Original subtitles

This is a land known by two names.

The first is Persia.

TRADITIONAL MIDDLE EASTERN SINGING

Ancient.

Mysterious.

A place of adventure...

..of mighty temples and palaces...

..built by powerful kings.

A land of unimaginable beauty.

The other is Iran.

Isolated...

..proud...

..defiant.

..especially of foreign interference.

Since Iran became an Islamic republic in 1979,

Western documentary teams are seldom given access.

But I'm a British journalist, and I've been granted a rare

opportunity to travel across this vast country

and discover its history and culture for myself.

In this final episode, I'm going back to when Persia

faced her gravest threat,

the greatest conqueror the world has ever known -

Genghis Khan.

But from death and destruction emerged a golden age...

..when Persia's conquerors discovered her literature

and transformed it into dazzling illuminations,

then used it for politics and propaganda...

This is the way to convince people that I am the rightful king.

..including Iran's last Shah...

..with momentous consequences for the world.

In the early years of the 13th century, terrible rumours swirled.

A great warlord was coming.

He'd swept away the Chinese empire.

Now his eyes were set on Persia.

His army was disciplined, ruthless and showed no mercy.

He was the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan.

So when, in February 1221, the great Persian city of Merv

refused to open her gates,

the Mongols attacked.

Even the mighty walls couldn't withstand

their devastating onslaught.

On the seventh day, the city lost the will to fight

and surrendered.

But it was too late.

The population was driven out into the open countryside.

It took several days to empty the city.

And then each Mongol warrior was assigned 400 people

to put to the sword.

If eyewitness accounts are to be believed, up to a million

men, women and children were butchered this way.

I don't think we can overemphasise

the sheer apocalyptic feeling

of these great hordes of Mongol warriors

bursting from the Eurasian steppes.

They came, they sapped, they burned, they slew,

they plundered, they departed.

That says it all.

When Genghis Khan's army continued south, they left many cities

in ruins and whole populations massacred.

By 1258, Persia was under Mongol rule.

The economy collapsed and the people were enslaved or forced to flee.

Huge expanses of Persia reverted to nomadic existence.

It seemed the previous golden age under Islam was over.

Even Islam itself was threatened,

for these new Mongol rulers were pagan.

Now there was a new dynasty in charge.

They were called the Ilkhanids.

Despite the violence and ferocity of the invasion,

all was not lost.

For the first time since the Muslim invasion,

Iran becomes a separate entity, political entity,

it becomes basically an entity apart from the rest of the Muslim world.

The Mongols found that they could not run their empire

without Persian officials.

And in 1295, the Mongol elite goes over to...

..to Islam, and from then on, they are more Persian

than the Persians.

So Persian, in fact, the Ilkhanids even turned to a book written

at the beginning of the 11th century -

the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings.

The mythical spine of Persian identity.

What they like about the Shahnameh is it's about heroics,

it's about heroes,

it's about fighters.

And they can identify with it.

The Shahnameh was written by Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi

and told the story of Persia's kings before the arrival of Islam.

Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh to keep alive Persia's

pre-Islamic language and history,

but it was also a sort of how-to - a handbook

full of stories and examples of ancient kings,

advice on how to take control and keep it.

The Mongol Ilkhanids were so impressed that they decided

they wanted to adorn themselves in some of the Shahnameh's

mythological lustre.

I've come to this extraordinary citadel in north-west Iran

to find out how the Mongols refashioned the Shahnameh

for themselves.

This magical place is known as Takht-e Soleyman -

King Solomon's Throne.

And according to folklore, the Old Testament ruler kept monsters

imprisoned in a mountain nearby

and here in the sulphurous, fathomless waters

of this ancient crater.

What the Mongols discovered wasn't home to Solomon at all,

but home to Zoroastrian priests.

This was one of Persia's most important fire temples.

Built by the Sasanian dynasty,

it had survived the Islamic conquest in the seventh century.

And the Mongols didn't destroy it.

Instead, they used it to reinforce their authority and transformed it

into a new seat of power.

In choosing this ancient site, the Ilkhanids were making a statement -

by reusing the stones and bricks from the pre-Islamic buildings,

they were trying to directly link the new Mongol dynasty

to old Persia's Sasanian kings.

And they didn't just use bricks and mortar -

they also turned to the Shahnameh.

