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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Ancient History
  • Cited by 36
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1988
Online ISBN:
9781139054317
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521228046
Subjects:
Ancient History, Classical Studies
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Ancient History & Classics
Series:
The Cambridge Ancient History
Information

Book description

The years covered by this volume saw events and developments of major significance in the Mediterranean world. The first section of the book examines the Persian empire, the regions it comprised and its expansion during the reigns of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. In Greece, Sparta was attending maturity as the leader of a military coalition and Athens passed through a period of enlightened tyranny to a moderate democracy of dynamic energy and clear-sighted intelligence. Given the contrast between Greek ideas and Persian absolutism a clash between Greece and Persia became inevitable, and important chapters deal with the revolt of the Ionian Greeks against the Persians, and the two Persian invasions of Greece including the epic battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis. The third part of the volume turns to the Western Mediterranean. Italy now becomes a significant factor in the history of the area and this section covers the Italic peoples and their languages from the Bronze to the Iron age, and examines the Etruscans and their culture. Sicily is the subject of the final chapter. There the Greek city-states under Gelon of Syracuse and Theron ruler of Acragas repelled a Carthaginian onslaught at the battle of Himera. This new edition has been completely replanned and rewritten in order to reflect the advances in scholarship and changes in perspective which have been taking place in the sixty years since the publication of its predecessor.

Reviews

"CAH IV fulfills its function: it sets forth the state of the questions, clarifies controversies, suggests new approaches. It will be found useful by graduate students reviewing for comprehensive examinations and by professors wishing to update lectures in survey courses." Paul MacKendrick, Classical World

