The Winged Symbol (the figure in the winged ring)

The symbol takes two related forms. The simpler is a plain winged disc or ring, wings spread wide, sometimes with a tail and downward-curling volutes below. The fuller adds a human figure: a robed, bearded man from the waist up, rising out of the ring.^[1] His near hand is raised palm-outward, in a gesture usually read as blessing or salutation; his far hand holds a smaller ring, often taken as a sign of investiture or covenant, the round token the gods are shown handing to kings in later Iranian art. Figure and disc are one composite. The ring becomes the man's waist, the wings his outstretched arms of feathers.

His crown is not everywhere the same. At Behistun he wears the high cylindrical crown of Mesopotamian gods, adorned with horns and an eight-rayed star, which Mary Boyce calls "both ancient symbols of divinity".^[2] On the tomb of Darius the tall archaic crown has gone, and the figure wears a low crown like the king's own. The two forms of the sign are not scattered at random across the monuments. The figure in the ring is prominent at Behistun, above Darius as he treads on the prostrate Gaumāta and faces the roped line of nine captured rebels, and over each king on the tomb façades at Naqsh-e Rostam; but on the securely dated reliefs of Darius's own Persepolis it is the plain winged disc, not the figure, that appears, set on the royal canopy over the enthroned king and flanked by lions, bulls and sphinxes as an object of veneration.^[2] The figure within the ring enters the Persepolis reliefs on later work, of Xerxes and after. Mark Garrison's study of the Persepolis seal images makes the point exactly: the figure in the winged ring "is conspicuous in the reliefs at Bīsotūn and Naqš-e Rostam", yet "it cannot be documented in any surviving relief from Persepolis dated to the time of Darius I".^[3] Wherever either form appears, it hovers above a royal scene and never stands alone. It is a caption of legitimacy written in a picture rather than in words.

The motif is not native to Persia; it is the Persian recension of a very old Near-Eastern royal sign. Its remotest ancestor is the Egyptian winged sun-disc, the falcon-god Horus of Behdet spread above the pharaoh and above temple doorways as a mark of solar protection and kingship, current for millennia before the Persians. The Mesopotamian world took up the winged disc and, in Assyria, set within it a human figure: a god shown from the waist up, often drawing a bow, riding above the king in battle, usually read as the great Assyrian god Aššur, though the sun-god Šamaš is sometimes preferred.^[4] Boyce traced the chain in detail, from Egypt, where the falcon-disk "belonged to Horus", to Assyria, where the crowned and bearded figure with the bow appears within the circle from the ninth century, and on to Urartu "in a form closely resembling that of the Behistun monument", whence the Medes and then the Achaemenids most likely took it over.^[2] Margaret Cool Root, working from the Assyrian side, is equally plain that the Achaemenid rendering "stems directly from neo-Assyrian iconography", where the god within the disc is "apparently Assur (though never actually labeled)".^[5]

The borrowing is not in doubt; what the Persians meant by the figure they borrowed is the whole question, for a form can be adopted and its sense recast. One change of detail already signals a change of sense: "in all known Iranian examples the figure in the winged circle holds the ring of divinity, instead of the bow of Assyrian and Urartian tradition."^[2] The Assyrian god fights for the king; the Persian figure lays the bow aside, blesses, and holds out the ring. That is as far as the pedigree carries. It fixes the ancestry of the shape and leaves the Persian meaning open.

