Was There an Achaemenid Empire?

The Achaemenid Empire: created by the conquests of Cyrus (ca. 559-530) and Cam-byses (530-522) on the rubble and the fertile ground of the various kingdoms of the Near East, then expanded and reorganized by Darius I (522-486), for more than two centuries it extended from the Indus Valley to the Aegean Sea, from the Syr Darya to the Persian Gulf and the first cataract of the Nile —until the moment Darius III perished in a conspiracy, when his nemesis Alexander had already completed his conquest (330). The ordinary word Empire, as is well known, has no exact correspondence in any ancient language: the inscriptions of the Great Kings refer both to the land (Old Persian hfwii) and to the peoples (Old Persian dahyu/dahyava), and the Greek authors speak of ‘royal territories’ (khora hasileos), of the ‘power’ (arkhe) of the Great King and his satraps, or again of “kings, dynasties, cities, and peoples.’’ The term Empire implies a territorial authority. This is in fact the basic problem posed by the origin and constraction of the Achaemenid Empire. Marked by extraordinary ethnocultural diversity and by a thriving variety of forms of local organization, it evokes two interpretations: one that sees it as a sort of loose federation of autonomous countries under the distant aegis of a Great King, a federation that is evident solely from the perspective of tribute levies and military conscriptions; and another that without rejecting the evidence of diversity emphasizes the organizational dynamic of the many sorts of intervention by the central authority and the intense processes of acculturation. The direction in which my own preferences tend can be discerned even from this formulation of the problem —I will explain myself along the way. This in a nutshell is the aim of this book, which I now offer for the appraisal of my readers.