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One you don’t often hear about is one of the most crushing defeats in Roman history. It was delivered at the hands of the Persian Empire under the Parthian Dynasty in 53 BC at the Battle of Carrhae.The Persian General Surena defeated a vastly larger Roman force under Crassus.The Persians used what was essentially a combined arms approach, including the use of their Cataphracts (heavy armoured horse) and superb horse archers famed for the Parthian Shot or Parting Shot.This was one of the early acts in what is considered the longest conflict in human history, the 720+ year Roman–Persian Wars that weakened both empires to the point that they were spent by the time of the Islamic invasion of the 7th century AD.The Persian Cataphracts:Recreation of The Parting Shot by a Parthian horse archer (Ardeshir Radpour - Photo by Holly Martin Photography):Not a good day to be a Roman legionnaire:

My sister and I like to hike and go to weird places, and we’re always on the look out for the unusual. And my sister especially loves to get photos of weird stuff. Here are some strange and mystifying signs we’ve come across. All photos by Anna.We came across these words of wisdom on a basketball court of a long abandoned school in Massachusetts.Doesn’t get any cooler than a turnip festival on Cape Cod.The trail doesn’t look all that healthy to me.I wouldn’t have noticed if that sign wasn’t there.On the side of a building in Mount Holly, New Jersey.An interesting exhibit, too bad we didn’t have time to see it.Ancient graffiti in an old house we were in.No wonder the species are endangered, they live in a cemetery.We saw this in the woods near Bar Harbor, Maine. Our elderly neighbor told us that these are code signs that the old hobos used to describe how the people in an area were.I have no doubt that you can get plenty of food and gas at this place. :)Before the sign, were people just getting nonchalantly buried there?A fun way to die on Maho Beach, in St Maarten. It was stupid but we had to try it. And yes indeed, we got knocked on our skinny butts.

Yes, it was a tripolar world. Rome was not the sole undisputed superpower as often depicted in books and movies, the Persian Empire (under both the Parthian and Sassanian dynasties), and the Chinese Han Dynasty, were its equals, with Han China being arguably greater than either Rome or Persia for a period of time.The longest conflict in human history that you've never heard of because they don't really focus on what lies between Greece and India in western schools (i.e. anything to do with ancient Iran and the Persians), was the 720+ year war between Persia and Rome and its incarnation Byzantium. Iran stopped Rome's eastward expansion while Rome stopped Persian westward expansion through an almost-millenial conflict that left both Iran and Rome/Byzantium so weak they succumbed to the Islamic invasion of the 7th century.Roman–Persian WarsThird century AD, Emperor Shahpur I of the Sassanian Dynasty taking the Roman Emperor Valerian I prisoner after defeating the Roman army, as Phillip the Arab pleads on Valerian's behalf:Aaaand...he also defeated the Roman Emperor Phillip:The Persian Horse Archer and the Parthian (aka Parting) Shot (Ardeshir Radpour - Photo by Holly Martin Photography):The Persian Cataphract, the bane of the legions of Rome:Persian Infantry, Sassanian era:The two empires in 600 AD:Since you will almost certainly never see a Hollywood movie about the time a Roman Emperor was defeated and captured by an Iranian Shah, here is a CGI recreation of the Battle of Edessa:Note1: People get confused about the Persian/Iranian thing. "Persia" is what the West called Iran, via the ancient Greeks, since the home of the first Emperors of Iran, Cyrus the Great and his successors, was in Pars (or Fars) in southern Iran, and the language (and ethnicity) of the largest group of Iranians is Persian (Kind of like "British" vs "English"). Iranians have never called their country Persia. It was referred to as Aryanem-Veija (the Aryan Expanse) in Pahlavi Persian, Eiran-Shahr (Land of the Aryans) in Middle Persian, and Iran in Modern Persian for the past thousand years (when as old as us you become, changed your perceptions of “modern” will be).Reza Shah insisted the international community respect the local name for the country in 1935 (long story), but the two terms refer to the same thing. It's a bit infuriating when people imply the "Persians" are long gone and Iranians are a new, unrelated people who just wandered onto the Iranian plateau sometime recently. The name "Iran" has absolutely no relation to the term "Iraq", by the way, they only sound (and are spelled) alike in some languages other than Persian or Arabic.Note2: Many people are astounded they haven't heard any of this before. Most of the Roman legions were focused on the East and the Iranian threat was the main worry of the establishment in Rome. Yet everyone has heard of Carthage and Hannibal and the Visigoths etc.. To give an (admittedly imperfect) analogy that might help explain this, the single most important conflict in WWII was between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The bulk of the Wehrmacht (over 200 divisions) was deployed on the Eastern Front with the Western front being a side-show with tens of divisions. North Africa that is so romanticized in Western movies was literally a side-show to a side-show. The largest tank battle in History took place at the Kursk-Orel salient in 1943 and it was this battle that broke the back of Nazi Germany, and yet almost everyone in the West seems to think The Battle of the Bulge or D-Day were the pivotal battles of WWII. Essentially, the Russians, being the "Enemy" of the West, are largely ignored in the legend created about that conflict in mainstream Western media. And so it is with the Persians, against whom the West essentially defined itself since the Greco-Persian wars (don't even get me started about the lop-sided narrative of that one, essentially 100% based on Greek sources. Three million against three hundred. Right). See my bio for this topic above to get a sense of why I bothered writing any of this. Also see the first episode of the new Netflix series “Roman Empire; Reign of Blood” to see how completely the Persian gorilla in the room is ignored by Hollywood in order to magnify Rome.Edit: I don't want to imply the Arab victory over the Persians and Byzantines was strictly a function of the relative exhaustion and weakness of the two empires at that time. There is no question that Khalid ibn al-Walid was one of the greatest generals of all time. However, he wouldn't have stood a chance against either empire if they hadn't been punch-drunk by the 7th century. That said, if someone of a lesser caliber had been leading the Muslim armies against an even weakened Persia or Rome...well, look at how modern Iran stopped Saddam when Iran was at its weakest, in post-revolutionary turmoil, embargoed and sanctioned to death, while Saddam enjoyed the support of two superpowers, Europe, and basically the entire Arab league.