The Accession of Darius (522 BCE)

The bare frame is agreed across the sources. Cambyses II had conquered Egypt in 525 BCE and stayed there some years. In the spring of 522, according to the inscription Darius later carved, a man rose in Persia claiming to be Bardiya, Cyrus's son and Cambyses' brother, and was widely obeyed; when Cambyses died soon after, the claimant reigned without much opposition. That Cambyses died is certain; how is not. The Behistun text says only that he "died his own death" (that is, was not killed), which most take to mean illness or, as Herodotus has it, an accidental self-inflicted wound to the thigh that turned gangrenous.^[1] The one hard, external fix comes from Babylonia, where business tablets were dated by the reigning king's regnal year: they confirm that for some months in 522 a king named Barziya (Bardiya) was officially recognised.^[2] So a man calling himself Bardiya did hold the throne.

The fullest and earliest account is Darius's own, cut into the cliff at Behistun within a few years of the events, in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, and diffused across the empire in its many languages (an Aramaic copy turned up on a papyrus at Elephantine in Egypt). Its story is precise and self-justifying. Cambyses, before leaving for Egypt, had secretly murdered his own brother Bardiya, and the killing was hidden from the people. In that concealment lay the opening for the fraud: a magus named Gaumāta rose on 11 March 522, pretending to be the dead prince, and "the people became faithless".^[3] Of the pretender Darius uses the flat, total charge he repeats over every rebel of the year:

He lied; he said: I am Bardiya, the son of Cyrus.

Darius I, DB §11^[4]

The deception is folded at once into the reign's governing theology. Rebellion is more than treason: it is the work of the Lie (Old Persian drauga) loose in the world:

The Lie made them revolt, so that they deceived the people.

Darius I, DB §54^[4]

Who the man Darius killed really was, and whether the magus Gaumāta existed at all, is the central unanswered question of the reign (see Bardiya / Gaumāta). What the inscription does with the killing is turn a contested seizure of the throne into the correction of a fraud, and a private act of violence into the founding deed of a reign consecrated to the Truth.

By Darius's own reckoning the deed fell on 29 September 522. He records it in a single dense sentence that names the place and claims the act as his alone:

I with a few men slew that Gaumata the Magian, and those who were his foremost followers.

Darius I, DB §13^[3]

The fortress was Sikayauvatiš, in the Median district of Nisaya; the "few men" were the six Persian nobles who, with Darius, became the Seven. Herodotus and the Greek tradition make the killing a palace assassination, daggers drawn in an inner room; Darius's version is starker and points the other way. Briant reads it as the close of a campaign rather than a murder in a badly guarded bedroom: if the man had won over part of the population, his removal was more probably the outcome of a lost battle, after which he took refuge in a Median stronghold and was cut down there with a few dozen of his associates, the pattern of every other revolt of that year.^[5] On this reconstruction the council of nobles Herodotus dwells on was the general staff of an armed coalition, and Darius already held, at Cambyses' death some months earlier, a position strong enough to command what the inscription repeatedly calls the Persian and Median army that stood with him.^[5] The deed belonged as much to the Seven as to Darius (see the Seven).

The aftermath is told as a restoration. The usurper, Darius says, had cast down sanctuaries and stripped pastures, herds, households and men from the kāra, the people or the host at large; Darius gave them back and set the kingdom on its base. His whole title to the throne is that he did this as the chosen agent of Ahura Mazdā:

By the grace of Ahuramazda am I king; Ahuramazda has granted me the kingdom.

Darius I, DB §5^[4]

The killing did not settle the empire; it lit it. Darius's text turns at once from the deed at Nisaya to a catalogue of revolt that runs the width of his lands, from the Mediterranean to the Indus:

The people became hostile, and the Lie multiplied in the land, even in Persia and Media, and in the other provinces.

Darius I, DB §10^[4]

Nine pretenders rose, in his telling, each of whom also lied, claiming to be a lost king of an old royal line; he says he beat them in nineteen battles and took nine rebel kings, in a single year and by the god's favour, and shows them on the relief: the fallen pretender beneath his foot, the rest roped in a file before him.^[6] The catalogue fills the greater part of the inscription, and it is very nearly the only evidence there is. Herodotus, for reasons no one has explained, passed over the revolts of the subject peoples almost in silence, and the other classical writers ignore them altogether.^[5] Behistun half-conceals that crisis and has to be used all the same, because it was real, and came within a year of undoing what Cyrus had built.

