Arta (Truth, right order)

Arta (Old Persian arta-, Avestan aša) is the Iranian word for the right ordering of things: truth as against falsehood, order as against chaos, the correct joining of the world in the heavens and in the dealings of men alike. It is one of the deepest continuities of Iranian religion, older than the empire and older than the prophet, and it is the moral spine of the Achaemenid kings' self-presentation. Darius I's great apologia at Behistun frames his whole seizure and holding of the throne as a war of the Truth against the Lie: the rebels are lie-followers, they lied, the provinces fell to the Lie, and Ahura Mazdā gives him victory because he kept faith with the right. On his tomb Darius makes it a personal creed. And Herodotus, looking on from outside, caught its social face: the Persians, he says, reared their sons to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth, and held the lie the most disgraceful thing in the world. It is, in a sense, the one word that gathers up the whole moral world of the empire this encyclopaedia describes, and a foundational concept for much of what follows.

The word, and what it means

The Old Persian arta- and the Avestan aša are the same word in two Iranian dialects, and the concept is notoriously hard to render by any single term in another tongue. The primary meaning is truth: the standard Iranica treatment (Skjærvø and Schlerath) argues that aša / Vedic ṛta should be taken always as "truth" and its fuller sense derived from the sum of its occurrences, rather than translated loosely as "order".^[7] The reasons are concrete: aša is the standing opposite of Avestan druj, "the Lie"; Plutarch, reporting the Persian religion to the Greeks, translated aša by alētheia, "truth"; and on the Vedic side ṛta stands against ánṛta, "untrue, false". Yet many scholars, Mary Boyce among them, hold that so central a concept also carries "order" (cosmic, social and moral order) and "righteousness", precisely because a word this deep cannot be caught by one narrow gloss.

The etymology points the same way. Ṛtá- is a past participle from the Indo-European root meaning "to join, to fit properly together"; arta, then, is that which is correctly joined, the true fit of things. Hence its double face is not a muddle but a single idea seen from two sides: truth is the world rightly joined, and the rightly-joined world is true. The word describes at once the turning of the seasons and the honest word in a man's mouth, and treats them as one order.

An inheritance older than Persia

The Truth-and-the-Lie is older than the empire, older than Zarathustra, older than the parting of the Iranians from the Indians. Aša is the exact cognate of the Vedic Sanskrit ṛta, the cosmic order of the Rigveda; druj, the Lie, is the cognate of Vedic druh, deceit. The same word-pair survives on both sides of the Indo-Iranian split, in the Gāthās on the Iranian side and the Rigveda on the Indian, which means the opposition was carried out of a shared past, reconstructed by scholars to around 2000 BCE, before either people had a name.

The depth of the inheritance shows in the fixed poetic phrases the two traditions hold in common. Skjærvø and Schlerath list a whole set of inherited Indo-Iranian formulas built on \ṛtá- that recur in both the Avesta and the Rigveda: to think of truth, to drive the truth (the poet drives the true words of his hymn as a charioteer drives his horses), the path of the truth (the road the hymn travels to the gods), to follow, to be in alliance with, truth (the poet follows the truth as a retainer follows his lord), to win by truth, to uphold the truth, to venerate the truth, to serve truth.^[7] These are not loose parallels but the same set phrases, preserved word for word across a thousand years and a subcontinent's distance. So when Darius carves that the rebels followed the Lie, he is reaching for an order older than his own throne, a contest of Truth and Falsehood that the future Iranians and the future Indians had carried, already ancient, out of their common inheritance. It is that contest, already ancient when Darius carved his rock, that the word arta* names.

The order of the good creation

Within Zoroastrian thought aša is the truth or right arrangement of Ahura Mazdā's good creation, and Ahura Mazdā is its creator and its upholder. In the Gāthās the Wise Lord is hailed as "Creator as well as upholder of aša" (so Boyce), and the great abstractions the prophet praises (Truth, Good Thinking, Dominion, Devotion) are aspects of the god's own being. Aša stands first and highest among them: by one count it occurs 157 times in the 238 verses of the Gāthās, more than any other, the dominant concept of the oldest Iranian hymns.^[7]

And the good creation is besieged. Just as the good man, the ašavan, is opposed on earth by the wicked man, the drəgvant, so the Truth itself is opposed by the Lie, the druj, and behind the Lie, in the fully developed teaching, the Hostile Spirit. The whole moral drama of the world is the contest of the two. Zarathustra set it at the very origin, in the verse the game itself takes for its spine:

"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." (the Gāthās, Yasna 30.3, trans. Bartholomae)^[4]

The choice is renewed at the world's ending as it was at its making: the truthful and the followers of the Lie do not share the same fate.

"And when these twain Spirits came together in the beginning, they created Life and Not-Life, and that at the last Worst Existence shall be to the followers of the Lie, but the Best Existence to him that follows Right." (the Gāthās, Yasna 30.4, trans. Bartholomae)^[4]

Arta in the royal ideology

With Darius the cosmic order becomes the engine of a political apology. The Behistun inscription, his own monument, carved to be believed, remembers the year of revolts not as unrest but as the Lie loosed upon the world:

"The people became hostile, and the Lie multiplied in the land, even in Persia and Media, and in the other provinces." (Darius I, the Behistun inscription, DB §10)^[1]

Each beaten pretender is charged, flatly and identically, with the same offence, not merely treason but falsehood, the Lie made flesh: He lied; he said: I am Bardiya, the son of Cyrus. Rebellion, in the King's telling, is the drauga at work, and so the King's war is Truth's war. His victory is the proof of his truthfulness, and his truthfulness the ground of his victory:

"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, the Behistun inscription, DB §63)^[1]

And he binds it upon his heirs as the first duty of a king, the one enemy above all others to be guarded against:

"Thou who shalt be king hereafter: guard yourself vigorously against the Lie." (Darius I, the Behistun inscription, col. IV)^[1]

This is royal propaganda, and must be read as such: it names every rival a liar by definition, and lets the victor write the record. That the King insists his own inscription be believed, let it not seem false to thee; believe it to be the truth, is itself part of the rhetoric of arta, and part of what the honest reader must weigh.

