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Occasional flashes of vigour and intelligence by some of Xerxes' successors were too infrequent to prevent eventual collapse but did allow the empire to die gradually. It is a tribute to Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius that the empire they constructed was as resilient as it proved to be after Xerxes.
The three kings that followed Xerxes on the throne--Artaxerxes I (465-425 BC), Xerxes II (425-424 BC), and Darius II Ochus (423-404 BC)--were all comparatively weak individuals and kings, and such successes as the empire enjoyed during their reigns were mainly the result of the efforts of subordinates or of the troubles faced by their adversaries.
Artaxerxes I faced several rebellions,
the most important of which was that of Egypt in 459 BC, not fully suppressed
until 454 BC.
An advantageous peace (the Peace
of Callias) with Athens was signed in 448 BC, whereby the Persians agreed
to stay out of the Aegean and the Athenians agreed to leave Asia Minor
to the Achaemenids. Athens broke the peace in 439 BC in an attack on Samos,
and in its aftermath the Persians made some military gains in the west.
Xerxes II ruled only about 45 days and was killed in a drunken stupor by the son of one of his father's concubines. The assassin was himself killed by Darius II, who rose to the throne through palace intrigue. Several revolts marred his reign, including one in Media, which was rather close to home.
The major event of these three reigns
was the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens that lasted, with occasional
pauses, from 460 to 404 BC. The situation was ripe for exploitation by
the famous "Persian archers," the gold coins of the Achaemenids that depicted
an archer on their obverse and that were used with considerable skill by
the Persians in bribing first one Greek state and then another.
Initially, the Persians encouraged
Athens against Sparta and from this gained the treaty of Callias. Then,
after the disastrous Athenian campaign against Sicily in 413 BC, the Persians
intervened on Sparta's side. By the treaty of Miletus in 412 BC,Iran recovered
complete freedom in western Asia Minor in return for agreeing to pay for
seamen to man the Peloponnesian fleet. Persian gold and Spartan soldiers
brought about Athens' fall in 404 BC.
Despite the fact that the Persians played the two sides against each other to much advantage, they should have done better. One observes a certain lack of control from Susa by the king in these proceedings, and the two principal governors in Asia Minor who were involved, Tissaphernes of Sardis and Pharnabazus of Hellespontine Phrygia, seemed to have permitted a personal power rivalry to stand in the way of a really coordinated Persian intervention in the Greek war.
Artaxerxes II came to the throne in 404 BC and reigned until 359 BC. The main events of his long rule were the war with Sparta that ended with a peace favourable to the Persians; the revolt and loss to the empire of Egypt; the rebellion of Cyrus the Younger, brother of the king; and the uprising known as the revolt of the satraps.
Sparta, triumphant over Athens, built
a small empire of its own and was soon involved in a war against the Persians,
the principal issue again being the Greek cities of Asia Minor.
While Sparta played one Persian
governor in Anatolia against the other, the Persians spent gold in Greece
to raise rebellion on Sparta's home ground.
The Persians rebuilt their fleet
and placed a competent Athenian admiral, Conon, in command. The contest
continued from 400 to 387, with Sparta forced to act on an ever-shrinking
front.
A revitalized Athens, supported
by Persia, created a balance of power in Greece, and eventually Artaxerxes
was able to step in, at Greek request, and dictate the so-called King's
Peace of 387-6 BC. Once again the Greeks gave up any claim to Asia Minor
and further agreed to maintain the status quo in Greece itself.
When Egypt revolted in 405 BC, Persia was unable to do much about it, and from this point forward Egypt remained essentially an independent state.
Cyrus the Younger, though caught
in an assassination attempt at the time of Artaxerxes' coronation, was,
nevertheless, forgiven, thanks to the pleadings of the Queen Mother, and
was returned to the command of a province in Asia Minor. But he revolted
again in 401 BC and, supported by 10,000 Greek mercenaries, marched eastward
to contest the throne.
