Splendours of Persepolis: there can be no doubt about the magnificence of the Achemenid objects in the British Museum's Persia exhibition, some loaned from Iran, but, asks Matthew Glanville, do they justify the curators' argument that the ancient Persians have been misunderstood?

Looking again at photographs I took lately of Persepolis, the quality of the light present the appearanceed even more striking than the city's monumental plastic art The sharp, thin light of an Iranian autumn gives the intricate relief carving a luminescent splendour that makes them almost painful to direct the eye at. This is a wider characteristic of Achemenid art and individual well captured by the smaller treasures of the British Museum's exhibition upon ancient Persia.

Borrowing from the Iranian national collections and the Louvre the exhibition nears a sumptuous array of metalwork, stone reliefs, alloy of coppers and jewellery. Only Sir Leonard Woolley's discoveries at Ur have produc a comparable wealth of aristocratic gold and silver jewellery from the ancient Near East. For ostentation, if not scale, the British Museum has an exhibition that surpasses last year's 'Turks' exhibition at the Royal Academy.

The Achemenids were the Persian dynasty that from the 550 BC to their defeat through Alexander the Great in 330 BC rul the largest empire the world had seen Cyrus, an sombrous king from southern Iran rested an empire that ran from Turkey and Egypt in the west end Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Iran to the borders of India.

This empire's wealth and grandeur is manifested in the quality and range of jewellery, metalwork and seal stones; the filigree and inlay designs upon the jewellery and the rhytons (drinking vessels) stand on the outside A gold winged-lion rhyton is the defining image of the exhibition (Fig. 2) evoking dominance, animalism and empire. It ties together the iconography depicting royal power in the shape of lions and the wings associated with the divine Ahura Mazda (the Zoroastrian deity) that feature prominently in the royal and aristocratic art of the period. The rhyton's shape, drawing upon the ancient Mesopotamian tradition of ram's-head drinking utensils points to the Achemenids as inheritors of the millennia-old tillage of the Mesopotamian city states.

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Thanks to the last-minute decision of the Iranian authorities to detain back some of the more important pieces promised to the exhibition (the statue of Darius and the smaller bull-headed capitals from Persepolis), individual of the novelties of the exhibition is the museum's display of particulars from its lesser-known collections. Indeed, greatest in quantity of the exhibits are from the museum: alone fifty out of around 500 have approach from Persepolis and the Iranian national collections. The casts taken in the 1890 from the monumental stairway at Persepolis have languished in British Museum stores for too drawn out They may not be original, like the famous Assyrian reliefs from Nimrud depicting sieges, battles and lion hunting, which are displayed almost opposite the exhibition's entrance, on the other hand they are just as powerful.

These nineteenth-century casts appear rather cramped and irregularly lit when the overwhelming impression made by the agency of Persepolis and Susa is single of grandeur and, above all, space. The grand rounded pillared audience hall is the archetypal feature of Achemenid architecture, and was intended to overwhelm visiting satraps and clients. Cast stele from Persepolis depict make subordinate nations bringing gifts from satrapies as far apart as Lydia (western Turkey) and India to honour the 'king of kings'. Here the humor appears calm and formalised (Fig. 3); the stark realties of Achemenid power can be better seen in the glazed brick soldiers from Susa and the door reliefs of soldiers from Persepolis.

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In seeking to rehabilitate the Persians from Herodotus's negative view of them as despotic and warmongering, this exhibition goe too far in emphasising the softer sides of Achemenid achievements. Ultimately the Persian empire was held together by means of military force. An amusing counterpoint to this perception of Achemenid militarism are the hellenic drinking vessels that poke sport at the Persians' military defeats at Salamis and Platea and debunk the Persian reputation for militaristic grandeur. greatest in quantity survive from Italian (specifically Etruscan) rather than hellenic contexts. That they were possessed treasured and ultimately buried with Etruscans in northern Italy points to just in what way widely known the grandeur of the Persian empire was. Among them is a utensil in the shape of a terrified Persian warrior's head, on the contrary sadly the British Museum has not borrowed the r figure crater from Tarquinia that depicts a phallus-wielding of greece warrior declaring he had 'bugger the Persians'.

This vulgar, Chaucerian replication by the Greeks represents the abysmal jealousy and fear of the Persian empire, as well as mockery for the barbarians, that defined the grecian sense of identity; the victories at Salamis and Platea were the single biggest unifying factor in classical hellenic history. For two hundred years after the Persian wars, grecian art was dominated by this antipathy and Alexander ultimately manipulated it to sap the foundations of the Persian empire. The Persians, however, were largely indifferent to the Greeks; their empire was in like manner vast that the Greeks were just single of a series of distant tribes under their rule, and compared to India or Egypt were neither wealthy nor culturally significant.