Browse Achaemenica

Showing 84 results.

• Aeschylus, Persae (The Persians)Source

  The Persae of Aeschylus, "The Persians", produced at Athens in 472 BCE, is the earliest surviving account of any Achaemenid event by a contemporary, and the only Greek tragedy on a historical rather than mythological subject to survive complete. It was staged eight years after the sea-battle at…

• Ahura MazdāConcept

  Ahura Mazdā, the "Wise Lord", is the supreme god of the Achaemenid kings: named at the head of nearly every royal inscription as creator of earth, sky, man and human happiness, giver of kingship, and upholder of order against the Lie. He is also the God whom Zarathustra proclaimed in the Gāthās,…

• AnāhitāConcept

  Anāhitā, in full Arədvī Sūrā Anāhitā, 'the moist, the strong, the undefiled', is the great Iranian goddess of the waters. She is the deified cosmic river that falls from the mythical mountain Hukairya into the world-sea, the source of every stream and so the giver of fertility: she purifies the…

• AnshanPlace

  Anshan (Elamite Anzan) was the highland capital of Elam, on the Marvdasht plain in the province the Old Persian sources called Parsa, modern Fars. Its ruins are the tell of Tall-e Malyan, some 47 km north of Shiraz, identified as Anshan only in 1973, when inscribed bricks from the site were read.…

• Ardumanishhelper of Darius I in 522 BCERegister entry

  A Persian whom Darius I names at Behistun among the six men who helped him overthrow the king called Bardiya. He is otherwise unknown and must not be silently identified with Aspathines, who occupies the corresponding place in Herodotus's list.

• Arta (Truth, right order)Concept

  Arta (Old Persian arta-, Avestan aša) is the Iranian principle of truth and right order: the correct joining of the world, cosmic, social and moral at once, set against its standing opposite, the Lie (drauga). It is the exact cognate of Vedic ṛta, so the opposition of Truth and Lie is older than…

• Artaxerxes IAchaemenid king, r. 465–424/423 BCEPerson

  Artaxerxes I (Old Persian Artaxšaça, "whose rule is through Truth"), the fifth Achaemenid King of Kings, reigned from 465 until late 424 or early 423 BCE. A younger son of Xerxes I and Amestris, he came to the throne through the murder of his father and the killing of his elder brother, and held…

• Artaxerxes IIAchaemenid king, r. 405/4–359/8 BCEPerson

  Artaxerxes II (Old Persian Artaxšaça, "whose rule is through Arta"; throne-name of a prince born Arsaces), the seventh Achaemenid King of Kings, reigned from 405/4 to 359/8 BCE. His forty-six years on the throne are the longest of the dynasty, and the Greeks who wrote of him called him Mnemon,…

• Artaxerxes IIIAchaemenid king, r. 359/8–338 BCEPerson

  Artaxerxes III (the throne name of Ochus; Babylonian Umakuš or Umasu, Greek Ôchos) was the Achaemenid King of Kings from 359/8 to 338 BCE. The son and successor of Artaxerxes II, he came to the throne late in a century the Greek sources present as one of dynastic murder, over-mighty satraps and…

• Artaxerxes IVArses; Achaemenid king, r. 338–336 BCERegister entry

  A young son of Artaxerxes III, known personally as Arses, whose short reign and violent death are registered independently in a Babylonian dynastic text as well as in the Greek tradition.

• Artemisia I of Halicarnassusqueen of Halicarnassus; naval commander in 480 BCEPerson

  Artemisia I of Halicarnassus was a widowed subject-dynast of Xerxes I who ruled Halicarnassus and several neighbouring Carian and Dorian communities. She brought five ships to the invasion of Greece and fought at Salamis in 480 BCE. Almost everything known about her comes from Herodotus, a later…

• Artemisia IIHecatomnid ruler of Caria; Mausoleum patronRegister entry

  The fourth-century Hecatomnid ruler, wife and sister of Mausolus, who completed the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. She lived about 130 years after Artemisia I and belongs to a different dynasty.

• Aspathinescourtier of Darius I; Herodotean conspiratorRegister entry

  A prominent courtier shown on Darius I's tomb as the royal garment-bearer holding the king's bow-case. Herodotus places him among the Seven, where the Behistun list instead names Ardumanish; the two identities remain distinct.

