Topic: material-culture (6)

• ObjectGold plaque of a barsom-bearer (Oxus Treasure)

  One of the small gold votive plaques of the Oxus Treasure (British Museum 123949): a standing man in Median dress (belted tunic, trousers, and a soft hood with a neck-guard) holding before him a slim bundle of rods, the barsom of Iranian worship. It is the clearest surviving material image of the rite the texts describe, though the treasure's own archaeology is deeply uncertain.

• PlaceNaqsh-e Rostam

  The perpendicular cliff about six kilometres north-west of Persepolis where the Great Kings of the Achaemenid house were entombed. Four cruciform tombs are cut into the rock: the oldest secured to Darius I by its inscriptions, DNa and DNb; the other three attributed on position and style to Xerxes, Artaxerxes I and Darius II. Each façade carries the same religious tableau: the king raised up on a platform borne by the empire's peoples, hand lifted before a fire, beneath the winged figure and the disc of heaven. Before the tombs stands the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt, a windowless stone tower whose Achaemenid purpose is still unresolved. The Sasanian reliefs cut lower on the same cliff give the site its modern Persian name, 'the picture of Rostam'.

• PlacePasargadae

  The first Achaemenid capital, raised by Cyrus the Great on the high, well-watered plain of the River Pulvar in the heart of Persis, some forty kilometres north-east of the later Persepolis. Here Cyrus built a dispersed royal park of columned stone halls (a free-standing gatehouse, Gate R, with its surviving winged 'genius', a public palace, Palace S, and a more intimate one, Palace P, whose throne-portico looked down the central path of a watered garden), set among the earliest 'paradise' garden yet excavated, its plan traced by surviving stone channels. Apart stand two sacred plinths for open-air fire-worship, a tall stone tower (the Zendān), and, a kilometre to the south, the tomb of Cyrus: a gabled stone chamber on a six-stepped plinth, whose Greek-reported epitaph asked the passer-by not to grudge the founder his little earth. The trilingual inscriptions that name Cyrus here (CMa) were, on the current reading of the excavator David Stronach, cut a generation later under Darius. Alexander visited and had the plundered tomb restored in 324 BCE; local memory long knew the tomb as that of the Mother of Solomon.

• ObjectThe Daric (and the Siglos)

  The gold daric (~8.4 g of very pure gold) and its silver companion the siglos (~5.5 g) were the coins of the Achaemenid king, introduced by Darius I toward the end of the sixth century BCE and stamped with the running or kneeling ROYAL ARCHER, the figure the Greeks nicknamed the 'archer' (toxotēs). Minted chiefly at Sardis and circulating mainly in the western empire and as mercenary pay, they were the visible edge of a monetary economy that had barely penetrated the heartland: the Persepolis tablets show a realm still run on payment in kind and weighed silver, not coin.

• ConceptThe Sacred Fire

  Fire, the purest of the creations and the visible icon of aša/arta, tended by the Magi and venerated in the open air at free-standing stone fire-holders. The enclosed fire-temple with its ever-burning consecrated fire is a later, largely Sasanian institution, and reading it back into the Achaemenid period is one of the commonest anachronisms in accounts of the reign.

• ArtworkThe Winged Symbol (the figure in the winged ring)

  The winged ring, often enclosing a robed male figure, that hovers above the Great King at Behistun, Persepolis and the royal tombs: the most conspicuous religious image of Achaemenid kingship, and the plainest statement that the king rules by divine favour. Long read by European scholars as a portrait of Ahura Mazdā himself, it is now generally taken for the royal xᵛarǝnah, the god-given glory that alights on the legitimate king; but no Achaemenid text names it, and the identification remains one of the field's genuine open questions. In modern dress the same image is the 'Faravahar': a form authentically Achaemenid, under a modern name, given a settled meaning the ancient evidence does not fix.