Ex. 13. Develop the ideas of Ex. 3.

 

Ex. 14. Make up a plan of the text, provide each point of the plan with necessary words and word combinations.

 

Ex. 15. Retell the text using your own plan and expressions from Ex. 5, 14.

Ex. 16. Give the gist of the text.

 

Ex. 17. Discuss the problem of classical revival in a dialogue. Try to take into consideration all pros and cons.

VII. WRITING SKILLS

 

Ex. 18. Make up sentences of your own using expressions from Ex. 5, 7.

 

Ex. 19. Topics for discussion and essay writing:

1. The revival of the classics today.

2. Classics and low-brow culture.

3. New forms of studying classics.

 

Ex. 20. Make a list of words to do with:

1. literary terms;

2. mass media terms;

3. educational terms.

 

 

VII. TRANSLATION SKILLS

Ex. 21. Translate the title and the subtitle of the text, paying special attention to the words "trash", "tripe", "trivia", "mass media".

Ex. 22. Translate into English:

 

Многочисленные подвиги Геракла уже в древности стали сюжетами в скульптуре, росписи, мозаике. Особенно много было монет с изображением Геракла и тех, кто с ним боролся и соперничал. Огромное количество монет посвятили Гераклу города, объединенные в морскую лигу во время войн с Персией. Александр Македонский, разгромив Персидскую империю Дария II и считая себя божественным потомком Геракла, чеканил в более чем 20 крупнейших монетных дворах Греции, Малой Азии и завоеванной Персии серебряные монеты с изображением Геракла вместе с богом богов Зевсом, чтобы подчеркнуть важность героя и свое собственное значение.

Ex. 23. Translate into Russian:

 

The Seven Wonders of the World

 

The Seven Wonders of the ancient world are preeminent architectural and sculptural achievements of antiquity, as listed by various Greco-Roman observers.

Included on the best known list were the Pyramids of Giza (the oldest of the wonders and the only one substantially in existence today), the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (a series of landscaped rooftop terraces on a ziggurat, ascribed to either Nebuchadnezzar II or the semi-legendary Queen Sammu-ramat), the Statue of Zeus at Olympia (a large gold-and-ivory figure of the god on his throne by Phidias), the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (a temple, built in 356 ВС, famous for its imposing size and the works of art that adorned it), the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos of Alexandria (a lighthouse built с 280 ВС on the island of Pharos off Alexandria, said to have been more than 350 ft, or 110 m, high). These wonders inspired the compilation of many other lists of seven attractions, or "wonders," by later generations.

The modern wonders include Channel Tunnel and Concord Airliner (UK/France); Sydney Opera House in Australia; Empire State building and Golden Gate Bridge in the USA; Aswan Dam in Egypt; US Space Programme (Apollo, Cape Canaveral, Space Shuttle).

Words to remember

 

academic mandate - заинтересованность учебных заведений

ambitious a – претенциозный

backlash n - отрицательная, негативная реакция (на политическое событие и т. п.)

beguile v — занимать, развлекать

be hot for - сходить с ума, неистовствовать

bondage n — 1. рабская зависимость, рабство, неволя; крепостное состояние, крепостное право, Syn: servitude, serfdom, slavery; 2. садомазохизм

chunk n - большое количество

complacent a – самодовольный

confine v — ограничивать

copyright I n - авторское право; ~ reserved - авторское право охраняется

copyright II а - охраняемый авторским правом; this book is - — на эту книгу распространяется авторское право

copyright III v – обеспечивать авторское право

corrective n — поправка, частичное изменение, исправление

fine a - тонкий, утонченный

inherent а — присущий, неотъемлемый, свойственный (in, to — кому-л., чему-л.)

