Managing the Past: Influences of Achaemenid Imperial Historiography on the Greek Historians of Persia

Abstract

The birth of historiography has sometimes been understood as a primarily Greek phenomenon, to the exclusion or minimization of other cultural inputs. Building on the observations of Arnaldo Momigliano, however, I argue that in their nascent efforts at documenting and analyzing the past, the Greek historians of Persia were influenced by the intellectual strategies of the Achaemenids for managing their empire and its past, present, and future history. First I demonstrate the interplay of these strategies in an exemplary historiographic text produced by King Darius the Great, namely, the monumental inscription at Mount Bisitun (DB) in which he justifies his irregular accession to the Persian throne and elaborates a programmatic vision of Achaemenid kingship. Then I argue that the Greek historians of Persia were not only aware of some of the strategies exemplified by DB but incorporated and/or problematized some of them in their narratives of Persian affairs. I examine three of these tendencies in particular. First, the Greek historians appropriated and experimented with the chart, with its penchant for rigorous categorization of people and resources, as an organizational format characteristic of Persian imperial bureaucracy and royal inscriptions. Second, they reacted to Persian uses of monuments, often with unfavorable comparison of such efforts to previous Near Eastern (e.g., Egyptian) exemplars or to traditional Greek forms of commemoration. Third, they adopted a suggestively similar rhetorical posture to the Achaemenids as judge-kings whose top-down enunciation of history is informed by regionally-specific ethnographic research. Greek engagement with these strategies affirms that cultural and intellectual transfer from Persia and its empire conditioned the emergence of historiography in Greece.