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The Parsa, or Persians, were a people who were initially vassals of the Medes until Cyrus II became their king in 559 BC. It was Cyrus who rebelled against the Medes, captured their king and built the Achaemenid Persian Empire into the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Spanning from Egypt to present-day Afghanistan, the empire was built at a speed and on a scale as had never been seen. When Cyrus and his army occupied Babylon in 539 BC, he freed the Hebrews from slavery and permitted them to return to their ancestral homeland, an action for which he was hailed as a liberator in the Book of Isaiah. Known as being benevolent and tolerant, Cyrus also declared the first Charter of Human Rights known to mankind: the ‘Cyrus Cylinder’, a baked clay cylinder, which is now kept in the British Museum.
After Cyrus and his son died, a nobleman named Darius claimed descent from an ancestor of Cyrus and stepped into the resulting power vacuum in a bloodless coup. With due modesty, he named himself ‘King of Kings’ and founded the city at Persepolis, which became the Persian capital. He is important because his campaigns and those of his son, Xerxes, which sought to bring the rebellious Greeks into submission, are some of the most written-about episodes of the time and lead us into the history of Ancient Greece.