Customer Reviews

The Persians (Peoples of Asia)

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This is the second book I have read in the Peoples of Asia series, (the first being The Tibetans), and in general I have been impressed by the evenhanded scholarship that goes into these volumes.

In this book, the author attempts to portray the history the Persian people, (now known as the Iranians), from their own point of view, and through their own historical/archaeological archives. Unfortunately, from my point of view, there seems to be not much available from the period I was most interested in, which was the ancient period from the Elamites through the Parthians, and so the author is forced to rely heavily, too heavily in my opinion, on the monumental inscriptions of the great kings. In fact, the Elamites are given such short shrift that they barely touch the surface. Still, it was nice to see the wars against Greece put into the opposite perspective from what we are accustomed to, that from the Persian point of view they were probably nothing more than irritants, and most likely had no lasting effect on the course of the empire. Just as the later Roman defeats at the hands of the Parthians were really only irritants on their side, and had little lasting effect on the course of the Roman empire. East was East and West was West and their major spheres of influence were quite distinct. The Persians are not so much a Middle Eastern people as an Asian people.

The surprise from this book was the way the text showed up so many gaps in my knowledge of modern Iran, and then proceeded to fill them in. If you are interested in a brief account of just how the Islamic Revolution unfolded, of just how the ulema originally became so powerfully entrenched in the Iranian bureaucracy, and of just how both of the Pahlavi shahs (who in spite of their shortcomings, did display tendencies toward modernization) so overplayed their hands that they eventually became despised by both the left and the right, this book would be a great place to start. And in contrast to the impression you might receive from the Western press, this book also establishes how even today the Iranians are deeply divided amongst themselves over just which direction they want their country to take.

This volume packs a wealth of information into a small yet readable space.