Chapter 14. The Achaemenid Kings and Ahuramazda: Religion and Empire, 550-330 BC

The Achaemenid empire of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes was the first world state whose rulers proclaimed that they ruled “by the favour of Ahuramazda.” Whether these kings were Zoroastrians in the full sense is one of the oldest disputes in Iranian studies. Their inscriptions praise Ahuramazda and condemn the Lie, but they never name Zarathushtra. Their policy toward subject peoples, the Judeans above all, also carries what the nineteenth-century scholar L. H. Mills called “the Persian question” into the study of the Bible. This chapter sets out the evidence and the rival readings as the library’s sources give them, and ends with Mehran Keshe’s use of the period as a model for his own politics.

Medes, Persians and the coming of the faith

Boyce’s narrative begins with the Medes and Persians. They entered western Iran separately from the eastern Iranians among whom Zarathushtra preached, and they lived for centuries beside Assyria, Urartu, Elam and Babylon. They “may therefore have looked down on their fellow-Iranians in the east.” The Median priestly tribe of the magi “may well have formed a stiff obstacle to the western spread of Zoroastrianism” [Boyce, Zoroastrians, #55117, ch.5 “The Medes, the Persians and Zoroaster”]. In her account the faith probably reached the west in the last decades of the Median empire, after the Medes and Babylon destroyed Assyria in 614-612 BC. It came through missionary priests and through eastern hostages and princesses at the Median court. Cyrus, who rebelled in 549, found it “a long-established faith,” and the Greeks learned of Zoroaster as a figure of immense antiquity: Xanthos put him 6000 years before Xerxes, Eudoxus and Aristotle 6000 years before Plato’s death [Boyce, #55117, ch.5]. Ragozin’s popular history of 1888 likewise takes the sixth Median tribe on Herodotus’ list, the Magi, to be “the priests, forming a separate body” [Ragozin, Media, Babylon and Persia, #360912].

Cyrus and Cambyses

Cyrus left only brief inscriptions at Pasargadae and “no declaration of his religious beliefs.” His sacred precinct, with two plinths and three stone fire-holders, and his naming of a daughter Atossa (Hutaosa, the name of Vishtaspa’s queen) are what Boyce reads as signs of the faith. She calls his rule “that of a loyal Mazda-worshipper.” He “made no attempt… to impose the Iranian religion on his alien subjects” [Boyce, #55117, ch.5 “Cyrus”]. His body was embalmed and laid in a stone tomb, not exposed. Boyce explains this as a royal exemption, kings regarding “themselves as above this particular religious law.” She ties it to belief in the royal khvarenah abiding at the tomb. Cambyses endowed a daily sheep and a monthly horse sacrifice there, kept up for two hundred years until Alexander [Boyce, #55117, ch.5]. Jackson adds the evidence of non-Iranian texts. In the Babylonian Cyrus Cylinder, Cyrus calls himself “the chosen one of the god Marduk” who returned exiled gods to their homes. Cambyses ordered the desecrated temple of Neit at Sais repaired. Jackson concludes that their dealings with foreign religions show “the attitude of the statesman rather than the religious devotee” [Jackson, Zoroastrian Studies, #55164, ch.X §89].

Darius, Behistun and the Lie

The Behistun relief and trilingual text (Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian), carved on a cliff above the Babylon-Ecbatana road, tell how Darius fought nineteen battles in a year against “impostors” after Cambyses’ death, the Magian Gaumata first among them. Henry Rawlinson copied the Old Persian text from 1835 [Wikipedia: Behistun inscription]. Boyce reads Darius as “a devout believer, convinced… that he had a divine mandate to rule the world,” and quotes him: “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” (Naqsh-i Rustam A). Each rebellion was the work of Drauga, the Lie, the Old Persian form of the Gathic druj: “Thou who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from Drauga” (Behistun IV.37-8). In his own words, he received Ahuramazda’s aid “because I was not hostile, I was not deceitful… Neither to the weak nor to the powerful did I do wrong.” Elsewhere he says: “Those Elamites were faithless and by them Ahuramazda was not worshipped.” Yet the Persepolis Elamite tablets show him funding Elamite gods from his treasury [Boyce, #55117, ch.5 “Darius the Great”]. Mills, translating the “sculptured texts,” asks under the heading “Dualism in the Inscription?” whether the Lie stands as a counter-power. He observes that Auramazda “is signally the creator of what is ‘good'” and “did not make evil,” as Yahweh is said to do in Isaiah 45. He renders the rebel as “a (political) intriguer… (a revolutioniser, lit., ‘a liar’)” [Mills, Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia, #55044, “The sculptured texts of Behistun, Persepolis”]. Jackson finds truth inculcated “as the very foundation of the code of ethics.” He adds that the standard “seems to us to be slightly lowered by the extreme cruelty of the punishments which Darius inflicted, as we know from his own words” [Jackson, #55164, ch.X §88].

