Arta (Truth, right order)

Old Persian arta- and Avestan aša are one word in two Iranian dialects: the word for the right ordering of things, truth as against falsehood, order as against chaos, the correct joining of the world in the heavens and in the dealings of men alike. The etymology carries the concept's whole shape. *ṛtá- is a past participle from the Indo-European root meaning "to join, to fit properly together"; arta, then, is that which is correctly joined, the true fit of things.^[1] Hence the word describes at once the turning of the seasons and the honest word in a man's mouth, and treats them as one order. Its double face is no muddle: the two senses are one idea seen from two sides, for truth is the world rightly joined, and the rightly-joined world is true. The standing opposite gathers the same range from the other side: the *drauga*, Avestan druj, the Lie, is falsehood, deceit and the un-making of the right fit; the two are one opposition, and the Lie's half of it is treated in its own entry.

No single English word holds the concept, and the choice of gloss has divided the philologists for over a century. The standard Encyclopaedia Iranica treatment (Skjærvø and Schlerath) argues the case for "truth": aša is the fixed opposite of druj, "the Lie"; Plutarch, reporting the Persian religion to the Greeks, rendered it alētheia, "truth"; and on the Vedic side ṛta stands against ánṛta, "untrue, false". On this view the word should be translated "truth" everywhere, and its fuller sense derived from the sum of its occurrences rather than smuggled in as a loose "order".^[1] Kellens observes that the division runs, curiously, by national school: French philologists have preferred "order" or "justice" where German ones say "truth", and "The common denominator of these quite differing interpretations is the etymological meaning of the word", which is "ordered structure".^[2]

The "truth" school has a long pedigree, running from Lüders's study of Vedic ṛta through Gershevitch, though Kuiper already objected that "truth" was too narrow for the word's range.^[3] Its most concrete modern statement is Humbach and Faiss's: Avestan aša "basically denotes the truth of a spoken word and the true word itself", grounded in the Younger Avesta's usage and in Plutarch's Greek; and the truth so spoken is effective, for "By uttering a true statement one can inspire, or even constrain, a deity to fulfill one's wishes".^[4]

The other side of the field translates accordingly. Skjærvø's own later work renders aša as "Order", "the literal meaning being probably “something (harmoniously) fitted together”", and warns, in a head-on collision with Humbach's proof-texts, that "The term asha is often rendered as “truth,” but this English word can be misleading, since asha never means “truth” in the usual sense", the everyday true statement being expressed in Avestan by other words entirely.^[5] West prints "Right", a divine principle governing the natural world as much as human honesty: "Zoroaster made it the defining principle of his religion. The antithesis of Right and Wrong encapsulates the whole of his moral concern."^[6] Boyce declined to choose at all. The term, she wrote, "cannot be precisely rendered by any single word in another tongue":

It stands, it seems, for "order" in the widest sense: cosmic order, by which night gives place to day and the seasons change; the order of sacrifice, by which this natural rhythm is strengthened and maintained; social order, by which men can live together in harmony and prosperity; and moral order or "truth".

Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism I^[3]

The glosses are best read as perspectives on one idea rather than rival doctrines. A word whose semantic field bound the sunrise, the sacrifice, the just verdict and the honest tongue into a single order died with the world that thought that way; every modern rendering cuts off part of it, and no consensus has emerged, much of the scholarship now simply keeping the Iranian word. What the dispute itself demonstrates is the concept's reach, and that reach, not any one gloss, is what the Achaemenid material presupposes.

The empire did not invent the contest of Truth and Lie, and neither did Zarathustra: it descends from the age before the Iranian and Indian peoples went their separate ways. Aša is the exact cognate of the Vedic Sanskrit ṛta, the cosmic order of the Rigveda; druj, the Lie, is the cognate of Vedic druh, deceit. The Gāthās preserve the word-pair for Iran as the Rigveda preserves it for India, which places the opposition in the undivided Indo-Iranian world of roughly 2000 BCE, before either people had a name.^[7]

