Persian, Indian, Asian

The Persian Empire was a series of historical empires that ruled over the Iranian plateau (Irān - "Land of the Aryans") and beyond. more...

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Generally, the earliest entity considered a part of the Persian Empire is Persia's Achaemenid dynasty (648–330 BC), a united Aryan kingdom that originated in the region now known as Pars province of Iran and was formed under Cyrus the Great. Successive states in Iran prior to March, 1935 are collectively called the Persian Empire by Western historians.

Name

Persia has long been used by the West to describe the nation of Iran, its people, and its ancient empires. It derives from the ancient Greek name for Iran's maritime province, called Fars in the modern Persian language, Pars in Middle Persian and Pārsā in Old Persian, a word meaning "above reproach". Persis is the Hellenized form of Pars, and through the Latinized word Persia, the other European nations came to use this word for the region.

This area was the core of the original Persian Empire. Most foreigners referred to the state as Persia until March 21, 1935, when Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asked the international community to call the country Iran; which was often used by the Aryan tribes who formed the country in the Achaemenid era united the plateau in that region.

History

Achaemenid Empire (648 BC–330 BC)

The earliest known record of the Persians comes from an Assyrian inscription from c. 844 BC that calls them the Parsu (Parsuash, Parsumash) and mentions them in the region of Lake Urmia alongside another group, the Madai (Medes). For the next two centuries, the Persians and Medes were at times tributary to the Assyrians. The region of Parsuash was annexed by Sargon of Assyria around 719 BC. Eventually the Medes came to rule an independent Median Empire, and the Persians were subject to them.

The Achaemenids were the first to create a centralized state in Persia, founded by Achaemenes (Hakhamanish), chieftain of the Persians around 700 BC.

Around 653 BC, the Medes came under the domination of the Scythians, and Teispes, the son of Achaemenes, seems to have led the nomadic Persians to settle in southern Iran around this time — eventually establishing the first organized Persian state in the important region of Anshan as the Elamite kingdom was permanently destroyed by the Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal (640 BC). The kingdom of Anshan and its successors continued to use Elamite as an official language for quite some time after this, although the new dynasts spoke Persian, an Indo-Iranian tongue.

Read more at Wikipedia.org