History TV Channel documentary- Warriors-How the world is still fooled, and the full truth is veiled. On the Greek and Persian Wars and how it is claimed, this changed the course of Western Civilization,forever!
Briefly, the Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus The Great, the Achaemenid, (Hakhamanish), in 500 B.C., and which at it's greatest extent stretched from the present territories of Europe's Macedonia/Romania, the regions around the mouth of the river Danube, and present day Eygpt and parts of Libya, all forming it's grand western borders. To the east, it's extent reached the Indus river, and the river Oxus north east of the Caspian and Aral seas in the far north east.
One very brief mention, the Persians used paid labor to build their royal Capitals, and the kings were judged by their personal role in the Empire's politics and sentiments-this is well attested by historical chronicles that were finally brought to full literary fruition in the Shah Nameh that chronicled good kings from bad; not as now popularly alleged that the Persians were blind and dumb subjects of their kings.
The great Greek historian, Herodotus, who was born in Ionia, a Persian province of Greek cities in western Turkey, grudgingly admits of "the Persian Law" that does not change and is equally applied to all subjects! The Bible calls this "the Persian Laws that changeth not."
Greek society at that time was a full senatorial voting democracy, but for an elite class only; the rest were workers and slaves, with abundant male and female resources for any work you may wish to extract from them. Greek politics comprised of bickering and quarrelsome city states. The Spartans, particularly, were the bullies of the region. The Spartans' military society demanded all boys, from the age of seven, were given over to a mentor, a Spartan warrior, who, in his bid to cement the ties between soldier and learner, used the small boy as his concubine; any amount of historical Greek records will attest to this. They proudly proclaim the paedophilic relationship as part of military training!
The Persian Achaemenid dynasty held their vast empire for around 220 years, upto 336 B.C., with its collapse at the hands of Alexander the Great, who, incidently, considered himself heir to Cyrus, made Babylon his capital, never returning to Macedonia, and is known to have adopted Persian court etiquettes and adorn himself with the Persian purple. He married three Persian royal ladies, one of whom bore him his son and heir, who never lived to take his father's throne. Alexander's Empire of Asia collapsed, literary, on his death bed, disintegrating into five kingdoms. The Persian Empire had lasted for over 200 years.
Anyone familiar with the present politics of the great powers, the United States, have no doubts this great country is indeed a great power, although it got a thorough drubbing in Vietnam, and is not making much headway in Iraq.
Clay tablets found in the Persian royal Capitals, Persepolis, Susa and Ekbatana describe the wars with Greece as a necessary military 'arm' of politics, to keep the city states warring with one another. The Persians were carrying on a diplomatic war with Greece, bribing their leaders with gold, which kept the Greek city-states disunited, for over 150 years, well after their victories over Persian forces in the 4th century B.C.
Further, what is little known, and generally ignored, is that the western regions of present Turkey, known as Ionia, were a significantly large group of Greek cities under Persian rule; and keeping the mainland Greeks warring was as much in the interests of Persia, as keeping the communists in check was in US interest in the twentieth century!
Now, coming to the contention that the Greek victories "saved" Western civilization, allow me to present the full truth, rather the other side of the truth.
At the time of the Greco-Persian wars, in the 4th century B.C., the rest of Europe had no organised states other than the Greek city states on Mainland Greece, and we had Macedonia on it's northern borders. The rest of Europe comprised of warring rural pre-Germanic, pre-Slavic and Scythian village tribes, at most a huge mass of tribal and nomadic warring groups ruled by chieftains and petty kings. The earlier European civilizations in Greece and on the island of Crete, the Mycenaean, had long disappeared.
So to contend, the Greco-Persian wars saved Western Civilization, none existed at that time in heartland Europe! The Greeks were in fact Dorians, who migrated to the Greek mainland from Asia, and the Greek language is Indo-European, the same as ancient Persian!
To say that these wars saved the present day Western Civilization is to place everything about European civilization in some time warp.
Right through the next great European civilization, the Roman Empire, it's eventual collapse at the hands of Germanic tribes, the spread of Christianity that supported the divine rights of kings, the later rise of the Carolingian and European kingdoms, from the time of Charlemagne and the German kings, right down to the absolute Russian and French kings, we have autocratic or near despotic monarchies for some 1700 years, ruling over Western Civilization!
Everything was farthest away, in ideas, to the so called Greek democracy, which latter was, in any case, a senatorial voting right for an elite class to choose a leader from amongst themselves, whilst the rest, workers or slaves, slaved, or were done away in the gory gladiator battles, in Roman times!
To equate present Western democratic institutions to a non-existent Western Civilization based on Greek ideals that stretched back to the days of Greece or Rome, is to take all the innumerable despotic kings and monarchies, through 1700 years, and throw them into oblivion, into the ignorant man's well!
Of course, all these wild conjectures are possible by taking fullest advantage of the complete collapse of Persian civilization at the hands of the great spread of Islam, for the Zoroastrian Persian Empires fully disappeared off the face of history after the advent of Islam, that is the sad part. Pre-Islamic Persian civilization could boast of several ruling queens,and women as Generals and leaders. It was not for nothing that Alexander had fallen in love with the then Persian Orient, a fact kept well hidden from the popular image today.
