Topic: historiography (5)

• PersonCambyses II

  The second Achaemenid Great King (r. 530–522 BCE), elder son and heir of Cyrus the Great, who in 525 BCE conquered Egypt and added the last of the great old kingdoms of the Near East to the empire, the achievement that turned Cyrus's realm into a power spanning three continents. He is also the compendium's clearest case of a king remembered through his enemies: the Greek tradition, above all [[herodotus|Herodotus]] (Book 3), made him a raging madman who stabbed the sacred Apis bull, mocked the gods and desecrated tombs, while the contemporary Egyptian and Babylonian record shows a conqueror who took the pharaonic titulary, buried an Apis bull with due honour, and left the temples standing. Between the two lies the central problem of his reign, and a lesson for the whole period: how a hostile source can bury a king. He died mysteriously in 522 returning from Egypt, childless, leaving a throne that his brother Bardiya, or a man claiming to be him, had already seized, and so the succession crisis out of which [[darius-i|Darius]] rose (see [[the-accession-of-darius]]).

• PersonCroesus

  Croesus (Greek Kroisos; reigned c. 560–547/546 BCE) was the last king of Lydia, ruler of the wealthy kingdom of western Anatolia from his capital at Sardis, the subjugator of the Ionian Greek cities of the coast, and, in the Greek imagination, the archetype of the fabulously rich king undone by his own confidence. His defeat by Cyrus the Great and the fall of Sardis in 547/546 BCE ended the Mermnad dynasty and the last great independent kingdom west of Persia, and carried the Achaemenid frontier to the shore of the Aegean, where it met the Greek world: the conquest of Lydia is the beginning of the long entanglement of Persia and the Greeks that runs through the Ionian Revolt to Marathon and Salamis. Croesus matters to this compendium in two registers at once. He is a real king, richly documented for his fall by the contemporary Babylonian [[the-cyrus-cylinder|record]] and by the archaeology of Sardis; and he is a Greek literary construction, the hero of the most famous moral tale in [[herodotus|Herodotus]] (1.26–94): Solon's warning to 'count no man happy until he is dead,' the Delphic oracle he misread, the pyre from which Apollo or Cyrus's pity delivered him. Between the man and the legend, and between the sources that say Cyrus killed him and those that say Cyrus kept him as a counsellor, lies the difficulty of reading him at all.

• SourceCtesias, The Persica

  The lost history of Persia by a Greek physician who served for years at the court of Artaxerxes II, the one classical author who wrote from inside the palace, and the least trustworthy of them. The Persica survives only in Photius' Byzantine epitome and scattered fragments; it is sensational, chronologically garbled, and repeatedly wrong against the Iranian record, yet it is our fullest window on the court's own tales, the royal women, and the reign of Artaxerxes II, and the modern reassessment reads it as a witness to Persian palace tradition rather than as a mere catalogue of lies.

• PersonNabonidus

  The last king of Babylon (r. 556–539 BCE), and the man whose fall handed the ancient Near East's richest and holiest kingdom to Cyrus, turning the Persian realm into a Mesopotamian empire. An Aramean who seized a throne he was not born to, Nabonidus is remembered above all for two things his enemies never forgave: an extraordinary religious policy that raised the moon-god Sin, whose temple at Harran he rebuilt, toward precedence over Marduk, the supreme god of Babylon; and an unexplained decade-long absence at the desert oasis of Teima in Arabia, during which his son Belshazzar governed Babylon in his place. Those years estranged the Marduk priesthood, whose Akitu (New Year) festival could not be kept in the king's absence, and it was exactly this grievance that Cyrus exploited: the Persian conqueror entered Babylon in 539 posing as Marduk's chosen restorer, come to undo Nabonidus's impieties. He is therefore the compendium's foundational case of the hostile source, for nearly everything the tradition says of him, the [[the-cyrus-cylinder|Cyrus Cylinder]], the Nabonidus Chronicle, the so-called 'Verse Account,' the Book of Daniel, is Persian or pro-Marduk propaganda, even as his own inscriptions survive to tell a different story. Modern scholarship has largely rehabilitated him: not the mad or negligent apostate of the legend, but a pious antiquarian and restorer of ancient temples, undone by a conflict with a powerful priesthood and by the arrival of [[cyrus-the-great|Cyrus]]. His deposition is treated in full at [[the-fall-of-babylon]].

• Survey essayThe Sources & How We Know

  A 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.