Judaism
How Persia Created Judaism 1.3
Abstract
As the religion of a great empire, Zoroastrianism exerted its widest influence, notably on the Jews, contributing thus to shaping the beliefs and hopes of a large part of mankind.Mary Boyce
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, August 11, 1999;
Thursday, 04 August 2005
Abstract
Darius the Great (522-486 BC)
The son of Cyrus, Cambyses, a more ruthless man than his father completed the conquest of Egypt, ending traditional pharaonic rule for good. Following standard policy, Cambyses transported the ruling class of the Egyptians, including Pharaoh and his family, to Susa, but legitimized his rule by paying homage to the Egyptian gods. Then, so as to appear to the common people as a deliverer, he ordered the administration to introduce reforms to benefit them. While conquering Egypt he incidentally made several north African Greek colonies, like Libya and Cyrenaica to submit, thus bringing more of the Greek world into the Persian ambit.
In Egypt, Cambyses set up or sponsored a garrison of Jewish soldiers at Elephantine. According to a later letter, a temple to Yehouah had been set up here before the Persians came, and the polytheistic nature of the gods worshipped there besides Yehouah serves to confirm the idea. The name of Yehouah or Yeho as a god appears all over the Levant, not just in the Judaean hills, and even as far south as the Sinai, which is where Yehouah first appeared to Moses in the biblical myth. So the Semitic people of the Levant had Yehouah among their other gods and expatriate Semites in Egypt had apparently set up a temple for their devotional purposes. Perhaps, though, Cambyses tried to help the “returners” to Jerusalem by conscripting leaders of the Am ha-Eretz opponents of the new Yehouah temple and deporting them to Egypt where he allowed them to set up a temple to the traditional Yehouah and his heavenly court.
Cambyses was said to have disparaged the Egyptian gods and killed the Apis Bull, but inscriptions cast doubt on this. It seems to have been Egyptan and Greek propaganda, made possible because Cambyses was soon dead, either of suicide in the face of mass uprisings or, more likely from gangrene in an accidental wound caused by his own knife (Persian nobles all wore a knife) loosing its sheath and impaling him in the groin as he jumped on to his horse. A cousin of Cambyses, Darius, one of the seven Persian princes, seized power and, though faced with considerable opposition eventually put down the rebellions and re-united the vast Empire.
To mark his success, Darius built the large monument at Behistun between Egbatana and Kirimanshah. Ahuramazda or his fravashi, typically rising head and shoulders above a winged circlet, overlooks Darius treading over a usurper while eight other false kings trail behind in bonds. The inscription tells the story of the revolts but says “Ahura Mazda and the other gods helped me” confirming again that the Achaemenids did not consider Ahuramazda the only god, but the highest of them. Even Persis had been in revolt and Darius moved his capital to Persepolis. The dangers of the liberality of Cyrus had been proved and Darius determined to set up a much more formal and effective system of governance.
A Greek admiral was ordered to build a fleet in the head waters of the Indus and find a way to Egypt. He succeeded in 30 months. Darius wanted to secure the north and planned to invade Scythia via the Hellespont. In preparation he forced Byzantium to submit, conquered Thrace and Macedonia and moved a massive army across the Hellespont and the Danube on bridges of boats built by Ionian Greek engineers. He was ready to force the European Greeks to submit and the Athenians were happy to do so, but the Spartans objected.
Attempting to be assured of Athenian loyalty with a large bribe, the Persians came up against the paradox of democracy. The Athenians were now offended and sided with the Spartans. Meanwhile the Greeks of Ionia decided it was a good time to revolt and set up the Ionian league, supported by Athens, seizing Sardis, the Persian regional capital, except for its citadel. The Persians re-asserted themselves in 497 AD and treasure was taken and populations deported. Milesian Greeks were settled at the mouth of the Tigris where earlier the settlement of Aramaeans had helped to destabilize the country of Elam, allowing the Persians to take root. At Lesbos, young women were taken for the harems and young men were castrated, leaving the remaining women to satisfy themselves in unconventional ways.
Darius sent a fleet under a Median admiral to secure Athens. He captured the town of Eretria on Euboea and transported the citizens to Susa as slaves. They were settled at Arderikka and still spoke Greek in the first century AD, according to the supporters of Appollonius of Tyana. Their abduction was bad psychology for creative and perverse people like the Greeks and it only had the effect of again uniting them and allowing them to win the battle of Marathon (490 BC). Turning to a rebellion in Egypt, Darius died in 486 BC.
