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<\/p>\nIn order to understand the transition teased at the end of the Chapter 2, we need to take a detour to examine an external force that will help with that transition. Persia was one of the most significant ancient civilizations, a vast empire that was at the time the largest the world had ever seen. It incorporated all of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, and at its height it even included Egypt. In other words, the entire expanse of land stretching from the borders of India to Greece was conquered and controlled by the Persians.<\/p>\n
The core region of Persia itself corresponds with present-day Iran and the language of Iran today\u2014Farsi\u2014is a direct linguistic descendent of ancient Persian. Geographically it consists of a high, arid Iranian Plateau, ringed by rugged mountains like the Zagros and Elburz ranges. Situated between the Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf\/Gulf of Oman to the south, the region features harsh central deserts and fertile coastal strips. In the ancient world, it was dominated by warriors that fought on horseback who were generally perceived as \u201cbarbarians\u201d by the settled people of Mesopotamia to the west. By the seventh century BCE, a powerful collection of clans, the Medes, dominated the region, forming a loosely governed empire which included control over the Persian clans of southwest Iran.<\/p>\n
Historians divide Persian history into periods defined by the founding clan of a given royal dynasty. The empire described in this chapter is referred to as the Achaemenid Persian Empire after its first ruling clan. Later periods of ancient Persian history, most importantly the Parthian and Sasanian empires, are described in the chapters on ancient Rome.<\/p>\n
In the late 1700s CE, an English judge and linguist named Sir William Jones made a remarkable discovery: ancient languages whose speakers lived thousands of miles apart shared significant similarities in their words and grammar. Jones himself was fluent in an astonishing twenty-eight languages, including ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit\u2014the ancient Indian language in which the earliest major books of Hinduism were written. Jones surmised that, at some point in the ancient past, there must have been a single language spoken by a group of people whose descendants spread across much of Eurasia, in the process bringing dialects of that shared language with them. Over time, the languages would have branched apart until they were mutually unintelligible, despite sharing a common linguistic root. Jones was the first to determine that languages as seemingly unrelated as English, Spanish, Turkish, Farsi, and Hindi were in fact all part of one vast linguistic family.<\/p>\n
Put simply, Jones was right. Subsequent generations of scholars have established beyond a doubt that there was indeed a group, about whom we know almost nothing, who spoke dialects of the root language Jones discovered. Since the descendants of that group migrated and settled from India and Iran in the east all the way to western Europe, the term Indo-European is used both for the people and the languages they spoke. There is no archeological, let alone historical, evidence that identifies exactly where this group originated, nor can we determine much about their culture. That said, based on linguistic evidence, it is certain that the Indo-Europeans migrated south, east, and west from somewhere in the southern part of Central Asia by the third millennium BCE (i.e. the 2000s BCE). They both conquered and settled among the people who were already present, in some cases coming to completely dominate, and in other cases simply intermixing over time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Figure 3.1<\/strong> Approximate dates of the Indo-European migrations. Note that the ancestors of the Persians were relative latecomers; the migrations had been occurring for thousands of years, but the people who would become the Persians arrived in Iran in about 800 BCE.<\/em> Credit: Indo-European Migrations<\/u><\/a> by Joshua Jonathan.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, within a century of Jones\u2019 discovery, both genuine scholars and racist hacks\u2014Europeans at the height of European global dominance, the late nineteenth century CE\u2014tried to impose their own worldview on ancient history. Rather than the Indo-Europeans being a large group of nomadic peoples who spent over a thousand years migrating and settling, in the minds of these pseudo-scholars the Indo-Europeans were instead a dominant ancient \u201crace\u201d of conquerors. Seizing on the fact that the ancient Indo-Europeans of India and Iran called themselves Arya<\/em>\u2014which was simply their name for themselves, a self-designation\u2014 these racist pseudo-scholars claimed that the \u201cAryan race\u201d had been a group of pale-skinned geniuses who brought the light of learning and culture to \u201cinferior\u201d racial groups through force. These \u201cAryans,\u201d however, foolishly interbred with their inferiors, and when they did, the ancient civilizations they founded, from actual Indo-European empires like Persia to totally unrelated ones like Egypt, collapsed. While some of these European mythmakers claimed\u2014against all evidence\u2014that the Indo-Europeans originated in northern Europe, others grudgingly accepted that they were originally from Central Asia. This has left the strange legacy of using the term \u201cCaucasian\u201d for pale-skinned people of European descent, named after the Caucasus Mountains\u2014stretching between the Black and Caspian Seas\u2014near where the Indo-Europeans may have originated.<\/p>\n This racist myth has overshadowed the real history of a tremendously important fact: the Indo-Europeans were real, they truly did migrate and settle across a vast swath of Eurasia, and they left an enormous linguistic and, arguably, cultural legacy to world history. They were not, however, a \u201crace,\u201d let alone a pale-skinned one, nor were most ancient civilizations founded by them. Needless to say, all of East Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific developed major civilizations that had nothing to do with the Indo-Europeans, and both the pre-Indo European Indian cultures like the Harappans of northern India and the various ancient cultures of the Middle East\u2014including the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Hebrews\u2014were well established before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans.<\/p>\n In the case of the Persians, the Indo-European migration to the Iranian plateau was complete by the eighth century BCE. Over time, the two distinct but closely related groups noted above\u2014the Medes and the Persians themselves\u2014were established as the dominant powers in the region, with the Medes holding the majority of power. The Medes were allies of Babylon, and in 612 BCE they took part in the huge rebellion that resulted in the downfall of the Assyrian Empire. For just over fifty years, the Medes continued to dominate the Iranian plateau. Then, in 550 BCE a Persian leader\u2014Cyrus II the Great\u2014led the Persians against the Medes and conquered them. He assimilated the Medes into his own military force and then embarked on an incredible campaign of conquest that lasted twenty years, in the process forging Persia into a gigantic empire.<\/p>\n Cyrus began his conquests outside of Iran by invading Anatolia in 546 BCE and conquering the kingdom of Lydia. He continued west where he encountered the Greek colonies of Ionia along the coast of the Aegean Sea. Cyrus swiftly defeated these Greek city-states. He found Greek leaders willing to work with the Persians and he appointed them as governors of the colonies. With these governors\u2014really tyrants\u2014supplying him with loyal warriors and paying tribute, Cyrus allowed the Greeks to keep their language, religion, and culture. Thus, even though they had been beaten, most of the Greeks in the colonies did not experience Persian rule as particularly oppressive. This is not to say they were happy with the situation, as we shall soon see.<\/p>\n Cyrus next turned south and conquered the city-states and kingdoms of Mesopotamia, culminating with his conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE. This conquest was surprisingly easy. At the time, authority in Babylon was contested between the priests of Marduk\u2014the patron deity of the city\u2014and the king, who was trying to favor the worship of a different goddess. After Cyrus defeated the forces of the king in one battle he was welcomed as a liberator by the Babylonians. Incidentally, he then made a point of venerating Marduk to help ensure their ongoing loyalty.<\/p>\n Figure 3.2<\/strong> Part of the inscription reads: \u201cI am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters, the son of Cambyses, great king, king of An\u0161an, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of An\u0161an, descendant of Teispes, great king, king of An\u0161an, of an eternal line of kingship, whose rule B\u00eal and Nabu love, whose kingship they desire for their hearts' pleasure. When I entered Babylon in a peaceful manner, I took up my lordly abode in the royal palace amidst rejoicing and happiness. Marduk, the great lord, established as his fate for me a magnanimous heart of one who loves Babylon, and I daily attended to his worship.\u201d<\/em> Credit: Cyrus cylinder<\/u><\/a> by Mike Peel. Translation by Mordechai Cogan, published in W.H. Hallo and K.L. Younger,\u00a0The Context of Scripture. Vol. II: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World<\/em>\u00a0(2003, Leiden and Boston), but has been adapted to Schaudig's edition with the help of Bert van der Spek: Cyrus Cylinder<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n Much of what historians know about Persia is gleaned from the propaganda Persian kings left behind. The conquest of Babylon produced an outstanding example\u2014the Cyrus Cylinder, a pillar covered in a proclamation that Cyrus commissioned after the conquest of Babylon. The Cyrus Cylinder is a crucial source for understanding Persian rulership at its very beginning. Cyrus established his authority on two principles: descent from other great kings and the favor of the gods. He was the living representative of a supreme royal line of descent and the agent of his patron god on earth. Over time the identity of the god in question became Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of the Zoroastrian religion (described below) rather than Marduk, but the principle remained the same. All subsequent Persian kings would cite these two principles, which in their own eyes elevated them in authority above all other rulers.<\/p>\n Cyrus continued the practice of finding loyal underlings to rule over the conquered territories and treating his conquered enemies fairly. This kept uprisings against him to a minimum. With the west secured in this way, he then pushed into Central Asia\u2014in particular present-day Afghanistan\u2014conquering all of what constituted the \u201cknown world\u201d in that region.<\/p>\n The campaigns of Cyrus ended with his death in battle against the Scythians in 530 BCE. He was followed by his son Cambyses II who led the Persian armies west, conquering both the rich Phoenician cities of the eastern Mediterranean coast and Egypt. There he was installed as pharaoh, again demonstrating Persian respect for local traditions. Between these two rulers\u2014and in less than thirty years\u2014Persia had gone from an obscure kingdom in the middle of the Iranian plateau to the largest land empire in the world. Cambyses died not long after the conquest in 522 BCE under somewhat mysterious circumstances when he supposedly fell on his sword while getting off of his horse.<\/p>\n Following Cambyses\u2019 death, his distant cousin Darius I became king (r. 522-486 BCE). The story of how this happened is complicated and disputed by different accounts from the period. Cambyses might have had his brother, and heir, Bardiya, murdered. After Cambyses\u2019 own death, an imposter named Guamata might have seized the throne pretending to be Bardiya, but knowing he was not the rightful heir, Darius assassinated him and claimed the throne for himself. Other accounts claim that this was just a fabrication, and that it was Darius who originally killed Bardiya, not Cambyses. Regardless of what truly happened, Darius\u2014who will also come to be known as the Great\u2014ended up on the throne. In order to solidify his claim, he then married several women from the line of Cyrus and Cambyses. In the midst of the political chaos at the top, a series of revolts briefly shook the empire, but Darius swiftly crushed the uprisings and reasserted Persian rule. He captured his moment of triumph in a huge carved image on a rock wall\u2014the \u201cBisitun Inscription\u201d\u2014which depicts his victory over these other\u2014lesser\u2014kings and traces his royal lineage back to a shared ancestor with Cyrus the Great.<\/p>\n By the time Darius came to power, the Persian Empire was already too large for one person to rule effectively, mainly due to the lack of the necessary bureaucratic infrastructure. Darius worked to change that. Even as he expanded the empire further, he consolidated royal power by setting up a bureaucracy which worked to standardize taxation and establish universal expectations of behavior across the empire. He also improved infrastructure by establishing a postal service and standardizing weights, measures, and coinage.<\/p>\n Figure 3.3<\/strong> The Persian Empire at its territorial height under Darius I<\/em>. Credit: Map of Persia<\/u><\/a> by Sumerophile.<\/p>\n While Darius inherited the conquests of his predecessors he also personally oversaw the conquest of new regions. This included the northern part of the Indus River Valley in northwestern India, thus marking the first time in world history when one state ruled over three of the major river systems of ancient history\u2014Nile, Mesopotamia, and the Indus. In 513 BCE Darius led a gigantic invasion of Central Asia to try to end the raids of the Scythians once and for all. However, he was forced to retreat without winning a decisive victory. Despite failing in his primary aim, his army was still intact, and he had been able to add Thrace\u2014present-day Bulgaria\u2014to the empire.<\/p>\n Darius was also interested in seizing more territory to the west, which he did by conquering the remaining Greek colonies on the coast of Anatolia. In 499 BCE several Ionian Greek city-states rose against the Persians and successfully secured Athenian aid. Several years of fighting followed, with the Persians eventually crushing the rebellion in 494 BCE, in the process deporting many of the Greek rebels to India as punishment. However, Athens\u2019 decision to support the rebellion angered the Persians, and Darius began to plan a full-fledged invasion of Greece.<\/p>\n Before returning to Greece though, let\u2019s take a moment to see just exactly what they were up against. As mentioned above, Darius instituted a number of reforms to strengthen the central government. As you might imagine, an empire as big as Persia posed some serious logistical challenges. The Persians kings may have had relatively loyal subjects, but if it took months for messages to reach them even loyal subjects could make decisions that the kings would disagree with. To help address this issue, Darius turned to the past. In order to keep centralized control, the Assyrians had built highways with regularly spaced supply posts for their messengers. The Persians mimicked this. The most important of their highways was called the Royal Road, linking the empire all the way from western Anatolia to the Persian capital of Susa, just east of the Tigris. A messenger on the Royal Road could cover 1,600 miles in a week on horseback, trading out horses at posts along the way. This then mostly solved the communication issue.<\/p>\n However, another issue that Darius had to face when he took the throne was the number of different peoples\u2014who all spoke and wrote in their own distinct languages\u2014that were under his authority. Since there could be push back if the people were forced to adopt a single language, the state used several languages to communicate with them. Additionally, to promote literacy\u2014so that more people could be directly reached by these decrees that were traveling across the empire\u2014the government sponsored a major effort to standardize a new, simplified cuneiform alphabet.<\/p>\n The diversity of people also meant a diversity of customs, both legal and economic. Here, the Persians responded by standardized laws across the empire and issuing regular coinage in both silver and gold. Together, these last two reforms led to a more unified economy, one that led to greater prosperity for the people and more resources for the empire to continue its conquests.<\/p>\n In stark contrast to the earlier methods of rule employed by the Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians\u2014who relocated entire populations to make them more reliant on the state\u2014the key to Persian rule, as described above, was the novel innovation of treating conquered people with a degree of leniency. So long as they were loyal, paid taxes, and sent troops when called, the Persian kings had no problem with letting their subjects practice their own religions, use their own languages, and carry on their own trading practices and customs. For example, it was Cyrus who allowed the exiled Jews to return to Judah from Babylon. It seems that the Persian kings felt it very important to maintain an image of beneficence, of linking their power to sympathy for their subjects, rather than trying to terrorize their subjects into submission.<\/p>\n It is not as if the kings were na\u00efve though and expected their beneficence to lead to a completely compliant population. To make sure that they maintained their control, the Persian kings introduced a system of governance that allowed them to gather intelligence on their subjects. To do this, the empire was divided into twenty satrapies<\/em>\u2014provinces\u2014ruled by officials called satraps<\/em>. In each satrapy, the satrap was the political governor, who was advised by a military general who reported directly to the king. In this way, the two most powerful leaders in each satrapy could keep an eye on each other. Interestingly, despite this system of political checks and balances on the authority and loyalty of these governmental officials, it was the satraps who appointed the new king from the royal family when the old one died. Sometimes they were able to appoint weak-willed members of the royal family so that they might enjoy more personal freedom. Even with a powerful ruler such as Darius and despite the innovations that he introduced in organization, the satraps still normally operated with a large degree of autonomy. While good for the satraps, this was one of the factors that ultimately weakened the Achaemenid Empire. As for everyone else, roaming officials called the \u201ceyes and ears of the king\u201d traveled around the empire checking that the king\u2019s edicts were being enforced and that conquered people were not being abused, then reporting back to the Persian cities of Susa and Parsa\u2014both of which served as royal capitals. Finally, in the realm of control, one should not dismiss the power of pomp and ceremony in keeping a population\u2014both domestic and conquered\u2014cowed. The Persian kings adopted the title of \u201cKing of Kings\u201d and utilized elaborate, staged court ceremonies to reinforce their immense power. Even approaching the king required formal, often ritualized, gestures of submission, such as\u00a0prostrating oneself before the king and not making eye contact. This level of ceremony applied to all levels of society. Indeed, while the Persian kings acknowledged the authority of the rulers of the lands they had conquered, they required those rulers to in turn acknowledge the Persian king\u2019s overarching supremacy. Persian images of the kings depicted them receiving tribute from these lesser kings who had come to Susa or Parsa in a show of loyalty and support. In this way, the political authority of the empire was tied together by both the formal bureaucratic structure of the satrapies as well as the bonds of loyalty between the King of Kings and his subject rulers.<\/p>\n One final component of the Persian system was relatively modest taxation. In order to keep taxes moderate, the Persian kings only called up armies\u2014of both Persians and conquered people\u2014when there was a war. Otherwise, the only permanent army was the 10,000-strong elite bodyguard of the king that the Greeks called the \u201cImmortals.\u201d They were named such by the Greek historian Herodotus\u2014the Greek term is Athanatoi.<\/em> They were not immortal in the sense of being unkillable, but because the unit was constantly kept at 10,000 soldiers by instantly replacing casualties or sick members, making the army appear to never diminish in strength. When the Persians did go to war, their subjects contributed troops according to their strengths. The Phoenicians formed the navy, the Medes the cavalry, the Mesopotamians the infantry, and so on. This system worked well on long campaigns, but its weakness was that it took up to two years to mobilize the whole empire for war, an issue that will be fully on display in the war against the Greeks.