Topic: kingship (27)

• ConceptAhura Mazdā

  The supreme god of the Achaemenid kings, the "Wise Lord", named at the head of the royal inscriptions as creator of earth, heaven and man, giver of kingship, and upholder of order against the Lie; the same Wise Lord proclaimed as God by Zarathustra, and the ancestor of the Zoroastrian Ohrmazd. His figure stands at the centre of ancient Iranian religion and of its hardest question: whether, and in what sense, the kings were Zoroastrians.

• ConceptArta (Truth, right order)

  The Iranian principle of truth, right order and righteousness, cosmic and social at once, set against the Lie (drauga); the exact cognate of Vedic ṛta, so the Truth-versus-Lie opposition is older than Persia or the prophet; the moral spine of Achaemenid royal ideology, and, personified as the Aməša Spənta Aša Vahišta, a central concept of Zoroastrianism.

• 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]]).

• 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.

• PersonDarius I

  The third and greatest of the Achaemenid Great Kings (r. 522–486 BCE), who seized a contested throne by killing a king he called an impostor, put down a year of revolts, and then remade the loose federation of Cyrus and Cambyses into a true empire: the roughly twenty tribute-paying satrapies, the gold daric, the Royal Road and the Aramaic chancery, the palaces of Susa and Persepolis, the canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. His inscriptions, above all [[behistun-inscription|Behistun]], are the fullest and most personal statement of Achaemenid royal ideology to survive: the king made king by Ahura Mazdā, the servant of [[arta|the Truth]] against [[the-drauga|the Lie]]. Whether his account of his own accession is itself a lie is the central unresolved question of the reign.

• ConceptMithra

  One of the oldest gods of the Indo-Iranian world, whose very name is the common noun for 'contract'. Mithra is the deified covenant: the all-seeing guardian of the sworn word and the alliance, 'he of the wide pastures', watchful across the sky with a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes, terrible to the oath-breaker (the mithra-druj) and associated (though not identical) with the sun. He enters the Persian royal inscriptions late, only with Artaxerxes II, in the triad 'Ahuramazdā, Anāhitā and Mithra'; his cult is woven through the Achaemenid ethic of good faith, and his name lived on in the festival of Mehregān and in a flood of names like Mithradates. The Roman Mithras is a distinct Western creation and no simple continuation of him.

• 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]].

• PlaceNaqsh-e Rostam

  The perpendicular cliff about six kilometres north-west of Persepolis where the Great Kings of the Achaemenid house were entombed. Four cruciform tombs are cut into the rock: the oldest secured to Darius I by its inscriptions, DNa and DNb; the other three attributed on position and style to Xerxes, Artaxerxes I and Darius II. Each façade carries the same religious tableau: the king raised up on a platform borne by the empire's peoples, hand lifted before a fire, beneath the winged figure and the disc of heaven. Before the tombs stands the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt, a windowless stone tower whose Achaemenid purpose is still unresolved. The Sasanian reliefs cut lower on the same cliff give the site its modern Persian name, 'the picture of Rostam'.

• PlacePasargadae

  The first Achaemenid capital, raised by Cyrus the Great on the high, well-watered plain of the River Pulvar in the heart of Persis, some forty kilometres north-east of the later Persepolis. Here Cyrus built a dispersed royal park of columned stone halls (a free-standing gatehouse, Gate R, with its surviving winged 'genius', a public palace, Palace S, and a more intimate one, Palace P, whose throne-portico looked down the central path of a watered garden), set among the earliest 'paradise' garden yet excavated, its plan traced by surviving stone channels. Apart stand two sacred plinths for open-air fire-worship, a tall stone tower (the Zendān), and, a kilometre to the south, the tomb of Cyrus: a gabled stone chamber on a six-stepped plinth, whose Greek-reported epitaph asked the passer-by not to grudge the founder his little earth. The trilingual inscriptions that name Cyrus here (CMa) were, on the current reading of the excavator David Stronach, cut a generation later under Darius. Alexander visited and had the plundered tomb restored in 324 BCE; local memory long knew the tomb as that of the Mother of Solomon.

• Survey essayReligion & the Lie: the Achaemenid religious world

  A 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.

• EventThe Accession of Darius (522 BCE)

  The violent, contested seizure of the Achaemenid throne in 522 BCE: the killing of a king held to be an impostor magus, the coup of the Seven that raised Darius, and the year of rebellion that followed. It is the founding case of the imperial ideology of the Truth against the Lie, and the single sharpest instance in this compendium of a source that must be read as an argument for its author rather than a record of what happened, because whether Darius told the truth about it is precisely what cannot be settled.

