Even Today, though the archeologists have been at work for a hundred years, we do not know where the Persians came from or how they brought about the beginnings of their empire. All we know of them is that about 1400 BCE, when Mycenae and Troy and Cnossus were falling to the Greeks, a small army of tribesmen emerged out of the great plains north of the Black Sea and the Caspian and made their way by slow stages towards the Persian Gulf. We know that they came with horses and short stabbing swords and lances, and that they were an Aryan people with long heads, high foreheads and thin noses, and their blood may have already been mixed with a slight Mongol strain. They were brothers of the Scythians and the Medes, who also emerged from the great grasslands. Yet the tribesmen who were later to be called Persians --the Assyrians knew them as the Parsua-- seem to have been of finer build than the Medes or the Scythians, slighter, hardier, and more warlike.
At the beginning they can have numbered only a few hunvdreds. In time they were to conquer all the known world: Greece, Egypt, all of Asia Minor, all that was contained in the Assyrian empire, much of southern Russia and Afghanistan and northern India were to -fall under their sway.
We shall never know the names of the first Persians who set the tribesmen on the path of kingship. They had no writing and no arts except pottery-making and no records have come down to us except obscure phrases in Assyrian inscriptions which may or may not refer to them. For a while we catch glimpses of them occupying the lands to the west and south of Lake Urmiya. Here they seem to have carved out a small principality for themselves, and the records of the reign of the Assyrian King Shamsi-Adad (823-810 BCE) speak of a sudden raid against them and the destruction of 1,200 of their cities, which may mean no more than the destruction of fortified huts. A little later we find them forcing their way through the Zagros Mountains and settling on the southern slopes, living in the shadow of the mountains. By this time they have become hardy warriors, and cylinder seals show them riding to battle with gay plumes in their helmets, the heads and breasts of their horses adorned with jewels.
We find them living in primitive wooden huts, looking after their horses, watching over their flocks, tilling their fields and sacrificing to their gods occasionally we find them living in magnificent stonewalled, many towered buildings. Like nearly all the other tribes in this area they seem to have worshipped a Divine Mother who wore on her breast the badge of the Sun and they reverenced the ibex whose curved horns were sacred to the moon.
They were a frontier people, living on the edge of the desert, with memories of having passed through the forbidding territories of the Kings of Elam, who ruled from Susa. They were good hunters and excellent warriors, proud of their independence; having no culture of their own, they were beginning to borrow from Assyria and Elam and the neighboring Kingdom of Urartu and even perhaps from the Egyptians through traders. Herodotus says they had no luxuries. They despised comfort, unlike the Medes who lived in the northeast and were closely related to them in race. Already the Medes had acquired a written language and were compiling the great code of laws which the Persians were to take over. Meanwhile the Persians were living strenuously in their fortified huts or in castles which were usually built on high plateaux. The princes who ruled them possessed absolute power; there were no slaves; every man had his appointed place in the community. They give the impression of people deliberately and quietly training themselves for conquest.
The opportunity came in 596 BCE, when the Kingdom of Elam was destroyed by an invading army of Assyrians. Susa was plundered and razed to the ground, the royal sepulchres were desecrated and the images of their gods were carried away. Ezekiel tells the story: "There is Elam and all her multitude round about her grave, all of them slain, fallen by the sword, which are gone down uncircumcised into the nether parts of the earth, which caused their terror in the land of the living; yet have they borne their shame with them that go down to the pit." (Ezek. 32:24) The great empire of Elam vanished from the map, and into this vacuum, when the Assyrian armies withdrew, the sturdy Persians marched with their prince Teispes (675-640) at their head. They captured Anshan, once a stronghold of Elam, and Teispes began to call himself "King of the City of Anshan." It was the first of the Persian victories: there were to be many others.
It seems that Achaemenes, the father of Teispes, had prepared the ground and was chiefly responsible for training a hard-hitting force of cavalry, since forever afterwards the Persians regarded Achaemenes with a respect bordering on the reverence they paid to their gods. But they rarely spoke of his achievements. The man who gave his name to the royal line of Achaemenian Kings vanishes in the mist of history, and all we know of Teispes is that he extended the Kingdom and at his death divided it into two parts, giving the northern part to his son Ariaramnes and the southern part to his son Cyrus. Ariaramnes called himself "great King, King of Kings, King of the land of Parsa." Cyrus, more modest, or perhaps less powerful, contented himself with the title "great King of Parsumash." Within a few years Ariaramnes vanishes from the scene, but not before he had caused to be written in an ancient cuneiform script on a gold tablet which still survives the proudest of all the boasts uttered by the Persian Kings. Remembering that the hardy Persians had depended upon their horses for victory, he wrote:
The land of Persians, which I possess, has been granted unto me by the great God Ahuramazda. My land is filled with fine horses and good men, and I am the King of this land.
