AchaemenicaAn Encyclopaedia of the Achaemenid Persian Empire
Concept

Proskynesis

Proskynesis (Greek προσκύνησις, from pros, "towards", and kyneō, "to kiss") is the gesture of respect a Persian made before a social superior, and above all before the king: a graded act that ran from a kiss between equals to a full prostration by the lowly. The word is Greek, not Persian, and almost everything known about the gesture comes from Greek writers and from a single carved scene, the audience relief of Persepolis, where a court official bends toward the enthroned king and lifts a hand to his lips. In Persian usage it marked rank and distance, the order of a society in which every man stood above some and below others; at its summit it acknowledged the majesty of the King of Kings, before whom no one might speak until he had first bowed. To Greeks the same gesture meant something else. Full prostration was, for them, an act owed only to the gods, so a Greek who performed it before a mortal king was thought to have thrown away his own freedom and treated a man as divine. That mismatch turned proskynesis into one of the master images of the Greek portrait of Persia, the sign of a servile East ruled by a god-king. Herodotus made the Spartan envoys who refused to bow before Xerxes into models of the free man; a century and a half later Alexander's attempt to bring the Persian gesture into his own court broke on the same objection, and the historian Callisthenes' refusal cost him his life. Whether the Persians ever held their king to be a god, or whether proskynesis was only the etiquette of a steeply ranked court, is the central question. The Achaemenid kings never claim divinity in their own inscriptions, and modern scholarship, from Elias Bickerman to Pierre Briant, reads the gesture as social rather than religious: a mark of hierarchy that the Greeks, reading it through their own horror of kneeling, mistook for worship. The gesture and its ambiguity outlived the empire, passing through Hellenistic ruler-cult and the Parthian and Roman courts into Byzantium, where the old distinction between veneration and worship was argued out once more, in the same Greek word.

The word is Greek and describes a Persian thing from the outside. No Old Persian term for the gesture survives; it is known through the Greek writers who watched it, disliked it, and named it after the kiss it seemed to contain. Proskynesis joins pros, "towards", to the verb kyneō, "to kiss", and the earliest and fullest Persian description, in Herodotus, is indeed of a graded exchange of kisses that marks where two men stand in relation to each other:

When one man meets another in the way, it is easy to see if the two are equals; for then without speaking they kiss each other on the lips; if the difference in rank be but little, it is the cheek that is kissed; if it be great, the humbler bows down and does obeisance to the other.

Herodotus 1.134[1]

The scale is the point. Between equals the greeting is a kiss on the mouth; a small difference of rank moves it to the cheek; a large one turns it into a bow. Richard Frye put the range at its extremes as "kissing the king's feet for servants, to a cheek kiss for the nobility".[2] The same gesture, in other words, ran the whole height of a society that Herodotus and Strabo describe as sorted into ranks, the great nobles or "equals in honour", the lesser gentry, and the commoners, each owing the one above him the mark of respect his station allowed. Briant reads the greeting-code as a map of that hierarchy: proskynesis was what a man of much lower birth owed his better, the bottom rung of a ladder whose top was the king.[3] Before the King of Kings, who stood above every rank, the gesture reached its most formal pitch.

Herodotus goes straight on to a second gradation, of peoples rather than persons: "They honour most of all those who dwell nearest them, next those who are next farthest removed, and so going ever onwards they assign honour by this rule",[1] until the most distant peoples are held in least regard. Greeting-code and world-view obey a single logic, respect proportioned to distance from oneself, and the king sat at the centre of both. That the code was real and durable, and no Herodotean invention, is suggested by Strabo, who repeats the same scale four centuries later, at the end of a long Parthian era: acquaintances of equal rank are kissed, a man of lower standing "they offer the cheek and in that way receive the kiss", and those lower still merely make obeisance.[4]

The audience relief

One Persian image of the act survives. On the carved panel usually called the audience relief, found in the Treasury at Persepolis and now in the National Museum of Iran, the king sits enthroned with a long staff in his hand and a crown prince standing behind him; in front of him, across two tall incense burners, a court official in the belted riding-dress of a Mede leans forward from the waist and raises one hand toward his mouth, fingers curled as if to blow a kiss. Behind that figure wait the royal guards. Briant identifies the bowing official as the chiliarch, the "commander of a thousand" who captained the royal bodyguard and controlled access to the presence, the man through whom every petitioner had to pass.[3] Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones reads the gesture on the relief as "kissing from the hands": the courtier is bowed and blowing a kiss toward the king, not flat on the ground.[5] The composition survives in the two Treasury panels, and most likely once stood on the façade of the Apadana, the great audience hall, before the reliefs were moved; it is the empire's own picture of how one came before its ruler.