The two richest and most recently conquered lands rose first. In Elam a man named Açina seized power and called himself king; his revolt collapsed at the approach of the royal army, and the Elamites, Darius says, seized their own king and killed him. A second Elamite rising, under a Persian named Martiya who took the name of a former Elamite king, ended the same way. Babylon was harder. There Nidintu-Bēl proclaimed himself Nebuchadnezzar, son of Nabonidus, reviving the name of the city's last independent kings, and was obeyed across Babylonia; the dated business tablets confirm his reign from the beginning of October 522, non-propagandistic clay that fixes the very revolt Darius describes.^[2] Darius led the main army in person, crossed the Tigris and then the Euphrates, beat him in two battles, and had him impaled with forty-nine of his followers in December 522.^[5] Babylon rose again in August 521 under an Armenian, Arakha, who took the same throne-name as Nebuchadnezzar IV; the tablets date him too, and Intaphrenes, first of the Seven, crushed him by late November. That each Babylonian pretender reached for the memory of Nebuchadnezzar shows plainly what the risings were: bids to resume a local history the Persian conquest had cut off.

The gravest danger lay nearer the centre. In Media, Fravartiš claimed descent from the family of Cyaxares, the line of the Median kings Cyrus had displaced, took command of the Median army, and held out for months, his revolt drawing in Parthia, Hyrcania and Armenia.^[5] Darius judged it dangerous enough to leave Babylon in January 521 and shift his headquarters into Media; he beat Fravartiš in person at Kunduruš in May, then had him run down and taken at Rhagae. The punishment was staged for the public eye:

I cut off his nose, ears, and tongue and plucked out an eye; he was chained under guard at the gate of my palace and everyone could see him there.

Darius I, DB §32 (Babylonian version)^[7]

Fravartiš was then impaled at Ecbatana and his chief followers hung in the citadel. The Sagartian rebel Ciçantakhma, who likewise claimed the house of Cyaxares, was mutilated the same way and impaled at Arbela.^[7] In Parthia and Hyrcania the rebels were beaten by Darius's own father, Hystaspes, still a satrap and now fighting for his son's crown; in Margiana, Frāda was crushed by Dadarši, satrap of Bactria, and put to the sword with his following.^[5]

The most pointed revolt broke out in the Persian homeland itself. There a man named Vahyazdāta rose claiming, exactly as the first pretender had, to be Bardiya son of Cyrus, a second false Bardiya on Darius's account; he raised the Persian army from the palace, then a fresh army near Pasargadae after a first defeat, and was not beaten until mid-July 521, when he was taken and impaled near the site of the future Persepolis.^[6] That the dead prince's name could raise the Persian heartland twice in a year, in the one place an impostor was least likely to pass, bears directly on the question of who the first Bardiya was (see Bardiya / Gaumāta); as a military threat it was the sharpest Darius faced, yet he pointedly gives Vahyazdāta no more space on the relief than the rest.^[5] Beyond these he names risings in Assyria, Egypt, Sattagydia and among the Saka, and treats Armenia as an appendage of the Median revolt, giving it no separate liar-king.^[5]

The pattern is consistent, and it is dynastic rather than national in any modern sense. Each ringleader took the title king and, in most cases, a regnal name reaching back to the dynasty Cyrus had erased: Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, the house of Cyaxares in Media and Sagartia, Bardiya son of Cyrus in Persia.^[5] Briant argues the deeper grievance was the one the man ruling as Bardiya had already read, for his reported remission of three years' tribute and levies names the burden the risings answered; the revolts were led by local ruling classes who had lost the profits of their own land and people to a new Persian master.^[5] The casualty figures Darius gives in the Babylonian and Aramaic versions, on the order of a hundred thousand killed and captured across the fronts, are too uncertain in the readings to measure how deep the movements ran, or to separate a populace in arms from a repression striking blindly at civilians; Darius openly boasts of slaughtering the survivors of the Babylonian armies.^[5] What stands clear is that the empire's oldest and its newest provinces alike had risen, that the loyalty of the Persian and Median army held, and that Darius won in the end because the rebels never combined against him.^[5]

Darius insists, over and over, that he did all this in a single year, and stakes his truthfulness on it:

Those who were the former kings, as long as they lived, by them was not done thus as by the favor of Ahuramazda was done by me in one and the same year.

Darius I, DB §59^[8]

His own dates sit awkwardly beneath the claim. Gaumāta was killed in late September 522, and his generals were still putting down the last rebels in December 521, more than a year on; the "single year" is reached only by counting from the accession and straining the reckoning, and a good deal of scholarly ingenuity, Bickerman and Tadmor's foremost, has gone into reconciling it.^[9] The compilers did not arrange the account by time at all: they took the fronts region by region, while the file of liar-kings on the relief appears to run in order of date, so that the two sequences cross.^[5] The one-year claim reads best not as a calendar fact but as a claim of legitimacy, and a borrowed one. The motif of nine kings beaten in a single year was already ancient when Darius used it: it recurs in the inscriptions of the Akkadian king Naram-Sin, some sixteen centuries before, one of them a statue-plinth found at Susa that claims victory in nine battles in one year. It is possible the monument was on display there in Darius's day.^[9] He denies exaggerating in the same breath, and warns his readers off the very suspicion he is inviting:

...lest whoso shall hereafter read this inscription, to him what has been done by me seem excessive, (and) it not convince him, (but) he think it false.

