Volume 1

Encyclopædia of religion and ethics / edited by James Hastings ; with the assistance of John A. Selbie ... and other scholars.

Date:
1908-1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Encyclopædia of religion and ethics / edited by James Hastings ; with the assistance of John A. Selbie ... and other scholars. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    99/932
    other hand, was the act of a maniac’s cruelty, and was not inspired by any devotion to religious tenets of his own. 3. Darius I.—The chief source for a study of the religion of this monarch is furnished by his in- scriptions in Old Persian, with their Babylonian and New Elamitic versions. The texts are found at Behistun, Persepolis, Naqs-i-Rustam, Elvand, Susa, Kirman, and Suez. In his inscriptions the king constantly ascribes the source of his authority to the ‘ grace of Ahura Mazda,’ declaring : ‘ Aura- mazda brought me the kingdom ; Auramazda bore me aid until this kingdom was held; by the grace of Auramazda I hold this kingdom ’ (Bn. i. 24-26). All evil in the realm is regarded as due to the malignant influence of the ‘ Lie ’ (drauga), which is to he compared with the dru^ of the Avesta. The ‘Lie’ was the cause of rebellion, while the power of Darius was due, in his opinion, large) the fact that he had not been a ‘liar.’ The ‘ is thus closely parallel with the Anra Mainyu of the Avesta, and it is not impossible that it is a euphe- mistic term for the arch-fiend, thus accounting for the omission of all mention of Ahra Mainyu in the Old Persian inscriptions. The fact that the Pahlavi translation of Yasna, xxx. 10, identifies the druj with Ahriman cannot, however, he cited in sup- port of this hypothesis. Ahura Mazda is frequently aescribed in the texts of the Achaemenian kings as ‘ a great god who created this earth, who created yon heaven, who created man, who created peace for man, who made Darius [or, Xerxes, Artaxerxes] king, the one king of many, the one ruler of many.’ This passage is very similar to the Gatha Avesta Yasna, xxxvii. 1: ‘ Here praise we Ahura Mazda, who created both kine and holiness, and created Avaters, created both good trees and light, both the earth and all good things.’ This is but one of a number of parallels between the Old Persian texts and the Avesta which might be cited (cf. Windisch- mann, Zoroastr. Studien, 121-125); yet, on the other hand, an equal mass of coincidences exists between the Achsemenian inscriptions and the Assyr.-Bah. records (cf. Gray, AJSL xvii. 151-159). It has been suggested that Ahura Mazda was regarded, in a sense, as the author of evil as well as of good, since Darius says (Bh. iv. 67-59): ‘ If thou hidest this tablet, (and) tellest it not to the people, may Auramazda be thy slayer, (and) may thy family be not.’ This is not, however, altogether certain, for Ahura Mazda, as the god of the king, might fairly be Invoked to destroy his enemies, such an act scarcely being regarded a, evil. On the other hand, the only direct allusion to Ahrimai in connexion with an Achsemenian monarch is found 11 Plutarch’s Life of ThemistocleSj^ m., where Xerxes prays that rhetorical author, especially as he was well acquainted w orthodox Zoroastrianism (see his de Iside et Osiride, xlvi.). The course which the upright man should pursue is termed ‘ the right path ’ padim {tydm rdstdm), an idea which recurs not only in the Avesta (Yasna, Ixxii. 11; Ya&t, x. 3, 86; Vendldad, iv. 43), but also in the OT, the Veda, and especially in Buddhism. In this spirit Darius declares, in a much-disputed passage, that ‘I walked according to rectitude’ (upariy arStdm upariydyam, Bh. iv. 64; for the establishment of this text see Jackson, JAOS xxiv. 90-92), the Arsta here mentioned being doubtless identical with the Arstat of the Younger Avesta, ‘who furthereth creatures, prospereth creatures, giveth health unto creatures’ (YaSt, xi. 16). If these two beneficent powers are repre- sented both in Old Persian and in the Avesta, the two sources agree in their view of the demon of drought, for the Dusiyara against Avhom Darius invokes the protection of Ahura Mazda is to he identified with the Du2yairya, for whose destruc- tion, according to the Younger Avesta (YaSt, viii. 50-56), Tistrya, the Dog-Star, was especially created by Ormazd (note also the mention of the ‘ horde,’ Old Persian haind, Avesta Tuiena, in both texts in close association with ‘ drought ’). It is thus evident that the Old Persian inscrip- tions of Darius represent him as a worshipper of Ahura Mazda and as filled with abhorrence of the ‘ Lie.’ One beneficent godling (Arsta) and one maleficent fiend (Dusiyara) are mentioned under the same names in the Younger Avesta. The stylistic parallels which may undoubtedly be traced between the Acheemenian texts and the Avesta, on the other hand, are coimterbalanced by the Assyr.- Bab. inscriptions from which Darius and his suc- cessors manifestly drew. His policy towards other faiths than his own was that of Cyrus. In his re- construction of the kingdom on liis accession, he states that he ‘restored the places of worship which Gaumata had digged doAvn ’ (Bh. i. 64). He thus appears as an opponent of rigid Magian ortho- doxy, for the ‘places of worship’ (ayadand) are shown by the Bab. version to have been ‘ houses of the gods’ (bitdti sa ildni). That these were fire temples, like the Magian structures described by Strabo (733) as existing in Cappadocia, seems less probable than that they were temples of the gods of non-Persian peoples. This view receives confirmation from a Greek and an Egyptian inscription of Darius. In the former text, found in 1886 at Deirmenjik (ed. Cousin and Deschamps, BCH xiii.), the king reproves his subject Gadates, who had sought to efface all traces of the royal attitude towards the gods, which, Darius expressly states, had been that of his predecessors, and who had exacted a tax from the priests of ‘ApoUo.’ Who ‘Apollo’ was is doubtful. Cousin and Deschamps, somewhat strangely, identify him with AtarS (the sacred fire), who appears in Greek, as noted above, under the name of Hestia. He is probably, however, the Greek divinity ApoUo, who in times past had given a favourable oracle to Cyrus, perhaps during his Lycian campaign, and who was consequently honoured by the Aohaemenian dynasty. At all events, the inscription is non- Zoroastrian in tone. Still more polytheistic is the stele of Darius at TeU el- Maskhutah (ed. Gol6nischeff, RTAP xiu. 106-107), which contains the following words : ‘(Darius) bom of Neit, the lady of Neit, the lady of Sais, image of the god Ea who hath put him on his throne to accomplish what he hath begun . . . (master) of all the sphere of the solar disc. WTien he (Darius) was in the womb (of his mother) and had not yet appeared upon earth, she (the goddess Neit) recognized him as her son . . . she hath (extended) her arm to him with the bow before her to overthrow for ever his enemies, as she had done for her own son, the god Ea. He is strong . . . (he hath destroyed) his enemies in all lands, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Darius who liveth for ever, the great, the prince of princes . . . (the son) of Hystaspes, the Aohaemenian, the mighty. He is her son (of the goddess Neit), powerful and wise to enlarge his boundaries.’ Devout and noble though his inscriptions show him to be, Darius seems to have been by no means a strict monotheist. This statement is borne out by the old Persian texts themselves, which shoiv that he felt merely that Ahura Mazda was, as he himself says, ‘the greatest of gods.’ A Perse- politan inscription thrice contains the words hadd vidaibiS bagaibiS, which were formerly rendered ‘with the clan-gods,’but which are now regarded as meaning ‘ with all the gods.’ This interpretation is confirmed by the Bab. itti ildni gabbi and the New Elamitic annap marpepta-ita/ca (‘with all the gods ’) in texts of closely similar content and phraseology. The plural of baya (‘god’) occurs in the Avesta only in YaSt, x. 141, whidi states that Mithra ‘ is the wisest of gods,’ but its Pahlavi form occurs at least thrice, an undoubtedly Zoroas- trian passage {Denkarf, viii. 15. 1) being especially interesting in this connexion, since it speaks of the ‘ worship of Auharmazd, the highest of divinities.’ This phrase is strikingly similar to passages in the inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes which describe Ahura Mazda as ‘ the greatest of gods.’ That such a phrase is not necessarily polytheistic is clear from such passages of the OT as Ps 82' 95® and 97®. In the New Elamitic version, however, occurs the statement, which may be significant, that Ahura Mazda was ‘ the god of the Aryans.’ If stress may be laid on this (a fact Avhich is by no means certain).