Syrians bearing tribute to Darius the Great of Persia / Wikimedia Commons
Hushang ascended the throne after his grandfather and declared himself the king of the seven realms. During the forty years of his reign, Hushang spread justice
Syrians bearing tribute to Darius the Great of Persia / Wikimedia Commons
Hushang ascended the throne after his grandfather and declared himself the king of the seven realms. During the forty years of his reign, Hushang spread justice and enriched the world as he was commanded to do so by God. He melted iron and inaugurated the use of instruments such as hatchets, axes, saws, and maces. But all of these new inventions were made possible only after he accidentally discovered the secret of making fire.
—Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings
In his celebrated epic poem the Shahnameh, the Persian poet Ferdowsi put to verse a history of the kings of Persia whose mythical beginnings establish in no uncertain terms the infrangible link between the material devices of work and war and the just and good imperial sovereign. Hushang, the second mythical king of yore, who took to the throne after defeating a horde of black demons, inadvertently discovers fire while attempting to strike a snake with a piece of flint. Missing the target, the flint instead hits a nearby stone, producing a spark, which leads first to Hushang’s discovery of flames, and onward ineluctably to humankind’s reliance on metal instruments. Once Hushang masters fire and introduces to humanity the metallurgical arts, he goes on to teach irrigation, agriculture, hunting, and the domestication of animals. He dies a peaceful death, forever remembered as a great king who transformed human experience for the better.
It is difficult to read Ferdowsi’s verses on Hushang, the second king of the seven realms, without recalling the better-known Greek myth of the fire-stealing titan, Prometheus, which Adam T. Smith (2015: 27) recently described as an “urtext for today’s material turn.” In the ancient Promethian cycle, just as in the tenth-century Shahnameh, the introduction of fire is tied to the invention and use of material implements that dramatically improved the human condition, while at the same time leaving us hopelessly obliged to labor with this sophisticated new world of material things (Smith 2015: 28). And in both stories, such advances are attributed to figures credited with humanity’s salvation—in the Greek case from the wrath of Zeus, and in the Persian case from the evil spirit Ahiraman, creator of demons and source of all darkness in the universe.
But the Greek and Persian tales differ in at least two critically important respects. First, unlike Prometheus, the heroic figure of the Shahnameh is a blameless savior. Hushang commits no transgression, angers no tyrant god, and faces no tragic fate. On the contrary, in putting his accidental discovery of fire to profitable use, he acts in accordance with God’s will. The Hushang story asserts the connection between imperial sovereignty and metal as the natural and divinely ordained order of things. Second, the Prometheus legend is nearly cosmogonic in its temporality, unfolding in a fully mythic age when a titan still walked the earth and humankind had not yet assembled into political association. The Shahnameh, in contrast, sets the invention of fire, metallurgy, and the attendant enrichment of the world in the quasi-profane realm of primordial political history, in which the first kings not only walked the earth, but ruled it. The Hushang verses of the Shahnameh, in other words, represent an early rumination not principally on the general relationship between humans and things, but more specifically on the links that bind monarchal sovereigns, subjects, and things.
This is no isolated or coincidental convergence. As we return now to the word “satrapy” and a close dissection of its meanings and associations, what comes to the fore is a prevailing concern across various strands of Persian cultural production—sometimes explicit, often not—to grapple with this nexus of phenomena. The exploration that follows dwells on selected texts and sculptural reliefs of the Persian sovereigns, before moving forward in time to examine innovations in Mazdean religious scripture that postdate the Achaemenid fall by several hundred years. In the final section of this chapter, the insights from these esoteric bodies of ancient Persian thought are brought into conversation with contemporary anthropological reflection on imperial sovereignty, giving rise to a full elaboration of the satrapal condition as a productive heuristic for an archaeology of empires.
Sovereignty Co-Constituted and Conditional
Figure 4. Photograph of the rock relief on Mt. Bisitun (courtesy of Rémy Boucharlat).
The primary lexical unit on which the word satrapy is built belongs to a language now called Old Persian, one of two textually preserved Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan, the language of Zoroastrian scripture), which occurs in written form in the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid Persian kings. It is in one of the oldest, if not the first, such Old Persian inscription, carved into the cliff face of Mount 