 I know I'm going to introduce our speakers. First of all, chairing the event, we have Chaparack Corsandi, who established herself as one of the country's finest comedians in 2006, with her sell-out Edinburgh show, Asylum Speaker, which led to the publication of her best-selling literary debut, her childhood memoirs, A Beginner's Guide to Acting English. This told the story of how her family were forced to i'r Ffliaran i'r Gael Acyllum i'r Unig. Shaperx yn ymweld ymweld ymlaen. Mae'n rhaid i'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r sgolau yma, ond mae'n bwysig i'r ffordd o'r ffordd, 8 o 10 o'r cael, mae'r byd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd, ac o'r rhaid i'r ffordd o'r rhaid i'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd. Ffwrddio'r cwmbrir ymlaen, mae'n rhaid i'r wneud o'r drwynt gyda'r Unig, ac rhai o'r unrhyw unig yw'r gennymau hynny o gyffredigus James Joyce-Award oên nhw'n ddefnyddio'r unig. Gleinion Shaparach yn... Mae'r unrhyw gwybod, rhai o'r unrhyw gwybod. Rhai o'r unrhyw gwybod? Rhai o'r unrhyw gwybod! Mae'r unrhyw gwybod, ond mae'n ddaid o'r unrhyw gwybod. Mae'n ddoi'r unrhyw gwybod, ond mae'n ddwy oherwydd mae'n ddwy. Oedd yw'n ddoi. Oedd yna'n ddwy. Wel, mae'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio i'r profesor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, sy'n gweithio'r pwysig o'r University of Wales College Cardiff in 2000, ac mae'n gweithio i'r leiswyr yn yng Nghymru, sy'n gweithio i'r University of Exeter, i'r University of Edinburgh, ac mae'n gweithio i'r profesor yng Nghymru, ac mae'n gweithio i'r University of Cardiff, mae'n gweithio i'r University of Cardiff, i'n gweithio i'r profesor yr Yng nghymru i'r Unedol o y Pysigol Bereth, a mae'n gweithio i'r Yng Nghymru i'r Yng nghymru i'r Gweithio i'r Wyrd Gwyrddol Cynllun Argylogiol. Mae'r gweithio i'r Ynghylch Llywodraeth, mae'n gweithio i'r Ynghylch Llywodraeth, ac mae'n gweithio i'r Ynghylch Llywodraeth, i'r Monach, i'r Cyfrwyntol Cwyrdd, i'r cyfrwyntol, a'r cyfrwyntol i'r Cyfrwyntol, King and Court in Ancient Persia, the history of Persia, Tales of the Orient, and Designs on the Past, how Hollywood created the ancient world. His latest work, which is on sale now, but actually isn't released until next Wednesday, so grab yourself an early copy, is called Persia the Age of Great Kings, and that's been hailed in, as I quote here, a masterful account and evocation of the history and culture of the first true world empire. And finally, on our panel, last but not least, we have Victoria Princewell. Victoria is an author, essayist, researcher, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She has an academic background that spans both the arts and sciences, and holds an MA in literature from Oxford, an MA in philosophy from UCL, and is currently completing another masters in neuroscience at King's College London. She's got bylines in the Guardian, Independent, Gal Dem and the BBC and more, and her most recent essay, What's in a Name for Granted Magazine, was endorsed by Penn Faulkner and deemed, I quote here, best of the literary internet on literary hub. Her debut book, The Palace in the Palace of Flowers, which is on sale, is a beautiful story, is a historical novel inspired by a real-life protagonist and tells the forgotten story of enslaved absinians, the black people living in the court of Iran, who navigated the geopolitical landscape and rising nationalism ahead of Iran's first constitutional revolution. The novel has been named one of Time's Radio's top five novels of 2001 and was listed by African arguments as the best African novel of 2001 and has been lauded as, and I quote here, a compelling example of historical fiction at its finest, a book in which unpalatable humanistic truths and disquieting historical details undergird a truly enrapturing story. So, after that introduction, I will hand you over to Shafi. Thank you. Thank you so much for that introduction. I've been told I've got to use a microphone because just in case I say something interesting, just in case. I think the worst thing for the chair of a panel is somebody who knows anything near what you guys know, and thankfully, my only qualification for sitting here is that I happen to have had the great good fortune of being born in the geographical space that you guys show us so vividly. And so, that said, I'm not a complete novice. I remember the Persian boy by Mary Reynolds being at my mum's bedside book when I was a child, and I went to pick it up and she goes, no, that's not for you. And so, of course, I sneakily read it and learned far beyond what was appropriate for a child of that age. I was three, no. And also in the Palace of Flowers, again, with the eunuchs, et cetera, which I won't be explaining to my daughter who's in the audience. So, it's a real pleasure to be talking with you both. And let's start with a question. What do we mean by Persia and the myths and preconceptions versus the reality? Persia, I think, is a very difficult term to define. And as you'll know, you walk a tightrope when you use the word Persia and Iran. In my book, I kind of use them interchangeably because I refuse to get drawn into a debate. It's not as simple as saying Persia stands for the pre-Islamic period and Iran for the Islamic period. It's not that at all. And these days, within Iran, with an increasing rise of a nationalist tendency, which is happening there, in fact, more Iranians are adopting the word Persia than ever before because they're looking back to a kind of glory days of the Achaemenid Empire and later, and seeing themselves as Persians. Since the 1979 revolution, Emma Gray's from Iran, living in America and the West, have very often adopted the word Persia because they see it as a more sophisticated way of alluding to their country because Iran is often seen as, of course, the harbinger of terrorism. This very unpleasant regime, which indeed is there. But the word Iran actually has far more coagency for me than Persia does. Persia was an invented word. It's a Greek word. That was just the international, but the Iranians have never... So Iran comes from the word Iran, which is definitely a Middle Persian word, so it's been around for millennium. And people, the ancient Persians saw themselves as Iran, or if you were not Iran, you were an Iran, or outside of Iran. And I think there's a pride to be had in that. And yet there is also some kind of flavour that emerges when you use the word Persia as well. But I am not addicted to one more than the other. I will happily use the two. Can I ask you as well, when you are discussing your book, do you tend to say Persia more than Iran? I would like to know what drew you to that particular place to set your novel. And how would you describe Persia? This is one of those things where I'm first of all really glad you asked me a different question, because I had an answer, but you never want to go after an expert. You're like, what could I really say now? Nothing as useful. So thanks for the pivot. But no, I don't call it Persia largely because... So it's interesting that the people that I often speak to today, who are contemporary Iranians, will describe using the word Persia as a kind of almost westernised, more palatable, and to your point about the kind of flavour, there's almost a kind of remoteness, maybe exoticness, maybe it's far enough away you can project onto it. But in the period that I was writing about, they see it in the way that you describe where to use the word Iran is to reclaim a nationalist pride at a time where there's all this foreign interference, there's what we call the great game, you have the British and the Russians selling off, having monopolies on, profiting from all of their resources, and it ultimately leaves the people feeling impoverished, carious, enraged and quite xenophobic in a way. So in terms of what actually drew me to this particular period, and I was wittering away about this to Lloyd before, whether he wanted to know or not, basically I came across in the Guardian... Can I just say, I was there, it was not witter. Very kind, she also has to say it. There's an academic called Pedram Kozrinjad, whose name I am mispronouncing, it's always awkward in front of who's actually Iranian, but he basically uncovered this trove of photography taken by the Shah at the