Boyce links Darius’ self-image to doctrine. On his tomb at Naqsh-i Rustam the king prays before a fire on a three-stepped stand. He is borne by thirty peoples and flanked by the six nobles who helped him to the throne, “as the six Amesha Spentas stand… on either side of Ahuramazda.” Above hovers the winged-circle symbol, read either as khvarenah or as Ahuramazda himself [Boyce, #55117, ch.5 “Achaemenian palaces and tombs”]. Roux, writing on sacral kingship, warns against overreading: “The imposing stature of the Achaemenid king on the reliefs attests not his divinity but only his supremacy.” The Persian king is “a chosen one of the supreme God. The God sought him; he found him; he made him king” [Roux, Regele, #15817, “Regele iranian”; translated from the Romanian].

The silence about Zarathushtra

Moulton (1912) states the problem plainly: “what of his failure to mention Zarathushtra himself, Angra Mainyu, and the Amesha Spenta?” Against L. H. Gray, who saw Darius’ restoration of the ayadana (places of worship) and his letter to the satrap Gadatas protecting Apollo’s shrine as “polytheistic” policy alien to Zoroastrian teaching, Moulton argues that “Darius was no fanatic” and that his position “was remarkably like that of King David.” He finds the Amesha Spenta ideas “not far away.” Vashna Auramazdaha, “by grace or will of Auramazda” (forty-one times in the inscriptions), echoes Vohu Manah, and arstam, “uprightness,” answers to the yazata Arshtat. The Lie supplies what Angra Mainyu would. “After much hesitation… and not a few pendulum swings,” he gives “my vote Aye” that Zarathushtra “comes into Darius’s spiritual ancestry” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II “Before Zarathushtra”]. Jackson notes that the classical writers never name Zoroaster with any king, apart from Plato’s Alcibiades, which has royal children taught “the Magism of Zoroaster the Ormazdean.” His conclusion is that for Artaxerxes I-III and Darius III “everybody is agreed” that they were adherents, while for Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius I and Xerxes “the special question… has been left open” [Jackson, #55164, ch.X §§90, 92a]. Boyce sees the silence as a convention, since “the same curious omission is found in the royal inscriptions of the later Sasanians, and even in those of their great high priest, Kirder” [Boyce, #55117, ch.5 “Xerxes”].

Xerxes, the daivas and the later kings

Xerxes’ inscription from Persepolis says that where “previously the Daivas were worshipped… I destroyed that sanctuary of the Daivas, and I proclaimed: ‘The Daivas shall not be worshipped!’… there I worshipped Ahuramazda with proper rites, in accordance with asha.” Boyce reads this as “the religious struggle initiated by the prophet… being carried on centuries later by his followers in the west.” She takes it as action against fellow Iranians rather than subject peoples [Boyce, #55117, ch.5 “Xerxes”]. Moulton, writing before that text was found, judged that “religion meant much less to him than to his great father.” He accepts as “entirely credible” Herodotus’ report that at Nine Ways the Magi buried nine boys and girls alive, and that Amestris, Xerxes’ wife, buried fourteen children of noble Persians to propitiate “the god who is said to dwell beneath the earth” [Moulton, #55011, Lecture II]. Boyce places the invocation of “Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra” under Artaxerxes II, along with the founding of the Anahita image cult (see ch.13). She dates the Zurvanite heresy and the creation of the Zoroastrian calendar to the late Achaemenid period, and with them the “three world Saviours” scheme of millennia [Boyce, #55117, ch.5 “The Zurvanite heresy”, “The three world Saviours”]. In the Pahlavi tradition, Jackson notes, the Bahman Yasht credits “Artakhshir the Kaianian” with making “the religion current in the whole world.” The Denkard says that “Darai, son of Darai” ordered two written copies of the Avesta to be kept [Jackson, #55164, ch.X §91].

