We can date the fall of the Persian Empire to a single day of battle on 1 October 331 BC.
It had once been the greatest empire the world had ever seen, stretching from Thrace (modern Bulgaria) in the west to the Indus Valley (in modern Pakistan) in the east, from the Caucasus Mountains in the north to the Nubian Desert in the south.
It had existed for the best part of two centuries, a strapping together of hundreds of ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, perhaps 50 million people, under the supreme autocratic rule of a ‘Great King’, a ‘King of Kings’ – the Achaemenid Persian Emperor.
Retreading old trails