The orders of Darius I and Xerxes in the corpus of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions

Abstract

The article examines the role of the orders of Darius I and Xerxes in the functioning of the legal system in the Achaemenid Persian Empire. It is concluded that along with local political and legal traditions, royal decrees, commands and instructions that came from the king himself and his office served as tools of socio-political and economic regulation in the Achaemenid empire. The Achaemenid trilingual royal inscriptions are analysed as the main source of information on this subject. These texts contain references to king’s orders, and the terminological analysis, covering the corresponding vocabulary of inscriptions in the main three languages (Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian), allows us to come to some conclusions regarding the functioning of the Achaemenid legal system as a whole. It can be asserted that royal orders mentioned there can be divided into three groups (royal decrees, royal commands and proclamations). In the Achaemenid royal inscriptions orders given by the king to his military commanders or his army can be considered as commands, while decrees do not have any specific addressee and are of more general nature. If one speaks about a special type of royal commands, such as proclamations, these are addressed to the entire population of the Achaemenid Empire.