laudatory a - похвальный, хвалебный; панегирический

plunder n — воровство, грабеж, плагиат

proliferation of outlets - расширение рынка сбыта

public domain - всеобщее достояние

readership n - читатели; круг читателей, читательская масса

republican symbolism - республиканская символика

resonant a – созвучный

revival n — оживление, возрождение

saccharine ['sækarin] a - приторный, слащавый

sexism n - дискриминация по полу, особенно дискриминация женщин

spectacular а-1. производящий глубокое впечатление; впечатляющий; эффектный, Syn: impressive; 2. волнующий, захватывающий, Syn: thrilling

take to phr v - 1. начинать заниматься чём-л.; 2. пристраститься, увлечься; 3. обращаться, прибегать к чему-л.

trash n - отбросы; мусор; макулатура

tripe n - вздор, дрянь; чепуха, чушь (slang)

trivia n — мелочи, пустяки

worldly a - житейский, практичный, мирской; земной, суетный

wrack v - разрушать(ся)

READER

SUMERIANS

 

Possibly about 3500 ВС the people who are known as the Sumerians relocated in the Tigris-Euphratus Valley. Many archaeologists think that they came from the north, possibly from the Caspian Sea region. Others believe that the Sumerians may well have been in the Fertile Crescent long before 3500 ВС. Archaeologists are certain that there was a major growth in population, either the result of migration or an unforeseen jump in the number of indigenous people at that time.

The Sumerians took advantage of the large number of plants and animals that their predecessors cultivated. They grew both barley and wheat and number of vegetables. Much of the grain they fermented into ale, the common drink of the Sumerians. The date palm gave them fruit and shade, as well as tall reeds for roofing their homes. Among the animals they kept were cattle, goats, sheep, and onagers, a kind of donkey.

It was Sumerian farmers who first learned that the use of a plow made planting crops much easier. Before the plow was invented, seeds were scattered by broadcasting them by hand. Once the plow appeared, the young plants could grow in rows and develop deeper root system. Farmers could cultivate the plants during the growing season and harvest them much more easily after they matured.

The first plow was little more than a tree branch that, as one person pulled and another pushed, made a furrow in the ground. Later farmers put an arrow-shaped metal piece on the plow, making it go deeper and straighten Oxen and donkeys pulled the plow because the work was so hard.

The need for greater physical strength using plow agriculture was probably responsible for changing roles in the Sumerian family. Even though both women and men shared in agricultural work in the past, now the need for men to manage animals pulling plows gave women a lesser role in a family's food production. Their lesser position increasingly relegated them to the home, with the result that patriarchal attitudes grew more prominent. Men made the decisions on economic matters, and they soon monopolized political decisions as well because they also filled the ranks of the armies. Patriarchal society became the norm in southwestern Asia.

In order to be certain of the bounderies of their fields, the Sumerians developed mathematics and surveying techniques. Instead of using 10 as a basis for calculation, the Sumerians preferred 60. Their calculation based on 60 explains why we use 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle.

The wheel was another invention of the Sumerians. As early as 3400 ВС the potters of Mesopotamia discovered how much easier it was to shape their vases and jugs by spinning them on a wheel. The insight allowed them to find other uses for wheel. This first wheel was made of solid wood. They put wheels on sleds, using an axe to hold the wheels together, so that they could transport goods. The early carts were so light that when their drivers reached water they could be dismantled. Pulling a cart, rather than putting baggage on the back of a pack animals, increased the weight carried threefold. For travel on their rivers, the Sumerians first employed the sailboat.

City people also had their share of discoveries. Jewelry of gold, silver, and precious stones was favored by the wealthy as a way to demonstrate their importance. Goldsmiths proved especially adept at hammering this metal, valued for its color and permanence. Cloth makers used cotton and wool to make garments that were dyed many colors. Often it seems that the weavers were slave women forced to work at this tedious job long hours each day. Workers tanned hides and used the leather for shoes and bags.

Sumerian businessmen used stone cylinder seals with a unique carving on them that could be rolled in soft clay to make an impression. This device served as the autograph of a Sumerian merchant. Sumerian cities also had pharmacists who dispensed drugs that the doctors, after examination, had prescribed for variety of illnesses.

