Kartir

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In 1924 the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, working in the hills of Fars below the road that once ran from Susa toward Persepolis, came upon the longest Middle Persian inscription then known, cut into a cliff above a carving of a king killing lions. The king in the relief is Bahram II. He stands over two beasts, one hand thrown back to shield a woman, while behind him a slighter figure looks on. That smaller figure is a priest, and the wall of words beside him is his. For roughly a thousand years the rock faces of Iran had carried only the deeds of kings. Here, for the first time, a man who wore no crown had written himself onto the stone — his offices, his fires, the heresies he had crushed, and a journey his own soul was made to take across the bridge of the dead.

His name was Kartir, sometimes read Kerdir or Kirdir. He is known almost entirely from these self-glorifying inscriptions, which makes him at once one of the best-documented and one of the most one-sided figures of late antiquity: every claim about his greatness is his own.

From herbad to Mowbed of Ohrmazd

Kartir entered the record under Shapur I — the second Sasanian king of kings, who reigned roughly 240 to 270 — as a junior cleric of the rank herbad, a teacher-priest who tended the doctrine and the lesser fires of the countryside. The Sasanian dynasty had risen a generation earlier in Fars, the old Persian heartland, and had bound its legitimacy to the worship of Ohrmazd, the Wise Lord. The faith they inherited was an ancient one, descending from the visions of Zoroaster and carried for centuries by the priestly caste of the magi. But it was not yet a church. It had no single hierarchy, no fixed canon, no central authority over who might burn a fire or call himself a priest. What Kartir built, across the reigns of half a dozen kings, was that authority.

His ascent can be read off the inscriptions themselves, which name the title he held under each ruler. Under Shapur he is “Kartir the herbad.” Shapur’s own great inscription on the tower at Naqsh-e Rostam — the one monument on which a king records his administration — lists Kartir among the dignitaries of the realm, the only religious officer to make the cut. When Shapur died and his son Hormizd I took the throne for a single year, Kartir rose: Hormizd, he records, made him mowbed and granted him the cap and belt of the nobility, the insignia of high rank. The word mowbed, from an older magu-pati, “chief of the magi,” would become the standard title of the ordained Zoroastrian priest; in Kartir’s mouth it marked him as a master over other priests.

Under Bahram I, Hormizd’s brief-reigning successor, he holds the office of “mowbed of Ohrmazd.” And under Bahram II — who reigned from 274 into the 290s and whom Kartir seems to have helped place and keep on the throne — he reaches the summit. The king, he writes, raised him into the ranks of the wuzurgan, the grandees of the empire, gave him the office of dadwar, supreme judge, so that across the whole realm priests became the arbiters of law, and made him steward of the great fire of the goddess Anahita at Istakhr, the dynastic shrine of the Sasanian house. To these he added a title no priest had borne: Mowbed of Ohrmazd, the supreme authority over the religion itself, with the whole apparatus of fires and clergy in his hand. By the reign of Bahram II he stood, in effect, as the second power in the empire — a churchman whose word ran from the court to the smallest village shrine.

The Sasanian high priest Kartir beside his inscription at Naqsh-e Rajab, near Persepolis. The carved figure raises a hand in a gesture of address; the text records his offices and his works. — Photograph by dynamosquito, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The four stones

There are four inscriptions, and together they form the longest first-person statement to survive from Sasanian Iran. The shortest and earliest, accompanied by a portrait of the priest, stands at Naqsh-e Rajab, a small recess of rock near Istakhr where the early kings had carved their investitures; Kartir set his words beside a relief of Ohrmazd granting the ring of kingship to Ardashir, the dynasty’s founder. A second, fuller version he cut on the stone tower at Naqsh-e Rostam called the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht, the “Cube of Zoroaster” — placing his own account directly below the administrative inscription of Shapur, as if to answer the king’s record with a priest’s. The third and longest he set at Sar Mashhad, beside the lion-hunt relief, in tiny crowded lines. A fourth, more weathered, runs across the rock at Naqsh-e Rostam itself.

