The Persian Empire was a hypertextual entity. The Achaemenids deployed written texts in order to maintain control of their territories: royal inscriptions promulgated the imperial ideology, while a bureaucracy glutted with written records, exemplified by the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury finds, maintained the Persian imperial structure. Greek and biblical sources further testify to Persia’s zeal for hyper-documentation. Greek historians have delivered the most prolific extant accounts of the Persian Empire and its careful management, while biblical writers have crafted stories in which the Persian interest in documentation is asserted and then parodied. Though the minutiae of historical details in the Greek and biblical narratives can be dubious, their references to the primacy of written texts in the Persian setting accumulate into a well-corroborated portrait of Persian textuality. The book of Chronicles was composed in the shadow of this imperial obsession with written records. Chronicles was crafted by stitching together, glossing, or even reworking copious citations from a variety of sources, a process that betrays a written rather than oral backdrop for its composition history. This paper contends that the citation-heavy, “patchwork” nature of Chronicles is itself a reflection of the Chronicler’s engagement with the Persian administrative system. Particularly via the book’s pronounced interest in genealogies and the diversity of its source citations, Chronicles echoes the new, uniquely Persian textuality initiated by the Achaemenid Empire. The Chronicler produced a strategic—though not necessarily calculated—deployment of written texts to undergird his own work with authority, thus appropriating the textual values propagated by the Persian Empire.