Who made up the royal harem? It is difficult to be precise, but it seems likely that the Achaemenid harem, operating within the highly sophisticated Persian court system, was just as complex as the harem structures in other court societies. In most historical periods the harem was headed by a chief queen, usually the king’s mother or, in her absence, the most favoured (or influential) wife, who gathered about her the other royal and noble women - secondary wives, royal sisters, royal daughters, and others. Beneath those favoured women ranked the concubines, the female administrative personnel, and, at the lowest level, the female slaves. This might work as a model for thinking about the structure of the Achaemenid harem also, although in reality the harem hierarchy must have been in a state of continual flux as, for instance, wives gave birth to sons rather than daughters and thereby gained some hierarchical cachet or a concubine suddenly became a favoured companion of the Great King. All that can be said with some certainty is that, according to the Persepolis
Tablets, high-ranking women of the royal house were honoured with the title *duxdrt (literally, ‘daughter’), which has been preserved in Elamite transcription as duksis (pl. duksisbe), which can be generically translated as ‘princess’ or ‘royal lady’ (for instance PF 1795; PF 823). Duksisbe was used collectively for Achaemenid royal women but their individual status was determined by their relationship to the king. Thus, the Persepolis texts record Elamite court titles, deriving from Assyrian and Babylonian prototypes, which give us an indication of how royal women were addressed (some examples are presented in Table 3). Achaemenid sources from Babylonia also refer to a woman belonging to the royal household as a ‘woman of the palace’ (sa ekalli). However, the Greek term basileia (‘queen’), which is used to identify a specific royal female of high status (usually the king’s mother or wife) in Greek texts, cannot be justified when set alongside bona fide Persian evidence; Brosius therefore argues compellingly for a translation of basileia simply as ‘royal woman’ (see Brosius 1996: 20, 27-8; Brosius 2006: 41).
Although they might have been called sa ekalli, it is not certain whether royal concubines enjoyed the title duksis too, although it is unlikely. Deinon’s Persica gives an interesting glimpse of some kind of formalised hierarchical court etiquette among royal women which carefully demarcated concubines from more superior royal ladies (D6; on concubines, see below). Some sort of hierarchical structure seems to be reflected in the all-female audience scene on the cylinder seal we explored earlier (F20) (similar models are found in Neo-Elamite and archaic Greek contexts too; see Brosius 2010a; Lerner 2010). A woollen tapestry saddle cloth found at Pazyryk in the Crimea has another intriguing (and rare) scene showing Achaemenid royal women standing at an incense burner (see Lerner 2010: 160; Brosius 1996: 86). Hierarchy here is augmented both through scale and (as in the cylinder seal) through dress: all women wear crowns but in each case the higher-status woman wears a long veil draped over the rear of her crown.
Let us explore the harem ranks a little more, and observe three of the categories in more detail: the king’s mother, the wives of the king, and the royal concubines.
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