PERSIA AWAKENS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 22, 26 January 1935, Page 8 (Supplement)

PERSIA AWAKENS.

FROM CYRUS TO RIZA

ANCIENT GLORIES AND MODERN WAYS. LOOKING STEADILY FORWARD. Toward Persia's glamorous past the attention of the Western World is more and more sharply focused. Archaeologists, toiling beneath the relentless sun, of the East, have been wresting the sccrets of past civilisations from the arid soil of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. But, heretofore, little consistent research has been undertaken in Persia, to which the Aryan tribes presumably trekked from the steppes of Southern Russia about the time that Greece was sacking Troy; the ancient land whose Islamic culture, beginning with the Arab invasion in (540 A.D. and profoundly affecting a backward Europe, recovered from the devastations of Genghis Khan to flower for the last time when Elizabeth was ruling England.

Persia, inviting endless exploration, is fraught with- romance for the West. A sepulchre stands desolate upon a plain, grass springing from the interstices of its stone walls. It is known to contemporary Moslem Persians as " The Mosque of Solomon's Mother," and is \ isited by women who, desiring children, hang amulets about its portal. This mosque" is the tomb of Cyrus the Great, who died in 509 8.C., liavinomoulded Media and Persia into an empire, having conquered -the Lydia of Croesus, having conquered Babylon and fieed the captive Jews. Near by the nomads jiiteli their tents and graze their flocks upon a plateau, the " Throne of Solomon," which is the grass-grown site of the great king's vanished capital.

Ihe capital of Darius the Great of Aerxes, demolished by Alexander of Macedon, has lain throughout the centuries an inchoate mass, ignored by educated Persians and shunned by superstitious peasants. Overlooking a muchtravelled highway, yet seldom visited by Persians, the lofty palaces rise once again upon their terrace, hewn from a mountain s rocky slope. They are bein i_r restored by the Oriental Institute, which recently unearthed 20,000 clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions, believed to constitute the archives of the MedoPersian Emperors who penetrated beyond the Danube and whose sway extended from Northern India to the Nile—those first Empire builders concerning whom information has been gleaned from such alien sources as the Old Testament and the writings of Herodotus aijd Plutarch.

Travelling between the Iraq frontier and Hamadan, muleteers halt tneir caravans and regularly build their fires against the base of a sheer cliff, unaware that 300 feet above is the bas-relief which, memoralising the victories of Darius the Great in sculptures and also in tri-lingual inscriptions, gave archaeologists of the nineteenth century West the key to cuneiform inscriptions found throughout the East and reposing undeciphered in museums. Soil of Far Renown. Hamadan is a sleepy town beneath whose nondescript buildings lie buried, it is generally agreed, the ruins of Ecbatana, the summer city of the MedoPersian Emperors, • which Alexander plundered. Revered as the biblical Ecbatana of Ahashuerus, it is visited during Purim by Persian-Jewish pilgrims, who worship beside two graves declared by them to be the graves of Esther and Mordecai. No one worships, however, in the neglected mausoleum, of the Moslem poet-physician, author of the Canon of Medicine, who, dying in 1038, achieved phenomenal posthumous fame in distant Europe, where, his Persian name distorted, he was known as "Avicenna."

Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, patron of the arts and sciences, lies buried in Eastern Persia, where he perished en route to Samarkand. In death he is separated from his beloved Bagdad by the width of Persia, its area three times that of France. Persia was then an Arab dependency, and a mosque with a golden dome was raised above the garden where the Caliph died.

To-day Haroun-al-Rascliid shares his golden dome with a latter-day Persian saint; and while the saint's memory is worshipped by pilgrims for whom the mosque is comparable to Mecca, "the Good Caliph" is forgotten or execrated by modern Persians who, belonging to a' dissident Moslem sect, now deny his caliphate.

Buried also in Eastern Persia is Omar Khayyam, but gone is the great city of Nishapur, where he forgathered ■ with scholars and mathematicians. His tomb, a whitwashed niche, its walls covered •with scribblings, adjoins a mosque, and, overlooking an untended garden, is a lounging place for peasants of modern Nishapur, a shabby village. Greatest of her Vanished Cities. Long and covetously liave archaeologists contemplated a desolate area which, lying beyond the outskirts df Teheran, the modern capital, is overlooked by a "Tower of Silence," in which the Zoroastrians —worshippers of Persia's pre-Islamic God of Light and Good —have exposed their dead for centuries. For here Persian peasants, tilling the soil with wooden ploughs, have unearthed rare specimens of early Islamic potter}'. Tliig area, covered with sprawling mounds and vestiges of ruins, is believed to be the site of possibly the oldest and greatest of Persia's vanished cities, or the site of a series of vanished cities variously known to historians as Rhages, Rhei, Rei or Ray.

