Achaemenid Empire

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The Achaemenid Empire was the first Persian empire, founded by Cyrus the Great around 550 BCE and brought down by Alexander of Macedon in 330 BCE. At its height under Darius I it reached from the Indus valley to the Aegean and into Egypt — the largest political structure the ancient Near East had produced, holding a patchwork of peoples, languages, and cults under a single Persian king. By the calculations of historical demographers it ruled, near 480 BCE, a larger share of the living human population than any state before or since: something close to two persons in five drew breath under the King of Kings. The size was not incidental to its religious self-image. A king who governed the inhabited world governed it, in his own telling, because the great god had handed it to him.

The founding line

The empire took its name from Achaemenes — Old Persian Haxāmaniš — a semi-legendary ancestor through whom the ruling line traced its right to rule; no contemporary source attests him, and his existence is itself partly a retrospective genealogy the dynasty supplied for itself. Cyrus assembled the core by conquest. He absorbed first the Median kingdom of his maternal grandfather (the takeover of the Medes, c. 550 BCE, is the conventional birth date of the empire), then the wealthy realm of Lydia in western Anatolia, whose king Croesus had grown proverbial for gold, and finally Babylon, which fell to him in 539 BCE with little recorded fighting. The annexation of Babylon brought with it the whole imperial apparatus of Mesopotamia — the scribal schools, the temple economies, the centuries-deep astral learning of Babylonia — and made the Persian king heir to the oldest continuous administrative tradition in the world. To the southwest the old kingdom of Elam, centered on Susa, was folded in as a heartland province; Susa became one of the empire’s capitals, and Elamite one of its chancery languages.

Cyrus died on campaign in 530 BCE; his son Cambyses added Egypt in 525 BCE. After a disputed succession Darius I seized the throne in 522 BCE and held it until 486, and it is under Darius that the empire acquired the shape later ages remembered. The Persian-controlled world now ran from the Indus and Gandhara in the east, through the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia, across Anatolia to the Aegean coast, and south through Egypt toward Libya.

The machinery of rule

What held this expanse together was an administrative architecture of remarkable durability. Darius organized the whole into satrapies — provinces under appointed governors, xšaçapāvan, protectors of the realm, the word that Greek rendered as satrapēs. A satrap assessed and collected tribute, maintained order, and answered for the military levy of his province; royal secretaries and inspectors, the latter remembered in later Greek anecdote as the eyes and ears of the king, kept the governors under watch from the center. The provinces were stitched together by a system of royal roads, the most famous running some 2,500 kilometers from Susa to Sardis, and along it a relay post that changed horses and riders at fixed stages. Herodotus describes this courier service with open admiration — neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness stayed the riders from their appointed stages, in a phrase that crossed two and a half millennia to be carved over a post office in New York. The Persians called the relay angareion.

The administration ran in several languages at once. Royal monuments spoke in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian together; but the working tongue of record across the western provinces — the language of dispatch, account, and order — was Aramaic, the Semitic lingua franca already spread through the Near East by the Assyrian deportations of earlier centuries. An order could be dictated in Persian at Susa, written down in Aramaic, carried by relay to Egypt or Anatolia, and there read aloud in translation to a governor who knew no Persian at all. This imperial Aramaic outlived the empire by centuries and seeded the scripts in which Hebrew, Syriac, and much of later Iranian were written. Darius also fixed a standardized coinage, the gold daric and silver siglos, and a uniform system of weights and tribute assessment — the fiscal scaffolding of a state that drew revenue from Bactria to the Nile.

The god in the inscriptions

The religious picture is the part most often misread. Royal inscriptions, above all the great trilingual relief that Darius had cut into the cliff at Bisitun, credit the king’s victories and his very kingship to Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord. The Bisitun text — carved around 520 BCE in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, high on a rock face on the road between Babylon and Ecbatana — narrates Darius’s seizure of power, his killing of a usurper the inscription names Gaumata the Magian, and his suppression of the rebellions that broke out across the empire in his first year, each episode punctuated by the refrain that Ahura Mazda bore him aid. The same monument, by preserving one message in three scripts, became in the nineteenth century the key that unlocked cuneiform itself, when Henry Rawlinson worked back from the Old Persian to the Babylonian. The god of the inscriptions is a sky-lord of truth against the lie, a moral cosmos rendered in royal stone: the king rules truthfully, aša, and his enemies are followers of the druj, the lie. Later kings — Xerxes among them, in the so-called daiva inscription denouncing the worship of false gods — speak the same idiom.

From this it is sometimes said that Zoroastrianism was the Achaemenid state religion. Scholarship treats the claim with caution. The kings clearly venerated Ahura Mazda and spoke in a recognizably Mazdean idiom, and a hereditary Iranian priestly class, the Magi, appear in Greek and later sources as the empire’s ritual specialists, tending fire, performing the libations, and chanting the sacred formulas. But how far the kings’ beliefs matched the later, systematized religion of the Avesta — its developed dualism of Ahura Mazda against Angra Mainyu, its eschatology of bridge-judgment and final renovation — is genuinely uncertain, and whether the prophet Zoroaster (whose linguistically dated hymns most scholars now place in the second millennium BCE, far to the east, in a stone-and-bronze pastoral world that knows nothing of the Achaemenid horizon) stood behind the dynasty at all is a separate question again. The royal inscriptions never name him, never name the Avesta, never name the daēvas as a class of demons in the systematic later sense. The term Zoroastrian, laid over the sixth century BCE, is a projection backward as much as a description; the safer statement is that the Achaemenids practiced an Iranian Mazda-worship from which the later religion grew, not that they professed the religion in its codified form. (The doctrines themselves — the Wise Lord, the choosing soul, the world’s renovation — belong to the entry on the Avesta; what concerns the empire is the political use the kings made of the god’s name.)

