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Persian
Responses: Political and cultural interaction with(in) the Achaemenid Empire
edited by Christopher Tuplin
A generation ago the Achaemenid Empire was a minor
sideshow within long-established disciplines. For Greek historians
the Persians were the defeated national enemy, a catalyst of change
in the aftermath of the fall of Athens or the victim of Alexander.
For Egyptologists and Assyriologists they belonged to an era that
received scant attention compared with the glory days of the New Kingdom
or the Neo-Assyrian Empire. For most archaeologists they were elusive
in a material record that lacked a distinctively Achaemenid imprint.
Things have changed now. The empire is an object of study in its own
right, and a community of Achaemenid specialists has emerged to carry
that study forward. Such communities are, however, apt to talk among
themselves and the present volume aims to give a professional but
non-specialist audience some taste of the variety of subject-matter
and discourse that typifies Achaemenid studies.
The broad theme of political and cultural interaction - reflecting
the empire's diversity and the nature of our sources for its history
- is illustrated in fourteen chapters that move from issues in Greek
historiography through a series of regional studies (Egypt, Anatolia,
Babylonia and Persia) to Zarathushtra, Alexander the Great and the
early modern reception of Persepolis. The editor Christopher Tuplin is Professor of Ancient History
at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Failings of Empire
(1993) and Achaemenid Studies (1996), editor of Pontus and the Outside
World (2004) and Xenophon and his World (2004) and co-editor (with
T.E.Rihll) of Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture (2002).
He has also published numerous research papers, chiefly on Xenophon,
classical Greek history and the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction - Christopher Tuplin
1. Thucydides' portrait of Tissaphernes re-examined - John O. Hyland
2. Xenophon's wicked Persian, or What's wrong with Tissaphernes? Xenophon's
views on lying and breaking oaths - Gabriel Danzig
3. On Persian tryphe in Athenaeus - Dominique Lenfant
4. Treacherous hearts and upright tiaras: the Achaemenid king's head-dress
- Christopher Tuplin
5. Darius I?in Egypt: Suez and Hibi - Alan B. Lloyd
6. Indigenous aristocracies in Hellespontine Phrygia - Frédéric
Maffre
7. Hellenization and Lycian cults during the Achaemenid period - Eric
A. Raimond
8. Babylonian workers in the Persian heartland: palace building at
Matannan in the reign of Cambyses - Wouter F.M. Henkelman and Kristin
Kleber
9. Reading Persepolis in Greek: gifts of the Yauna - Margaret Cool
Root
10. Boxus the Persian and the hellenization of Persis - Nicholas
Sekunda
11. The philosopher's Zarathushtra - Phiroze Vasunia
12. Alexander the Great: 'Last of the Achaemenids'? - Robin Lane
Fox
13. 'Chilminar olim Persepolis': European reception of a?Persian ruin
- Lindsay Allen
14. Pottering around Persepolis: observations on early European visitors
to the site - St John Simpson
Index