Ka'ba-ye Zartosht

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A single flight of stone steps climbs the outside of a white cube and stops at a low doorway some three meters up the wall. Behind the door is one room and nothing else: a chamber a little under four meters to a side and five and a half high, blind on every face, with no second door, no shaft, no niche cut for anything to stand in. The builders dressed the limestone finely, fitted the blocks without a smear of mortar, offset the courses with panels of dark stone that read from a distance as windows and are not windows, and then left no word anywhere — on the tower, in any Achaemenid record — to say why they had raised a sealed box in the middle of the royal necropolis. The most conspicuous fact about the building is the plainest one. It was made to hold something, and its makers never said what.

The tower stands at Naqsh-e Rostam, the cliff of royal tombs in the Marvdasht plain of Fars, about six kilometers northwest of Persepolis, directly across a short stretch of ground from the cross-shaped tomb faces cut high in the rock. For more than a century the argument over what it was — fire-house, archive, mausoleum, coronation seat — has run without resolving, and the evidence still does not settle it. What is not in doubt is the tower’s second life. Long after its purpose had been forgotten, the last great Iranian empire before Islam chose its blank stone as the surface on which to write, and cut into it two of the most important inscriptions in the whole history of ancient Iran.

The white box that no text explains

The structure is a freestanding tower of white, faintly marbled limestone, near-cubical, each side of its base about 7.3 meters long. It rises roughly 12 meters, or about 14 meters if the three-tiered platform of steps at its foot is counted in. The stone, by the survey record, was brought from Mount Sivand and laid dry, block on block, with no mortar; at the roofline the great ceiling slabs — four of them, spanning the full width — are locked together with dovetail joints, the joinery of the finest Achaemenid masonry. Each outer face carries panels of black stone set into the pale wall in a run of blind windows: false openings, dark against light, four to a side, that give the tower its distinctive checkered severity and admit no daylight at all.

The interior answers the exterior’s austerity. The one chamber measures about 3.74 by 3.72 meters and stands some 5.5 meters high, walled in on all sides by stone between 1.54 and 1.62 meters thick — the ratio of wall to room is that of a strongbox, not a shrine hall. It is reached only from outside, by a stairway of about thirty shallow steps climbing the front of the tower to a doorway a little over a meter and a half tall. Once a person is inside and the door is shut, the room is lightless, airless, and all but impossible to enter unseen. Whatever the tower was for, it was built to keep the world out of a single small space.

The tower seen from the necropolis: white limestone laid without mortar, the courses offset by panels of dark stone that read as windows but open on nothing. Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

On the date there is a working consensus. The masonry, the dovetailing, and the tower’s kinship with the earliest Persian building place it in the Achaemenid period — the first half of the sixth to the early fifth century BCE — and most scholars attribute it to the reign of the empire’s great organizer, the king who raised the terrace of Persepolis a short walk to the southeast, in the years around 522 to 486 BCE. The tower does not stand alone in its type. At Pasargadae, the older capital some distance to the north, there survives the ruin of a near-twin, a matching square tower the local tradition calls the Zendan-e Soleyman, the “Prison of Solomon” — an earlier or sister structure of the same design, and the one comparison that any account of the tower’s function has to reckon with, since whatever solves the one should solve the other.

The name it now carries is not old and was never its own. “Ka’ba-ye Zartosht” — the “Cube of Zoroaster” — is a late attachment, fixed to the building only around the fourteenth century, long after anyone remembered what it had held. Local usage before that had called it other things, among them Karnaykhaneh, a “house of the horn” or trumpet. The cube took its later name from a double misreading: outsiders who took the Zoroastrians for worshipers of fire assigned the tower to them as a fire temple, and the building’s blunt cubic mass, banded with black stone, invited a comparison to the Ka’ba at Mecca with its black cornerstone — so a nameless Persian tower became, in popular speech, the shrine of a prophet who had nothing to do with it. The one genuinely ancient name the record preserves is later still than the building and later even than the Achaemenids: the Sasanian priestly inscription cut on the tower refers to it with the word bwn, “the foundation” — a bon-khanak, a foundation-house — and offers no dedication to Zarathustra or to anyone. The tower reaches the documentary record as a structure its own builders declined to explain and its later occupants named only for what it plainly was: a footing, a place, a foundation.

