title: Toni Collette

text: In 2014, Collette appeared in three comedy films, "Tammy", "A Long Way Down" and "Hector and the Search for Happiness". All three are rated as having "generally unfavorable reviews" by Metacritic. Also in that year she provided the voice to Lady Portley-Rind in the animation "The Boxtrolls". She starred as Milly, opposite Drew Barrymore as Jess, in the comedy drama "Miss You Already" (2015), about two women whose friendship is tested when Jess starts a family while Milly falls ill. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Metacritic rated it at 59% indicating "mixed or average reviews". Billy Goodykoontz of "The Arizona Republic" asserted that "[her] work is so compulsively watchable that "Miss You Already" is worth a watch for that reason alone." Collette then played the matriarch of a dysfunctional family in the horror film "Krampus" (also 2015), which was a commercial success, grossing $61.5 million against a budget of $15 million. Her sole release of 2016 was the crime thriller "Imperium", opposite Daniel Radcliffe, she portrayed Angela Zamparo, an FBI analyst targeting a white supremacist group. Despite its limited release, the film garnered positive reviews, with Gary Goldstein of the "Los Angeles Times" calling it "impressively dimensional...tense, gripping and disturbing," and found her to be "excellent" as Radcliffe's character's supervisor.


title: Toni Collette

text: In 2017, Collette appeared in several films: to varying degrees of success. The action film, "", starring Vin Diesel, was a commercial success, grossing $346.1 million and earned mixed reviews, though Mick LaSalle of the "San Francisco Chronicle" praised her for "embrac[ing] the cold-blooded extremes of her role" as a CIA operative. Her next two films, the war drama "The Yellow Birds" and the comedy "Fun Mom Dinner," premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Although both of these gathered "mixed or average reviews", the actor's work was appreciated, particularly in the former, with the "Los Angeles Times" critic taking note of how she, and co-star Jennifer Aniston, "deliver uniformly naturalistic performances." She was also in the action-thriller "Unlocked", and the comedies "Madame" and "Please Stand By", all of which received "mixed or average reviews" according to Metacritic. The mystery drama "Jasper Jones" (2017) was better received—obtaining 77% at Rotten Tomatoes. Sandra Hall of "The Sydney Morning Herald" praised her emotional range and James Douglas, writing for "The Guardian", said that she was "impossibly vivacious as always". Richard Kuipers of "Variety" eulogized the artist's climactic monologue in which her character laments her discontent, calling her "positively electrifying".


title: Toni Collette

text: Also in that year, she formed the production company Vocab Films, with her US-based talent manager Jen Turner. She had previously worked as executive producer for the films she appeared in, "Like Minds" (2006), "The Black Balloon", and "Hey, Hey, It's Esther Blueburger" (both 2008). Vocab Film's first project is "The Best of Adam Sharp" (2016), a novel by fellow Australian, Graeme Simsion. Collette is set to play the female lead role, Angelina Brown, who is described by Anita Busch of "Deadline" as, "an intelligent and strong-willed woman... who taught [Adam] what it meant to find—and then lose—love." Another project is Julia Dahl's novel, "Invisible City", a co-production with RadicalMedia, for a TV murder mystery with the actor also serving as a script writer for the pilot episode. She explained her motivation, "it's about fighting for personal freedom and living an authentic life. It couldn't be a more relevant time to tell this story about acceptance and integration, or lack thereof. These complex female characters are honest, flawed, and inspiring. We can always use more of those."


title: Toni Collette

text: In 2018, Collette gave what some critics considered to be one of her best performances in the horror film "Hereditary", in which she played Annie Graham, the matriarch of a family haunted by the supernatural following the death of her mother. She was initially reluctant to take on the role, but became convinced by the script's grounded approach and its exploration of grief and loss. She considered it to be the most difficult of her career: in an interview with "Vulture"s Rachel Handler she reflected, "There was no easy moment in this movie... I was shooting 14-take scenes, talking about great loss and difficulty in relating to my family." The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim, and it became A24's highest-grossing film, earning US$80.2 million Chris Nashawaty of "Entertainment Weekly" praised her for "real dramatic power and force", while Michael Phillips of the "Chicago Tribune" complimented her "fierce performance with a human pulse". She won the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Actress and was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead for her performance.


title: Toni Collette

text: She starred in "Wanderlust" (2018), a BBC One drama series about the troubled relationship between Collette's character, Joy Richards, a therapist, and her husband. It was her first lead role in TV series since "Hostages". She also served as an associate producer on the series. Ben Travers of "IndieWire" wrote "[she guides] the [series] through turbulent emotional seas with assurance" and Jen Chaney of "Vulture" remarked that the show was worth watching solely for her performance. Also that year, she appeared in the critically acclaimed comedy "Hearts Beat Loud", which also premiered at Sundance. Peter Bradshaw called it "a likable heartwarmer" and praised the actor for "[giving the] film some sinew in her supporting role."


title: Toni Collette

text: That following year, Collette returned to the horror genre in Dan Gilroy's "Velvet Buzzsaw" (2019), alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo. Partly a satire about the art world, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to polarising reactions. "Chicago Sun-Times" Richard Roeper gave it a positive review, "[she is] as good as we’d expect [her] to be." She played a supporting role as Joni Thrombey in Rian Johnson's critically acclaimed mystery thriller "Knives Out", alongside an ensemble cast including Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, and Christopher Plummer. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was a commercial success, grossing US$311.3 million. Critics highlighted the performances of the cast: Joe Morgenstern wrote that Collette "nails her character’s style with elan" and David Rooney considered her to be "divine as a deeply sincere phony".


title: Toni Collette

text: In 2019, Collette took on the role of a detective, Grace Rasmussen, investigating a troubling rape case, with Merritt Wever and Kaitlyn Dever, in the Netflix miniseries "Unbelievable". She had accepted it prior to reading the script, finding the topic "important and so meaningful". She prepared for the role by having a female cop on set who helped her with such particulars as where to place badges and guns and how to stage a medical examination with a rape victim. It had been seen by over 32 million people making it one of Netflix's highest viewed TV series. The artist received acclaim for her performance and several critics praised her chemistry with Wever: Jen Chaney of "New York" wrote, "Wever and Collette both create fully authentic women who ooze integrity but also have enough insecurities and make enough mistakes to seem like actual human beings". For her performance, she received nominations for a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award, and won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Movie/Miniseries.


title: Toni Collette

text: In 2020, she took on a leading role in the drama film "Dream Horse", playing a middle-aged South Wales native who decides to train a racehorse. Dennis Harvey of "Variety" praised her for "easily [carrying] the film’s emotional weight." She appeared in Charlie Kaufman's psychological thriller film "I'm Thinking of Ending Things", which was released on Netflix in September 2020. In 2021, she had lead roles in the science fiction thriller film "Stowaway", and Guillermo del Toro's neo-noir thriller film "Nightmare Alley". She starred in the Netflix thriller series "Pieces of Her" (March 2022) and played Kathleen Peterson HBO Max limited series "The Staircase".


title: Toni Collette

text: Despite cherishing music and singing at a young age, Collette had stopped in the mid-1990s and explained, "[Singing] comes from a very personal place. It's your voice... and it's only in the last couple of years I felt comfortable in myself singing." In 1996 she sang three cover versions for the soundtrack of the film, "Cosi": "Don't Dream It's Over" (originally by Crowded House), "Stand By Me" (Ben E. King) and "Throw Your Arms Around Me" (Hunters & Collectors). In 2000 she recorded nine tracks for the cast album, "The Wild Party", for the eponymous Broadway musical. Elyse Sommer of "CurtainUp," in a review of the musical, wrote that she was a "topnotch singer" and particularly praised her rendition of "People Like Us". For the soundtrack of "Connie and Carla" (2004), Collette, and her co-star Nia Vardalos, recorded duets of several show tunes including, "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair", "Maybe This Time" and "Cabaret". David Haviland of "Eye for Film" praised the renditions, "The musical numbers are a camp triumph." She sang the track, "Sunday Morning", for the album "Summertown" by Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier. She has also performed songs for soundtracks of "About a Boy", "A Long Way Down", "Miss You Already" and "Hearts Beat Loud".


title: Toni Collette

text: Collette has been writing her own songs since early teens. In 2006 with encouragement of her husband Dave Galafassi on drums (ex-Gelbison), she formed Toni Collette & the Finish in Sydney. Also joining the band were Amanda Brown on keyboards, Glenn Richards on guitar, David Lane on piano and keyboards and Pete Farley on bass guitar. Their first gig was at The Basement, Sydney, "I was completely petrified and I think once I got that out of the way, I have just been enjoying it... In the acting, the film world, they try to hide things from actors, keep them cushioned. So I am really enjoying getting my hands dirty."


title: Toni Collette

text: On 9 October 2006 the band released their debut album, "Beautiful Awkward Pictures", on Hoola Hoop Records. Using her personal life as an inspiration, she wrote all eleven tracks under her married name, Toni Collette-Galafassi. It was recorded in two weeks: Collette co-produced with Zygier. Eclectic of "Sputnikmusic" gave it a positive review, "Collette's subdued vocals aren't perfect, but they're close enough to love all the same." He did, however, rebuke the lyrics of some tracks remarking that they had "some stunningly bad lines". The album produced two singles, "Beautiful Awkward Pictures" (September 2006) and "Look Up" (March 2007). The latter reached the ARIA Singles Chart top 100. In July 2007 Toni Collette & the Finish headlined the Sydney show of Live Earth, singing a cover of T. Rex's "Children of the Revolution". They toured Australia, but have not performed nor released any new material after 2007. In 2012 she expressed her desire to make another album, but said she found it difficult to find enough time to commit to that project.


