The Ancients - Persia's Untapped Source: The Persepolis Fortification Texts

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

The Persepolis Fortification Tablets / Texts are the who’s who of the Ancient Achaemenid Empire, a unique insight into the administrative workings of this jurisdiction emerging from present day Iran. 30,000 of these clay tablets, inscribed in cuneiform, have so far been identified. Each forms a new piece of evidence for who the people of the Achaemenid Empire under Darius I were, where they were, what they did, and even what they ate. Tristan was joined by Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from Cardiff University to discuss how these texts have completely reshaped our understanding of this civilisation, and how the Ancient Persian perspective has demonstrated its remarkable networks, trade, administration and international travel.Lloyd's new book, out in April 2022, is called: 'Persians: The Age of the Great Kings'.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And in today's podcast, boy, have I got another brilliant episode for you. I'm joined by the fantastic Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from the University of Cardiff to talk about one of the most extraordinary sets of texts that survive from antiquity. Now, these texts, they're not Roman, they're not Greek, they're Persian. They're the Persepolis fortification texts. Now, these texts, they provide, shall we say, the Persian version of the Achaemenid Empire. They tell us about Persian administration, they tell us about royal women, they tell us about slavery. They tell us about Persian administration. They tell us about royal women. They tell us about slavery. They tell us about communication routes and so much more as you're about to hear. And it's incredible because also in these texts you hear of figures working within the imperial administration who we otherwise would never have heard of. So it almost makes

in one sense these texts the Persian equivalent of the Vindolanda tablets, telling us stories of individuals who would otherwise be lost to history. So this was a fascinating, eye-opening chat, looking at Persia from within Persia, from the Persian records that survive the Persian version. So without further ado, here's Lloyd. Lloyd, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. You're very welcome. It's good to be here. Now, the Persepolis fortification texts, these are a remarkable set of ancient documents

that help shine a light on Persia from within, on the administration, and so much more. That's right. In many respects, they are the untapped source for the uninitiated. For those of us who study ancient Persia, they are probably one of the most important indigenous Iranian sources that we have. And they've been known about for a long time, since the 1930s, when they've been worked on, translated, transliterated, and many of them have been published. There are many, many more to come. But really, unless you're sort of operating in that world, you don't know about them. And it's a great shame, because for me, they are probably the most important texts we get, even more important than the royal inscriptions,

you know, that people know about from Bicetune, or Persepolis, or Narcissus, which speak the ipse vis a verba, as it were, you know, the authentic words of the great kings. But what we have here are clay tablets written in cuneiform, which really get to the heart of day-to-day living in the empire. We actually know about, you know, who's who in the empire. We know where they are, what they're doing, what they're eating. It's quite remarkable in the minutiae that it gives us. And when we can use them all together, we get also a very big picture of the Persian empire as well. So, I mean, you mentioned that there are a lot. So how many of these tablets are we talking?

Well, on the last count, we have something like 30,000 of them. But I think now the count is going up all the time at the Oriental Institute, where the best work on this is being done, which is digitalising all of the finds, transcribing and translating them all online. There have already been publications from the 1950s, but also in Iran itself, in Tehran, there is a major project going on as well in the National Museum, which again is digitalising and translating all of these things. So it is churning stuff out on a remarkable level of knots, really. And even other institutions around the world, like the British Museum, have one or two of these tablets as well. And they're being found now and added to the corpus all the time. So let's say 30,000 right now, but maybe 100,000 in five years.

Lloyd, this is so exciting to hear about. I mean, compare it, for instance, like the Vindolanda tablets, all these more ones being found, the fragments of Sophocles' plays that are currently in collections somewhere that are yet to be focused on. And it's the same with these texts in Persepolis II, these fortification texts, that there are still so many that we haven't focused on, but hopefully in the years ahead, we will focus on. Absolutely. And who knows what we're going to find, you know, new names, possibility of redating things, of thinking very differently about, well, it could be anything, about succession,

about communications, anything at all could be found potentially in these sources. And so these texts, when do they date to in the Achaemenid Persian Empire? They're kind of interesting, really, because the Persians were enormous bureaucrats. You know, they loved their red tape, just as their modern Iranian counterparts do, in fact. These particular set of cuneiform tablets, which were discovered in the 1930s, they're called the fortification texts because they were found in the fortified area to the north of Persepolis. They essentially give us a snapshot of the reign of Darius the Great. They cover about a decade, I suppose. We have a few more that come from the early part of the reign of Ataxerxes I, but on the whole, what we're dealing with here is a snapshot

of Darius I. So let's say around about 490 BCE, that's the kind of when the shutter was pressed, as it were. You know, that's what we've captured in these. Now, of course, you know, the frustration of it is that we don't have the administration for much longer. Don't forget the Achaemenid Empire was around for 250 years. And it's a great shame they didn't survive. And I'm sure they were created. But let's be grateful for what we get. So we have this one snapshot of maybe a decade in the reign of Darius the Great, when in a way the Persian bureaucracy was at his greatest. Darius was an obsessive

