The Achaemenid Persian empire has undergone a revival among ancient historians. The number of new volumes appearing each year has grown considerably since the path-breaking Achaemenid History Workshop and the important work by P. Briant and others. What these scholars achieved was a fundamental re-orientation of Persian history from its traditional Helleno-centric viewpoint towards its treatment as an empire in its own right and one of tremendous cultural and linguistic diversity. R.'s debt to this revision is acknowledged in the preface and he too offers a re-orientation of sorts, arguing that the conflict with Egypt, rather than Greece, was central to the ‘grand strategy’ of the Persian empire. It is fundamentally a political and military narrative based almost exclusively on classical sources. There are several strong chapters, especially those that shed light on Persia's campaigns to reclaim Egypt in the early fourth century. Unfortunately, its core assumptions are weak, while its style and methodology have little in common with the new Achaemenid studies.
For those familiar with recent research on Persian imperialism, the thesis that Egypt was more vital to Persian interests than Greece is not new. What is worse, R. is not interested in getting rid of the old dichotomy between East and West, for which he duly credits Herodotus, as a narrative framework (p. xxi). The core argument is that all of Near Eastern history can be reduced to a competition between an eastern core (Mesopotamia) and a western core (Egypt) played out largely in the ‘middle territory’. He justifies this with a sweeping survey of the Near East since the mid-second millennium, Chapter 1, which sometimes reads like notes for a simplistic undergraduate lecture. It begins in true Herodotean fashion: ‘the Persian-Egyptian conflict … was in fact the continuation of an enduring conflict between Near Eastern imperial states and Egypt’ (p. 3).
The Persian conquest, Chapter 2, deterministically represents for R. ‘the culmination of a struggle going back 1,000 years and was an achievement unprecedented in the whole of that long past’ (p. 25). The sometimes repetitive use of the term ‘middle territory’ for Syria–Palestine throughout the book is problematic for what it implies, namely, its passive role in history, as only the Mesopotamian and Egyptian ‘cores’ exercise real agency over it. Not only does this eliminate explanatory possibilities for Hittite, Greek and later Macedonian state formation, R. seems to ignore that Persia's rise itself is evidence that peripheries were fruitful incubators of empires. Hence although he claims to be writing a Persian-centred account, he in fact reduces Persia's role to the fulfilment of a Mesopotamian strategic objective.
The rest of the book focuses meticulously on a chronological narrative history of political and military events. To explain these events R. calls upon notions of ‘grand strategy’ founded ultimately in his deterministic notion of the unification of the two cores. He is fond of modern diplomatic terms such as ‘détente’. His speculations about what the Persian emperor was thinking or how he had learned from previous setbacks are stated with unwarranted certitude. There is hardly any appreciation for the social or institutional factors that might shape processes of state formation or bind provinces within the empire.
In Chapter 3, ‘Managing Egypt, 518–415’, anyone looking for a description of Achaemenid provincial administration, as this reviewer was, will be disappointed. The scattered references to administration are ancillary and sometimes questionable. For example, R. subscribes to an interpretation of Darius' codification of laws in Egypt as a mere extension of privileges to certain status groups that is no longer tenable according to newer (especially German) scholarship that is not cited (p. 23). Herodotus' tribute list is accepted without reference to scholarly controversy as evidence for low taxes under Darius but then R. supposes that high tribute under Xerxes was a cause for Egypt to revolt. What little R. devotes to ideology likewise deserves qualifications. Egyptian kings in this period were not living gods (p. 24), as Hellenists like to assume, nor is it the case that Xerxes and his successors ‘did not try to appear as kings of Egypt, claiming the favor of Re or Neith or building at or otherwise benefiting Egyptian temples’ (p. 28), as Xerxes is depicted as pharaoh in hieroglyphic inscriptions and Darius II may be the king responsible for some construction in the Kharga oasis.
The book does have its strengths. These shine through most in the chapters on Persian logistical preparations as well as aborted and failed campaigns after 400 b.c.e., once Egypt had broken away from the empire. One of his most persuasive arguments is that the island of Cyprus and the cities of Syria–Palestine were strategically vital for the Persian re-conquest of Egypt and conversely for the rebel Egyptian kingdom's protection. Thus the long digression on the Cypriot war against Evagoras is fully justified in a book about the Egyptian revolts and sheds light on an obscure and easily forgotten aspect of the Greek–Persian relations in the fourth century (Chapter 9). Preventing the Greeks from interfering in its preparations for re-conquest was surely an important factor governing Persian policies in the Aegean during this period. Often R. contributes to our understanding of historical chronology and at the very least provides reasoned arguments for his own placement of events.
Judged as a work of ancient military history, adopting the traditional methods of that field, the book can be deemed a success. To the extent that it reorients the perspective of Greek historians towards the east and conceptualises the Aegean as a peripheral region to the real centres of power it brings it in line with the spirit of the new Achaemenid studies scholarship. Its failure to incorporate a genuinely Near Eastern perspective based on documents and material culture from outside the Greek world is due mostly to the lack of narrative sources for the kind of narrative history that he sets out to relate. The neglect of the rich multilingual sources for Persian rule in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean can be attributed to R.'s narrow focus on strategy, logistics, battles and the chronology of events. The work is accordingly written almost wholly on the basis of Greek sources. Besides English, French secondary literature is used extensively but German scholarship is scarce in the notes and bibliography.
As a contribution to Oxford Studies in Ancient Empires, the book is a disappointment. The previous volumes admittedly set an ambitious agenda with two edited volumes that tackled large problems of imperial organisation from a comparative perspective. Although case studies of particular empires are a welcome follow-up, the narrowness of the present volume stands in stark contrast to the aims of the series. The model of eastern and western cores competing for the middle territory is a limiting one that blends out the independent developments in Syria–Palestine, Anatolia and south-eastern Europe as well as in the eastern Iranian–Bactrian world. While Mesopotamia and Egypt were crucial for the emergence of the earliest imperial states in history, to insist on their overriding significance for all subsequent empires ignores substantial social, cultural, economic and political changes over time.