The depth of the inheritance shows in the fixed poetic phrases the two traditions hold in common. Skjærvø and Schlerath list a whole set of inherited Indo-Iranian formulas built on *ṛtá- that recur in both the Avesta and the Rigveda: to think of truth, to drive the truth (the poet drives the true words of his hymn as a charioteer drives his horses), the path of the truth (the road the hymn travels to the gods), to follow, to be in alliance with, truth (the poet follows the truth as a retainer follows his lord), to win by truth, to uphold the truth, to venerate the truth, to serve truth.^[1] These are the same set phrases, preserved word for word across a thousand years and a subcontinent's distance, far too exact to be accidental echoes. The word even surfaces far to the west, centuries before Cyrus: among the Indo-Iranian-looking royal names in the El-Amarna letters of fifteenth-century BCE Syria-Palestine stands Arta-manya, "he who thinks Order".^[8] When Darius I damned the rebels as followers of the Lie, therefore, the language on his rock was heir to a quarrel some fifteen centuries old, framed long before there were Persians to carve it.

Within Zoroastrian thought aša is the truth or right arrangement of Ahura Mazdā's good creation, and Ahura Mazdā is its creator and its upholder. In the Gāthās the Wise Lord is hailed, in Boyce's phrase, as "Creator as well as upholder of aša", and the great abstractions the prophet praises (Truth, Good Thinking, Dominion, Devotion) are aspects of the god's own being.^[9] Aša stands first and highest among them: by one count it occurs 157 times in the 238 verses of the Gāthās, more than any other, the dominant concept of the oldest Iranian hymns.^[1]

And the good creation is besieged. The man who holds the Truth, the ašavan, has his earthly counterpart in the drəgvant, the man the Lie possesses; the same enmity holds above them between aša and the druj themselves. On their contest the moral history of the world turns, and Zarathustra set it at the very origin:

"Now the two primal Spirits, who reveal themselves in vision as Twins, are the Better and the Bad, in thought and word and action. And between these two the wise ones chose aright, the foolish not so." (the Gāthās, Yasna 30.3, trans. Bartholomae)^[10]

The choice is renewed at the world's ending as it was at its making: the truthful and the followers of the Lie do not share the same fate.

"And when these twain Spirits came together in the beginning, they created Life and Not-Life, and that at the last Worst Existence shall be to the followers of the Lie, but the Best Existence to him that follows Right." (the Gāthās, Yasna 30.4, trans. Bartholomae)^[10]

That last clause of the hymn, the Best Existence for the follower of Right, is where arta becomes an ethic with a stake in it. He who possesses the Truth, Avestan ašavan, Old Persian artāvan, is more than honest: he is aligned with the right order of the world, and the alignment outlasts death. Kent's lexicon glosses Old Persian artāvan- as "righteous, blessed", "denoting the blissful state of the true religionists after death".^[11] The word appears in exactly one royal text, Xerxes' daiva-inscription at Persepolis (XPh), where it carries the only afterlife doctrine the Achaemenid kings ever wrote down.^[12] In the current standard translation:

"The man who obeys that law which Auramazda has established, and (who) worships Auramazda at the proper time and in the proper ceremonial style, he both becomes happy (while) living and blessed (when) dead." (Xerxes I, XPh §4d, trans. Kuhrt)^[13]

Happiness in life, šiyāti, and blessedness in death, artāvā: the pairing expresses, as Briant puts it, a belief in an afterlife whose course is set by judgement of a person's conduct on earth. He quotes Kellens's reading of the promise: "whoever performs acceptable sacrifices to Ahura-Mazda can during his lifetime be assured of his fate after death, and upon dying, will find his artavanité officially recognized".^[14] Even "blessed" is a translator's compromise: Skjærvø, keeping the word's structure visible, renders the clause "he will both be blessed while alive and one with Order when dead", the dead artāvan less rewarded than absorbed into the right order itself.^[5] Boyce notes that on both sides of the Indo-Iranian divide, "when used of the dead these words implied that the departed was blessed in the hereafter, having attained the Paradise which he deserved".^[3] The doctrine did not appear from nowhere. Already at Behistun, in the late fifth column, Darius had extended the reward beyond the grave, in Boyce's rendering: "Whoever shall worship Ahuramazda as long as he has strength, he will be happy, both living and dead".^[15] And the Vendidad states the same correlation in reverse, of the man guilty of a certain offence: "Living, he is not asavan-, dead, he does not enjoy the Best Existence".^[15]

The term has been fought over. Kuiper and Gershevitch argued that artāvan, used thus of the blessed dead, belonged to the old pagan terminology and was alien to Zoroastrianism proper; Boyce, following Bianchi's demonstration, judged the claim to lack justification, the Avestan parallels being close and the theology consistent: "The virtue of the asavan is not specific; it is acquired during a lifetime by religious acts of merit, and receives divine confirmation at the gates of Paradise".^[15] However the philology is settled, the ethical architecture is the same one the Gāthās teach: the Truth possessed in life is the passport at death, and the follower of the Lie forfeits it.

