Hi there, you're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast, Episode 48, Persian and Iranian survival in a Hellenistic world. After two centuries of ruling over much of Eurasia, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus

the Great in the mid-6th century, would come to an end when the last great King, Darius

the Third, was unceremoniously murdered in the remote

land of Bactria by a rogue subordinate in 330 BC.

The Achaemenid dynasty collapsed in the wake of invasion by the Macedonian king, Alexander

the Great, and the subsequent infighting of Alexander's successors resulted in the creation

of several kingdoms atop of the empire's corpse. The Greco-Macedonians became the new elites in a new Hellenistic world for the next three centuries,

replacing the previous Persian ruling bodies and noble families in areas like Western and Central Asia.

However, the triumph of the Greeks do not spell the end of Persian and Iranian civilization, as both

commoners and elites alike managed to get a foothold in the new geopolitical dynamic,

whether out of a desire for self-preservation and continuation of their daily lives,

or by taking advantage of the chaos, by setting out to found new dynasties of their own.

People such as the Mithridates of Pontus, the Aria-Rothids of Cappadocia, atropatids of Media,

and the last Achaemenid princess Amastris, all managed to navigate through the turbulent

period of the early Hellenistic age to varying degrees of success.

In this episode, we'll be approaching the Macedonian conquest in early Hellenistic

period from the Persian and Iranian perspective, follow the careers of several important

dynasties and kingdom founders, and end by looking at the ways Iranian culture adapted and propagated

in a new Hellenistic world. It would be appropriate to begin this episode with a brief discussion

on what I exactly mean when I speak of Persian and Iranian.

Iranian is a term that is broad in scope and used as either an ethnic, linguistic, or cultural designation that, when referring to the ancient world, can include groups as diverse as nomadic scythians and imperial Persians.

It also can be used to refer to the peoples

...