"I established kingdom on its place": an idea of law and order in the Achaemenid Empire

Abstract

The article aims to consider the problem of correlating the concept of “law” in the Achaemenid Empire, expressed by the word dāta-, with the ideological concept of “order”, metaphorically denoted by the word gāϑu-, i.e. “place”. The article examines in detail the word gāϑu-, which denotes not only the imperial world order, but also the royal throne. In Old Persian royal inscriptions, the expression “I established in its place” is often used in those texts that testify of the restoration of political stability after a series of uprisings and turmoil. The return of the kingdom “to its original place” was obviously thought of as the restoration of the power of the Achaemenids over the entire Persian Empire, and the people – as the return of their property. The statement that Darius “put the royal house in its original place” could mean that he restored order in the succession to the throne by removing Gaumata the Magus. The “return to the place” of the rebellious satrapy meant the pacification of this uprising. If in the Elamite version of the Achaemenid inscriptions the word kat in the meaning of “place” was most likely a loanword from the Old Persian gāϑu-, then in the Babylonian version the Akkadian word ašru has its own tradition of use as early as the pre-Achaemenid period in inscriptions from the Mesopotamian region. As for the term dāta-, it refers not only to the judicial and administrative state of affairs in the Achaemenid Empire, but also reflects the religious and political-ideological ideas of the Achaemenids, including those related to their perception of the idea of justice.