UC Press Blog

By Rhyne King, author of The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire

The ancient Persian Empire is well known for its failures. Many readers will know two things about the Persian Empire: King Xerxes tried and failed to conquer the Greek cities of Athens and Sparta, and Alexander the Great of Macedon conquered the entire Persian Empire with remarkable speed. But the Persian Empire ruled most of the Middle East for over two hundred years, from 550 to 330 BC. An empire does not last two hundred years by accident. Instead of asking why the Persian Empire failed to survive, I asked the opposite question: how did the Persian Empire endure at its continental scale for over two centuries?

 To answer this question, I wanted to think about the daily routines that kept the empire running. When we think about governments, we often think first of heads of state. If you think of the United States, you probably think first of the president. But this can be misleading. A host of other people do the daily work of running the government: mayors, congresspeople, city councilors. It is the collective actions of these local figures that keep our governments running, and these are precisely the types of people I wanted to investigate in the Persian Empire.

Who did the day-to-day work of managing the Persian Empire? In my book, I analyze a group of people known as satraps, the regional representatives of the Persian kings. The kings drew on their social networks to establish loyal satraps across the empire: many were blood relatives, others married into the royal family, and others were long-time friends. Satraps conducted themselves as kings in miniature. They built their own palaces, they held great feasts, and they hosted dignitaries.

But the satraps could not govern on their own. Instead, they drew on the labor of others: family, friends, free and enslaved subordinates. At the same time, they used their property to conduct imperial business: satraps’ farms fed workers, their money paid for soldiers. The satraps referred to this collection of people and property in their orbit collectively as a “house.” My book analyzes how these satrapal houses conducted themselves across the empire.

Most studies of the Persian Empire tend to focus on one particular region. But my goal was to think about how the satrapal houses worked as a unified imperial system. I take readers on a tour across the empire: Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. No two satrapal houses were identical, but we can find shared features across the empire. Satrapal houses had a few common responsibilities. Perhaps the most important duty was to collect taxes (some things never change!). They also had to maintain critical infrastructure. The road system, which could move travelers from Turkey to Pakistan, was the most important. Satraps also had to keep the peace. This could range from calming squabbles between local landowners to leading armies in battle.

Across my book, I find one principle that unifies the behavior of satrapal houses: selfishness. I should explain. Satraps managed the empire in ways that benefited themselves personally. Gathering more taxes, for example, allowed them to enrich themselves because the satraps could keep a portion of what they collected. Or expanding the road system allowed the satraps to consume exotic goods that merchants could now transport at greater distances. The same principle was true for the other people in the satrapal house. As long as the satrapal houses kept the peace and sent requisite taxes to the royal court, the king was content with this self-interested approach to governance. 

Satrapal houses, then, were the key to the Persian Empire’s expansive reach. The king’s court did not rule the whole empire from the center. Instead, two dozen satrapal houses managed their own jurisdictions to suit both themselves and the empire at large. This was a decidedly diffuse, ad hoc approach to running an empire. But it was remarkably effective for two hundred years.