I am reading about the reliefs of the tribute bearers to King Darius I at Persepolis. Basically, they are a bunch of carvings of different peoples from around the empire such as Elamites and Lydians paying their tributes to the Achaemenid Persians. One of the texts I read suggests that that facts that they are all wearing different clothing and had different hairstyles is important because it shows that the Persians let the people they subjugated retain their cultural identity.
As a result of this, I was wondering wether or not previous Mesopotamia ruling empires like the Assyrians or Babylonians forced everyone to wear the same style of clothing as they themselves did.
For reference: The reliefs themselves http://www.zoroastrian.org.uk/vohuman/SlideShow/Tribute%20Bearers%20of%20Persepolis/Tribute%20Bearers%20of%20Persepolis.htm
Note: This is not the site wear I got the information from, it is just the only one I could find that lays out a bunch of the reliefs on the same page.
Thank you!
No, as I suppose you realize, the very suggestions is pretty silly. What this relief shows, much like Dareios' inscription at Susa where he describes the many lands the workers who built his palace came from, is the vast extent of the Great King's dominion and the many lands he rules over. I think the most telling image in this regard, which is pretty typical of Near Eastern Royal Ideology, is the relief at Behistun which shows Dareios addressing different populations in fetters, with a religious symbol overhead. It was in fact part of this ideology to describe subjects and loyal ministers as "bond-servants" or "slaves" of the Great King.
The Achaemenid Empire was probably more efficicently administered than e.g. the Neo-Assyrian and might have established a much more pervasive image of the Great King as a divinely sanctioned ruler - it certainly seems to have been able to mobilize resources on a previously unseen scale. But it was still a Near Eastern Empire; the symbolic notion of the King's physical subjugation of the population, backed up with incredibly violent punishments of traitors, was by all appearances a core part of its ideology.
You may be interested in Amelie Kuhrt's The Persian Empire, which is a vast source corpus on the Achaemenid Period. www.iranicaonline.org is another great source.
