Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West - 'Magisterial' Books of the Year, Independent

by Tom Holland

Ahura Mazda,

Arta, who was Truth,

Even so, the work of Truth was never done. Just as fire, when it rises to the heavens, is accompanied by black smoke, so Arta, the Persians knew, was shadowed by Drauga, the Lie.

Two orders – one of perfection, the other of falsehood, each the image of the other – were coiled in a conflict as ancient as time. What should mortals do, then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie, lest the universe itself should totter and fail?

Drauga

Sikyavautish,

Gaumata

The insignia of royal power – a robe, a bow and a shield – waited in Sikyavautish for the rightful claimant. Who that might be, however, and how he was to be recognised, remained, on the evening of the assassination, a mystery. Only the most garbled account of what followed has survived.

The conspirators, it was said, rode out by night into the open plain. At an agreed point, they reined in their horses and awaited the coming of dawn. When the sun’s first rays appeared above the rugged line of mountains to the east, it was Darius’ horse who neighed to them in greeting. At once, his companions slipped from their saddles and fell to their knees in homage. The Greeks, when they repeated this story, would claim that it had ...

For it is evident, even from the unsatisfactory version that we have, that Darius’ accession was marked by potent and awful ritual. The conspirators gathered in the chill of that September night not because they wished to discover who the next king might be, but because they already knew.

Otanes, Darius’ only conceivable rival, had already bowed to the inevitable and discounted himself as a candidate for the throne: the noblemen riding across the plain of Nisaea were celebrating a fait accompli.

Or so it pleased Darius to claim. Yet the imagery, although it would suffuse his propaganda, was not his own.

If it bore witness to the reverence for Arta found among all the Aryans,then it drew as well on the teachings of a far more rigorous dualism. ‘The twin destinies of the Liar and of the Righteous Man’: not Darius’ words but those of that most fabled of visionaries, Zoroaster, the prophet of the Aryans, the man who had first revealed to a startled world that it was the battleground in a relentless war between good and evil.

Here, in this war, was the great death-struggle of things – for the Prophet, continuing with his novel doctrines, had taught that the cycles of the cosmos would not keep revolving for ever, as had always been assumed, but move instead towards a mighty end, a universal apocalypse in which Truth would a...

Presiding over this final and decisive victory would be the Lord of Life, Wisdom and Light, Ahura Mazda himself – not, as other Iranians had always believed, one among a multitude of divinities, but ...

hedgehog);

dog;

‘Unblock your ears, then, to hear the Good News – gaze at the bright flames with clear-seeing thought!’ the Prophet had proclaimed, alerting humanity...

Was Darius the first usurper to appreciate just how amenable to his purposes this great religion of peace and justice might prove to be? We shall never know for sure. The early history of Zoroaster and his doctrines was a puzzle even to his own followers. That the Prophet had been the only baby to laugh, rather than cry, at his birth; that he had been granted his first vision of Ahura Mazda at the age of thirty, as he emerged from a river; that he had finally succumbed, aged seventy-seven, to an assassin’s knife: these few scraps of his biography had been preserved by the devout. But as to when he had lived, and where, wildly divergent opinions were held: some dated Zoroaster to the dawn of time, others only to the reign of King Astyages;55 some held that he had been raised in Bactria, others on the steppes.

But to what effect? The empire founded by Cyrus was certainly no theocracy; it was never, in any real sense, ‘Zoroastrian’ at all. The Persians continued to worship their ancient gods, to honour mountains and flowing streams, and to sacrifice horses before the tombs of their kings. But if the Achaemenid court remained pagan in much of its practice, it was also, in its dominant sensibility, not entirely removed from Zoroaster’s teachings.

Both were the expressions of a single religious impulse, one that had been evolving over centuries, and was still, as the Persians conquered the world, in a state of flux.

In particular, between the Magi, who had long been adepts of the most occult and sacred knowledge, and the priests of Zoroaster, there were numerous correspondences. It was not even clear which order had first proclaimed eternal war against insects and reptiles, had first worn white robes as the mark of their status, or had first exposed the corpses of their fellows to be consumed by birds and dogs (a fate otherwise regarded among the Persians as so terrible that it was reserved for regicides).

Far from dividing the Medes and Persians from their cousins in the East, their ‘Mazdaism’ appears to have served them as a source of unity.

A bond certainly appreciated by Cyrus. Looking to dramatise his unprecedented dominion over the various Iranian peoples, he had consciously adopted certain customs from their ancient heartlands.

In the nursery of his own tribe, at Pasargadae, far distant from Bactria or Sogdiana, he had ordered the building of three startling new structures: fire-holders made of stone, their tops hollowed out into deep, wide bow...

