Arab groups enjoyed another kind of relationship with the central authority. In
return for ensuring safe routes through the desert (Herodotus 3. 7 – 9 ) and organising
the lucrative caravan-trade, which ran from the southern tip of the peninsula to
Palestinian ports, such as Persian-controlled Gaza, they did not pay the usual tax.
Instead, they presented the king with a regular ‘gift’ of incense.
Another important frontier-group was the Scythians, who lived in the area beyond
the Oxus (mod. Amu Darya). Their traditional lifestyle was nomadic – horse-borne
warrior elites competed for, and maintained, status through booty acquired by raiding
and war. How precisely the Persian authority managed relations with them is unknown,
but they certainly supplied warriors to the Persian army. They regularly appear in
Persian battle ranks and also as marines, which suggests that a reciprocal arrangement
had been arrived at. That would have given the Persians potential access to trade
routes through the Central Asian regions beyond their frontiers, as well as helping
to safeguard such a highly permeable zone. A carpet in one of the ‘Scythian Frozen
Tombs’ of the Altai mountains, near China, is decorated in a recognisably Achaemenid
style, which reflects something of this network of relationships.
In these instances, climate, environment and patterns of life determined the solutions
found for managing relations with such potentially troublesome groups. Differences
in the style of imposition of Persian control in other places, or at least the way it
was represented, hint at specific local factors with which the central authority had
to deal.
Egypt, for example, retained its own very characteristic culture, especially in the
realm of artistic expression and production, in styles of architecture and in its belief
system, which traditionally assigned a special divine role to the king. As a result,
from Cambyses on, Persian kings were hailed as pharaohs, represented as such and
given pharaonic-style formal names, and titulary (Posener 1936 : no. 1 ). They may
even have assumed traditional Egyptian royal dress when acting in Egyptian royal
rituals; certainly, that is how they are presented in temple and votive reliefs.
In Babylonia, too, the Persian king acted in accordance with local royal ideology
which demanded that the king maintain and build temples and city walls, confirm
the protected status of certain cities, ensure that rituals were performed, divine offer-
ings authorised, and support (even, occasionally, take part in) the politically important
New Year festival (Grayson 1975 : no. 7 ; Schaudig 2001 : Cyrus Cylinder). At no point
were the essential ingredients for carrying out these crucial rites dismantled or sup-
pressed by the Persians. However, the precise pattern of their enactment and associated
royal activity were modified. Early in the reign of Xerxes, the established old and
powerful city elites, who had dominated civic and temple institutions in northern
Babylonia from the Neo-Babylonian period on, were replaced by individuals dependent
on Persian patronage. The earlier system of local government also changed and segments
of civic and sacred institutions were more tightly drawn into the system of taxation.
This may well be linked to the reorganisation of the province (see above, p. 566 ) and
have been either the result of, or the reason for, two short-lived revolts in 484.
Another point to note is that, within each satrapy, local conditions varied from
place to place not simply because of climate, language and political culture, but
because a diversity of political units could all form part of one overall satrapy. Thus,
in the province ‘Beyond the River’, a place such as Jerusalem, with the district of
Yehud, retained its sacred laws, priestly hierarchy and was, almost certainly, governed
— The Persian empire —