The Drauga (the Lie)

The drauga (Old Persian drauga-, Avestan druj) is the Lie. The word covers more than a spoken untruth: it names the whole principle of falsehood, deceit and disorder that stands against arta, the right ordering of the world. Where arta is the world rightly joined, the drauga is its un-making, and the two are a single opposition seen from its two sides. In the religion of ancient Iran the Lie is the adversary that the Wise Lord's good creation must overcome; in the royal ideology of Darius I it is the charge levelled, flatly and identically, at every enemy of the King. This entry is the counterpart of arta, its pair; and a curiosity of the record makes the counterpart the louder of the two, for it is the language of the drauga, not of arta, that fills the inscriptions the kings actually carved.

The word, and its Indo-Iranian background

The Old Persian drauga- "lie" belongs with a small, sharp family of words that runs all through Darius's texts: draujana- "liar, deceitful", and the verb durujiya- "to lie". The Avestan cognate is druj, the standing opposite of Avestan aša (= Old Persian arta), and the whole opposition is older than Persia, older than the prophet, older than the parting of the Iranians from the Indians. On the Indian side of that split the Lie survives as Vedic druh, "deceit, harm", just as aša/arta survives as Vedic ṛta; the same Truth-versus-Lie word-pair is carried in the Gāthās on the Iranian side and the Rigveda on the Indian, reconstructed by the philologists to the common Indo-Iranian past of around 2000 BCE. So when the King carves that the rebels "followed the Lie", he reaches for a contest of Falsehood and Truth already ancient when his throne was new. The etymology of its opposite makes the point exactly: ṛtá- is that which is properly joined, and the drauga is the disjointure of it, the false where the true should be.

The vocabulary that saturates the inscriptions

Here the record springs a surprise, and it is worth stating plainly because it corrects a natural assumption. One would expect the King who swears by the right order to fill his monuments with the word for it; in fact the word arta "truth" occurs in only a single Achaemenid royal inscription (Xerxes' daiva-text, XPh), whereas the words for the Lie are everywhere. The authoritative treatment, Skjærvø and Schlerath's Encyclopaedia Iranica article, opens its Old Persian section on exactly this asymmetry: "In view of the frequent occurrence in the Achaemenid inscriptions of words for lie (drauga 'lie', draujana 'liar, deceitful', durujiya 'to lie') it is surprising that the words arta 'truth' and artāvan 'truthful' are found in only one inscription."^[6] The moral world of the dynasty, in other words, is built in the negative: the King defines himself and his order not so much by naming the Truth as by naming, and casting down, its enemy. To understand Achaemenid arta one must read the drauga, for that is the term the stones themselves press.

The Lie as the enemy of the good creation

Within the religious vision the Lie is the besieging power against which the ordered creation is held. Just as the good man, the ašavan, is opposed on earth by the wicked man, the drəgvant (the "possessor of the druj", the Lie-owning one), so aša itself is opposed by druj, and the whole moral drama of the world is the contest of the two.^[8] The Wise Lord's creation is good and ordered by the Truth, and it is besieged by falsehood, chaos and disloyalty; the King prays that his god keep the good land from exactly this, setting the Lie among the three great banes a country can suffer:

"May the Wise Lord protect this land from the hostile army, from famine, and from the Lie." (Darius I, Persepolis, DPd)^[2]

Enemy, dearth and falsehood: the raid, the failed harvest, and the Lie loosed among men, the three faces of disorder held off by the creator through his king. The pairing is doctrinally exact, for in the developed teaching the followers of the Lie and the followers of the Truth do not share one fate: the Best Existence is for the truthful, the Worst for the drəgvant, and the choice between them is set at the very origin of the moral world.

No middle ground: the two that share nothing

What makes the drauga so absolute an adversary is that between it and the Truth there is, in the prophet's teaching, no meeting and no compromise. The two are not a spectrum with a comfortable middle but a stark either/or, decided anew by every soul and in every word a man utters. The Gāthās, the oldest Iranian hymns, put the antithesis at its sharpest in the mouth of the holier of the two primal Spirits, who declares to his enemy that they hold not one thing in common:

"I will speak of the Spirits twain at the first beginning of the world, of whom the holier spoke thus to the enemy: 'Neither thought, nor teachings, nor wills, nor beliefs, nor words, nor deeds, nor selfs, nor souls of us twain agree.'" (the Gāthās, Yasna 45.2, trans. Bartholomae)^[13]

Not a thought, not a word, not a soul shared: the Truth and the Lie agree in nothing. It is this absoluteness that Darius's political theology borrows and puts to work. If there is no middle ground between arta and the drauga, then there is no middle ground between the rightful King and the rebel either, and the man who is not wholly for the one is wholly for the other. The cosmology gives the propaganda its either/or, and the propaganda its terrible simplicity: whoever is not on the King's side is, by the very structure of the world, on the Lie's.

