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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom Holland
Started reading
July 29, 2022
Darius, not content with building one new capital from scratch, then began scouting round virgin sites in Persia itself, looking to found a second and even greater one.
Pasargadae,
Mount of Mercy,
Vahyzdata
Now, abutting the slope of the mountain, Darius ordered the const...
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terrace, a platform with perfect views on to the killing field below, ‘beautiful and impervious’23 – a fitting ba...
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‘Paa...
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The king’s appetite for centralisation was insatiable.
Persepolis
Darius had not spent the first years of his reign shoring up the empire for nothing; and he was resolved never again to see it threatened by collapse. With his habitual energy, he threw himself into the most overwhelming task of administration that any monarch had ever faced: nothing less than to set the world upon a sound financial footing. This was the same challenge that had destroyed both Cambyses and Bardiya; but Darius’ talents, once again, were to prove the equal of his ambition.
The financial crisis that had racked the empire in the last year of Cambyses’ reign was briskly resolved: the ramshackle system of tribute that had prevailed under Cyrus and his sons was streamlined and reformed; levies in every province, to the far ends of the known world, were carefully fixed. It was an unprecedented achievement, and one destined to endure for almost two centuries as the bedrock of Persian power. Even more than his generalship or his genius for propaganda, it was Darius’ punctilious mastery of fiscal policy that pulled the empire back from the brink.
A truth illustrated by the very fabric of the palaces themselves – for tribute receipts to the Great King were not merely the stuff of dusty archives, but of splendid and sacred drama.
During his months in Babylon, Darius would have seen how much of that city’s greatness, from the fittings of its palaces to the many languages on its streets, bore witness to the scale of its vanished empire. It was only proper, then, that Susa and Persepolis, as the capitals of a dominion incalculably more extensive than that of Babylon, should have lavished on them ‘materials brought from afar’.
If furnishings could be reckoned the measure of greatness, then Darius, with his grands projets, had hit unprecedented heights.
Sardis,
Bac...
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lapis ...
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Sogdi...
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I...
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I...
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Ethi...
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Arach...
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And what of the Babylonians, whose city had previously been the capital of the world? Their allotted task was to dig foundations and bake mud bricks. Not the most glamorous responsibilities, it might be thought; but Darius, when he came to enumerate the various subject peoples who had contributed to Susa, put the men of Babylon at the head of the list.
The symbolism was profound, and – Darius being Darius – no doubt deliberate. As he would well have known, it was the practice in Mesopotamia never to clear away the rubble of toppled monuments, but always to seal it before raising new structures on top of the ruins. A temple, for instance, even though it might tower into the heavens, would be founded on the detritus of the past. And so it was with the palaces of the Great King.
Susa
Persepolis
Where Babylon seethed with an energy that derived from its own awesome size, the capitals of the Persian monarch, modelled according to their founder’s every whim, held up splendid mirrors to the harmonies of order. This is not to say that they were wholly lacking in metropolitan character: already, even before the foundation of Persepolis, that ubiquitous banking family, the Egibis, had opened an office in the area, soon to be followed by other merchants and financiers; bureaucrats swarmed everywhere; craftsmen and labourers, transported from all corners of the world, brought their own hint
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It did not require the Great King to emerge from his palace into a stinking mass of humanity for him to flaunt and represent his sway. The detail of a tax payment, safely logged inside an archive; the glinting on a palace door of rare and precious metals, quarried from an incalculably distant mountain range; the portrayal on a frieze of some humble tributary – an Arab, or an Ethiopian, or a Gandharan – his submission forever frozen by the pattern of the design; all these spoke with perfect clarity of the timeless nature of Persian power.
The covenant embodied by Persian rule could not have been made any clearer: harmony in exchange for humility; protection for abasement; the blessings of a world order for obedience and submission.
For the logic was glaring. If it was the destiny of the Persian people to bring peace to a bleeding world, then those who defied them were clearly the agents of anarchy and darkness. Tools of the Lie as they were, they menaced not merely Darius’ empire but the cosmos that it mirrored.
In 519 BC,
Elamites’ revolt,
inveterate rebels, ...
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Darius, leading an army against them, was betrayed by his guide, and found himself lost and parched amid the bleak steppes. With no water for miles, nor any hint of rain, the king had little choice but to take desperate measures: climbing to the summit of a hill, he duly divested himself of his robes and kidaris, and thrust his sceptre in the ground. As dawn broke, purging the shadows of darkness from the earth, the King of Kings raised his voice in his prayer. His appeals were answered: rain began to fall from th...
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Admittedly, unprecedented though the Great King’s reach was, it did not yet quite embrace every limit of the world.
Jaxartes, the steppelands of Asia
Af...
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Europe,
In 518 BC
gazing eastwards, he dispatched a naval squadron to reconnoitre the mysterious lands along the Indus. Invasion swiftly followed; the Punjab was subdued; a tribute of gold dust, elephants and similar wonders was imposed. Even the great river itself was placed symbolically under the yoke: its waters were brought to Darius in an immense jar, and placed in his treasury, there to join the waters of other rivers, likewise held captive to the greater glory of the King.
The supplicants themselves, withdrawing from the dreadful presence of the king, could have no possible doubts as to the significance of the gesture they had performed. They had taken a step from which there could be no retreat. They had become a part, however humble, of the empire of the world.
Punjab,
Otanes,
Ae...
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S...
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Here, for Darius, was a development of much promise. With the rich plains of the Indus pacified, his attentions could now be turned to the opposite end of his dominion. Two continents had already submitted to his supremacy – why should not a third? The gaze of the Great King, inexorably, began to fix itself on the West.
Back in the early years of the Persian rise to greatness, while Cyrus was still in Lydia, he had found himself unexpectedly visited by a delegation from across the Aegean Sea.
The ambassadors were Greek, but quite different from the Greeks of Asia, whose cities, prosperous and tempting, Cyrus was plotting at that very moment to crush and make his own. The strangers wore their hair long; they sported distinctive red cloaks; they spoke not with the subtlety and sense of propriety that conventionally marked an ambassador’s language, but brusquely, bluntly, rudely.
Ionians
Spartans.