AchaemenicaAn Encyclopaedia of the Achaemenid Persian Empire
A scholarly, searchable encyclopaedia of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (Cyrus the Great to Alexander, 550–330 BCE): its people, places, peoples, institutions and ideas; the primary sources and their evaluation; the material record; and long-form thematic surveys. Primary sources are cited precisely; modern scholarship is represented honestly, with debate and uncertainty kept visible rather than smoothed away.
Survey essays
- Religion & the Lie: the Achaemenid religious worldA survey of Achaemenid religion: the worship of Ahura Mazdā and the ideology of Truth against the Lie; the Magi and their rites of fire, oath and the dead; the toleration of subject gods and its limits; and the vexed, still-open question of the kings' relationship to Zarathustra.
- The Sources & How We KnowA survey of all the evidence for the Achaemenid empire and its problems: why no Persian wrote its history; the kings' own propaganda in stone; the Greek writers and Janett Morgan's "looking glass" (their Persia reflects Greek concerns as much as Persian fact); the Near-Eastern documents, each with its agenda; the unpropagandised administrative tablets; the material record; and the modern method of triangulation that reads through the Greek mirror while keeping the uncertainties visible.
- Warfare & the ArmyA survey of the Achaemenid armed forces under Darius I and his successors: the seasonal levy of the subject nations set beside the standing royal guard the Greeks called the Immortals; the shield-and-bow files, the bow as the national weapon, the cavalry and the scythed chariot; the great ethnic army-list of Herodotus and the modern case against its millions; supply, pay and the navy; fortification and siege; and, throughout, the gap between the Greek image of a vast, soft oriental horde and the professional reality the documents disclose.