The World

Haxamanis and Alcmaeon: Houses of Persia and Athens

NEBUCHADNEZZAR, HIS QUEEN AND THE WHORE OF BABYLON

In 612 BC, the armies of Assyria’s enemies surrounded Nineveh, trapping the king, Ashurbanipal’s son Sinsharishkun, within the doomed city. The seven and a half miles of walls were reinforced, the broad gates narrowed, but the very size of this capital of the world made it almost impossible to defend. Attracted to the prizes of this now lame giant, new predators arrived to feast on the body.

A Babylonian potentate, Nabopolassar, had seized the throne there in 626. Determined to regain Babylon, Sinsharishkun called in Egyptian help, but in 616 Nabopolassar defeated the once invincible Assyrians.

Yet it took the Median cavalry to bring them down. The Median king, Uvaxštra (Cyaxares in Greek) – son of Fravartis, who had been killed by Ashurbanipal – was based in his mountain capital of Ecbatana, a city of seven circular walls fortified with bastions painted in bright colours. As he grew up, Scythians had taken over most of Iran. When he was ready, Uvaxštra invited the Scythian chieftains to a banquet and, when they were drunk, killed them all. He then united the Median tribes of western Iran, and allied with Nabopolassar of Babylon to carve up Assyria. In 612, ‘the King of Babylon mobilized his army and the King of the Medes joined him. They advanced along the Tigris towards Nineveh.’ The siege lasted three months, during which Scythians arrived to join the mayhem. In August, the attackers smashed the dykes, and the flooding enabled them to breach the walls. The fighting was savage – at the Halzi Gate, skeletons of men and women, even a baby, struck by arrows, lay tangled for many centuries where they fell. ‘A great slaughter was made of the people,’ recounts the Babylonian Chronicles. ‘Horsemen charging, flashing sword, and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead without end, they stumble over the bodies.’ At the palace Sinsharishkun – last of House Tiglath-Pileser – perished in the flames.

Nabopolassar commandeered the Assyrian kingdom for his Babylonian empire; Uvaxštra, who had been little more than a horse-breeding chieftain two years earlier, ruled from northern Iran westwards into Türkiye. Uvaxštra gave his daughter Amartis to Nabopolassar’s son, Crown Prince Nebuchadnezzar. But Egypt, invited in by the Assyrians, was not yet finished.

Pharaoh Necho rode up the Levantine coast to defeat the Babylonians. On the way north, he was challenged by Josiah, king of Judah, who sensed an opportunity for glorious independence, a moment of exhilaration captured in the Bible. But Necho routed the Judeans at Megiddo – the biblical origin of Armageddon – and then conquered Syria.

In 605, Nebuchadnezzar halted the Egyptians at Carchemish and ‘inflicted such a defeat on them that none returned home’. Then, learning that his father was dying, he literally galloped home – 620 miles – to be crowned twenty-two days later.

Nebuchadnezzar spent most of his long reign suppressing rebellions, successfully on the Phoenician coast, less so in Canaan. In 586, Zedekiah of Judah defied him: Nebuchadnezzar stormed Jerusalem and destroyed the city, deporting most of the Jews to his capital: Babylon became a huge building site as he constructed eleven miles of walls with an inner royal city entered by the colossal Ishtar Gate glazed in deep blue and decorated with Ishtar’s lions, Adad’s bulls and Marduk’s dragons. This led to the Processional Way known as May the Arrogant Not Flourish and so to the temple of Esagila and a ziggurat tower known as The House That Is the Border between Heaven and Earth, the centrepiece of the city. Home to 250,000 people – Babylonians, Scythians, Greeks, Medes, Jews – Babylon was notorious for its wild pleasures. The Jews denounced the king as ‘destroyer of nations’ and wrote holy books in a distinctive monotheistic voice. Refusing to vanish like other defeated peoples, the Jews dreamed of a return to their sacred city Zion amid the sun-blistered wilderness of Judah: Jerusalem. It was a longing that defined them: religions and peoples are formed by shared experiences of suffering, lived and relived as inherited stories. ‘By the rivers of Babylon,’ they sang, ‘they sat down and remembered Zion.’

Everyone enjoyed the metropolis – except those few austere Jews who called it the Whore of Babylon.^* But in the palace the Median queen was homesick. Nebuchadnezzar supposedly built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to comfort her.

Her father Uvaxštra advanced into Anatolia until he was stopped by a regional potentate, Alyattes, who, based in Sardis, ruled Lydia, a rich realm extending to the Aegean, trading between Babylon and Greece. Alyattes was the first to cast coins, money that gleamed with electrum, an alloy of silver and gold. The Lydians invented coins at the same time as they appeared in India and China.

