Religion & the Lie: the Achaemenid religious world

The Achaemenids left no scripture and no theology of their own; what they believed must be pieced together from sources that pull in different directions. Any honest reconstruction must keep three registers distinct: how much is known, how much is inferred, and how much is genuinely disputed.

The evidence is of four kinds, and none of it was made to answer modern questions. The kings' own inscriptions name Ahura Mazdā as the giver of kingship and the enemy of the Lie, but they are proclamations of power, and they are silent on much a historian would most like to know. Albert de Jong states the limit exactly: "None of the royal Achaemenid inscriptions is actually about religion, but religious language is a very prominent part of many of these royal declarations".^[1] The Greek writers (Herodotus above all, then Xenophon, Strabo, Plutarch and a fragment of Aristotle) are curious and often well informed, but they are outsiders describing rites they did not share and rendering Persian gods under Greek names. The Avesta, the scripture of later Zoroastrianism, preserves genuinely ancient Iranian material but was written down centuries after the Achaemenids fell and cannot simply be read back onto them. The fourth kind is the newest and has changed the field most: the administrative tablets from Persepolis, records of offerings issued for Ahura Mazdā and for Elamite and Iranian gods side by side. They answer no doctrinal question directly, but they are the one witness with nothing to prove.^[2]

The weight given to each kind of evidence has shifted with each generation of scholarship.

At the centre stands Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord, whom the royal inscriptions invoke as creator of earth, sky and man, and as the god who made the king. His creation is ordered by arta (Avestan aša), the truth or right arrangement of all things, and it is besieged by the drauga, the Lie: falsehood, chaos, disloyalty. This dualism of Truth and Lie is the moral and political axis of the whole system. One detail sharpens the picture: the abstract word arta, "truth", occurs in only one Old Persian inscription, whereas it is the vocabulary of the Lie (drauga, the "lie-follower", the province that "became rebellious") that saturates the royal texts. The kings define their order most vividly by its enemy.^[3]

What the king feared for his country, he named in threes. At Persepolis Darius prays: "May Auramazda bring me aid, together with all the gods; and may Auramazda protect this country from the army (of the enemy), from famine, from the lie!"^[4] Enemy army, famine, Lie: war, want and falsehood stand together as the three assaults on the good order, and the third is treated as no less real than the other two. On his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam the same theology becomes a personal profession: "By the favour of Auramazda I am of such a kind that I am a friend to what is right, I am no friend to what is wrong."^[5] Above the king on the reliefs floats the figure in the winged ring, the sign of divine sanction; whether it is Ahura Mazdā, the royal glory (khvarnah), or the king's guardian spirit is one of the field's genuinely open questions (see the winged symbol).^[6]

The relation between god and king ran in both directions, and the traffic left marks on the god. The inscriptions make royal rule the earthly repetition of the god's creative work: Ahura Mazdā set the world in order, and the king, by his favour, sets the empire in order. De Jong draws out the consequence: the kings claimed to repeat the work of their god, and over time the god came instead to be imagined in the likeness of the earthly kings.^[1] The god himself, his names, his image and his archive are examined in full under Ahura Mazdā; the concept of Truth under arta; the Lie's vocabulary, personification and political theology under the drauga. Together the three lock into a single scheme: a god who creates, an order that his creation keeps, and an anti-order that must be fought wherever it appears, in a rebel province or in a courtier's false word.

The Behistun inscription, Darius's great monument of about 520 BCE, shows the system doing political work. Nine kings rise against him in a single year; the inscription does not treat them as nine political events but as one moral one:

These (are) the countries which became rebellious. The Lie made them rebellious, because these (men) lied to the people. After that Auramazda gave them into my hand; as was my desire, so I did unto them.

