Book Review: Persian Responses: Political and Cultural Interactions with(in) the Achaemenid Empire

Christopher Tuplin (ed.), Persian Responses: Political and Cultural Interactions with(in) the Achaemenid Empire. Swansea: The University of Wales Press, 2007

Reviewed by Stanley M. Burstein

The last several decades have witnessed a virtual revolution in scholarship on the history of the Persian Empire. With rare exceptions such as A. T. Olmstead, historians in the first half of the twentieth century made little effort to write the history of the Achaemenids from the perspective of Persia. Instead, the history of the last and greatest of the ancient Near Eastern Empires was treated almost as an appendix to the history of Greece with the Persian invasions of Greece in 490 and 480/79 BC and their background almost eclipsing all other aspects of the empire's history. . . .

The focus switches to the provinces of the Persian Empire in the next four papers. In "Darius I: Suez and Hibis" Alan B. Lloyd deconstructs the evidence for Darius I as a benevolent ruler of Egypt supposedly provided by the Suez Stelae and his role in the construction of the temple of Amun at Hibis by demonstrating, first, that in actuality Darius had nothing to do with the construction of the Hibis temple; and, second, that, while the Hieroglyphic texts of the Suez Stelae portray Darius as Pharaoh as would be expected, the Babylonian and the Old Persian versions of the texts are unabashedly "Persocentric," highlighting Darius' position as king of Persia and emphasizing his role as conqueror and ruler of Egypt.