CTESIAS (Greek s ), a physician at the Achaemenid court for Artaxerxes ii, was also interested in history along with his profession, and was able to gain access to archived data in the Treasury of the Persian Archives, and wrote at least two of these three famous books, Assyrica and Persian. Although the originals of these books have disappeared, the basic themes of his work remained in the writings of other authors after him. These data have received little attention from academic researchers to date, and even they were considered an absolute and sometimes relative mythological...