The Persian Charts of the Greek Historians

Abstract

In their nascent efforts at documenting and analyzing the past, the Greek historians of Persia, beginning with Herodotus, if not Hecataeus as well, were influenced by the intellectual strategies of the Achaemenids for managing their empire and its past, present and future history. The current contribution demonstrates that the Greek historians appropriated and experimented with the chart, with its penchant for rigorous, even obsessive categorization of people and resources, as an organizational format characteristic of Persian imperial administration. First I illustrate the pervasiveness of the charting impulse in the day-to-day imperial bureaucracy and the programmatic royal inscriptions of the Persian Empire. Secondly, I explore the engagement of Herodotus’ Histories, Ctesias’ fragmentary Persica and Xenophon’s Anabasis with this writerly, typically Persian technique against these texts’ oralistic backdrops and argue that the historians’ respective treatments and uses of the chart correspond to their apparent attitudes towards imperialism and its technologies.