Esther and Xerxes - A Cross-Cultural Love Story

Tomb of Esther and Mordecai
Photo by Philippe Chavin

On a quiet street in Hamadan, a sprawling city in the foothills of Iran’s Alvand mountains, stands an unassuming monument to Biblical history. It is a crudely fashioned brick building with a domed tower rising awkwardly at one end. The sand-colored structure has no adornment except for two diamond-shaped patterns on the side of the dome, made of turquoise-colored tile. And yet this odd little building is reputed to house the final resting place of two beloved Old Testament figures: Queen Esther, the second wife of Persia’s King Xerxes (486–465), and Mordecai, Esther’s older cousin and guardian.

Of course, there is a story attached to this holy site, and it begins with a big party. King Xerxes had been drinking a little too much wine when he ordered his queen, Vashti, to display her beauty in front of all his male friends. She refused and in a rage, he cast her aside and went looking for a new queen.

Xerxes replaced Vashti with a Jewish orphan named Esther, who’d been raised by her cousin , Mordecai, after her parents died. This cousin had earned favor with the king when he’d overheard two guards plotting to murder Xerxes. Naturally, Mordecai went straight to the monarch with the news and was rewarded with many royal favors, not least of which was to become Xerxes’s cousin-in-law. Nevertheless, neither Esther nor Mordecai told the king that they were Jewish and not Persian.

Not everyone was happy with the king’s new marital situation. Haman, a powerful royal adviser, became enraged when Mordecai refused to bow down before him. (And why should the Mordecai do so? He’s now related to the king.) In his rage, Haman hatches a plot to kill not just the queen’s recalcitrant cousin, but all Jews in Persia. He casts lots to determine which day would be the most auspicious time for a massacre.

The sharp-eared Mordecai again uncovered the plot. But this time, instead of going straight to the king, he asked Esther to use her influence with her husband to prevent the calamity. However, Persia had a law at the time that prevented anyone from approaching the king unbidden on pain of death. Apparently, this law also applied to the Queen. But Esther overcame her fear of breaking this law and asked her husband if he could grant her a favor.

“You may have anything you wish,” Xerxes told her, not at all enraged that she’d approached him without permission. “Even if it is half my kingdom.”

All Esther asked for was a banquet, to be held for her, the king, and Haman. At a second banquet some time later, she revealed the plot to kill the Jews as well as her own Jewish faith. (I’m not entirely sure why she needed two banquets to get the job done, but apparently she had her reasons.) Outraged by the revelation, Xerxes ordered Haman to be hanged on the same gallows the man had erected for Mordecai.

Jews today celebrate their deliverance from the impending massacre with the festival of Purim, named after the lots Haman had drawn to determine the day on which the deed was to take place. (Pur means “lot” in Hebrew.) And they revere Esther for having the courage to face possible death so as to save her people.

This story raises questions in my mind. Why didn’t Mordecai go straight to Xerxes and ask him to save the Jews? Why did Esther fear for her life when it’s clear that the king loved her so much he was willing to grant her half his kingdom? Wouldn’t a wife have known that? And why was Esther buried next to her cousin and guardian and not near her husband, the king?

In fact, no one knows for sure if Esther and Mordecai really are buried in the unassuming, brick shrine in Hamadan. No archaeological studies have been conducted on the remains. What’s more, the village of Kfar Baram in northern Israel also claims to be the place where Esther is buried. Yet many scholars do not believe that Esther existed in the first place but is merely the central figure in a Biblical morality tale.

As for me, I like to think that the tomb of Esther and Mordecai is the real deal. I still remember the sense of wonder I felt on entering the plain, brick-walled shrine and finding myself inside the richly decorated inner sanctuary where the reflection from the red brocade cloths draped over the sarcophaguses created an ethereal glow in the soft light from an overhead chandelier. The place fits Esther’s story somehow, a rags-to-riches tale of intrigue, courage, and survival.

It’s also a love story, and a cross-cultural one at that. Xerxes would likely not have stopped the massacre out of the kindness of his heart, let alone execute his trusted advisor. But he adored his wife and, since she was Jewish, he wanted to save her people to please her. So maybe love does indeed conquer all.

Pony Express On The Silk Road

James Farley Building in New York

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

The above sentence is inscribed on the James Farley Post Office building in New York City, which opened its doors in 1914 and is now a registered historic site. Considering the inscription’s location, one might be forgiven for thinking it is a tribute to the diligence of American postal workers. But it’s not. The words were written 2,500 years ago by the Greek historian, Herodotus, who was expressing his admiration for the Persian empire’s mail couriers in the sixth century B.C.

The practice of sending messages through couriers probably began as soon as people started writing their thoughts down on physical media, but it was Cyrus the Great (600–530 B.C.), the founder of Persia’s Achaemenid dynasty, who invented the world’s first regular postal system. He’d organized his empire in the form of satrapies, provinces that were granted a certain amount of autonomy and could practice their own religions and customs, but always under Cyrus’s central authority.

