Ahura Mazdā

Ahura Mazdā, the "Wise Lord", is the one god the Achaemenid kings name again and again, and the divine source of their authority. He is at once the god of the royal inscriptions from Darius I onward and the supreme divinity of the Gāthās, the oldest Iranian hymns, in which Zarathustra took the immense step of proclaiming him the one uncreated God, not one great god among many, wholly wise and good. That double attestation makes him the pivot of ancient Iranian religion, and the centre of this compendium's governing problem: the relationship between the kings' Mazdā-worship and the prophet's reform. Because no Achaemenid ever wrote a creed, the surest way into the Wise Lord is through the words the kings actually carved, and this entry lets them speak.

The name and its Indo-Iranian background

The name joins two Iranian words: ahura, "lord", and mazdā, "wisdom", hence "the Wise Lord", or, keeping the grammar, "Lord Wisdom". Even the form is debated: some read Mazdā, some Mazdāh; some take it as a noun, "Wisdom", others as an adjective, "wise", qualifying ahura (F. B. J. Kuiper devoted a study to the question, "Ahura Mazdā 'Lord Wisdom'?"). Ahura is cognate with the Vedic asura, a class of sovereign lords; the Wise Lord's Indian counterpart has been sought in the "nameless, exalted Asura" of the Rigveda, that is, in Varuna, guardian of ṛta, the exact cognate of Iranian arta/aša, though the identification is not universally accepted. Mary Boyce suggested the earthly model for such a "Lord Wisdom" was the high priest, who led by counsel and knowledge of the law.

The deeper background is the shared religion of the Indo-Iranians before they split, in which the asura/ahura lords stood beside the daiva/daēva gods; the two branches then diverged in opposite directions, so that in India the devas remained gods and asura drifted toward "demon", while in Iran the ahuras were exalted and the daivas demonised, a reversal that surfaces sharply in Xerxes' inscription against the daiva-worshippers (below). The name itself may be very old: the earliest possible trace in western Iran is an Assyrian god-list of the eighth or seventh century BCE that names as-sa-ra ma-za-áš, held to preserve the name of the greatest of the Ahuras, presumably the Old Iranian divinity rather than the prophet's God.^[1]

The god across the empire's languages

Because the empire wrote in many scripts, the Wise Lord is attested under many spellings: Old Persian Auramazdā (his name and title fused into one word) in the monumental cuneiform; Elamite forms in the administrative tablets from Persepolis; Aramaic ʾhwrmzd in the chancery, including the Aramaic version of the Behistun text; and, through the Greeks, Ōromasdēs or Horomazes. That spread is itself evidence: the god of the dynasty's proclamations was also a name handled in the day-to-day paperwork of the state.

Creator of the world, and of human happiness

The standard Achaemenid royal text opens by invoking Ahura Mazdā as creator, in a formula repeated with little variation across the reigns. On Darius's tomb it runs:

"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]

The last words are doctrinally pointed: the god creates not only the world but happiness (Old Persian šiyāti, "well-being, blessedness"), and, as Boyce observed, in Zoroaster's teaching the supreme Lord creates only what is good.^[1] The Susa charter says the same, that Ahura Mazdā "created me; he made me king; he bestowed upon me this kingdom" (DSf §3); and the tomb text adds that the god "bestowed wisdom and activity upon Darius the King" (DNb §7)^[3]. Creation and kingship are one act of the divine will, for the formula continues, "who made Darius king — one king of many, one lord of many", and against the world's disorder the god raises the king as remedy:

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

And the king prays that the creator keep the good creation from the powers that unmake it:

"May the Wise Lord protect this land from the hostile army, from famine, and from the Lie." (Darius I, Persepolis, DPd)^[4]

Enemy, dearth, and falsehood: the three faces of disorder, held off by the creator through his king.

