Topic: religion (25)

• 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.

• PersonCambyses II

  The second Achaemenid Great King (r. 530–522 BCE), elder son and heir of Cyrus the Great, who in 525 BCE conquered Egypt and added the last of the great old kingdoms of the Near East to the empire, the achievement that turned Cyrus's realm into a power spanning three continents. He is also the compendium's clearest case of a king remembered through his enemies: the Greek tradition, above all [[herodotus|Herodotus]] (Book 3), made him a raging madman who stabbed the sacred Apis bull, mocked the gods and desecrated tombs, while the contemporary Egyptian and Babylonian record shows a conqueror who took the pharaonic titulary, buried an Apis bull with due honour, and left the temples standing. Between the two lies the central problem of his reign, and a lesson for the whole period: how a hostile source can bury a king. He died mysteriously in 522 returning from Egypt, childless, leaving a throne that his brother Bardiya, or a man claiming to be him, had already seized, and so the succession crisis out of which [[darius-i|Darius]] rose (see [[the-accession-of-darius]]).

• PersonCyrus the Great

  The founder of the Achaemenid Empire (r. 559–530 BCE), a petty king of Anshan in Fārs who in twenty years overthrew the three great powers of his world (Median, Lydian and Babylonian) and left the largest empire the earth had yet seen. His conquest of Babylon in 539 is commemorated on the [[the-cyrus-cylinder|Cyrus Cylinder]], whose open-handed restoration of deported peoples and their gods, the Jews of the Babylonian captivity among them, permitted to rebuild their temple, made him the model of the tolerant conqueror, hailed in the Hebrew scriptures as the Lord's anointed. He was remembered by the Persians as their father, by the Greeks as the ideal king ([[herodotus|Herodotus]] and Xenophon), and by [[darius-i|Darius]], who was not of his line, as the founder whose blood and legitimacy the new dynasty had to claim. His death fighting a nomad queen on the eastern steppe, and his tomb at Pasargadae, closed the reign that opened this compendium's world.

• PersonDarius I

  The third and greatest of the Achaemenid Great Kings (r. 522–486 BCE), who seized a contested throne by killing a king he called an impostor, put down a year of revolts, and then remade the loose federation of Cyrus and Cambyses into a true empire: the roughly twenty tribute-paying satrapies, the gold daric, the Royal Road and the Aramaic chancery, the palaces of Susa and Persepolis, the canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. His inscriptions, above all [[behistun-inscription|Behistun]], are the fullest and most personal statement of Achaemenid royal ideology to survive: the king made king by Ahura Mazdā, the servant of [[arta|the Truth]] against [[the-drauga|the Lie]]. Whether his account of his own accession is itself a lie is the central unresolved question of the reign.

• 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.

• SourceHerodotus, The Histories

  The earliest surviving Greek history, and the fullest classical account of the Persians: their rise, their customs and religion, and the wars with Greece. Indispensable and endlessly informative, but an outsider's report to be read critically: sound in its institutional substance, where the Iranian evidence repeatedly confirms it, and most Greek in the motives, speeches and court-tales it builds over the facts.

• 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.

• PersonNabonidus

  The last king of Babylon (r. 556–539 BCE), and the man whose fall handed the ancient Near East's richest and holiest kingdom to Cyrus, turning the Persian realm into a Mesopotamian empire. An Aramean who seized a throne he was not born to, Nabonidus is remembered above all for two things his enemies never forgave: an extraordinary religious policy that raised the moon-god Sin, whose temple at Harran he rebuilt, toward precedence over Marduk, the supreme god of Babylon; and an unexplained decade-long absence at the desert oasis of Teima in Arabia, during which his son Belshazzar governed Babylon in his place. Those years estranged the Marduk priesthood, whose Akitu (New Year) festival could not be kept in the king's absence, and it was exactly this grievance that Cyrus exploited: the Persian conqueror entered Babylon in 539 posing as Marduk's chosen restorer, come to undo Nabonidus's impieties. He is therefore the compendium's foundational case of the hostile source, for nearly everything the tradition says of him, the [[the-cyrus-cylinder|Cyrus Cylinder]], the Nabonidus Chronicle, the so-called 'Verse Account,' the Book of Daniel, is Persian or pro-Marduk propaganda, even as his own inscriptions survive to tell a different story. Modern scholarship has largely rehabilitated him: not the mad or negligent apostate of the legend, but a pious antiquarian and restorer of ancient temples, undone by a conflict with a powerful priesthood and by the arrival of [[cyrus-the-great|Cyrus]]. His deposition is treated in full at [[the-fall-of-babylon]].

• 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.

• 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.

• EventThe Accession of Darius (522 BCE)

  The violent, contested seizure of the Achaemenid throne in 522 BCE: the killing of a king held to be an impostor magus, the coup of the Seven that raised Darius, and the year of rebellion that followed. It is the founding case of the imperial ideology of the Truth against the Lie, and the single sharpest instance in this compendium of a source that must be read as an argument for its author rather than a record of what happened, because whether Darius told the truth about it is precisely what cannot be settled.