Neither the figure nor the act, however, is agreed. Margaret Root catalogued four identifications of the bowing official, a worshipper performing the rite the Greeks described, the chiliarch, the chief treasurer reporting to the king, and a grand marshal of ceremonies announcing the tribute delegations, and preferred the last, reading his bow and raised hand simply as "a respectful attitude adopted when addressing the king".[6] On her reading the panel does not show proskynesis at all: it shows a high official speaking to his king in the posture court manners required, and it was Elias Bickerman who argued, against the older view, that this dignified rite is precisely what the Greek word denoted, a social act of homage rather than an adoration.[7] A stranger suggestion, reported by Root from Walther Hinz, would make the hand before the mouth a screen, so that the visitor's breath might not reach the king; it has found little following, but it registers how underdetermined the image is.[6] One further observation bears on the question. As Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg noted, prostration is otherwise absent from Achaemenid royal art: the one figure on the ground before an Achaemenid king is the defeated impostor Gaumāta beneath Darius's boot on the Behistun relief, a crushed enemy, not a subject at court, and that absence has been used to argue that the court ceremony cannot have required going to the floor.[8]

What the relief shows, then, is a bow and a blown kiss by a member of the court elite; what it cannot settle is whether this was the whole ceremony or only its most dignified register. It does not depict a commoner flat on his face, and read against the Greek reports of men thrust to the ground it opens rather than closes the question every modern discussion turns on: what act the ceremony required, and of whom.

An old Near Eastern gesture

Whatever its exact form, the gesture was not a Persian invention. Bowing, kneeling, kissing the ground, the hem of a garment or the feet of the monarch were standard marks of submission in Assyrian and Egyptian court protocol, and the Hebrew court narratives grade obeisance by relative standing just as Herodotus does.[5] The grading itself is ancient: Briant notes Mari tablets, more than a millennium older than the Achaemenids, in which ambassadors already stand in a hierarchy, some exempt from bowing altogether, others required to bow two or three times.[3] The Persians inherited a very old language of the body and formalised it; Llewellyn-Jones's summary is that in a Near Eastern setting the practice "looks very much at home".[5]

The Greeks knew the gesture too, and that is the hinge of the whole misunderstanding. In their own usage it was owed to the gods, as when Xenophon's soldiers, hearing a sneeze at the moment deliverance was mentioned, "all with one impulse made obeisance to the god".[9]

Before the king

The Greek sources agree that no one addressed the Great King before performing the act. The rule is stated flatly in the anecdote of the Theban envoy at court: "The law of the Persians is, that he who cometh into the King's presence shall not speak with him till he hath first adored him."[10] The same protocol frames the story of Themistocles, the Athenian exile brought before Artaxerxes, whom the chiliarch briefs on the custom before admitting him. Persian law, he explains, holds it "the most excellent" of customs "to honour the king, and to worship him, as the image of the great preserver of the universe".[11] The chiliarch's speech makes plain both the Persian claim, that to bow before the king was to honour the good order he upheld, and the Greek gloss upon it, for the cosmic language and the word "worship" are a Greek author's, laid over a Persian act of respect. The commitment was exacted in advance: Nepos has the chiliarch warn Conon that a man unwilling to perform the rite could deal with the king only through intermediaries, and a late text adds that each visitor was registered, and made his prostration before a portrait of the king even when the king himself was elsewhere.[3] The act could likewise be paid to the king in absence: Briant cites the satrap Datames making proskynesis before a letter he had just received from Artaxerxes, the royal word standing for the royal person.[3]

Xenophon's romance of the ideal king turns the ceremony into deliberate theatre. In the Cyropaedia the first royal procession of Cyrus is staged in every detail, and the first prostration is its climax:

And when they saw him, they all prostrated themselves before him, either because some had been instructed to begin this act of homage, or because they were overcome by the splendour of his presence, or because Cyrus appeared so great and so goodly to look upon; at any rate, no one of the Persians had ever prostrated himself before Cyrus before.

Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.3.14[12]

The passage is fiction, an aetiology written by a Greek admirer, but its assumption is worth keeping: Xenophon took the ceremony to be an instrument of majesty, planted by design ("some had been instructed to begin") and spreading by awe. And the gesture could make a king as well as honour one. When the omen of the neighing horse settled the contest among the seven conspirators, Herodotus says, Darius's "companions leapt from their horses and did obeisance to him";[1] in Polyaenus's version the nobles "set foot on the ground, performed the proskynesis, and made him king of the Persians".[3] The first proskynesis is the recognition of the new reign (see the accession of Darius).

A gesture of rank at every level

The king stood at the apex of the custom, which reached well below him, and the range of its recipients is the strongest internal evidence for what it meant. Great nobles received it from their inferiors. In Xenophon's Anabasis the condemned traitor Orontas, led away to die, receives it still: "when the men who in former days were wont to do him homage saw him, they made their obeisance even then, although they knew that he was being led forth to death".[9] Deference followed rank, not power of life and death, and it survived the man's fall. In the Cyropaedia the defector Gadatas bows to Cyrus long before Cyrus is a king, as Christopher Tuplin notes in warning against building elaborate ceremonial reconstructions on such scenes.[13] The royal women received it: in Aeschylus the chorus of Persian elders greets the arrival of the queen mother Atossa with the declaration "To her I make lowly obeisance",[14] and Athenaeus, cited by Briant, has the king's concubines do obeisance before the queen.[3] High officials received it: in the Book of Esther the king's servants at the gate bow and do obeisance to the vizier Haman "for the king had so commanded",[15] and the whole plot springs from Mordecai's refusal, a Judaean's scruple against a gesture his neighbours performed as a matter of course. Benedikt Eckhardt observes that behind the tale, as behind the Macedonian tales, "the supposed worship of Persian kings through proskynesis stands in the background", though the narrative itself gives Haman's rank as what Mordecai defies, with no cult at issue.[16]

The traffic even ran downward from the throne when a god stood at the other end. Plutarch has Artaxerxes II pray to the goddess he calls Hera, "making his obeisance and clutching the earth before this goddess as he did before no other".[17] The King of Kings, that is, performed the gesture himself, to a deity; the same act, at the top of the human ladder as at the bottom, marked the step above.