The Ka’ba-ye Zartosht — the “Cube of Zoroaster” — at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the rock-cut tombs of the Achaemenid kings behind it. Kartir carved his deeds on this tower, below the record of Shapur I. — Photograph by Roozbeh Taassob, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The shorter texts are a litany of works. Kartir recounts how, in king after king, he founded fires and ordained priests; how he multiplied the Wahram fires, the highest grade of sacred flame, across the empire and beyond its borders into the lands Shapur had conquered, so that wherever Iranian arms reached, an Ohrmazd fire was kindled and magi were settled to tend it. He made the religion prosper, he says, and the magi with it; he performed the yasna and the seasonal feasts; he saw to the marriage of next-of-kin, the khwedodah that the orthodox held a pious act; he gathered up scattered priests and gave them rule and order. The repeated refrain is institutional: fires founded, magi made great, the religion of the Mazda-worshippers exalted in the land. These are the words of a man building a structure meant to outlast him.

The smiting of the heretics

And against that structure he set its enemies. In the most quoted passage of all — preserved at several of the sites, in the translation of D. N. MacKenzie — Kartir names those his orthodoxy struck down. “And Jews and Shamans and Brahmans and Nazarenes and Christians and Baptists and Manichaeans were struck in the empire,” the inscription reads, while the idols were destroyed and the dens of demons broken up and made into seats of the gods. The “Shamans” are Buddhist monks; the “Brahmans,” Hindu priests; the “Nazarenes” and “Christians” appear to name two distinct communities, perhaps the Aramaic-speaking Christians long settled in Mesopotamia and the Greek-speaking captives Shapur had deported from the Roman wars; the “Baptists” are a baptizing sect, the Elchasaites or Mandaeans of the southern marshes — the very milieu, as it happens, in which the prophet Mani had been raised. Each is a rival way of approaching the divine; each, in Kartir’s accounting, was an ahremenic growth to be cut back so that the worship of Ohrmazd might fill the ground it left.

This is the architecture of an exclusive orthodoxy, and Kartir is its earliest named architect: a single right way, defined against a list of wrong ones, enforced by a clergy that is also a magistracy. The vision is of a church coextensive with the Iranian state — the faith of the king of kings made the only lawful faith, its boundaries policed by priests who are now judges.

Whether the smiting was as thorough as the stone claims is a question the inscriptions cannot answer, because they are the only witness. No Jewish or Christian source from the period records a great persecution under Bahram II; the Babylonian rabbis, busy compiling the Talmud in these very decades, register no catastrophe. Modern scholars have read the list two ways. To some it is a record of real repression, the first state attempt to make Zoroastrianism exclusive. To others it is priestly rhetoric — a boast of orthodoxy’s triumph that inflates scattered local pressures into an empire-wide purge, the heresies listed less because each was hunted than because naming and condemning them was itself the work of defining the true religion. The historian Parvaneh Pourshariati has cautioned that it is far from clear to what extent Kartir’s declarations reflect the actual implementation, or the success, of the measures he claims. The safest reading holds both truths at once: that Kartir worked to subordinate the empire’s other faiths, and that the totalizing scope of his stone is the voice of a man writing his own monument.

One death, at least, the sources outside the rock confirm. The prophet Mani, founder of a dualist church that drew on Zoroastrian, Christian, and Gnostic streams and that had flourished under the tolerant Shapur, fell when Shapur’s protection lapsed. Under Bahram I, at the urging of Kartir and the Zoroastrian clergy, Mani was summoned, chained, and held at Gundeshapur, where he died in his bonds — by the usual reckoning in 274, though some place it in 276 or 277. His followers spoke of his death as a crucifixion, in conscious echo of Jesus; the harder accounts have his corpse mutilated and his head displayed above the city gate. The Manichaeans appear on Kartir’s list as the zandiks, the heretics par excellence, and the timing leaves little doubt that the priest’s ascendancy and the prophet’s end belong to a single moment. The exact weight of Kartir’s hand in the sentence is debated — the king pronounced it — but the inscriptions claim the war on the zandik as the priest’s own.

