Within this hierarchy of peoples, contradictions arose as to the function of the harem’s role in creating political stability and continuity. As in other Near Eastern courts, personal intrigues within the harem generated significant power politics. The manoeuvrings of Atossa, the wife of kings Cambyses, Bardiya, and Darius, and Amestris, the wife of Xerxes, Parysatis the sister-wife of Darius II, and Stateira the first (known) wife of Artaxerxes II are not simply acts of casual vindictiveness conjured up for the titillation of a Greek audience but genuine political power struggles in which rival wives and mothers pushed their favoured sons forward to gain the position of crown prince or Great King. These reports of amphimetric conflicts (the sons of the same father by different mothers can be termed amphimetores) demonstrates the importance of the harem as a political institution. This particular strain of courtly tension has been well argued for by Daniel Ogden (1999) in relation to the courts of the Hellenistic world and by Elizabeth Carney (2000) for the early Macedonian court, but has generally been overlooked or ostracised from Achaemenid studies. Yet in a court where polygyny was practised on a grand scale, but where there was no role for an official ‘queen’ or first wife, ‘royal wives hated each other; the various groups of paternal half-siblings hated each other; but the most intense hatred of all was reserved for the relationship between children and their stepmothers’ (Ogden 1999: x). To confuse matters further, as we have seen, primogeniture was not employed by the Persian monarchy. Moreover, in a policy such as that of the Achaemenids, where the Empire was considered to be the personal domain of the royal family, it was natural that the important women within the royal family would assume legitimate roles of authority. Brosius (1996: 105) has stressed that royal mothers took it upon themselves to guard the safety of the throne and the son who occupied it. Parysatis, for example, became entangled in the deaths of the pretender Sogdianus who threatened Darius II’s accession to the throne, and of the eunuch Artoxares, the Paphlagonian who later tried to overthrow him (Ctesias F15 §40, §54).
But harem politics went beyond the royal women’s roles as ‘dynastic guard dogs’. Sometimes personal squabbles or bitter vendettas were played out in the harem, with royal women jealously guarding their personal status as much as the dynastic well-being (see Chapter 5). A Neo-Assyrian text aptly demonstrates this fact. It is a letter of complaint from a king’s daughter, Serua-eterat, a princess of the blood, to her sister-in-law Libbali-sarrat, who had married into the royal family and was therefore outranked by the blood princess (see further Novotny and Singletary 2009: 172-3). And Serua-eterat’s grievance? That Libbali-sarrat had not shown her the respect due to a royal noblewoman of her rank:
Why do you not write me letters, why do you not send me any message by word-of-mouth? Isn’t it because, in all honesty, people might say: ‘That one (i. e. Serua-eterat) is higher in rank than she’? After all, I, Serua-eterat, am the eldest daughter born in the official residence to Esarhaddon the great and legitimate king, king of the world, king of Assyria, while you are only a daughter-in-law, the lady of the house of Ashurbanipal, the eldest son of the king born in the official residence of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria. (Oppenheim 1967: 158)
There is no record of a reply, although it is interesting to speculate on how this tense relationship developed, especially following Esarhaddon’s death and Ashurbanipal’s accession to the throne - and Libbali-sarrat’s elevation to queen. As such, Libbali-sarrat then outranked Serua-eterat - although it is impossible to know if Esarhaddon’s haughty daughter ever changed her attitude towards the new queen and treated her with due deference.
However, while the royal harem was often a particular centre of intrigue, rebellion, and even assassination, it also served the important role of binding the throne close to the cooperating noble families, and to bind together the Achaemenids themselves as a dynasty. As kings and nobles married each other’s sisters, daughters, and cousins, the process of marriages kept Achaemenid royalty and Persian nobility within a confined group, strengthening and re-strengthening its dynastic rule through its offspring - although the dynasty also lay itself open to the genetic problems of consanguinity and incest.
Achaemenid royal polygyny also served a major political purpose in tying the Empire together, for the harem women produced ranks of children: sons to serve as satraps and to implement and assist the king’s rule or to serve in his military forces; and royal daughters to marry high-ranking courtiers and local dynasts and thus create political alliances and allegiances through marriage and through childbirth. Throughout the Empire provincial rulers and nobles became bound to the royal house through a complex network of marriages as territories were enmeshed into the greater imperial infrastructure. The harem was therefore an institution fundamental to the integral policy of the Achaemenid Empire as it helped to centralise sovereignty in the figure of the Great King over the Persian courtiers and other imperial nobles, and was used to maintain the political power of the dominant ethno-class, the Achaemenid dynasty.
World History
