Penguin Random House, Sachbücher, Iran and America: Subtitle TK (Englisch, JOHN, Ghazvinian, 2021)

I East of Eden Once upon a time in Iran, there was a city that gave men butterflies. Centuries before the ayatollah, before the shah before even Muhammad and Jesus Christ shook up their respective corners of the Middle East the emperors of Persia had built one of the most magnificent capital cities the world had ever known. It was called Persepolis literally, the city of Persians. And such was its reputation that even the mightiest of princes, as they saw it coming slowly into view after days and weeks of trekking across the desert, could feel themselves reduced to nervous wrecks. Once a year, in ancient times on the first day of spring rulers of the twenty-eight great kingdoms that Persia had conquered were expected to journey to Persepolis to pay tribute to their lord and master, the King of Kings. And they never failed to carry out this duty. From the Mediterranean city of Sardis would come the obscenely wealthy kings of Lydia, carrying all the riches of Croesus to lay at the feet of the shah. From Memphis and Alexandria came Egyptian nobles, their Nubian slaves in tow. From the hills of Bactria, the emperor of a thousand cities brought his camels laden with gold. Timidly they would all climb the enormous staircase to the Apadana Palace and walk through the fabled Gate of All Nations, hoping what they had brought would prove worthy of their overlord, the Persian emperor. Hoping he would have mercy this year and not reduce their meager satrapies to weeping hillocks of rubble. At its height in the fifth century B.C., the Persian Empire ruled over 60 million of the world s 100 million people making Persepolis, for all intents and purposes, the capital city of all humanity. And anyone who laid eyes on this fabled city could not fail to come away in awe of its power and opulence. Great stone columns, capped by winged bulls, soared into the sky at the entrance to every ceremonial building. Palaces and throne rooms, overflowing with jewels and sumptuous furnishings, shimmered in the midday sun. Tombs of ancient emperors, chiseled into the surrounding cliffs, loomed dramatically over the landscape below. It was the kind of place one had to see to believe a city designed to strike reverence into the hearts of visitors and remind them of their own insignificance before the mightiest empire the world had ever known. Like so many other imperial projects, the famous city of Persians long ago went the way of all souls. Burned and pillaged by Alexander the Great and his army of conquering Greeks in 330 B.C. (legend has it they required three thousand camels to cart away all its gold and jewels), its columns still reach proudly into the cloudless blue sky, in one of the most remote and unpopulated corners of Iran. Today, though, it is not Sogdian princes but busloads of tourists Japanese, Germans, occasionally even Americans who are driven across the vast, hot, and flat Morqab Plain to pay their tribute. As they approach the ruins of Persepolis, they marvel, just as the Elamites and the Babylonians once did, at a city that seems to rise out of nowhere the final punctuation mark at the end of a merciless expanse of dust. And as modern visitors scramble among ancient tombs and statues, snapping pictures and admiring what is left of the palaces of Darius and Xerxes, they often notice, just off to the side, a rusting metal grandstand rows of empty spectator seating rising like bleachers at a high school football field. These are the ruins of a much more recent emperor. In October 1971 the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Imperial Majesty and Commander-in-Chief of four hundred thousand fearsome (if somewhat modernized) Persian warriors chose Persepolis as the backdrop for one of the most audacious, expensive, and self-in.