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I wish more research would dig into the ancient Persian tablets as well. There’s just so much mystery around Persia, and unfortunately, in many contexts (movies

I wish more research would dig into the ancient Persian tablets as well. There’s just so much mystery around Persia, and unfortunately, in many contexts (movies, books, websites, or discussions in general), people act as if Persia never existed. This is despite the fact that Persians had such an undeniable impact on human history. Cyrus the great, for example, was the one who liberated Jews in Babylon and wrote the first human right cylinder. At best, Persians are portrayed as bar bars or black mercenaries (absolutely nothing wrong with being black. But Persians were definitely not black).

PathOfEclipse 3y ago
> and wrote the first human right cylinder. This interpretation of the Cyrus Cylinder is highly contested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder From Wikpedia: The interpretation of the Cylinder as a "charter of human rights" has been described by various historians as "rather anachronistic" and tendentious. It has been dismissed as a "misunderstanding" and characterized as political propaganda devised by the Pahlavi regime. The German historian Josef Wiesehöfer comments that the portrayal of Cyrus as a champion of human rights is as illusory as the image of the "humane and enlightened Shah of Persia". D. Fairchild Ruggles and Helaine Silverman describe the Shah's aim as being to legitimise the Iranian nation and his own regime, and to counter the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism by creating an alternative narrative rooted in the ancient Persian past.
goodbyesf 3y ago
Unfortunately, academia is just as much a slave to geopolitics as governments, media, tech, sports, etc. Hopefully things will get better in the future.