Discovering Cyrus: The Persian Conqueror Astride the Ancient World (Iran's Age of Empire) - Hardcover

* Some of the most fascinating human epochs lie in the borderlands between history and mystery. So it is with the life of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire in the 6th century B.C. By conquest or gentler means, he came to rule tens of millions in a dominion stretching from the Aegean Sea to the Hindu Kush. In his vast sweep, Reza S. Zarghamee draws on sources of every kind, painstakingly assembling detail, and always weighing evidence carefully where contradictions arise.