title: Toni Collette

text: Collette supports various charities including Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and Feeding America. She expressed her support for PETA and, in July 2005, wrote a letter to then Australian Prime Minister John Howard, asking him to ban the practice of mulesing and the live export of sheep. Later that month, after speaking to sheep farmers, she reneged on supporting PETA's campaign against mulesing: "The issue is not as black and white as was previously presented to me. I was given to understand that there were 'effective and humane alternatives to prevent fly strike' and they are 'currently available.' I am now aware that there are no simple alternatives available to farmers at this time."


title: Toni Collette

text: In 2009, the actor auctioned off T-shirts of her own design to raise money for various charities. Collette along with Drew Barrymore and Catherine Hardwicke, who all worked together on "Miss You Already", wore pink ribbons to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October 2014. She has raised money for OzHarvest, an organisation which collects excess food from Australian restaurants and redistributes it to the homeless. She sold some of her personal items for an auction to raise money for the charity Cure Our Kids, which is dedicated to raising money for the oncology unit at The Children's Hospital at Westmead.


title: Toni Collette

text: In 2010, she was part of the host committee to hold the third annual Go Go Gala which will benefit the GO Campaign which seeks to help orphans and vulnerable children throughout the world. She took part in the promotion of the documentary "The Lazarus Effect" (2010), being featured in a small clip which sought to raise awareness of the positive impact of free antiretroviral drug therapy for those living with HIV in Africa. In 2012, Collette has contributed an exclusive blog on the fight against hunger and a call to action for Giving Tuesday and the holiday season to the "Huffington Post".


title: Toni Collette

text: In 2014, she was appointed as a global ambassador for Concern Worldwide. She made her first field visit with Concern to Haiti where she met families who, together with Concern, are working to break the cycle of extreme poverty. She had previously raised money for Concern's global campaign to fight hunger and malnutrition. She has taken part in multiple Public Service Announcements by Concern requesting the viewers to donate to Concern's various campaigns. In 2017, she attended the 25th Annual Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Award Party which seeks to raise money to support innovative HIV prevention, education programs and direct care and support services to people living with HIV. She has expressed her support for the Me Too movement.


title: Toni Collette

text: Collette is described by Toby Creswell and Samantha Trenoweth in their book, "1001 Australians You Should Know" (2006), "she proved her abilities as a serious actress in Rowan Woods' 1998 film "The Boys" and again in the big budget international hits "The Sixth Sense" and "About a Boy"." Sharon Waxman of "The New York Times" wrote that the artist often embraces characters who are pathetic, insecure or otherwise unattractive. However, the actor said she detests playing such characters, "If I keep perpetuating that image of myself — that of a downtrodden person — that's the only roles I'll get. And I'm getting tired of playing those roles." Despite achieving stardom early in her career with "The Sixth Sense", she rarely acted in commerce-driven pictures. She prefers working in independent films over blockbusters where the latter prioritize box-office success over telling a story. Several journalists noted her gravitation towards playing dissatisfied and slightly neurotic mothers. When asked about being typecast in such roles, Collette replied, "All people are different. All women are different. A lot of women haven't had children but it doesn't change the fact that they're individuals and have some kind of individuality and spark about them."


title: Toni Collette

text: Collette listed Geoffrey Rush as one of her influences and remembered seeing him in "The Diary of a Madman" (1989): "When I watched him in that, it was like being in church, I had a full-on spiritual awakening. I even wrote him this letter – I don't remember what it said, but it was very complimentary." She does not find it difficult to detach herself from her roles, but reflected that after doing several heavy thematic films she, "[started] to find things were accumulating. I had to figure out a way to kind of shake it off. So I am figuring that out." When asked how she decides to play her characters, she replied, "When I look at a character, I never look at the size of the role. I always look at the whole person, no matter how much they're featured in the movie." She dislikes working with dialect coaches when preparing for an accent, as they usually make her feel self-conscious. Although she has gained weight to play characters in previous films, she dislikes doing so, and after filming "In Her Shoes", said that she would never do so again. Brie Larson, who starred with Collette in "United States of Tara", has cited her as an inspiration and praised her for being able to "disappear" into her roles. Greg Kinnear, her co-star in "Dinner with Friends" and "Little Miss Sunshine," called her "gifted" and commended her for being able to communicate without dialogue.


title: Toni Collette

text: In an analysis of Collette's acting style, Rilla Kingston compared her to character actress Thelma Ritter who was widely critically acclaimed for her supporting roles, and repeatedly typecast as the female comic second. Kingston took note of her use of physicality to convey her characters' emotions as in "Emma" and "United States of Tara". She remarked that Collette's acting method references the components of Stanislavski's System of Acting. In studying her typecasting as mothers, Kingston wrote, "[Collette] selectively chooses roles of women and mothers which she can portray in ways that are multidimensional and different from another." She also wrote that the actor makes conscious efforts to break from the typecasting, with leading roles in films like "Miss You Already" and "Lucky Them". At the end of her analysis, Kingston concluded, "Collette truly is a chameleon in both the versatility of her acting style and in the kind of roles she is willing to approach with a physicality-based method."


title: Toni Collette

text: Collette is particularly known for her expressive and highly malleable face, her ability to convey emotions and messages without dialogue, distinctive versatility, physical transformations and accents. Collette's versatility as a performer is unique in that despite playing a wide range of characters with vastly different personalities and nuances they're usually portrayed through the medium of a mother character and they often deal with issues relating to motherhood.


title: Toni Collette

text: In her twenties she found it difficult to adapt to being in the media spotlight and, as a result, struggled with bulimia and panic attacks. The panic attacks lasted eight months; she described having pains in her chest, blurred vision and profuse sweating. During this period she travelled extensively, shaved her head five times (once for a film role) and bought a flat in Brixton, London. Her aim was to "explore different ideas and just look at life and try to understand it." She left the Brixton flat after a few months because she saw a man "getting his head bashed in with a pole 30 metres away."


title: Toni Collette

text: Collette dated her "Velvet Goldmine" co-star, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, for about a year ( 1997) before ending their relationship and described it as "hedonistic, drunken and probably dangerous". When asked about her faith, she remarked: "We're all spiritual... I'm not Buddhist but I am drawn to it because it seems the most beneficial of organised religions, and the most compassionate. It's an ongoing journey."


title: Toni Collette

text: She met musician Dave Galafassi at a 2002 album launch for his then-band Gelbison. The couple married in a traditional Buddhist ceremony on 11 January 2003. The couple have a daughter, Sage Florence, born on 9 January 2008, and a son, Arlo Robert, born on 22 April 2011. She has said that she is an avid camper and enjoys meditating. They lived in Sydney in the 2000s before moving to Los Angeles. The family returned to Sydney in 2019. On 7 December 2022, Collette announced that she and Galafassi were divorcing.


title: Toni Collette

text: Among her numerous accolades, Collette received five AACTA Awards from eight nominations, a Golden Globe Award from six nominations, a Primetime Emmy Award from four nominations, and a Screen Actors Guild Award from four nominations. She also received nominations for two British Academy Film Awards and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.


title: Toni Collette

text: For her performance in "Muriel's Wedding" (1994), Collette received her first Golden Globe Award nomination. For her role in "The Sixth Sense" (1999), she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She went on to earn BAFTA Award nominations for "About a Boy" (2002) and "Little Miss Sunshine" (2006). Collette earned further acclaim for the comedy-drama series "United States of Tara" (2008–2011), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. For her performance in the acclaimed miniseries "Unbelievable" (2019), she earned a Critics' Choice Television Award and garnered further Golden Globe Award and Primetime Emmy Award nominations.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Sanna Mirella Marin (; born 16 November 1985) is a Finnish politician who has been serving as the Prime Minister of Finland since 2019. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP), she has been a Member of Parliament since 2015.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Following Antti Rinne's resignation in the wake of the postal strike controversy, Marin was selected as Prime Minister on 8 December 2019. Taking office at the age of 34, she is the youngest person to hold the office in Finnish history, as well as the world's fourth-youngest state leader after Dritan Abazović of Montenegro, Gabriel Boric of Chile and Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Sanna Mirella Marin was born on 16 November 1985 in Helsinki. She also lived in Espoo and Pirkkala before moving to Tampere. Her parents separated when she was very young; the family faced financial problems and Marin's father, Lauri Marin, struggled with alcoholism. After her biological parents separated, Marin was brought up by her mother and her mother's female partner.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Marin graduated from the Pirkkala High School (Pirkkalan Yhteislukio) in 2004 at the age of 19. She worked in a bakery and as a cashier while studying, graduating with a bachelor's and master's degree in Administrative Science from the University of Tampere.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Marin's political career was described by the BBC as "beginning at the age of 20", in the years following her high school graduation and beginning her affiliation with the Social Democratic Youth. Marin joined the Social Democratic Youth in 2006 and served as its first vice president from 2010 to 2012.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In 2008, she unsuccessfully ran for election to the City Council of Tampere, but stood again and was elected in the 2012 elections. She became chairwoman of the City Council within months, serving from 2013 to 2017. In 2017, she was re-elected to the City Council. She first gained prominence after video clips of her chairing contentious meetings were shared on YouTube.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Marin was elected second deputy chairman of the SDP in 2014. In 2015, she was elected to the Finnish Parliament as an MP from the electoral district of Pirkanmaa. Four years later, she was re-elected. On 6 June 2019, she became Minister of Transport and Communications.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In December 2019, Marin was nominated by the SDP to succeed Antti Rinne as the Prime Minister of Finland, but Rinne formally remained party leader until June 2020. In a narrow vote, Marin prevailed over Antti Lindtman. A majority of the ministers in her five-party cabinet are women, numbering 12 out of 19 at the time of the cabinet's formation. She is the third and longest-serving female head of government in Finland, after Anneli Jäätteenmäki and Mari Kiviniemi.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Upon her confirmation by Parliament at the age of 34, she became Finland's youngest-ever Prime Minister, and was the youngest serving state leader until Sebastian Kurz regained that description in January 2020.


