The highest rank was held by the descendants of the six great families, whose heads stood by Darius at the killing of the Magian. The Greeks class them and the king together, under the name of the seven Persians." These enjoyed the right of entering the presence unannounced, and possessed princely estates in the provinces. Besides these, however, numbers of other Persians were despatched to the provinces, settled there, and endowed with lands. There existed, in fact, under the Achaemenids a strong colonizing movement, diffused through the whole empire; traces of this policy occur more especially in Armenia, Cappadocia and Lycia, but also in the rest of Asia Minor, and not rarely in Syria and Egypt. These colonists formed the nucleus of the provincial military levy, and were a tower of strength to the Persian dominion. They composed, moreover, the Persian council, and vice-regal household of the Satraps, exactly as the Persians of the home-country composed that of the king.

Royal

Though the world-empire of Persia was thus deeply impressed by a national character, care was nevertheless exercised that the general duties and interests of the subject races should receive due consideration. We find their representatives, side by side with the Persians, occupying every sort of position in the regal and vice-regal courts. They take their part in the councils of the satraps, precisely as they do in military service (cf. the evidence of Ezra); and they, too, are rewarded by bounties and estates. To wield a peaceful authority over all the subjects of the empire, to reward merit, and to punish transgression-such is the highest task of king and officials. On his native soil Cyrus built himself a town, with a palace and a tomb, in the district of Pasargadae (now the ruins of Murghab). This Darius replaced by a new capital, deeper in the centre of the country, which bore the Residences. name "Persian" (Pārsa), the Persepolis (q.v.) of the later Greeks. But the district of Persis was too remote to be the administrative centre of a world-empire. The natural centre lay, rather, in the ancient fertile tract on the lower Tigris and Euphrates. The actual capital of the empire was therefore Susa, where Darius I. and Artaxerxes II. erected their magnificent palaces. The winter months the kings chiefly spent in Babylon: the hot summer, in the cooler situation of Ecbatana, where Darius and Xerxes built a residence on Mt Elvend, south of the city. From a palace of Artaxerxes II. in Ecbatana itself, the fragments of a few inscribed columns (now in the possession of Mr Lindo Myers and published by Evetts in the Zeitschr. f. Assyr. V.) have been preserved. To Persis and Persepolis the kings paid only occasional visits especially at their coronations. Within the empire, the two great civilized states incorporated by Cyrus and Cambyses, Babylon and Egypt, occupied a position of their own. After his defeat of Nabonidus, Cyrus proclaimed himself "King of Babel "; and the same title was born by Cambyses, Smerdis and Darius. So, in Egypt, Cambyses adopted in full the titles of the Pharaohs. In this we may trace a desire to conciliate the native population, with the object of maintaining the fiction that the old state still continued. Darius went still farther. He encouraged the efforts of the Egyptian priesthood in every way, built temples, and enacted new laws in continuance of the old order. In Babylon his procedure was presumably similar, though here we possess no local evidence. But he lived to see that his policy had missed its goal. In 486 B.c. Egypt revolted and was only reduced by Xerxes in 484. It was this, probably, that induced him in 484 to renounce his title of "king of Babel," and to remove from its temple the golden statue of Bel-Marduk (Merodach), whose hands the king was bound to clasp on the first day of each year. This proceeding led to two insurrections in Babylon (probably in 484 and 479 B.C.), which were speedily repressed. After that the "kingship of Babel " was definitely abolished. In Egypt the Persian kings still retained the style of the Pharaohs; but we hear no more of concessions to the

Babylonia and Egypt.

priesthood or to the old institutions, and, apart from the great oasis of el-Kharga, no more temples were erected (see EGYPT: History).

At the head of the court and the imperial administration stands the commandant of the body-guard-the ten thousand "Immortals," often depicted in the sculptures of The Vizier Persepolis with lances surmounted by golden apples. and other This grandee, whom the Greeks termed "Chiliarch," Officials. corresponds to the modern vizier. In addition to him, we find seven councillors (Ezra vii. 14; cf. Esther i. 14). Among the other officials, the Eye of the King" is frequently mentioned. To him was entrusted the control of the whole empire and the superintendence of all officials.

