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As a model the pluriethnic empire developed in the Ancient Near East during the first millennium B.C. From 900 to 610, the Assyrians moved from a vassalic system of interrelations built by conquest to a tentatively political and economic unification. The Babylonians who succeeded them tried to keep the same territorial frame, but with a special emphasis on Babylon, as a political, economic and cultural center of the Empire. Finally, the Achaemenid Empire developed into an "world-empire" from 539 to 330, trying to put together the imperial unity and the preservation of many local identities. These three successive formulae of territorial empire worked as a kind of matrix for the later imperial constructions, at first with Alexander the Great’s.