Ancient persia and the caucasus

Abstract

In the middle of the 6th century BC Cyrus the Great founded an empire which dominated the Near and Middle East for more than two centuries. Nevertheless, for a long time scholars emphasized the feebleness of Achaemenid traces in archaeological records. The Achaemenid imprint was hardly visible in most of the provinces. In the recent past this situation has begun to change2. In the following I am going to present an area on the north-western periphery of the vast empire: the Caucasus. In Russian terminology the region south of the Caucasus mountain range is called Transcaucasia. It includes the former Soviet republics Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Whereas Transcaucasia formed a kind of strategic unity from the Russian point of view, the geography as well as the (ancient) political history of these three countries have little in common. The region which the Russians call Cis-Caucasia, i.e. Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia and the Kuban region, all still belonging to Russia, have been beyond the Persian sphere of influence in antiquity and will therefore be omitted here. Until the present day there is no agreement among scholars upon the extension of the Persian Empire on its north-western border. Textual sources are rather quiet concerning the above-mentioned countries for the time of the Achaemenid Empire. Nevertheless, there is little reason to doubt that they became part of the empire some time in the later 6th century BC3.