The Persepolis ritual evidence

Archaeology complicates both the textbook “fire temple” and the purely Zoroastrian reading. The Oriental Institute’s Ritual Landscape at Persepolis (SAOC 72) catalogues the seals on the Persepolis Fortification tablets. It concludes that scenes of fires on stepped structures show “multiple types of ritual activities for multiple deities,” and that their variety “is not… conducive to a reading of the scenes as the worship of sacred fire per se” [SAOC 72, The Ritual Landscape at Persepolis, #60404, §3.4]. Geller, from the Babylonian side, notes that Cyrus had medicinal plants gathered for his troops. Following Briant, he holds that the specialists concerned “were none other than the magi” [Geller, Ancient Babylonian Medicine, #69076].

Cyrus, the Judeans and the “Persian question”

Boyce writes that Cyrus “permitted [the Jews] to return from exile in Babylon and to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.” Second Isaiah hails him as messiah and for the first time celebrates Yahweh as Creator, “as Ahura Mazda had been celebrated by Zoroaster.” She takes these verses as “the first imprint of that influence which Zoroastrianism was to exert so powerfully on post-Exilic Judaism.” The doctrines that “came to be adopted by various Jewish schools” include one Creator God, an evil power not under his control, a cosmic Saviour, heaven and hell, individual judgment, resurrection and a Last Judgment [Boyce, #55117, ch.5 “Cyrus”, “The spread of Zoroaster’s teaching”]. Mills makes the strongest claim. Pre-exilic Israel was “without a pointed hope of any such an Immortality… without a definitive Judgment, without a Resurrection.” The captives then found that “their own fresh ideas upon futurity were an ancient creed with their new-found friends.” He argues for “a very strong and completely surrounding and enveloping later and supervening influence of the North Persian One-Godism, Angelology, Immortality, Soteriology, Judgment, Resurrection, Millennium, Heaven, and Recompense.” He rejects only the view that the Persians “originally and first of all taught the Jews these things in their full… shape” [Mills, #55044, Second Lecture]. Carter’s study is more cautious. He notes that in the period of contact “not only a complete system of angels was developed,” but he stresses that the Jews “conceived of Satan as a fallen creature,” far from equal to Yahweh, unlike Ahriman [Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, #55114]. Ragozin records the opposite position, held by scholars “much inclined to attribute the similarity to direct Hebrew influences.” She dates possible contact to the eighth century BC, when Sargon of Assyria settled Israelite deportees in the cities of the Medes [Ragozin, #360912]. Jackson adds that the Elephantine papyri show Cambyses’ and Darius II’s tolerance toward the Jews, “bearing out the literary tradition of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah” [Jackson, #55164, ch.X §89].

Keshe’s reading of the Persian peace

In KSW 590 (15 May 2025), discussing a Keshe Foundation peace agreement and a “World Universal Currency,” Keshe says: “Go back to the history of Iran. Kourosh and Darius, kings came and they gave their crown to become part of the Persian Empire, because it was peace time… Whenever has been peace… Man’s technological knowledge has grown so rapidly, because Man doesn’t need to fight.” He presents this as a precedent for plasma technology replacing war and for the “Keshe Coin.” In the same session he predicts that the dollar “is going to collapse” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 590, #378302, “Global Peace, Currency Shift, and the Keshe Foundation Agreement”]. This is Keshe’s own historical reading and political programme.

Key points

• Boyce holds that the Medes and Persians received Zoroastrianism as an ancient eastern faith; the Magi were a Median priestly tribe [#55117].
• Darius rules “by the grace of Ahuramazda” and treats rebellion as the Lie (drauga); Behistun is the key text [#55117, #55044].
• None of the inscriptions names Zarathushtra or Angra Mainyu. Moulton votes “Aye” to Darius’ Zoroastrianism, Jackson leaves the early kings open, and Boyce reads the silence as a royal convention [#55011, #55164, #55117].
• Xerxes’ daiva inscription records the destruction of a daiva sanctuary; Moulton’s earlier picture of Xerxes rests on Herodotus’ reports of live burials [#55117, #55011].
• Roux holds that the reliefs show the king’s supremacy, not divinity; the Persepolis seals point to many cults, not fire-worship alone [#15817, #60404].
• The Cyrus Cylinder (Marduk) and the restoration of Judah show policy-driven tolerance [#55164, #55117].
• On Persian influence on post-exilic Judaism, Mills and Boyce argue for strong influence, Carter for more limited influence, and Ragozin reports the counter-view of Hebrew influence [#55044, #55117, #55114, #360912].
• Keshe uses Kourosh and Darius as a model of peace and technological growth for his currency and peace agenda [#378302].