The giver of kingship, and the winged figure

Ahura Mazdā is above all the god who "made Darius king", and Achaemenid kingship is a trust held "by the favour of Ahuramazda" (vašnā Auramazdāha):

"By the grace of Ahuramazda am I king; Ahuramazda has granted me the kingdom." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §5)^[5]

To rebel against the king is therefore to side with the Lie against the god's own order. It is a striking fact, and an important one, that no image of Ahura Mazdā is recorded from the early Achaemenid period. The famous figure in the winged ring that hovers above the king at Behistun, on the reliefs of Persepolis, and on the tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam, long taken by European scholars for the god himself, has an identity that is in fact unresolved and actively contested. The old reading as Ahura Mazdā is still defended (Root, von Gall); many now prefer the royal khvarnah (Middle Persian farr), the divine glory that alights on the legitimate king (Boyce, Shahbazi), Boyce arguing that the figure is male where the fravashi was female, and that it mirrors the king too closely to be the supreme God^[1], though Gnoli judges even that unproven^[6], the glory being nowhere named in the inscriptions; and a fravashi or dynastic-emblem reading has its adherents too. On Darius's tomb the figure seems to carry a double sense, the glory (or the god) and the sun, with the Akkadian crescent-moon disc of Sin set behind it, so that the king is shown at prayer before the fire and beneath the sun and moon, according to the widest Zoroastrian usage, a scene Boyce reads as the king praying "according to orthodox Zoroastrian prescriptions"^[1]. The one safe statement is that it marks the king's rule as divinely sanctioned (see the winged symbol). The god's own presence was marked not by an idol but by an emptiness: from Cyrus to Darius III an empty chariot drawn by white horses accompanied the Persian army, sacred to the god the Greeks called Zeus, Ahura Mazdā, who was invoked to ride in it unseen.

The Wise Lord and the order of arta

The creation is good, and ordered by arta (Avestan aša), the truth or right arrangement of all things, and it is besieged by the drauga, the Lie. The king is the god's agent in that contest, and on his tomb Darius turns the theology into the fullest code of conduct to survive from any Achaemenid (DNb §8)^[3]:

"I am a friend to the right; I am no friend to the wrong... It is not my wish that the mighty should do wrong to the weak, nor that the weak should do wrong to the mighty."

He binds it to fair judgement, "what a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until I hear the testimony of both", to reward by desert, and to self-mastery: "I am not hot-tempered; what things develop in my anger, I hold firmly under control by my thinking power." The one enemy he names is the Lie: "to the man who is a follower of the Lie I am no friend." The same runs through Behistun:

"Ahuramazda brought me help, because I was not wicked, nor was I a liar, nor was I a despot; I have ruled according to righteousness." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §63)^[5]

The stress on discernment, justice, self-control and resolution is, as Boyce noted, wholly consonant with Zoroastrian moral theology: in bridling his wrath and dealing even-handed justice the king serves Aša Vahišta, who hypostatizes right, and Khšathra Vairya, honoured through rightly exercised power, "as a true Zoroastrian should".^[1]

"And the other gods who are": the limits of the royal monotheism

The royal cult was supreme but not, on its face, exclusive. Darius invokes Ahura Mazdā "together with the gods of the royal house" (DPd), which Boyce renders "with all the gods", and, the passage most pressed by both sides, names "Ahuramazda and the other gods who are" (DB). He never honours one of these lesser beings by name, Boyce notes, though Zoroaster himself names more than a dozen yazatas in the Gāthās.^[1] The word he uses for these other divine beings is baga, rare in the Avesta, not the characteristic Zoroastrian yazata; his texts also lack spənta, the name Angra Mainyu, and the name of Zoroaster. The maximalist reply (Boyce) is that Zoroaster preached an original, not a present monotheism (the lesser divine beings are the god's own emanations, so to invoke them with him is orthodox), and that Avestan religious vocabulary took centuries to displace the older Persian terms (the Sasanian priest Kirdēr still called Paradise "the place of the bagas"). Even so, the attempt to read "the other gods who are" as the six Aməša Spəntas is, as Gershevitch showed, not very convincing. The administrative tablets confirm the plural reality on the ground: one Persepolis Fortification tablet (PF 337) records Ahura Mazdā together with "Mithra-and-the-Baga", and the crown issued rations for many gods at once.^[7] The Achaemenid state is best described not as monotheist but as a working henotheism: Ahura Mazdā supreme, without any denial that other gods are and may be served. Cyrus and Darius alike honoured the gods of Babylon, Jerusalem and Egypt as a matter of imperial policy.

