AHC: A thousand nations of the Persian Empire

Expand or fragment the Persian Empire to an extent that they have a thousand satrapies, a thousand officially-recognized ethnic groups, or a thousand different languages (dialects count).

Then have at least one member from at least nine hundred of these 'nations' participate in the same invasion of the city-state of Sparta.
 
Persians absorb India *de jure* and the rest of Greece? Then they subdivide their territory based on geography for satrapies and not ethnicity, thus giving you a "1000 nations".
 
Usually countries, even very large empires do not have thousand first level subdivisions. It will cause administrative problems. There could be second or third level subdivisions reaching a thousand in number. Thousand states or provinces or satrapis are quite unlikely. But thousand districts or counties are possible. Historically Persian Empire had around twenty satrapis, I think.
 
Hmm...well, we start with 20 satrapies under Darius the Great. I don't know that splitting each of those up into five districts would be practical. So it seems like they would have to do some expanding. Reading Creation by Gore Vidal gives me the idea of Persia invading India and occupying the Ganges Valley, which could certainly double the number of satrapies. Maybe from there they could be rearranged to 100?

So an invasion force landing in Greece consisting almost half of Indians?

EDIT: Misread it as 100. 1000? Good luck...
 
Somehow have them conquer India and still be called Persia and retain the satrapies? That would get them the required diversity. Perhaps some later administrative reform changes the definition of a satrapy so it's a lot smaller?
 
Expand or fragment the Persian Empire to an extent that they have a thousand satrapies, a thousand officially-recognized ethnic groups, or a thousand different languages (dialects count).

Then have at least one member from at least nine hundred of these 'nations' participate in the same invasion of the city-state of Sparta.

These are three separate possibilities, right? Because the third is possible if we put India in the empire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India, the second would require an unusually narrow definition, and the first is just silly if Persia is to be a coherent enough entity to invade anyone.

Bruce
 
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