Achaemenid Empire

Cyrus

Drafted from Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002)formation

Persia in 560 BC was a kingdom in the south-west of the Iranian plateau, subordinate to the Medes, and of no consequence to anybody writing anything down. Within thirty years it held the Near East.

Cyrus II took Media around 550 — the Median king's own army is said to have handed him over, which is either propaganda or the ordinary way a subordinate dynasty replaces its overlord. He took Lydia and the Anatolian coast around 546, defeating Croesus. In 539 he took Babylon, and the manner of it is the thing worth stopping on.

Babylon was the greatest city in the world and it did not fight. Cyrus entered after a battle at Opis, kept the priesthoods and the temple administration intact, restored cults the previous king had neglected, and had himself proclaimed in Babylonian terms as the man Marduk had chosen to restore order. The Cyrus Cylinder, a foundation deposit in Akkadian recording this, is a document of exactly that kind: a conqueror speaking to a conquered elite in its own formulas.

It is also, in modern usage, routinely described as the first charter of human rights, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not. It is a building inscription in a long Mesopotamian genre, and every claim in it — restoring temples, returning displaced gods, releasing captives — appears in earlier Assyrian and Babylonian examples of the same genre. What is true, and more interesting, is the policy it describes: the Achaemenids governed by leaving local institutions in place and speaking to each population in its own language, and they did it consistently for two centuries.

The Hebrew Bible's account of Cyrus authorising the return from the Babylonian exile and the rebuilding of the temple is part of the same policy and, unusually for this empire, is a Persian action recorded by beneficiaries rather than enemies. It is most of the reason a Persian king has a positive reputation in the Western tradition at all, and the next chapter is about why nothing else does.

Satrapies

Drafted from Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002)expansion

Cyrus took Media in 549, Lydia in 546 and Babylon in 539, and his successors added Egypt and the Indus. Within thirty years a minor people of the south-west Iranian plateau held everything from the Aegean to the Punjab — the first time one authority had governed the whole Near East.

What made it hold was administrative rather than military. The empire was divided into satrapies under governors who kept substantial autonomy, connected by a road system and a relay post, taxed on a fixed assessment, and audited by travelling inspectors. Local law, local religion and local elites were left in place: Cyrus is remembered in the Hebrew Bible for returning the Judaeans from Babylon, and in a Babylonian inscription for restoring Marduk's cult. Aramaic did the administrative work across the whole empire regardless of what anyone spoke.

Briant's insistence is worth carrying forward. The Achaemenid empire is overwhelmingly described in Greek sources written by its enemies, and the picture of oriental despotism and decadent decline they produced is a literary construction that the empire's own documentation does not support. It was conquered by Alexander in three battles, which is a fact about Macedonian military capacity rather than evidence that it was rotten.

Every later Iranian dynasty claimed it. The Parthians and the Sasanians both asserted descent or succession from the Achaemenids, and neither was in any position to be contradicted.

The Lie

Drafted from Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun in Persia (1907)expansion

Darius was not Cyrus's son, and the empire he inherited fell apart the moment he took it. The account of how he put it back together is his own, cut into a cliff where nobody could reach it, and its organising idea is not conquest or descent. It is truthfulness.

What he says happened

The narrative on the rock begins with a killing inside the royal family, told flatly:

Cambyses had a brother, Smerdis by name, of the same mother and the same father as he; and afterwards Cambyses slew Smerdis. When Cambyses slew Smerdis, the people knew not that Smerdis was slain. Thereupon Cambyses went into Egypt.

Then the consequence, in the sentence that supplies the inscription's whole vocabulary:

Then the people became hostile, and the Lie multiplied in the lands, even in Persia, as in Media, and in the other provinces.

A magus named Gaumata, Darius says, rose claiming to be the murdered brother, and was believed — because the murder had been secret, and there was nobody to say otherwise. Cambyses died. The imposter held the empire. Darius killed him, and then had to fight everyone else.

Nineteen battles

The scale of the collapse is the part usually skipped, and Darius states it as a total:

After I became king, I fought nineteen battles.

