00:00
Hey there, history lovers!
00:02
Spring, 3.30 BC, Persepolis, the heart of the biggest empire on earth, is on fire. Before the flames, Alexander's men hauled out the treasure on some 10,000 pairs of mules and 5,000 camels. That's not a moving truck, that's a moving traffic jam. Tonight we follow the Persians from a small mountain tribe to masters of the world and all the way to that fiery night.
00:27
Big thanks to Jakob for suggesting this topic. Hit like and tell me in the comments. Where in the world are you watching from? So let's rewind the clock.
00:35
Before the palaces, before the treasure, and long before the mules, the Persians were just one more group of herders looking for decent pasture, and nobody in the ancient world would have bet a single sheep on them becoming anything more.
00:49
To find where they came from, we need to go back much further than any Persian king, to a time when the word Persian did not yet mean anything at all. The Persians and their close cousins the Medes spoke Iranian languages, and those languages belonged to the huge Indo-European family.
01:05
That family is the same one that later gave us Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, the Germanic and Slavic tongues, and eventually English. So if you have ever wondered why the old Persian word for Father Pitar sounds suspiciously like the Latin Peta, this is the reason. Linguists love this kind of thing, and they have spent about 200 years building family trees of words, which is a very quiet hobby, but a surprisingly revealing one. Within that big family, the Iranian languages sit right next to the Indo-Aryan languages of ancient India.
01:35
The oldest Iranian texts, the Avestan hymns linked to the Prophet Zarathustra, are so close to the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda that a reader of one can often guess at the meaning of the other, a bit like a Spaniard reading Portuguese road signs. Both groups even called themselves by a similar name Arya, roughly meaning the noble ones or our people. Much later, that self-name would give the country of Iran its name, which means more or less the land of the Aryans. The word has had a very unfortunate career in modern times, but in its original setting it was simply what these people called themselves, the way any group tends to call itself the good guys.
02:11
The ancestors of these speakers did not begin on the Iranian plateau. Most scholars place their earlier home on the steppes of Central Asia and the lands around them, the vast grassy belt that runs from the area north of the Black Sea all the way to the borders of China. There, in the Bronze Age, people lived from cattle, sheep and, above all, horses.
02:31
Archaeologists connect them, cautiously, with what they call the Andronovo culture, a widespread of settlements, burials and pottery across the steppe. The steppe was a place where wealth walked on four legs and where a family's fortune could literally wander off overnight if nobody was watching the herd.
02:49
At some point in the second millennium BC, groups of these people began moving south, off the steppes and onto the Iranian plateau.
02:57
This was not one great march with banners and a leader pointing heroically at the horizon. It was more likely a slow drift over generations, clan by clan, herd by herd, following grass, water and opportunity.
03:11
Some groups ended up in what is now Afghanistan and northern India and others settled across what is now Iran.
03:18
One fascinating clue to this movement comes from far to the west. Around 1380 BC, a treaty between the Hittites and the Kingdom of Mitanni in northern Syria calls on gods named Mitra, Varuna and Indra, who are unmistakably Indo-Aryan gods.
03:34
Somebody speaking a language related to Sanskrit had clearly wandered a very long way from home and was signing international treaties about it. Historians argue, politely and endlessly, about how exactly the Iranians arrived. Some point to a new kind of grey pottery that appears in western Iran in the later second millennium BC and suggest it marks the newcomers. Others warn that pots do not speak and that a change in fashion for dishes does not necessarily mean a change in population.
04:02
After all, if archaeologists 3,000 years from now find a lot of Swedish furniture in your house, they should not assume you are Swedish. What is clear is that by the start of the first millennium BC, Iranian-speaking peoples were well established on the plateau, living alongside much older local populations who had been there for thousands of years.
04:21
Now, the Iranian plateau is not exactly a gentle meadow. It is a high, dry table land ringed by mountains, with the Zagros range running down its western side like a long stone wall and great salt desert sitting in the middle. Summers can be scorching, winters in the mountains can be brutal, and good farmland is found mostly in valleys and along the foot of the hills.
04:43
For people who lived from flocks, this was workable. They could graze their animals in the high valleys in summer and bring them down to warmer lowlands in winter, a way of life that some groups in Iran still follow today.
04:55
It was not a lifestyle that left much room for marble statues or fancy libraries, which is one reason these early Iranians left almost no written records of their own. Unfortunately for us, herders tend to carry everything they own and clay tablets are not on the list. So how do we know anything about them at all? The answer, rather ironically, is that we learn about the early Persians and Medes from the people who are busy attacking them. Those people were the Assyrians. The Assyrian kingdom, centred on the Tigris in what is now northern Iraq, was the great military power of the Near East in the early first millennium BC.
05:30
Assyrian kings went on campaign almost every year and they had their scribes write up the results in long, detailed annals. These texts are not modest. They tend to list how many cities the king took, how much tribute he collected, how many horses he brought home, and how thoroughly he impressed everyone who saw him.
05:48
If the Assyrian annals were a social media feed, every single post would be a victory selfie. But for historians, this boasting is pure gold because the scribes also wrote down the names of the peoples and places their kings ran into, including in the mountains to the east.
06:04
The first time we meet the name of the Persians, it appears in the annals of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III.
06:10
In 843 BC, his records mention a land called Paswar, somewhere in the Zagros Mountains.
06:17
Most scholars connect this name with the Persians, and the name itself is usually linked to an old Iranian word that may have meant something like border people or perhaps people of the edge. A few years later, in 835 BC, the records of the same king mention another group, the Amadai, and this is the first appearance of the Medes in history.
06:36
Both peoples, in other words, enter the written record as entries on an Assyrian to-do list, which is not the most glamorous debut, but it is a debut. These early mentions do not describe great kingdoms. In the Assyrian texts, Paswa and the Median lands look like patchworks of small territories, each run by its own local chief or city lord.
06:57
The Assyrian kings dealt with them one by one, collecting tribute, especially horses, which the mountain peoples were famous for.
07:04
Assyria had a permanent appetite for horses because chariots and cavalry do not run on enthusiasm alone.
07:11
Later Assyrian kings like Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II campaigned in the Zagros again and again, sometimes turning parts of the region into Assyrian provinces and sometimes simply returning home with long lines of animals and a long list of names.
07:25
There is one puzzle here that historians still discuss. The Pasua of the Assyrian annals seems to have been in the central Zagros, quite far north of the region we later know as Persia proper, which lies in the southwest of modern Iran. So did the Persians move south over time, or were there several groups with similar names in different places?
07:45
Many scholars think that at least part of the Persian population did gradually shift southward during the early first millennium BC. Others are more careful and say we simply cannot tell whether the Paswar of the north and the Persians of the south were exactly the same people. Ancient names have a habit of wandering around maps, which is understandable, since the people carrying them were wandering too. Either way, over time the Persians settled in a region called Parsa. which the Greeks would later call Persis, and which today is the Iranian province of Fars. If the word Fars sounds familiar, that is because it is simply the later form of Parsa, and it also gives us Farsi, the name of the Persian language.
08:24
So the Persians name themselves after the land, or the land after themselves, and both names have stuck around for nearly 3,000 years, which is impressive brand loyalty by any standard. Fers is a region of mountain ridges and fertile valleys in the southern Zagros with rivers that run through wide plains where farming is possible and higher pastures for animals. It is about as far from the sea as you can comfortably get while still technically being near the Persian Gulf and it is protected by mountains on most sides.
08:54
For a small people trying to survive in a dangerous neighbourhood, it was not a bad place to settle. It was remote enough to be left alone most of the time, but not so remote that nothing interesting ever happened.
09:05
And here is the crucial point. The Persians did not move into an empty land. Fars was part of the world of Elam, one of the oldest civilisations on earth. ilam deserves a moment of attention because it is one of the great forgotten civilisations of the ancient world it stretched across what is now south-western iran from the lowland plain of khuzestan around the city of susa up into the highlands of faz Elamite cities were already flourishing in the 4th millennium BC. At roughly the same time as the first cities of Mesopotamia, the Elamites developed their own early writing system which scholars call Proto-Elemite around 3100 BC and later another script called Linear Elamite These scripts have resisted full decipherment for a very long time and only in recent years have researchers made real progress on Linear Elamite.
09:55
So for most of modern history, a major civilization sat right there in the archaeological record, politely refusing to explain itself.
10:03
The Elamites spoke a language that is not related to any other known language. It is not Indo-European, not Semitic, not Sumerian, nothing.
10:12
It is what linguists call an isolate, a language with no living relatives, a bit like that one guest at a family wedding who knows nobody and somehow still ends up dancing the longest. Over the centuries the Elamites built temples, palaces and, most famously, the Great Ziggurat of Chogha-Zanbil, raised in the 13th century BC by King Untash-Napirisha. It still stands today, a huge stepped temple tower of baked brick in the plains of Khuzestan, and it is one of the best preserved ziggurats anywhere. Elam's history was a long and complicated relationship with Mesopotamia.
10:46
Elamite kings fought Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians, sometimes winning spectacularly.
10:53
In the 12th century BC, an Elamite king raided Babylon and carried off a pile of famous monuments to Susa, including the Stele of Hammurabi with its law code. That is why this most famous of Babylonian monuments was dug up not in Babylon but in Susa. by French archaeologists in 1901 and why it now stands in the Louvre in Paris.
11:14
The Elamites, it seems, had a habit of collecting other people's national treasures, which is a tradition some later museums would continue enthusiastically. Elam had two main parts. The lowland around Susa was closely tied to Mesopotamia, with cities, canals and a busy political life. The highland part around the city of Anshan in Fars was more remote and mountainous. Elamite kings often carried the title King of Anshan and Susa, showing that they saw these two centres as the twin pillars of their realm. And it is in that highland zone around Anshan that the newcomers from the Iranian world arrived and settled down.
11:50
The site of ancient Anshan was identified only in the early 1970s. It lies at a place called Torley Malion, a large mound in a fertile plain in Fars, not far from where Persepolis would later be built.
12:02
A team led by the American archaeologist William Sumner from the University of Pennsylvania excavated there, and inscribed bricks confirmed that this was indeed Anshan.
12:12
At its height, in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC, Anshan was a big city with walls enclosing about 200 hectares.
12:19
By the early first millennium BC, however, it seems to have shrunk dramatically, and much of the highland population may have shifted to a more mobile way of life. In other words, when the Persians arrived, Anshan had a glorious past, but its present was rather modest. This is where the story gets genuinely interesting. The Persians and the Elamites in Fars did not simply live side by side and glare at each other across the valley.
12:43
Over generations they gradually mixed. Some modern scholars, especially specialists working on Elamite texts, described the emergence of the Persians as a kind of slow fusion.
12:55
Iranian-speaking newcomers settled among Elamite-speaking locals, married into their families, worshipped some of their gods and took on many of their ways. The people we later call Persians were, in this view, not just Iranian herders who arrived from the north, but a new blend created on the soil of Fars itself.
13:13
Archaeology supports this picture of mixing. A small number of rich tombs from the late Elamite period have been found in the region, with objects that combine Elamite traditions with styles that point toward later Persian taste. Clothing, jewellery, weapons, and the way important people were shown in art all seem to slowly shift in a direction that leads to the Persian style we know from later monuments.
13:37
Nothing about this was sudden. It was more like the way two neighbouring families might over a hundred years start sharing recipes, then holidays, then grandchildren.
13:46
What exactly did the Persians take from the Elamites? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
13:52
They borrowed elements of court etiquette, the rules about how a ruler should be approached, how he should appear, and how people around him should behave.
14:01
Elamite kings had been running royal courts for well over a thousand years, so the Persians were learning from experienced professionals. When later Greek visitors were amazed and sometimes shocked by the elaborate ceremony around the Persian king, part of what they were seeing was this old Elamite inheritance. They also took over the scribal tradition. The Persians had no writing of their own in the early period, but the Elamites had scribes who wrote in cuneiform on clay tablets and knew how to keep records, write letters and draft royal inscriptions. When the Persians needed to do any of that, they used Elamite scribes in the Elamite language.
14:36
This habit lasted a remarkably long time. Even when Persian kings later ruled from enormous palaces, much of their day-to-day bookkeeping in the homeland was still written in Elamite. So the bureaucrats of the future Persian Empire were, in a sense, carrying on a profession, invented by the people whose land the Persians had moved into. It is a little like a start-up company that still runs on the accounting software of the old firm it replaced. And finally the Persians took over a place, and in this case a very important one, the city of Anshan itself.
15:07
The old Elamite capital of the highlands became the cradle of the Persian royal dynasty. The early Persian kings called themselves Kings of Anshan, a title that came straight out of the Elamite tradition and carried centuries of prestige. When you call yourself King of Anshan, you're not just a local chief with a lot of sheep. You're claiming to be the heir of a very old and respectable royal line. This was clever branding and it worked. Meanwhile, Elam itself was having a terrible century.
15:35
In the 7th century BC, Elam and Assyria were locked in a long and bitter conflict.
15:40
The lowland Elamite kingdom around Susa supported Babylonian rebels against Assyria, fought several wars, and suffered from violent struggles for the throne. In the end, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, one of the most powerful rulers Assyria ever had, launched a series of devastating campaigns against Elam.
15:59
Around 646 BC, his armies captured and sacked Susa. Ashurbanipal's inscriptions describe the destruction in proud and lengthy detail, including the looting of temples and the carrying off of statues of gods.
16:13
Assyrian kings were not known for their gentle approach to diplomacy, and their idea of a peace settlement was usually that the other side ceased to exist. The fall of Susa was a political earthquake for the whole region. It weakened Lowland Elam enormously and changed the balance of power in the highlands too.
16:30
For the smaller peoples living in the mountains, like the Persians, it was a clear message. Assyria was at the height of its power, and the safest thing to do was to show respect, quickly and visibly.
16:41
And that brings us to one of the most interesting moments in early Persian history. In the Assyrian texts from around 646 BC, among the reports of Ashurbanipal's triumph over Elam, there is a mention of a king named Kurash of Parsumash.
16:56
parsimash is another form of the name of the persian land and kurash is the akkadian way of writing the name that the greeks would later turn into kiros and we turn into cyrus according to the assyrian account when crash heard about the mighty victories of ashubanipal he decided that friendship was the wisest policy He sent his eldest son, Araku, to the Assyrian court, along with tribute to show his loyalty. Sending a son to a foreign court was a common practice in the ancient Near East, and it was a polite way of saying hostage. The prince lived at the great king's court, was usually treated reasonably well, and often received an education there.
17:32
but everyone understood that he was also a guarantee. If his father misbehaved, the son was right there within easy reach. It is the ancient version of leaving your passport with the hotel reception, except the passport is your firstborn child.
17:46
We do not know what happened to Araku afterward. He appears in history for one brief moment, traveling to Nineveh, and then vanishes from the record completely. So who was this Kurash? Many historians think that he is the same man as Cyrus I, the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, The dates fit reasonably well. If Cyrus I was ruling around 646 BC, then his son Cambyses could have ruled after him, and his grandson, the famous Cyrus, could have come to power about a hundred years after Koresh sent his son to Assyria.
18:17
Three generations in roughly a century is perfectly possible, especially if the kings lived long lives.
18:24
This identification also explains why the name Cyrus appears in the royal family twice.
18:29
Grandsons were often named after their grandfathers in this world, a tradition that makes family trees beautiful and history exams confusing.
18:38
Not everyone agrees, however. Some scholars point out that the chronology is a bit tight and that Qurash was not exactly a rare name. They also note that Pesumish may not have been in exactly the same place as Anshan, so this Qurash might have been a different Persian ruler, perhaps from another branch or another region. As with so much in early Persian history, the evidence is thin enough that you can build two quite different stories on top of it, and historians, being historians, have built both.
19:04
The safest thing to say is that around 646 BC a Persian king named Qurash was important enough to send tribute to Assyria and that he may well have been the grandfather of the most famous Persian of them all.
19:17
There is another precious piece of evidence that helps us here, and it comes from a surprising place. Many decades later, at Persepolis, the great palace city built by later Persian kings, archaeologists found thousands of clay tablets used by the royal administration. Some of these tablets were sealed with impressions of a very old cylinder seal. A cylinder seal is a small stone cylinder carved with a design, which was rolled across wet clay to leave a picture, a bit like a tiny rolling pin that prints a signature. This particular seal carried an inscription in Elamite naming Kurash of Anshan, son of Tespes.
19:51
The design of the seal is also revealing. It shows a horseman in battle, riding over fallen enemies, carved in a style that belongs to the late Elamite tradition. So here we have a Persian king, with a Persian name, calling himself by the old Elamite title of Anshan and using an Elamite-style seal with an Elamite inscription.
20:10
If you wanted one object that summed up the mixed Persian and Elamite world of Fars, it would be hard to find a better one. The seal itself has never been found, only its impressions. But those impressions confirm that an early dynasty of kings of Anshan really existed, with a T-spess and a Qurash in the family line. What makes this even more charming is that the seal was still in use long after its original owner had died. Some official in the later Persian administration was rolling an antique royal seal onto everyday paperwork, perhaps as a family heirloom or as a mark of an old office.
20:43
Imagine a modern clerk stamping delivery receipts with a medieval king's signet ring, and you get the idea.
20:49
Whatever the reason, that bureaucratic habit preserved a precious link to the earliest Persian kings. These early kings of Anshan were real then, but they were small players. In the big leagues of the Near East the giants were Assyria, Babylon, Egypt and the remains of Elam. The Persians were somewhere near the bottom of the table, and nobody was writing long inscriptions about them. Meanwhile, to the north, their cousins the Medes were heading in a much more ambitious direction. The Medes lived in the central and northern Zagros and the lands around them in what is now northwestern Iran.
21:22
Their heartland lay around the city of Ekbatana, which today is the Iranian city of Hamadan.
21:27
Like the early Persians, the Medes were for a long time divided into many small chiefdoms. The Assyrian kings collected tribute from them, fought them, sometimes made treaties with them, and generally treated them as a useful but troublesome source of horses.
21:42
One of the most interesting documents from this period is a set of loyalty treaties drawn up by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon in 672 BC.
21:52
Several of these were sworn by Median chiefs who promised to support Esarhaddon's chosen heir, Ashurbanipal.
21:59
Copies of these treaties were found by archaeologists at the Assyrian city of Nimrud, and more recently another copy turned up at Teltayenat in Turkey. Some historians think Median warriors may even have served as bodyguards at the Assyrian court, so the Medes knew Assyria very well from the inside, which would turn out to be a dangerous kind of knowledge. Over time, the Medes united into a single kingdom. How exactly this happened is not entirely clear, because once again we have no Median written records. The Medes, as far as we know, did not leave royal inscriptions of their own, or at least none have been found.
22:34
For their story, we rely on Assyrian and Babylonian texts, on archaeology, and on the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote in the 5th century BC, more than 100 years after the events. Herodotus tells a lovely story about how the Median Kingdom began. According to him, the Medes were living in scattered villages without any proper government, and life was chaotic and lawless. A man named Dioses gained a reputation as a fair and honest judge, and people from all over came to him to settle their disputes. Then, cleverly, he announced that he was too busy to keep doing it for free.
23:09
Chaos returned, and the Medes decided they needed a king, and naturally they chose Dioses. He then built the great city of Ecbatana and surrounded himself with strict court ceremony so that nobody could see him easily. Herodotus says that Ecbatana had seven circular walls, each one painted a different colour with the innermost ones covered in silver and gold. It is a wonderful image, though it should be treated more like a legend than a city plan.
23:36
There is an Assyrian mention of a man named Dayuku in the late 8th century BC, a local ruler who was captured and deported by Sargon II, and some scholars think the Greek story of Dioses may be a distant echo of him. If so, the founding hero of the Medes started his career by being taken away by the Assyrians, which is not quite how founding legends usually go. Herodotus also says that the Medes were dominated for a long time by the Scythians, nomadic horsemen from the steppes north of the Black Sea who swept through the Near East in the 7th century BC.
24:09
He claims this Scythian domination lasted 28 years and that the Scythians mainly collected tribute and helped themselves to whatever they liked.
24:17
Herodotus describes their rule as a mixture of heavy taxation and simple theft which, to be fair, was a fairly common model of government at the time. Modern historians are unsure how much of this is accurate but the Scythians were certainly active in the region during this period. The king who turned the Medes into a real power was Siaxares. He came to the throne around the 620s BC and under his rule the Median kingdom became a great power. Herodotus tells us that Siaxares reorganized the Median army, separating it into units of spearmen, archers and cavalry, instead of letting everyone fight in a big mixed crowd as before.
24:53
That may sound obvious to us, but it was a real step toward a professional army. He also, according to Herodotus, dealt with the Scythian problem by inviting the Scythian leaders to a banquet, getting them thoroughly drunk and then having them killed. It is one of those stories where the moral seems to be that you should always be careful about free dinner invitations from your hosts. Whatever the details of his rise by the late 7th century BC Syaxeres was ready to take on the greatest power of the age, and the timing could not have been better because Assyria, after centuries of dominance, was falling apart.
25:27
After the death of Ashurbanipal, around 631 BC, the Assyrian Empire was shaken by civil wars and rebellions. In the south, a Babylonian leader named Nabopolassar rose up, drove the Assyrians out of Babylon and, in 626 BC, made himself king.
25:46
For the next several years, Babylon and Assyria fought back and forth across Mesopotamia. Then the Medes entered the war. In 614 BC, Syaxares attacked the old Assyrian religious capital of Asher and captured it.
25:59
Nabopolassar arrived with his army just after the city had fallen, and the two kings met and made an alliance. It was a partnership of convenience, founded on a shared dislike of Assyria, which is the kind of foundation many alliances in history have been built on.
26:14
Two years later, in 612 BC, the Allies marched on Nineveh, the vast and magnificent Assyrian capital on the Tigris. Nineveh was one of the biggest cities in the world, surrounded by massive walls filled with palaces, gardens and the famous library of Ashurbanipal.
26:31
After a siege of about three months, Kayaksaras together with the Babylonian Nabopolasa destroyed Nineveh. The city was sacked and burned, and Assyria, the terror of the Near East for so long, was effectively finished off.
26:44
We know about these events in part thanks to a Babylonian chronicle tablet now in the British Museum, often called the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle, published by the scholar C.J. Gadd in 1923.
26:56
The Babylonian chroniclers were usually dry and businesslike, recording each year's main events in a few lines. For 612 BC, the tablet describes the siege, the capture of the city and the heavy plunder taken away.
27:10
The chronicle calls the Medes by an old term Uman Manda, a slightly vague word used for barbarian hordes from the north. So even while the Medes were helping to change the course of history, the Babylonian scribes were quietly describing them as those wild people from the mountains, which is roughly how sophisticated city dwellers have always described their rural allies. There was actually a small encore. A surviving Assyrian prince, Ashurubalit II, fled west to the city of Haran and tried to keep the kingdom going with Egyptian help. But in 610 BC, the Medes and Babylonians took Haran too, and an attempt to win it back failed.
27:47
After that, Assyria disappears from history as a state.
27:51
Its great cities lay in ruins, and when the Greek soldier and writer Xenophon passed by the remains of Nineveh's neighbour Nimrud, about 200 years later, he did not even know its real name.
28:03
One of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen had become, within a few centuries, a set of mysterious mounds that travellers walked past without a second glance.
28:12
Interestingly, the archaeology of Nineveh has found traces of that final destruction, including burnt layers in the palaces and, in one of the city gates, signs of desperate last-minute efforts to narrow the gateway against attackers.
28:25
Archaeology rarely gives us dramatic scenes, but sometimes a few bricks hastily blocking a doorway tell the story of a city's last days better than any chronicle.
28:34
After the fall of Assyria, the victors divided the spoils. The Babylonians took most of the old Assyrian heartland in Mesopotamia and soon pushed on into Syria and toward the Levant under Nabopolassar and then his famous son Nebuchadnezzar II.
28:50
the medes it seems took control of the northern and eastern lands including the mountains of the zagros and the upper tigris region and pushed their power westward into eastern anatolia in what is now turkey here they eventually ran into another kingdom with large ambitions of its own lydia Lydia was a rich kingdom in western Anatolia, with its capital at Sardis. The Lydians were famous for their wealth, which came partly from gold found in the river Pactolus, near Sardis. They are often credited with being among the first people to strike coins, small lumps of a natural gold and silver alloy called electrum, stamped with a lion's head.
29:27
So in a sense the Lydians helped invent money, which certainly makes them one of the most influential peoples in human history, for better or worse.
29:34
At this point, Lydia was ruled by King Aliaz, a capable and ambitious king who was expanding his power eastward across Anatolia.
29:43
As the Medes moved west and the Lydians moved east the two powers collided. Herodotus says the war began over a group of Scythians who had served Gaiaxeres and then, after a quarrel, fled to the protection of Aliates.
29:57
When Aliates refused to hand them over, war broke out.
30:00
Whether that is the full story or a convenient excuse, the real issue was clearly control of Anatolia. Two growing kingdoms were reaching for the same territory and neither felt like backing down.
30:12
The Medes fought Lydia for five years. According to Herodotus, the war went back and forth, with victories on both sides, and neither power could gain a decisive advantage.
30:23
Then, in the sixth year, something extraordinary happened.
30:28
On May 28, 585 BC, the armies of the Medes and Lydians met in battle near the river Halys, the great river of central Anatolia known today as the Kazilomak, which means the Red River in Turkish.
30:42
In the middle of the fighting the sun went dark. The day suddenly turned to night as a total solar eclipse passed over the battlefield. Herodotus says the soldiers on both sides were so astonished and alarmed that they stopped fighting immediately. You can understand their reaction. When you are in the middle of a battle and the sun simply switches off, it is reasonable to assume the gods have an opinion about what you are doing. What makes this event even more remarkable is that, according to Herodotus, this eclipse had been predicted. He says that the Greek thinker Thales of Miletus had foretold it to the Ionian Greeks, naming the year in which it would happen.
31:19
Thales was later remembered as one of the seven sages of Greece, and is often called the first Greek philosopher, the man who started asking what the world was made of without simply answering that the gods did it. If the story is true, this is one of the earliest recorded examples of a scientific prediction of an astronomical event.
31:38
Modern scholars, however, are rather sceptical about the details. Predicting the exact time and place of a solar eclipse requires a lot of mathematics and observation that Greek science did not yet have in the 6th century BC.
31:52
It is possible that Thales had heard of Babylonian astronomical records, which tracked eclipse cycles over centuries and could suggest when an eclipse might happen. But even the Babylonians could not reliably say whether a solar eclipse would be visible at a particular spot, so Thales may have made an educated guess, or later Greeks may have improved the story in his favour, as later generations often do with their heroes.
32:14
Either way, it makes for a very good tail and it gave Thales one of the best reputations for timing in ancient history.
32:21
What we can say is that modern astronomers can calculate the dates of ancient eclipses very precisely by running the movements of the Sun and Moon backwards.
32:30
A total solar eclipse really did cross Anatolia on May 28, 585 BC, which is why this battle has one of the most exact dates of any event in ancient history. Thousands of years of uncertainty about ancient chronology, and then suddenly, thanks to the sky, we know the very day. It is one of those moments when astronomy hands historians a precise answer, and historians, unaccustomed to such kindness, are deeply grateful.
32:59
After the eclipse, the two sides were in a mood to make peace. According to Herodotus, two rulers acted as mediators, Sienesis of Cilicia and a Babylonian ruler he calls Labanitus.
33:11
The sides made peace, and the border between the Median and Lydian kingdoms was set along the river Halis.
33:17
To seal the agreement, the daughter of Aliats, Arienis, was married to Astyages, the son of Siaxares.
33:25
Royal marriages were the ancient world's way of signing a contract in a form that was very difficult to tear up, at least in theory.
33:32
In practice, of course, family ties did not always prevent future wars, but they did make diplomatic dinners more awkward. The Halis border was a big deal. For the next few decades it divided Anatolia between the Lydians in the west and the Medes in the east. It was also, in a way, the first time that a power from the Iranian plateau established a recognised frontier deep in Anatolia, touching the edges of the Greek world.
33:56
Few people at the time could have guessed how important that river would become for the future, but it would soon play a key role in the story.
34:04
Not long after the peace, Syaxares died and his son Astyages became king of the Medes around 585 BC.
34:12
Astyages inherited a large realm stretching from eastern Anatolia across the Zagros and possibly far into the Iranian plateau.
34:20
He ruled from Ecbatana and Greek tradition remembers him as a wealthy and powerful king surrounded by luxury and strict court ceremony.
34:28
For a while, the Median Kingdom looked like one of the great powers of the Near East alongside Babylon, Lydia and Egypt. Now here is where modern scholarship adds an important twist. For a long time, historians spoke confidently about a Median Empire, a large and well-organised state that came before the Persian Empire and served as its model.
34:48
But in recent decades, some scholars have asked whether there really was a Median Empire in that sense.
34:53
The Dutch historian Helene Sansisi Weardenberg, in a famous article, raised exactly this question, pointing out how little solid evidence we actually have.
35:03
There are no Median royal inscriptions, no Median archives, and very little archaeology from the Median capital, because Ekbatana lies underneath the modern city of Hamadan, and it is difficult to dig up a city while people are still living in it.
35:18
Residents tend to object when archaeologists start excavating their kitchens. The archaeological sites that do exist in Median territory, such as Godin Tepe, Nushi Jan and Baba Jan, have revealed fortified buildings, columned halls and temples, but they do not clearly show a centralised imperial administration. So some scholars suggest that the Median kingdom may have been more like a powerful confederation of tribes and chiefs, held together by a strong king and by military success, rather than a carefully organized empire with provinces and bureaucrats.
35:51
Others still believe the Medes built a substantial state. The truth may lie somewhere in between. What is not in doubt is that the Medes were a major military power, that they helped destroy Assyria, and that they controlled a great deal of territory. and somewhere in that territory, or at least within its circle of influence, were the Persians of Anshan.
36:11
By the middle of the 6th century BC, the Persian kings of Anshan were still vassals of the Median king Astyags. They ruled their own land in Fars, kept their own royal title and their own court, but they acknowledged the Median king as their overlord, which probably meant paying tribute, sending troops when asked, and showing proper respect at the right moments.
36:32
The Persians were related to the Medes, spoke a closely related language and shared many customs, so this arrangement was perhaps more like being the junior cousin in a large family business than being a conquered people. Still, the junior cousin rarely gets to choose the direction of the company. From the Median point of view, the Persians must have seemed a useful but minor part of the kingdom, a hardy mountain people in the south, good for soldiers and loyal enough, living in a slightly old-fashioned region with a mixed Elamite and Iranian culture. From the outside, Fars was not exactly the centre of world affairs.
37:06
If you had asked a well-informed Babylonian merchant or a Lydian nobleman around 560 BC to name the great peoples of the world, they would probably have mentioned the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Lydians and the Medes. The Persians would have come up if at all as a footnote. The Medes, sitting in their palaces at Ekbatana, had no idea that in the royal house of Anshan a boy named Cyrus was growing up and that this footnote was about to rewrite the whole book. So the Persians of Anshan were loyal vassals, paying their dues to the Median court and minding their mountain business.
37:39
Then a young man named Cyrus came along and decided that being a vassal was not really a long-term career plan. Here is the slightly awkward truth about the most famous Persian who ever lived. we know almost nothing reliable about his early years. What survives about the childhood of Cyrus is mostly legend, and rather wonderful legend at that.
37:58
The ancient world had a clear rule for great founders. A future ruler could not simply be born, grow up, and eat his vegetables like everyone else. He had to be threatened in the cradle, abandoned, rescued, and raised in humble obscurity, ideally by someone who smelled faintly of goats.
38:16
Sargon of Akkad was said to have been floated down a river in a basket.
38:20
Romulus and Remus were nursed by a wolf. Moses was placed among the reeds of the Nile, so when we open the Greek historian Herodotus and find a dramatic baby story for Cyrus, we should enjoy it the way you enjoy a good fairy tale, with genuine pleasure and a healthy amount of suspicion. Herodotus was writing in the 5th century BC, roughly a hundred years after the events, and he admits openly that he heard several versions of the Cyrus story. He tells us he chose the one told by Persians who did not want to glorify Cyrus too much, which is a charming thing to say right before telling a story full of prophetic dreams and secret babies.
38:56
According to his account, the Median king Astyages had a daughter named Mandane. After an unsettling first dream about her, he married her off not to a powerful Median noble, but to a quiet Persian named Cambyses, on the theory that a Persian son-in-law was a respectable provincial, not a threat.