title: Sanna Marin

text: During the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Marin Cabinet invoked a state of emergency in Finland to alleviate the epidemic. When Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven could not attend a European Council meeting in October 2020 because of his mother's funeral, Marin stepped in to represent Sweden. In return, Marin asked Löfven to represent Finland at a Council meeting later that month.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In March 2021, Marin condemned the persecution of ethnic Uyghurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. She emphasized that "trade or the economy is not a reason to ignore these atrocities".


title: Sanna Marin

text: In a new year address at the start of 2022, Marin stated that Finland had the right to join NATO if it wanted to, and should consider this option. This action caused a negative reaction from the Russian media, with some outlets reporting that "Moscow was stabbed in the back". In February, following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Marin commented on Finland's potential membership, observing: "It is also now clear that the debate on NATO membership in Finland will change", while noting that a Finnish application to NATO would require widespread political and public support.


title: Sanna Marin

text: On 24 February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. On 25 February, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson threatened Finland and Sweden with "military and political consequences" if they attempted to join NATO, which neither were then actively seeking. Both countries had attended an emergency NATO summit as members of NATO's Partnership for Peace and both had condemned the invasion and had provided assistance to Ukraine.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In March 2022, she said the EU needed to end its dependency on Russian oil, adding that "we have these very tough economic sanctions on the one hand, and on the other hand we are financing the Russian war by buying oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels from Russia."


title: Sanna Marin

text: On 4 March 2022, President of Finland Sauli Niinistö visited Washington, D.C. to meet with President Joe Biden and a number of other U.S. politicians and security personnel. In a press conference with Finnish media, Niinistö said that in the meeting the presidents discussed the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its impact on European and Finnish security. Furthermore they agreed on deepening Finnish-US security co-operation and bilateral relations. On 12 May 2022, ten weeks after the beginning of the invasion, President Niinistö and Prime Minister Marin in a joint statement said that "Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay" as such membership "would strengthen Finland's security".


title: Sanna Marin

text: On 15 May, Niinistö and Marin announced that Finland would apply for NATO membership, and on 17 May the Finnish parliament approved the proposal in a vote of 188-8. Marin said she was surprised by Turkey's opposition to Finland's NATO membership. She said her country did not want permanent NATO bases or nuclear weapons on its territory. On 26 May 2022, Marin went to Kyiv at the invitation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, where she met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and visited the war-torn cities of Irpin and Bucha. On 26 May 2022, Marin also signed a bilateral framework agreement on the rebuilding of Ukraine's education with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. On 31 May, she welcomed a deal agreed by all EU leaders to ban more than 90% of Russian oil imports by the end of the year, voting for it in the European Council.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In late November and early December 2022, Marin visited New Zealand and Australia, becoming the first Finnish prime minister to visit the two countries. She met with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and covered several issues including bilateral trade relations, the global economic situation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and climate change mitigation.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In October 2020, an interview of Marin in the Finnish lifestyle magazine "" about her job and its expectations was illustrated by a photograph in which she wore a blazer with nothing underneath it and trousers. It generated much public controversy, with critics accusing her of tastelessness and demeaning her office, and others defending her and accusing the critics of sexism.


title: Sanna Marin

text: On 25 May 2021, Finnish media reported that Marin and her family were spending about €300 per month on groceries with public funds as a part of the Prime Minister's tax-free housing benefits in the official residence, Kesäranta. The legality of the customary arrangement that had been in place for decades was questioned since the rules on the residential benefits did not explicitly mention food provisions. Later, the amount spent was found to be €850 per month, not the €300 first thought. Marin and her family had used around €14,363.20 on catering services in the form of breakfast provisions and cold evening meals in the Prime Minister's official residence between January 2020 and May 2021, equivalent to €845 per month. She stated that she did not know the limit. It turned out that civil servants in the Prime Minister's Office (VNK) handled the payments and Marin was not informed of the running costs of the residential perk. Marin's family have resided in the Kesäranta residence unusually much for a Prime Minister due to the restrictions and practicalities during the pandemic. With the controversy over spending on groceries, Marin had to dispel speculation that public money had also been spent on her wedding, saying that she and her husband "paid for all our wedding expenses ourselves". The Office of the Chancellor of Justice cleared Marin of illegalities in its verdict in December 2022, and stated that she had the right to trust the civil servants whom the Office rebuked for unlawful actions.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In early December 2021, Marin visited a night club in Helsinki with some friends; earlier that day she had been in contact with Finland's foreign minister, who subsequently tested positive for COVID-19, thus exposing the Prime Minister to the infection. Marin was informed of this and advised by an Undersecretary of State that she did not need to self-isolate, as she was fully vaccinated. Later that night two text messages were sent to Marin's governmental work phone alerting her that she should self-isolate after all. However, Marin didn't receive the messages because she was only carrying her parliamentary work phone; the governmental work phone has different security restrictions for its usage. Apparently there was a failure to check whether she had received the update, and therefore no messages to her parliamentary phone. The phone camera video of Marin in the night club published by the magazine that broke the story, 7 Päivää, shows Marin on the dance floor checking her smartwatch for messages.


title: Sanna Marin

text: According to Marin, she had been told that going out in public was permitted due to her having been fully vaccinated. The next day she received information that this was not the case, so she explained missing the updated advice and apologised for her poor judgement on Facebook. Two complaints about Marin's behaviour were filed to the Chancellor of Justice, who subsequently exonerated her. Prominent members of the Centre Party, a partner in Marin's five-party coalition government, alleged that Marin had lied to them by altering her explanations of the events; however, they did not provide evidence of where this occurred.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In August 2022, leaked videos of Marin partying and dancing in a private apartment in Helsinki became public, and went viral. In response to what Marin called "serious allegations in the public domain" regarding drug use, she voluntarily took a drug test on 19 August "for [her] own legal protection [and] to clear up any doubts" and tested negative. There was further controversy after an image of Marin's friends from a party in the prime minister's official residence were leaked depicting two topless women kissing with a "Finland" sign covering their breasts. Marin apologised for the image and called it "not appropriate".


title: Sanna Marin

text: In October 2022, Sanna Marin apologized to the indigenous Sámi people for the delays in the reform of the Sámi human rights legislation. The legislation has been in the making for three parliamentary terms without success. In Marin's cabinet, the law has been repeatedly blocked by the Centre Party. Marin stated that she would bring the legislation for a parliamentary vote even without Centre Party support. In November, ministers voted 11-3 to send the legislation to the Finnish Parliament.


title: Sanna Marin

text: In January 2018, Marin and her partner Markus Räikkönen had a daughter. In August 2020, Marin and Räikkönen, who works in communications, married at the Prime Minister's official residence, Kesäranta. Their permanent residence is in the Kaleva district of Tampere, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, they have resided at Kesäranta. She has said that, if she had the choice, she would move to the countryside.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Marin describes herself as coming from a "rainbow family", as she was raised by two female parents. She was the first person in her family to attend university. Marin is a vegetarian.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Marin was on the list of the BBC's "100 Women" announced on 23 November 2020. On 9 December 2020, she was selected by "Forbes" to rank 85th on the list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women. In 2020 she became a "Young Global Leader" of the World Economic Forum. Marin was selected for the cover of "Time" magazine's "Time100 Next" theme issue, which showcases one hundred influential leaders from around the world. In the December 2022 Financial Times selected Marin on the 25 most influential women list.


title: Sanna Marin

text: Also, the French magazine "Marie Claire" ranked Marin as one of the most influential women in its "1st Annual Power List". The German newspaper "Bild" has praised Marin as the "coolest politician in the world". In 2022, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation named Marin as the icon of progressive leadership.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction.


title: Indo-European languages

text: In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language — by far the highest of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by "Ethnologue", with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.


title: Indo-European languages

text: All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BC to early 3rd millennium BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and part of Western Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian. The oldest records are isolated Hittite words and names — interspersed in texts that are otherwise in the unrelated Akkadian language, a Semitic language — found in texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia dating to the 20th century BC. Although no older written records of the original Proto-Indo-European population remain, some aspects of their culture and their religion can be reconstructed from later evidence in the daughter cultures. The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any known family, after the Afroasiatic family in the form of the pre-Arab Egyptian language and the Semitic languages. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-European languages, and the reconstruction of their common source, was central to the development of the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The Indo-European family is not known to be linked to any other language family through any more distant genetic relationship, although several disputed proposals to that effect have been made.


