Topic: economy (12)

• 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…

• 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,…

• 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…

• 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 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…

• 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…

• ConceptThe paradise garden

  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-…

• 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 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…

• 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…

• SourceXenophon

  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…