Naqsh-e Rostam

Four monumental tombs are hewn from the native rock, high in the cliff face.^[2] The oldest is Tomb I: its inscriptions name Darius, so its attribution is secure. The other three carry no royal name and can only be assigned tentatively, on their position relative to Darius's and on the style of their carving: Tomb II (east-north-east of Darius) to Xerxes, Tomb III (west-south-west) to Artaxerxes I, and Tomb IV, the westernmost, to Darius II.^[1] Schmidt's own case for the sequence rests on the tombs' spacing and the progressive coarsening of the carving; no signature settles it. He kept the honest caution, dropping the question-mark from Tombs III and IV in his report only to spare the reader tedium, that their chronology is not certain.^[2] Three of the four, then, are exactly that: attributions, not certainties.

The cliff held the house for four reigns and then fell silent. Darius II, buried here around 404 BCE, was the last king laid in it; his successors Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III cut their tombs into the slope of the Kuh-e Rahmat directly behind the Persepolis terrace (Schmidt's Tombs V and VI, assigned to them by the same conventional reasoning of position and style rather than by any inscription), in a near-exact copy of the Naqsh-e Rostam façade, so that the dynastic necropolis in effect migrated the six kilometres south to the royal seat itself.^[2] Why the move, the sources do not say; the form did not change.

The four Naqsh-e Rostam tombs follow one pattern, and it is a new one. It owes nothing to the built, gable-roofed tomb Cyrus had raised at Pasargadae a generation before; the cruciform rock-cut façade was devised for Darius and has, in von Gall's words, no exact prototype in the Near East, Egypt or Greece, though the stone-cutting technique descends from Urartu.^[1] Darius's masons began cutting the great cross-shaped cavity into the sloping rock-wall not long after 520 BCE; the finished façade stands 22.93 metres high, its foot already some fifteen metres above the ancient ground, under a cliff that rises about sixty-four metres in all.^[2] Each tomb sets a rich façade against a plain interior. Behind the sculptured cross a low door opens on a vestibule cut parallel to the rock; from it, rectangular vaults are tunnelled deeper in, and in the floor of each vault are sunk the cists, rectangular graves hewn to take a (probably wooden) sarcophagus and sealed after burial with a monolithic lid. The interiors differ where the façades match: Darius's tomb holds three vaults and nine cists, room enough for the king with his queen and family, where the later Naqsh-e Rostam tombs each hold but three.^[2] Nothing of the original interments survives, all having been rifled in antiquity. The bodies were laid, embalmed, deep in the sequestered rock, a mode of royal burial that itself became a small puzzle of the faith (below).

The one Greek notice of a burial here is a grim domestic anecdote. Ctesias, court physician to Artaxerxes II, reported that Darius's parents, wishing to be hauled up the cliff to inspect their son's finished tomb, fell to their deaths when the priests working the ropes took fright, by one version at a glimpse of snakes, and let go.^[3] Whatever its truth, the story fixes the tomb as complete and in use within Darius's own lifetime, reached by a scaffold since lost.

The cross-arm of the façade is carved in three registers, best read on the tomb of Darius.^[4] At the centre stands an image of a palace front with four engaged columns, a deliberate recall of the living king's house, for its dimensions are almost those of Darius's own palace on the Persepolis terrace, as Schmidt's measurements showed.^[2] Above this rests a great throne-platform (Old Persian gāθu in the inscription DNa), and the platform is borne up by thirty figures, the peoples of the empire, each carved in his own dress and headgear, arms upraised to lift the throne. Twenty-eight of them stand ranged in two tiers directly beneath the platform, taking its weight on their hands; the last two brace its outer feet from below, so that the whole seat of empire is shown resting on the lands together.^[5] The composition is not a scene from life but an emblem of the realm itself: the Achaemenid empire as a structure whose seat is upheld by all its nations at once.

