Topic: ideology (31)
- ConceptAhura Mazdā
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,…
- ConceptArta (Truth, right order)
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…
- 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 II
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,…
- PersonArtaxerxes III
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…
- 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.…
- PersonCyrus the Great
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Survey essayReligion & the Lie: the Achaemenid religious world
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;…
- EventThe Accession of Darius (522 BCE)
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…
- ArtworkThe Apadana Reliefs
The Apadana reliefs are the sculptured façades of the two great stairways of the Apadana, the audience hall of Persepolis: files of Persian and Median guards, courtiers and royal grooms on one wing and, on the other, twenty-three delegations of subject peoples, each in the costume of its land,…
- EventThe Battle of Marathon (490 BCE)
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…
- EventThe Battle of Mycale (479 BCE)
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…
- EventThe Battle of Plataea (479 BCE)
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…
- EventThe Battle of Salamis (480 BCE)
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…
- EventThe Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE)
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…
- SourceThe Behistun Inscription (DB)
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…
- SourceThe Cyrus Cylinder
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…
- SourceThe Daiva Inscription (XPh)
The daiva inscription (XPh) is a trilingual proclamation of Xerxes I (r. 486–465 BCE), known from three Old Persian copies, with a Babylonian and an Elamite version. The surviving limestone tablets were recovered in secondary, reused contexts at Persepolis and Pasargadae, so their original…
- ConceptThe Drauga (the Lie)
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…
- EventThe Ionian Revolt (499–494 BCE)
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…
- ConceptThe King of Kings
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- ArtworkThe Winged Symbol (the figure in the winged ring)
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…
- PlaceThe Xerxes Canal
The Xerxes Canal was a navigable channel cut through the neck of the Athos peninsula in northern Greece on the orders of Xerxes I, during the regional preparations made over roughly the three years before his invasion of Greece in 480 BCE (see the invasion of Greece). Herodotus describes conscript…
- 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…
- PersonXerxes I
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…
- EventXerxes' Invasion of Greece (480–479 BCE)
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…