time, the Iranian king of his enslaved people, and they were all dressed in robes, they were all looking really sad, and they were black. None of these things had I really expected to encounter in one image taken by a king. It was all, I was going to say like a mind, and I can't, but it was confusing, it was surprising, this is the PC version of it, but it kind of set me on a journey, where I was one curious about where and how the black people got to Iran, because there's a lot of, especially because I'm an old person basically, which isn't a shame, anyone old is to say that I lived in a pre-Internate age of 31, so your access to global history when you're young was pretty limited. For any of you who are British or most of you, there's questions you don't ask, you know, why is Africa so poor? Which doesn't actually shame Africans, but you know, you wouldn't have to ask this. You know, why are there black people here, there, everywhere? And so discovering this, I was like, oh, okay, and then wanted to follow the story, and I wanted to be able to tell stories that took place in history that centred people that we didn't assume had lived there, and to me it's really important to start with history, because I feel like when you tell stories that are set in the future, it almost seems kind of like compensation of a sort, oh, we're trying to ponder, whereas I think when we tell stories that are steeped in history, we remind people of what's possible, we broaden their assumptions and kind of challenge the sense of what is out there, and we also have the capacity to almost write back people who have been erased from their own stories, because, and then I will bring it to a close, and it's no coincidence that we don't know these stories, right? There are narratives that are kind of ultimately forms of propaganda that are better served by aligning certain truths, right? So by bringing in all of the messy, broader existence of just all the different people that lived and how we allow people to rethink what they thought the world looked like and what is possible going forward, so that's my very, very long answer to that. It's the idea of reclaiming your own story that sits behind my book as well, because years ago I read an amazing poem by Robert Graves, the great classicist who wrote a poem in 1942. It was called The Persian Version, and in it he looks at the Battle of Marathon, which in the West has become mythologised as this moment where Europe is created. We push back the Persian Empire, the Barbaroi who came from the East and suddenly we become European and we become a white civilisation. And Robert Graves very correctly in that poem says, well really was it like that? How did the Persians really think of this? And he comes up with the idea that really Marathon was just a little skirmish on the outpost of the great Persian Empire. And that really sort of stuck with me for these years. I've been teaching ancient Persian history for 20 years, but always with Graves in the back of my mind. And what I've been trying to do always in what I teach and now in what I've written here is to privilege the Persian version all the time. So get away from the European narrative, the Eurocentric approach to history and to actually see that there is a major world civilisation that was not necessarily clashing constantly with the West, but is part of the same dialogue with the West as well. My sadness remains that I wish that within Iran itself, as you know, pre-Islamic Iran's history is a hot potato for the government there. And so therefore pre-Islamic history is not taught well in Iranian schools and universities to become an ancient historian of Iran for an Iranian. You have to come outside and study. And what I want to see is Iranians, young Iranians, learning their pre-Islamic past and writing their own histories. That's my hope. And inshallah it will happen because as the Persians say, nothing stays the same forever, this too will pass. And that's what we need as far as we get there. I really hope that I'm giving the Persian version of the past. I'm stealing Persian version from my next comedy show. All these years, that hasn't occurred to me. Copyright, Llywydd, I'm Elin Jones. You can be in it. You're like this white dude trying to tell the Persian version. Well, it's interesting because I was going to ask both of you because Iranians, I love that you say Iranians, that is the correct way. Iranians who fled the regime like me and scattered mainly in London and Los Angeles and Paris and I met some Iranians in Melbourne when I did the Melbourne comedy festival and I said, how come you ended up here? And they went, oh, we couldn't get visas for America or England. Because it wasn't by choice, we tend not to be one. Some, obviously, were economic migrants with Donald Trump's money but a lot of us were writers and the artists and et cetera. We, my father, I was only a child. And so there is this tremendously protective attitude towards how we're perceived, which is why the Persia thing I think plays in because so many people will ask, oh, so you speak Arabic and they don't differentiate between Iran and Arabic-speaking countries and I wanted to ask you because it must have been at times a minefield sort of navigating Iranian people's reaction to what you do because we think we are all experts by osmosis. And so when actually somebody who isn't from Iran troubles themselves to travel there and learn from a historical point of view and look at the human stories that isn't Iranian, I wondered if you have come across a little bit of not what you want to be talking about is this. Well, so I have a heartwarming story and... And an interesting one. Very different. Well, you know, it was very much in what wasn't said, but we can start with the heartwarming version, which is that there's a collective of black Iranians who I think they're pretty much based internationally, but they are people who often were born in Iran or usually they have a parent who is Iranian and a parent who is black from outside of Iran. I will say sorry to interrupt, but oh, is it Fahima? Priscilla. She was Doctor Who's assistant. She's a mixed-race girl whose mother is Iranian. I think her father is, but I'm gone. I'm not 100% sure. No, no, I've fully got a list of every single possible black Iranian. So I'm like, yeah, I know who that is. I didn't watch it, but I know who she is. She was insensate as well, it's great. Anyway, but yeah, so in speaking with them, one of the first things that they, like it was actually quite emotional and they were like, they had not seen themselves in the story before. And I thought a lot about that because in telling the story I was motivated by wanting to tell stories that centered black people who got to be awful, you know, and I mean that in a way that, you know, they got to have the full breadth of human experience told as the main character as opposed to a character on the side. And I knew how I felt impoverished in terms of what literature was available to me when I was young. I can't imagine having no stories. And so it felt a little bit like, you know, if I don't know you give someone, I don't know, a cup of tea because they're feeling stressed and they go, oh my goodness, it's killed my cancer. And you're like, I'm unworthy of the prick. I'm not sure I even, okay. And it felt a bit like that, but I was also very, very humbled, grateful. The other story is that, and I'm mindful this is streaming, there's a particular New York Times journalist who read an article that I wrote in Gwanto that talked about naming and histories and brought in some of the story and reached out to me because she was related to the, well, to the char, well, to the char and to, obviously his daughter, Tarj Sartanema, I'm also mispronouncing that. And she was someone who I really relied on for a lot of research for the book. And she was really excited about my book and we talked a lot and then she read the book and then we didn't talk so much afterwards because, like I said, it's a book that allows everybody the permission to be tellable including, you know, the Qajars, her family. And so I think she was maybe less enthused. I think that because since 79, Iran and Iranians have been, the people have been, and the culture has been so misrepresented. I imagine while I was reading your