The Rise of the Persian Empire: Professor Matt Waters on Ancient Empires and Cyrus the Great
Tides of History
The Importance of Durability in Empire
No empire can rule through an iron fist alone because your armies can't be everywhere all the time and eventually your soldiers aren't going to want to spend all their time burning down cities. But at the same time, if your subjects forget that the iron fist is still there inside the velvet glove, then you're going to have more trouble than you can deal with. The Persians, the Assyrians and the Persians especially seem to have found a really effective balance between those two things to build imperial systems.
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