Greek historians and the memory of the Assyrian court

This article is devoted to the study of the image of the Assyrian court and royal behaviour as preserved and interpreted in the Persian period in relation to the Achaemenid court and court etiquette. The main problem in the background is the degree and the quality of the preservation of the memory of the Assyrian empire after its fall in 612 BCE, especially at the Achaemenid court and among the members of the Persian élite governing the new universal empire founded by Cyrus II. The first subject is the strong importance given to war cruelties in narrative texts like the royal inscriptions, in the official correspondence protocol, and in the visual representation of the palace reliefs. It is stressed that this image was transmitted to later periods, since Ctesias and other Greek historians depicted the Assyrian kings as ruthless and cruel tyrants. The discussion then focuses on the possibility that Ctesias had access to a surviving memory of the Assyrian royal protocol, or that he projected into remote antiquity royal protocols or behaviours of the Achaemenid kings. Due to the Assyrian tendency to imprint the peripheral élites with their own cultural models, it is suggested that possibly the Achaemenid kings inherited the, or a part of the Assyrian royal protocol requiring the image of a ruthless king. Further analysis shows that ctesias himself considered cruelty as a unavoidable characteristics of kingship, as opposed to Greek "democracy". The problem of royal inaccessibility, or restricted accessibility is then discussed, starting from a study of the royal etiquette in late Assyria. It is suggested that the royal inaccessibility was a true protocol of the Oriental courts, but was negatively considered in the Greek world. Finally, a discussion is brought forward about the possibility that the Assyrian king was not easily accessible because he was considered a superhuman creature or evan a god, a fact which is reported in Ctesias' work. The most recent studies demonstrated that the last Sargonid kings tended to restrict the possibility to approach the king, in the framework of a tendency to move the king towards the divine world, although his mortal nature was never challenged. The conclusion is that in this case too Ctesias had access to true fragments of the memory of Assyria, albeit mediated by the Achamenid imperial culture.