Mesopotamia became a fringe border region between the Roman Empire and the Persians.

Numerous intraregional wars were fought between Soghdian states and the other states in Mawarannahr, and the Persians and the Chinese were in perpetual conflict over the region.

* The Roman Empire is threatened by the Alemanni, Franks and Marcomanni in Germania, by the Goths in the Danube region ( Moesia and Thrace ) and Asia Minor, and by the Persians in the East.

He proposed the introduction of an endurance road race under the name " Marathon " which would start from the region where in 490 BC the battle of the Greeks against the Persians occurred and would end at the Pnyx of Ancient Athens, where, presumably, the messenger arrived bringing the good news of victory to the Athenians.

The region came under the control of the Armenian Orontids in the 7th century BC and later Persians in the mid 6th century BC.

Then, two centuries later in 330 BCE the Macedonian emperor Alexander the Great overthrew the Persians and took control of Mesopotamia itself, bringing Hellenic influence to the region with the Seleucid Empire.

The original homeland of the Kassites is not well known, but appears to have been located in the Zagros Mountains in Lorestan in what is now modern Iran, although, like the Elamites, Gutians and Manneans, they were unrelated to the later Indo-European / Iranic Medes and Persians who came to dominate the region a thousand years later .< ref >

The entire region was heavily contested between the successor states of Alexander's empire, the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Egypt, during the six Syrian Wars of the 3rd – 1st centuries BCE: " After two centuries of peace under the Persians, the Hebrew state found itself once more caught in the middle of power struggles between two great empires: the Seleucid state with its capital in Syria to the north and the Ptolemaic state, with its capital in Egypt to the south ... Between 319 and 302 BCE, Jerusalem changed hands seven times.

Subsequent rulers of the region include the Ghorids, Persians, Ghaznavids and Mongols.

Arabs and Persians have used and distilled petroleum for tar and fuel from ancient times, as attested in local Greek and Roman histories of the region.

Thrace south of the Danube ( except for the land of the Bessi ) was ruled for nearly half a century by the Persians under Darius the Great, who conducted an expedition into the region from 513 BC to 512 BC.

The Iranic Medes and Persians who had been largely subject to Assyria since their arrival in the region circa 1000 BC, took full advantage of the anarchy in Assyria, and in 616 BC freed themselves from Assyrian rule.

In 575 Tiberius began moving the armies of Thrace and Illyricum to the eastern provinces, and to give himself time to make the necessary preparations, he agreed to a three year truce with the Persians with the payment of 30, 000 nomismata, although the truce excluded action in the region around Armenia.

The Persians and their allies made for Sestos, the strongest town in the region.

The independent and warlike Sogdiana formed a border region insulating the Achaemenid Persians from the nomadic Scythians to the north and east.

The next year, the Persians reduced the last rebel strongholds, and began the process of bringing peace to the region.

See Ankara for the history of this region which has seen the passing of numerous great civilisations including Phrygians, Lydians, Persians and Alexander the Great, Galatians ; the city of Ankara becoming a fortified stronghold of the Byzantines ; and then falling to the Seljuk Turks, and later the Ottoman Empire ; and finally being chosen by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as the site of Turkish parliament in 1920 and subsequently in 1923 as the capital city of the Republic of Turkey.

A number of groups, including the Canaanites, the Israelites, the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Jews, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Turks, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, the British and now Israelis have controlled the region at one time or another.

With the arrival of Arabs and Persians in the region, the term Malik became popular amongst rulers and aristocrats.

The terms Hindi and Hindu are derived from word Sindh, as the ancient Persians pronunciate " s " as " h " ( e. g. sarasvati as harasvati ), the same way they called the people of this region as Hindhi people their language as Hindhi language and the region as Hindh, the name which is used for this region since ancient times and later for whole northern part of Indian sub-continent even today India is also known as Hindustan the name which has nothing to do with hinduism, but related more to a people and their language named after the main river flowing through this region sindhu ( Indus ).

Everyone is ready to grant the Persians their history, but almost no one is willing to acknowledge their present.

Those three other great activities of the Persians, the bath, the teahouse, and the zur khaneh ( the latter a kind of club in which a leader and a group of men in an octagonal pit move through a rite of calisthenics, dance, chanted poetry, and music ), do not take place in buildings to which entrance tickets are sold, but some of them occupy splendid examples of Persian domestic architecture: long, domed, chalk-white rooms with daises of turquoise tile, their end walls cut through to the orchards and the sky by open arches.

But more important, and the thing which the casual traveler and the blind sojourner often do not see, is that these places and activities are often the settings in which Persians exercise their extraordinary aesthetic sensibilities.

To a stranger their delight in these things may seem paradoxical, for Persians chase the golden calf as much as any people.

The Assyrian empire collapsed due to a bitter series of civil wars followed by a combined attack by Medes, Persians, Scythians and their own Babylonian relations.

Classical civilizations, notably the Assyrians, Persians, Parthians, Indians, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese and Turks fielded large numbers of archers in their armies.

The Persians followed up their victory by sending a fleet to re-establish their control over Cyprus, and 200 ships were sent out to counter them under Cimon, who returned from ostracism in 451 BC.

The Persians used Aramaic in their administrative control of the empire.

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.

The completion of the pacification of Ionia allowed the Persians to begin planning their next moves ; to extinguish the threat to the empire from Greece, and to punish Athens and Eretria.

All this was evidently much to the surprise of the Persians ; "... in their minds they charged the Athenians with madness which must be fatal, seeing that they were few and yet were pressing forwards at a run, having neither cavalry nor archers ".