He was defeated and killed at the
Battle of Cunaxa in Mesopotamia in the summer of 401.
The Greek mercenaries, however,
were not broken and, though harried, left the field in good order and began
their famous march, recorded in the Anabasis of Xenophon, north to the
Black Sea and home. Probably no other event in late Achaemenid history
revealed more clearly to the Greeks the essential internal weakness of
the chaemenid Empire than the escape of so large a body of men from the
very heart of the Great King's domain.
Since 379 BC Greek mercenaries had been gathered together in order to mount a campaign against Egypt. An attack in 373 failed against the native 30th dynasty.
On the heels of this failure came the revolt of the satraps. Several satraps, or provincial governors, rose against the central power, and one, Aroandas, a late satrap of Armenia, went so far as to stamp his own gold coinage as a direct challenge to Artaxerxes.
The general plan of the rebels appears
to have been for a combined attack.
The rebel satraps were to coordinate
their march eastward through Syria with an Egyptian attack, under the pharaoh
Tachos (Zedhor), supported by Greek mercenaries. The Egyptian attack was
called off because of a revolt in Egypt by Tachos' brother, and Artaxerxes
managed to defeat the satraps who were left alone to face the Great King's
wrath.
How different would have been the
wrath of Darius! Several of the satraps, including Aroandas, were actually
forgiven and returned to their governorships.
In general the impression is that,
in the end, rather than fight the central authority, the satraps were willing
to return to their own provinces and plunder there in the name of the Great
King. Perhaps they saw that they actually had more authority and more control
over real events in their own provincial territories than Artaxerxes had
in his empire.
Plot and counterplot, harem intrigue, and murder brought Artaxerxes III to the throne in 359 BC. He promptly exterminated many of his relatives who might have challenged his rule--all to no avail, for revolts continued to rock the empire.
A fresh attempt to win back Egypt
was thrown back in 351-350. This setback encouraged revolt in Sidon and
eventually in all of Palestine and Phoenicia.
Parts of Cilicia joined the rebellion
but the revolt was crushed the same year it had begun, 345 BC. Peace was
achieved only temporarily; mercenaries from Thebes and the Argives, as
well as from the Greek cities of Asia Minor, gathered for a new attempt
on Egypt, which, led by Artaxerxes III himself, succeeded in 343 BC.
But the local dynasty fled south
to Nubia, where it maintained an independent kingdom that kept alive the
hopes of a national revival.
Persia then misplayed its hand in
Greece by refusing aid to Athens against the rising power of Philip II
of Macedon. In 339 BC Persian troops were fighting alone in Thrace against
the Macedonians, and in the following year, at the Battle of Chaeronea,
Philip extended his hegemony over all of Greece--a united Greece that was
to prove impervious to Persian gold.
Artaxerxes was poisoned by his physician at the order of the eunuch Bagoas. The latter made Arses king (338-336 BC) in hopes of being the power behind the throne, but Arses did not bend easily to Bagoas' will. He attempted to poison the kingmaker but was himself killed in retaliation. Bagoas then engineered the accession of Darius III, a 45-year-old former satrap of Armenia. So many members of the royal house had been murdered in the court intrigue that Darius probably held the closest blood claim to the throne by virtue of being the grandnephew of Artaxerxes II.
Darius was able to put down yet another
rebellion in Egypt under Khababash in 337-336 BC, but the beginning of
the end came soon afterward, in May 334, with the loss of the Battle of
Granicus to Alexander the Great. Persepolis fell to the invader in April
330, and Darius, the last Achaemenid, was murdered in the summer of the
same year while fleeing the conqueror. His unfinished tomb at Persepolis
bears witness to his lack of preparation.
Alexander did not win his victories easily, however, and the catalog of troubles that marked the latter part of the Achaemenid Empire--rebellions, murders, weak kings trapped in the harem, missed chances, and foolish policies--cannot be the whole story.
