Arshama, satrap of Egypt

Every statement about the satrap begins with a disambiguation, because at least three prominent Achaemenids bore the name. The earliest is the ancestor: in the genealogy of the Behistun inscription, Darius I presents himself as “grandson of Arshama (Gr. Arsames), an Achaemenid”, the line running back through Ariaramnes to Teispes and Achaemenes.^[6] Herodotus repeats the filiation, and this Arsames, presented in the Behistun pedigree as a king in Persis, was reportedly still alive when his grandson took the throne in 522.^[7] The second is a son of Darius I himself. In the army catalogue of Xerxes’ invasion Herodotus records: “The commander of the Arabs and the Ethiopians, who dwell above Egypt, was Arsames, son of Darius and Artystone, the daughter of Cyrus”, adding that “Darius loved her most of his wives and had a statue of beaten gold made of her”.^[8] The same prince appears in the Elamite documents of the Persepolis Fortification archive in the 490s. The third is the satrap of Egypt, the subject of this name’s densest documentation.

The three are genuinely entangled, in the ancient sources and in the modern literature alike. Tuplin’s account of the satrap opens with exactly this knot: Aršāma “is a ‘son of the house’ (bar bayta)—conventionally understood to mean royal prince” and bears the name both of Darius’ grandfather and of Darius’ son by Artystone, a figure known independently from the Fortification archive and “the presumed earlier owner of the magnificent cylinder seal used by our Aršāma”.^[9] Nor did the name stop there. “Much later the name was borne by a son and a nephew of Artaxerxes II”, by “the governor of Cilicia killed at Issus” and by a son of Artabazus; a Lycian Aršāma appears in an inscription from Xanthos.^[9] The name, a compound of aršan “male, hero” and ama “strength”, was common at the top of the Persian elite.^[7] Every ancient notice of an “Arsames” must therefore be tied to its bearer by office, date and context before it can be used, and the seal impressed on the satrap’s letters shows how physically close the namesakes could stand: he sealed his orders with a cylinder cut, on the prevailing view, for the second Arsames a lifetime earlier.

Modern accounts routinely call Arshama a prince, and the title deserves scrutiny. “The Aramaic term rendered as ‘prince’ is bar bayta, literally ‘son of the house’.”^[10] It is applied to Arshama in the external address lines of three of his letters (TADAE A6.3, A6.4, A6.7) and in the Aramaic inscription on the letter-bullae; his name otherwise usually stands untitled.^[10] Equivalents run right across the imperial record: “‘Son of the house’ is, therefore, a well-established term of art for certain very high-status Persians, attested in a range of different places and in Old Persian, Elamite, Akkadian, Aramaic, and Demotic Egyptian forms.” In at least one Babylonian text the royal reference is explicit: the courtier Menostanes is mār bīt šarri, “son of the king’s house”.^[10]

The conventional gloss is nonetheless not automatic, because the term also had a wider, humbler use. In the witness lists of four Elephantine documents the same Aramaic title belongs to a man called Nahum, of whom Tuplin observes: “He is plainly nothing to do with the Achaemenid royal family.”^[10] The Murašû archive of Nippur applies the Akkadian form to more than a dozen men who are each the mār bīti of a named private magnate; in that material “mār bīti designates individuals of privileged status in the environment of men who wield significant economic and social power but are certainly not kings and do not even have to be Iranians”. On this evidence “The mār bīti as putative ‘prince’ thus simply represents a special case of the phenomenon, one in which the household happens to be that of the king.”^[10] Arshama himself carries the Akkadian title in one Nippur tablet (BE 9.1), and he is not the only bearer within his own dossier: Kuhrt’s translation renders Varuvahya, a fellow estate-holder in Egypt, “the prince”, the same Aramaic BR BYTʾ standing behind the English.^[10][3]

For Arshama the royal sense remains much the likeliest reading: the heirloom seal, the name shared with a son of Darius, and the appointment to so great a satrapy all point that way. The safer formulation is that bar bayta marks membership of a great “house”, normally the king’s, and that its precise genealogical force, how close a relative it made him, is beyond the evidence.

