Ancient civilizations-2

The organization and achievement of the Achaemenian Empire

At the centre of the empire sat the king of kings. Around him was gathered a court composed of powerful hereditary landholders, the upper echelons of the army, the harem, religious functionaries, and the bureaucracy that administered the whole. This court lived mainly in Susa but went in the hot summer months to Ecbatana (modern Hamadān), probably in the spring to Persepolis in Fārs, and perhaps sometimes to Babylon. In a smaller version it traveled with the king when he was away in the provinces.

The provinces, or satrapies, were ruled by satraps (governors), technically appointed by the central authority but who often became hereditary subkings, particularly in the later years of the empire. They were surrounded and assisted in their functions by a court modeled on that of the central government and were powerful officials. The great king was nevertheless theoretically able to maintain considerable control in local affairs. He was the last court of appeal in judicial matters. He directly controlled the standing military forces stationed in the provinces, though as time went on the military and civil authority in the provinces tended to become combined under the satrap. The king was also aided in keeping control in the provinces by the so-called king’s eyes or, better, the king’s ears—officials from the central government who traveled throughout the empire and who reported directly back to the king on what they learned. The number of provinces and their boundaries varied greatly from time to time; at the beginning of Darius’s reign there were 20 provinces. In general, as time went on, the number increased, partly because of the need to reassert control over the satraps by decreasing their power base, partly because the feudal structure that underlay Persian society required rewarding more and more people with a role in government, and partly because the original 20 provinces were undoubtedly simply too large to permit efficient administration.

The army was a particularly important element within the empire. It, too, developed and changed with time. After Cyrus the Persian tribal levy, based on the responsibility of all male Persians to fight for the king, was replaced by a professional standing army supplemented by a troop levy from the subject peoples in times of intensive military activity. The elite of the standing army were the 10,000 “immortals,” composed of Persians and Medes, 1,000 of whom were the personal guard of the king. The person who controlled this elite guard, as did Darius on the death of Cambyses, usually controlled all. The troops of the imperial levy fought alongside the regular army in national units, were armed according to their individual customs, but were usually officered by Persians. Permanent bodies of troops were stationed at strategic points throughout the empire, and, to judge from the garrison at Elephantine in Egypt, these were actually military colonies, firmly settled into the local countryside. Greek mercenaries were used with increasing frequency in later years, and many Greeks fought faithfully for Persian silver.

Both the civil and the military administration, as well as public and private trade, were greatly facilitated by the famous royal Achaemenian road system. Communications throughout the empire were better than any previous Middle Eastern power had maintained. The famous road from Susa to Sardis in western Asia Minor is the best known of these imperial highways. It was an all-weather road maintained by the state. Over it ran a governmental postal system based on relay stations with remounts and fresh riders located a day’s ride apart. The speed with which a message could travel from the provinces to the king at Susa was remarkable.

On the whole, Persian rule sat lightly on the subject peoples, at least under the early Achaemenids. It was a conscious policy of Cyrus and Darius to permit conquered nations to retain their own religions, customs, methods of doing business, and even to some extent forms of government. This policy was exemplified by Cyrus’s attitude toward the Babylonians, which led to his being accepted as the rightful successor of Nabonidus, his willingness to permit the Jews to return to Palestine and to their own way of life, and his successors’ concern that this promise be honoured; Cambyses’ behaviour in Egypt and his acceptance by the Egyptians as founder of a legitimate new Egyptian dynasty; and the policy adopted under Mardonius toward the Ionian cities following their rebellion. Perhaps even in the later empire, rebellious peoples, governments, and leaders were too often forgiven and not suppressed with the thoroughness sometimes characteristic of other regimes. Lapses in this policy, such as Xerxes’ violent reaction to rebellion in Babylon, stand out in the record.

Law played an important role in the administration of the empire, and stories of Persian justice abound in the Greek sources. Darius particularly wished to be remembered as the great lawgiver, and law reform was one of the cornerstones in his program for reorganizing the empire. To judge from the Babylonian evidence, two sets of law, possibly administered by two sets of courts, were in force in the provinces. One was the local law, undoubtedly based on custom and previous local codifications; the other was the Persian, or imperial, law, based ultimately on the authority of the great king. A new word for law appeared in the Middle East in Achaemenian times, the Iranian dāta, and was borrowed by the Semitic languages used in the empire. In Babylonian and Aramaic, sources give evidence for Persian judges called by the Iranian word dāta-bar. These were probably the judges of the imperial courts.

