Episode 19: City and Countryside

The Persian Empire

Dr John W I Lee (2012)

Film Review

Most of the Persian empire’s urban centers were in Mesopotamia and Persia. The city of Babylon, the largest, had a population of 100,000. The western empire had fewer cities and none with over 10,000 people. In Mesopotamia, cities continued to hold popular assemblies following Persian conquest.

Eighty per cent of Persians farmed for a living, with Persian nobles and wealthy merchants owning the vast majority of land. Some farms were irrigated (in the Nile, Indus and Tigris/Euphrates valleys). Farmers relying on the Tigris/Euphrates and Indus river had to dig the silt out of their irrigation canals to combat desertification. In some areas, farmers used karnats for irrigation – underground channels they dug relying on gravity driven flow.

Elsewhere dry farming relied on rainfall to water crops. Farmers planted in the fall after summer rain had softened the soil and harvested in the spring. Those in mountainous areas raised olives, grapes and grains. Those in Egypt and Mesopotamia raised barley dates and emmer wheat. Those in Bactria and modern day Iran grew hardier wheat and those in the Indus valley cotton. Farmers throughout the empire also kept sheep, goats, pigs, duck and geese, but commoners only only ate meat on special occasions. They also produced alcohol: wine in Ionia and beer in the eastern empire.

Farmer timed their lives around the date harvest in August because that’s when debts and taxes were due. They paid taxes (in crops) to the government and landlord and sold any excess in local markets.

Many inhabitants of the eastern Empire were  pastoral nomads, who shifted their sheep and goats either vertically (in the Zygros mountains, Persepolis and Parthia) or their horses and camels horizontally from the steppes and deserts, where they wintered, to the river valleys.

There were four social classes in the Persian empire

• nobles, government officials and wealthy merchants
• craftsmen (potters, metal workers and weavers), merchants and freehold farmers
• dependents of rich nobles, government or temples. This included palace laborers (who were either prisoners of war or owed taxes) and deportees from conquered territories.
• slaves – either debt-slaves or prisoners of war. There was active slave trade in Egypt and Babylonia from pre-Perisan times. Those forced to work in mining and agriculture lived horrible lives. In contrast, Babylonian slaves could own property, take people to court, own their own slaves and hire freemen to do their work.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/15372393/15372440