The Greek objection

For a Greek, the trouble was religious. Prostration, and the kiss blown toward a superior, were in Greek practice acts reserved for the gods and their images; to perform them before a living man was to treat him as a god and, in doing so, to unmake one's own standing as a free citizen. Xenophon has a Greek refuse proskynesis precisely because it was incompatible with eleutheria, freedom.[5] From this conviction the Greeks built a set of exemplary tales in which the refusal to bow becomes the badge of the free man facing the servile East. The sharpest is Herodotus's account of the Spartans Sperthias and Bulis, sent to Xerxes to atone for the killing of Persian heralds, who would not be forced to the floor:

Thence being come to Susa and into the king's presence, when the guards commanded and would have compelled them to fall down and do obeisance to the king, they said they would never do that, no not if they were thrust down headlong; for it was not their custom (said they) to do obeisance to mortal men, nor was that the purpose of their coming.

Herodotus 7.136[1]

Their refusal, that it was not their custom "to do obeisance to mortal men", turns on exactly this point: the objection is not to homage as such but to homage of the kind owed to gods, paid to a man. Margaret Miller states the mechanism plainly: the notoriety of the act among Greeks "stems from their wilful misunderstanding" and from its use as the touchstone of the opposition between free Greek and enslaved barbarian.[18] The gesture had been oriental shorthand on the Athenian stage since Aeschylus, whose Persian elders abase themselves before the royal house, and the caricature fed on itself: the more the bow stood for servility, the more every story about Persia turned on it.[19] Herodotus himself could treat the excesses of the motif critically. The tale that Xerxes' Persian courtiers, told their king's safety required a lighter ship, "did obeisance and leapt into the sea" he reports only to reject: "I for my part believe neither the story of the Persians' fate", he writes, nor the rest of it.[1]

Greeks who had to deal with the court found ways through. Plutarch tells how the Theban envoy Ismenias "threw his ring down on the ground in front of him, and then stooped and picked it up, thus giving men to think that he was making the obeisance":[17] honour satisfied at Thebes, protocol satisfied at Susa. Briant notes that the ruse cuts both ways as evidence, working equally well whether proskynesis meant going to the ground or only bending forward, so that even the best anecdote about the act's form refuses to settle it.[3] Themistocles, who simply performed the ceremony and prospered, was remembered by some as a model diplomat and by others as a Greek who had sold his freedom; the gesture had become a test no Greek could take neutrally.

Alexander and Callisthenes

The episode that fixed the Greek reading for good came not in the Persian empire but at its conqueror's court. In 327 BCE, in Bactria, Alexander tried to make proskynesis a general custom of his own court, requiring it of Greeks and Macedonians as his Persian subjects already performed it. His court had met the gesture from the start: Curtius has the captive royal women prostrate themselves, by Persian custom, before Hephaestion, the taller of the two Macedonians who entered their tent, mistaking him for the king.[20] Arrian records the suspicion that Alexander "wished men to prostrate themselves before him as to a god", now that he entertained the notion that the god Ammon, not Philip, was his father.[21] The philosopher Anaxarchus proposed the honour; the historian Callisthenes, a kinsman and pupil of Aristotle who had come with the expedition, spoke against it. Alexander, he allowed, deserved every honour consistent with his being human, but the line between men and gods had to hold, and the speech Arrian gives him is the clearest ancient statement of that Greek distinction:

men have made distinctions between those honours which are due to men, and those due to gods, in many different ways, as for instance by the building of temples and by the erection of statues. … But the greatest distinction is made by the custom of prostration.

Arrian, Anabasis 4.11[21]

Callisthenes also reached for history, and his aetiology is the only ancient attempt to date the custom:

But if it is said that Cyrus, son of Cambyses, was the first man to whom the honour of prostration was paid, and that afterwards this degrading ceremony continued in vogue among the Persians and Medes, we ought to bear in mind that the Scythians, men poor but independent, chastised that Cyrus

Arrian, Anabasis 4.11[21]

The ancient tradition then splits into two scenes. In Arrian's main account the debate ends the affair among the Macedonians, "the most honourable of the Persians" nonetheless "arose in due order and prostrated their bodies before him",[21] and when one Persian bowed awkwardly the Companion Leonnatus laughed at him and earned the king's anger. The second scene, which Plutarch takes from Chares of Mytilene, the court chamberlain, is a choreographed banquet: Alexander passed a golden cup, and each guest in turn "rose up so as to face the household shrine, and when he had drunk, first made obeisance to Alexander, then kissed him, and then resumed his place upon the couch".[17] Drink, bow, kiss: the sequence is the Persian greeting between unequals, adapted to a Macedonian symposium, with the kiss restored at the end as if between near-equals. Callisthenes took the cup while the king's attention was elsewhere, drank, skipped the bow and came forward for his kiss; a courtier called out, "O King, do not accept his kiss, for he alone has not done thee obeisance"; Alexander refused the kiss, and Callisthenes exclaimed, "Well, then, I'll go away the poorer by a kiss."[17] The attempt was abandoned; as E. Badian put it, "Alexander gave up and never required proskynesis of Greeks and Macedonians".[22] Soon afterwards Callisthenes was implicated, on evidence the sources themselves doubt, in the conspiracy of the royal pages and destroyed; even his death is told two ways, dead in chains of disease by Aristobulus's account, tortured and hanged by Ptolemy's.[21]

