Encyclopedia
The
Persian Empire was a series of historical empires that ruled over the
Iranian plateau and beyond. Generally, the earliest entity considered a part of the Persian Empire is Persia's
Achaemenid dynasty , a united
Aryan kingdom that originated in the region now known as
Pars province of
Iran and was formed under
Cyrus the Great. Successive states in
Iran prior to 1935 are collectively called the
Persian Empire by Western historians.
Name
Persia has long been used by the West to describe the nation of
Iran, its people, and its ancient empires. It derives from the ancient Greek name for Iran's maritime province, called
Fars in the modern
Persian language,
Pars in Middle Persian and
Parsa in
Old Persian, a word meaning "above reproach".
Persis is the Hellenized form of Pars, and through the Latinized word
Persia, the other European nations came to use this word for the region.
This area was the core of the original Persian Empire. Most foreigners referred to the state as
Persia until March 21, 1935, when
Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asked the international community to call the country Iran; which was often used by the
Aryan tribes who formed the country in the Achaemenid era united the plateau in that region.
History
Achaemenid Empire
The earliest known record of the Persians comes from an
Assyrian inscription from c. 844 BC that calls them the
Parsu and mentions them in the region of
Lake Urmia alongside another group, the
Madai . For the next two centuries, the Persians and Medes were at times tributary to the Assyrians. The region of Parsuash was annexed by Sargon of Assyria around 719 BC. Eventually the Medes came to rule an independent Median Empire, and the Persians were subject to them.
The
Achaemenids were the first to create a centralized state in Persia, founded by Achaemenes , chieftain of the Persians around 700 BC.
Around 653 BC, the Medes came under the domination of the
Scythians, and Teispes, the son of Achaemenes, seems to have led the nomadic Persians to settle in southern Iran around this time — eventually establishing the first organized Persian state in the important region of
Anshan as the
Elamite kingdom was permanently destroyed by the Assyrian ruler
Ashurbanipal . The kingdom of Anshan and its successors continued to use Elamite as an official language for quite some time after this, although the new dynasts spoke Persian, an Indo-Iranian tongue.
Teispes' descendants branched off into two lines, one line ruling in Anshan, while the other ruled the rest of Persia.
Cyrus II the Great united the separate kingdoms around 559 BC. At this time, the Persians were still tributary to the
Median Empire ruled by Astyages. Cyrus rallied the Persians together, and in 550 BC defeated the forces of Astyages, who was then captured by his own nobles and turned over to the triumphant Cyrus, now Shah of a unified Persian kingdom. As Persia assumed control over the rest of Media and their large empire, Cyrus led the united Medes and Persians to still more conquest. He took
Lydia in
Asia Minor, and carried his arms eastward into
central Asia. Finally in 539 BC, Cyrus marched triumphantly into the ancient city of
Babylon. After this victory, he set the standard of the benevolent conqueror by issuing the
Cyrus Cylinder. In this declaration, the king promised not to terrorize Babylon nor destroy its institutions and culture. Cyrus was killed during a battle against the Massagetae or
Sakas.
Cyrus' son, Cambyses II, annexed
Egypt to the Achaemenid Empire. The empire then reached its greatest extent under
Darius I. He led conquering armies into the
Indus River valley and into
Thrace in Europe. His invasion of
Greece was halted at the
Battle of Marathon. His son
Xerxes I also tried to subdue the Greeks, but his army was defeated at the
Battle of Plataea 479 BC.
The Achaemenid Empire was the largest and most powerful empire the world had yet seen. More importantly, it was well managed and organized. Darius divided his realm into about twenty satrapies supervised by satraps, or governors, many of whom had personal ties to the Shah. He instituted a systematic tribute to tax each province. He took the advanced
postal system of the Assyrians and expanded it. Also taken from the Assyrians was the usage of
secret agents of the king, known as the King's Eyes and Ears, keeping him informed.
Darius built the famous
Royal Road by improving ancient trade routes, thereby connecting far reaches of the empire. He moved the administration center from Fars itself to
Susa, near Babylon and closer to the center of the realm. The Persians allowed local cultures to survive, following the precedent set by Cyrus the Great. This was not only good for the empire's subjects, but ultimately benefited the Achaemenids, since the conquered peoples felt no need to revolt.
During the Achaemenid period,
Zoroastrianism became the religion of the rulers and most of the people of Persia. Its founder
Zoroaster had lived around anywhere between 600 BC and 1800 BC, and according to Plato and other Greek sources as early as 7000 BC, making him a candidate as the founder of the earliest religion based on revealed
scripture. The new religion was a new look at the traditional Aryan gods; it emphasized a
dualist struggle between
good and evil gods and a final battle yet to come in the form of the apocalypse. Zoroastrianism and its
mystic leaders, called
Magi, would become a defining element of Persian culture, and is believed by many scholars to have had a considerable influence on Judeo-Christianity, and as a result the
Western culture.
