The Achaemenid Persian Empire: the First Great World Empire

Introduction

In the middle of the sixth century before the common era, a remarkable series of events unfolded across the ancient Middle East that would change the nature of political power forever. Within a generation, a man named Cyrus, king of the small Persian kingdom of Anshan on the Iranian plateau, defeated three of the largest and most powerful empires of the ancient world in rapid succession and wove their territories into a single political entity of staggering size. The empire that resulted, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, was unlike anything that had come before it. It was not merely the largest empire the world had yet seen; it was the first political structure that can meaningfully be called a world empire — an entity that encompassed so many different peoples, languages, religions, and cultures that it required entirely new methods of governance simply to hold together.

At its greatest extent, under the emperor Darius I in the early fifth century before the common era, the Achaemenid Empire stretched from the shores of Libya and the mountains of Thrace and Macedonia in the west to the valleys of the Indus River in the east, and from the steppe frontier of Central Asia in the north to the deserts of Arabia and the cataracts of the Nile in the south. It covered approximately 5.5 million square kilometers, a territory so vast that even with the sophisticated road system and postal relay network the Persians developed, it took months to travel from one end to the other. Scholars have estimated that at its height around 480 before the common era, the Achaemenid Empire contained approximately fifty million people, accounting for roughly forty-four percent of the entire human population of the world at that time. No empire before or after has ever governed so large a proportion of humanity.

The Achaemenid Empire lasted from approximately 550 before the common era, when Cyrus defeated the Median Empire and began his rapid conquests, until 330 before the common era, when Alexander the Great of Macedon killed the last Achaemenid king, Darius III, or rather allowed him to be murdered by his own commanders, and claimed the Persian throne for himself. In those two hundred and twenty years, the empire produced some of the most remarkable administrators, builders, and soldiers in the ancient world. It established governance systems, religious policies, and infrastructural innovations that influenced every subsequent empire of the ancient and medieval Near East and whose echoes can still be felt in modern administrative practice. It was the crucible in which many of the foundational concepts of imperial governance were first tested at a global scale: the idea that diverse peoples could be governed together under a single political structure without being required to abandon their own languages, religions, and customs; the idea of a standardized system of weights, measures, and currency that could lubricate commerce across a vast territory; the idea of a professional civil service organized hierarchically to extend the will of the central government into the farthest provinces. These were the gifts of the Achaemenid Empire to the history of civilization.

The Origins of the Achaemenids and the Persian People

The Achaemenid dynasty took its name from Achaemenes, a semi-legendary ancestor whom later Persian kings cited as the founder of their royal line. Whether Achaemenes was a real historical figure or a mythological construct used to give the dynasty a deeper pedigree is uncertain; the earliest Achaemenid rulers about whom we have reliable historical information are Teispes, who ruled in the early seventh century before the common era, and his successors who governed the small Persian kingdom of Anshan in what is now the southwestern Iranian province of Fars, known to the ancient Persians as Parsa — the word from which both Persia and Pars are derived.

The Persians were an Iranian people, part of the broad family of Indo-Iranian speaking peoples who had migrated onto the Iranian plateau from the Central Asian steppes sometime in the second millennium before the common era. They were related linguistically and culturally to the Medes, another Iranian group who had established a powerful empire centered on Ecbatana, in the Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran. For much of the seventh and early sixth centuries before the common era, the Persians were clients or vassals of the Median Empire, which was itself one of the great powers of the ancient Middle East alongside Babylon and Egypt and the kingdoms of Lydia and Urartu.