The drauga in Darius's political theology

With Darius the cosmic Lie becomes the engine of a political apology, and Behistun is its great deployment. The inscription remembers the year of revolts that followed his seizure of the throne not as unrest but as the Lie loosed upon the world; and each beaten pretender, the string of rebel "kings" in Elam, Babylon, Media, Persia and the east, is charged with the same offence, which is named not as treason but as falsehood. The Magus who claimed to be the murdered Bardiya, son of Cyrus, is the type of them all:

"He lied; he said: I am Bardiya, the son of Cyrus." (Darius I, the Behistun inscription, DB §11)^[1]

The same flat formula is turned on rebel after rebel, so that rebellion itself becomes the drauga at work, and the King's war becomes the Truth's war. And the Lie is not only what the pretenders spoke but a force that acted on the provinces, turning them faithless:

"The Lie made them revolt, so that they deceived the people." (Darius I, the Behistun inscription, DB §54)^[1]

The rhetoric is total, and it is self-serving: to be Darius's opponent is, by the very terms of the monument, to be a servant of the Lie, and the victor is left to write the record. It must be read as such. But it is not therefore insincere. The King's whole legitimacy is made to rest on his being the one man on the side of the Truth, and his victory on his truthfulness (see the paired entry arta for the positive half of the claim, "I was not a liar... I have ruled according to righteousness"). The two functions of the drauga in the record, a genuine religious-ethical category and a propaganda instrument for delegitimising every rival, cannot be neatly separated, and it is precisely their fusion that makes Behistun so rich and so treacherous a document.

The Lie-follower as the King's named enemy

The drauga has a human face: the draujana-, the Lie-follower, the man who has taken the Lie's side. In the royal ethic he is the one enemy the just King names above all others. On his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, in the fullest code of royal conduct to survive from any Achaemenid, Darius sets out justice as the even hand, and then names the single figure he will not befriend:

"To the man who is a follower of the Lie I am no friend." (Darius I, his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb)^[3]

And he binds the guarding-against of the Lie upon his heirs as the first duty of a king, closing the great inscription with it as with a testament, in the words that make the drauga, not any rival army, the true and permanent enemy of the throne:

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

To lie, in this frame, is no ordinary fault. It is a cosmic disloyalty, an alliance with the disorder that the King exists to hold back; the Lie-follower is the enemy within the order, the crack through which chaos returns.

The personification: Druj, the demoness

In the later Avesta the abstract Lie hardens into a person: Druj, a female demon, one of the fiends of the developed daemonology. As the good abstractions of the Gāthās (Truth, Good Thinking, Dominion, Devotion) crystallised in the Younger Avesta into the divine beings called the Aməša Spəntas, so by the same inherited logic the powers of falsehood were assigned their answering fiends: the counterpart of aša is druj, and the personified Druj takes her place among the enemies the faithful and the yazatas fight. The best-known of her forms is the corpse-demoness Druj Nasu, who rushes upon the dead body to defile it, against whom the elaborate Zoroastrian purity law is directed. The line from the drauga of Darius's rock to the demoness of the Avestan books is thus one of hardening abstraction into figure, of a moral principle becoming a mythological adversary.

With the personified Lie comes a host. The daēvas (Old Persian daivā), the class of old gods that the prophet's reform repudiated and demonised, are in the Younger Avesta the servants of falsehood, the deceivers of mankind; and the whole religious world divides into the powers of Truth ranged with the Wise Lord against the powers of the Lie. It is precisely this widening from a single word into a peopled cosmos of good and evil that the King's own texts do not record: Darius's Persian inscriptions know the drauga and its human followers, but not yet the demoness Druj or the legions behind her. The personification belongs to the religion's later, systematising centuries, and reading it whole onto the Achaemenid rock would be to run ahead of the evidence.

The line toward Angra Mainyu, and a caution

Behind the Lie, in the fully worked-out teaching, stands the Hostile Spirit: Angra Mainyu, Middle Persian Ahriman, the uncreated adversary of the Wise Lord, the maker of the counter-creation, the source of death and the demons. It is natural to run the line straight, drauga to druj to Angra Mainyu, the Lie personified and then enthroned as the very principle of evil. But a precision must be kept, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Ahriman states it in its first words: Ahriman, Avestan Angra Mainyu, is "not attested in Old Persian."^[7] The name of the Hostile Spirit appears nowhere in the royal inscriptions. Darius fights the drauga, the Lie, and the Lie's human followers; he does not name Angra Mainyu, and the fully dualist cosmos of two primal Spirits locked in a war to the world's end is elaborated in the Avesta and hardened in the much later Pahlavi books, not carved by the Achaemenid kings. In the Gāthās themselves the Hostile Spirit is the twin and antithesis of the Bounteous Spirit and an actor in the primeval choice; the very name Angra Mainyu occurs there only once, in the Yasna 45.2 verse quoted above, where the holier Spirit addresses him.^[12] Only in the later systematising does he become the flat negative counterpart of God, and the question of his very origin gives rise to the Zurvanite speculation that made Ohrmazd and Ahriman alike the twin sons of Time. So the drauga of Darius is the near end of a long development whose far end is Ahriman; the compendium marks the line as real but does not read the whole later demonology back onto the King's own texts.

The social face: the shame of the lie

The outsider's testimony meets the royal creed on this one point without strain. Herodotus, describing the Persians from the outside, reports that they reared their sons in three things only, to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth, and he ranks the shame of the Lie 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)^[4]

Here the drauga is not a demon or a rebel's charge but the plainest fact of a Persian's upbringing: the lie the deepest disgrace a man can wear, debt shameful chiefly because it drives a man to lie. The court-wisdom of the empire's own subject peoples says the same. On a papyrus from the Jewish garrison at Elephantine, the proverbs of Ahiqar set the enthroned liar against the reckoning that finds him out, the arta-and-drauga thesis carried into a proverb the age itself wrote down:

"At first the throne is set up for the liar, but at last his lies shall find him out, and they shall spit in his face." (the words of Ahiqar, the Elephantine papyrus)^[5]

The Lie may be enthroned for a while; it does not hold. That, in the end, is the whole shape of the thing: the drauga is the disorder that rises against the right order and is, at the last, cast down, whether by the King on his rock, by the god at the world's ending, or by the spittle of men on the exposed liar's face.