A fluted gold bowl from the Persian empire
Fluted bowl, ca. 6th–5th century BCE
Marked Marathon

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Persian Wars

The Persian empire twice invaded Greece, and lost. The battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea became legends, told above all by Herodotus, the first writer to call his work “history”.

Date
499 to 479 BCVI · The classical world
Place
Marathon · Thermopylae · Salamis · PlataeaEurope, The Middle East
Laid out as
A warTwo sides, a front line, and the turns the fighting took.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

The Persian empire and its allies

  1. IThe Ionian revolt
  2. IIMarathon
  3. IIIThermopylae
  4. IVSalamis
  5. VPlataea and the end
  6. VIHerodotus, the first historian

An alliance of Greek city-states, led by Sparta and Athens

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Darius I
  • Xerxes I
  • Leonidas
  • Themistocles
  • Artemisia of Caria
  • Herodotus

Objects

  • The Serpent Column
  • A Persian helmet from Olympia

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

499 BC to 479 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?