Tom Holland

And in Syria, he pauses, has some food, and then he's climbing up onto his horse and his sword accidentally slips and he stabs himself in the thigh with it.

And this wound then goes septic and he dies very shortly afterwards.

So that's Cambyses out of the way.

And at this point, the false Magus, the kind of the pretend Bardia, declares that he is now king of kings.

And the only people who know the truth that this isn't really Bardiya is Darius and six other noblemen.

And they get together a posse and they gallop from Syria across the kind of the parched flatlands of Mesopotamia up the Khorasan Highway, which is the road that sneaks up through the Zagros Mountains up towards the great plateau of Iran.

And they arrive at a place called Sikia Vautish, which is up in the heights of the Zagros Mountains, surrounded by rich fields.

There are famous horses from these fields.

So it's a kind of beautiful spot.

And Bardia is, or rather the fake Bardia, is hanging out there enjoying his concubines when Darius, the six other noblemen, and the kind of posse of men they've brought in.

burst in on him take the fake body completely by surprise he reaches for a a chair smashes it up tries to use the chair leg to fend them off it's no good he is dispatched and darius then proclaims to the world that there's you know there's been this terrible scam that body has been replaced by this false magus and that he is now the king quite deep waters i think i

Quite a lot of improbabilities there.

Yeah, and even that's not as improbable as the idea that, you know, there's a guy who looks exactly like...

The murdered king.

So I think the likelihood is there isn't a false Bardia, there isn't a kind of Magian doppelganger, and that the person who gets killed by Darius and his fellow conspirators in Scythia Vartish was actually Bardia himself.

And there's very good corroborating evidence for this.

Because the moment Darius announces his accession to the throne, there is a succession of rebellions.

And these take place in Persia itself, in Media, just to the north, and in Elam, which is a country in the southwest of Iran.

So basically, these are the absolute heartlands of the empire.

These are the kind of, you know, the Iranian strongholds.