Название: The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume V: The Age of Persia
Автор: Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, D.T. Potts
Издательство: Oxford University Press
Год: 2023
Страниц: 1089
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: MB

The fifth and final volume of the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East covers the period from the second half of the 7th century BC until the campaigns of Alexander III of Macedon (336-323 BC) brought an end to the Achaemenid Dynasty and the Persian Empire. Tying together areas and political developments covered by previous volumes in the series, this title covers also the Persian Empire's immediate predecessor states: Saite Egypt, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Lydia, among other kingdoms and tribal alliances. The chapters in this volume feature a wide range of archaeological and textual sources, with contributors displaying a masterful treatment of the challenges and advantages of the available materials. Two chapters focus on areas that have not enjoyed prominence in any of the previous volumes of this series: eastern Iran and Central Asia. This volume is the necessary and complementary final component of this comprehensive series.

In 522 bc, rulership over the Persian Empire passed from the short-lived Teispid dynasty (Cyrus, Cambyses, Bardiya), named after an eponymous ancestor called Teispes (chapter 54 in this volume), to Darius I (521–486 bc), whose descendants have been known collectively, since antiquity, as the Achaemenids, a term derived from the name of an eponymous ancestor called Achaemenes. The absolute chronology of the reigns of the Achaemenid rulers is a complex topic involving Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek calendrics and dating conventions. Discrepancies between the results derived from each of these bodies of evidence, while certainly important, have little bearing on the main focus of this chapter, which is the overarching history of the Achaemenid Dynasty.

Few details are known of the early life of Darius I. According to Herodotus, he was about 20 years old when Cyrus the Great (559–530 bc) died in 530 bc, implying that he was born ca. 550 bc. He died in November 486 bc. According to an inscription on the façade of his tomb at Naqš-e Rustam (DNa), Darius I was the son of Vištaspa/Hystaspes, an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan descent. In DB I 3–6, Darius set out a much more detailed genealogy in which he named his father Vištaspa/Hystaspes, grandfather Arsama/Arsames, great-grandfather Ariyaramna/Ariaramnes, great-great-grandfather Cispis/Teispes, and great-great-great grandfather Haxamanis/Achaemenes. This has been viewed almost universally as a none too subtle artifice, indeed a fabrication, by which Darius contrived—without naming Cyrus the Great himself—to establish a familial tie, via descent from Teispes and Achaemenes, to the great conqueror, thereby incorporating Cyrus within the Achaemenid descent group and establishing his own legitimacy. It would be wrong, however, to view Darius’s genealogy as a case of pitting genetic or biological “truth” against a tendentious, downright falsehood promulgated by an ambitious social-climber seeking to justify his claim to the throne. As anthropologists have long stressed, genealogies are not historical records but post-facto, jural constructs that are retrojections of genealogical data, rearranged “to bring them into line with changes in the existing pattern of legal and political relations within and between lineages.” To expect otherwise is to misapprehend the functions of genealogies in many societies all around the world. The case of Darius I is no different.

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