<\/p>\n The Achaemenid dynasty of Persia would rule for approximately two centuries, from Cyrus\u2019 victories in 550 BCE to its conquest by Alexander the Great, completed in 330 BCE. It is worth noting that despite the relatively \u201cenlightened\u201d character of Persian rule, rebellions did occur frequently during periods of transition or civil war between rival claimants to the throne. In a sense, the empire both benefited from and was made vulnerable by the autonomy of its subjects. While each region maintained its own identity and traditions, thereby keeping everyday resentment to a minimum, in moments of crisis that autonomy might also lead to the demand for actual independence.<\/p>\n Despite the overall policy of religious tolerance, there was still a dominant Persian religion: Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism, named after its prophet Zoroaster, taught that the world was being fought over by two great powers: a god of goodness, honesty, and benevolence known as Ahura Mazda\u2014meaning \u201cWise Lord\u201d\u2014and an evil spirit that represented destructive energy\u2014 Angra Mainyu, also known as Ahriman. Ahura Mazda was aided by yazatas\u2014 divine beings or \"angels\" worthy of worship\u2014like Mithras, yazata of light, covenants, justice, and friendship, and Anahita,\u00a0yazata of rivers, fertility, and the nurturing of life. Every time a person did something righteous, honest, or brave, Ahura Mazda won a victory over Angra Mainyu, while every time someone did something cruel, dishonest, or dishonorable Angra Mainyu celebrated the win. Thus, humans had a major role to play in bringing about the final victory of Ahura Mazda through their actions.<\/p>\n Zoroaster himself lived sometime between 1300 BCE and 1000 BCE\u2014long before the rise of the empire\u2014and was responsible for codifying the beliefs of the religion named after him. Zoroaster claimed that Ahura Mazda would ultimately triumph in the battle against evil but explained that the existence of evil in the world was necessary for people to understand the paradise being offered by Ahura Mazda. After all, can one really understand light, if they have never experienced dark? Thus, Ahura Mazda was not all-powerful in quite the same way as the Jewish\u2014and later Christian and Muslim\u2014God was believed to be. Human actions mattered in this scheme because everyone played a role, however minor, in helping to bring about order and righteousness or impeded progress by indulging in wickedness. Zoroastrianism also told a specific story about the afterlife. When the power of good finally triumphs definitively over evil, those who lived righteously would live forever in the glorious presence of Ahura Mazda, while those who were evil would suffer forever in a black pit.<\/p>\n There are obvious parallels here between Zoroastrianism and Jewish and Christian beliefs. Indeed, there is a direct link between the Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu and the Jewish and Christian figure of Satan, who was simply a dark spirit in the early books of the Torah but later became a distinct presence, the \u201cnemesis\u201d of God Himself and a threat to the order of the world, if not to God. Likewise, the Christian idea of the Final Judgment is clearly indebted to the Zoroastrian idea of a great day of reckoning.<\/p>\n One noteworthy aspect of Zoroastrianism is that, in contrast to other ancient religions\u2014including Judaism, and later, Christianity\u2014Zoroastrianism appears to have banned slavery on spiritual grounds. This is important to bear in mind as we move into our discussion of the Persian War. The Greeks thought of the war as the defense of their glorious traditions, including the political participation of citizens in the state. However, it was the Greeks who controlled a society that was heavily dependent on slavery, whereas though slavery was still clearly present in the Persian Empire\u2014despite the religious ban\u2014 it was less prevalent than in Greece.<\/p>\n Almost all of the theological details about Zoroastrianism are known from much later periods of Persian history, although historians have established that the Persian rulers themselves were almost certainly Zoroastrians by the rule of Darius I. Indeed, Zoroastrianism provided a spiritual justification for the expansion of the Persian Empire. Because the great kings believed that they were the earthly representatives of Ahura Mazda, they claimed that the expansion of the empire would bring the final triumph of good over evil sooner. The kings sponsored Zoroastrian temples and expanded the faith at least in part because the faith supported them and the magi<\/em>\u2014or priests\u2014preached in favor of the continued power and expansion of the empire.<\/p>\n Zoroastrianism reveals much about what the Persians valued<\/em>, not just what they believed about the universe. Truth was the cardinal virtue of Zoroastrianism, with lying being synonymous with evil. Each person had a certain social role to play in the Zoroastrian worldview, with the kings presiding over an ordered, loyal, prosperous society. In theory, war was fought to extend righteousness, not just seize territory and wealth. There was clearly a sophisticated ethical code and set of social expectations present even in early Zoroastrianism. This is reflected in a comment made Herodotus. According to him, the Persians taught their children three things: to ride a horse, to shoot a bow, and to tell the truth.<\/p>\n When the Greek cities of Ionia revolted against Persian rule, Darius vowed to make an example not just of them, but of the Greek city-states that had aided them, including Athens. While the resulting Persian War is rightly remembered in European history as a tremendous victory of the underdog Greeks against the mighty Persian Empire, it was also unfortunately appropriated to support proto-racist beliefs regarding the superiority of \u201cThe West.\u201d Because the Greeks saw the conflict in terms of the triumph of true civilization over barbaric tyranny, and the surviving historical sources are told exclusively from the Greek perspective, this bias has managed to last until the present. Consider the movie adaptations of the most famous battles of the Persian War, 300<\/em> and 300: Rise of an Empire<\/em>, in which the Persians are depicted as being literally monstrous, ruled over by a comically evil, eight-foot-tall king. The fact that both Sparta and Athens were slave-based societies is not<\/em> part of those movies' narratives.<\/p>\n The war began in 490 BCE, when the Persians landed at Marathon, a site 26 miles from Athens. The Athenians sent a renowned runner, Pheidippides, to Sparta\u2014about 140 miles from Athens\u2014to ask for help. The Spartans agreed but said that they could only send reinforcements when their religious ceremonies were completed in a few days. Pheidippides ran back to Athens with the bad news, but by then the Athenians\u2014joined by 1,000 hoplites from Plataea\u2014were already engaged with the Persians.<\/p>\n There were about 25,000 Persian troops\u2014this was an expeditionary force, not a large army\u2014 against which the Athenians and Plataeans fielded 11,000 hoplites. The two armies watched each other for a few days, until the Persians decided to dispatch about 10,000 of their troops in naval transports to attack Athens directly. This prompted a gamble on the part of the leading Athenian general Miltiades to attack the remaining Persians, rather than running back to defend Athens. The ensuing battle was a decisive show of force for the Greeks. The citizen-soldier hoplites proved far more effective than the conscript infantry of the Persian forces. The core of the Persian army, its Median and Persian cavalry, fought effectively against the Athenians, but once the Athenian wings closed in and forced back the infantry, the Persians were routed. According to the Greek accounts of the battle, the Persians supposedly lost 33 men to every Greek lost in the battle\u20146,400 Persian dead to 192 Greeks. By all accounts it was a smashing victory for the Athenians. A later\u2014almost certainly fabricated\u2014account of the aftermath of the battle claimed that Pheidippides was then sent running back to Athens to report the victory. Though he was able to deliver his message, he then dropped dead of exhaustion. Pheidippides had run the first marathon.<\/p>\n It is entirely possible that despite this victory, the Greeks would have still been overwhelmed by the Persians if not for setbacks in Persia and its empire. When a major revolt broke out in Egypt against Persian rule, it drew attention away from Greece until the revolt was put down. Likewise, it took years to fully activate the Persian military machine and preparation for a full-scale invasion took a decade to reach completion. Additionally, in 486 BCE as preparations were still ongoing Darius died. This meant the invasion had to be postponed further while his son Xerxes consolidated his power.<\/p>\n In the meantime, the Greeks were well aware that the Persians would eventually return. A new Athenian general, Themistocles, convinced his countrymen to spend the proceeds of a silver mine they had discovered on a navy. Athens went into a naval-building frenzy, ending up with hundreds of warships called triremes. They were manned by free Athenians who were too poor to afford armor and weapons and serve as hoplites, but who now had an opportunity to directly aid in battle as sailors. This was perhaps the first time in world history that a fairly minor power transformed itself into a major power simply by having the foresight to build an effective navy.<\/p>\n The Persians had finally regrouped by 480 BCE, ten years after their first attempt to invade. Xerxes I, now secure in his position, dispatched a huge army\u2014as many as 200,000 soldiers\u2014supported by a navy\u20141,200 ships\u2014over twice as large as that of the Athenians. The Greek were, for the most part terrified into submission, with only about 6 percent of the city-states joining into the defensive coalition created by Athens and Sparta. The Spartans took leadership of the land army that would block the Persians in the north while the Athenians attacked the Persian navy in the south.<\/p>\n Figure 3.4<\/strong> Route of the Persian invasion under Xerxes<\/em>. Credit: Persian invasion<\/u><\/a> by GNU Free Documentation License.