The Persepolis Fortification Archive

In March 1933, digging at the north-eastern corner of the great terrace at Persepolis, Ernst Herzfeld's expedition for the Oriental Institute of Chicago broke into two small chambers inside a bastion of the casemate fortification wall and found them packed with clay. There were tablets and fragments by the tens of thousands, most inscribed in a cramped cuneiform, many merely stamped with seals, all of them the discarded and filed working records of a government office. Herzfeld reckoned there were thirty thousand or more. They had lain there for two and a half thousand years, since the middle years of Darius the King, and they are, for the daily working of his empire, the most important source we have. Where Darius's cliff at Behistun is the King's own voice raised to proclaim his truth to posterity, the Fortification tablets are the opposite kind of witness: nobody who wrote them expected them to be read by anyone but the next clerk. They are the empire caught not performing.

What they are

The archive is bureaucratic memoranda, and almost nothing else. An agency based at Persepolis managed the intake, movement, storage, and outlay of the region's staples, grain, fruit, and cress; sheep and goats, cattle, horses, mules, and poultry; the things made from them, flour, beer, wine, oil, meat, hides, over a territory reaching roughly from the Behbahān plain in the west to Neyrīz in the east. It supported, in the words the tablets keep, everything from livestock up through workers, craftsmen, administrators, travellers, priests, and courtiers, to the gods themselves, who received their offerings from the same stores by the same kind of receipt. A typical Fortification tablet is a small tongue of clay three to five centimetres across, formed around a knotted string, sealed, and recording a single transaction: so much barley issued to such a person at such a place in such a month of such a regnal year. Larger rectangular tablets, often ruled into tables, are the second-order records, monthly and yearly accounts compiled at Persepolis from the little memoranda, which were then meant to be thrown away while the summaries were kept on file. This is why the find survives at all: it is a snapshot of documents in mid-process, the raw slips and the digests together, caught before the routine housekeeping could clear them.

The numbers are worth stating plainly, because the archive is enormous and only partly read. Of perhaps fifteen to eighteen thousand original documents surviving in legible form, only a fraction has been fully edited: Richard Hallock's 1969 edition published 2,087 Elamite texts, with further texts since, and work continues on thousands more from his own drafts and from tablets recorded only after 2006. About seventy per cent of the tablets carry Elamite cuneiform, the largest single body of writing in that language anywhere. Roughly five per cent are in Aramaic, one of the largest corpora of Imperial Aramaic known. Around a fifth bear no text at all, only the impressions of seals, of which more than 3,400 distinct designs have been read, one of the largest bodies of glyptic imagery from the entire ancient world.^[1] And then there are the freaks that prove how many tongues met in one office: a single tablet in Greek script recording an amount of wine, a single one in Old Persian (the only known use of that script for real accounting rather than for display), one Babylonian legal deed about the sale of a slave, and one, uninterpreted to this day, apparently in Phrygian.

The candid record: how the tablets correct the Greeks

The great value of the archive is that it is not propaganda and not literature. Herodotus and the other Greek writers give us Persia from the outside, late, and often hostile, fond of the palace intrigue and the inflated number; the royal inscriptions give us Persia as the King wished it seen. The Fortification tablets give us neither the enemy's picture nor the official one, but the ledger, and on several points where the Greek image hardened into cliché, the ledger tells a different story (see the sources and how we know).

The sharpest correction concerns women. The Greek picture of the Persian court is the harem, the secluded, passive royal woman as ornament and property. The tablets know nothing of it. They record women, the pašap, working in the royal economy in numbers comparable to men, classified like the men by skill and seniority rather than by sex, and paid accordingly, so that a senior female overseer might draw larger rations than the men she supervised.^[2] Women who had just given birth received enhanced rations for a period, and a distinction is even drawn in the reward for bearing a son and for bearing a daughter. Above the workforce stand the great women of the realm as economic powers in their own right. The tablets show Irdabama, a woman of the highest rank, holding her own estate and commanding a large workforce, her own sealed orders moving commodities across the heartland. They show Irtašduna, whom the Greeks called Artystone, Darius's wife, with estates and a household of her own, her table provisioned by royal decree, drawing on the same stores as her husband and her satrap. These are not concubines; they are landholders and employers, administering property and labour and travelling to see to it. Wouter Henkelman has drawn together the tablets that let Irdabama's and Irtašduna's own tables be set beside the table of Darius himself: the royal women are visible in the archive doing what the Greek sources say Persian women could not do.^[3] The tablets are, in short, the documentary ground for portraying the women of this empire as agents rather than decoration.