Uvaxštra’s army was made up of Medes, Persians and Scythians; the latter were training his young men in their unsurpassed ability to shoot bows on the gallop, skills aided by first the bit, then foot supports, which gradually improved from a length of rope into wooden and eventually iron stirrups. Together these innovations meant they could control their mounts while shooting their bows. But when Uvaxštra insulted these Scythians, they killed the boys, cooked them in a stew and fed them to the king before seeking asylum with Alyattes, who refused to surrender the cannibalistic gourmets. Their armies met in May 585 on the River Halys when suddenly ‘the day became night’ – a solar eclipse – which so amazed both sides that they stopped fighting and made peace: Uvaxštra married his son Rishtivaiga (Spearthrower, Astyages) to Alyattes’ daughter Aryenis.

When both kings died, Rishtivaiga found himself at the centre of a family network as brother-in-law to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and the new king Croesus of Lydia, who boasted that he was the world’s richest king. To keep his tribal federacy together, Rishtivaiga married his daughter Mandana to a Persian khan, king of Anshan, Cambyses (Kabūjiya).^* When their baby, named Cyrus – Koresh – half Mede, half Persian, was born, he was brought up like all Persian khans until he was six by his mother Mandana, who still at this stage churned milk, made bread, spun cloth. Then he was handed over to his father Cambyses to be trained in horsemanship and marksmanship, wearing trousers and leather chaps.^* When Cambyses died, Cyrus donned the cowhide coat, the gaunaka, of kings of Anshan and started to plan the destruction of his grandfather Rishtivaiga, who had alienated his khans by adopting fancy court ritual and bureaucratic controls. One of them, Arbaku, sent an appeal to Cyrus sewn inside the body of a hare: ‘The Median nobles will join you.’ Cyrus extended his power by marrying a khan’s daughter, Cassandane, from the respected Haxamanishiya (Achaemenid) clan, with whom he had two sons. But he also negotiated with the king of Babylon, Nabunid (Nabonidus), against their mutual Median enemy.

When Rishtivaiga cavorted with a concubine, she sang about a ‘lion who had a wild boar in his power but let him into his lair’.

‘Who is this wild boar?’ asked Rishtivaiga.

‘Cyrus,’ she replied. But before Rishtivaiga could break Cyrus, the Persian gathered his khans at Pathragarda, his capital near Shiraz: ‘I’m the man destined to undertake your liberation; you’re the match of the Medes. Fling off the yoke of Rishtivaiga!’ Cyrus marched against his grandfather: in 550 at Pasargadae, the Persians broke before the Median charges, but their women opened their robes and flashed their vulvas at their men, shouting, ‘Where are you off to, quitters? Do you want to crawl back into where you came from?’ The Persians turned and fought, Cyrus seized Rishtivaiga, took his capital Ecbatana and married his daughter.

Next, Cyrus came up against the richest man in the world, Croesus.

CYRUS AND QUEEN TOMYRIS: CONQUEROR TO GOBLET

Croesus claimed he was descended from the Greek god Herakles (Hercules) and regularly consulted the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi – but he was not Greek himself. Yet as master of Eurasian trade, whose currency was widely used, he was as at home with the people of the Aegean as with those of the Euphrates (he was after all brother-in-law of Nebuchadnezzar, cousin of Cyrus). But now Cyrus had to be stopped, so Croesus turned to the Greeks, recruiting two Greek city states, Sparta and Athens, to join Babylon and Egypt.

Croesus’ fixer on Greek matters was an Athenian nobleman named Alcmaeon, descended from the half-divine king Nestor, and member of one of the richest families in the city. Alcmaeon did so well that Croesus offered to pay him as much as he could carry from the Lydian treasury. In a story that illustrated his family’s voracity, Alcmaeon turned up in Sardis wearing loose clothes filled with pockets and wide boots that he filled with Croesian coins, adding to the family fortune. The story of Alcmaeon was not just that of Athens but of the Greeks themselves.