The order of the thirty is not random. Inscribed labels name each bearer ("This is the Persian... This is the Mede..."),^[6] and the sequence runs by concentric zones and radiating axes, from Persians, Medes and Elamites at the centre outward to the Scythians, Libyans and Ethiopians of the periphery, an ordering worked out by Peter Calmeyer.^[1] Almost every bearer wears his weapons; to go armed in the king's presence was a mark of honour and trust. The one unarmed figure is the Babylonian, read by von Gall, since Xerxes probably oversaw the finishing of his father's tomb, as a deliberate humiliation answering Babylon's repeated revolts.^[1] The relief is the sculptural counterpart of the empire's formal lists of subject lands, and the ideology of that catalogue of peoples belongs with them (see the peoples of the empire); here the same claim is made in stone rather than in words. The empire's diversity, and its hierarchy, are written into the tomb's titulary as well, "I am Darius the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries containing all kinds of men, King in this great earth far and wide".^[7] And Darius himself, in the upper inscription, points the visitor to exactly this carving:

If now thou shalt think that "How many are the countries which King Darius held?" look at the sculptures (of those) who bear the throne, then shalt thou know, then shall it become known to thee: the spear of a Persian man has gone forth far; then shall it become known to thee: a Persian man has delivered battle far indeed from Persia.

Darius I, DNa §4, trans. Kent^[7]

On the platform borne by the peoples stands the religious scene, and it is the cliff's richest evidence for the faith of the early kings. The king stands on a three-stepped plinth, his left hand resting on a bow, his right hand slightly raised toward a winged figure that hovers above the whole tableau. He faces a fire-holder on which flames leap up, though he stands at a distance from it; in the upper corner floats a disc with an inscribed crescent.^[4] It is the clearest visual statement to survive of Achaemenid royal religion: the king lifted up by all his lands, worshipping before the fire, beneath the sign of heaven's favour.

Mary Boyce read this scene as profoundly Zoroastrian in the widest sense. The fire-holder is of the Pasargadae type (a three-stepped top and base joined by a shaft), and this is the earliest known representation of such a holder with its fire burning, the image that would become the most general Zoroastrian symbol of all; to pray before an elevated fire, Boyce held, may be assumed to have been the rite of a Zoroastrian king, so that the carving is "a strong visual affirmation of his faith".^[8] The winged figure she takes to carry a double significance here: a symbol of both the royal xᵛarǝnah, the god-given glory that alights on the legitimate king, and the sun; the Akkadian crescent-and-disc behind it she reads as the moon. Since in Zoroastrian practice prayers may be said before a terrestrial fire or facing the sun or the moon, Darius has had himself shown "at prayer according to the widest Zoroastrian prescriptions": before the fire, beneath the lights of heaven, under the sign of the glory that legitimates him.^[9] And the whole programme, Boyce notes, was reproduced over the tomb of every succeeding king (of whom the later ones are independently known to have been Zoroastrians), so that any change of faith in a later reign should have shown as a change in the funerary iconography, and none did.^[9]

Darius's own inscription turns the picture into words. The god is named as creator, and as the power that raised the king out of the world's disorder: "A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king";^[7] and again, "Ahuramazda, when he saw this earth in commotion, thereafter bestowed it upon me, made me king; I am king."^[7]

What the winged figure is remains one of the genuine open questions of Achaemenid studies, and the two Encyclopaedia Iranica articles that treat this site, Boyce's and von Gall's, flatly disagree. Boyce's reading is the one given above: not the god himself but the royal xᵛarǝnah, the glory. Her case rests on two observations: the fravashi (the guardian spirit once proposed for the figure) was conceived as female, where the figure is always male; and the figure so exactly mirrors the king beneath, "in both gesture and apparel", that it can hardly portray the supreme God, while a mirrored king is just what a representation of his own glory should look like.^[8]

Von Gall's article takes the older, opposite line, following Margaret Cool Root's full-dress defence of the identification: for Root the figure "most probably represents Ahuramazda", the fravashi theory rests on the untested assumption that Achaemenid religion already kept later Zoroastrianism's ban on divine images, and Herodotus's remark that the Persians made no images of their gods is not to be trusted against the monuments themselves.^[10] Von Gall accordingly reports that the winged ensign "has been understood as a representation of Ahura Mazdā", that "recent attempts to interpret this symbol as the royal genius Frawahr have been rejected", and, in a subtler observation of his own, that the gesture of the king's raised right hand corresponds in every detail to the gesture of the figure's hand, so that the relief "stresses the close connection between the king and Ahura Mazdā, whose will is decisive for the king's actions."^[1]

