Achaemenids, Royal Power, and Persian Ethnicity 187the differential power frame of empire (Root 1989; Dusinberre 1997, 2003; Brosius
2011). This is a stubborn problem that must be tackled in the particular context of spe-
cific evidence and culture contact situations (Gates 2002), but as a final brief illustration,
I now turn to an object that encapsulates some of these complexities and offers a case
study for the challenges of assessing the meaning of imagery, style, onomastics, and lan-
guage in consideration of the saliency of ethnicity in the Achaemenid Empire from the
perspective of the satrapies.
The stele of Djedherbes was recovered in 1994 at Saqqara in Egypt and has, ever since,
attracted much attention due to its evocative combination of Egyptian and Achaemenid
Persian iconography (Mathieson et al. 1995). If names are to be taken as evidence of eth-
nic or cultural heritage, the individual whose burial it commemorates was apparently of
mixed descent; his father was a Persian named Artam and his mother an Egyptian named
Tanofrether, according to the details of his lineage, which are provided in hieroglyphic
and demotic inscriptions (Figure 12.4). The date of the object is unclear, with some
advocating a date in the first Persian domination of Egypt (525–404BCE) (Mathieson
et al. 1995; Vittman 2006), and others a date sometime in the first half of the fourth
centuryBCE(Wasmuth 2010).
Figure 12.4 Image of Djedherbes stele from Saqqara. Adapted from Figure 3 in Mathieson,
Bettles, Davies, and Smith (1995). Image courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.