The orders of the court were issued in a very simple form of the cuneiform script, probably invented by the Medes. This comprised 36 signs, almost all of which denote single sounds. In the royal inscriptions, a translation into Susan (Elam- Official itic) and Babylonian was always appended to the Languages. Persian text. In Egypt one in hieroglyphics was added, as in the inscriptions of the Suez canal; in the Grecian provinces, another in Greek (e.g. the inscription of Darius on the Bosporus, Herod. iv. 37, cf. iv. 91). The cuneiform script could only be written on stone or clay. Thus there has been discovered in Babylon a copy of the Behistun (q.v.) inscription preserved on a block of dolerite (Weissbach, Babylonische Miscellen. p. 24). For administrative purposes, however, it would seem that this inconvenient material was not employed; its place being taken by skins (dépai, parchment), the use of which was adopted from the western peoples of the empire. On these were further written the journals and records kept at the court (cf. Diod. ii. 22, 32; Ezra iv. 15, v. 17, vi. 2; Esther vi. 1, ii. 23). With such materials the cuneiform script could not be used; instead, the Persian language was written in Aramaic characters, a method which later led to the so-called Pahlavi, i.e. Parthian script. This mode of writing was obviously alone employed in the state-services since Darius I.; and so may be explained the fact that, under the Achaemenids, the Persian language rapidly declined, and, in the inscriptions of Artaxerxes III., only appears in an extremely neglected guise (see CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS, ALPHABET).

66

Satrapies.

Side by side with the Persian, the Aramaic, which had long been widely diffused as the speech of commerce, enjoyed currency in all the western half of the empire as a second dominant language. Thus all deeds, enactments and records designed for these provinces were furnished with an official Aramaic version (Ezra iv. 7). Numerous documents in this tongue, dating from the Persian period, have been discovered in Egypt (cf. Sayce and Cowley, Aramai Papyri discovered at Assuan 1906), and the coins minted by the satraps and generals usually bear an Aramaic inscription. (So, also, a lion-weight from Abydos, in the British Museum.) The Demotic in Egypt was employed in private documents alone. Only in the Hellenic provinces of the empire Greek replaced Aramaic (cf. the letter to Pausanias in Thuc. i. 129: an edict to Gadatas in Magnesia, Cousin et Deschamps, Bulletin de corresp. hellénique xii. 530, Dittenberger, Sylloge 2; so, also, on coins)—a clear proof that the Persians had already begun to recognize the independent and important position of Greek civilization.1 Darius I. divided the Persian Empire into twenty great provinces, satrapies, with a guardian of the country" (khshathrapavan; see SATRAP) at the head of each. A list is preserved in Herodotus (iii. 89 sqq.); but the boun- The daries were frequently changed. Each satrapy was again subdivided into several minor governorships. The satrap is the head of the whole administration of his province. He levies the taxes, controls the legal procedure, is responsible for the security of roads and property, and superintends the subordinate districts. The heads of the great military centres of the empire and the commandants of the royal fortresses are outside his jurisdiction: yet the satraps are entitled to a body of troops of their own, a privilege which they used to the full, especially in later periods. The satra is held in his position as a subject by the controlling machinery of the empire, especially the "Eye of the King"; by the council of Persians in his province with 1 For the editions of the Persian inscriptions see BEHISTUN. For the Persian documents, Ed. Meyer Entstehung des Judentums, p. 19 sqq. The hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Suez Canal are published in the Recueil de trav. d'égyptol. et d'assyriol. vols. vii. ix. Strassmaier, Babyl. Urkunden, and Hilprecht and Clay, Babyl. xi. xiii; the private documents from Babylonia and Nippur, by Exped. of Univ. of Pennsylvania, vols. ix. x. Numerous Jewish decuments in Aramaic have been found at Elephantine (Sayce and Cowley, Aramaic Papyri discovered at Assuan, 1906), among them an addressed to the Persian satrap of Judaea, in 408 B.C., which throws official complaint of the Jewish colony settled at Elephantine, a new light on many passages in Ezra and Nehemiah, published by Sachan in Abhandlungen der berl. Akademie, 1907.

whom he is bound to debate all matters of importance; and by the army: while in the hands of the messengers (Pers. dorávdat or ayyapo—a Babylonian word: see ANGARIA) the government despatches travel "swifter than the crane along the great imperial highways, which are all provided with regular postal stations (cf. the description of the route from Susa to Sardis in Herod. v. 52).

Within the satrapies the subject races and communities occupied a tolerably independent position; for instance, the Subject Jews, under their elders and priests, who were even Communi- able to convene a popular assembly in Jerusalem tles. (cf. the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah). Obviously also, they enjoyed, as a rule, the privilege of deciding law-suits among themselves; their general situation being similar to that of the Christian nationalities under the Ottomans, or to that of many tribes in the Russian Empire at the present day. The pressure of despotism was manifest, not so much in that the king and his officials consistently interfered in individual cases, but that they did so on isolated and arbitrary occasions, and then swept aside the privileges of the subject, who was impotent

to resist.