To maintain this authority, Cyrus needed a way to exchange information with his satraps (governors), so he came up with a system of relay couriers (chapars) who could cross the empire swiftly and deliver important messages.

He calculated how far a chapar could ride in a day without stopping to feed or water his horse. At each point, Cyrus built a chapar-khaneh (courier house), a posting station where the courier could swap his exhausted mount for a fresh horse and continue on the next leg of the journey or hand his packet of letters on to another courier, relay-style.

Sound familiar? The Pony Express of the 1860s American West used the same principle of speedy horses and relay posts. It was certainly a practical way to get messages to their destinations in a world that lacked proper roads.

The third Achaemenid emperor, Darius I (550–486 BC), expanded Persia’s postal system, adding new routes as the empire grew. He built the Royal Road between his administrative seat at Susa (in present-day Iran) and Sardis, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia (in eastern Turkey).  The road enabled Darius to add horse-drawn carts, known as barids, to the chapar couriers and transport larger amounts of mail than a single horseman could carry.

Persia's Royal Road

A good chapar could cover the 1,600 miles of the Royal Road in seven to nine days, a journey that took three months on foot. As Herodotus wrote, “nothing mortal travels as fast as these Persian messengers.”

I doubt that the life of a chapar was as glamorous or heroic as Herodotus makes it sound. There had to be many hazards along the way as the couriers rode through treacherous mountain passes in the Zagros range, evaded bandits, and passed across desolate plains in Asia Minor. And what did they do if a horse went lame in the middle of nowhere, half a day’s journey to the next posting station? I hope Cyrus paid his couriers well. After all, these men risked their lives to deliver the empire’s precious mail.

The Sun Also Rises - Over the Lion of Persia

Tile on the wall of a hosseinieh in Kermanshah, Iran

When I go to Iran, I often feel like I'm drowning in symbolism. There are the usual Islamic and pre-Islamic symbols everywhere, from the four crescents framing a sword on the Islamic Republic’s flag to the fire-and-water representations I blogged about here. Sometimes, even conversations feel symbolic when I suddenly realize the topic I thought we were discussing turns out to be something entirely different, filled with hidden meaning.

One of the most striking Iranian symbols is the shir-o-khorsid: a lion defiantly gripping a sword in one paw, with the sun rising out of its back. It makes you stop and think, doesn't it? What does the ascending sun mean? And what's with the anthropomorphic image of an animal holding a human weapon? This is where history and symbolism come in.

The Lion and Sun symbol goes back centuries, perhaps even millennia. The first known instance of the image comes from a coin that dates to 333 B.C. and was struck to honor the governor of Babylon (which was once part of Persia). In this depiction, the sun rises over the lion, but the beast lacks a sword.

Safavid Flag

The emblem’s association with Persia began in the 14th century, during the Mongol-led Timurid dynasty. The rulers of this period brought the tradition of sun worship to Iran, where the lion had already been a symbol of Persian kingship, dating back to ancient times. Back then, the Achaemenid kings (550—330 BC) adorned their royal garments and ceremonial cloths with embroidered designs showing a lion, though without the sun rising out of its back. So the later Timurids just put the two ideas together and came up with an entirely new meaning.

The lion’s sword was added after the arrival of Islam, and the symbolism underwent a shift during the Safavid period (1502—1722). To the Safavids, who introduced the Shia branch of Islam to Iran, the sun came to represent Jamshid, the mythical founder of the Persian empire, while the lion symbolized Ali, the chosen successor to the Prophet Mohammed as Islam’s top religious leader (from the Shi’ite perspective, anyway). The monarchs of this dynasty saw themselves as both spiritual and political leaders of their people, so it makes sense that they would combine the kingship motif with a religious interpretation. The Safavid rulers were the first to put the Lion and Sun emblem on the national flag (although the background was entirely green, unlike the later tricolor of green, white, and red).

Qajar Lion and Sun

The symbolism underwent another shift during the Qajar dynasty (1785—1925). According to the Qajars, the lion represented Rostam, the hero of the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), a 10^th-century epic poem by Ferdowsi that recounts the heroic deeds of historical and mythical Persian rulers. In doing so, they lent the emblem a nationalist meaning, representing not only the monarchy but Iran itself as a political entity. The Qajars made a few other changes, too. They added a crown above the sun and decreed that the lion’s weapon represented Zulfiqar, the sword owned by Imam Ali.

The Pahlavis, who took power in 1925, kept the essential elements of the Qajars’ Lion and Sun, only they removed the face from the sun and changed the Qajar crown to one that more closely resembled their own. The nationalist symbolism remained until the 1979 Islamic Revolution (and is still embraced by some expatriate groups). The emblem adorned the Iranian national flag from 1965 to 1979.