The sources, mostly Greek, are often prejudiced against the Persians and tend to view events from but a single point of view. No government could have lasted so long, found its way somehow through so many difficulties, and in the end actually have fought so hard against the conqueror without having much virtue with which to balance its vices.
Map of Persepolis
Achaemenid society and culture
Achaemenid society and culture was in reality the collective societies and cultures of the many subject peoples of the empire. From this mosaic it is sometimes difficult to sort out that which is distinctively Persian or distinctively a development of the Achaemenid period and therefore perhaps an early Iranian contribution to general Middle Eastern society and culture.
The languages of the empire were
as varied as its peoples. The Persians, at least originally, spoke Old
Persian, a southwestern dialect of Iranian (Median was a northwestern Iranian
dialect), but they were illiterate.
Their language was first written
when Darius commanded that a script suitable for this purpose be invented
so that he might inscribe the record of his rise to power at Bisitun (the
inscriptions in Old Persian are attributed to earlier kings as either latehistorical
forgeries or as probably written during the reign of Darius).
That few could read Old Persian might
be the reason why Darius at Bisitun established the tradition that royal
inscription should be trilingual in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite.
Old Persian was never a working
written language of the empire. Elamite, written on clay tablets, appears
to have been the language of many of the administrators in Fars and, it
may be assumed, in Elam.
Archives of administrative documents
in Elamite have been found at Persepolis. Aramaic, however, was the language
of much of the empire and was probably the language most used in the imperial
bureaucracy.
The beginnings of the strong influence
of Aramaic on Persian, which is so evident in the Middle Persian of Sasanian
times, can already be seen in the Old Persian royal inscriptions of late
Achaemenid times.
Social organization
Little is known of Iranian social
organization in the period. In general, it was based on feudal lines that
were in part drawn by economic and social function.
Traditional Indo-Iranian society
consisted of three classes, the warriors or aristocracy, the priests,
and the farmers or herdsmen.
Crosscutting these divisions was
a tribal structure based on patrilineal descent. The title king of kings,
used even in the 20th century by the shahs of Iran, implies that
the central authority exercised power through a pyramidal structure that
was controlled at levels below the supreme authority by individuals who
were themselves, in a certain sense, kings.
Traditionally the king was elected
from a particular family by the warrior class; he was sacred, and a certain
royal charisma attached to his person.
Such a method of organizing and controlling society undoubtedly changed under the influences and demands of imperial power and underwent much modification as Iranians increasingly borrowed social and political ideas from the peoples they ruled. Even in later times, nevertheless, there is evidence that the original Iranian concepts of kingship and social organization were still honoured and remained the ideals of Persian culture.
Religion
Iranian religion in the pre-Achaemenid and Achaemenid periods is a subject on which there is little scholarly agreement. When the Iranians first entered the semilight of the protohistoric period, they were certainly polytheists whose religious beliefs and practices closely paralleled other Indo-Iranian and Indo-European groups at the same stage in history.
Their gods were associated with natural
phenomena, with social, military, and economic functions, and with abstract
concepts such as justice and truth. Their religious practices included,
among others, animal sacrifice, a reverence for fire, and the drinking
of the juice of the haoma plant, a natural intoxicant.
Probably about 600 BC there arose
in the northeast of the plateau the great Iranian religious prophet and
teacher Zoroaster. The history of the religion that he founded is even
more complicated and controversial than the history of pre-Zoroastrian
Iranian religion. Yet certain features of his religious reform stand out.
He was an ethical prophet of the
highest rank, stressing constantly the need to act righteously and to speak
the truth and abhor the lie.
In his teaching, the lie was almost
personified as the Druj, chief in the kingdom of the demons, to which he
relegated many of the earlier Indo-Iranian deities.
His god was Ahura Mazda, who, it
seems likely, was a creation in name and attributes of Zoroaster.
Though in a certain sense technically
monotheism, early Zoroastrianism viewed the world in strongly dualistic
terms, for Ahura Mazda and the "Lie" were deeply involved in a struggle
for the soul of man. Zoroaster, as might be expected, attempted to reform
earlier Iranian religious practices as well as beliefs.
He first rejected and then perhaps
allowed the practice of the haoma cult in a modified form, he clearly condemned
the practice of animal sacrifice, and he elevated to central importance
in the ritual a reverence for fire. Fire worship, however, is a misnomer
since the Zoroastrians have never worshipped fire but rather have revered
it as the symbol par excellence of truth.
The crucial question is: were the Achaemenids Zoroastrians or at least followers of the prophet in the terms in which they understood his message? Possibly Cyrus the Great was, probably Darius I was, and almost certainly Xerxes and his successors were. Such a simple answer to the question is possible, however, only if we understand that Zoroastrianism as a religion had already undergone considerable development and modification since Zoroaster's lifetime, influenced by beliefs and practices and by the religions of those people of the Middle East with whom the expanding Iranians had intimate contact.
The god of the Achaemenid kings was
the great Ahura Mazda, from whom they understood they had received their
empire and with whose aid they accomplished all deeds. Xerxes and his successors
mention other deities by name, but Ahura Mazda remains supreme. Darius
I names only Ahura Mazda in his inscriptions. More significant, however,
is Darius' tone, which is entirely compatible with the moral tone of Zoroaster
and, in some instances, even compatible with details of Zoroaster's theology.
During the reigns of Darius and
Xerxes, the archaeological record reveals that religious rituals were in
force that were also compatible with an evolved and evolving Zoroastrianism.
The haoma cult was practiced at Persepolis, but animal sacrifice is not
attested. More important, fire clearly played a central role in Achaemenid
religion.
There may have been religious overtones
in the quarrel between Cambyses and Darius on the one hand and the false
Bardiya, a Magian or Median priest, on the other. Certainly there were
religious as well as political motivations behind Xerxes' suppression of
the Daeva worshippers and the destruction of their temple. It is possible
that there was some conflict among the royal Achaemenids, who were followers
of one form of Zoroastrianism, the supporters of a different version of
Zoroastrianism as practiced by other Iranians, believers in older forms
of Iranian religion, and foreign religions, which in the light of the Prophet's
teachings were reprehensible.
Compromises and syncretism, however, probably could not be prevented. Though the Zoroastrian calendar was adopted as the official calendar of the empire in the reign of Artaxerxes I, by the time of Artaxerxes II, the ancient Iranian god Mithra and the goddess Anahita had been accepted in the royal religion alongside Ahura Mazda.
Thus, in a sense, the Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrians, but Zoroastrianism itself was probably no longer exactly the religion Zoroaster had attempted to establish. What the religion of the people beyond court circles may have been is almost impossible to say.
Achaemenid art, like Achaemenid religion,
was a blend of many elements.
In describing, with justifiable
pride, the construction of his palace at Susa, Darius says:
"The cedar timber--a mountain by
name Lebanon--from there it was brought /.../ the yaka-timber was brought
from Gandara and from Carmania. The gold was brought from Sardis and from
Bactria /.../ the precious stone lapis-lazuli and carnelian .
/.../ was brought from Sogdiana. The
/.../ turquoise from Chorasmia /.../ The silver and ebony /.../ from Egypt
/.../ the ornamentation from Ionia /.../ the ivory /.../ from Ethiopia
and from Sind and from Arachosia /.../ The stone-cutters who wrought the
stone, those were Ionians and Sardians.
The goldsmiths . . . were Medes
and Egyptians. The men who wrought the wood, those were Sardians
and Egyptians. The men who wrought the baked brick, those were Babylonians.
The men who adorned the wall, those
were Medes and Egyptians."
This was an imperial art on a scale
the world had not seen before. Materials and artists were drawn from all
the lands ruled by the Great King, and thus tastes, styles, and motifs
became mixed together in an eclectic art and architecture that in itself
mirrored the empire and the Persians' understanding of how that empire
ought to function.
Yet the whole was entirely Persian.