about administration. There was nothing too small for his own personal involvement. And we really see that operating in the texts themselves. But also we know that from other sources, from Babylon, even from Greece as well. Herodotus himself says, of course, that Darius was compulsive when it came to dotting the I's and crossing the T's. You mentioned it there, the reign of Darius the Great, late 6th century, early 5th century BC. You've kind of mapped it out there. But Lloyd, just so we can entirely understand the background, set the scene. The Persian Empire at this time is at quite a height. Yes. So essentially founded around about 559 BC by Cyrus the Great, who of course took Persia from being a tiny tribal territory in southwestern Iran to being essentially the master

of the known world at the time. By the time Darius had come to the throne, Cyrus and his successor Cambyses II had created a superpower which incorporated not just the whole of Iran and the east up to Pakistan, but also, of course, had taken in the whole swathe of the former Babylonian Empire. So that means Babylonia itself right the way down to the Levant. And of course, also the Kingdom of Lydia. So the whole of Anatolia or Asia Minor, and right the way down to through Egypt into Ethiopia as well. And it was Darius that he inherited this vast empire of enormous size, the biggest empire the world had ever seen. And I think the true superpower of antiquity before the term was dreamed of.

And what Darius did with it was try to give it a kind of cogency of coherence, really, by establishing things like effective communication systems through a channel of really, really efficient roadworks and service stations. roadworks and service stations, and the imposition of a lingua franca, the use of Aramaic as the language which would dominate the whole empire in terms of its bureaucracy as well. So we see Darius really expanding on the rationale of empire and making it work for the Persians, which I suppose, in a way, Cyrus and Cambyses hadn't had time to do as the conquerors. Darius was more the settler. Now, there are a few campaigns, of course, which he tried to increase the size of the empire. So we hear of an aborted attempt in Scythia. And of course, we have the aborted attempt in Greece as well. But in his favor, he did take in North India. And I think actually, if little Greece hadn't got in the way for him, and he hadn't spent his resources there and turned away at Marathon, then probably the whole of the

Indian subcontinent could have fallen to the Persians as well. So it would have been an even bigger empire. That is food for thought. Let's go back to the texts then. You mentioned the communication routes, and we'll definitely get onto those in a bit. But first of all, I mean, what kind of administrative dealings do these texts cover? Are we talking about large scale logistical operations from place to place or the distributing of supplies to particular people? In effect, they are ration accounts and many of them just say so many sheep or so many cur of barley given to person A by person B at place X, recorded by scribe Z. That's the kind of general agenda. When you put all of these things together, you get this magnificent jigsaw puzzle of names and places where you can actually start to draw up systematic connections.

You know, you know, you can follow people around the empire. systematic connections. You can follow people around the empire. And what's remarkable is that the Persepolis texts only really deal with the area of Fars province. It was ancient Parsa, and so that was the administrative area around Persepolis. But we know that the same kind of administration was in operation in Susa, in Ecbatana, in Babylon, in Bactria, across the empire. This was a system which was utilized because of darius's obsession i suppose we only again have this one archive from persepolis but we know that people at persepolis were making contacts with their equivalent positions in places like susa or egypt or bactria they're recorded in the texts. So on some levels,

they work on a very much a micro kind of system dealing with the area in and around Persepolis itself, maybe a 50 mile radius. But in other respects, they give us an example of how the empire functions. So I'm always amazed when you look at some of the journeys that individuals took and these texts are saying, you know, this is, chit, which you're going to have. They would travel, for instance, from Susa in western Iran all the way up to Kandahar in Afghanistan, for instance. Or they go from Sardis in modern-day Turkey right the way through to the Punjab. I mean, these are international travellers, really quite, quite remarkable international travellers.

And what these kind of documents tell us is, first of all, people were taking those kind of journeys, but also they were being supported on them. So these texts, I suppose, are like little chits that you could hand in at service stations. And we know that there were these kind of stops, really, like caravanserai, right the way throughout the empire, where you could have your provisions replenished. So there's talk of, you know, so much wine should be doled out to this individual, so much barley for bread should be doled out. And then also things like fodder for horses and so forth.

So they are completely travel documents in themselves. And that's what's really remarkable about them. It sounds like the travel aspect of this thing, the communication routes, the roads, these supply stations, it really emphasises the sophisticated, amazing quality of Darius's Persian empire. Yes, the infrastructure was second to none. I think far better than any other ancient world empire, far outstripping the Romans in what they did, even with their straight roads.

