Naqsh-e Rostam

A perpendicular wall of limestone on the southern nose of the Ḥosayn Kuh, about six kilometres north-west of Darius's terrace at Persepolis, holds one of the richest concentrations of ancient monuments in Persis. Into this cliff the Achaemenid house cut four great cruciform tombs; before it stands a massive square tower, the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt; and lower on the same rock, seven centuries later, the Sasanians carved the triumph-reliefs from which the whole place takes its modern name, Naqš-e Rostam, 'the picture of Rostam', because tradition read those later kings and horsemen as the deeds of the epic hero. For the age of Darius, the site is above all a royal necropolis and the fullest surviving statement, cut in living rock, of how the Great King wished his kingship and his god to be seen.

This entry keeps to the Achaemenid monuments (the four tombs, the tomb-façade programme, and the tower) and lets the tomb of Darius, the one securely dated and inscribed, carry the reading. The authoritative modern description is the Encyclopaedia Iranica article of Hubertus von Gall, resting in turn on Erich Schmidt's excavation for the Oriental Institute of Chicago in 1936 and 1939, and it is the frame followed here; the religious reading of the relief follows Mary Boyce.

The cliff and the four tombs

Four monumental tombs are hewn from the native rock, high in the cliff face (Schmidt, Persepolis III, 1970). The oldest is Tomb I: its inscriptions name Darius, so its attribution is secure. The other three carry no royal name and can only be assigned tentatively, on their position relative to Darius's and on the style of their carving: Tomb II (east-north-east of Darius) to Xerxes, Tomb III (west-south-west) to Artaxerxes I, and Tomb IV, the westernmost, to Darius II (von Gall, Iranica).^[1] That the line of attribution runs by proximity and workmanship, not by a signed name, is the plain reason the compendium marks three of the four as attributed rather than certain.

The four follow one pattern, and it is a new one. It owes nothing to the built, gable-roofed tomb Cyrus had raised at Pasargadae a generation before; the cruciform rock-cut façade was devised for Darius and has, in von Gall's words, no exact prototype in the Near East, Egypt or Greece, though the stone-cutting technique descends from Urartu. Chisel-marks date the work to the early years of Darius, around 500 BCE. Each tomb presents a sharp contrast: a richly sculptured cross-shaped façade on the cliff face, and behind it a plain interior: a long vestibule cut parallel to the rock, with doors leading to barrel-vaulted chambers, and in each chamber a trough hewn to hold a (probably wooden) sarcophagus, sealed after burial with a monolithic lid. Nothing of the original interments survives. The bodies were laid, embalmed, deep in the sequestered rock, a mode of royal burial that itself became a small puzzle of the faith (below).

The façade: the peoples bear up the throne

The cross-arm of the façade is carved in three registers, best read on the tomb of Darius. At the centre stands an image of a palace front with four engaged columns, a deliberate recall of the living king's house, for its dimensions are almost those of Darius's own palace on the Persepolis terrace (Schmidt). Above this rests a great throne-platform (Old Persian gāθu in the inscription DNa), and the platform is borne up by thirty figures, the peoples of the empire, each carved in his own dress and headgear, arms upraised to lift the throne. The composition is not a scene from life but an emblem of the realm itself: the Achaemenid empire as a structure whose seat is upheld by all its nations together.

The order of the thirty is not random. Inscribed labels name each bearer, and the sequence (set out at length in the accompanying text) runs by concentric zones and radiating axes, from Persians, Medes and Elamites at the centre outward to the Scythians, Libyans and Ethiopians of the periphery (von Gall, following Calmeyer). Almost every bearer wears his weapons; to go armed in the king's presence was a mark of honour and trust. The one unarmed figure is the Babylonian, read by von Gall, since Xerxes probably oversaw the finishing of his father's tomb, as a deliberate humiliation answering Babylon's repeated revolts. The empire's diversity, and its hierarchy, are written into the stone. The same idea speaks in the titulary Darius set on the tomb:

"A great king, king of kings, king of countries containing all kinds of men." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNa)^[2]

The topmost register: the king at worship

On the platform borne by the peoples stands the religious scene, and it is the reason this cliff matters so much for the faith of the early kings. The king stands on a three-stepped plinth, his left hand resting on a bow, his right hand slightly raised toward a winged figure that hovers above the whole tableau. He faces a fire-holder on which flames leap up, though he stands at a distance from it; in the upper corner floats a disc with an inscribed crescent. It is the clearest visual statement to survive of Achaemenid royal religion: the king lifted up by all his lands, worshipping before the fire, beneath the sign of heaven's favour.