Darius I, DB §58^[8]

The protest cuts both ways. The rebellions were genuine, two of them fixed to the month by the Babylonian tablets, and the danger was real; but the shape Darius gives them, nine liars beaten in one triumphant year by one true king, is dictated by the need to legitimate, not by the calendar.

Winning the war was not the same as securing the throne. Darius belonged only to a collateral Achaemenid branch, his father a satrap and not a king, and he set about making himself the heir of Cyrus by every means the position allowed. The most immediate was marriage. Herodotus lists the unions the new king contracted:

Darius took wives from the noblest houses of Persia, marrying Cyrus' daughters Atossa and Artystone; Atossa had been wife of her brother Cambyses and afterwards of the Magian, Artystone was a virgin.

Herodotus 3.88, trans. Godley^[10]

He married also Parmys, daughter of Bardiya, Cyrus's son, and Phaidyme, daughter of Otanes.^[10] The programme drew into Darius's household every woman who carried the blood or the claim of the old line, so that his sons would descend from Cyrus though he did not. On the sceptical reading of the accession these are exactly the matches a usurper needs (see Bardiya / Gaumāta).

Descent was the other instrument. At Behistun Darius traces a royal pedigree back through Hystaspes, Arsames and Ariaramnes, and counts himself the ninth king of the house:

My father was Hystaspes; the father of Hystaspes was Arsames; the father of Arsames was Ariaramnes. Eight of my line were kings before me; I am the ninth. In two lines have we been kings.

Darius I, DB §§3–4^[11]

None of those forebears is known to have reigned, and the eponymous Achaemenes may be Darius's own back-projection; the genealogy is the manufactured spine of the dynasty (see the Achaemenid dynasty).

Of the crowning itself the sources say almost nothing. What rite marked Darius's making as king goes unrecorded. The one detailed account of an Achaemenid accession ceremony is much later, Plutarch's of Artaxerxes II, more than a century on, set at Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus:

...he might receive the royal initiation at the hands of the Persian priests. Here there is a sanctuary of a warlike goddess whom one might conjecture to be Athena.

Plutarch, Artaxerxes 3, trans. Perrin^[12]

Into the sanctuary the new king passed, laid aside his own robe, put on the robe Cyrus had worn before he was king, and ate a ritual meal of figs, turpentine-wood and sour milk.^[12] How far the ceremony reaches back toward Darius cannot be known. That it was kept at Pasargadae, over Cyrus's tomb, shows how every later king's kingship was bound back to the founder, the same knot Darius's marriages and his pedigree were tied to make.

The monument that carries all this was itself the last act of the accession. Darius planned it, most likely, during his long stay in Media in the first half of 521, while the counter-offensives were still under way, and had it cut high on the sacred cliff above the road from Babylon to Ecbatana.^[5] It is the only sustained narrative composition in all of Achaemenid art, and it was made to be permanent and to be read. The relief states the claim in one image: Darius, bow in hand, his foot on the fallen pretender, faces a file of eight bound liar-kings, while above them the figure in the winged disk, taken for Ahura Mazdā, holds out the ring of kingship. It is an investiture scene, the god granting the throne, and it is deliberately unhistorical. The pretender lies already vanquished before a crowned king, and every liar-king stands as though Darius had taken him in person, though several were killed by his lieutenants and their torments go unshown.^[5]

The text was the first ever written in Old Persian, a script that seems to have been devised for it, and it was issued in four languages: Elamite first, then Babylonian and Old Persian on the rock, with a fuller Aramaic version copied out and sent through the provinces.^[5] Darius ordered it broadcast to every land, and the order was carried out: fragments of a Babylonian stela have been found at Babylon, a copy of the relief besides, and an Aramaic papyrus of the text at Elephantine in Egypt, still being copied as a scribal exercise generations later.^[5] A later hand added one more defeated rebel, the Saka Skunkha, to the end of the line, cutting into the finished inscription to make room.^[9] For the accession itself, the decisive fact is that Darius, having taken the throne by killing its holder, fixed his account of the deed in stone and scattered it across the world (see the Behistun inscription for the document's own making and its several versions). On the cliff, as Briant puts it, the history of historians was forestalled for all time.^[5] The inscription closes on the note the whole monument is tuned to, the founder's oath that he is a man of the Truth:

Ahuramazda brought me help, because I was not wicked, nor was I a liar, nor was I a despot; I have ruled according to righteousness.