Under Darius the old cosmology was put to work as statecraft. The Behistun inscription, his own monument, carved to be believed, tells the story of his accession year in the vocabulary of the opposition itself:

"The people became hostile, and the Lie multiplied in the land, even in Persia and Media, and in the other provinces." (Darius I, the Behistun inscription, DB §10)^[16]

How the monument prosecutes that charge, turning the flat formula he lied on pretender after pretender until rebellion and falsehood become one crime, belongs to the *drauga* and is told there. What concerns arta is the affirmative side of the same argument: the King's standing as the one truthful man. His victory is the proof of his truthfulness, and his truthfulness the ground of his victory:

"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, the Behistun inscription, DB §63)^[16]

And he charges his successors with the same watchfulness, the first commandment of Achaemenid kingship: every king to come must guard himself vigorously against the Lie, the closing testament of Behistun (see the drauga, which quotes it in full).^[16]

The modern synthesis has made this polarity the centre of Achaemenid political theology. In Briant's summation, from the late 520s the monarchy's rules and justifications fused politics and religion into a whole of rare consistency, and "The concept of arta ('truth')—in relation to its antithetical corollary, drauga ('the Lie')—was the true linchpin of this ideological structure".^[14]

A striking asymmetry runs through all of this: the word Darius never carves is arta itself. The vocabulary of the Lie saturates his texts while the noun of Truth is absent from them, a pattern treated in full on the drauga entry; yet, as Boyce observed, "The positive concept of arta, in the sense of good social order, even if not expressed, was clearly constantly present in Darius' thoughts", the order the god had charged him to restore by ruling.^[17]

How far the ideology should be read as religion has been staged most sharply by Lincoln, who treats the empire's whole self-understanding as an application of the truth-religion to power: the wars of the kings pit "truth against the Lie, with the empire defending the interests of God, morality, and progress", and imperial aggression is thereby represented, in the words of Skjærvø's summary of the book, as "a soteriological mission".^[18][19] Lincoln himself marks the limit of the claim: the inscriptions set the king against the Lie but never make him "an active hero of truth", the hope for truth in the fullest sense being deferred to the eschatological future of XPh's blessed dead.^[18] Skjærvø, reviewing him, endorsed the picture as "intriguing and nuanced" while pressing the definitional question the book set aside, and the 2021 Companion's synthesis states the current balance plainly: the royal terminology of arta and drauga "can be correlated with the Zoroastrian traditions we know from the Avesta", while the same dualism, in Hutter's words, "fits excellently for a “political” use of Zoroastrianism by the rulers".^[19][20] This is the pleading of an interested party, and the reader must weigh it accordingly: on the monument's own terms no opponent of the King can be anything except false. Wiesehöfer states the redefinition flatly: where the followers of Zarathustra took truth and lie as moral concepts by which to order their lives, Darius counted as drauga whatever was directed against his own god-given reign, and "To him even rta was ultimately what he himself proclaimed as truth".^[21] That the King insists his own inscription be believed, let it not seem false to thee; believe it to be the truth, is itself part of the rhetoric of arta, and part of what the honest reader must weigh. But the fusion runs deeper than cynicism: conviction and calculation are woven into a single fabric here, with no seam along which to part them, and the ideology built on that weave, with its wider machinery of toleration and punishment, is treated on the religion and the Lie survey.

Nowhere is arta made more personal than on Darius's tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, where the inscription DNb sets out, more fully than any other Achaemenid text, what a king ought to be. Here the King measures himself not by conquest but by justice, self-mastery and the even hand, the social face of the Truth, cut where he lies:

"I am a friend to right, I am not a friend to wrong. It is not my desire that the weak man should have wrong done to him by the mighty; nor is that my desire, that the mighty man should have wrong done to him by the weak."

