Co-Sponsorship: Achaemenid Workshop 3 – Towards a Literary History of the Achaemenid Empire

Achaemenid Workshop 3 | Columbia University

February 21-22, 2025
Columbia University, New York

An International Workshop Convened by:
John Ma & Marc Van De Mieroop, Columbia University
M. Rahim Shayegan, UCLA

Co-sponsored by:
The Pourdavoud Institute for the Study of the Iranian World
The Yarshater Center for the Study of Iranian Literary Traditions

Towards a Literary History of the Achaemenid Empire, the third Achaemenid Workshop, seeks to investigate the various literatures of the Achaemenid Empire, their impact on the empire, and the empire’s impact on them. What does it mean to produce and consume literature in a multi-cultural world-empire—indeed in the first such entity? To answer this question, one must discern the outlines of a literary history of the Achaemenid Empire.

Primarily, it is imperative to gain a thorough understanding of the landscape of local literate cultures within the geographical ambit of the Achaemenid Empire. Examples of these cultures include Hebrew sacred literature, Demotic tales, Akkadian antiquarianism and scientific writing, and Aramaic hymns and wisdom literature; a capacious definition of “Achaemenid literatures” might also include royal discourse (in Old Persian but translated into local vernaculars), as well as texts produced in the Greek world, starting with Herodotus.

Just to survey all of these literary phenomena for the two centuries 550–330 BCE is a challenging prospect. How should one survey and read all of these literary phenomena for the two centuries 550–330 BCE as a unified corpus of literature representative of the empire? We must examine local literatures not only as reactive to, but also as reflective of the Achaemenid Empire. There are studies of these literary cultures within the empire for different regions, but to gather all of the regional viewpoints under an overarching problématique is a new and exciting endeavor.