Topic: empire (4)

• PersonCyrus the Great

  The founder of the Achaemenid Empire (r. 559–530 BCE), a petty king of Anshan in Fārs who in twenty years overthrew the three great powers of his world (Median, Lydian and Babylonian) and left the largest empire the earth had yet seen. His conquest of Babylon in 539 is commemorated on the [[the-cyrus-cylinder|Cyrus Cylinder]], whose open-handed restoration of deported peoples and their gods, the Jews of the Babylonian captivity among them, permitted to rebuild their temple, made him the model of the tolerant conqueror, hailed in the Hebrew scriptures as the Lord's anointed. He was remembered by the Persians as their father, by the Greeks as the ideal king ([[herodotus|Herodotus]] and Xenophon), and by [[darius-i|Darius]], who was not of his line, as the founder whose blood and legitimacy the new dynasty had to claim. His death fighting a nomad queen on the eastern steppe, and his tomb at Pasargadae, closed the reign that opened this compendium's world.

• ConceptThe Royal Road

  The great overland route and courier relay that bound the Achaemenid empire together: the road of stations and inns Herodotus walked in his mind from Sardis to Susa, and the mounted post along it that the Greeks called the angareion, carrying the King's word across a world in a matter of days. It was at once the empire's nervous system and its leash on distant satraps: the same arteries that let the King reward and provision a province let him also recall and destroy an over-mighty servant. The Greek picture of a single measured highway is real but partial; the Persepolis Fortification tablets show the road-system from the inside, as a lived bureaucracy of sealed travel-passes and issued rations.

• 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.

• Survey essayWarfare & the Army

  A 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.