A Greco-Macedonian problem

Because the one full ancient discussion of proskynesis is this Macedonian quarrel, the gesture has almost always been read through it, as a question about the divinity of a king and the freedom of those who would not bow. The Persian practice, about which the sources are far thinner, has been coloured by a debate that was, as Frye put it, "a Greco-Macedonian problem and not an Iranian one".[2] The affair itself is now handled with growing caution. Badian observed that the deification frame may be an interpretation laid over the events after the fact, since the set-piece debate "is not, of course, a genuine document", while the fact that Chares, the apologetic chamberlain, took trouble to strip Callisthenes of the credit for stopping the ceremony tells in favour of something real having been stopped; his sober conclusion is that "the sources will never permit us to give a clear description and evaluation of the proskynesis affair".[22] Robin Lane Fox pointed out that both attested occasions were social rather than religious; Hugh Bowden has gone further and suggested the whole "experiment" "is an invention of later tradition", a tale built up by writers who saw Alexander through Roman debates about ruler-worship.[23] However far that scepticism is pressed, the direction of distortion is not in doubt: a Persian court usage reached the western tradition wrapped inside a Greek argument about deifying a man, and Callisthenes' refusal was retold for centuries as a set-piece of Hellenic liberty, carrying the divine-king reading of proskynesis with it.

Etiquette or worship

Whether Persian proskynesis was a religious act, the worship of a deified king, or a secular etiquette of rank, is the question on which the sources divide, and on which the modern reading has largely settled.

The religious reading is the older and the one the Greek texts encourage. In them the gesture is repeatedly cast as adoration: the chiliarch likens the king to a god who preserves the universe, the Latin sources render proskynesis as veneratio, Curtius states outright that the Persians revered their kings as gods, and Alexander is said to have wanted the act "as to a god". Taken at face value, this evidence makes the King of Kings an object of cult and the bow an act of worship, and some earlier scholarship read it so. Muhammad Dandamaev and Vladimir Lukonin answer for the current consensus: such statements "represent a blatant Hellenization", for "the deification of kings was alien to the Persians", who held their rulers to be the gods' earthly instruments and no more.[24]

Against the religious reading stands the Persian evidence, and it is silent on the point. The Achaemenid royal inscriptions, which say a great deal about the king's relation to Ahura Mazdā, never claim that the king is a god; they make him the god's chosen instrument, king "by the favour of Ahuramazda" and no divinity to be worshipped (see The King of Kings). There is no Achaemenid cult of the living king; Badian, no minimiser of Greek evidence, allowed that "however hedged about with divinity, an Achaemenid king could not himself be a god".[22] The one Persian picture of the gesture shows a controlled bow and a blown kiss, at home in a Near Eastern court tradition that carried no implication of divinity. Bickerman's 1963 study drew the conclusion: the rite depicted on the audience relief simply is proskynesis, a social act of homage, and the Greek talk of worship misdescribes it.[7] Amélie Kuhrt adds the philological point on which much confusion has turned: "proskynesis itself does not mean physical prostration", the depth of the preceding gesture varying with the rank of the person received.[25]

Frye's formulation mediates between the positions by separating the gesture from the meaning read into it. The physical acts, "the prostration of menials, or the raising of the hand to the mouth on the part of nobility before the ruler", were an old and unremarkable Iranian custom; the idea that performing them amounted to worshipping a god was a Greek and Macedonian anxiety, generated by Alexander's ambitions and by the Greek reservation of such gestures for the divine.[2] The gradation Frye and Herodotus describe fits an etiquette of rank far better than an act of cult: one does not worship a god more or less according to one's own social standing, and a rite paid to the range of recipients already surveyed cannot have been a royal cult without making gods of half the court.

The balance of modern scholarship rests here. Briant states the conclusion plainly: performing proskynesis "recognized the majesty of the sovereign", but "contrary to what the Greeks deduced from it, the rite did not imply that the king was considered a god".[3] Llewellyn-Jones treats the "veneration of divine monarchy" as a Greek misunderstanding, "a claim never made by the Achaemenid kings themselves, nor understood that way by the Persians".[5] What the evidence cannot yet settle is the exact form of the act and how far it was graded: Herodotus and the tales of men thrust to the floor imply full prostration, at least for the lowly; the relief shows only the dignified bow of a great courtier; and no Old Persian word, and no fuller image, survives to arbitrate. The gesture is known only through the eyes that found it strangest.

The afterlife of a gesture

The custom outlived the dynasty that perfected it. Within the fourth century it was already being borrowed at the empire's edges: Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea on the Black Sea, "appears to have adopted elements of Persian ceremonial", including the demand for proskynesis, a generation before Alexander tried the same and failed.[26] After Alexander the gesture flowed into the ceremonial of the Hellenistic monarchies and into the genuinely new institution of Greek ruler-cult, where the old ambiguity, honour or worship, was institutionalised rather than resolved; how far the Hellenistic bow descends from the Persian court rite and how far from Greek religious practice remains debated.[5] The Parthian kings received obeisance in their turn, and could pay it: when the Arsacid prince Tiridates of Armenia knelt before Nero in 66 CE, Cassius Dio has him say "Master, I am the descendant of Arsaces, brother of the kings Vologesus and Pacorus, and thy slave", adding, "And I have come to thee, my god, to kneel" (proskynēsai) "to you as I do to Mithra".[26] An Iranian king thus offered a Roman emperor precisely the theological reading of the gesture that the Achaemenids had never asked of anyone.