They still didn't have actually the interconnectability that the Persians actually created. So there were major road systems. The most famous one, of course, is the Royal Road, which ran from Sardis down to Susa, changing horses regularly at these weigh stations in about 14 days, which is pretty good going for that mileage. And then that interconnected with a myriad of other roads. And then, of course, there were the river systems, the Tigris and the Euphrates in particular, and then the sea routes too. Darius also dug a major canal from the Red Sea to the Nile as well to make that journey from the Persian Gulf

into Egypt much easier. Before the Suez Canal, he dug his own canal to connect the Nile to the rest of the empire. These texts, I'm thinking now, for instance, like the Greco-Roman historians who perhaps might talk about the Royal Road in particular. There's a lot of focus on the Royal Road or perhaps the messenger system changing horse every day how they were so fast but it sounds like these texts are shining so much more light beyond that about the whole transport system completely natalie i mean we're getting you know now the information of who is using it and how practically it really operates i mean herodotus was is completely in awe of of the the persian road system and the and the horse messenger system. He's very upfront about that. But really, we didn't know how it worked until essentially 20 years ago when we

started to really deal with these texts in some detail. Now we've even, of course, with the wonderful archaeology that's going on in Iran, most of which is done by Iranian archaeologists, I'm really pleased to say, we've even found some of these way stations as well. So in the centre of Iran, we found one of them, which is actually quite a lavish one. It's a beautiful pavilion with what would have been marble columns. And this is obviously for sort of high end travellers who are stopping there. It's a really smart rest house, where of course, we've got others who are far, far more basic, you know, the kind of travel lodge of its day, rather than, you know, the sort of elite getaway, little country retreat, which others were using. So it's really interesting on all those kind of

strata of structure of society, wealth, and all of these questions are being opened with this as well. Talking about these commodities that are mentioned in the text, what kind of commodities are we talking about? Well, they are, the whole limited to the real practicalities, the kind of subsistence diet, I suppose. So a lot of mention of barley, which of course can be used for drink and also for baking of bread. So they come very often in their raw substances. So barley is the main thing and it's measured in curs and then also wine. We don't get so much mention of beer, interestingly, and that's maybe because the barley does that job if you want to turn it into that. So barley and wine are the basics, but then at other times you get other food

stuff. So there are certainly mention of lots of different vegetables and different fruits. Dates are particularly prominent and the urns are there quite a lot. And then in terms of animal supplies, sheep turn up the most frequently. And these sheep are often flocks, which are sort of divided. And one sheep is given to a group of workers at Persepolis or another sheep is given to a group of women. And, you know, they use that sheep over the next two months to eat off should they want mutton or whatever it is. Or if they want to keep it alive, I suppose, as well, you know, to shear it and to milk it or whatever. We're more vague on what happens to these things. But that's the general sort of dole out of food things. And what we get, of course,

again, this idea of a hierarchy of people at Persepolis are given essentially different rations of this according to their status and according to their needs. Some of them are quite clearly individual rations, and we see that on the journeys, and others who are working in and around Persepolis may be supplying rations for others. So they're given a big dole out, and then, of course, they're expected to dole from that themselves. So we have different systems working. But it's quite clear that the administration of Persepolis was very strictly controlled. So we have, you know, departments of drink or department of wine, I suppose we could say. We have departments of vegetables. We have the department of grain and so forth. And all of this is operated under the control of one chief director. And he has the seal of authority on everything.

His name is Parnaka. In the Greek sources, which we do know of him in the Greek sources, he's called Parnakes. So Parnaka was probably the uncle of Darius the Great. So keep it in the family. The Ecumenids always did. So Parnaka is in the uncle of Darius the Great. So keep it in the family. The Ecumenids always did. So Parnaka is in charge of the whole system. And he has a deputy working for him. And his name is Zishawish, which is a good Persian name.

He's not found in the Greek sources at all. So Parnaka and Zishawish are the go-to individuals. And we see all sorts of things occurring. So let me give you one example. Imagine a late morning on some Wednesday in the middle of summer in Persepolis. We have one set of documents where a group of civil servants are preparing a dossier, a file, that is to be on Panaka's desk at two o'clock that afternoon, as it were. And what Panaka has asked for, the director, is a complete breakdown of the costs of a particular administrative centre close to Persepolis. So they've been pulling these files together and then suddenly they go into a panic. And that's because one of the most important documents is missing. One of the big financial documents is missing and they think where can it be and then they realize that it's in the briefcase as it were of one of their

colleagues who has left the administration he's left the job and he's gone north to media to be with his family and they realize that he has got this sensitive information with him. He no longer works for the government either. So they go into absolute breakdown. And we have all of this recorded as their panic ensues. They write all this down on cuneiform documents and they send it to the next office. They send it up to the middle manager and they say, what are we going to do? And he says, well, you're going to have to face facts. You're just going to have to deal with Panaka. You're going to have to face him and tell him this. And the next thing we have is a document from Panaka, obviously burning with anger, which says to them, find this man, get the document back and bring it to me. And the words he says, when you get him, put him under

surveillance by the police. And the phrase that's translated literally from the Elamite is, his oil, squeeze it from him. In other words, force the truth out of him, make sure he gives us those documents back. So, you know, like in every situation, bureaucratic bungling was part of the Persian system as well. We really get a sense in these documents of how this operated. Now, Panaka and Zesharwish then, they basically rubber stamp everything. And I really do mean stamp everything, because the other thing that happens with these documents is we know who's who of Persepolis, because every individual working in the Persian government used their own cylinder seal. So they would

