What if the Persians would have conquered Arabia? [Vanity]

What if instead of invading Greece the Persians would have invaded and conquered Arabia? At the time Arabia was real weak so it would have been an easy victory. Freeper CarrotandStick poised this question in another thread.

Lets hear your predictions history buffs. No Islam? A Zoroastrian Middle East? How would it have played out?

Until the sixth century BC, they were a people shrouded in mystery. Living in the area east of the Mesopotamian region, the Persians were a disparate group of Indo-European tribes, some nomadic, some settled, that were developing their own culture and religion unique from that of the great cities to their west. Sometimes history is about ideas, and nothing more clearly emphasizes this aspect of history than the sudden eruption of Persians on to the world stage, or at least the world stage as it centered around Mesopotamia. For the sudden rise of Persian power not only over Mesopotamia, but over the entire known world, has its center of gravity in a new set of ideas constellating around a new religion. For the Persians would become the largest and most powerful empire ever known in human history up until that point. By 486 BC, the Persians would control all of Mesopotamia and, in fact, all of the world from Macedon northeast of Greece to Egypt, from Palestine and the Arabian peninsula across Mesopotamia and all the way to India. The Persians throughout their history, such as we know it, lived peacefully in the region just north of the Persian Gulf (modern day Iran). For the most part, they were left unbothered by the epic power struggles broiling to the west in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt. They were Indo-European peoples who spoke a language similar to Sanskrit and who worshipped gods very similar to the gods of the Vedic period in India. Life was hard in the region they controlled; the coastline afforded no harbors and the eastern region was mountainous. Only a few interior valleys supported the peoples; in part because of the geography, the Persians never really united into a single peoples but rather served as disparate vassal states to the Medes, who, from their capital at Ecbatana, controlled the area east of the Tigris river.

In this state, somewhere around 650 BC, a new religion suddenly took hold. While we know little or nothing about the Persians in this period, we know the man who invented this new religion. Called Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek), his new religion and new gods captivated the spiritual and social imagination of the Persians. In its roughest outlines, Zoroastrianism is a dualistic religion; in Zarathustra's cosmos, the universe was under the control of two contrary gods, Ahura-Mazda, the creating god who is full of light and good, and Ahriman, the god of dark and evil. These two evenly matched gods are in an epic struggle over creation; at the end of time, Ahura-Mazda and his forces will emerge victorious. All of creation, all gods, all religions, and all of human history and experience can be understood as part of this struggle between light and dark, good and evil. Zoroastrianism, however, is a manifestly eschatological religion; meaning and value in this world is oriented towards the end of history and the final defeat of Ahriman and all those gods, humans, and other animate forces arrayed on the dark side of creation.

It is not possible to underestimate how Zoroastrianism changed the Persian world and its sense of its own community. If the world and human history could be understood as an epic struggle between good and evil, a struggle whose ultimate trajectory is the establishment of good throughout the universe and the defeat of evil, then one's own role, as an enlightened people, in the world becomes vastly different. This political role in the world was put together by Cyrus, called The Great.

Cyrus was a first in human history, for he was the first to conceive of an idea that would forever fire the political and social imaginations of the people touched by the Persians. That idea? Conquer the world.

Up until Cyrus, no culture or individual had ever really thought this one up. Territorial conquests, like monarchical power, were justified on religious grounds, but these religious grounds never gave rise to the notion that one's religious duty was to conquer the whole of the world as you knew it.

In 559 BC, Cyrus became the chief of an obscure Persian tribe in the south of Persia. A devoted Zoroastrianism, he believed that his religious duty was to bring about the eschatological promises of Zoroastrianism through active warfare. If the universe was an epic struggle between the forces of Ahura-Mazda and the forces of evil, Cyrus his job as personally bringing about the victory of his god. As an extension of this, Cyrus would bring Zoroastrianism to all the peoples he conquered; he would not force them to become Zoroastrian, though. For Zoroastrianism recognized that all the gods worshipped by other peoples were really gods; some were underlings of Ahura-Mazda and some were servants of Ahriman. Cyrus saw as his mission the tearing down of religions for evil gods and the shoring up of religions of gods allied with Ahura-Mazda.

By 554 BC, Cyrus had conquered all of Persia and defeated the Medes for control of the region. He soon conquered Lydia in Asia Minor, Babylon in 539 BC and, by the time he died in 529 BC, he had conquered a vast territory—in fact, he probably was the greatest conqueror in human history.