<\/p>\n The Spartan-led force\u2014about 3,000 hoplites consisting of both Spartans and their allies\u2014was very small compared to the Persian army, but for several days they held the Persians back at the Battle of Thermopylae, a narrow pass in which the Persians were unable to deploy the full might of their army against the Greeks. Leonidas\u2014one of the Spartan kings\u2014and his troops held the Persian forces in place until the Spartans were betrayed by a Greek, hired by the Persians, who revealed a path that allowed the Persians to surround the Greeks and, finally, overwhelm them. . As the battle on land was occurring, a Greek fleet\u2014dominated by Athenian ships and led by Themistocles\u2014protected the Spartan flank and prevented the Persians from landing troops behind them. This\u00a0Battle of Artemisium\u00a0was largely a stalemate with heavy losses on both sides. However, when news arrived that Thermopylae had fallen, the Greek fleet retreated to Salamis. Despite the ultimate defeat of the Spartan-led force, this delay gave the Greeks the time to coalesce their forces to face off against the Persians in greater numbers.<\/p>\n In the meantime, Xerxes\u2019 army was easily able to march across Greece and ransack various city-states. It even sacked Athens itself, though this was an empty victory as the city had been evacuated earlier. With this Xerxes claimed victory over the Greeks and then personally withdrew along with a significant portion of his army. However, the Greeks were not ready to admit defeat. The tides would turn due to two military engagements. First up was the Battle of Salamis in September 480 BCE. The remainder of the Persian fleet had chased after the Athenians following the Battle of Artemisium as they headed for the straits of Salamis. Though they were outnumbered, the Athenians were able to use the constricted space as well as the greater maneuverability of their ships to inflict a devastating naval loss on the Persians. With their fleet destroyed, the army left behind by Xerxes was in dire straits as it was now impractical for the empire to resupply them.<\/p>\n The next year, in June 479 BCE, a decisive land battle was fought in central Greece\u2014at Plataea\u2014by a Greek coalition led by the Spartans. After an 11-day\u00a0stalemate the decisive fighting came on the final day after a tactical Greek retreat was mistaken for a rout by the Persians.\u00a0The main engagement, involving intense melee combat, concluded within hours, and resulted in the death of the Persian commander Mardonius. The victory was followed by a Greek offensive to push all remaining Persians out of not only Greece proper, but the islands and Ionia. The Greeks won engagement after engagement, and the Persians finally decided to abandon the attempt to conquer Greece as being too costly. The remaining Greek colonies in Anatolia rose up against the Persians, and sporadic fighting continued for almost 20 years.<\/p>\n While there is obviously a pro-Greek bias to the Greek sources that describe the Persian War, they do identify an essential reason for Greek victories. Thanks to the phalanx, each Greek soldier\u2014from any city-state, not just Sparta\u2014was a real, viable soldier. The immense majority of the Persian forces were relatively ineffective peasant conscripts, unwillingly recruited from their homes and forced to fight for a king for whom they had little personal loyalty. While the core of the Persian army was excellent cavalry from the Iranian plateau and Bactria, they were always a small minority of the total force.<\/p>\n As was mentioned at the start of the chapter, 479 BCE truly marked the beginning of the \u201cclassical age\u201d of Greece. During this period, Greek intellectualism would flourish. However, it was also marked by perhaps their most selfish and misguided political blundering in the form of a costly and ultimately pointless war between Sparta and Athens: the Peloponnesian War.<\/p>\n When the Spartans and Athenians led the Greek city-states to victory against the Persians in the Persian War, it was a shock to the entire region of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Persia was the regional \u201csuperpower\u201d at the time, while the Greeks were just a group of disunited city-states on a rocky peninsula to the northwest. After their success, the Greeks were filled with confidence about the superiority of their own form of civilization.<\/p>\n However, victory did not bring the Greeks closer together. Instead, there was a great contest between the two most powerful city-states: Athens and Sparta. Wars would break out as each tried to expand their power and control. This contest was not immediate though. Initially after the defeat of the Persians, the Greeks created the Delian League, in theory a defensive coalition that existed to defend against Persia and to liberate the Ionian colonies still under Persian control. In reality it would become a political tool eventually used by Athens to create its own empire.<\/p>\n Each year, the members of the Delian League contributed money to build and support a large navy, meant to protect all of Greece from any further Persian interference. Athens, however, quickly became the dominant player in the Delian League. They were able to control the League due to the powerful Athenian navy. No other city-state had a navy anywhere near as large or effective, so over time the other members of the League only contributed funds and supplies, while the Athenians fielded the ships. Thus, it was all too easy for Athens to simply use the League to drain the other city-states of wealth while building up its own power. The last remnants of Persian troops were driven from the Greek islands by 469 BCE, about ten years after the great Greek victories of the Persian War, but Athens refused to allow any of the League members to resign from the League after the victory.<\/p>\n Soon, Athens moved from simply extracting money to actually imposing political control over other city-states. They stationed troops in garrisons in these cities and forced them to adopt new laws, regulations, and taxes, all designed to keep the flow of money going to Athens. Some of the members of the League rose up in armed revolts, but the Athenians were able to crush them with little difficulty. The final event that eliminated any pretense that the League was anything but an Athenian empire was the failure of a naval expedition sent in 460 BCE by Athens to help an Egyptian revolt against the Persians. The Greek expedition was crushed, and the Athenians responded by moving the treasury of the League, formerly kept on the Greek island of Delos\u2014 hence Delian League\u2014to Athens itself, arguing that the treasury was too vulnerable if it remained on Delos. At this point, no other member of the League could do anything about it. It existed as an Athenian-controlled empire, pumping money into Athenian coffers and allowing Athens to build some of its most famous and beautiful buildings. Thus, the great irony is that the most glorious age of Athenian democracy and philosophy was funded by the extraction of wealth from its fellow Greek cities. In the end, the Persians simply made peace with Athens in 448 BCE, giving up the claim to the Greek colonies entirely and in turn eliminating the very reason the League had come into being.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Sparta was the head of a different association, the Peloponnesian League, which was originally founded before the Persian War as a mutual protection league of the Greek cities of Corinth, Sparta, and Thebes. Like Athens, Sparta dominated its allies, although it did not take advantage of them in quite the same ways that Athens did. Sparta was resentful and, in a way, fearful of Athenian power. Open war finally broke out between the two city-states in 431 BCE after two of their respective allies started a conflict and Athens tried to influence the political decisions of various Spartan allies. The war was fought intermittently for 27 years, from 431-404 BCE.<\/p>\n As the war progressed, it was clear that the Spartans were unquestionably superior in land warfare, while the Athenians had a seemingly unstoppable navy. The Spartans and their allies repeatedly invaded Athenian territory, but the Athenians were smart enough to have built strong fortifications that held the Spartans off. The Athenians, in turn, attacked Spartan settlements and positions overseas and used their navy to bring in supplies. While Sparta could not take Athens itself, Athens was essentially under siege for decades. Life went on, but it was usually impossible for the Athenians to travel over land in Greece outside of their home region of Attica.<\/p>\n Figure 3.5<\/strong> Athens and its allies, including the city-states it dominated in the Delian League, are depicted in orange, Sparta and its allies in green.<\/em> Credit: Peloponnesian War<\/u><\/a> by U.S. Military.<\/p>\n This conflict could actually have been over after only a couple of years of fighting. In 429 BCE a plague hit Athens. The illness\u2014described by the historian Thucydides as a lingering, debilitating sickness\u2014killed as much as one-third of the population of Athens, including its most influential leader, Pericles. Sparta didn't directly attack Athens during the plague primarily because\u00a0the disease within the city's crowded walls made a direct siege risky for their own troops, so they chose to raid the surrounding countryside instead, waiting for the plague to weaken Athens without directly exposing themselves. However, this didn\u2019t happen in the short run as Athens rebounded remarkably well from the disease. Additionally, by\u00a0leveraging its naval power and defensive walls it was able to strike back at Sparta, ending the immediate threat.<\/p>\n Still, the Athenian Plague had a long-term detrimental effect on the city-state. A lot of senior leadership perished in the plague, leaving untested political and military leaders to take over. This can be exemplified by an event in 415 BCE when Athens suffered a military disaster when a young general convinced the Athenians to send thousands of troops against the city of Syracuse\u2014a Spartan ally\u2014in southern Sicily, hundreds of miles from Greece itself, in hopes of looting it. The invasion turned into a nightmare for the Athenians, with every ship captured or sunk and almost every soldier killed or captured and sold into slavery, dramatically weakening the Athenian military.