book, first thing I thought was this thing that we Iranians feel that you should run it past all of us beforehand. Have you had a... Constantly, absolutely constantly. So, you know, just a few incidents. And when I go to Iran, and I've been lucky enough to go to Iran very often over the last 20 years, I've seen all sorts of permeations going on there. And I speak Falsi. When I speak Falsi to people, but no, it's not because simply they cannot believe that anybody outside of Iran has ever bothered to learn Falsi. So it's kind of a nice thing really. And then I explain, you know, I'm a historian, and then they become all sort of sentimental. And then the list of must-haves comes out. So there are some things that you are non-negotiable. Cyrus the Great is a non-negotiable. He was the creator of human rights. Cyrus cylinder. So the Cyrus cylinder down in the British Museum is this lump of clay which was found in Babylon, written in Babylonian language. It actually has nothing to do with Iran whatsoever. It's a purely... Right, thank you very much. And now we're going to commercial. So it's a document which was written as a piece of propaganda for when Cyrus conquered Babylon. He presents the conquest as a liberation, like the First Gulf War. Liberation Babylon. So the Babylonian priests write this document for him in which he is a follower of Marduk, the great god of Babylon who chooses Cyrus. He calls him from afar and says, come on, he takes Cyrus' hand and walks him into Babylon as this liberator figure. Now that has been so mythologised that it's been made into a great Iranian document, of course, to begin with. So back in 2009, a real diplomatic coup occurred when the British Museum agreed to loan the Cyrus cylinder to Tehran to the Bastan Museum, the National Museum, and it was on an extended loan and there were queues around the blocs for months and months and months. Curiously, to look at this object which actually has no Iranian identity to it at all, Stifax. And what's happened is, there are so many fake translations of this document on the internet which say things like, I am Cyrus, I will never hold my people to ransom, I abhor slavery, you will all have the rights of being humans wherever you are, no religion will be imposed upon you. It's not there. It's simply not there. But you know, it's so persuasive that Sharon Abadi, when she received her Nobel Peace Prize, she quoted a bogus translation and she was mortified when she found out. Well, didn't you say that a similar thing has happened with Magna Cata? Yes, yes. And so that might not have been the original intention, however, that myth is sort of created in good faith. I agree, I agree. I think that I am happy for it to run because it gives Iran an identity, it gives something to hang on to. And there is no doubt in my mind. As long as you stop talking. There is no doubt in my mind that Cyrus the Great is an individual deserving of the title, the great, okay, an amazing man. Of course, the other thing which the Iranians have to come to face with, come to terms with is that empire building is a bad thing. And regardless of how we go about doing it, it is always going to be bloodshed and square George soldiers doing pretty awful atrocities as you go. So the Persian empire is built on violence, however, it was maintained in a way which was quite diametrically opposed to other ancient and more recent world empires. I always take as an example Rome and Britain because these two empires are so intertwined in the way that they've followed one another. The Persians, unlike the Romans, never, for instance, inflicted a language policy on its peoples. So there was no compulsion to speak Persian. There was no religious imposition whatsoever. In fact, the Persians attempted in their empire to have a sense of harmony to actually recognize the different peoples of its empire as they are. If you go to a Roman site anywhere in the world, you might be in Syria on Hadrian's Wall, you will notice it is Roman because it's Roman architecture. It's implanted on the landscape. The Persians never did that. They took the best of the architecture and the art from across their empire and brought it back into Iran to make something which we now call Persian. That's the remarkable difference in this. You see, one of the points I make in the book, and I wish I could have been stronger in the book when my editor said a full pack of it, is to I do criticize a little bit about the English school system, the private school system in which classics has been so held as the benchmark to what great learning should be and we see it in our own Beloved Prime Minister, of course, who uses his, and I have to say he mangled Greek and Latin to as a kind of form of social distancing. Greece and Rome, first of all the Greek miracle and then the Roman expansion of empire was the model for the British Empire and how sad it is that the Persian past wasn't taught in our schools. Empire is never a good thing but the British Empire actually could have had another model of how to work in at least would have ensured that the peoples of the empire had more dignity than they actually had under the Roman model which was followed and I think that's the exceptional thing that the Iranians should be proud of. It's another way of empire. As ugly as empire is I would rather have been under the Persian than the Roman. No one's ever tickled into submission and I've always found that interesting growing up in Britain and being Iranian and having my my motherland and my adopted land both like empire it's been quite a trial. But what I was going to say just very briefly was that's really interesting what you say about how the again going back to the Cyrus cylinder because Iranians relate to that they relate to the idea of not imposing your religion your language on people we're such a mishmash of people and that really is present in the culture of Iranians when I was at school my Indian and Pakistani friends had such restrictions over who they marry for example because they come from a place of religion whereas we're not like that and a friend of mine worked for a housing association Refugees and he said the only refugees that never say I won't live with someone from this country or I won't live with someone from that country is Iranians so I'm just basically telling you that we're incredibly intolerant people. I think it's because, I agree with the entirely you're going, yeah finish my book love you I think it's because after the great empires of antiquity and then the conquest by the Arabs essentially Iran then becomes the crossroads of conquest everybody's coming in Mongols, Turks, everybody's coming in but what's remarkable is that Iranian culture conquers them all they all become purgenised essentially we feed them into submission yes you actually feed them into submission but it is the strongest culture wins out each time and I think that's a remarkable thing about this you can't argue with our food this is true I'm thoroughly enjoying myself which is the main thing I'm going to have another look at my questions and yes let's talk about kings if we may, Lloyd so your book covers a huge period of history and can you please pick out two or three kings and tell us how they shaped the empire we've covered some of this already we've talked about Cyrus the Great Darius and I'm going to say the proper Iranian word for Xerxes Khashoyarsha I was really debating whether I should use the Persian names Daravayush instead of Darius Khashoyarsha instead of Xerxes but I thought I'd better not because fortunately I read the audiobook but I was thinking of some for an arrangement I know it's called Khashoyarsha but also just within the context of the kings if you tell us about the palace city of Persepon yes of course I think that Darius Darius the Great actually is again another another individual worthy of the title he was one of the great administrator kings he was a great bureaucrat that's what he loved nothing was too remote from him to dot an eye or cross a T he was obsessed with bureaucracy he was of that really he gives a kind of structure to the empire under Darius the empire is at its biggest so the center there is southwest Iran around the city of Persepolis but the empire reaches right the way out to the coast of North Africa to Libya right the way down