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Deer

Deer in the woods and hunting grounds of the Persian world, 6th-5th century BCE

In the game: Level 6: The Bridge of Boats, Level 7: Sardis Burns, Level 8: The Bay of Marathon, Level 9: The Canal, Level 10: The Hot Gates, Level 11: The Finale

Deer were part of the woodland game of the lands the Persians ruled, from the Balkan woods to Anatolia. The surviving notices are Greek and mostly describe hunting in general terms. Deer are rarely singled out, so what can be said of them rests largely on habitat and on later Greek pictures of Persian hunting.

In the game: Deer are drawn as scenery on the Athos, Ister, Marathon, Plataea, Sardis and Thermopylae levels, on land the town has not taken. No rule reads them. Their placement is a design choice, not a sourced record.

Deer in Xenophon's picture of Persian hunting

Ancient account

Xenophon, writing in the 4th century, has the young Cyrus hunt deer, gazelles, wild sheep and wild asses. The scene belongs to an idealised account of a prince's education and is not a report of Cyrus's own life. It shows how a Greek writer of a later age pictured Persian hunting and its link to training for war.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.4.7

Parks and the Persian paradise

Ancient account

Xenophon describes a park at Celaenae in which Cyrus the Younger kept and hunted wild animals. The word paradise is of Iranian origin and came into Greek through such descriptions. Xenophon writes about 400, so this shows later Achaemenid practice, and the contents of parks in 559 to 479 are not recorded.

Xenophon, Anabasis 1.2.7

Game on Xerxes' march through Thrace

Ancient account

Herodotus says that lions attacked the baggage camels of Xerxes' army in the region between the Nestos and the Achelous, and that wild oxen lived there too. He does not mention deer in this passage. Deer in Thrace are therefore an inference from the woodland setting and not a statement of this source.

Herodotus 7.125-126

Wild horses on the Scythian steppe

Ancient account

Herodotus says that wild white horses grazed by the lake at the source of the Hypanis. This is the nearest game notice for the steppe country on the Ister level, and it concerns horses, not deer. No ancient text consulted here records deer on the Ister, at Sardis or at Marathon, so their presence in those places rests on habitat alone.

Herodotus 4.52