Alexander the Great conquered Persia and in the process changed the history of an ancient land, whose secrets could be traced back to the fire temples of Ahura Mazda
While not as well-known as that of the Achaemenid dynasty (550–330 BC), the second Persian empire ruled by the Sasanian dynasty (AD 224–642) is a pivotal but often overlooked period of ancient Western Asian art and archaeological history. Standing at the cusp of the ancient and medieval worlds, the Sasanian empire was the last great Iranian empire to rule over Western Asia before the coming of Islam, extending at its height in the seventh century from the Nile to the Oxus. Over the course of late antiquity, Sasanian art, architecture, and court culture created a new dominant aristocratic common culture in western Eurasia, beguiling their Roman, South Asian, and Chinese contemporaries and deeply imprinting the later Islamic world.