After the chaos of 1200, when the Mycenaean kingdoms were overthrown, the Greeks gathered in villages that coalesced into small cities (poleis) – the process known as synoecism – where they developed a concept of communal self-government. Their Greekness centred on their language, developed from the Phoenicians whom they encountered around the Mediterranean: Phoenicians only used consonants; the Greeks added vowels to develop the first alphabetic system of writing. Then came their stories. Around 850, writing and reading started to spread.^* Rhapsodes – song-stitchers – recited poems at festivals. Drama, developing out of religious festivals, became popular. It was not so much that Greeks placed humanity at the centre of their world; all people did that. What was new was their consciousness of this self-focus.^* Their sculptors developed the skill to fashion human likeness out of marble. Their religion was a set of rituals rather than a system of beliefs, concerned with living rather than afterlife. They worshipped a pantheon of flawed, greedy gods, led by Zeus, and treasured stories of half-divine supermen, like Hercules, and god-blessed travellers, like Odysseus, whose global exploits reflected the voyages of Greek sailors.^* ‘Are you here on business,’ asks a character in The Odyssey, ‘or traversing the seas as reckless raiders?’ The Greeks, like their rivals the Phoenicians, were seafarers, traders and pirates, colonizing the Mediterranean they called the Great Sea in ships powered by rows of oars.

Yet not all their cites were naval: Sparta was a land-based monarchy, more precisely a diarchy ruled by two kings from rival dynasties, descended from Hercules, elected to rule with a twenty-eight-man council of Elders, assuming command in times of war. The Peloponnesian city was organized around a small citizenry of Spartiates who did not trade but served as soldiers in order to overawe a conquered subject population of serfs – the helots, benighted inhabitants of Helos. Spartiates were trained by living in a barracks, not with their families; they dined with their soldier messmates and maintained their martial ferocity and the obedience of the underclass by sending squads of adolescent Spartiates annually into the countryside to kill a certain number of serfs; they were also spurred by wargames such as missions to steal cheeses, and by having ephebophilic relationships with twenty-something men.^* They married in their twenties, but did not live with their families until they were thirty and only ceased military service at sixty. Deformed children were exposed – that is, abandoned to the elements. They prided themselves on manners and control, and were so curt that the word laconic comes from Laconia, the Spartan homeland. Yet Spartiate women, famed for fitness, blondeness and morality, trained in tiny tunics, nicknamed ‘thigh-flashers’ by prudish Athenians.

Dominated by a martial nobility, Greek society was macho, social and competitive: men exercised naked at gymnasia; at symposia dinners, they drank mixed wine and water out of a shared bowl, symposiasts told stories and had sex with pipe-playing hetairai – courtesans – or cupbearer boys. Their peasant farmers served as infantrymen, hoplites, wearing iron cuirasses, greaves, plumed helmets, and they fought together in a phalanx, guarded by their interlinked shields; nobles fought on horseback – all of them much in demand as mercenaries. In distant Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar employed Greek auxiliaries.

The Greeks prided themselves on their involvement in governing the polis – politics based on good governance, eunomia, and freedom, eleutheria. Yet their poleis were dominated by aristocracies and often ruled by tyrants, sometimes by benign autocrats, who were supported by middle and lower classes against overweening nobles.

Alcmaeon and his Athenian family were typical of these aristocrats. Athens had developed as an aristocracy in which an elected council of nine archons ruled, presenting their ideas to an assembly of male citizens. A mythical Alcmaeonid was said to have been the first archon in the eighth century BC, and in the 630s the clan leader Megacles and his son Alcmaeon ruled as archons. In 621, a nobleman Drakon drafted the first laws in his own blood, but his draconian code scarcely restrained the aristocratic faction fights that often led to massacres: eighty skeletons with bound wrists were found in one mass grave. Around 593, Solon, an archon, established a constitution that turned the poor into full citizens, but its system still favoured the Alcmaeonids and other clans. When another Megacles murdered his opponents, the entire family were expelled from Athens, even down to the bones of their ancestors. Yet they rose again.

The Athenian rivalry with Sparta started early: in 510, when Athens was ruled by a tyrant, the Alcmaeonids, now led by Cleisthenes, appealed for help to the Spartans who, seeing the chance to make Athens a client state, drove out the autocrat. Instead Cleisthenes dispensed with the Spartans and then promised new powers to the people who had supported him. Athens depended on its navy; its triremes needed rowers; and that meant the people had to be consulted. Cleisthenes devised the rule of the people – democracy – by an assembly (ecclesia) of all the male citizens (excluding women and slaves).^* Real democracy was regarded as election by lottery: the ruling Council of Five Hundred was chosen by lot. Only the ten commanders – strategoi – were chosen annually by a show of hands or by a vote using pebbles. Devised by a member of the most ambitious family in Athens, people power was never quite as democratic as it seemed – not with the Alcmaeonids involved.^*

In 547, as he negotiated his anti-Cyrus alliance, Croesus thrice consulted Pyphia, high priestess of the Delphic Oracle, via his Athenian ally Alcmaeon, focusing on war with Persia. Her oracular reply was a masterpiece of ambiguity: if he attacked Persia, he would destroy a great empire. Cyrus marched immediately. In 546, when the kings fought, Cyrus placed his dromedaries, which carried his supplies, at the front, thereby panicking Croesus’ cavalry. Croesus was executed, and Cyrus dispatched Arbaku to mop up the Greek cities of Ionia, the Aegean coast.

