Law played an important role in the administration of the empire, and stories of Persian justice abound in the Greek sources. Darius particularly wished to be remembered as the great lawgiver, and law reform was one of the cornerstones in his program for reorganizing the empire. To judge from the Babylonian evidence, two sets of law, possibly administered by two sets of courts, were in force in the provinces. One was the local law, undoubtedly based on custom and previous local codifications; the other was the Persian, or imperial, law, based ultimately on the authority of the great king. A new word for law appeared in the Middle East in Achaemenian times, the Iranian dāta, and was borrowed by the Semitic languages used in the empire. In Babylonian and Aramaic, sources give evidence for Persian judges called by the Iranian word dāta-bar. These were probably the judges of the imperial courts.
With legal reform came reform and unification of tax structures. The tax structure of the empire was apparently based on the principle that all of the conquered lands were the actual property of the king. Thus taxes were rather rents, and the Persians and their land, Fārs, by virtue of not being a conquered people or land, were always tax-free. Each province was required to pay yearly a fixed amount in gold or silver, and each vassal state paid a fixed tribute in kind. Again going on the Babylonian evidence, in previous times agricultural taxes had been levied in fixed amounts regardless of the fluctuating quality of the harvest, but under Darius all land was surveyed, an estimate of its yield (based on an average of the harvests over several years) was from time to time established, and taxes were levied in fixed amounts based on a percentage of that average yield. This was not quite an income tax, since it was not based on a percentage of each year’s production, but it was at least a reasonable figure based on a reasonable production average.
Breakdowns often occurred in the Achaemenids’ effort to maintain a productive balance between local social structures, customs, laws, and government and the demands of the empire. The failure of the Persians to find such a balance when dealing with what was for them an extremely strange system of social and political organization—the Greek polis, or city-state—probably lay at the heart of their never-ending troubles in Ionia as much as did the power and ambitions of mainland Greeks. Yet even the Ionians, at the best of times, often realized the mutual advantages and benefits of the king’s peace and a unified western Asia under a tolerant central administration.
The economy of the empire was very much founded on that king’s peace; it was when the peace broke down with ever-increasing frequency during the last century of Achaemenian rule that the economy of the empire went into a decline that undoubtedly contributed significantly to the eventual political and military collapse. Wealth in the Achaemenian world was very much founded on land and on agriculture. Land was the principal reward that the king had available for those who gave service or who were in positions of great political or military power in the empire. Under Darius there was a measure of land called a “bow” that was originally a unit considered sufficient to support one bowman, who then paid his duty for the land in military service. At the other end of the scale were enormous family estates, which often increased in size over the years and which were or became hereditary holdings. They were often administered by absentee landlords. Such major landholdings were, as one would expect, usually in the hands of Iranians, but non-Iranians were also able to amass similar wealth and power, thereby testifying once again to the inherent tolerance with which the empire was administered. The Achaemenids themselves took a positive role in encouraging agriculture by investing state funds and effort in irrigation and the improvement of horticulture.
They also invested in and endeavoured to promote trade, a major source of imperial wealth. The effect of the state-maintained road system on the encouragement of trade has already been mentioned. Equal attention was paid to developing seaborne trade. State-sponsored voyages of exploration were undertaken in order to search for new markets and new resources. Darius completed a project, begun by the Egyptians, that connected the Nile to the Red Sea by a canal, so that routes across the Arabian Sea and into the Persian Gulf could be used to link the eastern and western ends of his empire. As part of the same program, port development on the Persian Gulf coast was encouraged. Imperial standardized weights and measures, efforts to develop and use coinage, and standardizing that coinage in the king’s name were all policies intended to encourage commerce and economic activity within the realm.
Banking also played a role in the economy. Documents have survived from a family banking business in Babylonia—the house of Murashu and sons of Nippur—covering the years c. 455–403 bc; the firm evidently prospered greatly by lending money and by acting as a middleman in the system of tax collection. Interest rates were high, but borrowers were numerous.
As time went on, there were clearly more and more such borrowers, for the later empire is marked by a general economic decline. The principal cause of this decline was the unsettled political conditions, but other, more indirect causes were unwise government interference in the economy, overtaxation, and the removal of too much hard money from the economy. Gold and silver tended to drain into the treasury of the central government from the provinces, and too little found its way back into general circulation. Disastrous inflation was the result. The large sums of money paid to foreign mercenaries and as bribes to foreign governments must also have contributed to an unfavourable balance of payments that in turn stimulated inflation. Such conditions hardly strengthened the empire and must have contributed, in ways that cannot be documented with certainty, to the political unrest that was their own main cause.
Ultimately, the achievement of the Achaemenian Persians was that they ruled with such creative tolerance over an area and a time that, for both the Middle East and for Europe, included the end of the ancient and the beginning of the modern world. In one sense, the ancient Middle East died when Cyrus marched into Babylon. Others would argue that its death came when Alexander burned Persepolis. The question remains open. What is clear is that the Achaemenian Empire—the largest anyone had ever yet tried to hold together and one that was not surpassed until Rome reached its height—was a profound force in western Asia and in Europe during an important period of ferment and transition in human history. That era was one of major developments in art, philosophy, literature, historiography, religion, exploration, economics, and science, and those developments provided the direct background for the further changes, along similar lines, that made the Hellenistic period so important in history. Hellenism probably would not have been possible, at least not in the form we know it, if it had had to build directly on the rather more narrow and less ambitious bases of the individual civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, or Greece. In a sense, the Achaemenian Persians passed on a concept of empire that, much modified by others, has remained something of a model of how it is possible for diverse peoples with variant customs, languages, religions, laws, and economic systems to flourish with mutual profit under a central government. In narrower terms, but for the Iranians themselves no less important, the Achaemenian Empire is seen as the beginning of the Iranian nation, one of the pivotal peoples in the modern Middle East. T. Cuyler Young The Hellenistic and Parthian periods Alexander and his successors