What it was built to hold

Because no text fixes the tower’s use, the question has been left to the building itself, and the building answers in more than one voice. Four readings have been pressed for over a century, and each rests on something real in the stone.

The oldest and most persistent reading makes it a fire-house — a chamber for a sacred flame, its false windows and sealed room shielding the fire from wind and defilement. In favor of it is a plain observation: a corner of the inner chamber is blackened, the southwest angle darkened by old smoke, as though something had burned there. Two of the twentieth century’s principal excavators of Achaemenid and Sasanian Iran, Roman Ghirshman and Erich Schmidt, argued the fire reading. Against it stands the room’s own construction. In the theology of the tradition, fire — Atar, the divine flame venerated as the visible sign of the cosmic truth called Asha — is a living thing that must breathe, tended without interruption in the open air of a temple built to vent it. A windowless box with a single sealed door is close to the worst possible house for a flame meant to burn perpetually; the room could hold a fire for a rite, but it could not keep one alive. And here the tower’s fate demands a caution the tradition insists on. To read the soot as proof that this was a “fire-worshippers’ shrine” is to compound two errors at once. The Zoroastrians do not worship fire; they face it, and through it turn toward the Wise Lord who made the world, honoring the flame as a medium and a sign and never as an idol. The old European label that fastened this tower to them was a slur first and a misidentification second.

The second reading makes it a strongroom — a secure repository for documents, treasure, or the regalia of the crown, raised in stone precisely because stone resists fire and theft. The proportions fit: a thick-walled, windowless, hard-to-enter vault is exactly what one builds to keep valuables safe. The treasury idea is not new — it was already argued in the nineteenth century — and it gained a philological prop in the twentieth, when the scholar W. B. Henning pointed to the Sasanian priest’s own inscription on the tower, which speaks of the building as a bon-khanak, a foundation or endowed place, in terms that read more naturally of a repository than of a shrine. On this reading the tower is a state safe: the archive or the reliquary of an empire, where records or ornaments or sacred texts were locked against the two things stone defeats.

The third reading makes it a tomb, or a cenotaph — a monument to a body, whether or not a body was ever laid in it. Its whole stance argues for the funerary: it faces the rock-cut sepulchers of the kings, a tower of the dead set before a wall of the dead. Its form has close relatives among the tomb-towers of Anatolia and recalls, in its freestanding severity, the stepped tomb of the empire’s founder at Pasargadae. Most who have studied it have inclined, at one time or another, to some version of the funerary reading — a royal tomb, a burial place for the bones of a king, or an empty memorial raised to one.

The fourth reading makes it a throne of a different kind: a dynastic or coronation monument, a stone stage in the ceremony of Achaemenid kingship. The Dutch historian Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg proposed that the tower was raised by Darius as a coronation structure, its high chamber and ceremonial stair serving the making of a king rather than the keeping of a fire or a corpse. On this account the sealed room is not a vault but a setting — a place designed to be climbed to, and to confer something on whoever climbed.

None of the four has been proven, and the tower has yielded no find that decides among them. What can be said with confidence is narrower and, in its way, more interesting than any single answer. The Ka’ba-ye Zartosht is one of the very few major monuments of the Persian heartland whose function is genuinely, and not merely conventionally, unknown — a building so completely a strongbox in form that it fits every reading requiring secrecy and permanence, and so entirely mute that it confirms none. Its later importance turned out to have nothing to do with what it was made to enclose. It came instead from the one quality all four readings agree on: the tower presented, to anyone who approached it, a tall expanse of dressed white stone with nothing written on it — and blank stone, in the ancient world, was an invitation.

