Cyrus called himself the Shahanshah - the King of Kings - making clear that this was a confederation of allied states, each with their own ruler but all under firm Persian control. But whatever it meant then, this tiny golden chariot allows us today to conjure up a whole empire.īut what kind of an empire was it? It was more a collection of kingdoms than what we might immediately think of as an empire. We can't be certain the chariot was in fact a toy it could have been made as an offering to the gods, either asking them for a favour or thanking them for one. This magnificent chariot sits quite comfortably on the palm of my hand, where it looks like an exquisite toy for a privileged child. It's part of a huge hoard of gold and silver objects, which for over a hundred years have formed one of the great collections here at the British Museum. He is probably meant to be a high-up administrator, visiting the distant province that he rules on behalf of the King of Persia.Īnd this chariot was found in a very distant province, right on the far eastern edge of the empire, somewhere on the borders of modern Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
It's got two figures in it: the driver, who stands holding the reins, and the much larger and clearly very important passenger, who sits on a bench at his side. It's easy to imagine a chariot like this racing along those great Persian imperial roads. In front of me now is a chariot made of solid gold and pulled by four golden horses. To control an empire like this required land transport on a quite unprecedented scale, and so the Persian Empire is the first great 'road' empire of history. It is the tomb of Cyrus, the first Persian emperor, the man who two and a half thousand years ago built the largest empire that the world had then seen, and changed the world - or at least the Middle East - for ever.Ĭentred in modern Iran, the vast Persian Empire ran from Turkey and Egypt in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. It's pretty featureless landscape, except that right in front of me is a huge stone plinth, rising in six gigantic steps to what looks like a gabled hermit's cell. We are about 70 miles north of Shiraz, Iran, and the low camel-coloured hills have opened out into a flat windy plain. "Persian occupation - I suppose you could compare to a light morning mist settling over the contours of their empire - you were aware of it, but it was never obtrusive." (Tom Holland) "This was an empire that was run on a rather different principle to previous empires - which were really based on might being right." (Michael Axworthy) I'm going to begin with the world superpower of two and a half thousand years ago: Persia. This is the era of what some have called the 'empires of the mind'. They're inventing and defining what we would now call statecraft. It's the fifth century BC, and across the world societies are beginning to articulate very clear ideas about themselves and about others. This week we're in very exalted intellectual company: we're with Confucius in China, Pericles in Greece, and Cyrus in Ancient Persia. Oxus chariot model (made almost 2,500 years ago).