• EventThe Battle of Mycale (479 BCE)

  The defeat, in the late summer of 479 BCE, of a beached Persian fleet and its covering army on the Ionian shore below Mount Mycale, opposite the island of Samos. Coming in the same season as the land defeat of [[warfare-and-the-army|Mardonius]] at Plataea, it ended [[xerxes-invasion-of-greece|Xerxes' invasion of Greece]] and, more consequentially for the empire, reopened the Ionian question: the Ionian contingents in the King's own line turned on their masters, Herodotus' 'second revolt of Ionia' began, and within two years the Aegean seaboard passed to the Athenian-led Delian League. The event is known almost entirely from [[herodotus|Herodotus]] (Book 9), who framed it around a providential motif, that it fell on the very day of Plataea; that synchronism is a Greek literary device, and the near-monopoly of one hostile source is the entry's governing problem. Seen from Susa, Mycale was not a catastrophe but the loss of the western sea-fringe, while the empire held its heartland and endured for another century and a half.

• EventThe Battle of Plataea (479 BCE)

  The land battle fought in the summer of 479 BCE on the plain of the Asopos river in Boeotia, near the ruined town of Plataea, in which the picked Persian army left in Greece under [[xerxes-i|Xerxes']] general Mardonius was beaten by a coalition of Greek states under the Spartan regent Pausanias, and Mardonius was killed. It was the decisive engagement of [[xerxes-invasion-of-greece|the invasion of Greece]]: after it the Persian army withdrew from Europe, and the bid to add the Greek mainland to the empire was over. Plataea is the one true land battle of the war, and so the sharpest test of the empire's army against the hoplite; yet it survives almost entirely through [[herodotus|Herodotus]], a Greek writing two generations later, whose account inflates Mardonius' force to 300,000, credits the outcome to Persian equipment and cowardice, and casts the whole as the just ruin of a villain. The Persian-side reading has to recover, against that one patriotic narrative, the real size of the force (some tens of thousands, with a large medizing-Greek component above all Thebes), the shrewd cavalry campaign that Mardonius nearly won, and the narrower, more contingent reasons the battle was lost.

• EventThe Battle of Salamis (480 BCE)

  The naval defeat of Xerxes' fleet in the straits between Attica and the island of Salamis, on a day near the end of September 480 BCE, watched by the King from a throne on the shore. It is the most famous single engagement of the Achaemenid wars against the Greeks, and one of the sharpest tests in this compendium of a rule taken almost entirely from the losers' enemies: our two witnesses are both Greek and both triumphal, Aeschylus' Persae (staged in Athens only eight years after, the earliest account of any Persian event by a contemporary) and Herodotus, with no Persian narrative surviving at all. The fleet that lost was not 'Persian' but the empire's subject navies, Phoenician, Egyptian, Cypriot, Cilician and Ionian Greek; the defeat did not end the war, which ran on a further year to Plataea and Mycale; and what Salamis broke was less the King's army than the image of a king who ruled the sea.

• EventThe Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE)

  The forcing of the coastal pass of Thermopylae by [[xerxes-i|Xerxes I]] in high summer 480 BCE, during [[xerxes-invasion-of-greece|his invasion of Greece]]. A small allied Greek army under the Spartan king Leonidas held the defile for some days against the King's advance, was outflanked by a Persian column sent over the Anopaea mountain path, and was destroyed; the road into central Greece lay open. In later Greek memory, above all in [[herodotus|Herodotus]], it became the supreme tale of free men choosing death over submission, the '300 Spartans' against the countless horde. From the empire's side it was something far smaller and wholly successful: the costly but decisive forcing of a chokepoint by a king performing kingship, a victory the Greek sources bury under the glory of the men who lost. The gap between those two readings, and the near-total dependence on one patriotic Greek narrator, is this entry's governing problem.

• SourceThe Behistun Inscription (DB)

  Darius I's monumental cliff-relief and trilingual inscription at Bagastāna, recounting his seizure and defence of the throne against Gaumāta and a wave of rebels; the single most important primary source for the reign, the oldest connected Achaemenid narrative, and the key that deciphered cuneiform.

• SourceThe Cyrus Cylinder

  A barrel-shaped clay cylinder inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform, buried in the foundations of Babylon's city wall after Cyrus II took the city in 539 BCE. In the traditional idiom of a Mesopotamian building inscription it makes the god Marduk choose Cyrus, condemns the deposed Nabonidus, and proclaims the restoration of the cults and the return of deported gods and peoples. It is a Babylonian priestly composition, not a Persian one; recovered in 1879 and now in the British Museum, it has become, since 1971, the most famous and the most misread object of the Achaemenid world, wrongly promoted as the 'first charter of human rights'.

• ConceptThe Drauga (the Lie)

  The Iranian principle of falsehood and disorder, the cosmic and moral opposite of arta (Truth); the un-making of the right order of the world. It is, on the comparative linguistics, the exact counterpart of Avestan druj and cognate with Vedic druh; and, remarkably, it is the vocabulary of the Lie, not of arta, that actually saturates the Old Persian royal inscriptions, where every rebel against Darius is said to have 'lied' and the provinces to have 'become faithless'.