Two notices of Ctesias, surviving in Photius’s epitome, frame the tenure. After the suppression of the Inaros revolt, about 454 on the usual chronology, Megabyzus installed one “Sarsamas” as satrap of Egypt (FGrH 688 F14 §38); and during the disorders after the death of Artaxerxes I, in 424–423, the satrap of Egypt “Arxanes” sided with the eventual winner, Darius II (F15 §50).^[11] The second figure can hardly be anyone except Aršāma, whose connection with Egypt is directly attested in those years. The first is harder. One manuscript of Photius reads “Sartaman”, which would point to a satrap called Artames; and the installation notice itself, Tuplin remarks, “is surely shorthand for establishing in post someone who had, of course, been selected by the king”.^[11] Identifying Sarsamas with the later satrap makes one man “Egyptian satrap for at least forty-seven years” (454–407), a tenure with few parallels in the empire.^[12]

The length is the obvious objection, and Tuplin meets it with context. “The satrap of Egypt immediately before the revolt (and since the 480s) had been Xerxes’ brother Achaemenes”, killed in the Inaros rising; a princely successor would continue a royal association with the post.^[12] Cyrus the Younger later received a politically difficult regional command in his mid teens, and “perhaps Aršāma was sufficiently well-connected to the core Achaemenid family to be sent to Egypt at an age which makes his survival in post until the century’s final decade not too disturbing”.^[12] The verdict is deliberately provisional:

I think, therefore, that we can in good conscience opt for Sarsaman, emend it to Arsaman and identify the individual with our Aršāma. But if a dated document from the 440s were to turn up in which the Egyptian satrap was called Artames, we could not claim to be utterly surprised.

Tuplin, Aršāma: Prince and Satrap^[12]

The alternative stays on the table: “there could be more than one Egyptian satrap called Arsames/Aršama, whether immediately consecutively or not”, a possibility Joachim Quack’s re-examination of the letters’ dating keeps explicitly open.^[12] The single long tenure is the leading reconstruction rather than an established fact.

At the other end the record fades rather than closes. The Elephantine dossier attests Arshama to late 407, and a Babylonian tablet, TCL 13.203, “prima facie implies that he was still alive in August–September 403”.^[5] Nothing later is heard of him.

“This dossier comprises fifty-seven items drawn from three distinct contexts.” Egypt supplies forty-one: thirty-six in Aramaic, of which twenty-six form a single set from an unknown site and ten come from Elephantine, with four Demotic items and one in Old Persian. Babylonia supplies thirteen cuneiform tablets from Nippur, all but one from the archive of the Murašû firm. The Greek literary tradition supplies three notices.^[1] The three contexts are three very different windows: a satrap’s own chancery products in Aramaic; a banking house’s records of his rented-out Babylonian holdings; and a handful of late, refracted anecdotes.

The distribution is itself the dossier’s central fact. “What primarily characterizes Aršāma is that he was a royal prince, satrap of Egypt, and an estate holder in both Egypt and Babylonia”, and it is the last role that generates most of the paper: “thirty-nine from the total of fifty-seven” items concern the estates.^[1]

Dating is thin. “Nine documents from Egypt carry dates, with an outer range of 435–407”; the earlier terminus was pushed back to 435 only by the publication of a Demotic document in 2009, and the Bodleian letters themselves carry no dates at all, being placed in the later fifth century on converging indirect grounds.^[1]

The Bodleian cache is as remarkable a group of objects as of texts. The dossier as a whole reaches us on “clay tablets, papyrus, a perfume-holder lid, and leather”, and the last of these carriers sets the cache apart: tablets and papyrus were the ordinary writing materials of Babylonia and Egypt, while leather letters of this date were, until the Bactrian finds, all but unparalleled.^[2] “They were also reportedly found together with two leather bags and eight letter-bullae”, and despite suspicion of the sellers of unprovenanced goods in 1930s Egypt “there seems no compelling reason to doubt that report”.^[2] The cache has no excavated context: it surfaced through the antiquities trade, its Egyptian find-spot is lost, and the modern edition states the limitation plainly. The surviving bag “was nicely calculated to fit the dimensions of a letter when folded”: a purpose-made pouch for satrapal dispatches, folded, tied and clay-sealed for the long road from Babylonia.^[2] Some bullae still preserve “some of the string that once encircled the folded letter”.^[2] The physical archive is still yielding material: “a box discovered out of place in the Bodleian Library in September 2013”, labelled in Latin as restored Aramaic leather fragments, holds mounted and loose pieces associated with letters opened, and largely destroyed, before Driver’s edition.^[2]