The Achaemenid Empire united people and kingdoms from every major civilization in south west Asia. For the first time in history, people from very different cultures were in contact with one another under one ruler.
Hellenistic Persia
The later years of the Achaemenid dynasty were marked by decay and decadence. The greatest empire of the time collapsed in only eight years, when it fell under the attack of a young
Macedonian king,
Alexander the Great.
The Achaemenid Empire's weakness was exposed to the Greeks in 401 BC, when the Satrap of
Sardis hired ten thousand Greek mercenaries to help secure his claim to the imperial throne . This exposed both the political instability and the military weakness of late Achaemenid State.
Philip II of Macedon, leader of most of Greece, and his son Alexander decided to take advantage of this weakness. After Philip's death, Alexander looked toward Persia. Alexander's army landed in Asia Minor in 334 BC. His armies quickly swept through Lydia, Phoenicia, and Egypt, before defeating all the troops of
Darius III at Issus and capturing the capital at Susa. The last Achaemenid resistance was at the "Persian Gates" near the royal palace at
Persepolis. The Achaemenid Empire was now in Alexander's hands.
Along his route of conquest, Alexander founded many colony cities, all named "Alexandria". For the next several centuries, these cities served to greatly extend Greek, or
Hellenistic, culture in Persia.
Alexander's empire broke up shortly after his death, and Alexander's general,
Seleucus I Nicator, tried to take control of Persia, Mesopotamia, and later Syria and Asia Minor. His ruling family is known as the
Seleucid Dynasty. However he was killed in 281 BC by Ptolemy Keraunos before he could conquer Greece and Macedonia.
Greek colonization continued until around 250 BC; Greek language, philosophy, and art came with the colonists. Throughout Alexander's former empire, Greek became the common tongue of diplomacy and literature. Trade with
China had begun in Achaemenid times along the so-called
Silk Road; but during the Hellenistic period it began in earnest. The overland trade brought about some fascinating cultural exchanges.
Buddhism came in from India, while Zoroastrianism traveled west to influence
Judaism. Incredible statues of the
Buddha in classical Greek styles have been found in Persia and Afghanistan, illustrating the mix of cultures that occurred around this time , although it is possible that Greco-Buddhist art dates from Achaemenid times when Greek artists worked for the Persians.
The Seleucid kingdom began to decline rather quickly. Even during Seleucus' lifetime, the capital was moved from Seleucia on the Tigris in Mesopotamia to the more Mediterranean
Antioch on the Orontes. The eastern provinces of
Bactria and
Parthia broke off from the Seleucid Kingdom in 238 BC. King
Antiochus III's military leadership kept Parthia from overrunning Persia itself, but his successes alarmed the burgeoning
Roman Republic. Roman legions began to attack the kingdom. At the same time, the Seleucids had to contend with the revolt of the
Maccabees in Judea and the expansion of the
Kushan Empire to the east. The empire fell apart and was conquered by Parthia and Rome.
Parthian Confederacy
Its rulers, the
Arsacid dynasty, belonged to an Iranian tribe that had settled there during the time of Alexander. They declared their independence from the Seleucids in 238 BC, but their attempts to unify Iran were thwarted until after
Mithridates I advent to the Parthian throne in about 170 BC.
The Parthian Confederacy shared a border with Rome along the upper Euphrates River. The two polities became major rivals, especially over control of Armenia. Heavily-armoured Parthian cavalry supported by mounted archers proved a match for Roman legions, as in the
Battle of Carrhae in which the Parthian General
Surena defeated Marcus Licinius Crassus of Rome. Wars were very frequent, with
Mesopotamia serving as the battleground.
During the Parthian period, Hellenistic customs partially gave way to a resurgence of Persian culture. However, the empire lacked political unity. The administration was shared between Seven Parthian clans who constituted the Dahae Confederation, each of these clans governed a province of the empire.
Suren-Pahlav Clan, Karen-Pahlav Clan and Mihran Clan were the most influential ones.
By the 1st century BC, Parthia was decentralized, ruled by
feudal nobles. Wars with Rome to the west and the
Kushan Empire to the northeast drained the country's resources.
Parthia, now impoverished and without any hope to recover the lost territories, was demoralized. The kings had to give more concessions to the nobility, and the vassal kings sometimes refused to obey. Parthia's last ruler Artabanus IV had an initial success in putting together the crumbling state however the fate of Arsacid Dynasty was doomed when in AD 224, the Persian vassal king
Ardashir revolted. Two years later, he took
Ctesiphon, and this time, it meant the end of Parthia. It also meant the beginning of the third Persian Empire, ruled by the Sassanid kings. Sassanids were from the province of Persis, native to the first Persian Empire, the Achaemenids.
