Persia was one of the more highly developed of the many ancient civilizations, and it has a long history.
The earliest Persians (after the fall of the Assyrian state in the 6th century BC) lived in the area south of the city of Shiraz in what is now southern Iran (where Persepolis, the capital of Persia, was located back then).
In the era spanned by Age of Empires 2, Persian civilization only began to flourish in the third century A.D. This is not to say that ES misinterpreted the history of Persia; in fact, Persia in Age of Empires also includes the predecessor of the Persian Empire (which began in the third century A.D.).
It was from the third century that this civilization appeared on the stage of history under the name of the Persian Empire until the seventeenth century AD.
In the centuries before that, the land was ruled by many powers that originated in the Mediterranean region, but eventually became an independent kingdom, regained the freedom and glory that belonged to its people, and grew into an empire that spanned Mesopotamia and India.
What is now Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan were once part of the ancient Persian Empire.
But successive wars weakened the Persian Empire, which battled the mighty Roman Empire for years to seize control of Syria, Turkey, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, and the entire *** peninsula.
It was not until 364 AD that the Romans signed a peace treaty with the Persians.
Later, when the Roman Empire split, the Persians threw their formidable military might into a new series of wars.
Their new enemy was the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire: the Byzantine dynasty.
The Persians began a sustained onslaught from the Byzantine borderlands-Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Turkey.
The greatest moment in the history of the Persians finally came in 619 AD.
The Persian Empire completely conquered the entire region of Egypt and the Caucasus Mountains.
In 626 A.D., the Persians lost a crushing defeat in the siege of the Byzantine capital.
The Byzantines took advantage of the situation and began to invade the territory of the Persian Empire.
Years of endless fighting had, in fact, sounded the death knell for these two otherwise powerful civilizations.
In 628 A.D., when both sides were exhausted, the rulers finally agreed to a long overdue peace treaty.
After this, the Persian Empire, weakened by war, was overrun by *** legions from the east.
In 651 A.D., the *** forces conquered the Persian Empire and took full possession of its territories in just ten years.
The new *** kingdom was called Iran.
However, as if peace could never be realized in this hot land, new invaders appeared in the following centuries.
First, the Seljuks, ancestors of the Ottoman Turks, conquered all of Iran.
Next came the terrifying Mongol legions, and later the Turkomans.
A new dawn did not appear until the 16th century AD.
Like the ancient Persians 1300 years earlier, the Iranians eventually recovered their territory.
Ancient Persian civilization has been lost for more than 2,000 years, and the cuneiform script of ancient Persia has long since become a kind of "dead script", which is quite unfamiliar to most people, so how do we look at it through the fog of thousands of years? In the western part of the Persian plateau, Iran and Iraq border next to the Iranian territory, there is a commercial city called Kermanshah, 2 to 3 kilometers east of the city there is a small village called Behistun.
For more than two thousand years, it has been silently away from the hustle and bustle of the city, forgetting the past and being forgotten in the corners of memory.
But today, the name "Behistun" has not only made its way out of the city of Kermanshah, it has made its way out of Asia and into the world.
This is due to a nearby cliff, which contains an ancient script for recovering lost civilizations, and to an Englishman named Rawlinson.
In 1835, Major Rawlinson was ordered to Iran as a military advisor to the governor of Kurdistan.
Soon after his arrival, this amateur archaeologist heard about the nearby rock carvings.
Of course, he did not turn a deaf ear to this, and ran to see what he had found, a large cliff carving near the village of Behistun.
The cliff inscription is about 100 meters from the ground, and the carving itself is about 8 meters high and 5 meters wide.
The upper part is a relief and the lower part is an inscription written in three cuneiform scripts: ancient Persian, Elamite and Akkadian.
Cuneiform is an ancient script of Western Asia, more than 5,000 years old.
The script was written on clay tablets made of clay using a wooden stick or reed as a pen.
The clay tablets were dried in the sun or over a fire and preserved as "books".
In the case of letters, the clay tablets were coated with a layer of powder and then put into "envelopes", which were also made of clay, for delivery.
Because of the cuneiform shape of the strokes, archaeologists call this writing "cuneiform".
Why three scripts? Because ancient Persian cuneiform was not a historical script, but a purely artificial one, and it was used only to a limited extent and recognized by very few people.
Therefore, when issuing edicts in it, it was necessary to translate it in Elamite and Aramaic, which were common at that time.
This is the reason why the inscriptions were written in three cuneiform scripts.
However, with the fall of Persia in 330 BC, the cuneiform script of ancient Persia gradually became a dead script that no one knew, and the other two cuneiform scripts have long been lost.
As a result, it is not known what these scripts were telling people.
Rawlinson was determined to solve this mystery! He risked his life climbing up the cliffs, carefully and unusually topped off a piece of the inscription, began a painstaking interpretation work.
The success of the work.
Treading in the footsteps of his predecessors, after 12 years of research, Rawlinson finally succeeded in 1845 in translating one of the ancient Persian, and the remaining two texts are estimated to be the same as the Persian.
From then on, this puzzling thing on the cliff was no longer a mystery, and people learned a little-known story behind it.
In March 522 BC, the Persian Emperor Gambesis II led an expedition to Egypt.
A monk named Gomorda took the opportunity to pose as Baldia, the emperor's brother who had been executed by Gambisis, and started a rebellion across Persia and in Midi.
The rebellion lasted six months.
Emperor Gambisius suddenly fell ill and died on his way back to Persia from Egypt.
Gomorpha then became emperor in the name of Bardia.
But he never summoned his ministers, and lived in seclusion.
This was uncharacteristic of an emperor, and the ministers were suspicious, and rumors spread.
Some people say that this Bardiya is actually the Zoroastrian monk Gomorrah, but they could not find any solid evidence.
Later, a past consort of Gambisius realized that the new emperor had no ears and told his father, Othanes, who immediately concluded that the new emperor was not Baldia, but the monk Gomorrah.
For when Cyrus was emperor, this Gomorda had both his ears cut off by order of Cyrus for his faults.
Immediately, Othanes told the truth to six other Persian nobles, including Darius I, the later emperor.
They decided to stage a coup d'état to kill Gomorrah and take back power.
They succeeded, but there was a lot of arguing around who was most qualified to be emperor.
For a time, the Persian aristocracy was leaderless.
A little later, Othanes withdrew, but the remaining six remained at odds with each other.
Finally, they agreed that the next morning the six would ride their horses through the countryside *** and whoever's horse neighs first would be the emperor.
Darius had his horseman make a ploy to make his horse neigh first and become emperor.
Darius was a resourceful character, using the lack of contact between the "rebels" flaws, each breakthrough, and finally put down the rebellion in a year.
The cliff carvings at Behistun, which record Darius's achievements, are full of praise.
The inscription is in the first person, and reads, "I, Darius, the great king, the king of kings, the king of Persia, the king of provinces, the son of Systaspa, the grandson of Arshama, the king of the Ahelemonides ...... according to the will of Ahura Mazda, I am the king. " Originally, after the kingdom was stabilized, Darius felt that he had achieved success, and in September 520 BC hesitantly toured the regions.
In the tour to the capital of the Midian Ekbatana (now the Iranian Hamadan) near a small village called Behistun, his mood is incomparably magnificent, recalling the ups and downs of the years, a lot of feelings, so he ordered people in the cliffs next to the village to carve his own achievements, especially the suppression of rebels, in order to make a name for themselves in the next generation.