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King of Persia
About Xerxes II
In the shadow of Persepolis, during the forty-seven days between Artaxerxes II’s death and his own assassination, Xerxes II performed a single, decisive act that reveals his political temperament: he confirmed the satrapy of Bactria to his half-brother Sogdianus, not as a gesture of trust, but as a calculated containment, assigning him a distant, restive province while retaining Babylon and Susa under direct royal control. Unlike his father’s decades-long balancing of Persian nobles and Greek mercenaries, Xerxes II moved swiftly to reassert the king’s ritual primacy, reinstating the Nowruz purification rites at Pasargadae with unprecedented austerity, banning non-Zoroastrian libations in royal precincts. His court was stripped of the cosmopolitan banter that had flourished under Artaxerxes; instead, silence was enforced during audience hours, and petitions were received only in Old Persian script, not Aramaic or Elamite. This wasn’t incompetence; it was a deliberate, brittle attempt to re-anchor imperial legitimacy in archaic form, just as the empire’s fissures widened beneath him.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Xerxes II:
- “Why did you confirm Sogdianus as satrap of Bactria instead of eliminating him?”
- “What happened to the Babylonian scribes who refused to transcribe your decrees in Old Persian?”
- “Did you personally oversee the restoration of Cyrus’s tomb rituals—and why only those?”
- “How did you respond when the Egyptian garrisons withheld grain shipments after your accession?”