The First Superpower
LLast time we were discussing Assyria—the power that undermined Urartu and left traces even in Erzurum. But Assyria did not survive the shock of time, and its inheritance was largely taken up by a new force: the Achaemenid Persian empire.
The satrapy of Armenia
In the middle of the sixth century BC Cyrus the Great began a rapid expansion: from the Indus to Egypt, from Central Asia to Asia Minor. Under Darius I and Xerxes the empire reached an unprecedented scale, and became the first genuine superpower in history.
Erzurum, with the whole Armenian Highland, entered the Achaemenid state as part of one of its twenty satrapies—Armenia.
The word is worth a moment, since English has kept it and put it to spiteful use. Old Persian xšaçapāvan meant “protector of the realm”; Greek turned it into satrápēs; and English now uses satrap to mean a subordinate official with delusions of grandeur. A title of honour, demoted over two and a half thousand years to an insult.
Through this country ran the roads that joined the eastern satrapies to the western; here stood garrisons and depots. And with them the material culture of the Persians travelled too.
Those roads deserve their own footnote. The Achaemenid postal relay so impressed Herodotus that he wrote of the couriers that neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night stays them from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. That sentence, in a nineteenth-century translation, is carved across the front of the main post office in New York, where it is generally taken for the motto of the United States Postal Service—which has never officially adopted it. Herodotus on Persian messengers, doing duty as American civic sculpture.
Where the name was born
It is in the Achaemenid period, in the famous Behistun inscription of Darius I, that the name Armina—Armenia—first appears, alongside the Urartian Urashtu. This was the moment at which the region formally entered world history under the name we use today.
And the Behistun inscription has a second claim on our attention: it is the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform. Darius had his account of his accession cut into a cliff face in three languages—Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian—about a hundred metres up, quite deliberately out of reach.
Which is why the decipherment involved a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, hanging off ladders on that cliff through the 1830s and 40s to make paper squeezes of the text, employing at one point a local boy to swing across the unreachable Babylonian section on a rope. The trilingual text he brought down opened cuneiform to modern scholarship. So the first written appearance of the word “Armenia” arrived in the same package as the key to the entire literature of Mesopotamia.
Horses, rams and birds in metal
In the Erzurum Museum all this can be seen in a set of zoomorphic rhytons and an elegant bronze handle from a situla.
🐎 Two rhytons in the form of horses—symbols of military power and of the royal cavalry. Even after so many centuries the painted bridles and harness are still legible.
One style, from the Indus to the Aegean
The Persian empire was not merely a military machine but the carrier of a single cultural style: the rhytons and vessels from Erzurum are made in the same spirit as finds of this period right across its enormous territory.
But this power too proved mortal. At the end of the fourth century BC the Achaemenid world came down under the blows of Alexander’s army. From that moment a new era begins on the Armenian Highland—and I shall write about its traces next time.
