The socio-political and cultural memory of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire played a very important role in Antiquity and later ages. This book is the first to systematically chart these multiform ideas and associations over time and to define them in relation to one another, as Persianism . Hellenistic kings, Parthian monarchs, Romans and Sasanians: they all made a lot of meaning through the evolving concept of "Persia", as the twenty-one papers in this rich volume illustrate at length. Persianism underlies the notion of an East-West dichotomy that still pervades modern political rhetoric. In Antiquity and beyond, however, it also functioned in rather different ways, sometimes even as an alternative to Hellenism .

Rolf Strootman is Associate Professor of History at Utrecht University. He studies imperial ideology, court culture and monarchical ritual in premodern empires. His current research project, "Royal Roads: The First World Empires and the Integration of Central Eurasia", examines how the mobile royal court created trans-cultural connectivity in the Achaemenid and Seleukid empires.

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