History of the Persian Empire

By A. T. Olmstead

Out of a lifetime of study of the ancient Near East, Professor Olmstead has gathered previously unknown material into the story of the life, times, and thought of the Persians, told for the first time from the Persian rather than the traditional Greek point of view.

"The fullest and most reliable presentation of the history of the Persian Empire in existence."—M. Rostovtzeff

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226826332

Book preview

Chapter I

ANCIENT HISTORY

WHEN Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 B.C., the world was old. More significant, the world knew its antiquity. Its scholars had compiled long dynastic lists, and simple addition appeared to prove that kings whose monuments were still visible had ruled more than four millenniums before. Yet earlier were other monarchs, sons of gods and so themselves demigods, whose reigns covered several generations of present-day short-lived men. Even these were preceded, the Egyptians believed, by the gods themselves, who had held sway through long aeons; before the universal flood the Babylonians placed ten kings, the least of whom ruled 18,600 years, the greatest 43,200.

Other peoples knew this flood and told of monarchs—Nannacus of Iconium, for example—who reigned in prediluvian times. The sacred history of the Jews extended through four thousand years; modest as were their figures when compared with those of Babylon and Egypt, they recorded that one prediluvian patriarch almost reached the millennium mark before his death. Greek poets chanted a legendary history which was counted backward to the time when the genealogies of the heroes ascended to the god. Each people and nation, each former city-state, boasted its own creation story with its own local god as creator.

Worship of the remote national past was a special characteristic of these closing days of the earlier Orient. Nabu-naid, last independent king of the Chaldaeans, rejoiced when he unearthed the foundation record of Naram Sin, unseen for thirty-two hundred years—or so his scholars informed him. His inscriptions are filled with references to rulers long since dead, from Ur Nammu and his son Shulgi, founders of the Third Dynasty of Ur, through the great lawgiver Hammurabi and the Kashshite Burnaburiash, to the Assyrian conquerors of almost his own day—a stretch of at least fifteen centuries. Ancient temples were restored, ancient cults revived with their ancient ritual, and his daughter consecrated to an ancient temple office.

Nabu-naid was not the only antiquarian. More than one of his temple restorations had been commenced, and more than one of his cult reforms initiated, by Nebuchadnezzar, who sought in vain early building records his more fortunate successor uncovered, and whose own inscriptions were purposely archaistic, imitating in style and in writing those of the famed Hammurabi.

The cult of antiquity became a passion when the Twenty-sixth (Saite) Dynasty seemed about to restore the Asiatic empire of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Ancient texts were copied and new texts composed on their model—even to style and form of hieroglyph. Contemporary Saite art was a softened copy of Eighteenth Dynasty sculpture. The god Amon, upstart of less than fifteen centuries, lost his place of honor to Neit, the aged mistress of Sais, and almost forgotten deities were again worshiped. Officials borrowed pompous titles from the Old or Middle Kingdom and were buried with ancient ceremony in tombs which repeated the plans, reliefs, and pyramid texts of the Fifth and Sixth dynasties some two thousand years before.

Like forces were at work among the lesser peoples. Josiah’s reform was a national declaration of independence, but its basis was a legal code attributed to the ancient lawgiver Moses. Hope for an immediate deliverance was found in the story of how the national God had saved his people from Egyptian bondage. Revival of the past was the theme of Exilic prophecy and the dream of the Second Isaiah. High as was the degree of literacy, the majority could neither read nor write—but they could listen. By word of mouth, Jewish fathers taught their sons about the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the Promised Land, and that Davidic rule which some bright day would return; by word of mouth, legends of Sargon, Moses, or Khufu filtered down to the common people. Vague as might be the details, all the peoples of western Asia were conscious of a past whose glories shone the brighter as they faded into the remote distance. Conquest by rulers increasingly alien only intensified this worship of the past.

What these peoples thought of their past is a vital element of our history; what that past actually was must form the background of the picture. In essentials their account was true. We may prove that scholars placed in succession dynasties which were actually contemporary and that the beginnings of written history came a thousand years later than they supposed. We no longer believe that gods and demigods ruled through aeons far greater than the span of life today. But we need only substitute for the demigods the unnamed heroes of proto-history to recognize how much of truth is dimly remembered in the legends; for the reign of the gods we substitute prehistory and realize how these men twenty-five centuries ago experienced the same awe we feel in recalling the long ages since man first strode the earth.

True man is first discovered in the Near East. Before the first period of intense rainfall and glaciation, he had begun to chip flints. By these flint implements, we may trace his progress through the second, third, and last of these wide swings of climate, each of enormous duration counted in our years; at the close he was still at the paleolithic, or Old Stone, level of culture. During these long ages he had done more than improve his stone or bone technique: he had evolved the family, which he supported by hunting; he had made a cave home; he propitiated or averted the dangerous powers by magic; and he hoped for life beyond the grave.

Near the end of the paleolithic period, men of our own species were inhabitants of the Near East. Cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs were domesticated; barley, wheat, and flax were cultivated. Thereafter the inhabitants of the Near East were divided, some as wandering nomads, some as settled villagers. While the nomads remained essentially the same, civilization grew in the villages. Walls were built to protect the prosperous from the less fortunate or from the nomads, and a king was chosen to lead the village levies in war. Specialization of function increased as life became more complex. That the soil might give freely its products, there was worship of the powers of fertility, which became defined as true gods and goddesses, of whom the greatest was Mother Earth in her varied manifestations.

To the early and inferior Eurafrican, other races were added. Around the great inland sea the dominant race was Mediterranean—longheaded, slim, of moderate height, with clear olive complexion. Subraces developed: the Egyptian in the Nile Valley, the Semitic in the North Arabian Desert. South of Egypt were Negroids, to the west were Libyans (in whom some would find the earliest Nordics), and in the northern highlands were Armenoids, tall and stout, with sallow complexions and extraordinarily round heads.

Caucasian, spoken today only in the nooks of the Caucasus, was perhaps the basal language of the Near East. Until the first pre-Christian millennium, Elamite was spoken in western Persia; Haldian appeared in Armenia, Hurrian or Mitannian in northern and western Mesopotamia, and Hittite, Carian, Pamphylian, Lycian, and Lydian in Asia Minor. The original Semitic was confined to North Arabia. Some six thousand years ago the first great outpouring of nomads brought a near-Semitic language to Egypt, introduced the Canaanites and Phoenicians to their historic abode, and led the speakers of Akkadian to Babylonia. Into Babylonia also descended the Sumerians, whose use of the horse and chariot, physical characteristics, and agglutinative Turanian speech suggest a Central Asian origin.

Man had learned to hammer pure copper. Later, he discovered that copper might be smelted from ore; soon gold, silver, and lead were secured by the same process. Metal implements made agriculture more fruitful and industry more productive and assured the basis for a more advanced technology. Clay for the hitherto crude pottery was cleansed, while a primitive wheel permitted more regular forms, and slips and paint gave further ornament. Medicine men added to their charms and incantations a knowledge of wild herbs.

A more complicated civilization expanded villages into cities and these into city-states which constant fighting gradually welded into larger units. Royal power increased as more complex living conditions demanded more efficient government.

Toward the close of the fourth millennium, writing was invented in Babylonia and in Egypt. Each started with simple picture-writing, in which the sign meant the word. Each quickly took the next step, employed the sign for any word of like sound, and evolved a purely phonetic writing by syllables. The Babylonians indicated the vowels; the Egyptians did not, but in compensation they worked out a consonantal alphabet to supplement the ideographic and syllabic characters. Egypt retained its picture-writing for monumental inscriptions, while a conventionalized script—the hieratic—grew from the pen and papyrus. Babylonia passed rapidly through a linear form to the cuneiform, best impressed by the stylus on clay tablets.

Writing made possible a narrative history, written when kings of Egypt or Babylonia engaged in war with other peoples. Through their records we may glimpse these cultures, which are still more evident in the material objects they left behind. In essential elements, the picture is identical. Everywhere we find the city-state, an urban center with its surrounding villages and fields. At the head is the king, vicegerent on earth of the local god, and as such partaking of the divine essence. He has direct access to the gods, but there are also priests who perform a ritual prescribed from dim prehistoric times. The land is owned by the divine king who presents the usufruct to his earthly deputy, the actual ruler; tillers of the soil therefore pay the deputy rent and not taxes. A king’s first duty is to protect the god’s worshipers. Success in war is the victory of the local god over his divine rivals; the subjugated gods become his vassals just as the subjugated kings become the vassals of his deputy. In this fashion, city-states gradually merge into kingdoms.

Despite the long narrow Nile Valley in its desert trough, where the only political boundaries must of necessity be upstream and down, at the date writing appeared there were but two kingdoms in Egypt, and Menes quickly united both in the Egypt of history. In Babylonia the whole process of unification, which the elaborate canal system demanded, can be followed in written documents. North Babylonia was occupied by illiterate Semites. The south was the home of Sumerians, advanced in material culture but with lives overshadowed by fear of innumerable malignant spirits whose attacks could be warded off only by a vast magical literature. To the east was the Iranian plateau, where painted pottery showed to perfection the abstract art which was always to dominate these lands. Near the close of the period Elam borrowed Sumerian signs for its language and with them many another element of culture. Mesopotamia proper was in the Babylonian sphere of cultural influence, as was North Syria, which, however, also exhibited peculiar characteristics stemming from Asia Minor. Canaanites and Phoenicians were in closer contact with Egypt; so also were the future Greek lands, already an essential part of the Near East.

With the beginning of the third millennium, the picture becomes clearer. Egyptian and Sumerian tombs alike show an amazing outburst of a fresh vigorous art and an equally amazing use of the precious metals, but everything is devoted to the dead king and his court, whose members, ritually slain, accompany their lord to the afterworld. The cult of the dead king reached its climax in the Egyptian pyramid, which exhausted the land in order that one man might remain ever living. To accomplish this end, the kingdom was overadministered, but, even with this handicap, documents prove that business flourished.

Parallel with the development of administration and business went the beginnings of science. Business and administration demanded reckoning, and this was carried out by the decimal system in Egypt, by a combination of decimal and sexagesimal in Babylonia. Arithmetical problems were solved, and the survey of fields resulted in elementary geometry.

Men so close to the soil, whose outdoor life compelled minute observation of the heavens, could not fail to realize the influence of the celestial bodies. Day and night were distinguished by the sun- and moon-gods; waxing and waning of the moon-god gave the next calendar unit, the month; the sun-god, by his northern journey and return, afforded a still larger unit, the year. Soon it was recognized that sun-and moon-gods did not agree in their calendar, for the sun did not return to his starting-point in twelve of the moon-god’s cycles. Adjustment of the lunar to the solar year was made quite differently by the two peoples. The Egyptians had early learned that the sun’s year is approximately 365 days; they therefore added to the twelve months of thirty days five extra days to form a year whose deviation from the true solar year would not be discovered for several generations. The Babylonians were content to retain the year of twelve months, intercalating a new month when it was observed that the seasons were out of order.