For the rest, the subject population falls into a number of distinct groups. In the desert (as among the Arabian and Turanian nomads), in wild and sequestered mountains (as in Zagros in north Media, and Mysia, Pisidia, Paphlagonia and Bithynia in Asia Minor), and also in many Iranian tribes, the old tribal constitution, with the chieftain as its head, was left intact even under the imperial suzerainty. The great majority of the civilized provinces were subdivided into local administrative districts governed by officials of the king and his satraps. These the Greeks named ovn, "peoples.' "Within these, again, there might lie large town settlements whose internal affairs were controlled by the elders or the officials of the community: as, for instance, Babylon, Jerusalem, the Egyptian cities, Tarsus, Sardis and others. On the same footing were the spiritual principalities, with their great temple-property; as Bambyce in Syria, the two Comanas in Cappadocia, and so forth. Besides these, however, vast districts were either converted into royal domains (wapádaoo) with great parks and hunting grounds under royal supervision, or else bestowed by the king on Persians or deserving members of the subject-races (the "benefactors") as their personal property. Many of these estates formed respectable principalities: e.g. those of the house of Otanes in Cappadocia, of Hydarnes in Armenia, Pharnabazus in Phrygia, Demaratus in Teuthrania, Themistocles in Magnesia and Lampsacus. They were absolute private property, handed down from father to son for centuries, and in the Hellenistic period not rarely became independent kingdoms. These potentates were styled by the Greeks dvváσra οι μόναρχοι.

States.

The last class, quite distinct from all these organizations, was formed by the city-states (Tóλes) with an independent constitution whether a monarchy (as in Phoenicia), The City an aristocracy (as in Lycia), or a republic with council and popular assembly (as in the Greek towns). The essential point was that they enjoyed a separate legalized organization (autonomy). This was only to be seen in the extreme western provinces of the empire among the Phoenicians, Greeks and Lycians, whose cities were essentially distinct from those of the east; which, indeed, to Greek eyes, were only great villages (KWμomóλels). It is readily intelligible that their character should have proved practically incomprehensible to the Persians, with whom they came into perpetual collision. These sought, as a rule, to cope with the difficulty by transferring the government to individual persons who enjoyed their confidence: the tyrants" of the Greek towns. Mardonius, alone, after his suppression of the Ionic revolt-which had originated with these very tyrants-made an attempt to govern them by the assistance of the democracy (492 B.C.).

66

The provinces of the Persian Empire differed as materially in economy as in organization. In the extreme west, a money currency in its most highly developed form that of coinage minted by

the state, or an autonomous community-had developed since the 7th century among the Lydians and Greeks. In the Commerce main portion, however, of the Oriental world-Egypt, and Finance. Syria, Phoenicia and Babylonia-the old mode of commerce was still in vogue, conducted by means of gold and silver bars, weighed at each transaction. Indeed, a money currency only began to make headway in these districts in the 4th century B.C. In the eastern provinces, on the other hand, the primitive method of exchange by barter still held the field. Only in the auriferous and civilized frontier districts of India (the Punjab) did a system of coinage find early acceptance. There Persian and Attic money was widely distributed, and imitations of it struck, in the fifth and fourth pre-Christian centuries. Thus the empire was compelled to grapple with all these varied conditions and to reconcile them as best it might, At the court, "natural economy" was still the rule. The officials and Oriental troops received payment in kind. They were fed "by the table of the king," from which 15,000 men daily drew their sustenance (cf. Heraclides of Cyme in Athen, iv. 145 B, &c.) and were rewarded by gifts and assignments of land. The Greek mercenaries, on the contrary, had to be paid in currency; nor could the satraps of the west dispense with hard cash. The king, again, needed the precious metals, not merely for bounties and rewards, but for important enterprises in which money payment was imperative. Consequently, the royal revenues and taxes were paid partly in the precious metals, partly in natural produce horses and cattle, grain, clothing and its materials, furniture and all articles of industry (cf. Theopomp. fr. 124, 125, &c.). The satraps, also, in at which the officials ate (Nehem. v. 14). addition to money payments, levied contributions" for their table,"