Ariaramnes was the first to call himself "King of Kings," a title which Persian sovereigns have continued to employ until the present day, but we do not know how he lost his kingdom to his brother. For a few brief years Cyrus rules over Parsumash, Anshan, and Parsa He is followed by his son Cambyses, who married into the royal family of Media. From the union between the gentle King Cambyses and Princess Mandane was born a son called Kurush, whom we know as Cyrus the Great.
At great length and in enormous detail Herodotus and Xenophon (Cyropaedia of Xenophon, The Life of Cyrus The Great) have depicted the births the upbringing, and the military conquests of Cyrus, who captured Sardis and Babylon and ended for a thousand years the rule of the Semites in Western Asia. His childhood gamed his table manners, how he walked and how he addressed his soldiers --all these are recorded for us. He is the first Persian to be presented to us in three dimensions. We know that he was so handsome that long after his death Persian sculptors continued to model his features because they represented an ideal of physical beauty. He was tall and slender, with a straight nose, a firm chin, and thick lips. He had high coloring and walked a little stiffly, and was much given to laughter. He took his kingly duties seriously, but he was perfectly capable of being informal with his soldiers. He was merciful and deeply religious, but sometimes his enormous eyes flashed with anger and then the rage of kingship would descend upon him. At such moments he would drive himself and his armies into dangerous campaigns which swept him halfway across Asia, to die at last fighting some obscure tribesmen who, though a potential threat, were not worth conquering. Like Alexander he carved out a great empire, and like Alexander he did not live to organize it.
Herodotus, who often tells the truth when he seems to be telling extravagant stories, records that as the consequence of a dream interpreted to mean that the boy would command all Asia, his Median grandfather ordered him to be killed at birth. The herdsman Mithradates received the boy and was about to put him in a box and leave him in the hills for animals to eat when he learned that his own wife had just given birth to a stillborn baby. The dead baby was substituted for Cyrus, who grew up to become a handsome and impudent herdboy. One day, when he was ten, Cyrus was playing the game of "Kings" in the same village street where Mithradates kept his oxen. Cyrus was elected "King" by the village boys and immediately set about distributing tasks among his subjects. One boy he ordered to build a palace, another became his bodyguard, a third was his prime minister, and a fourth his herald. It happened that one of the village boys playing the game was the son of a distinguished Mede. He refused the commands of Cyrus, who ordered his arrest and decreed a punishment‹a savage beating with whips. The boy escaped, ran to his father's house and complained about the behavior of the son of a herdsman. The boy's father complained to the King, who summoned Cyrus into his presence. "I did what I had to do," Cyrus said, "and if you are going to punish me, I am ready for it!" The King was troubled. He recognized that no son of a herdsman would dare to speak in this way, and he saw that the boy bore an extraordinary resemblance to himself. He asked for the herdsman to be brought before him. Soon the whole story came out, and then once again the King summoned his magicians and asked what should be done: should the boy be kept at the Court, or killed, or exiled?
In the end it was decided that since the boy had played the game of "Kings" and had therefore enjoyed all the prerogatives of kingship, though in a childish way, he presented no danger. He had been "King," and would be King no more. So he was simply exiled to his father's Court in Persia. On the way he learned the full story of how he had nearly been killed at birth, and for the first time there came to him a thirst for revenge against his grandfather, the King of the Medes. A few years later, when he became King of Persia, he hurled his army at the Medes and conquered them. Once he received their surrender, he showed mercy. He spared the capital, Ecbatana. He spared his grandfather, only making him a prisoner. He retained the Median officials in their posts, and combined the Median army with his own. Media had grown until it reached out towards the Scythian tribes in the north and included all the land touching on the Black Sea north of the Babylonian empire. Assyria had perished some sixty years before, and now there was the Empire of the Medes and Persians stretching from the Halys River in Asia Minor to the borders of India. Two empires faced him: that of the Lydians in the west, and that of Babylonia on his left flank. He decided to attack the Lydians first.
In those days Lydia was at the height of her power. All the Greek cities of Asia Minor paid tribute to the King, Croesus. The Lydians had invented banking (it is now believed, however, that banking was invented by a coalition of prostitutes and priests in Babylonia for the purpose of fund-raising for their temples) and almost possessed a monopoly of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean; wealth and treasure poured into the capital city of Sardis. Croesus seems to have been an able monarch with affection for philosophers and no particular love for ostentation, though he is remembered for his wealth. Once when the Athenian lawgiver Solon came to visit him, Goesus asked him who was the happiest of men, and Solon answered that the happiest man he had known was an obscure Athenian called Tellus who had brought fine sons into the world and lived to see his grandchildren around his knees, only to die gloriously in a battle against the city of Eleusis and to receive a public funeral at the place where he died. "Until a man is dead," said Solon, "one should not use the word happy, it is better to use only the word lucky."