Darius I, DB §54, trans. Kuhrt^[7]

Each pretender "lied"; each province the Lie "made rebellious". Rebellion is treated not as resistance but as contagion. The lesson is then made explicit for his successors: "You, who shall be king hereafter, be firmly on your guard against the Lie; the man who shall be a follower of the Lie - punish him well, if you think: 'May my country be secure!'"^[7] The Lie-follower (draujana) is the named enemy of the state, and punishing him is presented as a condition of the country's safety.

The same text turns the theology inward. Darius explains why the god chose him: "because I was not disloyal, I was not a follower of the Lie ... Neither to the powerless nor to the powerful did I do wrong."^[7] Divine aid is earned by truthfulness; kingship is the wage of not lying. And at the end of the fifth column, worship itself becomes the measure of loyalty. Of a further Elamite revolt Darius says: "Those Elamites were disloyal, and by them Auramazda was not worshipped. I worshipped Auramazda. By the favour of Auramazda, as (was) my desire, so I treated them", adding, "Whosoever shall worship Auramazda, his shall be the prayer, both living and dead."^[7] It is the closest the corpus comes to a confessional test, and it points forward to the daiva inscription of the next reign.

On the tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam the political creed becomes a moral self-portrait, duplicated almost word for word for Xerxes (XPl). "What is right, that is my wish. I am no friend of the man who is a follower of the Lie", the king declares, and then turns to his own temper: "I am not hot-tempered. When I feel anger rising, I keep that under control by my thinking power. I control firmly my impulses."^[5] Justice is procedural as well as personal: "What a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until I have heard testimony from both parties."^[5] The ideal king of the inscriptions is at once pious and self-governed: truthful, deliberate, deaf to slander.

Herodotus, writing from outside and a generation later, mirrors the same ethic at the level of society. "Their sons are carefully instructed from their fifth to their twentieth year, in three things alone, — to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth", he reports, and again: "The most disgraceful thing in the world, they think, is to tell a lie; the next worst, to owe a debt: because, among other reasons, the debtor is obliged to tell lies."^[8] The Greek report and the Persian self-presentation agree closely, though the agreement should be read with care: Herodotus may be reflecting the empire's own propaganda about itself as much as observed behaviour. In his account of the conspiracy against the magus, though, it is Darius who argues that men lie or tell the truth for the same end, advantage, and that a needful lie is no sin (Histories 3.72). The great enemy of the Lie, in the Greek telling, reasons like a practised liar; the anecdote is usually taken as Greek invention in Persian dress, but it shows how visible, and how usable, the Persian cult of truth was to outsiders.^[8]

Worship was mediated by the Magi, the hereditary priestly class the Greeks took for a Median tribe. A Persian, Herodotus says, raises no image, temple or altar, but goes up to a clean high place and calls on the god: "The Persians have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly."^[8] Sacrifice was plain to the point of austerity, and no offering could be made without a priest: "When all is ready, one of the Magi comes forward and chants a hymn, which they say recounts the origin of the gods. It is not lawful to offer sacrifice unless there is a Magus present."^[8] Even prayer was communal rather than private: "The sacrificer is not allowed to pray for blessings on himself alone, but he prays for the welfare of the king, and of the whole Persian people, among whom he is of necessity included."^[8]

The Magi tended the sacred fire, the purest of the creations and the visible focus of worship, guarding it from the pollution of the breath and handling the barsom, the sacred bundle of rods that the gold plaques of the Oxus Treasure show in a worshipper's hands (see the barsom plaque). The fire was kept in the open, on free-standing stone fire-holders like those excavated at Pasargadae, not in the enclosed fire-temple with its ever-burning consecrated flame, which is a later, Sasanian institution; to picture the Achaemenids worshipping in fire-temples is one of the commonest anachronisms in accounts of the reign. The Magi also read omens for the king, presided over oaths, and conducted the distinctive Iranian treatment of the dead. Herodotus reports it: "It is said that the body of a male Persian is never buried, until it has been torn either by a dog or a bird of prey. That the Magi have this custom is beyond a doubt."^[8] Exposure kept the corpse, the most polluting of things, from defiling earth and fire; the same logic of purity protected water ("They never defile a river with the secretions of their bodies, nor even wash their hands in one") and armed the priests against the creatures of the Lie: "The Magi, on the contrary, kill animals of all kinds with their own hands, excepting dogs and men."^[8] Killing snakes and ants was clergy work because those creatures belonged to the wrong side of the cosmic war.

