Concepts & Institutions (5)

• ConceptAhura Mazdā

  The supreme god of the Achaemenid kings, the "Wise Lord", named at the head of the royal inscriptions as creator of earth, heaven, and man, and as the god who bestows kingship and upholds order against the Lie.

• ConceptArta (Truth, right order)

  The Iranian principle of truth, righteousness, and cosmic and social order, opposed to the Lie (drauga); the moral axis of Achaemenid royal ideology and, later, a central concept of Zoroastrianism.

• ConceptMithra

  The ancient Iranian god of covenant, the sworn oath and the light of the sun; the all-seeing guardian who punishes the oath-breaker, invoked in royal inscriptions from Artaxerxes II onward and woven through the Achaemenid ethic of good faith.

• ConceptThe Drauga (the Lie)

  The Iranian principle of falsehood and disorder, the cosmic and political adversary of arta (Truth); in Darius's Behistun inscription, the force embodied by every rebel and pretender against the rightful king.

• ConceptThe Sacred Fire

  Fire, the purest of the creations and the visible focus of Iranian worship, tended by the Magi in the open air at stone fire-holders; the enclosed fire-temple of later Zoroastrianism is a Sasanian development and an anachronism for the Achaemenid period.