Down the silk road: Iranzamin at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

This exhibition cannot really be said to be an adequate reflection of the richness of the Persian tradition; still, it is full of beautiful and appealing objects.

Ceramic plate, 1800s, Persia. Powerhouse Collection

Iranzamin
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, until August 8

The title of this exhibition, Iranzamin, means “Iranian land”, and refers not only to the territory that constitutes the modern state of Iran, but much more broadly to lands that have been part of the Persian empire over the centuries and represent the modern extent of Persian cultural hegemony. These include Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Georgia.

And this vast area only represents the Persian Empire of the early modern period. Under the Achaemenids, in antiquity, it also included Egypt, Anatolia and considerably more of India. In the course of the 19th century in particular, Persia lost some territory to Britain (Afghanistan) but much more to Russia; the central Asian states remained under Russian domination until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is why many architectural monuments in these countries and their great cities, whose names are so evocative of the silk road – Herat in Aghanistan, Samarkand or Bukhara in Uzbekistan – are pure expressions of Persian culture, despite a century and a half of Russian domination. In some of these countries Persian is also the local language, particularly in Afghanistan, where it is known as Dari and Tajikistan, where it is called Tajik.

The ethnic and linguistic map of this enormous area is complex and unfamiliar to most people in the west. Apart from Hebrew, which was revived in the 20th century after some two- and-a-half millennia, there are three main languages: Persian, Arabic and Turkish. Each of these belongs to a completely different linguistic family yet because they have been thrown together by history for so many centuries, they also are joined by loan words and idioms.

Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages, Turkish is Turkic and Persian is Indo-European, and thus related to Greek, Latin and German. Hence connections which surprised early European travellers to the east in the Renaissance: the words for mother and father are mâdar and pedar, like Greek mêtêr and patêr or Latin mâter and pater; the words for brother and girl are barâdar and dokhtar like the German words for brother and daughter – bruder and tochter – or the English daughter. The third person singular of the verb to be is hast or ast, like Greek esti, Latin est, French est, etc.

Pen box, 1800s, Persia. Powerhouse Collection

The Persians were originally one of several Iranian peoples, but rose to prominence in the 6th century BC when Cyrus the Great, whose father was Persian and whose mother was a Median princess, united the two peoples and conquered the Babylonians. Under his successor Darius, the empire was extended to include Egypt and parts of India, becoming the greatest empire in history up until that time. Two centuries later the Greek soldier, statesman and historian Xenophon wrote an admiring biography of Cyrus which begins by pondering the extraordinary difficulty of ruling over so vast an empire and so many very different peoples.

The Persians assimilated a great deal from the Semitic civilisations that had preceded them, and also from the Greeks, some of whom were their subjects on the Ionian coast of Anatolia (the Persian word for Greek is still Yunani). The Greeks turned out to be the one people who refused to be conquered; the culture of the Archaic polis, with its decentralised constellation of independent city states, had developed not only an ethos of self-reliance and responsibility but a new concept of liberty which was unimaginable among people who had always lived as the subjects of great empires.

Darius, then his successor Xerxes made two unsuccessful attempts to conquer Greece, in 490 and 480BC. A century and a half later, in 334BC, Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont and invaded the Persian empire, conquering all the lands once ruled by Darius, from Egypt to India, and in the process opening up new avenues for cultural exchange between east and west: Greco-Indian cities in what is now Pakistan became the first centres to represent Buddha as a man, for example, and the anthropomorphic Buddha spread from there to the Pacific Ocean.

Wine jar, 1800s, Persia. Powerhouse Collection

After Alexander’s death and the break-up of his enormous empire, Persia was ruled first by the Seleucids in Greek Syria, then for more than 450 years (247BC to 224AD) by the Parthians, a Hellenised Iranian people; they were replaced by a restored Persian dynasty, the Sasanians, from 224 until the Arab conquest in 651AD. Under these two dynasties, Persia was the great eastern neighbour of the Roman empire, and among the many points of cultural exchange the acculturation of plants is particularly interesting: the Latin word for peach was persica, just as the Greek for walnut (gerdu in Persian) was karuon persikon, the Persian nut.

The Arab invasion could have overwhelmed Persian culture and in particular the Persian language, but this did not happen for a number of reasons. Probably the principal one was that the Persians were so much more culturally sophisticated than the Arabs, so that it was rather the invaders who learnt from the invaded, as happened later when Persia was invaded by the Turks or the Mongols. The culture of the Islamic golden age, indeed, was essentially based on what the Arabs learnt from both Greeks and Persians.

