The Sasanians

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At Naqsh-e Rostam, in the limestone of Fars, four Achaemenid kings lie in cross-shaped tombs cut high in a cliff, and below them stands a squat windowless tower of pale stone, older than the graves it faces are old to us. It is called the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht, the Cube of Zoroaster, though no one now knows what the Achaemenids kept in it. What matters here was added seven and eight centuries after it was raised. Wrapped around one face, in three languages, is the boast of a king who caught a Roman emperor alive. And beneath that royal record, in tighter and humbler lines, a priest who wore no crown set down his own rise from country cleric to master of every fire in the empire. The two inscriptions, stacked one above the other on a single wall, are as good a portrait as survives of the thing the Sasanians made: a throne and an altar built into one house, so that to serve the King of Kings was held to be service to the Wise Lord himself.

The house of Sasan and the fire of Istakhr

The dynasty took its name from Sasan, a figure the later tradition made a keeper of a temple in Fars — Pars, or Persis, the old Achaemenid heartland in the south of the Iranian plateau. Its history opens with a prince of that country, Ardashir, whose family the sources remember as hereditary custodians of the fire-sanctuary of the goddess Anahita at Istakhr, near the ruins of Persepolis. Kingship and the tending of a sacred fire were, in this line, one inheritance from the start.

Ardashir rose against his overlords, the Parthian Arsacids who had ruled Iran for nearly five centuries. On 28 April 224 he met the last Arsacid King of Kings, Artabanus IV, at the plain of Hormozdgan and killed him in the field, breaking the Parthian power. As the World History Encyclopedia records, the victory marks the official beginning of the Sasanian era; the formal coronation, at which Ardashir took the ancient title shahanshah, “King of Kings,” followed at the Mesopotamian city of Ctesiphon about 226. That city on the Tigris, inherited from the Parthians, would remain the seat of the empire for four centuries. The realm Ardashir founded would last from 224 to 651 — the last of the great pre-Islamic Persian empires, and the one that made the veneration of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, the confession of its own crown.

What can be known of the Sasanian religious settlement comes in three registers, and they must be kept apart. The first is contemporary and hard: the rock-reliefs and inscriptions the Sasanians themselves cut, above all at Naqsh-e Rostam, where they answered the Achaemenid tombs with images of their own gods and kings. On the cliff below the graves, Ardashir had himself carved receiving the ring of sovereignty from a mounted, radiant figure of Ohrmazd — the god handing the king his rule, the two horses nose to nose, a fallen enemy under each. The coins carried the same argument in miniature: the king’s head on one face, a fire-altar on the other, kingship and flame stamped into the same metal.

Ardashir I receives the ring of kingship from Ahura Mazda, Naqsh-e Rostam — one of the earliest Sasanian reliefs, carved around 235. Ginolerhino, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The second register is the boast on the tower itself. Ardashir’s son Shapur I, who reigned from about 240 to 270, fought three Roman emperors and left an account of it — a trilingual inscription on the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht that scholars call his res gestae, the fullest royal record the empire produced. Its centerpiece was the campaign of 260, when at Edessa Shapur defeated and captured the emperor Valerian alive, a humiliation Rome never quite lived down. On the cliff nearby Shapur had the scene cut in stone: the king towering on horseback, the Roman kneeling or held by the wrist in submission. It is the single most famous image the Sasanians left, and the most exact statement of what the dynasty thought itself to be.

Shapur I holds the Roman emperor Valerian captive, with a second emperor kneeling, at Naqsh-e Rostam. Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The third register is different in kind, and later, and must be marked wherever it is used. The great Pahlavi books — the encyclopedic Denkard, the cosmological Bundahishn — were written or redacted after the empire had already fallen, by priests preserving a tradition under Islam. They credit the Sasanian kings, and above all Shapur I and the sixth-century Khosrow I, with gathering and canonizing the scattered scriptures of the Avesta. These accounts are precious, but they are retrospective, the memory of a lost church written down by its heirs; scholars read them critically, not as the minutes of the events they describe.

