Gold plaque of a barsom-bearer (Oxus Treasure)

Among the roughly fifty small gold votive plaques of the Oxus Treasure are several that show a standing man in Median dress — belted tunic, trousers, and the soft bashlyk hood with cheek- and neck-flaps — holding before him a bundle of thin rods. The bundle is the barsom (Avestan barəsman), the sheaf of twigs that the Iranian priest gathered up and held during worship, and which the Magi handled while chanting over the offering. These thin gold sheets, cut and lightly worked with a figure, were dedications, given to a shrine as tokens of worship.

Why it matters

Achaemenid religion is thin in texts and thinner in cult buildings, so its material traces are precious. The barsom-plaques put a face and a gesture to the ritual the written sources only name: they show, in the Achaemenid present, the sacred bundle in a worshipper's hands. Whether the figures are priests (Magi) or lay worshippers in the priestly posture is not certain, but the object is direct evidence that the barsom rite known from the Avesta and from Herodotus' report of the Magi was practised across the Iranian world, out to its Bactrian edge.

Cautions

The Oxus Treasure is a problematic find: it surfaced on the market in the 1880s (bought at Rawalpindi), its exact findspot and original coherence are disputed, and it may gather objects of somewhat different dates. The plaques are best dated broadly across the Achaemenid period. None of this cancels their value as images of the rite, but it is why the entry is marked probable rather than secure.