Travels with Herodotus. Space control, historical (non)fiction, and The Limits of Empire in Chorasmia

Herodotus recounts (3.117) how, through the control of the region’s water regime, Darius I succeeded in bringing under his power a vast space on the northern borders of the Achaemenid Empire in Central Asia. Since Briant’s assessment of this passage, it has been argued that it can be used to shed some light on the processes underpinning the spread of Achaemenid infrastructural power as far as the Central Asian satrapies. In the following paper, Briant’s reading of the text shall be problematized against the background of both the present state of knowledge of the administration of Achaemenid Central Asia and of some historical and ethnographic comparanda coming from Soviet-era Chorasmia. It shall be argued that such evidence is potentially as valuable as it has (yet) been overlooked in the study of the power dynamics of the Achaemenid empire in the framework of its Central Asian natural and anthropic environment.