The Greek portrait, for all its distance, holds up well against the documents. The Persepolis tablets record priests, Iranian and Elamite alike, drawing rations to perform offerings across Persis, exactly the priestly monopoly of rite that Herodotus describes from the outside; there is, as de Jong notes of the archive, evidence for Elamite religious specialists and for Iranian ones side by side.^[1]

The Persepolis Fortification tablets, thousands of Elamite administrative records from the two decades around 500 BCE, are the only evidence that shows Persian religion being paid for rather than proclaimed. Officials issue grain, wine, beer and animals for the cult; named beneficiaries include Ahura Mazdā, but also Humban, the old royal god of Elam, and a crowd of lesser Iranian and Elamite figures; the single commonest cultic outlay, the lan ceremony, was not the exclusive rite of any single god. Wouter Henkelman, the archive's leading interpreter, reads the whole dossier as the product of a long Elamite-Iranian fusion: what the tablets document is "a religious landscape inhabited by gods of both Iranian and Elamite descent, a divine world that had become truly 'Persian'".^[9]

The proportions tell their own story. Texts recording offerings for Humban outnumber those for Ahura Mazdā, and in the one tablet where the two gods share an allocation, PF 0339, the Elamite god receives twenty quarts of wine to the Wise Lord's seven.^[9] Whatever the inscriptions proclaim, the crown's own storehouses fed a pantheon. De Jong draws the conclusion for imperial history:

the evidence for this support and this maintenance is incontrovertible: a not negligible portion of the revenue of the central areas of the Achaemenid Empire went to ritual acts in honor of a wide assortment of deities, many of them Elamite

de Jong, 'Religion at the Achaemenid Court', 2021^[1]

The discrepancy between archive and inscription is real, but it is a discrepancy of genre rather than a contradiction: the inscriptions present the king's god to the world, the tablets pay the region's gods their customary due, and both were policy. Darius's own formula at Behistun concedes the plurality, crediting his victories to Auramazda "and the other gods who are".^[7]

Ahura Mazdā never stood alone even in the royal texts. Behind the formulas "with all the gods" and "the other gods who are" stood old Iranian divinities the inscriptions do not name for over a century: above all Mithra, guardian of covenant and oath, under whose eye agreements were sworn and treaties kept, and Anāhitā, the goddess of the waters. Herodotus already knew a Persian "Mitra", though he mistook the name for a goddess and equated her with the Greek Aphrodite, a slip that shows how easily the Greek grid distorted Iranian names.^[8] Only under Artaxerxes II (404–359 BCE) do Mithra and Anāhitā enter the royal inscriptions beside Ahura Mazdā, a change once read as syncretic decline and now generally read as old worship finally surfacing in the epigraphic record.^[3] What the change under Artaxerxes II means is a question of its own (see Mithra and Anāhitā); the sign that hovers over the king on every major relief, under the winged symbol.

The Achaemenid state did not impose the worship of Ahura Mazdā on its subjects; it did something more useful, and stranger to modern eyes. In each conquered land the king stepped into the vacant role of the native cult's royal patron. The Cyrus Cylinder presents the conquest of Babylon entirely in Marduk's voice: the god "sought a just ruler to suit his heart, he took him by the hand: Cyrus, king of Anshan", and the conqueror answers in kind, restoring the displaced gods of the region: "the gods who dwelt there I returned to their home and let them move into an eternal dwelling. All their people I collected and brought them back to their homes."^[10] In the Hebrew Bible the same king is Yahweh's anointed, charged to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem (Isaiah 45; Ezra 1); in Egypt, Cambyses II took pharaonic titles after the conquest of 525 BCE, and Darius did likewise; both presented themselves as patrons of the gods of the land.^[2]

