300

[A Black Falcon]

Actually the word king in both ancient persian and modern Farsi is "Shah" , Cyrus's title was Shah'an'shah "King of Kings" more or less emperor, Their culture never had such a title as a emperor since the persians were really the first to have such a massive collection of territory and conquered nations, China did not even exist yet. Local tribal kingdoms like Israel were subordinate to them.

Islam has nothing to do with it , The Arab monarchs up untill Genghis khans invasion who ruled over Iran refferd to themselves as sultans since they were arabic and they made their language official , But with the advent of Shia sect and devision with the rest of Islam a new dynasty of native rulers helped the local cultural regain a revival along with Farsi , So Shah became the title again.

ome Kings tried to associate with a angelic being who ruled as a lord within their god's court amongst 6 other figures two of which are female. Cyrus tomb pretty confirms that he didnt have a god complexe, As it was inscribed with a prayer to Ahura mende in penitent for his misdeeds and transgressions while on earth and be allowed to cross over the celestial bridge into heaven. Records of his burial suggest he gave some kind of offering to a spirit gaurdian who's job it was to judge who was worthy of going into purgatory or paradise .

The faith was scriptural and some of it called the gathas was taught like the hindu vedas with oral recitating hymns.

*deletes paragraph expressing uncertainty about details*

*spends at least an hour wandering around Wikipedia reading about Persia/Zoroastrianism/Parthia/etc*

I have seen some people claiming to be Iranian complain about the depictions of the persians in 300 but they were quickly eased from any emotional gripe when people pointed out from the Uk how BraveHeart and the Patriot trashed their image , That its simpily hollywood custom to exaderate and inflate things for the sake of adding drama and not some racially motivated slander.

Yup. Whoever the badguy is in a Hollywood movie is going to get a "they are pure evil" depiction, given how Hollywood prefers black-and-white divisions to shades of grey pictures of reality...

Irans goverment is intentionaly making a deal of this to falsely feed the idea to their people that americans are making hate films about them , Like I said before the Islamic republic has a poor record for honnoring Irans heritage so their claims are hypocritical to say the least.

Well of course, but when your government is anti-American, they'll seize on anything they can, whether or not it makes sense compared to how they treat their own citizens... (not that we are innocent of doing the same thing at times either, of course -- cultures would rather look at the flaws of others rather than the problems within their own, since their own troubles are probably much more difficult to fix than simple complaints about the issues of others are, and it makes you feel better too! :))