Scholarship on the Achaemenid Empire has consistently skirted the attention of archaeological theory. Ending this drought is Lori Khatchadourian's compelling and well-written book, which draws on multiple themes in contemporary archaeological research—posthumanism, entanglement theory, empire, among others—to examine one of the world's oldest and often misunderstood empires, which held sway over the ancient Middle East from 550 to 330 BC. Despite more than a century of research, the field still suffers from an early confidence in Greek writers’ (e.g., Herodotus, Xenophon) and more recent Orientalists’ claims about Achaemenid politics and culture.
Khatchadourian considers one such misunderstood issue, the idea of the satrap, a term that Greek writers (e.g., Herodotus's The Histories, 3.89) glossed as “political province” when describing the empire's territorial organization. “Satrap” now commonly appears in modern usage to describe a subordinate political polity or actor. The book's introduction invokes this familiar term but quickly pivots to suggest that a more nuanced meaning waits to be discovered. The book is then divided into two parts, each consisting of three chapters. Chapter 1 draws on Ancient Iranian texts and visual culture to orient the reader not only to the study of Achaemenid imperialism but also to what the author describes as the “satrapal condition,” a state in which Achaemenid elites and their constituents were bound together in xšaça. Philologists have long debated this term, which most consider to mean “divinely granted kingship.” However, there is a deeper meaning to be found in the Avesta, a Zoroastrian religious text, and the carved relief sculptures adorning Achaemenid buildings such as Persepolis, located today in modern Iran. Both sources are sensitive to the roles that materials play in granting and sustaining xšaça. Khatchadourian argues that xšaça is a dialectical condition in which kings and their subjects—including nonhuman actors—co-constituted Achaemenid sovereignty. This expanded notion of xšaça presents opportunities to appreciate the roles that objects played in promoting, tolerating, and resisting imperial ideologies.
Chapters 2 and 3 scaffold the book's intellectual framework. Chapter 2 observes how archaeological investigations of empire habitually interpret objects as the material outcome of dutiful human agents working, willingly or not, on behalf of the empire's economic interests. This “imperial debris,” Khatchadourian insists, should also be recognized for its capacities to shape human political relationships. Merely stating that “objects have agency” is not the author's goal, however. Chapter 3 sets out a framework to understand four distinct political roles that objects can play under imperial circumstances. Nonhuman delegates promote “the terms of imperial sovereignty through the force of both their material composition and the practical mediations they help afford” (p. 69), whereas proxies are mimetic “copies” of delegates who possess capacities that can differ from their original forms. Captive objects, on the other hand, are displaced things that are conscripted by empires to carry out the work of imperialism. Last, affiliates are the inconspicuous and stubborn objects that participate in the entanglements of everyday life under empire.
Part Two illustrates this framework in three case studies drawn from around the Achaemenid Empire. Chapter 4 examines how the architectural genre of the monumental pillared halls became material captives of the Achaemenid imperial project. These halls first appeared in the Zagros Mountains and South Caucasus, where, the author suggests, the buildings were designed to mediate the political interactions of highland agropastoralist communities who assembled and deliberated with each other in these spaces. Once assuming power in the sixth century BC, Achaemenid rulers took this architectural design captive, building at least 17 versions across their territory to serve as throne rooms where the sovereign hosted large audiences. The Achaemenid redeployment of the pillared hall consequentially transformed the design into a delegate that furthered the imperial project.
Chapter 5 visits the dahyu of Armenia, a land whose territory included what is today the eastern edge of Turkey and modern Armenia. Although fragmentary, the evidence suggests that the dahyu's inhospitable mountainous terrain challenged the Achaemenid's capacity to rule the region's communities. Object delegates—notably the silver feasting vessels that were popular in Achaemenid elite courts—as well as the monumental pillared hall design conscripted “users . . . into relationships that bound the dahyu to the empire” (p. 132), helping exert Achaemenid sovereignty over communities who were otherwise ambiguous about imperial rule. Chapter 6 narrows the resolution of analysis to everyday life at Tsaghkahovit, a modest fortress in the highlands of the dahyu. Khatchadourian identifies affiliates, proxies, and delegates among the commingled archaeological evidence documented in the rooms of excavated buildings. Among them was a potential delegate, a stone assemblage used in an Achaemenid ritual in which hallucinogenic plants may have been crushed in a vessel and consumed.
Imperial Matter is a significant intervention in archaeological inquiry. Readers interested in the archaeology of empire and colonialism, materiality and New Materialism, and posthumanism will find the book of great interest. Scholars thinking about the roles that objects played in the political formations of the Ancient Middle East will discover a fresh framework for consideration.
