Ezra - Blog Posts
All the drawing ideas in my head right now are nonsense so here's a Spiderverse/Rebels crossover
some ezra bridger in these trying times?
Just the boy and a loth-cat as it should be 🫶🫶
Ezra, breathing: A
All the fandom instantly:
You're amazing, all of your works deserve a smooch and every time I see them I just wanna snuggle up to my phone and hug it and cry into my pillow
Totally didn't take me days just to say this
It did ;;
Hiki!! ♥ I totally didn't see this ask until now, I'm so sorry,,,
Here is an Ezra I never really shared on my art blogs but you get a special boi for this heartwarming message (seriously melts my heart each time I reread it)
I'm looking forward to spending more time with you my friend and I believe in you ♥♥ Stay awesome, friend
I’m excited for the all the new Star Wars shows, but I feel like we’re missing out if we never get a buddy-cop show of Thrawn and Ezra in the Unknown Regions.
I made an AU for my ocs called the ROYALS AU. anyways Jace and Ezra are being sooo sillayyy
The full pic for the first piece is on my instagram btw!!! I think it’s in my bio but IF NOT my insta @ is sunset_falsetto :3
MAINVERSE NAVIGATION:
◑ █ ＡＢＤＩＣＡＴＥ ⇉ I’ll FIGHT (( ℱ o r e v e r )):
He has lost so much, both his memory and the fight, but this does not destroy his resolve; a resolve that transcends. In his first waking hours, instead of focusing on what was lost, Ezra focuses on what could be done to better himself. He understands that the events that took place on that battleground, his loss against Mordred, are all a part of a greater game. One he intends to win. Titan rises again.
◑ █ ＤＯＷＮ with the ℱallen ●●● (( AGAIN )):
Like with Erza and Mord, Ez will have a verse tag tied to Minerva. Ezra loses his memories in his fight against Minerva, but he stands victorious. He defeats the Lady of Sabertooth. He does not mourn his loss of memory. All that he focuses on is getting stronger. If he was broken once, then he will fight now to not be broken a second time.
◑ █ ΙnsΙdﾼ the ＢＥＡＳＴ รтill gяσwร (( CHEWING тняσυgн the RѺPЄՏ )):
This is a version of his story where instead of Mira/Malik being the one that’s taken by Tartaros and experimented on, it’s the other way around. Kyouka takes Mira, and Lamy sets her eyes on Ezra (not a surprise). I headcanon that the process of becoming a demon is a hit or miss. If the person does not possess the necessary amount of darkness within, they will not survive the transition. Ezra survives.
((( REDIRECT TO EZRA’S ABOUT PAGE )))
((( REDIRECT TO HEADCANONS )))
((( REDIRECT TO ALTERNATE UNIVERSES )))
TIMELINE TAGS:
┊♘┊ The CAUSE:
This is kid!ra. Everything from his childhood (Tower of Heaven events) and its early days falls here. All events leading up to when he first joins Fairy Tail.
┊♘┊ The ANTIDOTE:
Everything from his first days as Fairy Tail’s Titan to his fight in the Grand Magic Games.
┊♞┊ The SINKING Ship:
He wakes up, and is definitely suspicious of faces he does not recognize. While he lacks my Erza’s hatred and depth of inner turmoil, he has ten times the doubt and suspicion. More so in the verse where he defeats Minerva. It is his understanding that, victory only means one thing: you have something to lose. So he guards and trains against what might stand to strike him down.
┊♞┊ DROWNING (he is alive):
From the point where he regains his memories, onward. (Ezra is without recollection of his past for the entirety of two years.)
ABOUT THE MUSE :
Like I’ve done with my Erza, I’ve decided to make one post where I’ll address the most significant/defining moments/details of my character. Basically, what you’ll need to know before interacting with him. That kind of stuff. This way, you can search through headcanons and other such posts at your leisure, but you’ll still know the fundamental bits. (I will give word of any updates done to this post.)
