The Acropolis was the fortress on top of the hill overlooking Athens where the city’s troops held out. Of course that would be the first place the Persians destroyed…it was the city’s defensive structure.
I meant the Parthenon & temples *inside *the Acropolis. Which were burned and looted specifically.
In any case there were not even very many troops to hold it in the first place - the overwhelming majority of the population & army (but that’s the same thing) of Athens had bugged out to the island of Salamis for Reasons. The city fell almost overnight.
Though obviously any Ancient Greek would tell you that the city never *really *fell, because the *real *City of the Athenians is within the Athenians themselves, and those kicked Persian arse ! Later. Elsewhere. Look, it didn’t count alright ? 
The general pattern of imperialist expansion before the advent of firearms, was to co-opt or replace the top rulers of a conquered land and leave the rest intact. Why rile up the locals unnecessarily?
Perhaps invaders with overwhelming force could inflict whatever damage and intimidation they wanted, but don’t forget - until recent times, much of an army was recruited from the countryside and had to return once invasion season was over. It took a big empire to maintain a decent number of dedicated troops.
Of course, during the time of first conquest, a decent amount of damage may be done- rowdy and victorious troops will tend to run amuck. (For example there’s a suggestion that the first burning of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70AD was an accident or undisciplined troops, they burned it despite attempts by the generals not to.) But - looting the conquered city was one way the troops got paid, or at least a bonus. Temples are where a lot of the riches are going to be found.
British conquest is noticeably mixed on this. In certain areas, the British did generally obliterate or at least severely marginalize local traditions, such as in North America and Australia. In India however, they pretty much just set up themselves as a ruling class to siphon wealth off, leaving Hindu and Muslim sites and traditions in place.
Yup - but it could be argued that it’s because they didn’t really have a choice in the matter. I say, far too many of those blasted Hindoo chaps to take head on and teach jolly well what for, indeed, what, what.
Kinda why the “conquest” didn’t really stick, though. India was always *India, *as opposed to e.g. New New England. Thus demonstrating my seminal point ! 
Didn’t Xerxes regret it right away, and then ordered it rebuilt? “Oh shit guys, this isn’t me. Here, let me make this right.”
Years later Alexander is celebrating victory in Persepolis. The wine is flowing, things are getting out of hand, somebody gets a little too close to the drapery with a torch. “Well, we were drunk. And hey, they burned Athens.”
In India, the Moguls starting with Akbar used a light hand on the Hindus, since they needed their support as they expanded (sometimes against other Muslims). It wasn’t until the 17th C. when Aurangzeb came along. His brother had been the sophisticated, enlightened one; but Aurangzeb, dumber though tougher, took over. He toed a hard line on religion, resulting in enough disruption to allow the British to begin gaining control.
The burning of Athens was a revenge attack, for the Athenian participation in the burning of Sardis.
It wasn’t a policy of Persian cultural repression - plenty of Greeks fought on the side of the Persians, and it was in fact Persian imperial policy not to mess with local beliefs. If point of fact, they went around deliberately undoing the imperial cultural repressions undertaken by previous conquerers, as a goodwill-building gesture.
Fun fact: this gets them an admiring write-up in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, the messiah specifically idenified in the Book of Isaiah was - the Persian emperor Cyrus!
He gets to be the “messiah” even though, of course, he was neither Jewish nor a believer in the Jewish god - because he “undid” the Babylonian captivity.
This isn’t true, in respect of North American natives. The Britsh did not “obliterate or severely marginalize” native beliefs. In some places, they destroyed the native ways of life, in once case leading to their physical extermination (for example, Newfoundland) but this tended not to be official British policy so much as the acts of local settlers, facing relatively primitive hunter-gatherers (the vast majority of the native population was considerably more sophisticated).
Often, the British carefully co-opted local natives and participated in their ritual systems to gain their co-operation - see for example native and British co-operation during the War of 1812.
The British manipulated and exploited natives for their own imperial ends (and, to be fair, the natives were manipulating the British as well, to the best of their abilities, for similar purposes - each saw the other as a counterweight against the Americans). What they did not do, was supress native beliefs.
There was some attempts at suppression and forced assimilation, but those were much later, and not “British” - rather, they were Canadian.
Neither the original invasion nor the subsequent Muslim waves nor most of the Reconquista were particularly keen on destruction. Differential taxation on the Muslim side made it easier to be a Muslim than a Jew or a Christian; laws on the Christian side generally didn’t have that particular bent. There are cathedrals where part of the decoration was built by Muslim artists, one place where the same building (entered by three different doors) served as Cathedral, Mosque and Sinagogue, Muslim palaces still standing pretty far North… The closest thing to a “ghetto” I’m familiar with is in a location where some Muslims complained that when their children played with the Christian and Jewish children, they got contaminated; they wanted everybody to have to follow Halal strictures (I’m still wondering what had they been smoking); the King offered to let them set aside an area where only Muslims would be allowed to live and they accepted. It wasn’t wine and roses but in general, both population and policies were pretty laid back about it.