probably wear this around their neck. So this was usually a piece of jade or carnelian, which was beautifully, very often intricately inscribed with imagery. And this was rolled onto the wet clay, and it basically acted like a signature. The Romans did the same sort of thing later on in Bula, if you think about the ring bezels that the Romans used. But the Persians tended to use the Near Eastern type of cylinder seals. So we can trace a who's who because we can now name who the seal image belongs to. The seal no longer exists, but the image imprinted into the clay, which is dried and hardened and baked, still exists. And these seals are very personalized. So Panaka is always known because he has a very distinctive seal.

It's an Assyrian seal. It's an heirloom, very old seal he uses. It shows a man strangling an ostrich. Always very obvious to see. shows a man strangling an ostrich okay always very obvious to see and zishawish always has his seal and it's of a winged cow suckling her calf so when you see these seals you know that they've been through the hands of the top bureaucrats now seals of course are small items and like keys they are liable to get lost and this is what happens actually one day to panaka and he issues a message to the whole like a memo to the whole of the bureaucracy of persepolis and he says i've lost my seal with me strangling the ostrich from now on only accept this seal and he impresses into the

clay a new seal which is a picture of a man fighting lions instead. And now we know that that's going to be his seal. But of course, because this is a security issue, Zeshawish has to change his seal as well at the same time. So now he has a seal, which actually is a promotion for him as well. It shows the picture of Darius, the king, standing at the side of an altar. So it's almost like being authorized by the king for this. So you can see the things that really obsess us about real work in life practices, losing stamps, losing documents, whatever, is all part of the process of Persepolis as well. And for me, what this does, you see, it just personalises the Persians. It puts breath back into them. Even though these things look so dry, these texts, they are full

of personality, in fact. Absolutely. And once again, it kind of feels similar to the Vindolanda tablets. They're more than just texts. They're stories, they're personal stories that otherwise you would never have heard of. And they shine this amazing light on this aspect of the ancient Persian administration. That's precisely right. Absolutely. You know, and obviously it's an area of life that we just cannot access from any other source. And why would we. Absolutely. And obviously, it's an area of life that we just cannot access from any other source. And why would we want to? We've been obsessed with seeing Persia through Greek eyes, and it's no longer the accepted way to do it. What I believe in is trying to look for what I call the Persian version in everything. Behind every Greek text or image,

we will find a Persian rationale sitting there somewhere, which may endorse what a Greek is saying, but very often, of course, contradicts what the Greek is saying. And I think that's the most important. I believe in the text that there is sometimes a difference between monthly rations and daily rations. What's the difference in these texts in regards to this? That's right. So sometimes the monthly rations tend to be those that are doled out to a middleman for him to then pass on to others. So, for instance, we get quite a lot of texts that look at religious dole outs. So to the Magi or to Elamite priests who are serving, for instance, as cult personnel at the tomb of Cyrus the Great, for instance, at Passagard. cult personnel at the tomb of Cyrus the Great, for instance, at Passagard. So there they are given a kind of a month's ration of food for themselves, plus enough ration to complete what

we call the land sacrifice, so animal sacrifices, plus every now and then, once a month, the sacrifice of a white horse as well. So we get these kind of bigger commodities given to groups, and then sometimes on a daily basis to others. Individual we get these kind of bigger commodities given to groups, and then sometimes on a daily basis to others, individuals operate on a daily basis more likely. Now, let's keep focusing on these individuals, Parnaka, remarkable. But also we see in these texts, the mention of some extraordinary royal Persian women. Yes, this is where really the Persepolis fortification texts have changed our vision completely of Persian women. As you know, from the Greek sources, Persian women are manipulative.

They are corrupt. I mean, they are all kind of Clytemnestra-like or Medea-like. And this is what essentially the Greek sources are doing with them. I don't want to dismiss female power at all and the influence that women had in the royal family over the dynasty. After all, you know, the Achaemenid dynasty, like all absolute monarchies, was essentially a family-run affair and therefore the women of the dynasty had a high status in that, you know, as the dynastic wombs, they were carrying legitimacy and succession within them, and they fought for the dynasty constantly. I do believe that the Persian women lived in a world of what we can classify as harem, but let's qualify that term. I do not mean by any means, you know, some kind of orientalist locale of scatter cushions and Persian kittens, you know, where women idle away their days for languid

nights of sensuality in some sultan's bed. It's not about that. A harem in its true ancient Near Eastern setting is the domestic heart of a palace where the king, his women and his sons and his other male affines spent their time. So there is very much a feeling in my mind that the women of Persia operated in a kind of harem society. That is to say, there was segregation from men, but it wasn't a life of purdah. And we really see that in the text. These women are influential, they are wealthy, they travel. What I think people have a difficulty with is bringing together our idea of power and wealth with the idea of privacy or segregation. So today, of course, we think that if you're famous, if you're wealthy and renowned, then you have to be visible, you have to be visible you have to be seen

