The education of a boy, right the Greek historian Herodotus about the Persians, will begin

at the age of 5 and finish when he is 20. But in all that time he will only ever be taught

three things. How to write a horse, how to fire a bow, and how to tell the truth.

The thesis of today's episode of the Restless History is that actually the Persians taught

a lot more than that. Actually in fact that huge amounts today, even in the 21st century,

here in the West, that we take for granted that it derives ultimately from Persia.

And I guess this is a thesis that may not seem immediately obvious because the Persians

don't really tend to occupy the kind of outsized role that other ancient civilizations do in

the popular imaginings, civilizations like the Egyptians or the Greeks or the Romans. But

speaking for myself, the more I've studied antiquity written about it, thought about it,

the more I've come to think that Persia is like some great kind of underground spring from which

infinite numbers of rivers and streams when you trace them back over the course of the centuries

and the millennia, turn out to have sprung from. Dominic, as a modern historian, I don't know whether

you would accept that. I mean, I guess even the Iranian Revolution of 1979 is slightly plays

that role, doesn't it? I think it absolutely does, Tom. I think actually when you, we in the West,

sort of tend to forget a little bit about Iran, and particularly we're fixated in the 20th

century on Russia and China, I suppose, as the sort of antagonists of the West. But Iran,

the Iranian Revolution of 1979 seems to me one of the great foundational moments of the contemporary

era. So it's the moment that the rise of the Ayatollahs of radical Islam and then the way in which

that was exported. And Iran sort of status, as you know, this, I mean, Iran talks of the United

States as a great Satan. But in many ways, Iran has been the great Satan, hasn't it, for the secular

West ever since 1979? Yeah, and I think that for lots of people, if you say Iran, you tend to think of

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