Topic: peoples (11)
- 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,…
- 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…
- EventThe Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)
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…
- 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…
- PeopleThe Medes
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- PeopleThe Saka (Scythians)
The Saka (Old Persian Sakā), the horse-riding nomad peoples of the Eurasian steppe, were the empire's whole northern and eastern horizon: fought at the frontier, enrolled in the royal armies, carved on the monuments, and never wholly ruled. The name itself is the first problem. "Saka" was the…