Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface xiii Introduction xix PART ONE 1. The Satrapal Condition 1 2. Where Things Stand 25 3. Imperial Matter 51 PART TWO 4. From Captives to Delegates 81 5. Delegates and Proxies in the Dahyu of Armenia 118 6. Going Underground: Affiliates, Proxies, and Delegates at Tsaghkahovit 153 Conclusion 194 Notes 205 References Cited 231

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Preface

This book is an extended investigation into the power of things to make a difference in shaping the conditions of imperial power. It is also an effort to bring together an eclectic range of scholarly conversations on imperialism and matter, and draw forth from this convergence what might be called a uniquely archaeological approach to explaining both the perdurance and the fragility of imperial sovereignty. It may come as little surprise to learn that a book under the title Imperial Matter presses anthropological engagements with problems of empire and colonialism up against the growing body of social and political thought that has come to be known as the “material turn.” But perhaps less anticipated, and maybe even a bit jarring to our disciplinary sensibilities, is the intrusion of ancient Persia into this encounter of otherwise steadfastly contemporary bodies of thought. One of my main intentions in writing Imperial Matter is to demonstrate that the cultural production of ancient Persia can be taken seriously as an untapped wellspring for theoretical reflection on the material constitution of imperial sovereignty. Ancient Persia figures here neither as a misrepresented “Other” calling out for post-Orientalist rediscovery, nor merely as a compelling archaeological case study for extending ideas that derive from the canons of Western philosophy and social theory. Rather, my goal is to explore how the earliest politico-religious thought of ancient Persia, long marginal in the Western academy, can profitably contribute to political and material theory as we know it today. At the center of this effort is what I am calling the “satrapal condition,’ an analytic framework built out of the Old Persian word for sovereignty. The term plays on the dual meanings of the word condition, calling up the variable work of material things both in reproducing “conditions” of subjection and subordination, and in placing limits or “conditions”

xiii xiv PREFACE on imperial sovereignty, thus rendering it perpetually aspirational and incomplete. An investigation of satrapal conditions entails a close examination of the practical entanglements among humans and a range of political things that I call delegates, proxies, captives, and affiliates, whose capacities for action depend on their material properties as well as the cultural and political logics in which they are enlisted.

Empirically, these ideas are put to work through an archaeological examination of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 B.C.) and especially its northern territory of Armenia and neighboring regions. The data in this book include both my own findings from excavations of a settlement in the modern Republic of Armenia known as Tsaghkahovit, as well as the discoveries from new and old investigations conducted by others in Iran, Turkey, and the South Caucasus. Given various evidentiary limitations that will become clear in due course, Achaemenid Armenia offers difficult terrain for an examination of satrapal conditions. In a sense, the time and place under view represent an archaeological no man’s land, geographically distant from the contemporary cities of ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, and Iran, sociologically removed from the transformative developments in human history that have long captivated archaeological attention (e.g. the emergence of social complexity), and largely unseen in the eventful pages of Furasia’s documentary history in the mid-first millennium B.c. Moreover, during the centuries in question, the people of the mountains appear to have been resolutely uninterested in the kinds of social technologies that make ancient societies most visible to us today: writing, ostentatious burials, large visible settlements, and so on. There is, in short, little glamor in this kind of archaeology at the extreme margins. But there is the opportunity to shift our vantage on the ancient world and denormalize the empirical and conceptual sources of contemporary archaeological thought. It can only be hoped that, in time, future fieldwork and methodological advances will bring to light new data to support or force a reconsideration of the arguments advanced in these pages.

The deep origins of this book reside in my doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Michigan in 2008. While Imperial Matter bears resemblance to that project in its empirical commitments rather more than its conceptual ambitions, the kernels of an argument on the capacity of material things to exert their own force in the lived experience of empire can be found in that earlier work. The dissertation came about under the guidance of a number of advisors who played a critical role in shaping my thinking on complex societies of the ancient world. I am deeply grateful to Norman Yoffee, both for his friendship and for his unstinting support for a career that has taken shape at the intersection of anthropological and Near Eastern archaeology. I also owe a tremendous debt to Margaret Cool Root for leading me to discover the sublime pleasure of studying ancient Persia, and for a pioneering body of scholarship on the visual production of the Achaemenids whose influence can be felt across this book. The work and guidance of Carla

PREFACE XV

Sinopoli and Susan Alcock urged me to think concertedly about what might constitute a distinctly archaeological contribution to the study of empires. I also owe a great thanks to John Cherry for his years of mentorship. Unbeknownst to them all, these individuals “visited” me regularly in the writing of this book as shoulder angels, pressing me to refine my ideas and cautioning me to pursue new lines of reasoning with care and clarity.

