“Persians”

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

I continue my slow procession eastward in my reading of history!

The core concept of this book was, really, “hey, you: most of what you know about Persia was written by the Greeks, who were writing it as anti-Persian propaganda. Let’s talk about the Persian Version of history.” And, for the most part, it sticks with that — there’s a few places where what’s available gets a bit thin, as the Persian Empire didn’t really do written records of history, they went in for the oral tradition, which… doesn’t survive well, after that many centuries. Whereas the Greeks sure liked writing down their stories, and hey presto, we’ve been basing our entire shared background knowledge of an ancient culture on… someone using them as a definitive Other around which to construct a shared identity. Not great, Bob!

As per usual with my reading of history, I don’t really expect to retain a whole lot of detail, I’m just trying to fill in enough that I’ll have some vague knowledge to get me started if I want to dive deep again later. As such, the middle section, where the author pauses the actual “and so-and-so did such-and-such thing” history bits and instead devotes a fair chunk of time to just talking about how the Persian Empire worked, how people lived, was my favorite. That’s what I wanted from the history book! I wanted to know what my fellow, like, mid-level bureaucrats were doing; that’s the lifestyle I occupy now, and it’s the one that’ll be the most directly comparable for me mentally then.

Overall, a good read; occasionally in danger of getting a bit too dry, but Llewellyn-Jones managed to balance that out with the occasional flash of that characteristically British dry humor, which somehow cancels out any dryness in prose. Check it out.1