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 dispatched 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.
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 Royal Residences. Murghab). This Darius replaced by a new capital, deeper in the centre of the country, which bore the 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 Babylonia and Egypt. 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 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 The Vizier and other Officials. “Immortals,” often depicted in the sculptures of Persepolis with lances surmounted by golden apples. This grandee, whom the Greeks termed “Chiliarch,” 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 Official Languages. 36 signs, almost all of which denote single sounds. In the royal inscriptions, a translation into Susan (Elamitic) and Babylonian was always appended to the 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 (διφθέραι, 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 maybe 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).
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, Aramaic 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; The Satrapies. see Satrap) at the head of each. A list is preserved in Herodotus (iii. 89 sqq.); but the boundaries 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 satrap 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
- ↑ 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. xi. xiii; the private documents from Babylonia and Nippur, by Strassmaier, Babyl. Urkunden, and Hilprecht and Clay, Babyl. Exped. of Univ. of Pennsylvania vols. ix. x. Numerous Jewish documents in Aramaic have been found at Elephantine (Sayce and Cowley, Aramaic Papyri discovered at Assuan, 1906), among them an official complaint of the Jewish colony settled at Elephantine, addressed to the Persian satrap of Judaea, in 408 B.C., which throws a new light on many passages in Ezra and Nehemiah, published by Sachan in Abhandlungen der berl. Akademie, 1907.