The Sar Mashhad relief — Bahram II fighting two lions, protecting his consort, with the high priest at his shoulder. Above it runs Kartir’s longest inscription, including the vision of the soul. — Photograph by Pentocelo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA / GFDL)

The journey of the soul

The longer inscriptions, at Sar Mashhad and at Naqsh-e Rostam, do something the shorter ones do not, and something no earlier inscription in Iran had done. They turn from the record of deeds to a vision — a first-person account of the otherworld, among the earliest in any literature, set down a generation or two before the better-known Zoroastrian journey of the visionary Arda Wiraz.

Kartir wished, he says, to know whether the things the priests taught about heaven and hell were true. So a rite was performed and a likeness of his soul — his double, his image — was sent out across the world of the dead, that he might see for himself. The text is broken and its reading contested; the scholar Prods Oktor Skjærvø, whose 1983 translation remains the standard, had to reconstruct much of it from the worn lines. But its shape is clear. The likeness comes to a road, and on the road a woman approaches from the east, of a radiance greater than any Kartir had seen — his den, his own religion made flesh, the guide who in Zoroastrian belief meets each soul at death wearing the form its deeds have earned. With her the double comes to the Chinvat bridge, the span every soul must cross, where the good is weighed against the evil. A prince sits enthroned, the color of dawn; before him opens a pit like a bottomless well, full of foul creatures, and over it lies a beam, and the beam is the bridge. For the blessed the bridge widens to a broad road and leads up to thrones and bread and the company of the radiant. For the damned it narrows to the edge of a blade, and they fall to the torments below. Kartir’s likeness is led across, sees the rewards of the righteous and the punishments of the wicked, and returns — and the priest, having seen, writes that the doctrine is confirmed, that there is indeed a heaven and a hell and a reckoning at the bridge.

It is a remarkable thing for a churchman to carve into a cliff: not an argument but a testimony, the founder of an orthodoxy offering his own soul’s journey as the proof of what that orthodoxy teaches. The vision serves the institution. A faith being made exclusive and enforced wants its rewards and penalties made vivid and certain, and Kartir supplies them in the first person — he has been to the bridge, by proxy, and come back to tell the empire what waits on the far side.

Reception and afterlife

Then he vanishes. After Bahram II, the record goes silent; the next king, Narseh, set up his own great inscription and did not mention the priest who had towered over his predecessors. Whether Kartir died, fell from favor, or simply outlived his usefulness, the stones do not say. The church he built, however, outlived him by centuries. The structure of a hierarchical clergy under a chief priest, of sacred fires graded and multiplied, of a faith identified with the realm and defined against its rivals, became the enduring shape of Sasanian Zoroastrianism, and it was that shape — a state religion — that the Arab conquests of the seventh century would break, scattering its keepers and sending some east to become the Parsis of India.

Modern scholarship reconstructs Kartir almost wholly from his own boasts, and is candid about the difficulty. There is no chronicle of his life, no hostile witness to balance the inscriptions, no friendly one either — only the priest’s account of the priest. What the field can verify it verifies sparingly: that a cleric of this name rose under these kings; that the inscriptions are genuine and are his; that his era coincided with Mani’s death. The persecution list it reads with caution, the visionary journey it reads as the earliest Iranian text of its kind, and the man himself it treats as a figure of the first importance precisely because of what he was the first to do.

For the deeper claim that historians now make about him is not about any single fire or any named heretic. It is that Kartir, more than any king, conceived the idea that a religion could be the spine of an empire — that the worship of Ohrmazd should be organized, hierarchical, exclusive, and one with the state, its truth attested even by a journey across the bridge of the dead. He carved that idea into the rock beside the monuments of kings, and in doing so he made himself, a priest, into a monument. The kings around him are remembered as kings. He is remembered as the man who built the church.

→ Related: Zoroaster · Mani · The Magi · Ahura Mazda · Angra Mainyu · The Mandaeans · Naqsh E Rostam · Persepolis · The Parsis · Saoshyant · Zurvan · Cyrus The Great · Pasargadae · Anahita · Mithra · The Amesha Spentas · Takht E Soleyman · Chak Chak · Ostanes