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Contents

Page 1 of 2

Contents
  • 1 - The early history of the Medes and the Persians and the Achaemenid empire to the death of Cambyses
    pp 1-52
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Median and Achaemenid periods define a critical disjunction in history. Iranians, more particularly the Medes and the Persians, first appear in history in the ninth-century BC cuneiform texts touching on the western half of the plateau. For some time thereafter the Medes and Persians are only two of several ethnic and political groups found in the Zagros mountains. Only late in the seventh century BC do the Medes apparently begin to become the dominant power even in Media. Cyrus is the son of Cambyses, grandson of Cyrus, and a descendant of Teispes. Cambyses succeeded to the throne in September 530 BC after Cyrus' death. Four years after ascending the throne Cambyses marched against Egypt. Amasis, the shrewd penultimate ruler of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, attempted to bolster his defences by securing the aid of the Cypriots and other islanders in order to cut off any possibility of a Persian invasion by sea.
  • 2 - The consolidation of the empire and its limits of growth under Darius and Xerxes
    pp 53-111
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Darius and his successors ruled a large land mass containing a bewildering variety of ethnic groups for almost two hundred years. They did it with very little violence and without the need for the almost annual military activity characteristic of the smaller Assyrian empire. Xerxes was a powerful figure, but it would seem that he never lived up to his early promise and was certainly never the king, or perhaps the man, that his father Darius had been. Early in the reign of Xerxes rebellion broke out in Babylon. Whatever the timing or cause of the revolt in Babylon, it is put down with a firm hand. Xerxes sends Megabyxus in command of troops to crush the revolt, which is apparently accomplished in almost no time at all. In the end, Xerxes has the honour to be the first of the great Achaemenid kings to be assassinated.
  • 3a - Babylonia from Cyrus to Xerxes
    pp 112-138
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter presents an outline of the history of Babylonia from Cyrus II to Xerxes. The historiographic texts from Babylonia providing an outline of the main political events are very sparse, the major one being the Nabonidus Chronicle, which covers the whole reign of Nabonidus, last king of Babylonia, the rise of Cyrus and his conquest of Babylonia. The major political event which is partly reflected in Babylonian documents is the seizure of royal power by Bardiya, the brother of Cambyses. Bardiya was killed by Darius and his fellow conspirators on 29 September, and no Babylonian text dated by him later than 20 September has yet been found. On Bardiya's assassination Babylonia revolted immediately under the leadership of the Babylonian Nidintu-Bel who took the name Nebuchadrezzar (III). Xerxes' relations with Babylonia have been generally sought in the development of his titulature; the earliest texts like those of his Achaemenid predecessors regularly call him 'King of Babylon and Lands'.
  • 3b - Syria-Palestine under Achaemenid rule
    pp 139-164
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In 539 BC Cyrus overcame Nabonidus, the last king of Babylonia; as a consequence, Syria-Palestine fell into the Persian king's hands, and thus began the period of Persian rule in the history of these countries. Until 525, Palestine marked the farthest limit of Persian rule. However, as a result of Cambyses' conquest of Egypt in that same year, the entire region west of the Euphrates took on a unique geopolitical significance in the context of the Persian Empire. This chapter explores the history of the region in the general context of the Achaemenid Empire from the standpoint of the imperial authorities. The area extending from the Euphrates to southern Palestine is designated in the Eastern sources from the Persian period by the territorial term 'Beyond the River', which is Mesopotamian in origin. One question of paramount significance for the history of Palestine in the Persian period concerns the ethnic composition of the population of the province of Samaria.
  • 3c - Central Asia and Eastern Iran
    pp 165-193
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Achaemenid culture in Central Asia is rooted in a distinctive local tradition and differs markedly from what one finds in Persia. The sequence of Achaemenid conquests include: Babylon (539), Bactria, Saka (530 and death of Cyrus), Egypt (Cambyses, 525). The whole of Central Asia was not won by conquest, however; between 550 and 547 the remnants of the Median Empire fell into the hands of Cyrus. According to many writers, the so-called 'Achaemenid' assemblage in Central Asia could begin as early as the beginning of the seventh or even the eighth century. This period is characterized by the appearance of a distinctive type of white wheel-made pottery whose distribution coincides with Central Asia. Parthia-Hyrcania and Seistan are within the Iranian sphere of influence, pottery of the plateau. It is a fact that the whole of East Iranian mythology is linked to a concept of mounted warrior.
