I was responding to a comment about Western media. Which is a 20th century affair. I also think 18th and 19th century we working from a much more limited set o

I was responding to a comment about Western media. Which is a 20th century affair. I also think 18th and 19th century we working from a much more limited set of historical information. Persepolis was first excavated in the 1930s. Old Persian Cuneiform wasn't fully deciphered until around 1850 and was the basis for decipherment of other languages using cuneiform. It wasn't until then tat any primary historical texts could even be studied. Whereas Greek never disappeared and ancient greek was studied from the classical era onwards. A lot of what we knew about old Persia prior to the 1850s came from people like Xenophon who had a particular ax to grind in contemporary (to him) Greece and used Cyruus and Persia as stand in for ideas he wanted to compare and contrast with Athens and Sparta.