Topic: ritual (5)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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'.

• 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.

• 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.