Post-Exilic Religion As one aspect of the religious eclecticism of Zoroastrianism and Cyrus's intentions, the conquest of Babylon led to the immediate freeing of the Hebrews who had been exiled in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus claimed to have been visited in a dream by Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews. Aligned with Ahura-Mazda, Yahweh demanded to be worshipped in the land of Judah; Cyrus freed the Hebrews with the specific intent that they reintroduce the proper worship of Yahweh in the Temple at Jerusalem. The Hebrews, however, took several Zoroastrian ideas with them; alhtough these religious ideas simmered and brewed as unorthodox ideas among common people, they would eventually resurface with a vengeance in Christianity.

Although the internal structure of the Persian imperial government was somewhat shaky, the conquests and fire for conquest continued after Cyrus's death. His son, Cambyses, conquered Egypt in 525 BC, but the Chaldeans revolted in Mesopotamia and the Medes revolted east of the Tigris. Cambyses's son, Darius I (reigned 522-486 BC; pronounced like "dry as, " only with an unvoiced s), or Darius the Great, quelled the Chaldeans and Medes and worked on firming up the state. His great innovation was to divide the huge empire into more or less independent provinces called satrapies.

Darius extended the Persian empire to its farthest reaches, extending through his conquests all the way into Macedon just northeast of Greece. When the Greek cities of Asia Minor revolted against the high tributes demanded of them by the Persian empire, the Athenians joined in and conquered and burned Sardis, the capital of Lydia, in 498 BC. The Athenians, however, lost interest in the Greek struggle against Persia and, by 495 BC, Darius had reconquered Asia Minor. Eager to prevent any future threats to the empire by Athens or any other Greek city, Darius set out to conquer the whole of Greece. And he almost made it.

Thanks I am going to buy it and read it.

One caveat--the Persians come off pretty badly in this book, which is written from a Roman point-of-view--Belisarius being a great Roman general.

The term "true Arab" refers to people from the core of the Arabian peninsula. It does not mean "real Arab". Many Arabicized peoples are easily mistaken for "true Arabs".

It's a rather specialized term useful in Middle Eastern studies.

Not all non-Jewish semitic language speakers are Arabs.

Most everyone tells me I look Italian as is common among most Iranians. As far as the blondes blue eyes. Two of my cousins have blue eyes with light brown to blonde hair and one of my cousins is wider than a ghost with bright green eyes all of them from Iran. It is quite common especially in the north.

The Romans lost a lot of battles ot the Persians, and the Persians took a lot of Roman cities by storm in the 6th and 7th centuries--including Antioch the Great in 541 AD. As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of formerly Roman citizens were taken prisoner and marched back to Persia, some to be slaves, others to be free people living in cities built specifically to house them. While it's impossible to say how much of an impact they had on the Persian gene pool as a whole, one must assume that they had some impact.

The term "true Arab" refers to people from the core of the Arabian peninsula.

That's true. But I never heard that the Lakhmids and Ghassanids were anything but "true Arabs", even if they weren't currently residing in Arabia. It was my understanding that they were Arabs who had moved out of Arabia into the desert wastes between the Roman Empire and Persia.

Not all non-Jewish semitic language speakers are Arabs.

That's true. But if you have a group that migrated from the Arabian peninsula at some point (I'm not sure of this point, though), spoke Arabic, worshiped the same divinties as the Arabs of Arabia, and followed the same nomadic lifestyle, is it possible to say that they weren't "true Arabs?"

On another note Iranians are Aryans decedents of the original tribe of Aria who were light haired and white. Iran literally means "the land of the aryans"

Yeah, because they weren't living there.

That seems to be little more than a semantic difference, though. Like saying the Greeks in Sicily weren't really Greeks because they weren't living in Greece.

The Greeks in Sicily eventually found themselves in hot water ~ although modern Sicilian is more properly a Greek dialect than Italian, that dates from a later time.

However, a "True Arab", to maintain his status, has to be able to differentiate himself culturally and geographically from the others. That does make them different than the Greeks who thought of themselves as "culture bearers to the world", which is not a view shared by the True Arabs.

Interesting that Saddam is Mongolian descent. I have seen photos under the certain lighting and he does tend to look Asiatic to me, rather than Arab.

Sometimes when I see Iraqis, some of them look European to me. I remember seeing some with faired skin and even freckles. I can tell the difference between Persian and Arabs too. Persians have lighter skin and some larger eyes, sometimes almond shape. Arab is more of a cultural designation. Arabs likely came from present day Yemen. I've seen Arabs with dark skin to really faired skin. I remember seeing Arabs with red and even blonde hair and blue eyes. I see this a lot especially among Lebanese, Jordanians, Syrians, Palestinians, Algerians, and Iraqis.

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