<\/p>\n From this point, the Athenians went on the defensive as the Spartans were able to establish a permanent garrison within sight of Athens itself. Things became even worse when close to 20,000 slaves escaped from the Athenian silver mines\u2014the ones that had originally paid for the navy before the Persian War\u2014and were welcomed by the Spartans as recruits. This both bolstered the Spartan forces and cut off Athens' main source of revenue. Sparta finally struck a decisive blow in 405 BCE by surprising the Athenian fleet in Anatolia and destroying it leaving Athens no choice but to sue for peace. Also suffering from fatigue from the war, Sparta didn\u2019t have the manpower to force Athens to accept an unconditional surrender. The final peace agreement saw the walls of the city torn down and the remainder of the navy to be disbanded. The city itself escaped destruction and its inhabitants were not enslaved. Within a year the Athenians had created a new government, but it is safe to say that neither city-state was in a position to dominate Greek affairs. The end of the war opened the door for a new state to fill that power vacuum, but the story of the Macedonians will have to wait until Chapter 5.<\/p>\n Greece itself was transformed by the Peloponnesian War. For one, the Greeks as a whole were less isolated and more cosmopolitan by the time the war ended. This is due to both sides seeking out allies outside of Greece. The Spartans even allied with the Persians\u2014formerly their hated enemies\u2014in the final stages of the war. These connections meant that at least some of their prejudices about Greek superiority became muted. Likewise, the war had inadvertently undermined the hoplite-based social and political order of the prior centuries.<\/p>\n Nowhere was this truer than in Sparta where their entire way of life was transformed. Out of necessity the once isolated and landlocked city-state become a naval power that relied as much on diplomacy as they did on battle. Indeed, since controlling diplomatic alliances was as important as sheer military strength, cultural xenophobia was weakened. After all, diplomacy required skill, culture, and education, not just force of arms. Finally, the obsession with austerity and egalitarianism also was abandoned. Some Spartans had gotten rich from the war and used that wealth to buy their sons out of the formerly obligatory life in the barracks. Others were too poor to train in the traditional manner. While these changes helped Sparta beat Athens in the Peloponnesian War, they also ultimately spelled the end of the militant state. The Greeks as a whole were shocked in 371 BCE when the city-state of Thebes defeated the Spartans three times in open battle. Following the victories, they symbolically marched to within sight of Sparta itself, thereby destroying the myth of Spartan invincibility.<\/p>\n Another change brought on by the war was a change in how militaries were constructed. Across Greece, the practice of relying on volunteer citizen-soldiers was abandoned in favor of state-financed standing armies. Additionally, the city-states came to rely on mercenaries\u2014many of whom ironically went on to serve the Persians after the war wound down. Between 405 BCE-338 BCE, the old order of the hoplites and republics atrophied, replaced by oligarchic councils or tyrants in the city-states and stronger, tax-supported states. The period of the war itself was thus both the high point and the beginning of the end of Classical Greece. Meanwhile, Persia re-captured and exerted control over the Anatolian Greek cities by 387 BCE. Even though the Persians had lost the Persian War, they were once again as strong as ever as an empire.<\/p>\n However, despite the importance of the Peloponnesian War in transforming ancient Greece, it should be emphasized that not all of the city-states were involved in the war, and there were years of truce and skirmishing during which even the major antagonists were not actively campaigning. The reason that this part of Greek history is referred to as the Classical Age is that its lasting achievements had to do more with culture and learning, than with warfare.<\/p>","rendered":" In order to understand the transition teased at the end of the Chapter 2, we need to take a detour to examine an external force that will help with that transition. Persia was one of the most significant ancient civilizations, a vast empire that was at the time the largest the world had ever seen. It incorporated all of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, and at its height it even included Egypt. In other words, the entire expanse of land stretching from the borders of India to Greece was conquered and controlled by the Persians.<\/p>\n The core region of Persia itself corresponds with present-day Iran and the language of Iran today\u2014Farsi\u2014is a direct linguistic descendent of ancient Persian. Geographically it consists of a high, arid Iranian Plateau, ringed by rugged mountains like the Zagros and Elburz ranges. Situated between the Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf\/Gulf of Oman to the south, the region features harsh central deserts and fertile coastal strips. In the ancient world, it was dominated by warriors that fought on horseback who were generally perceived as \u201cbarbarians\u201d by the settled people of Mesopotamia to the west. By the seventh century BCE, a powerful collection of clans, the Medes, dominated the region, forming a loosely governed empire which included control over the Persian clans of southwest Iran.<\/p>\n Historians divide Persian history into periods defined by the founding clan of a given royal dynasty. The empire described in this chapter is referred to as the Achaemenid Persian Empire after its first ruling clan. Later periods of ancient Persian history, most importantly the Parthian and Sasanian empires, are described in the chapters on ancient Rome.<\/p>\n In the late 1700s CE, an English judge and linguist named Sir William Jones made a remarkable discovery: ancient languages whose speakers lived thousands of miles apart shared significant similarities in their words and grammar. Jones himself was fluent in an astonishing twenty-eight languages, including ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit\u2014the ancient Indian language in which the earliest major books of Hinduism were written. Jones surmised that, at some point in the ancient past, there must have been a single language spoken by a group of people whose descendants spread across much of Eurasia, in the process bringing dialects of that shared language with them. Over time, the languages would have branched apart until they were mutually unintelligible, despite sharing a common linguistic root. Jones was the first to determine that languages as seemingly unrelated as English, Spanish, Turkish, Farsi, and Hindi were in fact all part of one vast linguistic family.<\/p>\n Put simply, Jones was right. Subsequent generations of scholars have established beyond a doubt that there was indeed a group, about whom we know almost nothing, who spoke dialects of the root language Jones discovered. Since the descendants of that group migrated and settled from India and Iran in the east all the way to western Europe, the term Indo-European is used both for the people and the languages they spoke. There is no archeological, let alone historical, evidence that identifies exactly where this group originated, nor can we determine much about their culture. That said, based on linguistic evidence, it is certain that the Indo-Europeans migrated south, east, and west from somewhere in the southern part of Central Asia by the third millennium BCE (i.e. the 2000s BCE). They both conquered and settled among the people who were already present, in some cases coming to completely dominate, and in other cases simply intermixing over time.<\/p>\n Figure 3.1<\/strong> Approximate dates of the Indo-European migrations. Note that the ancestors of the Persians were relative latecomers; the migrations had been occurring for thousands of years, but the people who would become the Persians arrived in Iran in about 800 BCE.<\/em> Credit: Indo-European Migrations<\/u><\/a> by Joshua Jonathan.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, within a century of Jones\u2019 discovery, both genuine scholars and racist hacks\u2014Europeans at the height of European global dominance, the late nineteenth century CE\u2014tried to impose their own worldview on ancient history. Rather than the Indo-Europeans being a large group of nomadic peoples who spent over a thousand years migrating and settling, in the minds of these pseudo-scholars the Indo-Europeans were instead a dominant ancient \u201crace\u201d of conquerors. Seizing on the fact that the ancient Indo-Europeans of India and Iran called themselves Arya<\/em>\u2014which was simply their name for themselves, a self-designation\u2014 these racist pseudo-scholars claimed that the \u201cAryan race\u201d had been a group of pale-skinned geniuses who brought the light of learning and culture to \u201cinferior\u201d racial groups through force. These \u201cAryans,\u201d however, foolishly interbred with their inferiors, and when they did, the ancient civilizations they founded, from actual Indo-European empires like Persia to totally unrelated ones like Egypt, collapsed. While some of these European mythmakers claimed\u2014against all evidence\u2014that the Indo-Europeans originated in northern Europe, others grudgingly accepted that they were originally from Central Asia. This has left the strange legacy of using the term \u201cCaucasian\u201d for pale-skinned people of European descent, named after the Caucasus Mountains\u2014stretching between the Black and Caspian Seas\u2014near where the Indo-Europeans may have originated.<\/p>\n This racist myth has overshadowed the real history of a tremendously important fact: the Indo-Europeans were real, they truly did migrate and settle across a vast swath of Eurasia, and they left an enormous linguistic and, arguably, cultural legacy to world history. They were not, however, a \u201crace,\u201d let alone a pale-skinned one, nor were most ancient civilizations founded by them. Needless to say, all of East Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific developed major civilizations that had nothing to do with the Indo-Europeans, and both the pre-Indo European Indian cultures like the Harappans of northern India and the various ancient cultures of the Middle East\u2014including the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Hebrews\u2014were well established before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans.