weakened,
27:57 the temptation to act independently proved irresistible.
28:02 The great satraps revolt of the 360s and 350s
28:05 B.CE saw multiple governors simultaneously defying the crown,
28:10 coordinating rebellions across Asia Minor and Egypt.
28:14 The empire wobbled but did not fall.
28:17 Held together partly by the catap's own
28:19 inability to unite under a single alternative.
28:26 Through all of this turbulence,
28:28 Zoroastrianism provided something the political order could not.
28:32 A stable spiritual foundation for Persian identity.
28:36 The faith of the prophet Zarathra proclaimed
28:39 a universe locked in struggle between Ahuram Mazda,
28:42 the wise lord of truth and light,
28:45 an angry Manu, the destructive spirit of darkness and lies.
28:50 Persian kings had long framed their rule in this cosmic language,
28:55 casting themselves as agents of order against chaos.
28:59 By the 4th century B.CE, fire temples burned across the empire,
29:04 priests called magi maintained sacred rights,
29:07 and the faith had woven itself so deeply into Persian
29:11 culture that it would survive even the empire's eventual destruction.
29:18 The one figure who briefly reversed the decline was Artag Xerxes III who
29:24 came to power in 358 B.CE with a ruthlessness that impressed even his enemies.
29:31 He reconquered Egypt in 343 B.C.E.
29:35 suppressed the satropole revolts and briefly made the empire feel whole again.
29:41 Then he was poisoned in 338 B.CE CE almost certainly by his vizier begoas.
29:50 The throne passed through two more kings in as many years.
29:54 Into that vacuum from the cold mountains of Macedonia,
29:58 a young general was already looking east.
30:03 He was 22 years old when he crossed the Hleispont in 334 B.CE.
30:08 leading an army of perhaps 40,000 men
30:11 into the heart of the world's largest empire.
30:14 Alexander of Macedon had absorbed the lessons
30:16 of his tutor Aristotle and the battlefield genius
30:19 of his father Philip II and he had
30:21 come not merely to raid but to conquer everything.
30:25 The Persian resistance collapsed with startling speed.
30:29 Two early victories in Asia Minor opened the western provinces
30:33 and by 333 B.CE Te at the battle of Ishis in southern Anatolia,
30:38 Alexander met the Persian king Darius III in person
30:41 and routed him so completely that Darius fled the field,
30:45 leaving behind his mother, his wife, and his daughters as prisoners.
30:49 Alexander, to his credit, treated them with conspicuous respect.
30:54 It was a gesture that spoke as much
30:56 to political calculation as to personal honor.
31:03 The decisive blow came in 331 B.CE at Gagamala
31:07 on the dusty plains of what is now northern Iraq.
31:11 Darius had chosen the ground carefully,
31:14 leveling the terrain to maximize the effectiveness of his war chariots.
31:19 It was not enough.
31:22 Alexander's oblique cavalry charge tore open the Persian line,
31:26 and Darius, facing encirclement, fled a second time.
31:31 The Amonid Empire, that extraordinary structure built
31:35 by Cyrus and Darius the Great across two centuries,
31:39 effectively ceased to exist in a single afternoon.
31:42 Babylon surrendered.
31:45 Susa surrendered.
31:48 Then came Persipalus.
31:53 The burning of the great ceremonial capital in 330 B.C.E.
31:58 remains one of antiquity's most debated acts of destruction.
32:02 Ancient sources offer conflicting accounts.
32:06 One tradition holds that Alexander torched the palaces in deliberate
32:10 revenge for the Persian burning of Athens 150 years earlier,
32:15 a symbolic settling of accounts.
32:18 Another suggests the fire began during a drunken banquet,
32:22 perhaps at the urging of an Athenian
32:24 curtis named Ty and spread beyond anyone's intention.
32:30 The truth is probably irretrievable.
32:32 What is certain is that the magnificent stone terraces, the painted columns,
32:38 the treasury containing the wealth of generations, all were consumed.
32:43 Travelers would find the ruins blackened for centuries afterward.
32:51 Yet even as he destroyed, Alexander was transforming himself.
32:56 He adopted Persian court dress,
32:59 incorporated Iranian nobles into his administration,
33:02 and demanded the proskinesis, the prostration ritual of Persian royal
33:08 protocol from his own Macedonian officers.
33:12 They were appalled.
33:14 To Greeks, bowing before a living man was a gesture reserved for gods.
33:19 The tensions nearly broke his army from within.
33:26 In 327 B.CE, Alexander married Roxanna,
33:30 a Bactrian princess from what is now Afghanistan,
33:34 and encouraged his officers to take Persian wives.
33:37 He was not merely conquering Iran.
33:41 He was attempting to become its king in the truest sense,
33:44 fusing two civilizations into something unprecedented.
33:52 He never finished the project.
33:55 In 323 B.CE in Babylon, Alexander died of fever at the age of 32.
34:03 He left no clear successor and within hours of his death,
34:07 the argument over his empire had begun.
34:10 His generals, the diadeachi, the successors,
34:14 spent 40 years tearing the conquests apart.
34:18 Iran eventually fell to Celikus, who founded a dynasty bearing his name.
34:24 Greek cities rose across the plateau.
34:26 Greek became the language of administration
34:29 and helenic culture pressed deep into Asian soil.
34:36 But beneath the marble columns and the Greek inscriptions,
34:40 something older persisted.
34:43 The Persian language endured in villages and valleys.
34:48 Zoroastrian fire temples continued to burn.
34:52 Local customs, land tenure patterns,
34:55 and administrative traditions quietly carried forward the Aminid inheritance.
35:01 Conquerors could rename the cities.
35:04 They could not so easily rename the people.
35:08 And from the eastern reaches of the former empire,
35:11 a new Iranian dynasty was already beginning to stir.
35:16 Salucas had been one of Alexander's most capable commanders,
35:20 a general who had survived the chaos of the Diadeochi wars through patience,
35:24 calculation, and a ruthlessness he rarely advertised.
35:28 By 312 B.CE, he had secured Babylon.
35:33 And from that foundation, he reached eastward,
35:36 reasserting control over the Iranian plateau with an army that combined
35:40 Macedonian discipline with the organizational memory
35:43 of the empire he had inherited.
35:46 The Seucid dynasty had arrived.
35:51 What followed was something genuinely novel.
35:55 The Seucids did not simply occupy Iran.
35:59 They attempted to reshape it.
36:02 Greek colonists arrived in organized waves
36:04 and new cities rose across ancient soil
36:07 bearing names that would have sounded impossibly foreign to a cayman at ears.
36:12 Seucia on the Tigris grew into one of the ancient world's great urban centers.
36:17 Its population eventually rivaling Alexandria itself.
36:21 Along the plateau's trade routes,
36:23 dozens of smaller settlements carried Greek names,
36:26 Greek architecture, and Greek civic institutions.
36:30 The gymnasium, that quintessential symbol of helenic culture,
36:34 appeared in cities where a generation earlier
36:38 Zoroastrian priests had performed their rights undisturbed.
36:45 The administrative language shifted to Greek.
36:49 Coins bore Greek inscriptions.
36:52 Royal correspondence flowed in a tongue that most Iranians
36:55 had never heard before Alexander's cavalry appeared on their horizon.
37:03 And yet, was any of this truly transforming the people themselves?
37:12 Walk beyond the city walls
37:15 and a different world persisted with remarkable stubbornness.
37:19 In the agricultural villages that fed those gleaming new cities,
37:23 Iranian dialects continued as the natural language of daily life.
37:28 Zoroastrian fire temples maintained their sacred flames.
37:31 Tended by priests who traced their lineage and their lurggical
37:34 knowledge back through generations the Greeks had never touched.
37:38 Local dynasts in peripheral regions,
37:41 men who had served the Amonids in administrative roles,
37:44 quietly continued governing their territories under
37:47 a thin veneer of Hellenistic loyalty.
37:50 The deeper structures of Iranian society,
37:53 its land arrangements, its village hierarchies,
37:56 its religious calendars proved stubbornly resistant
37:59 to reorganization by distant kings in Antioch.
38:05 The Seucid Empire was simply too large to govern with any real coherence.
38:11 Stretching from the Aian coast to the borders of India,
38:15 it demanded constant military attention on multiple frontiers simultaneously.
38:20 The western provinces with their lucrative trade and restless Greek populations
38:26 inevitably absorbed more royal energy than the eastern reaches of the plateau.
38:34 By the mid3rd century B.C.E.
38:37 This neglect was beginning to show.
38:39 The eastern frontier grew porous.
38:43 Royal governors in distant provinces accumulated local power and local loyalty,
38:49 sometimes pursuing their own ambitions
38:51 with minimal interference from the center.
38:54 The mechanisms of control that had once held
38:56 an empire together were loosening one thread at a time.
39:04 In a region the Greeks called Partha
39:07 in the northeastern stretches of the plateau,
39:10 a nomadic Iranian people known as the Parnney were watching
39:13 and waiting for their moment to step into that widening gap.
39:18 That moment came around 247 B.CE when a chieftain named Arcuses led
39:24 his Pne warriors into Partha and seized control of the region from its governor.
39:30 The act was bold, almost reckless by conventional measure.
39:34 Arcuses had no grand palace, no treasury,
39:37 no administrative apparatus to speak of.
