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Bruno Jacobs and Robert Rollinger

In 262 CE an army of Roman and Greek forces, led by the Roman Marianus (then probably governor of the Roman province of Achaea/Greece), gathered at Thermopylae to ward off an expected attack by Gothic invaders from the north.¹ In the wake of the military preparations to defend the pass, Marianus addressed the assembled Greek soldiers and fired up their emotions by referring to the achievements of their ancestors. This splendid episode was discovered only recently on a palimpsest in the Austrian National Library and convincingly identified as a fragment of the lost Scythica of the Greek author Herennius Dexippus (third century CE). The episode runs as follows:

(7) ‘O Greeks, the occasion of our preservation for which you are assembled and the land in which you have been deployed are both truly fitting to evoke the memory of virtuous deeds. For your ancestors, fighting in this place in former times, did not let Greece down and deprive it of its free state, for they fought bravely in the Persian wars and in the conflict called the Lamian war, and when they put to flight Antiochus, the despot from Asia, at which time they were already working in partnership with the Romans who were then in command. (8) So perhaps it may be good fortune, in accordance with the daimonion, that it has been allotted to the Greeks to do battle against the barbarians in this region (indeed your own principles of fighting the wars have turned out to be valid in the past). But you may take confidence in both your preparation for these events and the strength of the region – as a result of which, in previous attacks you seemed terrifying to the enemies'.

(Codex Vindobonensis Hist. gr. 73, ff. 192^v–193^r after Mallan and Davenport 2015: p. 206)

The passage is remarkable for many reasons. On the one hand, it reveals a specific lieu de mémoire where the Persian Wars (actually the “Median [Wars]”: tois Me&c.macr;dikois) still had some relevance during the Roman Empire. On the other hand, at least in our text, this relevance is of somewhat reduced significance. Whereas from a modern perspective a battle at the famous site of Thermopylae would above all call to mind the celebrated event of 480 BCE, the Roman perspective of the third century CE is a rather different one.² To be sure, Thermopylae is still a battlefield that recalls the invasion by the Achaemenid Persian Empire, but this is just one event among others, and, as it appears, not the most important one. Thermopylae seems to be about equally significant as the location of a comparable event during the Lamian War (323–322 BCE), and both occurrences are far outstripped by the Syrian War (192–188 BCE): this was the war that Rome fought against the Seleucid king Antiochus III (223–187 BCE), and it is Antiochus – and not primarily the Persians – who is introduced as the ultimate representative of Asian hubris, threat, and outreach. What can we learn from this episode and what is its relevance in the introduction to a new Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire?

Historians are nowadays well aware of the fact that their understanding and reconstruction of history are shaped both by tradition and by the view of past and present current in their own time. But it is not always easy for them to escape from this situation and find their own perspective.

From the very beginning, reconstruction of the history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire was affected by a point of view that focused primarily on two events: the first was the Persian Wars at the beginning of the fifth century BCE and the second the downfall of the empire at the end of the fourth century BCE. Both events became part of well‐designed master narratives that presented the empire as a colossus with feet of clay, and the empire's defeats were celebrated as the heroic deeds of opponents fighting for freedom against an Asian craze for the huge and spectacular. Thus, the Persian Wars became a climax in the conflict between Greek (and European) liberty and Asian despotism, and Alexander III was staged as “Alexander the Great,” a heroic conqueror king, while other relevant aspects of his “career” such as aggression, violence, and destruction moved entirely into the background. The sources that established these master narratives originated without exception from the western fringes of the empire, but this did not impair their success. On the contrary, such narratives became an integral part of classical and later European history, one that shaped perception not only of the “oriental” Other and of Asia but also of their purported European antithesis. Although, as we have seen, the importance of the Persian Wars within the general course of history was somewhat relativized during the Roman Empire (cf. Spawforth 1994; Rollinger 2019), our view of the Achaemenid Persian Empire remained primarily determined by other sources and their presentation of the impressive defeats suffered by the Persians in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE (cf. Wiesehöfer 1992, 2002, 2003, 2013).

The resulting lopsided and distorted view is still frequently encountered, but among specialists a considerable change of perspective has taken place in the last 35 years. During the 1980s the Achaemenid History Workshops paved the way for a new understanding of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.³ This was, on the one hand, due to the development of a post‐colonial approach in Ancient Studies in which Graeco‐ and Eurocentrism were strongly challenged. On the other hand, more and more sources in different languages and writing systems emerged from the various regions of the empire and were subjected to proper historical analysis. The result was in effect a new discipline, Achaemenid History Studies, and a complete transformation of the Achaemenid Persian Empire as an object of historical investigation: no longer conceptualized as a side‐show of the Classical World, it became an entity in its own right deserving of study from a variety of angles and in a thoroughly interdisciplinary fashion. It is to this approach that the present publication is indebted.

