I’ve been meaning to announce this for a while now, but other, pesky things, like spending time with my family over the holidays, got in the way. So here it is: last November my paper “‘The Spear of the Persian Man Has Gone Forth Far:’ The Achaemenid Empire and Its African Periphery,” was published in Iran and Its Histories: From the Beginnings through the Achaemenid Empire. Proceedings of the First and Second Payravi Lectures on Ancient Iranian History, UC Irvine, March 23rd, 2018 and March 11th-12th, 2019, edited by Touraj Daryaee and Robert Rollinger and published by Harrassowitz Verlag in the Classica et Orientalia series.
It’s an attempt to contextualize Egypt, Libya and Kush in their broader Achaemenid setting, using world-systems analysis as conceptual glue to hold them together. It also includes, thanks to a very strider anonymous peer reviewer, my first explicit attempts to explain how we can use Herodotus to study the Achaemenids (it was a very useful exercise for me to think this through).
I know what you’re going to say: there’s no such thing as ‘Achaemenid Africa,’ since ‘Africa’ is a Latin term, probably derived from Punic (as I said myself in a recent post). That is true. But it is still a convenient shorthand for talking about Achaemenid territories on the African continent, which despite not being innately or cogently ‘African’ per se (whatever that means) are still unified by geography and politics, which is one of the points I (try to) make in this paper.
The whole volume is very impressive, and I am very grateful to Touraj for the invitation to participate in one of the conferences that generated it back in 2019. Although I’m moving away from Egypt in my scholarship, this was a sufficiently different undertaking from my dissertation/book to pique my interest. I hope the result is worthwhile!