Under the Achaemenians

above the other, three to each side. These represent the six noble
Persians who helped Darius to gain the throne, who thus stand on
either side of the Great King as the six Amesha Spentas stand,
according to the Pahlavi books, on either side of Ahuramazda. Darius
thus declared visually, it is suggested, his conviction that he ruled as
,. Ahuramazda's representative on earth, being likewise the chief
personage of a great heptad. The three nobles who face the king in the
right-hand panel are all shown raising their left hands, covered by the
sleeve, towards their mouths in a ritual gesture of mourning (a gesture
which Zoroastrian priests still make today when reciting confessional
texts for the dead) .
Above the king's head, in the right-hand corner of the main panel, a
moon symbol is carved, which shows the round disc of the full moon
with a crescent moon within it, along the lower rim. This symbol is
Egyptian in origin, and had earlier been adopted by the Assyrians for
their moon-god. Its significance on Darius' funerary monument is
still debated. A little below it, hovering between king and fire, is
carved what has come to be regarded (through its revival in modern
times) as the characteristic Zoroastrian symbol. This again is of
� ,Egyptian origin, the symbol of the god Horus. It is a circle with a
',wing on either side. Often there is a bird-tail beneath it, and two
undulating appendages, deriving from the sacred snakes of the
prototype. The Assyrians had adopted this symbol also, and they set
'" within the circle the upper part of a male figure; and the Persians
followed them in this, although they still made use also of the simple
winged circle. Usually in Achaemenian art the symbol is placed above
a person; and when that person is royal, then a male figure is regularly
set within the circle, himself robed and crowned like a king, his right
hand raised in benediction, the left holding a ring. The earliest known
occurrence of the symbol in this form is on Darius' inscription at
Behistun, made early in his reign; and thereafter it recurs repeatedly
on the stone walls of the great Achaemenian palaces. There is no
specific link, therefore, between it and death ; and one interpretation
of it is that is represents Khvarenah or Divine Grace, either as a
general concept (conveyed by the simple winged circle) or, specifi­
cally, the Royal Khvarenah, symbolized by the addition of the kingly
figures within the circle. But the symbol has been more widely
interpreted as representing Ahuramazda himself.
The main themes of Darius' tomb sculpture are thus strikingly
Zoroastrian: the king, Ahuramazda's royal representative, is shown
 Under the Achaemenians

flanked by his six noble helpers, the mortal counterparts of the

Amesha Spentas, and praying, as the prophet had taught his followers
to do, in the presence of fire. The sacred number three occurs in the
three steps of dais and fire-holder, and in the triple panelling of the
stand's shaft. The iconography is thus orthodox, although the kings
kept to the unZoroastrian practice of preserving their bodies - even
while regarding a corpse as unclean, and therefore to be scrupulously
isolated. (Herodotus, 1 . 1 87, relates that it vexed Darius that he could •

not use one of the gates of Babylon, because the embalmed body of a
former queen lay in a tomb-chamber above it.)
Even Persians of lesser rank seem to have adopted the rite of
exposure only slowly, for Herodotus states that, although it was
common knowledge in his day that the magi let a corpse be 'torn by
bird or dog' before it was buried, the Persians were more reticent
about this matter, their regular custom (he says) being 'to cover the
corpse with wax and bury it in the earth'. The oldest archaeological
evidence for the distinctive Zoroastrian rite comes from about 400
B.C., with a rock-cut sepulchre in a mountain cemetery in Lycia, in
western Asia Minor. The other tombs there appear to be those of
Lycian aristocrats, but this one is distinguished by inscriptions both
in Greek and Aramaic. The latter declares that 'Artim son of Arzifiy
made this ossuary (astodana),. 'Artim' has been identified as being
probably the Artimas who was appointed Persian governor of Lydia:
in 40 l B . C. ; and the ossuary, which (as the Greek inscription shows)
he had made to receive the bones of himself and his descendants ,
consists of two small chambers, each with a rectangular cavity cut in
the rock floor, that was once covered by a stone lid, for further
security. Each cavity evidently held the bones of several persons,
gathered up after the rite of exposure. Artimas was probably of royal
blood; and the ossuary shows that the rite of exposure had found
acceptance among even high-ranking nobles by the end of the fifth
century.
There exist at Pasargadae and Naqsh-i Rustam two impressive
free-standing structures, which some have thought to be connected in
some way with funerary observances. They were evidently very
much alike ; but the one at Pasargadae, called in later times the
Zindan-i Suleyman, 'Solomon's Prison', is in ruins, whereas the one at
Naqsh-i Rustam, now termed the KaCba-yi Zardusht or 'Zoroaster's
Box', is well preserved. This is a tower-like building set on a three­
stepped stone base, and consists of massive blocks of masonry which

59
 Under the Achaemenians

enclose a solitary windowless chamber, raised high above the ground.

Its one aperture, a narrow doorway, is reached by a steep flight of
thirty stone steps. Details of the stonework show that the Zindan
belongs to the time of Cyrus, and that the Kacba, evidently modelled
on it, was not built until the reign of Darius I. The two structures are
unique, and their purpose remains, for a variety of reasons, a matter
of much perplexity. The effort and outlay involved in thus raising and
isolating two narrow chambers is a testimony, however, to the vast
wealth of the new Achaemenian Empire.

Fires and fire altars

Achaemenian tombs and funerary sculptures show a mixture of
Zoroastrian orthopraxy (with scrupulous care for the purity of the
creations) with alien usages and newly adopted symbols; and this
mixture demonstrates the fact that, though the Persians received
Zoroastrianism as an authoritative revelation come to them from the
east, yet, as a great imperial people, they set their own imprint on it in
a number of lasting ways . Their earliest known innovation in cult was
that of setting fire upon a raised stand. Yet still at Persepolis it must be
presumed that under the early Achaemenians such fire-holders
existed only within their palaces, for there is still no evidence for
separate sacred buildings at that period. Indeed, the Greeks stated
positively that the Persians despised temples, considering it wrong, in
Cicero's later words, 'to keep shut up within walls the gods whose
dwelling place was this whole world' . The two great plinths which
survive at Pasargadea testify to the persistence of the tradition of
worship under the open sky; and Strabo records (XI. 8 . 4) that a
temple founded by Cyrus at Zela, in Asia Minor, consisted originally
simply of a great artificial mound encircled by a wall - a man-made
hill rather than a building, which people could ascend to pray. It may
have been sacred precincts such as these to which Darius referred
when he spoke in the Behistun inscription (I. 63 ) of 'ayadana', that is,
'places of worship' (though the word is rendered, perhaps conven­
tionally, in the Elamite and Babylonian versions as 'temples'). Still in
the fifth century B . C . Herodotus could write of the Persians that they
erected no statues or temples or altars . Nevertheless, fire exalted upon
an altar-like stand was, it is clear, very important for the early
Achaemenians, perhaps as a double declaration both of their
Zoroastrian faith and of their sovereign rule (the king's hearth fire,

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