Persian History · Chronicle I of X
Ancient Iran
Elam and its ziggurats, and the Medes and Persians who inherited the plateau.
Proto-ElamiteCultural
On the lowland plain of Khuzestan the city of Susa flourishes, and a distinctive Proto-Elamite script spreads across the Iranian plateau.
Founded around 4200 BCE, Susa became one of the great cities of the ancient Near East, poised between Mesopotamia and the highlands of Iran. The still-undeciphered Proto-Elamite tablets, used for accounting from Susa to distant Tepe Yahya, mark the first literate civilization of the Iranian world.
Old ElamitePolitical
The dynasty of Awan gives Elam its first known kings, rivals and trading partners of the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia.
Elam — known to itself as Haltamti — united the lowland Susiana with the highland kingdom of Anshan in the Zagros. Its kings warred with the rulers of Ur and Akkad and shared in the wider Mesopotamian world, even as they preserved their own gods, language, and a matrilineal succession unusual in the region.
Old ElamiteMilitary
Elamite armies sack the great Sumerian city of Ur and carry off its last king, ending the Third Dynasty of Ur.
The fall of Ur around 2004 BCE was long remembered in Mesopotamian lament literature. The Elamites installed a garrison in the city and took the statue of the moon god Nanna and King Ibbi-Sin back to Susa, a spoil that later Mesopotamian kings would try for centuries to reclaim.
Middle ElamitePolitical
Powerful dynasties centred on Susa and Anshan raise Elam to the height of its wealth and independence.
The kings of this era styled themselves 'king of Anshan and Susa,' binding highland and lowland into a single realm. Elamite, an isolate written in cuneiform, became the language of monumental inscriptions, and the god Inshushinak of Susa stood at the head of a rich pantheon.
Middle ElamiteReligious
King Untash-Napirisha founds a new sacred city and raises a towering ziggurat to the gods of Elam.
The ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil, best preserved in the world outside Mesopotamia, still rises in Khuzestan. Its five terraces of mud-brick, faced with glazed tiles and inscribed bricks, were dedicated to Inshushinak and Napirisha and mark the summit of Elamite monumental religion.
Middle ElamiteMilitary
The Elamite king raids Mesopotamia and carries the great law stele of Hammurabi and other trophies back to Susa.
At the peak of Elamite power, Shutruk-Nahhunte and his sons overran Babylon and hauled off its monuments — including the Code of Hammurabi and the victory stele of Naram-Sin — which archaeologists later recovered at Susa. The triumph was brief: within decades the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I struck back and shattered Elam's power.
Neo-ElamiteMilitary
The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal storms and destroys Susa, breaking the last great kingdom of Elam.
Assyrian reliefs boast of levelling the city, sowing it with salt, and desecrating the tombs of Elam's kings. Though Elamite culture lingered in the highlands, the independent power of Elam was finished — and into the vacuum on the plateau moved the Iranian-speaking peoples who would inherit its lands.
Iranian MigrationsPolitical
Iranian-speaking tribes — among them the Medes and the Persians — settle across the western plateau and the Zagros.
Descended from Indo-Iranian pastoralists who had moved south from the steppe, these peoples first appear in Assyrian records of the ninth century BCE as troublesome neighbours of the mountains. The Medes gathered around Ecbatana in the north, while the Persians drifted south toward Anshan and the region that would give its name to Fars — and to Persia itself.
Religious
Somewhere in the eastern Iranian world the prophet Zarathustra composes the Gathas, hymns to the one god Ahura Mazda.
The date and homeland of Zarathustra (Zoroaster) are disputed, ranging over many centuries, but his teaching of a cosmic struggle between truth and the lie, of free moral choice, and of a final judgement would shape Iranian religion for two thousand years and echo through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
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Median KingdomPolitical
According to Herodotus, Deioces unites the Median tribes and founds a kingdom with its capital at Ecbatana.
Herodotus tells how Deioces, famed for his justice, was chosen king and built the seven-walled citadel of Ecbatana. Whatever the legend, the Medes were coalescing into a real power in the seventh century BCE, strong enough to threaten Assyria itself.
Median KingdomMilitary
King Cyaxares, allied with Babylon, storms Nineveh and helps bring down the Assyrian Empire.
Cyaxares reorganized the Median army and, in coalition with the Babylonian king Nabopolassar, shattered Assyria, the terror of the Near East. The Medes now ruled from central Anatolia to the edge of Iran, and the Persians of Anshan were their vassals — until one of those vassals rose to overturn the order.
Rise of PersiaPolitical
Cyrus II succeeds to the throne of the Persian kingdom of Anshan, a vassal of the Medes — and the founder of an empire in waiting.
Cyrus of the Achaemenid house inherited a small kingdom in Fars, nominally subject to his Median overlord Astyages. Within a decade he would overthrow the Medes, unite the Iranian peoples, and launch the conquests that created the largest empire the world had yet seen — the story that opens the Achaemenid age.
3 more entries, to 559 BC