ONE. Unlike with my Erza, who lost against Minerva, EZRA stands victorious. He defeats her, though not without pushing himself to his absolute limits. His wounds, while not nearly as life-threatening as Erza’s own, are still not something to be taken lightly. Equipping the Nakagami Armor still took quite the toll, taking with it his memory. While he doesn’t struggle nearly as much as she does, he does struggle. Minerva might’ve lost, but she did not go down easy. In fact, shortly after his victory was announced, he collapses, unable to stand for that last fight. Fairy Tail is marked as victorious there, but does not receive full points because he does fall.
TWO. Ezra does not partake in the Dragon part of that arc, nor does he take part in the celebration after the GMGs. During this time Ezra is hospitalized. He wakes up with no memory, but is told of his final moments, of defeating Minerva. While he has no recollection of past events, he feels that if he risked so much, then that victory was well earned. (NOTE: Even in the verse where he does lose, against Minerva’s male counterpart, Mordred, he does not take such a dive as the one Erza falls to.)
THREE. Comparing pre!GMG Ezra to pre!GMG Erza, he is much less compassionate, quieter, and less willing to show mercy. He is methodical, organized. He will give you a chance to back off once. If you do not take the exit when he signals it, you are fair game. He is more serious than Erza is, keeping mostly to himself and immersing himself in work. He trains. A lot. And he ENJOYS the fight, comes alive when he is able to display the extent of his skill. Though this should not be mistaken for over-confidence. Defeating an opponent once is not enough to make him think himself GRAND. Defeating someone once merely means that he wants to fight them AGAIN, see if it he can achieve it a second time. Like with his rivalry with Mira (or her genderbent ). Sometimes he won, sometimes he didn’t. It’s not about that to him. It’s about the skill. About improving, about having something to better in himself. It’s about the rush. He’s a competitive bastard (IF it catches his interest).
FOUR. Hate does not consume him in the way it does for his female counterpart. It merely gives him something to look forward to, an opponent that will put his strength to the test. He enjoys being able to use that strength, to display all that he has made of himself in all these years. So even without memory, the man trains, and does so obsessively from the first moment he can, so that he can have something to show for himself during that time. Because even though he lost his memory, the way he sees it, he risked this for a reason. And that’s the point, not the outcome. It means that his past self chose to stand for something.
FIVE. As with my AU!Erza, Ez CAN feel love. His emotions are way more limited than her, but he does have the capacity to feel things. And quite strongly if the circumstance provided him reason to. He is just a bit harder to show it. And often, when he does, it’s either in full force or very subtle, not often does it land in the middle.
SIX. Due to being the victor of his fight, Ezra does heal in time to help FT in Tartaros. (He is not around for the dragons, the celebration, or Flare’s part of the story. And he does not arrive in the first wave to Tartaros. He comes much later). Now, he does not yet have his memory. But he does fight. It is here that he meets Minerva again. And it is she who saves him (though not out of compassion) from Kyouka, using his own blade to strike the woman.
SEVEN. His female counterpart saves Hisui during her healing phase in Crocus. Ez saves Hisui during the same time. For him, however, it is on his way back from the fight in Tartaros. On his return trip, diving into the chaos of the ‘after’ is when he retrieves her. This is how he gains her respect, which will add to influences that he will have later. It is as a Knight of sorts to her, that he spends the time-skip.
Okay kind of mando spoilers
I bet (and hope) the Jedi will be Ezra Bridget, whose older now and has possibly even met Luke, because they would be about the same age ish. I desperately want it to be him. It connects so well with Thrawn coming back and another Ashoka-Ezra reunion would be awesome.
Redrew this meme with the other artist in reverse ask (mine is on the right). Drawing ezra makes me feel better ; ;
-Hmm? You want to try my hat? Sure, Ms. Vertin. Our heads are of a similar size, so I think it will look just well on you.
