Literature of the Achaemenid Persian empire

by Megabyzusxasca

I've read a lot of classical Greek stuff written around the Persian empire but nothing written within it. From what I've read online there seems to be an enormous dirth of surviving lit. Can anyone explain why this is as the few explanations I've seen seem weak... Also could anyone recommend me anything worth reading of what has survived?

lcnielsen

It is a mistake to use Ancient Greece as a baseline for what kind or amount of literature to expect. Not only is the amount of writings that survive from the period anomalously high, the city-state of Athens specifically is heavily overrepresented. This isn't just due to remarkable productivity, but also because of a very long tradition of copying this particular set of manuscripts, into the medieval era, whence our manuscripts.

The Lingua Franca of the Achaemenid Empire was Aramaic, and Elamite was heavily used in its core. The administrative (&c) documents that survive are almost exclusively in these languages. Dareios I did create a writing system for Old Persian, but it was not very widely used, being attested only in royal inscriptions and a single tablet, compared to ten thousand or so tablets in Elamite and Aramaic. To whatever extent literature was produced in the various parts of the empire, the dominance of Greek after Alexander's conquests would have served as a very severe bottleneck for its survival.

The Achaemenid Empire was of course a very diverse and cosmopolitan state, and although one can perhaps point to the dominance of oral tradition in Iranian culture as making the production of "literature" as we think of it less likely (the Zoroastrian and more generally Iranian oral tradition seems to have flourished), the sheer size of the empire means that there must have been a substantial amount of literary works produced within it. Yet these were works written in a particular context, for particular audiences, that just didn't stay relevant to the shifting ruling classes in the various successor states to the Achaemenid Empire, in the way that Greek writings of the same period did (or the way e.g. Chinese literature remained relevant in its locale).

While it is tempting to imagine catastrophes such as Alexander's burning of Persepolis responsible (never mind that Persepolis was a large estate, not a city), all it really takes is for there to no longer be a leisure class or professional class interested in copying works, for them to be forgotten.

Also could anyone recommend me anything worth reading of what has survived?

Could you be a bit more specific, it's not clear to me what you're looking for. Amelie Kuhrt's Corpus of Sources is very extensive, if you're looking for sources on the Achaemenids.

Trevor_Culley

Part 1/2

I'm going to expand a bit on the Achaemenid section of this this answer that I wrote last week.

First, why does so little survive. Gradually over the 8-7th centuries BCE, and rapidly from the 5th century onward, the media of writing began to change. Since the earliest cuneiform records from the Sumerians, written records were created on hard, inorganic platforms. For permanent structures - usually monuments or buildings - it would be chiseled directly into stone. For smaller, less permanent, or more mobile documents, it would be inscribed into clay tablets. If it was only a short term document, the clay could be left wet and be wiped clean when you were done. If someone wanted that same document to last, they just had to fire and harden the clay. Cuneiform writing was developed around this system. The complex system of angular lines and wedges were well suited to a chisel and stone or a stylus and tablet. They were less well suited to being drawn in ink.

Gradually from the 10-6th centuries BCE, then rapidly beginning in the 5th, Aramaic became the lingua franca of the ancient Near East. The spread of the Achaemenid Empire, putting a larger area under one government than ever before, hastened the process. Aramaic, unlike the other languages in the Persian heartland in western Iran and Mesopotamia, was written using an alphabetic script modeled on the Phoenician alphabet, which itself was derived from an earlier Egyptian predecessor. Like other writing that developed out of Egypt (namely hieroglyphs), these alphabetic scripts were well suited to writing with ink on sheets of papyrus. This aided in its spread around the region because papyrus was very cheap, easy to move, and widespread (by the time of the Achaemenids at least). These were all benefits over clay and stone. Aramaic itself was also easier to learn, it only required 22 simple letters, rather than the hundreds of symbols from Mesopotamian Akkadian or the Elamite traditionally used to keep records in Persia itself.

The problem is that papyrus is not just organic, but a very brittle organic medium. Outside of the driest locations, like Egypt, it cannot survive for centuries, let alone millennia. The trade off for the generally more convenient form of communication, was recopying all of those Aramaic documents on to new papyrus every couple of decades. If someone stopped copying, then that document could be lost.

That brings me to the second big reason that Achaemenid documentation did not survive. Alexander the Great and his successors. After the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire, the Geco-Macedonian successor kings did not prioritize or even have particular need to maintain Achaemenid records. They were establishing their own new systems. They kept some infrastructure in place, but replaced a lot of the administrators and started keeping their own records. Most of Achaemenid territory was in a state of disorder or semi-anarchy for the first decade or so after Alexander died. That was a lot of time to neglect the Achaemenid records, and in that time, political power shifted away from Persis and Elymais to Babylonia and Syria. A lot of Achaemenid continuity was lost in that time, and the Seleucids never steeped themselves in Persian traditions the way the Parthians eventually would. So there was a century and half of the imperial government neglecting Persia in general. That's not even including the vast archives of papyrus that were presumably lost instantly when Alexander burned Persepolis.

There's also the significant culture difference between the Achaemenids and Greek-influenced cultures, including our own. Beginning as early as the 8-7th centuries BCE with the Illiad, the Greeks developed a notable passion for writing down long narratives. Starting with early chroniclers like Hecataeus, but really exploding with Herodotus, that passion was turned to events in living memory, and to recent recorded history. In the Persian world, this was a largely Greek phenomenon. Certainly the dynamic narrative style of authors like Herodotus or Thucydides was a Greek innovation. This was not the case in many other cultures, in the modern west, we tend to think about history in very similar way to the Greeks. It's a story, a narrative of past events in detail checked against multiple accounts of the same event. Most cultures in the region simply didn't approach their own history on those terms.

In Mesopotamia, partly due to the complexity of cuneiform, writing was mostly used for record keeping. Sometimes this included historic events, but usually in the form of royal inscriptions commemorating a victory or ceremony or as chronicles. The Babylonian Chronicles continued recording the event of each year well into the Seleucid period, but were more like a catalog of things that had happened than a narrative history. In Persia itself, the situation is even less helpful. Certainly, history was remembered and passed on, and stories were told, but not (we think) in writing. Persian was only written down for the first time after the Achaemenids were in power. Darius the Great even claimed to have been the first to write down an Iranian (Aryan) language, and as far as we can tell, he was right. So Persian history for the Persians themselves was largely an oral history, outside of a few key events recorded in monuments. So, as Persis lost its importance, its traditional leadership, and its relative wealth and comfort, many of the stories of the Achaemenid period were no longer told, and those that were told were meshed so heavily with other traditions legends as to be almost unrecognizable.