The Medo-Persian Empire
With the Persian Empire we first enter on continuous history. A multiplicity of histories first met and commingled in that of Persia. The Persian Empire extended itself over the whole of western Asia, and into Europe and Africa; it drew together Bactria, Parthia, Media, Assyria, Syria, Palestine, Phœnicia, Asia Minor, Armenia, Thrace, Egypt, and the Cyrenaica. The voice of the Great King was law from the Indus on the east to the Ægean Sea and Syrian Gulf on the west, from the Danube and the Caucasus on the north to the Indian Ocean and the deserts of Arabia and Nubia on the south.
The empire of the Medes and Persians, commonly known as “the Persian Empire,” absorbed all the territories of Western and Southwestern Asia (except Arabia), as well as Egypt and a small portion of Europe. The Medes and the Persians are treated of together, because of their intimate connection in race and the fact that Media was conquered by and included in Persia, as the latter empire rose into power and importance in the western Asiatic world.
Geographical Situation of Media and Persia
The map shows the position of Media on the tableland south of the Caspian Sea, east of Armenia and the Zagros Mountains, and north and west of the mountains of Persia proper and the great rainless Persian desert, or desert of Iran. The mountain ranges enclosed fertile valleys, rich in corn and fruits; and the Zagros Mountains had on their pastures splendid horses, which supplied the chargers of the king and nobles of Persia.
Persis, or Persia proper, was a mountainous district between the desert of Iran and the northeastern shore of the Persian Gulf. The country contained, among its hills, fertile plains and valleys abounding in corn, pasture and fruits.
Origin and Character of the Medes
The close connection of the Medes, in origin and institutions, with the Persians, is shown in the famous expression, “The law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not.” The people migrated into Media at an early period, from the original abode of the Aryan race. By degrees they overcame the Scythian races whom they found in possession of the land. The Medes were a warlike race, strong in cavalry and archers. Their language was a dialect of the Zend, the ancient tongue of Persia, and their religion was the Magian.
Probably about 800 B. C. the Medes had established themselves in their new home. About 710 B. C., Sargon, king of Assyria, conquered some part of Media, and made settlements of Israelites taken captive by him from the cities of Samaria; but the Assyrians could never conquer the Medes, who at last grew into a powerful kingdom under native princes.
Median Power First Established by Cayaxares
The monarchy was founded by Cyaxares about 633 B. C. He extended the Median Empire westward, by conquest, through Armenia to the river Halys in Asia Minor. His great achievement was the capture of Nineveh, about 620 B. C., in alliance with the revolted Babylonians, and the consequent overthrow of the Assyrian Empire. Cyaxares reigned forty years, and died about 593 B. C.
He was succeeded by his son Astyages (as-ty´a-jēz), who reigned for over thirty years,—a despot of quiet life and peaceful disposition. The end of the Median monarchy came in 558 B. C., with his dethronement by Cyrus of Persia.
Origin and Character of the Persians
The Persians, in race, language, and religion, were closely connected with the Medes. They appear first in human records as hardy and warlike mountaineers, noble specimens of the great Aryan race,—simple in their ways of life, noted for truthfulness, keen-witted, generous, and quick-tempered. The language which they brought with them when they migrated is known as the Zend, closely allied to the Sanscrit, and now only existing in the sacred books of the Zendavesta, containing the doctrine of Zoroaster (Persian name, Zarathustra), the founder of the Magian religion.
The Persians were, in their early history, subject to the Medes, but governed by their native princes. The Median supremacy passed to the Persians with the dethronement of Astyages, king of Media, by Cyrus.
Founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus
Master of Media, Cyrus came next into collision with the great kingdom of Lydia,[2] in Asia Minor. Crœsus was king of Lydia when Cyrus met his attack and conquered him, in 546 B. C. The rising empire of Persia was thus extended to the western seaboard of Asia Minor. The Greek colonies on the coast next fell a prey to the arms of Cyrus, and in 538 B. C. he captured Babylon, as we have seen, and added the provinces of the later Babylonian Empire to the Persian. Before this he had conquered the territory eastwards between Media and the Indus, and restored the Jews from captivity. His power and life ended in his expedition against the Scythian people, by whom he was defeated and killed, in 529 B. C. Cyrus, the greatest as a king and the best as a man among all the Persian monarchs, had spread the Persian sway from the Hellespont on the west to the Indus on the east.
