Achaemenes, Teispes and the Early Persian Kings of Anshan

Achaemenes (Old Persian Haxāmaniš) is the ancestor who gave the Achaemenid dynasty its name, a shadowy figure probably of the early seventh century BCE who is known only from inscriptions carved generations later. Before Cyrus the Great built an empire, his family ruled Anshan in what is now Fars province as minor kings on the edge of Elam, Assyria and Media. Almost everything about them comes from two royal family trees that do not quite match, and that mismatch is one of the real puzzles of ancient Iranian history.

Two royal genealogies that disagree

The earliest Persian kings left no inscriptions of their own that survive. What we have are two later statements of descent, made by two different kings for two different audiences.

The first is the Cyrus Cylinder, written in Babylonian after Cyrus captured Babylon in 539 BCE. Cyrus calls himself the son of Cambyses, grandson of Cyrus and descendant of Teispes, and gives each of them the title “great king, king of Anshan”. He never mentions Achaemenes, and he never calls himself a Persian. In Babylonian eyes he was the heir of an old royal house of Anshan.

The second is the Behistun inscription, carved for Darius I around 520 BCE. Darius traces his line from his father Hystaspes through Arsames and Ariaramnes to Teispes, and then to Achaemenes. “For this reason we are called Achaemenids,” he explains, and adds that eight of his family had been kings before him and that he was the ninth. The Old Persian word that follows is often translated “in two lines”, although the meaning is debated.

Herodotus (7.11) puts a longer list of ancestors into the mouth of Xerxes, which seems to merge the two lines and repeats some names. It shows that Greeks knew of the family tree but not how to make it fit.

The family tree as usually reconstructed

If both genealogies are taken at face value, they meet at Teispes, who would have had two sons. One line ran to Cyrus the Great, the other to Darius:

The dates often printed for these men, such as Teispes c. 675–640 BCE or Cambyses I c. 600–559 BCE, are estimates counted backwards at roughly 25 to 30 years a generation. No contemporary document dates any of them. The scheme also leaves a problem: Darius counts eight royal predecessors, but Ariaramnes, Arsames and Hystaspes are not known to have ruled anything, and Hystaspes was still alive, serving his son, when Darius became king.

Did Darius borrow Cyrus’s ancestors?

Many historians now suspect that the shared ancestry was at least partly constructed. Darius came to the throne in 522 BCE after killing a king he said was an impostor, a story told on the page about Bardiya and Gaumata. He was not a son of Cyrus, and he needed a claim that made his rule look like a continuation rather than a seizure.

Several details support the suspicion. Cyrus’s own Babylonian text knows Teispes but not Achaemenes. The short inscriptions at Pasargadae that read “I am Cyrus the king, an Achaemenid” were probably added under Darius, since the Old Persian script itself seems to have been developed in his reign. Darius also married Cyrus’s daughters Atossa and Artystone, which tied his house to the old one in the most direct way available.

Not every scholar goes so far. Some accept a real distant kinship between the two branches, with Darius stressing it for political reasons rather than inventing it. Because of the uncertainty, some historians call Cyrus’s line the “Teispids” and keep “Achaemenids” for Darius and his successors. Either way, the name stuck: later kings, Greek writers and modern Persian all call the whole dynasty after Achaemenes. The full story of how Darius won power is on Darius the Great Takes the Throne.

The gold tablets of Ariaramnes and Arsames

Two small gold tablets found at Hamadan carry Old Persian texts in the names of Ariaramnes and Arsames, each calling himself “king of Persia”. If genuine, they would prove that Darius’s grandfather and great-grandfather were kings. Most specialists doubt them: the grammar contains errors, and the tablets are generally treated as later Achaemenid productions or as forgeries, not as evidence for the seventh century.

Anshan: the kingdom before the empire

Anshan was an ancient city long before any Persian ruled it. For more than a thousand years Elamite kings had used the title “king of Anshan and Susa”, pairing their highland centre in Fars with the lowland city of Susa. The site was identified in the early 1970s as Tall-e Malyan, a large mound in the Beyza plain north-west of Shiraz, after inscribed bricks naming Anshan were found there.

Persian-speaking groups were settling in Fars by the early first millennium BCE. They lived alongside Elamites, intermarried with them and borrowed heavily from Elamite court culture. The great sack of Susa by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal around 646 BCE, described on the Neo-Elamite period and the fall of Susa, weakened Elam and opened room for local dynasties in the highlands. The Persian kings of Anshan grew up in that space. When their descendants ran an empire, the administrative tablets at Persepolis were still written mostly in Elamite.

Kurash of Parsumash and the seal of Kurash of Anshan

Two pieces of evidence outside the royal genealogies may touch this family directly.

An inscription of Ashurbanipal records that after his victory over Elam, a ruler called Kurash of Parsumash sent his eldest son Arukku to Nineveh with tribute. The name is the same as Cyrus, and for a long time historians identified this Kurash with Cyrus I, which would give the dynasty a fixed date in the 640s BCE. The identification is now often questioned. Parsumash may not be the same as Anshan, and the dates are tight: a ruler active in the 640s would have to have been the grandfather of a man born around 600 BCE, which is possible but strained.

The second piece is a seal. Impressions of it appear on Persepolis Fortification tablets from around 500 BCE, and its Elamite inscription reads “Kurash of Anshan, son of Teispes”. It shows a horseman spearing enemies. The seal was an heirloom, still in use generations after its owner died, and it is the nearest thing we have to a contemporary document of Cyrus I. It confirms that the kings of Anshan named in the Cyrus Cylinder were real.

Achaemenes in legend and in the tribes of Persis

Of Achaemenes himself nothing historical survives. The Roman-era writer Aelian repeats a story that he was raised by an eagle, a typical founder’s legend. His name is usually explained as “having a friend’s mind”, from the Old Persian words for friend and mind.

Herodotus (1.125) gives a little social background. He says the Persians were divided into tribes, of which the Pasargadae were the most noble, and that the Achaemenids were a clan within the Pasargadae. The same name was later given to Cyrus’s capital, discussed on Pasargadae: Cyrus’s Capital and Tomb.

For the life of Cyrus himself, start with the site’s overview of Cyrus the Great, then read the next page in this series, Cyrus the Great: Birth, Legends and Rise to Power.