Did your teachers spend time bad-mouthing Iranian culture??? All I got was that Persia was one of those ancient empires like Assyria and Babylonia that were big for a while and then gone. If you were Iraqi, I suppose you'd be arguing that there ought to have been blocks of time allocated to explaining the Assyrian and Babylonian influences on succeeding cultures.
Ethics is important enough, of course, that OTHER PEOPLE HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THE SUBJECT WITHOUT EVER HEARD OF "ZOROASTER". I get tired of you thinking that people only got notions of right and wrong because Iranians showed them how: you are just being silly. I can't think of any ethical thinker in the West, not one, who was influenced by Zoroastrianism: Nietzche's Also Sprach Zarathustra uses the name in a purely arbitrary way; nothing that he says has anything to do with real Zoroastrianism.
I guess that is what it sounded like I was saying, but this reminds me of that movie "The Day After Tomorrow" where the world was freezing over and the one guy didn't want to throw away the bible because according to him it was the source for ethics. Something along those lines. And that just makes me sick especially when I know what I know about Zoroaster and his influence on the Bible.
Alexander is of great historical importance because he successfully imposed Greek language and culture as the main medium of expression in a large region for an extended period of time, with the result that Greek stories and ideas remain pervasive in Western literature even thousands of years later. References to anything from Persia are exceedingly rare by comparison.
And I am tired of your pretence that "human rights" had anything to do with the Persian imperial regime, which had no concept of individual rights whatsoever. The system whereby communities were largely controlled by their local religions (which no individual had a right to opt out of) is much more like the millet system of Ottoman Turkey, in which you were assigned at birth to some particular subsect of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism which determined what family laws (inheritance, marriage, divorce etc.) you were subject to, and even what criminal and contract law applied, if the victim or other party were of the same millet. This is still in place in much of the Middle East: on another board Muslimwoman wondered whether it will finally become legal to list "Bahai" as your religion on your ID in Egypt, and I asked why religion had to be on legal papers at all: she explained that it still controls family law.
An Arab from Dubai (which hardly has a reputation as an arch-Islamist country) asked me what religion I was, and rather than go into my vaguely Buddhistic ideology, I told him "none" and he couldn't believe me: "But everybody has to have a religion! What were your parents?" and I told him my parents weren't really believers of any kind either, so he decided that I must be a Jew, and embarrassed to tell an Arab so, and he assured me that it was all right if I was a Jew; I told him no, I have no Jews in my ancestry as far back as I can trace, and that my great-grandparents were mostly Presbyterian, though that wasn't handed down. He didn't know what "Presbyterian" was, but was satisfied when told it was a kind of Christian. In the Middle East of course, you can't be a "Protestant" Christian, or a "Mormon", only a Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox or Coptic or Armenian or Nestorian Christian; the list is fixed as of the time the Ottomans took over. This is why "Bahai" and "Ahmadiyya" are not options: not because they are rejected as heretical and persecuted in their lands of origin, since many rival Islamic sects that consider each other heretical are recognized religions; it is just because they are new.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here too, because maybe every westerner has kept on telling themselves that Alexander was important like that, but I, personally, don't think he was as big as people make him out to be. I will give him this. He swept through Persia, though it was on the decline, and overran the establishment in a short time. But he's empire was not the first of its kind, a world-empire, multicultural, not as large as the Persian Empire at its greatest extent, very short lived in contrast to the Persian Empire, and I revere "Freedom of Religion" much more than I do anything that Alexander achieved even if the rest of the Persian establishment was not altruistic. It was a novel idea for for its time.
As far as you're personal experience, are you trying to say that the Muslims are not tolerant of other religions?
And that's it? They are two examples of the "Abrahamic" type of religion, and nothing about the content?
Actually, there was content. Abraham is content. I recall the story of how Mohammad received the Koran.
Again: the stories in Homer etc. come up in Western literature ALL THE TIME, Firdousi's stories NEVER.
Homer comes up in Western literature all the time because Homer is taught in schools. Most people don't know about Homer other than from what they learn about in schools or directly from Homer. If their going to teach Homer in English they should definitely teach the Gathas in English and point out all the parallels to the Abrahamic philosophical and religious heritage. That would be awesome.
You were claiming Iranian tribes as the source of those names. Sarmatians were the Slavic-speakers whom the Iranians oppressed. The "Serbi" are described by Ptolemy as living out on the Volga (they did not migrate to the Balkans until 8th century AD), further east than the power of the Royal Scyths probably ever extended, so these particular Slavs were never even ruled by Iranians as far as we know.
I thought the Sarmations were Iranian speakers?
What??? People in the Roman empire may have had many reasons for not liking the Sassanid king, and the Roman emperors themselves of course had no intention whasoever of submitting to the Sassanid king.
I don't really want to push this one, but why would the people in the Roman empire not have liked the Sassanid king, because he was Sassanid and not Roman? But it was alright that they adopt a religion that no doubt drew from the religion of the Sassanids.
