Three key features identified kingship in the ancient Near East. First and foremost was the fact that monarchy belonged to heaven and that earthly kingship was vested in the gods so that the men who ruled on earth did so as mediators and intercessors of a divine agency. Second, but as an extension of this god-given status, kings had a judicial responsibility to guard and protect their subjects from war, want, and terror. Third, kingship was sacred, and ceremonies like the royal investiture often involved a ritual of humiliation followed by reinstatement, as an expression of the regeneration of cosmic order encoded within the monarch’s being. As Henri Frankfort (1944: 3, 12) summarised:
The ancient Near East considered kingship the very basis of civilization. Only savages could live without a king. Security, peace, and justice could not prevail without a ruler to champion them. Whatever was significant was embedded in the life of the cosmos, and it was precisely the king’s function to maintain the harmony of that integration. . . . For the truth about their king affected their lives in every (even the most personal) aspect, since through the king the harmony between human existence and the supernatural order was maintained.
There was no doubt in the Near Eastern mind that the universe was divinely ordered and that kings and their appointed courtiers were the mundane earthly reflections of a heavenly hierarchical ideal. On earth the reality was that kings were confronted by all sorts of political upheavals, ranging from succession challenges to international rebellions, but the ideological picture of kingship created and promoted by king and court was one of cosmic harmony maintained only through the centralised position of the throne. Rituals of monarchy and the royal ideologies from which they emerged were designed to articulate the complex interconnection between the cosmological and earthly aspects of rulership.
Hugo Gressmann’s influential 1929 work on the concept of ancient sacred kingship has suggested that in the religious and political thought of the Near East the royal body was generally perceived to have taken on a new form of semi-divine being at the investiture, so much so in fact that Gressmann argued that this transformation of the royal body was part of a region-wide Hofstil (‘court style’). If this is correct, then it is logical to see the ancient Persian investiture ritual examined above as part of the same Near Eastern theological system. Certainly, in Achaemenid iconography the Great King shares his appearance with that of the supreme Iranian deity, Ahuramazda, echoing a Hofstil which was already identifiable in a proverb of the Neo-Assyrian period: ‘Man is a shadow of God [but] the King is the perfect likeness of God’ (Parpola 1970: 112-13, no. 145).
Created under imperial auspices for predominantly Persian spectators at the heart of the Empire, the monumental Bisitun relief (F5; dated to just before 519 bce) is a vivid depiction (although not necessarily a ‘portrait’ as we might use the term) of Darius the Great. The high relief compresses into one tableau the essence of the dramatic events of Darius’ accession to power, as described in the accompanying trilingual inscription. Darius, attended by two courtly Persian weapon-bearers, treads upon the prostrate Gaumata as nine rebel leaders, securely bound in fetters, approach the king. They wear elements of regional dress and are identified by name. Darius, bow in one hand, lifts his other hand in a gesture of salutation to Ahuramazda, who hovers over the scene and offers a ring (perhaps representing the kingship itself) to Darius. (On the Bisitun monument see Briant 2002: 122-7; Kuhrt 2007: 141-58; of course, there is no consensus that the anthropomorphic figure emerging from the winged disk is Ahuramazda; for debates see Briant 2002: 248.)
It is clear from Achaemenid royal iconography that just as the king and the god share close intimacy of space (F3 and F5), so they share a physical form. The Great King encodes in his appearance the best physical attributes of the anthropomorphic divinity, Ahuramazda; the Great King is the deity’s doppelganger. They adopt the same hairstyle and beard shape, the same crown, the same type of garment, and they ‘emit’ the same xvarnah or ‘brilliance’ (in terms of luminosity or glory; Battesti 2011). The iconography stresses that reciprocity between king and god is guaranteed, and thus, in an inscription from Susa, Darius can state with confidence that ‘Ahuramazda is mine; I am Ahuramazda’s’ (DSk). Even if Persian kings were not gods, they could be understood only in their intimate relationships with the divine (Lincoln 2012).
We have already seen that Xerxes attributed his success in the succession struggle which followed the death of Darius I to the divine favour and celestial support of Ahuramazda: ‘by the grace of Ahuramazda I became king on my father’s throne’ (XPf §4-5). But who exactly was Xerxes’ helpful deity?
