INTRODUCTION

The Achaemenid empire is the earliest and largest of the known ‘world empires’. It developed around a tiny core in the modern province of Fars in south Iran – the modern form of the Old Persian name for the region, Parsa, called by classical Greeks ‘Persis’ – our ‘Persia’ (cf. RLA X, s.v. Persien, Perser. B). ‘Achaemenid’ derives from the eponymous founder of the ruling dynasty, ‘Achaemenes’; it was the name of the Persian royal clan (3, no.5), members of which ruled the empire for more than 200 years. Its expansion began c.550, with the astonishing conquests of Cyrus (II) the Great (559-530) and Cambyses (II, 530-522); it was brought to an end by the conquests of Alexander of Macedon between 334 and 323 – the turning point in his campaign came with the death of the last Achaemenid emperor, Darius III, in 330 (see Chapter 10). On Alexander’s death, his empire was shaken by struggles among his generals and its territorial integrity was shattered (see the quote above). In contrast, the Achaemenid rulers controlled a territory stretching from the Hellespont to north-west India, including Egypt (most of the time) and extending into Central Asia up to the frontiers of modern Kazakhstan for over two hundred years. At the time, there was no other state of even remotely comparable size or power, in contrast to later kingdoms occupying the same territory (the Ptolemaic and Seleucid realms; the Parthian and Sassanian empires). It is possible that we should understand the emergence of new, expansionist states along the Persian empire’s frontiers in the last decades of Achaemenid rule (such as Macedon to the north-west and Mauryan India to the south-east) as occurring, at least partly, in response to Persian imperial pressures, although this is an aspect that remains to be analysed in full.