Topic: women (7)

• 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…

• 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,…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 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…

• 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…