
According to the Cyrus Cylinder (the oldest extant genealogy of the Achaemenids) the kings of Anshan were Teispes, Cyrus I, Cambyses I and Cyrus II, also known as Cyrus the Great, who created the empire (the later Behistun Inscription, written by Darius the Great, claims that Teispes was the son of Achaemenes and that Darius is also descended from Teispes through a different line, but no earlier texts mention Achaemenes ). There are conflicting accounts of the identities of the earliest Kings of Anshan. The Achaemenids were initially rulers of the Elamite city of Anshan near the modern city of Marvdasht the title "King of Anshan" was an adaptation of the earlier Elamite title "King of Susa and Anshan". The Achaemenid Empire may not have been the first Iranian empire, as the Medes, another group of Iranian people, possibly established a short-lived empire when they played a major role in overthrowing of the Assyrians. The Persians were originally nomadic pastoralists in the western Iranian Plateau.

1000 BC and settled a region including north-western Iran, the Zagros Mountains and Persis alongside the native Elamites. The Persians were Iranian people who arrived in what is today Iran c. The Achaemenid Empire was created by nomadic Persians. The Persian term Xšāça ( 𐎧𐏁𐏂), literally meaning "The Kingdom", was used to refer to the Empire formed by their multinational state. The name "Persia" is a Greek and Latin pronunciation of the native word referring to the country of the people originating from Persis (Old Persian: 𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿, Pārsa). Īround 850 BC the original nomadic people who began the empire called themselves the Parsa and their constantly shifting territory Parsua, for the most part localized around Persis. Achaemenes was himself a minor seventh-century ruler of the Anshan in southwestern Iran, and a vassal of Assyria. The term Achaemenid means "of the family of the Achaemenis/Achaemenes" ( Old Persian: 𐏃𐎧𐎠𐎶𐎴𐎡𐏁 Haxāmaniš a bahuvrihi compound translating to "having a friend's mind"). The Achaemenian empire borrows its name from the ancestor of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the empire, Achaemenes.

With Alexander's death marking the beginning of the Hellenistic period, most of the empire's former territory fell to the rule of the Ptolemaic Kingdom and the Seleucid Empire following the Partition of Triparadisus in 321 BC. īy 330 BC, the Achaemenid Empire was conquered in its entirety by Greek Macedonia under Alexander the Great, an ardent admirer of Cyrus the Great. Its advancements inspired the implement of similar styles of governance by various later empires.
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The Achaemenid Empire is well-known for having imposed a successful model of centralized, bureaucratic administration its multicultural policy building infrastructure, such as road systems and a postal system the use of an official language across its territories and the development of civil services, including its possession of a large, professional army. Īround the 7th century BC, the region of Persis in the southwestern portion of the Iranian plateau was settled by the Persians from Persis, Cyrus rose and defeated the Median Empire-of which he had previously been king-as well as Lydia and the Neo-Babylonian Empire, marking the formal establishment of a new imperial polity under the Achaemenid dynasty. Based in Western Asia, it was contemporarily the largest empire in history, spanning a total of 5.5 million square kilometres (2.1 million square miles) from the Balkans and ancient Egypt in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. The Achaemenid Empire ( / ə ˈ k iː m ə n ɪ d/ Old Persian: 𐎧𐏁𐏂, Xšāça, lit. 'The Empire' or 'The Kingdom' ), also called the First Persian Empire, was an ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC.
