Persia

                                                                                                                                                                  In 2000 BC there were new people in town. They were called Persians. At first they only had a small piece of land, but all of that was going to change, because after 1555 years they had the biggest army in the entire world.  During the Dark Ages they moved south to find drier land for their crops. Then after the Dark Ages they moved back north and took over anything in their path.

At its greatest extent, the Persian Empire spanned from northern Greece, including the modern states of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Jordan, Armenia, Georgia, Abkhazia (de-facto independent) Chechnya and Ossetia regions, Azarbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, parts of Libya and Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, parts of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of Kyrghystan.  It was huge!  They had the biggest empire ever.  Forty – five percent of all of the people in the world known at that time lived in the Persian Empire.  The country itself was 1,000,000 sq miles.  In my opinion, I don’t think it should’ve been a country I think it should’ve been a continent.   

Their flag was a square with a falcon in it that looked just like an Egypt god named Horis.  This is a picture of a stone carving of the flag. Persians keep changing their flag. But the one I found is the oldest.      

Their greatest defeat was in Athens.  They were completely annihilated and their king watched it all.    Here let me tell the whole story………The Persians had defeated the Spartans and their next stop was Athens.  The king’s advisor happened to be an Athenian. He tricked the king into sending all of his army men into a small lagoon where the Athenians just happened to be waiting.  One by one the Persian ships sunk.   This battle, called the Battle of Salamis Island, is just one of their defeats but it was the worst one.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Kings are the Persian’s royalty and their most famous king was Cyrus.   Cyrus died in 530BC. The Persians had a good run but all empires end eventually no matter how powerful they are. Two hundred and thirty years later, the Persian army of 200,000 men was pathetically defeated by a small army of 35,000 men led by Alexander the Great.