It can’t be easy to make a documentary about ancient history engrossing, and breathe life into dusty ruins, bits of broken pottery and fragmented artefacts.
Nor to compress an epic narrative like this one, which spans several thousand years, into just three hours on screen. Where do you start? But Samira Ahmed and her team, with the help of some amazing drone photography, make a pretty good stab at revealing Iran’s fascinating, rich and complex past, a story of successive invasions and empire-building, about which, I imagine, most of us are fairly ignorant.
By calling the three-parter The Art of Persia, as opposed to Iran, there’s a clear delineation between the country’s past and present, its pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures, and the time before and after it became an Islamic Republic in 1979.
Unusually, as a British journalist, Ahmed was granted “a rare opportunity to travel across this vast country” to visit off-the-beaten-track spots as well as the great archaeological sites. Blending these with scenes of present-day Iran, her whistle-stop tour begins in 1250BC, with the qanats that brought water down from the mountains to irrigate land for crop cultivation.
It was these underwater tunnels that allowed people to put down roots and for art to flourish, she says, although artefacts shown include a bronze figurine and a gold pin from about 2,200BC.
No matter. From here we are transported to what remains of the ziggurat built by the Elamites more than 3,000 years ago at Chogha Zanbil. Although it is badly eroded by the elements, Ahmed can walk freely and alone around this “relic of a lost world”, pointing out archaeological curiosities including a clearly defined footprint and cuneiform writing on the brick walls in praise of the King of Elam.
On to the remains of the other great Elamite edifice at Susa, where French 19th-century archaeologist Jacques de Morgan repurposed the original bricks to build a “chateau” next to the site.
We get a potted history of Cyrus the Great, who conquered the Elamites and swathes of the Middle East to establish the first Persian empire, although it was one of his successors, Darius, “the first royal architect of his dynasty”, who built Persepolis.
We’re told that its builders earned salaries and that the female workers got maternity allowance. Also that Alexander the Great was able to conquer Persepolis because it was never fortified, and that he burned it to “obliterate the shrine to Persian culture and identity once and for all”.
As well as providing a brief glimpse into the history of these sophisticated dynasties (the story of how the Islamic crusading armies defeated the Sasanian empire in the seventh century is told next week), the programme reminds us that empires expand and shrink, that conquests succeed and fail, that walls are built and fall, and that trying to erase past identities is nothing new.
The Art of Persia airs tonight on BBC4, 9pm