A lively exchange between the artisans who lived in the towns and the farmers who produced the food kept Sumerian cities filled with shoppers and traders. Since wood, stone, and metal ores were all absent from their valley homes, Sumerian merchants took their wares to other nearby regions where they sought these products. Metal, especially copper and tin, had to be found, for these were used to make bronze cooking utensils for the kitchen and arms and armor for the army.

Houses in Sumerian cities were built of mud brick with reed roofs. They were built next to one another, sometimes sharing a common wall, because space was at a premium. Their houses lined the narrow streets that led away from the public square where the temple and its ziggurat were located. Homes of the wealthy were quite comfortable with wooden furniture and carpets. The bedrooms opened onto a courtyard, which offered a shaded place for conversation and a room to entertain guests.

Society in ancient Sumer was, as in all ancient cultures, divided between the wealthy and the poor. Land ownership was the major source of wealth, but merchants who prospered were also numbered among the rich. These families, along with the priests of the temples, composed the social elite. The acquisition and exchange of costly items in the upper class was a major source of class differentiation.

Artisans formed associations with those who practiced the same craft. Often they appear to have pooled their resources for common projects. What we know of these associations, or guilds, comes from tablets that tell of business transactions that involved them in places as far away as India, Iran, and Egypt.

НITTITE EMPIRE

 

About 2000 ВС a people called Hatti occupied most of Anatolia. Then a new people came on the scene; they may have been invaders or people who had always been present but now emerged from the Stone Age to create Anatolia's first major civilization. These people were the Hittites. They spoke an Indo-European language, showing that they were not related to any other western Asian population.

The Hittite language was written down using a hieroglyphic script to represent ideas or less frequently the syllables found in its pronunciation. These hieroglyphs show pictures of objects in the Hittite vocabulary or stand for ideas. Some 25,000 Hittite tablets exist, dating from the seventeenth century ВС. They are the oldest writing in any Indo-European language.

The first use of the name Hittite comes from the records kept by merchants who speak of their presence in western Anatolia. They lived in the region of the Halys River (now the Red River), which makes a great arc on the Anatolian plateau and then empties into the Black Sea.

The Hittites capital was at Hattushash, near modern Boghazkoy in Turkey. It was centrally located and easily defended. Within their empire, the Hittites themselves were but a ruling elite, for the population of the area remained extremely diverse.

The ruler's title was Great King. The mythology of the state held that Labarnas, the first ruler, was reincarnated in each of his successors. During the period of the Hittite Empire, the king's title changed to My Sun, and the sun became the symbol of royal authority. After the king died, he became a god.

The period of Hittite history from 1460 to 1190 ВС is known as a period of the empire, a time when the Hittites were the most aggressive people of western Asia. Their great advantage now came from their knowledge of the process needed to smelt iron ore. Using iron weapons against bronze-armed enemies was hardly a contest. Their second advantage came from their mastery of the horse-drawn chariots. This kind of warfare was not known before the Hittites introduced it. A combination of iron weapons, iron-tipped spears, and arrows that archers and bowmen shot from the chariots made them invincible for several centuries.

The Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II, decided to challenge the Hittites. In 1299 ВС a great battle took place at Kadesh. Hittite and Egyptian forces fought each other with charge after charge, but the battle proved indecisive. Several years later Ramses offered to make peace, and the dispatch of a Hittite royal princess to Egypt sealed the agreement.

The Hittites were anxious to keep the secret of iron-making to themselves for it gave them a great advantage over all other peoples of western Asia. However, this proved impossible, and soon the secret got out. This discovery of how to make iron is the most important contribution of the Hittites to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, its more lethal weaponry also had the effect of making empire-building more attractive.

