Portrait of Darius in a cave in ancient Greece

On October 12, 539 BC, the army of the Persian king Darius captured Babylon, and then made the city the capital of the Persian Empire.

Darius I (translated as "Darius" in the Chinese Bible) was Darius the Great, son of Histaspius, governor of Persia, and monarch of the Achaemenid Dynasty of the Persian Empire from 521 to 485 BC.

The record of Darius's life mainly comes from the Bechstone inscription found in the Zagros Mountains in Kerman Province in southwestern Iran (based on the name of the village closest to it). The inscription is engraved on a cliff 100 meters above the ground and is 25 meters long and uses three scripts: Ancient Persian, Elamite and Akkadian. Although the inscriptions were engraved at the instructions of Darius, according to the comparison of records by ancient Greek historians Herodotus and Ketesias, many of the main historical facts are relatively true.

In Darius's early years, he belonged to a branch of the royal family, but Cyrus the Great suspected him of having participated in a conspiracy against the royal family. After Cyrus's death, he followed the new emperor as a bodyguard. Cyrus's son Cambyses II went to Egypt. In March 521 BC, Cambyses II committed suicide, and Cyrus's other son Baldia ascended the throne in Medes. Darius rushed to Medi and, with the help of six Persian aristocrats, killed Baldia in October of that year, declared him the heir to the orthodox Achaemenid family, ascended the throne, and married the daughter of Cyrus the Great. His father and grandfather were still alive at that time, so he was not universally recognized. Nobles from all over the country rose up one after another, and the eastern provinces declared independence one after another. Although Darius did not have heavy troops, he was still able to put down the revolts one by one from 520 to 519 BC because the rebels in various places were not coordinated and fought independently.

In 519 BC, he attacked the Scythians on the east coast of the Caspian Sea and marched into the Indus Valley. In 518 BC, he patrolled Egypt. In 513 BC, he conquered eastern Thrace in Greece, and then crossed the Danube River to attack the European territory of the Scythians. According to Herodotus, he had even reached the Volga River. He captured several islands in the Aegean Sea, and the Macedonians had surrendered.

According to the inscriptions, Darius believed in Zoroastrianism and had strong organizational skills. He perfected the domestic administrative system, divided provinces and regions, clearly determined the number of tributes in each province, unified currency and weights and measures, minted gold coins, and expanded the territory of the Persian Empire to the Caucasus Mountains. Although he deeply believed in Zoroastrianism, he respected the religious beliefs of the various ethnic groups under his jurisdiction. He allowed the Jews to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and allowed the ethnic groups to repair their own temples. His name also appears in the inscriptions of the Temple of Memphis in Egypt, and even in the inscriptions of the Vatican. He allowed the priests of other religions to take charge of the local religious power and exempted the property of the Temple of Apollo, so in the war between Persia and Greece, all the Greek temple priests in Asia Minor and Europe sided with Persia and warned Greece not to resist.

He carried out plans to promote imperial commerce and trade, opening sea routes, sending fleets to explore the Indian Ocean, opening sea routes from the Indus estuary to Egypt, and opening a canal from the Nile to Suez. According to the inscriptions, his ships could cross the Red Sea from the Nile to Persia (there was no Suez Canal at that time).

His fleet had visited Carthage (now Tunisia) and explored Sicily and Italy.

In 499 BC, Athens and Eretelia supported the Ionian uprising against Persia. Darius sent his son-in-law Madonius to lead a fleet to attack Athens. The land army was blocked by cliffs and the fleet was destroyed by storms. In 490 BC, Daitis led the fleet to set sail again, leveling Eretria, but was defeated by Athens at Marathon. The navy was destroyed when the whole city of Athens was dispatched at that time, each holding a mirror and focusing the sun on burning the Persian fleet. After the uprising broke out in Egypt in 486 BC, he prepared for a third expedition to Athens after quelling the uprising, but died in October 485 BC.

Comment: The disintegration of the Persian Empire has been alleviated by him