What the cache is, archivally, has also been redefined. “It is likely that the Bodleian cache of letters comes from Nakhtḥor’s personal papers”: the working file of the Egyptian steward who received most of them, since it also contains letters to him from Persians other than his master. The editors are candid about the limits: the cache “does not allow for detailed micro-history or historical biography”. It offers the empire’s workings in cross-section, and nothing like a life.^[13]

For a governor so richly documented, the governing is nearly invisible. “Direct documentary reflection of Aršāma’s activity as satrap is confined to the letters and memorandum about the temple affray in Elephantine and four or five other disconnected items.”^[5] Memphis functioned as the satrapal centre, and his estates lay in different parts of Egypt, but of his movements within the province little can be said; what the record documents insistently is his absence from it. The letters were written from Babylonia or Susa, where the estates and the court repeatedly drew him; the heading under which Tuplin treats this side of the tenure is simply “The Absent Satrap”.^[5] Absentee lordship was normal for the highest Persian nobility, whose holdings spanned provinces and whose standing required attendance on the king. In Arshama’s case the absence had public consequences, for his longest documented stay away, between 410 and 407/406, coincided with the destruction of the Judaean temple at Elephantine in 410.

The satrap’s “house” (Aramaic bayta) was a trans-imperial concern. Kuhrt introduces the letters as documents that “provide detailed insight into the structure of great landed estates”, the largest such concentration to survive from the empire.^[14] In Egypt the estates were scattered from the Delta southwards and run by a steward (pqyd) with a staff of accountants; in Babylonia Arshama held land around Nippur, administered through the Murašû firm, whose tablets record, among other things, the flocks of his estate under contract herding (see the Elephantine papyri).^[1] Wealth moved between the two. In TADAE A6.13 the estate-holder Varuvahya, at court with Arshama, complains: “They are bringing me nothing from the estate in Egypt, which was given to me by my lord.” Arshama orders that Varuvahya’s steward “collect the rent on the estates of Varuvahya in full and with interest” and bring it to Babylon together with the treasure “which I commanded to be brought to Babylon”.^[3] Egyptian rents (mndt), collected on the spot, travelled under escort to their absent lords in Babylonia: the estate was a machine for moving wealth across the empire (see tribute and taxation).

The machine’s personnel were as mixed as the peoples of the empire: an Egyptian steward, Nakhthor, and his Egyptian predecessor Psamshek son of Ahohapi; a chief accountant, Kenzasirma, with an Anatolian name; road-officers with Babylonian and Iranian names; Cilician workers on the estates; Aramaic scribes serving a Persian lord in Egypt.^[3][15]

The private estate did not float free of the state’s land system. One letter (Driver’s AD 8) records an Egyptian, Pamun, asking to be granted as a gift (*baga) land his late father had held. The satrap agreed, provided that “the domain of Pamun’s father, that farm of 30 ardab, was abandoned” and had been neither attached to Arshama’s own estate nor granted to another of his servants. Briant draws the institutional conclusion: the conditional clauses “prove that he had ordered his manager to verify Pamun’s rights to the farm”, which in turn implies “the existence of a register where the different categories of land were recorded”.^[16] Arshama appears here as the granting authority for land in Egypt, working from records of who held what and on which terms: the fiscal spine of the satrapy system, visible for a moment through a private file.