The workforce itself is a second correction, to the picture of a slave empire. Its base was the kurtaš (Elamite kurta), dependent labourers, of both sexes and various ages, organised in gangs and paid in kind, drawn from across the whole span of the empire and labelled by origin: Egyptians, Babylonians, Cappadocians, Carians, Lydians, Ionians, Thracians, Bactrians, Sogdians, and more, working side by side in the Persian homeland. They are not free wage-earners in the modern sense, and the relation is not simple; but neither are they the chattel slaves the Greek word for the King's subjects would imply. They were rationed, tracked, and organised by a state that fed and moved them, and true chattel slavery is in fact barely visible in these texts.

The plural gods of the King's own country

The third and perhaps most surprising correction is religious. It is tempting to imagine Darius's Persia as a land of Ahura Mazdā alone, and the tablets forbid it. From the very storehouses that fed the workers, the administration also paid out grain, wine, and beasts for the cult, and the gods it provisioned were many. Offerings went to Ahura Mazdā, the supreme Iranian god, and in the same breath to other Iranian divinities, and to the great Elamite gods Humban and Napiriša, and to the Babylonian Adad, and to mountains and rivers, and to divine beings whose very origin is now uncertain. In one text a priest draws eighty measures of grain, forty of them destined for the cult of Ahura Mazdā and forty for another Iranian deity; in another, offerings are apportioned among Ahura Mazdā, the Elamite Humban, and libations to three rivers. Strikingly, the Iranian gods appear in these accounts less often than the Elamite ones, and the royal administration provisioned all of them without evident preference. The tablets also preserve the vocabulary of ceremonies otherwise lost, above all the lan offering, a regular sacrifice served by priests called šatin, and the šip feast of Elamite ancestry that Henkelman has reconstructed as a procession and banquet, once presided over by the chief administrator Parnakka himself.^[3] This is not the enforced Mazdā-worship of later imagination but a working, subsidised pluralism in the court's own back garden, the practical face of the tolerance the dynasty is famous for (see the Magi, who appear here too, drawing their rations like any other religious personnel).

The roads, and the ration as a passport

Because the archive fed travellers as well as workers, it is also the inside evidence for the imperial road and courier system that Herodotus describes from the outside. Officials moving on the King's business carried authorisations, sealed by the governor at their point of departure, and drew rations at way-stations spaced along the main roads at intervals of about a day's journey; the vouchers for what they took were sent back to Persepolis to be reckoned. The tablets thus record, from within, the same institution Herodotus praises as the angareion, the tireless mounted relay, which they name with the Old Iranian term pirradaziš, the express courier.^[4] Two independent witnesses, the Greek historian outside and the clerk inside, describing the same machine, is as good as ancient evidence gets. The destinations named in the travel texts stretch to the far edges of the empire, Sardis in the west, India, Arachosia, and Bactria in the east, so that the reach of the roads can be measured in the ration-slips of the men who walked them. One tablet has some seven hundred shepherds driving the King's sheep from Persis to Susa; a Babylonian named Bēl-eṣir shuttles documents between Persepolis and Susa; the whole apparatus of a governed distance is here in receipts.