This was an imperial henotheism rather than a strict monotheism, and modern praise of it as "tolerance" needs careful handling. Boyce's verdict is deliberately cool: "Persian tolerance of 'anarya' religions appears to have been the beneficent aspect of a fundamental indifference to them, tempered by pragmatism".^[11] The empire protected what was orderly and useful and punished sanctuaries as it punished cities, for rebellion, not for doctrine. The Elephantine papyri show the machinery at ground level: when Egyptian priests of Khnum, allied with a corrupt governor, destroyed the temple of Yahu kept by a Judaean garrison in Egypt, the community petitioned the Persian authorities for years, begging the governor of Judah to "send a letter to them about the temple of Yahu the god, that it be rebuilt at Elephantine fortress as it was earlier", and eventually recovered its sanctuary, minus the animal sacrifice that had offended its neighbours.^[12] Imperial religious policy, seen from below, was not a charter of rights but patronage, paperwork and the balancing of local rivalries; the popular image of Cyrus as the first champion of religious liberty is a modern construction on ancient diplomatic convention, weighed in full under the Cyrus Cylinder.

The one apparent exception to the policy is the daiva inscription of Xerxes (XPh), found in copies at Persepolis and Pasargadae. Among his countries, Xerxes says, was one in turmoil, and one where false gods were served:

Afterwards by the favour of Auramazda I destroyed that place of the daivas, and I gave orders: 'The daivas shall not be worshipped any longer!' Wherever formerly the daivas have been worshipped, there I worshipped Auramazda at the proper time and with the proper ceremony.

Xerxes I, XPh §4b, trans. Kuhrt^[13]

The text then generalises the demand with the corpus's only explicit promise about the afterlife: "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."^[13]

What event, if any, lies behind this is disputed, and the text withholds the one fact that would decide it: it never says where the daiva-sanctuary stood. Boyce read it as an internal Iranian affair; on her reading "the natural interpretation of Xerxes' words is that, as a Zoroastrian, he was recording the destruction of an Iranian sanctuary devoted to the worship of those warlike beings" the tradition condemned as demons.^[11] Kellens and Herrenschmidt took the passage as formulaic, a timeless statement of the king against disorder that need record no single event. The once-standard historical readings, which identified the sanctuary with the temples of Babylon and made Xerxes the destroyer of Esagila, have collapsed: the cuneiform evidence shows no destruction, and the daiva inscription, as the most recent reassessment puts it, "is not usually read historiographically anymore".^[14] The old picture of Xerxes the intolerant, which nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship built from this text and Greek rumour together, has been dismantled; what remains is a royal declaration whose theology is clear and whose history is not.^[6]

If the inscriptions are read not for doctrine but for what they justify, Achaemenid religion appears as one of antiquity's most complete imperial ideologies. Bruce Lincoln has pressed this reading furthest: on his account "Achaemenian Persia perceived itself as God's chosen instrument for the project of world salvation and, as such, supreme benefactor of the peoples it conquered".^[15] Conquest becomes rescue; the fragmented world is gathered back toward the wholeness the Wise Lord gave it at creation. Even the walled gardens the kings planted across the empire, the paridaida from which the word "paradise" descends, belong to the programme, in Lincoln's phrase "as models of the empire they were more actively laboring to create and prefigurations of what the world would be when their work was fully accomplished".^[15] The scheme could stretch to justify anything: when Darius invaded Scythia, whose king had never rebelled and never lied, the scribes coined a new charge, that the Scythians were "vulnerable to the Lie", corrupted in prospect if not yet in deed.^[15]

The reading has been influential, and its limits have been marked out in review: it works from the royal proclamations, which are the voice of the palace, and the lived religion of the tablets and the villages answers to no such tidy system.^[16] Both points stand together. The ideology was real, coherent and durable; it was also, precisely, an ideology, and the archive is the standing reminder that it never described everything Persians did with their gods.