title: Indo-European languages

text: During the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages. In 1583, English Jesuit missionary and Konkani scholar Thomas Stephens wrote a letter from Goa to his brother (not published until the 20th century) in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Another account was made by Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (these included "devaḥ"/"dio" "God", "sarpaḥ"/"serpe" "serpent", "sapta"/"sette" "seven", "aṣṭa"/"otto" "eight", and "nava"/"nove" "nine"). However, neither Stephens' nor Sassetti's observations led to further scholarly inquiry.


title: Indo-European languages

text: In 1647, Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted the similarity among certain Asian and European languages and theorized that they were derived from a primitive common language which he called Scythian. He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorn's suggestions did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission and noted a few similarities between words in German and in Persian.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a thorough comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Meanwhile, Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups, including Slavic, Baltic ("Kurlandic"), Iranian ("Medic"), Finnish, Chinese, "Hottentot" (Khoekhoe), and others, noting that related languages (including Latin, Greek, German and Russian) must have separated in antiquity from common ancestors.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on the striking similarities among three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, to which he tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, and Persian, though his classification contained some inaccuracies and omissions. In one of the most famous quotations in linguistics, Jones made the following prescient statement in a lecture to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786, conjecturing the existence of an earlier ancestor language, which he called "a common source" but did not name:


title: Indo-European languages

text: Thomas Young first used the term "Indo-European" in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India. A synonym is Indo-Germanic ("Idg." or "IdG."), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French ("indo-germanique") in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than "Indo-European", although in German "indogermanisch" remains the standard scientific term. A number of other synonymous terms have also been used.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Franz Bopp wrote in 1816 "On the conjugational system of the Sanskrit language compared with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic" and between 1833 and 1852 he wrote "Comparative Grammar". This marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline. The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleicher's 1861 "Compendium" and up to Karl Brugmann's "Grundriss", published in the 1880s. Brugmann's neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure's development of the laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of "modern" Indo-European studies. The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins, Jochem Schindler, and Helmut Rix) developed a better understanding of morphology and of ablaut in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 "Apophony in Indo-European," who in 1927 pointed out the existence of the Hittite consonant ḫ. Kuryłowicz's discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure's 1879 proposal of the existence of "coefficients sonantiques", elements de Saussure reconstructed to account for vowel length alternations in Indo-European languages. This led to the so-called laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics and a confirmation of de Saussure's theory.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The various subgroups of the Indo-European language family include ten major branches, listed below in alphabetical order:


title: Indo-European languages

text: In addition to the classical ten branches listed above, several extinct and little-known languages and language-groups have existed or are proposed to have existed:


title: Indo-European languages

text: Membership of languages in the Indo-European language family is determined by genealogical relationships, meaning that all members are presumed descendants of a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. Membership in the various branches, groups and subgroups of Indo-European is also genealogical, but here the defining factors are "shared innovations" among various languages, suggesting a common ancestor that split off from other Indo-European groups. For example, what makes the Germanic languages a branch of Indo-European is that much of their structure and phonology can be stated in rules that apply to all of them. Many of their common features are presumed innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, the source of all the Germanic languages.


title: Indo-European languages

text: In the 21st century, several attempts have been made to model the phylogeny of Indo-European languages using Bayesian methodologies similar to those applied to problems in biological phylogeny. Although there are differences in absolute timing between the various analyses, there is much commonality between them, including the result that the first known language groups to diverge were the Anatolian and Tocharian language families, in that order.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The "tree model" is considered an appropriate representation of the genealogical history of a language family if communities do not remain in contact after their languages have started to diverge. In this case, subgroups defined by shared innovations form a nested pattern. The tree model is not appropriate in cases where languages remain in contact as they diversify; in such cases subgroups may overlap, and the "wave model" is a more accurate representation. Most approaches to Indo-European subgrouping to date have assumed that the tree model is by-and-large valid for Indo-European; however, there is also a long tradition of wave-model approaches.


title: Indo-European languages

text: In addition to genealogical changes, many of the early changes in Indo-European languages can be attributed to language contact. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, etc.) might well be areal features. More certainly, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, because English and continental West Germanic were not a linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar innovations in Germanic and Balto-Slavic that are far more likely areal features than traceable to a common proto-language, such as the uniform development of a high vowel (*"u" in the case of Germanic, *"i/u" in the case of Baltic and Slavic) before the PIE syllabic resonants *"ṛ, *ḷ, *ṃ, *ṇ", unique to these two groups among IE languages, which is in agreement with the wave model. The Balkan sprachbund even features areal convergence among members of very different branches.


title: Indo-European languages

text: An extension to the "Ringe-Warnow model of language evolution", suggests that early IE had featured limited contact between distinct lineages, with only the Germanic subfamily exhibiting a less treelike behaviour as it acquired some characteristics from neighbours early in its evolution. The internal diversification of especially West Germanic is cited to have been radically non-treelike.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Specialists have postulated the existence of higher-order subgroups such as Italo-Celtic, Graeco-Armenian, Graeco-Aryan or Graeco-Armeno-Aryan, and Balto-Slavo-Germanic. However, unlike the ten traditional branches, these are all controversial to a greater or lesser degree.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The Italo-Celtic subgroup was at one point uncontroversial, considered by Antoine Meillet to be even better established than Balto-Slavic. The main lines of evidence included the genitive suffix "-ī"; the superlative suffix "-m̥mo"; the change of /p/ to /kʷ/ before another /kʷ/ in the same word (as in "penkʷe" > "*kʷenkʷe" > Latin "quīnque", Old Irish "cóic"); and the subjunctive morpheme "-ā-". This evidence was prominently challenged by Calvert Watkins, while Michael Weiss has argued for the subgroup.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Evidence for a relationship between Greek and Armenian includes the regular change of the second laryngeal to "a" at the beginnings of words, as well as terms for "woman" and "sheep". Greek and Indo-Iranian share innovations mainly in verbal morphology and patterns of nominal derivation. Relations have also been proposed between Phrygian and Greek, and between Thracian and Armenian. Some fundamental shared features, like the aorist (a verb form denoting action without reference to duration or completion) having the perfect active particle -s fixed to the stem, link this group closer to Anatolian languages and Tocharian. Shared features with Balto-Slavic languages, on the other hand (especially present and preterit formations), might be due to later contacts.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The Indo-Hittite hypothesis proposes that the Indo-European language family consists of two main branches: one represented by the Anatolian languages and another branch encompassing all other Indo-European languages. Features that separate Anatolian from all other branches of Indo-European (such as the gender or the verb system) have been interpreted alternately as archaic debris or as innovations due to prolonged isolation. Points proffered in favour of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis are the (non-universal) Indo-European agricultural terminology in Anatolia and the preservation of laryngeals. However, in general this hypothesis is considered to attribute too much weight to the Anatolian evidence. According to another view, the Anatolian subgroup left the Indo-European parent language comparatively late, approximately at the same time as Indo-Iranian and later than the Greek or Armenian divisions. A third view, especially prevalent in the so-called French school of Indo-European studies, holds that extant similarities in non-satem languages in general—including Anatolian—might be due to their peripheral location in the Indo-European language-area and to early separation, rather than indicating a special ancestral relationship. Hans J. Holm, based on lexical calculations, arrives at a picture roughly replicating the general scholarly opinion and refuting the Indo-Hittite hypothesis.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The division of the Indo-European languages into satem and centum groups was put forward by Peter von Bradke in 1890, although Karl Brugmann did propose a similar type of division in 1886. In the satem languages, which include the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian branches, as well as (in most respects) Albanian and Armenian, the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European palatovelars remained distinct and were fricativized, while the labiovelars merged with the 'plain velars'. In the centum languages, the palatovelars merged with the plain velars, while the labiovelars remained distinct. The results of these alternative developments are exemplified by the words for "hundred" in Avestan ("satem") and Latin ("centum")—the initial palatovelar developed into a fricative in the former, but became an ordinary velar in the latter.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Rather than being a genealogical separation, the centum–satem division is commonly seen as resulting from innovative changes that spread across PIE dialect-branches over a particular geographical area; the centum–satem isogloss intersects a number of other isoglosses that mark distinctions between features in the early IE branches. It may be that the centum branches in fact reflect the original state of affairs in PIE, and only the satem branches shared a set of innovations, which affected all but the peripheral areas of the PIE dialect continuum. Kortlandt proposes that the ancestors of Balts and Slavs took part in satemization before being drawn later into the western Indo-European sphere.


title: Indo-European languages

text: From the very beginning of Indo-European studies, there have been attempts to link the Indo-European languages genealogically to other languages and language families. However, these theories remain highly controversial, and most specialists in Indo-European linguistics are sceptical or agnostic about such proposals.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Nostratic and Eurasiatic, in turn, have been included in even wider groupings, such as Borean, a language family separately proposed by Harold C. Fleming and Sergei Starostin that encompasses almost all of the world's natural languages with the exception of those native to sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, Australia, and the Andaman Islands.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Objections to such groupings are not based on any theoretical claim about the likely historical existence or nonexistence of such macrofamilies; it is entirely reasonable to suppose that they might have existed. The serious difficulty lies in identifying the details of actual relationships between language families, because it is very hard to find concrete evidence that transcends chance resemblance or is not equally likely explained as being due to borrowing, including "Wanderwörter", which can travel very long distances. Because the signal-to-noise ratio in historical linguistics declines over time, at great enough time-depths it becomes open to reasonable doubt that one can even distinguish between signal and noise.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The proposed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE. Using the method of internal reconstruction, an earlier stage, called Pre-Proto-Indo-European, has been proposed.