Tolerance as theology and as policy

What can be said with confidence is that the Achaemenids did not impose their royal cult on their subjects. Cyrus, in the clay barrel-inscription known as his cylinder — recovered by Hormuzd Rassam in 1879 from the foundations of Marduk’s temple at Babylon, and now in the British Museum — presents himself not as a conqueror of Babylon but as its liberator and restorer. He has Marduk, the city’s chief god, scan the lands for a righteous king, find the reigning Nabonidus wanting in piety, and summon Cyrus by name to set the cult right. The text describes returning to their proper shrines the divine images that Nabonidus had gathered into the capital, and sending home peoples whom earlier kings had deported. The cylinder is sometimes called the first charter of human rights — a description the British Museum’s own curators reject as anachronistic, since the document is a thoroughly conventional Mesopotamian royal proclamation in the Marduk idiom, written for a Babylonian audience by a king borrowing the religious vocabulary of the city he had taken.

The same policy wears a different face in the Hebrew Bible, where Cyrus is remembered as the king who ended the Babylonian exile — who permitted the deported Judeans to return and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and who is named, remarkably, the māšîaḥ, the anointed of the Lord (Isaiah 45). A foreign monarch is cast as the instrument of Israel’s God; the prophet who hails him insists that the God who anoints Cyrus is the only god there is. The return and the rebuilding, the work of Ezra and Nehemiah under later Persian kings, fall within the empire’s reach and within its policy, and the long Persian period — Judah a small district of the satrapy “Beyond the River” — is the matrix in which the Torah moved to the center of Jewish life. This same period of sustained Judean contact with Iranian religion is where the maximalist case for syncretism locates the catalyzing of later Jewish ideas of bodily resurrection, a hierarchy of angels, and a cosmic adversary — a transmission long argued and far from settled, and one whose chronology turns on the dating of oral Zoroastrian doctrine against its much later surviving texts.

The tolerance was theology and policy at once. A king who upheld local sanctuaries — who restored Marduk’s images, funded the Jerusalem temple, styled himself pharaoh in Egypt and son of the sun-god in his Egyptian titulary — governed more cheaply and more durably than one who provoked the priesthoods of a hundred peoples. The Achaemenid genius was to let each subject nation address heaven in its own tongue while the King of Kings collected the tribute of all of them.

Scholarship and sources

The empire is reconstructed from an unusually disjointed evidentiary base, and the discipline that does so has a documented history of its own. The indispensable modern synthesis is Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (English translation, Eisenbrauns, 2002), which deliberately reads the empire from the inside, against the long Hellenocentric habit of viewing Persia only through Greek eyes. The royal inscriptions are gathered and edited in the line running from Roland Kent’s Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon (1953) to the ongoing corpus work of Rüdiger Schmitt; the administrative archives — the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury tablets, the Aramaic documents of the satrap Aršāma — have transformed the picture since the mid-twentieth century. On the religious question, Mary Boyce’s A History of Zoroastrianism (Brill, 1975–1991) and her Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979) make the maximal case for deep Achaemenid Mazdeanism, while Albert de Jong’s Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Brill, 1997) supplies the critical treatment of the Magi as the Greeks and Romans actually reported them — and the corrective against reading the classical magus topos back onto the historical priesthood. The standing reference for every name, place, and text named here is the Encyclopaedia Iranica, whose article on the Cyrus cylinder lays out the document’s Mesopotamian context, and whose treatment of the Bisitun inscriptions anchors the chronology of Darius’s first year.

Much of the older comparative apparatus through which the West first met Persian religion is itself a primary source for the history of the idea of Persia — the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compilations of “ancient fragments” that set Persian, Chaldean, and Egyptian remains side by side, such as Isaac Preston Cory’s collection of the surviving classical citations of lost Eastern books (Ancient Fragments, 1832). These works belong to the reception history as much as to the documentary record: they are where the figure of the Persian sage was assembled for modern readers, often well in advance of the philology that would later discipline the picture.

The two Persias

For the later Western imagination the empire matters twice over, and the two afterlives pull in opposite directions. It is the adversary of the Greek histories — the Persia of Marathon (490 BCE), Thermopylae and Salamis (480 BCE), the vast slow-moving power that Herodotus made the foil against which a Greek idea of liberty defined itself. That Persia is an antagonist, a cautionary giant, the East as overreach. And it is, at the same time, the channel through which Iranian religious figures — the Magi above all — entered the Hellenistic world, where the Greek magos gave its name to mageia and so to magic, and where the Persian priest was recast as the archetypal keeper of secret wisdom — the magus of later esoteric genealogy, no longer the fire-tending functionary of an imperial cult. Pliny the Elder traced the art of magic to Persia and to the name of Zoroaster; the prophet who never appears in the royal inscriptions becomes, in Greek and then in Hellenistic and Roman hands, the author of vast occult libraries he never wrote, a sage ranked beside Hermes Trismegistus in the genealogies of hidden knowledge that traced all wisdom eastward.

The distance between those two Persias is the distance between the empire and its image. The historical Achaemenid state was a tax-gathering, road-building, shrine-restoring administration that spoke of its god in the flat declarative of monumental stone and never once claimed to traffic in secrets. The Persia that the West kept was the Persia of the Magi as the Greeks misremembered them — robed astrologers, masters of fire and prophecy, custodians of a wisdom older than philosophy. Alexander’s army ended the first; the second was only beginning. The priestly knowledge that the empire never advertised became, in the hands of those who had defeated and outlived it, the very thing the name of Persia would come to mean.

→ In the library: Ancient Fragments (2nd ed.) — incl. the Chaldean Oracles

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