Its one day before the banner ends and I’ve just red his voicelines and had to rush to draw this like omggggg two very good people exchanging hats what can be better, right
Sometimes I just go and draw a depressive meme with Mesmer
That's how I live
So, Lucy, the highest Laplace character, is 190 cm, while Ezra is 155. That's 35 cm heigh difference. I just tried to visualise how it should look like
Warning Star Wars Rebels Finale Spoilers Ahead
So I honestly don't know how to put a cut here so just as a warning this will contain spoilers for the SWR finale and possibly (if you haven't yet seen it) TLJ spoilers. This post won't be too long though and should be short so just skip this post. I feel like those space whales were rather deus ex machina. Honestly they just felt kind of thrown in there like I had completely forgotten that they even existed. Asides from that, I'm not all to sure when the finale episode takes place in the timeline when compared to Rouge One but it feels like it was a bit too big of a victory for how reluctant to fight the rebels were in Rouge One if Ezra got rid of the entire seventh fleet in one fell swoop. Like sure it was just one planet they liberated but they took out an entire fleet doing it. Asides from that, it was stated that Thrawn survives Rebels. I'm not entirely sure if that's true now. I can see Ezra surviving for a bit because of what we saw in TLJ from Leia but Thrawn? In hyperspace? With open holes in the Star Destroyer? Thrawn is not General Grievous who could survive just being in open space (probably due to Grievous being a cyborg). So??? I'm not sure if I'm the only one feeling kind of confused about this episode.
Ezra: (Singing) We must admit, your parlor tricks are amusing, I bet you've got a bunny under your hat.
Hazel: (Singing) Now here's your chance to get the best of me, hope your hand is hot, C'mon, clown, Let's see what you've got.
Ezra: (Singing) You try to slam us with your hardest stuff, but your double whammy Isn't up to snuff, We'll set the record straight You're simply out of date.
Ezra and Hazel: (Singing) You're Only Second Rate!
Hazel: (Singing) You think your cat's a meanie, But your tiger's time, You've got to learn about the demon angel game, So for your information, We'll reiterate.
Ezra and Hazel: (Singing) You're Only Second Rate!
Ezra and Hazel: (Singing) Men cower at the power in our pinky, Our thumb is number one on every list!
Ezra: (Singing) But if you're not convinced That we're invincible, put us to the test! We'll love to lay this rivalry to rest!
Hazel: (Singing) Go ahead and zap us with the big surprise, snap us in a trap, cut us down to size, We'll make a big escape, It's just a piece of cake.
Ezra and Hazel: (Singing) You're Only Second Rate!
Ezra and Hazel: (Singing) You know, your hocus-pocus isn't tough enough and your mumbo-jumbo doesn't measure up let me pontificate upon your sorry state, You're Only Second Rate!
Ezra: (Singing) Zaba-caba-dabra!
Hazel: (Singing) Granny's gonna grab ya!
Ezra and Hazel: (Singing) Alakazam-da-mus and this thing's bigger than the both of us! So spare us your tremendous scare, You look horrendous in your underwear and we can hardly wait to discombobulate, We'll send ya back and packing in a shipping crate, You'll make better living with a spinning plate, You're Only Second Rate!
Music: https://youtu.be/7iVbF6aYFnM?feature=shared
History of Achaemenid Iran 1A, Course I - Achaemenid beginnings 1A
Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
Tuesday, 27 December 2022
Outline
Introduction; Iranian Achaemenid historiography; Problems of historiography continuity; Iranian posterior historiography; foreign historiography; Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia
1- Introduction
Welcome to the 40-hour seminar on Achaemenid Iran!
It is my intention to deliver a rather unconventional academic presentation of the topic, mostly implementing a correct and impartial conceptual approach to the earliest stage of Iranian History. Every subject, in and by itself, offers to every researcher the correct means of the pertinent approach to it; due to this fact, the personal background, viewpoints and thoughts or eventually the misperceptions and the preconceived ideas of an explorer should not be allowed to affect his judgment.
If before 200 years, the early Iranologists had the possible excuse of studying a topic on the basis of external and posterior historical sources, this was simply due to the fact that the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing had not yet been deciphered. Still, even those explorers failed to avoid a very serious mistake, namely that of taking the external and posterior historical sources at face value. We cannot afford to blindly accept a secondary historical source without first examining intentions, motives, scopes and aims of it.