<\/p>\n In the case of the Persians, the Indo-European migration to the Iranian plateau was complete by the eighth century BCE. Over time, the two distinct but closely related groups noted above\u2014the Medes and the Persians themselves\u2014were established as the dominant powers in the region, with the Medes holding the majority of power. The Medes were allies of Babylon, and in 612 BCE they took part in the huge rebellion that resulted in the downfall of the Assyrian Empire. For just over fifty years, the Medes continued to dominate the Iranian plateau. Then, in 550 BCE a Persian leader\u2014Cyrus II the Great\u2014led the Persians against the Medes and conquered them. He assimilated the Medes into his own military force and then embarked on an incredible campaign of conquest that lasted twenty years, in the process forging Persia into a gigantic empire.<\/p>\n Cyrus began his conquests outside of Iran by invading Anatolia in 546 BCE and conquering the kingdom of Lydia. He continued west where he encountered the Greek colonies of Ionia along the coast of the Aegean Sea. Cyrus swiftly defeated these Greek city-states. He found Greek leaders willing to work with the Persians and he appointed them as governors of the colonies. With these governors\u2014really tyrants\u2014supplying him with loyal warriors and paying tribute, Cyrus allowed the Greeks to keep their language, religion, and culture. Thus, even though they had been beaten, most of the Greeks in the colonies did not experience Persian rule as particularly oppressive. This is not to say they were happy with the situation, as we shall soon see.<\/p>\n Cyrus next turned south and conquered the city-states and kingdoms of Mesopotamia, culminating with his conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE. This conquest was surprisingly easy. At the time, authority in Babylon was contested between the priests of Marduk\u2014the patron deity of the city\u2014and the king, who was trying to favor the worship of a different goddess. After Cyrus defeated the forces of the king in one battle he was welcomed as a liberator by the Babylonians. Incidentally, he then made a point of venerating Marduk to help ensure their ongoing loyalty.<\/p>\n Figure 3.2<\/strong> Part of the inscription reads: \u201cI am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters, the son of Cambyses, great king, king of An\u0161an, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of An\u0161an, descendant of Teispes, great king, king of An\u0161an, of an eternal line of kingship, whose rule B\u00eal and Nabu love, whose kingship they desire for their hearts’ pleasure. When I entered Babylon in a peaceful manner, I took up my lordly abode in the royal palace amidst rejoicing and happiness. Marduk, the great lord, established as his fate for me a magnanimous heart of one who loves Babylon, and I daily attended to his worship.\u201d<\/em> Credit: Cyrus cylinder<\/u><\/a> by Mike Peel. Translation by Mordechai Cogan, published in W.H. Hallo and K.L. Younger,\u00a0The Context of Scripture. Vol. II: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World<\/em>\u00a0(2003, Leiden and Boston), but has been adapted to Schaudig’s edition with the help of Bert van der Spek: Cyrus Cylinder<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n Much of what historians know about Persia is gleaned from the propaganda Persian kings left behind. The conquest of Babylon produced an outstanding example\u2014the Cyrus Cylinder, a pillar covered in a proclamation that Cyrus commissioned after the conquest of Babylon. The Cyrus Cylinder is a crucial source for understanding Persian rulership at its very beginning. Cyrus established his authority on two principles: descent from other great kings and the favor of the gods. He was the living representative of a supreme royal line of descent and the agent of his patron god on earth. Over time the identity of the god in question became Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of the Zoroastrian religion (described below) rather than Marduk, but the principle remained the same. All subsequent Persian kings would cite these two principles, which in their own eyes elevated them in authority above all other rulers.<\/p>\n Cyrus continued the practice of finding loyal underlings to rule over the conquered territories and treating his conquered enemies fairly. This kept uprisings against him to a minimum. With the west secured in this way, he then pushed into Central Asia\u2014in particular present-day Afghanistan\u2014conquering all of what constituted the \u201cknown world\u201d in that region.<\/p>\n The campaigns of Cyrus ended with his death in battle against the Scythians in 530 BCE. He was followed by his son Cambyses II who led the Persian armies west, conquering both the rich Phoenician cities of the eastern Mediterranean coast and Egypt. There he was installed as pharaoh, again demonstrating Persian respect for local traditions. Between these two rulers\u2014and in less than thirty years\u2014Persia had gone from an obscure kingdom in the middle of the Iranian plateau to the largest land empire in the world. Cambyses died not long after the conquest in 522 BCE under somewhat mysterious circumstances when he supposedly fell on his sword while getting off of his horse.<\/p>\n Following Cambyses\u2019 death, his distant cousin Darius I became king (r. 522-486 BCE). The story of how this happened is complicated and disputed by different accounts from the period. Cambyses might have had his brother, and heir, Bardiya, murdered. After Cambyses\u2019 own death, an imposter named Guamata might have seized the throne pretending to be Bardiya, but knowing he was not the rightful heir, Darius assassinated him and claimed the throne for himself. Other accounts claim that this was just a fabrication, and that it was Darius who originally killed Bardiya, not Cambyses. Regardless of what truly happened, Darius\u2014who will also come to be known as the Great\u2014ended up on the throne. In order to solidify his claim, he then married several women from the line of Cyrus and Cambyses. In the midst of the political chaos at the top, a series of revolts briefly shook the empire, but Darius swiftly crushed the uprisings and reasserted Persian rule. He captured his moment of triumph in a huge carved image on a rock wall\u2014the \u201cBisitun Inscription\u201d\u2014which depicts his victory over these other\u2014lesser\u2014kings and traces his royal lineage back to a shared ancestor with Cyrus the Great.<\/p>\n By the time Darius came to power, the Persian Empire was already too large for one person to rule effectively, mainly due to the lack of the necessary bureaucratic infrastructure. Darius worked to change that. Even as he expanded the empire further, he consolidated royal power by setting up a bureaucracy which worked to standardize taxation and establish universal expectations of behavior across the empire. He also improved infrastructure by establishing a postal service and standardizing weights, measures, and coinage.<\/p>\n Figure 3.3<\/strong> The Persian Empire at its territorial height under Darius I<\/em>. Credit: Map of Persia<\/u><\/a> by Sumerophile.<\/p>\n While Darius inherited the conquests of his predecessors he also personally oversaw the conquest of new regions. This included the northern part of the Indus River Valley in northwestern India, thus marking the first time in world history when one state ruled over three of the major river systems of ancient history\u2014Nile, Mesopotamia, and the Indus. In 513 BCE Darius led a gigantic invasion of Central Asia to try to end the raids of the Scythians once and for all. However, he was forced to retreat without winning a decisive victory. Despite failing in his primary aim, his army was still intact, and he had been able to add Thrace\u2014present-day Bulgaria\u2014to the empire.<\/p>\n Darius was also interested in seizing more territory to the west, which he did by conquering the remaining Greek colonies on the coast of Anatolia. In 499 BCE several Ionian Greek city-states rose against the Persians and successfully secured Athenian aid. Several years of fighting followed, with the Persians eventually crushing the rebellion in 494 BCE, in the process deporting many of the Greek rebels to India as punishment. However, Athens\u2019 decision to support the rebellion angered the Persians, and Darius began to plan a full-fledged invasion of Greece.<\/p>\n Before returning to Greece though, let\u2019s take a moment to see just exactly what they were up against. As mentioned above, Darius instituted a number of reforms to strengthen the central government. As you might imagine, an empire as big as Persia posed some serious logistical challenges. The Persians kings may have had relatively loyal subjects, but if it took months for messages to reach them even loyal subjects could make decisions that the kings would disagree with. To help address this issue, Darius turned to the past. In order to keep centralized control, the Assyrians had built highways with regularly spaced supply posts for their messengers. The Persians mimicked this. The most important of their highways was called the Royal Road, linking the empire all the way from western Anatolia to the Persian capital of Susa, just east of the Tigris. A messenger on the Royal Road could cover 1,600 miles in a week on horseback, trading out horses at posts along the way. This then mostly solved the communication issue.<\/p>\n However, another issue that Darius had to face when he took the throne was the number of different peoples\u2014who all spoke and wrote in their own distinct languages\u2014that were under his authority. Since there could be push back if the people were forced to adopt a single language, the state used several languages to communicate with them. Additionally, to promote literacy\u2014so that more people could be directly reached by these decrees that were traveling across the empire\u2014the government sponsored a major effort to standardize a new, simplified cuneiform alphabet.<\/p>\n The diversity of people also meant a diversity of customs, both legal and economic. Here, the Persians responded by standardized laws across the empire and issuing regular coinage in both silver and gold. Together, these last two reforms led to a more unified economy, one that led to greater prosperity for the people and more resources for the empire to continue its conquests.