title: Indo-European languages

text: PIE was an inflected language, in which the grammatical relationships between words were signaled through inflectional morphemes (usually endings). The roots of PIE are basic morphemes carrying a lexical meaning. By addition of suffixes, they form stems, and by addition of endings, these form grammatically inflected words (nouns or verbs). The reconstructed Indo-European verb system is complex and, like the noun, exhibits a system of ablaut.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The diversification of the parent language into the attested branches of daughter languages is historically unattested. The timeline of the evolution of the various daughter languages, on the other hand, is mostly undisputed, quite regardless of the question of Indo-European origins.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following evolutionary tree of Indo-European branches:


title: Indo-European languages

text: In reconstructing the history of the Indo-European languages and the form of the Proto-Indo-European language, some languages have been of particular importance. These generally include the ancient Indo-European languages that are both well-attested and documented at an early date, although some languages from later periods are important if they are particularly linguistically conservative (most notably, Lithuanian). Early poetry is of special significance because of the rigid poetic meter normally employed, which makes it possible to reconstruct a number of features (e.g. vowel length) that were either unwritten or corrupted in the process of transmission down to the earliest extant written manuscripts.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Other secondary sources, of lesser value due to extensive phonological changes and relatively limited attestation:


title: Indo-European languages

text: As the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, changing according to various sound laws evidenced in the daughter languages.


title: Indo-European languages

text: PIE is normally reconstructed with a complex system of 15 stop consonants, including an unusual three-way phonation (voicing) distinction between voiceless, voiced and "voiced aspirated" (i.e. breathy voiced) stops, and a three-way distinction among velar consonants ("k"-type sounds) between "palatal" "ḱ ǵ ǵh", "plain velar" "k g gh" and labiovelar "kʷ gʷ gʷh". (The correctness of the terms "palatal" and "plain velar" is disputed; see Proto-Indo-European phonology.) All daughter languages have reduced the number of distinctions among these sounds, often in divergent ways.


title: Indo-European languages

text: As an example, in English, one of the Germanic languages, the following are some of the major changes that happened:


title: Indo-European languages

text: None of the daughter-language families (except possibly Anatolian, particularly Luvian) reflect the plain velar stops differently from the other two series, and there is even a certain amount of dispute whether this series existed at all in PIE. The major distinction between "centum" and "satem" languages corresponds to the outcome of the PIE plain velars:


title: Indo-European languages

text: The three-way PIE distinction between voiceless, voiced and voiced aspirated stops is considered extremely unusual from the perspective of linguistic typology—particularly in the existence of voiced aspirated stops without a corresponding series of voiceless aspirated stops. None of the various daughter-language families continue it unchanged, with numerous "solutions" to the apparently unstable PIE situation:


title: Indo-European languages

text: The following table shows the basic outcomes of PIE consonants in some of the most important daughter languages for the purposes of reconstruction. For a fuller table, see Indo-European sound laws.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The following table presents a comparison of conjugations of the thematic present indicative of the verbal root * of the English verb "to bear" and its reflexes in various early attested IE languages and their modern descendants or relatives, showing that all languages had in the early stage an inflectional verb system.


title: Indo-European languages

text: While similarities are still visible between the modern descendants and relatives of these ancient languages, the differences have increased over time. Some IE languages have moved from synthetic verb systems to largely periphrastic systems. In addition, the pronouns of periphrastic forms are in parentheses when they appear. Some of these verbs have undergone a change in meaning as well.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Today, Indo-European languages are spoken by billions of native speakers across all inhabited continents, the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of speakers according to "Ethnologue", 10 are Indo-European: English, Hindustani, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, Persian and Punjabi, each with 100 million speakers or more. Additionally, hundreds of millions of persons worldwide study Indo-European languages as secondary or tertiary languages, including in cultures which have completely different language families and historical backgrounds—there are around 600 million learners of English alone.


title: Indo-European languages

text: The success of the language family, including the large number of speakers and the vast portions of the Earth that they inhabit, is due to several factors. The ancient Indo-European migrations and widespread dissemination of Indo-European culture throughout Eurasia, including that of the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves, and that of their daughter cultures including the Indo-Aryans, Iranian peoples, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germanic peoples, and Slavs, led to these peoples' branches of the language family already taking a dominant foothold in virtually all of Eurasia except for swathes of the Near East, North and East Asia, replacing many (but not all) of the previously-spoken pre-Indo-European languages of this extensive area. However Semitic languages remain dominant in much of the Middle East and North Africa, and Caucasian languages in much of the Caucasus region. Similarly in Europe and the Urals the Uralic languages (such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian etc.) remain, as does Basque, a pre-Indo-European isolate.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Despite being unaware of their common linguistic origin, diverse groups of Indo-European speakers continued to culturally dominate and often replace the indigenous languages of the western two-thirds of Eurasia. By the beginning of the Common Era, Indo-European peoples controlled almost the entirety of this area: the Celts western and central Europe, the Romans southern Europe, the Germanic peoples northern Europe, the Slavs eastern Europe, the Iranian peoples most of western and central Asia and parts of eastern Europe, and the Indo-Aryan peoples in the Indian subcontinent, with the Tocharians inhabiting the Indo-European frontier in western China. By the medieval period, only the Semitic, Dravidian, Caucasian, and Uralic languages, and the language isolate Basque remained of the (relatively) indigenous languages of Europe and the western half of Asia.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Despite medieval invasions by Eurasian nomads, a group to which the Proto-Indo-Europeans had once belonged, Indo-European expansion reached another peak in the early modern period with the dramatic increase in the population of the Indian subcontinent and European expansionism throughout the globe during the Age of Discovery, as well as the continued replacement and assimilation of surrounding non-Indo-European languages and peoples due to increased state centralization and nationalism. These trends compounded throughout the modern period due to the general global population growth and the results of European colonization of the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, leading to an explosion in the number of Indo-European speakers as well as the territories inhabited by them.


title: Indo-European languages

text: Due to colonization and the modern dominance of Indo-European languages in the fields of politics, global science, technology, education, finance, and sports, even many modern countries whose populations largely speak non-Indo-European languages have Indo-European languages as official languages, and the majority of the global population speaks at least one Indo-European language. The overwhelming majority of languages used on the Internet are Indo-European, with English continuing to lead the group; English in general has in many respects become the "lingua franca" of global communication.


title: Kate Mara

text: Kate Rooney Mara ( ; born February 27, 1983) is an American actress. She is known for work in television, playing reporter Zoe Barnes in the Netflix political drama "House of Cards" (2013–2014; 2016), computer analyst Shari Rothenberg in the Fox thriller series "24" (2006), wronged mistress Hayden McClaine in the FX miniseries "" (2011), Patty Bowes in the first season of the FX drag ball culture drama series "Pose" (2018) and Claire Wilson, a teacher who begins an illicit relationship with an underage student, in the FX on Hulu miniseries "A Teacher" (2020), for the last of which she received an Independent Spirit nomination for Best New Scripted Series as an executive producer.


title: Kate Mara

text: She made her film debut in "Random Hearts" (1999). She has since appeared in "Brokeback Mountain" (2005), "We Are Marshall" (2006), "Shooter" (2007), "Transsiberian" (2008), "Stone of Destiny" (2008), "The Open Road" (2009), "Transcendence" (2014), "The Martian" (2015), "Fantastic Four" (2015), "Morgan" (2016), "Megan Leavey" (2017), "My Days of Mercy" (2017), and "Chappaquiddick" (2018).


title: Kate Mara

text: Kate Rooney Mara was born on February 27, 1983, in Bedford, New York. Her parents are Timothy Christopher Mara, an NFL scout and vice president of the New York Giants for player evaluation, and Kathleen McNulty Mara ("née" Rooney). She is the second of four siblings, with one older brother, Daniel; one younger sister, the actress Patricia "Rooney"; and one younger brother, Conor. Her ancestry is Irish, one quarter Italian, and smaller amounts of German, French-Canadian, and English. Her father is one of 11 children, through whom she has 20 aunts and uncles, and 40 cousins.


title: Kate Mara

text: She is a great-granddaughter of both New York Giants founder Tim Mara and Pittsburgh Steelers founder Art Rooney, Sr. Her mother's side of the family has held ownership in the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers football team since its formation in 1933, and her father's side of the family has held ownership in the NFL's New York Giants since its formation in 1925. Her paternal grandparents were Wellington Mara and Ann Mara. Wellington co-owned the Giants football team from 1959 until his death in 2005, and was succeeded by his son (Kate Mara's uncle), John Mara, who is currently President, CEO, and co-owner of the team. Kate Mara's maternal grandfather, Timothy James "Tim" Rooney, has operated Yonkers Raceway in Yonkers, New York since 1972. Her granduncle, Dan Rooney, chairman of the Steelers, was a former United States Ambassador to Ireland and the co-founder of the charitable organization The Ireland Funds. Her first cousin, once removed, Art Rooney II, is the current President and co-owner of the Steelers.


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara began acting at the age of nine in a school musical. She attended several youth theater-arts schools and appeared in community theater and in school plays. In an "Esquire" magazine interview, she says she was "painfully shy" growing up, adding she only had one friend.


title: Kate Mara

text: Her first audition was for the NBC police drama "". She did not get the role, but knew from then on she wanted to act. Mara graduated from Fox Lane High School a year early, and was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University to study musical theater, but deferred her slot to work as an actress.


