Xerxes I
Xerxes I (OP Khšāyaršā),
son of Darius (1) and Atossa, king of Persia 486–465 bc, chosen by his father as successor (XPf ll. 31 ff.; Hdt. 7. 2–3). At the beginning of his reign he crushed a revolt in Egypt (Hdt. 7. 3) and later two rebellions in Babylon. Plans for an expedition against Greece were inherited from Darius: for the course of events see persian wars. No Persian document mentions the expedition.
The more important palaces on the terrace of Persepolis were built in Xerxes' reign, including the Apadana with its impressive reliefs, illustrating the structure and the extent of the empire: king, court, and subject populations with their ethnographic characteristics. In the Daiva-inscription (XPh ll. 28–41) rebellion is equated with the neglect of Ahuramazda and the worship of daiva's (‘bad gods’). Xerxes' destruction of the daiva-sanctuary marks no breach with his ancestors' presumed religious tolerance, as is often thought, since DB 5 already contains similar phraseology. Xerxes' reputation as a weakling and a womanizer depends on certain recognizably novelistic passages in Herodotus (7. 2–3, 9. 108–13) and on the reading of royal inscriptions as personal messages by the kings, rather than as formulaic royal statements. Seen from the heartland, his reign forms a period of consolidation, not of incipient decay. Xerxes was murdered in 465.
R. G. Kent, Old Persian (1953);Find this resource:
for abbreviations of old Persian inscriptions, see Kent, pp. 107–15;Find this resource:
W. Hinz, Altiranische Funde und Forschungen (1969);Find this resource:
P. Lecoq, Les inscriptions de la Perse achéménide (1997);Find this resource:
R. Schmitt, The Old Persian Inscriptions of Naqsh-i Rustam and Persepolis (2000) for the inscription;Find this resource:
M. C. Root, King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979) for the reliefs;Find this resource:
A. Kuhrt and S. Sherwin-White, Achaemenid History 2: The Greek Sources (1987), 69–78;Find this resource:
P. Briant, Histoire de l'empire perse: de Cyrus à Alexandre (1996; Eng. trans. 2002), ch.13, 425–43;Find this resource:
A. Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: a corpus of sources from the Achaemenid period (2007), ch. 7.Find this resource:
