The Androphagi were an ancient Scythian tribe whose existence was recorded by ancient Greco-Roman authors.
Darius I, commonly known as Darius the Great, was the third King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, reigning from 522 BCE until his death in 486 BCE. He ruled the empire at its territorial peak, when it included much of Western Asia, parts of the Balkans and the Caucasus, most of the Black Sea's coastal regions, Central Asia, the Indus Valley in the far east, and portions of North Africa and Northeast Africa including Egypt (Mudrâya), eastern Libya, and coastal Sudan.
The Thracians were an Indo-European speaking people who inhabited large parts of Southeast Europe in ancient history. Thracians resided mainly in Southeast Europe in modern-day Bulgaria, Romania, North Macedonia, northern Greece and European Turkey, but also in north-western Anatolia in Turkey.
The Ionian Revolt, and associated revolts in Aeolis, Doris, Cyprus and Caria, were military rebellions by several Greek regions of Asia Minor against Persian rule, lasting from 499 BC to 493 BC. At the heart of the rebellion was the dissatisfaction of the Greek cities of Asia Minor with the tyrants appointed by Persia to rule them, along with the individual actions of two Milesian tyrants, Histiaeus and Aristagoras. The cities of Ionia had been conquered by Persia around 540 BC, and thereafter were ruled by native tyrants, nominated by the Persian satrap in Sardis. In 499 BC, the tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras, launched a joint expedition with the Persian satrap Artaphernes to conquer Naxos, in an attempt to bolster his position. The mission was a debacle, and sensing his imminent removal as tyrant, Aristagoras chose to incite the whole of Ionia into rebellion against the Persian king Darius the Great.
Atossa was an Achaemenid empress. She was the daughter of Cyrus the Great, the sister of Cambyses II, the wife of Darius the Great, the mother of Xerxes the Great and the grandmother of Artaxerxes I.
Aristagoras of Miletus, d. 497/496 BC, was the tyrant of the Ionian city of Miletus in the late 6th century BC and early 5th century BC. He acted as one of the instigators of the Ionian Revolt against the Persian Achaemenid Empire. He was the son-in-law of Histiaeus and was granted the tyranny of Miletus from him.
Mardonius was a Persian military commander during the Greco-Persian Wars. Though he secured initial victories in the first Persian invasion of Greece, he was ultimately forced to retreat into Anatolia after suffering catastrophic losses in both men and material due to a storm off the coast of Mount Athos, following which he was relieved of his command by Darius the Great. He was later re-appointed by Xerxes I and took part in the second Persian invasion of Greece. In 480 and 479 BC, Mardonius spearheaded the Persian army's destruction of Athens. Shortly thereafter, he was killed during the Battle of Plataea.
The Neuri or Navari were an ancient Slavic or Baltic people whose existence was recorded by ancient Graeco-Roman authors.
The Agathyrsi were an ancient people belonging to the Scythian cultures who lived in the Transylvanian Plateau, in the region that later became Dacia. The Agathyrsi are largely known from Herodotus of Halicarnassus's description of them in the 5th century BC.
Histiaeus, the son of Lysagoras, was a Greek ruler of Miletus in the late 6th century BC. Histiaeus was tyrant of Miletus under Darius I, king of Persia, who had subjugated Miletus and the other Ionian states in Asia Minor, and who generally appointed Greeks as tyrants to rule the Greek cities of Ionia in his territory.
The Massagetae or Massageteans, also known as Sakā tigraxaudā or Orthocorybantians, were an ancient Eastern Iranian Saka people who inhabited the steppes of Central Asia and were part of the wider Scythian cultures. The Massagetae rose to power in the 8th to 7th centuries BCE, when they started a series of events with wide-reaching consequences by expelling the Scythians out of Central Asia and into the Caucasian and Pontic Steppes. The Massagetae are most famous for their queen Tomyris's alleged defeating and killing of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire.
Tomyris also called Thomyris, Tomris, or Tomiride, was a queen of the Massagetae who ruled in the 6th century BCE. Tomyris is known only from the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, according to whom Tomyris led her armies to defend against an attack by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire, and defeated and killed him in 530 BC.
Megabazus, son of Megabates, was a highly regarded Persian general under Darius, to whom he was a first-degree cousin. Most of the information about Megabazus comes from The Histories by Herodotus.
The siege of Eretria took place in 490 BC, during the first Persian invasion of Greece. The city of Eretria, on Euboea, was besieged by a strong Persian force under the command of Datis and Artaphernes.
Maka was a satrapy (province) of the Achaemenid Empire and later a satrapy of the Parthian and Sassanian empires, corresponding to Greek Gedrosia, in the barren coastal areas of modern Pakistan and Iranian Baluchistan. Alternatively, it may have corresponded to modern day Bahrain, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates, plus the northern half of Oman.
Ionia, known in Old Persian as Yauna, was a region within the satrapy of Lydia, with its capital at Sardis, within the First Persian Empire. The first mention of the Yauna is at the Behistun inscription.
The first Persian invasion of Greece took place from 492 BC to 490 BC, as part of the Greco-Persian Wars. It ended with a decisive Athenian-led victory over the Achaemenid Empire during the Battle of Marathon. Consisting of two distinct campaigns, the invasion of the independent Greek city-states was ordered by the Persian king Darius the Great, who sought to punish Athens and Eretria after they had supported the earlier Ionian Revolt. Additionally, Darius also saw the subjugation of Greece as an opportunity to expand into Southeast Europe and thereby ensure the security of the Achaemenid Empire's western frontier.
Skudra was a province (satrapy) of the Persian Achaemenid Empire in Europe between 510s BC and 479 BC. Its name is attested in Persian and Egyptian inscriptions (an Egyptian record of c. 498–497 BC, and a list on the tomb of Darius the Great at Naqsh-e Rustam, c. 486 BC. It is believed to have comprised the lands now known as Thrace and Macedon.
The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire, also known as the Persian Empire or First Persian Empire, was an Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. Based in modern-day Iran, it was the largest empire by that point in history, spanning a total of 5.5 million square kilometres. The empire spanned from the Balkans and Egypt in the west, most of West Asia, the majority of Central Asia to the northeast, and the Indus Valley to the southeast.
Achaemenid Macedonia refers to the period in which the ancient Greek Kingdom of Macedonia was under the reign of the Achaemenid Persians. In 512/511 BC, the Persian general Megabyzus forced the Macedonian king Amyntas I to make his kingdom a vassal of the Achaemenids. In 492 BC, following the Ionian Revolt, the Persian general Mardonius firmly re-tightened the Persian grip in the Balkans, making Macedon a fully subordinate kingdom within the Achaemenid domains and part of its administrative system. Macedonia served the Achaemenid Empire during the Greco-Persian Wars in their invasion of mainland Greece. They regained independence following the defeat and withdrawal of the Achaemenid Empire in 479 BC.