Only Babylon held out, but its empire was mired in crisis. In 539, Cyrus routed the Babylonians. Now King of the World, he paraded into Babylon on a white stallion accompanied by his son Cambyses and held a durbar for the princes of his vast new empire at which the ex-king Nabonidus was executed. Now he showed respect for the Babylonian elite – including the top banking family, the Egibi^* – and careful reverence for Marduk in his temple of Esgila where he buried a clay cylinder that recast his career of conquest and killing as the liberation of Babylon and all his subject peoples.^*

Yet his empire would be different from that of Tiglath-Pileser and Nebuchadnezzar. All deportees could return home. All could worship their own gods and manage local affairs – provided they absolutely obeyed the King of the World and paid his taxes. In 537, 40,000 Jews returned to Jerusalem to rebuild their Temple: no wonder some regarded Cyrus as the anointed one, the Messiah.

Now finally he could relax in his new palace and gardens – pairidaeza, origin of the word paradise^* – at his capital at Pathragarda (Pasargadae). His empire was now the largest the world had seen, but could he keep it together? Cyrus accepted no limits. Egypt was next, but in the east a Scythian queen based on the steppes between Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan was raiding his lands. She too had to be destroyed. Summoning his sons, he appointed Cambyses, king of Babylon, as his successor and assigned the second boy Bardis to rule Bactria before he himself set off.

The queen’s name was Tomyris (Tahmirih), which simply means brave. Women leaders were much more common among the nomadic tribes of Scythians^* in the north and the Arabs in the south than among the settled peoples, because their women fought alongside the men on equal terms: 37 per cent of Scythian warriors found in tombs were women with bodies trained to ride and fire arrows, wearing armour and golden headdresses, lying beside horses in golden trappings – just like the men. The Greek myth of the one-breasted she-warriors, the Amazons, was based on the Scythians.

These were the people that Cyrus now pursued, but somehow the septuagenarian world conqueror was himself killed. Tomyris crucified and beheaded him in the Scythian manner, stuffing his head into a wineskin filled with blood with the words, ‘I warned you I’d quench your thirst for blood, and so I shall.’^*

She made a cup out of his head.

At a king’s death, the sacred fires were extinguished. In 529 BC, the Persians brought back what was left of Cyrus, but a royal funeral in which the waxed body was borne on a golden chariot was impossible.^*

DARIUS AND BUDDHA: THE WHEEL

The news that Cyrus had ‘gone away from the throne’ shook the empire. Cyrus’ son, Cambyses II, underwent the ritual investiture that combined sacred blessing and tribal glory at the shrine of the goddess Anahita (the Persian equivalent of Ishtar) in Pasargadae. A Great King underwent a metamorphosis, throwing aside his own clothes and choosing a throne name, donning the robe of Cyrus, drinking magical (and intoxicating) elixirs of sacred terebinth and distilled milk cooked up by the magi, taking the sceptre, then being crowned with the kidaris or royal tiara, before all the courtiers threw themselves to their knees in obeisance.

Cambyses planned to finish his father’s work and take Egypt. He had to prove himself fast. First he married his two elder sisters, Atossa and Roxane, to prevent them marrying anyone else, appointing his strapping brother Bardiya, a muscled bowman extraordinaire known as Strongbody, as satrap of Bactria – and culling all opposition. Accompanied by Strongbody and a well-connected young courtier Darius, and raising a force that reflected his family’s astonishing multinational empire, pointy-hatted Scythians, Medes, Persians and a Phoenician navy, he conquered Egypt and killed the pharaoh yet treated Egyptian traditions respectfully. He planned to attack Carthage (a plan vetoed by his Phoenician sailors, who refused to attack their compatriots) and instead marched down the Nile and into Nubia and Ethiopia. His successes were remarkable, yet he did not inspire loyalty.^* Jealous of Strongbody, Cambyses sent him back to Persia, then, tormented by stories of his treason, ordered his killing. In 522, Strongbody declared himself king, while in Cambyses’ own retinue a cabal of seven respected khans, all related to the dynasty, plotted against him. The youngest of them was Darius (Da¯rayavauš, or Holder of Good), aged twenty-two, grandson of the khan of the Haxamanishiya clan who had served Cyrus as quiver bearer and was now Cambyses’ lance bearer. Even though he was the junior member, he was tall, charismatic, athletic and remarkably confident: he emerged as the candidate for king.