The compendium reads this scene, with Mary Boyce, as profoundly Zoroastrian in the widest sense. The fire-holder is of the Pasargadae type, the object particular to the worship Zoroaster enjoined, before which the faithful stood to pray. The winged figure Boyce takes to carry a double significance here: a symbol of both the royal xᵛarǝnah, the god-given glory that alights on the legitimate king, and the sun; the Akkadian crescent-and-disc behind it she reads as the moon. Since in Zoroastrian practice prayers may be said before a terrestrial fire or facing the sun or the moon, Darius has had himself shown "at prayer according to the widest Zoroastrian prescriptions": before the fire, beneath the lights of heaven, under the sign of the glory that legitimates him.^[3] And the whole programme, Boyce notes, was reproduced over the tomb of every succeeding king (of whom the later ones are independently known to have been Zoroastrians), so that any change of faith in a later reign should have shown as a change in the funerary iconography, and none did.

Darius's own inscription turns the picture into words. The Wise Lord is named as creator, and as the god who raised the king out of the world's disorder:

"A great god is the Wise Lord, who created this earth, who created the sky, who created mankind, and created happiness for mankind." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNa)^[2]

"When Ahuramazda saw this earth in commotion, thereafter he bestowed it upon me; he made me king. I am king." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNa)^[2]

Who is the figure in the ring? — the field is split

What the winged figure is remains one of the genuine open questions of Achaemenid studies, and honesty requires saying that the two Encyclopaedia Iranica articles this compendium draws on disagree. The reading followed above is Boyce's: not the god himself but the royal xᵛarǝnah, the glory. That reading rests on the fact that the Achaemenid god had, so far as the evidence goes, no image, and on the awkwardness of showing the king at prayer to a figure crowned like himself. But von Gall's own Naqš-e Rostam article takes the older, opposite line: following M. C. Root, he reports that the winged ensign with a human figure "has been understood as a representation of Ahura Mazdā", and that "recent attempts to interpret this symbol as the royal genius Frawahr have been rejected." He adds a subtler observation of his own, that the gesture of the king's raised right hand corresponds in every detail to the gesture of the figure's hand, so that the relief "stresses the close connection between the king and Ahura Mazdā, whose will is decisive for the king's actions."^[1]

So the same scene is read by one Iranica authority as the king before his glory and by another as the king before his god. The compendium favours the glory-reading, with Boyce, because it squares the image with the aniconic worship the outside sources describe; but it will not pretend the question is closed, and the fuller argument, with all four candidate readings (glory, dynastic emblem, fravashi, or a non-specific sign of god-given rule), is set out in the winged symbol. On one point von Gall is clear where popular writing is loose: the disc-and-crescent in the corner is of Assyrian origin (there the moon-god Sin), and whether the Persians meant it for sun or moon "is difficult to comprehend... and there are no written sources to corroborate either view."^[4]

The attendant nobles, and the mourners

Flanking the worship scene, on the framework of the throne-platform, stand smaller figures, three to each side. On Darius's tomb the two upper men on the left are named by inscription: the lance-bearer Gobryas (Gaubaruva) and the bearer of the royal battle-axe Aspathines (Aspacanā), Darius's chief supporters, the same weapon-bearer whose name marks him as one of the men closest to the throne (compare the seventh of the conspirators of the accession). The three men on the right are unarmed, in the long Persian robe, raising a fold of the garment to the mouth.

The gesture has been read three ways: as mourning, in the Greek manner (Schmidt); as the ritual guard against polluting the sacred fire with the breath (Hinz); or as a sign of respect for the king's majesty (Root). Beyond these, A. Sh. Shahbazi proposed that the six noble Persians are grouped so as to mirror the six Aməša Spəntas, the great Bounteous Immortals about Ahura Mazdā: the three armed men reflecting Aša, Vohu Manah and Xšaθra, the three weaponless mourners the female Ārmaiti with Haurvatāt and Amǝrǝtāt (Shahbazi, AMI 13, 1980, cited via Boyce).^[5] Boyce reads the whole tableau, on this basis, as a visual statement of the Zoroastrian divine heptad, compensating for the absence of the doctrine from the king's carved words. It is a suggestive reading, not a proven one; the compendium reports it as Shahbazi's and Boyce's, not as fact.

