Tag: Achaemenid Empire

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Servant or Slave

Sheikh, Hossein. 2023. Servant or slave: The Old Persian words Bandaka, Marika and Daha and their cognates in Middle Iranian languages. In: Jeannine Bischoff, Stephan Conermann and Marion Gymnich (eds.), Naming, defining, phrasing strong asymmetrical dependencies: A textual approach, 55-67. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

In this paper, I will briefly examine the concept of superiority/inferiority in the Achaemenid administrative system in particular and in the ancient Iranian world in general. In doing so, I will focus on the word bandaka, its meanings and its nuance in Iranian languages in the context of ancient Near Eastern culture, as this word plays a very important role in the definition of terminology related to slavery and associated terms in the Iranian world. In addition, I will discuss two additional words related to this topic that shed more light on the concept of superiority/inferiority in Ancient Iranian societies. Our main sources for this study are inscriptions, letters and contracts from a variety of Western and Central Asian cultures. In this study, I chose three Middle Iranian languages, Sogdian, Pahlavi, and Bactrian, because the geography in which these languages were spoken was a part of the Achaemenid Empire.

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Luxury and Power

Fraser, James, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones & Henry Bishop-Wright. 2023. Luxury and power: Persia to Greece. London: British Museum Press.

Luxurious objects are celebrated for their exoticism, rarity and style, but also disparaged as indulgent, extravagant and corrupt. The ancient origins of these attitudes emerged at the boundary between the imperial Persian and democratic Athenian Greek worlds.

Luxury was at the centre of the royal Persian court and behaviours of ostentatious display rippled through the imperial provinces, whose elite classes emulated luxury objects in lesser materials. But luxury is contrastingly depicted through Athenian eyes – within the philosophical context of early democratic codes and the historical context of the Greco-Persian Wars, which suddenly and spectacularly brought eastern luxuries into the imagination of the Athenian populace for the first time. While Athenian writers rejected luxury as eastern, despotic and corrupt, the elite adopted Persian luxuries in imaginative ways to signal status, distinction and prestige.

Under the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great and its subsequent kingdoms, royal Achaemenid luxury culture would be adopted and displayed by the Macedonian and local elite across the Greek and Middle Eastern worlds: behaviours of ostentatious display were a means to seek advantage in the new Hellenistic world order.

Ultimately, this publication demonstrates how competing political spins woven around 2,500 years ago still continue to shape the modern perceptions of luxury today.

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The Cambyses Logos

Schwab, Andreas & Alexander Schütze (eds.). 2023. Herodotean Soundings: The Cambyses Logos. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.

This volume is dedicated to the logos of Cambyses at the beginning of Book 3 in Herodotus’ Histories, one of the few sources on the Persian conquest of Egypt that has not yet been exhaustively explored in its complexity. The contributions of this volume deal with the motivations and narrative strategies behind Herodotus’ characterization of the Persian king but also with the geopolitical background of Cambyses’ conquest of Egypt as well as the reception of the Cambyses logos by later ancient authors. “Herodotean Soundings: The Cambyses Logos” exemplifies how a multidisciplinary approach can contribute significantly to a better understanding of a complex work such as Herodotus’ Histories.

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Equine Rations of Bread and Wine at Persepolis

Potts, Daniel. 2023. ‘Pain et vin:’ Equine Rations of Bread and Wine at Persepolis in their Broader Historical Context. Cheiron 3/1: 25-47.

In the early fifth century BC rations of bread and wine were issued to small numbers of horses at Persepolis, the Achaemenid Persian capital located in what is today the southwest Iranian province of Fars. Although considered puzzling by many students of ancient Persian history, ample evidence exists in the historical and equine veterinary literature of mediaeval through early twentieth century date attesting to the widespread practice of giving bread and wine to horses for both nutritional and therapeutic reasons. This evidence is reviewed in order to contextualize the Persepolis evidence within the broader framework of equine management across space and time.

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The Greek Tablet of the Persepolis Fortification Archive

Aperghis, Gerasimos George & Antigoni Zournatzi. 2023. The Greek Tablet (Fort. 1771) of the Persepolis Fortification Archive. Arta 2023. 001.

This paper reflects on the circumstances that could be held to account for the singleton tablet in Greek, Fort. 1771, of the Persepolis Fortification archive. It proposes that this tablet possibly records a wine ration for a functionary of the Persepolis administrative system, which could have been drafted by this functionary himself. The use of Greek would imply that he was a native Greek speaker.

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Feeding and Labeling Inequality at Persepolis

King, Rhyne. 2023. La desigualdad en la alimentacion y la clasificacion de personas en Persepolis. In: Marcelo Campagno et al. (eds.), Desigualdades antiguas: Economía, cultura y sociedad en el Oriente Medio y el Mediterráneo, 341-358. Barcelona: Miño y Dávila.