the Nile to Ethiopia and then across into the steps of Russia and into Pakistan it is the biggest world empire ever seen but really it was the biggest empire the world had ever seen and what Darius does brilliantly is to give cogency to all of this by constructing incredible road networks some of which really have survived across the centuries so if you could get from Sardis in Turkey to Suza in Iran in about 17 days for instance riding on a kind of pony express you can get messages around all the time he issued a dictum where the the international language of the empire was Aramaic which is a kind of Semitic language which Jesus was still using and that became like Latin in the Middle Ages the common language of all bureaucracy so you were able to communicate with each other and you know we have these tablets written in cuneiform which show that people journeyed across this whole empire and given provisions as well so like service stations everywhere to allow this text says that a woman with a translator guide travels from Memphis in Egypt to Kandahar in Afghanistan this is truly an international empire and of course they're using the seas as well Darius has all this one of Darius's great feats was to cut a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile so that he could actually get Egyptian goods and the grain from Egypt right the way around the Red Sea and into the Persian Gulf that way as well I mean he was a phenomenal individual his son Xerxes is famous for being a bad king and that of course is the Herodotian take on it you know he's been much maligned by Herodotus and what I've tried to do in the book is to liberate Xerxes from this catalogue of catastrophes that the father of history father of lies tells about him it's really hard because when it comes to a Persian account of the Greek wars we simply don't have one and I think that's because they were a very little consequence to the Persians who had bigger fish to fly elsewhere but I've tried as best I can to give ok taking Herodotus's account of Persian advance into Athens the defeat of Athens and then the ultimate defeat of Persia in the setback how would the Persians have understood this and in many accounts the idea of Thermopyla the 300 who were killed defending the past there, the Spartans well for Xerxes that would have been mission accomplished because he killed the Spartan king who was clearly a follower of what Xerxes would have called Drauga the lie which was the opposite of Arta which is truth and in the religious system of the Achaemenids who were kind of proto-Zoroastrians they believe in this duality there is Arta truth and there is lie Drauga and truth means loyalty giving due service to the crown and to the king and to the gods so when people rebel against that they become liar kings they become followers of the lie so when Xerxes kills Leonidas at the pass of Thermopyla as far as he was concerned that was mission accomplished so I'm trying to read the Persian version into these very grand old Greek narratives that we are so obsessed with and have been building blocks for our civilization and likewise the final king I mentioned is right at the end of the dynasty is Darius III so he's the guy who has to go up against Alexander of Macedon and I notice I do not say Alexander the Great and I think he was one of the biggest vandals in history but Darius III has because of the classical tradition been so downplayed it's as though he flees from the battle of Isas flees from the battle of Galgamelar well it's not about that what he was trying to do every time he saw that his forces were being defeated was to take himself out of battle so that the dynasty could survive it was only going to survive through the king himself and he was always ready to fight another battle being a coward which comes over in the classical sources Darius III was actually a very pragmatic soldier and a very good leader in fact but trying to habilitate that has been a kind of uphill struggle for me and colleagues who are like me who try to look for the Persian version each time Thank you very much I want to just go on to Victoria's bit now because and also I need to ask you something I need to ask you so much so your book Victoria is a work of fiction but it draws on the only first person account of an enslaved Abysinian in Iran and I wanted to ask you about that and also to tell us about the Trans-Saharan slave trade again something you never want to do when there's like an Iranian expert in the room but no he doesn't know that much he doesn't know that much you're right I mean it could have two goodness no so I guess the first thing I would say is so in the Palace of Flowers is literally I mean the phrase like Palace of Flowers comes from Galestum Palace which is where it's set and it is basically taking this sliver of what we could call an autobiography but it's so it's so small and so slight that it that it feels quite too bereft to even be one but takes the autobiography of the real life Jamila Habashi that she wrote in 1905 and at the time it was certainly very rare and at the time it was the only available piece that certainly was in English that you could find if you weren't literally in Iran I think only ever is the obsessive with accuracy is like someone's going to come out and go there was like 80 of them here so but I think very much discouraged from being accessible because they clash with this narrative that Iran had slaves because they didn't you know they didn't this book is all lies they didn't but so basically I felt the story as I said I came across in a lot of photography these images of these black slaves and until I came across this autobiography I don't think that I felt I had a a story or a hook or an individual character that I could really kind of connect to it was a young woman it was actually she actually wrote it in 1905 so it was just around the same time as the first constitutional revolution and I pulled it back to 1895 and I put her in the palace where to my knowledge she actually wasn't but I wanted to tell this story because not only were Abysinians enslaved they were also prized of the you know various types of African slave that you would have in the Khadra Court and I thought to myself ok if she has access to education and she's not worried about you know dying for any sort of arbitrary infringement of any sort of mild you know she has a relatively stable life at that point and at the same time there's this rising nationalism that is actually penetrating the horror and is you know going to influence even the things that they hear even when they go out into the bazaar what it was almost the question that I have as like a person born to immigrant parents who had a lot more time to naval gaze than my very practical parents who just kind of got on with stuff and I thought well what was what was she thinking in all this type like you know you're listening to people talk about you know Iranian nationalism and you aren't you aren't Iranian your family is how far like does any of this penetrate at which point and I wanted to kind of tell a story that did more than the autobiography because there's so little that you can't even imagine it's just I was born here to these tribes and sold to these men and I was sort of like is this all the only autobiography actually tells us and yeah so that was the jumping off point that the trans-saharan slave trade to me at least was fascinating because it was so far from anything that I understood about slavery it was very very much at least what I read very tied into religion into Islam and there were all these sort of I guess colourism sort of gradations of like mambasins versus Zanzibarians versus Abysinians and who was a domestic slave and who was a concubine who could be a temporeff and all these different things and it was surreal in the way it really transformed my understanding of what slavery is but even what I guess it means to own someone because on one level there would be stories of slaves when their masters died who got to robes quite literally who had photos taken of them who lived relatively like they had freedom, there's some story of a freeman who runs off with some governor's daughters there's all these stories that imply agency that imply autonomy things we can understand but these people are still ultimately owned