A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  If the story was a fabrication, Darius was certainly brazen in the presentation of his case. In the Bisitun inscriptions, the rebel leaders are called liar kings, and Darius, appealing to religious feeling and Mazdaean beliefs about arta and druj, declares,

  [. . .] you, whosoever shall be king hereafter, be on your guard very much against Falsehood. The man who shall be a follower of Falsehood—punish him severely . . .

  and,

  [. . .] Ahura Mazda brought me aid and the other gods who are, because I was not disloyal, I was no follower of Falsehood, I was no evil-doer, neither I nor my family, I acted according to righteousness, neither to the powerless nor to the powerful, did I do wrong . . .

  and again,

  This is what I have done, by the grace of Ahura Mazda have I always acted. Whosoever shall read this inscription hereafter, let that which I have done be believed. You must not hold it to be lies.

  Perhaps Darius protested a little too much. Another inscription in Darius’s words, from another site, reads,

  By the favor of Ahura Mazda I am of such a sort that I am a friend to right, I am not a friend to wrong. It is not my desire that the weak man should have wrong done to him by the mighty; nor is it my desire that the mighty man should have wrong done to him by the weak. What is right, that is my desire. I am not a friend to the man who is a lie-follower [. . .] As a horseman I am a good horseman. As a bowman I am a good bowman both afoot and on horseback . . .17

  The latter part of this text, though telescoped here from the original, echoes the famous formula from Herodotus and other Greek writers, that Persian youths were brought up to ride a horse, shoot a bow, and tell the truth. Darius was pressing every button to stimulate the approval of his subjects. Even if one doubts the story of Darius’s accession, the evidence from Bisitun and his other inscriptions of his self-justification, and the use of religion by both sides in the intensive fighting that followed the death of Cambyses, nonetheless stands. It is a powerful testimony to the force of the Mazdaean religion at this time. Even the suppressors of the religious revolution had to justify their actions in religious terms. Although Darius by the end reigned supreme, the inscriptions give a strong sense that he himself was nonetheless subject to a powerful structure of ideas about justice, truth and lies, and right and wrong. that was distinctively Iranian—and Mazdaean.

  THE EMPIRE REFOUNDED

  Darius’s efforts to justify and dignify his rule did not end there. He built an enormous palace in his Persian homeland, at what the Greeks later called Persepolis (City of the Persians)—thus starting afresh, away from the previous capital of Cyrus at Pasargadae. Persepolis is so big that a modern visitor, wandering bemused between the sections of fallen columns and the massive double-headed column capitals that crashed to the ground when the palace burned, finds it difficult to become oriented, much less make sense of it. The magnificence of the palace served as a further prop to the majesty of Darius and the legitimacy of his rule. But it helped in turn to create a lasting tradition, a mystique of magnificent kingship that might not have come about but for the initial doubts over his accession. A dedicatory inscription at Persepolis played again on the old theme:

  May Ahura Mazda protect this land from hostile armies, from famine, and from the Lie.

  The motif of tribute and submission is also repeated from Bisitun. Row upon row of figures representing subjects from all over the empire are shown queuing up to present themselves, frozen forever in stone relief. The purpose of the huge palace complex at Persepolis is not entirely clear. It may be that it was intended as a place for celebrations and ceremonies at the time of the spring equinox, the Persian New Year (Noruz—celebrated on and after March 21 each year, today as then). The rows of tribute-bearers depicted in the sculpture suggest that it may have been the place for annual demonstrations of homage and loyalty from the provinces. Whatever the reason for the grandeur of Persepolis, it was never the main, permanent capital of the empire. That was at Susa, the old capital of Elam.

  This, again, shows the syncretism of the Persian regime. Cyrus had been closely connected with the royal family of the Medes, and the Medes had a privileged position with the Persians as partners at the head of the empire. But Elam, too, was important and central, and not least for its language, as used in administration and monumental inscriptions. This was an empire that always preferred to flow around and absorb powerful rivals, rather than to confront, batter into defeat, and force submission. The guiding principles of Cyrus persisted under Darius and at least some later Achaemenid rulers.

