The Achaemenids

At Pasargadae, on a windswept plain in Fars, a stone tomb stands on six stepped tiers. It is small, plain and gabled, more like a house than a monument. Greek writers say that Alexander the Great found it two centuries later and ordered it repaired. It is the tomb of Cyrus II, called the Great, who within a generation turned a kingdom in the south-western highlands into the largest empire the world had yet seen. Cyrus defeated the Medes around 550 BCE, took Lydia around 547 BCE, and entered Babylon in 539 BCE. A clay barrel found at Babylon, the Cyrus Cylinder, records in Akkadian cuneiform how he presented himself there: as a king chosen by the city's god Marduk, who restored temples and let displaced peoples and their gods return home. The Hebrew Bible remembers him for allowing exiled Jews to go back to Jerusalem. The Cylinder was excavated in 1879 and is now in the British Museum. It is sometimes called the first charter of human rights; most historians read it instead as royal propaganda in an old Mesopotamian tradition.

Darius and the order of empire

Darius I, who took the throne in 522 BCE after a violent succession crisis, gave the empire its structure. He organised its provinces under governors called satraps, from the Old Persian xšaçapāvan, 'protector of the realm', issued the gold coin called the daric, and linked his cities with roads and relay stations. On the cliff at Bisotun, near Kermanshah, he had his version of events carved in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Centuries later that inscription helped scholars decipher cuneiform.

Darius also began Persepolis, around 518 BCE, on a terrace below the Kuh-e Rahmat, the 'mountain of mercy'. Its most famous carvings line the staircases of the Apadana, the great audience hall: delegations from across the empire, Lydians carrying bowls, Bactrians leading a two-humped camel, Africans from the upper Nile bringing an elephant tusk, each group led by the hand by a Persian or Median usher. The message is plain: many peoples, one king. Thousands of clay tablets from the site record the rations of the workers who built it, women as well as men.

The empire lasted some two centuries. In 334 BCE Alexander of Macedon crossed into Asia. In 330 BCE Persepolis burned, whether by drunken accident or as revenge for the Persian burning of Athens, and the last king, Darius III, was killed by his own officers.