The precious metals brought in by the tribute were collected in the great treasure-houses at Susa, Persepolis, Pasargadae and Ecbatana, where gigantic masses of silver and, more Money and wrought into vessels (Herod. iii. 96; Strabo xv. 731, especially, of gold, were stored in bullion or partially Coinage. 735; Arrian iii. 16, &c.); exactly as is the case to-day in the shah's treasure-chamber (Curzon, Persia, ii. 484). It is also observable that the conjunction of payments in kind and money taxes still million inhabitants, paid in 1885 £154,000 in gold, and in addition exists. The province of Khorasan, for instance, with some half natural produce to the value of £43,000 (Curzon, op. cit. i. 181, ii. 380). When the king required money he minted as much as was necessary. A reform in the coinage was effected by Darius, has nothing to do with the name of Darius), a gold piece of 130 who struck the Daric (Pers.' Zariq, i.e. piece of gold"; the word grains (value about 23s.); this being equivalent to 20 silver pieces

Median shekels," aiyo) of 86-5 grains (value according to the then rate of silver-13 silver to I gold-about Is. 2d.). The coining of gold was the exclusive prerogative of the king; silver could be coined by the satraps, generals, independent communities and dynasts.

Policy.

The extent of the Persian Empire was, in essentials, defined by the great conquests of Cyrus and Cambyses. Darius was no more a conquistador than Augustus. Rather, the task he set himself was to round off the empire Imperial and secure its borders: and for this purpose in Asia Minor and Armenia he subdued the mountain-tribes and advanced the frontier as far as the Caucasus; Colchis alone remaining an independent kingdom under the imperial suzerainty. So, too, he annexed the Indus valley and the auriferous hill-country of Kafiristan and Cashmir (Káσmiol or KáσTapot, Herod. iii. 93, vii. 67, 86; Steph. Byz.), as well as the Dardae in Dardistan on the Indus (Ctesias, Ind. fr. 12. 70, &c.). From this point he directed several campaigns against the Amyrgian Sacae, on the Pamir Plateau and northwards, whom he enumerates in his list of subject races, and whose mounted archers formed a main division of the armies despatched against the Greeks. It was obviously attempt to take the nomads of the Turanian steppe in the rear and to reduce them to quiescence, which led to his unfortunate expedition against the Scythians of the Russian steppes (c. 512 B.C.; cf. DARIUS),

y an

Side by side, however, with these wars, we can read, even in the scanty tradition at our disposal, a consistent effort to further the great civilizing mission imposed on the empire. In the district of Herat, Darius established a great water-basin, designed to facilitate the cultivation of the steppe (Herod. iii. 117). He had the course of the Indus explored by the Carian captain Scylax (q.v.) of Caryanda, who then navigated the Indian Ocean back to Suez (Herod. iv. 44) and wrote an account of his voyagé

in Greek. The desire to create a direct communication between the seclusion, of Persis and the commerce of the world is evident

CAMBYSES (528-521).

SMERDIS (521).

DARIUS I. (521-485).
XERXES I. (485-465).

ARTAXERXES I. (465-425).

(XERXES II. and Secydianus or Sogdianus, 425-424.) DARIUS II. Nothus (424-404).

ARTAXERXES II. (404-359).

ARTAXERXES III. Ochus (359-338).
ARSES (338-336).

DARIUS III. (336-330)..

The chronology is exactly verified by the Ptolemaic canon, by numerous Babylonian and a few Egyptian documents, and by the evidence of the Greeks. The present article gives only a brief conspectus of the main events in the history of the empire.

Though, unlike Cyrus and Cambyses, Darius made no new expeditions of conquest, yet a great empire, which is not bounded The Wars by another equally great, but touches on many small against tribes and independent communities, is inevitably Greece. driven to expansion. We have already seen that the attempt of Darius to control the predatory nomads in the north led to his expedition against the Scythians; this, again, led to the incorporation of Thrace and Macedonia, whose king Perdiccas submitted. And since a great portion of the Mediterranean coast-line belonged to the empire, further complications resulted automatically. In contrast with the Greeks Carthage took the part of Persia. Darius, indeed, numbers the city-under the name of Karka-among his dominions: as also the Maxyans (Maciya) on the Syrtes (Andreas, Verhandl. d. xiii. oriental. Congresses, Hamburg, 1902, p. 97). But, above all, the Greek cities with their endless feuds and violent internal factions, were incessant in their appeals for intervention. Nevertheless, Darius left European Greece to itself, till the support accorded to the Ionian and Carian insurgents by Athens and Eretria (499 B.C.) made war inevitable. But not only the expeditions of Mardonius (492) and Datis (490), but even the carefully prepared campaign of Xerxes, in conjunction with Carthage, completely failed (480-479). On the fields of Marathon and Plataea, the Persian archers succumbed to the Greek phalanx of hoplites; but the actual decision was effected by Themistocles, who had meanwhile created the Athenian fleet which at Salamis proved its superiority over the Perso-Phoenician armada, and thus precluded beforehand the success of the land-forces.

