The collective consciousness field of Persia across three millennia — from Cyrus’s famously tolerant empire and Zoroastrian ethics, through the Islamic Golden Age and the summit of Sufi mystical poetry, to the Safavid glory of Isfahan and the turbulence of the modern theocratic state. One of the most continuous civilizational threads on earth, and one whose highest points were its most open, tolerant, and mystical — a pattern the single world line cannot show.
This is derived, not measured. Two lines run across the chart. The promise is the era's dominant worldview or professed ideal; the practice is the more binding of its political and economic order — the reality people actually lived under. The band between them is the gap: the distance between what a civilization professed and what it enacted. The starkest gap on the Persian arc is the age of Sufi poetry under Mongol devastation: Rumi and Hafiz carried the worldview to 460 — among the highest on the whole map — while the shattered political order sat at 175, a chasm of +285. Lofty mysticism and material ruin at once. Where promise and practice converge instead — as at the modest Elamite dawn — the civilization was telling the truth about itself. Every input opens on click — argue with the numbers.