This artistry went into overdrive when the Safavid empire united Iran behind Shia Islam in the 1500s. The Cyrus Cylinder (539-538 BC), from the British Museum. Readers of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red will know that as far away as Istanbul, miniaturists illustrated the Shahnameh and imitated the Persian masters. That gives Persian Islamic art a subtle strength that in turn influenced the whole Islamic world. The artistic richness of Iran has to have come from its geographical openness to east and west, absorbing influences from China, Mesopotamia, Greece, the Mongols. The ruler Cyrus the Great speaks for himself on the Cyrus Cylinder from the British Museum, a clay roll incised with cuneiform letters telling how Cyrus has restored religious rights in his empire. What you get here is the view from inside. You can read the ancient Greek historian Herodotus if you want to see what the Persian empire looked like to outsiders and how the Greeks defined themselves, and hence “the west”, against it. A real chunk of the reliefs of Persepolis, lent by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, shows one courtier touching his friend’s beard in a gesture of intimacy: the other reciprocates with a similarly warm tap on the shoulder.Īlexander the Great torched Persepolis and crushed the Persian empire. Yet even here there was room for artistic delicacy. Persepolis was built for rituals and tribute ceremonies, not living in: its mystique soaks in as you watch a cast of its sculptures change colour to show how it was originally painted. Real treasures such as a spindly gold model of a chariot and huge horn of plenty drinking vessels are displayed among ever-changing virtual images of Persepolis, as it was and is now. The Persian empire is brought to stately, ceremonial life in one of the exhibition’s big set pieces.

‘Isfahan’s walls and domes flow up around you’. An armlet has horned griffins on it, in gold, lapis lazuli and other precious stuffs.

In the Persian empire, which ruled much of the Middle East in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, the beasts become even more mythic and ornate. A pottery jug in the shape of a humpbacked bull from 1200-800 BCE, a golden bowl from the same period with exquisite 3D gazelles bursting from it, and many more horned and frolicking beasts fill the earliest art here with animal life. That eye for nature is rooted in antiquity. A masterpiece made in Tabriz in the 1500s for the Safavid ruler is open on a battle scene in which bejewelled horsemen charge each other across a sea-like expanse of blue: the painter takes time to depict little flowers blooming on the battlefield, just before the horses trample them. There are gorgeous manuscripts of this classic. It is also written in Persian, as opposed to Arabic. Iran had been converted to Islam in the seventh century, but Ferdowsi’s epic is packed with the heroic deeds and bloody battles of the ancient, pre-Islamic Sasanian empire. The most important document of that is The Shahnameh, The Book of Kings, written at the start of the 11th century CE by the poet Ferdowsi. That’s partly because of a pride in history that preserved traditions across the millennia. To put this in perspective, that’s like telling the story of Britain from before Stonehenge to the present and hoping it all connects up somehow.

Epic Iran shows there is a cultural history that connects the country as it is today with the people who lived here five millennia ago. That’s what the V&A’s luxury coach tour of a blockbuster promises, and delivers, including quite brilliant recreations of Iran’s two most renowned sites, Persepolis and Isfahan. You go for months without any culture, then 5,000 years of it come along at once.

Who sings a thousand years