Iran Untold: 20 Stories Never Written in English
The fall of a civilization and the making of a border, recovered from Persian and Arabic sources that English-language history has left untranslated.
In November 636, the last great army of Zoroastrian Iran met an Arab force at al-Qadisiyya. Three days of fighting, then a night of combat conducted in total darkness, then a sandstorm at dawn blowing straight into Sasanian faces. The general Rostam Farrokhzad, who had argued against fighting the battle at all, was killed and beheaded. The royal standard was carried to Medina, stripped of its jewels, and the leather thrown away. Fifteen years later the last king of kings was murdered in a watermill outside Merv, over a purse holding a thousand dirhams. He was twenty-seven.
On August 23, 1514, a shah whose followers believed bullets could not harm him ordered cavalry against two hundred Ottoman cannon. Ismail I had refused a night attack: "I am not a caravan-thief." Roughly three hundred men rallied around him by evening. He never commanded an army again.
The frontier fixed that day is still the Turkey-Iran border. This book tells the reader why.
Iran Untold: 20 Stories Never Written in English is Book 5 of Untold Histories - documented military and civil history, one nation per volume, recovered from primary sources and told as narrative.
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