چکیده:
There is a range of evidence that informs us about the organisation of the Achaemenid Empire, but our understanding of the eastern-most reaches of the empire, which lie within the bounds of modern-day Pakistan is relatively limited. Whilethere is evidence for the eastern provinces in imperial art and references to them in Achaemenid Royal inscriptions, the archaeological record in the subcontinent is far more ephemeral and less straightforward to interpret. Some of the clearest
information about these eastern regions comes from the historians who wrote about the conquest of Alexander at the end of the 4th century BC. The evidence for the Achaemenid period in the east is also informed by an understanding ofthe archaeological evidence from the preceding periods, which implies that the Achaemenid Empire annexed existing regional entities during the 6th century BC, and employed a layered administrative system in the east that saw differing
degrees of control exerted in different regions.
خلاصه ماشینی:
This is at least partly because the evidence for Achaemenid control at the easternmost edge of the empire is limited, and although there is archaeological evidence from various sites in the western borderlands of Pakistan, much of what is known comes from inscriptions and texts from palaces and tombs in Susiana and Fars in Iran, and Classical Greek and Roman historical sources relating to the Achaemenid period and the conquests of Alexander.
It is very likely that geographical considerations played a role IRANIAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES 2:1 (2012) The Achaemenid Expansion to the 4 in the operation of this economic zone, as the primary distribution of the red ware lies along east-west communication routes from the northern Punjab to the Peshawar region and from there into the highland valleys to the north (Magee and Petrie 2010).
The names of these provinces, variants of those names, and the names for peoples from these regions appear in royal inscriptions of various Achaemenid kings, several Persepolis Fortification Texts, a number of major Sanskrit texts including the Rigveda, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and a variety of Classical sources, including Herodotus’ Historiaes, and the accounts of Alexander’s conquest by Arrian and Quintus Curtius (Vogelsang 1990: 97-102, 1992: 94-244; Magee et al.
In addition to the route of Alexander’s advance and the political geography of ancient India, these texts also contain evidence about the nature of Achaemenid control over its far eastern provinces in the Late Achaemenid period and also the nature of indigenous control structures at this time (reviewed in Petrie and Magee 2007; see McCrindle 1896; Bosworth 1995; 1996).