When archaeologists later excavated Takht-e Soleyman,

they made a surprising discovery.

Glazed tiles inscribed with tales from Ferdowsi's Book of Kings

that once would have adorned the walls of this palace.

I don't think that the Shahnameh on the walls of the Mongol palace

there is the idea of any Mongol ruler.

It's the idea of their bureaucrats, their viziers.

The people who say,

"Now, look, you're in charge of Iran.

"You've got to behave like an Iranian king, like Kay Khosrow.

"And here's the story of Kay Khosrow all round the walls of your palace.

"And let me tell you the story of Kay Khosrow,

"and how he did right, and then how he did wrong.

"So, watch out.

"There's a moral here."

The Ilkhanids also commissioned versions of the Shahnameh itself,

like this rare page from a copy made in 1300.

And, not surprisingly,

the heroes start to look less Persian,

more Mongol.

So we see beautiful scenes of princes in gardens,

or riding on horseback.

They're very much Mongol faces, wearing Mongol-style clothing.

We see garden scenes of lovers drinking wine together

in a completely Persianate setting,

but with the distinctive images of the Mongol appearance.

I find the Ilkhanate period one of the most exciting

in all of Persia's history.

The Ilkhanids were so seduced by this new-found culture,

Persia became their new home.

200 miles to the east, they built their imperial capital here.

They called it Soltaniyeh.

At its heart stands the second-largest mausoleum

in the Islamic world.

The peak of the dome is 51 metres high...

..its walls seven metres thick.

As well as a projection of Persian architectural brilliance,

this mausoleum tells us something else -

the new ruler who ordered its construction had converted

to the faith of the people the Mongols had conquered -

Islam.

Sultan Oljeitu, who built this mausoleum, had converted

to Shia Islam, and it's one of the great what-ifs of buildings.

His plan was to house the remains of the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law

and cousin, the martyred Imam Ali,

which would have made this mausoleum the biggest pilgrimage site

in Shia Islam outside of Mecca.

But it never happened.

Just look at this place. Even though it's partly hidden

behind the scaffolding,

I'm just thinking, the word Mongols, we think of the hordes, barbarians,

and yet when you walk into this building and you can see

this amazing exquisite calligraphy and the ceramic work

and the geometric designs, and this magnificent dome,

one of the biggest in the world,

one can't help think how the Ilkhanate dynasty

may have come here as invaders,

but they'd become absorbed by Persian culture.

Restoration here has been going on for 50 years,

and the painstaking work is slowly revealing

the building's former artistic wonders.

The sultan spared no expense.

Is this gold here? Yeah, this is gold.

You can see gold here and here.

Many of these floral motifs were embellished with gold leaf.

So you have to be gentle, you have to take your time?

Yeah.

Coming up here to this workshop, I really feel like I've reached

a hand across the centuries to 700 years ago,

watching these workmen replicate those same skills

with the plaster work and the painting and the tiles.

Like Mohammad said, there's a real sense

of bringing this building back to life.

Not all of Persia was put to the sword by the Mongol swarm.

The city of Shiraz was spared thanks to her quick-witted governor

called Atabak.

When the Mongols appeared on the horizon,

he very wisely opened the gates

and laid on a great banquet for the Mongol general.

The clever ruse worked.

Atabak kept his job, and under Ilkhanate rule,

Shiraz positively bloomed.

There's something weirdly psychedelic about the way

the sunlight comes through the windows and hits the floor

here in the Pink Mosque in Shiraz.

And if you look at the walls, they're covered with flowers,

mainly roses.

The rose is the symbol of Shiraz,

and it was this flower that would inspire

one of Iran's greatest poets to put pen to paper.

He would continue the work that Ferdowsi had started,

and usher in a golden age of Persian poetry.

Born in 1210, he was called Saadi.

Saadi was reputedly a great traveller - as far west as Anatolia

and as far east as India.

And his poetry is full of references to his wanderings through countries

devastated by Mongol invasion.

Late into the night in teahouses,

he would talk to ordinary people who'd survived -

merchants, farmers, preachers and Sufi mystics.

And when he returned to Shiraz around 1256,

he turned all these encounters into poems.

IN FARSI:

The work for which Saadi is best remembered is the Golestan -

inspired by the roses for which his home city is famous.