[2] Lydia, with its capital at Sardis, and extending from the coast of the Ægean Sea eastward to the river Halys, was easily one of the most powerful monarchies of the second class in Asiatic history. The Lydians were a highly civilized, wealthy, and energetic people, great in agriculture, manufactures, commerce and the arts. In music and metallurgy their names are famous as inventors or improvers; they were proverbial in the ancient world for luxury and the softer vices that attend it.
He was succeeded by his son Cambyses who is distinguished by his conquest of Egypt in 525. He died in 522, on his march from Egypt against a Magian pretender to the throne. The usurper reigned for a few months, and was then dethroned and slain in an insurrection headed by Darius, son of Hystaspes, a noble, who succeeded to the throne.
The Great Reign of Darius
Darius Hystaspis, or Darius I, reigned from 521 to 485 B. C., and was a great and able monarch. He finished the work which Cyrus had begun, by setting in order the affairs of the vast empire which Cyrus and Cambyses had conquered.
A PORTRAIT OF DARIUS THE GREAT
Here “The Great King,” with state umbrella and attendants, as carved on one of the door-jambs of the palace of Darius I. at Persepolis. The original bears considerable traces of color.
Darius is credited with the establishment of highroads and swift postal communication between the provinces and the court. The kings of Persia resided in the winter at Susa, a warm place in the plain east of the Lower Tigris; in the summer at Ecbatana, in Media, by the mountains; and Babylon was a third capital of occasional residence in winter. From these different centers of power the Persian monarchs, according to their measure of energy and resolution, controlled the conduct of the satraps in every quarter of their widespread dominions.
Attempt to Invade Europe, and War with the Greeks
About 508 B. C. Darius invaded Scythia, and, crossing the Danube, marched far into the territory which is now European Russia; but the expedition ended in a retreat without encountering the enemy, and with great loss of men from famine. On his return his generals subdued Thrace and Macedonia, north of Greece, and added them to the Persian Empire.
His famous war with the Greeks arose out of the revolt of the Ionian Greek cities in Asia Minor in 501, and the burning of the city of Sardis by their Athenian allies. An expedition sent against Greece under the general Mardonius, in 492 B. C., was defeated by the Thracians on land, and frustrated by a storm in the Ægean Sea. In 490 a great armament was sent by Darius under Datis and Artaphernes, and then was fought the decisive battle of Marathon. Darius’s proposed and long-prepared revenge upon the Greeks was baffled by a rebellion in Egypt; and he died in 485, leaving the task to his son and successor, Xerxes.
Reign of Xerxes the Great
Xerxes reigned from 485-465 B. C., and he began with the suppression of the Egyptian revolt in 484, devoting the next four years to preparations against Greece. The grand effort made in 480 has been ever famous in history for the magnitude of the host of men and ships employed, for the heroism of the resistance on the one side, and the completeness of the final disaster on the other, as will be seen in the history of Greece. Xerxes returned to Sardis, after the destruction of his fleet at Salamis, toward the end of the year 480. The defeat of his general Mardonius at Platæa ended the war in Greece, and the Persians lost their last foothold in Europe by the capture of Sestos on the Hellespont.
Artaxerxes II. and the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks”
Artaxerxes II., reigned 405-359. At the beginning occurred the revolt of his younger brother Cyrus, satrap in Western Asia, who marched against Babylon, and fell in the battle of Cunaxa, 401 B. C. He was supported by a body of Greek mercenaries, whose retiring march to the Black Sea over the mountains of Kurdistan has been immortalized by Xenophon’s description in his Anabasis, and is known as the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks.” After many conflicts between the Persians and Greeks, the peace of Antalcidas, concluded in 387 B. C., gave to the Persians all the Greek cities in Asia Minor. The Persian Empire, however, was now going to decay. Artaxerxes failed to recover revolted Egypt, and was constantly at war with tributary princes and satraps. The want of cohesion in the unwieldy, ill-assorted aggregate of “peoples, nations, and languages,” was being severely felt.