In its current form, this book came together in earnest once I joined the vibrant intellectual community at Cornell University, first as a Hirsch Post-Doctoral Fellow in Archaeology (and visiting professor in anthropology), and then as a member of the faculty in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. A number of colleagues at Cornell offered guidance and encouragement throughout the writing process. As a mentor, Kim Haines-Eitzen provided invaluable advice at various stages of this project, and I am truly appreciative of her and the current chair of Near Eastern Studies, Lauren Monroe, for their unflinching support and friendship. I also thank Sturt Manning for his constant encouragement, and Catherine Kearns, who helped me as a research assistant in 2011-12. The Bret de Bary Interdisciplinary Mellon Writing Group on Material Culture in 2011-12 provided an extended opportunity to gather with fellow scholars who share an interest in matters of ontology and materiality, and I am grateful to Elizabeth Anker, Elisha Cohn, Renate Ferro, Noor Hashem, Stacey Langwick, Adam T. Smith, and Saiba Varma for many engaging conversations around stimulating texts, some of which found their way into this work. The introduction and chapter 1 of Imperial Matter were discussed at a workshop of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and I am particularly thankful to John Henderson for sharing thoughts that helped me sharpen my concepts. I also want to thank colleagues in an anthropology writing group for their comments on those same two chapters, namely Chris Garces, Saida Hodžić, Hiroku Miyazaki, Paul Nadasdy, Lucinda Rainberg, and Marina Welker.

It would be difficult to overstate how influential the fieldwork conducted at Tsaghkahovit was in formulating the ideas that lie at the heart of this book, quite apart from the intriguing data generated at the site. The excavations were carried out under the auspices of the Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS), and I am deeply grateful to my friends and fellow co-directors, Ruben Badalyan, Adam T. Smith, and Ian Lindsay, for ensuring that Project ArAGATS continues to thrive as the longest-standing international archaeological research initiative in the South Caucasus. It could have become isolating to be one of the lone historical archaeologists on a team of prehistorians if not for their unfailing support for the work at the Iron Age settlement of Tsaghkahovit. I am especially grateful to Ruben Badalyan for securing the permits for fieldwork, and for facilitating artifact restoration, illustration, and photography. I also thank team members Roman Hovsepyan, Belinda

Xvi PREFACE

Monahan, and Maureen Marshall for their archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and bioarchaeological analyses, and Lilit Ter-Minasyan and Hasmik Sargsyan for their architectural and artifact drawings. I was lucky to welcome a wonderful group of trench supervisors over the years, including Catherine Kearns, Kathryn Weber, Jacob Nabel, Elizabeth Hardy, and most especially Elizabeth Fagan, a trusted colleague who periodically directed the excavations when family obligations pulled me away. As director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography and former co-director of Project ArAGATS, Pavel Avetisyan has been a steadfast supporter of our investigations on the Tsaghkahovit Plain, and I thank him genuinely for that. I have benefited greatly from conversations with fellow historical archaeologists in Armenia, Mkrditch Zardaryan and Inessa Karapetyan. I am also especially thankful to the people of the village of Tsaghkahovit for their tireless work in the trenches, their friendship, and their hospitality. The Tsaghkahovit community’s needs are great, and it is unfortunately the case that the employment opportunities Project ArAGATS has afforded over the years have not enhanced the community’s prosperity to the same degree that the community has enhanced our understanding of their region's rich past.

The fieldwork and research for this book were made possible by the financial support of a number of institutions, to which I am most appreciative, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the President’s Council of Cornell Women, the Fulbright Scholar’s Program, the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School and Center for Russian and East European Studies, and the Social Science Research Council. Much of this book was written during the 2013-14 academic year, while I was a fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies. The ACLS afforded me the time to develop part 1 of this book in a way that would not have been possible without a year’s leave from teaching.

I had the benefit of several opportunities to experiment publicly with the ideas in this book, when they were still germinating, through lectures at the University of Binghamton’s Department of Anthropology, Columbia University’s Seminar on the Ancient Near East, and a comparative conference on imperial states at the University of Chicago. I thank the organizers for providing these forums to present the concepts in this book when they were still in development.