In contrast to earlier research, which mainly looked in one direction (the West or the East), we conceptualize the Achaemenid Persian Empire as the center of an interrelated network that connected the Eurasian and African continents for the first time and in an entirely new way. With its outreach into the Mediterranean on the one side and toward the Central Asian and Indian worlds on the other, the Achaemenid Persian Empire established and energized a new dimension of connectivity, in which an imperial structure with its dynamic fringes was a key factor in creating and disseminating the new ideas that increasingly shaped an interconnected, proto‐globalized world. This applies to numerous aspects of culture, thought, and belief, and it gives rise to new research objectives that can be achieved only within the sort of genuinely inter‐ and transdisciplinary framework that reflects the still very recent global turn.

The present Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire aims to approach the empire from a multi‐angled and transdisciplinary perspective that takes into account all of the currently available sources, written, artistic, and archeological. Political history (traditionally a primary focus) is now just one of many topics that illustrate the fascination and the multifaceted nature of what was truly the first empire in world history. The study of Nachleben and of the history of perception up to the present day is taken to be as important as the history of the empire itself, a history which is presented in its multiregional dimensions. Apart from the introduction, the Companion is divided into 12 sections with a total of 110 chapters. Specialists from all over the world and from various scientific disciplines have contributed their expertise and knowledge.

During its existence there was no other political formation that could match the Achaemenid Empire in dimensions and outreach. The already huge territories of several preceding empires (those of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Lydians) were united in a single state that then expanded further toward Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and India. These dimensions, as well as the empire's highly diversified natural geography, are dealt with in Sections II (Geography and Demography: chapters 1–5) and V (Structures and Communication: Chapters 53–58) of the present volume.

As already indicated, the study of the Achaemenid Persian Empire has to confront and satisfactorily address certain specific challenges. Among these is the need for a critical and balanced review of all available sources, taking into consideration each source's Sitz im Leben, perspective, intention, and contemporary setting. At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, it is no longer adequate to come to the history of the Achaemenid Empire solely through the lens of Greek authors such as Herodotus, Ctesias, or Xenophon. The labeling of such authors, or at least some of them, as historiographers by modern scholarship obscures the fact that what they present is by no means history in the modern sense of the word. They are better seen as offering a literary representation of the Greeks' powerful, daunting, and fascinating eastern neighbor. Their perspective unites research and knowledge with literary creativity, fiction, and imagination, and in writing as they did, they both respected the expectations of their Greek audience, including its desire for sensational stories, and exercised their power to create and shape identities. All of this requires critical reading and investigation by the modern historian who is interested in not only a specific “view of history,” literary tradition, and pattern of thought but a multifaceted approach to the historic past.

An enormous amount of indigenous written material originating inside the Achaemenid Persian Empire survives, and the stock of what is available for study is increasing all the time. The texts in question encompass royal inscriptions and archival documents in a number of languages and writing systems, originating from various contexts in the different regions of the empire. These sources must also, of course, be approached by the modern historian in a critical frame of mind. What they reveal is often an entirely different perspective from that of the western sources. They document administrative actions and decisions, processes in the royal, provincial, or regional bureaucracy, correspondence between court and officials, temple administration, trade, and entrepreneurship, crime and punishment, and even, if only in glimpses, daily life, but also royal self‐presentation, ideology, and the self‐perception of Great Kings who were convinced that they ruled the world by divine favor.

Obviously, there are major obstacles and difficulties in dealing adequately with this vast amount of material. The texts are written in a variety of languages and writing systems and they belong to different local contexts and traditions. The Achaemenid Persian state was a true empire in terms of its multilingualism and its ability to bring together distinct age‐old traditions of writing and thought under a single roof. There is nobody who could deal with the totality of this heterogeneous and diversified material alone. The task has to be shared and the issues discussed in a transdisciplinary approach that is interested not only in a single archive and region but in the empire as a whole. Only in this manner is it possible to evaluate the importance and quality of each individual source for the reconstruction of the political, cultural, social, economic, and religious history of the empire. It will be no surprise that there is still considerable dissent among scholars about how this can be achieved successfully and what these reconstructions might look like. These written sources in their entirety, structured according to the individual languages involved, are presented in this Companion in Section III‐A (Written Sources: Chapters 6–14).

