Topic: religion (39)
- ConceptAhura Mazdā
Ahura Mazdā, the "Wise Lord", is the supreme god of the Achaemenid kings: named at the head of nearly every royal inscription as creator of earth, sky, man and human happiness, giver of kingship, and upholder of order against the Lie. He is also the God whom Zarathustra proclaimed in the Gāthās,…
- ConceptAnāhitā
Anāhitā, in full Arədvī Sūrā Anāhitā, 'the moist, the strong, the undefiled', is the great Iranian goddess of the waters. She is the deified cosmic river that falls from the mythical mountain Hukairya into the world-sea, the source of every stream and so the giver of fertility: she purifies the…
- ConceptArta (Truth, right order)
Arta (Old Persian arta-, Avestan aša) is the Iranian principle of truth and right order: the correct joining of the world, cosmic, social and moral at once, set against its standing opposite, the Lie (drauga). It is the exact cognate of Vedic ṛta, so the opposition of Truth and Lie is older than…
- PersonArtaxerxes II
Artaxerxes II (Old Persian Artaxšaça, "whose rule is through Arta"; throne-name of a prince born Arsaces), the seventh Achaemenid King of Kings, reigned from 405/4 to 359/8 BCE. His forty-six years on the throne are the longest of the dynasty, and the Greeks who wrote of him called him Mnemon,…
- PlaceBabylon
Babylon was one of the largest cities of ancient western Asia and the centre of the Achaemenid empire's most heavily assessed province. It was a royal residence and, among the principal residences of the Persian kings, the only one whose densely built urban character is beyond dispute. Rebuilt on…
- PersonBardiya and Gaumata
Bardiya (Old Persian Bardiya; Greek Smerdis) was the younger son of Cyrus the Great and the full brother of Cambyses II. For some months in 522 BCE a man ruling as Bardiya held the Achaemenid throne, until Darius, son of Hystaspes, and six fellow Persians killed him and Darius took the crown.…
- PersonCambyses II
Cambyses II (Old Persian Kambūjiya; r. 530–522 BCE) was the second Achaemenid Great King, elder son and heir of Cyrus the Great, who in 525 BCE conquered Egypt and added the last of the great old kingdoms of the Near East to the empire, the achievement that turned Cyrus's realm into a power…
- PersonCyrus the Great
Cyrus II, called the Great (Old Persian Kūruš), was the founder of the Achaemenid, or first Persian, empire, and reigned from about 559 to 530 BCE. A king of Anshan in the highlands of Fārs, he overthrew in turn the three great powers of his world, the Median kingdom of Astyages about 550, the…
- ConceptDaēnā
Daēnā is the Avestan term associated with vision, conscience and religious understanding, and the name of the female figure whom the soul meets after death. In the Hāδōxt Nask’s righteous-soul narrative, she approaches as a beautiful maiden and identifies herself as the person’s own daēnā. Her…
- PersonDarius I
Darius I (Old Persian Dārayavauš, born about 550, reigned 522 to 486 BCE) was the third of the Achaemenid Great Kings and, in most respects, the true founder of the Persian empire as an organised state. He came to the throne by killing a king he called an impostor, spent his first year putting…
- PersonDarius II
Darius II (Old Persian Dārayavauš), born Ochus and remembered by the Greeks as Nothus, "the bastard", was King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire from 424 to 405/4 BCE. A younger son of Artaxerxes I by a Babylonian concubine, he reached the throne through the most tangled succession the dynasty had…
- PlaceEgypt as a Province
Egypt as a province of the Achaemenid Empire, the Twenty-seventh Dynasty of the Egyptian king-lists, ran from the conquest by Cambyses II (conventionally 525 BCE) to a staggered secession between 405/4 and 400/399. Artaxerxes III recovered the Delta and Memphis in 343/2, but the evidence does not…
- ObjectGold plaque of a barsom-bearer (Oxus Treasure)
The barsom plaque is one of the small gold votive plaques of the Oxus Treasure (British Museum 123949): a standing man in Median dress holding before him a slim bundle of rods, the barsom of Iranian worship. It is the clearest surviving material image of the rite the texts only name, one of about…
- SourceHerodotus, The Histories
Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484 to after 430 BCE) wrote the Histories, the earliest surviving work of history in the Western tradition and the fullest classical account of the Persian empire. Its announced subject is the great collision of Greeks and barbarians that culminated in Xerxes'…
- ConceptMithra
Mithra (Avestan Miθra, later Mihr) is one of the oldest gods of the Indo-Iranian world, and the one whose nature is least in doubt, because his name is also the ordinary word for 'contract'. He is the deified covenant, the all-seeing guardian of the sworn word and the alliance, he of the wide…
- PersonNabonidus
Nabonidus (Akkadian Nabû-naʾid, "the god Nabu is exalted"; r. 556–539 BCE) was the sixth and last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire, and the man whose fall handed the ancient Near East's richest and oldest kingdom to Cyrus. His importance to Achaemenid history lies not in anything he did to Persia…
- PlaceNaqsh-e Rostam
Naqsh-e Rostam is the perpendicular cliff about six kilometres north-west of Persepolis where the Great Kings of the Achaemenid house were entombed. Four cruciform tombs are cut into the rock: the oldest secured to Darius I by its inscriptions, DNa and DNb; the other three attributed on position…
- PlacePasargadae
The first Achaemenid capital, raised by Cyrus the Great on the high, well-watered plain of the River Pulvar in the heart of Persis, some forty kilometres north-east of the later Persepolis. Here Cyrus built a dispersed royal park of columned stone halls (a free-standing gatehouse, Gate R, with its…
- PlacePersepolis
Persepolis was the ceremonial and administrative heart of the Achaemenid empire in its Persian homeland, a vast terraced complex of palaces, audience halls and treasuries raised by Darius I from about 518 BCE on the Marv Dasht plain of Fars. The Persians called it simply Pārsa, the name of the…
- Survey essayReligion & the Lie: the Achaemenid religious world
Achaemenid religion, as the kings proclaimed it, turned on a single polarity: the worship of Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord who set the world in order, against the drauga, the Lie that forever works to corrupt it. The kings of Persia proclaimed themselves the god's chosen instruments in that struggle;…
- EventThe Accession of Darius (522 BCE)
The violent, contested seizure of the Achaemenid throne in 522 BCE: the killing of a king held to be an impostor magus, the coup of the Seven that raised Darius, and the year of rebellion that followed. It is the founding case of the imperial ideology of the Truth against the Lie, and the single…
- SourceThe Behistun Inscription (DB)
The Behistun inscription (DB) is the monumental cliff-relief and trilingual text that Darius I had carved at Bagastāna in Media between about 520 and 518 BCE, recounting in the king's own voice his seizure and defence of the throne against Gaumāta and a wave of rebels. It is the longest Achaemenid…
- EventThe Conquest of Egypt by Cambyses
The conquest of Egypt by Cambyses II, conventionally dated to 525 BCE, brought the Nile valley under Achaemenid rule. Cambyses II, the son and successor of Cyrus II, crossed the northern Sinai with Arabian assistance, defeated the forces of Psammetichus III near the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile, and…
- SourceThe Cyrus Cylinder
A barrel-shaped clay cylinder inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform, buried in the foundations of Babylon's city wall after Cyrus II took the city in 539 BCE. In the traditional idiom of a Mesopotamian building inscription it makes the god Marduk choose Cyrus, condemns the deposed Nabonidus, and…
- SourceThe Daiva Inscription (XPh)
The daiva inscription (XPh) is a trilingual proclamation of Xerxes I (r. 486–465 BCE), known from three Old Persian copies, with a Babylonian and an Elamite version. The surviving limestone tablets were recovered in secondary, reused contexts at Persepolis and Pasargadae, so their original…
- ConceptThe Drauga (the Lie)
The drauga (Old Persian drauga-, Avestan druj) is the Lie: the principle of falsehood, deceit and disorder that stands against arta, the right order of the world, in the religion and the royal ideology of ancient Iran. More than a word for the spoken untruth, it names the power that unmakes…
- PeopleThe Elamites