  • 3d - The Indus Lands
    pp 194-210
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In 517 BC, after the reconquest of Egypt by Darius, that the king of Gandara put in hand a reconnaissance of his eastern frontier, now effectively defined by the river Indus, which so often in subsequent centuries was to represent the boundary between India and Iran. The exact details of the voyage of Scylax of Caryanda, the navigator whose story later became known to the Greek world, have long been a subject of debate among historians in Europe. It has to be noted that no such place as Caspatyrus is known in ancient times along the Indus. A better reading of the name is provided by Stephanus Byzantinus in his entry under Caspapyrus. In any event, the Achaemenid provinces of Arachosia, Sattagydia and Gandara, with the tribal lands of Pactyica, the Aparytae and the Dadicae, and finally the province of Hindus were neatly skirted by the voyage of Scylax on the Indus.
  • 3e - Anatolia
    pp 211-233
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Persian rule over Anatolia under Darius and Xerxes was a continuation of the take-over initiated by Cyrus when he pushed across the Halys to Lydia and captured Sardis. The major problem of controlling Western Anatolia was symbiosis with the Greeks. The districts along the south coast of Anatolia, from Caria to Pamphylia, with their orientation to the Mediterranean and their Bronze Age heritage any more than they had been culturally dominated by Hittites, Phrygians and Lydians. The neighbours of Pamphylia were the inhabitants of the mountainous stretch of Cilicia. The pattern of Persian domination in the heartland of Phrygia, part of the satrapy of Dascylium, can be reconstructed tentatively from the excavations of the citadel and tombs of Gordium. A Pontic blend of Greek and Persian art decorated façades of rock-cut tombs in Paphlagonia in the later fifth and fourth centuries BC.
  • 3f - Persia in Europe, apart from Greece
    pp 234-253
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The revenge motive arising from Scythian attacks on the Medes in Asia a century or so earlier hardly accounts for a Persian king attacking Scythians in Europe. The real intention of Darius was made clear by the building of a bridge across the Bosporus. Darius commemorated the bridge by erecting two columns of white stone with inscriptions in cuneiform and in Greek letters. Herodotus described the campaign from the Scythian point of view, which shows that he relied chiefly on Scythian informants. The existence of a satrapy in Europe, called 'Skudra', is known from Persian inscriptions. The name 'Skudra' was probably Phrygian for the homeland which the Phrygians had left in migrating to Asia. In cultural terms, Thrace looked not to Greece but to Scythia, Asia Minor and Persia. In the last decades of the sixth century large tombs with gifts of gold and silver vessels and jewellery, and sometimes bronze helmets and cuirasses, became much more frequent.
  • 3g - Egypt 525–404 B.C.
    pp 254-286
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Egypt may have recognized Darius from 522 onwards. A greater memorial to Darius is his codification of the laws of the Persian Empire, when the satrap was instructed to assemble 'the wise men among the warriors, priests, and all the scribes of Egypt' presumably the last period of normal life in Egypt. The polyglot nature of Achaemenid Egypt is nowhere better shown than in the accounts of the Memphite dockyards, which survive in several fragmentary Aramaic papyri, including the newly-discovered ones from Saqqara. One Egyptian institution created almost intractable problems for any foreign administration: the temples. The new Saqqara texts can add a magnificent marriage document of the eleventh year of Darius, and an interesting record of self-sale or hire to a temple, a practice not otherwise known until much later. The Persian conquest left its impression, shaping the whole of Egyptian foreign policy and determining many of its national attitudes.
  • 4 - The tyranny of the Pisistratidae
    pp 287-302
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Pisistratus died in spring 527, but tyranny survived at Athens until 510. Pisistratus left three legitimate sons, Hippias, Hipparchus and Thessalus. Pisistratus' notion of tyranny had certainly included efforts to reach friendly relations with atleast some noble families and there is one clear case of his having recalled an exile, Cimon, towards the end of his life. For his sons' relationships with the nobles, little material existed until the publication in 1939 of a fragment of the archon-list for the first years of their rule, which has thrown valuable light on their use of the eponymous archonship for control and conciliation. When Pisistratus first came to power, Attica had been a country in which the local power of the great dynasts had been all-important. Athens itself had been not much more than the largest centre of population and the seat of some of the more important generally accepted cults.
  • 5 - The reform of the Athenian state by Cleisthenes
    pp 303-346
    • By Martin Ostwald, William R. Kenan, Jr, Professor of Classics, Swarthmore College, and Professor of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvani
  • View abstract

