Achaemenid Empire

Achaemenid royal inscriptions, from Darius I onward, invoke Ahura Mazda by name as the god who granted the king his throne and his victories, the clearest evidence historians have that the Persian monarchy understood its own legitimacy in explicitly Zoroastrian terms. A history of Zoroastrianism traces how the religion moved, across the Achaemenid centuries, from a faith practiced among Iranian priestly families into one bound up with imperial ideology, without the empire ever compelling its subject peoples to adopt it themselves.

The winged disc symbol carved above Achaemenid kings at sites including Persepolis, showing a bearded figure emerging from a ring of feathers, is read by most scholars as a representation of Ahura Mazda or of the royal glory the god conferred, appearing consistently in contexts of kingship and conquest rather than in ordinary religious practice. Whether Cyrus the Great, the empire's founder, was himself Zoroastrian in a doctrinal sense his successors would have recognized remains debated, since the earliest Achaemenid inscriptions are sparser on religious language than Darius's later ones, but by the time of Xerxes the association between the Persian crown and Ahura Mazda's favor was stated as a matter of course. That association gave the Achaemenid kings a religious vocabulary for empire that outlasted the dynasty itself, echoed in the Zoroastrian kingship ideology of the later Sasanian empire centuries after Alexander ended Achaemenid rule.

Achaemenid religious policy toward conquered peoples was not uniform, and the empire's dealings with Egypt show both its harsher and more accommodating faces within a single conquest. Cambyses II conquered Egypt in 525 BCE, and later Greek and Egyptian sources accused him of killing the sacred Apis bull and desecrating Egyptian temples, a reputation for sacrilege that colored Greek writing about Persia for generations afterward, whatever its exact basis in fact.

Darius I, who took the Achaemenid throne a few years later, pursued a markedly different course in Egypt. A history of Egypt covering the Persian conquest describes Darius restoring damaged temples, commissioning new temple construction dedicated to Egyptian gods, and having himself depicted in Egyptian temple reliefs in the traditional regalia of a pharaoh making offerings to Egyptian deities, adopting the religious language of the people he ruled rather than imposing Persian religious forms on them. Darius's Egyptian temple patronage sits alongside the more famous Achaemenid policy toward the Judean exiles as evidence that the empire's approach to subject religions was calculated province by province, aimed at securing the cooperation of local priesthoods rather than following any single imperial religious doctrine.