Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: The Persians: The Age of the Great Kings (Basic Books 2023) [IBR2026]

This is a history of ancient Persia. It is unlike other histories of Persia (not that there have been many). This history uses genuine, indigenous, ancient Persian sources to tell a very different story from the one we might be familiar with, the one moulded around ancient Greek accounts. This story is told by the Persians themselves. It is Persia’s inside story. It is the Persian Version of Persia’s history. In addition to being a great review – and sometimes, a take-down – of Herodotus, this helped clarify a lot of my long-standing confusion about Persia and expand my knowledge of the culture. Perhaps a good place to start is with the question, which is it, Persia or Iran? Llewellyn-Jones (hereafter referred to as L-J) deals first with the common notion that Persia was the old place and Iran is the new one, that Persia is exotic and enticing and Iran is dangerous. But it was Reza Shah, first of the Pahlavi dynasty, who decided, in 1935, that Iran be used as the name of the country.…