THE IRANIAN PIVOT - The Revenge of Geography - page 196

Iran is much smaller in size and population than those two powers, or Russia or Europe for
that matter, Iran, because it is in possession of the key geography of the Middle East—in
terms of location, population, and energy resources—is, therefore, fundamental to global
geopolitics.
There is, too, what British historian Michael Axworthy calls the “Idea of Iran,” which,
as he explains, is as much about culture and language as about race and territory. 16 Iran, he
means, is a civilizational attractor, much as ancient Greece and China were, pulling other
peoples and languages into its linguistic orbit: the essence of soft power, in other words,
and so emblematic of McNeill's concept of one civilization and culture influencing anoth-
er. Dari, Tajik, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and Iraqi Arabic are all either variants of Persian or
significantly influenced by it. That is, one can travel from Baghdad to Calcutta and remain
inside a Persian cultural realm of sorts. A brief scan of Iranian history, with an emphasis on
old maps, further clarifies this dynamism.
Greater Iran began back in 700 B.C . with the Medes, an ancient Iranian people who es-
tablished, with the help of the Scythians, an independent state in northwestern Iran. By 600
B.C ., this empire reached from central Anatolia to the Hindu Kush (Turkey to Afghanistan),
as well as south to the Persian Gulf. In 549 B.C ., Cyrus (the Great), a prince from the Persian
house of Achaemenes, captured the Median capital of Ecbatana (Hamadan) in western Iran,
and went on a further bout of conquest. The map of the Achaemenid Empire, governed
from Persepolis (near Shiraz) in southern Iran, shows antique Persia at its apex, from the
sixth to fourth centuries B.C . It stretched from Thrace and Macedonia in the northwest, and
from Libya and Egypt in the southwest, all the way to the Punjab in the east; and from the
Transcaucasus and the Caspian and Aral seas in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Ara-
bian Sea in the south. This was Bosporus-to-Indus, including the Nile. No empire up to that
point in world history had matched it. While the fifth-century B.C . wars between Persia and
Greece dominate Western attitudes toward ancient Iran, with our sympathies lying with the
Westernized Greeks as opposed to the Asiatic Persians, it is also the case that, as Hodgson
notes, the Oikoumene, under the relative peace, tolerance, and sovereignty of Achaemenid
Persia and later empires, provided a sturdy base for the emergence and prospering of the
great confessional religions. 17
“The Parthians,” Axworthy writes, “exemplified the best of Iranian genius—the recog-
nition, acceptance, and tolerance of the complexity of the cultures … over which they
ruled.” 18 Headquartered in the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan and the adjacent
Kara Kum, and speaking an Iranian language, the Parthians ruled between the third cen-
tury B.C . and the third century A.D ., generally from Syria and Iraq to central Afghanistan
and Pakistan, including Armenia and Turkmenistan. Thus, rather than Bosporus-to-Indus
or Nile-to-Oxus like Achaemenid Persia, the Parthian Empire constitutes a more realistic
vision of a Greater Iran for the twenty-first century. And this is not necessarily bad. For