The Drauga (the Lie)

The drauga (Avestan druj) is the Lie: not only the spoken untruth but the whole principle of falsehood, deceit, and disorder that stands against arta, the right order of the world. In Iranian religious thought it is the adversary that the Wise Lord's creation must overcome; in Achaemenid royal ideology it is the charge levelled at every enemy of the king.

Darius's inscription at Behistun is the great political deployment of the idea. The pretenders who rose against him — Gaumāta the Magus who claimed to be the dead Bardiya, and the string of rebel 'kings' in Elam, Babylon, Media, and the east — are each said to have lied: 'he lied; thus he said: I am Bardiya son of Cyrus.' The provinces that rebelled 'became faithless'; the Lie 'made them rebellious'. Darius closes with a warning to future kings and readers: guard strongly against the Lie; the man who is a lie-follower, punish him well. The rhetoric is total and self-serving — to be Darius's opponent is, by definition, to be a servant of the drauga — but it is also sincere ideology: the king's legitimacy rests on his being the one man on the side of the Truth.

The drauga therefore does double work in the sources: it is a genuine religious-ethical category (the Persians' horror of the lie, reported independently by Herodotus) and a propaganda instrument (the delegitimising of all rivals). The two cannot be neatly separated, which is part of what makes Behistun such a rich and such a treacherous document.