6 On the Edges of Empire

The breakup of Elam under Ashurbanipal in the 640s facilitated the establishment of more direct contacts between Parsumash and Assyria. Sometime around 640 BCE, a king of Parsumash by the name of Kurash sent his son Arukku to Nineveh to pay his respects to the Assyrian monarch. This Kurash must have been an ancestor of the renowned Persian king Kurash (or Cyrus) II, who, in the 530s—almost exactly one hundred years after Arukku’s visit—established the Persian Empire and became famous in Western historiography as Cyrus the Great. It may well be that Arukku learned something about empire-building while staying at Ashurbanipal’s imperial court at Nineveh—and passed it on to his descendants.