Throne and altar

Within the frame of the good religion, the Sasanian achievement was to give the cosmic order a body. The tradition calls that order Asha — truth, and the right arrangement of a world made wholly good by Ahura Mazda and assailed by the Druj, the Lie, the spirit of disorder the Avesta names Angra Mainyu. To rule justly, to keep one’s word, to tend the pure creations of fire and water and earth was to stand with Asha; to lie and to defile was to serve the Lie. The Sasanians bound this ethical cosmos to their state. The throne of the shahanshah and the perpetual fire of the Wise Lord became two pillars of a single house, and the king held his crown, in the language of the reliefs, by the khvarenah, the divine glory that ran through the altar. Service to the King of Kings was framed as service to the good creation against the Lie.

The instrument of that binding was a priesthood — the magi, the mowbeds, an order at once clerical and juridical, crowned in time by the office of mowbedan mowbed, chief priest of the chief priests. Its first great architect can be named, because he named himself: Kartir, whose lines run below Shapur’s on the tower at Naqsh-e Rostam. As the Encyclopaedia Iranica sets out, he entered the record under Shapur I as a herbad, a teacher-priest of the second rank, rose under Shapur’s son Hormizd I to mowbed, and under the brothers Bahram I and Bahram II reached the summit as Mowbed of Ohrmazd and supreme judge of the realm, steward of the very fire of Anahita at Istakhr where the dynasty had begun. On the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht, in a text of some nineteen lines carved about 280, and in longer versions at other sites, he set down what he had done: how in king after king he had founded fires and ordained priests, multiplied the sacred flames of the highest grade across the empire and into the lands Iranian arms had taken, and made the religion of the Mazda-worshippers great in the land. It is the single richest first-person source for the making of the state church, and every word of it is the church’s own.

Against that structure Kartir set its rivals. In the passage most often quoted, in the translation of the philologist D. N. MacKenzie, the inscription runs: “And Jews and Shamans and Brahmans and Nazarenes and Christians and Baptists and Manichaeans were struck in the empire” — the Buddhists, the Hindu priests, two kinds of Christian, the baptizing sects of the southern marshes, and the followers of the prophet Mani, whose death in prison under Bahram I the priest’s ascendancy attended. Whether the smiting was as thorough as the stone declares is a question the stone cannot settle, because it is the only witness: no Jewish or Christian source from those decades records a great persecution. The historian Parvaneh Pourshariati has cautioned that it is far from clear how far Kartir’s declarations reflect the actual implementation of the measures he claims. The safe reading holds both truths — that Kartir worked to subordinate the empire’s other faiths, and that the totalizing sweep of his inscription is the voice of a man building his own monument.

At the center of the church stood the fires. The tradition counted three Great Fires burning in the land, each of the highest consecrated grade, each bound to one of the three estates into which society was ordered. Adur Farnbag was the fire of the priests and burned in Pars, in the south. Adur Gushnasp was the fire of the warriors and the kings and burned in Media, in the district of Shiz — the site known today as Takht-e Soleyman, where a new monarch was expected to come, on foot for the last stretch, to be confirmed in his rule. Adur Burzen-Mihr was the fire of the farmers and burned in Parthia, in the northeast. What burned on those altars was Atar, the divine fire — the purest of the good creations, the visible sign on earth of Asha and of the light of the Wise Lord. The faithful faced Ahura Mazda through the flame; they did not bow to it as to a god. The old outsiders’ slur of “fire-worship” mistakes the medium for the object, the sign for the thing signified. The fire was tended, screened, and kept pure by priests who by custom veiled the mouth so that no breath should defile it, and it was never an idol worshiped for itself, in a faith that shaped its holiest powers in fire and the recited word rather than in carved images.

