The Faravahar, also written Farohar, is the best-known visual emblem of Zoroastrianism: a bearded male figure emerging from a winged disc, one hand raised, the other often holding a ring. It derives from the winged sun disc of the ancient Near East, adopted into Achaemenid Persian royal art, where it appears above the king at Persepolis and on the tomb reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam. Its precise ancient meaning is debated: scholars have read it as the fravashi, the guardian spirit or pre-existing soul of Zoroastrian tradition, as the khvarenah, the divine royal glory or fortune, or simply as a sign of divine kingship watching over the ruler.
No Achaemenid inscription labels the figure, so any single reading is interpretation rather than attested fact, and specialists including Taraporewala, Shahbazi and Boyce have argued for different identifications without reaching consensus. What is not in doubt is that the image belonged to kings and their monuments for well over a thousand years before it became a personal religious badge at all: the same winged solar disc, without the human figure, protects Egyptian temple lintels from the Old Kingdom onward and hovers over Assyrian kings in the ninth-century reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II, so the Achaemenid sculptors who carved Darius beneath it at Persepolis from around 520 BCE were drawing on royal iconography already many centuries old, and the term faravahar itself is a modern coinage, not the Avestan or Old Persian name for the figure, which is not recorded.