India: enduring civilization

RAILROAD INTO HISTORY In the 1850s two British railway builders, the brothers John and William Brunt on, stumbled unknowingly on the two most ancient cities in the Indian subcontinent: Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Looking for ballast for the line of the East India Railway in what is now Pakistan; they were led by locals to two earth mounds packed with baked-earth bricks. Unaware of the mounds’ importance, the brothers saw them simply as ideal fill to make a solid roadbed for their tracks. Near Harappa, William dug up 164,000 cubic yards of India’s priceless heritage to lay 93 miles of railway. It was not until the 1920s that archaeologies discovered that the mounds were the remains of a highly developed Indus Valley civilization dating from 2500 B.C.

ENGINEERED FOR PUBLIC HEALTH The town planners of the Indus civilization built into the city of Mohenjo-Daro the world’s first known main-drainage system, and every house was piped into it. Brick-lined pipes carried sewage from each home into covered channels that ran along the centers of the main streets to disposal points away from the city. The drains took waste from kitchens, bathrooms, and in-door toilets. The main drains even had movable stone slabs that covered inspections points

LIFESAVING REPLY

Cyrus the Greta’s son, Cambyses, was a hard-drinking man of violent rages. He was also fond of asking people what they thought of him. It was a question that could cost an undiplomatic vassal his life. But the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century B.C., reported that at least one courtier, faced with this dangerous question, found a lifesaving reply. The courtier is said to have told the king: “I do not think you are equal to your father, for you do not yet have a son like the son he left behind him in yourself”.

FLAMES OVER THE PALACE

A hall that could hold 10,000 people was a central feature of Persepolis, the enormous palace complex built by Darius I in what is now southwestern Iran. In 1933 archeologists digging among the foundations discovered inscriptions describing the extent of the Persian Empire, as well as an earnest prayer by Darius for his people: “God protect this country from foe, famine, and falsehood.” Persepolis- a name later applied also to the city that grew up around the palace- is a corruption of the Greek name for the palace, Persepolis. The Persians themselves called the palace complex Parse, after the surrounding province. Darius began building Persepolis in about 520B.C., and his successors completed it. The wooden-roofed palace remained intact for less than two centuries, how-ever. It was burned to the ground by the invading troops of Alexander the Great in about 330 B.C.

PLEASURE GARDEN

The word paradise comes from an old Persian word for a pleasure garden or a deer park. Not only the king had such gardens; many of the provincial governors, known as satraps, had them too.

Persia: the first great empire

GUARDING THE HAREM

The Persian kings kept many wives, and even more concubines, in harems guarded by eunuchs. After Cyrus subdued Babylonia in 539 B.C., the province had to supply already castrated boys each year to learn their trade as eunuchs. Probably none of the kings had more wives and concubine than Xerxes I, who regained from 486 to 465 B.C. He appears as the amorous king Ahasuerus(the Hebrew version of his name) in the Old Testament book of Esther.

STORMY CROSSING

When the Persian king Xerxes I led and expedition against Greece in 480 B.C., he had some of his Egyptian and Phoenician engineers throw two pontoon bridges across the narrow Hellespont Strait to carry his armies over. But a storm wrecked the bridges, and in a fury Xerxes ordered his men to give the Hellespont 300 lashes and to throw a symbolic pair of shackles into the waves. Some accounts say that he also had the waters branded with hot irons to show his displeasure. The engineers’ punishment was not symbolic; they were beheaded. However, their successors kept their heads, because the whether improved and the Persians were able to cross safely. At first the invasion was successful, but after a crushing defeat at Salamis later that year, Xerxes had to withdraw.

Persia: the first great empire

MEN OF MAGIC

The English word magic is derived from the Magi, a mysterious Persian priestly clan. A magus was a person wise in religious matters, and the Magi were probably also scribed and keepers of records. The word magic may have acquired its modern meaning from a branch of the clan that moved to Babylonia and specialized in telling fortunes and working religious “wonders.” It was three of the Persian Magi, “wise men from the east,” whose journey to visit the infant Christ is described in St. Matthew’s Gospel.

CULT OF WARRIORS

One of the main religions in ancient Persia was the cult of Mithras, who was portrayed as a man slaying a bull. It was a men-only religion, and several of the ceremonies had parallels with those of Christianity, including baptism with water and the sharing of a sacramental meal. Mithraism later spread to the West and, because of its emphasis on manly strength and courage, became popular among Roman soldiers.

Persia: the first great empire

WORLD RULER

The Persian Empire reached its greatest extent under Darious I, who seized the throne in 522B.C. It stretched about 2,500 miles from the Indus River in present-day Pakistan to what is now Benghazi in Libya in the west, and from the Arbian Sea in the south to the Caucasus and Macedonia  in the north. This, the first “world empire,” covered about 2,000,000 square miles, an area about two-thirds as large as the 48 contiguous U.S. states, and had a population of 10,000,000.

THE FIRST SUEZ CANAL

To facilitate trade between Egypt and his ports on the Persian Gulf, Darius I ordered the construction of a canal to link the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. In fact, the value of such a link had long been appreciated by rulers in the region, and there is evidence that a canal was dug and maintained for a time as early as the 20th century B.C. About 1,300 years later, under the Egyptian pharaoh Necho, construction of a new canal was started but abandoned. Darius’s workers began completing this canal in about 500 B.C. and, when they finished the job a few years later, they set up five inscribed stelae (stone slabs), of which four survive.

Darius’s canal-which ran along a course similar to the modern Suez Canal, from the Nile delta through the Bitter Lakes to a point near the port of Suez-remained  in more or less regular use until the 8th century A.D. Then part of it was blocked for military reasons- 12 centuries before similar closures of the Suez Canal in 1956 and 1967.