As Cambyses rushed home, he met with an unfortunate accident: dismounting from his horse, he cut himself with his dagger and died of gangrene. Darius later wrote that Cambyses ‘died his own death’ – whatever that means. One has to wonder if the Seven quietly killed him. Now they galloped for home, where Strongbody had married his surviving sister Atossa but alienated his own nobles. The Seven arrived at his fortress near the sacred mountain Bisitun, where Strongbody was cavorting with a concubine. A eunuch let the hit squad into the royal chamber where the half-naked Strongbody put up such a fight with a stool that it took all Seven to subdue him. Darius’ brother Artafarna delivered the fatal stab. The Seven met at dawn on horseback to decide who was to be king. Whosever horse neighed first would be he. Darius ordered his groom to dip his fingers into a mare’s vulva first and then, just as sun rose, to wave them temptingly under the nose of his stallion, which then neighed. The other six fell to their knees before the prince, who now adopted the throne name Darius. More likely he had been the king-designate from the start.^* The Seven agreed that the rest of them could always have access to Darius even if he was in bed with a girl.

The empire was in ruins; nine contenders rose to claim the throne. But blessed with irrepressible energy and invincible luck, claiming to be the warrior of Truth, manifestation of Ahura-Mazda, and aided by his six compadres, within two years Darius defeated all contenders, whom he dubbed ‘agents of the Lie’, definition of evil in Zarathustrianism. They were skinned and stuffed, crucified and rectally impaled on the walls of Ecbatana near Mount Bisitun. There, on a blood-red cliff-face, with a winged Ahura-Mazda, chief god of truth, order and war, hovering above him, Darius himself appears, brandishing his bow, sporting the kidaris, the bejewelled robe, and a square-cut plaited beard scented with oil, as he crushes a pretender beneath his foot – ‘I cut off his nose, ears, tongue and tore out one eye’ – while the others writhe in chains awaiting their impalement. The message, in three languages, was pure fake news, obscuring the killings of Cambyses and Strongbody and the usurping of the throne and merging his ancestry with that of Cyrus: ‘I am Darius, King of Kings … a Haxamanishiya. Whoever helped my family, I favoured; whoever was hostile, I eliminated.’

Darius the Great was that most unusual phenomenon, a warlord of panache and stamina who was both visionary and master of detail, so much so that his subjects nicknamed him the Trader. He launched an imperial currency, the daric, but he was also a master of security: his spies – King’s Ears – reported any treason to his secret-police boss entitled the King’s Eye. Constantly travelling in splendour, a maestro of colossal projects, tolerant of other religions (helping the Jews rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem), he built a new capital at Parsa (Persepolis) with enormous throne halls and a ceremonial staircase designed to be ascended, probably by Darius, on horseback, all built with ‘the gold of Sardis and Bactria, lapis and carnelian of Sogdiana, silver and ebony from India, friezes from Ionia, ivory from Ethiopia and India’. As a young man he had married the daughter of one of the Seven, with whom he had three sons, but now he married all the wives and daughters of Cyrus, Cambyses and Strongbody, having children with each. Atossa, Cyrus’ daughter, now married her third Great King. In a marital history brimming with blood and betrayal, both her brother-kings had likely been murdered by her new husband Darius. It was enough either to crush a woman’s spirit or, in her case, to fortify it for she became the mother of three sons, including Xerxes, and a political force.^*

Darius’ women and children resided in a protected household: women were invisible in the inscriptions of court life; indeed, since the court was frequently on the road, women travelled in special giant curtained carriages which in camp were placed together to create a familial compound. Yet royal women were potentates who ran their own estates. The family court, protected by trusted eunuchs – African and Colchian (Georgian) boys seized or bought in childhood and then castrated – was run by Darius’ mother Irdabama, who ruled when he was away.

Darius was restless: when he travelled, the courtiers and their wives and families – 15,000 people – went with him. The sacred fire was borne ahead of him, pulled by eight white horses, then came the magi, followed by the empty carriage of Ahura-Mazda, then the crack royal bodyguard the Immortals and the top courtiers, led by the Master of the Thousand, and the Royal Companions, followed in turn by the queen’s household. Wherever he stopped, a palatial round tent would be erected at the centre of a resplendent tented capital.