The primary voice, in a ration-list

Because the tablets are memoranda, they do not speak in sentences the way an inscription does, but a few of them preserve the King's own order relayed into the account. Darius commanded wine and sheep from the palace stores for his wife's household, and the clerk booked it:

"200 marriš of wine and 100 sheep, by the order of the King, issued to Irtašduna the princess." — Persepolis Fortification tablet (after Hallock, PF 1795; the queen is Artystone)^[5]

And the plural cult, likewise, survives only because a priest's draw on the stores had to be recorded:

"grain, of which 40 (measures) for the cult of Ahuramazdā, 40 for the deity Miš(a)duš." — Persepolis Fortification tablet (after Hallock, PF 337)^[5]

These are not the sentences of a man addressing history. They are the reason the archive is trusted: the wine for the princess and the grain for the god are booked in exactly the same dry hand as the fodder for the mules, and none of it was written to impress anyone. What the King wished the world to believe is at Behistun; what his government actually did, day by day, is here. The nearest the archive comes to a creed is the same prayer the King set over his palaces, that the god keep the land from the army, the famine, and the Lie, the three banes the tablets themselves are the record of holding at bay:

"...from a (hostile) army, from famine, and from the Lie." — Darius I, the closing prayer against the three banes (DPd, Persepolis; the same triad at Behistun IV; carried in the compendium quote-library as "the Wise Lord" rendering)^[6]

What the tablets cannot tell us

An archive so candid tempts one to treat it as a clear window, and its limits must be kept in view; the fuller weighing is in the evaluation below. It is a snapshot of a narrow slice: one region, administered from two capitals, over about sixteen years in the middle of one reign, in the specialised idiom of a food-and-travel bureau. It says a great deal about rations, flocks, seed, and journeys, and almost nothing directly about high politics, war, law, or the sentiments of the people it counts. Its language is Elamite, itself a screen: Iranian names and words reach us only in Elamite spelling, and scholars must work back through that disguise. It is silent where its transactions did not fall, and it was compiled by the very institution whose competence and reach it records, so that even this candid source shows the heartland as the bureau saw it. What it is not is propaganda, and that is its whole value: it is the empire's own accounting, kept for the empire's own use, and only by the accident of a burned and buried terrace kept for us.

The modern story: Herzfeld, Hallock, and a court case

The tablets' second life has been long and is not over. After Herzfeld's find of 1933, the Iranian government in 1935 loaned the whole mass to the Oriental Institute at Chicago for study and publication, and there the slow work of reading them began. Its hero is Richard T. Hallock, whose 1969 Persepolis Fortification Tablets edited and translated two thousand and eighty-seven of the Elamite texts and remains the foundation of the field;^[7] the sibling Persepolis Treasury Archive, found by Erich Schmidt's excavations in the Treasury on the same terrace and edited by George Cameron, is smaller and a little later (about 492 to 457 BCE) and records something new, the payment of workers' wages partly in silver rather than wholly in kind, the first stirrings of a money economy in the heartland's paperwork. From 2006 the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project at Chicago, under Matthew Stolper, set about recording the still-unpublished thousands with modern imaging, and its findings pour steadily into print.^[8] But the archive became, in the 2000s, the object of a bitter lawsuit: plaintiffs holding a United States judgment against Iran sought to seize the tablets, as Iranian state property, to satisfy it, and for years the collection was under threat of being sold off piecemeal at auction. The scholars fought the claim on the ground that the tablets are an indivisible cultural whole and were only ever loaned; in 2018 the Supreme Court of the United States decided for Iran and the museum, and the archive was spared.^[9] That a food-bureau's discarded receipts from the reign of Darius could, twenty-five centuries on, be argued before the highest court of a republic on the other side of the earth is a fair measure of how much these small clay slips have come to matter.

Why it matters here

For this compendium the Fortification Archive is the corrective conscience that sits behind a great deal of the rest. Wherever a Greek anecdote or a royal boast is in play, the tablets are the place to test it against the empire's own books, and again and again they ground the picture the game means to teach: the working satrapal economy of ration and store; the roads and couriers seen from inside; the great women as landholders and employers rather than harem ornaments; the many gods fed side by side from one storehouse; the multi-ethnic workforce of the heartland. They are the reason we can be confident, and the reason we must be careful, about how the empire actually ran.