Shiraz. The city of Saadi and Hafez. A place where Tagore once lingered and wrote, drawn by the fragrance of Persian poetry and memory. Persian wisdom carries a sombre proverb: when the fire spreads, the dry wood and the green wood burn together. The innocent and the guilty perish in the same blaze. I think of Persepolis — the great capital of the Achaemenids — burned by Alexander more than two thousand years ago. Empires rise, destroy, and pass. Yet Persian civilisation endured: in poetry, language, music, and memory. From Babylonia and Mesopotamia to the Indus, these lands carry humanity’s earliest chapters. They are not merely territory. They are the archives of civilisation. Saadi wrote that humanity is “one body.” Hafez warned that the pride of kings passes like dust. And Yeats, in another age of turmoil, sensed the widening gyre — a moment when the centre struggles to hold. Powerful states speak today of deterrence and strategy. History speaks in a quieter, sobering voice. It reminds us that when war spreads across landscapes layered with millennia of memory, the flames do not distinguish between soldiers and children, between stone and story. And so the old Persian warning returns: when the fire spreads, the dry and the wet burn together. #WestAsia #Civilisation #History #Iran