The Persians, ancient inhabitants of Iran

The Persians, ancient inhabitants of Iran

The Persians, ancient inhabitants of Iran, created one of the ancient world’s largest and most powerful empires, flourishing from 550-330 BC. At its height, the Persian Empire, also known as the Achaemenid Empire, stretched from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the western border with India and included a diverse array of cultures and ethnic groups. It was finally conquered by Alexander the Great during his invasion of Asia in the 4th century BC.”

The Achaemenid Empire was something drastically different from its predecessors,” said Touraj Daryaee, the Maseeh chair in Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine, and the editor of “Excavating an Empire: Achaemenid Persian in Longue Durée” (Mazda Publishers, 2014). “It was the first world empire. It’s an Afro-Eurasian empire because it included parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe.”

The ancient Persians were an Indo-Iranian people who migrated to the Iranian plateau during the end of the 2nd millennium BC, from the Caucasus or Central Asia. Originally a pastoral people who roamed the steppes with their livestock, they were ethnically related to the Bactrians, Medes, and Parthians.

In the 5th century BC, Greek historian Herodotus described them as being divided into several different tribes, the most powerful of which was the Pasargadae, of whom the Achaemenid clan was a part.

“We first hear of the Persian people from Assyrian sources,” an ancient ethnic group indigenous to the Middle East, said Daryaee.In the 9th century BC, Assyrian king Shalmaneser III recorded encountering a people who were settled in the area that is now southwestern Iran and went by the name Parsua. This reference, written in cuneiform, appears on his “Black Obelisk,” which was found in 1846 and commemorates Shalmaneser III’s deeds and military campaigns.

Scholars suggest the limestone obelisk was probably engraved in 825 BC, according to the British Museum. The translated reference to the Persians reads as follows:”Moving on from the land Namri, I received tribute from twenty-seven kings of the land Parsua. Moving on from the land Parsua I went down to the lands Mēsu, Media (Amadāiia), Araziaš, (and) Harhār, (and) captured the cities Kuakinda, Hazzanabi, Esamul, (and) Kinablila, together with the cities in their environs.”Xenophon, a Greek soldier and writer (430-350 BC), is another important source of information on Cyrus’s life.

In his work on Cyrus, called Cyropaedia, he described the Persian king as “most handsome in person, most generous of heart, most devoted to learning, and most ambitious, so that he endured all sorts of labor and faced all sorts of danger for the sake of praise.”