The stone that was made to speak

Seven and a half centuries after the tower was raised, the empire that took the invitation was the Sasanian. In 224 CE the house of Sasan overthrew the last Parthian king and made the worship of Ahura Mazda the religion of a new Iranian state, and its kings reached back deliberately to the Achaemenid past among whose monuments they now carved. The second of them, Shapur I, King of Kings, chose the old white tower for the record of his reign. Around 262 CE he had cut into three of its walls the long inscription that scholars call the SKZ or ŠKZ — the trilingual res gestae of Shapur — in three languages at once: Middle Persian in about thirty-five lines, Parthian in about thirty, and Greek in about seventy, the Greek and Parthian versions the better preserved where the Middle Persian has flaked away.

The text is the fullest single statement the Sasanian empire left of itself. Shapur names his descent, catalogs the provinces that obey him from Mesopotamia to the edge of India, and records the endowment of sacred fires and the foundations he established for the souls of his house — the ordinary machinery of a Zoroastrian king’s piety, set down as public account. Above all it records his wars with Rome, and it records three of them at once. It names his defeat of the emperor Gordian III near the Euphrates; the vast tribute — half a million gold pieces — that the emperor Philip paid him for peace; and, at the summit of the boast, the capture of the emperor Valerian himself, taken alive at the battle of Edessa with his army, the only Roman emperor ever made a foreign king’s prisoner. It lists the Roman cities Shapur burned and carried off, some thirty-six of them by his own reckoning. The reliefs cut into the cliff a few paces away show the same triumph in stone — the Roman emperors kneeling and held at Shapur’s stirrup — but the inscription on the tower gives it in words, and for the geography, the administration, and the self-conception of the early Sasanian state it is the single most important document to survive.

A panel of the SKZ on the tower wall: the Parthian text of Shapur I’s account of his empire and his wars with Rome, cut around 262 CE. TruthBeethoven, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

About two decades later, around 280 CE and under the king Bahram II, a second man cut his own record into the same tower, lower on the wall and in his own name. He was the priest Kartir, and the inscription he set there — some nineteen lines of Middle Persian, one of four such texts he left across Fars, the others at Naqsh-e Rajab, at Sar Mashhad, and elsewhere on the Naqsh-e Rostam cliff — is the first-person testament of the man who did more than any other to build the Zoroastrian church into an organ of the state. As the standard account of his career sets out, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica’s article on Kartir by Prods Oktor Skjærvø, he traces his own rise through the ranks of the priesthood — from ehrbed, a scholar-priest, up through the offices to the supreme rank of mowbed of Ohrmazd — across the reigns of a line of kings he served. He tells of the fires he founded and the priests he installed, the ordering of the good religion across the empire; and he names, without softening, the communities he moved against, the Jews and Buddhists and Brahmins and the several kinds of Christians and baptizers, and the zandiks, the heretics, whom he says were struck down in the land.

That list is Kartir’s own voice and must be read as such — the partisan record of a churchman describing his own victories, not a neutral history of what happened. What it documents is the making of an established faith: the moment when the veneration of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, was hardened into the church of an empire, with its hierarchy and its fires and its boundaries against everyone outside. The theology that stood behind Kartir’s work was not the crude thing his enemies’ descendants would later caricature. Its core is an ethical dualism of great coherence — the standing war of Asha, the truth and right order of the world, against the Druj, the Lie that corrupts it — a vision in which every soul is enlisted on one side or the other, and which the tradition has never regarded as anything but the plain structure of reality. Kartir cut its charter into the tower; the tower did not ask what the charter defended.

The old white cube still stands at Naqsh-e Rostam, at the foot of the cliff of kings, within the wider landscape of Persepolis and its monuments that the international heritage record keeps. Visitors climb the same short ground between the tombs and the tower that Shapur’s masons crossed, and read, where they can, the flaking lines of an empire’s account of itself. The living faith whose great war of truth and Lie Kartir carved here is carried now by small communities — the Zoroastrians of Iran and the Parsis of India — whose fires burn far from this plain. And the tower keeps, as it has always kept, its double character: a building whose purpose no one has proven, made permanent by the words that were later cut across its silence, so that the surest thing anyone can report of it is not what it was raised to hold, but what a later empire chose to have it say.

→ Related: Atar · Verethragna · Sraosha · Fravashi · Haoma · Yazd Atash Behram · Udvada Atash Behram · Pir E Naraki · The Zoroastrians · The Sasanians · Gathas