Women of the Achaemenid Court

The women of the Achaemenid royal house, wives, mothers and daughters of the kings, held real wealth and political weight between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE. Greek writers remember them as schemers of the harem, such as Amestris and Parysatis; the Persepolis tablets show women such as Irdabama and Irtashduna running estates, workforces and their own seals. Putting the two kinds of evidence side by side has changed how historians picture the Persian court.

Two kinds of evidence

Almost every story about Persian royal women was told by Greeks: Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, Ctesias, a Greek doctor at the court of Artaxerxes II, and Plutarch, writing five centuries later but using Ctesias and others. Their women are cruel, jealous and powerful behind closed doors, and their kings are often weak in their hands. The picture fitted a Greek idea of the East as luxurious and unmanly.

In 1983 the Dutch historian Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg challenged this picture in an essay called “Exit Atossa”. She argued that the harem intrigues tell us more about Greek expectations than about Persia. A few years later Maria Brosius used the Elamite tablets from Persepolis to show what royal women actually owned and did. The working women of the tablets, the ration scales and the extra allowances for mothers are described on the page on the Persepolis Fortification tablets. This page looks at the royal women themselves.

Marriage and legitimacy: Atossa and the wives of Darius

Atossa was a daughter of Cyrus the Great. Herodotus says she was married in turn to her brother Cambyses, to the man who ruled as Bardiya, and then to Darius I. Darius, who came from a side branch of the family, also married her sister Artystone, a daughter of Bardiya named Parmys and a daughter of the noble Otanes. These marriages tied the new king to the line of Cyrus and to the great families who had helped him to power (see Darius the Great takes the throne).

Herodotus credits Atossa with great influence. He tells a story that the Greek physician Democedes cured her of a growth on the breast, and that in return she urged Darius to invade Greece; most historians treat it as a tale. More weight is usually given to his statement that Xerxes was chosen as heir partly because he was Atossa’s son and so a grandson of Cyrus. In Aeschylus’s play The Persians, staged in Athens in 472 BCE, the queen mother, generally identified as Atossa, is the main Persian character.

Artystone and Irdabama: women with estates

Artystone, whom Herodotus calls Darius’s favourite wife, appears in the Fortification tablets as Irtashduna. She owned estates in several places, had her own steward and staff, received large quantities of grain and wine, and wrote letters, through scribes, with her own seal. Darius had a gold statue made of her, Herodotus says.

Irdabama, whose exact place in the family is uncertain, controlled one of the largest workforces in the tablets, partly based at Tirazziš, the Elamite name of Shiraz. She gave orders to officials in the same form as high male administrators. The Elamite texts call such royal women dukšiš, usually translated “princess”. Brosius concluded that these women were landowners and employers with their own income, not only members of a household.

Amestris: the queen of the Greek stories

Amestris was the chief wife of Xerxes I and mother of Artaxerxes I. Herodotus tells two grim stories about her. In one, she learns that Xerxes has given a robe she made for him to Artaynte, his niece and lover; at the king’s birthday banquet, when he cannot refuse a request, she asks for Artaynte’s mother, the wife of Xerxes’ brother Masistes, and has her mutilated. Masistes flees to raise a revolt in Bactria and is killed. In the other, Amestris in old age has fourteen children of noble Persian families buried alive as an offering to the god of the underworld.

Ctesias adds that she remained powerful under her son Artaxerxes I and avenged the death of a grandson. Whatever the truth of the details, the stories agree on one thing: a queen mother could command and punish members of the nobility.

Esther and Vashti

The biblical Book of Esther is set at Susa under a king named Ahasuerus, usually identified with Xerxes. It tells of Queen Vashti, dismissed for refusing to appear at the king’s banquet, and of Esther, a Jewish woman who becomes queen and saves her people. Greek sources name Amestris, not Vashti or Esther, as Xerxes’ queen, and most historians read the book as a story rather than a record. It does show how Jewish writers imagined the Persian court, and its setting at Susa is detailed.

Parysatis: power across three reigns

Parysatis, half-sister and wife of Darius II, is the woman about whom we know most. She held villages and estates as far apart as Syria and Babylonia; Xenophon passed through some of them on the march of the Ten Thousand, and Babylonian business documents mention her agents managing her lands near Nippur.

She had two sons who mattered: Artaxerxes II and Cyrus the Younger. According to Plutarch, she favoured Cyrus, saved him from execution once, and supported him when he rebelled. After Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa in 401 BCE, she pursued the men who claimed his death: Plutarch says she won one of them from the king at dice and had him flayed. Her long feud with Stateira, Artaxerxes’ wife, ended, in Plutarch’s account, when she poisoned Stateira with a knife smeared with poison on one side only, so that she could eat safely from the same bird. The king sent his mother away to Babylon, but later recalled her.

Stateira

Plutarch also records that Stateira was loved by the people because she rode in a carriage with its curtains open, so that ordinary women could greet her. If true, it is a small sign that royal women were not always hidden from view.

Women and the end of the dynasty

When Alexander defeated Darius III at Issus in 333 BCE, he captured the king’s mother Sisygambis, his wife and his daughters, who travelled with the army. The Greek historians of Alexander treat their capture as a turning point, because royal women carried the blood of the dynasty. Alexander later married a daughter of Darius III at Susa in 324 BCE.

How historians see them now

Most historians now accept two things at once. The Greek stories exaggerate cruelty and secret influence, and they were shaped for Greek audiences. But they are not pure invention: the tablets and Babylonian documents confirm that royal women had wealth, staff, seals and the ear of the king. Their power came through birth, marriage and above all motherhood of the heir, and it was exercised openly through property as well as quietly at court.