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INTRODUCTION The Persian Empire is one of a series of imperial dynasties centered in Persia. The first of these was the Achaemenid Empire established by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC with the conquest of Median, Lydian and Babylonian empires.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

•ARMY •PHYSICAL FEATURES •OCCUPATION •NAVY •RELIGION •POPULATION •WEALTH

ARMY The first Persian Empire (550 BC – 330 BC), called the Achaemenid Empire, is known for having an elite force of soldiers. Named the “Immortals” by Herodotus, this army consisted of a heavy infantry of 10,000 men, that never reduced in number or strength. The Immortals played an important role in Persian history, acting as both the Imperial Guard and the standing army during the expansion of the Persian Empire and the Greco-Persian Wars.

PHYSICAL FEATURES Persia was a land that included parts of what are now Iran and Afghanistan. The map above shows the Achaemenid Empire at its peak in 500BC. It was the center of an empire that stretched west to the central Mediterranean Sea, east to India, and from the Gulf of Oman in the southern Russia in the north. Persia is one of the world's most mountainous countries. Its mountains have helped to shape both the political and the economic history of the country for several centuries. The mountains enclose several broad basins, or plateaus, on which major agricultural and urban settlements are located. There are no major river systems in the country, and historically transportation was by means of caravans that followed routes traversing gaps and passes in the mountains. The mountains also impeded easy access to the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea.

OCCUPATION The Persian population is engaged in a broad array of occupations, in both urban and rural settings. In urban areas Persian society is stratified by profession; real-estate investors and commercial entrepreneurs occupy the highest position, followed by upper-level administrators, merchants, and clergy. The middle class consists largely of civil servants and assorted white-collar workers. The next group generally comprises labourers of various sorts, while the lowest class includes the unskilled and the unemployed. In rural areas, which are largely agrarian, social stratification is much less marked. The traditional handwoven cloth and carpet industries have remained strong, despite competition from mechanized textile mills. Persian villages often pride themselves on the unique designs and high quality of their carpets, most of which display the typical geometric figures and floral designs prevalent in Muslim visual art. Products of the weaving industry are both used locally and exported. The Persians are known for their intricately inlaid metalwork as well as for their legacy of extraordinary architecture

NAVY It is charged with the responsibility of forming Iran's first line of defense in the Gulf of Oman and beyond with the mission of acting as an effective blue-water navy.[1] However it is generally considered as a conventional green-water navy[3] as it mostly operates at a regional level, in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman but also as far afield as the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and northwest quarter of the Indian Ocean.[1] In July 2016, the Navy said that it would establish a presence in the Atlantic Ocean, of unspecified duration.[4] One of Iran's two maritime military branches alongside the IRGC Navy, it overlaps functions and areas of responsibility with the other navy, but they are distinct in terms of military strategy and equipments. Despite IRGC Navy which is equipped with the small fast attack crafts, backbone of the Artesh navy’s inventory consists of larger surface ships, including frigates and corvettes, and submarines.

RELIGION The ancient pre-Islamic religion of Persia that survives there in isolated areas, and more prosperously in India, where the descendants of Zoroastrian Persian immigrants are known as Parsis, or Parsees. In India the religion is called Parsiism. Founded by the Persian prophet and reformer Zoroaster, the religion contains both monotheistic and dualistic features. It influenced the other major Western religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The ancients saw in Zoroastrianism the archetype of the dualistic view of the world and of man's destiny. Zoroaster was supposed to have instructed Pythagoras in Babylon and to have inspired the Chaldean doctrines of astrology and magic. It is likely that Zoroastrianism influenced the development of Judaism and the birth of Christianity. The Christians, following a Hebrew tradition, identified Zoroaster with Ezekiel, Nimrod, Seth, Balaam, and Baruch, and even through the latter, with Christ himself. On the other hand, Zoroaster, as the presumed founder of astrology and magic, could be considered the arch-heretic. In more recent times the study of Zoroastrianism has played a decisive part in reconstructing the religion and social structure of the Persian peoples.

POPULATION The world's core Jewish population was estimated at 14.31 million (around 70% of the world's "enlarged" Jewish population) in early 2015. Demographer Sergio DellaPergola proposed an "extended" Jewish population, including people identifying as partly Jewish and non-Jews with Jewish parents, that numbered 17.3 million globally, and an "enlarged" Jewish population figure that also included non-Jewish members of Jewish households and totals 20.2 million. Additionally, the total number of people who hold or are eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return — defined as anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, and who does not profess any other religion — is estimated at around 23 million, of which 6.6 million are living in Israel as of 2015. Figures for these expanded categories are less precise than for the core Jewish population. While dozens of countries host at least a small Jewish population, the community is concentrated in a handful: Israel and the United States account for 83% of the Jewish population, while a total of 98 countries host 17%.

WEALTH Tiridates led Alexander [the Great] into a large building behind the palace of Xerxes [at Persepolis] that served as both an armory for the royal bodyguard and a repository for the king’s wealth. Diffused light filtered through a series of openings in the roof above and washed gently over the tons of gold and silver bullion that had been neatly and methodically stored there. Within the treasury building were 120,000 talents of bullion, the largest single concentration of wealth to be found anywhere in the ancient world. Darius I had imposed a tribute of precious metals in addition to a tribute of goods on his satraps and on the subject nations of the empire. Instead of converting that tribute into coins that could then have been put into circulation, Darius and his successors had it melted and then formed into ingots of gold and silver. The bars were stored in the palace treasury, and when the kings of Persia needed to finance particular projects, wars, or adventures, the precious metals were cast into coins. It was Darius who had introduced the coining of money into the empire; hence, the Persian coin became known as the Daric. Until that time, the empire had been administered largely on the basis of barter.