After the Islamic Revolution, the clerics abolished the Lion and Sun, banning it as the symbol of the monarchy they had overthrown. They replaced the emblem on the flag with the current red crescent-and-sword design and removed the Lion and Sun from all public spaces – although they missed a few images, like this one on a mosque in Kashan:

Today, most Iranians agree that the Lion and Sun design represents the monarchy, and it has become a sign of defiance and opposition to the regime, even among those who don't wish to see the mullahs replaced by another shah. Which doesn’t mean that all those opposed to the Islamic Republic are eager to see the Lion and Sun back on their national flag. The debates over symbols can be as fierce as the ones over what political system people would like to see: a monarchy or a republic.

Pahlavi Flag

As a non-Iranian and free of the burdens of history, I can appreciate the Lion and Sun in a much more neutral way. I find the emblem rather pretty, and I like the idea that it is neither entirely pre-Islamic nor Islamic but has collected meaning and images from every historical period through which it passed. This motif should be a symbol of unity, not one of division. Maybe that day will still come.

Persia's Renaissance Man

Once a millennium or so, certain civilizations produce a genius who is so far ahead of his era I have to wonder whether time travel is possible after all. Fifteenth-century Italy produced Leonardo da Vinci, whose agile mind still impresses us five hundred years after his death. Eleventh-century Persia had its own Renaissance man in the form of Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina, a mouthful of a name that is thankfully often shortened to Ibn Sina or Abu Ali Sina. In the West, he is known by the Latinized version of his name: Avicenna.

Born in 980 A.D. in Afshana, a village near Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan (but part of the Persian Empire at the time), Avicenna had a thirst for knowledge that quickly outstripped the capabilities of his many tutors. He memorized the Koran by the age of 10, an accomplishment that earned him the title of Hafez (just like the great Persian poet of the same name).

Avicenna began studying medicine at the age of 16 and became a practicing physician at 18. His medical skill drew the attention of Nooh ibn Mansoor, the emir of the Persian Samanid Dynasty (whose capital was Bukhara). The emir suffered from a mysterious illness that baffled the royal physicians but proved to be no match for Avicenna’s skills. As payment for his successful services, the young doctor would accept no reward except access to the emir’s vast royal library. For a man with Avicenna’s insatiable curiosity, a library was worth far more than all the emir’s gold.

Trouble came in 999 when Turkish invaders booted the Samanids out of Bukhara, and Avicenna had to flee. He embarked on a series of wanderings through the Persian Empire that lasted the rest of his life. After short stays in various towns such as Nishapur (Eastern Iran), Merv (Turkmenistan), Gorgan (near the Caspian Sea), and Rey (just south of Tehran), he ended up for a longer period in Hamadan, where he became the court physician to the local ruler.

When political turmoil forced Avicenna to pack his bags once again, he fled to Isfahan and took another job as court physician. This nomadic life in no way interfered with Avicenna’s scholarship, for he wrote over 450 books, only half of which have survived. They cover a wide range of subjects, including geology, astronomy, mathematics, psychology, physics, and music. (Avicenna believed that music was conducive to healing.) As well as a scientist, he was an accomplished poet, writing in both Arabic and his native Persian.

The two works that form Avicenna’s greatest legacy are the Book of Healing, a scientific encyclopedia that covers logic as well as a range of medical and natural sciences, and the Canon of Medicine, a compendium of all medical knowledge available during Avicenna’s time, augmented by his own observations. The Canon, a huge, million-word volume, was used as a medical textbook at European universities for 700 years.

The Canon of Medicine in Persian

Due to these two impressive books, begun in Hamadan and completed in Isfahan, Avicenna is often called the “father of modern medicine.” In fact much of his approach to medicine, as documented in the Canon, would be familiar to us today. He recognized the contagious nature of certain illnesses, such as tuberculosis, and introduced the concept of quarantine to halt the spread of infectious disease. He discovered that alcohol kills germs and devised experimentation rules that still form the basis for clinical drug trials today (including the need to test new drugs on humans and not just animals). Avicenna also believed in the mind-body connection, hence his interest in the healing power of music.

Avicenna died of an intestinal disease in 1037 on a return trip to Hamadan, where he is buried. Iranians today view him as something of a national icon and one of the greatest Persians in history, a status I was able to observe first hand on a visit to Avicenna’s tomb several years ago. We arrived on a religious Shi’ite holiday (the birthday of the 12^th Imam), and the place was packed with Iranian tourists—entire families with children in tow. As the kiddies raced around the oddly shaped tower that sits atop the tomb, their parents unpacked picnic lunches and prepared to make a day of it.

Inside the mausoleum, the tone was reverent as people spoke in hushed tones and quietly read the inscriptions bordering the great man’s tombstone.

In addition to the tower (built in 1954 but modeled on a similar structure from Avicenna’s time), the complex includes a museum, a library, and an exhibit of medicinal herbs documented in the Canon of Medicine.

So the next time you pat antiseptic on a scrape or put on calming music to smooth away the day’s stress, think of all we owe to the inquiring mind of Persia’s Renaissance man.

And if you’d like to hear Avicenna speak about his life and work, check out this video where he reaches out to us over the space of a thousand years (as interpreted by the actor, Roger Worrod):