Topic: women (3)

• PersonArtemisia I of Halicarnassus

  The queen of Halicarnassus and its dependent Carian and Dorian towns at the time of [[xerxes-invasion-of-greece|Xerxes' invasion of Greece]], a widow ruling in her own right who brought five ships to the King's fleet and fought at [[the-battle-of-salamis|Salamis]] in 480 BCE. She matters to this compendium as a triple lens on the empire and its sources. She is a woman wielding power and naval command in the King's service, at a time and in a world where that was remarkable enough for [[herodotus|Herodotus]] to say he marvelled at it. She is a subject Greek-and-Carian dynast fighting *for* the Great King, so that the "Persians against Greeks" frame collapses yet again: the most conspicuous captain in Herodotus' account of the Persian fleet is a Greek-speaking queen from the historian's own city. And she is the sharpest single case in the whole subject of source-bias, because Herodotus is her fellow Halicarnassian and shapes her at every turn: he gives her the "wise adviser" role who counsels against Salamis, reports the King's line that "my men have become women, and my women men," and tells the ambiguous story of her ramming a friendly ship to escape. How much of this is memory and how much Herodotean design is the question the entry keeps open. She should not be confused with Artemisia II, the builder of the Mausoleum, a different Halicarnassian queen more than a century later.

• 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.

• 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.