Introduction

In the court I exist and of the court I speak but what the court is, God knows. I know not.

(Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ‘Of Courtier Trifles’, c. 1190)

Around 1190 CE Walter Map, a Welsh cleric at the court of Henry II of England, attempted to articulate the nebulous nature of the court in a treatise which, with its famous, if somewhat exasperated tone of phrase, has been much quoted by historians of court societies ever since in their own attempts to voice a definition of this most ambiguous of royal institutions. It is a fitting place start to this short work on the Achaemenid court, because in spite of recent sophisticated scholarly advances in the study of ancient courts (Spawforth 2007b; Strootman 2007; Jacobs and Rollinger 2010; Lanfranchi and Rollinger 2010; Duindam et al. 2011; Erskine et al. 2013), in our quest for the Persian court we ultimately share with Walter Map a frustration with the difficulty of defining what precisely a ‘court’ is.

Map was irritated by the fact that his contemporaries could interchangeably refer to the ‘court’ as a location (palace, castle, hall), an institution (the ‘office of court’), a group of people (the royal retinue or entourage), or even an event (‘holding court’). The court could also be a ‘place’ where myths and legends were created on the stage of monarchy, as well as a ‘place’ which was legendary in its own right (like King Arthur’s court at Camelot). Courtiers in successive times and places have tried in vain to articulate the institution that created and defined them, but none has done it with such sublime irony as Walter Map (see further, Vale 2001). Let his experience stand as an exemplar for our own investigation of the court of the Achaemenid Persians.

Part of the difficulty in understanding the construction, functioning, and ideology of the Achaemenid court lies with the source materials available for our study: Iranian and other Near Eastern iconographic materials, fragmentary bureaucratic texts, repetitive and formulaic royal inscriptions, and scattered archaeological remains provide only piecemeal evidence for court structure, while, as we will quickly learn, Greek and Hebrew literary texts are as fulsome in their vivid descriptions of the court as they are judgemental or fantastical. Accessing the Achaemenid court is fraught with difficulties. It is logical to turn, therefore, to comparative court studies of royal cultures with richer source materials for models of how to think about ancient courts, and particularly that of the Achaemenid rulers.

For instance, the renowned modern historian of Tudor England Geoffrey Elton once wrote that ‘the only definition of the court which makes sense. . . is that it comprised all those who at any given time were within “his grace’s house”’ (Elton 1983: 38) - suggesting that, predominantly, the court was seen to be a social space comprised of all the individuals who circled around the king, regardless of social rank. Elton contends that these varied individuals, the socially diverse members of the royal retinue should, en masse, be classified as ‘courtiers’; their presence within the extended ‘family’ of the royal household qualified them as such. Can Elton’s model of an extended entourage work for the Achaemenid court too? Perhaps, although David Starkey (1987: 5) has rejected Elton’s hypothesis by suggesting that the ‘court’ consisted of the nobility and elite of the kingdom alone; therefore, Starkey has argued, ‘lesser’ persons such as guards, grooms, stablehands, servants, cooks, and all other labouring household personnel should not be incorporated into the definition of ‘court’ at all. Their occupations denied them the privilege of being a courtier. But Starkey’s is a shortsighted approach. Certain individuals with regular (and on the face of it) menial labour tasks were in fact members of what can be termed an ‘inner court’; they were servants with close access to the king (and even to the king’s actual body in the cases of wardrobe officials, grooms, barbers, and beauticians, or even doctors and chefs), and even though they might be ignobly born, these individuals had the potential to wield great power and influence. Elton’s definition of a ‘courtier’ is therefore more persuasive than Starkey’s: membership of the ‘court’ should include all individuals with ready access to the monarch in any form, and regardless of high or low birth (or indeed of sex). This is the appropriate way to think about the Persian court as well.

