Topic: economy (4)

• ObjectThe Daric (and the Siglos)

  The gold daric (~8.4 g of very pure gold) and its silver companion the siglos (~5.5 g) were the coins of the Achaemenid king, introduced by Darius I toward the end of the sixth century BCE and stamped with the running or kneeling ROYAL ARCHER, the figure the Greeks nicknamed the 'archer' (toxotēs). Minted chiefly at Sardis and circulating mainly in the western empire and as mercenary pay, they were the visible edge of a monetary economy that had barely penetrated the heartland: the Persepolis tablets show a realm still run on payment in kind and weighed silver, not coin.

• SourceThe Persepolis Fortification Archive

  The working paperwork of Darius I's own heartland: tens of thousands of clay tablets from a bastion in the Persepolis fortification wall, recording the intake and disbursement of food, livestock, and travel rations across Fars and Elam in the middle of the reign. Dry, sealed, never meant for posterity, they are the empire's most candid source, and they quietly overturn several of the Greek stereotypes about Persia, above all the harem cliché.

• ConceptThe Satrapy System

  The great administrative frame of the Achaemenid empire: the division of a realm that stretched from the Indus to the Aegean into provinces, each held for the King of Kings by a satrap, his viceroy. The satrap gathered the tribute, judged the causes, kept the roads and raised the levies of his province, and held a court in the King's own image; a web of parallel officers and travelling eyes was meant to keep him loyal. It is the institution the player of this game inhabits, and its central tension, the viceroy grown too great, is the bind the whole game turns on. How many satrapies there were, and how neatly Darius arranged them, are among the most argued questions in the field, and the tidy scheme most books repeat, Herodotus's twenty tribute-districts, is exactly the part the sources trust least.

• SourceXenophon

  The Athenian soldier-writer who marched into the empire with the Ten Thousand and led them out, and who then made Persia the subject of some of his books. His Anabasis is our best first-hand look at the empire's interior, an eyewitness of the roads, the satraps and the land; his Cyropaedia is an idealised 'education of Cyrus', a philosophical romance and not history, but the fullest Greek portrait of Persian kingship as the Greeks wished to imagine it. Reliable, and precious, for institutions and texture; to be handled with care for events, and never trusted for the life of Cyrus the Great.