The tomb inscriptions: DNa and DNb

Two long cuneiform texts stand on the façade of Tomb I, each in three languages. DNa is set in the top register, to the left of the king (Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian); DNb stands lower, on the panels between the engaged columns of the palace-front (Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian). In the Seleucid period an Aramaic version of DNb was added below the Elamite. DNa records the lands and the god-given kingship; DNb is the fullest first-person code of royal conduct to survive from any Achaemenid, and it is the arta-thesis of the whole reign carved where the king lies. Its ideal is the even hand of justice:

"I am a friend of the right, of wrong I am not a friend. It is not my wish that the weak should have harm done him by the strong, nor is it my wish that the strong should have harm done him by the weak." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8; trans. after Kent)^[6]

It binds justice to fair hearing, and to reward by desert:

"What a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until I hear the sworn statements of both." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8; trans. after Kent)^[6]

"The man who cooperates, him according to his cooperation do I reward; who does harm, him according to the harm I punish." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8; trans. after Kent)^[6]

And it closes with the king's word to all who come after him, the compact of arta and obedience set at the door of the grave:

"O man, that which is the command of Ahuramazda, let this not seem repugnant to you; do not leave the right path; do not rise in rebellion!" (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb; trans. Kent)^[6]

The general ethic of these lines (the stress on discernment, justice, self-control and resolution) is, as Boyce observed, wholly consonant with Zoroastrian moral theology, even though the text names neither the prophet nor the distinctively Avestan vocabulary of the faith.

The Kaʿba-ye Zartošt: a tower and an argument

Before the tombs stands the site's other great Achaemenid monument: the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt ('the Kaʿba of Zoroaster'), a massive, built square tower resting on a three-stepped base, some 12 metres tall, roofed with a flat pyramid of stone. Its walls of pale limestone are broken only by blind windows of dark grey stone and shallow rectangular recesses, ornament with no function but to relieve the mass. Its one true opening is a door high in the north wall, reached by a stair of thirty steps. Chisel-marks date it, like the tomb of Darius, to the early years of Darius, around 500 BCE; it has a close but earlier twin at Pasargadae, the Zendān-e Soleymān, from the last years of Cyrus (von Gall; Stronach).

What the tower was for has never been settled, and the compendium flags this as genuinely unresolved. Several functions have been argued:

• a fire-temple, but the chamber has no provision to ventilate a fire, which von Gall takes to exclude it (Stronach);
• a royal tomb, but the entrance is not sealed and smoothed to the ground as the true tombs are, so the tower was not a burial-place (Stronach);^[7]
• a depository for the paraphernalia of rule, or for sacred records, the reading of R. N. Frye, and (in a religious key) of W. B. Henning, who from the tower's later Middle Persian name bun-xānak, 'foundation house', proposed it held the archives of the church and even the master copy of the Avesta;
• a coronation tower with a dynastic rather than a purely religious purpose, the reading of H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg, who tied the twin towers to Plutarch's notice of a coronation shrine at Pasargadae; this dynastic interpretation, von Gall reports, "has become widely accepted," though the suggestion that a sacred fire burned in the towers "can no longer be upheld."

No single answer commands the field, and the compendium leaves the tower's Achaemenid purpose an open question, the honest state of the evidence, and one of the site's real puzzles.

What is certain is the tower's later importance. In Sasanian times its three outer walls were carved with the great trilingual res gestae of Shapur I (r. 241–272 CE), Greek on the south, Middle Persian on the east, Parthian on the west, and beneath the Middle Persian version the high priest Kirdēr incised one of his own inscriptions.^[8] A monument the early kings raised for a purpose we cannot name became, seven centuries on, one of the most important inscribed documents of the Sasanian state.

Baga, Bagāstāna, and the older sanctity of the place

The cliff's holiness may be older than its Achaemenid tombs. The dedication of high and striking places to the divine is a recurring feature of Iranian religion: the name of the great rock at Behistun, Bagāstāna, means 'place of the god' (baga), the very word the Achaemenid kings used for the divine beings they invoked beside Ahura Mazdā. That a king chose this particular wall of rock for the tombs of his house, over against the seat of his power at Persepolis, fits a pattern in which the god's presence is met at height and in the open, at places already charged with sanctity, rather than in built temples, exactly the aniconic, open-air worship the outside sources describe for the Persians of the age. The compendium notes the baga association as context, not as a documented cult of the site; the tombs' own witness is religious enough.

The Sasanian afterlife and the modern name

The Achaemenid kings gave the cliff its tombs and its tower; the Sasanians gave it its name. Lower on the same rock, and on the tower, later kings cut a series of great rock-reliefs (investitures and triumphs, the mounted king and his defeated enemy), and a fortified enclosure with semicircular towers once ringed the sculptured face. Persian tradition, reading those armoured horsemen as scenes from the national epic, called the whole place Naqš-e Rostam, 'the picture of Rostam', after the hero of the Shāhnāma. The name that the site now bears the world over thus belongs neither to the kings buried there nor to the god they worshipped, but to a legendary champion of a much later memory, a last reminder that the meaning of these monuments has been read and re-read across two and a half thousand years.