• Astyageslast king of the MedesPerson

  Astyages (Greek Astyagēs; Babylonian Ištumegu; from an Old Iranian R̥šti-vaiga-, perhaps 'lance-hurler') was the last king of the Medes, who reigned from about 585 until his kingdom fell to his Persian neighbour Cyrus around 550 BCE. Son and successor of Cyaxares, the king who had helped destroy…

• AtossaAchaemenid queen; daughter of Cyrus IIPerson

  Atossa (Old Persian Utauθā, corresponding to Avestan Hutaosā; lived c. 550 to after 480 BCE) was an Achaemenid queen, the daughter of Cyrus the Great and the mother of Xerxes I. She married in turn her brother Cambyses II, the usurper Bardiya (the 'Smerdis' of the Greek writers), and Darius I,…

• Bardiya and Gaumatacontested identity of the king overthrown in 522 BCEPerson

  Bardiya (Old Persian Bardiya; Greek Smerdis) was the younger son of Cyrus the Great and the full brother of Cambyses II. For some months in 522 BCE a man ruling as Bardiya held the Achaemenid throne, until Darius, son of Hystaspes, and six fellow Persians killed him and Darius took the crown.…

• Cambyses Iking of Anshan; father of Cyrus IIRegister entry

  A king of Anshan and the father of Cyrus II, named in Cyrus's own Babylonian genealogy. He is not Cambyses II, the later conqueror of Egypt.

• Cambyses IIAchaemenid king, r. 530–522 BCEPerson

  Cambyses II (Old Persian Kambūjiya; r. 530–522 BCE) was the second Achaemenid Great King, elder son and heir of Cyrus the Great, who in 525 BCE conquered Egypt and added the last of the great old kingdoms of the Near East to the empire, the achievement that turned Cyrus's realm into a power…

• Croesuslast king of LydiaPerson

  Croesus (Greek Kroisos; reigned c. 560 to the mid-540s BCE) was the last king of Lydia, ruler of the wealthy kingdom of western Anatolia from his capital at Sardis, subjugator of the Ionian Greek cities of the coast, and, in the Greek imagination, the archetype of the fabulously rich king undone…

• Ctesias, The PersicaSource

  Ctesias of Cnidus (fl. c. 400 BCE) was a Greek physician who served for years at the court of Artaxerxes II and there gathered the matter of the Persica, a history of the Near East in twenty-three books. He is the one classical writer on Persia who worked from inside the palace, and, by the…

• Cyrus the Greatthe Great; founder of the Persian empirePerson

  Cyrus II, called the Great (Old Persian Kūruš), was the founder of the Achaemenid, or first Persian, empire, and reigned from about 559 to 530 BCE. A king of Anshan in the highlands of Fārs, he overthrew in turn the three great powers of his world, the Median kingdom of Astyages about 550, the…

• Cyrus the YoungerAchaemenid prince; rebel killed at CunaxaPerson

  Cyrus the Younger (Old Persian Kūruš; died 401 BCE) was a son of Darius II and Parysatis and a younger brother of Artaxerxes II. His epithet distinguishes him from Cyrus the Great, the sixth-century founder whose name he shared. In the last years of Darius II, the younger prince governed Lydia,…

• Darius Ithe Great; Achaemenid king, r. 522–486 BCEPerson

  Darius I (Old Persian Dārayavauš, born about 550, reigned 522 to 486 BCE) was the third of the Achaemenid Great Kings and, in most respects, the true founder of the Persian empire as an organised state. He came to the throne by killing a king he called an impostor, spent his first year putting…

• Darius IIAchaemenid king, r. 424–405/4 BCEPerson

  Darius II (Old Persian Dārayavauš), born Ochus and remembered by the Greeks as Nothus, "the bastard", was King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire from 424 to 405/4 BCE. A younger son of Artaxerxes I by a Babylonian concubine, he reached the throne through the most tangled succession the dynasty had…

• Darius IIIlast Achaemenid king, r. 336–330 BCEPerson

  Darius III (Old Persian throne name Dārayavahuš; personal name Artašata, the form recorded in the Babylonian diaries; called Codomannus by the Roman epitomator Justin) was the last King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, reigning from 336 to 330 BCE. He came to the throne from a collateral branch…

• EcbatanaPlace

  The chief city of the Medes and, after Cyrus took it in 550 BCE, one of the four working royal residences of the Persian empire, the one where the King and his court passed the height of summer. It lay on the flank of Mount Alvand (the ancient Orontes) on the great road from Mesopotamia into Iran,…

• Gobryashelper and spear-bearer of Darius IRegister entry

  One of the six Persians named at Behistun as Darius I's helpers in 522 BCE, later shown on the king's tomb as his spear-bearer. He was the father of the commander Mardonius.