<\/p>\n In stark contrast to the earlier methods of rule employed by the Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians\u2014who relocated entire populations to make them more reliant on the state\u2014the key to Persian rule, as described above, was the novel innovation of treating conquered people with a degree of leniency. So long as they were loyal, paid taxes, and sent troops when called, the Persian kings had no problem with letting their subjects practice their own religions, use their own languages, and carry on their own trading practices and customs. For example, it was Cyrus who allowed the exiled Jews to return to Judah from Babylon. It seems that the Persian kings felt it very important to maintain an image of beneficence, of linking their power to sympathy for their subjects, rather than trying to terrorize their subjects into submission.<\/p>\n It is not as if the kings were na\u00efve though and expected their beneficence to lead to a completely compliant population. To make sure that they maintained their control, the Persian kings introduced a system of governance that allowed them to gather intelligence on their subjects. To do this, the empire was divided into twenty satrapies<\/em>\u2014provinces\u2014ruled by officials called satraps<\/em>. In each satrapy, the satrap was the political governor, who was advised by a military general who reported directly to the king. In this way, the two most powerful leaders in each satrapy could keep an eye on each other. Interestingly, despite this system of political checks and balances on the authority and loyalty of these governmental officials, it was the satraps who appointed the new king from the royal family when the old one died. Sometimes they were able to appoint weak-willed members of the royal family so that they might enjoy more personal freedom. Even with a powerful ruler such as Darius and despite the innovations that he introduced in organization, the satraps still normally operated with a large degree of autonomy. While good for the satraps, this was one of the factors that ultimately weakened the Achaemenid Empire. As for everyone else, roaming officials called the \u201ceyes and ears of the king\u201d traveled around the empire checking that the king\u2019s edicts were being enforced and that conquered people were not being abused, then reporting back to the Persian cities of Susa and Parsa\u2014both of which served as royal capitals. Finally, in the realm of control, one should not dismiss the power of pomp and ceremony in keeping a population\u2014both domestic and conquered\u2014cowed. The Persian kings adopted the title of \u201cKing of Kings\u201d and utilized elaborate, staged court ceremonies to reinforce their immense power. Even approaching the king required formal, often ritualized, gestures of submission, such as\u00a0prostrating oneself before the king and not making eye contact. This level of ceremony applied to all levels of society. Indeed, while the Persian kings acknowledged the authority of the rulers of the lands they had conquered, they required those rulers to in turn acknowledge the Persian king\u2019s overarching supremacy. Persian images of the kings depicted them receiving tribute from these lesser kings who had come to Susa or Parsa in a show of loyalty and support. In this way, the political authority of the empire was tied together by both the formal bureaucratic structure of the satrapies as well as the bonds of loyalty between the King of Kings and his subject rulers.<\/p>\n One final component of the Persian system was relatively modest taxation. In order to keep taxes moderate, the Persian kings only called up armies\u2014of both Persians and conquered people\u2014when there was a war. Otherwise, the only permanent army was the 10,000-strong elite bodyguard of the king that the Greeks called the \u201cImmortals.\u201d They were named such by the Greek historian Herodotus\u2014the Greek term is Athanatoi.<\/em> They were not immortal in the sense of being unkillable, but because the unit was constantly kept at 10,000 soldiers by instantly replacing casualties or sick members, making the army appear to never diminish in strength. When the Persians did go to war, their subjects contributed troops according to their strengths. The Phoenicians formed the navy, the Medes the cavalry, the Mesopotamians the infantry, and so on. This system worked well on long campaigns, but its weakness was that it took up to two years to mobilize the whole empire for war, an issue that will be fully on display in the war against the Greeks.<\/p>\n The Achaemenid dynasty of Persia would rule for approximately two centuries, from Cyrus\u2019 victories in 550 BCE to its conquest by Alexander the Great, completed in 330 BCE. It is worth noting that despite the relatively \u201cenlightened\u201d character of Persian rule, rebellions did occur frequently during periods of transition or civil war between rival claimants to the throne. In a sense, the empire both benefited from and was made vulnerable by the autonomy of its subjects. While each region maintained its own identity and traditions, thereby keeping everyday resentment to a minimum, in moments of crisis that autonomy might also lead to the demand for actual independence.<\/p>\n Despite the overall policy of religious tolerance, there was still a dominant Persian religion: Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism, named after its prophet Zoroaster, taught that the world was being fought over by two great powers: a god of goodness, honesty, and benevolence known as Ahura Mazda\u2014meaning \u201cWise Lord\u201d\u2014and an evil spirit that represented destructive energy\u2014 Angra Mainyu, also known as Ahriman. Ahura Mazda was aided by yazatas\u2014 divine beings or “angels” worthy of worship\u2014like Mithras, yazata of light, covenants, justice, and friendship, and Anahita,\u00a0yazata of rivers, fertility, and the nurturing of life. Every time a person did something righteous, honest, or brave, Ahura Mazda won a victory over Angra Mainyu, while every time someone did something cruel, dishonest, or dishonorable Angra Mainyu celebrated the win. Thus, humans had a major role to play in bringing about the final victory of Ahura Mazda through their actions.<\/p>\n Zoroaster himself lived sometime between 1300 BCE and 1000 BCE\u2014long before the rise of the empire\u2014and was responsible for codifying the beliefs of the religion named after him. Zoroaster claimed that Ahura Mazda would ultimately triumph in the battle against evil but explained that the existence of evil in the world was necessary for people to understand the paradise being offered by Ahura Mazda. After all, can one really understand light, if they have never experienced dark? Thus, Ahura Mazda was not all-powerful in quite the same way as the Jewish\u2014and later Christian and Muslim\u2014God was believed to be. Human actions mattered in this scheme because everyone played a role, however minor, in helping to bring about order and righteousness or impeded progress by indulging in wickedness. Zoroastrianism also told a specific story about the afterlife. When the power of good finally triumphs definitively over evil, those who lived righteously would live forever in the glorious presence of Ahura Mazda, while those who were evil would suffer forever in a black pit.<\/p>\n There are obvious parallels here between Zoroastrianism and Jewish and Christian beliefs. Indeed, there is a direct link between the Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu and the Jewish and Christian figure of Satan, who was simply a dark spirit in the early books of the Torah but later became a distinct presence, the \u201cnemesis\u201d of God Himself and a threat to the order of the world, if not to God. Likewise, the Christian idea of the Final Judgment is clearly indebted to the Zoroastrian idea of a great day of reckoning.<\/p>\n One noteworthy aspect of Zoroastrianism is that, in contrast to other ancient religions\u2014including Judaism, and later, Christianity\u2014Zoroastrianism appears to have banned slavery on spiritual grounds. This is important to bear in mind as we move into our discussion of the Persian War. The Greeks thought of the war as the defense of their glorious traditions, including the political participation of citizens in the state. However, it was the Greeks who controlled a society that was heavily dependent on slavery, whereas though slavery was still clearly present in the Persian Empire\u2014despite the religious ban\u2014 it was less prevalent than in Greece.<\/p>\n Almost all of the theological details about Zoroastrianism are known from much later periods of Persian history, although historians have established that the Persian rulers themselves were almost certainly Zoroastrians by the rule of Darius I. Indeed, Zoroastrianism provided a spiritual justification for the expansion of the Persian Empire. Because the great kings believed that they were the earthly representatives of Ahura Mazda, they claimed that the expansion of the empire would bring the final triumph of good over evil sooner. The kings sponsored Zoroastrian temples and expanded the faith at least in part because the faith supported them and the magi<\/em>\u2014or priests\u2014preached in favor of the continued power and expansion of the empire.<\/p>\n Zoroastrianism reveals much about what the Persians valued<\/em>, not just what they believed about the universe. Truth was the cardinal virtue of Zoroastrianism, with lying being synonymous with evil. Each person had a certain social role to play in the Zoroastrian worldview, with the kings presiding over an ordered, loyal, prosperous society. In theory, war was fought to extend righteousness, not just seize territory and wealth. There was clearly a sophisticated ethical code and set of social expectations present even in early Zoroastrianism. This is reflected in a comment made Herodotus. According to him, the Persians taught their children three things: to ride a horse, to shoot a bow, and to tell the truth.<\/p>\n When the Greek cities of Ionia revolted against Persian rule, Darius vowed to make an example not just of them, but of the Greek city-states that had aided them, including Athens. While the resulting Persian War is rightly remembered in European history as a tremendous victory of the underdog Greeks against the mighty Persian Empire, it was also unfortunately appropriated to support proto-racist beliefs regarding the superiority of \u201cThe West.\u201d Because the Greeks saw the conflict in terms of the triumph of true civilization over barbaric tyranny, and the surviving historical sources are told exclusively from the Greek perspective, this bias has managed to last until the present. Consider the movie adaptations of the most famous battles of the Persian War, 300<\/em> and 300: Rise of an Empire<\/em>, in which the Persians are depicted as being literally monstrous, ruled over by a comically evil, eight-foot-tall king. The fact that both Sparta and Athens were slave-based societies is not<\/em> part of those movies’ narratives.