As the seminar covers only the History of the Achaemenid dynasty, I don't intend to add an introductory course about the History of the Iranian Studies and the re-discovery of Iran by Western explorers of the colonial powers. However, I will provide a brief outline of the topic; this is essential because mainstream Orientalists have reached their limits and cannot provide us with a real insight, eliminating the numerous and enduring myths, fallacies, and deliberately naïve approaches to Achaemenid Iran.
In fact, most of the specialists of Ancient Iran never went beyond the limitations set by the delusional Ancient 'Greek' (in reality: Ionian and Attic) literature about the Medes and the Persians (i.e. the Iranians), because they never offered themselves the task to explain the reasons for the aberration that the Ancient Ionian and Attic authors created in their minds and wrote in their texts about Iran. This was utterly puerile and ludicrous.
And this brings us to the other major innovation that I intend to offer during this seminar, namely the proper, comprehensive contextualization of the research topic, i.e. the History of Achaemenid Iran. To give some examples in this regard, I would mention
a - the tremendous, multilayered and multifaceted impact of the Mesopotamian World, Civilization and Heritage on the formation of the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, and more specifically, the determinant role played by the Sargonid Empire of Assyria on the emergence of the first Empire on the Iranian plateau;
b - the ferocious opposition of the Mithraic Magi to the Zoroastrian Achaemenid court;
c - the involvement of the Anatolian Magi in the misperception of Iran by the Ancient Greeks; and
d- the utilization of the Ancient Greek cities by the Anti-Iranian side of the Egyptian priesthoods, princes and administrators.
To therefore introduce the proper contextualization, I will expand on the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Sargonid times, not only to state the first mentions of the Medes and the Persians in History, but also to show the importance attributed by the Neo-Assyrian Emperors to the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau, as well as the numerous peoples, settled or nomadic, who inhabited that region.
There is an enormous lacuna in the Orientalist disciplines; there are no interdisciplinary studies in Assyriology and Iranology. This plays a key role in the misperception of the ancient oriental civilizations and in the mistaken evaluation (or rather under-estimation) of the momentous impact that they had on the formation of the World History. There are no isolated cultures and independent civilizations as dogmatic and ignorant Western archaeologists pretend.
Only if one studies and evaluates correctly the colossal impact of the Ancient Mesopotamian world on Iran, can one truly understand the Achaemenid Empire in its real dimensions.
2- Iranian Achaemenid historiography
A. Achaemenid imperial inscriptions produced on solemn occasions
Usually multilingual texts written by the imperial scribes of the emperors Cyrus the Great, Darius I the Great, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, Darius II, Artaxerxes II, and Artaxerxes III, as well as of the ancestral rulers Ariaramnes and Arsames.
Languages and writing systems:
- Old Achaemenid Iranian (cuneiform-alphabetic; the official imperial language)
- Babylonian (cuneiform-syllabic; to offer a testimony of historical continuity and legitimacy, following the Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great, who presented himself as king of Babylon)
- Elamite (cuneiform-logo-syllabic; to portray the Persians in particular as the heirs of the ancient land of Anshan and Sushan that the Assyrians and the Babylonians named 'Elam' and the indigenous population called 'Haltamti' / The first Achaemenid to present himself as 'king of Anshan' is Cyrus the Great and the reference is found in his Cylinder unearthed in Babylon.)
and
- Egyptian Hieroglyphic (if the inscription or the monument was produced in Egypt, since the Achaemenids were also pharaohs of Egypt, starting with Kabujiya/Cambyses)
Imperial inscriptions are found in: Babylon (Cyrus Cylinder), Pasargad, Behistun, Hamadan, Ganj-e Nameh, Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rustam, Susa, Suez (Egypt), Gherla (Romania), Van (Turkey), and on various items
B. Persepolis Administrative Archives
This consists in an enormous documentation that has not yet been fully studied; it is not written in Old Achaemenid as one could expect but mainly in Elamite cuneiform. It consists of two groups, namely
- the Persepolis Fortification Archive, and
- the Persepolis Treasury Archive.
