Is there a consensus on the pre-Achaemenid Persian kingdoms?

by ypana3

I should apologise for being somewhat vague in my title, but this is a topic of great confusion for me. I say Persian, rather than Iranian to specifically avoid the Medians, though I understand it might be impossible as they were something of a hegemon.

King Kuras of Parsua/Parsuwash/Parsumash has been identified as Cyrus I of Anshan. My understanding is that there are two views: first, that Anshan and Parsua are the same; and second, that Parsua was a separate kingdom somewhere around Lake Urmia, from which they migrated to Anshan. This is a great source of confusion for me.

  1. What are the sources for Parsua/Parsumash? Is it simply the Akkadian reading of Parsa, or is it a separate name for a separate region?

  2. Is there any consensus on the location on this kingdom, i.e. whether it is synonymous with Anshan? Because Old Persian cuneiform was not recorded until the Behistun inscription, could it be that references to 'Anshan' in the Cyrus Cylinder were references to a Persian kingdom, using a name familiar to Babylonians (for the same reason as he had paid tribute to Marduk)?

  3. Is the only source of the Teispids being kings of Anshan the Cyrus Cylinder? Could it not be interpreted that Cyrus' progenitors were merely the chiefs of his clan, and Cyrus said Anshan for the sake of simplicity, or out of ignorance?

  4. If Parsua has an Iranian etymology and the Teispids were Kings of this land, wouldn't that support the view that Cyrus II was Iranian rather than Elamite?

I apologise if I have made any false assumptions, I am by no means a historian. Please feel free to correct me. It just seems that there is so much contradicting information on this topic, and sources are few and far between. Thanks for reading, and I would greatly appreciate any responses.

dub_sar_tur

That is a very complicated question. The Encyclopedia Iranica is a great, peer-reviewed source but I would also recommend having a look at Amélie Kuhrt's The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources (2007) and the article:

  • Rollinger, Robert (1999) "Zur Lokalizierung von Parsu(m)a(š) in der Fārs und zu einigen Fragen der frühen Persischen Geschichte." Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 89 pp. 115-139

To try to answer your four questions:

  1. Parsua and Parsumaš appear in Assyrian royal inscriptions and Babylonian chronicles, its not clear whether they are one name or two.
  2. In the 9th century BCE, Parsua/Parsumaš seems to be somewhere to the north and west of modern Fars (the mountains of southwest Iran). Rollinger thinks Assurbanipal still believed it was there in the seventh century. By 520 BCE later Darius says that Fars is Parsa. In the old days people assumed that nations were eternal and one people had migrated from one place to another, but the passes are in the wrong direction (east-west more than north-south) and its just as possible that in the chaos of the collapse of the Elamite and Assyrian kingdoms, kingdoms which had ruled the Zagos mountains for a long time, a small number of people migrated south and became powerful in the area around Anšan. In that case, the people of this area may have acquired a sense of national identity as they were unified under Cyrus the Great, which Darius the Great made use of when he killed the king and seized the throne and had to fight rival claimants based in Susa (modern Khuzestan in southwest Iran) and Babylon which had traditionally been the places of kingship. He needed to find a reason for supporters to gather around him, other than "I killed the old king," so he said "we are all Persians and they are not." And the basis for this national identity could have been as arbitrary as the formation of a German nation in the 19th century, or the division of British settlers in North America into Canadians and Americans.

The big advantage of this view is that it relies on what Cyrus and his contemporaries wrote, not on what we think they should have written.

  1. No, a cylinder seal is labeled "Cyrus the Anshanite, son of Teispes" in Elamite (although this seal was used in Darius' day, so it may be just another Cyrus and Teispes not two kings) and the Nabonidus Chronicle from Babylonia says that "Cyrus, king of Anšan" defeated Astyages the king of the Medes.

  2. No. After all, England, Wales, and Aquitaine had etymologies in three different language families, but one family of Angevin kings and queens! And most people in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania do not identify as Wampanoag or Latins, despite their lands having Wampanoag and Latin names.