300

The "300" is now on screens. 300 Spartans defeating the huge Iranian army of hundreds of thousands. Can anybody believe that such a feat is possible? Of course not in real world.

But in a world where there were no media, radio and TV and papers, anybody could write anything they wanted and boast as much as they wanted about their great achievements. There were no checks and balances. There were no records kept, no photos, no videos, no journalists. It was easy to claim you have seen miracles, prophets, mythical warriors. And if all around you are surrounded by your own tribe who wants to believe and pride themselves with their achievements, you can even claim more.

Imagine for a moment that George Bush claims that he conquered Iraq with only 300 brave American soldiers against 300,000 Iraqi special forces, he can never write a history book with this claim. Media will eat him alive if he ever boasts about this. But in the Greece of 500 BC you could get away with it. And then if these books later were absorbed and made into foundations of a civilization(western civilization) the claims would be widely accepted in that civilization.

The problem is, nobody has asked what the enemy wrote about the same event. Unfortunately the Persian history books, were all wiped out and burnt during the Arab and later invasions. There was not even one book saved from the devastating Arab conquest, so we don’t know much about Persia before the Arab invasion. If the books were not burnt, then we would have had the other side of the story at least and how the Persians looked at that incident.

My take is that: Imagine the most powerful empire of our time, US, sends a few of its forces to Somalia for peacekeeping because groups in Somalia has asked it to send the forces and stop the civil war. It is not a force of hundreds of thousands, but a few thousand. Somalia does not have anything to draw the empire in, no oil, no minerals, no technology, it is a backward primitive land of tribes fighting each other forever. Now after a short period the empire understands it has made a mistake sending even that little force there, it is wasting money and resources on a land and people which is not worth it. It calls them back.

Now imagine Somalian historians later write books and claim that a few hundred Somalians had defeated a force of hundreds of thousands of Americans and kicked then out. The empire does not care about those books. The empire does not even notice somebody has written such a book, the empire has its own history and its own important matters. Now imagine in an atomic holocaust the whole US civilization, all the books, the library of congress and everything is burnt. Nothing, not even one book is saved and the empire is no more. After a thousand years, the only books that remain are the history books written in the Somalia and now we have a civilization in Africa that traces its roots to Somalia. Now what everybody will believe in that civilization is that, yes, a few hundred Somalians really defeated the main forces of the US empire thousands of years ago.

For Persians, the same thing happened. Greece was a mountainous faraway land like today’s Afghanistan, full of warring tribes, without any riches to attract the empire to its gates. They had some goats and a little olive oil and some small towns here and there. No empire in its sane mind would care to even contemplate wasting its forces to conquer such a land. Greece was located far away from the centre, on the vicinity of the empire, inhospitable and poor and not at all enticing. From time to time they had to be dealt with to stop them from sending small pirate missions to Asia minor cities, that was it. Persian empire never cared about Greece. But, for Greeks it was completely different. Persia was the great power of its time and all they could think of was the huge riches of that empire. They fought for that empire from time to time as mercenaries and tried to take part in the trade.

So the story of 300 is just what it is. Only a story, told by uncontested historians that did not have to deal with checks and balances of modern academia and could write virtually any nonsense they wanted. And the counter-history, the history books of Persia, were all burnt down and turned into smoke during the Arab invasion, so we don’t know how the other side saw it. Perhaps no more than a small temporary military operation to calm down some warring tribes at the fringes of the empire. Like how Romans saw their affairs in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus Christ, not even one Roman historian has mentioned his name in their books, he was a non-entity for the empire.

footnote: just to finish it on a funny note, somebody wrote recently: ignore the whiners, they are just a bunch of pussy Athenians!