Walking Down the (Dynastic) Line: Royal Ancestors and Sacred Kingship in Early Achaemenid Persia

Under the Achaemenids (ca. 550-330 BCE), a millennia-long discourse on universal rule and kingship reached unprecedented heights, while a new rhetoric and visual vocabulary to display royal self-understanding was developed and spread from Makedonia to Pakistan. Yet, the Persian case is significantly overlooked in anthropological scholarship focusing on these topics. Moreover, specialists in the Empire have yet to consistently engage with the anthropological literature on kingship across world history. This paper argues for the suitability of looking at early Persian dynastic history through the prism of sacred kingship, exploring both the affordances and drawbacks it provided to the Empire’s most towering Kings: Cyrus II and Darius I (the Greats: 530-519 BCE).