The earliest reference to Ahuramazda (‘the Wise Lord’) is actually found in an eighth-century bce Assyrian text, in which as-sa-ra ma-za-as is named as one god in a list of many gods. It is clear that Ahuramazda was one of the Elamite pantheon, although it is difficult to know for sure if he was Cyrus the Great’s god. Nevertheless, there are numerous references to this deity in the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, and especially those of Darius the Great, who lauded the god as creator: ‘A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man, who created happiness for man’ (DNb §1-3). In other words Darius envisaged the Wise Lord as a creator only of what is good, and he expresses over and over again his faith in Ahuramazda and his belief that he serves the god as a divine instrument for establishing order and justice on earth: ‘When Ahuramazda saw this earth turbulent, then he bestowed it on me. . . . By the will of Ahuramazda I set it again in its place’ (DNa §31-6); and ‘After Ahuramazda made me king in this earth, by the will of Ahuramazda all (that) I did was good’ (DSi §2-4). Commenting on the close affinity between the king and his god encoded in the royal texts of Near Eastern antiquity, Leo Oppenheim (1964: 149) observed:
One gains the impression that these inscriptions were written for the king
Himself. The scribes and poets at court created for him his own image as
Hero and pious king; they show him in the texts as he wanted to see himself.
It is little wonder that the Greeks mistook the Great King’s intimate relationship with Ahuramazda to mean that the king himself was divine, and a text by Plutarch attempts to articulate what was perceived to be a bona fide Persian point of view (A8). The Great King held, by virtue of his office, a mystical position and he was, if less than a god, still more than a man. Therefore in his tragedy Persians, Aeschylus calls the dead Darius isotheos (‘equal to the gods’), theion (‘divine’), and akakos (‘knowing no wrong’), and while the Athenian playwright must not be taken literally on these points, he was capable, nonetheless, of thinking of the kings of the Achaemenid dynasty in this way (Aeschylus, Persians 651, 654-5, 671, 711, 857; see further Garvie 2009: 73-80; on later Classical Greek conceptions of the Great King see Llewellyn-Jones 2012). Indeed, some Greeks described the Great King as having a divine daimon, or spirit. Plutarch (Artaxerxes 15.5), dependent for much of his information upon Ctesias and Deinon, says that courtiers revered the daimon of the king, while Theopompus (Histories F17 = Athenaeus 6.252B) went so far as to say that the Persians piled tables high with food for the pleasure of the king’s daimon. This Greek belief in the king’s daimon is a reasonable interpretation of the Persian belief in the fravashi, or ‘soul’ of the monarch. Moreover, Herodotus (1.131-2) says that the Persians were duty-bound to pray for the king and his sons during their private acts of worship, which demonstrates that the Greeks understood the Persian ‘intertwining of god(s), king, and Empire’ (Kuhrt 2007: 473).
It is clear that Ahuramazda was conceived of as the king’s god par excellence and the intimate relationship between the two is reiterated repeatedly; the king was expected, under the auspices of the Magi, to pray and carry out rituals in Ahuramazda’s honour, or to tend to the god’s sacred fire (Briant 2002: 246-50). In the early Achaemenid royal inscriptions Ahuramazda alone is named, although occasionally he is mentioned alongside ‘all the gods’ or as the ‘greatest of the gods’ (DPh §2; DPg §1). On one of the Elamite tablets from Persepolis dating to Darius I’s reign, he appears with ‘Mithra-[and]-the Baga’ (that is, ‘gods’; PF 337) and towards the end of the Achaemenid period, under Artaxerxes III, the same occurs (A3Pa §24-5). The Persepolis texts amply testify to the presence of ‘the other gods who are’ and show how the royal administration supplied cultic necessities for the worship of numerous Iranian, Elamite, and Babylonian deities (Henkelman 2008, 2012). In addition to Ahuramazda, the Persepolis texts name other gods worthy of ritual offerings, including Zurvan (a weather god), Mizdusi (a fertility goddess), Narvasanga (a fire deity), Hvarita (Spirit of the Rising Sun), and Visai Baga (a collective entity of deities).
It was Artaxerxes II who conspicuously invoked a new triad in the official inscriptions of his reign - ‘Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra’ (A2Sd 3-4) - and these latter two gods proved to be popular in the Sasanian period alongside the ever-present Ahuramazda. Artaxerxes’ texts suggest that they stood close to Ahuramazda in the monarch’s esteem, probably for good reason: Mithra was a sun god and a deity closely associated with horses (see Chapter 3), while Anahita was an important water goddess as well as a warrior and fertility deity, likened by the Greeks to Athene, Artemis, and Aphrodite (Briant 2002: 250-4; on Persian religion and Iranian traditions see Briant 2002: 93-4).
World History