39:14
Then came a second dream. Astyages saw a vine growing out of the womb of Mandane, a vine that spread and spread until it covered the whole of Asia.
39:23
The royal dream interpreters, the Magi, were consulted, and they gave the kind of answer that ruins a grandfather's week.
39:31
The child of Mandane, they said, would one day rule in place of Astyages. So the king summoned his pregnant daughter back from Persia and kept her under watch.
39:40
When the baby boy was born, Astyages handed him to a trusted noble and kinsman named Harpagus with instructions to take the infant away and make sure he did not live. Harpagus, unsurprisingly, was not thrilled with this assignment. He was a courtier, not a monster, and he also did some quick political arithmetic. Astyages had no son. If the king died, the throne might pass to Mandane, and Mandane would not be very warm toward the man who had disposed of her baby. so Harpagus passed the job down the chain, which is a management technique as old as civilization itself.
40:14
He called in one of the king's herdsmen, a man named Mitrodates, who kept cattle in the mountains north of Ecbatana where wild beasts roamed and ordered him to leave the child exposed on a hillside. Now the story takes its happy turn. The herdsman's wife, whom Herodotus calls Sino in Greek and Spaco in Median, both names meaning roughly dog, had just given birth to a stillborn child.
40:37
When her husband came home carrying a royal baby wrapped in gold and fine embroidered cloth, she begged him not to leave it on the mountain. The couple came up with a plan. They would place their own dead infant in the fine clothing and leave it out, and they would raise the living prince as their son.
40:52
Some servants of Harpagus came to inspect the little body, saw the royal wrappings, and reported that the job was done. Paperwork closed. Nobody asked further questions, which tells you something about how thorough royal inspections were in the 6th century BC. So the boy grew up in the herdsman's hut, and by the age of ten his royal nature was already showing, at least according to the story.
41:14
The village children played a game in which they chose a king, and naturally they chose the herdsman's son. Young Cyrus took the role extremely seriously. He appointed guards, messengers, builders, and an official called the Eye of the King.
41:27
When one of the players, the son of a distinguished Mede named Artembares, refused to follow orders, Cyrus had him firmly punished with a whipping, as any strict playground monarch would. The offended boy ran home, his father complained to Astyages, and the herdsman's son was dragged to the palace to answer for himself.
41:45
Standing before the king, the ten-year-old calmly explained that he had only done what a king should do with a disobedient subject, and that if this deserved punishment, he was ready to accept it.
41:57
Astyages looked at the boy, noticed that his face resembled his own, and a nervous herdsman soon confessed everything. Astyages pretended to be pleased. He consulted the Magi again, and they reassured him that the prophecy had already been fulfilled, since the boy had been king in the village game. The danger, they said, had passed. Children's games apparently counted as an official coronation, which would make many of us retired monarchs by now. So Cyrus was sent back to Persia to his real parents, Cambyses and Mandane, who were astonished to find him alive.
42:29
Harpagus, however, did not get off so lightly.
42:32
Astyages took a terrible revenge on him for disobeying, punishing him through his own son in a way Herodotus describes in grim detail and which we will leave politely in the past. The point for our story is simple. Harpagus swallowed his grief, smiled at court and waited. A courtier with a long memory and a deep grudge is a very dangerous thing to keep around and Astyages kept him around for years That was not the wisest management decision in Median history. This is the tale as Herodotus tells it, and it is not the only one. A Greek doctor named Ctesias, who actually lived at the Persian court around 400 BC as a physician to the royal family, told a completely different story.
43:11
In his version, Cyrus was not a grandson of Astyages at all, but the son of a poor man from the Mardians, a rough tribe whose mother tended goats.
43:21
The young Cyrus supposedly worked his way up from Palace Servant, an ancient rags-to-riches story.
43:27
Then there is the Athenian writer Xenophon, who wrote a long book called The Cyropedia, or The Education of Cyrus. His book is less a history than a philosophical novel about the ideal ruler. Treating it as a biography is a bit like treating a motivational leadership seminar as a documentary. So we have three Cyruses, and none of them comes with a birth certificate. A royal grandson made the conquest of Media look like a family inheritance, which was very convenient for everyone involved. Modern historians generally place his birth somewhere around 600 to 590 BC, though even that is an educated guess.
44:02
He was certainly the son of a king of Anshan named Cambyses and the grandson of another Cyrus, the one we already met in the last chapter through his seal. Whether his mother was really a Median princess is impossible to prove, though a marriage alliance between an overlord and a valued vassal would have been perfectly normal diplomacy.
44:21
For something closer to what actually happened, we have to leave the Greek storytellers behind and turn to Babylon. Babylonian scribes kept chronicles short, dry, year-by-year records of important events, written in cuneiform on clay tablets. They are about as exciting to read as a ship's logbook, which is exactly why historians love them.
44:40
One of these tablets, now in the British Museum, is known as the Nabonidus Chronicle because it covers the reign of Nabonidus, the last native king of Babylon.
44:50
The tablet is damaged, with chunks missing and edges worn away, but the surviving lines about the sixth year of Nabonidus, which corresponds to roughly 550 BC, are clear enough.
45:01
The chronicle says that Astyages, whose name appears in Babylonian as Ishtomegu, gathered his army and marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan, to conquer him. Then comes the twist, delivered in the flattest possible bureaucratic tone. The army of Astyages rebelled against him, took him prisoner, and handed him over to Cyrus. Cyrus then marched to Ecbatana, the royal city of the Medes, and carried away silver, gold, goods, and property as plunder, taking them back to Anshan. That is it. A whole empire changes hands in a few lines of clay with all the emotional drama of a delivery receipt.
45:38
What the Chronicle does not explain is why the Median soldiers turned on their own king. This is where the Greek stories, legendary as they are, may preserve a grain of something real. Herodotus says that Harpagus, still nursing his old grievance, spent years quietly sounding out the Median nobles, many of whom were tired of the harsh rule of Astyages. He then secretly encouraged Cyrus to revolt.
46:01
In one of the most famous details of the story, Harpagus supposedly sent his message hidden inside the belly of a hare, sewn up and carried by a messenger disguised as a hunter, so the guards on the roads would not find it.
46:14
Whether that happened or not, it is a nice reminder that people have always found creative ways around the postal service. When Astyges finally sent an army against the rebellious Persians, Herodotus says he foolishly put Harpagus in command, apparently forgetting the small matter of having destroyed the man's family.
46:31
At the decisive moment, part of the Median army went over to Cyrus and the rest fled. Astyages then gathered a second force himself, was defeated and was captured. Other ancient writers describe more prolonged fighting over several years, so the real revolt may have been messier than either version suggests.
46:50
What most historians accept is the outline. Around 553 to 550 BC, the vassal king of Anshan stopped behaving like a vassal and a large part of the Median nobility decided their future looked brighter with the energetic young Persian than with their aging king.
47:06
Ekbatana, the prize, is worth a moment of our time. It stood where the modern Iranian city of Hamadan stands today, high on a plain at the foot of Mount Alvand, which meant pleasantly cool summers and genuinely miserable winters. Herodotus describes it as a fortress ringed by seven circular walls, each painted a different colour, the innermost two plated with silver and gold.
47:30
Archaeologists have not found anything quite like that, partly because modern Hamadan sits right on top of the ancient remains, and the residents understandably prefer not to have their houses dug up.
47:42
Now the conquerors of the ancient Near East had a well-established tradition for dealing with defeated kings, and it was not a gentle one. The Assyrians in particular liked to make examples of their enemies in ways that were very public and very final. So what Cyrus did next was genuinely striking. He let Astyages live.
48:00
According to Herodotus, the old king spent the rest of his days at the court of Cyrus, treated with honour and without further harm. Theseus even claims that Cyrus married the daughter of Astyages, making the former enemy part of his household. Whatever the details, the deposed king seems to have been retired rather than removed, which is about as close to a generous pension plan as the 6th century BC ever got. The more important decision was what Cyrus did with the Median elite. Instead of wiping out the old ruling class and replacing it with his own Persians, he kept much of the Median nobility in their positions.
48:34
Median officials, generals and administrators continued to serve now under a Persian king.
48:39
Harpagus himself became one of the most important commanders in the new state, as we will see shortly.
48:45
The Medes knew how to run a large territory, and Cyrus was not starting a company from scratch. He was buying an existing firm and keeping most of the staff. As a result, the new state was not purely Persian at all. It was essentially a joint Persian and Median empire, with the Persians at the very top and the Medes as close, privileged partners.
49:05
Median clothing, Median court customs, and Median titles flowed into Persian royal culture. The two peoples spoke closely related Iranian languages, worshipped similar gods, and had already lived side by side for generations. To an outsider, the difference must have been very hard to spot. That is exactly why the Greeks long called the Persians Medes. To a Greek living on the Aegean coast, the great power in the east had always been the Medes, and when the management changed, the Greeks did not bother updating the name. Greek writers talk about the Median Wars when they mean the Persian Wars.
49:39
A Greek who collaborated with Persia was accused of medising, of going over to the Medes, and in Greek politics that was one of the worst insults you could throw at someone. Cyrus also needed a capital of his own, a place that symbolised the new order. According to a tradition preserved by the geographer Strabo, he founded his new residence on the very spot where he had won his decisive victory over Astyages. He called it Pasargadae.
50:04
The name may be related to one of the leading Persian tribes, the Pasargadai, to which the royal clan belonged, though scholars still argue about the exact meaning.
50:13
It lies on a high plain in the province of Fars in southwestern Iran, at an altitude of nearly 1,900 metres, which means that, once again, the summers were lovely and the winters required serious layers. Pasargadae was not a city in the way we usually think of one. There were no crowded streets, no market squares, no dense neighbourhoods of houses. Instead, it was a royal landscape of palaces, pavilions and gatehouses scattered among gardens, with neat stone water channels that looked like an early version of the classic Persian garden.
50:46
The old Persian word for an enclosed park was something like paradida, a walled-around place, and through Greek it eventually became our word paradise. So when people speak of paradise, they are, without knowing it, describing a Persian king's well-irrigated backyard. The buildings themselves show that Cyrus was a collector of styles as well as of kingdoms. The stonework recalls the techniques of Ionian Greek and Lydian masons. The colossal winged bulls at the gateways echo Assyrian palaces. One famous relief on a gatehouse shows a winged figure in an Elamite-style robe wearing an elaborate crown borrowed from Egyptian art.
51:23
yet the tall slender columns the black and white stone contrasts and the open porticoes facing the gardens added up to something new this was the beginning of a distinctly persian royal art the style that would later reach its full splendour at persepolis Many of the buildings at Passagarde were probably still unfinished decades later because this king moved faster than his builders.
51:45
Almost as soon as he had swallowed media, the neighbours began to get nervous. The Empire of the Medes had shared a border with the Kingdom of Lydia along the Hallis River in central Anatolia, the line fixed after that famous battle interrupted by an eclipse.
52:00
Now the Medes were gone, or rather absorbed, and Lydia found itself sharing a border with someone new and decidedly more ambitious.
52:08
The first ruler to stand up and challenge the new king was Crucis of Lydia. If there is one name from this period that everyone still recognizes, it is Crucis. We still say that someone is as rich as Crucis and the phrase is deserved. Lydia, in western Anatolia, was rich in gold. The river Pactolus, which flowed through the capital Sardis, carried gold-bearing sand down from the mountains, and an alloy of gold and silver called Electrum could be panned from its waters. The Lydians are widely credited with inventing coinage itself, stamping small lumps of Electrum with official marks to guarantee their value.
52:45
Under Croesus, according to tradition, they went one step further and produced separate coins of pure gold and pure silver, so that the value of each coin was clear. If you have ever wondered who to blame for the invention of money, the Lydians are a strong candidate, though in fairness they cannot be held responsible for subscription services. Croesus belonged to the Mermnad dynasty, which had seized the Lydian throne several generations earlier, and he ruled over most of Anatolia west of the Hallis.
53:12
Many of the Greek cities along the Aegean coast, in the region called Ionia, paid tribute to him. Yet Croesus was also a great admirer of the Greeks. He sent spectacular gifts to Greek sanctuaries, especially to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and he welcomed Greek visitors to his court. Herodotus even has the Athenian sage Solon visit Sardis and warn Croesus that no one should be called happy until the end of his life, which Croesus found deeply unimpressive.
53:39
The dates of the two men do not really fit, but the moral was too good to leave out.
53:44
When Cruces heard that Cyrus had overthrown Astyages, he had several reasons to worry and a few to feel tempted. Astyages had been his brother-in-law, linked by the marriage alliance that sealed the peace after the eclipse battle. Avenging a relative was a respectable excuse for war. The more practical motive was that the new Persian power was clearly growing fast and it might be wise to strike before it grew any bigger.
54:07
and there was simple ambition. The lands east of the Hallis looked rich, and for the moment unsettled. Croesus was a careful man in some ways, and before starting the war he wanted divine advice. But first he decided to test the oracles to see which ones actually worked, which is a refreshingly scientific attitude for the 6th century BC.
54:28
Herodotus says he sent messengers to several of the most famous oracles in the Greek world and beyond.
54:33
On the hundredth day after leaving Sardis, each messenger was to ask the oracle what Croesus was doing at that very moment. Croesus then did something deliberately absurd. He chopped up a tortoise and a lamb and boiled them together in a bronze cauldron with a bronze lid. The idea was that no one could possibly guess that. According to Herodotus, only the oracle at Delphi got it right, with the Pythia, Apollo's priestess, describing the smell of a hard-shelled tortoise cooking with lamb in bronze. Croesus was impressed, and as a sign of gratitude he sent Delphi a staggering pile of gifts, golden bricks, a lion of pure gold, enormous mixing bowls of gold and silver and much more.
55:15
Herodotus says he saw some of these treasures himself, still standing at Delphi a century later.
55:21
Having found an oracle he could trust, Croesus asked his big question, should he go to war against the Persians?
55:28
The answer came back in the famous ambiguous style that made Delphi both respected and slightly infuriating. If Croesus crossed the Hallis River, he would destroy a great kingdom. Croesus heard exactly what he wanted to hear. He was delighted. He did not stop to ask which great kingdom the god had in mind. To be fair, very few people pause to read the small print when the headline sounds this good. Delphi also advised him to seek the friendship of the most powerful Greeks, so Croesus made an alliance with Sparta. He also had treaties with Amarsis, the pharaoh of Egypt, and with Nabonidus of Babylon.
56:02
On paper, this was a grand coalition against the rising Persian. In practice, the allies were far away and in no particular hurry, which is a common weakness of grand coalitions. So Croesus crossed the Hallys, probably around 547 BC, and he did indeed destroy a great kingdom. unfortunately it was his own. He marched into Cappadocia, into a region the Greeks called Tyria, and there he captured and devastated a city and enslaved its inhabitants.
56:29
Where exactly Tyria was is still debated.
56:32
One strong candidate is a huge ruined city on a hill called Kirkenes Dag in central Turkey, a site surrounded by about seven kilometres of stone walls, which was clearly burned and abandoned around this time. If that identification is correct, archaeologists have found the actual scorch marks of Croesus' campaign. Cyrus, meanwhile, had gathered his army and marched west, picking up extra troops along the way. The two armies met near Tyria and fought a fierce battle that lasted all day. When night fell, neither side had won. Herodotus says the losses were heavy on both sides and the next day Cyrus did not attack again.
57:09
Croesus now made a decision that seemed perfectly reasonable by the standards of his time and turned out to be a catastrophe. His army had not won and he felt his forces were smaller than those of Cyrus.
57:20
Winter was approaching. In the ancient world war was largely a seasonal activity, like harvesting olives or complaining about taxes.
57:29
So Croesus marched back to Sardis, planning to call up his allies, the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Spartans, to meet him in the spring for a larger campaign.
57:39
Then he disbanded the mercenaries and much of the army that had fought at Tyria, sending them home for the winter. He was quite sure that Cyrus would do the same. Cyrus did not do the same. As soon as he learned that the Lydian army had been dispersed, he marched straight after Croesus, moving so quickly that, as Herodotus puts it, he himself was the messenger of his own arrival.
58:00
The Persian army simply appeared before Sardis while Croesus was still drafting letters to his allies. It was the ancient equivalent of turning up for a meeting that the other side thought had been postponed until spring. Croesus gathered whatever forces he could and led them out onto the plain in front of Sardis near the river Hermas.
58:18
The pride of the Lydian army was its cavalry. Herodotus says that at this time there was no people in Asia braver or more warlike than the Lydians, and that they fought from horseback with long spears and were superb riders.
58:31
Facing such horsemen on an open plain was not an inviting prospect. Here Herodotus credits Harpagus, now serving as a general of Cyrus, with a clever idea.
58:41
The Persians took all the camels from their baggage train, the animals that carried food and equipment, removed their loads and put riders on them. These camels were placed at the front of the army, facing the Lydian cavalry, with the infantry behind them and the Persian cavalry at the back, The reasoning was simple. Horses are frightened by camels. They cannot stand either the sight or the smell of them. When the two armies closed, the Lydian horses caught the scent of the camels turned and bolted, carrying their riders away from the battle. The finest cavalry in Asia was defeated not by swords but by a smell.
59:16
If you have ever stood downwind of a camel, you will find this part of the story surprisingly easy to believe. Herodotus does add that the Lydians were not cowards about it. Many of them jumped off their panicking horses and fought on foot, but it was not enough. Eventually the Lydians were driven back inside the walls of Sardis and the city was put under siege. Xenophon mentions the camels too, though no one can prove it happened exactly like that. Still, it is one of the very few battles in history where the decisive weapon may have been an aroma. Sardis was a formidable place.
59:50
The citadel sat on a steep rocky hill above the lower town and the Lydians had every reason to feel confident behind its walls.
59:57
Croesus sent urgent messages to his allies asking them to hurry. The Spartans, to their credit, did start preparing a fleet, but the news came too late. After a siege of just fourteen days, according to Herodotus, the citadel fell. The way it fell is another of those stories that Herodotus loved. On one side, the hill was so steep that the Lydians had not bothered to post guards there.
60:19
A Persian soldier named Hierides, watching that cliff, saw a Lydian soldier drop his helmet down the slope, climb down to retrieve it and then climb back up again. Somebody had just demonstrated the secret route. The next day, Hierides led a group of Persians up the same path. Others followed and the citadel of Sardis was taken.
60:39
Somewhere in that story is a lesson about workplace safety and about not advertising your shortcuts in front of the enemy. Traditionally, the fall of Sardis is dated to around 547 or 546 BC. The date is not completely certain. The Nabonidus Chronicle records a campaign of Cyrus against a king in the ninth year of Nabonidus, but the country's name is damaged and many specialists now doubt the old reading of Lydia, so Sardis may have fallen a few years later than once thought. For our purposes, it is enough to say that sometime in the 540s BC the richest kingdom in Anatolia came under Persian rule.
61:15
What happened to Croesus himself is a question that ancient writers answered in very different ways, and the variety tells us how quickly his story became legend. Herodotus says that a Persian soldier was about to strike him down in the confusion of the capture when the king's son, who had been unable to speak since birth, suddenly cried out in terror, warning the soldier not to kill Croesus. It was, Herodotus says, the first time the boy had ever spoken. Croesus was taken alive and brought before Cyrus. Herodotus then tells the most dramatic version of all.
61:48
Cyrus, he says, had Crucis placed on a great pyre, perhaps as an offering to the gods, perhaps to see if some deity would rescue a man so famous for his piety.
61:58
As he waited, Croesus called out the name of Solon, finally understanding the old warning. Cyrus asked what he meant, was moved by the answer, reflected that he too was only a man and ordered the fire put out.
62:12
When his servants could not put it out, Croesus prayed to Apollo and a sudden storm burst from a clear sky and extinguished the flames.
62:20
The poet Bacillides, writing even earlier, has Apollo carry Croesus away to a happy land beyond the north wind.
62:27
The Greeks could not agree on how the story ended, but they all agreed that the gods had cared about Croesus, which is not bad posthumous publicity for a man who had sent them so much gold.
62:37
The version that interests historians most, though, is the plainest one.
62:41
By this account Cyrus spared Croesus and kept him at court as a companion and advisor. Herodotus offers a charming scene.
62:49
Shortly after the capture Croesus watched the Persian soldiers looting the city and asked Cyrus what all those men were so busy doing. Cyrus said they were plundering his city and carrying off his treasures. Croesus replied that it was no longer his city or his treasure. It now belonged to Cyrus and it was Cyrus' property that was being carried away. He then suggested that Cyrus post guards at the city gates and have the soldiers hand over a tenth of everything as an offering to Zeus. That way the king would recover his wealth and the troops would not feel cheated. It was excellent advice, and it was precisely the kind of advice that only a former king who knew exactly where everything was kept could give.
63:28
Whether all of this happened, we cannot be sure, but the idea of the defeated king becoming a valued counsellor fits the pattern we have already seen with Astyages. Cyrus seems to have preferred to collect defeated kings rather than dispose of them. With Sardis taken, the whole of western Anatolia lay open. Lydia had been the overlord of the Greek cities of the Aegean coast, and now those cities faced a new situation.
63:51
Before the war, Cyrus had actually invited the Ionian Greeks to revolt against Crucis and join him. They had refused, staying loyal to their Lydian overlord. Now that Crucis had fallen, they sent envoys to Sardis, asking Cyrus to accept them as subjects on the same easy terms they had enjoyed under Lydia. Cyrus answered them with a little fable. A flute player, he said, once saw fish in the sea and played his flute to them, hoping they would come out onto the land. They did not.
64:19
So he took a net, caught a great many fish, and pulled them ashore. When he saw them leaping about on the sand, he told them they could stop dancing now since they had refused to dance when he played for them. The message to the Ionians was clear and not especially cuddly. You had your chance to dance. Now you will be netted. Only one city got a good deal. Miletus, the greatest of the Ionian cities, had apparently been more farsighted and was granted the same treaty terms it had held under Crucis.
64:47
The other Ionians began to fortify their towns and sent an urgent appeal to Sparta. The Spartans sent no troops, only a herald warning Cyrus to leave the Greek cities alone. Herodotus says Cyrus asked who these Spartans were and then remarked that he had never feared people who set aside a place in the middle of their city to cheat one another under oath. He meant the Agora, the Greek marketplace, and it was a magnificent insult, even if it may owe more to Herodotus than to Cyrus. Cyrus himself did not stay in the west to finish the job. He had bigger matters to attend to in the east, and he left Sardis in the hands of a Persian governor, with a Lydian named Pacties in charge of collecting the gold.
65:26
This was not the best personnel decision of his reign. As soon as Cyrus had left, Pacties took the gold, hired mercenaries, and rose in revolt. Herodotus says Croesus talked an irritated Cyrus out of harsh reprisals, suggesting instead that the Lydians be disarmed and encouraged to take up music and shopkeeping, which would cure them of rebellion. A Median general named Mazares crushed the revolt, and the Greek cities passed the fugitive Pactes around like an unwanted parcel until he was finally handed over.
65:56
Mzares then began to punish the cities that had helped the rebels, but he soon fell ill and died.
66:02
His replacement was Harpagus, the same Median noble whose grudge had helped bring Cyrus to power in the first place. The former courtier of Astyages was now a conqueror in his own right. Harpagus set about reducing the Greek cities of Ionia and then the lands of Caria further south one by one. The Ionian cities were mostly built on hills or peninsulas with stone walls and they were used to defending themselves against each other and against occasional Lydian armies.
66:29
Harpagus had a simple and effective method for dealing with them. He would drive the inhabitants back behind their walls and then his soldiers would build great earthen ramps, siege mounds, against the fortifications, piling up soil, stone and timber until the ramp reached the top of the wall. Then the Persians would simply walk up and over. This was an old Near Eastern technique used for centuries by the Assyrians and it was something the Greeks had rarely faced. Greek warfare was mostly about meeting on an open field, settling things in an afternoon and going home for dinner.
67:02
A methodical army that could reshape the landscape until your city walls became irrelevant was a very new and very unwelcome experience. At Paphos in Cyprus, archaeologists have even uncovered a Persian siege mound from a slightly later campaign, still full of arrowheads, so this is not just a Greek story.
67:21
Harpagus also understood the value of a harsh example. Cities that resisted were treated without mercy and the message spread quickly along the coast.
67:30
The most famous case was Phocaea, a seafaring city in northern Ionia. The Phocaeans were the great long-distance sailors of the Greek world. They sailed not in round cargo ships but in sleek 50-odd warships, and they had explored far to the west, founding the colony of Massalia, the modern city of Marseille in France, around 600 BC, and trading as far as Spain.
67:53
When Harpagus built his siege mound against Phacias' walls, he offered terms that were almost polite. He said he would be satisfied if the Phacians would pull down just one section of their walls and dedicate one house to the king as a sign of submission. The Phacians asked for one day to think it over and asked that Harpagus withdraw his army from the walls during that time. Harpagus said that he knew very well what they were planning, but he would allow it anyway.
68:19
That night the Phacaeans launched their ships, loaded them with their wives and children, their household goods, and even the statues of their gods from the temples, leaving behind only the bronze and stone too heavy to carry and the paintings on the walls. When the Persians arrived the next morning they found an empty city. Harpagus had captured Phacaea without a fight, which would have been a great success if there had been anybody in it.
68:43
The Phakeans first tried to buy some nearby islands from the Greek city of Chios, but the Sheans refused, worried that a new trading city would steal their business.
68:52
Nothing brings out neighbourly solidarity like the threat of competition.
68:57
So the Phocaeans decided to sail west, all the way to Corsica, where they had founded a settlement called Alalia some twenty years earlier. Before leaving, they sailed back to Phocaea one last time, attacked the Persian garrison left there, and then gathered together and swore a solemn oath.
69:13
They threw a lump of iron into the sea and vowed never to return to Phakea until that iron floated back to the surface.
69:20
Iron, as you may have noticed, is not especially buoyant. It was an oath meant to last forever. Forever turned out to be quite short for some of them. Herodotus says that more than half of the Phocaeans were overcome with homesickness and longing for their old city, broke their oath, and sailed back home to live under Persian rule. Even the grandest dramatic gestures can wilt a little when you start thinking about your old street and your favorite spot by the harbor.
69:46
The rest sailed on to Corsica and settled at Allalia. Their habit of raiding the neighbours soon brought a combined Etruscan and Carthaginian fleet down on them, and although the Phocaeans won the sea battle off Allalia around 540 BC, they lost so many ships that they had to move on yet again.
70:03
They finally founded a new city in southern Italy, on the coast south of modern Naples. It was called Elea, later known as Velia. A few generations later, Elea would give the world the philosopher Parmenides and his student Zeno, famous for puzzles about motion that still annoy students of philosophy. So in a roundabout way, the Persian siege mounds of Harpagus helped produce one of the important schools of Greek thought, which is not a sentence you expect to write about a siege. Phocaea was not the only city to choose emigration. The people of Thaos, another Ionian city, also abandoned their homes when the Persian siege mound reached their walls and sailed north to Thrace, where they founded the city of Abdera.
70:45
The other Ionian cities fought, each separately, and each was conquered in turn.
70:50
The Ionians had held meetings at their common sanctuary, the Panionion, on the slopes of Mount Michael, but they never managed to act as one. Getting a dozen proud Greek cities to agree on anything was a task that would have defeated even the Pythia.
71:05
One by one the cities of the mainland surrendered. The Ionian islands, such as Chios and Samos, submitted to Cyrus voluntarily for the time being, mostly because the Persians, as yet, had no fleet that could reach them. Harpagus then moved south into Caria, a land of rugged hills and coastal cities, home to both Carians and Greek settlers. Here, too, resistance was mostly brief. The Greek city of Nidus tried to turn its peninsula into an island by digging a canal across the neck of land, until Delphi told them that if Zeus had wanted an island, he would have made one.
71:39
The Sidians put down their shovels and surrendered, which is perhaps the only time an oracle has been used to cancel a construction project. Further south still, in Lycia, Harpagus met the fiercest resistance of all at the city of Xanthos, where the defenders chose to fight to the last rather than surrender. With that, the Persian conquest of the western coast of Anatolia was essentially complete. Not bad for a man whose most famous early decision was to hand a baby to a cowherd.
72:06
The Greeks of the mainland felt this change very directly. For the first time, the Persians and the Greek world were in direct contact, not through intermediaries, not through Lydian kings who liked Greek oracles and Greek art, but face to face across a frontier.
72:21
Ionian Greeks now owed soldiers and tribute to a king who lived more than 2,000 kilometres away, in a garden palace most of them could never have found on a map. A poet from Colophon named Xenophanes, who himself left his home city around this time and wandered the Greek world for decades, later recalled people asking each other over a pleasant winter evening by the fire how old they had been when the Mead arrived.
72:44
For a whole generation of Ionians, the coming of the Persians became the moment from which they measured their lives. None of the Greeks could have known it at the time, but this first collision between Persia and the Greek cities of the coast had set in motion a relationship that would shape the next two centuries of history in the eastern Mediterranean. for now though cyrus was not especially interested in the small argumentative towns by the aegean he had left the west to his generals and his eyes had already turned toward the greatest and oldest city of them all the ancient and fabulously wealthy babylon While Harpagus was still busy collecting the keys of Greek cities along the Aegean coast, Cyrus was already looking the other way, toward the oldest, richest and most self-important prize in the whole Near East.
73:27
Down on the flat plains between the Tigris and the Euphrates sat Babylon, and Babylon had no idea that its turn was coming. To understand why Babylon mattered so much, it helps to remember what the Neo-Babylonian kingdom was in the middle of the 6th century BC.
73:42
This was the state that had helped bring down Assyria a few generations earlier, and it had inherited most of the Assyrian leftovers. Under its greatest king, Nebuchadnezzar II, it had grown into the largest power in Mesopotamia, controlling not only the riverlands of modern Iraq but also Syria, the Phoenician coast and the hill country of Judah, right up to the edge of Egypt.
74:04
Nebuchadnezzar spent the loot of all those campaigns on his capital and the result was spectacular.
74:09
Babylon had double walls so thick that, according to the Greeks, a chariot could turn around on top of them, which may be an exaggeration but tells you the general mood. Its main processional street led through the Ishtar Gate, covered in glazed blue bricks with yellow lions, bulls and dragons marching across them. Today a reconstruction of that gate stands in a museum in Berlin, which means one of the great monuments of ancient Iraq is now best visited with a German train ticket.
74:36
Above the city rose a Temananki, the great stepped temple tower of Marduk, which many historians think lies behind the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
74:46
At the centre of all this stood Esagila, the temple of Marduk, the patron god of the city and king of the Babylonian gods.
74:54
Esagila was also a huge economic institution that owned land, herds and workshops, and recorded every sheep and sack of barley on clay, and its priests were among the best educated people on earth. If you wanted to rule Babylon comfortably, you needed these people on your side.
75:11
The man on the throne in the 540s BC had managed with remarkable consistency to do the opposite. His name was Nabonidus, and he was an unusual king even by Babylonian standards. He was not a son of Nebuchadnezzar. After the great king's death in 562 BC, the Babylonian throne turned into something like a game of musical chairs, in which the music kept stopping rather suddenly for the losers.
75:35
One king was removed by his brother-in-law, but king died soon after, and his young son was overthrown within months.
75:43
Out of this shuffle, in 556 BC, came Nabonidus, an experienced official who was probably already well into middle age and who seems to have had family roots in the old city of Haran in northern Mesopotamia, far from Babylon itself.
75:58
Haran explains a great deal about him. It was the great centre of the moon god Sin, and Nabonidus' mother, a woman named Adad Gupi, was a lifelong devotee of that god.
76:09
We know her surprisingly well because she left an inscription, found at Haran, describing her own life. According to that text, she lived to more than a hundred years, kept her eyesight and her wits to the end, and spent much of her life praying to Sin, which makes her one of the very few ancient grandmothers whose opinions have survived in stone.
76:27
Nabonidus inherited her devotion. He rebuilt the moon temple at Haran with great enthusiasm, and in his inscriptions sin often seems to stand at the front of the divine queue, while Marduk, the official boss of Babylon, is politely shuffled a little further back. To the priests of Isagala, this was roughly as welcome as a new company director who keeps praising the competitors' products at staff meetings. Then came the strangest episode of the reign. Early on, Nabonidus marched an army into northern Arabia and took the great oasis of Tamar, a palm-shaded trading town on the incense roots in what is today northwestern Saudi Arabia.
77:04
And then he simply stayed there.
77:07
For about ten years, the king of Babylon lived in the Arabian desert, while back home his son Belshazzar ran the government as a kind of regent.
77:15
Nabonidus also took control of a string of other oases in the region, including Yathrib, the town later known as Medina, so this was not exactly a holiday. Still, from the point of view of Babylon, the king had moved several hundred miles away to live among the palm trees and the camel caravans, which for a Mesopotamian monarch was a very unconventional career choice.
77:34
Why he did it is one of the long-running puzzles of ancient history.
77:38
Some historians think it was about money, since Tamar sat on the routes that carried frankincense and other luxury goods north from southern Arabia, and controlling those routes was very profitable. Others see a religious motive, since the moon was important in Arabian worship as well. Some suggest he was ill, and interestingly, among the Dead Sea Scrolls there is a fragment called the Prayer of Nabonidus, in which the king describes being struck by a long illness while staying at Tamar. And there is the simplest explanation of all, that the king and the Babylonian priesthood could not stand each other, and he found it more pleasant to rule from far away.
78:15
In recent years, Saudi and German archaeologists working at Tamar have found inscriptions and a carved relief connected to Nabonidus. so his desert residence is no longer just a story told by his enemies. He really was there. His absence had a very particular consequence. The most important event of the Babylonian year was the New Year festival, called the Akitu, held in the spring month of Nisan.
78:37
it lasted about twelve days with processions sacrifices and the reciting of the creation poem in which marduk defeats the forces of chaos at the heart of it all was the king he had to come before marduk take the god by the hand and lead him out in procession In one curious part of the ceremony, the high priest stripped the king of his royal insignia and struck him on the cheek.
78:59
If tears came to the king's eyes, it was a good sign that Marduk was pleased. It is perhaps the only job interview in history where crying was considered a strong performance. Without the king, none of this could happen properly, and the Babylonian records make a point of saying so.
79:13
A text known as the Nabonidus Chronicle, a damaged clay tablet now in the British Museum, notes year after year, in the dry tone of an accountant, that the king was in Tamar, that the crown prince and the army were in Babylonia, that the king did not come to Babylon in the month of Nisan, that the god Nabu did not come to Babylon, that Marduk did not go out, and that the festival was not held. Imagine an entire nation's new year, its most important religious holiday, and its great annual city celebration all quietly cancelled, not once, but repeatedly, because the boss preferred the desert.
79:49
For ordinary Babylonians it was disappointing. For the priests of Marduk, whose whole world revolved around that ritual, it was something close to an insult to the god himself.
79:59
All of this together, the devotion to sin, the long years in Tamar and the skipped festivals, turned the powerful priesthood of Babylon against their king. Much of the hostile material, though, was written after he fell by people eager to please the new ruler. One such text, the versacount of Nabonidus, accuses him of impiety and foolishness in a tone closer to a satirical pamphlet than to history.
80:23
But even allowing for this propaganda, it is clear that by the end of his reign, a large and influential part of Babylonian society was not prepared to fight very hard for Nabonidus.
80:34
It is only fair to add that Nabonidus was also a genuinely fascinating man. He was obsessed with the past. When he restored old temples, he had his workmen dig down to find the foundation deposits of the ancient kings who had first built them, and he proudly recorded what he found. At one site he uncovered an inscription of Naram-Sin, a king of the old Akkadian Empire, and calculated that this ruler had lived 3,200 years before him.
80:59
The real figure was closer to 1,700 years, but for a man sometimes called the first archaeologist, that is a forgivable margin. Nabonidus may have been a poor politician, but he would have made an excellent guest on a history podcast. There is one more irony worth mentioning. Back when Cyrus first rose against the Medes, Nabonidus seems to have welcomed the news. The Medes controlled his beloved Haran, and in one of his own inscriptions Nabonidus describes a dream in which Marduk tells him that Cyrus, a young servant of the god, will scatter the Median armies.
81:31
So the king of Babylon once celebrated Cyrus as a useful tool of heaven. Unfortunately for Nabonidus, the tool turned out to have its own plans.
81:40
By the time Nabonidus came back from Arabia, probably around 543 BC, the political map had changed beyond recognition. Media was Persian. Lydia, once a partner of Babylon, was Persian. The great alliance of kingdoms that had balanced each other for half a century had collapsed into one enormous state ruled from the Iranian plateau, and Babylon was the last great independent power left between the Mediterranean and the mountains.
82:06
Nabonidus did hold the New Year festival again after his return and he tried to prepare for what was coming.
82:13
In the final months before the invasion, according to the Chronicle, he had the statues of gods from many Babylonian cities brought into the capital, presumably to keep them safe behind the great walls. From Babylon's point of view, this was a sensible precaution. From the point of view of the towns that had just watched their divine protectors carted off to the big city, it looked rather like having your gods confiscated. It did not win him many friends. In 539 BC, Cyrus moved against the Neo-Babylonian kingdom.
82:43
We do not know exactly what happened in the years between the fall of Sardis and this campaign, and it is quite possible that he spent some of that time fighting in the east, but by 5.39 he was ready.
82:55
The Persian army came down from the Zagrus Mountains into the Tigris Valley, and here Herodotus offers one of his most delightful stories.
83:02
On the way, he says, the army had to cross a river called the Gindis, and one of the king's sacred white horses tried to swim across, was swept away and drowned. Cyrus was so furious with the river that he stopped the whole campaign and set his army to digging, dividing the Gindis into 360 small channels so that, as he put it, even a woman could cross it without wetting her knees.
83:25
this supposedly took the entire summer naturally there is no evidence for any of this and it is probably a folk tale but it remains one of history's finest examples of a man holding a grudge against water the real campaign as recorded in the nabonidus chronicle was much quicker and much less whimsical In October 539 BC, in the Babylonian month of Tashritu, the Persians met the Babylonian army at Opus on the Tigris, a city somewhere near modern Baghdad whose exact location is still uncertain.
83:56
The Persians crushed the Babylonian army there. The chronicle says that the people of Akkad, meaning the Babylonians, retreated, and that Cyrus took plunder and that people were killed. It is a short and grim entry, and it is a useful reminder that the famous peaceful takeover of Babylon began with a very real battle. After Opis, resistance simply fell apart. On the 14th of the month, the city of Sippa was taken without a fight, and Nabonidus fled. A few days later, on the 16th, the Persian general Ugbaru, whom the Greeks called Gobrius, entered Babylon without a battle.
84:29
He is described in the Chronicle as the governor of Gutium, a name the Babylonians used rather loosely for the mountain lands to the east, and some historians think he may originally have been a Babylonian provincial governor who switched sides at exactly the right moment.
84:44
If so, he showed excellent timing.
84:47
Nabonidus himself was arrested when he returned to the city. The chronicle adds a small but telling detail. Soldiers with shields from Gutium surrounded the gates of Isagala, the temple of Marduk, but there was no interruption of the rites, and no weapons were brought into the sacred buildings. Someone in the Persian high command clearly understood that if you want to win over a city of priests, you do not start by letting soldiers trample through the temple. Then, on 29 October 539 BC, which in the Babylonian calendar was the third day of the month of Arasamnu, cyrus himself made a ceremonial entry into babylon the chronicle says that green branches or perhaps reeds were spread out before him the ancient version of a red carpet and that peace was imposed on the city Cyrus sent greetings to all of Babylon and his officials appointed new district governors.
85:39
In a sad little footnote, the same chronicle records that Ugbaru, the general who had taken the city, died only a few days later. The name Gabrius appears quite a lot in Persian history, so it is best not to get too attached to any one of its owners. As for Nabonidus, he was not executed.
85:57
According to the Babylonian priest Barossus, writing a couple of centuries later, Cyrus sent him away to Carmania in southeastern Iran, where he lived out the rest of his days.
86:06
By the standards of deposed kings in the ancient world, that was an exceptionally generous retirement package. Now, if you have read the Bible or Herodotus, you might remember a rather different version of the fall of Babylon, and it is worth comparing them, because this is a lovely example of how historians weigh their sources.
86:24
Herodotus says that Babylon was so strongly defended that Cyrus could not take it by assault, so he diverted the Euphrates, which ran right through the middle of the city, into a lake or a basin upstream. When the water level dropped to about the height of a man's thigh, his soldiers simply waded along the riverbed and slipped inside. The city was so vast, Herodotus adds, that the people in the centre did not realise the outer districts had already fallen and carried on dancing and celebrating a festival until they found out the hard way. The Book of Daniel tells a different but equally dramatic story.
86:58
Belshazzar holds a great feast, drinking from the sacred vessels taken from the temple in Jerusalem, when a mysterious hand appears and writes on the wall a message that the prophet Daniel interprets as the end of the kingdom.
87:11
That very night, the story says, Belshazzar was killed and the kingdom passed to a ruler called Darius the Mede, a figure no other source has ever heard of. The phrase, the writing on the wall, entered the English language from this scene, which is quite an achievement for a story that historians do not take literally. So which version is right? The Babylonian sources are contemporary, they come from inside the city, and they plainly say that Babylon was entered without a battle. they do not mention any river being diverted. Most historians therefore believe that the city surrendered more or less peacefully after the defeated Opus.
87:46
The stories of Herodotus and Daniel may preserve a memory of a festival happening at the time or of the city being caught off guard, but the dramatic details are almost certainly later embellishment.
87:57
What happened to Belshazzar is unknown. He simply vanishes from the record, which, considering the alternatives, may have been the best thing for him.
88:06
There is one more quiet source of evidence that is easy to overlook, the everyday business documents of Babylonia. Scribes dated every contract and receipt by the year of the reigning king, and within weeks of the conquest, ordinary contracts in Babylonian towns were being dated to Cyrus, king of Babylon, king of the lands.
88:25
The fall of the greatest city in the world, from the point of view of a Babylonian accountant, mostly meant changing the date formula at the top of the page, which brings us to the most famous document of Cyrus' entire reign.
88:37
In 1879, the archaeologist Hormuz Drassam was digging at Babylon on behalf of the British Museum.
88:43
Rassam, born in Mosul to a family of Assyrian Christians, had already made his name excavating Nineveh. At Babylon, in the area of the old Temple of Marduk, his workmen found a barrel-shaped clay object about the size of a rugby ball, though considerably less enjoyable to throw, covered in lines of Babylonian cuneiform. This is the Cyrus Cylinder and it is kept today in the British Museum in London. It was broken when found and part of it went missing for almost a century, until a fragment sitting in the collections of Yale University was recognised in the 1970s as a piece of the same text.
89:18
In 2010, two small tablet fragments, with parts of the same wording turned up in the museum's own storerooms, suggesting the text was also copied and circulated as a kind of official announcement, The cylinder is written in Akkadian, the old language of Babylonian literature, and in the style of the building inscriptions that Mesopotamian kings had been burying in temple foundations for centuries.
89:41
The text begins by describing the wickedness of Nabonidus, who, it says, had neglected the proper worship of Marduk, imposed hardship on the people, and generally made a mess of things. Marduk, angry, looked across all the lands for a righteous ruler and found Cyrus, king of Anshan. The god took him by the hand, called him by name, and declared him ruler of the whole world. Marduk then made Cyrus march to Babylon, going at his side like a friend, and let him enter the city without any battle. In other words, the cylinder presents Cyrus as the chosen one of Marduk, sent by the god himself to rescue Babylon from its own bad king.
90:17
Cyrus then speaks in the first person, proudly listing his titles as king of the universe, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, and king of the four quarters of the world, and naming his ancestors as kings of Anshan.
90:32
The most interesting part comes next. According to the text Cyrus returned the statues of gods to their shrines, both the gods of Babylonian cities that Nabonidus had brought into the capital and the gods of a whole list of cities beyond the Tigris, places like Asher, Susa and Dare whose sanctuaries had been in ruins for a long time. He also let deported peoples go home, gathering the inhabitants of these places and returning them to their dwellings.
90:58
The cylinder adds that Cyrus worked to repair the walls of Babylon, and in a nice little touch his scribes mention that during the work they found an inscription of Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian king who had ruled more than a century before. That is a clue to how the text was written. The scribes of Babylon were consciously following the model of earlier royal inscriptions, slotting the new king into a very old template. Cyrus may have approved the message, but the words were almost certainly written by Babylonian priests who knew exactly what a good Babylonian king was supposed to sound like.
91:30
This brings us to a famous modern debate.
91:32
In 1971 the last Shah of Iran held a lavish celebration at Persepolis to mark 2,500 years of the Persian monarchy.
91:41
and in the run-up to it the Cyrus Cylinder was hailed as the world's first charter of human rights. That same year a replica was presented to the United Nations, and it is still on display at the UN headquarters in New York.
91:53
On the internet you will find a supposed translation of the Cylinder that talks about freedom of religion, the abolition of slavery and the right of every person to choose their own job. It is a very inspiring text. Unfortunately, it is not on the Cylinder. Most historians see the real document as royal propaganda in the Mesopotamian tradition. a new ruler justifying his conquest, blackening his predecessor and presenting himself as the restorer of proper worship, exactly as earlier Assyrian and Babylonian kings had done. There is no concept of individual rights in it at all.
92:26
That said, the policies it describes were real enough, and they were also clever. Allowing local gods and local peoples to return home cost the king relatively little and bought him a great deal of goodwill.
92:38
Cyrus was not a modern humanitarian but he does seem to have understood, better than most conquerors of his age, that a grateful province is much cheaper to run than a resentful one.
92:49
Among the deported peoples who benefited from this approach were the Jews and it is through their story that Cyrus became famous far beyond the Near East. About half a century earlier, Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem twice, first in 597 BC and then again around 587 or 586 BC when the city was destroyed and the Temple of Solomon burned.
93:11
Many people from Judah, especially the elite, craftsmen and priests, were carried off to Babylonia.
93:18
This was the Babylonian exile, remembered in the psalm that describes the captives sitting by the rivers of Babylon and weeping as they remembered Zion, a lament that more than two thousand years later turned into a disco hit, which the exiles could hardly have predicted. Interestingly, we now have direct evidence of these exiles' daily lives. A group of about 200 cuneiform tablets from a Babylonian village called Al-Yehudu, which means something like the town of Judah, records the rents, contracts and business dealings of Judean families living there across several generations.
93:51
Exile, it seems, also involved a great deal of paperwork. The Book of Ezra preserves a decree to rebuild the Jerusalem temple. In its opening chapter, Cyrus, in the first year of his reign over Babylon, proclaims that the God of heaven has given him all the kingdoms of the earth and has charged him to build a house for him at Jerusalem, and he invites any of the exiles who wish to do so to go back and take part in the work.
94:14
Later in the same book there is a second, more business-like version of the order, written in Aramaic, which Ezra says was later found in the royal archive at Ecbatana. This version reads like a real administrative memo, giving the size of the new building, saying the costs should be paid from the royal treasury, and ordering that the gold and silver vessels Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the old temple be returned.
94:36
According to Ezra, these treasures were handed over to a Judean leader named Shesh Bazar who brought them back to Jerusalem.
94:43
Historians have long argued about how exactly these texts relate to what Cyrus actually ordered. The Cyrus Cylinder does not mention the Jews at all, it focuses on Babylonian and Mesopotamian sanctuaries, and the decrees in Ezra were written down and edited by people with their own religious purposes.
95:00
the general policy described in Ezra fits very well with what the cylinder says Cyrus did elsewhere, and many scholars accept that some kind of permission to return and rebuild really was granted.
95:11
It is also important to remember that the return was not a sudden mass departure. Some exiles went back in waves over the following decades, the rebuilding of the temple was slow and only finished years later, and a large number of Jews chose to stay in Babylonia, where they had built homes and businesses, their community would remain there for some two and a half thousand years. So the exile did not so much end as become optional, which for many families was a perfectly reasonable compromise. For the biblical writers, Cyrus was nothing less than an instrument of God.
95:42
In the book of Isaiah, in the part that most scholars attribute to an anonymous prophet writing in Babylon around the time of the Persian conquest, often called Second Isaiah, God calls Cyrus his shepherd, who will carry out his purpose and order Jerusalem to be rebuilt. And in one remarkable passage Cyrus is called the Lord's Anointed. In Hebrew the word is Mashiach, the same word that gives us Messiah. This is the only time the Bible gives this title to a non-Israelite king.
96:11
a Persian ruler who worshipped other gods, who had never set foot in Jerusalem and whose own inscriptions thanked Marduk for his success, was being described in Hebrew scripture as the anointed one of the God of Israel. In Babylon, Cyrus was Marduk's chosen one. In the writings of the Judean exiles, he was the anointed of the Lord. Cyrus, for his part, seems to have been perfectly happy to be everybody's chosen one. And in the traditional Jewish ordering of the Hebrew Bible, the very last verse of the whole collection is Cyrus' proclamation inviting the exiles to go up to Jerusalem, so the Persian king quite literally gets the final word.
96:45
The capture of Babylon brought Cyrus much more than one city. Together with Babylon, Cyrus also got Syria, Phoenicia and Palestine, right up to the borders of Egypt. These western lands had been ruled from Babylon and they seemed to have passed to the new master with very little resistance. For the Phoenician port cities like Tyre and Sidon, a change of overlord was nothing new and as long as trade went on they were content. For Persia, this was a huge strategic gain. A former landlocked mountain kingdom now had access to the Mediterranean and through the Phoenicians to one of the finest navies in the ancient world.
97:20
It also meant that the Persian frontier now touched Egypt, which was very old, very rich and very aware that it might be next. In just over two decades Cyrus had turned a vassal kingdom in Phars into the largest empire the world had yet seen, stretching from the Aegean Sea to Central Asia.
97:38
Babylon became one of its royal residences and its old bureaucracy and much of its elite simply carried on under the new king, which set a pattern. Conquer firmly, then rule lightly where possible and let local people keep their gods, their customs and their paperwork.
97:54
After Babylon, the sources become frustratingly quiet.
97:57
We know that his last years were spent campaigning in the East, in the lands of Central Asia, but almost nothing of the detail has survived.
98:05
Herodotus gives a brief summary. While Harpagus subdued the lower parts of Asia, meaning Anatolia, Cyrus himself conquered the upper parts, nation after nation, and Herodotus declines to describe most of them because, he says, it would take too long. Few historians in history have been so generous with their readers' time. The exact order and dates of these eastern campaigns are uncertain, and some may well have taken place before the attack on Babylon. But we know the results. When Darius later listed the lands of the empire in his great inscriptions, they included Bactria, Sogdiana and other eastern regions, and since there is no record of anyone else conquering them in between, Cyrus is the obvious candidate.
98:47
Bactria lay in what is now northern Afghanistan, with parts in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan along the upper course of the Amudarya River, which the Greeks called the Oxus.
98:57
It was a rich land of irrigated fields, walled towns and excellent horses, and its name lives on in the Bactrian Camel, the sturdy two-humped variety that carried goods across the cold deserts of Central Asia.
99:09
Further north lay Sogdiana, centred on the fertile valley around the city later known as Samarkand, a land of farmers and merchants who would become famous centuries later as the great traders of the Silk Road.
99:21
These were old, settled societies whose people spoke Iranian languages related to Persian, and bringing them into the empire added enormous resources in men, horses and tribute. Beyond Sogdiana, however, the settled world came to an end. To the north stretched the vast steppes, home to nomadic peoples whom the Persians called Saka and the Greeks often called Scythians. These were horse archers who moved with their herds across enormous distances, and they were the great security problem of every settled power in the region for the next two thousand years.
99:54
You could not easily conquer people who had no cities to capture and who could simply ride away, and you certainly could not ignore people who could ride back whenever they pleased. Cyrus's solution was a line of fortifications along the northern frontier, and the most famous of them was the fortress he founded on the Sir Daria. the river the Greeks called the Jaxartes. It was named after him, Krushkatha in Old Persian, and the Greeks knew it as Chiropolis, the city of Cyrus. Its exact site is still debated, but many scholars place it near the modern town of Istaravshan in northern Tajikistan.
100:28
It was a frontier town in the truest sense, the very edge of the known Persian world, with fields and orchards on one side and the open steppe on the other.
100:36
Two centuries later Alexander the Great had to besiege it, and in a neat echo of the Babylon legend his men are said to have got inside through the nearly dry channel of a stream that ran under the walls. Apparently ancient generals never tired of the riverbed trick, and it was out there, somewhere on that north-eastern frontier, that the story of Cyrus came to an end. In 530 BC Cyrus died in a war with nomads. That much is generally accepted. Everything else is a matter of which ancient author you choose to believe, and they disagree with a cheerfulness that is almost admirable.
101:10
The most famous version comes from Herodotus, who admits right at the start that many stories were told about the death of Cyrus, and that he has chosen the one he found most believable. According to him, Cyrus decided to conquer the Masajte, a powerful nomadic people living beyond a river to the east of the Caspian Sea. They were ruled at the time by a widowed queen named Tamiris. Herodotus says the Masagte worshipped the sun alone and sacrificed horses to it, on the logic that the swiftest of gods deserved the swiftest of animals.
101:40
Cyrus first tried diplomacy of a rather direct kind, sending a proposal of marriage to Tamiris. She understood perfectly well that he was courting her kingdom rather than her and declined.
101:51
Apparently even in the 6th century BC a queen could tell when someone was only interested in her property. cyrus then prepared to invade building bridges across the river and here our old friend croesus the former king of lydia who now served as an advisor at the persian court makes one final appearance in herodotus's story he advised cyrus to cross the river and try a trick the persians would set up a camp full of food and crucially large quantities of strong wine a drink the massage tay were not used to leave only their weakest troops behind to guard it and withdraw the main army the trap worked A third of the Masajte army, led by Tamiris's son, a young man named Spargapises, attacked the camp, overwhelmed the guards, and then settled down to enjoy the feast.
102:37
When they had eaten and drunk themselves into a deep sleep, the Persians returned and captured or killed most of them. Spargapises was taken prisoner.
102:46
When he sobered up and understood what had happened, Herodotus says, he asked to be released from his bonds and then took his own life, unable to bear the shame.
102:55
Tamiris sent Cyrus a furious message, calling his victory a cowardly one, one not by courage but by wine, and warning him that if he did not leave her land she would give him more blood than even he could drink.
103:07
Then came the battle, which Herodotus calls the fiercest ever fought between non-Greek peoples. In the end, the Masagte won. Most of the Persian army was destroyed, and Cyrus himself fell after a reign of 29 years. Herodotus then adds a final dark episode. Tamiris, he says, had the king's body searched for among the dead, and when it was found she made a grim symbolic gesture of revenge over it, reminding the fallen conqueror that he had always been thirsty for blood, and now could have all he wanted.
103:38
It is a powerful story, and it has inspired painters for centuries, but it is exactly the sort of tale that grows in the retelling, and we have no way of knowing whether any of it happened.
103:49
Other ancient writers tell the story quite differently. Ctesias, a Greek doctor at the Persian court a century and a half later, with a well-known love of sensational detail, says that Cyrus was wounded fighting the Derbises and their Indian allies with elephants and died three days later. Barossus, the Babylonian priest, apparently said that he died fighting another nomadic group called the Dahai, so we have one king, one death, and at least three different enemies, which tells you a great deal about the state of the evidence. And then there is Xenophon, the Athenian soldier and writer, who wrote of a peaceful death.
104:24
In his long work called The Cyropedia, The Education of Cyrus, Xenophon describes the old king dying peacefully in his palace in Persia, warned of his approaching end by a dream. He gathers his sons and friends, gives them a long and very wise speech about the soul and the duties of a ruler, and quietly passes away.
104:43
It is a beautiful scene, but the Cyrepedia is less a history than a political novel about the ideal ruler, and a perfect hero naturally deserves a perfect death.
104:53
As a source for how Cyrus actually died, most historians treat it with polite scepticism, so what can we say for certain? the Babylonian business tablets come to the rescue again. The last ones dated to the reign of Cyrus come from the late summer of 530 BC, and documents dated to his successor begin almost immediately afterward. That gives us a firm date.
105:15
As for the manner of death, most modern historians think the broad outline of Herodotus and the others is probably right. Cyrus was killed or fatally wounded while campaigning against nomadic enemies on the north-eastern frontier, somewhere beyond the region of the Sir Daria and the Caspian.
105:32
The details of who, where and how will probably always remain a mystery. Cyrus seems to have walked out of folklore into history and then walked back into folklore again at the end.
105:42
What is not a legend is his tomb.
105:45
Cyrus was buried in a modest stone tomb at Pasargadai, which still stands. His body, or what remained of it, must have been carried back across the empire, a journey of well over a thousand miles to the city he had founded in the heartland of Persia, The tomb sits on the open plain, made of large blocks of pale limestone. It has a base of six steps rising like a stepped platform, and on top of that a small gabled chamber with a sloping stone roof, rather like a little house. The whole structure stands about 11 metres tall, and the burial chamber inside is tiny, only a few metres long.
106:20
Compared with the pyramids of Egypt, it is almost shockingly simple. the man who ruled more of the world than anyone before him, chose, or was given, a grave about the size of a garden shed on top of a staircase. Its design may borrow from Mesopotamian temple towers and the gabled tombs of Anatolia, a fitting mix for an empire of so many peoples.
106:42
We know something of what was once inside thanks to the historian Arian, who drew on the account of Aristobulus, an officer in the army of Alexander the Great.
106:51
When Alexander came to Pasargadae, he ordered Aristobulus to inspect the tomb. Inside, according to this account, there had been a golden coffin, a couch with golden feet, fine tapestries, robes, weapons and jewellery. There was also an inscription, which Arian reports as telling the passer-by that here lay Cyrus, who had founded the Empire of the Persians and ruled Asia, and asking him not to begrudge the king the little patch of earth that covered his body.
107:18
A small house nearby was home to a group of magi, the Persian priestly guardians, who looked after the tomb from generation to generation.
107:26
Once a month they sacrificed a horse to Cyrus. Unfortunately, when Alexander's men arrived they found that the tomb had already been robbed, the coffin damaged and most of the treasures gone. Alexander, who had a great admiration for Cyrus, had the tomb restored and the doorway sealed. Apparently even the conqueror of Persia drew the line at leaving its founder without a proper roof over his head. The tomb's later history is just as interesting.
107:51
After the coming of Islam, the memory of Cyrus faded among the local people, and the monument became known as the Tomb of the Mother of Solomon. In the 13th century, a small mosque was built around it, using columns taken from the ruins of Cyrus' palaces nearby, and a prayer niche was carved into the wall of the burial chamber, which you can still see today.
108:11
this change of identity may actually have protected the tomb. A shrine connected to the family of Solomon, a prophet in Islamic tradition, was not something people would lightly destroy. Only in the 19th century did European travellers, comparing it with the descriptions in Arian and Strabo, become convinced that this was the tomb of Cyrus the Great.
108:31
it has outlasted the palaces, the gardens and the city around it, which now survive mostly as low foundations and lonely columns. Today Pasargadae is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the tomb stands alone on the windswept plain of Fars, surrounded by low hills and wide skies.
108:48
Every year, around 29th October, the anniversary of Cyrus' entry into Babylon, people from across Iran and beyond gather near the tomb to remember him. a quiet reminder that the memory of a king who died more than two and a half thousand years ago is still very much alive. The kingdom he left behind was immense, young, and still held together largely by the reputation of one remarkable man, and it now passed to his son Cambyses, who would soon turn his eyes toward the one great kingdom on its borders that remained unconquered.
109:20
Cyrus was barely settled into his stone house at Passagade when his son picked up the family to-do list. and the next item on it was the biggest prize left in the ancient world.
109:30
That son was Cambyses II, and the prize was Egypt.
109:35
Cambyses had been training for this moment for most of his adult life. He was the eldest son of Cyrus and his wife Cassandane, a Persian noblewoman of the Achaemenid clan, and he was not some untested prince stepping out of the nursery.
109:49
Babylonian documents show that after the capture of Babylon his father gave him a royal role in the city, and for a short time business contracts there were even dated by the reigns of both men together, which is the ancient equivalent of putting your son's name on the company letterhead.
110:03
The Nabonidus Chronicle mentions him taking part in the Great New Year Festival in Babylon. So by the time Cyrus died in 530 BC, Cambyses already knew how temples, tax collectors and nervous local elites worked.
110:18
What he did not yet have was a conquest of his own, and in the ancient Near East a king without a conquest was a bit like a chef without a signature dish. The transfer of power seems to have gone smoothly, which given what happened at the end of this chapter is worth enjoying while it lasts. Cambyses took the throne, and his younger brother Badia, according to the later Greek writer Ctesias, received a large command in the eastern lands with privileges and freedom from tribute. Remember that brother, because his name is going to come back to haunt everybody.
110:47
The plan to attack Egypt was not really Cambysi's invention. Cyrus had swallowed the Medes, Lydia and Babylon, and that left exactly one independent great power standing in the whole Near East. Egypt was rich, ancient and very proud of being both. The Nile Valley could feed enormous numbers of people, its temples held gold that had been piling up for centuries, and its pharaohs had a habit of meddling in Syria and Palestine whenever their neighbours looked weak.
111:15
Any empire that controlled the Levant had to think about Egypt sooner or later, the way anyone living next to a large and grumpy dog has to think about the fence.
111:23
Greek writers say that Cyrus had already been planning the campaign before his death. Cambyses inherited the project and the next few years went into preparing it. Egypt in those days was ruled by the XXVI dynasty, often called the Seyte dynasty, after its capital city of Sey in the Western Nile Delta.
111:41
These pharaohs had come to power about a century earlier, after the Assyrians pulled out, and they had built a remarkably successful kingdom. They liked to present themselves as old-fashioned guardians of tradition. Their art copied styles from the Age of the Pyramids, already some 2,000 years in the past, so in a sense the Saint Kings were running a very long and very expensive retro revival.
112:04
At the same time, they were thoroughly modern in their politics. They hired Greek and Carrion mercenaries, built a navy, and let Greek merchants settle at a trading town called Naukratis in the Delta.
112:15
The long-reigning pharaoh Amosai II, whom the Greeks called Amasis, ruled for over 40 years and was famous among the Greeks for being clever, worldly and fond of a drink. Herodotus tells us that Amasis worked hard all morning and then spent the afternoon joking and feasting with friends, and when his advisors complained he answered that a bow kept permanently strung will eventually snap.
112:36
It is hard not to like him a little. The Greeks, who loved a good personal reason behind a big war, offered several explanations for why Cambyses attacked Egypt. Herodotus collects them with the air of a man who does not fully believe any of them.
112:50
In the Persian version, Cyrus had once asked Amasis to send him the best eye doctor in Egypt. The Egyptian doctor was not happy about being shipped off to Persia, apparently without being asked, and he took his revenge by advising Cambyses to ask Amasis for his daughter in marriage. If Amasis said yes, he would lose his daughter. If he said no, he would make an enemy of Persia.
113:13
Amasis tried to wriggle out of the trap by sending a different young woman, Natetes, the daughter of a previous pharaoh, dressed up as his own child. When Cambyses discovered the swap, so the story goes, he was furious. Unsurprisingly, the Egyptians told a different version, in which Cambyses was actually the son of Cyrus and this same Natetes, which would make the conquest of Egypt a kind of family homecoming rather than a foreign invasion. Herodotus points out with some patience that this is nonsense, since the Egyptians knew perfectly well that Persian kings were not normally the sons of foreign concubines.
113:47
Peoples who have been conquered often try to make the conqueror one of their own, and these stories tell us more about wounded pride than about real events. The real reasons were simpler. Egypt was rich, Egypt was independent, and Egypt had been allied to Lydia and Babylon, the very powers Cyrus had already defeated. A Persian empire that stopped at the Sinai would always have had a hostile neighbour on its flank.
114:11
So Cambyses prepared, and the preparations were serious. The biggest problem with invading Egypt from Asia was not the Egyptian army. It was the desert.
114:20
Between southern Palestine and the eastern edge of the Nile delta lies the northern Sinai, a strip of sand and scrub with very little water. Armies had crossed it before, including the Assyrians, but it was always a dangerous business, which is a polite way of saying that marching thousands of thirsty men and animals through a waterless landscape is how great empires lose campaigns before the first arrow is fired. Herodotus says that Cambyses got help here from two unexpected directions. The first was a man named Phanes, a Greek from Halicarnassus, who had served as a mercenary commander for Amasis.
114:55
Phanes had fallen out with the pharaoh, slipped away from Egypt and made his way to the Persian court, carrying with him a head full of inside information about Egyptian defences. amasis apparently sent a trusted servant on a fast ship to chase him down and feigns managed to escape by getting his guards drunk which is not a method recommended by modern security consultants but seems to have worked feigns advised cambyses to make a deal with the king of the arabs who controlled the desert routes The second helper, then, was this Arab ruler who agreed to supply the Persian army with water.
115:28
Herodotus reports that the Arabs filled camel skins with water and placed them along the route, and he also passes on a much more ambitious story about a pipeline made of ox hides carrying water from a distant river into the desert. He sensibly says the camel skin version is more believable. Either way, the Persians crossed the Sinai in good order, which in itself was a quiet triumph of logistics. There was also the sea. Cyrus' conquests had brought the cities of Phoenicia into the empire, and the Phoenicians were the finest sailors of the age. The island of Cyprus, which had been under Egyptian influence, now switched sides and offered ships as well.
116:04
Even the Greek tyrant Polycrates of Samos, who had been a friend of Amasis, decided that the wind was blowing from the east and sent ships to help the Persians. Herodotus adds a delightful detail here. Polycrates filled those ships with citizens he suspected of disloyalty and quietly asked Cambyses not to send them back. It was, in effect, a way of mailing your political opponents to a war zone.
116:26
For the first time, a Persian king had a real navy at his disposal, and this would become one of the great tools of the empire. Then fortune lent a hand.
116:36
In 526 BC, just as the Persian storm was gathering, old Amasis died after his long reign. The throne passed to his son, Psamtik III, who had the unenviable job of becoming pharaoh only months before the largest army in the world arrived on his doorstep.
116:52
If you have ever started a new job on the day the office caught fire you have some sense of his situation, although your office probably did not contain three thousand years of tradition and an angry Persian king.
117:04
Herodotus even reports that during the short reign of Samtik it reigned at Thebes in Upper Egypt, something the locals said had never happened before and many took it as a bad omen.
117:14
In a land where rain was a rare event, a shower was apparently more alarming than a foreign army. In 525 BC the two sides met at Pelusium, a fortified city at the easternmost mouth of the Nile, the traditional gateway into Egypt from Asia.
117:29
Anyone coming from the Sinai had to deal with Pelusium first, so it was the obvious place for the Egyptians to make their stand.
117:36
Zamtic III had his Egyptian troops and his Greek and Carian mercenaries, the same kind of men Fanes had once commanded. Herodotus tells a grim story about how the mercenaries showed their anger at Phanus' betrayal before the battle, and we will leave the details of that in the sand where they belong. The battle itself was hard fought, and Herodotus says many fell on both sides, but in the end the Egyptian army broke and fled.
118:00
Herodotus adds a strange observation that he says he checked personally when he visited the battlefield decades later. The bones of the fallen were still lying in two separate heaps, Persian and Egyptian, and local people told him that the Egyptian skulls were much harder than the Persian ones.
118:16
Their explanation was that Egyptians shaved their heads from childhood and toughened their skulls in the sun, while Persians wore felt caps and kept their heads soft and shaded.
118:26
It is one of those pieces of ancient science that combines careful observation with a completely wrong conclusion, and it reminds us that Herodotus was a traveller who liked to see things for himself, even if he did not always understand what he was looking at.
118:40
Much later, a Greek writer named Polyenus, working some seven centuries after the event, added a far more famous legend. He claimed that Cambyses won at Pelusium by placing cats and other animals sacred to the Egyptians in front of his troops, so that the Egyptian archers refused to shoot for fear of harming them. It is a wonderful story, and it appears in countless books and internet articles today, but there is no early evidence for it at all. Herodotus, who loved this sort of thing and would certainly have mentioned it, says nothing of the kind.
119:11
So the cat shield should probably be filed under legend, alongside most other things that sound too good to be true.
119:18
After Pelusium, the defeated Egyptians fell back to Memphis, the ancient capital near the apex of the Delta, close to where Cairo stands today.
119:27
Cambyses sent a ship up the Nile carrying a herald from Mytilene, a Greek city on the island of Lesbos, to offer terms. The Egyptians, in no mood to negotiate, attacked the ship and killed the crew, which is about the clearest way imaginable of saying no thank you. The Persians then besieged Memphis, and after a siege the city surrendered. Samtick III was taken prisoner. With Memphis in Persian hands, the rest of Egypt followed, and the neighbouring Libyans and the Greek cities of Cyrene and Barca to the west sent gifts and offered their submission without waiting to be asked.
120:00
Herodotus says that Cambyses was not impressed with the modest gift sent by Cyrene and scattered the silver among his soldiers with his own hands, which tells us that even conquerors can be fussy about presents.
120:12
What happened to Samtick III is a story Herodotus tells at length, and it is one of the more moving passages in his work. He describes how Cambyses tested the captured pharaoh by making him watch his daughter, sent to fetch water like a servant, and his son led away among the prisoners, and how Samtick stayed silent through it all, only breaking into tears when he saw an old friend. a former companion at his table, reduced to begging. When asked why, he's supposed to have said that the misfortunes of his own family were too great for tears, but the fall of a friend into poverty in his old age was something he could weep for.
120:46
Cambyses, the story continues, was touched and decided to spare the former king. Herodotus says that the Persians had a custom of honouring the sons of defeated kings and sometimes giving them back their thrones, and that Samtik might have been allowed to govern Egypt if he had kept quiet.
121:03
Unfortunately, he was later caught trying to stir up a revolt and paid with his life. How much of this is true is impossible to say, and the scene has the polished shape of a moral tale. Still, the basic outline, a captured king, first treated with respect and later removed when he became a danger, fits the way the Persians often behaved. and then Camboses did something that tells us a great deal about Persian methods. He did not simply declare Egypt a conquered province and send in a governor. He became pharaoh. He took the full traditional titles, appeared in Egyptian art in the traditional costume, and was listed by later Egyptian historians as the founder of a new dynasty, the 27th.
121:43
In the eyes of Egyptian tradition, the world needed a pharaoh to keep cosmic order going, to make offerings to the gods and to keep chaos at bay. If the old dynasty had fallen, then the new king, whoever he was and wherever he came from, had to step into that role. Cambyses understood this, or at least he had advisors who understood it, and that brings us to one of the most interesting witnesses of the whole period.
122:06
Most of what we know about the Persian conquest of Egypt comes from Herodotus, who was writing about 70 years later and whose main informants were Egyptian priests with their own opinions. Fortunately, we also have a voice from the Egyptian side, and it comes from a statue. The statue belonged to an Egyptian official named Ujahorasnet, and today it stands in the Gregorian Egyptian Museum, part of the Vatican Museums in Rome. It is a little odd, when you think about it, that one of the most important documents of Persian history is kept a short walk from the Sistine Chapel, but that is the strange journey of ancient objects for you.
122:41
The statue was most likely brought to Italy in Roman times, when Egyptian antiquities were extremely fashionable among wealthy Romans, the way some people today decorate their living rooms with old maps and globes they will never use. The statue is made of dark green stone and shows Ujahorosnet standing, holding in front of him a small shrine containing a figure of the god Osiris. Egyptologists call this kind of statue a neophorus statue, from the Greek words for shrine carrying, which is a good example of scholars taking a simple idea and giving it a name that requires a dictionary.
123:14
The original head has been lost and the one you see today is a modern restoration, but the important part is the body, because almost every available surface is covered with carved hieroglyphic text. Ujah Horisnet essentially wore his autobiography. It is a little like having your entire LinkedIn profile tattooed on your robe, but for an ancient Egyptian official hoping to be remembered by the gods and by future generations, it made perfect sense.
123:40
What does the text say? Ujahorosnet had been a naval commander under the last eight kings, Amasis and Samtik III. In other words, he was one of the people responsible for defending Egypt against the very invasion that succeeded.
123:54
One might expect such a man to have been removed, exiled, or worse. Instead, after the conquest, he became a trusted advisor to Cambyses. He describes how the great king of all foreign lands came to Egypt and how Cambyses made him chief physician and a companion of the king with a place at court. Then comes the most fascinating claim.
124:13
Ujahorosnet says that he composed the royal titulary of Cambyses.
124:17
Egyptian pharaohs had a series of formal names, each with its own religious meaning and a new king needed a proper set.
124:25
Ujahhorisnet provided canvases with a throne name meaning roughly offspring of Ra, the sun god. So the Persian king, a worshipper of Iranian gods from the mountains of Fars, was presented to the Egyptian people as a son of the sun, with the paperwork drawn up by a former admiral of the enemy fleet.
124:42
If you want a single image of how the Persian Empire worked, this is a good one. Ujahhorisnet also tells us what he did with his influence. He came from Seis, the old sate capital, and he was a priest of its patron goddess Neith, an ancient deity associated with weaving, hunting and creation. According to the inscription, foreigners, probably soldiers of the Persian army, had settled in the temple precinct of Neith, which for a sacred sanctuary was roughly as welcome as finding strangers camping in your cathedral. Ujahorosnek complained to Cambyses, and the king ordered the intruders removed, their houses cleared away and the temple purified.
125:18
The temple's revenues and festivals were restored, and Cambyses himself, says the inscription, came to say, bowed before the goddess and made offerings as earlier kings had done.
125:29
Ujahorosnet presents himself as a protector of his city in a terrible time, a man who used his position to save what could be saved. He mentions a great turmoil that happened in Egypt, which is a phrase that has kept scholars busy for a long time. Naturally, historians argue about how to judge him. Some see Ujahorosnet as a pragmatist who collaborated with the conqueror in order to protect his temple and his people, a kind of ancient civil servant who decided that the best way to serve Egypt was from inside the new regime. Others see a man who simply switched sides to keep his career going and then wrote the most flattering possible version of events, as people writing autobiographies tend to do.
126:08
The truth may be somewhere in between and the two motives are not mutually exclusive. What matters for us is that his statue gives a picture very different from the one painted by Herodotus.
126:19
In the statue, Cambyses is a king who listens to Egyptian advice, respects Egyptian gods and takes care to look like a proper pharaoh. With Egypt in hand, Cambyses turned his attention to the lands around it, and this is where things started to go badly wrong.
126:34
Herodotus says he planned three more campaigns. One was against Carthage, the great Phoenician colony in North Africa. This one never even started because the Phoenician sailors, who made up the backbone of his navy, refused to sail against their own colonists. They had a point, and Cambyses, who could hardly fight a sea war without his sailors, let the matter drop. It is a rare example of an ancient army simply declining an assignment and getting away with it.
127:00
The second campaign was aimed south, at the kingdom of Kush in Nubia, which the Greeks called Ethiopia. This was not the modern country of Ethiopia but the land along the Nile beyond the cataracts in what is today northern Sudan, ruled by kings who had once, a century and a half earlier, conquered Egypt themselves and ruled it as pharaohs. To the Greeks, this distant southern land was a place of legend, where people were said to be the tallest and most beautiful on earth and to live to a hundred and twenty years. Herodotus tells us that Cambyses first sent spies disguised as ambassadors bearing gifts, including a purple robe, a gold necklace, perfume and a jar of palm wine.
127:41
The king of Cush saw through them immediately. According to the story, he mocked the gifts, except for the wine, which he admitted was rather good, and sent back his own enormous bow with a message that the Persians should attack only when they could draw a bow of that size. It is a classic piece of Greek storytelling, and it may have nothing to do with real events, but it does capture the idea that the far south was a world the Persians did not understand.
128:05
The real campaign was a disaster for practical reasons. Herodotus says that Cambyses marched off in a rage without proper preparation, without enough supplies for a long trek through the deserts, beyond the southern border of Egypt.
128:18
Before the army had covered even a fifth of the distance the food ran out. The soldiers ate their pack animals and then they ate whatever plants they could find. Herodotus adds even darker details about what happened when there was nothing left and those, like the bones at Pelusium, we can leave in the desert. The famine forced Cambyses to turn back and the army limped home with heavy losses. Some historians suspect that Herodotus, as so often with Cambyses, made the failure sound worse than it was.
128:45
There are hints in other sources that the Persians did gain some control over the northern edge of Nubia, and later Persian kings list Cushites among their subject peoples, bringing gifts of ivory and ebony.
128:57
but whatever the exact scale of the expedition, it clearly did not end in a grand conquest. Logistics, the dull subject that wins and loses most wars, had won again.
129:08
The third campaign is the one that still captures imaginations today. Cambyses sent an army west into the vast western desert of Egypt, toward the oasis of Siwa near the modern border with Libya. Siwa was home to a famous oracle of the god Amun whom the Greeks identified with their own Zeus and the oracle was respected throughout the Mediterranean world. Two centuries later Alexander the Great would make his own famous trip there. Why Cambyses wanted to attack it is unclear. Herodotus suggests he wanted to punish the people of the Oasis, the Ammonians, perhaps because the oracle had said something unflattering.
129:43
It may also have been about controlling the desert routes to the west. According to Herodotus, the army numbered 50,000 men.
129:51
It set out from Thebes in Upper Egypt and marched through the desert to a town Herodotus calls Oasis, probably the Oasis of Carga, a journey of about seven days.
130:01
Up to that point everything was fine. Then the army left Carga to cross the great sand sea towards Siwa, and it was never seen again.
130:09
The Ammonians told Herodotus that while the soldiers were eating a midday meal somewhere between the oases, a great wind blew up from the south and buried them under mountains of sand. Neither the army nor any messenger ever reached Siwa, and none of the men ever came back to Egypt.
130:24
Unsurprisingly, a lost army of 50,000 men in the desert has become one of the great treasure hunts of archaeology. People are still looking for it. Explorers have crossed the dunes with camels, jeeps and satellite images. Every few years someone announces that they have found traces, a few bronze weapons, arrowheads, a scattering of bones, perhaps an old earring, and every few years the scholarly world raises an eyebrow and waits for proper evidence.
130:50
In 2009, two Italian researchers, the Castiglioni brothers, made headlines with claims of possible remains, but their finds did not convince most specialists. The desert, which keeps secrets very well, has so far declined to confirm anything. There is also a more sceptical theory. The Dutch Egyptologist Olaf Kaper has suggested that the army may not have been swallowed by a sandstorm at all. He points to evidence for an Egyptian rebel leader named Petubastis, who seems to have claimed the throne around this time and to have been active in the Oasis region.
131:22
In Capers' view, the army may have been defeated by these rebels, and the story of the sandstorm may have been a convenient way of explaining away an embarrassing military defeat. A sandstorm, after all, is nobody's fault, while losing a battle to rebels makes the government look bad. If that is true, it would be one of the oldest cover stories in recorded history. It remains a theory, and it is disputed, but it is a good reminder that a dramatic tale is not always the whole story. Whether wind or war swallowed it, the army is gone and somewhere out there in the western desert, perhaps, a great many Persian soldiers are still waiting to be found.
131:59
If you are planning a weekend expedition, do bring more water than they did.
132:04
Now we come to the part of the story that made Cambyses famous, or rather infamous. In the Greek tradition, and especially in Herodotus, Cambyses is portrayed as a madman. Herodotus does not merely say he was harsh or cruel. He builds a whole picture of a king who had lost his mind and the centrepiece of that picture is the Apis bull.
132:23
To understand why this mattered so much we need to understand what the Apis was. In Memphis the Egyptians worshipped a living bull as the earthly form of the god Tar, the creator god of the city. The apis was not just any bull. He had to be black, with very particular markings, including a white triangle on his forehead and a mark shaped like an eagle on his back, among others.
132:46
When one apist died, the priests searched the country for a calf with the right markings, and when they found him there was national celebration. The apist lived in luxury in his own temple, was fed the finest food, had a harem of cows, and was consulted as an oracle. When he died, he was mummified with enormous ceremony and buried in a giant stone sarcophagus in underground galleries at Saqqara near Memphis. It was, without much exaggeration, the best job in Egypt, provided you were a bull.
133:15
According to Herodotus, Cambyses returned to Memphis from his failed southern expedition in a black mood and found the city celebrating because a new Apis had just appeared.
133:25
Cambyses assumed that the Egyptians were celebrating his defeat. When the priests explained that a god had appeared among them, he called them liars, ordered the bull brought before him, drew his dagger and struck at the animal wounding it in the thigh. He then laughed at the priests for worshipping a god of flesh and blood that could be hurt by iron. The bull, Herodotus says, lay wounded in the temple and eventually died, and the priests buried him in secret. From that moment, according to Herodotus, Cambyses went completely mad. Herodotus goes on to list a whole series of crimes against his family, his courtiers and Egyptian religion, including opening ancient tombs and mocking the statues of the gods in the temples of Memphis.
134:07
He sums it all up by saying that only a madman would ridicule the religion and customs of other peoples, since everyone believes their own customs to be the best.
134:15
Herodotus even offers a medical explanation, suggesting Cambyses may have suffered from the sacred disease, which is what the Greeks called epilepsy. It is a vivid portrait and it was very influential. For more than 2,000 years, Cambyses was remembered as the mad Persian king who stabbed a god. And then, in the 19th century, archaeology quietly ruined the story.
134:37
In the 1850s, the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette discovered the Serapeum at Saqqara, the vast underground burial complex of the Apis Bulls, after spotting the head of a sphinx sticking out of the sand. Among the huge granite sarcophagi and the inscriptions in the galleries, he found evidence concerning an Apis who died and was buried during the reign of Cambyses.
134:59
There is an epitaph for this Apis, along with a sarcophagus inscribed in the king's name. The inscription is dated to year 6 of Cambyses' reign as king of Egypt, counting his years in the Egyptian way, and it describes the burial of the sacred bull with all due honours. It shows Cambyses in the traditional pose of a pharaoh kneeling before the Apis, and the text says that the king had the sarcophagus made for the bull and provided everything that was needed for the burial, as a pious pharaoh should. In other words, far from murdering the god, Cambyses paid for his funeral and the funeral was done properly.
135:33
There is also an inscription from early in the reign of Darius recording the birth of the next Apis, and when the dates are put together there seems to be no room for the dramatic stabbing story as Herodotus tells it.
135:44
Some scholars have tried to rescue part of the legend by suggesting that Cambyses might have wounded a different younger bull, but that requires the evidence to bend quite a lot.
135:53
The simplest explanation is that the story did not happen. So where did the black legend come from? The most likely answer leads back to the priests, the very people who were Herodotus' main sources in Egypt. Ujahorosnet's statue shows Cambyses favoring some temples, but other evidence suggests that his government also cut the income of many others.
136:13
A later document written in Demotic, the everyday Egyptian script of the late period, preserves what appears to be a decree of canvases reducing the supplies that Egyptian temples receive from the state, such as wood, livestock and poultry, while exempting only a small number of major sanctuaries.
136:30
Temples in Egypt were not just places of worship, They were huge economic institutions with land, workshops, granaries and staff, and their income was the lifeblood of the priestly class. A king who trimmed that income was not going to be remembered fondly in the temple records or in the stories the priests told to curious foreign visitors. Imagine the situation from the point of view of a priest in a temple that had just lost a good part of its revenue. You have a foreign king from a distant land with strange gods, who has cut your budget and who, in the end, did not stay long enough to win your affection.
137:05
A few decades later a Greek tourist named Herodotus turns up asking questions about the past. It is not hard to guess what kind of stories he might hear. Add to that the general Greek fondness for tales about arrogant tyrants who are punished by the gods and the result is the mad canvases of the histories. The real king was probably a tough, ambitious ruler who made some enemies, had some military failures and handled some Egyptian institutions roughly, but who also took care to present himself as a legitimate pharaoh. That is not quite as thrilling as a mad king stabbing a sacred bull.
137:38
But historians, unfortunately, are not allowed to choose the more exciting version just because it makes a better story. This does not mean that the conquest of Egypt was gentle. Ujahorsnet himself speaks of a great turmoil and there were surely deaths, destruction and looting during and after the invasion as there always were. Egyptians did not welcome foreign rule and over the following centuries they would rebel against the Persians again and again. But the gap between the sober picture from the Egyptian monuments and the wild portrait in Herodotus is a good example of why historians try to compare different kinds of evidence.
138:14
A statue, a sarcophagus and a dry administrative decree can sometimes tell a truer story than the most brilliant storyteller of the ancient world.
138:24
Cambyses stayed in Egypt for about three years. In the spring of 522 BC, troubling news arrived from the heart of the empire. A herald came to the army with a remarkable announcement. Persia, he declared, now had a new king, and the soldiers should no longer obey Cambyses but Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, the king's own younger brother.
138:45
Somewhere back in Iran, a man calling himself Bardiya had seized the throne and large parts of the empire seemed to have accepted him, at least for the moment. Babylonian business documents from this time begin to be dated by the reign of Bardiya, which shows that the new ruler was recognised in at least some important places.
139:02
Herodotus says the new king had made himself popular by announcing a holiday from military service and taxes for three years, which is the kind of election promise that tends to go down well in any century. Who this man really was is one of the great puzzles of ancient history, and it belongs to the next part of our story. For Cambyses the question was simple. Someone had taken his throne, and he had to get home fast. He gathered his army and started the long march back from Egypt toward Persia, along the coast of the Levant. He never made it.
139:33
while the army was passing through syria cambyses suffered an accident that sounds almost too ordinary for a king who had conquered egypt herodotus says that as he was jumping onto his horse the cap of his sword's scabbard fell off and the bare blade cut into his thigh the wound became infected and gangrene set in In a world without antibiotics, that kind of infection was usually fatal, and there was nothing his physicians could do.
139:58
About three weeks later, Cambyses died. He had ruled for about eight years. Herodotus, who never misses a chance to tie a story together, points out that the wound was in the same part of the body where Cambyses had supposedly struck the apis bull, the thigh.
140:14
To a Greek audience, that was clearly divine justice. The god had been avenged. Since we have already seen that the bull story is very likely untrue, this neat symmetry looks more like the work of a storyteller than of the gods.
140:26
Herodotus adds another touch of fate. An Egyptian oracle had once told Cambyses that he would die in Ecbatana, and he had always assumed this meant the great Median capital in Iran, where he expected to end his days in comfortable old age.
140:41
but when he asked the name of the Syrian town where he lay wounded, he was told that it too was called Ekbatana. Realising the prophecy had come true, he accepted his fate.
140:51
Oracles and Greek stories are always technically correct in the most annoying way possible, a bit like a very literal customer service robot. The real place was probably a town in Syria whose name sounded similar to the Greek here, and modern historians debate exactly where it was.
141:07
Some modern scholars have wondered whether an accident is really the whole story. A sudden death, at the exact moment when a rival had seized the throne and the king was marching home to deal with it, is the kind of coincidence that makes historians suspicious by profession.
141:22
Was it truly an accident, a moment of despair, or something arranged by people around him who had already decided which side they were on? We simply do not know, and the ancient accounts do not agree on all the details. What we do know is the result. Cambyses died without a son. He had no direct heir to carry on the line of Cyrus, at least none who could take the throne. The only other living son of Cyrus was Bardia, and whether the man now sitting on the throne really was Bardia was exactly the question that would soon tear the empire apart.
141:53
In just a few years, Persia had gone from the triumph of conquering the ancient kingdom of the pharaohs to a strange and dangerous situation.
142:01
The king was dead in Syria, far from home. His army was leaderless, somewhere on the road between Egypt and Iran. A man claiming to be the king's brother ruled at the centre, and the conquered peoples of the empire from Babylon to Media were watching very carefully to see whether this enormous new state would hold together or fall apart like so many empires before it.
142:23
The empire that Cyrus had built in a single generation and that Cambyses had extended to the banks of the Nile now stood on the very edge of collapse.
142:32
Out of that confusion, a group of Persian nobles was about to make a decision that would change everything. So the king of kings was dead on a dusty road in Syria. The man on the throne claimed to be his brother and nobody could quite agree on who was really running the world.
142:47
Into that silence steps a young Persian officer named Darius, who would spend the next year fighting nearly everyone and the rest of his life making sure we heard his side of the story first, and he made very sure we heard it. If you travel today along the old road that runs from the plains of Mesopotamia up into the Zagros Mountains, toward the city of Kamansha in western Iran, you pass a huge wall of limestone called Bisutun or Behistun in the older English spelling. It rises straight out of the plain, grey and stern, with a spring at its foot where caravans have stopped to water their animals for thousands of years.
143:21
Travellers on this road were going somewhere important because this was the main highway between Babylon and Ecbatana, the old Median capital.
143:30
If you wanted a billboard that the whole empire would drive past, this was the spot.
143:34
And around 520 BC, Darius bought the space. High up on the cliff face, roughly 60 metres above the old road, his workmen carved a relief and a long inscription.
143:45
The relief shows Darius standing tall, with a bow in his hand and two attendants behind him carrying his weapons. Under his left foot lies a man flat on his back, arms raised in what is clearly not a comfortable position. In front of the king stands a line of captives, their hands tied behind them and a single rope looped around all their necks, like the world's least cheerful conga line.
144:07
Above them all floats a winged figure in a ring, which Darius presents as the sign of his god Ahura Mazda, whose favour he credits for everything that follows.
144:16
Small labels carved beside each prisoner tell you exactly who they are and what they claimed, so that even the sculpture comes with captions. Around the relief runs the text itself, and here Darius did something clever. He had it carved not in one language but in three, Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian.
144:36
Old Persian was his own tongue, the language of the Persian nobility. Elamite was the old language of the lowlands around Susa, and it had long been the working language of scribes in the region, so it was the closest thing the Persians had to an office language at the time. Akkadian, in its Babylonian form, was the great prestige language of Mesopotamia, the language of ancient law codes, temple archives and royal boasts going back two thousand years.
145:03
All three were written in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script pressed or carved in little triangular strokes, but the old Persian version used a much simpler script of its own, with only a few dozen signs. In fact, Darius seems to say in a later passage that this script was created at his own command, so that Behistun may be one of the very first texts ever written in it.
145:24
Historians still argue about whether he truly invented it or simply took credit for it, which, given what we're about to learn about Darius, would not be entirely out of character.
145:34
Now, a cliff 60 metres up is not exactly easy reading. Unless you had very sharp eyes and a strong neck, you could see the relief but not read a single word. Darius knew this. He tells us that he had copies of the text sent out across the lands of the Empire and we know he wasn't bluffing.
145:51
A fragment of a Babylonian version turned up in Babylon itself on a stone block, and far away in southern Egypt, on the island of Elephantine in the Nile, archaeologists found a copy written in Aramaic on papyrus, kept by a garrison of soldiers about a century after the events it describes. so the story was a kind of ancient press release, distributed to the provinces and apparently still being copied out generations later. Once the carving was finished, his workmen even cut away the rock beneath it, so no one could climb up and chisel out the parts they disliked.
146:22
Darius was building not just a monument, but a monument with security. So what does the official version say? It begins with a family history, which we'll come back to because it turns out to be one of the most interesting parts. Then it tells the story of the crisis. According to Darius, there was once a king called Cambyses, son of Cyrus, and Cambyses had a brother named Bardia, born of the same mother and the same father. Before Cambyses set out for Egypt, he secretly had Bardia killed. The killing was kept quiet. The people did not know their prince was dead.
146:55
Then, while Cambyses was away in Egypt, the Lee, as Darius calls it, grew great in the land. A man named Gaumatar and Magus rose up in Persia and told the people that he was Bardia, son of Cyrus. The people went over to him, Persia and Media, and the other lands as well, and he seized the kingship.
147:15
After that, says Darius, Cambyses died by his own hand, a phrase that historians have argued about for a long time, though it may simply mean the accidental death we've already seen. A Magus, by the way, was a member of a priestly caste from Media. The Magi handled sacrifices, interpreted dreams and performed rituals, and they show up all through Persian history as religious specialists. The word is where we get magic and magician, and the three wise men in the Christian nativity story are the Magi too, So in the official telling, the empire of Cyrus had been quietly taken over by a priest from Media wearing a dead man's name like a borrowed coat.
147:53
Darius then explains with some feeling that nobody dared to say anything. The people were afraid of Gaumata because he killed anyone who had known the real Bardiya so that no one could expose him. Not a single person, not a Persian, not a Mede, not anyone of the royal family would stand up to him until I came, Darius says in effect. It's a very good story and it puts Darius exactly where he wants to be, at the centre, alone, brave and right.
148:22
The inscription also records dates with the precision of a court clerk. Gaumata first rose up in the spring of 522 BC, and some months later he was recognised as king. Then, on a day in the Persian month of Begayadish, which modern scholars convert to the 29th of September, 522 BC, Darius and a small group of companions acted. They found the false badia at a fortress called Sikhayavatish, in a district called Nisaya in Media, and there, Darius says simply, I killed him.
148:53
Then he took the kingship by the favour of Ahura Mazda. Darius was not alone that day, and to his credit he doesn't pretend to have been.
149:01
Near the end of the inscription he lists the men who were with him, six Persian nobles, and he asks future kings to look after their families. Among them were Oteans, Gobrias, Interfernes, a man named Vidana whom the Greeks called Haidans, and Megabezus, along with one more, Ardumanish, who appears in the Persian list.
149:22
Together with Darius, they made Seven, and the Seven became a kind of legend in Persian history, the founding families of a new era, a bit like a club whose membership card guaranteed you a very good seat at court for generations.
149:35
A quick word on these names, because they can be confusing.
149:38
The inscription gives them in their Persian forms, like Utana for Otanes, Galbaruva for Gobrius, Vindafana for Interfernes, and Bagabuksha for Megabezus.
149:48
The Greeks, who were never very patient with foreign names, smoothed them into forms that rolled more easily off a Greek tongue, Most English books use the Greek versions, which is why we will too. Gobreus, by the way, is a popular name in this story, and you may remember another man with a very similar name helping Cyrus take Babylon. Whether they were related is unclear, and the Persians, unfortunately, did not leave a family tree with notes for the confused. As for Darius himself, he was perhaps 28 years old. He was the son of Histaspes, a Persian noble who was alive and well at the time and seems to have been serving as governor in Parthia, in the northeast.
150:25
Herodotus says that Darius had been with Cambyses in Egypt as one of his spear-bearers, a position of trust in the royal guard.
150:32
So he was well-connected, ambitious, close to the court and not, at least by birth, next in line for anything. Keep that in mind.
150:41
Now let's bring in our other great source, the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote about 70 years later and loved a good story. Herodotus tells the whole affair at length and his version agrees with Darius on the basic outline, which suggests that by his time the official account had become the accepted one. He calls the dead prince Smyrdis instead of Bardia. in his telling cambyses had a dream in egypt in which a messenger told him that smerdis sat on the royal throne with his head touching the sky alarmed cambyses sent a trusted man named praxispes back to persia who quietly did away with the prince later a magus who happened to look like smerdis and conveniently also happened to share his name took the throne with the help of his brother who had been left in charge of the palace herodotus is a little vague about the magus's real name though some later greek writers give him different ones Rarely has a conspiracy been so dependent on a lucky resemblance.
151:36
Herodotus also tells us how the plot was uncovered, and this is one of his most charming stories. Otains, a high-born Persian, became suspicious because the new king never left the citadel and never summoned any of the leading Persians to see him. Otains had a daughter named Fadim, who had been one of the wives of Cambyses and had passed, as royal wives did, to the new king.
151:57
Utain sent her a message. He knew that years earlier Cyrus had punished a certain magus by having his ears cut off, so he asked his daughter to wait until her husband was asleep and then gently feel for his ears. It was a dangerous request and Fadim knew it, but she did as her father asked.
152:14
When her turn came to visit the king, she waited until he slept, reached out carefully, and found that he had no ears. She sent word back to her father. Detective work in the ancient world, as you can see, required a great deal of nerve and very little equipment. Otains then gathered trusted friends, and the group grew to seven, with Darius arriving last, fresh from the provinces, and insisting that they move at once before someone betrayed them.
152:39
In Herodotus, there's a dramatic twist. The Magi, hoping to calm the rumours, persuaded Praxaspes, the very man who had killed the real Smyrdas, to climb a tower and announce to the people that the king was genuine. Instead, Praxaspes told the crowd the truth, that he himself had killed the son of Cyrus, and then he threw himself from the tower.
153:00
With the secret now out in the open, the seven made their way to the palace, bluffed their way past the guards thanks to their rank, and confronted the Magi inside. In the struggle that followed, the two Magi were killed. Herodotus says that afterward the Persians celebrated the day every year with a festival called the Killing of the Magi, during which the Magi stayed indoors, which seems like very sensible advice. That's the story. It is detailed, dramatic, and clearly built to be retold around a fire. Historians treat many of its parts with caution, but it does show how deeply the official version had soaked into the way people remembered these events.
153:37
And Herodotus wasn't done yet because he adds two more episodes that have become famous in their own right. The first one is a debate. According to Herodotus, about five days after the killing, when things had calmed down, the seven sat together to decide what kind of government Persia should have. Not who should be king, but whether there should be a king at all.
153:58
Utain spoke first, and he argued for what Herodotus calls rule by the many, with equality before the law, which is to say, a kind of democracy. A single ruler, Utain said, answers to no one, and even the best man in the world given that kind of power would eventually turn arrogant and cruel. He'd seen what Cambyses had become, and he'd seen the Magus, better to hand power to the people as a whole, with officials chosen by lot and held accountable. Megabusus spoke next and disagreed. The mob, he said, is ignorant and violent, rushing into things like a river in flood.
154:32
Why escape the arrogance of one tyrant only to fall into the arrogance of an unruly crowd? Instead, he argued, power should go to a small group of the best men, and naturally he added the seven of them would be among those best men, which is the ancient equivalent of proposing a committee and nominating yourself as chair.
154:50
Then Darius spoke. He said that both the others had a point about the faults of each system, but that the best possible monarchy beat the best possible version of anything else. In an oligarchy, he argued, the few would compete for glory, quarrel and fall into feuds, and the feuds would end in bloodshed and then in one man taking over anyway. In a democracy, bad men would form gangs to plunder the public until a single champion of the people arose to stop them, and that champion would become a king. So every road led to monarchy in the end.
155:22
And besides, he added, Persia had won its freedom under one man, Cyrus, so why abandon the customs of the ancestors? Four of the seven voted with Darius and monarchy carried the day. Otanis, who had lost, announced that he didn't want to rule or be ruled and he withdrew from the contest for the throne on one condition, that he and his descendants would never have to obey the king against their will as long as they kept the laws of Persia. Herodotus says that in his own day, Otenes' family was still the only free household among the Persians.
155:53
It's a lovely detail, though one wonders how often they tested it. This passage is often described as the first recorded debate on forms of government in history, and that is fair as long as we remember it's recorded by Herodotus, not by any Persian.
156:08
Many scholars find it very Greek in flavour. The arguments sound like the ones Greek thinkers were having in Athens in the 5th century BC about democracy, oligarchy and tyranny, and the word Herodotus uses for equality before the law was a hot political slogan in Greece at the time.
156:24
Herodotus himself seems to know people will doubt it, because he insists both here and later in his book that these speeches really were made, even though some Greeks refused to believe it. So we can say, gently, that if seven Persian nobles really did hold a seminar on political theory in 522 BC, they were remarkably well-read in Greek philosophy.
156:46
More likely, Herodotus or his sources used this moment to stage an argument that was really about the Greek world. Either way, it's the first time we find all three systems laid out side by side and compared, and political thinkers have been arguing along the same lines ever since.
157:01
The second episode answers the obvious next question. if there would be a king which of the six remaining nobles would it be according to herodotus they agreed to a test that was simple fair and crucially left to the gods at sunrise they would all ride out together to a spot outside the city and the man whose horse neighed first would become king In a culture that revered the sun and treated horses as noble animals, letting a horse greet the dawn on behalf of heaven made a certain kind of sense.
157:31
It also had the advantage of being completely impossible to rig, or so the others thought.
157:36
Darius had a groom named Uberes, and Uberes was a practical man.
157:40
When Darius told him about the contest, Uberes assured him not to worry.
157:46
That night he took Darius's stallion out to the very spot where the nobles would gather, and he brought along a mare that the stallion was particularly fond of.
157:54
Let's just say that he gave the stallion a pleasant evening and a very happy memory associated with that place.
158:01
The next morning, as the six riders reached the spot, Darius's horse remembered, and neighed loudly and cheerfully, Herodotus adds that at that very moment, lightning flashed and thunder rolled out of a clear sky, as if heaven was signing off on the result.
158:17
The other nobles leapt down from their horses and bowed before Darius as king. Herodotus, ever the thorough reporter, mentions that some Persians told a slightly different version of how Aberas managed it, which we can politely leave to the footnotes. He also says that Darius later set up a stone monument showing a man on horseback, with an inscription giving credit for his kingship to his horse and to his groom Ubaras. If that's true, it's a rare case of a king publicly thanking the stable staff, which is more than many modern companies manage. Whether the horse contest happened at all is another question.
158:51
It has the feel of a folk tale, and similar stories of kings chosen by signs from animals appear elsewhere in the ancient world. but it captures something real, which is that Darius won the throne not by right of birth but by being quicker and cleverer than the men around him. Which brings us to the big question that has hung over this story for about two and a half thousand years. Was any of it true? Let's think about the official version the way a detective might. First, everything we know comes from the winner. The Behistun inscription is Darius' account and Herodotus, writing generations later, mostly repeats a version that agrees with it.
159:26
We have no independent Persian source telling the other side. The supposed magus never got to carve his own cliff. Second, the story is remarkably convenient. A prince is killed in total secret, so secretly that nobody notices for years, not even his own mother and sisters. Then a stranger who happens to look exactly like him takes his place and fools the court, the army, the nobles and the entire empire for months. Then, of all the people in Persia, it's Darius, a man with no direct claim to the throne, who sees through it and ends up king.
160:01
As plots go, it requires the rest of the world to be extremely unobservant. Third, the people of the empire seem to have accepted the new king quite happily. Herodotus says that when the false Smyrdas came to power, he announced that for three years no one would have to pay taxes or serve in the army. When he died, Herodotus says, everyone in Asia except the Persians themselves mourned him, and Babylonian business documents from that summer were dated by the reign of Bardia without any sign of trouble, just as normal as anything else.
160:31
Darius, for his part, accuses Gaumeter of seizing the pastures, herds, workers and houses that belonged to the people, and of destroying places of worship, and he claims that he gave them all back.
160:43
Some historians read this as a hint that the man on the throne was taking land and labour away from great noble families, which would explain why a group of nobles wanted him gone. Put it all together and a different picture appears. Many modern historians suspect that the man killed at Sakaiovatish really was Bardiya, the true son of Cyrus, who had taken the throne either because he rebelled against his brother or because Cambyses had just died.
161:07
On this view, the story of the secret murder and the lookalike Magus was invented afterward, to turn the killing of a legitimate king into the heroic removal of an imposter, and Darius, rather than a saviour, was a usurper, a man who seized the throne by killing its rightful holder and then wrote an excellent story about it. It's worth saying that this is a suspicion, not a proven fact. Some scholars still accept the official version or think the truth lies somewhere in between and the evidence that would settle it simply doesn't exist.
161:38
But you can see why the doubt has never gone away. There's another clue, and it brings us back to that family history at the start of the inscription. Darius opens by introducing himself. He is Darius the great king, king of kings, king in Persia, king of the lands, son of Histaspes, grandson of Asimese, and Achaemenid.
161:58
Then he gives his line of descent. His father was Histaspes, whose father was Ossimese, whose father was Arioramnes, whose father was Tespes, whose father was Achaemenes. For that reason, he says, we are called Achaemenids. And he adds that eight of his family were kings before him, and he is the ninth.
162:17
Now here's the interesting part. When Cyrus the Great listed his own ancestors on his famous clay cylinder in Babylon, he named his father Cambyses, his grandfather Cyrus, and his great-grandfather Tispes. There is no Achaemenes. Cyrus never calls himself an Achaemenid in any text that we're sure he wrote himself. A few short inscriptions at Pasargadae do call Cyrus an Achaemenid, but many scholars think those were actually carved later, under Darius, who had every reason to add them. So the suspicion is that Darius took the line of Cyrus and his own family line, which were probably distant relatives at best, and joined them together by inventing, or at least promoting, a shared ancestor named Achaemenes.
162:58
Then he named the whole dynasty after him. In other words, the name we use for the entire empire, the Achaemenid Empire, may come from one man's very creative work on his family tree. Today we have websites for that sort of thing. Darius had a cliff. And notice how his list of eight earlier kings is hard to make work. His own father and grandfather were both still alive when he took power and neither of them had ever been king of anything. The count of eight only works if you mix both family branches together and add a generous helping of optimism.
163:28
Darius also strengthened his claim in a more personal way. He married Atossa and Artistone, two daughters of Cyrus, and also Parmes, the daughter of Bardia himself. He also married Phaedimea, the daughter of Otenes, who had found out about the years. In the ancient world, if you couldn't be born into the royal family, you could at least marry into it, as thoroughly as possible. A tosser in particular would become one of the most powerful women at the Persian court, and her son Xerxes would one day be chosen as heir over his older half-brothers, partly because his mother was a daughter of Cyrus.
164:01
So whatever Darius' own blood was worth, his children would carry the blood of the great founder, which was a long-term plan if ever there was one.
164:10
Whatever the truth about Bardia, the empire didn't wait politely for historians to make up their minds.
164:16
Almost immediately after the killing at Sicayo Vatish, the whole structure that Cyrus had built began to come apart. Remember, this empire was barely a generation old. Many of its peoples had been conquered within living memory and they were watching closely to see whether the new man could hold on. To many of them, Darius was not the king of kings. He was a stranger from a minor branch of the family who had just killed the man they had been paying taxes to.
164:41
and to ambitious local leaders a crisis at the center looked very much like an opportunity so the revolts came one after another sometimes several at once elam rose first the old kingdom around susa right on the doorstep of persia then babylon the greatest city in the world declared its independence under a man who claimed to be a son of the last babylonian king nebonidus and took the throne name nebuchadnezzar nebuchadnezzar the third as modern scholars number him reaching back to the most glorious king in Babylonian memory.
165:12
Media rebelled under a man named Fravatish, who claimed to be descended from Siaxares, the old Median conqueror, and so offered the Medes the chance to reverse the conquest of Cyrus and rule themselves again. Armenia rose up in the mountains of the north, Marjiana, an oasis region in what is now Turkmenistan, revolted far to the east.
165:32
Parthia and Hyrcania joined in, and so did Sagatya, and others too. And then, most alarming of all, Persis itself revolted, the Persian homeland, the place where Cyrus had begun. There, a man named Vahyasdata announced that he was Bhardia, son of Cyrus. Yes, that's right. Bardia had now been killed once in secret by Cambyses and once in public by Darius, and here he was again.
165:58
One way to read this second Bardia is that it shows how popular the real prince's name still was, especially among ordinary Persians.
166:06
If Darius really had removed the true son of Cyrus, a second claimant using the same name was a direct reminder that many people didn't believe the official story. So Darius found himself, within months of taking the throne, fighting his own countrymen in his own homeland, in the name of the very man he said was a fake. It's hard to overstate how close the Empire came to disappearing in these months. Picture a map where nearly every province is flashing red. The army itself was divided, and Darius had only a limited force that he could completely trust.
166:37
He couldn't be everywhere at once, so he sent his loyal nobles and generals off in different directions while he himself took on the most dangerous threats. His father Histuspes fought the rebels in Parthia. A Persian named Dadashi, the governor of Bactria, crushed the rising in Margiana.
166:54
Other generals fought in Armenia, where the mountains made every campaign slow.
166:59
Interfernes, one of the seven, later took care of a second rising in Babylon. Darius himself marched against Babylon first, crossing the Tigris in the face of the enemy and winning battles along the Tigris and the Euphrates before taking the city.
167:14
Then he turned toward Media, where Fravartish was gathering strength. Communication, of course, depended on riders and messengers moving through mountains and deserts, so each general often had to act on his own judgment for weeks at a time. Imagine running a crisis response where every update takes a month to arrive and might already be out of date when it does.
167:34
It says something about the loyalty of Darius' companions and about his choice of men that so few of them turned against him.
167:41
The Behistun inscription records all of this in great detail, battle by battle, giving the name of each rebel, the place of each fight and often the exact day. It reads almost like a military logbook and it tells the same kind of story over and over again. A man rose up and lied, saying, I am a king. The people went over to him. Darius sent an army or went himself. By the favour of Uhura Mazda, his army won, and then the rebel was captured. In the inscription, the word for lie is draugr, and the rebels are not just enemies, they are liars, men who claim to be something they were not.
168:18
For Darius, rebellion was not only treason, it was a moral failure, a crime against the truth itself. which fits nicely with the fact that the very first lyre in his story was the man he killed to become king. Darius sums it all up with a proud boast. In a single year, he says, he fought nineteen battles and captured nine kings. The lyre kings, those very captives you can see on the relief, roped together at the neck before him. The single year is probably a slight exaggeration, since the fighting seems to have spread from late 522 into the end of the following year and some of the work was done by his generals rather than Darius in person, but even allowing for some rounding up, it was an extraordinary achievement.
169:01
Within about a year and a half, a young man who had seized the throne with six friends had put down rebellions across an area larger than any empire before it. Whatever we think of how he got the crown, it's very hard to argue that he didn't know how to keep it. How the rebel leaders were treated tells us something important about the Persian Empire. They were not quietly forgiven. Several of them, including Fravertish of Media and a rebel in Sagartya, were punished and executed in public, and the inscription explains that Fravertish was displayed at the gate of Ekbatana where everyone could see him before being put to death.
169:34
Other rebel leaders and their closest followers met similar fates in Babylon and elsewhere. We don't need the details. The point was simple, and every passing traveller was meant to understand it. We sometimes hear about the famous tolerance of the Persians, and it was real. Cyrus returned exiled peoples and their gods, and the Persian kings generally allowed their subjects to keep their own religions, languages, customs, and local rulers.
169:59
but the tolerance had firm limits and Darius showed exactly where they were. You could worship any god you liked, speak any language you wished and keep your own traditions as long as you paid your dues and accepted the great king.
170:13
If you challenged him, the response was swift and very public. Persian tolerance, you might say, was generous in matters of culture and completely unbending in matters of power.
170:24
The empire was a large tent with many kinds of people inside, but it had only one owner, After the fighting was over, Darius had the relief carved, and then, interestingly, he kept adding to it.
170:36
The original scene seems to have included Gamata under his foot and eight captives, then a ninth was added, and after a later campaign against the Scythians of Central Asia, a tenth figure was squeezed into the end of the line, a man with a very tall pointed hat named Skunker, who stands out because the carvers had to cut away part of the text to make room for him.
170:56
A fifth column of text was also added, describing campaigns in the second and third years of the reign, against Elam once more and against those Scythians. So the monument was not a single Finnish statement, but something more like a running-up date, which is perhaps the earliest known example of a public notice that kept getting revised.
171:15
The inscription ends with words for the future. Darius speaks to whoever will be king after him, warning him to protect himself from the lie and to punish liars severely. He speaks to anyone who will read the text, urging them not to hide it and to tell others about it, and he promises blessings to those who preserve it and curses to those who damage it. He insists rather often that everything he describes really happened and that he is not lying.
171:43
Historians, being historians, have noted that a man who keeps insisting he isn't lying has not always made the most convincing case, but the message comes through loud and clear. This was the story, and it was carved in stone on a cliff in three languages, so that nobody would ever forget it, and nobody did, though for a very long time nobody could actually read it.
172:06
After the Persian Empire fell, the knowledge of cuneiform slowly faded away. The last cuneiform texts were written in Babylon around the first century AD, mostly by astronomers keeping old records.
172:18
After that, the wedges fell silent. Travellers passing Behistun saw the relief and made up their own explanations. The Greek writer Theseus, followed by later authors, linked the cliff to the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis.
172:32
Medieval travellers thought the figures might be a teacher and his students, or a king and his subjects, or anything else that came to mind. The inscription itself was simply a mass of strange marks, high up and far away. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, European scholars became fascinated by the cuneiform inscriptions found at Persepolis and other sites.
172:53
A German schoolteacher named Georg Grotefend made a clever start in 1802. He guessed that some short Old Persian inscriptions from Persepolis followed the pattern of later Persian royal titles. A king's name, the words Great King, King of Kings, Son of Another King, and by working out which names fit the pattern, he identified Darius, Xerxes, and Histospes, and read a handful of signs correctly.
173:17
It was a brilliant beginning, but the short texts available to him weren't enough to crack the whole system, let alone the much more complicated Elamite and Babylonian scripts. What everyone needed was a long text in several languages with the same content in each, and there was one sitting on a cliff in western Iran. Enter Henry Rawlinson. He was a young British officer of the East India Company, an energetic, adventurous man with a gift for languages who had been sent to Persia to help train the army of the Shah.
173:48
In 1835 he found himself stationed near Kermansha, close to the great cliff of Behistun, and he became obsessed with the inscription. The trouble, of course, was getting to it.
173:58
Darius had cut away the rock below precisely so that nobody could climb up, and he had done a very good job.
174:05
The tech sat high on a sheer face, with only a narrow ledge beneath parts of it. Rawlinson climbed it anyway. Over the following years, whenever his duties allowed, he went back to the cliff with ropes and ladders. He would scramble up to the ledge, then set a ladder on that narrow strip of rock and climb it, standing on the top rungs with nothing between him and a long fall to the plain below, steadying himself against the cliff with one arm while he copied the signs into a notebook held in his other hand.
174:34
He later described this process with the calm of a man describing a slightly inconvenient commute. In one episode he tried to bridge a gap in the ledge with a ladder that turned out to be too short and he nearly fell.
174:45
Health and safety regulations, unsurprisingly, were not a strong feature of the period. The old Persian columns he could reach with some difficulty, and he copied them over several seasons, though his work was interrupted for years by his military and diplomatic duties, including service in Afghanistan.
175:02
The Elamite text was harder. The Babylonian version was the worst of all, because it was carved on an overhanging block of rock that no ladder could reach. For that, in 1847, Rawlinson relied on a local Kurdish boy, whose name he unfortunately didn't record, who climbed across the bare cliff face, fixed a rope and swung himself into position on a kind of improvised seat.
175:24
hanging there the boy pressed damp paper against the carved signs to make casts of them which rawlinson could then study at leisure the boy it should be said was probably the bravest scholar in the whole history of assyrology even if he never received a single footnote of credit Rawlinson published his translation of the Old Persian text in 1846 and 1847 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. With a long text and a known subject, the names of kings and peoples and places that could be checked against Greek sources like Herodotus, the Old Persian script finally gave up its secrets.
175:59
Then the Old Persian version became a key for unlocking the other two, because the same names and the same story appeared in all three languages side by side, Names like Darius, Babylon and Gaumeter, which had to be spelled out in each script, gave scholars their first firm footholds in the far more complex Babylonian system, where a single sign could stand for a syllable, a whole word or several different sounds depending on the context. That complexity made a lot of people doubt the whole project. Could anyone really be reading a script that worked so strangely?
176:30
So in 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society set a test. It gave copies of a newly-found Assyrian inscription to four scholars, Rawlinson, an Irish clergyman named Edward Hincks, the English inventor and photographer William Henry Fox Tolbert, and a German-French scholar named Julius Oppert, and asked each of them to translate it separately, in sealed envelopes, without talking to each other. When the envelopes were opened, the four translations agreed closely in their meaning. Cuneiform had officially been cracked. It's one of the nicer moments in the history of scholarship, an exam that the examiners couldn't have marked themselves.
177:05
This is why Behistun is often compared to the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone, with its parallel texts in Greek, Egyptian, Demotic and Hieroglyphs, gave Jean-Francois Champollion the key to reading the writing of ancient Egypt in 1822. Behistun did the same for cuneiform, but on a much grander and far less convenient scale. The Rosetta Stone was a slab you could carry to a museum. Behistun was a mountain you had to climb and what it unlocked was enormous. Cuneiform had been used for about 3,000 years across Mesopotamia and beyond for Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite and other languages.
177:42
Because of Behistun, scholars could eventually read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Laws of Hammurabi, the Annals of the Assyrian Kings, Babylonian astronomy and mathematics, countless letters, contracts and receipts, and even, as earlier chapters have shown, the very records that tell us about the Medes, about Cyrus and about the fall of Babylon. Much of what we know about the ancient Near East we can read today because one young officer was willing to stand on a ladder at the edge of a cliff. There is a certain irony in all this.
178:12
Darius carved his inscription so that his version of events would last forever and in a sense it did, though not in the way he imagined. The cliff preserved his story but it also gave later generations the tools to read his words closely, to compare them with other sources and to start asking awkward questions about what he left out.
178:32
The text he made to end all argument became the key that opened up the whole ancient world and with it the long argument about whether he was a hero or a usurper.
178:41
Behistun was added to the list of World Heritage sites in 2006 and the carvings are still there, weathered but clear, gazing down on the road as Darius gets on with the much less dramatic task of turning a reconquered empire into a system that actually worked.
178:57
Winning 19 battles in a single year is impressive, but it leaves a man with a rather awkward question. Now what? Darius had beaten every rival from Babylon to the mountains of Persis, and the reward for all that effort was the most complicated job on the planet, running a state that stretched from the Aegean coast to the edge of India. It is worth pausing on how strange his position was.
179:20
Cyrus and Cambyses had been conquerors. They took kingdoms the way a collector takes stamps, one after another, and they mostly left each one running much as it had run before, with a Persian at the top and the old machinery humming underneath. That worked while the king was winning. The revolts of the previous years had shown exactly what happened when he stopped. Almost every province had a memory of independence, a local royal family somewhere in the wings, and a population that paid tribute without any great enthusiasm. A pile of conquests, Darius seems to have realized, is not an empire.
179:53
It is a pile of conquests waiting for its next rebellion. So he set out to build a system. That word sounds dull, and in a sense it was meant to be. The genius of what Darius created lay precisely in how boring it could become. Regular taxes, regular reports, regular roads, regular rations, all of it written down. Revolutions are exciting. Accounting is not. Darius bet the future of his dynasty on accounting. And on the whole, the bet paid off for nearly two centuries.
180:23
The basic building block of the new order was the province, which the Persians governed through an official called a satrap. The word comes to us through Greek, but behind it sits an old Persian title that meant something like protector of the realm. Herodotus, our chatty Greek guide for so much of this story, tells us that Darius divided his lands into twenty such provinces, which the Greeks called nomoi, and he even gives us a list of them, with the peoples belonging to each one and the tribute each had to pay.
180:50
Herodotus wrote about two generations later, from the outside, and his list is probably a tidied-up picture rather than an official document. Darius' own inscriptions give different numbers. At Behistun he names 23 lands, and later royal texts list closer to 30 peoples, depending on the year and on how the scribes chose to count.
181:11
Historians generally take the view that both are true in their own way. The royal lists are a kind of proud catalogue of nations, while Herodotus' twenty provinces reflect tax districts, where several smaller peoples could be grouped under one governor. Either way, the map of the world was now carved into large administrative blocks, each with a name, a capital and a bill.
181:32
The satrap himself was usually a Persian, and very often a Persian of excellent family. Brothers, cousins, sons-in-law and old companions of the king turn up again and again in these posts. This was not merely nepotism, though it was certainly that too. In a world without telephones, the safest way to make sure a distant governor shared your interests was to make sure he was family. or at least that his own fortune depended entirely on yours, a satrap lived in a provincial capital such as Sardis in Lydia, Desilium near the Sea of Marmara, Memphis in Egypt, Babylon, or Bactra far away in modern Afghanistan.
182:09
He kept a court that looked like a smaller copy of the king's, with its own treasury, its own guards, its own hunting parks and its own crowd of people hoping for favours.
182:18
He collected the taxes, judged important disputes, raised troops when the king called for them, and generally acted as the face of Persian power in his corner of the world. From the point of view of a farmer in Lydia or a merchant in Babylon, the satrap was about as close to the great king as anyone would ever get, which was probably a relief for everyone involved. Here is where Darius' design gets clever. A man with that much wealth, land and authority, sitting two or three months' journey away from the king, is exactly the sort of man who might one day wake up and decide he would rather be a king himself.
182:52
Darius had just spent a year fighting men who had done precisely that. So the satrap's power was deliberately cut into pieces. Alongside him, in the same province, stood officials who did not answer to him at all.
183:05
The commanders of the main garrisons, the soldiers holding the citadels and strongpoints, received their orders from the king directly. The officials responsible for collecting and recording revenue had their own lines of reporting as well. Later, Greek writers also described royal secretaries placed beside the satraps, men who handled the correspondence and could quietly mention to the court anything that seemed a little off.
183:27
The result was a governor who had every possible privilege except the one he would most need for a rebellion. Full control of the soldiers and the money at the same time. It is the ancient equivalent of letting someone drive the car while somebody else keeps the keys to the petrol tank.
183:42
On top of that layer of mutual suspicion sat another. The Greeks spoke of officials whom they called the eyes and ears of the king. Exactly what these were is a matter of some debate. Some historians picture a formal corps of royal inspectors who travelled from province to province, arriving with the king's authority and the right to look into anything they liked.
184:01
Others think the Greeks took a figure of speech and turned it into an institution, and that the phrase really referred to the whole web of informers, envoys and loyal officials who sent information back to the court.
184:13
Xenophon, writing in the 4th century BC, explains it rather charmingly. The king, he says, had not one eye and one ear but many, because he rewarded generously anyone who told him something worth knowing, and so everyone was constantly listening on his behalf.
184:28
The idea clearly impressed the Greeks enough to end up on the comic stage. In a play by Aristophanes staged in Athens in 425 BC, a character appears who is introduced as the king's eye, a pompous envoy speaking gibberish Persian, and the Athenian audience was evidently expected to find the whole concept hilarious.
184:47
Whether the inspectors were a formal office or a loose network, the message to any satrap was the same. Someone, somewhere, was probably writing this down.
184:57
Now we come to the part that made the entire structure worth the trouble, which was money. Herodotus tells us something that may well be true, and is at the very least a good story.
185:07
The Persians, he says, had nicknames for their first three kings. Cyrus was the father, because he was gentle and had given them every good thing.
185:16
Cambyses was the master, because he was harsh and proud, and Darius was the shopkeeper, because he put a price on everything.
185:23
It is not the most heroic nickname ever given to a king, but it is surprisingly accurate. Under Cyrus, subject peoples had mostly sent gifts in amounts that were negotiable and irregular. Under Darius, each province had a fixed assessment, written down and expected every year.
185:41
The great king had invented the annual tax bill, and his subjects unsurprisingly did not throw a party. Herodotus then does something rather wonderful. He goes through his list of twenty provinces and gives the tribute owed by each, and at the end he adds it all up for us.
185:57
The grand total, he says, came to 14,560 euboic talents of silver every year. A talent was a unit of weight rather than a coin. and a euboic talent was in the neighbourhood of 26 kilograms, so we are talking about something like 380 tonnes of silver annually.
186:15
Modern scholars argue over the details, over whether Herodotus converted his figures correctly, and over whether such a neat number can really reflect a messy reality.
186:24
Some of the provinces were assessed in Babylonian talents, which were heavier, and Herodotus had to convert them, which is the kind of homework no ancient historian enjoyed. But even if the numbers are rounded or simplified, the picture is unmistakable. The empire was producing a staggering quantity of precious metal, and it was flowing towards the king.
186:44
The individual entries are full of character. Cilicia, the region in the southeast of modern Turkey, paid 500 talents of silver, and on top of that, 360 white horses, one for every day of the year.
186:57
Somewhere a royal stable manager presumably had very strong opinions about this arrangement. Egypt and its neighbours paid 700 talents, plus income from the fishing in Lake Morris, along with grain for the Persian garrison stationed at Memphis. Some peoples on the fringes, such as the Arabians, the Ethiopians beyond Egypt and the Colchians on the Black Sea, were not taxed in the normal way at all, but sent what Herodotus calls gifts at regular intervals. The Arabians, for example, are said to have delivered a thousand talents of frankincense every year, which must have made the royal storeroom smell considerably better than most government buildings.
187:33
and Persis itself, the Persian homeland, was exempt from the regular tribute altogether. Being the conquering people had certain perks. Two entries stand out from all the rest. The first is India, which in Herodotus' day meant the lands along the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. According to his account, the Indians paid their tribute not in silver but in gold dust, 360 talents of it, which made them by far the most valuable province on his list.
188:01
Herodotus, being Herodotus, cannot resist explaining where all this gold came from. He reports that out in the deserts of India there lived ants smaller than dogs but larger than foxes, which dug up gold-bearing sand as they built their nests, and that the Indians would ride out on camels to steal the sand and race home before the ants noticed. This is, to put it mildly, a legend, though some modern writers have had fun wondering whether it began as a garbled story about marmots digging in gold-bearing soil in the Himalayan foothills. whatever the source of the tale the gold itself was real enough washed out of the rivers of the northwest the second entry is babylon together with assyria which was one of the richest provinces of all herodotus says it paid a thousand talents of silver and in addition sent five hundred boys every year to serve as eunuchs at the royal court It is a stark detail, and Herodotus presents it simply as one more line on the bill, which tells us a great deal about how differently the ancient world looked at such things.
189:01
Eunuchs held positions of trust in many royal households of the Near East, and the Persian court was no exception. Once the silver arrived at the royal treasuries Herodotus tells us how it was stored, and the method has a kind of brutal practicality. The king had the metal melted down and poured into clay jars. When the jar was full, the clay was broken away, leaving a solid lump of silver and whenever the king needed money, he simply had a piece cut off.
189:26
It is hard to imagine a more effective security system. A thief would have needed a cart, several strong friends and a great deal of patience. It also tells us something important. For most of the empire, wealth was still counted by weight. Silver was cut, weighed on scales and handed over in pieces, much as it had been in Mesopotamia for two thousand years before. Coins were a relatively new invention, and they had been invented of all places in the very province Cyrus had conquered from Crucis, the kingdom of Lydia.
189:56
Darius took that Lydian invention and made it royal. Around 515 BC, give or take a few years, the first Persian gold coin appeared. The Greeks called it the Daric, and although it is tempting to think the name came from Darius himself, many scholars suspect it may come from an old Persian word for gold, with the resemblance to the king's name being a happy accident that everybody was happy to accept.
190:20
The Daric was a small, thick, slightly lumpy coin of very pure gold, weighing a little over eight grams.
190:27
On one side it showed the king, or perhaps simply the idea of the king as an archer. He's crowned, wearing a long robe, often kneeling or running with one knee bent, holding a bow and sometimes a spear.
190:39
The other side was not a second picture at all, but just a rough punch mark from the minting process. It was not exactly elegant by later Greek or Roman standards, but it did not need to be. Everyone who saw that figure knew whose gold it was. Beside the gold daric there was a silver coin that the Greeks called the siglos, and twenty of those were worth one daric. The choice of an archer is a nice touch. To the Persians, archery was one of the defining skills of a noble man. Herodotus famously says that Persian boys were taught three things, to ride, to shoot the bow, and to speak the truth.
191:13
Darius himself boasts in one of his inscriptions that he was a good bowman and a good horseman, so the image on the coin was a kind of portable advertisement for royal virtue, travelling from hand to hand through markets and army camps. The Greeks found it so recognisable that they eventually nicknamed Persian coins simply archers. Herodotus adds a darker little episode connected with the coinage. He says that Darius wanted to leave behind a memorial that no other king had left, and so he struck coins of the purest gold he could make.
191:44
The satrap of Egypt, a man named Ariandes, then decided to issue his own silver coins of exceptional purity, apparently an imitation of the king.
191:53
Darius treated this as a sign of ambition, and according to Herodotus, had him put to death, officially on a charge of rebellion.
192:02
Whether coin envy was really the reason, or simply the version that reached Herodotus, the story makes a point that the Persian court clearly cared about. Gold coinage belonged to the king. Provincial governors might mint silver in certain times and places, but nobody else was to put themselves on the same level as the man on the derrick.
192:21
It is also worth saying what the Derek did not do. It did not suddenly turn the Persian Empire into a coin economy. Coins circulated mostly in the western provinces, in Anatolia and along the coasts where Greeks and Lydians had long been used to them. In Babylonia and Iran, people went on weighing silver and paying in grain, sheep and wine, as they always had. The Daric was partly money and partly a statement, a shiny reminder of who was in charge. Darics were especially useful for paying soldiers, rewarding friends and, as later Greek history would show again and again, buying influence among people who were otherwise hard to persuade.
192:57
All of this money, information and authority had to move, and so we come to the roads. The most famous of them, described in detail by Herodotus, is the one we now call the Royal Road. It ran from Sardis, the old Lydian capital not far from the Aegean coast, all the way east across Anatolia, over the Euphrates and the Tigris, down into Mesopotamia, and onto Susa, the ancient city in southwestern Iran that Darius turned into one of his main capitals. Herodotus measured it in parasangs, the Persian unit of distance, which was roughly the distance a person could walk in about an hour, though as with every ancient unit, the precise length is still the subject of polite academic disagreement.
193:38
He gives a total of 450 parasangs, which works out at around 2,500 kilometres. That is about the distance from London to Moscow or from New York to somewhere in the middle of Colorado. What made it a royal road rather than just a long one was its infrastructure. Herodotus says there were 111 stations along the route, which he describes as royal staging posts with fine places to stay. Each station was roughly a day's travel from the next. Some sections had guard posts and gates, particularly at river crossings and mountain passes, and at the major rivers there were ferries or bridges.
194:14
The whole thing was patrolled and maintained, and travellers on official business could find food, shelter and fresh animals. It was not paved in the Roman sense. Large stretches were probably beaten earth and gravel, improved where it mattered, and anyone who has driven a dirt road after rain will have a fair idea of what certain sections were like in winter.
194:33
But in the ancient world, a road that was signposted, policed and supplied every 20 or 30 kilometres was a luxury of almost unimaginable scale. It is important to know that the royal road was not alone. Herodotus describes the Sardis to Suzerute because it was the one Greeks cared about since it led from their world to the king's. But the evidence from Persian documents shows a whole network of roads radiating across the empire, linking Persepolis and Susa with Babylon, Ecbatana in Media, Bactra in the east, Aracosia in what is now southern Afghanistan, and the lands of the Indus.
195:09
Some of these routes followed far older paths used by Assyrians and Elamites, and Darius improved and organized them rather than inventing them from nothing. What he did invent, or at least perfect, was the system that used them. That system was the royal courier service, and here Herodotus becomes genuinely enthusiastic, which is saying something for a man who had already seen the pyramids. He calls the couriers angeroi, a Persian word that passed into Greek, and he explains that nothing mortal travels faster than these messengers. The trick, he says, was a relay.
195:41
Men and horses were stationed along the road, one for each day's journey. A courier would ride hard for his stage, hand his message to the next rider, and that rider would set off immediately and so on, the message passing from hand to hand like a torch in a Greek relay race. Herodotus actually makes that comparison himself to the torch races held at Athenian festivals. Because the message never stopped to sleep, eat or complain about the weather, it moved far faster than any single traveller could.
196:11
Using this method, a royal letter could cover the full distance between Sardis and Susa in about a week, perhaps a little more depending on conditions. Compare that with the ordinary traveller. Herodotus works out the journey for a man on foot at a steady pace and arrives at about 90 days, in other words roughly three months. so a message sent by the king's couriers could arrive about twelve times faster than a merchant, a pilgrim or a soldier marching on his own. In practical terms, it meant that news of a revolt in Lydia could reach the king before the rebels had finished arguing about who was going to be in charge.
196:45
It meant that orders, appointments, warnings and demands for tribute could flow across the empire at a speed nobody had ever managed before. If information is power, the royal road was a power line. Herodotus sums up the courier's devotion with a phrase that has had a remarkable afterlife. He says, more or less, that they are not held back by snow or rain or heat or the darkness of night from finishing their assigned stage as quickly as possible. Some two and a half thousand years later, a version of that line was carved in large letters across the front of the great main post office building in New York City.
197:20
the one on 8th Avenue opposite Penn Station, which opened in 1914.
197:25
The architects borrowed it because it sounded suitably heroic, and it has been mistaken for the official motto of the United States Postal Service ever since, which it is not.
197:35
It is a lovely twist of history that Americans waiting in line for their parcels walk past a compliment originally paid to the mounted messengers of a Persian king.
197:44
Whether modern deliveries live up to the standard of the Angaroid is a question I will leave diplomatically to the comments. Travel along these roads was not a free-for-all. To use the stations to draw food and fresh animals, an official traveller needed a sealed document, a kind of ancient travel pass.
198:02
We know this not only from Greek writers but from the Persians' own paperwork, A remarkable group of letters written on leather in the late 5th century BC belonging to a later satrap of Egypt named Arshama includes exactly such a document.
198:16
In it the satrap instructs his officials at a series of stations along the route to give his agent, a man named Netihor, and his companions a fixed daily ration of flour, wine or beer and other supplies at each stop, and specifies that if they stay longer than a day at any station they are not to receive extra. It is perhaps the oldest surviving example of a business trip expense policy, and like every expense policy since, its main purpose was to stop people from enjoying themselves too much at the company's cost.
198:47
That leather document brings us to another quiet revolution, which is language. An empire of dozens of people speaking dozens of languages has an obvious problem. The king spoke Old Persian, but Old Persian was rarely written down at all, and when it was, it appeared mostly on royal monuments in a special cuneiform script that ordinary scribes did not use. The everyday business of governing needed something more practical, and Darius and his administrators found it in Aramaic.
199:15
Aramaic was not Persian at all. It was a Semitic language, a relative of Hebrew and Phoenician, which had spread across the Near East long before the Persians arrived, partly because the Assyrian and Babylonian empires had moved entire populations around and partly because Aramaean traders were everywhere. Crucially, it was written with a simple alphabet of twenty-two letters, in ink, on leather or papyrus. Compared with cuneiform, which needed hundreds of signs and years of training, Aramaic was the ancient equivalent of switching from carving stone tablets to sending emails.
199:48
The Persians adopted it as the common language of their chancery, the official correspondence of the state, and before long it was used from Egypt in the west to Bactria in the east.
199:58
We have the evidence on both ends. In southern Egypt, on the island of Elephantine in the Nile, there was a garrison of soldiers in Persian service that included a community of Jews, and their papyri, written in Aramaic in the 5th century BC, survive in surprising numbers.
200:14
They contain contracts, marriage agreements, letters and petitions to Persian officials, which give us a rare glimpse of daily life at the edge of the empire. At the other end, a collection of Aramaic documents on leather and wooden sticks from ancient Bactria, dating to the 4th century BCE and published only in recent years, shows exactly the same administrative style at work in what is now northern Afghanistan. A scribe trained in Memphis and a scribe trained in Bactra thousands of kilometres apart could in principle have read each other's memos.
200:45
One can only imagine their delight.
200:48
Darius was not content with roads on land. He also wanted a route by water linking the western and eastern halves of his realm, and for that he turned to Egypt. Long before the Persians, the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II had begun digging a canal from the Nile through the eastern part of the delta and along a dry valley to the Red Sea. Herodotus says Necho abandoned the work after an oracle warned him he was laboring for the benefit of a foreigner, which from a Persian point of view turned out to be an excellent prophecy. Darius picked up the project and saw it through to completion.
201:19
According to Herodotus, the finished canal took four days to sail and was wide enough for two warships to pass side by side.
201:27
Darius made sure nobody would forget who had finished the job. Along the route of the canal he set up large stone monuments, stele, carved with inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian on one side and Egyptian hieroglyphs on the other. Several of these were found in the area near Suez in the 19th century, as French engineers were digging an entirely different canal across the same ground, which is a rather neat coincidence. On the best preserved of them, Darius announces that he is a Persian who conquered Egypt. that he ordered this canal to be dug from the Nile, which flows in Egypt, to the sea that comes from Persia, and that ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia just as he had wished.
202:07
Some scholars think the canal may have been more of a grand symbolic statement than a busy commercial highway, and the stele themselves seemed designed as much for display as for information. Even so, the idea of ships sailing from the Nile all the way round Arabia to the Persian Gulf was a breathtaking one. So far, much of what I have described comes from Greek writers and above all from Herodotus. That is a problem historians worry about constantly. Herodotus was curious, intelligent and wonderfully entertaining, but he was an outsider and his figures are hard to check.
202:40
For a long time, scholars had very little of the Persians' own administrative voice. Their royal inscriptions told us what the kings wanted us to think, which was mostly that they were great, good and chosen by the gods, but not how the system actually worked day to day.
202:55
That changed in the 1930s thanks to a team of archaeologists from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago working at Persepolis. In the winter of 1933 and into 1934, while clearing part of the fortification wall at the north-eastern corner of the Great Terrace, the excavators came upon a couple of small rooms packed with clay tablets. not a handful, but a whole archive, many tens of thousands of tablets and fragments, some of them complete, many broken, a large number still carrying the impressions of the seals that had authorised them.
203:27
They had ended up there, it seems, because at some point they had been stored or discarded in these rooms, and when the building above them eventually collapsed, the tablets were sealed in a protective blanket of debris. The paperwork had outlived its office by about two and a half thousand years, which is more than most of us can say for our own filing cabinets. The tablets were written mostly in Elamite, the old language of southwestern Iran, in cuneiform script. This in itself is fascinating. The Persians, it turns out, had taken over the scribble traditions of the Elamites, the ancient kingdom whose lands they had moved into centuries earlier, and in the heartland of the empire the bookkeepers went on writing in Elamite even while Aramaic was spreading everywhere else.
204:08
A sizeable number of the tablets are in Aramaic instead, written in ink, and there are a few real curiosities, including one in Old Persian, one in Greek, and one in Phrygian, a language from central Anatolia.
204:21
Somebody, somewhere, clearly decided to write in whatever they happened to know, and the archive kept it anyway. Because many of the tablets carry dates, we know exactly when they were written. They cover the years from 509 to 493 BC, the 13th to the 28th years of Darius' reign.
204:40
That is a little window of about 16 years into the working life of the empire at the height of its first great king.
204:47
The tablets were sent to Chicago on long-term loan in the 1930s to be cleaned, studied and published, and scholars have been working through them ever since.
204:56
The first great edition, by the scholar Richard Hallock, appeared in 1969 and contained a little over 2,000 texts, and many thousands more have been read, photographed and recorded since then, much of the work done in recent decades by a dedicated project at the Oriental Institute. The tablets even had a strange modern adventure in American courts when a group of plaintiffs with a judgment against the Iranian government tried to have them seized as Iranian property. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in 2018 that the tablets could not be taken and batches of them have since been returned to Iran.
205:33
It is not every day that ancient grain receipts become the subject of a legal battle, but this archive has never been ordinary. So what do they actually say?
205:42
to anyone hoping for dramatic royal secrets the answer is a little disappointing to historians it is pure gold or perhaps pure grain the overwhelming majority of the tablets record the movement of food they list rations of grain flour wine beer sheep goats and other produce handed out by the administration to workers officials animals and travelers in a large region around persepolis They record who issued the goods, who received them, how much, for what purpose and on whose authority.
206:14
They are in short the receipts of a vast redistribution system in which the produce of royal estates and taxes in kind was collected into storehouses and then paid out again to the people who kept the empire running.
206:26
The people on these lists are wonderfully varied. There are high officials and humble laborers, scribes and herdsmen, stonemasons and treasury staff. The workers are often called by an Elamite term Kirtash, which simply meant workers or work groups. Some of them came from the local population, but many were brought from far away, and the tablets carefully note their origins. Egyptians, Babylonians, Lydians, Ionian Greeks, Bactrians, Thracians, Indians, and many more. They worked on estates, in workshops, on building projects and in the care of herds and they were paid largely in food.
207:03
A typical ration might be a monthly allowance of grain with wine or beer added for some and meat appearing more rarely and often for special occasions. Imagine a payslip that read 30 quarts of barley and a little wine and you have the basic picture.
207:17
At the top of the system sat a man named Parnaca, whom the tablets show as the chief of this whole administration. He appears to have been a close relative of Darius, very probably an uncle, and he received rations on a truly royal scale, with daily allowances of sheep, flour and wine large enough to feed an entire household of servants and guests. Beneath him came a hierarchy of deputies, storehouse managers, accountants and supervisors, each with a seal, and this is where the archive becomes almost touching in its precision. Every transaction had to be approved, sealed and recorded, and then the records were summarized into larger accounts, which were checked by other officials.
207:56
There are even tablets in which the accountants note small discrepancies, a little grain missing here, a jar of wine there, and the matter is followed up.
208:05
Somewhere in the heart of the Persian Empire, a bookkeeper 25 centuries ago was asking a colleague exactly where those two sheep had gone. Some things about office life never change. The travel texts are among the most vivid. They record rations given out to people passing through the stations of the road network, carrying sealed documents from the king or from senior officials. Groups of travellers are noted going to and from Susa, Sardis, Egypt, Kandahar, India and Bactria. A man with a group of workers is fed on his way to a new job.
208:36
An express messenger collects his flour. An envoy heading to the king is given his wine.
208:42
These little clay notes are the archaeological footprints of the very road system that Herodotus admired, proof that it was not a Greek exaggeration but a living, breathing and very well-catered network.
208:53
Perhaps the most human detail of all concerns women. Women appear in the archive constantly, as workers and craftspeople, sometimes in groups with their own supervisors, and in some cases they receive the same rations as men for the same work. Some of the highest paid supervisors in certain workshops were women, and there is a category of tablets that record special payments to women who had just given birth. A new mother among the craft workers received an extra ration, a sort of ancient maternity bonus, on top of her normal pay. The size of that bonus depended on the child.
209:26
In the texts that record it, the mother of a newborn boy typically received about twice as much as the mother of a newborn girl. It is a small detail that says a good deal about the values of the time, and it would certainly not pass a modern workplace review. Yet it is also remarkable that such a payment existed at all, and that some clerk thought it important enough to write down, tablet after tablet, for the mothers of Egyptian weavers and Ionian craftsmen whose names we would otherwise never have known.
209:54
What emerges from all this clay is a picture of the empire quite different from the one painted by its monuments. The royal inscriptions show the king standing triumphant over his enemies. The tablets show a king whose power rested on storehouses, accounts, rations and seals, and on thousands of officials who spent their days counting jars and checking figures. If Herodotus' Darius the shopkeeper sounds like an insult, the Persepolis archive suggests it might also have been the greatest compliment anyone ever paid him. None of this redistribution would have worked without food to redistribute, and in much of the Persian heartland growing food was not easy.
210:30
The Iranian plateau is largely dry, with hot summers, cold winters and very little rain in many places.
210:37
Rivers are few, and they often vanish into the desert or run too low to irrigate fields across the long summer. Yet the plateau also has mountains that catch snow and rain in winter, and beneath the gravelly slopes at their feet, water soaks into the ground and collects in underground layers. The question was how to bring that hidden water to the surface, far from the mountains, without it evaporating in the sun along the way. The answer was the kanat.
211:04
A kanat is, in essence, a gently sloping tunnel dug into a hillside until it reaches the water table. From the tunnel's head, water flows by gravity, slowly and steadily, downhill through the tunnel, which may run for many kilometres underground before it emerges into the open air as a stream at the edge of a village.
211:25
Every so often along its length a vertical shaft was dug from the surface down to the tunnel to let the diggers get in and out to remove the earth and to bring in air.
211:35
From above, a khanat looks like a long line of small round mounds marching across the desert, each one the rim of a shaft, like a chain of giant anthills in a very orderly queue. Digging one was dangerous, highly skilled work, done by specialists who passed their knowledge down through families, and the people who did it still enjoy great respect in Iran today.
211:56
The great advantage of a khanat is that it brings water underground, protected from the heat, with no pumps and no fuel, day and night, year after year.
212:06
Where once there was only dry gravel, a khanat could make fields, orchards and gardens possible. Whether the Persians invented the technique or adopted and spread it is debated, since similar systems may have existed earlier in the region, but the Achaemenid period is when they appear on a large scale, both in Iran and in other parts of the empire. In the Karga oasis in Egypt's western desert, archaeologists have found underground channels of this type at a site called Ain Manawer, together with documents from the Persian period that record the sale and sharing of water from them.
212:37
The Greek historian Polybius, writing centuries later, preserves a striking story that the Persian kings granted the right to farmland tax-free for five generations to anyone who brought water to a place that had never been irrigated before. If that is true, it is one of the most generous agricultural incentives in history and it would explain why so many people were willing to spend years tunnelling into hillsides in the dark.
213:01
Kanats are a perfect example of how the system fitted together. more water meant more land under cultivation more land meant more grain more wine more sheep which meant more taxes in kind flowing into the storehouses that food fed the workers officials and travelers recorded on the persepolis tablets who in turn kept the roads running the messages moving and the accounts balanced the money from the provinces filled the king's jars of silver and the derek carried his image into the markets of the west Each piece of the machine strengthened the others.
213:35
Some of those ancient khanats have been flowing for well over a thousand years, and a group of them in Iran is now recognised as a World Heritage Site, which is rather a better record of reliability than most modern plumbing can boast. It would be easy, after all this, to picture the Persian Empire as a perfectly smooth operation, and that would be a mistake. Satraps did occasionally rebel, especially in later generations. Tax burdens could be heavy and resented. Some provinces, Egypt above all, never fully reconciled themselves to foreign rule. The system did not create love, and it was not designed to.
214:09
What it created was stability, predictability, and a degree of control over a territory of unprecedented size, at a time when news usually travelled no faster than a donkey with somewhere better to be.
214:22
For a man who had begun his reign fighting nineteen battles against nine rival kings, that was no small achievement, and it gave Darius something else as well. A king who could count every talent of silver and every jar of wine from the Aegean to the Indus was a king with the means to build on a scale no one had attempted before, and he was about to raise his monument on the very terrace where those clay receipts would one day be found. and raise it he did, although raise is a modest word for what Darius actually had in mind. Around 518 BC, with the rebels of his first year safely behind him and the tax money flowing in like clockwork, the king chose a spot on the plain of Mavdashd in the heart of Persis, right at the foot of a mountain the locals now call Kueramat, the Mountain of Mercy.
215:08
There he ordered his builders to do something that sounds simple on paper and is exhausting in practice. Before a single palace could go up, they had to make the ground itself.
215:18
The Persians called the place Parsa, which simply means Persia, or the land of the Persians. The Greeks later translated that into Persepolis, the city of the Persians, which is about as imaginative as naming your house the house. But the plainness of the name hides an extraordinary piece of engineering. The builders cut into the lower slope of the mountain and filled in the uneven ground in front of it. creating a great artificial terrace about 450 metres long and 300 metres wide. In places, its walls rise around 12 metres above the plain.
215:50
Some of the stone blocks in the retaining walls are enormous, and they were fitted together without mortar, held in place by sheer precision and by iron clamps sealed with lead.
216:00
Modern contractors who complain about a tricky patio might want to sit quietly for a moment and think about that.
216:06
Anyone who has lived through a flooded basement will also appreciate the network of drainage channels cut into the bedrock beneath the buildings. No king ever boasted about his gutters, but they helped the ruin survive. Darius did not live to see his project finished, and frankly, nobody did. Work went on for generations. His son Xerxes added some of the grandest buildings, and Xerxes' son Artaxerxes I kept the masons busy after him. Later kings added their own touches, so that Persepolis was less a single building project than a family hobby that lasted the better part of two centuries.
216:41
The walls of the palaces were mostly made of mud brick, plastered and painted, while stone was saved for the parts that had to impress or endure. Columns, door frames, window frames, staircases and carved reliefs. The roofs rested on great wooden beams. That is why today the terrace looks like a forest of doorways and columns standing in empty air. The mud brick melted back into the earth and the stone stayed behind to tell the story.
217:07
Visitors approach the terrace by a monumental double staircase on its western side. Two flights that rise, turn and meet again at the top. The steps are unusually shallow and wide. It is often said that they were designed so that nobles in long robes could climb them with dignity, or even that horses could be led up them, though nobody left a note explaining the design. Either way, it is a staircase built for arriving slowly and being seen while you do it.
217:33
At the top stood the first thing a visitor met, the Gate of All Nations, built by Xerxes. Its great doorways were guarded by colossal stone bulls and on the side facing the mountain by winged bulls with bearded human heads, a style borrowed from the old palaces of Assyria.
217:51
Xerxes signed it in three languages, crediting much that was beautiful to himself and his father. The name of the building tells you its job. Every people of the empire was meant to pass through here on its way to the king, and the gate reminded them, quietly but firmly, whose house they were entering.
218:08
Centuries later the gate became a sort of guest book, as travellers carved their names into it, including the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in 1870. Defacing ancient monuments is naturally frowned upon, though these signatures are now a small piece of history themselves, The heart of the terrace was the Apadana, the great audience hall begun by Darius and finished by Xerxes.
218:32
Its central hall was a square of about 60 metres on each side, roofed over and held up by 36 columns. On three sides of it ran porches, each with 12 more columns, which brings the total to 72.
218:45
These columns were astonishingly slender and tall, reaching about 20 metres, roughly the height of a six- or seven-storey building. At the top of each one sat a capital carved in the shape of two animals back-to-back, usually bulls, sometimes lions, or a creature with the body of a bull and the head of a griffin, their twin backs forming a saddle for the huge cedar roof beams.
219:07
Only a handful of those columns still stand today, but even alone against the sky they make the visitor tilt their head back in exactly the way the architects intended. In 1933 the archaeologist Ernst Hertzfeld, digging at Persepolis for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, found something lovely in the foundations of the Apadana.
219:27
At two of its corners lay stone boxes, and inside each were two square plates, one of gold and one of silver.
219:34
On them Darius had inscribed a short text in the three royal languages describing the reach of his kingdom, from the Scythians beyond Sogdiana to Kush in Africa, and from India to Sardis.
219:45
It was a time capsule, buried by a king who clearly expected to impress whoever dug it up. On this point, at least, he was right. Next to the Apadana, and eventually even bigger in floor area, rose the hall of a hundred columns. Xerxes began it and Artax Xerxes I completed it. As the name promises, its roof rested on a hundred columns, ten rows of ten, inside a square hall of about seventy metres on each side. Its exact purpose is debated. It may have been a throne hall, a place for receiving the army's commanders, or a grand storeroom for displaying royal treasures.
220:20
Its doorways show the king seated on his throne, held up by figures representing the peoples of the empire, which is a rather clear way of explaining the political arrangement.
220:29
Elsewhere stood the smaller private palaces of Darius and Xerxes and a large treasury kept under lock, key and many watchful eyes.
220:37
But the most famous thing at Persepolis is not a building at all. It is a set of carvings. The stairways of the Apadana are covered with long stone reliefs, and they are some of the finest works of art the ancient Near East ever produced. On one part rows of Persian and Median nobles and guards stand in calm lines, some chatting, some holding flowers, one or two turning round to talk to a neighbour, which makes them feel surprisingly human for figures carved two and a half thousand years ago.
221:04
On another part, there is a great procession of foreign delegations, 23 of them, each bringing gifts to the king. The delegations are separated from each other by carved cypress trees, and each group is led by hand by a Persian or Median usher, a little like a polite guide steering confused tourists to the right gate. What makes the procession so valuable to historians is the care given to each people. Their clothes, hairstyles, hats, shoes, weapons and gifts are all different, carved with an eye for detail that turns the stairway into a sort of illustrated catalogue of the empire.
221:39
The Bactrians, from what is now northern Afghanistan, lead a two-humped camel, the kind that still bears their name. The Lydians from western Anatolia carry fine metal vessels, cups and bowls, along with bracelets, and they lead a chariot drawn by small horses.
221:54
The Ethiopians, meaning people from Kush to the south of Egypt, bring an elephant tusk and an animal with a long neck that many scholars identify as an okapi, though some prefer to see it as a young giraffe. The Elamites even bring a lioness with her cubs. It must have been the loudest, smelliest and most exciting day in the palace calendar, though fortunately the reliefs record only the dignified part Traces of pigment show the reliefs were once painted in deep blues and rich reds, so the Persians might find our taste for bare grey stone a little drab. What exactly do these reliefs show?
222:27
Many writers have linked them to Nohruz, the Persian New Year festival that falls at the spring equinox and is still celebrated across Iran and Central Asia today. In this picture, the peoples of the Empire came every spring to Persepolis to renew their loyalty and present their gifts, and the whole terrace was built as a grand stage for that festival. It is a beautiful idea, and it may even be true. Unfortunately, there is no direct proof. No inscription at Persepolis says the gifts were brought at the new year, and the reliefs may just as well show an idealised, timeless image of the empire as one great family bringing presents to its head.
223:04
Historians tend to say the Noru's theory is possible, attractive and unproven, which is the scholarly way of saying please stop asking. The parade of gifts on the stairway was matched by a real parade of materials and workers who built the palaces. We know this not from Persepolis but from Susa, the old capital of Elam, where Darius also built a magnificent palace. There he left a text that historians call his foundation Charter, a kind of proud receipt for the whole construction. in it the king explains where everything came from the cedar wood came from a mountain called lebanon carried first to babylon by the people the text calls assyrians and from there to susa by carians and ionians gold was brought from sardis and from bactria The precious blue stone lapis lazuli and the red stone carnelian came from Sogdiana, turquoise from Chorazmia, silver and ebony from Egypt, and ivory from Ethiopia, India and Aracosia.
224:00
The stone columns were brought from a village in Elam. The charter lists the workers too. The stone cutters were Ionians and Sardians, the Greeks and Lydians of western Anatolia. The goldsmiths were Medes and Egyptians. The brickmakers were Babylonians. Craftsmen from dozens of lands worked side by side, swapping tools, techniques, and presumably complaints about the boss. That mix is visible in the art itself. The winged bulls owe something to Assyria. The doorway mouldings echo Egypt. The delicate folds of the robe suggest Ionian Greek hands, and yet the result is entirely Persian.
224:35
The point was not to copy any one tradition, but to show that every tradition now served the king of kings. And no, despite what old films suggest, the builders were not crowds of whipped slaves. The tablets show registered, rationed work teams, many of them dependent labourers rather than free men, but paid in kind all the same.
224:56
For all its splendour, Persepolis was not where the king spent most of the year. The Achaemenid court was a court on the move. Rather than sitting in one capital, the king and his enormous household travelled between several royal residences according to the season.
225:10
Susa, in the warm lowlands, was a fine place in winter and spring. Ekbatana, the old median capital high in the Zagros mountains, offered cool air in the summer when the lowlands became a furnace.
225:23
Babylon, the great old city of Mesopotamia, was another major residence.
225:28
and Persepolis, in the Persian homeland, had its own special place, perhaps for important ceremonies and royal occasions.
225:35
Xenophon claims the king spent seven months in Babylon, three in Susa, and two in Ecbatana, living in perpetual spring, though other writers give different numbers and Xenophon was not above improving a story.
225:48
With wives, nobles, guards, cooks, scribes and treasurers in tow, each move was less a royal journey than a city on wheels.
225:57
Greek writers were amazed by the luxury of the king's table. One of them, Heracledes of Syme, wrote that the king's dinner fed some 15,000 people each day and that the cost was 400 talents of silver. The number sounds wildly inflated, and it probably counts everyone from princes to stable boys who ate from royal supplies, but it gives a sense of the scale.
226:19
Greek writers joked that a town could be ruined just by having the king over for dinner, which makes hosting royalty and honour best enjoyed from a distance. At each residence waited walled parks full of trees, water channels and game.
226:31
The old Persian word for such an enclosure, something like paradida, passed through Greek into our word paradise, so every beach resort called paradise is secretly a Persian hunting park, usually with fewer lions. At the centre of all this sat the king himself, and getting near him was a matter of strict ceremony. The court followed a careful etiquette, and Herodotus describes how Persians greeted each other according to rank, equals kissed each other on the lips. If one man was slightly lower in rank, they kissed on the cheek.
227:02
If one was much lower, he bowed down and threw himself on the ground before the other.
227:08
Before the king, everyone performed the gesture that the Greeks called proskinesis. Exactly what it involved is still debated. At the very least, it meant bowing deeply and blowing a kiss toward the king with the hand raised to the lips, and in some cases it seems to have meant going right down to the ground. To the Persians, this was simply good manners, the way you show respect to the man at the top of the social ladder. To the Greeks it was shocking. In their world, falling down before someone was something you did before a god, not a man, so to them the Persians seemed to be worshipping their king.
227:40
Herodotus tells of two Spartans who travelled to the Persian court and flatly refused to bow down, explaining that it was not their custom to worship a human being. A later anecdote says a Greek envoy named Ismenius dropped his ring before the king and bent to pick it up. So the Persian saw a bow and the Greek saw a man looking for his jewellery. It may not be true, but it deserves to be. The reliefs from the treasury at Persepolis show a royal audience in stone. The king sits on a high-backed throne, his feet resting on a footstool because a king's feet should not have to touch the ordinary floor.
228:12
Behind him stands the Crown Prince. Before him, an official bends slightly forward with his hand raised to his mouth, the gesture of respect, while two incense-burners stand between them. Attendants hold a parasol and a fly-whisk. The whole scene is perfectly calm. Nobody fidgets, and nobody, it seems, has been kept waiting too long, though the records of every empire suggest otherwise. Loyal men were rewarded with robes, golden bracelets and horses with golden bridles and their names were recorded as benefactors of the king.
228:43
In a world without medals a Persian noble wore his career on his wrists. Protecting all this splendour was the job of the most famous unit in the Persian army, the 10,000 soldiers whom Herodotus calls the Immortals. According to him they were picked Persian infantry and they got their name because their number never changed.
229:01
Whenever one man died or fell ill, another was immediately ready to take his place, so the unit always stood at exactly ten thousand. Any modern manager struggling to fill vacancies might envy that. Herodotus adds that they glittered with gold and travelled with their own servants. Among them, a thousand elite guards carried spears ending not in a plain butt, but in golden pomegranates, while the rest had silver ones.
229:26
Whether the Persians themselves called them immortals is less certain. Some scholars have suggested that Herodotus, or his informants, confused two similar sounding Old Persian words, one meaning companions and another meaning immortal, which would make the famous name a lucky mistranslation. The idea is disputed, but it is a good reminder that much of what we know about Persia passed through Greek ears.
229:49
What is certain is that the royal guard looked magnificent.
229:53
Rows of guardsmen with spears and bows march along the walls at Persepolis, and from Sousa come wonderful panels of glazed brick showing archers in patterned robes, now in the Louvre in Paris, their colours still bright after two and a half thousand years.
230:08
Behind the guards, the ceremonies and the audiences, there was another world at court, one that Greek writers found both fascinating and alarming, the world of the royal women.
230:18
The Greeks liked to imagine Persian queens as secluded figures locked away in a harem, scheming in whispers. The reality, as far as we can recover it, was more interesting. Royal women were wealthy, educated, connected, and in some cases very powerful indeed. The most important woman at the court of Darius was a tosser. She was a daughter of Cyrus the Great, which made her the living link between the new king and the founder of the empire. Herodotus says that she had been married to her brother Cambyses and then to the man who ruled as Bardia before becoming the wife of Darius.
230:51
For a king whose own claim to the throne was shaky, marrying Cyrus' daughter was not just romance but very sound political strategy.
230:59
Darius had other wives too, and older sons by an earlier marriage, so the question of who would inherit the throne was a delicate one. Herodotus says Atossa had enormous influence over her husband and that she used it on behalf of her own son Xerxes.
231:14
The eldest son of Darius was a half-brother named Artobazanes, born before Darius became king.
231:20
but Xerxes had two advantages. He was the grandson of Cyrus through his mother and he had been born after his father took the throne so he could claim to be the son of a reigning king.
231:30
Herodotus says that Atossa's power was decisive in the choice and Xerxes was named heir. Whatever the exact mechanics, the result was clear. The daughter of Cyrus secured the throne for her son and her bloodline continued the dynasty.
231:44
Not bad for someone the Greeks imagine sitting quietly behind a curtain. The administrative tablets of Persepolis add a woman whom no Greek writer ever mentions at all – Erdobama.
231:54
She's not known from any famous story, but in the dry, practical records of grain and wine she appears as a woman of real economic power. The tablets show her managing her own estates and controlling a large workforce, with hundreds of workers listed in her service at one centre alone.
232:11
She had her own seal and issued her own orders, which officials carried out, and she travelled with her own staff, drawing on supplies from the royal storehouses. She was, in modern terms, the head of a sizeable business. Clearly the rich women of the court owned, ran and profited from real property, and their stewards answered to them, which was probably not always comfortable for the stewards.
232:32
Later generations produced a royal woman whose name still makes historians sit up a little straighter, Parasatis.
232:40
She was the wife of Darius II, who ruled in the late 5th century BC and the mother of the future Artaxerxes II and of his younger brother Cyrus. As queen and later as queen mother, she became one of the most powerful and most ruthless figures in the whole history of palace politics at the Persian court.
232:58
Our main source is Theseus, a Greek doctor at the court with a gossipy pen and a taste for drama, but at least an inside view. According to him, Parasatis openly favoured her younger son over the elder, and she was willing to play rough to protect her favourites and punish her enemies. She's said to have had a long and bitter rivalry with Statera, the wife of her son Artaxerxes II, and Theseus claims that in the end she had the younger queen poisoned at dinner, using a knife coated with poison on only one side, so that she could cut a bird in two and eat her own half safely.
