Overview of ancient Persia | World History | Khan Academy

We're going to do in this video is have an overview of one of the greatest empires and really civilizations of not only the ancient world but of the world. And that is Persia. We see a map here; this is the extent of the Persian Empire at around 500 BCE under Darius the Great. In future videos, we'll talk more about Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great and the various Shahs, King of Kings of the Persian Empire.

You can see it was a massive empire. Not only did it contain modern Iran, which is really the heart of the Persian Empire, but much of the modern Middle East, including Turkey. You have Egypt here; we go into Central Asia and also Afghanistan and even parts of Pakistan. But before talking more about how it was established and who established it, I'm going to dig down a little bit into the word Persia.

Just as the ancient Greeks did not refer to where they lived as Greece—that is a Latin idea of calling it Greece—that the Greeks referred to where they lived as Elas. It turns out that the Persians did not refer to where they lived as Persia. Their terms are actually much closer to ideas around the land of the Aryans. Based on my research, ideas like Ariana Vaeja and Iran Shah and Iran.

So it actually turns out that the modern name of the country, the modern word Iran, is probably more appropriate or in some ways closer to what the region has always called itself, what the Iranians or the Persians have always called themselves and called their land. They referred to themselves as the Aryans and where they lived as the Aryanam Vaeja or Iran or Iran Shah or some version of that. The modern version is Iran.

Now, with that said, you might say, "Well, why did the Greeks call it Persia?" Well, the Persian Empire, what we consider to be the first true Persian Empire, is the Achaemenid Empire. We'll talk in a second about why we call it even the Achaemenid. The Achaemenid Empire emerges from a region of Persia, I guess we can say that. In this map, it is referred to as Persis, but other names for it are Pars. Even in modern Iran, there is a region called Fars, which coincides very close with it.

Since the leaders of the Persian Empire, especially Cyrus the Great, emerged from this region, they called them the Persians. It was the Persian Empire that emerges from this region. What you might want to call Pars, Fars—Fars especially comes from Arabic, where they don't have the P sound—but Pars or Persis or whatever you want to call it, and that's why it was called the Persian Empire.

Now, it wasn't the first empire in that region. Before the Persian Empire gets established, or what we associate with the Persian or Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great, much of this region of where we call modern-day Iran was controlled by the Medians. You can see Media is this region right over here.

It was Cyrus the Great that, in 549, some accounts say 550 BCE, was able to overthrow the Median emperor, who happens to be his grandfather; that is the real dawn of the Achaemenid dynasty. Now, the next question—and this was established—let me write this down. This is established by Cyrus the Great. Cyrus the Great, he was Cyrus II, but he became Cyrus the Great because he was able to break out and overthrow the Medians and establish this massive empire.

The reason why it's called the Achaemenid Empire, not the Cyrus Empire, is that Cyrus claims to be from the family of the patriarch Achaemenis. A lot of these names come from Greek accounts, and so that's why they sound a little bit more Greek. Achaemenes is a semi-legendary figure that we're not sure exactly when he lived. But the best accounts I could see are near the beginning of the 7th century BCE, and Cyrus the Great is from Achaemenis' family.

Since they came to power, this first really Persian Empire—when people talk about the Persian Empire, they don't tend to refer to the Median Empire; they're really referring to the Achaemenid Empire. That's why it's called Achaemenid.

In future videos, we'll talk more about what happened in the Achaemenid Empire, but you can see the extent of it was pretty significant, and it lasts for a little over 200 years until they are conquered by foreigners. The foreigners that conquer them are the Greeks. Philip of Macedon's son, Alexander the Great, is able to, on some level, unify Greece and Persia.

It's interesting because a lot of what we learn about ancient Persia comes from accounts by the Greeks, from folks like Herodotus. But during the time of classical Greece, Greece was really a bit of a sideshow. It was really this kind of thorn in the side of Persia. Persia was really where the power was.

As we get to the mid or the end of the 4th century BCE, Persia weakens, Greece unifies under Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great, and Alexander the Great is able to conquer the Persian Empire. His life is short-lived, as we have videos on Alexander the Great; I encourage you to watch them. His unified empire is short-lived, but he has this dream of mixing the cultures and really being a unified people.

As soon as he dies, his empire splits, but the Persian Empire, for the most part, is under the control of the Seleucids and the Seleucid dynasty. This is essentially foreign rule because Seleucus, who establishes the Seleucid dynasty, is one of Alexander's generals. He's fundamentally Greek, and so the rulers under the Seleucid dynasty are Greek.

You don't get back to having Persian rule until 238 BCE, as in 238 BCE, the Parthians emerge to conquer the empire. Once again, you could say, "Well, this is back to non-foreign rule." It's really important to keep in mind because in its day, the Achaemenid Empire was, if not the dominant one, one of the very dominant empires of the world.

At its peak, it had a population—this is roughly under Darius the Great, and we'll talk more about him; he was an interesting character—but the Achaemenid Empire at its peak had approximately 50 million people. That's a lot of people at any time in history, but especially at that time in history because, at that time, there was only a little over 100 million people in the world, or at least that's our current estimate.

So this is actually the largest proportion of the world's population that any empire has ever had in history, as far as we can tell. So that gives it some claim to being maybe the greatest or one of the greatest empires in world history. As we get into the Seleucid and especially the Parthian Empire, you know, in the West we talk a lot about the glory of the Roman Empire, but the Parthians were right there beside them.

They kind of went back and forth but were side by side. The peak of the Parthian Empire coincides with the peak of the Roman Empire, and they gave each other space. They went back and forth, especially around the Middle East. You have this empire from the Parthians; you go to the Sasanians, and eventually, in the 7th century CE, Islam comes into the Persian Empire and becomes the dominant religion.

So that might make you ask, "Well, what was the dominant religion before that?" The answer there is Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism was really spread by Cyrus the Great, who established the Persian Empire. It was based on their prophet Zarathustra, and when Zarathustra lived is up for some debate. It might be as early as 1500 BCE. Some people say it might be even right before or even coincident with the life of Cyrus the Great, so there's some debate on when Zarathustra lived.

But it was a monotheistic religion following the one god of Ahura Mazda. It was based on these ideas that good thoughts lead to good words and good deeds. Other big ideas of the Persian Empire include their system of governance. Because it was such a vast empire, they delegated the emperor, the Shah and Shah, the King of Kings, delegated authority to the regions.

Each region, each satrapy, had its governor called a satrap. As we see over time, some of these satraps got more power than maybe was intended and eventually took over. But this was a major empire in the history of the world. They unified people; they're famous for their Royal Road that connected Sardis all the way to Susa.

As you can imagine, it would have facilitated the transfer of knowledge and the transfer of trade. Under the Seleucids, you had huge Greek influence, but it was a two-way street. Not only did the Greeks influence the Persians, but the Persians heavily influenced the Greeks.

So, with that, in the next few videos, we'll go into even more depth on the Persian Empire and specifically the Achaemenids.