Darius III. Last of the Persian Emperors
In 336 B. C., the last king of the Persian Empire, Darius III., surnamed Codomannus, succeeded to power. With the great battle in the plains of Gaugamela, in Assyria, known as the battle of Arbela, from a town fifty miles distant, where Darius had his headquarters before the struggle, the Persian Empire came to an end in October, 331 B. C. The defeat of Darius was decisive; and in 330 he was murdered in Parthia by Bessus, one of his satraps. Asiatic Aryans had succumbed at last to their kinsmen of Europe, who, after repelling Oriental assaults upon the home of a new civilization, had carried the arms of avenging ambition into Asia, and struck a blow to the heart of the older system.
Science and the Arts in Persia
In science, art, and learning, the Persians developed nothing that was new, except in architecture. In the conquest of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Phœnicians, and Egyptians, the Persian kings and nobles came into possession alike of the scientific acquirements and learning of those peoples, and of the products of their mechanical arts. The Persians were soldiers, and not craftsmen, and had no need to be producers, when they could be purchasers, of the carpets and muslins of Babylon and Sardis, the fine linen of Egypt, and the rich variety of wares that Phœnician commerce spread throughout the empire.
Architecture.—In architecture, they were at first pupils of the Assyrians and Babylonians. The splendid palaces and temples of Nineveh and Babylon had existed for centuries before the Persians were anything more than a hardy tribe of warriors, and it was only after the acquirement of imperial sway that they began to erect great and elegant buildings for themselves. When that time came, the Persians showed that they could produce, by adaptation of older models, an architectural style of their own. This style was one that comes between the sombre, massive grandeur of Assyrian and Egyptian edifices and the perfect symmetry and beauty of the achievements of Greek art.
Palaces and Tombs, not temples, were the masterpieces of Persian building. The ruins of the city of Persepolis, in the province of Persis, are the most famous remains of Persian architecture. Here, on a terraced platform, stood vast and splendid palaces, the doorways adorned with beautiful bas-reliefs. The great double staircase leading up to the “Palace of Forty Pillars” is especially rich in sculptured human figures. The columns are beautiful in form, sixty feet in total height, with the shaft finely fluted, and the pedestal in the form of the cup and leaves of a pendent lotus. Throughout the ruins a love of ornament and display is visible. In the bas-reliefs are profuse decorations of fretwork fringes, borders of sculptured bulls and lions, and stone-work of carved roses.
Persian Cities
Babylon has been already described.
Ecbatana, formerly the capital of the Median Empire, was a very ancient city, surrounded by seven walls, each overtopping the one outside it, and surmounted by battlements painted in five different colors, the innermost two being overlaid with silver and with gold. The strong citadel inside all was the royal treasury.
Susa was a square-built city unprotected by walls, but having strongly fortified citadel, containing a royal palace and treasury. The only remains of the place are extensive mounds, on which are found fragments of bricks and broken pottery with cuneiform inscriptions.
Persepolis was one of the two burial-places of the Persian kings, and also a royal treasury. Darius I. and Xerxes greatly enlarged and adorned the city, which retained its splendor till it was partially burned by Alexander the Great. The tomb of Cyrus and a colossal bas-relief sculpture of the great founder of the monarchy, was at Murghab, northeast of Persepolis.
Sardis, in western Asia Minor, once the capital of the Lydian monarchy, was an almost impregnable citadel, and the residence of the satrap of Lydia, and is often mentioned in connection with the Persian kings.
Persian Life
The splendor of Persian life at court and abroad is known to us from many sources. The sculptures of Persepolis show something of the state and ceremony attendant on a Persian king. In the Book of Esther we read of King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) entertaining all “the nobles and princes of the provinces” for “a hundred and fourscore days,” of his making a feast for seven days “in the court of the garden of the king’s palace” for all the people of Susa; of pillars of marble, silver curtain rings, beds of gold and silver, pavements of marble that was red, and blue, and white, and black; of drinking vessels of gold diverse in shape and size, and “royal wine in abundance, according to the state of the king”; of garments of purple and fine linen; and of the absolute power of a Persian despot in his caprices and his wrath, with his “seven chamberlains that served in his presence,” and with the lives of men and women of all ranks held in the hollow of his hand.
The Magi.—The priests or Magi had great power, from the reverence of the people for them. The great objects of worship were the heavenly bodies. This national priesthood, like the Chaldeans in the Babylonian Empire, formed a caste to whom belonged all mental culture and legislation. The modern term “magic,” in its superstitious sense, is connected with their professions and practices.