However, there are nuances to take into consideration. In Tudor England, when the court ‘occurred’ in one of the monarch’s official residences, household ordinances and rules of ceremony regulated who could gain sight of the monarch. Within the royal residences, access to rooms and spaces was successively more restricted as one progressed through the palace. Tudor historians can therefore speak of an ‘inner court’ (meaning the rooms occupied by the king on an intimate basis and the people who worked within that space, as both ministers of state and intimate body servants; see further Knecht 2008) and of an ‘outer court’ (meaning the public areas of the residence, including large throne rooms and banqueting halls, and the people who served the public functions or who were within the king’s orbit only temporarily). Thus, under the Tudors only peers of the realm and the monarch’s closest servants were allowed to enter the Withdrawing Room - an intensely private place reserved for the monarch’s intimate relaxation hours. However, the barriers which restricted access were constantly being assaulted by courtiers who sought more intimate physical closeness to the monarch, for access to the monarch not only meant the opportunity to importune a favour, but also implied to all onlookers that the privileged gainer of access had social eminence. Tom Bishop (1998: 89) has perceptively noted that ‘the court often functioned like a series of locked rooms, with those on the outside always trying keys, and those on the inside constantly changing the locks’.

As we will see, the concept of an ‘inner court’ and an ‘outer court’ is applicable to the Achaemenid royal household too, and the Persian court can best be understood as operating around these two axes. The people who naturally orbited within the Great King’s inner court were members of the royal harem, in other words those people who were under his immediate protection, including his mother, wives, concubines, children (including royal princes who could, upon their maturity, be sent into the provinces as satraps and commanders to set up their own courts-in-miniature), siblings, personal slaves, nobles from the highest-ranking families of the realm, and those granted the honorific title ‘Friend’ of the king (see Chapter 1). Bureaucrats and administrators, ambassadors, eunuchs, and physicians made up the outer court. The Achaemenid court, just like that of the Tudors, obviously attracted individuals who sought access to the monarch, but it functioned as more than a place simply to catch the monarch’s eye, because the court was the social and cultural epicentre of the kingdom as well as a recruitment office and seat of bureaucracy for the administration.

We can, however, look for an interesting alternative definition of ‘court’ to that provided by Elton in a proposition of Rodriquez-Salgado, who regards the court as the residing place of sovereign power but not necessarily of the sovereign per se. In other words, even when the king was in absentia his monarchic authority nonetheless remained present among a group of people or in a fixed locale, so that it was ‘the monarch’s residual authority, not his presence, [which] was the prerequisite of a court’ (Rodriquez-Salgado 1991: 207). This probably holds true for the Persian king and court. The importance of the Great King’s court was reflected in the fact that throughout the Empire, satraps replicated its forms, structures, customs, and ceremonies as the most effective symbol of a centralised royal authority. For its part, the Great King’s power could be expressed in proxy, so that his physical presence was not needed. Courtiers, dignitaries, ambassadors, and even royal women might have deputised for the king’s authority as they travelled around the Empire with their own courtly entourages in the name of the king (see Chapter 4).

Of fundamental importance to the development of court studies has been Norbert Elias’ Die hofische Gesellschaft (1969; only partially updated from his 1933 Habilitationschrift), published in an English translation of 1983 (with revisions in 2006) as The Court Society. More of a Weber-inspired sociologist than a historian, Elias articulated a model of court society which focused sharply upon a study of Bourbon French monarchy at the palace of Versailles, and employed as a core text for his study the rich and detailed memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755), who lived as part of, profited from, and was ultimately almost destroyed by, the French royal court. Elias suggested that Louis XIV constructed his court as an effective political tool in order to consolidate and augment an absolutist rule through which the French nobility could be tamed and domesticated; stripped of effective power and occupied instead with the minutiae of etiquette and courtly ceremonial, the elite of French society became obsessed with their positions in the orbit of the Sun King, forgetting that they were prisoners within a gilded cage. Elias suggested that his model for the nature and workings of the French court could be utilised in the study of other courts.

However, Elias’ model has not passed without criticism: Jeroen Duindam (2003) in particular has questioned Elias’ image of Versailles and has challenged the strength of his argument, criticising especially the absence of a serious political dimension in Elias’ work. Nonetheless, Elias’ Court Society laid out the ground-plan for further research and his work has provided a stimulus for historians of court societies of other times and places, as we shall see in later chapters of this book.

