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In the beginning of his reign, Arsicas did seem to emulate the gentleness of the first Artaxerxes, being very accessible in his person, and liberal to a fault in the distribution of honours and favours. Even in his punishments, no contumely or vindictive pleasure could be seen; and those who offered him presents were as much pleased with his manner of accepting, as were those who received gifts from him with his graciousness and amiability in giving them.
Once, when some were offering him one thing, some another, as he was on a progress, a certain poor labourer, having got nothing at hand to bring him, ran to the river side, and, taking up water in his hands, offered it to him; with which Artaxerxes was so well pleased that he sent him a goblet of gold and a thousand darics.
And whereas none usually sat down to eat with the King besides his mother and his wedded wife, the former being placed above, the other below him, Artaxerxes invited also to his table his two younger brothers, Ostanes and Oxathres. But what was the most popular thing of all among the Persians was the sight of his wife Stateira’s chariot, which always appeared with its curtains down, allowing her countrywomen to salute and approach her, which made the queen a great favourite with the people.
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Cyrus marched against the king, having under his conduct a numerous host of barbarians, and but little less than thirteen thousand stipendiary Grecians; alleging first one cause, then another, for his expedition. Thereupon, the court was all in an uproar and tumult, the queen mother Parysatis bearing almost the whole blame of the enterprise, and her retainers being suspected and accused.
Above all, Stateira angered her by bewailing the war and passionately demanding where were now the pledges and the intercession which saved the life of him that conspired against his brother – “to the end,” she said, “that he might plunge us all into war and trouble.” For which words Parysatis hating Stateira, and being naturally implacable and savage in her anger and revenge, consulted how she might destroy her.
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Parysatis and Stateira had begun again to visit each other again, and to eat together. But though they had thus far relaxed their former habits of jealousy and variance, still, out of fear and as a matter of caution, they always ate of the same dishes and of the same parts of them.
Now there is a small Persian bird, in the inside of which no excrement is found, only a mass of fat, so that they suppose the little creature lives upon air and dew. It is called rhyntaces. Ktesias affirms that Parysatis, cutting a bird of this kind into two pieces with a knife one side of which had been smeared with the drug, the other side being clear of it, ate the untouched and wholesome part herself, and gave Stateira that which was thus infected.
Stateira, dying with dreadful agonies and convulsions, was herself sensible of what had happened to her, and aroused in the king’s mind suspicion of his mother, whose savage and implacable temper he knew. And therefore proceeding instantly to an inquest, he seized upon his mother’s domestic servants and Gigis was adjudged to death. But to his mother, Artaxerxes neither said nor did any other hurt, save that he banished and confined her, not much against her will, to Babylon, protesting that while she lived he would not come near that city. Such was the condition of the king’s affairs in his own house.
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Artaxerxes expired, after a life of ninety-four years, and a reign of sixty-two. And then he seemed a moderate and gracious governor, more especially as compared to his son Ochus, who outdid all his predecessors in bloodthirstiness and cruelty.”
ACTIVE WOMEN OF INDEPENDENT STATUS
Modern studies, like that of professor J. Wiesehöfer –published in 2001 in New York–, describe Persian women as “positively active, enterprising and resolute”; in the eyes of Greeks, “both attractive and dangerous.” Greek tales of Persian women living in seclusion have been proven wrong by the evidence in the clay tablets found at Persepolis, he states.
Wiesehöfer points out that the archive tablets routinely register travel rations of wine, beer and grain issued to royal women for extensive journeys throughout the empire on their own behalf. And just as regularly, the royal stores provide rations to commoner women if they are on the road for official business. For example, one tablet (PF 1546) registers a journey by a woman employee from Susa, Mirzapizaka, who has to carry a letter to Persepolis.