  Darius’s reign saw the Achaemenid Empire in effect re-founded. It could have gone under altogether in the rebellions that followed the death of Cambyses. But Darius maintained Cyrus’s tradition of tolerance, permitting a plurality of gods to be worshipped as before. He also maintained the related principle of devolved government. The provinces were ruled by satraps, governors who returned a tribute to the center but ruled as viceroys (two other officials looked after military matters and fiscal administration in each province, to avoid too much power being concentrated in any one pair of hands). The satraps, who often inherited their offices from predecessors within the same family, ruled their provinces according to pre-existing laws, customs, and traditions. They were, in effect, provincial kings, while Darius was king of kings (Shahanshah in modern Persian). The empire did not attempt, as a matter of policy, to Persianize as the Roman Empire, for example, later sought to Romanize.

  The certainties of religion, the principle of sublime justice that they underpinned, and the magnificent prestige of kingship—these were the bonds that held together this otherwise diffuse constellation of peoples, languages, and cultures. A complex empire was accepted as such, and was subjected to a controlling principle. The system established by Darius worked, proved resilient, and endured.

  Tablets discovered in excavations at Persepolis show the complexity and administrative sophistication of the system Darius established. Although Darius established a standard gold coinage, and some payments were made in silver, much of the system operated by payments in kind. These were assessed, allocated, and receipted from the center. State officials and servants were paid in fixed quantities of wine, grain, or animals; but even members of the royal family received payments in the same way. Officials in Persepolis gave orders for the levying of taxes in kind in other locations, and then gave orders for payments in kind to be made from the proceeds in the same locations. Couriers were given tablets to produce at post stations along the royal highways, so they could get food and lodging for themselves and their animals. These tablets recording payments in kind cover only a relatively limited period, from 509 to 494 BC. There are several thousand of them, and it has been estimated that they cover supplies to more than fifteen thousand different people in more than one hundred different places.18

  It is significant that the tablets were written mainly in Elamite, not in Persian. We know from other sources that the main language of administration in the empire was neither Persian nor Elamite, but Aramaic, the Semitic lingua franca of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. The Bisitun inscription states directly that the form of written Persian used there was new, developed at Darius’s own orders for that specific purpose. It is possible that he and the other Achaemenid kings discouraged any record of events other than their own monumental inscriptions, but these are all strong echoes of the Iranian distaste for writing that we encountered earlier in Mazdaism, and it may go some way to explain an apparent anomaly—the lack of Persian historical writing for the Achaemenid period. It is possible that histories were recorded, that poems were written down, and that all sorts of other literature once existed and have since been simply lost. But later Persian literary culture was strongly associated with a class of scribes, and the fact that the scribes in the Achaemenid system wrote their accounts and official records in other languages suggests that the literature was not there, either. There was no Persian history of the Achaemenid Empire because the Persia
n ruling classes either (the Magi) regarded writing as wicked or (the kings and nobles) associated writing with inferior peoples—or both. To ride, to shoot the bow, to tell the truth—but not to write it.

  That said, no histories as such have survived from the Egyptian, Hittite, or Assyrian empires, either. It is more correct, in the context of the fifth century BC, to call the innovation of history writing by the Greeks an anomaly.

  To ourselves, at our great remove of time, awash with written materials and dominated by the getting and spending of money, a human system that was largely nonliterate and operating for the most part on the basis of payments in kind, not cash, seems primitive. But the history of human development is not linear. We should not regard the oral tradition of sophisticated cultures like that of Mazdaism as unreliable, flawed, or backward, something we have gone beyond. The Persians were not stupidly trying, with the wrong tools, to do something we can now, with the right tools, do incomparably better. They were doing something different, and they had evolved complex and subtle ways of doing it very well indeed, which our culture has forgotten. To try to grasp the reality of that, we have to step aside a little from our usual categories of thought—despite the apparent familiarity of concepts like angels, a Day of Judgment, heaven and hell, and moral choice. The Achaemenid Empire was an empire of the mind, but a different kind of mind.

