{"id":198988,"date":"2022-12-12T19:29:24","date_gmt":"2022-12-13T03:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/?p=198988"},"modified":"2022-12-12T19:34:50","modified_gmt":"2022-12-13T03:34:50","slug":"the-multiculturalist-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/2022\/12\/12\/the-multiculturalist-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"The multiculturalist Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’ Persians: The Age of the Great Kings<\/a> is a narrative history of the Achaemenid Empire and ancient Iran which is brisk but detailed. Some of the writing is a little too informal for me, but overall it’s a fine scholarly accomplishment. The author integrates many Persian<\/i> sources rather than just the usual Greek-centric perspective.<\/p>\n

Overall, it’s a favorable treatment of the dynasty that nevertheless doesn’t shy away from unpalatable facts. For example, Llewellyn-Jones explores the role that chattel slavery seems to have played in the monumental construction projects of the Achaemenids and disabuses you of the notion that Cyrus the Great was the world’s first humanitarian ruler. But weirdly, the last chapter goes a bit off the rails on moralizing.<\/p>\n

The author contends that the Persians, as a multicultural empire, offer a better example than the Romans, who assimilated and acculturated local people. This is something of a caricature of Roman practice; the spread of Latin in the east was minimal, and local languages persisted after the fall of the Empire. But the flip side of Persian multiculturalism is that rulers had to be ethnic Persians, at least paternally.<\/b> The Achaemenid Empire was more ethnically exclusivist and closed than the Roman Empire at the elite levels because it was multicultural, preventing non-Persians from scaling the heights of power. In contrast, after the 2nd century, the Roman Empire routinely promoted Latinized outsiders, and the imperial resurrection of the second half of the 3rd century was almost entirely due to the emergence of Latinized Balkan military elite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’ Persians: The Age of the Great Kings is a narrative history of the Achaemenid Empire and ancient Iran which is brisk but detailed. Some of the writing is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[3243,3242],"class_list":["post-198988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-iran","tag-persia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pawqfx-PLu","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}