Before IRAN. The PERSIAN EMPIRE GOVERNED HALF the WORLD.

The Persian Empire governed 44 percent of every human being alive on earth. Not land. People. And it was built on the soil of modern-day Iran. Iran is in the news every day. Sanctions. Missiles. Conflict. The country at the centre of today's most volatile geopolitical standoff is discussed almost entirely in the language of threat. What almost no one in that conversation mentions is what existed on that plateau before any of it. Before the Islamic Republic. Before the Arab conquest. Before Islam itself. The people of ancient Iran built the largest empire in human history and held it together not with terror but with something far more sophisticated. This is that story. At its 480 BC peak, the Persian Empire stretched from the Greek islands to the edge of India, from Egypt to the steppes of Central Asia. Nearly one in every two human beings alive answered, in some form, to a single throne. Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, Indians, Greeks, Armenians — dozens of peoples, speaking dozens of languages, worshipping dozens of gods — and most of them went on doing exactly that. Their temples stayed open. Their laws stayed intact. Their local rulers kept their seats. No empire before Persia had governed this way. No empire after it has matched its scale. That record still stands. The people who built Persepolis, who connected the Nile to the Red Sea, who authored history's first recorded declaration of religious freedom, who gave the English language the word paradise — they were Persian. They were Iranian. What the Western world thinks it knows about them was written almost entirely by their enemies. The Greeks wrote brilliantly. They wrote about themselves. This video goes to the other side of that story: the clay tablets, the royal inscriptions, the Cyrus Cylinder, the archaeology of a civilisation that has been misread for two and a half thousand years. The Iran the world argues about today and the Iran in this documentary share the same mountains, the same plateau, and the same people. One of those stories dominates every headline. The other one starts here. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:25 The World Before Persia 10:42 The Outsiders: Medes, Persians and the Iranian Plateau 20:46 The Rise of the Medes 31:04 Cyrus the Great: The Conqueror Who Showed Mercy 45:36 The Idea of Persia: Tolerance as a System of Government 56:20 Cambyses and the Edge of the World 1:05:36 Darius the Great: The Empire Becomes a State 1:20:03 Persepolis: A City Built to Hold the World 1:30:25 The Empire at Its Height: What Half the World Looked Like 1:43:05 Persia and Greece: The War That Defined the Telling 1:56:32 Xerxes: The King History Got Wrong 2:07:46 The Long Afternoon: Artaxerxes and the Age of Stability 2:19:17 The Rot From Within: Succession, Assassination and the Weakening Court 2:30:09 Alexander: The End of the World 2:43:13 What Persia Left Behind SOURCES Herodotus. Histories. c. 430 BC. Xenophon. Anabasis. c. 370 BC. Xenophon. Cyropaedia. c. 370 BC. Ctesias. Persica. c. 398 BC. Arrian. Anabasis of Alexander. c. 150 AD. Aeschylus. The Persians. 472 BC. Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Achaemenid Empire. 2002. Kuhrt, Amélie. The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. 2007. Wiesehöfer, Josef. Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD. 1996. Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. 1979. Dandamaev, Muhammad. A Political History of the Achaemenid Empire. 1989. Olmstead, A.T. History of the Persian Empire. 1948. Allen, Lindsay. The Persian Empire: A History. 2005. Brosius, Maria. The Persians: An Introduction. 2006. MUSIC The Descent by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-... Artist: http://incompetech.com/ #PersianEmpire #AncientHistory #Achaemenid #CyrusTheGreat #IranHistory #DariusTheGreat #Xerxes #AncientCivilizations #Persepolis #HistoryDocumentary #MiddleEastHistory #IranBeforeIslam #WorldHistory #GreatestEmpires #LessonsOfHistory