  THE EMPIRE AND THE GREEKS

  In general, Darius’s reign was one of restoration and consolidation. It was not a reign of conquest like those that had been pursued by Cyrus and Cambyses. But Darius did campaign into Europe in 512 BC, conquering Thrace and Macedonia, and toward the end of his life, after a revolt by the Ionian Greeks of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, his subordinates fought a war with the Athenian Greeks that ended with a Persian defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. This ushered in what the Greeks called the Persian wars, the shadow of which has affected our view of the Achaemenid Empire, and perhaps our views of Persia, Iran, and the Orient in general. From a Persian perspective, the more serious event was a revolt in Egypt in 486 BC. Before he could deal with this, Darius died.

  The standard Greek view of the Persians and their empire was complex, and not a little contradictory. The Greeks regarded the Persians, as they regarded most non-Greeks, as barbarians (the term barbarian is thought to come from a disparaging imitation of Persian speech—“ba-ba”), and therefore ignorant and backward. The Greeks were aware that the Persians had a great, powerful, wealthy empire—but one, to their minds, run on tyrannical principles and redolent of vulgar ostentation and decadence. The Persians were therefore both backward and decadent. Here, we may be irresistibly reminded of the contemporary French view of the United States. Perhaps the view of the Greeks also was better explained in terms of a simple resentment or jealousy that the Persians, rather than the Greeks, were running such a large part of the known world.

  This is a caricature of the Greek opinion of the Persians, and cannot have been, for example, Plato’s attitude or the attitude (openly, at any rate) of the many Greeks who worked for or were allies of the Persians at various times.19 The Greeks were also an imperialistic or at least a colonizing culture of pioneering Indo-European origin. Perhaps the hostility between the Persians and the Greeks had as much to do with similarity as with difference. But in contrast to the Persians, the Greeks were not a single, unified power. They were composed of a multiplicity of rival city-states, and their influence was maritime rather than land-based. Greeks had established colonies along almost all parts of the Mediterranean coast not previously colonized by the Phoenicians, including places that later became Tarragona in Spain, Marseilles in France, Cyrenaica in Libya, and large parts of Sicily and southern Italy. They had done the same on the coast of the Black Sea. Unlike the Persians, their spread was based on physical settlement, rather than on the control of indigenous peoples from afar.

  Just as Persians appear in Greek plays and on Greek vases, there are also examples showing the presence of the Greeks in the minds of the Persians. As well as vases that show a Greek spearing a falling or recumbent Persian, there are engraved cylinder seals showing a Persian stabbing a Greek or filling him with arrows.20 But it is fair to say the Persians were more present to the Greeks—at least initially—than the Greeks to the Persians. Persian power controlled important Greek cities like Miletus and Phocaea in Asia Minor—only a few hours’ rowing away from Athens and Corinth—as well as Chalcidice and Macedonia on the European side of the Bosphorus. In Persepolis, Susa, and Hamadan, by contrast, Greece would have seemed half a world away, and events in other parts of the empire—Egypt, Babylonia, and Bactria—were equally or rather more pressing.

