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The Roman-Persian Wars were a series of conflicts between states of the Greco-Roman world and two successive Iranian empires. Contact between Parthia and the Roman Republic began in 92 BC; wars began under the late Republic, and continued through the Roman, Sassanid and Byzantine empires. Although warfare between the Romans and the Iranians lasted for seven centuries, the frontier remained largely stable. Neither side had the logistical strength or manpower to maintain such lengthy campaigns so far from their borders, and thus neither could advance too far without risking stretching their frontiers too thin. Both sides did make conquests beyond the border, but the balance was almost always restored in time. The resources expended during the Roman-Persian Wars ultimately proved catastrophic for both empires. The prolonged and escalating warfare of the sixth and seventh centuries left them exhausted and vulnerable in the face of the sudden emergence and expansion of the Caliphate, whose forces invaded both empires only a few years after the end of the last Roman-Persian war. Arab Muslim armies swiftly conquered the entire Sassanid Empire, and deprived the Eastern Roman Empire of its territories in the Levant, the Caucasus, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa. (more...)

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February 8: Prešeren Day in Slovenia

• 1587 - Mary I, Queen of Scots was executed at Fotheringhay Castle for her involvement in the Babington Plot to murder her cousin, Elizabeth I of England.
• 1879 - At a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute, engineer and inventor Sandford Fleming first proposed the adoption of worldwide standard time zones based on a single universal world time.
• 1904 - The Russo-Japanese War began with a surprise torpedo attack by the Japanese on Russian ships near present-day L��shunkou, China.
• 1910 - Newspaper man and magazine publisher William D. Boyce (pictured) established the Boy Scouts of America, expanding the Scout Movement into the United States.
• 1915 - Film director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was released, becoming one of the most influential and controversial films in the history of American cinema.
• 1969 - The Allende meteorite, the largest carbonaceous chondrite ever found on Earth, fell near Allende, Chihuahua, Mexico.

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