Topic: peoples (3)

• EventThe Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)

  The conquest of Babylon by Cyrus II in the autumn of 539 BCE: the last native Mesopotamian empire, ruled by the absent and religiously heterodox Nabonidus and his regent-son Belshazzar, fell to Persia after a decisive battle at Opis, the surrender of Sippar, and a near-bloodless entry into the great city itself. It is the event that made Cyrus lord of the ancient Near East and gave the Achaemenids the world's richest province and the tolerationist template Darius inherited. It is also a source-critical trap of the first order: the two fullest contemporary accounts, the Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder, were both composed by the Marduk priesthood that welcomed the conqueror, and both are propaganda in his service, so that our clearest witnesses to the fall are the least neutral.

• PeopleThe Medes

  The Iranian people of the north-western Zagros, settled about the plain of Ecbatana (modern Hamadān), who by the Greek account raised the first great Iranian kingdom: a line of four kings, Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares and Astyages, that broke Assyria (Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to the Medes and Babylonians together) and ruled 'upper Asia' until Cyrus the Persian overthrew Astyages in 550. Whether a centralised 'Median empire' truly existed, or whether the Greeks retrojected a Persian-style state onto a looser confederacy, is one of the sharpest debates in the field. Under the Achaemenids the Medes were the near-equals of the Persians, the two ruling Iranian peoples, so that Greeks called the whole empire, its army and its wars simply 'the Medes' and treason to their own side 'medism'.

• SourceThe Persepolis Fortification Archive

  The working paperwork of Darius I's own heartland: tens of thousands of clay tablets from a bastion in the Persepolis fortification wall, recording the intake and disbursement of food, livestock, and travel rations across Fars and Elam in the middle of the reign. Dry, sealed, never meant for posterity, they are the empire's most candid source, and they quietly overturn several of the Greek stereotypes about Persia, above all the harem cliché.