Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Persian Empire(s)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Located roughly in the territory of the modern-day nation of Iran is the ancient land known as Persia. Persia sat at the strategic crossroads between South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia Minor. It was not only influenced by all of the great civilizations around it, but it was also the birthplace of many of the great empires of antiquity. Learn more about the Persian Empires on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were really? long. Throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world

Starting point is 00:00:55 now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. When we talk about Persia, we're talking about the territory which is primarily the modern day country of Iran. As I've discussed in a previous episode, Persia was a name actually given to the people who live there by the Greeks. Iran is the modern name, but it actually stems from the ancient name the people who live there used to call themselves. As I'm trying to distinguish different periods in history, I'll refer to Persia whenever I'm referring to some past kingdom, empire, or government, and Iran, whenever I'm referring to anything more modern, in particular the 20th century to today. However, it should be kept in mind that I'm basically referring to the same people

Starting point is 00:01:42 and the same place. That being said, Persia stands alongside other great civilizations in world history. It wasn't simply a matter of having had a large empire like the Mongols or a very old civilization like Egypt. In no small part to its strategic location, Persia has both ancient roots and continued relevance over a span of millennia. The reason I wanted to do this episode is because the term Persian Empire can be a bit confusing. There wasn't a single Persian Empire. there were, in fact, many of them. They weren't necessarily a single continuous institution, like with the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Empire.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Nor was it like China, which had a series of different dynasties, basically ruling over the same area. My goal in this episode is to briefly go over the many empires which ruled over Persia. The sweep of history that I'm going to be going over is very long, and it would be impossible to cover everything. In between the empires I'll be mentioning, there were often smaller kingdoms and sultanates. The borders of what constitutes Persia were historically never well-defined.

Starting point is 00:02:47 They may have gone north into Central Asia, east into modern-day Afghanistan or Pakistan, and west into the Levant. Likewise, the borders of other non-Persian empires may have gone into Persia, especially from the West and Mesopotamia. All of the individual empires I'll be covering, I'll be going through quickly, and are potential topics for future episodes. So with that, we'll start with who the person, Persians were before they were called the Persians, the Medes.

Starting point is 00:03:13 The Medes originally hailed from northwest Iran and parts of the Caucasus in the area around modern-day Azerbaijan. The Medes, beginning in about the 9th century BC, began to coalesce as a people and establish a kingdom known as Media. As the kingdom of media became larger, it was the world's first example of big media. The Medes joined forces with the Babylonians to overthrow the Assyrian Empire in 612 BC, destroying the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. After the end of the Assyrians, the kingdom of media became a major power.

Starting point is 00:03:45 They had a centralized government and a complex bureaucracy, and they became known for having a top-notch cavalry. Around the year 550 BC, a mead by the name of Cyrus took control of the kingdom and established the Achaemenid empire. Cyrus is known to history as Cyrus the Great. If someone ever refers to the Persian Empire, this is the empire that they're probably referring to. The Achaemenid Empire was one of the largest empires in ancient history.

Starting point is 00:04:12 It extended from Pakistan and Afghanistan and the east through the Iranian plateau, the Levant, Turkey, much of the coast of Greece, and the Crimean Peninsula, as well as conquering Egypt all the way to modern-day Libya. The Achaemenid Empire also saw the rise of a religion that was particular to the region known as Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism became the state religion of the empire and the dominant religion of the region for more than a thousand years. The Achaemenid Empire was large and diverse, and over time it became extremely decadent. Despite being able to muster a very massive army, they were left extremely weak, and that weakness was exploited by Alexander the Great. The Greeks and Persians had clashed many times in the past, but from 334 to 330 BC, Alexander the Great defeated the Persian king Darius III.

Starting point is 00:05:01 Alexander was arguably the greatest general in the ancient world. The empire he created subsumed the entire Persian Empire and, went even further. He adopted many Persian customs and made his top generals marry Persian wives. However, he died in 323 BC, less than 10 years after conquering Persia. Alexander's massive empire was short-lived and didn't survive his death. The empire was split between his top generals, and the general, who ended up with most of Persia, was named Seleucus. The empire he and his successors ruled was known as the Seleucid Empire. The Seleucid Empire was saddled with conflicts in the West with Ptolemaic Egypt and in the east with the Gupta Empire in India.

Starting point is 00:05:41 Ultimately, an Iranian people from Central Asia known as the Parthians conquered the Seleucid Empire. The Parthians ruled for about 500 years and are best known as being the foil of the Roman Empire, just as the Achaemenid Empire was with the Greeks. The Romans never conquered Parthia, and Parthia was responsible for some of the most infamous feats of the Romans. Most notably was the Battle of Kare, where the Parthians defeated a Roman army led by one of the members of the first triumvirate, Krasis. A sort of frenemy stalemate developed between Parthia and Rome over time, and eventually both Rome and Parthia went into decline. Around the year 224, Parthia was conquered by the Sassanid Empire. The Sassanid Empire was established by Ardashir I, who defeated the Parthians at the Battle of Hormogsden in 224.

