A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

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Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: История
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isbn: 9781119071655
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epochs, archeology, anthropology, sociobiology, cultural geography, and sub‐disciplines of ancient history such as social, nutritional, economic, and medical history.

      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 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.

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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

      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).