Nineteen battles and nine captured kings, in something close to a single year, across Persia, Media, Elam, Babylonia, Armenia, Parthia, Margiana and Sagartia. Every province of the empire Cyrus and Cambyses had assembled either rose or produced a claimant.

This is not the record of a usurper covering his tracks. It is a man admitting that the empire he claims to have inherited had, in fact, comprehensively refused him — and then arguing that putting it down again is what makes the claim good.

Why it is all about lying

The word that does the work throughout is drauga, the Lie, and it is doing theology rather than ethics.

Every rebel is a liar. Gaumata lied when he said he was Smerdis; each pretender lied when he said he was of the old royal line; the provinces went over because the Lie multiplied among them. Against that, Darius's qualification is stated as a negative:

because I was not wicked, nor was I a liar, nor was I a tyrant

And the instruction to whoever comes after is the same one:

Thou who shalt be king hereafter, beware of lies; the man who is a liar, destroy him.

In Zoroastrian terms this is not a figure of speech. Truth and the Lie are the two principles the world is built out of, and a king who is on the side of the first is doing cosmology by putting down rebels. It converts nineteen battles against his own subjects into a religious duty, and it does so without ever claiming that Darius was the eldest son of anybody.

What the argument was for

Cyrus took the empire and did not have to explain himself. Darius took it from the inside, at speed, against nine other claimants, and needed a doctrine.

What he produced is the ideological apparatus every later Achaemenid inscription runs on: a king made by Ahuramazda rather than by birth, whose legitimacy is demonstrated by success and whose enemies are liars by definition. It outlasted him by two centuries.

And he had it cut three hundred feet up a cliff on the road from Babylon to Ecbatana, in three languages, above a road everyone used — and then had the ledge below it cut away, so that nobody could get close enough to read it, or to damage it.

What the tablets say

Drafted from Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002)aside?What aside means

Between 1933 and 1934 an excavation at Persepolis found tens of thousands of clay tablets in the fortification wall of the terrace, written in Elamite, and a smaller archive in the treasury. They are the empire's own paperwork, and they are the reason a modern account of it can be written at all.

They are not a narrative. They are travel authorisations, ration issues, livestock accounts, receipts for grain and wine and beer and flour, records of workers paid in kind, and orders for the supply of parties moving on the royal roads. There is no history in them and no ideology. What there is instead is what a functioning imperial administration leaves behind when nobody is composing anything.

What they establish is worth listing, because each item contradicts something in the Greek tradition. A road system with authorised stages at which named officials issued fixed rations against sealed documents. Workers of many nationalities — Egyptians, Ionians, Lycians, Bactrians — paid in commodities at graded rates, women among them, some receiving supplements for childbirth. A treasury converting rations to silver at fixed rates from the 490s onward, which is a monetising economy rather than a static tribute-collecting one. Royal women, Artystone among them, running estates and issuing orders in their own names on their own seals.

None of that is compatible with an empire of slaves ruled by whim, and it is also not the sort of evidence that produces a story. This is the general problem with the Achaemenids: the documentation and the narrative come from opposite directions and do not meet. The tablets tell you how the empire worked and nothing about what happened. The Greeks tell you what happened and are wrong about how it worked.

The tablets are also the reason anything can be said about how the empire was actually financed and manned — a land tax and tolls on movement, a professional core with levies behind it, and a succession the king designated. Every one of those comes out of the administrative record rather than out of Herodotus, which is the only reason to trust them.

The sources are the enemy's

Drafted from Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002)aside?What aside means

Almost everything commonly known about this empire comes from people it was at war with. Herodotus, Xenophon, Ctesias and the Alexander historians supply the narrative; the empire's own archives survive as administrative tablets from Persepolis, royal inscriptions, and scattered documents in Aramaic and Babylonian, none of which tells a story.

The consequences run deep enough to be worth naming. The Greek tradition produced a picture of oriental despotism — a king ruling slaves rather than subjects, a court of eunuchs and harem intrigue, an empire in long decline from Darius onward, ripe for Alexander. Briant's reconstruction from the administrative record gives something else: a functioning tax and audit system, governors who were checked and rotated, garrisons paid on time, and a Babylonian and Egyptian documentary trail that shows no collapse before the conquest.