Starting point is 00:06:27 As with the term Persian, the term Sassanid is one of the first. given by outsiders and historians. The name of the empire to those who live there was simply the empire of Iranians. It is called Sasanid Empire by historians after Sasan, who was a Zoroastrian high priest, who was the ancestor of the royal family. It is also sometimes called the Neo-Persian Empire or the Second Persian Empire. The Sasanian Empire was arguably the high point of ancient Persian culture. The Sasanians were known for their large-scale construction projects,

Starting point is 00:06:58 and they also marked the high point of Zoroastrianism as a religion. Prior to its end in the 7th century, the Sasanian Empire reached an extent rivaled only by the Achaemenid Empire. They ruled from Egypt to Turkey to Turkmenistan to Pakistan, as well as all the lands on either side of the Persian Gulf. The end of the Sasanian Empire marked a dramatic turn in the history of the region. In 632, the empire was conquered by the Muslim armies that had burst out of the Arabian Peninsula.

Starting point is 00:07:26 This began a 600-year rule by Islamic Council, who were not Persian. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I'll be covering the caliphates separately in another episode, but they were successively ruled by the Rashidun caliphate from 632 to 631 to 660, and the Umeid caliphate which ruled from 750 to about 750 to about 1050. The important thing to take away is that the conquest by the caliphates turned Persia from a Zoroastrian region to an Islamic one. Moreover, the branch of Islam, which was practiced at this time, predominantly Sunni Islam. Moreover, while Persia had been conquered, they in turn had a great deal of influence on Islamic art and architecture. Around the year 1050, a new force invaded from the Asian

Starting point is 00:08:11 steps in the north, the Seljic Turks. The Seljiks, like the Arabs before them, were Sunni Muslims. Their origins may have been Turkic, but their society ultimately became a Persianate society, which was dominated by Persian language and culture. In 1190, a former vassal of the Seljiks rose up, and conquered much of the Seljuk lands. This was known as the Quarismian Empire. The Chorismian Empire were culturally Persian Turkic people like the Seljuks and were extremely expansionistic. However, their expansion was extremely short-lived as they ran into the irresistible force that was the Mongol Empire. From 1219 to 1221, the Mongols, led by Gingas Khan, systematically dismantled the Quarizmian Empire. As the Mongol Empire was so large, it was split into parts to be ruled separately.

Starting point is 00:08:58 The Persian part was known as the Ilkanate. The Ilkanate lasted a little over 100 years and was replaced by the descendants of the Mongol conquerors to form the Timurid Empire in 1370. The empire was founded by Timor, who was known in English as Tamerlane, from whom the empire gets its name. As with so many previous conquerors, they adopted Persian customs and the Persian language. The Timurid Empire, at its greatest extent, had a footprint pretty similar to other Persian empires, centered on modern to Iran, but with territory extending into Iraq, Central Asia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. They ushered in a cultural renaissance, with Harat in present-day Afghanistan, becoming a prominent center of Persian literature, art, and architecture. The Timurid Empire lasted only about 125 years,

Starting point is 00:09:46 as they were overthrown by Ismail I, the founder of the Safavid Empire. The Safavid Empire marks a huge turning point and is often referenced as the start of modern Iranian history. For starters, it was the first time in almost 900 years that Persia wasn't ruled by outsiders, like Arabs, Turks, or Mongols. Second, they were the first empire to refer to itself as Iran since the Sasanids. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they made Shia Islam the state religion. The dominant form of Islam still practiced in Iran today. The Safavid Empire was one of three great Islamic empires of the period, which have been dubbed the Islamic Gunpowder empires. The Safavid Empire was right in the middle of the other two, the Ottoman Empire to the

Starting point is 00:10:30 West and the Mughal Empire to the East in India. The Safavid Empire lasted until 1722, with two brief restorations that took place in the 18th century. There was a brief period of rule by the Afshurid dynasty in the 18th century until the Qajar dynasty came to power in 1796. At this point, it wasn't so much an empire anymore as just a royal house that ruled Iran. The Qajar dynasty lasted through the 19th century and into the early 20th century, and there were seven rulers who held the title of Shah of Iran. They were overthrown in 2025 by Reza Shah Pahlavi, an Iranian soldier from an aristocratic family. He was forced to advocate the throne in 1941 after the joint British Soviet invasion of Iran, which was designed to remove Iran as a potential base of operations for Germany.

Starting point is 00:11:17 He was replaced by his son, Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was to become the last Shah of Iran. As we're now into contemporary history, many of you know the story. The Shah was extremely unpopular with his people and was overthrown in 1979 and was replaced by an Islamic revolutionary government, which was led by a Sunni cleric known as Ayatollah Ruhola Khomeini. The modern history of Iran since the end of the Second World War is a fascinating subject for a future episode. There is a saying that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location. And the same holds true with geopolitics. Whether they were the conquerors or the conquered, the location of Iran at the intersection of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, has made it relevant to world

Starting point is 00:12:02 history for over 3,000 years. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Must Listen Podcast on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, Must Listen Podcast. Everything Everywhere is a must listen podcast. For me, it is the intellectualsend podcast. For me, it is the intellectual equivalent of eating candy.

Starting point is 00:12:28 Every episode is interesting, even if you have no interest in the topic. And Gary does an amazing job of making even the most mundane or esoteric topics interesting, fun, and easily understandable. Do yourself a favor and listen to this podcast. You will not regret it. Well, thanks, must listen. That's a great review, but I do have one quibble. Listening to this podcast isn't like candy, which is nothing but empty calories that'll

Starting point is 00:12:50 write your teeth. This podcast is more like a home-cooked meal, consisting of food that'll help you grow. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it right on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Persian Empire(s)

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