About

Echoes of Empire

History, Memory, and the Quiet Persistence of Meaning

We inherit history in fragments: a weathered relief on a palace wall, the broken wing of a stone guardian, a half-remembered chronicle recited across centuries. But in these remnants, whole worlds still breathe. My work here is an attempt to listen to those worlds with patience — not merely as a historian recording facts, but as a wanderer returning to long-interrupted conversations.

Over the years, I have walked the silent avenues of Persepolis at dawn, traced the outlines of cuneiform at Pasargadae, climbed the citadel at Susa, and stood in the courtyards of Sardis and Ephesus where Persian and Greek memory once confronted each other openly. These are not tourist visits; they are examinations of identity — of the place where geography becomes destiny, and destiny becomes story.

The early Persian Empire was not formed by conquest alone. It grew out of highland migrations, frontier negotiations, inherited rituals, and the philosophical tension between power and responsibility. In tracing the rise of Anshan, the legacy of the Medes, the experiments of the Achaemenid kings, and the cultural diplomacy that shaped early imperial statehood, I have tried to reveal the deep, connective tissue that lies beneath what textbooks flatten into timelines. These essays are not conclusions; they are maps — provisional, interpretive, and open to the reader’s own thought.

If you follow them, follow them slowly.

The Measure of the Moment

Khayyam, Consciousness, and the Philosophy of the Moment

Parallel to the history that shaped the outer world is the philosophy that shapes the inner one. For that, I have turned to Omar Khayyam — not the romanticised wine-drinker of popular translation, but the mathematician, astronomer, and metaphysician whose quatrains conceal a profound critique of certainty and time.

My ongoing work, Philosophy in Verse, is an attempt to translate him faithfully, not merely in language but in thought. The quatrains are short — deceptively so — yet they open into questions that predate religion and outlast empire:

• What does it mean to exist in a world where time is not guaranteed?
• What is freedom, if choice is bound to necessity?
• Can meaning be lived without illusion?

This is not a literary project alone. It is an inquiry into consciousness, mortality, agency, and the structure of reality — the same themes that move quietly beneath the architecture of Persepolis and the dust of Susa.

These writings are done in the hours between obligations — after the children sleep, before the day’s work begins, during the rare quiet when thought can be heard clearly. They are side-projects only by schedule, not by significance.

What you read here represents a lifelong effort to uncover what endures when kingdoms fall, languages fade, and monuments erode:

A philosophy of being that outlives its empire.

If you choose to read:

• Read slowly.
• Question freely.
• Let what is ancient speak in its own time.

The journey is not linear — but it is continuous.

This project is followed by readers in more than 50 countries.