So the same scene is read by one authority as the king before his glory and by another as the king before his god, and neither reading has carried the field outright. The candidate readings are several (the god, the glory, the fravashi, a dynastic emblem, or a deliberately unspecific sign of god-given rule), and none has carried the field (see the winged symbol). On one adjacent point von Gall is clear where popular writing is loose: the disc-and-crescent in the corner is of Assyrian origin (there the moon-god Sin), and whether the Persians meant it for sun or moon "is difficult to comprehend... and there are no written sources to corroborate either view."^[1] Boyce, for her part, took it for the moon, completing a balanced trio (fire, sun-glory, moon) before which the king stands in reverence.^[8]

The most recent reference works no longer force a single label on the sign, treating it instead as a cluster of related senses. The 2021 Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire treats the flat equation of the winged figure with Ahura Mazdā as too rigid to bear the weight the older scholarship put on it, given how widely the sign varies in form and setting across the seals and the reliefs; it sets out the readings still in play, among them a personalised blessing conferred on the king, a numinous presence, a divine ancestor, and a sun-linked being in the disc, none of which, its authors add, need exclude some tie to the god.^[5] Mark Garrison, whose study of the divine and numinous imagery on the Persepolis seals is the fullest recent treatment, argues from the Fortification evidence that Auramazdā was only one of many divine entities in the religious landscape and held no dominant place in it; his own programmatic essay on the question is titled for the move away from the old certainty, going beyond Auramazdā and the winged symbol.^[11] The cult of Ahura Mazdā, on the current reading, carried both iconic and aniconic strands at once, a mixture the Persians evidently felt no contradiction in; Herodotus's flat claim that they made no images of their gods reads less as ethnography than as a Greek philosopher's approving gloss.^[5] The function of the sign stays clear even where its name does not: whatever it is called, the winged figure sets the reign under heaven's warrant. The older identification has not for all that been dislodged; Garrison reports that most scholarly opinion still leans, most recently, toward the long-standing reading of the figure as the god Auramazdā, carried above all by how pervasively the god fills the royal texts.^[11]

Flanking the worship scene, on the framework of the throne-platform, stand smaller figures, three to each side. On Darius's tomb the two upper men on the left are named by inscription. The upper caption (DNc) reads "Gobryas, a Patischorian, spear-bearer of Darius the King"; the lower (DNd) Kent rendered "Aspathines, bowbearer, holds the battle-ax of Darius the King".^[6] Kent's rendering of DNd has since been superseded. The Old Persian title vaçabara means "garment-bearer", that is, chamberlain, and the caption's second clause records that Aspathines holds the king's bow-and-arrow case, not a battle-axe: the correction was Rykle Borger's, worked out by Wouter Henkelman, so that Kuhrt renders the line "Aspathines, the 'garment-bearer' (i.e. chamberlain), holds Darius the king's bow-and-arrow case".^[12] These were Darius's chief supporters, the weapon-bearers whose office marks them as the men closest to the throne; Aspathines is the seventh of the conspirators of the accession, the courtier who stands in Herodotus's list of the Seven where Behistun names Ardumaniš.

The three men on the right are unarmed, in the long Persian robe, raising a fold of the garment to the mouth. The gesture has been read three ways: Schmidt took it for mourning in the Greek manner; Hinz for the ritual guard against polluting the sacred fire with the breath; Root for a sign of respect for the king's majesty.^[1] Beyond these, A. Sh. Shahbazi proposed that the six noble Persians are grouped so as to mirror the six Aməša Spəntas, the great Bounteous Immortals about Ahura Mazdā: the three armed men reflecting Aša, Vohu Manah and Xšaθra, the three weaponless mourners the female Ārmaiti with Haurvatāt and Amǝrǝtāt.^[13] Boyce adopted the reading, taking the whole tableau as a visual statement of the Zoroastrian divine heptad, compensating for the absence of the doctrine from the king's carved words.^[8] It is suggestive but unproven, and it remains Shahbazi's and Boyce's.

Two long cuneiform texts stand on the façade of Tomb I, each in three languages. DNa is set in the top register, to the left of the king (Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian); DNb stands lower, on the panels between the engaged columns of the palace-front. In the Seleucid period an Aramaic version of DNb was added below the Elamite.^[1] DNa records the lands and the god-given kingship; DNb is the fullest first-person code of royal conduct to survive from any Achaemenid, and it is the arta-thesis of the whole reign carved where the king lies. Its lines are read at length as the king's own self-portrait, the ideal ruler measured as judge, sportsman and master of his own temper (see Darius I); here it is enough that this creed stands cut into the tomb-façade itself, the last public word of the reign. Its ideal is the even hand of justice:

By the favor of Ahuramazda I am of such a sort that 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, DNb §8a, trans. Kent^[14]

It binds justice to fair hearing: "What a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until he satisfies the Ordinance of Good Regulations", in Kent's stiff rendering of the clause; Brosius translates the same lines plainly, "What a man says against a man does not convince me, until I hear the testimony of both".^[14][15] Reward runs by desert: "The man who cooperates, him according to his cooperative action, him thus do I reward", and the harm-doer is punished "according to the damage".^[14] And the king's word to all who come after him, the compact of arta and obedience set at the door of the grave, closes the upper text: "O man, that which is the command of Ahuramazda, let this not seem repugnant to thee; do not leave the right path; do not rise in rebellion!"^[7]

The general ethic of these lines (the stress on discernment, justice, self-control and resolution) is, as Boyce observed, wholly consonant with Zoroastrian moral theology: the just rule serves Aša Vahišta and Xšaθra Vairya, the disciplined body invites Haurvatāt and Amǝrǝtāt, even though the text names neither the prophet nor the distinctively Avestan vocabulary of the faith.^[8]

Before the tombs stands the site's other great Achaemenid monument: the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt ('the Kaʿba of Zoroaster'), a massive, built square tower resting on a three-stepped base, some 12 metres tall, roofed with a flat pyramid of stone. Its walls of pale limestone are broken only by blind windows of dark grey stone and shallow rectangular recesses, ornament with no function but to relieve the mass. Its one true opening is a door high in the north wall, reached by a stair of thirty steps. Chisel-marks date it, like the tomb of Darius, to the early years of Darius, around 500 BCE; it has a close but earlier twin at Pasargadae, the Zendān-e Soleymān, from the last years of Cyrus.^[1]

What the tower was for has never been settled. Several functions have been argued:

• a fire-temple, but the chamber has no provision to ventilate a fire, which von Gall, after Stronach, takes to exclude it;^[16]
• a royal tomb, but the entrance is not sealed and smoothed to the ground as the true tombs are, so the tower was not a burial-place;^[16] Boyce added the dynastic objection, that with every king of the line otherwise accounted for there is no ruler left for the Kaʿba to hold;^[8]
• a depository for the paraphernalia of rule, or for sacred records, the reading of R. N. Frye, and (in a religious key) of W. B. Henning, who from the tower's later Middle Persian name bun-xānak, 'foundation house', proposed it held the archives of the church and even the master copy of the Avesta;^[16]
• a coronation tower with a dynastic rather than a purely religious purpose, the reading of H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg, who tied the twin towers to Plutarch's notice of a coronation shrine at Pasargadae; this dynastic interpretation, von Gall reports, "has become widely accepted," though the suggestion that a sacred fire burned in the towers "can no longer be upheld."^[1]

No single answer commands the field, and the tower's Achaemenid purpose remains one of the site's real puzzles.^[1] The same debate attaches to the Zendān-e Soleymān, the tower's near-identical elder twin at Pasargadae (see Pasargadae); the two towers are the only buildings anywhere to carry the shallow patterned recesses, and whatever one was for, the other very probably was too.

What the newer fieldwork has added is context rather than an answer. Geophysical survey and test-trenching around both towers have found that neither stood alone: built complexes once surrounded them, so the Kaʿba is now read as the centre of a built precinct rather than an isolated marker.^[5] On this evidence the 2021 Companion raises the possibility that the two towers would qualify as cult-dedicated structures (Elamite ziyan) in the wider sense, and records what commands broad assent even while the precise function does not: that both were tied closely to the Achaemenid dynasty and its rites, whether of ancestor-cult, investiture, or something adjacent.^[5]

What is certain is the tower's later importance. In Sasanian times its three outer walls were carved with the great trilingual res gestae of Shapur I (r. 241–272 CE), Greek on the south, Middle Persian on the east, Parthian on the west, and beneath the Middle Persian version the high priest Kirdēr incised one of his own inscriptions.^[17] A monument the early kings raised for a purpose that cannot now be named became, seven centuries on, one of the most important inscribed documents of the Sasanian state.

The cliff's holiness may be older than its Achaemenid tombs. The dedication of high and striking places to the divine is a recurring feature of Iranian religion: the name of the great rock at Behistun, Bagāstāna, means 'place of the god' (baga), the very word the Achaemenid kings used for the divine beings they invoked beside Ahura Mazdā.^[18] That a king chose this particular wall of rock for the tombs of his house, over against the seat of his power at Persepolis, fits a pattern in which the god's presence is met at height and in the open, at places already charged with sanctity, rather than in built temples, exactly the open-air worship the outside sources describe for the Persians of the age. The baga association is context only; no cult of the site is documented, and the tombs' own witness is religious enough.

The cliff was never lost; it stands beside the old road, and European travellers drew and puzzled over it from the seventeenth century on. Its systematic recording is a twentieth-century achievement, and a by-product of the great American dig at Persepolis. The Oriental Institute of Chicago worked the terrace from 1931, under Ernst Herzfeld to 1934 and then under Erich F. Schmidt, whose expedition from the first conceived Persepolis as a wide zone taking in the rock-cut royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam and the plain between.^[5] Schmidt surveyed and cleared the necropolis in 1936 and 1939, using aerial photography from his own light aircraft to map the cliff, and his posthumous Persepolis III (1970) remains the standard record of the necropolis: the plans and sections of the tomb-interiors, the measured façades, the catalogue of throne-bearers, and the reading of the sculptured programme all rest on it.^[2] What Schmidt could not do was excavate the ground before the tombs. The area around the Kaʿba-ye Zartošt and beneath the cliff is barely dug, so the ritual apparatus the site must once have carried, the fire-installations, the buildings for the funerary cult, is largely unknown; only the geophysical and trench work of recent decades has begun to recover the outline of the vanished precincts.^[5] Much of what a full necropolis would reveal is still in the rock and the soil.

The Achaemenid kings gave the cliff its tombs and its tower; the Sasanians gave it its name. From the third century CE the new Persian dynasty, tracing its own legitimacy to a half-remembered Achaemenid past, made the necropolis the backdrop for its own self-display. Lower on the same rock, beneath the ancient tombs, its kings cut a series of great rock-reliefs: Ardashir I receiving the ring of rule from Ohrmazd, Shapur I mounted over his defeated Roman enemies (the emperor Valerian taken alive, Philip the Arab suing for peace), and the investitures and combats of later reigns, with a fortified enclosure once ringing the whole sculptured face.^[1] Ali Mousavi puts the strategy plainly: the royal necropolis at Naqsh-e Rostam became the royal "museum" for the Sasanians, who immortalised their victories and exploits "by having them carved on the sacred cliff below the tombs of their illustrious predecessors".^[19] The choice was deliberate rather than casual, a claim of continuity staged against the greatest kings the land remembered, the same instinct that led Michael Canepa to read the whole Sasanian programme at the Achaemenid sites as a technology of dynastic memory.^[19]

One point cuts against reading the reuse as simple funerary continuity. Leo Trümpelmann took the cliff for the necropolis of Persepolis and its successor Istakhr from Achaemenid into Sasanian times; but, as Mousavi observes, no Sasanian ossuary or dakhma has been found at the site, and the Sasanians seem in fact to have avoided burying their own dead in the shadow of the Achaemenid tombs, borrowing the place's prestige for their monuments while keeping their graves apart.^[19] The cliff was a stage, not a shared cemetery.

Persian tradition, reading those armoured Sasanian horsemen as scenes from the national epic, later called the whole place Naqš-e Rostam, 'the picture of Rostam', after the hero of the Shāhnāma. The name that the site now bears the world over thus belongs neither to the kings buried there nor to the god they worshipped, but to a legendary champion of a much later memory, a last turn in a meaning reworked again and again over some twenty-five centuries.