Nakhthor, the steward at the centre of the cache, emerges as anything except a passive instrument. In TADAE A6.15 another Persian noble, Virafša, bombards him with complaints. Virafša’s steward Masapata had been promised Cilician workers under a letter of Arshama and never received them from Nakhthor; worse, “Nakhthor has appropriated all the wine which is in Papremiss and the grain of the fields, all of it”. Virafša demands restitution “lest, when you come here, you will have to pay damages for what you took and be called to account”. A further report adds violence: “He has assaulted my lady’s personnel and taken goods from them.”^[17] Whether the accusations were true is beyond recovery. The world they assume, of stewards detaining workers, seizing a neighbour’s wine and grain, and roughing up a rival household’s people, sits some distance from any tidy image of provincial administration; and Arshama’s own letters to Nakhthor mix reliance with threat in the same breath, as the most famous of them shows. One physical detail cuts the other way: Virafša’s letter is the one item in the cache written on a sheet made from two pieces of leather stitched together, an exceptionally neat repair, where “Aršāma perhaps insisted on more perfect materials” for his own dispatches.^[2]

TADAE A6.10 was written after revolt had swept Egypt. Arshama begins by holding up the previous steward’s example: when the Egyptians rebelled, Psamshek guarded the personnel and goods so that the estate “suffered no loss”, and found more workers besides. Word has reached the satrap that the stewards of other lords in Lower Egypt are doing the same now, “that they are looking for more elsewhere and adding them to the estates of their lords and that you are not acting like this”. Then comes the order he says he has issued before:

Show yourselves diligent! Guard my personnel and goods carefully so that my estate will not suffer any loss. Look elsewhere for personnel – craftsmen of all types; bring them into my courtyard; mark them with my marks and attach them to my estate as did my earlier stewards.

Arshama to Nakhthor (TADAE A6.10), trans. Kuhrt^[4]

Failure, the letter ends, will leave Nakhthor “held accountable” and “liable to a harsh reprimand”; the docket on the outside reads “Concerning any damage to my house which is in Egypt”.^[4]

The letter is quoted in two quite different tones. For historians of administration it shows the absentee system working: instructions repeated in writing, responsibility fixed by name, performance compared across stewards, liability spelt out. Read as social history it is an order, issued during a rebellion, to seize skilled people, brand them like stock and absorb them into a nobleman’s holdings; the “marks” are an owner’s brand on human beings. The editors of the modern edition draw this reading out: the personnel were “to be brought to his courtyard and branded; this is also normal behaviour for the managers of other Persian ‘lords’ in Egypt”, and in their summary of the letters’ world, “The relationship between social position, access to political power, extraction, and violence is shown to lie at the heart of the Achaemenid world.”^[13] Both readings describe the same sentences, and neither can be dropped without misrepresenting the document.

TADAE A6.2, the papyrus long known as AP 26, is the one precisely dated letter: January 411 (5 January in Kuhrt's edition, 12 January in Tuplin & Ma), in year 12 of Darius II, from Elephantine. Two boatmen of the fortress hold a state boat in tenure, and their request, “The time has come to make repairs on the boat which we hold in tenure”, travels up through the boatman Mithradates and a chain of officials to the satrap, whose authorisation comes back down to the official Wahpremahi:

Let it be brought onto dry land. Let word be sent to the treasury accountants. … Let word be sent to whoever there is (in charge), and let them give materials, its paint, etc. … Let its repairs, etc. concerning which I sent word to them, be made immediately.

Arshama, TADAE A6.2 (trans. Kuhrt)^[18]

The reply attaches the shipwrights’ survey: an itemised bill of materials, “New wood of cedar” by the cubit, “bronze and iron nails” by count, panelling by the piece, with an audit clause at the end, “let old and broken materials which they have replaced be brought to the treasury”.^[18] A satrap’s chancery adjudicating a dockyard requisition at nail level, through a two-stage procedure of estimate and audit, places the routine machinery of provincial government under unusually close documentary observation.

