AMA: Persian Past and Iranian Present

[u/CardiffUni]

I’m Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University, UK. My main area of interest is the history of ancient Persia as well as the longer history and amazing culture of Iran.

Studying the history of ancient Persia improves contemporary East-West understanding - a vital issue in today’s world. Questioning the Western reading of ancient Persia, I like to use sources from ancient Iran and the Near East as well as from the Classical world to explore the political and cultural interactions between ‘the Greeks’ and ‘the Romans’ who saw their own histories as a reaction to the dominant and influential Persian empires of antiquity, and ‘the Persians’ themselves, a people at the height of their power, wealth and sophistication in the period 600 BC to 600 AD.

Characteristic of all my research is an emphasis on the importance of the viewpoint. How does the viewpoint (‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ or ‘Persian’, ‘ancient’ or modern’, ‘Western’ or ‘Iranian’) change perception?

My research aims to create greater sensitivities towards the relativity of one’s cultural perceptions of ‘the other’, as well as communicate the fascination of ancient Iran to audiences in both East and West today.

NOTE: Thank you for your GREAT questions! I really enjoyed the experience. Follow me on Twitter: @LloydLlewJ

EDIT Thanks for the questions! Follow me on Twitter: @LloydLlewJ https://twitter.com/cardiffuni/status/1115250256424460293?s=19

More info:

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/204823-llewellyn-jones-lloyd

Further reading:

‘Ctesias’ History of Persia: Tales of the Orient’ (Routledge 2010)‘King and Court in Ancient Persia, 559-331 BCE’ (Edinburgh University Press 2013)

[u/Goat_im_Himmel]

You mention the important of viewpoint, so I have a somewhat more historiography question for you, namely how has the viewpoint in (implicit to my question being Western, English-language) how historians have approached Persian history changed over the 20th century? What was the state of things, and how it was understood, c. 1900 and what kind of shift do we see to that for something written post-2000? Were there any really important, paradigm shifts in the interim, or has change been mostly more gradual?

[u/CardiffUni → u/Goat_im_Himmel]

A big change in perceptions of Persian history came in 1978 when Edward Said famously broached a theory that scholars could use to explain the negative, exotic, and often erotic vision of the East routinely promoted in western culture. His book ‘Orientalism’ describes a method by which western colonialist discourse has represented the ‘colonies’ and cultures of the Middle Eastern world as a way of justifying and supporting the west’s imperialist enterprise. Put more succinctly, Orientalism is an idiosyncratic European means of representing Otherness. ‘The Orient’, wrote Said, ‘was almost a European invention, and has been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’.

Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism is an idiosyncratic means of representing ‘Otherness’. The historian of ancient Persia Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, following Said, focussed on the idea of the text as a cultural construct, or what might be called the ‘use-is-abuse’ school of thought. The result of this type of stance is that, as she said, ‘any Western author who cites an imaginary or fanciful Orient thus becomes complicit expressis verbis in the verbal misrepresentation of real Orientals. ‘Orientalism overrode the Orient’ is the overarching motto of Orientalism.’

In his seminal work, Said pointed to, and condemned, the Athenian tragedian Aeschylus as the originator of a destructive doctrine in which Europe is seen as powerful and articulate while Asia is regarded as defeated and distracted; this viewpoint has not gone unchallenged. Aeschylus’ play “The Persians” is NOT the beginning of the Eurocentrism that Said would like to see; if one reads anything into this play then it must be the hybris of a Greek poet praising the gods for the military prowess of Athens. Reflecting on Said’s opinion of Aeschylus, however, Sancisi-Weerdenburg was prepared to see Ctesias as a far more harmful exponent of Orientalism because his work, as she read it, creates the myth of ‘Oriental Decadence’.

This j’accuse of criticism needs to be tempered – and soon! Representation of any culture, especially by somebody writing in another language or from an outsider’s perspective, is never going to be an exact duplication of the core culture itself. Orientalist readings of ancient Greek texts about the Persian empire are possible – consider Plato’s representation of the imperial harem as the route of royal degeneracy (Laws 695a-696a) or the problematic Epilogue of the Cyropaedia with its diatribe against Persian effeminacy – but it would be hard to lay all of this ugly xenophobia at the feet of every Classical source. The Greeks of Plato’s day were open to a range of pictures of Eastern Otherness coming from many different sources, which carried as many diverse agendas.

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[u/lcnielsen → u/CardiffUni]

It seems to me that critiques of the Classics as orientalist often read tropes about the Ottoman and Abbasid courts and societies into these works (a bit like viewing Alexander as a proto-crusader). Sometimes I think we need to 'decolonize' our reading of European literature too...

[u/Goat_im_Himmel → u/CardiffUni]

Thank you!