historia: History of Iran

Evidence: 72 • authority: 72

Cyrus II of Persia (c. 600 – 530 BC), commonly known as Cyrus the Great, was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Hailing from Persis, he brought the Achaemenid dynasty to power by defeating the Median Empire and embracing all of the previous civilized states of the ancient Near East, expanding vastly across most of West Asia and much of Central Asia to create what would soon become the largest empire in history at the time. The Achaemenid Empire's greatest territorial extent was achieved under Darius the Great, whose rule stretched from Southeast Europe and Northeast Africa in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. After absorbing the Median Empire, Cyrus conquered Lydia and eventually…

Evidence: 67 • authority: 72

The Achaemenid Empire (, ə-KEE-mə-nid; Old Persian: 𐎧𐏁𐏂, Xšāça, lit. 'The Empire' or 'The Kingdom') was an ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. At peak, its territorial extent was roughly 5.5 million square kilometres (2.1 million square miles), making it the largest empire of its time. Based in the Iranian plateau, it stretched from the Balkans and Cyrenaica in the west to the Indus Valley in the east, including Anatolia, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, the Levant, the South Caucasus, parts of Eastern Arabia, and large parts of Central Asia. By the 7th century BC, the region of Persis, located in the southwestern part of the Iranian plateau, had be…

Evidence: 63 • authority: 72

The Greco-Persian Wars, also called the Persian Wars, were a series of armed conflicts involving various Greek city-states and the Achaemenid Empire from 499 BC to 449 BC. The precipitating collision between the fractious political world of ancient Greece and the enormous empire of ancient Persia had begun when the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered the Greek-inhabited region of Ionia in 547 BC. As they struggled to exert authority over the independent-minded Ionian cities, the Persians appointed Greek tyrants to rule each of them, though this would prove to be the source of much trouble for the Greeks and the Persians alike. In 499 BC, the Greek tyrant Aristagoras of Miletus embarked o…

Evidence: 58 • authority: 72

The history of Asia can be seen as the collective history of East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, North Asia and West Asia. The continent is home to two of the world's oldest, continuous civilizations, Chinese civilization and Indian civilization. Asia was also home to the Mesopotamian, Ancient Egypt, Indus Valley and Yellow River civilizations. These civilizations were among the first in the world, and developed around fertile river valleys as they were conducive to agriculture. They shared similarities and likely exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other inventions such as writing likely developed independently as did cities, states, and emp…

Evidence: 43 • authority: 80

Persian Achaemenid Empire: Prehistory to 1200: South, Central, and West Asia

Evidence: 38 • authority: 72

The history of the Scythians—an ancient Eastern Iranic equestrian nomadic people—spans the period from the emergence of early steppe nomadism in the early 1st millennium BCE to the Migration Period in the mid-1st millennium CE. This history unfolds across time and space in Central Asia and Siberia, the Caucasus, ancient West Asia (that is the Ancient Near East) and the Pontic Steppe. Two main sources provide information on the historical Scythians: Akkadian cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia which deal with early Scythian history from the 7th century BCE, and Graeco-Roman sources which cover all of Scythian history, most prominently those written by Herodotus of Halicarnassus; the Greco-Roman…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 80

Languages of Central, South, and West Asia: Urdu and Persian

Evidence: 33 • authority: 80

The Yasavī Order and Persian Hagiography in Seventeenth-Century Central Asia

Evidence: 33 • authority: 88

Central Asia: West and East. This chapter discusses the interest of the west in the history of Central Asia. It explains that central Asia has been studied by many western scholars and explorers, including British archaeologist Aurel Stein and traveller Sir John de Maundeville. Central Asia figured prominently in the days of political concerns about the safety of British India in the nineteenth century and this generated the interest of scholars. Today, the boom in Central Asian studies is further encouraged by the presence in Britain of those who have worked in this field and the source of many new publications on both prehistoric and historic periods.

Evidence: 33 • authority: 92

Archaeological and molecular evidence for ancient chickens in Central Asia.. The origins and dispersal of the chicken across the ancient world remains one of the most enigmatic questions regarding Eurasian domesticated animals. The lack of agreement concerning timing and centers of origin is due to issues with morphological identifications, a lack of direct dating, and poor preservation of thin, brittle bird bones. Here we show that chickens were widely raised across southern Central Asia from the fourth century BC through medieval periods, likely dispersing along the ancient Silk Road. We present archaeological and molecular evidence for the raising of chickens for egg production, based on…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Several empires in human history have been contenders for the largest of all time, depending on definition and mode of measurement. Possible ways of measuring size include area, population, economy, and power. Of these, area is the most commonly used because it has a relatively precise definition and can be feasibly measured with some degree of accuracy; nevertheless, even area is limited in this regard because of the difficulty in defining the boundaries of empires due to things like the indirect nature of imperial control and sparsely inhabited or even uninhabited areas that may nominally have been controlled by an empire but not meaningfully ruled by it. Estonian political scientist Rein…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Ottoman Empire, also known historically as Turkey or the Turkish Empire, was a state that spanned much of Southeastern Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th century to the early 20th century, centred in modern-day Turkey. It also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe between the early 16th and early 18th centuries. The empire emerged from a beylik, or principality, founded in northwestern Anatolia in c. 1299 by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. His successors conquered much of Anatolia and expanded into the Balkans by the mid-14th century, transforming their petty kingdom into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of…