233:31
Whether every detail is true is uncertain, but the story tells us how the court saw her. When the king finally sent her off to Babylon for a time, he could not do without her for long, and she soon returned.
233:43
A Persian queen-mother, in other words, was not someone to be crossed, and Parasaitis made sure nobody forgot it, and yet the king of kings, for all his columns and courtiers, insisted that none of it was his own doing, but a gift from the god who had placed the crown on his head.
234:00
Every carved column and every bowing courtier at Persepolis sent the same message. The king of kings stood at the top of the world, but the king himself insisted, again and again in stone, that someone stood above him and that someone had a name. That name was Ahura Mazda, usually translated as the Wise Lord, and in the old Persian of the royal inscriptions it was often run together as Ora Mazda.
234:23
If you read the texts Darius and his successors left behind, you notice very quickly that they all begin in roughly the same way. Ahura Mazda is a great god, the inscriptions explain, who created this earth, who created the sky beyond it, who created mankind, who created happiness for mankind, and who made Darius king, one king over many, one lord over many.
234:46
Only after that cosmic introduction does the king get around to talking about himself. It is a bit like a modern company report that opens with three paragraphs thanking the founder before mentioning the prophets, except here the founder had also created the universe. The key idea was simple and very useful for a ruler. Kingship was not something a man grabbed. It was something the wise lord handed over. Darius tells us that by the favour of Ahura Mazda he became king, that Ahura Mazda brought him aid, and that whatever he did, he did by that favour.
235:17
A victory was proof that the god approved. A rebellion crushed was proof again.
235:23
Unsurprisingly, the god never seems to have withdrawn his support from the man writing the inscription, which is one of the quiet advantages of controlling the stonemasons. Behind this royal theology stood a pair of words that explained much of how the Persians saw the world. The first was Arta, which meant truth, but also right order, the proper way things ought to be, the harmony that keeps the cosmos running. The second was droga, the lie, which meant not just a fib but deception, disorder, chaos, the force that pulls everything apart.
235:55
In this view, the universe was not a neutral place. It was a field where order and disorder were always pushing against each other, and a good king was supposed to stand firmly on the side of the order. Darius says in one of his inscriptions that he was not a friend to the man who follows the lie and that he protected what was right.
236:12
In practice, of course, the side of order and the side of the king turned out to be the same side, which saved everyone a great deal of philosophical debate. We have already met the most famous use of this vocabulary on the cliff at Behistun, where every rebel against Darius is branded a liar king, as if lying and rebellion were one and the same crime, Greek writers noticed this obsession with truth too. Herodotus reports that Persian boys were taught three things between the ages of five and twenty – to ride a horse, to shoot a bow, and to tell the truth. He adds that the Persians considered lying the most shameful thing of all, and right after it being in debt because a man who owes money, they reasoned, will sooner or later be forced to lie.
236:53
It is a charming moral system, though one suspects the Persian equivalent of a credit card company would have struggled to find customers. All of this sounds strikingly close to the teachings of a figure the Greeks called Zoroaster and the Iranians called Zarathustra. In the hymns attributed to him, the wise lord is the supreme god of goodness, and human life is a choice between Asher, the same idea as the Persian Arta, and Druj, the same idea as Draugr.
237:20
every person in this teaching must choose which side to serve in thought, word and deed.
237:27
The match with the vocabulary of the Persian kings is too close to be an accident. The question is what kind of connection it was and here historians start to scratch their heads. The trouble begins with Zarathustra himself. His date is one of the great mysteries of ancient history. Some scholars place him somewhere in the middle of the second millennium BC, around the time when Indo-Iranian peoples were still moving across the steppes. Others put him much later, around the 7th or even the 6th century BC, which would make him almost a contemporary of the early Persian kings.
237:59
That is a gap of roughly a thousand years, which is a little like being unsure whether someone lived in the age of the Vikings or the age of the smartphone. The reason for the confusion is that our sources are, to put it gently, not cooperative. The holy texts of Zoroastrianism are gathered in a collection called the Avesta, but it was written down very late under the Sasanian dynasty, many centuries after the Achaemenids had vanished, and the oldest manuscripts we actually hold are medieval. The oldest part of it, a group of hymns called the Gathas, which tradition credits to Zarathustra himself, is composed in a very archaic language that closely resembles the language of the Rigveda, the most ancient sacred poetry of India.
238:39
That resemblance pushes many linguists toward an early date. The landscape in the texts also points to the East, to the regions of modern Afghanistan and Central Asia. not to persia proper and the avesta never mentions the persians the medes or any of their kings if zarathustra had lived in the court of darius you would expect him to have mentioned it at least once court poets rarely miss a chance like that There is one tantalising coincidence in all this. In the Gathas, Zarathustra's great patron and protector is a ruler named Vistaspa, and the father of Darius the Great was named Vistaspa too, a name the Greeks wrote as Histospes.
239:17
For a while, some scholars got very excited and suggested that the prophet's patron and the king's father were the same man. Most historians today think it is simply a shared name, popular among Iranian aristocrats, the ancient version of meeting two people called John at the same party. Still, it shows how tangled the threads are. So how Zoroastrian were the early Achaemenids? Here the debate gets genuinely interesting. Let us start with Cyrus the Great. In everything he left behind, including his famous cylinder from Babylon, Cyrus never once mentions Ahura Mazda.
239:48
In Babylon he praised Marduk, the city's own god, and presented himself as Marduk's chosen favourite. Cambyses, in Egypt, honoured the goddess Neith and took on the role of a pharaoh. Neither of them, so far as our evidence goes, put the wise lord on display at all. That does not necessarily mean they did not worship him. It may only mean that in Babylon one speaks Babylonian religion in the way a modern politician visiting a factory suddenly develops a passionate interest in machine parts. but the silence is real and it has to be explained.
240:21
With Darius, the wise lord suddenly moves to the centre of the stage. Some scholars think Darius was a convinced follower of Zarathustra's teaching who made it the faith of the dynasty. Others argue that he and his family followed an older Iranian religion, with Uhura Mazda at its head, which shared roots with Zarathustra's hymns but was not the same thing.
240:40
A third group points out that a usurper, which Darius may well have been, would have had every reason to wrap himself in a powerful divine endorsement and that Ahura Mazda was the perfect choice.
240:52
Notice too that Darius never mentioned Zarathustra by name, not once, in any inscription.
240:58
He also speaks of Ahura Mazda together with the other gods who exist, which suggests a supreme god at the top of a crowded heaven rather than a strict single deity. The honest answer is that we do not know for certain, and the arguments have been going on for well over a century with no sign of a ceasefire.
241:15
whatever the king believed someone had to actually perform the rituals and that someone was usually a magus the magi were originally a priestly caste among the medes one of the median tribes according to herodotus and they kept their role even after the persians took over They were the specialists of the sacred. They tended the fires, recited the hymns, interpreted dreams and omens, and made sure that every ceremony was done correctly.
241:40
Herodotus says that no Persian sacrifice could take place without a magus present, who would stand by and chant a song about the origin of the gods. Whether the worshipper understood the chant was apparently beside the point, which may sound familiar to anyone who has ever sat through a ceremony in a language they did not speak.
241:58
The Magi left a surprisingly long trail in later history. Our word magic comes from their name, because the Greeks and Romans regarded them as masters of mysterious arts. And the wise men from the East, who, in the Gospel of Matthew, follow a star to Bethlehem are called Magi in the Greek text. So the next time you see three kings with camels on a Christmas card, you are looking, in a roundabout way, at the descendants of the Median priesthood, though it is safe to say they rarely got the costumes right.
242:28
What exactly did Persian worship look like? Here Herodotus gives us a picture that surprised his Greek readers. The Persians, he says, did not build temples or set up statues of their gods, and they thought those who did were rather foolish, since they did not imagine the gods to have human form. Instead, they climbed to the tops of mountains and offered sacrifices to the whole circle of the sky. They also honoured the sun and the moon, the earth, fire, water and the winds. There were no altars in the Greek style, no music, no garlands on the sacrificial animal.
243:01
The worshipper put a wreath, usually of myrtle, on his own head, prayed not only for himself but for the king and for all Persians, and the meat was then taken home. Herodotus finds this very strange, though to be fair a Persian visiting a Greek temple full of marble gods with names and family quarrels would probably have found that just as strange.
243:20
at the heart of this reverence for the elements was fire fire was pure bright and alive the visible sign of truth and order and it had to be protected from anything that might pollute it On the royal tomb of Darius, carved into the cliff at Nakshi Rustam, the king is shown standing on a platform, raising his hand in prayer before a fire altar with the winged symbol floating above. It is one of the clearest images we have of Achaemenid piety. No temple, no statue, just a king, a flame and the sky.
243:53
Water and earth were treated with similar care. Herodotus says the Persians would not urinate or spit into a river, or even wash their hands in one, out of respect for the purity of water. That was perhaps the world's earliest environmental protection policy, enforced not by fines but by the fear of offending the divine. It seems a pity it did not spread more widely. The same concern for purity shaped how the Persians dealt with death. Herodotus explains that they did not burn their dead because they considered fire a god and it would be wrong to feed a god with a corpse.
244:27
The Greeks often cremated their dead, so they found this worth mentioning. Herodotus adds that Persians covered the body in wax before placing it in the ground, while the Magi, he says, did not bury their dead until the body had first been exposed in the open air.
244:41
That practice, keeping the dead away from both fire and earth, became central to later Zoroastrian tradition.
244:47
The royal tombs fit this pattern neatly. The kings were laid to rest not in the soil but in chambers cut high into solid rock, safely separated from the earth below and from the fire above. Even in death, a king of kings had to follow the purity rules, though admittedly with a far better view than most. The Now, if all this makes the Persian state sound like a strict theocracy devoted to a single faith, the Persepolis fortification tablets tell a very different story.
245:17
These are the same clay records of rations and payments we met before, and among the deliveries of grain and wine, the scribes also recorded supplies issued for religious ceremonies. Some of these offerings went to Ahura Mazda, as you would expect, but many went to other gods entirely. The treasury paid for offerings to Humbun, an old and great god of the Elamites, the people who had lived in this region long before the Persians arrived. It also paid for rites to other Elamite deities, to Iranian gods of mountains and rivers, and even to the Babylonian storm god Adad.
245:49
Some deliveries were simply marked for a ceremony called Lan, which seems to have been a general offering that could be made on behalf of many gods.
245:57
What is remarkable is that the same officials, sometimes in the same month, issued grain for Uhura Mazda and for Humban without any visible sense of conflict.
246:07
The royal administration was apparently quite happy to fund the gods of everyone who lived in the heartland. It is a bit like a government budget that includes a line for every religious festival in the country, and nobody in the accounting office finds it odd. In fact, Humbun appears in the tablets more often than Ahura Mazda, which must have been slightly awkward for anyone who believed the wise lord was the only god who really counted. This tolerance was not limited to Persia itself. Across the empire, the state generally supported local cults and treated local priests as partners in keeping order.
246:38
In Egypt, Persian kings were portrayed as pharaohs and honored the traditional gods. In Babylon, the temples kept their lands and their rituals. In Judah, the temple at Jerusalem was rebuilt under Persian rule. In Asia Minor, a Persian decree preserved in a later Greek inscription instructs a satrap to respect a sanctuary of Apollo and its sacred gardeners. The logic was practical. Gods were powerful, local priests were influential, and a happy temple meant a quiet province. Keeping the gods of other nations content was cheaper than garrisoning every city with soldiers and much better for public relations.
247:14
But this tolerance had limits, and the clearest sign of them comes from Xerxes, the son of Darius. In 1935, archaeologists working at Persepolis found stone tablets, carrying an inscription of Xerxes that has puzzled scholars ever since. It is usually called the Dieva inscription. In it, Xerxes lists the lands he ruled, and then says that among these lands there was one in which, before, the divers had been worshipped.
247:40
The word diver in the old Iranian tradition had come to mean false gods or demonic beings, the opposite of the gods of truth.
247:47
By the favour of Ahura Mazda, Xerxes says, he destroyed that sanctuary of the divers and proclaimed that they should not be worshipped. Where the divers had been worshipped before, he says, he now worshipped Ahura Mazda in accordance with truth. He also mentions that this land was in turmoil when he took the throne and that he put it back in its place. The frustrating part is that Xerxes does not name the land. Historians have suggested Babylon, Egypt, Bactria and even parts of the Greek world and nobody has managed to prove any of them. Some scholars think the inscription describes a real, specific event.
248:20
Others see it as a general royal statement, a kind of ideological manifesto about the king as defender of truth against chaos, not tied to one place.
248:29
What it does show is that the line between a respected local god and a false god could depend heavily on whether the god's worshippers were loyal Rebellion, in the Persian view, was a form of the lie, and a sanctuary that encouraged it could lose its protection. In other words, the empire's religious tolerance came with terms and conditions, and they were not printed in small letters.
248:50
The most famous test of those conditions came in Babylon. Early in the reign of Xerxes, around 484 BC, Babylon rose in revolt, and not once but twice, under two local men who each claimed the title of king.
249:04
The rebellions did not last long. Xerxes suppressed them firmly, and by most accounts, harshly. Some of the old Babylonian families whose business archives had run for generations seemed to stop keeping records at about this time, which suggests that the local elite paid a heavy price for backing the wrong side.
249:21
What happened to Babylon's gods is where the real argument begins. Herodotus tells us that in the great sanctuary of Babylon there was a golden statue and that Xerxes took it away, something Darius had wanted to do but had not dared. For a long time, historians read this together with some later Greek reports and concluded that Xerxes had wrecked Esagila, the great temple of Marduk, and carried off the statue of the god himself, a crushing blow to Babylonian religion.
249:48
More recent research has been much more cautious. Babylonian documents show that temple life continued, that priests went on working and that the city remained important. It is not even clear that the golden statue Herodotus describes was the cult statue of Marduk rather than some other precious object. Today many historians think the punishment was real but more limited than the old story claimed and that the image of Xerxes as a temple-smashing fanatic owes a good deal to later Greek writers who are not exactly his biggest fans.
250:19
As so often in Persian history the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle and the people who could tell us exactly where are no longer taking questions. The longest-lasting legacy of these ideas, however, may not be in Iran at all. Many scholars believe that Zoroastrian teachings influenced the religious thought of the peoples who lived under Persian rule and above all the Jews.
250:40
In Zarathustra's tradition, history is a struggle between good and evil that will one day come to an end. The dead will be judged, the righteous will go to a place of joy, the wicked will suffer in a place of darkness, and at the end of time evil will be defeated, the dead will rise, and the world will be made new. Some later texts even speak of a saviour figure who will come to bring about this renewal. In the older books of the Hebrew Bible these ideas are hard to find. The dead mostly go to a shadowy underworld, and there is little talk of a final judgment or a cosmic battle between good and evil.
251:13
But in books written during and after the Persian period, they start to appear much more clearly. A powerful adversary who opposes God, armies of angels, the resurrection of the dead, and a judgment at the end of days. Many scholars see Persian influence here, absorbed during the long centuries when Jerusalem was part of the empire. Through Judaism, these ideas later passed into Christianity and Islam, shaping how billions of people think about heaven, hell, and the end of the world.
251:41
Other scholars are more cautious and argue that the ideas could have grown on their own within Jewish tradition and the debate is far from settled.
251:48
but the possibility that a priest-poet from the Central Asian steppes, through the Persian Empire, helped shape the beliefs of half the planet is one of the most remarkable threads in all of ancient history.
252:00
Even our vocabulary carries a trace of it. The old Persian word for a walled garden or enclosed park, something like paradida, passed into Greek as paradesos, and from there into our word paradise.
252:13
So when people speak of paradise today, they are, without knowing it, describing a Persian royal garden with a very good wall around it. It is a nice reminder that even heaven in the end needed proper landscaping. The kings who prayed to the wise lord were convinced that truth was on their side, but along the coast of Asia Minor, in the proud Greek cities of Ionia, a very different idea of order was beginning to stir, and before long it would set the whole western edge of the empire on fire.
252:40
A king who sorted the world into truth and the lie was about to meet a scattering of small quarrelsome cities on the far western edge of his map and each side would end up convinced the other was the lie. To see how it started we need to go back to the coast of what is now western Turkey. You may remember that Harpagus, the old general of Cyrus, had brought the Greek cities of Ionia under Persian rule in the 540s BC.
253:06
For about half a century the arrangement mostly worked. The Ionian cities paid their tribute, sent ships when asked, and were governed by local strongmen whom the Greeks called tyrants.
253:17
The word did not yet mean a monster, only a ruler who had not come to power the traditional way. The Persians liked these men because they were reliable, and the tyrants liked the Persians because a great empire behind you is a very convincing argument in a town meeting.
253:32
Ordinary Ionians liked the system rather less, though for the moment nobody asked them. The richest and proudest of these cities was Miletus, a busy port that had planted colonies all around the Black Sea and produced some of the very first Greek philosophers. Its tyrant Histiaeus had served Darius loyally on campaign in Europe, and Darius rewarded him in the most Persian way imaginable, by inviting him to live at court in Susa as a royal companion.
253:58
It was a great honour, and also, not by accident, a comfortable way of keeping a clever man far from his power base. Miletus itself passed to his son-in-law Aristagoras. Aristagoras was ambitious and not always lucky. Around 500 BC he talked the Persian authorities into backing an expedition against the island of Naxos, promising an easy conquest.
254:19
The siege dragged on for four months, the money ran out, and Aristagoras now faced the uncomfortable task of explaining to the satrap at Sardis why the empire had just paid for a failure.
254:30
Herodotus says a secret message from Histaias arrived at exactly this moment, tattooed on the shaved scalp of a slave and hidden under regrown hair, urging revolt.
254:41
Like many wonderful stories in Herodotus, it may be a little too good to be entirely true. Whatever the trigger, in 499 BC Aristagoras chose rebellion over explanation. He did it cleverly. He gave up his own position as tyrant, declared that Miletus would govern itself, and encouraged the other cities to expel their tyrants too. Suddenly the revolt was not one man escaping a bad report card but a movement, and up and down the coast the pro-Persian rulers were sent packing.
255:09
The rebels needed friends, so Aristagoras sailed to mainland Greece. Sparta listened politely and declined. According to Herodotus, the Spartan king lost interest the moment he learned that Susa lay three months' march from the sea. Spartans were not great fans of long road trips. Athens, however, sent twenty ships, and the small city of Eretria on the island of Euboea sent five more, repaying an old favour to Miletus. By the standards of the Persian Empire, twenty-five ships was a rounding error. By the standards of what happened next, it was one of the most consequential decisions in Greek history.
255:43
In 498 BC, the rebels and their allies marched inland and surprised Sardis, the old Lydian capital and now the seat of the satrap Artafernes, a brother of Darius.
255:54
Artafernes held the citadel, but the lower town was built largely of reed and thatch, and when one house caught fire the whole place went up. Among the buildings that burned was the Temple of Cybele, the great mother goddess of Lydia. The Greeks probably did not mean to destroy a sacred site, but intentions are rarely what people remember about fires.
256:15
On the way back to the coast the attackers were beaten near Ephesus and the Athenians sailed home and stayed there. As foreign interventions go it was short but it had left a very visible mark. Herodotus says that when Darius heard the news he asked who these Athenians were, shot an arrow into the sky and ordered a servant to remind him three times at every dinner to remember them.
256:37
Whether or not that dinner ritual really happened, it captures something real. A small foreign city had helped rebels burn one of the empire's great capitals and its temple, and a king of kings who let that pass would look weak.
256:49
Kings who looked weak tended not to stay kings for long. The revolt spread for a while to the Hellespont to much of Caria and even to Cyprus, but the empire had patience and depth. Persian armies worked methodically through the rebel cities and Cyprus was back under control within about a year. Aristagoras, seeing the tide turn, left for Thrace and died there fighting local tribes. Hysterius talked his way out of Susa by promising to calm the Ionians. then drifted around the Aegean as a freelance adventurer trusted by nobody until the Persians caught and executed him.
257:23
He remains one of history's great examples of a man too clever for his own good.
257:28
The decisive moment came in 494 BC, at sea, off the small island of Laid near Miletus.
257:35
The Ionians gathered around 350 ships. The Persians brought more, drawn mainly from Phoenicia, Egypt and Cyprus, the empire's great seafaring peoples.
257:46
Herodotus says a commander from Fakir drilled the Ionian crews so hard in the hot sun that they simply refused to continue, which may be the earliest recorded case of a team walking out on its coach. Meanwhile, Persian agents quietly offered forgiveness to several contingents.
258:03
When battle was joined, the ships of Samos and Lesbos sailed away, and the Ionian line collapsed. Miletus was besieged and taken, and the punishment was severe.
258:13
Most of the men were killed, and the women and children were enslaved and resettled far to the east, near the mouth of the Tigris. The jewel of Ionia was emptied. In Athens, the playwright Phrynicus staged a tragedy about its fall, and the audience was so upset that the city fined him a thousand drachmas for reminding them of their own misfortunes. Theatre critics have rarely had that kind of power since. What came next surprises people. Artifernus did not simply grind Ionia down. He had the cities agree to settle their disputes by arbitration instead of war, and had their lands measured so tribute could be assessed fairly.
258:49
A little later, Darius's son-in-law Mardonius removed many of the remaining tyrants and let Ionian cities run themselves as democracies. The empire that crushed the rebellion then granted, in places, the very thing the rebels had claimed to want, which rather spoils the simple story of freedom against tyranny. That brings us to an important point. Almost everything we know about these wars comes from the Greek side, above all from Herodotus. who was born in the Persian-ruled city of Halakarnassus a few years after the events we are about to describe.
259:20
He was remarkably curious and fair-minded for his time, often reporting Persian views and praising Persian courage. But his informants were Greeks telling the story of their greatest victories, and Greeks were not famous for underselling themselves. The Persian royal inscriptions say almost nothing about these campaigns. To the court at Susa, this was a frontier problem in one corner of an empire stretching to India.
259:43
It is a bit like trying to understand a whole company by reading only the diary of one very proud employee in a branch office. With that in mind, let us follow the Persian response. In 492, BC Mardonius led an army and a fleet into Europe. On land, it went well. He reasserted control over Thrace along the northern Aegean and the Kingdom of Macedon accepted Persian overlordship, a nice irony given what a later Macedonian king would one day do to Persia.
260:11
At sea, though, the expedition met the real enemy of every ancient fleet, the weather.
260:17
As the ships rounded the rocky peninsula of Mount Athos, a violent storm drove much of the fleet onto the cliffs. Herodotus speaks of some 300 ships and 20,000 men lost, probably an exaggeration, but the disaster was enough to end the campaign and Athos earned a reputation Persian planners would not forget.
260:36
Two years later Darius tried a more direct route, straight across the Aegean island by island. The expedition was led by Datis, a Median noble, and Artifernis, son of the satrap of the same name. Naming your son after yourself was apparently as popular then as now, which does little to help historians.
260:55
In 490 BC, the fleet reached Eretria, which held out for six days before some of its own citizens opened the gates.
261:03
The Persians burned its temples in deliberate repayment for Sardis and deported the population to Persia, where Herodotus says their descendants were still speaking Greek in his own day. The fleet then crossed to Attica and landed at the Bay of Marathon, about 40 kilometres from Athens, on the advice of Hippias. the elderly former tyrant of Athens who had fled to the Persians and hoped to be restored.
261:26
The plane suited cavalry, and his own father had once landed there on the way to seizing power. Hippias may have hoped history would repeat itself. History had other plans. The Athenians marched out with about 10,000 heavily armed citizens, joined by the entire army of Little Plataea, roughly a thousand men.
261:44
They sent a runner to Sparta for help, but the Spartans replied that they were in the middle of a religious festival and could not march until the full moon.
261:53
For several days the Athenians waited in the hills, then one of their generals, Miltiades, won the argument for attacking. He knew the Persians unusually well, having once ruled a Greek territory on the Hellespont as a Persian vassal, before switching sides. The battle itself was brief. The Athenians thinned the centre of their line, strengthened the wings, and advanced quickly to close the distance before the Persian archers could do much. The Persian centre pushed back the thin Greek middle, but the strong Greek wings broke the troops facing them and turned inward.
262:24
The Persians retreated to their ships and most of the fleet got away. Herodotus says 6,400 Persians fell against just 192 Athenians who were buried in a great mound on the field that you can still visit today. The Persian figure has probably grown in the telling and some historians suspect the Persian cavalry was not even on the field for reasons nobody fully understands.
262:47
The famous runner who sprinted from marathon to Athens with the news comes from much later writers and is best treated as legend. Herodotus mentions only the run to Sparta, which was far longer, so modern marathon runners can be grateful they were not asked to do that one. For Athens, marathon became the founding myth of its democracy. For Persia, it was a setback at the end of a mostly successful campaign that had punished Eritrea and shown the Aegean could be crossed. Darius began planning a much larger expedition, but a revolt in Egypt distracted him, and in 486 BC he died, leaving the Greek question to his son.
263:24
Xerxes, as we have seen, first dealt with rebellions closer to home. Only then did he turn west, and when he did, it was on a scale the ancient world had never witnessed. The preparations took years. Supply depots were stocked along the route through Thrace, and contingents were summoned from across the empire.
263:43
Herodotus describes the army as a parade of peoples in national dress, from Indians in cotton to Ethiopians painted in chalk and red ochre. His claim of well over a million fighting men is impossible, since no ancient supply system could feed that many people in one place.
263:59
Modern estimates usually suggest one to three hundred thousand, still enormous. Herodotus also says the army drank whole rivers dry, which, with that many horses and mules, may not have been entirely poetic.
264:11
The planners had not forgotten Athos.
264:14
Xerxes had a canal dug straight across the neck of the peninsula, about two kilometres long and wide enough for two warships side by side. Herodotus thought it pure vanity, but modern surveys have confirmed the canal existed and it was a perfectly sensible insurance policy against the weather. Sometimes showing off and planning ahead look exactly the same. The other great project was at the Hellespont, the narrow strait between Asia and Europe. Engineers built two bridges by lashing hundreds of ships together, anchoring them against the current, and stretching enormous cables of flax and papyrus across their decks, then laying planks and earth on top, with screens along the side so the animals would not panic at the water.
264:55
A storm wrecked the first bridges before anyone crossed. Herodotus says the furious Xerxes ordered the sea to be given 300 lashes and had fetters thrown into it. It is the most famous story ever told about Xerxes and very probably a legend or a Greek misreading of some ritual to calm the waters.
265:13
Either way, the Hellespont seems not to have taken it personally and the second bridge is held.
265:19
In the spring of 480 BC, the army crossed into Europe. Many Greek states decided the wisest course was to submit, handing Persian envoys earth and water the traditional tokens of surrender. Thessaly, Boeotia, and others joined the Persians or stayed carefully neutral. It is easy to call this cowardice, but to a small city facing the largest army anyone had ever seen, it looked a lot like common sense. Only around 30 states, led by Sparta and Athens, formed an alliance to resist, and even they spent much of their time arguing about where to make a stand.
265:54
They chose Thermopylae, the hot gates, named for its warm springs.
265:59
Back then the sea came much closer to the mountains, leaving a narrow strip of land where a small force could block a large one. In August, 480 BC, the Spartan king Leonidas arrived with 300 Spartans and several thousand allies. The popular image of 300 men standing alone is misleading, since for most of the battle the Greeks numbered around 7,000.
266:21
Nearby, the Greek fleet took position at Artemisium to keep the Persian ships from sailing around them. Herodotus says Xerxes waited four days, expecting the Greeks to see sense and leave. When they did not, he sent his troops in. For two days the Greeks held the pass, rotating units so fresh men were always at the front, and even the immortals could not break through in such cramped ground.
266:44
Then a local man named Ephialtes came to the Persian camp and offered, for a reward, to show them a mountain path around the pass. His name became so notorious that in modern Greek it is still used to mean nightmare, not the legacy anyone hopes for.
266:59
A Persian force followed the path through the night.
267:02
Learning he was about to be surrounded, Leonidas sent most of the allies away and stayed with the Spartans, some thespians, and a contingent of Thebans. They were overwhelmed, and Leonidas died with them. Herodotus makes it a tale of glorious sacrifice. From the Persian side, it was a successful operation that opened the road into central Greece. Both things can be true at once.
267:24
the Greek fleet at Artemisium, which had fought several indecisive engagements, now withdrew south, and the road to Athens lay open.
267:32
On the advice of their leading politician Themistocles, the Athenians did something extraordinary. They evacuated nearly their whole population to the island of Salamis and the town of Trozen, while the men went to the fleet.
267:45
It is not often that a city answers an invasion by simply leaving, but it turned out to be a very good idea. The Persians took Athens, and the small group of defenders who had stayed on the Acropolis was overcome.
267:57
The temples there were burned, the long-promised payment for Sardis finally delivered. The Athenians later buried the broken statues in the rubble when they rebuilt, which is why archaeologists have recovered some of the finest early Greek sculpture.
268:11
The Parthenon that tourists photograph today was built a generation later on top of the ruins.
268:17
Now everything depended on the fleets, gathered in the narrow strait between Salamis and the mainland. Many Allied commanders wanted to pull back to the Isthmus of Corinth. Themistocles believed their only chance was to fight in the Narrows, where the larger Persian fleet could not spread out, but his own allies were trying to leave. So, according to Herodotus, he sent a trusted servant to Xerxes with a secret message. The Greeks were about to flee, and Themistocles himself secretly favoured the Persians.
268:46
If the king moved fast, he could trap them all. It was one of the great tricks of military history and a sign that Themistocles was perfectly comfortable playing both sides.
268:55
Xerxes took the bait.
268:57
One night in September, 480 BC, Persian ships moved to block the exits of the strait, and at dawn they rowed in to finish off what they expected to be a fleeing enemy.
269:07
Xerxes had a throne set up on a hillside overlooking the water, with scribes beside him to note which captains fought well.
269:15
It must have seemed like the best seat in the house. Instead, in the cramped channel, the Persian ships tangled with one another. The front rows could not retreat because the rows behind kept pressing forward, and the heavier Greek ships rammed them one after another.
269:30
By evening the Persian fleet had suffered heavy losses and pulled back. With winter coming Xerxes returned to Asia. Greek writers painted this as a panicked flight, but it made strategic sense. The King of Kings could not camp in Greece for a year while the rest of the empire waited, and Babylon had shown only recently what could happen when a province felt neglected.
269:51
He left Mardonius in Thessaly with a large picked army to finish the job. Mardonius first tried diplomacy, offering Athens generous terms, including rebuilding its temples at Persian expense.
270:03
The Athenians refused and he occupied their empty city a second time, which must have been discouraging for anyone who had just finished sweeping up.
270:11
In 479 BC, the Greek allies assembled their largest army of the war under the Spartan regent Pausanias and met Mardonius near Plataea in Boeotia.
270:22
For days, the army skirmished over water and supplies, and Persian cavalry did real damage. When the Greeks tried to shift position at night and ended up scattered, Mardonius saw his chance and attacked. But the Spartans held, and when Mardonius himself fell, his army lost heart and broke. The captured Persian camp was so full of gold and silver vessels and embroidered tents that Herodotus says Pausanias had a Persian banquet laid out beside a plain Spartan meal to show how foolish it was for people who ate like that to come and rob people who ate like this.
270:54
It is a lovely line, though it says more about Spartan cooking than about Persian ambition. Greek tradition holds that on the same day, across the Aegean, a Greek fleet reached Mikael near Miletus, where the remains of the Persian navy were drawn up on the shore behind a stockade. The Greeks landed and stormed the camp, Ionian troops in the Persian ranks switched sides, and the beach ships were burned.
271:17
Whether the two battles truly fell on one day or the coincidence was polished later, we cannot be sure. The result was clear either way. The Ionian cities rose again, this time with a Greek fleet just offshore, and twenty years after the First Revolt much of the coast slipped out of Persian hands. The Greeks told all this for centuries as the tale of a mighty empire humbled by brave free men. From Persepolis the view was different. A costly campaign lost at the far western edge, while the treasury stayed vast and the king still ruled from Egypt to India.
271:49
What changed was the method, because Persia would soon discover that the Greeks could be managed far more cheaply by paying them to fight each other.
271:57
After Plataea and Mikael, the Persian kings drew an important conclusion and drew it rather quietly.