by another person and I was just thinking briefly back to what you were saying about the sort of the sort of forgive me kind of fraudulent narrative that people kind of reclaim as they were and I think well what are the narratives that we tell ourselves about how we sit in the world this is ultimately at the crux of all the stories I want to tell and why I found even paying attention to the trans-Saharan slave trade even you know thinking about what it is to live in a royal palace to have your body be owned so you are effectively subject to someone's whim you may not be experiencing harm because they're not necessarily brutal every day but maybe they are tomorrow and I was conceiving of them almost the way you see a child with their toy sometimes they throw it to the side and that is ultimately the extent to which their bodies could be treated in a particular way it's not about sheer brutality all the time but it is about almost there's a lot of standing around playing at being invisible to a self you know what I mean to just kind of have to almost subjugate yourself within your own body every time you engage with the people and even the stuff about the eunuchs I had to speak to this this academic who's an expert in castration I do not know what leads someone to that career but you know it served me well and it was genuinely a more horrifying story than I could have imagined there's a lot of different types of castration that they went through literally they were just it was just all cut away and there was like a 75% death rate the sort of like ex-consultant and he was like this is not an efficient way of doing anything, why would people carry on 75% they're like what, who thought this was a good idea but what does that look like to be in this space with 75% of the people around you dying before you're all sold out there's all of this again is right with story which makes me sound like a vulture but you know there's and again to your point about wanting to change the kinds of whether it's sort of westernized or just sort of Greek narratives and I was saying this to you really that there's often an emotional incentive for me it's far easier to relate to or want to see some sort of border change in the world you live in if you're harmed on some level by the lack of change but I think there's also like an intellectual and a creative case for it it's so impoverished to just have the same very narrow stories over and over again in the same way of looking at things you know if we have one more pride and prejudice zombie whatever bloody story we're like set something on fire you know what I mean it's just like come on and I think there's so many things we're missing when we ignore huge swaths of the population and all the intricacies of the stories that can exist and that's way off what you actually asked me trying to trying to access women I think in my that phrase is like it's really hard trying to access women never handle those words get together that's something for like forgive me continue what you're saying because of course in ancient Persia we have concubinage as well and basically it's sex trafficking is what is going on there and how the empire itself is kind of played out by the ownership of the bodies of others of eunuchs of these harem women but what we need to do and I think your book does it really well is to resist the orientalist temptation to locate these women in a world of sultry pleasure you know they're just on scatter cushions in their harem outfits with Persian kittens waiting for the sexual adventures in the sultans bed and what I've certainly revealed about the harem and I think it's the right word to use for me within the Achaemenid period although we don't know what the Persians actually called it is that it was really the domestic space of the whole empire and what happened in this domestic space had repercussions throughout the empire so when a wife went head to head with another wife because kings were polygamers so the rights of succession for their sons that played out across the whole empire so for me to dismiss the harem as a kind of brothel like pleasure palace is to completely misunderstand the role of women in the courts of Persia and other ancient and more contemporary societies as well so I take them very seriously in the Qajar courts can you explain to me how that power structure would work when it came to oh hello sorry when it came to concubines so within most Persian courts across the centuries at the top is the king's mother because while a king could have many wives and even more concubines he can only ever have one blood mother so he takes the generations as well so her son's generation his father's generation so she reigns supreme and basically many of these queen mothers they can have their separate estates they have their own wealth they're not sort of enshrouded necessarily they can be political movers and operators even though they don't have an official title there's no role for them but of course it's just their proximity to their son this prestige and they often rule the harem more like a convent or a finishing school than anything else you know it's not you know below that you'll have the wives now in the Islamic period you have four wives but in the pre-Islamic period in my era you could have as many wives as you want we know that Darius I had at least six consorts and then below that there are as many concubines as you want there's no limit to these and concubines are brought into the palace for many reasons sometimes as they're trained as entertainers, dancers, musicians as secretaries learned women but often they become as well sexual partners and sometimes they never even see the king at all they're simply part of the furniture concubinage is not a dormant position though and we have several occasions in Persian history where the mother of a of a Shah was a concubine so just because of accident of history the Shah happens to like one particular woman she begets a son and there's no premature in Persian history either so it's not automatically the first son succeeds so it's game on and basically it's the power that a woman can have in bringing together other courtiers, eunuchs to work alongside her other women that really will force her son into the position of primacy and that's what every woman wants because that is safety because then she becomes the queen mother and in the in the in the Qajar which I'm definitely mispronouncing Dynasty at least the period that I'm looking at in the book it was really interesting because you had about I mean you had I think maybe about six actual wives and I can't pronounce the words I'm not going to but proper wives and they ultimately came from noble backgrounds and the Shah had had done this thing where as you say there's no sort of first born whatever but there was I don't know what's happening with my mic I feel like it's not me but there was a thing where ultimately the next in line had to be from a noble family so that affected things instead so the Shah had chosen a particular wife J-wan she was initially a concubine and then she was killed with it we don't know who most likely by the other women in the house like Arrhenage had her killed and then the two children she had were also killed and it was kind of he had tried to make what was like a temporary wife what they called into a sort of noble and you'd have all these all these machinations it was fascinating how much I end up having to keep out that was also stranger than fiction where I was kind of like I mean they literally would murder each other to stay on top it was really quite fascinating and yeah that was just the added distinction I wanted to bring in because it was the one moment where the Shah tried to actively kind of transform the way in which the sort of official hierarchy would go where you know if there was a fixed rule it was that at least you know it had to be a child from a noble family on one side and he had a penchant for like you know sort of like village girls shall we say for his temporary wife so they weren't going to whatever and it was incredibly interesting in this way because like I said the Shah's daughter had this autobiography that was kind of casually informative in ways you just could not get anywhere else like the deep down details of what the different houses