Aryan Tribes in Iran (3,000—1,000 B-C.) [ Part 1]
The earliest history of the Aryan tribes has provoked much speculation for a very long time and remains the subject of intense scholarly debates. The predominant theory, supported by anthropological, linguistic, and cultural evidence, is that the Aryans, or Indo-Europeans, originated in the steppes of Central Asia. Around 4,000 – 3,000 BC., in an attempt to escape from the cold and hostile neighbors, and to deal with the pressures of over-population and overgrazing in their home areas, the Aryans started to migrate toward the south and west.
Those who moved west are believed to be the ancestors of most European nations, while those who went south became known as Indo-Iranians. This last group seems to have, dwelt together for some time in a place called in Iranian myths Airyanem Vaejah and to have set forth (Greek: Cyrus II), who belonged to the Pasargadae clan of the Persians, and came of a royal line. He was a son of Kambujiya I (Greek: Cambyses I), grandson of Cyrus I, and a descendant of Chishpish (Greek: Teispes) and Hakhamanesh (Greek: Achaemenes), the latter being the eponym of the dynasty. When Cyrus II ascended the throne about 559 B.C., he was a vassal of the Median king Astyages, whom some sources say was his maternal grandfather. Cyrus, however, must have been a very remarkable, very ambitious person, unquestionably deserving his later title, Cyrus the Great. He started his career by conquering the satellites of Persia and establishing himself as the only suzerain of the southern Iranian plateau.
Very soon Cyrus ruled over a vast domain, but he aspired to nothing less than the conquest of the entire known world. He rebelled against the Medes and supplanted Astyages as a ruler of the Persian-Median kingdom with its capital at Ecbatana. The date of this event, 550 B.C., marks the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire. Cyrus then set up the federation of Elam and Armenia as the ﬁrst satrapies, setting the peculiar administrative pattern which the Achaemenid Empire followed throughout its existence.
Cyrus’s next step was to lead his forces against Croesus, the Lydian king whose name is still a byword for virtually unlimited wealth. An inconclusive battle was fought east of the Halys River, the boundary between the Lydian and Median states. The battle had ended in a draw, Croesus returned to his capital, Sardis, and not expecting to be followed, dismissed his conscripts for the winter. Cyrus, however, was not frightened of the bitter cold or the formidable Lydian cavalry.
In 546 B.C., he reached Croesus in Sardis and after a short siege, made him surrender. Cyrus then appointed his generals to crush the opposition of the Greek city-states along the western coast of Asia Minor, heretofore under Lydian control. Meanwhile, Cyrus himself returned to control the eastern borders of his state, now threatened by warlike tribes in the same manner as had the Medes and the Persians themselves menaced the native residents of Iran a millennium earlier. Cyrus’s next act of paramount importance was the conquest of Babylon. There he took maximum advantage of disunion and disaffection within the country, ruled by the weak king Nabonidus and his unpopular son Belshazzar. The priests of Marduk, the principal god of the city, promised Cyrus the surrender of Babylon if he would grant them special privileges in return. In 539 B.C., Cyrus entered the city of Babylon without a battle.
The other cities, even those in the racially mixed western part of the Babylonian Empire, submitted without resistance. The whole of western Asia as far as the Arabian desert and the borders of Egypt was now under Persian suzerainty. In Babylon, Cyrus released the Jews who had been held captive there since the conquest of the kingdom of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem. Cyrus not only permitted them to return to Palestine but also funded the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple. These acts procured Cyrus’s immortalization in the Bible.
Cyrus also issued what many call the ﬁrst declaration of human rights. In this code of laws, inscribed on a clay cylinder, Cyrus guaranteed freedom of religion and prohibited his soldiers from treating the inhabitants of the conquered lands as inferiors. Cyrus also noted on the cylinder some of his civic reforms and a public works program of the kind that wins votes for politicians even today: “I brought relief to their [the people’s] dilapidated houses, putting an end to their misfortunes.” This remarkable document is now in London’s British Museum, and there is a replica in the United Nations Building in New York.
Little is known of the last years of Cyrus’s life. concerning the circumstances of his demise, for lack of contrary evidence, we must rely on Herodotus’s account. This shows Cyrus as mounting a great expedition against the Massagetae tribe in the region of the Jaxartes River (the modern, Syr-Darya) on the north-eastern frontier of his empire, and falling in a hard-fought battle against the warrior- queen Tomyris. The king was buried in the capital he had founded, Pasargadae (339-355). Few rulers have won such unqualiﬁed admiration as did Cyrus. Even the Greeks, although they long considered the Persian Empire to be the chief threat to their independence, never ceased to regard Cyrus as a thoroughly admirable governor.
