ABSTRACT
This chapter falls into two parts of very uneven length. The first (16, Sections A & B) consists almost exclusively of a selection of texts from the Persepolis archives. 1 They illustrate the detailed workings of the administration in the imperial heartland and throw light on the handling of local production, the labour force, bureaucracy and a variety of large estates. In the second part, the geographical perspective widens, bringing in material from other parts of the empire. The documentation includes Elamite texts from beyond Fars, Babylonian legal documents, a passing biblical reference, snatches of Greek historians and directives sent to managers of Persian estates in Egypt. Although this evidence is of a very different type from the Persepolis texts, it indicates that some of the governmental practices and patterns of landholding definable in Fars were replicated in the empire as a whole.