Rome completed the circle. The late Roman court adopted a formal adoratio of the emperor, kneeling and the kissing of the purple, which ancient and modern observers alike have traced to the Persian model as it passed through the Hellenistic and Sasanian courts, and Byzantine ceremonial kept proskynesis as the standard obeisance before the emperor. The word then had a long Christian career: Greek theology came to distinguish the proskynesis of veneration, lawfully paid to icons, relics and holy persons, from the latreia of worship owed to God alone, a distinction defended at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 CE. The differentiation between a gesture of honour and an act of worship, which the classical Greeks refused to grant the Persians, became, in the same Greek word, a formal doctrine of the Greek church a millennium later.

The Persian court act itself vanished with antiquity, but its image never did. From Aeschylus to the Enlightenment, the bowed body before the throne remained Europe's shorthand for oriental despotism, and the modern scholarly recovery of the gesture, as etiquette rather than worship, is a recovery from that image as much as from the sources that created it.

Primary sources

The ancient evidence, and what each source attests.

Herodotus, Histories 1.134, 3.86, 7.136, 8.118
the graded greeting among Persians by rank; the Seven's obeisance to the newly chosen Darius; the Spartan envoys' refusal before Xerxes; the courtiers' obeisance before leaping into the sea, a tale Herodotus himself rejects
The Persepolis audience relief (two Treasury panels of one composition, originally from the Apadana façade)
the only Persian depiction of the act: a court official bowed before the enthroned king, hand raised toward his lips; the identification of both figure and gesture is debated
The Behistun relief
the one prostrate body in Achaemenid royal art, the defeated Gaumāta beneath Darius's foot; used to argue that court proskynesis did not require going to the ground
Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.3.14 and Anabasis 1.6.10, 3.2.9
the first prostration to Cyrus staged as deliberate ceremonial theatre; obeisance paid to the condemned noble Orontas; Greek soldiers' obeisance to a god, the gesture's proper Greek object
Arrian, Anabasis 4.10–12, with Plutarch, Alexander 54–55 and Curtius Rufus 8.5
the attempt of 327 BCE and Callisthenes' refusal, in two versions: the formal debate on divine honours, and Chares' choreographed banquet of cup, bow and kiss
Plutarch, Themistocles 27 and Artaxerxes 22.8; Aelian, Varia Historia 1.21; Nepos, Conon 3.3
the audience protocol: no speech with the king before the act; the chiliarch's briefing; Ismenias's ring-ruse; the rite exacted of Greek envoys in advance
Aeschylus, Persians 150–152, and the Book of Esther 3
the earliest Greek staging of Persian obeisance, paid to the queen mother; the king's command to bow to the vizier Haman and Mordecai's refusal, the gesture graded below the throne

How we know

Every reconstruction of proskynesis is an exercise in reading hostile witnesses, and the modern history of the question is the history of learning how. The Greek and Latin writers supply the word, the anecdotes and the whole vocabulary of adoration, but they describe a custom they found repellent, through a conviction that such gestures belonged to the gods alone, and their one sustained discussion of it, the Alexander affair, is an argument about deifying a Macedonian rather than an account of the Persian court. The Persian side amounts to a single relief, silent, of contested identification, showing only the elite form of the act. No Old Persian text names or explains the gesture. The task, therefore, is to correct a rich but tendentious literary tradition by one ambiguous image, and the correction has been run in both directions: Bickerman's 1963 study reclassified the rite of the relief as social homage; Gabelmann's 1984 study of royal audience dissented, holding the relief and the literary proskynesis apart; Root and Sancisi-Weerdenburg detached the relief from the gesture debate on iconographic grounds; Kuhrt's corpus commentary and Briant's synthesis consolidated the etiquette reading now standard; and the Alexander episode has been re-examined as historiography rather than as evidence, Bowden arguing the "experiment" may be a later construction shaped by Roman ruler-cult debates. Dandamayev's Iranica survey of the court sets the act among the ordinary protocols of access; there is still no dedicated Iranica article on the gesture.[27] What keeps the question open is the thinness of the Persian evidence: the exact choreography, and the degree of grading by rank, cannot be recovered from one relief, and the texts that might settle them are the very sources whose bias the reconstruction exists to strip away.

References

Source key: primary ancient evidence · secondary modern scholarship · consensus an explicitly labelled overview, not a specific citation. Open Source details for the full record.

  1. ↑ a b c d e
    primary Herodotus
    Source details

    Reference. Herodotus 1.134 (the graded greeting: equals kiss on the lips, near-equals on the cheek, the humbler bows down and does obeisance; and honour assigned by distance, Godley vol. 1 p. 175), 3.86 (Darius's companions leap from their horses and do obeisance at the horse-omen, vol. 2 p. 115), 7.136 (the Spartan envoys Sperthias and Bulis refuse to fall down before Xerxes, vol. 3 p. 439) and 8.118–119 (the courtiers' obeisance and leap into the sea, and Herodotus's disbelief, vol. 4 p. 123). Translation quoted: A. D. Godley, Herodotus, Histories (Loeb Classical Library, 1920–25).

