The Grece-Persian Wars

LO1: Define The Greco-Persian Wars
LO2: identify  causes and outcomes of the Persian wars.
LO3: Create a time line of important people, terms+events relative to the war.

The Greco-Persian Wars (also often called the Persian Wars) were a series of conflicts between the Achaemenid Empire of Persia (modern day Iran) and Greek city-states that started in 499 BC and lasted until 449 BC. The collision between the fractious political world of the Greeks and the enormous empire of the Persians began when Cyrus the Great conquered the Greek-inhabited region of Ionia in 547 BC. Struggling to rule the independent-minded cities of Ionia, the Persians appointed tyrants to rule each of them. This would prove to be the source of much trouble for the Greeks and Persians alike.

Huge and diverse, the Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great (reigned 559–530 BCE). He overthrew the ruling Median dynasty to establish Persian control: his conquest of Lydia and Babylonia vastly increased Persian territory. The Kings of Persia descended from a very small group of families descended from Cyrus' family. Each one was called "the Great King" and was the supreme ruler of the Persian Empire. It is important to remember that the Great King was the central figure of the Persian Empire. His word was the source of religious, legal, and political life. Revolts against the King were ruthlessly suppressed, and the goals of the Great King were universalistic: like the Assyrian and Sumerian Kings before him, the Persian King believed that he was appointed by god to rule the world. During the reign of Darius the Persian royal family had adopted the Zoroastrian religion, according to which there was only one god, Ahuramazda, who controlled all fates.

While 6th and 5th Centuries BCE Persia was huge, Greece was small. Modern scholars estimate the population of the Persian Empire at 70 million people, spread over 1 million square miles of territory. Greece, with about 50 thousand miles of territory, had fewer than 2 million inhabitants. Furthermore, in contrast to the Persian Empire, Greece was not a unified nation or country, but a dispersed group of individual city states, each with its own government. At the time of the Persian Wars the two most powerful states were Athens and Sparta, and they were the ones offering the greatest resistance to Xerxes and leading a small coalition of other city states in resisting the invasion. The Athenians were the primary source of Greek naval power; the Spartans of their land forces.

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