ASSYRIANS

 

Toward the close of the thirteenth century ВС, Hittite weakness became evident. The Assyrians, located in north Mesopotamia, were anxious to take the place of the Hittites as the region's dominant state.

The rise of Assyria was the most striking event in Mesopotamia. The Assyrians were a Semitic-speaking people, who had long lived in the upper region of the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, but they were spectators rather than participants in the civilizations that developed to the south. On all sides they had hostile enemies; hence, they acquired a major concern for defense.

The Assyrians began to assert themselves only about 1350 ВС. In this early period they became noted for their military strength and the cruelty they used to make certain that subject people were aware of the price they paid for any hint of revolt.

The first victims of Assyrian imperialism were the Kassites of lower Babylonia. Then the Assyrian kings turned their armies against their northern neighbors in the kingdom of Urartu. The strongest of the conquerors was Tiglath-Pilesar I, ruling from 1116 to 1078 ВС. His ruthless shifting of population and merciless disposal of his enemies brought fear and trembling to all subject peoples from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.

After Tiglath-Pilesar no king approached his level of competence so that Assyrian power languished for a century and a halfonly to be renewed in the time of Shalmaneser III about 859 ВС. Each year this ruler led his armies into territories not yet incorporated into the Assyrian state. When the Assyrians overran new regions, the inhabitants were forced to move far away from their homeland, and new settlers from other parts of Southwest Asia replaced them. Assyrian chronicles speak of over a hundred such deportations. The idea was to break the will of the conquered.

Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, was the largest and most impressive city of Southwest Asia, if not the world, in the seventh century. From his palace, the Assyrian king set up a strong financial system for the state, during that taxes would be assessed and collected on a regular basis. The Assyrians created the first fully developed bureaucratic state to appear in world history.

Despite their skills in war, the Assyrians were anxious to excel in other ways. These areas included their interest in history, for palace scribes kept careful notes on all the campaigns of the kings. Needless to say, they were always "victors", even when they were not.

Sculptors had a special place in Assyrian society, for the rulers wanted posterity to gaze admiringly on their portraits. They are depicted receiving tribute from conquered kings and hunting in their chariots. The sculptors told the stories of their conquests carved in stone on successive panels. Sculptors also pictured hunting scenes. In fact so many lions died at the hands of Assyrian rulers that the animals practically became extinct in Mesopotamia.

The last major ruler of Assyria was Assurbanapal. The library that he collected at Nineveh, 25,000 tablets, is a storehouse of information on Southwest Asia. Here were housed collections of all previous Mesopotamian literature. His patronage of sculptors and painters made the Nineveh palace the wonder of his contemporaries. At his death in 627 ВС, it appeared that Assyria stood at the pinnacle of success.

Like all empires in their glory, appearances were deceptive. Assyrian energies were on the wane after years of campaigns that embittered so many people. Revolts, despite the ferocity of their repression, continued to flare, as enemies gathered outside the nation. In 612 ВС the final blow fell on Nineveh when the Medes and Babylonians allied to destroy Assyria. The Babylonians now inherited the position of leadership in Mesopotamia.

BABYLONIANS

 

For a century the greatness of Babylon was evident under kings who were known as the Chaldean or New-Babylonian dynasty. Having destroyed the Assyrians and checked the Egyptians, the renewed Babylonian state became quite formidable. The reign of Nebuchadnezzar II the Great, from 605 to 561 ВС was the most brilliant.

It was then that Babylon surpassed all other southwestern Asian cities, with a population of nearly 100,000 men and women. The city wall of brick, with towers every 60 feet, extended for 10 miles. Built on both sides of the Euphrates, a great bridge connected the two parts of the city. A wide avenue led to the temple of Marduk, the chief god, and his ziggurat. The temple interior was covered with gold as well as the statue of the deity. Builders decorated the outside with glazed tiles.

Babylon's famous "hanging gardens" were a wonder of the ancient world. To please his queen a Babylonian king ordered a terrace of trees and bushes to be planted on an artificial mound that, at a distance, seemed to hang in the air.

