Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550-330 BCE

by Matt Waters

  Hebrew Bible

  Several books in the Hebrew Bible contain important information about Persian administration and its concerns in the Levant. As with any source, the audience and aim of each must be considered. Many Persian kings are portrayed positively in these works, because they are set during the so-called Second Temple period in Jewish history, the era after the Babylonian Captivity in which Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon enabled a return of many Jewish exiles and a restoration of Jerusalem and the temple of Yahweh.

  Greek/Classical Sources

  Far and away the richest sources – in quantity, if not quality – for Persian history come from Greek and Roman writers. As noted above, the mainland Greeks lived in the shadow of the great Empire. Many other Greeks, in Ionia and the Black Sea region, were its subjects. There was no shortage of commercial and diplomatic exchange between these various Greeks – most of whom, it should be remembered, lived in independent city-states – and other subjects of the Persian Empire in the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Persian authorities themselves. Many Greeks, especially in the fourth century, served as mercenaries in the Persian army. Despite this frequent and varied contact, we cannot rely on Greek writers to present an unbiased view of Persian government, strategy, or culture.

  The phenomenon of narrative, written history is traced to the Greeks and mainly to Herodotus, the so-called “Father of History,” who lived and wrote in the mid-fifth century BCE. Herodotus is by far the most important non-Persian source for this study, the main narrative source for the period preceding Cyrus the Great’s rise through the early reign of Xerxes. Herodotus was an Ionian Greek. He hailed from Halicarnassus, a city on the western coast of Turkey (Ionia) that was well-established as a nexus of west-east interaction; it was also subject to the Persian Empire. Well-read and well-traveled, Herodotus was in a position to offer significant insights into the scale and reach of the Empire, and yet as a Greek from the western frontier of the Empire, he was far-removed from the inner workings of the court and imperial bureaucracy. It is difficult, if not impossible, to trace where or from whom Herodotus gained his information. As with any source discussed herein, the modern historian must make informed choices about the reliability of the information presented.

  The meaning of the word “history” (Greek historia), as Herodotus used it, was “observation” or “learning,” especially “learning by inquiry.” The task that Herodotus gave himself was not modest: to record the cataclysmic – note that this is from a Greek perspective – confrontation between Greeks and Persians, when the Persians invaded Greece in 480–479 BCE under the command of King Xerxes. This was a watershed moment in Greek and western history, and Greek intellectuals of that period and thereafter could not help but react to it and its impact. The invasion was, incidentally, far less significant for Persian history. But Xerxes’ expedition occupies perhaps one-third of Herodotus’ work. Much of the rest is devoted to developments that preceded Xerxes’ invasion and thus helps to explain how and why the expedition came to be.

  Herodotus’ younger contemporaries Thucydides, Xenophon, and Ctesias also authored works helpful to the study of the Persians. The Athenian general Thucydides’ masterpiece chronicles the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies. Thucydides periodically shows keen awareness of the Persians’ influential and important role in the war – in fact, it was Persian financial support that ultimately enabled the Spartan victory in 404 BCE – but his concern is not with Persia but rather with the Greeks themselves. His work is thus not as informative as we would wish for the Persian Empire.

  The Athenian Xenophon, who lived at the turn of the fourth century, is known from a number of historical and philosophical works. The Hellenica, essentially a sequel to Thucydides’ history, provides the backbone of our historical narrative circa 411 to the middle of the fourth century. Xenophon also partook in an expedition of Greek mercenaries led by Cyrus the Younger, who attempted to overthrow his brother, King Artaxerxes II, in 401. That expedition failed, but Xenophon’s account of it and the Greek forces’ return (entitled Anabasis, usually translated as “the March Up Country”) is an important source for that turbulent period of Persian history. It likewise contains much of import for the historical geography of the ancient Near East. Xenophon’s Cyropaideia (“the Education of Cyrus”) is a quasi-historical novel and disquisition on leadership that reflects the Greek fascination with the founder of the Empire, Cyrus the Great. It adds little to our understanding of the history of the period but continues to be mined for social and cultural insights about the Persians.

  Another Ionian Greek, Ctesias of Cnidus (a city on the southwestern coast of Anatolia), served as a doctor in the Persian court for over a decade early in the reign of Artaxerxes II, which makes him a rough contemporary of Xenophon. Only fragments and summaries of his Persica – a monumental work tracing the histories of Assyria, Media, and Persia to this time – have survived. This mostly-lost work was extremely influential in antiquity, but what remains is in many ways disappointing. As a historical text, defined by modern standards, it is lacking in accuracy and overemphasizes the sensational – surely part of the reason for its popularity. Ctesias’ reputation, despite his work’s influence, was less than positive, and this outlook has also colored how modern scholarship views his extant work. However, used judiciously, his work also offers many potential insights into Persian history, culture, and court life.

