Compare And Contrast Persian And Greek Empires

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Anna Curran AP World History September 26, 2014 The victories of the Greeks at Marathon and of Alexander of Macedon at Guagamela are all too often seen as triumphs for the rise of western civilization.The traditional viewpoint is that the saintly democracy loving Greeks overcame the horrible, evil, totalitarian Persians and went on to give us western civilization as a result. However, when you take a close look at both the Persian and Greek civilizations, you might find that yourself reassessing the conventional perspective. Did the right side win? The Persians ruled a great and powerful empire. It was the model for practically all land based empires all throughout the world. The mighty empire of Persia sprouted up from the bone-dry deserts of Iran. For thousands of years Iran developed under the shadow of the wealthier and more prosperous Mesopotamia to the west while absorbing migrations and invasions of nomadic peoples coming out of central Asia. During the sixth century B.C.E., rulers of the province of Persia in southwestern Iran set about on a series of conquests that resulted in the formation of an enormous empire. For more than a millennium, four ruling dynasties—the Achaemenids (558-330 B.C.E), the Seleucids (323-83 B.C.E), the Parthians (247 B.C.E.-224 C.E.), and the Sasanids (224-651 C.E.)—maintained a continuous tradition of…show more content…
The Persians’ were an economic superpower. They had a unified economic system throughout the entire Persian Empire. They had a very efficient taxation system. They had standardized weights, measures and monetary units. Greek intellectuals and philosophers failed miserably to see the need for the development of economic science, and the development of a functional economic system. While the Greeks must be acknowledged for their contributions in science, art, music, politics, and philosophy, they did not make many significant advancements in the field of

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