In no small measure, the book is stronger thanks to the suggestions and assistance of a great many colleagues too numerous to list. I would especially like to single out Margaret Cool Root, whose close readings of various draft chapters saved me from many embarrassing missteps. I also extend my thanks to Bruce Lincoln, who was generous enough to indulge an archaeologist wanting to explore various crevices of Persian studies in which, without the requisite languages, she arguably has no business. Rémy Boucharlat helped me tremendously in securing illustrations of sites in the Achaemenid imperial heartland. The two anonymous

PREFACE xvii reviewers and the reader for the University of California editorial committee offered much insightful feedback, for which I am greatly appreciative. Any remaining errors are of course my own alone. I am also thankful to Eric Schmidt and Maeve Cornell-Taylor at University of California Press for their efforts in seeing this book to production, to Roy Sablosky for his skillful copyediting, and to project editor Francisco Reinking for shepherding the book through the final stages.

It is my remarkable good fortune to have a family that has been endlessly supportive throughout the process of researching and writing this book. I often recall a quiet twilight car ride in Armenia in the summer of 2014, when my four-year-old son, Avedis, broke the silence to ask how my book was coming along. It was one of many such occasions when I felt overwhelming gratitude for Avedis’s uncanny maturity, genuine curiosity, and basic trust that it was all just a matter of time. My daughter, Ani, was quite literally by my side throughout the writing process. When it comes to meeting a deadline, there is no better incentive than a pregnancy. Ani’s newborn presence in my life provided much needed perspective during the final months of this project. All the while, from the very beginning, my dear parents and in-laws have been a constant source of love and support.

Finally, this book simply would not have been possible if not for my colleague, collaborator, and husband, Adam T. Smith. I thank him for his unwavering encouragement and enthusiasm, for the care with which he commented on draft chapters, for his penetrating insights on matters of politics, materiality, and much else besides, and for his impactful scholarly oeuvre, which has so profoundly shaped my own thinking. Adam repeatedly gave me the one precious thing that is in shortest supply for parents of small children: time. On countless days and nights, and with unrelenting patience and good humor, he kept the ship afloat while I disappeared to write. For all these reasons and more, I dedicate this book to him.

Introduction

An old and obscure word has recently acquired new currency in the lexicon of contemporary world politics, summoning the attention of anyone who follows the matter of empire. By all accounts, we live in an age of peculiar political entities that go by the names “satrap” and “satrapy” If the words sound archaic and only vaguely English, it is because they are. To locate their origins is to traverse over two and a half millennia of human history, and arrive at the earliest imperial formations of ancient Persia. Yet these arcane political entities are apparently still among us, in an era in which the newest technologies of postindustrial capitalism exist alongside the oldest technologies of macropolitical power. If mainstream print media is any gauge, since 9/11 satraps and satrapies have proliferated around the globe, putting a great many of the world’s political communities under conditions of partial sovereignty (figure 1a). However ethereally, ancient Persia's singularly novel experiment with imperial dominion on a continental scale has come to haunt much of the world today.

It was not always so. In the simpler days of the Cold War, “satrapy” was a pejorative largely reserved for Soviet republics, protectorates, and allies, from Cuba to Czechoslovakia, Albania to Afghanistan. Yet these days, nearly every country has been said to either have one, or be one. It perhaps comes as no surprise that on the ledger of putative satrapal sovereigns, the United States tops the charts (figure 1b). In the decade that followed the 2003 Iraq War, commentators in leading world newspapers and across the blogosphere repeatedly opined that the U.S. had made satrapies out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, along with Britain, Australia, Canada, and other states conventionally considered allies. The Guardian anticipated the trend: “A collection of American satrapies” was how one xix

XX INTRODUCTION

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FIGURE 1. Left: Tracking occurrences of the words “satrap” and “satrapy” in major world newspapers and magazines from December 1973 to April 2015. Right: states said to have satrapies today. (Data source: LexisNexis Academic).

