The Persian Empire, like the former German Empire and the vast country under Napoleon, was an empire in the modern sense of the word, for it was made up of various countries which, although dependent on the Persian Empire, retained their individuality, customs, and laws. The general laws that were enacted, while binding on all, did not lead to ethnic hatred, but even supported them, so that each of the peoples that created the empire had its own political system. Just as light shines on everything and fills each with a way of life, so the Persian Empire embraced many peoples and left each free in its own unique character and character. Some of those peoples even followed their own kings, and had their own language, saddlery, way of life, and customs, and all of them lived peacefully together under the shelter of the impartial authority of "enlightenment." The Persian Empire embraced all three geographical elements that we have already recognized from each other. First, the mountains of Persia and Media; second, the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, whose inhabitants were united under the shadow of an advanced civilization; and also Egypt, that is, the Nile Valley, which has nurtured industrial and agricultural techniques and all kinds of knowledge in its bed; and finally, the third element of the Persian Empire must also be mentioned, and these were the peoples who went to the forefront of the dangers of the seas, namely, the Syrians and the Phoenicians and the inhabitants of the Greek colony and the coastal states of Greece in Asia Minor. Thus Iran mixed the three natural principles, while China and India were strangers to the sea. In Iran there was neither the sign of that unified whole that I saw in China, nor the chaos that lust created throughout Hindu life. Here the government, although it brought all the peoples together in a centralized unity, left each of them to itself; And thus the savagery and cruelty that were committed in the conflicts of peoples with each other, and which the Book of the Prophets and the Book of Samuel of the Torah testify to, came to an end. The lamentations of the Jewish prophets and their curses on the conditions existing before the opening of Babylon by Cyrus tell of the darkness, ruin, and confusion of their condition, as well as of the happiness that Cyrus bestowed upon all of Western Asia. The Asians were not accustomed to mixing independence, freedom, and agility of thought or civilization, that is, with attachment to various professions and amusements and the enjoyment of the means of comfort of life. Bravery in war is compatible with them only with savagery. This bravery is not the kind of bravery that is calm and based on order; and when it accepts various cultural attachments, their manhood soon weakens, their strength diminishes, and they become men who are slaves to success.
Taken from the book Reason in History, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel