The Winged Symbol (the figure in the winged ring)

Above the head of the Great King at Behistun, on the great reliefs and doorways of Persepolis, and on the cliff-cut tomb façades at Naqsh-e Rostam, floats a ring or disc with outspread wings, most often with a robed, bearded male figure rising from it, one hand lifted, the other holding a smaller ring. It is the most conspicuous religious image of Achaemenid kingship, and the plainest statement in stone that the king holds his office by the favour of heaven. Yet for all its prominence it is the least explained: no Achaemenid inscription ever names or glosses it, so every identification is an inference drawn from where it appears, from what it resembles, and from what the accompanying words say. This entry sets out the image, its ancestry, and the long argument over what (or who) it is.

The motif, and where it appears

The symbol takes two related forms. The simpler is a plain winged disc or ring, wings spread wide, sometimes with a tail and downward-curling volutes below; the fuller adds a human figure: a robed, bearded man from the waist up, wearing the fluted crown of the king, rising out of the ring. His near hand is raised palm-outward, in a gesture usually read as blessing or salutation; his far hand holds a smaller ring, often taken as a sign of investiture or covenant, the round token the gods are shown handing to kings in later Iranian art. Figure and disc are one composite: the ring becomes the man's waist, the wings his outstretched arms of feathers. It hovers, always, above a royal scene, never in isolation. At Behistun it stands over Darius as he treads on the prostrate Gaumāta and faces the roped line of nine captured rebel kings, in the very field where the inscription proclaims his god-given rule. At Persepolis it presides over doorway reliefs of the king and, on some carvings, over the enthroned audience scene. On the tomb of Darius at Naqsh-e Rostam it floats at the top of the façade, above the king who stands on a high stepped platform borne up by the personified peoples of the empire and lifts his hand in worship before a burning fire-holder, with a disc, read as sun or moon, also set in the sky. Wherever it appears, it marks the scene beneath it as sanctioned from above; it is a caption of legitimacy written in a picture rather than in words.

The iconographic ancestry

The motif is not a Persian invention; it is the Persian recension of a very old Near-Eastern royal sign. Its remotest ancestor is the Egyptian winged sun-disc, the falcon-god Horus of Behdet spread above the pharaoh and above temple doorways as a sign of solar protection and kingship, current for millennia before the Persians. The Mesopotamian world took up the winged disc and, in Assyria, set within it a human figure: a god shown from the waist up, often drawing a bow, riding above the king in battle; this figure is usually read as the great Assyrian god Aššur (some prefer the sun-god Šamaš).^[2] The Achaemenids inherited this shared imperial vocabulary (through the Assyro-Babylonian and, at one remove, the Egyptian traditions their empire absorbed, with the neighbouring Urartian and Syro-Anatolian kingdoms as intermediaries in which the winged disc was already long at home) and made the winged-ring-with-figure their own royal emblem, placing it over the Great King as the mark of divine backing. The borrowing is undoubted; what the Persians meant by the figure they borrowed is the whole question, for a form can be taken over and its sense recast. It is suggestive that the Assyrian figure draws a bow to fight for the king, while the Persian figure lays the bow aside and merely blesses and holds out the ring: a change of gesture that already hints the Persians bent the borrowed sign to a meaning of their own.

The old reading: the god himself

The natural first reading, and the one that dominated European scholarship into the twentieth century, was that the figure in the ring is Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord (the one god the inscriptions name), shown hovering above his king exactly as Aššur hovers above the Assyrian. On this view the image is a portrait of the supreme god granting and guaranteeing the kingship, a visual counterpart to the words carved beneath it:

"By the grace of Ahuramazda am I king; Ahuramazda has granted me the kingdom." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §5)^[3]

The reading is old, intuitive, and still widely met in popular and even scholarly writing. But it runs into a serious difficulty, and the difficulty is theological as much as visual. The Achaemenid god had, so far as the evidence goes, no image: as Mary Boyce states flatly, "no representations of Ahuramazda are recorded in the early Achaemenid period"^[5], and the outsider Herodotus confirms that the Persians of his day used no cult-images at all. More sharply still: on the tombs the king is shown at prayer, and it is awkward, on the god-reading, to have the king praying to a figure in the sky that is crowned like himself and looks like a double of the worshipper. A god does not usually wear his servant's hat. These objections drove the search for another identification.

The leading reading: the royal glory (xᵛarǝnah)

The reading that now commands the field is that the figure represents not the god but the royal xᵛarǝnah (Avestan xᵛarǝnah-, Middle Persian farr), the divine glory or god-given fortune that alights upon the legitimate king and forsakes the unworthy one. On this view the image says precisely what the inscriptions say (that the king is invested with a heaven-sent charisma) without making an idol of the aniconic god. Boyce puts it without hedging: the winged symbol with male figure, "formerly regarded by European scholars as his [Ahura Mazdā's], has been shown to represent the royal xᵛarǝnah."^[5] The case was argued in detail by A. Sh. Shahbazi, whose study 'An Achaemenid Symbol II: Farnah (God Given) Fortune Symbolised' (Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 13, 1980) gives the reading its fullest statement.^[8]

On Darius's tomb, Boyce reads the figure as carrying a double significance, "a symbol of both the royal xᵛarǝnah and the sun", with the Akkadian moon-symbol, a disc with a crescent along its lower rim, set behind it.^[6] Since in Zoroastrian practice prayers may be said before a terrestrial fire or facing the sun or moon, the whole tableau then shows Darius "portrayed 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. Boyce reads the scene as of a piece with the rest of the tomb's programme, in which even the six noble Persians flanking the king may be arranged to mirror the six Aməša Spəntas about Ahura Mazdā (Shahbazi, AMI 13, 1980, pp. 122–25)^[8], "profoundly Zoroastrian", and reproduced over every royal tomb.^[6]

The glory itself is a real and central idea of Iranian kingship, not a modern construct: the xᵛarǝnah is celebrated in its own Avestan hymn (the Zamyād Yašt, Yašt 19) as the fiery, luminous force that passes from holder to holder and thrice abandons the sinning king Yima, a hereditary dynastic charisma that can nonetheless be lost. That is exactly the theology a king would wish shown above his head.

