Category: Articles

Thomas, Rosalind. 2022. Greek Historians, Persika and the Persian Empire (late 5th.c. – 4th.c.). In: Efi Papadodima (ed.), Ancient Greek Literature and the Foreign: Athenian Dialogues II, 119-138. Berlin: De Gruyter.

The chapter discusses the ways in which various Greek writers en-gaged with the complexities of the Persian Empire, especially Herodotus, Xenophon, Aristotle, and some fourth-century writers (fragmentary) of Persika. It examines the tension between Greek hostility towards Persia and the conventional stereotypes, and their need to understand more about the Empire in a new form of ethnography. New insights into the Persian Empire (and new evidence) encourage returning to the Greek writers afresh and examining them from different angles: the chapter argues that amidst the clichés, there was also a seriousness and urgency in the fourth century about trying to understand the Persian Empire and its monarchy.

Henkelman, Wouter. F.M. 2022. God is in the Detail: The Divine Determinative and the Expression of Animacy in Elamite with an Appendix on the Achaemenid Calendar. In: Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum & Ingo Schrakamp (eds.), Transfer, Adaption und Neukonfiguration von Schrift- und Sprachwissen im Alten Orient (Episteme, 25), 405-477. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Instead of giving an abstract of the above-cited paper, a detailed table of its contents will follow:

1. Introduction

1.1. Of Aryan dictators and Elamite Tape Recorders

1.2. Iranian Elamite

2. Redefining the Divine?

3. Months as Divine or Numinous Beings

4. Semantic Animacy in Middle and Neo-Elamite

4.1. Semantic Animacy Expressed by Determinatives

4.2. Expression of Semantic Animacy by Primary Nominal Suffixes

4.3. Expression of Semantic Animacy by Animate Concord

4.4. Animacy in Elam: An Interim Summary

5. The Months of Achaemenid Pārsa

5.1. Cultural Preferences from Persepolis to the Fahliyān

5.2. Continuity and Change

5.3. The Importance of the Old Iranian Month Names

6. Appendix: the Achaemenid Calendar

6.1. A Multilingual Calendar

6.2. A Calendar for the Empire

Potts, Daniel T. 2021. Camels and their rations in the Persepolis Fortification Archive: An enigma and its variations. Egitto e Vicino Oriente 44, 231-247.

The feeding habits of camels entail exceedingly long periods (6-9 hours) of daily grazing and browsing unless fodder and/or rations are given to them as dietary supplements. Historical sources from the 17th to the 20th century attest to the use of such rations, particularly when camels were working, whether in commercial caravans or on military campaigns, and time constraints or a shortage of grazing would not provide the caloric intake necessary to keep the animals healthy and able to sustain their workload. These sources provide the key to understanding a small number of Persepolis Fortification Archive texts recording the disbursement of flour rations for camels. They also explain how ‘flour,’ normally a coarsely ground meal made of barley or another grain, was prepared with the addition of water, oil and/or other additives (fish, legumes), and formed into balls that were fed to camels as supplemental foodstuff. The study also presents some thoughts on long-distance travel involving camels. Based on several historical itineraries from the 17th and 18th century, it is possible to calculate likely rates of travel per day and time out for rest days, suggesting how long it may have taken to cover some of the distances mentioned in the Persepolis texts.

Tuplin, Christopher. 2022. The intersection of gods and kings in Achaemenid Iran. In: Eleni Pachoumi (ed.), Conceptualising divine unions in the Greek and Near Eastern worlds, 45-73. Leiden & Boston: Brill.

From the introduction of the chapter:

I start with two premises. First, among conceptions of divinity those around royal divinity have a strong claim to interest. Second, there is no evidence that the Achaemenid king was categorized or worshipped as a god in the imperial heartland. The (rather few) Greek sources that directly suggested this were wrong. (The ones that spoke of an isotheos king or skated round the issue in other ways are, of course, another matter.) But our business here is with intersections between king and divinity other than simple identification of the king as a god or attribution of his success to the help of a god. Is Achaemenid royal exceptionalism due not just to divine favour but to an inherent divine quality? There has been a growing tendency to perceive mitigations of the king’s human status, even in the heartland. I have discussed these matters in an earlier essay (Tuplin 2017). Here I elaborate on some material that appears more briefly there. I do so in three sections: (1) A tale of two statues. (2) Royal rhetoric in the heartland religious environment. (3) Image, light and daimōn: royal divine aura in Greek texts.