Nations and peoples on all continents looked to America to stand up for the values that created the Western world, and to oppose autocracy and repression. The United States was once the hope of the world, a beacon of freedom and the defender of liberal democracy. This period of time is sometimes called the Pax Persica, or Persian Peace.One of the West's leading intellectuals offers a provocative look at America's withdrawal from world leadership and the rising powers who seek to fill the vacuum left behind Subsequent rulers in the Achaemenid Empire followed Cyrus the Great’s hands-off approach to social and religious affairs, allowing Persia’s diverse citizenry to continue practicing their own ways of life. Hebrew scriptures praise Cyrus the Great for freeing the Jewish people of Babylon from captivity and allowing them to return to Jerusalem. While he ruled by the Zoroastrian law of asha (truth and righteousness), he didn’t impose Zoroastrianism on the people of Persia’s conquered territories. By most accounts, Cyrus the Great was a tolerant ruler who allowed his subjects to speak their own languages and practice their own religions. The Achaemenian kings were devout Zoroastrians. Zoroaster, who likely lived sometime between 1500 and 500 B.C., taught followers to worship one god instead of the many deities worshipped by earlier Indo-Iranian groups.
It’s still practiced today as a minority religion in parts of Iran and India. Named after the Persian prophet Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra), Zoroastrianism is one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions. The first Persian Empire was shaped by a different religion: Zoroastrianism. Many people think of Persia as synonymous with Islam, though Islam only became the dominant religion in the Persian Empire after the Arab conquests of the seventh century.
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