History of the Persian Empire

History of the Persian Empire, is a book by A. T. Olmstead. This is a book about Iranian history from Ancient period until the end of the Achaemenid period.

A part of History of the PERSIAN EMPIRE book

When Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 B.C. the world was old. More significant, the world knew its antiquity. Its scholars had compiled long dynastic lists, and simple addition appeared to prove that kings whose monuments were still visible had ruled more than four millenniums before. Yet earlier were other monarchs, sons of gods and so themselves demigods, whose reigns covered several generations of present-day short-lived men. Even these were preceded, the Egyptians believed, by the gods themselves, who had held sway through long aeons; before the universal flood the Babylonians placed ten kings. Other peoples knew this flood and told of monarchs—Nannacus of Iconium, for example—who reigned in prediluvian times. The sacred history of the Jews extended through four thousand years; modest as were their figures when compared with those of Babylon and Egypt, they recorded that one prediluvian patriarch almost reached the millennium mark before his death. Greek poets chanted a legendary history which was counted backward to the time when the genealogies of the heroes “ascended to the god/’ Each people and nation, each former city-state, boasted its own creation story with its own local god as creator. …

From the Introduction

A book—to its author—is a living, pulsing entity through every phase of its creation: through manuscript, galley proof, and page proof. Constantly it needs to be changed: words must be altered, thoughts rephrased, arguments re-worked, or conclusions redrawn. Unfortunately, A. T. Olmstead did not live to see this book through its later stages, and the task had to be undertaken by a few of his colleagues on the faculty of the University of Chicago.

Obviously their revision could by no means be as extensive as the author’s would have been—or as they themselves sometimes desired it to be. They, however, were not assuming full responsibility or editorship, for so eminent a scholar as A. T. Olmstead was clearly entitled to express his own point of view in his own way. As his colleagues they have performed their work as a last gesture of friendship. Professor Olmstead’s daughter, Cleta Olmstead Robbins Bough ton, has chosen the illustrations, read the page proofs, and prepared the indexes.

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