Marathon and Salamis are written off as ignominious failures for the Persians, who are depicted in history as fools and poltroons, but the inventive and creative Greeks lived on the mainland in Ionia, and were for long vassals of the Persians. All Greek achievements before the Persian wars were Ionian, and the Ionians taught the western Greeks seamanship and citizenship. The constitution of Athens took its main clauses from those of the Ionian cities. The talent, art, main population, wealth and commerce of the Greeks were in the eastern cities, while the Balkan cities were impoverished.
That, above all, is why the Persians were not unduly interested in European Greece, and the invasions of Darius and Xerxes were less aimed at conquest than to punish the western Greeks for helping the eastern Greeks in rebellion. If they hoped to subdue the western Greeks, the Persian kings failed, but those Greek cities who did not surrender as far south as Athens were razed, and Thrace was set up as a Persian buffer in Europe. When the independent Greeks defeated the Persians at Plataea, the spoils of victory were dedicated to Apollo at Delphi as “the spoils of the Persians, the Macedonians and the Thebans” so both Macedonians and Thebans were subject to the Persians and fought with them. The Persian empire therefore began in Europe, about forty miles from Athens. Macedonia was Persian for the first half of the Persian empire’s existence, and Thrace for even longer. Ionia remained a Persian colony, or in its sphere of influence.
The Persians lost some critical battles that the Greeks worked up in their propaganda, but the Persian kings considered that they had achieved most of their goals, and were able to keep the undefeated Greeks fighting each other for a hundred years until they exhausted themselves. Alexander was subject to Persian as well as Greek influences, a factor that might have been crucial to his success against the Persians.
From the time of Darius, the kings were laid in rock tombs. In his tomb inscriptions at Naqsh-i-Rustam, Darius praises Ahuramazda as creator of earth, sky, man and man’s happiness, and as the god who made Darius the king. The inscription lists people who were obedient to the king, through the favour of Ahuramazda, and it lists provinces where disturbances were qwelled, through the grace of Ahuramazda. On it, Darius says his law did not allow the strong to strike the weak. He then lists the buildings he has erected and concludes with a prayer for Ahuramazda and “the gods” to protect him, his dynasty and his inscriptions.
Darius’s inscriptions generally pray for Ahuramazda to protect the Royal House and the country from foreign armies, famine and the Lie. The “Lie” in Zoroastrianism is the equivalent of “sin” in Judaism—it is disobeying the word of God. The consequence of this in practical terms for Persian kings was that avoiding the baneful influence of the “Lie” meant, among other things, that the people would have to accept the Shahanshah as God’s regent on earth. Herodotus notes that Persians never prayed for personal benefit but only for benefits for Persia—they prayed for the good of the king, the people and the country.
The Legacy of Darius
Darius realized Cyrus had been too generous—in diplomacy generosity is often taken advantage of. The policy of the Great King as protector was continued but the individual kings were now effectively governed by the Satraps (Khshatrapavans)—“Protectors of the Kingdom”—a Persian noble. Darius divided the empire into twenty Satrapies to which he appointed his own loyal generals and Persian administrators, richly endowed with land and exempt from taxation. But there was no question of trying to force obedience by force of arms. The old diplomacy of Cyrus still had to be at the core but now Persians were to be the senior administrators.
Conquered lands were the property of the king, who had his lands surveyed, estimated their yields and levied a rent on what could be produced, then charged people rents for its use. So tribute or tax was technically a rent. Persians lived in their own land and so paid no rent. Satrapies and vassal states had to pay a fixed sum in talents of gold or silver to the Persian exchequer. The satrap stood alongside a local army commander and a local collector of taxes, all equal but independent and reporting only to Darius. Thus local power was divided. As extra safeguards, the satrap had an official secretary whose task was to record everything that the satrap did and report it to the emperor. Finally, Darius also appointed inspectors—“Ears of the King”—whose job was to call unexpectedly on any area official to check what he was doing. He had an independent small force of armed men to protect himself and enforce his actions if needs be.
