The Accession of Darius (522 BCE)

In 522 BCE the Achaemenid throne changed hands twice in a few months, and by violence. King Cambyses, son of Cyrus, died on his way home from Egypt; the throne was held by a man ruling as Bardiya, Cambyses' younger brother; and before the year was out Darius, son of Hystaspes, and six fellow Persian nobles killed that man in a fortress in Media, and Darius took the crown. Everything of consequence turns on a single question the sources cannot answer for us: who was the man they killed? Darius's own monument says he was a lying magus impersonating a prince long since secretly dead. A serious line of modern scholarship holds he was the true Bardiya, and the lying magus a fiction devised to justify a usurpation. Because the great monument that Darius raised was a monument against the Lie, the possibility that its central claim is itself a lie makes the accession the hardest of all cases in the study of this empire, and the reason this entry treats its principal source as testimony for the defence, not as history.

The crisis of 522

The bare frame is agreed across the sources. Cambyses had conquered Egypt in 525 and stayed there some years. In the spring of 522, according to the inscription Darius later carved, a man rose in Persia claiming to be Bardiya, Cyrus's son and Cambyses' brother, and was widely obeyed; when Cambyses died soon after, the claimant reigned without much opposition. That Cambyses died is certain; how is not. The Behistun text says only that he "died his own death" (that is, was not killed), which most take to mean illness or, as Herodotus has it (3.64–66), an accidental self-inflicted wound to the thigh that turned gangrenous. The one hard, external fix comes from Babylonia, where business tablets were dated by the reigning king's regnal year: they confirm that for some months in 522 a king named Barziya (Bardiya) was officially recognised. So a man calling himself Bardiya did hold the throne. The tablets cannot tell us who he was.

Darius's account at Behistun

The fullest and earliest account is Darius's own, cut into the cliff at Behistun within a few years of the events, in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, and diffused across the empire in its many languages (an Aramaic copy turned up on a papyrus at Elephantine in Egypt). Its story is precise and self-justifying. Cambyses, before leaving for Egypt, had secretly murdered his own brother Bardiya, and the killing was hidden from the people. In that concealment lay the opening for the fraud: a magus named Gaumāta rose on 11 March 522, pretending to be the dead prince, and "the people became faithless". Of the pretender Darius uses the flat, total charge he repeats over every rebel of the year:

"He lied; he said: I am Bardiya, the son of Cyrus." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §11)^[2]

The deception is folded at once into the reign's governing theology. Rebellion is more than treason: it is the work of the Lie (Old Persian drauga) loose in the world:

"The Lie made them revolt, so that they deceived the people." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §54)^[2]

On 29 September 522, Darius records, he killed Gaumāta with the help of six noble Persians at a fortress in the Median district of Nisaya, and "by the grace of Ahuramazda" took the kingship. He tells it as a restoration: the usurper had thrown down sanctuaries and seized pastures, herds, households and men from the kāra (the people, or the host); Darius gave them back and set the kingdom on its rightful base. His whole title to rule is that he did this as the god's chosen agent and the ninth king of an ancient line:

"By the grace of Ahuramazda am I king; Ahuramazda has granted me the kingdom." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §5)^[2]

And his defence, at the inscription's close, is the defence of a man of the Truth against the charge of being what he had accused his enemy of being:

"Ahuramazda brought me help, because I was not wicked, nor was I a liar, nor was I a despot; I have ruled according to righteousness." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §63)^[2]

The year of the Lie

The killing of Gaumāta did not settle the empire; it lit it. Darius's own text is a catalogue of revolt: Elam, Babylon, Media, Persia, Parthia, Margiana, Sagartia, Sattagydia, Armenia all rose, each behind a pretender who, in the telling, also lied, claiming to be a lost king of the old royal lines. Darius remembers the year not as unrest but as the Lie itself spreading through the lands:

"The people became hostile, and the Lie multiplied in the land, even in Persia and Media, and in the other provinces." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §10)^[2]