From Marduk's ziggurat Babylonian wise men studied the heavens at night. The astronomers noted the rise of certain constellations during the year, enabling them to construct the zodiac and a monthly calendar. The Babylonians were competent in mathematics, enabling them to find the square root of numbers and to compute percentages.

The Babylonian supremacy, however, was to last no longer than its great monarch. It was now a new Southwest Asian power's turn to rise to prominence. This was Persia. Babylon, because of its wealth and presumed decadence, became a symbol of urban corruption in the literature of its neighbors long after the city disappeared.

PEOPLES OE SYRIA

 

In 1200 ВС the Canaanites were the dominant people of Syria, where they had settled, about the same time that Egypt was in its Old Kingdom. The Canaanite population increased considerably during the Bronze Age, with cities along the Mediterranean as well as inland increasing in size and wealth. Although often conquered by empire-builders of either Mesopotamia or Egypt, the bulk of the Canaanite people remained in place as tributaries of Akkadians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, or Egyptians.

In 1200 ВС the Canaanite region consisted of three parts. The coastal area was Phoenicia, famous for its merchants that sailed the Mediterranean and the purple dye they sold. This dye gave its name to Phoenicia, for Greeks knew the region as the land of the purple merchants. Cities of importance in Phoenicia were Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre, which are now found in the modern state of Lebanon.

Inland from Phoenicia was the country of the Arameans, located between the desert and the Lebanon mountains. Damascus was its best-known city. The merchants among the Arameans traveled so extensively that their language spread all over Syria as the common idiom of discourse.

The third region was Palestine. Once a Canaanite preserve, it became a land contested between. Philistines and Hebrews after 1200 ВС. The Philistines, part of the Sea Peoples that scourged the eastern Mediterranean, settled along the Palestinian coast, giving their name to the land. Inland, the Hebrews invaded Palestine in the thirteenth century ВС after an escape from Egypt.

 

 

PHOENITIANS AND ARAMEANS

 

An account of Southwest Asia during the first millennium ВС would not be complete without a mention of the Phoenicians and Arameans; both peoples were members of the Canaanite nation. The name the Phoenicians gave themselves was Kena'ani, Canaanites.

The great gift of the Phoenicians to world history was their dissemination of the alphabet. The first of their alphabetic inscriptions used 22 letters, all of them consonants, dating from the eleventh century. The inscription is found on the sarcophagus of a king of Byblos. Later this Phoenician alphabet became known to the Greeks, allowing it to become the forerunner of all European scripts.

Their contemporaries knew the Phoenicians best for their extensive trading in the Mediterranean. As soon as spring came and the threat of storms passed, the Mediterranean became a lake criss-crossed with Phoenician ships headed for Egypt, Cyprus, North Africa, Greece, and even Spain. About 600 ВС one Phoenician expedition is reputed to have gone around Africa, a feat not accomplished again until AD 1498.

Phoenician trade was in glass, metals, jewelry, lumber from the famous cedars of Mount Lebanon, wine, and cloth. Especially treasured was the purple dye (actually closer to scarlet than purple in modern terms) that the Phoenicians obtained from the murex mollusk. To make a pound of the dye, 60,000 snails gave their lives. Wealthy people all over the Mediterranean wanted to wear cloth of this color to set them apart as men and women of importance.

The most well known of the Phoenicians was Queen Jezebel, who was married to King Ahab of Israel. The Bible recounts how she pursued an aggressive policy to convert her husband's subjects to her religion. This brought down on her the wrath of Yahweh's prophet, Elijah; she was trampled by horses in a bloody death.

The Phoenicians were very active in colonizing other parts of the Mediterranean, establishing settlements all along the Syrian coast and on Cyprus and Malta. The two Phoenician colonies that grew into major cities were Carthage, now in modern Tunisia, and Cadiz, a port of Spain. The Phoenician cities became very wealthy from their dominance of Mediterranean trade allowing the kings of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos to beautify their cities with temples to the Phoenician deity El, his wife Asherah, and Baal, a fertility god.

