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The Achaemenid (Persian) Empire
The first empire to rule from the Indus to the Aegean, held together by roads and satraps
When Cyrus the Great of Persia overthrew his Median overlord around 550 BCE, he began building the largest empire the world had yet seen. Within a generation his successors ruled from the Indus valley to Egypt and the Aegean, an estimated 5.5 million square kilometers governed through provincial satraps, a standard gold coinage and a road network that let royal couriers cross it in days. The Achaemenid kings generally left local religions and customs in place, a policy described on the Cyrus Cylinder, and according to the Hebrew Bible Cyrus let Jewish exiles return from Babylon to Jerusalem. The ruins of Persepolis in southern Iran and the empire's wars with the Greek city-states remain touchstones for Iranian and European memory alike.
The empire's heart was the Iranian plateau, a high, arid tableland ringed by the Zagros and Alborz mountains, together with the lowlands of Mesopotamia and Elam, where Babylon and Susa stood. From there it reached west across Anatolia to the Aegean coast and into Thrace, south through the Levant to Egypt and Libya, and east across Bactria and Sogdiana to the Indus valley. Much of it was desert or mountain, and the Royal Road, running some 2,500 kilometers from Susa to Sardis, tied the distant provinces together. Its territory now lies mainly in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Cyprus, with smaller parts of Bulgaria, Greece and Libya.
Cyrus II conquered Media, Lydia and Babylon between about 550 and 539 BCE, and his son Cambyses II added Egypt in 525. Darius I, who took power in 522, organized the empire into satrapies, standardized taxes and the gold daric, and began building Persepolis. His campaigns and those of his son Xerxes I against the Greeks ended in defeats at Marathon in 490 and at Salamis and Plataea in 480 and 479, but Persian power in Asia stayed intact for another 150 years. Alexander the Great of Macedon invaded in 334, defeated Darius III at Gaugamela in 331 and burned Persepolis in 330, the year Darius was killed by his own officers. Alexander and the Seleucid kings who followed kept much of the Achaemenid administrative system, and later Persian dynasties claimed its legacy.