Just as the Achaemenids were tolerant in matters of local government and
custom, as long as Persians controlled the general policy and administration
of the empire, so also were they tolerant in art so long as the finished
and total effect was Persian.
At Pasargadae, the capital of Cyrus
the Great and Cambyses in Fars, the Persian homeland, and at Persepolis,
the neighbouring city founded by Darius the Great and used by all of his
successors, one can trace to a foreign origin almost all of the several
details in the construction and embellishment of the architecture and the
sculptured reliefs, but the conception, planning, and overall finished
product are distinctly Persian and could not have been created by any of
the foreign groups who supplied the king of kings with artistic talent.
So also with the small arts, at which the Persians excelled: fine metal
tableware, jewelry, seal cutting, weaponry and its decoration, and pottery.
It has been suggested that the Persians called on the subject peoples for
artists because they were themselves crude barbarians with little taste
and needed quickly to create an imperial art to match their sudden rise
to political power.
Yet excavations at sites from the
protohistoric period show this not to have been the case.
Cyrus may have been the leader of
Persian tribes not yet so sophisticated nor so civilized as the Babylonians
or Egyptians, but, when he chose to build Pasargadae, he had a long artistic
tradition behind him that was probably already distinctly Iranian and that
was in many ways the equal of any.
Two examples suffice: the tradition
of the columned hall in architecture and fine gold work. The former can
now be seen as belonging to an architectural tradition on the Iranian Plateau
that extended back through the Median period to at least the beginning
of the 1st millennium BC.
The rich Achaemenid gold work, which
inscriptions suggest may have been a specialty of the Medes, was in the
tradition of the delicate metalwork found in Iron Age II times at Hasanlu
and still earlier at Marlik.
In its carefully proportioned and
well-organized ground plan, rich architectural ornament, and magnificent
decorative reliefs, Persepolis, primarily the creation of Darius and Xerxes,
is one of the great artistic legacies of the ancient world.
The organization and achievement of the empire
At the centre of the empire sat the
king of kings. Around him was gathered a court composed of powerful hereditary
landholders, the upper echelons of the army, the harem, religiousfunctionaries,
and the bureaucracy that administered the whole.
This court lived mainly in Susa
but in the hot summer months went to Ecbatana (Hamadan), probably in the
spring to Persepolis in Fars, and perhaps sometimes to Babylon. In a smaller
version it travelled with the king when he was away in the provinces.
The provinces, or satrapies, were
ruled by governors (satraps), technically appointed by the central authority
but who often became hereditary subkings, particularly in the later years,
of the empire.
They were surrounded and assisted
in their functions by a court modelled on that of the central government
and were powerful officials. The great king was nevertheless theoretically
able to maintain considerable control in local affairs. He was the last
court of appeal in judicial matters.
He controlled directly the standing
military forces stationed in the provinces, though as time went on,
the military and civil authority in the provinces tended to become combined
under the satrap.
The king was also aided in keeping
control in the provinces by the so-called king's eyes, or better, the king's
ears, officials from the central government who traveled throughout the
empire and who reported directly back to the king on what they learned.
The number of satrapies and their
boundaries varied greatly from time to time; at the beginning of Darius'
reign there were 20 provinces. In general, as time went on, the number
of satrapies increased, partly because of the need to reassert control
over the satraps by decreasing their power base, partly because the feudal
structure that underlay Persian society required rewarding more and more
people with a role in government, and partly because the original 20 satrapies
were undoubtedly simply too large to permit efficient administration.
The army was a particularly important element within the empire. It, too, developed and changed with time. After Cyrus the Persian tribal levy, based on the responsibility of all male Persians to fight for the king, was replaced by a professional army supplemented by a troop levy from the subject peoples in time of intensive military activity.
The elite of the standing army were
the 10,000 "immortals" composed of Persians and Medes, 1,000 of whom were
the personal guard of the king.
The person who controlled this elite,
as did Darius on the death of Cambyses, usually controlled all. The troops
of the imperial levy fought with the regular army in national units, were
armed according to their individual customs, but were usually officered
by Persians.
