The Elamites and the Persians — Sleep Podcast

In the far west of the land we now call Iran, the great dry plateau comes down gently into a wide, flat plain that runs all the way down to where two great rivers bend toward the sea. There, for a thousand years before the Persians came, there was a civilisation with its own writing and its own gods — Elam. And from the high country to the west came a young king with a name no one in the plain had ever heard, who took the plain, and built from it the first truly tolerant empire of the world. A slow bedtime history of the two peoples who made Persia: the Elamites, and the Persians.

About an hour and a quarter, in the voice of the show. We lie on the plain at the edge of the world, in the last warm light; we go up into the high country, and into the first writing; we sit with the gods of the hill, and with the plunderers of Babylon; we wait through the long twilight; and then the young king comes from the west — the king of kings, and the tolerant empire, and the cylinder with the question of mercy; we stand in the city of the Persians, with the scribes of the empire; we follow the son and the sea; and we come, at the end, to the fire in the high country, and the closing.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About seventy-five minutes. The scholarship on Elam is genuinely uncertain in places; where the narration hedges, the hedge is deliberate.

Sources (a selection): Wikipedia, “Elam” and “Achaemenid Empire”; Mark, “Elam: The Ancient High Country,” World History Encyclopedia; the Elamite royal inscriptions of Susa (Scribe, Iranica); the Cyrus Cylinder (British Museum, BM 90920); the Behistun inscription (DB); Herodotus, Histories (passim); the Persepolis reliefs and foundation inscriptions (Darius I); the Elamite administrative tablets (Tudela); World History Encyclopedia, “Cyrus the Great” and “Cyrus Cylinder” entries.