The Ancient Empires

In the wake of the flood, the earth was repopulated, and the Middle East became home to a series of empires that dominated the region. At its center, on the crescent of land known as Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the ancient peoples developed the earliest form of writing, and there appeared city-states that traded or warred with one another as the inclination suited them. Dynasties of rulers rose and fell, including various Babylonian and Assyrian kings, some of whom ruled empires that stretched as far west as the Holy Land and Syria. Meanwhile, the lands to the east of Mesopotamia were home to a variety of peoples living either as nomads or in urban centers.

The ancient Mesopotamians were pagans, worshiping a variety of deities, most of whom were powerful faerie creatures that demanded worship from mortals. These pagan practices were to be their downfall, however. In 539 BC, the Babylonian king Belshazzar provoked the ire of God by drinking from the sacred vessels of the temple of Jerusalem, which had been taken by his forefather Nebuchadnezzar when he led the Jews of the Holy Land into captivity. Three days after this act, his empire was overthrown by the armies of Cyrus the Great, who had united the Persians and adopted Zoroastrianism, becoming an instrument of the Lord's wrath in the face of this profanation.

Cyrus and his successors ruled the Middle East until the late fourth century BC, when they were overthrown by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. After Alexander's death in 323 BC, the Middle East came under the control of one of his generals, who founded the Seleucid dynasty that ruled in the region until its conquest by the Romans from the west and the Persian Parthians from the east in the second century BC. Thereafter, the Middle East became divided between the Romans and, later, the Byzantines, on the one side, against whom stood the Persian dynasties of the Parthians and their successors, the Sassanids, on the other. The situation remained thus until the seventh century AD, when a new force entered the scene.