While these European ideologies of court society provide much valuable material for consideration in our study of the Persian court, we must speculate if early-modern western courts like those of the Tudors and Bourbons really are the most apropos models to follow in our current study. After all, the Christian courts of pre-industrial Europe never fully experienced the true weight of an absolute monarchy in the way that courts of the pre-modern Middle East and Far East experienced absolutism (like that of the Achaemenids). Perhaps better comparative models for the Achaemenid court can be found in the structures, institutions, practices, and ideologies of the non-Christian court civilisations of the east, such as the dynastic courts of Mughal India, Safavid Iran, and Qing China (all dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries CE). The Christian European courts moulded themselves around the figure of a king who, while undeniably authoritative, nonetheless had his power tempered by clergy and politicians. European Christian monarchy was counter-balanced by political groups from among the social classes and castes of the realm, whereas the absolute tribute-gathering rulers of the east tended to govern with greater independent autocracy as kings fused their political rule with their integral religious identity, so that they were not answerable to a clergy or an independent parliament.

Moreover, a Christian monarch could, at most, be a serial monogamist - marrying one wife and replacing her with another only upon her death or divorce - so that the number of legitimate offspring born to a king was hampered by the childbearing capabilities of his queen. Bastards born to a Christian king’s mistresses might swell the royal nurseries, but these children (privileged though they might be) could never shake off the social slur of illegitimacy and the moral probity of the Church. Consequently, the royal succession and royal authority were sharply curtailed by the laws of the Church, as only legitimate sons could inherit the throne.

In contrast, the unions of eastern monarchs with their numerous wives and concubines resulted in multiple offspring who were free of the social stigma of bastardy; the sons of concubines had the potential to become kings, but even if they did not reach the giddy heights of rulership they could nonetheless serve their royal fathers by performing duties in the government or the military. In fact, this lack of social stigma over legitimacy propagated and unified the ruling eastern dynasties in tight family bonds, the mammoth scale of which was never experienced by Christian monarchies. Reproductive capabilities went hand in hand with dynastic success (Scheidel 2009). Oddly, in their comprehension of the Achaemenid court the Greeks - obsessed with issues of legitimacy - never understood the value of polygamous unions for the functioning and longevity of a monarchic house (see Chapter 4).

There can be no doubt that the pioneering work of Norbert Elias and other historians of western monarchies will continue to provide influential ways to examine court societies of antiquity (Maria Brosius’ 2007 significant study of the Persian court benefits from such an approach), but an even better understanding of the Achaemenid court can be achieved if historians look to eastern civilisations for comparative models. Asking questions of the eastern courts will expose more of the nature of Achaemenid court ideologies, ceremonials, and rituals, of royal hunts and feasts, of marriage practices, and gender roles. As this book progresses, we will have occasion to use early-modern eastern and western comparatives with Achaemenid practices.

But there is another aspect of the study of Achaemenid court which demands our attention: the question of cultural influence. As the Persian Empire expanded its territory in the Near East through wildly successful military campaigns, so the ruling dynasty came into contact with pre-existing court structures, which proved to be influential in the formatting of a definable Achaemenid court society. Ancient Egyptian, Neo-Assyrian, Babylonian, Urartian, Levantine, and Anatolian courts all provided the Achaemenids with blueprints for constructing a courtly identity and, as with art and architecture, the Persians readily took from these mature royal societies the elements which they found most appealing or meaningful and blended them to create something definably ‘Achaemenid’ (on Near Eastern courts see Spence 2007; Lanfranchi and Rollinger 2010; Barjamovic 2011). This is not to deny though that the Persians had their own developing court style before the conquests of Cyrus II and that this might have already existed when the Persians were still only a tribal federation in south-western Iran, in the ‘kingdom’ of Ansan. The sophisticated Neo-Elamite court based as Susa had an especial hold on Ansanite identity, and it is also feasible that a northern Assyrian-inspired courtly tradition based in Media infiltrated its way into the Persian heartland before Cyrus’ take-over of Median territories.

