纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 026奥克瑟斯战车模型（1）

026： EPISODE 26 - Oxus chariot model奥克瑟斯战车模型

Oxus chariot model (made almost 2,500 years ago). Gold - from the Ancient Persian Empire

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 superpower of two and a half thousand years ago: Persia.

"This was an empire that was run on a rather different principle to previous empires - which were really based on might being right." (Michael Axworthy)

"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." (Tom Holland)

We are about 70 miles north of Shiraz, Iran, and the low camel-coloured hills have opened out into a flat windy plain. It's 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's cell. It dominates the entire landscape. It is 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 - for ever.