Alec's first impression of the lobby was gloomy, Victorian dignity -- black walnut and red plush, a black and white tiled floor, and Persian rugs.

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.

During the Achaemenid Persian Empire, around 600 BC the Persians first began to use the abacus.

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.

During the first invasion, Thrace, Macedon and the Aegean Islands were added to the Persian Empire, and Eretria was duly destroyed.

Rabbani was one of the first Afghans to translate the works of Sayyid Qutb into Persian.

The Battle of Marathon (, Machē tu Marathōnos ) took place in 490 BC, during the first Persian invasion of Greece.

The defeat at Marathon marked the end of the first Persian invasion of Greece, and the Persian force retreated to Asia.

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

The first theory is that the Persian cavalry left Marathon for an unspecified reason, and that the Greeks moved to take advantage of this by attacking.

This theory therefore utilises Herodotus ' suggestion that after Marathon, the Persian army re-embarked and tried to sail around Cape Sounion to attack Athens directly ; however, according to the first theory this attempt would have occurred before the battle ( and indeed have triggered the battle ).

The West first encountered this eastern heavy cavalry during the Hellenistic period with further intensive contacts during the eight centuries of the Roman – Persian wars.

In publications of 1647 and 1654, Marcus van Boxhorn first described a rigid methodology for historical linguistic comparisons and proposed the existence of an Indo-European proto-language ( which he called " Scythian ") unrelated to Hebrew, but ancestral to Germanic, Greek, Romance, Persian, Sanskrit, Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages.

The first explicit conception of dualism came from the Ancient Persian Religion of Zoroastrianism around the mid-fifth century BC.

The first recorded reference to the bowed lira was in the 9th century by the Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih ( d. 911 ); in his lexicographical discussion of instruments he cited the lira ( lūrā ) as a typical instrument of the Byzantines and equivalent to the rabāb played in the Islamic Empires.

The first paper from his years of study in Paris appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1816, under the title of Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache ( On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic ) ( Windischmann contributed a preface ).

Some commentators have argued the story of the first three kings must have been originally planned as a history of Persia and the story of Xerxes, later added to it instead is a history of the Persian Wars.

According to the biblical history, one of the first acts of Cyrus, the Persian conqueror of Babylon, was to commission the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, a task which they are said to have completed c. 515.

According to the biblical history Ezra and Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem in the middle of the 5th century BCE, the first empowered by the Persian king to enforce the Torah, the second with the status of governor and a royal mission to restore the walls of the city.

The first battles of the campaign ended in defeat for the Byzantines ; the Persian army fought their way to the Bosphorus.

The first generation of Persian physicians trained at the Academy of Jundishapur.

The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on the striking similarities between three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, to which he tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, and Persian, though his classification contained some inaccuracies and omissions.

* 1806 – Santiago de Liniers, 1st Count of Buenos Aires re-takes the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina after the first British invasion.

It was probably in 401 that Alaric made his first invasion of Italy, Supernatural influences were not lacking to urge him to this great enterprise.

The first of the five books begins with some geographical background, and then sketches the history of England, beginning with Caesar's invasion in 55 BC.

The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion ; the first was by language speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family ; they conquered and colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries.

They first appear in history in connection with the Gallic invasion of north Italy, 390 BC, when they made the Etruscan city of Felsina their new capital, Bononia ( Bologna ).

Isaiah's first significant acts as a prophet occurred when Judah, under king Ahaz, faced invasion from Israel and Aram Damascus ( Syria ) after refusing to join them in a revolt against Assyria, the dominant imperial power of the age.

The first stage was the collection and arrangement of some spoken sayings of the historical Micah ( the material in chapters 1-3 ), in which the prophet attacks those who build estates through oppression and depicts the Assyrian invasion of Judah as Yahweh's punishment on the kingdom's corrupt rulers, including a prophecy that the Temple will be destroyed.

Sixty years ago most archaeologists believed that brochs, usually regarded as castles, were built by immigrants who had been displaced and pushed northward, first by the intrusions of Belgic tribes into what is now south-east England towards the end of the second century BC and later by the Roman invasion of southern Britain from AD 43 onwards.

County Dublin was one of the first parts of Ireland to be shired by King John of England following the Norman invasion of Ireland.

A full-scale invasion was not the administration's first option.

For the first two years of the Commonwealth, the Rump faced economic depression and the risk of invasion from Scotland and Ireland.

Professor X leaves after learning even he can no longer trust the others, yet appears to have severely restricted the number of people he informs of the forthcoming alien invasion, as the X-Men were not prepared for the Skrulls, at least at first.

Due to his two periods of exile in 1904 – 1909, to escape the British invasion of 1904, and from 1910 – 1912 to escape a Chinese invasion, he became well aware of the complexities of international politics and was the first Dalai Lama to become aware of the importance of foreign relations.

Eisenhower's first struggles however were with Allied leaders and officers on matters vital to the success of the Normandy invasion ; he argued with Roosevelt over an essential agreement with de Gaulle to use French resistance forces in covert and sabotage operations against the Germans in advance of Overlord.

One of the oldest is Dublin Castle, which was first founded as a major defensive work on the orders of King John of England in 1204, shortly after the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, when it was commanded that a castle be built with strong walls and good ditches for the defence of the city, the administration of justice, and the protection of the King ’ s treasure.

Emily, furious at the invasion of her privacy, at first refused, but relented when Anne brought out her own manuscripts and revealed she had been writing poems in secret as well.

For the first time following the Anglo-Saxon invasion, coins began circulating in Kent during his reign.

Additionally Britain's use of radar and the advantages of fighting above Britain's home territory allowed the RAF to deny Germany air superiority, saving the British Isles from German invasion and dealing the Axis their first major defeat of the Second World War.

It was the first invasion of the peninsula, apart from its remotest northern regions, since the days of Hannibal, 500 years before.