The foundation of the Old Persian Empire was undoubtedly an important link in the development of the ancient world. It happened for the first time in the history of humanity that the huge territory stretching from Libya to the Pamir, from Sudan to the Syr Darya was incorporated into a relative unity by an empire, which was practically a historical summing up of the results achieved by the earlier Near Eastern states in social-economic, technical and cultural fields, and which with its two centuries long existence exerted a significant influence on the further historical development. Although the historical importance of the Old Persian Empire was obvious since long time to historical research, the problem of its social-economic structure remaind surprisingly unclarified up to the latest times. A few years ago in scientific circles it was still a generally spread opinion that the Old Persian Empire was a slave-holding state, and the major part of its population consisted of slaves. In contrast to this opinion, represented by such eminent scientists as from 1961 in several lectures and publications, and especially in my study entitled «The Problem of Slavery in the Old Persian Empire»I tried to show that the above mentioned historical conception is based on an erroneous interpretation of the social terminology of the Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian, Aramaic and Greek sources, and that the relations of production in the Old Persian Empire do not reflect the conditions of the slave-holding social formation, but they represent the conditions of the Asiatic mode of production. Since then this opinion has found a rather general acceptance, and today it seems already to be doubtless that in the Old Persian Empire, beside the backward smaller peoples living still in tribal society and the slave-holding Greek city-states, the largest part of the population were ...