Indeed, based on their previous experience of the Greeks, the Persians might be excused for this ; Herodotus tells us that the Athenians at Marathon were " first to endure looking at Median dress and men wearing it, for up until then just hearing the name of the Medes caused the Hellenes to panic ".

The Athenians pursued the Persians back to their ships, and managed to capture seven ships, though the majority were able to launch successfully.

While the city withstood a siege, Heraclius campaigned deep into Persian territory and briefly restored the status quo in 628, when the Persians surrendered all their conquests.

The inscription on the stylobate indicates that it was built by the Athenians after their naval victory over the Persians in 478 BC, to house their war trophies.

After the 1932 release of MGM's adaptation of The Mask of Fu Manchu, which featured the Asian villain telling an assembled group of " Asians " ( consisting of caricatural Indians, Persians and Arabs ) that they must " kill the white men and take their women ", a Harvard University student group petitioned MGM producer William Randolph Hearst ( who had also serialized the novel in his Cosmopolitan magazine ) to cease making further films based on the property.

This proposes that the Persians, after their conquest of Babylon in 538 BC, agreed to grant Jerusalem a large measure of local autonomy within the empire, but required the local authorities to produce a single law code accepted by the entire community.

In the 550s BC the Persians revolted against the Medes and gained control of their empire, and over the next few decades annexed to it the realms of Lydia in Anatolia, Damascus, Babylonia, and Egypt, as well as consolidating their control over the Iranian plateau nearly as far as India.

Greeks, Romans, and Persians took the form to a greater depth during their years of world domination, using scale replicas of enemy fortifications, coastal defense lines, and other geographic fixtures to plan battles.

Within this basic structure, the author traces the way the Persians developed a custom of conquest and shows how their habits of thinking about the world finally brought about their downfall in Greece.

According to a contemporary account by theologian, Sheikh Yusuf Al Bahrani, in an unsuccessful attempt by the Persians and their Bedouin allies to take back Bahrain from the Kharijite Omanis, much of the country was burnt to the ground.

* The Phoenician allies of the Persians take savage reprisals against the Greeks, whom the Phoenicians regard as pirates.

The Greek fleet is victorious against the Persians and their allies and then returns to Athens.

* With the help of the Athenian statesman and general, Cimon, Aristides commands an Athenian fleet of 30 ships that the Spartan commander Pausanias leads to free the Greek cities on Cyprus and capture Byzantium from the Persians and their Phoenician allies.

* The Spartans dispatch an ambassador, Antalcidas, to the Persian satrap Tiribazus, hoping to turn the Persians against the allies by informing them of Conon's use of the Persian fleet to begin rebuilding the Athenian empire.

So Antalcidas enters into negotiations with the Persian satrap Tiribazus and reaches an agreement under which the Persians will enter into the war on the Spartan side if the allies refuse to make peace.

This upper section was decorated with pilasters, the remainder of which were destroyed at the beginning of the 7th century when the Byzantines reconquered Jerusalem from the Persians and their Jewish allies in 628.

The Portuguese returned to the Persian Gulf in the following year as allies of Afrasiyab, the Pasha of Basra, against the Persians.

The Persians, guessing that their Samian contingent would support the allies, took away their armour.

After his overwhelming victories over the Persians and their allies in the Caucasus and Armenia, Heraclius, in 627, launched a winter offensive against the Persians in Mesopotamia winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Nineveh thus threatening the Persian capital city of Ctesiphon.

On his deathbed, he urged his officers to conceal his death from both their allies and the Persians.

Aristagoras had brought all of Hellenic Asia Minor into revolt, but evidently realised that the Greeks would need other allies in order to successfully fight the Persians.

Control of both Sestos and Byzantium gave the allies command of the straits between Europe and Asia ( over which the Persians had crossed ), and allowed them access to the merchant trade of the Black Sea.

After Plataea and Mycale the Greek allies would take the offensive against the Persians, marking a new phase of the Greco-Persian Wars.

Aristagoras had brought all of Hellenic Asia Minor into revolt, but evidently realised that the Greeks would need other allies in order to fight the Persians.

Belisarius meanwhile leaves the dangers of both his emperor — being too popular can be a ' bad thing ' and his stunning victories in the first book against the Persians made him so — and cultivates the Kingdom of Axum as allies, a naval power of the day, and leads a five man invasion of his ' exposed ' Malwa enemies ( nominally diplomatic friends ).

Alarmed by these Athenian successes, the Persians stopped backing the allies and began supporting Sparta.

In 392 BC, the Spartans dispatched an ambassador, Antalcidas, to the satrap Tiribazus, hoping to turn the Persians against the allies by informing them of Conon's use of the Persian fleet to begin rebuilding the Athenian empire.

The Athenians learned of this, and sent Conon and several others to present their case to the Persians ; they also notified their allies, and Argos, Corinth, and Thebes dispatched embassies to Tiribazus.

Antalcidas, meanwhile, had entered into negotiations with Tiribazus, and reached an agreement under which the Persians would enter into the war on the Spartan side if the allies refused to make peace.

He wanted the Greeks as his allies for his planned campaign against the Persians, and he wanted to leave a stable Greece in his rear when he went on campaign ; further fighting was therefore contrary to his aims.

The brief admiration the Athenians and their allies may have had for Spartan Doric discipline and virtue born of cultural isolation, must be viewed in the context of their early alliance against the Persians, later to be turned to hatred and rebellion in the outcome of the Pelopennesian War and their loss of democracy and autonomy.