Persian Fire (65 page)
12
W. Golding, 'The Hot Gates', in
The Hot Gates,
p. 20. It was reading this essay
at the impressionable age of twelve that first inspired me with a passion for the story of the Persian Wars.
13
Quoted by David, p. 208.
14
Aeschylus, 104-5.
15
Curzon, Vol. 2, pp. 195-6.
16
'The historical record of the Imperial visit to India, 1911' (London, 1914), pp. 176-7.
17
Green, p. xxiii.
18
Murdoch, p. 171.
19
Starr (1977), p. 258.
20
Ehrenberg, p. 389.
21
Or, to be strictly accurate, since the author, Francois Oilier, was French,
Le Mirage Sparliale.
22
Plutarch, in his youthful and uncharacteristically splenetic essay 'On the malignity of Herodotus'.
23
Davidson (2003).
I The Khorasan Highway
1
The annals of Ashurnasirpal, Column 1.53, trans. Budge and King, p. 272. The phrase refers to Ashurnasirpal's campaigns in the mountains north of Assyria.
2
Quoted by Kuhrt (1995), p. 518.
3
That the Aryans arrived in the Zagros from the east is almost universally accepted, although hard proof is hard to come by. A minority view asserts that the Medes and Persians entered the Zagros from the north, over the Caucasus.
4
From the campaign records of Shalmaneser III (843
bc
); see Herzfeld, p 24.
5
The precise geographical limits of Media between the ninth and seventh centuries
bg
are unclear. According to Levine
(Iran
12, p. 118), it was most likely 'a narrow strip restricted to the Great Khorasan Road'.
6
Nahum, 3.3.
7
This account of the Median Empire depends heavily — and inevitably — on the testimony of Herodotus, who wrote more than a century after the events he was describing. The broad outline of his narrative appears to have been confirmed by contemporaneous Babylonian records, which make mention of both Cyaxares (Umakishtar) and Astyages (Ishtuwigu), but nothing is clear cut. The archaeology of key Median sites shows a precipitous drop in living standards following the overthrow of the Assyrian Empire — precisely when the Medes were supposed to have flourished. This seeming discrepancy between written and material evidence has led some scholars (most notably Sancisi-Weerdenburg in
Achaemenid History
(hereafter
Ach Hist) 3,
pp. 197-212, and
Ach Hist
8, pp. 39-55) to doubt the existence of a Median Empire at all. Of course, lesser empires built on the ruins of greater ones can often appear impoverished in comparison — the history of Europe in the Dark Ages provides an obvious analogy. All the same, even if one does accept - as most scholars do - that Herodotus got his basic facts right, the details of Median history remain frustratingly vague.
8
The accounts of the two expeditions are to be found in Xenophon and Ctesias, respectively. While neither historian is renowned for his accuracy, there seems no particular cause to doubt them on this occasion. True, there is a tradition preserved by Aristotle
(Politics,
1311b40) that Astyages was soft and self-indulgent, but this is flatly contradicted by all the other sources, to say nothing of the evidence of the length of his reign: weak kings, in the ancient Near East, rarely lasted for long.
9
The precise date of Ecbatana's foundation is unknown, but there is no record of it in Assyrian sources. This supports Herodotus' claim that the city was first established as an expression of Median royal power.
10
See Herodotus, 1.98.
11
Diogenes Laertius, 1.6.
12
The current scholarly consensus is that they were not.
13
Persian rule over Anshan was established shortly after 650
bc
. The last native king of Anshan can be dated to this period, and the first Persian to claim the title did so a generation later. Anshan itself had been shored against the ruin of the even more ancient kingdom of Elam.
14
The main source for legends about Cyrus' upbringing is Herodotus, who claimed to have learned them from Persian informants (1.95); variants are recorded by Nicolaus of Damascus — who derived his account from Ctesias -and Justin. It seems probable that the elements of folklore in the story do derive from the Near East: a very similar upbringing is ascribed to Sargon of Akkad, a proto-King of Kings from the third millennium
bc
(see pp. 42—3). Only the tradition that Cyrus was the grandson of Astyages can really be considered historically reliable: Xenophon and Diodorus Siculus, as well as Herodotus, insist upon it, and we know from Babylonian sources that Astyages was indeed in the habit of marrying off his daughters to the princes of neighbouring kingdoms. For the inevitable counter-view, however, see Sancisi-Weerdenburg,
Ach Hist
8, pp. 52—3.
15
From the so-called 'Dream of Nabonidus' (Beaulieu, p. 108). It is from another contemporary source, the
Nabonidus Chronicle,
that we know it was Astyages - and not, as Herodotus claims, Cyrus — who began the war.
16
Darius, inscription at Persepolis (DPd 2).
17
Herodotus, 1.129.
18
Nabonidus Chronicle,
II. 17. The applicability of this verse to Lydia is almost certain; damage to the inscription prevents it from being incontrovertible.
19
Diodorus Siculus, 9.35.
20
Darius, inscription at Persepolis (DPg).
21
Herodotus, 1.164.
22
Xenophanes, Fragment 22.
23
Our ignorance of the details of Cyrus' campaigns in the east is almost total. While there is no doubt that a vast swath of provinces to the north-east of Iran were brought under Persian control, the likely dates of these conquests have to be argued for from virtual silence. We do know that Cyrus was in Babylon in 539
bc,
but for the eight years preceding that date, and the nine years following it, the records are effectively non-existent. That said — and although historians have argued for both - an earlier date for Cyrus' conquest of the east seems more plausible than a later. It certainly makes better strategic sense — and Cyrus was nothing if not a master strategist. Moreover, the apparently successful integration of the eastern provinces into the Persian Empire by the time of Cyrus' death is more readily explicable if one assumes a longer rather than a shorter period of pacification. Finally, there is the evidence of Herodotus, whose knowledge of eastern affairs was inevitably hazy, but who does state categorically that 'While Harapagus was turning upside-down the lower, or western part of Asia, Cyrus was engaged with the north and east, bringing into subjection every nation without exception' (1.177). Berossus, a Babylonian scholar who lived shortly after the reign of Alexander the Great, but who would have had access to records unknown to the Greeks, corroborates this assertion.
24
Mihr Yasht,
14-15.
25
Ibid., 13.
26
Tentatively identified by some scholars as the Volga.
27
In Persian, 'Kurushkath'. The Jaxartes is the river now known as the Syr Darya, which runs through Kazakhstan.
29
This account of Cyrus' death derives from Herodotus (1.204-14), and seems to make the best sense of the many different versions of it that have survived. According to Xenophon, for instance, Cyrus did not even die in battle, but in his own bed, back in Persia: such are the contradictions that plague the sources for Persian history. That Cyrus was seventy when he died is recorded by Cicero (On
Divination,
1.23) — again, with what accuracy it is impossible to say for sure. Three score years and ten might perhaps be considered a suspiciously rounded age.