Persian Empire Essay

The Persian Empire spanned from Egypt in the west to Turkey in the north, and through Mesopotamia to the Indus River in the east. It was a series of imperial dynasties centered in Persia. It was established by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC, with the Persian conquest of Media, Lydia and Babylonia. The Persian history was interrupted by the Islamic conquest and later by the Mongol invasion. The main religion of ancient Persia was Zoroastrianism, but after the 7th century this was replaced by Islam. In the modern era, a series of Islamic dynasties ruled Persia independently of the universal caliphate. Since 1979 Persia has been an Islamic republic. In 552 BCE Cyrus led his armies against the Medes and captured Ecbatana in 549 BCE, effectively conquering the Median Empire

The Old Persian language appears in royal inscriptions, written in a specially adapted version of cuneiform. Cuneiform is a system of writing first developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia c. 3500-3000 BCE. It is considered the most significant among the many cultural contributions of the Sumerians and the greatest among those of the Sumerian city of Uruk which advanced the writing of cuneiform c. 3200 BCE. The name comes from the Latin word cuneus for 'wedge ' owing to the wedge-shaped style of writing. In cuneiform, a carefully cut writing implement known as a stylus is pressed into soft clay to produce wedge-like impressions that represent word-signs (pictographs) and, later, phonograms or `word-concepts ' (closer to a modern day understanding of a `word '). All of the great Mesopotamian civilizations used cuneiform (the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Elamites, Hatti, Hittites, Assyrians, Hurrians and others) until it was abandoned in favour of the alphabetic script at some point after 100 BCE. Under Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great, the Persian Empire eventually became the largest empire in human history up until that point, ruling and administrating over most of the then known