The gazelle

Antelope of the Iranian plateau and the Egyptian desert edge, 6th-5th century BCE

In the game: Level 1: The Founder's Tomb, Level 2: The Spear-bearer, Level 3: The Lie, Level 4: The Terrace, Level 5: The Charter

Gazelles were ordinary game animals in the lands the Persians ruled: the goitered gazelle on the steppes of the plateau and the dorcas gazelle at the desert edge of Egypt. Persian texts say little about them, and most of what is known comes from Greek writers on Persian hunting and from Egyptian art. They belong to the landscape the King's officials worked in.

In the game: Gazelles appear as wildlife on the Pasargadae, Parsa, Bagastana, Susa and Memphis levels. They are scenery only and no rule reads them. The Median and Elamite placements are the designers' interpretation, not documented.

Gazelles of the plateau

Disputed

The goitered gazelle is the usual gazelle of the steppe and semi-desert of Iran, and the game places it in Persis, Media and Elam on that basis. No Achaemenid text known to the author names where particular herds lived. The distribution is therefore inferred from the animal's later range and its habitat, not from ancient reports.

P. Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander, 2002

Gazelles in Xenophon's hunts

Ancient account

Xenophon, writing in the 4th century, has the young Cyrus hunt deer, gazelles, wild sheep and wild asses in the Cyropaedia. The work is an idealised, partly philosophical portrait, so it is not a record of what Cyrus actually hunted. It does show that Greeks of Xenophon's time thought of gazelles as ordinary Persian game.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.4.7

The enclosed hunting park

Ancient account

Xenophon says that Cyrus the Younger, satrap in Anatolia, kept a paradeisos at Celaenae, an enclosed park full of wild animals which he hunted from horseback. He does not name gazelles there, so their presence in Persian parks is a reasonable guess, not a reported fact.

Xenophon, Anabasis 1.2.7

The dorcas gazelle in Egypt

Disputed

Gazelles of the desert edge appear in Egyptian art and offering scenes long before the Persians, and the dorcas gazelle is the species usually identified in the Nile valley and nearby desert. Evidence for hunting them in the Persian period is thin. The game's use of the animal at Memphis rests on Egyptian tradition and habitat more than on texts from 525.