Note 424 — Chapter XXXIII · GROWTH OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE.

Herodot. iii, 95. The text of Herodotus contains an erroneous summing up of items, which critics have no means of correcting with certainty. Nor is it possible to trust the huge sum which he alleges to have been levied from the Indians, though all the other items, included in the nineteen silver-paying divisions, seem within the probable truth; and indeed both Rennell and Robertson think the total too small: the charges on some of the satrapies are decidedly smaller than the reality.

The vast sum of fifty thousand talents is said to have been found by Alexander the Great, laid up by successive kings at Susa alone, besides the treasures at Persepolis, Pasargadæ, and elsewhere (Arrian, iii, 16, 12; Plutarch, Alexand. 37). Presuming these talents to be Babylonian or Æginæan talents (in the proportion 5 : 3 to Attic talents), fifty thousand talents would be equal to nineteen million pounds sterling; if they were Attic talents, it would be equal to eleven million six hundred thousand pounds sterling. The statements of Diodorus give even much larger sums (xvii, 66-71: compare Curtius, v, 2, 8; v, 6, 9; Strabo, xv, p. 730). It is plain that the numerical affirmations were different in different authors, and one cannot pretend to pronounce on the trustworthiness of such large figures without knowing more of the original returns on which they were founded. That there were prodigious sums of gold and silver, is quite unquestionable. Respecting the statement of the Persian revenue given by Herodotus, see Boeckh, Metrologie, ch. v, 1-2.

Amedée Jaubert, in 1806, estimated the population of the modern Persian empire at about seven million souls; of which about six million were settled population, the rest nomadic: he also estimated the Schah’s revenue at about two million nine hundred thousand tomans, or one million five hundred thousand pounds sterling. Others calculated the population higher, at nearer twelve million souls. Kinneir gives the revenue at something more than three million pounds sterling: he thinks that the whole territory between the Euphratês and the Indus does not contain above eighteen millions of souls (Geogr. Memoir of Persia, pp. 44-47: compare Ritter, West Asien, Abtheil. ii, Abschn. iv, pp. 879-889).

The modern Persian empire contains not so much as the eastern half of the ancient, which covered all Asiatic Turkey and Egypt besides.