Bidar's signature: each card sets a popular belief against the documented reality — with sources, and without bias.
300 (2006, dir. Zack Snyder, from Frank Miller's graphic novel) is openly a stylized fantasy: the Persians appear as deformed monsters and giants, Xerxes as a nine-foot androgyne. The Achaemenid Empire was among antiquity's most sophisticated civilizations; the Spartans fought in armor alongside ~5,000–6,000 other Greeks. Kaveh Farrokh and Touraj Daryaee document the film's false binary. Iran formally protested in March 2007, and the film never officially screened in Iran.
The Cylinder is actually a Babylonian-style foundation deposit commemorating Cyrus's restoration of Marduk's worship. Specialists reject the “human rights” reading: Irving Finkel (British Museum): “There are no human rights in antiquity”; Kuhrt and Walker call it a building inscription. Yet Cyrus's tolerance is genuinely documented — he let exiled peoples (including the Babylonian Jews, praised in Isaiah) return home and rebuild their temples. The honest framing: real tolerance, overstated modern label.
For most of its Islamic history (7th–15th c.) Iran was majority Sunni (mainly Shafi'i); before the Safavids perhaps ~10% was Shia, concentrated in Qom, Kashan, Sabzevar, Ray, Gilan, and Mazandaran. The orphaned Ismail (c. 1494–1499) took refuge in Lahijan, Gilan, under the Zaydi-Shia Karkiya Mirza Ali, becoming committed to Shiism. In 1501 he declared himself Shah and made Twelver Shiism the state religion — though most of his realm was Sunni — to unify his subjects against the Sunni Ottomans and Uzbeks. The conversion used coercion (tabarra, exile of resistant ulama) and imported scholars from Jabal Amel, Bahrain, and Iraq. Britannica calls it “a major factor in the emergence of a unified national consciousness.”