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.

The empire took its name from Achaemenes, a semi-legendary ancestor through whom the ruling line traced its right to rule. Cyrus assembled the core by conquest, absorbing the Median kingdom, the wealthy realm of Lydia, and then Babylon, which fell to him in 539 BCE. His successors organized the whole into satrapies — provinces under appointed governors — linked by a system of royal roads and a relay post that later writers admired. The administration ran in several languages at once; Aramaic served as the common tongue of record across the western provinces.

The religious picture is the part most often misread. Royal inscriptions, above all those of Darius at Bisitun, credit the king’s victories and his very kingship to Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of what would become Zoroastrianism — and the Magi, a hereditary Iranian priestly class, appear in Greek and later sources as the empire’s ritual specialists. 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, but how far their beliefs matched the later, systematized religion of the Avesta, and whether the historical Zoroaster stood behind them at all, remains debated; the term “Zoroastrian” applied to the sixth century is a projection backward as much as a description.

What can be said is that the Achaemenids did not impose that cult on their subjects. Cyrus, in the inscription known as his cylinder, presents himself as restorer of the gods and shrines of Babylon; the Hebrew Bible remembers him as the king who permitted the exiles to return from Babylon and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and names him, remarkably, the anointed of the Lord — a foreign monarch cast as an instrument of Israel’s God. This tolerance was also policy: a ruler who upheld local sanctuaries governed more cheaply than one who provoked them.

For the later Western imagination the empire matters twice over. It is the adversary of the Greek histories — the Persia of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis, described by Herodotus and so handed down as the archetypal great Eastern power. And it is the channel through which Iranian religious ideas, the Magi above all, entered the Hellenistic world, where “magus” gave its name to magic and the figure of the Persian sage became a fixture of esoteric genealogies that traced hidden wisdom eastward. The empire itself ended at Alexander’s hands; the image of Persian priestly knowledge outlived it by two thousand years.

→ Related: Babylonia · Mesopotamia