Ebook: Political memory in and after the Persian Empire

This volume results from an international symposium of the same name held in Leiden, the Netherlands, on 18–20 June 2014. The symposium grew out of a recognition that the various disciplines which deal with Achaemenid hegemony offer starkly different assessments of Persian kingship. While Assyriologists treat Cyrus’s heirs as legitimate successors of the Babylonian kings, biblical scholars often speak of a “kingless era” in which the priesthood took over the function of the Davidic monarch. Egyptologists see their land as uniquely independently minded despite conquests, while Hellenistic scholarship tends to evaluate the interface between Hellenism and native traditions without reference to the previous two centuries of Persian rule. This discrepancy prompted us to seek a broader context for assessing interactions with the experience of Persian kingship, and to discover how much these differing assessments were due to diversity within the empire and how much they were due to disciplinary assumptions.

This volume comprises revised presentations from the 2014 symposium plus an additional contribution by Melanie Wasmuth, this introduction, and an overall critical assessment by R. J. van der Spek, who was also present at the symposium. We regret that not all of the participants of the symposium were able to contribute to this publication, especially with the resulting loss of discussion of certain areas of the empire (sadly even the heartland itself), but we trust the ones collected here profitably explore the issues from a variety of perspectives.