In the course of its two hundred years of existence, the Persian Empire (c. 550–330 BCE) met many forms of resistance from its subject populations.¹ The present collection of essays focuses on a particular moment of violent contestation in the empire and examines mostly, but not exclusively, its textual evidence: the Babylonian revolts against Xerxes in his second regnal year (484 BCE), as seen in cuneiform sources. Which considerations inform the particular focus of this volume?

In certain respects, the revolts of 484 BCE were unremarkable. The Babylonians had revolted against Persian rule before, once in 522 BCE and...

In a recent contribution, the present author discussed the significant developments in the social fabric of Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Babylonia, contrasting the ‘long 6^th century’ — the period between Nabopolassar’s establishment of the Chaldean dynasty in 626 and the putting down of the revolts against Xerxes in 484 — with the Late Achaemenid period, that is, the decades between 484 and the Macedonian conquest of Babylonia in 331.³ In order to integrate the results in the wider discourse on the exercise of state power in the pre-industrial world, a framework suggested by economist Douglass North (North et al. 2009) was employed that...

It is widely accepted that the Persians began their rule of Babylonia masterfully, changing very little with regard to the monarch’s role, temple policy and, more characteristically, the country’s administration. The only major administrative change implemented shortly after the regime change was possibly the abolishment of the office of the country governor (šakin māti) and the consequent introduction of the office of the governor of Babylonia (pāḫāt Bābili).² Some departures from this policy occurred under Darius I, but the watershed came with the revolts against Xerxes in the second year of his rule, to which the king responded by deposing...

This paper is based on the Sipparean textual record for the last regnal years of Darius I and the first two regnal years of Xerxes. It takes as its point of departure the fact that economic difficulties and the heavy burden placed by the Achaemenid government on the Babylonian elites contributed to triggering the revolts against Xerxes in 484 BCE (but they hardly were their structural cause). Given the absence of specific evidence from Sippar for crisis phenomena, the paper will point to a certain loosening of royal control over temple institutions before the revolts. Regarding the aftermath of the...

It is clear that the scanty remains of clay tablets from Uruk (Warka) do not provide answers to all questions concerning Xerxes’ reign in Babylonia. A solution, if possible, can only be achieved by a comparison with other Babylonian cities. However, Uruk is the only city in Mesopotamia that, thanks to the ongoing archaeological exploration of over one hundred years, helps to understand the fate of some urban areas affected by the change after the second regnal year of Xerxes.

Uruk was, with Ur and Eridu, the most southern town of Babylonia. The scholarship has dealt with many of the...

The Neo-Babylonian text corpus is a copious and varied source of documentary evidence on many aspects of Babylonia’s history under Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian rule. What is often not realized, however, is that two-thirds of this rich corpus was created in a single year (484 BCE)² by a single intervention, and that as a result of this intervention processes of archive production, that had taken place in a decentralized and organic fashion until 484 BCE, became politicized and homogenized during the corpus’ final moments of formation.

The political nature of this intervention was discussed in my article on the Babylonian...

The Persian era (539–330 BCE) was a period of remarkable achievements in Babylonian science, as witnessed by large numbers of scholarly tablets excavated in Babylon, Uruk, and elsewhere. However, the Early Persian era (c. 539–400 BCE) is badly represented in these texts, and the reign of Xerxes (485/4–465/4 BCE) comes across as a particularly fruitless period, since not one scholarly tablet has been found that was definitely written in that time. By contrast, a trickle of tablets date to earlier rulers and to his successor Artaxerxes I (464/3–424/3 BCE).³ It is tempting to correlate this lack...

Institutional archives rank among the most important sources for the social, economic and political history of Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. In the period after the Assyrian domination, almost all known institutional archives from Babylonia are temple archives; the only exception is the mostly unpublished ‘Palace Archive’ of Nebuchadnezzar.² The administration of Ebabbar (Sippar) and Eanna (Uruk) yielded the largest temple archives of that time. They provide us with a plethora of information that is indispensable for the reconstruction of the Babylonian temple households, but also of the political landscape in which these economic entities are embedded. After the...

Research conducted over the past three decades has enhanced our understanding of the political and cultural context of the Babylonian revolts against Achaemenid rule in the early part of the reign of Xerxes. C. Waerzeggers has convincingly argued that the two rebel leaders Bēl-šimânni and Šamaš-erība rose simultaneously in northern Babylonia and were defeated a few months later, all events happening in the second year of Xerxes.² Their defeat coincides with the end of entire segments of Babylonian documentation, especially at Babylon, Borsippa and Sippar, the main insurrectionist centres. Cuneiform sources dating after the second year of Xerxes and for...