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2 results

  • 5 - THE RISE OF THE ACHAEMENIDS AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THEIR EMPIRE

  • Edited by I. Gershevitch
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    06 June 1985, pp 200-291

  • Summary

    At the beginning of his History, for which he was gathering the material in the middle of the 5th century, the Greek writer Herodotus tells us what Persian men of learning had to say about the first confrontations of Europe and Asia. Modern scholars have varied greatly in the use they make of him for early Achaemenid history. The historians of Alexander the Great provide first-hand information about the Persian empire; and in particular it is to them that we owe our knowledge of the eastern Iranian lands as they first come into the light of recorded history. The whole of Western Asia as far as the Arabian desert was now under Persian suzerainty. The Persian satraps in the far western provinces of Asia Minor and Egypt were not involved in the clashes of rivals, though Oroites in Sardis took the opportunity to avenge an insult on the satrap of the Hellespontine region.

  • 11 - THE EVIDENCE OF THE PERSEPOLIS TABLETS

  • Edited by I. Gershevitch
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    06 June 1985, pp 588-609

  • Summary

    The Achaemenid Elamite texts found at Persepolis add a little flesh to the picked-over bones of early Achaemenid history. The fortification texts, which date from the thirteenth to the twenty-eighth year of Darius I, record many kinds of transfers of food products. The fortification texts were written at many sites in a region which, it seems, surrounds the Persepolis-Susa axis. The texts mention the names of many officials. By all evidence the chief economic official from the sixteenth to the twenty-fifth year of Darius was Pharnaces. In the assignment of work groups three persons are more frequent than any others: Irsena in the Susa area, Karkis and Suddayauda successively in the Persepolis area. In any case it would have been very difficult by the use of clay tablets to achieve an adequate accounting system for such varied and extensive operations. The problem might in the end have been solved by the use of records in Aramaic written on perishable materials.