The decline narrative is the most durable of these inheritances, and it is circular. The empire fell, therefore it must have been failing. But it lost three battles to an exceptional army and a commander who took every risk available, and its administrative machinery was intact enough that Alexander and then the Seleucids simply carried on using it, satrapy by satrapy.

Even the modern measurements inherit the problem. The standard figures for the empire's extent are computed from maps that descend, ultimately, from the same Greek geography. They are properly sourced and they are still a Greek estimate of a Persian empire.

By the favour of Ahuramazda

Drafted from Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002)peak

Every Achaemenid royal inscription says the same thing before it says anything else. A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth, who created that sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king. By the favour of Ahuramazda I am king.

That formula is the whole constitutional claim: the right comes from above rather than from a predecessor, a lineage or an army. Descent is the other half of it, and the prominence Darius gives it is a symptom. Darius spends the opening of the Behistun inscription establishing that he is an Achaemenid, eight kings in his line before him, precisely because his claim to it was the weakest thing about him: he came to the throne in 522 by killing the man on it, and his account of why that was lawful runs to several hundred lines on a cliff face in three languages.

Behistun is worth a moment as an object. It is cut sixty metres up a rock over the road from Babylon to Ecbatana, in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, with a relief of the king facing nine bound rebels. Nobody could read it from the road. It was made to be true rather than to be read, and copies were circulated in Aramaic — one was found at Elephantine in Egypt, two thousand kilometres away, which is how we know the text was distributed as policy.

Whether the Achaemenids were Zoroastrians is a long argument and will not be settled here. They worshipped Ahuramazda, used a calendar with Zoroastrian month names, and had magi at court; they also did not mention Zoroaster, and the royal inscriptions differ in important ways from the Avesta. The safe statement is that the dynasty's religion is continuous with what later became Zoroastrianism and is not identical to it.

What is not in doubt is the political use of the arrangement. A king who rules by the favour of one god who created the earth is not the god of one people, and the empire's practice of restoring local cults follows from the theology rather than contradicting it. Marduk chose Cyrus; Ahuramazda made Darius king; the Judaeans were sent home to rebuild their temple. Those are not three inconsistent policies. They are one policy stated in three vocabularies.

The bridges

Drafted from Herodotus, The History of Herodotus (1890)peak

Everybody knows that Xerxes had the sea whipped. It is the standard image of oriental despotism, and it comes from Herodotus, who is hostile. What is less often noticed is that the same passage, a few lines later, contains one of the best engineering descriptions to survive from antiquity — and that it is about the same project.

The first attempt

Two bridges were begun from Abydos across to a headland on the European side, seven furlongs of water. The Phoenicians built one with cables of white flax; the Egyptians built the other with papyrus rope. Two crews, two materials, working in competition.

A storm came on and smashed both.

What Xerxes did about it

Herodotus's account is precise about the punishment, and reports it at one remove in places, which is his way of flagging that he is passing on what he was told.

The Hellespont was to receive three hundred strokes of the lash, and a pair of fetters was to be let down into the sea. He had also heard, he says, that branders were sent to brand it. And the men doing the beating were to say this:

Thou bitter water, thy master lays upon thee this penalty, because thou didst wrong him not having suffered any wrong from him: and Xerxes the king will pass over thee whether thou be willing or no; but with right, as it seems, no man doeth sacrifice to thee, seeing that thou art a treacherous and briny stream.

Then he had the heads cut off the men who had been in charge of the bridging.

Herodotus calls the words barbarian and presumptuous, and he is writing for Athenians who had recently been invaded. Whatever happened at the water's edge, the executions are the part that reads as institutionally true: a project failed, and the responsible officers were killed for it.

The second attempt

And then new chief-constructors were appointed, and Herodotus describes exactly what they did, in the tone of a man who has taken the trouble to find out.