There can be no doubt that it was from Zoroaster that the Persians ‘derived the rule against burning dead bodies or defiling fire in any way’, for a Lydian scholar, in the earliest reference to the Prophet recorded by an anairya, commented as much.

Cyrus had hit upon the perfect image of his power. How better to represent royal greatness than to associate it with fire? Even those otherwise ignorant of the customs of the Iranians might readily appreciate such a notion. Soon enough, throughout the empire, similar sanctuaries began to appear, their flames guarded by the Magi, only ever to be extinguished on the death of the reigning monarch, symbols both of Arta and of the rule of Persia’s king.

And now Darius, his hands wet with royal blood, was moving to make this identification of the two orders, celestial and mortal, even more explicit. As he would never cease to acknowledge, everything he was, everything he had achieved, was due to the favour of Ahura Mazda: ‘He bore me aid, the other gods too, because I was not faithless, I was not a follower of the Lie, I was not false in my actions.’

Who precisely God might be, however, whether the Ahura Mazda of his ancestors’ pantheon, or the one supreme being proclaimed by Zoroaster, the new king was content to leave unclear. Ambiguity had its uses.

Bisitun,

Here, near the scene of his ambushing of Bardiya, Darius could offer sacrifice just as the Persians and the Medes had always done, in the sanctity of the pure and open air.

Yet the murder itself, the stern and epic quality of its execution, and the configuration of the assassins, would have conjured up associations for the followers of Zoroaster just as ripe with potential for Darius’ propaganda.

Six, according to the teachings of the Prophet, were the Amesha Spentas, the Beneficent Immortals who proceeded from Ahura Mazda – and six were the accomplices of Darius in his war against the Lie. That men might ponder this coincidence – ...

This seamless identification of his own power with that of a universal god was a development full of moment for the future.

Usurpers had been claiming divine sanction for their actions since time immemorial, but never such as Ahura Mazda could provide. Already, with the daring and creativity that were the trademarks of his style, Darius was moving with deadly speed to take advantage of this fact.

Dizzying as this startling ambition was, however, so too was the yawning of a waiting abyss.

The chosen one of Ahura Mazda could not afford to stumble: just one slip, and Darius would have failed. Already, as he and the other conspirators nursed their strength in Media, disturbing news was coming through to them of the empire’s reaction to their coup.

In Elam, an ancient kingdom on the borders of Persia, open revolt had broken out. In Babylon,* the great metropolis which was the largest and wealthiest city in the world, a pretender was repor...

Without dirt, there could never have been cities or great kings. So claimed the people of Babylon, who knew full well that their civilisation had been fashioned out of mud.

Lord Marduk, king of the gods,

the Esagila,

As Jeremiah, in far-off Judah, had wailed, ‘Their quiver is like an open tomb, they are all mighty men. They shall eat up your harvest and your food; they shall eat up your sons and your daughters; they shall eat up your flocks and your herds; they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees; your fortified cities in which you trust they shall destroy with the sword.’3 And all had come to pass just as the prophet had foreseen. In 586 BC, Jerusalem had been taken and left a blackened pile of rubble, and the hapless Judaeans hauled off into exile.

last king, Nabonidus,

Nebuchadnezzar III.

Here, for all those who had suffered from the Babylonians’ attentions in the past, was a name of ominous portent: for the second Nebuchadnezzar had been Babylon’s greatest ruler, the conqueror of Jerusalem and much more besides, a shatterer of cities and a breaker of proud nations, his memory preserved among those he had defeated as something fabulous, golden and deadly. But if the name of the new king would have sent shivers throughout the Near East, its effect on the Babylonians themselves would surely have been to set them dreaming.

Nebuchadnezzar II,

Here, millennia before Nebuchadnezzar, an intoxicating dream had

come to a man named Sargon, one never since forgotten, so that the kings of Babylon had been honoured to name themselves the kings of Akkad. Such a title, in contrast to some other Mesopotamian appellations – ‘King of the Four Quarters of the Earth’, say, or ‘King of the Universe’ – might have appeared modest; but it had served to link the kings of Babylon to the origins of empire.

Confronted by this menacing venerability, the Persians might have been expected to respond to it very differently: with suspicion, and even fear. It was not just that their own history, by comparison, was the merest blink of an eye.

And yet Cyrus, back in 539 BC, when he had first arrived in the city as its conqueror, had not been remotely intimidated. Indeed, he had shown himself far more sensitive to the alien and complex traditions of Mesopotamia, and to the potential they might offer his regime, than Nabonidus had ever done.