and that the mother of the Shah and the people just had outside of the actual harem and the way it was kind of run like I mean you know he had about 80 temporary wives and then all these other women in the house it was itself you know to your point about how ultimately limiting and false the orientalist narrative is it's basically like a convent like a school like a business like an entity there's so much work to be done they're not just lining up to sort of sleep with the king they're often having relationships with each other and not in the kind of eroticised you know sort of just in the way adult women will do and so there was a particular game called lights out where he he enjoyed playing this game he made you know turn off all the lights and everyone you know king prince slave whatever there are no walls you can do whatever you want and the daughter recounts being choked by people at various points and people anything is happening they map whatever and then they put the lights back on and you all have to say oh okay that's that's his fun all right and it's all these you know it's so easy to read that wouldn't it as through an orientalist lens you know and say oh these decadent Persians but I'm willing to take very seriously you know this is absolute monarchies that we're dealing with all the time and they rule absolutely and I don't think there's any difference really in the stories that emerge from I don't know we could call it the court of Stalin or of Saddam or of Putin that's any different really you know absolute monarchies rule with absolute authority and do the most bizarre things and truth is stranger than fiction very often absolutely right you're just often not getting to read them from his daughter because and it's a good point about the orientalist lens there because to me what I just got was her fear she was just kind of you know if someone had successfully killed her that would have been it and on they would have gone and it's sort of how is this and yeah we don't we don't really spend a lot of time really entertaining what it is to have that kind of absolute control and unless we're pointing at some aberrant country over there or something but yeah no it's fascinating Well it certainly is and we're going to go to have some questions from the audience I'm going to give you a minute to compose one but just very quickly before we do that can I just ask you a quick question so I did a show once about Emma Hamilton, Horatio Nelson the love of Horatio Nelson's life and it was you know I picked the bits that I enjoyed the most that I could put into my show and I just wanted to ask you what was your biggest challenge and perhaps and positive about taking real historical figures real people in history and kind of fictionalising them what was a big challenge on that and what was a positive So the big challenge I guess was making sure that I kept a kind of like I'm born in what we call the West I will have organically like a West in Gates so even when you think of slaves you think of freedom so even my notion of what freedom would look like I had to really make sure I was kind of divesting the importance I would give to a very liberal 21st century notion of like autonomy and agency which isn't to say they didn't entertain ideas of freedom but I had to really contextualise what I wrote and think about what they would think was possible, what would they be and what was fun in that regard I guess you know all the people were dead so I could sort of you know be a bit and not worry about libel but no but no also I guess taking poking fun at things I think you know when you live in a culture when a culture is your own you can kind of you're more comfortable mocking it especially if it has the kind of power that western soft power does and so the fact that the char is this avidureophile I thought to myself would all the wives be as well probably not, maybe things are a bit ridiculous maybe they're kind of a bit like him and his you know I think even his own family and what it is for them to you know they've grown up on a very different continent they've had their own cultural history and so how they view western art is so different from how I do and so I wanted to create that kind of insular space that you know there's a moment where I think because in real life the char's son moved to Paris and actually wanted to be a painter when he died and was buried in Paris and he's talking about it in the book and it's sort of like oh what's Paris like is it as beautiful as Toronto they're like no of course not and it's just me kind of playing with I was in Paris last week it's stunning but I've not been to Toronto yet I blame Trump but if you look at it and you'll be able to tell it's so like the architecture I just think well yeah they wouldn't think that the sunstone that we love is all that and just being able to kind of invert my own biases and things that was a bit fun Thank you Shall we go to Q&A? Yes we will have a Q&A Questions aren't Thank you so much Right so we have viewers online also hello to those online and so here is a question What are Victoria and Lloyd's your favourite sources when researching and writing about Persian history Are you going to say apart from your own? When it comes to ancient sources what I've tried to do is privilege as I say again the Persian stuff all the time so that's hard because the Persians didn't write narrative histories it's not part of the Persian tradition I think it was transmitted in song, in poetry but that hasn't come down to us there's this western dominance because it's as though the west invents history writing but you can access the Persian world in so many different ways but you have to use everything so royal inscriptions these cuneiform ration lists you have to use the architecture the archaeology, the iconography from across the whole empire so it's like working with a glorious jigsaw puzzle but frustratingly there are lots of pieces missing usually around the edges in particular but you have to use everything and that's both a challenge but also very liberating as well when it comes to actual other historians who have worked on Persia I'm glad to say in the last 30 years Persia has been given its proper place in ancient historical studies and I'm really indebted to the work of people like Pierre Brion who is the great grandfather of Persian studies he's a French-based scholar who's here in London who has combined incredible source books of materials so the groundwork is being done but what we in my generation and I hope the next generation the students I'm teaching now are going to do is to take Persian history be bolder with it and start approaching Persian history from different ways I want to have gendered readings of Persian history I want to have ethnic readings of Persian history I want to have bottom-up readings that's all possible now that we've got to this stage we're a long way behind classics we're a very new discipline really but it's all out there and I think we can be bold and challenging with what we do with it isn't Lloyd great you know what I mean seriously I was really nervous I was saying this before because it's like being in Year 7 to meet someone who's a professional writer and he's just very gracious obviously but also has a really really just valid and crystallised mission which mission always sounds a bit radical but I'm very behind just like vigorously recognising all the deficits that we have currently to answer the question so obviously Pedram really funny but once we started speaking we looked up the courage having worked with other academics Anthony Ailey in particular it was a huge debt too I did not tell any of these people I was writing a novel when I first sought them out I was just like I'm interested in and you know as we can see academics are really generous with their knowledge with their research but when I did and then I think it also got reported in some Iranian newspaper then Pedram sort of gave me access to all these all these drives all these files, all these photos mostly that can't be well well he can't publish them because he won't be loved back in Iran and it was just this incredible window into well again how photography for one is a really really vital medium for what we understand to be history what we understand to be research and storytelling