• Gold plaque of a barsom-bearer (Oxus Treasure)Object

  The barsom plaque is one of the small gold votive plaques of the Oxus Treasure (British Museum 123949): a standing man in Median dress holding before him a slim bundle of rods, the barsom of Iranian worship. It is the clearest surviving material image of the rite the texts only name, one of about…

• HarpagusMedian noble and commander under Cyrus IIPerson

  Harpagus (Greek Harpagos) is the Median grandee who, in the account of Herodotus, engineers the fall of the last Median king Astyages and the rise of Cyrus the Great, and then, as Cyrus's general, completes the Persian conquest of the western Anatolian coast. In Herodotus's founder-legend of Cyrus…

• Herodotus, The HistoriesSource

  Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484 to after 430 BCE) wrote the Histories, the earliest surviving work of history in the Western tradition and the fullest classical account of the Persian empire. Its announced subject is the great collision of Greeks and barbarians that culminated in Xerxes'…

• Hydarnesson of Hydarnes; commander of the Immortals in 480 BCERegister entry

  The Hydarnes who commanded the Immortals in Xerxes I's invasion and led the flanking march at Thermopylae. He is probably, but not certainly, the son of the conspirator of 522 BCE.

• Hydarneshelper of Darius I in 522 BCE; later satrap of MediaRegister entry

  One of the six Persians Darius I names as his helpers in 522 BCE, later active against the Median rebels and attested as satrap of Media. He is not the later commander at Thermopylae.

• Intaphrenesfirst-named helper of Darius I in 522 BCERegister entry

  The first of Darius I's six named helpers at Behistun and the commander who suppressed the second Babylonian revolt. Herodotus later makes him the first member of the Seven destroyed by the king.

• MardoniusAchaemenid commander; d. 479 BCEPerson

  Mardonius (Old Persian Marduniya, d. 479 BCE) was a Persian noble of the first rank: son of Gobryas, one of the Seven who put Darius I on the throne, and himself married to a daughter of Darius. He commanded the expedition of 492 that re-secured Thrace and Macedonia for the empire (his fleet…

• Megabyzushelper of Darius I in 522 BCERegister entry

  One of the six Persians named at Behistun as Darius I's helpers in 522 BCE. He must be distinguished from the fifth-century general of the same name descended from his house.

• Megabyzusfifth-century Achaemenid generalRegister entry

  A descendant of the conspirator Megabyzus, husband of a daughter of Xerxes I and commander in Artaxerxes I's Egyptian war. His reported revolt and reconciliation survive chiefly through Ctesias's court narrative.

• MithraConcept

  Mithra (Avestan Miθra, later Mihr) is one of the oldest gods of the Indo-Iranian world, and the one whose nature is least in doubt, because his name is also the ordinary word for 'contract'. He is the deified covenant, the all-seeing guardian of the sworn word and the alliance, he of the wide…

• Naboniduslast king of the Neo-Babylonian empirePerson

  Nabonidus (Akkadian Nabû-naʾid, "the god Nabu is exalted"; r. 556–539 BCE) was the sixth and last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire, and the man whose fall handed the ancient Near East's richest and oldest kingdom to Cyrus. His importance to Achaemenid history lies not in anything he did to Persia…

• Naqsh-e RostamPlace

  Naqsh-e Rostam is the perpendicular cliff about six kilometres north-west of Persepolis where the Great Kings of the Achaemenid house were entombed. Four cruciform tombs are cut into the rock: the oldest secured to Darius I by its inscriptions, DNa and DNb; the other three attributed on position…

• Otaneshelper of Darius I in 522 BCERegister entry

  One of the six Persians Darius I names as his helpers in 522 BCE. Herodotus makes him the first detector of the supposed imposture and later gives him the democratic speech in the Constitutional Debate.

