Made up of twenty-three lands (although the numbering varies slightly according to the source; Briant 2002: 173), the Achaemenid Empire stretched from Libya to India and from southern Russia to the Indian Ocean, making it, at its height, the biggest Empire the ancient world had seen. However, it is fair to suggest that, in fact, there was never one Persian Empire but multiple Persian Empires, since throughout its 230-year history the Achaemenid Empire was in a constant state of flux, expanding and contracting and sometimes expanding again as provinces and peoples were added to the central government by force or coercion and were lost from Persian control through wars and rebellions (Egypt, for example, was lost from the Empire for almost sixty years before being reconquered). After the reign of Xerxes, however, it is fair to say that there was no significant territorial expansion, though there were still numerous national or localised revolts. The royal rhetoric recorded in the Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions and disseminated widely across the Empire in multiple languages emphasised that all conquered nations were united in service to the Great King, whose laws they were required to obey and whose majesty they were obliged to uphold.
It was Darius I, a truly outstanding bureaucrat, who first (allegedly) divided the Empire’s territories into administrative satrapies in order to maintain the levy of tribute required from each region (Herodotus 3.98) and his Bisitun inscription provides the oldest extant list of the constituents of the Empire (C1). It begins with two core lands, Persia and Elam, and then the order roughly follows the map of the Empire in a clockwise fashion, first referring to the western provinces or satrapies, then those in the northern part, followed by the lands in the east of the Empire. The ordering of the provinces is interesting, since lands lying closest to the imperial centre (Elam, Media, Babylonia, Armenia) are privileged in the text over those at the periphery of the Empire (Ionia, Maka), suggesting an Achaemenid ideology of ethnic hierarchy. Proximity to Persia signified a higher level of civilisation (an ideology also understood and articulated by Herodotus 1.134). Royal texts constantly emphasise the size and the ethnic diversity of the Empire but always privilege Persia at its heart (C2, C3; see further Briant 2002: 178-81; Kuhrt 2002: 19-22). There are six surviving so-called Old Persian ‘Empire lists’ which project this world order (DB, DPe, DSe, DNa, DSaa, and XPh; see Briant 2002: 173) and there is little doubt that this official vision of the Empire was widely circulated throughout the king’s lands; it is therefore little wonder that Greek sources routinely reiterate this dominant Achaemenid rhetoric (Herodotus 3.97; Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.8.1; Xenophon, Anabasis 1.7.6; Strabo 11.11.4).
Any attempts to estimate the demographic parameters of the Persian Empire are fraught with contradictions and frustrations, mainly because the sources for such a study are highly controversial. Classical texts on Persia tend to overemphasise numbers (the size of the Achaemenid military, for instance; see Herodotus 3.89), while Iranian bureaucratic texts from Persepolis or the Babylonian Murasu Archive give only narrow demographic snapshots of a particular period and locale. Therefore estimates of the size of the Empire’s population range from a conservative 17,000,000 to a more extravagant 35,000,000 (Wiesehofer 2009: 77). The people of the wider Empire certainly mattered to the Achaemenid centre and in royal rhetoric the Empire is envisaged through its people, so that in official Achaemenid art the structure of the Empire (as well as its ethnic diversity) is given physical form through the representation of the peoples who inhabited the king’s lands. We have already noted the depictions of foreign gift-bearers on the great Apadana staircases at Persepolis and the collaborative role they might have played in state ceremonials (at Nowruz for instance), but other representations of foreign peoples exist too, as we have seen, on doorjambs at Persepolis (F12) and on the facades of the royal tombs at Naqs-i Rustam (F17) and Persepolis, as throne-bearers who, together, lift high the image of the Great King who rules over them (see Chapter 2); Root (1979: 47-61) calls this the ‘Atlas pose’ (see also Schmidt 1970: 108-19 and plate 66). This might be interpreted as a joyous act of reciprocal collaboration - the peoples of the Empire exalting their monarch - but it is more probable that the emphasis is not so much on willing togetherness but on political subjugation. An inscription accompanying such a scene on the tomb of Darius I (DNa §4) invites the viewer to contemplate the meaning of the relief and suggests this domineering agenda:
If you shall now think, ‘How many are the lands which king Darius held?’, then look at the sculptures of those who bear [i. e. carry] the throne, and then you shall know, then will it become known to you: the spear of a Persian man has gone far; then shall it become known to you: a Persian man has delivered battle far indeed from Persia.
