Word: persia
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...hoofs of the fast-moving Osmanli cavalry first sounded on the European shores of the Dardanelles in 1354. In 1453, under Mohammed the Conqueror, the Osmanlis took Constantinople and overran the Bal kans. Selim the Grim (1512-20) took Syria and Egypt. Suleiman the Magnifi cent (1520-66) conquered Persia and Hungary, got as far as the gates of Vienna before retiring to consolidate his conquests...
According to German Philosopher Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West), civilizations are born and die like human beings, their average life-span about 1,500 years. One crusty old civilization that lived longer than Spengler's average was Persia's. In 4000 B. C. Persia got started. The Greeks and Romans, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, came & went, and still Persia was going strong. Not until the 18th Century, after some 6,000 continuous years of art, culture and prosperity, did Persia finally bite the dust. Even then it was European commercial competition, more than...
...course of this cultural marathon Persia had ups & downs. She was conquered successively by the Greeks, Arabs and Mongols; she was sideswiped by nearly every artistic bandwagon that rumbled through Europe and Asia. But though her artists copied Genghis Khan's Chinese painters, Greek sculpture and the primitives of 14th-Century Italians, they made their Persian versions as characteristically Persian as an Isfahan carpet. The Persians concentrated on decoration, distorted their figures and landscapes into semi-abstract patterns, prized neatly filled space more than neatly copied nature...
When he went to Persia in 1925, the graduating class at Teheran University asked him to make a speech on philosophy. Instead, he told them about Persia's own glorious artistic past. The young Persians, who knew more about Henry Ford than they did about Darius, were surprised. Pope was asked to do it again before the Cabinet. The Prime Minister, who became the Shah that year, was so impressed that he gave Pope permission to ransack the art treasures of the country. Pope, sometimes disguised as a Moslem convert, has photographed and collected art works in every part...
...display went a 4th-Century Sasanian palace hall, the like of which does not exist even in its native Persia; a mandapam (pillared hall) from a Vishnu temple which Philadelphia Socialite Adeline Pepper Gibson spirited out of India by junk in 1912; a lofty Ming hall from Peking, "the finest single architectural unit ever to leave China"; a dozen other galleries. All 15 were crowded with a superb collection of Oriental art that ranged from Persian rugs to Japanese prints...