The Golestan translates as Garden Of Roses -

a compendium of history,

great tales and wise sayings.

You might recognise some of them.

But the poetry of Saadi is more than a compendium

of wise sayings.

Like the Shahnameh, Saadi's book is packed full of tips

on how to be a good ruler.

The building is...

According to Dr Kamali,

it was Saadi's poems that made a deep impact on Atabak -

that very same governor who saved Shiraz from the Mongols.

IN FARSI:

left a profound impression on Saadi -

a belief in the very modern concept of human rights.

These words were written

by Saadi several centuries ago.

They now hang in the entrance

of the United Nations headquarters

in New York.

"Human beings are members of a whole

"In creation of one essence and soul

"If one member is afflicted with pain

"Other members uneasy will remain

"If you have no sympathy for human pain

"The name of human you cannot retain"

Saadi lies here within this mausoleum.

Verses from his poetry adorn the walls and his coffin.

Words of peace and humanitarianism that resonate to this day.

It's hard to exaggerate the importance of poetry in Iran.

Ancient poems by Ferdowsi, Saadi and others

remain the lifeblood of modern Iranian culture -

emblems of Iranian identity.

Shiraz is called a city of poets,

and many of the streets bear

the names of Iran's greatest.

There's Ferdowsi Street...

..Khayyam Street...

..and, as you'd expect, Saadi Street.

And then there's one other.

Almost a century after Saadi was born,

Shiraz fathered another great poet.

His name was Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Shirazi...

..but his nickname is Hafez.

While Saadi is remembered for his humanism,

Hafez explored the tangled web of human emotions,

from romantic love...

..to the love of family...

..to the love of God.

Hafez wrote about the human heart.

IN FARSI:

To Iranians, Hafez is much more than a love poet.

His words are regarded as sacred.

Said to represent the voice of the unseen realm,

it's believed the poems can even predict the future.

Salaam, Mr Hafez.

Meet Mr Hafez.

His surname is no coincidence,

as he claims to be a direct descendant of the great poet.

He tells fortunes by randomly selecting lines from Hafez

and reading them aloud.

He's been telling fortunes now for 70 years.

Thank you.

I've never had my fortune told before.

But there's something slightly moving about the things

that Mr Hafez just told me.

And he's talked about happiness in the near future

and a boy and girl bringing you happiness.

I have a son and a daughter.

He's also talked about success, that something is doable.

He also said that God was pleased with me and that there was

prosperity and blessing ahead.

Like Saadi, Hafez has also been gifted a magnificent mausoleum.

It's hard to imagine playwrights or poets in the West being treated

with such reverence by every generation.

Many of the Iranians who come to have Hafez's tomb

reach out to touch it,

and for some they might say a prayer, as they would for a member

of the family who died, asking for God's blessing.

But there's more just a sense of reaching out to touch it

like a shrine, a place of spiritual connection.

Centuries after his death, after conquests, dynastic upheavals

and Islamic revolutions,

Hafez remains the country's most popular poet.

Hafez unites all Iranians.

As the 14th century drew to a close, the Mongols,

under whose rule Hafez had spent his entire life,

returned to their slash-and-burn style.

It seemed like history had turned full circle.

Another great warlord was coming.

He was called Timur.

In the West, we called him Tamburlaine,

and his eyes were set on Persia.

As he swept south out of Central Asia,

it was said he built pillars of human heads

from the armies he defeated.

By 1400, Persia was firmly under the heel of a new dynasty -

the Timurids.

Fortunately for the Persians, Timur's brutality was short-lived.

In 1405, he caught a fever and died.

And just like previous conquering dynasties,

the Timurids soon fell under the spell of Persian culture.

Everybody in the next generation forwent the whole idea

of large-scale conquest.

It was Timur who went around

building pyramids of skulls everywhere.

But the children and the grandchildren

of the butcher become aesthetes,

they become patrons of the arts.

And the Timurid renaissance

is one of the great highlights

of Persian history.

Timur's successors adored Persian art and literature,

and lured many artists to their new capital city - Herat,

now in modern Afghanistan.

The royal court soon became a new cultural centre,

and it was here that the art of miniature painting in particular

reached new heights of sophistication.

A tradition that lives on in modern Iran.

This is the workshop of Hossein Fallahi.