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara's first television role was in the NBC legal drama "Law & Order" in 1997. She went on to guest star on numerous television series, including "Madigan Men", "Ed" and "". Mara landed two recurring roles in 2003, as Kate on "Everwood", an 18-year-old who is impregnated by her piano teacher and then gets an abortion, and as Vanessa on "Nip/Tuck", a bisexual cheerleader involved in a love triangle with her boyfriend Matt McNamara (John Hensley) and another cheerleader (Sophia Bush). Mara also appeared on "Cold Case", "Boston Public", "" and "" that same year.


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara was cast as the lead in the 2004 The WB pilot "Prodigy", about a teenage child prodigy. She had a recurring role on the WB's "Jack & Bobby" in 2005 and a five-episode arc on the Fox TV series "24" in 2006, playing computer analyst . Mara joined the cast of the HBO comedy-drama "Entourage" for the series' sixth season in 2009. She played Brittany, Eric "E" Murphy (Kevin Connolly)'s assistant at his talent-management company and a potential love interest. Mara filmed four episodes for the series in 2009. In 2011, she guest starred on the FX horror series "American Horror Story", as Hayden McClaine, a student who becomes Dr. Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott)'s dead mistress, a spirit trapped in the Harmon house. Mara was offered the role by Ryan Murphy, her former producer on "Nip/Tuck".


title: Kate Mara

text: In 2012, Mara joined the cast of "House of Cards", playing the part of Zoe Barnes, an intrepid reporter from Washington, D.C. who becomes a major ally to Frank Underwood by leaking stories that undermine his rivals. She filmed a second season of the series, which was released on February 14, 2014. On July 10, 2014, she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara's stage debut, in 2003, was at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in John Guare's "Landscape of the Body" with Lili Taylor. Mara starred in "The Alice Complex", a play by Peter Barr Nickowitz, at Dixon Place in New York City in 2005, and at the Blank Theatre in Los Angeles in 2006. The production co-starred Tony Award-winner Harriet Harris. In 2006, she told WFAN radio that theater is a "dream" because it was "all I really wanted to do as a kid. I didn't care about movies or TV, I just wanted to do Broadway".


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara made her film debut in "Random Hearts", with Harrison Ford in 1999, directed by Sydney Pollack. She played Jessica Chandler, the daughter of a congresswoman (Kristin Scott Thomas). She next appeared in the Sundance Film Festival award-winning films "Joe the King" (1999) and "Tadpole" (2002), alongside Sigourney Weaver. Mara co-starred in "Peoples" (2004), a drama and coming of age story filmed in Louisville, Kentucky. She starred in the direct-to-video horror film "" and appeared with Noah Wyle and Illeana Douglas in the 2005 film "The Californians". Her supporting role as the daughter of Heath Ledger's character in the Academy Award-winning film "Brokeback Mountain" that year brought her more widespread critical notice.


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara signed with the William Morris Agency, and was included on the "New York Daily News" list of "10 young actors who have a shot at making it big" at the start of 2006. She appeared in "Zoom" that year as Summer Jones (aka Wonder), a 16-year-old girl with telekinetic and empathic abilities. She next appeared in "We Are Marshall", starring Matthew McConaughey, which recalled the aftermath of the 1970 Marshall University plane crash that took the lives of most of the football team. Mara played cheerleader Annie Cantrell.


title: Kate Mara

text: In 2007, she appeared in the comedy "Full of It" with Ryan Pinkston for New Line Cinema. The film later aired on television as "Big Liar on Campus". Mara was also featured in an advertising campaign for clothing retailer Gap called, "khakis with attitude." She appeared in "Shooter", a thriller about a master sniper portrayed by Mark Wahlberg, lured out of retirement to prevent an assassination. Mara played a Kentucky widow, Sarah Fenn, adopting a southern accent for the role.


title: Kate Mara

text: Also in 2007, she finished her work in the film "Transsiberian", by Brad Anderson, which takes place on the Trans-Siberian Railway that runs from China to Moscow. She spent three months shooting the thriller in Vilnius, Lithuania, starting in December 2006. The film also shot on location in Beijing and Russia. Mara played Abby, a 20-year-old runaway from Seattle. "Transsiberian" premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival in January.


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara starred in the 2008 film "Stone of Destiny", written and directed by Charles Martin Smith, about the theft of the Stone of Scone on Christmas Day, 1950. Mara played Kay Matheson, one of four students that removed the stone in a Scottish nationalist plot. The period adventure-comedy co-starred Billy Boyd, Robert Carlyle and Charlie Cox. Filming began in June 2007 in locations around Glasgow. Mara felt lucky and proud to play a role that was important to people's heritage. She stayed near the Botanic Gardens in the city's West End while filming, attending the film premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 21, 2008. The film closed the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2008.


title: Kate Mara

text: In December 2008, Mara appeared in "T Takes: Brooklyn 09", a series of 6 improvised short films directed by Brody Baker. She starred in "The Open Road" as Lucy.


title: Kate Mara

text: In 2009, Mara filmed the independent comedy "Peep World", starring Michael C. Hall, Sarah Silverman and Rainn Wilson, and joined the cast of Marvel's "Iron Man 2", making a cameo appearance as a U.S. Marshal who serves Tony Stark a subpoena. Mara shot the ensemble romantic comedy "Happy. Thank You. More. Please." in New York City in July 2009. She plays a waitress and aspiring singer named Mississippi, in a story about six single New Yorkers in their 20s. The film was written and directed by actor Josh Radnor ("How I Met Your Mother"). The film won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. In 2010, Mara played hiker Kristi Moore in the survival drama "127 Hours", a true story directed by Danny Boyle about Aron Ralston, a climber trapped while mountaineering in Utah.


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara appeared in "Ironclad" (2011), which tells the story of the siege of Rochester Castle by King John in the year 1215. It is her first film where she speaks in an English accent. Mara appeared in the short film "Ten Year", produced by Channing Tatum to attract financing for a feature film. The full-length feature went into production in Albuquerque in January 2010, with Mara starring in a large ensemble cast film about a 10-year high school reunion. In 2012, Mara starred in Stefan Ruzowitzky's thriller "Deadfall" with Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde. In 2013, Mara starred in Broken Bells video for the song Holding On For Life. Mara appeared in "Transcendence" (2014), starring Johnny Depp and directed by Wally Pfister.


title: Kate Mara

text: In 2015, she played Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman, in the "Fantastic Four" reboot. In that year, she also had a supporting role as astronaut Beth Johanssen in director Ridley Scott's film "The Martian". She also starred as Ashley Smith in the movie "Captive".


title: Kate Mara

text: In 2017, Mara starred in "Megan Leavey", playing Megan Leavey, a real-life U.S. marine who bonded with her military working dog. The film was directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, and released on June 9, 2017.


title: Kate Mara

text: In 2015, Mara began dating her "Fantastic Four" co-star Jamie Bell. In January 2017, the couple were engaged. On July 17, 2017, the couple announced that they had married. As a result, Mara became the stepmother to Bell's son from his marriage to Evan Rachel Wood. In May 2019, the couple's daughter was born. On November 17th, 2022, Mara announced on Instagram that she had given birth to a son the week before. Mara lives in Los Angeles and Manhattan.


title: Kate Mara

text: Mara credits her vegan diet and regular workouts for keeping fit. "I'm a massive animal lover, too," she explained. "Being vegan has been so good for me. I never felt better." Mara is one of the faces of the Humane Society of the United States. In 2015, she was featured in one of their campaign videos to promote Meatless Monday.