He claims to have fought, in a single year and by the god's favour, nineteen battles and captured nine rebel kings, who are shown on the relief bound at the neck in a file beneath his feet.^[3] The rhetoric is patterned and total, and its honesty is uneven: the compression into "one year, nineteen battles, nine kings" is a monument's arithmetic. But at least two of the revolts are independently confirmed, for the Babylonian pretenders Nidintu-Bēl ("Nebuchadnezzar III") in 522 and Arakha ("Nebuchadnezzar IV") in 521 are each attested by dated business tablets from Babylon itself, non-propagandistic clay that fixes their brief recognition to almost exactly when Darius says.^[6] The rebellions, then, were real. One is especially telling: in Persia itself a man named Vahyazdāta rose claiming, again, to be Bardiya son of Cyrus, a second false Bardiya, on Darius's own account, which shows how potent the dead prince's name still was, and how much rested on controlling who was allowed to have owned it.

The Greek tradition: Herodotus and the Seven

The Greeks told the same story in the same shape, a century later and from the outside. Herodotus (3.61–79) gives the longest version: Cambyses, envious, has his brother Smerdis (his name for Bardiya) secretly killed by the trusted Prexaspes; a magus left in charge of the palace, whose own brother both resembled the dead prince and happened to share his name, sets that brother on the throne as the false Smerdis; the fraud is at last uncovered, and seven Persian nobles conspire to kill the impostor and his brother. The list of the Seven in Herodotus (3.70) is all but identical to the six co-conspirators Darius names at Behistun (Intaphrenes, Otanes, Gobryas, Hydarnes, Megabyzus), with a single, genuinely uncertain discrepancy in the seventh name (Behistun's Ardumaniš against Herodotus' Aspathines, the latter a real figure, Darius's weapon-bearer on his tomb). The overlap is close enough that most read Herodotus as transmitting, at a distance, the official Persian version, which is exactly why his agreement cannot count as independent confirmation of it.

Herodotus also preserves the reward the conspirators are said to have set for themselves, a charter of aristocratic privilege that is pure Greek testimony and reads partly as an attempt to explain the later prominence of certain great houses:

"This they also determined for all in common, namely that any one of the seven who wished might pass in to the royal palaces without any to bear in a message, unless the king happened to be sleeping with his wife; and that it should not be lawful for the king to marry from any other family, but only from those of the men who had made insurrection with him." (Herodotus, Histories 3.84)^[4]

And he stages, before the deed, the famous Constitutional Debate (3.80–82), in which the conspirators are made to argue the merits of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy in good Greek political language. Otanes speaks against the rule of one man:

"How should the rule of one alone be a well-ordered thing, seeing that the monarch may do what he desires without rendering any account of his acts?" (Herodotus, Histories 3.80, the words of Otanes)^[4]

The debate is almost certainly a Greek literary invention (Herodotus himself notes that some Greeks disbelieved it) and should be read as a Greek story about Persian kingship rather than a transcript of a Persian council. Herodotus rounds the affair off with a note of custom: the Persians kept a festival, the Magophonia, "the killing of the magi", on the anniversary of the deed, on which no magus might show himself abroad (3.79).

The word of Darius against himself

Herodotus preserves one thing more, and it is the sharpest single line in the whole affair. On the eve of the killing, when a fellow conspirator hesitates at deceiving their way into the palace, the Darius of Herodotus answers:

"For where it is necessary that a lie be spoken, let it be spoken; seeing that we all aim at the same object, both they who lie and they who always speak the truth." (Herodotus, Histories 3.72, Darius before the killing of the Magian)^[4]

The man who would carve guard thyself against the Lie into a cliff is shown, by the Greek tradition, arguing that a lie may be told at need. Whether or not Herodotus had any Persian warrant for the speech, it lays bare the fault-line under the monument: the founder of the reign of the Truth, in the very act that founded it, reasoning that the Truth may be set aside when the aim is worth it. It is the anecdote the skeptical case would invent if it did not already exist.