Just as the Achaemenids drew inspiration from the older court societies of the Near East, so too the fully codified Persian court structure went on to influence successive empires. Following his overthrow of Darius III, Alexander of Macedon enthusiastically embraced important Achaemenid court rituals and structures and, in turn, some of these entered into the Hellenistic world through the practices of the Seleucid monarchs (Spawforth 2007a). Of course, there was a gulf of around 230 years between the reigns of the Persian kings Cyrus II and Darius III, and some 250 years separate the reign of Alexander III and the fall of the Seleucid kingdom; the political and cultural worlds of these monarchs might have changed considerably, and while they may have utilised the same palaces, we cannot say with any certainty that their courts remained unaltered over the centuries. Court reforms (in ceremony, personnel, and etiquette) are known to have occurred under King Artaxerxes I’s watchful eye, and there may have been many deliberate (or haphazard) changes to the Persian court system over the centuries of the Achaemenid dynasty’s existence, but nonetheless, in the essential elements of ritual and presentation, the longue duree of the Achaemenid court’s influence could still be observed in many prominent Roman and Byzantine court practices (Maguire 2004; Paterson 2007; Smith 2007). Within Iran itself, Achaemenid influences on the rituals of royalty, aspects of the presentation of monarchy (including elements of palace architecture), and imperial ideology survived into the Sasanian period (third to seventh centuries CE), and in fact could still be felt in the Safavid, Qajar, and Pahlavi courts of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries CE (see, for example, Babaie 2008; Huff 2010). A schematic representation of the way in which the Persian court drew on, and then influenced, other ancient court societies can prove informative (Figure 1). In addition to utilising early-modern comparative evidence, this book will also acknowledge the influence of neighbouring Near Eastern court cultures on the Achaemenids.

The definition of the court in its Persian context can be encapsulated in several important and interrelated ways. As we will go on to explore, the court was a circle of elite people and attendants (‘courtiers’) in orbit around a monarch (see Chapter 1; Briant 2002: 302-54; Brosius 2007: 30-40, 53-6) as well as being a larger environment of political, military, economic, and cultural structures which converged within the monarch’s household; the court was therefore the vibrant contact point between the Great King and the ruling classes (satraps and elites) at regional and local levels of the Empire (see Henkelman 2010a). The court was also an architecturally defined series of permanent and portable spaces: the private rooms, the bureaucratic quarters, and the public halls and courtyards of the royal residences, wherein the rituals of royalty were enacted and where the monarch received homage (Chapter 2), threw banquets, entertained, and relaxed (Chapter 5). In the case of the Achaemenids it is especially important to remember that the court was not a single place per se - the court moved (Chapter 3). The court was the setting of royal ceremonial and a place wherein

Past

Present

Future

Figure 1 The development and legacy of the Achaemenid court.

A theatrical display of power was created and presented through audiences, feasting, and even hunting (Chapter 5).

Taken together, the people of the inner and outer courts constituted the royal viO, an Old Persian word meaning ‘house’, ‘household’, and (by extension), ‘court’ and ‘palace’ (see Chapter 2 for further discussion). In Greek texts, individuals in the orbit of the Great King, his ‘courtiers’, were termed ‘the people of the court’ (hoi peri ton aulon; literally ‘those around the court’) or aulikoi (‘those of the court’), although the word aule (‘court’) itself was rarely used by the Greeks as a synonym for ‘palace’ or ‘residence’ (the possessive noun basileion or basileia - roughly, ‘the king’s habitation’ - was used instead; see for example Herodotus 1.30; alternatively, Ctesias F9 §13 used ta oikemata, ‘household’; see further comments in Brosius 2007: 25). The Romans usurped aule (Latin, aula - ‘courtyard’, ‘court’) and thus its compound meaning enters into modern European languages (court, cour, Hof) with all the nebulous connotations found in the definition of the institution itself.

The royal court influenced many of the key areas of Achaemenid culture and society. It was the epicentre of politics, bureaucracy, and administration, the military, and perhaps even a religious centre, with rituals enacted around the person of the Great King (de Jong 2010); the court was also the intellectual, artistic, and cultural centre of the Empire, and artisans of all sorts flocked to court to receive patronage from the monarch. The court was without doubt the hub for the creation of imperial royal ideology and the dissemination point for all forms of official Achaemenid dogma. In ancient Persia the royal court mattered; without it there would have been no Empire.