title: Kate Mara

text: As a descendant of the owners of the New York Giants and Pittsburgh Steelers, Mara is a fan of both teams; she joked, "If I'm mad at my mom, I root for the Giants, and if I'm pissed at my dad, I root for the Steelers." This relationship contributed to her role in "We Are Marshall". Mara has sung at both teams' games, and after missing the Steelers' 2006 victory at Super Bowl XL due to work, her contracts state she can attend if either team goes to the Super Bowl. She was in attendance for the Giants' victory in Super Bowl XLII, the Steelers' victory the next year in Super Bowl XLIII, and the Giants' victory in Super Bowl XLVI.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire (; , , ), also called the First Persian Empire, was an ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC. Based in Western Asia, it was contemporarily the largest empire in history, spanning a total of from the Balkans and Egypt in the west to Central Asia and the Indus Valley in the east.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Around the 7th century BC, the region of Persis in the southwestern portion of the Iranian plateau was settled by the Persians. From Persis, Cyrus rose and defeated the Median Empire as well as Lydia and the Neo-Babylonian Empire, marking the formal establishment of a new imperial polity under the Achaemenid dynasty.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: In the modern era, the Achaemenid Empire has been recognized for its imposition of a successful model of centralized, bureaucratic administration; its multicultural policy; building complex infrastructure, such as road systems and an organized postal system; the use of official languages across its territories; and the development of civil services, including its possession of a large, professional army. Its advancements inspired the implementation of similar styles of governance by a variety of later empires.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: By 330 BC, the Achaemenid Empire was conquered by Alexander the Great, an ardent admirer of Cyrus the Great; the conquest marked a key achievement in the then-ongoing campaign of his Macedonian Empire. As Alexander's death triggered the beginning of the Hellenistic period, most of the territory of the fallen Achaemenid Empire came under the rule of the Ptolemaic Kingdom and the Seleucid Empire, both of which had emerged as successors to the Macedonian Empire following the Partition of Triparadisus in 321 BC. Hellenistic rule remained in place for almost a century before the Iranian elites of the central plateau reclaimed power under the Parthian Empire.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: The Achaemenian empire borrows its name from the ancestor of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the empire, Achaemenes. The term "" means "of the family of the Achaemenis/Achaemenes" ( "Haxāmaniš"; a bahuvrihi compound translating to "having a friend's mind"). Achaemenes was himself a minor seventh-century ruler of the Anshan in southwestern Iran, and a vassal of Assyria.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Around 850 BC the original nomadic people who began the empire called themselves the "Parsa" and their constantly shifting territory "Parsua", for the most part localized around Persis. The name "Persia" is a Greek and Latin pronunciation of the native word referring to the country of the people originating from Persis (Old Persian: , "Pārsa"). The Persian term "Xšāça" (), literally meaning "The Kingdom", was used to refer to the Empire formed by their multinational state.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: The Achaemenid Empire was created by nomadic Persians. The Persians were Iranian people who arrived in what is today Iran c. 1000 BC and settled a region including north-western Iran, the Zagros Mountains and Persis alongside the native Elamites. The Persians were originally nomadic pastoralists in the western Iranian Plateau. The Achaemenid Empire may not have been the first Iranian empire, as the Medes, another group of Iranian people, possibly established a short-lived empire when they played a major role in overthrowing of the Assyrians.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: The Achaemenids were initially rulers of the Elamite city of Anshan near the modern city of Marvdasht; the title "King of Anshan" was an adaptation of the earlier Elamite title "King of Susa and Anshan". There are conflicting accounts of the identities of the earliest Kings of Anshan. According to the Cyrus Cylinder (the oldest extant genealogy of the Achaemenids) the kings of Anshan were Teispes, Cyrus I, Cambyses I and Cyrus II, also known as Cyrus the Great, who created the empire (the later Behistun Inscription, written by Darius the Great, claims that Teispes was the son of Achaemenes and that Darius is also descended from Teispes through a different line, but no earlier texts mention Achaemenes). In Herodotus' Histories, he writes that Cyrus the Great was the son of Cambyses I and Mandane of Media, the daughter of Astyages, the king of the Median Empire.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Cyrus revolted against the Median Empire in 553 BC, and in 550 BC succeeded in defeating the Medes, capturing Astyages and taking the Median capital city of Ecbatana. Once in control of Ecbatana, Cyrus styled himself as the successor to Astyages and assumed control of the entire empire. By inheriting Astyages' empire, he also inherited the territorial conflicts the Medes had had with both Lydia and the Neo-Babylonian Empire.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: King Croesus of Lydia sought to take advantage of the new international situation by advancing into what had previously been Median territory in Asia Minor. Cyrus led a counterattack which not only fought off Croesus' armies, but also led to the capture of Sardis and the fall of the Lydian Kingdom in 546 BC. Cyrus placed Pactyes in charge of collecting tribute in Lydia and left, but once Cyrus had left Pactyes instigated a rebellion against Cyrus. Cyrus sent the Median general Mazares to deal with the rebellion, and Pactyes was captured. Mazares, and after his death Harpagus, set about reducing all the cities which had taken part in the rebellion. The subjugation of Lydia took about four years in total.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: When the power in Ecbatana changed hands from the Medes to the Persians, many tributaries to the Median Empire believed their situation had changed and revolted against Cyrus. This forced Cyrus to fight wars against Bactria and the nomadic Saka in Central Asia. During these wars, Cyrus established several garrison towns in Central Asia, including the Cyropolis.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Nothing is known of Persian-Babylonian relations between 547 BC and 539 BC, but it is likely that there were hostilities between the two empires for several years leading up to the war of 540–539 BC and the Fall of Babylon. In October 539 BC, Cyrus won a battle against the Babylonians at Opis, then took Sippar without a fight before finally capturing the city of Babylon on 12 October, where the Babylonian king Nabonidus was taken prisoner. Upon taking control of the city, Cyrus depicted himself in propaganda as restoring the divine order which had been disrupted by Nabonidus, who had promoted the cult of Sin rather than Marduk, and he also portrayed himself as restoring the heritage of the Neo-Assyrian Empire by comparing himself to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. The Hebrew Bible also unreservedly praises Cyrus for his actions in the conquest of Babylon, referring to him as Yahweh's anointed. He is credited with freeing the people of Judah from their exile and with authorizing the reconstruction of much of Jerusalem, including the Second Temple.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: In 530 BC, Cyrus presumably died while on a military expedition against the Massagetae in Central Asia. He was succeeded by his eldest son Cambyses II, while his younger son Bardiya received a large territory in Central Asia. By 525 BC, Cambyses had successfully subjugated Phoenicia and Cyprus and was making preparations to invade Egypt with the newly created Persian navy. The great Pharaoh Amasis II had died in 526 BC and had been succeeded by Psamtik III, resulting in the defection of key Egyptian allies to the Persians. Psamtik positioned his army at Pelusium in the Nile Delta. He was soundly defeated by the Persians in the Battle of Pelusium before fleeing to Memphis, where the Persians defeated him and took him prisoner. After attempting a failed revolt, Psamtik III promptly committed suicide.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Herodotus depicts Cambyses as openly antagonistic to the Egyptian people and their gods, cults, temples, and priests, in particular stressing the murder of the sacred bull Apis. He says that these actions led to a madness that caused him to kill his brother Bardiya (who Herodotus says was killed in secret), his own sister-wife and Croesus of Lydia. He then concludes that Cambyses completely lost his mind, and all later classical authors repeat the themes of Cambyses' impiety and madness. However, this is based on spurious information, as the epitaph of Apis from 524 BC shows that Cambyses participated in the funeral rites of Apis styling himself as pharaoh.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Following the conquest of Egypt, the Libyans and the Greeks of Cyrene and Barca in present-day eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) surrendered to Cambyses and sent tribute without a fight. Cambyses then planned invasions of Carthage, the oasis of Ammon and Ethiopia. Herodotus claims that the naval invasion of Carthage was canceled because the Phoenicians, who made up a large part of Cambyses' fleet, refused to take up arms against their own people, but modern historians doubt whether an invasion of Carthage was ever planned at all. However, Cambyses dedicated his efforts to the other two campaigns, aiming to improve the Empire's strategic position in Africa by conquering the Kingdom of Meroë and taking strategic positions in the western oases. To this end, he established a garrison at Elephantine consisting mainly of Jewish soldiers, who remained stationed at Elephantine throughout Cambyses' reign. The invasions of Ammon and Ethiopia themselves were failures. Herodotus claims that the invasion of Ethiopia was a failure due to the madness of Cambyses and the lack of supplies for his men, but archaeological evidence suggests that the expedition was not a failure, and a fortress at the Second Cataract of the Nile, on the border between Egypt and Kush, remained in use throughout the Achaemenid period.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: The events surrounding Cambyses' death and Bardiya's succession are greatly debated as there are many conflicting accounts. According to Herodotus, as Bardiya's assassination had been committed in secret, the majority of Persians still believed him to be alive. This allowed two Magi to rise up against Cambyses, with one of them sitting on the throne able to impersonate Bardiya because of their remarkable physical resemblance and shared name (Smerdis in Herodotus' accounts). Ctesias writes that when Cambyses had Bardiya killed he immediately put the magus Sphendadates in his place as satrap of Bactria due to a remarkable physical resemblance. Two of Cambyses' confidants then conspired to usurp Cambyses and put Sphendadates on the throne under the guise of Bardiya. According to the Behistun Inscription, written by the following king Darius the Great, a magus named Gaumata impersonated Bardiya and incited a revolution in Persia. Whatever the exact circumstances of the revolt, Cambyses heard news of it in the summer of 522 BC and began to return from Egypt, but he was wounded in the thigh in Syria and died of gangrene, so Bardiya's impersonator became king. The account of Darius is the earliest, and although the later historians all agree on the key details of the story, that a magus impersonated Bardiya and took the throne, this may have been a story created by Darius to justify his own usurpation. Iranologist Pierre Briant hypothesises that Bardiya was not killed by Cambyses, but waited until his death in the summer of 522 BC to claim his legitimate right to the throne as he was then the only male descendant of the royal family. Briant says that although the hypothesis of a deception by Darius is generally accepted today, "nothing has been established with certainty at the present time, given the available evidence".