There were other needs to be met, equally practical to the Oriental. Every action might be ominous; data were collected from the activities of the most minute insect, the movements of the stars, the misbirths of women or animals, or from the livers of the sacrificial sheep. Men organized these into elaborate sciences, rigidly logical in classification and interpretation once their postulates were assumed, and so prepared the way for true science. Cosmological speculation was to answer practical questions such as why man, evil, and death came into the world, or why man cannot remain immortal; it resulted in stories of the creation which were deeply to influence later thinkers. Evil spirits or the gods themselves inflicted sickness; hence the medicine man must be invoked. Naturally, he employed spells from hoar antiquity in whose efficacy he half-believed; as a practical psychologist he knew their effect on the minds of his patients, but accumulated observation had given him certain knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants, animal substances, and minerals.

Toward the close of the third millennium, Sargon of Agade united the Babylonian alluvium and extended Semitic control far beyond its natural limits. Sumerian cuneiform was adapted to the phonetically different Semitic Akkadian, and Semitic literature began. Sumerian continued as the sacred language, alone intelligible to the older gods, alone of avail to drive off the evil spirits. Business formula likewise retained the ancient tongue, and so Akkadian was filled with Sumerian loan-words. To meet new needs, scribes prepared interlinear translations, sign lists, and phrase books, and practical grammar was born. Through the impact of the two cultures, thought was stimulated, new ideas came into the world, and there was a fresh outburst of artistic genius.

Then the ancient cultures began to disintegrate, as enemies threatened the borders, and new problems compelled men to think more seriously. Egyptian monarchs realized that mere weight of pyramid could neither assure personal immortality nor protect their poor corpses, and written magic superseded physical bulk in the pyramid texts of the Fifth and Sixth dynasties. Hope of a true immortality cheered the common man. The wise vizier Ptahhotep collected aphorisms from earlier sages and gave instruction in a practical morality. As disintegration increased, Ipuwer meditated on social and economic changes which horrified his conservative soul, dreaming of days to come when the god Re himself would reign in justice. Babylonia, likewise, reconsidered the problem of evil, why the gods are angered, why man does not live forever, and why the just reformer Urukagina met an unjust fate.

Complete disintegration split Egypt into warring local kingdoms which suffered Asiatic invasion; the Guti conquered Babylonia in the first northern folk wandering. Questionings of earlier sages culminated in a tremendous wave of pessimism, represented by the Egyptian’s dialogue with his soul or by the Babylonian Job, where the complaint of the just man unjustly punished is treated with sympathy, yet the conclusion is submission to an all-powerful deity whose will may not be questioned.

Babylonia recovered first under the Third Dynasty of Ur. Ur-Nammu and Shulgi reunited the alluvium and added foreign territory to north and east. The kings were Semites, but the royal inscriptions, the administrative and business documents, and the formal literature almost without exception were in Sumerian. Although this was the last great period of Sumerian literature, it was far from classic; the language showed marked signs of degeneration. Trade flourished, great buildings were erected, and a somewhat conventionalized art was in vogue. The dynasty fell and Elam entered upon its own career of conquest and cultural development, while Babylonia was divided into petty states always at war under newly arrived Amorites.

From the welter emerged Babylon as the capital of the able administrator and lawgiver Hammurabi. Henceforth this upstart city represented to foreigners the Babylonia to which it gave its name. Marduk, its local divinity, was saluted king of the gods; the ancient religious literature was translated from the dying Sumerian and re-written to honor Babylon’s divine lord as creator and king.

Hailed in almost messianic terms by predictions of alleged ancient prophets, Amenemhet reunited Egypt and founded the Twelfth Dynasty. Like Babylon, his capital Thebes was an upstart whose ramgod Amon secured lordship of the land through identification with the sun-god Re. Popular worship turned rather to the old fertility deities, Osiris and his consort Isis, while coffin texts show the first dawning of a belief that men must deal justly on earth if they would be happy in the world to come. Justice in politics was considered of great importance. A king just prior to Amenemhet had improved the older admonitions into an Art of Ruling for his son Merikere. Amenemhet prepared a Machiavellian tractate on kingship for his son Sesostris and another tractate for his vizier; he stressed the isolation of those in positions of responsibility with an equally emphatic—if thoroughly unsentimental—insistence on official regard for the welfare of the ruled. Canaan was made a dependency, and the Phoenicians became willing subject allies. Egyptian art, technically excellent but hardening through convention, found new life among Phoenician merchant-princes.

Minoan Crete was at its prime, its navy swept the sea, and its trade brought enormous wealth; this wealth was devoted to objects of art whose motifs are often borrowed from Egypt but whose perfection makes strong appeal to our modern taste. Writing was in general use; the idea of representing words by pictographs was suggested by Egypt, but the clay tablet was derived from Assyrian merchant colonies in eastern Asia Minor.