• SourceThe Behistun Inscription (DB)

  Darius I's monumental cliff-relief and trilingual inscription at Bagastāna, recounting his seizure and defence of the throne against Gaumāta and a wave of rebels; the single most important primary source for the reign, the oldest connected Achaemenid narrative, and the key that deciphered cuneiform.

• SourceThe Cyrus Cylinder

  A barrel-shaped clay cylinder inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform, buried in the foundations of Babylon's city wall after Cyrus II took the city in 539 BCE. In the traditional idiom of a Mesopotamian building inscription it makes the god Marduk choose Cyrus, condemns the deposed Nabonidus, and proclaims the restoration of the cults and the return of deported gods and peoples. It is a Babylonian priestly composition, not a Persian one; recovered in 1879 and now in the British Museum, it has become, since 1971, the most famous and the most misread object of the Achaemenid world, wrongly promoted as the 'first charter of human rights'.

• 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'.

• EventThe Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)

  The conquest of Babylon by Cyrus II in the autumn of 539 BCE: the last native Mesopotamian empire, ruled by the absent and religiously heterodox Nabonidus and his regent-son Belshazzar, fell to Persia after a decisive battle at Opis, the surrender of Sippar, and a near-bloodless entry into the great city itself. It is the event that made Cyrus lord of the ancient Near East and gave the Achaemenids the world's richest province and the tolerationist template Darius inherited. It is also a source-critical trap of the first order: the two fullest contemporary accounts, the Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder, were both composed by the Marduk priesthood that welcomed the conqueror, and both are propaganda in his service, so that our clearest witnesses to the fall are the least neutral.

• ConceptThe King of Kings

  The Achaemenid king's supreme title (xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām, "king of kings") and the whole ideology of rule it carried: a single righteous king set by the favour of Ahura Mazdā over all the peoples of the earth, guardian of the good creation and its order against the Lie. This entry gathers what the kings said of their own office in the inscriptions they carved, the virtues they claimed on their tombs, the distance and splendour of the court, and sets that royal self-portrait against the very different "oriental despot" the Greeks drew, foregrounding the modern scholarship (above all Amélie Kuhrt) that insists the ideology is not the reality, and that the king, for all his majesty, was never held to be a god.

• PeopleThe Magi

  The hereditary priestly specialists of the western Iranians, named by Herodotus as one of the six tribes of the Medes: the officiants without whom, the Greeks report, no Persian could sacrifice. They tended the sacred fire, chanted over the offering, poured libations to river and mountain, interpreted dreams and omens, exposed the dead, and attended the king; from their name, through Greek suspicion of their arts, comes the word 'magic'.

• PeopleThe Medes

  The Iranian people of the north-western Zagros, settled about the plain of Ecbatana (modern Hamadān), who by the Greek account raised the first great Iranian kingdom: a line of four kings, Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares and Astyages, that broke Assyria (Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to the Medes and Babylonians together) and ruled 'upper Asia' until Cyrus the Persian overthrew Astyages in 550. Whether a centralised 'Median empire' truly existed, or whether the Greeks retrojected a Persian-style state onto a looser confederacy, is one of the sharpest debates in the field. Under the Achaemenids the Medes were the near-equals of the Persians, the two ruling Iranian peoples, so that Greeks called the whole empire, its army and its wars simply 'the Medes' and treason to their own side 'medism'.

• SourceThe Persepolis Fortification Archive

  The working paperwork of Darius I's own heartland: tens of thousands of clay tablets from a bastion in the Persepolis fortification wall, recording the intake and disbursement of food, livestock, and travel rations across Fars and Elam in the middle of the reign. Dry, sealed, never meant for posterity, they are the empire's most candid source, and they quietly overturn several of the Greek stereotypes about Persia, above all the harem cliché.

• 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.

• PersonXerxes I

  The fourth Achaemenid Great King (r. 486–465 BCE), son of [[darius-i|Darius I]] and Atossa the daughter of [[cyrus-the-great|Cyrus]], and so the heir in whom the two royal lines met. He crushed the revolts of Egypt and Babylon that greeted his accession, then led against Greece in 480–479 the largest campaign the empire ever mounted: the bridging of the Hellespont, the pass of Thermopylae, the sack of Athens, and the sea-fight at Salamis where the invasion's spine was broken. He completed the great works at Persepolis begun by his father (the Gate of All Nations, the Hall of a Hundred Columns) and left in the daiva inscription (XPh) the sharpest religious proclamation of any Achaemenid. He was murdered in a palace conspiracy in 465. Because his reign is refracted almost wholly through hostile Greek witnesses (Herodotus and Aeschylus above all), the traditional image of a vain and impious despot who squandered his father's empire is itself the central historiographical problem: the royal inscriptions show a king careful of Achaemenid tradition, and the two pictures do not simply reconcile.

• 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.