People (7)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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]].

• 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.

• PersonZarathustra

  The Iranian prophet (Zoroaster to the Greeks) whose seventeen hymns, the Gāthās, exalt Ahura Mazdā as the one God and set before every person the choice between aša (the Truth) and druj (the Lie). His date, his homeland, even (to a few sceptics) his existence are among the most contested questions in the field; the Achaemenid kings worship his Wise Lord and make his Truth-and-Lie the spine of their ideology, yet no royal inscription ever names him.