The Persian influence was particularly strong after the early Umayyads were replaced by the Abbasid dynasty in 750AD, who moved their capital from Hellenistic Damascus in Syria to Persian Baghdad. It was particularly from this time, as the Arab rulers became more and more Persianised, that the Persians in turn abandoned their ancient Zoroastrian religion and converted to the new faith.

The most important factor in the survival of a distinct Persian culture, however, was adherence to the Persian language and resistance to the imposition of Arabic, which triumphed everywhere else. The first masterpiece of Persian literature, indeed, is Ferdowsi’s epic Shahname, the Book of Kings, written a thousand years ago with the explicit aim of defending the national tongue. For all this nationalistic intent, Ferdowsi is virtually unaware of the history of the Achaemenid founders of Persian civilisation, but celebrates Alexander (Iskander) who is conveniently imagined as Philip’s son by a Persian princess, and therefore not a foreign invader after all but a true national hero.

By Ferdowsi’s time, the whole Abbasid Caliphate was under the nominal protection of the Seljuk Turks, and the various parts of the empire were largely self-governing. This period was followed by the unimaginably brutal and murderous invasions of the Mongols in the 12th and 13th centuries, but after the slaughter came a period of cultural flourishing; there was more slaughter, followed by further flourishing with the invasion of Tamerlane and the rule of his successors, the Timurids. Strangely, these violent and tumultuous centuries were the golden age both of Persian architecture and literature, with such great authors as Omar Khayyam, Sa’adi, Rumi and Hafez and Rumi.

One Thousand and One Nights, lithograph Persian book, 1910, Persia. Powerhouse Collection

At last the new Persian dynasty of the Safavids arose in the 16th and 17th centuries, making Isfahan into their magnificent capital and establishing Shi’ite Islam as the national religion. Safavid power declined in the 18th century, to be replaced eventually with the ethnically Turkish Qajars who ruled throughout the 19th century and until they were overthrown by Reza Pahlavi, a Persian officer who made himself Shah and whose son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, succeeded him until the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Interestingly, the late Shah’s son, Prince Reza Pahlavi, announced a couple of weeks ago that he preferred a republican constitution to a hereditary monarchy. Was he perhaps implicitly offering himself as a potential president in the event that the unpopular clerical regime, faced with the irresistible demographic wave of a young and increasingly secular-minded population, runs out of supporters?

Elements of this story will be found throughout the exhibition, which is mostly of objects from the relatively recent Qajar period, whose art is far removed from the heights of the Mongol and Timurid periods, or the Safavid, which is splendid but not quite as exquisitely refined as its predecessors. So this cannot really be said to be an adequate reflection of the richness of the Persian tradition; still, it is full of beautiful and appealing objects, fragments of a civilisation that should be better represented in Australian collections.

The first we encounter is a wine jar, whose form reminds us of the complexities of a culture long been enriched by the exchange of materials and styles along the silk road that crossed the whole Eurasian continent, from the Mediterranean to the borders of China. Ceramics have an ancient tradition in the Iranzamin, and later were influenced by exchanges with China: Persian cobalt was exported to China to make blue and white ceramics that were in turn sent to Persia before the Chinese themselves, in the Ming dynasty, grew to love them too.

Wine jar, 1800s, Persia. Powerhouse Collection

But the form of this jar also speaks of the culture of the nomadic peoples of Iran and the silk road, recalling metal work; the sides of the vessel are decorated with charming figures of young lovers, the girl playing a lute and the youth holding a cup of wine – very much like another cup included in the exhibition. One of the most delightful details in their depiction, a real touch of folk art, is the way that the eyes of each turn inward to gaze at each other.

Wine, as this and many other objects remind us, was as important in Persian culture as in Greek, although it has been officially banned since the Islamic Revolution. In Persian poetry both love and intoxication are pervasive themes, sometimes literally, sometimes as metaphors for religious experience. A variety of Sufi objects refer to mystical religious practice, while others, including examples of textiles, evoke long traditions of handicrafts.

One of the most intriguing objects on display is a copy of the Thousand and One Nights, reproduced lithographically. Printing was late to arrive in the Islamic world and indeed was initially banned, contributing to a rapid relative decline compared to the western world that was in the ascendant with the explosion of knowledge and the scientific revolution of the early modern period. The Koran was not allowed to be set in movable type, and so the earliest printed versions, from the 19th century, were lithographically reproduced.

It is not quite clear why that is the case here, especially as the copy is clearly taken from a typeset page, not from handwriting. The book is open near the beginning, and the headers refer to the 6th and 7th nights of Scheherazade’s storytelling – a sultan in Qajar costume looks at the pond filled with enchanted fish. As her name, and that of the king Shahryar make clear, the title Arabian nights is misleading: this collection of tales survives in an Arabic rendering, but the original conception and the framing story are entirely Persian.