# Do We Have Persian Accounts of the Greek Wars? <cite>by u/Trevor_Culley (flaired user)</cite> ## Metadata - Full Title: Do We Have Persian Accounts of the Greek Wars? - Link: https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pnv5th/do_we_have_persian_accounts_of_the_greek_wars/hcv3lh7?context=3 ###### Outline - [[Persians put postpartum prisoners of war at work doing hard labor]] - [[Persians conquered many Greek city-states]] - [[Aristagoras rebelled because he was facing punishment for failure]] - [[Athens broke their promise to pay tribute to Persia]] - [[Persian adoption of papyrus is a reason we have few records]] ## Highlights ### q1 > The Achaemenid Persians were apparently not big fans of writing down war stories. There are a few exceptions, namely the Behistun Inscription of Darius I, but not about the wars in Greece. To some degree, this is not very surprising, given that the conflicts with the Greeks were not overwhelming successes for the Persians. The few Persian descriptions of war that do exist, are celebrating victory over rebels, not chronicling defeats. That said, I should at least acknowledge that we know the Achaemenid kings did maintain annual chronicles, but only a small fragment from Artaxerxes III has been found. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fgy3cxad950k2fcr6hkd04qa) ### q2 Persians put postpartum prisoners of war at work doing hard labor > One is a seemingly innocuous receipt from the time of the Ionian Revolt (BAR is a unit of volume just shy of 10 litres): > > 32 BAR of grain, supplied by Ashbashuputish, Shedda the [regiment commander] at Perspolis for whom Abbateya sets the apportionments, received, and gave it as [rations] to post partum Greek women at Persepolis - irrigation workers - whose apportionements are set by Abbateya and Mishabadda... 12th month, 22nd year. (PFA 1224) > > The only "22nd year" in the PFA is under Darius and the 12th month in the Persian calendar would be February-March. So we're looking at early 498 BCE, right in the early days of the Ionian Revolt. While there is an ongoing Greek revolt, we also happen to have recently pregnant women put to work on irrigation, the back breaking labor of digging canals. > > Post-partum rations appear regularly in the archive, but this kind of labor does not. We know from several instances in Herodotus' *Histories* that the Achaemenids used deportation to deal with rebellious Greeks on several occasions, and both Herodotus and accounts of Alexander the Great's conquests say that some of those Greeks ended up in southern Iran. They also seem to have been under the authority of a military commander - Shedda - rather than the regular administrators. > > It's very likely that these women were prisoner's of war put to work on hard labor - I hesitate to call them slaves only because this forced labor seems to have been a temporary punishment rather than permanent bondage. And in a morbid note to quote from [Encyclopedia Iranica](https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ionian-revolt) "...it must be doubted whether the children they had borne were the offspring of husbands." ### q3 Persians conquered many Greek city-states > Ancient Greece was not a unified political entity. Instead a huge variety of city states operated independently, not just in modern Greece, but around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. The Persians outright conquered many of these cities well before invading the Greek mainland, most notably the Greeks along the coasts of modern Turkey and the coast of Libya ### q4 Aristagoras rebelled because he was facing punishment for failure > The revolt actually started when the Persians' Greek governor in Miletus, Aristagoras, convinced his superiors in the regional capital, Sardis, to support him invading and annexing the island of Naxos. The invasion was a dismal failure and Aristagoras and Miletus wound up with empty treasuries. Unable to pay tribute and facing punishment for his failings, Aristagoras went into full on revolt in late 499 BCE and his rebellion spread like wildfire. Reminds me of Alcibiades. [[The Tyrants of Syracuse by Jeff Champion#p85 Alcibiades is vilified for not sticking around when Athens was going to execute him]] ### q5 Athens broke their promise to pay tribute to Persia > Interestingly, Athens itself actually comes closer to fitting what you described. In 510 BCE, faced with a Spartan invasion, an Athenian delegation actually submitted "earth and water," a promise to be subjects and pay tribute to Persia. When these delegates went home, the crisis had been averted without bloodshed and the Athenians refused to abide by their delegates' oaths. ### q6 Persian adoption of papyrus is a reason we have few Achaemenid records > A huge amount of information and tradition from the Achaemenid period is lost to us. The Persians adopted the Aramaic language and writing on papyrus as the primary method of communication and record keeping across the whole empire. This transition away from cuneiform languages on clay tablets had the side-effect of creating more perishable documents. Undisturbed, fired clay tablets will last for thousands of years. Papyrus paper degrades quickly, and unless records are copied, they will rot away. Following Alexander's conquests, nobody maintained Persian records and they were lost or destroyed quickly. > > Heroic poetry, religious rites, and even court history may have been exclusively passed on orally from one generation to the next. This is, of course, even more vulnerable to lack of maintenance than papyrus. With the Achaemenid house gone, there may not have been much motivation to pass on those histories to successive generations.