Because each Phoenician city was independent of the other, little resistance could be offered Assyrians or Persians when they threatened. Sending the monarchs of these nations tribute allowed the Phoenicians the latitude they needed to pursue their economic interests. Like the rest of Southwest Asia, Phoenicia's history extends to the coming of Alexander the Great, when it was merged into the Hellenistic world.

The Arameans, the Canaanites of the interior, were also great traders of the first millennium ВС. Rather than ships, their merchants used caravans of jackasses and camels to carry goods from all over the region, from Phoenicia to the Euphrates. Damascus was at the hub of the Aramean trading network, but other cities such as Aleppo shared in the prosperity that its merchants generated.

So many Aramean merchants traveled throughout Southwest Asia that their language often displaced native tongues. In the seventh century Aramean replaced Akkadian and a century later Hebrew. The Aramean alphabetic script was the forerunner of the modern Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.

 

 

ANATOLIA

 

The Anatolian plateau and coastline held a great variety of peoples from 1200 ВС onward. Among them were the Phrygians, who lived in much the same area as the old Hittite Empire. The Phrygians seem to have emerged just as the Hittites disappeared in Southwest Asia.

The Phrygian capital was located at Gordium, asite 50 miles from mod­ern Ankara, Turkey. One of its early kings, Gordius, is reputed to have tied his cart to a pole with a knot so difficult to loosen that a story went out that whoever untied it would rule Asia. Phrygian importance peaked under its king, Mida (in Greek, Midas), who was reputed to be the richest man in the world. Everything he touched turned to gold, even his food, a problem that came close to killing him. He ruled from about 725 to 675 ВС.

Mida was buried in a structure that still stands. It may well be the old­est wooden tomb extant in the world and is built inside a mound 150 feet high and 900 feet in diameter. About 700 ВС Cimmerian tribesmen fell upon Phrygia dealing it a devastating blow.

The Phrygian legacy is sparse because no archives have yet been found and the burial mounds of its kings have yet to be thoroughly excavated. A peculiar type of headdress, the Phrygian cap, a close fitted cone with a peak curling toward the front, was worn by freed slaves in Roman times. It was later revived during the French revolution.

The Lydians were another people of Anatolia, succeeding the Phry­gians when they went into decline after 700 ВС. The Lydian capital was at Sardis, where their best remembered king, Croesus, was also their last. It was his wealth, like that of Mida, that gave Croesus his reputation.

The Lydian claim on history derives from the nation's invention of money. As far as is known, the first coins minted with the image of a king come from Lydia. The metal used was electrum, a combination of gold and silver. Aesop, famous for his animal stories, was probably a Lydian.

Lydia fell first to the Persian king Cyrus and later to Alexander the Great. In Hellenistic times, the rulers of Pergamum were its governors.

One other people was found in Anatolia, the Greeks who lived along the Aegean Sea coast and on the Black Sea shores. Those on the Aegean were known as Ionian Greeks, since most of them spoke this dialect of ancient Greek.

In fact, one of the first recollections of the Greeks dealt with the city of Troy and the conflict that took place between their warriors and the Trojans. Homer's epic, the Iliad, tells the story of that war. If he drew on historic facts, then an attack on Troy fits well into the declining years of Mycenaean Greece, sometime before 1200 ВС.

The Ionian Greek cities filled with immigrants from the Balkans and the Aegean islands. It was in these cities that Greek science was born. In many ways the cities of Ephesus, Smyrna, and Prirene rivaled those of the homeland.

The coming and going of empires in Southwest Asia demonstrates how difficult it was for this part of the world to find stability, until the creation of the Persian Empire. Too many people with different cultures and religions lived in a very small part of the world. When one group attained as­cendancy for a while, another was in the wings awaiting its moment. At the same time advances were present. City life and its privileges extended to a larger number of people, and alphabetic writing became common as did coinage.

