World's First Superpower

In 500 BCE one empire controlled 44% of the entire world's population. It stretched from Greece to Pakistan, from Egypt to Central Asia, across three continents and twenty languages. It freed the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity. It issued what some historians call the world's first declaration of human rights. It invented the administrative toolkit that every large empire after it used. Its theological ideas shaped Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And for 2,500 years history called it barbaric — because the people who wrote the history were its enemies. This is the Persian side of that story.