The role of modern museums in setting the historical record straight is at the centre of an Anglo-Iranian-French collaboration in London.
Curators from the British Museum and the National Museum of Iran in Tehran have set out to challenge the Eurocentric view of ancient Iran, which has skewed our understanding.
Their show, Forgotten Empire: the World of Ancient Persia, certainly undermines new and old stereotypes of Iran as a land dominated by political or religious dogma and intolerance.
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum (BM), proposed a joint venture with Iranian museums when he visited Tehran in 2003. Although there was a favourable response, there were some tense moments after last June's elections.
There was speculation that the ousting of Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani would mean a more insular and possibly xenophobic government. No one knew how the election of the new president, Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, might affect the final preparations for the exhibition in London.
But in the event, 81 of Iran's great treasures were allowed to travel to the UK to form the first exhibition devoted to the empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550BC - half a millennium before Caesar even strapped his boots on. The exhibition also features loans from the Louvre and artefacts from the BM's own collection.
John Curtis, the keeper of the ancient near east department at the BM, points to the new forms of thinking and doing that made the largest and wealthiest state in the ancient near east so different. 'In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, Persia was a newly emerging empire and therefore fairly dynamic.' he says.
'It was a young nation with new ideas and fresh thinking and organisation. It was a considerable feat to organise such a vast empire. It was different from its Babylonian and Assyrian predecessors who stripped those that they conquered of everything.'
Curtis says large sums of money were used to improve communications, and a network of long-distance roads, pre-dating the Romans, was built. Currency was used in the west part of the empire, and Aramaic with its alphabetic script was used widely for official documents.
'Persia is the bridge by which the achievements of ancient Babylonia and Sumeria get transmitted to the west via Hellenistic Greece,' he says. 'For 200 years they were channelled through to the west after the conquest of Alexander.'
He strongly disagrees with the idea of a 'clash of civilisations' between east and west. 'The issues are much deeper. It is not simply about ancient Persia and Greece, but about today. If we imagine there is a fault-line between Persia and Greece, obviously we will never be able to establish a dialogue between cultures.'
And he is infuriated by claims that ancient Persia was founded on a 'repressive, monotheistic authoritarianism', which used 'God-ordained' violence against those who opposed its religion. He says people worshipped a whole range of other gods and there was no attempt to establish a state religion.
'King Cyrus and his successors would worship local gods wherever they went. The text inscribed on the famous Cyrus Cylinder explains how King Cyrus returned statues of gods to their shrines. He also allowed deported peoples, including the Jews, to return to their homes.'
Curtis's passion is matched by that of his counterpart from Iran, Shahrokh Razmjou, who heads the department for Achaemenid studies at Tehran's National Museum.
Razmjou decided at the age of seven to become an archaeologist, taught himself to read cuneiform inscriptions as a schoolboy, and began travelling to visit sites in Eygpt and Lebanon when he was only 12.
'We are trying to change the western perspective of history,' he says. 'It was very difficult for the ancient authors to write objectively, because their country was at war with the Persians.'
He believes a whole civilisation has been ignored because of this pro-west perspective. The Persian empire is still misrepresented in the academic world as the evil empire, which tried to conquer the world.
'But here is an identity, a vision of how things could be, which provides a contrast with the world at present. Instead of Christians, Jews and Muslims and others fighting each other, a multiplicity of religions, cultures, languages and artistic styles flourished under Cyrus and his followers.
'People could see themselves represented in the sculptures of the palace of Persepolis and feel a shared culture.'
Razmjou says that one of most important achievements of the empire was that it demonstrated how different peoples and cultures could live together in a kind of peaceful coexistence.
'They tried to have a multicultural society which tolerated different religions and had a priestly collaboration between religions to learn from each other. The individual kingdoms didn't need to spend money on arms and could use it to promote astronomy, geometry and architecture.'
Razmjou does not blame the ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus for the poor view of the Persian empire that has dominated western thinking. Rather, he believes that it was 19th-century scholars who purveyed the ideology of more modern imperialists, especially the British, who were seeking to justify their colonial rule.
But a simplistic pitting of one against the other, he insists, distorts the whole relationship between the two cultures. Rather than the Persians forcing their culture on others, it was the Greek-Macedonian, Alexander the Great, who burned down the great temple of Persepolis and tried to impose Hellenistic style on the areas he conquered.
'It's not that bad things didn't happen in the Persian empire. But they held things together in the Pax Persica - the Persian Peace - for almost 200 years.'
Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, a BM expert on the post-Alexandrian period, is keenly aware of the reverberations that the glory days of the Persian empire have had for rulers in the past as well as for Iranian national identity today.
'With the toppling of the Shah in 1979 Iran became a republic for the first time,' she says. 'Before that, people didn't like the artificial way the Pahlavi dynasty tried to link itself with the ancient empire, claiming its heritage and splendour.
Since that time, in post-revolutionary Iran, the pre-Islamic past has taken on a new significance.' Iranians pay a lot of attention to their ancient history, perhaps more so now than before the revolution. 'They are terribly proud of this period.'
The closing part of Forgotten Empire shows how Tehran's contemporary rulers bring the two epochs together for political purposes. One amazing image shows how some of those who died in the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s have been made into modern heroes.
Their bodies are placed side by side with those of the ancients in a depiction of the Persepolis ruins and a 2,500-year-old column is topped by an Islamic minaret next to the shining blue dome of a mosque, in a powerful amalgam of past and present.