Royal titulature re-emphasises the centrality of Persia over its world Empire and the role of the monarch in the space of the conquered peoples. Darius is therefore not only ‘Great King’ and ‘King of Kings’ (see Chapter 1) but also ‘King of countries containing all kinds of men’ (DNa) and the ‘King of many countries’ (DPe), as well as ‘King in this great earth far and wide’ (DNa). In Elamite and Old Persian terminology Darius is the king of ‘this land’ (dahyu/xsaga = Persia) and of all lands of the Empire (dahyava/bumi). Did this mean that the king truly thought of these lands as his own property? On the surface it looks that way (Wiesehofer 2009: 81). But the sources do not necessarily support such a view and it can be argued that in the Achaemenid period ‘there did not exist a theory of supreme property of the land’ (Dandamayev and Lukonin 1989: 133). Of course the king was master of the Empire and thus the conquered lands ipso facto came under his authority (the Old Persian word for ‘land’, bumi, has the implication of ‘land under royal right’) and as such the king demanded payment of tribute and taxes from his subject peoples. These fiscal obligations to the throne, ‘the king’s share’, were called baji (Old Persian) and bazis (Elamite; see Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1998: 33; Briant 2002: 398, 439) and were made up from a portion of produce from lands under the king’s jurisdiction. The people of Parsa (Fars), as the ‘insiders’ of the Empire, had a unique relationship with their king and although they nonetheless honoured him with gifts of local produce (see below), they did not come under the same ‘taxation bracket’ as peoples of the provinces, who were, on an annual basis, additionally taxed in the form of weighed silver or in local produce or sometimes specialised produce - or what Briant has labelled ‘over and above the tribute’. Egypt was thus obliged to send the king fish, flour, and corn, Cappadocia sent horses, mules, and sheep, while Babylonia (as we have noted) was required to send to Persia 500 castrated boys, bound for the royal court (for a discussion of this system see Briant 2002: 403-5). Generally, payments of foodstuffs were stored in centrally administrated granaries and warehouses, to be distributed later to courtiers, administrators, workers, and military personnel. It is worth citing Allen (2005a: 120), who sensibly notes that ‘the terminology distinguishing gifts from tribute. . . may have been the result of diplomatic rhetoric. . . . The boundaries between the concepts of land-obligations, tithes, tribute, and gifts were likely to be very fluid.’
By and large Achaemenid kings were not completely free to dispense with conquered lands as they wished but territories taken from rulers and peoples who did not willingly submit to Persian rule (perhaps following a revolt) did pass into hereditary ownership and could be gifted to members of the royal family, courtiers, and favoured individuals (i. e. those on what might today be called a civil list). Free from taxation, such estates were expected to provide troops when called upon by the throne (Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.8.20; see Wiesehofer 2009: 82; Briant 2002: 419). Babylonian texts refer to these royal lands as uzbarra, but what strictly constituted ‘royal land’ is ambiguous, leading Briant to suggest that, ‘in the politico-ideological sense of the term, “royal land” merged with tribute land - that is, with the Empire in its entirety’, although in reality the monarch’s actual ownership of land was more curtailed. Briant (2002: 421) therefore uses the term ‘crown lands’ to demarcate the Great King’s actual lands from his ideological domain. Of course, the king, as we have seen, was the ruler of his own house and household (vid; oikos) but Babylonian texts employ the term bttu and Elamite documents use ulhi (literally, ‘house’; the Aramaic equivalent is bet) to refer to estates belonging to the ruler and the royal family. We should not think of these estates as physical walled spaces or manor houses but, rather, as the monarch’s general uzbarra, productive lands (or farmsteads) with teams of workers which were administered by estate stewards (Briant 2002: 461-2). This type of royal property generated income and rent for the king, affording him, in turn, the opportunity to be generous to others in the gifts he doled out. In all reality, the king’s personal lands operated like those of any other Achaemenid noble but on a more substantial scale (on the royal ulhi see Henkelman 2010a).
Briant (2002: 470) is therefore able to note that ‘the king was not only a master of the Empire, but he also had a separate life as a private person or, rather, the head of a house (ulhi)’. To emphasise the point, Briant draws attention to a well known Fortification text from Persepolis (D10) in which Darius I instructs Parnaka to charge his ‘personal account’ for the 100 sheep he gave to Queen Irtasduna or, in other words, to take sheep not from a communal resource but from his own ulhi and to give them to his wife’s estate. This text demonstrates also that a high-ranking courtier like Parnaka served the king as both a state official and as a private manager, simultaneously tending to the king’s two spheres of operation. At one and the same time the king was master of two lands - his Empire (dahyu; dahyava; bumi) and his house (vid; ulhi; oikos).
World History