Croesus was unlucky. He had recognized very early the formidable power of Cyrus. He tried to awaken Egypt and Babylonia to the common menace and succeeded in procuring an alliance between them against Persia. Before the armies could move, Cyrus was marching against Asia Minor. The first battle, near the Halys, was indecisive. Winter was approaching. Croesus assumed that Cyrus would withdraw his forces and returned leisurely to Sardis, then believed to be an impregnable fortress, guarded by the best-equipped soldiers in all Asia. The Lydians were excellent cavalrymen; so were the Persians. But Cyrus possessed camels and decided to throw them into the battle for Sardis, believing that the presence of the camels would frighten the enemy's horses, for everyone knows that horses are instinctively afraid of camels. The ruse succeeded. Croesus's horses turned and fled, but the Lydians hurled themselves off their horses and fought on foot. They were brave, but no match for the Persians, who sent them fleeing behind the high, stern walls of the city. Then the city was besieged. For fourteen days it held out. At last the walls were breached, and the Persians poured through.
So Croesus was pardoned, and Cyrus held him in high esteem, retaining him as a councillor in his court. Lydia had fallen; the empire of Cyrus extended to the shores of the Mediterranean; and the world shuddered.
The strength of Cyrus lay in his own character and in the character of the army he led. His soldiers were accustomed to privations, but they possessed an inner fire. "The Persians are proud, too proud, and they are poor," Croesus said once, unwittingly explaining the reasons which brought about his own defeat. Unlike the Lydians, they despised armor: they wore only leather breastplates. They lived simply, and were close to the earth.
It had been hammered into them from their earliest childhood that they had only three tasks to perform well in life --to ride well, shoot straight, and speak the truth, by which it was meant that they should speak the true words of the prophet Zarathustra and worship the god Ahuramazda and the other gods. Half-enviously, Herodotus recounts the stern simplicity of their ceremonies; there were no flute-players, no garlands, no pouring of wine. Before worshipping, a Persian would simply stick a spray of myrtle leaves in his headdress. For a few more years this spartan simplicity remained; then, as more plunder fell into their hands, the Persians learned to enjoy magnificence.
It could hardly have been otherwise. With all the treasure of Lydia in his hands, and with the Lydian army marching under his own generals, Cyrus turned his attention to Babylonia, then ruled by the scholarly King Nabonidus, whose chief interest seems to have been antiquarian research. Cyrus was in a mood for conquest. He was also exalted by his successes in Lydia, and when he reached the river Gyndes and one of his sacred white horses entered the water and attempted to swim across and was drowned, he showed for the first time that sullen, determined rage which overcame him often in later years. He decided to make war on the river, saying that for daring to kill his beautiful high-spirited horse he would reduce the river to a stream in which a woman might enter without wetting her knees. He held up the march against Babylon, divided his army into two parts, marked out on each side of the river a hundred and eighty channels running ofl from it in various directions, and ordered the men to set to work and dig. The river squandered its force in three hundred and sixty channels, and having defeated the river, Cyrus marched on to Babylon.
After the great triumphal march in Babylon, he settled down to the enjoyment of his empire. He saw the dangers of luxury and did his best to combat them, but gave his officers the utmost licence, saying they deserved to do as they pleased and to adorn themselves in costly Median costumes and wear high-heeled shoes, so long as they continued to practice their military exercises strenuously. He made no attempt to invade Egypt. In the ten years that remained to him there were no revolts throughout his vast dominion. He showed an astonishing forbearance to his enemies and was notable for his zeal in gifts. He allowed the Jews, whom Nebuchadnezzar had transported to Babylonia, to return to Palestine and declared according to the Jewish records that it was his divine mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews owed their new existence as a nation entirely to his magnanimity, and called him the "anointed of God." He was tolerant of all religions. He returned the gods which the Babylonians had carried off to their own shrines. He was one of those rare men who remain human when cloaked in majesty.
He died mysteriously --Herodotus says it was during a border-raid against the Massagatae who lived on the shores of the Caspian-- and was buried at Pasargad in a great limestone tomb raised on a platform above the ground. The tomb remains, empty of every vestige of its imperial owner. We know that the King was placed on a golden couch and wore his vestments and his tiara, but nearly two hundred years after his death, when Alexander the Great reached Pasargad, he found the body lying on the floor of the tomb, plundered of all the royal ornaments. Such was the fate of the greatest of the Persian Kings, the man who was called "the Father of his people" by the Persians, and who called himself "the King of the World."