39:41 What he had was momentum, a loyal following,
39:45 and the instinct to move when empires are distracted.
39:49 He moved at exactly the right time.
39:55 The Seucids were entangled in dynastic conflict
39:58 and pressure from tomeic Egypt to the west.
40:02 Arcuses consolidated his hold on Partha, struck coins bearing his name,
40:07 and established what would become one
40:09 of antiquity's most enduring dynasties, the Arcusids.
40:13 His successors would treat his name with such reverence
40:15 that every subsequent Parthion king would adopted as a royal title,
40:19 blurring individual identity into something approaching myth.
40:26 For nearly a century after Arces,
40:29 the Parthion Kingdom remained a regional power.
40:31 cautious and consolidating, careful not to overreach.
40:36 Then came Mithrredates I ascending to the throne around 171 B.CE.
40:43 Mithridates possessed something rarer than military talent.
40:47 He possessed patience paired with vision.
40:50 He looked at the Seucid Empire, still vast on the map,
40:54 but hollow at its core, and understood that the time for patience was ending.
40:59 His campaign swept westward and southward with calculated aggression.
41:08 Media fell.
41:10 Then the extraordinary prize of Mesopotamia with its ancient cities
41:14 and incomprehensible wealth came under Parthion control around 141 B.CE.
41:21 When Miththerdates captured the Seucid King Demetrius II in battle,
41:25 the symbolic meaning was impossible to ignore.
41:29 A nomadic Iranian dynasty had just
41:32 humbled the inheritors of Alexander the Great.
41:38 What made the Parthion Empire genuinely
41:40 remarkable was not simply its military success,
41:44 but the civilization it constructed across its conquered territories.
41:49 The Arcusids were pragmatic rulers who understood that governing
41:52 a mosaic of peoples required flexibility rather than uniformity.
41:57 Greek remained in use on their coins and in certain official contexts.
42:01 And Parthion nobles sometimes bore Greek names
42:04 and collected Greek art with genuine enthusiasm.
42:10 The famous writen drinking vessels and bronze sculptures from this period
42:14 reveal an aesthetic that feels
42:16 comfortable in two cultural worlds simultaneously.
42:19 Neither fully Greek nor fully Iranian, but something interestingly its own.
42:24 The empire's underlying structure, however, was distinctly Iranian in character.
42:30 The Arsids governed through a feudal arrangement of powerful noble houses.
42:35 The great clans whose names appear repeatedly across Parthion records.
42:39 Families like the Shuran and the Karen who controlled vast estates
42:43 and furnished the cavalry that formed the backbone of Parthion military power.
42:50 These nobles owed loyalty to the king,
42:53 but they were not subjects in any simple sense.
42:56 They were partners in power, proud of lineages that predated Arsid rule,
43:02 capable of making and unmaking kings when royal authority grew weak.
43:06 This arrangement gave the empire resilience and flexibility,
43:10 but also a persistent vulnerability.
43:13 The same noble houses that could mobilize thousands of armored horsemen
43:17 for a royal campaign could under
43:19 different circumstances fragment the kingdom from within.
43:27 Architecture and urban life flourished under Parthion patronage.
43:31 The city of Kesopon on the Tigris
43:33 grew into an imperial capital of considerable grandeur.
43:37 The distinctive Parthion Iwan, a vaulted hall open at one end,
43:42 began appearing in palaces and public buildings,
43:45 a form that would echo through Iranian architecture for centuries
43:48 and eventually find its way into Islamic sacred spaces.
43:55 By the mid 1st century B.C.E.,
43:58 this hybrid empire stretched from the Euphrates to eastern Iran,
44:02 and a new rival had appeared on the western horizon.
44:05 The Romans were coming and the collision between
44:08 these two powers would reshape the ancient world.
44:13 The Romans arrived with absolute confidence.
44:17 In 53 B.CE, Marcus Lasinius Cassus, the wealthiest man in Rome and onethird
44:23 of the ruling triumvirate alongside Caesar and Pompy,
44:26 led seven legions eastward across the Euphrates.
44:30 roughly 40,000 soldiers, the finest infantry on Earth,
44:35 marching into Mesopotamia to add a Persian
44:37 Empire to Rome's growing list of conquests.
44:41 Craus had bought his way to political prominence
44:44 and now wanted military glory to match his peers.
44:48 He would not find it.
44:53 What he found instead was the Shireena,
44:57 the commander of the Parththeian forest bore the title of his noble
45:00 house rather than a personal name in most Roman sources.
45:04 Young, brilliant, and tactically audacious,
45:07 the Shireena understood exactly what Roman legions could and could not do.
45:13 They were devastating in close formation on flat terrain.
45:17 They were vulnerable to cavalry that refused to engage directly.
45:22 The Syrian desert between the Euphrates and the town
45:25 of Ker offered perfect ground for what came next.
45:32 The Parthion cavalry arrived not in a single mass charge,
45:36 but in swirling, shifting waves.
45:39 Roman infantry locked shields and waited for the momentum
45:42 to exhaust itself as it always had against every other enemy.
45:48 But the Parthion horse archers simply kept riding,
45:51 kept loosing, and crucially kept being resupplied.
45:55 A camel train carrying thousands of arrows moved behind the Parthion lines,
46:00 and the Romans realized with dawning horror
46:03 that the reign of arrows would not stop.
46:05 When Roman soldiers broke formation to pursue,
46:08 the famous Parthion shot found them.
46:11 Arrows released backward at full gallop with lethal accuracy.
46:18 Crais died in the aftermath, killed during negotiations.
46:21 His severed head reportedly delivered to the Parththeian
46:24 court mid-p performance of a Greek tragedy.
46:27 Around 20,000 Roman soldiers died with him.
46:31 Another 10,000 marched into captivity, disappearing into the Parthion East.
46:38 Legends would persist for centuries that some
46:40 of these lost legionaries eventually settled in Central Asia,
46:44 their descendants encountered by Chinese chronicers
46:47 near the borders of Han territory.
46:49 The evidence remains contested, but the story itself speaks to how
46:54 completely the disaster haunted Rome's imagination.
47:01 The captured Roman standards became a source of sustained humiliation.
47:06 For decades, those eagle standards stood in Parthion temples as monuments
47:10 to Roman defeat until Augustus finally
47:13 recovered them through diplomacy in 20 B.CE.
47:16 An event he celebrated with such theatrical enthusiasm
47:19 that one might forget no battle had been fought.
47:25 Mark Anthony tried where Cassus had failed,
47:28 launching a Parthion campaign in 36 B.CE.
47:31 that collapsed through poor planning and Parthion harassment.
47:36 He retreated having lost roughly a quarter of his force.
47:39 Though unlike Cassus, he survived to be undone by other forces entirely.
47:47 The wars that followed across the next two centuries
47:50 settled into a grinding rhythm of raid, counter raid,
47:52 and negotiation along the Euphrates,
47:55 with Armenia serving as a perpetual buffer state
47:58 whose throne both empires disputed and occasionally seized.
48:02 Neither power could deliver a killing blow against the other.
48:06 Rome's legions dominated siege warfare and pitched battle on favorable ground.
48:12 Partha's feudal cavalry could evade, exhaust,
48:15 and punish, but not hold territory permanently.
48:23 The emperor Trajan came closest to decisive Roman victory,
48:26 sacking the Parthion capital,
48:28 Cessopon, in 116 CE and briefly reaching the Persian Gulf.
48:33 Standing at its shore,
48:34 he reportedly lamented that he was too old to follow Alexander further east.
48:40 Rome created new provinces from the conquest,
48:43 but his successor Hadrien abandoned most of them within years.
48:48 The Euphrates reasserted itself as the boundary between worlds.
48:56 Two empires, centuries of war, and the frontier barely moved.
49:01 The exhaustion was real, and it was cumulative.
49:06 Something would eventually have to give.
49:08 Though the breaking point would come not from Rome but from within Iran itself.
49:14 Something giving way from within Iran itself arrived in the spring
49:17 of 224 CE on a plane near the river Hormos in southwestern Persia.
49:24 Ardasher, son of Papak and grandson of a Zoroastrian priest named Sassin,
49:29 had spent years consolidating power in the ancient heartland of Fars,
49:33 the same region where Cyrus and Darius had once ruled.
49:37 The Parthion system with its loose confederation of semi-independent
49:41 nobles had always allowed ambitious provincial rulers room to maneuver.
49:46 Ardasher maneuvered better than anyone before him.
49:53 The last Parthion king, Ardabanis IV, understood the threat too late.
50:00 At the battle of Hormosan, their forces met in a confrontation that would
50:04 determine the next four centuries of Persian history.
50:09 Arabanis died on the field.
50:12 With him died the Arsid dynasty after nearly five centuries
50:16 of rule and a new name entered history, the Sassinids.
50:24 What Ardure built was something deliberately consciously
50:27 different from the Parthion world that preceded him.
50:31 Where the Parththeians had governed through feudal decentralization,
50:35 the Sassinids reaching back to the memory of the Aminids
50:38 restored the idea of a single divine Persian king.
50:43 The title they chose was telling.
50:45 Shahancha, King of Kings, but now infused with sacred meaning.
50:51 The king was not merely a ruler.
50:54 He was the earthly representative of divine order itself.
