The only man who ever captured a Roman emperor | THE KING WHO CAUGHT A CAESAR Part 1

History Onion · Part 1 · 3:00

In 1957 Iran's last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sent army engineers into a mountain in Fars to lift a fallen king back onto his feet. The statue is nearly seven metres tall, carved from a single stalagmite, and it had lain face-down in the dark for centuries. The king was Shapur I — second ruler of the Sasanian empire, the last Persian empire before Islam. (Shah is simply Persian for king; Shapur's title was shahanshah, king of kings — and "the last Shah" means the most recent, not the final one.) Part 1: the empire Ardashir built out of the wreck of Parthia, the country that got the name it still carries, and the two Caesars Shapur went through before he ever met Valerian — Gordian III, dead at nineteen, and Philip the Arab, who paid five hundred thousand denarii to get his army home and then advertised the peace on a coin. And the part that isn't about war: Bishapur, a Sasanian city in Fars laid out on a Roman rectangular grid, home to the monumental rock reliefs and the Temple of Anahita — and Gundeshapur, whose library gathered Persian, Greek and Indian learning and whose hospital is the oldest teaching hospital we know of. Five hundred years later its learning reached Baghdad, carried in large part by Persian scholars, who wrote in Arabic because Arabic was the language of the administration — not because the learning was owed to it.