The Persian satrapies of Herodotus
This map shows how Herodotus imagined the division of the Persian empire into satrapies, which is fundamentally different from how Persian inscriptions and all the later greek/roman writers describe it. I was originally trying to reconcile Herodotus' evidence with all the other sources to create a single definitive satrapy map, but once you actually plot the Herodotus provinces on a map it quickly becomes undeniable that he was simply wrong in many cases, and that his version is an outlier, while all the other sources paint a relatively coherent picture with only minor differences. Some of Herodotus's provinces, like no. 19, are absurdly small, others like no. 14 and 16 are absurdly large. The southern half of satrapy #16 (Parthia and Aria) is separated from Chorasmia and Sogdiana by the Karakum desert with no road connection between the two halves, and there is a similar issue with satrapy #14 where Karmania and Sarangia are separated by the impassable Karmania desert - these groupings are almost certainly wrong and unrealistic. Satrapy #18 is also very suspicious: Matiene is considered a subset of Media by every other ancient writer, yet Herodotus groups it with the Saspeires at what would later be called Iberia, which requires an odd looking land connection through Armenia.
These obvious discrepancies raise the question: how did Herodotus arrive at his satrapy definitions? The popular answer among academics seems to be that "he just made it up", but I refuse to believe that he would simply invent twenty fake numbers for the tribute values. But he clearly didn't have access to an official persian tribute list: the names of most provinces in persian and akkadian are very similar to the greek forms, so if he actually had a list of 20 toponym-tribute value pairs then he couldn't have made the kind of mistakes that he made. For example, all 4 members of satrapy #16 are separate provinces in persian inscriptions and would be listed separately in a tribute list, with names that are easily recognizable to a greek speaker, yet here they are grouped together into a single satrapy. Furthermore, the many minor tribes that he lists sorted into the different satrapies wouldn't be part of an official persian document, and many of these small tribes aren't the main vassal nations that a persian official would choose to highlight. His source clearly wasn't a Persian.
It's probably not a coincidence that some of the paradoxical features of Herodotus's satrapy borders are already present in the surviving fragments of Hecataeus: The Moschoi on the pontic coast are described as neighbors of the Matiene near lake Urmia, which explains why Herodotus would group these faraway tribes in satrapy #18, while the Chorasmians are described as direct neighbors of Parthia to the east, even though in reality they were separated by the Karakum desert to the north, which explains why Herodotus would group these 2 regions into one province at satrapy #16. The small tribes of the pontic coast in satrapy #19 are all mentioned by Hecataeus, who probably paid a disproportionately large attention to these otherwise insignificant tribes because they were well known to the greek colonists, but in reality their combined strength still wouldn't be enough to form a real satrapy. The most likely explanation seems to me that someone wrote the tribute payment values onto a map of Hecataeus after interviewing a Persian official, and this way the tribute values were mapped to the tribes and regions known to Hecataeus, and lost their connection to the original satrapy name that they were paired with. Then later, when Herodotus was constructing his satrapy list, he was reading off the tribute values from this map, and he simply grouped the labels that were placed closest to the tribute value label's position into the same province. Doing this could explain the kinds of errors that appear in Herodotus, errors that look absurd on a modern map, but inevitably arise on the ancient maps that didn't have a fixed scale or precise locations: e.g. satrapies #14 and #16 wouldn't have to look too large or too spread out, satrapy #19 wouldn't look too small, and labels that end up close to each other don't necessarily represent places that are physically close.
Thus the tribute value of satrapy #19 probably belongs to Kappadokia and not just to a thin slice of the pontic coast: it's known from the post-Alexander partition of the Macedonian empire that the Trapezous coast (where all but one of the tribes of satrapy #19 are located), was governed together with Kappadokia. Herodotus is the only source who relegated the large province of Kappadokia to be a sub-region of Hellespontine Phrygia, it's a satrapy of its own in almost every other source. The tribute value was probably written on the pontic coast simply because that was the only part of the satrapy familiar to the coastal greeks, even though it wasn't even an integral part of Cappadocia. The tribute value of satrapy #18 might have belonged to a province that contained Colchis, Iberia and maybe the Scythians as far as the Tanais river, or alternatively to Assyria. But in the eastern half of the empire there are simply not enough satrapies in the list of Herodotus, there should be about 3 more provinces with tribute values to fit what is known from other sources.
Moreover, Herodotus's satrapy list seems quote old: he wrote the Histories in the 430s, but satrapy #1 stopped paying tribute after 480 BC, fifty years before his time. India (conquered c.515 BC, the last Asian addition to Darius's empire) has a tribute value in a different unit from the rest and a value ten times higher than the other satrapies - this is most likely an error and coming from a different source than the rest of his tribute numbers, so the original list presumably didn't contain India yet. And Herodotus admits he doesn't know how much Thrace and Macedonia (conquered c.512 BC) payed, which would be of obvious interest to his greek audience. All this suggests that the tribute values pre-date not just the Persian invasion of Greece, but also the conquests of India and Thrace, and might be as old as the work of Hecataeus.
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