From Cyrus’s empire of tolerance to the poets who outlived every conqueror — the Persian story is civilization’s longest comeback.
Few peoples have been conquered so often and survived so completely. The Persians built the first world empire, lost it to Alexander, to Arabs, to Mongols — and each time, the conquerors ended up speaking Persian, writing Persian poetry, and governing in the Persian style. Iran is the graveyard of empires that tried to erase it.
