Persia Rise and Legacy

<p>The story of Persia is not born in isolation. It emerges-like a shard of pottery found layered deep beneath more familiar ruins-from a broader older and more entangled world. Long before the name Persia echoed in the courts of Babylon the valleys of the Zagros Mountains and the plains of Khuzistan pulsed with the rhythms of older civilizations: Elamites Assyrians Babylonians and Medes. To truly understand the rise of Persia is to first understand the world that surrounded it-and in many ways made it possible. The earliest glimpses of the people we now call Persians appear not in their own voices but in the accounts of others. The first written records mentioning the Persians date to the ninth century BCE when Assyrian King Shalmaneser III waged campaigns through the rugged lands of the central Zagros. These Assyrian records describe a region populated by Iranian-speaking peoples-scattered semi-nomadic loosely federated-who offered tribute or more often resistance to Assyrian expansion. The term Parsua applied by the Assyrians to one such area gives us the first linguistic seed of what would later blossom into Parsa or Persia. But the voice of the Persians themselves their inner world remains mute in this early era.</p>