The royal inscriptions of Persian kings often mentioned Truth or Order, and Justice, “arta” and “asha”, and “data” meaning law as the order (“arta”) brought to the world by the king's will. The Iranian word for law “data” entered Hebrew and other Semitic languages of the ancient near east, at the time of the Persian conquest. Law was important to the Persians, and even Greeks said Persians were just. Famous stelae of law like that found in Babylon, together with the moral code of his own religion, inspired Darius to set down just laws. Persian judges held office for life as long as they were not corrupt. Two court systems operated in Babylon—and doubtless elsewhere—the local law based on local custom and practice, and the imperial law, the decrees of the shahanshah. Babylonian and Aramaic sources call imperial Persian judges “databar”. Rule by consent was still aimed for, and Darius hoped for rule by consent and thus to pass off his laws to local communities consensually under the guise of religious “restoration”. The great Persian scholar, A T Olmstead affirms that Darius meant to set a code of law for the whole empire, and more recently Thiery Petit noted that the actions of Darius in Egypt were only a part of an empire wide program of subtle legislation.
In Egypt, Darius had the rules and immunities granted by the pharaohs to the temples “codified” and made available in Demotic and Aramaic script. The Ptolemaic regime in Egypt was started by Alexander’s general, Ptolemy, only ten years after the defeat of the Persians. The Ptolemies were keen on preserving the written word, and began the collections of the Alexandrine library. The reverse of one Ptolemaic papyrus bearing the Demotic Chronicle, dated to the third century BC, carried an account of Darius setting up a commission of priests, sages and warriors to “codify” Egyptian law. It says it took 16 years to report. In fact, Diodorus Siculus had already given Darius credit for being one of the Egypt’s main lawgivers, and the Egyptian satrap, Arsames, had the same honour.
Curiously, the text specifies that Darius made made no innovations. Why should it make this point explicitly unless Darius was keen that no one should imagine he had done so? No codification of the law can be done while leaving it unchanged. The whole point of a code of law is that it should be systematic and therefore easier to use—law is codified for use, not as an idle pursuit, and it is hard to believe that practical rulers like the Persian shahs will have wanted to waste sixteen years on a project that would not give them some direct benefit. Someone must have suspected that the “codification” was indeed to make legal innovations, and so it must indeed, but the king was keen to stifle any such impression.
Cambysis had the reputation of having openly interfered with the Egyptian temples, and Darius wanted his own propaganda to counter any such thought by meretriciously proclaiming this shah had no intention of doing the same as his predecessor. Egyptians were not used to be subjects of foreigners, and many thought they had the wealth and power to declare UDI. In short, flagrant legal changes in a country that was notionally as powerful as its conqueror could have caused dangerous rebellion. A hand-picked commission of the good and the great taking sixteen years to report did just what any modern government commission does—it allowed plenty of time for tempers to cool, and changes to operate before any report emerged. But, if the changes made by Cambyses had been so badly received, why did Darius not simply reverse them, thus getting great kudos as a righter of wrongs? That is what he did not do. If Cambyses thought Egyptian laws were better for the Persians changed, Darius will have felt the same way. By making “no innovations”, Darius did not have to reverse the legal changes Cambyses had made. So, Diodorus tells us Darius “dealt with” the priests, by bribes and the delay in codifying the legal content of holy books.
The Persians were well aware people had their price, and the privileges of the priests would have been secured as long as they were cooperative. In the process of codification, many a clause will have been inserted favourable to Persian rule that no priest could object to if simply because no one knew the full corpus of religious law anyway! He also restored the Houses of Life, the schools and hospitals, attached to the temples. He was doing the same in Egypt as he did elsewhere. At Magnesia on the Meander river in Ionia, a satrap was rebuked for trying to curtail the privileges of the priests of Apollo. Persian kings, as in Jerusalem, were keen to have the priesthood on their side.
The introduction of a law book by a commissioner empowered for that purpose was not possible unless the central government approved of its contents.P Frei, Persia and Torah (Ed J W Watts)
Besides these legal and administrative reforms, Darius built a fine road network, only patches of which now remain. The Royal Road from Susa to Sardis in Asia Minor was 1600 miles long and could be traversed by caravan in 90 days, but post stations every 15 miles kept fresh relays of horses for the king’s couriers who could cover the distance in seven days. Such good roads and sound administration encouraged commerce.
The royal road was said to pass for its whole length “through country that is inhabited and safe”. This great highway made much of central Asia Minor accessible to Iranian colonists, who were attracted by its fertile river-valleys and wide plains. Noble fiefholders naturally had an interest in developing their estates, and this interest was quickened in them as Zoroastrians, for whom good cultivation of the land is a religious duty.
