Surveys (5)
A catalogue view: every article filed as survey essay. For the encyclopaedia arranged by subject, see the themes.
- 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;…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Survey essayWarfare & the Army
The Achaemenid army was the fighting force of the first Persian empire, under Darius I and his successors: the seasonal levy of the subject nations set beside the standing royal guard the Greeks called the Immortals; the shield-and-bow files, the bow as the national weapon, the cavalry and the…