272:04
If Greek spearmen could not be beaten in the field, perhaps they could be bought and over the next century and a half the empire would discover that a chest of gold coins often travels further than an army and complains a great deal less on the way. This was not surrender. The king still ruled from the Aegean to the Indus, and the defeats of 480 and 479 BC had cost him some coastal provinces and a great deal of pride rather than the heart of his realm. Salamis, where Themistocles had tempted the royal fleet into a strait too narrow for its numbers, was remembered in Athens as the hinge of history.
272:39
In Susa it was more likely remembered as an expensive afternoon. What changed was method. Instead of marching west, the great king would increasingly pay others to do his fighting, his negotiating, and, when necessary, his quarrelling for him.
272:55
The man who had launched the great invasion did not live to see the new policy mature. In 465 BC Xerxes was murdered in his own palace. The killer, according to our Greek sources, was Artabanus, the commander of the Royal Guard, which is roughly like being robbed by the head of your security company. The details survive mostly through Theseus, a Greek doctor who later worked at the Persian court, and through writers who borrowed from him, and they do not agree on much.
273:21
In one common version, Artabanus, with the help of a palace eunuch, killed the king at night and then accused the crown prince Darius of the crime. The younger son, Artaxerxes, believed him and had his brother put to death. Only later did the truth come out and Artaxerxes had Artabanus executed in turn.
273:41
Babylonian records give us a little firm ground. A document dates the death of Xerxes to the summer of 465, which at least confirms that the court gossip had a real event behind it.
273:52
So began the reign of Artaxerxes I, a king the Greeks nicknamed Long Hand. Plutarch explains that his right hand was longer than his left, which is either a genuine physical detail or the ancient equivalent of a celebrity rumour and nobody has the skeleton to check.
274:08
What matters more is that he ruled for about 40 years, from 465 to 424 BC, and by the standards of his family those decades were fairly calm.
274:18
There were rebellions, as there always were, but the empire held together, the tribute flowed, and the king seems to have preferred careful diplomacy to grand adventures.
274:29
After his father's experience in Greece, that was perhaps not surprising.
274:34
One of the stranger guests at his court was none other than Themistocles himself.
274:38
The hero of Salamis had not enjoyed a peaceful retirement. Athenian democracy had a habit of voting its most successful men out of the city through a procedure called ostracism, in which citizens scratched a name on a piece of broken pottery.
274:52
Themistocles was ostracised around 471 BC, later accused of plotting with Persia and condemned.
275:00
Unsurprisingly, the Spartans and Athenians were both keen to arrest him, so he fled from place to place across the Greek world and finally did something that must have startled everyone. He went to the Persian king. Thucydides, who is usually a sober writer, tells us that Themistocles wrote to Artaxerxes, newly on the throne, reminding him of certain services he claimed to have done Persia and asking for a year to learn the language before presenting himself in person.
275:27
He then studied Persian and the customs of the court, and when the year was up he appeared before the king and impressed him greatly. It is a remarkable picture, the man who had wrecked the royal fleet now chatting with the son of the king whose fleet it was. For the king, a famous defector who knew Greek politics from the inside was worth more than a shipload of silver. The reward was generous. Themistocles received the revenues of three cities in western Asia Minor. Magnesia on the Myander was supposed to supply his bread, Lampsacus on the Hellespont his wine, and Meos his other food, the sort of side dishes aggregate with his bread.
276:03
He lived at Magnesia as a kind of local governor, and coins struck there in his name have actually been found.
276:09
He died there some years later, probably of natural causes, though a more dramatic story claimed he took poison rather than led a Persian army against his own people. Thucydides mentions that version only to say he thinks illness is more likely and modern historians tend to agree with him.
276:25
The legend, naturally, has always been more popular. Meanwhile, the war in the Aegean had not really ended. Athens had organised many Greek cities into an alliance, known today as the Delian League, to keep the Persians out of the sea and around 466 BC its commander Simon won a double victory on land and sea at the Eurymedon River in southern Anatolia. Then, around 460, Egypt rose in revolt under a Libyan prince named Inneros and Athens sent a large fleet to help him. for a few years it looked as if the nile might slip out of persian hands but the king's general megabizus eventually trapped the athenians and their allies on an island in the nile delta and destroyed the expedition around 454 bc It was one of the worst disasters Athens ever suffered and it showed that the empire was still perfectly capable of winning when it chose its ground.
277:19
After one more Athenian campaign on Cyprus, around 450 BC, the fighting between Athens and Persia seems to have died down. Later Greek writers spoke of a formal treaty, the Peace of Callius, named after the Athenian who supposedly negotiated it at Susa around 449 BC.
277:38
According to these accounts, the king promised to keep his warships out of the Aegean and his armies a certain distance from the coast, while Athens agreed to leave the king's territory alone. The trouble is that the reality of this treaty is fiercely disputed. Thucydides, our best source for the period, never mentions it, which is a little like a sports reporter forgetting to mention the final score. In the 4th century BC, the historian Theopompus claimed that the inscribed copy displayed in Athens was a forgery. because it was written in a style of lettering that came into official use only later.
278:10
Some scholars think there was a real agreement, perhaps an informal understanding rather than a grand treaty. Others think the whole thing was a patriotic invention. Either way, the practical result was a long pause in open warfare. Artaxerxes died in 424 BC and his passing produced one of those years that make royal genealogies look like a crowded staircase. His only legitimate son, Xerxes II, reigned for about 45 days before he was murdered by a half-brother, Sogdianus. Sogdianus in turn lasted a few months before another half-brother, Ocus, satrap of Hyrcania, gathered support, defeated him and had him put to death.
278:50
Ocus took the throne name Darius, and so became Darius II. His wife was his half-sister Parasatis, who would become one of the most formidable figures at court, and who will reappear briefly in our story because she had very strong opinions about which of her sons deserved to rule.
279:06
Now the gold policy came fully into its own.
279:09
In 431 BC Athens and Sparta had gone to war with each other, in the long conflict we call the Peloponnesian War, and for Persia this was a gift.
279:19
The two strongest Greek states were busy exhausting each other and the king only had to decide when and how much to help.
279:26
For years, the answer was not very much. Then in 413 BC Athens lost a huge expedition in Sicily and suddenly the balance tilted. Persian satraps in Asia Minor, especially Tissiphernes at Sardis and Pharnabazus in the northwest, began to negotiate with Sparta. The Spartans had excellent soldiers but very little money, and fleets ate money. Each warship needed around 200 men, most of them rowers who expected to be paid, and they were not known for working on credit.
279:56
Entreaties concluded around 412 and 411 BC Sparta, which had entered the war promising to free the Greeks, acknowledged that the lands the king's ancestors had held in Asia belonged to the king. Tissaphernes, however, played a careful double game. He paid the Spartans, but not too much and not too regularly, because Persia's interest lay in having both sides weak rather than one side strong. He was managing a cash flow rather than fighting a war. That changed in 407 BC when Darius II sent his younger son Cyrus to take charge in Asia Minor.
280:29
We call him Cyrus the Younger to avoid confusing him with the founder of the empire, though he would not have minded the comparison. He was perhaps sixteen or seventeen, ambitious, energetic and very much his mother's favourite.
280:43
At Sardis he met the new Spartan admiral Lysander, and the two got on famously.
280:48
Lysander asked Cyrus to raise the row as pay, and Cyrus did, from three ebols a day to four.
280:54
It does not sound like much, but it meant that roers serving Athens had a reason to change sides, and many did.
281:01
Xenophon and Plutarch describe Cyrus as so keen that he offered to melt down the gold and silver throne he sat on, if that was what it took.
281:09
One suspects the throne was never actually in danger, but the point was made.
281:14
With Persian silver behind it, Lysander built the fleet that finished Athens. In 405 BC, he caught the Athenian navy drawn up on the beach at Egospotomy, on the Hellespont, and captured almost all of it.
281:27
Athens, which depended on grain shipped through those waters, was starved into surrender in 404 BC.
281:35
Its long walls were torn down and its empire dissolved. The city that had defeated Xerxes at sea was beaten in the end by ships paid for with the money of Xerxes' grandson. If there was ever a quiet revenge in ancient history, this was it, and nobody at the Persian court even had to get their feet wet. Darius II died in 404 BC, the same year Athens fell. His elder son, Arsaces, became king under the name Artaxerxes II.
282:03
Cyrus the Younger was not pleased. According to Plutarch, he was even accused of plotting against his brother at the coronation, and only the pleading of Parasatis saved him and sent him back to his post.
282:15
Back in Sardis, Cyrus began quietly hiring Greek soldiers. The Peloponnesian War had just ended, and there were thousands of experienced fighters with no war to go to, which in the ancient world was a little like a sudden surplus of unemployed engineers, except that these engineers specialised in demolition.
282:33
In 401 BC, Cyrus marched east with an army of Persian and Anatolian troops and more than 10,000 Greek mercenaries. Most of the Greeks learned only far inland that they were marching on the king himself. They grumbled, were offered more pay and kept walking. In the late summer, the armies met at Conaxa on the Euphrates north of Babylon. The Greek mercenaries on the right wing did exactly what Greek heavy infantry did best and pushed back everything in front of them. but a battle is won or lost at its centre, and in the centre Cyrus spotted his brother and charged straight at him.
283:07
Our sources say he managed to wound the king, but in the fighting Cyrus himself was killed. With him died the whole reason for the expedition. The Greeks had won their part of the battle and lost the war in the same afternoon. What happened next became one of the most famous adventures in all of ancient literature. The Greeks were stranded in the middle of Mesopotamia, with no employer, no supplies and no friends.
283:31
Tissaphernes invited their senior generals to a meeting under promise of safe conduct and then seized them, and the generals were later executed. Persian commanders evidently believed that an army without its leaders would simply fall apart.
283:44
Instead, the soldiers elected new officers, among them a young Athenian named Xenophon, and began to fight their way north, through the mountains of Kurdistan and the snows of Armenia towards the Black Sea.
283:55
When at last they climbed a ridge and saw the water, they shouted the Greek word for the sea again and again and built a great cairn of stones.
284:03
Xenophon later wrote it all down in a book called The Anabasis, which means the march-up country, and generations of Greek schoolboys would grow up reading it, often against their will.
284:14
The march of the 10,000 had an effect far beyond the men who survived it. It showed the Greeks that a Greek army could walk into the heart of the Persian Empire, win a battle there and walk out again. The empire, so huge on the map, suddenly looked vulnerable. Greek orators began to talk openly about the idea of a great campaign against Persia and the thought never quite went away.
284:35
In fairness, the Persian side would have pointed out that the king had won at Kunaxa and the rebellion was over.
284:42
But the Greeks wrote the books, and the books said Persia could be beaten. For the moment, though, it was Persia that held the stronger hand. Sparta, now the leading power in Greece, quickly fell out with its old paymasters and sent an army into Asia Minor in support of the Greek cities there. Its king Agesilaus campaigned with some success between 396 and 394 BC.
285:04
The Persian answer was entirely in keeping with the new policy. Instead of sending a vast army to meet him, the king sent gold to Sparta's enemies at home. Thebes, Corinth, Argos, and even Athens took the money and went to war against Sparta, and Agesilaus had to hurry back to defend his own country.
285:22
Plutarch reports that he joked he had been driven out of Asia by 30,000 archers, meaning the gold Darach stamped with the image of the king as an archer. It was probably the most effective archery unit in Persian history and not one of them ever drew a bow.
285:36
The next step showed how complete the turnaround had become. In 387 and 386 BC, the Greek states, worn out by years of fighting, accepted a settlement known as the King's Peace, sometimes called the Peace of Antalcidas, after the Spartan envoy who negotiated it. The terms were simple and remarkably blunt. All the Greek cities in Asia, together with the island of Cyprus, belonged to the king.
286:02
other greek cities large and small were to be independent and anyone who refused to accept the peace would face war from the king and those who supported him as xenophon preserves it the royal message reads less like a treaty than a judge's ruling artaxerxes ii had become the arbiter of greek affairs a century after marathon the greeks of ionia were back under persian rule and the mainland greeks had signed the paperwork themselves yet the empire's success in the west hid serious trouble elsewhere Around 404 BC, while the court was busy with the succession and the quarrel between the royal brothers, Egypt broke away.
286:40
A local ruler named Amataeus declared independence, and Egypt would stay free of Persian rule for about six decades.
286:46
Several native dynasties came and went, the last founded by pharaohs named Nectanebo, who hired Greek mercenaries from the same pool Persia was hiring from. The Persians tried more than once to win the country back. A great expedition in the 370s BC reached the Nile Delta, but stalled in quarrels between its Persian and Greek commanders, and then the annual flood arrived and settled the matter.
287:09
The Nile, as Persian generals kept discovering, was a river with a very poor sense of timing.
287:15
Artaxerxes II ruled for over forty years, longer than any other Achaemenid king, but his later reign was troubled. In the 360s BC a whole series of governors in Anatolia rose against him in what historians call the Great Satrap's Revolt. Names such as Datamis in Cappadocia, Ariobarzenis in the northwest and Orontes in Armenia appear in the sources. It sounds like the beginning of the end but in practice the rebels never formed a single united front. They distrusted each other and one by one they were betrayed, bought off or defeated.
287:49
Our evidence for the revolt is patchy and confusing, mostly from later Greek writers and modern scholars still argue over how serious it really was.
287:58
What it does show is a weakness built into the system. A satrap who controlled taxes, troops and a distant province could be tempted to wonder what he needed the king for. The king's family life did not help. Artaxerxes had many sons, and the competition between them turned ugly. The eldest was executed after being accused of plotting against his father, another was driven to take his own life, and a third was murdered.
288:23
The son who emerged from all this was Ocus, who took the throne in 358 BC as Artaxerxes III. He made sure there would be no rival claims by eliminating many of his relatives, which the Roman writer Justin describes as a palace swept almost clean of royal blood. By all accounts he was not a gentle man, but Artaxerxes III was effective. He restored order with an iron hand, and for a while the empire looked stronger than it had in a century. He ordered the satraps of Anatolia to disband their private mercenary armies, which was sensible after a generation of rebellious governors.
288:58
When the Phoenician cities and the kings of Cyprus revolted, he crushed them. The Phoenician city of Sidon, which had led the uprising, was taken around 345 BC after its own ruler betrayed it, and the city was largely destroyed by fire. Cyprus was brought back under control around the same time. Then he turned to Egypt.
289:18
An earlier attempt in the 350s had failed, but in 343 BC Artaxerxes III led a huge army in person, with Greek mercenaries fighting on both sides as usual. The pharaoh Nectonebo II was defeated and fled south, and Egypt became a Persian province again after some 60 years of freedom.
289:36
Later, Egyptian and Greek traditions remembered the reconquest as harsh, with temples plundered and sacred animals mistreated, though as with Cambyses, these stories come from people with every reason to dislike the conqueror and historians treat them with some caution. Whatever the truth, the empire had recovered its richest province.
289:56
For a moment the Achaemenid state was back at something close to its full size. The weak point of a ruler who governs through fear is that he must trust somebody, and Artaxerxes III trusted a eunuch named Bagoas, one of his leading officials, who had played an important part in the Egyptian campaign and had grown very powerful at court.
290:15
In 338 BC, according to the Greek historian Diodorus, Begoas had the king poisoned with the help of a physician. A Babylonian document records the king's death, so the event itself is certain, though the details as so often depend on Greek writers.
290:32
Bagoas then placed the king's young son Asus on the throne, expecting a ruler who would do as he was told.
290:38
Asus, also called Artaxerxes IV, seems to have had other ideas, and in 336 BC Bagoas had him killed as well, along with his children.
290:48
Having now disposed of two kings in two years, Bagoas needed a third and he chose a member of a side branch of the royal family, a man named Artashata, who took the throne as Darius III. Bagoas presumably believed he had found a grateful and obedient partner. He was mistaken.
291:04
According to Diodorus, when it became clear that the new king would not be anyone's puppet, Bagoas prepared a poisoned cup for him too.
291:12
Darius learned of the plot, summoned Bagoas and made him drink the cup himself.
291:17
One suspects even the palace staff quietly approved. With that, the most dangerous man at court was gone and the new king could finally begin his reign without looking over his shoulder.
291:28
For a hundred and fifty years Persian gold had kept the Greeks divided, busy and largely harmless, and the empire had outlasted every enemy it could not defeat by force.
291:38
But in that same year of 336 BC, far to the west in Macedon, a young man of twenty had just become king, and he had read his Xenophon very carefully.
291:48
So the new king of kings had cleared his throat of one problem with a single cup. Unfortunately for him, a much bigger problem was already sharpening its spear on the far side of the Aegean. The man now sitting on the throne was called Darius III and he was not exactly the obvious heir. He came from a side branch of the royal family, far enough from the centre that nobody had bothered to remove him during the bloody house-cleaning of Artaxerxes III, which in that family counted as a lucky break.
292:16
Before his elevation, he had served as satrap of Armenia, a rugged mountain province where governing mostly meant keeping the horses fed and the tribes calm. Greek and Roman writers also passed on a tale that made him sound like a character from an epic. During one of the wars against the Caduceans, a hardy people living near the Caspian Sea, an enemy champion supposedly challenged any Persian to single combat, and the future Darius stepped forward and won the duel.
292:41
Whether this really happened or was polished up later to give the king a heroic resume, we cannot say for sure, but it does suggest that he was remembered as brave, at least at the start. In any case, he was no weakling and no puppet. Bagoas had learned that the hard way. Here is the timing that historians love to point out. In the very same year of 336 BC, in the Kingdom of Macedon in northern Greece, King Philip II was assassinated at a wedding feast and his son took over.
293:11
That son was twenty years old, had been tutored by Aristotle, slept, so the story goes, with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow and was named Alexander. Philip had already been planning an invasion of Persian Asia and an advanced force was even operating in Anatolia when he died. So Darius inherited an empire that had just been put back together and Alexander inherited a war that was already half-packed.
293:34
It is hard to imagine a worse coincidence for a new king, a bit like opening your new shop on the same day a giant chain store moves in across the street.
293:43
For the first year or two, Alexander was busy at home, crushing rebellions in Greece and in the Balkans. Then, in the spring of 334 BC, he led his army across the Hellespont, the narrow strait between Europe and Asia that Xerxes had once bridged with ships going the other way.
294:01
The Macedonian force numbered roughly 40,000 men, infantry and cavalry together. That sounds like a lot, but compared with the resources of the Persian Empire it was modest and Alexander was short of money.
294:13
Ancient writers say he arrived with only a small war chest and considerable debts, which is not a typical starting point for someone about to conquer the known world.
294:23
Being a showman, he reportedly threw a spear into the soil of Asia as he landed, as if claiming the whole continent as a prize won by the spear and then paused to visit the ruins of Troy and honour the heroes of Homer.
294:35
Marketing, it seems, is not a modern invention. The Persian response at first was left to the local satraps of Anatolia. They had a capable Greek mercenary commander on their side, Memnon of Rhodes, who reportedly advised a scorched-earth strategy. His idea was to retreat, burn the crops and villages ahead of the Macedonians, and let hunger do the work, while the Persian fleet carried the war back into Greece. The satraps were not keen on burning their own lands, which is understandable if you think of it as setting fire to your own house to keep a burglar out.
295:06
Instead, they chose to fight. In May of 334 BC, the two armies met at the river Granicus in northwestern Anatolia.
295:16
The Persians lined the steep bank and Alexander led his cavalry straight across the water and up the slope. The fighting was fierce and Alexander himself came close to being killed, saved at the last moment by one of his officers, Clytus, known as Clytus the Black.
295:32
But the Macedonians broke through and the Persian satrap's army was defeated. The Greek mercenaries in Persian pay were treated harshly afterward and many were sent in chains to work in Macedon.
295:44
After Granicus, the cities of western Anatolia began to fall to Alexander one after another. Sardis, the old Lydian capital and seat of Persian power in the west, simply surrendered.
295:55
Some coastal cities resisted, Miletus and Halicarnassus among them, but they too were taken.
296:02
Alexander also made a point of showing the locals that life would go on much as before, keeping many local customs and even appointing his own men to the old Persian office of Satrap. He was, in a sense, not replacing the Persian system but taking it over, like a new manager who keeps the furniture and just changes the name on the door.
296:19
Memnon, meanwhile, led a dangerous naval counter-offensive in the Aegean, but he fell ill and died in 333 BC, and with him went the most promising Persian plan to distract the invader.
296:31
Now Darius took command himself. He gathered a huge army from across the empire and marched west to meet Alexander. Ancient writers give enormous numbers for this force, some claiming several hundred thousand men, which modern historians treat with great suspicion.
296:47
Greek authors tended to inflate Persian armies the way fishermen inflate the size of the one that got away. What is clear is that the Persian army was much larger than the Macedonian one, and here lay the trap.
296:59
In November of 333 BC, the two armies collided near the town of Issus, in the corner where the coast of Anatolia bends down towards Syria. Through a confusing series of manoeuvres, the Persians ended up behind Alexander and then faced him on a narrow coastal plain, squeezed between the mountains and the sea. On open ground, numbers would have been a huge advantage. On this cramped strip of land, much of the great army could barely get into action at all. The battle itself unfolded quickly.
297:29
Alexander led a charge of his companion cavalry at the Persian line and pushed toward the centre, where Darius stood in his chariot. At some point, as the danger came closer, Darius turned his chariot and left the field. Greek writers present this as cowardice, while some modern historians suggest that a king had to survive to keep fighting, since without him the whole empire could collapse.
297:50
Either way, once the king was seen leaving, the army lost heart and broke. The Persian army was routed and Alexander had won his second great victory. What happened next became one of the most famous episodes of the whole campaign. In the Persian camp, the Macedonians found the royal family.
298:06
In those days a Persian king travelled to war with his household, which meant tents, servants, treasure and relatives, the ancient equivalent of bringing the entire family on a business trip.
298:17
Darius' mother, Sissi Gambis, his wife and his children were all captured. Ancient writers, especially those who admired Alexander, stressed that he treated them with remarkable respect.
298:29
He let them keep their titles and their attendants, and he promised that no harm would come to them.
298:35
There is a well-known story that when Alexander and his close friend Hephaestion entered the tent, the Queen Mother bowed to Hephaestion by mistake, because he was taller and more impressive-looking. Embarrassed, she apologised, and Alexander supposedly told her not to worry, since Hephaestion was also Alexander. It is a charming tale, and like many charming tales from this period, it may have been improved in the retelling. Still, it shows how important it was for Alexander's image to be seen as a generous victor rather than a mere plunderer. Sisigambis, by the way, would later grow close to Alexander, which must have made for some awkward family conversations.
299:12
After Issus, Alexander did something that surprised many. Instead of chasing Darius into the heart of the empire, he turned south along the Mediterranean coast. His logic was simple. The Persian navy, largely manned by Phoenician ships, could still threaten Greece in his supply lines. If he took the coastal cities that were home to that navy, the fleet would have nowhere to go.
299:34
Most Phoenician cities opened their gates. Tyre did not. Tyre was an island city, standing about a kilometre offshore, protected by high walls and the sea itself, and its people were confident that no army without a navy could reach them. They were not wrong in principle. Alexander's solution was to build a causeway, a huge stone and earth mole stretching across the water to the island. The Tyrians fought back with fireships, divers and missiles, and the work dragged on. The siege lasted about seven months, which is a long time to spend piling rocks into the sea.
300:08
In the end, with the help of ships from other Phoenician and Cypriot cities that had switched sides, Alexander broke into Tyre in 332 BC.
300:18
The city was punished severely and many of its people were sold into slavery.
300:22
Interestingly, the causeway never went away. Over the centuries sand built up around it and Tyre today is no longer an island but a peninsula, so Alexander literally changed the map.
300:34
Next came Gaza, on the road to Egypt, which held out for a couple of months under a determined commander before it too fell.
300:42
Then, in 332 BC, Alexander reached Egypt and here something unusual happened. There was no fight at all. The Persian satrap, with no real army and no hope of help, surrendered the country and Egypt opened its gates. This was partly because the Egyptians had never warmed to Persian rule and the reconquest by Artaxerxes III only a decade earlier was still a fresh and bitter memory.
301:07
Alexander, for his part, played the role perfectly. He honoured the Egyptian gods, was welcomed as a pharaoh and made a journey across the desert to the Oracle of Amun at the Siwa Oasis, the same oasis that a lost Persian army had once tried and failed to reach.
301:22
Alexander, unlike that army, actually arrived. He also founded a new city on the coast, Alexandria, which would become one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. Not a bad year for a man who had started the war short of cash.
301:37
Meanwhile, Darius tried diplomacy. According to the ancient sources, he wrote to Alexander more than once offering peace. The first offer, sent soon after Issus, proposed a ransom for his family and a treaty of friendship. Alexander's reply was famously arrogant, telling Darius to address him in future as Lord of Asia rather than as an equal.
301:58
Later Darius made an even bigger offer, a huge sum of money, one of his daughters in marriage and all the lands west of the Euphrates. That would have meant giving up Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia and Egypt, almost half of the empire.
302:13
There is a famous story that Parmenion, Alexander's senior general, said that if he were Alexander he would accept.
302:20
Alexander supposedly answered that so would he if he were Parmenion.
302:25
In other words, the old general could settle for a fair deal, but Alexander wanted everything. He refused, and the war went on.
302:32
Darius used the time to prepare for one more great battle, and this time he was determined not to repeat the mistake of Issus. He chose a broad, flat plain near a village called Gaugamela in northern Mesopotamia, not far from the ruins of Nineveh. Here there would be room for his whole army to deploy, and especially for his cavalry, which was the strongest part of the Persian forces. He even had the ground specially levelled, smoothing away bumps and bushes so that his scythed chariots could charge at full speed.
303:01
These chariots had sharp blades fixed to their wheels and were meant to slice through the enemy ranks, a kind of ancient lawnmower, though not one you would want anywhere near your garden.
303:13
Darius also brought a small number of war elephants, probably from the eastern provinces near India. It was the first time the Macedonians met elephants in battle, and the sight must have been quite something.
303:25
The battle took place on 1 October, 331 BC.
303:30
A lunar eclipse a few nights before had unsettled both armies and the soldiers wondered what the gods were trying to say.
303:37
The Persian line stretched far beyond the Macedonian one, so Alexander arranged his troops cleverly, with flank guards angled backward to stop being surrounded. When the scythed chariots charged, the Macedonian infantry simply opened their ranks and let them pass, while light troops attacked the drivers and horses and the much-feared weapon did far less damage than expected. Then came the decisive moment. Alexander led his cavalry toward the right, drawing Persian horsemen after him and as they moved a gap opened in the Persian line.
304:08
Alexander turned and drove his companions straight into that gap, heading for the centre where Darius was standing.
304:14
Once again the Persian king turned and fled. Once again, his flight caused his army to collapse. Parmenion, on the other wing, had been under heavy pressure and sent urgent calls for help, so Alexander had to break off the pursuit.
304:29
Darius escaped east into the mountains of Media, but the battle, and with it the heart of the empire, was lost.
304:36
After Gaugamela, the great cities of the empire did not resist. Babylon surrendered and its satrap Mazaeus, who had fought bravely at Gaugamela, handed it over and was rewarded by being kept on as governor.
304:49
Alexander entered the city in a grand procession with flowers and incense along the streets, much as Cyrus had done two centuries earlier. Babylon had seen a lot of conquerors by now, and its people had clearly developed a good routine for welcoming the new ones. Then Susa, the old administrative capital, also surrendered without a fight, and Alexander took possession of its enormous treasury. His money troubles were over for good. The road to Persepolis, however, ran through the mountains of the Zagros, and there the Persians made one last stand worth the name.
305:21
At a narrow pass known as the Persian Gates, the satrap Ariobarsanese blocked the way with a much smaller force. For a while, this was the only Persian army that managed to hold the Macedonians back in a direct fight.
305:33
Alexander's men were stopped in the narrow valley and had to pull back. It was only when local guides, prisoners from the area, showed them a difficult mountain path around the pass that Alexander could attack from behind, and the defenders were overwhelmed. Historians sometimes compare this to Thermopylae in reverse, with Persians holding a pass against invaders from the west and being outflanked by a hidden track. History, it seems, enjoys a good repeat.
305:59
And so, we arrive back where our story began.
306:03
In the spring of 330 BC, after the treasury had been emptied, the great palaces of Persepolis went up in flames. The Apadana, the hall of a hundred columns, the stairways with their carved delegations, all of it burned.
306:18
Why Alexander did this is still debated. Some ancient writers say it was revenge for the burning of Athens by Xerxes, a symbol that the war of vengeance was over.
306:28
Others tell the story that it was a drunken impulse at a feast, encouraged by a woman named Thais.
306:34
Perhaps it was a little of both. Ironically, the fire baked the clay tablets of the archives and helped preserve them for later archaeologists, so the destruction ended up saving some of the most valuable records of Persian life. Darius, meanwhile, was still alive, but his authority was crumbling. He tried to gather a new army in the east, but his own nobles were losing faith in him.
306:56
In July of 330 BC, as he fled toward the eastern provinces with Alexander in close pursuit, a group of conspirators led by Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, placed him under arrest.
307:08
When it became clear that Alexander was about to catch them, they mortally wounded the king and left him by the roadside. By the time the Macedonians arrived, Darius was dead or dying. The last king of kings of the Achaemenid line ended his life not in battle and not in his palace, but betrayed by his own officials, which is a sad end even by the standards of this family. Alexander, who now presented himself as the rightful heir of the Persian kings, had Darius's body sent back to Persepolis and given a royal burial among his ancestors.
307:39
Bessus, who had declared himself king under the name Artaxerxes, was hunted down, captured and later executed in the Persian manor as a traitor and regicide.
307:48
Alexander, in a curious twist, was now the defender of Achaemenid honour against the man who had killed the Achaemenid king. Alexander went on to campaign in Central Asia and India for years, marrying a Bactrian noblewoman, Roxana, and later also a daughter of Darius. He adopted some Persian court customs, including Persian dress, and even the practice of bowing before the king, which annoyed many of his Macedonian officers no end.
308:15
In 324 BC, returning from the east, he visited Pasargadae and went to see the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the empire which he greatly admired. He was shocked to find it looted. Thieves had broken in, smashed the coffin and carried off its treasures. Alexander had those responsible, punished and ordered the tomb restored and sealed.
308:38
A Greek historian later recorded the inscription Alexander's men are said to have found there, in which Cyrus asked not to be begrudged the little earth that covered his body. Whether those exact words were really on the tomb is uncertain, but the scene captures a strange moment, the new master of the empire standing in respect before the grave of the man who had started it all.
308:58
Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, only 32 years old, and his empire was soon divided among his generals.
309:07
But here is the twist. The empire of the Achaemenids, as a political family, was gone, but the system they had built was far too useful to throw away.
309:16
The largest part of Alexander's eastern conquest passed to one of his generals, Seleucus, whose Seleucid dynasty ruled from the Mediterranean to Central Asia.
309:25
They kept the satrapies, used the old roads, and relied on local elites and local customs, just as the Persians had done. After them came the Parthians, an Iranian people from the northeast, who ruled for nearly five centuries and became Rome's great rival in the east. And in 224 AD, a new Persian dynasty, the Sassanians came to power, deliberately looking back to the Achaemenid kings as their glorious ancestors.
309:51
Even if their knowledge of the details was hazy, the Sasanians carved their own reliefs near the old royal tombs, as if to say that the kings of Persia had returned.
310:01
the model of a vast empire held together by provinces, roads, and a policy of letting local peoples keep their gods and their ways outlived the dynasty that created it by many centuries. Today, the stones still stand. Persepolis and Passagardae are both UNESCO World Heritage sites, visited by people from all over the world who climb the old stairways and look at the carved delegations still marching toward a king who is no longer there. The tomb of Cyrus still rises in its quiet plain, much as Alexander saw it.
310:30
And far from Persia, in the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, a copy of the Cyrus Cylinder is on display, a small clay object from Babylon that has become, rightly or wrongly, a symbol of tolerance and good governance. Not bad for a document that was originally just royal propaganda written on a lump of baked clay. So that is the whole journey. A small mountain tribe from the southwest of Iran rose to build the largest empire the world had yet seen, ruled it for more than two centuries with a mix of force, organisation and surprising tolerance, and then fell within a few short years to a young man from Macedon.
311:07
Their kings are long gone, but their roads, their ideas of government and their ruined palaces still speak to us across more than two thousand years.
311:16
Thank you so much for spending this long evening with me among the kings, couriers and clay tablets of ancient Persia.
311:23
Now it is time to let all those armies march quietly off into the distance and let the palaces settle into the dark. Sweet dreams, my friends, and good night.