He's been painting miniatures for over 60 years,

many in the Timurid style.

The work is so delicate that his brush consists of

a single cat's hair.

The character he's painting today is the writer

of the Shahnameh - Ferdowsi.

In the studio next door, artists work in small teams.

They're painting stories from the Shahnameh.

Today, they're sold to passing tourists.

But 600 years ago, such paintings served quite a different purpose.

Here in Tehran,

I've come to see an extremely rare example of the kind of work

that teams of artists under the Timurids produced

using the miniaturist style.

Six centuries old,

it's usually kept under lock and key here at the Golestan Palace Museum.

I'm incredibly lucky to be allowed to have a look.

A Timurid Shahnameh.

And to guide me through its pages is Giti Norouzian,

an expert on rare manuscripts.

It's her first glimpse too.

Tell me what we're looking at.

Oh, this is a masterpiece,

and I'm so surprised.

This is one of the most beautiful manuscripts in the world,

and the most important one, actually.

Can I ask how it feels handling this?

Oh, I-I am flying.

THEY LAUGH

I thought so!

The book was commissioned by Prince Baysunghur,

who is Timur's grandson.

This is mostly Baysunghur under this...

Under a kind of canopy. Yes.

And this is the hunting scene.

Like the Mongol rulers before them,

the Timurids gave themselves starring roles

in their new version of the Shahnameh.

People want to connect to their previous history,

so they connect themselves with previous kings,

especially the ones that have good reputation.

So this is the way to convince people that,

"I am the rightful king."

The prince was an enthusiastic patron of Persian art,

and in his royal workshop, around 40 calligraphers and artists

were devoted, quite literally, to painting Ferdowsi's poetry.

It's considered a masterpiece of Persian miniature painting.

This is one of the love scenes.

Yes, I can tell! Yes.

This is Rostam, one of the heroes, very famous heroes,

and Rudaba,

a daughter of one of the kings.

And they came together.

Rostam is perhaps the greatest hero.

He lives for 800 years in the Shahnameh, doesn't he?

Yes, this is mythical.

Who always helped the king, there's the, you know, whole package.

Yeah.

I've got to say, one of the things I've really noticed

looking through this with you,

there are fewer illustrations, but each illustration is bursting

out of its page.

The trees are spilling out of the top of the margins.

So you feel like it's concentrated, and in each picture,

I guess we'd say it packs a bigger punch.

While Timur's descendants were great patrons of the arts,

they proved to be feeble rulers.

For nearly a century,

Iran was left vulnerable,

waiting for the next invader to take his chances.

In my travels across Iran, I've come to appreciate the resilience

of the Persian people in the face of continual invasion

from east and west by nomadic warriors.

Religions, kingdoms and dynasties had risen and fallen.

Could the spirit of Persia endure what was still to come?

At the end of the 15th century, a band of nomadic horsemen

rose from the north west to set Iran on a new radical course.

A militant revolutionary sect.

Their self-declared mission was to forcibly convert all Muslims

to Shia Islam.

Their leader was called Ismail -

a warlord who was remarkable in many ways, not least his age.

He's extremely young - 12.

I think he takes the city of Tabriz at the age of 12.

I mean, he begins a life of conquest pre-teenage.

I mean, it's really quite striking.

But his followers believe him to be divine.

I mean, not just simply divinely legitimised,

but actually part of the divine.

Ismail certainly cut a dash -

handsome, strong, with broad shoulders,

he had a long moustache and was skilled with a bow.

Ismail played the militant Shia card in extreme form -

he required followers to curse the first three caliphs

before Muhammad's cousin, Ali.

Ismail crusade not only forcibly converted Muslims to Shi'ism,

but went to war with the forces of Sunni Islam...

..the Ottomans.

This grand, opulent building is called Chehel Sotoun.

It's a palace where Ismail's military campaigns

against the Sunni Ottomans

have been memorialised in huge frescoes.

When you pause for a moment, there are all these incredibly

moving details. There's an elderly man

being cradled by a younger soldier with incredible sadness.

There's a young boy, clearly some kind of hostage,

with his hands bound,

sitting in tears on the back of a horse.

And then there's this man lying prone in the foreground

next to a decapitated body. There's a head.

And then you realise he's lost his arm.

