Topic: ethics (6)

• ConceptAhura Mazdā

  The supreme god of the Achaemenid kings, the "Wise Lord", named at the head of the royal inscriptions as creator of earth, heaven and man, giver of kingship, and upholder of order against the Lie; the same Wise Lord proclaimed as God by Zarathustra, and the ancestor of the Zoroastrian Ohrmazd. His figure stands at the centre of ancient Iranian religion and of its hardest question: whether, and in what sense, the kings were Zoroastrians.

• ConceptArta (Truth, right order)

  The Iranian principle of truth, right order and righteousness, cosmic and social at once, set against the Lie (drauga); the exact cognate of Vedic ṛta, so the Truth-versus-Lie opposition is older than Persia or the prophet; the moral spine of Achaemenid royal ideology, and, personified as the Aməša Spənta Aša Vahišta, a central concept of Zoroastrianism.

• ConceptMithra

  One of the oldest gods of the Indo-Iranian world, whose very name is the common noun for 'contract'. Mithra is the deified covenant: the all-seeing guardian of the sworn word and the alliance, 'he of the wide pastures', watchful across the sky with a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes, terrible to the oath-breaker (the mithra-druj) and associated (though not identical) with the sun. He enters the Persian royal inscriptions late, only with Artaxerxes II, in the triad 'Ahuramazdā, Anāhitā and Mithra'; his cult is woven through the Achaemenid ethic of good faith, and his name lived on in the festival of Mehregān and in a flood of names like Mithradates. The Roman Mithras is a distinct Western creation and no simple continuation of him.

• Survey essayReligion & the Lie: the Achaemenid religious world

  A survey of Achaemenid religion: the worship of Ahura Mazdā and the ideology of Truth against the Lie; the Magi and their rites of fire, oath and the dead; the toleration of subject gods and its limits; and the vexed, still-open question of the kings' relationship to Zarathustra.

• ConceptThe Drauga (the Lie)

  The Iranian principle of falsehood and disorder, the cosmic and moral opposite of arta (Truth); the un-making of the right order of the world. It is, on the comparative linguistics, the exact counterpart of Avestan druj and cognate with Vedic druh; and, remarkably, it is the vocabulary of the Lie, not of arta, that actually saturates the Old Persian royal inscriptions, where every rebel against Darius is said to have 'lied' and the provinces to have 'become faithless'.

• PersonZarathustra

  The Iranian prophet (Zoroaster to the Greeks) whose seventeen hymns, the Gāthās, exalt Ahura Mazdā as the one God and set before every person the choice between aša (the Truth) and druj (the Lie). His date, his homeland, even (to a few sceptics) his existence are among the most contested questions in the field; the Achaemenid kings worship his Wise Lord and make his Truth-and-Lie the spine of their ideology, yet no royal inscription ever names him.