  Darius was succeeded by his son, Xerxes (Khashayarsha). The set-piece of Xerxes’s reign in the historical record was the great expedition to punish Athens and its allies for their support of the Ionian revolt. But at least as important for Xerxes himself would have been his successful reassertion of authority in Egypt and Babylon, where he crushed a rebellion and destroyed the temple of Marduk that Cyrus had restored. Xerxes is believed (on the authority of Herodotus) to have taken as many as two million men with him to attack Athens in 480 BC. His troops wiped out the rearguard of Spartans and others at Thermopylae, killing the Spartan king Leonidas in a protracted struggle that left many of the Persian troops dead. Xerxes’s men then took Athens, his hardy soldiers scaling the Acropolis and burning it. But his fleet was defeated at Salamis, leaving his armies overextended and vulnerable. Xerxes then withdrew to Sardis, his base in Asia Minor, and his forces suffered further defeats the following year at Plataea and Mycale (479 BC). Among other effects of the Persian defeat was the loss of influence on Macedon and Thrace on the European side of the Bosphorus, permitting the subsequent rise of Macedon.

  Xerxes’s son Artaxerxes (Artakhshathra) succeeded him in 465 BC and reigned for some forty years. The building work at Persepolis continued through the reigns of both, and it was under these two kings that many of the Jews of Babylonia returned to Jerusalem, under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah. Nehemiah was Artaxerxes’s court cupbearer in Susa, and both Ezra and Nehemiah eventually returned to the Persian court after their efforts to rebuild Jerusalem. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah give a different picture of the Persian monarchy to contrast with the less flattering image in the Greek accounts.

  The wars that continued between the Persians and the Greeks ended at least for a time with the peace of Callias in 449 BC, but thereafter the Persians supported Sparta against Athens in the terribly destructive Peloponnesian wars. These conflicts exhausted the older Greek city-states and prepared the way for the hegemony of Macedon. At the death of Artaxerxes, palace intrigues resulted in the murders of several kings or pretenders in succession. In the reign of Artaxerxes II (404–359 BC) there were further wars with the Greeks, and a sustained Egyptian revolt that kept that satrapy independent until Persian rule was restored under Artaxerxes III in 343 BC. But then a particularly lethal round of political intrigue orchestrated by the vizier or chief minister Bagoas caused the deaths of both Artaxerxes III and his son Arses, bringing Darius III to the throne in 336 BC.

  The Iranians must have changed their way of life considerably over the two centuries between the reigns of Cyrus and Darius III. One indicator of social change was the constitution of their armies. Prior to and during Xerxes’s invasion of Greece, large numbers of Medes and Persians fought on foot, but by the time of Darius III the armies were dominated by large numbers of horsemen. The impression is that the wealth of the empire had enabled the Iranian military classes to distribute themselves across the empire and supply themselves with horses, changing the nature of Persian warfare. There seems also to have been a deliberate policy of military garrisoning and military colonies, notably in Asia Minor. According to Herodotus, Cyrus had warned that if the Persians descended to live in the rich lands of the plain (he probably had Babylonia particularly in mind), they would become soft and incapable of defending their empire. It is too ne
at to suggest that this is precisely what happened. It may be somewhat the contrary—that by the time of Darius III, taxes had risen too high and the Iranians, having had their expectations raised, had become impoverished and demoralized. But whatever their exact nature, fundamental changes had taken place, and Iran had already moved closer to the social and military patterns of the later Parthian and Sassanid empires.

  MACEDONIA—STRANGE FRUIT

  Who were the Macedonians? Some have speculated that they were not really Greeks, but more closely related to the Thracians. Or perhaps they descended from some other Balkan people influenced by the arrival of Indo-European Greeks. They had come under heavy Greek influence by the time of Philip and Alexander—but even at that late stage the Macedonians made a strong distinction between themselves and the Greek hangers-on who accompanied Alexander’s eastern adventure. In the fifth century BC, Macedonians were normally, like other non-Greeks, excluded from the Olympic games. But the Persians seem to have referred to them as “Greeks with hats” (they were known for their wide-brimmed hats), and Herodotus too seems to have accepted them as of Greek origin. Like the Medes and Persians in the time of Cyrus, as well as many other militant peoples from mountainous or marginal areas, the Macedonians had a strong sense of their collective superiority—but they also sustained many private feuds among themselves. They were notoriously difficult to manage.