The Persepolis Fortification Archive was unearthed in the fortification area, i.e. the northeastern confines of the enormous platform of the Achaemenid capital Parsa (Persepolis), in the 1930s. It comprises of more than 30000 tablets (fragmentary or entire) that were written in the period 509-494 BCE (at the time of Darius I). The tablets were written in Susa and other parts of Fars and the territory of the ancient kingdom of Elam that vanished in the middle of the 7th c. (more than 130 years before these texts were written). Around 50 texts had Aramaic glosses. More than 2000 tablets have been published and translated. These texts are records of transactions, distribution of food, provisioning of workers, transportation of commodities, etc.; few tablets were written in other languages, namely Old Iranian (1), Babylonian (1), Phrygian (1) and Greek (1).
The Persepolis Treasury Archive was found in the northeastern room of the Treasury of Xerxes. It contains more than 750 tablets and fragments (in Elamite) and more than 100 have been published. They all date back in period 492-458 BCE. These tablets are either letters or memoranda dispatched by imperial officials to the head of the Treasury; they concern the payment of workmen, the issue of silver, and other administrative procedures. Only one tablet was written in Babylonian.
The entire documentation offers valuable information as regards the function of various imperial services, namely the couriers, the satraps, the imperial messengers, the imperial storehouse, etc. The archives shed light on the origin of the imperial administrators, as ca. 1900 personal names have been recorded: 10% were Elamites (who had apparently survived for long far from their country after the destruction of Susa by Assurbanipal (640 BCE), fewer were Babylonians, and the outright majority consisted of Iranians (Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Sakas, Arians, etc.).
C. Imperial Aramaic
The diffusion of the use of Aramaic started already in the Neo-Assyrian times and during the 7th c. BCE; the creation of the 'Royal Road', the systematization of the transportation, the improvement of communications, and the formation of the network of land-, sea- and desert routes that we now call 'Silk-, Spice- and Perfume- Road' during the Achaemenid times helped further expand the use of Aramaic. The linguistic assimilation of the Babylonians, the Jews and the Phoenicians with the Aramaeans only strengthened the diffusion of the Aramaic, which became the second international language ('lingua franca') in the History of the Mankind (after the Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian). Gradually, Aramaic became an official Achaemenid language after the Old Achaemenid Iranian.
Except the Aramaic texts attested in the Persepolis Administrative Archives, thousands of Aramaic texts of the Achaemenid times shed light onto the society, the economy, the administration, the military organization, the trade, the religions, the cults, the culture and the spirituality attested in various provinces of the Iranian Empire. At this point, only indicatively, I mention few significant groups of texts:
- the Elephantine papyri and ostraca (except Aramaic, they were written in Hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Coptic, Alexandrian Koine, and Latin) – 5th and 4th c. BCE,
- the Hermopolis Aramaic papyri,
- the Padua Aramaic papyri, and
- the Khalili Collection of Aramaic Documents from Bactria (48 texts written on leather, papyrus, stone or clay, dating from the period 353-324 BCE, and mainly from the reign of Artaxerxes III whereas the most recent dates from the reign of Alexander the Great).
Here I have to add that the widespread use of Imperial Aramaic and its use as a second official language for Achaemenid Iran brought an end to the use of the Elamite (in the middle of the 5th c.) and, after the end of the Achaemenid dynasty and the split of the state of Alexander the Great, contributed to the formation of two writing systems, namely Parthian and Pahlavi which were in use during the Arsacid and the Sassanid times. Imperial Aramaic helped establish many other writing systems, but this goes beyond the limits of the present seminar.