Professor Wiesehöfer’s criticism on Greek ‘tales’ can be applied more broadly. In the classical literature, Persian queens and princesses were invariably depicted as a negative power behind the throne. Until recently, Western scholars failed to take into account the fact that, for those Greek writers, Persia was the evil Empire that came out of the East to attack them. Their writings therefore contain much propaganda. Their bias has influenced academic opinion for centuries, also because few other sources were available to offer different information.
Thus queen Parysatis was described profusely as a vengeful, pathologically sadistic woman. The wife of Xerxes, Amastris, continued to be depicted as “a licentious and notoriously cruel woman, who exercised a baneful influence at court.” Even worse was the general academic opinion of Atossa, wife of Darius I. She was said to be “more bloodthirsty than any Persian king has ever been, with the exception of Artaxerxes III Ochus.” But then of course she hád to be very bad, since Herodotos had proclaimed her to be the original culprit of Persia’s aggressions against Greece!
In her thorough study based on Mesopotamian archive sources, Dr. Maria Brosius states:
“All these stories share a consistent plot. The women’s actions were determined to gain more power. The prevailing picture is that of a royal court in which the king’s power is repeatedly undermined by women. Atossa the Elder incited Darius I to attack Greece. Queen mother Parysatis supported Cyrus the Younger in his revolt against his brother and king, Atossa the Younger, daughter of Artaxerxes II, was willing to support her half-brother Ochus against the king. His other son, Darius, was provoked into rebellion by the concubine Aspasia. It seems that royal women and revolt against the king are irrevocably intertwined with each other.
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The women of the Achaemenid court were used by 5th and 4th century Greek writers to add sensationalism to their stories. We ought to be very cautious in accepting the image in which women of the Persian court are depicted.”
A first and failed opportunity for correction had been the discovery of Neo-Babylonian texts from the ‘Murashu’ archive in Nippur. It also recorded the economic activities of royal women in Babylon. Professor Bruno Meissner, in 1904, and Professor Hüsing, in 1933, were able to deduce from these texts that Persian queens privately controlled vast estates with a complete governing apparatus, and even appointed their own judges. However, this evidence was not pursued to the logical next step of reviewing the political and social status of royal ladies.
A new opportunity for a reappraisal of Persian women opened up with the publication, around 1970, of numerous tablet texts from Persepolis. In these ‘Fortification Texts’, Dr Maria Brosius identifies a particular category of women officials who carry the title of Arashara.
Tablet PF 1790 registers an order from the king’s treasurer for the distribution of sheep to royal personnel. Among the recipients, he specifically mentions four Arashara by name: Dakma, Harbakka, Matmaba and Sadukka. Meat rations are rare, so the issuing of 4 sheep to each of these women supervisors seems to be an extraordinary payment. Also the fact that they are known by their personal name to the Royal Treasurer, confirms the weighty status they enjoyed within the economic organisation of the Persian empire.
As more and more tablets from the archive were translated, it became noteworthy that an exceptionally high number of Arashara worked at the service of Irdabama, the queen-mother of Darius the Great. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the fact that such women were involved both in the economic management of the estates and their governance by (male ánd female) officials. The independent power enjoyed by these royal lad
ies is evident from their use of personal seals on the tablets, and their ability to give orders to their officials in the form of letters. They clearly had at their disposal administrative facilities similar to those available to the king.
Persian women –of the royal house, but commoners too– must have had full control over their properties, because they could lease land in return for rent. Babylon has a case registered in 486 BC in which Artim, a wet nurse of a royal daughter, receives a payment as rent for a field. “We have to assume that land ownership by women was far more widespread than, until now, it was considered to be,” Dr Maria Brosius states.
In short, the archives contain evident proof that, also outside the ruling class, the average Persian woman was much more respected than her contemporary Greek counterpart. Female workers could be exceptionally well paid: skilled women received wages far above those of the average man. The tablets show women in a wide range of occupations in Persepolis: woodworkers and stone-workers, artisans, wine makers, furniture makers, treasury clerks, storekeepers, carriers, grain handlers. Most trades were open to women as well as to men. Persepolis had its female staff of managers, directing work units (made up mostly, but not exclusively, of women) employed by the imperial family.