  Later writers such as Diodorus Siculus (first century BCE) and Plutarch (c. 100 CE) contain information to fill gaps in the narrative history, though their accuracy and reliability must also be qualified. Other Greek writers, whose works survive only in fragments or quotations by other authors, also provide information on the Persians. Names such as Deinon and Ephorus (both fourth-century BCE writers) will occasionally be referenced herein. Likewise, tragedy, such as Aeschylus’ play The Persians; philosophy, oddments from Plato’s and Aristotle’s works; geography, such as Strabo’s work; and scraps from other genres also provide useful information, but with the same caveats as noted above. The so-called Alexander historians, those who traveled with Alexander the Great during his conquest of the Persian Empire in the 330s and 320s BCE, are also noteworthy. Their works have not survived directly but were tapped by later Roman writers such as Quintus Curtius Rufus (first century CE) and Arrian (second century CE).

  Writing Achaemenid History: An Excursus on the Use of Greek Sources for Persian History

  It is no accident that many Greek writers other than Herodotus were obsessed with the Persian Empire. Because of the Persian Empire’s enormous resources and reach, even the Greeks of the mainland had to consider its policies, as represented by the western satraps (governors). Most often, Greek views of the Empire were suspicious or downright hostile, colored by the stereotypical Greek denigration of “the Other” (non-Greeks), which made the Persians the prototypical barbarians. This is more than slightly ironic when one considers that the Achaemenid Persians were the rulers of a world empire, heirs to – and innovators within – Near Eastern political and cultural traditions that dated almost two thousand years before the Greeks developed writing. The Greek word barbaros was initially a label for non-Greeks – specifically those who did not speak the Greek language – and who were, because they were not Greek, inferior.5 If one could imagine a situation where no Greek sources were available, it is interesting to speculate how modern scholarship would interpret the Greeks as displayed at Persepolis or the tomb reliefs, from the Persian perspective alone: rustic barbarians with goofy hats?

  An overview of the Persian Empire must rely on generalizations. Thorough, critical examination of each piece of evidence, with contextualization of its inherent problems, would move far beyond the scope of this book. There are many specialist books and articles that continue to grapple with the details of Persian history, some of which are cited in the footnotes and recommended readings. The reader is asked to keep in mind that the interpretations put forward
here are no more than an introductory word. Every source that tells us something about Persian history, from all the various categories above, must be scrutinized for its accuracy, or when we lack supporting evidence – which is often the case – for its potential reliability.

  An example from Herodotus may prove useful in this regard. He wrote his history, and notably read excerpts of it aloud to live audiences at Athens and elsewhere, in the late 430s and 420s BCE, a bitter and bloody period of Greek history in the initial stages of the Peloponnesian War. Herodotus invoked what in his view was clearly a better time: that time when much (but certainly not all) of the Greek world united against the overwhelming might of Xerxes’ invading army, and by so doing the Greek way of life, its values and its institutions, had prevailed against all odds.

  As the so-called “Father of History,” he holds pride of place in the development of that discipline, but “history” to Herodotus and others held a different meaning than it does for us. Writing two generations after Xerxes’ invasion (in 480–479 BCE), Herodotus had access to eyewitnesses of the invasion, but for those periods that came before – the reigns of Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius – he was reliant mainly on what his sources told him. As a public performer, Herodotus also knew the value of a good story and did not hesitate to tell one. Ultimately, then, the line between historical fact and hyperbole often seems blurred. It is this line that has preoccupied much of modern scholarship on Herodotus. He was not naïve, but he relayed the information given to him, often with a skeptical aside, and left it to his readers to decide. Some of his accounts of Persian customs seem bizarre and yet others echo, sometimes only faintly, important themes highlighted in the Persian kings’ own royal inscriptions. Regardless of the means of transmission, it is difficult to view this as a coincidence.

  Herodotus was a product of his times, the great intellectual milieu of the fifth-century Greek world, and his work is replete with its elements, for example, interest in medicine, the ordering of the natural world, ethnography, and the relationship between human and the divine. His work is not a loose collection of random accounts and observations but contains a clearly-demonstrable pattern in its arrangement. This makes his history as much a literary achievement as a historical one, but it makes the modern historian’s task that much more complex. For example, Herodotus relates that, at a critical moment in Cyrus the Great’s expansionist campaigns, it is the defeated Croesus, once king of Lydia and subsequently Cyrus’ “wise advisor” (one of Herodotus’ favorite literary character-types), who counsels Cyrus to make the fateful move across the river Araxes to engage his enemy. This reminds the reader to consider that it was Croesus’ own hubris in crossing the river to engage the Persians that brought about his defeat by Cyrus (see pp. 39–42). Did this actually happen as Herodotus tells it? Did Croesus become, in truth, an advisor of Cyrus who, in this case, gave Cyrus bad advice as a “payback” for his own defeat? Or was this entire episode an embellishment on Herodotus’ part, to emphasize a literary motif? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle? It is these sorts of questions that must be considered time and again in examination of our sources for Achaemenid Persian history.