The natural first reading, and the one that dominated scholarship into the twentieth century, was that the figure is Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord, the one god the inscriptions name, shown hovering above his king exactly as Aššur hovers above the Assyrian. Erich Schmidt's excavation reports simply call it "the symbol of Ahuramazda", derived from the Aššur emblem and ultimately from the Egyptian winged disk.^[6] On this view the image is a portrait of the supreme god granting and guaranteeing the kingship, a visual counterpart to the words carved beneath it: "By the favour of Auramazda, I am king; Auramazda bestowed kingship upon me."^[7]

The reading is old and long dominant, but from the 1970s a set of objections told against it, theological as much as visual. The Achaemenid god had, so far as the direct evidence goes, no cult-image: Boyce states flatly that "no representations of Ahuramazda are recorded in the early Achaemenid period",^[8] and the outsider Herodotus reports that the Persians of his day raised no statues, temples or altars to their gods at all.^[9] Sharper still is an argument from the worship scenes themselves. On the tombs the king is shown at prayer, and it is awkward, on the god-reading, to have him praying to a figure in the sky crowned and dressed as his own double. Boyce pressed exactly this, the figure being "sometimes, in both gesture and apparel... the mirror-image of the king beneath", which she judged made the supreme-God identification "wholly improbable".^[2] These objections drove the search for another name.

The most influential rival holds that the figure represents not the god but the royal xᵛarǝnah (Avestan xᵛarǝnah-, Median farnah, Middle Persian farr), the divine glory or god-given fortune that alights upon the legitimate king and forsakes the unworthy one. The glory is a real and central idea of Iranian kingship, not a modern construct. It is celebrated in its own Avestan hymn, the Zamyād Yašt (Yašt 19), as the fiery, luminous force that passes from holder to holder and three times abandons the sinning king Yima, a hereditary charisma that can nonetheless be lost.^[10] That is precisely the theology a king would wish shown above his head: a glory that says what the inscriptions say, that the king is invested with a heaven-sent fortune, without making an idol of the aniconic god.

The reading was argued in detail by A. Sh. Shahbazi, whose paired studies of the 1970s first dismantled the older identifications and then gave the glory-reading its fullest statement.^[11] Boyce adopted it without hedging, writing that the winged symbol with male figure, "formerly regarded by European scholars as his [Ahura Mazdā's], has been shown to represent the royal xᵛarǝnah."^[8] On this account the mirror-likeness to the king is the whole point, for a man's own glory should look like him; and the two forms of the sign, it is suggested, carry different senses, the plain winged disk standing for the xᵛarǝnah "accessible to all men, while the figure in the circle is the royal khvarenah, which accompanies each ruler and attaches itself to a whole dynasty through the sacred power of royal blood."^[2] The glory was indeed imagined as a spirit-counterpart of the king: a Sogdian tale of much later date has a thief address a supposedly dead Caesar in his coffin, "Fear not, I am your Farn!", and in the Avesta the xᵛarǝnah forsakes Yima "in the shape of the falcon-bird", the very falcon-disk the sign descends from.^[2] The etymology is often adduced too, xᵛarǝnah being linked by many with hvar, "sun", so that a falcon sun-disk would be a fitting emblem for it.

On Darius's tomb, where the figure wears the king's own low crown rather than the horned crown of Behistun, Boyce reads it as the king's "own khvarenah", carrying a double sense, in her Achaemenid Religion article "a symbol of both the royal xᵛarǝnah and the sun", the old Akkadian moon-disc set at its side.^[2][12] Because Zoroastrian devotion allows prayer at a terrestrial fire or turned toward sun or moon, the tableau then shows Darius "portrayed at prayer according to the widest Zoroastrian prescriptions", the fire before him, the heavenly lights above, the sign of his fortune between.^[12]

The glory-reading has not swept the god away. The identification with Ahura Mazdā is still defended in full dress by Root, in the standard study of Achaemenid royal iconography, who holds that the figure "most probably represents Ahuramazda", "a widely accepted interpretation, and the one which I follow".^[5] Her case answers the two objections that drove scholars off the god. The aniconism argument, she contends, assumes that the early Persians already observed the later Zoroastrian prohibition of divine images, an assumption "not borne out by the Achaemenid textual sources themselves"; and Herodotus is no safe witness against the monuments, for "I do not believe that we can trust Herodotus' reliability on this point."^[5] The mirror-likeness of god and king, far from telling against the identification, expresses a theology of what Root calls "fluid reciprocity", in which each is portrayed in the other's image, the king ruling only by the god's favour and the god's worship serving to acknowledge the king.^[5]

Root turned the same crown-evidence that anchors the glory-reading against a further candidate. Peter Calmeyer had proposed that the figure is the daimon of a royal ancestor, its crown individualised to identify a particular dead king; but on the Behistun relief, Root observes, the figure wears a horned polos and no royal crown at all, so it cannot be the crowned spirit of a named predecessor.^[5] Against the wealth of inscriptions that name Ahura Mazdā over and over, and the silence of the texts on any worship of dead kings, she finds the god the more economical reading.

