Lecture 1 & 2 as part of The Persian Empire – an education in 12 evenings at The Attic, 36, Regal Building, CP > 6:30pm on 4th November 2013

Time : 6:30 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : The Attic, 36, Regal Building, Connaught Place, New Delhi-110001 
Landmark : On Parliament Street close to 'The Shop' showroom & next to the 'Kwality' restaurant
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Metro : Nearest Metro Station - 'Rajiv Chowk' (Yellow Line and Blue Line)

Event Description : The Persian Empire  – an education in 12 evenings . Every Monday where possible.  An Attic video presentation from The Great Courses taught by Prof. John W.I. Lee, University of California, Santa Barbara.
In its time, the Persian Empire was the largest and greatest the world had ever seen. Beginning in 559 B.C under Cyrus the Great it lasted more than 2 centuries, until 330 BC encompassing lands stretching from Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt in the West, across Mesopotamia and Iran, through Central Asia, all the way to the Indus Valley in the East. The Empire developed an efficient bureaucracy, a postal service, a complex economy and a powerful army. The Persians numbered only about one million people and successfully ruled over a multi ethnic and multi cultural population of 25 million.

Lecture 1-  Rethinking the Persian Empire
 Under the Empires’ founder Cyrus the Great, the Persians rose from relative obscurity to conquer vast territories in a very short space of time. By 500 BC, when Rome was still a small village on the banks of the Tiber river and China was still divided into warring states the Persian Empire stretched from Greece to the Indus Valley and was the single greatest power anywhere on earth.
This lecture reviews some of the accomplishments of the Achaemenid kings which included building an empire of world historical significance, bringing together the great civilizations of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Jews, ruling with tolerance and bringing peace and stability to their empire.
Ironically it was the Great King Cyrus who released the Jewish people from captivity in Babylon, allowing them to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple and practice their religion unhindered.

Lecture 2 - Questioning the Sources
 In the study of the Persian Empire we need to .understand and evaluate the sources especially as most of them were biased Greek historians. The most important was Herodotus (485 BC). In the Histories he recounts the events that led to the wars between the Persians and Greeks from 499 to 479 BC , glorifying the Greeks.
Thucydides was mainly interested in the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta. Xenophon was a mercenary in the army of the Persian prince, Cyrus the younger before returning to Greece to write. In the final years of the empire the historian Arrans Anabasis of Alexander describes the campaigns of the Macedonians against the Persians and King Darius 111 and Plutarch, though living under the Roman Empire, wrote in Greek and gives a great deal of valuable information.
Other sources include the Hebrew Bible and other biblical sources. In the early 1800’s a young German school teacher Georg Grotefend connected cuneiform inscriptions from which he reconstructed the old Persian alphabet. Even I  recent times excavations in Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey have turned up new archaeological evidence for Persian history.

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