  2. ↑ a b c
    secondary Richard N. Frye 1984
    Source details

    Reference. Richard N. Frye, The History of Ancient Iran (Munich, 1984)

    Evidence used. proskynesis as a graded court gesture, 'kissing the king's feet for servants, to a cheek kiss for the nobility', and 'the kings were not divinised, as some have thought' (physical p. 126 of the scan); the divinization question 'a Greco-Macedonian problem and not an Iranian one', the prostration of menials and the raising of the hand to the mouth by nobility 'customary among the Achaemenids' (physical p. 162)

  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i
    secondary Pierre Briant 2002
    Source details

    Reference. Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. P. T. Daniels (Winona Lake, 2002), pp. 222–223 (the audience relief and the chiliarch; the interpretive problem of what proskynesis meant; 'performing proskynesis recognized the majesty of the sovereign' but 'contrary to what the Greeks deduced from it, the rite did not imply that the king was considered a god'; Datames' proskynesis before a letter; the Ismenias ring-ruse and its ambiguity), p. 261 (the advance commitment to perform the rite, Nepos, Conon 3.3; the visitors' register and the prostration before the king's portrait, Philostratus, Vita Apollonii 1.37), p. 323 (Polyaenus VII.10: the nobles 'set foot on the ground, performed the proskynesis, and made him king of the Persians'), p. 277 (Athenaeus XIII.556b: the concubines' obeisance before the queen), p. 335 (proskynesis as the mark owed by a man of much lower birth to his better, mapping the social hierarchy) and p. 914 (research notes: the Bickerman–Frye reading of the relief against Gabelmann 1984; the Mari tablets' hierarchy of ambassadors, some exempt from bowing, others bowing two or three times, after J. M. Durand)

  4. ↑
    secondary Josef Wiesehöfer 1996
    Source details

    Reference. Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 AD, trans. A. Azodi (London, 1996), p. 35

    Evidence used. Strabo 15.3.20 on the persistence of the graded greeting: equals kiss, to those of lower rank 'they offer the cheek and in that way receive the kiss', and those of still lower rank merely make obeisance (proskynesis)

  5. ↑ a b c d e f
    secondary Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones 2013
    Source details

    Reference. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, King and Court in Ancient Persia 559 to 331 BCE (Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 71–72

    Evidence used. the etymology (pros 'towards', kyneō 'to kiss'); the gesture on the Treasury relief as 'kissing from the hands' once bowed; for the Greeks a religious act suitable only before a god, so that to perform it before a man undermined eleutheria (Xenophon, Hellenica 4.1.35); the practice at home in Assyrian and Egyptian court protocol ('looks very much at home'), with the biblical parallels 2 Samuel 14:33 and 1 Kings 1:15, 31; the misunderstanding of proskynesis as 'a veneration of divine monarchy (a claim never made by the Achaemenid kings themselves, nor understood that way by the Persians)'; and the Hellenistic sequel via L. R. Taylor's 1927 study of proskynesis and the ruler cult

  6. ↑ a b
    secondary Margaret Cool Root 1979
    Source details

    Reference. Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire (Acta Iranica 19; Leiden, 1979), pp. 238–239

    Evidence used. the four identifications of the bowing official (worshipper performing the Greek-described rite; chiliarch; chief treasurer; grand marshal of ceremonies), Root preferring the last in view of the panels' original Apadana location; his bow read as 'a respectful attitude adopted when addressing the king'; Hinz's suggestion that the hand guarded the king from the visitor's breath; Bickerman cited for the critique of the proskynesis reading of the relief

  7. ↑ a b
    secondary Elias J. Bickerman 1963
    Source details

    Reference. Elias J. Bickerman, 'À propos d'un passage de Chares de Mytilène', La Parola del Passato 18 (1963), pp. 241–255

    Evidence used. argues that the rite shown on the audience reliefs is precisely proskynesis, a social act of homage rather than religious worship

    Source caveat. Bickerman’s article was not consulted directly; its argument is reported through Briant 2002, Root 1979 and Dandamaev and Lukonin 1989.

  8. ↑
    secondary Emma Bridges 2015
    Source details

    Reference. Emma Bridges, Imagining Xerxes: Ancient Perspectives on a Persian King (London, 2015), p. 85 n. 30

    Evidence used. Sancisi-Weerdenburg (1993, pp. 130–131) on the absence of prostration before the king in Persian art, the sole exception the defeated rebel identified as Gaumāta on the Behistun relief; 'this has led scholars to suggest that proskynēsis did not involve such a gesture'

    Source caveat. Sancisi-Weerdenburg’s 1993 essay is cited here via Bridges (2015), p. 85 n. 30, and was not independently checked.

