Travel in Tehran - Iran - History - WorldTravelGate.net®-

Evidence of Neanderthal Man, who lived 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, was found by American archaeologist Carlton Coon, and there are many signs of the Stone Age men of 15,000 years ago. At that time, an ice age in Europe and North America, Iran was a verdant, forested land of tumbling rivers whose waters emptied into inland seas that filled what are now the central deserts (shells and fossil fish are often found there). At length the rivers built fertile alluvial plains into the seas, and the hunters and berry-gatherers came down from the mountains to live on the meat of the animals that grazed in the new savannahs. After several millenniums, the women among these peoples learned not only to harvest wild emmer, the ancestor of wheat, but also to save seeds gathered in the fall and plant them in the spring. The arrival of agriculture heightened the need for storage; pottery, the archaeologists' main source of clues to prehistoric life, came into use. By the fifth millennium B.C., the villagers of what is now western Iran knew basketry (as basket designs on vases show), textile making (as clay spindles show), and cosmetics (as pestles and mortars show). The artefacts found with this pottery, in such digs as Roman Ghirshman's excavation of the ancient village of Siyalk, 110 miles south of Teheran, included flint knives, polished axes, shell necklaces, bone tool handles carved like the head of a gazelle, and, as the Stone Age drew to an end, objects of hammered copper. Families buried their dead under the hearths of their rammed-earth houses, a mere foot below the floor.

Sumerian city-states were founded about 3500 B.C.), and India (which built an urban civilization in the Indus valley about 2700 B.C.). Slowly the aboriginal Iranians developed the plow, the brick, the potter's wheel, and the casting of copper. They domesticated the sheep. But the ever harsher drought, drying up rivers and the inland sea itself in the gradual process of reducing Iran to the land that it is today, kept the population sparse and scattered, preventing widespread urbanization, which always and everywhere is the key to cultural greatness. Excavations since 1970, led by Harvard archaeologist Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, show that a sizable city, centred on a monumental building, existed at Tapeh Yahya, southeast of Kerman, perhaps as early as 4500 B.C.; and the future may bring other such discoveries among the innumerable mounds that in Iran bespeak once inhabited sites. But only when these people moved down from the Zagros Mountains to Iran's south western plain (now Khuzistan), which is a natural extension of Mesopotamia, did they build a major city, Susa, and the nation for which Susa was the capital, Elam. With that development, about 2500 B.C., this predecessor country of modern Ira n initiated its two thousand years on the world stage as an advanced civilization, centuries ahead of Crete and Mycenae (2000 B.C.), Anatolia (1800 B.C.), China (1500 B.C.), Phoenicia (1300 B.C.), and the Hebrews (1200 B.C.).

In the year 336 B.C., two princes came to power, one in Persia and one in Greece, one a poltroon and one an innate hero. The Persian was Darius III, the temperamental opposite of his daring-do namesake. The Greek was twenty-year-old Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon. Most of Persia's battles during the history of the empire had been struggles with Greece, a formidable civilization unable to win wars because its city-states would not unite and fight together. To Alexander and most Greeks, Persia was the historic, dangerously powerful enemy. But Alexander went to war with four new assets: his own confidence and will power; a united Macedonia behind him; foot soldiers loyal directly to him; and an elite, devoted cavalry recruited from the nobility. Crossing the Hellespont in 334 B.C., Alexande r first routed Persian troops at Issus (near modern Turkey's Alexandretta), where Darius fled, well before the battle was decided, leaving behind his mother, wife, and children. Alexander detoured to conquer Egypt and found Alexandria (he ultimately gave his own name to seventeen cities). He returned and backed the Persians up against the Zagros foothills of modern Iraq, where Darius again fled the field. The Greek then undertook a leisurely looting of Darius's capitals, Susa and Ecbatana, and of Persepol is. Since Alexander was not in the habit of destroying captured cities, scholars think he may have been out of his mind with drink when he burned Persepolis; in any case, the place must have been devastated after the Greeks seized treasure (including 5,50 0 tons of silver) that according to Plutarch required 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels to remove. Alexander finally caught up to Darius in 330 B.C. on the Iranian plateau about 150 miles east of modern Teheran; but the last Achaemenian had just been killed b y his own men. Seven years later, Alexander, too, died, in bed, at Babylon, never having returned to his birthplace. A few sheets of paper covered with the squiggles of Persian script -this was what touched off the avalanche that, growing monthly, carried the Shah of Iran in one year from seemingly invincible absolute monarch to dethroned exile.