and how we make sense of what things look like but also actually a lot of a lot of kind of academic secondary material because and this isn't just I'm not answering the question it's not a single favourite source but for me I think it's you're so often going to be looking at something with all of your own biases all of your own preconceptions so for me it's sometimes good to have a kind of secondary framing that will shape it somehow whether I want to agree with that, disagree, engage with that it will help crystallise which then helps sharpen my own so I think the like toggling between the two being able to look at this kind of primary research and visual research from Pedram and being able to look at more kind of like scholarly assessments and even you know some of the more Vanessa Martin and people like that who've written who've touched on in border books they've touched on nowadays around on slavery in Iran by the time I finished reading my book there was actually a lot more of it coming out which I am shamelessly going to say my influence even though the book wasn't out somehow but yeah part of it was like this should have been here when I started Thank you very very much and I wanted to ask you this is a question for me I know that you have advised filmmakers on the historical accuracy of the films they're making did they come to you for 300 Oh no I wish they had I've written several articles on that movie and the two movies and it's hideousness I mean it is the most destructive film I've had lots of Iranians writing to me over the years asking me to defend them from the movie and so I did I recently published an article called Trouble in the Terran Multiplex which is about the Iranian reaction within Iran to that so reading through Iranian reviews, Iranian newspapers I just wanted to gauge what the Iranians were saying and you know what comes up time and time again is this idea that the accumulated period we may not know much about it they say but we know it's our glory period and don't do this to us you know there were some such horrific rhetoric used when that film came out Frank Miller who created the original graphic novel he once said that alluding back to 9-11 he said we know that those planes were driven by terrorists Iranians in his point of view okay there's no difference that could never have the technology to build these kind of machines he said you know I mean this is what we're dealing with you see better than I you know and so yes it's important that those of us who have some kind of say challenge that horrific way of approaching history now part of it I could say is it's mythology it's still part of the same mythology of Thermopylai and Marathon Salamis that Herodotus is doing but you see if you take that to the extreme and that's what we've got in 300 that's how dangerous that mythology can be and I go on the web and look up you know there are lots of far right societies that utilize classical imagery classical ideology so that battle between east and west with the Persians being barbarized and the Persians representing everything which is the antithesis of freedom whatever that means is still being used and that's why you know it's not simply a little Hollywood fantasy it's a dangerous piece of work I think 300 that actually makes me think of there's a particular book called Destiny Disrupted by Tom Ansari and it's a history of what he calls the middle world which is how he frames the Middle East from the time of Muhammad to the present day this actually I used as an initial starting point when I realized how this line knew about Islam before I started writing but what I love about it is it's kind of the inverse of historical fiction it's creative non-fiction and it's this incredibly funny witty roller king read that is incredibly precise at the same time and I was thinking about this because in terms you know the idea of them not having the technological capabilities I'm like do we know technology and history and all that do we understand the origin of things maths knowledge doesn't really come from there's a real deficit of understanding about how ultimately integrated the whole world is and one thing I wanted to to add because I really appreciate just in general like I said the fact that you are really starting to bring the Persian perspective I think well a plurality of perspectives that allow us to look at these things more richly I think to me it's been very important to when you have a whether it's a people or a community or whatever that do not have the kind of agency on the global stage to sort of articulate themselves as they would want to it becomes really important to interrogate the narratives that ultimately reaffirm the existing power and I think to myself I want to get to a point and we probably aren't there with a lot of the most marginalised communities in terms of like public narratives where we just need to get narratives that just knock back the really nefarious ones we have but I want to get to a point where we can and you've been talking about this anyway except the the complexities that the whether it's corruption, whether it's all of the ways in which people and humans are terrible and they abuse power without that then sticking to and becoming a narrow confirmation that this is all that they are and a lot of and as I said the great-granddaughter of the Qajars we still talk but not about the book but it was important to me that people that we that we allow our stories to show the breath of humanity in all of the ways in which we are kind of proud and terrible and long for power and you know I guess when I interrogate these things I think well what do we owe each other what do we support, how are we meant to be engaging with each other, how are we meant to use narrative what does it mean for people to say don't take this story away from us because it's this Vainglorious story but it's all they have because all the other stories are being told you know what are we, how should we understand the impact, the power of narrative on what it does and those are the kinds of questions that I think that I really think we should all we obviously are but people should be asking and also think of a really vital way to get more people into things like history historical fiction is very fun for me to write but I I mean it's very hard to use in some ways but I think I'm so often like troubled just by how little we know about history how siloed off are as you say about you know a beneficiary of the English private school classic system goodness knows what we learned but I really think there is a need to get people into a broader way of understanding history and recognising global history and I think interrogating what we owe each other and what we owe the world and how we understand and analyse the things we're told from Frank Millar and the rest I was very aware that when I was writing Persians that essentially it was going to go to two audience it was going to go to Iranians and non Iranians you know as polarised as that and I hope that for the non Iranians they'll just realise that there's this wonderful rich and very important story that comes from Iran for Iranians within and outside of Iran I hope that they'll have the confidence to see that their their history is a genuine it makes a genuine contribution to world history that they have their place and they don't actually need to fixate on things like myths of human rights from Cyrus because what's there is enough you've got a great history which is part of a world culture you know by all means keep that story going if you want to but also recognise that there's a much bigger history of Iran which is worthy of telling and I think that's the main thing for me Thank you so much are there any questions from hello there or there's someone just coming down to you with a microphone Sara sorry thank you Thank you. Lloyd mentioned he'd like to hear more of ethnic narratives from the Persian Empire what sort of ethnic groups were there in the Persian Empire? Well you can imagine with an empire that size the diversity is absolutely enormous and work is being done on different parts of the empire and how they receive their Persianization, how far they go with it, how far they work with the central authorities and how far they're allowed or even break away from the central