but in the persian mindset there was no great honor certainly for a woman to be seen in public okay i mean that was just it was just not done so the higher up the social ladder you were actually the more kind of restricted you were you you deliberately kind of you know shrouded yourself away but that does not equate with lack of authority lack of autonomy or lack of power you know we've seen very very powerful women across the centuries in harem societies working in that way i'll draw your attention to ming and qing china for instance in the forbidden. It's not that these two ideas of harem and power cannot coexist. They do coexist very harmoniously, I would say. What the Persepolis texts tell us is the minutiae of how these women operated within that society. So there is one woman who

stands head and shoulders above all the others in the text, and her name is Irdabama. Now, it was once believed that she was simply a landowner around Persepolis. She has several estates, she has hundreds and hundreds of slaves, and she has rations, well, you know, which are above and beyond expectations. My colleague Wouter Henmann, thought long and hard about the presence of this woman and has come to the conclusion that she was probably the mother of Darius the Great. And I agree with that. Other people have said she's one of the wives of Darius. We know that Darius had at least six wives. I think it's the mother because of her prominence. Don't forget, a king in Persia could have many wives and they were definitely polygamous. They could have even more concubines, but they could only ever have one mother, one blood mother. And of course, she

had the ultimate authority within the court of women or the harem. And so we see her, I think, operating in that kind of way. We see her taking deliveries of huge amounts of grain and wine, enough to fill storerooms in many of her estates, which were spread out across the whole of the center of Iran and into Babylonia as well. We also know a lot about one of her stewards. The chief steward of her estates was a man called Rashtar, and he appears quite a lot in the tablets administrating her servants and her estates. He has his own very distinctive seal as well, which shows a seated enthroned woman, which even though it's an old seal, it's an Elamite seal, I'm sure in his mind he saw Idabama as that seated woman. So she is very conspicuous, the wealthiest woman of the age

and a significant presence in the royal court. Now on almost a par with her, but not quite, is another woman and she is one of the wives of Darius and her name is Ishtaduna. Ishtaduna is known to us from Herodotus where she is Ataistone and Herodotus always says that she's the favourite of Darius's wives. Well, actually, this seems to be confirmed in the text, because of all the consorts of the king, she gets, again, the highest look in. So she's conspicuous. She, too, has several estates. She also travels independently of the king. And this is something that's really interesting.

The great king, of course, constantly travelled around his empire. He was always on the move. They were quite nomadic. And the peripatetic courts could split. So just as we have in, say, medieval Europe, you know, where the household of the queen could be separate from the household of the king and they'd meet together for, say, you know, Christmas or Eastertide or whatever it would be, I think that's the way that the Persians were operating too. So we see the supplies of the household of Ataistone and of her son, Prince Arsham or Ashamah, operating separately from the king. So that's an interesting fact in its own right. And we have quite a lot of evidence that Darius lavished gifts upon her as well. Herodotus actually says that he had a gold statue of this queen made, but we see something a bit more pragmatic in the text

so i'm going to um i'm going to read you one of them okay so this is an instruction this has gone from darius directly to panaka right no middleman darius the king writes directly to his uncle the head of the administration so he says tell yaksheda, the wine bearer, that Panaka speaks as follows. 200 quarts of wine are to be issued to the dukshish, that's the royal lady, the dukshish Ishtaduna. It was ordered by the king in the first month of regnal year nine. So he goes straight to the top to make sure that his wife is getting the best wine, and there's no delay on this. And we have another one as well, which operates in the same way. This is quite a famous one for those of us in the know. Say to Haranna, the overseer of

livestock, Panaka speaks like this. Darius the king ordered me, saying, 100 sheep from my estate are to be issued to the dukshish ishtaduna and now panaka says as the king ordered me so i am ordering you now you are to issue 100 sheep to the duskish ishtaduna as was commanded by the king first month year 19 of darius so this is the way that they they operate you know we see dari you know, lavishing gifts of sheep and wine on his wife. But what's even more important about the Ishtaduna text is that we actually get her own voice in them as well. And that is really rare. You know, to hear the voice of a woman from ancient Iran is extremely rare. She's very curt in the way that she speaks as well.

