Eternal Persia: From Cyrus to the Streets of Tehran — 3,000 Years Civilization, Art, and Resistance

Three thousand years. Every conqueror absorbed. Every silence broken by a poem.In 539 BC, a Persian king walks into Babylon without spilling a drop of blood. Twenty-five centuries later, a woman climbs onto an electrical box in Tehran and takes off her headscarf.In between: Alexander burns Persepolis and leaves dressed as a Persian. The Arabs conquer the country and leave with its architecture. The Mongols stack skulls, and four centuries later Isfahan is blue with tilework. Persia loses its wars and wins its conquerors.A story, not a textbook. Twenty-four chapters that give as much room to poets as to kings, to carpets as to battles, to women as to dynasties.Inside: - Cyrus, and the invention of a way to conquer- Persepolis burned, and what Alexander carries away- The Arab conquest, and the architecture that changes sides- Isfahan the blue, four centuries after the Mongols- From a Tehran street to poems still recited today