TADAE A6.9 is the only surviving specimen of the empire’s road-pass. Arshama addresses seven officers by name, station by station from Babylonia through Lahiru, Arzuhina and Arbela to Damascus, instructing that his steward Nakhthor, travelling to Egypt with ten servants, two Cilicians and a craftsman, be issued daily “rations charged to my estates in your provinces”: “white flour, 2 ‘handfuls’”, rami flour, “wine or beer, 2 ‘handfuls’; sheep(?), one”, flour for the servants, and “fodder for his horses”. “Each officer in turn, according to the route from province to province until it reaches Egypt, is to give him these rations.” A control clause closes the allowance: “If he should be more than one day in a place, then for these days do not give them any rations.” And the endorsement: “Bagasrava knows this order. Rashta is the scribe.”^[15]

Kuhrt identifies what makes the document unique: it is “the only surviving example of the authorisations”, Elamite halmi, “regularly referred to in the records of disbursements made to travellers contained in the Persepolis Fortification archive”.^[15] Thousands of Persepolis ration-records presuppose exactly such a sealed warrant in the traveller’s hand (see the Royal Road); here the object itself survives, in a satrap’s name, on leather.

TADAE A6.12 commissions art by dispatch. A sculptor named Hinzani, Arshama’s “servant”, had been brought to Susa by the officer Bagasrava. Nakhthor and the accountants are told: “Give him and his household staff rations like my other artist(?) personnel”; and the sculptor is to work, “let him make statues/reliefs of a horseman” and of a horse with what appears to be its chariot, “just as he did for me previously”, with delivery in the chancery’s standing idiom of urgency: “And send (them and) have them bring (them) to me at once, immediately.”^[19] Kuhrt’s commentary notes that the Aramaic wording “places the artist Hinzani into the same category as Arshama’s other household staff”: the artist is bonded estate labour (grd), of the same class as the craftsmen of the branding order.^[19] A prince’s self-representation in the elite equestrian idiom was organised through the same machinery, and the same personnel categories, as his rents.

The letters close in formulae. “Artavahya knows this order. Rashta is the scribe.” “Artahaya knows this order. Rashta, scribe.” The travel warrant ends the same way, with Bagasrava as the responsible officer and Rashta again as scribe.^[3][4][15] A named responsible officer, a recurring scribe, an external address docketing each letter’s contents: the same discipline, letter after letter, the signature of a professional Aramaic secretariat travelling with the satrap. Kuhrt observes that the Demotic letters of Pherendates, satrap of Egypt under Darius I, carry the same endorsement formula some eighty years earlier (fuller treatment at the satrapy system).^[20] The closest parallel to the corpus as a whole comes from the empire’s opposite edge: the fourth-century leather letters of Akhvamazda, probably the satrap of Bactria, to his subordinate Bagavant. Naveh and Shaked, publishing the Bactrian documents, set the two corpora side by side, on the same material and in the same epistolary forms: “in both cases the letters come from the office of the satrap”.^[21] The Bodleian editors draw the same comparison.^[13] The comparison shows that this satrapal Aramaic letter-writing practice was not confined to Egypt: cognate administrative forms are documented from the Nile to Bactria.

In July 410, while Arshama was away from Egypt, the Judaean garrison community at Elephantine saw its temple of YHW destroyed at the instigation of the priests of Khnum and the district governor Vidranga. The crisis, the community’s three years of petitions and the eventual recommendation to rebuild are documented in the garrison’s own papers (see the Elephantine papyri). Seen from Arshama’s side, the dossier yields three points.

First, the chronology of the crisis turned on his movements. The petitions show that “he was not in Egypt in July 410”, the date of the destruction; “He was certainly back in Egypt by the time of A4.9”, the memorandum recommending rebuilding, which in practice “only proves that Aršāma was in his satrapy or soon expected there by some date in the early part of 406”.^[5] The satrap of Egypt was away from his province, on this evidence, for something like three or four years, and nothing rules out an unnoticed return in between.

Second, the petitions name a destination: he “went to the king”. Tuplin’s reading cuts both ways. “Nothing special has to be read into that: on the face of it ‘the king’ is simply a destination”, since the itinerant court had no fixed address; and yet, if the writers knew something particular lay behind the journey, “‘when Aršāma went to the king’ might be heavy with overtones—albeit ones that we cannot decode”.^[5] Routine attendance at court, or a summons tied to the politics of Darius II’s reign: the phrase supports either and settles neither.

