On 26 May 2006, Italian foreign minister Massimo D ' Alema announced that the Italian forces would be reduced to 1, 600 by June ; Italian participation in the military operations in Iraq was concluded by the end of 2006, with full withdrawal of Italian military personnel except for a small group of about 30 soldiers engaged in providing security for the Italian embassy in Baghdad, and about 87 soldiers stationing in bases in the Persian Gulf ( but not in Iraqi territory ).

The earliest evidence of curved swords, or scimitars ( and other regional variants as the Arabian saif, the Persian shamshir and the Turkic kilij ) is from the 9th century, when it was used among soldiers in the Khurasan region of Persia.

Under the pretext of fighting Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap of Ionia, Cyrus assembled a massive army composed of native Persian soldiers, but also a large number of Greeks.

Little is heard of these Caucasian Alans for many centuries, except occasionally as mercenary soldiers of the Byzantine emperors or the 316 Persian kings.

In 490 BCE, at the Battle of Marathon, the Persian army was defeated by a heavily armed Athenian army, with 9, 000 men who were supported by 600 Plataeans, 1, 000 soldiers from each of eleven Greek city-states ( 11, 000 men in total ) and 10, 000 lightly armed soldiers led by Miltiades.

Many Persian soldiers lost their lives that day, so many in fact that after the battle the casualties of the enemy ensured that Darius would never again raise an imperial army.

It has been successfully argued that the ancient runner took the more difficult northern road because at the time of the battle there were still Persian soldiers in the south of the plain.

Persian and Median soldiers at Persepolis

This achievement demonstrated the potential superiority of Greek soldiers over their Persian adversaries.

In an attempt to craft a lasting harmony between his Macedonian and Persian subjects, he took an oath of unity before 9, 000 Persian and Greek soldiers at Opis, he married Statira ( the daughter of Darius ) and held a mass marriage of his senior officers to Persian and other noblewomen at Susa just prior to coming to Opis.

The city remained in Persian hands until 331 BCE, when the soldiers of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great entered the city.

Apadana Hall, Persian and Median soldiers

The soldiers who stayed behind were to protect their escape against the Persian cavalry.

Since I Corps was assigned to Fort Lewis in 1981, soldiers from its units have participated in Operation Just Cause in Panama, Desert Shield and Desert Storm during the Persian Gulf War, Operation Provide Comfort for Kurdish Refugees, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

Enraged, Hormizd sent Persian soldiers to arrest Bahram but they moved over to Bahram's side.

Enraged, Manuel fell upon the ten thousand Persian soldiers stationed in Armenia and murdered them.

The soldiers of the right wing followed them into the camp, at which many of the Persian army fled from the camp, except the ethnic Persian troops, who grouped together and fought the Allied soldiers who entered the camp.

Another candidate for one of the first scholars to carry out comparative ethnographic-type studies in person was the medieval Persian scholar Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī in the eleventh century, who wrote about the peoples, customs, and religions of the Indian subcontinent.

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā ( Persian پور سينا Pur-e Sina " son of Sina "; c. 980 – 1037 ), commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian polymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived.

According to Benjamin Thorpe " Grimm says the word embla, emla, signifies a busy woman, from amr, ambr, aml, ambl, assiduous labour ; the same relation as Meshia and Meshiane, the ancient Persian names of the first man and woman, who were also formed from trees.

Those who had been involved in the Shah Khalil Allah's murder were punished and the Persian king Fath Ali Shah increased Hasan Ali Shah's land holdings in the Mahallat region and gave him one of his daughters, Sarv-i Jahan Khanum, in marriage.

In these campaigns Agesilaus also benefited from the aid of the Ten Thousand, who marched through miles of Persian territory to make it to the Black Sea.

The numeral system came to be known to both the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, whose book On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals written about 825 in Arabic, and the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi, who wrote four volumes, " On the Use of the Indian Numerals " ( Ketab fi Isti ' mal al -' Adad al-Hindi ) about 830.

Other important Arabic astrologers include Albumasur and Al Khwarizmi, the Persian mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, who is considered the father of algebra and the algorithm.

Persian King Darius I the Great, in an attempt to subdue the Scythian horsemen who roamed across the north of the Black Sea, crossed through the Bosphorus, then marched towards the Danube River.

The last events in Chronicles take place in the reign of Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who conquered Babylon in 539 BCE ; this sets an earliest possible date for the book.

Told largely in the form of a first-person memoir, it concerns the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem by Nehemiah, a Jew who is a high official at the Persian court, and the dedication of the city and its people to God's laws ( Torah ).

It was given its current form by a group of authors and editors who lived in the Persian period, called the Priestly source, and Numbers therefore reflects the program of this group.

The name Ahasuerus is equivalent to Xerxes, both deriving from the Persian Khshayārsha, thus Ahasuerus is usually identified as Xerxes I ( 486-465 BCE ), though Ahasuerus is identified as Artaxerxes in the later Greek version of Esther ( as well as by Josephus, the Jewish commentary Esther Rabbah, the Ethiopic translation and the Christian theologian Bar-Hebraeus who identified him more precisely as Artaxerxes II ).

