At the beginning of the Christian era, the region which we now call the Middle East was disputed, for neither the first nor the last time in the thousands of years of its recorded history, between two mighty imperial powers. The western half of the region, consisting of the countries round the eastern Mediterranean from the Bosphorus to the Nile delta, had all become part of the Roman Empire. Its ancient civilizations had fallen into decline, and its ancient cities were ruled by Roman governors or native puppet princes. The eastern half of the region belonged to another vast empire, which the Greeks, and after them the Romans, called 'Persia', and which its inhabitants call 'Iran'. The political map of the region, both in its outward form and in the realities which it represents, was very different from the present day. The names of the countries were not the same, nor were the territorial entities which they designated. Most of the peoples who lived in them at that time spoke different languages and professed different religions from those of today. Some even of the few exceptions are more apparent than real, representing a conscious evocation of a rediscovered antiquity rather than an uninterrupted survival of ancient traditions. The map of southwest Asia and northeast Africa, in the era of PersoRoman domination and rivalry, was also very different from that of the more ancient Middle Eastern empires and cultures, most of which had been conquered and assimilated by stronger neighbours long before the Macedonian phalanx, the Roman legion, or the Persian cataphract established their domination. Of the older cultures that had survived until the beginning of the Christian era, retaining something of their old identity and*their old language, the most ancient was surely that of Egypt (Source: Bernard Lewis's History of Middle East).
Middle Elamite Era: New Succession System
