“There I Made Another Their Chief” Kings, Ancestors, and Rebels. Anthropological Perspectives on Early Achaemenid Central Asia

DBp col. V § 74 is devoted to Darius’ conquest and subjugation of a group of Sakā and their leader. Despite the obvious importance the Great King attributed to this event, its political and intellectual context(s) have remained rather underexplored in modern scholarship. The approach taken in this paper is therefore twofold. First, building on previous insights, it situates Darius’ account within its Ancient Near Eastern tradition, focusing particularly on the importance of previous imperial engagement with mobile people and the concept of borderlands. In a second step, social anthropology is brought to the fore in order to show the potential of reading Darius’ account through the prism of scholarship on sacred kingship from a comparative and world-historical perspective. This methodological framework makes it possible to approach the topic of Persian Empire-building in Central Asia and in the steppes from a new, anthropologically sensitive perspective. Furthermore, attention is paid to the role that indigenous political systems and even cosmologies likely played in order to negotiate Central Asian élites’ role in the new world brought about by the Persian conquest of the (Far) East.