This was the great period of scientific advance. Egypt and Babylonia contended for supremacy in mathematics, The Egyptians employed a decimal system and expressed fractions by continuous subdivision. To the decimal system the Babylonians added the sexagesimal for the higher units and broke up the complex fractions into subdivisions of sixty which made easier computation. Egyptians knew squares and square roots and solved in textbooks complicated problems of proportion and arithmetical progression. Babylonians prepared handy reference tables for multiplication and division, squares and cubes, square and cube roots.

It was in algebra and geometry, however, that the most spectacular advances were made. Babylonians discovered the theorem for the right-angled triangle we name from Pythagoras, as well as two simpler methods which result in only a slight error. They had learned that similar right triangles have the sides about the right angles proportional; they had divided the triangle into equal parts; they could compute the areas of rectangles, right-angled triangles, and one form of trapezium. More irregular surfaces were broken up into forms they were able to calculate. They had found the area of a circle chord and approximated pi as three. Without the aid of algebraic formulas, they solved problems by methods essentially algebraic, and each step can be represented by a modern formula. They employed the equivalent of the quadratic equation and stopped just short of the binomial theorem.

Like the Babylonians, the Egyptians divided the triangle and calculated its area as they did the trapezium with parallel sides. Their approximation of pi as eight-ninths of the diameter (or, as we should say, 3.1605), was more accurate than the Babylonian, and with it they secured the areas of circles and the volumes of cylinders or hemispheres. They calculated the frustrum of a square pyramid, and what we call simultaneous quadratic equations they solved by false position.

Babylonian astronomers, not yet sufficiently freed from astrology to utilize the new mathematics, were nevertheless making observations and preparing a terminology. Often the constellations bore names familiar today: the Twins, the Snake, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Wolf, the Eagle, the Fish, Capricorn. Orion, the True Shepherd of Heaven, kept to their paths the wandering sheep (the planets), each identified with a god or goddess. The path of the sun-god was charted through the twelve constellations which were to give their names to our zodiac. His eclipses were ominous, but those of the moon-god were more numerous and more often observed; the four segments of the moon’s face were assigned to Babylon and to three neighbor-states, and eclipse of the appropriate segment portended evil to that land.

Other omen collections also contributed to coming science. More than by the stars, the fate of kings and nations was determined by the liver of the sacrificed sheep; models and drawings of the liver can be described only by the Latin terminology of modern anatomy. Long lists, roughly classified, were prepared of animals, plants, and stones. Plant lists begin with the grasses, then the rushes, then other groups closely corresponding to our families; we may distinguish species and varieties through the careful listing of the various parts. Sex in the date palm had long been recognized, and the terms male and female were applied to other plants. Classification systems employed such headings as men, domesticated animals, wild animals (including serpents, worms, frogs, and the like), fish, and birds.

Lists of plants were prepared generally for medical use. In the medical texts proper, there remain plentiful traces of magic, but there is also empirical knowledge. Symptoms of disease are carefully described in regular order from head to feet; we can identify the majority of the diseases. Poulticing, hot applications, massage, suppositories, and the catheter are employed. Drugs are usually taken internally; mercury, antimony, arsenic, sulphur, and animal fats are often prescribed, but in general the same plants are drawn upon that we find in the modern pharmacopoeia. Egyptian medical texts were much the same, but in a surgical textbook the attitude is quite scientific. Each case is given careful diagnosis, even if no cure is possible; if the case can or may be cured, suggestions for treatment follow. Wounds are probed by the fingers; cauterization is by the fire drill. In his treatment, the Egyptian surgeon uses absorbent lint, linen swabs and plugs, bandages and splints; wounds are brought together by tape or stitching. He describes the various parts of the body in such a fashion that we can see he is still working out his terminology, but he has made astonishing discoveries. He has recognized the brain and its convolutions, he knows that brain and spinal cord control the nervous system, and he suspects localization of function in the brain. He knows the heart is a pump; he takes the pulse; he has almost discovered the circulation of the blood.

Meanwhile, all unnoticed by the cultured peoples, a rude halfnomad Semite at the Egyptian mines in Sinai had introduced an invention of infinite promise for the future. Too ignorant to learn the complicated hieroglyphic of the Egyptians, but knowing that they employed a consonantal alphabet to supplement the syllabic and ideographic signs, he wondered why no one had realized the beautiful simplicity of a purely alphabetic writing. To a few common Egyptian signs he gave a name in his native Canaanite and took the first consonantal sound as its phonetic value. He scratched a few short sentences in his Canaanite dialect on the rocks of Sinai, and the consonantal alphabet was in use.

During the third millennium there lived on the broad plains of southern Russia a group of Nordics who spoke a primitive Indo-European language. At the head of each tribe was a king, chosen from the god-born family and assisted by the council of elders, although important decisions—war, peace, and the choice of a new ruler—were acclaimed by the fighting men, the people in arms. While to a degree they cultivated the soil, they were essentially half-nomads whose chief delight was in war. Their horses allowed free movement on their raids; their families were carried in the ancestor of the covered wagon. They settled, not in open villages, but in camps surrounded by quadrangular earthen ramparts. A highly developed technology and no mean art was devoted especially to weapons.