51:02 Religion became the architecture of this new state.
51:06 Zoroastrianism, which had persisted through centuries
51:09 of Macedonian and Parththeian rule without official patronage,
51:12 was now elevated into something altogether more formidable.
51:16 A priestly class called the Magi,
51:18 organized into a proper hierarchy under a chief priest,
51:22 became partners in power alongside the monarchy.
51:26 Sacred fires burned in temples across the empire,
51:29 tended and maintained by state authority.
51:33 Orthodoxy was defined.
51:35 texts were compiled and for the first time
51:38 Zoroastrianism had both institutional structure and royal backing.
51:46 Yet the most dramatic demonstration of Sassined power
51:49 came not from Ardasher but from his son Shapur the first inherited the throne
51:55 and immediately turned his ambitions westward toward Rome.
52:02 Three separate Roman emperors fell before him.
52:06 But it was the third encounter that gave
52:08 Shapur a moment unique in ancient history.
52:12 In 260 CE at the battle of Adessa,
52:16 Roman Emperor Valyrian made the catastrophic decision to engage Shapur directly.
52:22 The battle became a route and then a humiliation with no parallel.
52:27 a reaning Roman emperor captured alive on the battlefield.
52:35 Shapur commemorated this moment with characteristic Persian grandeur.
52:40 At Nakshi Rostam, the ancient cliff face near
52:43 Percepilus where a cayman haded kings lay buried.
52:46 His stonemasons carved an enormous relief into the rock.
52:50 There stands Shapur on horseback, massive and triumphant.
52:55 At his feet kneels a Roman emperor begging for mercy.
53:00 Behind him another stands in submission grasping the royal bridal.
53:06 The image broadcast across centuries what words alone could not sustain.
53:11 Persia had humbled the greatest power in the western world.
53:18 These rock reliefs were not mere decoration.
53:22 They were political proclamations carved in permanent form,
53:26 speaking to any traveler who passed and to every future generation.
53:34 Not everyone within the empire shared the official Zoroastrian framework.
53:39 The 3rd century also produced one
53:42 of antiquity's most remarkable religious thinkers, a prophet named Mani,
53:46 who wo together elements of Zorostrianism, Christianity,
53:50 and Buddhism into a new faith called manism.
53:54 It spread with extraordinary speed across the empire and beyond,
53:59 troubling both Zoroastrian priests and later Roman authorities.
54:04 The Sassined court tolerated it uneasily before eventually suppressing it.
54:13 Religious vitality, military ambition, and centralized royal authority.
54:19 These were the defining forces of the new Persia.
54:23 But holding an empire together across such
54:26 vast distances and ambitions would demand constant, exhausting vigilance.
54:34 By the 4th century, the foundations were firmly laid.
54:38 What came next was something rarer in the ancient world.
54:42 An empire that did not merely conquer, but genuinely flourished.
54:47 The reign of Kosro I who ruled from 531 to 579 CE and earned the title Anushvon,
54:55 meaning immortal soul, represents the clearest expression of what
54:59 Cissanid civilization could achieve at its height.
55:02 He inherited an empire shaken by internal revolt
55:05 and immediately set about rebuilding it from the inside out.
55:12 His administrative reforms were sweeping and systematic.
55:17 The empire was divided into four great quadrants,
55:20 each governed by a senior military commander answerable directly to the king.
55:26 A new land survey standardized taxation,
55:29 replacing the old system of arbitrary assessment with fixed
55:32 rates based on soil quality and crop type.
55:36 Peasants and landowners alike now knew what they owed.
55:40 This sounds bureaucratic, because it was.
55:44 But in an empire stretching from the borders
55:46 of Bzantium to the edges of Central Asia,
55:50 predictability and order were themselves revolutionary.
55:57 Kosro also reshaped Cissan society into a rigid hierarchy of four classes.
56:03 Priests, warriors, scribes, and commoners.
56:08 Each had defined roles, privileges, and obligations.
56:13 The system was inflexible and often harsh, but it gave the empire a coherent
56:18 social grammar that would endure for generations.
56:21 Yet Kosro's greatest legacy may not have been administrative at all.
56:27 It may have been intellectual.
56:33 The Academy of Gandhar located in the southwestern province of Hustan became
56:39 under his patronage the most important center of learning in the ancient world.
56:44 When the Byzantine emperor Justinian closed
56:46 the philosophical schools of Athens in 529 CE,
56:51 many of those displaced scholars traveled east.
56:54 Gandh were welcomed them.
56:57 The academy brought together Greek physicians, Indian mathematicians,
57:01 Syriak translators and Persian astronomers under a single roof,
57:05 creating a synthesis of knowledge without parallel.
57:10 Medical techniques developed there would not reach Western Europe for centuries.
57:15 The institution became the model for the great translation
57:18 movements that would follow under the early Islamic caliphates.
57:26 Sassinid culture extended far beyond the scholarly.
57:30 Persian craftsmen of this period produced textiles of breathtaking complexity.
57:36 Woven silks depicting hunting scenes and mythological
57:39 figures that were traded from China to Constantinople.
57:43 Their metal work, silver plates and bowls showing kings
57:46 at the hunt set aesthetic standards imitated across the known world.
57:51 When Islamic artisans of the seventh
57:53 and 8th centuries searched for visual models,
57:56 they reached instinctively for Sassined forms.
58:03 Persian courtly culture gave the world two enduring gifts in this period.
58:08 The game of chess arrived from India and was transformed
58:11 at the Sassined court into the strategic game recognizable today.
58:16 Polo meanwhile was already a Persian passion played with a ferocity
58:21 that blurred the line between sport and military training.
58:25 Both games traveled westward along trade
58:28 routes carrying Persian cultural prestige with them.
58:35 But no golden age exists in isolation from conflict.
58:39 Kosro fought the Byzantines with the same energy he devoted domestic reform.
58:44 Contesting control of Mesopotamia, Syria, and the rich trade corridors
58:48 of the Neareastern campaigns that exhausted both empires.
58:52 The wars were inconclusive but relentless,
58:55 draining treasury and manpower on both sides across generations.
59:03 His successors pressed these wars even harder.
59:07 By the early 7th century, under Kosro II,
59:10 Sassined armies achieved conquests that seemed
59:13 to vindicate every claim of Persian greatness.
59:17 Jerusalem fell.
59:20 Egypt was taken.
59:22 Bisantine armies were pushed back toward Constantinople itself.
59:27 For one extraordinary decade, it appeared that Persia had finally definitively
59:32 won the ancient contest with the West.
59:39 It had not.
59:41 The overreach was catastrophic, and the Byzantine counterattack that followed
59:46 would leave both empires exhausted beyond recovery.
59:53 Neither side recognized the true danger approaching from the south from a desert
59:58 peninsula that neither Rome nor Persia
1:00:00 had ever considered worth serious attention.
1:00:03 The armies gathering there would not merely defeat the Sassinids.
1:00:09 They would transform Iran so completely that every dynasty examined so far,
1:00:14 every king and empire and reform would be reframed through an entirely new lens.
1:00:20 The world was about to change again, and this time it would change forever.
1:00:26 The signs of collapse came, not gradually, but all at once.
1:00:31 Two empires that had spent the better part of four decades bleeding
1:00:34 each other white had finally negotiated a weary peace in 628 CE.
1:00:40 The Sassined state that emerged from that peace was barely recognizable.
1:00:46 In the 4 years following the fall of Kosro II,
1:00:49 no fewer than eight rulers claimed the Persian throne in rapid succession.
1:00:54 Generals murdered kings.
1:00:57 Court factions poisoned pretenders.
1:00:59 The treasury was depleted, the army fragmented,
1:01:02 and the magnificent bureaucratic machinery that Kosro the first
1:01:05 had built with such patient care was grinding toward paralysis.
1:01:12 Into this vacuum came something the ancient world had never seen before.
1:01:18 The Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula had always been to Persian eyes,
1:01:23 a peripheral nuisance, raiding the frontier and retreating into their deserts.
1:01:28 But between 632 and 636 CE, those tribes had been bound together
1:01:36 by something more powerful than any king's command.
1:01:39 The faith of Islam revealed through the prophet
1:01:42 Muhammad and carried forward by his successors, the califfs,
1:01:47 gave the Arab armies a unity and a purpose
1:01:50 that no military reorganization alone could have created.
1:01:54 These were men who believed absolutely in what they were fighting for.
1:02:02 The decisive confrontation came in the autumn of 636
1:02:06 CE at a place along the Euphrates River called Alcadisa.
1:02:11 For 3 days, perhaps four, the Sassinid forces under the General
1:02:15 Rostam Ferraxad held against the Arab advance.
1:02:18 The Persian war elephants terrified the Arab horses.
1:02:22 Initially, the Sassaned infantry fought with the disciplined
1:02:26 ferocity of soldiers from a proud tradition.
1:02:30 But on the final day,
1:02:32 a sandstorm blew across the battlefield, blinding the Persian lines.
1:02:38 Rostam was killed.
1:02:40 His forces broke.
1:02:42 The road to Kessafon, the imperial capital, lay open.
1:02:51 When the Arab armies entered Kzafon weeks later,
1:02:54 what they found astonished even them.