So this is one of them, for instance. Tell Daktuka Ishtatuna speaks as follows. One hundred litres of wine, issue it from my estate at Mirandu and from my estate at Kake. Do it now. So she's really kind of on the ball, you know. do it now. So she's really kind of on the ball, you know. And she writes quite a lot, actually, you know, through a middleman, through a scribe, to her steward. His name is Shalamana, and we have his seal as well, which shows him pouring into a ladle wine in front of a seated woman, which says a lot. I'll read one more of this, and she says, tell Shalemana, Ishtatuna speaks as follows, 500 litres of wine to his companions, full stop, issue it, exclamation mark. There is one more female character that takes Xerxes, and probably the most

prominent of Persian women in Herodotus. You know, at one point when he's discussing Xerxes' accession to the throne, he says that Xerxes got that position because Atossa had all the power. That isn't quite carried out in the text, interestingly. She has a far lower profile than her sister, Ishtatuna. She only appears six times, six times in all of the texts. She gets a lot of wealth. I mean, she does have her estates and she does have a lot of goods. But for a woman who is so conspicuous in the Greek sources, she is almost invisible in the Persian sources, which suggests to me that during the lifetime of Darius, she wasn't all that significant within the ranking of the harem, but really she rose to prominence, of course,

when Xerxes became king, and then she becomes queen mother and outranks all the other women of the royal family then. So, you know, you have to play the long game if you're a Persian royal woman. So it is, and this is all hypothetical, but it is possible that if there were texts that dated to this later period that we would see this figure feature more prominently. That's exactly right. I'm sure she would have, you know, absolutely, she would have come into her own that way. And who knows, let's really hope that some of these things do turn up. It would be wonderful to see some of these women like Parasartes, for instance, you know, the wife of Darius II, who is so well known in Plato and in Plutarch and Ctesias.

You know, it would be lovely to see her come up in the Persian archives. We already know of her in Babylon. It would be great to see her in Iran. We'll be right back. you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions, and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying yeah tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair.

And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. We've covered our administration, we've covered the communication routes and royal women. You mentioned it earlier there, Lloyd, because let's focus on the slavery aspect of it now. I mean, what can these texts possibly teach us about slavery in the Persian administration?

If we think about Persian, we look at its magnificent remains. You know, Persepolis is one of the most evocative ruins of antiquity. I mean, it is a masterpiece of construction. And of course, we have to remember that the elegant royal palaces, the fortresses, the high walls, the well-kept roads, the pavilions, the Persians just didn't build these themselves. These were the product of hard labour. the product of hard labor. And we've been quite puzzled and sometimes, I think, a little bit too naive in our approach to how the Persians dealt with the labor of their empire, you know, and what do we classify it as? Well, one word that comes over in the text, in the fortification text constantly, is this word kurtash. It's an

Elamite term. There is an old Persian version of that called mania, but kurtash is often translated simply as a worker. Well, that's nice, isn't it? Because, you know, we suggest, well, if you're working, you're going to get a wage of some kind. And to some extent, this is what the Persepolis texts are telling us. People are not being paid in coin, of course, but they are being paid in kind for the food, for what they do. But I want to know exactly who they are, because on the whole, the Kirtash that we find in the Persepolis tablets are foreigners. They tend to be Ionians, Sardians, Egyptians, Carians, Bactrians, Elamites, Babylonians, you know, you name it, who find themselves in the imperial core working on the building projects of the king. Now, the question

is, okay, do they come there willingly? You know, are they undertaking corvée labor, work contracts, or are they being forced into this? Well, I think that there's some whoée labor, work contracts, or are they being forced into this? Well, I think that there's some who are there on work contracts. And we can imagine that the highest kind of artisans, craftspeople from different parts of the empire, maybe earned a wage, earned a living, at least in Iran. Because if we think about, there's a wonderful series of trilingual texts from Susa, where Darius describes the building of his Apadana, of his palace there. It's a multinational labor of love. And he gets, obviously, the very best quality goods, ivory from Ethiopia, bricks from Babylon, timber from Lebanon, you know, cedars. timber from Lebanon, you know, cedars. And he obviously imports also very fine foreign workers, so Greek stonemasons. And we can actually see, of course, at Persepolis today, the remains of Greek workmanship there, Egyptian goldsmiths and so forth. So you can imagine on one level that, yes, there were kind of work contracts almost given to these individuals who worked with some quality.

contracts almost given to these individuals who worked with some quality. But of course, there were many thousands of unskilled workers around the place too. It's been estimated that in about 500 BCE, some 15,000 individuals made up the workforce in and around Persepolis. Persepolis alone, don't forget, okay? And these workers are often divided into subgroups as well. So we can classify them, again, by ethnicity. So, for instance, the Persepolis texts, around about 500, show us that there were gangs of 300 Lydians, 150 Thracians, about 550 Egyptians, almost 1,000 Cappadocicians and so forth. In fact, altogether, there are 27 ethnic Kurdish identified in the Persepolis tablets. Now, you know, they can't all have been economic migrants coming into Persia to look for ready wages. And I think that a lot of

them actually would have been prisoners of war, or as the Persians put it, the booty of the bow. That's what they would call prisoners of war. And many of them, of course, were transported to Persia. The Persians exploited the old Assyrian system of deportation en masse with their families as well. So taken up from wherever they might have been, Egypt, Asia Minor, and then transported with their families into Pars. So we're talking about perhaps mass migrations of people, and we do see it in the texts. We know that after Attaxerxes destroyed the city of Sidon because it had rebelled against Persia, the whole of the city was deported into Persia from the Greek sources. We know that Milesians, for instance, suffered the same fate, the Penoeans of Thrace, the Eritreans and so forth. You know, they're all part of this system.