Before the end of the millennium, they began to move out—west, south, and east. While Achaeans entered Greece, other Aryans were on their way to Italy, and a brilliant metal culture appeared in Hungary and Bohemia. Asia Minor was overrun, and the former individual states gradually coalesced into a mighty Hittite empire. No Hittite king bore an Indo-European name, which is mute witness to incorporation of the immigrants with older elements whose native language persisted in the sacred ritual. In an adaptation of the cuneiform, we may read the first Indo-European language to be written. Mitanni was conquered by an aristocracy with Indo-Iranian names, though they took over the local language of their subjects; they worshiped such Indo-Iranian gods as Mithra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatya twins. Egyptian tomb paintings show them to be pure Nordics, whose descendants remain as Iranian-speaking Nordic Kurds. Other Indo-Iranians penetrated Syria and Canaan and ruled as petty kings over cities to be made famous by our Bible. Hammurabi’s descendants were supplanted by Kashshites, who perhaps spoke a Caucasian language, though names of men and gods suggest an Aryan element. Soon they adopted the native Akkadian, and with it Babylonian culture, their only innovation being a feudal regime with charters of immunity, imposed on the older manorial system.

Aryan elements were discovered among the Hyksos, who founded a great empire in Syria and for many years held Egypt. The effort to expel them led the Eighteenth Dynasty into Asia and to the establishment of an empire. To original Mediterranean and Semitic elements, Syria had already added many from the Nile and the Euphrates; Egyptian cultural influence now grew much stronger. Anatolian elements entered with the Hittite conquest of North Syria, but the Akkadian of Babylonia was employed as the international language of diplomacy and commerce throughout the Near East. Civilization had become international in character.

The way was prepared for Ikhnaton, with his gospel of a loving god whose fatherly care extended to all peoples, and also with his intolerant monotheism. All thought was in flux. Talented artists hailed release from century-old shackles of convention and produced works of outstanding power and beauty; the mediocre artist turned out freakish modern caricatures.

Immersed in glorious dreams of universal religion, Ikhnaton permitted the empire to disintegrate. Under the influence of selfish Amon priests, the boy Tut-ankh-Amon restored the older cults and condemned the gracious teaching of the heretic, but the Egyptian Empire in Syria was not restored. Seti and Ramses II of the next dynasty recovered part of the loss, but the wars against the Hittites ended with Syria being divided between the rivals. Even the small portion thus far retained was soon lost, and Egypt ceased to be reckoned a first-class power. More and more the land fell into the hands of the priests, who ultimately secured the kingship and made Egypt a true theocracy.

New peoples once again appeared on the scene. From the North Arabian Desert came Aramaeans, who settled the whole border from Canaan to Babylonia. As a rule they continued to speak Aramaic, but a part of them—the Hebrews—learned the lip of Canaan. At first, the Hebrews were divided into numerous small warring tribes, but, as they gradually conquered the Canaanite cities, they absorbed something of the attenuated Canaanite culture which had survived their inroads. Acquisition of material culture was good; not so pleasant was the adaptation of their narrow, barbarous, but relatively pure desert religion to the degenerate cult of the fertility powers.

Pressure from new peoples in central and southeastern Europe was driving on fresh hordes of Aryans. Dorians were pushing south the older Indo-European-speaking Greeks and breaking up the far-flung Mycenaean empire which had renewed Minoan relations with Egypt. The last Minoan remnants were destroyed. Achaeans were pressed to the west coast of Asia Minor, where they met the Hittites and also the Phrygians, Aryans who had crossed the Hellespont and chosen the well-watered, well-forested uplands in the west-central interior. Other Achaeans reached Cyprus, to find half the island already colonized by Phoenicians. A last desperate effort of Mycenae captured Phrygian Troy, whose epic was to inspire later generations to fresh conquests in Asia; but the effort destroyed the empire. Ionians followed and married Anatolian wives. The once mighty Hittite empire disappeared in a chaos of tiny states.

Bands of homeless men, whether of Minoan or of Aryan tradition, united, and the wave rolled on over the sea or through Syria to Egypt, where Merneptah and Ramses III broke its force. Achaeans returned home or sailed away to Cyprus, while Silicians and Sardinians transferred their names to western islands; Etruscans brought to primitive Italians a rich oriental culture which was strongly to influence Rome; and Philistines settled that Palestine to which they gave their name.

Crushed between invaders from sea and desert, the Canaanites lost their freedom. For the moment, the Philistines were all-powerful; then foreign pressure and prophetic urging brought union to the Hebrew tribes. Saul’s kingdom was a failure, but David made good the union, and Solomon expanded it into a small empire whose administration copied the greater empires and whose royal shrine was equally foreign. His death marked the division into Israel and Judah; Israel was the greater and often held Judah as vassal, while Jerusalem and its temple were in ruins.

Sidonian traders invaded the Aegean and exchanged goods and words with the backward Greeks. They brought also a more precious gift: the alphabet, which the Greeks improved. Since the alphabet as borrowed had no characters to represent the vowels, the Greeks used some of the consonantal signs which stood for sounds not present in their tongue to write the important Indo-European vowels. In turn, the alphabet was transmitted to Asia Minor; the Greek alphabet had no problems for the Indo-European Phrygians, but Lydians, Lycians, and Carians found it necessary to invent new characters for native sounds. As the Greeks regained sea power, the Phoenicians abandoned the Aegean, and a race for the Mediterranean began, ending with Phoenician control of northern Africa and Spain.

Through long centuries Assyria had remained a second-rate power, often subject to Babylonia or Mitanni. In the general decline toward the end of the second millennium, Assyria extended its boundaries. After two periods of weakness—the second of which permitted the Jews to establish the Davidic kingdom—it was now the great world empire. Babylonia was definitely a vassal, Syria was invaded, and Jehu of Israel was forced to submit. In the wars with more important states, a few punitive expeditions against Parsua and the Medes passed with little notice.

For a few years Assyria was checked by Haldia, which enjoyed brief pre-eminence as the great world power. The moment of respite gave opportunity for a remarkable development in Hebrew religion. In essence, it was a reaction of the desert elements against civilization. The preaching of Elijah and Elisha culminated in the bloody reforms of Jehu, and thereafter Israel acknowledged no national god but Yahweh. The methods of the reform and its unsavory results could not satisfy finer spirits, and a noble company of prophets protested against Canaanite elements in the cult; with equal fervor, they protested against social injustice. Amos preached unmitigated doom, Hosea proclaimed the loving-kindness of Yahweh, but Isaiah again predicted destruction—which was, indeed, fulfilled for Israel. Sennacherib’s invasion opened the eyes of Isaiah, who henceforth proclaimed the inviolability of Jerusalem, Yahweh’s temple. However, Judah remained an Assyrian dependency.

The rise of Assyria marked a new era in the government of dependencies. Predecessors had been content with vassal states, controlled at best by a resident and a few soldiers; Assyria reduced the conquered areas to provinces whose administrators were kept in close touch with the central government by means of frequent letters. Rebels were transported to far-off lands where their future welfare depended on loyalty to their new masters; the provincials were united in worship of the national god Ashur and of the divine king.

Though based largely on the Babylonian, Assyrian culture was thoroughly eclectic in character. In the great cities, whether royal capitals or cities free by charter, a varied life of great complexity might be seen. Phoenicians and Aramaeans utilized to the full the trade opportunities of a wide empire, and Ishtar heads were employed as coins. Royal libraries were crammed with copies of ancient Babylonian tablets, but the royal annals were original productions of Assyrian historians. Alongside the cuneiform, Aramaic with its more convenient alphabet was coming into use. Scientific advance is indicated by a textbook on glazes, by letters from astronomers who await lunar eclipses at the full moon and solar eclipses at the new, and by a nineteen-year cycle of intercalated months, probably from the era of Nabu-nasir. Assyrian reliefs present battles, palace life, and the hunt most vividly, and their representations of animals have seldom been surpassed.

Babylon revolted under the Chaldaeans, and Assyria fell to an alliance of Chaldaeans and Medes. There were now four great world powers. Egypt had found new life under the Saites, who ruled by the aid of Greek and Carian mercenaries and allowed Greeks to live their own lives in their own city of Naucratis. Phrygia’s successor, Lydia, rich in Pactolus gold, reduced the Greek coastal cities. The merging of seaboard and inland trade was mutually profitable, and, with the wealth thus secured from Egypt and the Black Sea, the Ionians laid the basis for the first brilliant flowering of Greek civilization. Nabopolassar reconstructed Babylonian administration and business practice to such effect that his reforms dominated the country as long as cuneiform remained in use. Babylon was rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar and became the world’s metropolis. Jerusalem was destroyed and the rebels led into exile as Jeremiah and Ezekiel had foretold; Judaism came into being.

Hitherto there had been many changes in dynasty and many shifts in dominant peoples, but throughout there had been definite interrelation of cultures, and cultural evolution had followed much the same pattern in each segment of the Near East. If the Orient had repeatedly been invaded from without, it had always stamped its own characteristics upon the newcomers. To contemporaries, Iranian Media might appear only the fourth great oriental empire, and the inquisitive Greeks might seem, like their Minoan and Mycenaean predecessors, mere students of the ancient oriental cultures. But events were soon to prove that, with the appearance of Iranians and Greeks on the stage, the Near East had entered its modern history.

Chapter II

IRANIAN ORIGINS

PREHISTORIC IRAN

LONG before the great plateau was called Iran, it was well populated. Obsidian flakes have been found under the alluvial deposits from the last glacial period, while men of the late Stone Age left their crude flint implements in the open. By the fifth pre-Christian millennium, numerous tiny hamlets sheltered a peaceful agricultural population, which satisfied its aesthetic instincts through fine wheel-made pots decorated with superb painting; an elaborate though lively conventionalization of native flora and fauna betrayed more interest in beauty of design than in exact representation and set the pattern for all subsequent art on the plateau. Burned settlements and changes in pottery styles indicate population shifts.¹ Only Elam on the west affords us writing and, therefore, history,² though tablets from the middle of the plateau inscribed in Elamite pictographs³ suggest that the same language was spoken there as at Susa, Elam’s most important city.

For further information on these early peoples, we turn to the Videvdat, the Antidemonic Law. Although its form as it appears in the Avesta was written down shortly before our own era, it still retains the essential features of this prehistoric culture.⁴ At first view, it is a pleasant world in which we meet the house master richly endowed with cattle, fodder, hound, wife, child, fire, milk, and all good things, with grain, grass, and trees bearing every variety of fruit. Waste lands were irrigated by the underground qanat, and there was increase of flocks and herds and plenty of natural fertilizer. But to obtain these blessings hard work was demanded: sowing and planting and laborious construction of the underground water channels. It was a world in which there was no place for the slothful.⁵

We hear of skins in use for clothing or of woven cloth, of tents made of felt such as those yet found in Central Asia, and of houses of wood like those which have left the ash mounds in the Urumia plain.⁶ We might rhapsodize over the high position of the dog, elsewhere in the Orient degraded and unclean, but on the plateau treated as an honored member of the family with definite responsibilities and corresponding rewards.⁷ We might prepare to rejoice with the peasants when the long snowbound winter was over and the birds began to fly, the plants to spring up, the torrents to flow down the hills, and the winds to dry the earth,⁸ but we should completely misunderstand their mood.