Behind the two chief camps stand further candidates, each with something to explain and something it cannot. The oldest, favoured especially in the Parsi scholarly tradition, takes the figure for the king's own fravashi, the pre-existent guardian spirit of Zoroastrian belief. It accounts for the resemblance to the king, since the fravashi is the king, in spirit, and it lends the modern emblem its very name. But the fravashi is nowhere named in the Achaemenid record, and Boyce objected that the older tradition imagined it as female, whereas the figure is invariably male.^[2] A related reading makes the sign a dynastic emblem, the badge of the royal house rather than of an abstract quality (so P. Jamzadeh); Calmeyer's royal-ancestor daimon is a version of the same instinct, and both he and Shahbazi at one point suggested that the imposing Behistun figure might be the khvarenah of Achaemenes, the ancestral glory that validated Darius's seizure of the throne.^[13][2]

The glory-reading has a critic at the centre of the field. Gherardo Gnoli, in the authoritative article on the glory itself, enters a deflationary caveat: the xᵛarǝnah "is not mentioned in the Achaemenid inscriptions", whose focus is the investiture of the king "by the favour of Ahura Mazdā"; and among the theories of the glory's iconography, he judges, "not all... are convincing, for example, association with the winged sun disk."^[14] The very reading many take for settled, then, rests for its sharpest critic on a concept the royal texts never name.

The richest new body of evidence has widened the question rather than closed it. The seal images on the Persepolis administrative tablets, the largest and humblest corpus of religious imagery from the Persian heartland itself, were catalogued by Garrison, and they cut against any confident naming of the figure. The winged sign in both its forms is, he writes, "the most-often discussed, and most perplexing, symbol in the whole of Achaemenid art", and "attempts at identifying it are now legend."^[3] Against the impression given by the monumental reliefs, the figure is not even common in the glyptic: "there are relatively few scenes that show the figure in the winged ring/disk."^[3] Weighing the evidence of his own archive, Garrison declines to fix a name: "we are still unable to state categorically that the emblem represents the god Auramazdā."^[3] He resists even the mechanical decoding of the image, suggesting that the primary force of such seals lay less in an equation of winged disk with a named god than in "its very distinctive, and blatant, Assyrianizing" flavour, the sign advertising a borrowed imperial grandeur rather than spelling out a single referent.^[3]

The glyptic also unsettles one of the god-camp's own footings. The mass of divine and numinous figures on the seals, Garrison notes, "may then ultimately put to rest the Herodotean notion of the dearth of representations of deities" among the Persians, which removes the aniconism objection from the god-reading but equally removes the ground for privileging Ahura Mazdā over the crowded pantheon the tablets attest.^[3] The editors of the volume in which he set out the argument summarised it in the terms the field increasingly adopts: Garrison prefers to speak of "the winged symbol", with or without the anthropomorphic figure, a usage that forbids a straightforward reading as Ahura Mazdā while underlining the sign's strong royal associations.^[15] Even so, the older identification has not been dislodged: "the bulk of scholarly opinion seems most recently to lean toward the long-standing identification of the symbol as the god Auramazdā", carried above all by the sheer prevalence of the god in the royal texts.^[3]

The most recent constructive proposal tries to dissolve the opposition rather than win it. Bruno Jacobs, building on the deliberate physical likeness of the figure to the king in the art after Behistun, reads the sign as Ahura Mazdā conceived "as an ancestral or clan deity", a reading that, in the editors' words, "could help to explain why the deity was, on the one hand, of relatively modest importance in terms of sacrifices and, on the other, chosen as royal god and emblem of the empire."^[15] On this account the figure is the god, but a god understood as the divine forefather of the ruling house, which is why he presides over the dynasty's monuments while claiming little of the everyday cult the tablets record. The dynastic emblem, the ancestral spirit and the god here converge on a single figure, and the assimilation of the god's image to the king's, the crux that once told against the god-reading, becomes its explanation.