The daiva inscription and its problem

The sharpest single text is the daiva inscription of Xerxes (XPh):

"Where formerly the demons (daivas) were worshipped, there I worshipped Ahuramazda and Arta reverently." (Xerxes I, Persepolis, XPh)^[8]

Read literally, a sanctuary of the "false gods" is thrown down and the worship of the Wise Lord established in its place. But the text never says where, and readings diverge widely. Some sought the daiva-sanctuary in a specific rebel temple Xerxes is known to have destroyed (Esagila in Babylon, or the Athenian Acropolis), but Boyce objects that Xerxes would hardly have performed Iranian rites in those alien places, and reads daiva instead as Avestan daēva: an internal act of Zoroastrian zeal, suppressing among Iranians the worship of the warlike daēvas the prophet had denounced (a reading developed by Bianchi). Others (Kellens, Herrenschmidt) treat the passage as a formulaic, ideological statement of the king against disorder rather than a report of a particular event.^[9] The inscription itself closes not in triumph but in exhortation, promising blessedness to whoever keeps "the law the Wise Lord has established" and worships "him and arta". The location and the literal reality remain unresolved.

The Wise Lord of the Gāthās

In the Gāthās Zarathustra hails Ahura Mazdā as the one uncreated God, "all-seeing", "seeing afar", "whom none deceives", clad in "hardest stone" (the sky), and Creator and upholder of aša. The prophet also apprehended an adversary, uncreated like God, and in that sense his "twin": the Hostile Spirit, Angra Mainyu. The most quoted verse sets the choice at the origin of the moral world:

"Now the two primal Spirits, who reveal themselves in vision as Twins, are the Better and the Bad, in thought and word and action. And between these two the wise ones chose aright, the foolish not so." (Gāthās, Yasna 30.3, trans. Bartholomae)^[10]

A point of doctrine matters here, and is often got wrong. In the received Zoroastrian tradition Ahura Mazdā creates through his Bounteous Spirit, Spənta Mainyu, and it is Angra Mainyu who is his uncreated adversary; the two "twins" of Yasna 30.3 are the Bounteous and the Hostile. The reading that makes Ahura Mazdā himself the father of both good and evil spirits, and so the ultimate source of evil, was a nineteenth-century interpretation (M. Haug), gratefully adopted by Parsi reformists answering Christian critics, but with no basis in the tradition, which insists on "the separate origin of light and darkness". It is, however, close to the old Zurvanite heresy (below). The first of the god's creative acts was to emanate the six great Beings, the Aməša Spəntas, aspects of his own being who with the Holy Spirit make a mighty heptad, each taking one of the seven creations for his own, man being the special creation of Ahura Mazdā.

