Professor Christopher Tuplin MA DPhil

Professor Tuplin has published two books and six edited multi-author volumes, and is the author of some 150 research papers and other academic publications. Despite occasional forays into Roman matters (including mediaeval saints' lives), ancient science and Black Sea studies, the main focus of his work lies in classical Greece and Achaemenid Persia, and the topics on which he has written include: literary and historical and historiographical issues in Xenophon's Hellenica, Anabasis and Cyropaedia; classical Greek political and military history; the reality and perception of Media and "medism"; the civil administration and military structures of the Persian Empire; the Persian Great King's building projects, palaces, gardens, coins, inscriptions, political and historical misrepresentations, justice, nomadic habits, religious and military ideology and head-gear; seal-stone imagery; the historical trajectory of Achaemenid imperialism; Greek representation of the Achaemenid empire and Persian views of Greeks; the Hellenistic legacy of the Achaemenids; the historians Ctesias and Berossus; Babylonian astronomical diaries; the orator Demosthenes; Delos in classical Athenian imperialism; slavery in Greece and Egypt; and racism.

The publication of C.J.Tuplin & J.Ma (edd.), Aršāma and his World : The Bodleian Letters in Context (Oxford: OUP 2020) was the eventual outcome of a 2010-2011 AHRC-funded and Oxford-based project: Communication, Language and Power in the Achaemenid Empire – The Correspondence of the Satrap Arshama. This three-volume work involves over twenty authors and (1) presents and provides full commentary on the texts associated with a fifth century BC satrap of Egypt, (2) offers the first full publication and discussion of his magnificent seal, and (3) includes a large number of associated thematic studies.

The next major project (based on work that goes back over twenty-five years) is a full-scale commentary on Xenophon's Anabasis.

Professor Tuplin is co-editor (with Gabriel Danzig and Emily Baragwanath) of the newly established De Gruyter publication series Xenophon Studies, and he is also working with other present and former Liverpool colleagues on two volumes of papers from the third Liverpool Xenophon conference (held online in 2021).