Ctesias and the noise of the tradition

The court-physician Ctesias of Cnidus, writing a generation later still and surviving only in a Byzantine epitome, gives a third and wilder variant. In his telling (preserved by Photius) the prince is called Tanyoxarces, not Bardiya; a magus named Sphendadates, flogged by the prince and seeking revenge, denounces him to Cambyses, who has his brother killed by making him drink bull's blood; Sphendadates, who resembled the prince, then dresses in his clothes and reigns in his place, undetected for years.^[5] The names and mechanics differ at almost every point from both Darius and Herodotus. Ctesias is notoriously unreliable (an ancient reader remarked that his inaccuracy makes even Herodotus look exact), and his chief value here is negative: the sheer proliferation of incompatible versions of the same few weeks shows how completely the truth had dissolved into story within a century, and how little independent purchase anyone had on it even in antiquity.

Did Darius tell the truth?

The suspicion is old and serious, and it follows from the shape of the evidence rather than from mere cynicism. Darius was not a direct heir: he was the son of Hystaspes, of a collateral Achaemenid branch, with no strong claim to a throne that had passed from Cyrus to Cambyses in the direct line. The story he tells is precisely the one such a man would need: that the "real" Bardiya was already secretly dead, killed years before by Cambyses in a concealment no one could check, so that the king Darius struck down must have been a fraud. As the Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Bardiya sets it out, "some modern scholars (e.g., Olmstead) believe that the man who revolted against Cambyses was his true brother and lawful heir and that Darius killed him, calling him Gaumāta and inventing the story of the false Bardiya in order to justify his own seizure of the kingship", though it adds, soberly, that "this must remain hypothetical".^[7] The case has a long pedigree in the scholarship, from F. W. König's study pointedly titled Der falsche Bardiya to the closer analyses of Bickerman and Tadmor and of Gershevitch's "The False Smerdis".^[9]

The Iranica treatment of Gaumāta, by Pierre Briant, presses the doubt harder and then turns it in an unexpected direction. Briant takes it as evident that Darius "had much interest in presenting Gaumāta as a usurper and destroyer of traditions", and that "it was vital for a man like Darius, who had no particular rights to the throne, to invent a character (Gaumāta) condemned for his acts against gods and men"; he speaks plainly of "the pseudo-Gaumāta invented by Darius". But he resists the older romance that made the dead Bardiya a reformer and the coup a class war of restored aristocracy, a reading built, he shows, on over-pressing an obscure paragraph of Behistun and on trusting Herodotus' charter of the Seven, when the great families in fact received no such privileges and the picture of a king primus inter pares beside seven mighty houses is itself "historiographical myth".^[8] On Briant's account the true Bardiya leaned on the Persian aristocracy exactly as Cyrus and Cambyses had; his reign was no rupture; and his overthrow was one more of the palace usurpations by a brother or a son that recur throughout Achaemenid history, "rather banal", but for the fact that its winner "tampered with timeless memories" on a rock, and so turned an ordinary coup into the empire's foundation legend.

Against all this stands the plain difficulty that it cannot be proved. There is no contemporary source independent of Darius that either confirms or refutes the existence of the impostor; the Babylonian tablets fix only that a Bardiya reigned, not his identity; Herodotus and Ctesias are late and, in Herodotus' case, most likely downstream of Darius's own version. The maximal defence of Darius is simply that his story is the one first-person account we have and is not self-evidently false, and that men do sometimes tell the truth even when a lie would serve. This compendium takes no side. It records that the balance of modern scholarship leans toward suspicion (that the man killed was very possibly the genuine son of Cyrus) while insisting that the question is, on present evidence, undecidable,^[10] and that the honest reader of Behistun holds both the account and its likely motive in view at once.

Why this case matters most

Every source for the Achaemenid empire must be read critically, but the accession of 522 concentrates the whole problem into one document and one claim. Behistun is contemporary, first-person, monumental, and precise (the nearest thing to an official history the dynasty ever produced), and it is also the self-justification of the man who took the throne by killing its holder, composed to be read for a thousand years. The very features that make it invaluable make it treacherous: it is at once our best evidence and an interested party's brief. To use it well is to read it as argument and not as record: to ask, of every sentence, not only "what does the King say happened?" but "what did the King need his readers to believe?". The accession is where the compendium's whole method is forced into the open, because here the founding monument against the Lie may itself be the reign's founding lie, and no surviving evidence can close the case.