André Godard, the French archaeologist who excavated Persepolis in the early 1930s, believed that it was Cyrus the Great ( Kūrosh ) who chose the site of Persepolis, but that it was Darius the Great ( Daryush ) who built the terrace and the great palaces.

Darius knew that Parmenion held the Pass of Jonah and thus chose a northern route of advance.

Darius chose a flat, open plain where he could deploy his numerically superior forces, not wanting to be caught in a narrow battlefield as he had been at Issus two years earlier, where he was unable to properly deploy his huge army.

The mission was a debacle, and sensing his imminent removal as tyrant, Aristagoras chose to incite the whole of Ionia into rebellion against the Persian king Darius the Great.

The mission was a debacle, and sensing his imminent removal as tyrant, Aristagoras chose to incite the whole of Ionia into rebellion against the Persian king Darius the Great.

The mission was a debacle, and sensing his imminent removal as tyrant, Aristagoras chose to incite the whole of Ionia into rebellion against the Persian king Darius the Great.

The script of the episode " Band of Brothers " describes Darius as a monk with a " hideously ugly face ", but when the producers cast the part, they chose Stocker, who did not fit this description.

Around 500 BCE, following the Achaemenid conquest of Mesopotamia under Darius I, Old Aramaic was adopted by the conquerors as the " vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast empire with its different peoples and languages.

* 500 BC — Darius I of Persia proclaims that Aramaic be the official language of the western half of his empire.

The region around Kirkuk was known in Aramaic and Syriac sources as " Beth Garmai " (), which means the " place of bones " in a reference to bones of slaughtered Achaemenids which littered the plains after a decisive battle between Alexander the Great and Darius III.

Around 500 BCE, Darius I of Persia proclaimed that Aramaic would be the official language for the western half of his empire, and the Eastern Aramaic dialect of Babylon became the official standard.

The second was Darius II, Artaxerxes I's son by his concubine Cosmartidene of Babylon, who was married to their common half-sister Parysatis, daughter of Artaxerxes I and his concubine Andia of Babylon.

The Scythians were a group of north Iranian nomadic tribes, speaking a Indo-Iranian language who had invaded Media, killed Cyrus in battle, revolted against Darius and threatened to disrupt trade between Central Asia and the shores of the Black Sea as they lived between the Danube river, river Don and the Black Sea.

However, Darius gathered a group of scholars to create a separate language system only used for Persis and the Persians, which was called Aryan script which was only used for official inscriptions.

By the 4th century, the late Achaemenid period, the inscriptions of Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III differ enough from the language of Darius ' inscriptions to be called a " pre-Middle Persian ," or " post-Old Persian.

Daniel is elevated to a pre-eminent position under Darius which elicits the jealousy of other officials.

The vision in first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus ( 9: 1 ) concerning seventy weeks, or seventy " sevens ", apportioned for the history of the Israelites and of Jerusalem ( 9: 24 ) This consists of a meditation on the prediction in Jeremiah that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years, a lengthy prayer by Daniel in which he pleads for God to restore Jerusalem and its temple, and an angelic explanation which focuses on a longer time period-" seventy sevens "-and a future restoration and destruction of city and temple by a coming ruler.

As for the identity of Mordecai, the similar names Marduka and Marduku have been found as the name of officials in the Persian court in over thirty texts from the period of Xerxes I and his father Darius, and may refer to up to four individuals, one of which might after all be Mordecai.

Later in the inscription, Darius provides a lengthy sequence of events following the deaths of Cyrus the Great and Cambyses II in which he fought nineteen battles in a period of one year ( ending in December of 521 BC ) to put down multiple rebellions throughout the Persian Empire.

Darius then began raising a huge new army with which he meant to completely subjugate Greece ; however, in 486 BC, his Egyptian subjects revolted, indefinitely postponing any Greek expedition.

After Darius died, his son Xerxes I restarted the preparations for a second invasion of Greece, which finally began in 480 BC.

The revolt was used as an opportunity by Darius to extend the empire's border to the islands of the eastern Aegean and the Propontis, which had not been part of the Persian dominions before.

The expedition was intended to bring the Cyclades into the Persian empire, to punish Naxos ( which had resisted a Persian assault in 499 BC ) and then to head to Greece to force Eretria and Athens to submit to Darius or be destroyed.

In the meanwhile, Darius began raising a huge new army with which he meant to completely subjugate Greece ; however, in 486 BC, his Egyptian subjects revolted, indefinitely postponing any Greek expedition.

Larissa was indeed the birthplace of Meno, who thus became, along with Xenophon and a few others, one of the generals leading several thousands Greeks from various places, in the ill-fated expedition of 401 ( retold in Xenophon's Anabasis ) meant to help Cyrus the Younger, son of Darius II, king of Persia, overthrow his elder brother Artaxerxes II and take over the throne of Persia ( Meno is featured in Plato's dialogue bearing his name, in which Socrates uses the example of " the way to Larissa " to help explain Meno the difference between true opinion and science ( Meno, 97a – c ) ; this " way to Larissa " might well be on the part of Socrates an attempt to call to Meno's mind a " way home ", understood as the way toward one's true and " eternal " home reached only at death, that each man is supposed to seek in his life ).

From among the writings of others in the same period, there is the inscription and engraving of Darius the great, installed at junction of waters of Red Sea ( also called " Arabian Gulf " or " Ahmar Sea ") and the Nile river and the Rome river ( current Mediterranean ) which belongs to the 5th century BC where, Darius the Great, the king of the Achaemenid Empire has named the Persian Gulf Water Channel: Pars Sea ( Persian Sea ).

* Darius I sends envoys to all Greek cities, demanding " earth and water for vassalage " which Athens and Sparta refuse however.

He completed the Apadana, the Palace of Darius and the Treasury all started by Darius as well as building his own palace which was twice the size of his father's.

Darius left a tri-lingual monumental relief on Mount Behistun which was written in Elamite, Old Persian and Babylonian between his coronation and his death.

To aid the presentation of his ancestry, Darius wrote down the sequence of events which occurred after the death of Cyrus the Great.

He wrote an extensive amount of information on Darius which spans half of book 3, along with books 4, 5 and 6.

However, once Cyrus had crossed the Aras River he had a dream with a vision of Darius in which he had wings atop his shoulders and stood upon the confines of Europe and Asia ( the whole known world ).

While in Babylonia, Darius learned a revolution had broken out in Bactria, a satrapy which had always been in favour of Darius, and had initially volunteered an army of soldiers to quell revolts.

Darius felt that the Babylonian people had taken advantage of him and deceived him, which resulted in Darius gathering up a large army and marching to Babylon.

" For a year and a half, Darius and his armies were unable to capture Babylon, though he attempted many tricks and strategies — even copying that which Cyrus the Great had employed when he captured Babylon.

Darius escaped with a small core of his forces remaining intact, although the Bactrian cavalry and Bessus soon caught up with him.

The town, however, was soon rebuilt by his successor Darius I.

Both Gandhara and Kamboja soon came under the rule of the Achaemenian Dynasty of Persia during the reign of Cyrus the Great or in the first year of Darius I.

In Darius Green and his Flying Machine, Trowbridge penned the following prophetic verse: " Darius was clearly of the opinion / That the air is also man's dominion / And that with paddle or fin or pinion, / We soon or late shall navigate / The azure as now we sail the sea.

Darius fled, but he was soon killed.

The Persians responded in 497 BC with a three-pronged attack aimed at recapturing the outlying areas of the rebellious territory, but the spread of the revolt to Caria meant the largest army, under Darius, moved there instead.