Gold plaque of a barsom-bearer (Oxus Treasure)

Among the gold objects of the Oxus Treasure, the richest surviving hoard of Achaemenid metalwork, is a set of small, thin gold plaques, cut from sheet and lightly worked with a single figure, that were given to a shrine as tokens of worship. The most reproduced of them, now British Museum 123949, shows a standing man in what the museum calls "so-called Median dress": a belted tunic banded with embroidery, trousers, long boots, and a soft cap or hood with a neck-guard drawn up so that his chin is covered. At his belt hangs the short Persian sword, the akinakes, its scabbard held against his leg by a cord. In his right hand, held upright before him, he carries a slim bundle of rods. That bundle is the barsom (Avestan barəsman), the sheaf of twigs the Iranian priest gathered and held through the act of worship, and the plaque is the plainest thing we have that lets us see the rite the written sources only name. This entry keeps the object and the rite distinct from the treasure that carries them, because each is certain to a different degree.

The object

The plaque is a rectangle of gold about 15 cm high and 7.5 cm wide, and barely a millimetre thick, the figure raised in low relief by embossing and chasing. Scientific analysis gives the metal as gold 93 percent, with a little silver and copper. It was catalogued by O. M. Dalton as no. 48 of the treasure, illustrated on his plate XIV.^[8] The figure faces right, his hair showing above and below the hood, his tunic marked with vertical bands of applied or embroidered ornament and further bands at the wrist and shoulder, the dress, the British Museum notes, of the tribute-peoples shown coming from the north or north-east on the western façade of the Palace of Darius at Persepolis, and matched by an actual costume recovered from the Issyk kurgan far out on the steppe. Several such votive plaques survive, of varying size and finish, from a few centimetres to this larger sheet; they are dedications, not portraits, and the figure on them is a type rather than a named man.

The barsom

The bundle the figure holds is the heart of the matter. The barsom (Middle Persian for the Avestan barəsman, from a root meaning "to grow high") is a set of sacred twigs that forms, in the words of the Encyclopaedia Iranica, "an important part of the Zoroastrian liturgical apparatus".^[6] In the old rite the twigs were of a living plant, the haoma or the pomegranate; they were cut with prescribed prayer, laid out, and tied into a bundle, the number fixed by the ceremony to be performed. The celebration of the Yasna, the central act of worship, required twenty-three twigs, of which twenty-one made the bundle; the longer Vendidad service took thirty-five.^[6] The priest held the barsom in his hand while he chanted the liturgy, and the twigs were laid on a pair of crescent-shaped metal stands, the barsomdān. In later, temple-based practice the living twigs gave way to thin rods of brass or silver, each about nine inches long, still called by the old name, and it is this metal form that the Sasanian and modern Zoroastrian priest uses, and that appears in the hands of later divine and royal figures in Sasanian art.

What the bundle meant is spelled out in the rite itself. The Vendidad has Zarathustra ask Ahura Mazdā how the god may fitly be praised, and the answer sends the worshipper to a growing tree:

"Go near a tree grown out of the earth and repeat thus: 'Homage unto thee, O beautiful, flourishing, strong and Mazdā-created tree.'" (Vendidad 19.17–18, trans. Darmesteter, as given in the Encyclopaedia Iranica article on the barsom)^[5]

The twigs, cut with that homage, stand for the whole of the vegetable creation, and the holding of them is a thanksgiving to the creator for the produce of the earth on which human and animal life depends. The barsom rite is, in short, an act of gratitude to the maker of the good world, the same theology the kings carved on their tombs, performed with a handful of rods.

The rite the plaque shows

The plaque puts a body and a gesture to the barsom, and two Greek witnesses let us check what we are seeing. Herodotus, describing Persian sacrifice, insists on the priest at its centre:

"A Magian man stands by them and chants over them a theogony (for of this nature they say that their incantation is), seeing that without a Magian it is not lawful for them to make sacrifices." (Herodotus, Histories 1.132, trans. Macaulay 1890)^[2]

Strabo, drawing on Hellenistic sources, is more exact still, and describes almost precisely the figure the plaque shows — the bundle of rods and the felt cap drawn down over the face:

"In the midst of these there is an altar, on which there is a large quantity of ashes and where the Magi keep the fire ever burning. And there, entering daily, they make incantations for about an hour, holding before the fire their bundles of rods and wearing round their heads high turbans of felt, which reach down over their cheeks far enough to cover their lips." (Strabo, Geography 15.3.15, trans. Jones)^[3]

The "bundles of rods" are the barsom; the felt "turbans" drawn over cheeks and lips are the hood on the plaque, the padām or mouth-cover that keeps the priest's breath from defiling the holy things — the same reason, Strabo adds nearby, that the fire itself must never be breathed upon:

"To fire they offer sacrifice by adding dry wood without the bark and by placing fat on top of it; and then they pour oil upon it and light it below, not blowing with their breath, but fanning it; and those who blow the fire with their breath or put anything dead or filthy upon it are put to death." (Strabo, Geography 15.3.14, trans. Jones)^[4]

So the plaque, a Greek geographer, and the liturgical books agree on the same scene: a figure in Iranian dress, mouth covered, holding a bundle of rods before him in worship. That agreement across independent kinds of evidence is what gives the object its value.

Priest or worshipper?