(Darius I, his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb §8, trans. Kent)^[22]

Justice, in this creed, is fair judgement (a charge is not believed until both parties are heard), and it is reward and punishment measured to desert, and it is the temper mastered before the realm is ruled. Its one named enemy is, again, the Lie: the King sets down that he is no friend to any Lie-follower, the draujana, a line whose weight is set out at the drauga.^[22]

The stress on discernment, justice, self-control and resolution is, as Boyce observed, wholly consonant with Zoroastrian moral theology, whether or not the King would have called himself by the prophet's name.^[17]

The outsider's testimony agrees with the royal creed, and it is Herodotus who gives arta its most famous social expression, not as a doctrine of the fire-altar but as the plainest fact of how a Persian is made:

"They educate their children, beginning at five years old and going on till twenty, in three things only: in riding, in shooting, and in speaking the truth." (Herodotus, Histories 1.136, trans. Macaulay)^[23]

The last of the three is the greatest, and Herodotus goes on to grade the offences against it, an ordering that treats honesty as the very measure of a man: lying he ranks the most disgraceful thing of all, and debt the next, since the debtor is driven to lie (see the drauga for the judgement in full).^[23]

The schooling in truth-telling is echoed across the Greek witnesses: Strabo has the Persians trained "to use the bow, to throw the javelin, to ride horseback, and to speak the truth"; Xenophon says their boys go to school "to learn justice and righteousness" as naturally as Greek boys go to learn their letters.^[24] Truth-telling, on this showing, is arta's social form: a discipline drilled into boys along with the horse and the bow, so that the honest tongue counts among the accomplishments a Persian must master, and the ruler who keeps it serves the god's own order on earth. That the same Darius who cut guard thyself against the Lie on his rock is made by Herodotus, in a Greek-told scene, to argue that a lie may be spoken at need is one of the fine tensions the record leaves standing, the ideal and its worldly practice held in one frame.

A curiosity of the record deserves its own treatment. Across the whole surviving royal corpus the noun arta has a single candidate attestation, the phrase artācā brazmaniy, three times repeated in Xerxes' daiva-text, XPh.^[1] Kent's classic edition took the phrase as joining the god and the principle in one act of worship:

"Where previously the demons were worshipped, there I worshipped Ahuramazda and Arta reverent(ly)." (Xerxes I, XPh §4b, trans. Kent)^[11]

Grammatically, Kent judged, "Apparently two locutions have been contaminated: 'Ahuramazda along with Arta' and 'Ahuramazda and Arta', giving 'Ahuramazda and along with Arta'".^[11] But almost every element of the phrase has been read otherwise. His own lexicon catalogues the rivals: Pisani took it as an elliptic dual, "Arta and Brazman", a pair of divinities; Sen as "the divine fulfillments"; Nyberg, Bailey and Henning each differently again.^[11] Brazman is generally understood, after Henning, as "solemn rites, due ceremonial behaviour", though the case is perplexing; and artācā itself has been derived not from arta at all but from a word *artu, cognate with Avestan ratu, Kent's own siglum aside, Boyce reporting the proposal "as a locative of *artu, Av. rtu- 'time, season', hence 'at the (correct) time'".^[15] The current standard translation follows that agnostic line. Kuhrt renders the clause "there I worshipped Auramazda at the proper time and with the proper ceremony", noting that the phrase is "translated by some as 'I worshipped Auramazda and Arta (truth)', but the uncertainties loom large".^[13] Lincoln, following Herrenschmidt, gives a third construction: "Worship the Wise Lord with ritual speech accompanied by truth."^[18] And Skjærvø construes the words as artā hacā with a locative of barzman-, "height": the king sacrifices to Ahuramazda "according to the Order up on high", with no divinised Arta in the sentence at all.^[5]