  2 Forerunners of the Achaemenids: The First Half of the First Millennium BCE

  Iranians into Iran

  The Persians were one of many groups of Iranians, who were often demarcated by tribes.1 Based on assessment of archaeological evidence, scholars believe that Iranian migrations into western Iran may have begun as early as 1500 BCE. The kingdom of Elam was dominant during that time in western Iran, and we have little firm information on the Persians until several centuries later. Archaeologists emphasize how difficult it is to equate specific types of evidence (e.g., a particular style of pot) with specific groups of people. We can only generalize about the earliest migrations of Iranians into the land that would ultimately bear their name. Even some of the most basic questions remain contentious among specialists, such as which route or routes the Persians took into and through Iran. For much of twentieth century, it was held that Iranian migration occurred mainly through the Caucasus Mountains, west of the Caspian Sea. More recently, new discoveries in conjunction with reassessment of old evidence have identified an eastern route as more likely.

  Research in ancient Bactria – an area that encompassed modern northeastern Iran, northern Afghanistan, and parts of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – has uncovered remnants of an advanced, Bronze Age society that flourished in the centuries around 2000 BCE. Various sites in this area provide evidence of irrigation farming and monumental architecture, markers traditionally associated with early urbanization. As a whole, this area is called the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) or the Oxus Civilization, for the Oxus River (the Amu Darya) that runs through the region. Margiana was the name of Bactria’s neighbor in ancient Iran. It is a matter of ongoing debate whether various Indo-Iranian groups were some of the original inhabitants of the BMAC; whether they simply passed through – over decades, if not centuries – on their way to the Indian subcontinent or to Iran; or whether they had nothing to do with any of it.2 The linguistic and cultural affiliation between the various Indo-Iranian groups is well-established, but specifics regarding their settlement in Iran remain obscure.

  The Persians first appear in the written record of the ninth century BCE, from the reign of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (reigned 858–824 BCE). Shalmaneser III and his successors frequently raided territories in the central western Zagros Mountains northwest of the modern Mahidasht, home to Persians and various other Iranian groups. By the middle of the eighth century, the Assyrians had created a formal province of Parsua and controlled the area until Assyria’s fall in the late seventh century. Tracking the movements of the Iranians in this period seems a hopeless task; we have no sources from them and few references to them. Assyrian royal inscriptions and official correspondence refer to this region only in the context of military raids, receipt of tribute, or other administrative matters relating to the region’s government by Assyria.

  The connection between the Persians of the central Zagros and the Persians of southwestern Iran (Fars), the later core of the Achaemenid Empire, is unclear. If migrations continued, in the mid-first millennium from northeast to southwest along the Zagros chain, it is not evident in the available sources, nor have clear traces of such migration been found archaeologically. Some archaeologists consider pottery from the Achaemenid period (found at the major sites of Susa, Pasargadae, and Persepolis) to be stylistically linked to earlier pottery, dating as early as circa 800 BCE, from the Zagros. To date, no compelling explanation has been advanced to explain this linkage, beyond the reasonable – yet unsubstantiated – assumption that at least some migrating Persian groups brought the style with them when they migrated to Fars during the course of the seventh century. But this hypothesis has not found widespread acceptance.

  We thus have Persians attested separately in the central Zagros and in Fars, with the former attested somewhat earlier. It is difficult to imagine a large-scale migration through the Zagros Mountains over the course of the seventh and sixth centuries, but it cannot be ruled out. If there was such a movement by Persians who once lived under the Assyrian aegis in the Zagros, this migration may have been one source of the transmission of cultural conventions between Assyria and Persia, such as elements of imperial ideology. An alternative is that two separate groups of Persians migrated into the central Zagros and into Fars, respectively, during roughly the same period in the first half of the first millennium BCE.

  Elam

  Elamites were, as far as we can tell, the earliest inhabitants of southwestern Iran. The geographic term Elam comes from Hebrew êlm, and Akkadian Elamtu, to describe the land that the Elamites themselves called Haltamti. Elamite civilization may be traced to the fourth millennium BCE, roughly contemporary with the earliest Sumerians in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. The acculturation of Elamites and Iranians, especially the Persians and Elamites of Fars, is a major factor in t
he rise of the Achaemenid Empire, but it is a phenomenon that is not obvious in the available sources. One needs to dig beneath the surface, both literally and figuratively, to discern it. The lack of appreciation of Elamite influence on the Persians stems in the main from the relative paucity of Elamite material and the difficulties associated with its study. This lack has only begun to be rectified in the last generation of modern scholarship. Figure 2.1 is one such example, a procession portrayed at a long-standing Elamite shrine that scholars have compared to similar processions portrayed at Persepolis.

  Figure 2.1 Elamite rock relief from Kul-e Farah, Izeh, Iran. Courtesy of D. T. Potts.

  It is the Elamites who dominate the landscape of the historical period in southwestern Iran, until the Medes and Persians established themselves in the mid-first millennium. Khuzistan and Fars appear to have been the main areas of Elamite settlement. That statement must be qualified, because excavation in eastern Iran has been relatively limited. The Elamite language has been deciphered, but its vocabulary and grammatical elements are less well understood than other languages written in cuneiform scripts, such as the Akkadian used by Elam’s neighbors in Assyria and Babylonia. The corpus of surviving Elamite texts is not nearly as large, and for many periods we lack bilingual texts, which are so critical in cracking a language’s code. Further, the Elamite language has no clear linguistic relatives to aid translation.3 Elamite has therefore not been subjected to the same intensity of analysis as Akkadian or Sumerian.