Doubt it as he left very soon after that, in a hurry because his fleet got roflpwnd. Took most of his dudes along with him, and the ones that chose to stay in Greece to fuck some more shit up abandoned Attica. The Athenians took their city back without a fight within, like, a month.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
The burning of Athens was a revenge attack, for the Athenian participation in the burning of Sardis.
[/QUOTE]
Yes and no. It’s true that the first Persian war was indeed all about the pimp slapping of Athens ; but Xerxes OTOH meant more serious business. He did plan to set up shop in Greece permanently. Which presumably would have included Athens - unless his plan was to give them the full Carthage ?
Now, that being said, my original comment came with a “;)” for a reason - AK84 made a sweeping statement to which a counter-example immediately sprung to mind, even though I realized the example itself wasn’t necessarily significant - I really know fuck all about the inner workings or history of the Persian empire.
“the Lord Thy God is a jealous God” was a relatively minor concept until the Christians took over the Roman Empire. Even then, if I recall my Gibbons, the old paganism originally petered out due to lack of fanatic interest competing with Christianity, rather than concerted suppression by the now-ascendant Christians. As we see with Zeus-Jove, Venus-Aphrodite, the general concept was to match the gods if they could; or sometimes (like Isis from Egypt) simply acknowledge them as additional but irrelevant gods. Nobody in most early religions felt that they needed to convert the outsiders.
The Babylonians, IIRC ("…by the rivers of Babylon, I sat and wept…") made a concerted effort to shuffle the people in their empire away from their homelands, to break up any large collections of single ethnic groups that might get together and rise up against the central government. But although they relocated the twelve tribes all over the Babylonian map (along with all their other conquered nations), they did not appear to make a concerted effort to change their religion. Obviously, the thought was that the geographic disruption would contribute to religious disruption from loss of identity over time…
Even the conquistadors - they defeated the Incas and the Aztecs not just by shock and awe, but also with the help of those empires’ oppressed tribes they picked up as allies along the way. Destroying the temples helped win the hearts of the oppressed enjoying their revenge.
My understanding is that Xerxes felt he had to burn Athens to make an example of them; but he planned to rebuild it, and leave the Athenian exiles (who supported him) in charge. Those plans were upset somewhat by the battle of Salamis …
Universalist religions are mostly something seen in the first millenium onwards. Christianity was one taking after Judaism, (while modern day Jews might protest otherwise, we do in fact have evidence of ancient Isrelites making forcible conversions). Zoresternism and Islam were the other ones. Universalist religions tend towards the “our way or the highway approach”.Otherwise, mostly, conversions were not made except. In the case of the Romans, especially (and also the Persians to an extent) it was almost expected that you would make an offering to a local god when visiting a place. I remember reading a Biblical commentary that the the Romans would have been quite happy to worship Yahweh and do whatever rituals were required and were quite miffed and a little affronted that the locals would not let them.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
My understanding is that Xerxes felt he had to burn Athens to make an example of them; but he planned to rebuild it, and leave the Athenian exiles (who supported him) in charge. Those plans were upset somewhat by the battle of Salamis …
[/QUOTE]
Not Salamis as much as having to deal with a rebellion in Babylon which made punative expeditions on the marshes less pressing concerns.
The Ptolemies not only didn’t destroy Egyptian religion and culture, they actively embraced it. To the point where people today simply think of figures like Cleopatra as Egyptian rather than Greek.
My apologies, I should have been more clear that I was referring to armies invading/conquering/putting down rebels. Temple destruction as a form of social discrimination in places already under control is a different topic and out of the scope of this thread, I think.
I was thinking of Eaton’s articles but I had forgotten his name. Thanks. I don’t remember Shourie specifically, but I’ll check it out.
Come now, Greece is hardly swampy.
Depends on which source you believe.
According to Herodotus, after the loss of the battle, with the Persians’ naval superiority removed, Xerxes feared that the Allies might sail to the Hellespont and destroy the pontoon bridges/disrupt resupply by sea – so he withdrew the bulk of the army (for fear they would be starved out by cutting supply lines), leaving Mardonius with a picked group of troops to finish off the conquest. Mardonius was, after much to-ing and fro-ing, beaten by the Allies at Plataea (and at around the same time, the remnants of the Persian fleet was decisively defeated at Mycale).
It makes a certain amount of sense - in ancient times, moving bulk goods (like food for a massive army) was only really practical by sea, so losing overwhelming naval superiority = lots of supply problems. There was a limit to how many troops the Persians could keep in Greece, either by ‘living off the land’ or by extracting food from their allies.
Certainly, having troubles elsewhere could ‘seal the deal’, but I did not know that there was any reason to doubt that the loss of the overwhelming naval superiority originally enjoyed by the Persians wasn’t the main issue.
The Incas often adopted the gods of conquered people’s into their own mythology.
Tell that to the Parsis. The parsis of Persia (Iran) were wiped out by Muslim invaders. The religion survived because some parsis took refuge in India. We wouldn’t have had Freddie Mercury or the Tatas if left to the Muslims
In fairness, AFAIK that’s more the result of persecution than destruction of places of worship. There is a provision for a separate tax for non-muslims in Islam, and I doubt that would be the only way non-muslim subjects were disadvantaged.