  9. ↑ a b
    primary Xenophon
    Source details

    Reference. Xenophon, Anabasis 1.6.10 (Orontas condemned: 'when the men who in former days were wont to do him homage saw him, they made their obeisance even then, although they knew that he was being led forth to death') and 3.2.9 (the sneeze-omen: the soldiers 'all with one impulse made obeisance to the god')

    Evidence used. trans. C. L. Brownson (Loeb, 1922), in the Delphi Complete Works

  10. ↑
    primary Aelian
    Source details

    Reference. Aelian, Varia Historia 1.21 (the Theban envoy Ismenias at the Persian court: 'The law of the Persians is, that he who cometh into the King's presence shall not speak with him till he hath first adored him')

    Evidence used. trans. Thomas Stanley (1665)

  11. ↑
    primary Plutarch
    Source details

    Reference. Plutarch, Themistocles 27 (the chiliarch Artabanus explains the Persian custom to Themistocles: 'to honour the king, and to worship him, as the image of the great preserver of the universe')

    Evidence used. trans. Dryden, spelling anglicised; the passage as quoted and analysed in Briant 2002, p. 222 (Them. 27.4–5)

  12. ↑
    primary Xenophon
    Source details

    Reference. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.3.14 (Cyrus's first procession: 'they all prostrated themselves before him, either because some had been instructed to begin this act of homage, or because they were overcome by the splendour of his presence … no one of the Persians had ever prostrated himself before Cyrus before')

    Evidence used. trans. W. Miller (Loeb, 1914), in the Delphi Complete Works; cf. Briant 2002, p. 190

  13. ↑
    secondary Christopher Tuplin 2010
    Source details

    Reference. Christopher Tuplin, 'All the King's Men', in J. Curtis & St J. Simpson (eds), The World of Achaemenid Persia (London, 2010), pp. 51–53

    Evidence used. the proskynesis to the condemned Orontas (Xenophon, Anabasis 1.6.10) and Gadatas's proskynesis to Cyrus (Cyropaedia 5.3.17), with a warning against reconstructing elaborate Achaemenid investiture ceremonial from such scenes, including from 'the interplay of proskynesis and kiss' in Alexander's trial introduction of the rite

  14. ↑
    primary Aeschylus
    Source details

    Reference. Aeschylus, Persians 150–152 (the chorus of Persian elders greeting the arrival of the queen mother, Atossa: 'To her I make lowly obeisance')

    Evidence used. trans. H. Weir Smyth (Loeb Classical Library, 1922)

  15. ↑
    primary The Book of Esther 3:2
    Source details

    Reference. The Book of Esther 3:2 (KJV)

    Evidence used. the king's servants at the gate bow and reverence Haman, 'for the king had so commanded concerning him', while Mordecai alone refuses

  16. ↑
    secondary Benedikt Eckhardt 2017
    Source details

    Reference. Benedikt Eckhardt, 'Memories of Persian Rule: Constructing History and Ideology in Hasmonean Judea', in R. Strootman & M. J. Versluys (eds), Persianism in Antiquity (Stuttgart, 2017), pp. 259–260

    Evidence used. the Book of Esther's court driven by proskynesis; Mordecai's refusal before Haman religiously motivated while the narrative itself gives no cultic connotation to the act; 'the supposed worship of Persian kings through proskynesis stands in the background', a Greek misconception (with Rollinger 2011)

  17. ↑ a b c d
    primary Plutarch
    Source details

    Reference. Plutarch, Artaxerxes 22.8 (Ismenias 'threw his ring down on the ground in front of him, and then stooped and picked it up, thus giving men to think that he was making the obeisance'), Artaxerxes 23.5 (the king's prayer for Atossa, 'making his obeisance and clutching the earth before this goddess as he did before no other'), and Alexander 54.4–6 (Chares of Mytilene's account of the banquet: each guest 'rose up so as to face the household shrine, and when he had drunk, first made obeisance to Alexander, then kissed him, and then resumed his place upon the couch'; Demetrius: 'O King, do not accept his kiss, for he alone has not done thee obeisance'; Callisthenes: 'Well, then, I'll go away the poorer by a kiss')

    Evidence used. trans. B. Perrin (Loeb)

  18. ↑
    secondary Margaret C. Miller 1997
    Source details

    Reference. Margaret C. Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge, 1997), p. 126

    Evidence used. the Persepolis reliefs suggesting a slightly bent stance with the hand before the mouth; the notoriety of proskynesis among Greeks 'stems from their wilful misunderstanding' and its use as touchstone and symbol of the opposition free Greek : enslaved barbarian

  19. ↑
    secondary Edith Hall 1989
    Source details

    Reference. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford, 1989), ch. 2

    Evidence used. proskynesis on the Athenian stage from Aeschylus's Persae onward as a signifier of oriental servility, the performance of the gesture suffused by oriental colouring

  20. ↑
    secondary Pierre Briant 2015
    Source details

    Reference. Pierre Briant, Darius in the Shadow of Alexander, trans. J. M. Todd (Cambridge, MA, 2015)

    Evidence used. Curtius 3.12.17: the captive Persian princesses perform proskynesis suo more ('according to their own custom') before Hephaestion, mistaking him for Alexander; Curtius's dossier of Persian patrio more customs

  21. ↑ a b c d e
    primary Arrian
    Source details

    Reference. Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander 4.10–12 (Alexander's attempt to introduce proskynesis in 327 BCE; the report that he 'wished men to prostrate themselves before him as to a god'; Callisthenes' speech distinguishing the honours due to men from those due to gods, with prostration as 'the greatest distinction', and his aetiology tracing the custom to Cyrus son of Cambyses; the Persians who 'arose in due order and prostrated their bodies before him'; Leonnatus mocking a Persian's awkward bow; the divergent accounts of Callisthenes' death, Aristobulus against Ptolemy, at 4.14)