1:02:57 The treasury contained riches that the soldiers
1:03:00 of the desert could scarcely comprehend.
1:03:03 Silks, jewels, gold plate, the accumulated wealth of centuries.
1:03:09 The great Sassined throne hall, the Tacasra,
1:03:12 with its famous arched vault soaring nearly 40 m overhead,
1:03:16 stood as a monument to everything Persia had built.
1:03:20 It stands in ruins still today on the outskirts of modern Baghdad.
1:03:26 The only surviving piece of ancient Kesopon,
1:03:29 a solitary reminder of an empire that once commanded the world.
1:03:36 Yet Persia was not finished in a single battle.
1:03:41 The young assassined king, Yazdiger III,
1:03:44 retreated eastward, rallying what forces he could,
1:03:47 calling on local governors and generals to hold the line.
1:03:51 For six more years, he moved from province to province,
1:03:55 a king without a capital,
1:03:57 trying to reconstitute an empire that was dissolving around him.
1:04:05 The final military reckoning came at Nihavand
1:04:08 deep in the Iranian plateau in 642 CE.
1:04:13 The Sassaned forces gathered there represented
1:04:16 the last serious concentration of imperial power.
1:04:20 The Arabs called their victory at Nihavan the victory
1:04:23 of victories and the name was not an exaggeration.
1:04:27 After Nihavand, organized Sassined resistance effectively ceased.
1:04:32 Persian armies did not disappear overnight,
1:04:35 but no force large enough to reverse the conquest would ever assemble again.
1:04:42 Yazdiger III spent the remaining years of his life
1:04:46 as a fugitive in his own empire,
1:04:48 drifting eastward toward the borders of Central Asia, always seeking shelter,
1:04:54 always one step ahead of both the Arab advance
1:04:56 and the treachery of Persian lords who calculated their own survival.
1:05:00 In 651 CE, near the city of MV, he was murdered not by an Arab soldier
1:05:07 but by a local miller for his remaining possessions.
1:05:10 The last of the assassined line died in obscurity,
1:05:14 abandoned by the empire he was born to rule.
1:05:21 Four centuries of Persian kingship ended not with a final battle,
1:05:25 but with a body by a riverbank in the eastern dust.
1:05:31 What followed was not simply a change of rulers.
1:05:36 It was a transformation so total
1:05:38 that the very way Iranians understood themselves,
1:05:41 their language, their faith, their relationship to God and King.
1:05:47 What does it mean to conquer a civilization that refuses to disappear?
1:05:52 The Arab armies that swept across the Iranian plateau in the 600s
1:05:57 brought with them not just a new political order, but a new faith.
1:06:01 And the question of how that faith would take root
1:06:04 in Persian soil would shape the next 14 centuries of history.
1:06:08 The answer, it turned out, was slowly, unevenly,
1:06:14 and on terms that Persia itself would help to define.
1:06:21 The early Umayad Caliphate established in Damascus
1:06:24 in 661 CE administered its vast empire through a system that drew a sharp
1:06:30 distinction between Arab Muslims and everyone else.
1:06:34 Non-Muslims including the millions of Zorastrians across Iran were permitted
1:06:39 to practice their faith in exchange for attacks called the Jiza.
1:06:43 The arrangement carried a message beneath its legal surface.
1:06:47 Conversion brought not just spiritual belonging but relief from financial
1:06:51 burden and crucially access to the privileges of the conquering class.
1:07:00 Yet the Umayad approach to those privileges exposed a deep contradiction.
1:07:06 Arab identity and Islamic identity were increasingly treated as the same thing.
1:07:11 Iranian converts to Islam, known as Mali or clients,
1:07:16 found themselves Muslim in faith,
1:07:18 but still subordinate in status, excluded from senior administrative posts,
1:07:24 paid less than Arab soldiers in the same armies,
1:07:27 reminded at every turn that the empire
1:07:29 they now served considered them secondass believers.
1:07:33 The resentment this generated was not a quiet grievance.
1:07:38 It was fuel.
1:07:42 Through all of this, Persian identity did not dissolve.
1:07:47 It went underground and it endured.
1:07:50 The Persian language, Dary, continued to be spoken in homes, in markets,
1:07:55 in the courts of local administrators who had bent
1:07:58 the knee to the caliphate without surrendering their culture.
1:08:01 Nor, the ancient spring festival rooted in the Zorastrian calendar,
1:08:06 continued to be celebrated with fires and feasts across the Iranian countryside,
1:08:11 a rhythm of the year that no foreign conquest had yet managed to interrupt.
1:08:16 Zoroastrian priests preserved sacred texts.
1:08:20 Persian poets kept their language alive in forms that would eventually
1:08:23 produce some of the greatest literature the medieval world would ever know.
1:08:31 By the early 700s, the tensions within
1:08:34 the Umiad Caliphate had reached a breaking point.
1:08:38 A revolutionary movement began to crystallize
1:08:40 in the eastern provinces in Corusan,
1:08:44 the great Iranian region stretching across what
1:08:46 is today northeastern Iran and central Asia.
1:08:50 It drew together Arab settlers, Iranian Mali converts,
1:08:54 and communities who had never accepted Umayad legitimacy.
1:08:59 The movement organized under the black banners of the Abbasid family,
1:09:03 descendants of the prophet's uncle,
1:09:05 and it carried a message of Islamic equality that resonated
1:09:09 precisely because so many people had been denied it.
1:09:15 The Abbised revolution of 750 CE was in the most
1:09:20 direct sense an Iranian revolution wearing Islamic clothing.
1:09:25 The general who led the decisive military campaign was Abu Muslim,
1:09:29 almost certainly of Iranian origin,
1:09:32 commanding armies drawn heavily from Corusan's Iranian Muslim population.
1:09:37 When the last Umayad Khalif Marwan II was defeated and killed,
1:09:42 the world's most powerful empire changed hands and Iranians had made it happen.
1:09:51 The Abbassids moved their capital eastward to the newly founded city of Baghdad,
1:09:55 deep within the cultural orbit of ancient Mesopotamia and Persia.
1:10:00 Iranian administrators, scholars, and courters poured into the new capital.
1:10:05 The Persian bureaucratic tradition,
1:10:07 the very tradition that had run empires for centuries,
1:10:10 began reasserting itself at the center of Islamic civilization.
1:10:18 Persia had been conquered.
1:10:21 It had converted.
1:10:23 And now, quietly and with extraordinary patience,
1:10:27 it had begun to reconquer from within.
1:10:33 The stage was set for a Persian renaissance, one that would carry the language,
1:10:37 the poetry, and the memory of Cyrus's heirs into a new and brilliant age.
1:10:44 The reconquest from within did not happen in a single dramatic moment.
1:10:49 It unfolded over generations in the courts of regional
1:10:53 governors who gradually remembered what their ancestors had built.
1:10:57 By the late 800s, the Abbassid caliphate
1:11:00 in Baghdad was growing hollow at its core.
1:11:04 Real power had drifted to Turkish military
1:11:07 commanders and ambitious provincial dynasties on the periphery.
1:11:11 In Corusan and Transoxana,
1:11:14 the land stretching from northeastern Iran into central Asia,
1:11:18 a Persian family called the Seamanids had risen to govern in the califf's name.
1:11:23 In practice, they governed for themselves,
1:11:26 and they did so in a language their Arab overlords barely recognized.
1:11:35 The cemented court at Bkara became something remarkable.
1:11:39 a laboratory for the rebirth of Persian as a literary language.
1:11:45 For nearly two centuries, Arabic had dominated the written world of Islam,
1:11:49 the language of the Quran, of law, of science.
1:11:54 Persian had survived in spoken form, but had retreated from the page.
1:12:00 The Seamanids changed that.
1:12:02 They patronized poets who wrote in a refined New Persian,
1:12:06 the same language their subjects actually spoke.
1:12:09 And they filled their treasury with enough silver from Corusan's
1:12:12 minds to make literary patronage not just possible, but lavish.
1:12:20 From this court emerged a figure whose work
1:12:22 would define Iranian identity for a thousand years.
1:12:26 Abu Al- Kasim Ferdosce born around 930 CE in the Corissan region spent
1:12:34 the better part of 30 years composing the Shaana, the book of Kings.
1:12:39 60,000 verses.
1:12:41 The mythic history of Iran from the dawn of creation to the Arab conquest.
1:12:46 A vast tapestry of heroes, monsters, doomed kings, and tragic loves.
1:12:53 When the Seaman dynasty fell to Turkish
1:12:56 invaders before Ferdosa could secure his promised reward,
1:13:00 he reportedly revised the poem's dedication in bitterness.
1:13:05 No matter.
1:13:06 The Shaame survived every dynasty that followed,
1:13:10 preserving the memory of Rustam and Sorab of Zal and Symorg
1:13:13 in a Persian so pure that school children can still read it today.
1:13:21 While Ferdosi was writing mythology,
1:13:24 his contemporaries were transforming the actual structure of human knowledge.
1:13:29 Ibinc Cena, known in the west as Abasha, born in 980 CE near Bkara,
1:13:36 had memorized the Quran by age 10
1:13:38 and mastered Greek philosophy and medicine not long after.
1:13:42 His cannon of medicine remained a standard
1:13:45 medical textbook in European universities until the 1600s.
