Next month I’ll be giving a talk at the British Museum at a member’s conference entitled ‘Great Civilisations: Greece and Persia,’ held in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece‘ (which I am very much looking forward to seeing). My talk is called ‘Persian Silver: The Power behind the Throne,’ which is a title devised by the BM, but it does aptly convey the idea that money and power were intertwined in the Achaemenid court, but not in an economic sense so much as in the context of prestige.
This is really exciting for me, however, because I am on a program with many luminaries of the field, whom I respect and admire, including Paul Collins, St John Simpson and Tom Harrison, whom I last saw twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate at St Andrews and helped to set me on my current scholarly path towards the Persians. I am very much looking forward to seeing him again.