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receipted for from the centre. State officials and servants were paid in fixed quantities of wine, grain or animals; but even members of the royal family received payments in the same way. Officials in Persepolis gave orders for the levying of taxes in kind in other locations, and then gave orders for payments in kind to be made from the proceeds, in the same locations. Messengers and couriers were given tablets to produce at post-stations along the royal highways, so that they could get food and lodging for themselves and their animals. These tablets recording payments in kind cover only a relatively limited period, from 509 to 494 BCE . But there are several thousand of them, and it has been estimated that they cover supplies to more than 15,000 different people in more than 100 different places. 17
    It is significant that the tablets were written mainly in Elamite, not in Persian. It is known from other sources that the main language of administration in the Empire was neither Persian nor Elamite, but Aramaic, the Semitic lingua franca of Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine. The Bisitun inscription states directly that the form of written Persian used there was new, developed at Darius’s own orders for that specific purpose. It is possible that he and the other Achaemenid kings discouraged any record of events other than their own monumental inscriptions, but these are all strong echoes of that Iranian distaste for writing that we encountered earlier in Mazdaism, and it may go some way to explain an apparent anomaly—the lack of Persian historical writing for the Achaemenid period. It is possible that the histories once existed, and that there were poems written down and all sorts of other literature which have since been simply lost. But later Persian literary culture was strongly associated with a class of scribes, and the fact that the scribes in the Achaemenid system wrote their accounts and official records in other languages suggests that the literature was not there either. There was no Persian history of the Achaemenid Empire because the Persian ruling classes either (like the Magi) regarded writing as wicked or (the kings and nobles) associated it with inferior subject peoples; or both. To ride, to shoot the bow, to tell the truth; but not to write it. That said, no histories as such have survived from the Egyptian, Hittite or Assyrian empires either—it is more correct, in the context of the fifth century BCE , to call the innovation of history writing by the Greeks the anomaly.
    To ourselves, at our great remove of time, awash with written materials every moment of our working lives, dominated by the getting and spending of money, a human system that was largely non-literate and operating for the most part on the basis of payments in kind, not cash, even if it be a great empire capable of stunning monuments and great sculptural art, seems primitive. But the history of human development is not simply linear. It is not quite right to see the oral tradition of sophisticated cultures like that of Mazdaism as unreliable, flawed or backward, something we have gone beyond. The Persians were not stupidly trying, with the wrong tools, to do something we can now, with the right tools, do incomparablybetter. They were doing something different, and had evolved complex and subtle ways of doing it very well indeed, which our culture has forgotten. To try to grasp the reality of that we have to step aside a little from our usual categories of thought, for all the apparent familiarity of Mazdaean concepts like angels, the day of judgement, heaven and hell, and moral choice. The Achaemenid Empire was an Empire of the Mind, but a different kind of Mind.
    The Empire and the Greeks
    In general Darius’s reign was one of restoration and consolidation of previous territorial expansion rather than wars of conquest like those that had been pursued by Cyrus and Cambyses. But Darius campaigned into Europe in 512 BCE , conquering Thrace