• Parysatiswife of Darius II; mother of Artaxerxes II and Cyrus the YoungerPerson

  Parysatis (Babylonian Purušatu; Iranian name reconstructed as Paurušātiš) was a royal woman of the later fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. Ctesias's dynastic tradition makes her a daughter of Artaxerxes I by Andia and the wife and paternal half-sister of Darius II. Xenophon independently…

• PasargadaePlace

  The first Achaemenid capital, raised by Cyrus the Great on the high, well-watered plain of the River Pulvar in the heart of Persis, some forty kilometres north-east of the later Persepolis. Here Cyrus built a dispersed royal park of columned stone halls (a free-standing gatehouse, Gate R, with its…

• PersepolisPlace

  Persepolis was the ceremonial and administrative heart of the Achaemenid empire in its Persian homeland, a vast terraced complex of palaces, audience halls and treasuries raised by Darius I from about 518 BCE on the Marv Dasht plain of Fars. The Persians called it simply Pārsa, the name of the…

• ProskynesisConcept

  Proskynesis (Greek προσκύνησις, from pros, "towards", and kyneō, "to kiss") is the gesture of respect a Persian made before a social superior, and above all before the king: a graded act that ran from a kiss between equals to a full prostration by the lowly. The word is Greek, not Persian, and…

• Religion & the Lie: the Achaemenid religious worldSurvey essay

  Achaemenid religion, as the kings proclaimed it, turned on a single polarity: the worship of Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord who set the world in order, against the drauga, the Lie that forever works to corrupt it. The kings of Persia proclaimed themselves the god's chosen instruments in that struggle;…

• SardisPlace

  Sardis, the old royal capital of Lydia at the foot of Mount Tmolus on the river Pactolus, became after its capture by Cyrus in 547 or 546 BCE the chief seat of Persian power in the west, and held that place for two centuries until it surrendered to Alexander in 334. Under the Mermnad kings it had…

• Sogdianusshort-lived claimant after Artaxerxes IRegister entry

  A son of Artaxerxes I whom Ctesias places between Xerxes II and Darius II for a reign of a few months. Surviving Babylonian dating formulae do not recognise him, so the sequence and reach of his rule remain uncertain.

• SusaPlace

  Susa was the great lowland capital of the Achaemenid empire, the ancient city of Elam that Darius I rebuilt from about 520 BCE as a royal residence and working seat of government. It lay on the Susiana plain of south-western Iran, at the meeting point of the Iranian plateau and the Mesopotamian…

• The Accession of Darius (522 BCE)Event

  The violent, contested seizure of the Achaemenid throne in 522 BCE: the killing of a king held to be an impostor magus, the coup of the Seven that raised Darius, and the year of rebellion that followed. It is the founding case of the imperial ideology of the Truth against the Lie, and the single…

• The Achaemenid dynastySurvey essay

  The Achaemenid dynasty was the royal house that ruled the first Persian empire from its founding by Cyrus the Great about 550 BCE to its conquest by Alexander of Macedon in 330 BCE. Thirteen kings ruled across those two centuries, from Cyrus and his son Cambyses, through Darius the Great and…

• The Battle of Cunaxa (401 BCE)Event

  The Battle of Cunaxa (401 BCE) was the decisive clash between the royal army of Artaxerxes II and the coalition raised by his younger brother, Cyrus the Younger, somewhere north of Babylon. It was a civil war fought by two mixed royal armies, not a simple contest between Greeks and Persians.…

• The Battle of Marathon (490 BCE)Event

  The seaborne expedition of 490 BCE, led by the Median commander Datis and Artaphernes the younger, which sacked Naxos and Eretria and then landed on the plain of Marathon in Attica, where it was defeated by the Athenians and withdrew. In Greek, and above all Athenian, memory it became the founding…

• The Battle of Mycale (479 BCE)Event

  The defeat, in the late summer of 479 BCE, of a beached Persian fleet and its covering army on the Ionian shore below Mount Mycale, opposite the island of Samos. Coming in the same season as the land defeat of Mardonius at Plataea, it ended Xerxes' invasion of Greece and, more consequentially for…

• The Battle of Plataea (479 BCE)Event

  The land battle fought in the summer of 479 BCE on the plain of the Asopos river in Boeotia, near the ruined town of Plataea, in which the picked Persian army left in Greece under Xerxes' general Mardonius was beaten by a coalition of Greek states under the Spartan regent Pausanias, and Mardonius…

• The Battle of Salamis (480 BCE)Event

  The naval defeat of Xerxes' fleet in the straits between Attica and the island of Salamis, on a day near the end of September 480 BCE, watched by the King from a throne on the shore. It is the most famous single engagement of the Achaemenid wars against the Greeks, and one of the sharpest tests…

