Achaemenes

Who is Achaemenes?

Achaemenēs was the eponymous ancestor of the Achaemenid Dynasty, who ruled southern Iran between 705 BC and 675 BC.

The name is a bahuvrihi compound literally translating to "having a friend's mind", or "characterized by a follower's spirit".

As the eponymous ancestor of the clan, Achaemenes is very often held to be legendary. Achaemenes is generally known as the leader of one of the clans, known to the Greeks as the Pasargadae, that was one of the some ten to fifteen Persian tribes. Persian royal inscriptions such as the Behistun Inscription place him five generations before Darius the Great. Therefore, according to the Inscriptions, Achaemenes may have lived around 700 BC. The inscriptions do label him as a "king", which may mean that he was the first official king of the Persians.

Apart from Persian royal inscriptions, there are very limited historical sources on Achaemenes; therefore very little, if anything at all, is known for certain about him. It has been proposed that Achaemenes may merely have been a "mythical ancestor of the Persian royal house". The "Babylonian" Cyrus Cylinder, ascribed to Cyrus the Great, does not mention Achaemenes in an otherwise-detailed genealogy. Some historians hold that perhaps Achaemenes was a retrograde creation of Darius the Great, made in order to legitimize his connection with Cyrus the Great, after Darius rose to the position of Shah of Persia in 522 BC. Darius certainly had much to gain in having an ancestor shared by Cyrus and himself, and may have felt the need for a stronger connection than that provided by his subsequent marriage to Cyrus' daughter Atossa. An inscription from Pasargadae, also ascribed to Cyrus, does mention Cyrus' descent from Achaemenes; however, historian Bruce Lincoln has suggested that these inscriptions of Cyrus in Pasargadae were engraved during the reign of Darius in c. 510.