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: According to the Behistun Inscription, Gaumata ruled for seven months before being overthrown in 522 BC by Darius the Great (Darius I) (Old Persian "Dāryavuš", "who holds firm the good", also known as "Darayarahush"). The Magi, though persecuted, continued to exist, and a year following the death of the first pseudo-Smerdis (Gaumata), saw a second pseudo-Smerdis (named Vahyazdāta) attempt a coup. The coup, though initially successful, failed.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Ever since the Macedonian king Amyntas I surrendered his country to the Persians in about 512–511, Macedonians and Persians were strangers no more as well. The subjugation of Macedonia was part of Persian military operations initiated by Darius the Great (521–486) in 513—after immense preparations—a huge Achaemenid army invaded the Balkans and tried to defeat the European Scythians roaming to the north of the Danube river. Darius' army subjugated several Thracian peoples, and virtually all other regions that touch the European part of the Black Sea, such as parts of nowadays Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia, before it returned to Asia Minor. Darius left in Europe one of his commanders named Megabazus whose task was to accomplish conquests in the Balkans. The Persian troops subjugated gold-rich Thrace, the coastal Greek cities, and defeated and conquered the powerful Paeonians. Finally, Megabazus sent envoys to Amyntas, demanding acceptance of Persian domination, which the Macedonians did. The Balkans provided many soldiers for the multi-ethnic Achaemenid army. Many of the Macedonian and Persian elite intermarried, such as the Persian official Bubares who married Amyntas' daughter, Gygaea. Family ties the Macedonian rulers Amyntas and Alexander enjoyed with Bubares ensured them good relations with the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes the Great. The Persian invasion led indirectly to Macedonia's rise in power and Persia had some common interests in the Balkans; with Persian aid, the Macedonians stood to gain much at the expense of some Balkan tribes such as the Paeonians and Greeks. All in all, the Macedonians were "willing and useful Persian allies. Macedonian soldiers fought against Athens and Sparta in Xerxes the Great's army. The Persians referred to both Greeks and Macedonians as "Yauna" ("Ionians", their term for "Greeks"), and to Macedonians specifically as "Yaunã Takabara" or "Greeks with hats that look like shields", possibly referring to the Macedonian kausia hat.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: By the 5th century BC, the Kings of Persia were either ruling over or had subordinated territories encompassing not just all of the Persian Plateau and all of the territories formerly held by the Assyrian Empire (Mesopotamia, the Levant, Cyprus and Egypt), but beyond this all of Anatolia and Armenia, as well as the Southern Caucasus and parts of the North Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Bulgaria, Paeonia, Thrace and Macedonia to the north and west, most of the Black Sea coastal regions, parts of Central Asia as far as the Aral Sea, the Oxus and Jaxartes to the north and north-east, the Hindu Kush and the western Indus basin (corresponding to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan) to the far east, parts of northern Arabia to the south, and parts of eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) to the south-west, and parts of Oman, China, and the UAE.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: The Ionian Revolt in 499 BC, and associated revolts in Aeolis, Doris, Cyprus, and Caria, were military rebellions by several regions of Asia Minor against Persian rule, lasting from 499 to 493 BC. At the heart of the rebellion was the dissatisfaction of the Greek cities of Asia Minor with the tyrants appointed by Persia to rule them, along with the individual actions of two Milesian tyrants, Histiaeus and Aristagoras. In 499 BC, the then-tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras, launched a joint expedition with the Persian satrap Artaphernes to conquer Naxos, in an attempt to bolster his position in Miletus (both financially and in terms of prestige). The mission was a debacle, and sensing his imminent removal as tyrant, Aristagoras chose to incite the whole of Ionia into rebellion against the Persian king Darius the Great.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: The Persians continued to reduce the cities along the west coast that still held out against them, before finally imposing a peace settlement in 493 BC on Ionia that was generally considered to be both just and fair. The Ionian Revolt constituted the first major conflict between Greece and the Achaemenid Empire, and as such represents the first phase of the Greco-Persian Wars. Asia Minor had been brought back into the Persian fold, but Darius had vowed to punish Athens and Eretria for their support of the revolt. Moreover, seeing that the political situation in Greece posed a continued threat to the stability of his Empire, he decided to embark on the conquest of all of Greece. The first campaign of the invasion was to bring the territories in the Balkan peninsula back within the empire. The Persian grip over these territories had loosened following the Ionian Revolt. In 492 BC, the Persian general Mardonius re-subjugated Thrace and made Macedon a fully subordinate part of the empire; it had been a vassal as early as the late 6th century BC but retained a great deal of autonomy. However, in 490 BC the Persian forces were defeated by the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon and Darius would die before having the chance to launch an invasion of Greece.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Xerxes I (485–465 BC, Old Persian "Xšayārša" "Hero Among Kings"), son of Darius I, vowed to complete the job. He organized a massive invasion aiming to conquer Greece. His army entered Greece from the north in the spring of 480 BC, meeting little or no resistance through Macedonia and Thessaly, but was delayed by a small Greek force for three days at Thermopylae. A simultaneous naval battle at Artemisium was tactically indecisive as large storms destroyed ships from both sides. The battle was stopped prematurely when the Greeks received news of the defeat at Thermopylae and retreated. The battle was a strategic victory for the Persians, giving them uncontested control of Artemisium and the Aegean Sea.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Following his victory at the Battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes sacked the evacuated city of Athens and prepared to meet the Greeks at the strategic Isthmus of Corinth and the Saronic Gulf. In 480 BC the Greeks won a decisive victory over the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis and forced Xerxes to retire to Sardis. The land army which he left in Greece under Mardonius retook Athens but was eventually destroyed in 479 BC at the Battle of Plataea. The final defeat of the Persians at Mycale encouraged the Greek cities of Asia to revolt, and the Persians lost all of their territories in Europe; Macedonia once again became independent.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: After Xerxes I was assassinated, he was succeeded by his eldest surviving son Artaxerxes I. It was during his reign that Elamite ceased to be the language of government, and Aramaic gained in importance. It was probably during this reign that the solar calendar was introduced as the national calendar. Under Artaxerxes I, Zoroastrianism became the "de facto" religion of state.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: After Persia had been defeated at the Battle of Eurymedon (469 or 466 BC), military action between Greece and Persia was halted. When Artaxerxes I took power, he introduced a new Persian strategy of weakening the Athenians by funding their enemies in Greece. This indirectly caused the Athenians to move the treasury of the Delian League from the island of Delos to the Athenian acropolis. This funding practice inevitably prompted renewed fighting in 450 BC, where the Greeks attacked at the Battle of Cyprus. After Cimon's failure to attain much in this expedition, the Peace of Callias was agreed between Athens, Argos and Persia in 449 BC.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Artaxerxes I offered asylum to Themistocles, who was the winner of the Battle of Salamis, after Themistocles was ostracized from Athens. Also, Artaxerxes I gave him Magnesia, Myus, and Lampsacus to maintain him in bread, meat, and wine. In addition, Artaxerxes I gave him Palaescepsis to provide him with clothes, and he also gave him Percote with bedding for his house.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: When Artaxerxes died in 424 BC at Susa, his body was taken to the tomb already built for him in the Naqsh-e Rustam Necropolis. It was Persian tradition that kings begin constructing their own tombs while they were still alive. Artaxerxes I was immediately succeeded by his eldest and only legitimate son, Xerxes II. However, after a few days on the throne, he was assassinated while drunk by Pharnacyas and Menostanes on the orders of his illegitimate brother Sogdianus, who apparently had gained the support of his regions. He reigned for six months and fifteen days before being captured by his half-brother, Ochus, who had rebelled against him. Sogdianus was executed by being suffocated in ash because Ochus had promised he would not die by the sword, by poison or by hunger. Ochus then took the royal name Darius II. Darius' ability to defend his position on the throne ended the short power vacuum.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: From 412 BC Darius II, at the insistence of Tissaphernes, gave support first to Athens, then to Sparta, but in 407 BC, Darius' son Cyrus the Younger was appointed to replace Tissaphernes and aid was given entirely to Sparta which finally defeated Athens in 404 BC. In the same year, Darius fell ill and died in Babylon. His death gave an Egyptian rebel named Amyrtaeus the opportunity to throw off Persian control over Egypt. At his death bed, Darius' Babylonian wife Parysatis pleaded with him to have her second eldest son Cyrus (the Younger) crowned, but Darius refused. Queen Parysatis favoured Cyrus more than her eldest son Artaxerxes II. Plutarch relates (probably on the authority of Ctesias) that the displaced Tissaphernes came to the new king on his coronation day to warn him that his younger brother Cyrus (the Younger) was preparing to assassinate him during the ceremony. Artaxerxes had Cyrus arrested and would have had him executed if their mother Parysatis had not intervened. Cyrus was then sent back as Satrap of Lydia, where he prepared an armed rebellion. Cyrus assembled a large army, including a contingent of Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries, and made his way deeper into Persia. The army of Cyrus was stopped by the royal Persian army of Artaxerxes II at Cunaxa in 401 BC, where Cyrus was killed. The Ten Thousand Greek Mercenaries including Xenophon were now deep in Persian territory and were at risk of attack. So they searched for others to offer their services to but eventually had to return to Greece.


title: Achaemenid Empire

text: Artaxerxes II was the longest reigning of the Achaemenid kings and it was during this 45-year period of relative peace and stability that many of the monuments of the era were constructed. Artaxerxes moved the capital back to Persepolis, which he greatly extended. Also, the summer capital at Ecbatana was lavishly extended with gilded columns and roof tiles of silver and copper. The extraordinary innovation of the Zoroastrian shrines can also be dated to his reign, and it was probably during this period that Zoroastrianism spread from Armenia throughout Asia Minor and the Levant. The construction of temples, though serving a religious purpose, was not a purely selfless act, as they also served as an important source of income. From the Babylonian kings, the Achaemenids had taken over the concept of a mandatory temple tax, a one-tenth tithe which all inhabitants paid to the temple nearest to their land or another source of income. A share of this income called the "Quppu Sha Sharri", "king's chest"—an ingenious institution originally introduced by Nabonidus—was then turned over to the ruler. In retrospect, Artaxerxes is generally regarded as an amiable man who lacked the moral fiber to be a really successful ruler. However, six centuries later Ardeshir I, founder of the Sasanian Empire, would consider himself Artaxerxes' successor, a grand testimony to the importance of Artaxerxes to the Persian psyche.