Topic: administration (28)
- PlaceAnshan
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.…
- PersonArshama, satrap of Egypt
Arshama (Old Persian Aršāma; Aramaic ʾršm; Greek Arsames) was an Achaemenid prince who governed Egypt, among the empire’s richest and most rebellious provinces, through the later fifth century BCE. On the leading reconstruction he held the satrapy from about 454, after the suppression of the…
- PersonArtaxerxes I
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…
- PersonArtaxerxes IV (Arses)
Artaxerxes IV (personal name Arses; Babylonian Aršu) was the penultimate King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, the son whom Diodorus calls the youngest of Artaxerxes III's sons, who took the throne in the late summer of 338 BCE and was dead by 335, when a collateral kinsman acceded as Darius…
- PlaceBabylon
Babylon was one of the largest cities of ancient western Asia and the centre of the Achaemenid empire's most heavily assessed province. It was a royal residence and, among the principal residences of the Persian kings, the only one whose densely built urban character is beyond dispute. Rebuilt on…
- PersonCyrus the Younger
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,…
- PersonDarius I
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…
- PersonDarius II
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…
- PlaceEcbatana
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,…
- PlaceEgypt as a Province
Egypt as a province of the Achaemenid Empire, the Twenty-seventh Dynasty of the Egyptian king-lists, ran from the conquest by Cambyses II (conventionally 525 BCE) to a staggered secession between 405/4 and 400/399. Artaxerxes III recovered the Delta and Memphis in 343/2, but the evidence does not…
- PersonParysatis
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…
- PlacePersepolis
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…
- PlaceSardis
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…
- PlaceSusa
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…
- ObjectThe Daric (and the Siglos)
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…
- PeopleThe Elamites
The Elamites were the ancient people of south-western Iran, holders of the lowland plain of Khuzistan around Susa and of the highland valleys of Fārs, whose civilisation was already some two thousand years old when Cyrus rose. Within the Achaemenid story they are the heartland's other people: the…
- SourceThe Elephantine Papyri
The Elephantine Papyri are the Aramaic archives of a garrison town at the First Cataract of the Nile, where a community of Judaean soldiers and their Aramaean, Egyptian and Iranian neighbours served the Persian kings from before the conquest of Egypt until the empire lost the province at the end…
- SourceThe Hebrew Bible as an Achaemenid Source
The Hebrew Bible is the most widely read body of ancient writing that touches the Achaemenid empire, and the least externally controlled. A small set of books concerns Persia directly: the exilic oracles of Isaiah 40–55, which hail Cyrus as Yahweh's shepherd and anointed; Ezra–Nehemiah, which…
- PeopleThe Ionians
The Ionians were the Greeks of western Asia Minor, the twelve cities of the central Aegean seaboard from Miletus in the south to Phocaea in the north, with Samos and Chios offshore (the islands’ effective subjection came later, and its date is disputed), who spent the better part of two centuries…
- ConceptThe King's Eye
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…
- SourceThe Murašû Archive
The Murašû Archive is the business file of a firm of entrepreneurs at Nippur in central Babylonia, active under the Persian kings Artaxerxes I, Darius II and Artaxerxes II. It is the single richest documentary source for the countryside of the empire's wealthiest province in the later fifth…
- Survey essayThe Peoples of the Empire
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…
- SourceThe Persepolis Fortification Archive
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…
- ConceptThe Royal Road
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…
- ConceptThe Satrapy System
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…
- PersonTissaphernes
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…
- ConceptTribute & Taxation
Tribute and taxation comprised the assessments, renders and services imposed in Achaemenid territories. Herodotus distinguishes the “gifts” received under Cyrus and Cambyses II from fixed imperial assessments attributed to Darius I. Late Babylonian field plans begin around 519 BCE; Dandamaev…
- PersonUdjahorresnet
Udjahorresnet, an Egyptian noble of Sais (fl. c. 526–518 BCE), commanded the royal ships of the last two Saite kings and then served their Persian conquerors as chief physician, palace administrator and confidant of Cambyses II and Darius I. His autobiography, inscribed on a green-stone statue now…