The World

* Their books were collated into the Bible – exceptional because it records the unique survival of the Jewish people and faith in the face of political and physical destruction. But it became a book of universal significance because the founder of Christianity, Jesus, was a practising Jew who revered and fulfilled its prophecies. In turn, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, studied and revered both Old and New Testaments, which he often cited in his own sacred text, the Quran, making them also sacred for Islam. There is slim evidence that the biblical story of the Tower of Babel might have been influenced by the Babylon ziggurat, but there is no evidence that the Jews deported to Babylonia hated the ziggurat or called it anything other than ‘the temple of Marduk’. Babylon may have influenced the Book of Revelation, but the Whore is probably a much later metaphor for the Roman empire.

* According to the Greek historian Herodotos writing a century later, Astyages (Rishtivaiga) suffered a nightmare about Mandana in which she urinated a golden jet that flooded his empire. But when Mandana became pregnant, Astyages dreamed that a vine grew out of her vagina until it was entwined around the whole of Asia: the child would unite the Medes and Persians.

* The Persians and Medes ‘introduced trouser-wearing to the world’, writes Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. In Egypt, Greece and Iraq, people mainly wore robes of light cloth. In 2008 the mummified body of a boy from 500 BC was discovered in an Iranian salt mine wearing a tunic and baggy ‘harem’ trousers. Herodotos was horrified by the vulgarity of trousers: ‘The Athenians were the first Greeks to endure the sight of Persian clothing.’ Yet the trousers caught on.

* Greeks had started to write captions on their drinking cups. Around 750 BC, one of the earliest examples, at the Greek settlement on Ischia in the Bay of Naples, a Greek named Nestor etched three lines on to his drinking cup that combined verse, storytelling, theology, sex and drinking: ‘Nestor’s hearty-drinking cup am I. He who drinks this cup will soon take fire with fair-crowned Aphrodite’s hot desire.’

* They saw the world as a system that could be studied by lovers of wisdom, philosophoi. Around 500 BC, the contrarian philosopher Heraklitos of Ephesus first used the word cosmos – order – to mean the universe. ‘All things come into being by conflict of opposites,’ he said, ‘and everything flows’ in a constant evolution: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice.’ His view of the infallibility of gods and kings is always relevant: ‘Eternity is a child moving counters in a game; the power of kings is like a child’s game.’ Finally he was the first to define war as one of the engines of human development: ‘War is the father of all and king of all; and some he shows as gods, others as men, some he makes slaves, others free.’

* Between 750 and 650, a group of writers, later personalized as ‘Homer’, wrote two epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, channelling ancient Mycenaean tales. Homer called the Greeks ‘Argives’ or ‘Achaeans’, but a common ancestor named Hellen was invented in a poem Catalogue of Women to give them a name for themselves: Hellenes. It was the Romans who much later called them Graeci, after the first Greek-speaking tribe they encountered.

* This was common to all societies in ancient Greece: there was no concept of sexual identity. The relationship between an older man – the erastes – and a youth, generally fifteen to nineteen – the eromenos – was a normal stage in male life; most men married and had children as well as intimate friendships with other men. But the virile man took the position of sexual superiority.

* At the apogee of Athens, a third of its people were enslaved.

* There was another type of Greek state. In the wild, mountainous north, closer to the peoples of the Balkans and the Eurasian steppe, Greek kingdoms Macedonia and Epiros were ethne, semi-tribal states that had evolved into military monarchies.

* The Egibi family were the first known business dynasty in history: they dealt in property, land, slaves, trading and lending, surviving adeptly through dynasties and conquests. An archive of 1,700 clay tablets reveals their dealings over five generations from about 600 to 480 BC, referencing promissory notes and divisions of land. They married their sons to the daughters of other rich families. Dowries included land, silver, slaves and entire businesses. Starting as land managers under Nebuchadnezzar II and rising to become judges under Nabonidus, they now switched to serving Cyrus and would prosper even more under his successor (but one) Darius. They progressed from lending to rulers to becoming officials for the Great Kings.

* The cylinder is surely the most successful PR document of ancient times and its reputation as the ‘first declaration of human rights’ is absurd: Cyrus and his times had no concept of human rights.