• EventThe Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)

  The conquest of Babylon by Cyrus II in the autumn of 539 BCE: the last native Mesopotamian empire, ruled by the absent and religiously heterodox Nabonidus and his regent-son Belshazzar, fell to Persia after a decisive battle at Opis, the surrender of Sippar, and a near-bloodless entry into the great city itself. It is the event that made Cyrus lord of the ancient Near East and gave the Achaemenids the world's richest province and the tolerationist template Darius inherited. It is also a source-critical trap of the first order: the two fullest contemporary accounts, the Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder, were both composed by the Marduk priesthood that welcomed the conqueror, and both are propaganda in his service, so that our clearest witnesses to the fall are the least neutral.

• EventThe Ionian Revolt (499–494 BCE)

  The revolt of the Greek cities of the empire's north-western coast (Ionia, the Hellespont, Caria and Cyprus) against Darius I, from the failed attack on Naxos and the burning of Sardis in 499/8 to the sea-battle of Lade and the fall of Miletus in 494. From Susa and Sardis it was a provincial rebellion at the far edge of a realm that stretched from the Indus to the Aegean, put down city by city over five years and then rebuilt; in the hands of Herodotus, writing two generations later and without sympathy for the rebels, it became "the beginning of evils" and the first step on the road to Marathon and Xerxes' invasion. The near-total dependence on that one hostile Greek source is the entry's governing problem.

• ConceptThe King of Kings

  The Achaemenid king's supreme title (xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām, "king of kings") and the whole ideology of rule it carried: a single righteous king set by the favour of Ahura Mazdā over all the peoples of the earth, guardian of the good creation and its order against the Lie. This entry gathers what the kings said of their own office in the inscriptions they carved, the virtues they claimed on their tombs, the distance and splendour of the court, and sets that royal self-portrait against the very different "oriental despot" the Greeks drew, foregrounding the modern scholarship (above all Amélie Kuhrt) that insists the ideology is not the reality, and that the king, for all his majesty, was never held to be a god.

• 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.

• ArtworkThe Winged Symbol (the figure in the winged ring)

  The winged ring, often enclosing a robed male figure, that hovers above the Great King at Behistun, Persepolis and the royal tombs: the most conspicuous religious image of Achaemenid kingship, and the plainest statement that the king rules by divine favour. Long read by European scholars as a portrait of Ahura Mazdā himself, it is now generally taken for the royal xᵛarǝnah, the god-given glory that alights on the legitimate king; but no Achaemenid text names it, and the identification remains one of the field's genuine open questions. In modern dress the same image is the 'Faravahar': a form authentically Achaemenid, under a modern name, given a settled meaning the ancient evidence does not fix.

• 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.

• PersonXerxes I

  The fourth Achaemenid Great King (r. 486–465 BCE), son of [[darius-i|Darius I]] and Atossa the daughter of [[cyrus-the-great|Cyrus]], and so the heir in whom the two royal lines met. He crushed the revolts of Egypt and Babylon that greeted his accession, then led against Greece in 480–479 the largest campaign the empire ever mounted: the bridging of the Hellespont, the pass of Thermopylae, the sack of Athens, and the sea-fight at Salamis where the invasion's spine was broken. He completed the great works at Persepolis begun by his father (the Gate of All Nations, the Hall of a Hundred Columns) and left in the daiva inscription (XPh) the sharpest religious proclamation of any Achaemenid. He was murdered in a palace conspiracy in 465. Because his reign is refracted almost wholly through hostile Greek witnesses (Herodotus and Aeschylus above all), the traditional image of a vain and impious despot who squandered his father's empire is itself the central historiographical problem: the royal inscriptions show a king careful of Achaemenid tradition, and the two pictures do not simply reconcile.

• EventXerxes' Invasion of Greece (480–479 BCE)

  The great expedition that [[xerxes-i|Xerxes I]] led against the Greek mainland in 480–479 BCE, the largest single enterprise the Achaemenid Empire ever mounted and the campaign around which the component battles (Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, Mycale) belong. This entry treats the campaign as a whole: its conception as a royal undertaking, the engineering that most impressed the Greeks (the twin pontoon bridges across the Hellespont and the canal cut through the Athos peninsula), the mustering and the long march, and above all its scale, where the modern demolition of Herodotus' "five million" fixes the credible order of magnitude at a land army of some tens of thousands. Because the campaign survives almost wholly through the patriotic Greek near-monopoly of Herodotus and Aeschylus, the received image of a countless horde punished for its pride is itself the central historiographical problem, and the Persian evidence, thin and non-narrative, tells a different and more limited story.