What was the legendary Persian Empire like, the first superpower in history and which only Alexander the Great defeated?

In the mid-6th century BC, the Persians were an unknown people of the mountains of the Persis region, in the southwest of the plateau of present-day Iran.

But a fabulous leader arose and, in a single generation, swept across the Middle East, conquering ancient kingdoms, invading famous cities, and building an empire that would become the greatest ever seen.

It ruled 44% of the world's population, encompassing the Balkans and Egypt in the west, most of West Asia and Central Asia in the northeast, and the Indus Valley of South Asia in the southeast.

The rulers of his dynasty would be the most powerful on the planet. Their resources were so vast they seemed limitless.

The unprecedented speed and scale of their conquests would give them an aura of invincibility.

Until another fabulous leader emerged who dominated the conquerors and kept their conquests.

This is a story that began in 559 BC with the rise of Cyrus the Great, one of the most notable figures of the ancient world, and ended 230 years later at the hands of the Macedonian giant Alexander the Great.

As is often the case, fact is mixed with fantasy, but the first notable triumph of the man who would become the founder of the first Persian empire was the defeat of the king of the Medes, a neighboring people.

Having extended his rule over the central Iranian plateau and much of Mesopotamia, he confronted the powerful kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor, capturing its wealthy capital, Sardis, and paving the way for the capture of other important cities along the Ionian coast.

But his great victory came when Cyrus launched an attack against the Second Babylonian Empire, centered in Mesopotamia, and entered the culturally sophisticated and incredibly rich Babylon.

He conquered the city in 539 BC, and we know this because archaeologists have found one of the earliest examples of political propaganda in history.

It is known as the Cyrus Cylinder and has, inscribed in small lines of cuneiform script, a description of how "the king of the world" had won, not through violence, but through tolerance.

The cylinder was written by order of Cyrus to be buried in the foundations of the city wall of Babylon, fulfilling a tradition in the region to ensure divine favor and record a ruler's achievements for posterity.

He reports that the previous king, Nabonidus, had perverted the cults of the Babylonian gods, including Marduk, the god of the city of Babylon, and imposed forced labor on its free population, who complained to the gods.

Marduk sought a defender to restore ancient customs, details the British Museum in London, which houses the ancient document.

The god chose Cyrus, declared him king of the world, and ordered him to march on Babylon, where the people accepted his reign with joy.

Then the voice changes to the first person:

"I am Cyrus, king of the world, the great king, the mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four cardinal points (of the world)....”

"My vast army marched to Babylon in peace. I allowed no one to frighten the people, and I sought the welfare of Babylon and all its holy places."

Cyrus presents himself as a worshipper of Marduk who fought for peace in the city and, in addition to restoring religious traditions, allowed those who had been deported to return to their settlements.

"All the people of Babylon persistently blessed my reign, and I ensured that all the countries lived in peace."

The text was also reproduced on tablets, which scholars believe were read in public.

What had been domination was presented as a liberation of the people.

The advertising campaign seems to have worked.

Since ancient times, Cyrus has been considered a benevolent and noble ruler, even by his enemies.

Maybe that was true, but the important thing is that, as the saying goes, it's not enough to be, you have to seem to be.

And the Cyrus Cylinder served to disseminate this image, influencing opinions about the founder of the Persian Empire for generations.

The Greek historian Xenophon (~430–354 BC) presented him as an ideal leader in his Cyropaedia , while Old Testament texts praised Cyrus for ending the Jewish exile in Babylon and allowing the group to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple.

Thus, over the centuries, he was admired as the epitome of the great qualities expected of a ruler in antiquity, and he assumed heroic traits as a tolerant and magnanimous conqueror, as well as courageous and daring.

And in modern times, his cylinder has even been referred to as the first declaration of human rights, as it appears to promote freedom of worship and tolerance.

However, experts note that these concepts would necessarily resonate in the 6th century BC, when the environment was polytheistic, and it suited conquerors—before and after Cyrus—not to ignore the gods of the places they controlled.