At the court itself, the status of royal women – sustained by both economic and political power – went far beyond the comprehension of contemporary Greek authors. Clearly the most eminent of them all was the status of the queen-mother. As a case in point, Dr Maria Brosius cites instances in which the king’s mother had access to the throne when no one else was allowed to approach; and the many occasions in which she was present at the king’s audiences. This brings her to the conclusion that “the Queen Mother held the most important position at the Persian court.”
Ever since Kassandane, it was an established fact that Persian queens were much more than consorts, or than queen-mothers supposedly ruling a palace harem. They had a huge influence in decisions about whom to promote, whom to punish, whom to execute or whose life to spare. Sisygambis, queen-mother of Darius III, also wielded such power, even after her son had been replaced on the throne by Alexander the Great. He pointedly upheld her status as the most prominent woman in the empire, and treated her as if she were his own mother.
The fall of the Achaemenid empire not only had political consequences, but also meant a social earthquake in the principal model of the Ancient World. The result was an irreparable deterioration of the position of women in public and social life. Had Alexander the Great not beaten Darius III, or more precisely, had his successors not put an end to his policy of maintaining Persian traditions and customs, no doubt women throughout ancient and modern social history would have been far better off.
In a few instances, Hellenistic empires that appear after the fusion of Greek and Mesopotamian culture still give us examples of powerful women leading the way. The most famous of them all, queen/pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt, is a brilliant successor to Sammur-Amat, Kassandane, Atossa and Sisygambis.
• 4 •
EARLY HISTORY OF
KARIA, AND QUEEN ADA
The Karians lived in the southwestern region of Asia Minor below the river Meander. The oldest registered remnant of their civilisation has been uncovered on the banks of an affluent of the Meander: a settlement found on the acropolis of latter-day Aphrodisias (35 kms west of Pammukale, Turkey) and dated to 5800 BC. Already then it held a sanctuary of the Mother Goddess.
It became an advanced civilisation soon. Metalwork was introduced to Greece in the 3rd millennium BC by these peoples migrating to Crete and other islands, during the so-called ‘Western Anatolian Migrations’. This was also evidenced by ceramic and philological finds related to the cult of the Mother Goddess. They feature the bull and the double-headed axe Labrys, that were to figure so prominently in the Minoan civilisation.
The historian Thucydides affirms that the Karians did not pay taxes to king Minos of Crete, but served him with warships and soldiers. This alliance with Crete is confirmed by the fact that Karia’s first historic queen, Artemisia, was the daughter of a Cretan woman. Karia sustained its maritime relation with Crete over the centuries: today the Cretan capital and main port, Iraklion, still has a coastal suburb that bears the Karian name Halikarnassós.
Homer says that the Karians spoke their own language (“rough, and other than Greek”). It had a particular alphabet, looking similar to Linear A on Crete. The Greek author Eusebios states that the Karians formed a maritime kingdom c. 900 BC. Ancient Egyptian sources describe their mercenaries who went to Egypt as “bronze men that came from the sea”.
Karians were sailors and soldiers for Minos, for local kings in Fenicia, for the Persian navy since Cyrus the Great, and for the Egyptian pharaohs Psammetikos I and II. Of the 300-odd extant inscriptions in Karian, about 200 have been located in Egypt on graves of Karian mercenaries, mostly dating from the 6th century BC. The experts think that was a period when Karia ‘exported’ sailors and soldiers.
Despite their early Hellenisation, the Karians also kept in use their own language (evolved around 1000 BC from Hittite/Luwian), especially for religious ends, until the 1st century BC. The Great Goddess of the Luwians, Lada –meaning “woman”–, was a fertility deity represented with multiple breasts, as seen on the famous statue of the ‘Artemis of Efesos’. She was Hellenised under the names of Artemis and Afrodite, but also assimilated to Persian rites under the name of Anahita.