They assembled penteconters and triremes as pontoons — three hundred and sixty under the bridge on the Black Sea side, three hundred and fourteen under the other. The hulls were laid in the direction of the Hellespont's current, so that they took the tension of the cables rather than fighting the flow. Very large anchors went down on both sides: on the Pontus side against the winds that blow outward from within, and on the western side against the south-east and south winds. And they left an opening, so that shipping could still pass.

Six hundred and seventy-four vessels, requisitioned, positioned, moored against two different prevailing wind systems, and detailed to hold cable tension — with a navigation gap engineered into it.

The two halves of the story

Both halves are Herodotus and both are in the same chapter, and it is worth resisting the urge to pick one.

An empire that can whip the sea in a fit of temper and behead its engineers is also an empire that can, immediately afterwards, put a second and better bridge across a strait using six hundred and seventy-four ships from its own fleet, on schedule, in a way that accounts for the local winds.

The whipping is what the Greeks remembered because it explained the Persians to them. The anchors are what the Persian empire actually was — and the reason the invasion reached Greece at all was the second thing, not the first.

Not in decline

Drafted from Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002)contraction

The standard account of the fourth century BC has the Achaemenid empire in long decay — a succession of weak kings, palace intrigue, satraps in revolt, and a structure so hollow that Alexander pushed it over. Briant's book is, among other things, six hundred pages of argument against it, and the alternative is to repeat a Greek literary convention as though it were a finding.

The evidence usually offered is real and reads differently in sequence.

Egypt revolted successfully in 404 and stayed independent for sixty years. That is a serious loss — the richest province in the empire — and it is also a loss the empire kept trying to reverse and did reverse, in 343, at the fourth attempt. An empire that recovers its wealthiest province after six decades of trying is not decaying; it is slow.

The satrapal revolts of the 360s were serious and were also, on examination, less coordinated than the Greek accounts suggest and were put down. Artaxerxes III, who is generally the villain of the decline narrative, reconquered Egypt, reduced Phoenicia and Cyprus, and left the empire larger than he found it.

The dynastic violence was real and is not evidence of institutional failure. Violent successions are the norm in almost every monarchy anywhere; the Ottomans institutionalised fratricide and lasted six hundred years.

And the documentary record does not show collapse. The Babylonian business archives run continuously through the fourth century; the Egyptian and Bactrian material shows administration functioning; there is no fiscal crisis visible anywhere.

What defeated the empire was an army. Macedonian infantry with a long pike in depth, supported by heavy cavalry used as a shock arm and commanded by a man who took risks that ought to have killed him, was the best military instrument in the world for about twenty years, and the Achaemenids met it three times. The argument that they lost because they were rotten is circular — they fell, therefore they must have been falling — and the reason it survives is that the people who wrote the surviving account had every reason to make it.

Three battles and a satrap

Drafted from Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988)end

Alexander landed in Asia in 334 with something over thirty thousand men and no fleet worth the name, against an empire with the resources of the Near East and control of the sea.

He won at the Granicus in 334 against a satrapal army, at Issus in 333 against Darius III in ground too narrow for Persian numbers to tell, and at Gaugamela in 331 in open country Darius had chosen and levelled. The third is the one that mattered. The Persian army was larger, had chariots and elephants and the better cavalry, and was outmanoeuvred and broken; Darius left the field, as he had at Issus.

After Gaugamela there was no second army. Babylon surrendered and Alexander entered it as Cyrus had, sacrificing to Marduk. Susa surrendered with the treasury in it. Persepolis was taken, its treasury — the accumulated reserve of two centuries — removed, and the palace burned, in an act the sources variously present as a drunken accident, a calculated announcement that the Persian wars were avenged, and a deliberate destruction of the dynasty's ceremonial centre. It was probably the second.

Darius III fled east and was arrested, and then killed, by Bessus, his own satrap of Bactria, in the summer of 330. Alexander found the body, sent it to Persepolis for burial in the royal tombs, and hunted Bessus for two years.

The empire ends in 330, and the last detail is the one worth keeping. The empire was not ended by a foreign army defeating a king. It was ended when the king's own governor decided he was finished and killed him. That is why Alexander's first act on taking the body was to bury it as a king. He was not avenging Darius. He was establishing that the office continued and that he now held it.

