Erica and I joined the staff outing (Baha’i National Office and Baha’i Books UK) in visiting the British Museum’s wonderful Forgotten Empire exhibition about ancient Iran. The exhibition includes some exquisite items: sculpture, silverware, gold, coins, cuneiform tablets, and so on, mostly from the Achaemenid empire, the largest the world had seen up to that time, covering some 3 million square miles from North Africa to the Indus Valley.

Inevitably the great palaces, such as that at Persepolis, were vast. Size mattered when the King was the King of Kings and everything in the empire depended on the king. The royal palaces had to overawe the empire’s subject peoples. But alongside the obsession with gigantism, there were many small, elegant and beautifully crafted objects.

The ancient Persians were consummate diplomats and administrators. They allowed diversity of religion to flourish within the empire. But they took tribute from all their subject peoples and accumulated wealth at the centre. The exhibition said nothing about the lives of the ordinary peoples other than as providers of tribute and subjects of this mighty empire. There were glimpses: one part of the empire had to provide so many hundreds of boys to be eunuchs. The blood runs cold at the thought.

Inevitably this empire fell, as so all empires. Alexander of Macedon, whom we know as ‘Alexander the Great’ and Iranians as ‘Alexander the savage’ destroyed the empire and razed Persepolis. One of the fascinations of this exhibition is that it gives an account of a period of history we tend to learn about from Greek and Roman accounts. This exhibition provides a whole different perspective.

It was interesting to hear the comments of the Iranian Baha’is we were with. This is their heritage and, rightly, they are proud of it.

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