The king's own creed

Nowhere is arta made more personal than on Darius's tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, where the inscription DNb sets out the fullest code of royal conduct to survive from any Achaemenid. Here the King measures himself not by conquest but by justice, self-mastery and the even hand, the social face of the Truth, cut where he lies:

"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." (Darius I, his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8)^[2]

Justice, in this creed, is fair judgement (a charge is not believed until both parties are heard), and it is reward and punishment measured to desert, and it is the temper mastered before the realm is ruled. Its one named enemy is, again, the Lie:

"To the man who is a follower of the Lie I am no friend." (Darius I, his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8)^[2]

The stress on discernment, justice, self-control and resolution is, as Boyce observed, wholly consonant with Zoroastrian moral theology, whether or not the King would have called himself by the prophet's name.

The social face: reared to speak the truth

The outsider's testimony agrees with the royal creed, and it is Herodotus who gives arta its most famous social expression, not as a doctrine of the fire-altar but as the plainest fact of how a Persian is made:

"They educate their children, beginning at five years old and going on till twenty, in three things only: in riding, in shooting, and in speaking the truth." (Herodotus, Histories 1.136, trans. Macaulay)^[5]

The last of the three is the greatest, and the shame of its opposite is ranked with a precision that says much about the culture that held it:

"The most disgraceful thing in the world, they think, is to tell a lie; the next worst, to owe a debt: because, among other reasons, the debtor is obliged to tell lies." (Herodotus, Histories 1.138, trans. Rawlinson)^[5]

The schooling in truth-telling is echoed across the Greek witnesses: Strabo has the Persians trained "to use the bow, to throw the javelin, to ride horseback, and to speak the truth"; Xenophon says their boys go to school "to learn justice and righteousness" as naturally as Greek boys go to learn their letters.^[6] To lie, in this frame, is not merely a fault but a cosmic disloyalty, an alliance with disorder; the truthful ruler is the agent of the god's own order on earth. That the same Darius who cut guard thyself against the Lie on his rock is made by Herodotus, in a Greek-told scene, to argue that a lie may be spoken at need is one of the fine tensions the record leaves standing, the ideal and its worldly practice held in one frame.

The name that endures

Because arta was auspicious, it was carried in names. It stands at the head of the great royal name Artaxerxes, Old Persian Artaxšaça, understood as "whose reign is through arta", his kingship founded on the right order, and in a host of others, from Artaphernes to Artabazus to the personal name aša-sairi, "a combatant of truth", that the philologists note on the Iranian side beside the Vedic "troops of truth". To name a child with arta was to make a small public declaration of allegiance to the Truth.

And the personified Truth had its own place in the divine order. Among the six great Beings emanated by Ahura Mazdā (the Aməša Spəntas, the Bounteous Immortals, each an aspect of the god taking one of the creations for his own), aša is Aša Vahišta, "Best Truth" (Middle Persian Ardwahišt), and his creation is fire. The link of Truth and fire runs deep: the place of the sacred fire was the place where the highest, the "best", truth was recited, and the fire ordeal, a truth-test by flame, was known to Iranians and Indians alike, a microcosm of the last judgement by which the truthful would be sorted from the followers of the Lie. So the fire on the Achaemenid altar, before which the King is shown at prayer on his tomb, is not merely a holy element but the very emblem of arta.

The word's afterlife

A curiosity of the record deserves note, and corrects a natural assumption. Although the vocabulary of the Lie saturates the Old Persian inscriptions (drauga the Lie, draujana the liar, durujiya to lie, all frequent), the word arta "truth" itself is, surprisingly, found in only one royal inscription: Xerxes' so-called daiva-inscription (XPh), in a much-debated phrase where the King worships "Ahuramazda and arta".^[7] Its very rarity, and the fact that the Akkadian and Elamite versions merely transcribe rather than translate the phrase, suggest an old, fixed, perhaps borrowed religious formula. There the concept surfaces by name at last, joined to the divine law and carried across the reigns as the creed of the good ruler:

"Thou who shalt come hereafter: have respect for the law the Wise Lord has established, and worship him and arta, and thou shalt be happy in life, and blessed in death." (Xerxes I, Persepolis, XPh, the daiva inscription)^[3]

After the empire, the word narrowed. In India ṛtá faded from the language once the old style of religious identification lost its force, leaving only satya, "true"; in Iran aša survived above all as a Zoroastrian term, while ordinary New Persian took up rāst, "true", from a different Old Persian root meaning "made straight". But aša / arta never died. It lives on in the living Zoroastrian faith, in the name of the Aməša Spənta of fire, in the theophoric names still spoken, and, as the moral axis of a whole civilisation's memory of itself, in the word arta itself: the Truth, and the right order of the world.