The empire was a family business, with Darius’ brother, Artafarna, King Stabber, ruling as satrap of Greek Ionia, and most commanders being relatives or descendants of the Seven. But inevitably at least one of the Seven would resent that sacred kingship of their old messmate. Vidafarnâ (Intraphrenes) was outraged when one day refused entry to the royal apartments and cut the ears off the guards. When the rest of the Seven all wisely disavowed him, Darius executed Vidafarnâ and his family. Recalling the death of Cyrus in battle, Darius considered the succession: his sons were raised as warrior princes, growing up in the harem, awoken at dawn by trumpets, tutored by Greek eunuchs and magi, hardened by iced baths, practising horsemanship with spear and bow to enable them to accompany their father on lion hunts and to war. Even the princesses were taught bow shooting, riding and history. Among his many sons, Xerxes (Khshayarsha – He Who Rules Over Heroes) was handsome, brave in war and in the hunt. Male beauty was evidence of Ahura-Mazda’s favour: slaves were trained as beauticians; Persian men wore make-up and eyeliner; false beards and hairpieces were so valuable that they were taxed; beards were curled and anointed with perfumed oil. Getting dressed in the morning was a special ritual.

Darius, like Cyrus, recognized no limits. Once he was secure, the Trader ordered the building of a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, opening Mediterranean trade to Arabia and India. Then in 516 he invaded Afghanistan and India.

As Darius conquered provinces that his successors would rule for centuries – seven satrapies covered modern Afghanistan – the news of his invasion would have reached a prince living in the kingdom of Magada, one of the sixteen mahajanapadas, principalities of north-east India, dominated by high castes, Brahmin priests and kshatriya kings and nobles according to the Vedic rituals of what later became Hinduism.^* But many of the cities were republics ruled by sanghas, popular assemblies. The prince’s teachings both challenged and dovetailed with these existing religions to found what would become the first world religion.

Siddartha Gautama, the son of a minor ruler, a kshatriya, elder of the Shakya clan, and his wife, a princess of neighbouring Koliya (Nepal), enjoyed the noble lifestyle, at sixteen marrying his first cousin Yasodhara, with whom he had a son Rahula. ‘I lived a spoilt, a very spoilt life.’ But already he contemplated life and death, and was uneasy with his own pleasure-loving existence, deciding to seek enlightenment by embracing asceticism. Following Rahula’s birth, he left his marital home to travel with two friends as a sramana – a seeker.

After studying meditation, he rejected extreme asceticism when he accepted food from a village girl named Sujata. Instead he embraced a Middle Way. Sitting to meditate beneath a pipal tree in a deer park at Sarnath, he awoke with knowledge that human life is frustrating and desperate, cursed with ambition and appetites, but this could be mitigated by the Four Noble Truths and understanding of the dharma, a path of duty that to him meant the cosmic truth that led, after a lifetime of contemplation and suffering following his programme of the Noble Eightfold Path, to nirvana, freedom from endless rebirth. ‘We are what we think,’ preached Gautama. ‘All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.’

Now he formed the first sangha, a coterie of monks who believed they were witnessing the wheel-turning revelations of an exceptional human: the imagery of a chariot wheel turning to change consciousness and power was already part of Indian culture, used in the early Indus cities. They called Gautama’s version the wheel of dharma – the dharmachakra – and hailed him as Buddha, Enlightened One, though he never called himself that, preferring the modest Tathagata, the One Who’s Here. His teachings channelled Vedic ethics and meditations, yet he also threatened the dominance of the Brahmins.

Settling in Kosala, now surrounded by many followers, Buddha was joined by his son Rahula, who became a monk. But Buddha experienced betrayal from within his own family: his cousin Devadatta tried to seize control and kill him. When that failed, Devadatta spun off his own sect.

As he aged, Buddha advised the sangha to ‘meet in harmony, don’t fall prey to worldly desires’ and to ‘preserve their personal mindfulness’, but he refused to appoint an heir: ‘I’ve taught the dharma, making no distinction of inner and outer … If there is anyone who thinks: “I’ll take charge of the Order” … the Tathagata [himself] does not think in such terms. Why should the Tathagata make arrangements for the Order? I’m now old, worn out.’

