Ancient Persians

>>385403
>Greatest

Cyrus the Great, honestly. He really was that great.

>Underrated.

Darius. He did so much to build up the empire and continue what Cyrus started.

Well, Cyrus the Younger is underrated in that, although never and actual ruler himself, his story in trying to topple his brother as recounted in Xenophon's Anabasis is an amazing story.

>>385427
And no, he was not the younger brother of Cyrus the Great, he was the younger brother of Cyrus the Great's great-great-great-great-great-etc. grandson.

>>385439
>>385427
Wasn't the whole civil war between Cyrus the Younger and his older brother over the fact that his older brother was born to a woman from his father before their father was the Great King while Cyrus's mother was wed to him after he became king?

>>385447
Nigga, I don't know. Read it yourself. All I know is that Lil' C hired 10,000 Greek mercenaries to help him with the job, one of them who survived the battlefield and lived to tell the tale named Xenophon.

/his/ hates Persia I guess

>>385749
Doesn't hate, just ignorant.

I don't blame /his/

Besides the Cyrus Cylinder, I know of no first-hand accounts or really any documents whatsoever made by Persian sources pre-633

>>386011
We work with what we have. Also a lot of what we know about Darius and Xerxes comes from a shit-ton of administrative tablets written in Aramic and Elamite recovered by archaeologists in the 19th century.

>>386030
And those tablets are Persian ones I should add.

>>386035
>>386030
>>386011
Also to add, Jewish sources aren't bad either.

>>386030
>>386035
>>386039
But with compared to all the plays, essays, songs, oral traditions and poems that were eventually transcribed, illustrated pottery, paintings, sculptures, etc. etc. we have from ancient Greece that we'd have more from ancient Persia, when its borders expanded an area literally larger than the Roman Empire? Why is there so little left? Did they really get that WREKT by the Greeks...and the Arabs?...and the Mongols? and the Turks?

>>386086
>Why is there so little left?
>Greeks & Macedonians
Most probable cause is that Alexander's conquest of Achaemenid Persia if not even intentionally on Alexander's own part but his men and commanders likely looted other repositories of Persian archives before Persepolis and administrative centers where they kept records of transactions, daily affairs, decrees, laws, orders, and so forth.
>Arabs
While the looting of Ctesiphon is over-exaggerated by lovers of Persia, it is known that in the centuries that immediately followed the downfall of the Sassanid Persian Empire, later Islamic/Arab forces would raze Persian libraries all over the country as al-Tabri tells us.
>Mongols
Yes. Mongols were well known to have caused a great amount of havoc, psychological and physical trauma to Iranian peoples in Central Asia and Western Asia not just Iran proper, and razed entire cities under Genghis.
>Turks
Yes, Timer the Lane/Tamerlane is also well known to have destroyed great Persian and Iranian cities, butchering of intellectuals, artists, writers, and scholars. So in short: Persia never stopped having its fair share of great writers and sources of information, the issue is that its such a crossroads and nexus for trade, politics, and culture geographically speaking that it tends to get hit heavy and thus sources of pre-Islamic Persia tend be rarer.

>>386086
>>386140
Imagine there is some guy in 13th or 14th century Persia whose family line has kept the archives and transcripts of thousands of years of Persian history, folklore, culture, and customs.

And then wham, the next day he wakes up and his city is being burned to the ashes all around him and those records are lost over night as some Mongol fucks destroy everything.

>>386151
Sucks.


So, assuming that that shit wasn't all destroyed, do you think it could be comparable tot he greatness achieved by western societies? For example, looking at Persian paintings during the 15th century, so same time as the Italian Renaissance, their paintings looked like such crap in comparison. They couldn't draw for shit. Where's the perspectivism? Where's the accurate chariscuro? All I see are slanty-eyed chinks. The Mongols fucked the gene pools to the point where motherfuckers started looking Chinese, huh?

>>386175
>Looking at Persian paintings during the 15th century, so the same time as the Italian Renaissance, their paintings looked like such crap in comparison.
That was the vogue art style passed via the Silk Road from China to Persia and Western Asia; it was simply popular so it persisted in the world of artists in the Near East and Central Asia. Its completely subjective to compare them.