This paper deals with questions regarding the nutritional rations paid to individuals as reflected by the Persepolis Fortification Archive focusing on the inequality and its meanings in terms of labels of social status. The author has examined these unequal rations distributed among travelers and various workers and subordinates of different status (puhu, Kurtaš and libap).

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Persepolis: Stairways as Dialogic Spheres of Spiritual Social Community in Empire

Root, M. Cool. 2022. Persepolis: Stairways as Dialogic Spheres of Spiritual Social Community in Empire. In: Alexa Rickert & Sophie Schlosser (eds.), Gestaltung, Funktion und Bedeutung antiker Treppenanlagen (Kasion 11), 135-158. Münster: Zaphon.

The external stairways serving several ceremonial structures of Persepolis are often-illustrated hallmarks of this heartland capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (fig. 1). Yet their forms, kinetic dynamics, and experiential agencies receive very little commentary within any history of architecture, whether it be narrow or global. Within discrete discussions of the site itself, their nature as stairs typically defers to their pictorial aspect as sculptural surfaces. The reasons for this paradox are diverse and interesting. My modest aim here is to open fresh dialogue on the stairways and to suggest some prospects for further work.

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Women Involved in Daily Management in Achaemenid Babylonia

Watai, Yoko. 2023. Women Involved in Daily Management in Achaemenid Babylonia: The Cases of Rē’indu and Andiya. In: icole Maria Brisch and Fumi Karahashi (eds.), Women and Religion in the Ancient Near East and Asia, 63-79. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

Babylonia from the seventh to the fourth century BCE, in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods, has provided us with an abundance of cuneiform tablets: according to the estimate of M. Jursa (2005: 1 and 2010: 6), more than 16,000 legal or administrative documents have been published, with tens of thousands of unpublished texts housed in museum collections around the world. Most of these documents deal with everyday practical matters, and can be classified as economic texts, familial documents (marriage contracts, documents of division of succession and of transfer of properties, testaments, etc.), administrative records, and letters, mostly drafted in the “long sixth century” (Jursa 2010: 4–5) that lasted about 140 years between the fall of the NeoAssyrian Empire (620 BCE) and the “end of archives” in the second year of Xerxes (484 BCE). Although far fewer women appear in these texts than men, we estimate that at least several thousand women are mentioned. Most of them were inhabitants of Babylonian cities like Babylon, Borsippa, Uruk, and Sippar, and they represent various social strata: women of free status from urban families, slaves, and oblates at temples. The corpus constitutes, therefore, a good basis for discussing the role, status, situation, and activities of women in the social, economic, and familial frameworks.

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A Portuguese edition of the Behistun Inscription (Old Persian text)

Treuk Medeiros de Araujo, Matheus. 2023. A inscrição de Behistun (c. 520 a.C.): tradução do texto Persa Antigo para o Português, introdução crítica e comentários. Revista de História 182, 1-35.

The monumental Achaemenid inscription at mount Behistun (Bisitun), in the Iranian province of Kermanshah (western Iran), reports the official version of Darius’ accession to power in Ancient Persia. Written in three languages and scripts (Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian), this invaluable historical document was vital to the decipherment of the cuneiform script in the 19th century. It also enabled the reconstruction of the Achaemenid Empire’s history, previously known to us mainly through the accounts of Greek and biblical sources. Due to the importance and uniqueness of the Behistun Inscription, we propose the translation of the Old Persian text directly to the Portuguese language, providing wider access to the document for specialized and non-specialized audiences. Historical commentaries approaching the most important debates associated with the inscription also follow the text.

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The Intellectual Heritage of the Ancient Near East

Rollinger, Robert, Irene Madreiter, Martin Lang & Cinzia Pappi (eds.). 2023. The Intellectual Heritage of the Ancient Near East: Proceedings held at the 64th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale and the 12th Melammu Symposium, University of Innsbruck, July 16‒20, 2018 (Melammu Symposia 12). Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The proceedings of the 12th Melammu Symposium is out. Among other interesting subjects, several papers contribute to aspects of ancient Iranian history and culture:

  • Josef Wiesehöfer: Ancient History and the Ancient Near East: Comments of an Ancient Historian
  • Daniel Beckman: On a Possible Assyrian Source of the Achaemenid Demand for “Earth and Water”
  • Eckart Otto: The Intellectual Heritage from the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the Achaemenids in the Western Reception History of the Book of Deuteronomy in the 16th and 17th Century
  • Rolf Strootman: Memories of Persian Kingship in the Hellenistic World
  • Tonia M. Sharlach: Over the Mountains: The Movement of Goods and People between Mesopotamia and Elam in the 21st Century BCE