3- Problems of historiography continuity
There are no historical references to the Achaemenid dynasty made at the time of the Arsacids (Ashkanian: 250 BCE-224 CE) and the Sassanids 224-651 CE); this situation is due to many factors:
- the prevalence of another Iranian nation of probably Turanian origin, namely the Parthians and the Arsacid dynasty,
- the rise of the anti-Achaemenid, anti-Zoroastrian Magi who tried to impose Mithraism throughout Iran during the Arsacid times,
- the formation of an oral epic tradition and the establishment of a legendary historiography about the pre-Arsacid past during the Sassanid times, and
- the scarcity of written sources and the terrible destructions that occurred in Iran during the Late Antiquity, the Islamic era, and the Modern times (early Islamic conquests, divisions of the Abbasid times, Mongol invasions, Safavid-Ottoman wars, Western colonial looting, etc.).
This situation raised Western academic questions of Iranian identity, continuity, and historicity. But this attempt is futile. Iranian historiography of Islamic times shows that these questions were fully misplaced.
4- Iranian posterior historiography (Iranian historiography of Islamic times)
With Tabari (839-923) and his voluminous History of Prophets and Kings we realize that there were, in spite of the destructions caused because of the Islamic conquests, historical documents on which he was based to expand about the Sassanid dynasty; actually one out of the 40 volumes of the most recent translation of Tabari to English (published by the State University of New York Press from 1985 through 2007) is dedicated to the History of Sassanid Iran (vol. 5). And the previous volume (vol. 4) covers the History of Achaemenid and Arsacid Iran, Alexander the Great, Nabonid Babylonia, Assyria and Ancient Israel and Judah.
Other important Iranian historians of the Islamic times, like Abu'l-Fadl Bayhaqi (995-1077), Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318) who wrote the truly first World History, Alaeddin Aṭa Malik Juvaynī (1226-1283), and Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi (ca. 1370-1454), did not expand much on pre-Islamic periods as the focus of their writing was on contemporaneous developments.
However, the aforementioned historians and all the authors, who are classified in this category, represent only one dimension of Iranian historiography of Islamic times. A totally different approach and literature have been illustrated by Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (Book of Kings). Abu 'l Qasem Ferdowsi (940-1025) was not the first to compose an epic in order to standardize in mythical terms and legendary concepts the pre-Islamic Iranian past; but he was the most successful and the most illustrious. That is why many other epic poets followed his example, notably the Azeri Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209) and the Turkic Indian Amir Khusraw (1253-1325).
Within the context of this poetical historiography, historical emperors of pre-Islamic Iran appear as legendary figures only to be then viewed as materialization of divine patterns. The origin of this transcendental historiography seems to be retraced in the Sassanid times, but all the major themes are clearly of Zoroastrian identity and can therefore be attributed to the Achaemenid world perception and world conceptualization.
It is essential at this point to state that, until the imposition of modern Western colonial academic and educational standards in Iran, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and the corpus of Iranian legendary historiography was the backbone of the Iranian cultural, intellectual and educational identity.
It is a matter of academic debate whether an original text named Khwaday-Namag, written during the Sassanid times, and now lost, is at the very origin of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography. The 19th c. German Orientalist Theodor Nöldeke is credited with this theory that has not yet been proved.
All the same, the spiritual standards of this approach are detected in the Achaemenid times.
5- Foreign historiography
Ancient Greek (in reality, Ionian and Attic), Ancient Hebrew and Latin sources of Achaemenid History exist, but first they are external, second they appear to be posterior in their largest part, and third they often bear witness to astounding inaccuracies, fables, untrustworthy data, misplaced focus, excessive verbosity without real substance, and -above all- an enormous and irreconcilable misunderstanding of the Iranian Achaemenid reality, values, world view, mindset, and behavior.
The Ancient Hebrew sources shed light on issues that were apparently critical to the tiny and unimportant, Jewish minority of the Achaemenid Empire; however, these Biblical narratives concern facts that were absolutely insignificant to the imperial authorities of Parsa. One critical issue is concealed by modern scholars though; although all the nations of the Empire were regularly mentioned in the Achaemenid inscriptions and depicted on bas reliefs, the Jews were not. This undeniable fact irrevocably conditions the supposed 'importance' of Biblical texts like Ezra, Esther, Nehemiah, etc. All the same, these foreign historical sources are important for the Jews.