"When we talk about the ancient world, religion was not, as we understand it now, an organized entity," Mateen Arghandehpour, a researcher at the Invisible Orient Project at the University of Oxford in the UK, explained to the BBC.

"Someone in Babylon who worshipped Marduk may have worshipped other gods as well. So, religious freedom? Yes. Cyrus didn't force anyone to go against religion, but few people did that back then."

Little is known about the last years of Cyrus's life, and there are several contradictory versions of his death.

He died while campaigning on the eastern frontier of his empire.

Herodotus gives an account of his downfall, in which he died trying to conquer a nomadic group, and the queen, whose son Cyrus had murdered, ordered his head to be cut off.

However, Herodotus himself clarifies that this is just one of several versions of the accounts he heard.

The tomb, in any case, was at Pasargadae, the site where Cyrus built his capital.

It stood in the center of a vast walled garden, surrounded by lush vegetation and running water, an assertion of Cyrus's civilizing power against the savage wilderness.

Now, all that remains is his tomb, seemingly modest for the founder not only of the Persian Empire but also of his people's sense of national identity.

A simple inscription carved in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian proclaims: "I, King Cyrus, an Achaemenid."

It is a statement that the vast new empire of Cyrus the Great was under the rule of the Achaemenids, a Persian royal dynasty.

Another great

Cyrus the Great may have founded the Persian Empire, which his two subsequent successors expanded, but it was Darius I who consolidated it.

The rise of the man who would rival Cyrus as the most successful of all Persian rulers, and preside over the empire at its height, came about through brute force.

He seized power from Cyrus's son Bardia in a bloody coup, and was ruthless when the empire was rocked by a wave of revolts.

In little more than a year, he defeated, captured, and executed the rebel leaders, and for the remainder of his 36-year reign, he was never again threatened by an uprising.

But his reputation was not based solely on his military might.

Darius, in short, organized the empire.

He created a postal system, introduced standardized weights and measures, and also the minting of coins.

To deal with the enormous logistical challenge of presiding over such a vast empire, he divided the territories into provinces, or satrapies, and introduced taxes.

For the highest positions, he appointed a small group made up exclusively of members of the highest classes of the Persian aristocracy.

Furthermore, he ensured the implementation of engineering and construction projects throughout the empire, including a canal in Egypt between the Nile River and the Red Sea.

With such vast domains, roads were needed to connect the main centers to the imperial core.

The roads were excellent and equipped with rest stops to facilitate long journeys.

According to scholars, the quality of the Persian Empire's infrastructure was a factor that gave it a crucial competitive advantage.

It was this administrative genius that earned him the title of Darius the Great.

And another stroke of genius made him shine: the founding of the crown jewel of the empire, the legendary city of Persepolis.

Even today, the ruins of this monumental complex leave no doubt about the splendor of the place, which reflected the grandeur of the empire.

The magnificent esplanades were filled with buildings with columns up to 20 meters high, some of them with capitals at the top displaying birds, lions and bulls.

On the walls, exquisite reliefs depicted scenes and characters from this lost world.

On the stairs leading to the platform where the great throne room, or Apadana, is located, delegations from the 23 subject peoples were immortalized, bringing tributes to the king.

From the incredible details of their faces and national costumes, it is clear that they came from everywhere, from southeastern Europe to India, bringing gold dust, spices, fabrics, jewelry, elephant tusks, animals, and battle axes.

They entered through the imposing Gate of All Nations, guarded by bulls and mythological creatures called lamassus , bull-men originating from Babylon and Assyria, which the Persians had adopted to ward off evil.

The immensity of the empire is also reflected in Achaemenid architecture and art.

It was essentially an eclectic mix of styles and themes drawn from different parts, but fused together to produce a single, harmonious look that was distinctly Persian.

Persepolis was a masterpiece of imperial architecture.

And it can be assumed that it was built by exploiting a vast army of enslaved people.

But archaeologists have made a surprising discovery.

They found the Persepolis Fortress and Treasury Tablets, a set of administrative documents written on clay, which show careful record-keeping and exchange rates for cash payments.

They include various transaction data, mainly related to food distribution, livestock management, and the provisioning of workers and travelers.

Among other things, they speak of large operations to transport various basic products from one place to another, according to economic needs, and of sending silver and food to the workers of the royal economy in Persepolis and the surrounding area.

Thus, they reveal who the city's inhabitants were, where they lived, what they did and even what they ate.

They came from all parts of the Achaemenid Empire to work in the city and received wages.

A clue to how they got there can be found in an inscription from Susa, one of the most important cities in the ancient Middle East, where Darius speaks of his desire to build a throne room.

He assigns the people of the Empire the task of gathering various necessary goods.

Thus, for example, the Assyrians were instructed to bring cedar wood, and the Afghans, turquoise and lapis lazuli; the Babylonians were asked to produce bricks; and Egypt was directed to supply goldsmiths and ivory experts.

In this way, in addition to tributes and taxes, the wealth of the "four cardinal points" governed by the Achaemenids reached the heart of the empire.

Persepolis prospered for nearly two centuries, and was known as the richest city in the world.

And it was not just architecture that projected Achaemenid wealth and culture.

Beautiful decorative objects and jewelry, made of solid gold and silver, with precious and semi-precious stones, confirm the luxury.

Persepolis became an object of desire, especially for a place the Persians never managed to conquer: Greece.

A king with the empire in his sights

Darius the Great's attempt to subjugate Greece ended bloodily at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.

Darius died four years later, and the task of expanding the empire fell to his son, Xerxes.

Although he captured Athens in 480 BC, his forces suffered serious defeats at the hands of the Greeks, both at sea (Salamis) and on land (Plataea and Mycale).

Faced with the reality that Greece would never be incorporated into his empire, Xerxes gave up.

Over the next century and a half, there were internal rebellions, Egypt was lost and reconquered, and a revolt in Sidon (in modern-day Lebanon) was suppressed.

Despite all these crises, Persia's primacy remained unquestioned until, in ancient Macedonia, a king arose who, from the moment he ascended the throne, had set his sights on the Persian Empire.

He had grown up with this idea. Furthermore, he needed the wealth of Greece's enemy to maintain his army and continue his conquests.

He would go down in history as Alexander the Great and would destroy every Achaemenid building in just a few years.

In 330 BC, he invaded Persia and sacked Persepolis—it's said he took 200 wagons of gold and silver. In what is still considered one of the greatest acts of vandalism in history, he set the site on fire.

The exact reason is unknown.

The renowned Iranian intellectual Al-Biruni, in his Chronology of Ancient Nations, from the year 1000, presented a justification with which several sources agree.

"[Alexander] burned all of Persepolis in revenge against the Persians, because the Persian king Xerxes had apparently burned the Greek city of Athens about 150 years earlier. It is said that even today, traces of the fire can be seen in some places."

Others believe it was to announce to the East the end of the Achaemenid Empire.

Or because he wanted to erase Persian culture and identity and make the memory of the kings who lived there disappear.

If that was the case, in a way he succeeded: much of it disappeared completely from history.

Centuries later, when visitors wandered through the ruins and came across statues of strange and fantastical animals, they imagined that mythical kings, not the Achaemenids, had ruled the Persian Empire.

In the 10th century, the Persian poet Ferdusi compiled these fables and included them in his great work, Shāhnāmé , or The Book of Kings .

Neither Cyrus, nor Darius, nor Xerxes were mentioned in this epic book, which occupies a central place in the Iranian sense of identity.

In the West, their stories were told from the point of view of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The ruins of Persepolis remained unidentified until 1620.

Numerous European travelers and scholars visited the site and described it in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But it was only in 1924, when the Iranian government commissioned the German scholar Ernst Herzfeld (1879-1948), an expert in Iranian archaeology, history and languages, to explore the immense Achaemenid palace complex, that its history began to be unearthed.

Since then, it has become increasingly possible to tell it through the voices of those ancient Persians, and archaeological discoveries continue to refine it.

Thus, this story that began and ended with two "great" conquerors continues to be written.

* Main sources for this report: episodes " Cyrus the Great " and " Persepolis " from the BBC series "In Our Own Time"; and the BBC series " Art of Persia ".