It has long been known that population size and population development have always had a significant influence on political, economic, cultural, and mental performances and developments:
the distribution of people between town and country was instrumental in the creation of collective identity, and may reflect the scale of division of labor and commerce; human mobility mediated information flows and culture change; mortality and morbidity were principal determinants of wellbeing, and determined fertility (and thus gender relations), investment in human capital, and economic productivity, and more generally shaped people's hopes and fears. The same is true of marriage customs and household structure. Classical civilization was the product of a thoroughly alien environment of frequent pregnancy and sudden death. Along with technological progress and scientific discovery, it was demographic change that separated the modern world from the more distant past. Archaic patterns of marriage, reproduction, and death seemed as natural and immutable then as they are exotic to us, and we cannot hope to approach ancient history without a solid understanding of what these conditions were and how they permeated life. This is the true challenge of demography.
(Scheidel 2009: p. 134)
The Malthusian Law of Population in the meantime has been seen as flawed by its ignorance of factors such as technology, poverty, endemic disease, wars, and natural disasters, and modern theories have got as their point of departure the concept of demographic equilibrium, i.e. the idea that a population adapts itself to its biological, economic, and social‐structural environment in such a way that mortality and fertility balance each other out over an extended period of time and at a level that depends on the population's resources, technology, and standards of living (Scheidel 2007: 50 ff). Therefore, “significant demographic change is mainly (to be) attributed to exogenous factors: climate, technology and endemic disease patterns, and in the short run to famines, particularly virulent epidemics and political factors like war” (Jursa 2010: p. 37).
The Sources and Their Relevance
The evaluation of the various types of source materials for demographic history faces fundamental problems that are also unique to the field of ancient history on the whole: gaps and coincidences in the body of tradition firstly pose the question of how representative available materials are. It must also be noted that the sources available to us were only rarely created for the primary purpose of demographic statistics, but far more often primarily for fiscal, judicial, military, and administrative purposes and to facilitate economic organization.
Information on the demographic parameters of the Achaemenid Empire is rudimentary at best. What we have comes from a variety of sources, and the numbers they provide us with are highly controversial. As far as the total population of the Achaemenid Empire is concerned, a presentation of two different demographic tables reveals the problems of such calculations (Table 2.1)
.
Table 2.1 Modern Estimates of the Population of the Achaemenid empire (McEvedy and Jones 1978: p. 125 (low estimates) and Aperghis 2004: pp. 56–58 (high estimates; cf. also Aperghis 2001: pp. 73–77). Scheidel 2007: p. 63 gives 20 000 000–25 000 000 inhabitants).
| Area | Region population |
|---|---|
| Low estimates | |
| Egypt | c. 3 500 000 |
| Near East (without Arabia) | c. 12 000 000 |
| Central Asia and India | c. 1 500 000 |
| Whole empire | c. 17 000 000 |
| High estimates | |
| Mesopotamia | c. 5–6 000 000 |
| Bactria/Sogdiana | c. 2 000 000 |
| Margiana | c. 500 000 |
| Central and eastern Persis | c. 500 000 |
| Susiana and western Persis | c. 1 000 000 |
| Northern Syria | c. 500 000 |
| Cilicia | c. 2 000 000 |
| Western and southern Asia Minor | c. 5 000 000 |
| Syria/Palestine | c. 1 500 000–2 000 000 |
| Egypt | c. 5–6 000 000 |
| Eastern regions of the empire | At least c. 7 000 000 |
| Whole empire | c. 30–35 000 000 |
The surviving numerical material must be examined both for its reliability and for its possible topos‐related nature. This is especially true for Greco‐Roman literary sources, which are often enough internally contradictory, stereotypical, or accidental, as well as dependent upon the narrative intentions and the purpose of the author. For example, Herodotus' (3.89) accounts of tributes to the Achaemenid king and of the size of the Persian army and fleet during the so‐called Persian Wars (490–479 BCE) imply a very large population of the empire. More detailed analysis, however, proves that the Halicarnassian's figures are unreliable. Both his list of nomoi and the figures he gives for the tribute are not dependent on Persian sources (cf. Jacobs 1994: pp. 93–97; Ruffing 2009). His description of the size of the army is based on both Homer's epics and Hecataeus' ethnographical work, and the figures he lists for the number of soldiers and ships are based on patterns that express nothing but relations of magnitude (Bichler 2000: pp. 323–327). Finally, by exaggerating the size of the Persian army throughout Greek history, authors such as Herodotus, Xenophon, and the historians of Alexander the Great magnify the Greeks' military achievements to make them seem exceptionally glorious. The authors of the fourth century BCE in particular succeeded in making the Persian opponent appear extremely daunting, but only because of the sheer size of its army (whose members had allegedly been coerced by the Great King to serve and fight) and not because of any bravery on the part of the soldiers or the tactical skills of their commanders.
Apart from those foreign texts, research on the demographic parameters of the Persian Empire has so far concentrated on two kinds of evidence: archeological surveys of settlement patterns (especially in the central Mesopotamian floodplain, but also in Judaea, etc.) and epigraphic documentation (mostly also from Babylonian archives). Only recently, and for reasons of reconstructing the economic history of Neo‐Babylonian and Achaemenid Mesopotamia, scholars have intensively dealt with those two kinds of source material. It would be helpful to have those surveys and those assessments of the textual documentation also for other parts of the Persian Empire, e.g. for Egypt (where the evidence should be similarly sufficient to provide some information on demographic parameters. But see Chapter 20 Egypt and Wasmuth 2017. For a demographic study on ancient Egypt on the whole, see Kraus 2004).
Archeological surveys from the beginning of the 1980s, which, however, focused on the whole period from the third