Topic: historiography (24)

• 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 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…

• PersonArtemisia I of Halicarnassus

  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…

• PersonAstyages

  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…

• PersonAtossa

  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,…

• PersonBardiya and Gaumata

  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.…

• PersonCambyses II

  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…

• PersonCroesus

  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…

• SourceCtesias, The Persica

  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…

• PersonDarius III

  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…

• PersonHarpagus

  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…

• PersonMardonius

  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…

• PersonNabonidus

  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…

• 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…

• PersonSogdianus

  Sogdianus (the Secyndianus or Sekyndianos of Ctesias; Sogdianos in Diodorus and Manetho) was a son of Artaxerxes I by the Babylonian concubine Alogune, and for some months of 424–423 BCE a claimant king of the Achaemenid empire. In the only connected account that survives, Ctesias's Persica in the…

• Survey essayThe Achaemenid dynasty

  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…

• 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…

• 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…

• PeopleThe Persians

  The Persians (Old Persian Pārsa) were the ruling people of the Achaemenid Empire: the Iranian-speaking ethnos of the Fārs highland from which the dynasty sprang, whose aristocracy dominated imperial command and the great satrapies from the Indus to the Aegean, and whose name the subject world used…

• Survey essayThe Sources & How We Know

  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…

• 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…

• PersonTomyris

  Tomyris (Greek Τόμυρις; fl. c. 530 BCE) is, in the account of Herodotus, the queen of the Massagetae, the nomad people beyond the Araxes against whom Cyrus the Great led his final campaign. Ruling alone after her husband's death, she refused Cyrus's offer of marriage, seeing that his suit aimed at…

• 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…

• PersonXerxes II

  Xerxes II was the only legitimate son of Artaxerxes I, king of the Achaemenid empire, by his queen Damaspia, and when his father died at the end of 424 BCE he took, or claimed, the throne. About forty-five days later he was murdered in his sleep during a palace festival by partisans of his…