Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects

from BBC Radio 4. This week we're in very exalted intellectual company.

We're with Confucius in China, Pericles in Greece, and Cyrus in ancient Persia. It's the fifth century BC and across the world

societies are beginning to articulate very clear ideas about themselves and

about others. They're inventing and defining what we would now call

statecraft. This is the era of what some have called the empires of the mind.

I'm going to begin with the world's superpower of 2,500 years ago,

pressure.

This was an empire that was run on a rather different

principle to previous empires which were really based on might being right.

Persian occupation I suppose you could compare to a light morning mist settling over the contours of their empire.

You were aware of it, but it was never obtrusive.

A history of the world, in a hundred objects. Oxus Chariot, a gold model from the ancient Persian Empire, almost 2,500

and a half thousand years old. We're about 70 miles north of Shiraz and the low camel-colored hills have opened out into a flat, windy plain.

It's a pretty featureless landscape except that right in front of me is a huge stone plinth rising in six

gigantic steps to what looks like a gabled hermit cell. It dominates the entire

landscape. It's the Tomb of Cyrus, the first Persian emperor,

the man who two and a half thousand years ago built the largest empire that the world had then seen,

and changed the world, or at least the Middle East, forever.

Centered in modern Iran, the vast Persian Empire ran from Turkey and Egypt in the west to Afghanistan and

Pakistan in the east to control an empire like this required land transport

on a quite unprecedented scale and so the Persian Empire is the firstiot, made of solid gold and pooled by four golden horses.

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