Life of the Common Man, and the governments

Unfortunatelly, thousands of years of attacks by the foreigners on Iran has left us with almost nothing about the life of the common folk during the Achaemenid era. Alexander burned Persepolis and whatever it contained, and took the only remaining version of Avesta, the Zoroastrian holy book and an encyclopaedia of knowledges, to Greece. Greeks translated this text, and used it to advance their own knowledges, many of them presented to the western world as Greek. Later, Arabs burned the Gondi Shapour University and its library, thus destroying all signs of intellectual life in pre-Islamic period. So, at the first glance, it seems like for over a thousand years, Iranians achieved no scientific results, and almost lacked the intelectual life of their neighbours like Greeks and Romans. However, an educated man realises that this can not be possible for an empire which ruled a large part of the world for such a long time, and few books which remain from that era prove that Iranians have been very advance in knowledges of Medicine, Astrology, Mathematics, Architecture, and Literature.

During Achaemenid period, a major advancement took place in field of literature and writing. We see Persians adopting the Babylonian cunieform they have got through Medes, and modify it to become an alphabetical writing system, rather than its traditional syllable based system. They also adopted the Aramaic scripts for their everyday life and for regular government work, and Aramaic speaking secretaries became the back-bone of Achaemenid beaurocracy. This led to the creation of ideograms in later Iranian scripts such as Sassanian Pahlavi which caused a major handicap for writing and reading those languages.

For the common man however, these matters were not worth considering. A usual Persian folk during this era was most likely a farmer or a cattle breeder, this was the most common of the works at that time. Peasants either owned the lands, or they rented it from the owners. They would work on it individually, or occasionally form a common farm and work on it with other fellow farmers. Slavery existed, but only for the non-Persians, never a Persian became a slave as a result of a financial matter as it was common in many other societies later on. People of the conquered lands were left alone on the matters of their belief and their local economy. In most cases, a local dynasty ruled the people on behalf of the Great King, and most of these foreign subjects were happy, since they knew the independent locals would not be as kind as the ones answering to the Persians.

On the matter of religion. Early Achaemenids were most likely followers of the old Aryan religion of worshiping natural gods, mainly Mithra, god of sun, and Anahita, goddess of water and fertility. It has been proposed that after Xerxes (Khashayar) the Zoroastrianism became the most wide spread religion, although it existed way before Achaemenids. It can be viewed that the followers of Deevayasna (evil worshipers) were greatly out numbered by Mazdayasna (truth worshipers). Although there is no evidence of an Achaemenid king ever claiming a particular religion, it is most certain that by the time of Alexander, most Iranians were Zoroastrians. Never this affected their treatment of conquered subjects, since they respected Cyrus' freedom of religion laws very seriously, and never forced their religion on their subjects.

Persians hated lying and breaking promises, so they did not enagage in trade and left it to their subjects. Persian people were tall with strong features, men left their beard and hair to grow long, and men and women covered their whole body but their hands. They wore three trousers over one another, with long sleeved shirts that would cover the top part of the trousers, both of them made from fine cotton. Over them they occasionally wore long jackets. Soft shoes and small hats were part of the fashion, and men and women used almost identical clothes. Even the king wore the same clothes, with the exception of its deep orange colour.

Fine arts were not very popular by the Persians, rather architecture and design, fine arts were mostly works of the foreign people sent to the king as part of the tax, although there are evidence of pure Persian goldsmithery which is awfully similar to the works of their Scythian cousins. From the examples of Persan architecture, Palacesof Susa and Persepolis are well known. Persian road system was the bestof its time, and it made it possible for Barid (post) messangers to travel from Shusha to Sardis in a week, same as with a car today. Navigation was not their strongest point, they would either rent or capture Phoenician ships.

In the government, the country was divided into 20 Khshtrapti (Greek: Satraps), each ruled by a governor (Satrapi), who was the highest authority on the state. He could lay taxes as much as he wanted, so long that he sent the annual tax dictated by the central government on time. These Satrapis were controled by the Great King's "Eyes and Ears" which would secretly report the actions of the governor, and were also responsible for the occasional need to make one of them disapear! A noble class existed within the country, supposedly the members of the six families who helped Darius become king. These nobles held land, formed armies, and could even lay taxes. Much like their 18th century French counterparts, nobles were residents of the capital, either in Pasargedae (The Official capital), Hegmatana (Summer Capital) or Babylon (Capital of the west), but most likely in Susa, since it was where the king spent most of his time, much like what Louis XIV did with Versailles. Persian system of government was so well planned that it became a patern for other empires and survived until the fall of Rome.