    Summary

    There is little contemporary evidence for the history of Athens in the decade following the fall of the Pisistratid tyranny. Herodotus wrote some sixty or seventy years after Cleisthenes' reforms, and the internal history of Athens is for him incidental to other concerns. Membership in a deme constituted the most important indication of Athenian citizenship. The substitution of the deme for the phratry as the smallest political unit was one way in which the influence of the noble families was fragmented. The new tribal organization will have had an impact on legislation and policy-making. The Solonian constitution became much more populist than it had been under Solon. For disuse under the tyranny had brought about an eclipse of Solon's laws and had made Cleisthenes enact new legislation in his attempt to gain the favour of the masses. It was in this connexion that the law on ostracism was enacted.
  • 6 - Greece before the Persian invasion
    pp 347-367
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter concerns the general situation in Greece during the last quarter of the sixth century and the start of the fifth: the years when Persia's defeat and annexation of the non-Greek kingdoms which bordered the Aegean to east and south brought the power of her empire significantly near to the Greeks of the Aegean and the mainland itself. Sparta herself had recently been expending her military resources in challenging successfully the power of Argos for control of the districts north and east of Parnon: the Thyreatis and Cynuria down to and including Cythera. In 519, Cleomenes and the military League entered Boeotian politics. At the request of Athens, King Cleomenes undertook to arrest the Aeginetan medizers. He went, apparently, with little or no military support, and this gave his opponents at Sparta, foremost among them his co-king Demaratus, the chance to stiffen the Aeginetan resistance.
  • 7a - Religion and the state
    pp 368-388
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In a well-known story, Herodotus records how the Samians rescued three hundred boys whom Periander of Corinth was sending from Corcyra to Alyattes of Lydia to become eunuchs. The story illustrates the vocabulary and syntax of Greek ritual. More important, it throws light on the relationship between two ways of defining a community. On the one hand the political decision which the Samians have by implication taken is portrayed as one taken purely within the matrix of cult and ritual. On the other hand the story represents the political society of the Samians as being in full charge of their own religious practices. Neither Samos nor any Greek state was controlled by priests or prophets. It is this relationship between a society conceived of as embedded in cult and ritual and the same society conceived of as an autonomous political actor. Religion became a dependent appendage of national sentiment, and individual piety received an out and out deathblow'.
  • 7b - The development of ideas, 750 to 500 B.C.
    pp 389-413
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The development of thought and ideas during the period, 750 to 500 BC, in which the city state came into being have been heavily affected by three factors: the continuing influence of the epic tradition, the spread of literacy, and the social, political and economic changes associated with the polis itself. Individuals like Hesiod and Archilochus as well as self-declared sages played their part like the earlier Presocratics. The period was one of major changes in the whole literary and intellectual sphere, beginning as it did with Homer and ending with the rise of philosophy and drama. In tracing the development of ideas, one is at least entitled to assume that the mental capacities implied in Homer were the equal possession of many of his contemporaries. Finally the development of law and order that had been an essential part of social and political evolution depended heavily on the control of vendetta and the rationalizing of archaic ideas about pollution.
  • 7c - Material culture
    pp 414-430
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Athens' achievements in the Persian Wars, the brilliance of Periclean Athens and the activity of her own historians have ensured that even of the archaic period, before the Persian Wars, Athens occupies the centre of the stage. Almost all the substantial building activity of archaic Athens appears to fall in the period of the tyrants. The Athens left by the tyrants was already remarkable for the variety and number of its public buildings. Most plentiful source of material evidence for late archaic Athens is pictorial, mainly figure-decorated vases and to a lesser degree works of sculpture in the round or in relief. The Thessalians were the cavalrymen par excellence of the mainland and had been much involved in the local wars of central Greece, from the Lelantine to the first Sacred War. The ordinary Greek cavalryman is shown on vases bare-headed and fighting with spear only, and the occasional mounted archer appears.
  • 7d - Coinage
    pp 431-445
    • By Colin Kraay, Heberden Coin Room, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes the origin of coinage in mainland Greece. But coinage certainly started at an earlier date in Asia Minor, where the most readily available metal was alluvial electrum rather than silver. In the Peloponnese the transition from a utensil currency to a currency of silver appears to have begun under Pheidon in the first half of the seventh century but true coins are unlikely to have been minted at Aegina before the sixth century. The earliest datable context for an Aeginetan coin is the foundation deposit of the audience-hall of Darius I at Persepolis, which can be no earlier than circa 515. The most remarkable characteristic of the archaic coinage of South Italy is its uniformity in both weight standard and fabric. The practice of coining is seen to have been spreading across the Greek world during the sixth century though it was still a rather recent phenomenon in the West.
  • 7e - Trade
    pp 446-460
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By the time of the Persian Wars, when the great sea battles, Lade in 494 BC, Salamis and Mycale in 480 and 479, brought sea power into the political reckoning of Greeks and Persians, the Greeks had worked out a far-ranging trade by sea. The Aegean region had become an important market centre. Pottery and metal-working establishments served the local market and offered their goods for sale to traders collecting a cargo for export. The goods carried for trade were conditioned by the nature of the markets that they had to serve in Aegean cities, Greek colonies and foreign lands. Until the latter part of the seventh century Greek trade was relatively simple in organization and on a small scale. The trade in metals was enlarged by iron from the region of Sinope in the Black Sea and by new sources of precious metals. Regular Greek trade with Egypt began relatively late, in the last quarter of the seventh century.
  • 8 - The Ionian Revolt
    pp 461-490
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The narrative of the Ionian Revolt marks the beginning of the full-scale account in Herodotus of political and military events shows that he and his contemporaries regarded it as an intrinsic part of the series of wars between Greece and Persia. For the Ionian Revolt, Herodotus is our only surviving literary source; yet his narrative has generally been regarded as one of the most problematical sections of his history. Many attempts have been made to place Herodotus in a literary context that would provide him with written sources for his information, and also perhaps explain the origins of his conception of history. The absence of a politically oriented oral tradition in Ionia may reflect certain characteristics of Ionian society, where aristocratic dominance was perhaps less marked than on the Greek mainland. The immediate cause of the Ionian Revolt lay in the failure of the Persian attack on Naxos.
  • 9 - The expedition of Datis and Artaphernes
    pp 491-517
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the Persian records 'the lands beyond the sea' were mentioned first at the time of Darius' campaign in Europe. In this campaign only some of the Allies were involved. The Allies as a whole were Boeotia, Phocis and the Peloponnesian states, apart from Argos and probably Achaea. For the campaign, Darius appointed Datis, a distinguished Mede, as commander in the field and Artaphernes, his own nephew, as his personal representative. The ratio between the fighting men and the other personnel is much as in the expedition sent by Athens to Sicily. A few days were spent in organizing the base at Eretria. The Greeks were superior in armament for hand-to-hand fighting. The Greeks attacked with a 2.4 metre long spear and a sword, whereas the Persians relied on a short spear and scimitar and on the archery in which they excelled.
  • 10 - The expedition of Xerxes
    pp 518-591
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Datis and Artaphernes had shown how vulnerable Athens was to a seaborne attack in order to make a landing on the coast of Attica. Paros was one of the states which had sent a trireme and a crew to serve under Persian command against Athens. Like the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, the Persians relied on huge labour forces for the construction of such public works as the canal dug in the reign of Darius from the Nile to the Red Sea. Persia was justly famous for the royal roads, of which Herodotus described one, from Sardis to Susa. These roads were built by hand by large labour-forces; thus a third of Xerxes' army built a road across the Pierian range. The expeditionary force of Xerxes was certainly much larger than the army left with Mardonius. The Greeks on the League Council had chosen Thermopylae and Artemisium as stations close enough together for intercommunication some weeks before the Persians reached Macedonia.

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