No single identification commands the field, and the current reference works now frame the question as one of plural, overlapping senses rather than rival exclusive names. In the 2021 Companion, Wouter Henkelman treats the god-reading as the traditional default while marking its limit: the motif "is often thought to depict Auramazdā when used in an Achaemenid context, but that reading is too rigid given the many variations in form and setting."^[16] The alternatives he lists, a personalised divine blessing, a numinous presence, a divine ancestor, and for the plain disk a solar sense, are not held to exclude a connection with Ahura Mazdā. The seals, he stresses, show no ban on picturing the divine, and Herodotus's denial reflects Greek philosophical attitudes rather than Persian practice, so that the Achaemenid god's cult had "both iconic and aniconic elements: for Iranians such a mix was not contradictory."^[16] The effect is to loosen the century-old either/or. The referent stays open; the function does not: whatever its precise name, the winged figure marks the scene beneath it as sanctioned from heaven, under the eye of the Wise Lord and the order of arta.

The surest control on any reading of the sign is the theology the kings carved beneath and beside it. The god appears as creator and as the source of the kingship: "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, one king of many, one lord of many";^[17] and the kingship is a grant made in crisis, "Ahuramazda, when he saw this earth in commotion, thereafter bestowed it upon me, made me king; I am king."^[17] The king in turn presents himself as the god's instrument in the war of order against the Lie, favoured "because I was not disloyal, I was not a follower of the Lie, I was not an evil-doer."^[7]

Every one of these lines is about investiture and sanction: the god raises the king, and the king rules by his grace. That is content either chief reading can carry, for a glory alighting on the king says it, and so does the god extending the ring of covenant. The words, like the image, leave the choice open.

The same image, taken up in the twentieth century as the emblem of modern Zoroastrian identity and of Iranian nationhood, is now almost universally called the Faravahar (or farōhar), a name derived from the word for the fravashi, the guardian spirit. Two things must be held apart. In form, the modern emblem is faithfully Achaemenid, a clean-lined redrawing of the very figure on the reliefs, wings, ring, robed man and all, and to that extent a faithful descent from the ancient stone. But the name is modern, and the settled meaning now popularly attached to it is a later interpretation, not an ancient gloss.

The emblem's modern career is often mistaken for unbroken continuity. The archaeology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries recovered the figure from the reliefs; the Parsi community of India and, later, Iranian nationalists took it up as a badge of Zoroastrian and of national identity; today it appears on jewellery, on the walls of fire-temples, as a tattoo and as a civic emblem, and a standard set of moral glosses has grown up around its parts, the three tiers of feathers for good thoughts, words and deeds, the ring for eternity or for the pledge, the two streamers below for the choice between good and evil. These readings are edifying, and they are modern: no ancient text assigns any such meaning to the wings or the ring. The one thing the ancient evidence will not give is exactly the thing the modern emblem is most confident about, what the figure definitively means. The modern emblem is the living heir of a royal sign two and a half thousand years old; its confident gloss on what that sign means, however, is a modern reading, not a record of what the Achaemenids intended.

What would settle the identification is the one thing the Achaemenids never made: a caption. They carved a great deal, Behistun among the longest royal inscriptions of the ancient world, yet left their central religious image unglossed, so every reading is drawn from indirect evidence, and none of it is decisive. The uncertainty is therefore well defined and likely to last: two strong readings, the god and the glory, with defenders on either side and further candidates behind them, and no Achaemenid text to choose among them.^[3]