Permanent bodies of troops were
stationed at strategic points throughout the empire, and, to judge from
the garrison at Elephantine in Egypt, these were actually military colonies,
firmly settled into the local countryside. Greek mercenaries were used
with increasing frequency in later years, and many Greeks fought faithfully
for Persian silver.
Both the civil and the military administration, as well as public and private trade, were greatly facilitated by the famous royal Achaemenid road system.
An early
iranian soldier
Communications throughout the empire
were better than any previous Middle Eastern power had maintained.
The famous road from Susa to Sardis
in western Asia Minor is the best known of these imperial highways. It
was an all-weather road, maintained by the state. Over it ran a governmental
postal system based on relay stations with remounts and fresh riders located
a day's ride apart.
The speed with which a message could
travel from the provinces to the king at Susa was remarkable.
On the whole, Persian rule sat lightly on the subject peoples, at least under the early Achaemenids. It was a conscious policy of Cyrus and Darius to permit conquered nations to retain their own religion, customs, their methods of doing business, and even to some extent their forms of government. Cyrus' attitude toward the Babylonians, which led to his being accepted as the rightful successor of Nabonidus, his willingness to permit the Jews to return to Palestine and to their own way of life, and his successors' concern that this promise be honoured; Cambyses' behaviour in Egypt and his acceptance by the Egyptians as founder of a legitimate new Egyptian dynasty; and the policy adopted under Mardonius toward the Ionian cities following their rebellion are all examples of such a policy.
Perhaps even too often in the later empire, rebellious peoples, governments, and leaders were forgiven and not suppressed with the thoroughness sometimes characteristic of other regimes. Lapses from this policy, such as Xerxes' violent reaction to rebellion in Babylon, stand out in the record.
Law played an important role in the
administration of the empire, and stories of Persian justice abound in
the Greek sources. Darius particularly wished to be remembered as the great
lawgiver, and law reform was one of the cornerstones in his program for
reorganizing the empire.
To judge from the Babylonian evidence, two sets of law, possibly administered by two sets of courts, were in force in the provinces. One was the local law undoubtedly based on custom and previous local codifications; the other was the Persian, or imperial, law, based ultimately on the authority of the great king.
A new word for law appeared in the
Middle East in Achaemenid times, the Iranian data, and was borrowed by
the Semitic languages used in the empire.
In Babylonian and Aramaic, sources
give evidence for Persian judges called by the Iranian word data-bar. These
were probably the judges of the imperial courts. With legal reform came
reform and unification of tax structures.
The tax structure of the empire was
apparently based on the principle that all the conquered lands were the
actual property of the king. Thus taxes were rather rents, and the Persians
and their land, Fars, by virtue of not being a conquered people, were always
tax-free. Each satrapy was required to pay a fixed yearly amount in gold
or silver and each vassal state paid a fixed tribute in kind.
Again going on the Babylonian evidence,
where in previous times agricultural taxes were levied in fixed amounts
regardless of the fluctuating quality of the harvest, under Darius all
land was surveyed, an estimate of its yield based on an average of the
harvests over several years was from time to time established, and taxes
were levied in fixed amounts based on a percentage of that average yield.
This was not quite an income tax, since it was not based on a percentage
of each year's production, but it was at least a reasonable figure based
on a reasonable average production.
Breakdowns often occurred in the
Achaemenids' effort to maintain a productive balance between local social
structures, customs, laws, and government and the demand of the empire.
The failure of the Persians to find
such a balance when dealing with what was, for them, that extremely strange
system of social and political organization, the Greek polis, or city-state,
probably lay at the heart of their never-ending troubles in Ionia as much
as did the power and ambitions of mainland Greeks. Yet even the Ionians,
at the best of times, often realized the mutual advantages and benefits
of the king's peace and a unified western Asia under a tolerant central
administration.