correspondent writing in those pages described George H. W. Bush's hoped-for outcome in the Middle East after the first Gulf War (Woollacott 1991), in which Iraq lost its own “satrapy” in Kuwait (Haig 1991). Beyond the Middle East, journalists have remarked that Britain has long maintained its “satrapy” of Scotland (e.g. Liddle 2011; Young 1997), that China has made “satrapies” of Myanmar and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa (Applebaum 2008; Thompson 2011), and that financial crisis has allowed Germany to make a “satrapy” out of Greece (Johnson 2011). Meanwhile, post-Soviet Russia has tried to reestablish “satrapies” in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Ukraine, and beyond (e.g. Black 2011; Champion 1994; Reeves 1995; Traynor 2008), even as one analyst once asked whether this former superpower could itself become an “American satrapy” (Trenin and Dolgin 2010). Some architects of contemporary geopolitics have themselves used this unconventional term, preferring to project it onto an adversary with perceived imperial designs. According to Steven Lee Myers (2009) of the New York Times, in 2009 defense secretary Robert Gates assured Congress that Iraq's leaders “do not intend for the new, post-Saddam Iraq to become a satrapy of its neighbor to the east” (that is, Iran). Others in the media soon joined him in returning satrapy to its place of origin, signaling the politically compromised condition in which Iraq would find itself if Tehran’s ambitions were to be realized (e.g. Diehl 2011; Fisk 2011; Hughes 2011). The modern precedent is, of course, the Iranian “satrapy” of Syria (e.g. Ajami 2011; Harris 2013), itself at times overlord to satrapal Lebanon.’ “Iran must know . . . that the Sunni Arab world cannot be transformed into a series of satrapies subservient to Tehran,” the editors of the Guardian recently admonished.’ The list could go on.

INTRODUCTION xxi

How are we to reckon with this lively if at times sardonic appropriation of the ancient Persian past to the global present? It is, to be sure, easily dismissed as nothing more than a quaint and taunting archaism that is gaining fashion in the argot of punditry. But Imperial Matter opens with this word because the rhetorical trafficking of satrapies in the public sphere unwittingly conjures a term of rich but unrealized analytical potential derived from a sophisticated if obscure body of ancient Persian political philosophy. It is a term that will be pressed into service in this book to refigure the theoretical terrain of imperial sovereignty, and particularly its relation to the infinite world of physical matter. While materiality may not seem germane to the colloquial connotations that “satrapy” vaguely calls to mind—the subjugated provinces of bygone eastern despots, perhaps—this is only because satrapy’s material associations were long ago abandoned, lost in translation, and left behind in the obscurity of early Persian theology. The word’s potential for setting the terms of an archaeology of imperialism is therefore by no means self-evident. As we shall see in chapter 1, to discover it requires delving deep into satrapy’s etymological and historical anatomy, and making new alignments with contemporary social and material theory, only then to emerge with the outlines of a heuristic framework that pushes to the fore the relations of humans and things in the reproduction and attenuation of imperial sovereignty. Such relations are the central concern of this book.

WE ARE SOMETIMES LIKE THEM

One need not plumb such etymological depths to sense the poignancy of this curious lexical resurgence for students of empire. For one, talk of satrapies implicitly unsettles the modernist conceit that imperialism’s latest incarnations represent entirely novel forms of macropolitical ambition. It pushes us to ask how the trajectories of empires past can “help us to appreciate the importance of thinking clearly about what is and what is not possible in the present conjuncture” (Calhoun et al. 2006: 15). The resurrection of satrapies in contemporary political discourse therefore also adds new urgency to the oft-heard critique of colonial studies for its “exclusionary model of temporality” that has tended to “seal off” premodern periods (Loomba et al. 2005: 25), and treat the “distant’ past .. . as a field of undifferentiated alterity” (Cohen 2000: 3). In the words of other critics, the anthropology of colonialism has evinced a “temporal myopia” (Dietler 2010: 22) that has left it “rather uncurious about exploring the implications of looking backwards in time” (Cooper 2005: 409). Western social thought has worked assiduously to establish the intellectual ramparts that today separate notions of modern and ancient. But talk of contemporary satrapies represents a breach in that convention, denying the possibility of an autonomous account of the imperial present entirely unfettered by the political repertoires of the past.

