[38529977thrw]

Financial or not, clearly the notion of maintaining records was not foreign matter to these Persians.

> It was likely closer to a 100 years or so. e.g. it seems that by the time of the Parthian empire the Greeks and Roman "knew" considerably more about the Achaemenid Persia than the Persian themselves.

That is a pretty ridiculous notion. First let's break down what you mean by Persians. Do you mean a Dehghaan (land owner / farmer) or a member of the ruling families or some random Persian cranking around somewhere? How about Greece? Did Greeks uniformly had access to the same knowledge about Greeks and Greece?

So we are talking about either what outsiders or national elite classes knew and maintained. And your 100 year limit is based on the ignorance of the foreigners and various bits of court gossip, (Greek) mercenaries, and whatever else passed for a "public space of discourse" back then. Correspondences, tavern songs, stuff like that.

Iran has suffered 3 cataclysmic invasions and each featured destruction of the state and intelligentsia. For this reason it is 100% true that quite a lot of Iran's history was "news" to latter day Iranians but to claim someone of a given cultural and educational background in Persia in say early years of Hellenic occupation had no clue what had happened does not seem reasonable. At all.

[38529977thrw]

p.s. it appears (speaking as an Iranian) that there does seem to be a overall cultural element that has contributed to this matter: information is highly compartmentalized (and likely has always been) in Iranian society, down to the family unit with parents carefully curating what aspects of family history is discussed in front of adults or when children are present. Per this theory, the information was there but the channels for its dissemination were selective and regrettably all bound up with state structures that went belly up and not maintained in the larger collective oral lore in accurate form. So for example, Shahnameh clearly mismaps known historic figures for mythical ones so some form of preservation was maintained but this was couched in occult symbolism that is accessible to a much more limited readership.