Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

So I think a tosser has a very important role to play in this.

And he's not assassinated.

No, no, he dies.

Yeah, absolutely.

Of natural causes, as far as we know.

Absolutely.

And almost straight away, we have a series of inscriptions set up by Xerxes stamping his authority on the empire.

And the first one is an inscription that we know as the Harem inscription because of where it was found at Persepolis.

And there Xerxes makes a very bold statement.

He says, my father had many sons, but of his sons, I was the greatest.

And the word there is mathishta.

It's a power play, isn't it?

It really is, absolutely.

So he acknowledges this.

that there could have been a succession crisis.

And maybe there really was, you know, which he overwrites, of course, you know.

But then this statement, I was the greatest mathishta, you know, that really puts his seal on what's going on.

And what we find throughout the early part of Xerxes' reign in all of his inscriptions

He makes a real play at being the son of Darius all the time, as though he can't emphasize that enough.

He needs people to recognize his legitimacy as king through his ancestry in particular.