The Persepolis Fortification and Treasury Tablets

The Persepolis Fortification tablets are an archive of tens of thousands of small clay tablets, most written in Elamite cuneiform, found in 1933 in the fortification wall of Persepolis. They are the day-to-day records of the royal administration in Fars between 509 and 493 BCE, under Darius I, and record food rations, wages, travel and offerings to the gods. Together with the later Treasury tablets, they are the largest body of Persian evidence for how the empire actually worked, and they show it from the inside rather than through Greek eyes.

Discovery

In March 1933 the Oriental Institute expedition at Persepolis, led by Ernst Herzfeld, was clearing the northeast corner of the terrace when it came upon two small rooms in the fortification wall packed with clay tablets. The tablets had probably fallen from shelves on an upper floor when the building collapsed. Some years later Erich Schmidt’s team found a smaller archive in the Treasury. The Iranian government lent the Fortification tablets to the University of Chicago for study, and they arrived there in 1936. Most are about the size of a matchbox or a palm, and many bear seal impressions.

What kind of documents they are

The tablets are not literature or royal propaganda. They are receipts, memos and accounts written by scribes of the institutional economy that ran Fars, the province around Persepolis. A typical text records that a certain amount of barley, flour, wine, beer, fruit or sheep was issued from a named storehouse to a named person or group, on the authority of an official, in a given month and year. Others are journals and annual accounts drawn up from many such receipts. The language of most of them is Elamite, the old language of the region, which the Persians had taken over as their language of administration in Fars. Many tablets carry notes in Aramaic, the common written language of the empire, and several hundred are written in Aramaic alone.

Workers and wages

Many of the texts concern workers called kurtash. They came from across the empire, from Egypt, Babylonia, Lydia, Ionia, Caria, Thrace and elsewhere, and worked in groups on building sites, in workshops and on estates, including the building works at Persepolis. They received monthly rations of grain and wine, in amounts that depended on their skills, sex and age. Some were probably deportees; others may have been sent from their provinces as labour service.

The tablets give an unusually detailed picture of working women. As the historian Maria Brosius showed, women appear as workers, as heads of work groups and as specialists. Less skilled women usually received smaller rations than men in the same group, but skilled women could receive the same as men. Mothers received extra rations after giving birth, and the tablets distinguish between births of boys and girls, with the larger allowance given for a boy.

Royal women and their estates

Women of the royal family appear in a role that Greek sources hardly hint at. A woman named Irtashduna, the Artystone whom Herodotus calls Darius’s favourite wife, held estates, had her own staff and travelled with them. Another, Irdabama, a wealthy woman with her own large workforce and estates, issued orders under her own seal. These texts are the main reason historians now see royal women as economic actors in their own right. See Women of the Achaemenid Court.

Travel on the royal roads

A large group of tablets records food issued to travellers at the way stations of the roads in and around Fars. Travellers carried a sealed document authorising their rations, issued by the king or a senior official, and the tablets often note where they came from and where they were going: Susa, Sardis, Egypt, Arachosia and India appear. One records wine for a man named Datiya, travelling from Sardis to the king in early 494 BCE, who may be Datis, the general who later led the Persian force at Marathon. These texts show the road network described in The Royal Road and the Persian postal system in actual use.

Officials and seals

The head of the administration in these years was Parnakka, a high noble, probably an uncle of Darius, who issued orders under his own seal. Thousands of different seals are impressed on the tablets, and they form one of the largest collections of ancient art from the Persian heartland. One seal stands out: it names Cyrus of Anshan, son of Teispes, the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, and was still being used generations later. It is a direct link to the early Persian kings described in Achaemenes, Teispes and the early Persian kings.

Gods and offerings

The tablets also record food and drink issued for religious offerings. They name Ahura Mazda, the god of the royal inscriptions, but also Elamite gods such as Humban and the gods of mountains and rivers, all supplied by the same administration. This evidence shows that the religion of the Persian heartland under Darius was more varied than the royal inscriptions suggest, and it is central to the debate described in Religion of the Achaemenid Kings.

The Treasury tablets

The smaller archive from the Treasury, published by George Cameron in 1948, covers the years 492 to 457 BCE, from late in the reign of Darius into that of Artaxerxes I. These texts record payments in silver to workers, often instead of part of their rations in kind, and many concern craftsmen working on the royal buildings. They show the gradual use of silver money in wages alongside the older ration system; see The Daric and the Achaemenid economy.

Study, a lawsuit and the return to Iran

Hallock’s edition of 1969 made about 2,000 of the Elamite texts available, but many thousands remained unpublished. In 2006 the Oriental Institute began the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, led by Matthew Stolper, to record and photograph the whole archive. The work was given urgency by a lawsuit in American courts. Victims of a 1997 bombing in Jerusalem who had won a judgment against the government of Iran sought to seize Iranian property in the United States, including the tablets. In February 2018 the US Supreme Court ruled in Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran that the tablets could not be seized under the law they had relied on. The tablets have been returned to Iran in several batches since the 1940s, including 1,784 in 2019, with further returns in the 2020s.

Why they matter

Almost everything written about the Achaemenid Empire in antiquity was written by outsiders, mainly Greeks, and most of it is about war and the court. The tablets are a Persian record, produced by the empire’s own officials for their own use, and they show the empire as a working system of storehouses, roads, workers and accounts. Every new reading adds names, places and details to a picture that Greek writers never saw.