There's very much a real gruesomeness,

and then people being trampled under horses.

And... Oh, God, there's another headless body just there.

The legends of Ismail's campaign are very colourful.

One recounts how he ordered two of his enemies to be roasted

on a spit as kebabs,

and then commanded his followers to eat them

to prove their loyalty to their new shah

and to show their hatred of the Sunnis.

Shi'ism became Ismail's badge of identity.

Now he decided to go one step further.

Ismail had a concerted policy of making Shi'ism the state religion.

It was a way of basically distinguishing Iran

from their Ottoman rivals.

As Shi'ism took hold,

the arts and crafts became a means of branding

this sect of Islam, on everything from carpet design...

..to jewellery.

This beautiful ring made from gold

tells the story of Iran's conversion to Shi'ism under Ismail.

It bears a couplet by Hafez and reference to Imam Ali on the

last day, the Day of Judgment.

"On the day all men are in a state of helplessness,

"I will have the protection of Ali ibn Abi Talib."

In wearing it,

the ring declares the Shia beliefs of its owner.

What Shi'ism did for Iran was to fashion a national identity

which has survived in very good health

right up to today.

And Shi'ism and Iran are hand in glove

and have been hand in glove for the last 500 years.

Shi'ism was now firmly established.

So was Ismail's grip on power.

He was the first in a new dynasty of kings called the Safavids.

But while Ismail secured the throne using cavalry and swords,

his grandson secured the country

with the very latest weaponry.

Gunpowder.

Like his artillery, Shah Abbas would prove to be the

biggest gun in the Safavid dynasty.

I think you could call him the ruler of one of the three

gunpowder states of the 16th century -

the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals.

And Shah Abbas is at the centre of them.

This is a piratical, buccaneering personality.

He can drink anyone under the table,

he is a man of ferocious energy.

He has big ideas, big visions of what the country can do.

A vision that would become one of the world's

greatest architectural wonders.

Abbas decided to build from scratch.

His reign would mark the start of a new Persian renaissance.

But he needed a new canvas upon which to create it.

He would build it out of tiles and bricks and mortar.

He chose Isfahan.

The Persians called this square Naqsh-e Jahan -

Half the World,

meaning to see it was to see half the world.

He built it on a scale and at a size

and of a splendour

that had the Europeans who flocked to his court stupefied.

And they went back to Europe

and they told the story of these extraordinary palaces

with their great gardens.

And what happens?

Louis XIV builds Versailles.

The Ottomans heard about it and they built the Topkapi Sarayi.

And the Mughal kings heard about it

and they built their garden cities in Agra and Lahore and Delhi.

Tiled in turquoise - the symbol of heaven -

the jewel in Isfahan's crown is this, the Royal Mosque.

CALL TO PRAYER

This dome is over 100 feet high, and there's a second exterior dome

beyond that. And it's the gap between the two

which is responsible for all the echoes that you can hear.

Abbas instructed his architect to construct

a dome which could be filled with echoes.

The dome was designed to produce seven echoes.

The muezzin stands on seven black tiles to call

the faithful to prayer.

From the number of days in the week,

to the seven levels of paradise,

the number seven is, of course, a holy number.

The number of God.

In rebuilding Isfahan,

Shah Abbas pulled together the three main components

of power in Persia.

The power of Shia Islam, represented by the mosques,

the power of the Shah himself,

residing in the Ali Qapu Palace.

And the power of the merchants, represented by the Imperial Bazaar.

This is the Qeysarie Gate -

the entrance to Isfahan's bazaar.

The bazaar dates back more than a thousand years,

but it was Shah Abbas who transformed it from a local market

into a series of royal workshops.

In a matter of years,

Isfahan became the beating economic heart

of a refashioned Persian nation.

Under Abbas, artists and craftsmen achieved new heights of perfection,

employing skills that can still be found in the bazaar

to this day.

So how many days will it take you to finish a whole vase?

HE TRANSLATES

20 days?

It's so beautiful.

Today, the bazaar is as popular as it ever was.

It remains one of the largest bazaars in the world.

The tangle of lanes and stalls offer a veritable feast for the senses.

Can I get one bag of the big ones, which is how many?

HE SPEAKS FARSI

So this is 20?

OK, I'll get one.

I know that this is the bazaar,

and it may be a culture that's 400 years old.