xxii INTRODUCTION

This is not the first time that a challenge to the ancient/modern divide has pivoted on the Achaemenid Persian Empire, a dynastic polity centered in today’s southwestern Iran that spanned much of southwest Asia during the sixth through fourth centuries B.C. It was perhaps Hegel who first defied the division through recourse to ancient Persia, provocatively claiming in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1956: 187) that “the Persian empire is an empire in the modern sense? To Hegel, Persia’s satrapies were the earthly expression of a Zoroastrian religious philosophy that allowed for humanity’s discovery of the self-conscious Spirit as free and independent from matter and nature. Hegel held that the Persian political system entailed not only an interdependent unity, but also the possibility for a kind of freedom, manifested in the ability of each satrapal community to retain its distinctive customs and laws. This dialectic of unity and freedom Hegel associated with “Zoroaster’s Light?” It is the unifying essence of light that Hegel tied to the beginnings of an awareness of the self-conscious Spirit. Light “enables the individual human being, together with other beings, to achieve freedom to act in as many ways as their natural propensities allow” (Azadpour 2003: 140), in contrast to the state of darkness, in which Spirit and matter are still immersed in nature. “As light illuminates everything—imparting to each object its peculiar vitality—so the Persian Empire extends over a multitude of nations, and leaves to each one its particular character” (Hegel 1956: 187). Since the objectification of the Spirit was to Hegel the precondition of history, the Achaemenid Persian Empire “constitutes strictly speaking the beginning of world history” (174), and therefore the start of the modern era.

In Hegel's orientalist teleology, the torch of civilization would thence pass to the Greco-Roman world and onward to Europe, leaving Persia’s primordial modernity behind in what Zainab Bahrani (2003) has called the “extraterrestrial Orient.’ But viewed through the lens of contemporary political thought, Hegel seems downright heterodox to have located an early moment of political enlightenment in the mountains and lowlands of ancient Persia. Yet today’s invocations of American or Russian or Chinese satrapies go even further than Hegel in upsetting our historical sensibilities; they intimate that some modern empires are sometimes imperial in the ancient sense. Put another way, not only were they something like us, but we are sometimes like them (Latour 1993).

POLITICAL AND MATERIAL THEORY FROM A STILL-ENCHANTED WORLD

What makes the contemporary journalistic usage so exceptionally provocative is not only the transhistorical bridge that it builds but also the unseemly baggage that it brings. As we shall see in chapter 1, the word “satrapy” has a thick semantic geology. Sedimented strata of meaning have accrued ever since Herodotus first adapted

INTRODUCTION xxiii an Old Persian word and introduced his neologism into the Greek vocabulary to describe Persia's territorial possessions. These meanings have come to link the term inextricably with corruption, venality, brutality, greed, sycophancy, duplicity, authoritarianism, corruption, arrogance, feudalism, gluttony, and sloth—the full trait list of “oriental despotism” and then some. “A pile of satrap,” wrote the editors of the Independent, in a rare scatological invocation.* In modern political discourse, satraps and satrapies have traditionally been consigned to the Middle East. At times farcically modified with terms like “desert” or “robed,’ they are code words for that region’s perceived pathological politics. As it turns out, however, satrapies are also things of the West, the Far East, and other places besides. Globalizing the term “satrapy” to describe all arenas of partial sovereignty that inhere in today’s macropolities grates at our political sensibilities because the squalid orientalist meanings linger just beneath the surface. They threaten to suggest that a mode of politics the West has worked discursively to curtail and contain since the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century B.c. has spilled out across time and space.

By all popular accounts, Persia’s political habit entailed mainly the savage instruments of violence. Consider a cover story that appeared in the authoritative weekly news magazine the Economist in the summer of 2013, as America and its allies flirted with intervention in the Syrian civil war in the face of mounting Iranian influence over the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his neighbors (figure 2). “Can Iran be Stopped?” ran the headline, in a rhetorical turn of phrase that recalls a much earlier contemplation of the rampant advance of Persian power across the world stage.” This was no accident. The cover image of the Economist featured a stone sculptural relief from a palatial structure at the Achaemenid capital, Persepolis, in today’s southwestern Iran. It showed a brawny lion digging its fangs and claws into the rump of a rearing bull. In the learned opinion of the magazine, the West should enter the Syrian fray to check the ambitions of a “Persian lion” that “has not lost its claws.”

