A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set

During its existence there was no other political formation that could match the Achaemenid Empire in dimensions and outreach. The already huge territories of several preceding empires (those of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Lydians) were united in a single state that then expanded further toward Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and India. These dimensions, as well as the empire's highly diversified natural geography, are dealt with in Sections II(Geography and Demography: chapters 1– 5) and V (Structures and Communication: Chapters 53– 58) of the present volume.

As already indicated, the study of the Achaemenid Persian Empire has to confront and satisfactorily address certain specific challenges. Among these is the need for a critical and balanced review of all available sources, taking into consideration each source's Sitz im Leben , perspective, intention, and contemporary setting. At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, it is no longer adequate to come to the history of the Achaemenid Empire solely through the lens of Greek authors such as Herodotus, Ctesias, or Xenophon. The labeling of such authors, or at least some of them, as historiographers by modern scholarship obscures the fact that what they present is by no means history in the modern sense of the word. They are better seen as offering a literary representation of the Greeks' powerful, daunting, and fascinating eastern neighbor. Their perspective unites research and knowledge with literary creativity, fiction, and imagination, and in writing as they did, they both respected the expectations of their Greek audience, including its desire for sensational stories, and exercised their power to create and shape identities. All of this requires critical reading and investigation by the modern historian who is interested in not only a specific “view of history,” literary tradition, and pattern of thought but a multifaceted approach to the historic past.

An enormous amount of indigenous written material originating inside the Achaemenid Persian Empire survives, and the stock of what is available for study is increasing all the time. The texts in question encompass royal inscriptions and archival documents in a number of languages and writing systems, originating from various contexts in the different regions of the empire. These sources must also, of course, be approached by the modern historian in a critical frame of mind. What they reveal is often an entirely different perspective from that of the western sources. They document administrative actions and decisions, processes in the royal, provincial, or regional bureaucracy, correspondence between court and officials, temple administration, trade, and entrepreneurship, crime and punishment, and even, if only in glimpses, daily life, but also royal self‐presentation, ideology, and the self‐perception of Great Kings who were convinced that they ruled the world by divine favor.

Obviously, there are major obstacles and difficulties in dealing adequately with this vast amount of material. The texts are written in a variety of languages and writing systems and they belong to different local contexts and traditions. The Achaemenid Persian state was a true empire in terms of its multilingualism and its ability to bring together distinct age‐old traditions of writing and thought under a single roof. There is nobody who could deal with the totality of this heterogeneous and diversified material alone. The task has to be shared and the issues discussed in a transdisciplinary approach that is interested not only in a single archive and region but in the empire as a whole. Only in this manner is it possible to evaluate the importance and quality of each individual source for the reconstruction of the political, cultural, social, economic, and religious history of the empire. It will be no surprise that there is still considerable dissent among scholars about how this can be achieved successfully and what these reconstructions might look like. These written sources in their entirety, structured according to the individual languages involved, are presented in this Companion in Section III‐A(Written Sources: Chapters 6– 14).

In recent decades, extensive archeological fieldwork has been undertaken in a wide range of the modern states and regions that are situated on the territory of the former Achaemenid Empire. It is important to stress that archeological sources of any kind are as essential as written ones for reconstructing the past and they must be taken into account appropriately by the modern historian. One aim of the Companion is therefore to offer an up‐to‐date survey of the archeological state of the art from Kazakhstan to the Sudan and from India to the Aegean. Section III‐B(Archeological Sources: Chapters 15– 24) presents an overview of sites, excavations, and finds, structured by major geographical regions.

Section IV(History: Chapters 25– 52) is divided into three subsections: A Predecessors of the Persian Empire and Its Rise, B From Gaumāta to Alexander, and C Under Persian Rule. As is immediately obvious, it has a much wider focus than the history of the empire itself. This reflects our intention to situate and understand the empire within the broader historical developments of the first millennium BCE and their specific contexts. The empire, on the one hand, transcended the boundaries of its ancient Near Eastern predecessor states, but on the other hand it followed their general trajectories. Some of its core areas were indeed “Iranian”; nevertheless the Achaemenid Persian Empire was not an Iranian state but a multiethnic and multiregional giant that drew from age‐old Near Eastern traditions while at the same time introducing novel agendas and traits. This also, incidentally, applies mutatis mutandis to what followed with and after the conquest of the empire by Alexander III. Chapters 25– 28are, therefore, devoted to Media, Urartu, Assyria, Babylonia, and Elam. The great conquests of Cyrus and Cambyses are also part of subsection A, since the usurpation of the Persian throne by Darius I marks a major change in the history of the empire. Chapters 30– 33deal with the history of the Achaemenid Empire in its narrower sense, from the crisis after the death of Cambyses and Darius I's seizure of power through the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to Darius III and the conquest by Alexander.

Subsection C (Under Persian Rule: Chapters 34– 52) already mediates between Sections IVand V, since it illustrates the empire's astonishing capacity to create unity from diversity. This subsection offers a survey of all the major regions of the empire and the local dimensions of its history through the 200 years of its existence. The success of the empire was due to the fact that its developed structures and bureaucracies had local as well as transregional trajectories. It is this overarching and general layout that is the main focus of Section V(Structures and Communication: Chapters 53– 58). As has only become properly evident in recent years, the empire maintained already established local structures, at least to a certain extent, and developed an imperial and transregional superstructure that guaranteed its efficiency in collecting taxes and manpower and in maintaining communications between Central Asia, India, Iran, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia.

The administrative and economic dimension of the empire's structure is the general focus of Section VI(Administration and Economy: Chapters 59– 69), which is organized into three subsections: A Imperial Administration, B Local Administration, and C Economy. It has already been stressed that a major characteristic of the empire's highly developed bureaucratic apparatus was the interplay between local and transregional structures. This interplay is highlighted by a variety of sources and archives that run from Egypt across Syria, Asia Minor, and Babylonia to Fars and Central Asia. The focus is not only on structures but also on persons, and on rulers as well as the ruled, i.e. on the development of imperial elites with estates all over the empire and their transregional radius of engagement as well as on locals who kept the empire's structures going by paying taxes and delivering soldiers and manpower. The chapter also deals with transregional migration and deportations. The background to the latter is often difficult to grasp in detail; an element of punishment may sometimes be combined with a plan to develop underpopulated and economically weak regions of the empire. The economic aspect of imperial administration is more comprehensively dealt with in the last subsection, which discusses taxes and tribute, temple economy, and entrepreneurship and “banks.”