And you might be familiar with a really fascinating tale that is told by Diodorus Siculus of when Alexander entered into Paris. He meets with a group of old timers, old Greeks, and he sees them and some of them have got ears missing or noses missing or tongues have been ripped out or some of them are lacking a hand or a foot. And they say to him, you know, we've been here all this time. We've been here for all our lives since we were young men, working, essentially, you know, building for the great king. And I think that's really, it's very indicative of another side of Persia, which even we Persianists don't particularly want to look at, you know, that story. And I don't think it's purely propaganda. I think it does show us a rather grim perspective on the Persian labor system. And with that in mind, I've been thinking, therefore, about what do these fortification tablets tell us about the labor system that goes on in Iran? thing to say is that we always find that rations of food are given to heads of kurtash so there's a

head man who obviously presides and and doles out rations to the work teams that he supervised and they're always rations in kind grain barley beer we do get beer and oil sometimes very occasionally meat and red vegetables and they're doled out according to gender and to age okay so men and boys women and girls were given different amounts of food and this food is simply subsistence level diet it is barely enough calories to get you through it's the kind of thing actually that, that my very good colleague, Ulrike Roth, back in Edinburgh, has looked at in terms of Roman slavery. And, you know, she's looked at the rationing of foodstuffs in, say, Cato's farm, for instance. And again, we get this idea of basically just enough to survive.

That's what we're getting here. Interestingly, we can do quite a lot with the female workers at Persepolis because there are quite a lot of techs that talk to them. And they usually, of course, they're involved in textile making or rope production or something like that. tells us that one factory as it were one sort of textile factory was made up of 107 female workers who received one ration of of food that had to last them 13 months so that overseer was then responsible for doling out this this ration of food for 13 months which suggests you you know that they're not going to be having fresh produce in that case. It really is going to be the barley and the grain that you can store, you know. And it's interesting because what we don't get in the Persepolis text is any sense of family units at all. So there are no words for husband and wife used at all, or father and daughter, or father and son, which suggests that the Kurdish, when they arrived as a family unit, were separated.

You know, so there was no sense of family. They were put into work units according to the skills that were needed. So, you know, young girls, nimble fingers, for instance, within a within the textile manufacturing place, their fathers would be sent elsewhere. And this is the way that they seem therefore to have experienced life. The other thing that we do see, however, is that the Persians seem to have positively encouraged young men and young women from different families placed in the same kind of community. And we assume therefore living together, the same kind of community. And we assume, therefore, living together, you know, in one accommodation, say, they were encouraged to breed as well. So we have here, and it kind of is rather unsightly to say, but we have almost like a Persian slave breeding program that goes on as well.

And we know that registers were kept of the number of pregnant women in the the kurtash workforce as well and we have really interesting evidence to show that postpartum women were given feeding rations above and beyond the usual dole so for instance i'm going to read you one now 32 ban of grain supplied by a priest of Persepolis give it as a bonus to Ionian women after giving birth at Persepolis and to the spinning women whose rations are set. Nine women who bore male children receive two ban of grain and 14 women who bore girls receive one ban of grain. who bore girls receive one ban of grain. So these postnatal grain rations were provided over and above the subsistence diet level. And you can see that the women are being rewarded for successful reproduction. And I suppose these extra calories would have been welcomed by the women, of course, because then they could hopefully produce enough milk to keep the children healthy and alive for some time, you know, hopefully to survive infancy. And you can also see there's a gender ideology going on here, because mothers of boys are given twice as much rations as mothers

of girls. So this tells us things that, you know, we'd get from nowhere else in our sources. And the breeding program was clearly successful, because in the period alone, in the three years between 500 and 497, the fortification texts tell us that there were 449 live births of Persepolis and 247 were boys who made up 55 percent of children at that time. Interestingly, there are no records whatsoever of twins either. You know, it's strange. So, you know, none of this is set in one tablet. This is why we have to pull all of this stuff together and we can do the statistics. You know, we can get a really good idea of what's going on there. And the number of children in Pulse between 502 and 499 goes up from 16 to 99. So it's a very successful outcome for the Persians. But it really puts me in mind of the kind of slave ownership and slave breeding programs that were going on, certainly in Rome, but also in the American South, say, in the early part of the 19th century.

So for me, I can't get away any longer. Combining all this evidence, I don't think Kirtash is a word that can be defined simply as a worker. I think that we have to at least be open to the possibility that we should define this word as slave and take on board what that means for us as well. And I think there is a difficulty that we who work on Persia have because we are also, you know, products of our own making. And I think we like the idea of the Persians bringing harmony to their empire, you know, this idea of Pax Persiana, which the Persians endorse in their official inscriptions and in their artworks. But of course, let's be realistic. Building an empire of that size does not operate around holding hands and making contracts.

