Hello, you're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast.

As Alexander took his first steps across the Hellespont, he was entering into an old world.

The area of Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq and Iran, a land that was aired to a tradition of state

building, stretching back to the earliest settlements of Uruk along the Tigris

and Euphrates rivers of the 37th century BC, the Bronze Age kingdoms of Babylonia,

Hati and Elam of the 13th, and the Imperial Neo-Syrian Empire of the 9th.

This was a land whose history was as ancient to Alexander as he is to our own time. The culmination of this near-eastern

imperial tradition lay before him, more wealthy and powerful beyond any Greek's wildest imagination,

the Akhmaninid Persian Empire. By Alexander's time, it was the largest empire in world history,

hitting its territorial peak under Darius I,

with a range of over 2 million square miles, stretching from the Black Sea to the edge of the Indus.

It wasn't only large in terms of geographic spread.

It carried roughly 25% of the world's population within its borders during the reign of Darius.

Our earliest Greek sources about the empire are from the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus,

who traced the ethnic Persians to somewhere along the borders of modern-day Iran and Afghanistan

in his histories. The name Achaemenid, or Achaemenid, is borrowed from a legendary ancestor figure of the Persians named Achaemenes,

according to a description of Darius I himself.

Herodotus listed the foundation of the empire somewhere around 5.59 BC by the conqueror and future king Cyrus the Great.

Herodotus claims that his birth was foretold in a

prophetic dream involving urination and vines enveloping the world. It gets a bit strange,

including stories of cannibalism and baby switcher-rooos. But when he came to age, Cyrus toppled

the previously dominant Median Empire, Mead, ironically becoming the name by which

...