The Ionian and Attic accounts of events that were composed by the Carian renegade Herodotus, the Dorian Ctesias, and the Athenian Xenophon present an even more serious problem. They happened to be for many centuries (16th – 19th c.) the bulk of the historical documentation that Western European academics had access to as regards Achaemenid Iran. This situation produced grave biases among Western academics, because they took all these sources at face value since they had no access to original documentation. The grave trouble persisted even after the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid cuneiform writing and the archaeological excavations that brought to daylight original Iranian imperial documentation.
Only recently, at the end of the 20th c., leading Iranologists like Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg started criticizing the absolutely delusional History of Achaemenid Iran that modern Western scholars were producing without even understanding it by foolishly accepting Ancient Ionian myths, lies and propaganda against the Iranian Empire at face value. This grave problem had also two other parameters:
- first, there was an enormous gap of civilization and a tremendous cultural difference between the Iranian imperial world view, the spiritual valorization of the human being, and the Zoroastrian monotheism from one side and the chaotic, disorderly and profane elements of the western periphery of the Empire. The so-called Greek tribes in Western Anatolia and in the South Balkans were not only multi-divided and plunged in permanent conflict; they were also extremely verbose on common issues, they desecrated the divine world with their nonsensical myths and puerile narratives, and they defiled human spirituality with their love stories about their pseudo-gods. But, very arbitrarily and quite disastrously, the so-called Ancient Greek civilization had been erroneously taken as 'classics' by modern Europeans at a time they had no access to Ancient Oriental sources.
- second, the vertical differentiation between Imperial Iran as the blessed land of divine mission and the disunited and peripheral lands of conflict, discord and strife that were inhabited by the Greek tribes was reflected on the respective, impressively different types of historiography; to the Iranians, few words written by anonymous scribes were enough to describe the groundbreaking deeds of divinely appointed rulers. But for the Greeks, the useless rumors, the capricious hearsay, the intentional lie, the nefarious expression of their complex of inferiority, the vicious slander, and the deliberate ignominy 'had' to be recorded and written down.
The fact that Herodotus' and Xenophon's long narratives have long been taken as the basic source of information about Achaemenid Iran demonstrates how disoriented and misplaced modern Western scholarship is. But by preferring to rely mainly on the Ancient Greek lengthy and false narratives, and not on the succinct, true and chaste Old Achaemenid Iranian inscriptions, they totally misrepresent Ancient Iranian History, preposterously extrapolating later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations.
And whereas Ancient Roman authors, who wrote in Latin (Pliny the Elder, Seneca the Younger, etc.), and Jewish or Christian historians, who wrote in Alexandrine Koine, like Flavius Josephus and Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima, reproduced the style of lengthy narratives that turns History to mere gossip, the great Babylonian scholar Berossus was very reluctant to add personal comments to his original sources or to allow subjective considerations and thoughts to contaminate his text.
In any case, the vast issue of the multilayered damages caused by the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historiography to modern Western academics' perception and interpretation of Achaemenid Iran is a topic that deserves an entirely independent seminar.
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To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN - Achaemenid beginnings 1Α
By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
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To listen to the audio, clink the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN - Achaemenid beginnings 1 (a+b)
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Download the text in PDF:
are you reading my mind? XD evermore is just so cozy for me, i have so many nice evermore memories!! and 1989 is there for me when i just need something to bop along to and also when i need to sink into the lyrics of a song.
hii!!! i saw you in the teen lesbians group and you seem super cool omg. i also love taylor, what's your fav album?
hiiiii and tyy and my favorite album is folklore with red and midnights at 2nd and 3rd wbu?
RWBY Art Challenge Day 26: Crossover of Your Choice
I took a little longer with this one, but I think it was worth it :p Here’s Team JNPR dressed as the ghost crew from Star Wars Rebels, with one VERY confused Zeb.
Bonus: Here’s what happened with the ghost crew.
Concept art for a Loth-cat and Sabine’s room from Ahsoka by Christian Alzmann and Matt Allsopp, respectively.