Darius I, DB §63^[4]

The Greeks told the same story in the same shape, a century later and from the outside. Herodotus gives the longest version: Cambyses, envious, has his brother Smerdis (his name for Bardiya) secretly killed by the trusted Prexaspes; a magus left in charge of the palace, whose own brother both resembled the dead prince and happened to share his name, sets that brother on the throne as the false Smerdis; the fraud is at last uncovered, and seven Persian nobles conspire to kill the impostor and his brother.^[1] The list of the Seven in Herodotus is all but identical to the six co-conspirators Darius names at Behistun (Intaphrenes, Otanes, Gobryas, Hydarnes, Megabyzus), with a single, genuinely uncertain discrepancy in the seventh name (Behistun's Ardumaniš against Herodotus' Aspathines, a real figure attested as Darius's weapon-bearer).^[1] The overlap is close enough that most read Herodotus as transmitting, at a distance, the official Persian version, which is exactly why his agreement cannot count as independent confirmation of it.

Herodotus also preserves the reward the conspirators are said to have set for themselves, a charter of aristocratic privilege that is pure Greek testimony and reads partly as an attempt to explain the later prominence of certain great houses: any one of the Seven might enter the king's palace unannounced, and the king was bound to take his wives only from the households of the conspirators (Herodotus 3.84; see the Seven for the full text).^[1]

And he stages, before the deed, the famous Constitutional Debate, in which the conspirators are made to argue the merits of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy in good Greek political language, Otanes speaking against the unaccountable rule of one man (Herodotus 3.80; see the Seven for the full text).^[1] The debate is almost certainly a Greek literary invention (Herodotus himself notes that some Greeks disbelieved it) and should be read as a Greek story about Persian kingship rather than a transcript of a Persian council. Herodotus rounds the affair off with a note of custom: the Persians kept a festival, the Magophonia, "the killing of the magi", on the anniversary of the deed, on which no magus might show himself abroad.^[1]

Herodotus preserves one thing more, and it is the sharpest single line in the whole affair. On the eve of the killing, when a fellow conspirator hesitates at deceiving their way into the palace, the Darius of Herodotus answers:

Let lies be told where they are needful. All of us aim at the like end, whether we lie or speak truth; he that lies does it to win credence and so advantage by his deceit, and he that speaks truth hopes that truth will get him profit and greater trust; so we do but take different ways to the same goal.

Darius, in Herodotus 3.72, trans. Godley^[1]

The man who would carve guard thyself against the Lie into a cliff is shown, by the Greek tradition, arguing that a lie may be told at need. Whether or not Herodotus had any Persian warrant for the speech, it lays bare the fault-line under the monument: the founder of the reign of the Truth, in the very act that founded it, reasoning that the Truth may be set aside when the aim is worth it. The anecdote serves the sceptical case almost too neatly.

The court-physician Ctesias of Cnidus, writing a generation later still and surviving only in a Byzantine epitome, gives a third and wilder variant. In his telling (preserved by Photius) the prince is called Tanyoxarces, not Bardiya; a magus named Sphendadates, flogged by the prince and seeking revenge, denounces him to Cambyses, who has his brother killed by making him drink bull's blood; Sphendadates, who resembled the prince, then dresses in his clothes and reigns in his place, undetected for years.^[13] The names and mechanics differ at almost every point from both Darius and Herodotus. Ctesias is notoriously unreliable, and his chief value here is negative: the sheer proliferation of incompatible versions of the same few weeks shows how completely the truth had dissolved into story within a century, and how little independent purchase anyone had on it even in antiquity.

Darius was no direct heir but the son of Hystaspes, of a collateral Achaemenid branch, and the account he carved is exactly the one such a man would need: that the real Bardiya had been secretly killed years before, so that the king struck down in 522 must have been a fraud. That convenience has fed an old and serious suspicion. On one side stands Darius's official version, the murdered prince and the impostor magus Gaumāta; on the other, a sceptical tradition running from Olmstead onward takes Gaumāta for a fiction and the man Darius killed for the genuine son of Cyrus, reigning by right.^[14] The case cannot be closed either way, for no source independent of Darius confirms or refutes the impostor, and the Babylonian tablets fix only that a king named Bardiya was recognised, not who he was. Modern opinion leans toward suspicion, but on present evidence who the man in 522 really was cannot be settled^[15] (see Bardiya / Gaumāta).

Every source for the Achaemenid empire must be read critically, but the accession of 522 concentrates the whole problem into one document and one claim. Behistun is contemporary, first-person, monumental, and precise (the nearest thing to an official history the dynasty ever produced), and it is also the self-justification of the man who took the throne by killing its holder, composed to be read for a thousand years. The very features that make it invaluable make it treacherous: it is at once our best evidence and an interested party's brief. To use it well is to read it as argument and not as record: to ask, of every sentence, two things: "what does the King say happened?" and "what did the King need his readers to believe?". The accession is where the critical method the whole period demands is forced into the open, because here the founding monument against the Lie may itself be the reign's founding lie, and no surviving evidence can close the case.