Until the 1980s, scholars who studied the Near East after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire relied on Greek and Latin writers plus ideas about the timeless east, Zoroastrianiam, and Iranian national character. Most of the books on this subject were very specialized or short and quickly written. Then a woman named Heleen Sancisci-Weerdenberg organized a series of conferences in the Low Countries, UK, and USA to study the juncture between the two periods: the Achaemenid Empire. By using indigenous sources, and asking some basic questions about what the Greek and Latin writers were trying to do (people like Herodotus are a lot more like journalists than professional scholars: they had a story to tell and they had to amuse their audience) it quickly became clear that the old view was incomplete and misleading (and owed quite a lot to the ideologies which 19th century Europeans created to justify their own imperial ambitions in India and the Near East).

The results of the workshops were summarized in Pierre Briant's 1996 book From Cyrus to Alexander and Amélie Kuhrt's 2007 book The Persian Empire: A Sourcebook. Today, writing a book on the ancient Near East which ignores their work is like writing a book on physics which assumes that light travels instantaneously: some people will read it, but they won't be scholars.

An opinionated summary of the change is Jona Lendering, Let's Abandon Achaemenid Studies https://web.archive.org/web/20170228002404/http://www.livius.org/opinion/opinion0012.html