The Greek historian Xenophon, who in his Cyropaedia epitomized his ideal of the monarchy through Cyrus, calls him “a world conqueror unlike any other”. Herodotus reported that Cyrus’s reputation far outshone that of his two immediate successors: “The Persians say that Darius was a huckster, Cambyses a master, and Cyrus a father, for Darius looked to making a gain in everything, Cambyses was harsh and reckless, while Cyrus was gentle and provided them with all manner of goods.” The Medes do not seem to have felt that Cyrus was an alien master. The Jews praised him as the “Lord’s anointed” and the “Lord’s shepherd”. Alexander the Great is said to have emulated two heroes, Cyrus and Semiramis. Cyrus is remembered as a brilliant military commander and a perfect king.
Cyrus left two sons, the elder Cambyses and the younger Bardia (called Smerdis by Herodotus). During Cyrus’s lifetime, Cambyses was regent of Babylon, and after his father’s death, he was designated as Cyrus’s successor. Cambyses may have begun by restoring the situation on the northeast frontier of his empire, but if so, he did not spend long at it. In 525 B.C., only four years after he acceded to the throne, he launched a military campaign against Egypt. The rapidity with which this campaign was initiated suggests that preparations were already well advanced under Cyrus. With the aid of the Arabs, Cambyses successfully managed the crossing of the hostile Sinai Desert, Egypt’s ﬁrst and strongest line of defense. Then a grim battle was fought at Pelusium, the main eastern-frontier fortress.
The Egyptians lost and retired to Memphis, their traditional capital, near Cairo. Cambyses besieged the city, defeated the troops of the pharaoh Psamtik III of the 26th dynasty, and established himself as King of Upper and Lower Egypt. Three subsidiary campaigns were then launched: against Carthage (in modern Tunisia), against the oasis of Amon (Siwa oasis in the Egyptian desert west of the Nile), and Nubia (roughly present-day Sudan and Ethiopia). The Nubian campaign was led by Cambyses himself. All three campaigns, however, turned out to be failures. In 522 B.C., news reached Cambyses of a revolt in Iran led by an impostor claiming to be Smerdis, Cambyses’s brother. Hastening home to regain control, Cambyses died as the result of a wound accidentally self-inﬂicted (so says, Herodotus).
Hurrying back home with Cambyses was also Daryush (Greek: Darius), a leading army general, and reportedly one of the princes of the Achaemenid family. He, however, raced home to crush the rebellion in a manner advantageous to himself. Unlike his glorious father, Cambyses conserves the taint of an unsavory reputation. He was even reported to have gone mad after his Nubian expedition and to have committed many atrocities in Egypt. Worst of all, he is accused of murdering his younger brother before he (Cambyses) started his Egyptian campaign. This story remains an unsolved riddle in Iranian history.
According to both Herodotus and Darius’s inscription in Bistun, Smerdis was secretly assassinated by Cambyses‘s trustee, Prexaspes. Later, he was successfully impersonated by a magus, Gaumata, who seized the throne and reigned for several months, until overthrown by Darius and seven noble Persian families. However, intense controversy over the details of this “conspiracy of the Seven” stirs up suspicion in the minds of today’s generation so addicted to detective fiction and so distrustful of ofﬁcial accounts of political coups.
Many historians believe that Darius, who took the throne as Darius I, invented the story of Gaumata to justify his usurpation of the throne of the true Smerdis. Despite the dubious circumstances of his accession, Darius I proved to be another “Great” of the Achaemenid dynasty. He started by quelling the widespread revolts which had risen among the subject peoples after the coup d’etat. When victory was complete, and his authority established throughout the empire, Darius pursued an active expansionist policy and annexed large
sections of northern India to the enormous Achaemenid Empire. He even ventured north of the Black Sea, probably in an attempt to disrupt Greek trade with the Black Sea area. This campaign, however, yielded only partial success. Next, Darius invaded the Greek mainland, but as a result of his defeat at the Battle of Marathon, he had to retract the limits of his domain to Asia Minor. Despite the lack of military success, Darius yet possessed the most extensive empire the ancient world had ever known, and administering such a gigantic kingdom was a formidable challenge. Though not a great warrior, Darius was most certainly the greatest of politicians and managed to consolidate the empire through efﬁcient governorship. He completed the organization of the country into satrapies the administrative units ruled by governors (satraps) appointed by the central authority.