Quick questions on The historical context for Xerxes: HSC Ancient History

Xerxes came to the throne in 486 BC on the death of Darius, chosen over an elder half-brother partly, in Herodotus' account, through the influence of his mother Atossa and his birth to a reigning king. His early reign was dominated by consolidation: he suppressed a revolt in Egypt (c. 485 BC) that had broken out at the end of Darius' reign, and put down revolts in Babylon (c. 484 BC).

The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484 to 425 BC) is the indispensable narrative source; its final three books cover Xerxes' accession, court and invasion. Herodotus travelled widely, questioned informants across the Greek and Persian worlds, and preserves an enormous amount of otherwise lost detail, which is why he is called the "Father of History."

The Persae (The Persians), staged at Athens in 472 BC, is the earliest surviving Greek tragedy and a near-contemporary source, written by a man who probably fought at Salamis. Remarkably, it dramatises the Persian defeat from inside the Persian court, through the queen mother and the ghost of Darius. Its value is its date and Persian setting; its limit is that it is Athenian tragedy composed for an Athenian civic audience, designed to move and instruct Greeks, not to report Persian fact.

Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek doctor at the later Persian court, wrote a Persica drawing partly on Persian court traditions, but it survives only in fragments and a Byzantine epitome and is often sensational and unreliable; it offers an alternative, sometimes contradictory, Greek strand. Later writers such as Plutarch and Diodorus add further, still Greek, material.

The Achaemenid kings left trilingual inscriptions (Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian) proclaiming their titles, conquests and piety. Xerxes' most discussed text is the so-called daiva inscription (XPh), found at Persepolis, in which he proclaims his devotion to Ahura Mazda and states that in one land he destroyed a sanctuary of the daivas (false gods) and forbade their worship. These are priceless as the empire's own voice, but they are formulaic royal propaganda; scholars debate whether XPh records a specific act of religious suppression (and where) or is a general ideological statement of proper worship.

The ceremonial capital at Persepolis, its Apadana staircase reliefs of subject peoples bringing tribute, the Gate of All Nations built by Xerxes, and the Throne Hall he began, is monumental evidence for royal ideology and the empire's self-image. Alongside it, the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury tablets, thousands of Elamite administrative documents recording rations, workers and the movement of goods, give rare, contemporary, non-ideological evidence for how the empire actually functioned economically. Reliefs are idealised propaganda; the tablets are dry but honest, though patchy and hard to connect to named events.

The core methodological problem is that all the connected narrative is Greek and hostile, while the Persian evidence is royal, ideological and non-narrative (inscriptions, reliefs) or administrative and fragmentary (tablets). We can reconstruct the empire's extent, structure and ideology fairly independently, but for the story of the reign, its events, motives and Xerxes' character, we are largely reading the enemy's account. Sound method means triangulating: never taking the Greek narrative at face value, always testing it against the Persian record and asking what each source was for.