The rock

Drafted from Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun in Persia (1907)afterlife

For roughly two thousand three hundred years the Achaemenid empire had no voice of its own. Everything anybody could read about it had been written by Greeks. The empire's own account of itself was cut into the face of a near-vertical rock five hundred feet above the plain, on the high road from Babylon to Ecbatana, in plain sight of everyone who used the road, and nobody alive could read a word of it. Travellers sketched the sculptures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and guessed; one of them decided the figures were Jews, because the writing on their garments reminded him of phylacteries.

Darius had it carved shortly after 520 BC: the relief of the king with his foot on a fallen pretender and nine rebels roped at the neck, and beneath and beside it the text of the year in which he took the empire back, in Old Persian, in Elamite and in Babylonian. Three versions of one statement, which is the condition of a bilingual key. It had been waiting on the rock for the whole of the interval, and travellers had been walking under it and guessing.

Getting it down

The man who took it down was Henry Rawlinson, a lieutenant in the Indian service who had been sent to Persia in 1833 to help train the Shah's army and was posted to Kermanshah, twenty miles from the cliff, in 1835. He had already worked out the values of many Old Persian signs from shorter inscriptions on Mount Elwend, near Hamadan. Behistun gave him a long text to test them on.

The difficulty was not scholarly. The Persian columns sit on a foot-ledge about eighteen inches wide. He described the working position himself: a ladder too short to be given any slope, so that the upper lines could only be copied standing on the topmost step, steadying his body against the rock with his left arm, the notebook in his left hand and the pencil in his right. He adds that the interest of the occupation entirely did away with any sense of danger, which is the sort of thing men wrote in the 1840s and is also, on the evidence of what he did next, true.

The Elamite version is in a recess set further back, and reaching it meant bridging a gap over a sheer drop. His first attempt was made with a ladder laid on its side; the bars, which Persian ladder-makers fitted into their sockets without clenching them outside, worked loose under his weight, and the lower half of the ladder went over the precipice while he hung from the upper half until his friends pulled him in.

The Babylonian text — the one that mattered most, because Babylonian was the language of the entire Mesopotamian written record — was on an overhanging mass of rock that the local cragsmen, who tracked goats across the whole face of the mountain, said could not be reached at all. In 1847 a Kurdish boy who had come from a distance volunteered. He worked himself up a cleft to the left of the projection, drove in a peg, tied a rope, failed to swing across, and then crossed twenty feet of smooth perpendicular rock on his fingers and toes. From the far cleft he could swing out over the overhang, and there he rigged a short ladder into a hanging seat like a painter's cradle and, sitting in it, took the paper squeeze of the Babylonian version under Rawlinson's direction from below.

Rawlinson's own note on that squeeze is the reason to tell the story. He thought the block it came from was doomed: water trickling from above had almost separated the overhanging mass from the rest of the rock, and its weight threatened shortly to bring it down into the plain in a thousand pieces.

What it opened

Rawlinson published his memoir on the Persian text in 1847, the first correct translation of a long Old Persian inscription; the conclusions he reached then are still accepted with only small modifications. Edwin Norris took the Elamite. Rawlinson took the Babylonian himself, and Babylonian is the door to Assyria, to Babylon, to Sumer — to the entire cuneiform world.

So the reading of the ancient Near East was unlocked by a Persian king's account of how he had put down nine rebellions, which he had carved on a mountain because he wanted it to last.

It nearly did not. The paper squeezes were exhibited in London, handled by scholars for decades, and crumbled; the inscription on the rock was perishing at the same time. In 1904 the British Museum sent L. W. King and R. C. Thompson to Behistun to collate the whole thing again on the cliff itself, and their edition is why the text can be quoted with confidence now.

Two collations, sixty years apart, both made by men on ledges. The empire that the Greeks described as an oriental despotism ruling slaves had left an account of itself in its own voice all along. It took until 1847 for anyone to hear it, and the sentence standing at the head of every section is the same one: thus saith Darius the king.