Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph of the bas-relief from
     Persepolis now in the British Museum.

The first person to conceive the idea of establishing one was, perhaps, a certain Fravartish, the Phraortes of the Greeks, whom Herodotus declares to have been the son and successor of Deiokes.*

* The ancient form of the name, Fravartish or Frawarti, has been handed down to us by a passage in the great inscription of Behistun; it means the man who proclaims faith in Ahura- mazda, the believer.

[Illustration:  280.jpg THE PERSIAN REALM]

He came to the throne about 655 B.C. at a time when the styar of Assur-bani-pal was still in the ascendant, and at first does not seem to have thought of trying to shake off the incubus of Assyrian rule.  He began very wisely by annexing such of the petty neighbouring states as had hitherto remained independent, and then set himself to attack the one other nation of Iranian blood which, by virtue of the number and warlike qualities of its clans, was in a position to enter into rivalry with his own people.  The Persians, originally concentrated in the interior, among the steep valleys which divide the plateau on the south, had probably taken advantage of the misfortunes of Elam to extend their own influence at its expense.  Their kings were chosen from among the descendants of a certain Akhamanish, the Achaemenes of the Greeks, who at the time of the Iranian invasion had been chief of the Pasargadae, one of the Persian clans.  Achaemenes is a mythical hero rather than a real person; he was, we are told, fed during infancy by an eagle—­that mighty eagle whose shadow, according to a Persian belief in mediaeval times, assured the sovereignty to him on whom it chanced to fall.  Achaemenes would seem to have been followed by a certain Chaispi—­or Teispes—­a less fabulous personage, described in the legends as his son.  It was, doubtless, during his reign that Assur-bani-pal, in hot pursuit of Tiumman and Khumban-khaldash, completed the downfall of Susa; Chaispi claimed the eastern half of Elam as his share of the spoil, and on the strength of his victory styled himself King of Anshan—­a title on which his descendants still prided themselves a hundred years after his death.*

* The fact that Teispes was the immediate successor of Achaemenes, indicated by Herodotus, is affirmed by Darius himself in the Behistun inscription.  According to Billet- beck, the Anzan (Anshan) of the early Achaemenidae was merely a very small part of the ancient Anzan (Anshan), viz. the district on the east and south-east of Kuh-i-Dena, which includes the modern towns of Yezdeshast, Abadeh, Yoklid, and Kushkiserd.

Persia, as then constituted, extended from the mouths of the Oroatis—­the modern Tab—­as far as the entrance to the Straits of Ormuzd.* The coast-line, which has in several places been greatly modified since ancient times by the formation of alluvial