Sassanid Empire
Ardashir I, led a rebellion against the Parthian Confederacy in an attempt to revive the glory of the previous empire and to legitimize the hellenized form of
Zoroastrianism practised in south western Iran. In two years he was the Shah of a new Persian Empire.
The
Sassanid dynasty was the first dynasty native to the Pars province since the Achaemenids; thus they saw themselves as the successors of Darius and Cyrus. They pursued an aggressive expansionist policy. They recovered much of the eastern lands that the Kushans had taken in the Parthian period. The Sassanids continued to make war against Rome; a Persian army even captured the
Roman Emperor Valerian in 260.
The Sassanid Empire, unlike Parthia, was a highly centralized state. The people were rigidly organized into a caste system: Priests, Soldiers, Scribes, and Commoners. Zoroastrianism was finally made the official state religion, and spread outside Persia proper and out into the provinces. There was sporadic persecution of other religions. The Catholic Christian church was particularly persecuted, but this was in part due to its ties to the
Roman Empire. The
Nestorian Christian church was tolerated and sometimes even favored by the Sassanids.
The wars and religious control that had fueled The Sassanid empire's early successes eventually contributed to its decline. The eastern regions were conquered by the White Huns in the late
5th century. Adherents of a radical religious sect, the Mazdakites, revolted around the same time.
Khosrau I was able to recover his empire and expand into the Christian countries of
Antioch and
Yemen. Between 605 and 629, Sassanids successfully annexed Levant and
Roman Egypt and pushed into Anatolia.
However, a subsequent war with the Romans utterly destroyed the empire. In the course of the protracted conflict, Sassinid armies reached
Constantinople, but could not defeat the Byzantines there. Meanwhile, the Byzantine Emperor
Heraclius had successfully outflanked the Persian armies in Asia Minor and attacked the empire from the rear while the main Iranian army along with its top Eran Spahbods were far from battlefields. This resulted in a crushing defeat for Sassanids in Northern Mesopotamia. The Sassanids had to give up all their conquered lands and retreat. This defeat was mentioned in
Qur'an as a "victory for believers," referring to the Romans, who were monotheists, in contrast to the
pagan Sassinids. .
Following the advent of Islam and collapse of
Sassanid Empire, Persians came under the subjection of Arab rulers for almost two centuries before native Persian dynasties could gradually drive them out. In this period a number of small and numerically inferior Arab tribes migrated to inland Iran.
Also some
Turkic tribes settled in Persia between the 9th and 12th centuries.
In time these peoples were integrated into numerous Persian populations and adopted
Persian culture and language while Persians retained their culture with minimal influence from outside.
Islam and Persia
The explosive growth of the Arab
Caliphate coincided with the chaos caused by the end of
Sassanid rule. Most of the country was conquered from 643 to 650. The last resistance from the remnants of the Sassanid dynasty ended two years later. Persia's conquest by
Islamic Arab armies marks the transition into "
medieval" Persia.
Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian King, died ten years after he lost his empire to the newly-formed
Muslim Caliphate. He tried to recover some of what he lost with the help of the Turks and the Tatars, but they were easily defeated by Muslim armies. Then he sought the aid of the Chinese, but they refused to help him. He is believed to have lived on the borders of Islamic Persia. Some historians say that he lived inside Islamic Iran.
The Arab empire, ruled by the
Umayyad Dynasty, was the largest state in history up to that point. It stretched from the
Iberian Peninsula to the
Indus River, from the
Aral Sea to the southern tip of the
Arabian Peninsula. The Umayyads borrowed heavily from Persian and
Byzantine administrative systems and moved their capital to
Damascus, in the center of their empire. The Umayyads would rule Persia for a hundred years.
The Arab conquest dramatically changed life in Persia.
Arabic became the new lingua franca and Islam quickly replaced Zoroastrianism; and mosques were built. A new language, religion, and culture were added to the Iranian cultural milieu. During this time and because of the vast reaches of the Arab empire, many Persian scholars had a direct impact on the European
Renaissance centuries later
.
In 750 the Umayyads were ousted from power by the
Abbasid family. By that time, Persians had come to play an important role in the bureaucracy of the empire ISBN 1-84212-011-5. The caliph Al-Ma'mun, whose mother was Persian, moved his capital away from Arab lands into Merv in eastern Iran. It was he who later founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, based on the Iranian
Jondishapour.
