The Strategy of the List in the Textual Organization of the Royal Achaemenid Inscriptions (together with Ela Filippone, Tuscia University)

In the Royal Achaemenid documentation we find several lists (attributes [of God, King, etc.]; ‘creations' in the God evocation formulary; beneficiaries of divine protection; titles; ancestors; the King's qualities; subjected peoples/countries; rising up peoples/countries; lying kings; supporters; building materials and people contributing to the palace building, etc.)
All these verbal lists, having different roles in the text structure and sometimes iconographical counterparts in the monuments they are engraved on, may be interpreted as instances of the usage of enumeration as a figure of speech. The aim of the present paper is to pinpoint the salience of the list as a rhetorical device in the production of the Achaemenid celebratory, propagandistic multilingual texts (Old Persian, Elamite, Late Babylonian), emphasizing syntactic and stylistic implications in connection to the different language textuality, possible relations between verbal and visual lists, and analogies with similar strategies in the literary traditions from the wider Mesopotamian area.