<\/p>\n The war began in 490 BCE, when the Persians landed at Marathon, a site 26 miles from Athens. The Athenians sent a renowned runner, Pheidippides, to Sparta\u2014about 140 miles from Athens\u2014to ask for help. The Spartans agreed but said that they could only send reinforcements when their religious ceremonies were completed in a few days. Pheidippides ran back to Athens with the bad news, but by then the Athenians\u2014joined by 1,000 hoplites from Plataea\u2014were already engaged with the Persians.<\/p>\n There were about 25,000 Persian troops\u2014this was an expeditionary force, not a large army\u2014 against which the Athenians and Plataeans fielded 11,000 hoplites. The two armies watched each other for a few days, until the Persians decided to dispatch about 10,000 of their troops in naval transports to attack Athens directly. This prompted a gamble on the part of the leading Athenian general Miltiades to attack the remaining Persians, rather than running back to defend Athens. The ensuing battle was a decisive show of force for the Greeks. The citizen-soldier hoplites proved far more effective than the conscript infantry of the Persian forces. The core of the Persian army, its Median and Persian cavalry, fought effectively against the Athenians, but once the Athenian wings closed in and forced back the infantry, the Persians were routed. According to the Greek accounts of the battle, the Persians supposedly lost 33 men to every Greek lost in the battle\u20146,400 Persian dead to 192 Greeks. By all accounts it was a smashing victory for the Athenians. A later\u2014almost certainly fabricated\u2014account of the aftermath of the battle claimed that Pheidippides was then sent running back to Athens to report the victory. Though he was able to deliver his message, he then dropped dead of exhaustion. Pheidippides had run the first marathon.<\/p>\n It is entirely possible that despite this victory, the Greeks would have still been overwhelmed by the Persians if not for setbacks in Persia and its empire. When a major revolt broke out in Egypt against Persian rule, it drew attention away from Greece until the revolt was put down. Likewise, it took years to fully activate the Persian military machine and preparation for a full-scale invasion took a decade to reach completion. Additionally, in 486 BCE as preparations were still ongoing Darius died. This meant the invasion had to be postponed further while his son Xerxes consolidated his power.<\/p>\n In the meantime, the Greeks were well aware that the Persians would eventually return. A new Athenian general, Themistocles, convinced his countrymen to spend the proceeds of a silver mine they had discovered on a navy. Athens went into a naval-building frenzy, ending up with hundreds of warships called triremes. They were manned by free Athenians who were too poor to afford armor and weapons and serve as hoplites, but who now had an opportunity to directly aid in battle as sailors. This was perhaps the first time in world history that a fairly minor power transformed itself into a major power simply by having the foresight to build an effective navy.<\/p>\n The Persians had finally regrouped by 480 BCE, ten years after their first attempt to invade. Xerxes I, now secure in his position, dispatched a huge army\u2014as many as 200,000 soldiers\u2014supported by a navy\u20141,200 ships\u2014over twice as large as that of the Athenians. The Greek were, for the most part terrified into submission, with only about 6 percent of the city-states joining into the defensive coalition created by Athens and Sparta. The Spartans took leadership of the land army that would block the Persians in the north while the Athenians attacked the Persian navy in the south.<\/p>\nPersian Expansion<\/h2>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Yamnaya-related_migrations.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThe Persian Government<\/h3>\n
Zoroastrianism<\/h3>\n
The Persian War<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nThe Peloponnesian War<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nThe Aftermath<\/h2>\n
Persian Origins: The Indo-European Migrations<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\nPersian Expansion<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThe Persian Government<\/h3>\n
Zoroastrianism<\/h3>\n
The Persian War<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n
![Peloponnesian War<\/u><\/a> by U.S. Military.<\/p>\nThis conflict could actually have been over after only a couple of years of fighting. In 429 BCE a plague hit Athens. The illness\u2014described by the historian Thucydides as a lingering, debilitating sickness\u2014killed as much as one-third of the population of Athens, including its most influential leader, Pericles. Sparta didn’t directly attack Athens during the plague primarily because\u00a0the disease within the city’s crowded walls made a direct siege risky for their own troops, so they chose to raid the surrounding countryside instead, waiting for the plague to weaken Athens without directly exposing themselves. However, this didn\u2019t happen in the short run as Athens rebounded remarkably well from the disease. Additionally, by\u00a0leveraging its naval power and defensive walls it was able to strike back at Sparta, ending the immediate threat.<\/p>\nStill, the Athenian Plague had a long-term detrimental effect on the city-state. A lot of senior leadership perished in the plague, leaving untested political and military leaders to take over. This can be exemplified by an event in 415 BCE when Athens suffered a military disaster when a young general convinced the Athenians to send thousands of troops against the city of Syracuse\u2014a Spartan ally\u2014in southern Sicily, hundreds of miles from Greece itself, in hopes of looting it. The invasion turned into a nightmare for the Athenians, with every ship captured or sunk and almost every soldier killed or captured and sold into slavery, dramatically weakening the Athenian military.<\/p>\nFrom this point, the Athenians went on the defensive as the Spartans were able to establish a permanent garrison within sight of Athens itself. Things became even worse when close to 20,000 slaves escaped from the Athenian silver mines\u2014the ones that had originally paid for the navy before the Persian War\u2014and were welcomed by the Spartans as recruits. This both bolstered the Spartan forces and cut off Athens’ main source of revenue. Sparta finally struck a decisive blow in 405 BCE by surprising the Athenian fleet in Anatolia and destroying it leaving Athens no choice but to sue for peace. Also suffering from fatigue from the war, Sparta didn\u2019t have the manpower to force Athens to accept an unconditional surrender. The final peace agreement saw the walls of the city torn down and the remainder of the navy to be disbanded. The city itself escaped destruction and its inhabitants were not enslaved. Within a year the Athenians had created a new government, but it is safe to say that neither city-state was in a position to dominate Greek affairs. The end of the war opened the door for a new state to fill that power vacuum, but the story of the Macedonians will have to wait until Chapter 5.<\/p>\nThe Aftermath<\/h2>\nGreece itself was transformed by the Peloponnesian War. For one, the Greeks as a whole were less isolated and more cosmopolitan by the time the war ended. This is due to both sides seeking out allies outside of Greece. The Spartans even allied with the Persians\u2014formerly their hated enemies\u2014in the final stages of the war. These connections meant that at least some of their prejudices about Greek superiority became muted. Likewise, the war had inadvertently undermined the hoplite-based social and political order of the prior centuries.<\/p>\nNowhere was this truer than in Sparta where their entire way of life was transformed. Out of necessity the once isolated and landlocked city-state become a naval power that relied as much on diplomacy as they did on battle. Indeed, since controlling diplomatic alliances was as important as sheer military strength, cultural xenophobia was weakened. After all, diplomacy required skill, culture, and education, not just force of arms. Finally, the obsession with austerity and egalitarianism also was abandoned. Some Spartans had gotten rich from the war and used that wealth to buy their sons out of the formerly obligatory life in the barracks. Others were too poor to train in the traditional manner. While these changes helped Sparta beat Athens in the Peloponnesian War, they also ultimately spelled the end of the militant state. The Greeks as a whole were shocked in 371 BCE when the city-state of Thebes defeated the Spartans three times in open battle. Following the victories, they symbolically marched to within sight of Sparta itself, thereby destroying the myth of Spartan invincibility.<\/p>\nAnother change brought on by the war was a change in how militaries were constructed. Across Greece, the practice of relying on volunteer citizen-soldiers was abandoned in favor of state-financed standing armies. Additionally, the city-states came to rely on mercenaries\u2014many of whom ironically went on to serve the Persians after the war wound down. Between 405 BCE-338 BCE, the old order of the hoplites and republics atrophied, replaced by oligarchic councils or tyrants in the city-states and stronger, tax-supported states. The period of the war itself was thus both the high point and the beginning of the end of Classical Greece. Meanwhile, Persia re-captured and exerted control over the Anatolian Greek cities by 387 BCE. Even though the Persians had lost the Persian War, they were once again as strong as ever as an empire.<\/p>\nHowever, despite the importance of the Peloponnesian War in transforming ancient Greece, it should be emphasized that not all of the city-states were involved in the war, and there were years of truce and skirmishing during which even the major antagonists were not actively campaigning. The reason that this part of Greek history is referred to as the Classical Age is that its lasting achievements had to do more with culture and learning, than with warfare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-158","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/158\/revisions\/159"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/158\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palomar.edu\/europeaconcisehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Peloponnesian_war_alliances_431_BC.png\"){kind=link}