Who wrote the artic le is not known; it could have been Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi himself, or someone under his instructions. Toward the end of 1977, the paper passed under the sombre and thoughtful eyes of the minister of court, Amir Abbas Hoveyda. He no doubt reflected o n the consequences were the paper to be published. As the first glimmer of dawn lit the misty horizon on the morning of August25, 1941, the HMS Shoreham trained her forward gun battery on the Iranian warship Palang, which was moored peacefully at an Abadan pier. A moment later, a shell slammed into the Palang, the explosion engulfing the vessel in a ball of fire and smoke. As the listing warship settled into the river mud, British and Soviet armies stormed across Iran's borders-commencing perhaps the most dramatic and controversial untold episode of World War II.

Attacked without provocation, neutral Iran suffered her own "Pearl Harbor" three months prior to the United States' more famous Day of Infamy. Iran's army was crushed, her monarch was overthrown, the beleaguered Red Army was saved from defeat, a German conquest of the Persian Gulf oil fields was thwarted, and the conditions were created for the opening showdown of the Cold War... Few incidents of World War II relate more directly to the current crisis in the Persian Gulf than those described in this book. Sunrise at Abadan explains how -- more by accident than -- design the Anglo-Soviet invasion drew the United States deeply and inextricably into the affairs of Iran.

Sunrise at Abadan is intended as a scholarly rendition and analysis of these events and the attendant moral issues. In addition, the compelling political and human drama of this episode requires some portrayal to understand its mora significance...

Churchill viewed the issue as a simple choice: thwarting Nazi world conquest versus scrupulously observing international convention... The Prime Minister knew that he would require at least the tacit approval of President Franklin D. Roosevelt before attacking Iran. Roosevelt could have invoked U.S. moral authority and economic power to avert the Allied invasion. But instead, his administration stood by passively, brushing aside desperate Iranian pleas until it was too late. Moreover, Roosevelt even secretly approved the plans against Iran, only to later publicly deny any knowledge of British intentions.

Certainly publication could bring trouble to Hoveyda's rival, Jamshid Amuzegar, the prime minister. Hoveyda sent the article to Dariush Homayun, head of the sinister Ministry of Information, which had power to compel newspapers to print whatever th e ministry sent them.

Once a foe of the Shah, Homayun had joined the ranks of the many bright people whom the Shah co-opted by the offer of high office. He passed the article to ETELAAT (information), one of Teheran's two major dailies.

Published by Etelaat on January 7, 1978, the article was an attack on a man named Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shah's most dangerous political opponent. Khomeini is an ayatollah, the highest rank of the mullahs, and the priests of the Shiite Moslem faith, which prevails in Iran.

When copies of Etelaat reached Qom, Khomeini's former home and the theological centre of Iran, five thousand devout Moslems gathered in a large mosque to protest the article. Emerging, the crowd ran into a hail of pistol and submachine-gun fire from policemen, which killed scores. Afterward, police prevented people from donating blood to the wounded, and more died in hospitals. Qom's Ayatollah Sayad Ghassem Shariatmadari called the shooting "un-Islamic and inhumane" and predicted "Almighty God will in time punish those responsible."

In Islam, the fortieth day after a death is set aside for commemoration of the dead. Mourning for the dead in Qom brought riots and new killings, and mourning for the latest victims forty days later brought another explosion, this time in Tabriz. Mobs stormed banks, stores, government offices, and movie theatres that remained open in defiance of the clergy's call for a strike to commemorate the victims at Qom. The provincial government sent tanks into the streets, and killed about a hundred demonstrators. The Shah, for the first time sensing a need to make a concession, purged the governor general of the province and other officials blamed for ordering troops to fire at the mob. But forty days later, riots burst out again in fifty-five towns and cities, leading to another bloody explosion forty days after that.