1:13:49 His philosophical works pushed Aristotilian logic into new territory
1:13:54 that would unsettle thinkers from Paris to Baghdad for centuries.
1:14:02 Alongside him worked Alberuni,
1:14:04 perhaps the most quietly astonishing scholar of the medieval world.
1:14:08 Born in 973 CE in what is today Usuzbekiststan,
1:14:13 Alberuni calculated the circumference of the earth with startling accuracy
1:14:17 wrote pioneering studies of Indian
1:14:19 civilization and produced work on mathematics,
1:14:23 astronomy and ethnography that feels almost modern in its empirical discipline.
1:14:30 To the west, another Persian dynasty was making a different kind of statement.
1:14:36 The Bayads, a Shia Muslim family from the Caspian Highlands,
1:14:40 marched into Baghdad in 945 CE
1:14:43 and placed the Sunni calip under their protection.
1:14:46 A polite arrangement that left the calip
1:14:48 as a ceremonial figurehead while the Biades held actual power.
1:14:53 For the first time since the 7th century,
1:14:56 Shia Muslims governed at the center of the Islamic world.
1:15:00 Persian administrative culture,
1:15:02 Persian ceremonial titles, Persian aesthetic sensibility,
1:15:06 all of it flooded back into the heart of the caliphate.
1:15:13 Persian had become something extraordinary, not merely a language of one people,
1:15:18 but the shared literary and cultural tongue
1:15:21 of an entire civilization stretching from Istanbul to Delhi.
1:15:28 Yet the forces gathering on the step cared nothing for poetry or philosophy.
1:15:34 The Turkish world was moving and Iran stood in its path.
1:15:40 They came from the steps of Central Asia.
1:15:42 These Turkish warriors riding hard and fast across the grasslands
1:15:47 with little regard for the civilizations that had preceded them.
1:15:51 And yet something remarkable happened when they arrived.
1:15:56 Iran did not fall silent.
1:15:59 It converted its conquerors.
1:16:04 Mahmud of Gazni, Sultan from 998 to 1030 CE,
1:16:10 built the first great Turkish Empire centered on the Afghan city of Gazny.
1:16:14 He raided northern India 17 times,
1:16:17 stripping temples of their treasures and earning
1:16:20 a fearsome reputation across the subcontinent.
1:16:23 Yet back at his court,
1:16:25 he kept Persian poets and scholars in extraordinary comfort.
1:16:30 He famously promised Fozi a gold coin for every verse of the Shauneame.
1:16:35 Though that payment, as history records, never fully arrived.
1:16:40 The contradiction defined the Gaznavids entirely.
1:16:43 Conquerors who desperately wanted to be remembered as cultivated Persian kings.
1:16:52 That contradiction was settled permanently
1:16:54 at the battle of Dandanakan in 1040 CE.
1:16:59 A Turkish confederation known as the Seljukes met the Gaznivid
1:17:03 army in the deserts of Corusan and destroyed it utterly.
1:17:07 Within a decade, the Seljukes controlled Persia, Iraq, and Anatolia,
1:17:13 eventually becoming the dominant power in the entire Islamic world.
1:17:20 What did these new masters do with their conquest?
1:17:24 They hired Persian administrators and let them run everything.
1:17:28 The greatest of these was Nisam Mul,
1:17:31 a Persian bureaucrat from Corusan who served as vizier
1:17:34 to two successive Seljic sultans for over 30 years.
1:17:38 His treatis on governance, the Saiasatnama,
1:17:41 written in elegant Persian pros, codified an entire model of statecraft.
1:17:46 how kings should hear complaints,
1:17:48 how spies should operate, how courts should function.
1:17:52 It was essentially a Persian instruction manual handed
1:17:55 to a Turkish dynasty and they followed it faithfully.
1:18:00 Nisam Alulk also established the Nisamia Madrasa system,
1:18:04 universities stretching from Baghdad to Nishapur
1:18:07 that shaped Islamic scholarship for generations.
1:18:14 While administrators governed, poets soared.
1:18:18 Omar Hayyam, mathematician and astronomer from Nishapur,
1:18:23 calculated the solar year with greater precision than
1:18:26 the Julian calendar and simultaneously wrote the Rubayat,
1:18:30 quattrains of wine, roses,
1:18:32 and philosophical resignation that would eventually reach
1:18:35 Victorian England and astonish an entirely different civilization.
1:18:40 Sufi mystical poetry deepened alongside him.
1:18:44 Spiritual writers reaching toward divine union through verse
1:18:47 that blurred the line between sacred and intoxicating beauty.
1:18:54 But empires built fast can fracture faster.
1:18:59 After the great Seljic Sultan Malik Shaw died in 1092 CE,
1:19:04 his sons fought each other across a generation of civil wars.
1:19:08 The empire split into competing branches
1:19:11 and from the eastern margins rose a new power.
1:19:14 The querismian empire centered on the region south of the aerrol sea.
1:19:19 Ambitious and hungry.
1:19:24 Persian culture had survived two Turkish
1:19:26 conquests by absorbing its conquerors from within.
1:19:30 Whether it could survive what was coming next
1:19:33 from the east was an entirely different question.
1:19:38 What came next from the east was not conquest in any familiar sense.
1:19:43 It was eraser.
1:19:45 In 1218 CE, the Quorismian Sha Muhammad II made a decision
1:19:49 that would doom his empire and devastate an entire civilization.
1:19:54 When a Mongol trade caravan arrived at the border city of Otar,
1:19:58 the local governor, suspecting espionage, had its merchants executed.
1:20:05 Genghish Khan sent ambassadors demanding justice.
1:20:09 Muhammad had them killed, too.
1:20:12 It was, historians agree,
1:20:14 one of the most catastrophic miscalculations in recorded history.
1:20:22 The Mongol response arrived in 1219 CE with a force estimated between 100,000
1:20:27 and 200,000 warriors organized with a military
1:20:30 precision no army of that era could match.
1:20:34 Muhammad's empire, vast but hollow, crumbled within months.
1:20:40 And then the killing began in earnest.
1:20:47 MV, the ancient Silk Road city in present-day Turk Menistan,
1:20:51 once home to over 500,000 souls, fell in 1221 CE.
1:20:57 Contemporary accounts admittedly prone to exaggeration describe Mongol soldiers
1:21:04 dividing the survivors among themselves for systematic slaughter over days.
1:21:09 The Persian historian Ibir who lived through this era wrote
1:21:13 that he wished he had not been born to witness it.
1:21:17 Modern estimates suggest MV lost the vast majority of its population.
1:21:26 Mishapur followed.
1:21:28 The city where Omar Cayam had once calculated the movements of stars was raised
1:21:33 so completely that Mongol forces reportedly stacked
1:21:36 human skulls in pyramids separated by gender.
1:21:40 Herod surrendered, then revolted,
1:21:43 then was destroyed a second time with even greater ferocity.
1:21:48 City after city across Coruscant,
1:21:50 the cultural heartland of Persian civilization,
1:21:53 ceased to exist in any meaningful sense.
1:22:00 But the destruction went deeper than bodies and buildings.
1:22:05 Iran's agricultural civilization rested on an extraordinary
1:22:09 network of underground irrigation channels called canets.
1:22:12 Some of them centuries old, engineering marvels that carried water
1:22:16 from mountain aquifers across desert plains.
1:22:20 Mongol armies either deliberately or through
1:22:22 sheer indifference destroyed these systems wholesale.
1:22:26 Fields that had fed millions returned to desert.
1:22:30 The ecological damage outlasted the violence by generations.
1:22:38 The demographic numbers are staggering and contested.
1:22:42 But scholars estimate that Iran's population
1:22:45 may have fallen from somewhere between 10
1:22:47 and 15 million people before the invasions
1:22:49 to perhaps 1/3 of that figure within decades.
1:22:53 Entire regions that had been densely settled and agriculturally
1:22:58 productive remained sparsely inhabited for two centuries afterward.
1:23:03 This was not merely a political catastrophe.
1:23:07 It was a civilizational wound of extraordinary depth.
1:23:14 And yet with grim irony,
1:23:16 the Mongols did what conquerors before them had always done in Iran.
1:23:21 They stayed and Iran worked on them.
1:23:28 Huliguhan, grandson of Genghis,
1:23:31 established the Mongol Ilhanate across Persia following
1:23:35 his westward campaigns in the 1250s CE.
1:23:39 His conquest of Baghdad in 1258 CE destroyed the Abbasid caliphate entirely,
1:23:46 an event that sent shock waves across the Islamic world.
1:23:50 But Hulagu's wife was a Christian.
1:23:53 His court was cosmopolitan.
1:23:55 And Persian administrators once again found
1:23:57 their way into positions of genuine influence.
1:24:01 By the time of Huligu's successors,
1:24:04 Mongol Ilhans were converting to Islam and patronizing Persian art,
1:24:09 poetry, and architecture with considerable enthusiasm.
1:24:16 Recovery was slow, painful, and uneven.
1:24:21 But the Persian capacity to outlast catastrophe,
1:24:24 to absorb even the most destructive of conquerors and reshape them from within,
1:24:30 had not been extinguished.
1:24:32 It had merely been tested at a scale no previous century had imagined.
1:24:41 A new synthesis was emerging from the ruins.
