722 B.C.E. After Shalmaneser V conquers the kingdom of Israel, a group of captive Jews said to be descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel is sent into exile in Persia.

My love affair with the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE) began during my first season excavating in Turkey in 1991, just after I graduated from college. I was digging at a site named Sardis ...

Alexander the Great is feted in Western history books but his legacy looks very different from a Persian perspective, writes Prof Ali Ansari.

The Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC) was the largest and most durable empire of its time, stretching from Ethiopia, through Egypt, to Greece, to Anatolia (modern Turkey), Central Asia and to India. The ...

For the kings of the Achaemenid Empire, who ruled much of the ancient Near East from 550 to 330 B.C., there was little—apart from hunting lions and conquering the world—that rivaled a rhyton ...

In recent days, ancient sites in Iran such as Persepolis, the dynastic center of the Achaemenid Persian empire, have become part of a rhetoric of division. First President Donald Trump threatened ...

For the following two hundred years of the Achaemenid empire, successive rulers upheld their founder's laissez-faire approach, creating the period called "Pax Persica," or Persian Peace.