Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

The Persians are imposing a religious ideology on their empire.

It is completely...

out of touch with Cyrus the Great, who was happily worship, you know, whatever gods were available.

And likewise, Darius as well.

Darius, you know, when he conquers or goes into Egypt as a pharaoh, you know, he worships Egyptian gods.

It's no problem.

Xerxes certainly seems to have almost this kind of zealot-like attachment to Ahura Mazda.

Absolutely.

It is so unlike the Persians, you know.

So something strange is going on here.

And that strangeness is emphasised by the fact that Herzfeld and his team discovered these...

And they are beautifully made inscriptions.

They really are.

But they found them in the most unlikely context.

They found them taken off the walls, hacked off the walls, and they were actually in the latrines and the drainage channels underneath Persepolis.

So somebody has chosen to decry these things by literally putting them in their place and doing their business over them.

The question is, who was it?

Who was it?

Now we know that towards the end, there are tensions among Xerxes' many sons.

So just, you know, this is history repeating itself.