and Media. They, in turn, contributed to the emerging formulation of the Persian
imagery of power. This can be seen particularly clearly in the royal monuments and
iconography – although that must not blind one to important transformations delib-
erately wrought in the process of adoption and adaptation.
SOURCESThe sources for understanding the Achaemenid empire are complex and difficult to
use because they are extremely disparate and exist in many different languages and
forms. Before excavation and the decipherment of Ancient Near Eastern scripts, strong
images of the empire existed already, formed on the basis of classical writers, especially
the Greek historian Herodotus working in the later fifth century BC. As his aim was
to celebrate the victories won by Greeks over Persians between 490 and 478 , his
valuable information is limited, chronologically, to the early period of the empire.
Although Herodotus gives us a sense of the broad geographical sweep of the empire,
he treats the imperial regions very superficially, apart from Egypt and the north-
western frontier area (i.e. western Turkey), because his focus was the Graeco-Persian
conflict. Later classical writers, aside from the Alexander historians, generally exhibit
similar geo-political limitations. The exceptions are some fourth-century compilers
of Persian histories, such as Ctesias; but they are only preserved in selective late
citations and summaries. These reflect the taste of later readers in the Roman and
Byzantine periods, who were fascinated by the reported wealth and power of the
Persian rulers, and stories of court-corruption and intrigue. As a result, the image of
the empire to be gleaned from these sources is both partial and, sometimes, distorted.
Added to this was the image derived from the Old Testament, which is responsible
for the influential picture of the Persian kings as unusually religiously tolerant, shown
by their restoration of the Jerusalem temple and support of the Yahweh cult (Ezra;
Nehemiah). Very different is the Persian court story of Esther, which is closer in style
to the classical tales.
The Old Persian script was deciphered in the nineteenth century, but as its use
was largely limited to monumental royal inscriptions intended to reflect the unchanging
majesty of Persian power (the one exception is Darius I’s inscription at Bisitun, Kent
1953 : DB; Schmitt 1991 ), the texts are not directly informative on political changes
or administrative structures. To illuminate this, sources from elsewhere in the empire
- Babylonian, Egyptian, Aramaic and Elamite documents – have to be pressed into
service. Among these, the Elamite administrative texts from Persepolis and the Aramaic
material are particularly important. Aramaic had been widely used in the Near East,
especially in the Neo-Assyrian empire before the Persian conquest and was adopted
by the Achaemenid government as an administrative language. Its extensive use in
this period is illustrated by documents found in western Asia Minor, the Levant,
Egypt, Iran and Central Asia. In Babylonia, where it had already been used, that use
increases markedly in the Achaemenid period.
Archaeologically, the area of the empire has been only intermittently and partially
investigated. Most attention has been paid to the great royal centres of Pasargadae,
Persepolis and Susa. This situation is changing with archaeologists now focusing
more on the Achaemenid levels of long-occupied sites in the conquered territories,
such as Sardis in Lydia, settlement in Israel and Central Asia, rural development in
— The Persian empire —