The PERSIAN EMPIRE. How One People GOVERNED HALF the WORLD.

Описание: Iran is in the headlines every day. Sanctions, missiles, nuclear programmes, proxy wars, the country that sits at the centre of one of the world's most volatile conflicts is spoken about almost entirely in the language of threat. Before any of that, before the Islamic Republic, before the Arab conquest, before even the word Iran existed in its modern form, the people of that plateau built something the world had never seen and has never quite seen since. This video is about what they built.
The Persian Empire at its height governed 44 percent of every human being alive on earth. Not land, people. Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, Greeks, Indians, Lydians, Armenians, nearly one in every two souls on the planet, answering in some form to a single throne on the Iranian plateau. No empire before it had come close. No empire after it ever would. And it held that world together not through terror but through a governing philosophy so precise and so effective that its structures outlasted the dynasty by centuries, passed through Alexander, through Rome, and into the administrative DNA of every large state that followed.
The people who built Persepolis, who dug the canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, who authored the first recorded declaration of religious freedom, who gave the English language the word paradise, they were Persian. They were Iranian. What the world thinks it knows about them was written almost entirely by their enemies. This video goes to the source: the clay tablets, the royal inscriptions, the archaeology of a civilisation that governed half of humanity and has been misrepresented for two and a half thousand years. The Iran in today's news and the Iran of this story share the same soil, the same mountains, and the same people. One of those stories has been told relentlessly. The other one starts here.
Each video in this series stands alone. No prior knowledge required.

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
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/

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