authorities so much good work has been done especially in Asia Minor for instance where we have a lot of really good sources as well as in Egypt that are always problematic for the Achaemenids, they needed it because it was the bread basket of the world it was a rich, rich holding but Egypt broke away once from the empire for a good 60 years and had to be reconquered which says that all is not well in the Persian Empire all of the time it's much harder to get a hold on things that are happening in the eastern part of the empire in Afghanistan, northern India because our sources there unfortunately are really really piecemeal with ancient history generally but Persian history in particular is that we get lots of material from the west so from Asia Minor and especially of course from Greece and that kind of creates a narrative which is actually quite a false narrative they've got more of the empire to go, lots more of the empire to go but it's much harder to pick out the sources from those areas so I think it is possible to write an ethnic approach because ethnicity is a huge thing for the ancient Persians at Persepolis the amazing images of all the peoples of the empire who come and bring their diplomatic gifts to the great king what I'm interested in is if you come from Ethiopia and you see yourself on that staircase being in your relief what's your attitude to it are you thinking yes I'm joyfully coming here to give my gift to the king or I do not see myself there that is not who I am that's the kind of questions we need to start moving with penetrating into not easy to answer but the questions themselves I think are worth asking Thank you very much we just have a couple more minutes there's one more question from the gentleman here in the second row Bridget and I went with you to Iran about I can't remember now five years maybe longer one of the things as a ceramicist that I took away from going to the national museum in Tehran was the quality and the breadth of the ceramics particularly the evidence obviously of the silk road and it's much later than the period that you specialize in but I just thought that was quite revealing quite amazing actually and the quality was just absolutely stunning that's the first thing the second memory that I've got is when you took your roses to the tomb of Cyrus and you sprinkled the roses and the reception of local tourists to that was quite interesting wasn't it when I visit Cyrus's tomb I often offer my respect as well but you know that Cyrus's tomb has become the centre of a kind of nationalist revival of the past so in 2016 an estimated 30,000 people turned up at Cyrus's tomb and they started to perambulate around it as they do the carba in Mecca shout in long live Cyrus and 29th of October has been named the National Cyrus Day it's not a recognized holiday by the government and of course it's getting a lot of people into a lot of trouble but it's really interesting to see how the ancient past is being reactivated by particularly young Iranians and we should remember that Iran has got the youngest demographic in the world majority I think 70% of people are under the age of 50 or 40 maybe 40 I think you might be right very very young and it's wiped to change things are going to happen octogenarian mullers immediately condemned what are you doing walking around this as though it were the carba in the old days they used to shout long live the Shah and now you're doing it for Cyrus the Shah himself would use Cyrus of course in big time big propaganda thing so it's interesting that how the kemenid past is being reactivated I always say to my students studying ancient history is not a dead subject it's alive and vital and really matters in this world and I think in Iran you see it more than anywhere else right now is there another burning question or can I finish with one final question and wrap us up for today hello yes someone down here in the front thank you so much that was brilliant brilliant panel what I love about in the palace of flowers is what you said telling the forgotten stories and I really want to delve into your work and understand the whole mythology piece where's the tipping point when are these stories no longer going to be forgotten and how do we get there both in fiction in nonfiction and what can we do to support that thank you the best question I've saved a lot yeah huge question okay I think it's about normalising these stories you know it's no more it's not seeing them as orientalist tropes I called one of my books tales of the Orient because I want to stamp that out entirely they're just part of a story process of global histories when do we get there I don't know we have a long way to go to the history of Iran but the more we can do this kind of thing the more there are radio programmes and very good things that Sameera Ahmed did on the BBC art of Persia the more liberating liberated Persia will become from a western narrative that's all we can hope for I think the other thing and I agree with that I definitely do I think that also it there's got to be a kind of border a cultural shift in how we how we think of storytelling so I think of now I think it's the man in the National Book of Prize that respects translation as well and it's about also really kind of the way in which you change any kind of state is also you have to dilute the state that you already have so there has to be a kind of a recognition that we need to really bring into our understanding of the main stories a multiplicity a transnational set of narratives and also ultimately different languages and so I think there's a particular writer in Guggy Wath Youngo and he writes and I've forgotten the name something Tornau new and it's basically about the way in which you get for example post-Colonialism in Africa which he doesn't believe we have because he's saying you're not you're still speaking in colonial languages and I think that a really big part will be bringing it starts with bringing translation and recognizing the international nature of stories and even to the things we were talking about earlier on the way the history that we are taught in schools needs to be global it needs to recognize that it's way more integrated right from the beginning there's no British history different from world history and so the moment you start recognizing that we are really interconnected as your starting point and have that in your stories and your fiction and your non-fiction becomes much more organic to see this change because it doesn't feel like something radical or something that's marginalizing people who are used to feeling like they're in the centre because actually we're all part of the same whole and making that central to how we tell stories is going to be how we get there is what I think is what I hope anyway just to finish off on that students come to read ancient history at Cardiff University when I was at Edinburgh and I offer courses on Persia and the Ancient Near East where they want those courses when they arrive but they leave loving them and very often they come because they think it's going to be about Greece and Rome and they can do as much as that as they like but also now we offer this huge new level of engagement with the ancient Middle East as well when people go away and they start doing MAs in it and now we're writing PhDs in it and we have to do all of that and I'm delighted to say that now Persia is now part of the GCSE syllabus in ancient history and it's going to be an A-level section of ancient history as well with Persia rooted into it so it's a good start Thank you, that is brilliant and I was thinking about what you said about in Iran they don't teach Persian history of the empire and actually that's what we need in this country as well about the British Empire which is quite really quite shocking my last question very briefly about a subject that's very close to my heart and my brother told me this I want to know if it's true is it true that the first evidence of beer making was found on Iranian soil You are right It's Silek Tefe 4000 VC I'll give the Iranians that We invented beer Thank you so much to Victoria and to Lloyd who will be outside signing their books as soon as we leave I think Thank you very much for you guys for being here and thank you so much for his fest for having me, thank you