The celebration of “2500 years of the Peacock throne” held at Persepolis in 1971 first attracted my attention because of extensive coverage in the newspapers of the time. My memory is that the celebrations were favourably reported, perhaps mainly because The Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne attended.

Five years later an Iranian business contact gave me a glimpse of a potential darker side to the celebrations. Again stuck in my mind because it introduced an element of mystery into my knowlede of the proceedings.

When my investigations into the Visgothic Treasure, rather amazingly, took me back to Persepolis for a third time, I could not reject the temptation to make a fuller investigation.