    Evidence used. trans. E. J. Chinnock (London, 1884), pp. 223–229, 234

  22. ↑ a b c
    secondary E. Badian 1985
    Source details

    Reference. E. Badian, 'Alexander in Iran', in I. Gershevitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 2 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 457–458

    Evidence used. the deification frame of the proskynesis affair possibly ex post facto, the set-piece debate 'not, of course, a genuine document'; Chares' apologetic account as evidence something real was stopped; 'however hedged about with divinity, an Achaemenid king could not himself be a god'; 'Alexander gave up and never required proskynesis of Greeks and Macedonians'; 'the sources will never permit us to give a clear description and evaluation of the proskynesis affair'; the strain of the dual Macedonian–Persian kingship

  23. ↑
    secondary Janett Morgan 2016
    Source details

    Reference. Janett Morgan, Greek Perspectives on the Achaemenid Empire: Persia through the Looking Glass (Edinburgh, 2016), p. 287

    Evidence used. the two contrasting versions of the proskynesis 'request'; Lane Fox (2007) on both occasions being social, not religious; Bowden (2013) suggesting the tale of the 'experiment' 'is an invention of later tradition'; the caution that Alexander's behaviour is viewed through Roman eyes

  24. ↑
    secondary Muhammad A. Dandamaev & Vladimir G. Lukonin 1989
    Source details

    Reference. Muhammad A. Dandamaev & Vladimir G. Lukonin, The Culture and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 118–119 ('Before appealing to the king, it was necessary to bow down to the earth (proskynesis), but the Achaemenid kings were not considered to be gods'; 'The deification of kings was alien to the Persians'; the Greek statements, Aeschylus's 'gods of the Persians', Plutarch, and Curtius Rufus 8.5.11 on the Persians revering their kings as gods, dismissed as 'a blatant Hellenization') and p. 346 (Bickerman 'showed that the proskynesis was a greeting, the meaning of which the Greeks did not understand and, consequently, distorted')

  25. ↑
    secondary Amélie Kuhrt 2007
    Source details

    Reference. Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London, 2007), p. 539

    Evidence used. commentary on the audience protocol: the king never a god, the divine language Plutarch's gloss; the gesture preceding the ceremonial kiss varying with the rank of the person received; 'proskynesis itself does not mean physical prostration'; Ismenias obliged to comply however the tale excused him

  26. ↑ a b
    secondary Mary Boyce & Frantz Grenet 1991
    Source details

    Reference. Mary Boyce & Frantz Grenet, A History of Zoroastrianism, Volume Three: Zoroastrianism under Macedonian and Roman Rule (Leiden, 1991), p. 286 (Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea in Pontus in the fourth century, who 'appears to have adopted elements of Persian ceremonial', including demanding the proskynesis) and p. 39 (Tiridates of Armenia before Nero, 66 CE: 'Master, I am the descendant of Arsaces, brother of the kings Vologesus and Pacorus, and thy slave. And I have come to thee, my god, to kneel (proskynēsai) to you as I do to Mithra', Cassius Dio LXII.5.2 as cited there)

  27. ↑
    secondary Muhammad A. Dandamayev 1993 ↗
    Source details

    Reference. Muhammad A. Dandamayev, 'COURTS AND COURTIERS i. In the Median and Achaemenid periods', Encyclopaedia Iranica VI/4 (1993), pp. 356–359

    Evidence used. the audience protocol, with proskynesis ('it was necessary to prostrate oneself as a sign of respect', citing Bickerman) required before addressing the king; the usher who presents visitors. No dedicated Iranica article on proskynesis exists; this is the nearest treatment.

Cite this entry

“Proskynesis”, in Achaemenica: An Encyclopaedia of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (entry proskynesis), https://achaemenica.org/articles/proskynesis, version of 2026-07-20.

Show BibTeX and RIS
@misc{achaemenica-proskynesis,
  author       = {{Studio Daric}},
  title        = {Proskynesis},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://achaemenica.org/articles/proskynesis}},
  note         = {Achaemenica: An Encyclopaedia of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Version of 2026-07-20}
}
TY  - ELEC
AU  - Studio Daric
TI  - Proskynesis
T2  - Achaemenica: An Encyclopaedia of the Achaemenid Persian Empire
PB  - Studio Daric
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/20
UR  - https://achaemenica.org/articles/proskynesis
ER  -

The article's metadata is embedded on the page, so Zotero, Mendeley and other reference managers detect it automatically.

Corrections and suggestions

Every entry is checked against its sources, but errors and omissions are always possible. If you have found an inaccuracy, or can suggest an improvement, please email a correction. Each note is read and checked against the sources before any change is made.

The King of Kings · The Accession of Darius (522 BCE) · Persepolis · Herodotus, The Histories · Xenophon · Ctesias, The Persica · Aeschylus, Persae (The Persians) · Xerxes I · Darius I · Ahura Mazdā · The Sources & How We Know

Last updated 2026-07-20.

Entry metadata
Also known as
proskynein, obeisance, prostration, adoration, προσκύνησις
Certainty
secure how securely the subject and its dating rest on the surviving evidence