Topic: sources (10)

• SourceAeschylus, Persae (The Persians)

  The earliest surviving account of any Achaemenid event by a contemporary, and the only Greek tragedy on a historical subject to come down to us: staged at Athens in 472 BCE, eight years after Salamis, by a poet who by tradition had himself fought the Persians. It stages the Persian defeat from the enemy's side, as the lament of the losers (Atossa, the ghost of Darius, Xerxes home in rags), and it is a founding text of the Greek 'barbarian' construct. It is drama, not history: Athenian civic self-celebration performed for the victors. Yet it preserves a near-contemporary image, a roster of genuine Iranian names, and a real sense of the fleet and the battle, and it must be weighed line by line for the few things it can be trusted for.

• 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.

• SourceHerodotus, The Histories

  The earliest surviving Greek history, and the fullest classical account of the Persians: their rise, their customs and religion, and the wars with Greece. Indispensable and endlessly informative, but an outsider's report to be read critically: sound in its institutional substance, where the Iranian evidence repeatedly confirms it, and most Greek in the motives, speeches and court-tales it builds over the facts.

• 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 Immortals

  The 10,000-strong standing corps of elite Persian foot that guarded the King of Kings and formed the professional heart of the field army, famous under the Greek name Herodotus gave them, 'the Immortals' (athanatoi), because the corps was kept always at exactly ten thousand: a fallen or sick man was at once replaced. Almost everything vivid about them is Greek, and Herodotus above all; the Persian-side evidence is very thin. Their true Old Persian name is unknown, the popular claim that 'Immortals' is a mistranslation of anūšiya ('followers') is a modern conjecture and not established fact, and the celebrated glazed-brick 'archer' frieze from Susa is called 'the Immortals' only by a modern and unproven label. What is secure is the institution: a permanent royal guard, its inner thousand the king's spear-bearing bodyguard whom later writers call the 'apple-bearers' (mēlophoroi).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.