The Great King and His Men

Suddenly the Queen shot a look across at me. . . . For an instant we had eye contact and I thought with utter horror, ‘Oh no! She’s going to talk to me!’ I wanted the ground to swallow me. . . . Why should one individual have this capacity to strike awe? I have interviewed presidents and prime ministers, murderers, and generals - even, once, a living god (the Dalai Lama. . .). What was it about this diminutive grandmother that induced paralysing tension? ‘Majesty’ is one of those words almost meaningless through its overuse. It is part of the explanation, perhaps. The uniqueness of a king or queen has something to do with it - there is only one of them. (Jeremy Paxman, On Royalty, 2006: 45)

Between 12 and 16 October 1971, Mohammad Reza Shah, the last Pahlavi monarch of Iran, held an international gathering of heads of state in the ruins of the Achaemenid palace city of Persepolis to celebrate what he regarded as the anniversary of 2,500 years of unbroken rule by the Persian monarchy. Criticised at the time (and by generations since) for its extravagant hubris, for the Shah the Persepolis celebrations confirmed his belief that he was ruling as the direct descendant of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the first Persian Empire.

However, in his commitment to the Persepolis celebrations, the Shah managed to ignore centuries of Islamic rule in Iran, provoking contempt from many Iranians and outpourings of scorn from Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah and brought a swift and crushing end to the monarchy itself. ‘Islam came in order to destroy these palaces of tyranny’, the Ayatollah insisted as he contemplated the ruins of Persepolis from his exile in Iraq: ‘It is the kings of Iran who have constantly ordered massacres of their own people and had pyramids built with their skulls’ (see Milani 2011 for Khomeini’s reaction to the Shah’s anniversary celebrations).

The Iranian monarchy continues to have a hold on the public consciousness within the Islamic Republic of Iran, and whether the past kings of Iran are deplored or ridiculed, exalted or revered, there is no denying that the depth of history embodied in the institution of the Iranian monarchy is still overwhelming. Mohammad Reza Shah believed in the ancient Iranian concept of a demi-mythical force wherein God bestowed upon the kings of Iran a mystical light (farr-t tzadt) that legitimised their rule. This notion of farr persisted in Iran for thousands of years and some might argue that it continues to influence Iranian concepts of leadership in the modern Islamic Republic. Even without a monarchy, it would seem that monarchic ideology still structures, moulds, and underpins contemporary Iranian society. This chapter explores the deep-set fundaments of that ideology and examines the Achaemenid origins of Iranian governance.