186 Jennifer Gates-Foster
facet of imperial ideology. This epithet is appropriately contained in a three-part monu-
mental inscription that, like many of similar type, is multi-lingual. In this case, the text
is written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. In each example, the use of multi-
ple languages was a symbolic engagement with many communities, both in terms of the
Near Eastern past—multilingual inscriptions have a long history in the region—and con-
temporary audiences. Monumental texts such as these were sometimes translated into
multiple languages and distributed to communities throughout the empire. Versions of
the Behistun text, for example, have been recovered in Egypt (Greenfield and Porten
1982) and Babylon (von Voigtlander 1978) in the local vernacular.
Ethnicity and Responses to Persian Power:
A View from the Satrapies
The inscriptions and artifacts discussed thus far all reveal much about the worldview con-
structed and disseminated at the highest levels of the Achaemenid Empire and the central
role that ethnocultural constructs played in that formulation of empire. This final section
of the chapter considers the vexed problem of how to assess the saliency of ethnicity from
the opposite perspective by looking back at empire from the margins. Was ethnic or cul-
tural identity part of how individuals or groups subject to Persian control or influence
saw themselves? In what way did they respond to the ethnic and cultural categorizations
that were such an important part of the Achaemenid imperial vision of empire, if they
were aware of them at all? How might we access these patterns in the material and textual
evidence from the satrapies?
Scholarship on the effects of Persian rule in the satrapies takes strikingly varied stances
on whether the issue of identity is even relevant (or accessible) in the study of the
Achaemenid past. Tuplin has been a particularly strong advocate of limiting “identity”
discussions, arguing rather that the central fact of life under Persian rule was differen-
tial access to power, which was not intrinsically connected to ethnic or cultural identity
beyond the undeniable supremacy of Persian hegemony. He sees “cultural adjacency”
rather than interaction, and argues that “the way in which power was organized left a
great deal of space for people to cleave to existing modes of behavior and issued few
challenges to engage in serious reflection about cultural identity” (2009: 427). In a later
essay, he softens his view slightly to say that “cultural engagement with imperial power
was more a matter of choices made by subjects than requirements imposed by rulers, and
in which the forms those choices took were diverse and not always instantly explicable”
(2011a: 150).
The absence of animposedethnic dimension to Persian imperialism alongside the clearly
demonstrated ethnic dimension in the Persianideologyof empire is certainly striking, but
ethnocultural negotiation certainly existed under Achaemenid rule, even if never explic-
itly framed as such. Tuplin is perhaps, as others have been, frustrated by the ambiguity of
the evidence we have for the response of individuals to Persian hegemony, particularly as it
might have affected their own ethnic or cultural identification (see discussion of Hall and
others in the preceding text). Others see a dialogue that incorporates strains from multi-
ple traditions and work to untangle the possible valences of material style, iconographic
elements, linguistic influences, and other traceable aspects of cultural contact set within