Cylinder Seal from Mesopotamia

Episode 2 Questioning the Sources

The Persian Empire (2012)

Dr John W I Lee

Film Review

Because Persians didn’t record their history, the only written history about the Persian Empire is Greek or Hebrew

• Herodotus 485-425 BC – born in Halicarnassus (part of the Persian empire) on the Anatolian peninsula. Traveled to Persia and interviewed Persians.
• Thucydades 460-400 BC – mainly wrote about the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta (in which Persia backed Sparta).
• Xenophon 427-355 BC – Athenian close to Socrates (who opposed Persian influence in Greece). Later joined army of Cyrus the younger in his failed attempt to oust his elder brother, Artaxerxes II, from the Persian throne. Wrote about the Persian satraps (governors of the provinces of the ancient Median, Persian,  Sasanian and Hellenistic empires) and Anatolia. Had overly idealized view of Cyrus the Great and viewed contemporaneous Persian emperors as decadent.
• Ctesias (405-398 BC) – Personal physician of king Artaxerxes II and wrote 23 volume book called Persians Affairs. Although book itself didn’t survive, fragments remain in the accounts of more recent historians who quoted from. Although semi-fictional with numerous factual errors, Persian Affairs provides valuable insights into Persian life.
• Arrian 85-160 AD – Roman historian who wrote in Greek about Alexander the Great. One of the few to write about the eastern Persian empire.
• Plutarch 45-120 AD – Greek “middle Platonist” philosopher and historian sympathetic with Alexander the Great who wrote a biography of Anarxerxes.
• Hebrew Bible (second century BC) – books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther relate history of Persian emperors assisting the Jews in returning to Israel from Babylon and rebuild the Solomon’s temple.
• Josephus (37-100 AD) – Roman/Jewish historian and military leader whose work mainly influenced by book of Esther.

According to Lee, our main non-historical source Is Persian inscriptions in cuneiform discovered by archeologists. The first was discovered by a Portuguese merchant in 1602 and the first deciphered by German explorer Carsten Niebuhr in 1763 (with the discovery of a tablet inscribed in both cuneiform and Sanskrit). Philologist George Friedrich Grotefend contributed to this effort in 1802.

Western archeologists began large scale excavation of Babylonian, Iraqi and Persian palaces. in the 1830s. The scores of cylinder seals and tablets they discovered, inscribed in Persian, Akkadian and Elamite cuneiform, provide valuable information about agriculture and the economy in the Persian empire.

In the 1930s archeologists found archives from the reign of Darius I. Written in Aramaic and Elamite it took 30 years to translate them.

Archeologists have also retrieved ancient Persian texts from leather and pottery from Egypt, where the dry climate helped preserve them.