In Kushinagar, he achieved in bodily death the elevated state of parinirvana, after which his adepts cremated him and distributed his bones and relics among his followers, who started to build domed stupas in which to store and revere them. Buddha left no writings, but his son Rahula and the sangha preserved his teachings until a council started to organize his order. Buddha did not claim to be a god, merely a sage, and did not wish to create a structured religion, leaving a metaphysical worldview instead. His popularity revealed the human need for a higher mission, to mitigate the terrifying unpredictability of life and the inevitability of death but also to share values and rituals across oceans and peoples: its power was that it offered salvation to all.^*

After his death his followers formalized his ideas and rituals, and Buddha himself was soon regarded as divine, his very fingernails revered. Yet it needed a wheel-turning political leader to transform the movement into a world religion. It took time – but the wheel was turning.

Darius never made it to Buddha’s north-eastern India but he conquered Gandhara and Kamboya in the west, recruiting Indian troops who later served in the Persian armies that attacked Greece. He was curious enough to appoint a Greek sea captain, Scylas of Caryanda, to sail from the Red Sea to explore the Indian coast. Then, after a Scythian raid, he ordered his Greek allies, expert seamen, to build a pontoon bridge of boats, lashed together, across the Bosphoros – and invaded Russia and Ukraine.

* Their books were collated into the Bible – exceptional because it records the unique survival of the Jewish people and faith in the face of political and physical destruction. But it became a book of universal significance because the founder of Christianity, Jesus, was a practising Jew who revered and fulfilled its prophecies. In turn, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, studied and revered both Old and New Testaments, which he often cited in his own sacred text, the Quran, making them also sacred for Islam. There is slim evidence that the biblical story of the Tower of Babel might have been influenced by the Babylon ziggurat, but there is no evidence that the Jews deported to Babylonia hated the ziggurat or called it anything other than ‘the temple of Marduk’. Babylon may have influenced the Book of Revelation, but the Whore is probably a much later metaphor for the Roman empire.

* According to the Greek historian Herodotos writing a century later, Astyages (Rishtivaiga) suffered a nightmare about Mandana in which she urinated a golden jet that flooded his empire. But when Mandana became pregnant, Astyages dreamed that a vine grew out of her vagina until it was entwined around the whole of Asia: the child would unite the Medes and Persians.

* The Persians and Medes ‘introduced trouser-wearing to the world’, writes Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. In Egypt, Greece and Iraq, people mainly wore robes of light cloth. In 2008 the mummified body of a boy from 500 BC was discovered in an Iranian salt mine wearing a tunic and baggy ‘harem’ trousers. Herodotos was horrified by the vulgarity of trousers: ‘The Athenians were the first Greeks to endure the sight of Persian clothing.’ Yet the trousers caught on.

* Greeks had started to write captions on their drinking cups. Around 750 BC, one of the earliest examples, at the Greek settlement on Ischia in the Bay of Naples, a Greek named Nestor etched three lines on to his drinking cup that combined verse, storytelling, theology, sex and drinking: ‘Nestor’s hearty-drinking cup am I. He who drinks this cup will soon take fire with fair-crowned Aphrodite’s hot desire.’

* They saw the world as a system that could be studied by lovers of wisdom, philosophoi. Around 500 BC, the contrarian philosopher Heraklitos of Ephesus first used the word cosmos – order – to mean the universe. ‘All things come into being by conflict of opposites,’ he said, ‘and everything flows’ in a constant evolution: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice.’ His view of the infallibility of gods and kings is always relevant: ‘Eternity is a child moving counters in a game; the power of kings is like a child’s game.’ Finally he was the first to define war as one of the engines of human development: ‘War is the father of all and king of all; and some he shows as gods, others as men, some he makes slaves, others free.’

* Between 750 and 650, a group of writers, later personalized as ‘Homer’, wrote two epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, channelling ancient Mycenaean tales. Homer called the Greeks ‘Argives’ or ‘Achaeans’, but a common ancestor named Hellen was invented in a poem Catalogue of Women to give them a name for themselves: Hellenes. It was the Romans who much later called them Graeci, after the first Greek-speaking tribe they encountered.

* This was common to all societies in ancient Greece: there was no concept of sexual identity. The relationship between an older man – the erastes – and a youth, generally fifteen to nineteen – the eromenos – was a normal stage in male life; most men married and had children as well as intimate friendships with other men. But the virile man took the position of sexual superiority.

* At the apogee of Athens, a third of its people were enslaved.

* There was another type of Greek state. In the wild, mountainous north, closer to the peoples of the Balkans and the Eurasian steppe, Greek kingdoms Macedonia and Epiros were ethne, semi-tribal states that had evolved into military monarchies.

