Achaemenids, Royal Power, and Persian Ethnicity 185Figure 12.3 Apadana Tribute Procession at Persepolis, Bactrian Delegation. © The Oriental
Institute Museum.
that took place at Persepolis and other imperial centers. On a metaphorical level, the
“delegates bring not only themselves, but also the accumulated wealth of reestablished
wholeness” (Root 1990: 121). Of importance here is the visual articulation of the ideal
established on the empire lists and foundation inscriptions, with the empire articulated
through the counting of ethnically articulated peoples and their diverse resources
(Klinkott 2002).
This representation of harmonious subordination and co-option into the empire existed
alongside more overt expressions of dominance expressed in ethnic and cultural terms.
On royal tombs, palace doorways, and other sculptural monuments, conquered peoples
are shown supporting the throne of the Great King (Briant 2002). On the tombs of
Darius I (DNe) and Artaxerxes II (A2Pa) at Naqsh-i Rustam, the individual figures are
labeled, making clear the association with the cultural group—“this is the Egyptian”
(Schmidt 1970; Kuhrt 1995)—and the articulation of an ideology of rule resting, quite
literally, on the existence of definite ethnocultural groups (Walser 1972).
This programmatic visual and textual emphasis on enumerating the conquered existed
alongside a keen awareness of the multi-lingual nature of the empire, and indeed it is
difficult to know to what degree language was a critical factor in distinguishing dif-
ferent ethnic or cultural groups from the point of view of the Achaemenid admini-
stration. A title given to Darius, the “king of the lands of all tongues” (DE 15–16,
translation from Henkelman and Stolper 2009: 271), emphasizes linguistic diversity as a