Mark Gagnon

I mean, it's this mess, like what a mess.

Then Artaxerxes I takes the throne and then would rule for over 40 years.

He's actually the Persian king who appears most frequently in later books of the Hebrew Bible, like the book of Ezra, Nehemiah.

They both mention Artaxerxes in connection with the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

And then Xerxes was buried at Naqsh-i-Rostam.

This is a...

basically like a tomb cut into a cliff face alongside his father, Darius.

The tomb's facade shows the king standing on a platform supported by representatives of all the people of his empire, with the winged symbol of Ahura Mazda, again, that god of Zoroastrianism, hovering above.

And a final statement of legitimacy and divine favor, basically frozen.

for eternity.

The image of the tyrannical Eastern King drowning in luxury while his subjects are all suffering kind of became a stereotype in European thought.

And I think a lot of this comes from Herodotus, Greek sources, the legacy of Xerxes, probably the Bible to an extent.

And of course, Alexander the Great, you know, if he's going to destroy a kingdom, we need to have a good justification.

So as a result, a lot of our understanding of Xerxes has been framed in this lens.

But modern scholarship has been pushing back on the narrative for a long time.

The Achaemenid Empire, far from just only being, you know, brutal tyranny, was in many ways one of the most progressive large-scale governments in the ancient world ever.

I mean, it practiced...

religious tolerance mostly.

It allowed people within the empire to maintain their own language and customs and local governance.

It was building roads and had a postal system and standardized commerce and coinage and all that stuff, and really maintained relative peace across a massive piece of territory, going all the way from the Indus River to the Aegean Sea.