For an artifact with such an awesome legacy, the Cyrus Cylinder is remarkably unprepossessing. It looks like a small loaf of rye bread from which someone has broken off a chunk. Yet this nine-inch long piece of baked clay inscribed with cuneiform script — which begins a five-city tour of the United States in Washington this week -- has inspired religious and political thinkers from ancient times through the drafters of the US Constitution and the founders of modern-day Israel.

Argo won for Best Picture, of course, but in my view it merited an additional Oscar. And so did the far more controversial Zero Dark Thirty. Consider that Hollywood hands out awards for everything from “Sound Mixing” to “Best Picture”. But over the decades no Oscar category existed to honor movies for intellectual or political integrity. Perhaps that reflects, to be cynical, the recognition that in any given year there’d be too few nominees to fill out the category. But this year that was not the case. It was a banner year for Hollywood integrity.

Sunday night, Argo—the Ben Affleck film portraying the rescue of U.S. Embassy staffers from Iran—won best picture at the Oscars. Iran may have boycotted this years’ Academy Awards by pulling its film submission, but it certainly didn’t ignore Argo’s Oscar win. The biggest winner may have been U.S. public diplomacy efforts, given Argo’s recent underground popularity in Iran.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Egypt on February 5, 2013, was the first by an Iranian president since the Islamic Revolution. Occurring in the context of a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), he intended the visit as a step toward improving Iran's relations with Egypt in the aftermath of its revolution and the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. Instead, the visit exposed the tensions between two countries that are vying for regional leadership and, more generally, the deepening rift along Sunni-Shiite lines.

For a brief moment on Tuesday, the nuclear dispute between Iran and the United States took a back seat to sport...Diplomatic ties between Iran and the United States have been cut since 1980 after Iranian students took 52 U.S. diplomats hostage in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution. But wrestling, one of Iran's most popular sports, has proven a rare arena in which the two countries have friendly relations.

“IT is not going too far to say that American foreign policy has become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.” This stern verdict comes from Vali Nasr, who spent two years working for the Obama administration before becoming dean of the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Tensions between Iran and the US were intensifying in 2008 when American basketball player Kevin Sheppard went to play for the Iranian league. A German filmmaker has brought his unusual story to the cinema.

A proposed new Afghanistan-Iran university to undertake joint research and engineering projects, announced by the two governments last month, is being seen as part of a broader Iranian strategy to counter its international isolation brought about by Western economic sanctions over its nuclear programme. Collaboration in higher education, research and science is a key part of Iran’s ‘soft power’ strategy, with a large number of cross-border projects in the pipeline, in particular in Islamic countries