Corinna Lotz is a freelance journalist
Curators from the British Museum and the National Museum of Iran in Tehran have set out to challenge the Eurocentric view of ancient Iran, which has skewed our understanding.
Their show, Forgotten Empire: the World of Ancient Persia, certainly undermines new and old stereotypes of Iran as a land dominated by political or religious dogma and intolerance.
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum (BM), proposed a joint venture with Iranian museums when he visited Tehran in 2003. Although there was a favourable response, there were some tense moments after last June's elections.
There was speculation that the ousting of Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani would mean a more insular and possibly xenophobic government. No one knew how the election of the new president, Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, might affect the final preparations for the exhibition in London.
But in the event, 81 of Iran's great treasures were allowed to travel to the UK to form the first exhibition devoted to the empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550BC - half a millennium before Caesar even strapped his boots on. The exhibition also features loans from the Louvre and artefacts from the BM's own collection.
John Curtis, the keeper of the ancient near east department at the BM, points to the new forms of thinking and doing that made the largest and wealthiest state in the ancient near east so different. 'In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, Persia was a newly emerging empire and therefore fairly dynamic.' he says.
'It was a young nation with new ideas and fresh thinking and organisation. It was a considerable feat to organise such a vast empire. It was different from its Babylonian and Assyrian predecessors who stripped those that they conquered of everything.'
Curtis says large sums of money were used to improve communications, and a network of long-distance roads, pre-dating the Romans, was built. Currency was used in the west part of the empire, and Aramaic with its alphabetic script was used widely for official documents.
'Persia is the bridge by which the achievements of ancient Babylonia and Sumeria get transmitted to the west via Hellenistic Greece,' he says. 'For 200 years they were channelled through to the west after the conquest of Alexander.'
He strongly disagrees with the idea of a 'clash of civilisations' between east and west. 'The issues are much deeper. It is not simply about ancient Persia and Greece, but about today. If we imagine there is a fault-line between Persia and Greece, obviously we will never be able to establish a dialogue between cultures.'
And he is infuriated by claims that ancient Persia was founded on a 'repressive, monotheistic authoritarianism', which used 'God-ordained' violence against those who opposed its religion. He says people worshipped a whole range of other gods and there was no attempt to establish a state religion.
'King Cyrus and his successors would worship local gods wherever they went. The text inscribed on the famous Cyrus Cylinder explains how King Cyrus returned statues of gods to their shrines. He also allowed deported peoples, including the Jews, to return to their homes.'
Curtis's passion is matched by that of his counterpart from Iran, Shahrokh Razmjou, who heads the department for Achaemenid studies at Tehran's National Museum.
Razmjou decided at the age of seven to become an archaeologist, taught himself to read cuneiform inscriptions as a schoolboy, and began travelling to visit sites in Eygpt and Lebanon when he was only 12.
'We are trying to change the western perspective of history,' he says. 'It was very difficult for the ancient authors to write objectively, because their country was at war with the Persians.'
He believes a whole civilisation has been ignored because of this pro-west perspective. The Persian empire is still misrepresented in the academic world as the evil empire, which tried to conquer the world.
'But here is an identity, a vision of how things could be, which provides a contrast with the world at present. Instead of Christians, Jews and Muslims and others fighting each other, a multiplicity of religions, cultures, languages and artistic styles flourished under Cyrus and his followers.
'People could see themselves represented in the sculptures of the palace of Persepolis and feel a shared culture.'
Razmjou says that one of most important achievements of the empire was that it demonstrated how different peoples and cultures could live together in a kind of peaceful coexistence.
'They tried to have a multicultural society which tolerated different religions and had a priestly collaboration between religions to learn from each other. The individual kingdoms didn't need to spend money on arms and could use it to promote astronomy, geometry and architecture.'
Razmjou does not blame the ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus for the poor view of the Persian empire that has dominated western thinking. Rather, he believes that it was 19th-century scholars who purveyed the ideology of more modern imperialists, especially the British, who were seeking to justify their colonial rule.
But a simplistic pitting of one against the other, he insists, distorts the whole relationship between the two cultures. Rather than the Persians forcing their culture on others, it was the Greek-Macedonian, Alexander the Great, who burned down the great temple of Persepolis and tried to impose Hellenistic style on the areas he conquered.
'It's not that bad things didn't happen in the Persian empire. But they held things together in the Pax Persica - the Persian Peace - for almost 200 years.'
Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, a BM expert on the post-Alexandrian period, is keenly aware of the reverberations that the glory days of the Persian empire have had for rulers in the past as well as for Iranian national identity today.
'With the toppling of the Shah in 1979 Iran became a republic for the first time,' she says. 'Before that, people didn't like the artificial way the Pahlavi dynasty tried to link itself with the ancient empire, claiming its heritage and splendour.
Since that time, in post-revolutionary Iran, the pre-Islamic past has taken on a new significance.' Iranians pay a lot of attention to their ancient history, perhaps more so now than before the revolution. 'They are terribly proud of this period.'
The closing part of Forgotten Empire shows how Tehran's contemporary rulers bring the two epochs together for political purposes. One amazing image shows how some of those who died in the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s have been made into modern heroes.
Their bodies are placed side by side with those of the ancients in a depiction of the Persepolis ruins and a 2,500-year-old column is topped by an Islamic minaret next to the shining blue dome of a mosque, in a powerful amalgam of past and present.
Corinna Lotz is a freelance journalist
