- [i] Related:: [[Princesses in the Bronze Age Levant]] - [b] [[royal court of the Achaemenid empire]] - ["] Cyrus the Great in particular is noted for taking a Median wife by Ctesias, and Herodotus suggests that either Cyrus or his son Cambyses solicited Pharaoh Amasis for one of his daughters as a royal wife. However, both of these unions come from the context of Greek authors who did not always understand Persian court life and they pale in comparison to the rest of the known Persian royal wives. Every other "queen" in Achaemenid history was Persian herself. On top of that, even Cyrus and Cambyses had Persian wives, and their known children (ie Cambyses, his siblings, and his own miscarried son) were all from those Persian-Persian unions. - ["] The only other time that non-Persian blood was injected into the royal lineage was in 424 BCE, when a disputed succession led to a civil war and Darius II, the son of a Babylonian concubine taking the throne. The events of 424-423 BCE actually featured the children of three different Babylonian concubines from the harem of Artaxerxes I participating in the conflict. - ["] Based on both Persian and Greek sources, the primary difference between a royal wife and concubine usually seems to be ethnic background. Concubines included high status non-Persians in the royal harem, whereas the king's wives had to Persian.