With legal reform came reform and unification of tax structures. The tax structure of the empire was apparently based on the principle that all of the conquered lands were the actual property of the king. Thus taxes were rather rents, and the Persians and their land, Fārs, by virtue of not being a conquered people or land, were always tax-free. Each province was required to pay yearly a fixed amount in gold or silver, and each vassal state paid a fixed tribute in kind. Again going on the Babylonian evidence, in previous times agricultural taxes had been levied in fixed amounts regardless of the fluctuating quality of the harvest, but under Darius all land was surveyed, an estimate of its yield (based on an average of the harvests over several years) was from time to time established, and taxes were levied in fixed amounts based on a percentage of that average yield. This was not quite an income tax, since it was not based on a percentage of each year’s production, but it was at least a reasonable figure based on a reasonable production average.

Breakdowns often occurred in the Achaemenids’ effort to maintain a productive balance between local social structures, customs, laws, and government and the demands of the empire. The failure of the Persians to find such a balance when dealing with what was for them an extremely strange system of social and political organization—the Greek polis, or city-state—probably lay at the heart of their never-ending troubles in Ionia as much as did the power and ambitions of mainland Greeks. Yet even the Ionians, at the best of times, often realized the mutual advantages and benefits of the king’s peace and a unified western Asia under a tolerant central administration.

The economy of the empire was very much founded on that king’s peace; it was when the peace broke down with ever-increasing frequency during the last century of Achaemenian rule that the economy of the empire went into a decline that undoubtedly contributed significantly to the eventual political and military collapse. Wealth in the Achaemenian world was very much founded on land and on agriculture. Land was the principal reward that the king had available for those who gave service or who were in positions of great political or military power in the empire. Under Darius there was a measure of land called a “bow” that was originally a unit considered sufficient to support one bowman, who then paid his duty for the land in military service. At the other end of the scale were enormous family estates, which often increased in size over the years and which were or became hereditary holdings. They were often administered by absentee landlords. Such major landholdings were, as one would expect, usually in the hands of Iranians, but non-Iranians were also able to amass similar wealth and power, thereby testifying once again to the inherent tolerance with which the empire was administered. The Achaemenids themselves took a positive role in encouraging agriculture by investing state funds and effort in irrigation and the improvement of horticulture.

They also invested in and endeavoured to promote trade, a major source of imperial wealth. The effect of the state-maintained road system on the encouragement of trade has already been mentioned. Equal attention was paid to developing seaborne trade. State-sponsored voyages of exploration were undertaken in order to search for new markets and new resources. Darius completed a project, begun by the Egyptians, that connected the Nile to the Red Sea by a canal, so that routes across the Arabian Sea and into the Persian Gulf could be used to link the eastern and western ends of his empire. As part of the same program, port development on the Persian Gulf coast was encouraged. Imperial standardized weights and measures, efforts to develop and use coinage, and standardizing that coinage in the king’s name were all policies intended to encourage commerce and economic activity within the realm.

Banking also played a role in the economy. Documents have survived from a family banking business in Babylonia—the house of Murashu and sons of Nippur—covering the years c. 455–403 bc; the firm evidently prospered greatly by lending money and by acting as a middleman in the system of tax collection. Interest rates were high, but borrowers were numerous.

As time went on, there were clearly more and more such borrowers, for the later empire is marked by a general economic decline. The principal cause of this decline was the unsettled political conditions, but other, more indirect causes were unwise government interference in the economy, overtaxation, and the removal of too much hard money from the economy. Gold and silver tended to drain into the treasury of the central government from the provinces, and too little found its way back into general circulation. Disastrous inflation was the result. The large sums of money paid to foreign mercenaries and as bribes to foreign governments must also have contributed to an unfavourable balance of payments that in turn stimulated inflation. Such conditions hardly strengthened the empire and must have contributed, in ways that cannot be documented with certainty, to the political unrest that was their own main cause.

Ultimately, the achievement of the Achaemenian Persians was that they ruled with such creative tolerance over an area and a time that, for both the Middle East and for Europe, included the end of the ancient and the beginning of the modern world. In one sense, the ancient Middle East died when Cyrus marched into Babylon. Others would argue that its death came when Alexander burned Persepolis. The question remains open. What is clear is that the Achaemenian Empire—the largest anyone had ever yet tried to hold together and one that was not surpassed until Rome reached its height—was a profound force in western Asia and in Europe during an important period of ferment and transition in human history. That era was one of major developments in art, philosophy, literature, historiography, religion, exploration, economics, and science, and those developments provided the direct background for the further changes, along similar lines, that made the Hellenistic period so important in history. Hellenism probably would not have been possible, at least not in the form we know it, if it had had to build directly on the rather more narrow and less ambitious bases of the individual civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, or Greece. In a sense, the Achaemenian Persians passed on a concept of empire that, much modified by others, has remained something of a model of how it is possible for diverse peoples with variant customs, languages, religions, laws, and economic systems to flourish with mutual profit under a central government. In narrower terms, but for the Iranians themselves no less important, the Achaemenian Empire is seen as the beginning of the Iranian nation, one of the pivotal peoples in the modern Middle East. T. Cuyler Young