EARLY RELIGIONS

Physically, the inhabitants belonged to their own subdivision of the Mediterranean race.⁹ Culturally, they were more akin to the peoples of Central Asia, especially in their religious thinking. Greek writers tell us something of the culture of primitive peoples who still survived to their day along the southern shore of the Black Sea; in the disposal of their dead in particular, they present strange analogies to the practices of the Antidemonic Law.

For example, among the Derbices, men over seventy were killed and eaten by their kinsfolk, and old women were strangled and buried; men so unfortunate as to die before seventy were merely inhumed. Among the Caspians, who gave their name to the sea formerly called Hyrcanian,¹⁰ those over seventy were starved. Corpses were exposed in a desert place and observed. If carried from the bier by vultures, the dead were considered most fortunate, less so if taken by wild beasts or dogs; but it was the height of misfortune if the bodies remained untouched.¹¹ In Bactria, farther east, equally disgusting practices continued until Alexander’s invasion. The sick and aged were thrown while still alive to waiting dogs called in their language burial details. Piles of bones within the walls testified to burial customs quite as grim.¹² To understand the reason for these practices, set out in all their grisly minutiae by the Antidemonic Law, we must turn to read the still vaster magical literature of the Sumerians, immigrants into Babylonia from Central Asia, or the modern accounts of the Shamanism found to this day in the same regions.

To Magian thinking in its earliest form, there were no true gods, only a numberless horde of evil demons who constantly threatened the lives of the unhappy peasants and whose malign attacks could be prevented only by rites of aversion. Their home was in the north, from which more human enemies also threatened; after the Iranian conquest of Iran we are not surprised to find the Aryan storm-god Indra included among these demons.¹³ As in Babylonia, the majority of the fiends were without name: Perish, demon fiend! Perish, demon tribe! Perish, demon-created! Perish, demon-begotten! In the north shall you perish! Others personify the various forms of illness: Thee, Sickness, I ban; thee, Death, I ban; thee, Fever, I ban; thee, Evil Eye, I ban, and so on through a long series.¹⁴ Many more can be driven away if the worshiper knows the demon’s names;¹⁵ of these, the most dangerous is Aeshma, Drunkenness. One demon prohibits rain;¹⁶ there are fiends who seize the man’s incautiously trimmed hair and pared nails and from them raise lice to eat the grain and clothing.¹⁷

Chief of all the demons was Angra Mainyu, the Evil Spirit without qualification, the creator of all things evil and of noxious animals; for this reason the Magi accumulated high merit by killing the earthly representatives of these evil spirits—ants, snakes, creeping things, frogs, and birds—by stopping up their burrows and destroying their homes.¹⁸ It is also through the incantations of the Magi, fortified by perfumes and the magic furrow,¹⁹ that man was freed from his ailments and his uncleanness.

But powerful as was the Evil Spirit and his hordes of demons, in daily life the most feared was the Nasu Druj, the Corpse Fiend, to whom the greater part of the Antidemonic Law refers. Burial or cremation of the dead might be practiced by neighbors or enemies, but such easy disposal was not for the followers of the Magi. Despite all precautions, it was inevitable that the Corpse Fiend should envelop the living with her corruption, infection, and pollution.²⁰ From the very instant when breath left the body, the corpse was unclean, for the Corpse Fiend hovered over to injure the survivors. Only by the most rigid observance of the prescribed ritual was there safety: the dead must not pollute holy earth or water; corpses must be exposed, carefully tied down by feet and hair, on the highest points of land where they could be devoured by dogs and vultures. Only when the bones had been thus freed from all dead and therefore dangerous matter might they be collected in an ossuary (astodan) with holes to permit the dead man still to look upon the sun.²¹ This taint of the charnel-house permeates the whole later Zoroastrian literature and, with the host of malignant spirits, makes it depressing reading.²²

THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES

The majority of the Aryans left their homes in southern Russia for the plains of Central Asia; only the near-Iranian Scyths and a few genuine Aryans remained there. The Hyrcanians settled along the northern slope of Alborz and the coastal plain below, south of the sea to which they gave their name. This plain, slightly below sea-level and swept by torrential rains up to sixty inches per year, was semitropical, but dense forests on the slopes sheltered the lion and tiger for hunting. Other Iranians ascended the plateau, rimmed in by mountains on every side. To the west towered Zagros; on the north Alborz. Eastward the plateau rose steadily to the roof of the world in the Himalayas, while a lower range shut off the southern ocean. Within this rim, lesser ranges separated the subdivisions, which varied only to the degree in which the common elements in them—mountain, desert, and fertile strip—were combined.

In the center were great deserts, difficult to traverse and covered in part by salt lakes, in part by brownish-red, salt-impregnated soil. Equally barren were the mountains, generally devoid of trees or even shrubs. Between mountain and desert was good soil, needing only water—but water was a rare arid precious treasure. If the mountains shut off potential enemies, they also shut off the rains; only through such passes as that between Resht and Qazvin could a few clouds penetrate. Here the rainfall might reach eight inches; elsewhere, as at Isfahan, four inches or less. Nowhere was this rainfall sufficient to bring crops to maturity, but melting snows fortunately ran down from the barrier mountains.

