From the wind-swept plains of Anshan to the terraced palaces of Persepolis, Founding an Empire follows how a cluster of royal ambitions became the ancient world’s most sophisticated superstate. Opening with Cyrus the Great’s audacious conquests and his radical politics of legitimacy—liberation, local autonomy, and measured mercy—the narrative moves through Cambyses II’s Egyptian campaign at the edge of the known world and into the turbulence of succession that nearly cracked the young empire. It culminates with Darius I’s disciplined counterrevolution: a reforming king who turned roads, taxes, languages, and law into a scalable system.