Since the third millennium various states and nations with their center of gravity east of Mesopotamia, either in the Zagros Mountains, or the plain of Susa, or even further east on the Iranian plateau, had interacted with Mesopotamia. At times harmonious, at others adversarial, these relations had generally tended to stabilize around a point of equilibrium, since Mesopotamian states never succeeded in controlling those regions effectively except for short periods of time and at great military cost, while easterners occasionally raided Mesopotamian territory but never achieved lasting occupation. Why suddenly in the sixth century the balance tipped in favor of the Persians, we simply do not know. It is probable that various economic, demographic, and technological factors worked in their favor, but we lack the kind of information that would make the analysis of those factors possible. The irruption of the Persians onto the world stage and their swift success seem as sudden and unexplainable as that of Islam in the seventh century of our era. In a relatively short span of time the Persians built an empire so territorially extensive that even by modern standards it would seem extremely difficult to administer.
The Persians, led by the ruling family called the Achaemenids, certainly possessed an innate genius for co-opting the administration and structure of the kingdoms they conquered, and this must to some extent explain their success. Egyptian and Babylonian sources reveal that the transition to Persian rule was remarkably smooth. The former Babylonian empire remained whole for a long time, forming the satrapy, or province, of‘‘Babylon and Transeuphratene’’ which lasted at least until the end of the reign of Darius (521-486 bce), more than half a century after the conquest of Babylon (Stolper 1989). The superimposition of Achaemenid imperial institutions was therefore slow and cautious. Their function was to ensure the regular flow of taxes to the center for the maintenance of the court and the military. During the entire period of Persian rule one of the most conspicuously attested Achaemenid institutions in Babylonian documents was the regime of military colonies, which was particularly well documented, though indirectly, in the archives of the Murashu family from Nippur (Stolper 1985: 70-103).
Furthermore, the Achaemenid rulers did not try to Persianize their subjects in the same way as the Assyrians and the Romans sought to spread an imperial identity. For the Assyrian kings the world was divided into Assyrians and non-Assyrians, terms which had lost their ethnic connotation very early on to become expressions of the political divide between Assyrian subjects and all the people who had not yet submitted to the yoke of the god Assur. With the Achaemenids, on the other hand, conquered people were fully recognized as distinct and left undisturbed as long as they acknowledged their vassal status within the empire. There is no evidence for the extensive and sometimes brutal restructuring which characterized the previous Mesopotamian empires.
Achaemenid imperial art eloquently reflected the nature of Persian rule. It was a composite art, made up ofjuxtaposed elements borrowed, almost without alterations, from Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and other subject peoples of the empire. Yet, it also had, in spite of this, a highly distinctive, immediately recognizable style characterized by a cold and distant mood. Achaemenid art created an impression of calm and harmony emerging from the acknowledged diversity of the empire, expressed in its cosmopolitan iconographic repertoire. It also stressed the acceptance of Persian rule, expressed in a unified and subtly refined aesthetic, a far cry from the power art of the Assyrians impudently exalting the heroic and often brutal aspects of the monarchy. Indeed, there were no scenes of war or humiliation of the conquered in Achaemenid art. The procession of subject peoples at Persepolis proclaimed only a voluntary participation of every nation with its own traditions in the celebration of Achaemenid power. Such ideology was not only deduced from the art, but was also made explicit in the foundation charter of Darius I from Susa, which specifically named the nations from all over the empire which provided craftsmen to build the citadel at Susa (Lecoq 1997: 234-7).
It can be objected that such harmony existed only as an ideological claim, yet one suspects that it really tells us something about life in the Persian empire. The relative ease with which Achaemenid rule was installed and maintained almost undisturbed for such a long period, 539 to 331 bce, contrasts with the enormous difficulties encountered by Assyrian and Babylonian empire builders in the previous three centuries. Assyria especially was surrounded by enemies and powerful rival states, and the empire could be maintained only by costly annual campaigns. Even in the seventh century, when it reached a critical mass, rebellions were always simmering in one or another of its provinces, often encouraged by powerful rivals. More distant countries like Egypt were controlled only briefly, and never fully. The Babylonian empire reached a more harmonious equilibrium with its neighbors, but its hegemonic position was constantly held in check by equally powerful competitors such as Egypt and Persia. With the Persians all these formerly rival powers became finally united into one huge administrative and economic space. One must not forget that the work of imposing the imperial idea and structure had already been accomplished well before the Persians entered the stage. In a sense the Achaemenids gave Mesopotamia the world empire with a vast hinterland which neither Assyria nor Babylonia had ever achieved, although they had taken the initial, most difficult steps in that direction. One important ingredient ofAchaemenid success was precisely this absence of competing powers which allowed the ruling elite to exert its hegemony far more efficiently, while using much less force and repression than any previous imperial state.
The fact that the Persian ruling elite was a very small minority in the empire also accounts for the rather tolerant exercise of power. Forced acculturation of conquered people was unthinkable and not even desired. Like the Manchus in China during the Qing period (1644-1911 of our era), the Persians formed a thin aristocratic layer which could survive only by adapting to the nations it conquered as it was co-opting them into a fast-rising imperial structure. The Achaemenids formed an ethnically homogeneous ruling class (Briant 1987). Access to that class was severely restricted because of the fear of being diluted in the mass of subjects, and for the same reasons Persianization was not encouraged by the state, the main purpose of which was to maintain the privileges of that compact and jealously guarded aristocracy. The Achaemenids envisioned no dramatic reshaping or restructuring of their conquests since such policies were not necessary to ensure this basic function of the imperial structure. Indeed, such policies would have been counterproductive and imperiled the very reason of the state for being.
As had happened with Assyria and Babylon, the empire of the Achaemenids seemingly crumbled like a house of cards when faced with the onslaught of Alexander the Great. Should we then conclude that the empire suffered from a structural weakness that made it an easy prey for Alexander’s appetites? Such views were indeed propagated by fourth-century Greek writers, who did much to create the myth of Persian decadence and ineffectualness in order to provide a moral justification for the conquest or simply to explain the astonishing ease with which it was accomplished. This view of steady Achaemenid decline, which has survived in modern historiography, has been completely debunked by recent research (Briant 1993). Unlike Assyria on the eve of its destruction, it seems that neither Babylon in the sixth century, nor the Persian empire in the fourth, showed any particularly alarming sign of decline. On the contrary, in both cases the explanation for their demise probably lies in the superior resources and organization of their enemies. In the case of Persia an easy conquest was conceivable, for one could see that once the ethnically homogenous ruling class was successfully attacked and removed, the entire edifice would easily fall into the hands of the aggressors. Yet this does not mean that the empire was a diseased body, for in many respects the Persian state represented the culmination of Ancient Near Eastern empire building, a final synthesis of the oldest civilizations in that part of the world before their irreversible transformation by the ferment of Hellenism.
World History