Assumed by many Zoroastrians to be the birthplace of Zoroaster, mysterious founder of one of the first "revealed" religions, Pay—several times mentioned in the Book of Tobit—succoured Darius 111. as he fled before Alexander. It has also been named as the birthplace of Haroun-al-Raschid. An Oriental mart which traded with Babylon and, centuries later, with glamorous Bagdad, Northern Europe and Chinese Turkestan, it was razed by the Mongols seven centuries ago. It will be recalled that Persia declared its neutrality in 1914. But Persia is a corridor to India. And in Southern Persia are the oil fields of the AngloPersian Oil Company, in which the British Government invested heavily in the first year of the war. The neutral country, racked with the violence of spies and counter-spies, was overrun with British-Indian, British and Russian troops, with native forces which these allies recruited, and with Turks.

Gloomy was the Persian prospect when the present Shah, a former peasant officer of the Persian Cossacks, made his

now historic march upon Teheran, where, his coup slightly antedating Mussolini's march upon Rome, he seized the Ministry of War. Bifcoming Prime Minister, he assumed the role of dictator. There was no room for the hereditary Shah, who retreated to Europe. After toying with the idea of becoming first President of a Persian Republic, the soldier, mounting the throne, became Shah Riza Pahlavi.

Persia, with its masses of landless peasants and sheep-herding nomads, remains a feudal land. Therefore the story of modern Persia js the story of this aggressive soldier who is less an Oriental despot than a modern dictator. His government meticulously conforms with the provisions of the Constitution, hard-won by Persian Liberals. But no opposition party is now permitted to raise its head in the Representative Assembly.

The Press and all public utterances are rigidly censored. And while "The Merchant of Venice" has been repeatedly given by native troupes, those plays of Shakespeare's revealing the fallibility of rulers are banned, as are foreign films containing intimations of resistance to any established authority.

Ruled by a soldier, Persia is not —in proportion to its revenues—lagging behind nations of the West in its increasing expenditures upon militarisation. Maintaining more than 100,000 men under arms, it possesses a standing army, the first in centuries, together with a small air force, nine gunboats in the Persian Gulf, military police in all largo settlements and a nation-wide gendarmerie to police its roads, now rarely menaced by bandits. Teheran, tlio capital, has two modern military colleges for training officers, an arsenal and also a smokeless-powder plant, recently purchased from Germany. The Road of Progress. In bygone centuries Persia was famous for tho excellence of its trade routes, by ono of which Marco Polo, headed for China, made his way to India. The routes have remained unchanged throughout the centuries. But travelling thirteen years ago was both dangerous and laborious, the roads having degenerated into trails and carttracks. To-day Persia boasts 6000 miles of gravel-surfaced highways and 4000 miles of improved dirt roads. Gone are the rickety post-chaises, the caravans are disappearing and the roads are used by thousands of motor vehicles, consuming gasoline supplied by tho AngloPersian .Oil Company or shipped in—at mischievously lower prices—by the Soviet Government. Pious Moslems, the men in European dress, make their pilgrimages by automobile, while lorries bulging with rice and wheat dash past tho slow-footed camels and tho disconsolate muleteers. Foreign archaeologists, their cars filled with the latest scientific equipment, speed in comfort between the sites of vanished cities, travelling over tho ancient routes.

In the large settlements—no longer isolated and no longer a law unto themselves —great changes are apparent. Modern courts are administering laws, copied wholesale from France. Schools for girls as well as boys are being erected, and also hospitals. To be sure, the number of these institutions is small, for Persia is a poor country, and the Government is gravely handicapped by a lack of teachers and doctors. However, schools of higher learning and a medical college have been opened in Teheran.

Moslem women, enjoying a mild yet revolutionary freedom, visit public parks, cafes and moving picture theatres. They are timidly unveiling or quietly adopting foreign dress despite the cries of outraged Moslem clerics, who, their ranks diminished, are now shorn of temporal power.

Gone are the quaint costumes that, worn by Persian men, once brightened the stark Persian landscape. Every Persian male, save the licensed cleric, now wears a foreign sae suit, or its approximation, and also a peaked cap, resembling a car conductor's and known as a "Pahlavi." Incongruous when worn by a sheep-herding nomad or a peasant, this semi-foreign costume, prescribed by law, indicates that Persia, rejecting the past, is done with Oriental quaintness. It is also symbolic of the determination of the strongly nationalistic Government to efface the sharp differences which, existing between antipathetic groups within the country and constituting a menace to internal peace, were formerly advertised by differences of costume and even wider difference of headgear.

There is no longer any extra-terri-toriality in Persia; foreign nations, under pressure from the nationalistic Shah, have been compelled to relinquish their long-standing special privileges, thus following a precedent voluntarily established by Soviet Russia. To receive possible foreign offenders against Persia's new laws, the Government has built a modern prison in Teheran. It is in this prison that Persians adjudged guilty of Communist, activities are executed.