Third, the community’s final petition contains the dossier’s most debated sentence: Arshama “did not know about this which was done to us at all”. “One would have expected the Elephantine Judaeans to have reported their distress to the satrap.” Either they made no attempt to reach him, or the sentence is “a polite way of saying that, although Aršāma did actually know about the temple issue, he had shown no interest in intervening”.^[5] A governance vacuum during a long absence, or diplomatic cover for a great man’s indifference: the evidence does not choose between them, and Tuplin declines to.

What Arshama’s own correspondence contributes is silence. The Bodleian letters never mention the Judaeans, their temple, Khnum or Vidranga, though the rebuilding needed his endorsement and the reply-memorandum directed the petitioners to make their case before him in Egypt (the petition and memorandum are quoted at the Elephantine papyri). His documented concerns, in the very years of the crisis, are rent, labour, boats and statues.^[5] The silence is partly an accident of survival, since his chancery’s official files are lost; but as the record stands, the most notorious religious episode of the Persian period passed through his province without leaving one word in his letters.

Seven of the eight letter-bullae carry impressions of a single large cylinder seal bearing an Aramaic inscription that names Aršāma, catalogued as PFS 2899*. “That Aršāma uses the cylinder seal in his official function as satrap is also noteworthy. The seal remains today one of the few seals that can unambiguously be linked to an Achaemenid satrap.”^[22] Driver, who published the letters, had passed over the image as “an ordinary Babylonian cylinder-seal”; the modern study of the sealings reversed that judgement.^[22]

The reversal came from Persepolis. “The discovery that the Bodleian’s Aršāma letter-bullae came from a seal already in use in the 490s was made by Mark Garrison in summer 2012.”^[9] The same seal is impressed on two unpublished Elamite tablets of the Fortification archive, where its user was another Aršāma: the son of Darius I and Artystone. In consequence, “when Aršāma the satrap used the seal on the letter-bullae sometime in the second half of the fifth century, it was an heirloom some fifty to a hundred years removed from its original Persepolitan context”.^[22] Garrison and Henkelman label the two men “Aršāma 1” and “Aršāma 2” and place the object within a phenomenon the archive now documents well, “the use of high-prestige heirloom seals by members of the Achaemenid royal house”.^[22] “Though the exact relation between the Aršāma of the Fortification archive and the Aršāma of the Bodleian corpus remains unclear”, the seal’s descent within the royal house stands either way: an Egyptian satrap of the 410s sealed his orders with a cylinder cut for a son of Darius I, asserting in every impression the continuity of “house” that his title claimed in words.^[22] The seal itself survives only as impressions; the standard reproduction is the collated line drawing published with the sealing study.^[22]

Arshama governed through the last secure generation of the first Persian period in Egypt. His final certain appearances are the temple-crisis documents of 410–407 and, probably, the Babylonian tablet of 403. Within a few years the province was gone: in Kuhrt’s summary, the empire in its two centuries suffered “only one serious prolonged loss, i.e. Egypt, which had seceded by 400/399 and was not repossessed until 343”, the secession led by Amyrtaeus in the confusion after Darius II’s death.^[23] Whether Arshama lived to see the loss of the satrapy he had held for so long is unknown; the Iranica survey already noted that nothing is heard of him after Darius II died and Amyrtaeus seized power.^[7]

One Greek anecdote may or may not belong to him. Polyaenus preserves a stratagem (7.28.1) in which an “Arsames”, besieging Barca in Cyrenaica, makes peace, entertains the city’s magistrates, and at a signal seizes the gates and sacks the city. Tuplin stages three possible datings (the Persian capture of Barca in the 510s, in which case the man is Herodotus’s commander Amasis under another name, as Briant holds; the run-up to Xerxes’ invasion; or the satrap’s own tenure) and finds none provable; Driver preferred to see a simple confusion of the names Amasis and Arsames.^[24] The story has to stay unassigned, a final illustration of the namesake problem with which any account of Arshama begins.