The story told in the book of Esther takes place during the rule of Ahasuerus, who has been identified as the fifth-century Persian king Xerxes ( 486-465 ).

By the time Esther was written, the foreign power visible on the horizon as a future threat to Judah was the Macedonians of Alexander the Great, who defeated the Persian empire about 150 years after the time of the story of Esther ; the Septuagint version noticeably calls Haman a " bully " ( βουγαῖον ) where the Hebrew text describes him as an Agagite.

A more general binomial theorem and the so-called " Pascal's triangle " were known in the 10th-century A. D. to Indian mathematician Halayudha and Persian mathematician Al-Karaji, in the 11th century to Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam, and in the 13th century to Chinese mathematician Yang Hui, who all derived similar results .< ref > Al-Karaji also provided a mathematical proof of both the binomial theorem and Pascal's triangle, using mathematical induction.

Herodotus, who has been called the ' Father of History ', was born in 484 BC in Halicarnassus, Asia Minor ( then under Persian overlordship ).

Herodotus recounts the story that Cynaegirus, brother of the playwright Aeschylus, who was also among the fighters, charged into the sea, grabbed one Persian trireme, and started pulling it towards shore.

" Alternately, the name may have derived from the Persian bālkāneh or bālākhāna, meaning " high, above, or proud house ," and brought to the region in the 11th and 12th centuries by Turkic tribes who applied it to the area.

Before Constantius arrived, the Persian general Narses, who was possibly the king's brother, overran Mesopotamia and captured Amida.

The name Druze is derived from the name of Anushtakīn ad-Darazī ( from Persian, darzi, " seamster ") who was an early preacher.

This enraged Haman, who, with his wife and advisers, plotted against the Jews, making a plan to kill and extirpate all Jews throughout the Persian empire, selecting the date for this act by the drawing of lots ().

Shortly before leaving he had issued a famous instruction to F. Gaspar Barazeuz who was leaving to go to Ormuz ( a kingdom on an island in the Persian Gulf, now part of Iran ), that he should mix with sinners:

Bumin's brother Istämi ( d. 576 ) was titled yabghu of the west and collaborated with the Persian Sassanids to defeat and destroy the Hephthalite, who were allies of the Rouran.

He had also learned a great deal about Persian customs and traditions from his teacher.

Avicenna created new scientific vocabulary that had not existed before in the modern Persian language.

Shortly before this battle the Spartan navy, of which he had received the supreme command, was totally defeated off Cnidus by a powerful Persian fleet under Conon and Pharnabazus.

In the subsequent centuries, the Persian version of the name had begun to come into general use before it was adopted by official decree in 1935.

The Greco-Persian Wars had their roots in the conquest of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and particular Ionia, by the Achaemenid Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great shortly after 550 BC.

In the aftermath of Mycale, the Spartan king Leotychides had proposed transplanting all the Greeks from Asia Minor to Europe as the only method of permanently freeing them from Persian dominion.

After the Persian crisis had subsided, the Athenians incorporated many of the unfinished temple's architectural members ( unfluted column drums, triglyphs, metopes, etc.

It was remembered that there had been an Assyrian empire predating the Persian one, but all particulars were lost.

Massoud spoke Persian, Pashto, Urdu and French and had good English reading skills.

Since Daniel was a statesman during the Persian conquests, the Book of Daniel could have been written in a period when the Persians had their greatest influence on Aramaic, believed to be in the mid 6th century BC.

This points to a post-exilic date of composition both because of the use of the Persian period term and because Judah had a king before the exile.

According to Stephen Frederic Dale, the name Babur is derived from the Persian word babr, meaning " tiger ", a word that repeatedly appears in Firdawsī's Shāhnāma and had also been borrowed by the Turkic languages of Central Asia.

The first Persian invasion was a response to Greek involvement in the Ionian Revolt, when Athens and Eretria had sent a force to support the cities of Ionia in their attempt to overthrow Persian rule.

A stalemate ensued for five days, before the Athenians decided to attack the Persians because, under the cover of night, some of the Persian fleet had set sail for Athens.

The first Persian invasion of Greece had its immediate roots in the Ionian Revolt, the earliest phase of the Greco-Persian Wars.

Moreover, the Persian king Darius was a usurper, and had spent considerable time extinguishing revolts against his rule.

However, the Ionian Revolt had directly threatened the integrity of the Persian empire, and the states of mainland Greece remained a potential menace to its future stability.

The Ionian revolt had begun with an unsuccessful expedition against Naxos, a joint venture between the Persian satrap Artaphernes and the Milesian tyrant Aristagoras.

Cleomenes's attempts to restore Isagoras to Athens ended in a debacle, but fearing the worst, the Athenians had by this point already sent an embassy to Artaphernes in Sardis, to request aid from the Persian Empire.

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.

The Athenian wings quickly routed the inferior Persian levies on the flanks, before turning inwards to surround the Persian centre, which had been more successful against the thin Greek centre.