"It was the first world empire. It's an Afro-Eurasian empire because it included parts of Africa, Asia and Europe." The ancient ... Greece in what was known as the Second Greco-Persian War.

For more than four centuries the Sassanians dominated western Asia, expanding their empire and gaining lands ... was originally established by the ancient Persian kings, and lies near Persepolis ...

It would be another three centuries before Rome absorbed the Greek city-states into its own empire in 146 BC. The Persian Empire ... to defeat independent Greece and thereafter their heirs ...

The son and grandson of men who had forged the Achaemenid Empire, Xerxes I was born to rule in Ancient Persia, but his path ... forces during his invasion of Greece in 480 and 479 BCE.