Achaemenid Music and Performance

The Achaemenid Empire ruled much of western and central Asia from about 550 to 330 BC. Greek writers describe performance in royal households, while Herodotus places a priest’s chant within a Persian sacrifice.

Singing in the royal household

Heracleides of Cyme, a fourth-century BC writer describing the court of Artaxerxes II, wrote about women attached to the king’s household. His account survives in a quotation by Athenaeus, writing in the third century AD: the women slept during the day so they could remain awake at night, when they sang and played harps by lamplight. Heracleides also says the king selected concubines from their number. The description makes performance part of the household’s nightly routine around the ruler.

Other Greek writers place singers in more specific settings. In Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a literary life of the ideal king Cyrus, Cyrus’s allies divide captured goods after a battle and set aside two skilled singing women with a tent and a woman from Susa in Iran. In the same episode, a Median soldier tells Cyrus that he heard the singers the previous evening and asks for one as a reward for campaign service; Cyrus grants the request. The story links the captives’ performance with a military camp and presents one singer as a king’s reward to a soldier. It is Xenophon’s crafted picture of kingship, not an eyewitness report about Cyrus.

A later account preserved by Athenaeus describes the household of Darius III. After the battle of Issus in 333 BC, Alexander the Great’s Macedonian general Parmenion captured the king’s baggage at Damascus, in Syria. The report says he found 329 royal concubines skilled in music among the household. The account places musicians among the people and possessions accompanying the king during the campaign, rather than only in a settled court.

Chant during a Persian sacrifice

Herodotus describes a different vocal practice in his account of Persian worship. After the offerer had cut up and boiled the sacrificial animal, he laid the pieces on fresh grass, especially clover. A Magus—a Persian religious specialist—then stood beside the meat and chanted a theogony, an account of the gods’ origins. Herodotus says a sacrifice could not lawfully be made without a Magus; after a short wait, the offerer carried the meat away for use. The priest’s words thus marked a necessary stage between preparing the offering and taking it away. Herodotus also specifies that no pipe music accompanied the rite. For more on the participants and practices of Persian worship, see Worship, Offerings and Burial in Achaemenid Lands.