 

 

PERSIANS

 

The Persians were to inherit the rule of all the peoples that once in­habited Southwest Asia. They were an Indo-European people, a part of the great migrations that took place early in the first millennium ВС. The Persians chose the plateau that extends from the Zagros Mountains to the Indus Valley for their homeland. Much of the plateau, except for the val­leys of the Zagros and the immediate region south of the Caspian Sea, is very arid. For farmers, irrigation was needed, but for the herders of horses, the grass that grew on the plateau was sufficient for their needs.

The Persians had close relatives in the Medes, Sogdians, and Bactri-ans, all of whom found a place to settle on, or close by, the great Iranian plateau about 800 ВС. The Medes were the first to gain notoriety when their ruler, Kashtaritu (in Greek, Phraortes), was one of the allies that in 612 ВС attacked Nineveh and brought down the Assyrian Empire.

For a moment the Medes created a small empire that reached into Anatolia. Their king became so impressed with his victories that he as­sumed the name king of kings, just in time for the Medes to be toppled, as the Persians came on the scene. The future belonged to the Persians.

The greatest of Persian kings was Cyrus, who ruled at the very begin­ning of his nation's prominence, from 549 to 530 ВС. The dynasty he founded receives the name Achaemenid, from Achaemenes, a legendary king believed to be the first of the Persian kings.

Not surprisingly, Cyrus led his armies, as was expected of a ruler in South­west Asia, into Anatolia against the Lydian empire and Ionian Greek cities that were located along the coast. In 539 ВС he turned his forces southward, where the Chaldeans of Babylon opened the gates of the city to him.

His tolerance made Cyrus popular with conquered people, for he al­lowed them to retain their own culture as long as they paid tribute. Cyrus forbade his troops to pillage and ordered them to respect the temples of those he defeated. Peoples who had once been exiled, like the Jews, were allowed to return to their homelands. Cyrus's victories created a multieth-

nic empire over all Southwest Asia, and Mesopotamia lost its preeminence to leadership when it became a province of Persia.

The son of Cyrus, Cambyses, invaded Egypt, opening a brief period of Persian rule over that country. Because he died unexpectedly, the kingship passed to Darius I, one of his close relatives and a member of the elite army corps, the Immortals.

Persian kings were not bashful about their accomplishments. Darius ordered an inscription to be carved on a cliff at Behistun of all nineteen of his campaigns. This Behistun Rock, written in three languages, proved to be the key to deciphering cuneiform writing in modern times.

One campaign that Darius was not so happy to record followed a suc­cessful invasion of western India. Because of a revolt in the Ionian Greek cities of Anatolia while he was away, Darius not only suppressed the rebels but also decided to punish the Athenians for sending help to the Ionians. Thus began the classic conflict between Persians and Greeks.

A Persian army marched across Thrace while the navy followed it along the coast. In 490 ВС at Marathon, the Athenians met and defeated the Persians. Ten years later Darius's successor, Xerxes, tried once more to overcome the Greeks, but he, too, failed. Despite its strength, the Persian Empire had reached its limits.

It was now the turn of the Greeks to intervene in Persian affairs. Be­cause of a struggle over the kingship between two brothers, a Greek mer­cenary army fought on Persian soil, in vain as it turned out. On their de­parture from the country, one of the Greek generals, Xenophon, wrote a history of the expedition. This work, the Anabasis, is one of the most im­portant sources for the history of both Greece and Persia.

The final page of Achaemenid Persia came in the fourth century ВС, when Alexander the Great concluded the conflict between the Greeks and Persians, with a win for the Greeks. The last Persian king, Darius III, was killed as his troops fled from the Greeks. According to legend, Alexander gave the king a drink of water just before his death.