APPENDIX V - THE PERSIAN EMPIRE

Summary

Persia proper, roughly corresponding to the modern province of Farsistan, was comparatively a small district, about 450 miles in length by 250 in breadth. Eastward it touched on Kermân or Karamania, westward it was bounded by Susiana, southward by the Persian Gulf. Its inhabitants were Aryans, whose immigration into the country called after their name was hardly earlier than the period of the fall of the Assyrian empire. The Assyrian inscriptions know nothing of them. Under leaders termed Akhæmenians (from Hakhámanish, “the friendly”) the tribe of the Persians pushed its way into the old kingdom of Anzan, or Southern Elam, which had been destroyed and desolated by the armies of Assur-bani-pal, and subsequently left a prey to the first invader by the decay of the Assyrian power. The tribe was but one out of many which had long been steadily advancing westward from the regions of the Hindu Kush. The first great wave of Aryan emigration, which had resulted in the establishment of the European nations, had been followed by another wave which first carried the Hindus into the Punjab, and then the Iranian populations into the vast districts of Baktria and Ariana. Mountains and deserts checked for a time their further progress, but at length a number of tribes, each under its own chiefs, crept along the southern shores of the Caspian or the northern coast of the Persian Gulf. These tribes were known in later history as the Aryan Medes and Persians.