Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

We do, yes.

Now, I can say that with a caveat.

Most of them are royal inscriptions, so written in cuneiform letters,

They tend to be trilingual, so they tend to be in Old Persian, Babylonian or Akkadian, and also in Elamite.

They are on the whole ahistorical.

And what I mean by that is they tend to be very repetitive and they tend to say the same thing like, I am Xerxes, king of kings, king of all lands, king of all countries, son of Darius, who was the son of Hystapses, an Archimened.

You know, doesn't give us a lot to play with.

But as we'll go on to talk about, there are one or two inscriptions absolutely unique to Xerxes.

So I think we'd be really hard pushed to write a biography of Xerxes given just the Persian material.

So we have to look at the Greek material.

But we have to look at the Greek material with a kind of new set of eyes.

You know, I'm always after the Persian version of something.

So what I'll try to like to do is to strip away Xerxes

the kind of Greek writings and see if there isn't sitting underneath that, you know, something which is more indigenous Persian.

So let me give you a story, a very famous story that's told by several Greek historians.

Aelian, I suppose, is the one that we know the best.

It's this account that when Xerxes goes on his expedition to Greece,

he comes across this beautiful plane tree, okay?

And this, you know, gives him shade and everything.

And according to the Greeks, he falls in love with this tree, okay?