'The wreck of Xerxes' expedition is the turning-point in the history of the Persian Empire. The superiority of the Greeks was so pronounced that the Persians never found courage to repeat their attack. On the contrary, in 466 B.C. their army and fleet were again defeated by Cimon on the Eurymedon, the sequel being that the Greek provinces on the Asiatic coast, with all the Thracian possessions, were lost. In itself, indeed, this loss was of no great significance to such a vast empire; and the attempts of Athens to annex Cyprus and conquer the Nile valley, in alliance with the revolted Egyptians, ended in failure. Athens, in fact, had not sufficient strength to undertake a serious invasion of the empire or an extensive scheme of conquest. | Her struggles with the other Hellenic states constrained her, by the peace of Callias (448), definitely to renounce the Persian war; to abandon Cyprus and Egypt to the king; and to content herself with his promise-not that he would surrender the littoral towns, but that he would abstain from an armed attack upon them. The really decisive point was, rather, that the disasters of Salamis and Plataea definitely shattered the offensive power

had shifted from Susa and Babylon to the Aegean Sea; and that the Persians were conscious that in spite of all their courage they were henceforward in the presence of an enemy, superior in arms as well as in intellect, whom they could not hope to subdue by their own strength.

Thus the great empire was reduced to immobility and stagnation--a process which was assisted by the deteriorating influences of civilization and world-dominion upon the character Internal of the ruling race. True, the Persians continued State of the to produce brave and honourable men. But the Empire. influences of the harem, the eunuchs, and similar Rebellions, court officials, made appalling progress, and men of energy began to find the temptations of power stronger than their patriotism and devotion to the king. Thus the satraps aspired to independence, not merely owing to unjust treatment, but also to avarice or favourable conditions. As early as 465 B.C., Xerxes was assassinated by his powerful vizier (chiliarch) Artabanus, who attempted to seize the reins of empire in fact, if not in name. A similar instance may be found in Bagoas (q.v.), after the murder of Artaxerxes III. (338 B.C.). To these factors must be added the degeneration of the royal line-a degeneration inevitable in Oriental states. Kings like Xerxes and more especially Artaxerxes I. and Artaxerxes II., so far from being gloomy despots, were good-natured potentates, but weak, capricious and readily accessible to personal influences. The only really brutal tyrants were Darius II., who was completely dominated by his bloodthirsty wife Parysatis, and Artaxerxes III. who, though he shed rivers of blood and all but exterminated his whole family, was successful in once more uniting the empire, which under the feeble sway of his father had been threatened with dissolution.

The upshot of these conditions was, that the empire never again undertook an important enterprise, but neglected more and more its great civilizing mission. In considering, however, the subsequent disorders and wars, it must be borne in mind that they affected only individual portions of the empire, and only on isolated occasions involved more extensive areas in long and serious strife. To most of the provinces the Achaemenid dominion was synonymous with two centuries of peace and order. Naturally, however, the wild tribes of the mountains and deserts, who could be curbed only by strict imperial control, asserted their independence and harassed the neighbouring provinces. Among these tribes were the Carduchians in Zagros, the Cossaeans and Uxians in the interior of Elam, the Cadusians and other non-Aryan tribes in northern Media, the Pisidians, Isaurians and Lycaonians in the Taurus, and the Mysians in Olympus. All efforts to restore order in these districts were fruitless; and when the kings removed their court to Ecbatana, they were actually obliged to purchase a free passage from the mountain tribes (Strabo xi. 524; Arrian iii. 17, 1). The kings (e.g. Artaxerxes II.) repeatedly took the field in great force against the Cadusians, but unsuccessfully. When, in 400 B.C., Xenophon marched with the mercenaries of Cyrus from the Tigris to the Black Sea, the authority of the king was nonexistent north of Armenia, and the tribes of the Pontic mountains, with the Greek cities on the coast, were completely independent. In Paphlagonia, the native dynasts founded a powerful though short-lived kingdom, and the chieftains of the Bithynians were absolutely their own masters. The frontier provinces of India were also lost. Egypt, which had already revolted under Libyan princes in the years 486-484, and again with Athenian help in 460-454, finally asserted its independence in 404. Henceforward the native dynasties repelled every attack, till they succumbed once more before Artaxerxes III. and Mentor of Rhodes.

T

In the other civilized countries, indeed, the old passion for freedom had been completely obliterated; and after the days of Darius I.-apart from the Greek, Lycian and Phoenician towns-not a single people in all these provinces dreamed of shaking off the foreign dominion. All the more clearly, then, was the inner weakness of the empire revealed by the revolts