The Elamites were the ancient people of south-western Iran, holders of the lowland plain of Khuzistan around Susa and of the highland valleys of Fārs, whose civilisation was already some two thousand years old when Cyrus rose. Within the Achaemenid story they are the heartland's other people: the…
- SourceThe Elephantine Papyri
The Elephantine Papyri are the Aramaic archives of a garrison town at the First Cataract of the Nile, where a community of Judaean soldiers and their Aramaean, Egyptian and Iranian neighbours served the Persian kings from before the conquest of Egypt until the empire lost the province at the end…
- EventThe Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)
The fall of Babylon in October 539 BCE was the conquest of the last native Mesopotamian empire by Cyrus II of Persia. Ruled by the absent and religiously heterodox Nabonidus and his regent-son Belshazzar, Babylonia fell in a campaign of a few weeks: a decisive battle at Opis, the surrender of…
- SourceThe Hebrew Bible as an Achaemenid Source
The Hebrew Bible is the most widely read body of ancient writing that touches the Achaemenid empire, and the least externally controlled. A small set of books concerns Persia directly: the exilic oracles of Isaiah 40–55, which hail Cyrus as Yahweh's shepherd and anointed; Ezra–Nehemiah, which…
- ConceptThe King of Kings
King of kings (Old Persian xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām) is the title the Achaemenid ruler set at the head of almost every inscription he left, and the seed of a whole account of the world. It claims that above the many kings of the earth's many peoples stands one king; that his office is part of the…
- PeopleThe Magi
The Magi (Old Persian magu-) were the priestly class of the western Iranians, the one body of religious specialists named across the Median, Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian ages. Herodotus counts them among the six Median tribes and names them the officiants without whom no Persian could…
- PeopleThe Medes
The Medes (Old Persian Māda, Greek Mêdoi, Assyrian and Babylonian Mādāya) were the Iranian people of the north-western Zagros, settled about the plain of Ecbatana (modern Hamadān), who by the Greek account raised the first great Iranian kingdom: a line of four kings, Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares…
- SourceThe Persepolis Fortification Archive
The working paperwork of Darius I's own heartland: tens of thousands of clay tablets from a bastion in the Persepolis fortification wall, recording the intake and disbursement of food, livestock, and travel rations across Fars and Elam in the middle of the reign. Dry, sealed, never meant for…
- ConceptThe Sacred Fire
The sacred fire (Avestan ātar) was the purest of the good creations and the earthly emblem of aša/arta, tended by the Magi and honoured in the open air at free-standing stone fire-holders. The roofed sanctuary whose consecrated flame is kept perpetually alight belongs to the later empire and…
- ArtworkThe Winged Symbol (the figure in the winged ring)
The winged symbol is the ring or disc with outspread wings, most often enclosing a robed male figure, that hovers above the Great King at Behistun, on the reliefs of Persepolis and over the royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam. It is the most conspicuous religious image of Achaemenid kingship and the…
- PersonUdjahorresnet
Udjahorresnet, an Egyptian noble of Sais (fl. c. 526–518 BCE), commanded the royal ships of the last two Saite kings and then served their Persian conquerors as chief physician, palace administrator and confidant of Cambyses II and Darius I. His autobiography, inscribed on a green-stone statue now…
- PersonXerxes I
Xerxes I (Old Persian Xšayāršā, "ruling over heroes"), the fourth Achaemenid King of Kings, reigned from 486 to 465 BCE. Son of Darius I and of Atossa the daughter of Cyrus the Great, he was the heir in whom the two royal lines met, and he inherited a state his father had already made the largest…
- PersonZarathustra
Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks) is the Iranian prophet and poet-priest whose seventeen hymns, the Gāthās, exalt Ahura Mazdā as the one God and lay upon every person a choice: aša, the Truth, or druj, the Lie. His date, his homeland, even (to a few sceptics) his existence are among the most…