During the greater portion of the year, the sun blazed with intense heat from a cloudless sky. By September the air cooled a trifle; by November the nights were uncomfortably cool. Autumn rains were followed by mists and snows and finally fierce blizzards, creeping down lower and lower from the mountains until they reached the plain. The midday sun, when seen, remained hot, and thawed out sufferers frozen by night. By January the passes were filled, and villages hidden in the snows were isolated for the winter. In spring the snows melted almost without warning. Their waters poured down the bare slopes, destroying the trails and once more isolating the villagers. The stream beds were filled with roaring waters, each precious drop utilized by the irrigation ditches, until again the beds were dry. Thereafter water was sought in the seemingly dry hills; lest the precious fluid be lost by evaporation, it had to be carried underground in qanats. Thus, at tremendous expenditure of time and labor, a few more square feet of former desert were won for cultivation.

This eternal search for water left a permanent impress on the Persian mind. In the sacred Avesta, hymning Anahita, goddess of a thousand rills, and in later poetry, singing the joy of flowing stream and garden, the theme is constantly repeated. To strangers from happier lands, the rivers may appear insignificant, the rows of poplars, cypresses, and plane trees scant, the garden paradise sickly; the contrast with desert, bare plain, and snow-capped peaks is needed to render them beautiful.

CONQUEST BY NORTHERN HORDES

Archeology shows the first trace of the northerner when the fine, painted pottery of the earliest inhabitants is supplanted by a better-made pottery of a funereal black. Judging from their skulls, Nordic tribes make their appearance. Fresh hordes continue to drift down. A great fortified structure is built at Damghan; it is assaulted and taken. The bodies of the men who defended this fortress, with those of their wives and children, have been found by the excavator on the spot where they perished.²³

Episodes from the conquest of Iran, well mixed with good Aryan mythology, are found in the earliest sections of the Yashts;²⁴ there we read the first version of the Persian traditional history, best known to the West through the magnificent epic, the Shah Nameh or Book of Kings, produced by the great Moslem poet Firdausi.

The story begins with Gaya Maretan (Gayomarth), Mortal Man, who was ancestor of the Aryan people.²⁵ Next comes Haoshyaha (Hosheng), the first king of the Paradata (Peshdadyan) dynasty, who from a mount to the east named Hara conquered the demons of Mazana and the fiends of Varena.²⁶ This is generally considered a reminiscence of the subjugation of the spirit worshipers of Varkana or Hyrcania (later Mazandaran). However this may be, we do know that Zadrakarta,²⁷ the capital of Hyrcania in Iranian days, was probably located on a mound whose partial excavation has shown repeated settlements of Iranians over native sites of a still earlier period.²⁸

Next to Haoshyaha followed Yima, the good shepherd, son of Vivahvant, who first pressed out the sacred haoma juice.²⁹ In Yima’s reign there was neither cold nor heat, neither old age nor death, for he brought to man immortality. He also freed man from hunger and thirst, teaching the food animals what they should eat and preventing the plants from drying up. But although he lived on the sacred mount Hukairya near the sea Vouru-kasha, the Iranian Paradise, he sinned—Zoroaster later was to declare that his sin consisted in giving to men flesh of the cattle to eat³⁰—and Yima himself was sawed asunder by his wicked brother Spityura.³¹ Another brother, however, Takhma Urupa, succeeded in riding over the earth for thirty years the evil spirit, Angra Mainyu, who took the form of a horse.³²

At this time Azi Dahaka, the three-headed, three-mouthed, six-eyed dragon, with the thousand senses, carried off Yima’s two beautiful daughters and made them his wives; the dragon was killed and the ladies were rescued by Thraetaona (Feridun), son of Athwya, from Varena, now safely Aryan.³³ A second exploit of the hero Thraetaona was related, telling how he hurled into the air the wise seaman Paurva in the guise of a vulture.³⁴

Keresaspa, son of Sama, was a hero who avenged the death of his brother Urvakhshaya, the judge and lawgiver, by killing the assassin Hitaspa and carrying home the corpse in his own chariot. To him also was attributed the slaughter of various enemies both human and monster, like the golden-heeled Gandareva, who lived in the sea Vouru-kasha, and the poisonous yellow sea serpent on whose broad back Keresaspa unwittingly cooked his meal.³⁵ Hitaspa bears a good Iranian name; perhaps he was an enemy nomad, a Turanian.

The next enemy mentioned is also a Turanian: Frangrasyan (Afrasiab), who from his cleft in the earth swam across Vouru-kasha in a vain attempt to steal the Awful Royal Glory which conferred sovereignty. Captured and bound by a loyal vassal, he was brought to be slain by the Kavi Haosravah (Kai Khosrau).³⁶

Thus the Kavis, the local kinglets, enter the traditional history. Of the eight members of the dynasty listed,³⁷ we learn more only of the founder Kavi Kavata (Kai Kobad), of his son Kavi Usan (Kai Kaus), possesser of stallions and camels and controller of the ship-bearing sea, and of Kavi Haosravah (Kai Khosrau), who came from the salt sea Chaechasta (Lake Urumia), subdued the Aryan lands, and became a great

Reviews for History of the Persian Empire

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Now dated and always tendentious, but fascinating as written from a frankly pro-Persian viewpoint that sees the Greeks as the dangerous rabble they no doubt were(to the Persians)