AQUEMENIDA Empire: short SUMMARY + MAPS

Achaemenida is how we refer to the first and greatest of all persian empires, being the civilization that expanded through the Balkans and eastern Europe occupying an area of ​​more than 5 million km2. To know the interesting of the history of this great civilization, in this lesson from a PROFESSOR we offer you a brief summary of the Achaemenid empire.

Index

1. Origin of the Achaemenid Empire
2. The first Persian conquests
3. Crisis and changes
4. The medical wars
5. The end of the Achaemenid Empire

To start talking about the Achaemenid Empire we must talk about its origin, analyzing where the inhabitants of this culture come from and thanks to them understanding the history of the Empire.

The persian They are descendants of the Iranian groups that inhabited what we know today like Iran, being groups that were dedicated to traditional tasks such as agriculture and livestock in order to survive.

We are not sure when kings came into being in Persian culture, but

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The beginning of the great Persian domination took place with the coming to power of King Cyrus II the Great of Anshan. This monarch, since his arrival to the throne, had the mission of creating a huge army to defeat all those powers that sought to dominate the Persians. His first great victory was against the Medes, being a people of which the Persians had been vassals, ending their capital and beginning their time of rule.

After defeating the Medes, Cyrus set his eyes on the other great power of the time, Babylon, achieving great victories and ending an empire that was at the end of its time of hegemony. After that, Ciro continued with his expansion, conquering all the great regions of the time as they were Judea, Syria or Asia Minor.

Cyrus' strategy in all conquests was similar: he defeated the monarchs and placed the highest title in the region as his leader, but maintained the administrative structure of the region and was benevolent to the population, its culture, its cults and all relevant buildings (as long as the kings surrendered to him and all submitted to the power of the Empire).

After the death of Cyrus his successor was Cambyses II, who continued the conquest of Egypt that had been planned by Cyrus. At his death, the Achaemenid Empire extended from the Mediterranean to what is now Afghanistan, making it the largest empire in history up to that time.

To continue with our summary of the Achaemenid empire, we are going to talk now about the crisis that said people suffered. Although Cyrus had been a great king, it was not so with Cambyses, who always had a dictatorial management and cruel of the Empire; furthermore, during his campaign in Egypt, he largely forgot the management of the easternmost regions. It was for all this that the Persian monarch had numerous rebellions in the last years of his management and even much of the Empire defended that the new leader should be Gaumata, being a Mede who posed as Cambyses' younger brother who had died a short time before.

Gaumata he was the emperor for a few months, until he was overthrown by Darius I the Great, who in a few months was able to stop all the rebellions that had appeared throughout the entire region. It is thought that perhaps Gaumata was just a pawn created by Darío to carry out a coup in the Empire, although the sources neither confirm nor deny all this information.

Government of Darius I the Great

Darío's government is characterized by a lots of changes made to better manage the Empire. To understand the relevance of him and the great progress made by him during the years of his mandate, we must talk about this revolution, so the great changes made by Darío are the following:

• He divided the Empire into provinces called Satraps.
• He created a single monetary system for the entire region.
• He created a legal system based on the Egyptian.
• He made Aramaic the official language.
• He gave importance to the construction of large buildings for both worship and administration.
• It expanded into Thrace and India.
• He made Zoroastrianism the official religion.
• He built the Persian Royal Road to improve communications.

Image: Stories and Biographies

Although Darío's management was exceptional, his only failure was the defeat received at the hands of the Greeks in the First Medical WarThis being only the beginning of a series of wars that faced the Greeks and Persians for the dominance of different regions and cultural differences.

The defeat of Darius in the first war against the Greeks made his successor, Xerxes I, have as Priority task in his mandate to defeat the Greeks as revenge for the shame suffered by their predecessor of him. In 480 a. C. Xerxes sent an army overland to Greece to start the Second Medical War.

The beginning of the war was easy for Xerxes, easily defeating the Greeks in Macedonia and Thessaly. The advance of the Persians seemed unstoppable, but they were stopped at Thermopylae by a group of Greek troops led by the Spartan king Leonidas I. Although these Greeks managed to slow down the Persians, they were defeated by the large number of soldiers led by Xerxes. After that, the Persians won the naval battle of Artemisio, controlling the Aegean and making the Persian victory seem only a matter of time.

After sacking Athens, Xerxes faced the Greeks in the Battle of Salamis, being the place where the Greeks achieved their first great victory against the Persians in the war. After that and subsequent Greek victories, the Persians lost the Second Medical War.

Image: Google Sites

To finish this summary of the Achaemenid Empire, we must talk about the end of the empire and, thus, we will understand how such a relevant civilization lost all its power.

After the defeat against the Greeks, the Persians began a decline that, over the years, would lead them to lose all their power. Decade after decade the Persians were losing the territories that had made them such a great empire.

Even with all this, the Persians maintained a large area of ​​influence, although little by little the Achaemenid Empire was turning into other empires and their culture was changing to a very different one from the one established by Darío decades before.

Finally, with the arrival of Alexander the Great, the Achaemenid Empire disappeared as such, giving way to new great empires in which the influence of what was the great empire of the world did not disappear.

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