Kings’ wives could accrue wealth and status through landowning and the management of workforces. The duksis Irtasduna (known in Greek sources as Artystone) was, allegedly, the favourite of Darius I’s wives (Herodotus 7.69), an idea which does seem to be borne out from her prominence in the Persepolis archives (see for instance D10). Like Irdabama, Irtasduna held at least three estates, managed by stewards and maintained by workforces, and she too can be located travelling around the Empire’s core, sometimes with Irdabama (PFa 14a) and sometimes in the company of her son, Prince Arsama (Greek, Arsames; PF 733, PF 734). Her elaborate personal heirloom seal (PFS 0038; see Garrison and Root 2001: 83-5) is found on eight letter orders and nine documents listing foodstuffs ‘consumed before Irtasduna’ (Henkelman 2010a: 698-703).
Achaemenid kings were polygamous, although it appears that they took only Persian women as wives. It is difficult to know if the king picked out a ‘chief wife - on par with the pharaonic Egyptian tradition of appointing a ‘great royal wife’ (hmt nsw wrt), who ranked higher than the other royal wives (hmt nsw; Robins 1993) or whether precedence in the harem pecking order was negotiated on a more ad hoc basis. There does not seem to have been an official Persian title for a ‘chief’ wife, which suggests that it was not a recognised court position.
Our knowledge of the names of Achaemenid royal wives is largely confined to Greek sources and they usually name just one wife for each king - Amestris (I) is the only known wife of Xerxes I, and Damaspia is the only named wife of Artaxerxes I. This is probably the result of the Greek preoccupation with the ‘norm’ of monogamy and their inability to put themselves comfortably into a different cultural mindset; it is highly likely that, in reality, all Great Kings took multiple wives so that they could beget numerous heirs. Near Eastern literature often stresses the significance of multiple offspring - especially sons - to a man’s social position (Budin 2011: 334-46). A New Kingdom Egyptian didactic text known as the ‘Instructions of Any’ starts with an injunction for a man to marry a wife and beget children:
Take a wife while you are young,
That she make a son for you. . .
Happy the man whose peoples are many,
He is saluted on account of his progeny.
(Trans. Lichtheim 2003: 11)
And Sumerian proverbs (1: 146-7) call on the blessings of the gods for healthy issue from a buxom wife:
May Inanna make you a hot-limbed wife to lie by you! May she bestow on you broad-armed sons!
May she seek out for you a place of happiness. . . . Marrying is human.
Getting children is divine.
(Alster 1997: 29-30)
The pressure felt by kings to father many children was essential to their success and reputation as mighty monarchs, and heartfelt royal pleas to the gods - such as one addressed to Shamash in the Mesopotamian tale of King Etana - are telling: ‘Take away my shame [and] give me an heir’, he begs the god. Likewise, Kirta, the childless king of Ugarit, pours forth an anguished cry to his gods (column II: 1-5) to grant him heirs:
What to me is silver, or even yellow gold,
Together with its land, and slaves forever mine?
A triad of chariot horses
From the stable of a slavewoman’s son?
Let me procreate sons!
Let me produce a brood!’
(Trans. Parker 1997: 13-14)
Although Kirta had seven wives, they all either died in childbirth or of disease or else had deserted him, and Kirta had no surviving children. His mother had borne eight sons, although Kirta himself was the only one of his brothers to survive childhood and now he had no family members to succeed him and he saw that his dynasty’s demise was inevitable. To prevent this catastrophe, the wives of Near Eastern monarchs were expected to be fertile sexual partners and those of the Persian Great Kings were responsible for the Achaemenid dynasty’s promulgation; as Briant (2002: 778) puts it, ‘royal power was transmitted through the womb of the family’.
Some women clearly performed particularly important political roles in dynastic continuity. In the early Achaemenid period, for instance, the possession of a royal predecessor’s wives ensured the successor’s hold on the throne, and the control of the harem gave a new ruler the potential to legitimise his reign through the physical possession of a former monarch’s household. Darius I had capitalised on this when in his bid for power he had married all the available royal women of the line of Cyrus II - the former wives and sisters and daughters of Cambyses II and Bardiya - whereupon he incorporated them into his harem and established them as the most high ranking of all his existing wives. He quickly fathered children by his new acquisitions and promoted his sons born ‘in the purple’ above those born before his accession (Brosius 1996: 47-64; see also Ogden 1999: 45). In this Darius I was following a common Near Eastern practice: Ramses II of Egypt, for instance, inherited the women belonging to the harem of his father Seti I as a demonstration of dynastic longevity (Leblanc 1999);
Upon his military victory and subsequent accession to the throne of Israel, David claimed the females of the harem of Saul (2 Samuel 12:8) and Solomon inherited his father’s harem of women and servants (de Vaux 1961: 115).
While diplomatic marriages are attested early on in the dynasty’s history, the Achaemenid kings made more of a habit of forming marriage alliances with great Persian noble families or marrying within the family itself by taking cousins, nieces, and half-sisters as wives. The only fully incestuous marriage known to have taken place was that of Artaxerxes II to his daughters Atossa (II) and Amestris (II) (Plutarch, Artaxerxes 23.5); the accusation of Cambyses’ incest with his sisters should be treated very carefully, as it is probably founded in Egyptian propaganda (Herodotus 3.31).
World History