What is most fascinating about this tableau is neither the facile analogy of violence that it draws between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Achaemenid Persian Empire, nor the way in which the Economist strives to awaken long-dormant anxieties of unleashed Persian despotism that reside deep in the Western historical consciousness—as if to say, “Old specters haunt modern politics in new guises” (Euben 1999: 7). Rather, the magazine’s cover is of particular interest for how succinctly, if inadvertently, it encapsulates why it is difficult to fathom a serious contribution to political thought that derives from the cultural production of ancient Persia. The selected image of the grisly lion and the helpless bull is meant to invoke a primordial and untamable violence. The Economist's glib metaphor seems to elide predatory ferocity with state aggression (awkwardly casting the dangerous bull as the Syrian prey in need of the West’s protection), and thus calls up a visceral exercise of archaic political power that precedes and is closed off to rational xxiv INTRODUCTION

Talking to the Taliban, scaring Karzai Brazilians take to the streets Is China changing on Tibet?

End of empires: media giants break up

JUNE 22ND-28TH 2013 Economist.com Henry Cecil, high-class horse-whisperer |

Can iran be stopped?

Syria, nukes and the { rise of Persian power

FIGURE 2. Economist cover. (© The Economist Newspaper Limited, London, June 22, 2013).

thought—one that is animalistic, motivated by innate compulsion rather than mindful reflection on the nature of sovereignty and its means of reproduction. As it turns out, the metaphor could not be further from the scholarly understanding of the lion-and-bull symplegma, as art historians call such unusual pairings with both combative and erotic connotations.* But this is the ancient Persia that most of us have come to know. It is a Persia that is quintessentially despotic in the sense that Montesquieu meant it, a regime driven only by passions, one that paradoxically “renounces the order of the political” and thus subscribes to “the abdication of politics itself” (Althusser 2007 [1972]: 81-82). It is the Persia we encounter in comic books and major motion pictures like the award-winning 300 and its prequel, 300: Rise of an Empire (figure 3). It is the Persia of popular political histories like Tom

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FIGURE 3. Movie poster for 300: Rise of an Empire.

Xxvi INTRODUCTION

Holland's Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West or any one of a number of popular books and films that belong to the virtual cottage industry surrounding Alexander the Great. Hegel aside, theorists have generally hesitated to look conceptually at ancient Persian thought as a means to stimulate productive abstractions for the humanistic social sciences because of a prevailing suspicion of Persian political reflection as primeval, pre-rational, and grounded in nothing more than an insatiable thirst for power.

This is, of course, your garden-variety orientalism, as Edward Said (1978) famously called the West’s style of thought, system of knowledge, and modes of discourse concerning the Orient. But my critique of the Economist serves here not as a prelude to a corrective, “indigenous” history that works to rewrite the Persian past on its own terms. Scholars of Mesopotamia and ancient Persia have made great strides in recent decades in advancing accounts of the region’s history that demolish a metanarrative of Western civilization hinged on Near Eastern foils.’ Imperial Matter takes a different approach, one that nevertheless emerges in no small measure out of the opening cleared by that important turn to forge new paths into the southwest Asian past. This alternative asks whether there are fertile fields on the other side of the Saidian critique in which to sow the seeds for a political and archaeological theory that builds on ancient Persia's studied “metaphysics of power” (Lincoln 2007: xv). To the extent that it seems unthinkable to turn to such thought as a means to amplify our concepts of imperialism and materiality, it is in part because Western political theory long ago left the business of what Roxanne Euben (1999: 3, 7) has called “metaphysical truths” and “transcendent foundations” in favor of a “profoundly this-worldly scholarly discourse that sees no place for such foundationalist certainties in modern political life”

The project to lift the perspicacious intuitions of pious (and powerful) intellectuals who believed in “divine truths unknowable by purely human means” (Euben 1999: 4) from the particularist domain of history to the general plane of theory is thus perhaps audacious. But as I hope will become clear in chapter 1, taking seriously political thought forged in a still “enchanted” world (Euben 1999: 15) is a legitimate endeavor if one accepts a broad understanding of political theory as an inquiry into such matters as the nature of legitimate sovereignty, the relationship between moral and political life, and the relationship of individual to society and polity (9-10, 51). To adapt Euben’s judicious formulation, it might be best to speak not of an Achaemenid political theory, but of an engagement with Achaemenid premises of political life “in terms of political theory“ (52). Such an endeavor is also an extension of the recognition, to which Bruce Lincoln (2007, 2012) has attended with particular delicacy, that the cultural production of the Achaemenids is not reducible to a crudely instrumentalist logic of propaganda, but instead acutely forged out of a complex set of religious and political values—values that provided powerful justification for empire, to be sure. Insofar as theirs was, in its own historical and