It's moved with the times, and now they take debit cards only

for all the cash transactions.

Thank you very much.

I have been bazaar shopping with my debit card.

Isfahan was a visionary city that fascinated the Western visitors

who came here.

It stands today as an extraordinary gallery of Islamic architecture.

In one way, it's tempting to end the story of Persia right here,

in the golden age of Persian arts and culture.

The apex of 2,000 years of history.

This bridge, these mosques,

palaces and bazaars project Safavid power and prestige,

and its identification with Shia Islam

with a magnificence rarely surpassed.

Shah Abbas died in 1629,

but his successors proved to be

a pale imitation...

..failing to hold back yet another threat from the north-east.

Nomadic warlords from Afghanistan.

Caught in the crossfire was a soldier of fortune

from the city of Mashhad,

who rose through the ranks of the Persian Army.

Nader Shah proved to be so much more than an opportunist mercenary.

He was a military genius who not only fought for the Safavid king,

but overthrew him and went on to conquer Iran itself.

Meet Persia's Napoleon.

The reason why he's described, in some ways,

as the Napoleon of Persia

is because his military conquests are dramatic.

He comes in as a sort of generalissimo of the sort of

Safavid counterattack, and he's extremely successful.

And he then basically, by hook and by crook,

essentially pushes the Safavid pretender out.

He says, you know, "You're useless, you keep making mistakes.

"I'm going to eventually, you know,

"I think we should have a new dynasty and I'll be the new king."

Once Nader Shah crowned himself king in 1736,

he set his sights on India's Mughal Empire.

Famously, he crushed the Mughal army near Delhi in just three hours.

And now the Persian Empire reached its greatest territorial extent

since the days of her pre-Islamic kings.

Nader Shah returned to Iran with vast amounts of booty.

Here he sits on the legendary Mughal Emperor's Peacock Throne,

encrusted with jewels, including the fabulous Koh-i-Noor diamond,

later to be acquired by the British and set into the Royal Crown.

In India, Nader Shah is still very much regarded as a looter.

And I remember going to Delhi and being taken to see the site

of the disappeared Peacock Throne.

But here in his mausoleum, his weapons are treated with reverence.

And there's a view among historians, not just in Iran, that Nader Shah

in his prime came tantalisingly close to creating a unified

modern state,

one that could've rivalled Britain, France and America's empires

and transformed the future of the Middle East.

But that alternative future was not to be.

This is Nader's tomb in the city of Mashhad.

Tribute to his vaulting ambition and extraordinary success,

the heroic horseback statue crowns this brutalist

1950s granite mausoleum.

His death, however, was less than heroic.

Despite the plunder he brought back from India,

it was never enough to satisfy Nader Shah's thirst for war.

He bled the country dry.

And it's a great pity because a number of things

he was doing could have had far-seeing consequences.

Iranians, in modern terms, tend to remember all the good and glorious

things and ignore, rather conveniently,

all the rather brutal aspects,

of which there were many, unfortunately.

He became more and more cruel,

and in the end he was assassinated by his own people.

It was like a firework went off and it made a huge splash,

a huge display,

but there was no legacy,

just darkness.

After Nader Shah's assassination in 1747,

his rival generals fought over the spoils,

the Persian Empire slowly fell into decline and civil war,

setting the stage for European colonial penetration.

From being a confident culture

that somehow always got the better of its conquerors,

Persia became a plaything of imperial powers

like Britain and Russia.

Iran was slowly transformed from a proud, independent nation

into a buffer state, as Britain and Tsarist Russia battled it out

for domination.

Isfahan, Iran's once great jewelled capital city, declined.

The bazaars and streets fell silent.

Throughout the chaos, the civil war and intervention by imperial powers,

what survived of old Persia was the language itself

and the literature to which it gave birth.

These ancient words, stories and poems became an emotional home

for Iranians, a place where Persian culture endured.

The stories of poets and writers like Saadi, Hafez and Ferdowsi

were kept alive in the teahouses throughout Iran

by storytellers who brought to life the tales of Persia's ancient past.

Sipping their tea,

smoking their pipes,

Iranians were reminded of better times,

when Iranian kings ruled much of the ancient world.

HE SINGS

The tradition of storytelling remains alive to this day.