But political unrest continued. In 819, East-Persia was conquered by the Persian
Samanids, the first native rulers after the Arabic conquest. They made
Samarqand,
Bukhara and
Herat their capitals and revived the
Persian language and culture. It was approximately during this age, when the poet
Firdawsi finished the
Shah Nameh, an epic poem retelling the history of the Iranian kings; Firdawsi completing the poem in 1008.
In 913, Western Persia was conquered by the
Buwayhid, a native Iranian tribal confederation from the shores of the Caspian Sea. They made the Iranian city of
Shiraz their capital. The Buwayhids destroyed Islam's former territorial unity. Rather than a province of a united Muslim empire, Iran became one nation in an increasingly diverse and cultured Islamic world.
Turkic Rule
The Muslim world was shaken again in 1037 with the invasion of the
Seljuk Turks from the northeast. The Seljuks created a very large Middle Eastern empire and continued in the flowering of medieval Islamic culture. The Seljuks built the fabulous Friday Mosque in the city of Isfahan. The most famous Persian writer of all time,
Omar Khayyám, wrote his
Rubayat of love poetry during Seljuk times.
In the early
13th century the Seljuks lost control of Persia to another group of
Turks from
Khwarezmia, near the
Aral Sea. The shahs of the
Khwarezmid Empire ruled for only a short while, however, because they had to face the most feared conqueror in history:
Genghis Khan.
Persia under the Mongols and their successors
In 1218,
Genghis Khan sent ambassadors and merchants to the city of Otrar, on the northeastern confines of the Khwarizm shahdom. The governor of Otrar had these envoys executed. Genghis, out for revenge, sacked Otrar in 1219 and continued on to
Samarkand and other cities of the northeast.
Genghis' grandson,
Hulagu Khan, finished what Genghis had begun when he conquered Khwarzim Empire, Baghdad, and much of the rest of the
Middle East from 1255 to 1258. Iran became the
Ilkhanate, a division of the vast
Mongol Empire.
In 1295, after Ilkhan Mahmud Ghazan converted to Islam, he renounced all allegiance to the
Emperor Chengzong of Yuan China who had recently succeeded his grandfather
Kublai Khan as Great Khan. The Ilkhans patronized the arts and learning in the fine tradition of Iranian Islam; indeed, they helped to repair much of the damage of the Mongol conquests.
In 1335, the death of Abu Sa'id, the last well-recognized Ilkhan, spelled the end of the Ilkhanate. Though Arpa Ke'un was declared Ilkhan his authority was disputed and the Ilkhanate was splintered into a number of small states. This left Iran open to still more conquest at the hands of
Timur the Lame or Tamerlane, a Central Asian conqueror seeking to revive the Mongol Empire. He invaded Iran beginning around 1370 and plundered the country until his death in 1405. Timur was an even bloodier conqueror than Genghis had been. In Isfahan, for instance, he slaughtered 70,000 people so that he could build towers with their skulls. He conquered a wide area and made his own city of Samarkand rich, but he made no effort to forge a lasting empire. Iran was essentially left in ruins.
For the next hundred years Persia was not a unified state. It was ruled for a while by descendants of Timur, called the
Timurid emirs. Toward the end of the
15th century, Persia was taken over by the Emirate of the
White Sheep Turkmen . But there was little unity and none of the sophistication that had defined Iran during the glory days of Islam.
A new Persian empire: the Safavid dynasty
The
Safavid Dynasty hailed from the town of
Ardabil in the region of Azarbaijan. The Safavid Shah
Ismail I overthrew the White Sheep Turkish rulers of Persia to found a new native Persian empire. Ismail expanded Persia to include all of present-day Azerbaijan, Iran, and Iraq, plus much of
Afghanistan. Ismail's expansion was halted by the
Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, and war with the Ottomans became a fact of life in Safavid Iran.
Safavid Persia was a violent and chaotic state for the next seventy years, but in 1588 Shah
Abbas I of Safavid ascended to the throne and instituted a cultural and political renaissance. He moved his capital to Isfahan, which quickly became one of the most important cultural centers in the Islamic world. He made peace with the Ottomans. He reformed the army, drove the
Uzbeks out of Iran and into modern-day
Uzbekistan, and recaptured the island of Hormuz from the
Portuguese.
The Safavids were followers of
Shi'a Islam, and under them Persia became the largest
Shi'a country in the Muslim world, a position Iran still holds today.
Under the Safavids Iran enjoyed its last period as a major imperial power. In 1639, a final border was agreed upon with the Ottoman Empire with the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin; which delineates the border between the Republic of
Turkey and Iran and also that of between Iraq and Iran, today.
Persia and Europe
In 1722, the Safavid state collapsed. That year saw the first European invasion of Persia since the time of Alexander:
Peter the Great, Emperor of
Imperial Russia 
