The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period

"This is another great doorstop of a book, running to over 1,000 pages. It was originally published in two volumes in hardback and went into paperback a few years later. It is the most invaluable teaching tool for me. I teach several courses on Ancient Persia and this is an amazing compendium of all types of sources on the Persian Empire. It utilises old Persian inscriptions, Babylonian texts, Aramaic texts, Hebrew texts, Greek and Latin texts. They’re all there in translation and with Kuhrt’s very useful, very competent and very intelligent commentaries as well. She’s one of the great names in ancient Near Eastern studies and I admire her very much. Before The Persian Empire , she’d already published a two-volume history of the ancient Near East, which is a mammoth undertaking—from 3000 BCE, right until 300 BCE. She knows her stuff and what she was able to do in the sourcebook is bring together the richness and variety of the Persian sources. In some respects, The Persian Empire is still just the tip of the iceberg, because what she’s not able to do in that source book is to bring together all of the visual evidence, although there’s some visual material there. The visual stuff, of course, is even richer than the textual stuff. She’s not really able to do much of the archaeology, or much of the iconography, but it’s a starting point. She does try. The texts themselves are all there, with modern translations and up-to-date commentaries. It’s the most useful tool for anybody wishing to go further into the source materials for the study of Persia."

"The first thing to say is that if we want to get away from the tradition of writing about Alexander the Great that Briant describes in his book, we need to take the Persian evidence seriously and to understand better the empire in which he worked and to recognise that—going back to what I said at the start—it’s not straightforwardly Western Alexander conquers Eastern Persia. It’s Alexander coming from a monarchical tradition that has been influenced by Persia. He moves in and he essentially seizes control of the Achaemenid Persian Empire and he adapts it to his purposes. The other thing to mention is the myth—and again the ancient writers like Arrian, Curtius and others are to some extent the source of this—that Persia was weak, divided, feeble and ripe for conquest. But if we look at the Persian evidence it’s much less clear that it’s as simple as that. So, the point about Kuhrt’s very very large book is that it gives us a better picture of what Persia was like. I should say, I was torn between suggesting this and suggesting Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire , but I thought I’d already chosen Briant’s The First European and, actually, going back to the ancient evidence is important. “In the Enlightenment period you start to get a return to interest in the Greek texts and in a more scientifically historical study of Alexander” The problem we have is that actually evidence about the Persian Empire mainly comes from the sixth and first half of the fifth centuries BC. The major buildings that survive, the inscriptions and other documents, of which there are quite a lot, are mostly from the early period, in particular from the time of Darius and Xerxes. By the time you get to Alexander’s period, for whatever reason, there are fewer inscriptions, or at least fewer surviving. There’s less information about what’s going on. We do have some documents written on leather in the Aramaic language from Bactria—the area of modern Afghanistan—that date from Alexander’s period and that fit in with other stuff that that’s in Kuhrt, but we have relatively little specifically about the empire under Alexander. What Kuhrt provides us with is a clear idea of how the Empire functioned because, broadly speaking, it carried on much the same throughout the fifth and fourth centuries. Some of the material Kurt includes are Greek reports of Persia, so it’s not all Persian documents. It does include contemporary-ish Greek sources. So, we are reliant to some extent, even when we go back to the sources, on Greek perceptions of Persia. But the whole does allow us to see the Persian Empire as an efficient, well-run state with considerable resources and a highly developed organisation. It’s something that, by defeating Darius, Alexander is able to adopt and take over. And what makes it possible for him to run Persia for the brief time that he does before his death is his maintenance of Persian governmental structures and—what was controversial to people like Arrian and Curtius—his adoption of some of the practices of how to be an Achaemenid King and how he related to the Persian hierarchy by adopting these practices. Some of the extreme practices that the Greek authors described Alexander taking up, for example getting people to prostrate themselves in front of him, are clearly a misunderstanding of Persian practice. So again, it’s useful to have documentation about the Persian Empire from earlier periods, images of what proskynesis , which Arrian thinks means prostration, actually involves. Descriptions of the practice from Herodotus, writing in the 5th century show that, as far as he was concerned, proskynesis wasn’t about prostration. So, we have these sources which help us to get a more accurate impression of what the Empire that Alexander conquered was like, written by people who were not anxious to sell a particular picture of Alexander. ‘Both’ is the answer. There was quite a lot of acceptance, but there was resistance, too. After the battle of Gaugamela, which was Alexander’s second and final defeat of Darius, Darius fled to Afghanistan to regroup. There he was assassinated by one of his generals, who then took the throne under the name of Artaxerxes, until he himself was subsequently captured by other Persians. Later on, after campaigning in the Indus Valley, Alexander comes back and finds that, in one or two places, the people he appointed as provincial governors have been replaced and that some of the people who have replaced them are setting themselves up as Persian King. So, there was clearly resistance, but this is from members of the elite trying to re-establish or increase their own status, rather than there being general unpopularity. Probably, for most people in the Empire, it made relatively little difference who was king. In other parts of his Empire—Egypt, for example—there seems to be no evidence of any problem with having a non-Egyptian king. They’d had that before. Alexander is presented in Egyptian temple sculptures as looking exactly like a traditional Egyptian pharaoh. Similarly, in Babylon the scholar-priests very much start operating their system to work for Alexander. So, broadly speaking, it was possible for him to slot into this new role. Inevitably there were ambitious Persians who didn’t accept it and who wanted to take power for themselves, but I think that that’s better seen as a question of individuals rather than there being a groundswell of opposition to him. We have no actual Persian information about him. We do have some Babylonian evidence. There’s a reasonable amount of material and it very much presents him as a typical king of Babylon. So, he’s supposed to do the rituals and they look after him in the same way that they would look after any other king. I think the answer is that, where we do have indigenous sources, which is Babylon and Egypt in particular, he comes across very much as in the mould of how a Babylonian or Egyptian king should behave. In that sense, there is a difference because this—as I was suggesting earlier—is something that the Greek and Roman sources tend to downplay. For example, there are some stories of Persians or Babylonians behaving weirdly when Alexander does something, which are probably either accidental or deliberate misreadings of more typical Babylonian or Persian practice. To give an example, towards the end of his reign there’s a story told about how Alexander is exercising and has taken off his royal clothes and put them on his throne, which is nearby. And a madman or a prisoner puts them on and sits on the throne and everyone’s very upset by this, and the madman is dragged off and executed, but actually this is almost certainly a version of a standard near-Eastern substitute-King ritual where, when eclipses and other astronomical events portend danger to the king, the king temporary abdicates and a madman or prisoner is put on the throne so that the risk will fall on him. Then, when the period of danger has passed, they’re executed. So, this seems to be a Greek re-interpretation of a standard Babylonian or near-Eastern practice and it suggests that Alexander was quite happy to follow the guidance of locals and work with the local way of doing things. Arrian and Curtius are somewhat suspicious of this and think that these were people trying to hoodwink Alexander."