The honest caveat: even the glory-reading is contested

Here the compendium must be careful not to overstate the settlement. That the figure is not a straightforward portrait of Ahura Mazdā is widely held, but it is not closed: the older identification is still defended, notably by von Gall (following Root), who rejects the glory reading; and that the figure is specifically the xᵛarǝnah is the leading positive view, not a settled one. Gherardo Gnoli, in the authoritative Encyclopaedia Iranica article on the glory itself, is pointed: the xᵛarǝnah "is not mentioned in the Achaemenid inscriptions", whose focus is the investiture of the king "by the favour of Ahura Mazdā" (vašnā Auramazdāha); and among the theories of the glory's iconography, he judges, "not all... are convincing, for example, association with the winged sun disk."^[7] Others, notably P. Jamzadeh ('The Winged Ring with Human Bust in Achaemenid Art as a Dynastic Symbol', Iranica Antiqua 17, 1982), read the figure rather as a dynastic or ancestral emblem, the sign of the royal house rather than of an abstract quality.^[9] A further reading, older and still current in some quarters, takes the figure for the king's own fravashi, in Zoroastrian belief the pre-existent guardian spirit, the higher self each being possesses and which the righteous dead rejoin among the ranks of the blessed. On this view the winged man is the king's idealised soul, hovering protectively above him; the reading is attractive because it explains the resemblance to the king (it is the king, in spirit) and because it is the fravashi that lends the modern emblem its very name (below). Its weakness is that the fravashi, richly attested in later texts, is nowhere named in the Achaemenid record, so the reading rests on retrojection. Between the glory, the dynastic emblem, the fravashi, and a residual view that the sign is simply a non-specific token of god-given rule, the sources do not adjudicate. No Achaemenid text decides among these, and honest scholarship treats the identification as genuinely open even while favouring the glory.^[10] What is secure is the function: whatever its precise referent, the winged figure signifies that the king holds his office by divine sanction, under the eye of the Wise Lord and the order of arta.

Read against the king's own words

Because the inscriptions never gloss the symbol, the surest control on any reading is the theology the kings actually carved beneath and beside it. The Wise Lord is named as creator and as the giver of the kingship:

"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)^[4]

"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)^[4]

The king in turn presents himself as the god's instrument in the war of order against the Lie:

"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)^[3]

Every one of these lines is about investiture and sanction: the god raises the king, and the king rules by his grace. That is precisely the content the glory-reading assigns to the winged figure, and precisely why it fits the monuments better than a literal portrait of the aniconic god would.

The modern 'Faravahar'

The same image, taken up in the twentieth century as the emblem of modern Zoroastrian identity and of Iranian nationhood, is now almost universally called the Faravahar (or farōhar), a name derived from the word for the fravashi, the guardian spirit. Two things must be held apart here, and the distinction is the heart of this entry. In form, the modern emblem is faithfully Achaemenid: it is a clean-lined redrawing of the very figure on the reliefs, wings, ring, robed man and all, and to that extent it is a genuine and unbroken descent from the ancient stone. But the name is modern, and the settled meaning now popularly attached to it (a checklist of moral lessons read off the wings, the ring, the tail) is a later interpretation, not an ancient gloss. The one thing the ancient evidence will not give us is exactly the thing the modern emblem is most confident about: what the figure definitively means. The shape is authentic; the label and the certainty are not. The emblem's modern career is worth naming plainly, since it is often mistaken for unbroken continuity. Archaeology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries recovered the figure from the reliefs; the Parsi community of India and, later, Iranian nationalists took it up as a badge of Zoroastrian and of national identity; today it appears on jewellery, on the walls of fire-temples, as a tattoo and as a civic emblem, and a standard set of moral glosses has grown up around its parts: the three tiers of feathers for good thoughts, words and deeds, the ring for eternity or for the pledge, the two streamers below for the choice between good and evil. These readings are edifying, and they are modern: no ancient text assigns any such meaning to the wings or the ring. To admire the Faravahar as the living heir of a 2,500-year-old royal sign is entirely right; to cite it as proof that the Achaemenids meant by it what a modern plaque says they did is to close a question the sources leave open.

Why the doubt is permanent

The reason the identification cannot be settled is structural, not a gap that a lucky find will fill. The Achaemenids carved a great deal (Behistun is one of the longest royal inscriptions of the ancient world), but they never captioned their own central religious image. So the symbol has to be read through other evidence: its resemblance to the Assyrian and Egyptian discs (which tells us the form's pedigree, not the Persian sense), the logic of the worship scenes (which argues against the plain god-reading), and the theology of the accompanying texts (which speaks of god-given kingship in general terms). Each of these narrows the field; none of them pins the figure to a single name. The compendium therefore reports the leading reading (the royal glory) as leading, notes that it too has able critics, and keeps the identification a well-defined uncertainty rather than pretending to a consensus the evidence does not support.