Megas Alexandros

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Persia
Achaemenid Empire

The Achaemenid Empire (Old Persian: Hakhāmanishiya also frequently, the "Achaemenid Persian Empire".) (559 BC–338 BC) was the first of the Persian Empires to rule over significant portions of Greater Iran. It also eventually incorporated the following territories: in the east modern Afghanistan and portions of Pakistan; in the north and west all of Turkey (Anatolia), the upper Balkans peninsula (Thrace), and most of the Black Sea coastal regions; in the west and southwest the territories of modern Iraq, northern Saudi-Arabia, Palestine (Jordan, Israel, Lebanon), all significant population centers of ancient Egypt, and as far west as portions of Libya. Encompassing approximately 7.5 million square kilometers, the Achaemenid Empire was territorially the largest empire of classical antiquity, and second only to the Roman Empire in population.

The name refers to both the founding dynasty (disputed) and the small subservient tributary state which became its own self-liberator and the conqueror of the older Medean Empire. It is the political entity that generally comes to mind when referring to the ancient Persian Empire in western cultures—it was the empire which threw off the yoke of existence as a tributary state of the Medes (founders of the first empires in greater Persia/Iran), the empire which humbled and ruled Egypt, which twice threatened to conquer all the ancient Greeks, and which in turn, eventually fell to Alexander the Great — in its time it was a comparative superpower with high cultural and economical achievements during its lengthy rule over a vast region ten times the size of modern Germany from its picturesque capital at Persepolis.

Persian Unit Roster