Today’s intelligent humans (homo-sapiens) emerged around 200,000 years ago in North East Africa. Fifty thousand years back, a group of them moved into Asia and Europe.

When the last ice-age ended 10,000 years ago; a group of those migrants created the first world civilization (Sumer) in today’s Iraq.

Soon, the Sumerian civilization was flooded by waves of Semitic immigrants (forefathers of today’s Jews and Arabs) and at about 5,000 years ago, morphed into the Akkadian civilization.

The Akkadians in turn were defeated and absorbed into the Assyrian and Babylonian states.

The first Iran-based civilization was created by the people of today’s Khuzestan (the Elamites), at 3,000 BC and around the main city of Susa, near today’s Shush-e-Daniel.

Elamites were neither Semite nor Indo-European, but (like the Sumerians) indigenous and unique. Influenced by their neighbours’ militancy for 2,000 years; Elamites waged wars against their Mesopotamian rivals, but were finally defeated and decimated by the Assyrians in 640 BC.

The population vacuum left by the annihilation of Elamites was quickly filled by two Indo-European (Aryan) migrant tribes of Medes and Persians.

Those nomadic tribes had moved into the Iranian plateau since 1,500 BC, but were relentlessly haunted by the Assyrian warlords.

Finally, the Medes grew strong enough to establish a central power near today’s Hamadan (Ecbatana), and defeated the great Assyrian empire at their own game (610 BC).

Consequently, the Persians who had moved into the Elamite lands in today’s Fars, became allied vassals to the Mede kings.

Persians and Medes went to war in 550 BC, which resulted in a spectacular victory by Cyrus II (the great) who captured Ecbatana and sent the Mede king (his maternal grandfather) to exile.

Cyrus’s victory had a lot to do with his brilliant diplomatic skills, which could attract most of the Mede nobles and generals to his cause and against the cruel old king.

For the next twenty years, Cyrus continued with a string of incredible military expansions and established the fabled Persian Empire.