• The Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE)Event

  The forcing of the coastal pass of Thermopylae by Xerxes I in high summer 480 BCE, during his invasion of Greece. A small allied Greek army under the Spartan king Leonidas held the defile for some days against the King's advance, was outflanked by a Persian column sent over the Anopaea mountain…

• The Behistun Inscription (DB)Source

  The Behistun inscription (DB) is the monumental cliff-relief and trilingual text that Darius I had carved at Bagastāna in Media between about 520 and 518 BCE, recounting in the king's own voice his seizure and defence of the throne against Gaumāta and a wave of rebels. It is the longest Achaemenid…

• The Cyrus CylinderSource

  A barrel-shaped clay cylinder inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform, buried in the foundations of Babylon's city wall after Cyrus II took the city in 539 BCE. In the traditional idiom of a Mesopotamian building inscription it makes the god Marduk choose Cyrus, condemns the deposed Nabonidus, and…

• The Daric (and the Siglos)Object

  The gold daric (Greek dareikos statēr, about 8.4 grams of nearly pure gold) and its silver companion the siglos (about 5.4 grams) were the coins of the Achaemenid king, introduced by Darius I in the last decade of the sixth century BCE and stamped with a single unchanging image, the crowned royal…

• The Drauga (the Lie)Concept

  The drauga (Old Persian drauga-, Avestan druj) is the Lie: the principle of falsehood, deceit and disorder that stands against arta, the right order of the world, in the religion and the royal ideology of ancient Iran. More than a word for the spoken untruth, it names the power that unmakes…

• The Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)Event

  The fall of Babylon in October 539 BCE was the conquest of the last native Mesopotamian empire by Cyrus II of Persia. Ruled by the absent and religiously heterodox Nabonidus and his regent-son Belshazzar, Babylonia fell in a campaign of a few weeks: a decisive battle at Opis, the surrender of…

• The ImmortalsConcept

  The Immortals were the 10,000-strong standing corps of elite Persian foot that guarded the King of Kings and formed the professional heart of the field army, famous under the Greek name Herodotus gave them, 'the Immortals' (athanatoi): Herodotus says the corps was held always at ten thousand, a…

• The Ionian Revolt (499–494 BCE)Event

  The revolt of the Greek cities of the empire's north-western coast (Ionia, the Hellespont, Caria and Cyprus) against Darius I, from the failed attack on Naxos and the burning of Sardis in 499/8 to the sea-battle of Lade and the fall of Miletus in 494. From Susa and Sardis it was a provincial…

• The King of KingsConcept

  King of kings (Old Persian xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām) is the title the Achaemenid ruler set at the head of almost every inscription he left, and the seed of a whole account of the world. It claims that above the many kings of the earth's many peoples stands one king; that his office is part of the…

• The King's EyeConcept

  The King's Eye (Greek ho basileōs ophthalmos), with its companion the King's Ear, is the name the Greeks gave to a royal officer who watched over the empire's provinces and reported what he saw and heard straight to the king. Around it grew the picture of an Achaemenid surveillance state: a corps…

• The MagiPeople

  The Magi (Old Persian magu-) were the priestly class of the western Iranians, the one body of religious specialists named across the Median, Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian ages. Herodotus counts them among the six Median tribes and names them the officiants without whom no Persian could…

• The MedesPeople

  The Medes (Old Persian Māda, Greek Mêdoi, Assyrian and Babylonian Mādāya) were the Iranian people of the north-western Zagros, settled about the plain of Ecbatana (modern Hamadān), who by the Greek account raised the first great Iranian kingdom: a line of four kings, Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares…

• The paradise gardenConcept

  The enclosed, well-watered royal park of the Persian king and his satraps, and the single most resonant word the Achaemenids gave to the languages of Europe. In its own tongue the name was concrete and unromantic: Old Iranian pairi-daiza-, 'a walled enclosure', from pairi- 'around' and daiza-…

• The Peoples of the EmpireSurvey essay

  The peoples of the empire are, in the Achaemenid kings' own word, the dahyāva: the named lands-and-nations, from Persia and Media to Egypt, Ionia, India and the Saka steppe, whose roll the dynasty carved into its monuments as the very definition of what the empire was. Five royal inscriptions list…

• The Persepolis Fortification ArchiveSource

  The working paperwork of Darius I's own heartland: tens of thousands of clay tablets from a bastion in the Persepolis fortification wall, recording the intake and disbursement of food, livestock, and travel rations across Fars and Elam in the middle of the reign. Dry, sealed, never meant for…

