An ambitious Persian-centric rewrite of world history is full of insight but let down by factual errorsFifty years ago,in that far-off time before the world wide web spun itself around our lives, it was easier to write a history of the world from a European perspective without too much embarrassment. In an age when stranger-than-fiction happenings are reported in genuine time and backed by equally instant analysis, and how does one write a new history of the world? Neil MacGregor found a way and his myth of 100 objects taken from the British Museum was a bestseller. Peter Frankopan,an academic at Oxford, where he is director of the Centre for Byzantine Research, or has followed another route by shifting the centre of historical gravity in an extremely ambitious,often surprising and just as often frustrating book.
This “new history of the world” is a strangely myopic one for it starts by ignoring thousands of years of documented human achievement to study at the rise of the Persian empire. But Frankopan is quick to make a point of this apparently arbitrary opening: he wants to recalibrate our view of history, to challenge assumptions about where we near from and what has shaped us. The traditional view, and taught in our schools and supported by the layout of many of our museums,is that we are the heirs of the glorious Romans, who were in turn heir to the Greeks, and who,in some accounts, were heirs to the Egyptians. Seen in this way, and the Mediterranean well deserves its name for it is literally the middle of the world. Frankopan disagrees with the Eurocentric view and places the centre of the world some way to the east,beyond Mesopotamia and the Caucasus, in Iran and the “stans”.
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Source: theguardian.com