The Great Revolts of 522–521 BCE

In the year after he seized the throne in September 522 BCE, Darius I faced rebellions across almost the whole Iranian heartland of the empire, from Babylon to Margiana in Central Asia. By his own count he fought nineteen battles and captured nine “lying kings” within a single year. The victories, told in detail on the Behistun cliff, decided that the empire would survive under his line.

Why the empire broke apart

The empire Darius inherited was barely a generation old. Cyrus and Cambyses had joined together kingdoms with long histories of their own: Media had ruled the Persians fifty years earlier, Babylon had been the greatest city of the Near East, and Elam was older than both. When the king recognised everywhere, the ruler Darius called Gaumata, was killed by a group of nobles, the bond of loyalty broke. Local leaders took the chance, often claiming descent from the old royal houses.

Darius describes all the rebels in the same terms: each one “lied”, saying “I am king”, and the people followed him. In his religious language the Lie, drauga, had spread through the lands, and Ahura Mazda helped him put it down.

The nine kings

The figures on the Behistun relief are labelled, so we can match faces to names. The nine, in order of their rising, were:

1. Gaumata the Magian, who claimed to be Bardiya, killed in Media in September 522; he lies under Darius’s foot on the relief.
2. Açina in Elam, who rose in autumn 522 and was quickly brought to Darius in chains and killed.
3. Nidintu-Bel in Babylon, who called himself Nebuchadnezzar, son of Nabonidus (Nebuchadnezzar III in modern lists).
4. Martiya, a second Elamite pretender, killed by the Elamites themselves when Darius approached.
5. Fravartish (Phraortes) in Media, who claimed descent from the Median king Cyaxares.
6. Chissantakhma in Sagartia, who made the same Median claim.
7. Vahyazdata in Persia, who claimed, like Gaumata, to be Bardiya son of Cyrus.
8. Frada in Margiana, around modern Merv.
9. Arakha, an Armenian, who seized Babylon as a second “Nebuchadnezzar, son of Nabonidus”.

Babylon first

Darius marched himself against the most dangerous rebel, Nidintu-Bel. Babylonian tablets show that Babylon recognised the new Nebuchadnezzar from early October 522. The rebel army held the line of the Tigris, so Darius put part of his army on inflated skins, camels and horses and forced a crossing. A second battle followed at Zazana on the Euphrates in December 522. Nidintu-Bel fled into Babylon with a few horsemen; the city was taken and he was executed.

The war for Media

While Darius was in Babylon, the revolt that threatened the empire most broke out in Media. Fravartish took Ecbatana, and Armenia and Parthia went with him or rose separately. Darius sent the conspirator Hydarnes to Media, where an indecisive battle bought time, and sent the Armenian noble Dadarshi and the Persian Vaumisa to fight several battles in Armenia.

In spring 521 Darius himself came up from Babylon and defeated Fravartish at Kunduru. The Median king fled to Raga, the city of Rey near modern Tehran (see the historic city of Rey), where he was caught. Darius describes his punishment without embarrassment: he cut off his nose, ears and tongue, put out an eye, kept him chained at the palace gate for all to see, and then impaled him at Ecbatana with his chief followers. Chissantakhma of Sagartia met the same fate at Arbela.

Hystaspes in Parthia

In Parthia and Hyrcania, the people had joined Fravartish. Darius’s father Hystaspes, governor there, fought the rebels twice. After the Median victory Darius sent him reinforcements from Raga, and the Parthian revolt ended in summer 521.

A second Bardiya in Persia

The revolt of Vahyazdata was especially awkward because it came from Persia itself, the king’s homeland, and repeated the claim that Cyrus’s son was alive. Darius sent the Persian Artavardiya against him; after two defeats Vahyazdata was captured and impaled. He had also sent an army east to Arachosia, in modern southern Afghanistan, where the loyal satrap Vivana beat it in two battles.

The last risings

In Margiana, Frada was defeated by Dadarshi, the satrap of Bactria, in a battle in which, the Old Persian text says, thousands of rebels died. The Babylonian and Elamite versions give large casualty figures, and they do not always agree with each other.

The final rebel of the “one year” was Arakha, who took Babylon in summer 521. Darius’s companion Intaphernes captured him in late November 521, and he was impaled at Babylon. Darius’s year, counted from the death of Gaumata, was over.

How true is “one year”?

Darius stresses that all this happened in a single year, and the dated battles do fit into about fourteen months if one counts from the end of September 522. The claim is accurate enough, but it is also a boast: the speed proved that Ahura Mazda was with him. Historians note that the inscription names only the generals Darius wished to honour and gives only his side.

The fighting did not quite end. A fifth column, added to the Behistun text later, records a new revolt in Elam and a campaign against the Saka with pointed caps in Central Asia, whose leader Skunkha was added to the relief. Herodotus, for his part, tells of a long siege of Babylon under Darius, won by the noble Zopyrus, who cut off his own nose and ears to pass as a deserter. It is not clear which, if any, of the known revolts this story reflects.

What the victory meant

The war fixed the shape of Darius’s reign. The surviving conspirators, generals and satraps who had stayed loyal became the backbone of the new court, and the experience may lie behind the administrative reforms described on Darius’s reforms. Most visibly, Darius had the story carved, with the rebels in a line before him, on the cliff described on the Behistun Inscription; its modern visitor site is covered on Behistun (Bisotun).