DARIUS: - Coins bearing his visage are found in the Americas but we would never expect to see normal academic overviews mention this for public consideration. And I was not surprised when I read many other things about Aryans and supposed first Empires, as I read the following part of a far larger presentation. Was the US support of the Shah connected to a larger and long term plan to manage the plebs or serfs who think they are free?

"Cyrus recognized that the "known world" he wished to conquer included Egypt, Carthage, Ethiopia, and Greek colonies on the Mediterranean coast as far as Gibraltar, but for the time being he thought he had better seize the known world to the east (except for distant, legendary China). In about a year he took lands as far away as what are now the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He rushed west again and fell upon Babylon by diverting the unfordable Gyndes River, a tributary of the Tigris which protected the city, into many shallow hand-dug channels. There he freed the forty thousand Jews held in the Babylonian captivity. A few years later, putting down a revolt in the east, Cyrus died in battle. His troops brought his body back to Pasargadae, and laid it to rest in the tomb with the Nordic roof. {N.B.}

Cyrus was not only the world's first great emperor; he was a humane man, who treated his victims benevolently, honored their gods, and set higher standards for the profession of kingship than most other monarchs down through the centuries. His son and successor, by contrast, was a brute who had earlier kicked his pregnant wife to death. He adored flattery, not blinking even when a courtier told him, 'I do not think you are the equal of your father, because you do not have a son like the son he left behind.' Nevertheless, before he mysteriously committed suicide, he managed to capture Egypt and pack the pharaoh back to Iran. Upon his death, according to Herodotus, the seven young nobles who formed the imperial council met and agreed to accept as king him among them whose horse should neigh first at dawn the next day. One groom made sure that his master would win by providing a delectable, neigh-worthy mare for the stallion. In this way the noble named Darius became king, although his own account of his ascent, which he left engraved on stone, differs in ways that do not make nearly as good a story.

Whatever the truth, Darius turned out to be second only to Cyrus as 'Great King, King of Kings,' and even more than Cyrus, the architect of the Persian Empire. Despite his chance choice, Darius had the royal blood of Achaemenes in his veins, for he descended from a collateral branch of the family. Darius ruled for thirty-five years, at first putting down rivals (he fought nineteen battles at the rate of nearly a battle a month, and defeated nine upstart kinglets), then giving the empire the institutions that Cyrus had been too busy to devise. He had to keep the subject populations contented enough not to revolt (for the conquered masses greatly outnumbered the ruling Persians), but disciplined enough to pay heavy taxes to support the court and the armies." (2)

He established a secret spy network not unlike his far later relative and recent King, the Shah of Iran; but he also established a reliable postal service not unlike the Pony Express that Herodotus was inspired to write the words now used as the motto of the US Postal Service. We have all heard it and wondered perhaps, why we are not told the origin bespeaks great things in other cultures.

"? Sir Roger Stevens to write, in The Land of the Great Sophy: 'There can be no proper understanding of what underlies modern Iran unless we recognize the significance of this triumph of legend over history, or art over reality, this preference for embellishment as against unvarnished fact, for ancient folk beliefs as against new-fangled creeds.'" (3)

Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press
Guest 'expert' at World-Mysteries.com