What turns on the crux is real: on Kent's reading, Truth stands beside the Wise Lord as an object of royal worship, a personified Arta on the Achaemenid stone; on Kuhrt's, the word for Truth never appears in the whole royal corpus as a noun, and the concept is carried entirely by names, by artāvan, and by the drumbeat of its opposite. The versions of the empire's other tongues do not resolve it: the Akkadian and Elamite texts merely transcribe the Iranian phrase rather than translate it, which suggests an old, fixed, perhaps liturgical formula that the scribes themselves no longer cared to unpack.^[1] Boyce's judgement is the sensible floor under the debate: "Whatever the exact meaning of the words, the sense is clearly that the king worshipped Ahuramazda in a properly ordained manner".^[15]

Because arta was auspicious, it was carried in names, and the names are evidence of a different kind: they show the concept alive in the choices of parents, far below the theology of the court. At the head stands the great royal name Artaxerxes, Old Persian Artaxšaça, from arta- and xšaça-, "kingdom, power". The elements are certain; their syntax is not. Tavernier, assembling the proposals, warns that "The precise meaning of this name is not yet clear", every possible relation between the parts having been defended: Kent's "Having a kingdom of justice", Bartholomae's "who gives power to Truth", Thieme and Schmitt's "whose reign is through Arta", Hutter's "the one whose reign is based on truth".^[25][11][20] On any of these the name amounts to a programme, the kingship itself founded on the right order, and three Great Kings bore it. Kent's lexicon, indeed, glosses the element arta- in such names as "an archangel attending Ahuramazda", the personified Truth rather than the bare abstraction.^[11]

Boyce drew the same conclusion from the Persepolis Fortification tablets, whose thousands of recorded names include a whole family of arta- compounds borne by ordinary Persians: Artapata "Protected by Arta", Artadata "Given by Arta", Artabarzana "Exalting Arta", Artazusta "Beloved by Arta", Artafarnah "Having fortune through Arta". In her reading, "of the many names compounded with arta a high proportion appear to have been given in veneration of Arta as a divinity": worship, that is, rather than homage to a bare principle.^[26] Tavernier's lexicon of the Iranian names surviving in the empire's non-Iranian records tells the same story at scale: its catalogue of names built on *Ṛta- runs to some ninety-five entries, from *Ṛtabānduš to *Ṛtazušta-, "loved by Arta", the densest documentation there is of arta piety in ordinary naming.^[25] The philologists add the personal name aša-sairi, "a combatant of truth", on the Iranian side beside the Vedic "troops of truth".^[1] And the reach of the word may go further still: Herodotus reports that in early times the Persians "were known to themselves and their neighbours as Artaei", a name Hesychius glosses as "the heroes among the Persians" and moderns connect directly to arta: a people, on that reading, once named for the Truth itself.^[14] To name a child, or a king, or perhaps a whole people with arta was to make a small public declaration of allegiance to the right order of the world.

The personified Truth had its own place in the divine order. Among the six great Beings emanated by Ahura Mazdā (the Aməša Spəntas, the Bounteous Immortals, each an aspect of the god taking one of the creations for his own), aša is Aša Vahišta, "Best Truth" (Middle Persian Ardwahišt), and his creation is fire.^[1] The little prayer in his praise, the Ashem Vohu, remains one of the holiest utterances of the living faith, and its untranslatable wordplay on aša has exercised every translator; in Skjærvø's rendering:

"Order is the best good reward there is. There are wished-for things in the wish for this one when one's Order is for the best Order." (the Ashem Vohu, trans. Skjærvø)^[8]

The link of Truth and fire runs deep: the place of the sacred fire was the place where the highest, the "best", truth was recited, and the fire ordeal, a truth-test by flame, was known to Iranians and Indians alike, a microcosm of the last judgement by which the truthful would be sorted from the followers of the Lie. So the fire on the Achaemenid altar, before which the King is shown at prayer on his tomb, is more than a holy element: it is the very emblem of arta.^[3]

After the empire, the word narrowed. In India ṛtá faded from the language once the old style of religious identification lost its force, leaving only satya, "true"; in Iran aša survived above all as a Zoroastrian term, while ordinary New Persian took up rāst, "true", from a different Old Persian root meaning "made straight".^[1] But aša / arta never died. It lives on in the living Zoroastrian faith, in the name of the Aməša Spənta of fire, in the theophoric names still spoken, and, as the moral axis of a whole civilisation's memory of itself, in the word arta itself: the Truth, and the right order of the world.