Iran in World History

Subjects bring tribute to the Persian emperor in Persepolis. One of the four 
Achaemenid capitals, Persepolis was the site of the annual Persian New Year 
ceremonies every spring, when representatives from every province of the 
empire brought gifts for the king. The site was destroyed by Alexander the Great 
in 330 
bce
. 
Persepolis, Fars province, southwestern Iran, photo by author.

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ongoing Greek-Persian political rivalry is that most of the subject popu-
lations occupying this never-ending battleground were neither Greek 
nor Persian. Year after year, the farmers, craftsmen, and tradespeople 
of Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, and the Caucasus were 
forced to provide services or give up their crops, daughters, and liv-
ing quarters to an endless rotation of occupying foreign armies. Tribal 
nomads were somewhat better off, since they often constituted the 
main fighting forces and could simply switch sides or go home.
Also, the lines between the Greek and Persian armies were not so 
clearly drawn. Greeks were assigned governorships in some western 
Persian provinces, and Greek soldiers and even commanders served in 
the Persian army. During Xerxes I’s invasion of Greece, some two-thirds 
of the Persian army was made up of Greek mercenaries. More impor-
tant, not all Greeks and not all Persians were soldiers and occupiers; 
many were simply settlers who integrated over time into local society 
and were as much victims of the winds of war as anybody else.
A modern 
fravahr
 (the most recognizable symbol in Zoroastrian religious 
iconography) is displayed above the entryway to a Zoroastrian fire temple in 
Mumbai, India. In ancient times the figure within the winged disk, borrowed 
from Assyrian art, symbolized the Zoroastrian supreme deity, Ahura 
Mazda. Contemporary Zoroastrians, shunning idolatry, consider it to be a 
representation of the human spirit. During the twentieth century, the 
fravahr 
became a symbol of Iranian nationalism and is frequently used in jewelry, 
clothing, wall hangings, and even bumper stickers by Zoroastrians and 
non-Zoroastrian Iranians alike. 
Photo by author
.

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As common inheritors of the patriarchal Indo-European tradi-
tion, neither the Persian nor the Greek male elites had much to say 
about women, and what they did say was usually not positive. The 
Persepolis fortification tablets provide some information about women 
workers: in unskilled professions they were allotted one-third less food 
rations than men, although for skilled workers the rations were equal; 
new mothers were given extra rations, but more if they had boys. Royal 
Persian women could own estates and employ laborers, but in the 
Greek sources they are mainly portrayed as ambitious schemers insti-
gating court intrigues. The practice of incestuous marriages among the 
Persian royalty, first noted by Herodotus during the fifth century bce, 
is condemned as unnatural by Western writers and sometimes used 
for ridicule. For example, the first-century bce Roman poet Catullus 
insults a rival with the words, “May a Magus be born of the abomina-
ble union between Gellius and his mother, and may he learn the entrail 
divination of the Persians!”
5
An extraordinary Iranian woman by the name of Mania served 
briefly as satrap of the province of Aolis in western Anatolia at the end of 

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the fifth century bce. The Athenian writer Xenophon describes her rule 
as characterized by “magnificence” (that is, royal generosity), making the 
apparently counterintuitive point that at least some women were actu-
ally capable of demonstrating this quality: “Whenever she came to the 
court of Pharnabazus she brought him gifts continually, and whenever 
Pharnabazus went down to visit her provinces she welcomed him with 
all fair and courteous entertainment beyond what his other viceroys were 
wont to do. . . . Nor was she sparing of her gifts to those who won her 
admiration; and thus she furnished herself with a mercenary force of 
exceptional splendor.”
6
Mania’s son-in-law, finding it outrageous that a 
woman should hold such a high position, murdered her.
Subsequent female rulers of Iranian lands were rare and suffered 
similar fates: short reigns and dismissive mentions by historians. 
Alexander the Great’s Bactrian wife Roxana looms large in legend, but 
the historical facts of her life are not particularly happy—she was at 
least considered important enough to have to be murdered along with 
her son, Alexander IV, so that the usurper Cassander could assume the 
Macedonian kingship following Alexander’s death.
The nomadic steppe societies of the Sakas may have had a some-
what higher regard for women. Saka women participated in battle and 
provided the source for Greek legends about fearsome “Amazon” war-
riors. According to Herodotus, the Sauromatian Sakas intermarried 
with these Amazon women, and “Ever since then the women of the 
Sauromatae have followed their ancient ways; they ride out hunting, 
with their men or without them; they go to war, and dress the same as 
the men.”
7
The Massagatae Sakas who defeated Cyrus the Great were 
ruled by a queen, Tomyris (Tahmrayish); Herodotus lists their chief 
deity as “Hestia”—his Greek equivalent for a goddess whose actual 
Saka name is not known. In later centuries, the Turkic peoples who 
gradually took over the place of the Scythians as masters of the steppe 
also had strong female characters. Even to the present day, women in 
the rural Turkic communities of Central Asia—particularly the Kyrgyz 
and Kazakhs—are more publicly visible and active than in many other 
traditional Islamic societies.
Weakened by years of infighting and court intrigues, the Persian 
Empire proved unable to withstand the well-organized armies of 
Alexander III of Macedon, known as “Alexander the Great” in 
Western history (Persian sources, not surprisingly, call him “Alexander 
the Accursed”). Although the entire process actually took twelve years, 
the Macedonian advance, province by province, proved irreversible and 
ended with the destruction of Persepolis in 330 bce. According to the 

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Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, “The Macedonians spent the whole 
day in pillage but still could not satisfy their inexhaustible greed. . . . As 
for the women, they dragged them away forcibly with their jewels, treat-
ing as slaves the whole group of captives. As Persepolis had surpassed 
all other cities in prosperity, so she now exceeded them in misfortune.”
8
Following a successful campaign into India, Alexander himself died 
prematurely a few years later in Babylon in 323 bce. The Macedonian 
conqueror left behind Greek garrisons throughout the empire, many 
of them in newly built Greek-style towns he named after himself. At 
least twenty Alexandrias were constructed throughout Western and 
Central Asia, five of them in Afghanistan alone. (The present-day city 
of Kandahar is a corruption of the original Greek name.) Much of 
the Achaemenid administration he left in place, however, along with 
a number of Iranian provincial governors. Alexander had been criti-
cized within his own army for adopting Iranian dress and customs, in