In recent decades, extensive archeological fieldwork has been undertaken in a wide range of the modern states and regions that are situated on the territory of the former Achaemenid Empire. It is important to stress that archeological sources of any kind are as essential as written ones for reconstructing the past and they must be taken into account appropriately by the modern historian. One aim of the Companion is therefore to offer an up‐to‐date survey of the archeological state of the art from Kazakhstan to the Sudan and from India to the Aegean. Section III‐B (Archeological Sources: Chapters 15–24) presents an overview of sites, excavations, and finds, structured by major geographical regions.

Section IV (History: Chapters 25–52) is divided into three subsections: A Predecessors of the Persian Empire and Its Rise, B From Gaumāta to Alexander, and C Under Persian Rule. As is immediately obvious, it has a much wider focus than the history of the empire itself. This reflects our intention to situate and understand the empire within the broader historical developments of the first millennium BCE and their specific contexts. The empire, on the one hand, transcended the boundaries of its ancient Near Eastern predecessor states, but on the other hand it followed their general trajectories. Some of its core areas were indeed “Iranian”; nevertheless the Achaemenid Persian Empire was not an Iranian state but a multiethnic and multiregional giant that drew from age‐old Near Eastern traditions while at the same time introducing novel agendas and traits. This also, incidentally, applies mutatis mutandis to what followed with and after the conquest of the empire by Alexander III. Chapters 25–28 are, therefore, devoted to Media, Urartu, Assyria, Babylonia, and Elam. The great conquests of Cyrus and Cambyses are also part of subsection A, since the usurpation of the Persian throne by Darius I marks a major change in the history of the empire. Chapters 30–33 deal with the history of the Achaemenid Empire in its narrower sense, from the crisis after the death of Cambyses and Darius I's seizure of power through the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to Darius III and the conquest by Alexander.

Subsection C (Under Persian Rule: Chapters 34–52) already mediates between Sections IV and V, since it illustrates the empire's astonishing capacity to create unity from diversity. This subsection offers a survey of all the major regions of the empire and the local dimensions of its history through the 200 years of its existence. The success of the empire was due to the fact that its developed structures and bureaucracies had local as well as transregional trajectories. It is this overarching and general layout that is the main focus of Section V (Structures and Communication: Chapters 53–58). As has only become properly evident in recent years, the empire maintained already established local structures, at least to a certain extent, and developed an imperial and transregional superstructure that guaranteed its efficiency in collecting taxes and manpower and in maintaining communications between Central Asia, India, Iran, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia.

The administrative and economic dimension of the empire's structure is the general focus of Section VI (Administration and Economy: Chapters 59–69), which is organized into three subsections: A Imperial Administration, B Local Administration, and C Economy. It has already been stressed that a major characteristic of the empire's highly developed bureaucratic apparatus was the interplay between local and transregional structures. This interplay is highlighted by a variety of sources and archives that run from Egypt across Syria, Asia Minor, and Babylonia to Fars and Central Asia. The focus is not only on structures but also on persons, and on rulers as well as the ruled, i.e. on the development of imperial elites with estates all over the empire and their transregional radius of engagement as well as on locals who kept the empire's structures going by paying taxes and delivering soldiers and manpower. The chapter also deals with transregional migration and deportations. The background to the latter is often difficult to grasp in detail; an element of punishment may sometimes be combined with a plan to develop underpopulated and economically weak regions of the empire. The economic aspect of imperial administration is more comprehensively dealt with in the last subsection, which discusses taxes and tribute, temple economy, and entrepreneurship and “banks.”

Section VII (Society and Politics: Chapters 70–78) is concerned with another structural aspect, namely the sociohistorical dimension. It unfolds the social makeup of the empire, with its wide reach from slave to Great King. Because of the source situation, the imperial centers with their residences, courts, and court life feature heavily in this context. Since the satraps in the empire's provinces tended to mirror and imitate the Great Kings' attitudes and actions, this chapter reveals an imperial dimension as well. It describes places and techniques of imperial politics, such as banqueting and gift exchange, and highlights how the king and his court dealt with diplomacy and jurisdiction. Royal enactments were staged and performed in a ceremonial setting in which clothes and insignia played an important role. But it is not only the official aspects of monarchic rule that are taken into account; attention is also paid to the Great Kings' leisure activities, among which hunting wild game loomed especially large. Finally, as in all societies throughout world history, sex and gender are an integral part of social life that have to be given appropriate consideration.

Section VIII. (The Persian Empire at War: Chapters 79–82) investigates the military dimension. It goes without saying that the empire was the major military superpower of its time. Its ability to mobilize armies with manpower from all over its territory was more than impressive. Moreover, it was the first Near Eastern empire to build up a navy as an independent force that matched the quality and strength of its vast ground forces. All of this comes through in Greek reports of the so‐called Persian Wars, although, ironically, these accounts do not explicitly highlight the empire's organizational and infrastructural strength in mounting a campaign by a combined land and naval force at its outmost western fringes, but instead accentuate the Great Kings' hubris and arrogance. However, Chapters 79–82 do not focus only on the organizational skills of the empire in raising and recruiting vast armies; they also investigate ideology and the specific ways in which the empire and its kings legitimated the imperial war machine.