On the theology that this church professed, the tradition was not of one mind, and the Sasanian centuries are where the disagreement is clearest. The strict reading held Ahura Mazda the sole uncreated source of being, wholly good and supreme, with the hostile spirit a derivative thing, a choosing of the Lie rather than a second god. But at some Sasanian courts there flourished the current called Zurvanism, which made both the good Ohrmazd and the hostile Ahriman twin sons of Zurwan, boundless Time — a reading the priestly orthodoxy later condemned and pushed to the margins. Whether the good religion was a strict monotheism or a dualism of two coeval principles was thus contested within the tradition itself, not a settled creed handed down whole; the fuller treatment belongs with Ahura Mazda and with Angra Mainyu, and it is enough here to mark that the empire’s church argued the question rather than closing it. Beside the Wise Lord the older divinities kept their honor — Mithra, the all-seeing lord of the covenant, and Anahita of the life-giving waters, whose shrine at Istakhr the dynasty had held before it held the throne.

The breaking of the empire

The order held for more than four centuries, and reached its height under Khosrow I Anushirvan, who reigned from 531 to 579 — the reformer-king who reorganized the army and the land-tax, broke the egalitarian movement of the reformer Mazdak that had convulsed his father’s reign, and pushed the Zurvanite party from the court. To his reign the Pahlavi tradition, writing long after, attributes the final codification of the Avesta and the very invention of the Avestan alphabet, a script devised to fix in writing the exact sounds of the sacred recitation. That memory is retrospective, set down by the priests who preserved the books after the empire was gone, and is read as such; but it points to something real, a church at its most confident and most ordered under the last great king it would produce.

What broke that confidence was, first, a war of exhaustion. From 602 to 628 the Sasanians and the Byzantines fought the last and greatest of their long duels, a struggle that carried Khosrow II’s armies to Jerusalem and the walls of Constantinople and then, under the counterstroke of the emperor Heraclius, deep into the Iranian homeland. It ended in ruin for both empires and in the murder of Khosrow II by his own nobles in 628, after which the throne passed through a rapid succession of claimants and the realm fell into disorder. Into that weakness came a new power. The armies of the Rashidun Caliphate, carrying the new faith of Islam out of Arabia, met the Sasanian host at al-Qadisiyyah in Mesopotamia about 636. As Britannica records the battle, the Persian commander Rostam Farrokhzad fell there, his army collapsed, and the capital at Ctesiphon was lost. A second attempt to hold the plateau ended at Nahavand in 642, the rout the Arab tradition remembered as the Victory of Victories. The last King of Kings, Yazdegerd III, who had come to the throne as a boy in 632, fled eastward across his own dissolving empire and was killed near Merv, in the far northeast, in 651. With him the dynasty ended, and over the following centuries most of the people of Iran came, gradually, to Islam.

Here the empire and the faith must be held apart, for the state church fell with the state, but the religion did not die with either. The Sasanian polity is historical, finished in 651; the good religion of Ahura Mazda is living still. A remnant kept the fires burning in the desert cities of Yazd and Kerman under the new order, diminished and taxed but unbroken; and from about the eighth to the tenth centuries a body of the faithful took ship for the coast of Gujarat in India, where their descendants, the Parsis, carried the tradition into a second homeland and keep it there yet. Small and aging, in Iran and in Mumbai, the Zoroastrians who trace their faith to the prophet Zoroaster are the present-tense survival of what the Sasanian church had made the creed of an empire.

Of the three Great Fires, only Adur Gushnasp, the warriors’ flame of Shiz, has been found and dug from the ground — its temple identified at Takht-e Soleyman, set on a self-made mound of travertine around a deep spring-fed lake, and inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage list in 2003 as reference 1077. The other two are known only from the texts. The scholarship that reconstructed this whole history — the state church, the fires, the fall, and the survival — rests above all on Mary Boyce’s Zoroastrians of 1979 and on the accumulating articles of the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the critical instruments through which a lost imperial religion is read back out of its monuments and its books.

The tower still stands at Naqsh-e Rostam, blank-walled and roofless, the two inscriptions weathering on its side. Shapur’s Roman is long dust, and the fire Kartir tended at Istakhr went cold within a few generations of his death. But the flame he made the sign of an empire was never, in the tradition’s own understanding, extinguished — only carried off the throne and out of the ruined state, to be fed by hand in smaller rooms, in Yazd and in Gujarat, by people who never ruled anything and never stopped keeping it.

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