You know, I mean, a lot of blood would have been spilt. A lot of brutish things were done and continue to be done in the name of empire. That's the way that empires work. Right. So while, you know, name of empire that's the way that empires work right so while you know these dreams in stone are carved into persepolis's walls showing harmony of the empire gift giving of ambassadors to the great king of course you know the persians are striking terror into the hearts of of peoples across the world and i think in a way this is what we we get this is why we what we can why we can understand the greek text which depicts the Persians in such a hostile light, because the Persians were a terrifying entity. You know, this huge superpower

encroaching day on day from the east, taking away, yes, I suppose, freedoms. And I think we have to remember that the Persians are part of that imperial empire building scheme that has gone on across the whole of history and is never pleasant. So therefore, I would say, you know, this idea of Kurdish as slaves, at least it bears thinking about, we should be discussing this kind of thing. Are there any other particular aspects of the Persepolis fortification text that you would like to mention before we wrap up with this pod? Well, I suppose I'd just like to say about the, again, the visual aspect of these things and the system of seals and seal impressions, because they do take us on an empire-wide

tour. So we can go, for instance, to the north of Anatolia, to a place called Dascyleion, where we see, we've discovered there, for instance, a huge archive of bulli. So these are clay stamp seals, not the cylinder seals, but more in line with the Greek and Roman form of seal, but carrying the same artistic message that we find in Persepolis too. message that we find in Persepolis too. Now at the other end of the empire, way over in the east, only about a decade ago we uncovered another archive and this archive dates to the end of the Achaemenid period. In fact it straddles the reign of Darius III, the last Achaemenid king, and Alexander of Macedon. Found in Bactria, the ancient capital of the huge province of Bactria, probably the most important of the eastern provinces. We have this archive, but it's not written on cuneiform. Interestingly, it's written on wood, and it's written on bone as well. So the administration itself is exactly the same. It records exactly the same stuff, the dough load of foods, travel

rations, and so forth, but it's not in the same medium. And that the same stuff, the dough load of foods, travel rations, and so forth, but it's not in the same medium. And that's interesting, isn't it? So that different parts of the empire might have had different forms of undertaking the bureaucracy, but the bureaucratic formula itself was exactly the same. And now we can see that, you know, at the end of the empire, this kind of administration was just as buoyant as it was during the days of Darius the Great at the height of the empire. There's long been this idea that in Greek historiography and scholarship of Greek historiography, that Persia went into some long, slow decline from Xerxes onwards. You know, the glory days had gone and now it was all decadence and harems and eunuchs. And that, you know, essentially Alexander of Macedon put Persia out of its misery.

What these documents in the east have shown us, just through the pure administration itself, is that under Alexander, he changed nothing. The empire was flourishing, it was strong, it was buoyant, the communication system was still there, the economics of the empire was still superb. He didn't have to change a thing. Now that really rewrites the history of ancient Iran and ancient Macedonia. It suggests to me that, you know, Alexander didn't come along and do this mercy killing on persia what he did actually was he hijacked it and slit its throat you know he killed it there and then

but kept the processes of the empire alive and i think that's fascinating and we don't expect to see that from administrative documents do we but this is what we get absolutely and mentioning that text those texts in battery of all places with Alexander the Great in the northeast, Alexander's worst nightmare being there for three or four years or so, especially with Sogdia further north. And yet, even though he leaves this huge military presence there on the administrative side, it stays exactly the same. It is up and running.

And again, just as we find at Persepolis, no detail is too small to be recorded. There's a great text in particular which talks about that a wall is being built around some particular town, a mud brick wall, but that the workers have had to come in early. They can't finish the wall because there's an attack of locusts going on and because they can't work in the fields because these locusts are so thick. They're going to have to postpone building the wall. You know, I mean, it's tiny details. So that really suggests to me that the empire is just working as it always has. It's exactly the same thing as Panaka losing his keys, essentially. Good old Panaka. Good thoughts to leave it on.

I mean, Lloyd, this has been an amazing chat for the last hour or so. And I guess it really emphasises how these texts texts they do give us this amazing extraordinary insight which is changing perception on the persian empire and bringing it to light that's exactly right and you know we we must be we must be looking for this all the time we must look for the persian version it's not it's not easy to do because you know it's it's we i work in a in a very small field but i'm glad to say in a very cooperative field as well. But let's expand our understanding of what ancient history is all about. You know, let's not keep on privileging just the classical texts or classical images. Let's look elsewhere and realise that, you know, we can put together the picture of a global antiquity if we start thinking about looking for different sources.

Lloyd, brilliant way to finish it. Last of all, you've got this big book coming out on the topic. It is called? It's called Persians, The Age of the Great Kings. So it's being published in the UK by Wildfire Books and in the United States by Basic Books. And it should be available in shops from April 2022. So put it on your Christmas list. We all await it with bated breath, and I'm sure we'll get you back on the pod to talk more about

all things Persia closer to that time. Lloyd, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. Thank you. We'll see you next not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.