Were the Achaemenid kings Zoroastrians? They worship the Wise Lord of Zarathustra's hymns; they make Truth against the Lie the heart of their ideology; their priests are the Magi who would carry the later Zoroastrian tradition. Yet no king ever names the prophet, and the inscriptions show no unambiguously Gāthic doctrine.

The maximal case is Boyce's: continuity all the way down, argued from the theophoric names in the royal family (Vištāspa, Atossa), from the fire-holders by Cyrus's tomb, from the funerary practice at Naqsh-e Rostam, and from the liturgical conservatism of the later faith. She presses it back to the founder of the empire himself, finding in the Persian colouring of Second Isaiah "good evidence that the Persian king was not only a believer, but one committed to establishing the faith throughout his realms".^[11] The sceptical case is above all Kellens's: the question as traditionally posed assumes that sixth-century Zoroastrianism is a known quantity against which the kings can be measured, and it is not; Old Avestan Mazdaism, he observes, is the less securely known of the two.^[17] The old diagnostic tests (only Ahura Mazdā worshipped, no blood sacrifice, no other cults funded) he calls "obviously absurd" once the Fortification archive is admitted, since by those tests the communities of the Avesta itself would fail; and the categories are anachronistic in any case, for "the Achaemenids could say 'Ahura Mazdā is a great god' or 'I made a sacrifice to Ahura Mazdā' but not 'I am a Mazdean' or 'I am a Zoroastrian.'"^[18] Between the two poles, de Jong's formulation of 1997 marked where a broad middle then stood: "The question, it seems, is not whether the Achaemenians were Zoroastrians ... but what such a proposition implies for the writing of the history of that faith."^[19]

Since then the balance has moved toward dissolving the question rather than answering it: the archive has replaced the binary with a spectrum of Iranian and Elamite practice, and the prudent modern term is Mazdaean, devoted to Ahura Mazdā within the old Iranian religious world from which Zoroastrianism grew, leaving the exact relation to the Gāthic reform open. A point of doctrine is often got wrong on the way: in the Gāthās the two primal Spirits are twins, and the received tradition identifies Ahura Mazdā with the Bounteous Spirit against the uncreated Angra Mainyu; the reading that makes the Wise Lord the father of both good and evil is a nineteenth-century interpretation, Martin Haug's, not the tradition.^[6] What would settle the larger question is known and absent: a royal text naming Zarathustra, or an Avestan quotation in a dated Achaemenid document. Until one surfaces, the honest answer is a well-defined uncertainty. The full staging of the debate, scholar by scholar, is given under Ahura Mazdā; the prophet, his date and his hymns under Zarathustra.

The whole system has a founding case, and it is the plainest instance in the record of religion pressed into the service of power: the accession of Darius in 522 BCE. Darius killed a king he declared an impostor: a magus, Gaumāta, who had "lied to the people" by claiming to be the dead prince Bardiya. He cast the whole crisis, and the year of revolts that followed, as the victory of the Truth over the Lie, and carved the verdict into the cliff at Behistun beneath the winged figure of his god. Because that framing is precisely what justifies his own seizure of a throne he had no clear right to, it has been doubted since antiquity: a serious strand of scholarship holds that the man Darius killed was the real Bardiya, and the lying magus a fiction, so that the great monument against the Lie is itself the Lie.

The case reaches beyond the reign because it shows what the theology was for. Truth against the Lie gave Darius a language in which a contested seizure of power could be told as the defence of the god's own order, and every later use of the system, the tomb ethic, the daiva inscription, the loyalty-test of worship, descends from that first application. The religion of arta and the drauga is, at its origin, also a political weapon; whether its founding document tells the truth is weighed in full under the accession of Darius.