• The Retreat of the Ten Thousand (401–399 BCE)Event

  The Retreat of the Ten Thousand was the withdrawal and subsequent dispersal, from 401 to 399 BCE, of the Greek force that had marched with Cyrus the Younger after he was killed at Cunaxa. The soldiers first joined Cyrus's Asian troops under Ariaeus and negotiated with Artaxerxes II through…

• The Royal RoadConcept

  The great overland route and courier relay that bound the Achaemenid empire together: the road of stations and inns Herodotus walked in his mind from Sardis to Susa, and the mounted post along it that the Greeks called the angareion, carrying the King's word across a world in a matter of days. It…

• The Sacred FireConcept

  The sacred fire (Avestan ātar) was the purest of the good creations and the earthly emblem of aša/arta, tended by the Magi and honoured in the open air at free-standing stone fire-holders. The roofed sanctuary whose consecrated flame is kept perpetually alight belongs to the later empire and…

• The Satrapy SystemConcept

  The great administrative frame of the Achaemenid empire: the division of a realm that stretched from the Indus to the Aegean into provinces, each held for the King of Kings by a satrap, his viceroy. The satrap gathered the tribute, judged the causes, kept the roads and raised the levies of his…

• The SevenConcept

  The Seven are the seven Persian nobles, Darius among them, who in September 522 BCE killed the man ruling the empire as Bardiya, son of Cyrus, and made Darius king. They are unique in Achaemenid history in being attested by two versions of the same list, set down separately, in different languages…

• The Sources & How We KnowSurvey essay

  The evidence for the Achaemenid empire is abundant but broken into kinds that do not agree with one another, and the history of the empire is the discipline of reading them together. No Persian wrote a narrative history of Persia: the kings left proclamations in stone, their clerks left tens of…

• The Winged Symbol (the figure in the winged ring)Artwork

  The winged symbol is the ring or disc with outspread wings, most often enclosing a robed male figure, that hovers above the Great King at Behistun, on the reliefs of Persepolis and over the royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam. It is the most conspicuous religious image of Achaemenid kingship and the…

• Tissaphernesroyal commander in western Anatolia, d. 395 BCEPerson

  Tissaphernes was a Persian royal commander whose long western career crossed the reigns of King Darius II and King Artaxerxes II. He first emerges among the officers sent against the rebel Pissuthnes, then took over authority centred on Sardis and helped defeat Pissuthnes’s son Amorges. In 413/12…

• Warfare & the ArmySurvey essay

  The Achaemenid army was the fighting force of the first Persian empire, under Darius I and his successors: the seasonal levy of the subject nations set beside the standing royal guard the Greeks called the Immortals; the shield-and-bow files, the bow as the national weapon, the cavalry and the…

• XenophonSource

  Xenophon of Athens (c. 430–353 BCE) is the one classical writer on the Achaemenid empire who had actually been inside it, marching to Babylonia in 401 BCE with the rebel prince Cyrus the Younger and leading the stranded Greek survivors home. His Anabasis is the best first-hand look at the empire's…

• Xerxes IAchaemenid king, r. 486–465 BCEPerson

  Xerxes I (Old Persian Xšayāršā, "ruling over heroes"), the fourth Achaemenid King of Kings, reigned from 486 to 465 BCE. Son of Darius I and of Atossa the daughter of Cyrus the Great, he was the heir in whom the two royal lines met, and he inherited a state his father had already made the largest…

• Xerxes IIshort-lived son and successor of Artaxerxes IRegister entry

  The legitimate son of Artaxerxes I and Damaspia whom Ctesias says was murdered after about forty-five days. Surviving Babylonian dating formulae do not recognise his reign.

• Xerxes' Invasion of Greece (480–479 BCE)Event

  The great expedition that Xerxes I led against the Greek mainland in 480–479 BCE, the largest single enterprise the Achaemenid Empire ever mounted and the campaign to which the component battles (Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, Mycale) belong. The campaign is best taken as a whole: its…

• ZarathustraIranian prophet and poet-priestPerson

  Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks) is the Iranian prophet and poet-priest whose seventeen hymns, the Gāthās, exalt Ahura Mazdā as the one God and lay upon every person a choice: aša, the Truth, or druj, the Lie. His date, his homeland, even (to a few sceptics) his existence are among the most…