Darius the Great: Architect of the Achaemenid Administrative System
The accession of Darius I in 522 BCE is the most-debated event in Achaemenid history, because the only detailed account we have is Darius’s own. The Behistun Inscription — a trilingual text in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, carved about 100 metres up the cliff at Behistun in western Iran, on the road between Ecbatana and Babylon — opens with a story. Cambyses II had killed his own brother Bardiya in secret. After Cambyses’ death in 522 BCE, a Magus named Gaumata, who resembled Bardiya, seized the throne and ruled as the false Bardiya. Six Persian noblemen, including Darius, conspired to overthrow the impostor, killed him, and restored legitimate Achaemenid rule. Darius, by his own account, was chosen king by the leading Persian nobles, who decided that the new king should be drawn from the seven conspirators by an omen involving his horse.
Modern historians are sceptical. Darius belonged to a collateral branch of the Achaemenid house, and his claim to the throne was politically awkward; the impostor story served to justify a usurpation. Whether the real Bardiya was murdered by Cambyses (as Darius claims) or survived and was overthrown by Darius (as Ctesias’ later tradition hints) is one of the unsolved questions of Achaemenid history. Ctesias is unreliable on most things, but his divergence from the Behistun text is suggestive. The basic outline — a disputed succession in 522 BCE involving a figure called Bardiya or Smerdis — is probably correct, but the details are Darius’s reconstruction, and the reconstruction was written to be carved on a cliff face in three languages for as long as the stone held. You do not carve an ambiguous story on a cliff face.
The standard modern biography of Darius in English is Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander (2002), chapters 8–13, with Margaret Cool Root’s The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979) for the visual evidence and Matthew Stolper’s work on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets for the administration. The Behistun Inscription itself is published in R. G. Kent’s Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon (1950, revised 1953) and in W. J. Vogelsang’s comparison of the Elamite and Babylonian versions (1992); the most useful philological commentary is Pierre Lecoq’s articles of the 1990s.
The early years: 522–519 BCE
Whatever the truth about the accession, the early years of Darius’s reign were marked by a series of revolts across the empire — in Bactria, Media, Elam, Babylonia, Egypt, Parthia, and elsewhere. Darius describes the revolts in detail in the Behistun Inscription, naming nine rebel leaders and nineteen battles. By 521 BCE, within a year of his accession, he had crushed the rebellions and reasserted central authority. The Behistun text is a piece of wartime propaganda as well as a permanent monument, and the relief above the inscription — Darius with his foot on the chest of the defeated Gaumata, with nine bound rebel kings before him and the winged figure of Ahura Mazda floating above — is propaganda in a visual form. The relief panel measures about 7.8 m high by 15 m wide, and it is the largest surviving Achaemenid rock relief.
I think the conventional reading of the early years is essentially right: Darius won the wars, but the wars themselves demonstrated that the system of personal kingdoms that Cyrus and Cambyses had used was no longer adequate. The lesson Darius took from the revolts is the subject of the next section.
The reorganisation of the empire
The most consequential achievement of Darius’s reign was the reorganisation of the Achaemenid state into a system of satrapies. The term “satrapy” is ancient, and Cyrus and Cambyses had already established provincial administration, but the system that we know from Darius’s reign — roughly twenty provinces, each governed by a satrap who was a royal official rather than a local king — was largely his creation.
The satrap was appointed by the King of Kings, usually from among the Persian or Median nobility, and sometimes from the Achaemenid family itself. He was responsible for civil administration, the maintenance of order, the collection of tribute, and the supply of troops to the imperial army. He had wide powers, including the right to administer justice and to command the local military, but he was subject to a layered system of imperial control. A royal secretary attached to each satrap kept the King of Kings informed of every order issued in the province. A garrison commander, independent of the satrap, commanded the military forces in the province and reported directly to the king. The famous “King’s Eyes and Ears” — imperial inspectors who toured the empire on a regular schedule — reported to the king on the conduct of the satraps. The Royal Road and the courier service connected the satrapies to the capital, allowing rapid transmission of orders and intelligence. The combination gave Darius a sophisticated system of imperial control, in which the satrap was given considerable initiative but held in check by a layered hierarchy of royal officials.
The tribute system, in which each satrapy was required to pay an annual tribute calibrated to its productive capacity, is recorded by Herodotus 3.89–97. Babylonia paid 1,000 talents of silver per year, Egypt 700, Lydia 500. The total, according to Herodotus, was about 14,560 Babylonian talents of silver per year, plus an additional amount in gold and kind. The figures are not modern estimates; they are Herodotus’, and they are probably too low rather than too high, but they are the best we have. Briant and most modern historians treat the order of magnitude as plausible, perhaps a third of the actual total. The tribute was collected by royal financial officers, not by the satrap, and it was stored in regional treasuries that could be drawn on by the King of Kings.