Both Strabo and Pausanias state that when the Greeks migrated into Efesos, they found Karians there living around a temple of the Mother Goddess. Later, the Karians adopted the Greek male gods too, but their ‘Zeus Karios’ maintained the symbols of the Great Goddess, carrying the Labrys and shown on statues and steles as having female breasts. (Room 81 of the British Museum exhibits a stele that represents king Hidrieus and queen Ada flanking the god, who is depicted with six breasts and carrying a Labrys on his shoulder.)
Since at least 700 BC, Karia’s old capital Mylasa kept a golden Labrys as a sacred treasure at the ‘Zeus Labraunda’ temple. All over Karia, the double-headed axe is found on temples and official buildings as the national icon.
Living at the edge of the Achaemenid Empire, the Karians variously battled with and against the Persians. They opposed the western advance of the Persian armies fiercely – or rather, desperately. First in 540 BC, and then again during the Ionian uprising of 500-494 BC. There, on the banks of the Marsyas, they lost a whole army of 10,000 men, massacred by an expeditionary force led by general Daurises, a son-in-law of Darius the Great. But still they fought on, and ambushed Daurises when he marched on their capital. They killed him with all his men. Only after their total disaster in a sea battle near Miletos in 494 BC, they finally surrendered.
And thus High King Xerxes could order Karia to send ships for his invasion of Greece in 480 BC. The Karian queen Artemisia became one of his admirals. She commanded not only Karia’s 60 warships, but also those from Kos, Nisyra and Calydna. At the battle of Salamis she was the only naval commander who broke through the Athenian line. Such was her daring that Xerxes exclaimed: “Today, my men fought like women, and my women like men!” The Athenians put a price on her head of 10,000 drachma, “as she recalled the Amazon queen who had invaded Attika centuries ago.”
Her townsman Herodotos, then only a child, would later write: “Artemisia was the daughter of Lygdamis, a tyrant of Halikarnassos; on her mother’s side she was Cretan. At the death of her husband the sovereign power had passed into her hands, and she sailed with the fleet in spite of the fact that she had a grown-up son and there was consequently no necessity for her to do so. Her own spirit of adventure and manly courage were her only incentives. Not one of the allied commanders gave Xerxes sounder advice than she did.”
Xerxes rewarded her with the extraordinary honour of a ‘familiar’ relation with the imperial dynasty: he asked her to oversee the education of some of his sons. But that was for another reason. Her practical co
unsel and her gallant deeds at Salamis only made her one among many commanders getting the king’s attention through military prowess. But Artemisia’s sharp intelligence and keen eye enabled her to do him a personal service. Thanks to the Karian queen, Xerxes could give his eldest brother an honorable burial.
It is a significant detail, usually overlooked because it appears only as a side remark in a text centered on other leading characters. The top commander of all Persian naval forces at Salamis was “Ariamenes, a brave man and by far the best and most honest of Xerxes’ brothers”, so Plutarch tells us in Themistokles, 14. Ariamenes in person led the attack on the ships of Themistokles; but in the fight he was hit by a spear and, dying, fell overboard. “As his body was drifting here and there among the wreckage, Artemisia recognised it and recovered it for Xerxes”.
This was important to the Persian king, because Ariamenes had played a major role in his accession to the throne. As Plutarch notes (Apoplith., 173), Ariamenes –being the eldest of all the brothers– could have claimed the crown. But when the court acknowledged Xerxes, Ariamenes “immediately saluted him as king, acted as an obedient subject, and was much honoured by Xerxes”.
So the comfort of being able to give his elder brother a dignified burial –after the distress of believing him disappeared in action– surely was the key factor in the king’s personal gratitude to Artemisia. And not only Xerxes would be thankful to her, for Ariamenes’ sake. Many other front-ranking members of the imperial dynasty must have shared his appreciation for the Karian queen.
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