A Persian landowner in Lydia dwelling in a fortified manor house on his own estate, had armed retainers in his service, as well as slaves to work the land. His house was attacked by Greek raiders and a beacon was lit which brought a Persian neighbour to his aid, with his own body of fighting men, and some official forces also, and the marauders were driven off. The incident suggests a number of Persian estates in this, and doubtless other, fertile regions of western Asia Minor, with mutual support among the landowners and in general effective Persian vigilance and control.
Persian nobles must have brought skilled farmworkers with them from Iran, for still, in the fourth century AD, many villages scattered about Cappadocia were entirely inhabited by Iranians, descendants of the original colonists. Achaemenid armies were generally accompanied by women, and the long survival of some of these settlements must owe much to their being ethnically and culturally homogeneous, founded by Iranian families.
Another practical policy adopted by the Persians and useful to commerce and diplomacy alike was to use the popular and widespread language, Aramaean, rather than Persian as a lingua franca. Few people in the world at the dawn of the Achaemenid age knew Persian and, since it was not a written language, a special script now called Old Persian script was invented from Assyrian cuneiform script. The kings used it on inscriptions but for pragmatic reasons they used Aramaean otherwise, and helped to spread it as far as India.
Mesopotamian languages after the Sumerians were all Semitic and Aramaean was Syrian Semitic which gradually spread naturally then got a boost when the policy of transportation was introduced. Many Aramaean speakers were transported into the areas of Old Sumeria and Elam, as well as elsewhere, and it became the language everyone picked up a bit of, until it became the language everyone spoke. Significantly, the traditional script of the Hebrew language is this Aramaean script introduced by the Persians, and it differs from the Old Hebrew script used by the Samaritans.
The Persian empire above all improved commerce. The Persians introduced standard taxation, introduced coinage, first used by king Croesus of Lydia. Persian coinage did not catch on everywhere, so Darius introduced accurate weights and measures to ensure fair trading. They are however mentioned in the Jewish scriptures (1 Chr 29:7) where king David’s nobles offer Persian darics (adarkons, translated “drams” in KJV) for the upkeep of the temple. This is almost 500 years before darics were invented, but shows when and by whom the myth of David was written. Darics were gold coins but a lesser silver coin was called by a Babylonian word, segals—shekels.
Darius employed people in public works in mines, roadmaking and canal digging, drained swamps, spread useful animals and plants including domestic fowl and doves, promoted other useful activities in foodstuffs like the drying and pickling of fish so that it could be transported inland. They took pistachios to Aleppo, sesame to Egypt and rice to Mesopotamia. Persian kings were interested in public welfare. Later, the Greek kings continued this policy.
The standard of living rose throughout and was higher in the centres of Persia than it was in the Greek cities we so much admire. Partly this was because the greater volume of trade and enterprize took goods downmarket that had previously been the exclusive interest of the rich. More people benefited and standards as a whole rose. Banking boomed also. Banking had traditionally been the prerogative of the temples in, for eaxample Babylonia, but there were private bankers too. It was private banking that boomed, although the general swell of wellbeing spread so far as Greece and the temples of Delos, Delphi and Olympia all opened as banks based on Asian models. The role of the Temple of Jerusalem as a private bank in which the simple deposit their money as “corban” and the priesthood drew it out is well known!
Darius specified fair wages for workers and, since wages were often paid in kind, the values of standard goods were also specified so that the worker knew they were getting the right weight. Some serfs were tied to the estates but many were free and workers moved around in an extensive labour market. Tablets at Persepolis speak of workers from all over the empire. There must have been a labour exchange. There was certainly an imperial direct labour force working on palaces, temples and other large projects for the king. After 520 BC, Persian names are increasingly found in the city rolls of Babylonia, a result of the displacement of Persian smallholders from the plateau by the larger more efficiant estates.
Deportations continued and some were depicted as having been voluntary. Herodotus tells of Milesians transported from Ionia to the Persian gulf to establish sea-going routes to India and Egypt but little impression was made, perhaps simply because the wood to make ships was not readily available. The Peonians of Thrace were deported to Phrygia by Darius, but Herodotus says that many were shortly able to escape back home during an uprising encouraged by the Greeks.
Alexander used the same policy after the end of the Persian empire and, in the second century BC, it was still being used by the Parthians. Mithradates II transported Scythians into Seistan, now on the border of Iran and Afghanistan.
- Professor Pierre Briant’s remarkable website on the Persian Period on which he aim is “to make accessible and downloadable all documents pertinent to Achaemenid history—texts and inscriptions in every language and script, seals and seal impressions, coins, reliefs, results of excavations and surveys, etc”.