Whether the man on the plaque is a priest — a magus — or a lay worshipper in the priestly posture is not settled, and the object cannot decide it. The barsom and the mouth-covering hood are the priest's apparatus in the later liturgy, which argues for a magus; but in the earliest usage, the Iranica article notes, the barsom seems to have been required even of the ordinary worshipper's simple grace before meals, held in the hand during the recital, so that a layman at prayer would also have carried it. The Ferdowsi story of the last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd, calling for a barsom to say grace while in hiding — his asking for it betraying him to his killers — shows the object in a king's hands, not a priest's. The plaque, showing a single generic figure at worship, is compatible with either reading, and the safest description is the one the object itself supports: an Iranian at the barsom rite.^[9] What the plaque certainly is not is a portrait of a particular historical person; it is a dedicatory image of worship as such.

The Oxus Treasure and its problematic archaeology

The plaque's chief difficulty is not the figure but the hoard it belongs to. The Oxus Treasure — some 180 surviving gold and silver objects, with a body of associated coins — is the largest single group of Achaemenid precious metalwork known, and it includes some of the most famous images of the empire: a pair of griffin-headed gold armlets, a small gold model chariot drawn by four horses with two riders in Median dress, gold and silver statuettes, vessels, sword-fittings, seals, and the plaques. It surfaced on the antiquities market in the early 1880s and passed through the hands of merchants and British officers, much of it reputedly bought at Rawalpindi, before it reached England; the greater part came to the British Museum in 1897 with the bequest of Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, who had acquired it with Sir Alexander Cunningham. Its origin is only reported, not observed. It is said to have been found on the north bank of the Oxus (the Amu Darya), and the British Museum gives the findspot of this plaque as Takht-i Kuwad (Takht-e Qobād), a fortress site on the river. The Encyclopaedia Iranica article on the nearby temple of Takht-i Sangin sets out the uncertainty plainly: "The hoard of Achaemenid gold objects known as the Oxus Treasure, now in the British Museum, are thought by some to have originated as votives in the Temple of the Oxus, but may have come from somewhere else in the vicinity, such as the earlier fortress site downstream at Takht-e Qobād."^[7] Whether the treasure is a single deposit or a dealer's assemblage of finds from more than one place, whether every piece now grouped with it is genuinely ancient, and how much is later addition or restoration, have all been debated since Dalton's day. The plaques are therefore best dated only broadly, across the later Achaemenid and into the early Hellenistic period; the British Museum assigns this one to the fifth or fourth century BCE.

Bactrian workmanship, and the edge of the empire

The treasure is a Bactrian object — from the empire's north-eastern march, the satrapy on the Oxus — and this plaque may be Bactrian not only in findspot but in making. The British Museum records that its sheet is thicker, and its workmanship of a "considerably different standard", than the other plaques of the treasure, and reports the view of Lolita Nehru that it is possibly evidence of local Bactrian production: the face is somewhat individualised, with a faint trace of portraiture, unlike the highly stylised, formulaic figures on the Persepolis façades. If so, the object is doubly valuable — a provincial hand, out at the edge of the Iranian world, showing the same barsom rite the imperial centre and the Greek witnesses describe. It is direct evidence that the worship known from the Magi, from Herodotus, and from the Avesta was practised across the whole span of the empire, from Persis to the Oxus.

The rods in metal, and their long afterlife

The barsom outlived the empire, and changed form as it did. In the Achaemenid rite it was a bundle of living twigs, cut with prayer from a growing plant; but the demands of temple worship and the enclosed fire-cult of later Zoroastrianism turned it, in time, into a set of thin metal rods — brass or silver wires, each about nine inches long, one called a tae, laid up in the requisite number and handled with the old prescribed formulae. The rite survives in living Zoroastrian practice, where the priest still consecrates the barsom with the baj and the propitiatory formula for the plants and trees, and touches the ends of the bundle with the water-wire in the appointed order. The metal barsom also entered the picture of divinity itself: where the Achaemenid god had no image at all, the later Iranian world came to show its great figures bearing the rods. In Sasanian investiture reliefs Ahura Mazdā (by then Ohrmazd) can be shown as a crowned figure holding the barsom, the priestly emblem raised to the divine hand — the same object the anonymous Bactrian on the gold plaque holds, carried across a thousand years from a votive at the edge of Darius's empire to the iconography of the Persian kings of a later age. The plaque thus stands near the beginning of a very long continuity: the handful of rods is one of the few ritual objects that can be traced, in unbroken use and with its name intact, from the Avestan liturgy through the Achaemenid rite to the fire-temples of today.

Cautions

Two cautions bound the entry. First, the archaeology: because the treasure surfaced on the market and its findspot and unity are disputed, nothing here rests on a controlled excavation, and the dating is broad by necessity — this is why the entry is marked probable rather than secure. Second, the reading: a votive plaque shows an ideal of worship, the rite as it should be performed, not a snapshot of a particular ceremony; it tells us what the barsom rite looked like in the mind of the person who dedicated the plaque, which is itself precisely what makes it good evidence for the rite. Neither caution cancels the object's worth. Achaemenid religion is thin in texts and thinner in surviving cult-buildings, and a small gold figure with a bundle of rods in his hand, matched word for word by Strabo, is about as clear a window onto the living rite as the material record affords.