The standard gold daric, based on the Lydian gold standard that Cyrus had acquired, was introduced by Darius as the imperial currency, and the silver sigloi issued from the mints of Sardis and other western cities completed the bimetallic system. The daric’s weight of 8.4 grams and its purity of gold remained stable for more than a century, and the coin became the international currency of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.
The military campaigns
The reign of Darius was marked by the first major collision between the Achaemenid state and the Greek world. The Ionian Greek cities of the Aegean coast, subject to Persia since the conquests of Cyrus, revolted in 499 BCE with the support of Athens and Eretria. The revolt was led by Aristagoras of Miletus, accompanied by a Greek expedition to Sardis, which the Greeks sacked. The revolt was eventually crushed, but the burning of Sardis was a serious affront to Persian prestige. According to Herodotus (5.105), Darius ordered a servant to repeat to him at every dinner, “Master, remember the Athenians.” The story is too neat to be entirely true, but it captures something of the Achaemenid sense of wounded honour.
The first Persian expedition against Greece was launched in 490 BCE under the command of Datis and Artaphernes. The expedition sailed across the Aegean, captured and sacked Eretria, and then landed at the Bay of Marathon, on the northeastern coast of Attica. There the Persian army met the Athenian army under Miltiades and was defeated. The Battle of Marathon was a serious blow to Persian prestige. Darius began planning a larger campaign against Greece but died in 486 BCE, having reigned thirty-six years, before the plan could be carried out.
The earlier campaigns of the reign, in 513 BCE against the Scythians of the European steppe and in 513–512 BCE in Thrace and Macedon, established Achaemenid authority in the Balkans for the first time. Darius’ own account of the Scythian campaign is on the Behistun Inscription, and the Greek account is Herodotus book 4. The Greek version is more dramatic; the Persian version is shorter and more laconic. The army crossed the Bosphorus on a pontoon bridge engineered by Mandrocles of Samos — Darius’ own account, the Samos inscription — and crossed the Danube on a second pontoon bridge built by the Ionians. The campaign is the first Achaemenid expedition into Europe that we know of in detail, and it sets the pattern for Xerxes’ expedition of 480 BCE.
Persepolis and the imperial building programme
Darius was the founder of Persepolis, the great ceremonial complex in the heart of Persis, begun around 518 BCE and continued by his successors Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I. The complex included the great hypostyle hall called the Apadana, the Gate of All Nations, the Throne Hall, the Treasury, the private palaces, and the rock-cut royal tombs carved into the mountain behind the terrace. The Apadana staircase, with its reliefs of tribute-bearing delegations from twenty-three subject peoples, is one of the great documents of ancient art, and the Persepolis complex as a whole is the most complete surviving expression of Achaemenid imperial ideology.
The Persian building programme of Darius was not confined to Persepolis. The king rebuilt the royal residence at Susa, the winter capital, on a scale that impressed Greek ambassadors. The canals of Egypt, the Red Sea canal that connected the Nile to the Red Sea (via the Wadi Tumilat, not to the Indian Ocean as the older accounts said), the roads that bound the satrapies together, and the temples of the empire were all part of a coordinated programme. The Persepolis foundation tablets, inscribed in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, record the names of the peoples and the workforces that contributed to the project; the Elamite tablets in particular have been the focus of Matthew Stolper’s work since the 1970s and remain the richest single body of Achaemenid administrative texts.
What Darius was not
I want to end with what Darius was not, because the conventional picture of him tends to flatten his reign into a list of achievements. He was not, in his own time, a particular favourite of the Greek writers, who tended to prefer Cyrus. The Greek tradition, while acknowledging his greatness as a ruler, sometimes portrayed him as cold and calculating, particularly in the context of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus, in particular, treats him as the man who opened the long quarrel with Greece, and the framing is not flattering. The Achaemenid tradition, as preserved in the Behistun Inscription, presents him as the divinely chosen restorer of order, and Darius’ own inscriptions are notably more self-assertive than Cyrus’ surviving documents, of which there are essentially none.
The judgment of modern historians is that Darius was, in a real sense, the architect of the Achaemenid state as it functioned for two centuries. The institutions he established were not the only ones that mattered, but they were the ones that gave the empire its specific shape. Whether the institutions would have worked without the particular political circumstances of his accession is a question we cannot answer. The institutions were the response of a particular king to a particular crisis, and they were designed by a man who had just won a civil war. The wonder is that the response turned out to be so durable, and that the empire it created lasted as long as it did.
Where to go next
Briant (2002), chapters 8–13, is the modern synthesis. Root (1979) for the art. Stolper (1985) and the continuing publications of the Persepolis Fortification Tablets for the administration. Wiesehöfer (1996) for a more sceptical German-tradition reading. The relevant Cambridge History of Iran, vol. II (1985) chapters by Dandamayev and others remain useful for details. For a recent specialist treatment, H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg, ed., Achaemenid History (multiple volumes, 1987–), is the place to look for current scholarship.