A major exhibition at the British Museum is drawing attention to the Achaemenid kings of Ancient
Persia, rulers of Egypt before the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BC,
writes David Tresilian in London.
Once upon a time every schoolboy would have known something about the
Ancient Persian Empire, subject of Forgotten Empire, an exhibition currently
at the British Museum in London, if only because the Achaemenid Persian
kings, first Darius and then Xerxes, famously set out to subjugate the
Ancient Greek city states, and particularly Athens, in 490 and 480 BC.
The story of Greek resistance and eventual military success, along with
the names of battles such as those at Thermopylae, Marathon and Salamis,
were once the staple of every education, and the confrontation of Greek and
Persian, pitting tiny but largely democratic Greece against the vastly
superior might of the Persian Empire, an early example of "oriental
despotism", was long seen as a kind of "clash of civilisations" avant la
lettre, not least in the accounts of it left by the Ancient Greeks
themselves.
However, the curators of this major exhibition, organised in cooperation
with the National Museum of Iran in Tehran and the Louvre in Paris and containing objects never before seen
outside Iran, have evidently felt that the Persian Empire is today in danger
of being unjustly forgotten, or rather mis-remembered, largely thanks to the
unflattering portrayals of it left by Ancient Greek writers...