1:24:44 And with it, one of the most brilliant
1:24:46 cultural flowerings in Iranian history was quietly taking shape.
1:24:52 The transformation that previous chapter promised
1:24:55 came most dramatically through a single ruler.
1:24:58 In 1295 CE, Gazan Khan ascended to the Ilcanid throne
1:25:03 and made a declaration that permanently altered Persia's political landscape.
1:25:09 He converted to Islam not as a diplomatic gesture
1:25:12 but as a genuine reorientation of his entire administration.
1:25:17 Persian became the language of governance.
1:25:21 Mongol tribal customs gave way to Islamic law.
1:25:25 Taxes were rationalized.
1:25:27 Irrigation networks slowly repaired and the agricultural
1:25:31 heartland of Corusan began tentatively to breathe again.
1:25:39 Gazan's most enduring legacy arrived
1:25:42 through his extraordinary vizier Rasheed Aldin.
1:25:45 A physician turned statesman turned historian,
1:25:48 Rasheed Aldin assembled teams of scholars from across
1:25:52 the known world to produce the compendium of Chronicles,
1:25:54 the first truly universal history ever written,
1:25:58 spanning civilizations from China to Western Europe.
1:26:01 It was an achievement of staggering ambition and it was written in Persian.
1:26:06 The language of Ferdozi had become once
1:26:09 again the language of world historical thought.
1:26:16 Then Timmer arrived.
1:26:21 Born near Samarand in 1336 CE,
1:26:25 Teamer the lame called Tamarlain by the Europeans who feared him from a distance
1:26:30 was a Turkish Mongol warlord of ferocious
1:26:32 military genius and equally ferocious cruelty.
1:26:36 His campaigns into Iran beginning in the 1380
1:26:39 CE were not conquest in any administrative sense.
1:26:43 They were punishment applied at industrial scale.
1:26:47 Isvahan surrendered in 1387 CE, then rose in revolt.
1:26:54 Timmer's response was to order the construction of towers built from the skulls
1:26:58 of its citizens with estimates ranging from 70,000 to 200,000 dead.
1:27:04 Baghdad, Shiraz, and dozens of lesser cities endured similar fates.
1:27:10 What Gazan Khan's reforms had patiently rebuilt across a century.
1:27:15 Timber unmade in seasons.
1:27:21 And yet with the dark rhythm that defines so much of Iranian history,
1:27:26 catastrophe again preceded flowering.
1:27:32 Timur himself loved art and dragged craftsmen and architects back
1:27:36 to his capital at Samarand rather than simply killing them.
1:27:41 After his death in 1405 CE,
1:27:44 his son Shah Ruk moved the Tamurid capital to Herit in Eastern
1:27:47 Corusan and inaugurated one of the most
1:27:50 refined cultural periods in Persian history.
1:27:53 The court at Hat became a magnet for poets,
1:27:56 painters, calligraphers, and philosophers.
1:28:00 Shah Ruk's son, the astronomer Prince Olubbeg,
1:28:03 built an observatory at Samarand and calculated the length of the solar year
1:28:07 to within minutes of modern precision using
1:28:10 15th century instruments and pure observational genius.
1:28:18 It was painting however that achieved perhaps the highest expression.
1:28:23 The Herod school of miniature painting working under
1:28:26 the master Kamal Adinbezad produced works of extraordinary delicacy.
1:28:32 Every tiny figure alive with personality.
1:28:35 Every garden and palace rendered in jewelike detail.
1:28:39 Persian poetry found new champions
1:28:41 and the libraries of Timurid princes became legendary.
1:28:48 Brilliance and violence had braided themselves together
1:28:51 across two centuries into something distinctly unmistakably Persian.
1:28:56 The next transformation would emerge from a different kind of fire entirely.
1:29:02 Out of the ashes of Timrid's splendor, something wholly unexpected rose.
1:29:09 Not a foreign conqueror arriving from the steps,
1:29:13 not a dynasty carried in on horseback from central Asia,
1:29:16 but a movement born from within Iran itself,
1:29:19 from the mystical Sufi brotherhoods that had
1:29:22 quietly sustained Persian spiritual life for centuries.
1:29:28 The Safavia order had its origins in the city of Ardabil in northwestern Iran,
1:29:34 founded by a revered Sufi master named Safiel Din in the early 14th century.
1:29:39 For generations, it remained a peaceful religious brotherhood,
1:29:43 drawing followers through spiritual teaching rather than military ambition.
1:29:48 Then gradually something hardened inside it.
1:29:53 Political instability, the trauma of timid violence,
1:29:57 and the ambitions of successive leaders transformed this contemplative
1:30:01 order into something closer to a revolutionary army.
1:30:05 Its followers, fanatically devoted, wore distinctive red head gear with 12
1:30:10 folds honoring the 12 imams of Shia tradition.
1:30:14 History would call them the Kizlebash, the redheads.
1:30:20 In 1487 CE, a child named Ismile was born into this movement's leadership.
1:30:28 He was precocious, magnetic,
1:30:30 and possessed of an almost terrifying certainty about his divine purpose.
1:30:35 By the time he was 12 years old,
1:30:37 he was already leading his followers through hiding and exile,
1:30:41 hunted by rival Turkman powers.
1:30:44 By the time he was 14, he was commanding armies.
1:30:51 In 1501 CE, the 14-year-old Ismael captured Tris,
1:30:56 the ancient city that had served as a Mongol capital,
1:30:59 and declared himself Sha of Iran.
1:31:02 The Safavid dynasty had begun, but the political declaration was almost
1:31:08 secondary to the religious one that followed.
1:31:10 Immediately Ismael proclaimed 12 Shia Islam the official state
1:31:15 religion of Iran and ordered his entire population to convert.
1:31:23 This was not a gentle invitation.
1:31:26 Sunni scholars who refused were executed.
1:31:30 Shia rituals became compulsory.
1:31:33 Cursing the first three Sunni califfs
1:31:36 was mandated from pulpits throughout the land.
1:31:39 In a territory where the majority had been Sunni Muslim for centuries,
1:31:43 this enforced transformation was carried out with the absolute conviction
1:31:47 of a man who believed himself quite literally to be a divine figure.
1:31:55 The consequences rippled outward immediately to Iran's west.
1:32:01 The Ottoman Empire, the most powerful Sunni state on earth,
1:32:07 recognized an existential rival.
1:32:10 The collision came at the Battle of Calderan in 1514 CE.
1:32:16 Ottoman Sultan Salem I commanding an army equipped
1:32:19 with gunpowder artillery and disciplined
1:32:22 infantry crushed Ismile's cavalry-based forces.
1:32:26 The Kizzlebash warriors who believed their devotion made them
1:32:30 invincible discovered that faith provided no protection against cannon fire.
1:32:39 Ismma never recovered psychologically from the defeat.
1:32:43 He withdrew, drank heavily, and never commanded another major campaign.
1:32:49 But the state he had created proved more durable than the man himself.
1:32:54 Calderan established an Ottoman Safavidid frontier that would define
1:32:59 the border between the Sunni and Shia worlds for centuries.
1:33:03 A line whose echoes can still be traced in modern maps of the Middle East.
1:33:10 What Israel truly created more than any dynasty or border was a specifically
1:33:16 Iranian religious identity by making 12 Shia
1:33:21 Islam the defining characteristic of Iranian civilization.
1:33:25 He separated Iran permanently from its
1:33:27 Arab and Turkish Sunni neighbors and forged
1:33:30 a sense of distinctiveness that would
1:33:32 survive every subsequent conquest and upheaval.
1:33:35 The Shia clergy, empowered and institutionalized,
1:33:39 became permanent participants in Iranian political life.
1:33:46 The full flowering of this new state,
1:33:49 its arts, its administration, its architecture,
1:33:52 and its extraordinary ambition would await a ruler of even greater genius.
1:33:58 The foundations, however, had been permanently laid.
1:34:03 When Sha Abbas I came to power in 1588 CE, he inherited a state under siege.
1:34:11 Usuzbach raiders pressed from the northeast.
1:34:14 The Ottomans held vast territories
1:34:16 to the west and the Kiselbash tribal commanders
1:34:18 who had once built Safavidid power now threatened to devour it from within.
1:34:23 What he did next would transform Iran
1:34:25 into one of the most sophisticated empires on Earth.
1:34:30 His first instinct was ruthlessly practical.
1:34:36 Recognizing that the tribal cavalry loyal to their own
1:34:39 chiefs was more a liability than an asset,
1:34:42 Abbas dismantled the old military structure and built something entirely new.
1:34:47 Drawing on the model of the Ottoman Janisaris,
1:34:50 he created regiments of trained slave soldiers, young Georgian, Armenian,
1:34:54 and Sarcassian men absorbed into royal service,
1:34:58 loyal exclusively to the Sha rather than to any tribal master.
1:35:03 Equipped with musketss and artillery,
1:35:06 this modernized army gave Abbas the instrument he needed.
1:35:13 The reconquests came swiftly.
1:35:16 He first made a humiliating but calculated peace with the Ottomans,
1:35:21 trading territory for time,
1:35:23 then turned east to smash the Usuzbck forces, threatening Corusan.