At this teahouse in Tehran,

people have come to listen to a story from the Shahnameh.

The story of Bijan and his doomed love affair with the daughter

of an enemy king.

It's one of many origin myths that populate the Shahnameh.

Morality tales about characters who are not only the cause of their own

downfall, but their kingdoms' too.

The last shah was called Mohammad Reza Shah.

His rule eerily mirrors the fate of many of Ferdowsi's flawed kings.

What follows is a tale of pride and overreaching ambition.

In 1967, Mohammad Reza crowned himself king of kings -

a statement to his subjects that he was possessed by royal farr.

Royal farr, according to Ferdowsi, is the divine thumbs-up

all great Persian kings must possess.

I have this firm belief that I have a mission to accomplish.

And I believe in God.

This is what...

This is why I say I think that I have a divine command

of doing what I'm doing.

Mohammad Reza Shah saw himself as the final product

of 2,500 years of unbroken Persian monarchy.

He genuinely believes that this is his mission - to see himself

as a new Cyrus, I suppose.

Mohammad Reza Shah wanted

the world to know about the king who is buried here.

Way before the Mongol and Islamic invasions,

it was Cyrus the Great who forged the first Persian Empire

in 559 BC.

2,500 years later, in 1971, Mohammad Reza Shah hosted

a parade to celebrate the anniversary of the Persian Empire,

and to directly associate his reign with Cyrus.

The event was broadcast live around the world

and even made into a feature film.

Cyrus, the founder of Persian culture

and the father of Iran,

the land five times the size of Great Britain,

which this Shah rules today.

In 1971, you know, the Shah goes in front of the tomb

of Cyrus the Great and praises him and says, you know,

"Sleep easy, everything's going to be OK."

It's a political mistake.

I mean, what he should really be doing is paying more attention,

in some ways, to the narratives of the Shahnameh.

Since it was written, Persia's shahs had always allied themselves

with the Shahnameh.

Instead, along with a pantomime-style parade,

Mohammad Reza Shah hosted the biggest party

the world had ever seen.

In attendance, kings, queens, heads of state

and even an emperor.

They drank 5,000 bottles of champagne,

consumed a ton of caviar,

and were fed by more than 160 chefs

flown in from Paris.

It's like Oedipus in Sophocles' play.

You feel like saying, "No, no, don't do that. Don't do that.

"It's a bad idea."

And he still goes ahead and does it.

There were very few Persians actually invited

to the event itself.

We know that the food was all imported from France,

together with the porcelain.

It was actually very un-Iranian.

When they weren't being entertained or feasting, the Shah's guests

were accommodated in luxury tents - a reminder of the itinerant

tented court of the Achaemenid kings.

Today, the skeleton of the tent city still stands,

preserved by the desert climate.

Testament to the scale of his lavish dreams.

The whole thing backfired.

Costing more than £140 million,

the event came to be seen as proof of the excess and extravagance

of the Shah's dynasty in its final years.

Reza had completely misunderstood Persia's history.

In trying to impress foreign powers with a fabricated connection

to ancient kings,

he'd ignored the powerful forces that bonded ordinary Iranians.

Mohammad Reza Shah's twisted projection of royal power

played right into the hands of his arch-critic.

The Shia spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.

CROWD CHANT

As the Shah was making these statements about his right

to be the successor of Cyrus,

Khomeini was thundering from Najaf about how un-Islamic

and, in many ways, un-Persian

this adoration of the pagan past really was.

We'd never want to say that the Persepolis celebrations of 1971

was the cause of the Iranian revolution...

..but it didn't help the Shah.

Opposition to the Shah spread.

And in December 1978,

millions took to the streets of Tehran demanding his abdication.

The following month, Mohammad Reza left the country,

never to return.

His fall from grace was reminiscent of those kings in the Shahnameh

who fell prey to pride and ambition.

Mohammad Reza Shah should have heeded the advice

to be found in its pages.

The Shahnameh was, after all, a handbook for kings.

In the decades that followed, Iran's challenges multiplied.

Islamic revolution,

a bloody eight-year war with Iraq,

and economic sanctions imposed by the West.

To this day, Iranians seek refuge from the present

in their art, their poetry and their literature.

Persian culture, the unifying force that binds the people of Iran,

the culture that has shaped our world.