The Greek researcher and storyteller Herodotus of Halicarnassus (fifth century BCE) was the world's first historian. In The Histories, he describes the expansion of the Achaemenid empire under its kings Cyrus the Great, Cambyses and Darius I the Great, culminating…
Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions: collection of Old Persian cuneiform texts from the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE, left by the Achaemenid kings on their official monuments.DSaa, inscription on a slab of stone
[This text from Susa is a Babylonian, abridged variant of DSf on…
Tušpa: name of an ancient Urartian fortress on the eastern shore of Lake Thospitis, not far from the modern city of Van. One of the Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions can be found on the southern face of the citadel of Tušpa.In ca.521, the Persian…
In October 539 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus took Babylon, the ancient capital of an oriental empire covering modern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. In a broader sense, Babylon was the ancient world's capital of scholarship and science. The subject…
The suffering servant
One of the most impressive themes developed by Second Isaiah is that of the suffering servant. There are three poems (Isaiah 42.1-4, 49.1-6, 50.4-11) in which the prophet, who lived in the age of the Babylonian Captivity, describes…
Simon ben Kosiba, surnamed Simon bar Kochba ("son of the star") was a Jewish Messiah. Between 132 and 135, he was the leader of the last resistance against the Romans. After the end of the desastrous rebellion, the rabbis called…
In 579, a Byzantine general, Theophilus, exterminated the last pagans of Heliopolis. The shocking story is recorded by the contemporary author John of Ephesus (c.507-c.588). Ecclesiastical History 3.27 was translated by R.P. Smith.
Most scholars agree that the following story, told by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his Jewish antiquities 11.317-345, is not true. One argument is that Alexander is shown a book that was not yet written. Another argument is that…
In the war between the Jews and the Romans of 66-70, the Jewish general Joseph son of Matthias defended Galilee against the Roman legions. After he had been defeated, he defected to his enemies, and advised the Roman general Vespasian.…
The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37-c.100) describes in his Jewish Antiquities a terrible war between king Herod, who had only recently been appointed by the Roman leaders Mark Antony and Octavian, and his future subjects, who refused to acknowledge their…
Simon ben Kosiba, surnamed Simon bar Kochba ("son of the star") was a Jewish Messiah. Between 132 and 135, he was the leader of the last resistance against the Romans. After the end of the disastrous rebellion, the rabbis called…