Fifty years ago, King George VI died and suddenly Elizabeth became Queen. The immediate transfer of power caused tensions between the Queen and her newly bereaved mother. . . because there was absolutely no formal, constitutional role that the Queen Mother could adopt as her own. ‘The Queen Mother minded so much she became unapproachable,’ recalled the daughter of one of her attendants, ‘and she also resented and was horribly jealous of her daughter becoming Queen’. . . . The new Queen made every effort not to upstage her mother in public. . . . When the Queen gave her mother the use of Sandringham, for example, she was highly sensitive to any suspicion that she could be thought to be usurping her mother’s position as hostess. ‘She would leap away from the teapot which she had been about to pour when she saw the Queen Mother approaching,’ a courtier remembers. (Andrew Roberts, BBC News Online, 6 February 2002)
This chapter explores the role of royal women at the Achaemenid court and examines the evidence relating to queens (kings’ wives and mothers), princesses, and concubines within the rigid hierarchical system of the Great King’s household. The chapter will question the parts they played in power-politicking at court and assess their familial functions as the mothers, wives, daughters, siblings, and sexual partners of the monarch. As we will see, the women of the Achaemenid dynasty were part of a specific and potentially authoritative unit within the inner court, for they constituted the make-up of the royal harem itself.
Perhaps no other aspect of Achaemenid court society has attracted more controversy than the issue of the royal harem. The very use of the word ‘harem’ has caused dissent and rancour among modern scholars, some of whom are willing to embrace the employment of the word as a legitimate term to describe an important aspect of the court, while others baulk at its use in any context. This chapter will explore the validity of using the term ‘harem’ and go on to survey the evidence for the lives of royal women at the Persian court and the integral roles they played in Achaemenid court society.
World History
