Writing Ancient Persia

191 Pages·2011·3.32 MB·English

by  Thomas Harrison

Writing Ancient Persia
CLASSICAL ESSAYS
Series editor:
Thomas Harrison, University of Liverpool
Ancient Democracy and Modern Ideology
P.J. Rhodes
Interpreting Classical Texts
Malcolm Heath
The Invention of Ancient Slavery?
Niall McKeown
Reading Cicero:
Genre and Performance in Late Republican Rome
Catherine Steel
Writing Ancient Persia
Thomas Harrison
CLASSICAL ESSAYS
Writing Ancient Persia
Thomas Harrison
Bristol Classical Press
First published in 2011 by
Bristol Classical Press
an imprint of
Bloomsbury Academic
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square,
London W1D 3QY, UK
&
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New York, NY 10010, USA
Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Harrison
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
CIP records for this book are available from the
British Library and the Library of Congress
ISBN 978 0 7156 3917 7
Picture credit: all the photographs reproduced
in this book are by the author.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
www.bloomsburyacademic.com
For Cyrus, Alexander, Alfred and Flora
The real fact is, young Europe is whipped and schooled
into admiration of Greece, till no one dares give a candid
opinion. Otherwise, how can men in their senses affect
to believe all that stuff about the invasion of Xerxes?
Edward Eastwick (1864: 26-7)
6

Acknowledgements
This is an essay about the writing of the history of the Achae-
menid Persian empire. It is not itself a history of Achaemenid
Persia (let alone of other periods of ancient Persian history),
or even a prelude to the writing of one, but a discussion of the
way in which such histories have been, are being, and might
be, written. Achaemenid history is now a vast scholarly field –
one in which, by rights, as Heleen Sancisi Weerdenburg once
put it, ‘one should be thoroughly acquainted with at least six
ancient languages’ and their associated scholarly literatures
(1990: 253). I might as well state clearly now: I do not pretend
to this ideal. What follows is the account of a Greek historian.
This is not as perverse as it might seem, given the centrality of
Greek sources for Persian history. Indeed, much as one can
only be awed by the splendour, scale and variety of so much
past and current Achaemenid scholarship, it is an underlying
principle of this book that Hellenists can and must engage
with this body of work. This essay also makes no pretence of
being exhaustive in its coverage. In particular, it focuses on the
early period of Achaemenid history in which Persian sources
are more plentiful and Herodotus’ Histories constitute the
main Greek body of evidence. Certain themes, regions, classes
of evidence, and indeed modern scholarship, central to a full
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Writing Ancient Persia
historiography of the Achaemenid Persian world receive little
or no attention: the reader will look largely in vain for
discussion of Persian religion, for example (apart from the
theme of ‘religious tolerance’), for the details of Persian satra-
pal administration, or for the modern Iranian reception of
Achaemenid history. I hope that these and other exclusions are,
at least in part, defensible in terms of my focus on the overall
shape and tendency of recent narratives; I have little doubt,
however, that they are also driven by the limits of my expertise.
In daring to undertake a critique of a scholarly field in
which I have only a toehold, I have also necessarily relied upon
the generosity and expertise of others. Tom Holland, Lloyd
Llewellyn-Jones, Kostas Vlassopoulos, and, not least, my Liv-
erpool colleague Christopher Tuplin have all read and
commented on a full draft – and, though they cannot be held
responsible for the remaining errors and eccentricities, have
both helped me to refine my thinking and saved me from
embarrassment. The ideas expressed here have been tested
both by audiences of scholars (not least through the Mediter-
ranean and Near Eastern Studies programme of Trinity
College Dublin) and by generations of excellent students at St
Andrews and at Liverpool. The experience of working with
Deborah Blake and her colleagues at Duckworth has, as al-
ways, been a delight. My research has been assisted
enormously by the award by the Leverhulme Trust of a Philip
Leverhulme Prize. And the support of Catherine Pickstock, in
what was otherwise a difficult period, was essential to my
completing this essay (and to much else). I should like to
express my heartfelt gratitude to all of these, and – not least –
to the individual historians of Persia who feature so promi-
8
Acknowledgements
nently in this volume, not only for the scholarship to which I
am responding, but in the case of Amélie Kuhrt for her
encouragement and kindness during a period I spent as a
British Academy postdoctoral fellow in her department.
Finally, Frances Harrison, Kasra and Cyrus Naji looked
after and fed me royally during a trip to Iran in 2007. It is to
Cyrus, and to his cousins, that this book is dedicated.
A note to the reader
In order to make the book accessible to more than the initi-
ated, I have in general avoided all abbreviations, e.g. of the
names of ancient authors, or of journals. Persian royal inscrip-
tions are cited by the standard abbreviations used in e.g. Kent
1953 or Lecoq 1997. Fragmentary Greek historians are cited
according to the system of Jacoby’s Die Fragmente der griechis-
chen Historiker (now progressively being re-edited and trans-
lated as part of a project known as Brill’s New Jacoby),
according to which, for example, 688 F 1 denotes Ctesias fr.
1. Kuhrt 1997 is a readily available source of the most impor-
tant texts, with excellent notes. The site of Darius’ inscribed
account of his accession I have spelled consistently as Behis-
tun; this is the same place as Bisitun.
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