Reza Zarghamee

Reza Zarghamee

About the Author

RezaPortrait_180wReza Zarghamee brings mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives and deep knowl­edge to his account of the life of Cyrus the Great. Born in Lon­don in 1978 to Iran­ian par­ents, Zarghamee grew up in Boston. His immer­sion in the ancient his­tory of Iran started early: At the age of thir­teen, he beganstudy­ing Old Per­sian cuneiform at the urg­ing of Pro­fes­sor Richard Frye, a founder of the Cen­ter for Mid­dle East­ern Stud­ies at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity. Later, he took courses in Zoroas­tri­an­ism and Manichaenism taught by another emi­nent Har­vard scholar, Prods Oktor Skjaervø. He attended Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, pur­su­ing a double-major in his­tory and biol­ogy, study­ing Per­sian lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture, and grad­u­at­ing with hon­ors in 2000. Three years later, he received a J.D. degree from Har­vard Law School, where his writ­ings included a com­par­i­son of ancient Near East­ern legal sys­tems. Since then, he has prac­ticed law at the firm of Pills­bury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP while con­tin­u­ing his schol­arly inves­ti­ga­tions of the era of Cyrus. His exten­sive trav­els in the Mid­dle East have taken him across much of the empire founded by that giant of his­tory twenty-six cen­turies ago. He is cur­rently at work on a life of Dar­ius, the sec­ond vol­ume of Iran’s Age of Empire.