Copyright 2009 Matt MortensenI had a suspicion about something after my last post...and I was right. I walked the short 8 blocks from my apartment to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and there on the second floor my suspicions were confirmed. The Institute has in its collection a carved figure of a foreign diplomats head taken from the north stairway of the Apadana at Persepolis. The carving is rare and dates back to ca. 450 B.C. during the reign of Darius, the architect of the most precious city in the ancient Iranian empire. The Apadana was designed to hold ten thousand people and did so every vernal equinox when the Immortals guarded the King as all peoples of the Achaemenian Empire celebrated in parade. The tag from the original collection is still visible on the upper edge of this artifact, tattered and browned with age.
Darius was the second great King of the Achaemenian Empire, Cyrus, the namesake of my Persian friend, was the first. At its zenith the empire encompassed 29 distinct peoples including Indians, Asians, Syrias, Ethiopians, Egyptians and Babylonians. When Alexander the Great arrived over a hundred years later, it took his army 10,000 horses and 5,000 camels to empty Persepolis of its treasures. This is only one of the amazing events through which Persians (modern Iranians, as we think of them) view the present and future state of the world.
Ref: Mackey, Sandra. The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Darius was the second great King of the Achaemenian Empire, Cyrus, the namesake of my Persian friend, was the first. At its zenith the empire encompassed 29 distinct peoples including Indians, Asians, Syrias, Ethiopians, Egyptians and Babylonians. When Alexander the Great arrived over a hundred years later, it took his army 10,000 horses and 5,000 camels to empty Persepolis of its treasures. This is only one of the amazing events through which Persians (modern Iranians, as we think of them) view the present and future state of the world. Ref: Mackey, Sandra. The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Penguin, 1996.