1:35:28 By607 CE, he had reversed the Ottoman concessions entirely,
1:35:33 recapturing Tris, Baghdad,
1:35:35 and vast stretches of Mesopotamia in a sequence of campaigns
1:35:39 that announced Safavidit Iran as a military power demanding serious respect.
1:35:47 But Abbas was not merely a general.
1:35:51 He was a builder of civilizations.
1:35:57 In 1698 CE, he moved his capital to Isvahan,
1:36:01 a city of roughly 500,000 inhabitants nestled on the central Iranian plateau,
1:36:06 and proceeded to remake it into one of the most
1:36:09 beautiful urban spaces the world had ever seen.
1:36:12 Persian architects working under his patronage
1:36:15 constructed the Nakshi Jan Square,
1:36:17 an immense public space more than 500 meters long,
1:36:21 ringed by two-story arcades sheltering thousands of shops.
1:36:25 At its southern end rose the Shake Lot Fala Mosque,
1:36:29 its tiled dome shifting between Cream and Rose depending on the angle of light.
1:36:34 Dominating the square's southern axis stood the great Sha Mosque.
1:36:38 Its entrance portal soaring nearly 30 meters high covered
1:36:42 in turquoise and cobalt tile work of extraordinary intricacy.
1:36:47 Persians simply called Isvahan Nesb Jan half the world.
1:36:52 The boast was not entirely immodest.
1:36:59 The bizaars connecting the square to the older
1:37:01 city became arteries of global commerce.
1:37:05 Sappavid carpets, their geometric and floral patterns,
1:37:08 achieving a technical and artistic refinement never surpassed before or since,
1:37:12 flowed outward to European courts and Ottoman palaces.
1:37:16 Persian miniature painting, silk weaving,
1:37:19 and metal work reached peaks of accomplishment
1:37:22 that left visiting European diplomats struggling for adequate descriptions.
1:37:26 Those diplomats arrived in considerable numbers.
1:37:34 Abas actively curded European powers
1:37:37 as strategic counterweights against the Ottomans,
1:37:40 dispatching embassies to Spain, England, and the courts of Italy.
1:37:46 The partnership produced concrete results.
1:37:49 In 1622 CE with English naval assistance from the East India Company,
1:37:55 Abbas expelled the Portuguese from their fortified trading post at Hormuz,
1:37:59 reasserting Iranian control over the critical entrance to the Persian
1:38:03 Gulf and reshaping regional trade routes in Safavidid favor.
1:38:10 The century following Abos would slowly erode what he had built.
1:38:15 weaker successors proved unable to maintain either military discipline
1:38:19 or the extraordinary administrative energy he
1:38:22 had sustained across a 42-year reign.
1:38:25 By 1722 CE, Afghan invaders from the east
1:38:30 would march nearly unopposed into Isvahan itself, ending Safavidid rule.
1:38:39 Yet the Isvahana bas created endured.
1:38:43 Its mosques still stand.
1:38:46 Its square still draws millions of visitors annually.
1:38:50 What he built in stone and tile outlasted every conqueror who followed.
1:38:55 Which brings us to the question of what rose from those ruins next.
1:39:01 The Afghan tribesmen who poured through Isvahan's gates in 1722 came not
1:39:06 as a sophisticated conquering civilization
1:39:09 but as opportunists seizing a rotting prize.
1:39:13 The Gills AI Afghans under Mahmud Hotaki had besieged
1:39:17 the great city for months starving its population into submission.
1:39:22 The last Safavid Sha Sultan Hussein surrendered his crown in person.
1:39:28 What followed was 7 years of brutal occupation
1:39:30 that shattered the social fabric Abbas had so carefully constructed.
1:39:35 Population estimates for Isvahan collapsed from perhaps
1:39:38 500,000 to barely 100,000 within a generation.
1:39:47 Yet chaos in Iranian history has a habit of producing remarkable men.
1:39:56 Nater Kohi born somewhere around 1688 into a modest family in the northeastern
1:40:01 province of Corusan understood power the way a craftsman understands his tools.
1:40:08 Rising through tribal warfare and military service,
1:40:11 he gradually positioned himself as the indispensable
1:40:14 military force capable of driving the Afghans out.
1:40:18 By 1729, he had done exactly that, shattering the Gills
1:40:22 AI forces and restoring a nominal Sapphavid to the throne.
1:40:27 But everyone understood who truly held Iran in his fist.
1:40:35 In 1736, Nater dropped the pretense entirely and crowned himself Sha.
1:40:41 His ambitions, however, extended far beyond Iranian borders.
1:40:50 The invasion of India stands as one
1:40:52 of history's most spectacular military adventures.
1:40:56 The Mughal Empire, once a colossus stretching across the subcontinent,
1:41:01 had decayed almost as completely as the Sapphavids.
1:41:05 In 1739, Nater crossed the Indis,
1:41:09 crushed a vastly larger Mughal force at the battle of Carnol and entered Delhi.
1:41:15 What he extracted from that city staggers the imagination.
1:41:19 The peacock throne constructed for the Mughal emperor Shahaj Jahan at a cost
1:41:24 equivalent to twice the price of the Taj Mahal was carried back to Iran.
1:41:29 So was the Coenor diamond,
1:41:32 a stone whose subsequent journey through Afghan sik and finally
1:41:35 British hands would make it one of history's most contested objects.
1:41:40 The loot from Delhi was so vast
1:41:42 that NATO abolished taxation across Iran for 3 years.
1:41:49 But brilliance and cruelty traveled together in Nater Sha.
1:41:54 His later years darkened into paranoia and savage repression.
1:41:59 In 1747, his own officers murdered him in his tent and Iran fractured once more.
1:42:10 The decades following produced competing warlords
1:42:13 and dynasties fighting over the Iranian heartland.
1:42:17 From this struggle emerged two principal contenders.
1:42:21 Kareem Khan Xand ruling from Shiraz in the south
1:42:25 proved a genuinely unusual figure in this brutal era.
1:42:29 A leader who preferred the modest title of Aquil,
1:42:33 regent of the people over imperial grandeur.
1:42:36 His reign brought relative peace and modest prosperity to southern Iran,
1:42:42 but his Xan dynasty would not survive him for long.
1:42:50 Pressing from the north and east, a Turkish tribal confederation called
1:42:54 the Kajars waited patiently for their moment.
1:42:58 That moment was coming and with it
1:43:00 an entirely new chapter in Iran's ancient story.
1:43:05 The man who united Iran under Kajar
1:43:08 rule was not a figure history remembers fondly.
1:43:11 Agam Muhammad Khan, the dynasty's ferocious founder,
1:43:16 had been castrated as a boy by political enemies,
1:43:19 and whatever cruelty the world had shown him, he returned with interest.
1:43:24 By 1796, he had crushed the last Xand pretender
1:43:29 and seized control of the Iranian plateau, choosing Thrron.
1:43:33 then little more than a provincial town as his new capital.
1:43:37 He was assassinated the following year
1:43:40 before he could consolidate his empire further.
1:43:43 But the dynasty he built would endure for over a century.
1:43:51 The Kajar Shaw who followed were a different
1:43:54 breed from the warrior who founded their line.
1:43:57 They were courtmen, comfortable with ceremony, fond of pleasure,
1:44:01 and dangerously unprepared for the new world pressing in on Iran's borders.
1:44:10 That world arrived in the form
1:44:11 of two empires whose appetite seemed without limit.
1:44:15 Russia was expanding southward with relentless momentum,
1:44:20 absorbing the Caucasian kingdoms that had
1:44:22 long existed within Iran's sphere of influence.
1:44:26 Two catastrophic wars settled the question permanently.
1:44:30 The Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 stripped Iran
1:44:34 of territories including modern Georgia and parts of Azerbaijan.
1:44:39 The Treaty of Turk Manche in 1828 cut even deeper,
1:44:42 surrendering additional Caucasian lands and forcing Iran to pay
1:44:46 a ruinous indemnity of 5 million silver rubles.
1:44:50 Perhaps worse than the territory lost were the capitulation clauses,
1:44:54 legal provisions granting Russian citizens special protections
1:44:57 inside Iran that Iranian courts could not touch.
1:45:01 Sovereignty was becoming a polite fiction.
1:45:07 Britain watched from the south with equal calculation.
1:45:11 London's obsession was not Iran itself, but India,
1:45:15 the crown jewel of British imperial ambition.
1:45:19 Iran was a buffer, a corridor,
1:45:22 a potential invasion route that had to be managed,
1:45:24 pressured, and kept dependent.
1:45:27 The two empires competed across Iranian soil
1:45:30 in what historians would call the great game,
1:45:32 a phrase that sanitizes with sporting language what
1:45:35 was in practice a systematic dismemberment of Iranian independence.
1:45:43 Into this grinding pressure stepped Nir Alin Sha who
1:45:47 ruled for nearly half a century beginning in 1848.
1:45:51 He was not without curiosity or intelligence.
1:45:55 He traveled to Europe three times marveling at railways and telegraphs
1:46:01 and attempted to introduce some of these wonders to Iran.
1:46:05 A telegraph line connected Thyron to the wider world.
1:46:10 Militarymies opened.
1:46:13 A newspaper began publication.
1:46:16 Yet modernization without structural reform was decoration on a rotting wall.
1:46:25 To fund his court and his ambitions, Nir Alin Sha sold Iran piece by piece.