Section IX (Religion and Worship: Chapters 83–88) deals with cult and belief in the empire. This is a subject with many facets and the six contributions cover a wide range of topics. The section is one in which dissent within modern scholarship looms particularly large. We have made a conscious choice not to harmonize these different voices and opinions but to make plain the diversity of conceptions and reconstructions found in modern research. In this way the reader can get a proper flavor of the controversies surrounding the religion of Achaemenid rulers and their elites, and of the question as to whether their belief system may be described as Zoroastrianism, Mazdaism, or neither. The section also develops a broader perspective, however, by focusing on funerary customs as well as on the diverse practices of worship encountered both within the empire's heartland and across its various regions.

Section X (“Geistesgeschichte,” Science, and Technology: Chapters 89–93) pinpoints intellectual movements, education, and learning, as well as science and techniques. In doing so it touches on a variety of topics. Contributions on Astronomy and Astrology, Physicians and Medicine, and Techniques of Art and Architecture (Chapters 90, 92 and 93) deal with the empire's hard sciences. School, Erudition, and Wisdom (Chapter 89) focuses on the empire's educational system, while the provocatively titled contribution on Persian “Enlightenment” (Chapter 91) draws attention to intellectual accomplishments within the empire that are commonly ascribed only to its western neighbors.

Section XI (The Perspective of Art: Chapters 94–96) introduces the major categories of artistic production in the empire. Alongside statuary, relief sculpture, and minor arts, this includes poetry, music, and dance.

The last two extensive sections of the Companion focus in an innovative way on the empire's Nachleben. This is not just an appendix but a substantive part of the book in its own right, and it demonstrates clearly that the empire survived its downfall. Section XII (Reception and Heritage: Chapters 97–105) is divided into the three subsections: A Modes of Perception, B The Local Heritage, and C Contemporary Perception. Its nine contributions guide the reader through the empire's reception history, starting with Classical Antiquity and ending with the Popular Culture of our own times. Section XIII (History of Research: Chapters 106–110) concludes the Companion with a balanced overview of the ways in which the empire has been investigated by researchers from the major regions of the scientific world and highlights the principal trajectories and Leitfragen of this research through the past 100 years and more.

It will be no surprise that this Companion has quite a long history of its own. From its very beginning, with the initial conceptualization of the project and the first contacts with the publishing house in Berlin in August 2009, through the invitations to contributors and the gathering and editing of the papers, and then on to the eventual publication of the volume, many years have gone by. As always, the editors planned to finish their work much earlier than actually turned out to be possible. There were many reasons for this. On the one hand, the Companion set itself ambitious goals. It was our aim not just to publish a further volume on the Achaemenid Persian Empire but to present an up‐to‐date overview of recent research that included a broad set of topics that had not previously been dealt with in such a comprehensive manner. This is especially true for the chapters on archeological research as well as for those on reception history and history of research. Many contributions to the Companion are therefore not just summaries but the results of very recent research agendas in their own right. On the other hand, the sheer number of contributions (110 in total) created problems of its own that had to be tackled and solved by the editors. But in the end we have made it, and we very much hope that we have been successful in presenting an overview of a kind that has never been available before.

Finally, it is our pleasure to express our gratitude to those people and colleagues without whose help the Companion would not have been possible. This, of course, applies first and foremost to the 83 authors who contributed to the volume. Their competence and forbearance were essential for the result. There are also the various colleagues from the publishing house, whose friendly guidance and assistance we always enjoyed and appreciated. The editors' special thanks go to the editorial assistants at the Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik, Universität Innsbruck, whose skill and patience made a huge contribution to the success of the editorial work: Manuel Pohl, Matthias Hoernes, Katharina Reinstadler, Sabrina Buchebner, Dolores Dollnig, Julian Degen, Florian Posselt and Clemens Steinwender. They would not have been available, of course, without generous financial assistance from the University of Innsbruck, and especially the Dean of the Historisch‐Philologische Fakultät, Prof. Dr. Klaus Eisterer. Dankeschön! Very special thanks also go to Carmen Marcks‐Jacobs, who adapted several plans and maps for publication in the present work. There is a German proverb that may accurately describe the long and often strenuous editorial process of this Companion: “Gut Ding will Weile haben.” We hope that this also applies to the present publication.