The economy of the empire was very
much founded on that king's peace; it was when the peace broke down with
ever-increasing frequency during the last century of Achaemenid rule that
the economy of the empire went into a decline that undoubtedly contributed
significantly to eventual political and military collapse.
Wealth in the Achaemenid world was
very much founded on land and on agriculture. Land was the principal reward
that the king had available for those who gave service or who were in positions
of great political or military power in the empire.
Under Darius there was a measure
of land called a "bow" that was originally a unit considered sufficient
to support one bowman, who then paid his duty for the land in military
service.
At the other end of the scale were
enormous family estates, which often increased in size over the years and
which were or became hereditary holdings. They were often administered
by absentee landlords. Such major landholdings were, as one would expect,
usually in the hands of Iranians, but non-Iranians were also able to amass
similar wealth and power, thereby testifying once again to the inherent
tolerance with which the empire was administered.
The Achaemenids themselves took a positive role in the encouragement of agriculture by investing state funds and effort in irrigation and the improvement of horticulture.
They also invested in and endeavoured
to encourage trade, a major source of imperial wealth.
The effect of the state-maintained
road system on the encouragement of trade has already been mentioned. Equal
attention was paid to the development of seaborne trade.
State-sponsored voyages of exploration
were undertaken in order to search for new markets and new resources. Darius
completed a project, begun by the Egyptians, of linking the Nile with the
Red Sea by a canal, so that routes across the Arabian Sea and into the
Persian Gulf could be used to link the eastern and western ends of his
empire. As part of the same program, port development on the Persian Gulf
coast was encouraged.
An imperial standardization of weights
and measures, efforts to encourage the development and use of coinage,
and the standardization in the king's name of that coinage were all policies
intended to encourage commerce and economic activity within the realm.
Banking played a role in the economy.
Documents have survived from a family
banking business in Babylonia--the house of Murashu and Sons of Nippur--covering
the years c. 455-403 BC; the firm evidently prospered greatly by lending
money and by acting as a middleman in the system of tax collection. Interest
rates were high, but borrowers were numerous.
As time went on, there were more
and more such borrowers, for the later empire is marked by a general economic
decline. The principal cause for this decline was the unsettled political
conditions, but other, more indirect causes were unwise government interference
in the economy, overtaxation, and the removal of too much hard money from
the economy.
Gold and silver tended to drain
into the treasury of the central government from the provinces, and too
little found its way back into the economy.
Disastrous inflation was the result. The large sums of money paid to foreign mercenaries and as bribes to foreign governments must have also contributed to an unfavourable balance of payments that in turn stimulated inflation. Such conditions hardly strengthened the empire and must have contributed, in ways that cannot be documented with certainty, to the political unrest that was their own main cause.
Ultimately, the achievement of the
Achaemenid Persians was that they ruled with much creative tolerance over
an area and a time that, for both the Middle East and for Europe, saw the
end of the ancient and the beginning of the modern world.
In one sense, the ancient Middle
East died when Cyrus marched into Babylon. Others would argue that its
death came when Alexander burned Persepolis.
The question remains open. What
is clear is that the Achaemenid Empire, the largest anyone had ever yet
tried to hold together and one that was not to be surpassed until Rome
reached its height, was a profound force in western Asia and in Europe
during an important period of ferment and transition in human history.
That period witnessed major developments in art, philosophy, literature, historiography, religion, exploration, economics, and science, and those developments provided the direct background for the further changes, along similar lines, that made the Hellenistic period so important in history.
Hellenism probably would not have been possible, at least not in the form we know it, if it had had to build directly on the rather more narrow and less ambitious base of the individual civilizations of Bablyon, Egypt, or Greece.
In a sense the Achaemenid Persians passed on a concept of empire that, much modified by others, has remained something of a model throughout history of how it is possible for diverse peoples with variant customs, languages, religions, laws, and economic systems to flourish with mutual profit under a central government. In narrower terms, but for the Iranians themselves no less important, the Achaemenid Empire was the beginning of the Iranian nation, one of the pivotal peoples in the modern Middle East.
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