The Zoroastrian question

Were the Achaemenid kings, then, Zoroastrians? The Greek writers make it reasonably clear that the later kings were; the religion of the early kings, Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, is the long-debated question, and here the authoritative treatment, the Encyclopaedia Iranica articles by Mary Boyce and, at length, her History of Zoroastrianism, argues the strong case for continuity.^[11][12][1] Boyce marshals: the royal theophoric names (Arsames, an Achaemenid of c. 600, named a son Vištāspa, the name of Zoroaster's own patron; Cyrus named his daughter Hutaosā/Atossa, the name of that patron's queen), taken as a public declaration of allegiance; the redating of Zoroaster's "traditional date" (Shahbazi showed the "258 years before Alexander" was probably reckoned from the Seleucid era, so it no longer forces the prophet into Cyrus's own lifetime); the fire-holders excavated at Pasargadae by Cyrus's tomb, an object particular to Zoroastrian practice; and the funerary iconography at Naqsh-e Rostam, where the winged khvarnah, the fire, and even the six attendant nobles (read as mirroring the six Aməša Spəntas) compose a scene Boyce reads as "profoundly Zoroastrian", reproduced over every royal tomb. Against this stands the caution of other scholars: no royal text names the prophet, uses yazata or spənta, or shows a distinctively Gāthic doctrine rather than the common Old Iranian worship of a great Ahura Mazdā; and modern reverence for Cyrus can colour the debate. The prudent middle term, widely used, is Mazdaean (devoted to Ahura Mazdā within the old Iranian religious world from which Zoroastrianism grew), while the exact relationship to the reform is left open. This compendium treats Boyce's continuity thesis as the leading and best-argued position, not as a settled fact, and keeps the question a well-defined uncertainty.

How the god was worshipped

Worship of Ahura Mazdā used no images and no temples in the Achaemenid period. The outsider's eye of Herodotus caught it precisely:

"The Persians have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly." (Herodotus 1.131, trans. Rawlinson)^[13]

Instead the Persians went up to the high places, "called the whole vault of heaven Zeus", and sacrificed with a magus chanting over the offering, honouring fire, water and the elements. Herodotus' account (1.131f.) also gives, as Boyce noted, the earliest description of the Zoroastrian purity laws in action: the killing of noxious creatures, the avoidance of polluting water, the exposure of the dead. Darius's inscriptions mention āyadanā, "places of worship", but no temple remains of the early period have been found, which fits Herodotus exactly; the sacred fire was tended in the open, on stone fire-holders (not the enclosed fire-temple of the later, Sasanian faith, an anachronism when read back). Persian sons, Herodotus reports, were reared "in three things only: in riding, in shooting, and in speaking the truth" (1.136), "the most disgraceful thing in the world" being "to tell a lie" (1.138).

Ahura Mazdā in Greek eyes

The Greeks knew the Wise Lord as Ōromasdēs (Horomazes), and always "translated" his name as Zeus. The first attestation of the proper name is in the fourth century (the Platonic Alcibiades I 121, "Zoroaster son of Oromazes"); a fragment of Aristotle (Fr. 6) reports that the magi acknowledged "two first principles, a good spirit and an evil spirit, the one called Zeus and Oromasdes, the other Hades and Areimanius", the earliest philosophical statement of the dualism. Plutarch later gives the fullest account, of Oromazes the good creator against Areimanios the hostile spirit, with Mithres set between them. This Greek testimony is invaluable but refracted: outsiders, using Greek names and categories, and mostly later than the kings themselves (see the evaluation on the Herodotus entry).

From Ahura Mazdā to Ohrmazd

In later Zoroastrianism the Wise Lord becomes Ohrmazd, and the dualism hardens into cosmic war: the wholly good creator against Ahriman (Angra Mainyu), the hostile spirit, to a final renovation of the world. A rival, monist speculation (Zurvanism, probably evolved in the late fifth century BCE) made both Ohrmazd and Ahriman the twin sons of Zurvan, "Time"; the fourth-century Zoroastrian calendar, dedicating four days and a winter month to Ahura Mazdā as Creator, seems to bear its stamp. Orthodoxy rejected the monism and kept "the separate origin of light and darkness". After the Achaemenid period the god who had had no image began to be shown, worshipped with images in Parthian Armenia as "Aramazd", and in Sasanian investiture reliefs as a dignified crowned figure, sometimes bearing the priests' barsom. But the central figure (the Wise Lord who made the good world, and human happiness within it, and sustains its order against the Lie) is continuous from the prophet's hymns, through the carved words of the kings, to the fire-temples of Sasanian Iran and the living Zoroastrian faith.