* The Egibi family were the first known business dynasty in history: they dealt in property, land, slaves, trading and lending, surviving adeptly through dynasties and conquests. An archive of 1,700 clay tablets reveals their dealings over five generations from about 600 to 480 BC, referencing promissory notes and divisions of land. They married their sons to the daughters of other rich families. Dowries included land, silver, slaves and entire businesses. Starting as land managers under Nebuchadnezzar II and rising to become judges under Nabonidus, they now switched to serving Cyrus and would prosper even more under his successor (but one) Darius. They progressed from lending to rulers to becoming officials for the Great Kings.

* The cylinder is surely the most successful PR document of ancient times and its reputation as the ‘first declaration of human rights’ is absurd: Cyrus and his times had no concept of human rights.

* The Jewish writers of the Bible based their idea of the Garden of Eden on the Persian pairidaeza.

* The Scythians were skilled horsemen but also exquisite craftsmen. Like their fellow Aryans, the Persians, they revered fire as the senior of their seven gods, whose relations with men were mediated by transgender shamans. ‘Their favoured intoxicants,’ wrote Herodotos, ‘were hashish with fermented mare’s milk.’ Scythians cherished silver and gold artefacts, beautifully worked, but they were a civilization that ritualized aggression. They crucified and beheaded their enemies, scalped them (scalping developed simultaneously in the Old and New Worlds), flayed them and used their skins to cover their quivers, their blood as a drink and their heads, sliced below the eyebrows, as drinking cups. Every hundredth prisoner of war was sacrificed. As for their own dead, Scythians removed their brains and guts, which they ate, and interred them in burial chambers, filled with gold artefacts, sacrificed slaves and relatives and horses, all covered by mounds.

* Herodotos is our only source for this Scythian story, wherein Cyrus’s death reflects the Greek view of Persian kings as voracious, effeminate tyrants.

* The Persians buried the giblets in a golden sarcophagus in Cyrus’ simple Lydian-style temple that still stands near his paradise of Pasargadae.

* According to Herodotos and other Greek sources, he was alleged to be ‘half mad’, and it was said that he slaughtered the sacred Egyptian bull Apis, used humans for target practice, killed his wife, buried twelve noblemen upside down and taught justice to a corrupt judge by skinning him, tanning him and using the leather to make a chair which he then offered to his victim’s son and successor as judge: ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘on what you sit.’

* Herodotos and the court doctor-historian Ctesias both tell this story, implying that Darius somehow cheated his way to the throne – very Persian behaviour in Greek eyes. The story of Darius’ equine vaginal gambit reflected the importance of horses in Persian–Median culture. A horse was regularly sacrificed in honour of Cyrus. The story was based on the Persian practice, hippomancy, divination using the behaviour of horses.

* When she was older, Atossa found a tumour in her breast. Most of Darius’ doctors were Egyptians, but Darius had captured a Greek doctor, Democedes, who had set the king’s broken ankle. Democedes lived splendidly as royal doctor but longed to return home. Now he operated successfully on Atossa’s tumour, the first recorded mastectomy. Allowed to join a Persian embassy to Greece, he escaped and returned home.

* Hinduism itself is composed of different beliefs, practices and scriptures. Many of its traditions emerged out of the divinely revealed Vedas (the ‘knowledge’, composed c. 1500–500 BC) and its later sacred Vedic texts including the Puranas (‘old’ or ‘ancient’, composed from around AD 300). The Vedas include liturgical hymns and guidance for Brahmins (priests). Only Brahmins had the authority to use the Vedas in rituals.

* At the same time, in China, divided into warring kingdoms, a philosopher created his own moral order, founded on an ethical vision of China as a realm of families, a hierarchy starting with the ruler and extending down to the father’s rule over his family. Kong Qiu, later known as Master Kong (latinized by seventeenth-century Jesuits into Confucius), was a pragmatist and an enthusiast, not merely a bloodless ascetic – ‘Why didn’t you say how passionate I am?’ he used to ask his followers – and he liked to ride and hunt. But, faced with interminable wars and power plays, he advocated an ethical path, ‘the Way’: ‘When the Way prevails under Heaven’, there would be order; without it there would be chaos. Yet he also preached kindness: ‘Is there one word to guide a person throughout life?’ asked a follower. ‘How about “reciprocity”?’ suggested Confucius. ‘Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.’ It was a fourth-generation disciple, Mengzi (Mencius), who developed and structured his ideas. Confucius’ Analects, written before 200 BC, proposed orderly realms, ruled by kings guided by virtue and advised by scholars like himself; prayer would win divine harmony in the cosmos which would in turn deliver moral harmony on earth.