The King’s Peoples and Lands: The Apadana Reliefs, Herodotean Ethnography, and the Persian Imperial Lore

Antigoni Zournatzi-Tsami is Director of Research at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. Her main areas of research are the interconnections between the ancient Greek world and the ancient Near East, cross-cultural phenomena in archaic and classical Cyprus, and the Achaemenid Empire. She is currently a Guest Researcher at the Getty Villa, engaging in research that relates to the formative input, of which the encounters with the Achaemenid Persian empire played a crucial part, on the Greeks’ evolving definitions of identity and ethnicity. The ongoing project, Mapping Ancient Cultural Encounters: Greeks in Iran ca. 550 BC – ca. AD 650, which she coordinates, seeks to promote a holistic view of ancient Iranian and Greek interactions in Iran proper on the strength of an integrative inventory of different source materials and sites across historical periods.