Braindroppings

This sounds like some sort of inside joke. :) Perhaps it would make sense if I were Iranian.

Did you watch any of the Alexander the Great documentary on the History Channel this week? I have seen parts of it. I learned that one evening while Alexander was drunk, he decided to burn down Persepolis. In the morning, after sobering up, he was sorry for what he had done! It makes me wonder, did anything positive come out of all of Alexander's conquesting? Or, was his life's work just a net loss for all of humanity?

Hey David. Well, it's not exactly an inside joke, it is just a take on the fact that in Iran, history has been more an element of propaganda and even today, many "scholars" still tend to present history as such.

On the Alexander documentries. No, sorry that I missed them, too busy with stuff. As for his Persepolis act. I am not quite sure of that is completely real or somehow a myth. Persepolis was inhabited for some centuries after that. I would tend to think that the fire was more of a limited affair (maybe the Tachara and Hadish palaces on the south-eastern wing) but the rest was kept for sometimes after.

As for any positive results of Alexander's campaign. Getting away from Greek nationalism and Iranian defensive nationalism, my answer would be no. Alexander's campaigns (I think some of them are not real) did not have any positive outcomes. Of course, if you like, the actions of his successors (Seleucus, Antipater, and Ptolemy) had greater impacts, establishing Hellenism in the Near East for a good 500 years and creating a wonderful multi-cultural environment that was very important in the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. So, we might be able to credit Alexander with starting the process.

well, richard frye himself has made not a small amount of propagandistic (is that a word?) contributions to discourses about Iranians and Iranian history.

I just finished reading Frye's "The Golden Age of Persia". I thought it was a compelling and well reasoned perspective on the islamization of Iran and how the pre-Islamic Iranian culture was preserved. I'm curious to know what is your take on his analysis? I think his argument for how Iranians came to accept islam is pretty solid, but the argument that Persian culture migrated from west to east with the Arab conquerers and then got reintroduced to the west (or at least preserved in the west) by the Seljuks, felt less solid. What do think?

Well, I first would like Niki to qualify her assertion.

On the second question, I actually think his theory on the eastwards migration of Iranian culture is valid, but I would tend to think of the re-introduction to be more due to the Samanids.