Like other states, an empire maintains its political structure at least partly by coercion. Land-based empires (such as the Mongol Empire or the Persian Empire) tend to extend in a contiguous area; sea-borne empires, also known as thalassocracies (the Athenian, Portuguese and the British empires provide examples), may feature looser structures and more scattered territories.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Like other states, an empire maintains its political structure at least partly by coercion. Land-based empires (such as the Mongol Empire or the Persian Empire) tend to extend in a contiguous area; sea-borne empires, also known as thalassocracies (the Athenian, Portuguese and the British empires provide examples), may feature looser structures and more scattered territories.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Being Jewish, Jesus and his disciples would most likely have sung the psalms from memory.
However, without a centralised music industry, the repertoire of ordinary people was much greater than it is today, so they probably knew other songs too. Early Christians continued to sing the psalms much as they were sung in the synagogues in the first century.
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Thursday, June 21, 2007
Darius I was the first to speak of Achaemenes, who he claimed was an ancestor of Cyrus the Great, (ca. 576 - 529 BC) and therefore the progenitor of the entire line of Achaemenid rulers. However, some scholars hold that Achaemenes was a fictional character used to legitimize Darius' rule, and that Darius the Great usurped the Persian throne. In any case, the name Achaemenid has been commonly accepted for the line of Persian kings beginning at least with Darius the Great. When the name refers to the entire line of early Persian rulers, including Cyrus and his son Cambyses, the Achaemenid era stretches from about 650 to 330 BC.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
According to historical sources including the books 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees and the first book of The Wars of the Jews by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37–c.100 CE), the Hasmonean Kingdom rose after a successful revolt by Jews against the Seleucid Antiochus IV. After Antiochus' successful invasion of Ptolemaic Egypt was turned back by the intervention of the Roman Republic, he moved instead to assert strict control over Israel, sacking Jerusalem and its Temple, suppressing Jewish religious and cultural observances, and imposing Hellenistic practices.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
In historical artifacts discovered in the ancient ruins of Babylon and Ur, Cyrus identifies himself as King of Iran, where he reigned from 559 BC until his death. He is the first ruler whose name was suffixed with the words the Great (Vazraka in Old Persian, Bozorg in modern Persian), a title adopted by many others after him, including the eventual Acheamenid Shah, Darius the Great, and Alexander the Great, who overthrew the Achaemenid dynasty two centuries after the death of Cyrus.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
"Roman Empire" is also used as translation of the expression, Imperium Romanum, probably the best known Latin expression where the word imperium is used in the meaning of a territory, the "Roman Empire", as that part of the world under Roman rule.
The expansion of this Roman territory beyond the borders of the initial city-state of Rome had started long before the state organization turned into an Empire. In its territorial peak after the conquest of Dacia by Trajan, the Roman Empire controlled approximately 5
900 000 km². (2,300,000 sq.mi.) of land surface, thereby being the largest of all empires during the classical antiquity period of European history.