1:46:31 Concessions granted to British and Russian interests handed control of banking,
1:46:36 roads, fisheries, and extraction rights to foreign companies.
1:46:40 The most catastrophic of these was the tobacco concession of 1890,
1:46:45 which gave a British firm monopoly control over
1:46:48 the entire production and sale of Iranian tobacco.
1:46:54 The Iranian response was extraordinary.
1:46:58 In 1891, one of the country's senior religious scholars issued
1:47:03 a ruling declaring tobacco use forbidden so long as foreign control persisted.
1:47:08 In a society where tobacco was woven into daily life,
1:47:11 the effect was immediate and electric.
1:47:15 Iranians put down their pipes across the country.
1:47:19 Even the women of the Royal Harum reportedly refused to smoke.
1:47:23 The sha had no choice but to cancel the concession,
1:47:27 though the financial penalties cost Iran dearly.
1:47:33 It was the first mass political movement in modern Iranian history,
1:47:38 a preview of something larger gathering beneath the surface.
1:47:45 Nirro Den Sha never grasped what the tobacco protest truly signaled.
1:47:51 In 1896, on the eve of celebrations marking 50 years of his reign,
1:47:57 he was shot dead by an assassin.
1:48:00 The old order was cracking, and the Iranian people were beginning to imagine
1:48:04 something their rulers had never offered them, a voice in their own fate.
1:48:11 The voice the Iranian people imagined did not remain silent for long.
1:48:17 By 1905, a coalition of merchants, intellectuals,
1:48:21 and religious scholars had found common cause
1:48:23 in their fury at Kajar misrule and foreign domination.
1:48:28 Street protests, strikes, and the traditional practice of Bast,
1:48:32 taking sanctuary in a sacred space to demand justice paralyzed Tehron.
1:48:38 The movement was remarkable in its breadth.
1:48:42 Clerics who had never sat beside secular
1:48:44 reformers found themselves united by a single demand.
1:48:48 A constitution, a parliament, a law that bound even the sha himself.
1:48:57 Mosafar alin sha weakened and ailing conceded.
1:49:02 In 1906, Iran became one of the first
1:49:06 countries in Asia to establish a constitutional monarchy.
1:49:10 A parliament called the Mosley's convened in Thran
1:49:13 and for a brief extraordinary moment
1:49:16 ordinary Iranians held genuine political power.
1:49:23 The moment did not last.
1:49:26 The new Sha Muhammad Ali despised the constitution and in 1908
1:49:31 used Russian trained Kasac troops
1:49:33 to bombard the parliament building into rubble.
1:49:36 A civil war followed.
1:49:39 Constitutionalists fought back from TRIZ and elsewhere,
1:49:42 eventually restoring the constitution in 1909.
1:49:46 Yet the victory was hollow.
1:49:49 In 1907, Britain and Russia had quietly signed the Anglo-Russian Convention,
1:49:55 formally dividing Iran into spheres of influence.
1:49:59 A Russian zone in the north, a British zone in the south,
1:50:03 and a nominally neutral belt between them.
1:50:07 Iran was not consulted.
1:50:12 The First World War completed Iran's humiliation.
1:50:16 Though Tehran declared neutrality,
1:50:18 the country became a battleground for Russian, British, and Ottoman forces.
1:50:24 Famine swept through large parts of the country.
1:50:27 Perhaps 2 million Iranians died from starvation and disease,
1:50:31 a catastrophe largely forgotten by the outside world.
1:50:38 Out of this devastation came a soldier named Raza Khan.
1:50:43 In February of 1921, commanding the Ksac brigade,
1:50:48 he marched on Thran and seized power in a swift coup.
1:50:52 He was practical, ruthless,
1:50:54 and possessed of an iron will to restore Iranian sovereignty and order.
1:50:59 Within 4 years, he had outmaneuvered every rival.
1:51:03 In 1925, the last Kajjar Sha was formally deposed and Raakan crowned himself,
1:51:10 founding the Palavi dynasty.
1:51:15 As Raasha Sha, he pursued modernization with the force of a military campaign.
1:51:21 A trans Iranian railway stretching nearly 900 miles was completed by 1938.
1:51:29 Secular courts replaced religious ones.
1:51:33 Universities opened.
1:51:35 The veil was forcibly banned for women in 1936,
1:51:39 a reform imposed without consent as officers
1:51:42 tore headscarves from women in the streets.
1:51:48 He also broke Iran's economic dependence piece by piece,
1:51:53 renegotiating the British oil concession
1:51:56 and building a modern state bureaucracy.
1:52:02 But Resa's authoritarianism made him vulnerable.
1:52:06 When the Second World War engulfed the region and Britain
1:52:09 and the Soviet Union grew suspicious of his overtures to Germany,
1:52:13 they simply invaded Iran in August of 1941 and forced him to abdicate.
1:52:21 His son Muhammad Raza would inherit a throne already trembling beneath him.
1:52:29 The young Shaw, who inherited that trembling throne in 1941,
1:52:33 was just 21 years old, slight and uncertain,
1:52:38 surrounded by a country that had been occupied, humiliated,
1:52:42 and was now seething with political energy long suppressed by his father.
1:52:47 Into that opening stepped Muhammad Mosed,
1:52:54 a French educated lawyer from an aristocratic family.
1:52:57 Mosadic had spent decades in opposition,
1:53:00 insisting that Iranian sovereignty meant nothing as long
1:53:03 as British Petroleum operating under the Anglo Iranian
1:53:06 oil company extracted the country's greatest resource while
1:53:10 returning a fraction of its value to Iranians.
1:53:14 The numbers were stark.
1:53:15 Britain collected more in taxes
1:53:17 from the company than Iran received in royalties.
1:53:21 The oil beneath Persian soil was financing
1:53:24 British power while Iranians lived in poverty.
1:53:30 In April of 1951, the Majles voted to nationalize the oil industry.
1:53:37 Mosed became prime minister.
1:53:40 Crowds filled the streets of Thrron in celebration.
1:53:44 For the first time in living memory, Iran would control its own wealth.
1:53:52 The British response was swift and merciless.
1:53:56 A naval blockade stopped Iranian oil from reaching world markets.
1:54:02 Diplomats and technicians withdrew.
1:54:05 The economy began to suffocate.
1:54:11 Washington watched uneasily.
1:54:14 The Truman administration had initial
1:54:16 sympathy for Mosed's Democratic credentials.
1:54:20 The Eisenhower administration that followed did not.
1:54:24 By 1953, the Cold War calculus had hardened.
1:54:29 A weakened, unstable Iran on the Soviet border was,
1:54:32 in American eyes, a communist invitation.
1:54:36 The CIA and British intelligence services conceived Operation Ajax.
1:54:44 In August of 1953, paid mobs stormed through Tyrron.
1:54:50 Military officers loyal to the Sha moved against Mosade's government.
1:54:56 Within days, it was over.
1:54:59 Mosadg was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
1:55:05 The Sha returned from brief exile, now indebted to foreign powers in ways
1:55:10 that would define and ultimately destroy his reign.
1:55:19 What followed were decades of paradox.
1:55:22 The Shaw pursued genuine modernization through
1:55:25 his white revolution beginning in 1963,
1:55:28 redistributing land, expanding education, granting women the right to vote.
1:55:35 Industrialization transformed Iranian cities.
1:55:39 oil revenues, especially after the price shocks of the 1970s,
1:55:44 poured money into infrastructure and a swelling middle class.
1:55:51 Yet, alongside every school built, every new highway paved,
1:55:56 the secret police known as Savok tightened its grip.
1:56:00 Tens of thousands were imprisoned.
1:56:03 Torture was systematic.
1:56:06 political parties were abolished.
1:56:08 Iran grew richer and more repressive simultaneously.
1:56:12 A combination that breeds not gratitude but fury.
1:56:20 And the fury found a voice.
1:56:25 Ayatollah Rahul Kmeni had been exiled in 1964 for denouncing the Sha's reforms
1:56:32 as surrenders to foreign influence from Iraq and then from a suburb of Paris.
1:56:38 He sent cassette tapes into Iran.
1:56:40 His sermons duplicated by the thousands and passed
1:56:42 hand to hand through mosques and bizaars.
1:56:46 The medium was ancient.
1:56:49 The message was electric.
1:56:54 By late 1978, millions were in the streets.
1:56:59 The Sha's army, vast and American equipped,
1:57:03 hesitated to massacre the crowds it faced.
1:57:06 The institutions of modernization he had built.
1:57:10 The universities, the urban professional
1:57:12 classes had produced people with expectations
1:57:15 his government could not satisfy and patience it had exhausted.
1:57:23 On February the 1st, 1979,
1:57:26 Kmeni's Air France flight landed at Miraabad airport in Tehran.
1:57:31 The crowd that met him numbered in the millions.
1:57:35 Within days, the monarchy that Cyrus the Great
1:57:37 had first defined 25 centuries earlier was finished.
1:57:44 Iran would now become something the ancient world could never have imagined.
1:57:49 An Islamic Republic, a theocracy born from revolution, shaped by grievance,
1:57:55 and destined to reshape the Middle East
1:57:57 and the modern world for generations to come.
1:58:01 25 centuries of empire, invasion,
1:58:04 and reinvention reveal a civilization that has never stopped defying extinction.
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